Rough Magic

by Paul Alexander

  On the 23rd, only Susan’s second day there, Plath already thought of her as a member of the family. Feeling deeply relieved, Plath wrote her mother to apologize for her recent angry letter. With Susan around to watch the children, Plath felt like a new person, so she continued to write poems at a startling rate. On the 24th, she finished “Cut,” a poem, dedicated to O’Neill Roe, which was based on a real event. Just days before, Sylvia had accidentally cut herself while cooking, all but slicing off the whole fatty tip of her thumb. When she completed “Cut,” Plath composed “By Candlelight,” a poem in which a mother cares for her infant boy late at night. After writing “The Tour” on the 25th, Plath produced two poems on her birthday, the first birthday she celebrated without Ted since she had met him. (Among the presents she received was a fifty-dollar check from her mother.) One poem she wrote that day, “Poppies in October,” a sort of companion piece to her earlier “Poppies in July,” captures an ominous scene of a field of poppies so astonishing that they outdo even the beautiful morning clouds.

  The second poem she would write on her birthday—“Ariel”—would be quite different. In The Tempest, on an otherworldly island where magic and deceit are commonplace, Prospero is master to an airy creature of extraordinary power. Ariel is indentured to Prospero, because in the past Prospero freed him from the evil witch Sycorax’s terrible curse, which had trapped him in a pine tree for twelve years. Though she obviously knew of the overriding connotations of the name, Plath made her Ariel a horse, who is ridden by the poem’s narrator. (Plath still regularly took horseback-riding lessons at a nearby stable; on her birthday, in fact, she planned to ride her usual horse, Sam.) In “Ariel,” the narrator, holding on as best she can, leans into the horse as it gallops along violently. But the ride is not just a ride; the narrator seems to be approaching—metaphorically—her own sure death. A perfect lyric, “Ariel” creates a seamless metaphor, with the action of the poem and that action’s meaning overlapping identically. Finally, the ride on Ariel becomes Plath’s. The ride’s culmination is chilling. But whereas the rider may be headed for a particular destination— the morning sun—the poet’s destination is not yet fixed.

  3

  On October 28, after she wrote two new poems, “Purdah” and “Nick and the Candlestick,” Plath completed one she had started about a week before, “Lady Lazarus.” A wild lyric that she would eventually describe as light verse, the poem is spoken by a thirty-year-old woman who each decade tries to commit suicide. Once she finished these poems on the 28th, Plath did not write poetry again for a week. Her main distraction was a trip into London that she took while Susan stayed with the children at Court Green. She arrived by train at London’s Waterloo Station on the morning of the 29th to record “Berck-Plage” for George MacBeth’s program, “The Poet’s Corner,” at the BBC beginning at ten-forty-five. She then wasted time window-shopping and running errands before, later that afternoon, she headed for A. Alvarez’s flat.

  “For heaven’s sake, yes, I’d like nothing better than to hear your new poems,” Alvarez had written in response to Plath’s recent request to drop in on him. “I thought the last you sent were superb. And Ted told me, rather wryly, that your recent lot were even better. God knows you’re the only woman poet I’ve taken seriously since Emily Dickinson. And I never knew her.” Alvarez had been talking with Ted because Ted spent several nights on his sofa when he did not have a place to stay. If Ted had had a secret flat in London, it had not been permanent. Eventually, beginning in late October, Ted ended his apartment-hopping by settling down in the huge Montagu Square flat of Dido’s mother, who had recently died. He could remain there, Dido had told him, until she cleared up her mother’s estate. In a strange way, the signal from the summer’s bonfire had come true. Dido was integrally involved in Ted’s life, now that he and Sylvia had separated.

  Divorced also, Alvarez lived on Fellows Road in a tiny rented studio in which, as he would write, “there was nothing to lounge on—only spidery Windsor chairs and a couple of rugs on the blood-red uncar-peted lino.” Alvarez met Sylvia at the door. Welcoming her, he then made drinks. Soon, they settled down in his living room: Alvarez took a chair but Plath sat beside the coal stove on the floor. As they sipped their whiskey, the two of them chatted. When Alvarez asked, Plath admitted that she was in London (in part) to hunt for a flat for her and the children, since they were “living on their own for the time being.” (From Ted of course Alvarez knew about the separation.) Eventually, Plath began to talk about her poetry, the writing of which, according to Alvarez, she “made . . . sound like demonic possession.” Finally, she asked if he wanted to hear some, and Alvarez enthusiastically said yes. Pulling a sheaf of poems from her shoulder bag, she reproached Alvarez, who wanted to read them silently. These poems must be read aloud, she said—and began “Berck-Plage.” Unable to follow the difficult poem, Alvarez asked her to reread parts of it when she was done. Finished, she waited for his response. He liked it a great deal, he said, so she read him several others, among them “The Moon and the Yew Tree” and “Elm.” By the end of her reading, Alvarez concluded that she was developing something “strong and new” in her work—and told her so. Delighted, Plath agreed that the next time she came into London she would stop by his flat again and read him some more.

  Later, Plath went to a PEN party held to celebrate the publication of an anthology that contained her work and that Ted had helped edit. Her attendance at the gathering served as a statement: she and Ted might be divorcing, but she was still a part of the literary scene. During this trip to London, Plath also had agreed to stay with Helder and Suzette Macedo. Earlier in October, when Suzette had telephoned Sylvia at Court Green and learned that she had separated from Ted, Suzette insisted that Sylvia come visit her and Helder. Sylvia declined, since Suzette and Assia were friends. But Suzette argued that she and Sylvia were friends too, so Sylvia eventually agreed.

  Plath decided that seeing the Macedos would also allow her to inform Ted’s friends that she planned to file for divorce. She did this during her first night at the Macedos’. Her present freedom overjoyed her, Sylvia told Suzette; she would not even consider taking Ted back. When Suzette tried to explain that this situation had also disturbed David and Assia (after all, David had tried to kill himself), Sylvia did not want to hear it. In the end, Suzette was concerned by Sylvia’s preoccupied state, now so severe that she had apparently forgotten to change the bandage on her injured thumb for some time: the filthy bandage was surely preventing the thumb from healing properly. That night, Suzette was awakened by the sound of sobs coming from the bedroom in which Sylvia slept. Rushing in, Suzette discovered Sylvia, her face drenched in tears, sound asleep.

  The next morning, Plath saw Eric White, literary director of the British Arts Council, who extended to her an invitation, which she accepted, to organize American Night for the upcoming International Poetry Festival, scheduled to take place in London at the Royal Court Theatre in July 1963. Afterwards, Plath met Peter Orr at Albion House. Following a twelve-thirty lunch at the Star Steak House, Orr and Plath returned to the studio so Plath could record her poems. The consummate professional, she read one after another of those she had written over the past month, including three—“Nick and the Candlestick,” “Purdah,” “Lady Lazarus”—that she had finished just before her trip to London. In all, Plath recorded a total of fifteen that day, among them “Ariel,” “The Applicant,” “Cut,” “Fever 103°,” and “Daddy.” As she read these poems—written about a world where children hate parents, where parents are unsure of their own parenthood, where marriages break up—the emotion of the moment, and the strain of the subjects of the poems themselves, came through only once. When Plath reached the second and third stanzas of “Daddy,” which contained the lines about the father’s death, her voice weakened, quivering as she spoke the words. Then, after an almost imperceptible pause, she continued.

  Plath did not shout these poems of rage. Her sharp Boston “a"s— “art,
” “heart,” “scar”—cut through any British intonations. In a tight, controlled voice, she delivered these emotion-filled poems. She declared them in direct statements. She addressed the reader—or listener, in this case—just as she had taken on her subjects: without flinching. Finally, Plath’s voice sounded as if it belonged to someone much older than thirty. Full, resonant, mature, it resembled, in tone and clarity and intonation, a voice not unlike her mother’s.

  When Plath finished, Orr interviewed her. Beginning innocently enough, he asked: “Sylvia, what started you writing poetry?” Plath answered: “I don’t know what started me, I just wrote it from the time I was quite small. I guess I liked nursery rhymes, and I guess I thought I could do the same thing. I wrote my first poem, my first published poem, when I was eight and a half years old. It came out in the Boston [Herald], and from then on, I suppose, I’ve been a bit of a professional.” Next Orr asked her about influences, which prompted Plath to mention Lowell—his Life Studies was seminal—and Sexton, “who writes about her experience as a mother . . . who has had a nervous breakdown.” Later, when Orr wanted to know if her poems tended to emerge from books rather than her life, Plath said:

  No, no: I would not say that at all. I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and an intelligent mind. I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn’t be a kind of shut-box and mirror-looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things, such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.

  Finally, Orr asked: “But basically this thing, the writing of poetry, is something which has been a great satisfaction to you in your life, is it?” And Plath could hardly contain herself. “Oh, satisfaction! I don’t think I could live without it. It’s like water or bread, or something absolutely essential to me. I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I have written a poem, when I’m writing one. Having written one, then you fall away very rapidly from having been a poet to becoming a sort of poet in rest, which isn’t the same thing at all. But I think the actual experience of writing a poem is a magnificent one.”

  4

  On reflection, Plath decided that going to Ireland would be an evasion of the problems at hand. It made more sense for her to find a flat in London and move into the city right away. So, when she returned to Devon on October 30, she knew that she would be coming back to London soon. Indeed, she remained at Court Green only until November 5, long enough for her to arrange for Susan to baby-sit, to see Winifred Davies on the 3rd about her injured thumb (convinced that Dr. Webb had bungled treatment of it, she had gone to Horder while in London; it was better but healing slowly), and to write one poem on the 4th, “The Couriers.” In London, where she again stayed with the Macedos, Sylvia met up with—as arranged—Ted, who went with her to look at flats. Their first afternoon out, Sylvia and Ted found nothing. Then, one day as she was walking by herself through her old neighborhood on her way to Horder’s office for him to re-examine her thumb, Sylvia noticed a “Flat for Let” sign outside a house on Fitzroy Road. Approaching the building—Number 23—she discovered that it sported one of the blue plaques that adorned many historic structures in London. Unbelievably, this one read, “William Butler Yeats 1865-1939 Irish Poet and Dramatist Lived Here.” Excited by her luck, Plath asked construction workers refurbishing the house if she could walk through the two available flats. When they agreed, she proceeded inside and immediately fell in love with the top flat. Consisting of three bedrooms upstairs and a bath, kitchen, and living area down, it seemed perfect for her and the children. It even had access to a balcony garden, ideal to sit in during warm weather. Sylvia learned that Morton Smith and Sons were the flat’s agents and headed straight for their offices; there, without hesitation, she made an offer. The agent with whom she talked said he would consider her bid, although he would have to verify her references. Thrilled nevertheless, Sylvia returned to Court Green. On the 7th, she wrote her mother a letter enumerating the many reasons why she desperately wanted 23 Fitzroy Road: it was close to Primrose Hill and the London Zoo, only minutes from the BBC, and literally around the corner from the friends she had made during her Chalcot Square days like Katherine Frankfort, who had already advised her about au-pair girls. “And [it is] in the house of a famous poet,” Sylvia added, “so my work should be blessed.”

  The more she thought about it, the more she wanted to live in Yeats’s house. Plath recalled her trip to Ireland with fondness. She could vividly remember how, as she tossed coins out of a window from the top of Yeats’s tower into a stream below, she had actually sensed the presence of Yeats’s spirit. Indeed, even though she had been physically ill, her soul became invigorated merely by being where Yeats had lived. She almost felt as if she could still communicate with his spirit—just as she had at his tower in Ireland. One night in Devon, while she waited for the agents to approve her references, Sylvia decided to try to receive a message from Yeats, who had, after all, been a medium. So, with Susan looking on, she flipped through her copy of Yeats’s Collected Plays until she stopped at a particular line in The Unicorn from the Stars. “Get the wine and food to give you strength and courage,” the line read, “and I will get the house ready.” That settled it. Obviously, fate demanded that she move into Yeats’s house.

  In her first days back at Court Green, Plath produced in quick succession “Getting There,” a meditation on an approaching death; “The Night Dances,” yet another poem spoken by a mother to her infant at night; “Gulliver,” a retelling of the Gulliver story; and “Tha-lidomide,” about a sedative popular in the late fifties and early sixties that, doctors eventually determined, caused birth defects. Then, on the 11th, she composed “Letter in November” and, three days after that, “Death & Co.,” a poem she would describe as concerning “the double or schizophrenic nature of death.” In the poem, Plath symbolized the two sides of death by personifying them as contrasting men, but the most haunting section is the ending. As she contemplates these two men, the narrator realizes “[s]omebody’s done for.”

  Around the time she finished “Death & Co.,” Plath gathered together all of the poems she had written over the last few weeks. Beginning with an older poem, “Morning Song,” and ending with “Wintering,” the last of the bees sequence, Plath arranged the poems into a manuscript (of its forty-one poems, she had written well over half in October alone) that would begin with the word “love” and end with the word “spring.” In England she would dedicate the book to Frieda and Nicholas, in America to Olive Higgins Prouty—or so Plath wrote her mother. And after rejecting several titles—Daddy, A Birthday Present, The Rival, The Rabbit Catcher, all followed by the obligatory and Other Poems—Plath decided that she should name the manuscript for what she believed to be its best poem. Ariel and Other Poems—that would be the title of her second volume of poetry.

  Though Plath admired these new poems enough to assemble them into a manuscript, editors did not share her enthusiasm. In November, after The London Magazine accepted “The Applicant” and “Stopped Dead,” Plath met with a flood of rejections. The most notable ones came from The New Yorkers Howard Moss, who out of the countless new poems she sent him—and during the fall, in numerous submissions, she mailed him almost all of Ariel—accepted only “Amnesiac.” Towards the end of November, The Atlantic Monthly’s Peter Davison rejected seven poems, although he did keep six from which Weeks eventually accepted “The Arrival of the Bee Box” and “Wintering.” Plath even received rejections from small literary journals. While her Ariel poems met with a reception as cold as the one The Colossus had been afforded in America, P
lath came to realize that what she had to say in her poems would remain, for the most part, private. It looked as if they would never reach the wide audience of which she had dreamed. She had produced poems she knew to be far better than any she had written, and the editors of the periodicals who had accepted her work in the past simply did not care. Faced with this response, Plath saw herself as a failure.

  Despite these rejections, Plath continued to write poems during the last half of November. On the 16th, she turned out “Years” and “The Fearful,” the latter a dark piece about a woman who calls on the telephone but pretends to be a man and who detests even the thought of a baby because she would rather have only her man. On the 18th, Plath wrote “Mary’s Song,” which she dedicated to Father Michael, a priest with whom she had corresponded through the years. And, on the 26th, she composed “Winter Trees.”

  One weekend in November, Plath also hosted Clarissa Roche, who came to Devon with her one-month-old infant—her fourth child— from Kent, where she and Paul now lived. On the Monday after Clarissa left, heartened by seeing her old friend, Plath tried to strike up a new friendship. Writing to Stevie Smith, Plath told her that she enjoyed the recordings Smith had made for Peter Orr, that she considered herself a Smith-addict (she particularly liked Novel on Yellow Paper), and that she herself had a novel forthcoming. Plath then added that she hoped to move into London by New Year’s; perhaps Smith might stop by for tea when she did. (Eventually, in late 1962, Stevie Smith answered Plath: she wished her luck on her novel and suggested that they meet. They never did.)