DYING IS AN ART: Sylvia Plath

One
DYING IS AN ART
Sylvia Plath
1932-1963

"Dying
Is an art, like everything
else
I do it exceptionally well."
Lady Lazarus/
Sylvia Plath

Early in the morning of February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath, destined
to
become The High Priestess of Suffering, crept quietly into her
children's room in
her bleak London apartment. Three year old Frieda and year old Nicholas
were
still sleeping. It was approximately 6 a.m.
Plath placed a plate of bread and butter and two mugs of milk on the
night
table beside their beds, in case they awoke before the au pair arrived
at the
apartment. A local employment agency found Plath a young Australian
girl to
come each morning at 9 a.m. to take care of the two children and do
light
housework while Sylvia wrote.
After leaving behind the snack, Plath went to the kitchen where she
sealed
the door to the apartment and the windows as well as she could using
towels. She
took a handful of sleeping pills, turned on the gas in the oven and
laid her head
inside it, letting the fumes consume her. She was only 30 years
old.
She left a note on the table beside the oven with the name and
telephone
number of her physician, asking that he be called. The note may have
been an
indication that she expected to be found and rescued, as she had been
in her 1953
suicide attempt. She was not saved.
The au pair arrived promptly at nine o'clock but was not able to get
into
the building. The outside door was locked. Under normal circumstance,
Plath's
downstairs neighbor would have heard the au pair at the front door and
let her in.
But things were anything but normal on this morning. The man in the
first floor
apartment below Plath's did not hear the au pair knocking at the front
door
because the gas fumes seeping down from upstairs had rendered him
unconscious.
Unable to get into the apartment building, the au pair marched up the
road
to use the pay telephone to call her place of employment and explain
the
situation. The employment agency told her to go back to the apartment
and try
again. She did. By then it was eleven o'clock. There were several
carpenters at
the building when she returned. They were scheduled to do some work on
the old
building. They let the au pair inside the building. Knocking at the
door to Plath's
apartment, the young girl was overcome with gas fumes. She called for
the
carpenters to come and help. They broke open the door and found Plath
lying
lifeless on the kitchen floor.
A. Alvarez, poetry editor at the London Observer and a friend of
Plath, is
convinced that she did not intend to kill herself.
"If attempted suicide is, as some psychiatrists believe, a cry for
help, then
Sylvia at this time was not suicidal. What she wanted was not help
but
confirmation: she needed someone to acknowledge that she was
coping
exceptionally well with her difficult routine life...She needed even
more to know
that her poems worked and were good..." he wrote in his 1970 book, The
Savage
God.
"Had everything worked out as it should -- had the gas not drugged
the
man downstairs, preventing him from opening the front door for the au
pair girl --
there is little doubt she would have been saved. I think she wanted to
be; why else
leave her doctor's telephone number?" he wrote.
"...There was too much holding her to life," he says.
Her two young children, her renewed devotion to her writing and
the
publication of her first novel, The Bell Jar, were all supposed
factors, anchoring
her to life.
Ironically, if by Alvarez's contention, the note with her doctor's
name and
telephone number were an indication that she did not want to kill
herself, Plath's
telephone was disconnected at the time, so there couldn't be any last
minute,
life-saving calls made, even if she was discovered in time.
Whether she truly intended to kill herself, or whether she wished to
be
saved, on February 11, 1963, during one of the coldest winters in
English history,
30 year old Sylvia Plath committed suicide. And so began the long
literary legacy
of the High Priestess of Suffering. She was buried in the cemetery
adjoining the
Church of Saint Thomas a Becket in Heptonstall, a small village in
Yorkshire,
England.

"And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade."
Lady Lazarus
Sylvia Plath

