Ted was unsettled when Sylvia’s due date passed. He suffered what appeared to be a panic attack at the BBC on March 29. He was speaking to the critic George MacBeth “for the first time” about the possibility of a program as they drank pints in the BBC cafeteria. Suddenly he broke out “in a cold sweat.” He excused himself to the bathroom, where, he wrote in his journal, he “felt like fainting, fought to keep consciousness….I was in a bad way.” He returned to the lobby and fell to the ground “in a sitting position. Instantly felt better, & the pain vanished…from the pit of my stomach. My consciousness cleared and I said, ‘How extraordinary!’ ” He then rejoined MacBeth at the table. He thought that the attack was brought on by an account of Wilfred Owen’s death he had read that morning, as well as his own growing fame. “Also, last night, I read the first scenes of Julius Caesar. I connected it with (a) the extraordinary excitement of Sunday—the reviews, the Somerset Maugham Award precisely analogous, in my mind, to the offering of the crown to Caesar. My own dread of recognition, my immense satisfaction with it.”
There were domestic anxieties, too. “The great excitement I am living under—Sylvia expecting her baby today, my writing, my euphoria,” as well as “The hangover of exhaustion from the last nine months, which, for the first time in my life, showed me my health crack via nerves. My deep worry over this.” He remembered similar attacks in previous weeks before meeting John Lehmann, or anticipating a review by Roy Fuller, when his anxiety rose and his heart had begun to race. “I believe the most violent hidden reactions in me are connected with ‘literary public life’ as it threatens me….I have no doubt that involvement in all that would eventually kill me….Whoever owns me detests all that, and I pray to be able to obey her.” He believed the collapse at the BBC “was punishment” from “her,” the White Goddess. “I hope this was a genuine lesson.”85
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SYLVIA’S WATER BROKE on April 1 at 1:15 a.m. Ted had been hypnotizing her “to have ‘an easy quick delivery.’ ”86 The labor would be short—less than five hours—but not easy. When she began vomiting and “contracting violently,” Ted called the midwife, who arrived at two a.m.87 Sylvia was disappointed to see an unfamiliar midwife, Sister Mardee, rather than “the blond golden-voiced Irish one” she had come to know. But Sister Mardee soon proved herself most “capable”—the highest of Plath’s accolades.88 The midwife assumed that she would return to deliver the baby after breakfast and was astonished to see that Sylvia was nearly at the pushing stage. The pain, Sylvia wrote Marcia, was “very severe,” and she did not know how she “could last through 20 more hours.”89 She asked for anesthesia, but neither Sister Mardee nor Dr. Hindley could offer it. Ted and the midwife gave calm, soothing encouragements. A husband’s presence at the delivery bed was unusual in 1960, but Ted stayed by her side all night, “holding my hand, rubbing my back & boiling kettles—a marvelous comfort.” By five a.m. Sylvia was fully dilated and ready to deliver. Dr. Hindley arrived at five thirty, “just in time,” to deliver a baby girl, seven pounds, four ounces. “I looked on my stomach & saw Frieda Rebecca white as flour with the cream that covers new babies, little funny dark squiggles of hair plastered over her head, with big dark blue eyes.”90 The blue eyes were Otto’s, she told Aurelia.
