American Isis

by Carl Rollyson

  The sessions with Dr. Beuscher became more stressful, reducing Sylvia to tears as she admitted to jealousy of Ted and suspicion of his appeal to other women—and, at last, confessing that she identified him with her father, their faces and bodies becoming interchangeable in her dreams. Ted became the missing man, the father out with the girl on the Smith campus, a scene that had enraged Sylvia and fueled her dread about her husband leaving her. Sylvia’s journal entries about her colloquies with Dr. Beuscher resemble a cathartic Greek play, with Plath worrying that perhaps like others in her life, Dr. Beuscher would abandon her. Sylvia had not been paying for treatment and was relieved when her therapist suggested a fee of five dollars an hour. Like Marilyn Monroe, who also was undergoing psychiatric treatment at the time, Sylvia Plath wondered why she could not count on even those closest to her, why she suspected their motives—while at the same time she puzzled over a sense of guilt that resulted in punishing herself. And like Monroe, Plath read Freud in hope of understanding her rages at herself and others that led to her suicide attempt. Both women wondered if bringing another child into the world might somehow redeem them, make their lives worthwhile by grounding them in the continuity of existence. But birthing a child was also a frightening prospect. Sylvia dreamed of losing a month-old baby. She had trouble rising in the morning and was slipping into passivity, “going sloppy,” she wrote.

  Sylvia tried to keep her doubts to herself, knowing how much they would upset Ted. Judging by his letters home, he had worked up a good writing schedule by January 1959, while Sylvia still struggled. He had it all settled in his mind that they would return to England by the end of the year. For both Ted and Sylvia, a dinner party with Robert Lowell and his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, proved rewarding. Lowell was a great admirer of Hughes’s poetry, and Sylvia made a point of recording how tenderly Lowell kissed his wife. Such displays of affection, on which Sylvia put a high premium, present a very different picture from Hughes’s fond but also cavalier recollection of meeting Lowell, the mad poet, who from time to time had to be institutionalized when his behavior became erratic and sometimes even violent. Sylvia, for her part, looked forward to Lowell’s poetry class at Boston University, which would begin shortly.

  In the afterglow of the Lowell-Hardwick party, Plath wrote “Point Shirley.” Set in her grandmother’s back yard after the great hurricane of Sylvia’s childhood, the poem evokes the image of a spit of sand slowly eroded by the sea—an apt image of her own memories wearing out over time, suggesting the grief of loss, which is emphasized by the blood-red sun sinking over Boston. Sylvia remembered her grandmother’s love, which she now wanted to get from “these dry-papped stones.” Although motherhood and birth are never mentioned, they seem present in the poet’s yearning to generate a new life that arises out of her love for the old. She had Dr. Spock on her reading list. She enjoying visiting a friend and playing with her children, feeling a part of “young womanhood” absorbed in “women and womentalk.” She was even keeping her poems away from Ted because his opinion might paralyze her. After a visit to Stanley Kunitz, she concluded that Kunitz did not like women poets. Listening to him, she could only think about having a baby, and of her disappointment at the arrival of another menstrual period.

  It helped a little to attend Robert Lowell’s class and hear his response to her poems, but in truth, she did not feel very inspired by his ineffectual teaching and was hoping to do more with her prose. This is the class that included Anne Sexton and another well-known poet, George Starbuck. Sexton later wrote an unrevealing memoir about her jaunts with Sylvia and Starbuck. Lowell recalled Plath as “willowy, long-waisted, sharp-elbowed, nervous, giggly, gracious—a brilliant, tense presence embarrassed by restraint. Her humility and willingness to accept what was admired seemed at times to give her an air of maddening docility that hid her unfashionable patience and boldness.… I sensed her abashment and distinction, and never guessed her later appalling and triumphant fulfillment.” Although Lowell was beginning to enter his confessional poetry phase and Sexton proved an apt acolyte with her flamboyantly self-referential poems, the greater influence on Plath was Theodore Roethke’s brilliantly controlled self-revelatory poems, full of fecund metaphors of growth. Her reading of Faulkner, especially of Sanctuary and “The Bear,” would have a long-term impact on her own violent, apocalyptic verse. Sylvia Plath gave Anne Sexton her due but also thought her contemporary’s work “loose.”

