By creating fictional doubles of herself and Hughes, Plath simultaneously addressed and contained her anxieties about the creative partnership. She refused the role of muse; like the heroine of her unfinished novel Falcon Yard, she felt herself a “voyager, no Penelope.”46 Many Hughes poems from this period, too, display anxiety over a powerful female rival.47 While Sylvia worried that she would remain the trailing spouse, especially once a baby arrived, Ted would increasingly worry that underneath his wife’s freewheeling Lawrentian exterior lurked a bourgeois desire for respectability and financial security. And he was all too aware of Robert Graves’s warning, in The White Goddess, that one cannot serve Goddess and wife at the same time.48
* * *
—
As July turned to August, the couple became listless in Eastham. The temperature was in the high nineties, “terribly still and sultry”—and Sylvia longed for the “nip” of fall weather.49 The laundry came back dirty; she could not make sense of Faulkner. In late July, a pregnancy scare brought on “a black lethal two weeks” as bad as the weeks that had preceded her suicide attempt.50 She was paralyzed with fear; if she were pregnant, there would be no Smith job, no traveling, no novel: “clang, clang, one door after another banged shut with the overhanging terror which, I know now, would end me, probably Ted, and our writing.”51 She felt she would resent her child for closing the doors she had pried open. The couple biked through a driving thunderstorm to a doctor in Orleans on August 4 for a blood test. The next day her period came. But she had lost her momentum.
Ted, too, became restless. He was “paralysed” by the cost of the cottage Aurelia had rented for them—“Dowry almost” at $70 a week.52 He developed an ear abscess, which caused pain, fever, and severe facial swelling. “Conditions haven’t been as ideal as they’ve seemed,” he wrote Olwyn that August.53 Sylvia endured another setback in early August when she learned that her manuscript had not won the Yale Younger Poets contest. (John Hollander had won.) For over two months she had fantasized about her own moment in the sun—the introduction by Auden, the ensuing New Yorker acceptances. She confided in her journal:
Worst: it gets me feeling so sorry for myself, that I get concerned about Ted: Ted’s success, which I must cope with this fall with my job…feeling so wishfully that I could make both of us feel better by having it with him. I’d rather have it this way, if either of us was successful: that’s why I could marry him, knowing he was a better poet than I and that I would never have to restrain my little gift, but could push it and work it to the utmost, and still feel him ahead.54
Now she would have to begin again. She reread the manuscript with a newly critical eye, hating the poems for what she now saw as “bland ladylike archness or slightness.”55 She could hardly believe Adrienne Rich and Donald Hall, with their “dull” poems, were ahead of her. She had not worked hard enough, “Not one tenth hard enough.” She must become “stoic” again, and “fight.”56 There would be no more stories with “phony plots,” “the old lyric sentimental stuff.”57
By late August, Sylvia had begun counting down the days until they could leave the Cape. She felt lazy and unproductive, and hardly realized that she had experienced two creative breakthroughs. In July, she had sketched a rough outline of a major plotline of The Bell Jar, and, in late August, she had pondered a coastal scene in her journal that would inspire her fine poem “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor,” which The New Yorker would accept in June 1958: “the weird spectacle of fiddler crabs in the mud-pools off Rock Harbor creek….An image: weird, of another world, with its own queer habits, of mud, lumped, under-peopled with quiet crabs.”58 Hughes would later write of their coastal explorations in his Birthday Letters poem “Flounders.” “Was that a happy day?” he wondered, remembering how he and Plath had been swept out to sea in their dinghy by a strong current.59 They eventually rowed to a sandbar, where “big, good America found us”; a powerboat towed them back to the dock. Back in the shallows, they caught flounders “big as plates.” For Hughes, the day symbolized the life of adventure, beauty, and bounty they might have led had they not sacrificed their marriage to art:
And the day
Curled out of brilliant, arduous morning,
Through wind-hammered perilous afternoon,
Salt-scoured, to a storm-gold evening, a luxury
Of rowing among the dream-yachts of the rich
Lolling at anchor off the play-world pier.
