Frieda and Nicholas took the largest upstairs bedroom facing the street, while the other street-facing bedroom, barely big enough for a twin bed, would belong to the au pair. Sylvia’s bedroom-study faced south with a single large window that overlooked her downstairs neighbor Trevor Thomas’s back garden, with its three sycamore trees, and Camden’s rooftops.7 The Macedos had lent her a bed and Suzette brought her to a secondhand shop on Chalk Farm Road, where she purchased some rather battered armchairs. (Sylvia took to the shop’s owner—an “intellectual” sandal-and-socks-wearing socialist—and invited him to tea.)8 She plastered her bedroom walls with white and yellow wallpaper and decorated the rest of the room with “straw mat, black floor borders & gold lampshade—bee colors, & the sun rises over an 18th-century engraving of London each day.” She planned to paint the other rooms soon, and sew curtains. Court Green had been a warm red; Yeats’s house would be a cool blue. “Blue is my new color, royal, midnight (not aqua!),” she wrote Aurelia. “Ted never liked blue, & I am a really blue-period person now.”9 The new poems, too, would be cooler than the pulsing, blood-red lyrics of Ariel. The first published poem she would have read in her London flat was, fittingly, “Event,” very clearly about her rift with Hughes, in print in the December 16 Observer: “I walk in a ring, / A groove of old faults, deep and bitter. // Love cannot come here.” Alvarez could have published “Elm” but chose instead the less powerful but more personal poem.
Plath seemingly told no one the crushing news she had received in a letter dated December 8 from Heinemann: Knopf had rejected The Bell Jar. Ever the professional, she replied straightaway to Heinemann, instructing them to send her book to Elizabeth Lawrence, Ted’s editor, at Harper & Row in New York.10 She still hoped her novel would find an American publisher.
She had little time for disappointments, and once again filled her calendar with to-do lists: “paint lounge floor, paint bureau, paint au pair’s room & hall, paint downstairs hall; pick up laundry and grey paint; wash hair; call babyminders for Thursday morning.”11 She did not give herself a break until December 20, when she had tea with Catherine Frankfort and saw Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly. She bought fine new clothes full of blue tones at Dickens and Jones on Regent Street with a $100 Christmas check from Mrs. Prouty, and zipped around London in her Morris. Ted came once a week, usually on Sundays, to take the children to the zoo. She brought them there on her own, too, and to the playgrounds in Primrose Hill. She found an excellent nursery school for Frieda—Dibby’s, run by a grandmotherly woman in a nearby basement flat on Regent’s Park Road.12 Frieda was thriving in the company of other children, emerging from the difficult period that had followed her parents’ separation. Everything had miraculously fallen into place. “I feel Yeats’ spirit blessing me,” Sylvia wrote Aurelia.13
Sylvia quickly renewed her friendships with Catherine Frankfort and Lorna Secker-Walker, who still lived in Chalcot Square.14 Lorna and her husband, David, had been offended that Sylvia and Ted hadn’t bothered to say good-bye when they left for Devon. But Lorna did not hold a grudge, and besides, she could tell Sylvia “was in bad shape” when she returned.”15 Lorna remembered, “She wasn’t the bubbly cheerful person who she’d been before she left London….She was obviously upset, distressed. But she didn’t open up about it.” Lorna did not even realize, at first, that Sylvia and Ted had separated. She remembered seeing Nick for the first time and saying, “Isn’t he like his dad!” “She looked hurt as I said it,” and Lorna began to realize that everything had changed.
Sylvia never told Lorna about her history of depression, or about the brilliant poems she had been writing that fall. But she opened up about Ted’s affair, directing most of her anger at Assia.16 She sometimes spoke bitterly of Ted, too, saying that he had changed from the “withdrawn, very shy” man she had known to someone who courted fame and “now liked the gay life….It was she…who had pushed him into appearing publicly. She obviously felt that she had made him what he now was, and was now regretting it.”17 She told Lorna, Catherine, and Suzette that Ted ignored Nick on his visits (Ted himself had admitted in letters to others during this time that he favored Frieda). Suzette said, “she grieved for Nicky….she felt Nicky had been deprived.” Sylvia “was worried” that Ted’s lack of attention affected Nick’s health, as he was often sick.18 “Poor Nicky,” Sylvia would often say, looking despondently at him in his playpen.19 She worried her children would suffer, emotionally and socially, in what was then called a broken home.
But Lorna felt that Sylvia, too, seemed “cut off from her children” at this time. During the first phase of their friendship, “she had obviously adored Frieda” and was very “bound up” with her. Now Sylvia simply “looked exhausted,” her sparkle gone.20 Lorna, like Clarissa, had the sense that Sylvia was simply going through the motions with the children, without much feeling. For the first time, Sylvia spoke honestly to her about the challenges she faced as a mother and a writer. “She said that she felt she couldn’t give herself wholly to her work or wholly to the children.” Sylvia told Lorna—not boastfully—that she could “write a poem before breakfast,” but that it was “so difficult to write a novel because it takes time and I just don’t have time.”21 Lorna had put her medical career on hold in order to stay at home with her young daughter, knowing she might never be able to resume that career. But Sylvia, she thought, was different. “I think she was quite a natural sort of mother. But I was slightly surprised at the extent to which she had this other agenda. Clearly, this was all very important to her, where I had just decided at this stage of my life that I was going to devote myself to my children, come what may. I was fortunate in that I did get back into a career, and I had a very satisfactory second career. But it was a chance, and she was not going to take that chance.”22
Sylvia still socialized with Susan O’Neill-Roe, now attending nursing school in London, and Susan’s boyfriend, Corin Hughes-Stanton, a journalist who lived, Sylvia said, “right round the corner.”23 Elizabeth thought that Sylvia also saw more of Mark Bonham Carter in London, while Winifred’s eighteen-year-old son Kenneth, a newly minted London policeman, came on at least three occasions to help Sylvia paint floors and furniture.24 Small professional successes cheered her: she was asked, again, to judge the Cheltenham poetry contest, and Poetry accepted “Fever 103°,” “Purdah,” and “Eavesdropper” just after Christmas. She made plans to return to Court Green in the spring, where she hoped to spend April with Ruth Fainlight. She asked the Fosters to feed her cats for her until her return.
Ted tried to open doors for her. He told the BBC producer Douglas Cleverdon that Sylvia “had written some wonderful new poems,” which resulted in an invitation to read her poetry in a twenty-minute sequence, with her own commentary, on the prestigious Third Programme.25 It was for this occasion that Plath wrote her short introductions to “Ariel,” “Daddy,” “The Applicant,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Sheep in Fog,” “Fever 103°,” “Nick and the Candlestick,” “Death & Co.,” “Letter in November,” “The Bee Meeting,” “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” and “Wintering,” which she sent to Cleverdon in mid-December.26 He wrote Plath a few days later saying he and George MacBeth were impressed by the poems, but they could not take them all. In January 1963, a BBC features script editor would decide that, though the poems deserved recognition, they were “emotionally overcharged.”27 The program was never produced, but the introductions Plath wrote became an important part of her oeuvre.
Plath showed Alvarez the manuscript of Ariel, probably in late November or early December, and he recognized the collection’s importance immediately. “A. Alvarez,” she wrote home on December 14, “the best poetry critic here thinks my second book, which I’ve just finished, should win the Pulitzer Prize. Of course it won’t, but it’s encouraging to have somebody so brilliant think so.”28 Al had become her new sounding board, and she felt, finally, “out of Ted’s shadow.”29 But the “brief liaison,” as O
lwyn had called it, was about to end. Sylvia did not record any visits to Al in her December calendar; on December 17 she wrote “Call Al” in red pencil. The bright, circled words stand out amid domestic errands in black ink. She called him again on Christmas Eve, asking him to come round for dinner and listen to her new poems. Sylvia’s call was impulsive; she knew one did not make plans for Christmas Eve on the day itself. Alvarez declined—he was going to V. S. Pritchett’s house for dinner—but said he would stop by on the way. Sylvia’s journal entry about this evening, as described by Olwyn, suggests she sensed that he was distancing himself now that she had moved closer to him both physically and emotionally.
When she answered the door he was surprised to find her hair loose and long; normally, she wore it up in a braided coronet. The children were already in bed. Her white sitting room seemed chaste and very cold. “I had never seen her so strained,” he later wrote. He thought that the mood was due to Christmas, always a difficult season for the depressed. But Sylvia’s journal entry suggests that the strain had another source: she sensed this was her last chance with him, and she needed to execute a bravura performance. They drank wine, and she read him “Death & Co.” Alvarez found no “weird jollity” in this poem, no sense of triumph as with “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy.” He was deeply disturbed by the poem’s ending: “The dead bell, / The dead bell. // Somebody’s done for.” He thought that she was writing about herself. They argued about the line “The nude / Verdigris of the condor”—he said it was “exaggerated, morbid,” though Plath insisted it was an accurate description. “I was only trying, in a futile way, to reduce the tension and take her mind momentarily off her private horrors,” he later wrote, “as though that could be done by argument and literary criticism!”30
More than twenty-five years later, when Alvarez re-created this sad tableau in his autobiography, he added a more intimate detail:
I listened, and nodded and made the right noises—until I looked at my watch and said, “I’ve got to go.” She said, “Don’t, please don’t” and began to weep—great uncontrollable sobs that made her hiccup and shake her head. I stroked her hair and patted her back as though she were an abandoned child—“It’s going to be OK. We’ll meet after Christmas”—but she went on crying and shaking her head. So I went on to my dinner party and never saw her alive again.
I left knowing I had let her down unforgivably. I told myself she was Ted’s responsibility and Ted was my friend. But that wasn’t the whole story. I wasn’t up to her despair and it scared me. My own suicide attempt was two years behind me and I didn’t want to go that way again. Anyway, my head was full of Anne.31
This scene suggests a breakup, while Alvarez’s earlier 1971 memoir had indicated something more casual. “I have never kidded myself that changing from friend to lover would have made a jot of difference to her in the end,” Alvarez wrote in 1999. But it did make a difference. Although Plath had worried that she might scare him off, her tears, recorded by Alvarez himself, suggest that she had hoped for a deeper commitment.
She stopped visiting his flat, though she made a note in her calendar to tune in to his BBC radio program on January 2. She would send him a letter about her poem “Winter Trees” after it appeared in the January 13 Observer. It was the last poem of hers she saw in print. Braving another invitation, she suggested that they bring Frieda, Nicholas, and his son Adam to the zoo together so that she could show him “the nude verdigris of the condor.” By then he had fallen in love with Anne. He never replied.
* * *
—
Sylvia and the children spent Christmas Day with the Macedos in Hampstead, where they dined on roast duck and drank cognac. Earlier in December Sylvia had broken down to Suzette—the only time she ever did—and told her she had no friends and no place to go on Christmas.32 Suzette recalled, “I was so upset by this that I cancelled our arrangements and ‘made Xmas’ for her and the children, very much last minute shopping in Camden Town.” Sylvia had donned her new Jaeger suit, and Frieda and Nick were finely dressed in expensive American clothes. They opened gifts from Helder and Suzette, who remembered the “wonderful candles in the shape of oranges which I lit to Frieda’s great amazement and delight.”33 The children both had colds, but the evening was festive. Sylvia had dreaded the prospect of Christmas alone and told Aurelia she “was grateful to have Christmas dinner out with these friends.”34 In her calendar, she wrote “Paint bureau & au pairs [sic] room & hall” on Christmas Day, a strategy, perhaps, for getting through the holiday if she found herself alone. Still, she had cause to celebrate: she had received her first copy of The Bell Jar, mailed to her on December 12, with its cover of a shadowy young woman under a glass jar. She inscribed it with her Fitzroy Road address and “Christmas 1962.” Yet Suzette recalled that Sylvia could not keep her sadness and anger entirely at bay. “Oh, my poor babies,” Sylvia said despondently at one point. She spoke bitterly about Assia. “Ted tells me she’s like a cold fish in bed,” she told Suzette, who remembered that Sylvia was “determined to get her divorce, though we kept telling her, ‘You’re crazy. It’s all too quick.’ ”35 Suzette preached “reconciliation, compromise,” but Sylvia “said she could not bear anything broken.”36
The Macedos spent Boxing Day with David and Assia Wevill at their new flat in Highbury, along with Doris Lessing and her son Peter. Assia was still “pretending everything was normal.”37 She asked Suzette if Sylvia had given her anything for Christmas, and Suzette answered, “Oh honey.” “Next thing Sylvia was saying, ‘How could you be so awful? You apparently told Assia that I gave you nothing but a jar of honey for Christmas,’ Suzette recalled, adding, “Ted must have told her that. But Ted was in a terrible state, desperate about the children.” He worried mainly about Frieda, who he thought was “regressing.”38 Sylvia spent Boxing Day writing to her mother, Daniel and Helga Huws, and Ruth Fainlight; she had dinner with the Frankforts. Catherine remembered that Sylvia talked “nonstop about home and America” because Catherine’s mother-in-law had spent time in the United States. Sylvia had seemed to Catherine “the life and soul of the party…gay” that night, but Catherine’s perceptive mother-in-law afterward remarked on “what a sad person she was.”39
Jillian Becker remembered, “Sylvia thought of herself as poor. Insecurity was one of her biggest worries.”40 Suzette reassured Sylvia that, on the contrary, everyone assumed that she had money because she was American. Indeed, with checks arriving regularly from Aurelia, Aunt Dot, Mrs. Prouty, and Ted, who was paying her £22 a week—and with the prospect of regular BBC work on the horizon—money was not a pressing concern for Sylvia.41 Clarissa Roche was amazed by her setup at Fitzroy Road. “Marvelous heater, a proper cooker and a refrigerator, my God! And she had a car. She really was very very well away for England at the time. But of course not realizing it. As no American could have realized it.”42 Freedom to work, though, was in short supply. Frieda was only in school for three hours each morning, while Nick woke every day with a bang at six a.m. She needed to find an au pair, and soon.
She sounded lonely in her Boxing Day letter to Daniel and Helga. She was not yet ready to give up smoking but had consulted a doctor about weaning herself off the sleeping pills she took nightly and was “now addicted to.” She told the Huwses, untruthfully, that the divorce had been Ted’s idea and that she had resigned herself to it. Assia, she said, had taught Ted to lie: “she has enjoyed lying & being faithless to all 3 of her husbands & came into my house & wanted all I had & took it. Ted has always seemed so straight to me, brutal if he wanted, but not lying, so that I can hardly believe he thinks it sophisticated & grownup & crafty.” Daniel had reassured her that Ted felt much guilt and sadness over his actions and that his guilt made him “very hard & cruel & hurtful.” She mentioned the “public humiliation” she faced “being in the same work & Ted being so famous.” Sylvia asked the Huwses to be Frieda’s new godparents. Later, Daniel would regret his
response that as Catholics they could only take on the role symbolically. He felt that it was one more way he had let her down.43
* * *
AFTER YEARS OF NOSTALGIA for cozy New England winters, Sylvia was grateful for the “fine white snow” that fell on Boxing Day.44 She marveled at the “Dickensian” scene outside her window and longed to take Frieda sledding on Primrose Hill: “it looks so pretty!” she exclaimed to her mother.45 But the novelty soon wore thin. She woke each day with surprise, then alarm, as the snow continued to fall. In Devon, she had heard, there were twenty-foot snow drifts and helicopters dropping milk and bread. She congratulated herself on getting out, but London was little better.
That English winter—the Big Freeze—was the coldest of the twentieth century. The temperature stayed below freezing for nearly all of January. Three-foot icicles hung from roof gutters. A fountain in Trafalgar Square froze in mid-drip; double-decker buses were buried in snow. People cycled over the frozen Thames and skied over unplowed streets. Ice locked fishing boats in their ports. Even the fog froze.
Heavy snow in Boston was a seasonal rite; in London, it was a natural disaster. Sylvia wrote Aurelia in early January, “The English, being very English, have of course no snow plows, because this only happens once every five years, or ten. So the streets are great mills of sludge which freezes & melts & freezes. One could cheerfully use a dog sled.” Her car was packed in snow, and she decided against shoveling it out until “some of this Arctic is thawed.”46 The worsening weather coincided with the end of her fleeting relationship with Alvarez; the snow began falling two days after their last meeting.
The weather left its mark inside, too. In January, Sylvia’s bathtub filled with filthy water; her taps stopped flowing; the ceiling leaked. When she complained, her landlord shrugged and told her the roof was old and not built to withstand snow. He added that the gutter over her bedroom was also faulty. “But where I come from there is snow every winter and the roofs never leak,” she protested.47 He returned with a moisture detector and assured her that the ceiling would not buckle, though he warned her that she might not have drinking water for a few days because the pipes had frozen. They tried throwing a bucket of hot water on one of the outside pipes, which only succeeded at angering her downstairs neighbor, Trevor Thomas. Somehow they found a plumber who fixed the kitchen taps, but the bathtub stayed clogged and full of dirty water. The beleaguered family of three had no way to take hot baths—a situation that left them perpetually cold and grubby. Lorna remembered, “To an American, that was serious. To us, it wasn’t so serious.”48
Red Comet Page 121