Rough Magic

by Paul Alexander

  Finally, Sylvia dozed off again, and Jillian, exhausted by the scene, returned to bed. The next morning, though sick with the flu, Gerry went off to work; Jillian remained to care for Nicholas and Frieda. Soon after breakfast, Jillian took a telephone call from Horder, who told her he hoped to locate a hospital bed soon. Two hospitals he had approached had no rooms available; a third, which could admit her, seemed unsuitable to Horder. As they spoke, Horder implored Jillian to encourage Sylvia to care for the children herself. Sylvia adored the children. If she realized how much they depended on her, Horder believed, she might feel more worthy.

  Later in the morning, well after Jillian had hung up with Horder, Sylvia called him herself to set up an appointment. At that time, she also telephoned the au-pair girl, who, when Sylvia asked her to come back, refused to work for her again. In the afternoon, once she had rested and taken one of the four hot baths she would have that day, Sylvia drove back across town to see Horder. But when Trevor Thomas carried his milk bottles out, an hour or so after coming home from work, he discovered Sylvia sitting alone in the Morris in front of their building. Because the weather was cold and snowy, Thomas approached Sylvia to ask if she felt all right. Fine, Sylvia assured him; she was just thinking. Should he call Dr. Horder? Thomas said. (Like almost everyone in the neighborhood, he too used Horder.) “No,” Sylvia answered, “I’m going away for a long holiday, a long rest.” Then Thomas wanted to know where the children were; with friends, Sylvia said. Finally, Thomas returned to his flat and Sylvia drove off. At the Beckers’, she stayed only long enough to eat supper before she left again. This time, she took with her the curlers, cosmetics, and party dress. On her way out to the Morris, she told the Beckers not to wait up. She had a “very important” date.

  That night, Sylvia met Ted at Fitzroy Road. The two of them did not remain long, or so Hughes would say years later; Sylvia seemed in a hurry. Whether their conversation was brief, Ted ultimately left. Apparently, Sylvia then dressed and curled her hair (if she had not done so already). It is uncertain what she did next: she may have gone elsewhere, or she may simply have not felt like driving across town. At any rate, she hired a taxi back to Mountfort Crescent, where Jillian noticed a decided change in her personality. Her actions were direct and purposeful, as if after much uncertainty some vital issue had been settled. Had she finally come to realize that Ted did not intend to come back to her? Had he told her so in their conversation? Assia had become pregnant—a pregnancy she aborted around March 1; if Sylvia learned of Assia’s pregnancy that night, certainly the news would have further depressed her. Any reconciliation between Ted and Sylvia, if that was what Sylvia wanted, would have been rendered all but impossible. This, more than the resolution of any other unfinished business in her life, would have accounted for the new attitude Jillian saw. Or, as friends of Sylvias later speculated, perhaps something more ominous occurred Friday night at Fitzroy Road. After years of repeatedly being hypnotized by Ted and acting on his posthypnotic suggestions, Sylvia was highly sensitive to any signal—conscious or unconscious—that she perceived him to be sending. Several times during the fall she had told her mother that Ted wanted her to kill herself; if she believed this, it might have propelled her on some new and purposeful path of action tonight.

  The next morning, Gerry, now very ill, stayed in bed, while Jillian watched the children and Sylvia rested. In the evening, Jillian and Gerry reluctantly kept a supper date with friends. Gerry arranged for one of his students to come sit with Sylvia. With the Beckers away, Sylvia and the student listened to music, mostly Beethoven. Later, when the Beckers came back, Sylvia began her nightly routine: she took the sleeping pills, awoke in the middle of the night, and, calling out to Jillian, confided in her until she dropped back off to sleep.

  On Sunday, Gerry felt well enough to go with the children to the zoo. Jillian’s two children (by a previous marriage) had been staying with their father so that Sylvia and her children could sleep in their rooms. Today they joined Gerry, along with Nicholas and Frieda as well as the two Cleverdon children (Douglas and Nest lived on the same square as the Beckers), to make it a real outing. The group was back by lunch, at which Sylvia ate heartily. Then she went upstairs to her bedroom and took a long nap, the best rest she had had in days.

