The next day, October 30, brought two important professional opportunities. At eleven a.m., Sylvia met Patric Dickinson at The Running Hare pub on Davies Street, where she agreed to help organize the “American Night” at the Royal Court Theatre’s poetry festival in mid-July. Dickinson remembered, “She was open, lively, and attractive,” and drank two lagers.24 The offer boosted her confidence; she saw it as a gambit. “It means I’d have to be an actress-hostess of sorts,” she wrote Aurelia. “A fantastic challenge—me, on the professional stage, in London.”25 At twelve thirty she made her way to Albion House to meet Peter Orr, who interviewed her for the British Council’s The Poet Speaks series. She used the interview—at least in part—to broadcast her independence from Hughes’s circle. She told Orr she found “writers and artists” “the most narcissistic people.” She claimed to prefer the company of “doctors, midwives, lawyers, anything but writers….As a poet, one lives a bit on air. I always like someone who can teach me something practical.”
Plath read a selection of poems that reflected Alvarez’s aesthetic preferences: “The Rabbit Catcher,” “Ariel,” “Poppies in October,” “The Applicant,” “Lady Lazarus,” “A Secret,” “Cut,” Stopped Dead,” “Nick and the Candlestick,” “Medusa,” “Purdah,” “A Birthday Present,” “Amnesiac,” “Daddy,” and “Fever 103°.” When Orr asked her about the themes she liked to write about, she spoke of Lowell and Sexton. “I must say that the poets who excite me most are the Americans. There are very few contemporary English poets that I admire.”26 Plath left Orr wondering if her husband was among those “very few”; Hughes’s name was never mentioned. Instead Plath spoke of Alvarez and their shared aesthetic preoccupations. English poetry, she said, was “in a bit of a strait-jacket, if I may say so. There was an essay by Alvarez, the British critic: his arguments about the dangers of gentility in England are very pertinent, very true. I must say that I am not very genteel and I feel that gentility has a stranglehold: the neatness, the wonderful tidiness, which is so evident everywhere in England is perhaps more dangerous than it would appear on the surface.” Sylvia was keeping her distance from Ted in more ways than one.
She brought the conversation back to the preoccupations of Alvarez’s The New Poetry again and again. She had felt more freedom starting out as a poet in America, she said, where she did not feel the full weight of English literature on her. When Orr speculated that few Americans possessed the historical awareness that inspired a poem like “Daddy,” she averred that she was “a rather political person” and “fascinated by history.” She was reading about Napoleon and the First World War, she said. And her German-Austrian background gave her a “uniquely intense” perspective on the concentration camps. She quietly defended her use of the Holocaust, claiming that she had no time for
cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife….I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured….I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn’t be a kind of shut-box and mirror-looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.
Her new poems, she said, were meant to be read aloud: “In a sense, there’s a return isn’t there, to the old role of the poet, which was to speak to a group of people, to come across.”27 When Orr mused that poetry writing “has been a great satisfaction to you in your life,” she responded, “Oh, satisfaction! I don’t think I could live without it. It’s like water or bread, or something absolutely essential to me. I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I have written a poem, when I’m writing one….the actual experience of writing a poem is a magnificent one.”
When Sylvia returned to Court Green at the end of October, Ireland was out of the question. “You are absolutely right about the need for me to strike London now. Ireland was an evasion,” she wrote Mrs. Prouty on November 2. If she did not “return to London now, when it is most difficult,” she would “be more & more outside the literary business circle.” She was determined “to shirk nothing. To flee nothing.”28 She would return to London on Monday, November 5, to look for a new flat in Hampstead, not far from Al Alvarez.
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SHORTLY BEFORE her London trip of November 5–7, Sylvia visited a beauty salon in Winkleigh to have her hair done. She told others it was the first time she had visited a professional hairdresser in seven years. She had her bangs cut in a fringe “in the most fashionable style—high on top, curling down round the ears,” and kept her “long coronet in the back.” The new haircut improved her “morale”: “Ted didn’t even recognize me in the train station!” she wrote Aurelia. “Men stare at me in the street now, I look very weird & fashionable.”29 After years of scrimping, she used Mrs. Prouty’s and Aurelia’s recent checks to buy an exquisite camel suit and a few other fine pieces at the Jaeger shop in Exeter. Like her “platinum summer,” her new look reflected a new direction in her life, and also, perhaps, a new love.
