Sylvia Plath: A Biography (25 page)

Sylvia’s determination may have stemmed in part from the reassurance she received in a letter from Ruth Beuscher. Dated September 17, 1962, Beuscher’s warm reply offered Sylvia all the possible support a friend could give. She said that she (Beuscher) was “furious” with Ted and his immature behavior. She could not be impartial but neither could she take Sylvia on as a patient by mail (which Sylvia had evidently suggested). Sylvia, however, should count on her as a close friend, and she offered her love and support throughout the coming hard times. The important thing, according to Beuscher, was that Sylvia should keep control of her life in her own hands. If living with Ted in this divided way was impossible, then Sylvia should not continue to do it.

Sylvia replied quickly, explaining what she had done and what she planned, which at this time was to get a legal separation. But in Beuscher’s next letter, dated September 25, she urged Sylvia to get a divorce instead of a separation. She thought that a divorce would be better legally and financially. To that end, she warned, Sylvia should not be intimate with Ted because then she could not use adultery as grounds for a divorce. Neither should she take the children to their grandparents’ home until custody had been decided. Again, Beuscher’s primary admonition was that Sylvia take charge, that she make a plan and stick to it.

The last days of September continued to be erratic for Sylvia. Letters to both Aurelia and Mrs. Prouty (who had by this time been told the truth) repeat what was becoming a litany: Ted was immature, selfish, cruel; he lied, ruining the most important quality of their marriage, trust; he spent money that belonged to the family on himself and his pleasures. But especially in Sylvia’s letters to Mrs. Prouty, there is also the statement of her immense grief at losing her husband: “I loved the man I have lived with 6 happy years with all my heart, but there is
nothing
of this left.... Luckily Dr. Beuscher and my stay at McLean’s gave me the strength to face pain and difficulty.”

Sylvia may have been remembering her years of therapy because, according to her letters, Ted was taunting her with her earlier suicide attempt, saying that if she were to repeat that action, everything would be simpler for him. He called her a “hag” in a world of beautiful women. He described himself as being dragged down by her — or so Sylvia’s letters say. Her correspondence with her mother and with Mrs. Prouty recounts incredible happenings: jealous and angry insults; a fight between Ted and David Wevill. In the past, Sylvia’s letters had created a fabrication of the ideal. Might they now portray situations that would evoke sympathy for the young mother and her two children? In the case of Plath’s earlier letters, one can compare this correspondence with her private journals to discern the truth. However, the journals from this period of her later life have disappeared — according to Ted Hughes — so comparing accounts is impossible. In her own mind, certainly, Sylvia saw her position as bleak and thought of herself as Ted’s victim.

She became acutely aware of her own needs. She insisted that she must have time for her own writing, that she must have a nanny for the children. Yet even as she wrote Aurelia that she and Ted were finished, she explained that she would never return to America to live. She felt at home in England. In London she could make her living as a writer.

Winifred Davies’s advice may have saved Sylvia from more depression during the fall. Because Sylvia could not sleep well and was waking very early, Winifred suggested that she use that time to write. Beginning in late September, Sylvia did just that, starting with a few pages of a new novel, her third, only recently begun. By the 29th she was writing poems once more. “A Birthday Present,” that stark demand for truth, was dated September 30, 1962. This was the beginning of an astonishingly productive period during which Sylvia wrote most of the poems in her
Ariel
collection: “The Detective” on October 1; “The Courage of Shutting-Up” the next day; the five magnificent “bee” poems during the following week, ending with “Wintering” on October 9. It is the cutting, wry voice of the defensive and tormented wife that gives these October poems their strength. Especially notable is the raucous gallows humor of the detective who finds a crow in the last line of “The Detective,” and the blunt insistence of the speaker in “The Courage of Shutting-Up.”

The most important of these October poems is Plath’s bee sequence, her survival poetry. Expert and complicated poems, the series of five bee poems describes the joy of creation, the role in the bee community of the old queen who fights against dispossession by the more beautiful queens, and survives. “Winter is for women,” Plath wrote. Women survive together. As winter approaches, the community that endures is female:

They have got rid of the men

The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.

