Shushing the Dead and the Dying
Critique by Raymond Sokolov

In Third World countries such as the USSR. the first thing insurgents do in a coup d'etat is seize control of words. They take over TV and radio stations, muzzle the press and censor books. Really efficient governments monitor the sale of the means of verbal reproduction: Xeroxes, computers. faxes, typewriters and even ballpoint Pens. Americans love to decry this kind of totalitarian squelching of intellectual freedom, especially In a time of crisis elsewhere. Few things are so flattering to us as the reduction of Moscow radio to an all-music and KGB bulletin board, as it was on Monday morning.

Over here CNN kept on broadcasting non-stop, and if I want to say I think that George Bush is a rascal, only my employer can stop me. We have privatized the control of information, left it ultimately to the individual but, in effect, permitted the real power to collect in the hands of the economically powerful media interests that decide what to publish or broadcast or distribute in movie theaters. This is our system, our civilization, with its intellectual/moral bias toward freedom and its economic bias toward property rights. But it does not do away with the basic human desire to stifle free discussion. As current controversies in the literary marketplace demonstrate with wearisome familiarity.

Anne Sexton: A Biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook (Houghton Mifflin, 488 pages, $24.95) Is a full-dress account of the life of a deeply troubled "confessional" poet who killed herself in 1974. It would have caused a mild sensation under any circumstances, because of its relatively explicit sexual revelations. The most remarkable of these--in which the poet gets in bed with her daughter and, as the phrase goes, abuses herself--rest on the authority of direct testimony from the daughter herself, Linda Gray Sexton.

This scabrous material is not, however, what has set the tongues of commentators wagging. Ms. Middlebrook also makes use of many hours of tapes recorded during Sexton's psychoanalytic sessions with a certain Martin T. Orne. Dr. Orne gave the tapes willingly to Ms. Middlebrook, who uses them freely in her book. Dr. Orne has also written a foreword to the biography, a repulsive little piece in which he asserts that if he had been able to continue as the poet's therapist, even part-time after he left Boston for Pennsylvania, she would not have killed herself.

For this arrogant claim alone, Dr. Orne might have deserved the obloquy of newsroom moralizers. (Sexton's life is rich in material justifying the suppression of psychoanalysis as a learned conspiracy against the mentally ll: Outstanding is the therapeutic encounter with a satanic Dr. Zweizung, who carried on an affair with Sexton while continuing to charge his usual hourly fee). But the real outrage has not been aimed at these subfreudian interlopers for their destructive manipulations of a sad gifted person. Instead, Dr. Orne has been criticized for making the Sexton tapes public. What was wrong with that? To almost everyone who leapt out of the box yowling about it. it seemed obvious that Dr. Orne had violated his patient's right to confidentiaty--he had abrogated what is known as the doctor-patient privilege. As a matter of law in our society, this privilege makes it illegal for a doctor to reveal what he learns from a patient In the course of treatment. The privilege protects doctors from subpoenas and other official demands for testimony, but the privilege is not absolute and immutable like the law of gravity. It is meant to protect the patient, and the patient can release the doctor and permit him to tell what he knows.

Yes, in this case the patient is dead, but she made her daughter her literary executor, and even included four therapy tapes in the papers she explicitly left as her literary estate. So as a matter of law--and this has been tested in court--the release of the Orne tapes to Ms. Middlebrook, with the approval of Linda Sexton, follows an orderly and normal procedure, It also seems in keeping with Sexton's flamboyantly self-exposing life and poetic manner.

Not for nothing was Sexton known as a confessional poet. Writing In the early years of modern feminism, her tropes wallowed in gynecology. "Menstruation at Forty" is a famous title. So no Sexton biographer should think she was violating her subject's sacrosanct privacy in coming out with even the most malodorous details. Indeed, Ms. Middlebrook would have betrayed the Sexton spirit altogether if she had balked finically at telling everything. As it is, she seems to have continued and completed a job her subject wasn't strong enough to manage while alive.

The very strongest argument for the full and free use of the tapes is that they illuminate the work of an important poet (the entire enterprise would be a tawdry waste of time if Sexton hadn't been important). I've argued previously against this kind of probing into the more conventionally miserable life of the novelist Jean Stafford, because Stafford's troubles don't have much directly to do with her work. But Sexton's poetry was, in a concrete sense, caused by her therapy and, as Ms. Middlebrook so sensitively shows again and again, it was written in reaction to her sessions with Dr. Orne as well as to her blood-hot bouts with life.

So why would anyone want to suppress the Ome tapes? Why'was there such universal objection to their use? For one thing, people were mistaken about doctor-patient privilege. They thought the doctor owned the right to reveal secrets, instead of the patient. And they projected themselves into the situation. They would have wanted their secrets kept. But they weren't Anne Sexton.

Lucky them.

As penance for yielding unreflectively to the lust to censor, they should read "Se- lected Poems of Anne Sexton" edited by AU. Middlebrook and Diana Hume George 'Houghton Mifflin, 266 pages, $21.95). if these would-be suppressors had actually read the poems and the passages that stem from the Orne tapes in "Anne Sexton," they probably would have gone about their business with some real things to think about instead of pondering the basically empty question of whether Dr. Orne should have kept mum about his wretched tapes. People generally work themselves up to a censoring mood when they haven't read the offending book or movie, like all the millions of hysterical Muslims who refused to open Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" but joined unthinkingly in the murderous ululations against its author. Some of the same kind of people--nice moral folks with other folks' best interest at heart-also wish there weren't a book for sale now that explains how to commit suicide without pain or strain. But I can't believe many of them have actually opened Derek Humphry's "Final Exit" (Hemlock Society, 192 pages. $16.95). For the moment, they don't have a chance, since it's current sold out of bookstores after having zoomed to the top of the best-seller list, no doubt partly because of the shock and fuss against it, but mostly because of the sincere curiosity of thousands of old people worried about being forced to live out their lives as hydroponic vegetables tubed up to a survival system against what will remain of their wills.

"Final Exit" is a morbid little handbook full of cheerful hints about such matters as which pills to use and how to get them. Mr. Humphry's preoccupation with getting the details of other people's self-murder right is funny in a macabre way. At one point, he stops to correct a mistake in an earlier book "in the light of experience and discussions with physicians within the euthanasia movement": "It is preferable that the plastic bag not fit tightly over the head, but be moderately loose. It is very important that it be firmly tied around the neck with either a large rubber band or a ribbon. No more air must come in."

There follows a discussion of the basic problems of this method, its discomfort, the need to combine it with "fast-acting sleep inducers." And finally there is the question of what kind of plastic bag, clear or opaque. Always upbeat about the ultimate downer, Mr. Humphry says: "That's a matter of taste. Loving the world as I do, I'll opt for a clear one if I have to."

Loving good taste, as I do, I'll opt for not buying this weirdly awful book as a gift for friends or family, but I think the weirdest part of this latest publishing phenomenon is the fear it has inspired among supposedly thoughtful people who want it removed from bookstore shelves

The will to censor and suppress never dies--and is born again in places you'd least expect it, even among people trying to enjoy their vacations, as the fate of the mordant broadside reprinted below demon. strates. It was removed from public view last week by a self-appointed anonymous defender of deer and an unbidden protector of beachside neighbors he must think gentler even than Bambi.