Ted wrote to Olwyn from Yaddo, “Sylvia has suddenly begun to write in a completely new style—obviously her own at last.”117 The irony is that the style was borrowed from Theodore Roethke’s “The Lost Son.” Hughes later wrote that “the sequence began as a deliberate Roethke pastiche,” yet Plath knew this new note was also hers.118 “The absence of a tightly reasoned and rhythmed logic bothers me. Yet frees me,” she wrote in her journal.119 Though Sylvia would later complain that Yaddo was too monastic—a “nunnery”—this was the first time in her life she was completely free of both academic and domestic obligations. Even during her previous stretches of uninterrupted writing time in Benidorm, Boston, and Cape Cod, she had been responsible for the cooking, shopping, cleaning, dishes, laundry, ironing, mending, typing, bookkeeping, and the myriad other tasks that fell to women in the 1950s. At Yaddo, she was able to separate from Hughes, literally and figuratively. Her new pregnancy, her freedom from domestic chores, and her private studio helped her inhabit a less circumscribed psychological space that enabled her to make daring creative leaps. After Plath’s death, Hughes would write that in “The Stones” he heard, for the first time, the “real” or “reborn” voice of her deep self.120 He later remembered, “Bowed over your desk at Yaddo / Moored in some psychic umbilicus / Writing your Poem for a Birthday. / You thought it was your birthday, / Your rebirth. You wanted to be reborn.”121
As if confirming her new aesthetic direction, James Michie, a young half-Scottish, half-American editor at the British publisher Heinemann, contacted Plath that October expressing admiration for the poems she had recently published in The London Magazine (“In Midas’ Country” and “The Thin People”), where he was a member of the editorial board.122 He asked her to send him her poetry manuscript; a year later, Heinemann would publish The Colossus, the only collection of her poetry Plath ever saw in print.
By November there were only six guests left at Yaddo, all living in West House—Plath, Hughes, Howard Rogovin, May Swenson, Gordon Binkerd, and Arthur Deshaies. Plath wrote “The Burnt-Out Spa” on November 11, and, two days later, “Mushrooms.” But by mid-November her adrenaline subsided, and she wrote nothing new during her last week. “Paralysis again,” she wrote in her journal. “How I waste my days. I feel a terrific blocking and chilling go through me like anesthesia.” She wondered if she would “ever be rid of Johnny Panic.”123 She had barely achieved anything, she felt, in the past ten years. She was convinced that she had written no good story since “Sunday at the Mintons” and felt that she needed more space from Ted. “Dangerous to be so close to Ted day in day out,” she wrote in her journal on November 7. “I have no life separate from his, am likely to become a mere accessory.” They must “Lead separate lives.” She did not “dare open Yeats, Eliot.”124
She was ready to leave Yaddo, tired of the “drifting uncertainty of our lives,” and Saratoga Springs, another college town, reminded her too much of Northampton. She missed Boston, museums, and theaters, but she knew that Ted would stay another year if given the chance. He had met a Chinese composer, Chou Wen-chung, with whom he had begun collaborating on the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The production was to involve a chorus, “Buddhas and Demons and Hells and landscapes of rebirth flashed up onto the screen,” and priests and dancers. (“Pity we never went ahead with our spectacular,” Hughes later wrote a friend, “we’d have pre-empted the Timothy Leary Beatnik expropriation of all that business in the mid-Sixties.”)125 In her journal, Plath wrote that Hughes’s “vocation of writing is so much stronger than mine.”126 Her horror, at twenty-seven, was to find herself “well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.”127 The lesson of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” was never far from her thoughts.
As the end of their Yaddo stay approached, Plath began to feel an “Odd elation,” which she attributed to their upcoming departure for England.128 John Lehmann had accepted “The Daughters of Blossom Street” for The London Magazine, news that made her skip through the grounds like a child (although he had rejected “The Wishing Box” and “The Shadow”). She was particularly pleased by this acceptance, as the magazine’s editorial board included Elizabeth Bowen. Lehmann himself had helped Virginia and Leonard Woolf run the Hogarth Press. Plath was cheered, too, by the publication of “A Winter’s Tale” in the December 12 New Yorker. She hoped the three stories and eleven poems she had written at Yaddo would help make her name in England.129 “My tempo is British,” Plath wrote, and, indeed, British magazines and editors seemed more amenable to her dark wit. She thought that in England she would be less afflicted by her “commercial American superego.”130 She despaired of “breaking” the “drawingroom [sic] inhibitions” in her prose, but in her poems, she knew, “There I have.”131
Still plagued by nightmares of dead babies and “puritannical” [sic] mothers, she mustered her old optimism. “Whenever we are about to move, this stirring and excitement comes, as if the old environment would keep the sludge and inertia of the self, and the bare new self slip shining into a better life.”132 She was moving to England to find this new life—a “pioneer / In the wrong direction,” Hughes later wrote—but her desire for reinvention was American.133 From now on she would live, she wrote, in a “blithe, itchy eager state where the poem itself, the story itself is supreme.”134
Part III
23
The Dread of Recognition
London, 1960
Sylvia Plath crossed the Atlantic for the third and final time, aboard the SS United States, in mid-December 1959.1 The voyage was colder and less pleasant than her previous crossings. The decks were closed for most of the day and she felt “confined” in the narrow cabin at the water line, where rough seas slammed against the hull and broke her sleep. Drunken revelers paraded through the halls, screaming and laughing until dawn. She took sleeping pills, and Dramamine for seasickness. She and Ted dined on lobster Newburg and rare steak, yet the service was so terrible they resolved to “tip no one.”2 (Ted called the ship “the worst boat on the Atlantic.”)3 A photograph from the voyage shows an unsmiling couple dressed formally for dinner—Sylvia in a blue silk, kimono-style blouse, her hair swept back in a bun, Ted in tweed jacket and tie.4 Exhausted and seasick, Sylvia found nothing to catch her interest, not even Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, which “disappointed” her.5 There were no painterly word sketches of sea and wind in her letters. She did not try very hard to mask her despondency and homesickness to Aurelia, who was filled with anxiety about the move.
Ted wrote a cheerful letter to Aurelia at sea, but his parting advice suggested the strains of the previous months. “Look after yourself. As Frost says, ‘Something has to be left to God’—so don’t take every anxiety onto yourself, that’s a form of pride and unfaith. Just relax.”6 Sylvia too advised Aurelia to take sleeping pills, and to “treat” herself to “naps & relaxings, hot milk & honey.”7 Even Edith Hughes, writing to Aurelia from Yorkshire, tried to “extend some comfort” on the eve of the young couple’s departure from America. “I do try not to penetrate, in thought too deep where my children are concerned,” Edith wrote. “One has to form a kind of self protection against distress because as one grows older it doesn’t do any good at all.” She advised Aurelia to “wish them well and pray for them….When you feel overcome just go and make a pot of good black coffee and have a cigarette. I promise to keep you informed how Sylvia looks and little details we like to hear about them. So keep smiling. They love each other you know.”8 Edith’s kind words probably did not reassure Aurelia. In the margin of the letter, she wrote, “Sylvia, 5 months pregnant, leaves for England—to look for a home in London & to get a midwife to ‘take her on’!”
