Rough Magic

by Paul Alexander

  It had been well over a month since Ted had moved out of Court Green, but Sylvia remained furious. The mention of his name could sometimes throw her into a rage. On the 19th, as she wrote a letter to her mother, she fell into a vicious attack on Ted. Throughout their marriage, Sylvia had made countless sacrifices for him: she had placed his work before hers, taken part-time jobs when she did not want to, served as his typist and his agent, and deprived herself of luxuries like new clothes and a stylish haircut. And for what? So that Ted could date, as he was now, fashion models? Three days later, in a separate letter to Aurelia, Sylvia continued to express her disgust with Ted. She didn’t care if he was a genius, he was also a bastard and a gigolo. Yes, for six years he tried, and fairly well succeeded, at being pleasant and faithful, but in the end the pressure of living a lie got to him.

  Soon Sylvia became worried about her London flat. She suspected that an application placed by another person, Trevor Thomas—an artist who worked, she would learn, as the fine-arts editor at the Gordon Fraser Gallery, located near Fitzroy Road, on Fitzroy Yard—might be accepted instead of hers. In all fairness, Thomas had made his bid on the Friday before Plath put in one on Sunday. But Thomas had made the mistake of asking for the weekend to secure the lump sum of three months’ rent—180 pounds—which the agents wanted him to pay before he could sign the lease. From the start, Sylvia had offered fifty pounds a year more than Thomas. She had also argued her case well: she and Hughes—she did not tell the agents that they were separated—needed the large space for themselves and their two small children. Still, by Thanksgiving, she had no definite answer. Because of this, Sylvia made a second offer: she would be willing to sign a five-year lease, pay the whole first year in advance, and secure from America a reference from her mother, “Professor A. S. Plath.” This final ploy on Sylvia’s part worked. By the end of November, the agents agreed to the deal and issued her a move-in date of December 17. Delighted, Sylvia wrote to her mother about a trip she was going to make into London to apply for a telephone and to buy straw mats and a new gas stove. She could more easily afford these purchases, she said, because of an unexpected gift—a seven-hundred-dollar check from Aunt Dotty.

  During November, unknown to Plath, Knopf took actions on The Bell Jar which, if she had been aware of them, would have left her somewhat less ebullient. On the 7th, Knopf’s Koshland informed Heinemann’s Anderson that Knopf did not know why they had been sent The Bell Jar by Victoria Lucas but that they would not be publishing the book. Afterwards, Anderson reminded Koshland that Heinemann had forwarded Knopf the novel because Sylvia Plath, its real author, was obliged to submit her next book to them, since her Colossus contract contained a first-option clause. On the 30th, Koshland wrote back to Anderson. At Knopf, they “were knocked galley west” to learn that Victoria Lucas was Sylvia Plath. Nevertheless, though he and others had reread the novel, they still could not “warm up” to it, “despite her obvious way with words to say nothing of the sharp eye for unusual and vivid detail.” It seemed to those at Knopf, Koshland said, that Plath needed to get the novel “out of her system” so that she could move forward and deal with the book’s subject matter “in a novelistic way.” After all, The Bell Jar read “as if it were autobiographical, almost flagrantly so.” Because of the nature of the novel, Koshland continued, Knopf would rather that Plath withhold the book from the American market altogether. And, naturally, Koshland wanted Anderson and Plath to know, should another American house not pick up The Bell Jar, Knopf still retained the right of first refusal on her next work. On December 10, Anderson put that wish to rest. Yes, Heinemann would attempt to place The Bell Jar with another American publisher—and they would do so right away.

  Plath might have referred to The Bell Jar as a “pot-boiler” to Warren—as she also would to her mother—but the novel still represented the product of endless months of agonizing writing as well as the physical symbol of her own years of emotional upheaval. As a consequence, Plath was both upset over Knopf’s decision and heartened by Heinemann’s willingness to submit the book elsewhere. She learned these two pieces of news in early December, when Anderson wrote to tell her that they were looking at other American houses that might be appropriate for the novel. Plath suggested Harper and Row, Ted’s publisher, where his editor was Elizabeth Lawrence.

  In late November and early December, some good things did happen. The Home Services commissioned a two-thousand-word piece on her childhood landscape; two weeks later, she finished “Ocean 1212-W,” an airy, impressionistic memoir whose title refers to her grandmother’s Winthrop telephone number. In December, the BBC’s George MacBeth assigned her a review of an anthology of American poetry edited by Donald Hall (one in which her work did not appear) and Douglas Cleverdon asked her to record a program of her new poems. Finally, Three Women, translated into Norwegian, was scheduled to play on Oslo radio. Despite these successes, Plath still faced two realities. Judging from Knopf’s reaction, Heinemann would have trouble placing The Bell Jar in America. And, judging from the response of magazine editors on both sides of the Atlantic, Plath would encounter similar trouble selling her Ariel poems, the BBC’s support notwithstanding. Moss remained firm in his dislike for her new poetry, as did another editor, The New Statesman’s Karl Miller. At one point, he too rejected a huge batch of Ariel poems, telling Alvarez, when he ran into him on the street, that he found them “too extreme.” Instead, Miller set Plath to writing reviews of historical novels. Her last, a piece on Malcolm Elwin’s Lord Byron’s Wife, appeared on December 7. Ultimately, only Alvarez seemed to be excited by her recent work, yet because of space limitations at The Observer he could convince his superiors to purchase nothing but short poems. Recently, they had bought “Winter Trees” and “Ariel,” the latter of which the editors renamed (since they expected readers to be confused by the poem’s action) “The Horse.”

  Perhaps because of this cool reception, Plath again returned to fiction-writing. With her Bell Jar sequel destroyed, she now poured all of her creative energy into her newest novel, Doubletake. In a November 20 letter to Olive Prouty, Plath said that the novel’s title referred to the notion that a re-examination of events is often deeply revealing. In the novel, the heroine discovers that her perfect paragon of a husband is an adulterer. Plath hoped to complete Doubletake, which she would soon rename Double Exposure, by the new year. And, if it turned out to be good enough, Plath told Prouty, she wanted to dedicate the novel to her.

  5

  On December 3, Plath took the train to London to sign the five-year lease and pay the first year’s rent for 23 Fitzroy Road. While there, she also arranged for the electricity to be turned on and the gas stove she had bought to be delivered. Back in Devon, she began closing up Court Green, which she hoped to retain through the separation—or divorce—process. Over the next week and a half, she also packed, disposed of her bees, lined up Nancy Axworthy to feed her cats, and saw friends like Winifred Davies. During the first week in December, she telephoned her mother to say that she and the children would be moving to London within a couple of days. On the 10th, as things turned out. With Susan accompanying her, Sylvia drove her loaded-down Morris from North Tawton to London; her Devon mover followed. In London, Sylvia arrived at Fitzroy Road to discover that the electricity had not been switched on and that the gas stove had not been connected. Then a comedy of errors ensued. A gust of wind blew the door to her flat shut while her keys were inside—and she and Susan were outside. Seeing Trevor Thomas, her neighbor, emerge from the building, Sylvia said excitedly, “Oh, wonderful! You have keys and can let me in. I’m moving into the flat upstairs and I’ve locked myself out and the babies are crying and my husband has gone off with the keys.” Thomas replied by suggesting that she call the police. Instead, Sylvia hurried to the gas board to convince them to install the stove that day: it was the “gas boys,” as she called them, who climbed along the back roof, pried open a window, and unlocked the door. Later, after the Devon mover unloaded h
er belongings into the flat by candlelight, Sylvia complained to the electric board until a man showed up and turned on the power.

  During the next week, Sylvia tried to accustom herself to the new flat, to London, and to the fact that, now that she was in the city, Ted dropped in on a regular basis to see her. In those early days, she painted floors and bureaus, reintroduced herself to neighbors and area merchants, and contacted friends, especially the Frankforts and the Ma-cedos. The latter introduced her to the Beckers, with whom she struck up an instant relationship. Gerry, a professor at Hendon Polytechnic, and Jillian, an author who would one day write Hitlers Children, lived around the corner from Douglas Cleverdon and his wife, Nest. Of late, Plath had been in touch with Cleverdon to tell him that she had used the excuse of free-lancing for the BBC to apply for a priority telephone, which would speed up an installation process that normally took several months. In mid-December, not long after she had received her advance copy of The Bell Jar from Heinemann’s David Machin, the editor who had taken over her work now that James Michie had left for another publishing house, Plath submitted her new poems to Cleverdon for her reading on the BBC. None of the huge batch had been accepted by magazines, Plath wrote Cleverdon, except for “The Applicant,” by The London Magazine, and “Ariel,” by The Observer. Cleverdon was more than receptive, since he had been the one to suggest the program, on Ted’s recommendation.

  Ted knew the quality of Plath’s new work as a result of his visits to Fitzroy Road. On the morning of December 12, he and Sylvia took the children to the London Zoo. Being around him only made her angry again. She wrote her mother that she was happy she had eliminated Ted from her life. But Aurelia now had her doubts. Perhaps what she had suspected all along might be true: Sylvia still held “the hope of a reconciliation with Ted,” Aurelia would write later.

  Alvarez thought so too. On most of her trips to London during late October and November, Sylvia had dropped by Alvarez’s studio to spend part of an afternoon with him. Each visit progressed in almost the same way. After drinks, they chatted idly until Plath read Alvarez a handful of newjpoems. In this manner Alvarez had heard the bees sequence, “A Birthday Present,” “The Applicant,” “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Getting There,” “Fever 103°,” “Letter in November,” and “Ariel.” Of these afternoons, Alvarez would write: “Cross-legged on the red floor, after reading her poems, she would talk about her riding [her Devon horseback-riding lessons] in her twangy, New England voice. And perhaps because I was also a member of the club, she talked, too, about suicide in much the same way: about her attempt ten years before which, I suppose, must have been very much on her mind as she corrected the proofs of [The Bell Jar], and about her recent incident with the car.” There were other reasons why Plath sought out Alvarez. He was sympathetic to her poetry. She felt Alvarez’s introduction to his recent Penguin anthology, The New Poetry, more or less vindicated her present work. And she knew that Ted remained in contact with Alvarez. But as Plath read him her poems on visit after visit, Alvarez saw something more. In the wake of Ted’s departure, Sylvia was undergoing a severe emotional crisis. The key was “Daddy.” Ted’s desertion had obviously triggered in her the same feelings of isolation that had tormented her following her father’s death. “I suspect that finding herself alone again now, whatever the pretense of indifference,” Alvarez would write, “all the anguish she had experienced at her father’s death was reactivated: despite herself, she felt abandoned, injured, enraged, and bereaved as purely and defenselessly as she had as a child twenty years before. As a result, the pain that had built up steadily inside her all that time came flooding out. There was no need to discuss motives"—which they did not—“because the poems did that for her.”

  The obvious, also, had not escaped Alvarez. Because she was again “single,” Plath made it clear that she would be willing to become romantically involved with him. Alvarez could not, although he did not tell her why. At the moment, he was seeing a fledgling young writer, Jill Neville; he had also recently met the woman who would become his second wife.

  In her early days at Fitzroy Road, Sylvia tried to order her life. By December 21, she had finished decorating the living area, painting walls white and covering the floors with rush matting. For furniture, she bought pine bookcases, straw Hong Kong chairs, a small glass-topped table, and a large container in which she could arrange flowers. The decor, pleasing as it was, lacked warmth, which more than one guest remarked. Katherine Frankfort looked into a neighborhood nursery school for Frieda, now three. But Sylvia could not find a good au-pair girl (she had been spoiled by Susan, who had now assumed a nursing job in London). Without one, she got little work done. During all of December, she wrote only three poems (“Brasilia” and “Childless Woman,” the last of the Devon poems, plus “Eavesdropper,” the first poem she finished at Fitzroy Road), two radio scripts, and “Ocean 1212-W.”

  Also, Plath had some minor run-ins with Trevor Thomas, who had decided that she and Hughes had tricked him out of the upstairs flat, which was rightfully his and which he needed for himself and the two sons from his own failed marriage. Thomas complained to Sylvia that she did not keep the entranceway clean (as she was supposed to), that she did not purchase her own garbage can but used his, and that her perambulator blocked the building’s main doorway from the street. But Plath had to endure other problems. She still had neither a telephone nor a reliable au pair. Also, the immediate stress of the past few weeks, not to mention the emotional upheaval of the last six months, had seriously strained her physical health. It seemed she had no sooner moved into Fitzroy Road than she got the flu. To make matters worse, the children developed colds.

  With Christmas approaching, Sylvia became more depressed: this Christmas would be her first without Ted. During late December, presents flooded in—a one-hundred-dollar check from Olive Prouty, one for fifty dollars from Aurelia—but Sylvia realized that she and the children had no friends with whom they could celebrate the holidays. Despondent, she called several people; invitations were finally issued. On Christmas, Sylvia and the children had tea at the Frankforts’; they then ate Christmas supper with the Macedos, who gave Frieda a toy piano and Nicholas a rubber rabbit. The next day, Boxing Day, the three of them shared supper with the Frankforts as a steady snow fell in the city. Yet Sylvia remained haunted by thoughts of Ted frolicking on a carefree Spanish holiday with Assia or with one of the models he was dating.

  As this sense of abandonment weighed on her^ Sylvia had finally, on Christmas Eve, confronted Alvarez about a romantic involvement. Telephoning him, she asked him to come over for the evening—drinks, supper, poetry. He had already been invited to a supper party at V. S. Pritchett’s, Alvarez said, but he would stop by for a drink. Later, after the wine and the poetry—she read “Death & Co.,” among others—Sylvia aggressively forced the issue of an affair. “It would have been very easy to become involved with her,” remembers Alvarez. “She was in the most terrible state. Absolutely desperate. But it was the kind of situation where I realized I would have had to involve myself with her much more seriously than I wanted. In other words, it wouldn’t have been easy to take our friendship any further with her without going to bed, and I didn’t want to go to bed with her. It would have been trouble. So I backed off.” And left. Following an awkward good-bye, Alvarez headed for his supper at Pritchett’s.

  Alvarez’s rebuff, as Plath came to view it, was a serious blow to their friendship. “She must have felt I was stupid and insensitive,” Alvarez later wrote. “Which I was. But to have been otherwise would have meant accepting responsibilities I didn’t want and couldn’t, in my own depression, have coped with. When I left about eight o’clock to go on to my dinner party, I knew I had let her down in some final and unforgivable way. And I knew she knew. I never again saw her alive.”

  Professionally, the year 1962 ended on a disturbing note for Plath. In the last week in December, Judith Jones finally wrote her a letter to explain Knopf’s rejectio
n of The Bell Jar. Although she knew that Heinemann had already informed Plath that Knopf “would have to let your novel go,” Jones wanted to write her personally, because she felt bad about the rejection, since she admired “so much [Plath’s] lovely use of language and [her] sharp eye for unusual and vivid detail.” Indeed, Jones had hoped that Plath would “put [her] talents” to use on a novel so that she could become “more accessible to more readers,” the poetry market being as small as it is. But Jones and others at Knopf felt that Plath neither “managed to use [her] material successfully in a novelistic way” nor “succeeded in establishing a point of view.” Also, Jones did not “accept the extent of [the narrator’s] illness and the suicide attempt.” In short, The Bell Jar “never really took hold for” her. Finally, Jones wrote, she wanted Plath to know how hard it was to launch a first novel—"particularly your kind of novel"—and because everyone at Knopf who read the manuscript had such reservations about it, she could not guarantee that they could give the book “a fair shake” in terms of advertising and promotion. Nevertheless, even though she was not going to publish The Bell Jar, Jones wanted Plath to consider Knopf “her publishers,” for they had “a great deal of faith in [her] future.”

  6

  The Boxing Day snowstorm was nothing compared to the horrible weather that lasted throughout January. It was the worst January in London in recent memory. Snow would fall, melt, turn to sludge, and then, as the temperature dropped, the sludge froze and more snow fell on top of that. Traffic in the city virtually ground to a halt. With space heaters putting a strain on the electricity lines, the power failed regularly. Pipes froze, ruptured—and stayed out of service. The weather conspired to complicate the day’s simplest tasks: cooking breakfast, shopping at the corner market, or giving the baby a bath became a major undertaking. As Londoners begged for repairmen to fix the cracked pipes and for the electric board to restore power, they succumbed to flu, pneumonia, or depression. Hospitals were overcrowded and the suicide rate rose dramatically. For Sylvia, whose body had always responded poorly to cold weather, the season was especially painful. In her flat, the radiator pipes groaned and popped but produced no heat, the children lay bundled in bed while they fought colds, and Sylvia herself wandered about sick with the flu and sinusitis. It seemed as if winter would hang on forever.