Rough Magic Read online

  ROUGH MAGIC

  Preface

  I first read the poetry of Sylvia Plath in 1974, when I was a sophomore in college. At once, I was struck by each poem’s arresting emotion, by the sheer power of its language. Over and over that semester, I read the poems I admired most—"Morning Song,” “Blackberrying,” “Elm,” “Edge"—and was taken into a world so vividly realized that I was moved to anger, sympathy, awe. My connection with Plath did not result from any psychological identification. I was not then, nor have I ever been, suicidal. I am not a woman. My father did not die when I was eight years old. I simply fell in love with the beauty of the language of her poems. It was my admiration for Plath’s work that, years later, made me want to edit Ariel Ascending, an anthology of essays about her life and writings that appeared in 1985. And it was during my research for that book that I became taken with the idea of doing Plath’s biography.

  Before I began the writing of this book, I read in full the two major Plath archives, those housed at Smith College and those at Indiana University—and gathered information from many other university and community libraries that maintain smaller Plath holdings. I conducted some three hundred individual interviews with people who knew Plath, a number of whom had never before spoken openly about her. Though I have quoted from these interviews, I have been sparing in my use of Plath’s own words—the words that made me want to write her biography. The reason is both complex and simple.

  Because Plath died without leaving a will, Ted Hughes, the husband from whom she was estranged at the time of her death in 1963, inherited the copyright to her entire literary canon, both published and unpublished work. In time, he appointed his sister, Olwyn Hughes, as the agent for Plath’s estate. To many friends of Plath, this decision seemed odd. Comments made by Olwyn such as those quoted in a London newspaper article—“You liked her,” she had written to Clarissa Roche, “I think she was pretty straight poison. God preserve me from mixed-up kids”—suggest that through the years, on the subject of Plath, Olwyn Hughes has had an ax to grind. At the very least, one can surmise that Ted and Olwyn Hughes, the parties who control Plath’s copyright, are anything but disinterested bystanders.

  Historically, when an author has submitted a manuscript to the Plath estate for permission to quote, the Hugheses have asked the author for changes in substance as well as quotation in exchange for that permission. I decided early on that I would not subject myself to the constraints of the estate, and so I did not quote from unpublished sources, although much information in my biography is gleaned from such sources. I also determined that I would not quote so extensively from published material that I would have to seek permission from the estate.

  I was, however, careful not to exclude Ted Hughes’s participation in this book. In September 1988, on one of my three research trips to England, I wrote to Hughes, whom I had met on previous occasions in Boston and New York City, to request a formal interview. “I would like to ask if you would agree to meet with me,” I wrote, pointing out that I would soon be in North Tawton where he still lives in Court Green, the house he and Plath bought in the early nineteen-sixties. “The conversation could either be on or off the record—your decision—but I would like at least to see you while I am in England, if for no other reason than to discuss with you the image of Plath I am now forming.” My answer came a few days later. “I don’t suppose you will be surprised to hear that I have no interest, I’m afraid, in anything to do with biographical or critical writings about SP, beyond making some effort to protect myself from the legal consequences,” Hughes wrote. “And I hope it doesn’t sound too strange if I say that my home is the one place that I can keep reasonably clear of the agitations and foolishness of the public Plath debates, and that I wish to keep it so. . . . Otherwise, I wish your research well.”

  I answered Hughes in early October. “I can’t say that I’m altogether shocked by your statement that you have no interest in anything to do with biographical writings about Sylvia Plath,” I said. (In fact, in the nearly thirty years following her death, he has never given an interview on her.) “However, I was hoping that you might be willing to talk with me on some level so that I would be able to detail more accurately situations in which you were involved—to set the record straight, I suppose you could say.” In my letter I included a temporary address in London at which he could reach me, should he change his mind. I never heard from him again.

