We now know that Dr. Horder was referring to Halliwick Hospital.57 He spoke with a psychiatrist there about admitting Sylvia on Friday, February 8. Halliwick was, as one history put it, “generously staffed” and “attracted the ‘cream’ of both staff and patients.”58 It had a reputation of being modern, progressive, and compassionate, and had a new 145-bed unit that was separated from the wards of seriously disturbed patients. But Halliwick was on the grounds of the larger Friern Hospital, built in 1850 and formerly known as the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum. The name “Colney Hatch” had as much grim significance for Londoners as “Bedlam” and was notorious for containing six miles of corridors. P. G. Wodehouse and C. S. Lewis had written of its fearsome reputation in their novels. Sylvia was more likely to know about the hospital’s dark history rather than its shiny new ward. Dr. Horder was reluctant to “section” Sylvia, but he knew she needed residential care—a few days of voluntary “rest.” Sylvia may not have understood the distinction. “She was losing it, and she knew she was,” Jillian said. “She was not in possession of her right senses.”59 Thus Sylvia learned on Friday that as early as Monday she would likely be entering a public psychiatric hospital.
This knowledge helps explain why, on Friday, Sylvia mailed a terse, two-sentence letter to Ted—her last letter to him—from Fitzroy Road.60 It was likely sent in the batch of letters, including her last to Dr. Beuscher, that was postmarked in Primrose Hill at 12:45 p.m. But her letter reached Hughes the same day she sent it. In an undated, unpublished draft of his poem “Last Letter,” Hughes hinted that it was a suicide note: “The letter note came Goodbye / My darling love goodbye I am finishing / Everything.”61
Ted could not later remember how he got to Sylvia’s flat, only that he rushed over, that afternoon, full of dread. She came down the stairs slowly and opened the door in an “ordinary” way. He was surprised—as Alvarez had been on Christmas Eve—to see her hair “loose.” In the poem she puts on an “Enigmatic smile as he stood there weeping / What does it mean this letter?”62 Hughes wrote that she led him back up the stairs, where she tore the letter into small pieces and burned it in the ashtray. In a draft of the poem, they spoke of getting back together.
Her choking throat her plea & his promise
That they would be under the laburnums in June
That they would sit again under the laburnums
All together & this very next week yes this very week
They would go to Scotland yes it was all fixed
Assured he had gone off assured
It was all safe assured it was all her counsellers advisers
Would not defeat them now.63
He was “comfortable— / that she would let him get out of the tar-pit.” Olwyn remembered Ted telling her that Sylvia had “collapsed on the floor crying” that afternoon. “He knelt down and knew he’d go back.”64 Yet Sylvia might not have taken him back, as he assumed. She told Jillian that “ ‘a reconciliation would make no difference.’ ” Jillian reflected, “Sylvia was grieving, bereaved.” Ted was no longer “pure,” her own husband. Sylvia told Jillian her “world had been destroyed (not her marriage, her world).”65
Hughes’s account of the event, written shortly after Plath’s death in 1963, is more circumspect about the last letter’s contents. He does not mention any “pleas and promises” of reconciliation.
Friday about 3-30 a letter came from her. She’d posted it that morning, thinking I’d get it Saturday, probably. It was a farewell love-letter, two sentences. She was going off into the country and intended never to see me again. Very ambiguous. I went straight to Fitzroy Rd. She was there alone, tidying the place up. I was upset & crying, what did she mean, what the hell was going on? She was cool & hostile. Took the note, burned it carefully in the ash-tray & told me to go. Could not get her to talk. She was leaving too. Did not find out for a long time where she went. Becker at funeral did not tell me.66
Hughes became convinced that if he had received Plath’s letter on Saturday, when he was meant to—and if he had not rushed to her flat to stop her—she would have left London and, perhaps, somehow, survived. In the final version of “Last Letter,” he wondered,
One hour later—you would have been gone
Where I could not have traced you.
I would have turned from your locked red door
That nobody would open
Still holding your letter,
A thunderbolt that could not earth itself.
That would have been electric shock treatment
For me.
Repeated over and over, all weekend,
As often as I read it, or thought of it.
…Had you plotted it all?
