Sylvia Plath: A Biography (20 page)

September brought Londoners back to town, and Sylvia again raved about the “inexhaustible city” and her love for it. There was more socializing, and trips to museums and to the last day of the
Lady
Chatterley
obscenity trial at the Old Bailey. Ted and Sylvia lunched with the Sweeneys, visiting from Harvard; went to more of John Lehmann’s parties; and invited Thom Gunn, the British poet who later became Ted’s friend, for lunch at their flat. Gunn remembers spending the afternoon taking a walk through the Primrose Hill area, thinking Sylvia “sensible, cheerful, considerate, obviously a careful and loving mother.” Later she wrote to Aurelia that her October 27 birthday, her twenty-eighth, was the best she had ever known.

Ten days before that birthday, Sylvia had written a poem for Ted called “Love Letter.” One of her more relaxed, colloquial monologues, it described his drawing her away from a life of apathy to one of complete emotional fulfillment:

Not easy to state the change you made.

If I’m alive now, then I was dead,

Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.

In the poem, what results from her emotional involvement is a nearly transcendent state, which Ted shares.

This was one of several good poems Sylvia wrote in the fall of 1960. Many of her spring and summer poems had been less fully realized (a short poem, “The Hanging Man,” is an exception). She was once again aiming for sales to commercial magazines: an agent who had contacted her after “The Daughters of Blossom Street” appeared in
The
London
Magazine
was handling submissions. Sylvia finished three stories and continued to plan the novel about her college breakdown and recovery. Perhaps more important, she continued to write good poems. “A Life” and “Waking in Winter” are linked with “Love Letter” in that they use her past experiences as subject, and the lovely “Candles” draws on her grandparents’ lives, juxtaposed with that of her infant daughter.

As a group, however, these fall 1960 poems show Sylvia’s dissatisfaction with her life. Although Ted still made lists of topics for her to write about, she was more often using her writing to explore her psyche (one of her favorite words). “A Life” is a particularly bleak poem that moves from a description of an “ideal” family — the adjective used ironically — to a portrait of an isolated, sick woman who is “dragging her shadow in a circle.” The woman has suffered “a sort of private blitzkrieg” and the only way she can exist after that experience is to live “quietly/ With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle.” Separate in her own bell jar, dead to all emotion, she has exorcized her grief and anger. The poem ends with a set of more desolate images: a crying seagull and a drowned man.

In the fall of 1960, Sylvia seemed to be restless. With her characteristic need for activity and change, she began making plans to find a house — and thinking as well of having a second child. Her incipient depression undercut what might have been a happy autumn for Sylvia: her child was healthy and intelligent; Sylvia was about to make her first appearance on the BBC; and on October 26, she mailed advance copies of
The
Colossus
and
Other
Poems
to her family and Mrs. Prouty. The latter in turn sent Sylvia a celebratory check for $150. Sylvia was grateful for the check. Her book had not been taken by an American publisher, nor had it won any prizes, so she knew she would make very little money from its publication.

Reviews of
The
Colossus
were good. Sylvia read papers and magazines avidly and was pleased with the response, though it came slowly. Most of the better reviews came out in the winter — essays by John Wain, Roy Fuller, Geoffrey Dearmer. On December 18, 1960, she read the comment she had been watching for, the Alvarez review in
The
Observer
. It was a highly favorable notice, but had one reservation — that Plath had not yet developed a consistent voice. When Sylvia saw him socially a month later, she told Alvarez that she agreed with his criticism, and that she was writing a new kind of poem. She was excited about the voice she was speaking in, which caught what she called her “humour and oddnesses” as well as her “realistic” view of human experience.

But even as Sylvia was enjoying her new poems, other problems arose. Frieda started teething, and “the long, wet, grey half-year” English winter seemed even bleaker than her memories of it. Though Sylvia hoped she was again pregnant, she began having attacks of sharp abdominal pains which her doctor called grumbling appendix. Later she had a series of sinus colds, complete with high temperatures. As she wrote to her mother on December 17, just before going to Yorkshire for Christmas, “We’re both so tense we need to unwind for weeks.”

