Sylvia Plath: A Biography (22 page)

Most of the poems Sylvia wrote during September and October of 1961 still came from Ted’s lists of subjects for her to write about (“Finisterre,” “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.” and “The Moon and the Yew Tree”), but each drew on sources of imagery that Sylvia had used throughout her writing. Many of the images appear first in
The
Bell
Jar
; others had been in other pieces: the moon as a source of mystery and chill; mirrors as reflections of souls; sinister landscapes; and a number of different uses of images of water, blood, hooks, stones, flowers, graves. Each image is enriched by her cumulative use of it throughout different poems.

The speaker’s search for truth is one theme that dominates Plath’s Devon poems. “The Moon and the Yew Tree” began as an exercise. It quickly became one of her strongest, most surprising and most intense poems. It begins with a description of her Devon yard and its proximity to the old church burial ground. She admits her ignorance about death (“I simply cannot see where there is to get to”) and says specifically that the moon — for all its dominance in that shadowy landscape — is no answer. To her, the moon represents not beauty but “the O-gape of complete despair.” (Plath used the coined word “O-gape” in other contexts to contrast with
agape
, the term for Christian love. She used it, too, to describe the elongated mouths seen in African sculpture and painting — figures in pain or abandonment.) In the midst of her relatively sonorous description of the Devon location, the speaker says sharply, “I live here.” Or she attempts to exist here, grounded in the ancient culture and its graveyard, scrutinized by the moon, which reminds her of the scrutiny of her mother. Both moon and mother have no tenderness, the poem continues. The poem concludes with the image of “blackness — blackness and silence.” “The Moon and the Yew Tree” expresses Plath’s increasingly bleak sense of discomfort and foreboding in her Devon environs.

Images of blackness, fear, and hopelessness occur in many of Plath’s 1961 poems. At the end of the bushes in “Blackberrying” is “nothing, nothing but a great space.” In “Finisterre” the landscape is dominated by the Bay of the Dead.

Her 1961 poems also reflect some of her admiration for the work of W. S. Merwin. Merwin shared many of Ted’s interests in myth, ritual, and anthropology (he had lived in Mallorca as a tutor to Robert Graves’s son); but his macabre and existential vision was closer to Sylvia’s. She admired his bleak, symbolic poems. By 1960, Merwin was building poems around a single image, or clusters of images, rather than writing narratives. He often jumped from one image to the next without transition. Thematically, in his poems, the common becomes the miraculous, and the rational is often eclipsed by the intuitive. His poems “In a Cloud of Hands,” “My Friends,” “The Annunciation” (in which tenderness is the essence of love), and “Departure’s Girl-Friend,” with its images of covered, shrouded mirrors, all influenced Plath.

One of her key poems during this early Devon period is “Last Words,” a death poem with a strangely positive emphasis, whose mixed tones are reminiscent of Merwin’s work. Here the poet asks for a burial with great ceremony, one in which her household objects — “things ... warmed by much handling” — surround her, to bring her comfort. Emphasizing the artifacts of a woman’s life as she does here suggests that Plath’s life in Devon was giving her a sense of place and community she had not previously known. As she made bright curtains, baked whole wheat banana bread, and painted flowers on furniture, she was arriving at a different sense of her identity as woman. Whether her convictions came from Paul Radin’s African legends and art, or from Robert Graves’s
The
White
Goddess
, or from D. H. Lawrence or Carl Jung or Theodore Roethke, she was discovering that the objects and events of her daily life were the subjects she wanted to write about.

Sylvia tried to become part of the village life. She went to the church behind their house, where the music was wonderful but the sermons frustrated her. Together, the family went for long walks and to the meets organized by the local hunt. Although it was possible to travel into London by morning train and arrive before 10:00 a.m., Sylvia seldom made that trip. She did go in in late October, to attend the Guinness party where she collected a £75 poetry prize and read one of the prize-winning poems, as did Robert Graves. While she was in London, she went to see two Edward Albee plays, left some manuscripts with an agent who sold them for $280 to Indiana University, took new fiction to her literary agent, and spent the rest of the time with friends.

