111. Poetry from Cambridge 1958, Christopher Levenson, ed. (London: Fortune Press, 1958). The other woman, with one poem to Plath’s four, was Sheila Hardy, also from Newnham.
112. Wooten, Alvarez Generation, 81.
113. Philip Larkin’s lack of poems in the anthology was due to his high permissions fees rather than Alvarez’s “editorial stance.” Wooten, Alvarez Generation, 78.
114. HC interview with Al Alvarez, May 2016, London.
115. A. Alvarez, Where Did It All Go Right? (London: Richard Cohen Books, 1999), 242.
116. Broadcasts on this subject aired in 1962 and 1963; he would publish these features in a book in 1965.
117. A. Alvarez, Under Pressure: The Writer in Society: Eastern Europe and the U.S.A. (London: Penguin, 1965), 27.
118. Alvarez, Where Did It All Go Right?, 212.
119. She also references “Russia, Poland and Germany” in “The Swarm”; Poland and Germany in “Daddy”; “the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out / Germany” in “Mary’s Song”; and in “Getting There,” “It is Russia I have to get across, it is some war or other.”
120. There was Peter Porter’s “Annotations of Auschwitz” and “Soliloquy at Potsdam”; George MacBeth’s “The Disciple,” narrated by a Nazi officer, as well as “The Dream and “The Crucifix”; Anthony Hecht’s “More Light! More Light!”; Geoffrey Hill’s “Two Formal Elegies: For the Jews in Europe,” “Of Commerce and Society,” which speaks of Auschwitz, and “Ovid in the Third Reich.”
121. Edward Butscher, Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 335.
122. Wooten, Alvarez Generation, 114.
123. A. Alvarez, “The Muse in Chains,” Observer (14 Oct. 1962), 25.
124. Robin Peel, Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics (Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2002), 127.
125. HC interview with Al Alvarez, May 2016, London.
126. Alvarez has written about his revision suggestions in The Savage God.
127. Judging from Plath’s 1962 calendar (19.2, SPC, Smith) and letters, the dates for her visits were 24–26 Sept., 29–31 Oct., 5–7 Nov., and 3–6 Dec.
128. SP, 26 Sept. 1962. 1962 Letts Royal Office Tablet Diary. 19.2, SPC, Smith.
129. SP to AP, 26 Sept. 1962. L2, 838.
130. SP to AP, 23 Sept. 1962. L2, 834.
131. SP to AP, 24 Sept. 1962. L2, 835–36.
132. SP to AP, 29 Sept. 1962. L2, 839.
133. Ibid., L2, 840.
134. SP to Kathy Kane, 29 Sept. 1962. L2, 841.
135. SP to Dr. Ruth Beuscher, 29 Sept. 1962. L2, 843–45.
136. Dr. Ruth Beuscher to Linda Wagner-Martin, 3 Dec. 1985. Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse Papers, Smith.
137. HM, 40.
138. Dr. Ruth Beuscher to Linda Wagner-Martin, 3 Dec. 1985. Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse Papers, Smith.
139. HM, 40.
140. SP to OHP, 29 Sept. 1962. L2, 842–43.
141. Dr. Ruth Beuscher to SP, 26 Sept. 1962. 17.24, SPC, Smith.
142. SP to Dr. Ruth Beuscher, 29–30 Sept. 1962. L2, 845. Plath wrote a postscript to this 29 Sept. letter on 30 Sept. when she received Beuscher’s reply. The letter is dated 29 Sept. in L2.
143. SP to AP, 9 Oct. 1962. L2, 847–48. Plath wrote to Beuscher on 9 Oct., “I found he went after Ted with a knife at Waterloo Station & tried to commit suicide after.” L2, 851.
144. SP to AP, 9 Oct. 1962. L2, 847–48.
31. THE PROBLEM OF HIM
1. SP to Richard Murphy, 7 Oct. 1962. L2, 846.
2. According to Ted Hughes’s dates in SP’s Collected Poems, Plath wrote twelve poems in 1960, and twenty-two in 1961.
3. Plath had read Dante at Smith, and Jane Baltzell Kopp told me Plath had translated Dante at Cambridge.
4. TH, “Trial,” section 16. Add MS 88993/1/1, BL.
5. SP, “New Poems” (typed 13 Dec. 1962 for Douglas Cleverdon at the BBC for a program of new poems). 6.16 SPC, Smith.
6. Hughes told this to Keith Sagar and William Scammell. See HC, The Grief of Influence, for fuller discussion about the influences of these poems on Plath’s work.
