Telling Secrets

By Diane Wood Middlebrook

The publication of my biography of Anne Sexton in 1991 prompted a controversy, surprising to me, about ethical obligations of biographers toward their subjects. The precipitating event was a news story announcing that one of Anne Sexton's psychiatrists had provided me access to over 300 hours of taped psychotherapy sessions. The journalist interviewed a number of medical ethicists who claimed that the doctor had violated a fundamental ethical principle governing the conduct of psychiatry: the necessity of protecting doctor/patient confidentiality. A formal complaint was then filed by a colleague in the American Psychiatric Association, a complaint that was considered by the profession's ethics committee for two years before the charges were dropped. The defining issue was whether Sexton had given informed consent to disclosure of her records.

This was not a lawsuit; far from it: the Sexton estate had agreed in advance to provide me as biographer with every sort of documentation of Sexton's medical treatment, including the therapy tapes in Sexton's own possession at the time of her death. The doctor had complied with the estate's policy. Moreover, when the book was ready for publication the two parties (doctor and estate) developed a written agreement concerning eventual deposit of the tapes in a research archive. All legal issues in the case were settled with exemplary cooperation in advance of the publication of the biography. But that did not prevent the doctor from becoming embroiled in very severe charges of ethical misconduct. Ethical disputes are not the same as legal disputes.

I was not personally charged with ethical misconduct; but it seems that not much by way of ethical conduct is expected of biographers anyway. Or so I gathered from an editorial in The New York Times, in which the biography of Anne Sexton was held up as an cautionary example. The psychiatrist was condemned for releasing the tapes, but allowances were made for the author. "Middlebrook did what any biographer would do," said The New York Times; "[she] rose to the opportunity as the trout to the fly..."

The barb of truth on this hook prompted some self-examination. What ethical considerations had guided my decisions about what to say in that book, and what not to say? Would the same moral reasoning apply in the context of my new project, the biography of Billy Tipton, a female jazz musician who had passed successfully as a man for fifty years? Prior to the publicity I had not thought about this in the abstract, and I am not sure that my retrospective insights can in fact be generalized.

But instructed by my proximity to the professional ordeal of Sexton's psychiatrist, I find some analogies between questions posed by medical ethicists and the questions that rise inside the work of producing a of biography. Chiefly, does a version of the principle of informed consent extend to biography? That is, suppose a biographer knows the subject's wishes in the matter of disclosure; is the biographer ethically obliged to respect those wishes? And is there any biographer's equivalent to the firm rule of doctor/patient confidentiality, any kind of information it is always unethical for a biographer to disclose?

The case of Anne Sexton offers a nicely complicated set of issues for ethical contemplation in this regard. She was classified, somewhat scornfully by critics, as one of the American postwar "confessional" poets, artists who wrote candidly about experiences of the kind many people thought should be kept entirely private. She described her mental illness and her hospitalizations, and her addictions; just as unusual in those days of the early 1960's, she wrote about women's experiences of intimacy with men, with other women, and with children. A short list of titles can convey the kinds of embarrassment Sexton's poetry caused: "For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further." "The Abortion." "Housewife." "For the Year of the Insane." "Menstruation at Forty." "Wanting to Die." "Cripples and Other Stories." "The Addict." "In Celebration of My Uterus." "For My Lover Returning to His Wife." "The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator." And so forth.

Though Sexton's poetry conveyed a life of catastrophes and melodramas, she managed her professional life very purposefully. She won large audiences for her work, and also received all the major literary prizes available to American poets. And during the year preceding her suicide at age 45, she carefully organized her literary estate. She employed a secretary to organize her manuscripts and other personal papers; she consulted literary scholars about appointing an executor, and she wrote a will specifying her intentions. She named her elder daughter Linda as the executor of her will; I speculate that Sexton delayed committing suicide until Linda was twenty-one so that her daughter could step immediately into that role.

Young as she was, Linda Sexton proved to be very businesslike in handling the estate. She oversaw the publication of the books left in manuscript, edited a collection of letters, then sold the papers to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, and undertook a search for a biographer. Linda Sexton wished to be pro-active in the matter of encouraging a serious book to be written about her mother's messy life; she intended to appoint an academic critic with the credentials to evaluate Anne Sexton's place in literature; and she wished to appoint someone who had never met Anne Sexton.

These were reasonable criteria but they also reflected personal agenda of Linda Sexton, for Anne Sexton had already appointed a biographer, eleven years before her death. This was Lois Ames, a psychiatric social worker. At the time Sexton met her, Ames was under contract to write a biography of Sylvia Plath, with the promise of cooperation from the Plath estate. That book did not get written. Instead, Ames became a close friend, traveling companion, helpmeet and confidant of Anne Sexton. But as literary executor Linda was under no legal compulsion to carry out her mother's wishes. She offered the project to me.

This was a dream project for someone who had recently undergone an intellectual resocialization by feminist scholarship. Anne Sexton did not claim to be a feminist herself, but she was a leader of the pack nonetheless--one of the first American poets whose bold art made feminist issues accessible to middle-class white women. And Linda Sexton guaranteed me that no aspect of her mother's life would be off-limits. Our contract granted me not only full editorial autonomy over the book, but exclusive access to every scrap of material in the archive--including the materials pertaining to Sexton's psychotherapy that later became so controversial: Sexton's own reels of therapy tapes and her transcriptions of them; copies of hospital records; letters to and from Sexton's doctors: and other documentation of medical treatment. Sexton had placed these materials among her literary papers with the apparent intention of putting them on record. While Linda Sexton reserved the right to withhold permission to quote unpublished materials, she believed the biographer should be able to consult these confidential papers for background, and where they had explanatory power, to make use of them. "My mother had no sense of privacy," Linda told me, "and I don't believe it's my place to construct one on her behalf."

By this remark Linda Sexton meant me to understand, among other things, that she herself did have a sense of privacy and intended to exercise it on behalf of the survivors, including her sister, her father and her children; but that she respected the difference between her mother and herself in this regard, and meant to honor it. So I had in Anne Sexton an unusually cooperative estate and an exorbitantly forthcoming subject. As a consequence, the ethical problems that the Sexton material presented lay mostly in the field of feelings that psychoanalysis labels countertransference: how to deal with the intense disapproval I often felt precisely because of the predilection for self-exposure so prominent in her character?

So writing Sexton's biography required a moral re-education: I learned to recognize the temptation to interpret as pathology behavior I didn't like. Then I could distinguish from her follies Sexton's achievements as a disciplined artist who believed that the whole purpose of art is the disclosure of what is REAL-- a word she often wrote in caps. As she said once to an interviewer who was shocked by the autobiographical content of her play, "I can invade my own privacy. That's my right. It's embarrassing for someone to expose their body to you. You don't learn anything from it. But if they expose their soul, you learn something. That's true of great writers. They expose their souls; then suddenly I am moved, and I understand my life better."ii

Nonetheless, I discovered that there were limits even to Sexton's investment in self-exposure. While organizing her papers back in 1973 Sexton had taken pains to mark on a green cardboard file, in large letters in bold black pen, NEVER TO BE SEEN BY ANYBODY BUT LOIS AMES. NEVER TO BE PUBLISHED; then she signed and dated the folder. When Linda Sexton sold the papers to Texas in 1980 she held back this one file. In 1985 she changed her mind, sent the file to Texas, and placed it under restriction: no one may look at the file without her written permission. Of course she had looked in it first; and what she found had made her think twice about what the inscription meant. "Never to be published" was easy enough to understand, but what about the reference to the eyes of Lois Ames? By 1985 Ames had become generic, so to speak; there was now little likelihood that Ames would undertake a book about Sexton, and if she did, she would now need Linda Sexton's permission to read this very file inscribed with her name. So Anne Sexton's written instructions could be interpreted as referring not to the person but the role she had assigned Ames, the role of biographer. That was me!

In my next visit to the Sexton collection in Texas, armed with a note from Linda, the thing I most wanted to see was this tatty green file. After spending six years of intermittent drudgery in that familiar room, I fully savored the drama of the moment. Sitting with the file unopened in my hand, the only piece of forbidden fruit in the entire archive, I took my time, speculating about what it could possibly contain.

Like Linda, I had no intention of obeying the wishes Anne Sexton wrote down, signed and dated in 1973. This is my reasoning: the dead cannot have wishes, they can only have wills, and wills delegate the responsibility for making decisions. As I've indicated, I shared Linda Sexton's view that her mother apparently wished to withhold nothing from her biographer. But I do not believe that such a conception of one's subject constitutes an ethical justification--quite the opposite. Claiming to know what the dead would have wanted is usually a self-serving ploy of interested parties, I have found. Thus what Sexton's attitude might have been toward my use of any materials whatsoever--including the therapy tapes--is a meaningless question, in my view, because the dead cannot be asked to make contextual judgments, as the living can. And though the dead cannot be consulted, they can also not be shamed or in any way hurt by disclosures about what really happened to them, as the living can. What the biographer owes the subject is very like what the psychoanalyst owes the analysand upon encounter with hidden material: not judgment, but insight. --I read the file, and I wrote about what I found in it, on page 66 of the biography.

