giving up | the last days of Sylvia Plath
Giving Up
As part of my ongoing and recent resurgent interest in Sylvia Plath, I have greedily gobbled up all of the biographies I have and ordered others from Amazon. There is no end, it seems to the amount of information that the public will devour when it comes to Sylvia Plath and likewise, her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, often referred to by her and others as Ted Huge and likewise, she called him her “Colossus,” a name that would be applied to one of her volumes of poetry later on.
The new book I am reading is by Jillian Becker, a friend of Plath’s who spent the last few days with Sylvia before Plath took her own life. The book is categorized as a memoir, which I suppose it is since it is a part of Becker’s life and no doubt an important and difficult one. Plath is described as nervous, edge, popping pills, her “going to sleep” pills and her “waking up” pills, which she takes every day per orders from the now-infamous Dr. Horder – remembered for the note, the last thing Sylvia Plath ever wrote, most likely and which was pinned to the refrigerator. IT was a simple note that said, “Please telephone Dr. Horder.” Sylvia was found with her head in the oven, resting on some fabric or tea towels. The children could be heard crying, and were securing taped into their room, the door sealed with tape to block the gas from getting through (Plath’s downstairs neighbor would not be so lucky and slept for almost two days from the fumes before anybody found him and noticed he had been missing; a miracle he did not die).
Jillian Becker plays the role of nurse, making sure Plath takes her medicine, sitting with her at night until she falls asleep, paying attention to her, listening to her rants about Assia Weevill, the woman that had made off in the night with Ted Hughes, Sylvia’s true love. The Plath-Hughes and the Weevills met when Sylvia and Ted wanted to rent out their flat and move out to the country in Devon to Court Green in the country. The two couples seemed to hit it off right away and discovered to both couples amusement that they were all poets, though Assia worked as a publicist and in public relations, she considered herself a poet. One should note that Assia would never receive anything close to the acclaim that Sylvia would achieve in her short life. A short while later, the Weevills were invited to visit Sylvia and Ted in Devon, where it became apparent to Sylvia that there was a strong attraction between her husband and this Other, as she called her, this woman who went “picking through cow pats in high heels.” Assia also had had no children at this point, another fact that Sylvia found she could use, and would use to mock her.
As Becker reports, the meeting between the Weevills and the Hughes’s may not have been as accidental as originally thought. Early in the spring of 1962, Assia had been at a party at the Becker’s house where she asked if there might be a quiet room where she could go and listen quietly to the radio. Becker led her to a quiet room and helped her tune the station in. it was a reading of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, each of them reading their poetry. For as much as many have said that Sylvia was obsessed with Assia Weevill, it seems clear that Weevill was equally obsessed with Sylvia. She wanted to same strange force that drew Ted to Sylvia to exist between she and Ted. If Weevil wanted to fuck anyone in this pair, it seems more likely that it was Sylvia she was after, at least in her deepest desire. Weevill wanted to fuck Sylvia by taking her husband and thereby exerting her authority and she wanted to fuck Sylvia by sleeping with Ted; to be one with her, the one that Sylvia would call “The Rival” and “The Other” in her poems.
Weevill and Plath could not be more dislike each other. Weevill was Jewish, with family roots in then Palestine; Plath was Teutonic and German, huge compared to Assia’s slight frame; Plath was light and bright and American compared to Assia’s dark, sort of smoldering quality that Ted found so attractive. But Ted’s attraction to Assia likely had more to do with Sylvia than with Assia. It was as much a turning away from something as it was a turning to something or someone. Were it not for Sylvia, there would have been on Assia. Sylvia made Assia possible, in her own way; she made Assia desirable to Ted, who felt he needed some respite from Sylvia’s brooding and constant accusations of infidelity and perfidy. Sylvia herself has said that she “conjured her.” She wasn’t far off the mark. It seems very likely that without Sylvia, Ted would have nothing to rebel against. His relationship with Assia was as much about asserting his autonomy from what he felt was Sylvia trying to control him (which is unlikely. I think it’s more likely that she truly loved Hughes and needed him to be more present and reassuring. For all of her confidence at times, Sylvia needed a great deal of reassurance, particularly around issues of abandonment. She had long felt that her father, Otto Plath, had abandoned her by dying when she was a child. Note that Otto Plath is best known for his work with bees and as a bee-keeper, an activity that Sylvia would pick up while living in Devon on her own. Like her father, she was unafraid of the gentle, Italian bees and kept several hives.
