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SYLVIA’S LONDON HIGH did not last long. She returned to Court Green to find a letter, dated November 5, from Howard Moss at The New Yorker rejecting all ten of the new poems she had sent him: “A Birthday Present,” “The Detective,” “The Courage of Quietness,” “A Secret,” “For a Fatherless Son,” “The Bee Meeting,” “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” “Stings,” “The Swarm,” and “Wintering.” He also rejected “Poppies in October,” “Ariel,” and “Purdah.” Wasting no time, Plath sent her old beau Peter Davison “Fever 103°,” “Nick and the Candlestick,” “Purdah,” “A Birthday Present,” “The Jailer,” “The Detective,” “The Courage of Quietness,” “Lesbos,” “Eavesdropper,” and the bee poems.
On November 8, just after returning from London, Sylvia promptly wrote to another influential male ally, Bill Merwin. Dido had refused to speak to Sylvia when she had called in August with questions about a child psychiatrist for Frieda, and she felt that she needed to secure Bill’s support—especially now that she was moving back to London. “I was simply stunned. Ted has since told me that Dido is no friend of mine & to forget her. My one thought was—was it an illusion, an hypocrisy, all that love & friendship I thought was for me as well as Ted?” She told Merwin of her plans to move to London and hire an au pair so that she could write. “Domesticity always bored me, & I will simply buy myself a foreign girl….All I want is my own life—not to be anybody’s wife, but to be free to travel, move, work, be without check.” She still thought Ted “a genius & the best living poet,” and she wished him “joy”—“Ted is getting me writing jobs, I am delighted to be free of the need to crop my life to his will or that of any man.” But she was filled with sadness that Bill might side with Dido against her. “Must I give you up too?…Was I wrong in thinking you were real as well?”97
Hughes also wrote to Merwin in the fall of 1962:
Sylvia’s much better off now—it’s thrown her onto her better self. There are definitely two of those selves. The main difficulty is Frieda, I wouldn’t like to lose her….Your judgment of what was happening to my writing was exactly what I thought too. Marriage wasn’t entirely to blame. The hidden persuaders of Englishness were part of it…There were other troubles, which may now be over. Anyway, I’m finding it much easier to write.98
In London, Sylvia had purchased the book Dr. Beuscher had recommended—The Art of Loving, by Erich Fromm. She inscribed it on November 9, and began reading. Sylvia saw herself reflected in Fromm’s idea of “idolatrous love,” which was particularly influential. She starred and underlined Fromm’s words:
If a person has not reached the level where he has a sense of I-ness, rooted in the productive unfolding of his own powers, he tends to “idolize” the loved person. He is alienated from his own powers and projects them into the loved person, who is worshipped as the summum bonum, the bearer of all love, all light, all bliss. In this process he deprives himself of all sense of strength, loses himself in the loved one instead of finding himself.99
She also underlined passages about sadism, masochism, symbiosis, submission, womanizing, creative partnerships, spousal and maternal dependency, rebirth, and romantic love. Fromm suggested meditative exercises, which Sylvia practiced to calm herself: she should sit with eyes closed, relaxed, let her thoughts go, and “try to have a sense of ‘I’; I = myself, as the center of my powers, as the creator of my world.” Plath heavily underlined “To have faith requires courage.”100
By early November the phone at Court Green was working again, and Sylvia was back in touch with friends and family in America.101 Mrs. Prouty, concerned, phoned as soon as she could. David and Elizabeth Compton visited Sylvia frequently. “How do you deal with somebody who’s bereaved?” David had wondered. “I was cautious about being very jolly. I never saw her weeping or anything, but there were low days when it was a good thing that we were able to take the children unobtrusively….One goes on, doesn’t one, puts one foot in front of the other. You have to cope. And she did it pretty well, I think.”102 Clarissa Roche remembered the chill and fog as she alighted from the Devon train with her month-old infant on November 17. Sylvia was waiting for her, holding a huge umbrella that she steadied with both hands. “As I climbed down from the platform, she hugged me and said over and over, ‘You’ve saved my life.’ ”
