Red Comet

by Heather Clark

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  THE JOURNEY TO CLEGGAN, a small, isolated fishing village on the Connemara coast, was long and tiresome. Sylvia and Ted took the night ferry from Holyhead, Wales, to Dublin. There they met Jack and Máire Sweeney, who plied them with oysters, brown bread, and Guinness. On Thursday, September 13, they traveled west by train to Galway, and from there another sixty miles west to tiny Cleggan. The Connemara village was set on the west coast amid pristine beaches and dramatic cliffs where waves broke over daggerhead rocks. In this remote part of Ireland, peat smoke trailed out of white thatch cottages, sheep held up traffic, and men in Aran sweaters gathered in pubs, speaking quietly in Irish. Electricity had only recently arrived. To Sylvia and Ted, it was paradise.

  Richard Murphy greeted them warmly and escorted them to their twin-bedded room at the Old Forge, his small cottage behind the waterfront Pier Bar. Richard noted that when Ted signed the guest book, he wrote his address as “Halifax, Yorkshire,” while Sylvia listed hers as “Court Green, North Tawton, Devon.” Bad weather prevented them from sailing on Friday, so Murphy and his young assistant drove them instead to Yeats sites. They stopped first at Coole Park, the estate of Yeats’s patron Lady Gregory. There they inspected the famous copper beech tree where Yeats had carved his initials. Plath told Hughes he should carve his initials beside Yeats’s, as “he deserved to be in that company” more than the other Irish writers whose names appeared there.46 But a spiked fence surrounded the tree, and Hughes declined to make his mark.

  They drove on to Thoor Ballylee, Yeats’s tower, the destination of the pilgrimage. Richard remembered that Sylvia spoke often during the drive, while Ted remained quiet.47 The tower was then a ruin looted by locals, and the grounds were empty. “Jackdaws fled protesting as we climbed the spiral stairs. From the top, Sylvia threw coins into the stream,” Richard remembered. “There they were—the two of them—for the first time really confronting Yeats in his tower.”48 They noticed an apple tree bearing fruit, which they hoped dated from Yeats’s time. Sylvia and Ted “insisted” that they take some apples, and so they gathered “more than a hundredweight.”49 They saw this as a kind of “rite,” Richard said, appropriating Yeats’s apples.50 Murphy worried about the repercussions if an Anglo-Irishman, an Englishman, and an American were caught plundering the grounds of Ireland’s greatest bard. “Why are you doing this?” he asked Ted. “When you come to a place like this,” Hughes answered, “you have to violate it.” On their return to Cleggan they dropped in on Murphy’s wealthy aunt, who showed Plath the nineteenth-century prints of Rangoon that would reappear in her poem “The Courage of Shutting-Up.” Hughes, who called Murphy “decayed aristocracy,” was uncomfortable in the local “Big House.”51

  Though Sylvia and Ted did not argue in front of Richard, both opened up to him privately about their troubles. Sylvia told him that Ted’s “lies upset her.” She wanted a legal separation, not a divorce. “Their union had been so complete, on every level, that she felt nothing could really destroy this.” Like the Huwses and the Macedos, Richard thought the affair would blow over, for he had never encountered a couple whose minds were so “incredibly interlocked,” who had “a closer, more creative relationship” than Sylvia and Ted. He was astonished that Sylvia was ready to leave Ted on account of one adulterous lapse, and tried to persuade her that she was a “sophisticated, highly intelligent writer” who should not “go back to these innocent, puritanical notions and apply them to your life and Ted’s.”52 He told Sylvia that if she was serious about ending things, she should get a divorce. A legal separation would not allow Ted to remarry and would be “cruel.”53 Ted told him that the marriage had “been marvelously creative for him” for six or seven years, but that now it had “become destructive, and he thought the best thing to do was to give it a rest by going to Spain for six months.” Ted did not mention Assia, but, Richard recalled, “her role was implied.”54 Hoping for reinforcements, Richard phoned the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella in Dublin and asked him to come to Cleggan to help defuse the tension.

