Unlike most of Plath’s autumn poems, “Letter in November” describes real feelings in real time, largely unobscured by symbol and myth. But Sylvia’s timing was unlucky. She dated the poem November 11—the very day Al met his future wife, Anne Adams, a psychotherapist, who was staying with friends around the corner from his studio. He wrote that when he met Anne, he was “seeing someone else—or rather, I was gloomily playing the field.”67 He pursued Anne, inviting her to stay in his studio over Christmas when she was kicked out of her flat. By mid-January, she was living with him. The relationship stalled and restarted; they would marry in 1966.
Sylvia knew nothing about Anne when she wrote “Letter in November.” Other poems she wrote in early November, in that first flush of deep feeling, reflect what she thought was a burgeoning romance. “Gulliver,” too, is an oblique love poem. Plath finished it on November 6 in London, on the day she had seen Alvarez. (On the same day she also finished “Getting There,” with its eastern European themes and imagery, and “The Night Dances.”) Sylvia had long had a habit of describing her boyfriends in larger-than-life terms. Just as Ted had been Adam and Mallory Wober Hercules, Al was Gulliver—gigantic to the Lilliputians, who here stand for the quarreling, pretentious members of London’s literary society. The poem imagines Gulliver lying down, staring up at the clouds, tied to earth by his small captors, the “spider-men.” “Winding and twining their petty fetters, / Their bribes— / So many silks. // How they hate you. / They converse in the valley of your fingers, they are inchworms.” These little people are filled with contempt for the giant among them. Plath commands, “Step off! / Step off seven leagues,” “Let this eye be an eagle, / The shadow of this lip, an abyss.” The simile is clear: Alvarez was the most important critic in London, a metaphorical giant who might grow even bigger if he cut the sycophants and supplicants loose. Plath may even allude wittily to their relationship: clouds float over Gulliver’s horizontal body “Unlike you, / With no strings attached.”
Two days after “Gulliver,” Plath finished “Thalidomide” with its nightmarish imaginings of deformed babies. Thalidomide, a drug prescribed to pregnant women with morning sickness, was licensed in Britain in 1958. In 1961 the drug was withdrawn after doctors realized that it was deforming babies’ limbs. Two articles about the dangers of thalidomide appeared in The Observer in October 1962.68 Sylvia had given birth to Frieda in 1960 during the brief window between the drug’s licensing and ban. While the theme of doctors harming their patients had personal relevance for Plath, certain lines in the poem go further, and suggest that she may have taken the drug. Nightmares of deformed babies had haunted her when she was pregnant with Frieda at Yaddo in 1959. The speaker wonders, “What glove // What leatheriness / Has protected // Me from that shadow—” the “dark / Amputations.” “Thalidomide” is a meditation on the anxieties of mothering:
All night I carpenter
A space for the thing I am given,
A love
Of two wet eyes and a screech.
The lines suggest the burden of the infant’s endless demands, and the mother’s sacrifice. All seems out of a woman’s control, fated by a cold moon, which Plath connects to miscarriage and menstruation. “The dark fruits revolve and fall. // The glass cracks across, / The image // Flees and aborts like dropped mercury.” Plath’s final images hint at the specter of an unplanned pregnancy—which would have been disastrous for her—and the relief of menstruation. She began the poem on November 4 and finished it on November 8—just before and after she saw Alvarez in London. It also came between two poems whose subject was obviously Alvarez. Thalidomide babies, like the camps, were the kind of modern horror Plath and Alvarez might have discussed during her visit, while fears of pregnancy may have resurfaced if she had planned to become—or, indeed, had become—sexually active again.
While “Gulliver” and “Letter in November” suggest a deepening relationship with Alvarez, the other two poems Plath wrote the following week, “Death & Co.” and “Years,” speak to a new hopefulness. In “Death & Co.” Plath personified death coming for her speaker. But she resists: “I am not his yet.” And in “Years,” which echoes “Ariel” and foreshadows “Words,” Plath embraces Alvarez’s love of speed and risk:
What I love is
The piston in motion—
My soul dies before it.
And the hooves of the horses,
Their merciless churn.
