—David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding

[T]he hateful white light of understanding which floats like scum on the eyes of all white, oh, so white, English and American women, with their understanding voices and their deep, sad words, and their profound good spirits. Pfui! [Plath wrote, “ouch!”]

—D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

The artist must be inhuman, extra-human, he must stand in a queer aloof relationship to our humanity … Literature is not a calling, it is a curse, believe me!… It begins by your feeling yourself set apart, in a curious sort of opposition to the nice, regular people … the poet as the most highly developed of human beings, the poet as saint.

—Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger

Everything seemed to have gone smash for the young man. He could not paint.… Everything seemed so different, so unreal. There seemed no reason why people should go along the street, and houses pile up in the daylight. There seemed no reason why these things should occupy the space, instead of leaving it empty. His friends talked to him: he heard the sounds, and he answered. But why there should be the noise of speech he could not understand. [Next to this passage, Plath wrote, “cf. July 1953”]

—D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers

O strange happiness, that seeketh the alliance of Death to win its crown.… It must needs be a forcible evil, that has power to make a man (nay, a wise man) to be his own executioner.… A wise man is indeed to endure death with patience, but that must come ab externo from another man’s hand and not from his own. [In the left-hand margin, Plath wrote, “Why?”] But these men teaching that he may do it himself, just needs confess that the evils are intolerable which force a man to such an extreme impropriety. [Plath wrote, “yes.”]

—St. Augustine, The City of God

[T]hose who pursue philosophy right study to die; and to them of all men death is least formidable.

—Plato

Marriage was a ghastly disillusion to him [Herman Melville], because he looked for perfect marriage. [Plath wrote in the margin, “All our grievances come from not being able to be alone.” And on the next page she put an exclamation mark next to the following passage.] Melville came home to face out the long rest of his life. He married and had an ecstasy of a courtship and fifty years of disillusion.

—D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

It was her deep distrust of her husband—this was what darkened the world.

—Henry James, Portrait of a Lady

APPENDIX C

David Wevill

On 10 July 2010, I wrote the following to David Wevill:

I wonder if I could try your patience and ask if you would reply to a few questions via email. I know it was a long time ago, but I would very much like a sentence or two about how Sylvia Plath appeared to you. What was it like to be in her physical presence? Even a vague impression would be helpful. A related question: Do you remember noticing any change in her from the first time you met her to the last? For example: Did she look thinner? I’d be very grateful for even a sentence or two, which I would not use without getting your explicit permission.

On 19 July 2010, David Wevill replied:

I did not notice a change in Sylvia’s appearance while I knew her: she was slender (lean), looked fit, bore herself well. Personally she was witty, affable, had a quick smile, her conversation was bright and covered a wide range, she seemed interested in people and their lives, she could gossip but not cruelly. She and Ted seemed to complement each other, not contradict. I sensed no tensions there. Later I came to think some effort went into this—not so much an act, as a willed self-control? We four got on well, it seemed the start of a friendship, with much in common. As for the Assia biography, I came to know Eilat and Yehuda and liked them. They had done their homework and talked with many people. The story they had to tell was hard, tragic, and I think there were problems of tone and judgement as to what to include and leave out, and parts I found too sensational. Inaccuracies, some. I never threatened to kill anyone; I did not walk the streets at night with a knife; or plead with Assia to stay (rather, the other way around).… As for Sylvia, I wish I could help you. For nearly half a century I’ve tried to keep from getting involved in what became almost an investigative industry.

On 22 December 2011, I wrote to David Wevill again, saying I wished to reprint his 10 July 2010 reply to me, and that I wanted to do so without any comment of mine attached to his statement. He agreed that I could do so.

APPENDIX D

Elizabeth Compton Sigmund

On 14 January 2012, I journeyed to Cornwall to see Elizabeth Sigmund for a two-day talk about Sylvia Plath. Elizabeth was married to the writer David Compton when she became a good friend of Sylvia’s during the Court Green period. Elizabeth also had a good opportunity to observe Ted and the Hughes-Plath marriage. She has become one of the major players in a conflict that unfortunately is likely to go on as long as the Punic Wars, arraying Olwyn, Ted—and even Ted’s second wife, Carol, and Sylvia’s daughter, Frieda—against Elizabeth, Al Alvarez, and Clarissa Roche, joined later by biographers Linda Wagner-Martin and Ronald Hayman. The latter side, appalled at Olwyn’s handling of the Plath estate, and critical of Assia’s role in seducing Ted away from his Devon home and family, identifies with Sylvia’s grievances and deplores the vitriol in Anne Stevenson’s biography. Elizabeth showed me a letter from Olwyn to Clarissa Roche, written on 24 March 1986, which sums up the war in two brief sentences: “You liked her. I think she was pretty straight poison.” I went to Elizabeth seeking some understanding of why Ted left Sylvia. Virtually nothing in reports of his behavior while living with Plath—and certainly nothing in letters of his that have so far surfaced—signals anything like the depth of unhappiness that he expressed to his sister Olwyn shortly after he left Sylvia.

Later, Olwyn sought to extenuate her brother’s actions by pointing out that Sylvia had ordered Ted out of the house. In other words, it was not his doing, not his choice. But a letter he wrote to Olwyn, sent shortly after his leaving Court Green, shows he wanted out of the marriage. It was rather typical of him to let Sylvia actually declare the start of hostilities—just as it was nearly always the case that he let women, including Sylvia, seem the aggressor. Ted, like the female spirit who appears to him in his radio play, “Difficulties of a Bridegroom,” and in the persona he fashions for himself in Birthday Letters, was a curiously passive victim of an irresistible destiny. Ted was a sexual predator, Al Alvarez told me, but the prey had to become visible and come to him—“to show,” I added in conversation with Alvarez.

Elizabeth Compton Sigmund’s testimony is crucial, in part because initially she was quite fond of Ted Hughes. She did not regard him as a dour, if romantic, Heathcliff. She only got involved in the acrimony concerning how the marriage ended when Olwyn became upset that Elizabeth was not following the party line with regard to Ted’s behavior—a party line Olwyn had established. Then Olwyn began writing that in fact Elizabeth had only seen Sylvia and Ted on perhaps a dozen occasions and was nothing like a good friend of the couple (this despite Sylvia’s dedicating The Bell Jar to Elizabeth and David Compton).

In Elizabeth’s papers, two letters from Aurelia tell what Olwyn does not want told. On 11 April 1963, Aurelia wrote to Elizabeth, “I know what good friends you and your husband had been to my girl when she was so shocked by the change that came into her marriage.” After learning that Ted had installed Elizabeth to take care of Court Green in his absence, Aurelia wrote again on 5 May: “I want to say that there is no one in all England I would rather have in Court Green, doing what you are doing, than you. From the first moment I saw you, I rejoiced that Sylvia had such a fine and lovely a friend. Indeed I wish to see you when I come in June … I am glad to think of you at Court Green.” And more than a decade later, after the Plath wars had heated up, Aurelia wrote to Elizabeth on 18 May 1976, “When I met you … I thought you were one of the most beautiful, radiant women I ever saw. My heart went out to you in affection from the very start.”