  On Saturday, the trio sailed to Inishbofin on Murphy’s sailboat, a traditional Galway hooker, the Ave Maria. Richard remembered Sylvia’s happiness that day. “During our passage of six miles across open water with a strong current and an ocean swell, Sylvia lay prone on the foredeck, leaning out over the prow: a triumphal figurehead, inhaling the sea air ecstatically.” He dropped them off at the pier and told them he would return at five p.m. Inishbofin, remote, quiet, and beautiful, was an ideal place for the couple to reconnect. Sylvia and Ted spent the day wandering the dirt paths that traced the island’s hilly ledges, and eating lunch at Day’s harborside pub. Sylvia asked the pub’s proprietor, Margaret Day, if she would “dig up the roots of an arum lily” for her to bring home. The islander liked Sylvia but didn’t take to Ted. “He was one person you brought to the island whom I didn’t like,” Margaret told Richard.

  The craggy Connacht coast was straight out of a Hughes poem, but it was Plath, Murphy said, who fell “in love with Connemara at first sight.” She told him she wanted to rent his cottage even while he lived there. “Alarmed” by this proposal, he introduced her to a local woman, Kitty Marriott, whose nearby cottage in Moyard, “Glasthule,” Plath agreed to rent from November 1. Richard was struck by the “astonishing decisiveness” with which Sylvia made her plans.

  Thomas Kinsella arrived for dinner on Saturday night and impressed the company with his wit. That evening, Murphy wrote in 1988, Plath rubbed his leg “provocatively” under the table at dinner.55 By the time he wrote about the same incident in his later 2002 memoir, the gesture had lost its force and become, simply, “a gentle kick under the table”—allowing for the possibility that this “kick” might have been accidental.56 Elizabeth was always skeptical of Richard’s story. “This ridiculous thing that people seem to believe—the man they stayed with in Ireland, he told people she was playing footsie with him under the table! She knew he was gay! She wasn’t that kind of woman at all. She just would have thought it ludicrous.” Elizabeth said Sylvia told her, before she left for Ireland, that she was going to visit a “gay poet,” and that when she returned, she hinted that Richard had designs on Ted.57 It is possible that Plath knowingly put Murphy—who was not “out”—in a very awkward position. (Murphy was divorced with a daughter, yet his homosexuality was an open secret in certain circles.)58 Or she may, indeed, have been making a pass at a wealthy, aristocratic, and handsome poet who could give her refuge in Ireland. Accidental or not, Richard took Sylvia’s kick as an invitation. But he had just been through a painful divorce and had no interest in getting involved with Ted Hughes’s wife.

  After dinner, Sylvia and Ted made a Ouija board and held a séance. Richard did not participate, and Sylvia went to bed early. Hughes and Kinsella stayed up late; in the morning Murphy found scrap verse notes, in the manner of a Hughes poem, littering the table. Kinsella admitted he’d helped the spirits along.

  The next day, Sunday, Ted left Sylvia in Cleggan while Richard was out. He told her he had decided to go fishing with his painter friend Barrie Cooke in the village of Quin, in County Clare, for a few days and that he would meet her again on Wednesday at the Dublin boat.59 This was the same day the BBC broadcast Plath’s poems “The Moon and the Yew Tree” and “The Rabbit Catcher” as part of their New Poetry series, though it is unclear whether Ted and Sylvia heard the broadcast in rural Ireland. The airing of such a personal poem as “The Rabbit Catcher” would have complicated their fragile rapprochement. “Blackberrying” appeared in The New Yorker that week, in the September 15 issue. It was the last poem of hers Plath saw in the magazine.

  Cooke took Hughes to the rocky, lunar landscape of the Burren, and then fishing on a nearby river. They slotted themselves into the limestone slabs near Mullah Moor, and watched the geese flying overhead “off Slieve na Maun to their watering ground.”60 It was a cathartic, reinvigorating experience for Hughes, who spent that night with
Cooke and his wife, Harriet.61 Ted felt suffocated in his marriage, and the Irish landscape—and Barrie’s company—somehow freed him. “All understood without need for explanation,” Cooke told Sweeney of Hughes’s response to the Burren. He continued cryptically, hinting at Hughes’s marital troubles:

  His intensity is literally frightening. I don’t mean this in the romantic, hair-wild, wild-eyes, moody way of course. I mean his ruthless search to expose himself. He is quite dedicated to extracting everything out of himself and that doesn’t just mean ART. He’s also the only person I’ve met yet who is as serious as myself about IT. Maybe more, to be honest—perhaps that’s why he is disturbing. He is more ruthless than me by far and that I find terribly admirable.62

