1956-1963
Plath, back at Cambridge and not too happy with the English winter, began falling ill and sinking into a depression. She suffered from a splinter in her eye (subject of the poem "The Eye-Mote") and along with a cold & flu, began to think she would not conquer Cambridge. On 25 February Plath met with a psychiatrist named Dr Davy and in her Journal entry for that day expressed anger at Sassoon. At the ripe age of 23 Plath really needed someone to love and to love her. To be 23 and single in 1953 was considered to be over-ripe. That afternoon after the meeting with Dr Davy, Plath bought a copy of the Saint Botolph's Review and read impressive poems by E Lucas Myers and more impressive poems by a man called Ted Hughes. Plath was told of a party that evening celebrating the publication of this new literary review (and what would turn out to be the only ever issue) to be held at Falcon Yard.
It is probably the best-known meeting of two great minds this century. Plath walked into the room with a date named Hamish and quickly began enquiring as to Hughes' whereabouts. She found him out, recited some of his poems, which in the few hours since first reading them had memorized. According to her Journals and Letters, they were dancing and stamping and yelling and drinking and then he kissed her hard on the neck and she bit Hughes on the cheek, and he bled. No matter what sort of hyperbole was used in the retelling of their meeting, it was dramatic and life changing. Hughes' voice boomed like the Thunder of God, and his Yorkshire accent was deep and intense. She wrote the poem "Pursuit" to him and in the poem she calls him a panther. It is also in this poem that Plath announces with some clairvoyance that "One day I'll have my death of him." Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes both found influences in W.B Yeats, Dylan Thomas and D. H. Lawrence, to name a few. Hughes read these poets as well and also Hopkins, Blake, Chaucer and Shakespeare. There is no doubt that Hughes helped Plath achieve the major poetic voice she would later find. The voice might have always been in Plath, the talent and drive was certainly there.
That spring Plath suffered much heartache and confusion over her love for scrawny Richard Sassoon, who had asked Plath not to contact him until he figured out what he wanted (he was in love with at least two other women). Sylvia traveled to London for one night before going to Paris for her Spring Break and she stayed with Ted Hughes at his flat at 18 Rugby Street. They made hectic love all night long and then she traveled to Paris in search of Sassoon to find some resolution. It could not have been any clearer that Sassoon was far away from Paris and did not want to be found. Sylvia desperate and hurt frequented places she and Sassoon had spent time in, met several other friends from Cambridge, some strangers and finally had a bad time of traveling through Italy with her ex-flame Gordon Lameyer. Sylvia received at least one love letter from Hughes, which lifted her. She flew from Rome to London to be with Hughes.
They married on Bloomsday 1956 (16 June) at the Church of St. George-the-Martyr at Queen's Square, Bloomsbury, just a few paces from the offices of Faber & Faber. Aurelia was there to witness. They spent the summer writing and no doubt getting to know each other better in Benidorm, Spain. The couple also spent some time in Yorkshire with Ted's parents, who knew nothing of the wedding.
In the fall, Plath continued studying at Cambridge. At some point Plath moved in to 55 Eltisley Avenue with Ted Hughes. Ironically, some relatives of Richard Sassoon lived above them. The two poets would both study, cook, eat, take walks and learn to live with each other. Ted Hughes took a job teaching at a local boys school. This would be one of his most enjoyable jobs. Plath and Hughes made arrangements to go to America in the summer of 1957.
In early 1957 Ted Hughes won first prize in the New York Poetry Center contests judged by Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender for his book The Hawk in the Rain. His publishers would be Harper & Row and they would bring the book out that summer. Plath had been writing some very good poems this English winter, among them "Sow," "The Thin People," and "Hardcastle Crags." On 12 March 1957 Plath was offered a teaching position in Freshman English at Smith College.
The dark English winter dissolved into a studious spring for Plath as she had to read for her exams at Cambridge. She labored day in and day out, whilst being a housewife and typing and retyping manuscripts of Ted's poems, on all ages of Tragedy. At one point, Plath was reported to have spent morning to night at the Library reading. She was also writing poems too, like "All the Dead Dears," from this library blitz. Plath also submitted a manuscript of poems to the English faculty called "Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea," which had been all but lost until some time around 1967/8.
Plath and Hughes went to Yorkshire after Plath finished her exams to spend time with Ted's family until they sailed for North America. They took daily walks on the moors. This would be the end of Plath's formal studying and education as a 'student.' They read proofs of The Hawk in the Rain; Sylvia cooked for everyone. On 20 June the Hugheses sailed out of Southampton on the Queen Elizabeth and arrived in New York a week later.
On 29 June 1957 Mrs. Plath arranged a big garden party for her daughter and son-in-law. Over sixty people were there for the unveiling of Plath's Yorkshire man. After the pow-wow the Hugheses spent seven weeks on Cape Cod at Eastham, sunbathing, writing, fishing, etc. Sylvia's book "Two Lovers" was rejected from the Yale Series of Younger Poets that August. She had been writing in the Ladies' Home Journal style and hoping to have stories published but to this point unsuccessfully. It was here, on the Cape, that Sylvia experienced the "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor," which would become her first New Yorker acceptance.
In late August Plath & Hughes moved to Northampton & to Smith. They lived at 337 Elm Street, just up the road from Smith College, next to Child's Memorial Park. Sylvia immediately began panicking about teaching. She also immediately found it to be more exhausting than she thought. Among her frustrations were the lack of time for her own writing in any form — Journals, poems, stories, letters — and more importantly the teachers and other faculty Plath once so admired as a student turned out to be not so great as colleagues. Plath had extreme paranoia about her teaching ability and showed this face to nearly no one except her Journal and later, possibly, to her psychiatrist. No one on the faculty that year at Smith could sense the terrible feelings eating at Plath's inner mind. By November Plath and Hughes had made the tough but crucial decision to leave academia and turn to a life of writing. In a letter to Warren, Sylvia wrote "Every time you make a choice you have to sacrifice something." Still the year passed and she had moments of assuredness, and moments when her mind became doubting and frail.
The Hugheses met the Merwins that winter. The poet W.S. Merwin had written a glowing review of Hughes' book that summer in the New York Times Book Review, and the meeting proved strong. It was the first of many times the poets met, and thus also began a lifelong friendship. That winter Plath suffered a severe illness and was all but bed-ridden for much of the holiday season.
The new year, 1958, was also stressful for their relationship. At some point they moved into a flat at 9 Willow Street, Beacon Hill, in Boston. They were to dedicate all their efforts to writing and publications. Plath took a part-time job at Massachusetts General Hospital, and this is linked to the creation of "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams," one of her best short stories. She also began sitting in on Robert Lowell's seminar writing course at Boston University, where she met George Starbuck and Anne Sexton. Free from the restrictions of teaching, Plath found time to write and write and slowly, she began working her way to better poetry.
1959 brought travel to Plath and Hughes. In the summer they took Aurelia's car and drove out west, through National Parks and big cities. They had decided to move back to England. Plath became pregnant and Hughes wanted the child to be born on his native soil. That autumn the two writers went to Yaddo, a writer's colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. This is where Plath finally had a breakthrough. After getting accustomed to the grounds of the estate Plath was able to mix personal experience with the current landscape at her disposal. The poems were inspired by what she was seeing: "Dark Wood, Dark Water" and "The Manor Garden". She had been reading seriously and closely the poetry of Theodore Roethke. The most notable poem to come from this is her seven-parted "Poem for a Birthday," and in particular, the seventh poem, "The Stones." In December they sailed again for England.
The couple spent Christmas at Heptonstall. Plath found it difficult to be there, and felt that Olwyn Hughes, Ted's sister, didn't particularly want her company. Bitter Fame tells the chronology and shows the tension between the two women very well. In January 1960, they settled in London at 3 Chalcot Square, Primrose Hill. In April, their first child, Frieda Rebecca, was born. William Heinemann, Ltd. published Plath's first collection of poetry, The Colossus & Other Poems in October. It received decent reviews. With the publication of the book and the birth of Frieda, Sylvia found very little time to write. According the dates in the Collected Poems, Plath wrote only 12 poems in 1960. Among them, though, the wonderful "You're" and "Candles," and the eerie "The Hanging Man." There are other poems that Plath began working on, such as "Queen Mary's Rose Garden." This poem can be found in the 'Notes: 1960' section of the Collected Poems.
