4
“Two rooms, each with a big bay window overlooking rooftops, chimney pots, mosquito trees, and the blue of the Charles & the Harvard Bridge. . . . At my right, the pruned & plumed trees of Louisburg Square, at my left, the towering structure of the estimable John Hancock building. . . .” So began Plath’s description of Boston, her colorful language reflecting her love of the city, in a letter to Lynne Lawner. Since they owned no car, Plath continued, she walked everywhere— from the docks to Hanover Street to Blockstone Street, which “outdoes anything I’ve seen in England & Europe.”
Plath’s first two weeks in her new apartment at 9 Willow Street were so hectic and event-filled (among other things, there was a visit from Luke Myers) that they seemed to evaporate. Before long, Plath relegated herself to a daily routine of studying languages and writing, but by the end of September, she had become impatient with her inability to write at the level she wanted. She also worried about money, even though in September alone Ted earned upwards of one thousand dollars by selling poems to magazines and winning first prize in a poetry competition in England sponsored by the Guinness Brewery.
Because of her financial concerns, in early October Plath registered at a Boston employment agency. On her first job interview, she landed the position of part-time secretary at Massachusetts General Hospital’s adult psychiatric clinic, the same facility to which she had been admitted after her breakdown in the summer of 1953. Her duties included answering the telephone, assisting doctors, and typing patients’ records. Working again, she had an excuse for not writing. Yet, as the days passed, she drifted into another depression. She could not churn out fiction at the rate she had planned, and poems came sporadically, if at all. Even the appearance of “Night Walk” in The New Yorker on October 11 did not help. In time, Plath sought targets on whom she could vent the anger. She complained to Ted about money, his poor hygiene—she could not abide his dirty hair, his ragged fingernails, his disinclination for bathing—and her inability to become pregnant, something she now desperately wanted. In response, Ted either ignored her or, once again, accused her of nagging. Her unhappiness over her failure to conceive was self-evident. Her disgust with Ted, especially considering how physically attracted to him she had been when they first met, was more difficult to explain. It would seem her troubled emotional state had affected the very way she viewed the people whom she most loved.
Ted was not her only victim. She also attacked Aurelia—privately, not to her face—and came to consider her one cause of her depression. To help alleviate some of her emotional pain, Sylvia requested private sessions with Ruth Barnhouse, her McLean psychiatrist, then practicing in Boston. Barnhouse readily agreed and even lowered her regular fee to five dollars per session so that Plath, always strapped for money, could afford the therapy which Barnhouse realized she badly needed.
From the first session, Barnhouse forced Plath to examine the feelings she had for her husband, mother, and—most important—father. In early December, after they had discussed Aurelia at length, Barnhouse told Sylvia: / give you permission to hate your mother As soon as Barnhouse had said the words, or so it seemed, Sylvia began to re-evaluate Aurelia. Casting both Aurelia’s motives and her own reactions to them in loosely Freudian terms, Sylvia decided that her mother was a chronic worrier who agonized about everything—the man Sylvia married, Sylvia’s yearly finances, how she and Ted would support children. It was Aurelia’s worrying, Sylvia decided, that made her angry. And repressed anger, Sylvia learned from Barnhouse, leads to depression. To Sylvia, this explained why she had become chronically depressed. As she sat through her weekly sessions, Sylvia actually began using the phrase “I hate my mother” to describe the way she felt about Aurelia.
Around the Christmas holidays, a time of year when one often thinks about family, Sylvia began to wonder why she felt that her mother did not love her when through the years so much practical evidence existed to indicate that she did. She might hate her mother, Sylvia wrote in her journal the morning after she had welcomed her into her apartment for Christmas, but that wasn’t all. “I pity and love her too.” In fact, though she no doubt disapproved of much of her mother’s behavior, in particular her recent compulsion to offer unwanted advice, Sylvia did not harbor anything as strong as hate for Aurelia. Anger, impatience, resentment—yes; but on some level she could not hate the person in her life to whom she had been closest.
