In Memoriam

Poet, biographer, feminist Diane Middlebrook dies of cancer at 68

Heidi Benson
San Francisco Chronicle
December 16, 2007

(12-15) 15:42 PST San Francisco -- Diane Middlebrook, the award-winning poet, biographer, teacher, feminist and salonnière, died of cancer Saturday in San Francisco, her family said. She was 68.

A professor of English at Stanford University for 35 years, Middlebrook made a graceful and unusual leap from teaching poetry to writing biography.

She is perhaps best known for "Anne Sexton: A Biography," the controversial 1991 best-seller and finalist for the National Book Award, and for "Her Husband: Hughes and Plath, a Marriage," the best-selling 2003 biography about the troubled union of the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. She also wrote "Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton," the 1998 biography of a female jazz musician who lived as a man.

At the time of her death, she was at work on a fourth biography - "Young Ovid" - which will be published soon by Viking Penguin, to coincide with the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of the Roman poet.

Middlebrook was born in Pocatello, Idaho, in 1939, one of three daughters of Thomas and Helen Wood, a pharmacist and a nurse, and grew up in Spokane, Wash.

As a child, she was always writing. "I had a poem in the Spokane Daily Chronicle on the cartoon page when I was 8 years old," she told an interviewer in 2002. "It stays in my mind as a very thrilling experience."

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1961 from the University of Washington, Seattle, she went on to Yale University, where she earned a master's degree in 1962 and a doctorate in 1968. She was one of the first women to teach in the English department at Stanford University, where she was hired as an assistant professor while still in graduate school.

During the course of a distinguished career, Middlebrook received many honors, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and a Pew Foundation research grant. She was a 1990 fellow at the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy, and has been a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London since 2004.

She also created a series of literary salons for women, inspired by her numerous friendships and professional alliances with female writers and artists.

"Diane has a certain radiance that reaches out and attracts people," said author and Stanford senior research scholar Marilyn Yalom, who has been co-host of the San Francisco salon. Middlebrook went on to launch a second salon for her colleagues in London; in New York, authors Kamy Wicoff and Nancy Miller co-host a salon based on Middlebrook's model.

"Often poets and academics are really more interested in books and writing," said Rena Rosenwasser, co-founder of Kelsey Street Press in Berkeley. "But Diane was interested in people, especially in women and what they were encountering in their professional lives."

Middlebrook said the salons served as an extension of her life as a professor. "Women have a different kind of conversation," she said in a recent interview with The Chronicle. "Everybody who participates is there on an equal basis."

In 1963, she married Jonathan Middlebrook, a fellow graduate student in literature. Their daughter, Leah, was born in 1966, and Jonathan Middlebrook was hired as a professor of English at San Francisco State University, where he has continued to teach. The marriage ended in 1972. (A brief early marriage ended in 1961.)

In 1985, Diane Middlebrook married Carl Djerassi, emeritus professor of chemistry at Stanford University, who is best known for contributing to the development of the first oral contraceptive pill, an invention that brought him a fortune. In recent years, Djerassi turned to writing novels and plays.

"They each met their match," Dale Djerassi said of his father's marriage to Middlebrook. "She was clearly his literary counselor, critic and muse."

Their Russian Hill apartment, where the couple hosted many gatherings of intellectuals and artists, has spectacular 360-degree views of the San Francisco Bay and an equally spectacular art collection, with works by Paul Klee. They also lived part of the year in London, where they spent summers and the fall theater season.

The two collaborated on many endeavors including the creation of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in the Santa Cruz mountains, an artists colony founded in honor of Djerassi's daughter Pamela, an artist who took her life in 1978.

Middlebrook liked to see creative, talented individuals thrive. "Diane was fabulous at drawing us out, making an environment where women could talk about their dreams, about things they wanted to invent and do," said San Francisco artist Squeak Carnwath. "And then, they would happen."

At one salon, Carnwath posed a question: Is it possible, without money, to start a foundation to benefit artists? "That was five or six years ago, and now the Artist Legacy Foundation just gave away its first grant this year," she said.

"Diane is not just a great intellect and a creator and a gracious human being," said author Kate Moses, with whom Middlebrook shared research when they were both working on books about Plath and Hughes. "Diane also has this great well of womanliness and nurturing." From 1977 to 1979, she was director of Stanford's Center for Research on Women, where she worked closely with Yalom.

"Those were the years in which feminist scholarship was taking root in the public imagination, but in universities it happened much more slowly," Yalom recalled. "When Diane and I would sit down at the faculty club in the late '70s, it wasn't unusual for some male professor to come over and say, 'What are you two girls plotting now?' "

These were formative times, but Yalom believes it is as a biographer that Middlebrook "came into her own. The Anne Sexton biography really put her on the map," Yalom said.

She began working on the Sexton book in 1982, while teaching part time. When it was published 10 years later, the book stirred debate over revelations of incest by Sexton. The poet's psychoanalyst - believing he owned the rights to audiotapes of his sessions with Sexton - had given them to Sexton's daughter, who passed them to Middlebrook.

In writing the book, Middlebrook was determined to avoid academic language. "I had to teach myself how to write, which was very liberating," she said. To write biography, "you have to fill yourself with the writer's imagination. It was a pleasure to see that I could do it."

In 2004, Middlebrook resigned from teaching, with plans to focus on her writing and on the salons. But a routine physical checkup discovered a recurrence of a rare form of liposarcoma, a slow-growing cancer for which she had surgery previously.

"What is so extraordinary is that when she got ill, she was so committed to keeping herself vivid and alive - which meant continuing on her next project," Rosenwasser said. "As long as she had an ounce of energy, Diane was going to work on Ovid."

Moses - who has been helping Nancy Miller, Middlebrook's literary executor, prepare the manuscript - pointed out, "With the new book, Diane has created a biography of a person for whom there is no biographical information, doing it by using her skill as a poet to create fully fleshed-out, imagined scenes of key moments in Ovid's life."

Since her diagnosis, Middlebrook had further surgeries and several types of chemotherapy, and traveled to Germany for alternative dendritic-cell treatments. By early fall of this year, doctors predicted little hope of recovery, and she and Djerassi returned to San Francisco.
"Diane has influenced many people, not only as a professor and a writer, but as a human being lucidly and courageously facing death," Yalom said.

It is poignant that Ovid - who was banished from Rome but continued to believe in the timelessness of his poetry - is the subject of what would be Middlebrook's last book, Moses believes. "Ovid said, 'They've taken everything from me but my talent, and my talent is what's going to live on.' "

In a 2002 interview, Middlebrook compared Shakespeare and Ovid: "Both allude to the idea that 'If you can read this, I am still alive - because I am in my language.' "

Middlebrook is survived by her husband, Carl Djerassi, professor emeritus at Stanford; daughter, Leah Middlebrook, an author and professor of comparative literature at the University of Oregon; son-in-law, Norio Sugano, an entrepreneur; sisters Michole Nicholson of Arroyo Grande (San Luis Obispo County) and Colleen Dea of Spokane, Wash.; stepson, filmmaker Dale Djerassi of Woodside; and stepgrandson, Alexander Djerassi of Washington, D.C.

A memorial for friends and colleagues of Diane Middlebrook is planned for 2 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 27, at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside.

The family requests that donations be made to the Building Fund for the Diane Middlebrook Residence for Writers at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program (www.djerassi.org), a tax-exempt organization.

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