Welcome to Class A Felons, B-Films, C-Cups!
I’m your hostess Paris Brown, and this is the first episode of our second season “Stranger
than Fiction.” This episode is titled: “Sylvia Plath: The Oven Suicides, Part 1. It’s dedicated
in part to three listeners of the podcast who posted 5-star ratings and very complimentary
reviews on iTunes. The first goes by the moniker of “pirate jenny” (love it), the second
is “hghhigh,” (highest regards to you), and the next is “dddddpreston” (it feels
like this is some kind of Morse code message—very mysterious!). I want to humbly thank each
of you and tell you how much it’s appreciated. This is the number one way of helping us reach
new listeners, and it’s an honor to be recording for you. This episode is also dedicated to Professor
Steven Axelrod, a member of my dissertation committee, who I gratefully credit with having
humanized Sylvia Plath for me. This was during a seminar I took with him several years ago
called “The Age of Plath.” I’d like to thank him for nurturing my interest in
her since then and for inviting me to present a paper on Plath for the Pacific Ancient and
Modern Language Association in Honolulu, Hawaii in 2017. I also highly recommend his book,
Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words for all of you out there who are interested
in her writings, and I’ll include it in my source notes on the website so that you
can look it up. Listeners, if you’d like to have your own
show dedication, please take a minute to leave us a 5-star written review as well wherever
you listen to podcasts. It truly helps other listeners find the show, and we will love
you forever. Who was Sylvia Plath? I mean, besides the
brilliant author of The Bell Jar, a book that has been called the teenage girls’ version
of Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye. Who was she really, and why is her life considered
so tragic? Was it her childhood? The intense stress she inflicted upon herself in her drive
for success? Was it her marriage? Her husband’s affair? Was her mental illness taken seriously
enough? Let’s think about all of these factors as we get into the story. 2:17:5 [SYLVIA PLATH'S VOICE RECITING “DADDY”:]
"I was 10 when they buried you. / At 20 I tried to die / and get back, back, back to
you. / I thought even the bones would do. / But they pulled me out of the sack, / And
they stuck me together with glue. / And then I knew what to do. / I made a model of you,
/ A man in black with a Meinkampf look / And a love of the rack and the screw. / And I
said I do, I do. / So daddy, I’m finally through. / The black telephone’s off at
the root, / The voices just can’t worm through. / If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed
two—— / The vampire who said he was you / And drank my blood for a year, / Seven years,
if you want to know. / Daddy, you can lie back now. / There’s a stake in your fat
black heart / And the villagers never liked you. / They are dancing and stamping on you.
/ They always knew it was you. / Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through." Sylvia Plath was ahead of her time, both in
her writing and at her birth. According to her mother, she arrived three weeks early
on October 27, 1932. At any rate, she was a healthy eight-and-a-half pound newborn who
would someday grow into a tall and rather physically imposing woman who at times felt
she’d outgrown her own skin. Sylvia’s paternal grandmother had once been hospitalized
for depression and several other family members had also struggled with mental illness, but
Sylvia’s mother chose to keep this history hidden from her. Sylvia’s name now resonates in part for
its regular appearance in psychiatric indexes under the labels “bipolar, “schizoaffective,”
and “depressive.” But hers was not a household name until after her suicide, when it was
revealed that her book The Bell Jar, originally published in England under the pseudonym ‘Victoria
Lucas’ just months before her death, was in fact a roman à clef, a novel based on
the lived experiences of a woman who killed herself. PART 1: BACKGROUND Sylvia was born and raised in the Jamaica
Plain section of Boston, Massachusetts in the U.S. From the beginning, she was a bright
and inquisitive child who loved being read to before she was able to devour books on
her own. Her father, Otto, was a professor of entomology at Boston University. Always
conducting research and publishing papers, he rarely spent time with the family, but
asked Sylvia’s mother to please educate herself on informed child-rearing by reading
books on education. He suggested, for one, writings about Maria Montessori, founder of
the Montessori method of education on which Montessori schools around the world are based.
Sylvia’s mother, Aurelia, was way ahead of him, reading up on all the latest fads
in parenting at the time. Aurelia rebelled against the popular edict of scheduled feedings;
instead, she fed little “Sivvy,” as Sylvia was called, on demand. She also allowed the
baby to develop a deep tan, believing that direct sunlight was healthy for her. Aurelia
and Otto began discussing theories of child psychology when she wasn’t busy with the
baby or helping him with his research. They loved their little girl, but Otto was the
one to emphasize that she must be raised knowing that she was a unique individual. And she
was. By the time she was ten months old, she could speak four or five words. Sylvia was a tall and slender child and resembled
her mother. She had brown eyes and dark blonde hair, which later turned brown. She wore it
in short curls with fluffy bangs as a girl, usually with a ribbon tied around her head.
She had long legs and a toothy smile. Sylvia spent a lot of time with her adoring maternal
grandparents who lived on a bay of the Atlantic Ocean and grew up loving beaches and the sea.
She was a star Girl Scout. She acquired several pets, including a cat, parakeets, and even
a squirrel. Aurelia took her to plays and concerts and to a Unitarian Church each Sunday.
As an adult, Sylvia would identify as an "agnostic humanist," a philosophy that believes in living
an ethical life based on the primacy of humanity and reason but questions the existence of
a higher power or being. Aurelia gifted Sylvia a diary each Christmas and saved extra coins
for a “book fund” for her offspring, later writing, “Through education, we could…build
a priceless inner life!” Sylvia’s intellectual talents were probably inevitable, given her
parents’ views and backgrounds. Otto had been born in East Prussia, in what
is now part of Poland and was of German descent. As a young man, his grandparents, who had
emigrated to the United States, offered him a home and help in attending college. There
was a catch. They expected him to study at the seminary to become a Lutheran minister.
Otto was willing to comply, but then he became particularly interested in philosophy and
science. When he discovered that the work of Charles Darwin wasn’t offered at the
seminary, he changed his major to education. His grandparents were so angry that they never
forgave him and even struck his name from the family Bible. In his early 30s, he was briefly married and
was teaching at several prestigious universities across the U.S. but eventually settled in
Boston to begin a PhD program in entomology at Harvard University. By the time he finished,
he was 43 years old, having had to earn his own living throughout graduate school. His
specialization was bee colonies, and he published a landmark work on the subject in 1934. Aurelia Plath was 21 years younger than her
husband. Her parents had emigrated to the U.S. from Austria, and she spoke only German
as a child. But her parents had ambitions for her to be educated, and she attended college
while working as a secretary. She went on to a master of arts program at Boston University
while simultaneously teaching high school. Her German professor turned out to be none
other than Otto, and they fell in love. Within a year, Otto obtained an official divorce
from his first wife and married Aurelia. Within another year, Sylvia was born, and Otto then
announced that he expected Aurelia to produce a son in exactly two and a half years’ time.
Their second child, a son named Warren, was born only two hours past Otto’s planned
date of arrival. Although not yet three, Sylvia would later
relate that she initially felt rage toward her new sibling for displacing her as the
center of her family’s universe. Her mother tried to appease Sylvia by buying her new
toys. By the age of three, she was able to read short words. She loved movies, and at
the age of five was enrolled in an art class at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Around
this time, her father began suffering from a mysterious illness and Warren was also often
sick, so Sylvia stayed at her grandparents’ home for an entire summer. Before starting
kindergarten, Sylvia often “played” school with Warren and some neighborhood children,
yearning to experience the real thing. When Aurelia took her to school on the first day,
Sylvia immediately told her mother she could leave now. She already loved kindergarten. She also loved being the center of attention
at home, so her behavior alternated between impressing her parents with her reading and
storytelling abilities and bewildering them by throwing tantrums or locking herself in
her room. Otto prided himself on being supportive of Sylvia and involved in parenting, which
means that he was much less involved than fathers today commonly are, but much more
than many fathers of his own era. He praised Sylvia for her intellectual abilities and
discussed his day with her, treating her almost as an adult. She enjoyed sitting by his desk
to watch him grade papers and would devise methods of making Warren cry so that she would
look more mature in comparison. Otto shopped for the family’s groceries, but he preferred
to eat separately from his children. He liked to create science experiments for Sylvia and
Warren to work on, but he seldom did other activities with them. Aurelia was the one
who read to them; they enjoyed Dr. Seuss and The Hobbit. As time went on, Otto’s health
deteriorated to the point that he could only tolerate spending time with his children for
about 20 minutes a day, during which time Sylvia and Warren would compete for his attention
by reporting on their latest accomplishments and trying to outdo each other in storytelling. Four years into his illness, Otto finally
sought medical attention, but not for his long-term ailment. Instead, he’d injured
a toe which had then become inflamed. As it turned out, the injury was a direct result
of untreated diabetes. This would have been preventable, but since he’d waited so long,
the disease was too far advanced. Gangrene had set into his foot, and his leg had to
be amputated at the thigh. Less than a month later, Otto died at age 55 of an embolism
in his lung, caused by his immobility after the surgery. Sylvia had just turned 8 years
old. When Aurelia told her children of their father’s
death, Warren hugged her and proclaimed his relief that at least his mother was young
and healthy. Sylvia’s reaction was different. She said only, “I’ll never speak to God
again” and insisted on going to school that day. When she returned, she presented Aurelia
with a document she’d written up during school. On it was the statement “I promise
to never remarry.” Aurelia willingly signed it. Otto had an open-casket funeral, and Aurelia
decided that it would be too traumatizing for the children to see him in the coffin,
so they did not attend his services. Later, Sylvia would reveal the anger she felt toward
Aurelia’s decision and would accuse her mother of not properly grieving Otto’s death. Because Otto’s sudden and expensive medical
bills instantly depleted his life insurance policy, Aurelia had to go back to working
as a high school foreign language teacher, the job she’d abandoned when she married
Otto. Her parents moved in to help care for the children while she was at work. When Sylvia
was nearly 10, the family moved to a smaller home in Wellesley, Massachusetts, an upper-class
suburb, where Aurelia was offered a teaching position at Boston University, her alma mater
where she had met Otto. In the three-bedroom home, decorated extensively with the children’s
art projects, Sylvia had to share a bedroom with her mother. Her grandmother essentially
ran the house, which turned into what Sylvia later termed a “Viennese Victorian” atmosphere.
At just 8 ½ , Sylvia became a published author when the Boston Sunday Herald newspaper featured
a poem she’d written. A few months later, she won a $1 prize for her drawing of a woman
wearing a hat. She liked to make her own paper dolls and design their clothing; she also
made her own greeting cards which she labeled ‘Plathmark’ on the back. She earned babysitting
money so that she could buy new clothes. Sylvia, unsurprisingly, continued to excel
and win awards in junior high school. She allegedly scored near 160 on an IQ test but
was generally unpopular. She had only two close friends. At home, she still occasionally
lashed out at her mother. When Sylvia was 14, Aurelia was offered a prestigious career
opportunity—a position as dean at Northeastern University, which would of course come with
a substantial raise. But when she discussed the new job with her children and explained
it would be a full-time position, Sylvia angrily nixed the plan with the following overly-dramatic
accusation, “For your self-aggrandizement you would make us complete orphans!” Aurelia
thus turned down the job offer and the Plaths continued to live within tight financial restrictions. When she began high school, Sylvia was 5’8”
tall (or 1.77 meters) and weighed 119 pounds (or nearly 54 kilograms). Through her English
literature classes, she became aware of social conditions in the outside world and began
taking an interest in politics, including the Korean War, the peace movement, and labor
strikes. She railed against what she termed her mother’s “stupidity” at voting for
Eisenhower over his opponent Adlai Stevenson and wrote her in a letter, “I hope you’re
happy with McCarthy and Appropriations.” Sylvia gained several more publications in
Seventeen magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, and The Boston Globe, earning $63.50,
or about $673 U.S. in today’s money. During her junior year, or 11th grade, she finally
gained more of a campus presence when she was invited to join a high school sorority.
By senior year, she gleefully noted in her diary that she gone on 16 dates. She also
made lists with titles like “Boys who asked and were unlucky” and “List of excuses
for unwanted dates,” which included “tuberculosis” and “cancer.” She considered becoming
a communist and decided that she wouldn’t date wealthy boys on principle. At the same
time, she made careful notes of how prestigious her dates’ schools were and their family’s
social status. PART 2: COLLEGE, MADEMOISELLE MAGAZINE, & THE
FIRST SUICIDE ATTEMPT In this latter state of mind, she applied
to and was accepted at Smith College in Northampton, MA, one of the prestigious Seven Sister schools.
She was able to attend on two scholarships, one from a fellowship fund founded by the
famous Olive Higgins Prouty. Prouty was a novelist, most known for her books Stella
Dallas and Now, Voyager, which were both turned into successful films starring Barbara Stanwick
and Bette Davis respectively. Prouty took a personal liking to Sylvia and appointed
herself Sylvia’s lifelong advisor and benefactor, which the younger woman appreciated but also
sometimes resented and interpreted as intrusiveness. Sylvia graduated high school in 1950 and entered
college with a duel desire to meet a man to marry and to become the most accomplished
student at Smith. She would write, “I think I would like to call myself ‘the girl who
wanted to be God.’” She soon discovered that her ambition stood out, even at a place
like Smith. Her dorm-mates joked about her constant studying. She went on a few blind
dates, but the men usually never contacted her again. She worried that at 5’9” and
137 pounds now (or a little over 62 kilograms), she wasn’t petite enough. She ended her
first year at college with a B+ average and plotted strategies for better grades, such
as inviting her professor and his wife to her mother’s home for dinner. In the winter of Sylvia’s freshman year,
the son of a family friend invited her to his prom at Yale University. Suddenly, she
was excited at the prospect of dating this blond senior named Dick Norton, who was about
to begin medical school at Harvard. She splurged on a white crinoline formal dress and borrowed
a black purse, silver sandals, and a fur, feeling like Cinderella. Afterwards, she received
a kiss from her date. They began dating casually after that, although he treated her more like
a younger cousin than a love interest. He even addressed his letters to her as “Dear
Sister-Cousin.” Almost immediately, Sylvia had sized him up as husband material, but
she had to admit that she wasn’t actually in love with him. Eventually, he was diagnosed
with tuberculosis (or was he taking a cue from Sylvia’s journal and using TB as an
excuse to stop dating her?). But no, he was sent to a sanatorium in New York to recover. In her second, or sophomore year of college,
Sylvia won Seventeen magazine’s annual fiction contest and was awarded $250. She also won
Mademoiselle magazine’s 1952 fiction contest, which netted her an additional $500. In addition,
she served on the board of the campus literary magazine, wrote press releases about Smith
College for local newspapers, and volunteered to teach children’s art classes nearby.
All of this was in addition to her rigorous studies. But as her successes piled up, so
did her stress levels. She began experiencing breaks in her menstrual cycle of three to
five months at a time and suffered from insomnia. For the first time in her journal, she wrote,
“I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to draw back abjectly into the womb. I do
not know who I am.” In a letter to Aurelia, she wrote, “This is not education. This
is hell.” Her mother ineffectively responded by telling her to cheer up and count her blessings. Perhaps out of desperation, she resumed her
relationship with Dick Norton and occasionally visited him during his containment in New
York, although he flaunted his relationship with another patient there at the same time.
During her third, or junior year, she became editor of Smith Review magazine, sold poems
to Harper’s magazine, won another Seventeen magazine prize, and sold what would be one
of her best-known poems, “Mad Girl’s Love Song” to Mademoiselle magazine. Shortly
thereafter, she received a telegram informing her that she was one of the winners of Mademoiselle’s
College Board contest. For the month of June 1953, she would intern as a “guest editor”
in New York City with 19 other exceptionally accomplished college women from around the
country to work on the magazine’s annual “College Issue.” This was an utterly exciting
prospect; I myself feel fluttery every time I read or write about this opportunity of
working at Mademoiselle in glamorous 1950s New York. As part of her application, Sylvia was asked
to describe her ideal husband (and no, this is not an appalling joke) and her future goals
in life: “I will someday have a tall brilliant husband…We will work hard, have vital, intelligent
friends, go to plays, concerts, and exhibits, and subscribe to the Atlantic, the New Yorker,
the Saturday Review of Literature, Time (magazine), the Sunday Times, and the Monitor—and I
will be able to buy all the poetry books and tweed suits I want!” Slightly off-topic, another guest editor who
interned with Sylvia that summer, who was already married, had the annoyance of a husband
who peered over her shoulder as she was filling out her application to squawk, “What are
you doing competing with the best brains in the country? Why don’t you just wash the
dishes?” When she was notified of her acceptance, she immediately ran outside and shouted, “Guess
who has the best brains in the country?!” I hope either the husband changed his tune
or she filed for divorce afterwards. Mademoiselle styled itself as “the magazine
for smart young women,” and Sylvia referred to it as “the intellectual fashion magazine.”
