American Isis (17 page)

Christ is “filled still with the sickness of unspeakable disillusion.” But of course he is not Christ—not the Christian Christ, for Lawrence never uses his name, preferring instead to call him throughout “the man who died,” which is to say a mortal who chose death, as Sylvia did, because of a sense of disillusionment, a void that nothing in life can supplant. The man rises without desire, experiencing the very same lack of desire that beset Sylvia in the first days of her recovery. So profound is this “desireless resoluteness,” the man prefers it to any form of consciousness.

It may seem odd to say that Plath was elated to read this disturbing story, but apparently it addressed her own psychological problems in ontological terms. The man is weary of existence, not merely of what he has been able to make of it. What brings him back to life is first the light, and then his awareness of the sun, “falling into the hollows of his neck, and his thin, colourless arms utterly inert.” Like the protagonist in “Tongues of Stone,” he experiences no wish to return to the world, and yet the world keeps breaking in on him.

Repeated references to the sun that bathes the man in light call to mind the many references in Plath's writing to sunbathing, which brought out in her a sheer joy in existence. The man lies in the sun, and it makes him sway as he hears a bird cry out the “triumph of life.” Life seems as resolute as was his wish to die. Lawrence connects this gradual revival in the man to the cry of a cock, which in turn is compared to the “short, sharp wave of life,” the sea of feeling that elated Sylvia even as a child. The cock, like the man, is caught in the “cord of circumstance” (it has been hobbled by a rope), but it continues to crow and rock “in the tide of the swaying ocean of life.”

The man attributes his slowly emerging sense of himself to Judas and the high priests who “saved me from my own salvation.” In effect, Christ repudiates any sense of divinity he once claimed, now regarding himself as merely a man. Sylvia's own near death, as she would say after she met Ted Hughes, had been necessary in order to transform her into the woman who attracted him. Her painful experience had prepared her to go on. She had rejected the supposed salvation of her summer in New York, just as the man who died rejects “my own excessive salvation.”

Yet it is precisely his desire to free himself from this “excessive need for salvation” that attracts the wandering man to the woman who tends the temple of Isis. Indeed, she looks upon him as the lost Osiris who can fecundate the goddess's womb. Plath identified with Isis in her attraction to the mangod, the Isis whom Lawrence describes as searching and grieving for her beloved in “tormented ecstasy.” The Plath of the journals realizes at this point that she has discovered in Lawrence's text the very dynamic of life she has painstakingly reassembled out of the fragments of a woman who died. Lawrence's description of Isis finding her beloved bit by bit, “heart and head and limbs and body,” is the equivalent of Plath's experience on all those dates and drives with Myron and Richard, Dick and Gordon—each assignation undertaken in search of another piece of the man who would make her whole. “For she was Isis of the subtle lotus, the womb which waits submerged and in bud, waits for the touch of that other inward sun that streams its rays from the loins of the male Osiris,” Lawrence wrote. “‘The goddess is great,'” the man says to the lady who tends Isis's shrine. Sylvia was awaiting the man who would, in so many words, say the same to her. In Lawrence's version of rebirth, the man may see himself as an Osiris-candidate, so to speak, but what he experiences is the “greater day of the human consciousness.” And it is that sense of speaking to and for the world that Plath treasured in the story Lawrence had to tell. Perhaps the most thrilling moment for Plath was that when the man felt “his own sun dawned, and sent its fire running along his limbs, so that his face shone unconsciously.”

No wonder Krook's class seemed to galvanize Sylvia Plath. To her mother on 9 March, Sylvia wrote one of those patented sunshiny letters. She describes how the light came flooding through her windows into a room she especially treasured for its window seat, where she often perched writing poetry. Full of affection and enclosing two poems, including “Pursuit,” Sylvia effervesced. She noted the Blakean, hypnotic quality of “Pursuit,” emphasizing the “terrible beauty of death,” the result of having lived fully and intensely. Although Hughes was the primary inspiration for “Pursuit,” biographers have overlooked Plath's disclosure that she associated the fires of pain in that poem with Sassoon's furious soul, which had also ravished her. She did not mention Hughes in this letter to Aurelia, but perhaps she thought of him when she yearned for a man who could “overcome” Richard's image. Sounding very much like Marilyn Monroe, who would soon wed Arthur Miller, Plath called herself a princess awaiting her white knight, employing the same imagery Monroe used in sessions with her psychiatrist.

Writing to Elinor Friedman Klein, on that same day Sylvia compared Rhett Butler's
Gone with the Wind
rejection of Scarlett O'Hara (“Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!”) to Sassoon's desire to make his fortune and to give Plath her freedom—just when she had readied herself to surrender to him! The tone of this letter—“You have got to listen to this, because I am full of it”—is reminiscent of a late-night dorm room confession, as Plath spills out her confession of how Sassoon has set her raving, writing a letter that rivals Scarlett's plea that Rhett not abandon her. Sassoon was even talking about enlisting in the army, just as Rhett had forsaken Scarlett to join the retreating Confederates. Sylvia explained to her dear Elly that she had asked Sassoon if they could have a spring together in France and Italy before he got himself killed. She even imagined, as she was imploring him to see her, that like Rhett, Sassoon had a mistress on the side. In return, she received a postcard from her “noble” lover saying he would someday reappear, “crashing out of the ether.”

At this point, Sassoon was not so much a real man as an obsession, an image that could be replaced only by “some big, brilliant combination of all the men I have ever met…” Ted Hughes is not mentioned in this letter; apparently he still seemed unreal so long as her relationship with Sassoon remained unresolved. Richard still loved Sylvia, as he would later make clear, but he refused to act on the urgency of her need for him. The more she pressed, the more he resisted. Before 9 March, the Sylvia Plath of the journal raved about Richard's retreat, but the Sylvia Plath of the letter to Elly shows some of that self-mocking talent that critic Caroline King Barnard Hall has traced in the poetry, early and late (including “Circus in Three Rings”), that sends up Plath's imagination of disaster.

The letters to Elly and Aurelia signaled that Plath was pulling out of her obsessive-depressive state. She was looking forward to a visit from Gordon Lameyer. Her Fulbright, renewed for another year, would give her enough money to host Aurelia for a visit, and in Dorothea Krook she had at last found a brilliant, attractive supervisor whom she could match her wits against. Gary Haupt, a Fulbright student from Yale, was a huge source of comfort, “sweet, if pedantic.” He had stood by her through the ordeal of an operation to remove a very painful cinder from her eye.

For once, Sylvia's journal and her letters seem to be working in tandem as, having minimized her academic commitments, she confidently plotted her life as a writer in Europe. She wanted to write a novel that would include a story of love, suicide, and recovery, with perhaps a collegiate setting and incorporating her letters to Sassoon. Singing as she rode her bike, in a display of renewed appetite she picked up four sandwiches.

At first, Sylvia did not realize that Ted Hughes was on her trail. Then, while biking on 10 March, she learned from a Cambridge friend that the previous night Hughes had tried to look her up, throwing stones at the wrong window. Hughes, a recent Cambridge graduate, visited often. But he had a day job in London as, in his words, a “shit-shoveller” for the J. Arthur Rank film studio. He read scripts all day to determine which ones might be adapted for the screen. At the news of his reappearance, a flustered Sylvia mumbled to her friend that Hughes should “drop by, or something,” and rode off. Her nearly speechless excitement is evident in a journal entry that sputters: “He. O he.” She repeated, “please let him come” like a “black marauder.” Let him play Ulysses to her Penelope. She even quotes lines from “Pursuit” as she awaits being taken. She was dressing in violent, fierce colors and working herself up into a state that she compared to writing “Mad Girl's Love Song” and “Circus in Three Rings.” Those poems reflect just how intense her apocalyptic inner world could be, conjuring images of catastrophe—of the worst happening, as she described her first sight of Hughes. She reveled in straining her emotions to the utmost, even as she realized that by imagining disaster she might also find a way to save herself. Unless brought to the brink, she would never know just how great she could become. The previous night she dreamed of herself as “Isis bereaved, Isis in search.” She finds the suave “dark one” grinning behind a newspaper. The dark man turns out to be Richard Sassoon. Then another dark man, thinking she is a whore, accosts her in the street as she runs after Richard. Waking from her dream, Plath waited again for his tread on the stairs, all the while dreading what would become of her in Paris, since she was still determined to have one more showdown with Sassoon. She even imagined that without his protection she would be raped.

The next day Plath learned that Hughes and two other chaps had again thrown clods against the wrong window. She seemed fated never to meet him, and this time imagined herself as Blanche Dubois in
A Streetcar Name Desire,
becoming mired in the mud with drunken soldiers seeking her company. She thought of herself as a woman of the night whom Hughes and his cronies would not confront in daylight. She ached, though, to make him real, since he existed now simply as a figure of her imagination, a panther on the “forest fringes of hearsay.”

On 18 March, Sylvia wrote her mother, “I'd be happiest writing, I think, with a vital husband.” A good deal of her angst over Sassoon surely had to do with her rush to implement the next phase of her literary career: Husband, home, family, write. She would be all set, but not so Sassoon. That same day, Hughes wrote to his close friend, Lucas Myers, asking Myers to arrange for Sylvia to meet him in London.

On 21 March, as Sylvia was about to embark on her Easter vacation, she wrote a cheerful letter to Marcia Brown, omitting any reference to the drama with Sassoon and her first encounter with Hughes, except to say that she was on her way to London to meet “two erratic” poets. Lucas Myers, cousin of poet Allen Tate, she mentioned by name, but Hughes remained anonymous in this ebullient depiction of life at Cambridge, where world politics got debated and America now seemed so provincial that Sylvia dreaded her return, dreaming instead of spending a year writing in southern Europe. And yet, just a day earlier she had been dreaming of a home in the Connecticut Valley and summers on Cape Cod. This nostalgia was what her mother wanted to hear, but it was also what Sylvia wanted to write. America/Sassoon, Europe/Hughes—Sylvia seemed to be sidling in two very different directions.

On 23 March, on her way to France, Sylvia Plath ran up the stairs to Ted Hughes's grimy flat at 18 Rugby Street. Three days later in her Paris hotel, she noted their “sleepless holocaust night” in her journal. Even as she was preparing to beard Sassoon, she mentioned the marks Hughes had left on her “battered” face, including a purple bruise, and her raw and wounded neck. For his part, Hughes wrote her a short note, saying the memory of her smooth body went through him like brandy. He would be in London until 14 April, he informed her, and would see her there or come to her in Cambridge after her holiday in France.

But Sassoon, not Hughes, had Plath's full attention. At his apartment, prepared to deliver her plea, she learned from the concierge that Sassoon was gone and would not return until after Easter. Her journal describes a scene worthy of a weepie. Outside, an old beggar woman is singing in a “mournful monotone,” while inside the radio blares, “Smile though your heart is breaking.” Through her tears, Sylvia writes and writes a long disorganized missive, as she gazes at her unopened letters to Sassoon, “lying there blue and unread.” The color of aerograms and her mood coalesce. In a reaction shot, a black poodle pats the disconsolate lover with a paw. A stunned Sylvia notes, “Never before had a man gone off to leave me to cry after.” Gamely, she patted the poodle and set off wandering the Paris streets.

There is no indication that Plath was writing parody or sending herself up. Her self-dramatizing was real enough to her, but at the same time it bears all the marks of the popular romantic melodrama of her time, the kinds of films that starred Merle Oberon and Susan Hayworth in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Sassoon may well have debouched from the melodrama of her passion to avoid just this kind of scene.

Sylvia compounded her misery by imagining that Ted was regaling his Cambridge cronies with tales of his Plath conquest. One of his friends, Michael Boddy, had come upon her and Ted in the Rugby Street flat. Now the word would be out that she was Hughes's mistress, she imagined. Ted himself became an object of suspicion: In the height of their lovemaking he had called her Shirley, making Sylvia feel like one of his interchangeable lovers.

Plath's journal makes it seem as though Boddy had caught the couple in the act of love. But Boddy told Hughes's biographer that the two were simply sitting in chairs, leaning forward, whispering, and “virtually oblivious of me.” After walking Plath to her hotel, Hughes returned to awaken Boddy, who recalled that his friend was deeply agitated in a way that Boddy had never witnessed before. Sylvia Plath, in fact, had made a profound impression upon Ted Hughes. Sylvia, however, was still very much immersed in her fantasy world. She took long walks through Paris streets and was accosted by men in much the way she imagined in her dreams, although she was not raped and decided to forego the risk of a chance sexual encounter. She might be mourning her loss of Sassoon, but she ate heartily and saw plenty of friends, including one from Cambridge, who seemed to grow more attractive hour-by-hour, until she had him in bed, only to be disappointed when he decided he better not—a result, she opined, of his too proper breeding and desire to be associated only with distinguished families.