Sylvia Plath: A Biography (27 page)

Thematically, too, many of Sylvia’s later poems were concerned with the beauty of the maternal. Her positive descriptions of women as robust and life-giving (as in “Heavy Women” and “Morning Song”) contrast the negative imagery of women as thin and unproductive (“Munich Mannequins,” “Barren Women”), and in her letters home Sylvia frequently identified Ted’s new women friends with the second group. In her late 1962 poems, she describes her rival as having “a womb of marble,” makes pointed references to abortion, and in another poem laments, “Barren, the lot are barren!” Sylvia increasingly took pleasure in her role as mother of children, a pleasure her poems reflected.

On November 17, Clarissa Roche — whom Sylvia in the past had called “earth mother” — arrived in Devon with her five-week-old daughter. During the past year Sylvia had been inviting Paul and Clarissa to visit Devon, most recently in her October 19 letter in which she said she was living “without access to friend or relative.” She painted a pathetic picture of herself and so, although it had been nearly five years since she had seen Sylvia, Clarissa could not deny her. In the foggy, rainy night, Sylvia — a shadowy figure holding a large umbrella — hugged Clarissa repeatedly, saying, “You’ve saved my life.” Clarissa felt she was not joking.

The Devon house struck Clarissa as cold and forbidding, and there were signs that Sylvia was distraught. She talked incessantly, composing bitterly amusing stories out of the terrible marital scenes of the past summer and fall. “All experience is grist for the novelist,” she said, but the pain and embarrassment of some of the happenings tore through her pretense of distance. Clarissa heard about the summer bonfire; the curses Sylvia and Ted exchanged; the letters from Father Bart, the poet-priest from Oxford; the good times in London. Clarissa struggled along with Sylvia to see what shape her life would take on. She could see how frightened her friend was to face the future, despite her façade of bravado; how weary she was bearing the full responsibility for the children; how ill she had been, having lost twenty pounds during the summer and fall. Yet great, gusty laughter ricocheted through the house during the long weekend, for Sylvia was a good comic story teller. The laughter, sometimes, seemed almost desperate.

There were signs that Sylvia’s mood was erratic. Between October 19, when she had written to the Roches about their coming, and November 17, when Clarissa arrived, Sylvia had made important decisions. She had found the flat in London and had immersed herself in Yeats’s writing. She saw only promise ahead, once she left Devon. She told Clarissa that on the day she had returned from London with the promise of the flat, she had taken Yeats’s collected plays into her lap — by candlelight — and opened the book at random, to find the lines, “Get wine and food to give you strength and courage, and I will get the house ready.” For Sylvia, it was a sign that she was in touch with good spirits. Just as she was obsessed with the idea of herself being reborn, and the rebirth she had seen as the only possible solution to her breakdown in 1953, now she felt so alone and insecure that she again sought external assurance. No one was able to convince her that she had not needed rebirth but just needed some counseling.

A November letter from Sylvia to Ruth Beuscher prompted Dr. Beuscher to consider whether she should ask Sylvia to come to America and stay with her. Professional ethics dictated that a therapist not become so involved in a patient’s life, but Beuscher was sure that Sylvia needed a confidante. A later letter from Plath reassured Beuscher that she was coping with the changes and that she was intent on making a new life for herself and the children in London.

More confident because Clarissa’s visit had given her some relief from her anxiety, but depressed because Susan was taking a week off, Sylvia immersed herself in activity. She invited Winifred Davies for dinner on November 21. Although the next day was Thanksgiving in America, an important family holiday in the Plath home, Sylvia and the children celebrated alone. She wrote to Aurelia that she was sick, worn out from handling all the work while Susan was gone. But in the same letter Sylvia recovers her sense of humor enough to announce, wryly:

Boy, when I get to be 50 and if I’m famous, there will be no tributes to “The loving husband without whose help I would never have succeeded etc. etc.” Everything I have done I have done in spite of Ted....

Within a few days, Sylvia had again invited Winifred — this time with her son Garnett, an apprentice police officer visiting from London, and Susan O’Neill-Roe — for a special dinner. She was trying to keep up her spirits and her confidence.

On December 3, Sylvia went to London once more, this time signing the lease and arranging for a gas stove, electricity, and a telephone. London was shrouded in a terrible fog; as a result, there was no public transportation, and getting around in the city was nearly impossible. Instead of being discouraged, however, Sylvia thought the weather was a kind of personal challenge. She saw Alvarez, had lunch to discuss a poetry reading she was to give in early spring, and worked further on the American Poetry Night. Then she returned to Devon and spent four hectic days packing and loading the car (one entire day was spent stringing onions from her garden and packing honey, apples, potatoes, and holly). Then she, the children, and Susan drove to London.

Her checkbook testifies to the amount of purchasing she was doing. Some painting was done, and carpets were laid in the bedrooms. Her bedroom was decorated in what she called “bee” colors, white, yellow, and black. She put a deposit down on the telephone, although she was told that getting one could take months. Without a phone, making the professional and social contacts she had planned was difficult. Every few days she tried to get to a public phone, but dressing both children and timing such expeditions on cold days was frustrating. And once Sylvia had called people, they had no way to get back in touch with her. Sylvia was living in London, but she was nearly as isolated as she had been in Devon.

The coming Christmas holiday complicated matters further. People were busy with their own family plans. Few cared to invite Sylvia’s young family to their celebrations. Most of the people Sylvia did reach seemed glad that she had moved back to London, but they put her off, saying they would call her after the first of the year.

Being in London meant that Ted could see the children, and he came frequently to take them to the zoo or for walks. Seeing him was difficult for Sylvia, but she tried to pretend that she was busy and happy to be living in the city. When she had first moved to Fitzroy Road, she was thrilled that shopkeepers remembered her. As soon as December 20, she was having tea with Katherine Frankfort, a neighbor, and then going to see Ingmar Bergman’s film
Through
a
Glass
Darkly
. Doris Bartlett, a sitter Frieda remembered, cared for the children. Sylvia had also been lucky in being able to buy what she needed without worrying about money; before she had moved from Devon, her beloved Aunt Dot had sent her a check for $700.

As was customary, Sylvia wrote to her mother that she was exuberant with the move. “Well, here I am! Safely in Yeats’ house! I can just about allow myself time for a cup of tea and a bit of letter writing after the immensity of the move.... I can truly say I have never been so happy in my life. I just sit thinking, Whew! I have done it! And beaming. Shall I write a poem, shall I paint a floor, shall I hug a baby?” She wrote to Aurelia, “Everything is such fun, such an adventure.”

Professor Thomas, Sylvia’s downstairs neighbor, did not see much evidence of that fun in his various meetings with her. She appeared elegant and composed, usually wearing a long, lightweight coat, her hair braided and coiled around her head. And she was usually quite somber, worriedly maneuvering the children and a large, old-fashioned perambulator, and often carrying packages — taking out trash, more often carrying in food. The children were unnaturally quiet, he thought, and Sylvia herself seemed, in his words, “erratic” one day, “charming” another, and “bad tempered” and “pathetic” as well. She appeared to be busy. She invited friends for tea and dinner — Alvarez for the 24th (but he stopped only long enough for a drink); the Frankforts for the 26th; a guest known only as “Colin” for the 27th; Garnett Davies for the 30th. She shopped for dressy clothes in fake fur and velvet, and spent Christmas with some friends. Assia and her friends donated bits of furniture for the flat. But the days were long and the week before Christmas, London was once again buried in fog. The children were ill, too, and on December 28, Sylvia went to see her former physician, Dr. Horder, about the children’s health and her own weight loss and insomnia. She needed more sleeping pills.

