Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  That day, Sylvia and Elizabeth “discussed the military and industrial links between Britain and the US.”119 North Devon was a very conservative area, and the women found they shared liberal political views. “I could see that she could be savage because of the way she talked about big business and armaments in the States: her fury, her rage that men could exist in this corrupt way.”120 Elizabeth later introduced Sylvia to Mark Bonham Carter, the local Liberal candidate for Parliament, with whom she became friendly. Elizabeth would go on to receive an honorary doctorate from Plymouth University for her activism against chemical and biological weapons—she was profiled in The Independent in 1995 as “one of Britain’s most remarkable campaigners”—and later expressed sadness that Sylvia hadn’t been able to join her.121 “She would have been fascinated. She would have joined in. She would have taken over.”122

  Elizabeth, who became Sylvia’s closest friend in Devon, lived with her husband and three children, with little money and no electricity. She lit her house with oil lamps and candles. Sylvia romanticized these hardships and “became enamoured” of Elizabeth’s “earth-mother” image.123 She, too, was a mother married to a writer, with a complicated relationship with her own mother. Elizabeth remembered that Sylvia confided her apprehensions about Aurelia’s impending June visit, after Warren’s wedding, but did not discuss any tension in her own marriage.124 On the contrary, Sylvia and Ted seemed “incredibly close.” One spring afternoon the two couples took a walk near the Comptons’ home and paused on a bridge over a trout stream. Sylvia glanced down at the water and said to Ted, “See the color.” They exchanged looks, then both eyed the water below. “There was no need for words,” Elizabeth said. “They both knew; they both saw; they both felt it.” She sensed “a tremendous feeling of peace between them.”125

  David likewise had no idea that there was any real strain on the marriage that spring. Although he knew Ted was a famous poet, it was clear that Ted abhorred pretension. “He was a good pub guy. He handled the English villager extremely well. He was, after all, not at all upper class. He was closer to us socially than she [Sylvia] would ever be.” Sylvia was, he said, “The most American person I’d ever met.” He remembered her gushiness, but “it seemed genuine.” She was “all light.” In hindsight, David felt that Sylvia’s “bright American sensible no-nonsense” manner was at odds with Ted’s disposition. Ted “needed her discipline. He needed her direction. He needed all sorts of things that he resented.” And David remembered, too, Sylvia’s “delicate nastiness” toward Ted. The inside of Court Green—her domain—was “spotless,” but the garden—Ted’s department—“was a shambles. She would make little jokes that weren’t altogether kind….She would say, ‘Oh you must go and see what Ted’s been doing in the vegetable garden. It’s absolutely marvelous.’ ” Upon inspection, they saw that Ted had done “about two square inches in one corner.”126

  But David recalled a mostly easygoing friendship before Sylvia and Ted’s marriage broke up: “We were two young couples with children, and we were in many ways just bourgeois, making a life, a couple of fathers working at home. Most of our shared life was domestic—visits to the beach, taking the children up on Dartmoor. We both as fathers were very involved in our children’s upbringing, as was becoming a lot more fashionable in our group—certainly men were involved in that—and just meeting in the evenings….We’d come over in the kitchen with a bottle of wine and play poker for matchsticks. And nobody talked about their art. Occasionally there would be a reference between them….One I do remember was a dispute between them as to which poems were going to go into his next book. One didn’t intrude….They talked about his work, but not hers, not at all….We agreed on so many matters, of raising children. It was important. We were parents. It wasn’t all talk about existentialism.”127

  Soon David realized that Sylvia was a writer too. He was writing avant-garde, German-influenced radio plays for the BBC, some of which Plath read and commented on. She seemed to understand what he was trying to do. “They were both very, very good to me. They took me seriously. Nobody else I think ever had, you know. They sponsored me for Arts Council grants and things.” Sylvia, he remembered, “had a great openness. What came into her head, she said.” She was warm and personable, “and more physical than the British are. She would come out and grab your hand and touch you….She was an enormous enthusiast for everything. Everything she was doing was just so exciting and interesting to her.” Ted, too, “would lean forward with blazing eyes and really listen to what you were saying and say a fascinating thing back. He was my height and dark, dark, and cadaverous and just terribly romantic.” It was hard not to be swept away by this intense, erudite couple. “I was enormously aware that I was touching the hem of greatness.”128

  * * *

  “ON EASTER SUNDAY the world relented & spring arrived,” Sylvia wrote to Aurelia. The Easter holiday had always marked her own symbolic rebirth, and she filled her letters home with joyous proclamations. “I have such spring fever I can hardly think straight”; “O it is so heavenly here I can hardly speak”; “I wouldn’t leave this place for a billion dollars.”129 The daffodils were blooming in earnest now—she had picked six hundred in one week. The family spent whole afternoons gathering bunches, which they sold for a shilling. Sylvia felt intoxicated by Court Green’s beauty and thought her yard “More beautiful than the Cambridge backs.”130 Ted began to worry that their property was so idyllic the villagers would begin to regard it as “a public promenade.”131

  Just after Easter, a “lady” Swedish journalist, Siv Arb, took a now-famous series of photographs of Sylvia and her children among the daffodils at Court Green. Sylvia complained about Arb, but she was grateful for a visit from Ted’s aunt Hilda and her daughter Vicky over the Easter holiday—they “pitched right in with the dishes & cleaning, so were no extra work.”132 Hosting visitors was much more taxing now that she had to keep up with housework, gardening, renovations, two children, and her writing.

  Neighbors, too, got on Sylvia’s nerves that spring. Percy Key had cut down some of the Japanese creeper at Court Green, which outraged Sylvia and Ted. Sylvia became annoyed at Rose’s requests to buy daffodils while knowing full well that she would not be charged. Plath finally told her they were “a bob a dozen. She looked stunned. Is that too much for you, I asked dryly?” Sylvia felt “sick” about going to tea at Rose’s, “because Percy makes me sick.” He became so weak that June that Ted had to lift him in and out of bed every day. For Sylvia, the contrast was startling. “And all about the world is gold and green, dripping with laburnum and buttercups and the sweet stench of June. In the cottage the fire is on and it is a dark twilight.” She could hardly believe that Percy had been healthy just a few months before and was now plagued by “ ‘something on the lung,’ ” as she wrote in her journal.133 She would use the phrase in her April poem about Percy, “Among the Narcissi.”

  Sylvia had written to Ruth Fainlight in mid-April congratulating her on her new baby boy, who she hoped would be a companion for Nicholas. She invited them all to stay at Court Green and told Ruth’s husband, Alan Sillitoe, that she had an extra study where he could work. (She did not extend the same invitation to Ruth.) The Sillitoes arrived with baby David on May 2 after an eight-hour drive. Both seemed fatigued when they appeared in the doorway at Court Green, but it was Ruth’s birthday, and they had brought a bottle of champagne to celebrate. Ruth remembered Sylvia dressed in a plaid skirt and sweater, very much “an English country lady….I’m sure it was a self-conscious role.”134 The two women nursed their babies together while Plath read “Elm,” which she dedicated to Fainlight, out loud. Ruth thought the poem “extraordinary” and did not hear the similarities between it and her own “Sapphic Moon.” She remembered during the visit that Sylvia and Ted seemed tense around each other. “It wasn’t good. But we didn’t discuss it at all. I wouldn’t have initiated a discussion about it. And she didn’t. So that
was that….We wanted just to talk about poetry and be poets. The difficulties of everyday life we were glad to put to one side. We didn’t have complaining coffee-klatch conversations.”135 Sylvia wrote to Ruth after they left asking if she should use Ruth’s married name or maiden name in the dedication. Sylvia admitted that she preferred the latter, writing, “I had thought of the poet-self first.” Ruth was slightly troubled by the question, whose answer seemed obvious: “we were two poets, Sylvia Plath and Ruth Fainlight, not Mrs. Hughes and Mrs. Sillitoe, and our friendship was centred on this crucial reality.”136

  Ruth later admitted that she felt oppressed by Sylvia’s “impression of great confidence as a mother,” even if this confidence had been a show. Sylvia had begun painting hearts and flowers on the backs of chairs and cupboards, and the impulse and the symbolism troubled Ruth. “Sylvia painting those little Germanic hearts and flowers all over Court Green…trying to be the perfect everything. I know, I’ve gone through it, of wanting to be the best at it, and it’s a total waste of time and energy.” But the pressure to embrace domesticity was “absolutely” a force in the mothers’ lives.137