How tiny an adventure
To stay so monumental in our marriage,
A slight ordeal of all that might be,
And a small thrill-breath of what many live by,
And a small prize, a toy miniature
Of the life that might have bonded us
Into a single animal, a single soul—
It was a visit from the goddess, the beauty
Who was poetry’s sister—she had come
To tell poetry she was spoiling us.
Poetry listened, maybe, but we heard nothing
And poetry did not tell us. And we
Only did what poetry told us to do.60
* * *
HUGHES WAS INITIALLY EXCITED to live in America: he wrote repeatedly to Olwyn in 1957 that he was tired of England, which he described as “rotten,” “complete death.”61 Yet by the time he traveled to Cape Cod, he had become alarmed by American culture, wrapped, as he saw it, in “cellophane.”62 American food was “not fresh living stuff but a ten-year preservative, a chemical concoction.”63 Bread was “de-crapularised, re-energised, multi-cramulated, bleached, double-bleached, rebrowned, unsanforised, guaranteed no blaspheming. There is no such thing as bread.”64 He complained to his sister that “everybody’s so friendly, and nobody knows anybody else’s family history, and nobody ever bothers to get to know anybody except on purely temporary and facetious terms.”65 He spoke of the average American living on credit, mocked the “city man’s” naturalist pretensions (“Expensive rods and fat paunches”)66 and wrote to Danny Weissbort of “greed, vulgarity, & the horrible superficiality of a race without any principles.”67 He admired only the sharp honesty of American literary reviews, so unlike the vituperative tones of British reviewers, and the wildlife. Echoing Leavis, he told Olwyn that “women’s magazines & men’s paper-backs, newspapers…make up the shared consciousness of the American people.”68 He reckoned that the “indigenous literary form” was “the advertisement.”69 All the best Americans lived in Europe, he wrote his sister. “I think America will destroy the world, slowly.”70
Wellesley gave him—and Sylvia—the “jimjams.” That June he wrote Gerald, “a comfortably housed life in America is an officially entered numbered trap in the rat-race….The food, the general opulence, is frightening. My natural instinct is to practise little private filthinesses—I spit, pee on shrubbery, etc, and have a strong desire to sleep on the floor—just to keep in contact with a world that isn’t quite so glazed as this one….It’s good too for me to be surrounded by a world from which I instinctively recoil.”71 He and Sylvia busied themselves moving to Northampton, which struck him as more “English—all the shops & streets huddled together—so maybe that will be more congenial.”72
After paying their deposit and first month’s rent on the apartment, Sylvia worried about scraping by until her first paycheck and went over her bills in meticulous detail with Aurelia. Sylvia was still dependent on her mother, whom she constantly asked for favors. Would Aurelia withdraw money for them at the bank? Could she send their bookcase to Northampton? Could she call the dentist to ask about Sylvia’s swollen gum and make doctor appointments for herself and Ted in December? Did she have advice about driving lessons for Ted?
Aurelia sensed her daughter’s anxiety and advised her to take “deep breaths,” while Sylvia calmed herself with the knowledge that she would “never be anything less than conscientious.”73 She woul
d teach the same syllabus to three different classes and share her office with an older scholar, Miss Hornbeak (Sylvia loved her name), on the top floor of the Neilson Library. All three of her classes met in nearby Hatfield Hall and Seelye Hall, a suitably collegiate brick building with large, light-filled classrooms.74 She bought two new blouses to boost her “morale,” as Aurelia had advised.
As September drew to a close, Sylvia began to realize that class preparation, grading, and regular conferences with sixty-six students would leave her little time to write. Yet she was ready to immerse herself in academic life again, for she knew the bell jar descended when she was listless: “How I long to be busy!” She felt she functioned more “happily & efficiently” when she had “a hundred things to do.”75 Ted reassured her that she would inspire her students, and she was grateful to him for making meals and doing the dishes while she prepared her classes. On the day The Hawk in the Rain was published in America, September 18, the owner of a local bookshop sent the couple two bottles of champagne. They shared one bottle by candlelight and saved the other for the end of Sylvia’s first teaching week.
Sylvia could not sleep the night before her first class, and for many weeks after it, she battled to maintain her poise before the lectern. She had hoped that teaching would stimulate her and help her writing. Instead she found it an exhausting juggernaut that left her “always deathly nervous.”76 She thought of herself as a “hopeless extempore speaker” without sophisticated knowledge of the subjects she was teaching—an absurd comment from someone who had just earned a 2.1 on the Cambridge Tripos exams. She even worried that she did not know how to teach grammar properly, for she had always intuited correct usage by ear. Teaching at her alma mater, where she had been the star of the department, only intensified her anxiety. She recounted her struggle in her journal—“Letter to a demon”—on October 1. The demon within was her “murderous self”:
It is there. I smell it and feel it, but I will not give it my name. I shall shame it. When it says: you shall not sleep, you cannot teach, I shall go on anyway, knocking its nose in. It’s [sic] biggest weapon is and has been the image of myself as a perfect success: in writing, teaching and living. As soon as I sniff non-success in the form of rejections, puzzled faces in class when I’m blurring a point, or a cold horror in personal relationships, I accuse myself of being a hypocrite, posing as better than I am, and being, at bottom lousy.77
Thanks to the therapy she had undertaken in 1953–54, Plath was now better equipped to stop these cycles of negative thinking. She reassured herself that she could not be expected to teach as well as a published scholar with a PhD. She would do her best, and that ought to be enough. She had quit her job at the Belmont, and nearly quit her first nanny job with the Mayos. This time, she would not quit. “I’ll fight it…that black cloud which would annihilate my whole being with its demand for perfection and measure, not what I am, but of what I am not.”78
Hughes captured something of Plath’s terror in his Birthday Letters poem “The Blue Flannel Suit.”
…Now I know, as I did not,
What eyes waited at the back of the class
To check your first professional performance
Against their expectations. What assessors
Waited to see you justify the cost
And redeem their gamble. What a furnace
Of eyes waited to prove your metal. I watched
The strange dummy stiffness, the misery,
Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, ugly
Half-approximation to your idea
Of the proprieties you hoped to ease into,
And your horror in it.79
She would not always be so nervous; confidence would come with experience. And she knew, as she told Marcia, that she could learn something from teaching her “favorite writers, who stimulate my own writing”—Lawrence, Joyce, James, Dostoevsky, Woolf—to smart, disciplined women.80
Plath’s syllabus was deeply personal. In September and October, she taught two chapters from William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience and five Hawthorne short stories, including her old favorite “Rappaccini’s Daughter.”81 In November, she followed these texts with Henry James’s “The Pupil” and “The Beast in the Jungle” and D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” “The Blind Man,” “The Prussian Officer,” and “The Princess”; she ended the semester with Joyce’s Dubliners. During the spring semester, she would teach Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and a miniature version of her Cambridge tragedy course (Webster, Aristotle, Ibsen, and Strindberg).82 She used selections from Louis Untermeyer’s 1955 Modern American and British Poetry on Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, Thomas, Auden, Crowe Ransom, and e. e. cummings.83 She planned to teach poems by Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wilbur, and Edith Sitwell if she had time.
This was, as one of her former students recalled, “heavy, depressing stuff.”84 To her students, looking back, it must have seemed that Mrs. Hughes—as Plath’s students called her—already had a morbid obsession with death. Yet her interest in this theme reflected a sound and current approach to literary modernism. “Death-in-life,” alienation, and paralysis were prominent themes in discussions of modernist texts by critics like Edmund Wilson, Harry Levin, Hugh Kenner, David Daiches, I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, and Elizabeth Drew in the 1950s.85 Plath often quoted these critics’ works in her teaching notes, especially as they pertained to Joyce, Yeats, and Eliot. Her teaching notes on Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” for example, were typical of her era: “helpless consciousness of having dared too little…Fear of life. Hesitation: fatal: suspension of decision.” Again, on “The Waste Land”: “paralysis of man,” “life dead, love dead, nature dead, culture dead, no integration.” On Joyce: “modern man’s exile from the old vital relationships with family, country and religion. STERILITY. ISOLATION.”86
On the last day of class, Plath’s students would ask her why there was “so much death, so much living death in the stories, poems, plays & novels we’ve read.” Her response, as she wrote in her lecture notes, probably struck her students as unusually passionate. “DEATH IS ONE OF THE MOST MOVING & TROUBLING EXPERIENCES OF LIFE: DEATH-IN-LIFE IS ONE OF THE MOST TERRIBLE STATES OF EXISTENCE: NEUTRALITY, BOREDOM become worse sins than murder, worse than illicit love affairs: BE RIGHT OR WRONG, don’t be indifferent, don’t be NOTHING.” Poetry, she went on, could help us “re-create worlds.” “MANY POETS, MANY READERS live by poetry as people have lived by religion: BOTH ARE RITUALS, PATTERNS” that give “special meaning to the most profound experiences of human life.”87
Plath’s teaching notes suggest that her reading of modernist texts—Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, and Yeats—gave her the aesthetic tools and thematic confidence to transform her suicide attempt into high art in The Bell Jar. Her mouthpieces would not be working-class Dubliners, as in Joyce, or shell-shocked veterans, as in Woolf, but women who suffocate within a sexist society. Plath called Manhattan a “dry, humid, breathless wasteland” in a June 1953 letter to Warren; as the critic Amanda Golden has noted, Esther’s descriptions of herself as “numb,” “hollow,” and “dead” speak to the “death-in-life” that Joyce and Eliot wrote about in Dubliners and “The Waste Land.”88 (“The Waste Land,” after all, was in large part about Eliot’s nervous breakdown.) In other ways, The Bell Jar was an ironic reworking of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist.
Edmund Wilson’s depiction of London in “The Waste Land” in his landmark book of literary criticism Axel’s Castle—which Gordon gave Sylvia at McLean—resonated with her own experience of Manhattan. In the margin, she wrote, “1953—yes! June—NYC” next to the following passage: “The terrible dreariness of the great modern cities is the atmosphere in which ‘The Waste Land’ takes place….all about us we are aware of nameless millions performing bar
ren office routines, wearing down their souls in interminable labors of which the products never bring them profit—people whose pleasures are so sordid and so feeble that they seem almost sadder than their pains. And this Waste Land has another aspect: it is the place not merely of desolation, but of anarchy and doubt.”89 Plath probably made these markings during her teaching year, when she consulted Axel’s Castle regularly. Even Henry James gave her an idea when he described May Bartram, in “The Beast in the Jungle,” as “under some clear glass bell”—a phrase she underlined. She would return to Eliot, Joyce, James, and Wilson when she wrote The Bell Jar: “these are the sunk relics of my lost selves that I must weave, word-wise, into future fabrics.”90
But in the fall of 1957, Sylvia could not see more than one or two days ahead of her syllabus. She spent her free time correcting papers and trying to get a handle on “what the hell I’m teaching.”91 In an early November letter to Warren, she wrote of her frustration:
I sometimes wonder if I can live out the grim looming aspect of this year without despairing….I am simply not a career woman, and the sacrifice of energy and life blood I’m making for this job is all out of proportion to the good I’m doing in it. My ideal of being a good teacher, writing a book on the side, and being an entertaining homemaker, cook & wife is rapidly evaporating. I want to write first, and being kept apart from writing, from giving myself a chance to really devote myself to developing this “spectacular promise” that the literary editors write me about when they reject my stories, is really very hard.
…I am sacrificing my energy, writing & versatile intellectual life for grubbing over 66 Hawthorne papers a week and trying to be articulate in front of a rough class of spoiled bitches. If I knew how to teach a short story, or a novel, or a poem I’d at least have that joy. But I’m making it up as I go along, through trial and error, mostly error….it’s easier for the men…92
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