After their first night in London with Daniel and Helga Huws, at 18 Rugby Street, the couple traveled to Yorkshire, where an exhausted Sylvia reported a “black sky all day.” They had planned to travel to Corsica and Rome on the Guggenheim money, but n
ow had second thoughts. “Ted’s as tired of traveling as I am,” she wrote Aurelia before Christmas. As usual, Sylvia criticized Edith’s cooking and housekeeping, and she spoke of the superior meals she would make in her American-style kitchen. But she would overlook these annoyances for a two-week visit. “The main thing is that the family is loving & closeknit.” She was cheered, surprisingly, by Olwyn, who was home from Paris. “I like her a great deal,” Sylvia wrote Aurelia, describing her as “chic,” “a nice ally,” and “much more sophisticated & critical than even I.”9 Yet Olwyn remembered their time together as tense, marked by a feud over an old bathrobe.10
Plath got to work immediately, and spent the next two weeks typing her eighty-six-page poetry manuscript, The Colossus and Other Poems, to send to James Michie at Heinemann. She socialized with Ted’s relatives and played tarot cards with Ted and Olwyn. The stormy weather did not stop the young couple from taking long walks on the moors to escape the crowded quarters at the Beacon. (Sylvia told Aurelia to “reread Ted’s poem Wind, it’s perfect.”) On Christmas Day, Aurelia’s American gifts inspired collective sighs of admiration, though Sylvia’s favorite gift was from Olwyn—a pair of cinnamon colored gloves from Paris that fit her “like a second skin.” Sylvia and Ted prepared the Christmas meal, but even an eight-pound turkey could not dispel Sylvia’s homesickness. “No tree, which I missed,” she wrote Aurelia.11 The next day she wrote her aunt and uncle, “No snow for Christmas, just about a foot of water.”12 There was no central heating at the Beacon and Sylvia complained that she could see her breath if she sat more than “a few feet away from the fireplace.” The raw, damp weather seeped into her bones, and she lashed out at Edith to her aunt Dot. “Mrs. Hughes is a very simple, but nervous woman, who can’t imagine that hospitals in the city are better than drunken country doctors & it will be a relief to get away from her worrying.”13 To Aurelia, though, she admitted that she “must really be a terror of a daughter-in-law,” and acknowledged her own tendency to over-criticize. Edith was “really very warm & good-hearted & if anything, I think, inclined to be a bit frightened of me.”14
A few days after Christmas, Ted and Sylvia walked down to Heptonstall village to buy bread to make French toast. Hughes wrote in his notebook, “The sky clear, a wind beginning, the landscape bright. Not a feeling of the new year, but a definite respite day.” Later, when he and Sylvia went for a country walk, she talked to a young calf and tried to pet it, but Ted thought her new calfskin gloves repelled it. “We waded,” he wrote, “through the ankle deep hoof-churned mud behind that farm & went along toward the piggery. The bare hawthorn on the brim of the hill, over the trough—the clear still water—like ice water—in the trough….We grunted, squealed & addressed them.”15
The couple sounds content, but Hughes’s later Birthday Letters poem “Stubbing Wharfe” hints that he knew of his wife’s unhappiness. The poem recalls a night when they sat inside the Stubbing Wharf pub alongside the canal in Hebden Bridge, amid the “shut-in / Sodden dreariness of the whole valley, / The hopeless old stone trap of it” and “the moorland / Almost closing above us.”16 Hughes’s description is a far cry from Brontë country, as Plath had once described it to her mother. He recalled a somber mood:
You having leapt
Like a thrown dice, flinging off
The sparkle of America, pioneer
In the wrong direction, sat weeping,
Homesick, exhausted, disappointed, pregnant.
Where could we start living? Italy? Spain?
The world was all before us. And around us
The gloomy memorial of a valley,
The fallen-in grave of its history,
A gorge of ruined mills and abandoned chapels,
The fouled nest of the Industrial Revolution
That had flown. The windows glittered black.17
They returned to London in early January 1960 and stayed with Daniel and Helga Huws again for the next two weeks, as they hunted for a suitable flat of their own. Helga’s enormous German meals of bratwurst and sauerkraut made Sylvia feel “at home”; she nearly wept when Helga produced an exquisite gingerbread covered with glazed almonds.18 “I must say all her Germanic-ness, her German talk…& her rigorously clean housekeeping has sustained me through a very difficult period,” she wrote Aurelia.19 Sylvia had spent her wedding night at 18 Rugby Street and was all too familiar with its shortcomings; in a letter to Dr. Beuscher, she called it a “condemned slum.” There was no bathtub, and the only toilet—unfortunate for a woman in her seventh month of pregnancy—was in a “dark, dank” coal-filled cellar.20 She admired the way Helga endured these indignities with “Germanic stoicism.”21 Not to be outdone by a fellow Prussian, Sylvia displayed no discomfort with the primitive conditions. Helga was impressed. The two became close—partly, Daniel thought, because there was “no literary rivalry.” He remembered Sylvia’s exhaustion, but also her forays to London bookshops; one day she came home “full of enthusiasm with a copy of Philip Larkin’s The Less Deceived.”22 The choice surprised him, as Hughes did not care for Larkin. But the flat hunt soon became “very tiring.”23 The couple wanted to live in central London near a park, but the only places they could afford, at about $24 a week, were unfurnished dumps without heat or hot water. It was, Sylvia wrote Lynne Lawner in Rome, a “Dickensianly grim & chilblain-ridden” time.24
Apart from the Huwses, the couple’s only other friends in London were the Merwins, whose tales of subsisting off BBC commissions had helped lure Sylvia and Ted back to England. Bill and Dido Merwin were now living in north London at Saint George’s Terrace in an elegant townhouse that faced the grand, green expanse of Primrose Hill. “They seem to have become our amazingly close friends in no time at all,” Ted wrote to Aurelia and Warren in January.25 Bill, who had written a glowing review of The Hawk in the Rain in The New York Times, felt that Ted was on his way to becoming one of the most important poets in Britain. Sylvia and Ted preferred Bill to Dido, whom Ted described as a “slightly jewish [sic] hyper-charged upper middle class Scorpio of about 45.” Sylvia told Dr. Beuscher Dido was “middle-aged, thrice-married.”26 But when Dido contacted friends about vacancies, they knew they were in her debt. Ted called the Merwins “our saviours.”27
Sylvia made inquiries through Dido about obstetrical care and was told she would not be able to give birth at a hospital, as those beds were “spoken for at least eight months ahead of time.”28 She would have to give birth at home, without anesthesia, with a midwife—though a doctor would swoop in at the end to “catch” the baby. Sylvia assured Aurelia that midwifery was “a respected profession here”: “I shall be all set, & very glad to escape the crowded labor wards & hospital food, etc.”29 Better yet, it was all free. But to Marcia she wrote more candidly that she “shuddered at the word ‘midwife,’ ” and was “sceptical” of natural childbirth, which her American doctor had advised against.30 In her copy of Grantly Dick-Read’s Childbirth Without Fear, Plath marked up the chapters about diet in pregnancy, the pain of labor, fear of childbirth, and mental preparation. One heavily annotated passage suggests her fears: “How many women, therefore, who hear that one in a thousand dies in childbirth, can disregard the fact that they are not likely to be the one?”31 And also: “Depression and disappointment are potent pain intensifiers.”32 Next to Dick-Read’s assertion that “childbirth is not a physical function,” Plath simply wrote “!”33 She wrote Dr. Beuscher, “I don’t have any GrantlyDickRead illusions, but I feel I have made the best arrangements for my own odd psychic setup….Do let me know what you think about this!”34 Aurelia admitted in a letter to a friend that she was not reassured by her daughter’s bright talk.35
Sylvia settled on her obstetrician, the young, Cambridge-educated Dr. Christopher Hindley (referred to her by Dido), and they narrowed their hunt for a flat to his neighborhood near Primrose Hill. After a couple of false leads, Dido “smelt out” a third-flo
or flat in a four-story townhouse at nearby 3 Chalcot Square.36 It was just a two-minute walk from expansive Primrose Hill, with its large fields and walking paths, and beyond, Regent’s Park, where Sylvia had first stayed, at Bedford College, when she arrived in England in 1955. They had found the flat just in time; after six months of peripatetic living, Sylvia had very nearly reached her breaking point. To Olwyn she wrote, “I don’t think either of us has sustained such a prolonged period of crammed exhaustion & despair before—& physical cold, hunger & all the misères.”37 It had all convinced her, she told Marcia, that the English were “the most secretly dirty race on earth.”38
The one-bedroom flat was small but filled with light. Best of all, it overlooked a gated green square that could serve as the baby’s play space come spring. Indeed, the setting was “Ideal,” Sylvia told Aurelia: “like living in a village yet minutes from the center of London.”39 They could hear the animals from the nearby London Zoo. Today the neighborhood is pristine and affluent, as it was in the late nineteenth century, but in 1960 Sylvia described it as “slummy-elegant,” “rapidly up & coming.”40 Hughes called Chalcot Square “decrepit.”41 Their landlord assured them that the neighborhood would soon be another Chelsea. “I think I shall be a very happy exile & have absolutely no desire to return to the land of milk & honey & spindryers,” Sylvia wrote Lynne Lawner.42
In truth, the flat was far from ideal, and Sylvia only planned to stay a year before finding a larger dwelling. The townhouse, which had previously housed Irish laborers, was being renovated. They could not move in until February, and they would have to buy their own appliances and heaters. Still, Hughes knew that they had been lucky to find it, after a week of losing flats to others. And it was “cheap”—“18 dollars a week, not including electricity.”43 The Merwins would lend them furniture until they could purchase their own.
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