* * *
TED HAD RETURNED to Devon while Assia traveled with David in Germany. But he moved out of Court Green on Thursday, October 11, and did not return until after Sylvia’s death. She chose to commemorate his leave-taking by writing “The Applicant,” her devastating mockery of marriage. In the poem, the speaker makes a pitch to a potential groom. Plath called him “an executive, a sort of exacting super-salesman. He wants to be sure the applicant for his marvelous product really needs it and will treat it right.”23
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start
But in twenty-five years she’ll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.
The poem recalls fashion ads from Mademoiselle, as well as the long, sentimental verse Aurelia had sent to a very young Sylvia about a doll named Rebecca who was never sick or angry. This compliant model of womanhood was now the subject of Plath’s satire.
Alone in the home she had once shared with Hughes, Plath’s cynicism about marriage turned to sadness and anger. But it was Otto, rather than Ted, who would bear the brunt of her rage in verse. It was time for the reckoning she had first attempted in poems like “Full Fathom Five,” “Electra on Azalea Path,” and “The Colossus.” Plath knew how to take advantage of a creative burst, and she rode the waves of her fury. She wrote five drafts of “Daddy” on October 12, the day after Hughes left Court Green.24 The poem famously begins:
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
“Daddy, I have had to kill you,” Plath continues. “You died before I had time— / Marble-heavy, a bag full of God.” As in “The Colossus,” the father is a “Ghastly statue” with
…a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
The father becomes a Nazi, the daughter a Jew bound for the camps. “Here is a poem spoken by a girl with an Electra complex,” Plath wrote for the BBC. “Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other—she has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it.”25
Fantasy was spun from reality: Otto was no Nazi, but he possessed the habits of a rigid Teuton. “I think I may well be a Jew,” the speaker says. Aurelia almost certainly told Sylvia she suspected her maternal grandmother was Jewish or part-Jewish. Plath perhaps wondered whether she had other Jewish relatives on her mother’s side, for her maternal grandmother’s maiden name was Grünwald, a common Jewish surname in early-twentieth-century Austria and Hungary.
There is another possible source for “Daddy.” Elizabeth Compton’s father had abandoned his family when she was three to join the fascist Blackshirts. Her mother told her he became a bodyguard for Oswald Mosley. Elizabeth used to dream about him “in his black uniform with black boots. I think I really must have seen him like that when I was a child. My mother said I did, that he used to come home wearing those horrible big black boots and the full regalia.”26 Elizabeth was Sylvia’s only close friend in Devon that autumn, and she said that she and Sylvia discussed being raised by single mothers. Did Elizabeth tell Sylvia the story of her own father’s fascism, and the dream of his terrifying black boots?
After Daddy’s daughter admits that she tried to commit suicide to “get back, back, back to you,” she changes tack. Now Plath unleashes her fury at Hughes:
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
Daddy and his “model” are little Hitlers in a twisted, Wagnerian libretto. In the end, the speaker “kills” both men, and stands among the corpses. The poem ends as the daughter delegitimizes her father—“Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”
“Daddy” has become one of the most notorious poems of the twentieth century, blasted by prominent literary critics like Harold Bloom, Irving Howe, Helen Vendler, and even Seamus Heaney for what they considered Plath’s exploitative appropriation of the Holocaust. But the force of Plath’s rhetoric cannot be denied. As Maggie Nelson notes, “the injunction to behave appropriately…is but a death knell for art-making, especially for women.”27 Despite its blasphemies, the critic George Steiner famously declared “Daddy” the Guernica of modern poetry, even as he expressed his own skepticism about its “subtle larceny.”28 Hughes seemed to defend the poem:
Her reactions to hurts in other people and animals, and even tiny desecrations of plant-life, were extremely violent. The chemical poisoning of nature, the smiling pile-up of atomic waste, were horrors that persecuted her like an illness—as her latest poems record. Auschwitz and the rest were merely open wounds, in her idea of the great civilised crime of intelligence that like the half-imbecile, omnipotent, spoiled brat Nero has turned on its mother.29
“Daddy” became a rallying cry for feminists in the 1960s and ’70s. In one fell swoop, Plath seemed to have metaphorically killed off all the Fathers that had silenced and oppressed generations of women. And she had suggested women’s complicity in their own devaluation: “Every woman adores a Fascist, / The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you.” For these second-wave feminists, the poem was a potent blend of social commentary and autobiography.
But the drafts of “Daddy” show that the climactic ending did not come easily to Plath. The last stanza of the first draft of “Daddy” reads:
If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two—
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years if you want to know.
Daddy, daddy, lie easy now.30
With “lie easy now,” the poet offers the dead father comfort in the manner of a traditional elegy, and defuses her earlier rage. By the second draft, however, Plath changes her mind. She crosses out “lie easy now,” then replaces it with the more perfunctory, “it’s over.” She then crosses out “it’s over” and writes, “I’m through, I’m through”—then adds, “with you.” This too she excises. “There’s a stake in your fat black heart,” she writes, and then she is off, ending, “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” Daddy will not be avenged—she will. Even if the daughter’s victory seems forced by the poem’s end, the poem itself has triumphed. Plath has overturned centuries of elegiac—and feminine—convention in a single stanza.
The curse word “bastard,” which Plath uses here for the first time in her poetry, suggests the ungenteel influences of Hughes, Lowell, Alvarez, and most of all Sexton, whose “My Friend, My Friend” provides much of the tonal and thematic architecture for “Daddy.” Plath’s poem echoed the rhythms of Sexton’s first stanza:
Who will forgive me for the things I do?
With no special legend of God to refer to,
With my calm white pedigree, my yankee kin,
I think it would be better to be a Jew.31
“Daddy” shows that Plath had her finger on the pulse of contemporary poetry. Lowell and Sexton were pushing the boundaries of Brahmin propriety with poems about madness and suicide. Hughes had encouraged her to channel her more violent instincts into her verse. Alvarez thought poetry ought to deal with extremities of human experience and emotion, particular
ly the Holocaust and nuclear war. These voices were at her back, helping her navigate as she wrote “Daddy.” But this is Plath’s moment. “Bastard” announces Plath breaking from a male-centered, high literary tradition into something original. She becomes a Dadaist who rejects logic, good manners, and high rhetoric and lets the surrealist impulse of early poems like “The Disquieting Muses” flourish unchecked. “Bastard” sounds the confidence of a new aesthetic suddenly divined. Rivulets had appeared in “The Colossus,” “The Stones,” “Elm,” and “The Moon and the Yew Tree.” Now the geyser has blown. Clarissa Roche wrote that after Plath read “Daddy” to her at Court Green that fall, the two fell on the floor in fits of laughter. It was the laughter of liberation. Plath had introduced female anger into the poetic lexicon.
And yet, for all of its hatreds and grievances, Alvarez would perceptively call “Daddy” a love poem.32 Indeed, the poem is written in the cadence of a nursery rhyme. The vowels in the poem’s first stanza sound oddly like an attempt to comfort a child. “You do not do, you do not do / Any more, black shoe,” Plath writes. The “ooo” continues like a twisted leitmotif for the rest of the poem. It sounds a plaintive note at odds with the poem’s wild accusations. Even the title is affectionate. The ghost of form, too, gestures toward the decorous elegiac manners she has abandoned: Plath’s symmetrical five-lined stanzas just contain the rage expressed within them. The poem overwhelms with its rhetorical and performative brio, but a quieter message hums underneath the tantrum: only love deeply felt causes such pain. “Daddy” may appear a dead end of vengeance, but it is nakedly vulnerable. The speaker has been damaged—she sounds jilted—and the effort to turn weakness into strength may falter. Plath never reveals whether she admires or pities this little girl lost, wailing for retribution.
The repercussions of “Daddy,” however, extend beyond the Freudian family romance. Plath expresses horror at how an entire male humanist tradition, epitomized by her German professor father, has failed. While “Daddy” seems to emerge from a voice that is barely coherent, it is highly literary and historical. The poem draws not only on a photo of Otto Plath standing before a blackboard but also on a modernist masterpiece Plath had been taught to venerate—“The Waste Land.” As in Eliot’s poem, there are false prophets, an outworn religion, images of war and industrialization, nostalgic memories of prewar Europe, allusions to the restorative powers of water, references to suicide, images of bones and corpses, an inability to communicate, different polyphonic registers and shifting identities, the use of German, repetition, verbal tics, apostrophe, and nursery rhymes. Yet there is no chance for regeneration in “Daddy,” no hopeful possibility as in “The Waste Land” that the land will be set in order. There is only murder and “wars, wars, wars.” Here Plath does something akin to Picasso in his early Cubist drawings. What seems facile at first glimpse shows itself as a calculated, radical gesture born of impatience with a tradition that had run dry. Because Picasso could no longer imitate, he innovated. Plath does the same in “Daddy,” her surreal poem of rupture. The poem is not just a radical kind of elegy but an elegy for a bankrupt culture.
Read as public elegy rather than private confession, “Daddy” ironically conforms to Theodor Adorno’s famous statement that “it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz,” for in trying to describe the horrors of Belsen, the poem implodes. The European humanist and aesthetic tradition has failed to humanize, and the speaker’s language has been reduced to metaphorical rubble. Plath positions her speaker as the waste product of the twentieth century, filled with a violence and rage that will trump reason and beauty. She is the heir of Brueghel, whose paintings of war, death, torture, and public executions appeared in the October 7 edition of The Observer just a few days before she wrote “Daddy.” The article claimed, with persuasive illustrations, that Brueghel’s works were “more relevant to modern war and to the concentration camps than almost any painted since.”33 Plath had loved Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus since high school, and had written of his art in her 1959 poem “Two Views of a Cadaver Room.” She would have read this piece with interest.
