Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  The only characters that Plath admitted were based on real people were Buddy Willard (“indistinguishable from all the blond, blue-eyed boys who have ever gone to Yale”) and Mrs. Greenwood. “My mother is based on my mother,” Plath wrote in a revealing slip, “but what do I say to defame her? She is a dutiful, hard-working woman whose beastly daughter is ungrateful to her. Even if she were a ‘suing’ mother, which she is of course not, I don’t see what she could sue here.” Plath cited Lowell’s use of McLean in Life Studies and claimed, “All I say about it is laudatory anyhow.” She seemed not to take “the libel issue” seriously. The only concession she made was to change the name of Jane Anderson’s character, “Jane,” to “Joan.” She wrote breezily to Michie, “There are so few people or institutions that I can be said to ‘defame’ in any way, and the few I criticize I certainly don’t think are recognizable.” She asked him to keep a “Hush” about the book being finished, as she needed to keep its completion a secret from the Eugene Saxton foundation until her last installment.61 Michie agreed to stay mum. But he had been right to warn Plath about potential problems ahead. The novel would upend the lives of Dick and Mildred Norton and Aurelia—and Jane Anderson, who would sue the Plath estate for libel in 1982.

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  —

  Winter was fast approaching, and Court Green had no central heating. In December, Sylvia was troubled to find that most of the house was at 40°; portable heaters got it up to “50-55.”62 She bought two more electric Pifco heaters and spent $750 on rugs—an extravagance for two poets with no regular income. But rugs lent softness to a hard life: “it makes an immense difference in our morale. Living on dirtyish bare boards in very cold weather is grim.” She prized the living room Oriental—a wool Wilton, “rich red background & green & white figured border & center medallion.”63 The children would be kept off. She spent much less on furniture: they bought a chair, table, antique mirror, and dresser for under $2 at a local auction. (Sylvia boasted to Aurelia that they had paid just twelve cents for the table.)

  All of this determined nesting may have been a way to ward off other, more nebulous fears. On December 7, the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, Sylvia wrote Aurelia a long letter about nuclear war. She had been “so awfully depressed” by two articles on the subject she had read in The Nation:

  Juggernaut, the Warfare State, about the terrifying marriage of big business and the military in America, and the forces of the John Birch society etc., and another about the repulsive shelter craze for fallout, all very factual & documented & true, that I simply couldn’t sleep for nights & with all the warlike talk in the papers such as Kennedy saying Kruschev [sic] would “have no place to hide,” & the armed forces manuals indoctrinating soldiers about the “inevitable” war with our “implacable foe,” I began to wonder if there was any point in trying to bring up children in such a mad self-destructive world.

  She was glad to be living in England and was disgusted by the commercialism surrounding the sales of fallout shelters in the U.S. “I think the boyscouts [sic] & the American Legion & the rest of those ghastly anti-communist organizations should be forced to sit every Sunday before movies of the victims of Hiroshima, & the generals each to live with a victim.”64 This is the language of The Bell Jar and her Eisenhower collage. She and Ted worried about the poison in the atmosphere and strontium-90 levels in the milk; she was “very gloomy about the bomb news,” though she claimed that she felt safer in the country.65 The political anxiety added to other stresses. She had begun taking sleeping pills, she said, on account of pins and needles in her arms, a pregnancy symptom. And she worried about the upcoming delivery, which would again take place at home.

  Still, Plath and Hughes ended the year with reason for optimism. G. S. Fraser gave Plath’s American Poetry Now supplement a favorable review in The Times Literary Supplement, an endorsement that carried nearly as much weight as Alvarez’s.66 In mid-December, Plath was invited to judge the 1962 Guinness contest at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. The New Yorker accepted “The Moon and the Yew Tree” and “Mirror Talk” (later, “Mirror”) and renewed her contract. She delved excitedly into Frieda Lawrence: The Memoirs and Correspondence, which Knopf had sent to her, and she and Hughes paid off their £600 mortgage at month’s end. Hughes wrote to Theodore Roethke turning down a chance to teach with him at the University of Washington, telling him that they planned to stay in Devon for at least three years before moving.67

  They celebrated a relaxing and festive Christmas, the only one they would ever spend together at Court Green. “It is the first one we ‘made ourselves,’ from start to finish,” Sylvia wrote Aurelia in a happy letter. Frieda’s eyes lit up when she entered the living room, with its beautifully trimmed tree and stacks of presents. Ted had made her a wooden cradle for her baby doll, which Sylvia painted white with red and blue flowers and birds.68 She was determined to continue the Plath family traditions: steaming oatmeal followed by presents, then a mid-afternoon feast of turkey, gravy, stuffing, brussels sprouts, roasted chestnuts, and apple pie. Afterward, they sat by the fire and enjoyed candy, nuts, and fruit from their new neighbors. “I look so forward to our doing this every year,” Sylvia wrote home. “Our house is a perfect ‘Christmas’ house.”69 Next year she planned to have a piano, and play carols, and sing. For now, she was content with her blessings: “The merest dust of snow on everything, china-blue skies, rosy hilltops. New lambs in the fields.”70

  27

  Mothers

  Devon, January–May 1962

  Nicholas Farrar Hughes was born on January 17 at five minutes to midnight in the guest room at Court Green. “I had a lot more work with him than her,” Sylvia wrote home, hinting at the trials of delivering a nine-pound-eleven-ounce baby. Frieda, in comparison, had been a “ladylike” seven pounds, four ounces. “He looked very swarthy to me when he arrived, like a wrinkled, cross old boxer.”1 Ted thought he looked like Otto.

  Her due date, January 12, had passed uneventfully. She felt exhausted and “cowlike” in “layer after layer” of wool; at 170 pounds, four hours on her feet was like “a day’s work in the fields.”2 She rested, baked, and played with Frieda. Then, on the 17th, the contractions began “in earnest” in the late afternoon. Ted called the midwife, Winifred Davies, at eight thirty p.m. when they became regular. The two sat by Sylvia’s bed and “gossiped pleasantly” as she tried to follow their conversation between contractions. She felt more in control of her labor this time, with the help of gas. “Instead of the mindless crawling about and beating my head against the wall as with the worst cramps with Frieda, I felt perfectly in possession of myself, able to do something for myself,” she wrote in her journal.3 But her equanimity collapsed when the gas ran out and the pain grew unbearable near midnight. Winifred worried that the waters had not yet broken and sent for Dr. Webb. Later she told Sylvia it had been an emergency.

  Winifred finally broke the membrane herself, and Sylvia began to bear down. In her journal Sylvia later described the pain as “a black force blotting out my brain and utterly possessing me. A horrible fear it would split me and burst through me, leaving me in bloody shreds….‘It’s too big, too big,’ I heard myself say….I felt panic-stricken—I had nothing to do with it, It [sic] controlled me. ‘I can’t help it,’ I cried.”4 But within a few seconds the baby emerged “in a tidal wave of water…howling lustily.”5

  “Here he is!” I heard Ted say. It was over. I felt the great weight gone in a moment. I felt thin, like air, as if I would float away, and perfectly awake. I lifted my head and looked up. “Did he tear me to bits?” I felt I must be ripped and bloody from all that power breaking out of me. “Not a scratch,” said Nurse D. I couldn’t believe it. I lifted my head and saw my first son, Nicholas Farrar Hughes, blue and glistening on the bed a foot from me, in a pool of wet.6

  Exhausted, Sylvia thought that the baby looked “angry,” his head slightly misshapen during delivery. �
�I felt no surge of love. I wasn’t sure I liked him,” she wrote in her journal.7 She had been expecting a girl and was shocked at first by this swarthy, screaming boy. Ted, too, was shocked. He told Leonard Baskin that the baby had a “terrifying expression of ferocity” and had seemed to him “ugly” in the moments after birth.8

  Nurse Davies washed and swaddled the baby, then handed him gently to his mother. Soon enough, Sylvia was flooded with love. “It felt like Christmas Eve, full of rightness & promise.”9 She was calm and joyful as she watched Frieda hold her brother with Winifred’s help. Even the elm tree outside seemed a portent of blessings. “Beautiful clear dawn & full moon tonight in our huge elm,” she wrote Aurelia.10 Ted was reassured in the morning when the baby’s head had recovered its shape: “Now he’s thriving,” he told the Baskins, “a very calm, steady child.”11 Later, Plath would write of her son’s birth:

  You stuck & would not come.

  The pain grew black & contained me like the mouth of a flower,

  Black, blood-sweet.

  So we fought our first fight.

  It was so quiet.

  You came in spite of it, a rocket

  Sailing, in a wall of water, on to the sheet.