  On 9 March, Sylvia, accompanied by Ted, visited her father’s grave in Winthrop, just a flat stone near Azalea Path. She wanted to dig him up as proof of his existence. She felt cheated, probably because seeing the site resolved nothing. His dying while she was so young seemed a swindle. The poem commemorating her visit, “Electra on Azalea Path,” is, as she realized, overdone. She did not yet have the capacity to strip down her emotions into the taut lines of her later work. Still, the poem does capture the sensibility of a daughter who tells her father how she has dreamed his “epic, image by image,” and in the poem’s concluding line confesses, “It was my love that did us both to death.” Discussing her father and this visit in therapy made Sylvia feel she was regressing. But then Ted won a Guggenheim Fellowship, Sylvia received another acceptance from The New Yorker, and the couple was invited to spend two months at Yaddo, the writer’s colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, where they would repair in mid-September. Their concerns about money would be relieved until the end of the year, and in Yaddo’s bracing, pampered climate, perhaps Plath would finally achieve a breakthrough.

  For all her complaining about stunted creativity, Sylvia arose on 31 May to realize that since the beginning of 1959 she had written six stories, including some of her best: “Johnny Panic,” “The Shadow,” “Sweetie Pie and the Guttermen,” and “Above the Oxbow.” “The Shadow” re-creates the ambiance of the war years, when Sylvia listened to radio programs and read comic books featuring Superman, the Green Hornet, and The Shadow, with their messages that crime doesn’t pay. In the story, a young girl learns about the atrocities committed in Japanese prisoner of war camps and dreams of an evil that is not so easily defeated: “The hostile, brooding aura of the nightmare seeped out, somehow to become part of my waking landscape.” Even worse, her father is ostracized in their neighborhood because he is German. And the young girl further implicates her father in evil by biting a boy: “In some obscure, roundabout way” she has betrayed her father to the neighbors. When he is forced to leave home on government orders, the girl cries out at the unfairness and declares there can be no God if such injustice is permitted. What had seemed to be the externality of evil in programs like The Shadow is now brought home to her: “The shadow in my mind lengthened with the night blotting out our half of the world, and beyond it; the whole globe seemed sunk in darkness.” Such a story debunks American exceptionalism and foreshadows Sylvia’s return with Ted to Europe.

  Sylvia continued to publish poetry in top-rated journals like Partisan Review, The Sewanee Review, and The Hudson Review, but her first book of poetry had just missed winning the Yale Younger Poets prize that went to George Starbuck, whom Sylvia dismissed as a light verse writer. In a letter to Ann Davidow, she confessed she did not have the confidence to commit herself to a novel, the long-delayed “Falcon Yard,” which she could perhaps resurrect when she and Ted headed for Yaddo in September, now that she had thought of a name for a heroine, Sadie Peregrine, a stand-in for herself. In the interim, they were setting off on a cross-country adventure as soon as they found a summer sublet for their Boston apartment.

  By 25 June, Sylvia had purchased camping equipment. Out of the summer sojourn, she produced one memorable story, “The Fifty-Ninth Bear,” which makes for fascinating reading when set beside the long letter Hughes wrote to his parents about the adventure that inspired the tale, and beside Sylvia’s contemporaneous report to Aurelia and Warren. Ted described how he and Sylvia woke up in the middle of the night to the sounds of bears foraging through garbage in Yellowstone Park, sniffing
around their tent, and then apparently breaking into their car’s trunk, prompting him to look out and discover that a bear had broken the rear window to get at their food—all details Sylvia put in her story. Later they learned a bear had killed a woman who had shone a flashlight on it. Ted counted sixty-seven bears during their stay. Sylvia’s account emphasized their fear that the bear would eat them. She described looking out of the tent at the bear, not mentioning what Ted did at that moment. Later, he did get up to have a look. Sylvia said they were “quite shaken.”

  In Plath’s story, the husband is hectored by his passive-aggressive wife into shooing the bear away, an effort that results in the husband’s death. This death is the culmination of tensions between the couple, centering on his rather condescending efforts to placate her. She is portrayed as a hysteric who depends on her husband and resents him at the same time. According to Lucas Myers, when the story was published in The London Magazine, he and others were troubled by Plath’s willingness to kill Ted off in a story. But the husband’s name in “The Fifty-Ninth Bear” is Norton, and he does not resemble Ted Hughes so much as he does Dick Norton, whose sense of male prerogative deeply offended Sylvia. Neither Plath’s journals nor her letters offer any support for the kind of animosity toward the male protector that is portrayed in the story. Moreover, the wife, named Sadie (like the protagonist of Sylvia’s projected novel), is an unflattering portrait of Sylvia herself—or of the Sylvia she would have become as Dick Norton’s wife, subordinating herself to a doctor’s practice and neurotically relying on him to cosset her. Ted’s own commanding presence, and his affinity for the natural world, are entirely absent from this story. Indeed, as critic Tracy Brain observes, “The Fifty-Ninth Bear” is all about tourists on trips who “do” nature while having no real connection with it—and pay for their errant stupidity with their lives.

  And yet, how can one read “The Fifty-Ninth Bear” and not wonder if in fiction Sylvia Plath was owning up to her anger about her husband, which she could not yet express in a nonfictional voice? After all, Norton sings a ditty about the “wanderin’ boys of Liverpool,” although he is not explicitly identified as English. In this reading, the name Norton is merely a way to disguise an attack on Ted. Still, the man who is killed is foolish (to use Ted’s word from the letter to his parents) to shine a flashlight at the bear. And Ted Hughes was no fool. With his profound rapport with wild creatures he could not be more different from the hapless Norton of the story. What Sylvia might have been getting at in the private mythology of her life is unrecoverable, but the story seems nevertheless self-congratulatory, in the sense that it was her way of explaining why she rejected Dick and opted for Ted.

  Plath had her usual trouble settling into a new environment. She loved Yaddo’s traditional furnishings and the sumptuous meals, but she spent the balance of September reading Eudora Welty and Jean Stafford and writing story ideas in her journal. She sent three stories to Peter Davison, now an editor at The Atlantic Monthly. She doubted this weak-willed male, as she deemed him, would accept her work. Sylvia put in a good seven hours a day on her writing, enjoying her top-floor view of the “dense pines.” Ted had his own writing studio in the woods. Sumptuous breakfasts and box lunches kept them going for a whole day.

  Sylvia read Arthur Miller while Ted was writing a play, which is perhaps why in early October she dreamed of Marilyn Monroe. Aurelia had wished she could be the fairy godmother in her daughter’s life, and Plath was working on a “mummy” story when she dreamed the fairy godmother scene with Marilyn. Only with Monroe could Plath unbend, even though Monroe and Miller “could, of course, not know us at all,” Sylvia noted. And she still could not write her novel. And she still called Ted her “salvation.” Maybe in England, she confided to her journal, she would have more luck. Harcourt had just turned down her first book of poetry.

  Sometime during her stay at Yaddo, Plath realized she was pregnant, although her journal is surprisingly silent on the subject. In early November, in her fourth month, she sped up her creation of new poems. “It’s wonderful how the prospect of such responsibilities concentrates one’s mind,” Ted wrote to a friend in early December. But then Sylvia’s output abruptly stopped, and she wondered what had happened to the confident writer of “Sunday at the Mintons.” She worried that in spite of all efforts to the contrary she had relied too much on Ted. Now Yaddo seemed like a nunnery that locked her away from the world, and she thought of beating it back to Boston before settling in London—or perhaps in the English countryside, not far from the city. She was terribly confused, alternately elated and enervated, reflexively thinking that a baby would prevent her from being herself, and then spending a happy day with a stomach that felt fat with life—only to have another disturbed by a dream of dying in childbirth.

  The couple decided Sylvia would give birth in England, where they arrived in mid-December. An ebullient Ted, writing to Daniel Huws, declared he had escaped petrification and was already renewing himself in England. In her journal, Sylvia welcomed her return to a country that had been receptive to her poems and stories and seemed to share her sensibility. On 9 December, Ted wrote to Lucas Myers that Sylvia, now six months pregnant, had written a dozen spectacular poems that reflected an entirely new phase—all done as wild monologues. “I’ve already stolen several things from them,” he boasted.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE UNIVERSAL MOTHER

  (1960–62)

  1960: Plath and Hughes rent a London flat; 1 April: Frieda Rebecca, their first child, is born; October: The Colossus, Plath’s first book, is published; 6 February 1961: Plath suffers a miscarriage; 28 February: Plath undergoes an appendectomy; March: Plath begins writing The Bell Jar; July: the couple purchases a manor house in Devon; 17 January 1962: Nicholas Farrar Hughes is born; May: David and Assia Wevill visit Court Green.