7. Howard Moss to SP, 26 Sept. 1962. New Yorker Papers, NYPL.
8. Otto E. Plath, Bumblebees and Their Ways (New York: Macmillan, 1934), 36; 51.
9. SP, “New Poems.” Al Alvarez Papers, Add MS 88589/8, BL.
10. Ibid.
11. TH to William Scammell, 29 Apr. 1998. Add MS 88918/137, BL.
12. SP, “New Poems.” Al Alvarez Papers, Add MS 88589/8, BL.
13. The week of Oct. 7–13 is missing from Plath’s 1962 Letts Royal Office Tablet Diary (19.2, SPC, Smith).
14. SP, “New Poems.” Al Alvarez Papers, Add MS 88589/8, BL.
15. SP to Dr. Ruth Beuscher, 9 Oct. 1962. L2, 851.
16. SP to Dr. Ruth Beuscher, 22 Sept. 1962. L2, 832.
17. SP to Dr. Ruth Beuscher, 9 Oct. 1962. L2, 853.
18. SP to AP, 9 Oct. 1962. L2, 847–50.
19. Nathaniel Tarn, Oct. 1962, diary notes. M1132, Nathaniel Tarn Papers, Stanford.
20. Yehuda Koren and Eliat Negev, Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath’s Rival and Ted Hughes’s Doomed Love (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2007), 111.
21. Nathaniel Tarn, 1 Oct. 1962, diary notes. M1132, Nathaniel Tarn Papers, Stanford. David and Assia Wevill were still attending the Group together; on 5 Oct. Tarn noted his annoyance that the Wevills had not reacted to or discussed his poems that evening.
22. SP to Howard Moss, 10 Oct. 1962. L2, 854.
23. SP, “New Poems.” 6.16, SPC, Smith.
24. She handwrote her first draft on the back of Hughes’s play The Calm and then wrote two more typewritten drafts on the back of Hughes’s review of the socialist playwright Arnold Wesker. The fifth typewritten draft is on clean paper. The drafts are at 8.61, SPC, Smith.
25. SP, “New Poems.” 6.16, SPC, Smith.
26. Justine Picardie, “The Toxic Avenger,” Independent (30 Sept. 1995).
27. Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (New York: Norton, 2011), 246.
28. George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman. 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970; 1998), 301.
29. TH, “Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath’s Poems,” TriQuarterly 7 (Fall 1966): 81–88. 84.
30. SP, draft of “Daddy.” 8.61, SPC, Smith.
31. See Heather Cam, “ ‘Daddy’: Sylvia Plath’s Debt to Anne Sexton,” American Literature 59.3 (October 1987): 429–32. “My Friend, My Friend” appeared in The Antioch Review 19 (1959): 150, but, as Cam notes, Plath probably saw a version of it in Lowell’s seminar.
32. A. Alvarez, “Sylvia Plath,” TriQuarterly 7 (Fall 1966): 65–74. 71.
33. The article discussed Brueghel’s prophetic nature in the context of his paintings The Triumph of Death and The Massacre of the Innocents.
34. CPTH, 165.
35. CPTH, 166.
36. Helen Vendler, “An Intractable Metal,” New Yorker (15 Feb. 1992): 124.
37. SP to AP, 12 Oct. 1962. L2, 855.
38. EF interview with Elizabeth Compton Sigmund, Sept. 1999. EFP.
39. SP to AP, 12 Oct. 1962. L2, 855–57. The article Plath mentioned was by Elizabeth Jennings, who included Plath among a handful of “Memorable English or American woman poets” that also featured Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Edith Sitwell, Anne Ridler, Kathleen Raine, Elizabeth Bishop. Elizabeth Jennings. “Mrs. Browning. By Alethea Hayter,” Listener (13 Sept. 1962): 400.
40. SP to Warren and Margaret Plath, 12 Oct. 1962. L2, 859.
41. Ibid., L2, 858.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., L2, 859.
44. HC interview with Suzette and Helder Macedo, May 2016, London.
45. SP to Warren and Maggie Plath, 12 Oct. 1962. L2, 860.
46. SP to AP, 16 Oct. (#1) 1962. L2, 861–62.
47. SP to AP, 16 Oct. (#2) 1962. L2, 863.
48. SP to AP, 16 Oct. (#1) 1962. L2, 862.
49. SP, “Medusa,” draft 1, p. 2, composed 16 Oct. 1962. 11.152, SPC, Smith.
50. AP to Judith Kroll, 1 Dec. 1978. 29.26, SPC, Smith.
51. HC interview with Suzette Macedo, May 2016, London.
52. Harriet Rosenstein interview with Suzette Macedo, 1973. 2.18, MSS 1489, Emory.
53. HC interview with Suzette and Helder Macedo, May 2016, London.
54. SP to AP, 16 Oct. (#1) 1962. L2, 861.
55. Harriet Rosenstein interview with Marvin Kane, 1973–74. 2.8, MSS 1489, Emory.
56. SP to AP, 16 Oct. (#1) 1962. L2, 862.
57. Edith Hughes to AP, 17 Oct. 1962. Lilly.
58. SP to AP, 16 Oct. 1962. L2, 860.
59. SP to AP, 18 Oct. 1962. L2, 865.
60. Kenneth Neville-Davies revealed this information in an email to Peter Steinberg, 11 Feb. 2016. Cited with permission of Kenneth Neville-Davies.
