by Sylvia Plath
Literary influences are legion in Plath’s correspondence. She reads Virginia Woolf’s novels, for example, and tells her mother that she finds ‘them excellent stimulation for my own writing’ (21 July 1957). She and Hughes read The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson. Plath tells her mother: ‘I am going back to the ocean as my poetic heritage’ (5 July 1958) and later writes a series of poems about the sea surrounding Winthrop, Massachusetts, and a BBC script on the influence of this childhood setting on her writing. She tells Lynne Lawner that she admires Robert Lowell ‘immensely as a poet’ and audits his poetry course at Boston University (11 March 1959). Plath also likes poems by her Boston University classmate Anne Sexton, which she includes in her 1961 supplement to the Critical Quarterly entitled American Poetry Now. Sexton’s second book, All My Pretty Ones, particularly inspires Plath’s late poetry because it is, as she says: ‘One of the rare original things in this world’ (21 August 1962). Near the end of her life, Plath advises Catholic priest-poet Father Michael Carey to ‘study the assonances & consonances in Emily Dickinson (beloved of me) for a subtlety far beyond exact rhyme’ (21 November 1962).
Plath and Hughes were equally strong-willed individuals. There are many warning signs in the early days of their marriage that all is not harmonious. Plath tells her mother that she and Hughes ‘sometimes have violent disagreements’ (9 January 1957) and later realizes that ‘one must never push him’ (26 March 1957). Carving out sacrosanct time to write is the main challenge of their marriage. Plath tells her mother: ‘Both of us feel literally sick when we’re not writing’. Plath is determined to make her marriage successful. She tells her mother: ‘I am one of those women whose marriage is the central experience of life, much more crucial than a religion or career’ (7 May 1957). Plath thinks they are ‘both ideally suited temperamentally, with the same kind of life-rhythm, needing much sleep, solitude & living simply’ (17 June 1957). But the following year Plath confides to her brother: ‘we have rousing battles every so often in which I come out with sprained thumbs & Ted with missing earlobes’ (11 June 1958). Plath admits to Gerald Hughes that if Ted has any faults it is ‘the occasional black Moods’ (24 May 1959). When outfitting their new unfurnished flat at 3 Chalcot Square in London takes two months of their time, Plath admits to her mother that Ted ‘gets almost nervously sick when he hasn’t written for a long time, & really needs careful handling’ (24 March 1960).
Plath is formidable herself and can be devastatingly cynical in her correspondence. She thinks her upstairs neighbour in Cambridge, ‘the one & only son of Siegfried Sassoon is partly inhuman’ because he ‘runs a ham radio’, and describes Marianne Moore as filled with ‘old-maid blood’ because she wants to omit Hughes’s poems with sexual imagery from The Hawk in the Rain (15 March 1957). Plath finds many British women insufferable. They are all ‘shy, gauche and desperately awkward socially, or if social, dizzy butterflies’ (22 October 1957). She thinks the faculty members at the University of Massachusetts are ‘pedantic and cranky’ (20 January 1958). Theodore Roethke’s wife is ‘about as nice as nails’ (2 February 1961). And she tells her mother with disgust that recipes in British women’s magazines ‘are for things like Lard & Stale Bread Pie, garnished with Cold Pigs Feet’ (7 December 1961).
Plath is multitalented and exceedingly industrious, often taking part-time jobs so that Hughes can write full-time. She continues to study foreign languages throughout her marriage. She renews her German by reading Grimm’s fairytales and ‘trying to review one grammar lesson a day’ (5 July 1958). She also learns practical skills, such as stenotype, that help her secure part-time jobs to pay for groceries. When the couple live in Boston, Plath works as a secretary at the Massachusetts General Hospital and later for the chairman of the department of Sanskrit and Indian studies at Harvard. In preparation for possibly visiting Italy on Hughes’s Maugham award, Plath begins lessons in Italian at the Berlitz School. Plath also takes a part-time job in London at the Bookseller as a copy-editor and layout artist to earn money over their ‘bare time between grants’ (27 January 1961). Plath is a pacifist and interested in world events. She asks her mother for a subscription to the Nation in order ‘to keep up with American liberal politics’ (25 February 1960). Plath’s first outing with her daughter is attending a ‘Ban the Bomb’ march in Trafalgar Square. She hopes her mother will not vote for Richard Nixon, ‘a Macchiavelli of the worst order’ (21 April 1960). Plath also worries about ‘the repulsive shelter craze’ in America (7 December 1961). When Plath and Hughes live in the country, they buy a radio so that Plath can continue her language lessons in French, Italian, and German, and hear Hughes’s new BBC play The Wound (31 January 1962).