In their late-December sessions, Plath and Barnhouse addressed Plath’s writers block. Since moving to Boston, Sylvia had not even attempted the novel she had hoped to finish by Christmas; the random poem she turned out hardly encouraged her. Again, Sylvia wrote in her journal, the answer to her problem seemed to lie in Freud, specifically his Mourning and Melancholia. In his work, Freud used a vampire metaphor to suggest that an overbearing person—in Sylvias case, her mother—was guilty of sapping the ego of a lesser person, who was often injured by this behavior. When Aurelia had voiced dissatisfaction over Sylvia’s quitting her job at Smith, she had indirectly implied that Sylvia could not make a living as a writer. In effect, she was willing Sylvia’s writer’s block to prove her—Aurelia—right. For Sylvia, the solution was obvious: she had to write in order to defy her mother. Finally, she did. Encouraged by the publication of her poem “Second Winter” in The Ladies’ Home Journal and the purchase of three poems by The London Magazine, and inspired by the case histories that she had typed at the psychiatric clinic earlier in the fall (she had quit the job after two months), Plath tapped into subject matter— suicide and mental illness—from which she produced the short story “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams”—the best she would ever write.
In mid-December, she and Ted attended a Truman Capote reading. At this time, Capote, who had lived in Northampton in the late forties when he had had an aflFair with Newton Arvin, one of Sylvia’s Smith professors, was settling into the fame that books like Other Voices, Other Rooms and the recently published Breakfast at Tiffany’s had brought him. Plath responded to Capote with a mixture of emotions. She admired his work, yet felt jealousy over his fame, which in a perverse way impelled her to try to write even more. Ted hated, Sylvia observed, “the homosexual part of [Capote] with more than usual fury.” Though she saw this, she did not speculate what Ted’s attitude revealed, nor did she specify what kind of man is threatened by another man’s obvious displays of the feminine side of his personality.
“Second Winter,” Plath’s poem in the December 1958 Ladies’ Home Journal, is spoken by a narrator who realizes that her love is “gone.” When this poem appeared, Sylvia’s own romantic life was floundering. Lately, she and Ted had been arguing more than usual, although these fights had not become physical. Ted had recently humiliated Sylvia in front of Marcia and Mike Plummer; he accused her of refusing to sew buttons on his shirts and of tearing up his worn-out socks. Later, in private, when Sylvia demanded to know why he had degraded her in front of her friends, Ted told her that by scolding her he hoped to force her to perform these minor tasks in the future. On a broader level, Sylvia had come to believe that much of their friction derived from her (and Ted’s) fear of running out of money. If she suggested to him that he should find a job, though, Ted became angiy. In therapy, Sylvia had made one major breakthrough regarding her relationship with Ted. After considering why she had become so furious with him in Northampton when he did not meet her on her last day of class, she confided in her journal: he was aware of her love for him, but he wasn’t there for her. “Isn’t this an image of what I feel my father did to me?”
During that fall in Boston, Plath had rekindled a friendship with Lucie McKee, whom she knew from Smith. Both living in the city, they had run into each other one day at the Public Garden. Soon after this, Sylvia visited Lucie, who had just had a baby boy. At one point during her visit, as they stood by Lucie’s son’s crib, Lucie noticed a “dark look” about Sylvia. “It was a look that didn’t coincide with what Sylvia was talking about and what was going on bet
ween us,” McKee remembers. “It appeared to come from thoughts and feelings, unexpressed at the back of her mind. It didn’t last long, but it made an impression on me. It had an ominous quality about it—an expression of seeming foreboding, like the brief pulling away of a curtain from an inner vision of something morbid that clung to her consciousness and that she could not hide at that moment.” Afterwards, Sylvia and Lucie occasionally got together for coffee. “As she seemed glad to see me, my husband and I invited Sylvia and Ted and one or two other couples for dinner one evening.” All went well. Ted impressed the group with tales from his boyhood about a tomcat whom he, McKee remembers, “admired for his aggressiveness and prowess in the neighborhood.” Much later, Lucie ran into Ted walking on the Boston Common. “He told me about some records he had just bought. I’ve had a record orgy!’ he said. It was a brief conversation and he didn’t bring up Sylvia. I found Ted easy to talk to. He was warm and amusing, but had something to do with contained violence about him, in the way he expressed himself, his interests; that torn cat, for instance. I don’t remember him asking me about myself, but he talked about himself in a way that swept me up with his exuberance, so that I didn’t notice being ignored.”
