Sylvia Plath: A Biography (24 page)

Six round black hats in the grass and a lozenge of wood,

And a naked mouth, red and awkward.

Other lines and images in the masterful work connect that poem with others Sylvia wrote during the spring, and those she would write later. A seminal poem, “Berck-Plage” opens with the poet acknowledging her “twangling apprehensions” and builds to a decidedly unromantic treatment of death. Although the polite onlookers call death a blessing, the speaker disagrees emphatically. Death, even in what appears to be dignity; can be worse than the various indignities of life.

And the indignities of life fill Plath’s summer poems. In them she wrote about lies (“Words heard, by accident, over the phone”) and about her misery (“My heart is very quiet,” the speaker says in a draft of “Poppies in July.” The poem closes “I am unattached, I am unattached”). Yet on July 9, driving with her mother to Exeter to shop and have lunch, Sylvia told Aurelia how happy she was in her life with Ted and the children. Emotional truth surfaced in Sylvia’s poems, whether or not she planned for it to; the rest of her life she lived as though it were some blueprint for a woman’s fantasy. Like a child, Sylvia seemed to believe that pretending would make any situation improve.

The evening of July 9, however, Sylvia intercepted a mysterious phone call for Ted and when Ted’s conversation was over, she tore the telephone wires from the wall. She turned her rage inward as she stoically, blankly, dressed Nick and carried him to the car. Leaving Frieda with Aurelia, she drove the twenty-five miles to the Comptons’. When she arrived, both Elizabeth and David were worried about her behavior; distraught, she wept and held on to Elizabeth’s hands, begging “Help me, help me.” After she talked openly to her friends, Sylvia fed Nick and the two of them spent the night in the Comptons’ living room.

The next morning Sylvia returned home. That evening after dinner, she carried from Court Green various of Ted’s letters, drafts of work, and papers, and the manuscript of what was to have been her second novel, the book about her great love for Ted. Dedicated to “Ponter,” one of her nicknames for Hughes, the new novel was to have been his August birthday present. Aurelia, holding Nicholas and maneuvering to keep the inquisitive Frieda inside the house, tried to stop Sylvia, but she could not. Sylvia built and fed an eager fire with the torn pages of manuscript and correspondence. It was, in effect, a funeral pyre.

14 - The
Ariel
Poems

1962

“I Am Myself”

After the evening of the bonfire, Aurelia moved to Winifred Davies’s nearby house. Sylvia’s mother realized that the Hugheses’ marriage was “seriously troubled” and, even though Ted wanted her to stay on with them, she knew that Sylvia and Ted needed time to themselves. Over the next few weeks, Ted was living in London with friends some of the time, while Sylvia kept herself busy with housekeeping and the children. She wrote only two poems the rest of that summer. On July 20 she finished the elliptical “Poppies in July,” with its frightening lines in the draft version, “I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns....” and on August 13 she completed “Burning the Letters,” a long poem about the July scene in the yard. She wrote no more poems until September 26.

Sylvia was both angry and bewildered, but at this time she didn’t show her true emotional state to anyone except Elizabeth Compton. She instead busied herself with activities directly related to her professional career. Early in July she went to London to see George MacBeth about her doing readings for the BBC programs in poetry and to have lunch with Douglas Cleverdon, Ted’s BBC producer, who was directing her radio play “Three Women” for its August broadcast. On July 19 she went in to meet with Eric White, head of the London Arts Council, about her planning the American Poetry Night for the Royal Court Theatre’s summer festival, and to tape a reading of her poem “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.” for an August BBC broadcast. Between the two trips, she opened a separate bank account for her own earnings. There would be two more installments of the Saxton grant, at $520 each, and she wanted to be sure those funds were not eaten away by daily living expenses. She also worried that Ted would continue his habit of writing checks on their account without recording them.

With Aurelia in England, Sylvia was free to come and go as she wanted. July 25, her mother moved back into Court Green so that Sylvia and Ted could attend an arts festival in Wales, where they were scheduled to give poetry readings and discuss their work. On the way to Bangor, they spent the night with the Huwses, who had moved to Wales the previous year. Ted and Dan Huws went walking; Sylvia and Helga visited upstairs. Both Sylvia and Ted talked about the troubled marriage, and Helga could see how upset her friend was. Sylvia seemed distant, even hesitant; and she walked slowly, heavily.

Anthony Dyson and Brian Cox, the editors of
Critical
Quarterly
, were the Hugheses’ hosts in Bangor. Several times in the past these men had taken Sylvia and Ted to dinner in London; dinner in Wales was strained in comparison.

