An alarmed Aurelia had no trouble reading the signs and got word to a friend in London to contact Sylvia. Pat Goodall sent a reassuring letter to Aurelia, reporting that on 19 January, a “bitter cold day,” she went to see Sylvia and was met by a “bright and eager American expression” that immediately made Pat feel at home. The visit was worthwhile. Unfortunately, Pat mistook the point of this animation. Sylvia insisted that Pat and her husband stay for tea, while she “NEVER STOPPED TALKING!” The bright and cheerful children seemed well. They had all recovered from the flu, Sylvia assured Pat. They had a doctor who was “an absolute Saint.” Sylvia seemed all the more remarkable to Pat, because “Saturday was the dreariest of winter days, yet inside her flat life seemed warm and cheery.” Plath, a magnificent performer, loved to put on a show. Visits cheered her but did nothing to change her predicament. This bleak period is palpable in a poem completed on 28 January. “Sheep in Fog” envisages a heaven “Starless and fatherless, a dark water.” The same day this dreary season made its appearance in “The Munich Mannequins”: “The snow drops its pieces of darkness”—such a stark line annihilates the prosy pleasantries of “Snow Blitz.”
Respectable to mixed reviews of The Bell Jar began appearing and did little to hearten Plath, especially since the novel had not found a publisher in America. In an introduction to the first publication of Plath’s journals, Ted Hughes recalls, “If she felt any qualms at the public release of this supercharged piece of her autobiography, she made no mention of it at the time, either in conversation or in her diary.” Although he concedes that certain reviews exasperated and dismayed her, “they did not visibly deflate her.” But Sylvia confided to her friend Jillian Becker that the British reviews were discouraging, a real blow because when Sylvia saw the book in proof, she realized it was no potboiler and had high hopes for it.
To Trevor Thomas, Sylvia complained about her incarceration in a flat with two children, while Ted was free to enjoy his affair with Assia and travel. Thomas tried to console her, and she said he reminded her of her father. Thomas never knew which Sylvia he would encounter: charming, stylish, distracted, or even downright rude. By late January, the lightning shifts in Sylvia’s moods accelerated. Between 28 January and 4 February, she managed to write ten poems, a surprising revival after such an appalling month. But she seemed to be turning in on herself: “People or stars / Regard me sadly, I disappoint them” (“Sheep in Fog”). Similar expressions in “Totem,” “Paralytic,” and “Mystic” constitute terse expressions of futility, relieved only briefly by poems like “Child,” “Kindness,” and “Balloons,” which show she could still take great joy in her children. “Contusion,” completed on 4 February, ends with the portentous line: “The mirrors are sheeted.” The sense of closing up, of not seeing oneself reflected in the hopes of others, and the covering of objects in rooms no longer used—as if after a death—is pervasive.
On Sunday, 3 February, Sylvia called Ted and invited him to lunch. His diary notes, written the week after Sylvia’s death, record that he remained with her until 2 a.m. They had not enjoyed such a good time since July, he remarked, as he listened to her read her new poems. Sylvia seemed to have regained her equilibrium, although she wept when he played with Frieda and embraced both of them. When Sylvia repeated her conviction that he was looking for someone else, he “kept denying it absolutely.” He wanted to return to the marriage, but on terms that would no longer include what he deemed his slavish devotion to her. He was beginning to feel like his own man again.
The next day, according to Ted’s diary, Sylvia rang him from a public call box in bitterly cold weather and demanded that he promise to leave England in two weeks. She could not work so long as she had to hear about him. Ted demanded to know who was talking about him. She would not say. And he was startled to see how the calm Sylvia of the day before had given way to this distressed woman. Even when he said he could not afford to leave England and had no place he wanted to go, she extracted his reluctant agreement to depart the country. “She wanted me never to see her again,” Ted wrote. He talked over her phone call with Al Alvarez, who described his own divorce and regret that he had continued to see his wife after they were irreconcilable. Alvarez advised him to do as Sylvia said. Ted decided he would leave as soon as he could.
