American Isis

by Carl Rollyson

  Plath left a blank of nearly three weeks in her journal, not resuming until 11 June with the admission that she had taken that much time to deal with her last “nightmarish entry.” They had fought. Sylvia had sprained her thumb and had scratched and bloodied Ted. He hit her hard enough that she saw stars. Hughes would later tell his American editor, Frances McCullough, that he tried slapping Sylvia out of her rages, “but it was no good,” McCullough wrote. “And once she turned into his slap and got a black eye, & went to the doctor & told him Ted beat her regularly.” To Warren, Sylvia described, with typical hyperbole, “rousing battles every so often in which I come out with sprained thumbs and Ted with missing earlobes.”

  Ted rejoiced in finding a flat in the Beacon Hill section of Boston (they would not move in until September). The narrow streets and cobbles appealed to his sense of human scale. Better, evidently, to live in a cramped two-room apartment than in the indulgent luxury of the suburbs or the brassiness of New York City, with its “pathetic Bohemian district, called The Village,” he wrote Olwyn in early June. The robust Ted Hughes found America at midcentury too tame, undoubtedly influencing Sylvia’s aside to Warren on 11 June that she was working on “overcoming a clever, too brittle and glossy feminine tone.”

  By 20 June, Sylvia’s journal records her battle with depression. She simply did not have the sense of self-sufficiency that she so admired in Ted, who she compared to an iceberg with a depth and reality that constantly surprised her. She admitted that the thought of having a child was tempting, since caring for a baby would divert a reckoning with her demons—which in better days she called her muses. Summoned to writing, she nevertheless quaked at the wide gap that now opened up between her desire to write and the anxiety that desire provoked. She hoped to relieve her paralysis by revisiting the site of her early childhood, Winthrop by the sea, which she always associated with a life-giving power and creativity.

  Then on 25 June, a miracle. After years and years of rejections, The New Yorker had accepted two poems, “Mussel-Hunter at Rock Harbor” and “Nocturne.” Sylvia positively yipped with joy, exclaiming that the good news would carry her through the summer like the “crest of a creative wave.” That same day she wrote to Aurelia announcing her good fortune, which would amount to something like $350. That would pay for three months’ rent.

  The New Yorker poems showed the vulnerable side of Plath, somber and overwhelmed with composing a life outside of the academic boundaries that protected her. “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor” moves relentlessly toward the husk of a fiddler crab that has wandered out of its element to high ground among grasses. This stranded creature stimulates an inquiry: Is this the fate of a recluse, a suicide, an intrepid discoverer of new worlds? These alternatives occur to a poet seeking to renew her inspiration by returning to the seashore, figuring out her options, and trying to become her own woman, her own poet. “Night Walk,” published in The New Yorker and later retitled “Hardcastle Crags” in Collected Poems, brought Plath back to a “deep wooded gorge” in the Yorkshire valley of Hebden River. The landscape looms at night like the “antique world” that overwhelms the walker, who turns back toward the “stone-built town” before she is broken down into the quartz grit of the stones and hills. Sylvia was trying to save herself, even while wondering what kind of fate might pulverize her hopes. Could she build her work, like the town, out of the hard material of existence? Her haunting journal passages about a wounded bird she and Ted tried to nurse—and their failure, which ended in Ted gassing the bird to put it out of its misery—read like an unintended forecast of Sylvia’s own fate. She marveled at how beautiful, perfect, and composed the asphyxiated bird looked in death.

  During this period, “my father’s spirit” (as Sylvia put it in her journal) seemed to preside over the poems she was assembling, once again, for a book that would eventually be called The Colossus, its eponymous poem dealing with her mythologizing of Otto Plath. If Sylvia had become an actress, she would have been attracted to the role of Hamlet, beseeched by his father, a spirit “doomed to walk the night.” Reckoning with her powerful father’s image was gradually becoming a Shakespearean struggle with existence itself, with the claims of the past upon the present. Even as Sylvia tried to liberate herself from her father’s call, she was also suffocating. That sense of becoming bereft of and haunted by a father who will not let go, experienced by a child grown strong in the dominion of the father, bedeviled Sylvia Plath as she sat down beside Ted at the Ouija board during the summer of 1958, half-believing she really was in communion with Otto Plath, who appeared as “Prince Otto.”

  Sylvia could not sleep. She felt paralyzed, her novel appearing in her mind’s eye like a ghost that could not materialize. For the first time, she regarded Ted as an obstacle. He was powerfully didactic about his own ideas, as she began to see when they were in the company of others. They were still remarkably compatible, she confided to her journal, but she had to admit that she enjoyed herself during those times he was away from her. He liked giving orders, making him sound like the peremptory Otto Plath. Ted’s stiff neck, resulting from too much exercise, seemed indicative to Sylvia of his rigid personality.

  In letters to Aurelia and Olywn, Ted revealed no hint of Sylvia’s summertime funk. On the contrary, he pictured her as a poet on the go. Did he not see the suffering of a soul who said marriage to him was like sharing one skin? Was Ted keeping up appearances, or writing in wish fulfillment? Judging by Sylvia’s journals, he was so absorbed in his own routines that he did not take in her torment. And she did not let on to her mother, writing instead that she was reading about the sea for poetic inspiration and resuming her study of German because of her attachment to her roots.

  By late July, Sylvia began producing poems again, breaking a ten-day drought. This cycle reprised the summer before on Cape Cod, when it had taken two weeks or so for her to settle down to a writing regimen. Prose remained an obstacle. With plenty of ideas for stories, she was stymied when it came to plots, as well as feeling she had been spoiled by the early success of her fiction in Seventeen and Mademoiselle. Even on the level of slick magazine pieces, she thought she had to step up her game.

  Although Sylvia had always supposed she would wait to have children until after the publication of a novel or a first book of poetry, she began to yearn for motherhood. On 2 August, she complained to her journal that her life with Ted had become “ingrown.” In Letters Home, Aurelia describes Sylvia and Ted’s reaction to a visit on 3 August with friends and their three children. The two-year-old girl latched on to Ted, while Sylvia reverently examined the one-year-old as though discovering some treasure she had been seeking. Aurelia imagined what it would be like to be a fairy godmother waving a wand, producing a home, and greeting her daughter with all she needed to have a family and her writing, too.

  To Sylvia, though, having children in America meant capitulating to an overwhelming complacency. She hated the way her Aunt Dot looked down on Ted because he did not have a job and was not career oriented. Having those solid, middle-class achievements meant succumbing to the desperation that Sylvia disliked in her mother. Better the anxiety of the artist than the neurosis of the conformist. Sylvia averred that security was inside herself and Ted. She had the confidence of seeing “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor” in the 9 August issue of The New Yorker and imagining readers all over the world marveling at her work.

  The move from Northampton to Boston in early September cheered Plath, especially since she now had a good view of the Charles River. City noises took some adjusting to, she wrote to Elinor Friedman Klein. Plath sometimes suffered from painful menstrual cycles that could exacerbate her moodiness and discomfort with how little she had accomplished. On 11 September, she was suffering through cramps and a fever. She tried to distract herself with compulsive behavior: arranging the new apartment, scanning job ads in the paper—all the while telling herself she had to get on with her writing. Instead, she brooded over Elizabeth Taylor taking Eddie Fische
r away from Debbie Reynolds. She asked herself in her journal why this should matter. And yet it did, because Sylvia Plath seemed wired into what critic Leo Braudy has called the “frenzy of renown.” Ted Hughes was along for the ride, but Sylvia Plath drove herself just as wildly as the movie stars she read about.

  Three days later, Sylvia noted in her journal that they were both in a “black depression.” That their moods coincided so perfectly seemed yet another proof to her that he was her male counterpart—this time, though, she saw a dark side. Were they, like vampires, feeding off one another? She was in a suspicious mood and admitted her confusion. No longer part of an academic regime, she felt like a dilettante. If she got a job, at least she would be earning something and taking pleasure in a day’s work. On 16 September, Peter Davison, a former lover and publishing contact, visited her and observed a “tense and withdrawn” Sylvia. His visit, however, was good for her. Two days later she was writing again, beginning with an analysis of Davison’s character. She got a few “well-turned” sentences out of him. It was ever thus with her: relieving her depression with writing that converted her anxieties into satirical fiction. Davison preferred the “simpler, less poised,” woman who had told him touchingly about her suicide during the summer he dated her. He disliked the overly controlled narrative she later produced in The Bell Jar, deploring her “clumsy irony, the defenses, the semifictionalized characters, the nastiness of temper that mar the novel for me.” But this was genuine Sylvia Plath, too: astringent and happiest with a cudgel-like writing instrument in her hands.

  By mid-October Sylvia had a job at Massachusetts General Hospital typing up records in the psychiatric clinic, answering phones, and performing all sorts of office work. The job was a tonic that resulted in, by critical consensus, her best work of short fiction, “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams.” In the story, a secretary/narrator obsessively types up other people’s dreams. Although Plath believed she had profited greatly from her sessions with Dr. Beuscher, the story scorns modern medicine. Patients are “doomed to the crass fate these doctors call health and happiness.” The demented narrator becomes the scapegoat for “five false priests in white surgical gowns,” who place a “crown of wire” on her head and the “wafer of forgetfulness” on her tongue. In the psychologized 1950s, in the era of electric shocks, Plath imagines votaries protesting this crucifixion, chanting, “The only thing to love is Fear itself.” Electric shock therapy robs the patient not just of memory, but also of the dread that is debilitating but also essential to the fully human, fully creative self. And yet the machine betrays the technicians, and “Johnny Panic,” who embodies the fearful dreams the narrator has faithfully recorded, appears overhead in a “nimbus of arc lights” charging and illuminating the universe. Such an ending would seem to imply that fear is an ontological condition that cannot be medicalized—that is, cured. Plath was not endorsing fear per se—she knew too well how much it had immobilized her—but she regretted the bogus superiority of medical institutions that supposed they could manufacture a sense of health and well-being. The story is compelling and intriguing in large part because the narrator herself is unstable and yet commands a certain aura of authority—the kind of countercultural rebuttal to the establishment and to institutional psychiatric treatment reflected in novels like Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962).

  Sylvia did not, however, present a bold front to the poets and publishers who saw her socially. In his memoir, The Fading Smile, Davison reports poet Stanley Kunitz’s observation: On visits Sylvia seemed to make a ritual of taking a chair and sitting slightly behind Ted, who took the main stage, so to speak. She played the adoring, “very mousy” spouse in Kunitz’s memory. This is the same role Sylvia assumed during her year of teaching at Smith, when, according to Daniel Aaron’s recollection, she was “very deferential … to her husband” and wanted him to be “included in everything.” These impressions accord with Sylvia’s journal entries, which portray Ted at this time as the superior poet. Unsure of herself, Sylvia resumed weekly meetings with Dr. Beuscher.

  We know what was on Sylvia’s mind because she recorded Beuscher’s words in a 12 December journal entry: “I give you permission to hate your mother.” It was time, in other words, for Plath to acknowledge openly her loathing of the “smarmy matriarchy of togetherness.” It was such a relief just to tell the permissive Beuscher whatever she was really thinking. Unlike Aurelia, the therapist did not “withhold [sic] her listening.” Similarly, Sylvia reveled in the battles with Ted, in those rough-and-tumble arguments, seeking what Aurelia had absolutely no appetite for. Wasn’t Sylvia, in her own estimation, the mouse that roared? Wasn’t her therapy all about how when writing to her mother—and even more so in her mother’s presence—Sylvia surrendered to the role of dutiful daughter? Above all, this Sylvia wanted to please her mother, but in that very pleasing—that need to be good, that unquenchable craving for approval—she had betrayed herself and her urge to assert an entirely independent self, one that only got exercised in her fictional critiques of others. Why did she take an almost perverse pleasure in her rejection slips? Surely it was because this is what the world did: It rejected you. When a poem, story, or article did get accepted, Sylvia always reacted to her good fortune as if it were a kind of miracle, a momentary victory against overwhelming odds.

  Beuscher’s therapy provided no permanent solution to Plath’s anxieties—or to her sense of her mother as a “walking vampire,” sucking the life out of her. Sylvia might have been happier about hating her mother if Aurelia had not been so self-sacrificing, so saintly, that it enraged Sylvia when she thought her behavior worried her mother. She despised Aurelia because she had subjugated herself to the autocratic Otto, who wouldn’t go to a doctor when he was sick, who died because he could not deal with disease. Yes, her mother had genuinely suffered, but the agony was also a lie, because Otto’s tyranny had never been opposed or even admitted. Instead, Aurelia just gave herself over to her children. Aurelia’s long battle with ulcers revealed how her children had bled her dry. Otto, with his gangrenous leg, would have been a “living idiot” if he had survived longer, Sylvia thought. Lucky for him that a blood clot had gone to his brain, so Aurelia could assume the role of mourning angel, telling her children that Daddy was gone. A disgusted Sylvia ended her journal rant with “Men men men.” Sylvia told this tale about herself and her family in the third person, with scathing fairy-tale energy that ended in a sarcastic portrayal of Aurelia’s “honey sweet” version of her innocent children’s happy lives.

  Sylvia hated her mother as one hates the messenger arriving with bad news. It felt like Aurelia had killed Otto and played the noble grieving wife, when, in fact, he, “an ogre” like all men, “didn’t stay around.” Sylvia’s dismissive treatment of men exacted her revenge, she admitted in her journal. Men left and had fun; women stayed behind and mopped up. And Sylvia, still telling the tale of her life in the third person, pictured herself as the good girl who had gone mad and had been locked in a cell. The daughter had tried to kill herself as the only way to rid herself of her mother. This had been her golden rule: to do to herself what she wanted to do to her mother. She vowed to do everything her mother said not to do. She no longer wanted her mother’s sacrifice, so she had sacrificed herself. Now, Sylvia slipped back into the first person, resenting her mother worrying about her and Ted. “She wants to be me: she wanted me to be her: she wants to crawl into my stomach and be my baby and ride along. But I must go her way,” was Sylvia’s summary judgment.

  Dr. Beuscher associated Sylvia’s writing block with hatred of her mother. Not writing withheld the very thing that excited Aurelia’s approval, which would also be a form of appropriation, making Sylvia’s achievement Aurelia’s. Sylvia’s suicide had been an effort to punish her mother and to show that her kind of love was inadequate. Sylvia had felt better about her mother while living in England, because letters could function as a way for both of them to keep their desired images i
ntact.

  Sylvia did not seem to realize the danger of relying on Ted to be absolutely everything her father and mother were not. With him, she believed, she had rejected the compromises, the settling for less with smaller men. Dr. Beuscher had identified the risks: Would Sylvia have the courage to admit she had chosen the wrong man? Plath said the question did not scare her. Instead it prompted another aria about her husband’s virtues. A bad sign.

  Indeed, the compulsion to lionize Ted drove Sylvia to obsessive thoughts about motherhood and family, to experience the same kind of dynamic that Marilyn Monroe was playing out with Arthur Miller. The adoring, virtually simpering persona that Monroe affected in her public appearances with her big man reappeared in reports of Plath’s obeisance to her master. Thirteen December: a girl appears at the door of their apartment, selling Christmas arrangements, and Sylvia calls to Ted, telling the girl, “The man decides in this house.” Dr. Beuscher might have pointed out that Sylvia no longer felt the need of a father for reasons quite different from what Sylvia supposed. Or rather, Sylvia would need and yet reject that father once again when she saw that Ted was not so different from Otto after all. Such thoughts did occur to Sylvia in moments when an angry Ted accused her of behaving just like her mother. She was mulling over a story about a man with “deep-rooted conventional ideas of womanhood.” Talking with Ted about jobs—their money was running out—may have turned Sylvia’s attention to the notion of a story about Dick Norton and the doctor’s life she had renounced when she rejected him. Such a marriage would have deprived her of the very experience she needed to become a writer, she reasoned. Moreover, as a doctor’s wife she would have resented his opportunities. But the story went nowhere, and Sylvia diverted herself with looking up the requirements for a PhD in psychology.