Sylvia never mentioned her doubts and fears for her child in her letters, where Frieda squeals in delight over her teddy bear and beats on a book like a drum, as Ted taught her. Sylvia told Aurelia she would have three more children: Megan, Nicholas, and Jacob. But to the just-married Ann Davidow-Goodman she wrote of never-ending sinus colds, which Ted told her she could cure if she put her mind to it. (He prescribed brandy, which, she joked, was her preferred medicine.) After the “crisp blue American weather” of September, Sylvia knew that she needed courage for the darkening months ahead.217 “Winter is here, the long wet grey half-year, and the leaves afflicted with jaundice and raining down from the trees,” she wrote Ann that October.218 An uncollected poem from autumn 1960, “Home Thoughts from London,” sounds a melancholy note. “Milk-fog’s indigenous to Regent’s Park,” Plath writes. “Where are the trenchant autumns I knew— / The sumac-maple war paint of outer Boston?”
O blueness, crispness, O superlatives—
Call up those Lincoln-Concord clear days I
Let slip like football games, without a look.
I’m smothered by a fuzzed gentility,
Mopish in my black coat as any rook.
“Together with some dozen welfare mothers,” the speaker wheels her baby daughter to Primrose Hill in the mist. The poem ends, “we’re strangers here.”219
* * *
AS SYLVIA STRUGGLED to find time to write, Ted became more determined to protect himself from the distractions of literary life. “Very strange & very unpleasant because you feel you’re being turned into something, saturated with people’s thinking about you,” he wrote to Olwyn in the summer of 1960.220 In November, the BBC’s Third Programme aired his play The House of Aries, and he turned down the chance to appear on television as part of a show, hosted in Leeds by John Betjeman, on northern writers.221 Sylvia had written excitedly to Dr. Beuscher about the invitation, “I hope he gets his face on the screen!”222 In December, despite protest from his mother, he passed on another invitation to appear on British television as “poet-of-the-year.” He had begun to dread the critical commentary that followed his radio broadcasts, positive though they were. By year’s end he had decided to refuse all speaking engagements and “cumbersome commissions”: “public life appalls him,” Sylvia wrote.223 She began telling others he was a “hibernant.”224 Ted explained his predicament in more detail to Aurelia and Warren in a December letter, calling the previous year “the busiest, most preoccupied year I’ve ever spent”:
when I got back here (having left in 1957 as a complete unknown) I found myself really quite famous and was deluged by invitations to do this, give readings, do that, meet so-and-so, etc, and many doors were comfortably wide open that I had never dreamed of being able to enter and places such as the B.B.C., which I had been trying to penetrate for years, suddenly received me as guest of honour….To enter “literary life” is in fact to enter a small windowless cell, empty, under a stunning spotlight, and left to your own devices in the knowledge that millions of invisible eyes are watching through the walls. It’s not “life” at all, you see. And it cuts you off from life.
He admitted that “it had to be tasted at first hand” and had given him some “real advantages”—contacts with the BBC, influential editors, and grant givers. “Though I might have had these anyway.”225
Plath, however, was still vying for recognition. The Colossus received good reviews from prominent critics like John Wain in The Spectator, Roy Fuller in The London Magazine (“The language of this poetry is unusual but not eccentric, with a great gift for the right epithet, the metaphoric noun”), Austin Clarke in The Irish Times, Thomas Blackburn in the New Statesman, and Al Alvarez in The Observer.226 Richard Howard, in Poetry, perceptively noted that Plath wanted “to make you hear what she sees, the texture of her language affording a kind of analogue for the experience she presents.”227 The book would be reviewed prominently alongside collections by Boris Pasternak, e. e. cummings, and John Betjeman on the BBC in late December.228 But it won no prizes, and Heinemann, according to Plath, did not “advertise” it.229 The couple’s friends could not find it in London bookshops.230 Plath worried that she would never find her readers, and that The Colossus would remain merely a “gift book” for her friends and relatives.231 At least Mrs. Prouty had sent her another check for $150—the only money, she joked dryly, the book would ever earn. Still, she proudly sent an inscribed copy to Mr. Crockett with an accompanying letter about dinners with T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender.
Sylvia awoke on her twenty-eighth birthday to German coffee cake, complete with flaming candle, and gifts wrapped in brown paper. They celebrated at home with a Fortnum & Mason chicken pie, German chocolate, Brie, Stilton and cheddar, pink champagne, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Sylvia declared it her best birthday yet and told Aurelia with her usual hyperbole that she was “happier living in London than anywhere else in the world.”232 Yet in the same letter she spoke tentatively of returning to America and asked Aurelia to help organize Ted’s application to reenter the U.S.
Stephen Spender had written the Hugheses a letter after Eliot’s dinner party in May, apologizing for having talked too much. He invited them to dinner that October, along with Louis MacNeice and Rosamond Lehmann (John Lehmann’s sister). Hughes barely tolerated the evening. He told Olwyn he found Spender “poisonous,” chatting on about Churchill (“Winnie”) and other British politicians. “You constantly have the feeling of being permitted to look into this brilliant ballroom full of shining heads who are all exclaiming ‘Stephen, darling.’…MacNeice comes off much better,—though he’s terribly slimy, he’s slimy in his own way.”233 Hughes grew impatient of the talk surrounding poetry and politics, especially the poetry of the 1930s. Sylvia wrote Olwyn that she was “more tolerant of Spender than Ted—or corrupt enough to be amused by him & a bit fond of him.”234 Plath delighted in the literary gossip and felt herself a witness to history. “Their conversation is fascinating—all about Virginia (Woolf), what Hugh (Gaitskell) said to Stephen in Piccadilly that morning, why Wystan (WH Auden) likes this book or that, how Lloyd George broke Spender’s father’s heart.”235 On such evenings, Plath felt that she had arrived.
Spender procured Plath a press ticket to the last day of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial at the Old Bailey on November 2. The issue at the heart of the trial was D. H. Lawrence’s use of the word “fuck.” In her journal, Plath quoted Dame Rebecca West, the bishop of Woolwich, and Dame Helen Gardner of Oxford on the novel’s merit and moral message, which resonated with her own: in short, the novel was “a bold experiment trying to study sex. [sic] situation more openly.” Graham Hough from Christ’s College, Cambridge, told the judge (in Plath’s words), “No proper language to discuss sexual matters—either clinical or disgusting—secretive, morbid attitude. L tries to redeem normally obscene words.”236 The verdict in Lawrence’s favor came to symbolize the beginning of the swinging sixties, with its attendant loosening of restrictive social mores.237
The trial was a victory for literature in general, and Plath and Hughes’s vision in particular. Plath wrote to Dr. Beuscher about her surprise at the “not guilty” verdict from the “unpromising prosperous middleclass [sic] looking jury after a very biased, sneering summing up by the judge who tried to influence the jury against the ‘egghead’ witnesses.”238 Those impeccably credentialed “egghead witnesses” argued that the infidelity at the heart of the novel was “sacred,” “highly moral,” and “spiritual”—that this was, as the bishop of Woolwich put it, “a book Christians ought to read.” In her journal Plath recorded Mrs. Bennet of Girton College, Cambridge, saying, “physical life impt. & is being neglected—people live poor & emasculated lives, living with half of themselves….a marriage can be broken when it is unfulfilled.”239 Sylvia agreed wholeheartedly. Yet, when infidelity occurred in her own marriage, Hughes would look no further than Lawrence for his imprima
tur.
Sylvia spent much of November house hunting and working on stories she could sell to American women’s magazines (she and Ted had started collaborating on plots again). Ted felt that there was greater potential in such writing than the “art stories” she had previously been trying to sell. Instead of shoehorning her poetic sense into women’s-magazine fiction, Ted thought she was better off facing real life—particularly birth and marriage—head on.240 Meanwhile, he worked on the Bardo Thodol and a handful of poems. Sylvia told Olwyn she was “suffering late autumn exhausture & blues”; Frieda was teething, waking up two or three times each night and leaving her “haggard.”241 She dreamed about selling enough stories to pay for a regular part-time babysitter who would release her from “the drudge-work” of child-rearing, though she also felt that “children seem to be an impetus to my writing.” She was heartened by the BBC broadcast of “Candles” and “Leaving Early” on November 20 for The Poet’s Voice, as well as BBC commentator Owen Leeming’s request for her stories (she sent him one of Ted’s, as she felt she had nothing worth showing). But broadcasting work would not secure a mortgage. She needed to find a “queer parttime” job.242
On weekends, she and Ted explored art museums and bookshops. They were struck by the Picasso exhibit at the Tate. Sylvia bought and inscribed the exhibition book, while Ted wrote to Olwyn, “Everything after Bathers playing with a ball about 1930 to Guernica, really gave me a shock.” He thought Picasso “A sadistically abusive wit at bottom, a great noise in the street,” though he preferred Klee’s work.243 Plath found a new muse in the paintings of Leonor Fini, an Italian-Argentine painter whose work was exhibited at the Kaplan Gallery in London from November 2 to December 3 that year. Sylvia wrote to Olwyn of her enthusiasm for Fini’s “jewel-like misty otherworldish damsels & cadavers with a weird, terrifying beauty, like necrological mannequins.”244 She fantasized about “paying pilgrimage” to her Corsican monastic home. Fini’s paintings of women and corpses—some of them ironic depictions of women out of mythology and Romantic poetry—resonated deeply with Plath’s own “weird” aesthetic instincts. Indeed, there is an echo of Fini’s statuesque “necrological mannequin” in “Edge.”
On December 18, the day after Hughes’s short story “The Harvesting” was broadcast, Plath listened to Edward Lucie-Smith’s good review of The Colossus on the BBC’s Third Programme.245 Lucie-Smith, a member of the Group, was an important young critic. But Alvarez outdid him. His December 18 review of The Colossus in The Observer would help make Plath’s name. Alvarez was candid about the biases Plath faced in London:
Sylvia Plath’s The Colossus needs none of the usual throat-clearing qualifications, to wit: ‘impressive, considering, of course, it is a first volume by a young (excuse me), American poetess.’ Miss Plath neither asks excuses for her work nor offers them. She steers clear of feminine charm, deliciousness, gentility, supersensitivity and the act of being a poetess. She simply writes good poetry. And she does so with a seriousness that demands only that she be judged equally seriously….most of her poems rest secure in a mass of experience that is never quite brought out into daylight….It is this sense of threat, as though she were continually menaced by something she could see only out of the corner of her eye, that gives her work its distinction.
This was not fey ladies’ poetry—it was “serious.” Plath’s language was “no-nonsense,” “bare but vivid and precise, with a concentration that implies a good deal of disturbance with proportionately little fuss.” Even her weaker poems, which Alvarez likened to “fairy stories,” were intriguing: “here her tense and twisted language preserves her and she ends with something ominous, odd, like one of the original tales from Grimm.”246 Still, the poet Richard Murphy sensed the entrenched sexism behind even this review. “Sylvia got pats on the head from Alvarez for being such a good woman poet that you wouldn’t think she was a woman: ‘it’s wonderful to think that there’s at last a woman poet that you don’t have to make allowances for!’ She must have felt this.”247
Alvarez reviewed three other books that day, including Merwin’s The Drunk in the Furnace, but he gave pride of place to The Colossus. Plath was quietly jubilant that her review was twice the length of Merwin’s, though she knew that the attention would create trouble with Dido: “it would be difficult to toss off such a review where my book got first place, most space & best notices.”248 On the following page, Plath and Hughes saw Alvarez’s pick for the best poetry collection of the year: Lupercal.249 Alvarez, “the bright young critic,” as Plath called him, had singlehandedly secured their reputations in reviews that were practically side by side.250 Their poetic and personal partnership had never been so strong.
24
Nobody Can Tell What I Lack
London, January–March 1961
By mid-December 1960, Sylvia knew that she was again pregnant. She looked forward to “the deep dreamless sleeps of Yorkshire,” where they would spend Christmas.1 Ted, too, was ready to leave London and return to the moors—“the air like solid clear glass we can walk through miraculously,” Sylvia wrote to the poet Philip Booth.2 Yet the journey north was ill-starred. After Christmas, on December 30, Sylvia and Olwyn—“fresh from Paris”—had a terrible row.3 “Olwyn made such a painful scene this year that I can never stay under the same roof with her again,” Sylvia wrote Aurelia.4 She had left the Beacon at dawn with Ted and Frieda without a word.