  The Blue Hour

  The landscape surrounding the country house in Devon lay dead, silent—typical for this hour of the early morning. To the side of the house, the dark yard gave way to a shadowy block of bare ground, the location of the summer flower and vegetable gardens, while past the gardens skeletal shapes of trees, blacker still, rose up to break the sky’s fragile horizon. The main source of light, except for a scattering of stars, was a low moon that illuminated a clump of cherry trees growing on a knoll beside the house. In this darkness, all lines of demarcation faded; the whole scene appeared blurred, out of focus. Similarly, the morning’s stillness filled the interior of the house. In one upstairs bedroom, two small children, a girl not yet three and an infant boy ten months old, slept peacefully in their beds. Down the hall, in a room converted into a study, a young woman, the house’s only other inhabitant, hunched at her desk. Her frame was thin—for several months, she had been steadily losing weight—and her face was chalky and pale. Her long brown fall of hair hung down tangled and unkempt. Absorbed in her task, she perched on the edge of her chair as she studied the marked-up papers strewn on the desktop before her. Occasionally, she would glance out the window to catch sight of the predawn landscape—the stark moon or the bare trees or the hazy figures of tombstones rising up from the cemetery that lay between the country house and the twelfth-century stone church next door. She did not indulge this impulse often, however, for she had to proceed with her work—the reason, after all, she had awakened at four o’clock in the morning.

  Not that this was anything new. She had been rising at the same hour for several weeks’ running, because once her children rose, around eight, she had to stop writing and devote her full attention both to their care and to myriad household duties. What was more, these days, she felt an even greater responsibility towards her children, now that she and her husband were separated. Her infant son had been—and remained—oblivious to recent upsetting developments, but her baby girl, who sensed the tension around her, had become chronically fretful. Meanwhile, the young woman, who would be known one day to wide audiences although at the moment she was considered merely a promising young poet, fought off a fear of abandonment, which she had first encountered in the wake of the untimely death of her father when she was eight years old, and struggled to cope as best she could. She did this, at least in part, at least to her own thinking, through the very act of writing.

  Today, Tuesday, October 16, 1962, Sylvia Plath worked on a poem that, by the end of her writing session, she would title “Medusa.” She labored on the poem in the same manner she had on any recent piece. With a keenly focused tunnel vision, she pored—urgently, ex-haustingly—over each line, each word. The poem was evolving surprisingly slowly, through no fault of its own, but because, for the better part of a week now, Plath had suffered from a cold, a sinus infection, and a low-grade fever that alternated with chills. Most people in her physical condition would have shunned work for sleep. Not Plath. Left alone to face the demands of maintaining a country house and its grounds, of supervising the hired help (she employed, part-time, a nanny and a cleaning woman), and of caring for her children, Plath had found that the hours between four and eight in the morning were her only quiet time. So, even though she was sick, she forced herself to get out of bed to write. And in the weeks she had followed this schedule, she had experienced breathtaking results—almost a poem a day, some of them the best she had ever produced.

  Her method was simple. Each morning, she settled into a chair at her desk in her study and there, on the back of a
rough draft of The Bell Jar—her novel, soon to be published under a pseudonym in England—or on unused Smith College stationery shipped to her from America by a friend, she sketched out, first in longhand and then on a manual typewriter, draft upon draft of a poem, until she brought it into a state she considered final. In the four hours of writing she managed each morning, she took a poem through numerous rewrites, occasionally as many as ten. But when a poem was done, it was done; she rarely went back to a poem a second day. Working in this fashion, Plath had completed—just over the last seventeen days—eleven poems, among them “Daddy,” “A Birthday Present,” “The Applicant,” and a series of five poems about beekeeping that she had grouped under the title “Bees.”

  While she drafted “Medusa,” Plath began to think about these recent poems. She was convinced that she had now forged the ultimate breakthrough, evidence of her ability to write on an entirely new level. “I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me,” she told her mother in a letter later that day. “I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.” Despite this tone of self-assurance, Plath could never have imagined the extent to which her prediction would fulfill itself. She simply could not have foreseen the days when, in the shadow of her death, her first posthumous poetry collection would be read in massive numbers by a devoted audience who would cast her in the role of feminist martyr; when The Bell Jar, upon being released in America under Plaths own name, would become the commercial sensation of 1971, occupying The New York Times’ best-seller list for six solid months; or when the publication of her subsequent posthumous volumes of poetry and prose would be heralded as major literary events. In October 1962, though she sensed that her latest poems were exceptional, she knew only that she could not avoid writing them. No matter what, Plath had to rise each morning and brave the “still, blue, almost eternal hour”—the phrase she used to describe that singular blend of darkness and silence that emerges as dawn approaches in Devon.