…………………
…But what did you say
Over the smoking shards of that letter
So carefully annihilated, so calmly,
That let me release you, and leave you
To blow its ashes off your plan—67
Trevor Thomas’s account of Plath’s last Friday afternoon corresponds with Hughes’s. When he came home from work, he said, he saw that the front door of his building was “most unusually wide open.” He shut the door. An hour later, when he set out his milk bottles, he saw Sylvia sitting in her car in the snowy street “staring ahead with her hands clasped in her lap.” He went to her and asked if she was all right and whether he should call Dr. Horder. “She had a faraway dreamy look, pale and looking ill.” She assured him that she was fine. Then she looked straight at him and said, “I’m going away for a long holiday, a long rest.” Her children would be staying with friends. “So I won’t see you for some time?” he asked. “No,” she said.68 Then she drove away. “A long rest” was a common 1960s euphemism for psychiatric treatment. She had already spoken to—and likely, by late afternoon, seen—Horder, who had made it clear that she needed to be admitted to an inpatient psychiatric facility as soon as possible.
The prospect of a potentially horrific stay in an unknown mental hospital was one that filled Plath with fear. She had already written to Dr. Beuscher on Monday, February 4, of her terror of “mental hospitals” and her desire to end her life. Now she was on the verge of surrendering herself to unknown psychiatrists—likely all men—in a notorious asylum. She likely planned, or began planning, her suicide, on Friday, February 8, as Hughes’s draft of “Last Letter” suggests, or perhaps even earlier. She would have had to buy the heavy tape she eventually used to seal off her doors from the gas when the shops were open that Friday or Saturday, as most shops in England were closed on Sundays in 1963.
That Friday, Sylvia returned to the Beckers’ by taxi around midnight—she had given the car to Hughes back at Fitzroy Road—in an evening outfit with her hair nicely set. She did not tell Jillian where she had been. She and Sylvia talked for an hour; Sylvia took her “night” pill, then went to bed. Nick woke at five a.m. Jillian picked him up and brought him to Sylvia. Frieda came in and sat on her mother’s bed while Sylvia fed Nick. Sylvia put both children back to bed; Jillian, heeding Dr. Horder’s instructions, had not offered, and the fact that Sylvia did so herself was “a big deal.” Jillian and Sylvia talked “awhile, I gave her her wake-up pill.” Sylvia went back to sleep, then awoke around nine a.m.69
For years, biographers speculated about where Sylvia went that Friday night. Jillian wondered if she had set off to see the journalist Corin Hughes-Stanton, about whom Sylvia had spoken “mysteriously” several times.70 Corin was, or had been, dating Susan O’Neill-Roe, though Jillian had the impression that Sylvia was “seeing” him near the end of her life.71 Sylvia noted in her calendar that she saw Corin on December 22 and December 27. She did not mention Susan in these entries, and the notations—“tea—Corin” and, a week later, “Corin: dinner”—suggest an increasing familiarity.72 (Corin’s father had been a prominent figure i
n the early-twentieth-century British wood engraving movement and had illustrated several books by D. H. Lawrence. This background surely would have intrigued Plath.) Corin later said he had known Sylvia in late 1962 and early 1963, though he declined to elaborate on what he called “a very private matter.”73
Jillian also speculated that Sylvia had met up with Ted that Friday night. Anne Stevenson wondered if the appointment was “some ghoulish rendezvous with Death.”74 A 1963 guestbook reveals a much less dramatic scenario. That night, Sylvia had dinner with the Goodalls, the American friends of the Nortons, now living in London, who had visited her in January. She spent her last dinner party talking, presumably, about America, Wellesley, Aurelia, Mildred, Perry, and Dick.75
* * *