61. HC interview with Elizabeth Compton Sigmund, May 2016, Cornwall.
62. SP to AP, 16 Oct. (#2) 1962. L2, 863.
63. SP to AP, 18 Oct. 1962. L2, 865.
64. SP to WP, 18 Oct. 1962. L2, 870–71.
65. SP to OHP, 18 Oct. 1962. L2, 869. Edith complained to her son Gerald that Sylvia did not let her hold Frieda enough when they visited, and talked about how much it pained her to put the baby down. Edith Hughes to Gerald Hughes, Mar. 1961, quoted in Ted & I: A Brother’s Memoir (New York: St. Martin’s, 2012), 155.
66. SP to OHP, 18 Oct. 1962. L2, 868–69.
67. OHP to SP, 27 Nov. 1962. 17.43, SPC, Smith.
68. SP to Clarissa Roche, 20 Oct. 1962. L2, 872.
69. There are five drafts of the poem at 9.97, SPC, Smith.
70. SP, “New Poems.” 6.16, SPC, Smith.
71. She wrote to Aurelia on 22 Oct. saying that paying for the nanny was “a wise decision for us to make.” Lilly.
72. SP to AP, 21 Oct. 1962. L2, 873–74.
73. Ibid., L2, 875.
74. SP to Dr. Ruth Beuscher, 21 Oct. 1962. L2, 879.
75. Ibid., L2, 877.
76. Ibid., L2, 878.
77. Ibid., L2, 877–79.
78. SP to AP, 21 Oct. 1962. L2, 875.
79. SP to OHP, 15 Dec. 1962. L2, 937.
80. SP to Ruth Fainlight, 22 Oct. 1962. L2, 880–82.
81. She did not date them, but their subject and her pen color suggest that she read them also on 22 Oct. Plath’s copy of this book is at SPC, Smith.
82. Hughes’s edition of Plath’s Collected Poems gives “Lady Lazarus” a misleading chronology. There, it follows “Cut,” “Ariel,” and “Purdah.” But Plath wrote the first draft of “Lady Lazarus” on 23 Oct., before these other poems. The poem went through six undated handwritten drafts, on the back of chapter 3 of The Bell Jar, then four more additional typewritten drafts (on the back of chapter 2 of The Bell Jar, drafts of “The Bald Madonnas,” and “Totem”) dated 23 Oct. She removed one word on 29 Oct. and then made some additional changes in her December Ariel typescript. The drafts of the poem are at SPC, Smith.
83. SP, “New Poems.” 6.16, SPC, Smith.
84. CPTH, 11.
85. Jillian Becker to Harriet Rosenstein, 24 Feb. 1974. Provided by Jillian Becker. See HC, The Grief of Influence, for a detailed discussion of the ways in which Plath responded ironically to the White Goddess identification.
86. Paul Giles, Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 222. See also Robin Peel, Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics (Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2002) for more on this topic.
87. SP to AP, 23 Oct. 1962. L2, 882–83.
88. SP to OHP, 25 Oct. 1962. L2, 891.
89. Winifred Davies to AP, 3 Nov. 1962. Lilly.
90. SP to OHP, 25 Oct. 1962. L2, 891.
91. Harriet Rosenstein interview with Susan O’Neill-Roe Booth, 1973. 1.11, MSS 1489, Emory.
92. Critics have noted that “Dirty girl” suggests menstruation.
93. Harriet Rosenstein interview with Susan O’Neill-Roe Booth, 1973. 1.11, MSS 1489, Emory.
94. HC interview with Suzette and Helder Macedo, May 2016, London.
95. SP to AP, 23 Oct. 1962. L2, 884.
96. SP to Clarissa Roche, 25 Oct. 1962. L2, 889.
97. SP to AP, 25 Oct. 1962. L2, 887–88.
98. Ibid.
99. OHP to AP, 27 Oct. 1962. Lilly.
100. OHP to AP, 3 Nov. 1962. Lilly.
101. Fifty years after its composition, the critic Dan Chiasson wrote, “There is nothing else like this in English; it is, I think, a perfect poem, perfect in its excesses and stray blasphemies…which make Plath Plath—that is to say, dangerous, heedless, a menace, and irresistible.” “Sylvia Plath’s Joy,” New Yorker (12 Feb. 2013).
102. Robert Lowell, Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 191.
103. SP, “New Poems.” 6.16, SPC, Smith.
104. TH, “Poetry in the Making: Capturing Animals,” Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose (New York: Picador, 1995), 15.