Once back in Devon, Ted and Sylvia helped Aurelia prepare for her return trip on August 4. As she looked from the train as it left the station, Aurelia was thoroughly depressed by her daughter and son-in-law’s stony faces. It seemed clear that no reconciliation was near, and she feared for her daughter’s ability to keep up with the life she had committed herself to, particularly if she were to have to handle the children and the house alone.

As soon as Aurelia was gone, Sylvia called Joan Webb, the wife of her Devon physician, about the riding lessons they had talked about taking. For the next few months, Sylvia and Joan rode twice a week, Sylvia on the reddish-brown Ariel, a gentle horse very different from the runaway Sam of Cambridge days.

Her riding, visits to the Comptons’ and beekeeping helped to fill Sylvia’s days. This summer and fall should have been a happy time professionally: May 14 had seen the American publication of
The
Colossus
, and other of her new poems were appearing in
The
Observer
,
Harper’s
,
London
Magazine
,
Poetry
,
The
New
Statesman
,
The
New
Yorker
, and
Encounter
. But Sylvia took little pleasure in these accomplishments now.

She did maintain a correspondence with Alvarez (she had sent him poems early in the summer, and in July she wrote that he should be honest in his comments, not just “nice”). And she was evidently reading a great deal, particularly during the evenings when the children had been put to bed and she was alone. She had found C. A. Robinson’s translations of Greek plays and was drawing a great deal of her imagery for the summer poems from his rendering of Euripides’
Medea
. In “Burning the Letters,” she used echoes of the Medea legend, echoes that would persist through her poetry from this point until she wrote her last poems. In the legend, Medea loses her husband, Jason, to a rival after helping him find the Golden Fleece (and losing her own family and country in the process). She kills her rival by giving her gifts, a poison crown and gold-embroidered cloak that explode into fire when she puts them on. Medea later kills her own two children by Jason as the ultimate punishment for his having left her. Certainly Sylvia saw similarities in her situation, believing as she did that Ted was attractive to other women because of his literary reputation, which she took some credit for. Like Medea, Plath used fire as a weapon against her husband when she burned his papers. In Euripides’ drama, Medea is described as “subtle,” a word Plath uses often in these poems. Medea is also described as a “lioness” in scathing lines spoken by Jason after he discovers his children’s deaths. It might well be said that Plath used the Medea legend as scaffolding for her own poems of anger and that “Burning the Letters” was the first poem in her
Medea
cycle, which ended with her February 1963 poem, “Edge.”

The year 1962 was important for Plath, because she began to develop her own aesthetic about writing. With
The
Bell
Jar
successfully completed and accepted for publication by Heinemann, she had confidence that she could write for the commercial market. As a fiction writer, she might be able to live from her writing. While she loved poetry and knew that her best work was in the writing of poems, she was pragmatic enough to realize that she had to make money as well as develop her talents. In 1962 she wrote book reviews of both children’s and adult books, worked on essays for both the BBC and
Punch
, finished the radio play that paid substantially, and made plans to become a regular BBC contributor and reader. One of the essays Plath wrote early in 1962, “Context,” defined what she saw as her role as a writer in clear and emphatic language. She described herself as a “political” poet:

The issues of our time which preoccupy me at the moment are the incalculable genetic effects of fallout and a documentary article on the terrifying, mad, omnipotent marriage of big business and the military in America — “Juggernaut, The Warfare State,” by Fred J. Cook in a recent Nation. Does this influence the kind of poetry I write? Yes, but in a sidelong fashion. I am not gifted with the tongue of Jeremiah, though I may be sleepless enough before my vision of the apocalypse.

According to Plath here, her role as a poet was to write about the real world, “the terrors of mass extinction” and the rest of life’s problems, in ways that would create art. Even in a
New
Statesman
review of children’s books, where she lamented atmospheric contamination from bomb-test fallout, she stressed the artist’s responsibility to be aware of practical concerns of life. The poet should be involved in all aspects of living.

That conviction, coupled with her immense knowledge of literature, gave Plath a number of options when she came to write the poems of the fall, which are often considered autobiographical. Some experience from the writer’s life may serve as catalyst for the work; but the materials of fiction and poetry are often drawn from other experiences, other literatures, besides the obviously personal ones. Plath’s 1962 poems are certainly about anger, about the complexities of the modern family structure, about women’s roles in marriage and life. But they are about much more than Sylvia Plath’s personal situation in 1962. As George Steiner said so perceptively, these 1962 poems of Plath’s are comparable to Pablo Picasso’s remarkable antiwar painting,
Guernica
.

