Rough Magic

by Paul Alexander

  Some time in March, Ted and Assia drove down to Court Green to look around, now that Ted had decided to sell the property. At Court Green, they ate lunch with Elizabeth and David Compton, who, at Ted’s request, had moved in temporarily to show the house to real-estate agents and potential buyers. FollowiHgJunch, Assia asked to walk through the house (she had not been there since the fateful weekend in May 1962), and Ted, uneasy with the idea, asked Elizabeth to go with her. Reluctantly, Elizabeth agreed to. But upstairs, as she and Assia passed the door to Plath’s study and she pointed out that this was the room in which Plath had worked, the strain of the moment took over and Elizabeth broke down. To which Assia said: “You really did like her, didn’t you?” Upset, Elizabeth rushed back downstairs, where she told Ted that he could show Assia the house. He wouldn’t, he and Assia eventually argued, and they headed back for London.

  Elizabeth thought the ugly episode was over. Several days later, she was opening the mail one morning, and ran across a gas bill. She had been receiving utility bills for Court Green, but this bill came from London, not Devon. Examining it, she discovered that in fact the bill was for 23 Fitzroy Road and covered the period that included February 11. And when Elizabeth turned the bill over, she could not believe what she saw. On it Assia had written, “She was your friend. You pay the bill.”

  Others responded to Plath’s death less bitterly. While rummaging through old photographs, Wilbury Crockett ran across two of Sylvia, taken during her high-school years. When he mailed them to Aurelia Plath, he enclosed a brief letter.

  Dear Mrs. Plath,

  Not a day goes by that does not bring the question—“Why?” I grieve more than I can say.

  These pictures I thought you would like to have. Isn’t the one by the fire lovely?

  I hardly know how to bring you comfort as I can’t find any myself.

  My Best,

  Wilbury Crockett

  Like other Wellesley residents, Crockett had read about Plath’s death in her obituary in the Wellesley Townsman on February 21,1963. The newspaper revealed Plath’s cause of death as “virus pneumonia.” The error did not lie with the Townsman. At the time, the surviving family provided information for an obituary, in the same way that a subscriber did when he bought a wedding announcement or a classified ad. In this case, the family, both the Plaths and the Hugheses, had reached a decision. In deference to the children, no one would confirm the true nature of Plath’s death, even though rumors about her suicide were already becoming widespread among friends, acquaintances, and the literary community.

  Actually, Plath’s suicide had been reported in the February 22 edition of the Saint Pancras Chronicle, a small weekly newspaper that covered events in Camden Town, the London neighborhood in which Plath had died. The article, “Tragic Death of Young Authoress,” began: “Found with her head in the gas oven in the kitchen of their home in Fitzroy road, N.W.I, last week was 30-year-old authoress Mrs. Sylvia Plath Hughes, wife of one of Britain’s best known modern poets, Ted Hughes.” After detailing her final days, the article quoted from the coroners inquest. “Mr. Hughes told the Deputy Coroner (Dr. George McEwan) that his wife had lately had mysterious temperatures and nervous troubles.” The article’s last sentence summed up the facts of the case, known so far. “The Deputy Coroner recorded his verdict that she died of carbon monoxide poisoning while suffering from depression, and that she killed herself.”

  Because the Saint Pancras Chronicle’s audience numbered only several thousand, few people in London read the article. No one, outside Plath’s immediate family perhaps, read it in America. As a result, the March 7 Wellesley Townsman published a follow-up to its obituary that did not take into account any of the Chronicle’s revelations. Instead, “ ‘A Poet’s Epitaph’ Honors the Late Sylvia Plath Hughes” identified her cause of death as—again—"virus pneumonia.”

  Two additional notes commemorating Plath’s death appeared. The Spectator in London ran a brief remembrance. The April 1963 Smith Alumnae Quarterly published a short citation, which included Plath’s name and date of Smith graduation and a paragraph touching on the high points of her career, in an alphabetically arranged list of all recently deceased Smith graduates. The Quarterly did not mention the circumstances of Plath’s death.

