Red Comet

by Heather Clark

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  THAT OCTOBER, Sylvia reread D. H. Lawrence’s Complete Poems, which Ted had given her on the day she signed her contract for The Colossus in 1960. She underlined much of “The Mess of Love” and wrote “Oct. 22, 1962,” in the margin. (“We’ve made a great mess of love / Since we made an ideal of it.”) She dated and starred several other poems, including “Lies” (“Lies are not a question of false fact / but of false feeling and perverted justice”), “Poison” (“What has killed mankind…is lies”), “Commandments” (“faked love has rotted our marrow”), “Laughter” (“Listen to people laughing / and you will hear what liars they are / or cowards”), and “Retort to Jesus” (“And whoever forces himself to love anybody / begets a murderer in his own body”).81 Lawrence’s poems, with their images of love, truth, lies, poison, Lucifer, moons, knife edges, and rising phoenixes, gave Plath plenty of material to consider the day before she wrote the first drafts of “Lady Lazarus.”82

  The poem, more ironic than “Daddy,” explores similar surrealist territory. Plath’s BBC introduction suggests her admiration for her creation: “The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first. She is the phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a good, plain, very resourceful woman.”83 Lady Lazarus seeks to exploit her audience’s love of the freak show: “Peel off the napkin / O my enemy. / Do I terrify?— // The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?” No image is too grotesque or offensive for Plath—bad breath, corpses, Nazi lampshades made of human skin, maggots on wounds. The speaker, who taunts in irregularly rhyming tercets, performs a striptease before a “peanut-crunching crowd,” regaling them with tales of her previous suicides, promising them the ultimate spectacle—her own death. Finally she reaches her famous crescendo:

  Dying

  Is an art, like everything else.

  I do it exceptionally well.

  I do it so it feels like hell.

  I do it so it feels real.

  I guess you could say I’ve a call.

  Plath had been intrigued by female martyrs at least since seeing Joan of Arc with Richard Sassoon in New York City. In the poem, Lady Lazarus knows that she has already become a relic. “And there is a charge, a very large charge / For a word or a touch / Or a bit of blood // Or a piece of my hair or clothes.” The lines are uncanny—as if Plath foresaw her own afterlife. But in the moment, she was answering back to Hughes, offering him exactly what he had conjured up in his early poem “The Woman With Such High Heels She Looked Dangerous”: a woman “painted for the war-path,” who kills men. Indeed, Hughes could be describing Lady Lazarus when he writes:

  And when the sun gets at her it is as if

  A windy blue plume of fire from the earth raged upright,

  Smelling of sulphur, the contaminations of the damned,

  The refined fragile cosmetic of the dead.84

  Hughes thought that Plath possessed occult powers, an identity she takes up ironically in her poem when she plays with the idea of witch burning and witchcraft, answering back, perhaps, to Hughes’s famous poem “The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar.” Plath’s grotesque femme fatale is in part a rebuke to Hughes’s obsession with Gravesian motifs; as Plath’s friend Jillian Becker remembered, “Ted who Knew [sic] desired her to be Robert Graves’ Muse-Witch-Goddess.”85

  By the end of the poem, Lady Lazarus seems indeed to have died again as she transforms herself into a Jewish Holocaust victim. The lines are meant to shock:

  Ash, ash—

  You poke and stir.

  Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—

  A cake of soap,

  A wedding ring,

  A gold filling.

  Herr God, Herr Lucifer

  Beware

  Beware.

  Out of the ash

  I rise with my red hair

  And I eat men like air.

  What is one to make of this woman ambiguously poised between the mighty Classical heroines of myth and the doomed victims of the twentieth century’s greatest conflagration? Like the speakers of “Daddy,” “Stings,” “Fever 103°,” and “Purdah,” Lady Lazarus seeks revenge against her patriarchal tormenters. Yet there is something cartoonish about her—a whiff of cinematic melodrama that mocks Hughes’s obsession with the White Goddess and the femme fatale.

