The typical criticism of Plath then held her poetry to be overwrought, both in terms of technique and of temperature. The reader who withdraws from her work cries out, as she does, “They must take you back!” But Plath’s great achievement is precisely her refusal to be temperate, to exercise the restraint the British deem “good form.” Just as understatement can be a powerful literary tool, overstatement, like an optometrist’s overcorrection, can compel greater perception.
Charged words were a tonic for Sylvia Plath—no matter whether they expressed her highs or her lows. What Sylvia said on the day of the phone call—that she had never been happier with her husband, her children, her home, and her writing—was neither a ruse, nor wishful thinking meant to deflect the tension between the couple that troubled Aurelia. Sylvia’s moods rose and fell, day-by-day—sometimes moment-by-moment, like the voices in “Three Women.” Words were how she persuaded herself. Words—as her poems reiterate—were the very stuff of life to her: “[T]he blood jet is poetry.” Using words, she could create that blissful union with Ted, and with words she could demolish it. She could not, however, permanently secure herself with words, and her recognition that poetry was only a momentary stay against confusion undid her. She wanted more than words could give her.
The magical property Sylvia ascribed to words is evident in the bonfire she proceeded to make of Ted’s papers—adding for good measure her second novel, in which he figured as the hero. All these words had to be destroyed in order for her to continue composing her life and work. That her immolation of his writing did not disturb Hughes suggests he understood what words meant to her. To see burning of the papers as merely an act of revenge—or even as the act of a disturbed woman—does not do justice to the kind of writer Sylvia Plath was. As her husband knew, she could live again only if she destroyed those words, which now seemed a lie. In “Burning the Letters” (13 August), Plath wrote of flaking papers that “breathe like people,” deriving a savage sort of energy from the fire in veins that “glow like trees.” This ignition of rising flames mingles with the sound of dogs tearing apart a fox, the image of a life consumed, its oxygen supply depleted. The papers memorializing the life were now merely particles of immortality, seeming to satisfy her even as her rage reddened the very air.
Sylvia demanded that Ted move out. The next day he decamped for London. He returned occasionally to see the children. An angry, humiliated Sylvia hated to see her mother witness her disintegrating marriage. Confiding in her friend Elizabeth Compton, Sylvia called Ted a “little man.” This sounded to Elizabeth like an anguished cry over a fallen idol. Sylvia had trouble sleeping. “Poppies in July” reflects her exhaustion and search for relief. The flowers appear as “little hell flames” and seem to emit a dark energy that the poet craves, picturing a mouth unable to “marry a hurt like that!” Sylvia had drawn blood when she first kissed Ted Hughes, and she had married a hurt like that. Now she craved an alternative, “liquors” that would dull and still her. During this time of turmoil, Al Alvarez wrote her two letters (dated 21 and 24 July), responding to her demand that he tell her frankly what he thought of her new poems. She could take any criticism he wished to offer, she emphasized. But all he could say was, “They seem to me the best things you’ve ever done. By a long way.”
On 21 July, Sylvia wrote to Irish poet Richard Murphy, asking if perhaps he could help arrange for a visit in late August for her and Ted. Apparently she still hoped that the marriage could be repaired. She “desperately” wanted to be near the sea and boats and away from “squalling babies.” The ocean had been the center of her life, and its appearance in Murphy’s poetry attracted her. “I think you would be a very lovely person for us to visit just now,” she added, without explaining the crisis in her marriage.
Aurelia left for home on 4 August. She recalled in Letters Home, “There was a great deal of anxiety in the air” as the conflicted couple bid her a stony good-bye, an epilogue to the “oppressive silences” between Sylvia and Ted that Aurelia had noticed from the beginning of her stay. Yet the couple continued to speak to one another. Indeed, they continued to fulfill their professional commitments in London and elsewhere, not keeping their breakup a secret, exactly, but behaving like amicable husband and wife when they appeared in public.
Sylvia puzzled over what to tell people. A mid-August letter to her mother did not even mention the troubles with Ted. But on 27 August, she wrote in the hope that Aurelia would not be too shocked that Sylvia wanted a legal separation agreement. She did not believe in divorce, but she could not abide the degrading and agonizing days that had destroyed her well-being. Her language is melodramatic, evoking the doomed romances and marriages that her mentor, Olive Higgins Prouty, memorably portrayed in Stella Dallas and Now, Voyager. Made into films starring, respectively, Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis, Prouty’s works belonged to Plath’s store of tearjerker tales like Jezebel (another Bette Davis vehicle) that she could call up without irony.
Evidently Ted could not abide this side of Sylvia, for she reported to Mrs. Prouty at the end of September, “He says all the kindness and sweetness I loved & married him for was mere sentimentality.” To Aurelia, Sylvia added, “He now thinks all feeling is sentimental & womanish.” That Plath scorned Prouty’s sentimental novels is beside the point; they infected the poet’s temperament the same way a tune you do not like keeps playing in your head. Culture is fixed in the human psyche like the grooves of a long-playing record.
Ted’s mood can be gauged from the letter he sent to Olwyn in the late summer of 1962. The “prolonged distractions” of the previous nine months had depleted his bank account and diminished his productivity. So he was grateful when his sister offered her help. “Things are quite irrevocable,” he added. He had deferred too long to “other peoples’ wishes.” But now he seemed to feel a new burst of energy, with several promising projects in the works. The problem, his letter indicates, had been the “awful intimate interference that marriage is.” The language is startling, especially after reading so many earlier Hughes letters conveying just the opposite sentiment. But with Olwyn he could express himself without the need for excuses or rationalization. He was appalled at how he had circumscribed his existence.
During the second week of September, Sylvia left the children with a nanny to join Ted on an excursion to Ireland. Was the journey an effort to settle the terms of a separation or divorce? Ted wasn’t sure, he told Olwyn. The trip ended abruptly when he disappeared. Afterward he wrote to Olwyn, claiming, in contradictory fashion, that Sylvia had reverted to the immature state he had observed when he first met her, and that she reminded him of Aurelia, whom he said he detested. It wouldn’t hurt for Sylvia to grow up, he concluded. An unsympathetic Murphy did not know what to make of Sylvia, who wrote him upon her return home that his sudden coolness perplexed her, since he had shown her some cottages she might wish to rent. She assured him her interest was only in finding a place to write and to care for her children, accompanied by a nanny. The idea that she might be invading Murphy’s literary territory in order to write about it was preposterous, she assured him. “Please have the kindness, the largeness, to say you will not wish me ill nor keep me from what I clearly and calmly see as the one fate open. I would like to think your understanding could vault the barrier it was stuck at when I left,” she concluded. There is no record that he replied.