Plath’s hospital stay is the subject of one of only a few surviving journal entries after 1959. The entry is darker than what she wrote to Aurelia and suggests that the hospital brought back memories of Valley Head and McLean: “I feel curiously less worried about losing my appendix than being electrocuted.”73 Her details contain more wit and black humor than her letters home (“Snoring: the worst horror of all”); still, after a year of waiting on her husband and child, others were finally waiting on her.74 “I feel more fresh & rested than I have for months,” she wrote in her journal.75
Sylvia meant to be productive, even in the hospital. She enjoyed talking with the other women, whose fortitude made her feel that it was “impossible to indulge in mopes of self-pity, a very good thing.”76 She felt camaraderie with the infirm and filled her notebooks “with impressions & character studies.” She admitted, “I learn a great deal.” Her “pet” was a “suicidal Scorpio secretary”: “All morning talked to Jay Winn across the way about her office & private life & nervous breakdown—cannot congratulate myself too much on this confidence because I blabbed about my own breakdown & mis-applied shock treatment.”77 She tried to “cheer up” a patient in a leg cast, and spent time at the bedside of a woman named Joan from South Devon in a full-body plaster cast who became the inspiration for her poem “In Plaster.”
Sylvia was discharged from the hospital on March 8. Her doctors ordered her not to lift a finger and to “behave ‘like a lady’ ” for two weeks. Ted told her not to worry—he insisted that he enjoyed caring for the baby and doing housework, which he had taken over since the miscarriage. The hospital stay seemed to ease some of the tension in the marriage; Sylvia refers to Ted in many March letters as an angel and a saint. Hughes’s get-well gifts included “a stack” of D. H. Lawrence books (“the only diet I felt like”), a bouquet of yellow primroses, and The Oxford Book of Wildflowers. “I must say that the last 6 months I have felt slapped down each time I lifted my head up & don’t know what I’d have done if Ted hadn’t been more than saintly & the baby adorable & charming,” she told her mother, who had supplied the check that paid for Hughes’s gifts.78 The couple hoped that the removal of her appendix would have a positive effect on her mental and physical health. “That appendix really must have been plaguing her for years—a steady drain of toxins into her system possibly for the last five years,” Ted wrote to Aurelia and Warren. “Anyway now she’s renewed.”79 Sylvia felt resilient, “very close to a self I haven’t been for sometime & full of hope.”80
The flowers, the plaster cast, the patient’s stories, and the presurgical rituals would keep Plath writing for months. In her journal she wrote, “I shall have a story out of this, beginning, ‘Tonight I deserve blue light, I am one of them.’ ”81 The line sounds like something out of “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams” and lends credence to Hughes’s claim that The Bell Jar began to take shape while she was in the hospital. Yet when Plath began a prose sketch of her time at Saint Pancras in her journal, titled “The Inmate,” it had the sound and texture of her somber late poems, like “Sheep in Fog” or “Words”: “Still whole, I interest nobody.” “This is a religious establishment, great cleansings take place. Everybody has a secret. I watch them from my pillows, already exhausted.” The flowers are “sweet-lipped as children. All night they’ve been breathing in the hall dropping their pollens, daffodils, pink & red tulips, the hot purple & red eyed—anemones.”82
Her notes were preparation for “Tulips,” which she wrote on March 18, ten days after leaving the hospital. The poem’s driving force is desire for dissolution:
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anesthetist and my body to the surgeons.
