In 1976, Aurelia identified the problems of biographical readings in a public lecture for the Authors’ Series Talk of the Wellesley College Club:
Sylvia developed her triple literary dictum, which she told me to keep in mind whenever I read any of her creations.
First: The manipulation of experience
Second: Fusion of characters (creation of composite characters)
Third: Her firm belief that “art was a rearrangement of truth.”
She had a fantastic memory…and a developing psychic insight that she tried to deny, tossing it off as coincidental awareness, but would connect a fragment of her past experience, perhaps one from very early childhood, with imaginary events or universal themes or historic happenings, often resulting in a bizarre, yet strangely enough, credible combination that fused and came alive.136
Her tone was less neutral when she spoke openly to friends about her daughter’s writing. She told her friend Richard Larschan, “I had written her a very, very affectionate letter for her 30th birthday, and she wrote that stinking poem. She wrote a complete lie in that terrible ‘Medusa.’ Why she ever wrote anything so cruel…”137 She felt similarly about “The Disquieting Muses.” She once told a biographer that the only Sylvia she knew was the “Sylvia revealed in her own letters.”138 The private self of Plath’s journals was unknown to her. To Miriam she wrote in 1966, “There is always in my heart the memory of a healthy, bouncing baby who, when she could first form words, greeted me each morning, standing erect in her crib, shouting, ‘Happy Day, Mummy! Happy Day!’ ”139
Aurelia was proud of her daughter’s achievements, but she never escaped her legacy. In 1984, ten years before her death, Aurelia moved into North Hill, an upscale retirement home in Newton, Massachusetts. She felt she had trouble making friends because of The Bell Jar. Bill and Mildred Norton also lived in North Hill, which made her “uncomfortable.”140 Hughes had predicted that Aurelia would have a difficult time coming to terms with Sylvia’s portrayal of her in the novel. In the late eighties, he wrote of the painful dynamic between mother and daughter in his “Trial” sequence:
Surely you were unjust to your mother.
Surely she has never found, or suspected,
One fault in her care, in her anguish
Over protecting you.
Yes, you knew that. Long & surely
You had assessed her sacrifice. Yes.
And you knew you had to protect her.
From the behaviour of the dangerous child
Buried in you. Protect her from the heart
You had given your father.
You knew you had to. But you failed to.141
Aurelia wrote to the biographer Paul Alexander in 1983 that her daughter’s “loss is a constant pain, one that no critic of her writing has ever seemed to sense fully.” Yet, she added, “I find some measure of solace in the thought that her genius, evident in both her poetry and prose, will endure.”142
Aurelia Plath never lost her faith in humankind’s potential for goodness. “And as you and I believe,” she wrote Miriam in the depths of grief, “whatever the cost, the awareness, the leaping up of the heart must remain with us.”143
* * *
“I THINK WE CAN NOW reconstruct what happened,” Eric Walter White wrote to Jack Sweeney shortly after Plath’s suicide. “Recently her mental condition started to deteriorate as a result of the break-up of her marriage with Ted. Or the marriage with Ted started to break up as a result of the deterioration of her mental condition. Perhaps she wrote The Bell Jar as an explanation for her friends. Perhaps the very act of writing it and reliving those dreaded months of mental breakdown ten years ago helped open the wound.”144 And so it began. How could such a “charming, brilliant woman,” as White called her, leave behind her two young children at the height of her career? Friends and family thought there had been a mistake. One speculated that she had been murdered. Aurelia initially told friends and neighbors that Sylvia had died of pneumonia.145 Anita Helle, Otto Plath’s great-niece, would hear from her family, growing up, that “Plath committed suicide because she was exhausted and discouraged from having had the flu too long.”146 Wilbury Crockett initially refused to believe that Sylvia had killed herself.147 When he came to terms with the truth, he wrote to Aurelia, “Not a day goes by that does not bring the question—‘Why?’ I grieve more than I can say.”148
Though Hughes and Alvarez, the two men at the center of the last years of Plath’s life, later changed their minds about their initial theory that she wanted to be saved, Alvarez never believed the argument that Plath had “a sick and fragile personality” and was destined to repeat her 1953 suicide attempt. “Edge,” he noted, “is not the work of someone who is ‘out of her mind’; or governed by rogue ‘brain chemistry.’ ”149 He and Hughes came to believe that she had tapped too deeply into her creative powers, releasing emotions she was not equipped to handle. “A combination of forces, some chosen deliberately, others chosen for her, had brought her to the point where she was able to write as from her true centre about the forces that really moved her: destructive, volatile, demanding, a world apart from everything she had been trained to admire,” Alvarez wrote.150 For both men, Plath was defeated not by depression but by quasi-literary forces. Her grief for her unmourned father “came flooding out,” said Alvarez, and conquered her.151 Hughes, in his writings, portrayed his wife’s suicidal drive as a dark, subconscious force that engulfed her as she dove deeper and deeper into the mausoleum of her grief for Otto. Both understood Plath’s death in Romantic, Freudian terms: a “genius” artist overcome by her demons, lost on her courageous journey to the center of the Minotaur’s lair.
