to my own weirdnesses.’76 Madhouse, nature, identity, self, weirdness: in ‘Poem for a Birthday’, Sylvia began for the first time to write poetry overtly about her suicide attempt, mental breakdown and electro-convulsive therapy, albeit refracted through a symbolic narrative of descent and rebirth.
Within a fortnight the sequence was ‘miraculously’ written. The title came from the fact that her birthday fell halfway through the process of composition. What was it that released the flow? The example of Lowell confronting his nervous breakdown in Life Studies was crucial. Ted, who was convinced that this was indeed the turning point in her poetic career, pointed to the influence of the poetry of Theodore Roethke, which she read in the Yaddo library (where she also renewed her acquaintance with the wonderfully confident and supple poetry of Elizabeth Bishop). Conversations with Ted about the death and rebirth structure of Bardo Thödol would also have played a part. But her journal offers other clues. It reveals that she was ‘electrified’ by the consonance between the imagery she was developing and the language of Jung’s Symbols of Transformation, another book in the well-stocked Yaddo library. And a couple of days earlier, her creativity released by some breathing exercises that Ted taught her, she had written two poems that pleased her, one to ‘Nicholas’, the name they had chosen for their child if it proved to be a boy, and the other on ‘the old father-worship subject’.77 The father who had died when she was eight and the unborn child in her womb. She was on a cusp, about eighteen weeks pregnant. Did the baby quicken and give its first kick at this time? Before her stood tomorrow.
They returned to Wellesley just before Thanksgiving. Sylvia was now noticeably pregnant. Aurelia later remembered Ted working away in the upstairs bedroom while Sylvia ‘sorted and packed the huge trunk’ that they had set up in the breezeway. On the day they left, ‘Sylvia was wearing her hair in a long braid down her back with a little red wool cap on her head.’ She looked like a teenage girl going off to boarding school. As the train pulled out of the station, Ted shouted out, ‘We’ll be back in two years!’78 He was looking forward to home, and English beer, having found the American variety ‘unspeakable and unspewable’.79
On a clear blue day in March 1959, Ted and Sylvia had gone out from their little Willow Street apartment to Winthrop, the southernmost point of Boston’s North Shore. In the morning, Sylvia had been with her psychoanalyst, probing further at her feelings about her dead father. It was time, they decided, for her to visit Otto Plath’s grave in Winthrop for the first time. When they found it, she felt cheated by the plain and unassuming flat stone, tempted to dig him up in order to ‘prove he existed and really was dead’.80
Then they walked over some rocks beside the ocean. The wind was bitter. Their feet got wet and they picked up shells with cold hands. Ted walked alone to the end of the bar, in his black coat, ‘defining the distance of stones and stones humped out of the sea’.81 Afterwards, Sylvia wrote a poem called ‘Man in Black’. It was soon accepted by the New Yorker, one of her first big successes in getting her work into high-profile print. It catches the moment: the breakwaters absorbing the force of the sea, the March ice on the rock pools, ‘And you’ – Ted, that is – striding out across the white stones:
in your dead
Black coat, black shoes, and your
Black hair …82
There he stands, a ‘Fixed vortex’ on the edge of the land, holding it all together, the stones, the air, Sylvia’s life and her father’s death. The line-break catapults the word ‘dead’ into double sense. At one level, Ted’s coat is dead black in the sense of pitch black. At another level, it is black because black is the colour of death. Sylvia’s black imagination has indeed dug Otto out of his grave – and reincarnated him in her husband.
That is how Ted read the poem. In Birthday Letters, he made a point of placing his reply-poem, which he called ‘Black Coat’, after the long journal-like poems about the road trip. In terms of strict chronology, it should have been before. But he wanted to make it into a summation of their time in America. He places himself looking across the sea, ready for home. He remembers the moment in the Algonquin Provincial Park when he had photographed Sylvia feeding a wild deer with freshly picked blueberries. Something about the idea of a camera makes him uncomfortable. It is the same sensation as that provoked by the sinister image behind Sylvia’s shoulder in the portrait that Howard Rogovin had painted in the Yaddo greenhouse. A shadow, a double, a whisper of death. He then imagines Sylvia taking a photograph of him. Perhaps she had brought a camera to snap her father’s grave, or perhaps it is the metaphoric photograph of the poem ‘Man in Black’ that is entering her mind at this moment. Either way, he feels as if he has stepped ‘Into the telescopic sights / Of the paparazzo sniper’ nested in Sylvia’s brown eyes. He feels as if she is pinning him with a ‘double image’, ‘double exposure’ (the name she would choose three years later for her lost novel about the disintegration of their marriage). He feels as if her dead father has just crawled out of the sea. He ‘did not feel’ Otto sliding into him as Sylvia’s ‘lenses tightened’.83
Or at least all this is what he thought he thought when, years later, he began to write the series of letter-poems that first took their overall title from the deer, then from the black coat, and finally from the poem that Sylvia had written at Yaddo, ‘for a Birthday’.
11
When I got here (having left in 1957 as a complete unknown) I found myself really quite famous and was deluged by invitations to do this, give readings, do that, meet so-and-so, etc, and many doors were comfortably wide open that I had never dreamed of being able to enter and places such as the B.B.C., which I had been trying to penetrate for years, suddenly received me as guest of honour.
(Ted Hughes to Aurelia and Warren Plath, December 1960)1
At Yaddo, Sylvia had a dream in which Marilyn Monroe appeared to her as ‘a kind of fairy godmother’, gave her an expert manicure and advice on hairdressers, invited her for Christmas and promised her ‘a new flowering life’.2 Dream Sylvia told Marilyn how much she and Arthur Miller meant to her and Ted: the dream couple. But perhaps because the new flowering life involved motherhood, Sylvia stopped imitating the Marilyn look. When Olwyn arrived to spend Christmas 1959 at the Beacon, the first thing she saw was Ted and Sylvia standing at the sitting-room door, waiting to welcome her. Sylvia’s hair was mousy brown. Olwyn thought that she had stopped bleaching it (in fact, the last time she bleached it had been in 1954; thereafter, it was naturally lightened by sun-worship). Olwyn had not realised until that moment that she was not a natural blonde. Sylvia, she thought, had become less the ‘good-looking girl’ and more ‘a contained individual’.3
On Boxing Day, Sylvia sat by a roaring coal fire in the little second parlour of the Beacon, digesting a light supper of creamed leftover turkey and mushrooms that she had made for the family, and wrote to her mother as the rain lashed against the triple window and a gale howled. This was what the weather had been like for the entire two weeks of their stay. She told Aurelia that to feel the Yorkshire weather she should ‘reread Ted’s poem “Wind”: it’s perfect’. Olwyn, she said, was ‘very nice, a beautiful blonde, slim girl, my height and size, with
