The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides

by Gary Lachman

  There’s some speculation that Plath didn’t really want to die that night, that, as in many attempted suicides, she really wanted to be saved. Most of the evidence suggests otherwise, but the uncertainty that still hovers around the facts of her death24 is emblematic of the ambiguity surrounding her life as a whole, especially her marriage to Ted Hughes and Hughes’ responsibility, if any, for her death. So much mystery, so many conflicting stories, and so much control over the ‘official’ account, first by Ted Hughes himself, and then by the Hughes estate, has accreted around Sylvia Plath’s death that in 1993 Janet Malcolm published a book specifically about the difficulty of writing a biography of Plath.25 Malcolm was prompted to write her book – an essay on the perils of biography – after reading her friend Anne Stevenson’s ‘authorized’ biography of Plath, Bitter Fame; authorized, that is, by Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes’ sister, who hated Plath but who strangely had control of her literary estate. Stevenson’s book received bad reviews, precisely because it was written in close association with Olwyn Hughes, so close that she practically was credited as its co-author. Not surprisingly, it presented the official Hughes’ view regarding Plath and Hughes, and was seen as little more than propaganda for the pro-Hughes, anti-Plath camp.26

  On the other side of the debate is a book like Ronald Hayman’s excellent The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath which, because he raised points that clashed with the official accounts, could not quote from Plath’s and Hughes’ work, outside of what is permitted by ‘fair usage’. Hughes argued at different times that his actions were motivated by a desire to protect Sylvia’s memory, their children’s feelings, and his own privacy, but given that the lost diaries are indeed lost (or destroyed), we really have very little to go by to know how satisfying an explanation this is.

  Sylvia Plath was born on 27 October 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts. For the first part of her short life she seemed the kind of girl that her classmates would choose as “most likely to succeed.” By the time she was twenty, she was a top student, an editor and columnist for local journals, and had published short stories in popular girls’ magazines like Seventeen as well as more weighty publications like the Christian Science Monitor. She won a scholarship to Smith College, an exclusive all-girl school, and also a competition to be a guest editor for Mademoiselle, which had recently published her prize-winning story “Sunday at the Mintons.” Later achievements included a Fullbright scholarship to Cambridge. Yet, beneath the sparkling surface, things were not so bubbly.

  When Sylvia was eight, her father died. Otto Plath was a lecturer in entomology at Boston University, and his book, Bumblebees and their Ways was highly regarded. Otto was, by the standards of the time, old for a father; he was forty-six when Sylvia was born, and when Sylvia’s brother Warren arrived he was fifty-one. Sylvia’s mother, Aurelia, was twenty-five when Sylvia was born and had been Otto’s student; she had a great love of literature and showed promise in it herself, but after her marriage devoted herself exclusively to Otto’s needs, becoming his wife as well as his secretary. Sylvia loved her father and understandably desired his praise. And although Otto was an obsessive workaholic, a dominating type who despised small talk, vague ideas and sloppy thinking,27 Sylvia was his favourite and until his illness she didn’t feel any lack of the approval she needed from him. But then things changed.

  In 1936, just before her brother was born, Otto developed a form of diabetes. If he had it treated then, it wouldn’t have been fatal. Otto, however, had contempt for conventional medicine and had made his own diagnosis. He refused to see a doctor, and over the next four years his condition deteriorated; at the same time he kept up a gruelling work schedule. As Ronald Hayman points out, both Sylvia’s parents exhibited an inordinate self-discipline, rooted in a kind of masochism. In Aurelia’s case, its form was self-sacrifice, first of her own possibilities as a writer to Otto, then of her own pleasure, denying herself simple comforts in order to provide Sylvia and Warren with a good future. In later years, Sylvia would refer to her as a “martyr,” and in accounts of her own attempts to excel and be a good wife and mother, it isn’t difficult to find a family resemblance.

  As Otto’s condition worsened, and his work load increased, Sylvia felt him moving away from her. He had less patience with her and seemed less interested in her attempts to entertain him and win his favour. Her mother kept the children from pestering their increasingly irritable and suffering father, who often exploded in rage and pain at the muscle spasms gripping his leg. By October 1940, it was clear something was really wrong. One morning Otto stubbed his little toe; that evening it and the rest of his foot had turned black; red streaks shot up toward his ankle. His leg had turned gangrenous and had to be amputated. The surgeon asked, “How could such a brilliant man be so stupid.” Aurelia may have asked this herself. Less than six months later he was dead.

  Like many young children, Sylvia felt that her father’s withdrawal must have been her fault; if he spent less time with her, she must be to blame. After his death, and in the months approaching her own, the seat of blame had shifted. As A. Alvarez writes of the poetry of her last days, “She seem convinced, in these last poems, that the root of her suffering was the death of her father, whom she loved, who abandoned her, and who dragged her after him into death.” Eventually she would come to see both her mother and herself as responsible for his death. And although, as Ronald Hayman comments, Otto Plath didn’t quite kill himself, he did set a suicidal example, following the dictates of his obstinacy rather than the indications of his health. In her relationships with men, the loss of her father drove Sylvia to an obsessive need to be in her lover’s or husband’s company practically all the time.

  Although Sylvia had fantasized about her own death soon after her father’s, fantasies that would dominate her poetry and her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, the first visible sign of them becoming a reality occurred in 1953. During a skiing trip with a boyfriend she had decided she didn’t want to marry, she fractured a fibula attempting a run that, for an inexperienced skier like herself, was ‘suicidal’; the incident turns up in The Bell Jar. This ‘accident’ came just before she took up her guest editorship at Mademoiselle. It may have been a test run for the real thing, a few months later; or, as a story she told of her near drowning at two suggests, it may have been the surfacing of an urge that had been with her from birth. At the beach when a toddler, she said that she found herself crawling straight for the water; her mother snatched her just as her head pierced the “wall of green.” Other test runs turn up in her life. In 1962, a year before her suicide, she ‘accidentally’ sliced off the tip of her thumb; not long after she drove her car off the road in an attempt, she said, to kill herself. But just two months after she had spent four weeks in New York guest-editing Mademoiselle, enjoying the kind of approval only real talent could attract (its one thing to have your parents’ approval, quite another that of an upmarket, sophisticated glossy magazine), Sylvia took a shot at the real thing. After disappearing for days, sparking a search by police, neighbours and even the boy scouts, and triggering headlines like BEAUTIFUL SMITH GIRL MISSING AT WELLESLEY, she was finally found hiding in a crawlspace in the basement. She had taken an overdose of sleeping pills; when they found her she was more dead than alive. This too found a place in The Bell Jar.

  The sleeping pills were part of a regime started by a psychiatrist Sylvia had seen recently, recommended by her family doctor after Sylvia showed signs of depression. Her month at Mademoiselle by most accounts was successful, although Sylvia herself found much to criticize about her performance; she always found something lacking in her talents, even when they were being applauded by others. At the end of her month in New York, for example, she had felt such self-disgust that she threw her new, expensive clothes, bought for her trip, out of the hotel window. Before leaving she had applied for a place in a writing course given by Frank O’ Connor; on her return she found she hadn’t been accepted. The disappointment was devastating and her s
elf-deprecation increased.

  Like Virginia Woolf an obsessive diarist, she confided in her notebook: “You’ve failed to equip yourself adequately to face the world. You’re spoiled, babyish, frightened. You must be more honest, more decisive, more constructive. You’re not taking advantage of your freedom because you’re incapable of deciding where you want to go. You’re a hypocrite, plunged so deeply into your private whirlpool of negativism that the simplest actions become forbidding. When you see people who are married or happy or active, you feel frightened and lethargic. You don’t even want to cope. You big baby! You just want to creep back into the womb or retreat into a masochistic hell of jealously and fear. Don’t you see how selfish and self-indulgent it is to go on thinking about razors and suicide and self-inflicted wounds? Start writing. Be glad for other people and make them happy. Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.”

  This last remark is an echo of Hesse’s Steppenwolf, his realization that what he seeks liberation from are the limits of his own personality. And although in this passage, Sylvia knows – as she more than likely did throughout – that suicide is no answer, like Harry Haller, she pursued it all the same.

  Sleepless nights, horrible fantasies of killing her mother, shame over being unable to maintain the discipline and demanding work-schedule she had set herself – now geared toward winning Aurelia’s approval – failure with men and in her friendships: all this and more harangued her guilty conscience. When her mother noticed fresh gashes on her legs, Sylvia admitted to self-harming. Then, gripping her mother’s hand, she burst out: “Oh mother, the world is so rotten. I want to die. Let’s die together.”

  The electro-convulsive therapy the psychiatrist prescribed did as much good for Sylvia as it did for Ernest Hemingway. But her mother, remembering Otto’s deadly stubbornness, this time made the opposite mistake, and decided against a second opinion; the fact that she couldn’t afford another doctor’s fees was also a consideration. This was more material for The Bell Jar. Earlier, while in New York, Sylvia had become obsessed with the execution by electrocution of the ‘atomic spies’, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Now she knew what they must have felt. It’s difficult to assess the effect on her already troubled psyche. Not only must the ordeal have been repeatedly horrifying and dehumanising. It was her mother who had put her into the hands of her torturer. She was put into psychiatric care at McLean Hospital, and the treatment seemed to work, but this was only on the surface; the urge was still there. Like Jacques Rigaut, Sylvia simply put her suicidal intentions on hold for ten years; eventually she’d get around to it.

  Sylvia’s treatment was successful enough that in 1955 she graduated from Smith summa cum laude; the same year one of her poems won another award, and she also started her classes at Cambridge. In February 1956 she met another young poet, Ted Hughes, at a Cambridge party. Four months later, on 16 June, ‘Bloomsday’ (the single day making up Joyce’s Ulysses) they were married. For Sylvia, Hughes was “the best possible man to replace the father whose death had robbed her … of the man who could have been trusted never to withdraw his love.”28 Hughes was handsome, tall, strong, athletic, creative, competent, and successful, both as a poet and as a lover; tales of his seductions and affairs were plentiful. The attraction was immediate. After spying him at the party, Sylvia said he was the only man there big enough for her. They talked for a while, then Hughes ripped off her hairband and kissed her violently. She responded by biting Hughes on the cheek, drawing blood. Aggression was an ingredient in their relationship from the start. Although Plath gave the impression of a serious, sensible girl, sophisticated and poised, below the surface was a deep, insatiable hunger. Hughes, she thought, might be able to satisfy it.

  For a while the marriage worked. They travelled, first to Spain, then to meet his parents in Yorkshire. Sylvia took her final exams for her degree. In August 1957 they went to America, vacationing in Cape Cod, Maine. In September she began teaching at Smith College. But by May 1958, after less than two years of marriage, the first signs of a rupture appeared; they quarrelled after Sylvia had found Ted with a girl. The pit of insecurity started to open. The major event of that year, however, was the seminar given by the poet Robert Lowell, himself a sufferer of manic-depression, that Sylvia attended and where she met and became friends with Anne Sexton. It was after this that her poetry took on a new urgency and depth. It was then that she also decided to resume the analysis she had broken off when she left for Cambridge.

  In 1959, Sylvia became pregnant. After travelling through the states and spending time at a writers’ colony, they returned to England. Their first child, Frieda, was born on 1 April 1960, in London, where they settled. Later that year, her first collection of poems, The Colossus was published; reviews were modest, but respectful. In 1961 she began work on what would become The Bell Jar; soon after, however, her second pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. That August they moved to Court Green, in Devon. In January 1962, Nicholas, their second child, was born.

  In June that year, the womb that Sylvia had wanted to creep back into almost ten years earlier had started to attract her again. This is when she purposely drove her car off the road. Perhaps she was subconsciously aware that the man she could trust to never withdraw his love was doing precisely that. In July she discovered that Hughes was having an affair with Assia Wevill, the wife of another poet.29 Hughes himself was feeling constrained by Sylvia’s possessiveness. In September they separated and in December, at the start of one of the worst winters in memory, Sylvia and the children moved into 23 Fitzroy Road.

  It was hard. Sylvia did her best. But the children were demanding, the flat was barely furnished, she had very few friends and it was very, very cold. On top of this, the man who was supposed to be there for her, as her father had been, had abandoned her, as her father had. She tortured herself, thinking of the fun he and Assia were having, while she was here, in a half-empty, freezing house, alone with the children. She tried. She set herself an impossible work schedule, as she had done before. She would paint, repair, put the house in order, take care of Frieda and Nicholas, and write. But it didn’t work out that way. She couldn’t find the time. She had an au pair, but she didn’t last. One friend she did have was A. Alvarez, who met her and Hughes in 1960, and who remembers that Christmas Eve in 1962 when she asked him to come by for dinner and to hear some of her new poems. They had a lot in common. They were both poets and they had both attempted suicide. And not so long ago he had been through a divorce. Alvarez had already been invited to a friend’s for dinner but it must have been clear to him that she was terribly lonely, so he said he would come for a drink. When he did he was surprised. She seemed different. He had never seen her so strained. He listened to her poems in the cold, bare flat, and the proximity of death was palpable. He thought she was in some kind of ‘borderline psychotic’ state, but because he was dealing with his own depression, the responsibility of dealing with hers too wasn’t appealing. He stayed for a while, then left, knowing he had “let her down, in some final and unforgivable way.”

  Some other friends were Jillian and Gerry Becker, a South African couple who lived in Islington. Sylvia and the children stayed with them the weekend before she killed herself. Jillian remembers her alternately talking calmly and raving. At times she was lively and rational; at others, depressed and bewildered. Although she felt that she had been overshadowed by Hughes’ more prominent success, things were going well for her, she had commissions and had been invited to broadcast. But she couldn’t get over Ted’s betrayal, and her sedatives, stimulants and other medication couldn’t have helped her mood. She was expected to stay until Monday morning, when she would leave early, in time to be at the house when the new au pair arrived. But that Sunday she changed her mind and, convincing them she was fine, she returned home.

  One other friend was Trevor Thomas, although at first he didn’t take to her. She was a bad neighbour, leaving her pram blocking the hallway, fillin
g up his rubbish bin instead of buying her own. But he was beginning to like her better and soon realized she was in a bad way and needed help. One evening she had rung his bell and when he answered was in tears. “I’m going to die,” she told him. “Who will take care of the children?” Then she went off into a fit about Hughes and the Scarlet Woman, the Jezebel who had taken him away from her. She was responsible for all this. She was to blame. They were so happy until she arrived. Her husband was a famous poet, but she was a poet too and she should be celebrating: her book (The Bell Jar) had just been published (under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas) and had got good reviews. But he had left her with the children and no money and no help and had gone off with that woman. It was all her fault. His too …