Ted’s fall had been busy with readings at universities, regular programs for the BBC, and a television appearance. His major interest, however, following his fascination with drama, was rewriting his libretto for the opera of the
Bardo
Thodol
, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which he was composing in collaboration with Chou Wen-Chung. The Hugheses had met and liked Professor Chou at Yaddo, and this project had grown from that acquaintance. Ted and Sylvia often discussed the text, which describes the progress of the soul during the forty-nine days between death and rebirth and also serves as a meditative guide to the Buddhist art of “dying” to the phenomenal world. Sylvia was intrigued by Ted’s familiarity with non-Western cultures. The notion of reincarnation interested them both. In this opera project, on which Ted spent parts of the year, he was trying to re-create the imagery and language of the
Bardo
Thodol
in comparable English, without literal translation.
[2]

Plath’s letters home late in 1960 spoke retrospectively of that year as one of struggle. During it, she said, she and Ted were deciding what direction their lives would take, and they had found that literary life had been draining their home. They wanted to live more simply — at least Sylvia said she did. She commented that Ted wanted to be “famous, a lion,” and yet he also wanted to be a good husband and father. She might also have said that
she
wanted the same things Ted did: fame, accolades, a loving family (with children ranging in number from four to seven, depending on when she discussed the matter). Marriage might have been easier had either Ted or Sylvia been less ambitious, or had either of them been more willing to take on traditional gender roles. Ted’s confidence that income from their writing would support them unnerved Sylvia, especially now that they had a family; she had been reared to think that husbands should be providers. The wife’s having to assume the provider role was both unfair and inappropriate, in her judgment. With her journal dotted with accounts of “bloody private wounds,” and of arguments over buttons and haircuts, Sylvia’s married life had already known its share of regret and anger.

The Yorkshire holiday helped for a while. Sylvia and Ted took ten-mile walks. They slept deeply and had time for each other. The weather, however, was cold and damp, and Sylvia felt sick much of the time. When Sylvia returned to London, she applied for a copy-editing position with the book-publishing industry’s trade magazine,
The
Bookseller
. In this temporary job, she worked afternoons from 1:00 to 5:30, doing page layout and editing for the special spring issue. On January 17 she and Ted recorded a “Poets in Partnership” program for the BBC, part of a feature series that focused on married couples who had the same occupation. On the program, Sylvia and Ted joked about their poverty (Sylvia wished for a new lamp). She also made the point that she was working outside the home, as well as being a mother, housewife, and writer. As a result of this broadcast later in January, they received much mail, including a kind letter from a woman named Elizabeth Compton, who invited them to share her Devon farmhouse. Her husband was also a writer.

Although they were now trying to avoid parties, on February 1 they attended one to meet Theodore Roethke. He suggested that Ted apply for a teaching job at the University of Washington, where Roethke had taught for many years. The three became friends. Sylvia’s spring letter to Roethke, written to accompany a gift copy of
The
Colossus
, expressed her admiration for his work and acknowledged his influence on her poetry, especially on “Poem for a Birthday.” Her somewhat fawning tone in this letter is very different from that in the letter she wrote on February 5, 1961, to Anne Sexton. There Plath praised her friend’s
To
Bedlam
and
Part
Way
Back
, reminiscing about the Boston workshop where she had first seen some of the poems included in that book. She admonished Anne to write her a newsy letter, to tell Maxine Kumin that she admired her wry poem, written in an outspoken fraulein voice in
The
New
Yorker
, and closed by telling Anne about life in London, her wonderful comic child, and her equally wonderful husband.

And yet, only a few days before Sylvia wrote the Sexton letter, she had turned on Ted with fury. He had gone to the BBC to be interviewed by Moira Doolan about doing a series of children’s programs. (Sylvia had disliked Doolan’s voice on the phone, thinking she was a younger woman than she actually was.) The interview went well and lasted longer than Ted had expected. He got back late for lunch to find that Sylvia had burnt his notes and drafts of new work. A writer herself, Sylvia knew the best, or worst, way to retaliate.