“THE NEXT MORNING she had disappeared,” Suzette said. It was Saturday, February 9. “They didn’t know where’d she’d gone. Jillian phoned me and said, ‘I can’t control Frieda, she’s crying.’ So I went there…Frieda was in such a state.”76 Suzette took Frieda on a bus ride to distract her. The child sat in her lap as the bus went past the zoo, which she knew well. The thought of the animals calmed her, but every few minutes she would say, “Where’s Mummy?” Suzette told her, “She’s gone to the doctor to see about her headache.” (This was true—Dr. Horder said he saw Sylvia that Saturday.) Suzette got off the bus at one point with Frieda and phoned Jillian, asking if she had heard from Sylvia—she did not want to bring Frieda back until Sylvia had returned. Finally she brought her back at one, as she had to get ready for a two o’clock theater matinee. Suzette later called Jillian from the theater, asking again if Sylvia had returned. Jillian said she had but that she wouldn’t say where she had been, only “that it was very, very important.” Suzette asked to speak to Sylvia. “Where were you?” she asked. Sylvia said, “ ‘Something unbelievable has happened.’ She gave me to understand it was a decision, and it had to do with Ted.” But where did you go? Suzette pressed. “Never mind,” Sylvia said. “But it was very important, very important.” Suzette offered to return to the Beckers’ to mind Frieda, but Sylvia said it was not necessary, that she had “decisions to make.”77 A recently discovered letter from the poet Patric Dickinson provides a clue about where Plath might have gone that day. Dickinson said that one or two days before Plath’s suicide, he met with her, at The Running Hare pub, about the American Poetry Night she was producing at the Royal Court Theatre. Yet he may have been referring to his earlier, October 30 appointment with Plath, for he said in his letter that he met Plath only once, and the time and place of the appointment he dated one or two days before her death was exactly that of the October 30 meeting.78
Suzette assumed that she had been with Ted. “Assia thought this—that he had said he was going back to her. Because Assia couldn’t make up her mind, whether it was David she wanted, Ted she wanted. She wanted them both.”79 Ted, too, vacillated about the future of his marriage. By this time, Assia was pregnant with Hughes’s child. Jillian and Suzette both claimed that Sylvia did not know about Assia’s pregnancy; she never mentioned anything about it to them. Nor did Sylvia mention Assia’s pregnancy to Dr. Beuscher in her February 4 letter, which suggests that she did not then know. Ted was unlikely to have unloaded such news on her that Friday, February 8, if he had landed on her doorstep weeping and desperate with worry that she was suicidal, as he wrote in his journal. Suzette claimed that Assia learned she was pregnant only after Sylvia’s death. A letter from Assia to Peter Porter’s wife confirms that Assia had an abortion on March 21.80 Ted helped her recover at Fitzroy Road. Still, Jillian said that Ted told her he had told Sylvia they would be “back together ‘by the summer.’ ” Hughes had said as much in “Last Letter.” The phrase troubled Jillian over the years. Why “the summer”? She wondered if Ted had told Sylvia this because he needed time to deal with Assia’s pregnancy—to see “that complication through—either to a birth or a termination.”81
That night the Beckers went out to a dinner party, and a Slade student, an artist, came to keep Sylvia company. They listened to Beethoven and drank wine. When Sylvia asked the student what he painted and he replied, “Abstracts,” she said, “What a pity. If I could paint, I would want to paint things. I love the thinginess of things.”82 When the Beckers came home, Gerry went up to bed, and Jillian stayed up talking with Sylvia until two a.m. Then she helped Sylvia settle into bed and gave her the sleeping pill. Nick awoke at four thirty, and they fed him. Sylvia took her “pep” pill and fell back asleep until the morning.83
According to Susan Alliston’s unpublished journal, Sylvia called Ted at his Cleveland Street flat on Saturday night, then again early on Sunday morning. Sue wrote that Ted “leaned over the telephone, saying ‘Yes, yes’—being noncommittal, saying ‘Take it easy Sylvie.’ ” Sylvia did not know that Sue was at Ted’s flat, but she was upset about something.
He came back to bed, turned his back, clasped his head in his arms, “God, God,” he said. And said how she seemed drugged or drunk and wanted him to take her away somewhere. “But if I go back, I die,” he said. And he starts talking about his family: the uncle forced to marry a cripple out of loyalty & also “2000 on marriage the legacy is,” says her mother. The one who hanged himself. How they thought Sylvia like this a bit—grasping, destructive.84
In Sue’s rendering, Ted’s tone is exasperated. He sounds determined to leave Sylvia. He admits that his family thinks her “destructive” and money-grubbing (the “legacy” refers to a £2,000 life insurance policy); he compares his plight to his doomed uncle and hints that he will not stay with a “cripple.” The passage throws Hughes’s later claims that he and Plath were on the verge of a reconciliation that weekend into question. Yet he would hardly have told Sue, waiting for him in bed, that he was planning to get back together with his wife.