But she was initially as excited about the fashion as she was the intellectual promise
of an internship there. She bought a matching set of white and gold Samsonite luggage. She
also splurged $310 dollars on a new wardrobe, about $2,900 in today’s money. In her journal,
she commented on the conundrum she felt between her desires and the more insistently tangible
presence of an empty purse. She wrote, “Today I bought a raincoat…with a frivolous pink
lining that goes good to my eyes because I have never ever had anything pink-colored,
and it was much too expensive…soon I will not have any money to do anything more with
because I am buying clothes because I love them…And I feel dry and a bit sick whenever
I say ‘I’ll take it’ and the smiling woman goes away with my money because she
doesn’t know I really don’t have any money at all.” Upon her arrival in New York, Sylvia settled
in at the Barbizon Hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, along with the 19 other
interns. The Barbizon, built in 1927 and now a historic landmark, is a somewhat imposing
23-story salmon-colored brick and concrete building in the Romanesque, Late Gothic Revival,
and Moorish styles. The rooms were minuscule but fussily decorated with green and pink
floral coverlets on the twin-sized beds, drapes to match, delicate ladies’ writing desks,
and dark green carpet. In Sylvia’s time, it was still a women’s-only residence hotel
with strict dress codes and rules of conduct. Besides Sylvia, other notables who stayed
at the Barbizon prior to becoming famous included actors Joan Crawford, Gene Tierney, Grace
Kelly, and Candice Bergen and writers Joan Didion and Eudora Welty, fashion designer
Betsey Johnson, and Edie Bouvier Beale, better known as First Lady Jackie Kennedy’s cousin
and best known as “Little Edie” from the cult classic documentary Grey Gardens. Joan
Didion and Betsey Johnson were both later Mademoiselle contest winner interns. Sylvia was quickly singled out at the magazine’s
offices as one of the most brilliant interns. At first, she found it an honor to be chosen
to work directly for Cyrilly Abels, Mademoiselle’s tough and exacting managing editor. But what
this really meant is that she had a much larger workload than many of the other college guests.
While the rest of the interns spent most of their time at fashion shows, art galleries,
the ballet and visiting the sets of television shows, Sylvia was writing articles, assisting
with editing, corresponding with other writers, and arriving back at the Barbizon much more
exhausted than the rest of her group. During her internship, Sylvia became emotionally
distraught over the executions of married couple Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had
been convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage against the U.S. for the Soviet Union. Their
scheduled executions in the New York electric chair were met with widespread protests, both
in the U.S. and abroad, by people who either felt the couple were innocent or did not believe
in the death penalty. The Rosenbergs were killed anyway, on June 19th, 1953 and Sylvia,
perhaps the most politically conscious of the Mademoiselle interns, felt isolated in
her horror of their fate. After several more events that put a damper
on her New York trip, Sylvia was bewildered at the overall experience and ready to leave
New York. On her last night at the Barbizon, she threw all of her clothes—including the
expensive new pieces—out of her window into New York traffic, a symbolic rejection of
the fashion industry. This was such an impulsive idea that she had to borrow an outfit to wear
home from another intern, intentionally choosing an unsophisticated white ruffled peasant blouse
and green dirndl skirt. In exchange, she insisted that her friend take her white and green striped
bathrobe. The woman kept it the rest of her life. Sylvia returned home depressed. She spent
the rest of the summer at her mother’s home. One morning, Aurelia spotted gashes on Sylvia’s
legs. Sylvia admitted that she had considered suicide and cut into her own legs, “to see
if I had the guts,” adding, “Oh Mother, the world is too rotten! I want to die! Let’s
die together.” To say that Aurelia was alarmed must be an
understatement. She took Sylvia to a psychiatrist who recommended and then administered out-patient
electric shock therapy. This treatment, perhaps surprisingly to those who’ve heard of its
primitive applications in the mid-20th century, is still used as a last resort in treating
depression, dementia, and schizophrenic episodes of mental illness. In Sylvia’s day, electric
shock treatments were much more common and were given without any sort of anesthesia
or muscle relaxants. During the procedure, electrodes were placed on both sides of the
head and a rubber guard inserted into the mouth to keep the patient from biting her
tongue. An electrical stimulus would then pass through the electrodes for less than
60 seconds to produce a brain seizure. Often, as in Sylvia’s case, patients would have
to undergo these sessions numerous times until a doctor determined they were no longer necessary.
Without anesthesia, this was obviously extremely painful, dreadful, and frightening. Sylvia
felt extreme resentment toward Aurelia for encouraging the treatments and wrote about
the torture of them in a later poem called “The Hanging Man”: “By the roots of
my hair some god got hold of me. / I sizzled in his blue volts.” The next month, August, she was still receiving
electric shock therapy. On August 24th, Sylvia carefully dressed in the same white peasant
blouse and dirndl skirt in which she left New York. She then broke into a medicine cabinet
while her mother was at work, wrote Aurelia a note that read “Have gone for a long walk.
Will be home tomorrow,” swallowed approximately 40 sleeping pills, and lowered herself into
a crawl space beneath the house where she remained unconscious for more than two days.
During this time, she vomited some or all of the pills and scraped her face on the ground,
perhaps while losing consciousness, which left her with a slight scar beneath her right
eye. That evening, Aurelia reported her daughter
missing. Sylvia’s disappearance received national news attention. Newspaper articles
titled “Beautiful Smith Girl Missing at Wellesley” featured a photo of Sylvia, looking
very much like a sophisticated “Smith Girl” in a page-boy hairdo, little pearl earrings,
a gold necklace, dark dress, and dark red lipstick. Aurelia was interviewed and blamed
the disappearance on stress due to Sylvia’s personal goals and “responsibilities to
her sponsors.” She also described Sylvia, probably to the latter’s later embarrassment,
as 5’9” tall, 140 pounds (or 63.5 kilos), with brown eyes and dark hair. In one newspaper,
the Boston Globe, the second half of this article appeared alongside a review of a local
theatre adaptation of the Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Sylvia was an admirer of Marilyn Monroe. Police opened an investigation and nearly
one hundred volunteers, along with bloodhounds, searched nearby hiking areas and lakes. Two
days later, Sylvia’s brother Warren heard a moan beneath the floorboards. He immediately
shouted for someone to call an ambulance and rushed out to locate her. At the hospital,
one nurse proclaimed her “more dead than alive.” She was semiconscious with cuts,
bruises, and an infection that left her temporarily sightless in her right eye. As soon as she
saw her mother rushing into her hospital room, Sylvia immediately groaned, “Oh, no!” Aurelia wrote to Olive Higgins Prouty, Sylvia’s
most prominent sponsor, and told her that Sylvia attempted suicide because a young man
she liked had become engaged. This was not true, but I don’t know whether this was
a deliberate lie or just a mistaken assumption. Aurelia also confided that she was worried
about Sylvia’s medical bills. Without hesitation, Mrs. Prouty announced
that she would cover the full cost of Sylvia’s hospital stay and subsequent treatments. She
herself had recovered from a mental breakdown 25 years earlier and offered her support.
Mrs. Prouty soon arranged for Sylvia to be transferred to a posh private psychiatric
hospital. There, Sylvia was initially given insulin shock treatments to treat her depression.
Instead of electric shocks, insulin therapy involved injecting patients with large amounts
of insulin to induce coma lasting up to an hour. This would be repeated daily for usually
around two months. Aftereffects included significant weight gain, seizures, perspiration, excessive
salivation, and restlessness. One survivor of this type of therapy, which is no longer
used, described it as “the most devastating, painful and humiliating experience of my life”
and a violation of human rights. After her ordeal in the crawlspace, Sylvia had also
temporarily lost the ability to read and write as well as partial loss of her long-term memory.
Her favorite high school English teacher began visiting her weekly, retraining her with anagram
games. Sylvia missed the first term of her senior
year of college but returned in February 1954 and began earning As again. But she would
wake up regularly from nightmares about being wheeled into the cement tunnels of the mental
institution leading to the shock room. Her mental anguish had also transformed into physical
pain; she complained that “everything hurt “ and that she was “on fire under her
skin.” She became more noticeably moody and demanding
toward Aurelia; for instance, once commanding her mother to cook a steak dinner for her
roommate’s birthday. She also became an aloof figure on campus, although she still
wasn’t popular. Other students regarded her with awe for her widely-known accomplishments
as well as for the rumors of her breakdown. She did, however, date often, and in her senior
year at Smith, she began a serious relationship with a Yale history major named Richard Sassoon,
a relative of the English poet Siegfried Sassoon. Richard’s family was wealthy, and he often
took Sylvia on expensive New York weekend trips. Sylvia bleached her hair blonde and
wore it in a short pageboy style reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe. Soon after, however, when
she began considering going on to graduate school, she dyed her hair back to its natural
brown color, in order to look more serious and studious for potential acceptance committee
members. At graduation in 1955 (a year late due to
her previous hospital stint), Sylvia was the recipient of several major awards, including
a prestigious Fulbright fellowship to Cambridge University in England for a second bachelor’s
degree. Now, whenever I’m on a campus—any college
campus—I feel instantly at home. A feeling of inner tranquility immediately floods me
under the shelter of distinguished buildings that house knowledge and infinite possibilities.
And this is how Sylvia felt when she set foot in Cambridge…at least, initially. As with her Smith years, at Cambridge, Sylvia
prioritized male companionship over close relationships with women. She gravitated toward
the notion of male power and security, especially as many of the young women she knew were marrying
in their early 20s, as was commonplace in the 1950s. Sylvia made more of a splash at
Cambridge, initially stoking curiosity as an American and as a woman on a campus where
men outnumbered women 10 to 1. She was considered too flashy, loud, overdressed, and “forward.”
But Sylvia associated living abroad with a cosmopolitanism that allowed her to shed her
identity as an undergraduate college girl confined to boring and practical gray clothing. Some have said of Sylvia that she was much
more dynamic and beautiful than photos suggest, that the camera failed to capture some incandescent
quality that was only visible in the flesh. She was statuesque with strong facial features
and a long side-bang that was carefully trained to swoop down over one eyebrow. Bright red
lipstick with all-black clothing, red gloves, and a hairband was her signature look. She
wrote an article for the campus newspaper on the latest fashions and modeled the looks
herself, including a one-piece polka-dot swimsuit, for accompanying photos. She sent Aurelia
a clipping of the publication signed, “With love, from Betty Grable,” jokingly invoking
the famous World War II pin-up. Richard Sassoon had broken off their relationship in a letter,
and she was a bit insulted, even though she had always privately referred to him as “small
and sickly.” She threw herself, as usual, into her studies and writing. She also joined
the university’s amateur dramatics club and a political group called the ‘Labor
Club.’ PART 3: TED HUGHES, AKA TED HUGE On February 25, 1956, Sylvia attended a party
by herself. It was a rowdy bash to celebrate the first published issue of a small literary
magazine called St. Botolph’s Review. She tried to muster her most energetic and sociable
self by putting on a pair of red dancing shoes and drinking several shots of whiskey. Upon
her arrival, she worked the room, talking over the music at the top of her lungs and
cutting in on dance partners to dance with the male half for a song or two. Then she
spotted a man she was instantly attracted to and asked around for his name. It was Ted
Hughes, and she instantly recognized it as the name attached to several poems in the
new literary magazine. He caught her watching him and approached her. Her first words to
him were: “I did it, I,” words from one of his poems she’d read just before the
party. Ted was astonished and flattered. He shouted back, “You like?” He took her
into an adjoining, quieter room and poured her a brandy. They talked for a bit, and then
he suddenly leaned in and kissed her hard on the lips. Caught off guard, Sylvia turned
her head and sank her teeth into his cheek. She later bragged that he had blood trickling
down his face when he left the room a few minutes later. (#vampireSylvia) Ted Hughes was just over six feet tall (1.8
meters), 195 pounds (88.5 kilos), and two years older than Sylvia, which made him 25
when they met. She loved that his height meant she could wear heels when going out with him
and not feel self-conscious. She lovingly called him “Ted Huge.” He was from West
Yorkshire in the north of England, a largely rural and picturesque location of Wuthering
Heights fame. He had worked a number of menial jobs in his youth, but he had graduated from
Pembroke College as well as Cambridge University with a graduate degree in anthropology. In
1956, he was a submissions reader at the London film company J. Arthur Rank, but he considered
himself primarily a writer of poetry. He had broad shoulders, a prominent jawline, and
thin but expressive lips. As a country boy from the moors, he was initially in awe of
the seemingly sophisticated Sylvia. Like many of his young friends at the time, he thought
that all Americans were rich. Ted was accustomed to dressing shabbily, although
in that time and place, his style would have been called “bohemian.” His hair was so
greasy that flakes of dandruff were sometimes visible. He normally wore all-black clothing,
including corduroy pants, which he personally dyed black. He often topped off his somewhat
shapeless clothes with a heavy brown leather army-issue coat that had survived World War
I. Somewhat ironically, his mother had been a tailor at least up until she married, and
she had wealthy relations who owned textile mills. But Ted was much more admiring of his mother’s
more distant ancestors—exalted 16th-century clergymen like Nicholas Ferrar, who inspired
a poem by T.S. Eliot. Ted had decided at the age of 15 that he would be a famous poet someday.
He had a mesmerizing voice and an intellectual intensity that attracted many women; he was
reportedly known during his graduate school years as “the biggest seducer in Cambridge.”
He had a wide and surprising variety of interests, from hunting and fishing to astrology and
Ouija boards, once even presenting a paper at Pembroke College called “The Scope of
Horror.” Sylvia wrote Aurelia that Ted encouraged her
to think, write, and draw (sketching was a hobby they had in common), and that he also
fulfilled a part of her psyche that still longed for a father-figure. Seeming to recognize
the dangerous potential of such immediately overwhelming feelings, Sylvia wrote to her
mother: “In the last two months I have fallen terribly in love, which can only lead to great
hurt.” Nevertheless, within four months of meeting, they became engaged. Sylvia was
the one who proposed marriage. When later asked why he agreed to such a spontaneous
commitment, he replied simply, “Because she asked me.” Author and benefactor Olive Higgins Prouty
was still in Sylvia’s life through written correspondence. After meeting Ted, Sylvia
confided in her that her love interest “is a breaker of people and things,” but that
she intended to marry him. Mrs. Prouty wrote back incredulously, “You don’t really
believe, do you, that the characteristics which you describe as ‘bashing people around,’
unkindness, and I think you said cruelty, can be permanently changed in a man of 26?” Sylvia and Ted chose to marry in London on
June 16, 1956, which is also the date of Bloomsday, an annual commemoration of Irish author James
Joyce. It rained, and Sylvia cried tears of happiness during the ceremony. Aurelia brought
her a pink dress to wear for the informal ceremony, which later inspired Ted’s poem
“A Pink Wool Knitted Dress.” With it, she wore a matching hair ribbon and carried
a single pink rose given to her by Ted. True to form, he wore an old thrice-dyed corduroy
jacket and ancient black tie. Strangely, Ted did not tell his family about their engagement
until more than a month after the wedding, so none of them were in attendance. Perhaps
even more strange, the newlyweds invited Sylvia’s mother to accompany them for the first week
of their honeymoon in Paris, France. Aurelia had been intending to vacation in London when
Sylvia abruptly announced her wedding plans. After Paris, the couple spent six weeks in
Spain—alone. There, Ted, who had not bathed in two weeks, discovered that their hotel
room had a shower. There, he took the first shower of his entire life; previously, he
had always bathed in a bathtub. Almost immediately, as new spouses who barely
knew each other, Sylvia and Ted found it difficult to adjust to each other’s habits and expectations
of married life. This extended all the way to dietary customs. When Ted even bothered
to think about food, he preferred simple meals. Sylvia, on the other hand, went full 1950s
housewife extraordinaire. She often delighted in preparing elaborate meals from recipes
in The Joy of Cooking cookbook and served meringue-heaped desserts. As with everything
else in her life, Sylvia poured all of her energy into their relationship. At other times,
she resented having to do the cooking, housework, and grocery shopping herself and still try
to make time for writing, especially when compelled to pick up scraps of paper that
Ted tossed underneath his desk while writing. She was constantly exhausted from striving
for perfection and suffering from insomnia again. She wrote stern admonitions in her
journal to keep up the pace, reminding herself in one entry, “Work redeems. Work saves.”
It is a chilling invocation of the World War II Auschwitz concentration camp’s gate sign,
which read “Arbeit macht frei,” or “Work sets you free,” and Sylvia, at times haunted
by her German ancestry, incorporated the Holocaust into her poetry. Sylvia didn’t mind Ted’s low standards
of cleanliness, but she did take note of his appearance. She found an “American-trained
dentist who really saved [Ted’s] mouth” by fixing his teeth. She was proud of Ted,
but she fussed over his wardrobe, insisting that he buy some tailor-made clothes in Cambridge.
Sylvia also resented Ted’s view of fashion as superficial and his insistence that she
buy only discount clothing and constantly cut household expenses while he refused to
work a traditional job. And after a while, little things about him
began to bother her as well. She wrote about him as “coarse—scratching, nose-picking,
with unwashed, unkempt hair and dogmatic grumpiness—all unnecessary and unpleasant, about which I
am nagging if I say anything… Shut eyes to dirty hair, ragged nails. He is a genius.
I his wife.” But to her brother Warren, Sylvia wrote that Ted was “the only man
in the world who is my match.” Correspondingly, Ted wrote of Sylvia’s “oddly
combined vehemence and vulnerability in her temperament.” These early tensions exploded
when Sylvia suspected him of having an affair with a student. In what began as a verbal
fight, Sylvia threw a water glass at him, but embarrassingly, it ricocheted back and
hit her hard on the head, causing her to see stars. In 1957, Sylvia completed her degree at Cambridge
and the couple left England to live in the U.S. for two years. She’d been offered a
job as a teaching instructor of freshman English at her alma mater, Smith College, and persuaded
Ted to seek a teaching position of his own nearby. He was hired at the University of
Massachusetts, at nearly $4,000 (or $35,577 in today’s money) for nine months work,
which was just a little less than Sylvia was earning. They rented a small attic apartment,
and the dining room table served as Sylvia’s desk where she had to grade 70 essays per
week. She found that she disliked teaching and that she didn’t receive the same kind
of attention as a lecturer that she’d attracted as a star student. During her first teaching quarter, one of her students, an
18-year-old named Deborah Jean Coolidge, didn’t show up for the morning class. The next day,
her body was found in the woods near the college. She had hanged herself, possibly because of
a pregnancy or an abortion. Sylvia’s reaction to this is unknown, but the suicide of a character
in her later novel The Bell Jar is based on this disturbing incident. Also in 1957, the American publishing house
Harper Brothers accepted a book of poetry from Ted for publication. Sylvia had encouraged
him to submit it in a writing competition, in which he won first place. She often worked
as both his secretary and literary agent, typing his manuscripts and submitting them
for publication. In return, Ted compiled a list of subjects he thought should be the
focus of Sylvia’s poetry and assigned her to write a poem on each. At the end of the school year, Sylvia and
Ted were offered renewed teaching contracts. Aurelia Plath was flabbergasted when they
both turned down this job security in favor of full-time freelance writing. In early 1959,
Ted received a Guggenheim Foundation grant for $5,000 U.S. (about $43,100 US in today’s
money), which helped alleviate their financial precariousness. He was also winning numerous
other awards with cash prizes in small amounts and the publication of his poems in various
magazines. On her last day of teaching, Sylvia asked
Ted to meet her on campus after her last class to go celebrate. He failed to show up. Later,
she spotted him walking up the road from Paradise Pond, near the woods, with a female student.
Sylvia was furious, even though Ted proclaimed it was innocent and the two were just talking
poetry. The ridiculous boomerang water glass fight may have the result of this particular
confrontation. During the summer, Sylvia attempted to rescue
a dying bird. For a week, she cared for it night and day. Finally, Ted decided to gas
it, to put it out of its misery. They buried the bird with reverence. Sylvia wrote that
it looked “composed, perfect, and beautiful in death.” The couple then moved to Boston, where Sylvia
took a job in the psychiatric clinic of Massachusetts General Hospital, of all places, where she
had briefly stayed after her mental breakdown. But having such access to the records of current
patients was emotionally comforting to Sylvia as she realized that other people had similar
struggles. Her job was to act as receptionist and general office clerk while also transcribing
the dreams that patients reported to doctors. Ted refused to look for another job, confident
that his funding for writing would help keep them afloat. During her stay in the U.S., Sylvia began
manifesting signs of hostility toward her mother through poetry, despite Aurelia gifting
her and Ted a month’s stay in a cottage on Cape Cod as a belated wedding gift. Sylvia
also had a tendency to become depressed, physically ill, or both whenever she and Ted were at
home simultaneously writing full-time. The couple often entertained fellow writers, but
many of them had no idea that Sylvia was a poet herself. Ted was the rising star. While
Sylvia’s expectations for Ted to take up the role as the family breadwinner began to
rise, he treated her more like a housewife. Occasionally, he berated her in front of others
for missing buttons on his clothes or other mending issues. Sylvia secretly arranged to begin seeing her
therapist from her Smith days again. The therapist began helping her to sort out her conflicted
feelings toward Aurelia--love, pity, and resentment—and to trace her abandonment issues back to her
father’s death. Additionally, she realized that part of her relentless work ethic was
due to pressure she felt “about not doing what everybody and all my white-haired old
mothers want in their old age,” referring to interested parties like Mrs. Prouty and
her mother’s friends. But she remained as driven as ever. Within just a week after beginning
therapy, Sylvia composed one of her best short stories, called, “Johnny Panic and the Bible
of Dreams,” based on her job in the psych ward. She also took another part-time job
as a secretary in the Sanskrit Language Department at Harvard University. On top of all that, she began attending a
poetry workshop at Boston University headed by the brilliant Robert Lowell, who at that
time was just gaining recognition as the U.S.’s most prominent young poet and a major contributor
to the new sub-genre of “confessional poetry.” Sylvia was drawn to his writing in part because
he wrote openly about his own mental breakdowns. In his classes, Sylvia met Anne Sexton, a
vivacious, attractive, and fashionable suburban housewife who just happened to be another
up-and-coming great poet. Sylvia found that she strongly identified with the subjects
and style of Robert and Anne’s poetry in a way she didn’t with Ted’s, who, at the
time, wrote primarily about nature and tried to steer Sylvia in his own stylistic direction.
After class, Sylvia and Anne would sometimes go out for martinis, sitting in red upholstered
booths, taking advantage of free bowls of potato chips, and talking endlessly about
poetry. Sexton had recently written a poem called “The Double Image” about mother/daughter
relationships. This theme of doubling was an inspiration in Sylvia’s own work. At
times, the two women also discussed suicide. Anne would later kill herself in 1974. In December 1959, the Hugheses returned to
England and rented a London flat. Shortly thereafter, the British publisher William
Heinemann accepted Sylvia’s book of poetry, called The Colossus and Other Poems, for publication.
The title poem is about Sylvia’s father and describes Ouija board sessions that attempt
to contact him. Another one, called “Poem for a Birthday,” recounts autobiographical
details of Sylvia’s life, as well as the difficulties of being a woman in mid-century
American culture. She showed up at the publishing house to sign a contract “resplendent in
black wool suit, black cashmere coat, fawn kidskin gloves from Paris [which were a Christmas
present from Olwyn, Ted’s older sister], and matching calfskin bag [from Italy]…and
of enormous and impressive size [as she was now pregnant].” Ted bought her three volumes
of D.H. Lawrence’s poetry, which they both admired. He had also just had a second book
of poetry published, as well as a children’s book. However, since the poetry in Sylvia’s
book had not won any prizes nor been picked up by an American publisher, she knew it would
not make much money. On April 1, 1960, Sylvia gave birth to her
first child, a daughter she named Frieda Rebecca, after the author D.H. Laurence’s wife. Unsurprisingly,
she had worked hard during her pregnancy and experienced constant exhaustion. Ahead of
her time, Sylvia opted for a home delivery and natural childbirth, with Ted by her side.
In 1960, women usually gave birth in hospitals under anesthesia, or what was known as “twilight
sleep,” and husbands weren’t allowed anywhere near the maternity ward. Sylvia wrote afterwards
that she had never been so happy in her life, although she also seems to have developed
postpartum depression. In January 1961, BBC interviewed the couple
for a radio show called Two of a Kind about being married poets. The interviewer asked
if it was a marriage of opposites. Comically, Ted answered that they were very different
at the same exact moment Sylvia answered that they were quite similar. In February and March 1961, Sylvia wrote The
Bell Jar. It took her only six weeks to complete. The novel is the story, in fictional form,
of her month working at Mademoiselle magazine and her subsequent breakdown and suicide attempt.
Stylistically, it’s written very much like J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, a deliberate
choice because Sylvia admired it so much. Also in 1961, Sylvia suffered a miscarriage
and then won a $2,000 Saxton Fellowship grant and, even more impressively, a “first reading”
contract from The New Yorker. This had been one of her lifetime goals and provided a signing
bonus, higher payment for publications, and a cost-of-living bonus for accepted work—unusually
generous benefits for a writer, which is, in itself, a sad state of affairs. That same year, Sylvia was expecting their
second child, and the family were beginning to feel especially cramped in their tiny London
flat. Ted wanted to move to the countryside, and they found a charming 10-room home in
the village of North Tawton, in southwest England. They used their savings from teaching
and borrowed money from both of their mothers’ nest eggs to buy the property outright. It
was a former rectory, built in the 11th century with a thatched roof, and it bordered a church’s
old graveyard (which of course it did), and of course Ted and Sylvia were probably eager
to try out the family Ouija board there. And honestly, living next door to a graveyard
would probably both horrify and thrill me too. The first few months in the new home, called
Court Green, were an idyllic time. Sylvia painted heart and flower designs on nearly
every surface she find: the floor, a mirror frame, her sewing machine, and Frieda’s
furniture. Ted at first insisted on making the 20-mile trips to the nearest laundromat
so that Sylvia could rest. Since Frieda’s birth, she had produced little in the way
of writing. But now, settled into life in the country, she and Ted agreed upon a daily
schedule in which she wrote in the mornings and he in the afternoons, each taking over
household and childcare duties while the other worked uninterrupted. In March 1962, she sold
a 30-minute radio play to the BBC. Ted was also working regularly for the BBC, so he
traveled frequently to London. His recently published book of poetry called Lupercal (which
sounds kind of like a prescription medication) was receiving positive publicity. At literary
gatherings, Sylvia would attend solely as the poet Ted Hughes’ doting wife, rarely
alerting anyone to the fact that she too had published poetry under her maiden name. On January 17, 1962, Sylvia gave birth to
her second child. She named him Nicolas Ferrar, after Ted’s saintly and scholarly 16th-century
ancestor. Nicolas was a large newborn, weighing 9 pounds, 11 ounces at birth, and he was an
unusually well-dispositioned baby, always smiling and calm. Sylvia described Frieda,
now a toddler, as “beautiful but of a rapid, hysterical temperament,” probably due to
the expanding family and, well, being a toddler. Ted was Frieda’s consoler and playmate,
seeming to favor her over the new baby. He wrote to a friend during Sylvia’s latest
pregnancy: “I could do with ten daughters. Sons are just momentary hypodermic needles.” Meanwhile, both Sylvia and Ted’s writing
during this period reflected their moods. Ted wrote of death and being trapped by a
female adversary, while Sylvia’s themes centered around marriage, wistfulness, and
the loneliness of a wife. PART 4: THE INCIDENT Once Sylvia and Ted moved to their Court Green
house, they needed to sublet their London flat for the remainder of their lease. They
placed an ad in the paper, and soon received a phone call from an interested married couple.
Their names were David and Assia Wevill. They both worked as copywriters for advertising
agencies, but David was also pursuing a writing career. When they discovered their prospective
landlords were the well-known poet Ted Hughes and his wife Sylvia, the lesser-known poet,
the arrangement seemed serendipitous. David, 26 years old, and Assia, 34, were a stylish,
charming, and attractive pair. The Hugheses liked them immediately, and each couple immediately
invited the other over for dinner. When a newspaper editor called Sylvia and Ted to
inquire if they had any new poems to submit, they referred him instead to their talented
new friend they were happy to recommend, David Wevill. Around this time, Ted began expressing his
discontent with his marriage to his brother and several friends. He claimed his creativity,
which had once bloomed with Sylvia by his side, was beginning to be stifled. For four
years, he said, he had largely been unable to write, but then he wrote Lupercal in just
ten days when Sylvia was away. Tensions at Court Green began to increase. In May 1962, Sylvia and Ted hosted the Wevills
at their country home for a long weekend. They ate meals that Sylvia prepared around
a large round table the Wevills had loaned the Hugheses during their recent move. Assia
appeared for the first night’s dinner in a silk orange dress and heavy 1960s eye make-up.
In contrast, Sylvia by this time had shed her consciously fashionable clothing, lipstick,
and hair style in favor of a more comfortable ‘hausfrau’ look, as she jokingly termed
it. Since she now spent most of her time at home, she usually wore tunics or shapeless
jumpers over cotton shirts and her brown hair, which had grown long, was usually worn in
a braid that she wrapped over her head like a headband behind a thick fringe. After the visit, as a thank-you, Assia mailed
Sylvia a gift of tapestry supplies. Sylvia had mentioned a particular pattern she liked,
and Assia managed to find it for her. She signed the accompanying note, “Much love,
Assia.” Sylvia worked happily on the tapestry for the next five weeks. On June 21st, Aurelia arrived in England for
a visit and stayed at Court Green. On July 9th, she and Sylvia went shopping. Sylvia
purchased a black cashmere sweater and a full black wool skirt for herself and two shirts
for Ted. Sylvia told Aurelia, “I have everything in life I’ve ever wanted: a wonderful husband,
two adorable children, a lovely home, and my writing.” The two women were in high
spirits after having wine with their lunch, and the phone was ringing when they arrived
back home. Sylvia ran to answer it and then went ominously silent. She turned pale and
yelled for Ted. He stumbled down the stairs in his haste to reach the phone, while Sylvia
dashed upstairs. Apparently, Ted’s caller had been a woman who tried, unsuccessfully,
to disguise her voice as a man’s. After Ted finished his conversation, Sylvia ripped
the phone cord out of the wall. This led to a bedroom conversation between Sylvia and
Ted that lasted for hours, while Aurelia was forced to tend to the children downstairs. The next day, Ted left to live in the spare
room of a friend in London. At the train station, he told his mother-in-law, “Well, I don’t
know when I’ll see you again.” Later, Sylvia built a bonfire in the yard and cast
Ted’s letters and manuscripts into it. She told Aurelia that Ted was having an affair. Sylvia had been working on a second novel,
a sequel of sorts to The Bell Jar, in which the protagonist finds hope and purpose within
her marriage to an ideal husband. Sylvia destroyed the entire manuscript along with Ted’s creations,
saying later that it had symbolized a period of joy now proven to have been built on false
trust, and that the hero of the story was now dead to her. Strangely, in August, she decided to purchase
a life insurance policy on Ted, even though she would write Aurelia five days later to
announce she’d decided to officially separate from him. Furthermore, she used all but 10
British pounds of the money in their bank account at the time to pay the premium on
the policy. In September, Ted agreed to go on vacation
with Sylvia to Ireland. They knew a poet with whom they could stay in the remote village
of Cleggan. When they signed his visitor’s log, Sylvia recorded her address as Court
Green, while Ted listed his parents’ address as his own. Three days after arriving, Ted
informed Sylvia that he was going on a three-day grouse hunting trip with a friend from another
county and discouraged her from tagging along. He assured her that he would return on the
morning of September 19th. Sylvia waited all day in vain. That night, at the last possible
moment, she took transportation home. There, she found a telegram waiting for her from
Ted. It was postmarked from Ireland and said only that he would return in a week or two.
Sylvia had no idea where her husband had gone. In fact, Ted had sent the telegram as a ruse
to throw Sylvia off his track. He had immediately left Ireland and traveled with Assia Wevill
to Spain, where he had honeymooned with Sylvia six years earlier. Ted returned to Sylvia on October 1st. For
a week, they fought constantly. Hughes admitted to an affair with Assia. He told Sylvia that
he’d been looking for an opportunity to leave her, as he hated living with her. Sylvia
told her benefactor Mrs. Prouty in letters that Ted had called her a “hag” and told
her she bored and stifled him. She also claimed he taunted her, insinuating that if she were
to repeat her 1953 suicide attempt, things would be simpler for him. Afterwards, he went
into another room and composed a poem titled “Sunlight” for Assia. He left again on
October 11th and did not see Sylvia or the children for the next two months. In the meantime,
Sylvia functioned blindly, like a wounded animal in pain. Always a voracious eater,
she now skipped meals, took up smoking, suffered from insomnia, and began taking pills to give
her brief intervals from her mourning. Aurelia, separated from her daughter by an ocean, wired
one of Sylvia’s neighbors to ask her to hire someone to look after her; Aurelia would
foot the bill. Meanwhile, Mrs. Prouty wrote Sylvia back, advising her to move to London
for the winter and to seek out a divorce attorney. Sylvia convinced herself that Assia’s main
attraction for Ted was that she did not have children. Her imagination ran wild, and she
became paranoid that she would be forced to return to the U.S. and imagined working as
a waitress and having to place her children in an orphanage. She took Mrs. Prouty’s
advice and went to London to look for a rental. As if by divinity, a flat that had once been
occupied from 1867 to 1872 by the famous poet William Butler Yeats—one of Sylvia’s idols—happened
to be available. Ted later commented that he felt Sylvia had “witched” herself into
that building. Sylvia might have agreed. After returning home on the day she secured the
flat, she opened a book by Yeats at a random page and her eyes fell upon these words: “Get
wine and food to give you strength and courage, and I will get the house ready.” To Sylvia,
lover of mystic signs and Ouija boards, this seemed to be Yeats speaking directly to her. She made a list of last-minute chores to attend
to while locking up Court Green for the winter. One of those items was “turn off gas.” Sylvia had decorated Court Green in mostly
the color red. In her flat, she now decorated her bedroom in white, yellow, and black, what
she called “bumblebee” colors. These cheered her up and reminded her of her father and
his occupation. The rest of the flat she decorated in blue, partly because she thought Ted disliked
the color. Now without Ted and contemplating a divorce,
Sylvia channeled her hurt, fear, and anger into producing her greatest collection of
poetry, called Ariel, dedicated to Frieda and Nicholas. This is the period in which
she wrote her most famous poems, like “Daddy”—about both her father and Ted—“Lady Lazarus,”
“The Jailer,” and “Medusa,” a pointed critique of her mother. She wrote the title
poem, “Ariel,” a celebration of a new kind of female autonomy and freedom, on her
30th birthday. Obviously, she was no longer writing on topics dictated by Ted. In December,
she also began writing a semi-autobiographical novel she planned to call either Doubletake
or Double Exposure about a naïve American woman whose dishonest husband has an affair
and then deserts her. Sound familiar? Sylvia and the children spent a depressing
Christmas with married friends. The winter of late 1962 and early 1963, known as “the
Big Freeze,” happened to be the coldest in over 200 years in England, since the winter
of 1740. The freezing temperatures caused pipes to burst, and snow piled up on sidewalks.
Power outages were frequent, and stores sold out of candles. The River Thames froze, and
England was covered in snow every day for two months. Sylvia, Frieda, and Nicholas were
almost constantly ill with the flu and head colds. They lived mainly on boiled eggs and
chicken broth, and Sylvia lost 20 pounds. Further, she had not yet had a phone installed
in her flat, so her contact with the outside world was limited. To make a call, she had
to bundle up her two babies and walk through the snow some distance to a public phone.
In addition, two U.S. publishers had rejected her novel The Bell Jar, even though it was
receiving cautiously good reviews in England. She resented being chained to the children
while Ted was out living it up. None of this helped Sylvia’s drooping spirits. Aurelia wrote and suggested she send Frieda
to the U.S. to spend some time with the Plaths. Sylvia refused, responding, “I am her one
security and to uproot her would be thoughtless and cruel.” On February 5th, 1963, Sylvia wrote her last
poem, called “Edge.” A suicide note of sorts, it depicts a woman who, after a life
of toil, finally finds perfection in death. Her babies die with her. On either February 5th or 7th, Sylvia went
to meet Ted in his new flat. Humbling herself, she told him that she didn’t want a divorce.
