During the second week of September, Sylvia left the children with a nanny to join Ted on an excursion to Ireland. Was the journey an effort to settle the terms of a separation or divorce? Ted wasn’t sure, he told Olwyn. The trip ended abruptly when he disappeared. Afterward he wrote to Olwyn, claiming, in contradictory fashion, that Sylvia had reverted to the immature state he had observed when he first met her, and that she reminded him of Aurelia, whom he said he detested. It wouldn’t hurt for Sylvia to grow up, he concluded. An unsympathetic Murphy did not know what to make of Sylvia, who wrote him upon her return home that his sudden coolness perplexed her, since he had shown her some cottages she might wish to rent. She assured him her interest was only in finding a place to write and to care for her children, accompanied by a nanny. The idea that she might be invading Murphy’s literary territory in order to write about it was preposterous, she assured him. “Please have the kindness, the largeness, to say you will not wish me ill nor keep me from what I clearly and calmly see as the one fate open. I would like to think your understanding could vault the barrier it was stuck at when I left,” she concluded. There is no record that he replied.
After Sylvia returned to Court Green, her midwife, Winifred Davies, wrote to Aurelia. Davies had placed her hopes on the Irish holiday, which to her dismay went awry. Sylvia had returned upset that Ted had not come home, and she resolved to seek a separation. Sylvia said her decision had lifted her spirits. But Winifred thought Sylvia had a “hard hill to pull.” Talking did seem to ease Sylvia and bring some clarity, Winifred assured Aurelia. Winifred found it hard to “judge fairly,” since she had heard only Sylvia’s side, but it seemed to Winifred that Ted had “never grown up,” and that “paying bills, doing income tax, looking after his wife and children” were beyond him. So Sylvia had to be the practical one in their partnership. Ted desired the freedom to go to parties, to travel. He might tire of this in time, but then it would be “too late,” in Winifred’s estimation. “It seems to me that success has gone to his head, and he is not big enough to take it.” Winifred summed up her sad conclusion: “I feel awfully sorry for them all, but I do not think Sylvia can go on living on a rack, and it will really be better for the children to have one happy parent rather then two arguing ones…” Ted’s mother also wrote Aurelia, expressing her sorrow over the ruptured marriage, but noting that Sylvia had Court Green, a car, and the ability to “write for a living.” Aurelia took the letter to mean the break between Sylvia and Ted could not be repaired.
On 17 September, responding to Sylvia’s plea for help, Dr. Beuscher was uncertain how to proceed. So much of their therapy had centered on Aurelia and on Beuscher as an alternative source of authority. Was Sylvia consulting her as a “woman (mother) (witch) (earth goddess), or as a mere psychiatrist?” In truth, Beuscher could no longer be objective. Too much of Sylvia’s plight as a daughter and as a woman paralleled Beuscher’s own experience. The psychiatrist admitted she was furious with Ted, who was acting like a “little child.” His talk of starting over every few years was not the mark of a mature man. He was like a child in a toy store who wants everything, and then throws a tantrum when his wishes are thwarted. Making choices, even if that limited your scope in some ways, is what every adult had to do. Isn’t this what Sylvia had done? Beuscher was afraid that Sylvia might pin her well-being on this one man, rather than on her own “oneness.” The poet had not exhausted her possibilities by picking one man “for life.” All was not lost if Sylvia lost Ted. Sylvia had to remember that her husband was suffering an identity crisis. She should not, Dr. Beuscher admonished her, go down in a “whirlpool of HIS making.” This meant resisting the urge to suffer in his company: “Do your crying alone.” Sylvia was in danger of repeating Aurelia’s role: playing martyr to a “brutal male.” If Ted really wanted a “succession of two-dimensional bitchy fuckings,” then Sylvia should get a lawyer to hit him in his pocketbook for child support, reminding him of his responsibilities. Play the lady, the psychiatrist urged her, and resist the temptation to go to bed with him. In closing, Beuscher dismissed Sylvia’s offer to pay for therapy: “If I ‘cure’ no one else in my whole career, you are enough. I love you.”