It has always been the shocking, tragic story of Sylvia Plath's short
life
that has fascinated the public.
According to The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry in
English (1994, Oxford University Press) "In the quarter century
following her
suicide, Sylvia Plath has become a heroine and martyr of the feminist
movement.
In fact, she was a martyr mainly due to the recurrent psychodrama that
staged
itself within the bell jar of her tragically wounded
personality."
In proportion to her brief life and even briefer literary output --
only one
slim volume of poetry, The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and a novel,
The
Bell Jar (1963) were published in her lifetime -- nearly a half dozen
extensive
books on her life have been published. According to Time magazine
writer,
Andrea Sachs, "Everyone who even had lunch with Plath has seemingly
felt
compelled to write a memoir."
If what the 1920s artist, Jacques Riguat said is true, "Suicide is
a
vocation," then Sylvia Plath finally got the job done right on her
third try.
Her first suicide attempt was in the summer of 1953 while she was
still a
student at Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts. Between the
month
she was chosen as a student guest editor on New York's glossy
Mademoiselle
magazine, and her last year at Smith, she had a nervous breakdown and
attempted
to kill herself by taking sleeping pills. Plath was reportedly
depressed over not
being accepted into Frank O'Connor's writing seminar at Harvard
University that
summer. Sylvia was not used to being rejected.
She was born October 27, 1932 in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.
She
shared a birth date with another tragic poetic figure, Dylan Thomas.
Thomas was
born October 27, 1914. He died in 1953 at 39 years old. Like Plath, his
literary
legend only grew with his untimely death.
Sylvia Plath committed suicide outright, while Dylan Thomas
acted
sufficiently self-destructive so as to reach the same end. Thomas died
after a night
of heavy drinking at the White Horse Tavern in New York City. He
reportedly
drank 18 shots of whiskey. The cause of death was reported as alcohol
poisoning.
He was reported as to have died of "insult to the brain."
Plath was a child prodigy. She published her first poem in the
Boston
Sunday Herald newspaper when she was just eight years old.
Her father, Otto, was a professor of biology at Boston University and
he
was an expert on bees. Her mother, Aurelia (Schober) taught English and
German
at a local high school. She had been a student of Otto Plath's at
Boston
University. Sylvia had a younger brother, Warren. The Plath's lived in
Wellesley
and later moved to Winthrop, Massachusetts.
Sylvia was exceptionally close to her father and was devastated when
he
died suddenly. She was just nine years old. Otto Plath, who had
diabetes, was
forced to have his leg amputated because gangrene had infected his toe.
He died
in the hospital following complications from surgery.

"Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time --
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal."
Daddy
Sylvia Plath

Sylvia attended Wellesley High School where she excelled in all
her
studies and earned straight A's throughout her high school career. She
was
described in the Wellesley High School yearbook as "Having a warm
smile...a
future writer."
In 1950, she was accepted to Smith College, a prestigious
women's
college located in Northhampton, Massachusetts. She received three
scholarships
to attend. She maintained one of the highest grade point averages while
enrolled
there. She was a member of the editorial board of the Smith Review and
was
elected to various class offices. While at Smith she began publishing
in Seventeen
magazine.
In 1952, she won a Mademoiselle fiction writing contest for her
story
"Sunday at the Minons." She received $500 for her short story. Despite
all her
accomplishments, Plath continued to show signs of growing self-doubt
and
depression.
"For the few little outward successes I may seem to have, there are
acres
of misgivings and self-doubt," she wrote to her mother from
school.
She was chosen to represent Smith College as a guest editor at
Mademoiselle during the summer of her junior year. Staying in New York
City
that summer of 1953, the magazine wined, dined and photographed her all
over
Manhattan. Her poem, "Mad Girl's Love Song" was published in the August
1953
issue of the magazine.

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all are born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"
Mad Girl's Love Song
Sylvia Plath

Harper's magazine also bought three of her poems that summer and
she
was paid $100.00 -- her first professional earnings from writing. These
were
heady times for the young and talented Plath, but then the bottom
dropped out of
everything when she returned home that summer. In her novel, The Bell
Jar, she
describes her mental breakdown: "Here the cracks in her nature which
had been
held together as it were by the surrounding pressures of New York
widened and
gape alarmingly."
In late August, Sylvia left a note for her mother saying she was going
out
for a long walk and would return the next day. She stole sleeping pills
from her
mother and went down to the cellar of her home. There she hid in a dark
closet
and swallowed the pills. It was only by a miracle that she was found,
three days
later, lying in the darkest recess of the cellar. By the time she was
discovered, she
had slipped into a coma. She was rushed to the hospital and revived.
She was then
admitted to McLean's Hospital in Belmont Massachusetts, a psychiatric
hospital,
where she spent six months undergoing psychotherapy and shock
treatments. This
was her first, unsuccessful suicide attempt.
According to Alvarez, "The flow of life in her was too strong even for
the
violence she had done it. And so she learned the hard way the odds
against
successful suicide."
Following her extended psychiatric hospitalization, she returned to
Smith.
She wanted to, in her own words, conquer, "Old broncos that threw me
for a loop
last year."
She graduated summa cum laude from Smith in 1955.
Her second unsuccessful suicide attempt occurred sometime in the
summer of 1962. She drove off the rode in a car she was driving and
ended up in
a ditch along an abandoned airfield. She wasn't hurt.
"I believe she thought her car crash the previous summer had set her
free:
she had paid her dues, qualified as a survivor and could now write
about it,"
Alvarez says.
His contention is that she drove off the road deliberately, wishing to
die,
but she survived, so, according to Alvarez, "Death and suicide were now
in the
past for her."
"She seemed to view death as a physical challenge she had once
again
overcome," he said.
On her third attempt, Plath was successful, regardless of what she did
or
did not intend. "It was a cry for help, which fatally misfired,"
Alvarez said.

"Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to."
The Moon and the Yew Tree
Sylvia Plath

Popular belief is that Sylvia Plath killed herself because she
was
distraught over the break-up of her marriage to Ted Hughes. She met and
married
Hughes, an English poet, from Yorkshire, after graduation from Smith.
Following
graduation, Plath received a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham
College
at Cambridge University in England, where she met Hughes, then a
struggling,
unknown poet. Plath called him, "The only man in the world who is my
match."
After a brief, four-month courtship, they were married on June 16,
1956.
They honeymooned in Spain and returned to the college where Plath
finished her
studies. Plath and Hughes moved back to America where she took a
teaching
position at her alma mater, Smith College, teaching freshman English,
while
Hughes worked on completing his first book of poems, The Hawk in the
Rain.
Sylvia helped get the book published.
Her colleagues at Smith hailed her as one of the finest instructors in
the
English department, but she was still filled with self-doubt about her
teaching
abilities. In 1958, she decided not to return to her teaching position
at Smith and
instead, the couple moved to Boston, where they hoped to pursue writing
careers
on a full-time basis. They moved into a small, two-room apartment on
Willow
Street on Beacon Hill. Boston was a hotbed of literary activity during
this period.
Eighty-four year old Robert Frost lived on Brewster Street in nearby
Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Pulitzer Prize winning poet Robert Lowell was living on
Marlboro
Street in Boston and teaching at Boston University. In April 1958,
Sylvia enrolled
in a writing seminar taught at Boston University by Lowell. The 41-year
old
Lowell had already won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1947 for Lord
Weary's
Castle. It was his second book of poems.
The students in Lowell's class met on Tuesdays in a small classroom
on
Commonwealth Avenue from 2-4 p.m. Among the struggling poets in the
class
besides Plath were Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin and George Starbuck.
Sexton
and Sylvia became close friends. They had a great deal in common
besides poetry
-- they had both been committed to psychiatric hospitals and they both
had
attempted suicide.
Sexton had been institutionalized at Westwood Lodge, a private
psychiatric hospital. She and Sylvia talked constantly about suicide
both in and
outside of Lowell's class.
"She had the suicide inside her, as I do. As many of us do. But if we
are
lucky, we don't get away with it and something or someone forces us to
live,"
Sexton said about her friend Sylvia.
A kindred spirit, both in poetry and suicide, Sexton became an
inspiration
for Sylvia. Plath was working part-time as a secretary in the
psychiatric unit of
Massachusetts General Hospital, transcribing patient's histories, while
she was
attending Lowell's class. In a review of Robert Lowell's book, Life
Studies,
appearing in The Nation, M.L. Rosenthal, coined the phrase
"confessional
poetry," as a description of the writing Lowell, Plath, Sexton, Kumin
and W.D.
Snodgrass were doing. Although Sylvia never thought of herself as
a
"confessional poet" she did discover a new stylistic freedom after
studying with
Lowell.
"I've been very excited by what I feel is the new breakthrough that
came
with, say, Robert Lowell's Life Studies," Plath said.
"Robert Lowell's poem about his experiences in a mental hospital,
for
example interests me very much," she said.
According to Alvarez, "Lowell had opened a door which had
previously
been bolted against her."
Plath no longer had to be "imprisoned in her old poetic habits."
Ironically, out of that brief writing seminar at Boston University in
April
1958, four of its members won Pulitzer Prizes: Lowell in 1947 for Lord
Weary's
Castle; Anne Sexton in 1967 for Live or Die; Maxine Kumin in 1972 for
Up
Country: Poems of New England and Sylvia Plath, posthumously in 1982
for
Collected Poems. The book was edited by her husband, Ted Hughes.
Also ironic is the fact that three of the poets in this same class all
ended
up in mental institutions for some period of their lives. Robert Lowell
was in and
out of psychiatric hospitals because of depression and was
institutionalized at
McLean's Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts in May 1958 . Anne Sexton
was
admitted to Westwood Lodge in 1954 and Sylvia Plath was admitted to
McLean's
Hospital following her suicide attempt in 1953.
Two of the people in this class committed suicide -- Sylvia Plath in
1963
and Anne Sexton in 1972. They both gassed themselves to death.
"Sylvia's death disturbs me," Anne Sexton said after hearing
about
Sylvia's suicide in 1963. "It makes me want it too. She took something
that was
mine. That death was mine. Of course it was hers too. But we both swore
off it,
the way you swear off smoking."