5
In January 1959, Mademoiselle published Corinne Robins’s article “Four Young Poets,” which featured Plath and Hughes. The article focused on the various ways fledgling poets found to write poems and pay their bills. One new segment of the poetry scene consisted of the “bohemians,” who were, according to Robins, “swelling the ranks of the sound-deafened beat generation and building makeshift nests in the sacrosanct ivied schoolyards.” As alternatives to the beats, Robins presented Plath and Hughes, university poets who sometimes found higher education a “solution to the economic problem.” On the subject of teaching, Plath remained circumspect. “ ‘Ted and I had similar reactions,’ “ the article read. “ It was exciting and rewarding to introduce students to writers one particularly enjoys, to stimulate discussions and to watch students develop, but it takes time and energy. Too much, we found, to be able to work at length on any writing of our own.’” So, they gave up teaching to live in Boston and write—together. “ ‘The bonuses of any marriage—shared interests, projects, encouragement and creative criticism—are all intensified,’ “ the article continued, still quoting Plath. “ ‘Both of us want to write as much as possible, and we do. Ted likes a table he made in a window niche from two planks, and I have a fetish about my grandmother’s desk with an ivy and grape design burned into the wood. In the morning we have coffee and in the afternoon tea. That’s about the extent of our differences. We do criticize each other’s work, but we write poems that are as distinct and different as our fingerprints themselves must be.’ ” To show that difference, Mademoiselle ran Plath’s “The Times are Tidy” and Hughes’s “Pennines in April.”
Of course, the Hugheses’ lives did not exactly resemble the rosy picture Mademoiselle painted. Some days, Sylvia tired of cooking meals—especially breakfast, for example—and let Ted fix his own, even though she believed this was probably a mistake. More drastically, they continued to quarrel about finances. Sylvia now boldly confronted Ted—“Get a job,” she would snap—which only made him leer at her. That she could not write intensified her unhappiness about Ted. (After “Johnny Panic,” she had only been able to grind out one story, “The Shadow.”) On bad days, she had begun concocting a new plan. Perhaps she would get into a graduate school, earn a doctorate, and make a steady income by going back into teaching. Lately, she was crying often, and not only in therapy sessions, where she routinely broke down, but at home, alone or with Ted.
In late January 1959, Plath’s life started to look up—somewhat. On separate occasions, The Nation ran her poems “Frog Autumn” and “Two Views of a Cadaver Room.” One evening, she and Ted had a supper party for the Stephen Fassetts, Robert Lowell, and his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. And The Spectator published her poems “The Companionable Ills” and “Owl.” Plath also finished two poems, “Point Shirley” and “Suicide off Egg Rock.” Still, Ted had been writing so well that he now approached the end of his second book. While she fought a more contrary muse than Ted’s, she wrote to Lee Anderson, she dutifully reshuffled her poetry manuscript, renamed it The Bull of Bendylaw, and again submitted it to the Yale Series of Younger Poets.
Plath’s main source of creative encouragement at present came from a course she had begun auditing at Boston University, Robert Lowell’s creative-writing seminar. Following Lowell’s example, Plath now wanted her poetry to deal with matters closer to the bone. Instead of writing about subjects like goblins, the Lorelei, and fairy-tale characters, she would confront weighty issues—issues of the self. In therapy, Plath had learned that she most feared failure. Previously, she had chosen topics that presented her with little challenge. Now, she hoped to tackle difficult subjects: her husband, her mother, her dead father— and herself. She would attempt this departure even though, in March, eight of her “old” poems appeared in print in The London Magazine, Audience, The Nation, and The Christian Science Monitor. Plath described her new resolve to Lawner. She would reject the “Feminine (horror) lavish coyness,” she wrote, but would aspire to create poems that were “grim, antipoetic.” As for Falcon Yard, the Cambridge novel with which she had been dabbling for years, she had all but abandoned it. It existed only in fragments and in notes, daring her to finish it. She tried to write a novel, Plath confessed to Lawner, but had run into nothing but difficulty because she could not force the “material [to] take off from what did happen.”