Beuscher’s follow-up letter on 24 September advised a divorce, since Sylvia evidently told her that she was not “moping” and had grown to detest Ted. Collect the evidence and get a divorce now, while he remained reckless, the psychiatrist urged her. It would be harder later, especially if in a fit of remorse he proposed a reconciliation. If Sylvia could find happiness, whether or not she found another man, her children would be happy. Just stay out of Ted’s bed, Beuscher reiterated, apparently concerned that Sylvia would backtrack. Read Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, the psychiatrist advised. She wanted to hear from Sylvia that she had done so. No love could really survive, Fromm argued, without the fundamental self-confidence that Beuscher wanted to see in Plath.
Right up to the end of September, Sylvia described herself as trying to hold on to the last vestiges of what she had with her husband. Yet during this period she also saw a lawyer and seemed about to make peace with the idea of life without Ted—reclaiming her own freedom is what she called it. On 24 September, she wrote her mother that she realized Ted “wasn’t coming back.” This realization seemed to liberate her: “My own life, my wholeness, has been seeping back.” Seeping? She had used this word in her poppy poem to describe the slow dulling of her emotions. Was she escaping, or just entering the trauma of her breakup with Ted? “For a Fatherless Son,” written two days later, is full of foreboding: “You will be aware of an absence, presently.” Her happiness was temporary, her son’s smiles appeared as “found money.” Two days later, in another note to Aurelia, Sylvia concluded that she had to exert control over what little life she had left. She did not tell her mother about her crying jags and weight loss. She succumbed to the flu. She started smoking.
Sylvia steadied herself with routines: breakfast with Frieda and the religious taking of tea at 4:00 p.m. in the nursery; invitations extended to visitors; outings with the children; and riding lessons twice a week. Having a nanny also helped. “I don’t break down with someone else around,” Sylvia assured her mother. Clarissa Roche, on a four-day visit, listened to Sylvia vilify Ted: The “strong, passionate Heathcliff had turned round and now appeared to her as a massive, crude, oafish peasant, who could not protect her from herself nor from the consequences of having grasped at womanhood.”
The nights were so awful that Sylvia resorted to sleeping pills. They took her somewhere deep, she said, and waking up with plenty of coffee stimulated her to write both prose and poetry in the early morning hours. No matter how much Sylvia blamed Ted, the idea of divorce revolted her. She believed in the sanctity of marriage. She suspected Ted had a bachelor pad in London. Not Sylvia—no man on the side. She treasured the proprieties: “Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus / Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules,” she wrote obsessively in “A Birthday Present” (30 September 1962). Without that sense of order, life did not matter: “After all I am alive only by accident,” she admitted. “I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.”
Plath was referring, of course, to the attempt to kill herself after her traumatic stint at Mademoiselle. Suicide was always a genuine option. She had said as much to Anne Sexton during some of her happiest days with Ted Hughes. The two women poets discussed their suicide attempts with aplomb. They wanted to take life on their own terms, and though suicide can be regarded as the action of someone out of control, the suicide might regard the act in quite a different light. In “Lady Lazarus,” Plath boasted that to her dying was an art: “I do it exceptionally well.”
Plath’s poems and extant journals show that death itself held no horror for her. They also reveal that as important as writing was to her, it could not, ultimately, salve her. She confessed ruefully: “A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. Nothing is real except the present, and already
I feel the weight of centuries smothering me.” Her last poems are burdened with this sense of history and mortality. The passage of time imposed an unremitting pressure, and losing her father when she was so young made her consciousness of death inescapable. This mindfulness of mortality is probably why she said she lived every moment with intensity.
When she felt alone, nothing seemed real, and the present appeared an empty shell. Might as well commit suicide, she confided to her journal: “The loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering.” She did not believe in life after death—not in the literal sense. She thought instead of recently deceased writers such as Edna St. Vincent Millay and George Bernard Shaw, who “left something—and other people will feel part of what they felt.” Approaching her own denouement, she was confident of her own pitch to posterity. Life after death meant “living on paper and flesh living in offspring.” Or so she thought, pulling back with a “Maybe. I don’t know,” in a journal entry written in her nineteenth year.
By the autumn of 1962, Sylvia Plath was probing her connection to eternity. How would it come for her? Like an annunciation? She pondered the question in “A Birthday Present.” “My god, what a laugh” she heard the voice of immortality mocking her. This Pauline poem, with its references to veils, to what shrouds the human perception of a world elsewhere, built upon the superstructure of her fascination with what comes after death—not so much an end in itself as a transit to another realm. Death, in fact, is a seductive presence in this poem: “Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.” Has the coming of death ever been more grandly welcomed than in the final three stanzas of this poem, which evoke the “deep gravity of it,” as pristine as the “cry of a baby,” as the universe slides from her side. The scene is reminiscent of Brutus falling on his sword, rendered glorious in the Greco-Roman accents of “Edge,” perhaps Plath’s last poem, resulting from her recent reading of Greek drama.
In October, Sylvia experienced a burst of inspiration resulting in two dozen of her most powerful poems. Critics have been awed by their intensity and craft, but they have not done justice to their mordant humor. Even a poem as serious and daring as “Daddy” provoked raucous laughter when Sylvia read it to Clarissa Roche. To be sure, Sylvia remained angry and sometimes confused about her broken marriage and about what to do next. She could seem hysterical, reporting that Ted had told her about his and Assia’s speculation that Sylvia would commit suicide. Could Ted Hughes be quite that cruel? William Styron has noted in Darkness Visible that clinical depression often brings on overwhelming tendencies to create melodramatic scenes that express feelings, not facts. And the onset of depression is often not detectable by the afflicted one or by others because the depressed individual continues to function—at least on a basic level. Sylvia was doing better than that. Even at her worst, she continued to write.
Depression is a mysterious disease, Styron emphasizes, and so its origins and generalizations about it are both problematical. Individuals respond to the disease … well, individually. The literature on the subject, he concludes, contains no comprehensive explanation of the disorder. Why one person survives depression and another does not is a mystery, although Plath’s poetry reveals an attitude toward death that made suicide, in certain conditions, desirable—even just.
Death and dead bodies populate her poems. In “The Detective,” written on 1 October, she spoofs the detective story’s presentation of clues and explanations that wrap up a mystery. The confident detective tells Watson that they “walk on air” with only the moon, “embalmed in phosphorus” and a “crow in a tree. Make notes.” Existence is an enigma; the evidence is evanescent. Observation is all. Clearly Plath’s droll sense of fun—fun of a very high order—had not deserted her. And this is surely what is so thrilling about her life and work: its witty persistence, no matter the impediments.
Sylvia took to beekeeping, one of her many ways of honoring her father’s memory and feeling close to him, and in the first part of October she wrote her famous sequence about an insect world that had fascinated Otto Plath. The poems, like beekeeping, provide an all-encompassing experience—surely a welcome activity for a distraught writer, who had “seen my strangeness evaporate,” as she puts it in “Stings” (6 October), finding comfort in announcing her control of “my honey-machine.” In “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” the noisy swarm becomes Shakespearean, clustering in “unintelligible syllables … like a Roman mob.” Sylvia addresses herself as the “sweet God” that will set them free. More than one friend observed a more cheerful woman, still angry, but also liberated and thriving on animosity toward Ted and the ecstasy of composing poetry. Sylvia said that working on a poem gave her greater pleasure than any other activity. She lived for it and—she eventually realized—she was willing to die for it.
The bee poems also reflect a sense of powerlessness overcome. Sylvia knew this work was a triumph, but she knew she had a long way to go. Writing to her mother on 9 October, she wanted to believe that in a return to Ireland “I may find my soul, and in London next fall, my brain, and maybe in heaven what was my heart.” The last phrase echoes what she had told a friend, that she had given Ted her heart, and there was no getting it back—not in this life anyway. Ireland, the land of her hero, Yeats, she regarded as a fount of inspiration. London was “the city,” where poetry became commerce, where Al Alvarez at The Observer, now an indispensable reader of her work, published it.
