Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  More popular modes of poetic expression bothered Plath and Hughes. That spring, Paul Roche and his wife Clarissa invited them to tea with the poet George Abbe, who combined a beatnik spirit with a confessional sensibility. He seemed to Plath “slick,” a “huckster,” telling them “anyone can write.” He improvised poetry onstage, “fished up a mood poem in his unconscious & wrote it on the blackboard…Ted & I got sicker and sicker.” In her journal Plath wrote that his poems were “about his boyhood, sob….As if poetry were some kind of therapeutic public purge or excretion. Ted & I left, disgusted, to go home to our private & exacting demons who demand every conscious and deep-rooted discipline, and work, and rewriting & knowledge.”188 They liked Roche, but Abbe had struck a nerve. Plath was hesitant to equate poetry with therapy, yet she admitted in her journal, “Fury jams the gullet & spreads poison, but, as soon as I start to write, dissipates, flows out into the figure of the letters.”189

  Abbe was one of several poets Plath demeaned in her journal that year, in addition to Roche, Hecht, and Merwin. In a mean-spirited passage, she even dismissed Roche’s and Hecht’s wives as boring and their children as “idiots.”190 Plath felt herself a student or rival around the other woman professors—Mary Ellen Chase had retired, and younger faculty like Joan Bramwell and Marlies Kalmann were formal and distant—and admitted, in April, that she had “few friends.”191 She still saw Ellie and Marcia sometimes, but even these relationships had cooled. She felt that Marcia had settled into “dogmatic complacency” and had “shrunk so small” as a wife.192 When Ellie came to visit in early April, dressed in high black heels and a black cocktail dress, Sylvia fumed quietly while Ellie, she thought, “played to Ted.”193 Ellie had landed a plum position at the New York Herald Tribune, and Sylvia was full of sour grapes. She was “sick of everything.”194 Their social life was so monotonous that when Sylvia heard sirens she almost hoped “for an incident, an accident.”195

  Paul Roche remembered that they all spent a lot of time at the Ouija board together. Ted and Clarissa, he said, were “serious,” but Sylvia was not. “She was slightly ironic….almost as if it were a kind of game.”196 The only thing Ted and Sylvia seemed to enjoy together that year, besides their walks in Child’s Park and the surrounding countryside, was watching Leonard Baskin at work in his studio. Baskin remembered impassioned discussions with Plath and Hughes about “images of elemental force” and felt there was a “symbiosis going on among the three of us.” He found Sylvia “totally happy…in great harmony with Ted….There was no demonic, obsessive quality to Sylvia.” It was Ted, he remembered, who could fill a room with “the most unalterable silences….He had a grey, hulking, brooding quality. What this did to Sylvia I’m not sure.” Baskin wondered whether Ted was the right kind of husband for a sensitive woman who needed, he felt, “continual reassurance.”197 Plath would dedicate her 1958 poem “Sculptor” to Baskin.

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  As April turned to May, Sylvia felt increasingly exhausted. She called herself “weary” and “depressed” in her journal; she wrote of her fear of death and childbirth, her “slipshod part time” scholarly ways; she fretted about her novel and looked to George Eliot and Henry James for a model of “social surface, decorum.”198 She wanted her novel’s protagonist, Dody Ventura, to be “complex,” a moralist who was also a rebel. James’s heroines were “so noble: she sees and sees and will not flinch or be mean, be small…she will not indulge ‘the vulgar heat of her wrong.’ With which, under which, I should explode.”199

  Yet as the end of the semester neared, Sylvia vacillated between her contempt for teaching and her desire for security, prestige, and money: “teaching 3 or 4 days a week with over 3 months of paid vacation seems a gift, now I think of it.”200 She knew Aurelia was deeply skeptical of her decision to leave Smith, and wondered if this accounted for her sudden coolness. “Queer mother—stiff about helping us come to Boston…her guarded praise at our getting poems published, as if this were one more nail in the coffin of our resolve to drown as poets and refuse all ‘secure’ teaching work.”201 Aurelia indeed began to resent Ted for encouraging Sylvia to trade a promising teaching career for the elusive art of poetry.202 She knew that her daughter needed structure and routine. She had seen Sylvia shifting listlessly around the house, her self-hatred intensifying day after day, during the black July and August of 1953.

