But why did the poem make Sylvia and Clarissa Roche laugh? Was laughter a way to master the demons let loose in the poem, a therapeutic whistling past the graveyard? Certainly Sylvia’s mood lifted, for on the very day she composed “Daddy,” she wrote apologetically to her mother, “Do tear up my last one. It was written at what was probably my all-time low, and I have had an incredible change of spirit; I am joyous, happier than I have been for ages.…” Sylvia bustled with plans to remodel the cottage, Ted seemed amenable to a divorce, and she was writing every morning at five, a poem per day completed before breakfast. And these were “book poems. Terrific stuff.…” A novel was also in the works.
This revival turned her toward London: “I miss brains, hate this cow life, am dying to surround myself with intelligent, good people. I’ll have a salon in London … I am a famous poetess here—mentioned this week in The Listener as one of the half-dozen women who will last—including Marianne Moore and the Brontës!” Such letters could only have been written to a mother—not just to impress Aurelia, but also to perform for the one person who could utterly identify with this victory. Aurelia had given up her own literary ambitions to serve her husband and would clearly empathize with a woman rebuilding her life after the loss of a spouse.
To Warren and his wife, Maggie, Sylvia wrote on the same day, “The release in my energy is enormous.” She still believed in Ted’s genius, and it hurt no less to be “ditched,” but she was planning a London season full of freelance work, including broadcasting and reviewing. She still had to regain her health, she admitted, mentioning the black shadows under her eyes and a smoker’s hacking cough. She hoped she might join them on a trip. Their letters meant so much to her, she assured them, and as she had done with Aurelia, she spoke delightedly about her children, adding that she wanted Warren and Maggie to consider themselves Frieda and Nick’s godparents. In all, it sounded very much like Sylvia was reconstituting both her personal and professional worlds.
But at the same time, Sylvia emphasized to Warren and Maggie that she could not face her mother yet. Written four days later, lines in “Medusa” read like a companion piece to “Daddy”—this time an exorcism of the mother, the epithet “God-ball” recalling the “bag full of God.” Aurelia appears as an ancient “barnacled umbilicus” and “Atlantic cable.” Images from horror films again haunted Sylvia’s imagination: “Off, off, eely tentacle!” Instead of shouting “I’m through,” the poem ends on a flat, defiant note that seems less than convincing: “There is nothing between us.” Or is the last line less emphatic because it can also mean there is no longer anything separating mother and daughter, that the daughter has thrown off her mother’s hold on her only to reestablish a bond on the daughter’s terms? The aim of both poems seems clear: to re-invent Sylvia Plath the poet, an act that entailed putting her parents in their places. In reality, Sylvia could not reject her mother, but in poetry her creative survival depended on the conceit that she had done just that.
Even though Sylvia’s flu appears to have returned on the morning of 16 October, with her fever reaching 101 degrees, she remained ecstatic, writing her mother, “I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.” She anticipated finishing her novel in less than two months and was already inspired to write another. The Bell Jar had been accepted for British publication, and she looked forward to her “leap to London.” But she fretted over household arrangements and an unsatisfactory nanny, and she still hoped that her Aunt Dot or Warren’s wife, Maggie, could come to help with the children. Sylvia needed a respite, especially since she also had the ordeal of the divorce to confront. Although full of plans, she admitted she was struggling against “hard odds and alone.”
In another letter to her mother written the same day, Sylvia pressed her case for Maggie, suggesting her sister-in-law join her for a six-week convalescence in Ireland. It was asking a lot, Sylvia conceded, for Warren’s new wife to embark so soon on a trip abroad. Almost delirious from her 4:00 to 8:00 a.m. writing regimen, Sylvia pleaded, “I need someone from home.” Aurelia, for her part, was holding out for her daughter’s return, although she sent money to procure household help.
