by Philip Hoare
As we sit around her stove, peering into its glowing interior, Pat tells me she remembers how she has lost good friends, but they came to see her as they died, even though they were far away.
She raises her foot to kick a new chunk of wood into the furnace.
‘Do you have visitors like that?’ she asks me. ‘They do the rounds before they die.’
I see them walking up the beach to her, nonchalantly passing on the news of their passing. I remember walking on another beach with my mother by my side, waiting to see the sun slip behind the shadow of the earth at noon. I remember her greyness at the end, when all colour had been leached out of her, out of her red hair and her high cheekbones, lying there, so still, in her hospital bed. And I wonder if I’ll see my loved ones, pacing up the sand or peering round my door as the latch lifts and clicks.
At night, Pat lies in her wooden, boxlike bed, face up. Even in her unconscious she is open to the sea just beyond her window. Does she dream of her dogs, or do her dogs dream of her?
‘My dreams got too heavy,’ she tells me, as the stove warms my outstretched hands with its iron glow. ‘So I stopped having them.’
By the water, terror and beauty go hand in hand. The Pilgrims who came to the Cape – sailing at two miles an hour rather than travelling in the instant accomplished by Woolf’s Imagination – found this brave new world a ‘naked and barren’ place. Soon after Mayflower anchored off what would become Provincetown, Dorothy Bradford, wife of their leader, William Bradford, fell overboard and drowned in the harbour.
This naked and barren coast is now studded with lighthouses, symbols of the lost and found. They offer haven and home, safety and hope, welcome and melancholy. They’re the land’s last markers, measuring out the Cape’s confusing asymmetry; you never really know where you are here, no matter how much you might consult the compass or look to the sun. You lose your bearings, find them, then lose them again. But the lighthouses hardly help. They’re invested with the strangeness of the sea, only emphasising our separation. For Mrs Ramsay, the lighthouse represents ‘our apparitions, the things you know us by’. She looks out ‘to meet that stroke of the lighthouse, the long steady stroke … until she became the thing she looked at’. As she wrote her novel, Virginia saw Vita as a lighthouse, ‘fitful, sudden, remote’.
Once fuelled by the whales on whom their beams still fall, these towers of light map out the Cape like one of those illuminated museum displays where you’d press a button to turn on a little wavering bulb. They flash their characteristics, coded signatures like a cetacean’s metronomic clicks: from the unseen light at Nauset, which reveals itself only by an anonymous ten-second sweep over the horizon as if it were itself lost, to the six-second signal of the Highland Light, where Thoreau was entertained by the keeper in his ‘solitary little ocean-house’, and where his bedchamber was flooded with light ‘and made it bright as day, so I knew exactly how the Highland Light bore all that night, and I was in no danger of being wrecked’; and on, from Long Point’s green dash every four seconds to Wood End’s red twitch every ten, looking out over the waters in which in the US submarine S-4 was accidentally hit by a coastguard vessel, sinking one hundred feet to the sandy bottom in the winter of 1927. Wood End Light was no use to it now, down there in the darkness.
Most of the forty-strong crew died – not drowned, but poisoned by bad air like canaries – and storms prevented the rescue of the six survivors trapped in the torpedo room, the only remaining air pocket. A second submarine, S-8, was able to communicate with them by an oscillator attached to the hull of their vessel, transmitting Morse code through the metal skin that separated the men from the world above and the sea around them.
‘Is there any gas down there?’
Their officer, twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant Graham Fitch, replied, ‘No, but the air is very bad. How long will you be?’
‘How many are you?’
‘Six. Please hurry.’
Attempts to run fresh air using a hose were frustrated by the high seas. Lieutenant Fitch tapped out a terse entreaty.
‘Hurry.’
Then, later,
‘Is there any hope?’
‘There is hope. Everything possible is being done.’
That night the S-8 began sending out a message, over and over again.
LIEUTENANT FITCH: YOUR WIFE AND
MOTHER CONSTANTLY PRAYING FOR YOU
It took until the following morning, sixty-three hours after the submarine had sunk, for Fitch to tap out his final reply.
‘I understand.’
