Sylvia Plath: A Biography (28 page)

January was a depressing month. It began for Sylvia with a chest X-ray. She was sick again, running intermittent high temperatures. She and the children were trading colds. And at the beginning of their illnesses came the worst snowfall in London in 150 years. Because of consistent difficulty starting the car, Sylvia and the children were at times completely housebound.

On January 3, Clarissa Roche and her two youngest children came to visit. Having recently spent time with Sylvia, Clarissa knew what to look for. The kitchen was immaculate. Menus were written out on the counter — but, she asked Sylvia, had anyone been eating anything? Sylvia ate the porkchops and frozen corn Clarissa cooked for her and admitted that it was all too much trouble, everything was too much trouble. Going outside, going shopping, any outing meant getting everyone dressed, worrying about slipping on the snow and ice. None of it was possible any longer.

Clarissa put Sylvia to bed for the afternoon. It was clear that her friend was sick. She was despondent, she hardly knew the difference between night and day. Later, Paul came with the two older children and Sylvia joined everyone downstairs. She made plans to go with Clarissa and Paul on February 13 to see Paul Scofield in
King
Lear
. She also gave them the galleys of
The
Bell
Jar
, now dedicated to the Comptons, asking them to return the proofs to her with their comments. She promised that she would dedicate her next book to them: they were her good friends, friends that bridged the Atlantic, who had known Smith and her place in it. In retrospect, Smith seemed to Plath the heart of stability. It was clear that England was not the refuge Sylvia had hoped it might become.

Although Paul and Clarissa urged Sylvia to come back to Kent with them, she declined. She thought she could cope with the London winter. But conditions grew much worse. Thaws caused ice to layer over the accumulations of snow. More and more damage occurred, and power cuts were frequent. Stores sold out of candles. Sylvia, sick and worried over the intolerable conditions — and fearful without heat and light — was genuinely afraid for her children’s well-being. “Snow Blitz,” the wonderfully comic essay she wrote about it all for
Punch
, was misleading, another example of her ability to retell her experiences for whatever effect she chose. In truth, the weather had trapped her. As Trevor Thomas commented on Plath’s “Snow Blitz” essay, “In reality she was anything but the brave little woman of her apocalyptic account. She was frightened and pathetic as she appeared at my door all muffled up with scarves and dressing gown.”

Despite her poor health and the weather, however, Sylvia was trying to maintain a regular writing schedule. She had enrolled Frieda in a nursery school for three hours every weekday morning. While she was gone, Nick napped. During these mornings Sylvia wrote the poignant “Ocean 1212-W” for the BBC and her scathing exposé of American public education, “America, America!” She worked on her new novel, now titled
Double
Exposure
, about the gradual corruption of a naive American girl who revered honesty by a powerful and inherently dishonest man. As in her other writing, the theme came directly from her life. She also wrote a story called “A Winter’s Tale,” echoing Shakespeare’s play. Clearly intended for women’s magazines, the story describes the numb emotional state of its protagonist, Kate, a widow. “I had come to savor loneliness,” Kate explains, though she admits she is becoming “too broody” since she began living alone.

I didn’t believe in mending. If the heart was fragile, like a porcelain cup, and a great loss shattered it, all the time and kindness in the world couldn’t hide the ugly cracks. Once the precious liquid of love had seeped away, you were left dry. Dry and empty.

Echoing Sylvia’s words to Elizabeth Compton during the summer, when she lamented the loss of her husband, the images in this passage would appear as well in her February poems.

But January was dominated by illness, not writing. Early in the month she and the children ran what she called “scalding fevers.” Sylvia had blackouts. Frieda developed an allergy to penicillin and had hives. The three of them lived on boiled eggs and chicken broth. By January 10, when Sylvia wrote a thank-you note to the Roches, she was in bed under doctor’s orders. Dr. Horder was looking for a nurse for her and the children. She got out of bed that night to do a live broadcast about Donald Hall’s anthology of American poetry for the BBC, but quickly returned home.

That week of recuperation brought some good news. A cheerful letter from Ruth Fainlight in Morocco announced that she and Alan Sillitoe would be back in England in March and that she would visit Sylvia immediately. “I’m so glad you’re in your flat, back in society, and off the blasted heath.... I’m looking forward very much to being in London and, as you say, going to the theatres and movies together with you, and talking, talking, talking.” Tony Dyson wrote that
Critical
Quarterly
would pay Sylvia from £3 to £5 for any poem she cared to give the journal, and he was looking forward to taking her to dinner over Easter vacation. Charles Osborne of
The
London
Magazine
wrote that he was looking forward to seeing her soon, and in reply she wrote that she was “writing by candlelight with cold fingers. a sinister return to Dickensian conditions.” On January 13, “Winter Trees,” one of her new poems, appeared in
The
Observer
. January 14,
The
Bell
Jar
was officially published and available. But on January 16, the live-in nurse Dr. Horder had found left, and a few days later Sylvia received a letter from Elizabeth Lawrence of Harper & Row rejecting
The
Bell
Jar
. Addressing Sylvia as “Mrs. Ted Hughes,” the editor complained that the breakdown remained only “a private experience.” The novel did not work, she said.

When Nicholas turned a year old the same week, Sylvia spent the day reflecting on the many changes the year had brought. She wrote several beautiful poems about the children, but she could see ahead only endless days of chores, demands, tasks that tested both her physical and psychological strengths.

On January 25, two reviews of
The
Bell
Jar
by the unknown “Victoria Lucas” appeared. Robert Taubman, writing in
New
Statesman
, thought the novel was excellent and that “Lucas” was a female J. D. Salinger.
The
Times
Literary
Supplement
was less excited about the book but still reviewed it favorably. Although the reviews were very good, Sylvia was frustrated: they seemed to have missed the point of the ending, the affirmation of Esther’s rebirth.

She was so upset, in fact, with such a need to talk to somebody that she went downstairs to Professor Thomas, weeping uncontrollably. He asked her in and, alternating between grief and resentment, she gave free rein to her anger against her husband and the other woman, her frustration at being chained to the house and the children when she wanted to be free to write and become famous. Asking for a Sunday paper, she pointed to a poem in
The
Observer
and said it was by her husband. Then turning to a review of
The
Bell
Jar
by Victoria Lucas she disclosed that she, Sylvia Plath, was Victoria Lucas, and said that she did not want to die. Thomas tried to console her. He asked why she had not thought of getting a divorce. She told him she had reluctantly signed the divorce papers the previous week. She thanked Professor Thomas and said he reminded her of her father.

Recovered from the flu, Sylvia again tried to find an au pair and, by the week of January 22, had hired a Belgian girl to live with her and the children. The girl — boy crazy and food fussy — lasted until February 8. While she was there, Sylvia wrote more poems: four on January 28, two on January 29, three on February 1. She wrote one more on February 4 and two on February 5. With another bout of the flu, in addition to her growing depression, Sylvia was again at the edge of physical and emotional exhaustion. Her handwriting in the worksheets from some of these late poems — small, angular, almost scratchy suggests — that she was writing under extremely difficult circumstances, or that she was either terribly fatigued or terribly distraught, or both.

Sylvia’s late winter poems continued using the mother-and-child themes from her November and December poems, such as the Pieta and its religious connotations. In her last poems, however, she concentrated on the living, the real, the day-to-day beauty of children and their innocence. She was impatient with abstractions. “Eternity bores me, /I never wanted it,” she wrote in “Years.” What she did want was reassurance. The Sylvia Plath who looked out at the world during the winter of 1962-63 was relentlessly critical of herself (“People or stars / Regard me sadly, I disappoint them”) and thoroughly convinced of the evil of the world. She feared for her children, especially for Nick since, as a boy, he might be asked to fight for those very abstractions she could no longer bear. In “Mary’s Song” she described him as “the golden child the world will kill and eat.” The only power a child’s mother had was to pray, as in her poem “Brasilia”: “leave /This one ... safe.” Whatever her reasons, Plath was now willing to bow to the power of religious belief, perhaps because she had herself become so powerless.

