Sylvia was hard hit in the second week of November when The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly rejected several of her recent poems—the very ones that would appeal to posterity. But she rebounded, assembling forty of her best works into a manuscript with a title that would make her name, “Ariel, and other Poems,” a seeming tribute to Shakespeare’s freewheeling and enchanting androgynous sprite. The poems reflected a fiercely feminine spirit abetted by a regiment of women, including her old friend Clarissa Roche, her nanny Susan O’Neill Rowe, and Ruth Fainlight (a writer and the wife of novelist Allen Sillitoe). These women stimulated Sylvia to write about motherhood as in itself a courageous, life-affirming choice—precisely the decision that a woman like Assia, so Sylvia believed, had avoided.
That fraught telephone call in July continued to gnaw at the poet, who in “The Fearful” (16 November), brooded on a woman who would pretend to be a man, hollowing out her voice so that it sounded dead. The woman thinks that a baby will rob her of her beauty (Sylvia had heard Assia, worried about losing her beauty, did not want children). “She would rather be dead than fat,” so fearful is this woman who has turned her body over to a man. Plath would have made an excellent biographer. She had scoped out Assia and had a shrewd understanding of her rival’s tastes and temperament. Later, after Plath’s death, Assia would have access to Plath’s journals and see firsthand how the poet had nailed her.
When Clarissa arrived the next day at Court Green for a visit, Sylvia embraced a friend she had previously called an “earth mother,” exclaiming more than once, “You’ve saved my life.” “The Fearful” had brought on another round of rage against Ted. Clarissa caught her at a weak moment, when the burdens of caring for Frieda and Nicholas, for all Sylvia’s bravado, were wearing her out. And yet Clarissa also recalls their raucous laughter. Plath had a hearty laugh. By the time Clarissa departed on 19 November, Sylvia was again in high spirits, writing to her mother that same day as a busy professional woman, assembling her book of poetry and dealing with all manner of correspondence related to her work. She had time, however, to deck herself out with several new outfits and jewelry that she described in detail. These items were essential, making her feel “like a new woman,” although she remained in suspense about the London flat, since her references and financials were still being reviewed.
On Thanksgiving Day, Sylvia wrote again, mentioning her bad cold, made worse by chores such as lugging coal buckets and ashbins. She still worried about obtaining the flat, since she had “so much against me—being a writer, the ex-wife of a successful writer, being an American, young, etc., etc.” She was working like a navvy to prepare for her move, and that activity had disrupted her writing schedule, except for production of potboiling stuff that brought in some income. She was reviewing children’s books for New Statesman, but also reviewing Malcolm Elwin’s Lord Byron’s Wife, which seemed to reflect her state of mind. Although she acknowledged that “Byron the lion was undeniably poor husband-stuff,” she attributes the trouble in his marriage not only to his insufferable wife, Anna Isabella Milbanke, who always had to be “in the right,” but also to Byron’s sister, Augusta, with whom he had an incestuous relationship not unlike what Sylvia had insinuated (without any proof) was the case with Ted and Olwyn. Did Sylvia see that in her more self-righteous moods she resembled Anna Isabella—as Sylvia memorably put it—fixed in the “ego-screws of pride”? Sylvia, who would drop as much as twenty pounds during her separation from Ted, quotes Augusta’s account of Annabella’s wasting away in Byron’s absence: “She is positively reduced to a Skeleton—pale as ashes—a deep hollow tone of voice & a calm in her manner quite supernatural.”
Sylvia’s description of Augusta as a “hectic if unsuccessful Pandarus” seems eerily prophetic of the role Olwyn would later play vis-à-vis Assia Wevill (see chapter 8). Sylvia deplored Annabella’s “refusal to grant her spouse an interview (she never saw Byron again), let alone try to make a second go of it.” Is it too much to suppose that Sylvia, seeing the unfortunate consequences of Annabella’s adamantine attitude, decided not to cut off contact with her own lion simply because he was in the wrong? Trevor Thomas, who occupied the flat downstairs, would later observe her rages, which were an “ambivalent blend of blame, jealousy and wanting him back. She had not entirely given up hope of paradise regained.”
