Sylvia Plath: A Biography (29 page)

Sylvia’s letter to Aurelia written the same day repeated the word “grim” but spoke more directly about her pain. Sylvia wrote that her present unhappiness stemmed from “seeing the finality of it all.” Moving to London had not brought her reconciliation with Ted, or professional acclaim, or new friendships. Although she had been living in London less than two months, with her characteristic impatience she was ready to make another change. She was becoming depressed, partly with the realization of what faced her: she would live as a single parent, with these two wonderful children, for the rest of her days. Though she did not say it, she would live the life her own mother had led, a life that Sylvia had often criticized for its self-sacrifice and dedication.

Aurelia had suggested flying Frieda to America by jet, so that she could spend some time with the Plath family there. Sylvia would not hear of this. She pointed out that her children had no stability in their lives and needed her desperately now. “The children need me most right now, and so I shall try to go on for the next few years writing mornings, being with them afternoons and seeing friends or studying and reading evenings.” As for Frieda specifically, Sylvia wrote, “I am her one security and to uproot her would be thoughtless and cruel.” She mentioned that Dr. Horder, whom she was seeing frequently for her depression, was planning for her to consult a woman doctor. Meanwhile, the letter closed, “I shall simply have to fight it out on my own here.”

On February 4, 1963, Plath mailed another group of new poems to
The
New
Yorker
, and in a letter to Father Bart spoke of writing poems “in blood, or at least with it.” She wrote that she had recovered from the flu and was making curtains once again, Sylvia’s “normal” life continued. She called David Machin and set a lunch date for the following Monday, February 11, arranging for Katherine Frankfort to babysit on that day. About this same time, Sylvia received letters from several poetry magazines, asking her to send poems, and from other literary admirers. On February 7 she wrote letters to both Nancy Axworthy, who was taking care of the Devon house, and Elizabeth Compton, telling them what joy it would be to come back to Devon in the spring. “Thank God you are there,” she wrote to Elizabeth. “I long to see my home,” she closed. It was a letter filled with plans.

Sylvia was experiencing wide mood swings during the winter of 1963. She was seeing Dr. Horder frequently. He prescribed for her an antidepressant drug, which would take from ten to twenty days to become effective.

On February 8, Sylvia saw Dr. Horder several times. He continued to be alarmed at her state — thin and anxious, she was visibly unable to cope with the many problems of her present life. She had fired her au pair, refusing to pay her. Sleeping pills did not work any longer. The new drug had not yet begun to alleviate her depression. Horder tried to find Sylvia a bed in a hospital for the weekend. None was available in two locations; a third seemed unsuitable. Sylvia’s fears of electroconvulsive shock treatments made her unwilling to be hospitalized. She had said repeatedly ten years before that she would not go through such treatment again. By the time Horder talked with her later on that Friday afternoon, Sylvia assured him that she was better and that she had made plans to take the children to friends’ for the weekend. Dr. Horder set up appointments to see Sylvia on both Saturday and Sunday.

She kept her appointments and continued taking the antidepressant medicine. On Sunday her doctor thought she was beginning to respond to the medication. But sometimes when a depressed patient becomes capable of increased activity, the depression is still in place; if the patient acts, it may be to carry out a plan for suicide created in the depths of the illness.

At 11:45 p.m. on Sunday evening, Sylvia went down to Professor Thomas’s flat to buy postage stamps from him. He was happy to provide them and told her she need not pay him at that late hour. She insisted, saying, “Oh! but I must pay you or I won’t be right with my conscience before God, will I?” Dr. Thomas thought Sylvia looked very ill, and he suggested that he call her doctor. She refused and implied she was returning to her flat. Ten minutes later Professor Thomas opened his door again, and she was still standing as if in a trance in the hall. As Professor Thomas recalled the scene, “I said, ‘You aren’t really well, are you? ... Let me call the doctor.’ She said no again and that she was having a wonderful dream, a marvellous vision. I urged her to go back upstairs out of the cold. Twenty minutes later I looked again and she had gone. I could not sleep and I heard her walking to and fro on the wood floor....”

It was the night of February 10, 1963, just three years to the day since Sylvia had signed the contract for her first book,
The
Colossus
. So much, both good and bad, had happened in those short years. Sylvia had learned a great deal. She had become a mother and a homeowner; she had learned to share her life, and she had come into her own as a woman. In so doing, she had become a stronger writer. She knew that it would do no longer to write poems that were only exercises. Poems, like life, had to be honest and direct, arrowlike in their aim, relentless in their intensity.

Sylvia had learned to write those poems — without advice, criticism, or lists of suitable subjects. She had learned to take the fury and the joy, the feelings she could both deny and boast of, and from them create art that spoke powerfully to readers. And just when she was at the height of these accomplishments, because of changes in her personal life that revived earlier fears and depressions, her momentum stopped. The woman who had wanted nothing else but to write wondered why she had worked so tirelessly. “Words dry and riderless,” finally, seemed not to be a way out of her dilemma — at least not while she struggled under the weight of acute depression.

Early on the morning of February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath knelt beside the open oven in the second-floor kitchen of her Primrose Hill flat and turned on the gas. She had left cups of milk beside the children’s beds. She had put tape around the doors and had shoved towels under them to protect the children from escaping fumes. She had taken a quantity of sleeping pills, and had left a note, asking that her doctor be called. The nurse who was to arrive early came around 9:30 a.m. Sylvia was dead. The police were called, as was Dr. Horder. At 10:00 a.m., Katherine Frankfort arrived to babysit. Ted came soon after.

On February 15 an inquest was held. The following day, the death of Sylvia Plath Hughes was ruled a suicide.

Afterword

Assuming that writers find immortality through the life of their work, a kind of second existence began for Sylvia Plath shortly after her death. On February 17, 1963, in
The
Observer
, A. Alvarez published a memorial essay, “A Poet’s Epitaph,” in which he said of Plath’s death, “The loss to literature is inestimable.” Along with his essay, Alvarez published “Edge” and three of Plath’s other late poems.

Other notices and publication of more late poems appeared during the coming year. In 1965, Faber & Faber brought out
Ariel
, the collection of her late poems as chosen and edited by Ted Hughes. (It included fewer fall poems than Plath had chosen for the book, and those poems were arranged differently; it added many of her very late poems.) In 1966 Harper & Row published
Ariel
in the United States, with an introduction by Robert Lowell.

By 1968 Faber & Faber had printed over 10,000 copies of
Ariel
in hardcover and more than 122,000 in paperback. Figures about United States sales are unavailable, but the book sold much more widely in America than it did in England. There were several printings of
Ariel
in both hardcover and paper in both countries.

In 1967,
The
Bell
Jar
was reissued in England, this time under Sylvia Plath’s name. In 1971, the novel appeared in the U.S. Published by Harper & Row,
The
Bell
Jar
included a biographical essay and reproductions of some of Plath’s ink drawings. Translated and published in many countries,
The
Bell
Jar
has sold even more widely than Plath’s poetry, and each year in the U.S. alone sells between 80,000 and 100,000 copies.

In 1971 Ted Hughes brought out two other collections of Plath’s later poetry,
Crossing
the
Water
and
Winter
Trees
. In the U.S.,
Crossing
the
Water
was published in 1971, and
Winter
Trees
the following year. At least 60,000 copies of each title were sold in England alone.

In 1975 Aurelia Plath edited and published a large collection of her daughter’s letters — written to herself and her son Warren — as
Letters
Home
by
Sylvia
Plath
,
Correspondence
1950
-
1963
. The book received wide notice. Literary rights to all of Plath’s work are controlled by Ted Hughes, who gave Aurelia Plath permission to publish the letters.

In 1977, Hughes issued a collection of some of Plath’s published and unpublished short stories, essays, and journal entries under the title
Johnny
Panic
and
the
Bible
of
Dreams
and
Other
Prose
Writings
. A somewhat fuller selection was published under the same title in the U.S. in 1979. Plath’s unpublished fiction and poetry is available to scholars and students in the two manuscript collections at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, and at Smith College.

In 1981 Plath’s long-awaited and long-promised
Collected
Poems
was published, again edited by Ted Hughes. It was a stunning book, filled with more poems — more different kinds of poems — than anyone might have predicted.
Sylvia
Plath
,
The
Collected
Poems
won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, an award seldom given posthumously.

In 1982, excerpts from Plath’s journals appeared in the U.S., edited by Frances McCullough, with Hughes as “Consulting Editor.” (This book was not published in England.) Its publication — with Hughes’s admission that he had destroyed one of the volumes of Plath’s journals — created some furor. Several reviewers condemned Ted Hughes for irresponsibility in not preserving Plath’s writing. Reviewers also complained about the many omissions in the text, and about the fact that some omissions were not clearly indicated.

Sylvia Plath’s critical reputation has grown and changed many times since the original publication of
The
Colossus
and
Other
Poems
in 1960, and of
Ariel
in 1965. Plath has been championed, deified, criticized, and gossiped about, but her work continues to attract readers and to move them with its power and finesse, its technical range, and its strong, independent voice. As Plath had prophetically written in a 1958 journal entry,

the coming again to make and make in the face of the flux; making of the moment something of permanence. That is the lifework.... My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time.

But even now, Plath’s reputation as a writer is incomplete. Her later journal and the partial draft of the last novel that she was writing have yet to be recovered. Numerous short stories and poems remain uncollected; many of these have never been published. Only when all of Plath’s work is accessible will the full impact of her art during the last years of her life be felt; only then can the distinction of her work be fully evaluated.

Plath is buried in Yorkshire, in an unremarkable grave in the Heptonstall churchyard near Hebden Bridge. Her grave is not far from the graves of other members of the Hughes family. In death, as in life, Sylvia Plath is something of an American in exile.

Major Sources and Acknowledgments

I. MAJOR COLLECTIONS OF SYLVIA PLATH PAPERS

Code
letters
for
these
collections
are
given
in
parentheses
.

The
Lilly
Library
,
Indiana
University

The most extensive collection of Plath materials was purchased from her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, in 1977. This collection includes nearly 2000 letters, many from Sylvia to her family, others to her from a variety of correspondents. (The full manuscript of Mrs. Plath’s
Letters
Home
, much of which was not included in the 1975 book, is also here.) The holdings include Plath’s annotated photograph albums, high school and college year books and memorabilia, drawings, handmade paper dolls and costumes, her baby book and other materials of the family’s, papers she wrote in high school, college, and her two Fulbright years at Cambridge, and early diaries.

The collection holds over 150 of Plath’s personal books, many with under-linings and annotations, application materials for various awards and admissions, notes from classes at Smith and Newnham College, and notes for her own teaching at Smith during 1957-58.

It also contains over 200 poems, many unpublished and some with work-sheets; 60 works of fiction, many unpublished; and 15 pieces of nonfiction; and publication records and scrapbooks. The collection in total runs to 3324 items and is housed in 15 boxes and 11 oversize containers.

The
Neilson
Library
,
Rare
Book
Room
,
Smith
College
(
S
)

Purchased from Ted Hughes in 1981, this collection comprises much of Sylvia Plath’s late correspondence, writing, and book holdings. It includes approximately 4000 pages of Plath’s manuscripts and typescripts, among those 850 pages of journal material and the successive drafts and worksheets of more than 200 poems. Fragments of Plath’s novel,
The
Bell
Jar
, occur on the backs of some of the 1962 poems.

Also found in the Smith collection is extensive correspondence, a folder of Ted Hughes’s lists of subjects to write poems about, her extensive records of poems submitted to magazines and their acceptances, her financial records (checkbooks, lists of expenses), notes for BBC broadcasts, drawings, and a quantity of miscellaneous material. There are some photographs, address books, college year books, a calendar from 1962, and other notes connected with her writing.

Mrs. Plath has added materials to those purchased from Ted Hughes, some concerning herself, others concerning Sylvia. Clippings about many of the stage, music, and dance performances of Plath’s work are also present.

I am, of course, grateful to the excellent staff at both the Lilly Library (especially Saundra Taylor), and the Smith (especially Ruth Mortimer), and grateful as well to the following libraries and their responsive research librarians: The Pennsylvania State University Library; The Spencer Library, University of Kansas; the University of Illinois Library; the Houghton Library at Harvard University; Michigan State University Library; the Olin Library, Washington University; the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; the Suzallo Library, University of Washington; Worcester Polytechnic Institute; the Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library; the University of Liverpool Library; and The British Library. Thanks are also owed to the libraries at the University of Kentucky, Louisiana State University, Southern Illinois University, Carnegie-Mellon University, The University of Michigan, Yale University, Princeton University, University of Georgia, Northern Illinois University, University of Wisconsin, Dartmouth College, University of Minnesota, Radcliffe College, Cornell University, University of North Carolina, Temple University, University of California at Los Angeles, Duke University, Rutgers University, Northwestern University, State University of New York at Buffalo, Amherst College, University of Massachusetts, University of New Hampshire, and University of Hawaii; and to the Archives Division, The Commonwealth of Massachusetts; The Huntington Library; The Newberry Library; The Rosenbach Museum and Library; and the Boston Public Library.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SOURCES, PRIMARY AND SECONDARY

PRIMARY

(See Gary Lane and Maria Stevens, i
Plath
:
A
Bibliography
[Metuchen,

N.J.: Scarecrow, 1978] for essays, single poems, and stories)

Ariel
. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

The
Bell
Jar
. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Between
Ourselves
,
Letters
Between
Mothers
and
Daughters
, ed. Karen Payne. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1983.

The
Collected
Poems
, ed. Ted Hughes. New York: Harper & Row, 1981.

