Edge

1

Lately, Sylvia had been thinking a lot about Yeats. In early September, after she had finished some minor literary business (she wrote a letter to Judith Jones to tell her that Heinemann would be forwarding her a copy of The Bell Jar), she was free to go on the trip with Ted and attempt the reconciliation they had discussed. When the two of them thought about where to go, only one place seemed logical—Ireland. There they could try to communicate with Yeats’s spirit, who, perhaps, would tell them what to do with their lives.

Because the Kanes had become exhausted by caring for the children during the Hugheses’ mid-August trip to London, and by the stress they themselves felt over the Hugheses’ marital trouble, they moved from Court Green instead of staying to baby-sit. To take their place, Sylvia hired an employment-agency nanny, whom she put in charge when she and Ted left for Ireland by train on September 11. That evening, they arrived in Dublin in time to be treated to oysters, brown bread, and Guinness by Maire and Jack Sweeney, their Harvard friends, who were also visiting Ireland. The next day, Plath and Hughes traveled to Galway; from there, they continued fifty miles by car along the Connemara coast to Cleggan, the village in which Richard Murphy lived. In July, Plath had written Murphy to inform him that “Years Later,” the epilogue from his poem “The Cleggan Disaster,” had won first prize in that year’s Guinness Awards at the Cheltenham Festival, for which Plath, George Hartley, and John Press had served as judges. In her letter Plath also asked Murphy if he would take her and Ted out on the Ave Maria, his commercial boat, should they come to Ireland. Murphy wired Plath to say that he would be happy to; they could even stay with him. When Plath and Hughes arrived on Wednesday evening at the Old Forge, his Cleggan cottage, Murphy awaited them. Tired, the Hugheses spent the night in twin beds in Murphy’s guest room, the first of what they told Murphy would be a six-night visit.

After breakfast the next morning, Murphy took Plath and Hughes out on the Ave Maria. On the six-mile sail to Inishbofin, Plath, as Murphy would later recall, “leanjed] out over the prow like a triumphant figurehead, inhaling the sea air ecstatically/’ The next day, Murphy drove them in his minivan to Ballylee, where Yeats had lived. At Ballylee, they visited Coole Park and observed a copper-beech tree protected by a spiked fence. Sylvia talked Ted into scaling the fence to carve his initials beside Yeats’s—because he “deserved to be in that company"—but Ted could not make it over the spikes. After this, they all climbed the spiral staircase in Yeats’s abandoned tower. At the top, while she tossed coins down into a stream below, Plath felt overcome with joy. It was as if a powerful religious force had enveloped her. For some time, she had identified with Yeats and his work. Standing in his tower, she sensed that she had actually fallen into mystic harmony with him. Later, back on the ground, Ted and Sylvia noticed an apple tree heavy with fruit and persuaded Seamus, Murphy’s fifteen-year-old helper, who had come along with them, to climb the tree and shake down apples. When he did, they gathered up some before returning to Murphy’s cottage.

During their visit, Ted and Sylvia were open about the problems they were having with their marriage. According to Murphy, Ted told him that “the marriage had somehow become destructive” and that he was involved with another woman. Privately, Sylvia confided in Murphy that she wanted a legal separation, not a divorce. Himself divorced, Murphy advised against this move; it would be better for them both if they could make a clean break.

On Saturday the 15th, Murphy took the Hugheses cottage-hunting. One possible future plan for their domestic arrangements had Sylvia living with the children for six months not in Spain but in Ireland, while Ted traveled to Spain. They had discussed this scenario before coming to Ireland; once there, Sylvia seemed even more intrigued by the idea. To accomplish the move, Sylvia agreed in principle to rent a cottage beginning November 1 from Kitty Marriott, a friend of Murphy’s. With the deal struck, the three of them—Murphy, Plath, and Hughes—whiled away the rest of Saturday. That night, they ate a huge supper prepared by Seamus’s mother; for the meal, they were joined by Thomas Kinsella, an Irish poet who had just driven from Dublin. During supper, an awkward moment occurred when Plath brushed her knee against Murphy’s in such a way that Murphy would later accuse her of “rubb[ing] her leg against mine under the table, provocatively.” Besides Sylvia and Murphy, no one knew about the incident. Following supper, no doubt mindful of Yeats’s mysticism, the company began to talk about the Ouija board, which Ted and Sylvia volunteered to demonstrate. Murphy refused to be involved, and Sylvia soon lost interest, but Ted and Kinsella stayed up for hours communicating with spirits and writing poems based on information given to them from the other side.

After his night at the Ouija board, Ted was walking along a hallway in Murphy’s cottage when he saw the face of a portrait suddenly change. He read this paranormal transformation as a sign that he should leave the cottage—indeed Cleggan—at once. Three days before he and Sylvia had planned to go back to England, or so she would claim to a friend, Ted picked up and left. If he related this tale to Sylvia at Murphy’s cottage, she may or may not have believed him. Certainly, Sylvia could only feel his sudden departure was an abandonment. After their semi-idyllic day at Coole, and in the middle of their reconciliation trip, Ted just disappeared. She tried to explain to Murphy where Ted had gone, although she did not repeat the story of the portrait whose face changed. Instead, she told him that Ted had decided to go alone to County Clare to visit the American painter Barrie Cooke. Nor did she relate the portrait episode to her mother in her September 23 letter. Ted had deserted her in Ireland, Sylvia declared; he said that he was going hunting with a friend and never came back. In her heart, of course, Sylvia believed that Hughes had returned to London—and Assia. Whatever she did or did not believe (or know, for that matter) became academic. The fact was, Ted had left her.

Murphy responded curiously. Construing that Sylvia had somehow masterminded all this as a way to spend time alone with him, Murphy all but charged her with wanting to have an affair. He insisted then that she join Kinsella in driving back to Dublin. Astonished and hurt, Sylvia went with Kinsella the next morning; she remained in Dublin for two nights with Kinsella and his wife, Eleanor, whom she found unusually understanding.

On the 18th, Sylvia returned to Court Green to find a letter from Ruth Barnhouse, to whom she had written about her problems with Ted. Unflinching in her recommendation, Barnhouse demanded that Sylvia not wait for Ted to grow out of his immaturity (or, more to the point, tire of Assia) but file for divorce at once. Besides Barnhouse’s letter, Sylvia also discovered a telegram from Ted. Sent from London, it said only that he might come to Court Green within the next week or so As she read his—to her—spineless message, Sylvia became furious. It was bad enough that Ted had deserted her in Ireland. Now he could not even face her. Instead, he spent his time—and their money—in London with Assia.

When she realized that Ted did not intend to come back to Court Green, Sylvia came closer to having a breakdown than she had in years. Desperate to speak with someone, she approached Winifred Davies, who one evening in mid-September spent three hours talking to her. Several days later, Davies related the episode to Aurelia by letter. She wrote:

Sylvia came up here in great distress the other night when Ted did not come back. . . . [I]t seems to me that Ted has never grown up. He is not mature enough to accept his responsibilities, paying bills, doing income tax, looking after his wife and children, so Sylvia has taken over all that practical side of the partnership, of necessity. . . . He wants to be free for parties, traveling, etc. . . . It seems to be that success has gone to his head. I feel awfully sorry for them all but I do not think Sylvia can go on living on a rack and it will really be better for the children to have one happy parent rather than two arguing ones, especially as he has taken such a dislike to Nicholas.

Soon afterwards, Sylvia wrote to her mother that she had enjoyed a wonderful four days in Ireland. Then, after telling her that she planned to go back there to spend December, January, and February, she made, for the first time to Aurelia, the more startling revelation that Ted had never really been fond of Nicholas. On one occasion, Sylvia wrote, Nicholas had fallen out of his pram after Ted refused to buckle him in, although Sylvia had told him to. Amazingly, Ted did not even bother to get up to see about him. Hearing Nicholas screaming in another part of the house, Sylvia ran to find him sprawled on the floor. Some time later, Ted admitted to her that he had never wanted children, but had not been able to muster the courage to tell her. Curiously, he did seem to approve of Frieda—Sylvia believed she flattered him— and was happy to have her. Yet he now chose to live with a woman who, because she had had numerous abortions, was probably barren.

Through the rest of September, Sylvia became deeply depressed. She began to smoke cigarettes and often broke down weeping when she was by herself. To vent her rage, she wrote Murphy an angry letter; she still planned to move to Ireland temporarily, she said, but she did not wish to have anything to do with him. Actually, her anger at Murphy was nothing compared to the way she felt about Ted. Her list of complaints about him was endless. He wrote checks he never recorded in their books. He spent huge sums of cash drawn from their bank account without her knowledge. He used up her Saxton grant before she could properly renovate the cottage, her home in the future for a full-time nanny. He would probably try to retain custody of Frieda, if there was a divorce, since he favored her over Nicholas, whom he rarely ever touched. And, finally, because of Ted’s history of violent behavior, Sylvia now worried that she and the children would need protection from him indefinitely. Nor was his behavior improving. Lately, through the mail, Sylvia had been receiving police summonses for traffic tickets that, according to Sylvia, Ted had gotten but refused to pay.

On September 25, Sylvia went into London to confer with a lawyer, Charles Mazillius of Harris, Chetham and Company. From Mazillius, Plath learned that in England a wife was entitled to one-third of a husband’s salary, although, if he refused to pay, she would have to sue—a lengthy and expensive process. Second, since Ted had deserted her and his children, Sylvia could register their joint banking accounts in her name alone. By Sylvia’s calculations, all of the seven thousand dollars they had earned the year before, of which her income from writing accounted for about one-third, was gone. Mazillius had also offered his opinion of Ted: he was worthless. Sylvia would be better off if she just got rid of him. Because no one knew where Ted was, Mazillius would have to hire someone to search for him before he could serve him with papers. Sylvia felt sure that Ted would try to avoid being found. Indeed, as of September 29, she had not heard a word from him since Ireland, except for his telegram. Back at Court Green, Sylvia wrote to Aurelia and instructed her to withdraw the one thousand dollars in her and Ted’s Boston account; she should send the money to her in two five-hundred-dollar checks as “gifts,” one in September and one at Christmas.

