Fitting in was still a challenge, Suzette said, in England. “When she wanted to be accepted she went into this gushing mode….She didn’t quite know how to fit into the English village. Where she felt comfortable was with poetry groups, with poetry intellectuals, because she didn’t know how to fit in the dining circles of Primrose Hill.”62 Suzette was thinking of the Steins.
Moving amid these left-leaning intellectuals, Plath was free to criticize America without being blacklisted. Earlier, in the summer of 1960, her first in Chalcot Square, she had produced an extraordinary satirical collage that suggests the ideological position she had adopted. On a photo of President Eisenhower sitting at his desk in the Oval Office, she pasted a woman in a swimsuit lounging provocatively next to a caption that read, “Every man wants his woman on a pedestal.” (The line anticipates “Every woman adores a fascist,” in “Daddy.”) Other elements include a large fighter jet aimed at the woman’s vagina, controlled by two giddy young men in the corner cut from an ad for “Electric Scale-Model Racing,” and, in the right-hand corner, a couple sleeping with masks over their eyes. Plath pasted the word “SLEEP” onto Eisenhower’s lapel and fitted his hand with a deck of cards.63 As the critic Robin Peel has written, “The ‘toys for boys’ message is explicit, as is the somnambulism of America.”64
Plath had created a visual outline of the themes she would tackle in The Bell Jar: America, symbolized by Eisenhower, is an oppressive patriarchy in thrall to the Cold War’s military-industrial complex. Its consumer-citizens are asleep to the dangers its leaders pose, while those who see through the smoke and mirrors (as Esther Greenwood would) are marginalized and ignored. Plath suggests, with her phallic warplane poised to impale the sleeping beauty, that such a society is particularly dangerous for women. “The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way,” Esther Greenwood says in The Bell Jar.65
Had this collage been on the novel’s first cover, The Bell Jar, considered “an unhealthy celebration of death” by some, might have been read in a different way—its author more Beat than beaten down.66 It has survived to give us a deeper sense of the anti-military, anti-patriarchal, and anti-American feelings Plath possessed as she embarked on her novel in 1961. She had originally used the title “Diary of a Suicide,” but then changed it to the more ambiguous The Bell Jar when she wrote the second draft.67 She had encountered the phrase in work by Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Wylie, and in her favorite short story, “The Beast in the Jungle,” by Henry James. Yet it is perhaps no accident that she chose for her title a symbol shaped like an upside-down mushroom cloud.
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THAT MAY, Plath finished her short American poetry anthology for the Critical Quarterly, which encompassed “the Beats” to “the Elegant Academicians.”68 She had included Howard Nemerov, William Stafford, Denise Levertov, Richard Wilbur, George Starbuck, Lucas Myers, Adrienne Rich, W. S. Merwin, Anthony Hecht, Robert Creeley, Anne Sexton, and W. D. Snodgrass. Stafford, Rich, and Merwin had the most poems in the selection; Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke were notable exclusions. Plath’s choices related to her own preoccupations—the American landscape, love, sin, art, childhood, nostalgia—yet few of the poems seem direct influences on her own work. Most of her selections gave a nod to formalism. Though she had tried to include a poem by Gregory Corso, she otherwise ignored the Beats.69 Her picks were, essentially, conservative. The anthology would eventually sell twelve thousand copies—a staggering number for a one-off poetry imprint. The editors, Cox and Dyson, later acknowledged that Plath helped introduce a new generation of university students to American poetry.70
Plath knew that she was catching up with her husband. That summer several poems appeared in major publications, including “You’re” in June’s Harper’s, “On Deck” in the July 22 New Yorker, and “Words for a Nursery” in the August Atlantic, while another eight poems were published in the highbrow London Magazine (including “Zoo Keeper’s Wife” and “Parliament Hill Fields”) and the Critical Quarterly.71 She mentioned to Aurelia that Ted had typed up more than one hundred pages of his play The Calm himself, a significant detail that suggests a new dynamic within the marriage. Plath’s Knopf contract probably boosted her confidence, for Knopf was the most prestigious literary publisher in New York, the American equivalent of Faber and Faber. Her rising stock meant that she may have no longer felt obligated to play the perfect hostess to Hughes’s friends. Leonard Baskin, who stayed for ten days that May while launching a European exhibit of his work, tried her patience.72 The “ghastly arrangement” forced her to move Frieda into the kitchen and cook separate meals for Leonard, who was picky. She said he “used” her like a servant: “about all I saw of him was dirty dishes, unmade beds and piles of dirty shirts and socks which he left for me to do,” she complained to Aurelia.73 Near the end of Leonard’s stay, they all took a day trip to the countryside, at Ted’s suggestion. Sylvia was upset she had been pulled from her writing yet again. Baskin remembered her “glacial, punitive fury”; she refused to speak to him for twenty-four hours.74
Leonard did not understand what had angered Sylvia, and he asked Ted in a late-June letter whether he had been “somehow responsible” for the “cold un-generosity of that day.”75 Hughes explained the understandable source of Plath’s anger: “the main cause” of the “unpleasant” last day, he wrote, “was that Sylvia hadn’t been able to do any work all week in the middle of her first longish work which had been going like gunpowder up to that point, and she was upset at the same time at taking no part in your visit except to cook and so on. So your sharp remarks to her on that Friday hit her with a special irony.”76 The “longish work” was The Bell Jar. Plath was in the middle of writing a classic American novel, yet she was expected to drop everything to be a hostess and maid.