The same day, Sylvia wrote her last, disconsolate letter to her mother, confessing, “I just haven’t written anybody because I have been feeling a bit grim—the upheaval over, I am seeing the finality of it all, and being catapulted from the cowlike happiness of maternity into loneliness and grim problems is no fun.” She saw no way out: “I have absolutely no desire ever to return to America. Not now, anyway.” Work for the BBC and other outlets had no equivalent in the United States. Aurelia’s idea to take the children for a while seemed only disruptive to her daughter, likely to upset Frieda who was so close to her father, who visited once a week. Sylvia also counted on the National Health Service. She simply did not see how she could support herself back home. “I shall simply have to fight it out on my own over here,” she insisted. A new, flighty, and persnickety German au pair bedeviled Sylvia, but still gave her some peaceful mornings and a few free evenings. This letter strained to mitigate the bad news. It is a crushing final testament because, in effect, Sylvia was saying that all of it now depended on her. Aurelia was right to think that her daughter had put up a gallant effort.
Sylvia’s last two poems, “Balloons” and “Edge,” completed on Tuesday, 5 February, perfectly express the plight of someone who seemed poised between life and death—between the airy buoyancy of the balloons her children played with, a world of wish fulfillment, and the finality of “Edge,” in which the inevitability of death is articulated with profound satisfaction. “Balloons” ends with a burst balloon, “A red / Shred” in the child’s “little fist.” “Edge” expresses a bitter but nevertheless peaceful acceptance: “We have come so far, it is over.” Was it over? In the end, Sylvia Plath gave herself less than a week to decide. It is a common pattern in suicide, these swings between euphoria and despair. The energy Sylvia expended in her early morning writing sessions stripped her of the power to deal with the rest of her day. Writing can become a regular part of an insomniac’s routine, but waking up from a drugged sleep at 4:00 a.m. every day inevitably weakens an already vulnerable constitution. How much life can be left after writing so intensely?
Like Marilyn Monroe coming to a similar endpoint, Plath’s displays of herself became more extreme. Sylvia could not root herself in her London flat, anymore than Marilyn could anchor herself while furnishing her new Hollywood home. They share the same inability to maintain a new life, while obsessing about the failure of the old one. Sylvia wrote hyperbolically to Marcia Brown, her college roommate: “Everything has blown and bubbled and warped and split.” She felt “in limbo between the old world and the very uncertain and grim new.”
Friends coped with multiple Sylvias and Marilyns, confident and full of doubt, happy and horribly angry. These women weighed upon themselves. Like Marilyn, Sylvia was entering her middle years, which are, in Leslie Farber’s words, the “most vulnerable to the claims of this sickness of spirit, which now radically questions all we have been, at the same time scorning the solace formerly sought in the future, making who we are to become the most oppressive of questions.”
William Styron has eloquently described the unremitting pain of depression that led to his own suicidal period, an agony that Leslie Farber has succinctly articulated in his writings about the suicide who feels that “one is a body one is mortal, and since, by definition, mortality is crumbling, its claims are imperious.” In Sylvia’s case, as in the life of many suicides, a terrible isolation enclosed her every move. She complained of having no friends, even though the facts demonstrate otherwise. She felt alone—as Styron did even when receiving an international award for his work. And just as his medication (Halcion) may have contributed to his depression, so the drugs prescribed for Plath may have hastened th
e onset of her dark thoughts. Even today, the pharmaceuticals used to treat depression have widely varying impacts on different individuals. It can take weeks—sometimes months—to find the right dose, and for some individuals that dose is never adequate.
Nothing changed in Sylvia Plath’s last week of life, and perhaps that is what bothered her, the dread that nothing would change. On Wednesday, 6 February, still angry that Sylvia’s friends were spreading tales about his ill treatment of her, Ted wrote her a note and visited her, announcing that he was going to engage a solicitor to stop the lies. She implored him not to do that. She was very upset, but not more so than on previous occasions, he vouchsafed to his diary. But she kept asking him if he had faith in her, and that seemed “new & odd.”
On Thursday, another phone conversation between them settled nothing. Sylvia briefly entertained the idea of a reconciliation, but then reverted to her demand that Ted leave the country. Her mood, however, seemed better to him. That same day, she sacked her au pair—why is not clear, although one version has Sylvia discovering the woman in bed with a man. Sylvia became so distraught that she actually struck the woman. By 8 February, her trusted Dr. Horder concluded that the drugs were not working and made plans to hospitalize her. She could not have had a more sympathetic or understanding physician. Horder himself suffered periodically from depression. Without other help at hand, Sylvia phoned her friend, the writer Jillian Becker, and asked if she and the children could come over.
In Giving Up, Becker describes Sylvia’s last wracking weekend. The desperate visitor arrived at the Becker home around 2:00 p.m. on Thursday afternoon and announced, “I feel terrible.” Sylvia asked if she could lie down. Jillian led her to an upstairs bedroom, while Frieda and Nicholas played with Jillian’s youngest daughter, Madeleine. At 4 o’clock, Sylvia came downstairs and said she would “rather not go home.” She gave Jillian the keys to the Fitzroy Road flat and asked her to retrieve a number of items for a weekend stay.
Sylvia seemed to settle down after a steak dinner, just as she had done days before when Clarissa Roche visited and prepared a meal. Then Jillian watched her friend down several sleeping pills and waited until Sylvia slept. By 3:30 a.m., Sylvia had awakened and was weeping. For two hours she catalogued her woes—her father’s death and Ted’s betrayal of her with Assia. Jillian remembered Sylvia saying that when she and Ted moved to Court Green, they thought their “ideal life was starting.” Aurelia also became a target. “Sometimes we mentioned our mothers, each of us unforgivingly,” Jillian recalled. “In her case a need to impress her mother had been a driving force. She’d had to present her with success after success. The breakup of her marriage, she believed, was surely seen by her mother as a failure; and even though Aurelia Plath voiced no such judgment, the thought of it infuriated Sylvia. She hated the shame it would require her to feel.” The women remained awake until 5:30 a.m., when Sylvia took an antidepressant and dozed off.
Friday morning Sylvia ate heartily and called Dr. Horder, who was also Becker’s friend. Sylvia turned the phone over to Jillian when he asked to speak with her. “How does she seem to you?” Horder asked. “Depressed,” Jillian replied. He wanted Jillian to make sure Sylvia took her pills. It was also important, he emphasized, that Sylvia look after her children. She needed a sense of purpose and responsibility.
Becker’s own account of what happened next is far less dramatic than the versions reported elsewhere. Sylvia seems to have had a tranquil Friday and Saturday after her troubling night on Thursday. She went out Saturday evening, but did not tell the Beckers about her plans, and she returned without disturbing their sleep. But according to Ted’s diary, he met Sylvia at the Fitzroy flat Friday night after receiving a note from her that had arrived about 3:30 p.m. He called it a “farewell love letter.” In just two sentences, she announced that she was leaving the country and would never see him again. But what she really intended to do baffled him. This time an unruffled Sylvia Plath confronted an agitated Ted Hughes. When he demanded an explanation, she coldly took her note away from him, set fire to it in an ashtray, and ordered him to leave. She refused to say anything more than that she had to go out. He left.
On Sunday morning, Sylvia enjoyed an ample lunch with the Beckers, commenting that the soup, meat, salad, cheese, dessert, and wine were “wonderful” (or “marvelous”—Becker could not remember the exact words). Sylvia seemed “a little more cheerful, a little less tense,” and more focused on her children. She then announced that she wanted to return home that evening. Jillian wondered what had provoked this “suddenly purposeful” behavior. Was it her outing the previous night? Had it resolved something for her? In hindsight, Becker probed the moment: “Was it a decision to change her life—or … to die? Can a decision to die flush one through with a sense of excitement and urgency? Or was the bustle of commitment a deceptive performance, concealing a plunge into deepest despair? If so, it was an amazingly successful effort of will. She seemed invigorated, mildly elated, as I’d seldom seen her before.” As she watched Sylvia packing with deliberation, apparently in full command of herself, Jillian reminded her friend about taking her pills. “Yes, I’ll remember,” Sylvia assured her.
