Red Comet

  Together they attended a chamber concert in the nearby town of Holsworthy that November. Elizabeth, who was knowledgeable about music, thought the concert would be a welcome distraction for Sylvia. She began to regret the suggestion as they drove. “The tension in her was like a violin string—tighter and tighter,” Elizabeth remembered. “She was smoking and smoking, driving fast, on the edge of the seat the whole time. One wanted to make her relax but couldn’t get near. There were no tears left.” Yet on the way back, even “half-destroyed” with sadness, Sylvia asked Elizabeth to explain the difference between Bach’s trumpet, which they had heard at the concert, and the modern trumpet. “You know about this,” Sylvia said. “Tell me about it.” “She wanted to know everything,” Elizabeth said.127

  Sylvia came down with another bad cold that month and could find no time to read Lord Byron’s Wife, which Karl Miller at the New Statesman had sent her to review. The parallels were clear; Plath called it “the most fascinating book” and joked that Miller knew “I’d love to get my hands on it!”128 By now she had learned that Ted was also seeing Susan Alliston, a secretary he had met at Faber and Faber, who was, coincidentally, the ex-wife of Warren’s Harvard roommate Clem Moore (“evidently she wants to meet me, but that is a pleasure she’ll have to forgo,” Sylvia wrote Aurelia).129 Sylvia’s temporary goodwill toward Ted receded. “I despise him. I think he is a coward & a bastard & want him to have nothing to do with me or the children. He is a gigolo now, vain & despicable. I don’t care how much of a poetic genius he is, as a father he is a louse.” She admitted to Aurelia that he had been “kind, faithful & loving” during their six years of marriage. But the “strain was too much & it didn’t work. He had absolutely no right to have children.”130 A week later, relations had improved. She was going forward with the divorce petition and told her mother, “I think there should be no trouble, as Ted is very cooperative.”131 To Harriet Cooke, too, Sylvia wrote, “Ted & I are friends as much as can be at times like this.”132 Indeed, Hughes was willing to go through with the divorce. “There’s no problem…so long as I can keep up the cash,” he wrote to Olwyn that September.133

  Plath resumed her fight for Yeats’s house, worried that as “an ex-wife” she would be refused. Ted cooperated, but even when they applied as “Mr. and Mrs. Hughes” the landlord wanted more references, since Ted had no regular income. Sylvia listed her mother, “Professor A. S. Plath,” as “guarantor and security,” and urged Aurelia to “put on a good front for the agents.”134 She offered a year’s rent in advance for a five-year lease. She planned to be “rich enough” by then, after a best-selling novel, to buy the entire townhouse and rent out flats. “I have real business sense,” she told Aurelia. “I am just short of capital right now.”135 Thanks in part to Mrs. Prouty’s recent $500 check, she had already applied to an au pair agency for a German-speaking nanny. But Prouty advised Sylvia not to get carried away by romanticism. She thought Plath’s story about Yeats’s “message” to her just a coincidence. The Yeats house itself sounded like “ ‘A lovely castle in the air.’ But I fear it cannot come true so soon. There are so many obstacles.”136 Prouty had conferred with her lawyer and advised Plath to keep pressure on Hughes to pay alimony and to put Court Green in her name.

  In the end, Sylvia did not need her mother as a reference. She simply “had to bluster about being an American,” and her lawyer arranged things.137 She still needed Aurelia’s help, however—she asked her to close her two American bank accounts and send the $900 she had stashed away in the U.S.138 Aurelia sent her own checkbook instead and told her daughter to use whatever money she needed to secure the flat. Sylvia returned the checkbook, refusing the burden of obligation. “You can imagine how silly it is to have something like that around which Ted might see if he comes to visit the children.”139 Aurelia was stung. “Naturally I assumed that you would not leave deposit books lying carelessly about so that they could be noted!” she wrote her daughter in a rare surviving letter. She continued, “the balance of the Lombard account might have served as a comforting backlog—could have been put away with the house deed.”140 In the end, a $700 “investment” from Aunt Dot—a year’s rent in advance—secured the flat. Sylvia wept when she received it, and she signed a five-year lease in late November.

  The battle of the checkbooks suggests how the relationship between Sylvia and her mother was deteriorating. Aurelia tried her best to support her daughter. When Sylvia called home on December 6, Aurelia wrote, “Bless the telephone—and you for having made use of it to give us the joy of your strong, happy voice. You couldn’t have given me a better gift….Your courage, your planning, your writing throughout this time of stress amazes us all and we admire you tremendously, darling!”141 Such language grated on Sylvia. But when she told Mrs. Prouty she wanted to dedicate her second novel to her, Prouty reminded her of her debt to Aurelia. “She adores you—would die for you, & becomes terribly anxious if many days pass without hearing from you.”142 Such news prompted Sylvia to write to her mother in December, “Everybody—Frank, Dot, Mrs. P. says you worry if I don’t write. For goodness sake, remember no news is good news & my work is so constant I barely have a second to fry a steak.”143

  Aurelia’s surviving December 1962 letters reveal a desire for control. Sylvia must buy a double bed for the new flat, hook up a baby gate for Nick’s safety, and transport the cat in “a closed box (with holes for air) or closed basket; don’t attempt to have her loose!” “Wouldn’t it be wise to take some of your rugs….Take plenty of Pifcos!”144 At the zoo, Frieda must be instructed “not to put her fingers or hand into the cages!”145 Exclamation marks appear in nearly every paragraph of Aurelia’s surviving letters, just as they appear in many of Plath’s Ariel poems.

  A troubling passive aggression marked these letters as well. When Sylvia wrote her mother about the prospect of a potential reading in the working-class area of Stevenage, Aurelia told her, on December 4, to choose simple poems.

  When a listener feels a writer has spoken for him—has clarified an emotion or thought—some wonderful sensations may take place within him. He may feel the warmth of “being understood,” “being recognized.” He feels he “counts,” for that which has been his experience has been lifted into an art form. That is why so many of the earlier Frost poems are so loved and will be immortal.146

  Aurelia’s condescending message—that her daughter should write safe, traditional verse—was clear. In a December 8 letter, Aurelia heaped praise on John Steinbeck and Robert Graves, but then quoted excerpts from Sloan Wilson’s A Sense of Values about the neurotic tendencies of artists.147 Many artists, Aurelia wrote, have “severe nervous breakdowns,” and their “children do the suffering for them!” Writers were “oversensitive,” and success gave them “the opportunity to be immoral.” Aurelia warned of the “physical and emotional dangers of success” with a final quote from Wilson’s book: “ ‘There is the self-centredness of the artist—almost every writer or artist I ever met was an egomaniac to start with, and success makes them worse. When an egomaniac fails, as everyone has to do once in a while, it seems to him the world has come to an end!’ ”148 Aurelia was probably talking about Ted, yet the words could have applied equally to Sylvia. It was the same mixed message Plath had heard since she was a child: excel, but conform.

  Such letters help explain why Sylvia chose to stay in England, on her own. Returning to America would have meant, she thought, a terrible regression. She was annoyed that Aurelia hadn’t told her Wellesley friends and neighbors about the separation, and that she was still receiving Christmas cards addressed to her and Ted. In late November Sylvia lashed out: “And for goodness sake don’t say ‘unless you are safe & reasonably happy, I can’t live anyway’! One’s life should never depend on another’s in that way. Why do you identify so with me? That sort of statement only makes one chary of confiding any difficulties in you whatsoever.”149 Three days after her daughter’s
suicide, Aurelia wrote, “2/14/63 I regret this” in the margin of this letter, next to these sentences. But Sylvia’s letter suggests that she alone was responsible for her suicide—not Aurelia, not Ted.

  Susan’s return in late November righted the foundering ship. Sylvia cooked elaborate dinners and hosted teas for Winifred, Susan’s family, and a local literary-minded Irish couple, the Fosters, and their three young children.150 Sylvia’s thumb had healed, thanks to Dr. Horder, though part of its side was gone. She made arrangements to go up to London in early December to buy appliances for the flat and get her skirt hems taken up by a London seamstress. Winifred informed Aurelia that Sylvia was “very cheerful & full of plans for London….she says she feels so free.” But Aurelia was worried sick. She had confided to Winifred about her chronic insomnia, due to her anxiety about her daughter.151

  With Susan in charge of the domestic front, Sylvia turned to her new novel, which she wanted to enter in a contest Aurelia had told her about. The contest deadline was approaching fast, and Plath was determined to meet it: “even if I don’t win, which I won’t, it will be an incentive.”152 She told Aurelia she planned to finish the novel in early January, once she had a mother’s helper in London, and that she would publish it under a pseudonym.

  What was left of this novel disappeared after Plath’s death, though she left some clues as to its themes. To Mrs. Prouty on November 20, she wrote a detailed outline of what she called “my second novel.” (Because she had destroyed the manuscript of her second novel in a bonfire shortly after she learned of Ted’s affair with Assia, this was actually her third novel.) It had started out with the title The Interminable Loaf, but she had decided to call it Doubletake, “meaning that the second look you take at something reveals a deeper, double meaning….it is semi-autobiographical about a wife whose husband turns out to be a deserter and philanderer although she had thought he was wonderful & perfect.”153 The Hughes figure (the “hero”) was meant to be “a painter,” as she told Harriet Cooke, “so I’d like to see some of Barrie’s stuff.” She stressed that it was “a pot-boiler, I fear, due to my need for dough.”154 She told Prouty the book was set in Devon. The scholar Judith Kroll saw some of Plath’s rudimentary notes about this novel while researching a book on Plath at Court Green in the 1970s. In these notes, Plath referred to the characters as “ ‘heroine,’ ‘rival,’ ‘husband,’ and ‘rival’s husband.’ ” The rival tells the heroine, “ ‘I shall drive you mad.’ ” Plath also referred to two current films about a married woman who takes a lover—Last Year at Marienbad and Jules and Jim.155

  After Plath’s suicide, Hughes found the manuscript of the unfinished novel, which by then she had retitled Double Exposure, at her flat. Assia was “shocked” to find herself a character. She and David were, she told Nathaniel Tarn, the “Goof-Hoppers.” Nathaniel recorded that David was “detestable & contemptible. A. [Assia] is of course the icy barren woman. In the novel, apart from SP who is full of poems, kicks & kids, there are only saints and miserable sinners. She hopes TH will destroy this.”156 Elizabeth remembered Sylvia telling her that she and her husband, David, appeared in the novel as “plaster saints.”157 Dido Merwin, under the name Camilla, also made an appearance. Olwyn read some of this novel and told Alvarez in 1988 that it was “only a couple of chapters. One of which was simply a blow by blow account of the Wevills May weekend visit, the other, shorter, on a train when she and Ted were going up to London and stoniness had set in. Very slight and less as I recall them than the 150 pp Ted mentioned—around 60 draft pages Id [sic] say.”158 The editor Fran McCullough learned from Olwyn that the novel was “wicked…funny, nasty, precise about Ted & Assia.”159 Ted may indeed have destroyed the novel, as Assia wanted, or perhaps Assia herself destroyed it. He wrote in his introduction to Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams that it “disappeared somewhere around 1970.”160 In a 1995 Paris Review interview, he said he assumed that Aurelia had surreptitiously taken the manuscript on one of her visits to Court Green.161 It may exist still.

  * * *

  —

  In late November, an American Catholic priest studying at Oxford, Father Michael Carey, began sending Plath his poems. Despite her marital crisis, she read his poems carefully and offered sound advice. She told him to read more of Thomas Wyatt, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Emily Dickinson. “Beware, for Heaven’s sake, the fey, the pretty, the ‘cute’…let the world blow in more roughly….Do read Hopkins….Rhymes, exact rhymes, and especially feminine rhymes tend to ‘jingle’ too much….Speak straight out. You should give yourself exercises in roughness, not lyrical neatness. Say blue, instead of sapphire, red instead of crimson.” In return, she sent him “Mary’s Song,” which she described as a poem about “The Christ-ness in all martyrs, and written by the mother of a son.” She warned him that she was “an atheist.” But, “like a certain sort of atheist, my poems are God-obsessed, priest-obsessed….Theology & philosophy fascinate me.”162 Father Carey wrote back that he had blessed her. She thanked him and asked him to bless Yeats’s house, too.163

  Sylvia traveled to London on December 3 to arrange for her new appliances and utilities.164 She again stayed with the Macedos, and Suzette noticed that she was “calmer” than she had been before. They had dinner together, and “things were easier. She was very determined. She was not going to accept Ted.”165 Plath left them an inscribed copy of The Colossus, dated December 3, 1962.

  During this trip she had an emotional reunion with Ted. The head of the Poetry Book Society, Eric Walter White, had asked Sylvia and Ted to be his guests at a posh French restaurant, L’Epicure, on Dean Street. In an unpublished poem, Hughes, who was then staying at Dido Merwin’s mother’s flat at 17 Montague Square, gives a vivid account of that night. He suspected that White wanted to study them “with his gossip’s lens,” and that Plath wanted a reconciliation.

  After the dinner, Ted and Sylvia walked back together to Dido’s flat, where Ted became paranoid that Sylvia was looking for clues about his “secret life.” Indeed, the living arrangement enraged Sylvia, who suspected that Dido was attracted to Ted. (According to Suzette, this was indeed the case.)166 Dido had, he wrote, “seized the chance to detest you, /And to hurt you. And I had given her the power. / She had slammed the phone down on your voice / When you had tried to reach me.” He “refused” Sylvia the chance to indulge her “suspicion,” and so they continued walking outside around Soho Square in the dark winter night. Plath wept copiously: “your front collapsed. /…the all-out release / Of a dam-burst. I was appalled.”

  With my arm round you I tried to calm you.

  The support of my arm let you collapse.

  I hung on, out of my depth:

  In your torrent of grief, I could not check it

  Or escape it, or see any way out of it.

  ……………­……………­

  We went round & round, in your great grief,

  In your maelstrom, like debris.

  I just concentrated on lasting it out

  And keeping your head up. Till I cracked—

  And we got into Dido’s flat. I thought you might sleep.

  But the flood would not stop.

  The mountain of pain went on melting…

  …Volcanic

  Beyond your strength to control it. Futile

  Neighbors below banged on their ceiling.

  I rolled under it all.

  A boulder, irrelevant

  While that tidal wave, that eruption

  From your childhood, swamped & buried our world.

  ……………­……………­………….

  I did not see my chance

  To launch an ark. All it needed

  Was a little vessel. That was the chance

  I was too bewildered to take.

  And the next day separated us, barely
>
  Sharing a name, flood-victims, cold-mouthed.167

  33

  Yeats’s House

  London, December 1962–January 1963

  On December 9, Sylvia closed Court Green, bundled up the children, and set out with Susan for London. Movers arranged cheaply by Winifred followed. In a letter to her mother, Sylvia glossed over the move’s difficulties, which she described as a madcap “comedy of errors”—misplaced keys, jimmied windows, imperious neighbors. When she finally got inside the flat, there was no electricity, and she had to move furniture by candlelight. But soon enough all “went swimmingly.” She installed a gas stove and electricity, and made arrangements for a phone.1 “I just sit thinking Whew! I have done it, and beaming—shall I write a poem, shall I paint a floor, shall I hug a baby?” Susan helped with the move and stayed an extra day in London so Sylvia could run errands. The local grocers remembered her, as did the diaper service and the laundromat owners. “Well, it was like coming home to a small loving village,” she told Aurelia. At night she stood on her small balcony and stared at the full moon “in sheer joy.”2 After the darkness of Devon, she marveled at London’s light.

  While Ted took the children to the zoo, she swept, scrubbed, and painted. She was proud of herself for taking on “a man’s responsibilities as well as a woman’s.”3 The well-sized living room with its two floor-to-ceiling street-facing windows took up nearly the entire first floor. The narrow galley kitchen was entered through the living room: moving forward into the kitchen one would have passed, on the right, a refrigerator, then a sink, to come to the oven, set to the right of a large south-facing window.4 Sylvia painted the living room walls white and installed pine bookcases, rush matting, Hong Kong cane chairs, and a glass-top coffee table. (“I adore planning the furnishing.”)5 She told Aurelia the living room had “a very strong oriental feeling to it.”6 There would be no more hearts and flowers.