On the day after her conference with Mazillius, Plath secluded herself in her study in the morning and wrote a poem. September had been a good month for her poetry. The New Yorker published “Black-berrying,” The Listener “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.,” and The Observer “Crossing the Water.” Also, Howard Moss had accepted “Elm,” which he planned to run as “The Elm Speaks.” So, she felt confident as she worked on her poem that morning. Entitled “For a Fatherless Son,” the poem is a monologue spoken by a mother to her infant son, who soon, she tells him, will notice an “absence” emerging beside him. In the meantime, she wants him to know that she loves his “stupidity.”

Three days later, Plath wrote Olive Prouty to tell her about Ted, although, judging from Prouty’s comments in August at the Connaught about unfaithful men, Plath suspected that she already knew. Ted had deserted her, Sylvia told Prouty, for—naturally—another woman. At the moment, Sylvia believed Ted had become a stranger who had assumed the name of the man she married. Regarding the night at the Connaught, Sylvia now remembered it as her final happy night with Ted; “happiness” was a word that no longer held meaning to her.

The next morning, alone in her study, having drunk cup after cup of coffee to counteract the sleeping pills she had started to take at night, Plath wrote “A Birthday Present,” a rambling, energetic monologue. Several days later, at the very end of September, Ted finally appeared at Court Green, out of the blue. Sylvia had not seen him since Ireland and was enraged by his mere presence. He would have to come another time to gather his belongings, she said, and ordered him to leave immediately.

On the morning of October 1, Plath awoke around five, drank her coffee, and, alone in her study, wrote the longish poem “The Detective.” The next day, the same routine resulted in “The Courage of Shutting-up.” Over the ensuing week, Plath wrote the five poems— “The Bee Meeting,” “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” “Stings,” “The Swarm,” “Wintering"—which she collectively called “Bees.” By writing these poems, because the subject of bees was obviously tied to memories of her father, Plath seemed to be announcing, at least to herself, a resolve to tackle once again the issue of the father, something with which she had toyed since her year of therapy in Boston. Finishing “Wintering” on the 9th, Sylvia wrote her mother, not to discuss “Bees” but to respond to Aurelia’s suggestion that she move home. America was out of the question, Sylvia said. She did not want to flee from Ted or his fame. Instead, she would stay in England. Anyway, she could not be around Aurelia just now. “The horror of what you saw and what I saw you see last summer is between us,” Sylvia wrote, “and I cannot face you again until I have a new life.” As for the fifty dollars per month that Aurelia had offered, Sylvia could not accept it. She also really did not need it, because Ted had finally agreed to pay a yearly maintenance of one thousand pounds. That sum would at least cover the children’s needs and allow her to support herself by writing.

Sylvia found out that Ted had agreed to the maintenance when he came to Court Green on the 4th to pack his clothes, books, and papers. Ted took longer to pack than Sylvia had expected; indeed, his visit turned into a nightmarish week during which, Sylvia wrote Aurelia, he nearly murdered her as he tried to force her to give him the last installment of her Saxton grant. Sylvia refused, for she now planned to use that money, combined with a one-hundred-dollar birthday check from Aunt Dotty and a three-hundred-dollar birthday check from Olive Prouty, to hire nannies. At one point during his Court Green stay, Sylvia also said Hughes made an admission: he and Assia had speculated that, in light of her past emotional problems, Sylvia might have already killed herself. If she were dead, Hughes told Plath, he could sell Court Green and take Frieda. (He did not mention Nicholas.) Ted had another reason to hope for Sylvia’s suicide. David Wevill had recently tried to kill himself when Assia left him for Ted.

At last, the day arrived—the 11th—for Ted to go. That afternoon, Sylvia drove him to the train station. In a parting shot, Ted told her that he had not hated living in London—one reason they had bought a house in Devon—he had hated living with her. At Court Green, Sylvia was so relieved Ted was gone that she went about the house singing. The following day, writing her mother, Sylvia claimed she was thoroughly happy, more than she had been in years. Now that she knew Ted would not fight a divorce, she could get on with her life. If Ted wanted to marry Assia, which Sylvia expected he would do when both divorces were final, he would have the honor of being Assia’s fourth husband. Which was just fine with her. Sylvia only wished that Ted, whom she now regarded as a bastard and a criminal, had overcome his cowardice and admitted to her years ago that he had wanted to leave her—another recent revelation. That way, she could have started dating someone else, a man who would appreciate her for who she was.

2

As if the only way she could cope with her separation from Ted was through writing, Plath began to produce poems at a pace she never had before. On October 10, she wrote “A Secret,” a biting, acidic poem about the public disclosure of a secret. On the 11th, in the morning before she drove Ted to the Exeter train station, she finished “The Applicant,” a poem that, after one false start, seemingly wrote itself. Replete with savage wit and irony, “The Applicant” is a surreal monologue spoken by a sort of pseudo-marriage broker to a man whom he wants to set up with a woman. Plath chose to write such a poem on the 11th, the date that, essentially, marked the end of her marriage to Ted Hughes.

On the 12th, Plath returned to a familiar subject—the father. In the eighty-line poem “Daddy,” which was originally called “Daddy, Daddy, Lie Easy Now” and which shaped up quickly as she hurried through draft after draft, Plath unleashed a fury made acceptable to the reader only by the poem’s singsongy cadences. Speaking directly to her dead father, the poem’s narrator admits that she had considered him to be godlike (the way Sylvia had once seen Ted) and accuses him of being a German Nazi. Then the narrator, turning her logic in on itself, confesses that she loves him—her father—because “[e] very woman adores a Fascist.” This is why, she says, she married whom she did—someone like her father. Now, the marriage has ended, and she’s fed up. “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through,” reads the last line. Ultimately, it becomes clear that what she is through with is varied and complicated—her father, her husband, perhaps even her life.

On the weekend of the 14th, Sylvia and the children visited briefly with friends in Saint Ives, Cornwall. Home at Court Green, Sylvia came down with the flu, one of the worst cases she had ever had. Lifeless and feverish, she could barely force herself to crawl from bed. Fortunately, she did not have to; she kept a steady string of nannies to help her with the children. On the morning of the 16th, still sick, Plath wrote “Medusa,” a poem about a young woman who is victimized by a monster. That afternoon, she wrote her mother a letter in which she speculated that she was a “genius of a writer,” that she was writing the poems that would “make my name.” Then, in that same letter, Sylvia made some disconcerting revelations. To begin with, her first— secret—novel was finished and accepted. Also, she had already completed much of a second, and the idea for a third had recently come to her. Finally, Ted’s parents, Sylvia gathered from a recent letter of Ediths, were going to oppose the yearly maintenance Ted had agreed to pay. Though she had once considered the Hugheses her second family and Edith a lovely woman, Sylvia now expected them to try to torture her until she did what Ted wanted her to do.

For her part, Edith wrote Aurelia that she was shattered by the goings-on at Court Green, although she expected that Aurelia knew more about the situation than she, because Aurelia had been there when the problems started. Yet Edith felt sure that Ted had arrived at his decision to leave after much anguish, since Court Green represented his and Sylvia’s complete financial portfolio. Still, the world oflFered so much opportunity, Edith said, that she believed both Ted and Sylvia would have a prosperous future.

On the morning of the 17th, Plath completed “The Jailer,” a stinging lyric about a woman who wants the man in her life “dead or away,” neither of which seems feasible. The following morning, she produced “Lesbos,” a long domesticity-gone-haywire monologue inspired by her recent visit with friends in Cornwall. By this day, her fever had broken, and she felt well enough to write, besides “Lesbos,” four important letters: one to Peter Orr, the radio producer, to agree to record poems and an interview for the British Council; one to Olive Higgins Prouty to let her know that Ted had left her for good, that his final desertion had settled her on suing for divorce, but that, despite these setbacks, she was writing with a vengeance; one to Warren to tell him that The Bell Jar—a secret because it was a “pot-boiler [that] no one must read . . . !"—was about to be published; and one to her mother to relate a recent episode in which a Health Visitor arrived to treat her for the flu and blurted out, “My, Mrs. Hughes, you’ve lost weight!” (Since last summer, she had lost at least twenty pounds.) But Sylvia hoped to get some help soon. Upon receiving a telegram from Aurelia, Winifred Davies was now searching for a live-in au pair for Sylvia. In the end, Sylvia blamed all of her trouble on Ted and had recently decided how she could get even with him—by writing a novel.

As October passed, Plath continued to produce poems at an astonishing pace. On the 19th, she wrote “Stopped Dead,” a poem that Olwyn Hughes would later identify as a meditation on Ted’s Uncle Walter. The 20th brought “Fever 103°,” a stunning poem informed by her terrible fever, which had now returned. Then, on the 21st, she finished “Amnesiac” and “Lyonnesse,” the same day on which she wrote her mother one of the harshest letters she would ever mail her. Telling her that she did not want any money from her and that she did not wish to hear about “the world needing cheerful stuff [writings],” Sylvia attacked Aurelia for sending the telegram to Winifred Davies. Her business was her own, she wrote, furious—not her mother’s. In the future, Aurelia had to keep her advice to herself.

In fact, Aurelia’s telegram prompted Davies to call friends until she found a young girl who was free to help Plath during days through mid-December. Twenty-two years old, a nurse, and the daughter of a middle-class family in nearby Belstone, Susan O’Neill Roe started working for Plath on October 22. Arriving in the morning around the time the children awoke, Susan remained the whole day to mind the children and clean the house. After a morning in her study, Plath prepared lunch, and they all ate together. In the afternoon, Plath napped, wrote some more, and drank tea with Susan, who left before supper. Once the children were in bed, Plath returned to her study to write for an additional hour or two.

On the 23rd, only Susan’s second day there, Plath already thought of her as a member of the family. Feeling deeply relieved, Plath wrote her mother to apologize for her recent angry letter. With Susan around to watch the children, Plath felt like a new person, so she continued to write poems at a startling rate. On the 24th, she finished “Cut,” a poem, dedicated to O’Neill Roe, which was based on a real event. Just days before, Sylvia had accidentally cut herself while cooking, all but slicing off the whole fatty tip of her thumb. When she completed “Cut,” Plath composed “By Candlelight,” a poem in which a mother cares for her infant boy late at night. After writing “The Tour” on the 25th, Plath produced two poems on her birthday, the first birthday she celebrated without Ted since she had met him. (Among the presents she received was a fifty-dollar check from her mother.) One poem she wrote that day, “Poppies in October,” a sort of companion piece to her earlier “Poppies in July,” captures an ominous scene of a field of poppies so astonishing that they outdo even the beautiful morning clouds.

The second poem she would write on her birthday—“Ariel”—would be quite different. In The Tempest, on an otherworldly island where magic and deceit are commonplace, Prospero is master to an airy creature of extraordinary power. Ariel is indentured to Prospero, because in the past Prospero freed him from the evil witch Sycorax’s terrible curse, which had trapped him in a pine tree for twelve years. Though she obviously knew of the overriding connotations of the name, Plath made her Ariel a horse, who is ridden by the poem’s narrator. (Plath still regularly took horseback-riding lessons at a nearby stable; on her birthday, in fact, she planned to ride her usual horse, Sam.) In “Ariel,” the narrator, holding on as best she can, leans into the horse as it gallops along violently. But the ride is not just a ride; the narrator seems to be approaching—metaphorically—her own sure death. A perfect lyric, “Ariel” creates a seamless metaphor, with the action of the poem and that action’s meaning overlapping identically. Finally, the ride on Ariel becomes Plath’s. The ride’s culmination is chilling. But whereas the rider may be headed for a particular destination— the morning sun—the poet’s destination is not yet fixed.

3

On October 28, after she wrote two new poems, “Purdah” and “Nick and the Candlestick,” Plath completed one she had started about a week before, “Lady Lazarus.” A wild lyric that she would eventually describe as light verse, the poem is spoken by a thirty-year-old woman who each decade tries to commit suicide. Once she finished these poems on the 28th, Plath did not write poetry again for a week. Her main distraction was a trip into London that she took while Susan stayed with the children at Court Green. She arrived by train at London’s Waterloo Station on the morning of the 29th to record “Berck-Plage” for George MacBeth’s program, “The Poet’s Corner,” at the BBC beginning at ten-forty-five. She then wasted time window-shopping and running errands before, later that afternoon, she headed for A. Alvarez’s flat.

“For heaven’s sake, yes, I’d like nothing better than to hear your new poems,” Alvarez had written in response to Plath’s recent request to drop in on him. “I thought the last you sent were superb. And Ted told me, rather wryly, that your recent lot were even better. God knows you’re the only woman poet I’ve taken seriously since Emily Dickinson. And I never knew her.” Alvarez had been talking with Ted because Ted spent several nights on his sofa when he did not have a place to stay. If Ted had had a secret flat in London, it had not been permanent. Eventually, beginning in late October, Ted ended his apartment-hopping by settling down in the huge Montagu Square flat of Dido’s mother, who had recently died. He could remain there, Dido had told him, until she cleared up her mother’s estate. In a strange way, the signal from the summer’s bonfire had come true. Dido was integrally involved in Ted’s life, now that he and Sylvia had separated.

Divorced also, Alvarez lived on Fellows Road in a tiny rented studio in which, as he would write, “there was nothing to lounge on—only spidery Windsor chairs and a couple of rugs on the blood-red uncar-peted lino.” Alvarez met Sylvia at the door. Welcoming her, he then made drinks. Soon, they settled down in his living room: Alvarez took a chair but Plath sat beside the coal stove on the floor. As they sipped their whiskey, the two of them chatted. When Alvarez asked, Plath admitted that she was in London (in part) to hunt for a flat for her and the children, since they were “living on their own for the time being.” (From Ted of course Alvarez knew about the separation.) Eventually, Plath began to talk about her poetry, the writing of which, according to Alvarez, she “made . . . sound like demonic possession.” Finally, she asked if he wanted to hear some, and Alvarez enthusiastically said yes. Pulling a sheaf of poems from her shoulder bag, she reproached Alvarez, who wanted to read them silently. These poems must be read aloud, she said—and began “Berck-Plage.” Unable to follow the difficult poem, Alvarez asked her to reread parts of it when she was done. Finished, she waited for his response. He liked it a great deal, he said, so she read him several others, among them “The Moon and the Yew Tree” and “Elm.” By the end of her reading, Alvarez concluded that she was developing something “strong and new” in her work—and told her so. Delighted, Plath agreed that the next time she came into London she would stop by his flat again and read him some more.

Later, Plath went to a PEN party held to celebrate the publication of an anthology that contained her work and that Ted had helped edit. Her attendance at the gathering served as a statement: she and Ted might be divorcing, but she was still a part of the literary scene. During this trip to London, Plath also had agreed to stay with Helder and Suzette Macedo. Earlier in October, when Suzette had telephoned Sylvia at Court Green and learned that she had separated from Ted, Suzette insisted that Sylvia come visit her and Helder. Sylvia declined, since Suzette and Assia were friends. But Suzette argued that she and Sylvia were friends too, so Sylvia eventually agreed.

Plath decided that seeing the Macedos would also allow her to inform Ted’s friends that she planned to file for divorce. She did this during her first night at the Macedos’. Her present freedom overjoyed her, Sylvia told Suzette; she would not even consider taking Ted back. When Suzette tried to explain that this situation had also disturbed David and Assia (after all, David had tried to kill himself), Sylvia did not want to hear it. In the end, Suzette was concerned by Sylvia’s preoccupied state, now so severe that she had apparently forgotten to change the bandage on her injured thumb for some time: the filthy bandage was surely preventing the thumb from healing properly. That night, Suzette was awakened by the sound of sobs coming from the bedroom in which Sylvia slept. Rushing in, Suzette discovered Sylvia, her face drenched in tears, sound asleep.

The next morning, Plath saw Eric White, literary director of the British Arts Council, who extended to her an invitation, which she accepted, to organize American Night for the upcoming International Poetry Festival, scheduled to take place in London at the Royal Court Theatre in July 1963. Afterwards, Plath met Peter Orr at Albion House. Following a twelve-thirty lunch at the Star Steak House, Orr and Plath returned to the studio so Plath could record her poems. The consummate professional, she read one after another of those she had written over the past month, including three—“Nick and the Candlestick,” “Purdah,” “Lady Lazarus”—that she had finished just before her trip to London. In all, Plath recorded a total of fifteen that day, among them “Ariel,” “The Applicant,” “Cut,” “Fever 103°,” and “Daddy.” As she read these poems—written about a world where children hate parents, where parents are unsure of their own parenthood, where marriages break up—the emotion of the moment, and the strain of the subjects of the poems themselves, came through only once. When Plath reached the second and third stanzas of “Daddy,” which contained the lines about the father’s death, her voice weakened, quivering as she spoke the words. Then, after an almost imperceptible pause, she continued.

Plath did not shout these poems of rage. Her sharp Boston “a"s— “art,” “heart,” “scar”—cut through any British intonations. In a tight, controlled voice, she delivered these emotion-filled poems. She declared them in direct statements. She addressed the reader—or listener, in this case—just as she had taken on her subjects: without flinching. Finally, Plath’s voice sounded as if it belonged to someone much older than thirty. Full, resonant, mature, it resembled, in tone and clarity and intonation, a voice not unlike her mother’s.

When Plath finished, Orr interviewed her. Beginning innocently enough, he asked: “Sylvia, what started you writing poetry?” Plath answered: “I don’t know what started me, I just wrote it from the time I was quite small. I guess I liked nursery rhymes, and I guess I thought I could do the same thing. I wrote my first poem, my first published poem, when I was eight and a half years old. It came out in the Boston [Herald], and from then on, I suppose, I’ve been a bit of a professional.” Next Orr asked her about influences, which prompted Plath to mention Lowell—his Life Studies was seminal—and Sexton, “who writes about her experience as a mother . . . who has had a nervous breakdown.” Later, when Orr wanted to know if her poems tended to emerge from books rather than her life, Plath said:

No, no: I would not say that at all. I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and an intelligent mind. I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn’t be a kind of shut-box and mirror-looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things, such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.

Finally, Orr asked: “But basically this thing, the writing of poetry, is something which has been a great satisfaction to you in your life, is it?” And Plath could hardly contain herself. “Oh, satisfaction! I don’t think I could live without it. It’s like water or bread, or something absolutely essential to me. I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I have written a poem, when I’m writing one. Having written one, then you fall away very rapidly from having been a poet to becoming a sort of poet in rest, which isn’t the same thing at all. But I think the actual experience of writing a poem is a magnificent one.”

4

On reflection, Plath decided that going to Ireland would be an evasion of the problems at hand. It made more sense for her to find a flat in London and move into the city right away. So, when she returned to Devon on October 30, she knew that she would be coming back to London soon. Indeed, she remained at Court Green only until November 5, long enough for her to arrange for Susan to baby-sit, to see Winifred Davies on the 3rd about her injured thumb (convinced that Dr. Webb had bungled treatment of it, she had gone to Horder while in London; it was better but healing slowly), and to write one poem on the 4th, “The Couriers.” In London, where she again stayed with the Macedos, Sylvia met up with—as arranged—Ted, who went with her to look at flats. Their first afternoon out, Sylvia and Ted found nothing. Then, one day as she was walking by herself through her old neighborhood on her way to Horder’s office for him to re-examine her thumb, Sylvia noticed a “Flat for Let” sign outside a house on Fitzroy Road. Approaching the building—Number 23—she discovered that it sported one of the blue plaques that adorned many historic structures in London. Unbelievably, this one read, “William Butler Yeats 1865-1939 Irish Poet and Dramatist Lived Here.” Excited by her luck, Plath asked construction workers refurbishing the house if she could walk through the two available flats. When they agreed, she proceeded inside and immediately fell in love with the top flat. Consisting of three bedrooms upstairs and a bath, kitchen, and living area down, it seemed perfect for her and the children. It even had access to a balcony garden, ideal to sit in during warm weather. Sylvia learned that Morton Smith and Sons were the flat’s agents and headed straight for their offices; there, without hesitation, she made an offer. The agent with whom she talked said he would consider her bid, although he would have to verify her references. Thrilled nevertheless, Sylvia returned to Court Green. On the 7th, she wrote her mother a letter enumerating the many reasons why she desperately wanted 23 Fitzroy Road: it was close to Primrose Hill and the London Zoo, only minutes from the BBC, and literally around the corner from the friends she had made during her Chalcot Square days like Katherine Frankfort, who had already advised her about au-pair girls. “And [it is] in the house of a famous poet,” Sylvia added, “so my work should be blessed.”

