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In March 1965, Assia gave birth in London to a little girl, Alexandra, whom she called Shura. Though she was still living with David, she listed Ted as the father on the birth certificate. Assia delighted in her daughter, and she left David for good in February 1966 when she, Ted, Frieda, Nick, and Shura moved to a cottage named Doonreagan in the west of Ireland, not far from Richard Murphy. The move was supposed to have been permanent—a new start—but in May 1966, Assia returned to Court Green with Ted to help care for his ailing parents.
As the years passed, Ted promised Assia that they would buy a home of their own together, but he never followed through. Still, Assia could not give him up—not even when she was living at Court Green with his parents, who sometimes refused to speak to her. Hughes was “One of God’s best creatures,” “the beautiful Anatomical Man,” she wrote in her journal.103 There seemed to be no way to live a life of dignity with Ted, and no way to live a fulfilled life without him. She sensed he favored Frieda and Nicholas over Shura, as if he never quite believed she was his. Assia took to spending days in bed in her nightgown or bathrobe as her depression deepened.
Alarmed, Hughes drew up a list of daily domestic duties for Assia; she was to wake at eight o’clock every morning and get dressed right away, cook new recipes each week, play with the children, and teach them German. He hoped the “orders” would rouse her from her depressive stupor—he likely knew of Assia’s previous suicide attempts—but to Assia the list was just another reminder that she was not Sylvia, neither a model hausfrau nor a great poet. Jillian remembered,
Sylvia’s death “decided” her relationship with Ted as it had not been really decided before….With Sylvia’s death came (again) Romantic Inevitability—the black destiny to be lived out. She received, and bore, the responsibility for Sylvia’s suicide. Ted was tragic; she was evil….She accepted it—penance and identity all in one….She was miserable in Devon….Olwyn went after her as she’d gone after Sylvia only Assia had nothing to fight back with—no intelligence, no sense of entitlement….He would neither be with Assia nor release her.104
According to Ted’s friend Keith Sagar, Ted had told Assia he couldn’t marry her until his mother passed away. Edith had “so loved Sylvia,” and marriage to Assia would upset her too much.105 Edith’s health was very fragile by the mid-1960s, and Assia returned to London alone with Shura in 1967. That year Ted and Assia tried to repair their relationship, to little avail. By then, Ted had begun seeing two other local women in Devon, Brenda Hedden and Carol Orchard.
Ruth Fainlight had become close to Assia in the years since Sylvia’s suicide—closer even than she had been to Sylvia—and invited Assia to Christmas in 1968 when she and Shura had nowhere to go. “Everything was awful for her. She said afterward she was going to kill herself at Christmas, but because I had invited her and was so nice, she didn’t do it for a few months. Of course I didn’t know that….I felt so sorry for Assia. When I met her she was the demon woman, but I didn’t sustain that. Then I got to know her, and I liked her. She moved me. She moved me very much.”106 Assia had translated, with Ted, some of the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai’s poems. Ruth knew Amichai well, and she remembered how impressed he had been by Assia’s translations, which Assia and Ted read over the BBC. But the collaboration’s success was not enough to hold the couple together.
The novelist William Trevor saw Assia a month before her suicide. By this time she was living with Shura in Clapham Common. “She’d had enough of poets,” Trevor wrote.
For the first time she called herself a displaced person, tumbled about by circumstances, and war; for the first time she confessed she had created the woman she seemed to be, teaching herself an upper-class English voice and making the most of her looks, using them as a stepping stone whenever the chance offered. She spoke of her Russian blood, of childhood in Israel, and then being shipped away to Canada and the first of her marriages. The hours she talked that night near Waterloo Station were like hours spent in a cinema….she turned up the collar of a smart tweed coat and for a single instant seemed weary, as though she’d talked too long and said too much. Defeat, suddenly there, distorted her features, dragging at the corners of her mouth.
“Actually I’m afraid,” she murmured, before she smiled again and went away.107
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IN MARCH 1969, Assia and Ted journeyed north. He read his poems at a Manchester television studio, and Assia hoped that in the following days they would find a house for themselves and the three children. But after the reading, they had a painful conversation in the pub. Hughes admitted that he could not commit to her. In her diary on March 20, Assia wrote, “ ‘It’s Sylvia—it’s because of her’—I can’t answer that. No more than if it were a court sentence.” Assia felt she must “die, soon. But execute yourself and your little self efficiently. But I can’t believe it—any more than I could believe hearing of my own death.”108 The following day Hughes called on his parents, who had moved back to Heptonstall in the fall of 1968. He visited his mother, now in the hospital, and then returned to the Beacon to spend the night with his father. He left Assia in Haworth, where she procured a bottle of sleeping pills. The village’s literary associations were painful for her: this was Brontë country, where Ted and Sylvia had played Cathy and Heathcliff on their moorland walks to Wuthering Heights. Jillian said that Assia “told people Sylvia was beckoning her.”109
Despite their troubles of the day before, Ted picked Assia up the next day, and they looked at some houses in the area. While she fantasized about living together as a family, he found each residence unsuitable. He said good-bye to her in Manchester as she boarded a train back to London, alone. Assia’s au pair remembered her looking downcast upon her return; “Mr. Hughes,” the au pair said, “didn’t want her anymore.”110
The following day, March 23, 1969, Assia called Ted at Court Green shortly after receiving papers finalizing her divorce from David. She told Ted they were “just like a bad habit” and that they had “better separate for good.” He had failed to give her the “hope” she needed that their relationship could work.111 That night, Assia gassed herself and four-year-old Shura, whom she sedated with sleeping pills, in her London kitchen. Ruth Fainlight, by then one of Assia’s closest friends, said, “She just didn’t understand the possibility of living without a man. She wasn’t equipped to.”112
Ted arranged her funeral and cremation. “Our life together was so complicated with old ghosts, and dozens of near-separations over the years, but we belonged together so completely and so deeply,” he wrote Assia’s sister after her suicide.113 He struggled with guilt and grief. “If I’d put a ring on her finger, she’d still be alive,” he told Richard Murphy.114 Nathaniel Tarn, who had watched the “Greek tragedy” unfold and had half foreseen the consequences, was appalled that no one said Kaddish for her.
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Edith Hughes died shortly after Assia’s suicide. Hughes would always believe that the shock killed her. David Compton remembered Hughes saying around this time, “Everything I touch dies.”115
In 1970, Ted married Carol Orchard, who helped raise Frieda and Nicholas. The children eventually went to boarding school. Frieda became a poet and painter; Nicholas a professor in the School of Fisheries and Ocean Science at the University of Alaska. But Nicholas suffered, like his mother, from debilitating depressions. In March 2009, Nicholas Hughes hanged himself in Fairbanks, Alaska. “We say that every suicide in a family makes another one more likely,” Dr. de Marneffe, who had known Sylvia at McLean, later said of Nicholas. “His mother was a model one.”116
Hughes was all too aware of this dangerous familial inheritance. He worried about the trauma and the repercussions of Alvarez’s intimate portrait of Plath’s last days in The Savage God: “you somehow didn’t remember how history tries to repeat itself even without human help, it didn�
��t occur to you that her children are left with an even more dangerous situation than hers & with all her vulnerabilities.”117
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THOSE WHO SAW SYLVIA during her final months—and even those who did not—would spend years racked with guilt, wondering what more they could have done. Olive Prouty felt that she had done all she could, but it was not enough. “I am so, so sorry,” she wrote Aurelia in August 1963, “that you should bear it all again—her suffering and despair. You are the one who is paying the price.” In the weeks immediately after Plath’s suicide, Prouty blamed Hughes. “She wasn’t sunk in deep despair when she found the apartment—furnished it—took the children there. It was after Ted came back into her life again—or tried to—that the blackness returned.—And when illness sapped her strength.” Prouty wrote of the group of poems published in The New Yorker in August 1963, “what a murderer it makes him out to be—and what a poet it makes her out to be.”118
