Sylvia Plath: A Biography (19 page)

Sylvia and Ted spent the rest of December in Yorkshire. Olwyn was home from Paris for the holiday and she and a cousin, Vicky Farrar, spent hours playing cards with Ted and Sylvia. The weather was windy and rainy, especially unpleasant at the Heptonstall altitude, but they managed to get out for walks every day. They rested. Ted wrote and Sylvia typed his manuscripts and the final draft of her poem collection. She sometimes wondered whether their decision to move back to England had been wise, even though she knew that Ted would be happier there, and even though living in England as writers would be economically possible.

On January 2, 1960, they arrived in London for what they hoped would be only a few days of apartment hunting. They lived in a bed-and-breakfast place for $5 a day and began the search that Sylvia called “gruelling.” Later they moved to an extra bedroom in the Bloomsbury flat belonging to Helga and Dan Huws, Ted’s friends from
St
.
Botolph’s
Review
. There they had a central location in a picturesque part of London, and they also could cook. The search for a London flat was part of a depressing winter for Sylvia. As Ted recalled, “The December London gave her a bad shock — the cars seemed smaller and blacker and dingier than ever, sizzling through black wet streets. The clothes on the people seemed even grubbier than she remembered....”

In some ways, apartment hunting showed Sylvia at her best. Both Dan and Helga Huws remember her energy, her readiness to start out early each day, her strategies for scouring the city, and her moments of happiness in the midst of the ordeal. Even when she was tired, Sylvia was good company, excited about Philip Larkin’s poems in
The
Less
Deceived
, enthusiastic about teaching Helga to make Aurelia Schober’s fish chowder. Sylvia would wrap herself in one of Helga’s large aprons and chop and stir busily. After dinner, she usually wrote letters and talked with friends of Ted and the Huwses who stopped by.

Sylvia’s living standards were still American. She wanted a flat that was modern, and she sometimes failed to appreciate the charm of traditional London housing. But she was grateful for the help Ted’s friends gave them. Through the efforts of the American poet W. S. Merwin and his British wife Dido — a couple the Hugheses had met in Boston — Sylvia and Ted did find an unfurnished three-room flat at 3 Chalcot Square in the Primrose Hill area near Chalk Farm subway station. Sylvia was elated. The Merwins and Huwses helped them furnish the apartment, and the rent ($18 a week, gas and electricity extra) was reasonable. Even though the neighborhood was working class, filled with children and noise all day long, Sylvia described the location as a quiet square, overlooking a small green with benches and fence where mothers and children passed the day. The fact that she was only five minutes from beautiful Regent’s Park, and near her doctors, a laundromat, and shops also impressed her.

Helga Huws remembers how hard Sylvia worked at cleaning the flat, even to scrubbing floorboards on her knees and sanding them. She was a relentless worker. Helga recalls, “Never — even when she was highly pregnant — did I see her sit down, hands in lap, just resting.” Sylvia, by striking contrast, was surprised at her deep weariness and worried about the actual move. Her pregnancy had tired her beyond her expectations, and she was having trouble meeting the demands she was accustomed to making of herself. Ted did all the carrying up to the fourth floor, however, and a week after they had moved on February 1, Sylvia wrote to Aurelia about her “cheerful kitchen” filled with the smell of chicken stew and apfelkuchen. “Ted has just finished painting the living room walls white over the nice rough-textured linen paper.... We are going to have a lovely engraving of Isis from one of Ted’s astrological books blown up to cover one of the side-wall panels.”

Happy event followed happy event. On February 10, Sylvia signed a contract with William Heinemann Ltd. to publish
The
Colossus
and
Other
Poems
, the book manuscript she had submitted just a week earlier. Plans were for the book to appear in midfall. It seemed almost too easy. As she described the day (and herself “resplendent in black wool suit, black cashmere coat, fawn kidskin gloves from Paris [Olwyn’s Christmas present] and matching calfskin bag [from Italy] ... and of enormous and impressive size”), she signed the contract in the York Minster pub on Dean Street in Soho and then went with the publisher and Ted for a good lunch at a nearby Italian restaurant. A month earlier, she and Ted had lunched there, “homeless and cold and very grim.” Things do improve, as Ted always told her. To remind Sylvia of the happy occasion, Ted bought for her the three-volume set of D. H. Lawrence’s
Collected
Poems
, which he inscribed, “February 10, 1960, London.”