In his autobiography, Where Did It All Go Right?, Alvarez wrote of how he “slept around” after the breakup of his marriage in the summer of 1961. “After all, this was swinging London and everyone was doing it.” Alvarez, like Plath and Hughes, revered D. H. Lawrence, whose ethos of sexual freedom was in the air: “for perhaps the first time since the 1920s, it was possible to be young in England and feel free.” Even while he dated his girlfriend Jill Neville, he slept with other women, he admitted, “to prove my attractiveness.” “Now I was 30-something and divorced and it was my turn to misbehave. I chased women, drove too fast, played high-stakes poker and spent more time than I could decently afford off in the hills, climbing rocks with the boys.”30 Alvarez—like Hughes—tried to live the principles of the poetry he admired.
Sylvia herself liked risk, and she was attracted to powerful literary men. Although the Macedos did not think that Alvarez was “her type,” he may have reminded her of her other “type”—Richard Sassoon—who was also short of stature, Jewish, fiercely intelligent, and prone to black moods.31 Her independent career in London, and the quality of life for her two children, depended on her literary success and promotion. Plath, Ruth Fainlight remembered, was a networker, and Alvarez, as Plath told correspondents again and again, was “the critic.” Suzette Macedo remembered that when Plath stayed with them in London that fall she was always dashing off to see Alvarez. Suzette did not think that Sylvia was attracted to him as passionately as she was to Ted, but she understood why Sylvia was interested. “I got the feeling there was something with Alvarez, that she admired him a lot….I suspected she would have liked something to happen….Alvarez was a very powerful figure, he could get you BBC jobs, he could get your poems in The Observer.”32
When Sylvia returned to London on November 5, she read a Carolyn Kizer poem, “The Great Blue Heron,” for George MacBeth’s program The Weird Ones at the BBC.33 The nostalgic poem about ephemeral childhood summers at the seashore sounded like something Plath herself might have written about Winthrop or Nauset. The program featured new American poetry by several poets Plath had known in Boston: Robert Lowell, Philip Booth, John Holmes, and Richard Wilbur. Kizer herself had become close to Anne Sexton. Once part of this group, Plath had cast herself out of the magic circle and tied her destiny to Hughes and England. The program helped cement Alvarez’s idea that, as Plath had recently told Orr, the best new poetry was coming out of America. It may have made her wonder where her own work now stood. She was too American, it seemed, for Alvarez’s anthology, but too British to be included in the BBC’s American poetry programs.
This time, Sylvia stayed with the Macedos in Hampstead, at Fitzjohn’s Avenue. The choice was strategic, for though she was still friendly with Suzette, she considered her “a best friend of Ted’s girl friend.”34 Indeed the Macedos had become close to both David and Assia Wevill.35
On this visit, Sylvia tried to exude confidence and optimism, which she hoped Suzette would relay back to Ted and Assia. She wrote Aurelia, “they see how I am, full of interest in my own life, & are amazed, as everyone is, at my complete lack of jealousy or sorrow. I amaze myself. It is my work that does it, my sense of myself as a writer.”36 Suzette was only half aware that she was walking a “tightrope.” “I was having confidences with both of them. It took me years to understand that I had been used as a postbox.”37
Sylvia may have exuded control in her letters home, but Suzette remembered her “distress” during the visit. “She was hyper. She was obviously taking pills.” Suzette thought that Sylvia was on some sort of amphetamine.38 She seemed “up,” hardly aware of her badly infected, stinking cut thumb. She told the Macedos she “did not care” about Ted anymore—she was going to set herself up and become independent, start her own salon—and that she had nearly finished a novel “about IT.” Affairs were not uncommon in literary London, and the Macedos, like nearly all of Sylvia and Ted’s friends, assumed that Ted and Assia’s “bourgeois” liaison would run its course. They were troubled by Sylvia’s assumption that the marriage was over. “He’s become a tailor’s dummy to me,” Sylvia told Suzette, who remembered that “she talked as if she really despised him.” Sylvia also told Suzette about how cruel Olwyn had been to her, and how much she “loathed” her sister-in-law, who she felt had “a hold over Ted.”39 Suzette assured Sylvia that Assia did not want to leave David, and she advised her to “hold on” until the affair was over. Sylvia was unmoved by this revelation. “She couldn’t forgive him, because that was the one thing that had been absolutely no no no between them…any kind of adultery….She was absolutely adamant…hell-bent, furious.”40 Sylvia would not consider the possibility that there may have been other women before Assia, whom she blamed completely. She “hated Assia” and admitted to Suzette that she was not sure she could trust her. “She was very up up up up up. And then we put her to bed.”41 Sylvia slept on the couch in the living room.
After Suzette had tucked her in (Sylvia thanked her profusely), she retired to her bedroom and told Helder, “She’s in such a state….She’s mumbling like mad. She can’t forgive.” Sylvia had earlier told Suzette she was “seeing Alvarez,” and was going to “transform herself with a new outfit, a camel suit from Jaeger….She was high and flirtatious and enchanting.”42 She said Alvarez was “wonderful: without him she couldn’t have survived.”43 But Sylvia’s talk of independence made Suzette anxious—she could not imagine how Sylvia would cope on her own with two small children. Later that night, when she went to check on Sylvia, Suzette saw that she was “fast asleep, and crying.”44 “There was a kind of wildness that was held in check by this enormous will that was holding her up. She held herself very tall….She wouldn’t even cry when she was conscious. She had to be asleep.”45
On that visit, Sylvia showed Suzette drafts of some “poisonous” poems about Assia.46 She told Suzette “she was writing at white hot intensity, in a trance, until all hours of the morning. She was not afraid of it—she welcomed it. She talked of the fever of possession, but there was exaltation, a sense of privilege of being near the real thing.”47 She gave the Macedos a copy of her poem “Poppies in October,” which she dedicated to them. She left it for them on the table—along with a replacement tin of Nescafé, Suzette remembered, which Sylvia particularly liked—before she headed out in the early morning on November 6.48
On her way to see Dr. Horder in Primrose Hill about her cut thumb (so infected it was almost amputated), Sylvia stopped at a two-story, three-bedroom flat on Fitzroy Road, around the corner from her old place at Chalcot Square. The house was adorned with an official blue plaque stating that W. B. Yeats had lived there as a child. Suzette remembered that Sylvia had deliberately gone to see if there was a flat available at the Yeats house, though in a November 7 letter to Aurelia, Sylvia suggested that the discovery was accidental. “By an absolute fluke I walked by the street & the house (with Primrose Hill at the end) where I’ve always wanted to live,” she wrote. “Flew to the agents—hundreds of people ahead of me, I thought, as always. It seems I have a chance!” The flat, which was £10 a week, symbolized the fulfillment of her literary promise—“my work should be blessed”—and the dream of independence. “I shall be a marvelous mother & regret nothing. I have two beautiful children & the chance, after this hard, tight year, of a fine career—schools & London in winter, Court Green, daffodils, horse-riding & the beautiful beaches for the children in summer,” she wrote Aurelia. “Pray for this flat coming thru.”49 For Plath, Yeats’s house meant another rebirth.
