With the Merwins in France for the summer, the Hugheses socialized with the Huwses, Leo Goodman, and a local young couple, Ben and Sally Sonnenberg. (Ben and Ted would eventually grow close.) Sylvia and Ted celebrated Ted’s thirtieth birthday on Hampstead Heath, picnicking on his favorite food: Fortnum & Mason’s chicken pie, white wine, and salad. Sylvia gave him a witch figurine and an oil painting of an Aztec king from a local art gallery. To Aurelia she downplayed her disappointment about losing the Yale Younger Poets prize again, and American publishers’ lack of interest in The Colossus, which she thought “better than most first books.”182 But the couple’s recognition in America was growing. Harper’s publishers, after reading her short story “The Daughters of Blossom Street” in The London Magazine, had expressed interest in a novel or short-story collection, while the editor of the Texas Quarterly hosted lunch for Plath and Hughes, and bought $200 worth of their work on the spot.183 Six of Plath’s poems appeared in major magazines that summer, including “A Winter Ship” in the July Atlantic, “Mushrooms” in the July Harper’s, and “The Net Menders” in the August 20 New Yorker.184
Although Plath felt her days sliding into housework and baby-minding, she managed to write what she called several “light poems” that summer, including “Sleep in the Mojave Desert,” “Two Campers in Cloud Country,” and “On Deck.”185 (She sent them all to The New Yorker, along with “You’re,” on July 9; two were accepted.) But other summer poems were anything but light. In late June’s “The Hanging Man,” a poem about her shock treatment, one hears the chilly, authoritative voice of later poems like “Elm” and “Edge”: “By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me. / I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.” “The Hanging Man” set the tone for July’s “Sleep in the Mojave Desert,” which rehearsed similar imagery of deserts and lizards from Plath’s American cross-country trip. “Stillborn,” written in July, refers not to a baby, but to her poems, which refused to come to life:
O I cannot understand what happened to them!
They are proper in shape and number and every part.
They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid!
They smile and smile and smile and smile at me.
And still the lungs won’t fill and the heart won’t start.
Plath continues, in the final stanza, “they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction, / And they stupidly stare, and do not speak of her.”
Sylvia wrote frequently in her letters about Frieda’s merriness, and her delirious love for her daughter. But her poems that summer were filled with images of deformity, numbness, sterility, and terror. Gone were the playful invocations of “You’re”—“O high-riser, my little loaf.” Instead, there is “Stillborn,” with its imagery of jarred, pickled fetuses, and references to exhaustion (“their mother near dead”), guilt, and boredom. These poems hint that Plath may have experienced some form of postpartum depression, which was a deeply taboo subject in 1960. Fear of being separated from one’s baby—as chronicled in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic story “The Yellow Wallpaper”—kept the illness almost entirely underground. Postpartum depression was not even recognized in the psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual until 1994. Today the psychiatric community agrees that women with a history of depression are at a much higher risk for postpartum depression—indeed, Dr. Beuscher had warned Plath of that risk as early as 1959—and that mothers may experience postpartum depressive symptoms throughout the year following birth.186 (Sylvia would tell her friend Catherine Frankfort in 1962 that she thought she was suffering from postpartum depression in the wake of Nicholas’s birth.)187
Plath would have had no way to express feelings of postpartum depression in letters, and her journals from this time are lost. She may have turned to poetry to say the unsayable, with “stillborn” results: perhaps certain poems did not come because they were too terrible to write. There are some clues in her letters—the “ghastly July: rain every day,” her aimless, “helterskelter” days, the “10 and 2 day feeds which so broke up my time.”188 In August she wrote Aurelia, “I really hunger for a study of my own out of hearing of the nursery where I could be alone with my thoughts for a few hours a day. I really believe I could do some good stories if I had a stretch of time without distractions.”189 Her pleasure reading included Alan Moorehead’s Gallipoli. Ted wrote that it was around this time the two of them “with a great shock, discovered Emily Dickinson,” whom he called “America’s greatest poet, without a doubt.”190 Plath was already familiar with Dickinson, who was one of Aurelia’s favorite poets, yet her surviving college essays show no evidence that she had studied Dickinson in any depth. The omission suggests the lack of academic attention women poets received—even the “greatest” of them.