Sylvia’s grimmer mood emerged the next morning in “The Jailor,” in which a nameless man poisons the feverish speaker, who declares she has eaten “Lies and smiles.” Sylvia had condemned Ted many times for his lies, although the poem seems more about betrayal per se than about her disloyal husband. “Lesbos,” written the next day, was even more explicit about her misery, mentioning a “stink of fat and baby crap … The smog of cooking.…” Yet neither of these highly allusive poems seems fully developed, as if in deciding not to be so explicitly autobiographical she had truncated her art.
Plath’s dilemma was not much different from that of her contemporary, Marilyn Monroe. Each of Monroe’s screen performances, beginning with Bus Stop (1956) and concluding with The Misfits (1961), was built on scripts that blatantly exploited many of her own characteristics and experiences. In those films, Monroe gave her greatest performances, but like Plath, she did so at great cost to her psyche. To make yourself your own material is both exhilarating and exhausting. The exposure can be gratifying but also denuding.
Writing on 18 October, Sylvia expressed shock at what she had sent her mother two days earlier. It had been the fever speaking. After a visit to the doctor, effective medication, and a good night’s sleep, she was feeling better and taking back her plea for help. She felt strong enough to write Paul and Clarissa Roche, announcing that Ted had left her and that she would divorce him. He had confessed to a want of courage in not telling her earlier that he had never really wanted children. She was disgusted because it was his idea to move to the country, and now she was stranded, hoping they would have an opportunity to visit her.
Sylvia was gradually building up a persona, one she loosed in her next hectoring letter to her mother (21 October 1962): “Don’t talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen—physical or psychological—wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is.” For Plath, the Holocaust was both literal and metaphorical—she did not want the two separated in her poems. She wanted to feel like a Jew and like the cigarette-tortured “negress with pink paws” in “The Jailor.” Sylvia was a cynosure for suffering, “going through hell,” and her agony would mean far more to people than Ladies’ Home Journal “blither” about happy marriages.
Emerging from another cycle of sickness two days later, Sylvia wrote yet another apology to Aurelia, asking forgiveness for her grumpy, fever-induced letters. She now could count on Susan O’Neill-Roe, “dear to the children” and a love to Sylvia. The next day, Sylvia would dedicate “Cut” to Susan. Sylvia wrote in gushing tones about wanting to “study, learn history, politics, languages, travel. I want to be the most loving and fascinating mother in the world,” she declared to Aurelia. To Clarissa Roche, on 25 October, Sylvia wrote an equally buoyant letter announcing, “things were calming down,” and that she was happily planning her future now that Ted with his scornful comments about her novel writing was no longer in the way.
Sylvia Plath not only aggrandized her life, she also made her body into a historic and mythic battleground, the site of an epic contestation. Perhaps better than any poem she wrote, “Cut” exemplifies her grandiosity of purpose, the thrill of cutting her “thumb instead of an onion.” These lines bespeak a persona intent on watching itself with excited yet clinical detachment. The shocking accident becomes a vignette of a pilgrim scalped by an Indian, and then—like a CinemaScope feature—the landscape broadens outward to encompass the image of a million soldiers, “Redcoats,” an allusion, apparently, to the blood flowing from the thumb Plath almost cut off. This virtual severing of a digit makes her wonder whose side these Redcoats are on, as if some treachery is involved in what she has done to herself. Thus
she allegorizes her digit as a homunculus, a saboteur, a kamikaze man (a curious locution reminiscent of “panzer-man” in “Daddy”). Even more outlandish is the gauze bandage reddened with blood, which looks like a Ku Klux Klan hood over the thumb. The poem ends in a salute to the “trepanned veteran, / Dirty girl, / Thumb stump,” the poet’s yoking of the literal to the metaphorical, the personal to the political, and the moment to history. Allusions to mutilation, war, subversion, and persecution echo what she said in more prosy terms about wanting to study history, politics, language, travel. She had to bring it all to bear on the stuff of her life, the material of her writing, and present it on a world stage. It is not difficult to imagine Plath, with electrodes on her head and undergoing electroconvulsive therapy, identifying with the “trepanned veteran”—a “head case” with a hole in her skull.
