Between February 18, 1960, and February 4, 1963, a week before Sylvia Plath committed suicide, at the age of thirty, she sent a series of candid letters to her close friend and former psychiatrist, Ruth Beuscher. What has happened to these documents in the intervening years is a case study in Plath’s legacy. In the nineteen-seventies, fourteen letters, which cover in detail Plath’s estrangement from her husband, the English poet Ted Hughes, were passed from Beuscher to Harriet Rosenstein, a feminist scholar who was working on a biography of Plath. Stymied by the Plath estate, Rosenstein never published the book, and the letters, unknown to the public, remained in her files. In 2017, they were put up for sale by an American book dealer. Images of the letters, with passages clearly legible, were posted online; as rumors about their contents spread, Smith College, Plath’s alma mater and home to a collection of her papers, filed a lawsuit. The case was settled, the letters went to Smith, and Frieda Hughes, Plath’s daughter and literary executor, who had only recently learned of their existence, reviewed them for possible publication.
Plath used letters, often brilliantly, to master appearances. “I am the girl that Things Happen To,” she wrote to her mother, when she was twenty. “I have spent the morning writing a flurry of letters: all sorts, all sizes: contrite, gay, loving, consolatory.” The fact that she could toggle among these conflicting moods, then boast about it, all in a single morning, suggests how important letters were to her sense of herself as adaptable and presentable, whatever the occasion. The hundreds of missives that she sent home to her mother, almost invariably peppy, beginning when she was a seven-year-old away at her grandparents’ house and ending just a week before her death, are the most continuous thread running through “The Letters of Sylvia Plath” (Harper), which has been published in two volumes: the first in 2017, the second this November. But the Beuscher letters, included in the new volume, are different; they are among the most revealing pieces of prose that Plath ever wrote, in any genre. In them, she alleges that Hughes “beat me up physically” a couple of days before a miscarriage, “seems to want to kill me,” and “told me openly he wished me dead.” In a foreword to this volume, Frieda, who was not yet three when Plath killed herself, maintains, “My father was not the wife-beater that some would wish to imagine he was”:
What, I asked myself, would qualify as a physical beating? A push? A shove? A swipe? The assault had not warranted a mention in [an] earlier letter when my mother had written there was “No apparent reason to miscarry.” But of course, now that the relationship was disintegrating, what woman would want to paint her exiting husband in anything other than the darkest colours?
The “context,” she continues, “is not only important, it is vital ”: Plath had torn up a stack of her husband’s papers, and she herself admitted that his outburst was an “aberration.” Frieda writes, “My mother had hit out at the thing they both knew was most precious—typescripts of their own work.”
A letter tells only one side of the story. Plath’s letters to Beuscher, whom she stiffly addresses as “Dr.” throughout, sometimes assume the tone of a psychiatric appointment, where candor and speculation, fact and hunch, are twinned. But their transparency is arresting; these are the only letters in the book where Plath sets aside the kaleidoscopic genius of her style in favor of the plainest possible account. And it is fully consistent with what has long been suspected about Hughes and Plath’s relationship that he might have assaulted her. Since the night they met, as two aspiring writers in England—Plath, fresh out of Smith on a Fulbright; Hughes, a loamy Yorkshire giant—violence was distressingly adjacent to the sexual charge. Plath’s description of that meeting, at a Cambridge University party, in 1956, is among the most famous passages in her journals:
I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband off. . . . And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face.
Soon she was writing to a college friend that Hughes was “the only man I’ve ever met whom I never could boss; he’d bash my head in.”
It is no surprise that Plath’s clear account of Hughes’s alleged assault gets caught in the briar thicket of conflicting interests. Here is a letter to a friend who was once her psychiatrist, analyzed by a daughter who hardly remembers her mother, and who seeks to exonerate her father. Given Frieda’s suggestion that violence might be an understandable reaction to the ripping up of her father’s papers, it is ironic that we cannot consult all of Plath’s journals, where she was often extravagantly confiding: Hughes notoriously destroyed one of the volumes—in an effort, he said, to spare his daughter and son the pain of reading it. He claimed that a second notebook had mysteriously vanished.