And you, great Stasis—
What is so great in that!
Both poems reject the stasis of nonbeing, of death: “Eternity bores me, / I never wanted it.” Plath’s despair had lifted.
* * *
ALVAREZ NEVER DENIED that his relationship with Plath deepened during the fall of 1962. Indeed, he wrote poignantly about their afternoons together in his later memoirs. He sensed that she was interested in him, yet he always maintained that the relationship was platonic. But Olwyn Hughes, one of three people known to have read Plath’s 1962–63 journals, disputed Alvarez’s version of events. Before her death, Olwyn told Hughes’s biographer Jonathan Bate that Plath had written wittily in her journal about a sexual encounter with Alvarez during this November 5–7 visit (it probably took place on November 6, her only free full day in London, according to her 1962 calendar). Olwyn had earlier revealed this information to the Hughes critic Mark Wormald and Hughes’s biographer Elaine Feinstein.69 Such an encounter would explain why Plath felt bold enough to send Alvarez a love poem with a rose petal. Alvarez spoke of sleeping around during this time, but for Plath, sex was Lawrentian, sacred.
During our 2016 interview, Ted’s closest lifelong friend, Daniel Huws, said that Ted himself had told Luke Myers—who in turn told Daniel—that Sylvia had written in her journal that she had “spent the night” with Al once during the autumn of 1962.70 Myers confirmed this in a 2001 letter to Elaine Feinstein, in which he told her that his previous supposition that Plath and Alvarez had not slept together was wrong.71 Ted had told him of the details in Sylvia’s journal. Daniel said that the brief affair was why, for much of Ted’s life, “Alvarez was a dirty word. He felt betrayed.”72 Elizabeth Compton, who knew Alvarez in 1962, said he told her he had been involved in a romantic relationship with Plath at the time; he was the first person Elizabeth phoned when she learned of Sylvia’s suicide.73 When the matter of sex with Plath came up in our 2016 interview, Alvarez gave a small smile but stayed silent, neither confirming nor denying what his wife, sitting next to him, called “gossip.” Moments later, however, he vehemently denied any romantic involvement with Assia Wevill. “I was all sorts of things, but mad for her I never was.”74 In a 1970 letter to a Plath biographer, he called Assia a “bitch”; his bitterness toward her was still plain nearly fifty years later.75
A sexual encounter, however brief, casts a new light on Plath’s Ariel poems. Plath wrote nearly all of the poems for which she is now remembered—including “Daddy,” “Ariel,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Purdah,” “Fever 103°,” and the bee poems—in the month of October, between her first visit to Alvarez in late September as a newly single woman and her second and third visits to him in late October and early November. Al, not Ted, was her new sounding board. It is possible that she was writing poems she knew would please Alvarez—not only because she respected his aesthetic judgment and shared his aesthetic preferences but because she needed, very badly, to sell her poems. Her future and that of her children depended on her financial independence, and Alvarez was an emotional and professional lifeline for Plath in the winter of 1962. But because he always understated his romantic involvement with Plath, his role in her creative breakthrough that fall has been largely ignored.76 In his memoir The Savage God, he portrayed himself as someone who recognized the genius of Plath’s new poems, restored her confidence, and secured her posthumous reputation. All of this is true enough, but a sexual affair complicates that narrative. Sex raise
d the stakes, and raised Plath’s hopes.