When she returned to the Macedos’ later that day, she was full of enthusiasm. Suzette remembered her taking out a Yeats book and letting it fall to a page that read something like, “Prepare the house for George.” Helder felt she “took this magic business quite seriously,” though much less so than Ted.50 Jillian Becker had the opposite feeling, that she took none of it “seriously.” It was simply “fun…the fashion among poets, specially propagated by Robert Graves.”51 For Sylvia, near the end of her life, “magic” was Yeatsian—bound up with metaphor, allegory, symbol, mysticism. It was a force to be used creatively. Sylvia would repeat the “experiment” back at Court Green with Susan; that time, she opened up her Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats to a page from The Unicorn from the Stars, as she told Aurelia, and blindly pointed to “ ‘Get wine & food to give you strength & courage & I will get the house ready.’ ”52 In the margin she wrote the date, November 13, 1962, and “The prophecy—true?”53
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Plath rushed straight from the Yeats flat across “dark, blowy” Primrose Hill to tell Alvarez about her discovery. He remembered how on that “gloomy November afternoon she arrived at my studio greatly excited.”54 Her call was not spontaneous: Suzette remembered that she wore her new Jaeger suit that day and had done up her hair fashionably.55 It was probably during this visit that Plath read him “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” which she called “some light verse.”56 Poems full of Holocaust references needed the blessing of a prominent Jewish critic, but the material was familiar to Alvarez for another reason. He may have heard an echo of his own poem, “Back,” in “Lady Lazarus.” “Back” is about his suicide attempt in 1961, when he enacted “the whole performance again….Three times,” after leaving the hospital.57 But Plath’s approach was different; he recognized immediately that nobody had ever written poems like these before. He was “appalled” at first: “the things seemed to be not so much poetry as assault and battery.” Still, he thought them extraordinary. He was amazed, too, by Plath’s composure. “There was no trace of the poetry’s despair and unforgiving destructiveness in her social manner. She remained remorselessly bright and energetic.” When she asked him what he thought about “Lady Lazarus,” he told her to remove a line, “I think I may be Japanese.” She did so, though he later realized this had been bad advice. “I was over-reacting to the initial brutality of the verse without understanding its weird elegance,” he admitted.58 By erasing the reference to Hiroshima, the poem lost its wider sense of cultural horror and seemed to appropriate the Holocaust.59 She also told him she was “deep into a new novel.” While she spoke of The Bell Jar “with some embarrassment…this new book, she implied, was the genuine article.”60
On November 7, Sylvia wrote to Aurelia from London with a new exuberance. She told her mother Ted had helped show her around flats and that he was “behind” her now. She claimed that the anger on both sides was dissipating. “Now he sees he has nothing to fear from me—no scenes or vengefulness—he is more human.” She considered borrowing a table for her new flat from “Ted’s girl—I could be gracious to her now, & kindly. She has only her high-paid ad agency job, her vanity & no chance of children & everybody wants to be a writer, like me….let them have affairs & parties, poof! What a bore.” This attitude toward Ted and Assia was new. Since July
, she had been writing furiously about them both in her letters home. But now, she felt a growing sense of resilience. “I am no longer in his shadow, & it is heaven to be liked for myself alone, knowing what I want,” she wrote. “I envy them nothing.”61
Why “now” could Sylvia be “gracious” and “kindly” to Assia? Suzette remembered, “One day she went from the flat to meet Alvarez. And she came back and she was very revved up and it wasn’t to do with having got a contract for another program at the BBC!”62 Helder, too, remembered that when she returned from Alvarez’s studio, “She was pink and glowing. And warm….She contrasted the current rejections of others who had been her friends with Al’s ‘absolutely marvelous’ treatment.”63 Something happened during this London trip that inspired Plath to write “Letter in November,” a love poem for Alvarez, three days after she returned to Court Green. In her BBC introduction she described the poem as “a love letter—a tribute to that alchemical power which can turn the rattiest, deadliest season to fine, sheer gold.”64 The “alchemical” was a witty reference to Alvarez, who was the addressee, the “Love” of a poem that describes a new, life-affirming happiness: “Love, the world / Suddenly turns, turns color.” “I am flushed and warm. / I think I may be enormous, / I am so stupidly happy,” she writes. Abandoned in the country with her art and her children, she, like a soldier of Thermopylae, thrives in the space where she has been metaphorically left for dead. Plath dedicated “Letter in November” to Alvarez, and sent it to him with a rose petal.65 Years later, Alvarez said, “She was in love with me.”66
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