Rough Magic

by Paul Alexander

  No sooner was Warren gone than Helder and Suzette Macedo, a pleasant Portuguese couple the Hugheses knew from London, arrived for a weekend visit. When they left, Plath established a regular schedule: she wrote in the mornings while Ted minded Frieda, minded Frieda in the afternoons while Ted wrote, and cooked supper before an evening of reading and rest. Since March, Plath had written only a handful of poems: “Insomniac,” “Widow,” “Stars over the Dordogne,” and “The Rival.” But in North Tawton, in September alone, she would produce four substantial poems. After finishing “Wuthering Heights,” a poem in which the narrator identifies the difference between herself and the moors by depicting her body as “the one upright / Among all horizontals,” Plath continued her examination of the subject—man in nature—by writing “Blackbenying.” The poem, one of Plath’s best, documents the narrator’s movement down a lane lined by blackberry bushes so laden with berries that she can pick them at random. (During Warren’s visit, Sylvia and he had picked blackberries on a lane similar to the one Plath describes in the poem.) As she reaches the end of the lane, she walks between two small hills until she arrives at the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. And there the poem ends. For one of the first times, Plath fused the movement of the poem’s character with the movement of the language itself. The narrator of “Blackbenying” is finally in awe of the landscape, its richness and dominance. The poem’s success lies in Plath’s ability to summon the language to convey that awe to the reader.

  Life at Court Green, like life in London, was demanding for the Hugheses. Plath was assisted in her domestic chores by Nancy Axworthy, Lady Arundel’s maid, who for one dollar per day ironed and cleaned two days a week. Dr. Webb lived three houses up the road, and Plath, her pregnancy beginning to show, regularly consulted with him and his midwife, Winifred Davies. At this time, Plath heard from her agent: she had finally sold one of Plath’s short stories to a women’s magazine in London. Hughes too kept busy, driving thirty-five miles on four separate occasions to the BBC studios in Plymouth to record shows for “Women’s Hour.” He also finished a play for “Third Programme” and wrote a series of assignments for the Times’ “Children Pages.”

  By October, the Hugheses had settled into a productive routine. In that month, Plath solicited each of the magazines that had printed her poems to secure permission for Knopf to reprint them; wrote Judith Jones to ask her to include in The Colossus’s acknowledgments Elizabeth Ames and Yaddo, where many of the poems had been written; and began attending, along with Rose and Percy Key, the neighborhood Anglican church. But each morning, regardless of what she did in the afternoon, Plath wrote in her study. The month’s most successful poem, “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” started as an exercise given to her by Ted, who suggested that she write a poem about a yew tree that stood near the house. Ted continued to exert an influence over Plath’s creative life. As she tapped into her subconscious through mental exercises which Ted showed her how to do (one of his favorites involved free-associating on a particular object, like a yew tree), she opened herself up to write more innovative—and better—poetry.

  Plath finished three other poems in October. Towards the end of the month, however, a flurry of activities hampered her writing. She submitted to James Michie a draft of The Bell Jar, the novel she had just finished. Poetry accepted five of her new poems. Then, after celebrating her birthday on the 27th, she took the train into London on the 31st for a three-day, two-night trip during which she stayed with the Sillitoes. Her first evening there, she attended the Guinness ceremonies at Goldsmith’s Hall, where she accepted her seventy-five-pound prize and read her poem. The next day, she met with a women’s-magazine fiction editor who encouraged her to write more magazine fiction. Next, because the Hugheses felt they needed every penny they could earn, Plath dropped off her original manuscript of The Colossus to the bookdealer who had recently sold two of Ted’s original manuscripts to Indiana University. Finally, that evening, Plath saw two one-act plays, The American Dream and The Death of Bessie Smith, written by the young experimental American playwright Edward Albee. On the afternoon of November 2, Ted and Frieda met Sylvia at the Exeter train station and drove her back to Court Green.

  In November, Plath could hardly keep up with her career. Early in the month, The New Yorker bought “Blackberrying"; The New Statesman published her review of three children’s books, The Observer her poem “Sleep in the Mojave Desert.” On the 9th, she opened a letter from the Eugene F. Saxton Foundation telling her that she had won a two-thousand-dollar grant. Previously, the selection committee had turned down Plath’s application in the field of poetry; this time, Plath had applied in fiction—and won. She would receive the first of four quarterly payments in about two weeks. To reassure her mother that she would feel no pressure to crank out a novel just to fulfill the grant guidelines, Sylvia revealed that she had already completed a “batch of stuff” that was “tied . . . up in four parcels” and ready to be mailed to the Saxton “bit by bit as required.” In fact, The Bell Jar was much more than a “batch of stuff.” Michie had now accepted it at Heinemann. So, when William Koshland, of Knopf, wrote to Elizabeth Anderson, of Heinemann, to ask about a Plath novel (in The New York Times’ announcement of Saxton winners, Plath’s project was listed as a novel), Anderson told Koshland that Plath’s novel was forthcoming. But, she added, Koshland needed to know something. Concerned that the novel, which might be read as autobiographical, could anger family and friends, since some characters were based—very loosely—on living people, Plath had decided to play it safe and release the novel under a pseudonym.

  In December, Plath realized just how bad winter in Devon would be. The enormous two-story house, seemingly as big as a castle now that winter approached, remained next to impossible to heat, even after the Hugheses installed space heaters. The temperature in unheated rooms hovered around thirty-eight degrees, in heated rooms fifty-five. Still, Plath put up a strong front, though she had always been depressed by the cold. On the 18th, she told her mother that, because the Maugham committee did not want its prize money back (Ted had never taken the three-month trip abroad demanded of him), she would pay off their six-hundred-pound bank mortgage and save them, as she put it, a substantial amount in interest. Eleven days later, she wrote her mother again, this time to describe their Christmas tree and to congratulate Warren on his engagement to his girlfriend, Margaret Wetzel. In the letter, Sylvia also recalled their Christmas Day at Court Green. Before she spent the morning preparing a turkey dinner and her evening sitting beside a fire raging in one of their fireplaces, Sylvia and Ted had taken Frieda into the living room to see their Christmas tree for the first time. How her little face had blossomed with delight as she gazed up at those sparkling ornaments—the silver birds, the tinsel!

  6

  The first mild contraction hit at four in the morning, early on January 17, 1962. By eight-thirty, contractions came some five minutes apart— sufficient reason for Ted to call Winifred Davies. Soon Davies showed up with a cylinder of air and gas, which Sylvia breathed through a mask during particularly strong contractions. The day wore on. With Ted sitting by her side, Sylvia endured the afternoon and early evening. Finally, when Sylvia had been in labor for eighteen hours, Davies became concerned and called Dr. Webb, who arrived at Court Green at five minutes before midnight, just in time to see, as Sylvia later wrote her mother, “this great bluish, glistening boy sho[o]t out onto the bed in a tidal wave of water that drenched all four of us to the skin, howling lustily.” Immediately Sylvia sat up in bed, anxious to hold her baby. Weighing a hefty nine pounds eleven ounces, the boy had dark features—black eyes, black hair. Studying him, Sylvia decided that he bore an uncanny resemblance to Ted. Even so, Sylvia, who beamed with delight, saw that Ted responded to his son’s birth in a peculiar way: for some reason, he did not appear to be pleased that the baby was a boy.

  Over the coming days, Sylvia tried to rest, although the baby, whom she and Ted named Nicholas Farrar, often woke
her up with his crying. So he would be fresh to care for Frieda during the day, Ted slept in his and Sylvia’s bedroom alone while Sylvia moved to the guest room, Nicholas in a carry-cot beside her. Because of this arrangement, whenever Nicholas cried, Sylvia awoke instantly. Winifred Davies stopped by regularly to check on Nicholas; she always made sure to involve Frieda in the examinations so that she would not feel neglected. Neighbors also visited, among them Rose Key, who brought Nicholas a knitted suit. On the 24th, Sylvia spent her first whole day out of bed, only napping in the afternoon. Then she came down with a serious case of milk fever, which required additional bed rest and penicillin.

  Plath needed to regain her strength quickly, for she had work to do. In January, Judith Jones informed her that The Colossus would be published in April, probably on the 23rd; she would be receiving page proofs in the last week of January. Meanwhile, The Critical Quarterly released the anthology Plath had edited; because of good reviews, it sold well. Finally, late in the month, The Observer published “The Rival,” The New Yorker mailed her two checks for cost-of-living adjustments, and she and Hughes received notification that their work would be included in New Poets of England and America, Meridian Books’ forthcoming contemporary-poetry anthology. Relatively satisfied with her professional life, Plath had only one true worry: Nicholas. Specifically, she felt troubled that, as the days passed following Nicholas’s birth, Ted’s dissatisfaction over the baby’s sex seemed to increase. Ted appeared much more standoffish with Nicholas than he had been with Frieda, uneasy even about holding or cuddling him. Ted’s coldness towards Nicholas so bothered Sylvia that, while showing him off to her neighbor Mrs. Hamilton on Nicholas’s first day out of the house, Sylvia confided that Ted appeared “reluctant” the baby was a boy. Mrs. Hamilton, a gray-haired woman who was followed about by an old dachshund named Pixie, replied stoically that Ted was probably jealous for Frieda.

  In February, The London Magazine ran Plath’s “In Plaster” with Hughes’s “Still Life.” In that same issue, the editors published a selection of comments by contemporary poets on the day’s vital literary and social issues. Each contributing poet wrote a fifteen-hundred-word ars poetica, and the editors grouped these under the title “Context.” Both Plath and Hughes presented commentaries they had written back in the fall. Hughes tried to explain how poets grow as artists—or, rather, fail to grow, having burned out in youth. He did not seem to recognize that he was possibly writing about himself—and Plath. “The poet’s only hope is to be infinitely sensitive to what his gift is,” Hughes wrote, “and this in itself seems to be another gift that few poets possess. According to this sensitivity, and to his faith in it, he will go on developing as a poet, as Yeats did, pursuing those adventures, mental, spritual and physical, whatever they may be, that his gift wants, or he will lose its guidance, lose the feel of its touch in the workings of his mind, and soon be absorbed by the impersonal dead lumber of matter in which his gift has no interest, which is a form of suicide, metaphorical in the case of Wordsworth and Coleridge, actual in the case of Mayakovsky.”

  In a reflection of her political sensibilities not unlike those which she displayed when she implored her mother to vote Kennedy, not Nixon, Plath set out in her essay to pinpoint recent political trends that most affected her thinking. “The issues of our time which preoccupy me at the moment,” Plath wrote, “are the incalculable genetic effects of fallout and the documentary article on the terrifying, mad, omnipotent marriage of big business and the military in America”—“Jug-gernaut, The Warfare State” by Fredrick J. Cook, published in The Nation. Did this have an impact on her work? In a manner of speaking. Her poems did not directly address Hiroshima, she said, but “a child forming itself finger by finger in the dark.” They did not address world annihilation, but “the moon over a yew tree in a neighboring graveyard.” They did not concern “the testaments of tortured Algerians, but . . . the night thoughts of a tired surgeon.” Then, once she had listed the poets who delighted her—Lowell in Life Studies, Roethke in his greenhouse poems, Elizabeth Bishop on occasion, Stevie Smith almost all the time—Plath commented on the importance of the craft of poetry. “I am not worried that poems reach relatively few people. As it is, they go surprisingly far—among strangers, around the world, even. Farther than the words of a classroom teacher or the prescriptions of a doctor; if they are very lucky, farther than a lifetime.”

  Eighteen months after the release of the Heinemann Colossus, the Sewanee Review finally ran a review of the book, written by Lucas Myers. Stating that “there is not an imperfectly finished poem” in the volume and that he was “struck. . . by her posture vis-a-vis her material, which is one of considerable objectivity, even when the material is her childhood, her Muses, her pregnancy,” Myers wrote:

  Poems should be criticized as they are, not as the critic thinks they might have been, and these poems, as they are, merit anybody’s reading; but I can not help wondering what will happen if, in Miss Plath’s second volume of poems, the emotional distance is shortened—no melting of the moulds her craftsmanship has created, I think, but a lesser frequency of phrases like “Now, this particular girl,” “Mark, I cry,” “gimcrack relics,” and more of the pressure of “Lorelei,” of the close of “The Colossus,” or of “Departure,” which is an example of her finest writing.

  More than one critic had commented on the distance that Plath kept between herself and her subject matter. Ted too, by hypnotizing her and continuing to insist that she try mental warm-up exercises, had hoped to produce greater spontaneity in her poetry. Hughes’s efforts seemed to be working. Her best recent poems had been, in point of view, more subjective, less distanced. In March, when she had recovered from Nicholas’s birth enough to begin writing in her study two hours each morning, Plath decided to undertake a piece spoken by invented characters who address subjects about which she knew much—pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth. Set in a maternity ward and featuring three unnamed women, the piece, a radio play titled Three Women written for the BBC’s “Third Programme” at the request of Douglas Cleverdon, Ted’s producer, and inspired by the Bergman film, was subtitled A Poem for Three Voices.

  When Plath and Hughes were not writing in March, their lives progressed at a fairly quiet pace. Ted gardened, Sylvia started horseback-riding lessons at one of the local stables, and the two of them decided that both children should be baptized on March 25. Plath approved of this even though she had stopped attending the town church. One Sunday, the minister had told the congregation that Christians, unlike those “educated pagans” who feared dying, should be happy about the atomic bomb, for it was a sign of the Second Coming. If she were back in Wellesley, she would still worship at the Unitarian church, Sylvia told her mother. She was not, so she would send the children to the town church’s Sunday school but not attend the church herself.

  In April, Plath filled her afternoons with domestic duties. Since the weather had now turned nice, she spent hours out of doors, often picking daffodils from Court Green’s massive flower beds. Each week during April, she and Ted gathered from six hundred to a thousand daffodils to sell through a local market. When not outside, Plath helped Ted oversee workmen who were covering the house’s concrete floors with linoleum; was interviewed at home for a BBC series on Americans who came to England and did not leave; and greeted or planned for guests. Ted’s Aunt Hilda and Cousin Vicky drove down for Easter, although they did not bring Ted’s parents—a surprise.

  These were her afternoons; her mornings, she wrote. Now that Nicholas slept through the night, Plath did too, so she could rise at six o’clock and write for at least four hours without interruption. She began April by producing “Little Fugue,” another poem about “my” father, the first to tackle head-on the subject of his death. As the poem’s narrator remembers the father’s blue eyes and one leg, she also recalls his death when she was seven. In his absence, all she can do is try to get by. On the 4th, Plath wrote first “An Appearance,” then “Crossing the
Water.” A poem that describes two people rowing a boat across a lake at night, “Crossing the Water” is reminiscent of “Wuthering Heights” and “Blackberrying” in that it portrays a character’s response to a memorable landscape. The next morning, Plath wrote “Among the Narcissi,” a poem in which the narrator observes an octogenarian named Percy who, recovering from an operation, stands in his garden. Though the poem grew from fact (Plath’s neighbor, Percy Key, who had recently undergone surgery on his lung, did often stand among his narcissi), it addresses, on a larger level, the contradictory nature of life by depicting the image of a dying man engulfed by the bright, lively flowers. Her next poem, “Pheasant,” was inspired by an image as well—a pheasant standing on a hill—but the effort finally lacks the linguistic energy that her best poems now possessed.

  Not true her poem of the 19th—“Elm.” Based on a fragment she had written previously, the poem uses as its focus an elm tree not unlike the wych-elm near the cemetery next door to Court Green. The poem’s elm, however, is hardly real, for “Elm” is a monologue whose metaphorical strategy is so precise that the elm speaking is at the same time equivalent to a woman speaking. And it is through this voice, these synchronous voices, that the emotional power of the poem emerges. The speaker discovers herself in a love affair that is ending; she expresses her mental state through a sort of maniacal longing. After she describes her strained frame of mind, the poem’s narrator confesses that she is searching desperately for someone to love. Because of this hysteria, she realizes that some deadly force within her has been triggered into action by this loss of love. The disintegration of love, the poem says, is a sure death warrant for the speaker. The poem’s language may be subtle in its clarity, but its meaning is painfully obvious. Love, or the absence of love, destroys.