Hot baths, sun, and sleep were Sylvia’s home remedies for depression. They eluded her now. She was lucky to have drinking water. (One night she saw an elderly man filling his pitcher from a water tap on a street corner. “Shocking!” they both cried as they passed each other in the darkness “like sad ships.”)49 The power flickered on and off due to the overloaded city grid, and she began writing, as she told Charles Osborne at The London Magazine, “by candlelight with cold fingers, a sinister return to Dickensian conditions thanks to the Electricity Board.”50 Long lines formed at the few shops that had candles, which sold out in minutes.
Linda Gates, an aspiring American actress, arrived in London in February 1964, a year after the Big Freeze. She began dating Alvarez, who had briefly separated from Anne. Linda was appalled by Al’s paltry coal heater (“the size of a breadbox”) and took to using the toilet at a local department store rather than the freezing, primitive one in his garage. Above all, she remembered the “bitter, bitter cold,” and a society inured to life without heat. “We musn’t grumble,” she heard Britons say over and over. Linda spent her days huddling in a woolly bathrobe in Al’s bed trying to stay warm, reading loose sheets of Plath’s poems or “depressing” books he recommended like Jude the Obscure. She left in April. Her experience increased her admiration for Plath: “she could have fled back to central heating, indoor toilets, men who took you seriously and a secure university appointment to pay the bills.”51
Plath wrote wryly about her London winter in “Snow Blitz,” which she planned to publish in Punch.52 She described the conditions with an amused, if appalled, American sensibility. “The cheer seemed universal. We were all mucking in together, as in the Blitz.”53 Some of her anecdotes sound Pythonesque. Her local pharmacist reported excitedly that he had found a solution to all the snow: a plank to “push the snow aside.” She joked in “Snow Blitz” that she had been hoping for tranquilizers.
Trevor Thomas, who lived alone in the flat below Sylvia’s, remembered a different side of her that winter. Thomas had initially been angry with Plath, as he had been promised the larger flat she eventually secured. He resented the fact that she had been able to put up a year’s rent in advance, which meant that he was relegated to the less desirable ground floor (it had been divided into a street-facing bedroom and, behind it, a small sitting room with a fireplace). Thomas later wrote about this time in an unpublished memoir, “Sylvia Plath: Last Encounters.” The piece is not entirely reliable—Thomas wrote that Hughes had played bongo drums upstairs after Plath’s funeral, a claim he later retracted after Hughes threatened to sue. Many of Thomas’s recollections, however, dovetail with Hughes’s.54 Still, she seemed to him frightened and confused that winter, and he summoned up a modicum of pity for the single mother upstairs.
Thomas, born in Wales in 1907, was raised in a mining family and earned a degree in anthropology at Aberystwyth University. He became a specialist in what was then known as “primitive” art—the sort of subject that interested Plath and Hughes—and ascended to the top of his field. He won a Rockefeller Fellowship to study in America and in 1941 was appointed the director of the City of Leicester Museums and Art Gallery, where he built the best German Expressionist collection in Britain. After working in Paris for UNESCO, he was appointed professor of art education and art history at the University of Buffalo in the U.S., where he worked from 1956 to 1960. His career ended after he was arrested for public indecency outside a men’s restroom; although Sir Kenneth Clark testified that Thomas would likely succeed him as director of the National Gallery, Thomas eventually pled guilty rather than endure cross-examination about his sexuality. He was let go at the museum, and, after stints in Paris and America, he became the art director of a greeting card company, Gordon Fraser. Later in life, before his death in 1993, Thomas fought for gay rights. Today there is a movement to formally pardon him.55 Thomas did not include any of this secret history in his memoir. (Nor did Janet Malcolm in The Silent Woman, where she characterized him as a strange, narcissistic hoarder.) The man who got to know Sylvia that winter, and the last person to see her alive, had also been cast out of the magic circle.
Thomas found Plath exasperating, but he never turned her away. He had been treated well in America, and he wanted to pay the kindness forward. Sylvia relied on him as the weather worsened. She had few other options. Still, she was a proud woman who rarely opened up to those she did not like or trust. She had two other women friends in her neighborhood on whom she could have leaned; indeed, Catherine helped her with her shopping in mid-January. But she may have sensed in the fifty-six-year-old Thomas a sympathetic listener underneath his brittleness. And she may have guessed the truth of his sexuality, as she had Richard Murphy’s.
One day in late January she appeared at his door crying. “I don’t know what’s happened but all my lights have gone out and my fire’s gone off and my children are cold and ill and crying.” He told her there had been a power cut. “Oh what’s that?” she asked. He explained about the overuse of electric heaters. “Oh, but we don’t have power cuts in America,” she said. (An Observer article corroborates Thomas’s memory: on Friday, January 25, and Saturday, January 26, Britain experienced the “worst power crisis” in its history, caused by frozen fog on power lines.)56 Thomas reassured her that if she cooked with gas her “troubles were over.” She didn’t seem to realize that she could drink hot tea and warm the children with hot-water bottles until the power came back on. “Oh, you are so wonderful,” he remembered her saying.57 In “Snow Blitz,” Plath wrote, “I wrapped my daughter in a blanket with the hot-water bottle and set her over a bowl of warm milk and her favorite puzzle. The baby I dressed in a snowsuit.”
There are hints of depression behind the black humor in “Snow Blitz”: the joke about needing tranquilizers, the continual disbelief at each new crisis. When the snow began to melt in late January, Plath wrote that the plows finally came. “Where have you been all month?” she asked them. They told her they had been “coming.” There were only five. “Dress up warm, lots of tea and bravery. That seemed the answer,” she wrote. The entire episode became a metaphor, in “Snow Blitz,” for her own worsening battle with depression, her inner “blitz”:
Meanwhile, the pipes stay outside. Where else?
And what if there is another snow blitz?
And another?58
* * *
CLARISSA AND PAUL R>OCHE CAME from Kent to see Sylvia on January 3. There was about a foot of snow on her stoop, and the door was hard to open. Sylvia answered the door in her dressing gown and was so ill she seemed to be mixing up nights and days. The flat, however, was spotless. The beds were made, the children scrubbed, “clean and dressed”—everything pointed to “the astounding orderliness of a real hausfrau.” Indeed, the kitchen was so clean Clarissa suspected that Sylvia was not using it. When Sylvia confirmed her suspicions (she had written to the Fosters that she was mainly living on apples, onions, and potatoes she had brought from Court Green), Clarissa cooked her a meal of pork chops and tinned corn, which she “devoured.” She went to sleep, then later came down for tea, looking better. She was then, Paul said, “Talkative, laughing, full of interest in everything we were doing. And I thought: this is marvelous, she’s in great spirits, there’s nothing to worry about.” She told Paul, in a “very detached” way—as if she were not speaking about her adulterous husband—that he should ask Ted about BBC work: “Get in touch with Ted; he’ll help you; he’s very good about things like that.”59
She spoke again, as she had at Court Green, of her contempt for literary London, even though Clarissa knew that she was “proud to be accepted as a poet by these very people, honored to be published alongside them.”60 Henry Rago at Poetry had written in late December, accepting “Fever 103°,” “Purdah,” and “Eavesdropper,” while Tony Dyson wrote in early January asking for more poems for Critical Quarterly: “We should like to publish you very much indeed
(but you know this).”61 These affirmations surely lifted Plath’s spirits, but not enough. The Roches left that night and invited Sylvia to stay with them in Kent if an au pair did not materialize soon. Sylvia gave Clarissa proofs of The Bell Jar and asked her to read them. Clarissa had the sense that Sylvia had very few friends or visitors, and, indeed, the visit cheered Sylvia enormously. “I shall never forget the dear tea you left me with,” she wrote Clarissa. “I really thought I was dying & began having blackouts that [previous] night while the two babies later ran scalding fevers.”62
Sylvia hid her deepening depression in her letters, which give the impression of a woman in control. She was “in the best of hands” with the “wonderful and understanding” Dr. Horder, who was tending to Nick’s wandering eye.63 “The last 6 months have been a unique hell, but that’s finished & I am fine now,” she told Marcia Brown Plumer. She had not been in touch with her closest American friend in some time and brought Marcia up to date on her separation from Ted. “I’m in the process of a divorce suit now & will be very glad when that’s finished—I somehow never imagined myself as the sort!” The most she could hope for from Ted was £1,000—about $2,800—a year. She would ask him to put Court Green in her name when the time was right, though Hughes wanted her to buy “her half.”