Still, Leonard was one of Ted’s closest friends, and Sylvia knew that amends would have to be made. Almost a year later, in April 1962, she wrote Baskin a heartfelt letter inviting him to their home in Devon. Leonard had asked Ted to write the foreword for his new book of engravings—“an honor,” Sylvia admitted.77
O Leonard I have so many times thought of writing & written in thought: it is incredible what wounds & damages a few silly hours can do. I can only say, not in explanation or apology, but simply in fact, that when you came…I was very much worried at being in the middle of a first novel & living in that tiny hole with no place or time to finish it & having to forgo the art galleries & green breathing space & time to write which is my life blood & makes it possible for me to be domestic & motherly.
She graciously thanked him for serving as a character reference for her Eugene Saxton grant.78
On June 5, Plath recorded a twenty-five-minute BBC Third Programme broadcast of her poems for The Living Poet series, which would air on July 8. Plath was excited by the invitation and felt it was about time. “There is a Living Poet every month,” she told Aurelia, “and I am on the list of Americans among Robert Lowell, Stanley Kunitz and Theodore Roethke, which I find quite an honour.”79 Anthony Thwaite, who invited Plath to perform on The Living Poet series, also felt the broadcast was an important milestone for her, as she was getting “well-known among poetry-reading circles.” Plath had the freedom to write the script, choose her poems and her coreader. She chose Marvin Kane, an expatriate American playwright and actor with whom she and Hughes had crossed paths in London. Thwaite told Plath she should choose poems that rhymed for the show. “And she said, ‘Why, every one of them rhymes!’ And she pointed out that there was this tenuous, very off, off-rhyme in every one of them.” They all had “great structure.” Thwaite was impressed with Plath’s professionalism. “She was always very quick on the up-take…extremely businesslike. She knew what she wanted and there was no show or temperament about it.”80
Before reading “The Disquieting Muses,” “Spinster,” “Parliament Hill Fields,” and “The Stones,” she gave each poem its own concise, poetic introduction. Plath
said that her poems “attempted to re-create definite situations and landscapes” and were “quite emphatically, about the things of this world”: “fear,” “despair and barrenness,” domestic love, and delight in nature. Dark emotions took the guise of “unworldly things such as ghosts or trolls or antique gods.”81 Heeding T. S. Eliot’s call for impersonality, Plath distanced herself from the poems’ speaker, careful to call each of them “a person,” despite the autobiographical details. Yet her decision to explain the poems at all was anathema to the expected New Critical approach to the text. Kane read “Sleep in the Mojave Desert,” “Suicide Off Egg Rock,” “Magi,” “Medallion,” and “You’re.” Both Americans read with British accents.
