Up in London, Sullivan sells the hare at the butcher shop and meets with his “mistress,” who is appalled. He lies to her, saying he killed the hare by accident. “It’s evil blood money,” she says of the coins he receives for the dead hare. Sullivan responds that if he throws them away, “Somebody picks it up. Then what? The evil goes to them….The thing to do is redeem them.” They walk by a vendor, and he buys a rose for her. The play closes on Sullivan’s final words. “Let’s have a drink.”107 The rose symbolizes the new love that has come from the ashes of his real marriage—the end of Hughes’s love for Plath, symbolized by the hare’s death, has been “redeemed.” The “real” woman at the play’s end, likely based on Susan Alliston, is neither a materialistic seductress (Assia) nor a chaste goddess (Sylvia).
Ted explained the meaning of the play in a letter to Olwyn, probably written on February 10, the day before Sylvia’s suicide:
The day after I posted it [the play], I drove up to London, ran over a hare (by pure chance—it’s impossible to do deliberately) sold it to a butcher’s in Holborn and he gave me 5 bob. I spent it on roses…smashed two, and gave 2 to Assia.
Eventually the idea is that Sullivan must first of all recognise and dismiss—by some ordeal or other—the supernatural women which project themselves onto the real woman, and prevent him seeing her as real—as herself. Once he’s dealt with his instinct to do this, he can meet that real one. The hare is the tiger is the woman is his blood is all kinds of things. I’m not quite sure. But he has, so to speak, to kill it, master it, or at least meet it and recognise it, before he can get on with real outside life with a real woman.108
At its best, as Sue said, Ted’s play was full of “a fin-de-siècle eroticism,” so different from “the cool understated kitchen-sink type approach” then fashionable.109 At its worst, it was self-indulgent and misogynistic, like something Byron would have written, and its symbolism was both arcane and obvious—though Hughes suggested, in his letter to Olwyn, that the play was partly about his own struggle to see women for who they really were, rather than as femme fatales. Ted told Sue, as he had Olwyn, that everything in the play had later happened in real life. “What do you think it might mean?” he asked her. She replied, “Don’t worry about it,” though she later regretted her dismissal. When they spoke of the play after it first aired on January 21, she gathered that the two women were “metaphors in his mind. Both are destructive possessive and demand too much.” Hughes told her both women in the play were “feminine in demanding complete surrender.” Sue mused: “If he can evoke so fantastically forcefully and beautifully these two extremes, what could any woman give him?”110
Sue wondered whom the hare symbolized. But Sylvia would have understood clearly, as she listened to the play, that the hare’s death—the death of their marriage—symbolized Sullivan’s rebirth. “Ted always told Sylvia that her shamanic animal was her hare,” Elizabeth later said.111 It was as if Hughes was mocking her portrayal of him as a sadist in her earlier poem “The Rabbit Catcher.”
Elizabeth worried that Sylvia was “very low” in London “hearing that, and knowing that all her friends in London would hear that.”112 Daniel Huws thought that the play devastated her. He felt “there was no going back,” and that it had been the final humiliation that had pushed Sylvia to suicide. He speculated that Hughes afterward felt so guilty he gave other works the same title to deflect attention from the original.113 The play remains unpublished. Peter Hall would turn it down for the Arts Theatre in London on the grounds that it was not “a valid piece of theatre,” full of “over-blown metaphors,” “rhetorical and empty.”114 In a later poem, “The Afterbirth,” Hughes wrote of running over the hare on the A30, and his play’s effect on Plath: “…it screamed in your ear like a telephone— /…/ Unstoppably, like a burst artery, / The hare in the bowl screamed—”115
Alvarez broadcast a positive review of the play on the January 27 edition of The Critics on the BBC Home Service. With his intimate knowledge of Sylvia, Ted, and Assia, he understood exactly what Ted was trying to say. (“Love is a threat, the girl is a threat.”)116 Alvarez complimented Hughes’s writing as “extraordinarily vivid, imaginative and original,” though he averred that the program would have been even better without some of the melodramatic sound effects.117 Plath listened to The Critics regularly—Alvarez had extended an invitation for her to join the program in May 1963. To hear her erstwhile lover praise her husband’s play about the symbolic death of their marriage was deeply humiliating. Difficulties of a Bridegroom was as cruel, public, and personal as Plath’s “Daddy.” But Hughes’s play would not stand time’s test nearly as well as Plath’s poem.
Remarkably, on January 23—just two days after the play aired—Sylvia invited Ted to Fitzroy Road for sherry to celebrate the official January 14 release date of The Bell Jar. He wrote about the afternoon in an unpublished 1986–87 poetic sequence called “Trial,” written during the Bell Jar trial in Boston.
We toasted it. I admired the cover
The dim, distorted image of a girl
Dissolving in a Bell Jar. Did I wonder
“Now dare I read it? Ought I to read it now?”
The electric bars glared in the wall.
The matting smelt of tobacco. The glass-topped table
Bright fresh novelty reminding me
How you furnished Whitstead before my time.
Was it then or through the following week
You showed me the reviews. No pannings. No raves.
So there it was. The novel had been written,
And published, and here was the world’s response.
I was relieved to read
How seriously reviewers addressed it
Even if they disapproved. And yet, it was clear,
Nobody had admired a genius
Out of the ordinary. You were seasoned.
You hid your reaction, whatever it was
Under a guarded, ruminative sort
Of summoning acceptance.118
The Bell Jar, which Plath published under the pen name Victoria Lucas, received good reviews in nearly all the prominent British papers; only The Spectator was lukewarm. The best reviews came about ten days after the release date. On January 25 the anonymous reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement praised Plath’s “dry wit” and “convincing” narrative: “Few writers are able to create a different world for you to live in; yet Miss Lucas in The Bell Jar has done just this.” The reviewer called the novel “a considerable achievement.”119 On the same day, the New Statesman called it “clever,” and declared it the first “feminine novel…in the Salinger mode.”120 Two days later came a solid review in The Observer’s “Weekend Review”—the one Plath had been waiting for—by Anthony Burgess, who had just released A Clockwork Orange in December: “We’ve met the situation before, but rarely so mature a fictional approach to it. Where (especially in the asylum scenes) there might have been sensationalism, there is sensitivity and decorum; also, the characterisation is economical but full, and the style is careful without being labored or pretentious.”121 The review was neither celebratory nor damning—it was positive but dull. Worse, The Bell Jar was lumped in with five other books in a group review that showcased Julian Mitchell’s As Far As You Can Go as the best of the lot. The most prescient and perceptive review came from Laurence Lerner (who knew Plath was the author), writing in The Listener on January 31. He understood Plath’s deeper political message; this was not just a college-girl suicide drama. “I recommend The Bell Jar strongly,” he wrote. “There are criticisms of American society that the neurotic can make as well as anyone, perhaps better, and Miss Lucas makes them triumphantly.” He praised Plath’s “triumph” of “language,” and closed, “Miss Lucas is tremendously readable, and at the same time has an almost poetic delicacy of perception. This is a brilliant and moving book.”122
Nearly all the reviews were good, and some, like Lerner’s, were excellent. A first-time novelist with a print run of two thousand could hardly ask for a better reception.123 But Plath’s economic future depended on The Bell Jar, and the review that had mattered most, in The Observer, was not going to make her novel a best seller. Trevor Thomas remembered Sylvia telling him in late January what she had told Aurelia for years: “she wanted to become a famous novelist and make a lot of money.”124 But she learned, in late January, that Harper & Row had turned the book down; The Bell Jar—as far as she knew—would not catapult her to fame as The Ha-Ha had Jennifer Dawson. The Ha-Ha, awarded Britain’s prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1961, was a first novel about a brilliant female Oxford undergraduate who suffers a breakdown and recuperates in a country-clubbish psychiatric hospital.125 Plath was reading it the weekend she died—a novelistic doppelgänger to her own double-themed novel.126 She likely suspected that there was only so much room for novels about college-girl suicides. Hers, it seemed, was a year too late.
Ted and Aurelia both came to believe that reliving the events of The Bell Jar pushed Sylvia closer to suicide. Dr. Francis de Marneffe, the psychiatrist who had shared an office with Dr. Beuscher when Plath was at McLean, speculated similarly, wondering “to what extent was Sylvia’s suicide connected with the publication of the book and a related sense of remorse, perhaps, of what she had done to other people.”127 Like Plath herself, Hughes searched for the root cause of his wife’s depression. Neither could bring themselves to admit that her depression simply was. Thinking back to that time, in his “Trial” sequence, Hughes found himself “appalled” by the “malice” of her new poems.
I’d only heard
The few you’d let me hear, tantalizing,
Withholding the rest like a secret.
I knew that they were going to hurt your mother.
“Daddy” I’d heard, but how would she bear it?
Could she bear Medusa? I was right.
She could not. Did you think of it?
You declaimed them with a divine malice.
I was appalled. I was horrified.
How would you go on living in a world
Where you’d condemned your parents, publicly,
Into such everlasting furnaces?
It was “hatred” that had animated the novel as well, Hughes wrote, from beginning to end, “hatred” “most of all / Of your mother—”
Who bore the hate?
Not your smile, your platinum
Veronica Lake bangs. Or your summa.
A small girl bore it, crouching in a coffin,
That little poltergeist girl, who lived in death
Curled at the breast of her dead father.
………………………….
The buried girl had finally had her say.128
34
What Is the Remedy?
London, January–February 1963
The publication of The Bell Jar in mid-January should have been a cause for celebration. But for Plath, the victory was hollow. She had hoped for a best seller, fame, and a Primrose Hill townhouse all her own. But there was no windfall. The risk she had taken in fictionalizing her friends and family now hardly seemed worth the potential fallout.
Worse, American publishers were not interested. In early December, Plath learned that Knopf had turned down The Bell Jar. In a long, thoughtful letter dated December 28, her Knopf editor, Judith Jones, explained their reasoning.
Up to the point of her breakdown the attitude of your young girl had seemed a perfectly normal combination of brashness and disgust with the world, but I was not at all prepared as a reader to accept the extent of her illness and the suicide attempt. I had the feeling that you were not letting us in close enough so that we could share in and thereby understand the whole complex of this girl’s feelings and attitudes, and as a result the novel never really took hold for me.1
Plath instructed Heinemann to send The Bell Jar on to Harper & Row, who rejected it in mid-January for similar reasons. The first part, Hughes’s Harper editor, Elizabeth Lawrence, wrote, was “arresting,” but after Esther’s breakdown, “the story for us ceases to be a novel and becomes more a case history….It does not enlarge the reader’s knowledge of the girl substantially, or have the necessary dramatic impact. The experience remains a private one.” Lawrence continued, “we do not feel that it is truly successful in what it attempts, and there has been so much fiction in recent years dealing with this area of experience that we are doubtful of its chances in the current fiction market.”2 Plath had dared to hope her novel would be a best seller in America, but a few days after January 16, the date of Lawrence’s letter, she learned it would not even be published there.
Both publishers were wrong about the book—The Bell Jar remains one of the most widely read American novels of the twentieth century. Neither female editor saw how Esther’s illness reflected the American body politic. They did not absorb the prescient criticisms of Cold War America, the sympathy for outsiders, or the takedown of traditional femininity. But both, in their rejections, expressed a similar sense of disbelief that would haunt Sylvia’s own friends after her suicide. Esther’s descent into “madness” did not seem plausible. As the Harper & Row editor pointed out, nothing traumatic had happened to her beyond “a girl’s encounter with the big city—universal and individual.”3 In Esther Greenwood, Plath had crafted a heroine based on herself, disguising her illness so well that these editors did not believe her depression’s swift severity.
American publication had always mattered a great deal to Plath, and the rejections from Knopf and Harper & Row hit her hard. Just as her rejection from Frank O’Connor’s writing class had precipitated her first suicide attempt, these more important and brutal rejections precipitated the second. American publication would have renewed her optimism and self-confidence at a time when she was nearly running on empty. Instead, the rejections depleted her already low reserves of energy and validated her worst self-criticisms.
The Bell Jar’s publication, and its American rejection, marked a turning point. Plath’s mental health had been precarious after Christmas, but it deteriorated in January. Different stresses contributed to the onslaught. For someone who hated the cold and responded “intensely” to weather, the winter of 1963 was brutal. She was a single mother with two babies living with frozen pipes and intermittent heat and electricity. Since Christmas, she had been ill with a worsening bronchial condition and was not eating properly. She wrote to Hughes’s Cambridge friend David Ross asking for help with her “financial affairs,” but Ross never replied.4 Checks from Mrs. Prouty, Aurelia, and Ted kept her afloat that month, but she earned little from her writing. She had just £101 in her Lloyd’s Bank checking account on January 1; by January 31, the date of her last surviving check stub, she had only £59.5 She received more money after this point, for she had £2,147 in her account at the time of her death (equivalent to about $48,000 in 2020 dollars).6 Some of this money came in late January from Aurelia and Mrs. Prouty; the rest might be explained by a February transfer from her American bank accounts into her British account (Sylvia had instructed Aurelia to empty both of her American accounts and send the total balance to her in late November, when she thought she would need to pay a year’s rent on the Yeats flat herself); a substantial maintenance payment from Hughes; and a payment from her publisher, Heinemann. While this money would have assuaged Sylvia’s immediate financial anxieties, it was not a vast sum for a single mother in London supporting two children and an au pair. With her hopes for an American publication of The Bell Jar dashed, there would be no reliable income stream, no financial independence. Jillian Becker remembered that Sylvia feared having to support her children alone.7 She had achieved her dream of moving to London and living in Yeats’s house but had exposed herself to painful gos
sip about Ted, Assia, and Sue Alliston. She was becoming an object of pity—a difficult position for a woman with such pride.
Lady Lazarus promises to “eat men like air,” yet real life did not provide the freedom of poetry. In her letters, Sylvia put up a brave front about living on her own, but the stigma of divorce and single motherhood was real. Her new life had inspired her to write her best poems yet, but it carried the whiff of shame and failure. To blaze a trail as a woman poet in the early 1960s was isolating and exhausting work. Ted Hughes had made the journey less lonely. Now Plath was on her own in a sexist society where abortion was still illegal and marital rape legal. Alvarez’s American girlfriend Linda Gates recalled, “Although Al was very sweet, and tried very hard, it was really a man’s world in those days. Women were referred to as ‘birds,’ and generally sat quietly and listened to the men talk.”8 Paul Roche agreed, calling England then “a man’s country.”9 The celebrated biographer and Newnham graduate Claire Tomalin remembered the “shock of adjustment from competitive and high-achieving girl to subjugated wife and mother.” One of her most “vivid memories” from the mid-1950s was “crying into a washbasin full of soapy grey baby clothes” while her husband played soccer with friends.10 These were the years when Hannah Gavron was writing The Captive Wife, about the loneliness of housebound mothers in London. Shortly after completing the book, in 1966, Gavron, a young mother herself, gassed herself in a Chalcot Square flat, not far from Plath’s.
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