The feminist Meredith Tax, who spent four years on a Fulbright Fellowship in London during the 1960s, wrote that without a man, a woman during this time was “nowhere, disappeared, teetering on the edge of a void.”11 Her words conjure the interstellar void of Plath’s “Edge,” with its images of a mother and her children abandoned and alone. In Britain in 1961, just 2 percent of households were run by a single parent—and that figure would remain the same for the next ten years.12 Being a single mother, Lorna Secker-Walker remembered, was “unusual.” So was divorce itself—only 2.1 per 1,000 married people divorced in 1961.13 Lorna understood why Sylvia would have been anxious about finding another man: “someone at that age—pretty bleak prospects.”14 Plath was thirty.
The novelist Fay Weldon, a friend of Assia’s, remembered that in this sexist society, “to be without a man was such a disgraceful thing. It meant you were a total failure, to be alone. To be alone with a child beyond a certain age meant that you had been seen as unfit by men and rejected by them.”15 Hughes suggested, in an unpublished poem, that Plath saw no immediate change on the horizon:
When you wrote those poems of Ariel
Had feminism stirred in its crate?
Surely it had. But not a murmur of it
Had reached you, or alerted you, or touched
Your feminine instinct. Not a hint of it.
Any more than you’d heard a note of the “Beatles”
Those birds of the muddled dawn—who were already
1962—singing unnoticed
Under a skyline about to be transfigured.16
Even Doris Lessing’s freethinking heroine in The Golden Notebook, Anna Wulf, is not sure she can live without a man. Lessing herself, a former communist who had left two children and a husband behind in Africa in order to pursue an independent writing career in London, might have offered Plath a real-life model of “free” womanhood. She lived with her young son, Peter, in a townhouse on Charrington Street, which she had bought from the proceeds of The Golden Notebook. This pivotal novel, which eventually helped Lessing win the Nobel Prize in Literature, addressed madness, single motherhood, writing, male betrayal, literary ambition, politics, and exile—all themes that preoccupied Plath. Lessing inscribed a copy of The Golden Notebook, “To Ted and Sylvia, with love from Doris Lessing,” on June 14, 1962. In this copy, Plath placed three check marks next to passages about single, artistic, bohemian women who live freely. On page 20, for example, she checked: “Her source of self-respect was that she had not—as she put it—given up and crawled into safety somewhere. Into a safe marriage.” On page 46: “We’ve chosen to live a certain way, knowing the penalties, or if we didn’t we know now….”17 Lessing and her characters lived the free life Plath aspired to. After Plath read the book, Suzette brought her to Lessing’s Charrington Street home—this was in December or January—but Lessing spurned her. She was put off by Plath’s effusive praise and American gushiness, and thought her “needy and did not want to get involved.”18 Helder Macedo found Lessing’s response especially unfortunate, for when Sylvia got to know someone, “a deux,” she dropped the gushiness and became a “precise” and “marvelous” conversationalist, “a probing instrument, concentrated.” Helder had asked Sylvia why she “gushed” in groups, and she said “it had to do with her unease as a young woman who couldn’t make it socially, didn’t know how, and had developed this manner to ingratiate herself.”19 This was why, she said, social events and dinner parties exhausted her. But Lessing knew none of this. She asked Suzette not to bring Sylvia back.
* * *
—
Sylvia’s aspiration to live as an independent woman began to collide with the reality of her loneliness, her desire for love, and the stigma she surely felt as a single mother. Her depression worsened after Alvarez ignored her mid-January letter suggesting a date to the zoo, while a flirtatious February letter from John Richardson suggests that she was still looking for male companionship in the weeks before her death. She didn’t think she had much choice. Plath told friends she did not want to raise two children on her own as her widowed mother had. She was appalled that, for all her efforts to live a different kind of life, she had ended up in the very same situation as Aurelia, but worse—rejected, unemployed, far away from friends and family.
Plath had always charted her own course as a woman artist, deftly transcending the obstacles put in her way. The imagery of flight that reached its apotheosis in “Ariel” had its roots in her early poem “Aerialist.” There, a young woman “parries the lunge and menace” of heavy black bowling balls, swinging pendulums, and roaring trucks as she balances on a high wire in her dream. When she wakes, she is haunted by a sense that “as penalty for her skill,” “she must walk in dread”—that “out of spite,” the sky will “Fall racketing finale on her luck.” Now Plath’s luck had run out; the sky had, indeed, fallen. She felt that she could not return to America and Aurelia; nor could she face constant reminders of Ted and Assia in London. Dr. Beuscher was across the ocean and keeping her distance. Sylvia was reading novels about sanatoriums and nervous breakdowns and reliving that experience in her own novel, which had been rejected by American publishers. She probably worried, despite her use of a pseudonym, about the pain the book would cause her American friends and family if they learned of its true author—a reality brought home when she sat at the table of Patricia Goodall, Perry Norton’s relation, two nights before she died.
Without the patronage of Hughes or, now, Alvarez, Plath’s social capital dissolved. Friends remembered her during this time as gratingly effusive, desperately lonely, a subject of gossip, a burden. Jillian Becker felt that at the very end of Sylvia’s life she was “isolated and denigrated.”20 Plath’s January and February poems, filled with “translucent calm,” as Alvarez said, seemed to absorb this new, unhappy state.21
* * *
ON JANUARY 22, Sylvia wrote her last letter to Olive Prouty. Sad and candid, it offered a brief glimpse of the mental horror she would reveal in her final letter to Ruth Beuscher. Dr. Horder, Sylvia said, had been a “source of great help…but I do occasionally miss that wonderful Doctor Ruth Beuscher I had at McLean’s who I feel could help me so much now. She did write me a letter or two, very helpful, but it’s not the same as those hours of talk.” Sylvia hoped her new eighteen-year-old German-speaking au pair, who had moved in that day, would provide her some respite (she could afford the help as Ted was giving her $280 a month, more than the yearly $2,500 required by her lawyer).22 “I have not been alone with myself for over two months, when I had my dear young nurse in Devon, and this has been the keenest torture, this lack of a centre, a quietness, to brood in and grow from. I suppose, to the writer, it is like communing with God.” Prouty had advised her not to resume her novel until she had daily, uninterrupted time to write, and she now looked forward to beginning again. But for once, she told Prouty the truth.
Frieda makes me so sad. Ted comes once a week to see her, she hangs on him dotingly, then cries “Daddy come soon” for the rest of the week, waking in the night, tearful and obsessed with him. It is like a kind of mirror, utterly innocent, to my own sense of loss….I think my salvation will be to plunge into my work….I must just resolutely write mornings for the next years, through cyclones, water freezeups, children’s illnesses & the aloneness. Having been so deeply and spiritually and physically happy with my dear, beautiful husband makes this harder than if I had never known love at all. Now he is famous, beautiful, the whole world wants him and now has him. He has changed so that the old life is impossible—I could never live under the same roof with him again, but I hope for the children’s sake that each week he visits I can be brave and merry, without sorrow or accusation, and forge my life anew….I desperately want to make an inner strength in myself, an independence that can face bringing up the children alone & in face of great uncertainties. Do write me again! Your letters are like balm, you
understand the writer in me, & that is where I must live.23
The letter alarmed Mrs. Prouty, who had always been skeptical of Sylvia’s cheerful epistolary front. She replied immediately, sending a check and praising Sylvia’s courage and strength. “I know well how you must suffer & suffer & suffer—behind the mask you wear.”24 Mrs. Prouty, Betty Aldrich, the Nortons, Aunt Dot, and Warren all sent letters in late January and early February. To Sylvia, in her depressed state, their love and concern meant more obligation—like the “smiling hooks” of “Tulips.”
There was some good news. On January 25, Sylvia met with Philip French, a producer in the Talks Department at the BBC, about appearing as the broadcasting critic on The Critics that May. (She would sign a contract to record three programs.) Her behavior seemed normal to French.25 But Alvarez remembered Karl Miller, literary editor of the New Statesman, telling him around this time that Plath did not seem well and that he had turned down “a whole wodge of poems” he found “too extreme.”26 (Miller remembered, “I thought she was going mad…and found her poems very disturbing.”)27 Alvarez told Plath about the interaction, reassuring her, without using Miller’s name, that “nobody could hear them; they weren’t typically English taste.”28 Also on the 25th, she received an enthusiastic acceptance letter from Charles Osborne at The London Magazine, who took nine new poems: “Stings,” “The Couriers,” “Mary’s Song,” “Cut,” “Letter in November,” “The Bee Meeting,” “An Appearance,” “Berck-Plage,” and “Years.”29 The turnaround was astonishingly quick: she had sent the poems to Osborne on January 17. Given her recent New Yorker rejections, these acceptances were a boon. She was still showing her work to Ted, who was encouraging. Edward Lucie-Smith said that two weeks before Sylvia’s suicide, he had coffee with Ted, who told him, “in tones of perfectly detached admiration,” “ ‘Oh you should see the poems she’s writing now. She’s like a woman on fire. They’re extraordinary. The best things she’s ever done.’ ”30
Alvarez suggested in The Savage God that he was the only editor who truly appreciated Plath’s work during this time, and, indeed, Osborne later wrote that Plath’s poems impressed him “despite themselves.”31 But Plath was not howling in the wilderness. According to her submission list, more than half of her Ariel poems—twenty-four of forty—had been accepted by late January 1963 by The Observer, The New Yorker, The London Magazine, Poetry, and The Atlantic. These were among the world’s most prestigious publications for a poet. Although The New Yorker had rejected her most recent batch, it still had six poems waiting to go into print: “Elm” (published as “The Elm Speaks”), “Mirror,” “Amnesiac,” “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” “Two Campers in Cloud Country,” and “Among the Narcissi.” (All would be published posthumously in the August 3, 1963, issue.) But literary validation was no longer enough. She told Dr. Horder her depression was getting worse.
On Sunday, January 27, Sylvia knocked on Trevor Thomas’s door around eight p.m. “She stood there with red, swollen eyes, the tears running down her face and with voice shaken by sobs she said: ‘I am going to die…and who will take care of my children?’ ” Thomas sat her down in his living room and returned with two glasses of sherry. “Now, tell me what’s all this about?” She began crying again. “We were so happy. I don’t want to die. There’s so much I want to do,” she said. He assumed that she had been given a cancer diagnosis. “No, not that,” she said. “It’s too much. I can’t go on.” She started a diatribe against Assia, “an evil woman, a scarlet woman, the Jezebel.” She said Assia and Ted were on holiday in Spain, spending her money. “Oh! How I hate them!” Then she noticed that Thomas had a copy of The Observer, opened to the book review page. She pointed to a poem in the middle of the page—“Full Moon and Little Frieda”—and said it was by her husband, Ted Hughes.32 Then she pointed to Anthony Burgess’s review of The Bell Jar on the facing page and revealed that she was Victoria Lucas. She grew angry again, talking about how Ted would be “the centre of admiration, free to come and go as he pleases. And here I am, a prisoner in this house, chained to the children….We were so happy, so happy. Oh, if only…if only she had never come.” She blamed Assia more than Ted, whom she spoke of “in an ambivalent blend of blame, jealousy and wanting him back. She had not entirely given up hope of paradise regained.” Plath told Thomas he “reminded her of her father.”33 Thomas’s account dovetails with others’ stories of Plath at this time. She also raged about Assia and Ted to Jillian the weekend before she died and admitted to others that she felt isolated and burdened by the care of her children. And her plaintive fear of dying echoes similar sentiments in her letters to Dr. Beuscher that fall and winter.
The next day, January 28, Plath mailed Leonie Cohn at the BBC her script, “Ocean 1212-W,” with its nostalgia for Winthrop and buried grief for her father.34 With the decks cleared, Plath turned back to poetry. Her German-speaking au pair had been living with her for a week. But the match was not propitious; Sylvia wrote to Aurelia on February 4 that the girl was “food-fussy & boy-gaga,” and to Elizabeth on the same day that she was “trying to knock some notion of maternal responsibility” into her.35 Still, she had time to write again and did not waste an hour. On January 28 she finished three new poems—“The Munich Mannequins,” “Totem,” and “Child”—and revised “Sheep in Fog.” It was the beginning of another productive period, not unlike the creative outpouring of October. Between January 28 and February 5 Plath wrote eleven poems, some of them her best. The exuberance of “Ariel” and the campy black humor of “Lady Lazarus” evaporated; their insistent rhythms disappeared. Plath’s new register was still, flat. She had returned to the voice of “The Moon and the Yew Tree” and its subject—depression.
“The hills step off into whiteness. / People or stars / Regard me sadly, I disappoint them,” she wrote in “Sheep in Fog.” She had written an earlier version of the poem, “Fog Sheep,” on December 2, 1962. The first draft reveals that the poem had originally been based on the legend of Phaeton and Helios, and that the speaker had crashed after flying too close to the sun (there are two references to “a scrapped chariot”).36 The drafts also suggest that Plath had been influenced by Hughes’s poems “Phaetons” and “The Horses.” On January 28 she returned to “Fog Sheep,” removed the chariot reference, and rewrote the last stanza. She was likely influenced by Theodore Roethke’s poem “The Far Field,” which had been published in The Times Literary Supplement on December 21, 1962.37 Her dark new ending conjured despair:
My bones hold a stillness, the far
Fields melt my heart.
They threaten
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.
Seldom has the existential threat of depression been so memorably aestheticized. Plath described the mood in her BBC introduction: “the speaker’s horse is proceeding at a slow, cold walk down a hill of macadam to the stable at the bottom. It is December. It is foggy. In the fog there are sheep.”38 As in “Ariel,” the speaker is riding her horse on the moors, but the rhythms and tone of “Sheep in Fog” are somber. The “blue distances” of “Ariel” hold no more promise, nor are they menacing. They simply disappear into the fog, leaving the speaker disoriented. Her horse is now “slow” as dawn surrealistically gives way to night. Indeed, Plath no longer uses enjambment to create the illusion of motion; here the horse’s slow walk is emphasized by at least two end-pauses in most stanzas. Desertion and abandonment seem imminent. A line in the poem’s second draft hints at its biographical connections: “Now even your kisses stiffen.”39 Plath removed the line, preferring to let the landscape reveal her emotions, just as she had in childhood. The “far fields” do not fill her speaker with promise; instead, they “threaten.” She is not blessed by the landscape, as in a Wordsworth poem, or unnerved or emboldened by it, as in a Hughes poem. She is simply emptied. The hills provide no solace. The only striking use of internal assonance
and consonance comes in the last line of the poem, where the siren song of the soft vowels in “Starless,” “fatherless,” “dark,” and “water” tempts the speaker ever closer to the abyss.
Plath’s poem “Child,” too, describes the great distance between wholeness and emptiness, measured not by faraway hills but by the unreachable beauty of a child’s eye. The mother wants to fill her child’s eyes with “color and ducks,” but knows he sees her wringing her hands, and—echoing the last lines of “Sheep in Fog”—“this dark / Ceiling without a star.”
“The Munich Mannequins,” also finished on January 28, conjures Assia in its first line: “Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.” Naked mannequins in store windows symbolize this terrible state. At the poem’s end, Plath mentions “black phones on hooks”—another Assia motif—“Glittering and digesting // Voicelessness. The snow has no voice.” “Totem,” written on the same day, begins with references to Hughes’s radio play Difficulties of a Bridegroom; a long journey up to London, butchers’ knives, and dead hares—her “totem”—make the subject clear.40 Plath mentions a “counterfeit snake” modeled, Hughes later said, on the one Assia gave her. Hughes’s play had struck a nerve.
The following day, January 29, brought more poems. “Paralytic” is a less successful version of “Tulips,” with its desire for nullification (the magnolia “Asks nothing of life”). The speaker is not convalescing but in a permanent state of numbness. Plath also wrote “Gigolo,” likely directed at Hughes, that day. Soon after, on February 1, came “Mystic” and “Kindness.” The plaintive speaker of “Mystic” asks, “Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?” Hughes would later claim that Plath told him she had seen God during the last two weeks of her life. Yet her poem seems skeptical of religion’s consolations:
Red Comet Page 125