Dr. Horder saw Sylvia often in January, and then every day after February 4. Alvarez remembered Dr. Horder as an overworked, humane doctor who suffered from depression himself; he was discharged from the British Army during the Second World War because of it.12 Lorna remembered that he was “fragile, mental-health wise,” and had been in and out of mental hospitals voluntarily. “He was a very nice man, a rather intense man.”13 He checked on Sylvia frequently and showed more care and solicitude than her male psychiatrists had in Boston. He was an accomplished pianist and painter, and had a particular sympathy for artists. At this time, most British psychiatrists worked in national hospitals and preferred drugs over the more expensive and time-consuming practice of psychotherapy.14 Because of his own experience with depression, Dr. Horder felt comfortable prescribing antidepressants and prescribed Plath one such drug—either Nardil or Parnate—on February 4.15 (Through the years, Horder gave interviewers different information, at different times, about the drug’s exact name.)
Both Parnate and Nardil are monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitors—“uppers” (part of the amphetamine family)—and can cause insomnia. Both were used in cases of severe, treatment-resistant depression. In addition, Sylvia was suffering from a respiratory illness, for which she was taking codeine, then available over the counter. (She wrote a note to herself in her calendar on January 5 to buy codeine.) She was also taking a sleeping pill that contained both a barbiturate and an amphetamine (brand name Drinamyl, no longer manufactured because of its potential for abuse), and another medication for her fevers.16 Thus, by early February, Plath was taking two amphetamines (the antidepressant and Drinamyl), one opioid (codeine), and one barbiturate (Drinamyl), as well as an unknown medicine for her respiratory illness. The interactions from these drugs alone could have significantly worsened her depression and anxiety; and she had just started taking an antidepressant, which could, in its initial phase, increase anxiety and suicidal thoughts. As if this drug cocktail were not bad enough, the antidepressant could produce serious side effects when combined with phenylpropanolamine, a common ingredient in cold and flu medicine in Britain at the time.17 It could also produce a hypertensive crisis if taken with certain cheeses, yeasts, and red wine. Hughes later claimed that Plath was allergic to a drug she had been taking at the time of her death, which went by a different name in America.
Her doctor, excellent and sympathetic, was not to know what her U.S. doctors had learned in 1953: that she must never be given the particular tranquilising drug which he now prescribed. Her peculiarity was to react to this drug with such fits of depression that her life was endangered. She failed to identify the drug, and nobody near her in England knew about such details of her case history. He said the drug, which she was instructed never to take again, intensified feelings of suicidal depression in her.18
If Hughes was talking about Plath’s antidepressant, he may not have realized that the drug was in fact an “upper” rather than a “downer.” Regardless of whether or not Plath was allergic to her antidepressant, it is possible that the drugs she was taking in early February—and their ill-understood interactions—could have significantly worsened her mental health and pushed her closer to suicide. As in the summer of 1953, depression’s “cures” likely made her depression worse.
Dr. Horder knew Sylvia was suicidal, and he was aware that in “the first few days” of treatment with an MAO antidepressant, “it’s possible to improve the person’s energy without improving mood”—thus increasing the risk of suicide. He knew he had to take precautions with her, but, he said, “I was frightened of sending her into a mental hospital.” Sylvia had made her terror of shock treatment clear, and he knew sending her to the wrong institution could exacerbate her depression. “There are so few that give a person the privacy that they need and the understanding that they need….There aren’t very many such institutions in London and they are difficult to get into.” But by late January or early February, he had taken steps to admit her to St. George’s Hospital. In his telling, “a letter went astray; a silly failure postponed this.”19
On Thursday, February 7, Dr. Horder found Sylvia in a grave state. The loss of the au pair and the weeks of loneliness, exhaustion, and isolation ahead had brought her to a breaking point. Dr. Horder told her he wanted her to go into a psychiatric hospital “immediately,” but she “would not hear of it.”20 He bought time with a compromise; he suggested that she stay with friends while he searched for a bed in a psychiatric facility. Lorna, who was also a patient of Horder’s, thought that he was trying to arrange for Sylvia to go to the Maudsley Hospital, a large psychiatric hospital in south London.