A year later, when the vessel was salvaged, the divers ‘found a spectacle that moved them, hardy and inured as they are to horror, to deep emotion. Near the motors, arms clasped tightly about each other in protecting embrace, were two enlisted men, apparently “buddies”. The divers tried to send them up thus locked together, but the hatch was not wide enough and they had to be separated.’
If we are lucky, the way we leave this world will become the way we lived in it. According to Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus – briefly brought back to life online in her creator’s flatly expressive voice, rocked shut like a seashell, unpeeling her skin in the same breath – dying is an art. Plath’s fatal, watery dreams merge in her ‘Ariel’, as her imagination flying over Dartmoor’s tors to evoke a distant glimpse, ‘a glitter of seas’ and a child’s cry, an echo of Icarus, the winged boy fallen from the sky.
Plath grew up on the southernmost tip of Boston’s North Shore, a site now overflown by planes taking off and landing at the international airport which has turned the streets she knew into potential runways. ‘My childhood landscape was not land but the end of land,’ she recalled, in the last piece of prose she ever wrote, now living in London, ‘– the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own. I pick it up, exile that I am, like the purple “lucky stones” I used to collect with a white ring all the way round, or the shell of a blue mussel with its rainbowy angel’s fingernail interior; and in one wash of memory the colours deepen and gleam, the early world draws breath.’ She remembered other debris, too, ‘sea-beaten’ nuggets of brown and green glass – ‘blue and red ones rare: the lanterns of shattered ships?’ And she recalled her mother’s stories of wrecks picked over by townspeople on the shore like an open market, ‘but never, that she could remember, a drowned sailor’.
As a child, Sylvia had crawled into the water – ‘Would my infant gills have taken over, the salt in my blood?’ – and later taught herself to swim. She believed in mermaids more than in God, and saw the sea as ‘some huge, radiant animal’. At six years old, she and her younger brother watched a hurricane sweep over Cape Cod Bay, ‘a monstrous specialty, a leviathan. Our world might be eaten, blown to bits. We wanted to be in it.’ The storm rocked their house, howling outside the black window in which her face was reflected like a moth trying to get in. The sea was her past, sealed off like a ship or a god in a bottle, ‘beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth’. But it was her now, too, and it seethed through her poetry – ‘A far sea moves in my ear’ – sucking her body of blood till she was as white as a pearl.
As a teenager Sylvia returned to Cape Cod, which she had known all her life. She was the same age as Pat, swimming and sunbathing, modelling herself on Marilyn Monroe with her bright white bikini, her beach tan and her sun-bleached hair. She worked here in the summer as a mother’s helper, looking out longingly from her duties to the ‘blue salt ocean’. It promised all the ecstasy of expectation. But it was disturbing, too. Plath was already experiencing deep bouts of doubt and depression. In the summer of ’fifty-two she read To the Lighthouse, underlining the lines ‘Of such moments … the thing is made that remains for ever after’; in her beach bag was a copy of Orlando. The following summer of ’fifty-three, she swam out into the sea, and kept on swimming, trying to emulate her heroine, ‘Only I couldn’t drown.’ Two days later, and two days after that, s
he attempted again, and again, to take her own life.
Her mother tried to send Sylvia to a friend in Provincetown to recover. This place might have healed her. Instead she was admitted to an asylum where she felt she had been put under a glass bell. Electrodes were attached to her temples and dials turned on a console that resembled the equipment my father used to test the resistance of electrical cables. Instead of testifying to her resistance, they systematically attacked her memory, the most precious thing she possessed: the means of her imagination.
In 1957 Plath came back to Cape Cod with Ted Hughes. The newly-weds spent a seven-week summer here, a delayed honeymoon. It was a heady time. They stayed in a cottage at Eastham, down the coast from Provincetown. Sylvia introduced her lover to the beaches. Her favourite, at Nauset, named after the original inhabitants, was a bike ride away, and in her journal she recorded the rhythm of their lives, ‘write, read, swim, sun’, as if it would never end.
