On May 2, the Hugheses ate supper with Jane and Peter Davison, paid for by The Atlantic Monthly. The meal became uncomfortably anxious: Sylvia decided Peter was furious with her for mailing her last poems to Weeks, not him. His anger, although mostly concealed, only convinced Sylvia that he had in fact blocked her poems. After supper, as the Hugheses got onto the bus to go home, Peter shouted, “Look for The Hudson Review; I have a long poem coming out in it.” Sylvia would write her mother that pity prevented her from calling back that she had four poems forthcoming in the same magazine.
In May, when they had free time from their active social calendar and from caring for Frieda, Plath and Hughes also worked. With the Merwins in France, Hughes put in a morning and an afternoon shift in Bill’s study, accomplishing much on his third book of poems and on a play. He recorded his short story “The Rain Horse” for the BBC as well. Meanwhile, Plath corrected the Colossus proofs and saw the publication of her story “The Daughters of Blossom Street” in The London Magazine and her poem “Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows” in The New Yorker.
During June, Plath’s list of publications continued to grow, with her poems appearing in The Critical Quarterly, The London Magazine, and the Partisan Review. More important, by late June, Plath had finally returned to writing. To date in 1960, she had produced only one eighteen-line poem, “You’re.” But with life regaining some normality, Plath stole a few moments on June 27 and wrote “The Hanging Man.” Just six lines, it displays a power of language and voice as formidable as that of “The Stones.” The month’s most memorable event, though, occurred on the 24th. To commemorate the publication of W. H. Auden’s Homage to Clio, Faber and Faber hosted a cocktail party to which the Hugheses were invited. Midway through the party, Charles Monteith, a Faber editor, called Plath out into the hallway. There she saw Hughes standing, drink in hand, between four other Faber poets—Eliot, Auden, Spender, and Louis MacNeice. As the men posed nonchalantly, a photographer snapped away. “Three generations of Faber poets,” Monteith had said, predicting the sentiment of Philip Day’s London Times article “A Pride of Poets,” which ran on Sunday the 26th. Of Hughes, a member of the “younger” crowd, Day commented: “Ted Hughes from the Pennines, whose muscular verse has won him this year’s Somerset Maugham award, [was at the party along with] his poet-wife Sylvia Plath.”
In July, a month when her poems appeared in Harpers and The Atlantic Monthly, Plath began to write poetry in earnest. Working mornings in Merwin’s study, Plath finished “Sleep in the Mojave Desert,” “On Deck,” and “Two Campers in Cloud Country.” Immediately she mailed a batch of poems to Howard Moss, who bought “On Deck” and “Two Campers” for The New Yorker. Still, Plath was not satisfied with the amount of money she and Hughes earned by writing. In July, she requested help in finding a job from Cambridge University’s Women’s Appointment Board. Hughes, who had finished his play The House of Aries, which the BBC produced in early July, concentrated on writing poetry.
In August, the month The New Yorker published Plath’s “The Net-Menders,” the Yale Series of Younger Poets turned down another of her poetry manuscripts—the third one. Hurt, Plath told her mother in a letter that she was especially angry that no American publisher wanted her collection because it was better than the majority of first books. How ironic that her British husband could find success in her country—Harper and Brothers released Lupercal on August 3 to excellent reviews—and she could not.
Following a ten-day vacation in Heptonstall in late August, the Hugheses returned to London to work. Ted began writing in the upstairs flat of their neighbor Mrs. Morton while she was gone during the day; he found Mrs. Morton’s less distracting than the Merwins’ study. In the meantime, Plath finished four poems during September and October. She also continued to publish; in the early fall her poems appeared in The Hudson Review, the Kenyon Review, and The Atlantic Monthly. Late in October, the BBC, who had turned down everything she had submitted from The Colossus, accepted two new poems, “Leaving Early” and “Candles.”
