Sylvia Plath: A Biography (18 page)

After class, Plath, Sexton, and George Starbuck drove in Sexton’s old Ford to the Ritz bar for martinis. Sexton parked her car in the Ritz’s loading zone, shouting, when challenged, that it was all right for her to park there because the three of them were going to get loaded. Sylvia enjoyed every minute of it. Once in the red plush lounge, they huddled around the small table, eating dish after dish of free potato chips, talking poetry. Sometimes the two women discussed suicide. Then they all went to a cheap supper at the Waldorf Cafeteria.

Of all the many writers in the Boston area, Sexton most interested Sylvia. She took Ted to a meeting of the New England Poetry Club, which met monthly at the elegant Beacon Hill mansion of Mrs. Fiske Warren, so that he could hear Sexton and Maxine Kumin read their poems. Kumin (who, with Sexton, privately referred to Ted as Ted Huge) thought, “There was something very cleancut and lovely about Sylvia with her schoolgirlish good looks and long hair and very open and level way with people.” And Sexton, too, although she did not at the time like most of Plath’s poems, did like her — her shyly defiant manner, her sense of being someone, her intensity. Without a great deal of conversation, Sexton and Plath were good friends. They shared attitudes, knowledge, and experiences. They were women in a man’s field, but they were confident in their aesthetic direction. They had both tested the line between death and life and had come back wiser. In the spring of 1959, Sylvia was in therapy with Beuscher, and Sexton was using analysis to help her face the deaths of both parents within a few months of each other.

In May, Sylvia’s book of poems, which she now titled
The
Bull
of
Bendylaw
, was chosen the alternate to the winner of the Yale Younger Poets contest. (Plath’s book was eventually published in 1960.) She was disappointed not to win, especially when Dudley Fitts, who was judging the competition, wrote that she had missed “by a whisper.” When she discovered that the winner was fellow poetry student George Starbuck, whose work she thought imitative and immature, she was furious. She raged to Fitts in her journal that he was wrong about what he called her “lack of technical finish,” that the flaw in her poems was the opposite — too much finish. Sylvia found writing in formal patterns easy. What was hard was discovering the true life of the poem inside its technical scaffolding. Angry as she was, she knew her current poems did not do her ability or her vision justice, and she promised herself to work harder. Meanwhile, Sexton’s first poem collection,
To
Bedlam
and
Part
Way
Back
, had been accepted by Houghton Mifflin. Sylvia took pride in her friend’s success, but she wanted it for herself as well.

As the year in Boston closed, Sylvia was productive. She wrote three of her best stories, “Sweetie Pie and the Gutter Men,” “Above the Oxbow,” and “This Earth Our Hospital,” the latter drawn from her Mass. General stint, written with humor and compassion. She also finished a children’s story,
The
Bed
Book
.
The
New
Yorker
took two more poems. She and Ted had decided to return to England to live, but before they returned, they planned to spend the fall at Yaddo, the upstate New York artists’ and writers’ colony, and during the summer they were taking a cross-country trip, driving Aurelia’s car. Their leaving in June helped to bring to a close Sylvia’s therapy with Ruth Beuscher. As she wrote at the time, “A happier sense of life, not hectic, but very slow and sure, than I have ever had. The sea, calm, with sun bland on it. Containing and receiving all the reefy narrow straits in its great reservoir of peace.” No longer blocked by the Panic Bird, Sylvia was on her way to creating one of the most striking voices in contemporary literature.

11 - The Colossus and Other Poems

1960

“A Dawn of Cornflowers”

Sylvia and Ted’s cross-country trip in the summer of 1959 was a complete success. Months of hard work and financial worries fell away. They both loved the outdoors, the gorgeous scenery, the freedom of being on the road. Before they had left Boston, a gynecological examination had showed that Sylvia did not ovulate regularly, and she was depressed because her doctor had told her that becoming pregnant might be difficult. On the trip, however, Sylvia did become pregnant, and her suspicion that she was added to the happiness of the travel.