Sylvia’s suspicion of her husband’s infidelity was not entirely without grounds. Hughes – Ted Huge – was known for being a charmer, especially with women. Young girls flocked to this man who was by then, known for his poetry and his own brooding ways. But here again, so many of the young girls wanted Ted Hughes because like Assia, they wanted to be Sylvia. It’s not so much that they wanted Ted himself – it’s more that Ted had value because this brilliant and beautiful woman had chosen him and he had chosen her. The two were causal. Ted’s merit came from Sylvia’s love and desire and vice versa. Each in this marriage confirmed and authorized the desirability of the other. Each validated and made the other more attractive to outsiders who wanted a part of this incredible duo. The Plath Hughes’s had to be among the most powerful couples on the British literary scene, though it is known that Sylvia often felt like second fiddle to her husband’s first – that it was his poetry and his work that counted most. To this end, Sylvia herself often put her own work second to typing up poems and manuscripts and mailing them on Ted’s behalf (why he couldn’t do this on his own is another matter, but Sylvia seemed glad to do it for a long while).
Becker’s book is a telling one. We see Plath not just the day after her suicide but a personal account of the days before. A woman who needs her hand held as she falls asleep, who sends Becker to her flat on Fitzroy Lane to retrieve a few things for the children, Frieda and Nick as well as a few items of her own. Sylvia had told Becker that she just “couldn’t face it.”
What Becker finds at Fitzroy is a rather Spartan duplex, one that was once inhabited by W. B. Yeats (which made it all the more important that Sylvia get the lease – she felt it was destined). There was no sofa, just a few chairs. Sylvia’s office had a sign on the door that said “Quiet, Genius at Work.” Inside was a clean desk, well organized with a pad of paper and a few sharpened pencils. It hardly looked inhabited. What’s more, when Becker looked for clothes for Sylvia’s young daughter Frieda, she couldn’t’ find any either in the clean clothes or the laundry. She also picked up the two books that Plath was reading in those few days before she took her life. They were: The Ha Ha by Jennifer Dawson and Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm.
Becker retrieved all of the things she had set out to as well as a set of setting curlers that Plath used to set her hair. Even in her deepest depression, we see a Plath who was concerned about her appearance. A girl who rarely appeared in photographs without her hair set and blonded (Sylvia’s hair was naturally a medium brown and straight; she lightened it to blonde, often platinum blonde, depending on her state of mind.)
While at the Beckers, Sylvia talked about Assia a great deal, had many questions for Jillian. Sylvia’s obsession is understandable; she had lost the true love of her live to this man. It perhaps could have been a short-lived affair, and perhaps or even likely, would have been were it not for the fact that Assia became pregnant shortly before Sylvia died. There was also the fact that once Ted moved in with Assia, Sylvia went off and slept with another man (not Alvarez,). This act sealed her fate. The relationship with Ted may have survived his infidelity – Sylvia had known of his ways before, though he had never moved out, and they had worked through a great deal. Assia could have been, perhaps should have been, a brief fling. But modeling herself largely on Sylvia, Assia became pregnant. One wonders if Sylvia’s comments about Assia’s barrenness or the fact that she was not a real woman because she had not had children had any effect. Moreover, having a child would tie Assia to Ted for the indefinite future, perhaps forever. Whatever her motivation, Assia survived and Sylvia would take her own life. By moving on, or trying to by having sex with another man after so many years of playing second fiddle and subordinate, Ted would never take her back. It was too much for his ego to bear. More, he now had two sets of children to worry.
Becker’s book takes you on a journey through the last days of Plath’s life. We see Plath at her worst and her best, as she tries to soldier through, and on the day she leaves the Becker’s house, she seems better. Becker notes, Sylvia seemed happy, purposeful, like she had worked something out, and perhaps made her decision. This would follow, as most suicides that are successful are not spur of the moment decisions and are, in fact, worked out well in advance.
Whatever the matter, Becker has done an excellent job of providing an intimate portrait of a woman in distress and a certain coming to terms or a reckoning. This is highly recommended for Plath scholars or anyone with an interest in Plath – a poet to whom no doubt we are tired of, with her morbid and maudlin manner, but who attracts us with her spark and fire once again.
posted by ragazza @ 1:46 PM