The
Colossus
and
Other
Poems
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962.

Crossing
the
Water
. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Johnny
Panic
and
the
Bible
of
Dreams
,
Short
Stories
,
Prose
and
Diary
Excerpts
. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.

The
Journals
of
Sylvia
Plath
, ed. Frances McCullough. New York: Dial Press, 1982.

Letters
Home
by
Sylvia
Plath
,
Correspondence
1950
-
1963
, ed. Aurelia Schober Plath. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

Winter
Trees
. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

SECONDARY

Collections
of
Essays
on
Sylvia
Plath’s
Work

Because of the great number of essays and books on Sylvia Plath’s work, I have limited this listing to items
not
covered by Lane and Stevens,
Sylvia
Plath
:
A
Bibliography
. The five collections of essays on Plath’s work listed below are the places for beginning readers to start; each contains valuable material, most of it not available elsewhere.

Ariel
Ascending
,
Writings
About
Sylvia
Plath
, ed. Paul Alexander. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. Includes new and reprinted essays about both the person and the work.

The
Art
of
Sylvia
Plath
,
A
Symposium
, ed. Charles Newman (reprinted from
Tri
-
Quarterly
). Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1970. Includes writings by Plath, a bibliography of secondary material, and essays on both the person and the poetry.

Critical
Essays
on
Sylvia
Plath
, ed. Linda W. Wagner. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. Includes essays and reviews.

Sylvia
Plath
,
New
Views
on
the
Poetry
, ed. Gary Lane. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1979. Largely new essays on Plath’s poetry and fiction.

Sylvia
Plath
:
The
Woman
and
the
Work
, ed. Edward Butscher. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977. Includes largely new essays on both Plath and her writing.

ADDITIONAL SECONDARY SOURCES

Andreasen, Nancy C.
The
Broken
Brain
,
The
Biological
Revolution
in
Psychiatry
. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.

Atkinson, Michael. “After Twelve Years, Plath Without Tears: A Look Back at ‘Lady Lazarus,’” A
Book
of
Rereadings
in
Recent
American
Poetry
-
30
Essays
, ed. Greg Kuzma. Lincoln, Neb.: Pebble Press, 1979.

Auerbach, Nina.
Woman
and
the
Demon
. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982.

Axelrod, Steven Gould. “The Mirror and the Shadow: Plath’s Poetics of Self-Doubt,”
Contemporary
Literature
, 26 (Fall 1985), 286-301.

Banner, Lois W.
American
Beauty
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.

Bennett, Paula.
My
Life
a
Loaded
Gun
,
Female
Creativity
and
Feminist
Poetics
. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.

Berman, Jeffrey.
The
Talking
Cure
:
Literary
Representations
of
Psychoanalysis
. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1985.

Bernard, Caroline King.
Sylvia
Plath
. Boston: Twayne, 1978.

Besdine, M. “Jocasta Complex, Mothering and Women Geniuses,”
Psychoanalytic
Review
, 58 (1973), 51-74.

Biller, H. B. and S. D. Weiss. “The Father-Daughter Relationship and the Personality Development of the Female,”
Journal
of
Genetic
Psychology
, 116 (1970), 79-93.

Bollobas, Eniko. “Woman
and
Poet? Conflicts in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton,”
The
Origins
and
Originality
of
American Culture
, ed. Tibor Frank. Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1984, 375-83.
Bradford
,
The
(Wellesley, Mass.), 1947-50. SP co-editor, Vol. 6, 1949-50.

Broe, Mary Lynn.
Protean
Poetic
,
The
Poetry
of
Sylvia
Plath
. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1980.

… “A Subtle Psychic Bond: The Mother Figure in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry,”
The
Lost
Tradition
:
Mothers
and
Daughters
in
Literature
, ed. Cathy N. Davidson and E. M. Broner. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980, 217-30.

Bundtzen, Lynda K.
Plath’s
Incarnations
:
Woman
and
the
Creative
Process
. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1983.

Chodorow, Nancy.
The
Reproduction
of
Mothering
,
Psychoanalysis
and
the
Sociology
of
Gender
. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978.

…. and Susan Contratto, “The Fantasy of the Perfect Mother,”
Rethinking
the
Family
:
Some
Feminist
Questions
, ed. Barrie Thorne with Marilyn Yalom. New York: Londman, 1982, 54-71.

Christ, Carol.
Diving
Deep
and
Surfacing
:
Women
Writers
on
Spiritual
Quest
. Boston: Beacon, 1980.

Cox, C. B. “
Critical
Quarterly
—
twenty
-
five
years,”
Critical
Quarterly
, 26 (Spring and Summer, 1984), 3-20.