Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  Sylvia had dated the miscarriage to Monday, February 6, in her letter to Aurelia but suggested that it had been going on throughout the weekend of February 4–5. The fight, then, probably occurred during the first few days of February.

  There are no references to this disturbing incident in Sylvia’s surviving journal entries of February and March 1961, which date to her time at the hospital and are extremely loving toward Ted. On the day she told Aurelia about the miscarriage, she called Ted “the most blessed kind person in the world” and noted how he was “taking wonderful care of me.”42 But then, one of Sylvia’s favorite words for herself was “tough.” Her passing, almost blasé reference to this incident in her letter to Dr. Beuscher suggests that she probably did not think of herself as a victim at a time when slapping a “hysterical” woman was culturally sanctioned, even glamorized in Hollywood films. In the same letter, Sylvia told Beuscher that she and Ted had had “six stormy but wonderful” years together—more ambiguity. When Aurelia witnessed the couple quarreling in Devon in the summer of 1962, she told Warren their troubles were “not new, but erupted afresh.”43 Paul Roche had dinner with the couple in London in 1961 and remembered them as tense and bickering. Ted seemed to goad Sylvia with purposely “uncouth” table manners, as if playing up his working-class background. She reprimanded him and yelled at him throughout the evening to stop speaking so loudly or he would wake Frieda.44

  The American author Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, who was close to Ted and Olwyn, published a long novel about Ted Hughes called Poison in 2006. Her friendship with the Hugheses obviously, but secretly, supplied many of the details in this book. In one scene, the Hughes character tells the Dido Merwin character a version of the same story that Plath told Dr. Beuscher in her 1962 letter:

  I came back from a meeting in London….and there she was, shredding my manuscripts….No apologies. No regrets….So I struck her. And the pity of it was, that night she miscarried….I would have left her then, if she hadn’t miscarried, if I hadn’t given in and gotten her pregnant again as soon as the doctor gave the word, I had to give her back what I thought I had taken from her.45

  Either Olwyn, Ted, or Dido herself must have confided this story to Susan Schaeffer. Indeed, Olwyn felt so betrayed by Schaeffer after she published Poison that she cut off all contact with her.46 In 2006 she wrote to Schaeffer’s husband, “I’m reading POISON—in bits—as much as I can stand at a time. It has made me ill. I considered you and Susan good friends so the book is nightmarish.”47 A furious Olwyn listed many incidents in the book—which she called an “infantile willful atrocity”—that she said Schaeffer had made up. The incident surrounding the miscarriage was not among them.48

  Sylvia had written in her journal about scratches, sprained thumbs, and broken crockery after she had confronted Ted about his student in Northampton in 1958. She had also written about bruises after her first “holocaust” night of sex with Ted. Courting violence, as Plath’s early drafts of Falcon Yard show, was something of an aesthetic stance, and part of the couple’s shared mythology. Indeed, the relationship began with violence on the night they met. Sylvia and Sassoon had experimented with rough sex, and, according to one source, Gordon Lameyer believed that his own relationship with Sylvia fizzled out because he refused to “beat her up” in the bedroom.49 Ted recalled that Sylvia once smashed his mahogany writing table, made from his “mother’s heirloom sideboard,” with a stool in a fury when he was late to mind Frieda.50 (He told Frances McCullough that this occurred on a different day from the Moira Doolan incident, though his drafts of “The Minotaur” suggest it happened on the same day.) Hughes saw, in Plath’s rage, a deeper potential for her poems. He laughed when he witnessed the table’s destruction: “That’s what you should have put into The Colossus, all that energy,” he told her. “She began to laugh and stopped….it was like a revelation to her….she did begin to do that.”51 Hughes wrote about the incident in “The Minotaur”:

  “Marvellous!” I shouted, “Go on,

  Smash it into kindling.

  That’s the stuff you’re keeping out of your poems!”

  And later, considered and calmer,

  “Get that shoulder under your stanzas

  And we’ll be away.”52

  But by February 1961, the couple’s erotics of violence—itself a manifestation, perhaps, of their poetic war on gentility—seems to have morphed into something uglier.

  While there is no surviving contemporaneous account of this fight, both Plath’s and Hughes’s recollections suggest that there was a physical altercation when Hughes found Plath ripping his manuscripts. Frieda Hughes has noted that we will never know exactly what happened. While she was not surprised by her mother’s fury toward her father as the once passionate marriage burned itself out, her mother’s accusation of violence did not resonate with the loving, devoted father she knew: “In all my life with my father, I had never seen this side of him. What, I asked myself, would qualify as a physical beating? A push? A shove? A swipe?” For Frieda, the “context” of her mother’s destroying her father’s manuscripts—the thing, apart from Frieda herself, that was most “precious” to them—was “vital, and it confirmed in my mind that my father was not the wife-beater that some would wish to imagine he was.”53 Whatever happened between Sylvia and Ted that day, it was unusual enough that both poets singled it out, as, in Sylvia’s words, an “aberration” in their marriage. Ted felt guilty enough about what he did that he later unburdened himself to someone, probably Olwyn. According to Sylvia’s September 1962 letter to Dr. Beuscher, nothing like it ever happened again.

  Sylvia’s London friend Suzette Macedo remembered that this period had marked a “real cooling” in the marital relationship. Sylvia “wasn’t at ease” with Ted’s BBC work, she said, because “there were a lot of women at the BBC, and those were the kind of women who went to bed.” They had a “loose” reputation at the time, she said, though such a claim sounds sexist now. Plath was married to the most famous young poet in England. “She was not crazy,” Suzette said, to think that a successful BBC producer might find Ted attractive—or he her—while Sylvia folded diapers. Indeed, Sylvia later wrote Dr. Beuscher, “movie stars have nothing on a handsome male poet.”54 Suzette said that Ted had begun to feel that Sylvia “pushed too hard.” He “became passive”—and resentful—about her sending his poems out. They had begun “wanting different things.” Pregnant again, Sylvia dreamed of a larger home, more children, and more money, while Ted, sensing an ambush, began to retreat from domestic demands and public literary life. “She was always trying to encourage Ted to do more commercially, and he was not really interested,” Suzette said, though she pointed out that he enjoyed writing children’s books, plays for the BBC, and translations. But, according to Suzette and her husband, Helder, who knew Ted well, he still had qualms about turning poetry into profit. “He hated the idea of selling his stuff more than necessary.” Sylvia, meanwhile, was writing to family in America about her hopes that Ted’s plays would bring them wealth. Suzette remembered that there had been “a reconciliation between them” that June and July when Aurelia visited and babysat Frieda while they went to France together. Nicholas, their second child, she said, was “a peace-making baby.”55 Suzette’s memory dovetails with Susan Schaeffer’s suggestion, in Poison, of Ted’s strong sense of guilt and need to atone for his act.

  This marital crisis likely inspired Plath’s poem “Zoo Keeper’s Wife,” written on Valentine’s Day, about two weeks after the fight, in which a wronged wife suffers from insomnia: “I can stay awake all night, if need be— / Cold as an eel, without eyelids. / Like a dead lake the dark envelops me.” The speaker alludes to a miscarriage, and asks, sarcastically, “But what do you know about that / My fat pork, my marrowy sweetheart, face-to-the-wall?” Something has disturbed the marriage; a reckoning seems possible, if just out of reach. The wife bitterly describes their “court
ship” in a clear allusion to Hughes. The London Zoo was an important part of the couple’s life—they had chosen Chalcot Square partly because of its proximity to the zoo, where they frequently took Frieda, and Ted had once worked there as a dishwasher. Also, around this time, Ted was considering an advanced degree in Zoology.

  You wooed me with the wolf-headed fruit bats

  Hanging from their scorched hooks in the moist

  Fug of the Small Mammal House.

  ……………………….

  You checked the diet charts and took me to play

  With the boa constrictor in the Fellows’ Garden.

  I pretended I was the Tree of Knowledge.

