Sylvia Plath: A Biography (21 page)

On the heels of this good news came word that Ted had won the Hawthornden prize for
Lupercal
. He had also been doing some BBC recording, and he and Sylvia made another joint appearance there, reading new poems and discussing their childhoods. Ted had also been commissioned to write a play for the London company of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre by its director, Peter Hall, clear indication that he was as highly thought of as a playwright as he was a poet.

Sylvia’s letters home were ecstatic. What she was not writing to Aurelia, however, was even more exciting. With Knopf s acceptance of
The
Colossus
, a deep frustration had dissolved, and she was now working “fiendishly” on her novel. Now called
The
Bell
Jar
, the book was written in the satirical voice of a Salinger or Roth character, who uses a mixture of wry understatement and comic exaggeration. The protagonist’s interior monologue tells of her summer as guest editor at
Mademoiselle
, her first serious romance and its breakup, her depression, her attempted suicide, and — most important to Sylvia —  her recovery.

Plath wanted to do more than write autobiographical fiction. She wanted her novel to speak for the lives of countless women she had known — women caught in conflicting social codes who were able to laugh about their plight. A central image of the book, the fig tree bearing ripe figs, depicts the female dilemma of the 1950s. No woman can have it all, but choosing is also difficult.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree....

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest....

The protagonist’s comic monologue is calculated to imply that a woman does not have to make that single choice. Her dilemma is entirely artificial. Only social pressure forces the choice.

Esther Greenwood, the narrator of the novel, appreciates the ridiculousness of her plight. Her perceptions set her outside society, but they do not free her from the pressures of that world. Plath carefully sets the story of Esther in the context of a political situation (not for nothing had she been reading Camus and Sartre), the controversial execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Esther’s personal horror at what she finds in life is set against the horror of their executions.

Plath’s choice of her grandmother’s maiden name, Greenwood, was satisfying for both symbolic reasons and personal ones, and since the novel moves toward Esther’s rebirth, the image is appropriate. In
The
Bell
Jar
, Esther is a survivor: she has a sense of humor, a cool if cynical view of life that colors the grim comedy of her descriptions. She is also — at the time she writes the story — a mother, a practical woman who has made the best of her life, and who tries to learn from it. Like Holden Caulfield in Salinger’s
The
Catcher
in
the
Rye
, or Elizabeth in Shirley Jackson’s
The
Bird’s
Nest
, Esther is not ashamed of her descent into madness: she wants to tell about it, partly to rid herself of memories, partly to help other women faced with the same cultural pressure.

Writing
The
Bell
Jar
was a liberating experience for Sylvia. She went each morning to the Merwins’ and wrote for three or four hours. For the first time in her life, her writing provided continuity for her. The long prose story had its own rhythm, its own demands. With poetry, when Sylvia had finished one poem, there was no reason to write any particular next poem; everything was separate, distinct. With a novel, everything could be used: the writer’s life was fair game, including all the writer’s experiences and certainly the writer’s emotions, whatever had prompted them. And in writing this novel, Plath did draw on all her experiences. For example, she borrowed a sexual experience from a blind date during her freshman year at Smith, describing it as though it happened with Buddy Willard.

In many ways,
The
Catcher
in
the
Rye
was the model Plath was using for
The
Bell
Jar
. Sylvia turned to it for structure, and drew on it whenever she ran out of events that seemed to fit Esther’s story. Holden meets a sailor and a Cuban; so does Esther. Holden walks forty-one blocks back to his New York hotel; Esther walks forty-eight. Holden looks as yellow in his mirror as Esther (looking Chinese) does in hers. He vomits before going to bed; in
The
Bell
Jar
, Doreen does that, but then Esther and the other guest editors share in another long purge after eating bad crab. Both books have a cemetery scene.
Catcher
has its violent and bloody suicide in James Castle’s death, which becomes the suicide by hanging in
The
Bell
Jar
. Holden Caulfield wants to go West because he thinks that part of the country will save him. Esther wants to go to Chicago for the same reasons. The suggestion of sexual deviance in the subplot, too, echoes Holden’s discovery of the homosexuality of Mr. Antolini, his friend and former teacher. That discovery precipitates Holden’s breakdown. For Esther, however, the suspicion of her friend’s sexual preference is much less important than the fact of her death.