Of course, for Plath, the major professional event of October— indeed of “the entire year—was the publication of The Colossus and Other Poems by William Heinemann. Plath had asked Michie to release the book on her birthday, but because Heinemann only issued books on Mondays, The Colossus’s official publication date became October 31. As she waited for reviews, Sylvia kept active. She and Ted attended a supper at the Stephen Spenders’ where the guests, among them Louis MacNeice and Rosamond Lehmann, gossiped about Lloyd George’s jilting of Spender’s father. Then, only days after her birthday, she and Ted went to a November 1 champagne party for the Guinness Awards, the prize Ted had won last year while in America. As it happened, Plath would have quite a wait for reviews. None appeared in October. In November, only three minor notices came out, in John O’Londoris, Time and Tide, and the Manchester Guardian. Plath became so disheartened that, in November, she stopped writing poetry and concentrated on grinding out women’s magazine fiction; she even lined up a London agent to try to sell the stories.
During December, three more reviews were published. After Punch’s piece on the 7th, the next to appear—the first truly significant notice—was A. Alvarez’s “The Poet and the Poetess,” which The Observer ran on the 18th. In it, Alvarez wrote:
Miss Plath neither asks excuses for her work nor offers them. She steers clear of feminine charm, deliciousness, gentility, super-sensitivity and the act of being a poetess. She simply writes good poetry. . . .
She is not, of course, unwaveringly good. At times, her feeling weakens, the language goes off on its own and she lands in blaring rhetoric. At other times she hovers close to the whimsy of fairy stories. . . . But it would be a strange first book that had no faults; The Colossus has more than enough excellent poems to compensate for them.
Plath read Alvarez’s piece while she, Ted, and the baby spent Christmas holidays in Yorkshire, where they planned to stay until New Year’s Day. This visit to The Beacon turned out to be anything but pleasant for Plath.
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Sylvia and Ted’s week in Heptonstall had passed calmly, even though the Yorkshire winter bore down hard on The Beacon, and the house itself was too small to accommodate gracefully everyone staying there. The powder-keg atmosphere finally erupted one day when, according to Sylvia in a letter home to her mother, Sylvia asked Olwyn to stop degrading her and Ted, which she had done for much of the week, and Olwyn flew into a tirade. Calling Sylvia a “nasty bitch” and accusing her of overeating at Christmas dinner, Olwyn criticized Sylvia for acting as if The Beacon were her house, for defaming a poet whom Olwyn admired, and—of the three, this seemed the worst affront—for not putting her up at Chalcot Square when she was in London in the spring. Throughout the episode, Olwyn announced that she— Olwyn!—was the daughter of the house; she even referred to Sylvia as “Miss Plath"—an indication, to Sylvia, that Olwyn had never truly accepted Ted and Sylvia’s marriage. Also, Olwyn claimed Sylvia was intolerant, selfish, inhospitable, and immature—words she flung at her out of hatred. Finally, when Olwyn stopped, Sylvia, stunned and speechless, took Frieda from Olwyn, who had been holding her through all this, and fled upstairs. Early the next morning, Sylvia, Ted, and Frieda—at Sylvia’s urging—left The Beacon several days early. It was the last time Sylvia would see Olwyn. Years later, Olwyn would defend her actions by saying that Sylvia had merely overreacted to their charged dialogue.
On January 1,1961, at home in London, Sylvia nursed a “grumbling” appendix and the flu, which she and Ted had come down with following a heatless train ride back from Yorkshire. Sylvia also tried to find some logic in Olwyn’s tantrum. Only one explanation seemed reasonable. Obviously, Olwyn was extremely jealous of Sylvia. Writing to her mother, Sylvia speculated why. Ted and Olwyn were abnormally close, she said. One could even describe their relationship as incestuous, since they had slept in the same bed until Olwyn was a young teenager.
Sylvia believed that, specifically, the
immediate cause of Olwyn’s attack was the release of The Colossus. Sylvia’s accomplishments naturally increased her standing in Teds eyes; this filled Olwyn with jealousy. Whatever the reason was, Sylvia decided that she would never stay in the same house with Olwyn again—ever. From now on, she and Ted would visit Yorkshire only if Olwyn was not there. And, finally, Olwyn would not be Frieda’s godmother.
