American Isis (28 page)

On 17 December, just as the couple departed for another holiday in Yorkshire, Sylvia and Ted wrote separate letters to Aurelia and Warren. Ted confirmed Sylvia's reports of the significant attention his work continued to receive. He also made a point of saying that fatherhood was as much an adjustment for him as motherhood had been for Sylvia. He welcomed the change to family man, but seemed quite taken aback at his status as a public figure. He spoke of his fame as though a great cruelty had been done to him and showed no sign of the exultation that Sylvia experienced in the wake of his literary celebrity. He felt depleted, while Sylvia felt more full of herself. Literary life imprisoned Hughes even as it liberated his wife, but she honored his desire to reject certain kinds of media attention. He turned down, much to his mother's regret, an invitation to appear on a television program featuring the “poet of the year.” He did not like the idea of being watched. But in the main he believed he had escaped the worst effects of his renown and had emerged, as out of “battlesmoke,” still his own man. In the last month, Sylvia had recovered her momentum, writing five superior poems and energetic stories aimed at the women's magazine market, Ted reported. He thought these commercial outlets would be good for her, ridding her once and for all of the “arty” mood pieces her Smith professors had promoted. Sylvia really needed to put more action into her stories with killings, births, marriages—stories, in other words, in which things actually happened and were not just thought about. They were working together on plots that would get her stories going. As for his own work, he provides quite a long précis of a play,
The House of Aries,
which sounded very much in the vein of D. H. Lawrence: an exploration of the tensions between the logical, rational mind and the instinctive animalistic self which, if in conflict within the individual, lead to malaise and yearning for an undaunted savior, a dream figure, an “ideal accomplisher.” Ted worried that his play was excessively abstract. It is, but it also projects precisely the kind of sensibility that moved Sylvia to write that notorious line in “Daddy”: “Every woman adores a fascist.”

The Christmas visit did not go that well, as Sylvia related in part of a letter Aurelia chose not to include in
Letters Home.
According to Anne Stevenson's biography, the trouble started when Olywn expressed dismay over Sylvia's highly critical commentary about someone Olwyn did not know, but who was a poet she admired. To Olwyn, her sister-in-law's furious reaction only proved the “unwritten rule”: Sylvia was not to be criticized. But surely another interpretation occurred to Sylvia: Why was Olywn judging her, when Olwyn did not even know the party concerned? Wasn't Olwyn the one who was too quick to judge? Stevenson, working under the heavy burden of Olwyn's hectoring letters expressing exasperation with the biographer's handling of events, cut short this acrimonious scene. But the unauthorized Paul Alexander dilates upon it. Sylvia accused Olywn of degrading her and Ted. An enraged Olwyn called Sylvia a “nasty bitch,” and apparently disgusted with Plath's hearty appetite, made remarks about her overeating at Christmas dinner. And why had Sylvia not put Olwyn up at the Chalcot Square flat when Olwyn has visited London in the spring? Referring to Sylvia as “Miss Plath,” Olwyn announced that
she
was the “daughter of the house.” A silent Sylvia took Frieda out of Olwyn's hands, even as Ted's sister was evidently trying to calm down.

Olwyn later told Alexander that Sylvia had “overreacted to their charged dialogue.” But anyone not beholden to Olywn, anyone who had observed her over many years—and who was willing to speak to a biographer (as Marvin Cohen did with me)—can readily observe that even years after Sylvia's death, Olwyn still hated her brother's wife. Indeed, anyone Olwyn perceived as standing in the way of her close connection to Ted was bound to be rejected. Edward Butscher reports that Sylvia told Clarissa Roche that the bond between Olwyn and Ted amounted to “intellectual incest.” In her angrier moments, Sylvia omitted the adjective, Roche confided to Butscher. The higher Sylvia stood in Ted's estimation—especially after the publication of
The Colossus—
the more jealous Olwyn became. Never again, Sylvia vowed, would she stay in the same home with Olwyn Hughes.

Sylvia attached great importance to A. Alvarez's review of
The Colossus,
which
The
Observer
published on 18 December. “She steers clear of feminine charm, deliciousness, gentility, supersensitivity and the act of being a poetess,” Alvarez wrote. “She simply writes good poetry.” Welcome praise indeed for a poet who believed that, like Ted, she had broken through the constraints that Alvarez thought crippled a good deal of postwar British poetry. That she was holding her own in the intense competition of London literary life (from which Ted Hughes was now retreating, as he dreamed of a country refuge) emboldened her and may have accounted for her caustic expression of superiority that set Olwyn off.

Reviews of
The Colossus
were outstanding. Critics in prestigious journals and newspapers praised the “virtuoso qualities of her style,” calling her “clever” and “vivacious,” poised and cool, and deserving to be ranked with Ted Hughes and Theodore Roethke. Some of these adjectives could be interpreted as condescending, but read in full the reviews reveal respect and admiration. Of course, even supporters like Alvarez saw certain faults—a desire sometimes to indulge in rhetoric for its own sake, for example—but in the main Plath attracted the approval of important poet-critics like John Wain, Roy Fuller, and A. E. Dyson. A scene in the film
Sylvia,
in which an English critic dismisses
The Colossus
as merely the product of a wife married to a more important poet, does not do justice to Plath's place in the literary world of her time. Ted Hughes, writing to Lucas Myers on 21 January, expressed his satisfaction with Plath's excellent reviews. Both Ted and Sylvia wrote to Olive Higgins Prouty about their successes, and she, in turn, wrote back warmly, enclosing a check for $150.

Sylvia was pregnant again, and besides her usual wintertime colds and flu, she suffered from appendicitis. Surgery, she was advised, could be done safely long before the baby was due in late August. She would probably enter the hospital in early February, but in the meantime she started on a part-time copyediting job at
The Bookseller,
a trade organ. And she and Ted appeared in a BBC program, “Two of a Kind,” in which they described their lives and work. He depicted a couple so in sync with one another that they had become almost one sensibility. Sylvia, calling herself “more practical,” provided a soberer account of their collaboration.

Then on the morning of 6 February, Sylvia had a miscarriage. There seemed to be no explanation, she wrote her mother, assuring her that Ted was taking wonderful care of her. Sylvia felt especially awful, because she had asked Aurelia to change her travel plans so as to be present around the time of the child's birth. Undaunted, however, Sylvia was looking forward to her next pregnancy after scheduling removal of her appendix for late February. Given her horror of hospitals and concerns about the pain and recovery from surgery, she did remarkably well, enjoying Ted's hospital visit and substitution of rare steak sandwiches and Toll House cookies for the frightful hospital food. To the adoring Sylvia, he looked like a giant, trolling the hospital corridors next to people half his size. He seemed to be courting her as in their first days together.

The first of March marked an epic day, because Ted had delivered to her the much-coveted
New Yorker
first-reading contract. This development meant she would send her poems to
The New Yorker
first, and only to other publications if her work were not accepted. She received a one-hundred-dollar signing bonus, plus a 25 percent increase in the rates they paid her. The renewable one-year contract had cost of living raises built into it as well. Even though Sylvia had yet to write her greatest poetry, all signs pointed to her ascension to the pantheon with her beloved Ted.

Except for the food, Sylvia had no criticism of the National Health Service. Indeed, the facilities were brighter and the staff more cheerful than what she had seen in Wellesley when her mother had been hospitalized. Sylvia also enjoyed listening to her fellow patients. She began taking notes of their conversations. She greatly admired their hardy, uncomplaining natures. She enjoyed chatty visits with the vivacious “Bunny,” the goiter lady, and “the Duchess.” She was treated more like a guest than a patient. “Will I have an enema?” a solicitous nurse asked. The doctors were handsome and reassuring. Indeed, everyone was so amiable, saying goodnight to one another, that Sylvia felt no need to indulge in “the mopes” or any sort of self-pity. Turning in for her first night, she was delighted to discover she had her own set of flowered curtains affording her some privacy.

As she recovered from surgery, Sylvia began to notice petty annoyances: getting bumped in the hallway, feeling uncomfortable in a drafty room with a cracked window, and—the worst—the “ward-snorer.” And why were there no bells to call nurses? By 5 March, on her way to recovery and managing her pain quite well, Sylvia could feel herself departing from the company of sufferers, who lost interest in you as soon as you returned to health. But she loved all the gossiping—good story material—and realized that Ted was having a much harder time of it at home trying to work and take care of Frieda. Her feelings of camaraderie in hospital are reminiscent of her days at camp. In both cases, these tight-knit, closed-in communities brought out her compassion, as she consoled homesick girls and later cheered up other patients. And as she did during her work in the psychiatric ward and her time spent aboard an ocean liner, she enjoyed studying cases of the afflicted and the eccentric, writing them up in her journal. Sylvia reported that only one person, one of her fellow patient's daughters, noticed her books, telling her mother she was bedded next to an “intellectual.”

Returning home on 8 March, Sylvia still had to rely on Ted for baby lifting and laundry. Between her miscarriage and her hospital stay, it had been a terrible month for him, Sylvia told her mother. And yet he never complained. She felt badly about what she had put her “saintly” spouse through. Women in the hospital marveled that a husband would take on so much. Ted had some help with babysitting, but in the main he took over because he wanted Sylvia to recuperate as fast as possible to rejoin him in their writing regimen. In a letter to her Aunt Dotty, Sylvia reported that under Ted's care she had regained her energy by the end of March. With the thought of more children to come, Sylvia told Aurelia that by 1962 they just had to find a house, although they hardly had the income that would qualify them for a mortgage. Ted kept winning cash prizes, though, and his BBC work would net him something like $1,500 in the course of a year.

By 1 May, Sylvia was buoyed by the news that Knopf would publish
The Colossus
in the United States. Ted had written Aurelia a few weeks earlier to say Sylvia was in top form and much in demand. From her recent work he singled out “Tulips,” a poem derived from her hospital stay, and a work that reflected Sylvia's surrender not only of her day clothes and her body, but also her sense of self to the surgical staff. Looking at the photographs of her husband and daughter, she describes herself as a “thirty-year-old cargo boat,” letting slip things that “sink out of sight.” The poem says what Sylvia could not quite articulate in her journal and letters: The hospital stay had been a welcome letting go, a relaxation of nerves and an abnegation of family responsibilities. In the hospital she feels like a nun, white and pure. The stay is also, however, a kind of death, “the white of human extinction,” in critic Marjorie Perloff's words. The red tulips, rude with life, arrive as an intrusion, an invasion of the patient's pleasant anesthetic daze. The flowers seem like that roaring snorer Sylvia mentions in her journal, bringing the world back to her. But the tulips also come to symbolize the opening and closing of her blooming heart as she tastes water (her tears?) that reminds her of the salty sea in a “country far away as health.”

The persona of the poem, like Plath herself, seems to be emerging out of her passivity, becoming a person again, although she is not yet well. In
The Collected Poems,
Ted Hughes includes a note suggesting “Tulips” was
the
breakthrough poem, marking the moment when Plath threw away her thesaurus and spoke with spontaneity and clarity in her own poet's voice. Certainly after her miscarriage and hospital stay, both of which left her feeling like someone done to, “Tulips” seems to presage a rebirth in the classic fashion—in this case with a heroine, rather than a hero, reluctantly, then inexorably moving toward a seagoing quest, a type of female Ulysses.

Ted looked upon Sylvia's hospital stay as a detoxification. He believed that her appendix had been slowly poisoning her for five years. So the rest had done her good, giving her respite from taking care of Frieda as well, a comment that could be taken as a gloss on “Tulips.” That Ted, as he told Sylvia, had genuinely enjoyed taking care of his daughter seems apparent in his delighted descriptions of her standing up in her pen and laughing at everybody, then throwing her ball and bawling at them. He announced to Aurelia that they were buying a new Morris station wagon. He promised to take her on a tour when she arrived in June.

Sylvia did not mention in letters to her mother that she was already about a third of the way through the novel that would become
The Bell Jar,
the story of a college girl, as she told Ann Davidow, “building up and going through a nervous breakdown.” The book was full of real people, Sylvia admitted, and would have to be published under a pseudonym. The confident tone of her letter, written on 27 April, suggests that Sylvia had overcome the false starts and abrupt stops that had inhibited her previous attempts to write a long narrative. “I have never been so excited about anything,” Sylvia wrote—even though she predicted lawsuits. She found the book by turns funny and serious. It made her laugh. And indeed, the novel's mordant humor is superbly conveyed in Maggie Gyllenhaal's audiobook narration.