Sylvia told Dr. Beuscher that when Ted had returned from his first London tryst with Assia, he told her “the affair was kaput.” But he needed his freedom, he explained to her, and wanted to spend more time in London “on drinking bouts with a few friends.” Sylvia promised him that she “wouldn’t be tearful or try to stop him from anything.” He spent half his weeks in London, and when he returned he “would lay into me with fury—I looked tired, tense, cross, couldn’t he even have a drink, what sort of a wife had he married etc. I was dumbfounded.”77
She had hoped that Ireland would restore her health, but, she explained, Ted had left her one morning—he said “he was going grouse shooting with a friend”—and she hadn’t “seen him since.” It all made sense, suddenly. Ted had stopped sleeping with her and had been “groaning this other woman’s name in the night.” She had been “in agony,” but now understood he was “being faithful” to Assia. The few times they had sex, Sylvia felt degraded—“he made so sure I felt nothing, and was tossed aside like a piece of dog sausage. Well I am neither my mother nor a masochist; I would sooner be a nun than this kind of fouled scratch rug.” Sylvia wrote that she was going to London to see a solicitor about a legal separation. She would no longer allow Ted to come back to Court Green “every week to make my life miserable, kick me about & assure himself that he has a ghastly limiting wife.” He had let Nicholas fall out of his pram, she claimed, and called him a usurper. She added that Ted “beat me up physically” in February 1961, two days before her miscarriage. Now, she told Beuscher, “He means well—says all he wants is to live his own life & send us ²∕3 of what he earns.” But she still worried that Assia wanted to take Frieda from her.
The marriage was over. “Call solicitor,” Plath wrote in her calendar on September 21.78 Spain, she told Aurelia, was now “out of the question.”79 Ireland became the stay against confusion. She wrote Beuscher about her plan, to begin the separation somewhere else so that she would not be “left, passive. I need to act…to fatten and blow myself clear with sea winds & wild walks.” She would not sacrifice herself to her children as her mother had done, nor would she move in with Aurelia, who had already started lecturing her: “ ‘Now you see how it is, why I never married again, self-sacrifice is the thing for your two little darlings etc. etc.’ till it made me puke.” She would not burden her own children with the “lethal deluge of frustrated love which will lay down its life if it can live through the loved one, on the loved one, like a hideous parasite….I don’t want Frieda to hate me as I hated my mother, nor Nicholas to live with me or about me as my brother lives about my mother, even though he is just married.” She had once asked her mother “why, if she discovered so early on she did not love my father, that her marriage was an agony, she did not leave him. She looked blank. Then she said half-heartedly that it was the depression & she couldnt [sic] have gotten a job. Well. No thanks.” Ted would not turn her “into a doggy sobby stereotype…My sense of myself, my inner dignity and creative heart won’t have it….I think when I am free of him my own sweet life will come back to me, bare and sad in a lot of places, but my own, and sweet enough.”80
* * *
—
“I am afraid the news from Court Green is not good,” Winifred wrote Aurelia on September 22. Sylvia had been “in great distress the other night when Ted did not come back.” She felt better the next day, when she told Winifred she had “made up her mind to get a separation.” But Winifred was skeptical. “She has a hard hill to pull, I am afraid.” The midwife understood the need for a good nanny. “If she can write she will be able to loose [sic] herself for a few hours.” Winifred blamed Ted, whose unconventional writer’s life seemed to her too much like loafing. “Ted has never grown up, he is not mature enough to accept his responsibilities, paying bills, doing income tax looking after his wife & children, so Sylvia has taken over all that practical side of the partnership of necessity & no man really likes that. He wants to be free for parties, travelling etc.” She thought success had “gone to his head.” She assured Aurelia that Sylvia seemed “calmer” after their evening heart-to-heart: “I made her eat supper & we had some good laughs as well as some tears.”81 Sylvia continued to keep up a front with Nancy Axworthy, her cleaner, who detected almost no change in her employer throughout the summer and fall of 1962. Sylvia remained upbeat and cheerful on the mornings Nancy cleaned. When Ted did not return with her from Ireland in September, she told Nancy in a “breezy, casual” way that he was away lecturing at a university.82