Much of Plath’s effect in these poems stems from the racy rhythm — noun after noun, phrase after phrase. These are poems written, as she said, “for the ear, not the eye: they are poems written out loud.”

Sylvia had found those same speechlike qualities in Anne Sexton’s second book of poems,
All
My
Pretty
Ones
, which she had received from Sexton on August 17. In a letter thanking Anne, Sylvia said that she was “absolutely stunned and delighted” because the book was not only masterful but “womanly in the greatest sense” and “so blessedly unliterary.” Plath listed a dozen of her favorites from the book but closed by saying, “Hell, they are all terrific.” She asked to see new poems and a newsy letter. She closed wishing her friend “more power — although you seem to need nothing — it is all there.” It was reaffirming for Sylvia to read consummate poems about women’s subjects, observed through a woman’s eyes and told with a woman’s voice. Her aim, like Sexton’s, was to write about things that interested her, which more and more were “womanly.” Ever since “Three Women,” that had become a rich direction for her, and it was a route that was quickly leading to some of her best poems.

The bee poems spoke about domestic and womanly topics, but they were very much poems about power as well. From the first fairly literary poem, “The Bee Meeting,” with its echoes of Hawthorne’s story “Young Goodman Brown,” through the magnificent “Stings,” with its fearless female speaker (“I am in control ... I / Have a self to recover”), Plath moved farther and farther from the literary mainstream and further into her own mythic world. As in “Lady Lazarus” and “Purdah,” the woman avenger in “Stings” is also lionlike, red, winged, and powerful. Egyptian, African, and Grecian, Sylvia’s lioness not only escapes her painful life but sends tribulation on her enemies. She is a world force, a moral and corrective force. Sylvia’s use of the lioness image recalls Jason’s calling Medea a lioness. It also usurped Ted’s astrological identity as a Leo, the lion.

As she finished these poems on October 9, Sylvia’s personal situation hit rock bottom. It became clear that Ted was going to move out. Even though Sylvia had seen a lawyer and had discussed separation, she was not ready for this complete break. Her October 9 letter to Aurelia was distraught. She was vindictive, reciting stories about Ted and his lover — spiteful, angry, bitter tales. She was pathetic: “In Ireland I may find my soul, and in London ... my brain, and maybe in heaven what was my heart.” But she also wrote in some parts of the letter with the comic exaggeration that was customary for her: “Everything is breaking — my dinner set cracking in half, the health inspector says the cottage should be demolished.... Even my beloved bees set upon me today ... and I am all over stings.”

By October 12, when she again wrote to her mother, she was even less composed. Ted had moved out on October 11. In her subsequent fear and panic, Sylvia wrote Aurelia that she did not see how she could go to court and testify, portraying herself as the abandoned wife, or how she would live through the winter without a babysitter. She begged for someone from home to come and live with her for six weeks, but she insisted that the help must be either Aunt Dot, her mother’s sister, or Maggie, Warren’s new wife, whom Sylvia had not yet met. On October 13, however, in another letter, she swung into her familiar take-charge voice. There she wrote about her financial affairs, giving her mother information about the ways she would manage, faced as she was at that time with another bout of flu and more weight loss.

In the midst of this emotional storm, however, Sylvia finished “The Applicant” and wrote “Daddy,” poems that are clear testimony to the power of art to transform. The fury that she had managed to keep more or less in check all summer burst loose, and more fiery poems appeared — “The Jailer,” “Purdah,” “Ariel,” “Lady Lazarus.” Some of Sylvia’s finest poetry poured out in the weeks following Ted’s departure.

The artistry evident in the poems of October 1962 was the fruit of years of Sylvia’s studying her craft. Because of her daring, her reckless willingness to put words to emotions new to her, she found the form for the sorrow and anger she felt. The artist in Sylvia shaped the feelings that the wife could only begin to express. Meanwhile, the daughter wrote about those same feelings in her letters, the raw recital of facts from which the poetry would grow.

