Back in London, Sylvia and Ted headed to Devon on July 28. (Aurelia, who was staying in the Merwins’ flat, babysat.) They knew they needed more space, but they could not afford a London home. Ted preferred a rural retreat, and Devon, with its moorland, rivers, and direct train to London, was affordable; Clarissa Roche said Sylvia told her the move “was entirely Ted’s idea.”102 Hughes later claimed that their goal was also eventually to purchase a London flat so that they could have two bases. They had looked at a house in Yorkshire (Lumb Bank, which Hughes eventually purchased after Plath’s death), but it was eight hours by train and, as Ted later explained to Anne Stevenson, “full of my relatives.” The main reason they chose Devon over another rural part of England, though, had to do with their fear of a nuclear accident. “What decided us was that in 1961 the world seemed closer to nuclear war than ever since—and the panic was greater because the threat was really coming up for the first time. Nuclear business preoccupied us a good deal,” Hughes told Stevenson. They had secured a map in 1960 that alerted them to the locations of nuclear waste dumps and illnesses like leukemia. They worried about fallout, and decided that “if we were going to move we might as well be upwind of likely accidents—which brought us to Devon.”103
They had been combing through Devon’s real estate listings since early spring and narrowed the search down to eight homes, but only one enchanted: Court Green, a centuries-old manor house with a thatched roof, nine rooms, a wine cellar, attic, stable-cum-garage, servants’ cottage, and tennis court. The house was surrounded by three walled-in acres of apple and cherry trees, blackberry and raspberry bushes, and large elms. There was even a twelfth-century castle motte, about two meters high, on the grounds. Court Green was in the small rural village of North Tawton, near Dartmoor, on the River Taw, which meant good fishing for Ted. Sylvia was happier about the four-hour express train to London, while Exeter and the coast were just an hour’s drive. She was impressed by Court Green’s former inhabitants, Sir and Lady Arundell. Sir Robert Arundell, governor of Barbados, had grown up in the house, which seemed to Sylvia “as if it had been full of warm fires, and flowers, and happy children.”104
They returned to London at midnight on July 29, “exhausted” but full of enthusiasm for the home.105 They had agreed to pay £3,600 (about $10,000; $88,000 in 2020 dollars) for it.106 Aurelia offered to lend them the entire amount, but Ted refused. She and Edith would eventually lend them £500 each so that they would avoid the “terrible interest rate” of 6½ percent. Despite Aurelia’s generosity, her letter to Warren that week suggests tension. “I wish I could see it,” she wrote wistfully the day after Sylvia returned from Devon, “but Ted and Sylvia are glad (I sense) that the distance makes this impossible right now. They don’t mind your seeing it; but said that I would find flaws that they intend to eradicate by the time I come to visit next summer. (!)” She added that if Warren came to visit he should plan to stay at an inn: “truly you will be happier.”107 Aurelia returned to Boston on August 5.
Sylvia continued to fantasize about a London townhouse, but she also wanted a spacious home where, she had told Owen Leeming, “I can shout to Ted from one end to the other and he won’t be able to hear me.”108 And here was an ancient manor home, a veritable British estate with its own aristocratic lineage. If Court Green seduced Ted with its privacy and orchards, it lured Sylvia with its suggestion of grandeur; indeed, she had often dreamed about living in mansions like Olive Prouty and Sarah-Elizabeth Rodger. Court Green satisfied both her American Dream of home ownership and her American fantasy of British gentry life. Yet the decision to move to Devon—like the marriage itself—was romantic and impulsive; neither Sylvia nor Ted realized how isolated they would become in the deep country.
Ted hoped that Court Green would provide a grounded, earthy respite that would refocus his energies. He had not been producing much poetry over the past year. His “open ticket” at the BBC, as Sylvia described it, meant that he worked mainly on more lucrative plays and children’s programs.109 Ironically, his desire to support himself through writing meant that he had little time for the writing he valued most—poetry. He would write to Thom Gunn after the move about how pleased he was to be free of London and its paralyzing “smog of static.”110 He looked forward to fishing in the River Taw, his “main dream come true,” Sylvia wrote Jack Sweeney in August.111
Frieda was now walking and beginning to talk. She would point to the picture of Isis on the wall and say “I-see,” and sit on her mother’s lap as she typed. The couple still planned to use Ted’s £500 Maugham Award to go to Italy, but by mid-August, on the cusp of their move and expecting a second child in January, they decided to cancel the trip. “We’ve had enough of moving around to last for years,” Sylvia informed Aurelia.112 She had little desire to trot around Italy pregnant, with a toddler in tow. The forfeiture may have increased Ted’s sense, as he later wrote to Olwyn, that he was becoming imprisoned within the marriage.113 Plath was less in need of a writing holiday now that she had finished The Bell Jar. That month, revisiting her journals, she noticed a despondent 1958 passage. “Why don’t I write a novel?” she had written then. Next to it, in pen, she wrote, “I have! August 22, 1961: THE BELL JAR.”114 She likely finished the novel on this day.
Now that Ted was leaving London, he could afford to give himself over to it. During their last weeks in the city, the couple visited the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery. Sylvia wished that they’d taken off more afternoons together to explore. They made arrangements to sublet their flat. Two couples came round, and both wanted it. One was, Sylvia wrote, “a young Canadian poet, the girl a German-Russian whom we identified with.” They had originally promised the flat to the other couple, who had produced a check on the spot. But after reconsidering, they tore up the check and offered the flat to David and Assia Wevill. “The couple are coming to supper this week,” Sylvia wrote Aurelia.115 Ted told Al Alvarez he did not know David but that he had already “met her glancingly.” David showed sixty of his poems to Ted, who sent Alvarez three he thought “first rate” for The Observer.116 Sylvia seemed fascinated by Assia. She told Ruth Fainlight, shortly after meeting the Wevills, about “this marvelous, intriguing woman and this young poet.”117 Suzette was similarly struck by Sylvia’s fascination with Assia, whom she thought “wonderful, beautiful…with a passport on her face.”118 She called Assia “the Wandering Jewess. She’s lived everywhere, done everything; I know her; she’s my alter-ego.”119
The forthcoming Knopf edition of The Colossus distracted Plath from thoughts of leaving London. Filling out the author’s forms gave her a thrill, as did her seventy-five-pound first prize for “Insomniac” at the 1961 Guinness Poetry Competition at the Cheltenham Festival of Art and Literature. Anthony Thwaite had helped judge the prize. When Plath and Hughes had first come to London, he remembered, Plath had been “an obscure figure” associated with Hughes. “One saw odd poems of hers around…good, but nothing great.” With “Insomniac,” however, “I recognized it was a Sylvia Plath poem….She had established a voice after The Colossus.”120
Sylvia hoped that she and Ted would still see their London friends in Devon since they were “on the holiday route to Cornwall,” but claimed once a year was enough. “I shall look forward to the solitude.”121 Ted hoped that the move to a real home might help repair the family breach, and he took the unusual step of asking Olwyn to soften her stance toward Sylvia. “Since you mis-posted your letter to Sylvia at xmas you haven’t directly acknowledged her again, & it would be generous & quite timely for you to do so now. She wonders rather miserably if you ever will. If you didn’t think you had such a monopoly on temperament, we could be perhaps picturing pleasant meetings in Devon.”122 But Olwyn did not visit Court Green until after Sylvia’s death.
26
The Late, Grim Heart of Autumn
Devon, September–December 1961
The Hugheses arrived in the quiet c
ountry village of North Tawton, Devon, on September 1. Court Green was just a short walk from the town center, with its small clock tower, post office, shops, and redbrick town hall. Local footpaths offered stunning views of the surrounding moors. Their home was, and still is, one of the grandest in the village. “But the space! And the orchard! And the garden!” Ted exclaimed to Olwyn.1 The house conferred status on its new owners, whose grandparents had waited tables and cleaned houses. Sylvia joked to Helga Huws that she and Ted were the new “lords of the manor.”2
Sylvia immediately filled the house with flowers from the garden, “great peachy-colored gladiolas, hot red & orange & yellow zinnias.” Frieda loved “tramping through the big rooms” and got so much exercise that she needed two naps a day. Sylvia was thrilled to see her daughter so happy in the fresh country air. She felt calm and content. “My whole spirit has expanded immensely—I don’t have that crowded, harassed feeling I’ve had in all these small spaces I’ve lived in before,” she wrote Aurelia.3
On the ground floor were a dining room, living room, playroom for Frieda, kitchen and laundry, and storage rooms. Upstairs were two large bedrooms, a smaller bedroom, and a bathroom. The third floor was attic space. A cobblestone court surrounded the buildings, while large trees loomed over both sides of the property, which abutted Saint Peter’s Church, its graveyard, and farmers’ fields. Plath and Hughes finally had their own separate studies; his was in the attic, hers on the second floor facing the churchyard, “the best front bedroom.” An Aga coal stove warmed the large kitchen, and hot water came from an immersion heater. The dining room was “the heart-room of the house, with light-green linoleum, light pink walls, and shoulder-high wood paneling.” They ate on the Wevills’ large round dining table, which they were holding for them at Court Green. “The place is like a person: it responds to the slightest touch & looks wonderful immediately,” Sylvia told her mother.4 Ted was delighted by the starlings that “live over our bedroom under the thatch, thump & chirp in the mornings, fly into the cherry tree & whistle at each other.”5
One of the first letters Plath received in Devon was from Howard Moss at The New Yorker, suggesting revision to “The Rival” and rejecting “Stars Over the Dordogne” and “Face Lift.” Moss was confused but intrigued by “The Rival.” Plath explained the poem as “a contrast between two women: the speaker, who is a rather ordinary wife and mother, and her ‘rival’—the woman who is everything she is not—who obsesses her. This woman terrifies the speaker and dominates her thoughts, seeming almost superhuman…and, in the third section, grows impressive and omnipresent as a sort of goddess.”6 Moss would reject the poem in late September. The Rival, with her messages like “carbon monoxide,” was a personification of Plath’s perfection-demanding demon. In Devon, she set about protecting herself with her lares and penates—flowers, painted hearts, bright red curtains. She would not be turned to stone, would not find herself waking, as she wrote in the poem, in a “mausoleum.”
