plath’s death and the bell jar--9/27/24

27 Sep 2024

plath’s death and the bell jar--9/27/24

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Today's selection--from Loving Sylvia Plath by Emily Van Duyne. The tragic suicide of Sylvia Plath and the publishing that followed:

“Hughes was in London, a fact that might have, at least in part, initially attracted Plath back to the city. But being in the same city as him disturbed her. By December, Hughes was having at least two affairs, one with Assia Wevill, another with a woman named Susan Alliston, whom he had met at his publisher, Faber & Faber, where she worked. Sylvia was barraged with gossip about her husband's affairs wherever she went. Throughout the fall and winter, Aurelia Plath entreated her daughter to return home. But in a bizarre coincidence, Alliston was the ex-wife of a man named Clement Moore, who had roomed with Sylvia's brother, Warren, at Harvard; the two were close. Plath had touted Hughes as the ideal husband to everyone she knew back home in Massachusetts, but now, he was sleeping with Moore's ex-wife. There was no hiding this disaster, she surely felt.

“For this and other reasons, she stayed in London. By January, she was writing again, similar to her burst of creativity in October, but poems of a different nature. One was ‘Mystic,’ with its fusion of religion and domesticity, in which Plath asks, ‘Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?’ Another was the famous ‘Edge,’ in which a Medea-like woman kills her two small children along with herself Along with severe physical illness—cold and flu for both her and the children—Plath's depression had returned, as she wrote to Ruth Beuscher on February 4, 1963, a week before her death: ‘What appals [sic] me is the return of ... my fear & vision of the worst .... Perhaps ... accentuated by my seeing Ted once a week.’

“She wrote right up until the last week of her life, during which her doctor began to look for a place for her at an inpatient psychiatric hospital. It's possible that this was a tipping point. Plath had told many friends that she could not endure another stay in one, not after her time at McLean. She and the children spent the last weekend of her life with her friends the Beckers, but on Sunday, February ro, she insisted on returning home. She was distraught, and the Beckers tried hard to get her to stay. It is probable that she was planning suicide then, as she insisted on going. She put her head in the oven and gassed herself around seven o'clock the next morning. She was found dead several hours later by a young nurse who was scheduled to come help her with the children. Plath had protected the children by sealing off their nursery door from the gas with thick masking tape. She was thirty.

“She left behind her flat at Fitzroy Road, for which she had paid a year's rent in advance, a small amount of money, and a large amount of unpublished writing. The output of her final year astounded her husband, who spent the weeks after her death reading it aloud to visitors, telling them he planned to ‘auction’ it. Hughes recognized immediately that it would surpass artistic triumph to become a commercial and financial one, and by the 1980s, he reported making somewhere in the area of £150,000 a year from Plath's royalties. With the help of his sister, Olwyn, who left her job as a literary agent for Martonplay, in Paris, to represent Hughes and the Plath estate, he pulled Plath's books from her British publisher, William Heinemann Ltd., and published Ariel with Faber & Faber, his publisher, in 1965; they took over the publication of The Bell jar the same year. The inside back jacket of the first Faber Ariel was wholly taken up with advertisements for books by Ted Hughes.

“Plath's American editor, Judith Jones, wrote to Hughes that she ‘was not really prepared for the impact that the book, which Faber has just sent us in proof, made upon me. It is really ... extraordinary ... and ... we are very anxious to publish it.’ Jones and Plath had had a strong working relationship on The Colossus, but Hughes refused her offer. He gave the book to his American publisher, Harper & Row, after the poet Donald Hall, then an acquisitions editor for Harper, sent him an airmail asking, ‘Can Harper's have Ariel?’ Hughes's American editor, Fran McCullough, took over the editing of Plath's manuscripts, as well.

“Later, in his 1971 essay ‘Publishing Sylvia Plath,’ printed in the Observer, Hughes wrote that Knopf ‘seemed nonplussed’ about Plath's poems and that ‘a deadlock dragged on.’ Actually, he appears to have stopped replying to Jones's letters, even as Jones held a spot for Ariel on Knopf's fall list and told him repeatedly of her admiration for his late wife's work. It is difficult not to wonder how we would have perceived a Sylvia Plath edited by Judith Jones, who in 1964 was on her way to becoming one of the most important voices in publishing, responsible for The Diary of Anne Frank, the cookbooks of Julia Child, and the novels of John Updike, among many other books. She counted Plath among these landmark American voices and had worked with the living Sylvia Plath, not the Plath of legend.

First edition cover

“Plath had left her Ariel manuscript behind on her desk, with a typed table of contents, but Hughes excised nearly all of her poems about marriage from his version of Ariel and included, instead, poems she had written in the last three weeks of her life, when she was experiencing what her doctor, John Harder, later called ‘a psychotic depression.’ Hughes ordered ‘Edge’ as the penultimate poem, giving it the air of a suicide note. The book was chosen by the Poetry Book Society as its Book of the Month, for which Hughes wrote an accompanying, explanatory note that said of Ariel, ‘It is her. Everything she did was just like this, and this is just like her—but permanent.’ Ariel, a book Hughes had put together in a way that looked nothing like Plath's intentions for it, became a literary mausoleum for the dead girl, speaking.

“Almost as soon as Sylvia Plath became famous, she became infamous, and then iconic. Ted Hughes quickly blamed her fans for this state. But it was Hughes who couched repeated public references to Sylvia Plath in religious language. In 1966, he wrote that Plath's poems acted as ‘chapters in a mythology.’ ‘Every word is Baraka,’ he said—his first published comparison of Plath to Islamic divinity, but not his last. He wrote, ‘The world of her poetry is one of emblematic visionary events, mathematical symmetries, clairvoyance and metamorphoses. Her poetry escapes ordinary analysis in the way clairvoyance and mediumship do: her psychic gifts, at almost any time, were strong enough to make her frequently want to be rid of them.’ Hughes complained to Aurelia Plath in a 1966 letter that ‘teenagers at college set up [Plath's] corpse as a holy example,’ but he himself framed Plath's work in the language of Christian fundamentalists: If Robert Lowell ‘is a fine doctor, [Sylvia] is a miracle healer.’ Hughes continued to use the rhetoric of magic, mythology, and religion in his published descriptions of Plath's life and work until his death in 1998.

“When Plath died in February 1963, Hughes waited more than a month to write to her mother in America. He excoriated himself in that letter, telling Aurelia Plath that he didn't ever want to be forgiven (in the margins of the letter, in shorthand, Mrs. Plath wrote, ‘You won't be’) and that ‘if there is an eternity, I am damned in it.’ By the mid-1970s, reading, for publication, Plath's letters describing the breakdown of their marriage, Hughes rejected Plath's complaint that she had sacrificed a great deal for their marriage—her writing, her college teaching job, her homeland, a whole way of life. Hughes wrote to Mrs. Plath that actually, in their years together, Plath's writing took precedence. As for the marriage, it failed for mysterious reasons: ‘Sylvia's marriage hit an underwater rock. ... The geology of the rock is nobody's business.’ The further Hughes traveled from his actual history, the easier it became for him to see his life with Plath as a story with characters whose actions were dictated by unseen forces, rather than human beings living in ordinary time. His Plath character had ‘No case’ in her argument that she had made her writing career second to her husband's.”