Sylvia was pregnant again, and besides her usual wintertime colds and flu, she suffered from appendicitis. Surgery, she was advised, could be done safely long before the baby was due in late August. She would probably enter the hospital in early February, but in the meantime she started on a part-time copyediting job at The Bookseller, a trade organ. And she and Ted appeared in a BBC program, “Two of a Kind,” in which they described their lives and work. He depicted a couple so in sync with one another that they had become almost one sensibility. Sylvia, calling herself “more practical,” provided a soberer account of their collaboration.
Then on the morning of 6 February, Sylvia had a miscarriage. There seemed to be no explanation, she wrote her mother, assuring her that Ted was taking wonderful care of her. Sylvia felt especially awful, because she had asked Aurelia to change her travel plans so as to be present around the time of the child’s birth. Undaunted, however, Sylvia was looking forward to her next pregnancy after scheduling removal of her appendix for late February. Given her horror of hospitals and concerns about the pain and recovery from surgery, she did remarkably well, enjoying Ted’s hospital visit and substitution of rare steak sandwiches and Toll House cookies for the frightful hospital food. To the adoring Sylvia, he looked like a giant, trolling the hospital corridors next to people half his size. He seemed to be courting her as in their first days together.
The first of March marked an epic day, because Ted had delivered to her the much-coveted New Yorker first-reading contract. This development meant she would send her poems to The New Yorker first, and only to other publications if her work were not accepted. She received a one-hundred-dollar signing bonus, plus a 25 percent increase in the rates they paid her. The renewable one-year contract had cost of living raises built into it as well. Even though Sylvia had yet to write her greatest poetry, all signs pointed to her ascension to the pantheon with her beloved Ted.
Except for the food, Sylvia had no criticism of the National Health Service. Indeed, the facilities were brighter and the staff more cheerful than what she had seen in Wellesley when her mother had been hospitalized. Sylvia also enjoyed listening to her fellow patients. She began taking notes of their conversations. She greatly admired their hardy, uncomplaining natures. She enjoyed chatty visits with the vivacious “Bunny,” the goiter lady, and “the Duchess.” She was treated more like a guest than a patient. “Will I have an enema?” a solicitous nurse asked. The doctors were handsome and reassuring. Indeed, everyone was so amiable, saying goodnight to one another, that Sylvia felt no need to indulge in “the mopes” or any sort of self-pity. Turning in for her first night, she was delighted to discover she had her own set of flowered curtains affording her some privacy.
As she recovered from surgery, Sylvia began to notice petty annoyances: getting bumped in the hallway, feeling uncomfortable in a drafty room with a cracked window, and—the worst—the “ward-snorer.” And why were there no bells to call nurses? By 5 March, on her way to recovery and managing her pain quite well, Sylvia could feel herself departing from the company of sufferers, who lost interest in you as soon as you returned to health. But she loved all the gossiping—good story material—and realized that Ted was having a much harder time of it at home trying to work and take care of Frieda. Her feelings of camaraderie in hospital are reminiscent of her days at camp. In both cases, these tight-knit, closed-in communities brought out her compassion, as she consoled homesick girls and later cheered up other patients. And as she did during her work in the psychiatric ward and her time spent aboard an ocean liner, she enjoyed studying cases of the afflicted and the eccentric, writing them up in her journal. Sylvia reported that only one person, one of her fellow patient’s daughters, noticed her books, telling her mother she was bedded next to an “intellectual.”
Returning home on 8 March, Sylvia still had to rely on Ted for baby lifting and laundry. Between her miscarriage and her hospital stay, it had been a terrible month for him, Sylvia told her mother. And yet he never complained. She felt badly about what she had put her “saintly” spouse through. Women in the hospital marveled that a husband would take on so much. Ted had some help with babysitting, but in the main he took over because he wanted Sylvia to recuperate as fast as possible to rejoin him in their writing regimen. In a letter to her Aunt Dotty, Sylvia reported that under Ted’s care she had regained her energy by the end of March. With the thought of more children to come, Sylvia told Aurelia that by 1962 they just had to find a house, although they hardly had the income that would qualify them for a mortgage. Ted kept winning cash prizes, though, and his BBC work would net him something like $1,500 in the course of a year.
By 1 May, Sylvia was buoyed by the news that Knopf would publish The Colossus in the United States. Ted had written Aurelia a few weeks earlier to say Sylvia was in top form and much in demand. From her recent work he singled out “Tulips,” a poem derived from her hospital stay, and a work that reflected Sylvia’s surrender not only of her day clothes and her body, but also her sense of self to the surgical staff. Looking at the photographs of her husband and daughter, she describes herself as a “thirty-year-old cargo boat,” letting slip things that “sink out of sight.” The poem says what Sylvia could not quite articulate in her journal and letters: The hospital stay had been a welcome letting go, a relaxation of nerves and an abnegation of family responsibilities. In the hospital she feels like a nun, white and pure. The stay is also, however, a kind of death, “the white of human extinction,” in critic Marjorie Perloff’s words. The red tulips, rude with life, arrive as an intrusion, an invasion of the patient’s pleasant anesthetic daze. The flowers seem like that roaring snorer Sylvia mentions in her journal, bringing the world back to her. But the tulips also come to symbolize the opening and closing of her blooming heart as she tastes water (her tears?) that reminds her of the salty sea in a “country far away as health.”
The persona of the poem, like Plath herself, seems to be emerging out of her passivity, becoming a person again, although she is not yet well. In The Collected Poems, Ted Hughes includes a note suggesting “Tulips” was the breakthrough poem, marking the moment when Plath threw away her thesaurus and spoke with spontaneity and clarity in her own poet’s voice. Certainly after her miscarriage and hospital stay, both of which left her feeling like someone done to, “Tulips” seems to presage a rebirth in the classic fashion—in this case with a heroine, rather than a hero, reluctantly, then inexorably moving toward a seagoing quest, a type of female Ulysses.
Ted looked upon Sylvia’s hospital stay as a detoxification. He believed that her appendix had been slowly poisoning her for five years. So the rest had done her good, giving her respite from taking care of Frieda as well, a comment that could be taken as a gloss on “Tulips.” That Ted, as he told Sylvia, had genuinely enjoyed taking care of his daughter seems apparent in his delighted descriptions of her standing up in her pen and laughing at everybody, then throwing her ball and bawling at them. He announced to Aurelia that they were buying a new Morris station wagon. He promised to take her on a tour when she arrived in June.
Sylvia did not mention in letters to her mother that she was already about a third of the way through the novel that would become The Bell Jar, the story of a college girl, as she told Ann Davidow, “building up and going through a nervous breakdown.” The book was full of real people, Sylvia admitted, and would have to be published under a pseudonym. The confident tone of her letter, written on 27 April, suggests that Sylvia had overcome the false starts and abrupt stops that had inhibited her previous attempts to write a long narrative. “I have never been so excited about anything,” Sylvia wrote—even though she predicted lawsuits. She found the book by turns funny and serious. It made her laugh. And indeed, the novel’s mordant humor is superbly conveyed in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s audiobook narration.