American Isis

by Carl Rollyson

  CHAPTER 8

  IN THE TEMPLE OF ISIS:

  AMONG THE HIEROPHANTS

  (1963–)

  The candidate for initiation has now been taken by the High Priestess (the Gnosis) within the Temple and she has transformed herself into the Goddess Isis … He learns from her the secrets of nature … He learns the true meaning of Black Magic … The fact that the Empress precedes the Emperor in the pack is perhaps a relic of matriarchal rule …

  —Basil Ivan Rakoczi, The Painted Caravan: A Penetration into the Secrets of Tarot Cards (in Sylvia Plath’s library at Smith College)

  She had free and controlled access to depths formerly reserved to the primitive ecstatic priests, shamans, and Holy men …

  —Ted Hughes

  A priestess emptied out by the rites of her cult.

  —A. Alvarez

  Ted Hughes wrote the awful news to Olywn, tersely admitting that Sylvia had asked for his help. Too “jaded” by her entreaties, he had miscalculated just how desperate she had become. “Please don’t make this business gossip of any sort. It was gossip—faithfully reported by her ratty acquaintances that drove Sylvia over & I don’t like it.” To Daniel and Helga Huws, he wrote, “No doubt where the blame lies.” Ted tried to explain himself to Aurelia, adverting to the “psychic abnormalities” that afflicted both him and Sylvia. He presented their troubles as a form of mutual blindness and thought Sylvia had become a victim of bad timing, beset by “hellish details.” He believed they were coming to realize the marriage could have been repaired. But Sylvia did not hold on. Neither her final letters nor her poems suggest a reconciliation. To spare his children’s feelings, he said, he destroyed her journal recounting her final days, and this act surely does not indicate that Sylvia wished to resume her marriage. Ted told Aurelia that he was damned and did not want to be forgiven, presumably because of his role in destroying what he called “one of the greatest, truest spirits alive” and a “great poet.” Although he acknowledged that Sylvia could be hard on the people she loved, he was unable amidst his own grief to take the measure of her Dostoyevskian rage. Sylvia Plath hated Ted Hughes with “that hate which is only a hair’s-breadth from love, from the maddest love!”—to quote from the passage she asterisked in Mark Slonim’s introduction to The Brothers Karamazov.

  What could Aurelia say to Ted’s postmortem? She wanted Warren and his wife, who went over to England for Sylvia’s funeral, to return to America with her grandchildren. When Ted balked at that idea, she resigned herself to placating Hughes and those around him so that she could maintain contact with her grandchildren. She tried to enlist the help of Dr. Horder, who responded on 17 October 1963, “Ted’s behavior is disappointing … I feel completely impotent because I never had any relationship with Ted and it has become fairly clear, only three weeks ago, that no relationship of a constructive nature between us is possible because of what happened.”

  Hughes worried, as he wrote Aurelia three months after Sylvia’s suicide, that she would “mourn” over the children, especially Frieda, as a substitute for her daughter. He dreaded Aurelia’s overwhelming love, which would engulf them and distort their sense of reality at a time when they were much too young to understand what was happening. He noted that because his feelings and Aurelia’s no longer had a “worldly object,” their attachment to Sylvia freed them to regard her with an “unearthly” and even “religious” intensity. He did not want to deny Aurelia opportunities to visit her grandchildren, but he bluntly told her that her “watchful anxiety” had made life much harder for Sylvia, and he did not want to see the pattern repeated in the lives of his daughter and son.

  Angrily, Ted told Aurelia that friends had informed him about her efforts to learn more about his marriage to Sylvia. Warren had gone to see Sylvia’s lawyer, Aurelia recalled for Frances McCullough, who edited Letters Home. The lawyer was “very sympathetic. He discussed matters very freely … Sylvia was dead serious about the divorce until shortly before her death when her strength gave out.…” Already, years before biographers were on his case, Hughes said he felt “under investigation.” And he resented the implication that he was holding back anything that Aurelia was entitled to know. Certain questions from Warren had put Ted on his guard. Already, he was declaring that only his public “self-immolation over Sylvia’s name” would suffice. And yet when he vowed that his love for Sylvia remained, and that he would never marry again, what was he proposing but a kind of self-sacrifice? Even as he was writing letters to Assia Wevill, declaring himself wholly hers, he was insisting on his own form of consecration for Sylvia Plath. His behavior when Aurelia arrived to check up on him (this is how he put it) signaled the first phase of his dogged but futile effort to dictate the gospel of Sylvia Plath’s biography.

  Hughes envisioned a life in which his children would not “succumb back into Sylvia’s Magnetism.” He was also determined to spirit his family away from the “curators of the past.” In other words, only Ted Hughes would officiate at her temple. He found it utterly fantastic that Aurelia supposed he would hold on to Court Green, the “site, in fact, of my crime against her, against myself, and against every human thing.” Yet a month later, he wrote to Gerald, “I’ve been thinking I’ll hang on to Court Green.” Money was often a serious consideration for Hughes. He expected the property to appreciate in value, and it would make a good “country resort” for his children. Aurelia was now in England, which meant, Ted told his brother, “four weeks of nerves.”

  Ted had installed Assia in Sylvia’s Fitzroy Road flat over the objections of his Aunt Hilda, who described Assia as a

  reincarnated Cleopatra. At first I couldn’t bear the sight of her and told her to clear off and leave Ted in peace for a while until the Plaths had gone and I had gone. But of course she took no notice & Ted told me to mind my own business.… Ted is simply bewitched and I have told him he has only left one bondage for another, and she will turn into a devil one day.… I have come to the conclusion wherever Ted is there will be women, so it is no good being a hanger on.… I am concerned about the children.

  Al Alvarez and his wife, Anne, shared this view of Assia, whom they saw in Ted’s company during this period. She seemed manipulative—and very pleased with herself.

  On 2 September 1963, Edith Hughes wrote to Olwyn, preparing her for the current situation at Court Green. Elizabeth Compton (“very nice & will be useful until you get settled”) had told Edith that Sylvia had called Assia a “devil. Just watch what she will do to Ted.” Edith cautioned Olwyn to go easy with her brother, but also to be firm about Assia: “Don’t be conciliatory … or she will be wanting to come. For the children’s & Ted’s sake this must not happen.” With Olwyn and Aunt Hilda installed at Court Green in October, Ted promised Assia he would find another home for them, but he never did let go of Court Green.

  In a letter to Aurelia, he was full of news about the children, especially Frieda, whom he favored. He seemed relieved that they had adjusted in their old home. He reported that he was well treated by everyone, including Elizabeth Compton, who had been close to Sylvia. He was negotiating with publishers about the appearance of her poems. With full control over Plath’s estate, and not yet the object of public scrutiny for his role in her death, Hughes seemed especially heartened to trumpet her work, “written in blood,” he told poet Donald Hall, taking issue with reservations about certain poems that Hall had expressed in print.

  Everything was about to change—or rather intensify—in Ted Hughes’s life with the publication in March 1965 of Ariel, the book that confirmed Sylvia Plath’s position as a world-class poet. Assia Wevill, wearing badly under the strain of coping with Plath—who had become, in Hughes’s words, a “spectacular public figure”—gave birth on 3 March 1965, to a child by him, called Shura. A wary Hughes accused Assia of saving his letters, perhaps to use later against him—such was his reaction against the siege of “bloody eavesdroppers & filchers,” even though the first biographer had yet to arrive. He instruct
ed Assia to burn his letters, lest they be “intercepted.” Anne, Alvarez’s wife, thought of black-haired Ted and Assia, so often dressed in black, as two panthers hissing at each other: “It was very unpleasant.” Anne remembered visiting Assia, ailing with the flu: “She was in Sylvia’s bed all dressed up and glamorous and it really gave me the creeps … All she talked about was Sylvia.”

  Enter Lois Ames, a friend of Sylvia’s, bent on writing the first biography. She had secured Aurelia’s approval. Hughes was willing to cooperate only in so far as the book would provide a short and superficial view of Sylvia’s life, based mainly on reminiscences of the “right people.” He declared his intention to thwart any full scale, modern biography, the kind that inevitably proved reductive, he assured Aurelia and Warren when he wrote to them in March of 1966. Although Ames labored for several years on the biography, she gave it up in 1974, saying much later in an interview that it “became increasingly difficult for me to do this, as other biographers have found out. And I finally decided for the sake of my own sanity and my family that it was better to pay back the advance to Harper’s. I always felt it was a wise decision.” Her “Notes Toward a Biography,” which appeared in Tri-Quarterly 7 in 1966, reads like a work of Victorian circumspection. Sylvia’s last year is described as “difficult,” and Ames does not even mention the separation from Hughes, saying only that Plath moved to London, and that “despite the care of a doctor and prescribed sedatives, she was unable to cope.”

  Hughes contributed biographical notes to the same Tri-Quarterly issue, excusing himself to Aurelia on 19 May 1966 by saying Sylvia had already become a “literary legend”—without assessing his own part in making her so. He rated her far ahead of Robert Lowell and even better than Hughes’s touchstone, Emily Dickinson. His fervor belied his disclaimer that he did not want to portray himself as the “high priest of her mysteries.” But that, of course, is exactly what he had done by claiming total control not only over her work, but also over the manner in which her life should be revered.

  After Sylvia had been given demeaning and malicious treatment in Time, Hughes commiserated with Aurelia in a 13 July 1966. The magazine’s 10 June issue reviewed Ariel, focusing on “Daddy,” printing it in full, and labeling it an example of Plath’s style, as “brutal as a truncheon.” The poem was “merely the first jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a living river of bale across the literary landscape.” Leave it to Time to come up with “bale,” the archaic meaning of which is associated with misery, woe, misfortune, evil, and harm. In Britain, Ariel had sold fifteen thousand copies in ten months, figures often associated with a bestselling novel, Time reported.

  The remorse Hughes suffered over his part in Sylvia’s suicide was now overshadowed by his outrage over her posthumous denudation. He regretted publishing Ariel in the United States—although how he could square his misgivings with his desire to promote her greatness is baffling, especially since he jiggered publication of the book with Robert Lowell’s attention-getting introduction. Hughes deplored the too easy equation between Plath’s poems and her suicide. Indeed, the poems had “cured” her, he argued.

  In December, Aurelia wrote to Elinor Epstein, thanking her for publishing a memoir that honored her friendship with Sylvia without disclosing the intimacies they shared. Epstein’s anodyne memoir, emphasizing what a cheery person Sylvia was, only served to launch a spate of reminiscences, pro and con Plath. Already, on 3 December 1966, Aurelia was writing to Epstein, “I am so sick of the ‘legend,’ the ‘image.’”

  Even as Hughes indulged himself in degrading the efforts of anyone—other than himself—who dared to depict Sylvia Plath, he was replicating the very domestic disarray that had contributed to her demise. A disheartened Assia Wevill began to conclude that not only could she never compete with the legend of Sylvia Plath, she could not even secure Hughes’s commitment to find a permanent home she could call her own. Instead, she coped with a series of makeshift domiciles, beginning with the Fitzroy Road flat, then Court Green, followed by a brief period in Ireland—and then back to Court Green to confront the hostility of Hughes’s parents, installed there as caretakers whenever Ted’s marauding sensibility sent him off to the city and other locales that welcomed this controversial celebrity poet. By the end of the year, Assia was back in London with Shura, brooding over what to do about Hughes’s broken promises.

  To Daniel Weissbort in December 1966 Hughes revealed the mocking side of himself that revolted Sylvia Plath: first the bracing tonic of distraction-free country life, then the momentary sense of equilibrium it engendered, and then the flight to the city to “get the family lice combed out of you.” Plath understood the need to be off to London—she experienced the need herself—but to couch that need in such loathing, and to revel in dispatching the domesticity she treasured enraged her, especially since Hughes could turn from pliant to disdainful in a trice. Much has been written about Plath’s mercurial moods, but Hughes in his own way could cut her a new one.

  On 25 May 1968, Olywn wrote to Aurelia broaching the idea of publishing The Bell Jar in the United States—even though, as Olwyn admitted in her letter, Ted had told her that Aurelia was adamantly against such publication. Think how much more money a novel would bring in for the children’s benefit than the poetry would, Olwyn argued. Aurelia’s response, which she decided not to send to Olwyn, was a terse rebuttal: “Surely the children will respect their father, when they are grown, for having refused to make money for them at such a price to their mother’s people!”

  Olwyn persisted for the next two years, writing a series of letters Aurelia later deposited in her daughter’s Smith College archive. On 2 July, Olwyn argued against exaggerated fears of publicity over publication of The Bell Jar. No one would care much about the real-life figures Sylvia had turned into her characters. Sylvia herself was disappointed that Knopf had not wanted to publish the novel. And as a capper, Olwyn suggested Aurelia was depriving Sylvia of her place in “our literary heritage.” A skeptical, infuriated Aurelia annotated this letter, noting what a ruckus “Daddy” had caused. She wrote Olwyn a week later that she had no idea of the “cupidity” of the American press and motion picture industry, which would only be interested in the sensationalistic aspects of The Bell Jar and Sylvia’s suicide. Aurelia had obtained legal advice, which only confirmed her concerns. In an unsent note, dated 29 December, Aurelia let Olwyn have it: Aurelia was not only expected to suffer the publication of the novel, she was supposed to “sanction it!” Olwyn backed off, temporarily, even as she cited the opinions of writers like Alan Sillitoe, who deemed the novel a distinguished work. Olwyn’s subsequent letters to an obdurate Aurelia asserted that the estate could control publicity about Sylvia by funneling all queries about her life to Lois Ames—who became, in effect, not merely the authorized, but also the proprietary biographer.

  Then Frances McCullough announced that Random House planned to issue an American edition of The Bell Jar, capitalizing on the copyright law then in effect: “Plath or her publisher in England would have had to publish the book in the U.S. within 6 months, but because she never intended to publish it here, and because it was published under a pseudonym, that never happened.” McCullough contacted Random House and “managed to make an ethical case that they shouldn’t do this because Ted Hughes had promised Sylvia’s mother it would never happen.” Aurelia, worried about her deteriorating health and financial security, realized that nothing would stem the interest in all facets of her daughter’s life and work. As a result, she went along with Frances McCullough’s advice that to “protect the book,” they had to publish it. “Later it became possible to amend that copyright provision and it was registered in Frieda and Nicholas’s name,” McCullough explained to Beth Alvarez, an archivist at the University of Maryland.

  On 23 March 1969, Assia Wevill gassed herself and her daughter. In the past year, her life with Hughes had become a desperate affair. She had written to Aurelia on 4
January 1968: “Ted told me that I was no use to him as an invalid (this was during my post-flu depression and sinus and bronchitis and things), and I thought that was the most brutal thing he’d ever said to me, when I nursed him and his mother for three weeks of his slipped disc. I thought suddenly that that degree of brutality would slowly dement me. That I must perhaps think of living without him completely.” Hughes’s reaction to the news was the same as it had been when Sylvia killed herself: “I cannot believe how I never knew what was really happening to her.” To Celia Chaikin, Assia’s sister, he claimed that as a couple he and Assia were one, which is why her constant testing of him—right up to her telephone call shortly before her suicide—had not unduly troubled him. He had been too distracted and too exhausted to offer her the hope she craved. He might as well have copied the letters he wrote to Aurelia after Sylvia’s death.

  Writing to Aurelia on 14 April, an anguished Hughes alluded to the hellish atmosphere of Court Green, treating his home like a haunted Gothic castle. What could Aurelia have made of his insensitive comment that he and Assia had hoped they could make “some atonement” for Sylvia? And how did it help to tell Aurelia that since Sylvia’s death his nature had turned “negative,” prompting him yet again to make a fresh start. It was exactly this notion—that he could just move on—that had so devastated Plath.

  On 2 May 1969, Olwyn rang up Al Alvarez to talk about Assia’s suicide. He noted in his diary: “According to Olwyn—who is scarcely impartial and probably lying—Assia was drunk … and had taken sleeping pills.” When Alvarez said the real crime was killing her little girl, Olwyn replied, “She could hardly have left Ted with another motherless child.” An aghast Alvarez listened as Olwyn said that it had been a particularly trying week for Assia. She was probably looking ghastly and was probably thinking, “I’ve lost my beauty. Ted will never love me.” In his diary, Alvarez wrote, “Olwyn could scarcely contain her triumph and contempt.” Writing to Peter Redgrove, a friend, in the spring of 1970, Hughes might as well have said he had become a ringer for Byron’s Manfred: “I seem to have been populated by the deceased who go on requiring God knows what of me & permit me very little.”