American Isis (43 page)

In May 1963, Ted sent a letter to Elizabeth instructing her to be wary about what she told Aurelia, because Sylvia's mother had been “casting a spy-ring” around him as part of a plot to wrest the children away from him. Wary about what? I wanted to know. Elizabeth could not think of what Ted had in mind. In June, he asked her to hide albums and other memorabilia that Aurelia was sure to snatch up. Uncomfortable about these instructions, Elizabeth did go through the contents of a desk, but she saw nothing she wanted to hide away. In July, Ted made clear that he held Aurelia partially responsible for the breakup of his marriage, writing to David Compton, “My effort to get away from her was a large part of my leaving Court Green last summer & starting the fire I wasn't able to put out.” When Elizabeth made it clear she could not follow orders, Olwyn exacted her punishment, making sure that Sylvia's children never saw Elizabeth again.

In the course of two days, I recorded Elizabeth's reminiscences and looked through her extraordinary files, which include articles about Ted, Sylvia, and Olwyn, as well as letters sent to Elizabeth from Aurelia, Olwyn, and others, and correspondence involving Olwyn, Clarissa Roche, and Linda Wagner-Martin, and a few of Sylvia's own letters. What I include below are the exact words of Elizabeth's testimony, edited only to clarify chronology and eliminate repetition. I am grateful to her for verifying the accuracy of this account.

Elizabeth first became aware of the couple when they were on the BBC program “Two of a Kind,” describing their rather cramped lodgings that gave them little room to write. So she wrote to them describing her lovely house in North Devon that included an orchard: “My husband is a writer too, and we'd love you to come stay and have a holiday. I can look after the children because I'm well used to that, and you three can go off and write.” She went on to tell me: “And my husband who was very cynical said, ‘You silly woman. You won't have an answer from them.' And of course for a year I didn't. Then I got a letter from Ted saying, ‘We too are living in a thatched home and farmhouse a few miles from you. Come and have a meal with us.'” To Elizabeth, it seemed a rock solid marriage that would never, ever be broken.

They seemed to be so much a unit. And it grew because when they came up to visit us, and they went to look at a stream near us, you could see there was such closeness. But Sylvia was talking to me and Ted was talking with David about rights and money as all writers do. David was writing science fiction and whodunits and stuff like that. Sylvia said to me, “What other things do you do?” And I said, “Well I do some canvassing for the Liberal Democrats,” and she jumped up and rushed to Ted and shook him and said, “I've found a committed woman!” Our local MP, Mark Bonham Carter, got to know Sylvia and was very fond of her. We talked quite a bit about the military industrial complex. She was extremely politically aware.

To my questions, “Did Ted talk politics? Was he interested at all?” Elizabeth replied:

Now I'm glad you asked that question because nobody ever asked me this. I was going up to a meeting in the House of Commons about chemical weapons [Elizabeth was active in the movement to abolish them], and Ted happened to be at the station too. He said, “Oh, can I come along?” He'd never been to the House of Commons. We walked around, and he looked at the great marble busts, and he said, “I want to knock them down, crush their heads.” Ted had this feeling against people in power and the class system. But then of course when it came to being Poet Laureate, he had to go cringe before the Queen, and he wrote in a letter to me that because he was having an affair with a thrice married woman [Assia] his parents were saying he would never be made a knight. He was laughing at them for that.

It was a sad mixture of feelings I had about Ted. Because when I went to London [in early March 1963] after Sylvia's death, the nanny [taking care of Sylvia's children] told me Assia had moved in [to the Fitzroy Road flat]. I said, “Where is she?” The nanny said, “She's having one of those operations.” I said, “Do you mean an abortion?” She said, “Yes.” When they came back into the flat, Assia went straight up past the kitchen to the stairs to Sylvia's bedroom, and Ted came into the kitchen and stood back against the wall, and he did look like a whipped dog. He really did look dreadful. And he said to me, “It doesn't fall to many men to murder a genius.” And I said, “Well, you didn't murder her.” And he said, “I might just as well have done.” So my first impression was here was a man absolutely destroyed by what had happened. He said, “I hear the wolves howling.” [They were near the Regent's Park Zoo.] It seems appropriate. I got this impression that he was guilt ridden.

Later Ted's Aunt Hilda, who was taking care of the children, told Elizabeth that Assia had arrived at the Fitzroy Road flat after Sylvia's death and, according to Elizabeth, announced:

“I'm moving in.” “No, you're not,” Hilda replied. “I'm sorry, but I am, and I shall win,” and she did. Aunt Hilda then went to Court Green. Talk about Northern Yorkshire women [I had told Elizabeth about Al Alvarez's comment that Olwyn and Ted were Northern peasants who cared too much about money], when I saw her, she said, “Has your husband earned any more money this time?” I got to know all of them. Ted's parents. [This was the period when Ted asked Elizabeth and David to live in Court Green and look after it, the period when Assia visited and sensed Elizabeth's loyalty to Sylvia.] This was the very first time I met Olwyn. She was very pleasant to me in her own sort of fierce way.

Before I knew about you I tried last year to contact Wagner-Martin [who had corresponded with Elizabeth and interviewed her over the phone] because I felt very strongly that someone must write a book that tells the story of Olwyn because nobody's really done it—only hints and bits. Ted's position was very odd because he knew I was faithful to Sylvia's memory. He liked me. [Some years later] on the train to Exeter … [not far from Court Green, Elizabeth, returning to her seat, encountered Ted and his second wife, Carol Hughes.] She rose up, looked up at me and said, “Don't worry, we'll move.” I said, “You don't have to move.” She said, “Come on, Ted.” And he got up with the bags and he just trailed after her.

