To bring a child into the world out of wedlock and left field would be the death knell of his already perishing marriage. To tell the truth, he hasn’t given much thought to divorce. He has been busy being in love. But it takes no great amount of deliberation to determine that the legal decree would be a stake through Sylvia’s heart, a legitimized murder, no? Sylvia can accept adultery, after a manner of speaking. She can flare up, simmer down, threaten murder and suicide, and ultimately chalk it up to biology, and come away feeling wounded and superior. But an illegitimate birth hard upon a bill of divorce would constitute a betrayal of their children. Having no other recourse, the kids would turn their vengeance upon themselves, where it would damage Ted the most. Sylvia wouldn’t intervene. She would think a course of nonaction to be within her Medean rights. Ted would find himself powerless as well. If Sylvia chose to point to Assia’s belly in the courtroom, Ted probably wouldn’t even get visiting rights.
The shame of it is that he is love with another woman and not near to being ready for his marriage to end. He feels as though he has never really known Sylvia. The offshoots and ancillaries of her, sure. The molten essence of her, if there is such a substance, never. She has always been a thousand different variations on a missing central theme. In the beginning, this intrigued him. He was dancing with Salome, the life-jilted, potentially vindictive infinitude of Salome, tearing away layer after layer of artifice, pretension, and insecurity. Slowly, but steadily, he was getting closer to her. The poetry that she wrote at that point sustained the inscrutability that, in a very real sense, helped reinforce their marriage for quite a long while. The marriage had the cryptographic appeal of a language that he was just beginning to learn. Reasonably soon, given that they were married within five months of their first meeting, a terror took root in him: one day the music would stop cold and he would find that he had been dancing with a bundle of bloody rags and bones. He hadn’t really cheated with other women out of any sense of unfulfillment. Yes, he had been bored from time to time, but, for one thing, he and Sylvia had the love of their children in common. For another, they shared the highbrow’s predilection for near brutality in bed. Rather (honestly?) he cheated out of a submerged terror that he might have married a phantom and that, by extension, all women might be phantoms. And not that all the willing flesh that he has encountered ever served to reassure him. All men are looking to uncover their angel. Their own, by-God-ordained angel. All men are more than willing to stumble over ten thousand Furies to find her. The assumption is that one never truly looks at oneself until one is doing so in the eyes of one’s soul mate. Sylvia was no one’s angel but she turned out to be significantly more honest about herself than the women he sought sincerity from in the litmus of adultery. She simply had no idea who she was. She wrote her poetry to probe the question unremittingly. She married Ted, mistakenly thinking that their union would resolve the controversy. In the end, theirs became a marriage of mutual confusion. Successful in its bankruptcy.
Assia’s gone on ahead. He hears her heels climbing the hollow planks of the jerry-built belfry that habitats the great Anatolian organ, a spoil of the war. The organ has an impregnable cast-iron belly and, in former times, was situated over a brazier so that the water in its abdomen would seethe and gurgle as the instrument was played. The legend is that some sort of pyrotechnic curse has been placed upon the giant music box and that it is liable to incinerate the building if ever again it is made to sing. Jealous curators and collectors around the globe, whose operatives were somewhere else on the day that the Brit army discreetly loaded it into a transport truck, refer to it somewhat speciously as the “English Greek Fire.” Ted turns in the direction of the organ loft.
15.
Sylvia
She breaks off the poem, leaving a blue slash of disruption. Wasn’t it supposed to be a come-on to Abdiel? She is offering herself as putrid goods, red meat with the wounds still oozing. She smiles her Niagara smile, chewing on the pen. Communication between her and her father always had to be filtered through the hypothetical audience of her muses. Or else the conversation had to be enkindled over the tabernacle of the electroshock machine. Talk about the Freudian misfortune of the lack of communication between the generations. What had her father said in those electrode exchanges anyway? Whatever it was, he had said it too boisterously for her to hear. She assumes that Daddy yelled for her to go back. No one metamorphoses in death, Daddy shouted. Sylvia would only be cutting off her body to spite her soul.