Tone and mood in
The
Bell
Jar
change quickly. Plath opens with a flush of Esther’s euphoric memories, painfully described yet distant enough to be harmless. This was a “comic” novel Sylvia was writing (she later called it “a pot-boiler”). Its outcome was to be positive: the rebirth of Esther, a woman who had come through both Dante’s hell and her own, to find her fulfillment not in some idealized Beatrice, the unattainable woman/spirit, but in herself.
The
Bell
Jar
would reach beyond
Catcher
, because in that book Holden was telling his story to a sympathetic therapist and to his readers, but he was not yet free of the asylum or its stigma. For Esther, there was rebirth.

For Plath, too, a yearning for rebirth, for a clean start, seems to have dominated the spring of 1961. Now that her appendix had been removed, she could no longer blame her moods on health problems. The moods, however, remained and a vengeful anger periodically erupted through the calm surface of her life. It also erupted in her writing.

13 - The Devon Life

1961-62

“The Shine of These Small Things”

Sylvia’s convalescence at home, following her miscarriage and her appendectomy, convinced her that she and Ted needed a house to themselves. Ted could not keep working in such a crowded space — his concentration at the mercy of every phone bell or caller — nor could she. (Sylvia’s dream was an upstairs study for herself with a babysitter minding the children in a downstairs nursery.) As long as she and Ted used Merwin’s study during his absences from London, they could manage, but they could not rely forever on their friend’s generosity. Using the $1500 that Ted had earned from his BBC work in 1960, they bought a small Morris station wagon and, in late June of 1961, began driving into the London suburbs and to Devon, looking for appropriate and affordable houses.

Sylvia was writing
The
Bell
Jar
seven mornings a week at Merwin’s study, where Ted worked every afternoon. Both were trying to finish projects during May because the Merwins would be back in London later that month, and then in mid-June Sylvia’s mother was coming to visit. With the Merwins going to France for the summer, Aurelia would stay at their apartment most of the time.

Although her letters home that spring indicate that Sylvia was eager to see her mother and to show off her grandchild, once Aurelia arrived in London Sylvia could hardly wait to leave. She urged Aurelia to spend six weeks every summer visiting them in the future, saying nothing about things they might do together but only “then Ted and I could take an annual two-week holiday in the middle of your stay while you got re-acquainted with your grandchildren.” Now a mother herself, Sylvia had a better understanding of the time and energy Aurelia had spent on her care. She realized that her debt to her mother was impossibly great, and a kind of desperation existed in that knowledge. She could never repay Aurelia. And, again, she felt that she could not live up to her mother’s expectations — or what she thought were her mother’s expectations — that she excel in everything she did, including motherhood. During this visit; Sylvia was afraid that she would be judged and probably found wanting. The anger growing out of Sylvia’s feelings about her mother surfaced not only in
The
Bell
Jar
but in two poems, “Widow,” written May 16, 1961, and “The Rival,” written in July.

In
The
Bell
Jar
, Esther Greenwood’s feelings toward older women are also ambivalent. As she says, “all the old ladies I ever knew wanted to teach me something.” In her self-disgust, however, Esther cannot accept their teaching. The reader can see that many of these women characters would have been excellent role models for Esther, and would have helped her with her dilemma of life choices. In her present state, Esther cannot distinguish helpful people from conspirators. In her view, because she narrates the novel, all women act against her.

Esther’s mother is cast as the chief villain. While she sleeps in the room she shares with her daughter, Esther considers strangling her mother, mostly because
she
can sleep while Esther cannot. In her depression, Esther cannot tolerate her mother’s love for her. She experiences a second birth at the end of
The
Bell
Jar
, just as in effect she replaced her natural mother with her psychiatrist, Dr. Nolan.

Even though Sylvia enjoyed writing the book, and wrote her friend Ann Davidow that she had never been so excited about anything else she had written, she realized that the portraits of these women would hurt feelings. She told Ann that she would publish her “funny, and yet serious” novel under a pseudonym. Once past the glee of knowing that her novel was working — was coherent, interesting, even amusing in the gallows mode of humor she admired — Sylvia realized that the voice of
The
Bell
Jar
could also become a voice for her poetry. For the first time in her life, it was hard to stop writing each day.

Plath’s depiction of her mother and other female characters may trouble the reader who knows her biography, but
The
Bell
Jar
is a fiction, and in fiction real people are transformed. Plath’s caricatures helped to emphasize the torment of Esther Greenwood, the novel’s protagonist, who sees herself as subject to external forces working against her. The “bell jar” of the title that encloses the heroine in an airless suffocation is one image of that external force.

