After they went shopping, Sylvia and Aurelia enjoyed a pleasant lunch. Originally, they had planned to remain in Exeter all afternoon, but following the meal they both agreed to call it a day. Driving back to North Tawton, Sylvia again seemed in good form; her talk was upbeat and spirited. When they arrived at Court Green and had parked the car, she and Aurelia got out and headed towards the house. Then the moment Sylvia opened the front door, she heard it—the telephone ringing on the other side of the room. Instinctively, she rushed for the phone to answer it before it stopped ringing. As she did, Ted arrived at the top of the stairs. Startled by Sylvia’s presence, he too made a dash for the phone. But halfway down the stairs, he missed a step and—awkwardly, harshly—fell backwards. His momentum carrying him down the rest of the stairs, he hit his butt on each of a half-dozen steps before he landed with a thud on the floor. His giant bulk sprawled out near Sylvia’s feet. Calmly, she picked up the receiver and said hello.
To Sylvia’s surprise, the caller—without question a woman—drastically lowered her voice, trying to sound like a man, and asked to speak to Ted. Despite the woman’s obvious attempt to disguise who she was, Sylvia identified her immediately. The voice belonged to Assia Gutmann.
Sylvia could not move. Ted lugubriously struggled to his feet, and Sylvia handed the receiver to him. After talking briefly, Ted hung up. Then Sylvia jerked the telephone wire from the wall socket. A silence fell over the room. Even Aurelia, who stood motionless in the doorway, recognized the moment’s drama. Like Sylvia, Aurelia understood the full implications of the telephone call.
Asking her mother to look after Frieda, Sylvia spent the rest of the afternoon in torment. Later that evening, she gathered up Nicholas and his baby things and bolted from the house. Leaving in the Morris, she considered where she could go; finally, she decided to visit a couple whom she had seen a lot that spring—Elizabeth and David Compton. Driving over, she became more and more angry. When she looked at Nicholas sitting in the carry-cot beside her on the front seat, she became filled with rage and hatred. How could Ted do this to the children? To her? Back at Court Green, Aurelia tried to calm Frieda by reassuring her that everything would be all right. For Aurelia, though, the problem was dealing with her son-in-law. After all, how was she to treat Ted, now that the unthinkable had happened?
Eventually, Sylvia arrived at the Comptons’. By the time she reached Elizabeth, a woman who she believed would sympathize with her dilemma, Sylvia was almost unable to cope. Her mental condition, which had deteriorated considerably as she drove, would shock Elizabeth, who years later remembered the night in graphic detail:
Then suddenly, late one evening, Sylvia arrived with Nick in his carry-cot, and the change in her was appalling. She kept saying “My milk has dried up, I can’t feed Nick. My milk has gone.”
At last she told me that Ted was in love with another woman, that she knew Assia and was terrified of her. She wept and wept and held onto my hands, saying, “Help me!”
What could I do? I have never felt so inadequate in my life. She claimed, “Ted lies to me, he lies all the time, he has become a little man.” But the most frightening thing she said was, “When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn’t want it, you cannot take it back. It’s gone forever.”
Still despondent, Sylvia returned to Court Green the next morning. It was then Aurelia decided that, to be out of the way, she should stay with Winifred Davies. Afterwards, Aurelia visited Court Green daily to care for the children, which allowed Sylvia and Ted a chance to go about their routines with as much ease as possible. But each night Aurelia returned to Davies’s.
Sylvia would not have been much company for her mother anyway. She continued to appear more disturbed than she had in years. She piddled about in the house or garden, except for the mornings, when she was in her study.
Actually, though, she didn’t write much. In the three weeks after July 9, she produced only two short poems. On the 11th, her first day home after the night at the Comptons’, Plath wrote “Words Heard, by Accident, over the Phone.” Previously, when Plath had used life experiences as source material for her work, she had chosen events that had occurred in the past. She needed the episode to reinvent itself in her subconscious before she could capture it on the page. Not so with “Words Heard.” The poem opens as the narrator is shocked by a voice on the phone that asks—“Is he there?” The implied answer is, he is. Throughout, the poem’s language is coded—direct statements are always avoided—and it is through this misdirection that “Words Heard” achieves its own weird tone.
When the poems confrontation is over, the narrator has two revelations. First, the seeds of some future event have been laid. Second, she decides that if she did not have a telephone, then she could not have received the call, and therefore her life would not be in a state of disaster. In short, the cause of the problem is the telephone, or so the narrator has decided. Neither the “he” nor the “I” of the poem apparently has anything to do with it. It is an interesting if flawed line of logic.
Soon, Sylvia did not even try to control her anger, for in her mind it was justified. She had neither deserted nor betrayed her husband; she would never even have considered it. Her only crime was wanting to have everything—children, husband, home, career.
One afternoon, that anger finally got the best of her. In a fit of rage, Plath built a fire in the backyard on the spot where they usually burned rubbish. Then, with her mother looking on in disbelief, she ripped up the manuscript of her new novel—the sequel to The Bell Jar—and threw it piece by piece into the fire. Just days before, Sylvia had described the book to Aurelia at length. She told her that it focused on a narrator who, after enduring severe hardships in her youth, returns to health when she enters into a nourishing and supportive marriage. She had based the husband in the book on Ted—the reason she intended the rough draft to be his birthday present. After all that had happened, Plath could never finish the book. So there it was—her only copy, torn to shreds, disappearing in the flames.
This was not the only bonfire Sylvia built that summer. On another occasion, she burned all of the letters—upwards of a thousand—her mother had mailed her through the years. The loss of the letters especially hurt Aurelia, who watched as Sylvia burned them, since she had hoped that eventually she and Sylvia could publish a selection of their extensive correspondence. (Fortunately, Sylvia’s letters to her mother were in Wellesley, or she might have destroyed those too.)
On still another occasion, Sylvia decided to burn some of Ted’s belongings. After she had cleaned his “scum” from the desktop in his study (she did this by running her hand across the deck’s surface and brushing the invisible material into her other, open hand), she accumulated letters, drafts of poems, waste paper—boxes of it—and carried the whole load out back. On the—now—familiar spot, she built her fire, and burned everything. Soon, as she threw handfuls of letters onto the flames, she began to dance around the bonfire. She did this for two reasons: to exorcise Ted from her system and to seek an omen in the form of a signal. While she danced, the documents burned. A steady stream of smoke curled skywards. Then, to air the fire, Sylvia stirred the flames with a rake. Ash and bits of charred paper floated up weightlessly. Once, when she had poked at the fire especially hard, she stood back to watch the ascending debris. And suddenly, as she would tell a friend later, a scrap of unburned paper drifted over to land conspicuously at her feet—an omen in the form of a signal. Sylvia picked up the paper. On it was written one word: “Dido.”
Sylvia panicked. Was Ted having an affair with Dido too? Was Dido somehow involved in facilitating Teds affair with Assia? Or was Dido merely the enemy?
On July 17, the BBC’s “The World of Books” broadcast “A Comparison.” On the 20th, Plath wrote “Poppies in July,” her second poem since Assia’s telephone call. On the 21st, she submitted “Elm,” “The Rabbit Catcher,” and “Event” to Alvarez. Six days later, he wrote back. “They seem to me the best thi
ngs you’ve ever done,” he stated. “By a long way. Particularly, ‘The Rabbit Catcher,’ which seems to me flawless . . . The last half of’Elm’ is superb.” In the end, Alvarez could convince The Observers editors to buy only “Event.” It would be a foreshadowing of the treatment Plath’s poems would receive over the coming months. In rapid succession she produced the most remarkable poems of her career, yet magazine editors, in both England and America, would reject almost every one she submitted.
In July, it was decided that a photograph should be taken of the three generations—Aurelia, Sylvia, and Frieda and Nicholas. To do so, the four of them gathered in the yard—armed with a camera, Ted followed—where Aurelia knelt on the ground so that she could position her granddaughter in front of her. Sitting beside her mother, Sylvia held Nicholas in her lap. With her long hair pulled up into one fat braid worked across the top of her head, Sylvia had rarely looked so severe. In the photograph, she forces a smile. Her eyes squint, just enough to show her uneasiness at having to look at the photographer— her husband.
On August 4, as she had planned, Aurelia Plath left Devon. Sylvia, Ted, and the children accompanied her to the train station. “When I left . . . the four of them were together,” Aurelia Plath would write, “waiting for my train to pull out of the station. The two parents were watching me stonily—Nick was the only one with a smile.” On board, Aurelia positioned herself at the window to see Sylvia and her family standing on the platform. Soon the train lunged forward, picking up speed, and slowly Sylvia faded from sight.
4
In August, with her mother gone, Sylvia had to face her deteriorating marriage by herself. That same month, it became clear that the Knopf Colossus, in print three months now, was going to be a failure. As a result of these personal and professional disasters, Plath could not write. In all of August, she managed only “Burning the Letters,” a poem narrated by a woman who, to make her attic safe, cleans all the old papers from it and burns them in the backyard. Stabbing the fire with a rake, the narrator spots a scrap of paper drifting through the air to land at her feet. She reads the disturbing message—a name—written on it. At that same instant, she hears in the distance a fox being killed by dogs—an event that, the poem implies, reflects the situation in which the narrator now finds herself.
On August 15, eleven days after Aurelia’s departure, Sylvia and Ted put the best face on their shattered marriage and traveled into London to visit Olive Higgins Prouty, in England for an extended summer vacation. (The children were kept by the Kanes, a couple who had been evicted from their London flat and had temporarily moved into the Court Green guest cottage.) Prouty treated Ted and Sylvia to cocktails, supper, and Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. During the evening, she was impressed by Sylvia’s extravagant talk of, among other things, her and Ted’s careers. Afterwards, at Prouty’s expense, Sylvia and Ted spent the night at the Connaught, the same hotel in which Prouty was staying. Before coming to London, Sylvia and Ted had struck a deal. Under no condition would either even hint that their marriage was falling apart. So, when Ted and Sylvia told Mrs. Prouty good-bye the next morning, Sylvia thought she was none the wiser.
In Devon on August 21, Plath wrote a letter to Anne Sexton, who had just sent her a copy of her latest book, All My Pretty Ones. Declaring that the book delighted her and describing it as unique, Plath predicted—she was blessed with clairvoyance, she said—that All My Pretty Ones would earn Sexton a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. (Five years later, Sexton did win a Pulitzer for Live or Die.) Then Plath asked Sexton a most revealing question. How did it feel, she wanted to know, to be a female Poet Laureate? With The Colossus a failure in England and America, Plath posed the question out of at least some unacknowledged jealousy. Next, Sylvia told Sexton about Nicholas and Frieda, about tending bees and planting potatoes, and about trudging into the BBC to record broadcasts. However, she did not so much as allude to Ted, or her marriage.
“I hope you will not be too surprised or shocked when I say I am going to try to get a legal separation from Ted,” Sylvia wrote to her mother on August 27, adding that, although she did not believe in divorce and would never consider filing for one, she simply could not continue to lead the “degraded and agonized life” that Ted forced her to live. Since Aurelia’s departure, Ted was still seeing Assia. By late August, he spent most of the week in the city where, according to Plath, he was using up their joint savings. Soon Sylvia began to imagine, though she had no proof, that Ted maintained a secret flat in London. As it was, he came to Court Green only on weekends. If Ted preferred this other woman, he could have her, but not without paying a price— literally. One reason Plath wanted a legal separation, she told Aurelia, was to force Ted to pay the children’s daily expenses. Finally, Sylvia could not control her fury. She did not want her children to have a liar and an adulterer for a father, she wrote to her mother. But they did.
Throughout August, Sylvia saw Elizabeth and David Compton, who gave her emotional support. She also continued to employ Nancy Axworthy. Additionally, the Kanes (whom Plath now described as an American playwright, who was depressive, and his pleasant Irish wife, who was manic), helped out with the children. Still, the strain of the past six months, and in particular the last seven weeks, had drained Sylvia so badly that she got the flu. One day, by accident or on purpose, she had veered the station wagon off the road into an abandoned airfield. Some people—Ted, in fact—read this as a symptom of her unstable mental state, possibly an effort to harm herself.
In September, she would go to Ireland, she decided. There she and Ted would attempt a reconciliation, should he honor his promise to try one, while the Kanes kept the children in Devon. After Ireland, Plath thought, she might close up Court Green and go to Spain for the winter. In the warm, sunny climate she could regain her health as she wrote and cared for her children. She had to make some move— that was certain. Life as she had known it at Court Green had ended.
Edge
1
Lately, Sylvia had been thinking a lot about Yeats. In early September, after she had finished some minor literary business (she wrote a letter to Judith Jones to tell her that Heinemann would be forwarding her a copy of The Bell Jar), she was free to go on the trip with Ted and attempt the reconciliation they had discussed. When the two of them thought about where to go, only one place seemed logical—Ireland. There they could try to communicate with Yeats’s spirit, who, perhaps, would tell them what to do with their lives.
Because the Kanes had become exhausted by caring for the children during the Hugheses’ mid-August trip to London, and by the stress they themselves felt over the Hugheses’ marital trouble, they moved from Court Green instead of staying to baby-sit. To take their place, Sylvia hired an employment-agency nanny, whom she put in charge when she and Ted left for Ireland by train on September 11. That evening, they arrived in Dublin in time to be treated to oysters, brown bread, and Guinness by Maire and Jack Sweeney, their Harvard friends, who were also visiting Ireland. The next day, Plath and Hughes traveled to Galway; from there, they continued fifty miles by car along the Connemara coast to Cleggan, the village in which Richard Murphy lived. In July, Plath had written Murphy to inform him that “Years Later,” the epilogue from his poem “The Cleggan Disaster,” had won first prize in that year’s Guinness Awards at the Cheltenham Festival, for which Plath, George Hartley, and John Press had served as judges. In her letter Plath also asked Murphy if he would take her and Ted out on the Ave Maria, his commercial boat, should they come to Ireland. Murphy wired Plath to say that he would be happy to; they could even stay with him. When Plath and Hughes arrived on Wednesday evening at the Old Forge, his Cleggan cottage, Murphy awaited them. Tired, the Hugheses spent the night in twin beds in Murphy’s guest room, the first of what they told Murphy would be a six-night visit.
After breakfast the next morning, Murphy took Plath and Hughes out on the Ave Maria. On the six-mile sail to Inishbofin, Plath, as Murphy would later recall, “lean
jed] out over the prow like a triumphant figurehead, inhaling the sea air ecstatically/’ The next day, Murphy drove them in his minivan to Ballylee, where Yeats had lived. At Ballylee, they visited Coole Park and observed a copper-beech tree protected by a spiked fence. Sylvia talked Ted into scaling the fence to carve his initials beside Yeats’s—because he “deserved to be in that company"—but Ted could not make it over the spikes. After this, they all climbed the spiral staircase in Yeats’s abandoned tower. At the top, while she tossed coins down into a stream below, Plath felt overcome with joy. It was as if a powerful religious force had enveloped her. For some time, she had identified with Yeats and his work. Standing in his tower, she sensed that she had actually fallen into mystic harmony with him. Later, back on the ground, Ted and Sylvia noticed an apple tree heavy with fruit and persuaded Seamus, Murphy’s fifteen-year-old helper, who had come along with them, to climb the tree and shake down apples. When he did, they gathered up some before returning to Murphy’s cottage.
During their visit, Ted and Sylvia were open about the problems they were having with their marriage. According to Murphy, Ted told him that “the marriage had somehow become destructive” and that he was involved with another woman. Privately, Sylvia confided in Murphy that she wanted a legal separation, not a divorce. Himself divorced, Murphy advised against this move; it would be better for them both if they could make a clean break.
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