When the couple returned to Northampton from Cape Cod, they found their landlady furious that they had left their windows open. Mrs. Whalen even dared to criticize Sylvia’s meticulous housekeeping. Plath, seething, vowed to “caricature” her in a story. “All fury, grist for the mill.”56 It was a strategy she revisited in the years to come.
* * *
MRS. WHALEN BECAME “a flat memory only” as Sylvia and Ted left Northampton behind for Boston on September 1, 1958.57 Their Willow Street apartment, in the charming, historic Beacon Hill neighborhood, delighted with its forest-green walls, hardwood floors, and plush couch. The rent was high, at $115 a month, and only a curtain separated the “pigmy” galley kitchen from the living room, but there were spectacular views over the Charles River from the two bay windows, which Sylvia called their “writing corners,” “luminously light.”58 She told others she found the apartment’s small size “hostile to any elaborate housewifery, and that to the good.”59 Her “workroom” was the main living room; she loved to gaze across the gables and chimney pots of Back Bay to the Charles River, sparkling mesmerically in the autumn sun. To her left was the gleaming John Hancock building; to her right, the “pruned & plumed trees of Louisberg [sic] Square.”60 Ted worked in the pale blue bedroom, where he set up a desk of two large wooden planks before the bay window. Sylvia treasured her new anonymity, telling Ellie Friedman, “Nobody here has heard of Smith, or us, which is magnificent.”61 She wrote more candidly to Dorothea Krook of how “in America, privacy is suspect; isolation, perilous.”62
They spent their first few days exploring the city’s less genteel quarters. They wandered by wharves and dark waterside taverns that seemed straight out of Melville, and open-air markets in the Italian North End. Sylvia even ventured inside a tattoo parlor, but she nearly fainted as she watched the artist ply his trade. (She later wrote about the experience in a story, “The Fifteen-Dollar Eagle,” which would be published in the fall 1960 Sewanee Review. Ted boasted to Olwyn that the editor called it a “marvelous tour-de-force.”)63 They rode the famous swan boats in the Public Garden. Both decided that Boston was their favorite city, especially Ted: “he claims, everywhere, that the heavy stone buildings, the scraggly brick flats, the green park full of swans, remind him of England,” Sylvia wrote Dr. Krook.64
But within two weeks, Sylvia’s old panic, “absolute & obliterating,” was back.65 Ted’s ability to concentrate and produce made her feel lazy. He later told the critic William Scammell that his “influence” at this time amounted to “a relentless application to the job…a general pressure towards concrete language and direct statement.” He told Sylvia that when she had finished a poem, she should feel “exhausted…utterly spent” like the discus player who collapses on the field after his third throw, and he taught her exercises “to release her mind from the dreadful panic lock it used to get into.”66 But Hughes, too, was mired in a “black depression,” according to Sylvia, for much of September.67 The apartment had come with an aquarium and two goldfish, and he felt that the tank was too small. He became distraught at how the fish were “suffering, almost dying.”68 They changed the tank water every day, hoping that the fish would not die, as the drama of the baby bird played out all over again. Plath continued working on her short story about the bird throughout September, but it, too, refused to fly.
Aurelia’s calls, filled with “unspoken nervousness” about her own troubles and their joblessness, did not help.69 Whole days slid by with nothing to show. The two listened to Beethoven sonatas late into the night, woke late, ate at odd times, and sat in silence. “Stop & ask why you wash, why you dress, you go wild—it is as if love, pleasure, opportunity surrounded me, and I were blind,” Sylvia wrote in her journal.70 She and Ted bickered. He could nag her about her cooking and writing from his “superior seat,” she complained, but not the other way around. “No criticism or nagging,” she wrote in her journal on September 11. “Shut eyes to dirty hair, ragged nails. He is a genius. I his wife.” She vowed not to let Ted see her work, so that her life would not “hang on” his. She was annoyed when The Atlantic rejected her “Snakecharmer,” while Ted received a $150 check for “Dick Straightup.” “The famed & fatal jealousy of professionals,” she observed drily in her journal. “Do we, vampire-like, feed on each other? A wall, sound-proof, must mount between us. Strangers in our study, lovers in bed.”71 She spoke of “Ted’s depression” and her “disease of doldrums.”72 She wondered again and again how she would fill her days, thinking she might “rush to Harvard, to Yale” and “beg” them to admit her into a PhD program—anything to “take my life out of my own clumsy hands.”73 Smith had asked her back for a third time, sweetening their offer with a writing course. “I have nightmares about accepting,” she wrote Ellie, “so must refuse.”74
A visit from Luke Myers, who was teaching in Paris that year, seemed to rouse Ted. He read children’s books for ideas and began working on his play The Wound and two Yorkshire stories, “Sunday” and “The Rain Horse.” He also learned, on September 4, that “The Thought-Fox” had beaten more than three thousand other poems to win the 1958 Guinness Poetry Award for the best poem published in England. The award came with £300—enough, Plath wrote Krook, to “see us fed for ten months.”75 T. S. Eliot wrote personally to Hughes, “I have heard that you have won the first prize for the year in the Guinness Poetry Award and am writing to congratulate you. I should also like to tell you, not having had any communication with you before, how delighted I was when I first read the script of The Hawk in the Rain and how happy I am that you should be on our poetry list.”76 The note meant more to Hughes—and to his prospects—than the prize money.
Plath, meanwhile, was still trying to make headway on her Cambridge novel, Falcon Yard, reading the notebooks of Henry James for inspiration. She could not decide whose influence to follow—that of James or D. H. Lawrence. She had decided that Virginia Woolf was not the right model for her after all, telling Lynne Lawner that September that Woolf never “writes more than about tremulous party-dress emotions, except in the odd Mrs. Ramsey.” Even some of Lawrence’s stories, Plath felt, were “pot-boilers.”77 Her strongest influence, in many ways, was working in the room next door.
By late September, Sylvia could bear no more freedom. She wrote to the Smith vocational office asking for suggestions about a part-time job, or anything full-time that “involved newspaper, publishing, or editing work.”78 She also sent her résumé to three Boston temp agencies. She got the first job she interviewed for and started secretarial work in the outpatient psychiatric clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital. The pay was low and the hours longer than she wanted, but the position came “with compensations of fascinating work & no home work.”79 Sylvia had been treated at this hospital after her suicide attempt in 1953, a fact she omitted in her breezy letter to Ellie: “I type fascinating records, meet troubled people who think they are going to give birth to puppies or that they have lived for three centuries or that they will go mad if they leave an ingredient out of a cake.”80 She loved reading the patients’ strange case histories—“as if I had my wish & opened up the souls of the people in Boston & read them deep.” Their fears and anxieties—death, snakes, elevators, loneliness—made her feel less alone, and “paradoxically” her “panic-bird” began to recede.81 Yet Sylvia quit her job at the clinic after only two months and took a part-time job later that spring, three days a week, as a secretary to the head of the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard. Her short story “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,” which she wrote while working at the clinic, suggests that the hospital brought back painful memories.
“Johnny Panic” came easily to Plath in the midst of a writing block. The story is a reworking of an earlier mental hospital piece based on her stay at McLean, “Tongues of Stone,” now told from the perspective of a secretary at the adult outpatient unit at the City Hospital. In the story, widely considered Plath’s most succ
essful, the narrator collects patients’ dreams in her own manuscript—a transgression for which she is punished by shock treatment at the story’s end. “Johnny Panic” contains surrealist touches; the end sequence, when the narrator enters a dungeon-like basement filled with howling mental patients, may be a dream. Yet elements of the final shock treatment scene come straight from Plath’s shock sessions at Valley Head. Doctors are more threatening than patients; shock treatment is an instrument of torture. Plath had found her métier, “queer and quite slangy,” but her subjects—fear, anxiety, depression, mental hospitals—were not decorous.82 The now-classic story would be rejected by Sewanee Review in 1961 by an editor who seemed confused by Plath’s experimental prose. Her narrator, he said, was “too removed” from the “normal world.” The story amounted to “little more than notes,” but could she please tell her husband to send more poems?83 (The story was eventually published in The Atlantic in September 1968.)
Plath’s novel in progress, Falcon Yard, was more traditional. Her notes suggest the direction the book might have taken: “Denise Peregrine: Heroine, kinetic. Voyager, no Penelope. Leonard: Hero. God-man, because spermy, creator. Dionysiac. Pan. How to lead pan into world of toast and nappies? Falcon Yard: Love, bird of prey. Victors and victims. A fable of faithfulness. Risen out of depravity and suffering.”84 She desperately wanted to write celebratory prose about her Cambridge experience and love for Hughes, but she could not seem to sustain a long, exuberant Lawrentian narrative. Work on the novel continued to stall, and her depression deepened.
* * *
—
In mid-December, Sylvia decided to resume her therapy sessions with Dr. Beuscher, who convinced her that Aurelia was the source of her depression. “Better than shock treatment: ‘I give you permission to hate your mother,’ ” Plath wrote in her journal.85 In her notebooks about her sessions with Dr. Beuscher that winter, Sylvia mocked Aurelia for encouraging her to settle down with someone like Dick or Gordon:
a nice little, safe little, sweet little imitation man who’ll give you babies and bread and a secure roof and a green lawn and money money money every month. Compromise. A smart girl can’t have everything she wants. Take second best….
She slept with people, hugged them and kissed them. Turned down the nicest boys whom she would have married like a shot & got older and still didn’t marry anybody. She was too sharp and smart-tongued for any nice man to stand. Oh, she was a cross to bear.86
The dam had broken. There must have been some relief in finding a reason and a target for her depression, and Sylvia began to blame the insidious “demon” voice inside her head on Aurelia: “she doesn’t know she’s a walking vampire”; “I have ulcers, see how I bleed”; “I’d kill her, so I killed myself”; “She’s deadly as a cobra”; “She wants to be me: she wants me to be her”; “You won’t kill him [Hughes] the way you killed my father”; “Her daughter tried to kill herself and had to disgrace her by going to a mental hospital: bad, naughty ungrateful girl.”87 Sylvia wrote in her journal that she loved Aurelia, too, but Dr. Beuscher encouraged her to vent her anger. That December, Plath was reading Freud and was deeply swayed by his ideas regarding childhood trauma as the root of mental maladies. She did not need much prodding from modern psychiatry, which traced mental maladies, from shyness to schizophrenia, back to a “bad mother.” Sylvia believed that Aurelia lived through her accomplishments—and doled out her love through them—but was secretly jealous. Dr. Beuscher encouraged her to believe that her suicide attempt had been “An accusation that her love was defective….I felt I couldn’t write because she would appropriate it….if you don’t love me, love my writing & love me for my writing.”88
Aurelia and Otto did have high expectations for their children, but Sylvia’s accusations were influenced by Dr. Beuscher and the sexist Freudian and “Momist” rhetoric of the time. Dr. Beuscher had become a mother substitute, as Sylvia admitted in her journal, and wielded enormous influence. Plath’s depression may indeed have been exacerbated by the death of her father and her difficult relationship with her mother. But Dr. Beuscher’s strategy, which encouraged rage rather than understanding or forgiveness, was a Pyrrhic victory.89
Hating one’s mother was especially difficult when one secretly agreed with her. Over dinner in Wellesley that fall, Aurelia had told Sylvia that she wished she had been offered a teaching job at Smith. Sylvia bristled and became even more defensive about her unconventional marriage and career aspirations. Yet she shared Aurelia’s ambivalence. Ted, she felt, “is as pathological as I am in his own way: compulsive against society so he envisions ‘getting a job’ as a kind of prison-term….What is so terrible about earning a regular wage?” she wrote in her journal.90 The couple’s bickering continued. Ted told Marcia and Mike Plumer, when they visited that winter, that Sylvia had ripped up his torn socks and never mended his shirts. “So he thought by shaming me, he could manipulate me,” Sylvia wrote in her journal. “My reaction: a greater stubbornness than ever…Both of us must feel partly that the other isn’t filling a conventional role: he isn’t ‘earning bread and butter’ in any reliable way, I’m not ‘sewing on buttons and darning socks’ by the hearthside. He hasn’t even got us a hearth; I haven’t even sewed a button.”91 Incredibly, Plath began to wonder if Mildred Norton had been right after all about “a man supplying direction and a woman the warm emotional power of faith and love”—a bromide she would famously mock in The Bell Jar.92
Sylvia felt that she and Ted were “directionless”—“we belong nowhere”—and she was angry at herself for caring about society’s judgments.93 “Who am I angry at? Myself. No, not yourself. Who is it? It is my mother and all the mothers I have known who have wanted me to be what I have not felt like really being from my heart.”94 Her feelings toward Ted, Aurelia, and her writing all became intertwined: “Now all I need to do is start writing without thinking it’s for mother to get affection from her! How can I do this: where is my purity of motive? Ted won’t need to get out of the house when I’m sure I’m not using his writing to get approval too and sure I’m myself and not him.”95 She again vowed not to show him any more of her work and hinted at the creative marriage’s challenges in a Mademoiselle article in January 1959: “The bonuses of any marriage—shared interests, projects, encouragement and creative criticism—are all intensified. Both of us want to write as much as possible, and we do.”96 Yet Sylvia had also written lovingly about Ted in December when Dr. Beuscher asked her if she had “the guts” to ever admit she had married the wrong man. Plath responded in her journal:
I would. But nothing in me gets scared or worried at this question. I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make something, a poem or thing so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that.97
She had not been “afraid of marrying Ted, because he is flexible, won’t shut me in”—he never expected her to give up her literary aspirations, which he took as seriously as he did his own.98
By late December 1958 Plath had hit on a new subject. In “The Shadow,” a young German American girl’s father is sent to an internment camp during World War II. The story was loosely based on her own experience and that of Gordon’s father, who had been sent to an internment camp in Bismarck, North Dakota. Sylvia wrote to Gordon, who was now married, asking him for details regarding his father’s experience for an “article” she was writing.99 The creative swerve back to childhood may have been prompted by therapy. She was also beset by memories of her experiences with Dick—the traumatic birth scene, his sexual hypocrisy, his “conventional
ism”—and sketched out a story about him on December 28 that would later provide the backbone of The Bell Jar. “The modern woman: demands as much experience as the modern man,” she wrote in her journal.100
She celebrated Christmas 1958 in Wellesley with Ted, Aurelia, and Warren. After caroling around Beacon Hill, the four drank glühwein before the fire at Elmwood Road in what should have been a perfect holiday tableau. Sylvia had always been deeply invested in the aesthetics of Christmas—she loved the brilliant reds, greens, and golds, the carols and ringing bells. Yet, finally surrounded by friends and family, she still felt alone. In England she had authored an ideal life in her letters home. Now her quotidian struggles with career, marriage, and money were on full display. (Aurelia called Sylvia’s Boston apartment “tiny” in her Christmas letter to friends and family that year.) Many of Sylvia’s Wellesley and Smith friends were now mothers who had settled into the conventional suburban life she purported to disdain. She began to worry that she would “go soft” if she isolated herself too much and wished Ted would join a church with her. “If only Ted wanted to do something. Saw a career he’d enjoy. But I wonder: he says ‘get a job’ as if it were a prison sentence. I feel the weight on me. The old misery of money sweeping away….I need a flow of life on the outside, a child, a job, a community I know from the preacher to baker. Not this drift of fairytales.”101 Plath had a healthy vision of what a balanced and integrated adult life ought to look like, and, troublingly, it was not the sort of life Hughes wanted.
* * *
PLATH AND HUGHES’S ARRIVAL in Boston coincided with momentous developments in American poetry. Boston in 1959 was the unlikely epicenter of an aesthetic revolution. Robert Lowell was about to publish Life Studies, Anne Sexton To Bedlam and Part Way Back. Lowell, Sexton, Maxine Kumin, Adrienne Rich, Stanley Kunitz, Elizabeth Hardwick, George Starbuck, Sam Alpert, Richard Wilbur, and John Holmes all lived in or around the city. The Poets’ Theatre was thriving. “Being a ‘poet’ in Boston is not so difficult except that there are hoards [sic] of us living here,” Sexton wrote to the poet Carolyn Kizer in February 1959. “The place is jammed with good writers—it’s very depressing.”102
Red Comet Page 80