  Plath was also drawing on current events. The October 21, 1962, edition of The Observer carried articles about the mass suicide of Jewish martyrs at Masada; Anna Kindynis’s haunting charcoal drawings of World War II famine victims; unethical drug experiments on humans; the Berlin talks between John F. Kennedy and the Soviet foreign minister, Nikita Khrushchev; and American atomic bomb tests. Indeed, as the critics Paul Giles and Robin Peel have noted, the worst of the Cuban missile crisis occurred during the last two weeks of October 1962; the period from the 22nd to the 27th marked the most terrifying phase of brinksmanship between Kennedy and Khrushchev, when Americans and Russians confronted the prospect of nuclear annihilation on a daily basis. Plath’s letters during this period reflect more personal anxieties, but she must have been all too aware of the apocalyptic threat on the horizon. The despair and fury Plath felt toward Hughes was likely exacerbated by this life-threatening geopolitical reality. “It is easy to forget how all-consuming the fear of nuclear catastrophe was,” Giles notes, “and Ariel speaks cogently to this condition of terror and paralysis.”86

  War, martyrdom, suffering women, nuclear annihilation, sinister doctors, and male political leaders—all of this found its way into “Lady Lazarus.” If Plath could not rise up in her real life and exact her revenge, she could do it in her poems.

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  —

  On October 23, after writing the first few drafts of “Lady Lazarus,” Sylvia again apologized to her mother in a familiar refrain. “Please forgive my grumpy sick letters of last week. The return of my fever, the hideous nanny from whom I expected help, and my awareness of the ‘Hughes position’ combined to make me feel the nadir had been reached. Now, everything is, by comparison, miraculous. I hardly dare breathe.”

  The miracle was a twenty-two-year-old local nurse in training named Susan O’Neill-Roe, whom Winifred had found for Sylvia. She was a natural with the children, whom she watched daily from eight thirty a.m. to six p.m., and full of energy; “the difference in my life is a wonder,” Sylvia wrote. After Susan retreated to her second-floor bedroom and the children were in bed, Sylvia took a tray of supper upstairs and ate at her desk while she worked, “surrounded by books, photos, cartoons & poems pinned to the wall.”87 Her appetite returned, her health improved, and she caught up on professional obligations. “I feel, with health, I can face anything, and am in excellent spirits. This nurse is so capable & sweet!” she wrote Mrs. Prouty.88

  Susan’s presence righted Sylvia’s life. Winifred reported to Aurelia that Sylvia was now “full of the joys of spring.”89 Sylvia wrote of her study to Mrs. Prouty, “this quiet center at the middle of the storm. If I have this, the rest of my life will settle into pleasant lines.” She placed brilliant red poppies and dark blue cornflowers on her desk alongside Warren and Maggie’s wedding portrait. “I shall forge my writing out of these difficult experiences—to have known the bottom, whether mental or emotional is a great trial, but also a great gift.”90 She felt she was undergoing the symbolic rebirth she was describing in her poems.

  Susan indeed remembered that Sylvia seemed mostly happy throughout the six weeks she worked at Court Green; she did not detect any extreme emotional states, as Winifred had. (Though she noticed Sylvia had a strange habit of locking her room whenever she left it.) Sylvia seemed very loving toward the children and tended to them immediately if they cried in the night. Susan never saw Sylvia weep. On the contrary, she seemed full of energy and plans, taking control of her
life in small but significant ways. Sylvia had given up lighting fires in the drawing room when Ted left—she told Susan hauling firewood was a husband’s job—but now the two women collected the wood and enjoyed great, crackling fires in the evening. Together they visited St. Ives with the children, picnicking near the sea. Sylvia bought herself pottery and jewelry in one of the local shops.91

  Since Susan had arrived, Sylvia had written most of “Lady Lazarus” and “Cut,” about a recent kitchen accident. Plath had nearly severed her thumb with a knife, an event she described in shape-shifting quartets: “What a thrill— / My thumb instead of an onion.” A cascade of violent, male metaphors set within a feminine kitchen interior follow: the thumb becomes a “hinge,” “hat,” scalped pilgrim, Redcoat soldier, “Kamikaze man,” Russian babushka, and, finally, “Dirty girl, / Thumb stump.”92 The speaker shames herself for the unfeminine “thrill” she feels as she watches the blood jet, which she transforms into poetry. The poetic speaker seems fascinated by her injury, but Susan remembered that in actuality Sylvia had been very “frightened” by it. The cut itself took a long time to heal; Sylvia told Susan the local doctor had “botched” her treatment with “bad stitching.”93 Suzette Macedo recalled that when Sylvia stayed with them in London in early November, her hand was covered in a “stinky” and “dirty” bandage. The wound looked gangrenous. “She said it was like a fever, she was just writing these poems….All this fever of creation, she was in a terribly heightened state.”94 Suzette noted Sylvia was not just speaking in metaphors—she was physically feverish from her infected wound. And yet she hardly seemed aware of the dirty bandage, so confident did she seem of new beginnings.

