Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  It had been no accident; she had gone off the road deliberately, seriously, wanting to die. But she hadn’t, and all that was now in the past….The car crash was a death she had survived….there was neither hysteria in her voice, nor any appeal for sympathy. She talked about suicide in much the same tone as she talked about any other risky, testing activity: urgently, even fiercely, but altogether without self-pity. She seemed to view death as a physical challenge she had, once again, overcome.65

  Still, Hughes’s claim that the accident was partly caused by a feverish blackout seems plausible, especially as the site of the crash was a flat airfield where local adolescents learned how to drive. Nancy Axworthy, Elizabeth Compton, and Winifred Davies had no memory of this event. Sylvia herself told Suzette Macedo, in late summer, that “she had got into the car in a black mood and found herself driving it straight into a tree….it was not a conscious attempt at suicide but a blind destructive urge over which she had no conscious control….She said she had cried for hours afterwards.”66

  Assia told Nathaniel that David’s meekness made her long again for Ted, but she decided to stay with her husband “until he can get back on his feet properly.” Assia thought that Ted was going to stay with Sylvia; she told him she didn’t want “a slinky affair in London.”67 But David was not so sure, and he contemplated living in Portugal. Assia felt they had reached an impasse—David wanted children, she told Nathaniel, while she wanted to “keep independence” and have a career.

  Nathaniel had lunch with David near the end of July and tried to counsel him “about keeping on top of one’s woman.” He thought that David had a “completely mythical view of his marriage & this will blow up in his face one day.” Nathaniel was beginning to feel overwhelmed by the love quadrangle—Ted, Assia, Al, David—and vowed to stop attending the Group. The gossip was simply too much; Assia, he wrote, had told him “a whole stack of lies about the [Peter] Porter & [Peter] Redgrove party.” David was equally tired of gossip and also vowed to stop attending. Alvarez, meanwhile, was, in Tarn’s words, “cashing in on all this.” Assia told Nathaniel that Al proposed marriage to her in July. She refused, though she thought him “rather sweet.” Tarn noted that Alvarez retaliated by publishing a column of poems in The Observer on August 5, “starting with Sylvia, then Ted, then, immediately under this, a good Wevill poem about cuckolds! A fine piece of family history.”68

  * * *

  AURELIA HAD MOVED INTO Winifred Davies’s house in mid-July, a week after Assia’s phone call. Ted had wanted her to stay at Court Green, but she knew the couple needed space. He had returned from London by then. Aurelia told Warren that Ted and Sylvia “must work out their problems—not new but erupted afresh from a touching off of incidents.” Aurelia’s comment suggests that the marriage was already in distress before the Wevills’ May visit, and that Sylvia had confided in her about those troubles. “Sivvy has taken on too much again. Well, I gather this isn’t the first time—so that’s that.” She signed off sadly. “I hate writing all this—I am just holding on to my belief that we each have to live out our many lives in as much dignity & carefulness as possible.”69 Winifred remembered that Sylvia spoke to her about Ted and Assia during this time but that she never “referred to suicide nor breakdown.” Nor did Sylvia “express strong anger,” only sadness. “I didn’t get the impression that Sylvia was self-pitying.”70 But her behavior became more erratic. She lost track of time. “She’d ask you to dinner at seven and she wouldn’t have even started to cook it when you arrived.”71 Winifred’s son would wait four hours for lunch when he visited Sylvia in London that winter.

  Sylvia leaned on female friends like Elizabeth Compton and Sylvia Crawford, but kept her earlier commitment to accompany Ted to Bangor, Wales, during the last week of July to give a poetry reading for the Critical Quarterly. They spent a night en route with Daniel and Helga Huws at their home near Aberystwyth. (Daniel was now working at the National Library of Wales.) Sylvia and Helga had a long conversation in Helga’s bedroom, where Sylvia “unburdened.” She was angry about Assia, “in turmoil” and seeking “consolation.”72 Neither Sylvia nor Ted expressed a wish to separate to the Huwses, who thought the affair a typical marital difficulty they would work through. Tony Dyson and Brian Cox took them out to dinner in Anglesey the night before the reading. “At first they seemed strained, but as the red wine flowed we all relaxed, and the laughter and conviviality of our earlier dinners were restored.”73 But the bad feelings returned at the reading, where, Sylvia told Dr. Beuscher, she saw Ted eyeing a young blond secretary.

