Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  Sylvia left the Kanes in charge while she and Ted went up to London on August 15 to see Mrs. Prouty, who treated them to dinner, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, and a night at the posh Connaught Hotel. The two played the part of a loving married couple; Mrs. Prouty told Aurelia that Sylvia looked “so pretty—& Ted—handsome.”5 This charade initiated a thaw. Sylvia later told Dr. Beuscher in a September 22 letter, “I never had such good loving, felt it was the consecration of our new life.”6 The couple breakfasted in bed together, but when Ted emerged from the bath, dressed, “with a funny pleased smile,” he told her he was going out for a drink with some friends. Sylvia assumed that she would join him, but he told her to “go home on the next train.” She soon heard “by accident” that the affair was not over and he was going to see Assia.7 To Mrs. Prouty she wrote that September, “I will remember it as the last happy night with Ted, now happiness, the word, has ceased to have meaning for me.”8

  Richard Murphy wrote in mid-August, inviting Sylvia and Ted to Connemara in September. Sylvia imbued the trip with promise. “I simply must go to Ireland and sail for a week,” she replied. “I don’t know when I’ve looked so forward to anything. I am sick of the bloody British sea with its toffee wrappers & trippers in pink plastic macs bobbing in the shallows, and caravans piled one on top of the other like enamel coffins.”9 The trip was to be a reprisal of her American summers; a final chance to right the marriage.

  On August 25, the Canadian poet and critic John Malcolm Brinnin called on Court Green during a driving tour of Devon with his partner, Bill Reid. Brinnin, who had met Plath and Hughes in Boston, had been the director of New York’s 92nd Street Y Poetry Center until 1956; he wanted to include Plath and Hughes in a poetry anthology, The Modern Poets, which he was editing. He also wanted Hughes to replace him for a year at the University of Connecticut while he went on teaching leave. Brinnin spoke to Hughes about the anthology and the job offer. He spoke, too, about his recent visit to a morgue.10 Plath and the children were present in the room, and Hughes told Brinnin they needed to discuss the matter outside. Brinnin later told Peter Davison, “Ted said he couldn’t think about accepting any offer until certain matters (unspecified) in his life had been resolved.”11

  Plath would base the two characters in her mid-November poem “Death & Co.,” which included imagery of dead babies “in their hospital / Icebox,” on Brinnin and Reid. The poem portrays the couple as devilish harbingers of death. Plath blamed Brinnin for Dylan Thomas’s death, as Brinnin had brought Thomas to the United States on the four-year tour that culminated in his demise.12 This fact, combined with her own recent car crash and Brinnin’s talk of morgues, made him a model for her emissary of doom.13 Hughes thought her reasons were more personal. Plath, he said, was “outraged” that Brinnin had tried to hire Hughes, despite the fact that the job offer was “lucrative.” “She regarded it as an attempt to sabotage our experiment”—their creative marriage and writerly life at Court Green.14

  By late August, Sylvia had come down with the flu and was rapidly losing weight. Ted stayed in London during the week while the Kanes nursed Sylvia at Court Green. On August 27, Sylvia told Aurelia she’d had enough.

  I hope you will not be too surprised or shocked when I say I am going to try to get a legal separation from Ted. I do not believe in divorce and would never think of this, but I simply cannot go on living the degraded and agonized life I have been living, which has stopped my writing and just about ruined my sleep and my health. I thought I would take almost anything to give the children an illusion of home life, but I feel a father who is a liar and an adulterer and utterly selfish and irresponsible is worse than the absence of a father, and I cannot spend the best years of my life waiting week after week for the chance returns of someone like this. What is saddest is that Ted has it in him to be kind and true and loving but has just chosen not to be….I have too much at stake and am too rich a person to live as a martyr to such stupidity and heartlessness. I want a clean break, so I can breathe and laugh and enjoy myself again.15

  Sylvia was heartbroken, but she was also clear-eyed and self-aware enough to fight for her independence. She believed in her ability to rebuild her life, for she had already risen from the ashes, Lazarus-like, in 1953. She would do it again. She wrote what must have been a difficult letter to Edith Hughes revealing “Ted’s desertion,” “& his utter faithlessness & irresponsibility,” though she assured Ted’s family that she “deeply” loved them.16

  Plath finished only one poem that August, “Burning the Letters,” about a ritual bonfire she had made of Hughes’s manuscripts and the name—Assia’s—that had supposedly floated above the charred papers:

  And here is an end to the writing,

  The spry hooks that bend and cringe, and the smiles, the smiles.