But Elizabeth remembered happier days when Ted would sing and entertain friends. “You've made Ted human,” Daniel Craig told Elizabeth when he came to talk to her during his preparation to play Hughes in the film
Sylvia.
Elizabeth added: “There were those bits when [Ted] came to our house and drank coffee and sang, when he was quite a normal, ordinary person. I remember one Christmas Eve he came and took his children and three of my children on to Dartmoor. We stopped at the top of the moor. A streak of sunlight was coming through the clouds, and he said, ‘Look, children, that's the eye of God.'”

 

SOURCES

Abbreviations:

Wherever possible, I have built this biography on primary sources I have read in the archives at Smith College, Indiana University, Emory University, the University of Maryland, and the British Library. I am grateful to Peter K. Steinberg, author of a perceptive introduction to Sylvia Plath, for providing additional primary sources.
Letters Home,
Karen V. Kukil's scrupulous edition of Sylvia Plath's journals, and Christopher Reid's
Letters of Ted Hughes
form part of the bedrock of my narrative.

Although I diverge at various points from previous Plath biographies, I don't see how my book could have been written without them. As Plath's first biographer, Edward Butscher interviewed for the first time many of the key figures in his subject's life. To be sure, Butscher made errors, and his “bitch goddess” thesis has been deplored, but he nevertheless deserves an honored place in Plath biography as a pathfinder, and my debt to him shows in the notes below. Paul Alexander accomplished a good deal in discovering much new material about Plath's family and her childhood. His command of the details of Plath biography is such that I consulted his book continually as I composed my own. Linda Wagner-Martin's literary biography was the first effort to integrate a full discussion of her subject's literary sensibility and her life from a feminist perspective. I have often consulted Ronald Hayman's elegant and succinct biography when deciding how to handle some of the thornier issues in Plath's life.

Anne Stevenson is the only biographer to have had the sanction of the Plath estate and, as such, her work has certain built-in advantages in terms of access to material and the ability to quote. But it also has the disadvantages of the authorized biographer beholden to the literary executor. Paul Alexander wisely decided not to deal with the estate, so as to remain independent. I had several conversations with him while he was researching Plath's life and concluded then that should I ever attempt a Plath biography, I would not seek cooperation from the estate. The result, as in Alexander's case, is that I have quoted very sparingly in order to produce a fair use biography.

In my acknowledgments, I thank everyone I interviewed for this biography. My bibliography lists those books I found helpful in constructing my narrative. Below I have listed only those sources for individual chapters that are not identified in the text.

Acknowledgments:
For my extended critique of Janet Malcolm's
The Silent Woman,
see
Biography: A User's Guide.

Introduction:
The word “Isis” appears on the typescript of “Edge,” SP's last completed poem.

I first adumbrated the idea of SP as the Marilyn Monroe of modern literature in “Visions of Sylvia Plath,” the
New York Sun,
17/2/04. Jacqueline Rose has something quite different in mind when she calls Plath the “Marilyn Monroe of the literati.” That may be true, but implicity in Rose's words is the idea of a myth superimposed upon Plath. My point is that Plath herself made the connection to Monroe, who appeared to the poet in a dream-like vision of the creative, aspiring self, seeking a new look, and an ever-greater vision of self-fulfillment. I am indebted to Peter K. Steinberg, who discovered the rejected line in “A Winter's Tale” in the
New Yorker
papers in the New York Public Library.

Plath's parody of
Dragnet:
SP to Gordon Lameyer, 27/6/54, Maryland.

In
No Man's Land,
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar mention the
Varsity
photo layout as an example of “female impersonation” akin to promotional strategies used by Edith Sitwell, Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Elinor Wylie. But the term impersonation does an injustice, it seems to me, to SP's motivations. She was not merely impersonating what others wanted. She was far more implicated in her culture than such a term implies. Gilbert and Gubar reveal their misapprehension of Plath when they move away from the episode at Cambridge and begin a new paragraph with the words, “More seriously, in the same year Plath produced a poem…” SP calling herself Betty Grable may have been a joke, but it was also a part of her deeply ingrained need to display herself—and not just part of what Gilbert and Gubar call her “dutifully sexualized self.”

Stella Dallas as portrayed on the radio is a strong-willed and resourceful mother—much more positively portrayed than the lower class character of Prouty's novel.

Chapter 1:
For the details of SP's childhood and early schooling I draw on her stories and essays published in JP and on EBP, as well as on Elizabeth Hinchliffe's unpublished manuscript, “The Descent of Ariel: The Death of Sylvia Plath,” available at BL and Maryland. Wilbury Crockett's impressions of Sylvia are taken from his 26/7/74 letter to AP in the Frances McCullough Papers at Maryland. In essays, poems, and fiction, SP drew on details of her life to create a persona, a mythology of the self, and the critic has a right to question how much of her retrospective writing is true. For example, she draws on her mother's family experience during World War I, when German Americans were also under suspicion, to heighten her portrait of Otto the German. But what is true? Certain facts can, of course, be established. But in a figure as protean as SP, fact and fabulation are not easily disentangled.