Ruth Fainlight learned of Plath’s death in The Observer, in an article written by Alvarez, a week before she was to return to England from Morocco. “I was absolutely devastated,” she said.119 In a later poem, she wrote, “That poetic meeting never happened, yet / I dream about it. What more to say? Everyone / knows the story’s ending.”120
Elizabeth Compton also learned of Plath’s death from Alvarez’s Observer article. “I was absolutely appalled….I had no idea she was so desperate….I rang up Alvarez and I said, ‘This is dreadful. Is it really true?’ And he was crying and said, ‘What a waste, what a waste.’ ”121 Elizabeth then told her husband, David, who recalled, “I was unsurprised….Just the level of intensity with which everything happened in her life—suicide was somehow an essential part of it. What else had she left?”122
Sylvia’s old Smith friend Ellie Friedman was staying in Oxford in February 1963 and was excited to reunite with Sylvia, who had given her the phone number at Court Green. She called, but “the phone just rang and rang.” When she learned what had happened, she remembered the dark confidences Sylvia had shared with her nearly a decade before about her horror of electroshock therapy: “Her terror was that it would happen again. And it might happen again, but she had a safety. If it happens, she said, ‘I will kill myself. I would not hesitate.’ If that’s where she got to, there was nothing to save her from being committed again and having to go through electroshock therapy….There is no choice. It is like the last stage of a cancer of a mind. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’ve been made crazy by the drugs….I don’t think the world as we know it knows what mental illness is. They understand panic attacks, they understand anxiety, they understand stress. This is a whole different thing. This is somebody walking off a cliff and falling and smashing their brain. And it happened before to her and it happened again to her. No. She cannot live through it.”123
Marcia Brown Plumer was devastated, but she was not shocked. “Many people become depressed when they’re physically ill. They haven’t the energy to cope with ordinary life which, in Sylvia’s case, was not ordinary. Having seen her feeling despairing and sunk, just stricken as an ordinarily charming, buoyant, creative, busy eighteen-year-old, and just totally undone by a cold, I then translated that sort of thing into her [later] reaction.”124 Another of Sylvia’s Smith friends, Janet Salter Rosenberg, felt differently. “I was furious. I had never been so angry at hearing about somebody’s death. Obviously she was very sick. But she’d been there before, and she had survived.”125
Brian Cox, who had published Plath’s work in the Critical Quarterly, was teaching a tutorial at the University of Hull when he received the call from Tony Dyson. “I found it almost unbelievable. I was too overcome to continue with the tutorial and asked the students to leave. I sat in my room, very still, too conscious of the silence. I kept thinking of Judge Brack’s absurd remark after Hedda Gabler shot herself: ‘People don’t do such things.’ ”126
Anthony Thwaite, Louis MacNeice, and some other men were having a drink at a pub near the BBC’s Broadcasting House when Douglas Cleverdon walked in, “enormously shaken,” and told them about Plath’s death. One of the men at the table made an appalling remark (“women poets, what do you expect?”). MacNeice “rounded on the man” and told him to shut up. Thwaite felt “colossal shock” that this “quick,” “capable, social” person he had grown to know through her BBC work had committed suicide.127 Edward Lucie-Smith took a harder view. “Sylvia’s suicide more than most suicides was a calculated act of revenge….it was in the end effective.”128 Richard Murphy, too, felt her suicide was “an unforgiving blow aimed through herself at Ted.”129
On March 4, 1963, Aurelia wrote a letter to The Observer thanking Sylvia’s friends and neighbors for their help. She ended, “Those who systematically and deliberately destroyed her know who they are.”130 Aurelia never sent the letter. By the time she published Letters Home, Aurelia ascribed her daughter’s suicide to “some darker day than usual.” Lorna Secker-Walker agreed: “One must think of her suicide as a moment of madness, and not really relevant to her life, in a sense. Not what her life was about, really.”131
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Aurelia ended an early draft of Letters Home with three lines from “Elm” that seemed to predict her own torment:
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
Nearly a year after Sylvia’s death, Aurelia told her friend Miriam Baggett, “There are not many who realized the rare treasure I had in my relationship with Sylvia and, therefore, few have any conception of the depth and scope of the loss.”132 Two years later, she spoke more candidly about her grief. She was facing her first spring in five years without seeing Frieda and Nick, and Warren lived three hours away in Westchester County, New York, where he worked at IBM. She had nursed her father through his final years, as he lost his mind to dementia, and had not told him about Sylvia’s death. At times she had wished for him to comfort her, but by then, “he was the child, clinging to my hand; and in holding it, I did, at least, feel his love.”133 Now she was on her own in the house where she had once lived with her parents and children, and the solitude was becoming hard to bear. She could function well enough at Boston University when she was teaching others. As she wrote to Miriam,
When I am alone…it is so difficult for me to organize my tasks, to accomplish anything, to concentrate. I often just dissolve into violent weeping, feeling the past crowding in upon me with the accumulated tragedies of the years. Oh, I lecture myself, chiding myself—my health is good; I have my sight; I am blessed having Warren reasonably free of being drafted for this war that just seems senseless to me. I hear his voice weekly over the phone.
It just happens that all my friends here have either husbands still and/or children and grandchildren about them. I feel at times like the Ancient Mariner, walking among fulfilled people with an invisible, but very weighty, albatross about my neck!
Three months later, she told Miriam life had become a “nightmare” as she dealt with Ted and The Bell Jar: “this guilt-ridden man, publishing what should never have seen the light of day, to ‘establish a fund for the children’ and, of course, may thereby damage them irreparably….It is taking all my faith, all my strength to work on seeing ‘Life steadily and to see it whole.’ ”134
Aurelia confided to Miriam, too, about her anxiety regarding the children, especially Nick. “Frieda could talk and question: Nick could not—nor can sufficiently yet, and he is a bewildered frustrated child.” She worried that Olwyn, with no children of her own and rather “bohemian,” was the wrong person to raise them. Aurelia’s siblings urged her not to spend her hard-earned savings on transatlantic trips, but she was desperate to stay in her grandchildren’s lives. “Somehow I must manage to go over again. They must gradually come to understand that their mother’s people exist, that they love them, and tha
t we would always be ready to make a home for them with us.” Thoughts of Frieda and Nick kept her alive, she said. Earlier in life, over a fifteen-year period, she had faced the prospect of dying when she suffered internal hemorrhages, but Robert Browning’s poem “Prospice” had seen her through. Her experience, as she described it, sounds close to Plath’s in “Tulips”: “it was always ‘one fight more’ for the sake of my children. I kept their faces before me, struggling against that temptation to let myself go with the ebbing tide. In other ways, it is still ‘one fight more,’ the reason not defined, even within me, but the dim sense that maybe, maybe those two little ones across the sea might need me.”
Privately, Aurelia blamed Sylvia’s death on Ted, whose letters to her at Indiana University are full of her angry marginalia. But later she softened her stance and shifted blame to Dr. Beuscher, whom Ted would also come to blame. Aurelia was angry at her daughter, too. In the margin of Judith Kroll’s book on Plath’s poetry, which Kroll sent to her in the mid-seventies, Aurelia noted that she had always tried to foster her daughter’s independence—not so that Sylvia could be free of her, but so that she could free herself from Sylvia. Near a discussion of Plath’s poem “Medusa,” Aurelia scribbled, “And I worked constantly to free her & encouraged every act of independence! I worked to be free of her & at least live my life—not to be drawn into the complexities & crises of hers. I loved spending time with the children—but wanted freedom which Sylvia refused to grant. She, in summer ’62 showed me a house where she wished me to retire—in Eng!!” In another section of Kroll’s book, Plath’s distraught mother wrote, “I sent her to camp, let her go to Smith instead of Wellesley College, rejoiced in her Fulbright!! I wanted to be free at last!”135
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