"Thief!
how did you crawl into
crawl down alone
into the death I wanted
so badly and for so long,
the death we said we both outgrew."
Sylvia's Death
Anne Sexton

In 1959, Sylvia and Ted Hughes moved back to England where they
settled into a small flat in London. Hughes was on the edge of a
considerable
reputation based on his first book, The Hawk in the Rain. The book had
been
well-received in the United States.
In 1960, Sylvia gave birth to their daughter, Frieda and in 1962,
after a
previous miscarriage, she gave birth to a son, Nicholas. The family
moved to a
thatch-roofed country manor, Green Court in Devon. The house was up a
lane,
next door to a twelfth century church. There was a cobblestone
courtyard, apple
and cherry orchards and flower gardens. It was an idyllic spot for
raising a family
and writing.
Later, after she had moved out of Green Court and into her own
London
flat with the two children, Sylvia called the country home her, "lost
Eden." In
1960, her first book of poems, The Colossus and Other Poems was
published in
England. The book immediately established her credentials as an
emerging talent.
During his period, Alvarez described Plath as "the poet taking a back
seat
to the young mother and housewife."
She was "not pretty, but alert and full of feeling with a lively mouth
and
fine brown eyes."
"Bright. Clever. Competent...friendly and yet rather distant," he said
of
her.
At the time of her suicide, Plath had only published two books --
The
Colossus and Other Poems and her first novel, The Bell Jar. The novel
was
published in England under the pseudonym, "Victoria Lucas." Because of
the
volatile content of the book -- her version of her nervous breakdown
and
psychiatric institutionalization -- Sylvia did not want anyone to know
that the
autobiographical novel was about her and her family.
Sylvia killed herself just two weeks after the novel's
publication.
The book was, according to Plath's own words, "An
autobiographical
apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the
past."
Although the reviews for the novel were positive, Plath worried
that
readers and critics would miss the point of her story. She wanted them
to focus
not on the main characters' decline into insanity, but her recovery
from it. It was
supposed to be a book about hope and rebirth. It was anything but that
for the
reading public.
"There are criticisms of America that the neurotic can make as well
as
anyone, perhaps better, and Miss Lucas makes them brilliantly," critic
Lawrence
Lerner of The Listener wrote.
A reviewer for The New Statement call The Bell Jar, "The first
feminine
novel in a Salinger mood."
"Miss Lucas, can certainly write," proclaimed The London Times
Literary
Supplement.
But none of these favorable reviews and others eased Sylvia's
self-doubt
and growing depression. When the novel was finally released in America
in 1971,
under Plath's real name, it became a cult classic.
Aurelia Plath, her mother, didn't want the book published in America
and
wrote to the book's publisher, Harper &; Row in New York.
"I realize that no explanation of why the personal suffering that
this
publication here will create in the lives of several people would be
understood,"
she wrote. She claimed that her daughter confessed to her that she
intended the
book to be "a pot-boiler."
"I've tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through
the
distorted lens of a bell jar," Sylvia told her mother.
The Bell Jar was published in the United States in 1971, after
Ted
Hughes, who remained legally Sylvia's husband, sold the American rights
to the
book. Hughes, an accomplished poet in his own right, who was destined
to
become Poet Laureate of England in 1984, was married to Plath for six
years.
Rumor has it that Hughes sold the rights to the novel in order to
purchase a
country estate.
Hughes was also responsible for editing Sylvia's posthumously
released
second book of poetry, Ariel, which was published in 1965. Before her
suicide,
Sylvia had meticulously chosen what poems she wanted in Ariel and in
what
order. She was especially concerned that the poems focused on
redemption and
rebirth -- two reoccurring themes in her work.
Instead, Hughes fed into the growing dark and tragic reputation of
his
dead wife, and made his own decisions on what poems would be included
in the
book. The poems he chose were darker and foreshadowed Sylvia's
depression and
death.
Hughes also edited Sylvia's Collected Poems. In 1982, it was one of
the
few books to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously.
According to a 1994 Time magazine article by Andrea Sachs, Ted
Hughes,
"Plays two roles that are hopelessly in conflict: he is both Plath's
faithless
husband and also her literary executor."
In Birthday Letters, published in 1998, shortly before his death,
Hughes
described his role in Sylvia's brilliant but tormented life as being,
"auditioned for
the male lead in your drama." Hughes maintains that Sylvia was destined
to kill
herself because of her dark obsession with her father and that no
matter what he
did, he was powerless to stop it.
For years after Sylvia's suicide, Hughes refused to discuss his
relationship
with her. This both infuriated and puzzled readers and critics.
"What happens in the heart simply happens, " Hughes said about
his
relationship with Sylvia.
Ted Hughes died of cancer in October 1998 at the age of 68 years
old.