Olwyn claimed that part of the reason Ted burned Sylvia’s last journal was because he did not want her children to read about their mother being damaged by other men. Olwyn’s claim seems accurate in light of Ted’s own admission to a critic, Jacqueline Rose, in the 1990s. “First you must believe me when I tell you—I have never told this to anyone—I hid the last journal, about two months of entries, to protect—possibly to my utter foolishness—somebody else.”77 That “somebody else” could have been Assia but was likely Alvarez. Hughes felt obligated to “protect” him because he had been a friend and because his own actions had led to Alvarez’s entanglements with his wife. Ted was fiercely private, but he tried to tell Al, in his oblique way, that he knew. “What I didn’t find out in my nearly daily visits to her I found in her diary—complete details,” he wrote suggestively in a furious 1971 letter to Alvarez.78
Hughes’s knowledge of the affair helps explain his white-hot rage at Alvarez in this letter and others he wrote to him in the early 1970s, when Alvarez was about to publish The Savage God, a memoir of his friendship with Plath, and of her suicide, in serialized form in The Observer. Ted had not yet told his children that their mother had committed suicide, and he raged against Al for revealing intimate details about her death to the “peanut-crunching crowd.” Daniel Huws believed that the affair between Sylvia and Al fueled “Ted’s grievance” with The Savage God. “Alvarez must have felt almost as guilty as Ted in a way, and that writing that book was…he was driven by a bad conscience.”79 Hughes never made explicit accusations of an affair in his letters to Alvarez, though he alluded to it. He wrote that Alvarez’s book must have started “in a sacred way by one part of you, as a private, personal document,” but had become beholden to the “greedy demand of that empty public.”
Whatever Sylvia may be for your readers & you, for her mother & me & her children she is something different, she is an atmosphere we breathe. This is something apart from remembrance, it is a world imposed on us by the public consciousness of her and of our inevitable relationship to her. Your memoir has simply increased that atmospheric pressure intolerably…for your readers it’s five interesting minutes, but for us it is permanent dynamite.
He reminded Al that he had been “false to the facts,” and that Al didn’t know “half” of what had really been going on with Sylvia during the last week of her life.80 Ted also told Al that he knew he had “faked” some of the details of his memoir.81 “I can only think Sylvia’s death has become a theme for some involvement of your own—some private thing that’s fouled your judgment. If so, for Christ’s sake step back & see what you’re doing.”82 Alvarez himself admitted that he had destroyed most of Plath’s letters to him because he “was so upset and guilty about what had happened that I wanted to have done with it all.”83
Al replied to Ted that he wrote his memoir as “a tribute” to Sylvia. He had kept all of her angry revelations about her marriage out of the book, and thought that his account of her last days was more accurate than many of the “rumors” making the rounds. And he reminded Ted of the role he’d played in making both of their reputations:
For the last ten years or more I have taken a lot of trouble to get both your poetry and Sylvia’s read with understanding and a proper respect. I have done so not because you happened to be friends of mine but because I think you the most gifted poets of this generation. Sylvia knew this and knew I understood in some way what she was trying to do. That, presumably, is why she came to me with her poems after the separation.84
The Observer published the first serialization of The Savage God in 1971 but decided to “cut short the story” in light of Hughes’s angry letter to the paper casting doubt on its accuracy. On November 7, 1971, the paper published Alvarez’s response under Hughes’s comments. “I was writing about Plath as a person—I think, a genius—in her own right,” Alvarez wrote, and added, pointedly, that at the end of her life she was no longer living with Hughes.85 In other words, Ted had forfeited his right to outrage when he left Sylvia, who had turned to Al for comfort and companionship in late 1962. Hughes and Alvarez did not speak for six years after this incident. Ted finally broke the silence in 1977, dropping by Al’s place unannounced. “Believe me, I’ve really missed you,” he later wrote.86
If Hughes knew about the encounter, why did he not mention it in these furious letters? Perhaps because Hughes could hardly bring up the affair as he criticized Alvarez for publicizing details about his private life. Alvarez suggested the nature of this unspoken pact in a 2004 interview about the film Sylvia: “the scriptwriter has me telling Ted that Sylvia has made a pass at me. Treachery posing as confession and gossip may be the lifeblood of soap opera, but in the real world friends don’t behave like that, especially friends who know each other’s secrets and wish each other well.”87 In an unpublished, undated note in the British Library, Hughes wrote angrily:
Al hurt by my reaction to his account
Of S’s death…
his irresistible need to tell
How he too tended the final days
How he too performed on that stage
And shall now forever perform.88
Hughes felt doubly betrayed—not only had Alvarez kept quiet about his own romantic involvement with Plath, he had positioned himself as Plath’s champion when feminists began to attack Hughes, calling him a murderer. For decades no one doubted Alvarez’s side of the story because Plath confided only in her journal. She never confirmed the Macedos’ suspicions. But then, they noted, Sylvia wasn’t the kind of woman who spoke openly about such matters—unlike Assia, who reveled in her romantic dramas.89
Ted may have resisted the urge to reveal his hand, but Olwyn did not. In 1972, she wrote to Alvarez asking him to write to the president of Random House to protest the publication of Robin Morgan’s Monster, which included the controversial poem “The Arraignment” that accused Hughes of Plath’s “murder.” Doris Lessing and Richard Murphy had already written to Random House in protest, Olwyn said. Olwyn wrote dismissively, showing a lack of understanding of Plath’s work, “I think the day that girl discovered the Confessional School was a black day.”90
Alvarez, stung by his recent feud with Hughes, declined to help. “Naturally I think the poem is worthless,” he wrote to Olwyn. “But after Ted’s extraordinary behaviour last year it would be inappropriate for me to get into the act. My own reaction would be to take no notice of Robin Morgan’s carry-on. But you and Ted must do what you think best.”91 Olwyn, furious, suggested that he might want to think twice about withholding support, given his own involvement with Sylvia.