Sometime in latter 1960 Plath became pregnant again and in February she had a miscarriage. She also had an appendectomy, which left her stitched & hospitalized for a number of weeks. The surgery was performed at St. Pancras Hospital. It was the experience of being hospitalized that charged Plath in a writing frenzy that produced "Tulips" and "In Plaster" and also gave her momentum on writing a novel. According to Bitter Fame, the only authorized full biography, Sylvia Plath began writing The Bell Jar sometime in March 1961 and she worked like mad for the next seventy days on the novel. The experience probably threatened Plath, or at least brought back many memories of August 1953 when she was institutionalized. Plath felt the power of childbearing to be enormously inspirational. It no doubt led her to creativity — if she could create children, why not poems as well? Whilst at the hospital Sylvia received a first reading contract with a check for $100 from The New Yorker. This meant that The New Yorker would read all of Plath's new poems and have first choice at accepting them for publication.
In 1961 Plath completed only 22 poems. Among these are "Morning Song," "Tulips," "In Plaster," "Barren Woman," and "Parliament Hill Fields," "The Surgeon at 2 a.m.," "I am vertical," "Heavy Woman" and "Insomniac," which won first prize at the 1962 Cheltenham Festival Poetry Competition. These are all pretty much tied to her miscarriage and her stay in hospital after having her appendix removed. "Tulips" was written within ten days of Sylvia leaving the hospital and is, according to Ted Hughes, Plath's first spontaneous poem; the first poem really written without laboriously thumbing the pages of her beaten thesaurus. Sylvia Plath's mother came to England in mid-June. In July the Hugheses took a holiday in France — a well-documented & disastrous stay with the Merwins (see Bitter Fame). In August she both completed her novel and moved to North Tawton, Devon, to a once-manor house owned by Sir Robert and Lady Arundell. Court Green had nine rooms, an attic, and a cellar.
Plath and Hughes needed to pass on their current London flat. They advertised in the papers and a young Canadian poet and his German-Russian wife seemed best. The young couple was David and Assia Wevill.
In October Plath began & completed one of her most elegant poems, "The Moon and the Yew Tree." It began as an exercise Hughes had assigned to her, and I read somewhere that it's far from where Hughes had thought the poem would go! It is really the first poem that is just plain brilliant. Plath is looking out of her window and she 'simply cannot see where there is to get to.' She looks to the moon and the to yew tree for the answers, but she finds only 'blackness and silence.' It is a poem that gets Plath started in many ways. She's trapped in this poem, cannot see in what direction to head. She needs this direction. But what Plath didn't know when this poem was written is that she had taken off.
On 09 November 1961 Plath won a $2000 Saxton Grant to work on her novel. On 17 January 1962 Plath bore Hughes a son, Nicholas Farrar. Somehow with two children, writing and cleaning up Court Green, Sylvia began writing much poetry sometime around April. These are the true Ariel poems, and what would lead to the best poems of her life. Plath wrote the wonderful "Elm" and a series of poems expressing concern for Hughes' treatment of animals, "The Rabbit Catcher" being the most famous.
May and June seems to have solidified all the troubles the Hugheses would have. Sylvia became increasingly suspicious that Ted was having an affair. She wrote the poem "Apprehensions" in May. In June Aurelia came to visit and meet Nicholas. Whilst Aurelia was in England Sylvia found out for certain of Ted's infidelity. It seems to be a mixed blessing that Aurelia Plath was there. Sylvia was most certainly embarrassed and angry, but I suspect it was good that her mother was there to help her out. One of Sylvia's problems with living in Devon (and in England for that matter) is that she had very few friends, which meant she wrote many letters to her girlfriends back in the US.
In September Hughes and Plath went to Ireland for a holiday to mend their relationship, but within a day or two of being there, Hughes left and went to London; Plath returned alone to Devon. Late in the month they decided for a legal separation, though most of Plath's friends and family were in favor of a divorce.
In October Plath went on a poetic rampage! She wrote over 25 poems during the month and all of them were excellent. Among them are "Stings," "Wintering," "The Jailer," "Lesbos," "Lady Lazarus," "Daddy," "Ariel," "The Applicant," "The Detective," "Cut" and "Nick and the Candlestick". Most of them would be published in 1965 as Ariel. The best biography one can read are the poems themselves, in order they were written. The high period of productivity occurred very early in the morning, before the children rose. Plath would begin somewhere around four in the morning and write until the children woke. Her letters home during this period also lend a different sort of view. At least one Journal has been 'lost' and one destroyed. The publication on 3 April 2000 of the unedited Journals of Sylvia Plath covers the period of 1950-1962, with the later entries being character sketches and possible descriptions for future novels and short stories. Beginning in June 1962 Plath took meticulous notes on people, houses, feelings, etc. This certainly helped her creative output and range of emotion in the poems. This poetic blitzkrieg continued into November with strong poems like "The Couriers," "Getting There," "Gulliver," "Death & Co." and "Winter Trees." The birth cry was out.