In late January and early February, Sylvia wrote three joyful poems about childhood. “Child,” “Kindness,” and “Balloons” describe the kind of happy lives Sylvia wished for her children. But these poems contrast sharply with most of her late work. Such poems as “Totem,” “Paralytic,” and “Mystic” draw on several belief systems to express the sense that death is a reason-able alternative to life. “Totem” describes the “same self” unfolding like a suit from a bag: “There is no terminus, only suitcases.” In “Paralytic,” the paralyzed speaker is a “buddha, all /Wants, desire /Falling from me.” And in “Mystic,” the speaker asks directly, “Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?” A later line in the poem responds to that question with another question, “Is there no great love, only tenderness?”

Sylvia’s late poems drum on, describing her consciousness of — even obsession with — death. Her last poems are increasingly gnomic, sharing in the long tradition of religious poetry that does not verbalize ideas some readers might reject. Plath kept each poem carefully arranged with its worksheets, dated, filed separately from the poems intended for the
Ariel
collection. That book was finished. These late poems were for another book, as yet incomplete and untitled.

On February 4, Plath wrote “Contusion,” a poem that is apparently about a bruise, but which contains imagery suggestive of death, including the closing line, “The mirrors are sheeted.” In many cultures, after there has been a death in the house, mirrors are covered so that no other souls can be taken away. What “Contusion” presents, then, is a glimpse of a household in mourning. It was an eerie foreshadowing.

Similar in tone was Plath’s ominous last poem, “Edge”: “We have come so far, it is over.” That poem describes a woman who is now “perfect” because she has died. Called “Nuns in Snow” in an early draft, “Edge” places the woman’s death in the tradition of “Greek necessity” — a reference to the belief that suicide is an honorable way out of dishonor. But it also forces the reader to reflect on the way nuns — or any Catholic, and the oblique reference to Aurelia’s early Catholic rearing is relevant — would react with disapproval to the woman’s suicide. A strange mixture of cynicism and pathos, the poem presents the dead woman as wearing “a smile of accomplishment.” She is finally a woman the critical world might approve, now that her independent and sometimes vengeful character has been tamed. Dead, that head-strong woman is no threat.

As with her October poems, Plath’s last poems are interrelated. Some of the central imagery of “Edge,” and its title, occurred first in a draft of the poem “Mystic.” “Mystic” contains references to the monastic order of St. Teresa (the bare-footed) and the lives of sacrifice nuns were expected to live. Plath weaves imagery of transcendence, or of the visionary, throughout her last poems.

Among Plath’s papers are notes on St. Therese, St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross, and other Christian mystics. Because of her acute empathy and what she regarded as her natural psychic powers, Sylvia felt keenly the possibility of various visionary experiences. Once she found for herself the mysticism about which she wrote (Ted Hughes reported that she had told him she had seen God several times during January and February), perhaps the immediate frustrations of her life seemed pointless.

Perhaps this new attitude explains the cool, objective tone she chose to use in “Edge,” a poem about a woman’s suicide as the end of a life spent striving for success. The poem ends with the moon icily observing the dead woman. The distant, uncaring moon observes; neither life nor death occasions comment from it. The moon is the kind of feminine being a sensual, living woman would not want to mirror. Yet the always wry Plath cannot help but show the comic side of human beings thinking their lives are worth comment. The ambivalent moon, dressed in what she elsewhere called “snazzy blacks,” remains a chilling part of every woman’s world, a world replete with unexpected distance and contradictions.

February began with a kind note from David Machin, Sylvia’s editor for
The
Bell
Jar
at Heinemann, asking her to get in touch with him about having a celebratory lunch. He had tried to call and had found that she still had no telephone. He was pleased with the reviews. (On January 31 Lawrence Lerner had written favorably about the book in
The
Listener
, describing it as a political novel. And on the same day,
TimeTide
gave it a good review.) A few days later, Sylvia heard again from Ruth Fainlight, who said that they would be back at Pembroke Crescent in March and that she and the baby planned to go to Devon with Sylvia in April. Marcia Brown and her husband were also going to visit London, and on February 4 Sylvia wrote to her old friend, “Dearest Marty, ... Everything has blown and bubbled and warped and split.” Life was suspended. Sylvia felt herself “in limbo between the old world and the very uncertain and rather grim new.” She told Marcia that she was lonely, “cut off” from friends and relatives and torn with the sad knowledge that her beautiful and dear children would live without a father.