  In her three July letters to Dr. Beuscher, Sylvia wondered if she had been too possessive. She had always been terrified something would happen to Ted and had never wanted him to leave her alone in Devon. She now questioned her former assumption that “We would experience Everything together….both of us must have been pretty weird to live as we have done for so long.” And she admitted, “any husband of mine would have a large flow of my feeling for my father to complicate our relationship.”74 She did not want Ted to see her as a “puritanical warden.” She still thought about having two more children with him—though he did not want any more—and mentioned that he wanted to “hire a live-in nanny to free me.”75

  At least he had finally revealed the identity of the “femme fatale”: Assia Wevill, whom Sylvia dubbed “Weavy Asshole” to Dr. Beuscher. She had known it was Assia, of course, but to hear Ted confirm her suspicions at last was freeing. “It was very like the old shock treatments I used to fear so: it broke a tight circuit wide open, a destructive circuit, a deadening circuit, & let in a lot of pain, air and real elation. I feel very elated.” She had been in “wild agony,” but now that she knew it was Assia, she felt less threatened. “I didn’t die. I thought my capacity for conventional joy & trust & love was killed, but it wasn’t. It is all back.” Ted had told her that Assia “wasn’t very sensual.” Moreover, Sylvia wrote Beuscher, “she can’t make a baby (and really isn’t so sorry), can’t make a poem, just ads about bad bakery bread, wants to die before she gets old and loses her beauty, and is bored. Bored, bored, bored.”76 Plath felt herself intellectually and sexually superior:

  One thing about sex. I hate comfortable rituals. I like all sorts of positions at a lot of odd times of day, & really feel terrific and made new from every cell when I am done. I actually wondered at one point if Ted was sick. Well, of course, how can one keep up that intensity & variety every day & night for over 6 years. A biological and psychological impossibility I would think. And I have my pride. I mean, I was not schooled with love for 2 years by my French lover for nothing. I have in me a good tart, as distinct from a bad tart: I feel all I feel, which is a lot, & which I think men like to feel they can do, and I do not need to pretend I feel, or to feel only in my head. Well I want this tart to have a good life again. I’m damned if I’m going to be a Wife-mother every minute of the day. And as I am a pretty faithful type, and have no desire left for malice or revenge on Ted, to “get back at him,” I’d just as soon make love with Ted. But coming from a distance, from a space, a mutual independence.77

  Despite Plath’s open and mature attitude, notable in the age before second-wave feminism, she admitted that the thought of her husband with other women “nauseates me horribly.” How could she feel joy making love to him knowing that he was “registering them under my name in hotels”? She mocked her homey gestures of love—“baking bread, making pies, painting furniture”—as “silly and empty” now. And she could barely tolerate Aurelia’s presence. “I think in one way she hates me for having deprived her of her vicarious dream-idyll, and in one way she is viciously glad: ‘I knew men were like that,’ I feel her thinking. ‘Horrid, selfish bastards, just like my husband. And Sylvia thought hers was an exception!’ It has been humiliating for me to have her here through this.”78

  Above all, she hated her new status as the wronged woman. “I realise now he considered I might kill my
self over this…and what he did was worth it to him. I have always admired him for this inner pride and energy—most people just haven’t got the power in them. But I would like to break my life, & go ahead with him, not be relegated to the homefront: the suffering & pitied but very repugnant mother-wife.”79 Ted had told her he had been faithful to her before Assia, but this was little consolation:

  Am I to cheer him off onto one infatuation after another now? I have too much pride to say: O please God, it kills me to think of all these other women knowing you and your body and laughing at me, doing the dishes & wiping noses in Devon. My other impulse is to say: O fuck off, grab them all. What seems civilized & sophisticated to the people we move among seems stupid and boring and selfish to me. Am I an idiot to think that there is some purpose in being bodily faithful to the person you love?…I simply can’t laugh and blow smoke-rings.80