  There were a few high points that May—dinners with Leonard and Esther Baskin (the only faculty couple that escaped Plath’s scorn), the novels of Henry James, and a reading by Robert Lowell in Amherst on the 6th. Lowell’s poems had struck her just as Hughes’s had when she first read them in the Saint Botolph’s Review: “taste the phrases: tough, knotty, blazing with color & fury, most eminently sayable.”203 After the reading, she drove Lowell around Northampton “looking for relics of his ancestors, and to the Historical Society & the graveyard.” She described him to Warren as “the mad and very nice poet Robert Lowell (the only one 40ish whom we both admire, who comes from the Boston Lowells & is periodically carted off as a manic depressive)…He is quiet, soft-spoken, and we liked him very much.”204 Hughes too emphasized Lowell’s manic depression and asylum stays in a letter to Olwyn, but he found him “very congenial” and thought Lowell’s new poems, from the forthcoming Life Studies, “more exciting poetry than anything he’s ever written.”205

  That May, after Lowell’s reading, Plath began writing “Full Fathom Five,” another elegy for Otto:

  I walk dry on your kingdom’s border

  Exiled to no good.

  Your shelled bed I remember.

  Father, this thick air is murderous.

  I would breathe water.

  “Full Fathom Five” is an important thematic precursor of Plath’s more achieved paternal elegies, “Electra on Azalea Path,” “The Colossus,” and “Daddy.” She was pleased with her allusions to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and decided to rename her entire collection Full Fathom Five. “It relates more richly to my life and imagery than anything else I’ve dreamed up” she wrote in her journal, “the association of the sea, which is a central metaphor for my childhood, my poems and the artist’s subconscious, to the father image—relating to my own father, the buried male muse & god-creator risen to be my mate in Ted, to the sea-father neptune—and the pearls and coral highly-wrought to art: pearls sea-changed from the ubiquitous grit of sorrow and dull routine.”206 The Earthenware Head seemed too glassy and brittle a title after hearing Lowell.

  Sylvia’s mood descended as she moved closer to a life without regular income or structure. Her doubts manifested themselves in various physical ailments (colds, rashes), and on May 14 she wrote that she felt shut in a “prison of highstrung depression.”207 Ted, too was depressed; both stopped eating. She hinted obliquely at suicide in her journal: “I feel about to break out in leprosy: nervous: hearing stairs creak: dying of cowardice—ready for all the lights to mysteriously go out and the horror of a monster to take me: nightmares haunt me.”208 “All’s polished to a dull luster // In the sulfurous noon,” Plath wrote in her 1958 poem “In Midas’ Country.”

  She pushed through and finished teaching on May 22, ending with Edith Sitwell, e. e. cummings, and John Crowe Ransom. She told Warren she “felt honestly sorry to say goodbye to my girls” and was “amused” to “get applause in the exact volume of my own feelings toward every class: a spatter at 9, a thunderous ovation at 11 which saw me down two flights of stairs, and a medium burst at 3.” She was proud of herself for fighting through “those first black weeks of teaching,” to have “won over” her most difficult students and “taught them a good deal.” She could hardly believe she had eloquently unpacked “The Waste Land” and other difficult works. “But I have.”209

  When she emerged from Seelye Hall, finally free, she expected to find Ted waiting for her. Suddenly she saw him walking up the road from Paradise Pond (“where girls take their
boys to neck”) with a pretty young student who quickly turned away as Sylvia approached. “I gagged at what I saw,” she wrote in her journal. Distraught and enraged, she confronted Ted, who told her the woman was one of his students, and that they had run into each other by chance. Hughes later engaged in extramarital affairs, but that day—so early in their marriage—he probably told the truth. Sylvia did not believe him, and she poured out her despair and fury in her journal. “I made the most amusing, ironic & fatal step in trusting Ted was unlike other vain and obfuscating and self-indulgent men. I have served a purpose, spent money, mother’s money, which hurts most, to buy him clothes, to buy him a half year, eight months of writing, typed hundreds of times his poems. Well, so much have I done for modern British & American poetry.”210 She could no longer sleep “for shaking at horror.”211

  She had suspected that something strange had been going on because of his “late comings home,” but seduction was much on her mind that afternoon when she saw Ted with this young woman. Just before her last class, she had seen a Smith professor, Bill Van Voris, flirting with a student at a coffee shop; this scene made her remember her own meetings with Alfred Fisher, “sitting in the same seat, & me opposite, that official sexual rapport…students made mistresses.”212 She was also in the throes of a depression that, as she herself had admitted, heightened her sense of paranoia and insecurity. Back at Elm Street, they fought it out: she left bloody claw marks on Ted’s cheeks and sprained her thumb. In her journal she referred to bites and snarls. Some have assumed, from this entry, that Hughes hit her, but Plath’s syntax is ambiguous: “I remember hurling a glass with all my force across a dark room; instead of shattering the glass rebounded and remained intact: I got hit and saw stars.” Plath’s colon suggests that she “got hit” by the ricocheting glass, not by Hughes. She felt the fight had helped bring them closer. “Air cleared,” she wrote afterward. Nothing, not “even total possession,” was “worth jeapordizing what I have which is so much the angels might well envy it.”213

  If the bell jar had lifted, so had the veil on their marriage. Sylvia would spend the summer and much of the fall of 1958 battling depression and writer’s block, for which she partly blamed Ted. The shared sense of vocation that had helped bind them together suddenly seemed, by that summer, more problematic. Mrs. Prouty had warned her about the difficulties of a creative marriage, and she now worried she was becoming “too dependent” on Ted. She began to admit that the union had as much potential to hold her back as it did to propel her forward. The fury of May had unlocked other resentments:

  It is as if I were sucked into a tempting but disastrous whirlpool. Between us there are no barriers—it is rather as if neither of us—or especially myself—had any skin, or one skin between us & kept bumping into and abrading each other. I enjoy it when Ted is off for a bit. I can build up my own inner life, my own thoughts, without his continuous “What are you thinking? What are you going to do now?” which makes me promptly and recalcitrantly stop thinking and doing. We are amazingly compatible. But I must be myself—make myself & not let myself be made by him.214

  Two days after she wrote this passage, Sylvia experienced another kind of grief. Earlier that month, she and Ted had found a baby bird that had fallen from its nest, “convulsed in what looked like a death-shudder.”215 They brought it home, fashioned a rag-and-paper nest in a cardboard box, and fed it ground hamburger for a week. But the bird did not recover, and each dawn they awoke to its miserable scrabble and wheeze. “We couldn’t sleep or write for days, nursing it & hunting vainly for worms, identifying with it until it became gruesome,” Sylvia told Warren. “Finally, we figured it would be mercy to put it out of its misery.”216 Ted put the bird to sleep—“fixed our rubber bath hose to the gas jet on the stove & taped the other end into a cardboard box”—while she watched, distraught and weeping. When its small legs finally stopped shaking, Ted brought it to her, “composed, perfect & beautiful in death.”217 Plath would use similar language, five years later, to describe the dead woman in “Edge.”

  Together, they walked outside into the cool dusk of Child’s Park and buried the bird under a “druid stone.”218 For Sylvia, it was “a shattering experience. Such a plucky little bit of bird. I can’t forget it.”219 She had taught her students about the significance of birds as an augur of hope and creative inspiration in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist. This bird was a different kind of symbol. “We left ferns & a green firefly on the grave, felt the stone roll of our hearts.”220

  21

  Life Studies

  Northampton and Boston, June 1958–March 1959

  Sylvia ended her last semester on a final, sour note when the faculty decided to replace the low grade she had given a student’s senior thesis with a summa cum laude. Outraged and baffled, she saw it as another sign that she did not belong in academia. Some members of the faculty were not sorry to see her go. “She disappointed Miss Drew enormously when she came back to teach at Smith,” Janet Salter Rosenberg recalled. “I went to my fifth reunion, the year after Sylvia and Ted had been there. She said, ‘It didn’t matter whether the girl had emotional problems, she didn’t fulfill her responsibilities at Smith,’ and that was that. I really got quite an earful.”1 Mary Ellen Chase, too, was “very disappointed at her leaving the faculty.”2 Charles Hill, another English professor, felt Plath “owed” it to the department to stay because of all the support, financial and otherwise, she had received as a student. She had not been, he thought, sufficiently “considerate.”3 Plath had alienated Smith friends like Janet, Jane Truslow, Claiborne Phillips, and Nancy Hunter with her determination to fulfill her own desires in 1954–55; now a similar dynamic played out with her Smith professors. Because Plath was a woman, she would always pay a social price for putting her own needs first. But for her the cost was worth it. No longer would she extemporize about symbolism and irony in James Joyce and T. S. Eliot: “like a soldier, demobbed, I am cut loose of over twenty steady years of schooling & let free into civilian life.”4 Sylvia and Ted left Northampton for New York City after she finished grading her last exam on June 3. In her journal, she wrote, “I start, like a race horse at the bugle.”5

  The campaign began at the Biltmore Hotel, where the couple lunched with two of London’s most powerful literary men: Charles Monteith, chairman of Faber and Faber publishers, and vice chairman Peter du Sautoy. They promised to introduce Sylvia and Ted to “ ‘Tom’ Eliot” when they returned to England.6 This was the life Plath had dreamed of—not teaching Eliot, but knowing him. Later they called on their editor friend David Keightley, the critic Babette Deutsch, and Oscar Williams, who had included Hughes in a recent anthology.7 Williams shepherded them to a party on Fifth Avenue, where, after sharing an elevator with Lionel and Diana Trilling, Sylvia mingled with Ralph Ellison, John Farrar, “endless boring professors from Columbia,” and others Williams had published.8 This was Alfred Kazin’s crowd, and Sylvia was out of her element. (She disparaged the Jewish businessmen she met at a party that same day in a letter to Warren.) The couple also made a pilgrimage to Brooklyn Heights to visit Marianne Moore, who, Sylvia wrote, served “strawberries, sesame seed biscuits & milk & talked a blue streak.”9 Moore, one of the judges for the Harper/YMHA contest, would champion Hughes’s work but grow to dislike Plath’s.

  To save money, the couple stayed with Sylvia’s old friend Pat O’Neil, who lived near Columbia at 523 West 121st Street. They wandered through Central Park and Harlem (Hughes admitted he had once thought only African Americans lived in New York City) and saw Lorca’s Blood Wedding at the Actors’ Playhouse in Greenwich Village. Afterward Sylvia ran into Dick Wertz, Sassoon’s old roommate, as she headed to the subway. She was about to say hello when she suddenly saw Sassoon himself. His back was turned, and he did not see her. She told Aurelia about the moment, but not Ted. “I kept quiet & passed by….Of all the people in NYC!”10 The encounter rattled her.

  On their last ni
ght in New York, they saw two “experimental” Ionesco plays at the Sullivan Street Playhouse—The Bald Soprano and Jack.11 Hughes enjoyed them, but he was ready to leave the city, which he compared to “living in an underground terminal. Soot, noise, weariness, cheapjacks.” He thought the Village’s bohemianism contrived and “pathetic.” “If Chelsea is 5 removes from the Left Bank,” he wrote Olwyn, “this is 50 from Chelsea.”12 Manhattan embodied the brash American materialism, flashiness, and excess he had come to loathe. He was most interested in the Bowery bums.

  Hughes preferred smaller university cities like Boston and Cambridge, where he and Plath were quickly becoming part of the literary establishment, thanks to Jack Sweeney. After the couple returned to Northampton, Sweeney asked Plath to record several of her poems for the Harvard Poetry Room on June 13.13 Plath worked hard to be worthy. She had culled everything she had written more than two years ago from her collection and hoped to have fifty strong poems to send out to publishers by the winter. “I feel I’ve got rid of most of my old rigidity & glassy glossiness & am well on the way to writing about the real world,” she told Warren in early July.14 Ted pushed her in this “unsentimental” direction, telling Aurelia in July that Sylvia had written “two or three first class poems, as strong as anything she has done, and I think the unbroken practise is necessary—her style and self are changing so rapidly that it is a continuous labour to bring the two together.”15 Plath was cheered when “Spinster” and “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” appeared in the influential London Magazine in June—no purveyor of “glassy glossiness”—while her “Sow” and Hughes’s “Thrushes” would appear together in the next British PEN anthology. Each also had two poems in the forthcoming Borestone anthology—a reassuring symmetry.