The speaker is content in her inertia: “I have never been so pure.” The smiles of her husband and her children stare out from a photograph like “little smiling hooks,” catching her skin. “I only wanted / To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.” But the vivid, blooming red tulips assault her senses. They “are too red in the first place, they hurt me.” They break through her wish for death-in-life, and remind her of love, beauty, and obligation. Her heart beats, finally, “out of sheer love of me.” Tears stream down her face, and the poem closes with its famous lines: “The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea, / And comes from a country far away as health.” In “Tulips,” restoration defeats oblivion. Three days after her surgery, Plath had written in her journal, “I am myself again: the tough, gossipy curious enchanting entity I have not been for so long.”83
Remarkably, on the same day Plath wrote “Tulips,” she also wrote “In Plaster.” The poem plays with the idea of the double that had fascinated her since her Smith days; here, the saintly white cast duels with the “ugly and hairy” body within. Both poems were long and written in a similar sestet form. Plath realized that she was at the start of a new phase in early March. She wrote in her journal that reading Boris Pasternak’s late poems had unlocked something: “they excited me immensely—the free, lyric line & terse (though sometimes too fey) idiom. I felt: a new start can be made through these. This is the way back to the music. I wept to lose my new tough prosiness.”84 Ted likewise wrote to Aurelia, “Sylvia’s been writing a great pace ever since she’s been out of hospital & has really broken through into something wonderful—one poem about ‘Tulips’…is a tremendous piece. Her poems are in demand more & more.”85 He told Olwyn that “Tulips” was “absolutely inspired…a real torrent.”86 He later told Anne Stevenson that it was Plath’s “first spontaneous poem,” which she wrote “quickly, without recourse to her thesaurus.”87
Those tulips unsettled Hughes, too. On April 12, some weeks after Plath had written “Tulips,” he wrote in his journal, “The red tulips—hearts terrifyingly vivid terrible. Organs pulsing something red and uncontrollable…Tulips the colour of blooded yolks.”88 Aurelia, who had lost her husband and nearly lost her daughter—and who had endured several ulcer-related surgeries—understood the poem intuitively. When “Tulips” appeared in The New Yorker on April 7, 1962, she wrote to Mrs. Prouty: “It recalls to me the times when, after major surgery, I just floated thankfully, yet in clouded consciousness, reluctant to take up the business of full return to living—too weary yet to assume responsibility. Anything that compels one’s return to that awaiting struggle is, at first, a rude intruder—be it a well-meaning friend or, as here, a vase of vibrantly red tulips.”89
25
The Moment of the Fulcrum
London, March–August 1961
The English spring heralded the end of what Sylvia called, in a letter to the Booths, “a manic-depressive winter full of flu, miasmas, near bankruptcy, nights full of teething yowls from our changeling.” Ted chalked it all up to “starry malevolences.”1 The March weather was warm and sunny, “real June days,” Sylvia wrote to Aurelia.2 Sylvia spent hours on a blanket with Frieda on Primrose Hill, just as Aurelia had once taken her to the Arnold Arboretum and laid her out in the sunshine. In late March the news came that Lupercal had won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize, awarded to the best book published in England by a writer under the age of forty-one; a week later, Plath’s “Magi” appeared in the New Statesman. Hughes had earned about $1,500 since January for his BBC work. Sylvia told Aurelia, “they seem eager to take anything he does.”3
Sylvia’s health returned in time for Frieda’s first birthday on April 1.4 Sylvia and Ted began the day for Frieda with a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday,” followed by balloons, books, a “blue fairytale landscape” painting by a local artist,
stacks of new clothes from America, and a homemade cupcake. The balloons scared Frieda at first; she preferred the books, which she immediately pretended to read. Her parents were delighted. “She is mad for books,” Sylvia wrote home, “probably because we read all the time.”5 Frieda had “suddenly become a little girl,” and Sylvia loved brushing her hair and dressing her in fine Polly Flinders frocks from Aurelia.6
In the wake of the Hawthornden Prize announcement, there seemed an endless stream of publicity. Plath and Hughes were slated to record a joint program on April 6 for The London Echo on the BBC, “reading poems & talking about our childhoods. It’s supposed to come out over a lot of networks in America.”7 The BBC hoped to capitalize on the success of Poets in Partnership, which had been rebroadcast twice that winter. (No known recording of The London Echo program survived, if indeed it was ever made.) Alvarez published six new Hughes poems in The Observer on April 16.8 Around the same time, Hughes appeared on BBC television’s Wednesday Magazine to promote his new children’s book, Meet My Folks!9 Sylvia watched the interview at the studio, “very proud,” and reported home that Ted had received another request to appear in a television feature, reading his poems in Yorkshire.10 The handsome poet would have been a magnetic presence on