  And at least it will be a good place now, the attic.

  At least I won’t be strung just under the surface,

  Dumb fish…

  Her “love” now has “nothing to say to anybody. / I have seen to that.”

  After Plath’s death, Hughes told others Plath had been practicing “witchcraft” that fall.17 Suzette, who saw Sylvia mainly in London in December and January, claimed Sylvia believed in “the supernatural.”18 But in Devon, Elizabeth said Sylvia “never talked about astrology…psychic powers, receiving signs.” She made a “passing historical reference” to tarot, nothing more.19 Clarissa Roche remembered Sylvia had told her the bonfire story “as a big, big joke,” while laughing.20 David Compton said the real story was much less dramatic—Sylvia was simply cleaning out the fireplace and randomly saw a piece of “charred paper” with Assia’s name on it.21 (Presumably, then, Ted had tried to destroy Assia’s letters.) But whenever Sylvia told this story, she added, with absolute sincerity, “Truth loves me.”22 Indeed, she tacked a Stevie Smith poem, “Magna Est Veritas” (Great Is Truth), above her desk that fall:

  With my looks I am bound to look simple or fast I would rather look simple

  So I wear a tall hat on the back of my head that is rather a temple

  And I walk rather queerly and comb my long hair

  And people say, Don’t bother about her.

  The poem’s speaker says that she has picked up more facts over time than the people in “smart hats” and does not “deceive” because she is “simple.” Smith ends the poem, “Great is Truth and will prevail in a bit.”23 This poem seems to have become a self-help mantra: Plath likely imagined herself as the honest, “simple” woman, Assia and Ted the deceptive ones in “smart hats.”

  In “Burning the Letters,” Plath’s poetic speaker sounds strong and satisfied, but the real bonfire suggests rage and powerlessness. Without Hughes’s ballast, Plath’s career prospects and social position wobbled. She worried about the stigma of a broken home. Her next poem, “For a Fatherless Son” in late September, was an elegy for the lost family: “One day you may touch what’s wrong / The small skulls, the smashed blue hills, the godawful hush.” Though she would have been cheered by the BBC broadcast of Three Women on August 19, her letters around this time reveal a penchant for black humor. She sent George MacBeth two poems for inclusion in his Penguin Book of Sick Verse, “In case they strike you as being darker than my other darks, sicker than the old sicks.”24

  She considered closing Court Green in November, moving to Spain, and renting a villa through March. “I have just recovered from a bad bout of flu, which the babies caught too, and my weight has dropped after this worrisome summer, and I do not think it wise to try to undergo another English winter just now,” she told Aurelia.25 She wrote similarly to Ruth Fainlight. Ted, she said, “will set us up for 3 months in Spain this winter,” near Málaga, where his friend Ben Sonnenberg lived. Hughes still had to take up the Maugham grant, she explained, “so this is an excuse to do it.” She asked Ruth, who was living in Morocco, to give her practical advice about traveling
by car with children: “What route did you take, where stay, did you reserve ahead, etc. etc. Ted never will make a plan till the day ahead, but I would like to know what I can expect. Are there Paddipads [diapers] in Spain. Strained babyfoods? Is there a God? Where is Franco?” She fantasized about meeting Ruth in Spain and arranging playdates for their little boys. Nick, she wrote, “is gorgeous now….I adore him.” She hoped that it would be easier to find a nanny there, as it was “almost impossible” in Devon. “Have a 2nd novel I’m dying to write [Double Exposure] and no time. Which I suppose is better than lots of time & no novel.” She signed off, “please write,” and enclosed a copy of “Elm” dedicated to Ruth.26 Sylvia did not mention her looming separation in her light and chummy letter. She may have hoped that she and Ted could return to each other in the place they had honeymooned, far from Devon’s gray skies.

