This Day in Literary History (Plath Commits Suicide)

Feb. 11, 1963—On her third and last suicide attempt, having carefully stuffed the pipes in her London flat so her two young children upstairs would not breathe in the fumes, 30-year-old poet Sylvia Plath stuck her head in the oven of her kitchen, turned up the gas, and died, achieving a kind of ghoulish immortality as a symbol of victimized rage.

For a long time, students of literature would have picked up on one word in that last sentence—“third”—as a mistake. 

But, if a new biography of the estranged wife of British poet Ted Hughes by Andrew Wilson is to be believed, Plath had not only tried to kill herself in August 1953—a full decade before her death—but even at age 10, two years after the death of her father.

Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted benefited from access to the obsessive record-keeping of Plath’s mother, Aurelia. While Hughes became an object of hatred to feminists for driving not merely one, but two of the women he took up with to suicide, it seems that, in Plath’s case, there already was a tendency toward self-annihilation of long standing.

I have written before about the fateful meeting between Plath and Hughes, a portent of the extreme emotions that would surface after his infidelity, their breakup and her death.  

Hughes, according to friend Al Alvarez’s account to The New Yorker’s Janet Malcolm in The Silent Woman (1993), might have been a man whom women practically threw themselves at, but he had spectacularly bad luck with the two first, principal women in his adult life: both Plath and the woman he took up with and left his wife for, Assia Wevill, killed themselves over him.

In the years after Plath’s death, Hughes, as literary executor of her estate (they had not yet divorced at the time of her passing), had his sister Olwyn, as literary agent for the estate, control access to his dead wife’s work. Despite strenuous efforts to protect his and his family’s privacy—not to mention shape perceptions of their marriage—the surviving poet’s reputation took a hit from which, in a real sense, it never really recovered.

“To the readers of her poetry and her biography, Sylvia Plath will always be young and in a rage over Hughes’ unfaithfulness,” wrote Malcolm. As for Hughes: “he has been cheated of the peace that age brings by the posthumous fame of Plath and by the public’s fascination with the story of her life.”

A few weeks ago, I stood in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey in London and noticed the proximity of Hughes’ memorial there to that of two important influences on his work: Thomas Hardy and T.S. Eliot. As it happened, all three contracted first marriages that were train wrecks, and all would be haunted to the end of their days by the breakup of these relationships.

The inscription on Hughes’ memorial in perhaps England’s most hallowed tribute to its literary geniuses hints at a kind of peace found in nature: “So we found the end of our journey, So we stood alive in the river of light, Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.” 

For Plath, however, the end of life, in “Edge,” the last poem she finished, only days before her death in one of the historically worst winters England had ever faced, the end is something infinitely more harrowing, an almost hideous art form:

“The woman is perfected,

Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment.”

 

This Day in Literary History (Wife’s Death Inspires Hardy Elegies)

November 27, 1912--The sudden death of his wife of nearly 40 years left Thomas Hardy (pictured) with more than the grief customary to widowers. To the immediate cause of his anguish (why hadn’t he noticed that the gall-bladder condition his wife had recently complained of had deteriorated so quickly?) was added a longer-term question: How had a relationship begun with so much love evolve into one marked by so much discord?

Soon, the British man of letters took to sorting out the answers in an outburst of poems that, most biographers and critics believe, marked a significant advancement in his achievement in this genre.

Hardy owed his very livelihood to Emma Lavinia Gifford Hardy, as she had shared his interest in poetry and persuaded him to pursue writing, rather than his original intended vocation, architecture. Later, unfortunately, it might be said, too, that the frequent subjects of his novels and poetry (he was one of the few writers whose achievement was as significant in one form as another), marital misalliances and fate, owe much to their relationship.

The woman that Hardy wed within two years after the passing of Emma, Florence Dugdale Hardy, would eventually relate the story that the writer had married his first wife not knowing she was five years younger than she claimed. However, even at her real age, she was still several months younger than Thomas. It was more likely that the two were driven apart by temperament and the changes that time could bring.

When he first came to her father’s rectory as a 30-year-old architecture apprentice, Hardy was struck by Emma’s “golden curls and rosy colour” as she rode around the countryside in her horse, as well as by what the writer’s biographer Robert Gittings characterized as her “willfulness and lack of restraint.” But as she drifted into middle age, she no longer wore her hair long, her face grew heavier, and her eccentric digressions with friends became a source of increasing embarrassment to her husband. Nor were there children to bind them together.

Even worse, by the 1890s, when two of his novels, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, had ignited controversies over what was then deemed sexual explicitness, Emma—by this time having become religiously conservative—had become embarrassed by her husband.  In the same decade, his increasing emotional attachment to younger women may have become a source of tension between the two.

(Oddly enough, in the last years of her life, Emma did not notice the budding relationship between her husband and the woman who would succeed her as his wife. Florence, four decades younger than Thomas, became friends with the wife as well as the poet, which seems to have thrown off what would have been Emma’s normal suspicions.)

By the time of her death, Emma had taken to sleeping apart from her husband in a room in the attic, and had her meals taken up there. Her 72^nd birthday had passed uncelebrated, and she had suddenly announced that she would no longer play the piano, a longtime source of comfort for her.

Within a month of Emma’s passing, Hardy had already begun his private summing-up. In “The Voice,” he addressed her directly, immediately, as “woman much missed.” At the same time, he is also acknowledging—and wondering—to himself (and, as it happened when published, to the larger reading public), why “you had changed/from the one who was all to me.”

Emma’s death, according to Hardy biographer Claire Tomalin, became “the moment when Thomas Hardy became a great poet”:

“They are among the most original elegies ever written, in feeling and in the handling of both language and verse forms. They do not spare the truth about the unhappiness suffered by wife and husband, but they move into the past with an expansiveness and panache he had never found before.”

Nearly a century later, another British poet would come to a late-life reckoning with the ghost of his first wife. Ted Hughes felt a great affinity for Hardy’s intense interests in nature and memory. Perhaps not so coincidentally, he also sought to make sense of a troubled—in fact, deeply controversial—marriage, to the American poet Sylvia Plath. In 1998, 35 years after her suicide, Hughes responded, belatedly, to accusations that he had caused her death with a cycle of poems about their relationship, Birthday Letters.

Hughes—whose mistress also took her life six years after Plath had killed herself—would probably have endorsed Hardy’s notion that women represented “the most vivifying and disturbing influence in human life.”

(Photograph of Thomas Hardy from the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)

Bonus Quote of the Day (Sylvia Plath, on Meeting Her Lover and Doom)

''Then the worst thing happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes….and bang the door was shut and he was sloshing brandy into a glass and I was sloshing it at the place where my mouth was when I last knew about it.

''We shouted as if in a high wind … and 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, my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never find again, and my favorite silver earrings....And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when he came out of the room, blood was running down his face….Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists….And I screamed in myself, thinking: oh, to give myself crashing, fighting, to you.''—Poet Sylvia Plath, February 26, 1956, on meeting future husband and betrayer Ted Hughes the night before, in The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kulik (2000)

Some years ago, Edward and Nancy Caldwell Sorel collaborated on a text-and-illustration series for The Atlantic Monthly called “First Encounters.” I forget if this fateful meeting between star-crossed poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes ended up in the series. In a way, it shouldn’t have: the sheer violence of the event, and our knowledge of the horrifying end of their union, would have overwhelmed every other meeting of illuminati that the Sorels chronicled.

Most of what I’ve omitted, indicated here by ellipses, relates to other people at the wild literary party in Cambridge attended by the American Plath and the Briton Hughes. I deleted it because it would be of limited interest to my readers; 30 years ago, when the first version of the journals appeared, much of this was omitted, I think, because Hughes feared that the people mentioned (many still alive) would be all too interested in how they appeared.

But that early expurgated edition, though it included much of the alcohol-fueled groping and violence between the pair, also deleted the details about Hughes ripping off Plath’s hairband and earrings. That, in a way, is telling, because looked at in its entirety, it becomes clear that this passage is not just about sex but also possession: possession of objects, possession of another human being, and possession of one’s self.

That theme starts subtly. Plath had inquired about the handsome, dark mysterious stranger as soon as she saw him, “but no one told me.” It’s hard to resist the inference that many of these uncommunicative people were women who might have wanted Hughes for themselves (including, as it happened, Hughes' girlfriend of the time, who was understandably upset at how he looked after Plath got through with him for the night).

Instead, Plath engages in what, in its immediacy and violence, can only be thought of as what Charles Darwin termed “sexual selection”—the principle that determines the winners in the struggle for existence.

This passage becomes compelling not merely because of its all the emotion and energy that Plath invests in this act, but in the objects that mean so much to her: her hairband, itself symbolic of nature (it has “weathered the sun and so much love”), and her “favorite silver earrings.”

Already, foreboding pulses beneath the wild instincts on display (she writes of the hairband “whose like I shall never find again”), but everything is given over to the moment and its fervid remembrance several hours later. A mere four months later, the two married.

“These violent delights have violent ends,” Friar Lawrence ineffectively but accurately warns in Romeo and Juliet. For all of Plath’s astonishment in her journal that “the worst thing happened” the night she met Hughes, the truly awful events--the “violent ends” of their union--would occur later: Plath’s suicide, following Hughes’ infidelity and separation, in 1963; the suicide four years later of the woman for whom he left Plath, Assia Weevil, and her murder of their child; and, like a bomb going off nearly a half century after the initial fuse was lit, the 2009 suicide of the son of Plath and Hughes, Nicholas.