The more she thought about it, the more she wanted to live in Yeats’s house. Plath recalled her trip to Ireland with fondness. She could vividly remember how, as she tossed coins out of a window from the top of Yeats’s tower into a stream below, she had actually sensed the presence of Yeats’s spirit. Indeed, even though she had been physically ill, her soul became invigorated merely by being where Yeats had lived. She almost felt as if she could still communicate with his spirit—just as she had at his tower in Ireland. One night in Devon, while she waited for the agents to approve her references, Sylvia decided to try to receive a message from Yeats, who had, after all, been a medium. So, with Susan looking on, she flipped through her copy of Yeats’s Collected Plays until she stopped at a particular line in The Unicorn from the Stars. “Get the wine and food to give you strength and courage,” the line read, “and I will get the house ready.” That settled it. Obviously, fate demanded that she move into Yeats’s house.

In her first days back at Court Green, Plath produced in quick succession “Getting There,” a meditation on an approaching death; “The Night Dances,” yet another poem spoken by a mother to her infant at night; “Gulliver,” a retelling of the Gulliver story; and “Tha-lidomide,” about a sedative popular in the late fifties and early sixties that, doctors eventually determined, caused birth defects. Then, on the 11th, she composed “Letter in November” and, three days after that, “Death & Co.,” a poem she would describe as concerning “the double or schizophrenic nature of death.” In the poem, Plath symbolized the two sides of death by personifying them as contrasting men, but the most haunting section is the ending. As she contemplates these two men, the narrator realizes “[s]omebody’s done for.”

Around the time she finished “Death & Co.,” Plath gathered together all of the poems she had written over the last few weeks. Beginning with an older poem, “Morning Song,” and ending with “Wintering,” the last of the bees sequence, Plath arranged the poems into a manuscript (of its forty-one poems, she had written well over half in October alone) that would begin with the word “love” and end with the word “spring.” In England she would dedicate the book to Frieda and Nicholas, in America to Olive Higgins Prouty—or so Plath wrote her mother. And after rejecting several titles—Daddy, A Birthday Present, The Rival, The Rabbit Catcher, all followed by the obligatory and Other Poems—Plath decided that she should name the manuscript for what she believed to be its best poem. Ariel and Other Poems—that would be the title of her second volume of poetry.

Though Plath admired these new poems enough to assemble them into a manuscript, editors did not share her enthusiasm. In November, after The London Magazine accepted “The Applicant” and “Stopped Dead,” Plath met with a flood of rejections. The most notable ones came from The New Yorkers Howard Moss, who out of the countless new poems she sent him—and during the fall, in numerous submissions, she mailed him almost all of Ariel—accepted only “Amnesiac.” Towards the end of November, The Atlantic Monthly’s Peter Davison rejected seven poems, although he did keep six from which Weeks eventually accepted “The Arrival of the Bee Box” and “Wintering.” Plath even received rejections from small literary journals. While her Ariel poems met with a reception as cold as the one The Colossus had been afforded in America, Plath came to realize that what she had to say in her poems would remain, for the most part, private. It looked as if they would never reach the wide audience of which she had dreamed. She had produced poems she knew to be far better than any she had written, and the editors of the periodicals who had accepted her work in the past simply did not care. Faced with this response, Plath saw herself as a failure.

Despite these rejections, Plath continued to write poems during the last half of November. On the 16th, she turned out “Years” and “The Fearful,” the latter a dark piece about a woman who calls on the telephone but pretends to be a man and who detests even the thought of a baby because she would rather have only her man. On the 18th, Plath wrote “Mary’s Song,” which she dedicated to Father Michael, a priest with whom she had corresponded through the years. And, on the 26th, she composed “Winter Trees.”

One weekend in November, Plath also hosted Clarissa Roche, who came to Devon with her one-month-old infant—her fourth child— from Kent, where she and Paul now lived. On the Monday after Clarissa left, heartened by seeing her old friend, Plath tried to strike up a new friendship. Writing to Stevie Smith, Plath told her that she enjoyed the recordings Smith had made for Peter Orr, that she considered herself a Smith-addict (she particularly liked Novel on Yellow Paper), and that she herself had a novel forthcoming. Plath then added that she hoped to move into London by New Year’s; perhaps Smith might stop by for tea when she did. (Eventually, in late 1962, Stevie Smith answered Plath: she wished her luck on her novel and suggested that they meet. They never did.)

It had been well over a month since Ted had moved out of Court Green, but Sylvia remained furious. The mention of his name could sometimes throw her into a rage. On the 19th, as she wrote a letter to her mother, she fell into a vicious attack on Ted. Throughout their marriage, Sylvia had made countless sacrifices for him: she had placed his work before hers, taken part-time jobs when she did not want to, served as his typist and his agent, and deprived herself of luxuries like new clothes and a stylish haircut. And for what? So that Ted could date, as he was now, fashion models? Three days later, in a separate letter to Aurelia, Sylvia continued to express her disgust with Ted. She didn’t care if he was a genius, he was also a bastard and a gigolo. Yes, for six years he tried, and fairly well succeeded, at being pleasant and faithful, but in the end the pressure of living a lie got to him.

Soon Sylvia became worried about her London flat. She suspected that an application placed by another person, Trevor Thomas—an artist who worked, she would learn, as the fine-arts editor at the Gordon Fraser Gallery, located near Fitzroy Road, on Fitzroy Yard—might be accepted instead of hers. In all fairness, Thomas had made his bid on the Friday before Plath put in one on Sunday. But Thomas had made the mistake of asking for the weekend to secure the lump sum of three months’ rent—180 pounds—which the agents wanted him to pay before he could sign the lease. From the start, Sylvia had offered fifty pounds a year more than Thomas. She had also argued her case well: she and Hughes—she did not tell the agents that they were separated—needed the large space for themselves and their two small children. Still, by Thanksgiving, she had no definite answer. Because of this, Sylvia made a second offer: she would be willing to sign a five-year lease, pay the whole first year in advance, and secure from America a reference from her mother, “Professor A. S. Plath.” This final ploy on Sylvia’s part worked. By the end of November, the agents agreed to the deal and issued her a move-in date of December 17. Delighted, Sylvia wrote to her mother about a trip she was going to make into London to apply for a telephone and to buy straw mats and a new gas stove. She could more easily afford these purchases, she said, because of an unexpected gift—a seven-hundred-dollar check from Aunt Dotty.

During November, unknown to Plath, Knopf took actions on The Bell Jar which, if she had been aware of them, would have left her somewhat less ebullient. On the 7th, Knopf’s Koshland informed Heinemann’s Anderson that Knopf did not know why they had been sent The Bell Jar by Victoria Lucas but that they would not be publishing the book. Afterwards, Anderson reminded Koshland that Heinemann had forwarded Knopf the novel because Sylvia Plath, its real author, was obliged to submit her next book to them, since her Colossus contract contained a first-option clause. On the 30th, Koshland wrote back to Anderson. At Knopf, they “were knocked galley west” to learn that Victoria Lucas was Sylvia Plath. Nevertheless, though he and others had reread the novel, they still could not “warm up” to it, “despite her obvious way with words to say nothing of the sharp eye for unusual and vivid detail.” It seemed to those at Knopf, Koshland said, that Plath needed to get the novel “out of her system” so that she could move forward and deal with the book’s subject matter “in a novelistic way.” After all, The Bell Jar read “as if it were autobiographical, almost flagrantly so.” Because of the nature of the novel, Koshland continued, Knopf would rather that Plath withhold the book from the American market altogether. And, naturally, Koshland wanted Anderson and Plath to know, should another American house not pick up The Bell Jar, Knopf still retained the right of first refusal on her next work. On December 10, Anderson put that wish to rest. Yes, Heinemann would attempt to place The Bell Jar with another American publisher—and they would do so right away.

Plath might have referred to The Bell Jar as a “pot-boiler” to Warren—as she also would to her mother—but the novel still represented the product of endless months of agonizing writing as well as the physical symbol of her own years of emotional upheaval. As a consequence, Plath was both upset over Knopf’s decision and heartened by Heinemann’s willingness to submit the book elsewhere. She learned these two pieces of news in early December, when Anderson wrote to tell her that they were looking at other American houses that might be appropriate for the novel. Plath suggested Harper and Row, Ted’s publisher, where his editor was Elizabeth Lawrence.

In late November and early December, some good things did happen. The Home Services commissioned a two-thousand-word piece on her childhood landscape; two weeks later, she finished “Ocean 1212-W,” an airy, impressionistic memoir whose title refers to her grandmother’s Winthrop telephone number. In December, the BBC’s George MacBeth assigned her a review of an anthology of American poetry edited by Donald Hall (one in which her work did not appear) and Douglas Cleverdon asked her to record a program of her new poems. Finally, Three Women, translated into Norwegian, was scheduled to play on Oslo radio. Despite these successes, Plath still faced two realities. Judging from Knopf’s reaction, Heinemann would have trouble placing The Bell Jar in America. And, judging from the response of magazine editors on both sides of the Atlantic, Plath would encounter similar trouble selling her Ariel poems, the BBC’s support notwithstanding. Moss remained firm in his dislike for her new poetry, as did another editor, The New Statesman’s Karl Miller. At one point, he too rejected a huge batch of Ariel poems, telling Alvarez, when he ran into him on the street, that he found them “too extreme.” Instead, Miller set Plath to writing reviews of historical novels. Her last, a piece on Malcolm Elwin’s Lord Byron’s Wife, appeared on December 7. Ultimately, only Alvarez seemed to be excited by her recent work, yet because of space limitations at The Observer he could convince his superiors to purchase nothing but short poems. Recently, they had bought “Winter Trees” and “Ariel,” the latter of which the editors renamed (since they expected readers to be confused by the poem’s action) “The Horse.”

Perhaps because of this cool reception, Plath again returned to fiction-writing. With her Bell Jar sequel destroyed, she now poured all of her creative energy into her newest novel, Doubletake. In a November 20 letter to Olive Prouty, Plath said that the novel’s title referred to the notion that a re-examination of events is often deeply revealing. In the novel, the heroine discovers that her perfect paragon of a husband is an adulterer. Plath hoped to complete Doubletake, which she would soon rename Double Exposure, by the new year. And, if it turned out to be good enough, Plath told Prouty, she wanted to dedicate the novel to her.

5

On December 3, Plath took the train to London to sign the five-year lease and pay the first year’s rent for 23 Fitzroy Road. While there, she also arranged for the electricity to be turned on and the gas stove she had bought to be delivered. Back in Devon, she began closing up Court Green, which she hoped to retain through the separation—or divorce—process. Over the next week and a half, she also packed, disposed of her bees, lined up Nancy Axworthy to feed her cats, and saw friends like Winifred Davies. During the first week in December, she telephoned her mother to say that she and the children would be moving to London within a couple of days. On the 10th, as things turned out. With Susan accompanying her, Sylvia drove her loaded-down Morris from North Tawton to London; her Devon mover followed. In London, Sylvia arrived at Fitzroy Road to discover that the electricity had not been switched on and that the gas stove had not been connected. Then a comedy of errors ensued. A gust of wind blew the door to her flat shut while her keys were inside—and she and Susan were outside. Seeing Trevor Thomas, her neighbor, emerge from the building, Sylvia said excitedly, “Oh, wonderful! You have keys and can let me in. I’m moving into the flat upstairs and I’ve locked myself out and the babies are crying and my husband has gone off with the keys.” Thomas replied by suggesting that she call the police. Instead, Sylvia hurried to the gas board to convince them to install the stove that day: it was the “gas boys,” as she called them, who climbed along the back roof, pried open a window, and unlocked the door. Later, after the Devon mover unloaded her belongings into the flat by candlelight, Sylvia complained to the electric board until a man showed up and turned on the power.

During the next week, Sylvia tried to accustom herself to the new flat, to London, and to the fact that, now that she was in the city, Ted dropped in on a regular basis to see her. In those early days, she painted floors and bureaus, reintroduced herself to neighbors and area merchants, and contacted friends, especially the Frankforts and the Ma-cedos. The latter introduced her to the Beckers, with whom she struck up an instant relationship. Gerry, a professor at Hendon Polytechnic, and Jillian, an author who would one day write Hitlers Children, lived around the corner from Douglas Cleverdon and his wife, Nest. Of late, Plath had been in touch with Cleverdon to tell him that she had used the excuse of free-lancing for the BBC to apply for a priority telephone, which would speed up an installation process that normally took several months. In mid-December, not long after she had received her advance copy of The Bell Jar from Heinemann’s David Machin, the editor who had taken over her work now that James Michie had left for another publishing house, Plath submitted her new poems to Cleverdon for her reading on the BBC. None of the huge batch had been accepted by magazines, Plath wrote Cleverdon, except for “The Applicant,” by The London Magazine, and “Ariel,” by The Observer. Cleverdon was more than receptive, since he had been the one to suggest the program, on Ted’s recommendation.

Ted knew the quality of Plath’s new work as a result of his visits to Fitzroy Road. On the morning of December 12, he and Sylvia took the children to the London Zoo. Being around him only made her angry again. She wrote her mother that she was happy she had eliminated Ted from her life. But Aurelia now had her doubts. Perhaps what she had suspected all along might be true: Sylvia still held “the hope of a reconciliation with Ted,” Aurelia would write later.

Alvarez thought so too. On most of her trips to London during late October and November, Sylvia had dropped by Alvarez’s studio to spend part of an afternoon with him. Each visit progressed in almost the same way. After drinks, they chatted idly until Plath read Alvarez a handful of newjpoems. In this manner Alvarez had heard the bees sequence, “A Birthday Present,” “The Applicant,” “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Getting There,” “Fever 103°,” “Letter in November,” and “Ariel.” Of these afternoons, Alvarez would write: “Cross-legged on the red floor, after reading her poems, she would talk about her riding [her Devon horseback-riding lessons] in her twangy, New England voice. And perhaps because I was also a member of the club, she talked, too, about suicide in much the same way: about her attempt ten years before which, I suppose, must have been very much on her mind as she corrected the proofs of [The Bell Jar], and about her recent incident with the car.” There were other reasons why Plath sought out Alvarez. He was sympathetic to her poetry. She felt Alvarez’s introduction to his recent Penguin anthology, The New Poetry, more or less vindicated her present work. And she knew that Ted remained in contact with Alvarez. But as Plath read him her poems on visit after visit, Alvarez saw something more. In the wake of Ted’s departure, Sylvia was undergoing a severe emotional crisis. The key was “Daddy.” Ted’s desertion had obviously triggered in her the same feelings of isolation that had tormented her following her father’s death. “I suspect that finding herself alone again now, whatever the pretense of indifference,” Alvarez would write, “all the anguish she had experienced at her father’s death was reactivated: despite herself, she felt abandoned, injured, enraged, and bereaved as purely and defenselessly as she had as a child twenty years before. As a result, the pain that had built up steadily inside her all that time came flooding out. There was no need to discuss motives"—which they did not—“because the poems did that for her.”

The obvious, also, had not escaped Alvarez. Because she was again “single,” Plath made it clear that she would be willing to become romantically involved with him. Alvarez could not, although he did not tell her why. At the moment, he was seeing a fledgling young writer, Jill Neville; he had also recently met the woman who would become his second wife.

In her early days at Fitzroy Road, Sylvia tried to order her life. By December 21, she had finished decorating the living area, painting walls white and covering the floors with rush matting. For furniture, she bought pine bookcases, straw Hong Kong chairs, a small glass-topped table, and a large container in which she could arrange flowers. The decor, pleasing as it was, lacked warmth, which more than one guest remarked. Katherine Frankfort looked into a neighborhood nursery school for Frieda, now three. But Sylvia could not find a good au-pair girl (she had been spoiled by Susan, who had now assumed a nursing job in London). Without one, she got little work done. During all of December, she wrote only three poems (“Brasilia” and “Childless Woman,” the last of the Devon poems, plus “Eavesdropper,” the first poem she finished at Fitzroy Road), two radio scripts, and “Ocean 1212-W.”

Also, Plath had some minor run-ins with Trevor Thomas, who had decided that she and Hughes had tricked him out of the upstairs flat, which was rightfully his and which he needed for himself and the two sons from his own failed marriage. Thomas complained to Sylvia that she did not keep the entranceway clean (as she was supposed to), that she did not purchase her own garbage can but used his, and that her perambulator blocked the building’s main doorway from the street. But Plath had to endure other problems. She still had neither a telephone nor a reliable au pair. Also, the immediate stress of the past few weeks, not to mention the emotional upheaval of the last six months, had seriously strained her physical health. It seemed she had no sooner moved into Fitzroy Road than she got the flu. To make matters worse, the children developed colds.

With Christmas approaching, Sylvia became more depressed: this Christmas would be her first without Ted. During late December, presents flooded in—a one-hundred-dollar check from Olive Prouty, one for fifty dollars from Aurelia—but Sylvia realized that she and the children had no friends with whom they could celebrate the holidays. Despondent, she called several people; invitations were finally issued. On Christmas, Sylvia and the children had tea at the Frankforts’; they then ate Christmas supper with the Macedos, who gave Frieda a toy piano and Nicholas a rubber rabbit. The next day, Boxing Day, the three of them shared supper with the Frankforts as a steady snow fell in the city. Yet Sylvia remained haunted by thoughts of Ted frolicking on a carefree Spanish holiday with Assia or with one of the models he was dating.

As this sense of abandonment weighed on her^ Sylvia had finally, on Christmas Eve, confronted Alvarez about a romantic involvement. Telephoning him, she asked him to come over for the evening—drinks, supper, poetry. He had already been invited to a supper party at V. S. Pritchett’s, Alvarez said, but he would stop by for a drink. Later, after the wine and the poetry—she read “Death & Co.,” among others—Sylvia aggressively forced the issue of an affair. “It would have been very easy to become involved with her,” remembers Alvarez. “She was in the most terrible state. Absolutely desperate. But it was the kind of situation where I realized I would have had to involve myself with her much more seriously than I wanted. In other words, it wouldn’t have been easy to take our friendship any further with her without going to bed, and I didn’t want to go to bed with her. It would have been trouble. So I backed off.” And left. Following an awkward good-bye, Alvarez headed for his supper at Pritchett’s.

Alvarez’s rebuff, as Plath came to view it, was a serious blow to their friendship. “She must have felt I was stupid and insensitive,” Alvarez later wrote. “Which I was. But to have been otherwise would have meant accepting responsibilities I didn’t want and couldn’t, in my own depression, have coped with. When I left about eight o’clock to go on to my dinner party, I knew I had let her down in some final and unforgivable way. And I knew she knew. I never again saw her alive.”

Professionally, the year 1962 ended on a disturbing note for Plath. In the last week in December, Judith Jones finally wrote her a letter to explain Knopf’s rejection of The Bell Jar. Although she knew that Heinemann had already informed Plath that Knopf “would have to let your novel go,” Jones wanted to write her personally, because she felt bad about the rejection, since she admired “so much [Plath’s] lovely use of language and [her] sharp eye for unusual and vivid detail.” Indeed, Jones had hoped that Plath would “put [her] talents” to use on a novel so that she could become “more accessible to more readers,” the poetry market being as small as it is. But Jones and others at Knopf felt that Plath neither “managed to use [her] material successfully in a novelistic way” nor “succeeded in establishing a point of view.” Also, Jones did not “accept the extent of [the narrator’s] illness and the suicide attempt.” In short, The Bell Jar “never really took hold for” her. Finally, Jones wrote, she wanted Plath to know how hard it was to launch a first novel—"particularly your kind of novel"—and because everyone at Knopf who read the manuscript had such reservations about it, she could not guarantee that they could give the book “a fair shake” in terms of advertising and promotion. Nevertheless, even though she was not going to publish The Bell Jar, Jones wanted Plath to consider Knopf “her publishers,” for they had “a great deal of faith in [her] future.”