  Cooke’s perceptive letter reveals something of Hughes’s mood that weekend. Hughes later wrote to his son Nicholas in 1998, “going to Ireland broke me out of that arid sterile alienation from myself that my life at C.G. [Court Green] had trapped me into, and with a single stride plunged me right into the productive, fruitful thick of my best chances. And in Ireland I did make a big breakthrough—in my writing and in everything to do with myself.”63 Seven years later, when Ted visited after Assia’s suicide, Barrie felt he had misjudged him. He wrote to Sweeney, “He is a good man and not the ruthless man that everyone thinks he is and even I thought he was (though I admired and liked him). He is a very honest man. And, inside his rocks, has great loving warmth.”64 Richard agreed. He felt Ted’s “craggy” demeanor and “tough Yorkshire” manner concealed “marvelous tenderness…extraordinary gentleness.”65

  When Richard realized that Ted was gone, he “panicked.” He knew he could not spend a night alone with a married woman in rural, Catholic Ireland. He, “a divorced Protestant with a British accent,” did not want to jeopardize the alliances he had built with Cleggan’s villagers. The kick the night before made him worried Sylvia had encouraged Ted to leave. And so he asked Plath to return to Dublin with Kinsella the next day. Sylvia, he said, “was enraged….She scarcely spoke to me, and when she did, she put a strained, artificial distance between us.” Instead, she opened her heart to Mary Coyne, Richard’s neighbor and cook, who remembered her as “a lovely person” but “tearful, very highly strung.”

  The next day, Sylvia was polite but stony in her goodbye. Richard said that she had made him feel, in her silence, that he “had been mean, and was partly to blame for her misery.” She drove back to Dublin with Kinsella, and spent Monday and Tuesday night with him and his kindly wife, Eleanor, who comforted her. Kinsella wrote Murphy that when Plath boarded the boat to Holyhead, Wales, on Wednesday, September 19, she was “in fair form, giving the impression (to the casual observer at least) that no fears need to be entertained by anyone.”66 But Sylvia was seething. Ted failed to meet her at the Dublin boat as promised. This, for her, was the point of no return.

  Back in Devon, Plath would write an angry, intimate letter to Murphy on September 21. She had been “appalled” to realize that she had upset him when she joked about writing New Yorker poems about Connemara, “his” territory. She was still determined to spend the winter in Ireland and was unsure whether his initial support of that plan had been genuine. To Richard she wrote,

  May I say two things? My health depends on leaving England & going to Ireland, & the health of the children. I am very reluctant to think that the help you gave with one hand you would want to take away with the other. I am in great need of a woman like Kitty Marriott & if there is one thing my 30th year has brought it is understanding of what I am, and a sense of strength and independence to face what I have to. It may be difficult to believe, but I have not and never will have a desire to see or speak to you or anyone else. I have wintered in a lighthouse & that sort of life is balm to my soul. I do not expect you to understand this, or anything else, how could you, you know nothing of me. I do not want to think you were hypocritical when showing me the cottages, but it is difficult to think otherwise. Please let me think better of you than this.

  Plath had not actually wintered in a lighthouse—she was speaking metaphorically, letting Murphy know that she was strong enough to brave the Connemara wilds on her own. He had seemed so supportive of her plan to stay in Ireland, only to send her unceremoniously packing because she was a woman and her presence could make trouble for him. Plath was more widely published than Murphy, and his dismissal outraged and humiliated her. She rescinded an earlier invitation she had made for him to visit Court Green for the same reason he had expelled her from Cleggan: “My town is as small & watchful as yours.”67

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  Sylvia returned to Court Green on September 19, alone, a day early. She found the children rested and happy, and their agency nanny, Miss Cartwright, “wonderful.” For once, her child-care arrangements had gone smoothly, “everything in applepie [sic] order.” There was a telegram from Ted, sent from a London address, telling her that he “might be back in a week or two.”68 Sylvia, who would later learn that he was in Spain with Assia for ten days, was furious. (Hughes told Anthony Thwaite some months after Plath’s death that he felt very guilty about what he had done to Sylvia in Ireland. He told Murphy, too, in 1968 that “leaving her alone in Cleggan was cruel.”)69 She wrote that day to Kathy Kane, “the end has come. It is like amputating a gangrenous limb—horrible, but one feels it is the only thing to do to survive.”70 Plath chose a simile tangled up with her father’s death to describe the decision to end her marriage—a confluence of symbolism she would revisit in “Daddy.” After she put the children to bed, she walked to Winifred’s house for comfort. Sylvia told Aurelia that “she was a great help. She more or less confirmed my decision.”71

