lonely, not fertile with solitude. Not certain that she would ever write again, Anne sought consolation from Con, Margot,and her friends, including her long-time physician, Dana Atchley, now estranged from his difficult and quarrelsome wife, Mary. In Charles’s absence he was a sympathetic listener to Anne’s anger and fears, eager to encourage and support her.
During Charles’s absence, Atchley was a frequent visitor to Anne’s home in Darien, but in the fall of 1956, Anne rented an apartment in New York, at 146 East Nineteenth Street. It was a personal retreat and a place for her to be alone with Atchley. He often stayed for a martini and dinner, and for morning breakfasts with their friends. They even appeared together at dinner parties, restaurants, and the theater. Atchley loved Anne much as Saint-Exupéry had, for her warmth, sensitivity, and intelligence. She banished his troubles and rekindled his passion. Unlike Anne’s relations with the French writer, her affair with Atchley was neither platonic nor fleeting. 22
A year after Anne had preached that women were the bastions of Christian virtue and the saviors of Western civilization, she had a sexual liaison with a married man. Although Charles never knew, Anne’s betrayal haunted her. Ciardi’s condemnation had an ironic twist, freeing her to be the “sinner” she knew she was.
In the dead heat of summer, 1957, in her mother’s garden in Maine, she composed a poem heavy with disillusion and death. Her earlier poems had depicted her as a victim and a martyr; in this, her last published poem, she admits her complicity in her demise. As if looking Ciardi squarely in the eye, Anne adopts a new form, controlling the rhythm and the rhyme. Still in the garden of Adam and Eve, she is both the serpent and the sinner. Mistress of the house that once embraced her family, surrounded by memories of her mother and father, of Charlie and Elisabeth, Anne discards the illusions of her youth.
She had been blinded by the summer of her youth, swollen with passion and bursting with bloom. Once she had raced with the tides of time; now she was mired in the tall tangled grass, suddenly prey to satanic temptations. Echoing her poem “No Harvest Ripening,” Anne writes of the deception of summer which belies the coming of the frost.
But now Anne’s pain is profound and visceral. While the poem resonatesChristina Rossetti’s “Springtime” and Emily Dickinson’s “Hour of Lead,” Anne challenges their faith in Nature. Winter is certain but spring, she says, may never come. The smiles of summer smolder with storms, and her perfectly formed couplets burn with anger and rebellion. Anne feels cheated and bitter at a life that should have yielded more than mediocrity and sin. She writes:
This is the summer of the body but
The spirit’s winter
. 23
In one sweep of unstopped verse, Anne cries out for the fulfillment she believes she deserves. Her cry hangs unpunctuated, waiting for resolution—but there is none. Her fertility is waning, and the fruit is too long in the bearing. The “summer of the body” has sucked her spirit, and Anne passionately hungers for death.
It was the last poem Anne ever published.
32
Dearly Beloved
Anne and Charles at daughter Reeve’s wedding, 1968
.
(© Richard W. Brown)
The earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heroes and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool’s paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all … Here you call your appearance beauty, your emotions love, your sentiments heroism, your aspirations virtue, just as you did on earth; but here there are no hard facts to contradict you, no ironic contrasts of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance, a universal melodrama
.
— GEORGE BERNARD SHAW ,
Man and
During Charles’s absence, Atchley was a frequent visitor to Anne’s home in Darien, but in the fall of 1956, Anne rented an apartment in New York, at 146 East Nineteenth Street. It was a personal retreat and a place for her to be alone with Atchley. He often stayed for a martini and dinner, and for morning breakfasts with their friends. They even appeared together at dinner parties, restaurants, and the theater. Atchley loved Anne much as Saint-Exupéry had, for her warmth, sensitivity, and intelligence. She banished his troubles and rekindled his passion. Unlike Anne’s relations with the French writer, her affair with Atchley was neither platonic nor fleeting. 22
A year after Anne had preached that women were the bastions of Christian virtue and the saviors of Western civilization, she had a sexual liaison with a married man. Although Charles never knew, Anne’s betrayal haunted her. Ciardi’s condemnation had an ironic twist, freeing her to be the “sinner” she knew she was.
In the dead heat of summer, 1957, in her mother’s garden in Maine, she composed a poem heavy with disillusion and death. Her earlier poems had depicted her as a victim and a martyr; in this, her last published poem, she admits her complicity in her demise. As if looking Ciardi squarely in the eye, Anne adopts a new form, controlling the rhythm and the rhyme. Still in the garden of Adam and Eve, she is both the serpent and the sinner. Mistress of the house that once embraced her family, surrounded by memories of her mother and father, of Charlie and Elisabeth, Anne discards the illusions of her youth.
She had been blinded by the summer of her youth, swollen with passion and bursting with bloom. Once she had raced with the tides of time; now she was mired in the tall tangled grass, suddenly prey to satanic temptations. Echoing her poem “No Harvest Ripening,” Anne writes of the deception of summer which belies the coming of the frost.
But now Anne’s pain is profound and visceral. While the poem resonatesChristina Rossetti’s “Springtime” and Emily Dickinson’s “Hour of Lead,” Anne challenges their faith in Nature. Winter is certain but spring, she says, may never come. The smiles of summer smolder with storms, and her perfectly formed couplets burn with anger and rebellion. Anne feels cheated and bitter at a life that should have yielded more than mediocrity and sin. She writes:
This is the summer of the body but
The spirit’s winter
. 23
In one sweep of unstopped verse, Anne cries out for the fulfillment she believes she deserves. Her cry hangs unpunctuated, waiting for resolution—but there is none. Her fertility is waning, and the fruit is too long in the bearing. The “summer of the body” has sucked her spirit, and Anne passionately hungers for death.
It was the last poem Anne ever published.
32
Dearly Beloved
Anne and Charles at daughter Reeve’s wedding, 1968
.
(© Richard W. Brown)
The earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heroes and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool’s paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all … Here you call your appearance beauty, your emotions love, your sentiments heroism, your aspirations virtue, just as you did on earth; but here there are no hard facts to contradict you, no ironic contrasts of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance, a universal melodrama
.
— GEORGE BERNARD SHAW ,
Man and
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