Warren visited in September after a conference in London. Frieda peered at him shyly on the car ride from the train station back to Court Green, where Sylvia plied him with refreshments and homemade banana bread. He described the property enthusiastically to Aurelia, though he remarked that the town was so small he could hardly believe the London train bothered to stop there. Sylvia happily reported that he made “himself useful,” mowing the lawn and chopping wood. He and Ted sanded a large elm plank (which had been meant for a coffin) into her first “real capacious writing table.”7 Together they picked blackberries in the surrounding fields, explored Exeter Cathedral, picnicked over the sea at Tintagel, and ate at the local inn, the Burton Hall Arms. Sylvia and Ted split their days between child-minding and writing as they had in London—she had the mornings, he the afternoons—but she still bore the brunt of the housework. She decided to keep the Arundells’ cleaning lady, Nancy Axworthy, who helped with housework for three hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Nancy, she told Aurelia, was her “best news”; she had always dreamed of hiring help to free her from domestic drudgery. Nancy said Sylvia and Ted always treated her with kindness and decency: Sylvia “was good to work for.” She gave Nancy free rein to do her job and never complained. Ted and Sylvia brought her cups of tea while she cleaned and Sylvia encouraged her to use the Bendix washer for her own laundry. Nancy remembered that Ted “genuinely” shared the childcare duties, even nappy changing. “He did a lot for those children….He did a lot to give her the time to write.”8 Sylvia felt Ted, too, had found the right balance: “I never have known such satisfaction just seeing him revel in this place and leading at last exactly the life he wants.”9
Ensconced in her own manor home with her cherished family, a book of poems, and a novel to her name, Plath too finally had all that she wanted. And yet, the first poem she wrote at Court Green depicted ruin rather than promise. “Wuthering Heights” is a portrait of the abandoned Yorkshire farmhouse, Top Withens, on which Emily Brontë allegedly based Wuthering Heights. Sylvia and Ted had often hiked there over the moors in 1956 when they had blithely identified themselves with Cathy and Heathcliff. Plath’s depiction of Top Withens in 1961, however, is a rueful backward glance. The poem, set on Hughes’s ground, is filled with images of a home—and perhaps a marriage—coming apart: “The horizons ring me like faggots,” the skies “dissolve / Like a series of promises,” “Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.” The old farmhouse deteriorates more with each passing year on the high, lonely moor. The move to Court Green symbolized a new chapter; “Wuthering Heights” was an odd benediction.
More bleak images were to come. “Blackberrying,” finished on September 23, follows a speaker down a dead-end hill “That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space / Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths / Beating and beating at an intractable metal.” “Finisterre,” written six days later, also begins with an image of “the land’s end,” filled with cliffs, rocks, and mists. Between September 29 and October 29, Plath wrote five other poems that cast a baleful note—“Last Words,” “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” “Mirror,” “The Babysitters,” and “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.,” another surreal hospital poem. “The Moon and the Yew Tree” is among her finest. Hughes wrote that he suggested the poem as an exercise one night when she could not sleep. He told her to write about what she saw when she looked out of the window—Saint Peter’s Church, a graveyard, and a large yew tree. The result, he later said, greatly “depressed” him.10
The poem announces itself as a portrait of depression: “This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary,” Plath writes in her most memorable first line. “The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue,” she continues. Lines like “I simply cannot see where there is to get to” and “I have fallen a long way” suggest a terrible despondency. The speaker muses on the nearby church, which offers community and solace. Yet she feels unworthy:
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness—
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
She ponders the saints in the church, “stiff with holiness.” She stands apart. “The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild. / And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence.”
The last poem Plath wrote in 1961 was “The Babysitters,” about her summer with her old friend Marcia Brown (now Marcia Plumer) in Swampscott. “It is ten years, now, since we rowed to Children’s Island,” she begins. She recounts the mansions, the Mayo children, the yacht, the day off at the island. Apart from the very early “Betsy and Sylvia,” which was never published, “The Babysitters” is the only poem Plath ever wrote about friendship. Its nostalgic, intimate tone stands out in an oeuvre full of myth, symbol, dramatic landscapes, and psychic interiors:
&nbs
p; The bold gulls dove as if they owned it all.
We picked up sticks of driftwood and beat them off,
Then stepped down the steep beach shelf and into the water.
We kicked and talked. The thick salt kept us up.
I see us floating there yet, inseparable—two cork dolls.
What keyhole have we slipped through, what door has shut?
The shadows of the grasses inched round like hands of a clock,
And from our opposite continents we wave and call.
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