Catherine Frankfort remembered seeing Sylvia during the second half of that week, likely on Thursday. Normally Sylvia “looked after Frieda meticulously,” but now Catherine was troubled to see that the “houseproud and clean” Sylvia was “in a strange and undecipherable state. The children’s playpen was filthy, the house chaotic.” Sylvia had scheduled a lunch date with her new editor at Heinemann, David Machin, on Monday, February 11, and asked Catherine to babysit. Catherine agreed.21
Lorna said that Sylvia phoned her on Thursday or Friday. “Obviously I was concerned about her, as was Catherine. She phoned me to say, ‘Look, Lorna, I don’t want you to worry about me. I’m all right.’ She said, ‘I’m fine, you musn’t worry, you must understand I’m fine.’ Of course I thought afterwards that she was saying goodbye—this is what I’m going to do and this is what I want to do….She was going to stay with friends over the weekend, she said. I think she had already made up her mind, but who knows. Maybe there were these flashes in and out—she would, she wouldn’t.” Lorna said she and Catherine were completely unaware of Sylvia’s other literary friends—the Macedos, the Beckers, and the Merwins. “She certainly made no attempt to put the friends together.”22 The Macedos and the Beckers, likewise, never heard about Lorna or Catherine.
Sylvia phoned Jillian Becker around four p.m. on Thursday and asked, with some urgency in her voice, if she could come to Islington with the children. (“Can I come at once?”) She told Jillian the children had had the measles but were now better.23 Jillian had a nanny and a large house—the next best thing to a hospital. Jillian told Sylvia to come right over, and she soon arrived at Mountfort Crescent, off Barnsbury Square. According to Jillian, Sylvia told her she felt “terrible” and went upstairs to lie down after a cup of tea.24 Two hours later, she came downstairs and told Jillian she would “rather not go home.”25 Jillian agreed—it was no trouble, for her two older children were spending the weekend with their father, her first husband, and she had two spare bedrooms. Jillian went back to Sylvia’s flat to collect her medication, clothes for the children, and two books—The Ha-Ha and Fromm’s The Art of Loving. She left a note for the milkman to stop delivering milk for one week.26
Jillian found the flat clean and tidy; Sylvia had obviously cleaned up after Catherine’s visit. (Indeed, Jillian said that Ted “confirmed” to them that Sylvia’s flat had been “in perfect order” on Monday, February 11. Plath’s manuscripts, he said, were “sorted and tidy and arranged.”)27 In the living room, Jillian picked up a small wooden box, marked “Poor Box,” with a slot for coins, displayed on a small shelf. Sylvia told her it had once belonged in Saint Peter’s Church in North Tawton. Upstairs, a sign that read, “QUIET! GENIUS AT WORK!” hung on the door of her bedroom study. The desk “was tidy, with very little on it: paper, pens in a jar, and one of the books she’d asked for.”28 Jillian found clothes for Sylvia and Nick but, curiously, very little for Frieda.
Suzette Macedo claimed that Jillian and Sylvia “didn’t know each other very well.” Suzette accused Jillian of writing her “out of the story” in her memoir about Sylvia’s last weekend, Giving Up, in an attempt to settle old scores from their South African days.29 Suzette’s own version of Sylvia’s last weekend differs from Jillian’s. Suzette remembered that Sylvia phoned her on Friday (though it
was probably Thursday), saying, “I’m at Jillian’s. Why don’t you come after work and join us here.” When Suzette arrived she found a “strange” scene. The children were upset—they “didn’t gel” with the nanny or Jillian’s young daughter, Madeleine. Suzette thought they sensed that something was wrong with their mother. Indeed, Suzette found Sylvia “in a terrible state.” Plath, sitting in a chair drinking tea, suddenly “went pale.” She broke into a sweat and said she had a migraine; she asked if she could go upstairs and lie down in a dark room. (In Jillian’s rendering, Sylvia left the room because she was upset by Suzette’s presence.)
Suzette tried to give the children a bath, but Frieda became hysterical, saying, “Where’s Mummy?” Suzette brought her to Sylvia, and she soon calmed down. “Ill though she was with this terrible headache…this blinding headache, she said, ‘Hellooo, my baaaby.’ I’ve never forgotten that,” Suzette said.30 Suzette finally gave Frieda a bath, then returned to Sylvia. Suzette remembered that when Jillian invited her to spend the night, Sylvia replied, “I must, without the au pair I cannot cope.”31
That night Jillian made chicken soup, steak, and potatoes, and brought the food up on a tray to Sylvia, who was staying in her daughter’s room. Sylvia ate with relish, as if she were back at Girl Scout camp. Her appetite pleased Jillian. (Gerry was in bed with a flu, though Jillian thought he may have been avoiding Sylvia’s emotional needs.) Sylvia had a long bath, then asked Jillian to stay with her once she was back in bed.32 She “talked bitterly” about Ted and Assia, and asked Jillian why David had been “so passive” about Assia’s adultery. Jillian told her she’d met the Wevills at parties from time to time, and she “couldn’t make either of them out.” She thought “Assia seemed to have nothing much to say.”33 She found David soft-spoken, “a gentle chap.”34 Sylvia had written to David about Ted and Assia’s affair shortly after she had thrown Ted out in July. She told him they “should meet, we must talk.”35 But the meeting never happened. Now Jillian told her that David had punched through a glass-paneled door when Assia told him she was leaving him for Ted. “That was all he did?” Sylvia responded.36 If this conversation took place the way Jillian remembered, then Sylvia learned, that weekend, that Assia had finally decided to leave her husband for Ted. The news would have shocked Sylvia, who, according to Ted’s notebook entries, continued to hope for a reconciliation.
That night Sylvia took what Jillian assumed were her sleeping pills around ten, though they didn’t seem to make her tired. She began “rambling” about people Jillian had never met—Dick Norton, Gordon Lameyer, Richard Sassoon—“as if they were mutual friends.”37 She spoke of wanting to take the children someplace warm, perhaps Spain. They needed to be in the sun, by the sea. Jillian assured her that she would take them all to Spain or Italy over the Easter holidays. “Easter—that’s a long way off,” Sylvia said. Then she spoke about how Ted had taken Assia to Spain. She talked about “that fatal day” when Assia had come to Court Green and destroyed the “ideal life” she and Ted had shared. Sylvia ranted about Assia “teetering in her high-heeled shoes, among the cowpats in the slushy fields,” a story Jillian knew was false, as Assia always wore flats. But the image fit; they both thought Assia “vain and shallow.” Jillian told Sylvia that Assia had come to one of her parties in the spring or summer of 1962 and asked to listen to a radio program of Plath and Hughes reading their poetry. “Sylvia nodded slowly as I told her this, as if to say Yes, that figures.”38
Sylvia spoke bitterly, too, of Aurelia, Olwyn, Ted, and his family. She was “not terribly coherent,” Jillian remembered, and she was skeptical of some of her stories—for instance, that when she held baby Nick in her arms for the first time, Ted “stormed around the house, shouting, ‘There is a usurper in the house.’ ” She also told Jillian that the Hugheses had made her so miserable at the Beacon one Christmas that “she ran out into the snow in her nightdress to get away from them.”39 Sylvia was angry at her father, whom she now conflated with Ted, and at Aurelia, for saying she would end up just like her. She feared that she would never finish her novel, which she told Jillian was about a potter, because she needed “acres of time” to write fiction, and she was “disappointed by the reception of The Bell Jar.”40 (When Jillian asked her whether it was “autobiographical,” she answered “rather evasively.”)41 She had once showed Jillian a letter she received from The New Yorker, rejecting her poems. They had asked her to explain the poems to them. “She was knocked sideways by such a request,” Jillian said. “There was this sense of not being appreciated.”42 Yet Sylvia had “no doubt that the poetry was first rate, that she was writing superbly.” Sylvia spoke, too, of shock therapy, “a horror to her,” Jillian remembered. She finally fell asleep around midnight. “When she was raving, the distance between us was unreachable.”43
Nick awoke around four a.m. Jillian prepared warm milk and Sylvia fed him. Jillian got him back to sleep. But Sylvia was wide awake again. She could not sleep and wanted to take what she called her “pep” pill because it took “hours” to work. (This was either her antidepressant or a preludin pill; both are part of the amphetamine family.) “This is always the worst time, this hour of the morning,” Jillian remembered her saying. Jillian made her tea and gave her the pill, then sat beside Sylvia’s bed in a high-backed chair.44 “She would close her eyes, but suddenly open them, and once half rose, saw that I was still there, and lay down again as if reassured by my presence.”45 Sylvia finally fell asleep between five and six a.m.
On Friday morning Sylvia woke at eight a.m., came downstairs, and said she “felt fine now” as the “pep” pill was working. She ate a hearty breakfast and then called a new au pair with whom she had made some kind of prior, hasty arrangement—perhaps through Lorna’s au pair. Sylvia was on the phone for half an hour “trying to persuade this German girl” to come, Jillian remembered, “but the girl apparently protested that she could not.”46 The prospect of managing the children on her own seems to have overwhelmed her, and she called Dr. Horder. Sylvia spoke with him for a long time.