The English summer was proving as dismal as she had expected, and Sylvia longed for sunny blue skies and a tan. “I am a horrid pale yellow. O England.”191 Yet for all the “raw and chilly” weather, she was relieved to live in England’s welfare state. Her labor and delivery had been virtually free, as had all her postpartum treatment and Frieda’s pediatric care. A bad infection in her lower lip that month, which required several visits to the doctor and two boxes of penicillin shots, cost only twenty-five cents. (She still was not ready to “risk” a Health Service dentist, however, and paid out of pocket for private dental care.) Health care would have cost much more in America, while the state-funded BBC made it possible for them to live in London without teaching. The two had earned more than $1,000 from their writing since moving there in February, thanks mainly to the BBC. Ted had made $330 for his hour-long The House of Aries, while George MacBeth at the BBC had asked Sylvia to contribute some poems to “a program of New Poetry.”192
Aurelia’s own finances—always Sylvia’s safety net—became less secure when Boston University decided to fold its secretarial teaching department. Although she had tenure, she was now, she told her daughter, “working twice as hard” to earn an income—hoping for piecemeal work teaching German or medical shorthand.193 Sylvia told her she was disgusted by BU’s tactics, but she also sounds weary of her mother’s penchant for martyrdom. “And don’t think you should take courses to show them you’re ‘game’ for anything.” Sylvia had an answer to her mother’s dilemma—a fascinating piece of advice that sheds light on the complicated symbiosis between the two women:
I wish you’d spend half as much time in your afternoons playing with women’s magazine stories, with feeling. Get a plot, imagine it in several scenes, with a character changing through events & finding something out about life & resolving problems. I’ll edit anything you do for what it’s worth. I bet if you pretended this was the way you had to earn some money, you’d turn out two or three things in the year. Why don’t you try?194
Sylvia was all too aware, it seems, of her mother’s unfulfilled literary ambitions.
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In August, Sylvia and Ted returned to Yorkshire for a week. Hughes wanted to escape London’s “incessant grinding wheel,” which lately had caused him more “anxious pains.”195 His torpor dissipated as soon as he reached the moors. “The silence here is overpowering—because the hills seem to embody it—you can see it—everything is spellbound to it.”196 He was beginning to think that if he were ever to write anything of substance, he needed a real study and “spells of rural peace & isolation….One visitor puts me off for the day before & the day after.”197 Sylvia got Ted’s father talking about the First World War, and his stories amazed them both. She told Aurelia she was finally able to unwind after “months of half-fatigue.” They took long walks while Edith watched Frieda, cooked their meals, and did their laundry. Sylvia expressed her gratitude for this “vacation of sorts” begrudgingly (she had resolved not to cook).198 But the time away from the baby and the walks in the “pure clear air” widened her perspective. “All the frustrations of habit fell away & we made several
long-range plans.”199 They spent a day at the seaside resort of Whitby after Uncle Walt stuffed $150 into Ted’s pocket at the pub. Whitby did not impress Sylvia: “there is something depressingly mucky about English sea resorts….the sand is muddy & dirty. The working class is also dirty—candy papers, gum [sic] cigarette wrappers. My favorite beach in the world is Nauset & my heart aches for it. I don’t know, there is something clean about New England sand, no matter how crowded.”200 In her 1961 poem about the English seaside, “Whitsun,” she would write, “And we picnic in the death-stench of a hawthorn. / The waves pulse and pulse like hearts. / Beached under the spumy blooms, we lie / Seasick and fever-dry.”
Back in London, they began looking for a new study. They had tired of the “obligations” and “giddy hairdresser sublessees” that came with use of the Merwins’ study, and had decided that the Merwins would not, after all, be Frieda’s godparents.201 (In December they would ask Leo Goodman and Ann Davidow-Goodman.) Sylvia wrote Aurelia that they now had “large reservations” about the friendship with the Merwins: “both of us feel the need to free ourselves from this uncomfortable dependency….Ted’s work is so good he doesn’t need ‘contacts’ of any sort.”202 In December, they would use a $150 check from Mrs. Prouty to replace the Merwins’ furniture, still in their flat. Mrs. Morton upstairs allowed them to use her attic flat while she was at work, though Hughes only used it a few times before retreating, again, to the windowless cubicle in his entryway.
Success continued upon success. Stanley Kunitz published another glowing review of Lupercal in Harper’s, and Hughes appeared in the September 9 issue of The Times Literary Supplement in an article about the “British Imagination,” along with a photo and two poems, “Thistles” and “A Fable.”203 (He would publish the same two poems, for $50, in Mademoiselle, of all places, in March 1961.) Hughes now had various paid speaking engagements in schools and colleges around London. Plath published “The Manor Garden” in The Atlantic, “The Beekeeper’s Daughter” and “The Colossus” in the Kenyon Review, and other poems and stories in The Hudson Review, The Listener, the Texas Quarterly, and The Sewanee Review that fall.204 She began taking Italian lessons at Berlitz twice a week in anticipation of their Maugham travel award; despite a toddler in tow, she had talked herself into going either to Corsica or Italy (her friend Lynne Lawner was still living in Rome) in the spring of 1961.
The Yorkshire visit had prodded them to start house hunting in the countryside. They now considered Cornwall, where Sylvia fantasized about buying a house with an orchard and a view of the sea. Still, she would have preferred to stay in London; it seemed a mistake to leave just as their reputations were taking off. In late September, Ted lunched with Thom Gunn and Charles Monteith—who reported T. S. Eliot’s delight with his children’s book, Meet My Folks!—and he and Sylvia drank champagne with their publishers, a BBC producer, and John Lehmann at his “posh Kensington house.”205 If Ted ever became rich from his writing, Sylvia said, she would buy a home on Hampstead Heath and divide their year between London and the country. “I am much more a city-dweller than Ted,” she told Aurelia.206
In November, Sylvia would spend a day in a real estate agent’s office educating herself about “mortgages, rent controlled tenants and other details.” She collected lists of houses for sale in her district and presented herself, with a letter of introduction from her new doctor, Dr. Horder, to the owner of a nearby townhouse selling for £7,000 at 4 Chalcot Crescent. Sylvia told Aurelia it was her dream house, and felt that they would be able to afford it in another year or so. She put her name down for “first refusal.” “Oh mother for the first time I saw us living in a house perfectly suited to our needs!”207 She vowed to write more women’s magazine stories in hopes of making money, and signed with a London agent, Jennifer Hassell, who she hoped would help her break into the market. But Sylvia bet on Ted’s plays as the surest moneymaker. “Maybe someday you’ll be able to go see his plays on Broadway!” she wrote her aunt, uncle, and grandfather.208 She knew that the townhouse was “impossible to manage at this point, but who knows what Ted will have written in a year’s time.”209
Sylvia often dramatized their financial situation, telling others they were living on next to nothing when in fact they had managed to save $7,000 by November 1960—an astonishing sum of money for two freelance writers. It was enough to pay for a country house in cash. Sylvia’s American dream of home ownership dovetailed with Ted’s desire for a quiet rural retreat. And she wanted Ted to be happy. “There he is, after him a huge gulf, and then the rest of the little people,” she wrote her mother that fall.210 In the meantime, they lived frugally. They held off on a New Yorker subscription until Aurelia finally bought them one in September. Nor did they buy a radio, despite all of Hughes’s BBC broadcasts, until September. Sylvia began making Frieda’s clothes with a sewing machine (lent to her by Marcia’s London friend, Marcia Momtchiloff), boasting to Aurelia that she could save $3 on a nightie. The savings were almost an afterthought once she began designing; the outfits filled her with pride.
The Colossus was published on October 31, her birthday week. The print run was small—just five hundred copies—and Plath was upset by two typeset errors that had somehow slipped through. But she was delighted with the cover: a light green rectangle with her name and the title, in small black letters, surrounded by a delicate, Victorian floral pattern against a white background. It was a more feminine cover than the Faber jackets of Hughes’s books, with their bold colors and large typeface. But the poems inside were not delicate and feminine. Plath had mostly jettisoned her cerebral, reflective, formally intricate work—only three poems from 1956 or before remained—for an art that was looser and more ominous. The weather of these poems was gray-green storm light, their mood apprehensive. Ted was impressed. He wrote to Olwyn that week, “I’ve been living with her poems for 4 years now & am very critical, but they remain absolutely fresh & unique.”211
In the collection’s best poems, “The Colossus,” “Lorelei,” “Full Fathom Five,” “The Manor Garden,” “Hardcastle Crags,” “The Disquieting Muses,” “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor,” and “The Stones,” Plath builds up a pressure she never quite releases. In her manuscript’s previous incarnations (Circus in Three Rings, Two Lovers and a Beachcomber, The Bull of Bendylaw, The Earthenware Head, The Devil of the Stairs, Full Fathom Five), most of the poems were tightly reined in and controlled, more metaphysical than Romantic in spirit. In The Colossus, a master draftswoman has begun to paint abstracts. In her title poem, the dead father’s “pig-grunt” is “worse than a barnyard.” Plath conjures the Oresteia in the poem, but she has gained the confidence to question and subvert the elegiac tradition. These were courageous poems for a woman to publish in 1960. Still, despite Plath’s risk taking, no poem in the book truly shattered convention. “The Colossus,” with its anger toward the Father, and “The Stones,” full of asylum imagery, come close; but for all the thinly veiled anger toward Otto and Aurelia in “The Colossus” and “The Disquieting Muses,” the resentful daughter remains dutiful in both poems. Luke Myers knew that Plath was holding back. In his 1962 Sewanee Review analysis of the collection, he noted, “I can not help wondering what will happen if, in Miss Plath’s second volume of poems, the emotional distance is shortened.” He asked for fewer phrases like “Mark, I cry,” and more of “the pressure of ‘Lorelei.’ ”212 In Ariel, Plath would let the pressure build, and release: “Off, off, eely tentacle!” she would write in “Medusa”; in “Daddy,” “you bastard, I’m through.”
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Plath wrote at least six poems between late September and December 1960. The BBC asked her to record two of them, “Leaving Early,” set in Mrs. Morton’s attic flat, and “Candles,” on October 26. “I am just slowly surfacing,” she wrote to Lynne Lawner that fall.213 She was inching her way toward the Ariel voice. The end of October’s “Love Letter,” for example, rehearses the
rising, “pure acetylene / Virgin” of “Fever 103°”: “From stone to cloud, so I ascended. / Now I resemble a sort of god / Floating through the air in my soul-shift / Pure as a pane of ice. It’s a gift.” She conjured up a glass bell jar in November’s “A Life,” and examined its “inhabitants.” This was a stark portrait of depression:
A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle
About a bald, hospital saucer.
It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper
And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.
She lives quietly
With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,
The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture
She has one too many dimensions to enter.
“Candles” and its companion poem “Magi,” both written that October and inspired by Frieda, are gentler poems set in soft, golden light, but with ambiguous blessings.214 In both poems, Plath deconstructs the religious imagery surrounding the Christ child. (That year, Plath called herself and Hughes “two grim atheists.”)215 The wise men in “Magi” are “dull angels” who have nothing to teach her daughter: “Let them astound his heart with their merit. / What girl ever flourished in such company?” In “Candles,” the mother is full of doubt about her nursing infant’s future as the candles weep and glow around her. “How shall I tell anything at all / To this infant still in a birth-drowse?” Sylvia told Aurelia that the poem was “about candles & reminiscences of grammy & grampy in Austria spoken while nursing Frieda by candlelight at 2 am. I’m very fond of it.”216 The candlelight conjures up a gentler world that no longer exists, symbolized by the mother’s memory of her Austrian grandmother presenting roses to Emperor Franz Josef. Candles now “Drag up false, Edwardian sentiments.” The speaker knows a different reality—two world wars since Franz Josef, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.
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