As her letters, more than any other documents, reveal, Plath monitored life from behind a façade of chipper enthusiasm. Her genius took shape hidden by this screen, and when it flowered, especially in “Ariel,” the book of poems that she wrote in the months leading up to her suicide, it was sharp, chilling, and prosecutorial. Plath was always two or more people. She was a product of “the fearful, double-faced fifties,” as Janet Malcolm put it, in “The Silent Woman” (1994), and she has since become perhaps the premier symbol of that decade’s complicated psychological bargains. After her death, she was refracted through the interests of her admirers, or, too often, of her antagonists’ antagonists: widespread hatred of Hughes, which crested in the seventies, sometimes eclipsed an appreciation of her work, in all its furious wit, abrupt tenderness, and transgressive force. In solidarity with Plath, her fans repeatedly vandalized her tombstone, chiselling Hughes’s surname out of the granite. Because Hughes was so entangled in her tragedy—and, in turn, in her legacy—defending her sometimes meant defacing her.
Even “Ariel” was affected: though Plath had left a complete manuscript on her desk, Hughes altered the contents for publication, in 1965, in ways that struck many readers as self-absolving. A “restored” version, preserving Plath’s apparent wishes, was published in 2004. Some readers applauded the justness of the restoration, while still preferring Hughes’s version—the one that hit American literature like a meteor when it first appeared. The preference had to be carefully expressed: its implications for a woman’s agency were troubling.
The fiftieth anniversary of Plath’s death came and went in 2013. Almost all the major players in this story are now dead. Plath’s mother, Aurelia, published her own, highly selective edition of Plath’s correspondence, “Letters Home,” in 1975, and died in 1994. After Plath’s death, Hughes raised their two children, remarried, became the British poet laureate, and, for the most part, kept his silence about Plath. Just before he died, of cancer, in 1998, he published a book of elegies for Plath, “Birthday Letters,” which was received as either tender or tactical, depending on whose side you took. Ted’s sister Olwyn, who clung to her brother and clashed with Plath, died in 2016. Nicholas Hughes, the baby whose gravity-defying crib gymnastics are heartbreakingly described in “Ariel,” became a fisheries scientist in Alaska and, in 2009, hanged himself. Frieda, a poet and painter living in Wales, survives.
Though the main stakeholders in this saga have petered out, for most of Plath’s readers a vexed affinity endures. When I discovered Plath in high school (as many still do), I remember the feeling of being an interloper in a totally absorbing story. Now I often teach her poems, but rarely read them aloud; it is too absurd to hear a man say the lines “I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.” And yet, on many errands across town, here in Wellesley, Massachusetts, I detour past Plath’s childhood home, a small white Colonial, unencumbered by any marker or plaque. It looks much the same as it did one summer day in 1953, before Plath’s senior year in college, when she first attempted suicide, burrowing into a crawl space with a stomach full of pills and, as she writes, in “Lady Lazarus,” “rocked shut / As a seashell.” Much of the best writing about Plath suggests the ways in which she both attracts and forbids a reader’s identification, with Malcolm’s book at the very top of the list. This spring, Plath and Hughes’s private possessions, including books, typewriters, and wooden chairs, as well as Plath’s tartan kilt and yellow frock, were auctioned in London. Some items went to well-known writers and Plath scholars. Peter K. Steinberg, an archivist and one of the editors of her letters, got her fishing rod. The dispersal of her things suggests that Plath’s story, controlled so tightly for so long, has finally begun to come unknotted.
Plath was born in Boston in 1932, to Otto Plath, a German immigrant and an authority on bees, and Aurelia Schober, a former teacher twenty-one years his junior. Otto died when Sylvia was eight; soon afterward, she, her mother, and her brother, Warren, moved from Winthrop, Massachusetts, the working-class beach town where Aurelia was brought up, to Wellesley, a fashionable suburb. The first volume of Plath’s letters, spanning the years 1940 to 1956, begins with her only extant letter to her father and follows her from Girl Scouts to Wellesley High School and to Smith, where she excelled as a scholarship student. In that volume, we find the raw material of Plath’s only novel, “The Bell Jar,” which features an incident based on her first suicide attempt. In the seven years covered in the second volume, from 1956 to 1963, Plath lurches from gladness to despair, preserving the tenor of what she called “newsy” letters—chirpy and brisk—as best she can.