  Fewer than a half-dozen obituaries of Plath appeared. As the rest of the year unfolded, though, many magazines began to publish her work. In April, her poems appeared in The Critical Quarterly, The London Magazine, and The Atlantic Monthly; Punch printed her essay “America! America!” In June, The London Magazine published “Berck-Plage.” In August, Poetry (Chicago) offered three poems and a paragraph remembering Plath that stated that “[t]he death of Sylvia Plath on February 11 of this year was a shock and great sorrow to the world of poets here and in England.” But on August 3, 1963, the most noteworthy tribute to Plath appeared to date, in The New Yorker. The editors ran a two-page spread of her poems, seven in all, and added below her byline, which appeared after the last of her seven poems, two simple dates—“1932–1963.”

  Two more anthologies of Plath’s poems appeared in 1963, both in October. In England, Encounter ran ten poems and The Review, edited by Ian Hamilton, devoted a good portion of that month’s issue to Plath and placed a photograph of her on the cover. Snapped in 1957 by Olwyn Hughes, the picture shows a peaceful-looking Plath sitting in front of a wall of books, her blondish hair hanging down onto her shoulders. The plaid-trimmed wool cardigan sweater she wears lends a girlish naivete to her appearance. The nine poems inside, however, were anything but naive. From “Daddy” to “Lesbos,” poem after poem depicted a world shattered by warring emotions—love versus hate, rage versus happiness, insecurity versus self-determination. As a companion piece, The Review ran Alvarez’s “Sylvia Plath,” an adaptation of a talk he wrote for the BBC’s “Third Programme.” The piece ended with the inflammatory statement, “Poetry of this order is a murderous art.”

  In October, The Observer printed “Poppies in October,” in November “The Horse” (the renamed “Ariel”). Each poem appeared alone, accompanied by Plath’s byline, without any biographical information whatsoever.

  On the front page of the June 30,1963, New York Times Book Review, M. L. Rosenthal published “New Singers and Songs,” a discussion of several modern and contemporary poets. To define Theodore Roethke’s importance, Rosenthal cited the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. “Recently, [Roethke] has received a good deal of recognition in England,” he wrote, “where among others he has influenced the gifted poet Ted Hughes and his American wife, Sylvia Plath. Miss Plath’s very last poems, as represented in a recent issue of the Sunday Observer, were morbid but brilliant. In the absolute authority of their statement they went beyond Roethke into something like the pure realization of the latter-day Emily Dickinson.” A passing reference in a long essay, these three sentences foreshadowed the literally hundreds of critical essays and book-length studies that would be published on Plath’s work over the coming years.

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  It was Ted Hughes who had combed through Plath’s belongings in the days after her death to find the poetry and prose he knew she had been writing during the last months of her life. It was Hughes who negotiated with the editors who wanted to publish her work in periodicals in 1963 and 1964. So, not surprisingly, it was Hughes who, as early as mid-1963, began planning a posthumous collection of his late wife’s poetry.

  When he read through the manuscript of Ariel that Plath had arranged just before Christmas, Hughes decided that, because he wanted to incorporate poems she had written in the weeks immediately preceding her death, and because he wanted to excise some of the “more personally aggressive” poems from those she had written in 1962, he would delete fourteen poems, add thirteen others, and rearrange the order of the book. This done, in the summer of 1963 he submitted Ariel to William Heinemann, who held an option on Plath’s next book because they had published The Bell Jar. Heinemann offered Hughes a contract for Ariel, but ultim
ately the two could not agree on terms. In time, Hughes and his own publisher, Faber and Faber, came to an agreement after Faber gave Hughes considerable concessions—a larger-than-normal advance ($750), a 15 percent royalty rate on all hardback books sold, and a 100 percent royalty on anthology and broadcast rights. By the end of 1963, negotiations were complete. Faber would bring out Ariel in England as soon as they could rush it into print once Hughes had finished the introduction that he planned to write.

  In America, Alfred A. Knopf was interested in acquiring Ariel By mid-October 1963, not long after The New Yorker had published its two-page spread of Plath’s final poems, Knopf was ready to make an offer. But by February 1964, Knopf, hopeful yet, feared Hughes would want too much for Ariel In March, Knopf received their answer: Elizabeth Anderson, of Heinemann, wrote to William Koshland, of Knopf, to inform him that Olwyn Hughes, working as agent for the Plath estate, requested the rights for The Colossus to revert back to the estate. Obviously, the Hugheses wanted to control the rights to Plath’s late and early poems, since they believed both would be valuable soon. (In the end, Knopf retained rights to The Colossus because they still owned books—about seven hundred, selling at the rate of six copies per month; Heinemann, who had not kept an edition in print, lost control of the British rights to Faber.) As 1964 passed, Hughes and Knopf could not agree on terms. Knopf offered a standard contract for a poetry collection—a two-hundred-dollar advance and a 10 percent hardcover royalty—but Hughes insisted that Knopf meet Faber’s deal. The stalemate continued on in March 1965, the month Faber released the British edition of Ariel—without an introduction by Hughes, who had been emotionally incapable of writing one.

  Referring to the poems themselves and to the death of the poet who produced them, the blurb on the book’s dust jacket stated only that these poems “were all written between the publication in 1960 of Sylvia Plath’s first book, The Colossus; and her death in 1963.” The jacket copy did not mention details of her “death,” much less her suicide. Almost as a group, Ariel’s early critics also refused to reveal that Plath had died a suicide. In all honesty, they seemed puzzled by something much more basic: exactly what to make of these poems that defied the rules of traditional book-reviewing.

  In The Listener, P. N. Furbank called Plath’s art “hysterical bravado”; in The Spectator, M. L. Rosenthal expressed concern about her “fascination with death"; and in The New Statesman, Francis Hope questioned “how great a talent Plath’s premature death destroyed.” Finally, in The Observer, Alvarez stated that, although Ariel’s poems might be “despairing, vengeful, and destructive,” they are ultimately “works of great artistic purity and, despite all the nihilism, great generosity.” Alvarez also made the observation (and he was one of the first to do so) that since Plath’s death “a myth has been gathering around her work.” This myth stemmed from her premature death, which seemed, to Alvarez, “prepared for and, in some degree, understood"—"in a way, even justified, like some final unwritten poem.”

  Although he credited her death with the creation of the myth, he did not reveal that the death was a suicide. This veil of secrecy, one disregarded only by the tiny Saint Pancras Chronicle, would finally be dropped on October 7, when George Steiner disclosed in the Reporter what many of the readers of his review, “Dying Is an Art,” already knew: Plath had not simply “died suddenly,” she had committed suicide. “The spell does not lie wholly in the poems themselves,” Steiner wrote, addressing why Ariel had affected an audience the same way Dylan Thomas’s Deaths and Entrances had. “The suicide of Sylvia Plath at the age of thirty in 1963, and the personality of this young woman who had come from Massachusetts to study and live in England (where she married Ted Hughes, himself a gifted poet), are vital parts of it. To those who knew her and to the greatly enlarged circle who were electrified by her last poems and sudden death, she had come to signify the specifics, honesties and risks of the poet’s condition.”

  In November, both the daily Times and the Times Literary Supplement finally went on record concerning Ariel—almost eight months after the book’s publication. On the 4th, in “Poems for the Good-hearted,” the daily Times called Plath’s book “important,” adding, “They are notable poems.” Three weeks later, in “Along the Edge,” the TLS praised Ariel further. It was, according to the anonymous reviewer, “one of the most marvelous volumes of poetry published for a very long time.”

  In the fall of 1965, Knopf was still trying to purchase Ariel’s American rights from Ted Hughes. But Hughes had been approached by a number of other houses. Harper and Row, his publisher, had presented him with, as he wrote to Judith Jones at Knopf, a handsome offer— the same deal he struck with Faber and Faber. When Knopf firmly refused to meet those terms, Hughes made definite arrangements with Harper and Row.