  Ted, she told Beuscher, was “handsome & fantastically virile & attractive. I am not beautiful.” She thought he still loved her, “in a way,” but she wondered how she could make “these women unnecessary to him….I don’t want to be sorrowful or bitter, men hate that, but what can I do in the face of these prospects?…I want Ted to understand I am not a doll-wife who can be lied to & kept happy….What I am not is a Penelope type.”81 She had begun to love living in North Tawton, but Ted had told her “freedom” to him meant travel. She understood, in a way.

  I am damned if I want to sit here like a cow, milked by babies. I love my children, but want my own life. I want to write books, see people & travel….I refuse the role of passive, suffering wife….I get a terrific sensual pleasure in being pregnant & nursing. But I must say, I get a terrific sensual pleasure in being light & slender & fucking as well….What I don’t want to be is an unfucked wife. I get bitter then, & cross. And I feel wasted. And I don’t just mean the token American what-is-it twice a week, front to front, “thank you darling” either.82

  There were no other men she admired intellectually or physically “in cow country.” She was “a feeling & imaginative lay, & probably can write quite funny & good books.” This letter, and others like it, reveal how brave and self-aware Plath truly was; her evolved attitude toward her own sexuality and desire is especially remarkable for someone who had come of age in 1950s America.

  Ted trading her and the children in for “a better family model” would be, she told Beuscher, “the real worst.” Sylvia told him she had saved him from “ever getting mucked up with a wife & children again….And he does genuinely love us. He says now he dimly thought this would either kill me or make me, and I think it might make me. And him too.” She still thought he was a “genius” and a “great man.”83 She found it “funny” that he was working on a radio play called Difficulties of a Bridegroom, about his encounter with a “dream femme fatale.”84 She asked Dr. Beuscher in her July letters to bill her, as she needed her counsel now more than ever. What should she do when Ted made passes at a woman at a party? “Smile & vanish? Smile & stand by? What I don’t want to be is stern & disapproving or teary. But I am only human.”85 She considered flying to America to see Dr. Beuscher in person, but she felt she could not afford it. Beuscher, for her part, never formalized a long-distance doctor-patient arrangement with Plath. Indeed, she dismissed the paid session idea.

  On July 21, the day after she wrote the searing “Poppies in July,” Plath contacted Alvarez to ask if he had made a decision about three new poems she hoped he would publish in The Observer: “Event,” “The Rabbit Catcher,” and “Elm.” Her accompanying letter was brusque but confident. “I like your opinions. I don’t mean, agree. But like. And I am tough enough, so don’t be ginger. I’d be grateful to have a whole No, or whatever, soon, because I need to flog round what I’ve got. Money money. You know. Please don’t be ‘nice.’ ”86 By now Plath had probably read Alvarez’s polemical essay, “Beyond the Gentility Principle,” in his controversial 1962 anthology, The New Poetry.87 In the now-famous introduction, Alvarez argued that gentility had achieved a stranglehold on British art and life. Plath’s brusque tone reflected Alvarez’s sentiment; she, too, was done being “nice.” She signed the card, “Love, Sylvia,” a term of endearment she normally reserved for family and close friends, not poetry editors. Alvarez, who replied three days later, responded in kind. “They seem to me the best things you’ve ever done. By a long way.” He thought “The Rabbit Catcher” “flawless,” and told her, “The last half of ‘Elm’ is superb.” He promised to persuade The Observer to take all three. He signed off warmly. “Again: I think these poems very fine. Love, Al.”88

  On the same day she contacted Alvarez, she wrote to the Anglo-Irish poet Richard Murphy to tell him that the epilogue of his poem “The Cleggan Disaster” had won first prize in the Cheltenham contest she had helped judge that year.89 Her decision to contact two eligible literary men the day after she had written to Dr. Beuscher about creating a new life for herself seems more than coincidental. But her request to Murphy was also about healing. She asked him if she and Ted could visit him in Ireland in late August or early September. “I desperately need a boat and the sea and no squalling babies….The center of my whole early life was ocean and boats.”90 She had known the truth about Assia for less than two weeks, but she was already contemplating a reconciliation with Ted in Ireland. Her July letters to Dr. Beuscher, angry as they are, show that she wanted the marriage to survive.

