Listening at the Keyhole: The Anne Sexton Tapes

“I believe it is a vice, almost, to read such a book as the Letters,” said Mrs. Touchett. “It's the woman's soul, absolutely torn up by the roots — her whole self laid bare…. I don't mean to read another line: it's too much like listening at a keyhole.”

“But if she wanted it published?”

“Wanted it? How do we know she did?”

“Why, I heard she'd left the letters to the man — whoever he is — with directions that they should be published after his death —”

“I don't believe it,” Mrs. Touchett declared….

“Those letters belonged to the public.”

“How can any letters belong to the public that weren't written to the public,” Mrs. Touchett interposed.

“Well, these were, in a sense…. Such a mind is part of the general fund of thought. It's the penalty of greatness — one becomes a monument historique. Posterity pays the cost of keeping one up, but on condition that one is always open to the public.”

“I don't see that that exonerates the man who gives up the keys of the sanctuary, as it were.”

No, this isn't a debate about whether psychiatrist Martin Orne should or should not have turned over his patient Anne Sexton's therapy tapes to her biographer Diane Middlebrook. Despite some striking similarities, this discussion — purely fictional — appeared in Edith Wharton's novella, “The Touchstone,” published in 1900. Furthermore, there are some important differences between the two situations. Unlike Dr. Orne, who reaped no financial benefits from his action, Glennard — the protagonist of Wharton's moral tale — made his writer-friend's private letters public for personal, venal reasons: he needed the money to marry the woman he loved. And unlike Dr. Orne — who, when asked what he'd do if he had it all to do over again, replied, “I don't know … I kind of hope I would have done the same thing….”—(Hughes, 1991, p. 39), Glennard came to bitterly regret his actions. “I took everything