Returning to Aurelia’s home in Wellesley, they stored many of their books and, on September 9, left for Yaddo. Sylvia told her mother that she thought she was pregnant, but she felt good so she did not see a doctor to confirm her condition.

Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York, was beautiful, maintaining all the elegance it had had as a private estate rose gardens, marble statuary, goldfish ponds, small lakes, woodland walks, and a greenhouse that fascinated Sylvia, who was reading Theodore Roethke’s poems about the Michigan greenhouse he had worked in as a boy. The buildings were scrupulously cared for, decorated with valuable paintings and art objects.

Perhaps as important to Sylvia as Yaddo’s physical beauty was the fact that she was well cared for. Meals were tasty, and served in a central dining room so that — for the first time in over three years — she did not have to shop, cook, or clean. Breakfast was served between 8:00 and 9:00 in the dining room; box lunches were available for the noon meal; and the guests met again for dinner. After that meal, guests went to each other’s rooms to socialize or returned to their work. Being at Yaddo gave Sylvia the professional standing that she sometimes lacked as Ted’s wife. As she wrote her mother, “I have never in my life felt so peaceful and as if I can read and think and write for about seven hours a day.... I am so happy we can work apart, for that is what we’ve really needed.” Their bedroom was on the first floor of West House and Sylvia’s studio was on the third. Ted’s study was out in the woods, heated with a wood stove and surrounded with pines.

Sonia Raiziss, editor of
Chelsea
magazine and a poet and translator, thought that Sylvia and Ted’s relationship was complex. Sylvia usually walked a bit behind Ted, she observed, “content to be there and almost secretively pleased with the status and circumstance of their attention — like a double billing.” According to Raiziss, Sylvia’s manner was one of “wry trustfulness” and she exuded a sense of satisfaction. Pauline Hanson, acting director of Yaddo at the time, remembered that both Sylvia and Ted were innately gracious, but that Sylvia said very little. Her chief pleasures were those things that pleased Ted (a dessert of crepes, maple syrup, sour cream and red caviar, for example). Modest and unassuming, she was happy to be at Yaddo and appreciative of its beauties.

Above all, at Yaddo Sylvia and Ted were the
young
writers. In contrast to the slacks and businesslike skirts of older women, Sylvia wore Bermuda shorts and short skirts. She and Ted rowed on the lake, took long walks, and after dinner visited Raiziss, Malcolm Cowley, the novelist Charles Bell, and composers Gordon Binkerd and Chou Wen-Chung. Late in their stay, May Swenson joined the group and described meeting Sylvia, who was in bed in West House. In Swenson’s words, it was late afternoon, “already almost dark under the pine boughs outside their windows. A standing lamp was lit beside the bed in which Sylvia sat against pillows. A long-limbed, good-looking girl with blond hair worn to her shoulders, she looked languid and morose. There were books on the bed, and a cleared lunch tray being used as a desk held papers and a pen.”

Usually Sylvia gave an impression of energy, sometimes directed, sometimes frustrated. Yet these were the months when Ted hypnotized her so that she could sleep, months when he made lists of possible subjects for her to write poems about — months of anxiety as real as any she had known before, even in the midst of her contentment about being pregnant. During her eleven weeks at Yaddo, Sylvia’s moods fluctuated from recurring depression to calm tranquility.

The difference between Sylvia’s polished outward manner and her inward anxiety shows again in the discrepancies between her letters home and her private journals. To Aurelia she described the marvelous food and scenery, and her poetry reading in September. But in her journals she wrote at length about her nightmares (“Full of them. Keep them to myself or I’ll drive the world morbid”); her depression (“The old fall disease”); her anxiety (“Would getting a degree help me? Where is my will-power?”). Simultaneously, she was noting exciting things she had read — Roethke’s poems, Jean Stafford’s and Eudora Welty’s stories, and, most important, those stories read aloud so she could “feel on my tongue what I admire.”

Despite Sylvia’s emotional uncertainties, she grew as a poet. After all her years of study, and her workshop experience with Lowell and Sexton, Sylvia possessed a great deal of knowledge about writing. She knew what she liked and she knew what would be useful to her own work. From that perspective, she admired Eudora Welty’s remarkable ability to write in the voices of different characters, and Shirley Jackson’s
The
Bird’s
Nest
, a novel about psychosis in a young woman character, gave her important ideas that helped her in thinking about
The
Bell
Jar
.

Yaddo came at the perfect moment in Sylvia’s development as a writer. She turned twenty-seven there, an occasion which Polly Hanson celebrated with
vin
rosé
for everyone and a cake with candles. Sylvia could see that her writing was coming to fruition, after those years of work and study, and she was beginning to be as pleased with her poems as she was with the stories she had written the previous spring in Boston. Her journal is filled with admonitions to herself that she write in a more natural voice, that she open her experience like a wound and “then invent on the drop of a feather, a whole multicolored bird.” She warned herself not to write by formula, but to use her writing as a voyage of discovery, to find by writing what was important about her experiences.

These were also months of trying Ted’s exercises: deep-breathing, concentration on objects. Hypnosis was another way of reaching remote layers of consciousness; it was practiced by both Ted and Sylvia. Late in her Yaddo stay, Sylvia wrote in her journal that she had written two poems that pleased her, “Different. Weirder. I see a picture, a weather, in these poems.” And in a later entry she admonished herself “to be honest with what I know and have known. To be true to my own weirdnesses.”

One of the changes in Plath’s work at Yaddo was the use of more colloquial, even slangy, language as a way to get rid of the sound of what she called “drawing room” speech. She wanted a voice that was witty, wry, American, brazen, arrogant and, at times, comic — like those of Welty, Roth, and Salinger. One of her frustrations at Yaddo was that she had already completed several versions of a poem collection, and her new poems were not going to fit into it. At Ted’s suggestion, she began a new book (for which she did not have a publisher), calling it
The
Colossus
after a poem she wrote at Yaddo, which she considered little and humorous.

The poem “The Colossus” is apparently about Sylvia’s father, pictured as the ruin of a huge statue, over which the daughter crawls as she tries to repair it. The poem draws on imagery she had often used to refer to boyfriends, Mike Lotz and Ted among them. It describes Ouija board sessions in which her father was called “colossus” or “Prince Otto,” as well as Sylvia’s impression of the Elgin marbles and the many Egyptian colossi in the British Museum. Her tone of wry chagrin is clear from the start: “I shall never get you put together entirely/ Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.”

As the poet mends the statue, she regards it as an oracle, the source of wisdom she desperately needs but cannot quite understand:

Thirty years now I have labored

To dredge the silt from your throat.

I am none the wiser.

The language is reminiscent of Sexton’s; the comic yet matter-of-fact voice, the touches of absurdity, give the poem a more humorous tone than its subject would suggest. “The Colossus” is an important departure for Plath.

The book titled
The
Colossus
and
Other
Poems
contains many finished and expert poems. “Full Fathom Five,” “Moonrise,” and “Lorelei” are related poems in which Plath’s language is both deft and surprising. They show her admiration for Wallace Stevens and her effort to apply his principle that the poet should mesmerize through language. In the new poems, word by patient word, Plath lets the poem go where it will; “Blue Moles” is a good example of her exploration. “The Disquieting Muses” and “Point Shirley” are tapestries of memory about mothers and grandmothers; “Medallion” is a stream-of-consciousness description of a dead snake; and “Mushrooms” is the first of her three-line-stanza poems that move rapidly, connected more often by images than by narrative.