105. CPTH, 21.
106. J, 521.
107. CPTH, 21.
108. BJ, 72.
109. W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems, Richard Finneran, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 194.
110. The drafts of “Ariel” are at 6.15, SPC, Smith.
111. SP, “New Poems.” 6.16, SPC, Smith.
112. Giles, Virtual Americas, 221–22.
113. Eavan Boland, A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet (New York: Norton, 2011), 158.
114. Ibid., 75.
32. CASTLES IN AIR
1. Plath probably showed Hughes the bee poems before he left Court Green on 11 Oct. 1962.
2. Al Alvarez to SP, c. Oct. 1962. 17.21, SPC, Smith.
3. SP to OHP, 25 Oct. 1962. L2, 890.
4. SP to Warren and Margaret Plath, 25 Oct. 1962. L2, 893.
5. Other readers that day suggest the dominance of the Group: Zulfikar Ghose, John Lehmann, Peter Porter, Peter Redgrove, and Nathaniel Tarn, who would go on to win the Cheltenham Literature Festival Plath was supposed to have judged in 1963.
6. EF interview with Al Alvarez, July 1999. EFP.
7. A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971; New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 39.
8. Ibid., 37; 39–40.
9. Ibid., 33–34.
10. Ibid., 41.
11. HC interview with Al Alvarez, May 2016, London.
12. Alvarez, Savage God, 32. The manuscript is in the Al Alvarez Papers, Add MS 88589, BL.
13. Plath decided on Ariel after her 3–5 Dec. 1962 visit to London, when she saw Alvarez and showed him the full manuscript.
14. SP to OHP, 2 Nov. 1962. L2, 896.
15. New Poems 1962: A P.E.N. Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Lawrence Durrell, ed. (London: Hutchinson, 1962).
16. SP to OHP, 2 Nov. 1962. L2, 895.
17. Harriet Rosenstein interview with Edward Lucie-Smith, 1970. 2.17, MSS 1489, Emory.
18. Michael Hamburger, review of A Lover of Unreason, Modern Poetry in Translation, series 3, no. 7 (2006).
19. HC interview with Daniel Huws, May 2016. London.
20. Daniel Huws, Memories of Ted Hughes 1952–1963 (Nottingham: Richard Hollis/Five Leaves), 48.
21. SP to OHP, 2 Nov. 1962. L2, 895.
22. SP to Eric Walter White, 26 Oct. 1962. L2, 894.
23. Eric Walter White to Jack Sweeney, 11 Feb. 1963. LA52/348, Jack and Máire Sweeney Papers, UCD.
24. Patric Dickinson to Harriet Rosenstein, 1973. 1.24, MSS 1489, Emory. In this letter, Dickinson likely misremembers their meeting as occurring one or two days before Plath’s suicide. He states in his 1973 letter that their meeting in the pub was the first and only time he met Plath. SP recorded the Oct. 30 meeting in her calendar.
25. SP to AP, 23 Oct. 1962. According to Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil, “The American Poetry night was held on 16 July 1963; presented by Eric Mottram, with assistance from John Hollander and Jonathan Williams. Poets included Robert Lowell, Muriel Rukeyser, and Ronald Johnson; Guy Kingsley Poynter read from Paterson by William Carlos Williams.” L2, 883–84.
26. The Poet Speaks, Peter Orr, ed. (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1966), 167–68.
27. Ibid., 169–70.
28. SP to OHP, 2 Nov. 1962. L2, 895–96.
29. SP to AP, 7 Nov. 1962. L2, 898–99.
30. A. Alvarez, Where Did It All Go Right? (London: Richard Cohen, 1999), 313; 323; 319.
31. HC interview with Suzette and Helder Macedo, May 2016, London.
32. Ibid.
33. The dates of this visit come from Plath’s 1962 Letts Royal Office Tablet Diary, 19.2, SPC, Smith. The program was produced by George MacBeth. Plath read with Donald Hall, Basil Langton, and John Hall Wheelock.
34. SP to AP, 7 Nov. 1962. L2, 898.
35. David Wevill email to HC, 29 Sept. 2016.
36. SP to AP, 7 Nov. 1962. L2, 898.
37. HC interview with Suzette and Helder Macedo, May 2016, London.
38. Ibid.
39. EF interview with Suzette Macedo, Oct. 1999. EFP.
40. HC interview with Suzette and Helder Macedo, May 2016, London.
41. Ibid.
42. EF interview with Suzette Macedo, Oct. 1999. EFP.
43. Harriet Rosenstein interview with Suzette Macedo, 1973. 2.18, MSS 1489, Emory.
44. HC interview with Suzette and Helder Macedo, May 2016, London.
45. Harriet Rosenstein interview with Suzette Macedo, 1973. 2.18, MSS 1489, Emory.
46. EF interview with Suzette Macedo, Oct. 1999. EFP.
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