Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  Four days later, her tone grew more alarming. She could not go home, she wrote Aurelia, but “must get out of England.” Ted had told her, she claimed, “how convenient it would be” if she were dead. “I need help very much just now,” she wrote. Her “old fever” had returned, and she had the chills. Could Maggie quit her job and fly over? She must make a new start. “I am a genius of a writer, I have it in me. I am up at 5 writing the best poems of my life, they will make my name. I could finish the novel in six weeks of daylong work.” She admitted to Aurelia that her first novel, “a secret,” was “finished & accepted.” She was working hard on her third novel (what would have been Double Exposure), and a fourth novel idea had come to her that very week. “Ted is dead to me, I feel only a lust to study, write, get my brain back & practice my craft….I must not go back to the womb or retreat.” She made plans for the future—“a year of creative writing lecturing in America & a Cape summer”—when the children were older and her second book of poems finished.46 Her aunt Dot had written to say the family would pay for her to come home at Christmas, but Sylvia could not face them. She asked if they would instead “chip in” to send Maggie to England.

  Do I sound mad? Taking or wanting to take Warren’s new wife? Just for a few weeks! How I need a free sister! We could go on jaunts, eat together, I have all the cleaning done & someone who’ll mind the babies 9 hours a week.

  I need someone from home. A defender.47

  She implored Aurelia to “have a family powwow & answer this as soon as possible!”48

  Plath’s urgent letter refers obliquely to themes she wrote about that day in “Medusa,” the companion poem to “Daddy.” Aurelia was now the target:

  Did I escape, I wonder?

  My mind winds to you

  Old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable,

  Keeping itself, it seems, in a state of miraculous repair.

  In any case, you are always there,…

  Aurelia is “a placenta // Paralysing the kicking lovers”; “Cobra light / Squeezing the breath from the blood bells / Of the fuschia.” The poem’s ending names the old source of conflict: “your wishes / Hiss at my sins. / Off, off, eely tentacle! // There is nothing between us.” Does “nothing between us” mean severance or closeness? In an earlier draft, Plath made clear she was playing with the double meaning of “Aurelia,” which also refers to a jellyfish genus: “That stellar jelly-head! / And a million little suckers loving me!”49 The double meaning of her name had been a private joke between Aurelia and Sylvia, but “Medusa” suggests that Aurelia’s judging gaze could turn her daughter to stone.50 It is a more personal poem than “Daddy,” the distance between speaker and poet smaller.

  Indeed, according to Suzette, Sylvia spoke bitterly about her relationship with Aurelia around this time, calling her a “demon mother” who was “controlling, demanding, difficult.”51 She lied to Suzette, perhaps for dramatic effect, saying that as a child she had gone on a seaside holiday and found her father disappeared when she returned. She claimed Aurelia had not told her about her father’s death until she was sixteen and that “Her burden as a child was to figure out why he was gone.”52 “The father was the dead hero…she hated her mother. She told me so many things about this mother to the point where she didn’t want to live anymore, the mother who had pushed her beyond endurance, who wanted her to win all the prizes, all of this. And so when Letters Home was published, I was absolutely stunned, because on days when I remember her being with me and telling me how awful her mother was, it was ‘Darling Mummy, I’ve met T. S. Eliot,’ like a cat bringing little tidbits.”53

  * * *

  IN HER POETRY, Plath found a way to use the emotional contradictions she experienced toward her mother and husband. The day after Plath finished “Medusa,” she wrote “The Jailer,” which imagines a woman “drugged and raped,” kept by a Bluebeard figure. As in “Daddy” and “Medusa,” the speaker fantasizes about liberation from a tyrant. “I die with variety— / Hung, starved, burned, hooked,” she writes. “I wish him dead or away. / That, it seems, is the impossibility. // That being free.”

  Plath’s first “independent act,” as she put it to Aurelia, was a weekend visit to the Kanes (now a “horrid couple”) in St. Ives, Cornwall, on October 13–14.54 She wrote about the visit in “Lesbos,” whose first line—“Viciousness in the kitchen!”—sets the shrill tone for the rest of the poem. Just as Plath had rewritten the traditional elegy the week before, she now rewrote the feminine domestic tableau. The kitchen is no longer the warm heart of the house; instead, it is a place where “potatoes hiss” and “there’s a stink of fat and baby crap.” “The smog of cooking, the smog of hell / Floats our heads,” Plath writes. “Lesbos” attacks sentimental feminine ideals of hospitality, friendship, and motherhood. At the poem’s end, the speaker leaves in a huff, vowing never to return:

  Now I am silent, hate

  Up to my neck,

  Thick, thick.

  Marvin Kane remembered Plath’s unhappiness during the visit. “There was still this clinging to this feeling of why-should-this-happen. One felt that the old hadn’t been swept away yet: there was still too much rubble there.” Kathy urged Sylvia to rebuild her life in London, where she had friends and important professional contacts.55

  On October 19, Plath wrote “Stopped Dead,” about Hughes’s wealthy uncle Walt—“Uncle, pants factory Fatso, millionaire.” She no longer trusted Ted’s relatives, and she decided that seeing Ted’s aunt Hilda, who had offered to come to Devon, “would be insanity.”56 Ted’s mother, meanwhile, wrote to Aurelia that she was “shattered by the events at Court Green in the last few months,” though looking back, she remembered that Ted had been “very quiet” during the couple’s last trip to Yorkshire. She had “great faith in Sylvia’s future happiness—she is a brilliant woman, famous in her own right, and a very strong assertive person.” She told Aurelia they would always be there for her daughter if she needed them. “If they could have kept together I felt there was nothing they could not do, and those two lovely children. It breaks my heart.”57 But Sylvia’s relationship with Ted’s family had deteriorated. That month, Sylvia called Edith a “Yorkshire-Jew skinflint.”58

  Neighbors in North Tawton were sympathetic. “Everybody here [is] very good to me,” Sylvia wrote home, “as if they knew or guessed my problem.”59 (Ted tried not to burn bridges. Before he moved out of Court Green that October, he inscribed first editions of The Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal, and Meet My Folks! to Winifred.)60 But as autumn wore on, the villagers’ well-meaning inquiries began to bother Sylvia. She told Elizabeth that she practically had to chase the rector away with a broom when he called to offer counsel. Villagers brought up her situation in the local shop and gossiped that she was not married, since she received mail under her maiden name.61 Sylvia was appalled by such small-mindedness. It was as if she had become the stigmatized divorcée of her story “Mothers.”

  Sylvia continued to rage against the Hugheses in ugly anti-Semitic language, though admitted to Aurelia in mid-October, “I have a fever now, so am a bit delirious. I live on sleeping pills, work from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m.”62 She cursed in letters to her mother as she never had before: her “bastardly” nanny, who refused to cook and charged double the standard fee, and “This bitch of Ted’s” who was “barren” from all her abortions. Ted was “an absolute bastard.” He had told her before he left Court Green that “it was not living in London that he hated, but living with me! too bad he didn’t tell me then!”63 She claimed that he wanted her to return to America, but she would not surrender so easily.

  Her relationship with Ted had reached a new low, marked by a disturbing refrain in her letters to Aurelia, Warren, and Dr. Beuscher: “Ted’s fantastic thoughtlessness, almost diabolic—he keeps saying he can’t understand why I don’t kill myself, it would be so convenient, & has certainly tried to make life hell enough…
.I think he actually counted on my committing suicide.”64 It is hard to judge the veracity of this claim in the heat of marital war, for Sylvia exaggerated in other letters. (For example, she claimed, outrageously, that the Hugheses would have her put her children “in an orphanage” while she worked so that Ted would not have to support her. In fact Edith Hughes wanted to see more, not less, of her grandchildren.)65 If Ted did utter such callous words, were they a response to Sylvia’s goading threats that she would kill herself if he left her? Or were they as heartless as Plath alleged? The context of such conversations is unrecoverable, and only Plath’s contemporary side of the story survives. But she repeated this claim often. Normally formal and decorous in her letters to Mrs. Prouty, she now let loose—on October 18 she told her of Assia’s abortions, Ted’s wish that she kill herself, his “meanest, most materialistic” working-class family, and so on. Aurelia and Mrs. Prouty would remember these letters, and, when the wound was raw, they would privately blame Ted for Sylvia’s death. Ted would blame himself.

  Sylvia regained her composure when she talked about her work. “Miraculously, and like some gift, my writing has leapt ahead and not deserted me in this hour of need,” she wrote to Prouty. “I have devotion to it—what else but my babies could get me up at 4 in the morning! I have, too, great joy in my work.”66 Prouty sent Sylvia an encouraging letter in November, admiring her “fighting spirit and endurance” and reassuring her that friends and relatives in America loved her. She told Sylvia they could talk on the phone, and she promised that she could fly over in just a few hours if necessary.67

  Sylvia wrote to Clarissa Roche on October 19 about her “flickery” 103° fever, Ted’s desertion, the divorce, her early-morning writing, and her need for companionship.68 The following day, she wrote “Fever 103°.”69 The letter proves that Plath’s real fever—and anger—provided a metaphorical backdrop to one of her most iconic poems. The opening line tackled a question women had wrestled with for generations: “Pure? What does it mean?” Plath explained in her BBC introduction, “This poem is about two kinds of fire—the fires of hell, which merely agonize, and the fires of heaven, which purify. During the poem, the first sort of fire suffers itself into the second.”70 Dante is the obvious influence, but this is a modern woman’s journey. The poem went through five drafts, all written on October 20, on the backs of chapter 3 of The Bell Jar, Hughes’s The Calm, and blank paper. Like “Daddy,” it borrows heavily from Anne Sexton, this time from “Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound.”

  “Fever 103°” proceeds through the feverish speaker’s disjointed imaginings—the smoke of hell becomes “Isadora’s scarves,” which threaten to choke the “weak”; a baby becomes an orchid turned white by Hiroshima’s radiation. The speaker says she has been “flickering off, on, off, on” for three days and nights. But she has gained clarity. “I am too pure for you or anyone. / Your body / Hurts me as the world hurts God.” The poem ends with a vision of the speaker rising, “a pure acetylene / Virgin / Attended by roses, // By kisses, by cherubim, / By whatever these pink things mean.” Her “selves” dissolve, “old whore petticoats” “To Paradise.” In her delirium, the speaker believes she is becoming pure again. Yet her wish to achieve purity through “dissolving” also makes an ironic point that would secure this poem a place in the feminist canon. “Fever 103°” foreshadows “Edge,” where a perfect woman is a dead woman.

  The furies Plath had released in her poems made their way into several letters home that fall. Alarmed, Aurelia had sent Winifred a telegram: “Please see Sylvia now and get woman for her. Salary paid here.” (Mrs. Prouty would contribute, too.)71 When Sylvia got wind of this plan she wrote an angry letter to Aurelia on October 21:

  Will you please, for goodness sake, stop bothering poor Winifred Davies! You have absolutely no right or reason to do this, and it is an endless embarrassment to me….It was incredibly foolish of you to send her a telegram….Why didn’t you wire me? And to imply that money is available from over in America is the worst thing you could do—it completely falsifies my hard-up predicament, everybody thinks Americans are rich and my problems are magnified. I can’t see how you could be so silly! Just like telling them I had a nervous breakdown when I have a fantastic job to get this stupid doctor to admit I have a fever even when he takes it on his office thermometer. This is one of the reasons I find your presence so difficult. These absolutely scatty things! My business in this town is my business, & for goodness sake learn to keep your mouth shut about it.72

  Aurelia’s assumption that her daughter needed to be managed from afar infuriated Sylvia, while her attempts to comfort with Victorian platitudes backfired. Sylvia continued,

  Don’t talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen—physical or psychological—wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there & knows the worst, just what it is like. It is much more help for me, for example, to know that people are divorced & go through hell, than to hear about happy marriages. Let the Ladies’ Home Journal blither about those.73

  Yet Aurelia was only trying to give her daughter what she asked for in letter after letter—a nanny. Indeed, Aurelia and Mrs. Prouty’s help in this regard would prove crucial to Sylvia’s well-being that fall.

  By this point, Sylvia had jettisoned decorum. She wrote to Dr. Beuscher that same day, October 21, about her “intensified…dislike” of Aurelia:

  She has identified so completely with me or what she thinks is me, which is really herself, that she can’t eat, sleep etc. What I see now I despise about my mother is her cravenness. Her wincing fear, her martyr’s smile. Never has she taken a bold move, she has always stuck quietly in one place, hoping noone [sic] would notice. Her letters to me are full of “one can’t afford one enemy,” “the world needs happy writing”. Basta!74

  Plath’s poetic and epistolary voices had begun to reflect each other. As she told Dr. Beuscher, “All during my 6 years of marriage I wondered what to write about, my poems seemed to me like fantastical stuffed birds under bell jars.” That had changed. “I am doing a poem a day, all marvelous, free, full songs.” Everything she had “experienced is on tap.”75

  She was aware that Ted was seeing other women now—he “takes them to hotels” and bars, she wrote Dr. Beuscher. Hughes, too, seems to have reached new levels of fury. There were no more reassurances from him, as there had been before Ireland, that he would find his way back to her and the children. The couple was now at war:

  He told me openly he wished me dead, it would be convenient, he could sell the house, take all the money & Frieda, told me I was brainless, hideous, had all sorts of flaws in making love he had never told me, and even two years ago he had not wanted to live with me….Why in God’s name should the killing of me be so elaborate, and the torture so prolonged!…Two years of hypocrisy, just waiting for the right bed to fall in? I can’t believe it. It just seems insane to me….He was furious I didn’t commit suicide, he said he was sure I would!…He says he thinks I am “dangerous” toward him now. Well, I should think so!76

  Sylvia admitted to Dr. Beuscher that, though she got a certain satisfaction from “hanging out a clean laundry in the apple orchard,” she hated housework—“domesticity was a fake cloak for me.” She joked about sailing off to Lesbos, but told Beuscher she was not attracted to women and—still—could barely imagine herself attracted to anyone who wasn’t Ted: “few men are both beautiful physically, tremendous lovers & creative geniuses as Ted is.” Incredibly, she now thought “the ethic of faithfulness, is essentially boring. Ted made much better love while he was having these other affairs & the tart in me appreciated this.” But philanderers were boring too. Though she longed to see the “one man” who had attracted her as much as Ted (probably Sassoon), the only option was never to marry again—to be her own woman. “I am so bloody proud & parti
cular.” She would write novels that would fund a life of plays, dinners, and affairs with “men friends” in London. “I want my career, my children, and a free supple life. I hate this growing-pot as much as Ted did.” Yet she had enough self-awareness to understand the psychological risks and perils of a future alone. “I guess I haven’t really been ‘cured,’ ” she told Dr. Beuscher. “I seem to have acted, in a different key, my mother’s relation with my father—and my joy in ‘getting rid’ of Ted is a dangerous one.”77

  Sylvia loved her children passionately, yet she admitted to her mother, “I have so much writing in me, the children are a kind of torture when on my neck all day.” The villagers were friendly, but “everybody eventually comes round to ‘Where is Mr. Hughes.’ I hate Ted with a passion.” The painting, the sewing, the cooking, the planting—it had all been for naught: “Years of my life wasted,” she told Aurelia on October 21.78 That day Plath wrote “Amnesiac,” which she told Mrs. Prouty was “about a man who forgets his wife & children & lives in the river of Lethe. Guess who!”79

  And yet she was almost cheerful in a letter she wrote on October 22 to Ruth Fainlight, reminiscing about how they had talked of “less-famous, or even infamous wives of famous husbands.”

  Psychologically, Ruth, I am fascinated by the polarities of muse-poet and mother housewife. When I was “happy” domestically I felt a gag down my throat. Now that my domestic life, until I get a permanent live-in girl, is chaos, I am living like a spartan, writing through huge fevers & producing free stuff I had locked in me for years. I feel astounded & very lucky. I kept telling myself I was the sort that could only write when peaceful at heart, but that is not so, the muse has come to live, now Ted is gone, and my God! what a sweeter companion.80