The Plath we initially encounter in these letters seems very far from the person who, just a few years earlier, had attempted suicide with her mother’s sleeping pills; and perhaps even farther from the person who, a few years later, gassed herself in her London kitchen. Above all, we see Plath on the move. In a series of apartments and houses, in Cambridge, England, where she and Hughes met, then in Northampton, Massachusetts, where Plath had been hired to teach at Smith, in 1957, and Boston, where they shared a “small writer’s corner over-looking the rooftops and the river,” Plath wrote her poems and stories, managed Hughes’s career, shopped and cooked, dealt with the handymen and the neighbors, all while writing profuse updates to her mother, frequent letters to her brother, and regular reports to Hughes’s parents and sister. Applying for credit at a local general store, Plath discovers that “we fitted, amusingly enough, into none of the form categories of ‘The Young American Couple’: I had a job, Ted didn’t; we owned no car, were buying no furniture on the installment plan, had no TV, had no charge accounts, came as if literally dropped from foreign parts.” She comes off, most often, as a whirlwind. In a letter to her mother, enclosing two new, substantial poems, Plath complains about her period pains, which she treats with chicken broth and a resolution to write “another 90 lines tomorrow,” and reports that she’s used “the dregs of my inspiration” to write six entries for a jingle-writing contest for Dole pineapple: “We could use a car, or 5, or $15,000.” She also entered contests for Heinz ketchup, French’s mustard, Libby tomato juice, and Slenderella.
What made her present circumstances palatable was, usually, the prospect of her next destination. At the end of 1959, propelled by recent successes—several of Plath’s poems were accepted by The New Yorker, and Hughes, acclaimed for his first collection, “The Hawk in the Rain,” received a Guggenheim—the pair moved to London, settling in Primrose Hill, close enough to the London Zoo to hear the roar of lions. Leaving Massachusetts, while Plath was pregnant with Frieda, Hughes vowed that they would return in two years. That March, she writes, “I feel most like walking, reading & musing by myself now after three long months of enforced external, exerting & extrovert living.” A zero-sum calculation begins to creep into her effusions about house-hunting and meat-loaf-baking. According to the Plath biographer Anne Stevenson, she suffered a dry spell of three months, writing almost no poetry. The critic A. Alvarez, who interviewed Hughes for the Observer in the couple’s London flat, noted that Plath, hanging back while her husband held forth, “seemed effaced,” less a poet than “a young woman in a cookery advertisement.” His sexist judgment was shared by many in Hughes’s circle: she was “briskly American.” It did not connote a rich or interesting inner life. Two years after settling in Primrose Hill, Hughes’s deadline for travelling back across the Atlantic came and went, and a second child, Nicholas, arrived.
Both volumes of Plath’s letters are co-edited by Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil, the curator of the poet’s papers at Smith. Together, they have written a fine introduction to the second volume and provided a highly detailed index, with entries that cover everything from hiking to honeymooning to beekeeping and braiding, allowing readers to track Plath’s imagination as her poems evolved. Whatever the sensational effect of her confessions to Beuscher, it’s the alertness to daily life that makes Plath’s letters most poignant. Few writers have been as intensely attentive to quotidian details as Plath was, or understood so intuitively what to preserve in their art. A detail appears, uneventful on its face, first in a journal or a drawing, then in a letter, sometimes more than one. Her mind was brilliantly off-kilter, its emphasis falling in surprising places. We hear less than we might like about major literary or historical events: a dinner with T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender in London, or her Tuesday-afternoon classes at B.U. with Robert Lowell, or drinks afterward with Anne Sexton and George Starbuck at the Ritz bar in Back Bay. It was unlikely that she could use these occasions in poems, and so, I think, they settled very lightly on her consciousness. But a groundhog—that she knew she could use. She met two of them on outings with Hughes, and preserved their appearance on the page: in a letter to Hughes’s parents, as “stumpy,” with a “sweet gentle mousish face,” and, to her mother, as a “strange grey clumpish animal,” with “stout waddly build,” cowering and cornered. It’s the very groundhog, “claws braced, at bay,” that Plath’s readers know from her poem “Incommunicado.” There she compares her experience of the animal with the romantic version she’s read about in “märchen,” or German folktales, “where love-met groundhogs love one in return.”
