Sylvia Plath: A Biography (26 page)

As she wrote to her mother on October 16, the writing that had come from the pain of those months was almost worth the suffering. “I am a writer ... 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.” But at the end of that same letter, Sylvia added, almost wildly, “I am ... full of plans, but do need help for the next two months. I am fighting now against hard odds and alone.”

15 - Resolution

1962 - 63

“I See by My Own Light”

Winifred Davies found a wonderful young nurse who was willing to work for Sylvia. From October 21 to December 11, Susan O’Neill-Roe came at 8:30 a.m. and stayed until 6:00 p.m. Soon after Susan had begun caring for the children, Sylvia wrote her mother that she felt like a new person. She was writing each day until late in the morning and was thinking of continuing her new novel as well as working on her exciting poems. Susan agreed to stay overnight when Sylvia went out of town, so she planned her first trip to London since Ted had left. London, for Sylvia, was a cultural home. Devon, in contrast, was isolated and lonely, its rich fall harvest rotting in the forgotten gardens, its townspeople giving Sylvia a wide berth because word was that Ted had left her.

Although the Webbs invited Sylvia for tea on October 26, she had no plans for her birthday the following day. She inscribed John Berryman’s poem collection,
Homage
to
Mistress
Bradstreet
, with that date as if she had bought the book as a present; and she had been annotating poems from D. H. Lawrence’s
Collected
Poems
with October dates (“The Mess of Love” is dated October 22, for example). She was reading Blake, Yeats, Woolf, and Dylan Thomas (whose birthday she shared) during those fall nights after the children were in bed. Her household calendar for her birthday was completely blank, but she was not idle: on that day she finished the poems “Ariel” and “Poppies in October.”

Susan had stabilized the household so Sylvia was free to concentrate on writing what she called her “dawn” poems. On a drive to attend a Bach concert with Elizabeth Compton, Sylvia had used that phrase, telling her friend she was writing “dawn poems in blood.” Elizabeth thought Sylvia looked ill. She was thin, coughing, running a low temperature, trying to recover from still another bout of the flu — but flushed with the joy of successful work.

Other friends remember Sylvia’s frantic need to talk, her non-stop delivery of story after story, as she adopted the raconteur stance once more, just as she had after her 1953 breakdown and recovery. Clearly she needed someone to listen. She was also ready to take on whatever adventure might occur, especially after her year of living quietly in Devon. On October 25 she wrote an admonitory letter to her mother. Contrasted with the panic-filled letters of earlier October, this one is a model of confidence:

For goodness sakes, stop being so
frightened
of everything, Mother! Almost every other word in your letter is “frightened!” One thing I want for my children to have is a bold sense of adventure, not the fear of trying something new.... If I chained myself to my Bendix I would never see the world....

Responding to her own advice, Sylvia packed a literary world into her trip to London on October 29 and 30. She met with Peter Dickinson about the summer American Poetry Night at the Royal Court Theatre, recorded her poem “Berck-Plage” for the BBC, and went to Al Alvarez’s studio and read him the new October poems. Because he was recently divorced, Sylvia confided to him that she and Ted were separated. She attended a play and a PEN party in Chelsea where she and Dan Huws talked about Frieda’s development, the child’s regression since Ted had left, and Sylvia’s consequent fear that her daughter might have emotional difficulties. As good friends, they also talked about the possibility of divorce. Dan, who was a Catholic, said, “You know what we believe — till death do us part.” Sylvia, with great intensity, agreed, “Yes, yes, that’s what I believe too.”

The next day Sylvia had lunch with the BBC producer Peter Orr before taping the interview with him and reading from her new poems. In the interview, Plath spoke about herself as an American poet (though an old-fashioned American, one morally upright and traditional) and about the vitality of some recent American poetry. She admired the fact that it drew on “interior experiences” and on “private and taboo subjects,” as did the work of Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton. She criticized British poetry for its gentility and praised American poetry for its immediacy. She stated that the subjects of the best poems must be both real, based on genuine emotion, and relevant, “relevant to the larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.” “I’m a rather political person,” she concluded.