Clarissa, a fellow American mother whom Sylvia had known at Smith—also married to a British poet—stayed for four nights. She thought of herself as an “anchor.” They spoke of Sylvia’s first suicide attempt; Sylvia told Clarissa her “iron will to live” had “saved her.” “Death himself knocked her down and the cold concrete of her grave clawed her face, but she won the day and was there—alive, valiant, triumphant. I shall never forget her eloquence or her pride.” They spoke, too, about “treading the water of sleepless nights, ‘nappies,’ near-poverty, spilled porridge, hills of laundry, loneliness, and the cold.” Yet they remained “willful about our love for England.”103 Sylvia never spoke to Clarissa about leaving, though she spoke harshly of Ted, calling him “a traitor.” She ridiculed the Hugheses—“gross, ill-mannered shopkeepers”—and complained about Ted’s lack of manners. Her family, she said, cared deeply about “manners, gentility, respectability.”104 She “romanticized” her father, a “self-made man” who had walked off the boat not knowing any English and ended up at Harvard. She told Clarissa about their closeness—the walks they had taken together and how he had spoken to her as if she were an adult. Sylvia waxed lyrical, too, about her “gypsy grandmother,” probably her maternal, orphaned, Viennese great-grandmother. Sylvia had also told Suzette around this time that she had “gypsy and Jewish blood.”105
To Clarissa, Sylvia did not seem “heartbroken” over Ted. “Just plain bloody mad. And very very vengeful.” Sylvia said Ted had beaten her and caused her miscarriage, and that he had pulled a sink out of a hotel room wall when he was with Assia. All of this was told “in so dramatized a fashion” that Clarissa was skeptical. Sylvia thought that he was seeing other women besides Assia, and suspected that neighbors were gossiping about her, even peering into her windows.
During that visit Sylvia took particular pleasure in deflating literary reputations; she told Clarissa that Mrs. Prouty was “a bit of a nit. The general tone was, ‘Didn’t she realize what a fool she was, having written an absolutely terrible book, and trying to compensate for it all those years by giving her money to Smith girls.’ ” This was not the first time Sylvia had criticized Prouty; Smith friends remembered her occasionally mocking Prouty’s “soap opera” novels. Though Sylvia was unquestionably grateful to Prouty, she also chafed against the sense of obligation she felt toward her. Prouty had paid most of Plath’s Smith tuition and all of her McLean expenses, and continued to keep Plath afloat with large checks. Sylvia knew she was lucky to have such a generous benefactor, but part of her resented having to accept Prouty’s money, for it meant proving herself worthy, over and over. In this way, Sylvia’s relationship with Prouty mirrored—though to a lesser extent—her relationship with Aurelia. Plath’s resentment helps explain why, in The Bell Jar, her portrait of Philomena Guinea, based on Mrs. Prouty, is less sympathetic than Prouty deserved.
Mrs. Prouty was not the only writer Sylvia attacked as she played the cynic for Clarissa. She spoke too of Stephen Spender, “what an ass he was….And she thought Eliot was such a fool for having taken Ted up. She said it wasn’t because of Ted’s poetry but because he rather fancied him.” Sylvia mocked Ted for having played up his Yorkshire accent when they had returned to England, “playing the great country boy. And Eliot fell for it.”106 She felt Ted played to gay writers in London, too, the ones who were always sidling up to her, saying, “Oh, aren’t you lucky? He’s just like a great cowboy!”107 She told Clarissa that Alvarez was “her closest friend in London. And that they spent hours and hours talking about suicide. But as far as his knowledge of poetry went, he was absolutely dismiss
ed out the window. She would laugh and laugh and laugh….What fools they all were and how easily she could con them.”108 Shocking as Plath’s words sound, this ruthlessness, which Aurelia never forgave or understood, served Plath well in her art.
Clarissa found Sylvia to be a conscientious but detached mother. When Frieda began looking through Clarissa’s purse, Sylvia swiftly snatched it away and plucked out a bottle of iron pills that might have harmed the children. She called Frieda and Nicholas her “bunnies” but never hugged them in Clarissa’s presence. They were observant and clever, but quiet. Clarissa sensed that Sylvia preferred an orderly, Germanic approach over rambunctious American child-rearing. Elizabeth noticed the same tendency—Sylvia seemed “careful and controlled” with the children, rather than “warm and affectionate.” Frieda was not allowed to eat any candy, only raisins, as Sylvia did not want her to “ruin” her teeth.109 The children were fed, bathed, and put to bed on schedule, but, said Clarissa, “I don’t remember any climbing on laps. Certainly the silence I remember.” Still, Sylvia spoke of wanting more children, and they joked about a rich Polish army officer Clarissa knew who might be willing to father Sylvia’s future brood. “She’d be kept in enormous style.” Clarissa was joking, and became alarmed when Sylvia started to take the idea seriously. Sylvia said she was “warm-blooded…sexually she was ten-up on Ted.”110 Episodes like this, as well as her paranoia about the villagers watching her, made Clarissa realize that Sylvia needed help, and she tried as best she could to offer it. She speculated that Susan O’Neill-Roe’s kindness and hard work had saved Sylvia from suicide that fall.
Clarissa’s visit raised Sylvia’s spirits; she wrote to Aurelia on November 19 that she was “fantastically busy.” A hairdresser began setting her hair once a week in Winkleigh. She spent her evenings playing tarot with Winifred and other local women, and dining with Susan and her parents at their home in nearby Belstone. There she saw the Liberal Party candidate Mark Bonham Carter, who was, Sylvia noted, the son of Lady Violet Bonham Carter—herself the daughter of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith—and the head of Collins publishing house. (Elizabeth said Mark Bonham Carter was devastated after Plath’s death. She claimed that Plath had spent time with him in London in 1962–63. Clarissa said Sylvia had told her, during her Devon visit, that she was “leaning on” Mark Bonham Carter.)111 Sylvia was “riding twice a week now,” she wrote Aurelia.112 “I got off the leading rein on my horse just before I left & have had some heavenly rides under the moors.”113 She was reviewing biographies and children’s books for the New Statesman and was delighted to see some of her older reviews “take” as blurbs on book jackets.114 A Norwegian radio station wanted to translate and broadcast Three Women, while Peter Davison wrote full of praise for her new poems. He recognized something in them Howard Moss had not. “How good to see a new batch of poems! I find them quite extraordinary, and they strike a new note that I haven’t heard in your work before.” His “favorite was ‘In the Bee Box,’ ” which he said “fairly hums with fright.”115 Although he sent seven of the poems back, he kept the rest. (The Atlantic would publish “The Arrival of the Bee Box” and “Wintering” in April 1963.) Plath told her correspondents she would finish “novel after novel” once she found a nanny.116
Her second book of poems was now finished—the last poem to be included was “Death & Co.,” written on November 14. She knew they were her strongest yet. She began to negotiate for higher payments from the BBC; when a production company offered just two guineas to record “Mushrooms,” Plath balked. She thought it “a tiny sum. Or am I just sounding like an American capitalist.”117 She asked Heinemann to negotiate for five guineas, if possible. Sylvia knew what Ted was paid by the BBC and knew a male poet would have been offered more. She told Aurelia she had “neglected all my own talent, & thank God I have discovered it in time to make something of it!” But, with her shrewd understanding of literary politics, she still tried to capitalize on Hughes’s fame. The white-hot rage had died down enough for the two poets to discuss career matters, and Ted advised her to pitch a story about her American childhood to the BBC. When she did so, she referred to Hughes twice in her letter as “my husband.”118
In the past Sylvia had tried to cozy up to male writers. Now she began reaching out to literary women in London like Doris Lessing, whom she met through Suzette Macedo, and Stevie Smith, whose address Peter Orr had passed on to her. Plath wrote Smith on November 19 that she had been listening to some British Council recordings of her poems and had become “a desperate Smith-addict.” She had been trying “for ages” to find Smith’s A Novel on Yellow Paper—a title she admired given her own fetish for pink-colored paper—but lived far from bookshops in Devon. She asked Smith if she would “come to tea or coffee when I manage to move—to cheer me on a bit. I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time.”119 Smith replied kindly three days later, offering to send Plath her novel and agreeing that they should meet when Plath arrived in London.120
If only she could spend her winters in Yeats’s London house and her summers in Devon, she wrote to Ruth Fainlight that November. She had nearly wept on her London trips at the sight of museums and cafés. Convicts had escaped from the Dartmoor prison that month, and she was fearful—she kept “an apple parer ready & the door bolted.”121 In North Tawton she carried around coal buckets and ash cans “like a navvy.” Yet she took “terrific pride” in keeping the great stove blazing overnight; Ted, she claimed, had never learned. In Devon she had her bees and her garden and her riding. She invited Ruth to Court Green in April while Alan Sillitoe planned to spend the month in Russia. Ruth began making arrangements, including a visa for her Moroccan nanny and a driver’s license for herself.122
During the last half of November, the exuberance of “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” gave way to quieter, more anxious poems about Assia, Ted, and the children. Plath returned again to the old theme of barrenness. Once, Plath’s vilification of barrenness had been a conceptual protest against the idea that an intellectual woman must be bloodless. Now such vilification was less philosophical: Ted had left her for a glamorous, beautiful woman with no children and a history of abortions. Sylvia told others during this time that he was surrounding himself with “barren” women—Assia, Olwyn, Dido Merwin, Susan Alliston. She wrote to Harriet Cooke in Ireland, the wife of the painter Barrie Cooke, whom she had met in London, that the divorce would free her from “the sort of women who live from abortion to abortion & facelift to facelift—not my sort at all.”123
Assia was clearly the model for “The Fearful,” which Plath finished on November 16:
The thought of a baby—
Stealer of cells, stealer of beauty—
She would rather be dead than fat,
Dead and perfect, like Nefertit,
Hearing the fierce mask magnify
The silver limbo of each eye
Where the child can never swim,
Where there is only him and him.
If Plath could not have “him,” her rival could not have his children. “Childless Woman,” finished two weeks later on December 1, is a dramatic monologue in which the unhappy speaker imagines her legacy as “roads bunched to a knot.” The childless woman is “Spiderlike”: “I spin mirrors, / Loyal to my image.” Plath would recall the “dead and perfect” theme again in “The Munich Mannequins,” composed in late January 1963: “Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children / Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb.” Deadly perfection, childlessness, and Egyptian imagery would resurface with greater effect in “Edge.”
Poetic consolations were few. Motherhood, especially single motherhood, was itself precarious. “Mary’s Song” and “Brasilia,” written around this time, lament the horror of the modern postwar world that has been forever altered by genocide: “This holocaust I walk in, / O golden child the world will kill and eat.” In “Brasilia,” Plath conjures a race of “super-people” with �
��torsos of steel” who threaten. The mother-speaker begs God to protect her child: “leave / This one / Mirror safe, unredeemed // By the dove’s annihilation.” It seems only the trees outside her window have escaped the burdens of history and motherhood. “Knowing neither abortions nor bitchery, / Truer than women, / They seed so effortlessly!” Plath writes in “Winter Trees.” “O mother of leaves and sweetness / Who are these pietàs?” Even this comforting image vanishes at the end of the poem. The doves cry, “easing nothing.”
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AFTER CLARISSA LEFT Court Green, Sylvia foundered. Susan’s parents thought she seemed “perfectly happy” as she cooked them a delicious American Thanksgiving dinner, but Sylvia wrote Aurelia on Thanksgiving Day that late November was “absolute hell.”124 Susan was off, her cleaning lady was indisposed, and her backup babysitter sick. A local woman who filled in for Nancy Axworthy during this time remembered Sylvia staying in bed until 11:30 in the morning. “Some days she’d be really miserable….When she used to get strung up with the children she’d throw anything.”125 She struck Elizabeth during this time as very thin and pale, with dark circles under her eyes, and “a darkness about her that was very forbidding.” Sylvia seemed distracted as she set out cups of tea at Court Green. “She tried to make the social noises and smile but you weren’t really there.” Elizabeth had no idea Sylvia had had a previous breakdown, despite the fact that Elizabeth herself opened up to her about her own breakdown after losing a baby. Sylvia never confided anything about her past in America, only that America had “hurt her,” and Elizabeth did not probe.126
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