"There is no better way to know us
Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood
Now neither's able to sleep even at a distance
Distracted by the soft competing pulse of the other..."
A Modest Proposal
Ted Hughes

After Sylvia's suicide, for most of the rest of his life, Ted Hughes
was the
much maligned husband of a literary legend -- The High Priestess of
Suffering --
Sylvia Plath. No matter the extent of the awards or honors bestowed on
him,
Hughes talent and career was forever overshadowed by his wife's fame
and
celebrity.
In her book, The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm chronicles how a
generation of feminist writers and readers reviled Hughes for
abandoning Sylvia
and tampering with her work after her suicide. To make things even
more
diabolical, Assia Wevill, the woman Hughes left Sylvia for, also
committed
suicide. In 1969, Wevill killed herself by taking a handful of sleeping
pills,
sticking her head in an oven and gassing herself to death, just as
Plath had done in
1963. Tragically, Wevill also killed Shura, the four-year old daughter
she had
with Hughes.
Sylvia separated from Hughes sometime in late 1962 when she
discovered
he was carrying on an affair with Wevill. She was the wife of English
poet David
Wevill. Hughes' infidelity was a complete betrayal of everything Sylvia
felt their
marriage had meant. Assia Wevill was the opposite of Sylvia in every
way --
appearance, ambition, talent and personality. Wevill had no intention
of living out
her days in the idyllic, rural Green Court. But Wevill's romance with
Hughes
made it impossible for Sylvia to stay in the place she loved so
much.
Plath moved to London with her two children where she found a
small,
two-room flat on Fitzroy Road on Primrose Hill. William Butler Yeats,
one of her
favorite poets had lived in the apartment building. Sylvia took finding
Yeats'
apartment building as a sign that she would soon resume her writing
career.
Resigned to live away from Green Court and her husband, she
began
writing feverishly. She wrote every day, often completing one poem a
day and
finishing work on her second novel, Double Exposure.
"I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name,"
she
wrote to her mother.
"Terrific stuff, as if domesticity had choked me," she told her friend
and
editor Alvarez.
Despite all her hard work, most of her poems were rejected by
publishers
and magazines. The New Yorker, which had first refusal on her work,
rejected
most of the poems which latter appeared in Ariel. Most of these poems
are now
considered classics. She sent poems to a number of English magazines
and
newspapers but these too were rejected. More than anything, the
rejection of her
work weighed heaviest on her troubled heart.
On the cold gray morning of February 11, 1963, during what was one
of
the coldest winter's in London's history, heart-broken at the break-up
of her
marriage to Ted Hughes, lonely for her country "Eden" at Green
Court,
financially burdened, struggling to take care of two young children and
unable to
get her new poems published, Sylvia Plath took her life.
Shortly before her suicide, she had taken up horseback riding. The
stallion
she was teaching herself to ride was named Ariel.

"The woman is perfected
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare feet
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
Edge
Sylvia Plath