Walking between Nauset and Coast Guard Lights, the shore where the Pilgrims first sighted land, the pair found a sandbar, shallow and smooth. Floating with her hands and feet bobbing like corks, her wet hair trailing as if to trap the fish, Plath felt a sense of power and glory. The possibility of a new life lay ahead; the elemental flux refixed her; she was recalibrated to the ocean. The pair were caught in the ‘great salt tides of the Atlantic’; for Plath, marriage had set ‘the sea of my life steady’. To enshrine it, the two poets recorded the shore. She saw fiddler crabs in a dried pool at low tide, scuttling to dig themselves into the sand with their one gigantic claw; they were denizens of a ‘weird, other world’. He would recall the ‘pre-Adamite horse-shoe crabs in the shallows’, their ‘honey-pale carapaces’ and the ‘wild, original greenery of America’. They were post-war, modern people; they could fly over the ocean that had defied Shakespeare, Keats and Woolf. Here they found the oldness of a new world that Hughes had imagined before he’d ever seen it, defined by the ocean and ‘the whaled monstered sea-bottom’. His words echoed Eliot’s, who’d sailed here as a young man and found ‘hints of earlier and other creation: | The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone’.
While her husband thought of the men who drowned out there, ‘Where darkness on Time | Begets pearl, monster and anemone’, Sylvia was reading Woolf again. She finished The Waves, disturbed by its ‘endless sun, waves, birds, and strange unevenness’. She felt Woolf’s writing made hers possible: ‘I shall go better than she.’ The crystalline memory of that time would be set in the shadows of the future. Hidden in the sardonic snarls of ‘Daddy’ – partly written about her father, whom Plath saw as a dark Prospero, and partly about her partner, who, like everyone else, would leave her in the end – is a sudden shining invocation of happiness: the sight of a seal, ‘a head in the freakish Atlantic | Where it pours bean green over blue | In the waters off beautiful Nauset’. These lines would come to haunt Hughes, who, like Plath, believed in signs and wonders, and who, years later, recalled that same shore descried in Sylvia’s ‘seer’s vision-stone’ – one of the white-ringed purple stones she picked up from the beach. Through it he saw her brown shoulders, now in a black bathing suit, secure on her childhood’s shore. On the beach, everyone is immortal.
But Plath knew none of this was real. She was engulfed by the tyrannical beauty of this place. ‘I’d rather not live in this gift luxury of the Cape, with the beach & the sun always calling … I need to end this horror: the horror of being talented and having no recent work I’m proud of, or even have to show.’ The world was speeding past. As they trudged under the hot sun along the sandy roadside of Route 6, where the pines grew short and looked as young and as old as the country itself, ‘deathly pink, yellow and pistachio coloured cars’ shot by, ‘killer instruments from the mechanical tempo of another planet’. The pair were relieved to reach the beach, where the red-and-white Nauset Light surveyed waves five miles long.
Plath left the sea for Smith College in Massachusetts, where she was taught Melville by Newton Arvin, known as ‘the Scarlet Professor’ (and was also lover to Truman Capote). She lived with Hughes in the nearby town; someone in Provincetown who’d been to the same college told me that his landlady had complained about being unable to get rid of the smell of perfume which her former tenant, a poet, had spilled on her desk. Plath was rereading Moby-Dick and finding solace in it, ‘whelmed and wondrous at the swimming Biblical & craggy Shakespearean cadences, the rich & lustrous & fragrant recreation of spermaceti, ambergris – miracle, marvel, the ton-thunderous leviathan’. She even imagined herself, ‘safe, coward I am’, aboard a whale ship ‘through the process of turning a monster to light and heat’.
Four years later in her London flat, in the winter of 1962 – the coldest for two hundred years, when the capital lay covered in snow and ice and she was reduced to wrapping herself in her coat and walking to the telephone box to plead with her husband to come back or to tell him to leave the country forever – Plath wrote a radio talk for the BBC. It was entitled ‘Ocean 1212-W’, after her grandmother’s telephone number on Boston’s North Shore. In it, she recalled the hurricane which had turned a childhood afternoon sulphurous and dark. ‘My final memory of the sea is of violence,’ she wrote, ‘– a still, yellow day in 1939, the sea molten, steely-slick, heaving at its leash like a broody animal, evil violence in its eye.’
She would never record the broadcast. Two days later, with the snow still lying on the city’s streets and her children in their beds, she carefully sealed the kitchen with wet towels, turned on the gas, and put her head in the oven.
On the winter shore, where the sea rises higher than my head, Mary and I scramble down a great sandy scree. All around us purple and green stones stand proud where the air has scoured around them, leaving them balanced on gritty pedestals like miniature megaliths. Others have tumbled down the cliff, leaving a drunken trail behind them. We wonder if they continue to roll while we’re not looking, only stopping when we stare at them. Clumps of compass grass, true to their name, draw circles around themselves as they whip about. Their stalks are brown and dead, all colour drained away by the dunes. But they’ve been resurrected by the wind.
We associate the beach with life, with warmth and the sun; not this numbing down, this low-season, reiterated death. At Race Point, the old lifesaving station stands empty; there’d be no handsome New Englander ready to throw me a lifebuoy if the ocean or my heart decided this was my last swim. The New York Times of 23 August 1883 recommends this shore to ‘those looking for good surf-bathing’, so empty even on a summer’s day that ‘if one wishes to go in in his bare pelt he may do so without the fear of shocking propriety’. Although it is January and the air temperature is about to fall to minus twenty, I duly heed the Times’s advice.
You have to take your chances with this ocean, roaring, rising high, utterly elemental and unharnessed, more like a mountain range than water. I wait for my moment, trying to judge when to get in, if I should get in at all. The water is warm compared to the air. And just as the waves roll me around, like stones in a barrel, I feel abraded by the winter, made raw, my bones exposed by the cold, both withdrawn and peeled back by it, as if I took off my skin too when I skinny dip. The cold removes sensation then restores it. The hardness of winter is an absolute in an equivocal world.
Each day seems colder than the last. The black ducks and eiders come into shore, seeking the respite of the sand. But the buffleheads, the smallest ducks – so sharply marked in stark black and white that they look more like feathered orca than the buffalo they supposedly resemble – stay out, diving fast and brave beneath the surface. It is strange, this comfort birds offer us, considering the discomfort they seem to suffer. Polar animals occasionally arrive here: a beluga whale once nosed around the moored boats, and a bowhead whale has appeared in recent years, caught up with its right whale cousins, its slow smooth bulk bringing an Arctic chill to the bay.
The North does not feel far away: in Pat’s paintings of frozen seas, echoe
s of the icy waters in which her great-grandparents perished, or in the thick snow through which I wade to get into the water after driving back from New Bedford with Dennis in a blizzard whose swirling blinding flurries rouse like ice monsters, turning the Cape landscape into the Russian steppes. A few doors down from here is the home of the polar explorer Donald MacMillan. His wooden house stands over the beach as if it had arrived here on a floe, stranded like all those fatal ships – Resolute, Erebus, Endurance. Surrounded by a white paling fence, its lawn could have been a corral for the polar bear whose stuffed and yellowing remains rear over visitors to the town museum and in whose skin MacMillan might be hidden, like some Inuit shaman.
At MacMillan Wharf, named in his honour, the trawler Tom Slaughter out of Gloucester has come into the harbour, seeking shelter; the young bearded crew might have been fishing here for a hundred years. Dovekies – little auks, their wings whirring like clockwork toys, wound up by their economic binomial, Alle alle – fly in, too. Named after the Swedish diminutive for dove, they’re also known as ice birds. Out in the open ocean they assemble in their millions, flying through the water on their wings to feed. They’re seldom seen this close to shore, these brave, stubby birds; some storm far out at sea has driven them in, along with all the others. In Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, young Tom, become amphibious, goes north in search of Mother Cary, passing tens of thousands of birds, ‘blackening all the air; swans and brant geese, harlequins and eiders, harelds and garganets, smews and gooseanders, divers and loons, grebes and dovekies, auks and razorbills, gannets and petrels, skuas and terns, with gulls beyond all naming and numbering’, ending up in the frozen waters ‘where the good whales lay, the happy sleepy beasts, still upon the oily sea’.