The midwife sponged the baby in a Pyrex mixing bowl and wrapped her in a blanket before handing her to Sylvia for her first feeding. The “minute” they left the room, Sylvia called, as she wrote Lynne Lawner, “my nerve-wracked mother.”91 Ted assumed that Aurelia was worried about her daughter “in the hands of Europe’s mediaeval obstetricians,” though he himself thought the home birth more humane than the “chemically controlled occurrence” it would have been in an American hospital.92 Sylvia agreed, writing to Marcia on her typewriter a few hours after the birth about the “intimacy” and “privacy” of a home birth, and how she had feared the “nightmare of labor wards, deep anesthesia, cuts, doctors bills etc. in American hospitals.”93 She had been traumatized, she wrote Dr. Beuscher the next day, by her experience with Dick Norton, the “nightmare vision of that delivery I saw at the Boston Lying-In—the mother too doped to know what was happening, not seeing or holding the baby, cut open and stitched up as if birth were a surgical operation & sent off on a stretcher in the opposite direction from her child.”94 For two weeks before the birth, she had been unable to sleep through the night and had been taking sleeping pills. She told Lynne she had “deeply feared” childbirth and had been “as nervous as possible.” She recommended a home birth—blessedly free of “surgical instruments, masks etc”—“to anybody with my particular set of nerves.” She had not torn or needed an episiotomy. Now, as she gazed on her sleeping infant, she was filled with relief. “Have one, it’s incredible,” she told Lynne. “The whole experience of birth and baby seem much deeper, much closer to the bone, than love and marriage….Frieda is my answer to the H-bomb. I never gave a damn about babies till I had her; now I still don’t give a damn about other people’s, but regard her as a strange private miracle.”95 That night the new parents lit candles and “played with” their new baby. “I don’t know when I’ve been so happy,” Sylvia wrote Dr. Beuscher on April 2, “being tired, bloody & without apparent stomach muscles is just a stage to be grown out of, no real bother.”96
Nearly all Plath’s letters that April included news of the other long-awaited arrival. “LUPERCAL preceded Frieda Rebecca by exactly two weeks but she arrived in a hurry to make up for it,” Sylvia joked to Ted’s brother Gerald in Australia. “Both productions have been well-received by the world at large & are, we hope, destined for brilliant futures.”97 Plath, too, would have several professional successes that spring: “Man in Black” and “Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows” ran in The New Yorker on April 9 and May 28, respectively. The London Magazine would publish “The Daughters of Blossom Street” in May, and “The Sleepers” and “Full Fathom Five” in June.
Sylvia spent her first ten days with Frieda (whom she called Rebecca for several weeks) at home, as midwives descended twice a day to help her bathe and care for the baby—all for free. Sylvia breastfed her every four hours with ease. Dido sent veal casseroles, trout in aspic, and hearty stews, and the small flat filled up quickly with flowers, cards, and telegrams. Sylvia was oddly “moved” by Mildred Norton’s baby gift from Harrods and annoyed that Aurelia’s congratulatory letter did not arrive until a week after Frieda’s birth. She was also upset with Warren, who still had not written, and she made sure Aurelia knew that Dick’s mother had taken the time to write to her before her own family had. She was angry with Aurelia, too, for suggesting that they give the baby something to curtail her height.
I’m surprised at you. Tampering with nature! What an American thing to feel measuring people to ideal heights will make them happier or not interfere with other things. Whatever height Frieda Rebecca is, I shall encourage her to be proud of it.98
Bill Merwin was the baby’s first visitor, followed by the Huwses a day later. Bill arrived with a silver thimble for Frieda, and daffodils and New Yorkers for Sylvia. She was grateful for the gifts, but told Aurelia, “The one infuriating thing about the general euphoria around here is that I have no relatives or friends of my own to admire the baby in person. Ted’s people & friends are dear…but it isn’t the same.”99 Still, she appreciated the Merwins’ meals, attic furniture, books, gifts, and company, and was touched when Dido gave her a piece of pearl jewelry she had received for her own christening.100 Sylvia and Ted decided that the Merwins would be the baby’s godparents.
Ted temporarily took over the day-to-day burdens of domesticity that Sylvia was expected to bear while writing and, now, caring for a baby. She praised Ted for his attention to Frieda. “You should see him rocking her & singing to her!” she wrote home. “She looks so tiny against his shoulder, her four little fingers just closing around one of his knuckles.”101 Ted wondered if Frieda was “precocious”—“She already looks at things, your finge
r for instance,—with a ferociously intent expression.”102 He too felt that the baby had settled Sylvia, and that she took to motherhood naturally. “Sylvia is wonderful with her—serene, casual, full of solid sense,” he told Aurelia.103
After two weeks, Sylvia was discharged from the midwives’ care, though Sister Mardee still dropped by to check on her. Spring, with its warm “lambish” winds and tentative greens, had finally displaced the raw, wet winter.104 Sylvia bought a large, luxurious baby carriage with a check Mrs. Prouty had sent to cover her doctor. (“Don’t tell her my home confinement was free!” she instructed Aurelia.)105 They took Frieda for her first walk in Regent’s Park on April 14. Three days later, Sylvia brought her infant to the CND anti-bomb protest in Trafalgar Square, “an immensely moving experience.”106 She told Aurelia about the long column of protesters marching in silence with their “Ban the Bomb” banners, and how she wept as she watched them file past, “proud that the baby’s first real adventure should be as a protest against the insanity of world-annihilation—already a certain percentage of unborn children are doomed by fallout & noone [sic] knows the cumulative effects of what is already poisoning the air & sea.”107 She hoped that neither Aurelia nor Warren would vote for Richard Nixon in the upcoming American presidential election, a wish that became a command as the summer progressed. In July she told Aurelia she would “disown” her if she voted for him.108 She asked her mother to find out if she could vote in absentia for Kennedy and told her to get them a subscription to The Nation “to keep up with American liberal politics.”109
Sylvia was deeply concerned about the effect of nuclear war and fallout, but there was another reason she attended the march. Ted and Dido had gone off together to meet Bill Merwin there, and no one had thought to ask Sylvia to come along. Angry, Sylvia called Peter Redgrove, one of Ted’s old Cambridge friends, and asked him to accompany her. They carried Frieda in a cot between them. When Ted and Dido returned to the flat, they found no note and became worried. Dido speculated that this had been Sylvia’s way to exact “revenge” on her and Hughes for leaving without her.110 She was probably right. Yet Redgrove “detected no tension whatsoever” between Sylvia and Ted.111
By late April Frieda had dropped her early-morning feeding, which meant that Sylvia could sleep straight through from two to seven a.m. “My whole philosophy of life is dependent on getting enough sleep: without it, one gets completely demoralized,” she wrote to Aurelia. Although she was “eager to begin writing & thinking again,” she could not imagine being separated from Frieda. She fretted about leaving the baby with a sitter’s service during an upcoming cocktail party at Faber and Faber, where she would “presumably meet Eliot.” Since Sylvia was breastfeeding, it was difficult for her to leave Frieda for more than a few hours. “I wish I could carry her like a papoose,” she wrote.112 But she went ahead and employed the service anyway.
In the end, she was glad to escape the flat, however briefly, without the baby. They met Hughes’s Cambridge contemporary Karl Miller, literary editor of The Spectator (soon to move to the New Statesman), and a BBC producer for lunch, and had dinner with Lee Anderson, who had recorded Plath in Massachusetts for the Library of Congress. She gorged on performances: Laurence Olivier in Orson Welles’s version of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker (“how much better, profounder, Ted could do it”), and the Royal Ballet’s performance of Antigone (“tragic, wordless”).113 She would later persuade Ted to see Arnold Wesker’s “Roots” trilogy that summer, which he reviewed for The Nation. Hughes had little patience for the Angry Young Men of the 1950s, but Plath felt that Wesker was the inheritor of the American playwright Clifford Odets, whose plays she described as “also about Jews & Communists.”114 This kind of left-wing, vaguely socialist drama still interested Plath, who had once written a similar kind of play, Room in the World. Wesker’s work connected her back to American politics, and resonated with her interest in outsiders.
Only Ted spoke to T. S. Eliot at the Faber and Faber cocktail party in Russell Square on April 21. Sylvia spent most of her time talking to Janet Burroway, a 1955 Mademoiselle guest editor and Cambridge Marshall scholar now living below Sylvia’s old room at Whitstead. Faber and Faber was publishing her first novel, which put Plath on guard; Burroway was another doppelgänger, whose academic and literary trajectory resembled Plath’s.115 The two had mutual friends (Jane Truslow, Peter Davison) and had briefly crossed paths in America. Janet told Sylvia she had feared that her boyfriend would fall in love with her on his Oxford Fulbright—such was Sylvia’s brilliant reputation. Janet recalled, “She was in a postpartum glow. I remember her glee at being a retrospective object of jealousy, and her impulsive invitation to supper.”116 Janet thought that Sylvia regretted the invitation, for on May 3 she received a short note inviting her and her friend Zulfi—Zulfikar Ghose, the distinguished Pakistani writer—over for a “very simple spaghetti” supper.117 Veal scallopini, apparently, was for the Huwses; chicken tetrazzini for the Merwins.