One of the worst episodes of Plath’s summer of heartbreak occurred on August 16 and 17, when Mrs. Prouty, her Smith benefactor, invited Sylvia and Ted to be her guests in London. Mrs. Prouty, who by this time cared deeply about both Sylvia and Ted, put them up in The Connaught. They went with her to dinner and breakfast, saw Agatha Christie’s long-running play
The
Mousetrap
, and talked about their writing, their Devon house, and the children. It was Ted’s birthday, but he gave Sylvia a copy of Joseph Heller’s
Catch
22
. Sylvia felt wretched because she and Ted were pretending to be a happy couple, but the pretense seemed kinder than disclosure would have been. And it continued: on September 9 Mrs. Prouty came to dinner in Devon so that she could see the children and the house.

In London with Ted, Sylvia was all too ready to think that physical closeness meant reconciliation. So her disappointment was enormous when they returned to Devon and Ted resumed his life of unexplained absences. Two days later Sylvia cooked an elaborate dinner of roast lamb in honor of the August 19 birthday of David Compton, who came with Elizabeth to the Hugheses’ home for the meal. That evening was also the premier broadcast of Plath’s “Three Women.”

For all her apparent calm, Sylvia did not behave as though she was reconciled to a separation from Ted. There were long afternoons of crying and talking with Elizabeth Compton, and harsh self-scrutiny as wife and mother. Where had she gone wrong? What had she done that she should not have done?

Late summer brought evidence of Sylvia’s confusion. On August 22, she bought an insurance policy on Ted’s life. After she paid the £173 premium, she had only £10 left in their account. Yet on August 27, she wrote to Aurelia that she had decided to separate. In Sylvia’s eyes, Ted had lied to her repeatedly, had betrayed her (that word from the past, which she used whenever a man disappointed her). She would prefer to live away from him. A few days after that, when she was driving the station wagon, she experienced the overwhelming realization that she would be raising her children alone, that her isolated life would go on and on, forcing her to cope, no matter what Ted did.

Years before she had written in her journal, “My tragedy is to have been born a woman.” Circumstances were bearing out her worst fears. While driving in Devon one day, Sylvia let the car go off the road.

On September 5, she was fined £1 for her traffic offense. Otherwise there was no aftermath, no drama. The accident was minor and she was not hurt. Ted spoke to Alvarez about it, and Alvarez remembered Ted’s mood as well as the facts of the event itself. “Driving on her own, Sylvia had some kind of accident: apparently she had blacked out and run off the road onto an old airfield, though mercifully without damaging herself or their old Morris station wagon. His [Ted’s] dark presence, as he spoke, darkened an even deeper shade of gloom.” Later, in her poem “Lady Lazarus,” Sylvia wrote about the accident as if it had been comparable to her 1953 suicide attempt.

But in September Sylvia was not writing, nor was she eating. She was merely enduring in Devon, bothered by the presence of friends in the guest room who had overstayed their welcome. She was worried about money and about the future. Once again she was ill with her high-temperature flu, as were the children. She was losing weight and relying on sleeping pills, a practice that added to her depression. (There is some evidence as well that her depression alternated with a manic side: her boundless energy, her insomnia, her sometimes erratic decisions were all marks of that.) At the advice of her solicitor, Sylvia took up smoking cigarettes. Finally, she wrote to Ruth Beuscher, her Boston therapist. She felt that life was droning on unbearably, that something decisive was going to have to happen.

Earlier in the summer, Sylvia had planned a trip to Ireland. On one of Ted’s stays at home, he evidently agreed to the trip, and so she immediately jumped at the chance. Perhaps she thought a vacation would mean reconciliation. They traveled to Connemara in Galway, planning to meet their Harvard friends Jack and Moira Sweeney there, and to visit Yeats’s tower, Ballylea. But the vacation was shortened when Ted departed abruptly for London. According to Sylvia, Ted lied about his plans, saying he was going grouse hunting for the day while she sailed — and then never returning. According to other accounts, the two had an irreconcilable argument. And still another version recounts a mysterious tale of Ted and Sylvia in a large room at the tower, watching a portrait hanging there as its face changed to resemble Ted’s. In any case, Sylvia remained several days longer, enjoying the sea, the beauty of the coast, the sea-food.

Once she returned to Devon, she found a telegram from Ted saying that he was staying in London for another few weeks. Her anger knew no bounds. She went to Winifred Davies, and spent three hours that night mulling over the choices open to her. She decided that she had to separate from Ted. She could no longer stand the indecision of the situation. She had convinced herself that his behavior meant she and her writing might be unsafe. Now she made an appointment to see a London solicitor on September 25.