Becker felt relieved: “The truth was she had tired me. Her need for my attention had begun to seem relentless.” Jillian would have gone on taking care of Sylvia, but “she wanted to go, and nothing I could have done or said would have kept her against her will. And then there was Dr. Horder’s injunction: ‘She must look after the children, feel she’s necessary for them.’” Jillian’s husband, Gerry, drove Sylvia home. On the way she began to cry, and Gerry, an empathetic man who liked Sylvia, importuned her several times to return to the Beckers’ home. But she refused, and he left her around 7:00 p.m., after she had fed the children and put them to bed. Then Dr. Horder called to make sure she was all right.
Near midnight, Sylvia rang Trevor Thomas’s bell and asked him for stamps. She wanted to airmail some letters and get them in the post before morning. As he gave her the stamps, she asked him when he left for work in the morning. He asked why she wanted to know. Just wondering, she replied. Not long after closing his door, he noticed the hall light was still on. And when he opened the door, there was Sylvia. She had not moved. He told her he would call Dr. Horder. She did not want Dr. Horder, she answered. She was just having “the most wonderful dream.”
It is likely that the Sylvia seen last by Trevor Thomas was on an antidepressant. The euphoric sense of wholeness that is common in drug-induced states wore off perhaps around 5 a.m., when Thomas could hear Sylvia still pacing above as he fell asleep. That wonderful but evanescent moment of transcendence, akin to what she experienced when writing poems, seeped out of her. Knowing that a nurse was coming in the morning, it is just possible Plath expected to be saved. Was she seeking a temporary state of oblivion to assuage her agonies? A near death to be followed by yet another rebirth? No one can say. Perhaps Alvarez is right in suggesting suicide, like divorce, is a confession of failure, an admission, in Sylvia’s case, that “all one’s energy, appetite and ambition have been aborted.”
Mothers all over England tended to favor gas as a way to end their lives. They often took their children—extensions of their identities—with them, perhaps as vengeance against husbands and lovers, or because they had turned against a world that would treat their offspring cruelly. Sylvia seems to have considered this option in “Edge,” which describes a mother folding her children back into her body, just like petals “of a rose close.…” But always, she had returned to suicide as a singular act and death as a kind of deliverance.
Sylvia understood losing consciousness as a kind of death. The sensation fascinated her, as she recounts in a journal entry written after a tooth extraction. As the gas enters her, she feels her mouth crack into a smile: “So that’s how it was … so simple, and no one had told me.” Death itself she imagined as everything fading to black, like a fainting spell, but with “no light, no waking.” “I know a l
ittle how it must be,” she wrote prophetically more than a decade earlier, to “feel the waters close above you … To have your mind broken, and the contents evaporated, gone.”
It was now 11 February, and Sylvia Plath prepared to die. She left food and drink for her children in their room and opened a window. In the hallway, she attached a note with Dr. Horder’s name and number to the baby carriage. She sealed the kitchen as best she could with tape, towels, and cloths. She turned on the gas and thrust her head as far as she could into the oven. A hired nurse, arriving around 9:30 a.m. to begin her day heard the children crying at the window and called on a workman to break into the flat. They found Sylvia Plath lying on the kitchen floor with her head in the oven. It was far too late to revive her.
It may seem perverse—or at the very least paradoxical—to say that by her suicide Sylvia Plath finally found a way to recover herself. By all accounts, including her own, she had been writing the poetry that would make her reputation, but she knew that no human being could sustain such a peak of perfection and perform all the normal functions of existence in the “kitchen of life,” as Martha Gellhorn used to call day to day existence. When Sylvia Plath put an end to herself, she had reached one of those crisis points, exhilarated and exhausted by all she had accomplished—and by all she had left undone. This state of beatitude, this descent into the lower depths, is Shakespearean in its sublimity and tragedy and seems worthy of what Menenius says of Coriolanus, who had a nature “too noble for this world.”
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