On October 16, Sylvia wrote to Aurelia that she had the flu again and was running a temperature of over 101 degrees. That same day, she wrote the bitterly accusatory poem that was called in draft “Mum: Medusa” about her mother’s supposedly harmful influence on her. Even as she documented her dependency on her mother with a stream of intimate letters home, she reproached herself in the poem for that dependency. As had been the case since childhood, Sylvia desperately needed her mother. And, as since childhood, Aurelia responded. Reacting to that October 16 letter, she wired Winifred Davies to hire someone to stay with Sylvia (“salary paid here” the telegram instructed).

Sylvia continued to write out her vengeance. On October 17, she wrote “The Jailer,” the most vindictive of her late poems. In it, the male protagonist treats the speaker like a slave. She is worn to exhaustion. His rejection of her turns her to a skeleton. “My ribs show. What have I eaten? /Lies and smiles.” She can see the futility of thinking she is in any way necessary to his life; she says sadly, “I am myself. That is not enough.” Much angrier than “Medusa,” “The Jailer” ironically reflects the same kind of dependence, this time on a husband. In the poems themselves, Sylvia was attempting to free herself of artistic dependence. Before these October poems, she had usually written on topics Ted suggested. Now she was writing poems of her own devising.

Compared to “The Jailer,” Plath’s poem “Daddy,” which she wrote on October 12, is a nearly reasonable hate-chant that draws much of its power from its ironic tone and its form and movement. “Daddy” is a highly controlled narrative about her father’s effect on her, which then merges with the influence of her husband. Her anger at Ted was the fuel for this and for many of her other October poems. “Stopped Dead,” written on October 19, and “Amnesiac” and “Lyonnesse,” both written on October 21, continue the description of her estranged husband. The “high cold masks of amnesia” that Sylvia referred to in “The Jailer” remain his most hurtful trait: how can a man deny what his family has meant to him, she asks. But as Sylvia’s thirtieth birthday approached on October 27, she speculated about her future. In quick succession, she wrote four of her strongest poems: “Fever 103°,” “Ariel,” “Purdah,” and “Lady Lazarus.” In each poem a betrayed woman — sick, sexually abused, even dead — survives, and survives to mete out vengeance.

In “Ariel” the subject of the poem finds herself through the expansion of her spirit as she rides a beloved horse in early morning. The physical and emotional pleasure allows her to “unpeel,” to lose what she calls “dead hands, dead stringencies.” In her new-found freedom from male surveillance, she takes on all the independence, the aggression, that her culture had attempted to deny her. “I /Am the arrow” is the key image, recalling a speech of Mrs. Norton’s in which she had said that men are arrows and women are the places they fly off from. In “Ariel” the woman is the arrow — but she is also a lioness. Through her insight and understanding, she has become “God’s lioness,” and “Ariel” in Hebrew means just that. (“God’s Lioness” was the title of a draft version of the poem.)

“Fever 103°” portrays illness as a purifying event. Plath uses an image of sexual purity as a desirable quality for a woman. She imagines that her fevers have burned her out so that she is now “too pure” for everyday life. Yet her incorporation of the image of the leopard at Hiroshima, burned to white ash in the radiation, keeps the poem ironic and tells the reader that such sacrifice is never desirable.

The image of the lioness returns in “Purdah” as the woman with power becomes a Medea-like avenger, intent on punishing the unfaithful husband. Its tone is more sinister, and more sexual, than that of “Lady Lazarus,” written at nearly the same time. In “Lady Lazarus,” which is similar to “Daddy” because of its tight control and the macabre rhythm that Sylvia called “light verse,” the speaker’s guilt and anger have turned to pride. She is good at her profession (which is attempting suicide), and in a society that allows women so few distinctions, hers is significant. The poem ends with a phoenix-like image of rebirth that gives way to vengeance:

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air
.

In one sense, this is the ending of Plath’s long and debilitating saga of pain. By the end of October, she had reached a kind of reconciliation with herself, though she was worn and anguished from the struggle. It had gone on since early spring, over seven months, and it had become her life.