4
Plath read these reviews in a bed at Saint Pancras Hospital. Because the miscarriage had aggravated the soreness in the area of her appendix, Sylvia’s doctor recommended that she have an operation right away. Sylvia baked extra food for Ted, who alone would take care of Frieda for the two weeks of Sylvia’s hospitalization. Then, on February 26, the day the BBC rebroadcast the Hugheses’ episode of “Two of a Kind” on the weekly roundup, which doubled their initial seventy-five-dollar fee, Plath checked into Saint Pancras. She expected to be operated on the next morning, but Monday came and went and she did not have surgery. Ted arrived on Monday night with an airmail letter containing the best remedy to brighten her mood: a New Yorker first-reading contract. By signing the enclosed document, the cover letter said, Plath would agree to submit each new poem she wrote to The New Yorker before she showed it to any other magazine. For this right to exclusivity, The New Yorker would pay her one hundred dollars—the check was included—on signing the agreement; 25 percent more for each poem the magazine purchased; a cost-of-living bonus for all work accepted; and an even more lucrative rate for work the editors considered exceptional. Overjoyed, Plath signed the contract, even if, as she told her mother, the point was moot: she mailed The New Yorker all of her work first anyway, with or without a contract.
Sylvia finally underwent surgery at eleven o’clock on Tuesday morning. After a nurse gave her a shot to dry up her saliva and make her drowsy, attendants wheeled her into an anteroom to receive a second shot, which blacked her out. She had no further memories until she awoke following the operation. For the rest of that day, drugged with painkillers, she dozed non and off On Wednesday, considerably more alert, she sat up in bed, wrote letters, and observed the twenty-eight-bed ward. Over the next several days, Sylvia tried to cope with hospital living. She read Agatha Christie mysteries; admired the flowers that arrived from Ted, Ted’s parents, Helga Huws, and Charles Monteith; and, beginning Friday, added to a diary she kept on the ward. Hospital food tasted flat to her, so Ted brought her one good meal each day— fresh orange juice, creamy milk, a steak sandwich. A week after surgery, on the day doctors removed her stitches, Sylvia felt better than she had in a year. The appendix had probably been poisoning her system for some time, she decided. Her condition had improved so much that doctors released her from the hospital on the 8th, earlier than expected.
At Chaleot Square, Sylvia continued to recover. Under strict doctors orders, she rested in bed and refrained from lifting anything, no matter how light. The day’s major outing was usually a short stroll on Primrose Hill. Soon, she felt a drive to write. On the 18th, in the Merwins’ study, Plath wrote a poem on the back of pink Smith College memorandum stationery. Initially named “Sickroom Tulips in Hospital,” she shortened the title to “Tulips” on the third draft. Employing long iambic lines and fat seven-line stanzas, she described a bouquet of red tulips in a hospital room from the point of view of a woman who is sick. For much of the poem, the speaker paints a picture of the setting—the doctors, the nurses, herself. Then, finally turning to the tulips, she sees them as a rival for her health.
On March 21, Sylvia’s doctor examined her and reported that she was improving. A week later, Hughes received a letter from Lord David Cecil awarding him the Hawthornden Prize for Lupercal. The honor, which took the form of a gold medal and a one-hundred-pound cash prize, would be given to him at a public ceremony. On the 31st, three days after she wrote another poem, “I Am Vertical,” The New Statesman published Plath’s “Magi” on the same page as Roethke’s “In Evening Air.” All of this good fortune for the Hugheses was eclipsed by a letter from Judith Jones dated March 29. Knopf was interested in The Colossus, Jones told Plath. “One reason . . . that we have brooded so long over our decision is my uncertainty about one particular poem which seems frankly too derivative to me not to invite a good deal of criticism,” Jones wrote. “[‘Poem for a Birthday’ is] in terms of imagery and rhythmic structure . . . so close to Theodore Roethke’s ‘Lost Son’ that people would be likely to pounce on you.” If Plath would cut “Poem for a Birthday,” Jones said, Knopf would accept The Colossus.