television, but he declined. His decision likely frustrated Sylvia. In November 1960 she had written to Dr. Beuscher about her hope that Ted would get “his face on the screen” when he appeared on John Betjeman’s program. “To Ted’s mother, appearing on television with that best-selling nonpoet Betjemann [sic] would be the height of Ted’s career.”11 Sylvia kept her frustration to herself, exclaiming to Aurelia in late April, “It is so marvelous having married Ted with no money & nothing in print & then having all my best intuitions prove true!”12 She continued to hope for a windfall. By the end of the month, Hughes had nearly finished his five-act play, The Calm, which had been tentatively commissioned by Peter Hall, one of Hughes’s Cambridge contemporaries and, he thought, “the best director in England.”13 Sylvia felt this was their real break—“Oh you wait,” she told Aurelia, “we’ll be wealthy yet.”14 But The Calm was a flop. When it was staged in Boston at the Poets’ Theatre that November, Peter Davison wrote Hughes that he “left the theatre baffled but reflective,” and it received a harsh review in the Harvard student newspaper.15 The script later achieved fame as the scrap paper on which Plath wrote “Daddy.”
Still, Sylvia had reason to hope for a commercial breakthrough, for both enjoyed the privileges that came with membership in literary London’s old boy network. Ted explained the value of their connections to Aurelia: “All the posts of power—or the main ones—in the literary world over here are now filled by people who were my contemporaries at Oxford or Cambridge & many of them vague acquaintances. It’s the first time, I imagine, the very youngest generation has ever had such complete control. They’re all eager to promote their own ‘age-group,’ luckily for us.”16 This group included Alvarez at The Observer; Hall, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company; Brian Cox and Tony Dyson at the Critical Quarterly; Karl Miller at The Spectator and the New Statesman (Miller would found the London Review of Books in 1979); Charles Osborne, assistant editor of The London Magazine, future director of the Arts Council of Great Britain, and the main theater critic for The Daily Telegraph; Edward Lucie-Smith, Peter Redgrove, George MacBeth, Philip Hobsbaum, and others. Plath benefited from this network, but the strongest ties were among men. After her marriage ended, she would try to forge bonds with women writers like Stevie Smith and Doris Lessing, to little avail.
* * *
—
For all her success in Britain, Plath still coveted an American publisher. In late March, she received encouraging news: her Heinemann editor James Michie wrote from New York to say that Knopf was interested in publishing The Colossus.17 She called his letter a “drunken note” and refused to believe him.18 That very week, though, she received a letter from Judith Jones at Knopf offering her a contract. Stanley Kunitz had read her manuscript and advised Knopf to publish the book if Plath would cut the “Poem for a Birthday” sequence, which he thought plagiarized Roethke’s “The Lost Son.” Plath admitted to Jones that several of the poems in the sequence were “too obviously influenced” but asked to keep “Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond,” which she felt “stable and quite formal.” She was “delighted” to cut five other poems from the American edition but told Jones she was “most concerned about the chance of ending the book with ‘The Stones,’ ” a poem of ambiguous, perhaps ironic, rebirth. “The whole experience of being broken and mended, together with the ending ‘Love is the uniform of my bald nurse’ etc., seems to me the way I would like to end the book.” She argued that the cadence of “The Stones” “is nothing like Roethke.”19 This was the poem—or so Hughes had told her—that contained the first echoes of her “real poetic voice.”20
Jones had doubts about keeping “Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond,” but she finally gave in; Plath had persuaded her that it “prepares you for ‘The Stones.’ ” They cut “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” “Metaphors,” “Maudlin,” “Ouija,” and “Two Sisters of Persephone”—which Jones had agreed were “the least successful poems in the book.”21 Jones thought The Colossus would be the best first volume published in America that year. “I cannot remember when I have been as impressed by any collection of a young poet,” she wrote Plath.22 However, its earlier publication in England disqualified Plath from major American poetry contests.23
Plath quickly sent Theodore Roethke the Heinemann edition of The Colossus and offered a bashful apology for falling “too in love” with his work. “I hope you won’t hate me for the last sequence of 7 poems which show me so far under your influence as to be flat out.” She reassured him that she was removing the poems in the American edition, then asked if he would write her a reference for a Guggenheim fellowship “if you think any of these are any good.” She told him she would “rather have you than anybody so I ask you first.”24 (In fact she had already asked Philip Booth.)25 Sylvia’s pivot from alleged plagiarist to humble acolyte was as graceful as it was coy. She possessed a keener sense of how the literary game was played than did her husband; and her efforts were beginning to pay off: she would win a Eugene Saxton fellowship that year, though not the Guggenheim.
