Everything has happened.
Plath wrote this poem just a week after “The Moon and the Yew Tree.” The two poems sound very different, yet both speak to isolation, loneliness, and exile.
Plath probably also wrote her short story “Mothers” around this time. The story concerns a young mother, Esther, who lives with a writer-husband in a manor house clearly based on Court Green. She is an American transplant searching for community, but her options are limited. The town rector visits her at home and asks her if she believes in “the efficacy of prayer.” Plath writes, “ ‘Oh yes, yes I do!’ Esther heard herself exclaim, amazed at the tears that so opportunely jumped to her eyes, and meaning only: How I would like to. Later, she wondered if the tears weren’t caused by her vision of the vast, irrevocable gap between her faithless state and the beatitude of belief.”11 The language is very similar to that of Plath’s artful mindscape in “The Moon in the Yew Tree,” while the story itself, which chronicles Esther’s attempt to assimilate, suggests a root for such emotions.
Hughes sensed his wife’s unhappiness. He later wrote in his poem “The Beach” how that autumn Plath “needed the sea.”
England was so filthy! Only the sea
Could scour it. Your ocean salts would scour you.
You wanted to be washed, scoured, sunned.
That “jewel in the head”—your flashing thunderclap miles
Of Nauset surf.
“The Beach” becomes a meditation upon England and America. “England / was so poor!” Plath says in Hughes’s poem. “Were English cars all black—to hide the filth? / Or to stay respectable, like bowlers / And umbrellas?” English art was “depressionist.” Hughes tells her they had “never recovered” from two world wars. They drive to Woolacombe Sands, a wide and expansive beach on the north coast of Devon, but the November afternoon is cold and rainy. “So this was the reverse of dazzling Nauset.” In the poem, Plath refuses to get out of the car. Hughes writes, “You sat behind your mask, inaccessible— / Staring toward the ocean that had failed you.”12
* * *
—
The autumn weather was “crisp and clear,” and the accolades kept coming Hughes’s way.13 In July, Vogue had published an article about Hughes, Louis MacNeice, Thomas Kinsella, and William Empson. (Hughes, looking serious and swarthy, had the largest photo.) He was asked to co-judge the next two years’ Poetry Book Society Selection and learned that Faber and Faber was putting together a dual Selected Poems of him and Thom Gunn. His work would appear in October’s Harper’s Bazaar alongside poems, Plath marveled, by Robert Lowell and Marianne Moore. Likely reflecting on her experience at Mademoiselle, Sylvia wrote Aurelia that the editors at Harper’s Bazaar “are generally very brainy women & the fashion blurbs written by Phi Beta Kappa English majors. Poor things.”14
Yet Hughes’s poetic output was dwindling as his prestige grew. He was recording short programs for the BBC Woman’s Hour in a local station in Plymouth while completing other small assignments for the BBC and The Sunday Times. He had yet to make real money from his plays, as Plath had hoped. They had spent nearly their entire savings—$5,880—on Court Green, and had about $1,200 left. (Thanks to several generous housewarming checks from America, the balance grew to a little over $2,000 by late October.) Ever practical, Sylvia wrote a chummy letter to Peter Davison, who had been corresponding with Hughes, at September’s end. She waxed lyrical about her spacious rooms at Court Green and invited him and Jane to stay as if their last tense meeting had never happened. She enclosed several of Hughes’s poems, including “Wodwo,” “in case you want to publish it in America.”15 Her own career continued to gain momentum as Hughes’s plateaued. Her Heinemann contract for The Bell Jar is dated October 21, 1962, and states that the novel was “finished and submitted.”16 She had finally sold her first story, “My Perfect Place,” to a woman’s magazine, My Weekly, and was back to wondering if short stories were the route to steadier income. Ted encouraged her, and the two of them started collaborating on plots they intended to sell to women’s magazines, just as they had as Cambridge students.
Sylvia’s letters during this period move deftly between talk of potty training, home renovations, New Yorker acceptances, and meetings with James Michie at Heinemann. She was considering a new poetry collection called Tulips & Other Poems and organizing copyright permissions for her “American Poetry Now” Critical Quarterly supplement.17
The Macedos were the first London friends to visit Court Green that fall, after Warren’s visit. Suzette remembered little Frieda grabbing Helder’s hand, saying, “Show you my house!” as they entered Court Green. “It was lovely staying there, and Sylvia was very happy, but also there was an undercurrent that it hadn’t been quite the decision of both of them.” Suzette thought that the house suited Sylvia more than Ted, who seemed “restless…like a trapped animal.”18 “He used to say he hated London, but he didn’t really. He liked London….It was Sylvia who wanted the big house, the children….But it was too big a house. Too cold. When I came back, I thought, ‘Not a good idea.’ ”19
Sylvia did start to miss London. Although she extolled the bucolic virtues of Court Green to acquaintances, to closer friends she expressed her frustration with rural life. “I long to go to London, even for a movie or for a play,” she wrote to Ruth Fainlight less than two weeks after she arrived.20 She told Helga Huws that North Tawton was “ugly,” the yard full of nettles, the plaster “crumbling ominously,” and “a billion birds living in our thatch.” All this when they had “solemnly sworn No Thatches (fear of fire, expense, rain, predatory birds, etc.).”21 When her Knopf editor requested a publicity photograph for the American edition of The Colossus, Plath was embarrassed to admit that she was “so buried in the country” she knew no one with a camera. She understood the importance of the publicity photo from her Mademoiselle days, but hoped that “the public can get by without anything until I again return to civilisation.”22 She thanked Howard Moss at The New Yorker for sending her literary clippings from America. “Buried as we are among Devon hedges and livestock, we don’t get a chance to keep up on these at all.”23 The only newspaper they subscribed to was The Observer.24 They owned a radio and a record player (all of Plath’s records were Classical) but not a television.25
To London friends, Sylvia mocked her neighbors. Mrs. Sibyl Merton Hamilton, who lived across the street at Crispins Cottage, was the “wife of the dead coffee plantation owner & local power….She is old, booming, half-deaf, with a dachshund named Pixie.”26 (She would in fact come to like Mrs. Hamilton, whose sensible British demeanor struck just the right note.) There was also a young mother, Sylvia Crawford, whom Plath thought pleasant but “dumb.” (The vicar, she told Helga Huws, had sent Crawford round “to be my friend.”)27 The midwife seemed suspicious of them “as artists and outlanders” until her son, away at boarding school in London, informed her that Ted Hughes was a famous poet. After that, she treated Sylvia “with surprising warmth.”28
Fireside chats with T. S. Eliot became a distant memory. There were, Sylvia told Helga, “no soul-mates.”29 She expanded on this problem to Marcia: “What I miss most is (I don’t quite know how to put it) ‘college-educated’ mothers. I got to know several nice, bright girls in London whom I miss, but there is nobody like that round here.”30 She put on a brave face: “I don’t require the intimacy of other people to keep me happy.”31 But Sylvia had always flourished in the company of close female friends and foundered when those friendships receded. There were other hints of tension. To Ruth Fainlight she joked that she had one study, while “Ted has 3 or 4 in case he wants a change.” She asked Ruth and Helga to visit her “in the late, grim heart of autumn.”32
Kenneth Davies, the local midwife’s son, was sixteen when the Hughes family moved to North Tawton. He remembered that no one in the town of eleven hundred had any idea who Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were and no inkling of w
ho they would become. Most of the townspeople were farmers, factory workers, or employees of the North Devon Water Board. “There were very few educated people,” he remembered, “and I am pretty certain that none could match the Hugheses’ intellect. Add to that that she was an American, so Sylvia was going to find it difficult.” He noted, “word soon got around that a personality had arrived.”33
Sylvia knew the villagers found her and Ted “quite outlandish,” and she soon realized that if she wanted to fit in she needed to attend the local Anglican church. She found the Irish rector “a little dull simple man,” and his sermons slightly absurd.34 “When he talks of sinfulness, I have to laugh,” she wrote Aurelia. She would always remain a “pagan-Unitarian,” but she wanted to give Frieda a “spiritual” grounding.35 She had envied her mother, growing up Catholic and having “a rich & definite faith to break away from”—this seemed preferable to no religion at all, which might make Frieda feel “curious and outcast.”36 To Aurelia, she wrote, “I know how incredibly powerful the words of that little Christian prayer ‘God is my help in every need’ which you taught us has been at odd moments of my life.”37 She was not simply humoring her mother; on the same day she wrote this letter, she wrote “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” with its sense of loneliness and yearning for communion. Evensong would come closest to fulfilling her spiritual needs, such as they were: “it’s a peaceful little well on Sunday evenings, & I do love the organ, the bellringing & hymn-singing, & muse on the stained-glass windows during the awful sermons.”38 She could see the church windows through the trees from her house.
She and Hughes had about fifty children’s books between them to review, at $50 an article.39 (“My acquisitive soul rejoices,” Plath wrote home.)40 But she was deep in domesticity that fall and seemed most excited about her new Bendix washing machine. She planned to start her birthday week “with a bright white Monday wash.” On her twenty-ninth birthday, Ted presented her with “a lot of fancy cans of octopus & caviar,” two R. S. Thomas poetry books, a wicker basket, and a Parker pen. She also received a letter from Howard Moss at The New Yorker, accepting “Blackberrying.” Aurelia sent a check that would pay for a nice meal in London, where Sylvia, nearly seven months pregnant, traveled that week despite feeling “very ponderous.”41 She spent two nights in early November with the Sillitoes. Ruth Fainlight had written to her about a threatened miscarriage earlier that autumn, and Sylvia offered her support and sympathy: “noone [sic] can ever really identify deeply enough with someone else’s special predicament to make the words ‘I know how you feel’ carry their full weight. But our sad & confusing experience of losing a baby last winter has made me feel much closer to the difficulties & apprehensions of childbearing.”42
In London, Plath attended the Guinness award ceremony at Goldsmith’s Hall, where she read “Insomniac” and collected her seventy-five-pound prize.43 The next day she met with the editor at My Weekly and sold some old poetry manuscripts to Indiana University through the same seller who had bought Ted’s.44 She saw two Edward Albee plays, The American Dream and The Death of Bessie Smith—interesting choices for someone who had recently described herself as an “exile.” It was an exhausting trip for a woman in her third trimester of pregnancy. “London is very tiring when one doesn’t have a place of one’s own, and the getting about a Herculean task,” she wrote Aurelia.45 She was relieved to find Ted and Frieda waiting for her at the station on her return.
Diversions in North Tawton were simpler. Sylvia described the family’s early-morning walks among the “hedgerows a tapestry of oak leaves, holly, fern, blackberry leaves all intertwined, the green hills dotted with sheep and cows, and the pink plaster farms very antique.”46 One fall day they watched a fox hunt. The aesthetics fascinated Sylvia “in spite of our sympathy for foxes”—“red jackets, brass buttons & velvet caps drinking whiskey on horseback…sulphurous dogs.”47 It was another American fantasy of British life, like punting on the Cam, striding across the moors, tripping through Trafalgar Square. She could almost imagine that she was indeed the wife of a country squire with an ancient farmhouse every bit as impressive as Dido Merwin’s. There was occasional snow, but she wished for more. “I miss my crisp white 6 foot American blizzards,” she wrote to Ted’s brother, “we used to have such fun sledging & building igloos. I suppose I’ll be telling Frieda about ‘the old days in the old country’ where everything was just slightly legendary.”48
* * *
WHEN TED AWOKE on November 9, he turned to Sylvia and said, “ ‘I dreamed you had won a $25 prize for your story about Johnny Panic.’ ”49 Sylvia went downstairs to find a letter from the Eugene Saxton foundation telling her she had won a grant for $2,080 to work on The Bell Jar.50 She was ecstatic, and relieved. The foundation had awarded her the exact amount she had requested—enough, she calculated, to pay for a full-time nanny and housekeeper. She had bought herself time to write a second novel. She hadn’t told them that she had already finished and signed a contract for The Bell Jar. “Just between the two of us (and don’t tell anyone),” she wrote Aurelia, “I figured nothing was so sure to stop me writing as a grant to do a specific project that had to be turned in at the end, with quarterly progress reports—so I finished a batch of stuff this last year, tied it up in 4 parcels, & have it ready to report on bit by bit as required.”51
In early November, Hughes finished his play The Wound, which Plath described as “a poetic drama for voices (not acting) about the delusions of a soldier with a wound.”52 He typed it up himself. The New Yorker had taken “Tulips”; “Sleep in the Mojave Desert” appeared in The Observer; her American Poetry Now selection was almost ready for the printer; and “The Perfect Place” (originally titled “The Lucky Stone” and written in the fall of 1960) appeared in the October 28 issue of My Weekly. Plath called the story “very stiff & amateurish,”53 but she hoped it might help her get published in Ladies’ Home Journal, “a much more advanced and professional magazine than any of the women’s weeklies over here.”54 The British magazines were full of recipes, she complained, “for things like Lard & Stale Bread Pie, garnished with Cold Pigs Feet, or Left-Over Pot Roast in Aspic.”55 Indeed, she “rejoiced” at the arrival of two issues of Ladies’ Home Journal from Aurelia that November. “It has a special Americanness which I feel the need to dip into, now I’m in exile.”56
“The Perfect Place” concerns a young Canadian woman, Joanna, whose parents have died in a car accident. Engaged to a fastidious British lawyer named Kenneth, Joanna is on holiday at a British seaside resort planning their upcoming wedding. Joanna knows that she is supposed to feel lucky: “I should be loving this…yet I feel stifled, hemmed in.”57 She has begun to find Kenneth too “exacting,” and his mother insufferable. She tells herself that his “career comes first,” but she can’t quite convince herself. “Why must I feel so rebellious? What’s happening to me?” she wonders. Kenneth would rather work than take a walk on the beach, which Joanna thinks is her “native habitat.” When Joanna realizes that she is falling for a local artist, Simon—who personifies the “rough country”—she finds the courage to call off the engagement to the fey, urbane Kenneth and return her large diamond ring, a “cold emblem of security and affluence.” Joanna’s North American heritage, her love of the sea, her confusion surrounding the life she is supposed to want versus the life she actually wants—all of this brings the story back to Plath herself. Simon is based on Ted, while Kenneth, “a solid, commonsensical object blocking out the view of everything that mattered to her”—is yet another iteration of Dick Norton, who had become Sylvia’s improbable male muse.
She would send the editor at My Weekly, Helena Annan, two more stories in late December 1961—“Shadow Girl” and “A Winter’s Tale.” Both were rejected in early January 1962. “Shadow Girl,” written at Court Green, is set in London and concerns a young woman with a famous publisher father who is exploited by striving male authors. She finally finds love with a documen
tary filmmaker by escaping her father’s shadow. (An interesting detail, given the shadow Otto cast over Sylvia’s own life.) “A Winter’s Tale,” set in Hughes’s Yorkshire, is about a young woman, Kate, whose husband has recently died. She moves from London to a moorland cottage where she can mourn his absence in peace. The story involves a visit to Wuthering Heights with visiting London friends, and her meeting a local young widower who bears more than a passing resemblance to Heathcliff; Kate (whose name suggests Cathy) embarks on a tentative relationship with him at the story’s end.
Plath wrote “A Winter’s Tale” around the same time that she wrote her poem “Wuthering Heights,” in the fall of 1961. Certain words and images appear in both. Set side by side, the two pieces show how constrained Plath was in her stories, and how much more freedom she allowed herself in her poems. The powerful, bleak, imagistic poem and the cloyingly formulaic story seem written by two different authors. As the editor of My Weekly wrote to Plath in January 1962, they wanted stories with “nice, ordinary, recognizable homeliness.”58 Hughes had encouraged Plath to write for this commercial market as a way of “learning how to write about life directly and boldly and full-scale.”59 Yet he also maintained that her best work—and the work that mattered most to her—was her poetry.
In November, Sylvia received an alarming letter from James Michie at Heinemann about “the libel issue” in The Bell Jar. Plath had originally called her main character Victoria Lucas, which was also her pen name. (Sylvia’s friend William Sterling claimed this was the same name she used on her fake ID to get into Rahar’s as an underage Smithie.)60 Michie reminded her that this was not good practice, and she quickly changed the heroine’s name to Esther Greenwood. She admitted to Michie that the “whole first half of the book is based on the Mademoiselle College Board Program for Guest Editors,” but she called nearly all the main characters in the novel “fictitious.” Her arguments were spurious: “Presumably any old Doctor Gordon could sue me for saying he gave a bad shock treatment.”
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