Rough Magic

by Paul Alexander

  On April 10, Hughes received official notification: he had been granted a Guggenheim. More good news followed. First, Yaddo, an artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, invited the Hugheses to work there during September, October, and November. Next, The Sewanee Review accepted Plath’s “Point Shirley,” The New Yorker her recently finished “Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows” and “Man in Black.” Also, The London Magazine published three of Hughes’s poems, Horn Book Magazine and The Christian Science Monitor one each of Plath’s.

  Then, on the weekend of the 18th, Plath served as one of the judges—John Crowe Ransom was another—for the Glascock Poetry Contest, the Mount Holyoke competition that she had won as a student. Late in April, Plath decided to write a children’s book. On May 2, after she thought about it for a few days, Plath sat down at her typewriter and wrote The Bed Book; a series of ten poems about beds, it involves two main characters, Wide-Awake Will and Stay-Uppidy Sue. That same day, Plath mailed the book to Emilie McLeod at the Atlantic Monthly Press. In her cover letter, she told McLeod that Ted was also finishing a children’s book, Meet My Folks!

  In May, Plath began to feel jealous of Sexton and Starbuck. Sexton had submitted a poetry manuscript to Houghton Mifflin, Starbuck’s employer; Plath decided not to try her book there as she had planned, since the company would probably not accept hers and Sexton’s. Also, Starbuck, like Plath, had entered a manuscript in the Yale competition. In mid-May, Houghton Mifflin signed up Sexton’s book. Hearing this, Plath sulked. With her luck, she would find out any day that Starbuck or Maxine Kumin, a friend of Sexton’s, had won the Yale, Plath wrote in her journal; feeling sorry for herself, she even begrudged Sexton her champagne celebration.

  Near the end of the month, Plath and Hughes got into another argument; afterwards, they did not speak to each other for days. When she had moved to Boston in September, Plath had hoped she would be happy in the city. Now she counted the days until their lease expired. Since January, Ted had been talking about returning to England. With all of her problems in Boston, Sylvia had tentatively agreed, but only if Ted bought her an icebox and guaranteed her access to a good dentist.

  Plath met with more rejection in June. On the 6th, Dudley Fitts, editor of the Yale series, wrote that her manuscript had been chosen as that year’s alternate. It had “lost by a whisper,” Fitts contended, because the poems lacked “technical finish.” Plath could hardly believe Fitts’s letter. All but a handful of the poems had been published in or accepted by some of the leading periodicals in England and America, and over the years her poetry had been criticized for being too crafted, not too poorly crafted. Infuriated, Plath lashed out at Fitts in her journal, calling him a fool who couldn’t recognize a syllabic verse if he had to. Fitts’s rejection fueled her ambition. Renaming the manuscript The Devil of the Stairs, she submitted it to trade publishers—Knopf, Viking, and Harcourt, Brace. It was not until the 12th, when he called to chat on the telephone, that Plath discovered who had beaten her out for the Yale—George Starbuck! Furious, she wrote to Ann Davi-dow, her Smith friend, with whom she kept in touch. Blowing off steam, she called Starbuck a “louse” and dismissed his poetry as light verse.

  In June, William Maxwell at The New Yorker turned down two stories, although he did offer to meet with her to discuss fiction in general, and The Atlantic Monthly returned both poems and stories. Amid all this frustration, Plath did receive some encouragement. The Christian Science Monitor ran her article “A Walk to Withens,” the Sewanee Review two poems; and The London Magazine bought two poems, The Hudson Review four. Most important, however, Emilie McLeod wrote Plath: she admired The Bed Book but wanted changes. “I would very much like to have you take out the connecting narrative [including the poems’ characters],” McLeod said, “and just make this more or less a listing and description of beds—farfetched and exotic.” Within a week of receiving her letter on the 11th, Plath rewrote the book and mailed it back to McLeod.