I find your attitude extraordinary….The issues are so very different and this poem so truly vile, I was sure you would have no hesitation attempting by brief cable to sway Random House away from the ignominy of publishing it.
I was wrong.
PS You will be interested to know that the old red herrings—novel that tells all, piles of unpublished and damning late poems and all that piffle are given as basic reasons for Morgan’s disgusting piece. So you see in a way it concerns you more than you seem to think.92
Sixteen years later, she wrote to Alvarez again. This time she quoted a line from Plath’s 1962 journals about their sexual encounter, and asked him to elaborate for Anne Stevenson’s forthcoming biography of Plath, which she coauthored.93 He replied curtly: “Thanks for the invitation to tell all. The answer—of course—is a definitive no.”94 He added that he was struck that she was quoting Plath’s 1962 journals, which “Ted said were lost or destroyed. Does this mean that they have been found again and will eventually be available in print? If so, that is fascinating news.” Olwyn responded soon after, asking, “Would you like to go over the end chapters and see if you feel you want to add anything? Not about the brief laison [sic], necessarily. Just any touches or corrections.” Olwyn had lived in Pari
s and spoke French fluently; she was using “liaison” as the French use it. She elaborated on this “brief laison [sic]” in a condescending postscript:
JOURNALS: No, I read them 63-64. I suppose the line I mentioned was in the last one (which was only for a few months). The only other mention of you I recall was a full page of tense instructions to herself (just before yr. Xmas 62 meeting) to be patient, to be casual, not to show her feelings and scare you off) [sic] After that, with the January freezze [sic] up, she spiraled down. Its [sic] a pity they are lost, though—apart from more bitching than usual—they are very much a continuation of the others. Nightmares and struggle, jubilations on her work. And as usual little of the sort of simple information one would expect from a Journal.95
Olwyn went on, speculating that when Richard Murphy had “rebuffed” Sylvia’s alleged advances in Ireland, she had turned to Al in London.
Meanwhile she had the odd couple of days in London where the episode with you occurred and around that time switched her plans for a move to London. It seems both Murphy’s silence and your involvement may have played here. She then spent Dec. getting the flat to rights (did you see her during this time?) and the Xmas Eve meeting put an end to her hopes of a relationship with you….So you see for a real mapping of this period, her involvement with you is one of the keys. And why I finally asked you to think about indicating it in some way. But I see how you wouldn’t want to descend to such indiscretion.
At the end of the letter Olwyn added in a handwritten line, “Sylvia confided in no one about your relationship—except on ‘influential critic’ lines.” Later, Olwyn told the poet and critic Elaine Feinstein about the episode. When Feinstein wrote about it in an early draft of her 2001 Ted Hughes biography, Olwyn scribbled in the margin, “Please, Elaine OUT. This conveyed to you in confidence.”96 With nothing of her own to gain, Olwyn changed her mind about conveying this explosive information about Plath’s last lover to the public. Feinstein removed the passage.
Red Comet Page 118