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  ASSIA AND TED HAD RETURNED from Spain and were back in London. Assia had decided to leave David and asked Suzette if she and Helder would go round to “comfort” David after she broke the news. The Macedos agreed and were shocked when they arrived at the flat. David had smashed a hole in the wall with his fist and slashed “to ribbons” one of Assia’s leather handbags. Assia was there, too, and told Suzette, “I’m afraid he’s going to kill me.” Helder calmed David down, and they went out to the pub. Assia and Suzette stayed behind. Assia, now calmer herself, spoke of her “fabulous” time in Spain with Ted and, “in the same breath,” her second thoughts about leaving “poor David.” She told Suzette she had destroyed letters from Sylvia to David.72

  Sylvia now had a reply from Dr. Beuscher, dated 17 September, to her anguished July 30 and September 4 letters.73 “I just don’t see you as a second Caitlin,” Beuscher responded, referring to Caitlin Thomas, Dylan Thomas’s wife, who had endured his infidelities and abandonment until his death. “I much prefer your 50-yr. image with wisdom and blue hair.” Beuscher dismissed Sylvia’s notion of paying for letter sessions as “irrelevant” and asked on what grounds she was being consulted—as “woman (mother) (witch) (earth-goddess), or as a mere psychiatrist?” She hoped that it was not the latter, as “in spite of much effort on my part, I am totally unable to function solely as a psychiatrist in this crisis. Too much of my own past,” she admitted, “too much of my own feelings about my mother, my sister-in-law…my every personal experience, plus my general beliefs about women, their status as it is, was, has been, and should be, enter into whatever I might say to you. I cannot pretend my viewpoint is objective. Frankly, I am furious at Ted. You thought you had a man, and perhaps you do, but he is certainly acting like a little child.”

  Dr. Beuscher, then, would not treat Plath as a patient, but she tried her best to fill Plath with confidence about her future: “do not give up your own personal one-ness. Do not imagine that your whole being hangs on this one man….Just don’t get out of the driver’s seat in your own life. Has he left you? OK, sad, tragic, stupid, unfortunate, anxiety-provoking, BUT NOT THE END.” Beuscher thought Hughes was “a man in crisis” and that Plath should not get sucked down “in a whirlpool of HIS making
….Don’t be anyone’s doormat. Do your crying alone. Hold your head up, and your heart will follow.” She warned Sylvia against repeating her “mother’s role—i.e., martyr at the hands of the brutal male.” Resist the temptation to go to bed with Ted, she said—“Stand back and be an old-fashioned lady.” She should get a lawyer and discuss child support. She told Sylvia to write to her again. “If I help you, it is my reward….I have often thought, if I ‘cure’ no one else in my whole career, you are enough. I love you.”74

  Dr. Beuscher’s dismissal of Sylvia’s “paid sessions idea” seems generous, but it allowed her to disentangle herself from a messy situation. She realized that she had crossed an ethical line, and probably had legitimate misgivings about treating a patient across the Atlantic. She apparently made no plans to speak to Sylvia by phone once it was reinstalled at Court Green, nor, in her surviving letters, did she instruct Sylvia to seek help from a mental health professional in England.75

  Sylvia replied to Dr. Beuscher with an update on September 22. “I am really asking your help as a woman, the wisest woman emotionally and intellectually, that I know. You are not my mother, but you have been the midwife to my spirit.” Beuscher, she knew, would not advise her to “diminish” herself. Things had changed irrevocably since her September 4 letter. The Ireland trip had not saved the marriage, but hastened its demise.

  I have been very stupid, a bloody fool, but it only comes from my thinking Ted could grow, and grow up, not down, and my wanting to give us a new and better and wider start. I was prepared for almost anything—his having the odd affair, traveling, drinking (I mean getting drunk)—if we could be straight, good friends, share all the intellectual life that has been meat and drink to me, for he is a genius, a great man, a great writer. I was ready for this, to settle for something much different and freer than what I had thought marriage was, or what I wanted it to be. I changed. I have a rich inner life myself, much I want to learn & do, and this blessed gift made me feel capable of quite another life than the life I had felt at heart I really wanted. Even our professional marriage—the utterly creative and healthy critical exchange of ideas and publication projects and completed work—meant enough to me to try to save it. But Ted, his attitudes and actions, have made even this impossible, and I am appalled. I am bloody, raw, nerves hanging out all over the place, because I have had six stormy but wonderful years, bringing both of us, from nothing, books, fame, money, lovely babies, wonderful loving, but I see now the man I loved as father and husband is just dead….I realize, stunned, that I do not like him.76