Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  Hughes was not much impressed with contemporary American poets other than Lowell and John Crowe Ransom. He had told Olwyn in summer 1958, “American poetry—there are hundreds of writers producing poems that look at first sight impressive, but this common brilliant style is at second reading a poor cheat—there is a glaze of impermeable plastic cleverness laid over a general nothing. So that, after a year at close quarters with it, I begin to see clearly that the good poets since Robert Lowell are mostly English, still.”201 He wrote Luke Myers in May 1959 that he found e. e. cummings the “chief Christ” of “that most brainless American romanticism” that was “verseless, styleless,” full of “irreverence for poetic tradition.”202 Although he wrote Olwyn in 1959 that he found Lowell’s style “utterly new,”203 he told a critic in 1998 that he “despised” the confessional genre, and considered it “reprehensible, not truly creative.” He felt that true experience ought to emerge “obliquely, through a symbol.”204 He was still firmly ensconced within a British tradition that found such a poetics slightly embarrassing, slightly uncouth—as Sylvia herself had been perceived during her first few months in Cambridge. Hughes, as he told Daniel Weissbort in 1959, felt that “AutoBiography is the only subject matter really left to Americans. The only thing an American really has to himself, & really belongs to, is his family. Never a locality, or a community, or an organization or ideas, or a private imagination.”205 Indeed, he would tell Daniel Huws in December 1959, “Another year in America would have worked a permanent petrification on my glands.” Yet during his “exile” in America Hughes wrote what many critics consider to be his finest book: Lupercal.206 He later admitted that the year had been good for Plath, too. In 1966 he would write Lowell, “without the combined operation of you and Anne Sexton Sylvia would never have written what she finally did.”207

  22

  The Development of Personality

  Boston, America, Yaddo, April–December 1959

  Robert Lowell’s seminar broke up in April. Ted described the last class, as relayed by Sylvia, in a letter to Olwyn:

  Usually he is very quiet, shy, whispers (a real mad whisper) but this time he burst in, flung the tables into a new order, insulted everybody, talked incessantly….He told them, elegiacally, that he hadn’t been able to see any of them much outside class because he had to see his psychiatrist so often, as he had only just come out of McLean’s (the mental hospital he came out of over a year ago). Then he went on, like a deathbed speech, how he had loved teaching them, that he never wanted any of them to publish a ragged line that he wouldn’t be proud of, because he didn’t want any one to say that he was an incompetent teacher—etc. He drove straight from the class, we heard afterwards, to McLean’s—where he now is, under supervision. This was the day before his book came out. He gets quite homicidal.1

  Hughes’s writing was going unusually well. “I’m in a good year I think,” he wrote Olwyn, “the pieces I’ve got lately have the right sort of fire—a couple of them more deeply & brilliantly colored than anything in my book.” He’d written “Hawk Roosting” at Willow Street, and would publish “Thrushes,” “The Bull Moses,” and “Nicholas Ferrer” that summer. They would all go into Lupercal. D. H. Lawrence’s influence was as strong as ever, but Hughes was also reading Lowell’s new poems, as well as Crowe Ransom, Lorca, and Baudelaire. Lorca’s essay on the “Duende” perfectly encapsulated his new poetic strategy, he told his sister that spring: “It’s deeper than Dionysiac—it’s the direct voice of the blood, & speaks only directly into the face of death.”2 Poems like “View of a Pig,” “Hawk Roosting,” and “Pike,” which Hughes called “the most inspired poem I’ve ever written,” had come easily to him.3 (“I really believe Goethe’s remark that no amount of thought can correct or improve a work of genius,” he wrote Olwyn in August.)4 They became some of Hughes’s most famous poems.

  On April 11, Hughes learned that he had won a $5,000 Guggenheim Award with T. S. Eliot’s support. He and Sylvia were in bed when they heard the door buzzer, and exchanged a look of hope. He retreated to the bathroom while Sylvia took the envelope and “gasped out in her suppressed excitement, ‘They’ve given you 5000 dollars.’…I went on pacing, but weeping with relief.”5 It was more money than they had expected; to calm himself, he went for a walk along the Charles River with George Gibian, Sylvia’s old Smith professor, who had also won a Guggenheim.