  Sylvia and Ruth spent hours gathering daffodils and laid them carefully in cardboard boxes for the grocer. There were hundreds, thousands, it seemed. Ruth became dizzy from the effort. The flowers began to appear almost menacing, with their “eye-like” black dots and “sulphur” yellows. “Too many sexual organs. Looking down the trumpets of the daffodils again and again and again, it absolutely freaked me after a while,” Ruth said.138 “Sylvia laughed, but I hurried back into the house.”139 On May 3, Hughes and the Sillitoes drove to Dartmoor. A constable stopped them and warned them that a prisoner had recently escaped from the local prison. On the moor, Ruth stayed in the car, tired, while Ted and Alan walked through the heather. They came to a dirty stream near an old army camp, and saw rusty shell cases and “torn holes” in the grass. Something bleak had occurred there. Ted was disturbed by “The black scrubby cattle. The lamb’s head in the grass, which I dared not mention to Sylvia.”140

  Ruth continued to feel “a palpable tension” between Sylvia and Ted during this visit, which was around the time Sylvia had stopped allowing Nicola Tyrer into her home. The couple avoided looking at each other, or even speaking to each other; the air between them seemed much more strained than it had during their companionable meals in London. The air had been strained between Sylvia and Alan Sillitoe, too. After Sylvia’s death, David Compton—then living at Court Green with Elizabeth at Ted’s request—found a letter from Alan Sillitoe to Sylvia in her desk. “He had obviously somehow said something that she had misunderstood. There had been an unpleasant note and he really thought that she was being oversensitive….Apparently something had gone wrong and he felt it necessary to write and apologize. He said, ‘You overreacted.’ But very lovely.”141 (David found similar letters from Al Alvarez and Christopher Logue in her desk.)

  Ruth, Alan, and their three-month-old son would leave England to join Jane and Paul Bowles (and, sometimes, Tennessee Williams) in Tangier during the spring of 1962, partly, Ruth said, to avoid Sylvia and her aspirations of perfect motherhood. Ruth felt an immense relief in Tangier, where she could afford a maid who cooked, cleaned, and watched the baby while she wrote. Ruth did not return to London until February 1963, after Sylvia’s death. She would wonder if her presence there could have saved her.

  * * *

  IN EARLY MAY there was a spate of “Cape Cod August weather,” as Ted wrote. Letters home were full of cherry trees and daffodils. He told Aurelia, “Twenty or thirty times a day Sylvia staggers & exclaims—hit by a fresh wave of the wonders of this place.”142 They spent long sunny afternoons planting flowers and sowing rows of beans and peas, and reviewing children’s books.143 “I think Sylvia’s happier here, now the good weather’s come, than she’s been since I’ve known her,” Ted wrote to Aurelia that May. “Also, she’s writing very well, which seems to be the main thing. Since she left America, she’s lost the terrible panic pressure of the American poetry world—which keeps them all keeping up on each other. As a result, she’s developing her own way & will soon be a considerable genius.” He told Aurelia that Howard Moss at The New Yorker had made a “stir” over “Tulips,” which appeared in the April 7 issue. (Plath quoted Moss: “I have heard nothing but the most extravagant praise of TULIPS. Everyone I know thought it extraordinary. So do I.”)144 Ted sounded deeply content in his letter to Aurelia, but, like his wife, he was used to telling Aurelia what she wanted to hear. “This is a very satisfying life—producing steadily, in these surroundings, and with all this to work at. And we both needed it, since we’d got to be such outstandingly fleet rats in such a hectic pace….One needs to provide substance & duties to the life—as we’ve done by coming here.”145

  Faber’s Selected Poems of Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn came out in early May; Hughes inscribed his copy “To darling Sylvia” on May 10. Four days later, the American edition of The Colossus was released. Plath was pleased with it, and she wrote Knopf’s Judith Jones to express her gratitude. She felt that it was “the ‘final’ first book. The English one being a trial run.”146 Ted wrote Aurelia with pride about how “fantastic” the book was, though he denigrated the American poetry scene. “While all those busy clamourous American whippet poets race round in circles after their stuffed fashionable hare (and the publishers all betting drunkenly on them) Sylvia is beginning to produce some really permanent poetry.”147 Yet The Colossus would practically sink without a trace in America. No major paper reviewed it, and it did not sell out its small print run.148 The book’s lackluster sales would contribute to Knopf’s decision later that year to pass on an American edition of The Bell Jar. Plath still equated an American reputation with success, and she was bitterly disappointed as the months ticked by and her book remained unnoticed.

  But that May, she was hopeful. The BBC had contacted her about doing a literary program, The World of Books. The Tyrers had left town for good—Nicola with a tearful goodbye—and Sylvia now found North Tawton “with the T’s departure, an easier much more restful place.”149 She felt more relaxed than she had in months. “Now it is spring, it is just heaven here,” she wrote Aurelia on May 4. “I never dreamed it was possible to be so happy.”150

  28

  Error

  Devon, May–June 1962

  In his poem “Error,” Ted Hughes suggested that the move to Devon had marked the beginning of the end of his marriage:

  What wrong fork

  Had we taken? In a gloom orchard

  Under drumming thatch, we lay listening

  To our vicarage rotting like a coffin,

  Foundering under its weeds. What did you make of it

  When you sat at your elm table alone

  Staring at the blank sheet of white paper,

  Silent at your typewriter, listening

  To the leaking thatch drip, the murmur of rain,

  And staring at that sunken church, and the black

  Slate roofs in the mist of rain…1

  Years later, it seemed to Hughes, “The trans-continental dream-express / Of your adolescence” had “Slammed to a dead-end, crushing halt, fatal…”

  The move to Court Green was Hughes’s bid for imaginative freedom, away from the distractions and squabbles of London literary life. As he wrote to his friend Ben Sonnenberg in October 1961, “Life in London was no longer possible. For over a year I have written more or less nothing and finally just stopped trying—waiting for London to pass off somehow, like a headache….I thank London for nothing.”2 He had been delighted to leave the city for Devon, he told Sonnenberg. Yet in an early draft of “Error,” Hughes recalled the sense of apprehension he felt on his arrival at Court Green:

  When the lane narrowed—winding in and down,

  Tighter & tighter—my prophetic stone

  Tightened in me. The b
lack Morris Traveller

  Rigged with our Czechoslovakian kitchen chairs

  Wobbled into the ambush. What had we done?

  How would we ever get out of it?…

  For the first time

  We owned something & it was an orchard.

  It was an ancient home. And ancient ground.

  It was the end of freedom, of careless freedom.

  It was entering the alien, rooted society

  Of the dead. It was serious. I was not

  Sure we could measure up to it. The church

  Waited, blocking the sunset. A wall of gravestones

  Stood above us, like a reception committee

  Reading our credentials. What had we done

  With our lives?3

  Court Green seemed an “old evil house reeking / Of Rentokil.”4 Hughes’s diary suggests the poem’s accuracy. On October 11, 1961, he wrote, “awake all night…my brain by 5 a. m. like a rusted ball & socket joint, creaking & aching.” The next day brought little relief. “Bright day, windy fresh—blue sky, bright yard, but no settled feeling.”5

  The rural idyll did not, as he had planned, improve his imaginative faculties. By midyear, 1962, Hughes was in the midst of a serious writing block; the real drought that afflicted Devon that summer became a mockery of the creative drought afflicting him. He blamed his wife, in part. He wrote Olwyn in the summer of 1962, after he had fallen in love with Assia Wevill, that the only good work he had produced since moving back to England was while Sylvia was in the hospital for her appendectomy.6 (It seems both writers needed space from each other at that time, for Sylvia, too, had experienced a renewed period of heightened creativity during her hospital separation from Hughes.) In addition to being a famous writer, Plath wanted to be the ideal wife and mother—thrifty, hardworking, and faithful, like Jenny in “Day of Success.” And the harder she tried to inhabit these roles, the more constricted Hughes felt. Both would have recognized D. H. Lawrence’s observations in his poem “Both Sides of the Medal”: