… Is it because the avenue of memory is so painful that I do not walk down it, gray, laden with sorrow, vanished beauties and dreams? The skies and rooftops of Paris, the green Seine, the frieze of the British Museum in London. Once, once I began, all would be well. One story: shall I set a year to work? Then, if all is not reached, a year after that? One story, and I would have begun. I flit now from one subject to another: the farm? the Mayos? Spain? Paris? I must choose one. The only stories I can bear to reread are “The Wishing Box,” “Johnny Panic,” “The Mummy” and “The Tattooist.” All the others—the Oxbow, the Cornucopia one, the Fifty-Ninth Bear, and Sweetie Pie and the Hospital one—are duller than tears. Begin, begin.
October 10, Saturday.… The New Yorker accepted the Winter’s Tale poem. Felt pleased, especially after Harper’s rejection.
Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.
Am reading Elizabeth Bishop with great admiration. Her fine originality, always surprising, never rigid, flowing, juicier than Marianne Moore, who is her godmother.…
When will I break into a new line of poetry? Feel trite. If only I could get one good story. I dream too much, work too little. My drawing is gone to pot, yet I must remember I always do bad drawings at the first.
German and French would give me self-respect, why don’t I act on this?
October 13, Tuesday. Very depressed today. Unable to write a thing. Menacing gods. I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers’ beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass. Caught between the hope and promise of my work—the one or two stories that seem to catch something, the one or two poems that build a little colored island of words—and the hopeless gap between that promise, and the real world of other people’s poems and stories and novels. My shaping spirit of imagination is far from me. At least I have begun my German. Painful, as if “part were cut out of my brain.” I am of course at fault. Anesthetizing myself again, and pretending nothing is there. There is the curse of this vanity. My inability to lose myself in a character, a situation. Always myself, myself. What good does it do to be published, if I am producing nothing? If only a group of people were more important to me than the idea of a Novel, I might begin a novel. Little artificial stories that get nothing of the feeling, the drama even of life. When they should be realer, more intense than life. And I am prepared for nothing else. Am dead already. Pretend an interest in astrology, botany, which I never follow up. When I go home I must teach myself the tarot pack, the stars, German conversation. Add French to my studying. This comes so natural to some people. Ted is my salvation. He is so rare, so special, how could anyone else stand me! Of course, otherwise I might get a Ph.D., teach in New York, or work at a career. It is hard, with our unplanned drifting, to do much in this way.
Another thing that horrifies me is the way I forget: I once knew Plato well, James Joyce, and so on and so on. If one doesn’t apply knowledge, doesn’t review, keep it up, it sinks into a Sargasso and encrusts with barnacles. A job that would plunge me in other lives would be a help. A reporter, a sociologist, anything. Maybe in England I will have some luck. They are, in a sense, less “professional” than we are here. More open to the amateur. At least I think so.
I can’t reconcile myself to the small time. How easy it is to get ten dollars here and there from The Christian Science Monitor for poems and drawings. Two poems accepted this morning: my “exercises” on Yaddo and Magnolia Shoals. Yet I hunger after nebulous vision of success. Publication of my poetry book, my children’s book. As if the old god of love I hunted by winning prizes in childhood has grown more mammoth and unsatiable still. Must stop this. Grow enamored of the orange toadstool, the blue mountain, and feel them solid, make something of them. Keep away from editors and writers: make a life outside the world of professionals from which I work.
… Take a lesson from Ted. He works and works. Rewrites, struggles, loses himself. I must work for independence. Make him proud. Keep my sorrows and despairs to myself. Work and work for self-respect: study language, read avidly. Work, not expect miracles to follow on a hastily written nothing.
October 19, 1959, Monday. Most of my trouble is a recession of my old audacity, unself-conscious brazenness. A self-hypnotic state of boldness and vigor annihilates my lugubrious oozings of top-of-the-head matter. I tried Ted’s “exercise”: deep-breathing, concentration on stream-of-conscious objects, these last days, and wrote two poems that pleased me. One a poem to Nicholas,w and one the old father-worship subject. But different. Weirder. I see a picture, a weather, in these poems.… The main thing is to get rid of the idea [that] what I write now is for the old book. That soggy book. So I have three poems for the new, temporarily called The Colossus and Other Poems.
Involvement with Mavis Gallant. Her novel on a daughter-mother relation, the daughter committing suicide. A novel, brazen, arrogant, would be a solution to my days, to a year of life. If I did not short-circuit by sitting judgment as I wrote, always rejecting before I open my mouth. The main concern: a character who is not myself—that becomes a stereotype, mournful, narcissistic.
A beautiful blue day. Pure soul weather. Frosty, and my Harcourt form rejection. Ted says: You are so negative. Gets cross, desperate. I am my own master. I am a fool to be jealous of phantoms. Should maunder in my own way. These three new poems are heartening. Yesterday not so good—too linked to the prose vision of the garden in my Mummy story. Must not wait for mail for it ruins the day. Work without vision of world’s judgment. I shall do it yet.
Another thing: to stop concern only with own “position” in world. Another phantom. I am. That is enough. I have a good way of looking I can develop if only I forget about an audience.
Ted is the ideal, the one possible person.
Worked on German for two days, then let up when I wrote poems. Must keep on with it. It is hard. So are most things worth doing.
Immerse self in characters, feelings of others—not to look at them through plate glass. Get to the bottom of deceptions, emotions.
The florid cinnamon-scented oil-colored world of St.-John Perse.
Old wish to get reward for elimination. That is evident. Old rivalry with brother. All men are my brothers. And competition is engrained in the world. Separate baby and poem from decay and rot. They are made, living, good-in-themselves, and very keepable. Children might humanize me. But I must rely on them for nothing. Fable of children changing existence and character as absurd as fable of marriage doing it. Here I am, the same old sourdough. Eight years till I am thirty-five; I should work in that time: stories, New Yorker or otherwise. A novel. A children’s book. With joy and renaissance enthusiasm. It is possible. Up to me.
October 22, Thursday. A walk today before writing, after breakfast. The sheer color of the trees: caves of yellow, red plumes. Deep breaths of still frosty air. A purging, a baptism. I think at times it is possible to get close to the world, to love it. Warm in bed with Ted I feel animal solaces. What is life? For me it is so little ideas. Ideas are tyrants to me: the ideas of my jealous, queen-bitch superego: what I should, what I ought.
Ambitious seeds of a long poem made up of separate sections: Poem on [her] birthday. To be a dwelling on madhouse, nature: meanings of tools, greenhouses, florists shops, tunnels, vivid and disjointed. An adventure. Never over. Developing. Rebirth. Despair. Old women. Block it out.
This paragraph is the origin of Plath’s poem “Blue Moles.”
Two dead moles in the road. One about ten yards from the other. Dead, chewed of their juices, caskets of shapeless smoke-blue fur, with the white, clawlike hands, the human palms, and the little pointy corkscrew noses sticking up. They fight to the death Ted says. Then a fox chewed them.
The shed of the hydraulic ram. Black, glistening with wet: gouts of water. And the spiderwebs, loops and luminous strings, holding the whole thing up to the rafters. Magic, against principles of physics.
No mail. Who am I? Why should a poet be a novelist? Why not?
Dream, shards of which remain: my father come to life again. My mother having a little son: my confusion: this son of mine is a twin to her son. The uncle of an age with his nephew. My brother of an age with my child. Oh, the tangles of that old bed.
Drew a surgical picture of the greenhouse stove yesterday and a few flowerpots. An amazing consolation. Must get more intimate with it. That greenhouse is a mine of subjects. Watering cans, gourds and squashes and pumpkins. Beheaded cabbages inverted from the rafters, wormy purple outer leaves. Tools: rakes, hoes, brooms, shovels. The superb identity, selfhood of things.
To be honest with what I know and have known. To be true to my own weirdnesses. Record. I used to be able to convey feelings, scenes of youth; life so complicated now. Work at it.
October 23, Friday. Yesterday: an exercise begun, in grimness, turning into a fine, new thing: first of a series of madhouse poems. October in the toolshed. Roethke’s influence, yet mine. Ted’s criticisms absolutely right. Mentioned publishing poetry to [Malcolm] Cowley last night: his wry, tragic grimace told me: he’s seen my book, or heard of it, and rejected or will reject it. Dream of Luke’s painting: florid, elegant ballade landscape in silvered blues and greens of peasant Corsican nativity with Adam and Eve leaning out of the long grass to look. A luminous pink-white light on the scalloped and easy leaves, round caverns of pale blue shadow. Fine, welcoming letter from an editor at Heinemann on seeing my London Magazine poems, which begin the magazine: hope springs. England offers new comforts. I could write a novel there. So I say, so I say. Without this commercial American superego. My tempo is British. Wet, wet walk with Ted. Blue drippings, dulled green lakes, dim yellow reflections.
