Over the past five years, we have scoured the archives of Sylvia Plath’s family, friends, and professional contacts assembling as many letters as possible so that Plath may tell her own story in her own words at her own pace. While Sylvia Plath’s letters in Volume I (1940–1956) reveal her full-throttled embrace of life and the extraordinary talents, ambition, love, and dreams that she brought to the beginning of her marriage to Ted Hughes, Volume II (1956–1963) provides a detailed portrait of their marriage and continues the saga of Plath’s life to its tragic conclusion. There are 575 letters to 108 recipients in Volume II, written between 1956 and 1963. They begin on 28 October 1956, the day after Plath’s twenty-fourth birthday on which Hughes gives her ‘a lovely Tarot pack of cards’, and end on 4 February 1963, a week before Plath’s death at the age of thirty.
Plath’s voluminous letters to her mother form the backbone of the narrative. There are 230 letters to Aurelia Plath in this volume, chronicling Plath’s last year at the University of Cambridge as a married woman (1956–7), vacationing with Hughes at Cape Cod (summer 1957), teaching at Smith College and living together in Northampton, Massachusetts (August 1957–August 1958), pooling their savings to live in Boston and write full-time (September 1958–June 1959), travelling across North America to California (summer 1959), residing at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York (autumn 1959), and finally settling in England (December 1959–February 1963). Only bits and pieces of these letters were published in 1975 by Aurelia Plath in Letters Home whereas every extant readable word Plath sent to her mother has been included in this edition of The Letters of Sylvia Plath. Plath’s almost weekly letters to her mother are generally upbeat and focused on practical matters since Plath knew that her mother had difficulty handling her darker moods. Plath was much more honest with her brother, Warren. When he is in Germany on a Fulbright fellowship in 1957, Plath admits she is in a ‘black mood’ because her ‘ideal of being a good teacher, writing a book on the side, and being an entertaining homemaker, cook & wife is rapidly evaporating’ (5 November 1957). After teaching for a year at Smith College she decides that an academic career ‘is Death to writing’ and devotes herself to creative writing for the rest of her life (28 November 1957).
There are twenty-six previously unpublished letters to Hughes’s parents in Yorkshire. Plath often writes in British style. She is clearly trying to impress her new in-laws by showcasing the literary accomplishments of her husband as well as herself. Many letters are written jointly, but Ted Hughes’s contributions are not transcribed in this edition at the request of his copyright holder, although paraphrases are occasionally included in footnotes. Plath is particularly thrilled when she and Hughes are published together for the first time in Granta (5 May 1957). ‘Isn’t it poetic justice’, she later tells her in-laws who knew their son was considered a wild ruffian at Cambridge, ‘that Ted’s former teachers & lecturers are being paid to review his work!’ (5 November 1957). Plath is proud of her role in launching Hughes’s career when she writes to her sister-in-law, Olwyn Hughes, on 9 February 1958: ‘How does it feel to have a great and burgeoning poet for a brother?’ Plath is also quick to tell the family when she sells her own ‘two longest poems to The New Yorker’ (30 June 1958) or when Hughes wins honours like the Guinness Poetry Award for ‘The Thought-Fox’ (18 September 1958), the Somerset Maugham Award for the Hawk in the Rain (24 March 1960), and the Hawthornden Prize for Lupercal (27 March 1961). She tells Gerald Hughes in Australia that his younger brother ‘is appearing, it seems, in print every week in England’ (13 August 1958). The letters provide detailed information about Ted Hughes’s early publications in addition to her own. When their ‘rosebud’ of a daughter is born, Plath tells Olwyn that ‘Ted’s hypnosis, I am sure, made this unusual first labor possible’ (2 April 1960). She also regales Olwyn with some of the literary invitations they receive, such as ‘cocktails with Auden at Fabers’ (16 May 1960), and is pleased with a ‘spate of rave reviews’ of her own poetry in the Observer, the New Statesman, and over the BBC (1 January 1961). But Olwyn, who according to Ted is jealous of Sylvia, calls Plath a ‘nasty bitch’ one Christmas in Yorkshire causing a permanent rift in the family. Plath tells her mother: ‘Olwyn made such a painful scene this year that I can never stay under the same roof with her again’ (1 January 1961).
Some of Plath’s close classmates from Smith College, including Marcia Brown Stern and Ann Davidow-Goodman, receive very candid letters about the new stages in Plath’s adult life, from marriage and motherhood to Plath’s heartbreak over her husband’s infidelity and her plans for divorce. During Plath’s last semester as ‘the only married undergraduate, woman in Cambridge’, she is able to keep house and complete all her academic requirements at the same time – to ‘cook and cogitate’ as she tells Marcia on 15 December 1956. As a supplement to her exams, she even plans to turn in ‘a book of poems’. Occasionally, Plath is filled with confidence about ‘being a triple-threat woman: wife, writer & teacher (to be swapped later for motherhood, I hope)’ (9 April 1957). Plath tells Marcia that she plans to have Frieda Rebecca Hughes at home in London with the help of a midwife: ‘[I] am taking this chance to have the baby perfectly free after paying to make sure of conceiving it!’ (8 February 1960). Hughes adores Frieda and is continually marvelling ‘how beautiful she is’ (11 May 1960). ‘Her eyes are so blue they send out sparks’ (21 May 1960). Plath admits to fellow American poet Lynne Lawner, that ‘the whole experience of birth and baby seem much deeper, much closer to the bone, than love and marriage’ (30 September 1960).
Plath’s focus, drive, and ambition for the success of her writing and that of Hughes are astounding in this second volume of letters. For any novice writer, these letters provide a stunning blueprint of the talent and dedication required to succeed. Plath types Hughes’s poetry and her own and submits their work to magazines, keeping ‘20 manuscripts out continually from both of us’ (7 March 1957). Serving as Hughes’s secretary and American literary agent, she arranges his book manuscripts and submits them to literary contests, such as ‘a first-book-of-poems contest run by Harper’s publishing company’, which Hughes later wins (21 November 1956). The Hawk in the Rain launches his career and is dedicated to Plath. When Plath met Hughes, she guaranteed him ‘15 poems sold in a year if he let me be his agent’. On the day that Faber & Faber accepts Hughes’s poetry book for publication in Britain, Plath brags to her mother that true to her promise: ‘Ted has sold 14 poems, a broadcast poem & a book to two countries’ in the past year (10 May 1957). Hawk in the Rain wins the Poetry Society choice for autumn 1957, which guarantees, as Plath tells Lynne Lawner, ‘a sale of 800 copies, close to miraculous in England’ (1 July 1957). But in order for their poetry to earn as much money as possible, Plath realizes that Hughes’s next book, Lupercal, ‘will be made up only after all the poems in it are already sold to magazines’ (19 March 1957). Plath tells her brother that ‘Ted has the makings of a great poet’, and he also has the loyal support of Marianne Moore and T. S. Eliot (11 June 1958). Throughout her life, no matter the circumstance, Plath never wavers in her assessment of Hughes as a genius of a writer. However, part of the couple’s success as poets is their influence on each other. Plath tells Warren: ‘we are extremely critical of each other, & won’t let poems pass’ before each word, image, and rhythm is examined (25 June 1958). As Hughes becomes more famous, Plath’s creative writing time is occupied in answering his ‘voluminous correspondence’ (21 May 1960). She tells her mother on 22 April 1961: ‘It is so marvelous having married Ted with no money & nothing in print & then having all my best intuitions prove true!’
Plath’s publishing success is more gradual and her evolving philosophy of writing is clearly articulated in her letters. Her first poetry book is not published until 1960. She submits her poetry manuscript under three different titles to the Yale Series of Younger Poets contest without success. She finally starts weeding out her early poems as ‘too romantic, sentimental & frivolous & immature’ and tells her brother on 11 June 1958, ‘my main difficulty has been overcoming a clever, too brittle & glossy feminine tone, & I am gradually getting to speak “straight out” and of real experience, not just metaphorical conceits’. She becomes attracted to more ‘ugly’ topics and tells Ann Davidow-Goodman that she slowly writes poems about ‘cadavers, suicides, Electra complexes’ (12 June 1959). Plath explores all kinds of publishing options for The Colossus (the seventh title for her book), including the World Publishing Company, before Heinemann in London (18 February 1960) and Knopf in New York (1 May 1961) accept her revised manuscript. Marianne Moore is critical of The Colossus. Plath responds to Judith Jones at Knopf: ‘I am sorry Miss Moore eschews the dark side of life to the extent that she feels neither good nor enjoyable poetry can be made out of it’ (5 September 1962). Other poets are more supportive. Behind the scenes, W. S. Merwin arranges for Plath to receive a ‘first reading’ contract from the New Yorker (26 February 1961) and loans Plath his study in London where she eventually writes The Bell Jar, ‘a novel about a college girl building up for and going through a nervous breakdown’ (17 April 1961). Plath’s poem ‘Insomniac’ wins the 1961 Guinness Poetry Award and first prize at the 1961 Cheltenham Festival of Art and Literature. Plath is asked to be a judge for subsequent Guinness and Cheltenham contests and champions upcoming American writers throughout her career.
