No pit of shadow to crawl into,
And his blood beating the old tattoo
I am, I am, I am….
Everything shrank in the sun’s corrosive
Ray but Egg Rock on the blue wastage.
The couple marked the third anniversary of their Saint Botolph’s meeting over trout, duck, and French wine at the Blue Ship Tea Room, perched at the end of a sagging Boston wharf. But they celebrated in the shadow of a quarrel. “Last night a miserable dowie dowie fight over nothing, our usual gloom,” Sylvia wrote cryptically in her journal.158 They had decided to move back to England at the end of the year to a “big house in the country outside London.”159 Sylvia’s newly unearthed anger toward her mother gave her the momentary confidence to leave home, and anyway, she assumed the move would be temporary, just a year. But Ted’s increasing antipathy toward American life decided the matter. “There is something suspended about my life here,” he wrote to Olwyn in January, “like the beginnings of blindness & deafness.”160 Sylvia treated the move as another Fulbright gambit. In her journal she wrote, “Am happy about living in England: to go to Europe at the drop of a channel-crossing ticket: I really want that.” Yet in the same journal passage, she vowed to become less dependent on Hughes. “Must try poems. DO NOT SHOW ANY TO TED.”161
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By February, Sylvia had decided that she was not making enough progress writing at home, and she enrolled as an auditor in Lowell’s creative writing seminar at Boston University. The class met at 236 Bay State Road on Tuesdays from two to four p.m. and had an official roster of five students. About fifteen others audited the class, including Anne Sexton and, occasionally, George Starbuck, then a junior editor at Houghton Mifflin.162
Plath initially called the seminar “a great disappointment.” Lowell, in his “mildly feminine ineffectual fashion,” let his students say things she would not let her Smith freshmen get away with. “Felt a regression,” she wrote in her journal after the first class. But she continued to attend throughout the spring. Despite her misgivings, she sensed she needed a more structured, academic setting to conquer the feeling that she had become “a recluse who comes out into the world with a life-saving gospel to find everybody has learned a new language in the meantime and can’t understand a word he’s saying.”163 Plath’s words were prescient; in Lowell’s class, she would indeed start to learn a “new language.” Lowell encouraged Plath to write about experiences Dr. Beuscher had persuaded her to resurrect and her mother had wanted her to bury—experiences too painful to probe with Hughes. Indeed, Lowell’s poem about McLean, “Waking in the Blue,” which he read out loud in his seminar, moved Plath deeply.164 But it would take time for Plath to make the imaginative leaps Lowell and Sexton had already begun. “She was a dutiful student of poetic tradition of the time,” Kathleen Spivack remembered. “She was watchful and very careful, holding herself back.”165
In class that spring, Lowell hovered restlessly on the verge of a breakdown. By April, he would check himself into McLean; during his last class, his students were terrified he was going to throw himself out the window. Sexton recalled how everyone smoked and used their shoes as ashtrays while Lowell read poems “soft and slow” in his formal New England manner. Sitting at a window seat overlooking Commonwealth Avenue, Lowell performed cerebral, sometimes “maniacally elliptical” textual analysis. He discussed form as much as meaning, always prodding the class to investigate how the formal structure enhanced what was being said—or not said—within. “Poetry was meant to be understood,” Spivack remembered; he “had little patience” for students who wrote “obscure” verse. “What does this poem really mean?” he would repeat, going around the table, meeting silence.166
In class, Plath was formal, proper, confident in her superiority, Spivack thought, as she announced on the first day that Wallace Stevens was her favorite poet. Spivack never saw Plath crack a smile, even when Lowell joked. “She was precise, analytical, and could be quietly devastating to another student poet.”167 She remembered Plath nodding at whatever Lowell said, though she could match his ability to tease out obscure poetic influences. “ ‘Reminds me of Empson,’ Sylvia would say…‘It reminds me of Herbert.’ ‘Perhaps the early Marianne Moore?’ ”168
Lowell returned the favor, in his own deflating way. When Plath workshopped “Sow,” he declared it almost “perfect,” but then quickly moved on. “Everyone senses that Lowell has damned with faint praise and has managed to sidestep real engagement with the poem,” Spivack remembered. Lowell seemed more “dazzled” by Sexton, who approached her poetry from the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum.169 Plath was an academically trained poet, Sexton, intuitive; Plath’s poems were formal, cerebral, while Sexton’s were personal and raw. Lowell helped Sexton prune her manuscript To Bedlam and Part Way Back and then shepherded it to poetry editors at Knopf and Houghton Mifflin. He did not extend the same assistance to Plath.
Plath often went to the Ritz with Sexton and George Starbuck after the seminar ended. Their triple-martini afternoons are now legend, as is Sexton’s quip that they parked in the hotel’s loading zone because they were there to get loaded. Starbuck remembered their “hilarious conversations comparing their suicides and talking about their psychiatrists.”170 Sexton and Plath became literary doppelgängers in the public imagination: both attractive, young female poets with Wellesley roots, both students of Lowell, both McLean “graduates,” as Plath put it, victims of mental illness and suicide.171 Yet Sexton was a much wilder figure than Plath, and outwardly more unstable. She left her children largely in the care of her mother-in-law and battled addictions to pills, booze, and—as she put it—suicide. (She attempted suicide twelve times between 1957 and her death—from suicide—in 1974.)172 Her devoted fans felt that her unguarded lyrics spoke truth to power in the heady days of early feminism. But that very rawness led Elizabeth Bishop to believe Sexton was not in the same league as Lowell. “She is good, in spots,” Bishop wrote to Lowell in 1960, “but there is all the difference in the world, I’m afraid, between her kind of simplicity and that of Life Studies, her kind of egocentricity that is simply that, and yours that has been…made intensely interesting.”173 In 1962, Hughes told Alvarez that Sexton was “good”—to a point. “When Lowell holds his breath, she wilts. Surely she’s very thin, surely the writing’s pretty undistinguished. Very direct, unloading her life & all its paraphernalia, but the short sharp poems are the best.”174
Sexton had no formal education past high school, and by her own admission she was not widely read. Each time she was given the chance to teach literature at the university level, she balked, claiming she was no good at critical analysis. As her biographer Diane Middlebrook noted, “if someone floated an allusion to Yeats or Hardy, Eliot or Pound, she often had to bluff.”175 Even after Sexton won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967, the English department at Boston University, where she taught as an adjunct, refused to grant her a tenure line for several years. A former English professor there remembered, “It mattered a lot that she had absolutely no education—that outraged people.”176
Plath was less snobbish about Sexton’s lack of education than she might have been—though in a March letter to Lynne Lawner she mentioned that Sexton had published in The New Yorker and the Partisan Review “without ever having gone to college.”177 Yet Plath was pleased to be paired with Sexton during Lowell’s workshop. “He sets me up with Ann [sic] Sexton, an honor, I suppose. Well, about time. She has very good things, and they get better, though there is a lot of loose stuff.”178 Plath’s criticism of Sexton’s “looseness” comes as no surprise given her New Critical biases, which she had not yet purged.
Like Lowell, Plath recognized Sexton’s revolutionary talent at just the time she was trying to shed her formalist tics. For years Plath had castigated herself for not getting more “life” into her poems. Here, suddenly, was another Wellesley housewife-
poet, suicide survivor, and asylum patient who had effortlessly achieved the aural and emotional effects she herself tried so hard to create—and, more importantly, who wrote with confidence from a woman’s perspective. Musing on her decision to cut “Electra on Azalea Path” from what would eventually become The Colossus (though she later changed her mind and included the poem), Plath wrote in her journal, “Too forced and rhetorical. A leaf from Ann [sic] Sexton’s book would do here. She has none of my clenches and an ease of phrase, and an honesty.”179 Plath told Lynne Lawner that she admired Lowell “immensely” and that Sexton had “the marvelous enviable casualness of the person who is suddenly writing and never thought or dreamed of herself as a born writer: no inhibitions.”180 (Indeed, Sexton wrote to a friend that year, “I am kind of a secret beatnik hiding in the suburbs.”)181 Sylvia felt she had few such female models, she told Lynne that March. “Except for M. Moore & Elizabeth Bishop what women are there to look to? A few eccentrics like Edith Sitwell, Amy Lowell. And the perennial Emily, I suppose.”182
In Lowell’s seminar that spring, Plath read Sexton’s “You, Doctor Martin,” about Sexton’s experience in a mental hospital, as well as “Music Swims Back to Me,” “The Bells,” and “Some Foreign Letters.”183 Most searing was “The Double Image,” a seven-part sequence about Sexton’s mental breakdown, her separation from her infant daughter, and her mother’s death. Plath singled out “The Double Image” in her letter to Lynne Lawner as her favorite Sexton poem. It was inspired—like many of Lowell’s new poems—by W. D. Snodgrass’s “Heart’s Needle,” a poem about divorce. Sexton read “The Double Image” and “You, Doctor Martin,” aloud in class in early March. The latter poem ended in the “honest” voice Plath so admired:
…I am queen of all my sins
forgotten. Am I still lost?
Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself,
counting this row and that row of moccasins
waiting on the silent shelf.184
The effect of Lowell’s and Sexton’s poems on Plath was intoxicating. In a 1962 interview, Plath suggested the extent of their influence:
Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, this intense breakthrough into very serious, very personal, emotional experience…interested me very much. These peculiar, private and taboo subjects, I feel, have been explored in recent American poetry. I think particularly the poetess Anne Sexton, who writes about her experiences as a mother, as a mother who has had a nervous breakdown, is an extremely emotional and feeling young woman and her poems are wonderfully craftsman-like poems and yet they have a kind of emotional and psychological depth which I think is something perhaps quite new, quite exciting.185
Lowell later claimed he had thought Plath and Sexton “might rub off on each other” and that “Sylvia learned from Anne.”186 His instincts were good. As Sylvia wrote Lynne that March, “I am leaving the rather florid over-metaphorical style that encrusted me in college. The ‘Feminine’ (horrors) lavish coyness. The poems I have written in this last year are, if anything, ‘ugly.’ I have done many in syllabic verse which gives freedom of another sort & excited me for a good while, but they are pretty bare. The ones in the London magazine are the last of the lyric florid picture-poems.”187 (She was talking about “Snakecharmer,” “Lorelei,” and “The Disquieting Muses,” which had appeared in the March issue.) Inspired by Lowell’s and Sexton’s “honesty,” and pushed toward a tougher voice by Hughes, Plath thought she was finally breaking out of her “glass caul.”188
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The autobiographical explorations of both Lowell and Sexton dovetailed with the work Plath herself was doing in therapy with Dr. Beuscher, who encouraged Plath to visit her father’s grave in Winthrop. She did so, for the first time, on March 9. She was disgusted by his small, flat stone on Azalea Path, barely visible among the throngs of “crude block stones, headstones together, as if the dead were sleeping head to head in a poorhouse.” She wanted to “dig him up. To prove he existed and really was dead.”189 Afterward, she and Ted walked along the seawall to Deer Island, where they chatted with a prison guard. Hughes, in his black coat, walked out onto a long sandbar; his image inspired Plath’s poem “Man in Black” in March, eventually published in The New Yorker. Sylvia called it a love poem in her journal, yet admitted to Otto’s hovering presence.
Shortly after visiting her father’s grave, Sylvia began to doubt Dr. Beuscher’s methods. “I am getting nowhere with RB….What good does talking about my father do?” she wondered in her journal. “It might be a minor catharsis that lasts a day or two but I don’t get insight talking to myself.”190 Something about her relationship with Dr. Beuscher was not quite right—she admitted in her journal that her “extra-professional fondness” for her psychiatrist “inhibited” her during their sessions.191 She also scoffed at Dr. Beuscher’s claim that the pain of her menstrual cramps was all in her mind, and that she had “killed and castrated” her father. Did that mean that all her nightmares of defaced and deformed people were her “guilty visions of him or fears of punishment for me?”192 That seemed absurd. These journal entries suggest how blurred the patient-doctor lines had become and show Plath’s deep critical intelligence at work in the face of dubious psychoanalysis.