She can hear the swastika purring beneath the marble of the table. More buffer than blade. When thoughts of suicide enter a room, they always seem to arrive in their stocking feet. The hand upon her shoulder is gloved as well.
And yet when all is lost, all is illuminated. In the clear void that remains, there is only the desire for ecstatic union with one’s creator and savior. Suicide, for Sylvia, therefore, constitutes nothing less than a home-coming. The force that gave her life waits to deliver her from it.
She’ll do nothing on intellectual grounds. She would have to feel something gravid in the pit of her gut. She would have to give birth to her own death. She remembers being in the throes of labor. It was not so very different from the electroshock treatments. Something vital and dynamic was being taken forcibly from her being by way of agony. Both times in labor, how she longed for the little heads to round their way into faces. To see their wide smiles of terror as the overpowering deluge of air flooded down their throats. To feel the throb of their little lungs as they screamed. It was not that she relished their horror; it was that their anxiety at last legitimized hers. Her life was now an endgame. Her mortality no longer mattered. She had passed on the family curse.
No, her mortality does matter, after all. In the sense that the one thing that she has left to live for is death.
She brings the flat of her hand down hard and smites the stone cranium. She feels the tuning-fork resonance all the way to her elbow. She kneels there, waving an electrified bye-bye to Daddy. She gets up and goes into the kitchenette. She looks at the white cabinet of the oven with its corroded, star-shaped jet fountains, its drop door, and its five separate speedometers. She lowers the wick of her eye and visualizes the oven’s blue gas flames, quavering like arias. Her time machine. Her music box.
16.
Robert
I was accepted at Columbia University. I studied English literature and creative writing. I went around in a buckskin jacket. I wore my long hair in a Mongol braid. There was a war going on in Southeast Asia, and I considered many of my luckily deferred classmates to be psychological prisoners of that war. They proudly displayed all the dogmatism and the malcontentment of caged insurgents. The pain that they provoked in my ass was not going to stanch the hemorrhaging a world away. I, on the other hand, remained a prisoner of love. There were scores of more nuanced poets on the shelves of Butler Library. Sylvia Plath was not necessarily superior, but she remained always apart. She had given her all to say what little that she had said. Her whisper of adieu remained somehow the most singular voice in the cacophony. She had tightened all the bodily bolts. She divided the viscus from the baby fat. She graciously returned the unused portion of her allotted life span, apparently on the grounds that to live it out would only be redundant.
I thumbed furrows in card catalogs and tried the sainthood of librarians, searching for the proper mythological figure to compare Sylvia to. I might have characterized her as Dido or Medea by default. Or a female version of Narcissus who resolutely doomed her envied double. In truth, I doted on Medea most. She was the zenith and the nadir of feminine triumph. The only thing was that I had already reserved that designation for Sylvia’s rival, Assia Gutmann Wevill. The circumstances of Assia’s death in 1969 went virtually unreported in the American newspapers, the Gannett and Knight-Ridder cabals practicing the self-censorship of utter revulsion. Her death was, by the early 1970s when Sylvia’s popularity had reached its meridian, a dirty little lit-circle secret. The overkill o
f Assia’s death, symptomatic of what I understood to be the overkill of her entire existence, tended to redeem Ted Hughes somewhat in my eyes. Sylvia’s death was poetic and inevitable. Assia’s end was blood sport and, so very sadly, equally as inevitable. Ted lived through both deaths. I felt sort of sorry for him and waited to see how he would respond in verse. His half decade of silence following Sylvia’s demise tried my patience and whetted my appetite. A scant two years following Assia’s suicide, Ted put out a collection titled Crow. I hardly knew what to make of it. One theory of the period was that Crow designated that which Ted would eat, uncooked, for the remainder of his life. Another held that the poet’s mind had taken resolute wing off into the infernal darkness.
