Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  Immediately after Sylvia’s suicide, he “felt it had happened a month ago.” A month later, he wrote the Merwins, he felt it had “happened yesterday.” If only he’d given Sylvia as much “care, thought” as he devoted to some small task, he “could have helped her to live for a lifetime.” “But I depended on a resilience in her that I was too blind to see wasn’t there.” He told the Merwins he was afflicted with the “physical sensation of having been broken to pieces,” running “full tilt into a brick wall.”27 In a letter to the Comptons later that summer, he wrote that he understood why the public wanted to see him suffer as “the man who dies of remorse…married to a memory, a curator of the shrine.” This, he said, would be “justice.” He, too, hinted bleakly at suicide:

  When somebody who has shared life with you as much as Sylvia shared it with me, dies, then life somehow dies, the gold standard of it is somehow converted into death, & it is a minute by minute effort to find any sense in life, or any value. I never understood Sylvia’s wish to be with her father, as it appeared in her poems, and I never imagined I’d come under the same law. I’m aware that all this has somehow perverted my social sense, or what vestige of it I had. I’m aware of doing things that appal [sic] other people, but for which I have only worse alternatives. This is made more complicated by the tricky situation of the children—if it weren’t for them the answer would be the simplest.28

  * * *

  ON THE MORNING OF FEBRUARY 15, Al Alvarez and the Australian painter Charles Blackman accompanied Ted Hughes to the funeral home at Mornington Crescent. Hughes would later realize that the date fell on the Roman festival of Lupercalia that had inspired his second book—an uncanny coincidence. Alvarez remembered that the room smelled of rotting apples, something unclean. Plath looked gray, ashen, in her coffin, a “ludicrous ruff” at her neck. “It seemed impossible that she was dead,” Alvarez wrote.29

  The inquest on February 15 at the Saint Pancras Coroner’s Court was swift and efficient. Dr. Horder had “arranged for Mrs. Hughes, who was suffering from depression, to see a psychiatrist in the week prior to her death. But the letter was delivered to the wrong address.” In “recent weeks” Plath had told Dr. Horder of her history with depression and “nervous troubles.” He told the court that he had become “so worried as a result of a long talk with her” on Friday, February 8 that he had spoken with three psychiatrists in an attempt to find a hospital bed for her immediately. Only one could provide a bed, but he did not think it “suitable.” He spoke to Plath again later that day; she “seemed better” and had decided to spend the weekend with friends. It was then that he arranged for a nurse to come on Monday morning “to help her during what he regarded as a critical time.”30 The coroner, Dr. McEwan, blamed Horder, who said, “I couldn’t get an admission before Monday, and I thought that would be all right. I thought she’d be quite safe until then….We all underestimated her.”31

  Hughes, with Alvarez there for support, testified that his wife had previously been suicidal and “had lately had mysterious temperatures and nervous trouble.”32 Alvarez observed the “drab, damp” room, the “muttered evidence, long silences,” the nurse, Myra Norris, in tears.33 Hughes pointed out a man in a dark suit to Alvarez and called him, bitterly, Plath’s “boyfriend.”34 This man may have been Corin Hughes-Stanton.

  The verdict was recorded: “Carbon monoxide poisoning while suffering from depression. Did kill herself.”35 Later, Horder thought Plath had reached a perilous point where she was roused from lethargy by the antidepressants he had recently prescribed but not yet feeling their relief, which was expected to take ten to twenty days. He came to believe that Plath had “inherited a chemical imbalance that causes some kinds of depression” from her paternal relatives.36 (Aurelia likely told him that three women in Otto’s family, including his mother, had suffered from the disease.)37

  Lorna remembered that Horder, indeed, blamed himself: “He certainly was clearly very upset, felt he hadn’t…what had he not done?…Maybe in retrospect John Horder thought he should have sectioned her. It’s a difficult thing for a doctor to decide, because you’re going to be held somewhere against your will…this strikes them as being terrible. If people can do it voluntarily, that is infinitely preferable. She was an attractive woman, Sylvia, clearly, and clearly John Horder would have found her attractive. I’m not saying anything more than that. But I’m sure he would have done his best not to upset her…but he would have done that for anybody, really, to be fair to him. But at the same time, maybe slightly against his own better judgment, he didn’t have her sectioned.”38