At the same time she was experiencing mixed success professionally. On December 21,
The
Atlantic
had accepted two of the longer “bee” poems, and she was asked to judge the Cheltenham poetry contest again. But she seemed to be battling with
The
New
Yorker
. Because of her “first reading” contract, she had to send all her poems there first. Yet beginning in June of 1962, Howard Moss, the poetry editor, rejected nearly all her work. Sylvia’s records show that she sent Moss ten large groups of new poems from October 1962 to February 4, 1963. Of all that work Moss accepted only the second part of “Amnesiac,” saying the opening of that poem was not related to the rest. Sylvia counted on
The
New
Yorker
as a source of steady income. Was she going to have to change her style to please that magazine?

These wholesale rejections of her current poems were both puzzling and enervating. Sylvia was excited about these poems, and she knew that Alvarez, Ted, and Douglas Cleverdon, the BBC producer, admired them. Cleverdon had asked her to get a program of new poems ready for a BBC reading. She had herself developed enough confidence in her own critical judgment to know how good her new work was, but at times she was insecure enough to need confirmation.

The confusion
The
New
Yorker
rejections created was intensified in early January when Sylvia received a rejection letter from Judith Jones, her Knopf editor of
The
Colossus
, to whom she had submitted
The
Bell
Jar
for American publication. Dated December 28, 1962, Jones’s letter criticized the manuscript for its unbelievable point of view, saying that Plath’s use of the college girl’s voice did not prepare the reader for the seriousness of her illness or for her suicide attempt.

Sylvia quickly submitted the novel to Harper & Row, eager to find an American publisher before Heinemann brought out the book in England on January 14, 1963. Even though she had earlier referred to
The
Bell
Jar
as a “pot-boiler” and would be publishing it under a pseudonym (“Victoria Lucas”), her attitude about the novel had changed. Reading it in proofs, Sylvia realized what she had accomplished.
The
Bell
Jar
was a good, crisp, funny, and yet poignant book. It spoke with the voice of an over-aged Smithie, reminiscent of the cynical Smith voice that colored the campus newspaper and year book. It was a 1950s voice, a 1950s attitude, just as it was supposed to be.

Any rejection was painful at this time, however, because Plath was staking everything on her identity as a writer. She had moved back to London because she needed to have contacts for freelance work. She intended to show people that Ted’s leaving her had not demolished her life, though it had come close to doing that. But her first few weeks in London had not been reassuring, either socially or professionally. She had not been asked to do anything she could not have done in Devon, and socially she sensed that she was being kept at a distance. Her experience with Alvarez — who had been an interested and attentive literary friend in the months before she finally settled in London — was repeated with other acquaintances. Although Alvarez had come for a drink on Christmas Eve, she did not see him again.

Hurt by what she considered rejections of various kinds, Sylvia wrote to her former confidants. On January 2, 1963, to Marcia Brown, she told the story of her losing twenty pounds during the summer and said that she almost died with the flu, in the midst of herculean labors and the stress of Ted’s leaving.

I have been so utterly
flattened
by having to be a business-woman, farmer — harvesting 70 apple trees, stringing all my onions, digging and scrubbing all my potatoes, extracting and bottling my honey, etc. — mother, writer
and
all-round desperado that I’d give anything to be alone. I feel like a very efficient tool or weapon....

She urged Marcia and her husband to come for a spring visit, saying that she and the children were very lonely.

To the Huwses she wrote that she was happy to be away from Devon (where people suggested, once Ted had left, that she and he were never married because so much of her mail came to “Sylvia Plath”), but that she was lonely in London. She continued her conversation with Dan about what she called “Frieda’s awful regression” without Ted in the household, and referred to herself as a “desperate mother.” The purpose of her letter, however, was to ask the Huwses to replace the Merwins as Frieda’s godparents. She added that Ted joined her in asking them. Ted had been living in Dido Merwin’s mother’s flat in London, and during the weeks Sylvia was in London she thought Dido had slighted her several times. She therefore wanted to make this change in the relationship.