In early November, Sylvia received a Saxton grant of $2000. She and Ted had each previously applied for the funding and been turned down. The Saxton grant made possible child-care help while she finished
The
Bell
Jar
and was, therefore, “an absolute lifesaver.” Also that autumn both Sylvia and Ted had been asked to judge writing contests, Ted the Poetry Book Society competition, Sylvia the Guinness Awards. Plath and Hughes would make close to $7000 from their writing in the year ahead, Ted earning the larger share. And Sylvia wrote that her “acquisitive soul” was happy because they were both reviewing children’s books for
The
New
Statesman
. Of the fifty or sixty books sent to them, they chose ten to review and kept all the books. Their children’s library was soon extensive.

But between early November, when they received news of the Saxton grant, and the Christmas holidays, Sylvia again went through the winter doldrums. England was beginning one of its coldest winters. Even with four heaters running, she could not heat the house much above fifty or fifty-five degrees. Without the heaters, the temperature stood at thirty-eight degrees in the master bedroom, Sylvia said.

She claimed, however, that what depressed her was the impact of several essays that had appeared in
The
Nation
. These analyses of American foreign policy described the marriage of the military and big business; the bomb shelter craze; America’s awarding medals to former German Army officers; and President Kennedy’s warnings to the Soviet Union. As Sylvia wrote to her mother, “I began to wonder if there was any point in trying to bring up children in such a mad, self-destructive world. The sad thing is that the power for destruction is real and universal.”

The holidays calmed her. She had made friends with the bank manager and his wife, the Tyrers, who had invited them to a New Year’s Eve party. Even at close to 170 pounds in this ninth month of her pregnancy, Sylvia looked radiant. She spent the last weeks before Christmas busy around the house, cooking and decorating. She wrote to Aurelia that her turkey with dressing, chestnuts, and apple pies made a fine feast, and that Christmas of 1961 was “the happiest and fullest” she had ever known. Even though she thought of herself as an exile so long as she lived in England, Sylvia seemed — in her letters at least — to be very pleased with life in Devon.

Existence continued amazingly full with Nicholas Farrar’s dramatic birth at five minutes before midnight on January 17, 1962. A more painful labor than her earlier delivery, this one ended with a gush of the birth waters, propelling the heavy baby explosively into the room. Winifred Davies, Sylvia’s midwife and friend, had been with her since late afternoon; the doctor was just entering at the time of the baby’s birth.

Even though Nick weighed nearly ten pounds, he ate often and, initially, cried a great deal. But with Sylvia and the baby in the upstairs guest room, Ted was less disturbed than he had been during Frieda’s first weeks. Despite her physical weariness, Sylvia felt more relaxed: she knew what to expect. Most of the time, she enjoyed the night feedings, sitting by candlelight, looking out the upstairs windows at the great elm, silhouetted against the stark Devon landscape and moon. The only disappointment in the early months of Nick’s care came ten days after his birth, when Sylvia had a severe attack of milk fever and ran a temperature of over 103° for several days.

Her annotated calendar for 1962 suggests that the postbirth period was not entirely happy. Adjoining each day’s calendar space, Sylvia listed things she wanted to get done. The list for February 12, for example, reads, “Mending, Ted’s story, Ted’s BBC, scrapbooks, notebook, clean playroom, vac study.” Only two items — “Ted’s story” and “clean playroom” — are crossed off. The lists mushroom, items from a week before or a day before appearing repeatedly. She was trying to catch up, but the burden of caring for the large house with one child under two and a new baby was overwhelming. Yet her energetic activity went on. January 31, she sent in the income tax. The next week she cooked spaghetti, lemon pie, banana bread, stew, rhubarb, and cupcakes. Friends came to see the baby. On February 17, Ted’s play
The
Wound
was rebroadcast on the BBC and on the next day their friend Charles Causley came to dinner.