  The late-summer weather was “ghastly—nothing but rain.”27 Sylvia had her first riding lesson at a stable near Okehampton in late August on an older, plodding mare named Ariel.28 She would come to love her riding lessons, her bees, and her honey (“delectable stuff”). These activities made her feel capable again. She tried to exude confidence in her letters home: “I love you all very much and am in need of nothing, and am desirous of nothing but staying in this friendly town & my beautiful home with my dear children.” Once she had a live-in nanny, she said, she would be able to “lead a freer life.”29

  As for money, they were barely scraping by, living on the last of her Saxton grant and piecemeal BBC and poetry earnings. Ted had been withdrawing cash from their account since early July; Sylvia assumed that he was wining and dining women on his London jaunts.30 She retaliated by taking out a £173 life insurance policy on Ted on August 22, leaving them with only £10 in their British checking account.31 Hughes began borrowing money from the Kanes, who by late August had had enough of Court Green and decamped to Cornwall. “They took over the day we were in London and it nearly killed them,” Sylvia wrote Aurelia. She now had no one to watch the children while she and Ted were in Ireland and would have to hire someone. She planned to renovate a small cottage in her yard for a live-in nanny. “A business arrangement, with money paid, is the only thing I can count on,” she told Aurelia.32

  Not all the news was grim. Plath took great pleasure in a letter from Anne Sexton that included her new collection All My Pretty Ones. “I was absolutely stunned and delighted with the new book,” she told Sexton. “It is superbly masterful, womanly in the greatest sense, and so blessedly unliterary. One of the rare original things in this world one comes upon.” She had thought to buy Sexton’s book the day before, and was amazed to find it in the mail that very morning.

  Plath singled out “The Black Art” as her favorite and also praised “Letter Written During a January Northeaster,” “Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound,” “Water,” “Woman with Girdle,” “Old,” “For God While Sleeping,” and “Lament.” Sexton’s letter made Plath nostalgic for Boston, and she became hungry for details about the road not taken. What was it like to be a “Lady Poet Laureate”? Had the Radcliffe grant freed her from the “drudge of housework”? How were Maxine Kumin and George Starbuck? Who did she “see, know, now”? Sylvia did not mention Ted in the short letter, just Frieda and Nicholas, and “keeping bees and raising potatoes and doing broadcasts off and on for the BBC.” Sexton had already beaten her to a second poetry publication, and Plath felt no need to admit her marriage’s failure. If she was jealous, she didn’t let on. “More power to you, although you seem to need nothing—it is all there.”33

  All My Pretty Ones arrived at an auspicious time. Plath was poised to make a break with her husband, which would coincide with a new style of writing that would be, like Sexton’s, “womanly” and “unliterary.” Plath wanted to shed what remained of her formalist tics and write about vital experience—especially women’s experience. She recognized Sexton as a pioneer and fellow traveler. Her themes fascinated Plath: hospital stays, transcendence, the yearning for death, Icarian flight, birth, babies, maternal anxiety, abortion, atheism, doubles, mother anger. Indeed, some of Sexton’s phrases could have been written by Plath: “I soar in hostile air / over the pure women in labor”; “My nurses, those starchy ghosts”; “Now you rise, / a city from the sea.” Sexton’s “The Starry Night” would influence “Ariel,” while Plath’s “pure acetylene / Virgin” rising up to “Paradise” in “Fever 103°” owes something to the nuns in Sexton’s “Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound.”

  Disparate influences coalesced: Plath’s break with Hughes and desire for personal rebirth coincided with a growing interest in Alvarez’s polemic against gentility in The New Poetry and the arrival of All My Pretty Ones on her doorstep. Alvarez’s essay and Sexton’s verse emboldened her to push her voice to extremities, as Hughes himself had, ironically, encouraged her to do. Plath knew that Lowell, the most important contemporary American poet, favored Sexton’s verse, and that Sexton had won a prestigious grant from Radcliffe. The evidence, which Plath would have weighed shrewdly, suggested that Alvarez was right: the most exciting American poetry was not by the “Elegant Academicians,” as she had once called them. Not Wilbur, Merwin, Stevens, or Moore, but Lowell, Snodgrass, and Sexton. Sexton pulled Plath closer to the short lines, quick cadences, and bursts of Ariel. Ten days after receiving Sexton’s letter, Plath sent off a new batch of poems to The New Yorker: “Berck-Plage,” “The Other,” “Words heard, by accident, over the phone,” “Poppies in July,” and “Burning the Letters.” Nearly all of them concerned Ted’s affair with Assia, which was out in the open now. Sylvia’s desire for public retribution was strong.