  Sylvia felt that they were finally receiving their due. The New Yorker accepted her “Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows” and “Man in Black,” while a visit from photographer Rollie McKenna, who had also photographed Dylan Thomas and T. S. Eliot, confirmed a certain status. Plath’s new collection, which she had retitled The Devil of the Stairs (after a line by T. S. Eliot), now comprised “40 unattackable poems,” mainly recent work; she felt that her old Smith poems were “miserable death-wishes.”6 Only ten poems remained of the book that had been rejected by Auden for the Yale prize two years ago, and only thirteen remained unpublished. She still felt “blocked about prose” and thought of her poems as “an evasion,” an excuse not to begin a children’s book and finish her novel.7 She sought inspiration in Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, Virginia Woolf’s The Years, and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, which she found full of “miraculous flow and ease.”8 She wavered in her estimation of The Years. “The recreation is that of the most superficial observer at a party of dull old women who have never spilt blood.” Woolf’s “childless life” accounted for what Plath saw as her preference for “lighting effects” instead of “potatoes and sausage”: “she shows no deeper current under the badinage.”9

  By early May she felt stronger, and finally wrote The Bed Book in one day, after contemplating its plot line for six months. The children’s book was only eight pages long, but she felt an immense relief when she mailed it on May 3 to the Atlantic Press. (It was rejected, and remained unpublished until 1976.) “Suddenly it frees me—and Ted too.” She could finally read The New Yorker without feeling “drowned or sick.”10 She mailed Hughes’s children’s book, Meet My Folks!, to Harper’s and Faber and Faber in mid-May, and finished a story, “Sweetie Pie and the Gutter Men,” which she had begun earlier in the month. (The story remained unpublished until 1977, when it was collected in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams.)

  “Sweetie Pie and the Gutter Men” recounts a brief afternoon reunion between two old college friends, Myra, who is childless and married to a sculptor, and Cicely, the wife of an obstetrician and mother of two. Although Myra is based on Sylvia herself, Cicely is a version of Aurelia, or what Sylvia might have become had she married Dick: “prudish” and “provincial.” Her home is polished to perfection, conventionally decorated, and cold. Over lemonade in the backyard, the two discuss Cicely’s husband’s new obstetrical practice and Myra reveals that she saw a birth at a charity ward that left her shaken. (“They had to cut into her, I remember. There seemed to be a great deal of blood.”) Cicely would rather not speak of such things, and instead disciplines her daughter, Alison, who imagines dramatic scenarios for her doll, Sweetie Pie: “She pokes people’s eyes on the sidewalk. She pulls off their dresses. She gets diarrhoea in the night.” Myra is drawn to the little girl, and out of Cicely’s earshot she asks Alison what she does to her doll when she is “very bad.” “I knock her down. I spank her and spank her. I bang her eyes in,” Alison answers. “Good,” Myra responds. “You keep on doing that.” Myra finds the child’s fantasies of violence refreshing after the stultifying atmosphere of Cicely’s home, yet she is aware of her own “hurt” as she encourages the child to lash out. “She turned only once, and saw the child, small as a doll in the distance, still watching her. But her own hands hung listless and empty at her sides, like hands of wax, and she did not wave.”

  Myra’s despondency stems from her awareness of women’s limited choices: she does not want Cicely’s stable, bourgeois life, yet she envies the spoils of suburban womanhood. Plath makes a s
ubtle point here about how the sparks of female independence are snuffed out by a sexist culture that will not tolerate deviation from convention, and how women often dole out punishment because they are constantly punished themselves. Cicely punishes her naughty daughter, who then punishes her rebellious doll. Plath hints at the story’s proto-feminism when Myra considers the anesthetic given to women in childbirth: “It was barbarous. It was a fraud dreamed up by men to continue the human race; reason enough for a woman to refuse childbearing altogether.”11 (A similar line would appear in The Bell Jar.)

  Ambition was much on Sylvia’s mind that spring. She planned to discuss it in her upcoming sessions with Dr. Beuscher: “driving Ambition; how to harness it, not be a Phaeton to its galloping horses.”12 Sylvia did not want to become Myra or Cicely; she wanted to serve her art above all else, “to keep in that state of itch which is comfortable: go as far enough ahead to be stimulating, near enough to be attainable with discipline and hard work.”13 She had begun to realize that she was “furious” with anyone who got “ahead” of her professionally, and worried that she would fall forever behind once she had children. She was also fighting with Ted that spring after he had pronounced her nonfiction “too general.”14 She refused to speak to him for a day and again vowed to show him no more of her work. (The unflattering portrait of Myra’s husband, Timothy, may have been a result of this argument.) For solace, Sylvia turned to Perry Norton’s wife, Shirley, her rag-rug-braiding partner, with whom she felt the “anger flow harmlessly away into the cords of bright colored soft wool.”15

  Between the early winter of 1958 and late May 1959, Plath wrote six stories: “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,” “The Fifteen-Dollar Eagle,” “The Shadow,” “Sweetie Pie and the Gutter Men,” “Above the Oxbow,” and “This Earth Our Hospital” (retitled “The Daughters of Blossom Street”). The last three she wrote in May alone. When she took stock of her work in her journal, she felt her “panic bird” recede: “I weep with joy.”16 The routine of part-time work benefited her writing—as did Lowell’s creative writing class. She felt that she had finally broken through her writer’s block to produce good prose worthy of publication and prizes. “My poems are so far in the background now. It is a very healthy antidote, this prose, to the poems’ intense limitations.” She dreamed that two stories were published in The New Yorker and that Dr. Beuscher congratulated her as Aurelia turned away and muttered her indifference. “Which shows, I think, that RB has become my mother.”17

  Surveying her work, she pronounced “This Earth Our Hospital” her best story—an “amazing advance from ‘Johnny Panic’ ” “Full of humor, highly colored characters, good, rhythmic conversation.”18 The piece overflows with the snappy dialogue Plath had always longed to write; narrated by a secretary in a psychiatric clinic of a hospital, it contained a conventional moral and took fewer aesthetic risks than the subversive and surreal “Johnny Panic.” She sent it to The Atlantic on May 31, convinced that “It should be a Best American Short Story.”19 She loved the title so much she decided she would use it for a future book of her collected short stories. (She would wait a year to see it in print, in The London Magazine.)

  A week later, however, she was brought low by the news that her poetry manuscript had again lost the Yale Younger Poets prize “by a whisper.” The winner: George Starbuck, in her opinion “a rank travesty.” Dudley Fitts, editor of the series, wrote that her manuscript had lacked “technical finish,” and was too “rough.”20 (He did not tell her that Maxine Kumin’s manuscript had come in second after Starbuck’s.) Plath fumed at the absurdity of his criticism—she had tried hard to break out of the “machinelike syllabic death-blow” that she considered her poems’ “main flaw.” “Will I ever be liked for anything other than the wrong reasons?” she despaired in her journal. “My book is as finished as it will ever be….I have no champions. They will find a lack of this, or that, or something or other….How ironic, that all my work to overcome my easy poeticisms merely convinces them that I am rough, anti-poetic, unpoetic. My God.”21

  Fitts, she continued, was a “fool, who wouldn’t know a syllabic verse if he saw one,” while Starbuck was a writer of “glib light verse with no stomach to them.”22 Yet Fitts did Plath a favor—in June he sent her manuscript, along with Maxine Kumin’s, to Stanley Burnshaw, vice president at Henry Holt Publishers. Fitts asked Burnshaw to consider both manuscripts for publication. Burnshaw sent these manuscripts, plus another from Lee Anderson—who had recorded Plath in Springfield—to Robert Frost for his opinion. Burnshaw told Frost that “the girl,” Kumin, “might have got” the Yale prize, and recommended that they offer contracts to Anderson and Kumin.23 But he had his doubts about Plath. “The more I think of her writing,” he told Frost, “the less excited I become in the prospect of adding her to the Holt list. So she would be third on my list. I’m not even ready to recommend that we publish her.”24 (Frost presumably agreed; Henry Holt Publishers would reject her book later that fall.) Meanwhile, two days after the Yale blow, Plath, with her usual stoicism, sent her manuscript to Knopf.