On March 21, Sylvia’s doctor examined her and reported that she was improving. A week later, Hughes received a letter from Lord David Cecil awarding him the Hawthornden Prize for Lupercal. The honor, which took the form of a gold medal and a one-hundred-pound cash prize, would be given to him at a public ceremony. On the 31st, three days after she wrote another poem, “I Am Vertical,” The New Statesman published Plath’s “Magi” on the same page as Roethke’s “In Evening Air.” All of this good fortune for the Hugheses was eclipsed by a letter from Judith Jones dated March 29. Knopf was interested in The Colossus, Jones told Plath. “One reason . . . that we have brooded so long over our decision is my uncertainty about one particular poem which seems frankly too derivative to me not to invite a good deal of criticism,” Jones wrote. “[‘Poem for a Birthday’ is] in terms of imagery and rhythmic structure . . . so close to Theodore Roethke’s ‘Lost Son’ that people would be likely to pounce on you.” If Plath would cut “Poem for a Birthday,” Jones said, Knopf would accept The Colossus.
On April 5, Plath responded. She would drop five sections of “Poem for a Birthday” if Jones would let her print, as separate poems, “Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond” and “The Stones.” Also, she wanted to run “The Stones” last, since the act of being “mended” seemed like an appropriate way to conclude her volume. Finally, because Plath admired Stanley Kunitz—who believed the manuscript should be cut considerably, Jones had told her—she would omit “Point Shirley,” “Metaphors,” “Maudlin,” “Ouija,” and “Two Sisters of Persephone.” Hopeful, Plath mailed Jones the letter.
The following day, Faber and Faber officially released Hughes’s Meet My Folks!—a book, illustrated by George Adamson, which he dedicated to Frieda. Over the coming weeks, because of excellent publicity and good reviews, the book sold well. Later that month, Plath sat in the audience of a live BBC television broadcast featuring Ted. With each passing month, Ted seemed to become more respected—and well known—among both the literary community and the general population of England. On April 26, in a letter to Alfred Kazin, Plath described Hughes as a famous man whose stories and poems appeared widely. Without mentioning her fame (or lack of it), Plath asked Kazin to recommend her for a Saxton grant. She was writing seven days a week, she told him, in a borrowed study down the street from her flat. The dust in the room was so thick you couldn’t hear a pencil drop.
In late April, Jones answered Plath’s letter about The Colossus. She agreed wholeheartedly with Plath’s suggestions to end the book on “The Stones” and to cut “Metaphors,” “Maudlin,” “Ouija,” and “Two Sisters.” But instead of dropping “Point Shirley,” Jones preferred that Plath eliminate either “The Ghost’s Leavetaking” or “Black Rook in Rainy Weather.” It was now, once she had read Jones’s letter, that Plath realized Jones was going to offer her a contract. “ALFRED KNOPF will publish The Colossus in America!” Plath shouted on the page to her mother on May 1, adding that she had not told her before because she wanted to make sure the deal did not fall through. After all, Knopf had asked her to drop ten poems—to make a forty-poem book, she said. (Sylvia did not tell her mother half the cuts were made because “Poem for a Birthday” borrowed too heavily from Roethke.) To make sure that they did agree on the ten poems eliminated, Plath wrote back to Jones on May 2 to confirm that she would be happy to keep “Point Shirley” and drop “Black Rook in Rainy Weather.”
Now, Plath’s two May publications—The Listener printed “A Life,” The Observer “Morning Song"—were that much more satisfying. In some way, Plath perhaps felt that she was even keeping pace with Hughes, who finished his first five-act play, The Calm. Knopf’s acceptance encouraged her as she wrote each morning in the Merwins’ study. For some weeks, she had been at work on a secret project—a novel. Its protagonist was a young girl who has a nervous breakdown o
ne summer after she exhausts herself holding down a guest editorship at a Mademoiselle-like magazine in New York. Following the breakdown, which culminates in a failed suicide attempt, the young character, who would eventually be named Esther Greenwood and who feels more than passing anxiety about her confused romantic situation with her boyfriend, Buddy Willard, is confined to a mental hospital and subjected to a series of electroshock treatments. Familiar territory for Plath—maybe too familiar. She told few people about the book. One was Ann Davidow. She was about a third of the way through a novel concerning a college coed approaching and then enduring a nervous breakdown, Plath wrote to Davidow in April, but she did not go into detail.
In early June, Hughes was awarded the Hawthornden Prize. Since custom dictated that the previous year’s winner attend the public ceremony, Alan Sillitoe, the British novelist best known for The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, was also present. Like Hughes, Sillitoe was married to an American poet, Ruth Fainlight, who was there as well. Plath enjoyed meeting them both, especially Fainlight.
The day before the Hawthornden ceremony, Plath recorded a twenty-five-minute reading of her poems for “The Living Poet,” a monthly BBC series that in the past had featured, among others, Lowell, Roethke, and Kunitz. Also in June, Plath published “You’re” in Harpers and “I Am Vertical” and “Private Ground” in The Critical Quarterly. In that same Critical Quarterly, A. E. Dyson reviewed the Heinemann Colossus. Criticizing Plath for being “reminiscent” of Roethke and—curiously—Ted Hughes, Dyson ultimately offered the book high praise. “The Colossus is a volume that those who care for literature will wish to buy and return to from time to time for that deepening acquaintance which is one of the rewards of the truest poetry. It establishes Miss Plath among the best of the poets now claiming our attention; the most compelling feminine voice, certainly, that we have heard for many a day.” Finally, after a drought of critical attention, Plath was receiving some, though not so much as she would have liked.
For Sylvia, June’s major event was the arrival in London of Aurelia, who had been planning for some time to come visit. Nothing could have prepared Aurelia for the joy she felt at holding Frieda for the first time. Sylvia was, of course, happy to see her mother. Two years had passed since Ted and Sylvia’s departure for England, so they had much to catch up on. First, though, Sylvia and Ted would take a short vacation. With Aurelia there to baby-sit, they set out for France. Their initial stop was Douarnenez, a fishing port in Finisterre from which they could explore rocky terrain and swim in the Atlantic Ocean. The stay proved restful and reinvigorating. So, on July 5, tanned from hours of sunbathing and more relaxed than they had been in months, Ted and Sylvia traveled to the Merwins’ farm in Par Bretenoux. There they ate generous portions of the Merwins’ home-grown produce, continued to relax, and generally enjoyed life on a working farm. On Friday the 14th, after a week in the country, Sylvia and Ted returned to London; they arrived at Chalcot Square in time to eat supper, which Aurelia had prepared. Over the weekend, as Sylvia visited with her mother, who moved into the Merwins’ flat now that Ted and Sylvia were back, they spoke of Plath and Hughes’s BBC work, their current writing projects (Sylvia alluded to a novel but gave no details), and, of course, Warren, who hoped to come see Sylvia in the fall.
On July 17, Plath read “Tulips” live over the BBC from the Mermaid Theatre, the site of a festival. The next day, Sylvia and Ted, accompanied by both Frieda and Aurelia, made the seven-hour trip from London to Yorkshire in a new Morris station wagon they had bought. They passed through what Aurelia would call some of the “ugliest cities in the world” to arrive at The Beacon. Sylvia introduced her mother to Ted’s parents, and the three of them hit it off—a good sign, since bad feelings still existed between Sylvia and her in-laws because of Olwyn’s scene at Christmas. Aurelia wrote Warren that the Hugheses even “exceed[ed her] most optimistic expectations.” During the next week, Aurelia and Sylvia chatted with the Hugheses, played with Frieda, and took a side trip to West Riding. On the 26th, the four of them—Ted, Sylvia, Aurelia, Frieda—went back to London, whereupon Plath discovered in the mail a letter informing her that she had won first prize in the Cheltenham Festival.
Ted and Sylvia stayed in London only one night. The next morning, they drove for five hours to Devon, where they would look for a house to buy. They had reached the end of their patience with the tiny Chalcot Square flat. They needed space: studies for Ted and for Sylvia, and more room for Frieda to play. With the prices in London prohibitively high, they could only afford to buy a house in the country. The arrangement would not be ideal. Sylvia loved the cultural activities and amenities in the city. Nor did she relish the idea of moving to the boondocks now that her career seemed to be gathering some momentum. Yet if she wanted a home—and she did—she had little choice. Anyway, Ted wished to live in the country again (or so he said), far away from the city’s distractions.
On Friday at midnight, after they had looked at eight houses, only one of which was a possibility, Plath and Hughes drove back to London. That one potentially suitable estate, Court Green, was located in North Tawton, which was one hour by car from Exeter or from the coast. A typical Devon hamlet, North Tawton consisted of little more than a main street lined with shops and pubs around which a few houses had been built through the years. Surrounding the town in all directions was a lush countryside divided, usually by hedgerows, into pastures, where sheep and cattle grazed. Going into and out of town, a visitor traveled along a narrow two-lane road, also lined with hedgerows. Situated in North Tawton itself, Court Green, currently owned by a titled couple named Arundel, was comprised of three acres of land on which sat a two-story, twelve-room thatched-roof house, a two-room servants’ cottage off the main house’s cobblestone court, and stables. All structures desperately needed major repairs, just as the grounds, which featured a seventy-two-tree apple orchard, cherry trees, and blackberry and raspberry bushes, begged tending. Life in North Tawton would be the antithesis of the Hugheses’ life in London, since in the town, essentially a farm community, they would be landowners. Their nights at cocktail parties and suppers at the homes of such literary figures as T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender would be replaced by early mornings of potato-digging and strawberry-picking. So, Court Green’s price would have to be right before the Hugheses would consider such a drastic move.
When Aurelia left London for America on August 4, Sylvia and Ted had not made a commitment. Soon afterwards, the Arundels presented them with a price—thirty-six hundred pounds (about ten thousand dollars)—that the Hugheses decided was too good to pass up. Sylvia mailed the Arundels, as a deposit to hold the property, a check in the amount of 10 percent of the asking price. Then, because they did not want to pay what Sylvia considered to be an astronomical interest rate—6.5 percent—they set about accumulating cash. They withdrew all of the nearly six thousand dollars from their savings account in Boston; borrowed interest-free five hundred pounds (about fourteen hundred dollars) each from Aurelia and Teds parents, which they promised to repay through $280 reimbursements made every September; and took out a small bank loan to cover the difference. This way, they could essentially pay cash for Court Green, into which they wanted to move by the end of August.
On August 16, Plath signed a contract with Knopf for The Colossus. Two days later, almost ten months after the books publication, the Times Literary Supplement reviewed the Heinemann Colossus. “Miss Plath tends to be elusive and private . . . , as if what the poem were ‘about’ in a prose sense were very much her own business,” wrote the anonymous critic in a piece entitled “Innocence and Experience.” “Thus this first volume is a stimulating one but also, combining as it does fine surface clarities with a deeper riddling quality, it is a teasing one.”
The most dramatic development in Plath’s life during this time took place at mid-month, when her doctor informed her that, for the third time in two years, she was pregnant. In some way, for
Sylvia, this seemed to compensate for her miscarriage. She only hoped that nothing would go wrong with this pregnancy, due to reach full term around the first of the year.
Before they could move to Devon, the Hugheses had to sublet their flat. Because of London’s housing shortage, they did not expect trouble, yet they were still somewhat surprised by the eight calls they received on the first day the newspaper ran their listing. Of those eight parties interested, two couples stopped by at the same time, and both wanted the flat badly enough to pay the $280 fee for “fixtures and fittings” which Plath and Hughes were asking. One couple immediately wrote out a check, but Ted and Sylvia liked the other couple better. That night, the Hugheses called the first couple and told them that they had decided to remain in London. Next, they called the second couple, “a young Canadian poet” and his wife, a “German-Russian,” as Plath wrote her mother, and gave the flat to them. The Hugheses also asked them to supper the following week. Though the poet, David Wevill, was by no means as famous as Ted Hughes or Sylvia Plath, he had published poems in numerous literary magazines. His wife, Assia Gutmann, was a woman whose beautiful elegant face more than compensated for what one friend remembers as “hips like the rear end of a 158 bus.” Wevill was her third husband.
5
On August 31, 1961, the Hugheses moved from London to Court Green. For one hundred dollars, they hired movers, which they needed, since Sylvia, four months pregnant, could not lift boxes or carry furniture. As they settled into the house during their first days there, Ted and Sylvia spent little time out of doors, although Sylvia did pick some fruit and vegetables and visit her neighbors Rose and Percy Key, who lived at the end of Court Green’s driveway. In the middle of their move-in, Sylvia and Ted welcomed their first houseguest on September 9—Warren. Thrilled to see him in England for the first time, Sylvia showed Warren Devon—when, that is, Warren was not helping Ted rearrange furniture or make repairs around the house. Sylvia and Warren, sometimes joined by Ted, explored the Exeter Cathedral, picnicked at Tintagel, attended an auction, and ate at the local inn. As expected, Warren left by train on the morning of the 15th.
Rough Magic Page 32