The women’s previous two meetings had been fraught and tense, and their relationship had devolved during the past year. Sylvia thought that her book’s good reviews had made Olwyn jealous, while Olwyn claimed Sylvia overreacted to something she said and lost her temper. Both may have been looking for a fight. On New Year’s Day, Sylvia wrote a furious letter to Aurelia about the argument, and another long letter to Dr. Beuscher a few days later. She had always hoped that Olwyn would “accept Ted’s marriage and forgive me for being a person with marked opinions, feelings and ‘presence,’ but this Christmas some small spark touched off the powderkeg & she made obvious to Ted & his mother what I’ve known all along: that her resentment is a pure and sweeping and peculiarly desperate hatred.”
In her seven-page letter to Dr. Beuscher, the longest of Plath’s fourteen surviving letters to her former psychiatrist, she continued, “Olwyn had been nagging at us for being too critical of people ever since she came up & finally I asked her to lay off & said she was as critical as the two of us put together.” This was the first time she had ever “confronted” Olwyn.
She started to fume and shriek and the stream of words ran more or less “youre [sic] a nasty bitch, a nasty selfish bitch, Miss Plath” (she calls me by my maiden name as if she could unmarry me) “you act as if our house were your palace, I watched you eat Christmas dinner & you certainly stuffed yourself, you think you can get away with everything, you’re trying to come between Ted & me, you bully me and my mother and Ted. I’m the daughter in this house….you’re a bitch, an immature woman, inhospitable, intolerant…” and on and on….Ted’s mother did say blandly that the two of them slept in the same bed till Olwyn was 9 and Ted 7. So she does have a five year lead on me.
Sylvia thought that Olwyn’s “fury” had to do with her visit to Chalcot Square the previous spring, when she had brought a guest and expected a heavily pregnant Sylvia to wait on her. Sylvia “had visions of a sisterly interest in my feelings,” but Olwyn had ignored her and talked astrology with Ted. It turned out, Sylvia told Dr. Beuscher, that Olwyn had wanted to stay with them. Sylvia told her the flat was too cramped already, and she was about to have a baby. Olwyn brought up the issue again at Christmas, claiming “you had plenty of room.” That night, Sylvia left the house.
I put the baby to bed and went for a long walk in the full moon over the moors, utterly sick. What upset me most was that neither Ted nor his mother said anything. I simply said, “Go on, Olwyn, tell me all of it.” Ted appeared with his nice sane art-teacher cous
in in a car as I was nearing Scotland. He had evidently hit his sister & told her off after I’d gone. Later, he said what we’d just witnessed was a pathological case & that we’d better steer clear of Olwyn till she got married. Luckily I remembered your wise advice that the woman who shouts her head off most seems in the wrong regardless of who’s right & I was glad I hadn’t retorted to Olwyn in kind.
Olwyn told Sylvia she would never again return home for Christmas if Sylvia was there. “The morning we left—neither Ted nor I having slept & his mother having cried all night—she threw her arms around me, smiled, said ‘I’m sorry’ & ran back to bed.”5 Sylvia thought Olwyn’s apology was a show to mollify her brother. She told Aurelia that Olwyn had also taunted Gerald’s wife, Joan, into leaving the Beacon in tears; Ted had to retrieve her from the train station with her bags packed for Australia. Sylvia wrote Beuscher, “As Ted said, ‘if she did that to Joan, not caring much about Gerald & never writing to him, you can imagine how much more she resents you.’ I certainly can….I remember your saying when I spoke of their childhood intimacy that this sort of thing never ends or undoes itself.”6 (The fact that Ted and Olwyn had shared a bed as young children led Sylvia—and others—to speculate about incest. But this was a then common practice in cramped, working-class households like the Hugheses’ in Mytholmroyd.) Sylvia asked Beuscher for advice, as she did not want to “drive” Olwyn and Ted to have “clandestine meetings.” Should she keep quiet about what happened? “What attitude should I take when we meet again? Generous, I suppose.” She had acted like a “goody-goody” around her “pseudo-mothers—Mrs. Prouty, Mary Ellen Chase, Mrs. Cantor ad inf, but I am not prepared to regress & efface myself with Olwyn.”7
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