Cultural experiences are also very important to Plath. She tells her high school teacher Wilbury Crockett that she and Hughes ‘glut ourselves on the cheap play tickets, foreign films, galleries and all the best fare’ in London (17 December 1960). Other activities that Plath enjoys include cooking, rug braiding, and sewing (26 February 1959). She tells Olwyn: ‘Ted reads me Shakespeare while I work’ (25 May 1959). She also loves clothes even though she cannot afford the latest fashions. In the country, Plath takes riding lessons, enjoys fishing, keeps bees, and grows flowers, particularly poppies, cornflowers, and nasturtiums. In London, Plath and Hughes watch Ingmar Bergman films, Lawrence Olivier in Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, Brecht’s Galileo, and The Duchess of Malfi starring Peggy Ashcroft. Dinner at T. S. Eliot’s house, described as ‘one of those holy evenings’, is particularly fascinating: ‘Talk was intimate gossip about Stravinsky, Auden, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence’ (5 May 1960). Dinner and conversation at Natasha and Stephen Spender’s house with Rosamond Lehmann also turns to stories ‘about Virginia (Woolf)’ (26 October 1960). Stephen Spender even gives Plath a press ticket to attend the last day of the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial on her twenty-eighth birthday. American friends Leo and Ann Davidow-Goodman drive the Hughes family to Stonehenge and Vita Sackville-West’s Knole. Once they buy their own car, Plath and Hughes even visit remote towns in France. They regularly attend museum shows, such as the Picasso exhibition in London (13 September 1960), as well as visiting the small local galleries in Primrose Hill and Camden Town. Plath later tells Gerald Hughes that art is her ‘alternate love to writing’ (19 August 1961). At a party, Theodore Roethke offers Hughes a teaching post at Washington State University, which Plath looks forward to in a couple of years after they buy a house in England that they can rent out while they are away (2 February 1961).
‘Ted is in seventh heaven’ when ‘Sir Arundell agreed on the price of 3,600 pounds’ for Court Green in North Tawton, Devonshire (7 August 1961). Plath follows him into the country with Frieda even though she is ‘much more of a city-dweller than Ted’ and eventually hopes they can ‘be in London half a year and there half a year’ (28 September 1960). Plath tells her mother that the ‘move away from my marvelous midwives, doctors, friends, butcher & baker and parks and plays and all I enjoy so much is unbearable’ (14 April 1961). But Plath realizes Court Green is important to Hughes and writes to her mother after they move: ‘I never have known such satisfaction just seeing him revel in this place and leading at last exactly the life he wants’ (15 September 1961). Once again, Plath takes care of all the practical details in their daily life, such as hiring plumbers to lay the pipes for their Bendix washing machine, after which Plath tells her mother that she has ‘no worries about managing the new baby now’ (22 October 1961). ‘A house this old’, she tells Gerald and Joan Hughes, ‘needs one five-year plan, then another’ (6 December 1961). She even wins a $2,000 Saxton grant for prose writing on which they live for their entire time together at Court Green. Planning ahead, Plath has already written The Bell Jar, tied up into four parcels, for the Saxton’s required quarterly submissions. She sells ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ and other poems to the New Yorker to begin rebuilding their Boston Five Cents Savings Bank account after they deplete it to purchase Court Green. ‘Ted & I had nothing when we go
t married, & no prospects’, she tells her mother. ‘And in 5 years all our most far-fetched dreams have come true’ (12 January 1962).
