Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  The Holocaust was a particular obsession of several of the anthology’s poets, who, fifteen years after the war, felt a moral imperative to speak the unspeakable. In the wake of Adolf Eichmann’s capture and trial in 1960–61, there was a new desire to come to terms with the horror. Alvarez, who was Jewish, admitted that his experiences with depression and suicide influenced his interest in the Holocaust: “my own suicidal behaviour had given me a personal stake in the idea of a murderous century reflected in murderous art.”115 His feelings suggest the reasons Plath, too, was drawn to the Holocaust. Shortly after her visit to Alvarez, she criticized her mother for ignoring the horrors of Belsen and Auschwitz in favor of happier stories.

  When Plath first visited him, Alvarez was working on a BBC radio production, Under Pressure, about the legacy of the Holocaust and the Cold War in eastern Europe. The program was based on his visits to Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia in 1961 and 1962.116 Plath, the daughter of German-speaking parents, was interested especially in Alvarez’s attempt to understand how, as he wrote, “the concentration-camp experience has been coped with in imaginative terms.”117 Alvarez said he had “become obsessed with the concentration camps” in 1960—“they were all I read about while I was working myself up to my overdose….Later Sylvia Plath also became obsessed with the camps during her last months and we talked about them continually.”118 He remembered speaking with her about his visit to Auschwitz, in the fall of 1961. Concentration camp imagery and eastern European geography appeared in many of Plath’s October 1962 poems, most famously “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus.”119

  Plath was hardly alone in her use of Holocaust and Nazi imagery, for which she has been much criticized. As The New Poetry shows, the theme was in the air by the early 1960s. Peter Porter, George MacBeth, Anthony Hecht, and Geoffrey Hill all wrote poems around this time that referenced the Holocaust.120 MacBeth remembered Plath saying to him in 1960, “I see you have a concentration camp in your mind too.”121 Indeed, Plath had included Hecht’s “More Light! More Light!” in her 1961 American Poetry Now anthology. These poets did not, presumably, think they were exploiting or appropriating the Shoah. The Eichmann trial was ongoing, Hannah Arendt had published The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Erich Kahler The Tower and the Abyss (1958). Both books, which influenced Alvarez, argued that “mass evil accompanies ‘mass society.’ ”122 Arendt’s image of Lazarus to describe this phenomenon suggests that Alvarez may have recommended these books to Plath. The stakes had never been higher for poets, Alvarez argued in his anthology. The new poetry had a responsibility—not to “confess,” but to lift the veil; to bear witness to atrocity. Plath’s use of Holocaust imagery must be considered in this particular literary-historical context. In an Observer review on October 14, 1962, Alvarez picked out Vernon Scannell’s “Death of a Jew” and “Elegy,” about nuclear annihilation, for particular praise and dismissed Roy Fuller’s poetry as “laudably sensible.”123 Plath read this piece the week before she wrote “Lady Lazarus.” Her poem would be courageous and unflinching according to the terms Alvarez had helped set.

  In late September 1962, when Plath visited Alvarez in Hampstead, she was on the verge of writing some of the greatest poems of her life. Some of the poems she had written before she read The New Poetry contained graphic images of radium and fire, “destruction, annihilation, ash”—oblique comments on horror and extremity.124 But Alvarez’s anthology upped the stakes and nudged Plath further in the direction she was already moving. He “was sure” that the anthology had influenced her poems (“My guess is she was pissed off not to be in it”).125 Plath read many Ariel poems to Alvarez before she read them to Hughes, and she considered Alvarez’s advice when revising them.126 The imagery and themes in the Ariel poems corresponded almost uncannily with Alvarez’s concerns—the Holocaust, nuclear war, suicide, totalitarianism—which he discussed with her during her four visits to London in the fall of 1962.127

  * * *

  SYLVIA ARRIVED BACK at Court Green from London on September 26. Pain, anguish, and physical exhaustion were taking their toll. “To chemist for pills,” she wrote in her calendar that day.128 To Aurelia, she wrote of her troubles with Ted. “He is a vampire on my life, killing and destroying us all. We had all the world on tap, were even well off, now this insanity on his part will cost us everything.” She asked Aurelia to tell Mrs. Prouty about “the situation.” “It is difficult, I feel, & not my place, for I want nothing from her, but I would like her to know the truth, that I am deserted” with “a mountain of bills.”129 She probably hoped for financial help from Prouty, but she knew she could not depend on it. She instructed Aurelia to withdraw $500 from her Boston account and send it to her by check.

  She made an effort to visit friends every afternoon with the children to keep herself busy. But she began to suspect that the villagers’ attitudes toward her had changed now that she was living alone. She lashed out at Aurelia, with whom she was furious for telling Winifred about her “nervous breakdown.” “Any ordinary doctor treats a former ‘mental case’ as a 50% exaggerator.” Neither Winifred nor Dr. Webb believed, she said, that her temperature had reached 103° in late summer. And Ted, she said, had tried to convince Dr. Webb that she was “unstable” because of her jokes about “canine influenza.” “So you see how your blabbing has helped me.” Aurelia offered to visit, but Sylvia balked. “I do not want you to waste your money coming here, and I shall never come to America again.”130

  Miss Cartwright’s efficiency gave Sylvia hope—“she is a whiz, and I see what a heaven my life could be if I had a good live-in nanny.” Her dreams spilled out in letters—skiing in the Tyrol with Warren and Maggie, a Guggenheim in Rome with the children. She planned to write New Yorker stories and BBC plays in Ireland, though at the moment she was broke. Nearly all her Saxton grant money was gone, and the couple rarely had more than £300 in their checking account that summer. Ted had said she could take £300 from their joint account “as some recompense for my lost nanny-grant, to build over the cottage. This is a must.” If she were truly “lucky,” her writing would pay for a London flat and “fine free schools” for the children, and she would return to Court Green on holidays and during the summer. “I would starve intellectually here,” she told her mother.131

  Winifred found her a temporary nanny to come nine hours a week. She suggested that Sylvia work on her novel in the early morning when she couldn’t sleep, and go to bed early in the evening after she put the children down. Plath took this advice and worked slowly on her novel—just three pages on September 28, but better than nothing. “It is the evenings here, after the children are in bed, that are the worst, so I might as well get rid of them by going to bed,” she wrote Aurelia. “I feel pretty good in the morning, & my days are, thank goodness busy.” She still had no appetite, but she made a point to eat with Frieda in the kitchen. She forced herself to leave the house in the afternoon to see people “who know nothing, or at least who are darling, like the Comptons.” Her sleeping pills—“a necessary evil”—allowed her to “sleep deeply & then do some writing & feel energetic during the day if I drink lots of coffee right on waking.”132 She told Aurelia she would take them as long as she had to.

  Sylvia’s solicitor had told her that, since Ted had “deserted” her, she could deplete their joint savings, and she instructed her mother to send another $500 from their American account at Christmas. It would all go to renovating the cottage for the nanny. “I don’t break down with someone else around,” she confessed to Aurelia.133 To Kathy Kane, on September 29, she wrote, “The evenings are hell. I can’t sleep without pills. Well, if I can just live through this fall, & try to get my novel done somehow, then go to Ireland for the worst three months & come back with the daffodils, maybe this spring & summer will bring new life & new plans.”134

  She was more candid with Dr. Beuscher, whom she also wrote that day.

  I think I am dying. I am just despe
rate. Ted has deserted me, I have not seen him for 2 weeks….Tonight, utterly mad with this solitude, rain and wind hammering my hundred windows, I climbed to his study out of sheer homesickness to read his writing, lacking letters, and found them—sheafs of passionate love poems to this woman, this one woman to whom he has been growing more & more faithful, describing their orgasms, her ivory body, her smell, her beauty, saying in a world of beauties he married a hag, talking about “now I have hacked the octopus off at my ring finger.” Many are fine poems. Absolute impassioned love poems—and I am just dying.

  Even in the midst of heartbroken despondency, Plath was clear-eyed about the quality of her husband’s love poems to another woman. She was an artist before she was a wife.

  Compared to Assia, who was “beautiful,” she felt herself “haggish & my hair a mess & my nose huge & my brain brainwashed & God knows how I shall keep together….If I had someone living with me, I would not break down & talk to myself, cry, or just stare for hours.” She had considered “begging” her aunt Dot to come until she went to Ireland, which she hoped would help her heal. She had about $2,000 left in savings, and the house, which was in her and Ted’s names. But she worried continually about money, and felt that the British divorce laws were “so mean.” Still, she told Beuscher she wanted to remain friends with Hughes. “I mean my God my life with him has been a daily creation, new ideas, new thoughts, our mutual stimulation.” Plath still valued the artist in Hughes, even as he cavorted about in London and Spain, “passionately in love,” while she was “stuck with two infants.” But:

  Every view is blocked by a huge vision of their bodies entwined in passion across it, him writing immortal poems to her. And all the people of our circle are with them, for them. I have no friends left except maybe the Alan Sillitoes who are in Morocco for the year. How and where, O God do I begin? I can’t face the notion that he may want me to divorce him to marry her. I keep your letters like the Bible. How should I marshal my small money? For a nanny for a year, O God, for what. And how to stop my agony for his loved body and the thousand small assaults each day of small things, memories from each cup, where we bought it, how he still loved me then, then when it was not too late. Frieda just lies wrapped in a blanket all day sucking her thumb. What can I do? I’m getting some kittens. I love & need you.135

  There were no more façades or bluffs, but the lines between doctor and patient had become disastrously blurred. Dr. Beuscher hardly knew how to respond. She had already declined to offer Sylvia “paid sessions.” She later recalled that these fall letters had showed “that her depression had deepened and that there was a return of the somatic delusion (or only metaphors?) which she had had in her first illness….this was to the effect that her brain was turning to mush.” Sylvia’s letters had “alarmed” her, and she had thought, as she later admitted, of telling her to “get on the next plane and come to see me.”136 But she did not think that Sylvia should return home to her mother.137 She knew Plath did not have enough money to stay in a hotel, and she thought about inviting her to stay in her own guest room. But this would have gone against “the general protocol” for psychiatrists. “I thought of breaking that rule, but my own circumstances at the time were such that I knew it would be impossible.”138 Beuscher replied to Plath with a clear directive: Do not return to America.139

  On the same day that Sylvia wrote Dr. Beuscher, September 29, she finally admitted the truth to Mrs. Prouty. “Of course there is another woman, who has had so many abortions she can’t have children & is beautiful and barren and hates all I have created here.” She claimed that Ted had never wanted children but had not had the “courage” to say so. “I feel I am mourning a dead man, the most wonderful person I knew, and it is some stranger who has taken his name.” She hoped to finish her new novel, which she worked on in the mornings before the children woke, by midwinter. “It is funny, I think. At least I hope so.” The night with Prouty in London had been her “happiest night” “for months,” and was “the last happy night with Ted.” She would stay in England—“I love it here.” She asked Prouty to stay in touch. “I am so glad you have seen the dream I have made—as far as it got.”140

  Sylvia received Dr. Beuscher’s response to her previous letters on September 30. She advised Sylvia to go “the whole hog” and get a divorce. “You can certainly get the goods on him now while he is in such a reckless mood,” she said; it might be harder later, once he realized that she was trying to procure evidence. (The remark lends some credence to Assia’s claim, in October, that Sylvia had set detectives on her.) Beuscher reminded Sylvia to keep Ted out of her bed. She cited a practical reason for this: in America, she said, wives lost the right to sue for divorce if they slept with their husbands after they had admitted to adultery. She added, “The other reasons you already know.” She also advised Sylvia to cut contact with Ted’s family until the custody issue was settled. Beuscher had already been through a “bitter” divorce and lost custody of her two children.141 She was speaking from experience.

  Sylvia took Dr. Beuscher’s advice. “Bless you,” she wrote her. “There is a dignity & rightness to it. I was clinging to dead associations.” Sylvia did not want people thinking she would not allow Ted to remarry. “I do know he’s a lousy husband & father—to me at least. And I may, at 50, find a better.” She still loved Ted, but she could see a brighter path ahead. She was writing poems between five and eight a.m. each day before the children woke, “An immense tonic.” The divorce, she said, would be like “a clean knife. I am ripe for it now. Thank you, thank you.”142 She broke the news to Aurelia in early October:

  I am getting a divorce. It is the only thing. He wants absolute freedom, and I could not live out a life legally married to someone I now hate and despise. Ted is glad for a divorce, but I have to go to court, which I dread. The foulness I have lived, his wanting to kill all I have lived for six years by saying he was bored & stifled by me, a hag in a world of beautiful women just waiting for him, is only part of it. I am sure there will be a lot of publicity. I’ll just have to take it…there is no honor or future for me, chained to him….If I am divorced, he can never be unfaithful to me again, I can start a new life.

  Ted had agreed to pay a £1,000 yearly allowance, which was higher than the average yearly wage of £800. “I want no loans, no mercies. If Mrs. Prouty feels like any concrete help, fine. She can afford it, you can’t,” Sylvia wrote Aurelia. Ugly language surfaced: she worried that Hughes’s “working class family & sister” would tell him the allowance was too much. “I pray he will sign the maintenance before they get him to Jew us. The courts would give me nothing. They are bastards in England.” Yet she bristled when Aurelia sent $50. “For God’s sake, give me the feeling you are tamping down, taking care of yourself. Just sold a long New Yorker poem. I’ll get by.” She had heard that David Wevill had threatened Ted with a knife, then attempted suicide, and she worried that “he might come down here & do us in if Ted wasn’t found.”143 But she refused to ask Aurelia for help. “I haven’t the strength to see you for some time. The horror of what you saw & what I saw you see last summer is between us & I cannot face you again until I have a new life.” Although she said she would “move heaven & earth to have a visit from Aunt Dot, or Warren & Margaret,” moving back to America was out of the question. “I want to make my life in England. If I start running now I will never stop.”144

  31

  The Problem of Him

  Devon and London, October 1962

  In early October 1962, Sylvia wrote a warm, witty letter to Richard Murphy that bore no trace of her earlier bitterness. She reminisced about their visit to Yeats’s tower, “the first pure clear place” she had been “for some time.” She spoke of wintering in Ireland and joked that she might find a “good Catholic” to help her—“only I suppose I am damned already. Do they never forgive divorcées?” Plath described her decision without anger, connecting it to rebirth. “I am getting
a divorce, and you are right, it is freeing. I am writing for the first time in years, a real self, long smothered. I get up at 4 a.m. when I wake, & it is black, & write till the babes wake. It is like writing in a train tunnel, or God’s intestine.”1 Plath may well have been “damned” as a divorcée in early-1960s Britain. But excommunication empowered her to survey her new poetic landscape with the eyes of a fallen angel.

  Four days after returning from London—and Al Alvarez—on September 30, Plath wrote “A Birthday Present.” The poem reads like a grim, surreal mockery of her 1959 Roethkian “Poem for a Birthday,” whose themes of healing and resurrection now seemed quaint. Here, the poet longs to break through an artificial, cellophaned world to what is real and terrible: “Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.” The poem’s savage irony set the tone for what was to come—Plath’s grand non serviam.