Red Comet

by Heather Clark

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  That evening Dr. Horder came to check on Sylvia, Trevor Thomas remembered, “rather late.” He would have almost certainly discussed her looming hospital admission. Around eleven forty-five, Thomas said, she knocked on his door: “there she was, looking very odd indeed as if drugged or doped and faraway, out of this world.” (As Sue Alliston noted, Ted, too, had thought that she sounded “drunk” when she called him the day before.) She needed airmail stamps, as she had run out, and she told him the letters were bound for America and “must go tonight.” He remembered that her voice was “slightly slurred and somehow more American.” He asked why she had come home early, and she told him, “Oh, we didn’t like being away from home. The children were difficult and I wanted to write.” Thomas wrote that “she looked so obviously ill I asked if I should phone the doctor. She was quite adamant and she did not want to trouble him.”97 Sylvia’s “obvious” signs of illness—which Gerry had not noticed—were likely related not only to depression and her recent flu but also to the drug cocktail she was taking and the interaction of her antidepressant with the red wine she had at Jillian’s Sunday lunch.

  The most likely recipient of at least one of Sylvia’s last letters was her brother, Warren. She would not have wanted Assia, whom she despised, raising Frieda and Nicholas. Warren and Maggie were the obvious choice: she loved and respected her brother, who had bright professional prospects, and Maggie was a warm, “capable” woman she had wanted by her side when she was down with flu that summer. They had no children of their own yet and could devote themselves to hers. He and Maggie would provide a stable, prosperous, German American home where her children would be raised with strong values. Imagining such a future for Frieda and Nicholas may have eased her heartbreak; she may even have assumed, in her deeply depressed state, that they would be better off with Warren and Maggie than with her. Such a letter would also help explain why Warren and Maggie flew over in the immediate aftermath of Sylvia’s death and tried to make arrangements to take the children back to America. Aurelia told her friend Richard Larschan in the early 1990s that one of these last letters had been addressed to her, but that Ted told her not to read it in order to spare herself pain. Aurelia did not press him and never read the letter—if, indeed, it ever existed. Richard had his doubts, as Aurelia told him the story when she was in her early eighties and “increasingly demented.”98

  Sylvia wanted to pay Trevor Thomas for stamps then and there with money from her “small purse.” Thomas told her not to worry, and she said, “Oh! But I must pay you or I won’t be right with my conscience before God, will I?” She asked him what time he went to work in the morning; he told her between eight fifteen and eight thirty a.m. “She wanted to know if I’d be doing that tomorrow morning and when I said ‘I hope so, all being well’ she said that would be all right then. When I asked why she wanted to know she said: ‘Oh nothing, I just wondered, that’s all.’ ” Finally, he told her it was late “and too cold for her to stand there. She had better go to bed. She thanked me and I shut the door.”

  Ten minutes later he opened the door—the hall light was on—and saw that she was still standing there “with a kind of seraphic expression on her face.” “You aren’t really well are you?” Thomas said. “I’m sure I should get the doctor.” “Oh no,” he remembered her saying, “please don’t do that. I’m just having a marvelous dream, a most wonderful vision.” He invited her in but she refused. It was now twelve thirty in the morning, and he told her he needed to go to bed. When he opened the door again, twenty minutes later, the hall light was still on but she had gone. He assumed that she had gone out to send the letters. “In hindsight I’ve often wondered if the real purpose of her visit was to find out if I would be around or not when she turned on the gas.” He heard her pacing overhead for hours, and he finally fell asleep at about five a.m. He would not wake for twelve hours.