  Though she liked McLeod, Plath had become leery of Peter Davison, who, Plath concluded, now blocked her work at The Atlantic Monthly. In March, Davison had married Jane Truslow, a classmate of Plath’s, who shared numerous biographical facts with her. She had lost her father when she was young, attended Smith because of her widowed mother, lived in Lawrence, majored in English, studied with Kazin, worked as a Mademoiselle guest editor, suffered a breakdown at Smith, and graduated with honors in 1955. “I was grateful as a puppy that I had finally, at thirty, found the only woman I had ever unhesitatingly wanted,” Davison would one day write. But Plath believed that Davison resented her—Sylvia—because of their ill-fated affair; he was sabotaging her work as revenge. Naturally, Plath had no concrete proof. All she had was Editor Weeks’s last letter of rejection. “ ‘Alicante Lullaby’ has a lot of audible fireworks in it but no very clear plan,” it read in part; “The Eye Mote with its change of rhythm also held our attention, but I question if the interest in it holds up all the way.”

  Plath read much in June—J. D. Salinger’s Seymour: An Introduction, which appeared on the 6th in The New Yorker, Virginia Woolf ‘s The Years, and short stories by Jean Stafford, Lowell’s former wife, whose prose Plath considered more human than Elizabeth Hardwick’s—but she wrote little herself. By late June, Plath could hardly wait to leave Boston. At the moment, she and Ted planned to set out by car on July 1 and tour America. They had just one obligation: to arrive at Yaddo in September to begin an eleven-week residence. At present, omens were good. In June, Faber and Faber—in the person of T. S. Eliot, no less—bought Hughes’s Meet My Folks! Sylvia noted in her journal at the time that, because she had still not become pregnant, Ted unfortunately would have no child to whom he could dedicate his children’s book. In the spring, fearing she was barren, she had visited a gynecologist to have her tubes “blown out” (her phrase). The procedure had worked. Although she did not know it, Sylvia was already pregnant on the day in early July when she and Ted began their tour of America, in a car they had borrowed from Aurelia.

  As they headed for California, where their destination was Sylvia’s father’s sister Frieda (whom Sylvia called “Aunt Frieda,” even though they had never met), Sylvia and Ted stopped at points along the way— Sault Sainte Marie in Michigan, Yellowstone Park in Montana, and the Great Salt Lake in Utah. In Yellowstone Park, one night as they slept in their tent, loud clangs coming from the direction of their car woke them. When they peered out the tent’s flap, they saw the source of the commotion—a bear had broken in their car’s rear window and was rummaging through their food. Unable to do anything, Sylvia and Ted glared at the animal from their tent. Finally, they tried— unsuccessfully—to fall back to sleep. In the morning, they emerged to survey the damage, which was considerable. During the day, they reported the attack to other campers, prompting one to tell them about a woman in a nearby camp who had been mauled to death by a bear. That night, Sylvia and Ted covered both their car-window frames and their tent with kerosene and red-pepper flakes, the two substances known to ward off bears. Later, Plath would use this episode as the basis for the short story “The Fifty-ninth Bear.” Between the real-life incident and the imagined incident, however, there is one drastic difference: in the story, the bear mauls the husband—and kills him.

  Finally, Sylvia and Ted reached California. On August 1, they visited Sylvia’s Aunt Frieda and Uncle Walter in Pasadena. Though she had been close to her mother’s relatives, Sylvia had known few if any of her father’s. Coming on the heels of a year during which she had dredged up feelings about her father in weekly therapy sessions, had stood at the foot of his grave for the first time, and had attempted to deal with the pain of his loss in her poetry, this meeting did not leave Sylvia unmoved. “It is amazing,” Sylvia wrote to her mother, “how Frieda resembles daddy—the same clear, piercing, intelligent bright blue eyes and shape of face.” After two days in California, Sylvia and Ted headed back east. Along the way, they stopped in Luke Myers’s hometown of Sewanee, Tennesse
e, where a local socialite gave a party for them. One of the numerous guests they met was the Sewanee Review s editor, Monroe Spears. The magazine’s summer issue contained Plath’s “The Ghost’s Leavetaking” and “Point Shirley.” Because Plath had also recently submitted her story “The Fifteen Dollar Eagle” to Spears, she was happy to meet him and his wife, Betty, who, Plath would remember, welcomed them to the South.

  On August 25, once Plath and Hughes had left, Spears accepted “The Fifteen Dollar Eagle.” “[It] seems to me a remarkable tour de force and a very fine story,” Spears wrote. His letter awaited Plath when she and Ted arrived in Wellesley on August 28. The acceptance helped soften the disappointment Plath felt over yet another rejection, that of The Bed Book. “I’m sorry there has been such a delay in sending you word on The Bed Book” Emilie McLeod wrote in a letter dated August 17. “Unfortunately, Little, Brown does not share my enthusiasm. It was their feeling that the book is not simple and basic enough, that some of the beds are too farfetched, and that it has more appeal to adults than to children.” She suggested that Plath try other publishers, then told her to send the manuscript back to her, if she did not place it elsewhere. Perhaps in the future she might be able to push it through. “I do hope you and Ted enjoyed your trip,” McLeod concluded. “I’m sorry I could not have better news.”

  6

  In early September, the Hugheses arrived at Yaddo. In a grand Victorian manor house, residents met, attended concerts and readings, and ate breakfast and dinner. West House, a smaller building, had been divided into artists’ quarters and studios. Cabins, no two alike, were set in among the colony’s heavily wooded grounds. After checking in with Acting Director Polly Hanson, the Hugheses proceeded to their living quarters, a spacious ground-floor West House bedroom, complete with a bath and a huge closet. Hughes would write during the day in a cabin just a short walk from the grand manor, while Plath worked in a third-floor studio in West House. When she saw her studio, Plath could not have been more pleased. Containing a cot, a rug, and an enormous wooden desk on which she could write, the room had four big windows that, facing east, looked out onto towering green pine trees.

  During their stay at Yaddo, Plath and Hughes maintained a simple schedule. After breakfast in the mansion’s dining hall, at which Plath normally had eggs, a coffee roll, toast, jam, orange juice, and coffee, she and Ted picked up a boxed lunch (no community lunch was served), retired to their studies, and worked without interruption until they wished to stop. At night, residents reassembled in the dining hall for a semiformal supper. Then, following the meal, they often attended readings given by the writers in residence (Hughes read on September 9, Plath on September 23). In the summer, Yaddo housed some thirty residents, but, because it was fall and most writers had returned to university jobs, Plath and Hughes were two of only about twelve artists. (By mid-October, the number had dwindled to a half-dozen.) The staff carried out all practical duties—cooking, cleaning, and the like—so Plath felt free to read and write at will, roam the grounds, or accompany Ted on fishing trips. At first, she read mostly, studying stories she admired by Eudora Welty, Jean Stafford, and Katherine Anne Porter. She also scanned—and dismissed—the work of John Updike and Nadine Gordimer. Eventually, Plath moved on to Ezra Pound, who captured her imagination; Elizabeth Bishop, for whom she developed a deep admiration; and Iris Murdoch, whose prose had behind it an overpowering intellect. The longer Plath remained at Yaddo, the less she read. For, once she had adjusted to her surroundings, she started to write, again under Ted’s tutelage.

  Sylvia allowed Ted to control more areas of her life than her poetry-writing. “Despite the strength of her poetry, Sylvia seemed to hide behind Ted,” remembers Sonia Raiziss, one of the other residents then at Yaddo. “She always seemed to allow him to take the lead in conversations; she even let him enter a room first. They were both very imposing in looks—very tall, almost godlike in their physical aspect. Nevertheless, he was the important person in their household, although she didn’t seem to resent it. In fact, in an odd way, she had a confidence about herself. It was almost as if she were saying, ‘You’ll hear from me one day.’”

  At Yaddo, Plath wrote despite a string of rejections. In late September, The New Yorker returned a batch of poems, keeping only one “for further consideration.” In early November, New World Writing turned down a recent story. In late November, after it had refused three short stories under separate submission, The Atlantic Monthly mailed back a group of poems—more rejections Plath blamed on Peter Davison. Even worse, in early October, both Henry Holt and Harcourt, Brace refused her poetry manuscript. Plath had become so certain of her manuscript’s doomed fate that, when she mentioned it to Malcolm Cowley at Yaddo at the end of October, she read his reaction as a sign that he too had rejected it, or would in the future.

  Between September and November, some good news did arrive. Plath’s poetry appeared in the Partisan Review, Poetry, The London Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, and the Times Literary Supplement. Also, in October, The New Yorker bought “A Winter’s Tale” and John Lehmann at The London Magazine accepted her story “This Earth Our Hospital,” which at Lehmann’s prodding Plath renamed “The Daughters of Blossom Street.” Best of all, in that same month, Plath received a letter from James Michie, an editor at the British publishers William Heinemann; Michie inquired about the possibilities of acquiring a book of Plath’s poems. “Seeing two new poems of yours in this month’s London Magazine has reminded me how good your poetry is,” Michie wrote. “Have you an English publisher arranged for your first volume? If not I should be very glad if you would consider us as candidates. Being a poet myself I should be delighted to look after you here.” Finally, after so many publishers had turned down her poetry manuscript, Plath had something to be excited about, although she remained guarded in her optimism: she would celebrate when Michie accepted her book.

  Certainly, Michie’s letter motivated Plath to write. While she churned out more prose pieces—three short stories and the memoir “A Prospect of Cornucopia"—and considered starting another novel— because her life had been filled with, she believed, so much love, madness, and hatred—Plath also wrote several poems. At Yaddo, Plath and Hughes, as was their custom, routinely hypnotized each other. Good work sprang from deep within the imagination. To tap into that source, one could try mind control, hypnosis, stream-of-consciousness experiments, and Plath and Hughes tried them all. As they did, Plath met with startling results. In late September and early October, she produced three minor poems. On October 19, she warmed up by practicing Ted’s concentration exercises (breathing deeply, she focused her mind on a series of free-flowing objects); Plath then wrote “The Manor Garden” and “The Colossus.” The latter, one of the more intellectually satisfying and poetically mature poems she had yet written, depicts a daughter’s fruitless efforts to reassemble a crumbling statue that is her father. Finishing the poem, Plath renamed her poetry manuscript yet again. This time, choosing her newest effort as the title poem, she called the volume The Colossus and Other Poems.

  In late October, Plath envisioned a long “Roethke-influence[d]” poem that would be a meditation on a number of subjects as divergent as greenhouses and madhouses. To be called “Poem for a Birthday,” it became a seven-section poem, more a mosaic than a narrative, which took her two weeks to write. Though it does not follow in story line any of the poem’s previous six parts, the final section, “The Stones,” is narrated by a patient in a hospital that Plath surrealistically describes as being “the city of spare parts.” The bulk of this section details how the narrator, severely hurt by an unnamed injury, has her body sewn back together with catgut stitches. Finally, at the end of the poem, the narrator is “good as new,” although the stitches itch. Hughes would come to regard “The Stones” as the most significant poem Plath had written, a turning point in her canon. Calling it “unlike anything that had gone before in her work,” Hughes would write in an essay years later:

>   In its double focus, “The Stones” is both a “birth” and a “rebirth.” It is the birth of her real poetic voice, but it is the rebirth of herself. That poem encapsulates, with literal details, her “death,” her treatment, and her slow, buried recovery. And this is where we can see the peculiarity of her imagination at work, where we can see how the substance of her poetry and the very substance of her survival are the same.

  Early on in her Yaddo stay, Plath had asked herself when she would “break into a new line of poetry.” By Thanksgiving, she had—if not in “The Colossus,” in “The Stones.” Plath did not care about describing in critical language exactly what she hoped to attempt in her “new” poetry. She cared only about writing it. But critics had begun to invent a vocabulary to discuss the embryonic style of poetry represented by Plath’s latest work and Robert Lowell’s recently published Life Studies. Reviewing the book in the September 19 Nation, M. L. Rosenthal contended that “[t]he use of poetry for the most naked kind of confession grows sparse in our day.” Whitman had taken American poetry to “the very edge of the confessional, in his Calamus poems,” but Pound and Eliot had employed “a certain indirection [to mask] the poet’s actual face and psyche from greedy eyes.” Lowell, however, “removes the mask” in Life Studies, for “[h]is speaker is unequivocally himself and it is hard not to think of Life Studies as a series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor-bound not to reveal.” To place his achievement in perspective, Lowell credited his inspiration as being Heart’s Needle, a volume written—before Life Studies—by W. D. Snodgrass, a student of his at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop.