Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  Sylvia wrote to Dr. Beuscher in July that just when she thought she had “stepped into” her dream life, something changed. Ted began to “leap up” in the morning to get the mail.

  He began to talk, utterly unlike him, of how he could write & direct film scripts, how he was going to win the Nobel Prize, how he had been asleep all the time we were married, recoiling, as the French say, so he could jump the better. How he wanted to experience everybody & everything, there was a monster in him, a dictator….He would come out with these things after spurts of lovemaking as in our honeymoon days, asking me like a technician, did I like this, did I like that. Then round on me for holding hands & being jealous of other women.

  I just felt sick, as if I were the practice board for somebody else.

  When she told Ted that she intended to start a second novel, adding, “laughingly,” that she needed six weeks of peace and happiness, he “flew” at her, saying, “Why should I limit myself by your happiness or unhappiness?”105

  Hughes’s outbursts and actions suggest that he was, as he hinted to his brother, seeking his own rebirth. He wrote about freedom and morality in his journal that June: “How free?” “What are the elements of wholeness?” “Since life must be lived in bondage, can it be, by choice & discipline & cultivation, a bondage to joy?”106 On June 14 he recorded the outlines of a dream: “after some lively time in Paris, with attractive girls, back here. Postman comes. I run down, receive from him a note & take it into front room. On it is written the address, in Paris, of the most attractive of the girls—and ‘there is a room for you here if you still want it.’ ”107

  29

  I Feel All I Feel

  Devon and London, June–August 1962

  “*MOTHER ARRIVES*,” Sylvia wrote in her calendar on June 21. Starred entries were happy ones, though Sylvia confided to Elizabeth Compton that she had mixed feelings about Aurelia’s visit. She was excited to see her mother, but the visit came in the midst of a marital crisis. While she looked forward to the “free mother’s help, babysitter & part-time cook all of which I am desperate for,” she would have to contain her emotions.1

  Aurelia’s arrival was inauspicious. She did not know that she needed to open the train door herself when it arrived at the station, as train doors opened automatically in America. By the time she managed to open the door, the train had begun moving and she turned her ankle as she jumped onto the platform with her luggage. Sylvia instantly blamed herself. The swelling went down that evening, but the accident cast a pall over Aurelia’s arrival. While she thought North Tawton “plain,” she surveyed her daughter’s ancient manor home approvingly. “Here our land begins,” Sylvia said proudly as they approached Court Green. Sylvia had “wanted everything perfect” for her mother’s visit, Winifred Davies remembered. “She wanted to make that house rather like the picturebook Devon cottage with roses round the door….And of course she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t get the roses round the door.”2 Such trellises took more than one season to grow. Instead, Sylvia had placed a hand-drawn “Welcome Home” sign in the guest room, along with a blue and black Liberty silk scarf—the last gift she would ever give her mother.

  To Warren, Aurelia described her first week at Court Green as her “happiest in many, many years.”3 Frieda wandered into Aurelia’s room each morning to play, and Aurelia enjoyed helping Sylvia with the house and garden. Plath described an idyllic scene to the Kanes: “We are writing again, both of us, and she gets on beautifully with the babies, minds them, bakes cookies. O it is lovely.”4

  Aurelia’s help gave Sylvia more time to write, but it also gave Ted the freedom to pursue Assia in London. On June 26, Ted and Sylvia went up to London together to record for the BBC and have lunch with Douglas Cleverdon. That day Ted left the BBC studio for Assia’s advertising agency in Mayfair. “She got a fright when she heard that Mr. Hughes was downstairs,” Suzette recalled. Assia told her secretary to tell Ted she was in a meeting. Soon after, Assia called Suzette and announced, “Pub. 1:00.” They met at the pub halfway between their offices, and Assia gave Suzette a “very dramatized, Assia-like account of this enormous current.” Assia did not mention a kiss at Court Green, but she showed Suzette a note. “It said, ‘I must see you in spite of all marriages.’ ” Ted had left it for her at the advertising agency when she did not appear. “He definitely wants to see me. What am I going to do?” she asked Suzette.5 Assia told Suzette she was going to send him a flower or a leaf, with no note. According to Nathaniel Tarn, Assia showed Ted’s note to David to make him “react.” David was unconcerned and remained “v. sweet & loving.” Yet David later hinted to Nathaniel that he knew about his wife’s burgeoning affair with Ted Hughes. (Assia “gagged” when Nathaniel told her.)6 Ted was the senior poet, and had the ear of Faber and Faber, the publisher David hoped to land. He would have to tread carefully.

  One June afternoon when Assia was sitting in London’s Grosvenor Square with her colleague William Trevor, she told him about the May weekend at Court Green. She said she had been making a salad in the kitchen when Ted Hughes wandered in, “how they’d talked, and how she’d been attracted to him.” There was no mention of a kiss. She had thought Plath “A brisk, hard, magazine-editor kind of American”—“an assessment considerably at odds with the opinions of those who knew Sylvia Plath well,” Trevor pointed out.7 Assia reached down with her manicured fingers and picked up a blade of freshly mowed grass. “I think I’ll send him this,” she said. “Just by itself.” Trevor asked her if this was a good idea. “Not really,” she replied. He remembered her addressing the envelope and dropping the blade of grass into it, an attempt, he thought, to “enter the charmed circle by playing with fire for the sake of it.”8

  Assia told Trevor that within three days she received a reply from Court Green: “beside the scrap of London grass lay one from Devon.”9 Trevor was never sure if this part of the story was true, though Hughes later wrote about it in a poem, “Chlorophyll”: “She sent him a blade of grass, / but no word.”10 If Sylvia suspected that Ted had been to see Assia, she did not let on. She was cheerful during a June 28 lunch with the Comptons at Court Green, just two days after Ted had left his note for Assia. Elizabeth had no idea anything was wrong.11

  * * *

  —

  Sylvia visited Percy Key one last time on his deathbed, and found him, as Ted put it, “a bag of bones.”12 “I was very sick at this and had a bad migraine over my left eye for the rest of the day,” Sylvia wrote in her journal. “The end, even of so marginal a man, a horror.”13 Percy died on June 25. Three days later, Sylvia and Ted attended his funeral—Sylvia’s first. The funeral offered a surprising respite from marital troubles; she felt the “awful” urge to grin throughout. “A relief; this is the hostage for death, we are safe for the time-being.” They stood as Percy’s coffin was brought to the cemetery by cart. “Heard priest meeting corpse at gate,” Sylvia wrote in her journal, “incantating, coming close. Hair-raising.” She felt an urge to throw dirt into the grave, but stopped herself—she did not want to hurry Percy “into oblivion.” As she and Ted walked away, she felt an “unfinished feeling. Is he to be left up there uncovered, all alone? Walked home over the back hill, gathering immense stalks of fuchsia foxgloves and swinging our jackets in the heat.”14

  Details of Percy Key’s funeral would find their way into Plath’s art. “I have written a long poem, ‘Berck-Plage’ about it,” she wrote in her journal. “Very moved. Several terrible glimpses.”15 The seven-part poem in unrhyming couplets, completed on June 30—the same day as Percy’s funeral—merges imagery from the funeral with memories of the French seaside town Plath and Hughes had visited in 1961 on their way to the Merwins’ farm. Anne Stevenson has perceptively suggested that the poem is full of images Plath associated with her father: “the sea, the maimed man, the black boot, the crutches, the dying man and mourning wife, the corpse, the burial.” She argues that Plath wrote �
�Berck-Plage” to “create,” or re-create, her own father’s funeral, which she had not attended.16 Indeed, in the final section of the poem, Plath imagines a group of children “barred” from the funeral, turning “wordless and slow” from their play:

  Their eyes opening

  On a wonderful thing—

  Six round black hats in the grass and a lozenge of wood,

  And a naked mouth, red and awkward.

  For a minute the sky pours into the hole like plasma.

  There is no hope, it is given up.

  The associations in “Berck-Plage” are deeply private. Sylvia may indeed have been exorcising her own ghosts, trying to reinvent the end of Otto’s story. Where “Elm” took eight days and fifteen drafts, the much longer “Berck-Plage” came quickly. In earlier drafts, Plath included a more hopeful section about the birth of her son. But she cut it from the final version.17 By the poem’s end, the “wonderful thing,” the transubstantiation from flesh to soul, is impossible. The sky balks; the children turn away.

  Sylvia’s ability to finish “Berck-Plage,” one of her longest poems, in three days suggests that she had set her worries about Ted and Assia aside. But Assia’s envelope with its blade of grass, mailed sometime after June 26, likely arrived around the time of the funeral. Ted’s sudden desire to intercept the morning mail, along with his other “queer” behavior, may have roused her suspicions.18 Sylvia herself may have intercepted the letter with the blade of grass; after July 1, references to Assia’s tapestry disappear from her calendar. On July 1 she wrote “novel” in her to-do list. This was probably not the celebratory sequel to The Bell Jar set in Cambridge, Boston, and Devon and based on her life with Ted—which she discussed with Aurelia during her visit—but the beginnings of a new, third novel about marital betrayal. There was also a dramatic shift in the tone and subject matter of Plath’s poems after July 1. Her May poems “Event” and “The Rabbit Catcher” describe a couple in crisis, but no blame is apportioned. Her July 2 poem, “The Other,” clearly implicates Assia. Ted himself suggested a dramatic domestic shift when he wrote to his brother Gerald on July 2 that he was gathering himself “for a new putsch….It’s a good thing every ten years or so to smash your life to bits—whatever’s alive in it will survive and you’re well rid of the rest.”19

  Sylvia had a horror of “barren” women, and now one had seduced her husband; Assia’s barrenness would become part of her mythology. In 1970, Winifred recalled, “Sylvia told me once that Assia was making a set at Ted because she wanted children. Her own husband couldn’t give her any children. And that she wanted to take the children.”20 It is unlikely that Assia was attracted to Ted because she wanted to “take” his children. Nevertheless, Sylvia became fixated on Assia’s history of abortion, which she may have heard about from Suzette or Ted himself. The first draft of “The Other”—written on the back page of her earlier “The Rival”—sets up a comparison between the fertile Sylvia and the barren Assia: “I am thick with babies, ribboned with milk. / You carry seven small corpses in a handbag.”21 These lines, which judge a rival severely for her abortions, complicate Plath’s status as a feminist icon. Later drafts mention a woman in “silk” with “shoe-black hair”—clearly a reference to Assia. But Sylvia also suspected that Ted was attracted to Assia precisely because she had no children. “And now you are inserting yourself like glass / Between me & him,” she writes in another draft of “The Other.” Lines from earlier drafts of this poem suggest a marriage in turmoil: “Deranging my nerves, my nerves.” “And you say you have feelings.” “Mornings there is a pallor he cannot shake off.”22

  On July 6, Sylvia and Ted helped Elizabeth celebrate her thirty-fourth birthday. Sylvia brought a homemade cake with thirty-five candles. “ ‘One to grow on,’ she said,” Elizabeth remembered. “She was chatting and laughing and saying ‘I have swallows come and steal my thatch and put it in their nest.’ ”23 She charmed the other couple at the party and playfully chastised Elizabeth for asking whether she had made the cake from scratch or from a packet. (“What? A packet cake? Do you really think I would? I beat those whites for a quarter of an hour. I timed it.”)24 But Elizabeth remembered Ted as “quiet and sullen.”25 Elizabeth and David still had no idea the couple was having problems. Back at Court Green, Aurelia had “felt tension and had shuddered under the oppressive silences during the past week,” she wrote in her travel diary, but Sylvia had also, at times, seemed “almost hysterically gay.”26

  On July 9, Sylvia was relaxed and calm as she drove Aurelia to Exeter for a day of shopping. “I have everything in the world I ever dreamed and longed for—my husband, my babies, my writing,” she told her mother. They had wine with their lunch at the Clarence Hotel and returned to Court Green in “high spirits.”27

  Then the phone rang. Sylvia wrote to Dr. Beuscher on July 11, “I picked up the phone & a nasty man’s voice asked if Ted could take a call from London. Ted always wants me to find out who it is, so I asked, & the man said he was sorry, the person didn’t want to say. I felt thick with my own dumbness & called Ted. It was a woman, saying ‘Can I see you?’ He said she didn’t say her name & he had no idea who it was. I was pretty sure who it was.” Assia Wevill. “She is very destructive—had so many abortions when she was young she only miscarries now, wants to die before she gets old, tried to kill her first husband with a knife.” Sylvia claimed in this letter that Assia had been “calling for a while, for no apparent reason, seeming almost speechless when she got me.” When Sylvia went to clean Ted’s study, as she usually did, she found “empty envelopes in her hand lying around, dated during all the time he’d been leaping up for mail.”

  Ted said “No,” she couldn’t see him, over the phone. But I was standing there, stunned. Then the next day, after a night of no sleep & horrid talk (me asking him for god’s sake to say who it was so it would stop being Everybody), he took the train to London for a “holiday.” He assured me, in a flash of his old self, that me & the children were what he really loved & would come back to & he was not going to London to lie about & had not touched another woman since we were married. I have discontinued the phone, for I can’t stand waiting, every minute, to hear that girl breathing at the end of it, my voice at her fingertips, my life & happiness on her plate.28

  Aurelia provided the only other eyewitness account: “Sylvia went to it, put the receiver to her ear and the few seconds silence led me to look over at her. Her face was ashen and she called shrilly, ‘Ted!’ He must have been just at the top of the stairs, probably expecting that call, for he fairly fell down in his haste to get to the phone. Sylvia dashed upstairs. From this moment on, the whole atmosphere within Court Green changed.”29 Sylvia later pulled the phone cord out of the wall. The phone would not be in working order again until November. Ted’s friend, the critic Keith Sagar, thought Assia knew what she was doing. “Telephone calls—he’d never pick up the telephone.” It was, he thought, a “ruthless tactic.”30 Elizabeth agreed. “That wasn’t a way of contacting Ted, that was a way of destabilizing Sylvia.”31 Sylvia also told Suzette that Assia would often call pretending to be a man; Suzette said Assia’s voice was naturally very deep, though “she was perfectly capable of being very devious.”32

  After Ted hung up the phone, he went upstairs to join Sylvia in their bedroom. They talked while Aurelia watched the babies. Sylvia told Suzette that when she confronted Ted, “He denied everything….She ranted, she screamed, she pulled the phone from the wall. She told him to get the hell out. He got the hell out.”33 Suzette’s memory dovetails with Sylvia’s own description in her letter to Dr. Beuscher. Aurelia later recalled the scene with bitterness. “I had him [Nicholas] all day in my arms and I was going to leave—I wasn’t going to stay in that house. I wanted them to fight it out or do whatever they wanted to do. I wanted to get off the scene and be away from the whole thing and I wanted very much to go home.” Nicholas was “screaming and
screaming,” so she knocked on their bedroom door and asked Sylvia to take the baby while she went to dinner at Winifred’s. “I opened the door and they were in bed together—not in any embarrassing position—and I just handed her Nick and I didn’t even give them a good look and disappeared. And I think on the basis of that one thing she wrote that poem ‘Medusa.’ ”34

  The next morning, Aurelia got up early with the children and cooked them breakfast. Later, Sylvia came downstairs in her robe and made herself a cup of coffee. “She looked over toward me, her hand holding the mug shook, her lips trembled, and she then put the mug down and fled upstairs.” Sylvia could no longer pretend that her life was on an ascending trajectory. Aurelia felt she should “keep out of the way,” and took the children outside. She knit to “steady” her “thoughts,” and hoped that she was wrong about the source of her daughter’s unhappiness. “Sylvia and Ted came out and went to the far end of the vegetable garden, apparently talking earnestly. In my naivete, I thought that perhaps they had had bad news concerning some work sent out for publication.” Frieda approached her parents, then ran back to Aurelia, “shaking her head, Saying ‘Mummy cry; Daddy cry…’ (omitting the ‘r’).”35 Later that afternoon, Aurelia and Ted drove to the train station in silence. Hughes was leaving for London, where he would stay with Alvarez.36 Aurelia remembered how Ted gave “a strange little laugh. ‘Well, I don’t know just when I’ll see you again, Aurelia, but have a good time.’ ” Ted later told Elizabeth, a few months after Sylvia’s death, that Aurelia had driven him to leave Sylvia for Assia. “My effort to get away from her [Aurelia] was a large part of my leaving Court Green last summer & starting the fire I wasn’t able to put out.”37