She then passed the phone over to Jillian. Horder asked her how Plath seemed and whether she was taking her pills. He advised Jillian not to coddle her. “She must look after the children. She must feel that she’s absolutely necessary.” Jillian understood, and she tried to compel Sylvia to care for Frieda and Nick. But she seemed incapable of the most basic motherly duties like feeding, bathing, and changing diapers. “I’d wait for her to pick up a spoon, a sponge or whatever, but she didn’t.” At one point Sylvia realized that Jillian was in the middle of changing Nick’s dirty diaper and said, “Now that’s really beyond the call of duty. Let me do it.”47 But it was already done.
Despite some chronological disparities, all the accounts of Plath’s last week have one thing in common: she was not herself. She was up and down, “wobbly,” as Suzette remembered, tearful, standing for long periods at her window, sitting in a trance in her car.48 Her moods shifted quickly: she was at turns loving and hostile; she was forgetful; she stopped cooking and seemed suddenly incapable of caring for her children. Lorna remembered her that last week as “phased out….She looked exhausted, great circles under her eyes. She talked to me then about Ted and how it had gone all horribly wrong, but I didn’t know that she’d had post-natal depression after Nicholas, for instance, back in Devon. I didn’t know any of that. She didn’t talk about it.”49
To Ted and Trevor Thomas, Sylvia seemed at times drunk, out of it, slurring her words and lapsing back into an American accent. Hughes said that during the last three weeks of her life she kept saying, “I am full of God,” and “I keep being picked up by God.”50 She may have been referring to the blessings Father Carey was sending her way in his letters, but the language worried Hughes. Such talk from her—an atheist—was odd. He did not understand what she meant.51 Dr. Horder found her moods to be “so excessive” that he was sure her depression was biochemical. Jillian was alarmed by how many
pills Sylvia took during the nights she stayed and suspected that she may have been taking more than prescribed. Excessive dosage, combined with side effects that would result from mixing an antidepressant, codeine, Drinamyl, and other cold and flu medications, may explain Plath’s strange behavior. At the time, both Suzette and Jillian assumed that the pills were to blame, as the normally proud Sylvia was now talking in circles, shutting down, and asking for help. And there was Hughes’s recollection that she was taking a “tranquilising drug” at the time of her death, to which she was allergic. The effects of this potent drug cocktail on her emotions and her art can never be fully calculated; antidepressants were in their infancy in the early 1960s, and their interactions with other drugs were not well understood. Plath was not even under the care of a qualified psychiatrist but rather her general practitioner, Dr. Horder, who, while concerned and compassionate, did not possess a specialist’s knowledge of psychiatric drugs. As in August 1953, Plath was left to manage a severe depressive crisis almost entirely on her own.
On Friday, February 8, Sylvia left Jillian’s at about noon and returned alone to Fitzroy Road, where she had arranged to see Dr. Horder. She told Jillian “she must go, earlier than she’d thought” and would be back late. She asked Jillian if she would watch the children and then drove herself away.52 Before she left Jillian’s, she turned to Frieda, who was standing in the hallway, and said “I love you,” with strong feeling.53 The gesture moved Jillian, who had been worried by Sylvia’s uncharacteristic lack of attention toward her children. She had barely talked to them or played with them since she arrived, and she had shown no interest in Jillian’s daughter.
When Sylvia saw Dr. Horder that Friday, as Eric Walter White later wrote to Jack Sweeney, Horder was “so alarmed by what he found that he told her she must go into a home and he would arrange for a nurse to come to her house the following Monday at 9:00 a.m. to look after the children.”54 White’s letter suggests that the nurse was coming to care for the children full-time while Plath admitted herself into a hospital for a short stay—not that the nurse was supposed to help Plath with the children at home. After Plath’s death, Dr. Horder would tell the coroner that on that Friday “he became so worried as a result of a long talk with her that he spoke to three psychiatrists, trying to find a hospital bed for her. Two could not provide one, and although the third could, he did not think it would be suitable for her.”55 White’s account, which he likely heard from Hughes or someone in Hughes’s circle, dovetails with Horder’s testimony during the inquest after Plath’s death, in which he testified that he had found an opening for her at a hospital on Monday, February 11. (“I couldn’t get an admission before Monday, and I thought that would be all right.”)56
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