Sylvia broke the Knopf news to Aurelia on May Day. “GOOD NEWS GOOD NEWS GOOD NEWS!” she began her letter home. “ALFRED KNOPF will publish THE COLOSSUS in AMERICA!” She hadn’t told anyone except Mrs. Prouty, afraid to “jinx” her chances until she knew it was true.26 Knopf was “THE publisher.” Plath was giddy. “It is like having a second book come out—this one the Ideal. Ever since their first letter came I had a ‘night of inspiration’ and then started writing 7 mornings a week at the Merwins [sic] study and have done better things than ever before.”
The acceptance of her poems by an American publisher was indeed a major breakthrough which inspired her to home in on her novel. She had started working on something longer, she told Ann Davidow-Goodman, in late April. She was “one-third through a novel about a college girl building up for and going through a nervous breakdown.”
I have been wanting to do this for ten years but had a terrible block about Writing a Novel. Then, suddenly, in beginning negotiations with a New York publisher for an American edition of my poems, the dykes broke and I stayed awake all night seized by fearsome excitement, saw how it should be done, started the next day & go every morning to my borrowed study as to an office & belt out more of it. I’ll have to publish it under a pseudonym, if I ever get it accepted, because it’s so chock full of real people I’d be sued to death and all my mother’s friends wouldn’t speak to her because they are all taken off. Anyhow, I have never been so excited about anything. It’s probably godawful, but it’s so funny, and yet serious, it makes me laugh.27
Plath here suggests that she began The Bell Jar sometime between March 30 and April 6, the week that marked the be
ginning of her correspondence with Knopf. Hughes later claimed that she had started the book in late February.28 “She didn’t really talk to me about it. She simply said, she was writing a novel,” he testified in his 1986 deposition in the Bell Jar lawsuit. He “didn’t know until afterwards” what she was writing about.29 In an unpublished poem he wrote during the trial, Hughes remembered,
Morning after morning, you wrote it out
In Bill Merwin’s study—
(While I patrolled the zoo, introducing
All the creatures to Frieda, morning after morning).
You imparted no bulletin, only, “I am
Having a terrific time.” I recoiled from
My notion of your novel—how much more
Uneasy, manipulative prose!
I still dislike it. But now I understand it.
You were changing so fast—your every poem
I heard as a fuller, surer rehearsal
Of your voice—I never thought your novel
Might be producing the whole drama. Hindsight
Fastens on those poems you ventriloquized
In that appendectomy interlude
During your days in hospital, mid-novel.
That poem “In Plaster” epitomized
The moment of the fulcrum—the moment
Between Life & Death as you crossed from Death.
There you are: Prisoner & Jailor,
Perfectly parabled.
And for the first time (not quite the first)
The prisoner speaks the speech
And stays centre-stage
The jailor, no more voice than a straitjacket
Dangling on a tree, never after
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