  After she finished “Medusa,” Plath realized how little its strategy resembled that of her other October poems. Unlike “Bees,” in which apparent autobiography is really calculated melodrama, or “Daddy” and “The Applicant,” in which apparent autobiography is really black farce, “Medusa” relies for success on its artful construction: an imagined narrator, placed in the throes of an invented situation, responds in direct and emotional language. The repulsive monster Medusa, the feared Gorgon whose stare can turn a mortal into stone, attacks the poem’s unnamed “I”—this is the invented situation. The narrator, under siege, is horrified, but all the “I” can do is recoil from the monster’s advances. Ironically, these actions are unlike those of the original Greek myth’s hero, a superhuman who slays Medusa by hacking off her head with a sword. To Plath, such acts of valor are impossible. Indeed, in Plath’s re-creation of the myth, the central figure ultimately plays the part of victim.

  At no stage in her career did Plath engage in writing strict autobiography. Yet the strained voice of “Medusa” ‘s narrator echoed the pain Plath felt as she wrote the poem. Physically ill and emotionally wrung-out, she had reached her metaphorical edge. Most probably, her current crisis had begun in London two and a half years earlier, on April 1, 1960, when she gave birth to her first child, a daughter. Under the limited medical supervision of a midwife, Plath delivered her baby at home without the help of anesthesia or painkilling medication. In the months following the birth, Plath flung herself into the prepublication frenzy surrounding the appearance in England of her first book, The Colossus and Other Poems. But her enthusiasm soured noticeably when, in October 1960, at the time of the book’s release, and in the months to follow, the British press ignored The Colossus. All told, only a few reviews appeared, the collective tone of which was decidedly cool. “One might criticise the rather baffling obliqueness of some of Miss Plath’s work,” Thomas Blackburn commented in December in The New Statesman, voicing a pervasive skeptical attitude among reviewers towards the book, “[along with the discovery] that her imagery tends to get out of hand, so that the poem becomes not a single experience but a series of intriguing literary gems/ “ Plath had given a good portion of her adult life to the writing of this book. That the end product would go all but unnoticed became devastating to her. “Since I got no prize or any American publisher, [William Heinemann hasn’t] bothered to advertise [The Colossus], so I probably wont make a penny on it,” she wrote in a letter near the end of 1960, adding, with a deadpan candor that doesn’t quite disguise her grave disappointment, “Well, it’s a nice gift book.”

  If the year 1960 was hard on Plath, the next eighteen months were worse. After she endured a miscarriage and an appendectomy—in February and March 1961, respectively—she devoted much of the rest of the year to finishing The Bell Jar. Also, in the fall she moved, with her husband and daughter, from London to a spacious but dilapidated manor house hours by train south of the city, in Devon’s North Tawton, where, only days into the new year, on January 17,1962, she gave birth to her second child, a son. (In the space of thirty months, Plath had sustained three separate pregnancies, two to full term.) The most damaging blow to her psyche came in July 1962, on the afternoon when she accidentally discovered that her husband of six years, the man whom she had revered as the center of her universe, her “Adam,” was having an aflFair. Betrayed and insulted, Plath forced him, through her open displays of anger, to live away from their house for much of August. In early September, the couple went on a vacation to Ireland without the children. This last-ditch effort to save the marriage did not work. Following four days of a proposed week-long holiday, Plath was deserted—her word—by her husband, who returned to London—and his mistress. By October, Plath’s marriage had all but ended. Her husband collected his belongings, Plath began searching for a suitable flat in London into which she and the children could move, and the couple agreed to pursue a legal separation. So, as she worked on “Medusa” that morning in October 1962, Plath easily identified with the role of victim. In her mind, justified or not, she felt she had come to embody the very meaning of the word.