The scrutiny Plath trains on groundhogs, quahogs, bicycles, snowstorms, and other small-bore realia is also brought to bear on her conflicting ideas of what it means to be a writer, a wife, a daughter, and a mother. In poems like “The Applicant” and “Lady Lazarus,” Plath explores the gap between those idealized roles and their actual conditions. Her letters re-situate these poems, and others, within the stream of lived passions, banalities, and interruptions that surrounded and fed them. We already know what Plath sounds like when she’s alone with the page, but here we find the reservoirs of composure that she tapped when she faced the world, and we see how abruptly they went dry.
In Hughes, Plath found not only a husband and companion but also a deep and exceedingly mercurial subject. There are only a dozen or so letters to him, all of them in the first volume of her correspondence. In the years after they courted and before they became estranged, they were almost never apart. She often writes about him while sitting next to him. In her letters, Hughes is a savior and a protector, a “dead-eye marksman,” carpenter, and fisherman, and “the handsomest man” she had ever seen. Together they care for goldfish, an injured bird, and a cat named Sappho. Plath records their prodigious feats of eating: quahog fritters, onion soup, stews, meat loaf, lobster dinners, all fastidiously itemized, as though for later reimbursement. In an old Boston tearoom at the end of a “sagging wharf,” Hughes orders “two delicious mountain trout” for himself. Plath supplies the adjective, “delicious,” as though they shared a mouth. But later, in her journals, even early in the marriage, Plath salts her hero worship with mockery, describing Hughes as a post-adolescent basket case, “scratching, nose-picking, with unwashed, unkempt hair & a dogmatic grumpiness.” She wonders whether he will dedicate his next book to his penis.
Throughout, a sense of foreboding comes and goes. There are weird portents all along, or random events that Plath seems determined to read that way. A baby starling that she and Hughes rescued and fed “raw ground steak,” worms, and milk ends up “sickened, choking & pathetically chirping,” so they killed it. “We gassed it in a little box,” Plath writes, a “shattering experience.” (She used the episode in a now lost story, “Bird in the House.”) When they moved into their Northampton apartment, they witnessed a car crash on the busy road outside, with blood and broken glass. “We’ll probably witness worse before the year is out,” Plath writes.
The experience of reading these letters, even at their most joyous, cannot be separated from what we know is coming. Plath confided her jealousies to her journal in 1958, when, after seeing Hughes walking across campus with a female student, she wrote that she hated “male vanity” but refused to “jump out of a window . . . or fill the garage at home with carbon monoxide.” A letter to Hughes’s parents the following year tries to conceal the strain of being with their son:
Ted is thriving. He is handsomer than ever. I just got him a red & black-weave wool sweater which looks marvelous on him. And a couple of hopsacking neckties. If he has any faults they are not shutting the icebox (a kind of subconscious revenge on American appliances) and knotting his clothes up in unknottable balls and hurling them about the floor of the room every evening before retiring. Oh yes, and the occasional black Moods when he pretends the cat’s ear is broken or that the air is full of Strontium 90. . . . He eats well, too, although he complains that I am trying to kill him with [a] protein diet . . . and also that I hide things and secretly destroy them: i.e., mislaid papers, certain books, old coats, letters from the British tax authorities. I bear up as well as I am able.
Like the starling, Hughes had to be cosseted and cared for. If she was going to lean on him, she needed to strengthen him. He made it clear that otherwise he might snap.
In the winter of 1960, after the couple had moved back to England, Plath wrote to Beuscher. She had been treated by the psychiatrist at McLean Hospital, after her first suicide attempt, and began seeing Beuscher again while living with Hughes in Boston. She was resolved, as she wrote in her journal, “to pay money for her time & brain.” Their correspondence was in part an extension of treatment, and in part the evolution of an unusual friendship. The first several letters echo the mundane events described in others, though they are notably flatter and more to the point. It took effort for Plath to suppress the ebullience of her style, even at her most dejected, but here she spares the adjectives and keeps her metaphors in check.
By July of 1962, the tone changes. In Devon, four hours west of London by train, where she and Hughes had bought an ancient house, Court Green, with a beetle infestation and a thatched roof full of birds, Plath discovered Hughes’s infidelity. “Ted began to leap up in the morning & intercept the mail,” she writes. He talked about wanting to “write & direct film scripts,” and, their sex life renewed by techniques he seemed to have refined with somebody new, began asking Plath, “like a technician, did I like this, did I like that.” Meanwhile, Plath was receiving mysterious phone calls. They turned out to be from Assia Wevill, who had taken over the Primrose Hill flat with her husband, the Canadian poet David Wevill, and begun an affair with Hughes. For Plath, the thought of abandonment was instantaneous and total. “I have nothing to refresh me,” she wrote to Beuscher. “I am left here, with the evidence of the phonecall, the evidence of the oddly coincidental departure, the evidence of my each sense.”
In the last seven months of Plath’s life, her letters are the most vivid chronicle of her distress. She and Hughes separated, and Plath was beset by fevers, and troubled by thoughts of amputees, bees, and the icy scrutiny of the moon. She was “utterly flattened by having to be a businesswoman, farmer,” and a “mother, writer, & all-around desperado.” Hughes usually visited weekly, like an “apocalyptic Santa Claus.” Plath became addicted to sleeping pills and began smoking, a habit she had always despised. But under these emergency conditions she wrote her greatest poems. She composed “Ariel” in the blue light of dawn before the children woke up, planned to submit poems to magazines, and to record them for the BBC. These poems are not the hermetic record of an addled mind, as they have sometimes been thought to be. They contain, amid the extremity of suffering, extremities of joy. Interruptions appear in them in real time, capturing the ambient conditions of their composition. In “Ariel,” written at dawn about dawn, her writing day ends when she hears the harbinger of morning: “The child’s cry // Melts in the wall.”
In December of 1962, after failed attempts to reconcile with Hughes, Plath closed up Court Green and moved to an apartment building in London where Yeats had lived as a child. “Well, here I am! Safely in Yeats’ house!” she writes to her mother. “My bedroom will be my study—it faces the rising sun.” On February 4th, she sent her last extant letter to Beuscher: “What appals me is the return of my madness, my paralysis, my fear & vision of the worst—cowardly withdrawal, a mental hospital, lobotomies.” A week later, on the morning of February 11th, Plath sealed the children’s room with tea towels and tape, turned on the gas in the oven, and laid her head inside.
In the absence of her complete journals from this period, the letters to Ruth Beuscher are as close to an inside account of Plath’s despair as we will get. And yet there is something else in them that I value as much as this biopsy of agony. “First of all, please charge me some money,” Plath writes:
I feel a fraud and a heel to be cadging time and advice out of you for nothing. If I were in America, I would be asking you for a few sessions for which I’d want to pay, and right now, a few airletters back and forth could do me a powerful lot of good. You are a professional woman whose services I would greatly appreciate, and as a professional woman, I can pay for them what anyone else would.
The phrase that leaps out is “professional woman,” an identification that meant as much to Plath, perhaps, as the roles she had once yearned for in her journal: “I want to write stories and poems and a novel and be Ted’s wife and a mother to our babies.” Much of Plath’s letter-writing is consumed with a day-by-day account of rents, leases, meals, of diaper-changing, bicycle-hawking, bill-paying. These onerous preconditions for writing and mothering and being a wife had to be brokered all by herself, all for herself. Plath had none of the leisure for contemplation that we associate with male writers. Her muses were economy, thrift, and the clock. The most moving episode in Plath’s letters, for me, has to do with her discovery of “a new & exciting hobby.” One day, “cowlike and cabbagey” after Frieda’s birth, Plath went downtown and “bought three 2-yard lengths of material”:
One bright Red Viyella (at $1.50 a yard), one bright blue linen, and one soft Wedgwood blue flannel with stylized white little flowers on it (both about 50 cents a yard). I also got a dress pattern & nightgown pattern (Simplicity).
Her goal was to publish enough poetry to buy a sewing machine of her own. In this yoking of the beautiful to the practical, and in the meticulous auditing of the costs—and the savings—of making clothes, we see Plath stripped of the mythos that her creativity has accrued, and more astonishing without it. “I am awfully proud of making clothes for little Frieda,” she writes. But the true end product, even of the sewing, was more art. She wrote the poems that allowed her to buy the machine, which, in turn, shows up in a poem:
Is this love then, this red material
Issuing from the steel needle that fliesso blindingly?
It will make little dresses and coats,
It will cover a dynasty. ♦