Another overlooked influence on “Daddy” is Hughes’s poem “Out,” about a son’s inability to reach a father traumatized by his experience in the Great War. Plath had sent “Out” to the BBC and The Observer in the summer of 1962; Hughes would find a copy of it on Plath’s desk after she died, among a group of his poems he thought she was responding to, bitterly, in her own work. Indeed, “Out” shares certain words and images with “Daddy.” Hughes uses the phrase “Atishoo!,” and Plath uses “Achoo”; while he writes that the war held his speaker’s “neck bowed to the dunkings of the Atlantic,” Plath describes Daddy as having a “head in the freakish Atlantic.” The poems are also connected thematically. Both “Out” and “Daddy” deal with a child’s relationship to a distant soldier-father who has alienated or disappointed that child. The speakers of both poems are their fathers’ “luckless doubles”—inheritors of their psychic wounds, victims of their fathers’ wars.34 Both poems declare a renunciation.
But “Daddy” mocks the genteel pieties of “Out,” replacing them with an angrier and less reverent criticism of the father. Plath’s words are stronger, louder, more self-consciously vulgar (and, perhaps, American) than Hughes’s: where Hughes writes with Gravesian eloquence, “Goodbye to all the remaindered charms of my father’s survival,” Plath ends with “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”35 She one-ups Hughes by taking elements of his own work and grossly distorting them, giving him an exaggerated reflection of the world and world order he has presented.
Plath’s “tantrum of style,” as Helen Vendler once called it, is, more accurately, the style of ruin.36 But if the poem is diagnosing the modern condition in the manner of “The Waste Land,” Plath’s diagnosis is closer to that of Samuel Beckett’s “Nothing to be done” than to Eliot’s “shantih shantih shantih.” Surrealism allowed Plath to reinvent the elegy and change the course and current of twentieth-century poetry.
* * *
“DADDY” LEFT a luminous afterglow. After Plath wrote it, she composed a dutiful letter to her mother, telling her to “tear up” her previous letter, as it had been written at her “all-time low.” “I have an incredible change of spirit, I am joyous—happier than I have been for ages. Ted left yesterday, after a ghastly week, with all his stuff, clothes, books, papers. Instead of returning home to blueness & gloom, as I expected, I found myself singing, washing Frieda’s hair, rubbishing out junk, delighted.” She was “full of fantastic energy, now it is released from the problem of him.”37
Her appetite returned; she ate her “first good meal in months” after she returned from driving Ted to the train station. She was full of plans, flush with a $300 check sent by Mrs. Prouty and happy about her poem “Blackberrying” in the September 15 New Yorker. There would be a new nanny, a new nanny’s quarters, a new phone, and a holiday in Ireland (“heaven, utterly unspoiled…thank God I found it”). She would stay at her “darling cottage” from early December to late February with the children and, she hoped, Ted’s aunt Hilda; she would gaze at the sea, milk her own cows, make bread and butter, and drink “honey-tasting whisky.” Meanwhile, Nick was “an angel” and feeding him was no problem. “He’s just like me, greedy,” she told Elizabeth.38 Frieda was in love with her new kittens, Tiger-Pieker and Skunky-Bunks. Most importantly, Sylvia told Aurelia, she was writing again:
Every morning, when my sleeping pill wears off I am up about 5, in my study with coffee, writing like mad—have managed a poem a day before breakfast! All book poems. Terrific stuff, as if domesticity had choked me. As soon as the nanny comes & I know I’ve got a stretch of guaranteed time, I’ll finish the novel….I miss brains, hate this cow life, am dying to surround myself with intelligent good people. Shall have a salon in London. I am a famous poetess here—mentioned this week in The Listener as one of the half-dozen women who wi
ll last—including Marianne Moore and the Brontes!39
This vote of confidence from the literary establishment buoyed Plath’s spirits. The psychic weight of performing the role of the perfect wife was gone, and her writing became her salvation: “thank God I have my own work. If I did not have that I would not know what I would do,” she wrote to Warren and Maggie.40
Even at the height of her fury toward Hughes, Plath never renounced his writing. On the day she wrote “Daddy,” she told Warren, “The one thing I retain is love for & admiration of his writing, I know he is a genius, and for a genius there are no bonds & no bounds. I feel I did discover him, worked to free him for writing for six years.” But now she was “looking forward” to the divorce.41 Her letters to friends and family all contained the same grievances: Ted’s hypocrisy, the irony of his move to London, her cultural death in North Tawton. She looked forward to a freer intellectual life in London, better schools for her children, new friends, freelance work, and proximity to the BBC. She tried to be hopeful, and told her brother that “the release in my energy is enormous.”42
Yet there were outward signs of distress. She had taken up smoking when her solicitor in London offered her a cigarette, and she told Warren on October 12 that she was “a wreck, bones literally sticking out all over & great black shadows under my eyes from sleeping pills, a smoker’s hack.”43 (Suzette Macedo found Sylvia in a similar state when she visited her in London that autumn: smoking, which alarmed her, and “very up and down.”)44 Sylvia told Warren to “tactfully convey” to Aurelia that she should not plan a visit for a year and a half—not until she was settled and “happy” in her “new London life.” She hoped that he and Maggie would come instead, or that she might accompany them to Austria. “I must really learn German. I want above all to speak it,” she wrote on the same day she called the language “a barb wire snare” in “Daddy.”45
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