During the month of November Plath was looking for a flat in London. She was fond of the Primrose Hill area, where she and Ted lived when Frieda was born. She found a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road. It is the flat that W.B. Yeats once lived in and she considered it a great sign, a sign of great things to come. Plath and Hughes wore married faces in an attempt to get Plath the lease on the bigger of the two flats, comprising of the top two floors. A man called Trevor Thomas had also applied for the top two floors, for himself and his sons. Plath and Hughes paid several years rent up front, and the deal was done. The ordeal of securing the flat and starting to pack up Court Green was responsible for a less productive poetic month. She and the children moved into the flat in December. Plath finished only two poems in the month of December. With the onset of a terrible winter and Plath spending many hours painting and labouring, it's no surprise. Sylvia was still sending poems off, as was usual for her, but was finding publishers not too eager to accept these new, powerful poems. It is as though the publishers somehow were not ready for poems of such magnitude! Plath was mostly alone, although some friends did visit and she was out when possible. Plath and her children were without a telephone and the heat was poor or non-existent. The walls were painted white. The critic A Alvarez did come by the apartment on Christmas Eve but could only stay a short while as he had other places to go. Alvarez was the first critic to notice her poems and has been highly influential in Plath studies since — a very trusted voice.
The winter that would follow would be recorded as one of the coldest to date. Pipes froze and there was plenty of ice and snow on the ground. To read a faithful, detailed account of the winter please read Plath's "Snow Blitz" a work included in Johnny Panic. The Bell Jar was published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas on 14 January 1963 and received mostly positive reviews. An American publisher had not been interested with the story, thinking it either too personal or a case study. Reviews were not as positive as she hoped. Though she called the novel a 'pot-boiler' to nearly everyone who knew of it, its acceptance did weigh heavily on her faith. There were a good number of reviews that were published after her death, less than a month after the first reviews appeared. Sylvia had been writing some short stories & non-fiction pieces at this time. She began writing in what was another outburst of poetry late in the month, completing in 15 days twelve new poems, all in a brand new voice. This continued with more fine poems in February. It had taken Plath less than two months to begin a new collection of poetry, all in a new voice. This voice was softer and less angry; very somber, as though she knew she was nearing the end — poems like "Mystic," "Sheep in Fog," "Kindness," "Balloons," "Gigolo," "Totem," "Child," "The Munich Mannequins," "Paralytic," "Words," "Contusion," and "Edge," her last poem.
The public does not know whether or not she began any poems in the last six days of her life. It is not known what her Journals say or what is in many of the letters she might have written. We only know it was cold, the children were sick and Sylvia was severely depressed.
In the cold blue morning of 11 February 1963, Plath took her own life. She placed her head in a gas oven after completely sealing the rooms between herself and her children. She left a note for the man who lived downstairs, Mr Trevor Thomas, to call her doctor. The gas seeped through the floor and knocked Mr Thomas out cold for several hours. An au pair girl was to arrive at nine o'clock that morning to help Plath with the care of her children. Arriving promptly at 9, the au pair could not get into the flat. It has been suggested that Plath's timing & planning of this suicide attempt was too precise, too coincidental. She had previously asked Mr Thomas what time he would be leaving. Plath must have turned the gas on at a time when Mr Thomas should have been waking & beginning his day. A note was placed that read "Call Dr Horder" and left his phone number. These measures were too time-sensitive and could have saved Plath's life if events followed her logic. Living apart from her husband Ted Hughes, living in one of the worst English winters on record, this was Sylvia Plath's last cry for help.
Peter Keating Steinberg — January 1999, revised February/March 2000
Sources
Rough Magic, Paul Alexander
Sylvia Plath, Revised, Caroline King Barnard Hall
The Death & Life of Sylvia Plath, Ronald Haymen
A Closer Look at Ariel, Nancy Hunter-Steiner
Bitter Fame, Anne Stevenson
Sylvia Plath, Linda Wagner-Martin
© 2003, Peter K. Steinberg