.png)
3 hours ago
5
In February 1962, Sylvia Plath dropped in on her neighbour in Devon, Rose Key, with “a plate of absolutely indigestible Black Walnut-flavored cupcakes”. She had made them from a Betty Crocker mix palmed off on her by the bank manager’s wife. Not wanting to waste it nor feed it to her own family (she was scornful of both processed food and the British appetite for starch), Plath baked it and efficiently dispatched it next door.
There was a lot of cake-baking involved in the social life of North Tawton. Plath excelled at it – like everything else. In the early months of that year, shortly after giving birth to her second child, she was not only making her own “six-egg” sponges, she was taking Italian, German and French lessons, writing an experimental poem for the BBC Third programme (Three Women), obsessively sourcing rugs for her new house (“I have looked & looked at carpets, in Exeter, London & Plymouth, & feel now that our choice is right & sensible”), having the downstairs floors cemented (she hated dirty floors) and expressing a desire to begin woodwork classes.
“My trouble is that I can do an awful lot of stuff well,” she wrote ruefully to her former psychiatrist, Ruth Barnhouse Beuscher, the following October, when Ted Hughes had moved out and she found herself with two young children in a large house and garden in semi-rural Devon with well-insulated floors but otherwise a number of inconveniences, staring down a very different future from the one she had envisaged when they had moved there 12 months before.
The domesticity she had embraced was the same brand she sent up relentlessly in The Bell Jar, written in an eight-week sprint in the spring of 1961. “When I was ‘happy’ domestically I felt a gag down my throat,” she claimed to her friend the poet Ruth Fainlight in October. But that same month she was hand-painting labels for the 12 pots of honey she had produced from her first summer of beekeeping.
It is hard to contextualise Plath because this seeming split between her life and work mirrors the split she sits in, between two decades. In the first week of October 1962 she was rapidly writing the “bee sequence” of poems – five poems in six days – the triumphant conclusion to the Ariel manuscript left on her desk when she died. That same week saw the premiere of the first Bond film and the release of the Beatles’ first single, making 5 October 1962 the date that the social historian David Kynaston pins down as the beginning of “the ‘real’ Sixties”.
The 1950s had clung on doggedly. Plath and Hughes used to spend evenings listening to Beethoven records; their careful RP vowels on the BBC broadcasts they recorded are artefacts of a time when, as Martin Amis told his incredulous sons, “it used to be cool to be posh”. But the 60s were about to break like a wave across Britain. That autumn, when abortion was still illegal but the pill was not available to unmarried women, and when the BBC was notable for allowing female employees to keep their jobs not only after they married but even after they had had children, Plath was sending up her own talk of cupcakes and rugs with the scathing satire of The Applicant (“It can sew, it can cook, / It can talk, talk, talk”) and the subversive, practical Lady Lazarus (she described her as “a good, plain, very resourceful woman”) – who presumably would also not have wasted a substandard cupcake mix.
In those autumn weeks, Plath was equally resourceful. She wrote to Beuscher: “Every thing I read about, hear, see, experience or have experienced is on tap, like a wonderful drink. I can use everything.” Her thinking was crystal clear: “I want my career, my children and a free supple life. I hate this growing-pot as much as Ted did.” Typically she wrote a first draft and then edited it minimally a day or so later, her tweaks showing her intention to harden up the language. Poetic personas are put on like the fashions of the day. Plath understood her market, clearly defined that year by Al Alvarez’s trend-setting anthology The New Poetry. But in an interview that month, Plath insisted on the poet’s duty to “control and manipulate experience”. She did not want to be solely identified with Alvarez’s confessionalists, their untrammelled “cries from the heart”.
By November she had enjoyed a shopping spree at the Jaeger store in Exeter, got a “weird & fashionable” haircut, and was feeling buoyant at her prospective return to London. “Living apart from Ted is wonderful,” she writes airily to her mother. “My babies & my writing are my life & let them have affairs & parties, poof! What a bore.” Back in Primrose Hill, she grows into her new 60s self, furnishing her flat with “straw Hong Kong chairs” and rush matting, buying paint for the floors. She finds another language school to sign up to, accepts an invitation to host an evening of American poetry at the Royal Court the following summer, discovers Dickens & Jones, where she buys a pair of black fake-fur toreador pants and resists “a Viennese black leather jerkin”. “I am in 7th heaven,” she writes to her mother. “Life is such fun.”
But the long winter sets in. The hoped-for salons with new literary friends don’t materialise. And she can’t seem to get the floors finished (“two coats!” she insists). “Still have the babies’ floors to paint, the au pair’s floors, the hall floors & unpainted wood bureaus,” she lists in December. By the end of January it remains undone. They all catch flu, the pipes freeze, she struggles to eat.
The poems she wrote during that period were increasingly surreal. “Poems very good,” she wrote matter-of-factly in the last letter, on 4 February, to Beuscher, “but, I feel written on the edge of madness.”
When Hughes edited and altered Plath’s manuscript of Ariel into the collection published under that title in 1965, he dismantled that distinct poetic persona and blurred her legacy into something more complicated, more biographical. The uplifting, triumphant conclusion she had intended seeped away into a sombre fatalism. The work became templated on to the life; the gap between the two – where she skilfully “controlled and manipulated” each experience – neatly closed up.
Ariel: The Restored Edition was published 22 years ago. This coming May, Faber will publish The Poems of Sylvia Plath, a complete edition that almost doubles the content of the Collected Poems (1981) and properly reflects the remarkable acceleration Plath’s work underwent from 1959; as well as the distinct split between the Ariel poems and those of the early weeks of 1963 – Totem, with its unstoppable, machine-like escalation; the uncanny and startling Balloons – which indicate the pioneering direction in which she was headed.
Plath fought with self-doubt about her work throughout her life. But she never doubted it after that remarkable period in October 1962 when her poetic drive foregrounded and anticipated the changing time itself. Even when magazine editors were returning her poems, she had complete confidence in what she had achieved. She had realised both her own abilities – her practical wish to do what she could with what she had – and the work’s discrete life, beyond her. “Writing is a religious act,” she wrote in her journal at the age of 26, “it is an ordering, a reforming, a relearning and reloving of people and the world as they are and as they might be. A shaping which does not pass away like a day of typing or a day of teaching. The writing lasts: it goes about on its own in the world.”