6

The Boxing Day snowstorm was nothing compared to the horrible weather that lasted throughout January. It was the worst January in London in recent memory. Snow would fall, melt, turn to sludge, and then, as the temperature dropped, the sludge froze and more snow fell on top of that. Traffic in the city virtually ground to a halt. With space heaters putting a strain on the electricity lines, the power failed regularly. Pipes froze, ruptured—and stayed out of service. The weather conspired to complicate the day’s simplest tasks: cooking breakfast, shopping at the corner market, or giving the baby a bath became a major undertaking. As Londoners begged for repairmen to fix the cracked pipes and for the electric board to restore power, they succumbed to flu, pneumonia, or depression. Hospitals were overcrowded and the suicide rate rose dramatically. For Sylvia, whose body had always responded poorly to cold weather, the season was especially painful. In her flat, the radiator pipes groaned and popped but produced no heat, the children lay bundled in bed while they fought colds, and Sylvia herself wandered about sick with the flu and sinusitis. It seemed as if winter would hang on forever.

In January 1963, The London Magazine printed Plath’s “Stopped Dead” and “The Applicant,” The Observer “Winter Trees.” Because so few of her Ariel poems had been accepted, Plath was greatly pleased by these publications. She also eagerly awaited the January 14 release of The Bell Jar. Though she had hoped that her move into London would not put a stop to her hours of frenzied writing, it had. For she had written few poems and no prose in the last half of December and did not feel the urge to write now. Fighting the cold weather and her sicknesses, Sylvia could barely get through each day. Lately, Nicholas had been awaking at six in the morning—an added strain. Immediately after New Year’s Day, Sylvia had enrolled Frieda in the nearby nursery school Katherine Frankfort had found for her. It cost four dollars a week. Frieda attended weekdays from nine-thirty until twelve-thirty; some mornings she cried when Sylvia left her, some mornings she did not. Judging from the children’s behavior, they were both affected by the breakup of their parents’ marriage. Sylvia, who recognized this and described in letters to her mother how Frieda cried when Ted left at the end of his visits to Fitzroy Road, felt both angry with Ted and guilty over upsetting their young lives.

In the first days of January, Plath sought treatment from Dr. Horder, who, worried about the twenty pounds she had lost over the summer and the high fevers she ran in October, prescribed a tonic to help her gain weight and X-rayed her chest to rule out anything more serious than the flu. Plath had Horder look at Nick’s eye, which because of a minor deformity would probably require surgery. During early January, Plath was seeing more of Ted than she had been. On January 3, they again took the children to the zoo; on the 5th, he dropped by the flat at seven in the evening for a visit. Not long afterwards, Sylvia admitted to her mother that Ted came about once a week, under the guise of seeing Frieda. At times he treated Sylvia pleasantly; other times he could be dreadful. No matter what his behavior, his presence—or so Sylvia told Aurelia—unsettled her terribly. She could hardly bear to think of him living in an elegant flat, meeting important literary and publishing figures for supper, and taking carefree vacations with his girlfriend when it had been she—Sylvia!—who had worked so hard to put them in a position to enjoy the better things in life. Now the marriage had ended, and the sight of Ted made her furious. Even so, as Aurelia and others noticed, Sylvia would not put a stop to his coming by.

January 9th was an unusually bad day. The power failed, and the frigid weather would not let up. She had to write a cover letter to an editor at The London Magazine by candlelight, her fingers frigid as she typed, because the flat had neither electricity nor heat. At this point, she and the children, all three of them down with the flu, became so ill that Horder arranged for a live-in nurse, who stayed at the flat for a week, until Sylvia could recover enough to eat boiled eggs and chicken broth. Home Help Service, a government agency, sent her a cleaning woman, a Mrs. Vigors, who straightened up the flat while Sylvia was bedridden. But above all, she needed a good au-pair girl, Sylvia wrote to her mother on the 16th, a candidate for which she would soon interview.

In that same letter, Sylvia tried to convey how unbearable the winter really was. Because of electric strikes, all the lights and heat went out sometimes for hours. When this happened, meals went uncooked and parents bundled up their children to keep them warm. From those she cared about, Sylvia simply wanted encouragement. Occasionally she just needed someone to tell her she was doing fine, Sylvia wrote to her mother, under the conditions.

Actually, people did. The Beckers routinely saw Sylvia and the children. Gerry dropped by Fitzroy Road to check if all was going well (it often was not). Jillian invited Sylvia to a film festival at the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead in January; later that month, Sylvia attended a party at the Beckers’ to which the Cleverdons brought Richard Murphy. (The Cleverdons had warned Murphy that Plath was in a “very tense state,” which seemed an understatement; at the party she did not confront him, as some had thought she might.) Other supporters appeared. At mid-month, Susan O’Neill Roe and her boyfriend, Corin Hughes-Stanton, treated Sylvia to a night at the movies. On the 19th, Patty Goodall, a niece of Mildred Norton, and her husband had tea with Sylvia. Late in the month, Olive Prouty mailed Sylvia a $250 check. Around this time, the Beckers took her out for coffee to an all-night cafe in Soho, where they sat talking until dawn.

Still, throughout January, Sylvia fought the flu and her depression. Continuing to take her tonic to help her eat, she now needed sleeping pills at night to go to sleep. Finally, late in the month, she hired an eighteen-year-old au pair to watch the children. In January, she also wrote two nonfiction pieces that Punch commissioned: “America! America!,” a remembrance of her school days in Winthrop and Welles-ley, and “Snow Blitz,” a humorous sketch about the awful winter. But mostly she struggled to get well. Clarissa Roche visited Fitzroy Road early in February. Arriving to find Sylvia tired and sick, Clarissa cooked her a meal of pork chops and corn. “Sylvia devoured this so ravenously that I was suspicious,” Roche would later write, “and, sure enough, she confessed eventually that she had not been eating. . . . In fact, I think she was ill enough to muddle the days and nights. Sylvia then went to bed for a time and slept until my husband arrived. . . .” The sleep worked wonders. “When she came down there was no apparent trace of her feeling awful. She was a past master at disguising any state.” The Roches left, but not before they had arranged with Plath to go to the theatre one night in mid-February. Days later, Sylvia phoned the Roches from a coin box and they made plans. The three of them and Duncan Grant, Paul Roche’s former mentor, whom Plath wanted to meet, would go to King Lear the week of February 11. Clarissa would arrange for the tickets.

In January, Heinemann published The Bell Jar under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Dedicated to “Elizabeth and David” (“Compton” was omitted), the book was given a modest first run—the house would one day describe the initial printing as “token"—and received mostly very positive reviews. In the month following the novel’s release, about fifteen reviews appeared in a range of periodicals, from Time and Tide to the London Times. In his New Statesman review, Robert Taubman identified The Bell Jar as “the first feminine novel I’ve read in the Salinger mode.” The Times Literary Supplement’s anonymous reviewer set the tone of his piece with the lead sentence—"Few writers are able to create a different world for you to live in; yet Miss Lucas in The Bell Jar has done just this"—before he went on to say: “Miss Lucas can certainly write and the book is convincing. It reads so much like the truth that it is hard to disassociate her from Esther Greenwood, the T of the story, but she has the gift of being able to feel and yet to watch herself: she can feel the dissolution and yet relate it to the landscape of everyday life. There is a dry wit behind the poetic flashes and the zany fiascos of her relationships, and when the last part of the book begins to trail a little and details seem both ugly and irrelevant one finds oneself thinking ‘but this is how it happened/ “ The BBC’s review, which appeared in The Listener on January 31, also praised the book. “I recommend The Bell Jar strongly,” Laurence Lerner said. “There are criticisms of American society that the neurotic can make as well as anyone, perhaps better, and Miss Lucas makes them triumphantly. . . . This is a brilliant and moving book.”

While The Bell Jar was accumulating good reviews in England, no American publisher would touch it. Ted’s editor at Harper and Row, Elizabeth Lawrence, to whom Heinemann had submitted the novel after Knopf turned it down, rejected it. She did so because she believed that, following Esther’s breakdown, “the story ceases to be a novel and becomes a case history.” In retrospect, The Bell Jar seems to be a victim of its itime. Society allowed a man to write about going mad— Salinger and Ken Kesey did, to name two—but when a woman approached the subject she was disparaged. In Plath’s case, the editors who did not recognize the historical (if not literary) value of the book were women. Two men had edited The Bell Jar at Heinemann; two women turned the novel down in America.

At the very end of January, Plath began to write poetry again. On the 28th, she finished a poem she had drafted in early December, “Sheep in Fog.” On that day, she also completed, beginning from scratch, three more poems. “Child” is yet another poem concerning motherhood. “Totem” is, as Plath ^scribed it, “a pile of interconnected images, like a totem pole"—a sort of collage poem. And “The Munich Mannequins” recalls Plath’s visit to Munich with Gordon. After her marriage to Hughes had failed and an anticipated affair with Alvarez ended before it even started, Plath used as source material for a poem her disastrous trip with Gordon. Had her Munich trip turned out to be a reconciliation with Gordon, and not a debacle, Plath could surely not help but think, how different her life would have been. Perhaps they would have married, settled down, had a family. Perhaps she would never have married Ted Hughes.

The next day, Plath wrote the poems “Paralytic” and “Gigolo.” The latter, spoken by its title character, is about a narcissistic man dressed in black. On February 1, Plath produced three poems. “Mystic” is a religious poem in which the narrator thinks about love and faith. “Kindness” centers on a character named Dame Kindness, a woman who drips with sweetness, although her intentions may not be so pleasant as they appear on the surface. The last poem Plath wrote on the 1st, “Words,” deals with language, yet the poem’s final sentiment—“fixed stars / Govern a life”—also indicates the narrator’s resolve to accept her fate.

On February 4, Plath finished one short poem, “Contusion.” The next day, she wrote “Balloons” and “Edge.” The first paints a charming picture of a boy playing with balloons. Also dealing with children, “Edge” is not so quaint. A brief lyric, the poem describes a dead woman—her body is now “perfected”—who is shown with her two dead children. The disturbing reality of the poem is clear. The woman has committed suicide. “Edge” was possibly the last poem Sylvia Plath wrote.

7

Since the summer, Plath’s emotional state had gradually deteriorated. Her various physical illnesses, which proved to be unrelenting, only aggravated her condition. Her behavior had become disturbing at times. One day in January, after Trevor Thomas had shouted at her from the downstairs landing that the doorbell was ringing for her and it was up to her to answer it, Sylvia stormed out of her flat. “Can’t you see I’m very ill?” she yelled. “I’m a very sick woman and I’ve a lot to do. I don’t want to see anyone.”

Not long after that, on Sunday the 27th, the day The Observer ran Anthony Burgess’s review of The Bell Jar, Sylvia went down to Thomas’s and knocked on his door. When he answered, Thomas saw Plath crying hysterically. “I am going to die,” she said through her sobs, “and who will take care of my children?” Deeply concerned, Thomas took Sylvia into his flat, sat her down, and gave her a glass of sheny. Then he asked what had happened to make her this upset. “We were so happy,” Sylvia said. “It’s that awful woman’s fault. She stole him. We were so happy and she stole him away from me. She’s an evil woman, a scarlet woman, the Jezebel. They’re in Spain spending our money, my money. Oh! How I hate them!” Barely able to control herself, Sylvia picked up The Observer lying on a table. She flipped to Ted’s poem “Full Moon for Little Frieda,” which appeared in the literary section, and showed it to Thomas. Turning to Burgess’s review of The Bell Jar, she said: “That’s me, though that’s not my real name. I’m Sylvia Plath.” The revelation startled Thomas. He knew the byline from seeing it in magazines, but he had no idea that the “Mrs. Hughes” who lived upstairs was Sylvia Plath.

From her outburst, the source of Plath’s anguish became obvious. She might have pretended not to be jealous of Assia—she had even borrowed a table from her, she told her mother—yet Sylvia was, now as much as ever. It did not help that Ted continued to stop by Fitzroy Road regularly. “Daddy come soon?” Frieda would ask sometimes when she woke up at night crying. In a recent letter, Sylvia explained to her mother why she kept seeing Ted even if she hated him. As long as he visited the children, or at least Frieda, he would make his $280 monthly maintenance payment. However, others, like Aurelia, suspected that Sylvia saw Ted because she loved him. As January progressed, Colin and Valerie St. Johnson, neighbors who lived directly across Fitzroy Road and whose boy played with Frieda and Nicholas, noticed that lately Sylvia had taken to standing at a window in her living room and looking down towards the corner at which Ted would appear when he came from the nearby tube stop. During January, the St. Johnsons on occasion spotted Ted walking down Fitzroy Road. Each time, he wore all black; usually he had a black scarf thrown dramatically around his neck. By the end of the month, the St. Johnsons realized that Sylvia was standing at the window for longer and longer periods of time. Some days, she remained there, without moving, for hours. Though each St. Johnson mentioned it to the other, neither confronted Sylvia herself. Her neighbors simply assumed that Sylvia felt so strongly about the husband from whom (they knew) she was separated that she would wait at her window indefinitely, merely to glimpse his approaching figure.

Despite her problems, Sylvia still made plans for the future. On February 4, even as she admitted in a letter to her mother to feeling “grim” because of the “finality of it all,” she catalogued upcoming events: Marcia Brown would visit in March, a BBC critics’ program had offered her a $150 assignment for May, and she would travel in the summer. Also, though she did not tell her mother, John Richardson, a friend, had asked her to the Spike Milligan evening for March 3, and she had set up a lunch date with her new Heinemann editor for February 11. She did tell Aurelia, however, that Horder had arranged for her to start sessions with a woman psychiatrist supplied by the National Health. Until then, she kept in close contact with Horder; after February 4, she saw him daily. Horder knew of Plath’s marital and emotional problems. As of February 1963, he had diagnosed her as being “pathologically depressed,” a condition he considered much too severe to be a result of the breakup of her marriage. Instead, Horder believed the source of this depression was “a combination of things of which the broken marriage was very important.” She had an upper-respiratory infection, which can cause depression. She had just set up another new house in a foreign country—no easy task. She had a past history of severe—sometimes suicidal—depression. Worst of all, she was abnormally sensitive, as many artists are.

Horder himself had suffered for years with chronic depression. So, although he attempted to arrange for Plath a full-time National Health psychiatrist, he felt confident that he could treat her depression on his own. His decision about method proved crucial, for at some point early on in the week of the 4th Horder placed Plath on antidepressants. At that time, a physician had available to him two groups from which he could choose—tricyclics, which take three weeks or longer to go into effect and which can help the patient sleep, and monoamine-oxidase inhibitors, which work much faster—usually within two weeks—but can cause dangerous side effects if a patient eats the wrong foods, especially cheese. Since Plath did not need help sleeping—she still took barbiturates—Horder concluded that she needed relief as soon as possible. He put her on the latter and warned her about which foods not to eat.

On Thursday the 7th, Sylvia appeared to be nearing her breaking point. In the afternoon, she and the au pair got into a disagreement. According to the au pair, Sylvia, in a bad mood and sick, attacked her. According to Sylvia, who told two separate stories, the au pair either quit for no reason, or was fired by Sylvia because Sylvia discovered that she had left the children alone. Whatever really happened, when the au pair asked for the money Sylvia owed her, Sylvia did assault her; pushing and hitting her, she demanded that she go at once. Frightened, the au pair left without being paid. Almost hysterical, Sylvia telephoned Jillian Becker to ask if she and the children could come stay with her for a few days. This would be a stopgap measure while Horder, now gravely concerned about Sylvia’s condition, searched for a bed in a suitable hospital so that she could be admitted. More than receptive, Jillian demanded that Sylvia come over right away. Driving across London in the Morris, Sylvia arrived at the Beckers’ Mountfort Crescent flat around teatime, whereupon Jillian discovered that Sylvia had brought nothing with her except Nicholas and Frieda—no clothes, no suitcase, no baby paraphernalia. Apparently, she had just gathered up the children and rushed out of the flat. Jillian put the three of them in an upstairs bedroom, drove Sylvia’s car back over to Fitzroy Road, and collected the things Sylvia and the children would need to spend the weekend. She brought back clothes for the children, bottles for Nicholas, and, for Sylvia—at Sylvia’s request—curlers, cosmetics, and a party dress. At Mountfort Crescent, Jillian bathed and dressed Nicholas and Frieda, prepared a steak supper that Sylvia enjoyed enormously, and, after Sylvia had asked her to, went with her upstairs to her bedroom. Jillian watched as Sylvia swallowed one sleeping pill after another. She then stayed with her until the pills took over and Sylvia drifted off to sleep.

About three-thirty in the morning, Sylvia awoke Jillian—and the rest of the house—crying out for help. She wanted Jillian to sit with her until five-thirty, when she could take her next antidepressant. The hardest depression to endure, Sylvia told Jillian, was the one in the early morning. Fearful for Sylvia’s welfare, Jillian settled in a chair and listened to a two-hour tirade against Ted, Assia, and the entire Hughes family. Her ideal marriage, Sylvia said, had now ended. She felt abandoned, just as she had after her father’s death. She also brought up a list of names that meant nothing to Jillian—Richard, Dick, Gordon. They all had loved her and wanted to marry her. She could have been happy with them. Instead, she made the mistake of marrying Ted.

Finally, Sylvia dozed off again, and Jillian, exhausted by the scene, returned to bed. The next morning, though sick with the flu, Gerry went off to work; Jillian remained to care for Nicholas and Frieda. Soon after breakfast, Jillian took a telephone call from Horder, who told her he hoped to locate a hospital bed soon. Two hospitals he had approached had no rooms available; a third, which could admit her, seemed unsuitable to Horder. As they spoke, Horder implored Jillian to encourage Sylvia to care for the children herself. Sylvia adored the children. If she realized how much they depended on her, Horder believed, she might feel more worthy.

Later in the morning, well after Jillian had hung up with Horder, Sylvia called him herself to set up an appointment. At that time, she also telephoned the au-pair girl, who, when Sylvia asked her to come back, refused to work for her again. In the afternoon, once she had rested and taken one of the four hot baths she would have that day, Sylvia drove back across town to see Horder. But when Trevor Thomas carried his milk bottles out, an hour or so after coming home from work, he discovered Sylvia sitting alone in the Morris in front of their building. Because the weather was cold and snowy, Thomas approached Sylvia to ask if she felt all right. Fine, Sylvia assured him; she was just thinking. Should he call Dr. Horder? Thomas said. (Like almost everyone in the neighborhood, he too used Horder.) “No,” Sylvia answered, “I’m going away for a long holiday, a long rest.” Then Thomas wanted to know where the children were; with friends, Sylvia said. Finally, Thomas returned to his flat and Sylvia drove off. At the Beckers’, she stayed only long enough to eat supper before she left again. This time, she took with her the curlers, cosmetics, and party dress. On her way out to the Morris, she told the Beckers not to wait up. She had a “very important” date.

That night, Sylvia met Ted at Fitzroy Road. The two of them did not remain long, or so Hughes would say years later; Sylvia seemed in a hurry. Whether their conversation was brief, Ted ultimately left. Apparently, Sylvia then dressed and curled her hair (if she had not done so already). It is uncertain what she did next: she may have gone elsewhere, or she may simply have not felt like driving across town. At any rate, she hired a taxi back to Mountfort Crescent, where Jillian noticed a decided change in her personality. Her actions were direct and purposeful, as if after much uncertainty some vital issue had been settled. Had she finally come to realize that Ted did not intend to come back to her? Had he told her so in their conversation? Assia had become pregnant—a pregnancy she aborted around March 1; if Sylvia learned of Assia’s pregnancy that night, certainly the news would have further depressed her. Any reconciliation between Ted and Sylvia, if that was what Sylvia wanted, would have been rendered all but impossible. This, more than the resolution of any other unfinished business in her life, would have accounted for the new attitude Jillian saw. Or, as friends of Sylvias later speculated, perhaps something more ominous occurred Friday night at Fitzroy Road. After years of repeatedly being hypnotized by Ted and acting on his posthypnotic suggestions, Sylvia was highly sensitive to any signal—conscious or unconscious—that she perceived him to be sending. Several times during the fall she had told her mother that Ted wanted her to kill herself; if she believed this, it might have propelled her on some new and purposeful path of action tonight.

The next morning, Gerry, now very ill, stayed in bed, while Jillian watched the children and Sylvia rested. In the evening, Jillian and Gerry reluctantly kept a supper date with friends. Gerry arranged for one of his students to come sit with Sylvia. With the Beckers away, Sylvia and the student listened to music, mostly Beethoven. Later, when the Beckers came back, Sylvia began her nightly routine: she took the sleeping pills, awoke in the middle of the night, and, calling out to Jillian, confided in her until she dropped back off to sleep.

On Sunday, Gerry felt well enough to go with the children to the zoo. Jillian’s two children (by a previous marriage) had been staying with their father so that Sylvia and her children could sleep in their rooms. Today they joined Gerry, along with Nicholas and Frieda as well as the two Cleverdon children (Douglas and Nest lived on the same square as the Beckers), to make it a real outing. The group was back by lunch, at which Sylvia ate heartily. Then she went upstairs to her bedroom and took a long nap, the best rest she had had in days.

Late in the afternoon, when she awoke, Sylvia decided that she wanted to go home. Because her car was elsewhere, she asked Gerry to drive her and the children to Fitzroy Road. The Beckers protested. There was no reason for her to leave, they insisted. She should stay until she felt better, or until Horder could find her a bed in a suitable hospital. But she did feel better, Sylvia said. The sleep had made her feel like a different person. Anyway, Horder had lined up a nurse, whom she needed to meet at the flat early in the morning, and Sylvia had things to do tomorrow: wash clothes, take Frieda to nursery school, and have lunch with her Heinemann editor. Even so, the Beckers argued against her going—but to no avail. Finally, Sylvia collected the children and all the family’s belongings and convinced Gerry to drive her across town.

Although Sylvia cried most of the way, Gerry could not persuade her to go back with him. After he left around seven, Sylvia fed the children and put them to bed; then Horder checked in on her. Next Sylvia must have written letters. At eleven-forty-five, she walked down and rang Thomas’s bell to ask for stamps. Immediately upon answering his door, Thomas realized that, in addition to whatever she had been doing while he heard her pacing about upstairs, she had also taken some kind of medication. She looked drugged, distracted. “Would you be able to let me have some stamps, please?” Sylvia asked. Her letters were “airmail for America,” and she wanted to put them in the box tonight. Certainly, Thomas answered. But before fetching the stamps, he asked why she had not gone away for her holiday. “The children were difficult and I wanted to write,” Sylvia said. Thomas handed the stamps to Sylvia, who asked how much she owed him—an offer Thomas refused. “Oh! But I must pay you or I won’t be right with my conscience before God, will I?” Finally, as if Sylvia’s behavior had not been peculiar enough, she wanted to know what time he left for work in the morning. Around eight-thirty, Thomas answered. Why? “Oh, nothing, I just wondered, that’s all.” With this, Thomas shut the door. Ten minutes later, when he spotted the hallway light still burning, he opened the door to find Sylvia standing in the same place. I’m calling Horder, Thomas insisted. “Oh no, please, don’t do that. I’m just having a marvelous dream, a most wonderful vision.” Confused, Thomas shut the door once again and, since it was almost twelve-thirty, went to bed, although he was kept awake by the sound of Sylvia walking on her wooden floors upstairs.

At some point, Sylvia must have mailed her letters. If she slept, she did not sleep much. Thomas could hear her footsteps until he drifted off” to sleep at five. It would probably have been around this hour, the time of her early-morning depression, the one that was hardest to endure, that she began the actions that ended in her death. She wrote a note—“Please call Dr. Horder,” it said under his telephone number—and crept down the stairs into the main entryway to tape the note to the perambulator, just inside the building’s front door. Back in her flat, she prepared a plate of bread and butter and two mugs of milk, which she carried upstairs and placed in Frieda and Nicholas’s bedroom. She opened the window in the children’s room; then, going into the hall, sealed the room shut behind her by stuffing towels into the crack at the sill jamb and taping up the top and two sides. The children’s safety secured, Sylvia went downstairs and sealed herself in the kitchen. Again, towels under the door, tape over the cracks. Finally, in the heart of the blue hour, that part of the early morning during which she had written her best poems, Sylvia Plath opened the oven door, folded a cloth on which she could rest her cheek, turned on the gas full-tilt, and, kneeling down on the floor before the oven, rested her cheek on the folded cloth she had placed on the oven door.

At nine o’clock, Myra Norris, the nurse Plath was expecting, arrived at 23 Fitzroy Road. Because the house’s front entrance was locked, Norris could not get into the building to knock on Plath’s door. Also, the name of the patient, Sylvia Plath Hughes, did not appear on either doorbell, and Norris was not even sure that she was at the correct address. She rang Thomas’s bell—no answer. In time, she decided to telephone her agency to verify the patient’s name and address. After waiting in line at the coin box—a new frost had burst more pipes, so neighbors queued up to telephone plumbers—Norris contacted her office. Sylvia Plath Hughes, 23 Fitzroy Road—the information was correct. Returning to the building, Norris walked around back to look for a second entrance. When she did, she spotted the two children crying at their bedroom window. Deeply concerned, Norris ran around front and bumped into Charles Langridge, a builder working on the block. With his help, Norris gained access to the house. Outside the upstairs flat’s door, they could both smell the unmistakable odor of gas. When Langridge broke down the door, they rushed in, forced their way into the kitchen, and found Sylvia sprawled out on the tile floor, her head still in the oven.

Hurriedly they turned off the gas and opened the windows. Then they carried Sylvia’s body into the living room, and Norris began artificial respiration. Meanwhile, Langridge called the police from the coin box. When the policeman arrived, Langridge helped him rescue the children from upstairs. At some point, Langridge spotted the note taped on the perambulator and telephoned Horder. Soon Horder arrived with a friend, a doctor from America. Examining her, Horder agreed with the nurse, who had given up on the artificial respiration: Sylvia’s condition was hopeless. Horder pronounced Plath dead at ten-thirty. Afterwards, an emergency team removed her body from the flat on a stretcher and transported it by ambulance to University College Hospital, on Gower Street in Saint Pancras. On her death certificate, which was registered on the 16th, Plath was described as being dead when she arrived at the hospital. Listing her occupation as “an authoress . . . wife of Edward James Hughes an author,” the certificate documented her cause of death as “Carbon monoxide poisoning (domestic gas) while suffering from depression. Did kill herself.” On a desk in a room at 23 Fitzroy Road, the flat in which William Butler Yeats had lived and in which Sylvia Plath had now died, lay a finished manuscript, Ariel and Other Poems.

Horder telephoned Jillian Becker, who was devastated by the news. Jillian, who did not have Ted’s number, called Suzette Macedo, who reached Hughes at his Soho flat. Suzette arrived at Fitzroy Road to watch after the children, whom Horder had examined and found to be in good condition. Though the children survived, Trevor Thomas almost did not. Gas from the upstairs flat had seeped down into his room and knocked him out as he slept. Awaking late in the afternoon, Thomas felt sick and confused. When he saw him, Horder diagnosed Thomas as suffering from carbon-monoxide poisoning.

On February 12, Hughes cabled not Aurelia but Aunt Dotty. The cable was simple. “Sylvia died yesterday,” it stated flatly; then it documented the details of the funeral, which Ted was now planning without consulting the Plath family.

On Friday the 15th, an inquest took place at Saint Pancras County Court, a small brick building off the huge wooded Saint Pancras Gardens. Inside, in the cramped, dark courtroom, the coroner called witnesses to the box and asked them questions about the “sudden death” of Sylvia Plath Hughes. On this day the court heard testimony from Ted Hughes, who identified the body; Myra Norris and Constable John Jones, who presented evidence; Dr. Peter Sutton, who reported on the postmortem (he had concluded Plath “[d]id kill herself”); and Dr. Horder, who was criticized by the coroner for not finding Plath a hospital bed. With officialdom satisfied, only the funeral remained.

After the inquest, Ted traveled with Sylvia’s body to Yorkshire, where he had decided she would be buried in his family’s cemetery in Hep-tonstall. The next day, in the early afternoon of February 16, a brief service was held at the Hugheses’ local church. Overseen by Oliver Forshaw, who knew almost nothing about Ted and Sylvia, the service was attended by a handful of people—the Beckers, Ted’s parents, a local church devotee named Joan Mason, and Warren and Margaret, who had flown from America. The children did not come, but remained in London with Aunt Hilda; nor did Olwyn, ill with the flu. Shattered by the blow of her daughter’s death, Aurelia did not attempt the trip over. At the conclusion of the ceremony in the church, the funeral party reconvened at the cemetery, which, like much of the moors, lay under a layer of snow. When the minister had completed the prayers, the gathering of mourners dispersed; the open grave would be filled in by the undertaker. Though a tombstone had not yet been put in place, one eventually would be. Along with her married name—Sylvia Plath Hughes—and the dates—1932-1963—Hughes would select as an inscription a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted.”

Over the years, Plath’s family and friends would try to understand her death. “Sylvia was doomed,” Wilbury Crockett remembered. “I don’t want to say she had a death wish. What I’m saying is, I was not surprised by the way her life ended. I grieved but I was not shocked.” Gloria Steinem placed Plath in social context. “Sylvia Plath was an early prophet who described a societal problem by describing her own suffering, who described the problem without knowing why. And when the why finally came along, she became even more tragic.” Alvarez openly acknowledged his (and others’) guilt. “When I look back on her life, it fills me with shame about how badly everyone behaved towards her near the end . . . , myself included.” Aurelia Plath isolated her daughter’s most basic character defect. “Sylvia’s tragic flaw lay in her own very weak ego strength.” And Marybeth Little summed up the pathos of Plath’s death. “Her death was tragic but her life was a triumph. How many of us have recovered from the (almost) perfectly natural nervous breakdown of the sensitive scholarly student? Much more important, how many of us left poems that will live? And children who live, yes, in a shadow but, yes, in the light of a light undimmed.”