Certainly the poems that Sylvia had just been writing and that she read for Orr evidenced the aesthetic she described in the interview. They were drawn from her own life, but they opened to universal interpretation. Except for “The Rabbit Catcher,” all the poems Sylvia read had been written during October, and three of them — “Nick and the Candlestick,” “Lady Lazarus,” and “Purdah” — were dated October 29, the previous day. She raced emphatically through “Cut,” “Medusa,” “Amnesiac,” “Fever 103°,” “The Applicant,” “A Birthday Present,” “Stopped Dead,” “Daddy,” and “A Secret,” reading with an intense and sure speed and inflection that suggested ample practice. Plath’s expert reading gave further credence to her comment that these poems were written for the ear rather than the eye, and that she said them aloud to herself as she wrote them.

Sylvia returned to Devon, triumphant, flooded with compliments from friends and acquaintances about her appearance and her work. On November 2, she wrote an exuberant letter to Mrs. Prouty. Prouty had evidently told Sylvia that she must return to London for the winter. (Sylvia had been considering going to either Ireland or Spain, but childcare was a problem.) Now Sylvia agreed. Contrasted with daily life in Devon, London was brilliant. People there wanted to know her. She may have received more attention, in fact, because she was separated from Ted. For whatever reasons, Sylvia seemed sure that living in London would continue to be exciting. She would settle in, if she could find a flat, and have wonderful salons. She would have friends, good schools for the children, accessible plays and films, and opportunities to record for the BBC and write for the London magazines. Sylvia’s tendency to idealize circumstances was again operating in full force.

Once home from her London trip, congratulating herself on coming through in good form, Sylvia began her search for a London flat. November 5, the following Monday, she repeated her trip, this time staying two days and scouring the city for apartments. Ted helped her part of the time, but she found the vacancy at 123 Fitzroy Road on her own. She had returned to the Primrose Hill area where she and Ted had lived so happily in 1960 and 1961. To her amazement, she noticed a “To Let” sign just around the corner from 3 Chalcot Road, their former address. The flat to be rented was the top two floors of “Yeats’s house,” so indicated by the blue historical marker above the front door. Sylvia had just visited Yeats’s tower in Ireland. She had recently been reading a great deal of his work and, of course, she had long admired him. Finding this flat was beyond her wildest hopes. Three rooms on the top floor and as many on the second meant she would have space enough for a live-in girl. She was elated as she began a siege to get the flat. Single women were considered had credit risks, so she and Ted went to the agent’s together. The flat had been tentatively promised to Professor Trevor Thomas, an art historian who had asked the agents to reserve the maisonette just two days earlier. In return for a pledge of a year’s rent paid in advance, Ted and Sylvia were given the flat and Thomas was given the lower floor. He was not inclined to like the Hughes family after what he considered their trickery in getting the more desirable apartment.

From 123 Fitzroy Road Sylvia walked to Alvarez’s studio for a drink and a talk, happy that she would most likely be moving to London. She had become even more friendly to him since the publication of his anthology,
The
New
Poetry
, with its introduction critical of much contemporary British poetry. He, in turn, enjoyed her as she clinked the ice in her drink, saying that ice was all she missed about America. She read him more poems. He told her — again — that she was the most interesting woman poet since Emily Dickinson.

The next week Sylvia went on a clothes shopping spree in Exeter. She came home with a camel suit and matching sweater, a blue and black tweed skirt and a black sweater, and a green cardigan and red wool skirt. Later, in St. Ives, Cornwall, she bought a pewter bracelet, hair clasp, and earrings, and a blue enameled necklace. She wrote to Mrs. Prouty — whose birthday check she had been spending — that she had had few new clothes since her Smith days. Now her new London life could “begin over from the skin out.”

Sylvia felt new confidence partly because she was looking better. Her new shorter hair style left hangs to frame her face, and her new clothes transformed her. She wrote proudly to her mother that men stared at her in the street. She also had a new correspondent. Father Bart, a young Catholic priest studying literature at Oxford, had begun writing to her about poetry. They exchanged poems, and she asked him questions about his faith — a topic of increasing interest to her — and answered his questions about modern and contemporary poetry. After Sylvia had read some of his poems, her advice to him reflected what she was accomplishing in her October poems: “Speak straight out ... let the world blow in more roughly.”

Sylvia’s exuberance colored some of her November poems. There are moments of joy, although the tenor remains dark. On November 4 she wrote the gnomic “The Couriers,” a poem about signs and portents that seem to be based on Robert Graves’s
White
Goddess
symbology. After the speaker sorts through possible alternatives for her life, she comes to the celebration of the last line (more explicit in draft than in the final version), “Love, love, it is my season.” As Sylvia’s visits to London seemed to prove, it was her season.

She began getting ready physically, psychologically, and professionally for the move to London. In mid-November she assembled a second book of poems. She first called it
The
Rival and
Other
Poems
, then
A
Birthday
Present
, then
The
Rabbit
Catcher
, then
Daddy
, and finally
Ariel
. Her first idea was that the enemy suggested by “the rival” — whether mother, sister, lover, or the self as double — was the dominant theme. Then she focused on the issue of truth, the heart of the enigmatic “A Birthday Present.” With the choice of both “The Rabbit Catcher” and “Daddy” as title poems, she was emphasizing Ted’s control of her life and what she saw as his abandonment. It was only with “Ariel,” God’s lioness, that she chose a rich enough image to free the reader’s imagination: androgynous power, animal made human and spirit, the whimsicality of Shakespeare’s character in
The
Tempest
. Sylvia chose a title that stressed her affinity with a liberating imagination and thereby drew a portrait of the woman as artist. The magic of Plath’s collection occurs because domestic events are transformed by art. Sylvia, too, was an Ariel, using “art to enchant” and earning her freedom through truthfulness. As she had told Ted of her October poems, “They saved me.”

Dedicated to Frieda and Nicholas, the book as Plath arranged it began with “Morning Song” and ended with “Wintering.” (In the published version, Hughes included many more late poems, omitted many of those Plath had wanted to include, and rearranged everything.) Plath’s
Ariel
included poems from early in 1960 through “Death & Co.,” written on November 14, 1962. Starting with the word “love” and ending with “spring,” the book plunged through her most anguished and vituperative poems to end with the emotionally positive bee sequence. She did not order the poems chronologically; for instance, “Tulips,” a 1961 poem, was placed directly after “Lady Lazarus,” a late October poem. With her arrangement, she was telling a story, the story of her life as artist and married woman, and the dissolution of that life. But she let the sequence build and look ahead to spring, just as in
The
Bell
Jar
she implied a healthy rebirth with her ending.

In
Ariel
as Sylvia arranged it, there is also a tone of spirituality, which was to become more obvious in her poems from December, January, and February. Renunciation and transcendence began to replace the angry chastisement and name-calling of the October poems. Plath had been shaken to the core by the events of the summer of 1962, and it took her some time to recover her sense of self. “Letter in November,” written on November 11, shows Plath’s complex emotional state at the time. Walking in the Devon orchard, the speaker is “stupidly happy” because “This is my property. /Two times a day /I pace it.” Although she relies on sleeping pills, although her present life seems far from happy, she still loves and finds pleasure in her surroundings, her “wall of old corpses,” the sense of history the house exudes, and the seventy wonderful fruit trees. An image of a golden apple leads to the turn in the magnificent poem, however, because it is from the speaker’s recollection of the fantastic golden fruit, brimming with promise, that the poet faces reality. She has won the battle, but the skirmish has nearly destroyed her.

Plath’s late fall poems suggest that she was now relying on her own belief system, a system increasingly developed from contacts with other women. Her dependence on Ruth Beuscher, her admiration for Winifred Davies, her rapport with Elizabeth Compton, Ruth Fainlight, Susan O’Neill-Roe, and Clarissa Roche — as well as her continued intimacy with Ann Davidow and Marcia Brown — showed that Plath recognized what comfort and wisdom her women friends could provide. She was trying to broaden that circle: she wrote an admiring letter to British poet Stevie Smith, asking to meet her; and she grew closer to Olive Higgins Prouty, the older woman who had survived a breakdown and the struggle to write despite social pressure.