No doubt Sylvia & I plundered each other merrily—but if you say it, in my words—God, what new theses of accusation, what Job-loads of righteous wrath! If you say that, our generous readers will multiply it by ten. Your balancing statement, that she profited a little from me, will be reduced to one tenth. That’s the biological 1st law of human malice in action. It’s no good for me to say I designed prototypes, which she put into full Germanic production—though there’s truth in it. I would never be believed. But to say I stole from her—that would be an instant religion of verification, & my wretched undated efforts would reveal the new gospel, under compulsion.53
To suggest that Plath borrowed from Hughes or that Hughes borrowed from Plath does not diminish their individual achievements; on the contrary, reading these poets side by side (indeed, they often wrote literally back to back) reveals how deeply each influenced the other. But the strains of mutual ambition would become hard for both to bear. As the couple’s friend Al Alvarez wrote,
it was a question not of differences but of intolerable similarities. When two genuinely original, ambitious, full-time poets join in one marriage, and both are productive, every poem one writes probably feels to the other as though it had been dug out of his, or her, own skull. At a certain pitch of creative intensity it must be more unbearable for the Muse to be unfaithful to you with your partner than for him, or her, to betray you with a whole army of seducers.54
This is the first biography of Sylvia Plath to examine those “intolerable similarities” in depth, and to take Plath and Hughes’s literary dialogue—and rivalry—seriously.
Hughes’s coaching would eventually upset Plath; in 1959, three years after they met, she vowed to stop showing him her work. But he could hardly help himself, for he never doubted her genius. When the prestigious Poetry magazine accepted six of Plath’s poems in 1956, Hughes wrote to her, “Joy, Joy as the hyena cried. Now you are set. I never read six poems of anyone all together in Poetry. It means the wonderful thing. It will spellbind every Editor in America. It will also be a standing bottomless battery to charge what you write from now on, because you are almost certain to sell nearly everything you write now….Joy, Joy.”55 They split their days: he watched their children for five hours every morning while Plath wrote; she cared for them during the afternoons. This was an unusual arrangement in the early 1960s. Although Plath bore the brunt of the domestic load in general, Plath’s London friend Suzette Macedo was “amazed at his [Hughes’s] readiness to help with cooking and other household chores, including nappy changing….Astonishing at that period.”56
Hughes took Plath’s talent as seriously as she did and encouraged her to move beyond the sometimes stilted, thesaurus-heavy verse of her apprentice years; she, in turn, helped introduce him to contemporary American poetry that then left its mark on his own work. In 1962, when a Devon neighbor came round for tea and asked, “Does Sylvia write poetry, too?” Hughes responded, “No, she is a poet.”57 He had dared her to choose the artistic life she truly wanted over the comfortable bourgeois life her mother had carefully planned. Plath, always eager to show she had “guts,” took the gamble. Together, Plath thought, they would fly close to the sun: “no precocious hushed literary circles for us: we write, read, talk plain and straight and produce from the fiber of our hearts and bones.”58 She knew she was breaking new ground in her own creative marriage as writer rather than muse. In her journal she wrote, “there are no rules for this kind of wifeliness—I must make them up as I go along & will do so.”59 But those rules would be harder to make up than she realized.
Plath’s desire for reinvention was American, but her transformation could not occur in the United States. In late 1959, she left America for England with Hughes, never to return. Her flight was cloaked in respectability. By then Hughes was on his way to becoming the most famous young poet in England. In London, they could support themselves doing freelance work for the BBC, while British editors seemed more impressed than her own countrymen with Plath’s dark wit. She became a prodigal daughter, brazenly forgoing a comfortable life as a doctor’s wife for a peripatetic, jobless poet. Even Hughes would wonder if he had led Plath astray, far from her shining Cape Cod beaches into a world of gloom and fog. He once called Plath a “pioneer / In the wrong direction.”60 But England offered her a freer intellectual life; as an expatriate, she could make up her own rules. Ruth Fainlight felt that by moving to England, Plath “was defending her poetic self.” Fainlight thought the distance from home was as liberating for Plath as it was for her. “It’s a great advantage being a foreigner…you’re not expected to know what you should be conforming to.”61 In England, with her mid-Atlantic accent, Plath escaped the class snobbery she had experienced in Massachusetts. English friends simply assumed that she was a rich American. Plath delighted in English eccentricity; in America, she told friends, peculiarity was suspect. She would write her best works, The Bell Jar and Ariel, in England, far from the homilies of her mother and the Ladies’ Home Journal. Yet autonomy came at a cost. As she was separated from her husband and cut off from her family and close friends, a brutal loneliness would descend on her. In the months before her February 11, 1963, suicide, she asked her American psychiatrist if she should come home. Dr. Beuscher told her to stay.
* * *
—
It was on a less notorious early February day that I prefer to think of Sylvia Plath as I have come to know her during the eight years I spent writing this book. On February 10, 1960—three years to the day before she died—she signed her first book contract, for The Colossus, in a London pub. She was dressed in a black wool maternity suit, a cashmere coat, and fine Parisian calfskin gloves. She was seven months pregnant with her first child, newly installed in sunny Chalcot Square with her cherished husband, and free, finally, from the watchful eyes of the benefactors who had always paid her way. She had just signed with D. H. Lawrence’s publishers; it was the high-water mark of her professional life. She exulted in her triumph; in a letter to her mother she called herself “resplendent.”62 She rarely complimented herself, for she was relentlessly self-critical. No sooner had she scaled one “Annapurna,” as she called her literary goals, than she mounted another expedition. But not that day. That afternoon, in the waning winter light, she celebrated. Ted Hughes brought champagne and the Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence to mark the occasion.
Sylvia Plath would not see major literary success in her lifetime. The Colossus would barely make an impact on the Anglo-American poetry world. But after years of tirelessly pursuing her vocation in a profession hostile to women, she had cracked the door open—and not just for herself, but for the scores of women poets who came after her. Plath’s second collection, Ariel, became a best seller, as did her 1963 novel The Bell Jar, which would go on to sell more than four million copies. She would win a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for her Collected Poems and is now widely considered one of the most innovative, accomplished, and influential poets of the twentieth century. Sipping champagne with Ted Hughes in 1960, she may not have foreseen how famous she would become, but she knew she was taking flight.
Her life was about to become more difficult—two babies, a miscarriage, enmities, infidelities. Certainties would start to crumble like the masonry in Thoor Ballylee. She herself would become closed in, the key turned. But writing, even then, was her salvation; it was not her undoing. Ensconced in Yeats’s childhood home at the end of her life, this beekeeper’s daughter would have understood Yeats’s famous entreaty to reconstruct in the halls of ruin:
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.63
In fact, she had built. There on her desk when she died was “the thing,” the carefully calibrated counterweight to destruction: h
er new book of poems, the manuscript neatly bound, awaiting its revelation.
Part I
1
The Beekeeper’s Daughter
Prussia, Austria, America, 1850–1932
Like Sylvia Plath herself, Plath’s parents, Otto and Aurelia, have had to bear a difficult posthumous burden. Plath used her parents, like so many others in her life, as material for her writing. They existed as real people whose praise she craved and, at the same time, a deep fictional resource. They were of her, but not her—a looking glass that reflected the possibility of what might or might not be, and she could not resist plumbing their depths as she sought to understand her own. She came to feel that in her parents lay the root of her anxieties, and, encouraged by her psychiatrist in the late fifties, she began to lash out at them in her journals and, later, her poems. Plath would express rage toward her parents—at her father for abandoning her, at her mother for hovering too close. They remain distorted caricatures, stuck in amber. In Plath’s most famous poem, “Daddy,” Otto—who died when she was eight—is a patriarchal tyrant, a Nazi “bastard.” Aurelia, skewered in The Bell Jar, is a menacing martyr who demands perfection from her daughter. But if Plath inherited anxiety and depression from her parents, she also inherited intelligence, discipline, and ambition. They stand Janus-faced, curse and blessing, at the beginning and end of Sylvia Plath’s story.
In Otto Plath’s case, myth has overshadowed truth in the popular imagination. For many readers of Sylvia Plath, Otto Plath is “Daddy”: Aryan, fascist, Nazi. In fact, Otto Plath was a committed pacifist who renounced his German citizenship in 1926 and watched Hitler’s rise with trepidation. He held himself to rigid moral standards and expected others to do the same. In a photograph taken when he was a college student in Wisconsin, around 1910, he gives the impression of a man who does not suffer fools gladly. He sits unsmiling in the front row surrounded by drunken peers, laughing and holding steins. This is the serious, driven young man who would not compromise his ideals, even if that meant severing ties with his family—a decision that would have a profound impact on his daughter.
At least three generations of the Plath family lived in Posen Province, West Prussia, before coming to America. Today Posen (Poznan) is part of Poland, in the area known as the “Polish Corridor” when it was transferred from the German empire to Poland after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Like the Alsace-Lorraine region, it became a disputed territory, where tensions between ethnic Poles and Germans ran high. Despite the fact that the majority of those living in this area were Poles, Hitler attempted to annex it in 1939—one of the early acts of aggression that spurred France, Britain, and other Commonwealth nations to declare war on Germany. Though Otto Plath left Posen in 1900, well before both world wars, his daughter would eventually portray him as an embodiment of German imperialist aggression in “Daddy.”
Posen, whose population comprised Germans, Poles, and Jews who lived in separate ethnic enclaves, was perhaps the poorest region in Prussia.1 By the late 1800s, ethnic Germans, lured by the booming industrial economy in the Rhine and Ruhr regions, as well as free land in America, began leaving the region en masse in the Ostflucht, or “flight from the east.” More than two million had left by the early 1900s, including Sylvia Plath’s paternal great-grandparents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and father. Her great-grandfather, Johann Plath, was an illiterate farmer, but his grandson Otto would eventually become a Harvard-educated professor, and his great-granddaughter a trailblazing poet and novelist. Sylvia’s “perfectionism,” often derided as neurotic or pathological, needs to be understood within the historical and sociological context of the American immigrant experience, which framed her life. Her desire to excel on all fronts has its roots in the Germanic aspirational work ethic that was her inheritance.
Otto Plath’s German provenance was important to his daughter. Sylvia wrote that she felt her “German background very strongly,” and talked up her German-Austrian roots to her German pen pal, Hans-Joachim Neupert, in high school.2 “I feel a strong kinship for anything German,” she told him in 1949. “I think that it is the most beautiful language in the world, and whenever I meet anyone with a German name or German traits, I have a sudden secret warmth.”3 She felt “patriotic pride” when she read German authors such as Thomas Mann and spoke lovingly of her grandmother’s hearty Austrian cooking.4 She was well aware of the dazzling artistic and intellectual achievements of German musicians, writers, and philosophers; she listened to Bach and Beethoven, and read Nietzsche and Goethe with her mother. But hers was a dual inheritance, for she had also heard how her mother’s family was harassed during the First World War by Irish and Italian neighbors in Winthrop, Massachusetts. Sylvia may have been picked on for similar reasons during the Second World War and possibly nervous that members of her family would be sent to a domestic detention camp for German Americans. (Her father was, in fact, detained by the FBI for alleged pro-German sympathies in 1918.) In December 1958, she described a short-story plot in her journal—which eventually became “The Shadow”—about a young German American girl who is treated suspiciously by her neighbors during the Second World War:
My present theme seems to be the awareness of a complicated guilt system whereby Germans in a Jewish and Catholic community are made to feel, in a scapegoat fashion, the pain, psychically, the Jews are made to feel in Germany by Germans without religion. The child can’t understand the larger framework. How does her father come into this? How is she guilty for her father’s deportation to a detention camp? As this is how I think the story must end?5
These questions suggest that Sylvia understood from a young age that the German identity she shared with her father was somehow dangerous—a secret source of shame.
Plath’s journals are full of frustration about her inability to master the German language. In January 1953 she regrets not having taken more German in college; in February 1956 she wants to “revive German again,” declaring, “I haven’t really worked at learning it”; she vows to spend the summer of 1957 studying the language; in 1958 she berates herself for “wasting my German hours” and writes, “to learn that would be a great triumph for me.”6 In 1960, exhausted and homesick in London, she was comforted by her German-speaking friend Helga Huws, whose German cooking made her weep. As late as 1962, she listened to German linguaphone records and tuned into a BBC German radio program.7 She hired a German-speaking au pair shortly before her death in 1963.
Sylvia was the daughter of a German immigrant and a first-generation Austrian who had studied German language and literature and knew Middle High German. Her mother’s parents, the Schobers, with whom she lived in Wellesley, spoke German at home.8 Despite her exposure to the language—and the fact that she excelled at every other academic subject—German did not come easily to her. In her 1962 poem “Daddy,” the German language itself becomes the “barb wire snare” and “the language obscene,” “An engine, an engine / Chuffing me off like a Jew” to the death camps. Plath’s notorious metaphorical appropriation of Jewishness may not have been a fantasy of victimization, but rather a fantasy of purgation and purity: only by aligning her speaker with the enemy of the Germans could she reject her own Germanness, which, in the wake of the Holocaust, seemed like a curse.
* * *
—
Previous biographers have stated that the Plath name was originally “Platt,” and that it was anglicized on entry to America. According to a family member, the family name in Germany was von Plath.9 Sylvia’s paternal great-grandparents, John (Johann) von Plath and Caroline (Katrina) Katzsezmadek, were born in the Posen region in 1829 and 1826, respectively. John was German and Lutheran, Caroline Polish and Catholic, but the couple overcame the religious divide to marry in the 1850s. They raised their children as Lutherans, though there was religious tension within the marriage.10 Both spoke Polish and German; in later years, Otto would list both languages as his mother tongue.11 The couple settled
in the small town of Budsin, now Budzyn, in Posen Province.12 They had eight children, of whom Otto’s father, Theodore (b. 1850), was the eldest.13 The six children who survived into adulthood—Emil, Augusta, Mathilde, Mary, Emilie, and Theodore—all immigrated to America between 1882 and 1901 and settled across the West and Midwest in North Dakota, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Oregon.
The fact that all of John and Caroline’s children emigrated suggests that the family did not prosper in Posen. In America they became blacksmiths and seamstresses, their spouses railroad laborers and meat cutters. Mary Plath endured a particularly dark fate. According to a family story, she fell in love with a young man from Cando, a neighboring town in North Dakota, while she was visiting her relatives in Maza. She became pregnant by him, but he left her for another woman in Cando. Jilted and alone, she ran away to a boardinghouse in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she died in childbirth. Mary’s lonely death speaks to the cost of veering from traditional Lutheran codes of behavior. (Later, one of Mary’s nieces expressed guilt over her aunt’s sad fate.)14 Otto, too, would be cast out after his peregrinations from the faith.
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