November 1, Sunday. A wet, fresh air, gray skies. All the colors of the last weeks dulled to smoke-purple and blunt umbers. Dreamed several nights ago of having a five-months (born at five months?) old blond baby boy named Dennis riding, facing me, my hips, a heavy sweet-smelling child. The double amazement: that he was so beautiful and healthy and so little trouble. Ted claims this is a rebirth of my deep soul. Auspicious. Dreamed last night a confused dream of two youths, juvenile delinquents, on a dark lawn in front of our old Winthrop house, throwing our saucepan of milk out. In a fury, I flew at one and actually started tearing him apart with my teeth and hands. The other had said he was going into the house, and I thought he would ruin it and hurt Mother. (Triggered by seeing the children out for Halloween last night, the gang of adolescents?)
I wonder about the poems I am doing. They seem moving, interesting, but I wonder how deep they are. The absence of a tightly reasoned and rhythmed logic bothers me. Yet frees me …
Feel unlike writing anything today. A horror that I am really at bottom uninterested in people: the reason I don’t write stories. Only a few psychological fantasias. Know very little about lives of others. Polly’s ghost. The old superintendent standing at the foot of his bed in full moonlight holding a baby. She later finding a picture of him in same posture, holding a lamb.x
Get out big botany book at home. What an inertia has overcome me: a sense of fatality: the difficulty of learning out of school.
Ted’s dreams about killing animals: bears, donkeys, kittens. Me or the baby? Starting to type his play. Ill-advised, said yesterday wished it were realistic. Of course, I want a Broadway hit in my cheap surface mind, an easy street. He has revised and really improved the children’s book Meet My Folks! I feel we must find a publisher here, yet the macabre is so outside our tradition. There again, the real world must give the wonder. My Bed Book will probably fail because of no human, or child, interest—no plot.…
Wednesday, November 4. Paralysis again. How I waste my days. I feel a terrific blocking and chilling go through me like anesthesia. I wonder, will I ever be rid of Johnny Panic? Ten years from my successful Seventeen [publication], and a cold voice says: What have you done, what have you done? When I take an equally cold look, I see that I have studied, thought, and somehow not done anything more than teach a year: my mind lies fallow. I don’t look forward to a life of reading, and rereading, with no mentor or pupil but myself. I have written one or two unpleasant psychological stories: “Johnny Panic” and “The Mummy,” which might well justify printing, a light tour de force about the tattooist, and that is all since Sunday at the Mintons’ seven years ago. Where is that fine, free arrogant careless rapture? A cold mizzle of despair settles down on me when I try to think even of a story.
Miraculously I wrote seven poems in my Poem for a Birthday sequence, and the two little ones before it, “The Manor Garden” and “The Colossus,” I find colorful and amusing. But my manuscript of my book seems dead to me. So far off, so far gone. It has almost no chance of finding a publisher: just sent it out to the seventh, and unless Dudley Fitts relents this year and gives me the Yale award, which I just missed last year, there is nothing for it but to try to publish it in England and forget prizes, which might well be a good thing. I think I should try the Yales, therefore hope I won’t get it accepted as an entry to the Lamont, which I have even less chance of winning—that would cancel both. Comparing it to [Philip] Booth’s book, [Ned] O’Gorman’s book, etc., and Starbuck’s, I do feel I am not without merit.
I shall perish if I can write about no one but myself. Where is my old bawdy vigor and interest in the world around me? I am not meant for this monastery living. Find always traces of passive dependence: on Ted, on people around me. A desire even while I write poems about it, to have someone decide my life, tell me what to do, praise me for doing it. I know this is absurd. Yet what do I do about it?
If I can’t build up pleasures in myself: seeing and learning about painting, old civilizations, birds, trees, flowers, French, German—what shall I do? My wanting to write books annihilates the original root impulse that would have me bravely and blunderingly working on them. When Johnny Panic sits on my heart, I can’t be witty, or original, or creative.
… Writing is my health; if I could once break through my cold self-consciousness and enjoy things for their own sake, not for what presents and acclaim I may receive. Dr. B. was right: I avoid doing things, because if I do not do them, I can’t be said to fail at them. A coward’s custard.…
Pleasant dream of return to London: renting a room with the bed in a garden of daffodils, waking to soil smells and bright yellow flowers.
November 7, 1959, Saturday. Despair. Impasse. I had a vision last night of our swimming in the Salt Lake: a solid beautiful thing. I thought: this light, this sensation is part of no story. It is a thing in itself and worthy of being worked out in words. If I could do that, get back the old joy, it would not matter what became of it. The problem is not my success, but my joy. A dead thing.
My Mummy story came back from New World Writing with a mimeographed rejection. It is a very bitter, often melodramatic story, simply an account. I have built up my old brother-rivalry praise-seeking impulses to something amounting to a great stone god-block. Ten years after my first talent-burst on the world, when everything flowed supplely to my touch. I could create the Mintonsy seven years ago because I forgot myself in them.
Dangerous to be so close to Ted day in day out. I have no life separate from his, am likely to become a mere accessory. Important to take German lessons, go out on my own, think, work on my own. Lead separate lives. I must have a life that supports me inside. This place a kind of terrible nunnery for me. I hate our room: the sterile white of it, the beds filling the whole place. Loved the little crowded Boston apartment, even though J. Panic visited me there.
What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle-age. Instead of working at writing, I freeze in dreams, unable to take disillusion of rejections. Absurd. I am inclined to go passive, and let Ted be my social self. Simply because we are never apart. Now, for example: the several things I can do apart from him: study German, write, read, walk alone in the woods or go to town. How many couples could stand to be so together? The minute we get to London I must strike out on my own. I’d be better off teaching than writing a couple of mediocre poems a year, a few mad, self-centered stories. Reading, studying, “making your own mind” all by oneself is just not my best way. I need the reality of other people, work, to fulfill myself. Must never become a mere mother and housewife. Challenge of baby when I am so unformed and unproductive as a writer. A fear for the meaning and purpose of my life. I will hate a child that substitutes itself for my own purpose: so I must make my own. Ted is weary of my talk of astrology and tarot and wanting to learn, and then not bothering to work on my own. I’m tired of it too. And tired of the terrific drifting uncertainty of our lives. Which, I suppose, from his point of view, is not at all uncertain, for his vocation of writing is so much stronger than mine.
My poems pall. A jay swallows my crumbs on the wet porch. My head is a batallion of fixes. I don’t even dare open Yeats, Eliot—the old fresh joys—for the pain I have remembering my first bright encounters. Less able to lose myself. And myself is the more suited for quick losing.
Independent, self-possessed M. S. Ageless. Bird-watching before breakfast. What does she find for herself? Chess games. My old admiration for the strong, if lesbian, woman. The relief of limitation as a price for balance and surety.…
November 11, Wednesday. I only write here when I am at wits’ end, in a cul-de-sac. Never when I am happy. As I am today.…
Felt warm in my tweeds, pleasantly fat-stomached. The baby is a pleasure to dream on. My panics are seldom. If only I can get a doctor I trust, firm, capable and kind, and a hospital where I will know what is going on, I shall be all right. It can’t last much more than 24 hours. And if the baby is sound and healthy.…
Woodpile: cut limbs, heartwood pink as salmon, great fraying shards of bark. Textures of rough and smooth.
I am eager to leave here. 11 weeks is too much. Ted loves it though. If I were writing a novel it would be okay. But even then, I like the bother and stimulus of ordinary life, friends, plays, town-walking, etc. Dry grasses and blue woodsmoke sailing by my window. I’d like to work in London. A novel, a novel. I’d send it to a British publisher first. Feel my first book of poems should be published, however limited. I wrote a good poem this week on our walk Sunday to the burnt-out spa. A second book poem. How it consoles me, the idea of a second book with these new poems: “The Manor Garden,” “The Colossus,” “The Burnt-out Spa,” the seven Birthday poems, and perhaps “Medallion,” if I don’t stick it in my present book. If I were accepted by a publisher for the Lamont, I would feel a need to throw all my new poems in to bolster the book. For the Yalesz I do not feel such a need. Well, three months till the Yales open.
Excited about practical matters of packing and traveling, seeing people. I hate our room here: white, surgical, a hospital. Have, in two months, written three stories, none very satisfactory, about ten or twelve good new poems, a bad, impossible children’s book. When I am off alone I become more inhuman. Need width of interests, stimulus, demands. Distractions, yes. The fight to go to two good movies here ridiculous: there is the big station wagon they won’t use. To live in city or country. I am excited about England. When I think of living in America, I just can’t imagine where: hate suburbs, country too lonely, city too expensive and full of dog turds. I can imagine living in London, in a quiet square, taking children to the fine parks. Moving to country right outside, still being near. Every day life begins anew.
November 12, Thursday. A note only. My optimism rises. No longer do I ask the impossible. I am happy with smaller things, and perhaps that is a sign, a clue.… Last night found out Lehmann accepted my story “This Earth Our Hospital.” Have changed the title to “The Daughters of Blossom Street.” A much better thing. This is satisfying. The story is amateurish in very many ways, but not too thin in texture. I’m putting my old things, the thin ones, out of circulation. Skipped back from the garage in the blue light of a fuzzy moon, a warmish, windy night. Finished the blue mole poem yesterday to our satisfaction. Every day is a renewed prayer that the god exists, that he will visit with increased force and clarity. I want to write about people, moving situations. If only I could combine the humorous verve of my two recently accepted stories with the serious prose style of the Mintons [story], I should be pleased.… If only I could break through my numb cold glibness that comes when I try to make a declarative sentence. Color it up, thicken it.
