Rough Magic

by Paul Alexander

  In January 1963, The London Magazine printed Plath’s “Stopped Dead” and “The Applicant,” The Observer “Winter Trees.” Because so few of her Ariel poems had been accepted, Plath was greatly pleased by these publications. She also eagerly awaited the January 14 release of The Bell Jar. Though she had hoped that her move into London would not put a stop to her hours of frenzied writing, it had. For she had written few poems and no prose in the last half of December and did not feel the urge to write now. Fighting the cold weather and her sicknesses, Sylvia could barely get through each day. Lately, Nicholas had been awaking at six in the morning—an added strain. Immediately after New Year’s Day, Sylvia had enrolled Frieda in the nearby nursery school Katherine Frankfort had found for her. It cost four dollars a week. Frieda attended weekdays from nine-thirty until twelve-thirty; some mornings she cried when Sylvia left her, some mornings she did not. Judging from the children’s behavior, they were both affected by the breakup of their parents’ marriage. Sylvia, who recognized this and described in letters to her mother how Frieda cried when Ted left at the end of his visits to Fitzroy Road, felt both angry with Ted and guilty over upsetting their young lives.

  In the first days of January, Plath sought treatment from Dr. Horder, who, worried about the twenty pounds she had lost over the summer and the high fevers she ran in October, prescribed a tonic to help her gain weight and X-rayed her chest to rule out anything more serious than the flu. Plath had Horder look at Nick’s eye, which because of a minor deformity would probably require surgery. During early January, Plath was seeing more of Ted than she had been. On January 3, they again took the children to the zoo; on the 5th, he dropped by the flat at seven in the evening for a visit. Not long afterwards, Sylvia admitted to her mother that Ted came about once a week, under the guise of seeing Frieda. At times he treated Sylvia pleasantly; other times he could be dreadful. No matter what his behavior, his presence—or so Sylvia told Aurelia—unsettled her terribly. She could hardly bear to think of him living in an elegant flat, meeting important literary and publishing figures for supper, and taking carefree vacations with his girlfriend when it had been she—Sylvia!—who had worked so hard to put them in a position to enjoy the better things in life. Now the marriage had ended, and the sight of Ted made her furious. Even so, as Aurelia and others noticed, Sylvia would not put a stop to his coming by.

  January 9th was an unusually bad day. The power failed, and the frigid weather would not let up. She had to write a cover letter to an editor at The London Magazine by candlelight, her fingers frigid as she typed, because the flat had neither electricity nor heat. At this point, she and the children, all three of them down with the flu, became so ill that Horder arranged for a live-in nurse, who stayed at the flat for a week, until Sylvia could recover enough to eat boiled eggs and chicken broth. Home Help Service, a government agency, sent her a cleaning woman, a Mrs. Vigors, who straightened up the flat while Sylvia was bedridden. But above all, she needed a good au-pair girl, Sylvia wrote to her mother on the 16th, a candidate for which she would soon interview.

  In that same letter, Sylvia tried to convey how unbearable the winter really was. Because of electric strikes, all the lights and heat went out sometimes for hours. When this happened, meals went uncooked and parents bundled up their children to keep them warm. From those she cared about, Sylvia simply wanted encouragement. Occasionally she just needed someone to tell her she was doing fine, Sylvia wrote to her mother, under the conditions.

  Actually, people did. The Beckers routinely saw Sylvia and the children. Gerry dropped by Fitzroy Road to check if all was going well (it often was not). Jillian invited Sylvia to a film festival at the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead in January; later that month, Sylvia attended a party at the Beckers’ to which the Cleverdons brought Richard Murphy. (The Cleverdons had warned Murphy that Plath was in a “very tense state,” which seemed an understatement; at the party she did not confront him, as some had thought she might.) Other supporters appeared. At mid-month, Susan O’Neill Roe and her boyfriend, Corin Hughes-Stanton, treated Sylvia to a night at the movies. On the 19th, Patty Goodall, a niece of Mildred Norton, and her husband had tea with Sylvia. Late in the month, Olive Prouty mailed Sylvia a $250 check. Around this time, the Beckers took her out for coffee to an all-night cafe in Soho, where they sat talking until dawn.

  Still, throughout January, Sylvia fought the flu and her depression. Continuing to take her tonic to help her eat, she now needed sleeping pills at night to go to sleep. Finally, late in the month, she hired an eighteen-year-old au pair to watch the children. In January, she also wrote two nonfiction pieces that Punch commissioned: “America! America!,” a remembrance of her school days in Winthrop and Welles-ley, and “Snow Blitz,” a humorous sketch about the awful winter. But mostly she struggled to get well. Clarissa Roche visited Fitzroy Road early in February. Arriving to find Sylvia tired and sick, Clarissa cooked her a meal of pork chops and corn. “Sylvia devoured this so ravenously that I was suspicious,” Roche would later write, “and, sure enough, she confessed eventually that she had not been eating. . . . In fact, I think she was ill enough to muddle the days and nights. Sylvia then went to bed for a time and slept until my husband arrived. . . .” The sleep worked wonders. “When she came down there was no apparent trace of her feeling awful. She was a past master at disguising any state.” The Roches left, but not before they had arranged with Plath to go to the theatre one night in mid-February. Days later, Sylvia phoned the Roches from a coin box and they made plans. The three of them and Duncan Grant, Paul Roche’s former mentor, whom Plath wanted to meet, would go to King Lear the week of February 11. Clarissa would arrange for the tickets.

  In January, Heinemann published The Bell Jar under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Dedicated to “Elizabeth and David” (“Compton” was omitted), the book was given a modest first run—the house would one day describe the initial printing as “token"—and received mostly very positive reviews. In the month following the novel’s release, about fifteen reviews appeared in a range of periodicals, from Time and Tide to the London Times. In his New Statesman review, Robert Taubman identified The Bell Jar as “the first feminine novel I’ve read in the Salinger mode.” The Times Literary Supplement’s anonymous reviewer set the tone of his piece with the lead sentence—"Few writers are able to create a different world for you to live in; yet Miss Lucas in The Bell Jar has done just this"—before he went on to say: “Miss Lucas can certainly write and the book is convincing. It reads so much like the truth that it is hard to disassociate her from Esther Greenwood, the T of the story, but she has the gift of being able to feel and yet to watch herself: she can feel the dissolution and yet relate it to the landscape of everyday life. There is a dry wit behind the poetic flashes and the zany fiascos of her relationships, and when the last part of the book begins to trail a little and details seem both ugly and irrelevant one finds oneself thinking ‘but this is how it happened/ “ The BBC’s review, which appeared in The Listener on January 31, also praised the book. “I recommend The Bell Jar strongly,” Laurence Lerner said. “There are criticisms of American society that the neurotic can make as well as anyone, perhaps better, and Miss Lucas makes them triumphantly. . . . This is a brilliant and moving book.”

  While The Bell Jar was accumulating good reviews in England, no American publisher would touch it. Ted’s editor at Harper and Row, Elizabeth Lawrence, to whom Heinemann had submitted the novel after Knopf turned it down, rejected it. She did so because she believed that, following Esther’s breakdown, “the story ceases to be a novel and becomes a case history.” In retrospect, The Bell Jar seems to be a victim of its itime. Society allowed a man to write about going mad— Salinger and Ken Kesey did, to name two—but when a woman approached the subject she was disparaged. In Plath’s case, the editors who did not recognize the historical (if not literary) value of the book were women. Two men had edited The Bell Jar at Heinemann; two women turned the novel down in America.

/>   At the very end of January, Plath began to write poetry again. On the 28th, she finished a poem she had drafted in early December, “Sheep in Fog.” On that day, she also completed, beginning from scratch, three more poems. “Child” is yet another poem concerning motherhood. “Totem” is, as Plath ^scribed it, “a pile of interconnected images, like a totem pole"—a sort of collage poem. And “The Munich Mannequins” recalls Plath’s visit to Munich with Gordon. After her marriage to Hughes had failed and an anticipated affair with Alvarez ended before it even started, Plath used as source material for a poem her disastrous trip with Gordon. Had her Munich trip turned out to be a reconciliation with Gordon, and not a debacle, Plath could surely not help but think, how different her life would have been. Perhaps they would have married, settled down, had a family. Perhaps she would never have married Ted Hughes.

  The next day, Plath wrote the poems “Paralytic” and “Gigolo.” The latter, spoken by its title character, is about a narcissistic man dressed in black. On February 1, Plath produced three poems. “Mystic” is a religious poem in which the narrator thinks about love and faith. “Kindness” centers on a character named Dame Kindness, a woman who drips with sweetness, although her intentions may not be so pleasant as they appear on the surface. The last poem Plath wrote on the 1st, “Words,” deals with language, yet the poem’s final sentiment—“fixed stars / Govern a life”—also indicates the narrator’s resolve to accept her fate.

  On February 4, Plath finished one short poem, “Contusion.” The next day, she wrote “Balloons” and “Edge.” The first paints a charming picture of a boy playing with balloons. Also dealing with children, “Edge” is not so quaint. A brief lyric, the poem describes a dead woman—her body is now “perfected”—who is shown with her two dead children. The disturbing reality of the poem is clear. The woman has committed suicide. “Edge” was possibly the last poem Sylvia Plath wrote.

  7

  Since the summer, Plath’s emotional state had gradually deteriorated. Her various physical illnesses, which proved to be unrelenting, only aggravated her condition. Her behavior had become disturbing at times. One day in January, after Trevor Thomas had shouted at her from the downstairs landing that the doorbell was ringing for her and it was up to her to answer it, Sylvia stormed out of her flat. “Can’t you see I’m very ill?” she yelled. “I’m a very sick woman and I’ve a lot to do. I don’t want to see anyone.”

  Not long after that, on Sunday the 27th, the day The Observer ran Anthony Burgess’s review of The Bell Jar, Sylvia went down to Thomas’s and knocked on his door. When he answered, Thomas saw Plath crying hysterically. “I am going to die,” she said through her sobs, “and who will take care of my children?” Deeply concerned, Thomas took Sylvia into his flat, sat her down, and gave her a glass of sheny. Then he asked what had happened to make her this upset. “We were so happy,” Sylvia said. “It’s that awful woman’s fault. She stole him. We were so happy and she stole him away from me. She’s an evil woman, a scarlet woman, the Jezebel. They’re in Spain spending our money, my money. Oh! How I hate them!” Barely able to control herself, Sylvia picked up The Observer lying on a table. She flipped to Ted’s poem “Full Moon for Little Frieda,” which appeared in the literary section, and showed it to Thomas. Turning to Burgess’s review of The Bell Jar, she said: “That’s me, though that’s not my real name. I’m Sylvia Plath.” The revelation startled Thomas. He knew the byline from seeing it in magazines, but he had no idea that the “Mrs. Hughes” who lived upstairs was Sylvia Plath.

  From her outburst, the source of Plath’s anguish became obvious. She might have pretended not to be jealous of Assia—she had even borrowed a table from her, she told her mother—yet Sylvia was, now as much as ever. It did not help that Ted continued to stop by Fitzroy Road regularly. “Daddy come soon?” Frieda would ask sometimes when she woke up at night crying. In a recent letter, Sylvia explained to her mother why she kept seeing Ted even if she hated him. As long as he visited the children, or at least Frieda, he would make his $280 monthly maintenance payment. However, others, like Aurelia, suspected that Sylvia saw Ted because she loved him. As January progressed, Colin and Valerie St. Johnson, neighbors who lived directly across Fitzroy Road and whose boy played with Frieda and Nicholas, noticed that lately Sylvia had taken to standing at a window in her living room and looking down towards the corner at which Ted would appear when he came from the nearby tube stop. During January, the St. Johnsons on occasion spotted Ted walking down Fitzroy Road. Each time, he wore all black; usually he had a black scarf thrown dramatically around his neck. By the end of the month, the St. Johnsons realized that Sylvia was standing at the window for longer and longer periods of time. Some days, she remained there, without moving, for hours. Though each St. Johnson mentioned it to the other, neither confronted Sylvia herself. Her neighbors simply assumed that Sylvia felt so strongly about the husband from whom (they knew) she was separated that she would wait at her window indefinitely, merely to glimpse his approaching figure.

  Despite her problems, Sylvia still made plans for the future. On February 4, even as she admitted in a letter to her mother to feeling “grim” because of the “finality of it all,” she catalogued upcoming events: Marcia Brown would visit in March, a BBC critics’ program had offered her a $150 assignment for May, and she would travel in the summer. Also, though she did not tell her mother, John Richardson, a friend, had asked her to the Spike Milligan evening for March 3, and she had set up a lunch date with her new Heinemann editor for February 11. She did tell Aurelia, however, that Horder had arranged for her to start sessions with a woman psychiatrist supplied by the National Health. Until then, she kept in close contact with Horder; after February 4, she saw him daily. Horder knew of Plath’s marital and emotional problems. As of February 1963, he had diagnosed her as being “pathologically depressed,” a condition he considered much too severe to be a result of the breakup of her marriage. Instead, Horder believed the source of this depression was “a combination of things of which the broken marriage was very important.” She had an upper-respiratory infection, which can cause depression. She had just set up another new house in a foreign country—no easy task. She had a past history of severe—sometimes suicidal—depression. Worst of all, she was abnormally sensitive, as many artists are.

  Horder himself had suffered for years with chronic depression. So, although he attempted to arrange for Plath a full-time National Health psychiatrist, he felt confident that he could treat her depression on his own. His decision about method proved crucial, for at some point early on in the week of the 4th Horder placed Plath on antidepressants. At that time, a physician had available to him two groups from which he could choose—tricyclics, which take three weeks or longer to go into effect and which can help the patient sleep, and monoamine-oxidase inhibitors, which work much faster—usually within two weeks—but can cause dangerous side effects if a patient eats the wrong foods, especially cheese. Since Plath did not need help sleeping—she still took barbiturates—Horder concluded that she needed relief as soon as possible. He put her on the latter and warned her about which foods not to eat.

  On Thursday the 7th, Sylvia appeared to be nearing her breaking point. In the afternoon, she and the au pair got into a disagreement. According to the au pair, Sylvia, in a bad mood and sick, attacked her. According to Sylvia, who told two separate stories, the au pair either quit for no reason, or was fired by Sylvia because Sylvia discovered that she had left the children alone. Whatever really happened, when the au pair asked for the money Sylvia owed her, Sylvia did assault her; pushing and hitting her, she demanded that she go at once. Frightened, the au pair left without being paid. Almost hysterical, Sylvia telephoned Jillian Becker to ask if she and the children could come stay with her for a few days. This would be a stopgap measure while Horder, now gravely concerned about Sylvia’s condition, searched for a bed in a suitable hospital so that she could be admitted. More than receptive, Jillian demanded that Syl
via come over right away. Driving across London in the Morris, Sylvia arrived at the Beckers’ Mountfort Crescent flat around teatime, whereupon Jillian discovered that Sylvia had brought nothing with her except Nicholas and Frieda—no clothes, no suitcase, no baby paraphernalia. Apparently, she had just gathered up the children and rushed out of the flat. Jillian put the three of them in an upstairs bedroom, drove Sylvia’s car back over to Fitzroy Road, and collected the things Sylvia and the children would need to spend the weekend. She brought back clothes for the children, bottles for Nicholas, and, for Sylvia—at Sylvia’s request—curlers, cosmetics, and a party dress. At Mountfort Crescent, Jillian bathed and dressed Nicholas and Frieda, prepared a steak supper that Sylvia enjoyed enormously, and, after Sylvia had asked her to, went with her upstairs to her bedroom. Jillian watched as Sylvia swallowed one sleeping pill after another. She then stayed with her until the pills took over and Sylvia drifted off to sleep.

  About three-thirty in the morning, Sylvia awoke Jillian—and the rest of the house—crying out for help. She wanted Jillian to sit with her until five-thirty, when she could take her next antidepressant. The hardest depression to endure, Sylvia told Jillian, was the one in the early morning. Fearful for Sylvia’s welfare, Jillian settled in a chair and listened to a two-hour tirade against Ted, Assia, and the entire Hughes family. Her ideal marriage, Sylvia said, had now ended. She felt abandoned, just as she had after her father’s death. She also brought up a list of names that meant nothing to Jillian—Richard, Dick, Gordon. They all had loved her and wanted to marry her. She could have been happy with them. Instead, she made the mistake of marrying Ted.