The remaining letters in this volume chronicle the events that lead to the dissolution of the marriage, Plath’s valiant struggle to survive with her two children, and her eventual descent into depression and suicide. Discovering the unpleasant truth and background reasons for events often requires comparing descriptions of the same incident in a series of letters. Nicholas Farrar Hughes, for example, is born on 17 January 1962 and Plath writes ecstatic letters to her family and friends. However, to mutual friend Helga Huws, who knows Ted very well, she writes: ‘I am delighted with our Nicholas [but] Ted is cooler. I think he secretly desires a harem of adoring daughters’ (29 March 1962). She tells close friend Ruth Fainlight (wife of Alan Sillitoe), also the mother of a new son, that ‘Ted never touches him, nor has since he was born’ (8 September 1962). During the lingering bone-chilling winter in Devon, Plath suffers from a series of milk fevers and chilblains and she and Hughes hardly see each other ‘over the mountains of diapers & demands of babies’ (2 February 1962). Plath complains to Marcia Stern that Hughes finally paints the floorboards of their fifteen-room house ‘after much procrastination’, even though laying their turkey red and forest green carpets is a top priority (7 December 1961). Plath tells Smith-friend Clarissa Roche: ‘We are so stuck, with this new infant, and very broke with piles of necessary house repairs, plus investment in what Ted hopes will be a sort of lucrative garden’ (11 March 1962). Hughes plants the vegetable gardens on their 2½ acres while Plath does all the weeding, but the delicate plants suffer in the summer drought. Nothing materializes in the way they envision it, except for their hillside of daffodils, which bloom ‘in their heavenly startling way, like stars’ (27 March 1962). In the spring they entertain a string of visits from friends and family. Ruth Fainlight and Alan Sillitoe are no strain, whereas David and Assia Wevill, according to Plath, need to be formally ‘entertained’ (7 June 1962). Before the visit, Plath characterizes Assia Wevill, the wife of Canadian poet David Wevill, as ‘very attractive’ and ‘intelligent’ (14 May 1962). After the Wevills’ visit, Hughes begins spending more time in London. When Aurelia Plath arrives for a six-week stay, Plath hopes to get back to her study: ‘my poultice, my balm, my absinthe’ (18 June 1962). But, in front of her mother, Plath discovers to her horror that Hughes is having an affair with Assia Wevill, which destroys her health, concentration, and the idyll of her marriage. For healing she turns to the sea and makes arrangements to visit poet Richard Murphy in Ireland with Hughes: ‘I desperately need a boat and the sea and no squalling babies’ (21 July 1962).
When Plath returns to Court Green alone, she completes her book manuscript of Ariel over the autumn, writing as many as two startling poems every morning. She tells Richard Murphy: ‘I get up at 4 a.m. when I wake, & it is black, & write till the babes wake. It is like writing in a train tunnel, or God’s intestine’ (7 October 1962). The poems help her process her intense emotions following Hughes’s cruel desertion on their trip to Ireland (to join Wevill for a secret holiday in Spain) and the subsequent breakup of their marriage. She tells Ruth Fainlight: ‘the muse has come to live, now Ted is gone, and my God! what a sweeter companion’; she is ‘producing free stuff I had locked in me for years’ (22 October 1962). She tells her ‘literary godmother’ Olive Higgins Prouty: ‘I have never been so happy anywhere in my life as writing at my huge desk in the blue dawns, all to myself, secret and quiet’ (25 October 1962). When her mother suggests that she write happier poems, Plath responds: ‘What the person out of Belsen---physical or psychological---wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there & knows the worst, just what it is like’ (21 October 1962). Many of Plath’s observations in her letters from this period, such as her ‘enforced purdah in the West Country’ (26 October 1962) or a cut thumb, are recycled in her poetry. Plath tells Prouty that she feels like she is ‘writing in the blitz, bombs exploding all round’ (2 November 1962). Plath dedicates her ‘2nd book of poems (almost done) to Frieda & Nicholas’ (7 November 1962). Later, in London, when the poetry editor at the Observer, Al Alvarez, reads some of Plath’s poems for Ariel, he takes two on the spot (‘Poppies in October’ and ‘Ariel’, both written on her thirtieth birthday), and tells Plath her book ‘should win the Pulitzer Prize’ (14 December 1962). The next day, Plath submits a selection of her new poems, with commentary, to the BBC for a future broadcast. She tells Ruth Fainlight that she plans to sell the Ariel poems ‘one by one’ for much-needed income and then try to get the book published in London and New York (26 December 1962).
Plath contemplates wintering with the children in Spain or Ireland, but follows Prouty’s advice ‘to strike London now’ and goes up to look for a flat (2 November 1962). She takes out a five-year lease on a two-floor maisonette at 23 Fitzroy Road, the childhood home of W. B. Yeats, and tells Prouty: ‘I certainly think it would be symbolic for me to live in the house of a great poet I love’ (20 November 1962). Once she is able to secure an au pair, Plath plans to finish her second novel (‘Doubletake’) a semi-autobiographical work set in Devon ‘about a wife whose husband turns out to be a deserter and philanderer’ (20 November 1962). She plans to dedicate this novel to Prouty.