Shortly after this episode, on February 6, Sylvia miscarried. The unexpected loss frightened and saddened her. Then, on February 28, as had earlier been planned, she had an appendectomy and was hospitalized two weeks. While in the hospital, Sylvia received a “first reading” contract from
The
New
Yorker
, which meant she was to send all her new poems first to that magazine. Having such a contract was an honor for a young writer, and Sylvia responded by writing some very good poems. She was writing more quickly now. Ted recalled that the poem “Tulips” was written like an urgent letter, without the use of a dictionary or a thesaurus. The ambivalence of “Tulips” — the woman’s longing to stay in the hospital, to keep herself remote from even those who love her, set against the insistence that she recover and return home — perhaps reflected Sylvia’s own ambivalence at the time. The poem continued the tone of “A Life” and foreshadowed many of Sylvia’s late poems, in which unpleasant events were presented with equanimity, if not outright humor.

The speaker of “Tulips” is a woman who has been hospitalized for an operation. Her husband and their small child, whose photograph is beside her in the austere white room, have sent her vivid red tulips. The poem is an imagined dialogue between the woman and the flowers, as she accuses them of eating her oxygen. Surreal yet effective, Plath creates the woman’s tranquil postoperative state as idyllic; she decides, momentarily at least, she wants to remain in the hospital.

I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted

To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.

She thinks of her husband and child as antagonists. Their smiles in the photo are “hooks” that want to bring her back to a normal life.

The theme of “Tulips” was not an isolated sentiment in Plath’s writing that spring. “I Am Vertical” explores even more directly the theme of leaving the hectic world of the living for the peaceful world of the dead. In Plath’s poems, whatever offered tranquility, privacy, and some sure sense of self was positive — and in these poems, death seemed to provide that milieu.

Many of her other spring 1961 poems were about women or their children. “Barren Woman” and “Heavy Women” describe feminine fertility or its absence: Sylvia thought barrenness the worst possible condition for any woman. “Morning Song” is a poem of praise for an infant daughter. “Zoo Keeper’s Wife” is a macabre account of a zoo keeper’s courtship of his wife, which characterizes marriage as victimization of the woman. Since Ted had planned to study zoology, the poem has an ironic personal element. It is also the first of Plath’s poems to suggest that what men are capable of doing to animals, they are capable of doing to women. It anticipates in many ways “The Rabbit Catcher,” a powerful late poem on that theme.

Surely autobiographical, “Parliament Hill Fields,” one of Plath’s strongest poems of this period, describes a woman’s grief over a miscarriage. Withdrawing from her family, she returns from a walk to see her healthy child getting ready for bed in a brightly-lit house. But even with that joyful sight, her depression continues: “The old dregs, the old difficulties take me to wife.” With no explanation for the words “dregs” and “difficulties,” the reader can only surmise that Plath was suggesting recurring withdrawal, if not depression.

The birth of one child and the loss of another brought Sylvia into a matriarchal world. Those experiences, coupled with her stay in the women’s ward after her appendectomy, gave her a language that she used to express herself as a woman. Many of her 1961 poems (“In Plaster,” for example) explore the emotions associated with women’s experiences. At the same time, these were speaking poems, written in a more natural voice, regardless of whether the speaker was meant to be a Sylvia-like character or someone else.

Plath returned home from the hospital to the good news that Alfred A. Knopf had bought
The
Colossus
for American publication. Knopf wanted to cut ten of the fifty poems which had appeared in the British book, unfortunately removing “Poem for a Birthday.” Sylvia was elated, and was willing to do whatever Knopf requested. She seems not to have questioned the wisdom of deleting her best poem, although she later asked that two of its seven parts — “Stones” and “Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond” — be left in to close the book. She observed at one point that the collection had a theme, the person who is “broken and mended,” beginning with the smashed colossus and ending with the self.