Ted, meanwhile, felt as if he were emerging from a crisis he barely understood. “Things are quite irrevocable….I’m aghast when I see how incredibly I’ve confined & stunted my existence, when I compare my feeling of what I could be with what I am,” he wrote to Olwyn in late summer. “I’ve had the most terrific labours to get back the flow of mind & memory that used to be quite spontaneous, & should be.” His writing was suddenly taking off; he was “creating two other poets. One experimental & lyrical, one, very rigid formalist….My own poems barge midway…exploiting the qualities of the extremes without reducing myself to or losing myself in either.” This letter suggests how closely Hughes linked his new life to a new phase of writing: his personal and aesthetic choices seemed to reaffirm one another. He told Olwyn he was trying to set Sylvia up in Spain while he renovated the cottage for a nanny: “as soon as I clear out, she’ll start making a life of her own, friends of her own, interests of her own. If she wants to buy her half of the house gradually fair enough.”83 He had heard that Sylvia was trying to track him down through her solicitor. “Yes, it’s just like her, to employ a snoop.” Ted knew that Olwyn would sympathize with him; his letters to her, with their dismissive comments about Sylvia, suggest that his sister was now his strongest ally. He seemed excited about the looming separation and the prospect of freedom:
Sometimes she wants a legal separation, sometimes a divorce at once. I’ve left her in Ireland, while I attend to one or two small things, & I shan’t be back at Court Green until Oct. 1st—by then she’ll probably be wanting a divorce, & have started it up.
In her manner with other people she’s changed extraordinarily—become much more as she was when I first knew her & much more like her mother, whom I detest. You’re right, she’ll have to grow up—it won’t do her any harm.84
Both Plath and Hughes wanted the other to “grow up.” Plath’s love now seemed, to Hughes, a stranglehold. He wanted her to accept his need for erotic freedom, which he felt would enhance his creativity. The romantic patterns of his later life—he would never be faithful to a woman after he left Plath—suggest that for him, fidelity was a struggle. But Plath was too dignified to stay married to an adulterer. She had made sacred vows to Hughes, and she wanted him to “grow up” into the faithful husband and father he had promised to become.
Perhaps what finally doomed the marriage was neither Plath’s possessiveness nor Hughes’s adultery, but fame and its legendary temptations. There were other factors, obviously: depression, rivalry, disillusion, violence, class, to name but a few. But fame gave Hughes sexual and professional opportunities to expand at exactly the time Plath wanted him, as he saw it, to contract—to settle into a predictable, domestic life. Plath had suggested as much when she told Dr. Beuscher that movie stars had nothing on handsome male poets. And, indeed, Hughes was now secure enough in his professional success to tell his sister, with some bravado, “I’ll gradually become the guiding taste at Faber’s, when Eliot retires.”85 Fame made Hughes even more determined, as he had told Olwyn in 1958, to sacrifice everything to his poetic vocation: he would “pursue it at all costs.” For it would be “miserable,” he wrote, “to feel that your gifts have somehow fallen to pieces & come to nothing…through neglect.”86 This was the fate he was trying to avoid now that the walls of domesticity and fatherhood were closing in. Assia was his new muse—perhaps a directive from the Goddess herself—and he felt he owed it to his “gift�
�� to pursue her.
The marriage that had begun as a bold creative experiment ended in the most predictable of clichés. Plath was all too aware of this sad devolution, and her disillusion was nearly as painful as Ted’s abandonment itself. The tawdriness of the affair—that someone of Ted’s intellect could be seduced by a “whiff of Chanel,” as she put it—compounded her humiliation.87 It also disoriented her; maybe she did not know Ted at all. “Perhaps if Ted was that person that was enamored by Assia, then she had invented Ted,” Helder Macedo observed. But the Stevie Smith poem Sylvia tacked above her desk that fall suggests she saw herself in a new light, too—as honest, virtuous, and resilient. She was ready to make a new life.
* * *
MISS CARTWRIGHT, the agency nanny, returned to Court Green on September 24 to spend the night with the children while Sylvia traveled to London to see her solicitor. She still did not know Ted’s whereabouts and would have to “trace him.” “He is utterly gutless. Lies, lies, lies,” she wrote Aurelia.88 The solicitor told her that a wife was only allowed one-third of her husband’s income, and that if the husband did not pay, suing him would be “long & costly.” “The humiliation of being penniless & begging money from deaf ears is too much,” she wrote Aurelia. “I shall just have to invest everything with courage in the cottage & the nanny for a year & write like mad. Try to get clear. I’m sure the American laws aren’t like this.” She hoped that Ted would settle out of court and agree to a decent “fixed allowance.” She said she had contributed a third of their joint $7,000 income that year. “Now it is all gone. I am furious. I threw everything of mine into our life without question, all my earnings, & now he is well-off, with great potential earning power, I shall be penalized for earning, or if I don’t earn, have to beg. Well I choose the former.”89
Sylvia stayed with the Macedos on this trip, and Suzette remembered that she and Sylvia grew closer. Suzette had also attempted suicide, and the two women spoke frankly about their breakdowns. “She kept nodding & saying ‘Yes’ when I described my emotional state.” They spoke of their emotional and sexual lives like college girls in a dorm. Sylvia wanted to hear more about Suzette’s “intimate relations” with Helder and asked her if she had “ever been out of the body in love making.” Suzette added, “Sylvia had.”90
There was another reason, besides Sylvia’s solicitor’s appointment, for her London visit. She called unannounced on Al Alvarez, who had published her poem “Crossing the Water” in The Observer on September 23 and so given her a pretense for dropping by.91 Alvarez lived in a modest, sparsely furnished studio in an old converted barn in literary Hampstead, on Fellows Road, not far from where Sylvia was staying with the Macedos. The studio was quaint, but the only source of heat was a coal stove; the toilet was in a cold garage, and the water ran lukewarm.92 Sylvia suspected that Ted had been staying with Al in London; Ted later thought she had come to sniff out his lair.
Alvarez remembered that Plath arrived looking neat and prim, her hair in a bun, like “an Edwardian lady performing a delicate but necessary social duty.” The studio was sparsely furnished, and she sat cross-legged and comfortable on the floor as she clinked the ice around in her whiskey. (The sound was the only thing, she remarked, that made her “homesick for the States.”) She told him, with “polished cheerfulness,” that she was living on her own with the children. Alvarez later wrote that he was shocked to hear “that anything could have disrupted the idyll” of the Hugheses’ marriage.93 But his surprise was disingenuous. Ted had been staying with him on and off since July; he knew of their marital problems. Sylvia told him she had been writing “a poem a day” and that she possessed a “new drive.” She read him “Berck-Plage,” “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” “Elm,” and some others. They must be read aloud, she said. Alvarez had been receptive to her poetry in the past, and, with Hughes gone, she needed a sympathetic ear. She also understood the need for another male patron. Newly separated from England’s most famous young poet, she was trying to forge an alliance with London’s most famous young critic.
By 1962, Alvarez was a kingmaker whose influence stretched across the Atlantic. His April 1962 anthology, The New Poetry, became one of the most influential anthologies of the postwar period. The book promoted a new style of poetry, later dubbed “extremism,” whose exemplars were Hughes and Lowell.94 Hughes had given Plath an inscribed copy of the anthology (“For Sylvia All My Love Ted”), and she starred or underlined twenty passages from Alvarez’s introductory essay, “Beyond the Gentility Principle,” including parts that discussed “the poet’s ability and willingness to face the full range of his experience with full intelligence; not to take the easy exits,” and Berryman and Lowell’s practice of dealing “openly with the quick of their experience, experience sometimes on the edge of disintegration and breakdown.”95 Alvarez remembered that Sylvia “spoke of it often and with approval, and was disappointed not to have been included among the poets in the book.”96 Daniel Huws called the anthology “very, very influential” and said it “changed the general climate a lot.” He felt that Alvarez was trying to dethrone Robert Graves.97 The book made such an impression on a young Seamus Heaney that he brought it on his first date with his future wife, Marie. He hoped that its modern sensibility would impress her. The poet Michael Longley remembered that every aspiring poet he knew seemed to have a copy in his back pocket.98
Ted told Olwyn that The New Poetry sold ten thousand copies in its first month. “There must be a poetry boom,” he wrote.99 And, indeed, there was, thanks in part to the cheap paperback Penguin Modern Poets series, launched that same month, that introduced a generation of British readers to postwar poetry.100 More Britons than ever before were educated, and they were hungry for culture. But Alvarez had tapped into something deeper: the 1960s were dawning, and with them came a new impatience with British gentility and its American cousin, conformity.
Alvarez chose a Jackson Pollock painting, Convergence, for the cover of the book’s second edition, and scholars have traced ideas and language in the book’s introduction to Harold Rosenberg’s 1959 major work on abstract expressionism, The Tradition of the New. Rosenberg thought “A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist.”101 Alvarez absorbed Rosenberg’s ideas, and co-opted his term “extremist.” This alignment with both abstract expressionism and psychoanalysis symbolized the new poetry’s effort to break boldly and radically from literary convention: to shock, to flaunt taboo, to live the values of one’s art. The book’s guiding spirit was Lowell, whom Alvarez praised for “trying to cope” with his “disturbances” “nakedly, and without evasion.”102
Alvarez argued that gentility had sterilized British life and that “the makers of horror films are more in tune with contemporary anxiety than most of the English poets.”103 Behind and ahead stood the specter of mass extermination; it was the poet’s responsibility to bear witness and sound the alarm. “Theologians would call these forces evil, psychologists, perhaps, libido,” Alvarez wrote. “Either way, they are the forces of disintegration which destroy the old standards of civilization. Their public faces are those of two world wars, of the concentration camps, of genocide, and the threat of nuclear war.”104
Plath’s Ariel would become, for Alvarez, the high-water mark of “extremist” verse. But in 1961, when he was assembling his anthology, no other British poet exemplified this “new poetry” better than Hughes. To Philip Hobsbaum and Peter Redgrove, too, it seemed “that the future of poetry in Britain was dependent on Hughes’s work being established as the true model for the age.”105 Hughes, Hosbaum said, “was writing accomplished verse when the rest of his generation was still wondering whether to be barbaric like Dylan or sophisticated like Empson.”106 Edward Lucie-Smith recalled Hobsbaum’s London Group members crashing rival literary parties at G. S. Fraser’s Chelsea flat and “baiting the company” by reciting Hughes’s poem “The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar”—declaring their “fait
h in Hughes” in front of the “appalled” guests.107 “The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar” describes Farrar’s burning in graphic detail (“Hear him crack in the fire’s mouth”) and represented what Alvarez felt a modern poem ought to achieve. This poetry did not keep its distance from atrocity or violence: in Hughes’s poem, as the critic Will Wooten has written, “sincerity, extreme suffering and extreme death intersect.”108 “The Martyrdom” became the London Group’s banner poem, though Hughes attended its meetings only sporadically.109 Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” which was influenced by Hughes’s poem, would sound a similar note.
Alvarez said that including Plath in the first edition “never crossed my mind. She was an American in England, and ergo we couldn’t have her.”110 Yet Alvarez had included two other Americans, Lowell and John Berryman. The clear reason for Plath’s exclusion was her gender; there were no women poets in the first edition. (In Poetry from Cambridge 1958, Plath had been one of only two women represented in the selection of twenty-two poets.)111 The new poetry itself, as Wooten notes, could at times “be self-consciously masculinist” and “define itself in ways hostile to women.”112 Though Plath had not yet written the majority of her Ariel poems, much of her work at that point fit Alvarez’s criteria: “The Stones,” “Lorelei,” or “Tulips” would have been obvious choices. But Alvarez had ignored a whole swath of American poets: the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets, the New York School. The New Poetry seemed to confirm that Lowell and Hughes had single-handedly saved Anglo-American poetry from gentility.113 Alvarez would include Plath and Anne Sexton in his second edition in 1966, realizing too late that it was not Hughes but Plath whose work best articulated the sound and sense of the new poetry. He later called her exclusion from the first edition a “terrible mistake. Stupid.”114
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