  To prepare readers for the poems and to ensure a successful launch of the book, Harper and Row commissioned Robert Lowell to write an introduction. “Everything in these poems is personal, confessional, felt,” Lowell declared in his 750-word piece, “but the manner of feeling is controlled hallucination, the autobiography of a fever. She burns to be on the move, a walk, a ride, a journey, the flight of the queen bee. She is driven forward by the pounding pistons of her heart.” Then Lowell pushed his argument even further. “These poems are playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder,” he wrote; they are poems engaged in “a game of ‘chicken/ the wheels of both cars locked and unable to swerve.” And the “surprise, the shimmering, unwrapped birthday present” is what if not “death”? In charged language, Lowell elevated these poems to a whole new level of meaning, one where the line of distinction between a poet’s life and her art is so blurred as to become nonexistent. Yet even Lowell did not reveal the true cause of Plath’s death. This point finally became moot on June 10, 1966—the date on which Time magazine ran its review of Ariel

  One dank day in February 1963, a pretty young mother of two children was found in a London flat with her head in the oven and the gas jet wide open. The dead woman was Sylvia Plath, 30, an American poet whose marriage to Ted Hughes, a British poet, had gone on the rocks not long before. Her published verses, appearing occasionally in American magazines and gathered in a single volume, The Colossus, had displayed accents of refinement, but had not yet achieved authority of tone.

  But within a week of her death, intellectual London was hunched over copies of a strange and terrible poem she had written during her last sick slide toward suicide. “Daddy” was its title; its subject was her morbid love-hate of her father; its style was as brutal as a truncheon. What is more, “Daddy” was merely the first jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bile across the literary landscape.

  So began Time’s piece on Ariel. It was not so much a discussion of the poems themselves as a thumbnail sketch of Plath’s life and death, an overview that focused, predictably, on the darker elements, those worthy of banner headlines. In fact, throughout the article the magazine referred to Plath as “Sylvia”—an intimacy the editors heightened by illustrating the text with a sort of miniature family album featuring pictures of “Sylvia at 4, with mother,” “at 21” sunbathing on the beach in a stunning white two-piece, “at 23” arm in arm with Hughes, “at 25” in a pensive mood in her study. This intimate tone was echoed ten days later, when Newsweek ran its review of Ariel, which took up two-thirds of a page and contained a photograph of Plath holding an infant Nicholas. Despite the sensational slant of these reviews, Ariel had achieved a rarity for a book of poetry. It had been written up in the two largest weekly news magazines in America.

  Over the coming weeks, some critics, like Gene Baro writing in The New York Times Book Review, questioned whether Ariel would endure once the hoopla surrounding its release wore off Even so, the book was reviewed in numerous publications. Largely because of this attention, by March 1967—two years after the first copy of Ariel was sold in a London bookstore—the collection was on its
way to becoming an extraordinary success. Both Time and Newsweek reported that, in its first year of publication in England alone, the book sold more than fifteen thousand copies—probably a conservative estimate. Sales in America easily surpassed those in England. And as the years passed, the book continued to sell well. After its first twenty years in print, Ariel would sell upwards of a half-million copies, making it one of the best-selling volumes of poetry to be published in England or America in the twentieth century.

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  In September 1963, after he had lived briefly both at 23 Fitzroy Road and in a house in Yorkshire, Ted Hughes moved back to Court Green. He simply could not force himself to sell the house he and Plath had bought together. He was joined there by Olwyn, who quit her job in Paris to become Nicholas and Frieda’s “mother”—she would never have children of her own—and give Ted the freedom he needed to write.

  In the summers of 1964 and 1965, Aurelia Plath came to Devon to visit her grandchildren. (In the summer after Sylvia’s death, she had seen them in London.) She was planning to return to Devon in the summer of 1966 when, around the first of the year, Hughes wrote and told her not to. He said he and the children would be living in Germany while he filled a writer-in-residence position funded by the German Embassy. In reality, he did not want Aurelia to arrive in Devon and discover that Olwyn, who lived at Court Green for two years, had departed only to be replaced by Assia.