… Keep a notebook of physical events. My visit to the tattoo shop and my job at the hospital supplied me with two good stories. So should my Boston experience. If only I can go deep enough. A party at Agatha’s, Starbuck’s wife. The gardens. Oh, God, how good to get it all. Slowly, slowly catch the monkey. Small doses of acceptance help. Perhaps telling stories to children will help me do a few books there.…
… Last night … the girls: the elder, ageless, with dark, old-maidish bun, skinny, flat chested, short, with flat black shoes and a nondescript beige dress with maroon velvet belt.… Glasses, a bright, luminous face, a speech instructor: “Oh, Mr. Binkerd, the music sets such a mood!” The other, younger, arty, quite pretty with delicately heeled blue shoes, a loose fashionable hairdo, blue-shadowed eyes, glasses also, a stylish gray-blue sweater and skirt, a silver Mexican necklace, elaborate, in good taste. Sultry manner. Teaches weaving and jewelry making. May [Swenson] in the other room: freckled, in herself, a tough little nut. I imagined the situation of two lesbians: the one winning a woman with child from an apparently happy marriage. Why is it impossible to think of two women of middle-age living together without lesbianism the solution, the motive?
November 14, Saturday. A good walk this morning. Got up in time for breakfast at 8 and the mail came early as if to reward us. Warm blowy gray weather. Odd elation. Note this. Whenever we are about to move, this stirring and excitement comes, as if the old environment would keep the sludge and inertia of the self, and the bare new self slip shining into a better life.…
We walked out on the bland, sandy track. Pale purple and bluish hills melted in the gray distance. The black twiggy thickets of the bare treetops. Leaves rattled in the wind. A black bird flew up to a bow. Burnt corncobs, old corn stalks. A black flapping scarecrow on crossed staves made out of a man’s tattered coat and a pair of faded, whitened dungarees. Waved vacant arms.
Saw dogs, two, tongues hanging, exploring a copse of saplings and bracken. The yellow-brown, dessicated color of the land. Found cartridge shells. Fox tracks, deer prints in the soft sand. The green, brilliant underbed of the lakes. Molehills and tunnels webbing the Yaddo lawn. Felt into a hole, both ways, with my finger after breaking into the tunnel.
Wrote an exercise on mushrooms yesterday which Ted likes. And I do too. My absolute lack of judgment when I’ve written something: whether it’s trash or genius.
Exhausted today after several late nights. Fit to write nothing. Dreams last night troubled: Mother and Warren in puritanical, harsh, snoopy poses. I bit her arm (repeat of my biting the delinquent), and she was old, thin, ever-watchful. Warren discovering me about to bed with someone whose name was Partisan Review. Old shames and guilts.
But a sense of joy and eagerness at living in England. Partly, too, because of the recent hospitality my poems, and my story, have found there. Much closer to my mind.
November 15, Sunday. Have had a series of bad, sleepless nights. The coming unsettling? As a result, tired, without force, full of a sour lassitude. Late last night made the mistake of having coffee, thinking it would keep me awake for the movie. We didn’t go, and I lay in a morbid twit till the hollow dark of the morning, full of evil dreams of dying in childbirth in a strange hospital unable to see Ted, or having a blue baby, or a deformed baby, which they wouldn’t let me see.
My one salvation is to enter into other characters in stories: the only three stories I am prepared to see published are all told in first person. The thing is, to develop other first persons. My Beggars story a travesty: sentimental, stiff, without any interest at all. And the horror is that there was danger, interest. Slangy language is one way of breaking my drawing room inhibitions. Have I learned anything since college writing days? Only in poetry. There I have.
Ted’s good story on the caning. Very fine, very difficult. He advances, unencumbered by any fake image of what the world expects of him. Last night, consoling, holding me. Loving made my nerves melt and sleep. I woke drained, as after a terrible emotional crisis. Today am good for little. Submerged in reviews of reviews. How good is it to read other people? Of other people? Read their stories, their poems, not reviews. I am well away from the world of critics and professors. Must root in life itself. Yet Iris Murdoch has a brilliant professorial intellect operating in her work. Mesmerize myself into forgetting the waiting world. The IDEAS kill the little green shoots of the work itself. I have experienced love, sorrow, madness, and if I cannot make these experiences meaningful, no new experience will help me.
A bad day. A bad time. State of mind most important for work. A blithe, itchy eager state where the poem itself, the story itself is supreme.
In December the Hugheses left for England, where they planned to live in London. Frieda Rebecca was born at home in London in April 1960. Plath signed a contract with Heinemann for the publication of her first collection of poems, The Colossus, and the book was published in October. In early 1961 she suffered a miscarriage and underwent an appendectomy shortly thereafter—her notes on her stay in the hospital have survived as the following piece, “The Inmate.”
Monday, February 27, 1961. In Hospital. Still whole, I interest nobody. I am not among the cheerful smilers in plaster and bandages or the bubbling moaners behind the glass and pink wood partition. The sad, mustachioed doctor and his bright white starchy students pass me by. This is a religious establishment, great cleansings take place. Everybody has a secret. I watch them from my pillows, already exhausted. The fat girl in glasses walks by, testing her new leg, the noseless old woman, with her foot strung up in “traction,” the lady with the sour face, chest and arm in plaster, scratches herself inside with a stick. “My skin’s ruckled up.” They’ll cut her out Thursday. A helpful inmate in a red wool bathrobe brings the flowers back, sweet-lipped as children. All night they’ve been breathing in the hall, dropping their pollens, daffodils, pink and red tulips, the hot purple and red-eyed anemones. Potted plants for the veterans. Nobody complains or whines. In the black earphones hung on my silver bedstead a tiny voice nags me to listen. They won’t unplug him. Immensely cheerful pink, blue and yellow birds distribute themselves among flowers, primarily pink, and simpering greenery on the white bed-curtains. It is like an arbor when they close me in. Last night I got lost in the wet, black Sunday streets of Camden Town, walking resolutely in the wrong direction. I asked an old woman getting out of a car where the St. Pancras Hospital was: she asked her old husband—he said: “It’s a bit complicated. I better drive you there.” I got into the back seat of the old comfortable car and burst into tears. “I’d rather have a baby,” I say, “at least you’ve got something for it.” “That’s what we all say,” said the woman. The man angled the car through obscure, black glistening streets to the hospital. I stumbled through the rain, my bang in wet hanks plastered to my forehead. The admissions office was shut. I walk down a long brilliantly lit hall and a boy in brown takes me to Ward 1 in the elevator. The nurse asks me questions and fills out a form. I want to answer more questions, I love questions. I feel a blissful slumping into boxes on forms. The lady next to me has a bandage under her neck—they found in a chest X-ray that her thyroid had grown into her lung and cut it out. Now, curtains drawn round her bed, an occupational therapist sounds to be hitting her: a-slap-a-slap-a-slap. All kinds of equipment is ferried by—vacuum cleaners, stepladders, instruments for tipping up one end of the bed, a large aluminum box on wheels which is plugged into the wall—I think it is a hot-box for the steamed lunches. Last night I felt too sick for supper—had only a cup of Ovaltine, got into my nightdress behind flowered curtains. A young, attractively lean Doctor “Cahst” came round and asked me symptom questions. Put an exclamation after the observation that I might be pregnant again. Cold air blows down from the tall window on my head. The thyroid woman coughs dryly behind her curtain. A pretty young sociable woman named Rose came to chat with me last night, introduced me to a lively black-haired lady in diaphanous pale blue nightgown named “Bunny” who had “been in Boston,” another bright lady whose husband studied locusts in Africa—they both had malaria; he owns some zoo in South Devon to which he sent animals in pairs. Tried vacantly to read The Paris Review. A red and a white pill slowly dragged me into a fog. “Lights out” at nine. The round globed ward lights switched to red—8 red cutout circles in the twilight—light lingered everywhere. Good night, good night, bedmates said, and reduced themselves to humps. I considered asking that my curtains be drawn, but then shut my eyes and found with surprising pleasure I had my own curtains which I could shut at will. Woken out of a shallow sleep at 5 by a bustle, creaking, running of water and clanking of buckets. At six, in the wan wet gray, the white lights came on. Tea, temperatures, pulse. I washed, swabbed my privates with a blue antiseptic and urinated obligingly in a glass jar. Later they swabbed my nose to see if I was “carrying any germs to infect wounds.” Breakfast about 7:30. Thin brown bread scraped penuriously with butter (or some substitute) so only a faint glaze testified to which side was the right side for the orange marmalade; tea, a shallow bowl of smoky saltless gruel, bacon and tomatoes (very good) and more tea. Bad, dreggy fusty coffee midmorning. Paper boy, chocolate and cigarette cart. Green graphs on polished aluminum clipboards hooked to the foot of each bed.
Tuesday, February 28. Today is the day. Amid the chatter and breakfasting of all the other patients I alone am quiet and without food. Yet I feel curiously less worried about losing my appendix than being electrocuted. The gently-spoken gray lady at my right, “Duchess,” or “Mrs. Mac,” goes home today. She goes to Harrow by ambulance, her frail form stooped now over a bowl of cornflakes in her white crocheted shawl. I feel slightly sick after all this waiting, but here where everyone is amiable with gracious smiles, it is impossible to indulge in mopes or self-pity, a very good thing. Last night a young nurse shaved me with exceedingly scratchy strokes, exposing that old mole that grew on the left when I was pregnant. Today, after a sleeping pill, I woke when the nurse took my temperature and pulse. Had tea and buttered toast at 6:30. Then they took away my water and my milk. “Bunny,” “Daisy,” Jane, Rose. The goiter lady (her thyroid grew into her lung) on my left had a “pounding” yesterday—her bed raised at the foot and she pummeled “to loosen the phlegm,” Daisy said interestedly. I too as the latest operative case, am of interest. Was I shaved? Will I have an enema? And so on. Ted came last night. Precisely one minute after 7.30 a crowd of shabby, short, sweet peering people was let into the ward—they fluxed in familiar directions, bringing a dark-coated handsome shape twice as tall as all of them. I felt as excited and infinitely happy as in the early days of our courtship. His face, which I daily live with, seemed the most kind and beautiful in the world. He brought an air letter from The New Yorker for me with a $100 contract for letting them have “first reading” of all my poems for a year! The date of the letter was that of our first meeting at the Botolph party 5 years ago. He brought steak sandwiches and apricot tarts and milk and fresh-squeezed orange juice—I felt afterwards that if I said, “For him—he will be on the other side,” I could go through anything with courage—or at least reasonable fortitude.
Later—10 A.M.—now I’m really prepared for the slaughter—robed loosely in a pink and maroon striped surgical gown, a gauze turban and a strip of adhesive shuts off the sight of my wedding ring. The lithe nurse was snippy when I asked how long the operation took. Oblivion approaches. Now I’m close enough, I open my arms. I asked to have my flowered curtains left drawn—the privilege of a condemned prisoner—I don’t want the curious gossipy well-meaning ladies peering for signs of fear, stupor or whatever. Evidently a lady went out on a trolley a few minutes back—“Was she asleep?” “She looked asleep, she just lay there.” Now they’ve given me the first injection—which will “dry my mouth, make me feel drunk and so I don’t care what happens.” A handsome lady anesthetist came in and told me about the details of that. My arm is swollen—right upper—a bee sting, red and hard to the touch. I feel a bubbly drowsiness take my heart and so shall only write in here after it’s over—a letter from Ted reached me—my dear dear love.
Friday, March 30. Three days since my operation and I am myself again: the tough, gossipy, curious enchanting entity I have not been for so long. The life here is made up of details. Petty pleasures and petty annoyances. Tuesday I was so drugged I knew nothing and nothing bothered me. Wednesday the drugs wore off and I felt sick and resentful of the lively health of the ward. Yesterday I felt tired and so-so. Today I threw off my fetters—got up to wash and had my first laborious goat-shit, changed my hospital pink and red flapping jacket which left my bum bare to my frilly pink and white Victorian nightgown. They just wheeled one of the new women by on a stretcher—the muscular lime-green porter loaded her on the trolley—the queer flat shape of a drugged body—the white turban, green blankets, eyes staring up, dumbly. The other night, they say, “Thelma died.” I vaguely remember a lady in a yellow gown, youngish, wheeling the tea round. “She died after her op.” Outdoors it is sunny, smelling of wet sweet earth. A few stray airs filter in the windows. I remember luxuriating in these blowing airs on my first night when I lay wakeful after a day of sleep yet deeply drugged and invulnerable—it blew sweetly over the sleeping forms and stirred the curtains.
Annoyances & sorrows: The window above my bed was broken—cracked. First, before my op, a cold wet air laid itself on my head like a nasty poultice. Then, the day after my op, two men came to fix the window. My bed was wheeled out into mid-corridor. I felt unsettled, vulnerable. I was bumped. My side hurt. The fat girl in the wheelchair gave my dresser (locker) a great bump which jarred my bed. My side hurt. I slunk deeper into my pillows, exposed to strange peerers at the far end of the ward on all sides. I thought. “Everybody going by bumps me,” I said to the nurse after an hour. “I’d rather have the draft. I have to use the bedpan.” Chagrined, they had to wheel me back. When the workmen returned they were told to come back at one. They did come in visiting hours & move me out, but Ted was there so I didn’t care. Vacuuming: They vacuum all day—little frizzy-haired tasty fat lugubrious women mooching up the overnight dust—wooz-wooz. Then the bump and jingle of trolleys—bedpan trolleys, mouthwash trolleys, breakfast trolleys, tea trolleys, medicine trolleys. They thump on the floor & rattle. Then the typewriter: Hooknosed witch with the two crooked canes and green dressing gown put out a huge black old-fashioned monster typewriter on the table in front of my bed. Bank-bonk-clatter-clatter, the worst curse—an unsteady typist. “I’m not ready to go back to the office yet,” I said. Snoring: The worst horror of all. I am next to the ward snorer. The first night she came I was too drugged to hear her, but Wednesday morning a nurse laughingly remarked on it. That night I lay & tossed & ached till midnight: the stentorious roar echoed & magnified itself. The nurse with her flashlight said I couldn’t have another sleeping pill so soon—she pulled the flowered curtain, woke the snorer up and turned her over, made me some hot Ovaltine. Then the night sister came round with a second big blue pill which took me away in a warm bliss through all the petty bustle and noise from 5–10 A.M. (Now the stretcher with its two green plastic pillows comes in again for the neighbor of the first woman in Bed 9. Green blankets. She looks just like the other woman—her eyes staring at the ceiling.) Last night I went to sleep before the old woman started to snore but woke with a start before 3 A.M. to hear her roaring. Got up to go to bathroom in a daze and grunted. Nothing happened. They finally made me some Ovaltine and gave me two codeines which cut the sharp pang of my scar and the shooting gripes of wind in my bowels. I put the pillow over my head to shut out the noise and so woke at 7. Another peeve is that there are no bells to ring for the nurses—one has to rise on one elbow—mine are pink and raw from hauling myself up—and shout “Nurse” hoarsely. How a really sick person does, I don’t know.
Sunday, March 5. The fifth day after my op. I have been lazy about writing in here. I feel fine now: an old soldier. Still with my stitches in and something to talk about. The stitches pull and twitch (“My mendings itch”) but I demand codeine. Rose of the blue robe and white-haired “Granny” with the awful bloodshot crossed eyes, impressively black with iodine or some such when I came in, are going home today. Rose forgot her skirt so keeps her robe on—a Symbol, that of the desire to be “one of us.” A dressed person, a person dressed for the street, is a bother here—not “one of us,” a sort of masquerader. Rose wheels the trolley of flower vases about and distributes them—each glass vase or china pitcher is numbered with the bed number of the patient on a bit of adhesive. The nurse just walked by with the square white cardboard spittoons. I shall have a story out of this, beginning “Tonight I deserve a blue light, I am one of them”—describing the shock of entering this queer highly rhythmical and ordered society as a stranger, an outsider, attuning oneself to the ward vibrations, undergoing the “initiation”—the real central common yet personal experience, and recovering in harmony. As soon as one is well, too well, one is excluded, “unpopular”—the violet-gowned Miss Stapleton immediately to my left has relapsed. Her thyroid or goiter scar has healed, but she lies mouth open and eyes shut—her leg has swollen and hurts, she has phlebitis. She is going to a convalescent home after this. So is the lady with jaundice three beds down to my left next to Gran. She is bright yellow, has been “opened” innumerable times and is going to Clacton-on-the-Sea—to a convent convalescent home where the nuns bake their own bread and do up tasty dishes. “The Salt air does you good,” I say. I face Helga’saa pot of tulips and Charles’sab dying iris and daffodils. “That yellow stuff’s lasted well,” Daisy says of Miss Stapleton’s bouquet. “For-sigh-thia,” drawls Maury with the pain-set face and tart tongue. She told me she’ll never be able to move her arm, just her fingers. Now it is 1:40 P.M. Sunday afternoon. I have desperately washed, powdered my sallow bandaged body, combed my greasy hair—feel shoddily in need of a shampoo. Bunny and Joan are talking about the difference between “black African” and “white Afrikaans.” The nurses are “tidying” beds before visiting hours. To my own surprise I am allowed to go out and sit on a park bench in the sun with Ted and the pooker [Frieda] as I did yesterday all afternoon; I am immensely fond of all the nurses in their black and white pin-striped dresses, white aprons and hats and black shoes and stockings. Their youth is the chief beauty about them—youth, absolute starched cleanliness and a comforting tidying-up and brow-smoothing air. The routine, even with the quite short night’s sleep (about 10–6 if lucky—swimming to it through Mrs. John’s snores and clutching it through the nurses’ morning bustle and glassy clatter) I feel more fresh and rested than I have for months. I am above the “sick level” of the place so I have an extra advantage—although I slightly cancel it by much bedside visiting and gossiping. I feel so fresh and peaceful now, in spite of a slight shiver at the thought of my stitches coming out—it is like a diverting holiday—my first since the baby was born almost a year ago: quite bracing. All morning talked to Jay Wynn across the way about her office and private life and nervous breakdown—cannot congratulate myself too much on this confidence because I blabbed about my own breakdown and misapplied shock treatment. Shall outline her account after I come in tonight. Ted is actually having a rougher time than I—poor love sounded quite squashed yesterday: “How do you do it all?… The pooker makes an astonishing amount of pots to wash.… She wets a lot” and “I seem to be eating mostly bread!” I felt needed and very happy and lucky. My life—as I compare it to those in the ward about me—is so fine—everything but money and a house—love and all. A sunny day. HOT. The radiator at my back makes me sweat—I should have listed it among annoyances. The windows—the three bay windows on the far side of the ward—are white and dazzling with sun. Dark green blinds, dulled moon-bulbs.
7:45 P.M., twilight. Low voices, sleepy breathers. I was going to sleep till pill-time, but the sight of the old woman’s hands clutching the … bow-shaped … pull-up bar on its curiously heavy iron “prison chain” stopped me. Those gnarled white roots of hands. Mrs. Fry was evidently run over by a car on some Friday or other—latest news is that she insisted on being moved to this hospital—nearer her home—from another.… She moans, yells, curses. “You devil! You’re trying to murder me” … over pills, or moving down in bed or something. “Mother, Mother … Oh, how I’ve suffered.” She refuses medicine, calls the nurses constantly. I sat tonight (it’s now five to nine) with the giggly RADAac girl—all short red hair, pink luminous baby skin and even white teeth and giggles like a froth on champagne about the brain operation, snorting horribly in her nose tubes and skull sock. She told me Mrs. Fry’s legs (both broken) were almost mended. Another story said they were just broken. The man who ran her over and his wife came tiptoeing in with flowers; “How are you?” “Very poorly, very poorly,” she says with relish. Often, the nurses disappear. The old noseless lady of 82 with the broken leg in traction at the left end of the row facing me yelled for a bedpan earlier: “Nurse”—her sock-face grotesquely leaning forward past the fat jolly dark Italian girl’s. I gradually felt it devolve on me, bed by bed, to get a nurse. “Nurse,” the old lady yelled. I tried to cheer her up this morning by telling her a lady at least 10 years her senior with two broken legs was in the adjoining ward. “God is Good,” the old thing said. Immense camaraderie here. I am in an excellent position for “visiting round.” The nurses are absolute angels.
Monday, March 6, 4:20 p.m. In bed after an hour alone in the warm sun of the park reading the late poems of Pasternak—they excited me immensely—the free, lyric tone and terse (though sometimes too fey) idiom. I felt: a new start can be made through these. This is the way back to the music. I wept to lose to my new tough prosiness. Tired after a ghastly night—the woman (Mrs. Fry) with the two white-root hands put on a huge scene—started calling for the police. “Police, policeman, get me out of here”; “Oh, how I suffer.” Theatrical wooing groans. “I’ll call my doctor in in the morning to show how you leave me all night because of your whims. I’ll tell your mummies on you.” The sister went in to her. “Why won’t you take your medicine?” Evidently she had some pills to make her shit and shat all day and thinks they’re trying to kill her like this. Some more cursing and I saw the nurse and sister in the lit office-cubicle gleefully preparing a hypodermic. Often she sounds manic—“Ooo, what are those around me? Walls walls walls …” “Those are windows,” the sister said firmly. “What are those frocks on the chair?” “Those are pillowcases.” At about 3 I was woken by a crash and more wooing. She’d thrown a medicine glass down. Evidently on her first day here she hit a doctor with her pocketbook. My stitches pull and snick. I am tired.
•Notes: •The pink “bud vases” or antiseptic over each bed our thermometers are kept in.
•The flower bowls on windowsills, the trolleys of valiant but dying flowers.
•The old lady’s plastic flesh-colored neckpiece on her table like an extra head—peach-pink with air holes, white straps and silver studs and a lining of yellow sponge and pink-flowered nightgown silk. Her bowl of fruit, C. P. Snow’s New Men, stubbornness—eats food out of tins her daughter brings.
•Once last night the old lady Fry shouted, “You can laugh. I can laugh. He who laughs last laughs best.” I felt guilty, as I had just smothered a snort in the pillow. But the nurses laughed also.
•The sock-head nose-tube lady had water on the brain—snorkles and drools, dull-eyed. Was a district nurse, mannish, efficient—now: “she may go one way or the other—mental.”
Bed 1: Joan in a plaster cast from toe to bosom for 4 months knits dark green wool. Has a house on the sea in South Devon. Obvious brave front. Reads Horse and Hound. Two sons 16 and 14. Sent to public school at 6. “The only thing.” Her entomologist husband, their life in Africa, studying locusts.
Bed 2: The ubiquitous popular Rose, born in Camden Town and married at an early age to the boy round the corner, of Dutch descent and working at the same print factory for 15 years, with one son—is gone.
Bed 3: Mrs. Johns—the neckpiece lady—sits straight as a schoolmarm reading. I guessed right about her—she thinks she’s “better”—keeps an utter schoolmarmish reserve which she broke for me yesterday. She is the wife of an elementary-school headmaster, daughter of two country schoolteachers and granddaughter of schoolteachers. Her daughter is a bossy gabby schoolteacher who—not surprisingly—divorced her husband in Africa before the birth of their first baby and she now lectures at the University of London—teaching teachers. She informed me, almost in tears, last night, that her daughter had looked at my books while I was out and said she had “an intellectual next to her.” Said she felt “so unfriendly” not talking but she was always in pain, had a TB abscess in her spine. It was treated “wrong”—as neuritis, with exercises—now very bad. She seems to stick to her trouble and has given her doctors and nurses a stiff-neck resistance. Her night snoring and sleeping all day is enough to make us all pitiless.
I found out today who Mrs. Pfaffrath is—that elusive lady whose pool forms keep coming to our house. She is—or was—our dead landlady, and a woman here knew her! I got round to talking to the prim trim North Irish Nelly in the middle bay window as I dried my hair and found she once lived in our district. I asked if she knew Chalcot Square and she said, “I knew the landlady of Number 3.” She was married to a French wigmaker. Evidently there was a great demand for men’s wigs after the war, as lots of soldiers lost their hair and went bald for one reason or another.
Daisy is the real original. Wish I could overhear her stories. “I could tell she’s a Jew,” she said triumphantly of wild Mrs. Fry. “She said ‘already.’ That’s what the Jews say.” “I say ‘already’ too,” Jay put in gently, but that didn’t deter Daisy. “We’re all like little animals,” she said, “waiting for dinner.”
The white-haired Jewess from Hackney in the lavender bed-sweater told me of her pale hardworking teacher-daughter and her marvelous grandsons, who are brilliant, one entering Oxford in geology. Impression of desperate grubbing study. She went to have a badly fitted false leg improved Friday—has come back in because her other foot has “gone bad”—a diabetic—my father’s classic case—as the witchy Jewess in the green-arsenic dressing gown told me on my walk—she insisted on coming, but went right in.
In the spring and summer of 1961 Plath was at work on The Bell Jar with the help of a grant from the Eugene F. Saxton Foundation. According to a note in the margin, she was rereading the early journals at this point, possibly as source material. By late summer of 1961 the Hugheses had moved to Devon, where their second child, Nicholas, was born in January of 1962.
The following character sketches of Devon neighbors were done in 1962; they were separate from her regular journals, and are all that survive in prose from this period, though she was also at work on a second novel.
A tall, imposing white-haired woman at the back door early on—a sense of her measuring, judging. Invited me to coffee with Frieda [Plath’s daughter]. She lives across the street at an angle to the right in a handsome white house with black trim, and a wattle fence protecting her garden beautifully groomed by a retired gardener. With her aged dachshund Pixie.… During the war her daughter, Camilla (from where I got the name for Dido in my novel), stayed with her: they had a Victory Garden at the back. Mrs. Plum an eminent woman, admirable. I like her more & more. She “would have been a doctor” if women had been educated in her day. As it is, her granddaughter (Camilla’s daughter, I think) is studying medicine at Edinburgh. Virginia (I think) had her 21st birthday this winter—Camilla made a sit-down luncheon for over 40 people. Virginia got hundreds of pounds, records, jewels, etc. I was pleased to tell Mrs. Plum I had gone to Cambridge. That is the sort of thing that she would be pleased at. She seemed very hard of hearing at first, and I dreaded meeting her because I feel very reluctant to raise my voice—it makes everything one says seem rather fatuous because of the unnatural emphasis.
Mrs. P.’s interior: I came in the fall. The long living room with French windows out onto the screened lawn and flower border was jammed with flowers; bunches of huge chrysanthemums and dahlias arranged with no art in clumps of yellow, pink and tawny orange and red. Mrs. P. a marvel with Frieda. Not at all put off or silly as many grown-ups are. Let her go so far, gave her a box with a sixpence in it to shake. Frieda well behaved. A handsome Staffordshire (I think) pot dog on a side table—a wonderful red-orange and white. Pixie, like a patched sausage, dozed at the hearth. A coal fire, perfectly banked, burned like something artificial—one could not imagine that it left ash or clinkers—it was so high & full, glowing rosily. A handsome brick fireplace: copper coal scuttle, a flat, plaited woodbasket, gleaming brass tongs & brush. Mrs. P. has a son too, in Brooke Bond Tea. She lived in India, her husband was a coffee planter. Her tiny immaculate pale blue Morris. The sense of grandeur and expansion behind her. Comfort & the happiness of knowing precisely what she wants and how to achieve it. Very sensible.
Then she came here: sat at tea in the front room and told us of the place before our time—the gardener who kept all the gardens going, the austerities of the old lady with her stone kitchen floors, no electricity or phone. Asked about Ted’s writing. Very curious, but benignly so. Brought round a bunch of yellow mimosa when I had Nicholas.
February 6, 1962. Brought Nicholas to see Mrs. P. on his first day out. (“Mrs. P. is dying to see Nicholas,” said the midwife on her morning visit.) Waited in cold wintry sun in front alcove, too timid to go in, for Mrs. P. to return from market. She really admired Nicholas. Made me take off his white cap so she could see the shape of his head and remarked at the back brain-bulge of it. Her pleasure at his maleness; asked if Frieda was jealous. When I said Ted seemed to be reluctant it was not another girl, she said: I suspect he’s jealous for Frieda. Her queer, fine “listening” quality. Something N.T.ad for example does not at all have. I tried to notice colors, fabrics. Everything very very rich—deep-blue velvet piled curtains, deep blue & white Orientals, worn, elegant. A polished board floor. A bookcase containing, surprisingly, The Lord of the Rings, and, not surprisingly, all of Winston Churchill’s books on the war & the English people. A lot of old gardening and travel books. I must look closer sometime to get the thin titles. Mrs. P. made good mugs of Nescafe. “In the north,” she said, “we have a custom on the baby’s first visit.” She went into the kitchen and bustled about getting a paper bag with a match (for a good match), coal (to light the fire), salt for health, a sixpence for wealth, and an egg for I’m not sure what. Said she is flying to the Near East for two weeks with a friend.
February 21: Mrs. P. materialized outside my study this morning: source of a great fratch between Ted & me—my sense of surprise invasion. This is my one symbolic sanctum. Stunned, I asked her in. Ted got a chair, & I & she both realized the awkwardness of it. She had come to say good-bye & see baby before her 2 weeks in Beirut, Rome, etc. I took her to see Nicholas, not before her eyes had taken in the study in such detail as offered—“this was the boys’ playroom” (which boys?). The sense that Mrs. P. wanted to see how we lived in the back rooms. She looked at my long unbraided hair as if to take it in, drink the last inch, and make a judgment. I very upset, angry. As if we could be observed, examined at any moment simply because we were too shy or polite to say Nay, or She’s working, I’ll get her down. Or Please wait here. My anger at Ted for being a mat, not at Mrs. P., really.
May 12: Had not seen Mrs. Plum for three months. Ted met her in town & she suggested I come over this afternoon, Saturday. Stood at the door with the dressed-up baby & Frieda and rang and rang. No sound of Pixie barking. Felt cross and neatened for nothing; then I heard a bumping around upstairs, and knocked very loudly. Mrs. P. finally came to the door. Showed me around the garden first: a blaze of colors, little gravel paths, raised stone walls. One very pink cherry tree over a garden bench. A fire of wallflowers, red, yellow, pumpkin. I began to see the virtue of these common and popular garden creatures. An ornamental pool with a great orange carp. Begonias, peonies, lupins, lots of tulips, giant pansies. Immaculate weedless beds. We had tea. Frieda in a whiny spoilt mood. Carried about a glass ashtray with a provocative naughty look. Ran outside with a little table & put it on the grass. Mrs. P. had caught a chill in Italy. Had seen the pyramids. Loved Rhodes. She was to leave Monday for a fortnight at her daughter’s. Admired Nicholas’s head, no doubt but that he was a boy, she said. Frieda cried at the clock musical bell. Felt her competition with Nicholas for attention. Indoors, great bouquets of cherry blossom and tulips. Where was Pixie? She had died in Mrs. P.’s absence. A tone of muted grief. Advised me to dig up and burn my tulips, as from the symptoms I described they had fire-disease.
March 1, Thursday. My first visit to the Milfords in the cottage on the corner, adjoining Mary Smith’s, and, on the front, the crippled Molly (with the high black boot, humpback and the stuffed fox under glass in her parlor). I wanted to give some return to this crippled couple for their gift of three big, handsome chrysanthemums, one yellow and two mauve, and the pink potted primula they brought after I had Nicholas. So I made and sugared some one-egg cupcakes. Rang, with Frieda. The (I think) blind Mr. Milford answered the door, and I told him who I was. I could not look into his white eyes. He led me into a fearful, dark parlor with dark-brown veneered objects standing about and giving off the depressing smell of old people, varnish and stale upholstery. Led me through a door into a long room with a table and windows looking over (or rather up to) a little garden set on a level halfway up the house, with a well between it and the house, of paving. “It’s a pity we’ve just had tea or you could have some.” I sat down, with Frieda on my lap. She looked as if she were going to burst into tears—like a little animal frightened by the darkness and sad smells.
Mrs. Milford came out, took the cakes. I saw she had a handsome fruitcake, with one quarter cut out, on the table, cleared of tea things. Green and red and brown fruit studded the bottom of the yellow slab sides, and it rose to a browned crown. There was also a jar of black currant jelly she had preserved herself. I made conversation.
The Milfords lived in London (Wimbledon) during the bombings. Their windows were out. Mrs. Milford hugged her neighbor (a publican’s wife) during the raids as they sat under the stairs. “If we had been killed, we would have died with our arms around each other.” They stayed in London because of their son, Ben, who was in the forces. They thought if he was wounded or came home, they would be there for him, holding the home front. I hadn’t the heart to ask where Ben was now, for fear he would be dead.
Then they moved to Broadwoodkelly (a few miles from North Tawton). The soil there was poor, nothing like the rich red soil here. They had to work the garden too hard, it was too much for them, three quarters of an acre, so they moved to this cottage. They were waiting for a decorator, a Mr. Delve, to paper their front room, so they did not know when they could come to tea (how are the two related?). Mr. Delve had to fix the wall. Something about a heavy mirror, now in their dining room, that had either been about to fall off the parlor wall, or was shoring up a faulty parlor wall. I couldn’t tell. They go to the library … for books, but only seldom. The stairs up to the library room are too much for Mrs. Milford and Mr. Milford is blind and couldn’t read the titles if he went himself. “We’re a couple of old crocks.” They are Catholics, too. I left with Frieda, horribly eager to get out into the fresh air. The smell of age and crippling a real pain to me. Can’t stand it.
Mrs. Milford had taken my cakes carefully off the plate, washed and dried the plate, and handed it back to me. The bushy plants on tall stalks in the garden were, Mr. Milford told me, “greens.”
April 25. Nancy has not been to clean all this week. Her mother-in-law was sick again last Tuesday. Nancy’s husband, Walter, had gone to a contest of Devon bell-ringers the previous weekend. Then his mother was taken. I met Nancy’s friend, the humpbacked Molly who lives in a tiny cottage with a stuffed fox at the bottom of our lane, and she said Nancy was sitting up all night and had to wash four of the old lady’s sheets in one day, as she was wetting the bed and vomiting. Then, as Ted & I were going in the early dusk to deliver our great weekly bouquet of daffodils to Jim,ae on Friday, Molly came stumping out in her high, black orthopedic boot, called, “Mrs. Hughes, Mr. Hughes.” Nancy’s mother-in-law had died that afternoon, from a heart attack. I felt an immense relief, that I would not lose my invaluably helpful Nancy for her need to nurse a sick & malingering mother-in-law. So selfish am I. But the old lady was evidently a terrible patient, never doing what the doctor said, and Molly herself said Walter said it was a mercy, if she had to go, that she didn’t linger.
The funeral is to be at 2:30 this afternoon. Molly stumped up yesterday morning to ask if she could buy four shillings’ worth of daffodils. Of course we said no, we would bring down a big bunch, we had been meaning to bring her a bunch. So last night we picked about 150 daffodils & I went down in the clear pink twilight & knocked. Molly was not home. But this morning the top half of her Dutch door was open & she was waiting. “How much am I in your debt?” Oh, nothing, I said. She said she is going in a week to the holiday for the disabled (who come from as far as Oxfordshire) to Westward Ho! They come every year for two weeks. The Rotary Club takes them out for lunch. They are very high up, in this big place, with a ballroom. She can see the Isle of Lundy from her bed. I said to send the daffodils with our love. Nancy, she said, will be up to see me tomorrow.
Nancy’s husband, Walter, is a big heavy smiling blond man who works for Jim Bennett. He went through a ceiling he was repairing and strained his back. Marjorie Tyrer says when he came to repair their bathtub he broke a scale by stepping on it. He is a bell-ringer, the number seven bell, a big one. He is head of the North Tawton fire department (which has a drill every Wednesday at 7), and teaches woodworking at the local school. I hope to take woodworking this next fall.
July 4. Mr. Willis, said the midwife, had a piano. It looked horrible, she said, but was supposed to be in good tone. We walked round in the heat of the afternoon. Asked at a wrong door first. A smiling white-haired woman directed us to the next house in the street on the steep hill. She had a queer old zombie-dog, pink-gray flesh showing through shorn hair, at her door: it is not mine, it is a farmer’s on the hill, it is an ancient sort of sheepdog like they used to use, and it comes to me for scraps. We rang. No answer. She had been listening and came down: I expect he can’t hear, he is listening to the wireless. She pounded, went in: there are some young people to see you. A very old, crabbed white-haired man, but somehow lively, met us. He had been sitting in front of a radio, had a tea tray with currant buns on the made-up bed in the sitting room. Led us out back through a dark scabrous kitchen, did away with a bucket (urine?) and showed us a fusty old piano, the veneer peeling. We lifted, hopelessly, the keyboard cover. It was his wife’s, who had died four years ago at the age of 74 or so. Hadn’t been opened. We tried a few notes. Every other one stuck, motionless, and a substance, matted dust or the decay of the interior, seeped up between the keys.
Then he began to talk. Are those your writings in the window? I asked. I had seen some odd placards with large plain childlike writing about “the scandal of the century” and “would he have left his pram if he did not intend to stay?” and “Water Board” and “National Assistance Board.” A kind of public plaint, indecipherable, written first in pencil, then over again on the same card in ink. One placard was upside down. These, evidently, were his grievances. He had been robbed by his brother and sister of seven fields: property had been left to his brother and his heirs (that’s me, isn’t it, his heir?) and sold. A doctor in Wales had given him two injections a day, by nurses, and paralyzed his left side, then said he had a stroke. His wife had died—they wouldn’t take her into hospital because she was incurable. What had she died of—a broken heart? His son-in-law was a Freemason in Okehampton—the Freemasons were in power, they were robbing him, cheating him. The National Assistance were robbing him. He had written to the Queen. Somebody in a paper had said pink luster cups were worth hundreds of pounds. He showed us four saucers and three cups in pink luster in his cupboard. The man had said he would be in the district & have a look & value them, but of course never came. His wife had fallen from the bed, it was like a butcher shop, and no one came. Her daughter did not come and broke her heart. He had to leave the door unlocked Thursday night for the nurse, and someone might steal the cups. He had china as well, a dinner set and a lovely tea set. There was a desk, with two polished brass candlesticks & a brass bell. Winston Churchill had fallen, and look at the treatment he had. Mr. Willis fell, and was an hour picking himself up by himself. The flood of injustice went on, a great apocalyptic melding of perhaps slights or real small grievances. The policeman walked down the other side of the street, nose in the air, and did not read his complaints in the window, which were there for all to see. We edged out, in distress, telling him to talk to the nurse, she was nice. Yes, the nurses are all good, he admitted, I have had a lot of them.… And we went.
Whitsun, June 10. Met the Crumps at Charlie Pollard’s bee-meeting and were invited to tea. We found the house “small as a postage stamp,” on the Eggesford Road.… A tiny, cramped brick house all on one floor like a holiday camp, with a glass grape arbor built all along the front overlooking a view of rolling green farmland to Dartmoor, and a kitchen built along the back. An impeccably mown lawn back and front. Beehives, painted pink and white, in a nettly enclosure at the bottom of the front lawn, with lots of big blue cornflowers (“they love those”) and red and yellow broom (“three and six a cutting”) round about. And a new shed, one of those self-erectable ones with a clean gravel floor, for bee equipment and watching. Infinitely fine vegetable garden—rows of thick, bushy strawberry plants, some with white flowers, some with embryonic green berries beginning: sweet-peas climbing sticks, rhubarb, a weed-grown asparagus patch (the only slovenly corner), Velocity cabbages, goosegog, round and lucent green & hairy, celery, broad beans. The superbly weeded rows. Then a pile of hens in a battery, eggs collected by the Chumleigh man, not the Okehampton man (who was too fussy about washing the eggs). Seedlings set out in myriad tin cans.
Mrs. Olive Crump an amazing & indomitable woman: white short hair, tall, keen blue eyes & pink cheeks. Quite greedy, though fattish, she ate lots of scones & cream & jam for tea. She cans (or bottles) about 200 weight of jam a year. And extracts her own honey. Secretary of the Conservatives in the country. At the end of the afternoon, she brought out her scrapbook of her life in British Guiana. An astounding document. Lots of pictures of waterfalls seen from the air in her three-seater plane; her black silk flying suit, like Amelia Earhart; her handsome pilot; close calls. Pictures of her with short hair, in pants, handsome herself, ordering a cowering black to move some dirt, on horseback, driving a locomotive which she & her engineer built, straightening the 7-mile railway tracks they made to help get the timber to the river. A succession of wood houses, grander & grander, as they made more & more money. They were at first too poor to buy meat; at the end the grant was sold for £180,000. I couldn’t understand whether the Major was her first husband, or second. Or whether she & her father built the timber plantation, or she & her husband. At one point, she said she had no children but attended a mother’s union, as she had cared for a lot. And then, when she was showing me the pictures of children & weddings in the hall, she seemed to say, “These are his children,” meaning the Major’s? Her father … an amazing man of 89 in white linen jacket with that military blue eye who attributes his health to drinking a quart of rum a day all his life, said that when a jaguar was troubling them, she locked up all the dogs, resolved to shoot it. Heard a noise, a scratching, at the house window in the dark. Crept downstairs with rifle & outside: saw a dark shape fall from the window. That’s a dog, she thought, that the jaguar has thrown out. I’ll save it. She ran & embraced the dark object, which turned out to be the jaguar. It dashed off & hid in the chicken shed. She went over & shot into the shed, then did run. In the morning the natives found the jaguar in there, dead, shot through the lung. So she is a big woman. Very opinionated. Said that these women get multiple sclerosis from worrying over their husbands’ bad health and not accepting what God has sent them!
Major Sidney Crump curiously the odd man out. Always making jocular references to his wife’s expertise (on bees) & domination: “She has her finger on my jugular.” A man of action; can’t stand still. His father was a drunkard journalist & potboiler. He started in the ranks of the cavalry himself & worked up to head of the C.I.D. in British Guiana. An immense admiration, sardonic, for lawyers: how they can make monkeys of truths & learned men. He writes all winter: reports. Can’t talk standing still: walks round & round the lawn, with a sort of horse-rider’s lurch. His blue eye, also, his clipped silver mustache. The old man, his father-in-law, a sort of elderly double of himself. Three things I’ll tell you, he said: There is no sentiment in business. There is no honesty in politics. And self-interest makes the world go round. All right, I said. I give you those. Gave Ted a box of little Velocity cabbages in tins & a couple of bunches of very odd cylindrical green celery (“for soup”).
… The old man was according to his daughter all sorts of wonderful & odd things. He seemed drastically hungry for a listener. Brought out his photograph album with prize-winning photos he had taken: of an old hawker with white hair and wrinkled like Methuselah; a fat little native baby eating dirt; snow on a wire fence (“That’s a bee comb,” someone guessed, to his delight), hand-colored lily pads like violent green saucers, and moonlight on the big waterfall (Kaieteur?), the highest in the world, in British Guiana. [She] said something about his being a crack marksman, a world champion, & a trick entertainer on a [hunting] party with the king & queen (which?). He brought Ted to his bedroom at the end, to show him little boxes of jewelry he made from loose colored rhinestones & frames which he gave to friends; showed him his watercolors for doing photographs, and his mother and father, an oval black and white portrait of a dark, oppressed little woman & bearded smiling patriarchal man (her parents were killed in the Mutiny; she was married at 14). He prided himself on making the baby smile. Pretended to eat Frieda’s parsley & then gave it back, while she made her queer “shy” face, sliding her eyes to one side under her lids. Promised to tell a story of a cockroach. Gave me a sprig of “rosemary for remembrance” as we left. Brought out a Captain Hornblower book, autographed to him from C. S. Forester, whose picture he had taken atop the big falls.
Margaret, a blond, quiet plump-faced sweet-looking girl of 13 was home from boarding school to stay with her grandparents. She brought out her toys, a dog, a doll, to amuse Frieda & played with her; later cuddled and cooed over the baby.
A big tea laid, scones, cream, cherry jelly; a chocolate cake with rich dark frosting; little cut sandwiches. Tea a bit awkward, drafty, in the tiny dining room crammed with sideboards & tables. Two bedrooms, a bath & a tiny front room with a TV made up the interior of the house.
The old man, on showing his photos: “That’s the girl who has two children in New Zealand, that’s the one with the voice Olive’s going to visit next week, that’s the boy that’s dead, that’s the mother of the lot …” and a photo of his wife, dead 25 years, with a paper in her lap showing headlines about Hitler.
First met in Dr. Webb’s office last fall at my first checkup. A short, rotundish but not at all fat, capable gray-haired woman with a wise, moral face, in a blue uniform under a round-brimmed blue hat. I felt she would judge, kindly, but without great mercy. Her fine opportunities to visit me and observe the habits and domestic setup of the new arrivals. Very aware that our being undefined “artists,” with no provable or ostensible or obvious work, plus me being an American (the stereotype of pampered wealth), which would prejudice a staid English countrywoman against me. Her first judgment in my favor came the first day in the office, when I told her I nursed the baby, Frieda, for 10 months and that Ted was my “home-help.” There was some hope for us!
Nurse D. is by some odd linking I have yet to discover, the niece of Mrs. Plum. They are two pillars. They must know everything, or almost everything. Nurse D.’s visits invariably came when I most intuitively suspected them simply because I had been lax about housework to get to my study. Nothing Ted could say could stop her—she would forge up the stairs, he preceding desperately to warn me, and I would see her smiling white head over his shoulder at the study door. I would be in my pink fluffy bathrobe (over my layers of maternity clothes, for warmth), and she would say “artist’s outfit,” go into the bedroom, find the bed unmade, and I would have hastily thrown a newspaper over the pink plastic pot of violently yellow urine I had not bothered to empty, on the principle that all housework should wait till afternoon. She obviously relished seeing how far and of what sort our house-decorating was—observed our bedroom Indian rug was “very like her own” (the ultimate approval). One morning she seemed all twinkly with news, could hardly wait to say “My son’s school friend is a fan of your husband’s.” By some incredible coincidence, Nurse D.’s only son, Garnett (a family name in the north), had a school friend at the Merchant Taylors’ School in London who had written Ted about his book and received an answer postmarked “North Tawton,” whereupon he asked Garnett if he knew a Ted Hughes. We were “placed.” I felt very pleased.
Nurse D.’s husband is the mystery. Was he killed in the war? Garnett is roughly 19, hers was a “war marriage.” She has had to bring up the boy on her own. [Omission.] She raises Pekingese pedigree pups. Had one she doted on. She killed it by accidentally stepping on it. It used to go everywhere with her. A horrible story. As the baby approached in time, Nurse D.’s manner grew sweeter, gentler, more amiable. I felt very glad she would be my midwife, and lucky the baby came not on her day off, and just before she took a “holiday” to tend her sick father at a hotel in South Tawton (a man over 80, with two pneumonia attacks, living with his wife while they had a house built).
Nurse D. came from Lancashire (I think, not Yorkshire), had a wonderful big family (7?), and her mother had lots of help. She had a fine childhood, she said, and a nanny. I forget most of the picture she painted now, alas. She has brothers and sisters scattered about—a brother who was headmaster of a well-known boys public school here and who is now head of one in Australia; a sister, I think, in Canada. She has about 10 dogs, 3 of which are allowed to take turns coming into the house. She gardens. She has an acre or two and wants to raise geese, then sell the geese & buy sheep, then sell the sheep & buy a cow.…
May 16. Our second entering wedge. Is it that Mrs. D. disliked the Tyrers & waited till they were gone? At any rate, she invited us to tea to meet a Mrs. Macnamara on her own day off. We climbed the steep hill off the main street opposite the secondary modern school to where Mrs. D.’s new house sat spanking white overlooking the meadows that greenly undulated toward the purple domes of Dartmoor. A flashy blue car parked outside next to the nurse’s discreet pale one. Her house all white walls, full of light, big windows overlooking a plateau of close-cropped green lawn and a rather bald display of flowers—heather, tulips, anemones. A great many Pekingese dogs yapping like fur mice from a wire enclosure. Mrs. Macnamara a handsome white-haired woman (descended from Irish farmers), with red lipstick and a feminine blue-figured blouse and silvery suit. Exuded wealth, well-being. Had come round originally to buy a Pekingese. Lived at Cadbury House beyond Crediton. Her husband, Mrs. D. said, was something in ITV, and lived in a flat in London till he was to retire, for Mrs. Macnamara couldn’t bear going back to London. She had fallen in love with the house, which had 9 acres and was under repair. She had a lot of cats, one ginger one in shreds, pelt split, eye hanging out, from a fight, which she had to go home to swab. She had a doctor daughter in Washington state, married to a doctor, who was the “highest-earning woman” in the state, according to a tax official. The daughter had two daughters of her own and an adopted child. She had three miscarriages before she had a baby, and lost her baby son, born a Siamese twin with the other twin an embryo in his bowel. Insisted on knowing why his prognosis was only to live 8 hours, bundled up the dying baby & traveled 200 miles by train to where he could be operated on by a friend. Then nursed him (“he was quite blind, and deaf, and his hands could grip nothing, they just lay flat”) although she knew he would die in three months, which he did. Ever since she has been impossible, behaved badly, her father won’t let her into the house. Ironically, she was a child-specialist, called on all over to diagnose, prescribe. She had an adopted sister, adopted when she was 12 & had polio, and of the same age. Sisters devoted to each other.
We ate tea round a table, a yellow-frosted banana cake with cherries, very good currant buns, dainty tea service. Kitchen in half walled-off area, red counters, big windows overlooking moors. Photographs of places framed in narrow black & hung on white walls. A silver-embroidered Oriental screen in living room, an African violet, a little vase of early lilies of the valley, a sunny window seat, a handsome radio with all the foreign stations. Mrs. Davies in gray, with silver earrings. After Mrs. M. left, she showed us the garden in a high wind, then the upstairs, the stark white rooms, large built-in cupboards, Garnett’s room with a beer-bottle lamp & trophies from pubs, a set of literature in matched jackets. Her own room with framed photos of a fat shy boy and a Pekingese, a gas ring by the bed, a telephone. Modern lavatory. Her wired kennel of Pekes, jumping, praying, the babies a fat beary gray, toddling endearingly. Saw just-hatched blackbirds in hedge, a luminous martian green, pulsing like hearts. Arranged for luncheon at Mrs. Macnamara’s in a fortnight.
Because only work notes survive from this last section of the journal, it almost gives the impression that Plath died long before she actually did end her life—on February 11, 1963, in her thirtieth year.
In the fall of 1962, just after the end of her marriage, Plath came to write her great work, the poems of Ariel. They were written in a flood of incandescent energy, thirty poems in one month; the first drafts came pouring out, but she worked over each one carefully later. No one else had seen these poems, but she knew with great certainty that she had made the leap. As she wrote to her mother on October 16, 1962, in the middle of her extraordinary month: “I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.…”
* Selden Rodman, editor of a popular poetry anthology
† Plath’s aunt and uncle
‡ Wife of Stanley Sultan, Smith faculty
§ Philip Keightley, a friend who was an editor at World Publishing Company
‖ Edward Weeks, at The Atlantic Monthly
a The horrified reaction of Mary Ellen Chase—who had done so much for Plath both at Smith and in her Fulbright years—to Sylvia’s decisions to marry and to abandon the academic world weighed very heavily on her. Chase regarded these acts as betrayals.
b A later handwritten note
c Editor of The London Magazine
d Smith student who married Peter Davison
e Where Plath was hospitalized after her suicide attempt
f He had a recording studio on Beacon Hill and recorded poetry for the Lamont Library at Harvard.
g Esther Baskin
h Adrienne Cecile Rich, the poet
i Adrienne Cecile Rich
j A reference to her devastating shock treatments at Valley Head Hospital, described in The Bell Jar
k Anne Sexton was in Lowell’s poetry class with Plath
l The artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York
m The Bed Book, a children’s book, was published long after Plath’s death.
n Anne Sexton and George Starbuck
o Anne Sexton
p George Starbuck
q Maxine Kumin
r Editor of The Yale Series of Younger Poets
s Stephen Fassett’s wife
t Peter Davison
u A promised meeting with T. S. Eliot
v A woman on the Yaddo staff; Plath was very fond of her.
w The child she was expecting turned out to be Frieda; Nicholas was born two years later.
x Babies and lambs were part of Plath’s own system of correspondences. At this stage of her pregnancy, she had morning sickness.
y Plath’s early prize-winning story
z Yale Younger Poets series
aa Helga Huws, wife of Ted’s Cambridge friend Daniel Huws
ab Charles Montieth, editor at Faber & Faber
ac Royal Academy of Dramatic Art
ad Probably North Tawton, the local village
ae The local grocer