Ted Hughes and others — Plath’s college roommates among them — have given us the familiar image of Sylvia writing poems, sitting with the heavy, red-covered thesaurus that was her father’s open on her lap, consulting it frequently. But as early as 1956, even before she had met Hughes, Sylvia had begun trying to write poems that spoke more colloquially. She had come to think of the poet as song-maker, not as scholar with her head buried in books. Plath did not break the thesaurus habit over-night but in 1959 she was working much more orally, listening to the language of the poem to see whether it was the language of speech. She was choosing her “book poems,” those that would appear in her current collection, as much for the ease and naturalness of their language as for their subject matter.

Subject matter was an important consideration, but Sylvia at this point seemed unclear about what appropriate subjects for poems were. Because she relied so heavily on lists that Ted made up for her of subjects that he would consider possible writing topics, she was screened off from her own primary interests. Many of the poems she had written since her marriage were as much exercises as the poems she had written for college classes. In fact, many of the poems that Sylvia left out of
The
Colossus
collection were among her best. They were also her most personal. For example, from her Yorkshire poems she chose to omit “The Snowman on the Moor,” a narrative about a husband-wife argument; “Two Views of Withens,” the Brontë country described first by a man and then a woman; and “November Graveyard,” a poem about the Heptonstall cemetery where the Hughes family was buried. From her Boston poems, the more personal “Child’s Park Stones” and “Electra on Azalea Path” were omitted. The latter poem particularly is important for its striking imagery and terse language, as well as because it tells directly some of Plath’s early history — a possible suicide attempt after her father’s death, her guilt over that death, and her attempt to remain a child so that she could escape any consequences. Rich with fragments of imagery that would later open into poems less hurried, “Electra on Azalea Path” is a marvel of mood. How Sylvia could have thought it unfinished is a mystery, especially when she included a much milder pastiche, “The Beekeeper’s Daughter,” which uses some of the same imagery to tell much the same story, but more obliquely.

Had Plath included some of the good poems she chose to omit, the reader of
The
Colossus
as it was published in 1960 would have been better prepared for the culminating achievement of the seven-part “Poem for a Birthday.” By far the most interesting and powerful poem Sylvia had written, it began as an exercise modeled after Sexton and Theodore Roethke (at Yaddo, Plath had been reading Roethke’s sequences, “Words for the Wind” and “Meditations for an Old Woman”). Her own “Poem for a Birthday” combined history, clusters of strong and unexpected images, and haunting phrasing to create an exploration of the whole poetic self. Written in a childlike language reminiscent of Roethke, the poem included many of her dreams as she had recorded them in her journal, as well as images from Jung and Freud, and from Paul Radin’s African folktales. Like Sexton’s “The Double Image,” her long poem about mothers and daughters, which Plath had discussed when Sexton read it in Lowell’s workshop, Sylvia’s “Poem for a Birthday” traces the poet’s search for a mother’s love. It also tells of her quest for the protection of a father and fuses the husband figure with that of the father. It recounts, usually in a surreal manner, details of Plath’s childhood, her breakdown, her electroconvulsive shock treatments, her self-doubt, her marriage, and the problems of being female in midcentury America.

The
Colossus
and
Other
Poems
was a varied and comparatively innovative collection, the fruit of four years of serious writing. Except for her Yaddo poems, nearly all the work had been published in good magazines. That the book carried as its title one of the Yaddo poems, and that it concluded with the major sequence “Poem for a Birthday,” one of the last things Sylvia wrote at Yaddo, demonstrated that her fall experience at the writers’ colony was crucial to her development as a poet.

It was a satisfied Sylvia who leaned against the rail of the
Queen
Elizabeth
in December of 1959, pregnant with either Nicholas or Frieda Rebecca, the names she and Ted had chosen for their baby, luxuriating in a sense of accomplishment. She looked forward to living in England, although she hoped to have household help so she would not become, in her words, one of those English “drudges.” She also, as she had told Polly Hanson, hoped to avoid the moors. Thoroughly American, Plath felt that agreeing to live in England was a kind of sacrifice on her part.