American Isis (24 page)

It was Ted's turn in mid-March to be brought down with stomach upsets and fevers, as though he were putting himself in Sylvia's place. They argued about his clothes and about Sylvia's need to sew on buttons that went missing from his jackets. Reading the autobiography of a male friend, she objected to his notion that a man could eternally love a woman, even after he left her. She mused, “loving, leaving—a lovely consonance. I don't see it: and my man doesn't.” Or so she thought.

Plath sought inspiration in the work of Paul Klee, Henri Rousseau, Gauguin, and De Chirico, and on 22 March, at the beginning of spring break, she reported to Aurelia that the poem-drought had ended. Work was beginning to shoot out like a geyser. She was also writing Dole Pineapple jingles for a contest. After all, they could use a car. Even just a few cash prizes would help. Commerce and art intermingled easily in the poems she enclosed for her mother's perusal. In “Battle-Scene from the Comic Operatic Fantasy
The Seafarer,”
her whimsical work on Klee, she evokes a “little Odyssey” of battles in bathtubs such as children can create with extraordinary intensity. The child's ability to fashion a fully functioning world separate from what Plath calls “meat-and-potato thoughts” in “Departure of the Ghost (After Paul Klee)” suggests how sorely she wanted to escape from the all-too-material world of her Smith routines.

By 28 March, Plath had produced eight new poems—her best ever, she thought, vowing not to waste “poem-time” on people she did not like. In a self-described arrogant mood, she pictured herself as the “Poetess of America” and Ted as the “Poet of England.” Ted, likewise, was touting himself to Olwyn, writing in late March about selling a poem to the “high-heeled”
Mademoiselle,
and extolling Sylvia's recent productivity, the result of twelve-hour writing jags.

But a return to teaching brought out Sylvia's complaints. Ted's nose picking and scratching were getting on her nerves, even as she realized her petulance hardly made her an appealing companion. Right on schedule, she developed a cold and began her own irritating round of twitching and sneezing, only to be heartened by Ted's comforting closeness and willingness to cook for her when she felt ill. Thank God she had a man who understood the demon in her. At Easter she filled Ted's slippers with a chocolate rabbit and eggs, and he ate them all.

At a poetry reading arranged for Ted at Harvard by his friend Jack Sweeney, Sylvia was surrounded by the people who populated her journal: Mrs. Cantor, Gordon Lameyer, Marcia Brown, Phil McCurdy, Peter Davison, Aurelia, Olive Higgins Prouty—a veritable rollout of an audience she had made for herself and Ted. The group now also included Adrienne Rich, one of Plath's chief rivals, cut down to size as “little, round & stumpy,” but also endowed with “vibrant short black hair” and “great sparking black eyes.” Sylvia had to admit that Rich seemed perfectly genuine, if opinionated. In the end, Sylvia felt distant from the company, as though the whole affair, like the novel she still could not command, was out of her control. She had the end-of-term blues, a syndrome familiar to seasoned academics, but a dreary period for a poet dead tired of reading scholarly studies of the writers she loved. It always seemed to surprise her when a class went well, since her mind was elsewhere, on what she would write when no longer shackled to the academic bench. She scoured her apartment in a fit of spring cleaning. During this period of furious tidying up, she noted in her journal a quarrel with Ted, who objected to her throwing out parts of his ratty old wardrobe. Later, she went out looking for him and spotted him on the street, staring at her with one of his killer looks.

By the spring of 1958, Ted, like Sylvia, found the whole academic enterprise enervating and apparently sometimes took his disaffection out on her. Eileen Ouelette remembered the time the couple attended one of the Lawrence House Wednesday night dinners. Sylvia sat at the head table with Ted, who belittled her throughout the evening, much to Eileen's dismay. Then in her senior year, Eileen disliked this thin, tall Englishman. But Sylvia seemed very happy and very much in love, ignoring his disparaging commentary. Indeed, Sylvia wrote about him in her journal as the kind of man women looked for in romantic novels and when they scanned the pages of the
Ladies Home Journal.
When he was out, and they separated for as little as an hour, Sylvia wrote that she missed his heat and smell.

Like Hughes, Plath rejected any allegiance ancillary to her art. “The Disquieting Muses,” conceived as she was forsaking her teaching career, is an answer to the cautious mother who appears in Sylvia's 11 May 1958 journal entry. A reserved Aurelia seemed not to rejoice when her daughter told her on Mother's Day about the poems accepted for publication. Aurelia worried about the insolvency of poetry, but Sylvia remained stubbornly loyal to the muses that fostered her genius. She addressed her mother directly in the poem's last lines, which renew Sylvia's dedication to her troubling muses: “no frown of mine / Will betray the company I keep.” She seemed to take almost a perverse satisfaction when
The
New Yorker
rejected the poem. In her journal, she comforted herself with the thought of Henry James, writing often without much of an audience, and with the wish to tell him about his posthumous reputation, a reward for all the suffering he had endured. She had no intention, however, of waiting to be discovered. “I am made, crudely, for success. Does failure whet my blade?”

Sylvia described her last day of teaching (22 May) in a letter to Warren, reporting rounds of applause, ranging from tepid to thunderous in direct proportion to her own reactions to each class. Daniel Aaron, who observed her teaching earlier in the semester, described her as “rather schoolmarmy, prim and neat,” but overall, an effective instructor. To Warren, she confessed her disillusionment with her colleagues, a weak, vain, jealous, and petty lot. She called Smith an “airtight” community of gossipy, pot-bellied tenured males, sparing the women any specific epithets. She had adopted Ted's scorn for go-ahead Americans with their ten-year plans—even though she was surely one of them and would find the next months of freedom a trial precisely because she had no long-term, institutionally based program or regular job. She rather prided herself on having no charge accounts, TV, car, or other items purchased on the installment plan. Ted did not need immediate signs of success, she told Warren. But Sylvia always did, despite what she told her brother. For all their scorn of American appetites, Sylvia and Ted seemed very American indeed in their assurance that they would become wealthy and famous.

By late May, the ghost of Sylvia Plath, withdrawing from her all-too-terrestrial time at Smith, saw herself and Ted as practiced, smiling liars—he the vain and navel-gazing male, penis proud. He was going out alone, telling her not to come along. She was sure he was ashamed of something. Another day, as told in her journal, she spotted him near Paradise Pond on the Smith campus, smiling broadly in the company of a grinning undergraduate, whose appearance assaulted Sylvia in “several sharp flashes, like blows.” This was a man seeking adulation, and the girl served it up like soup, then bolted when she saw Sylvia bearing down on her. Ted wasn't even sure of her name. Was it Sheila? Just like him, thought Sylvia, who remembered their first long night together when he called her Shirley.

No biographer has identified “Sheila,” except to say that she was a student Ted had taught on the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus. What, then, was she doing at Smith? No biographer has been able to establish that Hughes was unfaithful to Plath during this period of her marriage, although A. Alvarez, who often talked about women with Hughes, has no doubt that Hughes was constitutionally incapable of fidelity. At any rate, Sylvia now believed she understood why Ted had been arriving home late. She rejected his explanations and got angrier when he snored and snorted in his sleep—another complacent male—while she remained awake. In her journal tirade, she admitted that she had divined this side of him when they first met, but had capitulated to the vulgar heat of their coupling. Why had she tidied up this messy man, now sulking in her disapproval?

Plath left a blank of nearly three weeks in her journal, not resuming until 11 June with the admission that she had taken that much time to deal with her last “nightmarish entry.” They had fought. Sylvia had sprained her thumb and had scratched and bloodied Ted. He hit her hard enough that she saw stars. Hughes would later tell his American editor, Frances McCullough, that he tried slapping Sylvia out of her rages, “but it was no good,” McCullough wrote. “And once she turned into his slap and got a black eye, & went to the doctor & told him Ted beat her regularly.” To Warren, Sylvia described, with typical hyperbole, “rousing battles every so often in which I come out with sprained thumbs and Ted with missing earlobes.”

Ted rejoiced in finding a flat in the Beacon Hill section of Boston (they would not move in until September). The narrow streets and cobbles appealed to his sense of human scale. Better, evidently, to live in a cramped two-room apartment than in the indulgent luxury of the suburbs or the brassiness of New York City, with its “pathetic Bohemian district, called The Village,” he wrote Olwyn in early June. The robust Ted Hughes found America at midcentury too tame, undoubtedly influencing Sylvia's aside to Warren on 11 June that she was working on “overcoming a clever, too brittle and glossy feminine tone.”

By 20 June, Sylvia's journal records her battle with depression. She simply did not have the sense of self-sufficiency that she so admired in Ted, who she compared to an iceberg with a depth and reality that constantly surprised her. She admitted that the thought of having a child was tempting, since caring for a baby would divert a reckoning with her demons—which in better days she called her muses. Summoned to writing, she nevertheless quaked at the wide gap that now opened up between her desire to write and the anxiety that desire provoked. She hoped to relieve her paralysis by revisiting the site of her early childhood, Winthrop by the sea, which she always associated with a life-giving power and creativity.

Then on 25 June, a miracle. After years and years of rejections,
The
New Yorker
had accepted two poems, “Mussel-Hunter at Rock Harbor” and “Nocturne.” Sylvia positively yipped with joy, exclaiming that the good news would carry her through the summer like the “crest of a creative wave.” That same day she wrote to Aurelia announcing her good fortune, which would amount to something like $350. That would pay for three months' rent.

The
New Yorker
poems showed the vulnerable side of Plath, somber and overwhelmed with composing a life outside of the academic boundaries that protected her. “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor” moves relentlessly toward the husk of a fiddler crab that has wandered out of its element to high ground among grasses. This stranded creature stimulates an inquiry: Is this the fate of a recluse, a suicide, an intrepid discoverer of new worlds? These alternatives occur to a poet seeking to renew her inspiration by returning to the seashore, figuring out her options, and trying to become her own woman, her own poet. “Night Walk,” published in
The
New Yorker
and later retitled “Hardcastle Crags” in
Collected Poems,
brought Plath back to a “deep wooded gorge” in the Yorkshire valley of Hebden River. The landscape looms at night like the “antique world” that overwhelms the walker, who turns back toward the “stone-built town” before she is broken down into the quartz grit of the stones and hills. Sylvia was trying to save herself, even while wondering what kind of fate might pulverize her hopes. Could she build her work, like the town, out of the hard material of existence? Her haunting journal passages about a wounded bird she and Ted tried to nurse—and their failure, which ended in Ted gassing the bird to put it out of its misery—read like an unintended forecast of Sylvia's own fate. She marveled at how beautiful, perfect, and composed the asphyxiated bird looked in death.

During this period, “my father's spirit” (as Sylvia put it in her journal) seemed to preside over the poems she was assembling, once again, for a book that would eventually be called
The Colossus,
its eponymous poem dealing with her mythologizing of Otto Plath. If Sylvia had become an actress, she would have been attracted to the role of Hamlet, beseeched by his father, a spirit “doomed to walk the night.” Reckoning with her powerful father's image was gradually becoming a Shakespearean struggle with existence itself, with the claims of the past upon the present. Even as Sylvia tried to liberate herself from her father's call, she was also suffocating. That sense of becoming bereft of and haunted by a father who will not let go, experienced by a child grown strong in the dominion of the father, bedeviled Sylvia Plath as she sat down beside Ted at the Ouija board during the summer of 1958, half-believing she really was in communion with Otto Plath, who appeared as “Prince Otto.”

Sylvia could not sleep. She felt paralyzed, her novel appearing in her mind's eye like a ghost that could not materialize. For the first time, she regarded Ted as an obstacle. He was powerfully didactic about his own ideas, as she began to see when they were in the company of others. They were still remarkably compatible, she confided to her journal, but she had to admit that she enjoyed herself during those times he was away from her. He liked giving orders, making him sound like the peremptory Otto Plath. Ted's stiff neck, resulting from too much exercise, seemed indicative to Sylvia of his rigid personality.

In letters to Aurelia and Olywn, Ted revealed no hint of Sylvia's summertime funk. On the contrary, he pictured her as a poet on the go. Did he not see the suffering of a soul who said marriage to him was like sharing one skin? Was Ted keeping up appearances, or writing in wish fulfillment? Judging by Sylvia's journals, he was so absorbed in his own routines that he did not take in her torment. And she did not let on to her mother, writing instead that she was reading about the sea for poetic inspiration and resuming her study of German because of her attachment to her roots.