Privately, Hughes was less sure. In the days immediately after, he blamed himself. He told Olwyn in the spring of 1963 that he had stifled his behavior with Sylvia to such an extent that his resentment exploded in a “stupid act of will” that was “the ruin of Sylvia.”152 Yet he soon blamed others, especially Sylvia’s “acquaintances” like Suzette and Jillian, who “drove her over” and “disturbed” her mind with “gossip.”153 He told Jillian and Gerry Becker they “should have kept her another day or two” at their house.154
Later, he began to consider more seriously the role mental illness had played. “Everybody seems sympathetic,” he told Olwyn in February 1963. “Sylvia didn’t exactly conceal her temperament.”155 Roughly two months after her suicide, he wrote in his notebook:
How much did depression—from Health, exhaustion, etc,—instead of foreboding, promote the final disaster: crystallizing into pronouncements absolute in character….How much did superstition set the stage?
How powerfully previous examples compelled the course of the disaster: Her obsession with P. Geagh’s wife.156
How general ideas, general notions—especially psycholog. ones, Jung etc, governed my actions: like edicts. The individuation idea; my ideas concerning her dependence & its effect on me.
How much was she my test—which I failed. How much was I hers.
How absolute her pride was. How absolute my inability to imagine she might be deceiving me in her pride. Her forcing the divorce—that was deceiving herself.
Horror of the person who has seen what we are ashamed of & tried to hide.157
Hughes never forgave Ruth Beuscher for persuading Plath to seek a divorce in September 1962. After Plath’s death, he found a marked-up copy of Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving in her flat. Near her inscription of “November 9, 1962,” on the frontispiece, either he or Assia wrote “Sept. 1963” and listed the pages Plath had aggressively underlined.158 These passages were about sadism, masochism, and womanizing, and all seemed to accuse Hughes. He later learned that Dr. Beuscher had recommended the book to Sylvia. Dr. Beuscher, for her part, recklessly revealed Plath’s early medical records to at least two biographers in the 1970s.
&nb
sp; By the mid-1980s, Hughes would tell Anne Stevenson that “the key factor” in Plath’s suicide was the antidepressant, which, Aurelia had told him, had been tried on Sylvia after her first suicide attempt and that “it induced such an extreme suicidal reaction, in the gap between doses,” that she had been instructed by Sylvia’s doctors “never to allow it to be given to S[ylvia] under any circumstances.”159 This explanation was a far cry from his earlier psychoanalytical approaches. “It’s too facile to regard her death as some inevitable culmination of her inspiration,” he wrote Stevenson in 1986. “Her death was the remotest fluke, an unbelievably freakish sequence of unlucky coincidences.”160 He tried as best he could to salvage light from darkness. In a tattered notebook in the British Library lies an early draft of his poem “Remission” (then called “Delivering Frieda”), in which he asked,
Why did you abandon it? Did her birth
Give you freedom to die? Did her existence
Shed you so utterly? Did you smuggle
Every good thing of yourself, every joyful
And happy thing of yourself, out with her—?
Her body is the symmetry
Of your dying & death.
She has grown. In her you have grown.
Again different. But the flare of your fingers
Has come back, your joyful beseeching hope
That the good things will happen, has come back—161
* * *
SYLVIA’S FIRST WORDS on awakening from her suicide attempt in 1953 offered an explanation for her act. “It was my last act of love,” she said. She claimed that she had wanted to spare her family from the burdens and humiliations of her disease, and protect herself from a life locked away in the dark bowels of a charity hospital. The second time, the desire to spare her children, and herself, from the ravages of depression was more urgent. She knew Dr. Horder would be admitting her to a psychiatric hospital and this time there would be no limousine to McLean, and no sympathetic young woman psychiatrist like Ruth Beuscher. Sylvia could not afford an expensive private hospital, and she was too proud to ask Mrs. Prouty for help again. She knew Aurelia would bankrupt herself trying to arrange private care. In her February 4 letter to Dr. Beuscher, she claimed that her feelings of animosity toward Ted had receded. It was depression, and its “cures,” which terrified her: “What appals [sic] me is the return of my madness, my paralysis, my fear & vision of the worst—cowardly withdrawal, a mental hospital, lobotomies.”162
In America, free psychiatric care meant substandard care: the dreaded state hospital of her nightmares. Sylvia would have feared “Dickensian” psychiatric treatment in England even more than she had in America, which had a comparatively more progressive approach toward mental illness in the 1960s. She liked and trusted Dr. Horder, but he was not a psychiatrist. Alvarez remembered that Plath had been reluctant to schedule a consultation with a proper psychiatrist, as Horder had advised. “Having been bitten once by American psychiatry, she hesitated for some time before writing for an appointment. But her depression did not lift, and eventually the letter was sent.”163 When she finally did agree to see a psychiatrist, she asked Horder to find her a woman. This was, presumably, the initial psychiatrist he had tried to contact at St. George’s Hospital. But the female psychiatrist’s letter never arrived at Fitzroy Road. The possibility of admittance to a mental hospital would have likely meant that an unknown, male doctor would be making treatment decisions for her—treatment that might include electroshock.