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Sylvia and Ted desperately needed a break from “babytending” and were relieved when Aurelia visited in June. Sylvia’s letter to Warren captures an intimate moment at Chalcot Square: “Mother is at the moment bathing Frieda, I halfway through making a strawberry chiffon pie & Ted typing a letter to T. S. Eliot.”82 The truth was probably more complicated. Sylvia could pour her heart out to her mother as long as she was far away; now, in person, she distanced herself. She was relieved when a friend of the Merwins took an interest in Aurelia. The woman “filled a gap” Sylvia was “no good at—a sort of chatty solicitous companion.”83 But she needed Aurelia’s help with Frieda if she was to have a holiday. They ate their lunches and suppers together and saw several plays. “We took her to see ‘Ondine,’ ” Sylvia wrote to Warren, “just her thing, all magic & fairytale.”84
On June 28, Sylvia and Ted headed to France to spend two weeks with the Merwins. They arrived in Boulogne and drove down the coast, through Berck-Plage and Rouen, then on to Mont Saint-Michel and Douarnenez in Finisterre. Sylvia swam in the Atlantic, explored rocky points at the western edge of Brittany—the Pointe du Raz, the Pointe du Van—breakfasted on crepes, and ate huge plates of lobster and mussels. She was struck by a statue of Our Lady of the Shipwrecked at the Pointe du Raz; “She is in love with the beautiful formlessness of the sea,” she wrote that September in “Finisterre.” The trip would yield another, longer poem, “Berck-Plage,” in June 1962.
They arrived at the Merwins’ farm in Lacan on July 5. Sylvia spent most of her time happily sunbathing on a geranium-filled terrace and eating Dido’s excellent meals. Dido had insisted that Sylvia rest—“she won’t let me wash a dish,” Sylvia wrote home. The farm had “a superb view, plum trees, country milk, butter & eggs, a billion stars overhead, cow bell’s tinkling all night softly.” After a few days, Sylvia felt “so renewed.”85
Dido remembered the holiday rather differently, and she later complained to Anne Stevenson that, among other things, Sylvia ate too much. Dido probably did not know that Sylvia was pregnant again and in her first trimester—normally a time of increased appetite. She complained, too, that Sylvia acted rudely toward her society friend Margot Pitt-Rivers, the Spanish wife of the anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers and the former duchess of Lerma. Dido claimed that Sylvia would not let Ted out of her sight around Margot and accused her of a “Liaisons Dangereuses phobia.”86 Margot was wealthy, titled, sophisticated, in her forties, and on her second husband—just the sort of woman Sylvia did not trust. She was also a glamorous martyr who had narrowly evaded imprisonment for her role in the Spanish Civil War.87 Bill Merwin had dedicated poems to her. Sylvia mentioned the duchess in a postcard to Aurelia, but also wrote, “I am ready & eager to come home.”88 Ted later told Frances McCullough that Sylvia had “exploded” in one of her “rages” at the Merwins’ farm, “where she wrote The Bell Jar very fast, and got very upset doing it.”89
Plath would write a poem about her time in Lacan, “Stars Over the Dordogne,” which suggests unease with this aristocratic set. As the speaker looks up into the night sky, she feels embarrassed by the “luxury” of stars.
The few I am used to are plain and durable;
I think they would not wish for this dressy backcloth
Or much company, or the mildness of the south.
Plath ends, “I shut my eyes / And drink the small night chill like news of home.” Hughes, too, would rue the holiday. In July he wrote to Daniel and Helga Huws, “I wish we had gone almost anywhere else. I’m sure now that I detest the French, France & everything touched by them.”90 But he apologized to the Merwins later that month. “Since we came back we’ve regretted some things.” He and Sylvia should have come to them “fresh” rather than after the Brittany excursion. “Perhaps we were unlucky with Margot too—things seemed to fall apart somewhat at that point, didn’t they.”91
The couple returned to England on July 14. The next day, Plath read from a selection of contemporary American poetry by Galway Kinnell, Anne Sexton, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, and others on the BBC program Possum Walked Backwards. The program did not feature her own work—a reminder of the shadowy liminal space she now occupied without a strong reputation in America or England.
