Together to the end — and beyond
The BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY’s vaulted marble interiors can sometimes seem as quiet as a tomb, but few realize that its Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts actually is a tomb, of sorts. It serves as a final resting place for none other than Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, whose commingled ashes form part of a vast collection assembled by fellow anarchist Aldino Felicani, treasurer of the doomed pair’s defense committee. Among the 126-cubic-foot collection’s highlights are the defense team’s papers, radical pamphlets and newspapers from the period, and Sacco and Vanzetti’s letters from their last years, as well as the eerie plaster death masks that preserve every detail of their faces. Plus, there are the certificates that offer an apt description of the cause of death: “Electric shock. Judicial homicide.”
Nixon walks
In the 1972 election, there was no talk of pregnant chads or hand recounts: Richard Nixon was re-elected in one of the largest landslides in our country’s history. It wasn’t quite a clean sweep, though — Massachusetts was the lone state to say no to another four years of Nixon. We would get our way 21 months later, when the man who rivaled our current president in his love for illicit surveillance resigned in the wake of Watergate, and it’s fitting that the sole state to reject Tricky Dick is now home to his letter of resignation. BU’s HOWARD GOTLIEB ARCHIVAL RESEARCH CENTER has Nixon’s decidedly terse memo to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, which changed history with 11 little words: “I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States.”
Confessions from the couch
In the 1950s and 1960s, the confessional school ruled Boston’s literary scene, and Anne Sexton was a reigning queen. Like fellow locals Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, Sexton elevated gut-spilling into something sublime, and even after death she’s still baring it all for art. Though the couch is usually afforded the same sanctity as the confession box, the Schlesinger Library has 101 tapes of the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet’s sessions with her psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Orne.
Orne may seem a model practitioner compared with Sexton’s subsequent psychiatrist — who slept with her while still charging for sessions — but after Diane Middlebrook used the tapes in her seminal 1991 biography of Sexton, Orne caught a lot of flak for airing the literary legend’s most private moments. He hadn’t obtained explicit consent to share the tapes for such a purpose before Sexton’s 1974 suicide, but felt the woman who famously declared “I hold back nothing” would have wanted it that way. The chair of the American Psychological Association ethics committee didn’t agree. Yet despite a debate that raged in psychiatric journals and op-ed pages, the tapes are still available for researchers, though not the merely morbidly curious — written permission from the poet’s daughter is needed to access the recordings.
Jacqueline Houton can be reached at jacqueline.houton@gmail.com.
