Rough Magic

by Paul Alexander

  As time wore on, Aurelia was apprised of the situation. To remain on good terms with Ted, her link to her grandchildren, she “approved” tacitly by refusing to confront him. By the summer of 1967, Aurelia felt comfortable enough with the arrangement to visit the children at Court Green once again. At that time, she met Assia, who from then on assumed the lion’s share of Ted’s correspondence with her. When Nicholas and Frieda flew to America for the first time, in the summer of 1968, for example, Assia maintained most of the letter-writing with Aurelia concerning the children’s travel plans. In June 1968, in a letter to Ted’s Aunt Hilda, Aurelia attempted to come to terms with the strange predicament in which she now found herself—being forced to befriend “the other woman” in her daughter’s life. “Whatever has been and is—[Assia] wanted to keep in touch with me and I feel she is trying to find something she can tell me that will give me some happiness,” Aurelia Plath wrote. “I want to be absolutely open about this, for my concern is to keep the channels between Ted and me and the children open. . . . What concerns the welfare of Frieda and Nicholas concerns me as their grandparent—the children of my lost daughter will always hold priority in my heart. Anything else is simply not my business.”

  On January 20,1967, Assia, who never legally divorced David Wevill, gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Alexandra Tatiana Elise (nicknamed Shura). On Shura’s birth certificate, which was recorded in Saint Catherines House in London, the surname is listed as Wevill; however, Assia wrote in the blank reserved for the identity of the child’s father: “Edward James Hughes, author.” So, in the summer of 1966, Assia arrived at Court Green already pregnant, and in the summer of 1967, Aurelia met not just Assia, but Shura as well. It would be the first and last time she would see them.

  By March 1969, Assia and Ted had been friends and lovers for the better part of a decade. They had endured catastrophes together, although they had enjoyed good times too, most notably the birth of their daughter. Because of her background in the arts, Assia had assumed more than a passing interest in Hughes’s career, which flourished in spite of setbacks in his personal life. In 1963 and 1964, Hughes published several children’s books, which sold respectably. His first major collection of poems to appear after Plath’s suicide, Wodwo— which Faber and Faber released in England on May 18, 1967, Harper and Row in America on November 22—was widely praised by critics, who believed the book reflected a deepening of his subjective voice. In the winter of that same year, Hughes’s translation of Seneca’s Oedipus opened at the Old Vic Theatre in London. Directed by Peter Brook, the play, which starred Irene Worth and John Gielgud, met with good reviews and enthusiastic audiences.

  During these years, Assia attempted to break into print in her own right. In 1968, she translated Yehuda Amichai’s Poems, a book that was published by Harper and Row in 1969. But as she tried to make her way in the literary world, she could not shake the curse of being Plath’s “successor.” In time, she must have realized that she would never equal Plath in professional achievement—and surely never in sheer notoriety. She might have replaced Plath in her husband’s life personally, but replacing her professionally would be another matter altogether. By the third week in March 1969, the burden of living in the shadow of Plath became too much for Assia, who herself suffered deep emotional instability. On a frigid spring morning in a flat in Clapham Common in London, Assia Gutmann swallowed a handful of sleeping pills and then, groggy and disoriented, gathered up her baby, Shura, and went into the kitchen. She switched on the gas in the oven and, as she held Shura, waited for the gas to fill the room. At the time of their deaths, Assia was thirty-four, Shura just two. Years later, unsubstantiated rumors about that morning would still circulate in literary circles. It was said that Assia had carried out her desperate act on— or beside—a trunk that contained the unpublished manuscripts of Sylvia Plath.

  The shock to Hughes—he had now endured three deaths in six years—was overwhelming. In April, in a letter to a literary friend in England, he referred to Assia as his wife and admitted Shura was his daughter; as for their suicide-murder, he called it a “disaster.” On April 19, Aurelia wrote Hughes to tell him that, if an “emergency situation” arose and he “fe[lt] it desirable for [the children] to leave England earlier [for their summer trip to America], telephone me and I’ll work out the arrangements.” On May 5, Hughes responded by saying that the children would vacation in America in August—as planned. Hughes kept the news of Assia’s death from both Aurelia and his mother. On May 13, following an operation on her knee in a local Yorkshire hospital, Edith Hughes died. She had recovered well enough for her doctors to discuss releasing her in a week or so, when Ted’s father went against Ted’s wishes and told her about Assia and Shura’s death. She died within two days. Afterwards, the family buried her in Heptonstall, at a spot in the cemetery not far from Plath’s grave.