This was the beginning of a new phase in Sylvia’s career as a writer. Just a few months earlier, she had written to Judith Reutlinger, a New England acquaintance who had asked for a copy of her poem “Lament,” that she had not yet published a book. She then added, “But I hope to manage this in a year or so if fates and editors are willing.”

12 - Babies and Bell Jars

1960-61

“The Old Dregs”

Despite her work on literary projects, most of Plath’s energy and attention during the winter of 1960 were not going into her writing or publishing. Instead, she was preparing for motherhood. The most important news she sent home was information about her weight; her most interesting occupation was feeling the baby move. Listening to its heartbeat in early March was one of the high points of Sylvia’s year.

From the time Ted and Sylvia had moved into their flat, various workmen were continuously on hand, remodeling the premises. After that work was finished, she and Ted settled in. They worked out a schedule whereby, for a time, each had one day a week in bed — being waited on, choosing menus, reading and writing, forgetting the outside world. Both were exhausted from the strain of coming to England, living out of suitcases, and spending nearly a month finding a flat. By late February, however, they began to take advantage of living in London, seeing movies and such plays as Ibsen’s
Rosmersholm
and Brendan Behan’s
The
Hostage
. Both Ted and Sylvia loved Primrose Hill and the zoo in Regent’s Park, and they took walks at night as well as during the day on the quiet streets.

Their move to London nearly coincided with the publication of
Lupercal
, Ted’s second collection of poems (March 18 was the official publication date). His publishers, Faber & Faber, were also readying
Meet
My
Folks
, his children’s book. On February 23, he received advance copies of
Lupercal
, which he took along for a poetry reading he was giving the next day at the Oxford Poetry Society. (He and Sylvia went to Oxford by train and, despite a cold rain, spent much of the day walking in the city.) On February 28, they went to a buffet dinner with the
St
.
Botolph’s
Review
editors — David and Barbara Ross, the Huwses, and Luke Myers, who was about to sail for New Orleans for the birth of his child. On March 1 Ted and Sylvia lunched at a Greek restaurant with Ted’s editors, and the next day they had cocktails with John Lehmann, the editor of
London
Magazine
, who had recently taken some of Sylvia’s poems and her story about Mass. General, now titled “The Daughters of Blossom Street.”

Even though she tried to keep up with a social life she thought was important to them as freelance writers, Sylvia was increasingly tired in the last month of her pregnancy. She was also disappointed: she had written only one poem that she liked since moving to England. “You’re,” the series of metaphors describing the active child she was carrying, was little to show for three months’ time. Her physical discomfort was also making her irritable. She insisted that she have the small apartment practically to herself. Number 3 Chalcot Square consisted of one small bedroom, a kitchen, a living room, and a bath. Like Ted, Sylvia felt physically inhibited by the tiny quarters, the narrow stairs, the low ceilings. Her weight was mounting toward 155 pounds. She used the living room as her study, leaving Ted to set up a card table in a small vestibule area as his workspace.

Sylvia’s need for privacy is reflected in several of her letters home. In early March she wrote, “I really put my foot down about visitors now. I get tired easily and like the house to myself so I can cook, read, write or rest when I please.... I have no desire for people sleeping in my living room or causing me extra cooking or housework.” A case in point was a London visit by Ted’s sister Olwyn and her friend Janet Crosbie-Hill, who had been invited to the Hugheses’ for lunch. Janet described the uncomfortable afternoon,

As Olwyn had spoken only with affection of both brother and sister-in-law, I was totally unprepared for the resentment our visit seemed to cause Sylvia. When, after a delayed and perfunctory lunch, W. S. Merwin arrived, Sylvia, who had been aggressively though quite uninterestingly rude hitherto, brightened visibly and offered Merwin the pleasure of taking herself and husband for a country run in his two-seater. This not materializing, there was a strained walk on Primrose Hill during which I was the unhappy witness of the sheer quantity of distress Sylvia was capable of causing her nearest and dearest. Her aggression was relentless and dominated the reactions of all present. Apologizing to me later, Olwyn attributed these astonishing effects to Sylvia’s pregnancy.

This sort of scene, according to other observers, was not uncommon. Yet, inevitably, when Sylvia wrote home about an incident, she described her own long-suffering patience. Sylvia seemed to use her letters home to explain away her impolite behavior. It was as if her letters allowed her to fictionalize the real events of her life — Aurelia was far away and so she would never know the truth of Sylvia’s stories.

Waiting for the baby to be born seemed interminable. But the wait brightened considerably when Ted won the Somerset Maugham Award for
The
Hawk
in
the
Rain
. This prize of £500 ($1400 at that time) was to be spent on travel abroad for three months, and could be spent any time during the next two years. The following Sunday, A. Alvarez, the important young literary critic, favorably reviewed
Lupercal
in
The
Observer
, and on another page of the paper appeared a photo of Ted with the announcement of the Maugham award. He then received what Sylvia called “a flood of mail,” including invitations to read and letters from old friends. In fact, Ted’s mail was so heavy that on March 31, Sylvia wrote that she would type answers for him the next day or they would never get done.

But the next day Frieda Rebecca arrived. Born at 5:45 a.m. on April 1, Ted and Sylvia’s first child was a healthy seven pounds, four ounces. She was named for Frieda Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence’s widow and a woman the Hugheses much admired, and for Otto Plath’s sister Frieda in California. Ann Davidow, Sylvia’s friend from Smith, and the Merwins were the baby’s godparents.

Sylvia was enthusiastic about Britain’s national health service. She admired Sister Malti, the Indian midwife who delivered Frieda. She enjoyed her home delivery and was pleased that, because her labor had been a rapid four-and-a-half hours, she had been given no anesthesia. With Ted at her side, Sylvia had experienced natural childbirth. She wrote to Aurelia,

I looked on my stomach and saw Frieda Rebecca, white as flour with the cream that covers new babies, little funny squiggles of hair plastered over her head, with big, dark-blue eyes.... The midwife sponged her beside the bed in my big pyrex mixing bowl, wrapped her up well, near a hot water bottle in the crib; she sucked at me a few minutes like a little expert and got a few drops of colostrum and then went to sleep.... I have never been so happy in my life.

Sylvia phoned her mother just a few hours after Frieda’s birth and wrote to Marcia Brown later that same day.

Ted noticed that Frieda’s birth seemed to be a turning point for Sylvia. He wrote that she had finally “received herself,” arrived “at her own center of gravity.” At times she was euphoric. But she was also overwhelmed with the changes in her life. Keeping to the orderly routine that had been so important to her was impossible. Though friends from these London years remember Sylvia’s excitement about parenting, most of them did not see the erratic behavior that her physical weariness and what seems to have been postpartum depression led to. After the health service nurses stopped coming, Sylvia grew more and more tired. She tried to do everything she ordinarily would — such as taking Frieda to a “Ban-the-Bomb” march and rally when the child was only a few weeks old — but she was not up to her usual routines. She did have some help; Ted watched Frieda while Sylvia napped, and he did much of the laundry, shopping, and cleaning for a time. Dido Merwin brought in delicious meals.

Sylvia was soon accompanying Ted to social and literary events. Scarcely two weeks after Frieda’s birth, they hired their first sitter in order to go to a Faber & Faber cocktail party, where they met Valerie and T. S. Eliot. The next night they had dinner in Soho with Lee Anderson, an American who was recording British poets for a Yale series of records. There were other lunches and dinners, as well as visits from Ted’s family, from Mike Lotz, and from Ann Davidow and her fiancé, who was on a Guggenheim at Cambridge. With the latter couple, the three Hugheses drove to Stonehenge for what Sylvia called “an exquisite day.” A few weeks later, Sylvia and Ted had dinner with the Eliots and the Stephen Spenders at the Eliot home. Sylvia wrote Wilbury Crockett a glowing description of that evening, during which time she was seated between Eliot and Spender. She and Ted also had dinner with Peter Davison, recently married to Jane Truslow, Sylvia’s housemate at Smith. Davison was now an editor at
The
Atlantic
Monthly
.

With Ted’s growing stature in poetry and work for the BBC, Sylvia was increasingly identified as Sylvia Hughes, Ted’s wife. A. Alvarez described one embarrassing occasion around this time when he discovered Sylvia’s dual identity:

Ted went downstairs to get the pram ready while she dressed the baby. I stayed behind a minute, zipping up my son’s coat. Sylvia turned to me, suddenly without gush.

“I’m so glad you picked
that
poem,” she said. “It’s one of my favourites but no one else seemed to like it.”

For a moment I was completely blank; I didn’t know what she was talking about. She noticed and helped me out.

“The one you put in the
Observer
a year ago. About the factory at night.”

“For Christ’s sake, Sylvia
Plath
.” It was my turn to gush, “I’m sorry. It was a lovely poem.”

“Lovely” wasn’t the right word, but what else do you say to a bright young housewife? ...

As housewife-and-mother became Sylvia’s identity in public, maintaining her identity as a writer at home was difficult. Someone had to watch the baby; that responsibility more and more often became Sylvia’s. In early May Ted began working all day in W. S. Merwin’s study. (The Merwins’ apartment was occupied while they were in France for the summer, but the poet’s study, which was kept locked, was not included in the occupancy. Merwin offered the study to Ted.) Evidently, Sylvia envied her husband the privacy and space, and by late June she had convinced Ted that he should share the borrowed study with her. She worked at Merwin’s flat during the mornings while Ted took care of Frieda, and he worked there during the afternoons.

It was a bright spot in a period that was frequently marred by anxiety and anger. A friend remembers reports of quarrels, and Ted’s coming to a pub even though Sylvia had been angry that he was going out. Ten weeks after Frieda’s birth, Sylvia lamented, “I get tired so easily.” “I am exhausted by noon.” “The baby’s feedings and keeping the house clean, cooking, and taking care of Ted’s voluminous mail, plus my own, have driven me so I care only for carving out hours where I can start on my own writing.” To Ann Davidow she wrote in June, “I am gradually getting my nose above crib-level.” But to her mother, she blamed her bad temper on her own unease with a new period of writing, “I am at the depressing, painful stage of trying to start writing after a long spell of silence, but the mornings at the study are very peaceful.... I am infinitely lucky we can work things out so I get a solid hunk of time off, or rather, time on, a day.”

As the summer progressed, Sylvia was once again worrying about money. She and Ted were trying to stretch his Guggenheim fellowship funds so that they would not have to look for jobs until fall. Ted sold the worksheets of the poems in his first two books to the Lilly Library at Indiana University for £160 ($450). He was writing prose as well as poetry regularly for the BBC: he recorded programs on May 8, May 20, June 26, August 2 (with Alvarez), and August 21. Although he and Sylvia had saved nearly $5000 from their year of teaching, they lived as though that money did not exist; it was earmarked for a house, the house that would have studies for each of them and ample room for children. Sylvia wrote to Aurelia early in July, “My own aim is to keep Ted writing full-time,” but she also noted that one of them would have to take a job soon. “I am thinking of working myself, if Ted would just feed the baby her noon meal.” Obviously, if Sylvia took an outside job, Ted would have to do much more than feed Frieda. The contradiction between Sylvia’s wanting Ted to write full time and also be a househusband with a baby to care for seems to have escaped her.

Or she might have been posing for her mother’s benefit, as she frequently did. Earlier in the spring, she had written confidentially to Aurelia that Ted was thinking of going back to school, this time to study toward a degree in zoology, given as an external course at the University of London. After Sylvia wrote to her mother about this notion, she instructed her to refer to it as The Plan if she mentioned it in subsequent letters. The sense of conspiracy between Sylvia and her mother suggests more than a little unhappiness with financial management. Mention of The Plan does not occur again.

Early in the summer Ted and Sylvia read their poems together at the Institute of Contemporary Arts following the Faber & Faber cocktail party at which the photograph of “Three Generations of Faber Poets” was taken: Ted Hughes with T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNiece, and Stephen Spender. In mid-July Sylvia, Ted, and Frieda went to The Beacon for a week’s vacation, spending one of the days at Whitby, a seaside resort, which only made Sylvia homesick for Cape Cod. Once back in London, they continued to write at the Merwins’, but leaving home became more difficult for Sylvia. During August Ted too stayed home to write, working in the attic apartment above theirs while that tenant was out for the day. On August 3, Harper’s published
Lupercal
in the United States, again to good reviews. And at the close of summer, the three Hugheses returned to Yorkshire, this time for ten days of unwinding from what Sylvia called “months of half-fatigue.”