  Head, shoulders, feet, dragging three shrieks

  After you like ripped silk. Blue, irrefutable

  As a totem.12

  Ted helped with Frieda and the washing-up. The bank manager’s wife, Marjorie Tyrer, stopped in with oranges and custard; their neighbor, Rose Key, brought a roast beef dinner. Other neighbors brought baby clothes. Sylvia was touched by their solicitousness, as she barely knew most people in North Tawton. Yet a “10 day misery” followed. Winifred Davies had to leave town to care for her ailing father, and Sylvia’s milk took a week to come in. In her journal she described the crisis: “the baby starving & crying all night, culminating in two nights of 103° milk fever followed, with me at war with the two substitute midwives & Doctor Webb.” Penicillin cured her fever, and her milk finally came in. Winifred returned, and she assisted the doctor with the circumcision—“a trauma for me,” Plath wrote in her journal. Nurse and doctor tried to shield the screaming baby with their bodies while Sylvia, weeping, nearly fainted.13

  Sylvia told Aurelia that Ted had been “a saint” through it all, making her fresh green salads and chicken soup while minding Frieda. She hoped to give him “a 6 week holiday from any babycare” when Aurelia came to visit in the summer.14 She did not question the assumption that such care was largely her responsibility. Court Green’s housekeeper, Nancy Axworthy, was now working extra hours, scrubbing, vacuuming, and ironing, but there was always more for Plath to do. “Even as it is, I have my hands full, with cooking & two little babies—I don’t know what I’d do without her.”15 Frieda, now a rambunctious toddler, needed “watching every minute”: she peeled wallpaper, threw things down the toilet, tore up papers, drew on walls with coal, uprooted flower bulbs, and gorged herself on hidden candy.16 Sylvia wondered how her own mother had ever managed without help when she and Warren were small, and congratulated herself for writing her novel ahead of the Saxton deadlines: “the day is a whirlwind of baths, laundry, meals, feedings & bang it is time for bed.”17 (She told Dr. Beuscher she had written the book “in under 2 months.”)18 Still, Frieda’s high jinks amused her. “Who did that?” Sylvia would ask, pointing to a patch of ripped wallpaper. Frieda would shake her head “chidingly” and say “bad girl.” “Who’s the bad girl?” Sylvia would ask again, barely containing her grin: “& she points to herself and says ‘ME’ and burst into uproarious laughter. She is such a sunshiney thing.”19 She was grateful that Nicholas did not have colic, as Frieda had. He was a calm baby, and Sylvia thought him a “darling.” “I imagine he will have a rather dark handsome craggy face, although now he is soft as a peach.”20

  The unremitting labor of child care and household chores became a familiar refrain in Plath’s letters that winter, as did lack of sleep. When a book publisher asked her for a brief biography she listed her occupation as “Housewife & mother of two small children,” rather than “writer,” above a list of her considerable publications.21 (Most recent was “The Rival” in The Observer on January 21.) Plath was well on her way to becoming one of the foremost poets of her generation, but she would not allow herself to claim that lofty mantle.

  They listened to Hughes’s The Wound on their new radio on February 1; “In Plaster” and “Context” appeared in The London Magazine, and “Sleep in the Mojave Desert” in Harper’s, that month. The proofs for the American edition of The Colossus arrived on February 2. Plath made just three small corrections. The book would be published on May 14, 1962, “in time for your birthday,” she wrote Aurelia. “I have got awfully homesick for you since the last baby—and for the Cape & deep snow & such American things. Can’t wait for your visit.”22 She had just one request: new bras and underwear from Filene’s in Boston. Her old ones had fallen apart, and she could not bear the thought of shopping for undergarments in Exeter. “If this is too extravagant, don’t bother,” she wrote her mother. “I’m slightly dazed & have no notion of common sense at the moment.”23

