Plath likened this new poetic sensibility to one that was emerging “in modern cinema, by the juxtaposition of images, without editorializing….So much of this poetry is visual.” (Indeed, her image of melting through the wallpaper was an allusion to Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly.) She discussed Robert Bly’s “Sunday in Glastonbury,” singling out lines that may have influenced the beginning of “Daddy”: “My black shoes stand on the floor. / Like two open graves.” She quoted James Merrill, James Wright, and Galway Kinnell, but no women poets. (Only seven of the fifty-one poets in the book were women, but that would not have surprised her.) Nor does she use the word “confessional.” Instead she uses “surrealist,” twice—a telling indication of how she understood the emerging “confessional” school of poetry with which her name would be forever linked. “There is no sure objective ground,” she said of this new poetry. It is “subconscious and archetypal.” She ended the review with a line from Kinnell’s “Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock”: “ ‘And the dimension of depth seizes everything.’ That is, I think, what’s been happening in a lot of American poetry.”
This cerebral, elegant review belied the daily torments of Sylvia’s physical and emotional reality. She wrote by candlelight with fingers chilled to the bone and a mind numbed by codeine, praising an editorial selection that did not include her work. Her health, still shaky after her late-summer flu, worsened in January. She had 103° fevers and an upper respiratory infection, while depression and anxiety further curtailed her appetite. She wrote to George MacBeth saying they had all, again, come down with what she called the flu.
In early January, Sylvia began seeing Dr. Horder, who gave her “tonics” to help stimulate her hunger, as she had lost twenty pounds over the summer. He was worried about her lungs and sent her to University College Hospital for a chest X-ray on January 1. She appreciated his solicitude and was relieved that he took her illnesses—both physical and mental—seriously. He estimated that he saw her twenty to thirty times before her death, and never for less than twenty minutes. When she first approached him about treatment, he recalled, “I knew that this was going to be, so to speak, a handful….she’d had a tremendous blow, and I was going to see quite a bit of her. But she wasn’t clinically depressed and certainly not suicidal to the best of my knowledge when she returned. Indeed, I remember her being pleased even in the week before her death about a BBC assignment….She wasn’t assuming Ted would come back. She was planning a life with the two children.”78
The children had high fevers, and Frieda developed a worrisome allergy to penicillin. This news, at a time when there were few “second-line” antibiotics, would have heightened Sylvia’s anxiety considerably. She herself was so sick that Horder arranged, during the second week of January, “a private day-nurse for 10 days.”79 Otherwise, she told the Roches, “I don’t know what I would have done.” (The care was not free; Sylvia complained to Aurelia that the nurse’s £17 fee had eaten up most of her $50 birthday check.)80 On January 9, Sylvia wrote the Roches a short letter “from bed where the doctor has put me,” thanking Clarissa for her kind notes about The Bell Jar. “Your wonderful perceptive letter about the novel—you are the first to read it—came at a most needed moment & I think you see just what I meant it to be. One day when there is a good enough one it shall be dedicated to you both.”81
Sylvia was so ill she qualified for free housekeeping help from the British Home Health Service. The housekeeper doted on the children, and Sylvia got “a terrific lift from it.” She joked that the housekeeper, “Mrs. Vigors (!)…had the place gleaming in about 2 hours.”82 She hoped to persuade Mrs. Vigors to come regularly, but she never returned, and Sylvia’s mood descended. She wrote her mother on January 16 of “all the heaped snow freezing so the roads are narrow ruts & I have been very gloomy with the long wait for a phone which I hope to get by the end of the month after 2 months wait! which makes one feel cut off, and the lack as yet of an ‘au pair.’ ”83 She was in the process of hiring a German au pair from Berlin, which Catherine Frankfort had helped facilitate, but nothing was finalized as yet.
Mrs. Prouty continued to send checks and urged Sylvia to spend the money on “the many things burdening you.” She offered legal advice, though she could not believe that Ted’s kindness was “dead forever.” Prouty warned Plath that the plan she had mentioned in a recent letter—to buy 23 Fitzroy Road and rent out its flats—presented too many challenges for a single mother. With all the upkeep and “complaining tenants,” Prouty wrote, “I fear there would be little time for your writing.”84 Prouty was probably Plath’s only hope for a loan to buy the property. Now that hope was dashed.
Sylvia began socializing with Jillian and Gerry Becker, whom she had met through the Macedos. Suzette had known Jillian Becker (née Friedman) in South Africa, and had introduced her to Sylvia in September 1962. Jillian was an aspiring writer who would go on to become a well-known novelist and journalist. She was wealthy and lived in a large house in nearby Islington with an Irish nanny who, Suzette hoped, might also help Sylvia for she could see that Sylvia was overwhelmed. “She had too much with the kids. She couldn’t handle it….I told her, ‘You have to use all the means available to you.’ ” Gerry was a lecturer in English—“a great, big, charming, leonine type,” Suzette remembered, whom Sylvia liked very much.85 Jillian, who was Sylvia’s age, admitted that she envied Sylvia’s literary success, and that as a Jew, she was slightly wary of her friend’s German background. But she was also intrigued by this “intellectual” poet and mother.86
That January, Sylvia accompanied Jillian to a film festival at the cinema in Hampstead about once a week—“comedies but they didn’t make her laugh,” Jillian remembered. Jillian sensed Sylvia was not absorbing the films, and she suggested that they stop going. Sylvia replied, dutifully, “We must see them all.” Jillian also took her to a play in the West End; afterward, they sought out a late-night café in Soho, where they “argued about psychoanalysis, she to some extent for and I wholly against it.” Sylvia did not discuss her own “problems,” but approached psychoanalysis as an intellectual idea.87
When Sylvia learned that Jillian was a writer, she tutored her on the proper ways to submit a manuscript. “Amateurism in writing she despised,” Jillian remembered.88 Sometimes they talked about their mothers, “each of us unforgivably,” Jillian wrote. “In her case a need to impress her mother had been a driving force. She’d had to present her with success after success.” Sylvia was sure that Aurelia saw the breakup of her marriage as “a failure,” although she never called it that. Still, Jillian remembered that Aurelia’s silent judgment “infuriated” Sylvia. “She hated the shame it would require her to feel. To shut it out she would now deny her mother any part in her life.” Sylvia was only too aware of how history was repeating itself. “I’ll be a single woman bringing up two children all by myself like my mother,” she often said to Jillian and Gerry.89
It was at the Beckers’, in late January, that Sylvia saw Richard Murphy for the last time. Douglas Cleverdon and his wife, Nest, were there, and they had warned Richard that Sylvia “was in a very tense state.” To Richard, she looked “feverish” but “ecstatic” as she spoke of living in Yeats’s house. Baby Nick was on her lap, and Frieda was playing nearby. He was relieved that she bore him no ill-will. He would learn of her death on February 14 when he returned to London from Ireland, and would feel guilty for not having provided “the haven she felt she needed in Connemara.”90 A rumor about Plath’s supposed advances toward Murphy would begin making the rounds. (Nathaniel Tarn wrote in his diary that he was surprised Edward Lucie-Smith “didn’t know about Richard Murphy” and Plath.)91 Suzette remembered Sylvia speaking generously during this time about three male poets: Richard Murphy, Bill Merwin, and Al Alvarez.92 A few months later, Richard would be astonished to find Assia and David Wevill at the Pier Bar in Cleggan—come, he presumed, “to find out what had happened in Cleggan to Ted
and Sylvia.”93
* * *
IN MID-JANUARY, Sylvia became uncharacteristically gloomy about her future, and let down her guard in a letter to Aurelia.
I just haven’t felt to have any identity under the steamroller of decisions & responsibilities of this last half year, with the babies a constant demand….How I would like to be self-supporting on my writing! But I need time.
I guess I just need somebody to cheer me up by saying I’ve done all right so far.94
The following day, January 17, was Nick’s first birthday. Jillian and Suzette had no memory of its being celebrated. This would have been a painful milestone for Sylvia.
Ruth Fainlight thought she understood Sylvia’s predicament perfectly, writing from Tangier in early January that she knew no one there and sometimes longed for London. “And yet, thinking about the people whom I call my friends there, the people I used to see, I remember meetings that left me despondent and unsatisfied.” Something about London, Ruth wrote, “seemed to be destructive.” She felt that she had not had time to settle down in Morocco: “And when I momentarily do sense what being settled down will be like, I usually panic.” Ruth had described Sylvia’s own complicated feelings about writing, home, and exile. Yet she reassured Sylvia that she looked forward to the April trip to Devon, and plays and movies in London—“and talking and talking and talking.”95 She had arranged a British visa for her nanny, Fatima, and obtained her driving license so that she could drive in Devon. Years later, Fainlight would say of her friendship with Plath that there wasn’t enough time.96
Aurelia, worried about her daughter’s state of mind, asked a favor of Mildred Norton. Perry Norton’s wife’s cousin, Patricia Goodall, lived in London; would she mind checking in on Sylvia? Patricia obliged, writing to Sylvia of their Wellesley connection and asking if she could “drop in on her” on January 19. Patricia did not want Sylvia to know Mildred had sent her, though Sylvia probably suspected as much, and she played the part. She greeted Patricia, her husband, and her young daughter with a “bright smile and eager American expression.” She served tea, and for the next hour, Patricia told Mildred, the three adults “NEVER STOPPED TALKING!” Patricia found the children healthy, in good humor, and well tended, the flat “warm and cheery.” Plath spoke of “some success in publishing a book” but “seemed shy about the subject, saying it was being published under an assumed name.”97 Patricia liked Sylvia so much that she invited her to dinner the following week. She hoped a true friendship might form, and asked Mildred not to tell Sylvia the real reason for her visit.
Ted came once a week, Sylvia told friends—“sometimes is nice & sometimes awful.”98 She called him an “apocalyptic Santa Claus” in a letter to Marcia.99 Although he may have visited more often, his name appears infrequently in Sylvia’s calendar between December 10 and January 5 (the last surviving page).100 His December letter to his brother Gerald in Australia suggests how little he had seen of his wife that winter:
All this business has been terrible—especially for Sylvia, but it was inevitable, and now the storm-centre of it recedes into the distance, I can only be relieved that I’ve done it. The one factor that nobody but quite close friends can comprehend is Sylvia’s particular death-ray quality. In many of the most important ways, she’s the most gifted and capable & admirable woman I’ve ever met—but, finally, impossible for me to live married to. Now we’re separated, we’re better friends than we’ve been since we first met. Mainly because we see each other only about once a month, if that. The main grief for me is that a life that had all the circumstances for perfection should have been so intolerable, and that little Frieda loses a father & I lose little Frieda. She’s been my playmate for 2 years & become absolutely a necessary piece of my life….I’m feeling a lot better except for dreaming about Frieda every night.101
On January 21, Ted wrote to the Merwins, who were abroad, that in London the cold was “freezing people dead.” He was trying to get enough money “to leave” Sylvia.102
Hughes’s journal reveals something of his state of mind that winter. “I am completely responsible for S’s fixation on me, I demanded it,” he wrote. Now, speaking of Assia, he saw that “only a partial balancing relationship can work & let us live.” He vowed
Not to drift helplessly…tied to babyish fear of losing her, or making her angry or overthoughtful, or tearful….Because my weakness with women, my difficulty in being rational & disciplined in my dealings with them, my yielding to whatever I may think is their whim is ruining—has probably already ruined my life. And in the end it leads to disaster for them too, meshed in my falsity.
So have I reached a decision? Yes.
My unwillingness to hurt women, my incredible indulgence toward them, is simple reflection of the same attitude toward myself….
My fear of rebuffing & feeling: ends in the utter callousness of my dealings with S.103
Ted was now seeing Susan Alliston as well as Assia. Tall, with long, thick bronze hair, Sue resembled Sylvia physically. Hughes later wrote about her “powerful athletic presence,” “slate-blue eyes,” and extraordinary poetic talent.104 Like Sylvia, he had thought she was Swedish when he met her in the elevator at Faber and Faber, where she worked as a secretary. She too had literary aspirations; Hughes had read one of her poems in The Nation while living in America. He met her after he had separated from Sylvia, at the Lamb pub on Great Conduit Street, around the corner from 18 Rugby Street, where Daniel and Helga still lived. By then Sue had separated from her husband, Clem Moore, Warren’s Harvard roommate, whom she had married in December 1959 in Cambridge. (Warren served as the usher.) Sylvia had known Sue for years, and Warren had even visited Sue and Clem during his 1961 visit to England. In late October 1962, when Sylvia was feeling very grim, she told her mother, “Got a darling letter from Clem today, very fond of him, like a second brother, and his mother”—a reference to Sarah-Elizabeth Rodger, the writer on whom she had once modeled her future.105 Now Clem’s wife was carrying on an affair with her husband. The fact that Ted was conducting a second, simultaneous affair with someone so close to her own family intensified Sylvia’s pain and humiliation.
Sue kept a journal during this time, and she ruminated on her relationship with Ted, which began in November 1962. She felt a tremor of excitement when she saw him walk into a party that month, “Somewhat blue-chinned, a little stooped, young, and with some enormous strength extending from him.” She knew that he was also seeing Assia, and she tried not to make any claims on him even after they began sleeping together. He made his feelings clear. “Marriage is not for me—nor you, I think,” he said to her during one of their early meetings. “Him, well,” she mused in her journal, “he’s got it in for Anglo-Saxon women, perhaps because too cold. He’s now with a non Anglo-Saxon.” On January 17, she wrote, “he talks so much, so personally about himself and S[ylvia] and Assia and his plans. He said the exclusivity of the relationship killed something—the keeping always on the same plane, and that she is an absolutist—will not accept a compromise.” He spoke to her of his poem “Dark Woman,” in which the “blood clot” that killed Percy Key also becomes, symbolically, the woman—Assia—who “brings life to Ted.” The other woman in the poem—Sylvia—was “The punctual evening star—the Venus of the piece…the polar to ‘blood clot’ I suppose.”106
Ted would transform Assia and Sylvia into poetic symbols again in his infamous radio play Difficulties of a Bridegroom, in which Sullivan, the hero, runs over a hare while driving up to London to visit his girlfriend. He then has visions of two women: one represents lust, the other chastity. The play was broadcast on the BBC on January 21, and again on February 9, two days before Plath’s suicide. For Sylvia, it was a very public—if coded and symbolic—humiliation. The play begins: “Your trouble, Sullivan, you’re still suffering from moon-glare. She’s attractive, but is she outstanding? You’re moon-blind….She somehow reached t
he secret switch in your brain.” Suddenly, Sullivan sees the hare. He grows excited and runs it over. “Speed it up, little experiment, gee up. (Car accelerates.) Forty. Forty five. No, Sullivan, no, O you cruel bastard.” Some poachers arrive at the scene, which soon becomes symbolic drama. Wedding bells toll in the background, while a chorus of four maidens describe his bride, the “beautiful maiden” who is a stock Hughesian femme fatale: “Here she comes, her perfumes before her, / A fox in her face, a bat in her hair / And a polecat in her navel.”
The seductress seems to possess Sullivan, who promises her “Everything.” She demands a flat in Soho, “A red convertible Cadillac….An unlimited allowance for sundries to my taste, wardrobe and so forth….You’ll have to get a job, of course.” “A job!” Sullivan cries out. He is “seeking the truth” and cares nothing about material things. The woman, known only as “SHE,” tells him he should stop dressing in rags and should wear things that express his convictions: “Your tie will be a single adder-skin, with the head and fangs intact, your finger-rings will be the carved eye-sockets of owls.” Plath had joyfully replaced and updated Hughes’s wardrobe when they first married. Now Hughes was symbolically shedding those clothes, giving in to his instincts, donning the mantle of the hunter.
Yet Sullivan soon realizes that SHE is simply a “Simulacrum,” preying on his fears of marriage. He refutes her for his real bride, and SHE vows, “I shall be a maneater and the blood on your head….I shall come after you, how can you leave me?” Now SHE becomes a Platonic vision of perfection, a geometrical abstraction that demands chastity. Plath would have understood. “Danger!” the chorus cries. “Poet!” After SHE instructs him to contemplate her breasts and body and cries, “Convert your genitals to the number one hundred percent,” Sullivan is “Burned to black, to white, to ashes, scattered, recovered.” He and SHE join together in “the white bed, the deep bed,” and the vision ends.
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