Sylvia Plath: A Biography (23 page)

At least until March 12, when Sylvia picked the first bouquet of daffodils for Ted’s tea tray. The Devon house soon had thousands of daffodils in bloom. That same day she wrote to Aurelia, “I have the queerest feeling of having been reborn with Frieda — it’s as if my real, rich, happy life only started just about then.” But soon after that she wrote to Clarissa Roche, emphasizing what a financial drain the house was (they were “broke,” in her words), that the winter had been nothing but grim, and that she was making forays into the wild garden, trying to control pests with “lethal pellets of SLUGIT and SLUGDEATH.” Abstractly, Sylvia may have loved all the parts of being a homemaker and mother; physically, to maintain home and family left her no time for herself, or for her writing, or even for her relationship with Ted.

Social life in the village had not helped to lighten her winter mood. Sylvia and Ted were not prominent there in any way. They were simply the young couple who had bought Court Green. They saw the Tyrtrs, Rose and Percy Key, Winifred Davies, and Sylvia’s new acquaintances including Elizabeth and David Compton. The Tyrers’ friendship quickly became a burden when they seemed to think the Hugheses should help educate their teenage daughter, Nicola. What resulted, according to Plath’s journals, was an imposition — largely upon Ted — that Sylvia resented. She was clearly suspicious of Nicola’s motives, noting that the girl’s visits increased whenever Ted had gotten some publicity in the papers. Sylvia promised herself to be “omnipresent” whenever Nicola came around.

Her apparent jealousy about Nicola and Ted’s friendship must have seemed a little unreasonable even to her; there is often some acerbic humor in what she writes about the girl. In one episode from Plath’s journal, Nicola says that the film
The
Seven
Samurai
bored her. Even though it is Ted’s favorite movie, he agrees with her. Sylvia admits in her journal that she relaxed once the Tyrers had moved away, and she also admits that she and Ted needed time together, alone, without the children and all the responsibilities they created.

Part of Sylvia’s uneasiness about Ted during that winter and spring stemmed from his moodiness and also from the bleak and introspective things he had been writing. Several of his stories and his play
The
Wound
recounted death or near-death experiences. In his stories “The Rain Horse” and “Snow” the male protagonist is mysteriously hunted down and trapped by a female adversary. Because she usually typed his work, Sylvia could hardly ignore this distrust of — and anger toward the feminine. Ted may not have consciously known what his writing suggested, but the fact that he was writing everything but the poetry he was known for might have hinted that he was in a period of transition. After his poem collection
Lupercal
was published in 1960, what poems he did write were either angry or oblique, eventually collected in a book called
Recklings
(the weakest animals of the litter) or, much later, in
Wodwo
.

Spring was bittersweet for Sylvia. She was not sure what was causing the distance between herself and Ted, but she knew that something was wrong. And while her infant son was growing rapidly, Percy Key, her good neighbor, was dying. The contrast between the healthy infant and the deteriorating man depressed Sylvia, and the rapidity of Percy’s decline from what was evidently lung cancer gave her little time to accept his approaching death. “I find this difficult to believe,” she wrote sadly in her journal. More important is what she was writing in her poems. Percy’s impending death is the subject of several of her spring poems, as if it was standing for some ominous other happening as well that she did not yet want to recognize or even name.

Her dirge for Percy Key begins with “Among the Narcissi” and continues in the haunting poem “Pheasant,” where the speaker tries to prevent a man’s killing the bird. The poignancy of the speaker’s plea for the kingly bird, its wonder and its easiness in life, all rest on a fear that the powerful hunter will not listen, contrasted with a reverence for the natural life that deserves to exist. Manuscripts of the poem show that it is closely connected with Percy’s death in its inception, and also with Sylvia’s fears that her husband is instrumental in death of some kind.

Her poems “Elm,” perhaps the greatest of her spring work, and “Berck-Plage” also stem from dismay over Percy’s illness. Like “Three Women,” “Elm” is written in a woman’s voice, speaking a woman’s wisdom and truth, unflinchingly. Like other 1962 poems, it is dedicated to a woman friend. On a May weekend visit from Alan Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight, during which time the two women had breast-fed their infant sons together in the upstairs room that overlooked the elm, Sylvia read the poem aloud to Ruth. After that weekend Sylvia dedicated the poem to her.

