The first of March marked an epic day, because Ted had delivered to her the much-coveted New Yorker first-reading contract. This development meant she would send her poems to The New Yorker first, and only to other publications if her work were not accepted. She received a one-hundred-dollar signing bonus, plus a 25 percent increase in the rates they paid her. The renewable one-year contract had cost of living raises built into it as well. Even though Sylvia had yet to write her greatest poetry, all signs pointed to her ascension to the pantheon with her beloved Ted.
Except for the food, Sylvia had no criticism of the National Health Service. Indeed, the facilities were brighter and the staff more cheerful than what she had seen in Wellesley when her mother had been hospitalized. Sylvia also enjoyed listening to her fellow patients. She began taking notes of their conversations. She greatly admired their hardy, uncomplaining natures. She enjoyed chatty visits with the vivacious “Bunny,” the goiter lady, and “the Duchess.” She was treated more like a guest than a patient. “Will I have an enema?” a solicitous nurse asked. The doctors were handsome and reassuring. Indeed, everyone was so amiable, saying goodnight to one another, that Sylvia felt no need to indulge in “the mopes” or any sort of self-pity. Turning in for her first night, she was delighted to discover she had her own set of flowered curtains affording her some privacy.
As she recovered from surgery, Sylvia began to notice petty annoyances: getting bumped in the hallway, feeling uncomfortable in a drafty room with a cracked window, and—the worst—the “ward-snorer.” And why were there no bells to call nurses? By 5 March, on her way to recovery and managing her pain quite well, Sylvia could feel herself departing from the company of sufferers, who lost interest in you as soon as you returned to health. But she loved all the gossiping—good story material—and realized that Ted was having a much harder time of it at home trying to work and take care of Frieda. Her feelings of camaraderie in hospital are reminiscent of her days at camp. In both cases, these tight-knit, closed-in communities brought out her compassion, as she consoled homesick girls and later cheered up other patients. And as she did during her work in the psychiatric ward and her time spent aboard an ocean liner, she enjoyed studying cases of the afflicted and the eccentric, writing them up in her journal. Sylvia reported that only one person, one of her fellow patient’s daughters, noticed her books, telling her mother she was bedded next to an “intellectual.”
Returning home on 8 March, Sylvia still had to rely on Ted for baby lifting and laundry. Between her miscarriage and her hospital stay, it had been a terrible month for him, Sylvia told her mother. And yet he never complained. She felt badly about what she had put her “saintly” spouse through. Women in the hospital marveled that a husband would take on so much. Ted had some help with babysitting, but in the main he took over because he wanted Sylvia to recuperate as fast as possible to rejoin him in their writing regimen. In a letter to her Aunt Dotty, Sylvia reported that under Ted’s care she had regained her energy by the end of March. With the thought of more children to come, Sylvia told Aurelia that by 1962 they just had to find a house, although they hardly had the income that would qualify them for a mortgage. Ted kept winning cash prizes, though, and his BBC work would net him something like $1,500 in the course of a year.
By 1 May, Sylvia was buoyed by the news that Knopf would publish The Colossus in the United States. Ted had written Aurelia a few weeks earlier to say Sylvia was in top form and much in demand. From her recent work he singled out “Tulips,” a poem derived from her hospital stay, and a work that reflected Sylvia’s surrender not only of her day clothes and her body, but also her sense of self to the surgical staff. Looking at the photographs of her husband and daughter, she describes herself as a “thirty-year-old cargo boat,” letting slip things that “sink out of sight.” The poem says what Sylvia could not quite articulate in her journal and letters: The hospital stay had been a welcome letting go, a relaxation of nerves and an abnegation of family responsibilities. In the hospital she feels like a nun, white and pure. The stay is also, however, a kind of death, “the white of human extinction,” in critic Marjorie Perloff’s words. The red tulips, rude with life, arrive as an intrusion, an invasion of the patient’s pleasant anesthetic daze. The flowers seem like that roaring snorer Sylvia mentions in her journal, bringing the world back to her. But the tulips also come to symbolize the opening and closing of her blooming heart as she tastes water (her tears?) that reminds her of the salty sea in a “country far away as health.”
The persona of the poem, like Plath herself, seems to be emerging out of her passivity, becoming a person again, although she is not yet well. In The Collected Poems, Ted Hughes includes a note suggesting “Tulips” was the breakthrough poem, marking the moment when Plath threw away her thesaurus and spoke with spontaneity and clarity in her own poet’s voice. Certainly after her miscarriage and hospital stay, both of which left her feeling like someone done to, “Tulips” seems to presage a rebirth in the classic fashion—in this case with a heroine, rather than a hero, reluctantly, then inexorably moving toward a seagoing quest, a type of female Ulysses.
Ted looked upon Sylvia’s hospital stay as a detoxification. He believed that her appendix had been slowly poisoning her for five years. So the rest had done her good, giving her respite from taking care of Frieda as well, a comment that could be taken as a gloss on “Tulips.” That Ted, as he told Sylvia, had genuinely enjoyed taking care of his daughter seems apparent in his delighted descriptions of her standing up in her pen and laughing at everybody, then throwing her ball and bawling at them. He announced to Aurelia that they were buying a new Morris station wagon. He promised to take her on a tour when she arrived in June.
Sylvia did not mention in letters to her mother that she was already about a third of the way through the novel that would become The Bell Jar, the story of a college girl, as she told Ann Davidow, “building up and going through a nervous breakdown.” The book was full of real people, Sylvia admitted, and would have to be published under a pseudonym. The confident tone of her letter, written on 27 April, suggests that Sylvia had overcome the false starts and abrupt stops that had inhibited her previous attempts to write a long narrative. “I have never been so excited about anything,” Sylvia wrote—even though she predicted lawsuits. She found the book by turns funny and serious. It made her laugh. And indeed, the novel’s mordant humor is superbly conveyed in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s audiobook narration.
Early June brought yet another sign of Sylvia’s burgeoning reputation. The BBC devoted a twenty-five-minute program exclusively to her poetry, a mark of distinction, she told her mother, that put her in the company of Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke, poets whose work had received similar treatment. The next week Aurelia arrived to mind Frieda, now just beginning to toddle, so that Sylvia and Ted could join the Merwins on their French farm for a two-week holiday. Ted said nothing at all about the Merwins’ negative reactions to Sylvia’s behavior, continuing his policy (as Dido Merwin described it) of never taking issue with his wife’s behavior.
In July, the couple joined Aurelia in Yorkshire, uniting with the Hughes family while Sylvia and Ted began looking for a country home, preferably in Devon, for their expanding family. Sylvia was now four months pregnant. The couple wanted easy access by rail to London, but also a more southerly climate—especially for Sylvia, who found Yorkshire cold and grim. By the end of July, the couple had discovered their dream home in Devon: Court Green, a nine-room house that included a wine cellar and an attic. It had a thatched roof, a cobbled court, and a lawn, making it a virtual picture-book English estate. At one time the home of Sir and Lady Arundel, Court Green is situated on land that had been farmed since the eleventh century, with a tumulus signifying the remains of even earlier Roman occupation. The three-acre walled estate included a two-room cottage and a stable that would serve as a garage. The grounds also included a vegetable garden, an apple orchard, cherry trees, and blackberry and raspberry bushes. An ab
andoned tennis court could be made into a yard for the children to play in. And there was a village, North Tawton, nearby. It was all quite grand, but also quite dilapidated. And it was not anything Ted and Sylvia could afford. An enthusiastic Aurelia wanted to foot the bill, taking out a mortgage for the whole property, but Ted resisted this proposal, ultimately agreeing instead to loans of $1,400 each from Aurelia and his parents, which greatly reduced the mortgage.
Busy planning their move to Devon, Sylvia and Ted sublet their London flat to a young Canadian poet, David Wevill, and his German-Russian-Jewish wife, Assia, both of whom made a strong impression and inspired a sense of identification, Sylvia told her mother. After all, Sylvia and Ted were just a few years ahead of this other twosome trying their luck in literary London. Writing to Lucas Myers shortly after moving into Court Green in early September, Ted observed that England gave Sylvia the leisure to “develop naturally” for a “more & more appreciative audience whereas America would be cramping & stunting & distorting her with that dreadful competitive spotlight, to which Sylvia is so susceptible, when she’s under it, as any Easterner over there.”
Sylvia luxuriated in her new home, swept clean by the Arundels. The coal stove warmed the first floor, and an electric heater took care of upstairs. As he always did when they moved into a new place, Ted built bookshelves. Sylvia had festooned the house with flowers from the garden and served breakfast with freshly picked blackberries. She had located a prenatal clinic nearby and seemed entirely pleased with her peaceful surroundings, which Frieda also found delightful. She was evidently taking after her mother, picking up every little crumb in her playroom. Sylvia had also lined up a midwife and doctor (his surgery was just three houses up and across from Court Green), and she was looking forward to another home birth in January. A local woman was engaged to do some cleaning and washing up. Warren visited in early September, and Sylvia loved the way he pitched in, mowing the lawn and chopping wood. He also sanded an elm plank that she used as a desk in the best front bedroom. Ted’s study was in the attic, a room of his own that had him joyously leading the kind of life he always wanted, Sylvia assured her mother.
Sylvia’s received gifts of money from Olive Higgins Prouty and her grandfather, which covered many of the moving-in expenses. Sylvia had sold a story, and Ted was doing some work thirty-five miles away at the BBC studio in Plymouth. From Exeter, about an hour away, he sometimes took the train to the BBC London studios. His descriptions of Court Green and its surroundings were nearly as ebullient as Sylvia’s, although he found their little village “grim.” Still, he had banished the “headache” of London and felt as though he had removed an ant’s nest from between his ears. He counted seventy-one apple trees, one less than Sylvia’s total, and was busy with strawberry plants, imagining there was money to be made out of their produce. He took pleasure in picking his own fruit and eating it atop his own prehistoric mound.
Writing to Daniel Weissbort, an old Cambridge friend, Ted congratulated him on his marriage, an institution Ted recommended. But he also made an oblique comment that reflects, perhaps, what it was beginning to feel like settling into a fully domesticated life without urban distractions, but also without the outlets the city provided. “Marriage is a nest of small scorpions, but it kills the big dragons,” Ted wrote. For all the couple’s talk about sharing the same wavelength, it is inconceivable that Sylvia could have written such a sentence—at least not then.
Unlike Ted, Sylvia really wanted to settle into village life, and she contacted the Anglican rector about attending church, even though, as she explained to him, she was a Unitarian. The broad-minded and well-traveled clergyman was most welcoming, although Sylvia found the Sunday service a rather tepid affair. The rector appears, along with other local characters, in Plath’s charming story, “Mothers,” revealing how curious she was about the lives of her neighbors, whom she invited into her home, bestowing on them the respect that her husband would not have thought of expressing. Sylvia’s satisfaction did not mean, however, that she did not miss her homeland. In mid-October she asked Aurelia to send a few issues of the Ladies Home Journal. She missed “Americanness” now that she was in exile. And she did not section herself off from what was happening in the rest of the world—especially the atomic testing that she feared would raise the levels of strontium 90 in the milk supply. Expressing herself just like a Brit, she declared the American fallout shelter craze “mad.” She wrote to Marcia Brown, hoping to coax her into a visit. As was usual with a close friend, Sylvia was more candid than she was with her mother, admitting the village was rather ugly and the rector dull and stupid. He had taken one look at the books on Sylvia’s shelves and called her an “educated pagan.” Still, evensong in the Anglican chapel soothed her. She realized that to the locals she was a curiosity, but they treated her with warmth and generosity.
During the autumn of 1961, Sylvia made occasional visits to London to see editors and publishers, attending the occasional party and meeting writers. But she never remained long and was always anxious to return to Court Green. Village life, including a hunt meet, continued to intrigue her. Red-jacketed, brass-buttoned foxhunters paraded through the village tooting their horns, accompanied by “sulphurous dogs.” Such events, she told her mother, were “oddly moving,” although she sympathized with the foxes.
Sylvia wrote reviews of children’s books for the New Statesman, assembling quite a collection for Frieda, and soon, Nicholas. Repairs to the house continued. She enjoyed peaceful interludes in the Anglican chapel and long walks with Frieda. On 9 November, she was elated to learn that she had won a $2,000 Saxton grant to support her proposed novel, the subject of which Sylvia still did not share with her mother. Instead, she reported to Aurelia that The New Yorker had just accepted her poem, “Blackberrying,” clearly based on one of her jaunts with Frieda, when they picked juicy ripe fruit that made them part of a “blood sisterhood.” Indeed, the blackberries are described in terms of Plath’s body, “big as the ball of my thumb.” The simple pleasures she described in letters to her mother become in this poem an unflinching evocation of rapacity—both hers and nature’s—suggesting the way humans eat and are eaten by the natural world. Blackberrying takes her down a sheep path that opens out “on nothing,” just a great space and the “din” of what sounds like silversmiths “beating at an intractable metal.” Even as Sylvia told her mother that her world was coming together, her poems offer an alternative vision of futility.
By mid-November, Sylvia had a draft of The Bell Jar in hand and was busy fiddling with details that would disguise her all-too-literal rendering of people and places. Her publisher worried about libel, an especially vexing problem in England, where the onus is on author and publisher to prove they have not libeled the plaintiff, whereas in America the burden of proof is on the plaintiff. At least Aurelia was not going to sue her daughter, Sylvia said: In the novel, the mother is “dutiful” and “hard-working,” with a “beastly” and “ungrateful” daughter. With the novel virtually completed, Sylvia swore her editor to secrecy, since the Saxton grant was supposed to be for fiction she had not yet finished.
With The Bell Jar, Plath was finally able to put her own experience in perspective as the story of what success meant in 1950s America to her alter-ego, Esther Greenwood: “I was supposed to be the envy of thousands of other college girls just like me all over America who wanted nothing more than to be tripping about in those same size seven patent leather shoes I’d bought in Bloomingdale’s one lunch hour with a black patent leather belt and black patent leather pocket-book to match.” Esther looks the part, with her perfectly put together ensemble like those of the other magazine guest editors with their “all-American bone structures.” The term all-American, usually reserved for superior college athletes, here suggests the conventionality with which this all-star team is assembled. Plath reduced the number of actual guest editors from twenty to twelve, the number of the apostles—in this case, devotees of American drive and energy
. Only Esther has lost her ambition, and what troubles her is that very lack of aspiration. She cannot simply be. She has to become something more, and when the zeal to be great deserts her, she is left with nothing.
With children, a home, and a husband, Plath was able to confront her earlier self. But as Ted Hughes wrote in his introduction to her journals, while a “new self” had created her mature poetry and her novel, it could not “ultimately save her.” If one interprets The Bell Jar as, in a sense, Sylvia turning her back “on an enemy who seems safely defeated, and is defeated,” her victory may well be, Hughes speculates, the “most dangerous moment of all.” Not always the keenest reader of his wife’s mind-set, here Hughes seems to have got it right. She mistakenly thought that with The Bell Jar she had put her trauma behind her.
Esther is demoralized, in part, by the standardized America that Hughes so detested. She rejects Buddy Willard, modeled after Dick Norton, because he has no intuition. She scorns his “good marks,” but then turns this hostility upon herself, noting that after “nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race.” Unlike Doreen, who does have intuition and does take chances, Esther suffers from a failure of nerve and a paralyzing indecisiveness that she tries to remedy with reckless behavior, resulting in a nearly successful rape she has invited in a desperate effort to “go the whole way.”
Esther makes it through her time of trial, rejecting the facile advice of Joan Gilling, whose false recovery from a mental breakdown ends when Joan kills herself. Esther is not cured, any more than Plath’s demons had been banished. Indeed, as Esther observes in the novel, “How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?” Indeed, Ted Hughes would use the metaphor of the bell jar more than once in Birthday Letters to suggest the return of Plath’s furies.
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