It never seemed to occur to Sylvia that it would be difficult to replicate the support group she could call on at Court Green. Neighbors, a nanny, and visits from friends had done nicely for her, but she was bent on this London adventure and expected, as she told her mother, to be “self-sufficient.” She was lining up readings and broadcasts, phone service for the flat (she had now reached the final stage of contract negotiations), a stove, and other amenities. During this period she impressed Ted Hughes, who while still decrying her “death-ray quality,” also told his brother, Gerald, that they had worked out a more amicable relationship after she arrived in London. Did Sylvia’s attraction to Alvarez also figure in her resurgence?
Between 12 December, the day Sylvia moved out of Court Green, and the end of January, she wrote little poetry, concentrating instead on a novel, “Doubletake,” that dealt with Ted’s desertion. She read biographies and contemporary women novelists, including Doris Lessing, whose new novel, The Golden Notebook, had just been published. When Plath met Lessing, the latter retreated from her importunate admirer. A better match was made with Emily Hahn, a New Yorker writer treasured for her ebullient, welcoming attitude. Hahn, a single mother and a shrewd survivor of hardship, a world traveler and a hardy raconteur, would have been a tonic for Plath, who was searching for new role models.
As Plath told interviewer Peter Orr in late October, she was shifting her attention to prose, wishing to engage with a broad range of subjects—stimulated no doubt by the historical biographies she had been reading. Some of her greatest poems were yet before her, but she seems to have sensed that this phase of her career might be winding down. She awaited the appearance of The Bell Jar, to be published in mid-January as the work of Victoria Lucas. Owing to the novel’s autobiographical nature, Plath thought it best to use a pseudonym.
Sylvia had reason to believe her London life would be a success. It was easier than ever for friends to visit, she had the trusted Dr. Horder close by, the zoo minutes away for the children’s amusement, and proximity to the BBC, where she had good connections. Delays in furnishing the flat, acquiring phone service, and finding an au pair did little to dampen her enthusiasm. She happily painted and cleaned her new home. The weather had not yet turned against her, and Ted’s visits to the flat to see the children had not yet riled her up. Even so, her life seemed to take on a relentless, unremitting quality that she tried to interrupt with lively letters home.
On 14 December, Sylvia wrote to her Aunt Dot about the children’s delight at the zoo, and the shopkeepers who remembered her from the days she had spent in the neighborhood with Ted just a few years earlier. It was like a village really, but with all the conveniences of London. She made even the hassles of moving seem elevating. Sylvia sounded English, but she craved connection with her homeland. “You have no notion how much your cheery letters mean!” she told her aunt. Aurelia sent chatty letters about family and friends and assured Sylvia she was updating Mrs. Prouty about recent developments.
That same day Sylvia wrote her mother that she had never been happier. Even dashing about to get the electricity and gas connected, while her door blew shut with the keys inside, was transformed into a “comedy of errors.” At the time, though, locking herself out had undone her, according to her neighbor Trevor Thomas, who recalled Sylvia’s hysteria. Yet she spoke as though having a five-year lease guaranteed five years of happiness. She imagined Yeats’s spirit blessing her. And why not? Al Alvarez had just told her that Ariel should win the Pulitzer Prize. She had a study that faced the rising sun. At night she joyously watched the full moon from her balcony. Everyone, it seemed, was a darling—or at least obliging—in
her catalogue of good fortune.
A week later nothing had changed, as Sylvia detailed for Aurelia the new furnishings and furniture and flowerpots, and more new clothes (made possible by Aunt Dot’s generous seven hundred dollar gift and a one hundred dollar check from Mrs. Prouty). “You should see me nipping around London,” she assured her worried mother. Aurelia suspected that all this frenzied activity simply masked her daughter’s depression—or so Aunt Dot had confided in a letter to Sylvia. Sylvia amped up her enthusiasm: “The weather has been blue and springlike.” That would change.