Sylvia’s letter of 9 October can be taken as a kind of relapse. “Everything is breaking,” including her dinner set and her dilapidated cottage, she told Aurelia. Even her beloved bees stung her after she had upset their sugar feeder. But in that same letter she refused her mother’s invitation to come home, to be financially supported and looked after. The daughter demurred. She had made her life in England. If she ran away, she would “never stop.” Surely this refusal was a courageous act, especially since she recognized, “I shall hear of Ted all my life, of his success, his genius … I must make a life all my own as fast as I can … I am a fighter.” This was taking Ted on in his homeland, and given the superiority of the work she was now creating, her statement cannot be discounted as bravado. In retrospect, it is difficult not to see her suicide in terms of this letter, as a turning of the tables: “I shall hear of Sylvia all my life, of her success, of her genius.”
Sylvia signaled the fragile equilibrium of her life to Aurelia, expressing the hope that Warren or his wife or some other family member could come for a visit by the spring. Aurelia herself would not do—as an uncompromising Sylvia vehemently pointed out: “I haven’t the strength to see you for some time. The horror of what you saw and what I saw you see last summer is between us and I cannot face you again until I have a new life; it would be too great a strain.”
And so Sylvia regrouped, three days later writing her most famous poem, “Daddy.” A new life meant coming to terms with the old one. The autobiographical references are inescapable: The speaker is thirty, mentioning she was ten when her father died and twenty when she attempted a suicide that would reunite her with him; the father is German, and like the pontificating Otto, stands before a blackboard; a heavy marble statue has one gray toe (one thinks of Otto’s amputated leg). And, of course, the poem definitively addresses the longing to recover a father who presided with such authority over his household that he seemed, as the poem has it, “a bag full of God.” Anyone reading Sylvia’s vituperative letters about Ted would be hard put not to identify him as one of the poem’s “brutes.”
“Daddy” reverberates with twentieth-century history, especially echoes of the Second World War, and reflects the poet’s desire to imprint herself on world-shaping events—to insert herself into history like one of those Jews sent off to concentration camps. The child who vowed when her father died that she would never speak to God again includes a father in her list of rejected authority figures. Only by forsaking what she has loved and yearned for can she be her own person. The im
age of the victim identifying with her persecutor, the “panzer-man,” anticipates the thesis Hannah Arendt’s propounded a year later in “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” (Eichmann was put on trial on 11 April 1961, more than a year before “Daddy” was conceived, and he was executed on 31 May 1962, a little more than four months before the poem’s composition.) As critic Judith Kroll points out, Plath also anticipates Susan Sontag’s analysis of fascist aesthetics—especially the desire to exalt “two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude.”
Plath’s identification with victims of the Holocaust has offended some readers. But it is very American of Plath to appropriate the history of others and welcome that history into her heart. Rather than reducing history to the confines of her personal agon, she regards her own experience as a chapter in a story larger than herself: “Every woman adores a fascist.” This is the great gift of “Daddy”: its amalgamation of the provincial and the international, the personal with the mythology of modern life. References to the “rack and screw” expand the poem’s reach to the Middle Ages, and with an image of a father sucking the blood out of his child, to the vampire myth. A reader of Plath’s generation might well conjure up Bela Lugosi, the fatherly middle-aged man engulfing his victims in his black cape. Photographs of the hulking, wolfish Ted Hughes, invariably dressed in black, also come to mind.
Plath’s ironic, bitter poem draws on—even as it debunks—popular songs such as Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” (1938), sung by Marilyn Monroe in Let’s Make Love (1960). In the film, “Daddy” is slang for a woman’s older lover, who treats her so well. In the poem, child and adult merge in the disturbing closing line: “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” Through with Daddy? Through with the idea of an idealized daddy? Or through in the more complete sense of just giving up? Has Plath triumphed, or just destroyed what gave her life meaning? The poem is perfectly pitched to pivot either way.
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