  After reading two mental health stories in Cosmopolitan on June 13, she vowed to write an asylum story along the lines of The Snake Pit: “I must write one about a college girl suicide. THE DAY I DIED….There is an increasing market for mental-hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don’t relive it, recreate it.”25 She thought of another title, “LAZARUS MY LOVE.” Plath was still working on her Cambridge novel, Falcon Yard; on her third wedding anniversary she decided to call her protagonist Sadie Peregrine—a name that conjured up peregrinations, wanderings, sadism, and, of course, her own initials. Yet she felt she would not be able to complete a novel until she was sure her short stories were “salable”; she told Ann Davidow she could not “cope” with the rejection of a three-hundred-page manuscript after all the “time, sweat and tears” it would require. “Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing, which remark I guess shows I still don’t have pure motives (oh-it’s-such-fun-I-just-can’t-stop-who-cares-if-it’s-published-or-read) about writing….I still want to see it finally ritualized in print.” She did: “Night Shift” was published in London’s Observer on June 14—the first of many to appear in that paper. Poems continued to come: “Slowly, slowly, I write poems and they are about cadavers, suicides, Electra complexes, Ouija boards, hermits, fat spinsters, thin spinsters, ghosts, old men of the sea, and, yes, fiddler crabs and mammoth pigs.” Her book, she told Ann, was “deeper, if more grim” than Starbuck’s, and she knew she should have won the Yale prize.26 Meanwhile, Hughes sent the completed manuscript of Lupercal to Faber and Faber in mid-June.

  * * *

  —

  In late June, a doctor told Sylvia she was not ovulating. The prospect of barrenness filled her with horror. She saw childless women as cursed, symbolic of the empty life she so feared, and she treated them cruelly in her poems. To think of herself among their ranks was a prospect that made her want to die. “My god. This is the one thing in the world I can’t face. It is worse than a horrible disease,” she wrote in her journal. She thought of herself as “part of the world’s ash….I want to be an Earth Mother in the deepest richest sense.” She feared Ted would want to leave her. Barrenness was even connected to Lupercal, whose title described a Roman fertility ceremony. “All joy and hope is gone.”27 Sylvia assumed that she would now have to undergo a regimen of injections and hormones, a “horrible clinical cycle” of “becoming synthetic.”28 However, the prognosis soon proved misleading; after having her tubes flushed (a common gynecological procedure to increase fertility), she became pregnant in early July.

  The couple had decided to spend some of Hughes’s Guggenheim money on an eight-week cross-country trip that summer before they hunkered down at Yaddo, the prestigious artist’s colony, in September. They planned a route to Pasadena, California, where they would visit Sylvia’s paternal aunt, Frieda Plath Heinrichs, and her husband, Walter.29 Before they le
ft, Sylvia and Ted camped in the backyard at Elmwood Road in their new tent, which was large enough for four people and tall enough for Ted to stand in. This was the night, Hughes later suggested in a poem, of their daughter’s conception.30 Aurelia bought them an air mattress and two light, comfortable sleeping bags, and lent them her 1953 gray Chevy sedan—a considerable sacrifice for eight weeks. Throughout the trip, Aurelia kept them informed of their literary acceptances and rejections.

  The couple left Boston on Tuesday, July 7, and spent the night at Whetstone Gulf State Park in upstate New York; the next day they drove into Canada, where they pitched their camp on the edge of Rock Lake in Algonquin Park, Ontario. They caught perch and picked blueberries. (Sylvia caught more, and bigger, fish than Ted throughout the trip.) Plath would later write in “Two Campers in Cloud Country” (July 1960) that she had wanted to get away from the Public Garden, “the labeled elms, the tame tea-roses,” and “The polite skies over Boston.” Yet the poem’s speaker suggests that the “big, brash” landscape is disturbing, too, with “neither measure nor balance.” In Canada, the “colors assert themselves with a sort of vengeance”:

  These rocks offer no purchase to herbage or people:

  They are conceiving a dynasty of perfect cold.

  In a month we’ll wonder what plates and forks are for.

  I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I’m here.