But that was changing. In June, she had been chosen for the BBC’s Living Poet series. On July 17, Plath and Hughes read their poems at the “Poetry at the Mermaid” Festival at the Mermaid Theatre in London. Hughes was given the more prominent billing—he read twice, first at one with Geoffrey Hill and Clifford Dyment, then again at eight in the evening in a lineup of eight poets that included Plath. (All the poems had been commissioned by Guinness; the best would win “Thirst Prize.”) Hughes read “My Uncle’s Wound” and Plath read “Tulips.” Introducing her, the festival director, the poet John Wain, remarked, “We have such a predominantly masculine week here, a fact that didn’t really strike me until the programming was complete….I’m very glad we have at any rate, one very fine woman poet this evening, Miss Sylvia Plath, as I refer to her by her maiden name before she was Mrs. Ted Hughes.”92 The introduction, like Alvarez’s review of The Colossus, reveals the sexist barriers Plath had to scale to be taken seriously. Yet loud applause welcomed her onto the stage. In the surviving recording, she sounds nervous at first, then settles confidently into her rhythms. Jack Sweeney, in the audience, was deeply impressed. To the Fassetts he wrote, “It was, for me, very moving to hear and see Sylvia as the only woman on the stage that evening and the only American on the stage! She read with great grace and clarity and command and the poem she read is a humdinger.”93 Over dinner that night with Eric Walter White, Sweeney asked Plath to send him her poem’s drafts for Harvard’s Lamont Library. She would send them to him about a month later, saying that she had “specially saved” them out of her weekly draft sheets.94
The other poets who read that night included R. S. Thomas, Michael Hamburger, Thomas Blackburn, and Richard Murphy, who had recently written his first poetry collection, Sailing to an Island, which would be published by Faber and Faber in 1962. Murphy, who was Anglo-Irish and five years older than Plath, joined Sylvia and Ted for lunch after Hughes’s afternoon reading. Ted “made a strong, silent impression” as Richard told stories about his home on the west coast of Ireland, where, from the small fishing village of Cleggan, he ferried passengers to the nearby island of Inishbofin on his traditional Galway hooker.95 To Ted and Sylvia, it seemed that Richard lived a Yeatsian dream life where peace came dropping slow. A friendship took root. Ted later wrote to Daniel Huws, “He’s unexpected—English Public School finish, manners & appearance of a fastidious cleric, but very fresh, & very nice.”96 When their marriage started to fall apart a year later, Sylvia and Ted would turn to Richard, and Ireland, to heal the wound.
The following day, July 18, the couple headed to Yorkshire for a week with Aurelia. Ted returned to his grammar school in Mexborough with Sylvia to deliver a lecture on Speech Day, arranged by his old teacher John Fisher. But the car broke down on the way, and they were late to the proceedings. Though the headmaster introduced Hughes as “the poet of his generation” he was privately upset by his tardiness. Hughes approached the lectern and
said, “I suppose it has taken me thirty years to get here” and admitted that he “had always set his mind against giving an ‘address’ and certainly did not intend to do so to this captive audience.’ ”97 He read his poems, explaining their links to Old Denaby, before sitting down. While the applause, one reporter claimed, was “the longest & loudest ever heard in Mexborough Grammar School,” several members of the school’s senior staff were angry Hughes had not delivered a more traditional speech.98 Fisher, however, was “delighted” with Hughes’s unorthodox style.99 Plath helped smooth things over by “graciously” presenting some of the school prizes and mixing easily with guests at the reception afterward.100 Later that day, they visited the Wholeys at Crookhill.
Aurelia wrote to Warren from Heptonstall sounding very much like her daughter: “I’ve never been happier than I have been since I’ve come to this strange, wild part of England.” Yet she did not seem happy. She mentioned her “cell-sized room (very quaint & I like it!)” and complained how her daughter just “can’t maintain American standards of cleanliness.” Aurelia was impressed with the moorland scenery but disturbed by the less romantic parts of Yorkshire: “The seven-hour drive up here was horrible—we passed through town after town of blackened brick-stone house attached to stone house—not a tree or blade of grass…the ugliest cities in the world, I’m sure, and the robot-like people one saw about made me shudder.” Heptonstall village itself she found “mean and ugly,” and she described Edith and William Hughes’s home condescendingly; like her daughter, she could not resist a jab at the tiny, “jammed” kitchen. But she liked the Hugheses, whom she found “earthy, warm-hearted.” As for English “middle class living,” it had taken her two weeks to “adjust,” but she was beginning to see its strengths. “Our American way of life is efficient, comfortable, but makes us soft,” she wrote. Sylvia cooked most meals, and the group made excursions to the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, Hebden Bridge, and the surrounding moors. The visit tired Aurelia, who told Warren she walked “several miles of steep climbing a day” between Sutcliffe’s Inn and the Beacon, sometimes pushing Frieda’s pram.101
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