American Isis (31 page)

Sylvia puzzled over what to tell people. A mid-August letter to her mother did not even mention the troubles with Ted. But on 27 August, she wrote in the hope that Aurelia would not be too shocked that Sylvia wanted a legal separation agreement. She did not believe in divorce, but she could not abide the degrading and agonizing days that had destroyed her well-being. Her language is melodramatic, evoking the doomed romances and marriages that her mentor, Olive Higgins Prouty, memorably portrayed in
Stella Dallas
and
Now, Voyager.
Made into films starring, respectively, Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis, Prouty's works belonged to Plath's store of tearjerker tales like
Jezebel
(another Bette Davis vehicle) that she could call up without irony.

Evidently Ted could not abide this side of Sylvia, for she reported to Mrs. Prouty at the end of September, “He says all the kindness and sweetness I loved & married him for was mere sentimentality.” To Aurelia, Sylvia added, “He now thinks all feeling is sentimental & womanish.” That Plath scorned Prouty's sentimental novels is beside the point; they infected the poet's temperament the same way a tune you do not like keeps playing in your head. Culture is fixed in the human psyche like the grooves of a long-playing record.

Ted's mood can be gauged from the letter he sent to Olwyn in the late summer of 1962. The “prolonged distractions” of the previous nine months had depleted his bank account and diminished his productivity. So he was grateful when his sister offered her help. “Things are quite irrevocable,” he added. He had deferred too long to “other peoples' wishes.” But now he seemed to feel a new burst of energy, with several promising projects in the works. The problem, his letter indicates, had been the “awful intimate interference that marriage is.” The language is startling, especially after reading so many earlier Hughes letters conveying just the opposite sentiment. But with Olwyn he could express himself without the need for excuses or rationalization. He was appalled at how he had circumscribed his existence.

During the second week of September, Sylvia left the children with a nanny to join Ted on an excursion to Ireland. Was the journey an effort to settle the terms of a separation or divorce? Ted wasn't sure, he told Olwyn. The trip ended abruptly when he disappeared. Afterward he wrote to Olwyn, claiming, in contradictory fashion, that Sylvia had reverted to the immature state he had observed when he first met her, and that she reminded him of Aurelia, whom he said he detested. It wouldn't hurt for Sylvia to grow up, he concluded. An unsympathetic Murphy did not know what to make of Sylvia, who wrote him upon her return home that his sudden coolness perplexed her, since he had shown her some cottages she might wish to rent. She assured him her interest was only in finding a place to write and to care for her children, accompanied by a nanny. The idea that she might be invading Murphy's literary territory in order to write about it was preposterous, she assured him. “Please have the kindness, the largeness, to say you will not wish me ill nor keep me from what I clearly and calmly see as the one fate open. I would like to think your understanding could vault the barrier it was stuck at when I left,” she concluded. There is no record that he replied.

After Sylvia returned to Court Green, her midwife, Winifred Davies, wrote to Aurelia. Davies had placed her hopes on the Irish holiday, which to her dismay went awry. Sylvia had returned upset that Ted had not come home, and she resolved to seek a separation. Sylvia said her decision had lifted her spirits. But Winifred thought Sylvia had a “hard hill to pull.” Talking did seem to ease Sylvia and bring some clarity, Winifred assured Aurelia. Winifred found it hard to “judge fairly,” since she had heard only Sylvia's side, but it seemed to Winifred that Ted had “never grown up,” and that “paying bills, doing income tax, looking after his wife and children” were beyond him. So Sylvia had to be the practical one in their partnership. Ted desired the freedom to go to parties, to travel. He might tire of this in time, but then it would be “too late,” in Winifred's estimation. “It seems to me that success has gone to his head, and he is not big enough to take it.” Winifred summed up her sad conclusion: “I feel awfully sorry for them all, but I do not think Sylvia can go on living on a rack, and it will really be better for the children to have one happy parent rather then two arguing ones…” Ted's mother also wrote Aurelia, expressing her sorrow over the ruptured marriage, but noting that Sylvia had Court Green, a car, and the ability to “write for a living.” Aurelia took the letter to mean the break between Sylvia and Ted could not be repaired.

On 17 September, responding to Sylvia's plea for help, Dr. Beuscher was uncertain how to proceed. So much of their therapy had centered on Aurelia and on Beuscher as an alternative source of authority. Was Sylvia consulting her as a “woman (mother) (witch) (earth goddess), or as a mere psychiatrist?” In truth, Beuscher could no longer be objective. Too much of Sylvia's plight as a daughter and as a woman paralleled Beuscher's own experience. The psychiatrist admitted she was furious with Ted, who was acting like a “little child.” His talk of starting over every few years was not the mark of a mature man. He was like a child in a toy store who wants everything, and then throws a tantrum when his wishes are thwarted. Making choices, even if that limited your scope in some ways, is what every adult had to do. Isn't this what Sylvia had done? Beuscher was afraid that Sylvia might pin her well-being on this one man, rather than on her own “oneness.” The poet had not exhausted her possibilities by picking one man “for life.” All was not lost if Sylvia lost Ted. Sylvia had to remember that her husband was suffering an identity crisis. She should not, Dr. Beuscher admonished her, go down in a “whirlpool of HIS making.” This meant resisting the urge to suffer in his company: “Do your crying alone.” Sylvia was in danger of repeating Aurelia's role: playing martyr to a “brutal male.” If Ted really wanted a “succession of two-dimensional bitchy fuckings,” then Sylvia should get a lawyer to hit him in his pocketbook for child support, reminding him of his responsibilities. Play the lady, the psychiatrist urged her, and resist the temptation to go to bed with him. In closing, Beuscher dismissed Sylvia's offer to pay for therapy: “If I ‘cure' no one else in my whole career, you are enough. I love you.”

Beuscher's follow-up letter on 24 September advised a divorce, since Sylvia evidently told her that she was not “moping” and had grown to detest Ted. Collect the evidence and get a divorce now, while he remained reckless, the psychiatrist urged her. It would be harder later, especially if in a fit of remorse he proposed a reconciliation. If Sylvia could find happiness, whether or not she found another man, her children would be happy. Just stay out of Ted's bed, Beuscher reiterated, apparently concerned that Sylvia would backtrack. Read Erich Fromm's
The Art of Loving,
the psychiatrist advised. She wanted to hear from Sylvia that she had done so. No love could really survive, Fromm argued, without the fundamental self-confidence that Beuscher wanted to see in Plath.

Right up to the end of September, Sylvia described herself as trying to hold on to the last vestiges of what she had with her husband. Yet during this period she also saw a lawyer and seemed about to make peace with the idea of life without Ted—reclaiming her own freedom is what she called it. On 24 September, she wrote her mother that she realized Ted “wasn't coming back.” This realization seemed to liberate her: “My own life, my wholeness, has been seeping back.” Seeping? She had used this word in her poppy poem to describe the slow dulling of her emotions. Was she escaping, or just entering the trauma of her breakup with Ted? “For a Fatherless Son,” written two days later, is full of foreboding: “You will be aware of an absence, presently.” Her happiness was temporary, her son's smiles appeared as “found money.” Two days later, in another note to Aurelia, Sylvia concluded that she had to exert control over what little life she had left. She did not tell her mother about her crying jags and weight loss. She succumbed to the flu. She started smoking.

Sylvia steadied herself with routines: breakfast with Frieda and the religious taking of tea at 4:00 p.m. in the nursery; invitations extended to visitors; outings with the children; and riding lessons twice a week. Having a nanny also helped. “I don't break down with someone else around,” Sylvia assured her mother. Clarissa Roche, on a four-day visit, listened to Sylvia vilify Ted: The “strong, passionate Heathcliff had turned round and now appeared to her as a massive, crude, oafish peasant, who could not protect her from herself nor from the consequences of having grasped at womanhood.”

The nights were so awful that Sylvia resorted to sleeping pills. They took her somewhere deep, she said, and waking up with plenty of coffee stimulated her to write both prose and poetry in the early morning hours. No matter how much Sylvia blamed Ted, the idea of divorce revolted her. She believed in the sanctity of marriage. She suspected Ted had a bachelor pad in London. Not Sylvia—no man on the side. She treasured the proprieties: “Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus / Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules,” she wrote obsessively in “A Birthday Present” (30 September 1962). Without that sense of order, life did not matter: “After all I am alive only by accident,” she admitted. “I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.”

Plath was referring, of course, to the attempt to kill herself after her traumatic stint at
Mademoiselle.
Suicide was always a genuine option. She had said as much to Anne Sexton during some of her happiest days with Ted Hughes. The two women poets discussed their suicide attempts with aplomb. They wanted to take life on their own terms, and though suicide can be regarded as the action of someone out of control, the suicide might regard the act in quite a different light. In “Lady Lazarus,” Plath boasted that to her dying was an art: “I do it exceptionally well.”

Plath's poems and extant journals show that death itself held no horror for her. They also reveal that as important as writing was to her, it could not, ultimately, salve her. She confessed ruefully: “A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. Nothing is real except the present, and already I feel the weight of centuries smothering me.” Her last poems are burdened with this sense of history and mortality. The passage of time imposed an unremitting pressure, and losing her father when she was so young made her consciousness of death inescapable. This mindfulness of mortality is probably why she said she lived every moment with intensity.

When she felt alone, nothing seemed real, and the present appeared an empty shell. Might as well commit suicide, she confided to her journal: “The loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering.” She did not believe in life after death—not in the literal sense. She thought instead of recently deceased writers such as Edna St. Vincent Millay and George Bernard Shaw, who “left something—and other people will feel part of what they felt.” Approaching her own denouement, she was confident of her own pitch to posterity. Life after death meant “living on paper and flesh living in offspring.” Or so she thought, pulling back with a “Maybe. I don't know,” in a journal entry written in her nineteenth year.

By the autumn of 1962, Sylvia Plath was probing her connection to eternity. How would it come for her? Like an annunciation? She pondered the question in “A Birthday Present.” “My god, what a laugh” she heard the voice of immortality mocking her. This Pauline poem, with its references to veils, to what shrouds the human perception of a world elsewhere, built upon the superstructure of her fascination with what comes after death—not so much an end in itself as a transit to another realm. Death, in fact, is a seductive presence in this poem: “Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.” Has the coming of death ever been more grandly welcomed than in the final three stanzas of this poem, which evoke the “deep gravity of it,” as pristine as the “cry of a baby,” as the universe slides from her side. The scene is reminiscent of Brutus falling on his sword, rendered glorious in the Greco-Roman accents of “Edge,” perhaps Plath's last poem, resulting from her recent reading of Greek drama.

In October, Sylvia experienced a burst of inspiration resulting in two dozen of her most powerful poems. Critics have been awed by their intensity and craft, but they have not done justice to their mordant humor. Even a poem as serious and daring as “Daddy” provoked raucous laughter when Sylvia read it to Clarissa Roche. To be sure, Sylvia remained angry and sometimes confused about her broken marriage and about what to do next. She could seem hysterical, reporting that Ted had told her about his and Assia's speculation that Sylvia would commit suicide. Could Ted Hughes be quite that cruel? William Styron has noted in
Darkness Visible
that clinical depression often brings on overwhelming tendencies to create melodramatic scenes that express feelings, not facts. And the onset of depression is often not detectable by the afflicted one or by others because the depressed individual continues to function—at least on a basic level. Sylvia was doing better than that. Even at her worst, she continued to write.

Depression is a mysterious disease, Styron emphasizes, and so its origins and generalizations about it are both problematical. Individuals respond to the disease … well, individually. The literature on the subject, he concludes, contains no comprehensive explanation of the disorder. Why one person survives depression and another does not is a mystery, although Plath's poetry reveals an attitude toward death that made suicide, in certain conditions, desirable—even just.

Death and dead bodies populate her poems. In “The Detective,” written on 1 October, she spoofs the detective story's presentation of clues and explanations that wrap up a mystery. The confident detective tells Watson that they “walk on air” with only the moon, “embalmed in phosphorus” and a “crow in a tree. Make notes.” Existence is an enigma; the evidence is evanescent. Observation is all. Clearly Plath's droll sense of fun—fun of a very high order—had not deserted her. And this is surely what is so thrilling about her life and work: its witty persistence, no matter the impediments.