But surely Plath’s regular sessions on the couch influenced the new poems she wrote that spring. Most of the poems Plath wrote in Lowell’s seminar—“Suicide Off Egg Rock,” “Electra on Azalea Path,” “The Beekeeper’s Daughter,” “The Eye-Mote,” “Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows,” “The Ravaged Face,” “Man in Black,” “Aftermath,” “A Winter Ship,” and “Metaphors”—were formal and precise. But now there were chinks in the armor. Several of these poems delved into autobiography much more profoundly than her earlier work. Consider “Electra on Azalea Path,” written in late March after her visit to Otto’s grave, and probably influenced by Sexton’s elegiac portrait of dark inheritances in “The Double Image.”
I am the ghost of an infamous suicide,
My own blue razor rusting in my throat.
O pardon the one who knocks for pardon at
Your gate, father—your hound-bitch, daughter, friend.
It was my love that did us both to death.
Although Plath had hinted obliquely at her suicide and depression in previous poems such as “The Disquieting Muses,” “Lorelei,” and “Full Fathom Five,” this was the first time she had addressed it in such direct, personal terms. The phrase “hound-bitch” was a huge leap—Plath had never before used a curse word in her poetry. Although “bitch” here describes a dog, she plays with its double meaning; the shadow curse gives the end of an otherwise conventional elegy an edge of rage. Plath was starting to shed her decorum; indeed, Hughes noted that in Lowell’s class, “For the first time, she tried deliberately to locate just what it was that hurt.”193 By “Daddy,” three years later, she would write in a much angrier voice. Sexton helped usher in this transformation. “Daddy,” Plath’s most well-known poem, is heavily indebted to Sexton’s “My Friend, My Friend,” which Sexton published in the summer 1959 issue of The Antioch Review and probably workshopped in Lowell’s class. Plath would pilfer Sexton’s cadences and tropes of Jewishness to buttress her own poem of vengeance and sorrow, while Sexton would draw on Plath’s Nazi imagery in her later work.194
Houghton Mifflin accepted Sexton’s To Bedlam and Part Way Back in May as Plath struggled to find a publisher. “I was too determined to bet on myself to actually notice where she was headed in her work,” Sexton later admitted.195 Indeed, in an April 1959 letter from Sexton to Snodgrass, Plath—whom Sexton had known for two months—hardly seems worth mentioning: “Ted Hughes and his wife (Sylvia Plath) are in Boston this year (he is an english [sic] poet).”196 Plath resented Sexton for publishing in The Christian Science Monitor—her domain—and doing poetry readings at McLean. Plath called her a “copy-cat,” though she admitted
that Sexton was the “more successful copy-cat.”197 Sexton eventually wrote a famous elegy, “Sylvia’s Death,” about their shared fascination with suicide (“what is your death / but an old belonging”).198 In 1967, she told Hughes that she had “little to add” to a biographical portrait of Plath. “ ‘Sylvia’s Death,’ ” she said, “makes everyone think I knew her well, when I only knew her death well.”199
Plath seems not to have invited Sexton to 9 Willow Street, but she did invite her Lowell classmate Kathleen Spivack to tea. Spivack was immediately struck by Hughes, whom Sexton had now started calling “Ted Huge.” He seemed tall, taciturn, “darkly handsome,” and “formidable.” He “folded himself into a sagging armchair and lounged in an exhausted manner” while Sylvia “fluttered nervously about with hot water, a kettle, pot, real tea (not tea bags!), cups and saucers.” She felt Sylvia wanted her to notice how she first warmed the pot and poured milk into the teacups in the proper “English way.” The erudite couple intimidated her, and conversation flagged until Sylvia and Ted began describing their young, British contemporaries, who were mostly unknown in America:
They were soon off on a conversation of their own, discussing the merits of the poems. Ted’s accent grew thicker, Sylvia’s too. They were more articulate for having an inarticulate audience, me. They said very “British” things like “Nonsense!” and “Rubbish!” to each other, clipping their consonants as they disagreed. This impressed me no end! It was an occasion for each of them to shine. I felt perhaps they did not talk this way when they were alone together. But here they seemed companionable, lively, interested in each other’s opinions, and also in besting each other in front of me. Ted munched a lot of shortbread. Sylvia kept pouring the tea. I was filled with the sense of all I had not read, and admired this literate, cultivated couple.200
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