  Late in the afternoon, when she awoke, Sylvia decided that she wanted to go home. Because her car was elsewhere, she asked Gerry to drive her and the children to Fitzroy Road. The Beckers protested. There was no reason for her to leave, they insisted. She should stay until she felt better, or until Horder could find her a bed in a suitable hospital. But she did feel better, Sylvia said. The sleep had made her feel like a different person. Anyway, Horder had lined up a nurse, whom she needed to meet at the flat early in the morning, and Sylvia had things to do tomorrow: wash clothes, take Frieda to nursery school, and have lunch with her Heinemann editor. Even so, the Beckers argued against her going—but to no avail. Finally, Sylvia collected the children and all the family’s belongings and convinced Gerry to drive her across town.

  Although Sylvia cried most of the way, Gerry could not persuade her to go back with him. After he left around seven, Sylvia fed the children and put them to bed; then Horder checked in on her. Next Sylvia must have written letters. At eleven-forty-five, she walked down and rang Thomas’s bell to ask for stamps. Immediately upon answering his door, Thomas realized that, in addition to whatever she had been doing while he heard her pacing about upstairs, she had also taken some kind of medication. She looked drugged, distracted. “Would you be able to let me have some stamps, please?” Sylvia asked. Her letters were “airmail for America,” and she wanted to put them in the box tonight. Certainly, Thomas answered. But before fetching the stamps, he asked why she had not gone away for her holiday. “The children were difficult and I wanted to write,” Sylvia said. Thomas handed the stamps to Sylvia, who asked how much she owed him—an offer Thomas refused. “Oh! But I must pay you or I won’t be right with my conscience before God, will I?” Finally, as if Sylvia’s behavior had not been peculiar enough, she wanted to know what time he left for work in the morning. Around eight-thirty, Thomas answered. Why? “Oh, nothing, I just wondered, that’s all.” With this, Thomas shut the door. Ten minutes later, when he spotted the hallway light still burning, he opened the door to find Sylvia standing in the same place. I’m calling Horder, Thomas insisted. “Oh no, please, don’t do that. I’m just having a marvelous dream, a most wonderful vision.” Confused, Thomas shut the door once again and, since it was almost twelve-thirty, went to bed, although he was kept awake by the sound of Sylvia walking on her wooden floors upstairs.

  At some point, Sylvia must have mailed her letters. If she slept, she did not sleep much. Thomas could hear her footsteps until he drifted off” to sleep at five. It would probably have been around this hour, the time of her early-morning depression, the one that was hardest to endure, that she began the actions that ended in her death. She wrote a note—“Please call Dr. Horder,” it said under his telephone number—and crept down the stairs into the main entryway to tape the note to the perambulator, just inside the building’s front door. Back in her flat, she prepared a plate of bread and butter and two mugs of milk, which she carried upstairs and placed in Frieda and Nicholas’s bedroom. She opened the window in the children’s room; then, going into the hall, sealed the room shut behind her by stuffing towels into the crack at the sill jamb and taping up the top and two sides. The children’s safety secured, Sylvia went downstairs and sealed herself in the kitchen. Again, towels under the door, tape over the cracks. Finally, in the heart of the blue hour, that part of the early morning during which she had written her best poems, Sylvia Plath opened the oven door, folded a cloth on which she could rest her cheek, turned on the gas full-tilt, and, kneeling down on the floor before the oven, rested her cheek on the folded cloth she had placed on the oven door.

  At nine o’clock, Myra Norris, the nurse Plath was expecting, arrived at 23 Fitzroy Road. Be
cause the house’s front entrance was locked, Norris could not get into the building to knock on Plath’s door. Also, the name of the patient, Sylvia Plath Hughes, did not appear on either doorbell, and Norris was not even sure that she was at the correct address. She rang Thomas’s bell—no answer. In time, she decided to telephone her agency to verify the patient’s name and address. After waiting in line at the coin box—a new frost had burst more pipes, so neighbors queued up to telephone plumbers—Norris contacted her office. Sylvia Plath Hughes, 23 Fitzroy Road—the information was correct. Returning to the building, Norris walked around back to look for a second entrance. When she did, she spotted the two children crying at their bedroom window. Deeply concerned, Norris ran around front and bumped into Charles Langridge, a builder working on the block. With his help, Norris gained access to the house. Outside the upstairs flat’s door, they could both smell the unmistakable odor of gas. When Langridge broke down the door, they rushed in, forced their way into the kitchen, and found Sylvia sprawled out on the tile floor, her head still in the oven.