Over the next ten days, Sylvia tried to forget Olwyn. She thought about the supplement of American poetry The Critical Quarterly had arranged for her to edit. She set up an appointment with a surgeon to advise her on her appendix. And she and Ted had lunch with Thorn Gunn, whom she considered genuine and caring. She wished that Gunn lived nearer (he taught at the University of California at Berkeley) so that she and Ted could see more of him. The Hugheses also had Dido Merwin over to supper; Dido, who had recently had a face-lift, was alone in London while Bill traveled across America on a reading tour. Because Dido had been so generous with Frieda—on this night she gave her the first in the series of Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit books— Sylvia concluded that Dido would be an ideal godmother.
Sylvia believed that Olwyn, still in Yorkshire, was now criticizing her to the Hugheses. Edith had mailed Sylvia and Ted a curt note which said that they should have expected to get the flu if they took the train on a Saturday during holiday season. Ted tried to reassure Sylvia. According to Ted, Olwyn had acted the way she did because of her— Olwyn’s—own jealousy.
Plath’s overall state of mind improved on January 13 with the publication of John Wain’s review of The Colossus in The Spectator. Wain wrote:
Sylvia Plath writes clever, vivacious poetry, which will be enjoyed most by intelligent people capable of having fun with poetry and not just being holy about it. This policy [of crafting poems] ought to produce quaint, over-gnarled writing, but in fact Miss Plath has a firm enough touch to keep clear of these faults. Here and there one finds traces of “influences” not yet completely assimilated (“Snake-charmer,” for instance, is too like Wallace Stevens for comfort, and the sequence “Poem For a Birthday” testifies too flatly to an admiration for Theodore Roethke), but, after all, this is a first book, and the surprising thing is how successful Miss Plath has already been in finding an individual manner.
Wain’s observation about “Poem for a Birthday” surfaced in another commentary. When Heinemann had submitted The Colossus to Alfred A. Knopf, the book was given to Judith Jones, one of the house’s young editors. In her in-house report on The Colossus, Jones had written, “This girl is a poet, there is no question about it, and I think one of the most exciting young ones that has emerged in a long time.” Her first manuscript had arrived at Knopf unsolicited about a year earlier, Jones went on, but Jones felt it was “too slim.” Now, from Heinemann, came this impressive—and significantly different—volume. “I have [only] one reservation about her work and because of that I would like to get the opinion of someone like Stanley Kunitz to try to find out whether the pros here would be apt to bear down too heavily on what I would call her imitativeness. This is most pronounced in a long poem that seems to be so deliberately stolen from Roethke’s ‘The Lost Son’ that I would almost fear the charge of plagiarism.”
In London, Sylvia, unaware of Jones’s interest, celebrated a different sort of good news: she was pregnant again. She went on a crash program of relaxation and diet reorganization to improve her health, which had declined since midwinter. Also, she planned to have her appendix removed in February, because the “grumbling” had worsened noticeably. First, she had to complete a part-time, afternoons-only job she had taken at The Bookseller, a London-based publication that advertised forthcoming books in two large biannual issues. Plath had been hired to copyedit and lay out the entire children’s section of the spring issue. While working at The Bookseller, she thought about babies’ names. She leaned towards Nicholas Farrar or Megan Emily. Megan would be shortened to Meg, Sylvia wrote her mother, and Emily, besides being for Brontë and Dickinson, was a feminization of her father’s Emil.
At the time, Plath was also keeping a hectic social and literary routine. The February Encounter, a magazine edited by Spender and Melvin J. Lasky, contained Plath’s poem “A Winter Ship”; the February London Magazine ran her story “The Fifty-ninth Bear.” On January 31, Plath and Hughes listened to themselves on the BBC radio program “Two of a Kind,” a show that featured interviews with married couples who worked in the same field. This week’s program, which the Hugheses had taped on January 18, was entitled “Poets in Partnership.” On the program, an extended edition of which was also broadcast on March 19, Plath commented that she believed she had lived a happy childhood until the age of nine, although she did not elaborate on air about the probable cause of the end of that happiness. As for Hughes, one of his more intriguing discussions involved a description of how he could write about Sylvia’s experiences as well as his own. It was as if he were a medium for her thoughts, he said; theirs was such a “sympathetic” relationship that he could read her mind at any given moment. They felt they made up, in essence, one person, one single shared psyche. Hughes believed, as he told the interviewer, that a “telepathic union"—like theirs—can and does exist between two people. Following the broadcast, the Hugheses received much fan mail. One letter was from a woman in Devon, Elizabeth Compton, whose husband, David, was also a writer. Should the Hugheses ever come down to Devon, Compton wrote, she would be honored to have them over for lunch.
