Have you ever gotten so invested in the characters of a book that you hate for it to end? In order to delay the inevitable, you purposely slow down the pace of your reading and cherish every moment you have with the characters.
That is the way I felt while reading Maggie Doherty’s book The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s. The feeling was compounded by the fact that I knew one of the characters in real life – Maxine Kumin.
For me, books can be a form of escapism and/or education. This one was unique because it was an opportunity to enjoy a reunion with an old friend. In between my reading time routine (at lunch and before bed), I found myself thinking about Maxine, especially during my walks in the woods. I’d wonder what she would be thinking about the times we are living through and how she’d write about them. Likely, she’d be writing rants about the orange menace in the White House and hoping beyond hope that she’d never have to write a eulogy for her black grandson. She would be outraged at the state of disunion in America.
Foremost in my mind, however, is regret – regret that I had not taken more of an opportunity to ask about her life while she was alive. Thankfully, this book provides some answers to the questions I had. While the book is primarily about the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, Doherty’s inspiration to write the book was Anne Sexton, who along with Maxine, was one of 24 women admitted to the institute during its inaugural year of 1961.
The common thread throughout the book is Anne and Maxine’s relationship, intermingled with the history of the institute, the women’s movement, and the efforts to integrate higher education with more diversity, particularly with the black voice (like Alice Walker) and people of different economic backgrounds (like Tillie Olsen).
The institute was an “experiment” in women’s higher education, one that had never been attempted in the country’s history. The founder, Mary Ingraham Bunting, targeted “a ubiquitous and yet marginalized class of Americans: mothers.” It was “designed to combat the ‘climate of unexpectation’ facing women in mid-century American.” Women who had given up their dreams of becoming scholars or artists because of the burdens of “managing a family and keeping house.” Each woman admitted to the institute would receive a $3,000 stipend (with no strings attached), access to Harvard’s library resources, and a private office (“a place to work free from the unpredictable distractions of family life, the compulsion to pursue the daily routine at the expense of a half-finished conception or dream, and the guilt over children rebuffed, or questions unanswered”).
The title of the book comes from a compromise reached by the founders of the institute. At first Bunting suggested that only women with doctorates would be admitted, but that seemed too harsh and the decision was made to admit “artists with the ‘equivalent’ of doctoral training.” They accepted applications from writers, composers, and visual artists. It was a two-year fellowship. In the second year of their fellowship, Sexton and Kumin became friends with Tillie Olsen, another writer, and two artists, Barbara Swan and Marianna Pineda, and they formed a group called “The Equivalents.”
The book is a who’s who in American poetry, introducing the reader to the likes of John Holmes, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, George Starbuck, Wallace Stegner, Carolyn Kizer, Adrienne Rich, and Alice Walker, among others. But mostly, Doherty focuses on Sexton and Kumin and their friendship, professional collaboration, poetry and fiction, and, to a certain extent, co-dependency.
The running theme of Anne’s life was her struggle with mental illness and suicidal ideation and attempts. I lost count of how many attempts Maxine had to live through before Anne finally took her own life. Even though I knew how the story ended, I still held out hope that Maxine would find her friend before she succumbed to the exhaust fumes. I sobbed while reading the lead up to the end. Doherty handled that part of the story with compassion and grace.
For Maxine, Anne’s death was “the open wound I must live with day to day.” Their 17-year friendship and poetic collaboration was dwarfed by the 40-year survival period during which Maxine wrote and published 11 poems and many essays about her friend. All of those poems and two essays are included on Maxine’s website (www.maxinekumin.com) under the heading “Selected Poems.” One cannot help but grieve over the sadness, angst, and guilt conveyed in those poems. It was the only way Maxine could process the greatest loss in her life – through poetry.
This time of the year is particularly poignant for me since Maxine’s birthday is on June 6 and I always send up a special greeting to mark the day (she would have been 95 this year). I wish I could call her on the phone and ask her if she read The Equivalents and what she thought of it. Instead I leave you with her immortal words from my favorite poem of Maxine’s, “Summer Meditation”:
If only death could be
like going to the movies.
You get up afterward
and go out
saying, how was it?
Tell me, tell me how was it.
(Susannah Colt lives in Whitefield.)