  * * *

  —

  Aurelia left Court Green on August 4. Sylvia and Ted drove her to the station with the children. They had not resolved their marital problems, and Aurelia suspected that her presence over the past six weeks had made things worse. Elizabeth remembered, “She didn’t want to upset her mother. She was impatient with her, I think. I understood because my father left us with very little and I remember the desire to protect my mother, and it did annoy me, and you felt very sorry, but also impatient. We both felt that about our mothers.”91 Winifred was kind to Aurelia but had found her, that summer, “so precise and time-tabley.” In later years Aurelia would complain to Winifred that Frieda was not being “stretched enough at school.” Winifred remarked, “I think she would have pushed. And I wonder whether she pushed Sylvia too much like a piece of elastic that never got a chance of going back again and being herself. And committing suicide”—the attempt in 1953—“was a sort of rebellion against being stretched too far. You’ve just got to break at some stage.”92 Clarissa Roche had a different view: “It was her mother who nursed her through the impossible summer of 1962 and restored order in her life, perhaps restored life itself.”93

  Three weeks after Aurelia returned to America, Sylvia would write to her full of apologies. “I can never say how sorry I am you did not have the lovely reveling and rest I meant you to have.”94 But that day at the station, baby Nick was the only one who smiled. As the train pulled away, Aurelia locked eyes on her daughter, who returned her gaze “stonily.”95 They never saw each other again.

  30

  But Not the End

  Devon and Ireland, August–September 1962

  Three days after Aurelia left Court Green, Sylvia traveled to the nearby town of Crediton to seek legal counsel regarding a separation from Ted. A new financial arrangement was on her mind—she wrote notes regarding checking accounts and tax statements in her calendar—and she set up horseback riding lessons with her new friend Joan Webb, the doctor’s wife. In riding she would find a metaphor of motion that would propel some of her best poems. She was trying to wrest back control of her life.

  On August 9 she went to London to record “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.” for the BBC’s The Poet’s Voice. (Ted had returned to care for the children in her absence.) Ideas began to coalesce in London, away from Hughes. On August 10, she wrote in her calendar, “Start Int. loaf!!!”—a reference to her third novel, which she would start later that summer and first titled The Interminable Loaf, then Doubletake, and finally, according to Hughes,
Double Exposure.1 It would chronicle the dissolution of her marriage. The 130-page draft (or partial draft) of this book, like most of Sylvia’s late journals, disappeared after her death—though not before Assia, Olwyn, and possibly Ted had read it. Ted may have destroyed it, as Assia wished him to; it may have burned in a 1971 fire at his Yorkshire home, Lumb Bank; or it may have been taken. Alvarez said Plath told him she was “deeply involved” in it during the fall of 1962 and that it “was the real stuff.” He remembered hearing that she had shown seven chapters to her Heinemann editor.2

  In London, Sylvia saw Marvin and Kathy Kane, who had recently been threatened with eviction. Seizing the opportunity, she offered them free rent at Court Green for six weeks in exchange for help with child care and cooking. Ted picked them up at the station on August 13. The Kanes lived in the guest room and were, Sylvia thought, “fantastically neurotic.” She told Aurelia she had “grave doubts as to their staying power.”3 Marvin Kane, for his part, felt the tension in the house and thought that the children had “absorbed this unhappy atmosphere….They weren’t docile.” Sylvia had difficulty with Frieda, especially, who was in a “highly charged state.” He and Kathy felt “uncomfortable” around the couple, though Marvin found Ted on his own “extremely pleasant to be with….He emanated a sense of stillness and peace.”4 Ted did not confide in Marvin about his marital difficulties, and Marvin did not probe. But Sylvia, full of anger and sorrow, opened up to him about the rift.