American Isis (36 page)

Becker felt relieved: “The truth was she had tired me. Her need for my attention had begun to seem relentless.” Jillian would have gone on taking care of Sylvia, but “she wanted to go, and nothing I could have done or said would have kept her against her will. And then there was Dr. Horder's injunction: ‘She must look after the children, feel she's necessary for them.'” Jillian's husband, Gerry, drove Sylvia home. On the way she began to cry, and Gerry, an empathetic man who liked Sylvia, importuned her several times to return to the Beckers' home. But she refused, and he left her around 7:00 p.m., after she had fed the children and put them to bed. Then Dr. Horder called to make sure she was all right.

Near midnight, Sylvia rang Trevor Thomas's bell and asked him for stamps. She wanted to airmail some letters and get them in the post before morning. As he gave her the stamps, she asked him when he left for work in the morning. He asked why she wanted to know. Just wondering, she replied. Not long after closing his door, he noticed the hall light was still on. And when he opened the door, there was Sylvia. She had not moved. He told her he would call Dr. Horder. She did not want Dr. Horder, she answered. She was just having “the most wonderful dream.”

It is likely that the Sylvia seen last by Trevor Thomas was on an antidepressant. The euphoric sense of wholeness that is common in drug-induced states wore off perhaps around 5 a.m., when Thomas could hear Sylvia still pacing above as he fell asleep. That wonderful but evanescent moment of transcendence, akin to what she experienced when writing poems, seeped out of her. Knowing that a nurse was coming in the morning, it is just possible Plath expected to be saved. Was she seeking a temporary state of oblivion to assuage her agonies? A near death to be followed by yet another rebirth? No one can say. Perhaps Alvarez is right in suggesting suicide, like divorce, is a confession of failure, an admission, in Sylvia's case, that “all one's energy, appetite and ambition have been aborted.”

Mothers all over England tended to favor gas as a way to end their lives. They often took their children—extensions of their identities—with them, perhaps as vengeance against husbands and lovers, or because they had turned against a world that would treat their offspring cruelly. Sylvia seems to have considered this option in “Edge,” which describes a mother folding her children back into her body, just like petals “of a rose close.…” But always, she had returned to suicide as a singular act and death as a kind of deliverance.

Sylvia understood losing consciousness as a kind of death. The sensation fascinated her, as she recounts in a journal entry written after a tooth extraction. As the gas enters her, she feels her mouth crack into a smile: “So that's how it was … so simple, and no one had told me.” Death itself she imagined as everything fading to black, like a fainting spell, but with “no light, no waking.” “I know a little how it must be,” she wrote prophetically more than a decade earlier, to “feel the waters close above you … To have your mind broken, and the contents evaporated, gone.”

It was now 11 February, and Sylvia Plath prepared to die. She left food and drink for her children in their room and opened a window. In the hallway, she attached a note with Dr. Horder's name and number to the baby carriage. She sealed the kitchen as best she could with tape, towels, and cloths. She turned on the gas and thrust her head as far as she could into the oven. A hired nurse, arriving around 9:30 a.m. to begin her day heard the children crying at the window and called on a workman to break into the flat. They found Sylvia Plath lying on the kitchen floor with her head in the oven. It was far too late to revive her.

It may seem perverse—or at the very least paradoxical—to say that by her suicide Sylvia Plath finally found a way to recover herself. By all accounts, including her own, she had been writing the poetry that would make her reputation, but she knew that no human being could sustain such a peak of perfection and perform all the normal functions of existence in the “kitchen of life,” as Martha Gellhorn used to call day to day existence. When Sylvia Plath put an end to herself, she had reached one of those crisis points, exhilarated and exhausted by all she had accomplished—and by all she had left undone. This state of beatitude, this descent into the lower depths, is Shakespearean in its sublimity and tragedy and seems worthy of what Menenius says of Coriolanus, who had a nature “too noble for this world.”

