American Isis (32 page)

Sylvia took to beekeeping, one of her many ways of honoring her father's memory and feeling close to him, and in the first part of October she wrote her famous sequence about an insect world that had fascinated Otto Plath. The poems, like beekeeping, provide an all-encompassing experience—surely a welcome activity for a distraught writer, who had “seen my strangeness evaporate,” as she puts it in “Stings” (6 October), finding comfort in announcing her control of “my honey-machine.” In “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” the noisy swarm becomes Shakespearean, clustering in “unintelligible syllables … like a Roman mob.” Sylvia addresses herself as the “sweet God” that will set them free. More than one friend observed a more cheerful woman, still angry, but also liberated and thriving on animosity toward Ted and the ecstasy of composing poetry. Sylvia said that working on a poem gave her greater pleasure than any other activity. She lived for it and—she eventually realized—she was willing to die for it.

The bee poems also reflect a sense of powerlessness overcome. Sylvia knew this work was a triumph, but she knew she had a long way to go. Writing to her mother on 9 October, she wanted to believe that in a return to Ireland “I may find my soul, and in London next fall, my brain, and maybe in heaven what was my heart.” The last phrase echoes what she had told a friend, that she had given Ted her heart, and there was no getting it back—not in this life anyway. Ireland, the land of her hero, Yeats, she regarded as a fount of inspiration. London was “the city,” where poetry became commerce, where Al Alvarez at
The
Observer,
now an indispensable reader of her work, published it.

Sylvia's letter of 9 October can be taken as a kind of relapse. “Everything is breaking,” including her dinner set and her dilapidated cottage, she told Aurelia. Even her beloved bees stung her after she had upset their sugar feeder. But in that same letter she refused her mother's invitation to come home, to be financially supported and looked after. The daughter demurred. She had made her life in England. If she ran away, she would “never stop.” Surely this refusal was a courageous act, especially since she recognized, “I shall hear of Ted all my life, of his success, his genius … I must make a life all my own as fast as I can … I am a fighter.” This was taking Ted on in his homeland, and given the superiority of the work she was now creating, her statement cannot be discounted as bravado. In retrospect, it is difficult not to see her suicide in terms of this letter, as a turning of the tables: “I shall hear of Sylvia all my life, of her success, of her genius.”

Sylvia signaled the fragile equilibrium of her life to Aurelia, expressing the hope that Warren or his wife or some other family member could come for a visit by the spring. Aurelia herself would not do—as an uncompromising Sylvia vehemently pointed out: “I haven't the strength to see you for some time. The horror of what you saw and what I saw you see last summer is between us and I cannot face you again until I have a new life; it would be too great a strain.”

And so Sylvia regrouped, three days later writing her most famous poem, “Daddy.” A new life meant coming to terms with the old one. The autobiographical references are inescapable: The speaker is thirty, mentioning she was ten when her father died and twenty when she attempted a suicide that would reunite her with him; the father is German, and like the pontificating Otto, stands before a blackboard; a heavy marble statue has one gray toe (one thinks of Otto's amputated leg). And, of course, the poem definitively addresses the longing to recover a father who presided with such authority over his household that he seemed, as the poem has it, “a bag full of God.” Anyone reading Sylvia's vituperative letters about Ted would be hard put not to identify him as one of the poem's “brutes.”

“Daddy” reverberates with twentieth-century history, especially echoes of the Second World War, and reflects the poet's desire to imprint herself on world-shaping events—to insert herself into history like one of those Jews sent off to concentration camps. The child who vowed when her father died that she would never speak to God again includes a father in her list of rejected authority figures. Only by forsaking what she has loved and yearned for can she be her own person. The image of the victim identifying with her persecutor, the “panzer-man,” anticipates the thesis Hannah Arendt's propounded a year later in “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” (Eichmann was put on trial on 11 April 1961, more than a year before “Daddy” was conceived, and he was executed on 31 May 1962, a little more than four months before the poem's composition.) As critic Judith Kroll points out, Plath also anticipates Susan Sontag's analysis of fascist aesthetics—especially the desire to exalt “two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude.”

Plath's identification with victims of the Holocaust has offended some readers. But it is very American of Plath to appropriate the history of others and welcome that history into her heart. Rather than reducing history to the confines of her personal agon, she regards her own experience as a chapter in a story larger than herself: “Every woman adores a fascist.” This is the great gift of “Daddy”: its amalgamation of the provincial and the international, the personal with the mythology of modern life. References to the “rack and screw” expand the poem's reach to the Middle Ages, and with an image of a father sucking the blood out of his child, to the vampire myth. A reader of Plath's generation might well conjure up Bela Lugosi, the fatherly middle-aged man engulfing his victims in his black cape. Photographs of the hulking, wolfish Ted Hughes, invariably dressed in black, also come to mind.

Plath's ironic, bitter poem draws on—even as it debunks—popular songs such as Cole Porter's “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” (1938), sung by Marilyn Monroe in
Let's Make Love
(1960). In the film, “Daddy” is slang for a woman's older lover, who treats her so well. In the poem, child and adult merge in the disturbing closing line: “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.” Through with Daddy? Through with the idea of an idealized daddy? Or through in the more complete sense of just giving up? Has Plath triumphed, or just destroyed what gave her life meaning? The poem is perfectly pitched to pivot either way.

But why did the poem make Sylvia and Clarissa Roche laugh? Was laughter a way to master the demons let loose in the poem, a therapeutic whistling past the graveyard? Certainly Sylvia's mood lifted, for on the very day she composed “Daddy,” she wrote apologetically to her mother, “Do tear up my last one. It was written at what was probably my all-time low, and I have had an incredible change of spirit; I am joyous, happier than I have been for ages.…” Sylvia bustled with plans to remodel the cottage, Ted seemed amenable to a divorce, and she was writing every morning at five, a poem per day completed before breakfast. And these were “book poems. Terrific stuff.…” A novel was also in the works.

This revival turned her toward London: “I miss
brains,
hate this cow life, am dying to surround myself with intelligent, good people. I'll have a salon in London … I am a famous poetess here—mentioned this week in
The Listener
as one of the half-dozen women who will last—including Marianne Moore and the Brontës!” Such letters could only have been written to a mother—not just to impress Aurelia, but also to perform for the one person who could utterly identify with this victory. Aurelia had given up her own literary ambitions to serve her husband and would clearly empathize with a woman rebuilding her life after the loss of a spouse.

To Warren and his wife, Maggie, Sylvia wrote on the same day, “The release in my energy is enormous.” She still believed in Ted's genius, and it hurt no less to be “ditched,” but she was planning a London season full of freelance work, including broadcasting and reviewing. She still had to regain her health, she admitted, mentioning the black shadows under her eyes and a smoker's hacking cough. She hoped she might join them on a trip. Their letters meant so much to her, she assured them, and as she had done with Aurelia, she spoke delightedly about her children, adding that she wanted Warren and Maggie to consider themselves Frieda and Nick's godparents. In all, it sounded very much like Sylvia was reconstituting both her personal and professional worlds.

But at the same time, Sylvia emphasized to Warren and Maggie that she could not face her mother yet. Written four days later, lines in “Medusa” read like a companion piece to “Daddy”—this time an exorcism of the mother, the epithet “God-ball” recalling the “bag full of God.” Aurelia appears as an ancient “barnacled umbilicus” and “Atlantic cable.” Images from horror films again haunted Sylvia's imagination: “Off, off, eely tentacle!” Instead of shouting “I'm through,” the poem ends on a flat, defiant note that seems less than convincing: “There is nothing between us.” Or is the last line less emphatic because it can also mean there is no longer anything separating mother and daughter, that the daughter has thrown off her mother's hold on her only to reestablish a bond on the daughter's terms? The aim of both poems seems clear: to re-invent Sylvia Plath the poet, an act that entailed putting her parents in their places. In reality, Sylvia could not reject her mother, but in poetry her creative survival depended on the conceit that she had done just that.

Even though Sylvia's flu appears to have returned on the morning of 16 October, with her fever reaching 101 degrees, she remained ecstatic, writing her mother, “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.” She anticipated finishing her novel in less than two months and was already inspired to write another.
The Bell Jar
had been accepted for British publication, and she looked forward to her “leap to London.” But she fretted over household arrangements and an unsatisfactory nanny, and she still hoped that her Aunt Dot or Warren's wife, Maggie, could come to help with the children. Sylvia needed a respite, especially since she also had the ordeal of the divorce to confront. Although full of plans, she admitted she was struggling against “hard odds and alone.”

In another letter to her mother written the same day, Sylvia pressed her case for Maggie, suggesting her sister-in-law join her for a six-week convalescence in Ireland. It was asking a lot, Sylvia conceded, for Warren's new wife to embark so soon on a trip abroad. Almost delirious from her 4:00 to 8:00 a.m. writing regimen, Sylvia pleaded, “I need someone from
home.”
Aurelia, for her part, was holding out for her daughter's return, although she sent money to procure household help.

Sylvia's grimmer mood emerged the next morning in “The Jailor,” in which a nameless man poisons the feverish speaker, who declares she has eaten “Lies and smiles.” Sylvia had condemned Ted many times for his lies, although the poem seems more about betrayal per se than about her disloyal husband. “Lesbos,” written the next day, was even more explicit about her misery, mentioning a “stink of fat and baby crap … The smog of cooking.…” Yet neither of these highly allusive poems seems fully developed, as if in deciding not to be so explicitly autobiographical she had truncated her art.

Plath's dilemma was not much different from that of her contemporary, Marilyn Monroe. Each of Monroe's screen performances, beginning with
Bus Stop
(1956) and concluding with
The Misfits
(1961), was built on scripts that blatantly exploited many of her own characteristics and experiences. In those films, Monroe gave her greatest performances, but like Plath, she did so at great cost to her psyche. To make yourself your own material is both exhilarating and exhausting. The exposure can be gratifying but also denuding.

Writing on 18 October, Sylvia expressed shock at what she had sent her mother two days earlier. It had been the fever speaking. After a visit to the doctor, effective medication, and a good night's sleep, she was feeling better and taking back her plea for help. She felt strong enough to write Paul and Clarissa Roche, announcing that Ted had left her and that she would divorce him. He had confessed to a want of courage in not telling her earlier that he had never really wanted children. She was disgusted because it was his idea to move to the country, and now she was stranded, hoping they would have an opportunity to visit her.

Sylvia was gradually building up a persona, one she loosed in her next hectoring letter to her mother (21 October 1962): “Don't talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen—physical or psychological—wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the
worst,
just what it is.” For Plath, the Holocaust was both literal and metaphorical—she did not want the two separated in her poems. She wanted to feel like a Jew and like the cigarette-tortured “negress with pink paws” in “The Jailor.” Sylvia was a cynosure for suffering, “going through hell,” and her agony would mean far more to people than
Ladies' Home Journal
“blither” about happy marriages.

Emerging from another cycle of sickness two days later, Sylvia wrote yet another apology to Aurelia, asking forgiveness for her grumpy, fever-induced letters. She now could count on Susan O'Neill-Roe, “dear to the children” and a love to Sylvia. The next day, Sylvia would dedicate “Cut” to Susan. Sylvia wrote in gushing tones about wanting to “study, learn history, politics, languages, travel. I want to be the most loving and fascinating mother in the world,” she declared to Aurelia. To Clarissa Roche, on 25 October, Sylvia wrote an equally buoyant letter announcing, “things were calming down,” and that she was happily planning her future now that Ted with his scornful comments about her novel writing was no longer in the way.