  Warren assumed that he and his wife Margaret would bring the children back to America. “Ted does seem genuinely shocked and grieved—also more than a bit guilty, and I hope I can turn this to advantage where the children are concerned,” Warren wrote to Aurelia on February 17. “At least it means that the children should be reasonably looked out for until we, God willing, are able to get them & bring them home.”39 Margaret also wrote to Aurelia, assuring her that the children were well-tended by Ted’s aunt Hilda and the Macedos. She already felt a searing love for them and vowed to bring them home. If Ted could not be moved to give up custody by “friendly persuasion,” Warren wrote Aurelia, they were prepared to dig in for a long legal battle. He had already broached the plan with a British solicitor and told his mother, “We will move forward.” Yet three days later he was less sure. “As for Ted, he admits that a life with nannies & such would not be best for the children and that they need some sort of stable existence, but he needs some time to make up his mind to let us take them….There is every evidence that Ted deeply feels the loss of Sylvia, and this somewhat complicates the whole problem of him making a decision about his children.”40 Ted was still wavering on February 25, telling Warren that their “offer might be the final solution to how to take care of Frieda & Nick, but only after he had ‘given it a good try.’ I have pretty much given up reacting to his sudden changes of attitude any more, preferring to stick to working quietly behind the scenes.”41

  In the end, Ted could not part with Frieda and Nicholas. Warren and Maggie stayed at Fitzroy Road while they were in London, and Ted called Jillian to complain about them—she remembered him telling her, angrily, that Maggie had left Alka-Seltzer out in the bathroom and Frieda could have eaten it. Jillian felt, in his devastated state, that he could not cope with the children.42 He also wrote angrily to the Merwins of Warren and Maggie’s visit. “The Plaths came over to salvage some sort of sustenance for Mrs. Plath’s future—feed Nick & Frieda to her. I think it’s time to say that.”43

  The funeral services were held in Yorkshire, at two different locations, on February 18. The brief wake, with closed casket, was in a chapel of a funeral home in Hebden Bridge; the funeral was at Saint Thomas the Apostle church in Heptonstall village. Elizabeth and Jillian were upset when they learned that Sylvia was to be buried in the Calder Valley, for she had told them she wanted to be buried in the graveyard next to Court Green. Aurelia and Warren, Jillian remembered, were also upset about the decision.44 Ted had looked into burying Sylvia in Devon, but the reverend at Saint Peter’s Church in North Tawton told him the graveyard was closed. The cemetery in Heptonstall, filled with the graves of Farrars, offered an immediate and practical choice. Plath was still his wife.

  But there was another reason he made Heptonstall Plath’s final resting place. The hilltop village, positioned at the very top of the valley, was bathed in light all year round and possessed a mythical beauty. All his life, Ted had dreamed of moving up the Calder Valley, into the high country. Heptonstall was the center of what he imagined to be the ancient Celtic kingdom of Elmet, an escape from the modern-day turmoil and pollution below. The air was clearer in Heptonstall, and the long views stunning. This was the center of Hughes’s symbolic geography, his still point of the turning world. And he remembered, too, Sylvia’s deep love of the moors—the only landscape that rivaled, for her,
the sea.

  Warren wrote Aurelia that the funeral services were “much better as an experience than we had dared to hope, and I think even Sylvia would have found it simple and beautiful.” The chapel in Hebden Bridge was “light and cheerful inside—almost like a tiny chapel in a New England church. Wood, not stone on the inside—simple, with not too many flowers.” The wake was small: Ted; Ted’s father; his uncle Walt and his wife; cousin Vicky and her husband; Jillian and Gerry Becker; and Warren and Maggie. (Edith’s painful arthritis kept her from attending both services.) The cortège then moved up the steep hill to Heptonstall for the funeral service at Saint Thomas the Apostle, where a few more mourners from the village joined them. Jillian thought that the absence of nearly all who knew Sylvia in England—the Macedos, the Roches, the Comptons, Al Alvarez, Susan O’Neill-Roe, Winifred Davies, neighbors from Primrose Hill and North Tawton—testified to how alone and isolated Sylvia had become in her last weeks. Lorna said there was a more practical reason so few attended: Yorkshire was simply too far to travel, at short notice, in the dead of winter. The funeral had been hastily arranged, and many friends may not have known about it. But the lack of mourners also suggested the heavy stigma suicide still carried. Nathaniel Tarn heard that one of Sylvia’s old “boyfriends” had kept her suicide out of the London papers the week after her death.45 Suicide was still a “dirty little secret,” Alvarez wrote, “something shameful to be avoided and tidied away, unmentionable and faintly salacious.”46

  Before the funeral, Jillian remembered having tea and sandwiches at the Beacon. Edith asked her how Sylvia had seemed in the days before she died. “We all loved her, you know,” Edith said. Billy Hughes stayed quiet.

  The service in Heptonstall was, Warren wrote, “brief” and traditional.47 For a moment, a shaft of sunlight came through a yellow stained-glass window and brightened the church’s dim, chill interior. Then the small party followed the coffin to the newer graveyard across the lane, with its view of the surrounding moors. The priest completed the funeral rites, and the group left Ted alone at the grave, which Jillian described as “a yellow trench in the snow.”48 The gravestone would read SYLVIA PLATH HUGHES 1932–1963, above a quotation Hughes had chosen from a Buddhist text, The Monkey, which he had often used to comfort her when she was feeling low: “Even amidst the fierce flames, the golden lotus can be planted.” In the years to come, Hughes would bury his parents a few meters away.

  The funeral party then retreated to what Warren called “a high tea (which none of us had much of) down in Hebden Bridge.”49 Ted sat at the end of a long table, next to the Beckers. Gerry procured a bottle of whiskey, and he and Ted drank in silence. Steak and kidney pies were served. Tea was poured. Suddenly Ted said, “Everybody hated her.” Jillian protested that she had not hated Sylvia. “It was either her or me,” he said, as if in a trance. He said this phrase several times that day—the same words he had said to the Macedos soon after Plath’s death. And then, later, “She made me professional.” Still later, “I told her everything was going to be all right. I said that by summer we’d all be back together at Court Green.” Jillian was skeptical, but she held her tongue. He then asked Jillian if she had read The Bell Jar, and if she knew that Sylvia had tried to kill herself before they met. “It was in her, you see,” he said. “But I told her that if she wrote about it profoundly enough, she would conquer it.” Jillian asked whether he thought Sylvia had written profoundly enough. “No,” he said.50

  * * *

  ON MARCH 15, Ted wrote to Aurelia for the first time since Sylvia’s death:

  I shall never get over the shock and I don’t particularly want to….The particular conditions of our marriage, the marriage of two people so openly under the control of deep psychic abnormalities as both of us were, meant that we finally reduced each other to a state where our actions and normal states of mind were like madness. My attempt to correct that marriage is madness from start to finish. The way she reacted to my actions also has all the appearance of a kind of madness—her insistence on a divorce, the one thing in this world she did not want, the proud hostility and hatred, the malevolent acts, that she showed to me, when all she wanted to say simply was that if I didn’t go back to her she could not live….

  We were utterly blind, we were both desperate, stupid, and proud—and the pride made us oblique, she especially so. I know Sylvia was so made that she had to mete out terrible punishment to the people she most loved, but everybody is a little like that, and it needed only intelligence on my part to deal with it….

  I don’t ever want to be forgiven. I don’t mean that I shall become a public shrine of mourning and remorse, I would sooner become the opposite. But if there is an eternity, I am damned in it. Sylvia was one of the greatest truest spirits alive, and in her last months she became a great poet, and no other woman poet except for Emily Dickinson can begin to be compared with her, and certainly no living American.51

  Privately, Hughes searched for meaning in his notebook:

  Sylvia’s presence, that now seems more impossible than Eden, was my daily life only 8 weeks ago, & for 7 years before that, daily daily hourly nightly real unalterably real & saturating everything. Now not a trace….

  If the presence, or goodwill, of one certain person can so completely modify the meaning of life & the move & every action & thought, what hope is there of making a stable dwelling-place in the Universe, or in the world at large, or in a society. The balance so precariously held. No wonder you hang on to anchors….

  If a guilty man confesses remorse enough, he is told, then his wife will be restored from the house of the dead. He confesses: is heard, recorded: evidence taken. He writes. More is needed. Again. And again. Hope mounting. Finally out comes one of the genuine masters of the underworld: your wife is dead, she never came back. Why are you making such a fool of yourself….

  When somebody you love has died it seems natural & the inevitable way to give up & die too: they have called life’s bluff. They have not so much escaped into death, as let death into all the veins & arteries of intimate existence. I see why life was a precarious balloon for Sylvia—she must have suffered this dead-weight all along.52

  For years, Hughes maintained that he and Plath were on the verge of a reconciliation that last weekend. In March 1963 he wrote to Aurelia,

  I had come to the point where I’d decided we could repair our marriage now. She had agreed to stop the divorce. I had that weekend cancelled all my appointments for the next fortnight. I was going to ask her to come away with me on the Monday, on holiday, to the coast, some place we had not been. Think of how it must be for me too.53

  He wrote his trusted friend Keith Sagar in 1998, “accidents accelerated that last week to free fall 32ft per sec. we [sic] ran out of time—by days, I think. So I shall always believe.”54 In the appalling aftermath of Plath’s death, Hughes may have believed this. But he had brought Sue Alliston to Rugby Street to avoid Plath’s phone calls on the night she died, and on March 27, 1963, he wrote to Assia begging her to leave David. “If my feelings about you had been moveable at all, this last 6 weeks would have moved them, but it hasn’t, it’s just shown me how final they are.”55

  * * *

  ON FEBRUARY 16, Nathaniel Tarn visited David and Assia Wevill at their flat. When David went out for cigarettes, Assia spoke “mildly as if unconcerned” about the details of Sylvia’s death. Tarn recorded details of the visit in his diary:

  [Sylvia] was depressed—a letter announcing a meeting with a psychiatrist did not reach her. Everyone is blaming himself. The doctor because he gave her pep pills which ran out. Hughes is crushed, D.[avid] also though he didn’t like her. A.[ssia] says that the children are not asking for her, the little girl is glad her daddy’s back (!!!) “All the women” are blaming Assia—on the night she acted, P.[lath] had talked to a group [of women], including a journalist &, somehow, Suzette Macedo…& had told terrib
le stories. A.[ssia] has been seeing H.[ughes] & the kids every day.

  Assia told him Sylvia had been writing “the most incredible poems for weeks.”56

  Ted moved into Sylvia’s flat at Fitzroy Road, whose rent had been paid through December 1963. He noticed her wineglasses, which had been “rubbed and polished.” In his notebook he wrote,

  Then the stove. Eerie. Gathered an evil something or other…distinct and heavy memories. A.[ssia] felt uneasy. I do too but something in me likes that we stay. We smoke. Frieda plays with her silver flask & bog cotton. Frieda vies with A.[ssia], becomes very possessive, won’t leave me an inch. I carry her on my shoulder. I love her too much probably, she’s a compensation for too much & her love flatters me & comforts me too, how would I feel if she lost interest.57

  Assia was still living with David but saw Ted regularly. She helped him with the children, reluctantly. Suzette helped too, along with a series of temporary nannies, Olwyn, and Ted’s aunt Hilda. Lorna remembered that she and Catherine “were very troubled” by Assia’s presence at Fitzroy Road. In April, they attended a birthday party for Frieda, organized by Ted, with their children. The Sillitoes and Dido Merwin were also there. “So there was this party up in that sitting room up on the first floor. And little Frieda looking really very sort of lost, and the little boy…oh, very sad. And Ted…he wasn’t, poor man, himself in very good shape. He had organized the party but you could see his heart wasn’t really in it.” Assia arrived late “dressed looking as if she was going to Ascot, a pale yellow dress with a jacket. I mean, not at all someone going to a children’s party. I can see her now sitting there looking amazing…she was beautiful, but…poor Ted.”58