 

CHAPTER 8

IN THE TEMPLE OF ISIS:

AMONG THE HIEROPHANTS

(1963–)

The candidate for initiation has now been taken by the High Priestess (the Gnosis) within the Temple and she has transformed herself into the Goddess Isis … He learns from her the secrets of nature … He learns the true meaning of Black Magic … The fact that the Empress precedes the Emperor in the pack is perhaps a relic of matriarchal rule …

—
Basil Ivan Rakoczi,
The Painted Caravan: A Penetration into the Secrets of Tarot Cards
(in Sylvia Plath's library at Smith College)

She had free and controlled access to depths formerly reserved to the primitive ecstatic priests, shamans, and Holy men …

—
Ted Hughes

A priestess emptied out by the rites of her cult.

—
A. Alvarez

Ted Hughes wrote the awful news to Olywn, tersely admitting that Sylvia had asked for his help. Too “jaded” by her entreaties, he had miscalculated just how desperate she had become. “Please don't make this business gossip of any sort. It was gossip—faithfully reported by her ratty acquaintances that drove Sylvia over & I don't like it.” To Daniel and Helga Huws, he wrote, “No doubt where the blame lies.” Ted tried to explain himself to Aurelia, adverting to the “psychic abnormalities” that afflicted both him and Sylvia. He presented their troubles as a form of mutual blindness and thought Sylvia had become a victim of bad timing, beset by “hellish details.” He believed they were coming to realize the marriage could have been repaired. But Sylvia did not hold on. Neither her final letters nor her poems suggest a reconciliation. To spare his children's feelings, he said, he destroyed her journal recounting her final days, and this act surely does not indicate that Sylvia wished to resume her marriage. Ted told Aurelia that he was damned and did not want to be forgiven, presumably because of his role in destroying what he called “one of the greatest, truest spirits alive” and a “great poet.” Although he acknowledged that Sylvia could be hard on the people she loved, he was unable amidst his own grief to take the measure of her Dostoyevskian rage. Sylvia Plath hated Ted Hughes with “that hate which is only a hair's-breadth from love, from the maddest love!”—to quote from the passage she asterisked in Mark Slonim's introduction to
The Brothers Karamazov.

What could Aurelia say to Ted's postmortem? She wanted Warren and his wife, who went over to England for Sylvia's funeral, to return to America with her grandchildren. When Ted balked at that idea, she resigned herself to placating Hughes and those around him so that she could maintain contact with her grandchildren. She tried to enlist the help of Dr. Horder, who responded on 17 October 1963, “Ted's behavior is disappointing … I feel completely impotent because I never had any relationship with Ted and it has become fairly clear, only three weeks ago, that no relationship of a constructive nature between us is possible because of what happened.”

Hughes worried, as he wrote Aurelia three months after Sylvia's suicide, that she would “mourn” over the children, especially Frieda, as a substitute for her daughter. He dreaded Aurelia's overwhelming love, which would engulf them and distort their sense of reality at a time when they were much too young to understand what was happening. He noted that because his feelings and Aurelia's no longer had a “worldly object,” their attachment to Sylvia freed them to regard her with an “unearthly” and even “religious” intensity. He did not want to deny Aurelia opportunities to visit her grandchildren, but he bluntly told her that her “watchful anxiety” had made life much harder for Sylvia, and he did not want to see the pattern repeated in the lives of his daughter and son.

Angrily, Ted told Aurelia that friends had informed him about her efforts to learn more about his marriage to Sylvia. Warren had gone to see Sylvia's lawyer, Aurelia recalled for Frances McCullough, who edited
Letters Home.
The lawyer was “very sympathetic. He discussed matters very freely … Sylvia was dead serious about the divorce until shortly before her death when her strength gave out.…” Already, years before biographers were on his case, Hughes said he felt “under investigation.” And he resented the implication that he was holding back anything that Aurelia was entitled to know. Certain questions from Warren had put Ted on his guard. Already, he was declaring that only his public “self-immolation over Sylvia's name” would suffice. And yet when he vowed that his love for Sylvia remained, and that he would never marry again, what was he proposing but a kind of self-sacrifice? Even as he was writing letters to Assia Wevill, declaring himself wholly hers, he was insisting on his own form of consecration for Sylvia Plath. His behavior when Aurelia arrived to check up on him (this is how he put it) signaled the first phase of his dogged but futile effort to dictate the gospel of Sylvia Plath's biography.

Hughes envisioned a life in which his children would not “succumb back into Sylvia's Magnetism.” He was also determined to spirit his family away from the “curators of the past.” In other words, only Ted Hughes would officiate at her temple. He found it utterly fantastic that Aurelia supposed he would hold on to Court Green, the “site, in fact, of my crime against her, against myself, and against every human thing.” Yet a month later, he wrote to Gerald, “I've been thinking I'll hang on to Court Green.” Money was often a serious consideration for Hughes. He expected the property to appreciate in value, and it would make a good “country resort” for his children. Aurelia was now in England, which meant, Ted told his brother, “four weeks of nerves.”

Ted had installed Assia in Sylvia's Fitzroy Road flat over the objections of his Aunt Hilda, who described Assia as a

reincarnated Cleopatra. At first I couldn't bear the sight of her and told her to clear off and leave Ted in peace for a while until the Plaths had gone and I had gone. But of course she took no notice & Ted told me to mind my own business.… Ted is simply bewitched and I have told him he has only left one bondage for another, and she will turn into a devil one day.… I have come to the conclusion wherever Ted is there will be women, so it is no good being a hanger on.… I am concerned about the children.

Al Alvarez and his wife, Anne, shared this view of Assia, whom they saw in Ted's company during this period. She seemed manipulative—and very pleased with herself.

On 2 September 1963, Edith Hughes wrote to Olwyn, preparing her for the current situation at Court Green. Elizabeth Compton (“very nice & will be useful until you get settled”) had told Edith that Sylvia had called Assia a “devil. Just watch what she will do to Ted.” Edith cautioned Olwyn to go easy with her brother, but also to be firm about Assia: “Don't be conciliatory … or she will be wanting to come. For the children's & Ted's sake this must not happen.” With Olwyn and Aunt Hilda installed at Court Green in October, Ted promised Assia he would find another home for them, but he never did let go of Court Green.

In a letter to Aurelia, he was full of news about the children, especially Frieda, whom he favored. He seemed relieved that they had adjusted in their old home. He reported that he was well treated by everyone, including Elizabeth Compton, who had been close to Sylvia. He was negotiating with publishers about the appearance of her poems. With full control over Plath's estate, and not yet the object of public scrutiny for his role in her death, Hughes seemed especially heartened to trumpet her work, “written in blood,” he told poet Donald Hall, taking issue with reservations about certain poems that Hall had expressed in print.

Everything was about to change—or rather intensify—in Ted Hughes's life with the publication in March 1965 of
Ariel,
the book that confirmed Sylvia Plath's position as a world-class poet. Assia Wevill, wearing badly under the strain of coping with Plath—who had become, in Hughes's words, a “spectacular public figure”—gave birth on 3 March 1965, to a child by him, called Shura. A wary Hughes accused Assia of saving his letters, perhaps to use later against him—such was his reaction against the siege of “bloody eavesdroppers & filchers,” even though the first biographer had yet to arrive. He instructed Assia to burn his letters, lest they be “intercepted.” Anne, Alvarez's wife, thought of black-haired Ted and Assia, so often dressed in black, as two panthers hissing at each other: “It was very unpleasant.” Anne remembered visiting Assia, ailing with the flu: “She was in Sylvia's bed all dressed up and glamorous and it really gave me the creeps … All she talked about was Sylvia.”

Enter Lois Ames, a friend of Sylvia's, bent on writing the first biography. She had secured Aurelia's approval. Hughes was willing to cooperate only in so far as the book would provide a short and superficial view of Sylvia's life, based mainly on reminiscences of the “right people.” He declared his intention to thwart any full scale, modern biography, the kind that inevitably proved reductive, he assured Aurelia and Warren when he wrote to them in March of 1966. Although Ames labored for several years on the biography, she gave it up in 1974, saying much later in an interview that it “became increasingly difficult for me to do this, as other biographers have found out. And I finally decided for the sake of my own sanity and my family that it was better to pay back the advance to Harper's. I always felt it was a wise decision.” Her “Notes Toward a Biography,” which appeared in
Tri-Quarterly
7 in 1966, reads like a work of Victorian circumspection. Sylvia's last year is described as “difficult,” and Ames does not even mention the separation from Hughes, saying only that Plath moved to London, and that “despite the care of a doctor and prescribed sedatives, she was unable to cope.”