Plath’s novel is also a story of betrayal. Esther thinks that everyone she trusts has somehow disappointed her. For all his prudish talk, Buddy is not really a virgin. For all his sexual experience, Irwin botches her deflowering. For all her brilliance and insight, Jay Cee does not recognize Esther’s talents. And even Esther’s helpful mother brings the news that she has not been accepted into the Harvard writing class. People fail Esther; disappointments test her. She lives through it all, however, heading toward eventual rebirth and ironically living to reach the very goals she has seemingly rebelled against during her college years: she marries and becomes a mother.

In literary study, the classic betrayal is that of Judas betraying Jesus. Sylvia was a product of traditional literary study, and she used elements of the Christ legend throughout
The
Bell
Jar
— ironically. She reduced the number of
Mademoiselle
guest editors from the actual twenty to the religiously significant twelve; one — Doreen — is conspicuously different, i.e., evil — from the start. It is Doreen’s influence that leads Esther to evil, and to her breakdown: she runs away from the Judas-like friend, takes scalding baths to purify herself, acts viciously against Doreen to escape her influence. But — the nature of evil being what it is — Doreen comes through victorious and it is Esther who nearly dies of severe food poisoning, a slick version of the Last Supper.

Esther’s wandering in the “garden” of the Boston Common and being tempted by the sailor, and her three suicide attempts, are heavily ironic replications of Jesus’s suffering. But these events are invested with deep irony: no mere young woman could attain the stature of a Jesus figure — not in “literature.” No reader who had been trained as Sylvia had to identify religious allusions would have even tried to spot Jesus in Esther Greenwood, even though she carried the name of a noble Old Testament woman.

In most of Plath’s writing, the intellectual component from the world of literature that she had studied was omnipresent. Young as she was, much of what she knew came from her studies, the books she had read. Still in her twenties, she was writing as much from literature as from life. The worksheets and manuscripts of all her work,
The
Bell
Jar
as well as the poems, are usually more explicit about these literary sources than are the finished works.

In June Aurelia arrived; she spent much time at Chalcot Square but lived in the Merwins’ flat and toured London from there. As Sylvia had feared would happen, she and Aurelia had some arguments, but once Sylvia and Ted left for their French vacation in late June, Aurelia had her beautiful grandchild to herself. She moved into Chalcot Square for the two weeks that Sylvia and Ted were gone.

The vacation in France that Sylvia had looked forward to so eagerly was a disappointment. She and Ted returned home on July 13, after four or five days at the Merwins’ farm in Lacam, and a few days later they, with Frieda and Aurelia, drove to Ted’s family home in Yorkshire for another week of vacation. Sylvia was now in her third month of a new pregnancy. Aurelia, fascinated with the atmosphere and landscape, enjoyed Ted’s parents and other relatives, and began a correspondence with Ted’s mother that lasted many years.

The summer events had further convinced Sylvia that she and Ted needed to leave London, to find a simpler life where their family could flourish. Having a second child also added urgency to what she saw as their need for more liveable space. In late July Ted and Sylvia drove to Devon and looked at eight properties they had chosen from real estate listings. All but one of the places were impossible, but it seemed perfect for them. The ancient ten-room house had a wine cellar and a small attic. The main house sat at the end of a gated lane, and its servants’ cottage, the stable (which was also a garage), and the cobblestone court took up the front of the two-acre plot. The “wilderness” of a back yard contained seventy apple and cherry trees and blackberry and raspberry bushes. The yard adjoined the church-yard and cemetery, and a nine-foot stone wall surrounded the yard.

Both Sylvia and Ted were intrigued by the history of Court Green. The oldest walls in the house were three feet thick. The roof of both the main house and the cottage were of thatch. Beneath the ancient elm tree, about which Sylvia would write several poems, was the mound of a Roman fortress.

The house contained a small kitchen, a cold larder, a larger eating area, a living room, a small study with a tiny fireplace, and a long room that would become the children’s playroom and Sylvia’s sewing room. Upstairs, Sylvia would choose to have her study facing the front, beside their bedroom, and near Frieda’s small bedroom, a guest room, one other bedroom, and the bath. Ted would take the peaked attic as his study.

For Sylvia, the move to Devon was crucial. It would provide necessary space for a growing family to live comfortably, and for both her and Ted to write. It would allow her to assume more fully the roles of mother, wife, and homemaker. In Devon she would have land, trees, flowers, and gardens. While she told friends that it was Ted who wanted to leave London, it seems clear that she thought living in Devon would benefit both of them and their work.