Then came Alvarez’s devastating Christmas Eve visit, which he has written about in The Savage God. Sylvia wanted more than supportive criticism from him. His understated published account suggests she wanted an affair. But other evidence suggests that the bond between them was much deeper than that. In a letter Olwyn Hughes wrote to Alvarez on 9 June 1988, in an effort to secure an interview for Anne Stevenson, Olwyn mentions reading Sylvia’s journal, written just before her Christmas encounter with Alvarez. Olywn tells Alvarez about a journal entry in which Sylvia cautions herself to relax so as not to “scare you [Alvarez] off.” Sylvia’s admonition to herself, as Olwyn reports it, is remarkably similar to the poet’s 1 April 1956, journal entry, in which she exhorts herself to “be more subdued” and quiet. “Don’t blab too much.” Olwyn refers to the “lost” journal, full of Sylvia’s suffering but also her “jubilation” over her work, including two chapters—one of which recounted the traumatic Wevill weekend visit in May 1962—she had drafted of a new novel. Then Olwyn mentions the “episode with you [Alvarez]” and Richard Murphy’s failure to respond to Plath’s plans to secure a cottage in Ireland for the winter. Olwyn clearly alludes to Plath’s romantic attachment to Alvarez, which Olwyn regards as “one of the keys” to understanding Sylvia’s final days. In effect, Olwyn complicates the story considerably, making it not just about her brother Ted, but also about Alvarez. What exactly is Olwyn saying when she adds that she could understand why Alvarez “wouldn’t want to descend to such indiscretion”? Olwyn assures him that Sylvia told no one about her personal relationship with Alvarez—although how Olwyn could know this is not clear, unless Sylvia said so in that lost journal.
In his reply of 10 June 1988, Alvarez adamantly refused to see Stevenson and “tell all,” expressing disdain for her “languidly researched” work. What else is there to tell? When I put the question to him for this book, he replied, “She was in love with me.” He would say no more, except to repeat what he has already written: He could not sleep with Sylvia because he was then involved with Anne, his future wife. Alvarez regarded Ted as a friend he would not betray; in fact, Ted had slept a few nights on Alvarez’s sofa, talking over his troubles with his estranged wife. And Sylvia wanted more from Alvarez than he was willing to deliver and more than he is willing to say, even now.
Sylvia’s response to Alvarez’s relative coolness was surely more than just disappointment. Like Hughes, Alvarez had championed the poet and the woman. In the most searching study of the Plath/Alvarez affaire, an article that Alvarez himself endorses, William Wooten writes: “Alvarez was now appreciating poems Plath’s husband had not read. Sending poems to Alvarez had become both an intimate act, making the editor a confidant in a marriage breakdown, and an act that defied intimacy, first of the marriage, then of the confidence.” That Plath could no longer draw near to Alvarez made the last six weeks of her life all the more agonizing.
The children had colds when Sylvia next wrote to her mother on 26 December after Christmas dinner with friends. The holiday made her homesick. Snow was falling, a winter scene she compared to an “engraving out of Dickens.” At first, this change from the soggy, wet winter she had anticipated cheered her. But by 2 January, the snow began to pile up. Everything had turned to sludge and then frozen. No snowplows swept through streets in a land that rarely saw appreciable snow. Still no phone. Still 103 degree fevers for Sylvia. No central heating. Dr. Horder prescribed a tonic for Sylvia, who had lost twenty pounds over the summer. “I am in the best of hands,” Sylvia assured her mother. But the chill had set in. It seemed like England had been engulfed in a new ice age. That same day, Sylvia wrote dejectedly to Marcia Brown that she felt “utterly flattened” by the last six months of life without Ted. As she had done with Warren and his wife, Maggie, she wrote to friends, urging them to come for a spring visit. She was lonely in London and feeling like a “desperate mother.”
And yet Sylvia was not without resources. Her urge for order asserted itself. On 3 January, Clarissa Roche arrived for a visit to find the flat tidy—although soon Sylvia admitted it was all too much for her. Still, she refused Clarissa’s invitation to accompany her to Kent for a stay with the Roches. No, Sylvia said, she would manage somehow. Trevor Thomas saw the other side: the look of terror in Sylvia’s face and her helplessness, which was becoming a nuisance, since she expected Thomas to help her cope with household crises. But his son said, “Can’t you see Daddy, she’s very sad? It’s in her eyes.” Children are often more observant, Thomas wrote in his memoir about Plath.
Sylvia continued to write, finding time by putting Frieda in nursery school for three hours a day and catching moments for composition while Nicholas napped. It was a virtuoso performance that kept her going—for a while. She had something to prove. To go home, to go to Clarissa, spelled doom, because in Sylvia’s mind writing on her own had become a lifeline. To give up the flat—even temporarily—when the writing was going so well meant becoming a patient again, the Sylvia of ten years earlier.
Sylvia stumbled her way to local shops, afraid of falling on the ice. Lacking snow shovels, shopkeepers resorted to using boards to scoop out narrow paths. In her flat, Sylvia was besieged high and low, with a stain creeping along her freshly painted white ceiling and her bathtub filling with murky water (the result of a frozen waste pipe). She pondered the mysteries of British plumbing. The wallpaper sagged. Busted pipes, she was told—and not a plumber to be had when everyone suffered the same plight. Roofs could cope with rain, but not the heavy weight of the snow. Workman pitched the snow off the roof but left behind a faulty gutter right by Sylvia’s bedroom window, resulting in a drip, drip, drip that she compared to Chinese water torture. It soon became apparent that this historic house had, in foul weather, revealed itself to be in an abysmal state of disrepair.
Sylvia blamed no one for deceiving her—after all, her neighbors were putting up with the same problems—but she had a nagging suspicion, never far from the thoughts of someone brought up in middle-class America, that the insalubrious British climate fostered a defect in the British sensibility, which like Ted, was all too willing to tolerate the haphazard. Americans plan for this sort of eventuality, she told the workmen. No American handyman would have stood with a bucket trying to catch the water cascading from the ceiling with the “embarrassed air of covering an obscenity.”
Outside, Sylvia contemplated the maze of different pipes—really quite an extraordinary puzzle to an American used to plumbing that was out of sight, behind walls or underground. She was advised to plug her drains every night to prevent more freezing. The agent in charge of her property asked: Had no one from the water board told her as much? No, she replied, perplexed. He advised heating the pipes by any means (including candles!) and running hot water through them several times a day. When she poured a bucket of hot water on pipes outside her balcony, Trevor Thomas shouted up to say there was a puddle on his kitchen floor. “The agent is a fool,” Thomas told her.
Miraculously, a plumber showed up. But then came the power cuts. It was just like the Blitz—a doughty time for hardy survivors of the war, but no pleasure for Sylvia Plath. The lights went out. Trevor Thomas told her the interruption of service had been announced in the newspapers. Hadn’t she read about it? With the gas still working, she managed to cook meals, while she wrapped her children in winter clothes.
Midway through this winter siege, Sylvia wrote her mother, admitting her f
lu-induced exhaustion, but claiming she was pulling out of it. Day nurses had helped with the children, who were also afflicted with colds and fevers. She called the weather “filthy”— a good word to describe her overwhelming sense of disgust and gloom, made worse by the two-month wait to get her phone service installed. Finding an au pair was another trial. Sylvia had done her best to make fun of her plight in a commissioned article, “Snow Blitz.” Trevor Thomas, not a very sympathetic observer of Plath’s last days, resented the gloss she put on her plight by removing the expressions of sheer panic he witnessed.
Sylvia leveled with Aurelia: She realized she had lost her “identity under the steamroller of decisions and responsibilities of this last half year, with the babies a constant demand.” Sylvia did not say, but it almost did not matter what she thought of Ted at this point. He was not there to help her, and he had come to represent the man who was not there, not the man she had dreamed of in an early Smith College journal, the man who “admired me, who understood me as much as I understood myself.” How awful to realize that she was “starting from scratch” in this “first year” of her new life.
Ted would later say that in Sylvia’s last weeks they were planning a reconciliation. Susan Alliston, now in Ted’s confidence, recorded in her journal her surprise at how much he talked about himself and Sylvia, “so personally.” She noted his remark that the “exclusivity of the relationship killed something—the keeping always on the same plane, and that she is an absolutist—will not accept a compromise.” But now that Sylvia was on her own and had to do everything for herself…? Alliston does not complete the thought, instead observing that she did not think Ted wanted a divorce. “It makes no difference,” she adds cryptically.
Sylvia sounded wistful when she wrote of earning enough from writing to support herself. She yearned for a “windfall” that “a really successful novel” would bring to relieve her “ghastly vision of rent bleeding away year after year.” The temporariness of it all after such a long decade of hard work defeated her. Time was running out. “But I need time,” Sylvia told her mother. Sylvia prescribed an antidote for herself, but it does not sound convincing: “I guess I just need somebody to cheer me up by saying I’ve done all right so far.”
American Isis Page 26
