Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  Got a word in.30

  Hughes may have been wrong about Plath’s dates of composition, but he was likely right about “In Plaster” releasing the voice of the “prisoner,” a voice Plath would graft onto Esther Greenwood. Another trigger, perhaps, was Alvarez’s essay “Beyond the Gentility Principle,” published in The Observer—the only newspaper Plath read regularly—on February 19, 1961. The essay was the basis for his introduction to his influential 1962 anthology, The New Poetry. He argued that English gentility ignored the horrors of “Two world wars, the concentration camps, genocide and the threat of nuclear war,” a criticism that surely resonated with Plath and her fledgling novel’s underlying message:

  This is not to say that English poets should write exclusively of psychoanalysis, or the concentration camps, the H-bomb or any of the other contemporary horrors. Heaven forbid, for the results would be propaganda, not poetry. But they should give up the pretence that life, a few social distinctions apart, goes on the same as ever, that gentility, decency and all the other social totems and taboos will eventually muddle through.31

  Released from the never-ending routine of housework and baby care; flooded, suddenly, with memories of her earlier hospital stays in Massachusetts; and nudged in an “ungenteel” aesthetic direction by Alvarez that February, Plath quickly began to sketch the outlines of The Bell Jar. As she had written in her journal in January 1958, “I wonder if, shut in a room, I could write for a year. I panic: no experience! Yet what couldn’t I dredge up from my mind? Hospitals & mad women. Shock treatment & insulin trances. Tonsils & teeth out. Petting, parking, a mismanaged loss of virginity and the accident ward, various abortive loves in New York, Paris, Nice.”32 Ideas that had been lying dormant for almost a decade suddenly took flight.

  By mid-April, she told her mother, she was “working like mad” in the Merwins’ study seven mornings a week from eight to one. Afterward, she could face her housework: “I find I enjoy all the little niggly jobs like ironing & floor scrubbing when I’ve had my Morning.”33 Sylvia’s friend and neighbor Lorna Secker-Walker remembered being impressed by Ted’s willingness to look after Frieda in the mornings while Sylvia wrote, which was highly unusual for husbands in those days.34 (Though he likely wasn’t ironing and floor scrubbing.) This arrangement, plus a quiet study outside of the flat, created the right creative environment for Plath. She would spend the next few months writing efficiently, finishing the novel by August. (She produced only four poems that spring.)

  Plath hardly spoke of her novel in her letters to her mother. She knew the devastation it would wield, yet she pressed on. She later claimed that the novel was a potboiler, but she was deeply excited by her progress. Her letter to Ann shows that she believed in her work and the new voice she had found. That discovery had been made possible, in part, by distance: she was writing about events that had taken place in America in 1953 from London in 1961. During the intervening years, the Cold War had intensified. The Bay of Pigs invasion took place in April 1961 and the Berlin Wall was erected in August—the very months Plath was writing The Bell Jar. Russia and America continued to test nuclear bombs. In May, The Observer ran a series on “America and the Cold War.” Sylvia had attended the CND Ban the Bomb march in April 1960, and become anxious about the effects of nuclear fallout on the environment. The Bell Jar would reflect these political anxieties. While she was alarmed by contemporary developments, time had dulled the personal pain surrounding her breakdown. She had achieved the very ambitions that had, in 1953, seemed the source of her malaise. Secure in her position as a writer, mother, and wife, she could look back without turning to salt.

  * * *

  —

  Sylvia’s London social circle was widening. She had befriended two of her neighbors who were also educated mothers. Lorna Secker-Walker was an alumna of Saint Anne’s College, Oxford, who had recently finished a PhD and would eventually become an esteemed professor of medicine. She had a little girl named Joanna and lived at 5 Chalcot Square, not far from Catherine Frankfort, a former nurse, who had two little boys at 18 Chalcot Crescent. Lorna’s and Catherine’s husbands had known each other at Oxford, and the Secker-Walkers had followed the Frankforts to Chalcot Square; Lorna moved just two doors down from Sylvia and Ted in March 1961. Catherine got to know Sylvia first and remembered her as “gay, warm and easy…a complete extrovert.”35 Lorna thought Catherine warmer and perhaps easier to talk to than she herself was. “She was a very, very sweet person. She wasn’t an academic in the same sense. She was a practical kind of person.” But Lorna, too, became Sylvia’s friend. “I would be coming out of my front door and she would give a great wave…just straightaway very friendly as we said in those days, ‘as Americans are,’ not the sort of rather more reserved British approach.”36

  Lorna remembered Sylvia’s happiness during this period, and was equally struck by Ted’s. He seemed to her “the gentlest of men.” One night, over a long, relaxed dinner at their flat, Ted told the story of the bear at Yellowstone that broke into their car. He entranced everyone with his deep voice; as darkness fell, his small audience was so rapt that no one got up to turn on the lights. “It was that kind of a night,” Lorna said. She remembered, too, Sylvia’s intense desire to buy a flat in the neighborhood. When 9 Chalcot Square went up for sale, Sylvia immediately arranged a tour with Lorna. The townhouse had been used as a halfway house for Borstal boys—juvenile prisoners—for a number of years. One of the boys had supposedly murdered the warden in the bathtub before the house was closed. During the tour, Lorna remembered, Sylvia was “fascinated” by the bathroom where the murder had allegedly occurred. It was one of the first rooms she wanted to see. She was unfazed by the building’s history but still could not afford it.

  Sylvia and Ted now had more than $6,000 in their American bank account, yet Sylvia wrote home several times that spring about how their London neighborhood was gentrifying and in five years they would not be able to afford anything. It made her “sad,” she wrote, because she wanted to spend the rest of her life there. Leaving would simply be “unbearable.” Perhaps Ted’s uncle Walt might lend them £1,000? The unwritten request was to Aurelia herself, who would eventually lend Sylvia half that amount. “I know I’m boring about this, but it’s the main big step ahead and somehow it seems the one problem: we have all the rest: love, work we love & that supports us, a wonderful baby etc. etc.”37

  Ted had other locations in mind. He wanted to explore the countryside in Cornwall and Devon, for he and Sylvia had felt “imprisoned” at home with the baby for the past year.38 They purchased a new black Morris Traveller station wagon with a light wood frame and red upholstery for about $1,900. (Neither trusted used-car salesmen.) The car seems to have been Ted’s idea; Sylvia felt that it would make “a big dent” in their American savings account. He told Aurelia they paid for it with poetry prize money but later wrote to Daniel Huws that the money had come from “one of Sylvia’s fairy godmother’s [sic].”39

  Just four years before, they had arrived in America with $100 between them. Since then, their currency, in all its forms, had risen. Their professional prospects looked ever brighter. Plath’s “A Life” appeared in The Listener on May 4 and “Morning Song” in The Observer on May 21; The London Magazine would soon publish Hughes’s story “The Harvesting,” while Harper’s Bazaar accepted his “Snow.” They were making important new connections, too. Sylvia wrote home that Eric Walter White, secretary of the British Arts Council, “has taken an interest in us,” treating them to a private box at Covent Garden’s Rigoletto.40 She enjoyed the publicity Ted disdained, and gushed to Aurelia and Warren about the Hawthornden Prize ceremony, presided over by Cecil Day-Lewis, on May 31.41 There, she and Ted met Ruth Fainlight, an American poet, and her husband Alan Sillitoe, a previous Hawthornden winner (for The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner), who presented Ted with his award.

  Ruth, who described herself as “a New Yorker and
a Jew who had ‘married out,’ ” became one of Sylvia’s closest friends in England.42 Fainlight was the daughter of a Ukrainian-American mother and British-Polish father; she had moved to Britain at fifteen and married her first husband at eighteen. She “ran away” with Sillitoe at twenty and lived with him in France and Spain for several years. In Mallorca, she became close to Robert Graves, whom she considered her mentor. (“That was my education.”)43 She had been “thrilled” by the connection to Laura Riding as well. Like Plath and Hughes, she was enormously impressed by The White Goddess, which she called “the poet’s handbook.”44 Ruth, like Sylvia, was an aspiring poet married to a more successful writer, who also happened to be a working-class northerner. Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner was an international best seller and established him as, in Ruth’s word, “a media ‘star.’ ”45 Ruth thought that she and Sylvia “were both very lucky because we had very lovely, obliging husbands”: they simply assumed that Ted and Alan would share the housework and child care, and give them time to write. “What other people were doing was neither here nor there. We were young, we were artists, and we thought we were different than anyone else.” Although Fainlight came to believe that her own career “suffered” as a result of Sillitoe’s fame, she thought Plath and Hughes’s poetic relationship was “exemplary.”46

  Ruth’s first impression of Sylvia was “of a burningly ambitious and intelligent young woman trying to look like a conventional, devoted wife but not quite succeeding. There was something almost excessive about that disguise.”47 “I empathized with her immensely because we were both in such similar situations, and it was so bizarre,” she remembered. “We were both Americans, both married to these charismatic men from the North who were very much in the public eye, and we were nobodies. I was more of a nobody than her because she at least had a book and a child. I didn’t have either….We had an enormous amount in common. And we were both suffering under the ‘Oh, you write as well, do you, Mrs. Sillitoe?’ She less of course. She was more assertive than me. She was very good at holding her own.”48

  Ruth recognized Sylvia as someone who, like her, abided by “then-current ideas of femininity” but who also “shared profounder self-destructive traits.”49 They dined together at Chalcot Square or at the Sillitoes’ flat in Notting Hill that summer. Ruth remarked, like many others, that Sylvia and Ted were “too large-scale and long-limbed for the small crowded rooms.” She remembered “heaps of books and papers” around the flat, Sylvia’s bright chatter as she cleared the table, and Ted’s playing with Frieda. Both seemed to her “equally, and touchingly, youthful. It was galling to have met such a congenial pair just before they left London.”50

  New friends also included Helder and Suzette Macedo, whom Sylvia often described as a Portuguese literary couple, though only Helder was from Portugal (Suzette was from South Africa). They met that June at the Primrose Hill home of a mutual Faber and Faber author, Sylvester Stein, and his wife, Jenny. The Steins, who were part of a South African literary expatriate community—anti-apartheid dissidents—lived in a large house on Regent’s Park Road, close to Chalcot Square. They were wealthy and well connected in the literary world, and threw a party—a “Faber to-do,” Suzette said—to celebrate Hughes’s winning the 1961 Hawthornden Prize. Jenny, who was friendly with Suzette, told her they had already met Sylvia and Ted. She had found Sylvia “very nervous, very American, there was a bit of gush, gush, gush,” and Ted “just gorgeous.”51 Jenny wanted them all to meet.

  At the Steins’ party, Suzette found Sylvia “overdressed” and “nervous,” but warm. They soon realized that they were both “starry students” of English literature with a deep love of Yeats. Ted and Helder took to each other immediately and would become, in Suzette’s words, “seriously good friends.” When Suzette asked Sylvia what she did, she said, “Oh, I write a bit.” “She said she was writing little stories for magazines”—she mentioned Woman’s Own—“and then she said, ‘And I write some poetry.’ Really playing herself down…She was being modest. She said ‘Oh, but Teddy’s a genius.’ ” When Suzette pressed her, asking if she had published in Britain, Sylvia revealed that she published under the name Sylvia Plath. Suzette was astonished, as she had read Sylvia’s poems and reviews of The Colossus in the London papers. But she was troubled by Plath’s modesty. “I thought, What is all this about? ‘Teddy’s a genius.’ It was over the top.”52

  Not long after the Steins’ party, Sylvia made a serious social blunder. When Jenny Stein came round to call at Chalcot Square, Sylvia did not invite her in. Sylvia, newly pregnant with her second child, had heard that one of the Steins’ children had the measles, and she was afraid of the risk the illness posed to her pregnancy. But Sylvia explained none of this to Jenny, who told Suzette and Helder that Sylvia just shut the door with a brusque “We’re busy.” Helder remembered that the Steins were astonished by Sylvia’s rudeness. Visits between friends in their social set at the time were, he recalled, “very informal, the door had no key, just walk in, there was always food. Ted and Sylvia didn’t want to be mixed up in that sort of thing.”53 Sylvester Stein was a politically engaged writer—his second novel, critical of apartheid, was banned in South Africa—and on Sundays he and Jenny held a literary salon of sorts where exiled South Africans congregated; Doris Lessing was also part of this set. Jenny Stein’s visit to Chalcot Square marked a symbolic invitation into this world, especially for Sylvia, who was still largely known as Ted’s wife. The Steins never invited the Hugheses to any of their parties again, and Plath was frozen out of what might have been, for her, a supportive and influential circle.

  But Suzette grew close to Sylvia. Both of them, she said, had “monster mothers,” and both had attempted suicide. She was struck by Sylvia’s love of cooking and her “adoration” for Ted. “She had huge respect for him as a mentor and felt he knew far more about literature than she did….She had Wagnerian fantasies about Siegfried and Brunhilde.” Suzette found Ted’s willingness to split the child care “astonishing at that period.”54 She would never have expected “such collaboration” from her own husband. “He believed in her. She owed a lot to Ted. A lot. Ted was a very generous person. He was the first man I’d ever seen change a nappy, or look after babies, because men did not do that at that time, I can promise you….He shared with her, he boxed and coxed with Dido about Merwin’s studio, and he really did the chores.” Helder said, “He really encouraged people. He was very generous, very giving.”55

  Plath had sensed that moving to England would be good for her writing, and it was. Living as an expatriate in London gave her a freedom she did not possess in America, where she had felt great pressure to live up to the feminine ideals touted by magazines like the Ladies’ Home Journal and Mademoiselle. Plath was too conservative for Greenwich Village, too free-thinking for Wellesley; London offered just the right kind of cosmopolitanism. She could escape her class anxieties, too, in England, where, as her Cambridge contemporary Michael Frayn noted, no one could place her mid-Atlantic accent, and where her Smith and Cambridge pedigrees suggested affluence.56 The American exuberance of Falcon Yard—a dead end, she now realized—soon gave way to the drier tone of The Bell Jar. Yet she would continue to look to American poets who broke taboos and wrote about their mental breakdowns as she assimilated her own experience into her work.57 She had absorbed Hughes’s and Crockett’s disdain for “cellophane” American values, but American poets like Lowell and Sexton, whose poems chronicled the self in crisis, offered her a new way forward.

  Still, The Bell Jar is as much a work of social protest as it is the chronicle of a breakdown. Plath had read Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom at Smith, and was probably familiar with his 1955 book, The Sane Society, which had chapter titles like “Are We Sane?” and “Can a Society Be Sick?—The Pathology of Normalcy.” Fromm argued that “a whole society can be sick” and that those “of greater integrity and sensitivity” who were “incapa
ble of accepting the cultural opiate” often went crazy:

  Many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of “unadjusted” individuals, and not that of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself.58

  This, Plath’s shadow argument in The Bell Jar, would come to dominate the anti-psychiatry movement in Britain, led by R. D. Laing, in the early 1960s. Suzette said she was “sure” Plath “was aware” of Laing’s 1960 groundbreaking book The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, which contains many images and ideas that resonate with the Ariel poems. Plath, with her deep interest in doubles and doppelgängers, would have been hooked by the title alone. Suzette read The Divided Self soon after it came out in 1960 and “was fascinated” by it. She said she “talked about it to Sylvia,” as psychoanalysis was a fashionable topic within their leftist circles. These circles included Laing himself, who met the Macedos and Doris Lessing at Ruth Fainlight and Alan Sillitoe’s home in the 1960s.59 Fainlight remembered that Laing was “one of the hot properties…people wanted to meet him.”60 This circle also had communist ties, though its members were appalled by Stalin’s abuses. Lessing had been an active communist in her youth, while Sillitoe’s works often portrayed working-class heroes; he was invited to the Soviet Union many times in the ’60s.61 Plath was not exposed to leftist ideas so openly in America, where none other than Robert Lowell had denounced Yaddo’s director Elizabeth Ames in the late 1940s for communist ties. In the spring of 1961, Plath’s London friends provided an incubator and a receptive audience for the Cold War concerns of The Bell Jar.

  Indeed, Suzette remembered conversations with Sylvia about the Cold War and “the Jewish question.” “She did talk about the politics…how awful the putting to death of the Rosenbergs was. And she had very strong liberal opinions.” Sylvia also complained to her about “the narrow-mindedness of the American dating system, and petting”—“the demands made on a girl…the difficulties of proving oneself. All of that. She did criticize very much the emphasis on virginity….She said it was such a difficult world to be a young woman.” She told Suzette, too, about her general anxieties during her summer in New York: “When she got to New York, this was her first time confronting an unknown world. She had to confront it. The world she came from was this small world of her mother’s and preconceptions of what society was, and she was really stunned by the sophistication, and the experience of the Mademoiselle prize, and it made her…well, she didn’t want to stay alive for a while because she didn’t fit in. There was always this need to fit in, which must have been there from when she was young.”