Similar issues inhabit the estate of my current subject, Billy Tipton. Salient facts can be summarized very quickly: As a teenager, Dorothy Tipton began cross-dressing in order to get a job with a band. She cut her hair, bound her breasts with torn sheets, put on men's clothes and re-christened herself Billy. The customers in the clubs didn't know that the saxophone player was actually a girl, but the other band members did--this was 1931, the Depression, everybody needed a job; and this was jazz, too. (Billy was white, by the way.) In her mid-twenties, Tipton went on the road, and while she stayed in touch with her brother and her cousins, who continue to think of her as Dorothy, for everybody else, for the rest of her life, she became Billy, and Billy was "he."

Tipton established himself as the leader of a trio that traveled constantly: to Kansas City, Joplin, New Orleans, Amarillo, Santa Barbara, Portland, Seattle, and finally Spokane, Washington where he settled down. Eventually he took over a booking agency and stopped playing music. During his twenty years as an itinerant musician--1935-1955--he appears to made at least four successive common-law marriages; but after he settled in Spokane, he legally married a stripper named Kitty whom he met in the night club where his trio played. She quit the business and they adopted three children, and became utterly conventional good citizens: active members of the PTA and the Boy Scouts. Everybody--band members, clients, wives and sons-- was amazed to discover, only after Tipton was dead and the corpse examined, that Tipton had a woman's body. As one of his sons put it in a TV interview, "He'll always be Dad to me--" And so far, after having interviewed a number of people close to Tipton, including three of the wives, I haven't found cause to doubt their claims that they really believed he was a man.

Billy Tipton too left a will, naming his divorced wife Kitty as executor, but in it he disclosed none of his secrets. But if I should ever find a document in which Tipton left an explicit request not to publish any of the sorts of information my research has uncovered, I believe that my proper and ethical relationship to that document would be, not to carry out the instructions but to figure out where they fit into the puzzle of Tipton's character, and into the social conditions that made possible this lifelong masquerade. I think of my files on the life of Billy Tipton, filling up slowly as a cistern with details, as a catchment area for investigating contemporary society's deeply held ideas about sex difference. To return to the question I posed about the ethics of disclosure--if a biographer knows the subject's wishes in the matter of disclosure, is the biographer ethically obliged to respect those wishes?--I hope I have clarified that my response proposes a special definition of the term "respect." I believe that all records left by the dead, whether intentionally or unintentionally, are a legacy with absolute value of the kind that might best be understood under the legal definition of "cultural property." This definition holds that culture has an interest in the products and documentation of human activity, and that individual ownership claims recede over time. Once a person's lifework is terminated by death, the circumstances of the production of the life and the work can be asked every kind of question.

Then is there any kind of information it is always unethical for a biographer to use?

The answer is Yes, two kinds. One is the kind frequently found today in genres that blend historical writing with fiction, and offer speculation disguised as information. Possibly the most egregious example ever published is Joe McGinniss's The Last Brother, a life of Senator Edward M. Kennedy. McGinniss never interviewed Kennedy; instead, he composed and quoted as direct discourse a number of interior monologues commenting on family tragedies. A journalist whose previous métier was the so-called "true crime story," McGinniss claimed to be expanding the resources of biography by "novelizing" the genre. This is the biographical equivalent of glow on the face of the fashion model bestowed by the Scitex computer retouching system: art undetectably intervening where actuality is claimed.iii But McGinniss's book was a dud, possibly because genre works like a default system in the reader's contact with a book. In a work of fiction (remembering Aristotle), we want to hear about things happening the way they ought to have happened. With biography, we want to know they happened even when the life reads as if it had been conducted in a novel.

The other thing biographers should not do is invade the privacy of the living. I remarked earlier that the category of what is ethical is not the same as what is legal. Nonetheless, biographers are often brought to reflect upon ethical questions by taking hard knocks from legal ones, and I think legal guidance is especially helpful in the question of rights to privacy. The US Supreme Court articulated a useful concept for biographers in its finding in 1965 that the Bill of Rights provides citizens a "penumbra of privacy" protecting relationships in which the privacy of communication is an essential element. This ruling applied to professional confidentiality, but the principle extends to ethical ground as well, in my view. Citizens give up some of their privacy rights when they enter into relationships with public figures of the sort that biographers tend to write about, and yet I believe any biographer is ethically obliged to bear in mind the notion of the penumbra of privacy when writing a representation of any living person. When biographers discover information compromising to the living, they should take pains to avoid inflicting harm. They should ask for permission to use the information; if permission is refused, they should disguise identities; if they cannot disguise identity they should forebear to disclose hurtful findings until the person's death has made them harmless.

Having drifted this from the excruciating particulars of real choices, the only kinds of conflict that can decently be labeled ethical, I will now go all the way, and end thumpingly with a motto. Too witty to sound entirely high minded, too general for application in specific instances, it nonetheless captures a view essential to ethical conduct in the practice of biography as I understand it. "We must respect the living," says Voltaire, somewhere, "but only truth is good enough for the dead."