She asked him to commit to returning with her to Court Green in the summer. Ted agreed,
but he was misleading her: he was still in a relationship with Assia that he had no intention
of quitting. Ted later claimed, however, that he and Sylvia were on the verge of reconciliation
that week. That weekend, Sylvia and the children stayed
with a married couple she knew, the Beckers. Lately, Sylvia had been so despondent that
she sought help from her doctor from the National Health Service , who reluctantly prescribed
her antidepressants and visited with her daily. He cautioned her that the pills would not
take effect for several weeks. On Saturday, however, she seemed optimistic after her meeting
with Ted, although in a dazed state and somewhat unresponsive to questions. Her hosts and their
maid had to look after Frieda and Nicholas for her, as she seemed almost unaware of them.
After the children went to bed that night, though, Sylvia expressed her hostility toward
him in a long, rambling diatribe to her friends. Dr. John Horder wanted to hospitalize Sylvia
over the weekend, but there was no space in two of the three local hospitals, and he knew
Sylvia would dislike the third and might refuse to stay there. So instead, he arranged for
a nurse to drop in on her at 9 a.m. on Monday morning, believing that Sylvia would be staying
with her friends until then. But the next evening, Sunday, February 10th,
Sylvia insisted that she felt much better and wanted to return home. She was expecting
the nurse in the morning as well as a babysitter who was to stay with the children while Sylvia
went out to lunch with a literary editor. At this point, she sounded clear-minded and
positive. Her host Gerry drove them home. She talked again about Ted, that it was difficult
to obtain money from him for the children, that she missed his company. After Gerry saw them into the flat and made
sure the heat was working, Dr. Horder stopped by for a moment and then left, satisfied that
Sylvia would be fine until morning. Then, shortly before midnight, Sylvia’s downstairs
neighbor, Trevor Thomas, heard his doorbell ring. It was Sylvia. She looked and sounded
as though she were in a trance, her speech slightly slurred. She asked him if she could
borrow some stamps, as she had some letters she needed to mail right away. Trevor told
her that there wouldn’t be any mail service until morning, but she insisted she needed
to get letters to America into the mailbox that night. Feeling it was useless to argue
further, he gave her the stamps and she insisted on paying him. Trevor hadn’t liked Sylvia until just recently.
The upstairs apartment had initially been promised to him, but the Hugheses had swooped
in and offered to pay a year’s rent in advance. Then Sylvia habitually used his disposal bin
for her trash instead of buying her own. But in the last several months, after talking
to her a few times, he felt sorry for her. She had told him approximately a week prior
that she’d just reluctantly signed divorce papers. After Sylvia left his apartment, Trevor noticed
that he could still see the hallway light on outside his door. He waited ten minutes,
then opened the door again. Eerily, Sylvia was still standing there. Trevor offered to
contact her doctor, but Sylvia asked him not to. She was having a marvelous dream, a wonderful
vision, she said. He invited her back in, but she refused. He suggested she should go
back to her flat because the hallway was cold, but she just smiled. He then advised her that
he needed to sleep because he had work in the morning and closed the door. The light
stayed on. After 20 minutes, he checked the hallway again, but she was gone. During the
night, he heard her pacing the wood floor upstairs. Above Trevor’s head, in her own flat, after
she’d finished pacing and planning, Sylvia entered Frieda and Nicholas’ room. She placed
slices of bread and two cups of milk between their beds, even though the baby was only
13 months old and not yet able to drink from a cup. She opened their window wide, letting
the cold night in, then exited. Closing their door, she stuffed towels and cloths around
all the cracks and then carefully applied adhesive tape over it all to help seal the
cracks. She left a note in the next room that read, “Please call Dr. Horder.” She then
went into the kitchen and repeated the same procedure with the kitchen door, sealing herself
inside. Older gas ovens didn’t have pilot lights,
which are continuously-burning gas flames. If you turned an old oven on without lighting
the pilot, methane gas would fill the oven and, eventually, the room. In the 1930s, a
safety valve called a flame failure device was invented for gas stoves and ovens. Still,
some appliances manufactured into the 1940s and ‘50s lacked the flame failure device.
Thus, if the pilot ignition flame went out, there was nothing to prevent the gas valve
from staying open if someone turned on the stove or oven and failed to ignite the flame. I haven’t been able to determine what kind
of oven range Sylvia had in her Fitzroy flat, but it would have assuredly been this type.
Somewhere between four and eight o’clock a.m., Sylvia turned on all of the gas taps,
knelt on the floor, carefully folded a cloth on which to rest her cheek and placed it—then
her head—deep inside the oven. PART 5: THE AFTERMATH Myra Norris, the nurse Dr. Horder had dispatched
to Fitzroy Road, rang Sylvia’s doorbell promptly at 9 a.m. She could hear children
crying inside, but no one answered. She left to find a telephone booth to confirm the address.
There was a long line, and when she finally contacted her agency, they confirmed that
she was at the right place. She returned to the address and found a construction worker
outside. He forced Sylvia’s door open and the smell of gas hit them. Rushing into the
kitchen, they opened the windows and dragged Sylvia’s body into the living room, where
Myra tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate her. Frieda and Nicholas were very cold and still
crying but otherwise fine. Sylvia’s downstairs neighbor Trevor was
bewildered to wake up and find that his clock showed it was five in the afternoon. He tried
to get out of bed and fell over. His head was pounding, and he felt ill. He decided
to go see his boss to apologize for missing the entire day of work; on his way back, he
learned of Sylvia’s death from a neighbor. That’s when Trevor realized that he’d
been poisoned as well, because coal gas, being heavier than air, had sunk into his downstairs
apartment. Sylvia’s autopsy revealed that she was adequately
nourished and showed recent unexplained bruises on her right forehead and the right side of
the back of her head. Her blood was bright pink in color, an intense result of the carbon
monoxide poisoning. She had a number of hemorrhages in her lower lungs, also from the oxygen toxicity. Ted was able to view Sylvia’s body the next
day at the undertaker’s. It lay at the far end of an empty room that smelled faintly
like rotting apples. Sylvia appeared thin and was dressed in a garment with a ruffled
neckline. Her face was greyish and waxy. When asked if there would be an open casket funeral,
Ted replied, “No, she doesn’t look as she used to.” He blamed her suicide on the
publication of “that accursed book” The Bell Jar as well as what he claimed was an
allergic reaction to her antidepressant medication. There was a public inquest, and Ted was asked
to testify. Before doing so, he pointed toward a man in a dark suit and told his companion,
“That’s a boyfriend of Sylvia’s.” As far as is known, Sylvia was not dating
anyone in the months leading up to her death. Ted testified at the inquest that Sylvia had
a long history of mental illness and previous suicide attempts. The official cause of death,
to no one’s surprise, was suicide, and the coroner placed some of the blame on Dr. Horder,
although it’s unknown if he was formally punished. Sylvia had once mentioned wanting to be buried
in the creepy graveyard next to her dream home at Court Green, but Ted insisted that
she was “fond of West Yorkshire.” So he had her buried near his parents’ home. He
picked out a grey marble headstone with the epitaph “Even among fierce flames / The
golden lotus can be planted.” He said it was a passage he had often quoted to her during
her bouts of depression. Over the years, the headstone has been vandalized numerous times
by visitors attempting to scratch off the name “Hughes.” Aurelia Plath was too overcome with emotions
to travel to England for the funeral, nor did any of Sylvia’s London friends with
the exception of the Beckers attend, but Sylvia’s brother Warren and his wife made the trip.
The couple had made up their minds to ask Ted if they could raise Frieda and Nicholas,
but he refused the offer and said he would raise them himself. At the funeral feast,
he was somber and was heard to remark, “Everybody hated her,” and, later, “It was a fight
to the death. One of us had to die.” Because Sylvia died intestate, or without
a will, Ted was able to assume total control over the children and everything she’d ever
written. He disputed the suggestion that he and Sylvia were about to be divorced and managed
her estate and literary holdings after she died. He hired an agent to negotiate Sylvia’s
manuscripts, which became more valuable as time passed. He also released some of her
work at great profit to himself. In 1965, Ted found a publisher for Sylvia’s
last, most brilliant batch of poems. She had left them on her desk, with a table of contents
stating the order in which she wanted them to appear in a planned book of poetry, along
with the book’s title: Ariel. Ted, however, did not honor her wishes. He rearranged the
poems, omitted some that portrayed him in a bad light, added others, and provided no
editorial notes acknowledging his changes. Despite this, Ariel was an immediate smashing
success. Sylvia Plath became posthumously famous overnight, with her poetry described
as masterpieces of twentieth-century writing. Ted had also discovered the manuscript for
Sylvia’s novel Doubletake about the thinly-veined philandering husband, as well as all of her
journals throughout the years. According to him, the novel mysteriously disappeared, along
with her journals from 1960 to 1963, the years in which she and Ted began having serious
marital problems. In 1982, he admitted that he had actually burned the last of Sylvia’s
journals. His reason? “I did not want her children to have to read it (in those days
I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival).” He apparently did not consider
the possibility of keeping the journals out of their hands through some other non-destructive
means. Then, in 1990, Ted wrote in a letter draft to a literary scholar, “I have never
told this to anyone—I hid the last journal—about 2 months of entries” and claimed he did
so to protect someone. However, he crossed out these lines and sent the woman a second
draft of the letter without them, but for some reason, kept the original draft. Those
journals have still not been found. So the mystery remains. The Bell Jar was finally published in the
U.S. in 1971. Aurelia was horrified. She wrote a letter to the publisher, complaining that
every character was a caricature of people who had helped Sylvia throughout her life
and that the book “represents the basest ingratitude.” To counter these character
portraits, including the one of the protagonist, Esther-as-Sylvia, Aurelia begged Ted for permission
to publish a book of Sylvia’s correspondence to her, titled Letters Home. Ted agreed, after
censoring a few of them while making sure to include the early, complimentary letters
about himself. Aurelia wanted to prove her daughter was a sweet, dutiful girl, not the
victim of a twisted mother/daughter relationship as Esther is in The Bell Jar. Author Janet Malcolm, who wondered at Ted’s
acquiescence in publishing such intimate details of his and his late wife’s lives, found
the answer through her research of Ted and Aurelia’s correspondence. In early 1970,
Ted had written Aurelia. He still owned and lived in Court Green, but claimed he didn’t
have much money, because he’d just recently bought a second home. However, he’d just
found a third house he wanted to buy. “Therefore,” he writes, “I am trying to cash all my other
assets and one that comes up is The Bell Jar.” He wanted to get it published in the U.S.
Aurelia, who always deferred to him, had reluctantly agreed. But this, of course, had made it difficult
for him to refuse her publication request in turn. Another book of Sylvia’s poetry, simply
called Collected Poems, won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1982. She undoubtedly
would have been astounded yet extremely gratified at her success. When writer Linda Wagner-Martin began writing
a biography of Sylvia’s life in 1982, she contacted Ted’s sister Olwyn, who had managed
to become the literary executor of Sylvia’s estate. She initially seemed cooperative and
helpful; however, after reading drafts of chapters about Sylvia’s life that involved
her brother, she began to argue with Wagner-Martin about portrayals of Ted. Both Olwyn and Ted
requested that she make numerous and seemingly endless changes, to the extent that Wagner-Martin
finally withdrew contact and deleted all previously permitted quotes from Sylvia’s writing for
fear of never being able to complete the book. Olwyn’s dislike of Sylvia has been well-documented. Ironically, the woman with such strong feelings
against Sylvia so much also became the person to help raise her children. Olywn quit a fairly
lucrative job in Paris to move back to England and into Ted’s household for two years.
Nicholas and Frieda discovered at ages 12 and 14 that Sylvia had committed suicide.
Frieda first found out from her roommate at boarding school who was reading The Bell Jar.
Prior to that, they believed she had died from pneumonia, a falsehood that Aurelia had
perpetrated immediately following Sylvia’s death. Frieda also had the unusual experience
of having both her parents’ poetry appear as reading assignments on her high school
literature syllabus. On March 16, 2009, Sylvia and Ted’s son
Nicholas, aged 47, hanged himself at his home in the U.S. state of Alaska. Nicholas had
earned his Ph.D. at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks in 1991 and was considered a
leading expert on the ecology of stream salmon and other fish, an interest he shared with
Ted. Like Sylvia, he too had grappled with depression. His death raises the unpleasant
question of what role genetics play in hereditary mental illness and the susceptibility of suicidal
thoughts. In 2003, a film called Sylvia was released
in the UK and the US. Starring Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath and Daniel Craig as Ted Hughes,
the film narrates Sylvia’s life primarily from the time she met Ted to her death. The
BBC, who co-produced the film, contacted Frieda Hughes to invite her to collaborate on the
project. Furious at what she called voyeurism, she responded, “I want nothing to do with
this film. I will never, never in a million years, go to see it.” She banned the film’s
producers from quoting any of her parents’ poetry and wrote her own poem disparaging
both the film and its audiences. Titled “My Mother,” the poem reads, in part, “They
think I should give them my mother’s words / To fill the mouth of their monster / Their
Sylvia Suicide Doll.” Around 2004, Frieda began granting more interviews
in which she shared her thoughts about her parents’ lives and relationship. Frieda,
who had always been close to Ted her entire life, defended him against charges that he’d
been at least partially to blame for her mother’s suicide. This, I think, is to be expected,
as she also formed a close bond with her aunt, Olwyn Hughes. Frieda has written that Ted
was more temperate than Sylvia, that he only left the family home because Sylvia, egged
on by Aurelia, forced him out, that he came back to see his children daily, that he had
been trying to reconcile his marriage in those final weeks, and that he often “babysat”
his children when Sylvia needed time to herself. It should be noted, however, that when a father
spends time alone with his children, that’s not babysitting, that’s just parenting. Frieda further claims that Aurelia was trying
to “steal” her away from her father by encouraging Sylvia to leave him. She has described
her mother’s poems as “merciless” and “an act of revenge” and Sylvia herself
as having “a ferocious temper and a jealous streak.” Frieda also suggests that Ted was
the “victim” of his wife’s talents. More than anything else, it seems, the research
of feminist scholars enrages her, as their analysis primarily tends to examine and give
power to Sylvia’s feelings as expressed through her writing. As for Ted’s redactions
of Sylvia’s Ariel book, Frieda suggests he only omitted certain poems because he thought
they might hurt others, alienate readers, and damage Sylvia’s literary standing. Frieda’s
been anxious to redeem her father and redirect the world’s view of his actions. In 2018, Frieda relinquished some of Sylvia
and Ted’s clothing and personal effects for auction. Much to my horror, I only discovered
this auction took place while I was researching for this podcast. I would have considered
selling everything I own—and that still probably wouldn’t have been enough—for
Sylvia’s yellow-and-white gingham summer dress with a scalloped boat neck (which sold
for $1, 417) and her mint green Hermés 3000 typewriter on which she banged out The Bell
Jar (which sold for $46,071). Other items that sold included Ted’s typewriter and
manuscripts, an armchair, Sylvia’s costume jewelry, including a dragon pendant that Sylvia
can be seen wearing in photos, her thesaurus, a tartan kilt, her wallet and ID cards, her
Joy of Cooking cookbook (with the words “Ted likes this” scrawled next to a recipe for
breaded veal slices), and her signed pre-publication copy of The Bell Jar, which fetched $124,150.
In all, Frieda made around half a million US dollars. In 2017, letters that Sylvia had written to
her former psychiatrist, with whom she had kept in touch for the last 10 years of her
life, surfaced. In one, Sylvia tells the doctor that her 1961 miscarriage occurred just two
days after Ted had beaten her. Ted’s widow, Carol Hughes, responded in a statement that
this claim was both “shocking” and “absurd.” All her life, from her performative interactions
with her father, to her college career, to her incessant drive to publish at all costs,
to her obsession with becoming the perfect wife, Sylvia never understood that she was
worthy of love simply for being Sylvia. Instead, she believed that she constantly had to outdo
herself in her quest for perfection to qualify for acceptance from everyone around her. And
in some ways, she was desperate to keep her marriage intact to justify her existence as
a woman, as the kind of woman she needed to be in that place and time. The last year of
Sylvia’s life was the most devastating. Perhaps this is why it produced her greatest
poetic masterpieces. When she felt she had nothing more to lose, she found the emotional
freedom to let loose her voice. Years earlier, she had written in her journal:
“My tragedy is to have been born a woman.” It couldn’t have been lost on her that she
had effectively turned into her own mother, who she loved but also pitied and scorned.
Now she was the single mother raising a daughter and a younger son. It must have seemed like
a terrifying, meaningless cycle. It was exhausting, and at 30, she was no longer able to sustain
her previous level of effort. But the story’s not over; in fact, from
1962 on, it’s only been half told. Be sure to tune in for part 2 of this episode, the
tragedy of Assia Wevill and her strange, sad decision to replicate Sylvia Plath’s suicide
and also commit filicide, along with more details of the intersection of Sylvia and
Assia’s stories and how Ted got on with his life. Finally, if any part of this story sounds
familiar; for instance, if you or anyone you know is suffering from depression, please
don’t wait. Many treatments are available, and this is a common condition, so there’s
no limit to the number of people who can empathize and want to help you. If you or anyone you
know is contemplating suicide, please immediately call the Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-TALK,
or text “home” to the Crisis Text Line, or log onto suicidepreventionlifeline.org. That concludes today’s blast into the offbeat
past. If you’ve enjoyed our show, please subscribe, follow us on Facebook, Instagram,
or Twitter, and consider rating us with 5 stars. Source information and further reading
is listed on our website at classafelons.wordpress.com. Thank you for listening, and we’ll be back
with another story told with vintage flair and big hair.