  On 3 February, Sylvia sent a round-up letter to Marcia Brown, explaining what it had been like to move back to England. She and Ted had stayed part of the time with Hughes’s parents in Yorkshire, but with Olwyn visiting and other relatives dropping by, Sylvia had little time to herself or space in which to read, let alone write. Ted’s mother, a messy housekeeper who left greasy pans in the oven and cupboards, got on Sylvia’s fastidious nerves. Sylvia wanted to help out, but Mrs. Hughes resisted. Sylvia felt hurt, she later told her friend Elizabeth Compton. Mrs. Hughes, Compton felt sure, did not want to exclude Sylvia, only wanting to pay respect to this well-educated woman of a different class.

  Then there had been a ghastly three-week search for a furnished flat. The awful rainy, cold, and windy weather—always sure to depress Plath—and the appalling, dingy condition of the housing stock that cost more that twenty-five dollars a week (out of their price range), made her feel adrift in the large city, especially since she wanted to be near a good doctor and hospital. The American poet W. S. Merwin and his English wife, Dido, tried to be helpful, making phone calls and using their contacts, but they also agreed with Sylvia that the English were the “most secretly dirty race on earth.” Even new items in department stores looked shabby to Sylvia. To get anything decent seemed to involve “key money,” a form of large bribe to a real estate agent or landlord. Welcome to England, which had yet to boom itself out of its postwar blues.

  Thanks to the Merwins, Sylvia and Ted finally found a flat on Chalcot Square near Primrose Hill, a very pleasant, almost country-like setting. The place needed a lot of work (Sylvia was applying her third coat of paint), but they were happy to have a home on a three-year lease—and relieved, since the baby was due in late March. They had a sunny kitchen and a view of the square, where Sylvia watched birds and children playing. They had to buy appliances, but the Merwins lent them some furniture. At the equivalent of eighteen dollars a week, plus charges for gas and electricity, they could budget enough using Ted’s Guggenheim Fellowship money. And of course the National Health Service would cover all costs associated with childbirth. Ted’s letters share Sylvia’s enthusiasm for their ne
w home, as well as her dismay over what he called the “frightful competition for flats.” Sylvia reported to her mother on 7 February that Ted had just finished painting the living room walls in white over textured paper, and that they intended to have an engraving of Isis, enlarged from one of his astrology books, mounted on one wall. To Olwyn, Ted wrote that he liked “the feel of living in London. My stay in America seems to have greatly objectified my sense of England.”

  Sylvia decided to have her baby at home with the assistance of a midwife, not an unusual practice in England, but one forced on Sylvia because it was too late to register at a hospital under the National Health Service. She could be admitted as an emergency patient, but Sylvia preferred to plan ahead. She was comforted to have the assistance of Dido’s obstetrician. Natural childbirth—still an unusual choice for a woman in the States—had the blessing of her English doctor, who promised to be on call should there be complications. Sylvia was also practicing relaxation exercises, and although she did not mention it to Marcia, Ted had also experimented with hypnotizing her and with teaching her self-hypnotic states that relieved stress. She was counting on him to be on hand, to cook and generally to bolster her—although she wished a friend like Marcia could also be around. Sylvia, probably more fearful than she let on, wanted to know what Marcia thought of this setup.

  Dido Merwin, Lucas Myers, and other British friends of Ted Hughes have portrayed Sylvia as rigid, self-absorbed, and hopelessly American. And yet here was an aspect of her that they did not seem to appreciate. Her American doctor had advised against natural childbirth. And indeed, everything in Sylvia’s suburban background cried out against this old world way of doing things. For all her nightmares about childbirth gone wrong, Sylvia showed considerable flexibility and courage in approaching this momentous change in her life. Her husband seems to have had qualms. To Lucas Meyers, Hughes showed the first sign that not all was well. Out for a drink with his friend from Cambridge days, Ted “confided to me what seemed not to be manageable in the marriage,” Myers recalls in Crows Steered/Bergs Appeared. To Myers, Hughes had never before been critical of married life with Sylvia, and like many of his friends, Myers perceived Hughes to be a “mostly willing prisoner” of the marriage. But in one instance, he told Myers, he had decided to count the number of times Sylvia had interrupted his work in the course of a morning: The total had reached 104.