Somehow, Sylvia was also returning to writing. Her first project was a radio play. Called “3 Sisters’ Exercise” in draft, it became “Three Women.” Although Sylvia said that “Three Women” grew from the Bergman film of that title, and also was influenced by Virginia Woolf’s novel
The
Waves
, she drew as well on Dylan Thomas’s
Under
Milk
Wood
, and on the emotions she had known during her two childbirths, her miscarriage, and her recovery from surgery in the hospital. The “three women” of the title have each just been through labor. One has had a son, another a miscarriage, and the third a daughter whom she will give up for adoption. The range of emotions — joy, guilt, shame and sorrow — allowed Plath to write new kinds of poetry, some lines ornate, others flat and distinct, as the characters tried to rein in their sometimes overwhelming feelings.

In an early version, the women had names, but in the final, Plath used the more formal “First Voice,” “Second,” “Third,” to give the play a universal quality. Much of the text suggested Dylan Thomas’s
Under
Milk
Wood
, which was subtitled
A
Play
for
Voices
. Read by the author on his 1953 American tour (which Plath heard in Amherst), his work had been one of her earliest models of truthful, comic — sometimes bawdy — drama. What Sylvia attempted in “Three Women” was also a truthful and unconventional treatment of an equally unconventional literary subject — birth.

Her play of 378 lines is an alternating tapestry of the three voices but each speaker tells a dramatic tale complete in itself. The confident First Voice conveys some of Plath’s humor (“I am slow as the world. I am very patient, / Turning through my time, the suns and stars / Regarding me with attention.... I am a great event”) as it builds to the agony of the birth and the quiet of recovery. Some of the most beautiful writing is the mother’s expression of her fears for the child:

How long can I be a wall, keeping the wind off?

How long can I be

Gentling the sun with the shade of my hand...

In contrast, the Second Voice is anguished and angry; the Third, trapped in her guilt as she gives up her child (“I am a wound walking out of the hospital. / I am a wound they are letting go. / I leave my health behind”).

After Sylvia finished “Three Women,” she sent in her quarterly report to the Saxton foundation. She considered
The
Bell
Jar
already finished, except for minor revision. Then she began writing her second novel, one based on her “Falcon Yard” fiction in which she and Ted met at the
St
.
Botolph’s
Review
party. The book was to be finished for Ted’s birthday in August. But she also wrote Aurelia, asking that she buy her some underwear and send it, because getting out to shop was so difficult. Sylvia was feeling the distance from London and the confinement of the responsibility for two children. She was also mired in what she called “the horrible winter,” once again experiencing her own “megrims.” Her spirits reached a new low when she discovered that much of her personal discomfort was from chilblains, stinging itchy sores that developed from extremely cold temperatures.

Part of her depression was a natural aftermath of the birth of a second child. Nicholas’s birth had, in effect, re-created her own family situation as a child. Sylvia had been two and a half when her brother Warren was born; her children were somewhat closer in age, but the girl’s birth first followed by the boy’s set up the same kind of pattern she had known — and disliked — as a child. Psychologists now understand that giving birth does in most instances return the mother to her own childhood and makes a repetition of childhood emotions likely. Fragile as she was psychologically during this winter, Sylvia more than likely did not understand why she was so subject to fits of unrest and temper. Caring for two very small children was stressful, although Ted did help, lovingly, with both Frieda and Nicholas. As Sylvia wrote to Aurelia, she hoped that when her mother came for her summer visit, “We can give him a 6-week holiday from any baby care. He needs it....”

Life in the Devon house — far from being the relaxed idyll Sylvia described to Aurelia in her letters home — was a frantic, sometimes sullen, race to keep up with the chores of caring for two small children. Diapers figure more prominently than writing schedules, and even with the cleaning help two days a week, chores were interminable. It may have looked as if Sylvia did those chores with enthusiasm, but her resentment that so much work existed underlay all her responses to any suggestion that they take a break, change routine, have some fun. Aside from the week Warren was visiting them in the fall of 1961, they did nothing to explore the area or to benefit from being in a new part of England. It could be said, though Sylvia never said it in her letters, that not only was the English winter grim but life in the Devon house shared that quality.