Sylvia also struggled for a breakthrough in her emotional life. Without a doubt, the most cathartic episode of her entire residence in Boston took place on Sunday, March 8. For the last several therapy sessions, Barnhouse had suggested that Sylvia do something she never had before: visit her father’s grave. Sylvia finally decided she would. On that Sunday morning, she and Ted dressed, ate breakfast, and boarded a trolley bound for Winthrop. In the small town, as she walked along one street and then another on her way to the graveyard, Sylvia became more and more apprehensive. Finally, she and Ted arrived at the Winthrop Cemetery. Sylvias father was buried in the third (and newest) section in a grave located on Azalea Path, not far from the front gate. Because his grave was close, Sylvia spotted the marker right away: “Otto E. Plath: 1885-1940.” Staring at the marker, Sylvia was torn with emotion. “Felt cheated,” she would write in her journal. “My temptation to dig him up. To prove he existed and was dead.” Barely able to cope with her sorrow and anger, she turned to Ted and they left. To calm her down, they took a long walk along Winthrop’s rocky shore and eventually ended up on Deer Island. There a prison guard told them that they could not continue on, so they headed back to Boston.
At home, Plath worked on a poem. Ten days later, the visit to her father’s grave still haunted her memory. To purge herself and to better understand her feelings, she wrote another poem, “Electra on Azalea Path.” In it, the narrator, a young woman in her twenties, visits the grave of her father, who had died, according to the narrator’s mother, from gangrene. Now the daughter, who had previously attempted suicide, has come to the father to ask his forgiveness; the narrator never reveals to the reader why she believes she must be forgiven. Once she has asked the father to “pardon” her, the speaker declares the climactic confession: her love killed him. On the day Plath finished this poem— the same day she completed another, “Metaphors"—she posed in her journal the question: if she had “killed and castrated” her father, were her “dreams of deformed and tortured people” a result of “guilty visions of him or fears of punishment for me?”
In the spring, still worried about money, Plath accepted another part-time job, this one as a secretary for the chairman of the department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard. In late March, Hughes received a letter from the award committee for the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, to which he had applied for a grant. Without making a firm commitment, the comm
ittee requested additional information, such as a proposed budget. If Ted won a Guggenheim, which would bring him about five thousand dollars, they could subsist well beyond September, the month when Plath now projected that their money would run out.
Somewhat relieved, Plath continued to work, read, and write. She and Ted also entertained. The Hugheses regularly visited with the Fassetts, the Booths, and Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. Of her schedule, Plath most enjoyed Tuesday afternoons, the time when she attended Lowell’s creative-writing class. As the semester had progressed, she slowly gravitated towards two fellow students—a chainsmoking young woman who used her shoe for an ashtray and the man with whom she appeared to be romantically involved, Anne Sexton an George Starbuck. Plath had been drawn to them in large part because she admired their poetry; compared with other students’, it was lively and innovative. Once she came to know them, she discovered that they both had interesting lives. An editor at Houghton Mifflin, Starbuck had published poems widely. Sexton, a mental-hospital “graduate"—as Plath called her—and a favorite of Lowell’s, had also published well, even in The New Yorker. Born in Wellesley, she, like Plath, went to Bradford High School, though Bradford marked the end of her education, since she had not gone on to college. (Younger than Sexton, Plath had not known her in Wellesley.) According to Plath, Sexton possessed the nonchalance of a person who was writing at a level she had never dreamed of.
As March gave way to April, the three young poets struck up a close friendship. After sitting in Lowell’s class for two hours, Plath, Sexton, and Starbuck would hurry from the building, squeeze into the front seat of Sexton’s dilapidated Ford, and weave through the zigzagging Boston streets to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. “I would always park illegally in a LOADING ONLY ZONE, telling them gaily, It’s okay, because we are only going to get loaded!’ “ Sexton would write years later in an essay. “Off we’d go, each on George’s arm, into The Ritz to drink three or four or two martinis.” While they drank and ate bowls-ful of free potato chips in the hotel’s mezzanine-lounge bar, they talked about their private lives enough for Plath to figure out that Sexton and Starbuck were having an affair. Sexton would remember that on more than one occasion she and Plath broached the issue of suicide as well: Sexton had tried once. As they discussed their earlier attempts (neither saw this line of conversation as morbid), Plath and Sexton felt a kind of release. Once they had finished their martinis, the three of them wandered over to the Waldorf Cafeteria, where each could eat supper for seventy cents.
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