“I do not believe in ghosts
(very much)”
–Anne Sexton, “Leaves that Talk”
*
In her 1959 letter to Frederick Morgan, one of the founding editors of The Hudson Review, Anne Sexton beamed: “I wrote this short story in Sept. and the first place I sent it to, took it!” The story would appear alongside new fiction from Thomas Pynchon (“Low-lands”) and Tillie Olsen (“Tell Me a Riddle”) in the 1960 issue of New World Writing.
Yet Sexton undercut her enthusiasm with writerly doubt. She had worried that the story was “so amateur” that the magazine would dismiss any further submissions. “I can judge the poems pretty well,” Sexton concluded, “but I’m quite unsure with fiction.”
It was a prescient line. For years, Sexton pined to place fiction. She lamented having “been so busy with the poetry that I have not given any time to prose.” She “prefer[ed] dramatic situations to anything else,” far more than poetic images, which “most anyone” could create. As with many writers, Sexton was tempted by another mode, especially one that haunted her: “I can’t seem to handle prose.” Despite the publication of “Dancing the Jig,” Sexton was unsatisfied: “I saw that my own words were the words of a beginner, and, much as a child learns to talk, I had only just begun.”
“To me there’s something about fiction that is too large to hold. I can see a poem, even my long ones, as something you could hold.”
Again and again, Sexton struggled with sentences: “prose in the wastebasket” (1962), “I don’t know how to write prose” (1964). She had a habit of attempting prose in the spring, a form of literary rebirth—even tooling around with a novel that she was never able to complete. Her thwarted attempts at paragraphs made their way into conversations about her poetry. “Content dominates, but style is the master,” she told an interviewer. “I think that’s what makes a poet. The form is always important. To me there’s something about fiction that is too large to hold. I can see a poem, even my long ones, as something you could hold, like a piece of something.”
In 1974, The New Yorker—a regular home for her poetry—rejected three of her stories. As critic Liz Langemak notes, the rejection from editor Roger Angell was sent to Sexton’s agent, Joan Brandt. Angell praised the stories for being “interesting and wholly original,” but in a vague editorial phrase of the type that writers know all too well, “they seem to work in very different ways on different readers.” He was rather conciliatory: “I’m not at all sure that we aren’t making a mistake.”
Sexton certainly thought they did.
I am awfully sad about the New Yorker—it would have been better if they loathed them than that they almost took them and fought over what was most interesting or the better of the three. Of course, it is pleasant to think the New Yorker is so regretful, but I do think “The Bat” is so far superior that they wouldn’t have much trouble choosing.
Sexton’s trio of rejected stories were never published during her lifetime.
*
A week after Anne Sexton died, Black Christmas was released in theaters.
Bob Clark’s proto-slasher largely takes place in a sorority house—so much of horror unfolds in hallways and bedrooms—and stars a hilarious Margot Kidder, Keir Dullea acting wild on the piano, John Saxon’s police-prep for his later turn in A Nightmare on Elm Street, and a fiercely resilient Olivia Hussey.
In the final scene, Olivia is recovering in bed, surrounded by other characters in the room. Television and newspaper reporters are swarming the sorority house, and the police go downstairs to fend them away. One of the men left behind, the father of one of the murdered girls, passes out. He is ushered to the hospital, leaving Olivia behind, alone. The camera lingers. There is a moment of calm—before the camera pans elsewhere.
Anne Sexton’s horror stories are imperfect and thorny, but just strange enough to kindle fear.
After the violence, after the noise, after the visceral frights, the horror remains: a lingering, melancholy fear. It is with us most acutely in these quiet moments.
Sexton had written of hauntings for years before her horror tales. Her long poem, “The Division of Parts,” from her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) ends:
And now, while Christ stays
fastened to his Crucifix
so that love may praise
his sacrifice
and not the grotesque metaphor,
you come, a brave ghost, to fix
in my mind without praise
or paradise
to make me your inheritor.
“Ghosts” appeared in her 1962 collection, All My Pretty Ones. “Some ghosts,” she writes, “are women,”
neither abstract nor pale,
their breasts as limp as killed fish.
Not witches, but ghosts
who come, moving their useless arms
like forsaken servants.
Yet not all ghosts are women, there are also “fat, white-bellied men.” One “thumps barefoot, lurching / above my bed.” Others are children who curl, and kick, and play, all the while “wailing / for Lucifer.”
Ghosts were everywhere for Sexton. Yet in “Leaves that Talk,” she explains: “I do not believe in ghosts / (very much) / but I wonder if they aren’t my whole past—”. The ghosts of a “generation of women, down the line, / the genealogical line right to the Mayflower.”
To be alive in a certain lineage is the horror; to carry the hauntings of one’s foremothers.
*
Sexton’s three horror stories are uneven. It is not surprising that The New Yorker passed on them; they would not have sat well next to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Donald Barthelme.
The narrator of “The Ghost” was born in Bath, Maine, in 1851, one of twelve children. A “madness” overtook her when she was 64, followed by “sixty shock treatments.” She died when she was 77: “Dying on a hot day in a crib with diapers on. To die like a baby is not desirable and just barely tolerable, or there is fear spooned into you and radios playing in your head.”
The story’s tone is uneven. The ghost is talky, with parentheticals and exclamation points. The method could work in a poem, tongue planted firmly in cheek for a dozen lines, but it wears thin in prose.
Yet one particular element is compelling: she haunts neither a “house” nor “a former room,” but her namesake: “I will peer in her window at noon and watch her sip the vodka, and if I so desire, can place one drop of an ailment into it to teach her a little lesson about such indulgence and imperfection.” The ghost once “gave her” a “broken hip.” She is there when the woman has sex “to observe and call forth a child to be named my name.”
The ghost ultimately poisons her namesake. “She shut her eyes, but they kept popping open to see the objects of the kitchen multiply, widen, stretch like rubber and their colors changing and becoming ugly and the lemon floated in the multiplying and dividing teacups like something made of neon.” Doctors can do nothing to help her: “Right now they scream to her and fill her with an extraordinary terror. But somehow, I know full well she is indubitably pleased that I have not left. Nor do I plan to.”
“Vampire” is the weakest of the trio.
A successful insurance agent, who “could sell death to anyone,” is kidnapped in the middle of the day on Beacon Street in Boston. Two men “quickly grabbed me and held both arms to my back in an armlock and shot me with a needle straight through the camel’s-hair-Filene’s-Basement overcoat, Brooks Brothers jacket, Brooks Brothers shirt, deep into the skin, through the skin of both forearms (oh the skin!) a needle containing a drug—or a potion?”
He wakes hungry and drugged, and has been given a “rubber skin diver’s suit,” an address book, and a loaf of French bread. He enters a woman’s apartment through a ground-floor window, and he bites her belly button to suck her blood. It’s a bizarre tale.
Sexton was correct when she said “The Bat” was her best.
The story takes place in Hell, or on the precipice of it. Starts: “There I was at the judgement court, badly needing a shave, having sat outside for days and days, the case load is too much, poorly handled I’d say, and the dead sit in rows on stone benches, waiting and waiting until their number is called. Perhaps this is part of the plan—to wait and wait—gnawing at your tongue, watching the door open and someone make his exit.”
The narrator is interrogated by “a marionette” lit by “a small, pinpoint light” that “was dressed in a plush sort of suit that had no more color than the tiny light had a color.”
She is reincarnated as a bat, and still remembers the “terrible mixture of nine human lives relived each day as I hang upside-down” The result is a dizzying and cacophonous dream-memory: “So many moments, mixed into each other from different lives, at different ages and the wrong wives talking to the wrong husbands or the sister talking to the baby I aborted (perhaps an eighth life) and the Great Aunt pouring tea from a Spode pitcher and asking (a fourth life perhaps) though she always knew, ‘Lemon, dear, or milk?’”
Sexton ends the story with a poetic direct address:
I wish I could peer into your window at night, and speak in the human voice I had nine times and say something to your snuggling pillowy head of this, this damnation. But you would wake and scream, then with a shaking hand take a pill and at last go back to sleep again, not knowing that the nightmare at your window is living, and reliving, his upside-down lives and maybe, poor sleeper, even one of yours.
Anne Sexton’s horror stories are imperfect and thorny, but just strange enough to kindle fear.