American Isis (33 page)

Sylvia Plath not only aggrandized her life, she also made her body into a historic and mythic battleground, the site of an epic contestation. Perhaps better than any poem she wrote, “Cut” exemplifies her grandiosity of purpose, the thrill of cutting her “thumb instead of an onion.” These lines bespeak a persona intent on watching itself with excited yet clinical detachment. The shocking accident becomes a vignette of a pilgrim scalped by an Indian, and then—like a CinemaScope feature—the landscape broadens outward to encompass the image of a million soldiers, “Redcoats,” an allusion, apparently, to the blood flowing from the thumb Plath almost cut off. This virtual severing of a digit makes her wonder whose side these Redcoats are on, as if some treachery is involved in what she has done to herself. Thus she allegorizes her digit as a homunculus, a saboteur, a kamikaze man (a curious locution reminiscent of “panzer-man” in “Daddy”). Even more outlandish is the gauze bandage reddened with blood, which looks like a Ku Klux Klan hood over the thumb. The poem ends in a salute to the “trepanned veteran, / Dirty girl, / Thumb stump,” the poet's yoking of the literal to the metaphorical, the personal to the political, and the moment to history. Allusions to mutilation, war, subversion, and persecution echo what she said in more prosy terms about wanting to study history, politics, language, travel. She had to bring it all to bear on the stuff of her life, the material of her writing, and present it on a world stage. It is not difficult to imagine Plath, with electrodes on her head and undergoing electroconvulsive therapy, identifying with the “trepanned veteran”—a “head case” with a hole in her skull.

Such poems emboldened Sylvia. She looked forward to cutting a figure on her way to the city. As she wrote her mother the day before writing “Cut,” she planned to use the money Aurelia had sent to buy a Chagford dress (a reference to a clothing shop in Devon, which today still advertises “snazzy” dresses). She was going to put her hems up and get a fashionable short haircut. “Just wait till I hit London,” she announced. Sylvia Plath had to present a certain “look.” She was as acutely conscious of appearance as a public figure, as Marilyn Monroe, and like the actress, she craved public display of her prowess after the failure of her marriage. In a sense she was a mad girl who could not help herself, but she had the confidence to give in to her torment. As a result, she was now giving the performance of her life, going from strength to strength as she built up to a crescendo of poetic outpouring.

Sylvia mentioned to her mother that her “riding mistress” had said she was “very good.” A woman riding a horse named Ariel appears in a poem by the same name, one in a series produced in late October culminating in the hard-won triumph of “Lady Lazarus,” in which the female protagonist exclaims, “I eat men like air.” Sylvia would show these verses in London, she told her mother. She would be announcing to one and all her intention to divorce Ted. She refused to play the “country wife” he had left behind. A woman betrayed was also a woman avenging herself. Or as the speaker in “Ariel” puts it, “I / Am the arrow.” Yet just two lines later, the word “suicidal” is attached to this same speaker, so that as in “Lady Lazarus,” near-death experience is deemed vital to rebirth. The late October poems building toward Plath's birthday on 27 October enact an ascent, Lady Lazarus rising “out of ash,” the flames of rebirth suggested by her red hair. As grand as the poem sounds, Sylvia prefaced a planned reading of this poem on the BBC with a comment mixing the mythic and the down to earth: “She is the phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a good, plain, very resourceful woman.”

In Plath's poetry, in her letters to her mother, in what she was telling others she wrote and spoke to, Sylvia declared her need for an audience. On 29 and 30 October, she met in London with Al Alvarez and read him her recent poems. He seemed then the only editor who could appreciate her bold new work. When Alvarez encountered
New Statesman
editor Karl Miller on the street, a stunned Alvarez learned that Miller had rejected Plath's new work, including “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” as “too extreme.” Many years after Sylvia's death, Olwyn, who had access to her sister-in-law's so-called lost journal, would imply in a letter to Alvarez that Sylvia began to think of him as more than a supporter of her work. Olwyn didn't make the connection, but perhaps Sylvia did: As Sylvia's lover, Alvarez would also represent part of her new life, just as Ted Hughes had done after Richard Sassoon had rejected her.

Sylvia's powerful new voice emerged in a program produced by Peter Orr of the British Council. She sounded older than her thirty years and gave a commanding performance. The poems she read were designed for the ear, she had insisted to Alvarez, who championed her as a bold new voice that shattered the English sense of propriety. Sylvia Plath dared to be intense and violent, the “dirty girl” of “Cut.” Like Plath, Alvarez had attempted suicide. Like her, he was a risk-taker, a rock climber and vigorous athlete. He was a fellow poet who likened the force of her work to “assault and battery.”

By coming to London, Sylvia was going to best Ted Hughes at his own game. Peter Porter, a poet in the Hughes circle who also knew David and Assia Wevill, concluded that Ted really left Sylvia because he could all too clearly see her rising star:

It has always seemed to me that Hughes, though formidable, was not as strong and imaginative a force as Plath.… Leaving Plath must have been not just an imperative for someone who wished to love other women whenever it suited him, but also a move to defend his own talent from competition with a superior one. Such a notion might seem doubtful given the greater recognition he enjoyed than she did, but it is one which has begun to convince readers of her poetry since the true scale of its achievement has become known. Judging the completed course of the two poets' productions, it is tempting to see Hughes's attitude as resembling Alexander Pope's Turk, who will suffer no rival next to the throne.

In
The Savage God: A Study of Suicide,
Alvarez mentions that in June 1962, even before Assia's call to Ted at Court Green, the balance of power had shifted to Sylvia. But Alvarez, mistaking the amity the couple showed him, supposed that Ted did not mind this turn of events.

From the moment Sylvia ripped the phone cord out of the wall, she was declaring open hostilities. The wife who had put her husband first, made sure he entered poetry competitions, cooked and cleaned for him, held her career in abeyance and raised his children—all that was over for Ted Hughes, and he knew it. He knew it because he had seen how Sylvia could turn on people, and he knew she was merciless—caricaturing even mentors like Mrs. Prouty and her own mother. The question was, “What wouldn't Sylvia do to Ted now that she was aroused?” This was, after all, the woman who had drawn blood the first time they kissed. Sylvia could play the victim, but no victim writes the kind of poetry she mustered in her last seven months.

Sylvia returned to her Devon home on 30 October only long enough to make preparations for her flat-hunting trip the first week of November. Although very much on her own, she accepted monetary support from Hughes, and he joined her on 4 November in the search for London lodgings. These fitful meetings upset her. Friends saw her cry and then surmount her grief with rage over his treachery. This behavior, like the poems she was then writing, played like a piece of music, the descending and ascending notes reflecting a huge emotional range. At parties, events, and various get-togethers, Sylvia, a prodigious performer, orchestrated her break with Ted, making it an operatic public affair. Like her urge to publish, to make herself known to the world, which had begun at such an early age, the compulsion to brand her husband in the open got the best of her.

Ted was behaving in a similar fashion, announcing his separation from Sylvia and attracting the attention of other women. On 1 November, he met anthropologist and poet Susan Alliston, who recorded in her journal his declaration that “Marriage is not for me.” Alliston thought he had “got it in for Anglo Saxon women, perhaps too cold. He's now with a non-Anglo-Saxon”—a reference, no doubt, to Assia. He was already sizing up Alliston, though, admiring her long legs, which he later mentioned in his romantic introduction to her poems and journals. He told her that marriage was not for her either (she had recently separated from her husband). Two weeks later, she was at The Lamb, a Bloomsbury pub, trying to “beautify myself up a little” and hoping Ted would turn up.

On destiny's doorstep, Sylvia discovered her dream home: 23 Fitzroy Road in Primrose Hill, not far from Dr. John Horder, who was treating her infected thumb. She was alone as she read the plaque noting that W. B. Yeats had lived there. This was
it.
She immediately got to work securing a five-year lease and raced home to open her edition of Yeats's
Collected Plays,
which obliged her with this passage: “Get wine and food to give you strength and courage, and I will get the house ready.” Although the obstacles for a single mother obtaining a flat that others wanted were formidable, and negotiations would prove complicated, the flat represented the assertion of a new, insurgent self. She contrasted herself with Ted, whom she now portrayed as an establishment man caught in “petty fetters” and “bribes,” the world of London silks he had always scorned—a rather prophetic vision of a man who would become poet laureate.

On 7 November, readying herself for the move to London, an exultant Sylvia wrote Aurelia from Court Green about the new flat, which included “two floors with three bedrooms, upstairs, lounge, kitchen, and bath downstairs
and
a balcony garden!” As usual, she could not help overdoing it, vowing to be a “marvelous mother” who regretted nothing. She spent more than a page on domestic details, including her discovery of a “
fabulous
hairdresser.” She loved her look, and it had cost her only $1.50. She liked to measure out her happiness in monetary terms, an aspect of the practical Plath that Hughes had deplored but depended upon. Ted had not even recognized her at the train station. No longer in his “shadow,” she would make it on her own and be recognized for her own genius. She even felt magnanimous, if dismissive, about Assia, who had only her well-paid ad agency job and her vain wish to be a writer. Sylvia envied Ted and Assia “nothing.” Men now stared in the street at her new fashionable self. She would appear a “knockout” at the Royal Court summer theater program devoted to poetry. Ted had disdained her love of stylish clothes and thought spending sums on ensembles extravagant. Sylvia, on the other hand, was a center court poet. She dreamed of eventually buying a London home if she ever published a “smash-hit novel.”

Sylvia was hard hit in the second week of November when
The New Yorker
and
The
Atlantic Monthly
rejected several of her recent poems—the very ones that would appeal to posterity. But she rebounded, assembling forty of her best works into a manuscript with a title that would make her name, “Ariel, and other Poems,” a seeming tribute to Shakespeare's freewheeling and enchanting androgynous sprite. The poems reflected a fiercely feminine spirit abetted by a regiment of women, including her old friend Clarissa Roche, her nanny Susan O'Neill Rowe, and Ruth Fainlight (a writer and the wife of novelist Allen Sillitoe). These women stimulated Sylvia to write about motherhood as in itself a courageous, life-affirming choice—precisely the decision that a woman like Assia, so Sylvia believed, had avoided.

That fraught telephone call in July continued to gnaw at the poet, who in “The Fearful” (16 November), brooded on a woman who would pretend to be a man, hollowing out her voice so that it sounded dead. The woman thinks that a baby will rob her of her beauty (Sylvia had heard Assia, worried about losing her beauty, did not want children). “She would rather be dead than fat,” so fearful is this woman who has turned her body over to a man. Plath would have made an excellent biographer. She had scoped out Assia and had a shrewd understanding of her rival's tastes and temperament. Later, after Plath's death, Assia would have access to Plath's journals and see firsthand how the poet had nailed her.

When Clarissa arrived the next day at Court Green for a visit, Sylvia embraced a friend she had previously called an “earth mother,” exclaiming more than once, “You've saved my life.” “The Fearful” had brought on another round of rage against Ted. Clarissa caught her at a weak moment, when the burdens of caring for Frieda and Nicholas, for all Sylvia's bravado, were wearing her out. And yet Clarissa also recalls their raucous laughter. Plath had a hearty laugh. By the time Clarissa departed on 19 November, Sylvia was again in high spirits, writing to her mother that same day as a busy professional woman, assembling her book of poetry and dealing with all manner of correspondence related to her work. She had time, however, to deck herself out with several new outfits and jewelry that she described in detail. These items were essential, making her feel “like a new woman,” although she remained in suspense about the London flat, since her references and financials were still being reviewed.

On Thanksgiving Day, Sylvia wrote again, mentioning her bad cold, made worse by chores such as lugging coal buckets and ashbins. She still worried about obtaining the flat, since she had “so much against me—being a writer, the ex-wife of a successful writer, being an American, young, etc., etc.” She was working like a navvy to prepare for her move, and that activity had disrupted her writing schedule, except for production of potboiling stuff that brought in some income. She was reviewing children's books for
New Statesman,
but also reviewing Malcolm Elwin's
Lord Byron's Wife,
which seemed to reflect her state of mind. Although she acknowledged that “Byron the lion was undeniably poor husband-stuff,” she attributes the trouble in his marriage not only to his insufferable wife, Anna Isabella Milbanke, who always had to be “in the right,” but also to Byron's sister, Augusta, with whom he had an incestuous relationship not unlike what Sylvia had insinuated (without any proof) was the case with Ted and Olwyn. Did Sylvia see that in her more self-righteous moods she resembled Anna Isabella—as Sylvia memorably put it—fixed in the “ego-screws of pride”? Sylvia, who would drop as much as twenty pounds during her separation from Ted, quotes Augusta's account of Annabella's wasting away in Byron's absence: “She is positively reduced to a Skeleton—pale as ashes—a deep hollow tone of voice & a calm in her manner quite supernatural.”