With the publication of Ariel, which Ted edited and garnered all of the profits from, Sylvia had been allowed to go on the offensive from the grave. To unleash that book upon the world was the closest thing to the act of suicide that Ted ever attempted. Crow, with all its obfuscations, covered Ted’s retreat from the graves.
I did not fault Assia her legendary philandering, since fidelity was considered quaint until the advent of the AIDS crisis. I did think her a definite poseur, a Mata Hari attempting, in the end, to go out with all the ceremony of Joan of Arc. Assia, as I saw it, played her last card and played it to the gallery, unaware that the only game left to her was solitaire. Unlike Sylvia, there would be no dividend in the risk that she incurred, and, doubly unlike Sylvia, there would be no transcendence in her demise. She left no liturgy behind, and no next of kin, either. To me, Assia was who Sylvia might have been, had she ever made the mistake of growing up.
Joan of Arc. Of course. By lucky accident and process of elimination, I had uncovered the obvious icon. Sylvia was a Joan of Arc for our time. The child/woman who interpreted divine whispers, chafed at her femininity while at the same time bringing new depths of perception to femininity in general, and who was tried, convicted, executed, retried, exonerated, mythologized, beatified, canonized, archived, and foremost she who was a harbinger of standards so wholly foreign to those that she had lived and died by that her legacy qualifies as a second execution in perpetuity. I had wasted my time trying to locate Sylvia’s tie-in with the Greek world. What about her tie-in with the Promised Land? What about the boorishness of us earthlings abducting Sylvia Plath into a heaven of our own imagining? We were all as culpable as Ted Hughes and Assia Wevill. We were, all of us, guilty of murdering Sylvia’s afterlife.
I would save the link with Joan of Arc for my doctoral thesis. My dissertation would be the crowning laurel of my graduate career, and it would win me a berth in a leafy, indulgent midwestern college, a beach-head back to Columbia or to the lyceums of Europe. Academia, then as now, was boom or bust; the fellowship or the fast-food counter. I leisurely went about outlining and eventually braved the arduous microform projectors in Butler Library that the engineering students had secretly revamped to thwart and frustrate us creative writing kids and hasten our irrevocable nervous breakdowns. I begged one of the Asian exchange girls, who worked for sweatshop remuneration in the library and who spoke with a breakneck chop suey accent, for tech assistance. After bellicose coaching and trial and error, I penetrated the London of Sylvia’s death, via The Times on microfiche.
To my amazement, I found that London in the winter of 1963 was not located in a foreign country, as I had every reason to expect, but in a completely foreign world. Freezing temperatures and blizzard conditions were marooning and killing lorrymen along the roads (in England?); armored personnel carriers, up on blocks for twenty years, were enlisted to transport essentials; food and petrol rationing were unofficially reintroduced for the first time since the war; pigs were slaughtered by the thousands for the lack of feed, the snouts posted to Ten Downing; villages along the Scottish border were cut off and serviced only by helicopter armadas; catastrophic floods were being projected, come the thaw; and the queen and the duke of Edinburgh were in New Zealand for the weekend of Sylvia’s death, reviewing apple orchards. The editorial page of that Monday edition, the eleventh of February, offered health tips on how to avoid hypothermia if stranded outdoors and chided the citizenry for denuding public parks of both saplings and park benches. A time for alarm, the paper pronounced before Sylvia’s body was even cold, was also a time for restraint. In the days to come, cantankerous wits would permeate the correspondence section, asking that the queen and the duke be good enough to wear the prize New Zealand tree stumps home, Wellington wood come to London proper.
The paper’s front page, as near as I could make out through the topsyturvy sauna scope of the projector, did not lead off with headlines but with the “Appointments and Situations” segment. There were “opportunities” in Nigeria and Australia and villas to let along Lake Maggiore. There were four full columns of death auctions and a snooty crossword puzzle with references to the Whigs and the War of the Spanish Succession. There were theater and book reviews and coverage of the press conference in which the home secretary publicly apologized for ordering Allen Ginsberg’s antihistamines confiscated while he was on tour in the UK the previous spring. The secretary cordially invited Allen to revisit England on the condition that he not read so many poems exalting male genitalia and move on to something more edifying, if you please, sir. The Top of the Pops, the Brit music survey, numbers one through forty, appeared on that Monday’s waning pages. The list was pre-Beatles, overwhelmingly Yank, and almost as cheerless as the weather. This was what I found among the national sound track to Sylvia’s death scene: “Loop de Loop” by Johnny Thunder, “Everyday I Have to Cry” by Steve Alaimo, “Don’t Make Me Over” by Dionne Warwick, “Why Do Lovers Break Each Other’s Hearts” by Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, “Blame It on the Bossa Nova” by Eydie Gorme, and “The End of the World” by Skeeter Davis.
17.
Ted
He passes through two more musical galleries, dark and baroque. He climbs up into the organ loft where Assia is sitting, straddling the old bench with a cigarette burning in her hand. The gold-colored flue pipes extend out of the wind chest of the water organ like gunnery. The great vox humana is akin to the prow of a dragon schooner, and the entire monstrosity of the organ brings to mind one of those Wurlitzer time machines that spouted blue thunder and transmogrified Buster Crabbe in the American Saturday serials that the Yanks sent over during the war.
“So?” she says, raising her head. She begins so many of her conversations with “So?”
“Could I have a cigarette?”
“Where’s your pipe?”
At home atop a batch of cold poems.
“Never mind.”
She blows smoke at him, snapping the cigarette to her lips and huffing. She never seems to be inhaling.
“You’re not saying anything.”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“That’s your way of avoiding it.”
“Thinking about it isn’t avoiding it.”
“Thinking about it alone is.”
“Why don’t you give me a chance to find out how I feel about this before we find out how we feel about it?”
“I’m having it.”
“Like that?”
“Like what?”
“Just like that?”
She says, “You’d like me to ask your permission?”
“Did you do it alone?”
“The part that mattered I did. I changed it from nothing.”
“But it was my nothing.”
He takes out his pocketknife. The bench is pockmarked and splintery. His homely name will harmonize.
“I had one taken care of when I was fifteen,” she says.
Ted has carved a rubrical T. He hears her say this and tries to approximate the implications. A child killing a child in the Holy Land? Would that not mean summary death if it was discovered? Would that not mean a prolonged, tribulating death if it went undiscovered and was allowed to fester in Assia’s psyche?
“Do I have to hear about it?” he asks.
She takes off her sunglasses.
He looks away and continues to carve the bench. He hears the sound of her bussing the end of her cigarette. So much for studied coolness under duress. It sounds like a fipple flute.
“You didn’t tell your mother?” Ted asks.
“No, I did not tell my mother.”
He wants to know why, but he knows better than to ask. The Jews are naturally self-critical but splenetic at any hint of dishonor upon the family. “Did your family find out?” he cannot help but ask, in a cringing tone.
“I didn’t have a family after that,” she says, “I had lovers.”
“Sylvia—”
“Don’t.”
If she didn’t interrupt, Ted would have told her about the hysterical pregnancy that Sylvia supposedly tried to cleanse with a length of hanger during her second year at Smith. The various revisions that she applied to the story never succeeded in making it seem genuine to Ted. Still, he was desperate to furnish evidence that he could sympathize with what she had gone through, if it was only through one of his wife’s ersatz experiences.
“Don’t ever talk to me about Sylvia,” Assia says.
He has cut his name into the wood of the bench and begun hers. “I don’t know what to say.” Ted says.
“Did someone ask you to say something?”
“My father fought in one of the bloodiest hand-to-hand battles in modern times.”
“You told me.”
“Now you know how I feel. I think that he only had a son so that he could tell me about the war.”
“We were talking about me.”
“We were talking about us.”
“Get to the point.”
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