  Hughes spent much of August in London. When the Kanes left for Cornwall on August 31, he returned to Court Green to look after Sylvia, who was still ill with flu. Ted wrote to Eric Walter White in early September that he and Sylvia would have to forego a London meeting with him, Jack, and Máire Sweeney as Sylvia had come down with “a most severe bout of flu—quite knocked out, temp 103° etc….and I shall have to stay here & nurse.”34 He resented the sacrifice. But Sylvia told Elizabeth that it was the sickest she had ever been—“double pneumonia was nothing to this.”35

  Just when Sylvia began to regain her strength, she received another blow. Judith Jones at Knopf wrote to explain why more reviews hadn’t appeared of The Colossus, complaining that the “self-involved” poets to whom she had sent copies had not bothered to respond (though she did, at least, express interest in publishing The Bell Jar).36 Marianne Moore had written to Jones criticizing the American edition of The Colossus; it was in this letter that she stated Plath’s poems were “bitter, frost-bitten, burnt out, averse.”37 Jones forwarded the letter to Plath. “I am sorry Miss Moore eschews the dark side of life to the extent that she feels neither good nor enjoyable poetry can be made out of it,” Plath replied to Jones. “She also, as I know, eschews the sexual side of life, and made my husband take out every poem in his first book with a sexual reference before she would put her name to endorse it. But she is a scrupulous letter writer, so bless her for that!”38 Plath had once called Moore “the most famous American poetess.”39 She would have a hard time shaking off her criticisms.

  Sylvia wrote another distressed letter to Dr. Beuscher on September 4. Beuscher had sent one reply in response to Plath’s previous letters about Hughes’s affair but had not yet made clear whether the letters would count as paid therapy. Sylvia was desperate for a more structured, doctor-patient relationship. “I wish to hell I could have a few talks with you. Nobody else is any good to me, I’m sick of preamble. That’s why I thought if I paid for a couple of letters I might start going ahead instead of in circles.”40

  The home situation, she explained, had deteriorated. “Any kind of caution or limit makes him murderous.” After spending the week in London, Ted had come home to “lay into us: this is a Prison, I am an Institution, the children should
never have been born.” When she was ill with flu she had started having blackouts; she asked Ted to stay home and help her, and he accused her of “blackmailing him with my health.” When he returned from London she was even sicker with flu and a 103° fever for three days, and the doctor had lectured Ted “about manly responsibilities, the old red flag to the old bull.”41 Ted had told the doctor that she was “unstable” because she said she had “canine influenza”—a joke, as she had caught the sickness from the Kanes. Such talk between husband and doctor scared her; Sylvia well knew that these were the sorts of discussions that could lead to involuntary asylum commitments. (Indeed, the mid-fifties saw the peak of asylum inpatients in Britain.) “I honestly think they might try to make my life such a hell I would turn over Frieda as a sort of hostage to my sanity,” she would write Dr. Beuscher on September 22.42 She wrote to Aurelia, too, of her worries that Ted would try to use her mental health issues to get custody of Frieda. As terrible as the end of her marriage was, the idea of being committed to an asylum and losing her daughter was much worse. Sylvia had good reason to maintain a front of “sanity” that fall—to broadcast optimism, reasonableness, and proactiveness. Ted’s perceived line of attack both terrified her and filled her with fury. “I am so bloody sane,” she wrote Beuscher. “I am not disaster-proof after my years with you, but I am proof against all those deadly defences—retreat, freezing, madness, despair—that a fearful soul puts up when refusing to face pain & come through with it. I am not mad; just fighting mad.”43

  On September 9, Sylvia hosted Mrs. Prouty for dinner at Court Green—an occasion that required more theater. Her thoughts turned to Ireland. She spoke of the upcoming trip with Ted happily to Elizabeth. “She was very excited then because she felt like it was a real rapprochement. It was the first time they’d been together for a long time,” Elizabeth said.44 Sylvia told Elizabeth she would try to regain her health on the trip and asked her to send David’s 1962 novel, Too Many Murderers. “I’m dying to read it, it looks just the thing to cheer me up, all about murder.”45