The poetry of Plath and Hughes is different, and in some cases disturbing, compared to the ‘new movement poetry’ popular at the time. Even Plath’s early poems, such as ‘Spinster’, which appears in the new Oxford–Cambridge magazine Gemini, is reviewed as ‘sharp-edged’ (18 March 1957). But it takes dogged determination in the early days of their writing careers to be published: ‘We still get on an average two rejections apiece to every acceptance’ (13 April 1957). The New Yorker rejects Hughes’s signature poem, ‘The Thought-Fox’ a year before they accept it and finally, after ten years of rejections, Plath wins her own first coveted acceptance by the magazine in June 1958. Even on their cross-America camping trip during the summer of 1959, Plath asks her mother to ‘make a chart of all poems accepted’ and send a carbon of it to Frieda Heinrichs, Plath’s aunt, who lives at their ultimate destination in California (12 July 1959). ‘You need to develop a little of our callousness and brazenness’, she continues, ‘to be a proper sender-out of mss’ (2 August 1959). Once the quality of their poetry is recognized they are quickly anthologized. Oscar Williams includes Hughes in the 1958 revised edition of the Pocket Book of Modern Verse, which begins with Walt Whitman and ends with Hughes. Williams also introduces Plath and Hughes to all the publishers in New York City, including the editor of the Hudson Review, who later publishes their poetry. They both have poems included in the annual British PEN and Borestone anthologies (11 June 1958). Because Plath lives in England and is married to an Englishman, she is even included in the Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse 1918–60, an anthology of modern British poetry (1 January 1961), as well as the following year in New Poets of England and America: Second Selection (31 January 1962).
Plath is in charge of the couple’s finances, always looking ahead for ways to supplement their income, and becomes ‘extremely interested in money-managing’ in the process (9 July 1958). While she is still a student at Cambridge, Plath sends queries to some of her Smith College contacts, such as Professor Robert Gorham Davis, about future teaching vacancies. Her former English professor, Mary Ellen Chase, becomes one of her most ardent advocates and Plath is later offered a job as ‘freshman English instructor at Smith’ (9 April 1957) and Hughes is offered a ‘full-time instructorship at the University of Massachusetts in English’ (6 January 1958). In 1959 Hughes is awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and Plath also secures artistic residencies for both of them at Yaddo in the fall. When they live in London, Plath sends cheques from American publishers to her mother to deposit in their account at the Boston Five Cents Savings Bank where they receive 3½% interest instead of 2% offered in Britain (16 January 1960). Dr Horder, Plath’s favourite physician in England, gives her a letter of introduction to view a house at 4 Chalcot Crescent where she wants to live: ‘I do so want at least four children & am head over heels in love with London’ (28 November 1960). After five years they are able to buy a house in the country on their savings. Almost any goal Plath articulates in her letters later comes to fruition.
It is possible to witness the specific experiences of Plath and Hughes described in letters that later result in poems. While they are living in Cambridge, Plath visits her bust, sculpted by Smith classmate Mary Derr Knox, that now resides in one of the trees on Grantchester Meadows and writes ‘The Lady and the Earthenware Head’ (3 February 1957). In April 1957 she walks with Hughes at dawn to Grantchester and stands on a stile to recite ‘in a resonant voice’ all she can remember from the Canterbury Tales to twenty cows (8 April 1957). Many years later Hughes publishes the poem ‘Chaucer’ about this incident in the New Yorker and in his book Birthday Letters. A cornered groundhog on Mount Holyoke in Hadley, Massachusetts, inspires Plath’s poem ‘Incommunicado’ (5 July 1958). A walk with Aurelia, Warren, and Ted around Beacon Hill inspires ‘A Winter Tale’ (13 October 1959). The birth of Frieda is chronicled in ‘Morning Song’ (15 April 1960). ‘Tulips’, which is commissioned for the summer poetry festival at the Mermaid Theatre in London and later published in the New Yorker, is written after Plath’s ‘latest bout in hospital’ for an appendectomy following her miscarriage three weeks earlier (13 April 1961). Plath’s radio play Three Women is also partially based on this hospital experience as well as two poems published in George MacBeth’s Penguin Book of Sick Verse (1963).
In addition to poetry, Plath and Hughes try other kinds of writing to earn money. Plath sends short stories, such as ‘The Perfect Place’, to British women’s magazines, essays with original drawings to the Christian Science Monitor, and, early in her career, toils daily on the rough draft of her first novel Hill of Leopards (later entitled Falcon Yard), which is never published (7 May 1957). She later reviews children’s picture books for the New Statesman because of her interest in the art of illustration. Hughes initially writes short stories for children published in Jack and Jill (6 January 1958) and Meet My Folks! – ‘a book of humorous poems about relatives’ that T. S. Eliot accepts for Faber & Faber with a few suggested revisions (December 1958). Plath also writes a children’s book (The Bed Book) and tells Ann Davidow-Goodman that she wishes Maurice Sendak would do the illustrations (12 June 1959). During their ten-week stay at Yaddo, Plath writes another children’s book (The It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit) while Hughes writes a play (The House of Taurus), ‘based on the Euripides play The Bacchae’ (7 October 1959), followed by The House of Aries (9 July 1960), a libretto of an opera based upon The Tibetan Book of the Dead (19 July 1960), and The Calm, ‘a sort of dark opposite to Shakespeare’s Tempest’ (26 February 1961). Hughes eventually garners success with his adult short stories, such as ‘The Rain Horse’ published in Harper’s, which Plath thinks is a real masterpiece ‘better than DH Lawrence’s descriptive stories’ (8 October 1959). Some of Plath’s psychological short stories, such as ‘The Daughters of Blossom Street’, are accepted by the London Magazine (12 November 1959). On 26 December 1959 Hughes even makes fair copies of his two poetry book manuscripts to sell and is offered £160 (about $450). Plath later sells 130 pages of her early poetry manuscripts for £100 ($280) to the same bookseller in London ‘who is buying stuff for the University of Indiana’ (20 November 1961).
Recording programmes for the BBC is their most lucrative venture besides publishing. In April 1957, after Hughes broadcasts his poems over the BBC Third Programme, Plath writes directly to D. S. Carne-Ross to try out for the ‘Poet’s Voice’ herself. However, her first extant poetry recordings are for the Library of Congress with Lee Anderson on 18 April 1958 and on two occasions at Steven Fassett’s studios on Beacon Hill for Harvard (13 June 1958 and 22 February 1959). Once the BBC is willing to record her ‘odd accent’, Plath suggests a programme about young American women poets (24 October 1960). In addition to recording their poetry and Hughes’s verse plays and partial translations of the Odyssey, they are also interviewed for Two of a Kind and other programmes. Plath confides to Marvin Kane that she is excited about participating in What Made You Stay? and ‘being on a program all to myself’ (15 July 1962).
Literary influences are legion in Plath’s correspondence. She reads Virginia Woolf’s novels, for example, and tells her mother that she finds ‘them excellent stimulation for my own writing’ (21 July 1957). She and Hughes read The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson. Plath tells her mother: ‘I am going back to the ocean as my poetic heritage’ (5 July 1958) and later writes a series of poems about the sea surrounding Winthrop, Massachusetts, and a BBC script on the influence of this childhood setting on her writing. She tells Lynne Lawner that she admires Robert Lowell ‘immensely as a poet’ and audits his poetry course at Boston University (11 March 1959). Plath also likes poems by her Boston University classmate Anne Sexton, which she includes in her 1961 supplement to the Critical Quarterly entitled American Poetry Now. Sexton’s second book, All My Pretty Ones, particularly inspires Plath’s late poetry because it is, as she says: ‘One of the rare original things in this world’ (21 August 1962). Near the end of her life, Plath advises Catholic priest-poet Father Michael Carey to ‘study the assonances & consonances in Emily Dickinson (beloved of me) for a subtlety far beyond exact rhyme’ (21 November 1962).
Plath and Hughes were equally strong-willed individuals. There are many warning signs in the early days of their marriage that all is not harmonious. Plath tells her mother that she and Hughes ‘sometimes have violent disagreements’ (9 January 1957) and later realizes that ‘one must never push him’ (26 March 1957). Carving out sacrosanct time to write is the main challenge of their marriage. Plath tells her mother: ‘Both of us feel literally sick when we’re not writing’. Plath is determined to make her marriage successful. She tells her mother: ‘I am one of those women whose marriage is the central experience of life, much more crucial than a religion or career’ (7 May 1957). Plath thinks they are ‘both ideally suited temperamentally, with the same kind of life-rhythm, needing much sleep, solitude & living simply’ (17 June 1957). But the following year Plath confides to her brother: ‘we have rousing battles every so often in which I come out with sprained thumbs & Ted with missing earlobes’ (11 June 1958). Plath admits to Gerald Hughes that if Ted has any faults it is ‘the occasional black Moods’ (24 May 1959). When outfitting their new unfurnished flat at 3 Chalcot Square in London takes two months of their time, Plath admits to her mother that Ted ‘gets almost nervously sick when he hasn’t written for a long time, & really needs careful handling’ (24 March 1960).
Plath is formidable herself and can be devastatingly cynical in her correspondence. She thinks her upstairs neighbour in Cambridge, ‘the one & only son of Siegfried Sassoon is partly inhuman’ because he ‘runs a ham radio’, and describes Marianne Moore as filled with ‘old-maid blood’ because she wants to omit Hughes’s poems with sexual imagery from The Hawk in the Rain (15 March 1957). Plath finds many British women insufferable. They are all ‘shy, gauche and desperately awkward socially, or if social, dizzy butterflies’ (22 October 1957). She thinks the faculty members at the University of Massachusetts are ‘pedantic and cranky’ (20 January 1958). Theodore Roethke’s wife is ‘about as nice as nails’ (2 February 1961). And she tells her mother with disgust that recipes in British women’s magazines ‘are for things like Lard & Stale Bread Pie, garnished with Cold Pigs Feet’ (7 December 1961).
Plath is multitalented and exceedingly industrious, often taking part-time jobs so that Hughes can write full-time. She continues to study foreign languages throughout her marriage. She renews her German by reading Grimm’s fairytales and ‘trying to review one grammar lesson a day’ (5 July 1958). She also learns practical skills, such as stenotype, that help her secure part-time jobs to pay for groceries. When the couple live in Boston, Plath works as a secretary at the Massachusetts General Hospital and later for the chairman of the department of Sanskrit and Indian studies at Harvard. In preparation for possibly visiting Italy on Hughes’s Maugham award, Plath begins lessons in Italian at the Berlitz School. Plath also takes a part-time job in London at the Bookseller as a copy-editor and layout artist to earn money over their ‘bare time between grants’ (27 January 1961). Plath is a pacifist and interested in world events. She asks her mother for a subscription to the Nation in order ‘to keep up with American liberal politics’ (25 February 1960). Plath’s first outing with her daughter is attending a ‘Ban the Bomb’ march in Trafalgar Square. She hopes her mother will not vote for Richard Nixon, ‘a Macchiavelli of the worst order’ (21 April 1960). Plath also worries about ‘the repulsive shelter craze’ in America (7 December 1961). When Plath and Hughes live in the country, they buy a radio so that Plath can continue her language lessons in French, Italian, and German, and hear Hughes’s new BBC play The Wound (31 January 1962).
Cultural experiences are also very important to Plath. She tells her high school teacher Wilbury Crockett that she and Hughes ‘glut ourselves on the cheap play tickets, foreign films, galleries and all the best fare’ in London (17 December 1960). Other activities that Plath enjoys include cooking, rug braiding, and sewing (26 February 1959). She tells Olwyn: ‘Ted reads me Shakespeare while I work’ (25 May 1959). She also loves clothes even though she cannot afford the latest fashions. In the country, Plath takes riding lessons, enjoys fishing, keeps bees, and grows flowers, particularly poppies, cornflowers, and nasturtiums. In London, Plath and Hughes watch Ingmar Bergman films, Lawrence Olivier in Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, Brecht’s Galileo, and The Duchess of Malfi starring Peggy Ashcroft. Dinner at T. S. Eliot’s house, described as ‘one of those holy evenings’, is particularly fascinating: ‘Talk was intimate gossip about Stravinsky, Auden, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence’ (5 May 1960). Dinner and conversation at Natasha and Stephen Spender’s house with Rosamond Lehmann also turns to stories ‘about Virginia (Woolf)’ (26 October 1960). Stephen Spender even gives Plath a press ticket to attend the last day of the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial on her twenty-eighth birthday. American friends Leo and Ann Davidow-Goodman drive the Hughes family to Stonehenge and Vita Sackville-West’s Knole. Once they buy their own car, Plath and Hughes even visit remote towns in France. They regularly attend museum shows, such as the Picasso exhibition in London (13 September 1960), as well as visiting the small local galleries in Primrose Hill and Camden Town. Plath later tells Gerald Hughes that art is her ‘alternate love to writing’ (19 August 1961). At a party, Theodore Roethke offers Hughes a teaching post at Washington State University, which Plath looks forward to in a couple of years after they buy a house in England that they can rent out while they are away (2 February 1961).
‘Ted is in seventh heaven’ when ‘Sir Arundell agreed on the price of 3,600 pounds’ for Court Green in North Tawton, Devonshire (7 August 1961). Plath follows him into the country with Frieda even though she is ‘much more of a city-dweller than Ted’ and eventually hopes they can ‘be in London half a year and there half a year’ (28 September 1960). Plath tells her mother that the ‘move away from my marvelous midwives, doctors, friends, butcher & baker and parks and plays and all I enjoy so much is unbearable’ (14 April 1961). But Plath realizes Court Green is important to Hughes and writes to her mother after they move: ‘I never have known such satisfaction just seeing him revel in this place and leading at last exactly the life he wants’ (15 September 1961). Once again, Plath takes care of all the practical details in their daily life, such as hiring plumbers to lay the pipes for their Bendix washing machine, after which Plath tells her mother that she has ‘no worries about managing the new baby now’ (22 October 1961). ‘A house this old’, she tells Gerald and Joan Hughes, ‘needs one five-year plan, then another’ (6 December 1961). She even wins a $2,000 Saxton grant for prose writing on which they live for their entire time together at Court Green. Planning ahead, Plath has already written The Bell Jar, tied up into four parcels, for the Saxton’s required quarterly submissions. She sells ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ and other poems to the New Yorker to begin rebuilding their Boston Five Cents Savings Bank account after they deplete it to purchase Court Green. ‘Ted & I had nothing when we got married, & no prospects’, she tells her mother. ‘And in 5 years all our most far-fetched dreams have come true’ (12 January 1962).
The remaining letters in this volume chronicle the events that lead to the dissolution of the marriage, Plath’s valiant struggle to survive with her two children, and her eventual descent into depression and suicide. Discovering the unpleasant truth and background reasons for events often requires comparing descriptions of the same incident in a series of letters. Nicholas Farrar Hughes, for example, is born on 17 January 1962 and Plath writes ecstatic letters to her family and friends. However, to mutual friend Helga Huws, who knows Ted very well, she writes: ‘I am delighted with our Nicholas [but] Ted is cooler. I think he secretly desires a harem of adoring daughters’ (29 March 1962). She tells close friend Ruth Fainlight (wife of Alan Sillitoe), also the mother of a new son, that ‘Ted never touches him, nor has since he was born’ (8 September 1962). During the lingering bone-chilling winter in Devon, Plath suffers from a series of milk fevers and chilblains and she and Hughes hardly see each other ‘over the mountains of diapers & demands of babies’ (2 February 1962). Plath complains to Marcia Stern that Hughes finally paints the floorboards of their fifteen-room house ‘after much procrastination’, even though laying their turkey red and forest green carpets is a top priority (7 December 1961). Plath tells Smith-friend Clarissa Roche: ‘We are so stuck, with this new infant, and very broke with piles of necessary house repairs, plus investment in what Ted hopes will be a sort of lucrative garden’ (11 March 1962). Hughes plants the vegetable gardens on their 2½ acres while Plath does all the weeding, but the delicate plants suffer in the summer drought. Nothing materializes in the way they envision it, except for their hillside of daffodils, which bloom ‘in their heavenly startling way, like stars’ (27 March 1962). In the spring they entertain a string of visits from friends and family. Ruth Fainlight and Alan Sillitoe are no strain, whereas David and Assia Wevill, according to Plath, need to be formally ‘entertained’ (7 June 1962). Before the visit, Plath characterizes Assia Wevill, the wife of Canadian poet David Wevill, as ‘very attractive’ and ‘intelligent’ (14 May 1962). After the Wevills’ visit, Hughes begins spending more time in London. When Aurelia Plath arrives for a six-week stay, Plath hopes to get back to her study: ‘my poultice, my balm, my absinthe’ (18 June 1962). But, in front of her mother, Plath discovers to her horror that Hughes is having an affair with Assia Wevill, which destroys her health, concentration, and the idyll of her marriage. For healing she turns to the sea and makes arrangements to visit poet Richard Murphy in Ireland with Hughes: ‘I desperately need a boat and the sea and no squalling babies’ (21 July 1962).
When Plath returns to Court Green alone, she completes her book manuscript of Ariel over the autumn, writing as many as two startling poems every morning. She tells Richard Murphy: ‘I get up at 4 a.m. when I wake, & it is black, & write till the babes wake. It is like writing in a train tunnel, or God’s intestine’ (7 October 1962). The poems help her process her intense emotions following Hughes’s cruel desertion on their trip to Ireland (to join Wevill for a secret holiday in Spain) and the subsequent breakup of their marriage. She tells Ruth Fainlight: ‘the muse has come to live, now Ted is gone, and my God! what a sweeter companion’; she is ‘producing free stuff I had locked in me for years’ (22 October 1962). She tells her ‘literary godmother’ Olive Higgins Prouty: ‘I have never been so happy anywhere in my life as writing at my huge desk in the blue dawns, all to myself, secret and quiet’ (25 October 1962). When her mother suggests that she write happier poems, Plath responds: ‘What the person out of Belsen---physical or psychological---wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there & knows the worst, just what it is like’ (21 October 1962). Many of Plath’s observations in her letters from this period, such as her ‘enforced purdah in the West Country’ (26 October 1962) or a cut thumb, are recycled in her poetry. Plath tells Prouty that she feels like she is ‘writing in the blitz, bombs exploding all round’ (2 November 1962). Plath dedicates her ‘2nd book of poems (almost done) to Frieda & Nicholas’ (7 November 1962). Later, in London, when the poetry editor at the Observer, Al Alvarez, reads some of Plath’s poems for Ariel, he takes two on the spot (‘Poppies in October’ and ‘Ariel’, both written on her thirtieth birthday), and tells Plath her book ‘should win the Pulitzer Prize’ (14 December 1962). The next day, Plath submits a selection of her new poems, with commentary, to the BBC for a future broadcast. She tells Ruth Fainlight that she plans to sell the Ariel poems ‘one by one’ for much-needed income and then try to get the book published in London and New York (26 December 1962).
Plath contemplates wintering with the children in Spain or Ireland, but follows Prouty’s advice ‘to strike London now’ and goes up to look for a flat (2 November 1962). She takes out a five-year lease on a two-floor maisonette at 23 Fitzroy Road, the childhood home of W. B. Yeats, and tells Prouty: ‘I certainly think it would be symbolic for me to live in the house of a great poet I love’ (20 November 1962). Once she is able to secure an au pair, Plath plans to finish her second novel (‘Doubletake’) a semi-autobiographical work set in Devon ‘about a wife whose husband turns out to be a deserter and philanderer’ (20 November 1962). She plans to dedicate this novel to Prouty.
Plath’s letters are filled with fury and vitriol against Hughes while she pursues legal action and closes up Court Green to move to London. To justify a divorce on the basis of desertion, she tells her mother, ‘a father who is a liar and an adulterer and utterly selfish and irresponsible is worse than the absence of a father’ (27 August 1962), but Frieda misses him and ‘lies on the floor all day & sucks her thumb & looks miserable’ (29 September 1962). Plath tells her friend Kathy Kane that amputating Hughes from their life like a gangrenous limb is horrible, but ‘the only thing to do to survive’ (21 September 1962). She tells her mother: ‘Ted has spent all our savings to the tune of $100 a week & hasn’t worked for 4 months’ (23 September 1962); ‘He is a vampire on my life, killing and destroying all’ (26 September 1962); ‘He has behaved like a bastard, a boor, a crook, & what has hurt most is his cowardice---evidently for years he has wanted to leave us & deceived us about his feelings’ (12 October 1962). None of these passages was included in Letters Home. To Aurelia’s request for Sylvia to return home, Plath retorts: ‘America is out. Also, as you can see, I haven’t the strength to see you for some time. The horror of what you saw & what I saw you see last summer is between us & I cannot face you again until I have a new life’ (9 October 1962). Plath tells her brother that Ted is ‘just reverting to type’ (12 October 1962); ‘he can’t understand why I don’t kill myself’ (18 October 1962); and she resents having to ‘cope with the endless practical ruins that ass left behind him’ (25 October 1962). She tells Prouty on 18 October 1962 that he has ‘been secretly planning to desert us all along, withdrawing money from our joint account unknown to me, getting a London flat and mailing address, and leaving us with no access to him at all, and no explanation’. Plath is also hurt that the Hughes family – ‘the meanest, most materialistic of the English working class’ – support him and not her and the children. With disdain, she calls Hughes a gigolo, ‘vain & despicable’ as he dates various women, including Susan Alliston Moore, who works at Faber & Faber and is the ex-wife of Warren’s roommate from Harvard (22 November 1962).
Plath’s evolving and crumbling marriage is documented in intimate detail in fourteen letters written between 18 February 1960 and 4 February 1963 to Dr Ruth Beuscher, Plath’s former Boston-area therapist, as described in Frieda Hughes’s Foreword for this volume. Because Plath trusts and respects Dr Beuscher, whom she calls her spiritual midwife, she can be utterly candid. As a result, these letters are very difficult to read. Plath equates her gradual knowledge of Hughes’s lies and infidelities to ‘the old shock treatments’ she used to fear so at McLean Hospital (20 July 1962). With Beuscher’s encouragement, Plath finally begins divorce proceedings after she reads Hughes’s ‘impassioned love poems’ to Assia Wevill and realizes their marriage is over – ‘the knowledge that I am ugly and hateful to him now kills me’ (29 September 1962).
During the stress of Hughes’s desertion, Plath suffers from high fevers, loses twenty pounds in weight, takes up smoking, and becomes addicted to sleeping pills. She tells Marcia Brown Stern that she is ‘utterly flattened by having to be a business woman, farmer’, as well as ‘mother, writer & all-round desperado’ (2 January 1963). Even though ill health continues to plague Plath, she does not lose her sense of humour in her correspondence. To London friend Eric White, she writes: ‘I am just through a week of influenza & about as strong as a dead codfish’ (3 September 1962). She tell Elizabeth Sigmund that she looks forward to reading David Compton’s latest book all about murder – ‘just the thing to cheer me up’ (8 September 1962). When her Saxton grant runs dry, Plath continues to send her unpublished poems to Al Alvarez and other editors. To counteract Hughes’s characterization of her as a ‘hag’ compared to all the beautiful, stylish models he dates, she is determined to begin her life over ‘from the skin out’. She has her hair cut in a modern ‘fringe’ and buys a ‘gorgeous camel-colored suit’ with a gift cheque from Prouty (20 November 1962). Desperate to try anything to improve her morale, she even pays attention to ‘directions of the Taroc pack’ (25 October 1962). She paints the living room of her new flat in London midnight blue with accents of lilac and apple green, as she tells her mother, because ‘Ted never liked blue, & I am a really blue-period person now’ (21 December 1962).
Once the upheaval of her move is over, Plath begins to reminisce about the good times in her marriage and feels the finality and loneliness acutely, although on some level Plath realizes she is ‘mourning a dead man’ (29 September 1962). She agrees with mutual friend Daniel Huws that part of Hughes’s brutal behaviour is probably due to his guilt. She tells Prouty that Frieda in her innocence and heartbreak over her father’s absence holds a mirror up to Plath that reflects her ‘own sense of loss’ (22 January 1963). The last few weeks of Plath’s life are affected by the extreme winter weather of the time and her family’s acute sickness. Dr Horder orders Plath ‘a private day-nurse for 10 days’ when she and the children suffer ‘scalding fevers’ from the flu. Plath tells Paul and Clarissa Roche that, as a result, she ‘began having blackouts’ and thought she was dying (9 January 1963). She tells Marcia Brown Stern on 4 February 1963 that ‘Everything has blown & bubbled & warped & split---accentuated by the light & heat suddenly going off for hours at unannounced intervals, frozen pipes, people getting drinking water in buckets & such stuff---that I am in limbo between the old world & the very uncertain & rather grim new.’ On the same day she tells Father Michael Carey that she writes at present ‘in blood, or at least with it’. In her last letter to Beuscher, posted on 8 February 1963, Plath writes of the return of ‘my madness, my paralysis, my fear & vision of the worst---cowardly withdrawal, a mental hospital, lobotomies’ and of ‘wanting to give up’. Without psychological support or a devoted husband by her side, Plath cannot love herself enough to face the extraordinary demands of her current situation. She commits suicide on 11 February 1963 despite her earlier mantra: ‘I am stubborn. I am a fighter’ (9 October 1962). But the resistance that Plath could not muster for her own survival would be poured into her powerful poetry drafts, which she left on her desk in her bee-coloured bedroom for the ultimate benefit of her beloved children, Frieda and Nicholas Hughes.
Karen V. Kukil and Peter K. Steinberg
2018