American Isis (42 page)

Less fastidious than her academic commentators, Plath realized that her “fiction” could be read both ways: as stories and as accounts of her own life. The problems for the biographer, however, are chronology and causation. It would be illuminating to know if Kroll is right about the passages coming so late in Plath's development as an individual and as a writer. Then Jung is a kind of “proof” for Plath, and also, perhaps, a catalyst for her final burst of creativity. If the passages come earlier, a case could be made for them as influences, writing that shaped her psyche and her style. Critic Tim Kendall argues that Jung served as Plath's vindication while she also becomes “her own case history.” It is the same dual role—both victim and analyst of her victimhood—she plays in “Daddy,” Kendall concludes.

This discussion of Plath and Jung appears in an appendix precisely because her handwritten quotations from Jung cannot be dated and thus cannot be confidently inserted into a narrative of her life. Even so, what Plath copied explains certain mysteries that appear in her journals and letters. To begin with, what exactly did Aurelia do to Sylvia that made her both grateful and hostile? Both the Smith and Emory archives contain letters from a mystified Aurelia, who emphasized how tactful and tolerant she tried to be with Sylvia.

Carl Jung ratified much of what Sylvia (and her fictional alter-ego, Esther) felt, observing that parents “set themselves the fanatical task of ‘doing the best for the children' and ‘living only for them.'” As a result, parents never develop themselves, so focused are they on thrusting their “best” down their children's' throats. “This so-called ‘best' turns out to be the very things the parents have most badly neglected in themselves. Thus children are goaded on to achieve their parents' most dismal failures and are loaded with ambitions that are never fulfilled.” Precisely so. Aurelia writes in the introduction to
Letters Home
that after the first year of her marriage, she realized she would have no peace with Otto unless she did exactly as he said. Her own proud independence, her literary interests, would have to be subordinated to his work. In a letter to Ted Hughes that is in the Emory archive, an agonized Aurelia tells Ted (years after Sylvia's death) how she longed to share her joy in literature, instead of constantly playing the nurturing mother—not only to Sylvia, but also to Ted when the couple visited—and she did everything in her power to make them comfortable, never demanding any time for herself. One of Aurelia's notes in the Smith archive welcomes Ted and Sylvia home with the announcement that the refrigerator is not only full, it is stocked with ready-made meals. She did not want a dependent life for Sylvia, and yet Sylvia found it hard not to replicate her mother's marriage to a powerful man. She “inherited” the desire to abase herself—which haunted her even as she arose from her bed with Ted to become her own person and poet.

Aurelia's insistence that she did not project herself onto Sylvia is countered by Jung: “The infectious nature of the parents' complexes can be seen from the effect their mannerisms have on their children. Even when they make completely successful efforts to control themselves, so that no adult could detect the least trace of a complex, the children will get wind of it somehow.” Jung told the story of a mother with three loving daughters who were disturbed about their dreams, which all had to do with her turning into a ravening animal. Years later, the women went insane, dropping onto all fours and imitating the sounds of wolves and pigs. All this and more Plath noted in four pages of verbatim passages.

Plath copied out other passages in Jung that attacked the “sanctity of motherhood,” noting that mothers had produced their share of lunatics, idiots, and criminals. As much as Plath embraced motherhood, she also found she had a profound need not to sentimentalize it. She pointed out in letters to Paul and Clarissa Roche that taking care of children was an exhausting enterprise. No wonder she became enraged when her husband told her family life was becoming too much for him. Her death, in a way, finally forced fatherhood on him, making it his inescapable fate.

A final page of passages on marriage may indicate why Kroll believed Plath was reading Jung in the latter part of 1962. Jung describes marriage as a return to childhood and to the mother's womb in an effort to recapture the community of feeling that adults so rarely achieve. As parents, husband and wife become part of the “life urge.” But this initial harmony inevitably turns to anguish and pain for anyone who puts a premium on individuality and independence. Sometimes the Jung quoted in Plath's copied-out passages sounds very like her own verse, as here, where he describes the trajectory of marriage: “First it was passion, then it became a duty & finally an intolerable burden, a vampire that battens on the life of its creator.” In Ted Hughes, in other words, Sylvia had created a monster.

 

APPENDIX B

Sylvia Plath's Library

Plath underlined, starred, and annotated the following passages in books now part of her collection at Smith College. These selections reflect her wide reading in literature, philosophy, and theology that led her to believe in the primacy of the poet. In literature, especially in the work of D. H. Lawrence, she could read the prophecy of her own life and the means by which she would accomplish her own death.

[W]hile all of us, at bottom, pursue only our private interest, we wear these fair disguises in order to put others off their guard, and expose them the more to our wiles and machinations. [In the right-hand margin, Plath wrote, “good.”]

—David Hume,
An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding

[T]he hateful white light of understanding which floats like scum on the eyes of all white, oh, so white, English and American women, with their understanding voices and their deep, sad words, and their profound good spirits. Pfui! [Plath wrote, “ouch!”]

—D. H. Lawrence,
Studies in Classic American Literature

The artist must be inhuman, extra-human, he must stand in a queer aloof relationship to our humanity … Literature is not a calling, it is a curse, believe me!… It begins by your feeling yourself set apart, in a curious sort of opposition to the nice, regular people … the poet as the most highly developed of human beings, the poet as saint.

—Thomas Mann,
Tonio Kröger

Everything seemed to have gone smash for the young man. He could not paint.… Everything seemed so different, so unreal. There seemed no reason why people should go along the street, and houses pile up in the daylight. There seemed no reason why these things should occupy the space, instead of leaving it empty. His friends talked to him: he heard the sounds, and he answered. But why there should be the noise of speech he could not understand. [Next to this passage, Plath wrote, “cf. July 1953”]

—D. H. Lawrence,
Sons and Lovers

O strange happiness, that seeketh the alliance of Death to win its crown.… It must needs be a forcible evil, that has power to make a man (nay, a wise man) to be his own executioner.… A wise man is indeed to endure death with patience, but that must come
ab externo
from another man's hand and not from his own. [In the left-hand margin, Plath wrote, “Why?”] But these men teaching that he may do it himself, just needs confess that the evils are intolerable which force a man to such an extreme impropriety. [Plath wrote, “yes.”]

—St. Augustine,
The City of God

[T]hose who pursue philosophy right study to die; and to them of all men death is least formidable.

—Plato

Marriage was a ghastly disillusion to him [Herman Melville], because he looked for perfect marriage. [Plath wrote in the margin, “All our grievances come from not being able to be alone.” And on the next page she put an exclamation mark next to the following passage.] Melville came home to face out the long rest of his life. He married and had an ecstasy of a courtship and fifty years of disillusion.

—D. H. Lawrence,
Studies in Classic American Literature

It was her deep distrust of her husband—this was what darkened the world.

—Henry James,
Portrait of a Lady

 

APPENDIX C

David Wevill

On 10 July 2010, I wrote the following to David Wevill:

I wonder if I could try your patience and ask if you would reply to a few questions via email. I know it was a long time ago, but I would very much like a sentence or two about how Sylvia Plath appeared to you. What was it like to be in her physical presence? Even a vague impression would be helpful. A related question: Do you remember noticing any change in her from the first time you met her to the last? For example: Did she look thinner? I'd be very grateful for even a sentence or two, which I would not use without getting your explicit permission.

On 19 July 2010, David Wevill replied:

I did not notice a change in Sylvia's appearance while I knew her: she was slender (lean), looked fit, bore herself well. Personally she was witty, affable, had a quick smile, her conversation was bright and covered a wide range, she seemed interested in people and their lives, she could gossip but not cruelly. She and Ted seemed to complement each other, not contradict. I sensed no tensions there. Later I came to think some effort went into this—not so much an act, as a willed self-control? We four got on well, it seemed the start of a friendship, with much in common. As for the Assia biography, I came to know Eilat and Yehuda and liked them. They had done their homework and talked with many people. The story they had to tell was hard, tragic, and I think there were problems of tone and judgement as to what to include and leave out, and parts I found too sensational. Inaccuracies, some. I never threatened to kill anyone; I did not walk the streets at night with a knife; or plead with Assia to stay (rather, the other way around).… As for Sylvia, I wish I could help you. For nearly half a century I've tried to keep from getting involved in what became almost an investigative industry.

On 22 December 2011, I wrote to David Wevill again, saying I wished to reprint his 10 July 2010 reply to me, and that I wanted to do so without any comment of mine attached to his statement. He agreed that I could do so.

 

APPENDIX D

Elizabeth Compton Sigmund

On 14 January 2012, I journeyed to Cornwall to see Elizabeth Sigmund for a two-day talk about Sylvia Plath. Elizabeth was married to the writer David Compton when she became a good friend of Sylvia's during the Court Green period. Elizabeth also had a good opportunity to observe Ted and the Hughes-Plath marriage. She has become one of the major players in a conflict that unfortunately is likely to go on as long as the Punic Wars, arraying Olwyn, Ted—and even Ted's second wife, Carol, and Sylvia's daughter, Frieda—against Elizabeth, Al Alvarez, and Clarissa Roche, joined later by biographers Linda Wagner-Martin and Ronald Hayman. The latter side, appalled at Olwyn's handling of the Plath estate, and critical of Assia's role in seducing Ted away from his Devon home and family, identifies with Sylvia's grievances and deplores the vitriol in Anne Stevenson's biography. Elizabeth showed me a letter from Olwyn to Clarissa Roche, written on 24 March 1986, which sums up the war in two brief sentences: “You liked her. I think she was pretty straight poison.” I went to Elizabeth seeking some understanding of why Ted left Sylvia. Virtually nothing in reports of his behavior while living with Plath—and certainly nothing in letters of his that have so far surfaced—signals anything like the depth of unhappiness that he expressed to his sister Olwyn shortly after he left Sylvia.

Later, Olwyn sought to extenuate her brother's actions by pointing out that Sylvia had ordered Ted out of the house. In other words, it was not his doing, not his choice. But a letter he wrote to Olwyn, sent shortly after his leaving Court Green, shows he wanted out of the marriage. It was rather typical of him to let Sylvia actually declare the start of hostilities—just as it was nearly always the case that he let women, including Sylvia, seem the aggressor. Ted, like the female spirit who appears to him in his radio play, “Difficulties of a Bridegroom,” and in the persona he fashions for himself in
Birthday Letters,
was a curiously passive victim of an irresistible destiny. Ted was a sexual predator, Al Alvarez told me, but the prey had to become visible and come to him—“to show,” I added in conversation with Alvarez.

Elizabeth Compton Sigmund's testimony is crucial, in part because initially she was quite fond of Ted Hughes. She did not regard him as a dour, if romantic, Heathcliff. She only got involved in the acrimony concerning how the marriage ended when Olwyn became upset that Elizabeth was not following the party line with regard to Ted's behavior—a party line Olwyn had established. Then Olwyn began writing that in fact Elizabeth had only seen Sylvia and Ted on perhaps a dozen occasions and was nothing like a good friend of the couple (this despite Sylvia's dedicating
The Bell Jar
to Elizabeth and David Compton).

In Elizabeth's papers, two letters from Aurelia tell what Olwyn does not want told. On 11 April 1963, Aurelia wrote to Elizabeth, “I know what good friends you and your husband had been to my girl when she was so shocked by the change that came into her marriage.” After learning that Ted had installed Elizabeth to take care of Court Green in his absence, Aurelia wrote again on 5 May: “I want to say that there is no one in all England I would rather have in Court Green, doing what you are doing, than you. From the first moment I saw you, I rejoiced that Sylvia had such a fine and lovely a friend. Indeed I wish to see you when I come in June … I am glad to think of you at Court Green.” And more than a decade later, after the Plath wars had heated up, Aurelia wrote to Elizabeth on 18 May 1976, “When I met you … I thought you were one of the most beautiful, radiant women I ever saw. My heart went out to you in affection from the very start.”