  Hurriedly they turned off the gas and opened the windows. Then they carried Sylvia’s body into the living room, and Norris began artificial respiration. Meanwhile, Langridge called the police from the coin box. When the policeman arrived, Langridge helped him rescue the children from upstairs. At some point, Langridge spotted the note taped on the perambulator and telephoned Horder. Soon Horder arrived with a friend, a doctor from America. Examining her, Horder agreed with the nurse, who had given up on the artificial respiration: Sylvia’s condition was hopeless. Horder pronounced Plath dead at ten-thirty. Afterwards, an emergency team removed her body from the flat on a stretcher and transported it by ambulance to University College Hospital, on Gower Street in Saint Pancras. On her death certificate, which was registered on the 16th, Plath was described as being dead when she arrived at the hospital. Listing her occupation as “an authoress . . . wife of Edward James Hughes an author,” the certificate documented her cause of death as “Carbon monoxide poisoning (domestic gas) while suffering from depression. Did kill herself.” On a desk in a room at 23 Fitzroy Road, the flat in which William Butler Yeats had lived and in which Sylvia Plath had now died, lay a finished manuscript, Ariel and Other Poems.

  Horder telephoned Jillian Becker, who was devastated by the news. Jillian, who did not have Ted’s number, called Suzette Macedo, who reached Hughes at his Soho flat. Suzette arrived at Fitzroy Road to watch after the children, whom Horder had examined and found to be in good condition. Though the children survived, Trevor Thomas almost did not. Gas from the upstairs flat had seeped down into his room and knocked him out as he slept. Awaking late in the afternoon, Thomas felt sick and confused. When he saw him, Horder diagnosed Thomas as suffering from carbon-monoxide poisoning.

  On February 12, Hughes cabled not Aurelia but Aunt Dotty. The cable was simple. “Sylvia died yesterday,” it stated flatly; then it documented the details of the funeral, which Ted was now planning without consulting the Plath family.

  On Friday the 15th, an inquest took place at Saint Pancras County Court, a small brick building off the huge wooded Saint Pancras Gardens. Inside, in the cramped, dark courtroom, the coroner called witnesses to the box and asked them questions about the “sudden death” of Sylvia Plath Hughes. On this day the court heard testimony from Ted Hughes, who identified the body; Myra Norris and Constable John Jones, who presented evidence; Dr. Peter Sutton, who reported on the postmortem (he had concluded Plath “[d]id kill herself”); and Dr. Horder, who was criticized by the coroner for not finding Plath a hospital bed. With officialdom satisfied, only the funeral remained.

  After the inquest, Ted traveled with Sylvia’s body to Yorkshire, where he had decided she would be buried in his family’s cemetery in Hep-tonstall. The next day, in the early afternoon of February 16, a brief service was held at the Hugheses’ local church. Overseen by Oliver Forshaw, who knew almost nothing about Ted and Sylvia, the service was attended by a handful of people—the Beckers, Ted’s parents, a local church devotee named Joan Mason, and Warren and Margaret, who had flown from America. The children did not come, but remained in London with Aunt Hilda; nor did Olwyn, ill with the flu. Shattered by the blow of her daughter’s death, Aurelia did not attempt the trip over. At the conclusion of the ceremony in the church, the funeral party reconvened at the cemetery, which, like much of the moors, lay under a layer of snow. When the minister had completed the prayers, the gathering of mourners dispersed; the open grave would be filled in by the undertaker. Though a tombstone had not yet been put in place, one eventually would be. Along with her married name—Sylvia Plath Hughes—and the dates—1932-1963—Hughes would select as an inscription a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted.”

  Over the years, Plath’s family and friends would try to understand her death. “Sylvia was doomed,” Wilbury Crockett remembered. “I don’t want to say she had a death wish. What I’m saying is, I was not surprised by the way her life ended. I grieved but I was not shocked.” Gloria Steinem placed Plath in social context. “Sylvia Plath was an early prophet who described a societal problem by describing her own suffering, who described the problem without knowing why. And when the why finally came along, she became even more tragic.” Alvarez openly acknowledged his (and others’) guilt. “When I look back on her life, it fills me with shame about how badly everyone behaved towards her near the end . . . , myself included.” Aurelia Plath isolated her daughter’s most basic character defect. “Sylvia’s tragic flaw lay in her own very weak ego strength.” And Marybeth Little summed up the pathos of Plath’s death. “Her death was tragic but her life was a triumph. How many of us have recovered from the (almost) perfectly natural nervous breakdown of the sensitive scholarly student? Much more important, how many of us left poems that will live? And children who live, yes, in a shadow but, yes, in the light of a light undimmed.”

  A Posthumous Life

  1

  Though Plath did not become famous during her lifetime, she would in the years following her death, as a quasi-cultish audience—the sort that rarely forms around an author, living or dead—bought almost anything written by her. Indeed, in her “second,” and posthumous, life it was as if Plath had not died at all. Beginning in February 1963 and continuing over the next two decades, Plath’s poetiy, fiction, non-fiction, and even drama appeared regularly both in periodicals and in book form, the presentation and frequency similar to that of an author who was very much alive.

  The release of this material was overseen by Ted Hughes. Since Plath was legally, married to Hughes at the time of her death, and since she did not leave a will stipulating otherwise, Hughes became not only the custodian of Frieda and Nicholas (after toying with the idea of letting Aurelia raise the children, he decided to do so himself) but also, under British law, heir to her estate. The inheritance included both Plath’s material property and, more important, the copyright to her entire canon of published and unpublished work. All monies made from the sale of that work went to the Estate of Sylvia Plath, which for all intents and purposes was Ted Hughes.

  Sylvia Plath’s posthumous life began on Sunday, February 17, 1963, when The Observer in London printed A. Alvarez’s short but poignant homage, “A Poet’s Epitaph.” The single paragraph read:

  Last Monday, Sylvia Plath, the American poetess and wife of Ted Hughes, died suddenly in London. She was thirty. She published her first and highly accomplished book of poems, The Colossus, in 1960. But it was only recently that the particular intensity of her genius found its perfect expression. For the last few months she had been writing continuously, almost as though possessed. In those last poems, she was systematically probing that narrow, violent area between the viable and the impossible, between experience which can be transmuted into poetry and that which is overwhelming. [Her final work] represents a totally new breakthrough in modern verse, and establishes her I think as the most gifted woman poet of her ti
me. . . . The loss to literature is inestimable.

  To accompany Alvarez’s epitaph, The Observer ran a black-and-white photograph of Plath. In the shot, her face appears delicate and innocent, its tenderness enhanced by the black turtleneck she wears and by her dark hair curving inward against her ashen cheeks. Completing the tribute, the paper printed four of Plath’s poems—"Contusion,” “The Fearful,” “Kindness,” and “Edge.” If these poems underscored the tragedy Alvarez tried to capture—the poems’ brilliance suggested at least some justification for his praise—"Edge” and “The Fearful,” whose narrators contemplate self-destruction, cast some doubt on Alvarez’s terse statement that Plath had “died suddenly.”

  The topic of The Observers homage was no doubt discussed one week after Plath’s funeral at a gathering at 23 Fitzroy Road. (Because Plath owned a long-term lease on the flat and had paid the whole first year’s rent, Hughes, whom the real-estate agents believed to be living there anyway—and Assia—moved in.) To the gathering Assia invited about a dozen people, including Olwyn, Daniel and Helga Huws, friends of the Huwses’, Aunt Hilda, and Luke Myers, who, hearing of Plath’s suicide, had come to Ted’s support. They put on some records—Olwyn remembers playing a Joan Baez album—and guests stayed until well after midnight. Years later, Trevor Thomas published a memoir of Plath in which he referred to this event as a party. He also said he heard the sound of bongo drums in the flat above him. Olwyn vehemently denied the accusations. Though they did have people over and they did talk loudly and play music, this, to Olwyn, was not a party. And, she said, there were no bongo drums!