On February 1st, Plath and Hughes went to a party for Theodore Roethke, the American poet whom Plath now ranked second only to Robert Lowell. Roethke extended to Hughes an open invitation to teach at the University of Washington, Roethke’s longtime employer, whenever he liked. On the 5th, in response to a card from Anne Sexton, Plath wrote her that she admired To Bedlam and Part Way Back, the new book of Sextons that Lowell had said would place her alongside Pasternak; that she was mother to a comedienne named Frieda, a child who had made Sylvia and Ted want to forge a dynasty; that she relished the reception her work had received in England; and that she had met Spender, MacNeice, Auden, Gunn, and, just this week, Roethke.
The next day, Plath miscarried. To comfort her, her doctor told her that one in four women did so; if she wanted to, she could also become pregnant again right away, he said. Still, Sylvia was saddened and depressed. To help cheer her up, Ted bought February 10 tickets for Webster’s The Duchess of Malji, starring Dame Peggy Ashcroft. Plath herself tried to divert her thoughts from the incident by spending time with Frieda—and writing. In the days following her miscarriage, Plath turned out seven poems. The first, “Parliament Hill Fields,” is spoken by a woman who has just lost a child—the word “miscarriage” is never used—but who finds solace in the fact that she has another child at home. Her grief over the dead child and her joy over the one who survives create a push-pull of emotions that colors all the narrator sees and does as she wanders through Parliament Hill Fields, a section of London’s Hampstead Heath. Three days later, Plath wrote two poems, “Whitsun” and “Zoo Keeper’s Wife,” neither of which concerns babies or miscarriages. The next day, Plath finished “Face Lift,” inspired by Dido’s recent surgery. In the poem, a woman attempts to recapture her youth by submitting to cosmetic surgery. Whereas babies are mentioned only metaphorically in “Face Lift,” the poem she wrote four days later, “Morning Song,” directly addressed the issue of motherhood. Awakened by her baby’s crying, the speaker gropes from bed, “cow-heavy and floral / In my Victorian nightgown,” and heads for the child. Beautiful, simple, touching, “Morning Song” was Plath’s— then—definitive statement on motherhood.
After “Morning Song,” Plath wrote “Barren Women,” which states flatly that a woman without a child is like an empty museum, and “Heavy Women,” which implies that conceiving a child is almost a divine act. These two poems, and “Face Lift,” seem directed at Olwyn and Dido, who were childless and—to Plath—manipulative. (Plath saw Dido’s face-lift as a desperate pl
oy for Dido to keep Bill.) Because poems like “Barren Women” and “Face Lift” are indictments of their subjects, several of the February poems appear to have been triggered, on some level, by Olwyn’s attack on Sylvia at Christmas. If Plath could not adequately defend herself in person, then she would get revenge in print. When Olwyn read “Barren Women” and other, similar poems, she could not deny the obvious: Plath was writing about women like her.
In February and March, more reviews of The Colossus appeared. In The London Magazine, Roy Fuller attacked Plath for echoing established poets. “The language of this poetry is unusual but not eccentric,” Fuller wrote. “How excited we would be about Miss Plath if we—and she—had never read Mr Ransom and Miss Moore.” Plath felt comforted, though, by Howard Sergeant’s notice in the spring English. In a long piece on several books, Sergeant devoted two sentences to The Colossus: “Miss Plath . . . is unusually reserved and precise in The Colossus, withholding sufficient to create almost an air of mystery about her subjects, yet not too much to destroy the balance or the tension of the poems. Indeed, what few defects there are in this distinguished first volume are due more to her sudden descents into fantasy than to any failure of craftsmanship.”
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