  With Susan at the helm, Sylvia wasted no time planning another London trip. She wanted to see Al Alvarez, Clem Moore’s father, and Patric Dickinson from the Royal Court Theatre, who was organizing a poetry festival and wanted her to help present the festival’s American night. Dickinson’s invitation made her optimistic about the glorious London life that awaited, and she used a birthday check from Aurelia to buy a stylish dress at a posh local shop. She would, she wrote home, have “the Salon that I will deserve,” and her children would converse with London’s greatest minds.95 She wrote Clarissa Roche, urging her to visit Court Green from November 15 to 20, when Susan would be away on holiday. She asked Clarissa to bring a copy of Sappho with her (“I must read her—a fellow lady poet!”). Clarissa had hinted in her previous letter that Ted may have become jealous of Sylvia’s talent, and that his decision to leave was based on “ego.” Sylvia agreed. “Ever since I wrote my novel for example (which Ted never read) Ted has been running down the novel as a form—something ‘he would never bother to write.’ ”96

  Finally released from Sisyphean domestic drudgery, Sylvia grew more confident about her future, and she resented Aurelia’s doubts about her chosen course. “For goodness sake, stop being so frightened of everything, Mother!” she wrote on October 25. “Almost every word in your letter is ‘frightened’! One thing I want my children to have is a bold sense of adventure, not the fear of trying something new.” The Irish winter would be no worse than winter in Devon. Now that Susan had agreed to accompany her to Ireland, Sylvia’s optimism returned. She was eating three healthy meals a day—“Probably a lot more than you do!” Aurelia had admitted that she felt helpless to protect her daughter. Sylvia’s response was brisk. “Now don’t you feel helpless any more. I am helped very much by letters, the birthday checks. If Ted gives me £1,000 I shall manage very well, with just an ‘au pair,’ the car & his insurance to pay.” She added that she was making headway in her riding lessons, “ ‘rising to the trot’ very well now….My riding mistress thinks I’m very good.”97

  Warren and Maggie had offered to come to England, but with Susan’s help there was no need of that now. Sylvia was resigned to seeing Ted’s friends during her upcoming trip to London and would hold her head high. She believed in “going through & facing the worst, not hiding from it.” Two days after writing “Lady Lazarus,” she told Aurelia, again, “Now stop trying to get me to write about ‘decent courageous people’—read the Ladies Home Journal for those! It’s too bad my poems frighten you—but you’ve always been afraid of reading or seeing the world’s hardest things—like Hiroshima, the Inquisition or Belsen.”98 After this letter, she would not write to Aurelia for almost two weeks—and then even more infrequently as autumn turned to winter.

  Some of the anger in this letter comes through in “The Tour,” which Plath wrote on the same day she wrote her mother, October 25. The poem concerns a maiden aunt shocked by the speaker’s unkempt appearance and lifestyle.

  Toddle on home to tea now in your flat hat.

  It’ll be lemon tea for me,

  Lemon tea and earwig biscuits—creepy-creepy.

  You’d not want that.

  The poem takes aim at the symbols of passive femininity—maiden aunts, reading glasses, and tea, which the hostess-speaker fails to serve—as well as Marianne Moore, who had criticized Plath’s work and asked Hughes to remove poems with sexual references from The Hawk in the Rain. The speaker dares to expose herself unguarded, “in slippers and housedress with no lipstick!” Her house is “a bit of a mess!” Like “Lesbos” and “Cut,” “The Tour” is both a fantasy of release from oppressive feminine roles quietly enforced by other women and an aesthetic manifesto (“creepy-creepy”) proudly at odds with Moore’s (“You’d not want that.”). Plath found in Alvarez’s war against gentility a kind of proto-feminism, for women had the most to gain—and the most to lose—by shedding decorum.

  Mrs. Prouty was relieved to hear that Sylvia had dropped her request that Warren and Maggie fly to England. “For it troubled me that she could seriously ask it,” she told Aurelia. “It seemed so unreasonable that I feared perhaps her grief & despair & shock of Ted’s desertion had affected her in some mental way beyond her control.” She agreed with Aurelia that the Ireland trip was a terrible idea—Sylvia had no friends or “connections who would keep her in a crisis,” no doctor for herself or the children. But she knew that there was no way either of them could change Sylvia’s mind if she was determined. “I know how you go on suffering. But it may come out all right,” Mrs. Prouty told Aurelia.99 She wrote Sylvia that she would pay for a permanent nanny, but Sylvia gently rebuffed the offer in an October 25 letter; she could manage the $15 a week from her own New Yorker earnings, and with Ted’s alimony she would stay afloat. Prouty ignored her and sent a $500 check ($4,300 in 2020 dollars) in late October to cover Susan’s salary, and told Sylvia to spend the previous $300 she had sent on new clothes that would boost her morale.100 If there is an unsung hero in Sylvia Plath’s life, it is Olive Prouty.

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  —

  On October 27, Sylvia turned thirty. She wrote two poems that day: “Poppies in October” and “Ariel,” one of her best.101 “Poppies in October” juxtaposes alarming images of emergency—carbon monoxide, a woman in an ambulance—with the disquieting presence of poppies and cornflowers. There is something of Lowell’s “My mind’s not right,” from “Skunk Hour” here (“O my God, what am I”), but the poem is more impressionistic.102 “Ariel” strikes a more exuberant note. There are three handwritten drafts, followed by three typed drafts. Most of these drafts are dated October 27. Plath used fresh paper for “Ariel”—there is nothing on the backside—which suggests that the poem she sat down to write on her thirtieth birthday was too important for scrap paper.

  Plath’s BBC introduction to “Ariel” is spare: “Another horseback riding poem, this one called ‘Ariel,’ after a horse I’m especially fond of.”103 The poem combines images of Plath’s recent horseback rides with her memory of a runaway journey on a faster horse at Cambridge years before, which she wrote about in “Whiteness I Remember.” In reality, Ariel was an old and slow mare, but her name was full of Shakespearean possibility; she is also Pegasus, long associated with poets an
d poetry in Greek mythology.

  “Ariel” begins on the moors at dawn with a stanza full of assonance and sibilance:

  Stasis in darkness.

  Then the substanceless blue

  Pour of tor and distances.

  The ride begins, and the mare becomes “God’s lioness”:

  How one we grow,

  Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow

  Splits and passes, sister to

  the brown arc

  Of the neck I cannot catch

  The poet-speaker invokes Lady Godiva, who rode naked through Coventry to protest her husband’s ill-treatment of the townsfolk. “White / Godiva, I unpeel— / Dead hands, dead stringencies.” The allusion suggests female rebellion against male perfidy, as Lady Godiva’s decision was prompted by her husband’s dare. Plath may have imagined herself reenacting this dare in “Ariel,” stepping up to Hughes’s poetic challenge and proving to him that in her metaphoric nakedness she is empowered rather than humiliated. Indeed, Plath wrote and double-starred the date, “27 October,” into her copy of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet by John Berryman, suggesting that the American poetry collection, with its considerations of infidelity, was an influence on “Ariel.”

  There are other allusions to Hughes throughout “Ariel,” which draws on his earlier poems “Phaetons,” “Constancy,” “The Horses,” and, most explicitly, “The Thought-Fox.” By the fall of 1962, “The Thought-Fox” had become Hughes’s most famous poem. Hughes spoke of his pride in it during a 1961 BBC broadcast: “long after I am gone, as long as a copy of the poem exists, every time anyone reads it the fox will get up somewhere out in the darkness and come walking towards them.”104 “The Thought-Fox” established Hughes’s reputation as an animal poet who tracked his creatures through his poems with the surefooted instinct of a hunter.