As she had in Boston, Sylvia was seeking out women as friends. Winifred Davies was a mentor, but Sylvia’s best friend became Elizabeth Compton, who had written while Sylvia and Ted were in London about their possibly living in the Comptons’ Devon farmhouse. The Comptons came to tea in late winter. With her customary eagerness, Sylvia questioned Elizabeth, asking rapidly what her opinions were about this or that national and international event. When Elizabeth said she was a member of the Liberal party, Sylvia jumped up and said, “Thank God, a committed woman!” Their conversation ranged from armament issues and American big business to Sylvia’s plans for expanding her family and the garden. Elizabeth thought that Sylvia’s life was a seamless blend of the concrete and the abstract, joy about her children meshing somehow with worry about world issues. Sylvia gave the impression of wholeness, purposeful activity, and plans for a future that would be glorious.

The Hugheses then visited the Comptons at their farmhouse twenty-five miles away. Sylvia began calling Elizabeth “Earth Mother,” as she had formerly called Clarissa Roche; she admired Elizabeth’s ability to keep house and care for her children in the inconvenient home (smoky oil lamps were the only lights).

The Comptons and Ted and Sylvia became good friends that spring. Only gradually did Elizabeth notice that Ted was either off working or in London or Exeter much of the time. He had a series of dental appointments in Exeter; he was doing BBC broadcasts. Sylvia was the person hungry for friendships; she planned the family outings and celebrations (the children’s christenings, Frieda’s birthday). She also celebrated her friends’ birthdays. Elizabeth recalled Sylvia and Ted’s coming unexpectedly on her birthday that summer, bringing wine and a beautiful cake, complete with candles.

Initially, Elizabeth marveled at the closeness between Sylvia and Ted. It was as if they shared one attitude, one experience of life. But then Sylvia became more open with her friend and hesitantly shared some of her worries about Ted’s apparent unhappiness. Other spring poems also reflected her anxiety: “Little Fugue” in particular speaks of a woman’s anxiety, her fear of loss, and the figures of Otto Plath and Ted Hughes are merged in this poem as they would be in the later “Daddy.” The male voice here gives “a yew hedge of orders,” and the male figure is portrayed as a dark funnel, drawing the speaker (a child, “guilty of nothing”) down and into an abyss of guilt she cannot get free of. The poem closes with the speaker fighting to stay far from the threats mentioned in the poem, trying to maintain some sense of normalcy, trying to survive.

I survive the while,

Arranging my morning.

These are my fingers, this my baby.

The clouds are a marriage dress, of that pallor.

Many of Sylvia’s poems from April and May of 1962 are about marriage or about the female speaker’s role as lonely, wistful wife. The comparatively obscure poem “An Appearance” was originally called “The Methodical Woman” and presents negatively the woman who can organize life. As with many of Plath’s late poems, this one is much clearer in early drafts than in the final version. As she reworked her spring poems, Sylvia disguised their meanings — perhaps to keep Ted from knowing that she was uneasy, perhaps to keep herself from naming her suspicions.

For instance, even though the poem “Crossing the Water” appears to be about death in the abstract, in early drafts it too was about a marital relationship. In their boat, the man and woman, separated, float on a dark lake; the tone is ominous. The boat has “nothing to steer by.” Asking whether the relationship is founded on luck or accident, the speaker trails her hand in the cold water. At the close of the poem, with no explanation, the woman’s hand is dead.

By the time Sylvia had written this group of anxiety and death poems, it was the end of May 1962. Earlier that month David and Assia Wevill had spent a weekend, the last of several pairs of friends that had visited Devon in the spring. The day after they left, Sylvia wrote two angry, revealing poems, “The Rabbit Catcher” and “Event.” It had been clear to Sylvia that Ted was either seeing Assia already or making plans to do so. The beautiful woman, whose present marriage was her third, made no secret of her admiration for Ted. She had boasted earlier to friends that she would seduce him, and had told Sylvia that her present marriage was “little more than a loving friendship.”

The original draft of “The Rabbit Catcher”, includes autobiographical details that Sylvia deleted from the final version. The young wife of the rabbit catcher dreams of an ideal marriage that will allow her freedom to become herself. Once married, however, she finds that her husband maintains rigid control over her life. In the poem, however,
she
does not complain. It is rather the husband who says that he is missing too much of life, that he is going to do and have whatever he chooses. In the drafts, the wife speaks of her “impotence” and his “morning anger.” Titled “Snares” in draft, “The Rabbit Catcher” is both a cry for understanding and a lament for the wife’s misconceptions. Now what she sees, in place of her ideal marriage, is the snare used for catching rabbits. Behind the snares are her husband’s hands, taking pleasure in their power to deliver death. The poem closes with a line that identifies the wife with the rabbit: “Those hands /Muffled me like gloves.”

The common tragedy of Plath’s spring poems is that the woman speaker has come to realize what a trap her marriage is, now dramatically changed because of what seem to be changes in her husband. “Event,” originally called “Quarrel,” continued the narrative. It mourns, “I cannot see your eyes.... I walk with an absence.” Filled with images of despair and loss, the poem closes with the speaker’s admission, “I am appalled by the death smell of everything.” Written a week later, Sylvia’s poem “Apprehensions” tells the same story; the speaker states, “I am deserted.” The desolation and the fear of these poems are the themes of her late June poem, “Berck-Plage.” In these spring poems Plath had already written her text for the summer of personal discovery. It is evident in the poems that she suspected Ted of infidelity. But, perhaps worse in some ways, she also suspected him of not caring how much she needed their marriage to justify her existence as a woman — perhaps to justify her life. Infidelity was less the issue than was Sylvia’s almost obsessive need to live the perfect life, love the perfect man, create the perfect household, as a means of proving that she was a success in all the areas women were supposed to excel in. Her marriage had been carrying the weight of this idealistic fabrication, as well as the stresses of both adults’ being professional writers and working in a household with two very young children. Assia continued to pretend that she and Ted were only friends. As a thank-you gift for the weekend, Assia sent Sylvia a piece of needlepoint, the rose at its center already finished. Sylvia carefully worked the rest of the piece, until her own intuition about the nature of Assia and Ted’s relationship made such activity impossible.

Besides writing her revealing poems, Sylvia survived early summer by working frantically to get the house and grounds ready for her mother’s visit. She cleaned the barn and cottage, mowed the grass, painted, weeded. She tried to repress her anger at a series of mysterious phone calls for Ted, even though she was sure they were from Assia. On June 7, she and Ted went to a meeting of beekeepers. There she bought a hive; soon she was keeping bees. She found the satisfaction of this hobby another bond with her father.

On June 8, Alvarez and a friend visited the Hugheses on their way to Cornwall for a Whitsun holiday. Alvarez saw changes in Ted and Sylvia’s relationship but attributed them to what he called Sylvia’s new maturity:

No longer quiet and withheld, a housewifely appendage to a powerful husband, she seemed made solid and complete, her own woman again. Perhaps the birth of a son had something to do with this new, confident air. But there was a sharpness and clarity about her that seemed to go beyond that. It was she who showed me around the house and the garden; the electric gadgets, the freshly painted rooms, the orchard and the burial mound.... Ted, meanwhile, seemed content to sit back and play with little Frieda, who clung to him dependently. Since it was a strong, close marriage, he seemed unconcerned that the balance of power had shifted for the time being to Sylvia.

Alvarez’s later explanation for the change was that Sylvia was confident because she was writing well again. In truth, in her anger and confusion, she was leading a comparatively independent life as a way of removing herself from her husband’s authority. She was leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind that — if necessary — she could survive alone.

On June 16, Sylvia cooked a quiet sixth anniversary dinner. June 21, Aurelia arrived. A few days later Sylvia went into London to record a BBC program and to sell books at a book-dealers. Then she returned to attend Percy Key’s funeral on June 29. The next day she finished writing the sadly powerful long poem “Berck-Plage,” with its concluding scene of the casket-bearers in the cemetery: