Rough Magic

by Paul Alexander

  “Elm” is a powerful, urgent statement spoken by a narrator who has been abandoned by the person she loves. As far as Plath knew, Ted was not drifting away from her. On the surface, their marriage appeared to be as stable as ever. But over the next several weeks events would unfold that would prove that Hughes’s affection for Plath was not nearly as strong as she had hoped. The summer of 1962 would be a long, bitter season.

  The Bitter Season

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  When they were not fixing up Court Green, watching the children, or writing, the Hugheses spent much of the early spring planting a huge vegetable garden, since they hoped to live the next year off the food they would grow. Each also anticipated the release of a book: Plath awaited the Knopf Colossus, Hughes his Faber and Faber Selected Poems. (He would share the volume with Thorn Gunn, as each poet was too young for a “selected” of his own.) In early May, the Hugheses interrupted their busy routine to host the Sillitoes, down from London. During the brief visit, Plath and Fainlight often left their husbands, who entertained themselves, and engaged in long, absorbing conversations—in the morning over coffee at the kitchen table before Plath retired to her study to write, in the afternoon during tea, at dusk while they sat outside beside the flower garden. The two women had always enjoyed one another’s company, but now they felt closer, perhaps because each had recently given birth to a boy. They talked about their newborn sons, although they touched on other subjects as well— Plath’s horseback-riding lessons, London friends, and, most often, of course, poetry.

  One morning, after they had breastfed their babies, Fainlight described her recent poems and Plath read aloud her newest one, “Elm.” After Plath finished, Fainlight was overwhelmed. Moved by the poem’s haunting sentiments and impressed by Plath’s skillful use of language, Fainlight raved. Plath did not comment. She merely put the poem away, and they carried on their conversation. When the Sillitoes were leaving, though, Plath told Fainlight that, because she liked the poem so much, she was dedicating “Elm” to her.

  Following the Sillitoes’ visit, the Hugheses resumed their normal schedule. They wrote—Ted poems, Sylvia a New Statesman review of four books written for or about children—and they had lunch one day with Elizabeth and David Compton. Later in the month, they received more houseguests. On May 14, Sylvia wrote to her mother that, on the coming weekend, she and Ted would entertain the “nice young Canadian poet"—David Wevill—and his “attractive, intelligent wife"— Assia Gutmann: the couple subletting Chalcot Square. From all indications, Plath eagerly awaited the Wevills. She did not feel the same way, however, about the trip to Court Green that Ted’s family had planned for the first part of June. Since Teds mother, Edith, in Sylvia’s eyes, did little to help out around the house (Sylvia described her to Aurelia as a lazy woman who lay in bed until noon), Sylvia had to assume the burden of cooking and cleaning not only for her family but for her guests. Besides, because of the scene with Olwyn, Sylvia still felt awkward around the Hugheses.

  As expected, David and Assia arrived on Friday. Like Ted, Sylvia had always been drawn to the Wevills, whom she considered exceptionally bright and energetic. They were certain to realize their dreams, she thought: David worked hard to develop as a poet and Assia, at present employed by an advertising agency, hoped to become a poet too, or possibly a translator. Early in the weekend, the two couples talked about the Hugheses’ new home, the London literary scene, and poetry in general. Yet as the weekend progressed, an odd chemistry formed between Ted and Assia: their interaction began to take on obvious sexual overtones. This should not have been surprising. Ted had been the object of women’s flirtations in the past (Sylvia could not forget the anonymous girls at Smith), and Assia—a beautiful if thick-waisted woman who disguised her figure by wearing long, flowing coats—had the reputation of having affairs, especially with poets. Her marriage to Wevill had evolved out of an affair the two had started while Assia was married to another man.

  Strong-willed and determined, Assia—apparently—made the first move with Ted. On one morning of the Wevills’ stay, as Sylvia would later contend, Assia came downstairs to discover Ted sitting alone at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee. Creeping up behind him, she lifted her nightgown to her chin, releasedrit ta flutter down over his face and torso, and trapped him inside the nightgown with her. Though Plath never saw anything so flagrant as Ted and Assia strait-jacketed in her nightgown together, she did pick up on unmistakable clues—a prolonged glance, a subtle body gesture, a suggestive insinuation. Nevertheless, she did nothing.

  In person, that is. On Monday after the Wevills left, Plath locked herself in her study and wrote “Event” and “The Rabbit Catcher,” poems that deal with dying relationships. In the brief slice of life captured in “Event,” one learns that the narrator’s mental, even physical, well-being depends upon love—above all else. The loss of love, the poem implies, impairs. “The Rabbit Catcher” also deals with a couple’s strained romance. At the end, the narrator reveals that the “we” of the poem are in a relationship so confining that it is killing her. The poem’s stifling tone paralleled the anxiety Plath experienced, now that, once again, a source of tension had emerged between her and Ted. When the marriage that is supposed to be perfect—made in heaven, as she once called it—begins to break up, the disintegration becomes magnified many times over. At the moment, Plath was reacting to her perception of trouble in her marriage on nothing more than hunches. The concrete evidence would come soon enough, although one piece, about which Plath did not yet know, had already occurred. On the day the Wevills left Court Green, Ted had sneaked to Assia a private note: “I must see you tomorrow in London.”

  After delaying the book in April, Alfred A. Knopf finally released The Colossus and Other Poems officially on May 14. With the deletions Plath and Jones had made, the volume contained forty poems, a size with which Plath was genuinely pleased. When Heinemann had brought out the book in England, The Colossus had, if nothing else, been reviewed by the major periodicals, even if it took six months or longer for some of the notices to appear and, once they did, they were not so unqualified as Plath would have hoped. But the reception of The Colossus in America was drastically worse than imagined by either Plath or the Knopf staff, who, according to in-house routing sheets, had expected to sell one thousand copies of the book.

  In May, June, July, and August, only one review appeared—in Library Journal In August, The Christian Science Monitor and the New York Herald Tribune mentioned the book briefly in round-up pieces. Eventually, in the fall, three more notices appeared—in the Kenyon Review, The Hudson Review, and the Charleston Miscellany. That, however, would be it. The Colossus was never reviewed in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, or any other major city newspaper—not the Chicago papers, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, not even—and this was most surprising—Plath’s hometown newspapers, the Boston Herald or Globe.

  Plath had worked hard on The Colossus, which had gone through draft after draft. Had she wasted all the years she spent writing these poems? With the prospect of receiving no fame and no money from the book, now out in both England and America, Plath could not help concluding that she probably had wasted her time. The Colossus s reception was a blow to Plath—one of many, as it turned out, that she endured in the summer and fall of 1962.

  2

  During the first week in June, Ted’s family arrived in Devon. His mother, father, and Uncle Walt remained six days in all; Edith spent the nights at Court Green, while Ted’s father and uncle lodged in the village, at the Burton Hall Hotel. This was a pleasant visit, marked by long conversations about family matters, suppers out (four in six days, which solved the problem of Plath’s having to cook for her company), and drives through the countryside in the Morris. Plath had prepared herself for a bad jolt, but it did not transpire: no one brought up Olwyn. Still, Plath felt relieved when the Hugheses were gone; in fact, she seemed almost content. For the first time in months, she tried to
, appreciate life’s simple things. She coddled her babies, read books, and strolled through the countryside. As of June 7, she had not been in her study for three days; during her writing time, she had weeded her garden instead. “This is the richest and happiest time of my life,” Plath wrote to her mother. One reason for her happiness, Sylvia implied, was Ted’s success. His first two poetry collections had brought him respect and adulation in the literary community; his children’s book and BBC broadcasts had expanded his popularity. Already, at the young age of thirty-one, he ranked the release of a “selected” poems (though shared with Gunn), which Faber had published on May 18. In fact, Hughes now wielded so much power that on his recommendation alone, a whole career could be made—or resurrected. He had proved his clout in late May by broadcasting over the BBC a radio show on Keith Douglas, a British poet killed at age twenty-four in Normandy during World War II. “Keith Douglas was born in 1920,” Hughes stated in his prepared text. “By the time he was killed . . . in 1944, he had produced what is to my mind a more inexhaustibly interesting body of poetry than any one of his generation has produced since, in England or America.” On the basis of Hughes’s single broadcast, Faber decided, provided that Hughes would write an introduction, to issue a “selected” edition of Douglas’s poems, much to the delight of Douglas’s impoverished mother, who wrote Hughes to thank him.

  Before long, Plath returned to her study. If critics and readers were going to ignore The Colossus, then she would just write poems so startling, so innovative, that they could not be overlooked. She began to consider a new, ambitious poem, “Berck-Plage.” She would draw much of her inspiration for the poem from the Devon landscape, she decided, which occupied her mind a great deal these days. In her recent letters to her mother, Plath had lingered on descriptions of the local countryside (she loved the laburnums and the orchard of blossoming apple trees) and told her at one point that she longed to see Court Green “through your eyes.” She was referring to Aurelia’s upcoming six-week vacation to England, which had her arriving in Devon during the third week in June.

  Before that, Sylvia saw Alvarez, who, with his American friend John Nesselhof, stopped at Court Green briefly on his way from London to Cornwall over the Whitsun weekend. Instantly, Alvarez recognized a change in Plath. The move to the country and Nicholas’s birth seemed to have produced in her a new confidence and fulfillment. But there was something else. “Fm writing again,” Plath told Alvarez privately. “Really writing. I’d like you to see some of the new poems.” She was writing too. After producing little poetry between October 1961 and February 1962, Plath had written, in March, the lovely and strange Three Women; in April, six poems, including “Elm” and “Crossing the Water”; in May, three shorter poems. Now, in June, she was working on “Berck-Plage.” Happy for her success, Alvarez told her to send some of her recent work to The Observer. (When she did, he accepted “Crossing the Water.”)

  Alvarez made another observation. “No longer quiet and withheld, a housewifely appendage to a powerful husband, she seemed made solid and complete, her own woman again,” Alvarez would write. “Since [theirs] appeared to be a strong, close marriage, I supposed [Ted] was unconcerned that the balance of power had shifted for the time being to [Sylvia].” Mistaking Plath’s false security for true strength, Alvarez never guessed that she and Ted were drifting apart. Like Fainlight before him, Alvarez had been taken in by Plath’s apparent joy. He had believed what Plath had wanted him to believe—that all was well, even blissful—not what was actually occurring.

  Recently, Sylvia and Ted had gone to a town meeting of beekeepers. At it, they wore masks and watched a Mr. Pollard make three hives out of one by transferring queen cells. Because of the meeting, Plath ordered some Italian hybrid bees, which Pollard delivered to Court Green on the 15th. Even though Pollard placed the box out in the orchard, well away from the house, in the days following the installation the bees swarmed Ted, stinging him six times. Ted was still nursing his bee stings on June 21, when Aurelia arrived in Devon, after flying from Boston to London and taking the train south from there. Sylvia, Ted, and both children greeted her at the train station and drove her to Court Green in the Morris. Aurelia would later recall her early hours in North Tawton. “The welcome I received when I arrived . . . was heartwarming. The threshold to the guest room I was to occupy had an enameled pink heart and a garland of flowers painted on it. Frieda recognized me; ‘Baby Nick’ “—whom she had never seen—”went happily into my arms.”

  Over the next day or so, Aurelia settled in. She and Sylvia played with the children, wandered Court Green’s grounds, and talked about Warren and Margaret’s wedding, which Sylvia had missed on June 2. Sylvia spoke passionately about how, at that moment in her life, she had everything—beautiful children, a successful husband, a nice home (or it would be eventually), and her own career. But while Aurelia listened to her daughter’s monologues, she could not help thinking that, below the illusion of bliss which she projected, Sylvia was worried and depressed. Aurelia’s suspicions resulted from the “tension,” as she called it, between Ted and Sylvia. Although she recognized this from the start, she did not confront Sylvia. After all, to hear Sylvia talk, life was perfect.

  The first real blow of the summer came in late June. While Aurelia kept the babies at Court Green, Sylvia and Ted traveled by train into London to record appearances for the BBC, Hughes for “Children’s School Hour’ and Plath for “The World of Books.” In London, Sylvia telephoned home to check with her mother. When she did, she learned that what she and Ted had feared before they left had occurred: their neighbor, Percy Key, had died (on the night of the 25th). Lately, Percy had appeared to be giving in to his lung cancer; he sometimes became so ill, in fact, that he would hallucinate. His illness must have reminded Plath that, twenty-two years ago, her father had mistakenly diagnosed himself as dying from this same disease. In past weeks, Percy’s condition had deteriorated dramatically; on occasion, Rose had to ask Ted to carry him from room to room. Plath and Hughes had dropped in on Percy the morning they were going to London, and they both knew then death was upon him. Now it had happened—just as it had with Sylvia’s father so many years ago.

  Returning to Devon, Ted and Sylvia attended Percy’s funeral services; he was buried in a cemetery on a hill near Court Green. When Sylvia first saw Rose following Percy’s death, she hugged her; Rose kissed Sylvia and burst into tears. The entire ordeal affected Sylvia deeply. Images of Percy’s death and funeral worked themselves into “Berck-Plage,” which Plath finished on June 30.

  Plath had recorded an essay, “A Comparison,” for “The World of Books.” Its subject, the difference between writing a poem and writing a novel, was informed by The Bell Jar (she had sent her final progress report to the Saxton Foundation in early May) and by a second novel she was writing. (In the program, Plath did not use the books’ names.) In fact, Plath had completed a large portion of this new manuscript, which was a sequel to The Bell Jar. “This was a joyous book, dealing with her experiences as a young American girl in England,” Aurelia Plath would remember Sylvia revealing to her on this trip. “It told of her romance, her return to this country [America] with her husband, when she taught and traveled with him, and ended with the birth of her first child. The hero of that book was her husband. It was to be given to [Ted] in rough draft form as a birthday gift [in August].”

  As June progressed, Sylvia again experienced second thoughts about her husband’s character. By July 2, well into her mother’s stay, Plath wrote another poem about a failing relationship. Her first poem since “Berck-Plage,” “The Other” tries to identify the catalyst for a doomed love afiFair. Alluding to adulteries, the poem’s narrator, never clearly revealed, speaks directly to the “other.” The poem remains purposefully vague, and Plath plays with the anonymity of pronouns throughout, but the main concern of “The Other” is beyond conjecture. In the poem, the rival is not a family member—mother, sister, brother. It is another woman.
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  On the morning of July 9, 1962, Sylvia lay in the bed she shared with her husband. Already, the day was hot, but Sylvia did not think of the heat. Almost two months had passed since David Wevill and Assia Gutmann’s visit to Court Green. Over these two months, Ted’s behavior had become increasingly odd. Sometimes, Sylvia did not know where he was, for Ted now regularly went into London alone. When they were together, they often argued, more so than they had in the past. But this morning, Sylvia tried to take her mind ofif Ted. With her mother at Court Green, her pace had been busy. Yesterday, they had visited the Adamsons’; tomorrow, they would have tea with Mrs. Mac-namara, a neighbor. Today they planned to shop in Exeter while Ted took care of the children. Soon Sylvia got out of bed, dressed, and proceeded down to the kitchen. After breakfast, ready for the day, Sylvia and her mother headed for the Morris.

  On the way to Exeter, Sylvia sounded even more optimistic than usual. As she steered the Morris, she chatted with her mother. At one point, she made a remark that echoed something she had said days before: “I have everything in life I’ve ever wanted—a wonderful husband, two adorable children, a lovely home, and my writing.” Again, Aurelia listened to Sylvia without commenting, even if she did not fully believe her. “[T]he marriage was seriously troubled,” Aurelia Plath later wrote. “There was a great deal of anxiety in the air.” A few hours later, events would prove Aurelia right.