  I entered your bible, I boarded your ark…

  “Zoo Keeper’s Wife” sounds a new note in Plath’s poetic lexicon. It uses the voice of the wronged, avenging woman in language that prefigures later Ariel poems like “The Jailor” and “The Courage of Shutting-Up.” Suddenly, Plath unleashes anger normally reserved for mothers, fathers, barren women, and spinsters upon a husband figure. Plath had already done this in her short stories “The Wishing Box” and “The Fifty-Ninth Bear,” but never in her poems. Something had inspired her to use this caustic voice against Hughes.

  Plath also wrote a short story, “Day of Success,” between February and August of 1961, that alluded to the Moira Doolan incident.56 A housewife, Ellen, spends her days pinching pennies and minding her six-month-old baby girl while her playwright husband, Jacob, retreats to his private study to write. (The furniture, drapes, and wallpaper are exact duplicates of those in the Chalcot Square flat.) The self-sacrificing Ellen is a model of mid-century femininity. But Ellen lacks confidence. “I’m homespun, obsolete as last year’s hemline,” she says. She begins to worry that the assistant of a high-powered television producer, Denise Kay (a “real career girl” and a redhead, like Moira Doolan), will seduce Jacob. She imagines Jacob and Denise together at rehearsals, “author and producer collaborating on the birth of something wonderful, uniquely theirs.” Tellingly, Ellen’s anxiety has to do with Jacob and Denise “collaborating”—creating art together.

  In the story, Jacob remains true to his wife. He blasts Denise Kay for drinking martinis at lunch and ridicules her for being a “career woman with a mind of her own,” a “highpowered” “diesel engine.” Plath too was a woman with a powerful engine. But the Ladies’ Home Journal ethos of the day demanded that the career woman must lose to the happy homemaker. The story ends as Jacob tells Ellen he has bought her a home in the country with his advance. When a divorced friend gives Ellen a recommendation for an expensive hairdresser, she says, “Braids are back in style this season, love—the latest thing for the country wife!”57 (Later, after she and Ted separated, Sylvia wrote to Aurelia that she was going to “face” her literary friends in London and tell them “happily” that she was “divorcing Ted, so they won’t picture me as a poor, deceived country wife.”)58

  Doolan’s phone call may have aroused Plath’s jealousy—most BBC producers were men—but “Day of Success” suggests that it also made her feel powerless. As the critic Luke Ferretter has noted, Ellen’s successful, literary husband possesses an “absolute sovereignty against which there is no appeal.”59 Plath had absorbed this sexist power structure. It is perhaps no accident that in retaliation she attacked the source of Hughes’s financial and professional power: his manuscripts.

  * * *

  —

  Plath turned to her writing as a way of restoring order. Poetry demanded concentration, precise language, and a philosophical outlook; it could contain experiences that seemed chaotic and sprawling. The two poems Plath wrote that month about motherhood, “Parliament Hill Fields,” completed on February 11, and “Morning Song,” on February 19, are among her finest.

  “Parliament Hill Fields,” her elegy for the lost baby, is tender, brave, and beautifully crafted. Miscarriage was a taboo subject in the 1960s—or at least, as the poet Ruth Fainlight said, “unseemly.”60 Even the word “pregnant” was deemed indelicate, and it was banned from 1950s television shows like I Love Lucy. There was no female elegiac tradition mourning the unborn—an astonishing omission from the literary canon given that a quarter of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. Plath was writing in uncharted territory, giving voice to an experience shared secretly by millions of women. In June, she would read “Parliament Hill Fields” on the BBC. She began with a short introduction that did not obscure the poem’s devastating subject: the speaker is caught, Plath says, “between the grief caused by the loss of a child and the joy aroused by the knowledge of an only child safe at home. Gradually the first images of blankness and absence give way to images of convalescence and healing as the woman turns, a bit stiffly, and with difficulty, from her sense of bereavement to the vital and demanding part of her world which still survives.”61 Rarely was miscarriage given such a public forum. “Your absence is inconspicuous; / Nobody can tell what I lack”; “I suppose it’s pointless to think of you at all. / Already your doll grip lets go,” Plath reads, her voice faltering.