I have been so utterly flattened by having to be a businesswoman, farmer…mother, writer & all-round desperado that I’d give anything for a brief week in which somebody, some dear friends, went places, ate, talked, with just me….I feel like a very efficient tool or weapon, used & in demand from moment to moment by the babes….Nights are no good, I’m so flat by then that all I can cope with is music & brandy & water!64
Meanwhile, Hughes complained to his sister of his financial difficulties. “The Assia saga is doing allright [sic]. If I had cash enough, we would be out of this tomorrow….I’m just set on earning enough to leave.” Sylvia, he wrote, seemed “much better.”65 He still worried, though, about leaving Frieda, and he sent Olwyn a poem called “Frieda’s Early Morning” (eventually revised and retitled “Full Moon and Little Frieda”). It is set in “the dawn twilight” as Frieda sleeps peacefully, “And the roses not stirred.”
Once more everything crawls onto the razor’s edge
From which there is no falling
And massively-golden Jupiter, hanging there in the orchard,
Seems more like something belonging to us than to the heavens
It seems likely Plath saw this poem at some point, for she echoed Hughes’s imagery—roses, a garden, a celestial body, even the word “edge” itself—when she composed “Edge.”
Hughes had written to Alvarez the previous autumn, “I shall be out of England as much as I can manage,” and that he would try to see him again before he left “for the winter.”66 The letter suggests that Ted knew Assia was still not ready to leave her husband. On January 5, Nathaniel Tarn visited the Wevills at their flat in Highbury. When David left to get cigarettes, Assia began talking about Ted, who was now living in his own small flat in Soho at 110 Cleveland Street. (Sylvia recorded the new address in her address book, in neat, blue ballpoint pen, under “Ted Hughes.”) Assia told Nathaniel that Sylvia was “being extremely extravagant & sucking him dry economically.” This was an exaggeration, as was Sylvia’s claim that Ted was withholding money from her that winter: Sylvia recorded payments in her checkbook from Ted of £50 on December 11 and £75 on January 1.67 (Assuming that he planned to make comparable payments monthly, the yearly sum would amount to more or less the annual alimony the couple had agreed on.) Assia “raved” about Ted to Nathaniel: “he has everything: charity, energy, love, genius. He is writing enormous quantities of everything.” She wanted to leave David but could not “bring herself to.” David knew that she was “seeing H. [Hughes] regularly,” but the two had simply “stopped talking about it.” Nathaniel found Assia filled with “cold calculation”; he could not understand why David “does not kick & go.”68
Sylvia heard some of this from Suzette, the “postbox.” Plath had thought moving to London would increase her sense of independence, but now, with the possibility of a relationship with Alvarez receding, there was only the memory of her husband and the devastating reality of her loneliness. She was closer to Ted in London, and this new proximity meant she heard constant gossip about his new life. Olwyn wrote Alvarez in 1988, “In London most of her intimates seemed to know Assia and David and Ted, so she was doing a lot of propaganda / stirring it, and what not. It meant she never got away from it all and must have caused her much private torment.” Underneath her typed words, Olwyn, who once again recalled details from Sylvia’s missing journals, scribbled, “it did—this in Journals—as people told her things all the time.”69 Some of the details may have come from Ted himself. Suzette said Sylvia told her Ted tormented her with details of his relationship with Assia during his weekly visits that January, though Helder, who had become much closer to Sylvia that winter over a series of long, philosophical discussions, thought that she had asked Ted about Assia. They “were in this awful game of show-and-tell together,” he said.70
In early December, Nathaniel wrote that Assia and Ted’s affair “was now a matter of common knowledge” “since SP had gone round the whole P.E.N. party telling people about it.”71 David Wevill told the poet Peter Porter that the affair was nobody’s business, though admitted that “everyone’s very curious, of course.”72 Sylvia confided to her mother that January, “It is very hard for me to think of him living in an expensive flat, being wined & dined, taking his girlfriend to Spain without a care in the world when I have worked so hard all these years & looked so forward to what I saw was to be our good fortune.”73 Despair began to replace rage.
* * *
SYLVIA DESCRIBED HIKING OVER “treacherous mountains to shop,” but she was not holed up indefinitely.74 Winifred’s son Kenneth remembered that the councils had kept central London relatively clear of snow, and in late January the weather began to thaw.75 The BBC treated Plath to drinks and food; her checkbook shows her shopping for curtains, shelves, a bed, carpets, and other home goods; and she saw plays and movies with Suzette, Catherine, Jillian, and Susan. “Stopped Dead” and “The Applicant” appeared in The London Magazine that month, and “Winter Trees” in The Observer.
Sylvia continued to seek out other women writers. She wrote again to Stevie Smith, hoping to meet for tea, and she asked Suzette to introduce her to her friend Doris Lessing and New Yorker writer Emily Hahn. The Macedos knew Hahn’s husband, Charles Boxer, who held a chair in Portuguese at King’s College, London. Sylvia gasped when they told her about this connection—“Emily Hahn?!” But Suzette demurred to introduce Sylvia, thinking that Emily was in New York. Sylvia was particularly interested in women writers, Suzette said, “because after the breakup she really said she was going to have a salon, she was going to set herself up, she was going to be independent….Sylvia had this touch of hero-worshipping of writers.”76 In the meantime, Plath made significant strides toward becoming a self-supporting freelance writer in London. With Hughes’s help, she lined up BBC commissions, while Alvarez pulled strings to get her on the BBC’s prestigious weekly roundtable, The Critics. The Critical Quarterly solicited more poems and reviews from her in early January and invited her to dinner. Punch planned to publish “Snow Blitz” and a short piece about Plath’s schoolgirl years in America, “The All-Around Image.”
On January 10, Plath ventured over the snow drifts to record her review of Donald Hall’s Penguin Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry for the BBC.77 While she must have been disappointed not to be included in Hall’s anthology—just as she was left out of Alvarez’s—the review gave her the chance to promote the work of her favorite poets. (She had been included, however, in Hall’s 1962 anthology, New Poets of England and America: Second Selection.)
“A new spirit is at work in American poetry,” she began. She spoke of Lowell and
the “intimate disarmament” of “Memories of West Street and Lepke.” “The shift in tone is already history….The flashing elaborate carapace of Lord Weary’s Castle dropped for Life Studies, walking the tightrope of the psyche naked.” This was an elegant restatement of Lowell’s famous demarcation between “the cooked” and “the raw.” She continued,
“I myself am hell; / nobody’s here—” The inwardness of these images, their plummeting subjectivity, is what Mr. Hall points to as genuinely new to the American scene. The uncanny faculty of melting through the leaves of the wallpaper, through the dark looking-glass into a world one can only call surrealistic and irrational. The analyst’s couch has played its role here, I think, that important and purgatorial bit of American literary furniture.
She moved on to W. D. Snodgrass’s “Heart’s Needle,” complimenting his “laconic, wry” verse that showed no “exhibitionism, no thunder and lightning”; she then noted the “claustrophobic flow of nightmare” in Louis Simpson’s “There Is.” She was naming her influences and promoting her own aesthetic: Simpson’s poem sounded like something Plath herself had written—“The mannequins stare at me scornfully,” she quotes. “The word ‘eros’ falls with a hiss of some disease,” she said of his poem.
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