  An underwear purchase was hardly extravagant against the background of a life lived at full tilt. Against all odds, Sylvia and Warren had switched filial roles: she had left home to marry in secret, while he had spent every weekend with Aurelia for the past eighteen months. He, not she, had involved Aurelia closely in his wedding preparations even as he was finishing up his PhD at Harvard.24 Sylvia had done nothing wrong by leaving America and marrying a foreigner, yet Aurelia could never shake the feeling that something was wrong. She had seen her daughter’s limp body crouched in a basement crawl space, and she worried constantly about a recurrence. And so Aurelia sent the bras and panties, along with sweaters, dresses, and gift cards to posh London toy stores. Sylvia sometimes resented the gifts even as she showed them off to neighbors. The largesse represented another form of obligation, while the gifts could embarrass her. “Honestly, you must go slow, mother!” Sylvia wrote to her in early March. “You have been so generous with things for Frieda and Nicholas I am concerned about your budgeting!”25 A Devon friend, David Compton, remembered Sylvia making fun of her shining Bendix washing machine: “Aurelia organized delivery of the biggest, grandest Bendix you’d ever seen in all the world. Elizabeth and I were taken in—to show it to us, you’d think, proudly—but basically to show how awful Aurelia was, how American and overdone. Poor Aurelia couldn’t get it right.” Sylvia, he said, “found it necessary to apologize for her mother….‘Oh that’s terribly Aurelian.’ ” He said Sylvia spoke of her mother with the superior air of an educated English person mocking a vulgar, rich American.26 She would read Aurelia’s letters out loud to the Comptons, saying, “Oh you must see what my mother says here. Oh, my God!”27 Yet to Aurelia, Sylvia waxed lyrical about her Bendix. Her letters from Devon are full of reassurances and homely asides that seem calculated to distract her mother from her life’s radical decisions. “How I envy girls whose mothers can just drop in on them,” she wrote Aurelia in early February.28

  Such sentiments were not outright lies, despite the way Sylvia mocked Aurelia to her British friends. She was attached to Aurelia and was still her mother’s daughter—appearance, respectability, and good manners mattered. Her thank-you notes to the Wellesley neighbors she would mock in The Bell Jar were prompt and decorous. “Ted joins me in sending best wishes and in admiring the lovely blanket and potholders,” she wrote to a family friend in early February after a full paragraph extolling the gifts’ virtues.29 Ted wrote many gracious, good-humored letters to Aurelia that bear no trace of the hatred he later told Olwyn he bore her. The Cruickshanks and the Aldriches and the Freemans all received pleasant updates after Nicholas’s birth. Sylvia delighted most of all in news of the Nortons and asked Aurelia to keep her informed. “I was fascinated to hear about Dick Norton’s starting a practise—
how perfectly Dickensian! I would love to know details about David. Why does he find his parents difficult??? How is it Perry didn’t save any money? O I love hearing all these bits of personal detail about the people I used to know. New people are never as interesting as the ones one grew up with.”30

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  FOR SYLVIA, the gray, rain-clogged winter was “a grubby time with little children, indoor washing, and no snow to play in.”31 But by mid-February, snowdrops began to appear along with “a scattering of primroses & countless daffodil sprouts.”32 She fantasized about lying in the apple orchard all day with her children once the trees were in bloom. For the first time since her Wellesley years, she was gardening again; she filled her letters with excited talk of buds and sprouts. “I find being outdoors gardening an immense relaxation,” she wrote Aurelia in late February.33 “I think I will go just wild when our trees start blooming—there are fat buds on the lilac. I think the most exciting thing to me is owning flowers and trees!”34 Ted had planted plum, pear, peach, and nut trees, while Sylvia and Frieda prepared the flower beds. They had been taking the vitamin C pills Aurelia had sent all winter, and, “miraculously,” none of them had caught a cold.35

  But it was a false spring. Winter dragged on stubbornly through March, and Sylvia became disconsolate. Letters home alighted on a familiar theme. “I miss the American snow, which at least makes a new clean exciting season out of winter, instead of this 6 months cooping-up of damp & rain & blackness we get here. Like the 6 months Persephone had to spend with Pluto.”36 Court Green was still very cold; the temperature was at freezing in the “drafty halls,” and the east wind blew the heavy back door wide open. The skies remained “grey tombstone.”37 That March, Sylvia told Marion Freeman, was reputed to be the coldest in seventy years. The whole family slept in Nicholas’s room, the warmest in the house. In the evenings, they huddled around the fire. Sylvia suffered chilblains, a skin condition caused by prolonged exposure to cold. To Clarissa Roche, she wrote, “the word Chilblains undid me….I got very grim.”38 She had always thought it “a Dickensian disease” and felt “morbid” about living in Victorian conditions when central heating was ubiquitous in America.39 She was determined to make the house warmer, and drew up plans to lay a stone foundation. “Wuthering Heights” appeared in the New Statesman in mid-March; the poem reflected her mood that spring.