Sylvia had joked that Janet would find her flat among the “squalidia” of Chalcot Square. Janet deconstructed the cute term years later: “It would be impossible to infer from England today the England of the fifties. Swinging London was not so much as a twinkle in anybody’s eye, and the culture shock for the daughters of Betty Crocker was of a grimy kind—dour, fusty, crusted with the penury of spirit that a whole country had learned in war.”118 She thought Sylvia’s décor—much of it inherited from the Merwins—“shabby” but “chosen with a good eye, care, and flair.” She remembered “the stingy lighting and the sense of the ceiling’s being too low for this high couple and their energy.” She and Zulfikar found Sylvia busy with preparations, and Ted “cordial enough.” Sylvia tried to hold her crying baby, only five weeks old, in her left arm as she cooked with her right. Janet saw that Sylvia was becoming “increasingly brittle, taut.” When Frieda cried, Sylvia brought the baby into the living room and “shoved her” at Ted.119 “He was pacing, gesturing with one simian arm, the baby held in an elbow-out crook of the other, while he described, intense and intent, how the animals woke him at night and how he lay listening to them.”120 Janet wrote her parents soon after the dinner that she found Ted “capable and slightly tough-looking…articulate and interesting and strong.” He described for her the “English Attitude”: “A fellow asked me: what do you think of being a father? What do you think of it—isn’t that just like an Englishman?”121
Janet assumed that the Hugheses thought she and Zulfikar were a pair of “chattering hopefuls,” though both were already quite successful.122 The situation, with its rivalrous tension, “was dangerous,” she wrote years later. She wished she could have “known Sylvia better.”123 Not long after the dinner, Sylvia wrote Lynne Lawner about Janet. “I find her cold & very clever, but feel—whether wrongly or not—that you & I are emotional sisters on the other side of the moon.”124 Sylvia could have used an American girlfriend who shared her intellectual firepower and literary aspirations. Back in Boston, Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin read their poems to each other over the phone almost daily. Sylvia had no such female collaborator; in 1960, she had few friends in London at all. Her resentment of “doubles” like Janet stemmed partly from the sexist literary climate of the time and the scarcity of literary opportunities extended to women.
Over fifty years later, reflecting back on the dinner, Janet wrote, “All of us were floundering through new ideas of what marriage was…how far the writer’s need for solitude could be allowed in the life of a wife and mother.”125 No one in her 1958 Barnard class, she said, had heard of feminism “except to describe antiquated efforts to win the vote. ‘Liberation’ was a word we used for ‘Europe’ and ‘the Jews.’ ”126 Barnard’s president, Millicent McIntosh, had told Janet to call her “Mrs.” rather than Professor, Dr., Dean, or President, as it was the title “she’s proudest of.” The messages were indeed mixed, and their effect on ambitious young women was d
estabilizing. Like Sylvia, Janet veered between visions of herself as a writer and herself as a mother. “I knew these two images were in conflict. What I didn’t understand was that the choice might never be made, that my life could unroll, or lurch, or cascade, with the tension between them constant.”127 Sylvia had convinced herself, when she married Ted, that there was no conflict. But when the marriage began to dissolve, so did the glue with which she had fixed together these two seemingly irreconcilable selves.
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IN THE SPRING OF 1960, Plath and Hughes made an influential friend: Al Alvarez, the young poetry critic at The Observer. Alvarez was well on his way to becoming his generation’s kingmaker, that rare critic who would change the course of twentieth-century poetry. While the New Critical mantra was that poems should “not mean, but be,” Alvarez felt poems should both mean and be. “Movement” poets were targets, as were “loose” Americans like William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg. Technical skill was still highly valued, yet there was a new urgency: poems should engage, even if that engagement took the form of the death of a pig, or the shadows of a yew tree.
As an undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Alvarez had formed a trio with George Steiner—who would later write influentially about Plath—and the American poet Donald Hall, who was there on a Henry Fellowship.128 Hall became Alvarez’s mentor, and introduced him to contemporary American poetry.129 After Oxford, Alvarez spent a year at Princeton. America was “a relief,” he recalled. “England was all balled up in those days. It got its jaws a bit looser, but it took time. There was no American literature taught, which was rather stupid.”130 By the time he met Hughes and Plath at age thirty-one, he had published two academic books: The Shaping Spirit (1958), about modernist poetry; and The School of Donne (1960). He was an early champion of Thom Gunn, whose first book, Fighting Terms, he declared in the Partisan Review “the most impressive first book of poems since Robert Lowell’s.”131 He would be partly responsible for the “twinning” of Gunn and Hughes.132
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