  Ted and Sue spent Sunday together, reading each other’s poetry and socializing with Tasha Hollis and Ted’s old Cambridge friend David Ross at David’s flat in Great Ormond Street. They drank wine and discussed poetry. (Ted and Assia often used David’s flat when he was out.)99 Later that night, Ted brought Sue to 18 Rugby Street to avoid “a surprise visitation” from Sylvia. The decision to bring Sue, on the night before Sylvia’s suicide, to the house where he and his wife spent their wedding night would haunt him for the rest of his life. “Why did we go there?” he later wrote in “Last Letter.” “Of all places / Why did we go there?” He imagined Sylvia tapping, like Cathy Earnshaw, at his “dark window” in the hours before she died, and calling all night. “Before midnight. After midnight. Again. / Again. Again. And, near dawn, again.”100

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  AT ABOUT SEVEN A.M. on Monday, February 11, Sylvia put bread, butter, and two baby bottles of milk in her children’s room. She opened their windows, covered them with extra blankets, left the room, and taped around the outside edges of their door.101 Jillian remembered that Nick always awoke for the morning at six a.m. (Sylvia had recently told Aurelia the same), which suggests that at least one child was awake while she acted. On a small, torn piece of paper, in large block letters, she wrote her last note in separate, angled lines:

  PLEASE CALL

  DR HORDER

  AT

  PRI 3804

  Her poems had flouted gentility, but she began her last written words with “Please.”102 Across Regent’s Park, the Beatles were getting ready to arrive at Abbey Road Studios at ten a.m., where they would record their first album, Please, Please Me. The morning of February 11, 1963, was the dawn of the 1960s.

  Sylvia Plath laid her last words against the stroller in the flat’s entryway. In the kitchen, she stuffed the cracks around the door and window with tea towels and clothes, and taped herself in.103 She turned on the gas taps, lay down on the floor, and placed her head on a folded cloth atop the oven’s drop door. As she died, the sun rose out the large window to her left, flooding the kitchen with light.104 “The evil times,” Hughes later wrote, “were those two or three hours between the effects of one dose wearing off, and the effect of the next dose taking hold, in the early morning. In the last paragraph of her diary, she described her fear of the horror of these hours.”105

  “Ariel” almost anticipates Plath’s last morning: the speaker longs to flee the “child’s cry” as, “suicidal,” she contemplates apotheosis. In a 1998 letter, Hughes called the poem “a prophecy of suicide.”106 But, like “Lady Lazarus” and “Edge,” “Ariel” uses suicide metaphorically—as spectacle—to elucidate the risks, rewards, and limits of female ambition. Those poems do not offer an explanation for their author’s actual suicide. “Child,” with its intimate revelation of depression’s dark heart, does. It comes closest to being the note Plath never left.

  Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.

  I want to fill it with color and ducks,

  The zoo of the new

  Whose names you meditate—

  April snowdrop, Indian pipe,

  Little

  Stalk without wrinkle,

  Pool in which images

  Should be grand and classical

  Not this troublous

  Wringing of hands, this dark

  Ceiling without a star.

  Plath dedicated Ariel to her children. Full of grand and classical images, it sat neatly arranged in a black binder on her bedroom desk. Hughes would find it later that day next to manuscript copies of some of his own poems—“Out,” “The Road to Easington,” “The Green Wolf,” “New Moon in January,” two Lorca translations—and a stack of nineteen other poems Plath intended for her third collection.107 Of her mother’s greatest work, Frieda Hughes wrote, “The art was not to fall.”108

  EPILOGUE

  Your Wife Is Dead

  As Plath prepared to die, Hughes lay in the ar
ms of Sue Alliston at 18 Rugby Street. He drove her to work on Monday morning and then retreated back to the still, snowed-in quiet of his Cleveland Street flat. In “Last Letter,” he re-created the scene that morning before Dr. Horder delivered the four words that changed his life:

  I lit my fire. I had got out my papers.

  And I had started to write when the telephone

  Jerked awake, in a jabbering alarm,

  Remembering everything. It recovered in my hand.

  Then a voice like a selected weapon

  Or a measured injection,

  Coolly delivered its four words

  Deep into my ear: “Your wife is dead.”1

  For years, Hughes and Alvarez would speculate that Plath had been playing a game of Russian roulette, hoping the nurse would find her still alive and so achieve another rebirth. Winifred Davies thought the same, that “she was trying to frighten Ted….she was too fond of the children to have made up her mind to do it if she didn’t think she would be rescued before it was too late.”2 But the information now available suggests that Sylvia was not thinking of herself: she was thinking of her children. She knew that either Trevor Thomas or the visiting nurse would smell the gas between eight thirty and nine a.m. She calculated the shortest time she would need the gas on in order to minimize its effect on her children, trapped in their room upstairs. She thought that the deadly coal gas would rise—but instead it sank into Thomas’s flat below, knocking him out until five p.m. that day. Indeed, he nearly died. Dr. Horder never believed the gambling theory. He was one of the first to arrive at Fitzroy Road that morning, and he would never forget the care Sylvia had taken to seal off the kitchen.3

  When the visiting nurse, Myra Norris, came round to Fitzroy Road that morning, no one answered the buzzer. She walked to a nearby phone booth and called Dr. Horder to make sure she had the right address. Reassured that she was in the right place, she returned a few minutes after eleven a.m. and saw some builders who, according to the police report, “were working on repairs on the premises.” (When Jillian heard about this, she thought with bitter irony that they were finally fixing Sylvia’s heat.)4 The builders had a key to the house and let her in. The nurse immediately smelled gas, ran upstairs, and found Sylvia, still in her “night clothes,” lying on the floor with her head on a cloth on the oven door.5 One of the builders, Charles Langridge, told the police, “The nurse came running out to me crying the woman had gassed herself.” They rushed back into the flat, turned off the gas, threw open the windows, and ran upstairs to the cold, crying children, who were, Langridge said, “alright.”6 Together they moved Sylvia into the living room, where the nurse tried artificial respiration. Langridge found Plath’s note on the stroller “in the next room,” and rushed outside to call both Dr. Horder and an ambulance from a public phone booth. According to the London police report, Horder arrived at eleven thirty and a London County Council ambulance came five minutes later—the nurse was still trying to revive Plath—and brought her to University College Hospital. She was pronounced dead on arrival at 11:45 a.m.7

  A twenty-four-year-old policeman, John Jones, arrived at the flat at 11:45, and later interviewed Dr. Horder at his office at 114 Regent’s Park Road.8 Horder told him, “She has been under me for treatment for mental depression but had seemed much brighter these last few days. I arranged for the nurse to attend to help her with the children and was very surprised when I found she’d done this.”9 (Horder could not have been that surprised, as he was arranging Plath’s admission to a psychiatric ward on the Friday before her death.) Constable Jones then interviewed Dr. Hill, the pathologist who attended to Plath at University College Hospital. Hill told Jones, “She has been dead for about four hours. The body was cold when it arrived.”10 Horder estimated that she had turned on the gas between six thirty and seven.11 The pathologist thought she had died around seven thirty.

  Though Plath had been suffering from fevers and an upper respiratory infection, the autopsy showed that all of her organs were healthy when she died. There were no tumors or indicators of pregnancy. The level of carboxyhaemoglobin—a measure of carbon monoxide poisoning—in her blood was 76.5 percent, well over the 50–60 percent in most victims. There was so much carbon monoxide in her body that her blood, and her flanks, had turned pink. The autopsy stated that there were recent bruises on her forehead and the occipital region on the back of her head, which suggest that she had banged her head, perhaps several times, while losing consciousness.12 This may have been the result of random spasms, or she may have tried to get up, too late. Both children probably would have been awake and crying by seven a.m.

  Dr. Horder first called Jillian, who called Suzette, who called Assia for Ted’s number. Suzette then rushed to 23 Fitzroy Road to care for the children. Catherine was one of the first to know. She had earlier promised Sylvia she would babysit that day while she had lunch with her new Heinemann editor, David Machin. When she arrived at Sylvia’s flat, she encountered Ted, who pushed past her, “charging up the stairs like Rochester…he roared in, looking absolutely distraught.” Dr. Horder walked Catherine, in shock herself, over to his car. “We sat there thinking wretchedly how all this had happened, despite our joint efforts. It really hurt him so much and he felt, I think, responsible.”13 Lorna vividly remembered opening the door to find Catherine on her step, crying, telling her, “ ‘Sylvia’s killed herself.’ The tears.”14

  Ted formally identified his wife’s body at University College Hospital, then went round to the Macedos’ flat in Hampstead. Suzette remembered him in a very shaken state, quietly telling Helder as he leaned against their wooden chest, “Listen, it was her or me.”15 Hughes would repeat this astonishing phrase to others in the days after Plath’s death. Had he, too, contemplated suicide? Was the relationship so dysfunctional that he felt only one of them would survive it? His words suggest he may have been close to breakdown himself.16

  When Sue heard the news of Sylvia’s suicide that afternoon from her ex-husband, Clem Moore, she sent Ted a telegram—“Sorry sorry sorry if I can do anything.”17 That week, she and David Ross visited Ted at Fitzroy Road. “So we drove to the flat,” David said, “and there was Ted, and he had the final Sylvia poems, which he proceeded to read to me. And I was absolutely startled with those poems—they were extraordinary and sent shivers up and down my spine that night.” David remembered that Ted was alone and that the children were probably sleeping upstairs. Ted had already read the poems in the Ariel typescript that afternoon, but David “had the impression he hadn’t seen them before” her death. “We were both so startled with these poems.” Ted told David that night he planned to “auction” them to publishers.18

  Jillian and Gerry Becker came to Fitzroy Road on that night of the 11th. Ted talked to Gerry about the children, Jillian remembered, but he asked them no questions about Sylvia. Later that week, however, Ted called Jillian several times in the middle of the night. “What had she said? What had she done?” he demanded. Jillian had the sense that he was not really listening to her answers. Sometimes he became “hostile,” accusing her of telling people his children should be raised by Warren and Maggie Plath. “I barely had time to deny it before he’d gone on to something else….And even if he’d been willing to hear me speak, what could I (what could anyone) have said to save him from the furies of his own darkest hours?”19

  On February 12, Ted sent a telegram to Aurelia’s sister Dot, saying simply, “Sylvia died yesterday.” He may have thought such devastating news was best delivered by a family member, or he may have felt too guilty to speak to Aurelia. Dot was left to shatter Aurelia’s world. Warren and Maggie flew over while Aurelia, lost in grief, remained in Wellesley. She assumed that Sylvia had died of pneumonia until Warren told her, in his February 17th letter from Halifax, the “hard news” that she had died from “carbon monoxide poisoning from the gas stove.”20 He had wanted to defer this news until he returned
home, but he feared it would reach her by other sources before then. Later that year, Aurelia visited Jillian. The two women spent many hours walking along the banks of the Thames. “She was a sad, quiet woman who was absolutely devastated.”21

  Ted wrote to Olwyn telling her what had happened. He blamed himself. “She asked me for help, as she so often has. I was the only person who could have helped her, and the only person so jaded by her states & demands that I could not recognize when she really needed it.”22 To Daniel Huws, he wrote bluntly, “No doubt where the blame lies.”23 When Elizabeth Compton came to Fitzroy Road, he told her, “It doesn’t fall to many men to murder a genius.”24 Warren wrote Aurelia that when he saw Ted in London shortly after Sylvia’s death, “he looked as though he would have been relieved had I struck him or spit in his face.”25 Luke Myers arrived on February 13. Ted told him he thought Sylvia had “intended to be rescued. Shortly before her death, they had agreed to meet within several days. Ted believed that they would have been reunited in two weeks.”26 At night, Hughes lay sleepless and tormented as he listened to the wolves howling in Regent’s Park Zoo.