* * *
ON SUNDAY MORNING, February 10, as Sylvia was calling Ted, Gerry Becker and Nest Cleverdon took the children to the zoo. Sylvia had not bundled Nick up, which Nest thought odd. (She stopped at her own house on the way to pick up winter clothes.) They returned for a traditional Sunday lunch with wine and all the trimmings. “She helped Nick with his food and seemed, I thought, a little more cheerful, a little less tense,” Jillian recalled. After lunch, they “lingered” over coffee, talking. Sylvia ate and drank heartily; then she and the children slept deeply through the afternoon. Red wine, which Jillian implies Sylvia drank that afternoon, can cause dangerous hypertension if taken with Nardil or Parnate. Whether Plath knew this, or experienced symptoms that night (extreme fatigue, headache, confusion, vision problems, and dizziness), is unclear.
When Sylvia woke around four p.m., she had tea with Jillian and Gerry. “She ate and drank and talked, the children played contentedly. Nothing in particular was said or done to change the easy mood we all seemed to share, when Sylvia got up briskly and began gathering things and putting them into carrier bags. She declared she ‘must get home tonight.’ ”85 She also told Suzette, by phone from the Beckers’, that she had to go home because Dr. Horder was sending round a nurse to help her with the children on Monday morning, and she was going to meet her publisher for lunch. “She’s coming tomorrow morning, so I have to get home, I have to get the clothes done, I have to get Frieda ready,” she said. “I have to go.”86 Suzette said that during this phone call Sylvia was distraught about the fact that the Beckers’ Irish nanny had pressed a pound into her hand “for the babies.” “Everybody smells the poverty on me,” Sylvia said.87 Sylvia told Gerry the same story that evening.88 But Jillian thought she sounded upbeat as she said, “I must get back. I have to sort the laundry. And I’m expecting a nurse.”89 “She seemed invigorated, mildly elated, as I’d seldom if ever seen her before.”90
Sylvia did not tell them that Dr. Horder had found her a bed in a “suitable” hospital and had arranged for her admission on Monday. The nurse was coming not to help her with the children, but to look after them while she was aw
ay.91 Jillian and Gerry tried to persuade her to stay until Monday—Jillian would later ruefully remember that Sylvia had talked about her 1953 suicide attempt several times that weekend—but she quickly packed up and left at around six p.m.92 It was only later that Jillian realized that Sylvia had forgotten her coat, which remained hanging at the Beckers’ with a pair of extra house keys in the pocket. She would wonder if Sylvia had left them intentionally, so that she and Gerry might go after her that night. Or perhaps Sylvia had left the spare set so Jillian would be able to get into the locked house and save the children the next morning.
Gerry drove Sylvia back to Fitzroy Road in his old rattling black taxi. When he stopped at a red light, he heard her weeping in the back seat. He pulled over, got out, and sat in the back on the pull-down seat opposite her. She continued weeping, with her head in her hands. By now the children were crying, too, and he pulled them both onto his lap. He begged Sylvia to come back with him to Islington, but she refused. She grew calmer, “lifted her head and said, ‘No, this is nonsense, take no notice. I have to get home.’ ” He continued to ask her if she was sure she wanted to go home, and “she answered as often as he asked that she was absolutely sure.”93 He walked her into the flat and helped her get her things upstairs. She put the children to bed and made Gerry some tea. He stayed for two hours. She told him she was looking forward to seeing Marcia at Court Green in the spring, and she invited him and Jillian to visit then, too. She seemed generally “clear-minded and optimistic,” though she grew upset when she spoke about Assia and the impossibility of ever reconciling with Ted.94 Before he left, he told her he would check in on her the next day, and she reassured him that a nurse was coming at seven a.m.95 He returned to Islington and told Jillian what had happened. He did not think Sylvia “could cope on her own.” “I knew he was right,” Jillian later wrote, “yet I wasn’t entirely sorry she had left. I would not have to go on being nurse to her and her children. My daughters would not have to give up their rooms. I would have no more interrupted nights. And pity tires the heart. For which thoughts I was to endure long remorse.”96
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