To buy the property they had to spend all they had saved. In August, Aurelia sent them a check for $5880 from their Boston savings. She added a loan of $1400 (charging three percent interest, at Sylvia’s insistence), an amount Ted’s mother matched with a gift. Though there would be furnishing and redecorating costs, Sylvia seemed to think that their writing incomes would sustain the enterprise.

In the month that remained before the move, they took care of business in London. They advertised and sublet their flat, resorting to some subterfuge so that David Wevill, a young Canadian poet, and his striking, somewhat older wife, Assia, could rent it. They saw friends — the American poet Ruth Fainlight and her husband, Alan Sillitoe, among them. Sylvia also called Clarissa Roche, who had finally arrived to join her husband Paul in London after years of living in Mexico. Sylvia and Clarissa, as Americans, often traded “Englishisms,” anecdotes about the British customs they thought amusing. This time Sylvia told Clarissa about an English cafe that closed from noon to 2:00 p.m. so that the staff could have lunch.

Finally August 31 came. Ted and Sylvia had packed their books, records, clothes, and household and baby goods, and relinquished the image of themselves as Londoners, at least for a time. For Sylvia, the move to Devon was hopeful. It was the beginning of a new fantasy.

When the Hughes family and all their possessions arrived in a small moving van and their station wagon, they saw that the wonderful new home was dilapidated and in need of a great amount of work. Rose and Percy Key, near neighbors, brought in tea that day and helped set the tone of welcome in the midst of discouragement. Once again, Sylvia’s American standards of living made it difficult for her to accept living in the ages-old house, despite its charm. By September 4, however, when she wrote home to Aurelia, she was careful to be cheerful: “My whole spirit has expanded immensely — I don’t have that crowded, harassed feeling I’ve had in all the small places I’ve lived in before.”

She loved the quiet center of the village, sitting on a slope so that the sidewalks that formed a triangle around it pitched at unexpected angles. She liked walking the short distance to the village over the cobbled pavement. (The narrow pitch cobble-stones in her courtyard were like those of the nearby church floor, edges melted to a mosaic through centuries of wear.) She felt refreshed by the blue skies that seemed closer to earth here, and the fields that stretched away into a faint horizon, studded with clusters of shaggy sheep and a few scattered flowers. And she knew that if she found Devon peaceful, thinking of herself as an American “city” person, then Ted was enjoying it even more.

When Sylvia’s brother Warren came for a week in September, Sylvia and Ted used his visit as an excuse to explore the new territory. They took picnics to the coast and tried out various beaches, ate at the local inn, went for long walks, picked blackberries, and met townspeople whenever possible. Warren helped with various tasks, including the sanding of Sylvia’s new writing table (which was six feet long, one of her dreams) that Ted had made for her. Once Warren had left, Sylvia and Ted settled into what would be their Devon routine. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Nancy Axworthy came to clean and iron. Each morning Sylvia worked in her study; after lunch, Ted wrote while Sylvia did the housework and took Frieda outside for yard work and gardening. By the end of September, Ted had recorded four BBC programs at Plymouth, a location closer than London. He was finishing a new radio play for the Third Programme.

It looked as if moving had been wise. Yet the physical work of living in Devon was much greater for Sylvia, and now that she was six months pregnant, she felt much pressure to attend to household matters first. As she wrote to the Huwses in her usual wry tone, the house was indeed “a very ancient manor, with plaster crumbling ominously behind the wallpaper which obviously holds it on ... and nettles overall.” She was writing good poems, however. Part of the impetus for her writing was the arrival of
American
Poetry
Now
, the supplement of contemporary American poems she had edited for the journal
Critical
Quarterly
. The booklet was eclectic, full of strong poems by people who would nearly all become important poets. Robert Creeley, Richard Wilbur, and Denise Levertov appeared with Edgar Bowers, Barbara Guest, Louis Simpson, George Starbuck, Luke Myers, Dan Hoffman, Anthony Hecht, and Hyam Plotzik. Plath included three poems each by Adrienne Rich, William Stafford, and W. S. Merwin, and two by Howard Nemerov, W. D. Snodgrass, and Anne Sexton. The Sexton and Snodgrass poems close the volume, giving them an importance that reflected Sylvia’s opinion that the most interesting poetry was that written out of personal experience. The process of choosing these poems and editing the booklet gave her a better understanding of her own Americanisms. Her voice in poems as different as “Mirror,” “Blackberrying,” and “The Moon and the Yew Tree” was a continuation of that strikingly real and unhappy voice in “Tulips.” She seemed to be taking her poetry more seriously; she dated each finished poem and saved the worksheets for it.