  In an effort to somehow cope with this spate of tragedies, Hughes moved with his children to Yorkshire. In the fall of 1969, he purchased a huge house in Heptonstall, the Manor on Lumb Lane. Placing the children in a local school, he focused on writing poetry that would be among the most brutal, violent—and original—he ever wrote. All of the poems in Yorkshire portrayed a fantastic character named Crow, a bird who assumed human qualities. Day after day, the poems came effortlessly. By the summer of 1970, the poems were appearing in magazines and literary journals—Michigan Quarterly Review, The Critical Quarterly, The Listener, The London Magazine, The New Yorker. On October 13,1970, Faber and Faber brought out an English edition of Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow. Five months later, on March 3,1971, Harper and Row published the book in America. The dedication page of each edition read the same: “In Memory of Assia and Shura.”

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  On April 14, 1971, just one month after their release of Crow, Harper and Row finally brought out The Bell Jar in America. The true identity of its author had been known for years: William Heinemann had disclosed that the book was Plath’s not long after her suicide, and by 1966 Faber and Faber had published a subedition in England under Sylvia Plath’s name. Because it had appeared in England before Plath’s death, the novel could legally be distributed in that country; the American copyright had not been sold, so no American house could print the book without acquiring the rights from Hughes. Not Hughes but Aurelia Plath had prevented The Bell Jar from being released in the United States. Aurelia believed that certain characters—Esther’s dimwitted mother, the wealthy popular-novelist whose scholarship subsidizes Esther’s education at an expensive Eastern college, the boyfriend who makes a sexual advance towards Esther by exposing himself—were grotesque caricatures of living individuals—herself, Olive Higgins Prouty, Dick Norton—who would be hurt by the book and by the publicity its release would produce. Also, Aurelia did not think that the overall achievement of The Bell Jar did justice to the memory of her daughter. After all, Sylvia had felt so apprehensive about the novel that she referred to it as a “pot-boiler” and demanded that her British publisher print it pseudonymously. Over the years, Aurelia made it clear that she would put up any roadblock, personal or legal, to keep the novel out of American bookstores. For his part, Hughes feared lawsuits and the possible negative reaction of an American audience to a novel that seemed to be autobiographical.

  Finally, by 1970, Plath was so famous that Hughes could not resist selling The Bell Jar. He offered Aurelia a deal. If she would not block the novel, Hughes, who controlled the copyright, would give her the permission she needed to publish excerpts from the nearly one thousand letters Sylvia had written her. Aurelia accepted Hughes’s offer. Then Hughes negotiated with Harper and Row on terms for the book’s publication.

  The Bell Jar met with mostly excellent reviews. Many critics agreed with Robert Scholes, who, in The New York Times Book Review, contended that The Bell Jar “is literature” and that it “is finding its audience, and will hold it.” As if Scholes had predicted it, the book immediately climbed onto The New York Times b
est-seller list and remained there for twenty-four weeks—an unprecedented accomplishment for a first novel written by an author known primarily for her poetry. The Bell Jar became so popular that, when Bantam Books brought out an initial paperback edition in April 1972—a run of 375,000 copies—it sold out that printing, plus a second and a third, in one month. In the mid-eighties, more than a decade and a half later, the Bell Jar paperback edition was selling some fifty thousand copies a year.

  On May 31, 1971, six weeks after Harper and Row’s release of The Bell Jar, Faber and Faber published Crossing the Water in England— the first major collection of poems by Plath to come out since Ariel. Because the thirty-four poems in Crossing were selected from those Plath had written between finishing The Colossus in late 1959 and beginning Ariel in early 1962, Hughes, who took even greater editorial liberty with this book than he had with Ariel, called Crossing “transitional poems.” The tag also implied, quite accurately, that, in producing these poems, Plath was trying to move from an objective to a more subjective style of writing. Fewer periodicals than expected reviewed Crossing because, even as the first copies of the book were being shipped, Hughes announced that a second Plath collection would be published soon. The wait was not long. On September 27, 1971, four months after the release of Crossing, Faber and Faber issued Winter Trees.

  To help explain the contents of the book, just eighteen poems and the radio play Three Women, Hughes wrote a brief two-paragraph prefatory note. He stated that Plath had finished all of the poems in Winter Trees during “the last year” of her life, which made them part of the large batch of poems from which he had chosen Ariel “more or less arbitrarily.” According to Hughes, Three Women, “written slightly earlier,” should be viewed as “a bridge between The Colossus and Ariel” which would have placed it in the so-called transitional phase that Crossing represented. Hughes’s introductory note raised some interesting questions. For example, if Plath had written Three Women during her transitional phase, why had that piece not been included in Crossing? One answer was obvious. Without Three Women, Winter Trees would have been too slim to print.

  On October 1, 1971, in The Observer, A. Alvarez took Hughes to task. “With such a vast potential audience,” Alvarez wrote in “Publish and Be Damned,” a review of both Crossing and Winter Trees, “there must be an overwhelming temptation to make the stuff last, with a new volume every few years.” Alvarez also probed Hughes’s censorship of his late wife’s work. “Ofihand, I can think of two [uncollected poems], both as powerful and new as anything she wrote: ‘The Fearful,’ published in The Observer the Sunday after her death, and ‘The Jailer,’ which appeared in Encounter later the same year. If poems in the public domain have been left out, how many others, I wonder, remain in manuscript? Unless she was grossly exaggerating when she said she was writing at least a poem a day, the number must be large.” Despite the controversy surrounding the release of the book, Winter Trees received good reviews—unusually good, considering that in his introduction Hughes essentially dismissed the poems as Ariel out-takes. Like Crossing the Water, Winter Trees chalked up impressive sales figures.

  A second—and more dramatic—battle between Alvarez and Hughes erupted on November 14,1971, when The Observer published the first of a scheduled two-part installment of Alvarez’s memoir of Plath—a piece The Observer called “Sylvia Plath: The Road to Suicide”—which was to be the preface to Alvarez’s forthcoming study of suicide, The Savage God. “As I remember it, I met Sylvia Plath and her husband Ted Hughes in London in the spring of 1960,” began Alvarez. From there, he sketched in his friendship with Plath up until—or at least this was where the Observer excerpt ended—the “gloomy November afternoon” on which she discovered the vacant Yeats flat on Fitzroy Road, put in an application for it at the agent’s office, and “walked across dark, blowy Primrose Hill to tell me the news.” A tangible feeling of foreboding hung in Alvarez’s prose as he described Sylvia heading across the park. This disquiet was spelled out clearly by the newspaper’s advertisement for the promised conclusion: “next week: The last gamble.”

  Hughes could not bear the idea of someone deeply familiar with Plath’s life revealing publicly, in one of England’s most widely read periodicals, the details of her suicide. He demanded that The Observer cancel the second installment, and he wrote to Weidenfeld and Nicholson to insist that the section of The Savage God concerning Plath be eliminated. Weidenfeld and Nicholson did not cave in to Hughes’s pressure; The Observer did. On the following Sunday, the newspaper announced, “At the request of the Hughes family, we have cut short the story of Sylvia Plath. . . . Readers may find its continuation in Mr. Alvarez’s book, The Savage God, from which we publish further extracts this week. . . .”

  The Observer also printed a statement provided by Hughes. “I would like to make it known to readers of A. Alvarez’s memoir of Sylvia Plath, in last week’s Observer, that it was written and published without my having been consulted in any way. Though at one time Mr Alvarez mentioned he was writing ‘something,’ and would show it to me when it was done, he did not say it was a ‘memoir/ or I would have made more effort to see it and check the nature and accuracy of his facts.” The newspaper included Alvarez’s rejoinder as well. “I did not consult Mr Hughes because I was not writing a memoir of him. I was writing about Sylvia Plath as a person—I think, a genius—in her own right. The memoir is also of the girl as I knew her, during a period when she was mostly living on her own.” What was more, Alvarez declared, Olwyn Hughes had read the memoir in an American magazine “at least by the last week in September” and suggested only three minor factual changes.

  Two days later, on November 19, the TLS ran an angry letter from Hughes who contended that Alvarez’s facts were “misremembered” and that Alvarez’s “main trouve”—that Plath had “gambled” with her suicide—"was, in fact, a notion of mine, which haunted me at the time, and which I aired to him, even though it went against the findings of the coroner, and against other details which I imparted to no one.” On November 26, the TLS published Alvarez’s response:

  Mr Hughes says he distorted the evidence when he spoke to me. I am, of course, not responsible for that. Mercifully, I was not relying only on information he gave me. I based my memoir on my own impression of Sylvia and on what she herself told me. . . . There is, however, one distortion I admit to: I deliberately suppressed all mention of the personal situation between Sylvia and her husband during the last months of her life. I did this both out of consideration for the feelings of the living and because I felt it was nobody else’s business.

  Hughes prevented the second installment of Alvarez’s memoir from reaching a mass audience through The Observer, but the complete memoir finally did enjoy a huge readership, since The Savage God proved to be an unqualified popular success. Indeed, Hughes’s references to his theory that Plath may have “gambled’ with her life in her last suicide attempt, a notion not included in The Observers first installment, may have intrigued readers so much that it increased book sales. Finally, Alvarez’s memoir of Plath reached a large audience— both in England and in America, where Random House published it— because his portrait of her rang true. It is a document written by an author who adores his subject and who is guilt-ridden because he did not answer her final, desperate, soul-searching cry for help.

  On September 29,1971, Harper and Row published Crossing the Water in America. Of the thirty-four poems included in the British version, six were omitted in the American to be replaced by the five sections of “Poem for a Birthday” that had been eliminated from the Knopf Colossus nine years earlier. Bolstered by The Bell Jars exceptional sales, Crossing became an immediate commercial success. The Saturday Review Book Club even chose it as one of its selections—an unusual achievement for a volume of poetry.

  In America, a year elapsed between the release of Crossing and Winter Trees—not four months, as in England. Once again, the American and British editions differed. This time, three po
ems were cut and nine added, three new ones plus the six left out of the American Crossing. This book too sold unusually well for a volume of poetry; it was chosen as an alternate selection for The Book-of-the-Month Club.

  In the posthumous life of Sylvia Plath, the years 1971 and 1972 marked the height of her popularity. “During the past year or so,” Marjorie Perloff wrote in The Iowa Review in the spring of 1973, “Sylvia Plath has become a true cult figure. At this writing, the Savile Book Shop in Georgetown, D.C., has a huge window display in which copies of The Colossus, The Bell Jar, Ariel, and Crossing the Water encircle a large photograph of Sylvia Plath, which rests against a copy of A. Alvarez’s The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, that ultimate tribute to Sylvia Plath as our Extremist Poet par excellence.” Not since Dylan Thomas had there been this sort of response to a poet’s work following his death, or before him Hart Crane.

  5

  Soon after she made the deal with Hughes, Aurelia Plath approached Harper and Row with her idea for Letters Home, excerpts from Sylvia’s letters to her. Immediately, Harper and Row offered Aurelia a contract. When Hughes had granted Aurelia permission to print Sylvia’s letters, it had been with the stipulation that the estate would exercise final editorial judgment on the project. In time, Aurelia submitted the proposed manuscript to Hughes, who asked her to cut the book, strictly for editorial reasons, because he felt it was too long. Even though she had already drastically reduced the material from Sylvia’s original letters, Aurelia agreed. Hughes approved the new, shorter version. But only weeks before publication, Hughes read the galleys and decided that the text revealed too many personal details about himself, his friends, and his children. Nearly all of the material that he wanted eliminated was, at most, only mildly revelatory in nature; however, Harper and Row—and Aurelia Plath—grudgingly obliged. Finally, after three years in the works, Letters Home appeared on December 3, 1975.