Alvarez, in his memoir, hints at what Plath herself suggested many times—that her disastrous round of shock treatment at Valley Head may have left her with post-traumatic stress disorder. Aurelia alluded to this condition in a letter to a biographer, writing that Sylvia’s “obsessive return to the period of emotional confusion and the horror of that first shock treatment” frightened her: “I so longed for her to free herself from these memories.”164 Hughes later wrote to a correspondent that the “mismanaged” shock treatment “goes straight to the fundamental catastrophe—as she herself understood it.” The experience had “pervaded everything she was & did.”165 Plath’s terror of depression was one of the cruelest symptoms of depression itself. It is likely no accident that she killed herself on the very day she was supposed to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital—“a home,” as Eric Walter White put it—where she had every reason to assume she would lose control of her autonomy.166 Alvarez recognized the appeal of suicide in such a terrifying context. “Some kind of minimal freedom—the freedom to die in one’s own way and in one’s own time—has been salvaged from the wreck of all those unwanted necessities.”167
* * *
SYLVIA PLATH SOUGHT ALWAYS the light of the mind. That light was her lodestar in the face of depression, when all went “cold and planetary.”168 She tried to feed this clarion flame with literature, art, philosophy, drama, travel, love—anything to prevent its extinguishment. Plath told friends that it was the final dimming of that light, the threat of exile from her own person, that had led her to attempt suicide in 1953. “When you’re crazy, that’s all you ever are,” she told Ellie Friedman in 1954.169 Plath’s last letter to Dr. Beuscher reveals that she thought she was on the verge of another breakdown that would leave her permanently incapacitated. The prospect of losing her sanity seems to have made her consider suicide sometime in late January, when she burst into Trevor Thomas’s flat in tears and told him that she did not want to die.
But there may have been a stronger impetus for Plath’s final act—stronger, even, than depression: maternal love. In “Delivering Frieda,” an early draft of Hughes’s poem “Remission,” he wrote,
That last poem you wrote designed, modelling your death,
You planned to take
“She is taking them with her.”
Poetic justice crossed it out cancelled poetic frenzy.
You went on alone. Now erase delete
That line utterly. Reabsorb
Into unbeing every letter of it—
Let your last sea-cold kiss evaporate
From the salt affliction.170
Hughes was talking about the first draft of “Edge,” where Plath had written, and then crossed out, “She is taking them with her.” But he was also referring to something else. According to Ted and Olwyn, who both read Sylvia’s last journal, Sylvia had contemplated taking her children “with her” when she committed suicide.171 This was one of the reasons Hughes claimed to have burned part of Plath’s last journal.172
Thoughts of harming one’s children are symptomatic of severe postpartum depression, known as postpartum psychosis, which in 20 percent of cases can last “beyond the first year after delivery.”173 Mothers with a history of depression are at much greater risk of developing postpartum depression, as Dr. Beuscher had warned Sylvia in the late 1950s. Plath had a history of such psychosis; she had fantasized about killing her mother during her first breakdown, and had told her friend Catherine Frankfort that she thought she was suffering from postpartum depression in the winter of 1962–63.174 “I am terrified by this dark thing / That sleeps in me,” Plath wrote in “Elm.” “All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.” She may have used what she thought were her last remnants of lucidity and free will to protect her children from herself. For Sylvia Plath knew what happened when the light went out. She had tapped that bottom. She had been there.
POSTSCRIPT
A Poet’s Epitaph
What can I tell you
Of the life after death?
Of how the year old boy cries all the time,
And cries as the spoon is pushed into his mouth
With disembodied hand
Of how the three year old girl is pale
With the wound she cannot
Touch or see or feel1
—Ted Hughes
When Sylvia Plath disappeared in August 1953, more than 250 newspaper articles covered the search for the missing Smith beauty. After her death in February 1963, there was just one brief news mention of her “tragic” suicide in the Saint Pancras Chronicle, buried deep amid articles about shoplifters and road improvements.2 The article described the “30-year-old authoress Mrs. Sylvia Plath Hughes, wife of one of Britain’s best known modern poets, Ted Hughes.” Gas poisoning was a common way for women to kill themselves in mid-century London.3 The death of a thirty-year-old mother did not merit much attention.
Al Alvarez changed that. On February 17 he published an anguished essay on Plath, titled “A Poet’s Epitaph,” in The Observer. Below a photograph of Plath holding her infant daughter were four astonishing poems: “Edge,” “The Fearful,” “Kindness,” and “Contusion.”4 Alvarez wrote that Plath “died suddenly” at age thirty and that the four poems were all written within a few days of her death. The photo of the young mother seemed to move readers as much as the poems themselves. On the day the article appeared, Nathaniel Tarn wrote in his diary, “A shock, not because of the poems which have moved into Hughes’s latest style, but because of P’s face. Is it lovely? Yes almost, though perhaps not in detail. It is v. young & fresh & untortured.”5
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