She struggled to be optimistic: “Life begins at 30!” she told Aurelia in late March.40 When the weather improved, she vowed to spend six months outdoors and learn to ride. That March she wrote Dr. Beuscher an upbeat, cheerful letter asking if she could dedicate The Bell Jar to her—it was “serio-comic…fictionalized, but not so much that doing it & coming back to life is due so much to you that you are the only person I could dedicate it to.”41 (Beuscher replied that September, “I would love to have the dedication to RB,” though Plath eventually dedicated the novel to Elizabeth and David Compton.)42 Sylvia wrote of her beautiful “Manor,” the birth of Nicholas, her pride in her land and gardens. The letter contains no hint of the unhappiness she had confessed to other friends. Dr. Beuscher had indeed become a mother figure—and as she did for her real mother, Sylvia was trying to put up a good front.
She had few visitors from outside North Tawton, and so she made a concerted effort to visit her neighbors: Mrs. Hamilton across the street at Crispins; Mrs. Macnamara, with her nineteen-room rectory, Cadbury House; Rose Key, in the Court Green cottages, whose husband, Percy, was suffering from lung cancer; the “humpbacked” Elsie Taylor, and Mr. and Mrs. Watkins, also in the cottages; Dr. Webb and his wife, Joan; Major and Mrs. Billyeald; the old widower Mr. Ellis, with his “fusty” piano; George Tyrer, the local bank manager, and his wife, Marjorie.43 These older, provincial villagers comprised Sylvia’s new social set. Although she made fun of their stodgy décor (“Yes, it was all brown and cream”), she spared them the unkindness she routinely launched at writers.44 Sylvia’s closest Devon friend, Elizabeth Compton Sigmund, remembered that she was “so interested in people. She used to absolutely buttonhole them and say, ‘How does your husband do the bell ringing?’ And, ‘Was he a fireman?’ She wanted to know about people’s lives.”45 Elizabeth’s husband at the time, the writer David Compton, felt that both Sylvia and Ted shared this passion for the quotidian. “They were always so, so aware of the significances of things. Everything in life was large and important…they lived an exhausting intellectual and emotional life because they cared.”46
Sylvia’s midwife, Winifred Davies, became fond of her after Nicholas’s birth and helped her acclimate to village life. Winifred recalled, “North Tawton is rather a conservative place and she used to dress oddly—which put people off to begin with….Sylvia’s appearance—black stockings, long braid down her back—suggested the college girl far more than the mother of two.”47 Winifred’s son Kenneth remembered, too, that “Sylvia was a bit like a fish out of water in the quiet market town of North Tawton. She wanted to fit in and to meet people but there were few of her level of intellect. My mother by virtue of her job knew everybody and was able to make introductions and suggestions.”48 Though Sylvia would complain to Dr. Beuscher later that fall that Winifred was unimaginative and unintellectual, David remembered her as a steady hand during Sylvia and Ted’s 1962 marital crisis. “She was of the village, but she was a larger person, and Sylvia could talk to Winifred. So could we. She was perfectly comfortable with our concerns, was aware that there were other things than North Tawton….In the best sense, she was motherly. Winifred was special. Sylvia was very lucky to have her.”49
Sylvia tried to impress the matrons of North Tawton over tea and sandwiches. These afternoon tête-à-têtes revolved around ailments, distant relatives, home renovations, and upcoming holidays. “Talked of the wallpaper,” she wrote in her journal about an afternoon at the Tyrers’, without a trace of irony.50 She was sounding for story material, yet these encounters filled a real need for female companionship. Sylvia liked being fussed over by these older women. “My very pleasant sense of warmth, hot tea, and being neatly dressed for a change,” she wrote in her journal after tea with Marjorie Tyrer. “Felt refreshed, enlivened, renewed. Very at home.”51 Her efforts speak to her loneliness, and her desire for respectability. Clarissa Roche remembered, “Doctors, nurses, midwives, these words peppered her conversation and letters….they took the place of nonexistent family and friends.”52 When Winifred’s son told his mother that Ted was a famous writer, Sylvia wrote in her journal, “We were ‘placed.’ I felt very pleased.”53
Yet even as Sylvia drank from their steaming pots of tea and ate their herring on toast, she felt a “curious desperate sense of being locked in among these people, a cream, longing toward London, the big world. Why are we here?”54 She later wrote of “the flat malice of people I keep dreaming into friends.”55 She sometimes called them “Jewy.”56 In her short story “Mothers,” she described the village women: “Burdened by their cumbersome woolens and drab hats, they seemed, without exception, gnarled and old.”57 Hughes later wrote, in an early draft of his poem “Error,” “Old women, / Brueghelish, earth-worn, / Stump-warts, you called them, — / Sniffed at your strangeness…”58 To Aurelia, Sylvia wrote of their small kindnesses, but she described them as “provincial” to Ruth Fainlight. “I am very happy with Court Green, my study, the babies, but mad for someone to talk to.”59 She begged Clarissa and Paul Roche to visit before they headed back to America.
“Mothers,” probably written in the autumn of 1961, was the best short story Plath wrote in England. Esther is an American wife and mother married to a poet who lives in a house just like Court Green. She has become friendly with a London transplant, Mrs. Nolan, the pubkeeper’s wife. At first it seems like Esther and Mrs. Nolan, with their sophisticated urban values, will form a natural alliance. “What do you do here?” Mrs. Nolan asks Esther conspiratorially. Esther says she cares for her baby and types her husband’s work. Plath does not reveal whether Esther has any artistic ambition herself, but she suggests that such ambition would be met with skepticism in the village.
Esther and Mrs. Nolan, both newcomers, hope to join the town’s Mothers’ Union, but at a church tea the rector humiliates Mrs. Nolan by announcing that she is a divorcée. Tension builds as Esther’s desire to assimilate into this provincial community threatens to annul the burgeoning friendship. “If Mrs Nolan, an Englishwoman by her looks and accent, and a pubkeeper’s wife as well, felt herself a stranger in Devon after six years, what hope had Esther, an American, of infiltrating that rooted society ever at all?”60 At the story’s end Esther allies herself with a local woman (probably based on Rose Key) who agrees that divorcées should be barred from the Mothers’ Union. The ending conforms to Ladies’ Home Journal ethics, yet read in light of The Bell Jar, Esther seems to betray her own values when she shuns an outsider to fit in. Plath’s use of the name Esther suggests that “Mothers” may have been part of a new novel, a sequel to The Bell Jar based on her life in Devon with Hughes.
Sylvia appreciated her neighbors’ attention, but she balked when they called on her unexpectedly. One morning in February, she was “stunned” when Ted led Mrs. Hamilton up to her study, her “symbolic sanctum.” Fuming silently, Sylvia invited her in. After she left, Sylvia and Ted had a “great Fratch.” Why, Sylvia wondered, could Ted not have turned Mrs. Hamilton away with a polite “She’s working”? She would never have interrupted him while he was working. “My anger at Ted being a man, not at Mrs. H. really,” Sylvia wrote in her journal.61 Three days later there was a more upsetting surprise visit from sixteen-year-old Nicola Tyrer, the daughter of the Tyrers. Sylvia again recorded her fury in her journal: “ ‘I’m not too early?’ Oh no, said Ted. He made her a cup of tea and she stood in the kitchen while I finished my coffee and Frieda her bacon….I kept wanting to get to work. Furious that Ted had invited anyone in. The morning gone….She is shrewd, pushing, absolutely shameless….I must have my mornings in peace.”62
Sylvia and Ted had socialized with the Tyrers that winter, but Sylvia had come to resent Nicola’s interest in her husband. Ted initially assumed the role of Nicola’s mentor (“Ted’s Biblical need to preach,” Sylvia wrote dryly), inviting her to come round to “sample our books.”63 He lent her Orlando—pretentiously, Sylvia thought—while she recommended The Catcher
in the Rye. But the relationship soon morphed into something more charged. Ted wrote Nicola letters about poetry when she returned to her boarding school in Oxford; on vacations, she showed up at Court Green dressed elegantly, her hair perfectly coiffed. Sylvia tried to match her: “I managed a girdle & stockings & heels and felt a new person,” she confided to her journal that February.64 During one visit, when Nicola complained that she wanted to trim her shape, Ted said, “What’s wrong with your shape?”65 Another time, Nicola said that The Seven Samurai bored her, and Ted agreed. But Plath knew that The Seven Samurai was her husband’s favorite film. Sylvia directed her anger at Nicola rather than Ted. “She will of course take anything from him & who doesn’t love to have bright young youth listen to pontificatings.” She vowed vigilance. “I shall be omnipotent—chauffeur, entertainer, hostess, if the occasion arises. A charming ignorance as to any difference between us. Her models: Bridgette Bardot & Lolita. Telling.”66
Nicola had unwittingly arrived at the Hugheses’ doorstep during the most difficult period of their marriage. Winifred remembered that before Nicholas’s birth, Sylvia and Ted had established an orderly and productive writing routine. “Sylvia would work early in the morning while Ted tended Frieda in the garden. Then they would exchange roles. But after Nick’s birth that’s when things began to break up. Sylvia used to interrupt his train of thought with cooking or the children.” Ted “resented the interruption.” Sylvia, meanwhile, felt that “Ted should enjoy the little baby as much as she did.” “My impression is that they both demanded too much of each other,” Winifred said. Sylvia, especially, demanded too much of herself:
Sylvia wanted lots of children, and yet she didn’t want to give up her writing for the children….She wanted to do everything herself, you see….Sylvia wanted to grasp everything, not just know about it….She wanted to ride. And she wanted a cow so she could learn to milk. She wanted bees so she could keep bees. And she wanted her roses-round-the-door Devon cottage….And she wanted her man who would be her man and nobody else’s.67
Sylvia hinted at her frustration to Aurelia: “I long to have a day or two on jaunts with just Ted—we can hardly see each other over the mountains of diapers & demands of babies.”68 The stresses of trying to write and keep house with a new baby were hard to bear alongside visits from a besotted high schooler. Sylvia felt that she, “a scatty mother of almost 30,” could not compete with the “young girl’s complete flowerlike involvement in self, beautifying, opening to advantage.” She wrote in her journal of her desire “to unclutch the sticky loving fingers of babies & treat myself to myself alone for a bit….To purge myself of sour milk, urinous nappies, bits of lint and the loving slovenliness of motherhood.”69 Whenever she heard Nicola’s voice at the door, she “flew down” the stairs. By April, Sylvia began turning Nicola away. One day, when she showed up and asked to read in their garden, Sylvia, “aghast,” made up an excuse: “so, No.” Another time when Nicola stopped by and asked to play with Frieda, Sylvia told her that she had been bitten by a crow. “To give the illusion of sweet loving charm while refusing. A marvelous art I must develop.”70
On April 19, Ted joined the Tyrers for tea, and Nicola accompanied him back to Court Green. Sylvia opened the door to find them “under the bare laburnum like kids back from the date, she posed & coy.”71 Nicola remembered Sylvia standing at the door with Nicholas in her arms, saying, “Oh Nicola, are you seeing Ted home?” in a “steely” voice.72 Nicola asked if she could come inside and listen to Sylvia’s German records, whereupon Sylvia “rushed” inside, got the records, and, as she wrote in her journal, “thrust them into her hands. ‘This way you can study them to your heart’s content all the rest of your vacation.’…For some time I seriously considered smashing our old & ridiculous box victrola with an axe. Then this need passed, & I grew a little wiser.”73 Nicola thought Sylvia’s jealousy absurd—she did not think that Ted had feelings for her—yet she was “euphoric” that Sylvia saw her as a threat, because Ted Hughes, she told Anne Stevenson, was her “adolescent fantasy.”74 Even if the teenager’s solicitous attention did not tempt Hughes, it unquestionably strained the marriage.
There were other strains. David Compton remembered Ted bringing a young woman back from London that spring and putting her up in the guest room at Court Green. Ted explained that they had met at a poetry reading and that she was “simply a fan” who wanted to learn more about his poetry; he had obliged by offering to show her Devon. David and Elizabeth had dinner with Ted, Sylvia, and the young woman—whom David thought in her late teens—at Court Green. “She was so evidently besotted with him…very worshipful. It showed. And Elizabeth and I did say afterwards, ‘You know, I was surprised that Sylvia put up with that!’…But Sylvia did not appear to be noticing.”75 This young woman was not, David insisted, Nicola Tyrer but someone who had accompanied Hughes back on the train and who had no connection to North Tawton. She may have been Siv Arb, the Swedish journalist who arrived after Easter to take photographs, though David’s memory of this woman’s arrival dovetails with specific details in Plath’s calendar: there she noted that Ted went to London alone on April 16 and that the Comptons came over for “tea” the following day.76 Olwyn later told Anne Stevenson she remembered lines from Sylvia’s lost journals from that spring: “We answer the door together. They step over me as though I were a mat, and walk straight into [Ted’s] heart.”77 Later, in a frank letter to Olwyn, Ted admitted, “Something began to happen to me in April or so, & since then this marriage, house, Sylvia etc have seemed just like the dead-end of everything.”78
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PLATH’S STUDY WAS her sanctuary. Her mornings there were “as peaceful as churchgoing—the red plush rug and all, and the feeling that nothing else but writing and thinking is done there, no sleeping, eating or mundane stuff.”79 Poetry published five of her poems in its March issue; “Tulips” appeared in the April 7 New Yorker; and “The Colossus” in the April Encounter.80 The New Statesman sent her a batch of books to review. And she had begun a new novel, she told Aurelia—“something amusing…but may just be happy piddling…I find long things much easier on my nature than poems—not so intensely demanding or depressing if not brought off.”81 Plath had told her Knopf editor Judith Jones that she was working on a novel in February 1962, and the word “novel” also appears in Plath’s 1962 calendar during the week of March 4. (In her surviving 1962 journal, she wrote that Dido Merwin appeared in her novel under the name Camilla.) Aurelia later said this novel was about Sylvia’s life in England with Ted—a continuation of the unfinished “Falcon Yard,” and a sequel to The Bell Jar—but that Sylvia burned the manuscript in summer 1962 after she learned of Ted’s affair with Assia Wevill.
Political anxieties shaped Plath’s work that winter. In her essay “Context”—published in The London Magazine in February 1962—she described her preoccupations as “the incalculable genetic effects of fallout” and “the terrifying, mad, omnipotent marriage of big business and the military in America.” She had been deeply disturbed by Russia’s test explosion of a huge nuclear bomb on October 30, 1961—the biggest explosion to date, which dwarfed all World War II explosions combined. In December 1961 and January 1962, Plath would have read graphic accounts of violence in Algeria in The Observer; a January 13 article in The Times described “stealthy throat-cutting” and “lynching.”82 In “Context,” she wrote of “the tortured Algerians,” “Hiroshima,” and “mass extinction” as contexts for her poems, but claimed that these events influenced her work only in “a sidelong fashion.” Her images—“the moon over a yew tree,” “a child forming itself finger by finger in the dark”—might be “deflections,” but never “an escape.” Poetry was not “political propaganda,” she wrote. “I do not think a ‘headline poetry’ would interest more people any more profoundly than the headlines.”83
Cold War anxieties found expression in a long poetic sequence about childbirth, which she wrote from December
1961 to late January or early February 1962. “All night I have dreamed of destruction, annihilations—/ An assembly-line of cut throats,” she wrote in “Waking in Winter,” the first poem.84 The unpublished sequence, containing sections with variant titles—“Woman as Landscape”/“The Ninth Month”/“Waking in Winter”; “Fever in Winter”/“Fever”/“Fever 103°” (not to be confused with the later Ariel poem of the same name)—features images of annihilation and atrocity that look forward to “Elm” and other Ariel poems.85 The first line of “Fever,” for example, is, “The elm is a clot of burnt nerves, the sky is tin.”86
The “Fever” sequence and “Context” laid the groundwork for Three Women—Plath’s proto-feminist verse play written in March 1962—produced by Douglas Cleverdon and broadcast on the BBC’s Third Programme on August 19.87 Three Women was inspired by a 1958 Ingmar Bergman film, So Close to Life, which is set in a maternity ward and follows the lives of three women: one who has a miscarriage early in her pregnancy; another whose full-term baby dies shortly after delivery; and an unmarried mother who considers giving up her baby.88 Sylvia probably saw Bergman’s film in February or March 1961 after her own miscarriage and hospital stay in London. But she had set off in a different direction that spring, choosing to write The Bell Jar. Now Plath was drawn back to maternity and childbirth, a subject she could mine for dramatic potential as Hughes could not. Plath’s three women differed from Bergman’s: the first is a married mother who has a healthy baby; the second a secretary who has a miscarriage; the third an Oxbridge student who gives up her baby after considering an abortion.
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