Plath’s letters are filled with fury and vitriol against Hughes while she pursues legal action and closes up Court Green to move to London. To justify a divorce on the basis of desertion, she tells her mother, ‘a father who is a liar and an adulterer and utterly selfish and irresponsible is worse than the absence of a father’ (27 August 1962), but Frieda misses him and ‘lies on the floor all day & sucks her thumb & looks miserable’ (29 September 1962). Plath tells her friend Kathy Kane that amputating Hughes from their life like a gangrenous limb is horrible, but ‘the only thing to do to survive’ (21 September 1962). She tells her mother: ‘Ted has spent all our savings to the tune of $100 a week & hasn’t worked for 4 months’ (23 September 1962); ‘He is a vampire on my life, killing and destroying all’ (26 September 1962); ‘He has behaved like a bastard, a boor, a crook, & what has hurt most is his cowardice---evidently for years he has wanted to leave us & deceived us about his feelings’ (12 October 1962). None of these passages was included in Letters Home. To Aurelia’s request for Sylvia to return home, Plath retorts: ‘America is out. Also, as you can see, I haven’t the strength to see you for some time. The horror of what you saw & what I saw you see last summer is between us & I cannot face you again until I have a new life’ (9 October 1962). Plath tells her brother that Ted is ‘just reverting to type’ (12 October 1962); ‘he can’t understand why I don’t kill myself’ (18 October 1962); and she resents having to ‘cope with the endless practical ruins that ass left behind him’ (25 October 1962). She tells Prouty on 18 October 1962 that he has ‘been secretly planning to desert us all along, withdrawing money from our joint account unknown to me, getting a London flat and mailing address, and leaving us with no access to him at all, and no explanation’. Plath is also hurt that the Hughes family – ‘the meanest, most materialistic of the English working class’ – support him and not her and the children. With disdain, she calls Hughes a gigolo, ‘vain & despicable’ as he dates various women, including Susan Alliston Moore, who works at Faber & Faber and is the ex-wife of Warren’s roommate from Harvard (22 November 1962).
Plath’s evolving and crumbling marriage is documented in intimate detail in fourteen letters written between 18 February 1960 and 4 February 1963 to Dr Ruth Beuscher, Plath’s former Boston-area therapist, as described in Frieda Hughes’s Foreword for this volume. Because Plath trusts and respects Dr Beuscher, whom she calls her spiritual midwife, she can be utterly candid. As a result, these letters are very difficult to read. Plath equates her gradual knowledge of Hughes’s lies and infidelities to ‘the old shock treatments’ she used to fear so at McLean Hospital (20 July 1962). With Beuscher’s encouragement, Plath final
ly begins divorce proceedings after she reads Hughes’s ‘impassioned love poems’ to Assia Wevill and realizes their marriage is over – ‘the knowledge that I am ugly and hateful to him now kills me’ (29 September 1962).
During the stress of Hughes’s desertion, Plath suffers from high fevers, loses twenty pounds in weight, takes up smoking, and becomes addicted to sleeping pills. She tells Marcia Brown Stern that she is ‘utterly flattened by having to be a business woman, farmer’, as well as ‘mother, writer & all-round desperado’ (2 January 1963). Even though ill health continues to plague Plath, she does not lose her sense of humour in her correspondence. To London friend Eric White, she writes: ‘I am just through a week of influenza & about as strong as a dead codfish’ (3 September 1962). She tell Elizabeth Sigmund that she looks forward to reading David Compton’s latest book all about murder – ‘just the thing to cheer me up’ (8 September 1962). When her Saxton grant runs dry, Plath continues to send her unpublished poems to Al Alvarez and other editors. To counteract Hughes’s characterization of her as a ‘hag’ compared to all the beautiful, stylish models he dates, she is determined to begin her life over ‘from the skin out’. She has her hair cut in a modern ‘fringe’ and buys a ‘gorgeous camel-colored suit’ with a gift cheque from Prouty (20 November 1962). Desperate to try anything to improve her morale, she even pays attention to ‘directions of the Taroc pack’ (25 October 1962). She paints the living room of her new flat in London midnight blue with accents of lilac and apple green, as she tells her mother, because ‘Ted never liked blue, & I am a really blue-period person now’ (21 December 1962).