  Later in the day, “Medusa” completed and the children awake, Plath went about her regular schedule. She fed and tended the children, performed minor outdoor chores, and trudged through a list of household duties. At some point in the afternoon, she became extremely uneasy. To calm her nerves, she wrote the letter to her mother, who still lived in Wellesley, Massachusetts, the quaint, stylish Boston suburb where Plath spent most of her girlhood. Though almost all of the nearly one thousand letters she had written her mother over the past decade projected optimism and joy, Plath could feign neither emotion this afternoon. She simply could no longer hold back her despair, which she normally vented more privately, in her journal. “I can go nowhere with the children”—her mother had suggested she travel to Wellesley—“and I am ill, and it would be psychologically the worst thing to see you now or to go home,” she wrote, soon becoming more self-indulgent. Craving the company of family, she longed for someone to assist her while she endured the “daily assault of practical nastiness,” to stand by her if the ordeal of a divorce weighed her down. She dreamed of the security of home, she said, but could not imagine giving up her safe harbor—England. So she made a request. Could either Dorothy, an aunt, or Margaret, the new sister-in-law whom she had never even met, spare her six weeks and come to England? Desperate, Plath offered to pay for room, board, and travel expenses for either one of them—money she did not have but would find. Plath’s cry for help, so totally out of character for her, would alert her mother to the acute mental distress of which it was a symptom. Yet Plath remained unaware of, or perhaps unconcerned about, the serious worry her letter might provoke. As soon as she had finished it, she mailed it.

  That night, Plath prepared supper, bathed the children, put them to bed. Finally, she became consumed by an intense feeling of loneliness. To counteract this, she wrote her mother a second letter. In it, Plath begged for Margaret to come right away, t
hen continued, “Do I sound mad? Taking or wanting to take Warren’s wife?” If she did sound mad, she had cause. She felt sick and exhausted, she admitted, sometimes even a “bit delirious.” But all would be well by spring, she speculated, when the weather would be better, she and the children would be healthier, and friends and relatives would arrive for visits. If only she had someone to help her through her present dilemma. If only she had Margaret for six weeks . . . Plath closed the letter by offering love to them all, her family.

  (The day Plath’s mother received these letters, she wired a friend in Devon with instructions to hire her daughter a full-time housekeeper immediately—a stopgap solution, Plath’s mother hoped, to Sylvia’s problems. “Salary paid here,” the telegram said.)

  With the second letter ready to be mailed, Plath went to bed. At four the next morning, she awoke and, although still sick, drafted another poem, “The Jailer.” A tense psychological monologue spoken by a prisoner about her captor, the poem chills with its biting honesty and unrelenting hopelessness.

  Not quite four months later, on February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath— plagued by flu, a sinus infection, and a depression caused in large part by the events of the summer and fall of 1962 and also by a new romance that ended before it really began—succeeded at an act she had attempted on at least one prior occasion: she killed herself. In the years following her death, the poems she had written each morning at the blue hour in October 1962 would make her name. They would earn for her in death the recognition, fame, and honor she had wanted so badly while she was alive.

  Otto and Aurelia

  1

  On the last day of the spring semester that year—1930—a handsome German professor stood before his class of a dozen students, his figure rugged against the blackboard behind him. The semester had been a good one—not a surprise, since the professor, who taught both German and biology, had become a virtual legend on campus. Yearbook citations bore witness. From 1926: “We interviewed him. ‘What is your greatest interest?’ He smiled. ‘Bees’ he answered. ‘Yes’ we persisted, ‘but what is your—your ambition?’ He smiled. ‘Bees’ he said. ‘We mean’ we patiently explained, ‘what is your passion—that of which you dream?’ He smiled—opened his mouth.. . . But we fled, remembering Hamlet pointing to his head, and saying to Polonius, ‘B-z-z.’ “ From 1927: “Once there was a sturdy youngster with round eyes who sat in a school room on warm June days with a German reader propped up before him and gazed beyond it straight out the window at a bee sailing round the clover tops. His schoolmates called him Bienen-König. Even today the Herr professor breaks into a German declension with talk of locusts and wild honey.” Yet this folklore paled, compared with the “rat” episode, which year after year he perpetrated on his students. To demonstrate man’s illogic, the professor would skin a dead rat, slice meat from its bones, sauté the meat in a pan, and, as his students gazed on in horror, proceed to eat the fried meat piece by piece. “Rat meat might be thought of as disgusting and inedible,” he would declare, munching heartily, “but it is really no different from rabbit meat, which people have eaten as a delicacy for centuries.”