  “Morning Song,” with its memorable first line, “Love set you going like a fat gold watch,” is more joyful: the living baby’s “clear vowels rise like balloons.” Yet the poem is not sentimental. Plath treats the pious culture of motherhood ironically when she writes, “One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral / In my Victorian nightgown.” As in other poems, Plath registers unease with her massive new responsibility: “I’m no more your mother / Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow / Effacement at the wind’s hand.”

  Other poems from February rehearse themes and images Plath would return to in her Ariel poems. “Barren Woman” seems a premonition of “Edge”: “Marble lilies / Exhale their pallor like scent” and “nothing can happen.” At the poem’s end, “The moon lays a hand on my forehead, / Blank-faced and mum as a nurse.” “Barren Woman” was likely inspired by Dido Merwin, as was “Face Lift,” another poem in this group, which merges hospital imagery and the language of rebirth that Plath had used in “The Stones”: “Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze, / Pink and smooth as a baby.” Sylvia had been fascinated by Dido’s descriptions of the procedure, but, as she wrote Aurelia, “I have a very moral attitude that one should earn good wrinkles & face up to them.”62

  * * *

  SYLVIA ARRIVED AT Saint Pancras Hospital for her appendectomy on February 26 carrying a suitcase full of books. She had taken the bus to Camden High Street, but got lost soon after it dropped her off. An older woman took pity on her and summoned her husband to drive her to the hospital. “I sat in the back among oil cans & promptly started bawling,” Sylvia wrote the Merwins.63 Both fascinated and repulsed by hospitals, she was extremely nervous about the procedure. She brought a notebook, at Ted’s and Aurelia’s suggestion, to “occupy” herself with notes for poems.64 The Atlantic had recently taken “Words for a Nursery,” and Plath was writing poetry again in earnest. That February, “The Fifty-Ninth Bear” appeared in The London Magazine, and “A Winter Ship” in Encounter.

  Her surgery on February 28 went smoothly, and she was filled with “immense relief” when it was over. “You were absolutely right about the anesthesia, Dido—just my thing….they gave me heavenly pain-killing injections which caused me to ‘float’ over my inert body feeling immensely powerful & invulnerable.”65 She spent her days drowsing “pleasantly” and reading Agatha Christie novels in the new, pink-walled ward, an “immense improvement over that grim ward at Newton-Wellesley.”66

  By her third day she was walking around “gossiping” with her fellow patients.67 Ted came round in the evening with grapes, rare steak sandwiches, freshly squeezed orange juice, and tollhouse cookies. When he visited, she wrote in her journal, “I felt as excited & infinitely happy as in the early days of our courtship. His face which I daily live with seemed the most kind & beautiful in
the world.”68 One evening he arrived with a letter from The New Yorker offering her their “coveted” first-reading contract for the next year. She earned $100 simply for signing the renewable contract, which stipulated a 25 percent “bonus” on the price of each poem accepted, plus other financial perks, in exchange for right of first refusal.69 Sylvia was only too happy to sign, “under the influence of morphia, but genuinely.”70 She had been dreaming about joining this rarefied company for years. She thanked Bill Merwin, who had written to Howard Moss at The New Yorker earlier in the month on the couple’s behalf.71

  Once she could eat again, she told Aurelia, her days were restful. “I haven’t been free of the baby one day for a whole year & I must say I have secretly enjoyed having meals in bed, backrubs & nothing to do but read.” Ted had been “an angel,” though she sensed he was ready for her to come home: “little remarks like ‘I seem to be eating a lot of bread’ & ‘Doesn’t the Pooker make a lot of dirty pots’ tell me he is wearying of the domestic routine.” Sylvia’s own “domestic routine” had no end in sight, but she was not about to complain. On the contrary: “Poor dear, I’d like to know how many men would take over as willingly & lovingly as he has!” She told Aurelia she admired the “table of flowers sent by Ted’s parents, Ted, Helga Huws & Charles Monteith, Ted’s Editor at Faber’s.”72 The bouquet of red tulips from Helga would soon inspire one of her best poems.