Such poems emboldened Sylvia. She looked forward to cutting a figure on her way to the city. As she wrote her mother the day before writing “Cut,” she planned to use the money Aurelia had sent to buy a Chagford dress (a reference to a clothing shop in Devon, which today still advertises “snazzy” dresses). She was going to put her hems up and get a fashionable short haircut. “Just wait till I hit London,” she announced. Sylvia Plath had to present a certain “look.” She was as acutely conscious of appearance as a public figure, as Marilyn Monroe, and like the actress, she craved public display of her prowess after the failure of her marriage. In a sense she was a mad girl who could not help herself, but she had the confidence to give in to her torment. As a result, she was now giving the performance of her life, going from strength to strength as she built up to a crescendo of poetic outpouring.
Sylvia mentioned to her mother that her “riding mistress” had said she was “very good.” A woman riding a horse named Ariel appears in a poem by the same name, one in a series produced in late October culminating in the hard-won triumph of “Lady Lazarus,” in which the female protagonist exclaims, “I eat men like air.” Sylvia would show these verses in London, she told her mother. She would be announcing to one and all her intention to divorce Ted. She refused to play the “country wife” he had left behind. A woman betrayed was also a woman avenging herself. Or as the speaker in “Ariel” puts it, “I / Am the arrow.” Yet just two lines later, the word “suicidal” is attached to this same speaker, so that as in “Lady Lazarus,” near-death experience is deemed vital to rebirth. The late October poems building toward Plath’s birthday on 27 October enact an ascent, Lady Lazarus rising “out of ash,” the flames of rebirth suggested by her red hair. As grand as the poem sounds, Sylvia prefaced a planned reading of this poem on the BBC with a comment mixing the mythic and the down to earth: “She is the phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a good, plain, very resourceful woman.”
In Plath’s poetry, in her letters to her mother, in what she was telling others she wrote and spoke to, Sylvia declared her need for an audience. On 29 and 30 October, she met in London with Al Alvarez and read him her recent poems. He seemed then the only editor who could appreciate her bold new work. When Alvarez encountered New Statesman editor Karl Miller on the street, a stunned Alvarez learned that Miller had rejected Plath’s new work, including “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” as “too extreme.” Many years after Sylvia’s death, Olwyn, who had access to her sister-in-law’s so-called lost journal, would imply in a letter to Alvarez that Sylvia began to think of him as more than a supporter of her work. Olwyn didn’t make the connection, but perhaps Sylvia did: As Sylvia’s lover, Alvarez would also represent part of her new life, just as Ted Hughes had done after Richard Sassoon had rejected her.
Sylvia’s powerful new voice emerged in a program produced by Peter Orr of the British Council. She sounded older than her thirty years and gave a commanding performance. The poems she read were designed for the ear, she had insisted to Alvarez, who championed her as a bold new voice that shattered the English sense of propriety. Sylvia Plath dared to be intense and violent, the “dirty girl” of “Cut.” Like Plath, Alvarez had attempted suicide. Like her, he was a risk-taker, a rock climber and vigorous athlete. He was a fellow poet who likened the force of her work to “assault and battery.”
By coming to London, Sylvia was going to best Ted Hughes at his own game. Peter Porter, a poet in the Hughes circle who also knew David and Assia Wevill, concluded that Ted really left Sylvia because he could all too clearly see her rising star:
It has always seemed to me that Hughes, though formidable, was not as strong and imaginative a force as Plath.… Leaving Plath must have been not just an imperative for someone who wished to love other women whenever it suited him, but also a move to defend his own talent from competition with a superior one. Such a notion might seem doubtful given the greater recognition he enjoyed than she did, but it is one which has begun to convince readers of her poetry since the true scale of its achievement has become known. Judging the completed course of the two poets’ productions, it is tempting to see Hughes’s attitude as resembling Alexander Pope’s Turk, who will suffer no rival next to the throne.
In The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, Alvarez mentions that in June 1962, even before Assia’s call to Ted at Court Green, the balance of power had shifted to Sylvia. But Alvarez, mistaking the amity the couple showed him, supposed that Ted did not mind this turn of events.
From the moment Sylvia ripped the phone cord out of the wall, she was declaring open hostilities. The wife who had put her husband first, made sure he entered poetry competitions, cooked and cleaned for him, held her career in abeyance and raised his children—all that was over for Ted Hughes, and he knew it. He knew it because he had seen how Sylvia could turn on people, and he knew she was merciless—caricaturing even mentors like Mrs. Prouty and her own mother. The question was, “What wouldn’t Sylvia do to Ted now that she was aroused?” This was, after all, the woman who had drawn blood the first time they kissed. Sylvia could play the victim, but no victim writes the kind of poetry she mustered in her last seven months.
Sylvia returned to her Devon home on 30 October only long enough to make preparations for her flat-hunting trip the first week of November. Although very much on her own, she accepted monetary support from Hughes, and he joined her on 4 November in the search for London lodgings. These fitful meetings upset her. Friends saw her cry and then surmount her grief with rage over his treachery. This behavior, like the poems she was then writing, played like a piece of music, the descending and ascending notes reflecting a huge emotional range. At parties, events, and various get-togethers, Sylvia, a prodigious performer, orchestrated her break with Ted, making it an operatic public affair. Like her urge to publish, to make herself known to the world, which had begun at such an early age, the compulsion to brand her husband in the open got the best of her.
Ted was behaving in a similar fashion, announcing his separation from Sylvia and attracting the attention of other women. On 1 November, he met anthropologist and poet Susan Alliston, who recorded in her journal his declaration that “Marriage is not for me.” Alliston thought he had “got it in for Anglo Saxon women, perhaps too cold. He’s now with a non-Anglo-Saxon”—a reference, no doubt, to Assia. He was already sizing up Alliston, though, admiring her long legs, which he later mentioned in his romantic introduction to her poems and journals. He told her that marriage was not for her either (she had recently separated from her husband). Two weeks later, she was at The Lamb, a Bloomsbury pub, trying to “beautify myself up a little” and hoping Ted would turn up.
On destiny’s doorstep, Sylvia discovered her dream home: 23 Fitzroy Road in Primrose Hill, not far from Dr. John Horder, who was treating her infected thumb. She was alone as she read the plaque noting that W. B. Yeats had lived there. This was it. She immediately got to work securing a five-year lease and raced home to open her edition of Yeats’s Collected Plays, which obliged her with this passage: “Get wine and food to give you strength and courage, and I will get the house ready.” Although the obs
tacles for a single mother obtaining a flat that others wanted were formidable, and negotiations would prove complicated, the flat represented the assertion of a new, insurgent self. She contrasted herself with Ted, whom she now portrayed as an establishment man caught in “petty fetters” and “bribes,” the world of London silks he had always scorned—a rather prophetic vision of a man who would become poet laureate.
On 7 November, readying herself for the move to London, an exultant Sylvia wrote Aurelia from Court Green about the new flat, which included “two floors with three bedrooms, upstairs, lounge, kitchen, and bath downstairs and a balcony garden!” As usual, she could not help overdoing it, vowing to be a “marvelous mother” who regretted nothing. She spent more than a page on domestic details, including her discovery of a “fabulous hairdresser.” She loved her look, and it had cost her only $1.50. She liked to measure out her happiness in monetary terms, an aspect of the practical Plath that Hughes had deplored but depended upon. Ted had not even recognized her at the train station. No longer in his “shadow,” she would make it on her own and be recognized for her own genius. She even felt magnanimous, if dismissive, about Assia, who had only her well-paid ad agency job and her vain wish to be a writer. Sylvia envied Ted and Assia “nothing.” Men now stared in the street at her new fashionable self. She would appear a “knockout” at the Royal Court summer theater program devoted to poetry. Ted had disdained her love of stylish clothes and thought spending sums on ensembles extravagant. Sylvia, on the other hand, was a center court poet. She dreamed of eventually buying a London home if she ever published a “smash-hit novel.”
American Isis Page 25