Sylvia Plath: A Biography Read online

  Sylvia Plath

  A Biography

  Linda Wagner-Martin

  Copyright © Linda Wagner-Martin 1987

  The right of Linda Wagner-Martin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in 1987 by Simon and Schuster.

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  To Andrea and Bob, Doug and Tom

  “the loss of it, the terrible loss of the more she could have done!”

  — Anne Sexton, letter, 1/20/67

  Table of Contents

  Sylvia Plath

  A Biography

  Linda Wagner-Martin

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  1 - Childhood

  2 - Adolescence

  3 - Bradford High School

  4 - Beginning Smith College

  5 - Conquering Smith

  6 - Junior Year

  7 - Smith, a Culmination

  8 - England

  9 - Marriage

  10 - Marriage in America

  11 - The Colossus and Other Poems

  12 - Babies and Bell Jars

  13 - The Devon Life

  14 - The Ariel Poems

  15 - Resolution

  Afterword

  Major Sources and Acknowledgments

  Preface

  Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982, nearly twenty years after her death on February 11, 1963. This was a rare event: the Pulitzer is almost never given posthumously. But the poems Plath wrote in the last five years of her life, leading to those she wrote during 1962, the year of her Ariel poems, were so distinctive — such virtuoso performances in technique, such spellbinding expressions of emotion — that the Pulitzer jury could award the prize to no other book.

  Plath would have relished both the prize and the reasons it was given. She believed in her poetry, and she knew her craft thoroughly. In her poems, she wrote about the crucial issues of her life, but she made expert art from those issues. She voiced anger as well as hope; she spoke of sorrow as well as joy. She wrote scathingly about people of whom she disapproved and about the husband who angered her. She wrote peacefully, with a calm lyricism, about her children and their daily activities. And she wrote politically: Plath cared intensely about the arms race, nuclear power, and people’s injustice to others.

  Plath was a feminist, in a broad sense of the term: she never undervalued herself or her work. She insisted that she be recognized as the talented writer she was even while her children were infants and she was spending more time as a mother and a wife than as a writer. She sought out women as friends and mentors and long admired the writing of Virginia Woolf, Marianne Moore, Stevie Smith, Elizabeth Bishop, and Anne Sexton. Yet, product of the American fifties that she was, Plath knew that, because she was a woman writer, her work would be judged by standards different from those used to judge the work of male writers. She knew that becoming successful would be difficult, if she were to remain true to her artistic convictions and to her own poetic voice. That knowledge angered her, as did other circumstances of her life in 1962, when the pressures of caring for an ancient house and two children in diapers seemed relentless. Her “October” poems, written in part to release that anger, formed the heart of Ariel, the first book published after her death. There were a great many other fine poems from the 1960s; some were published in other posthumous collections, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees; others did not appear until The Collected Poems in 1981. Even the so-called Collected Poems is not complete, and it is possible that other of Plath’s poems will be found.

  Although her writing in the final year of her life has gained the most attention, Plath wrote well from early in her career. She considered herself a professional writer beginning in 1950, when at the age of seventeen, she published nine pieces of writing in Seventeen, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Boston Globe, all for payment. In college, her publications appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, the Monitor, Mademoiselle, and Seventeen, as well as campus magazines. Several years out of college she was appearing as well in British magazines, and had added The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, The Nation, Partisan Review, Ladies’ Home Journal, and other American journals to her credits. Her first poetry collection was chosen the alternate to the winner of the prestigious Yale Younger Poets book competition. In 1960 this revised collection, The Colossus and Other Poems, was published in England. It appeared in 1962 in the United States. In 1961 The New Yorker gave Plath a “first reading” contract, which meant that that magazine chose first from all her new work and paid her for the privilege. In early 1963, her novel The Bell Jar was published in England.

  This biography emphasizes Plath’s identity as a writer. Her life was shaped by her ambition to be a writer, and the consequences of her important personal choices are clear in her work. Because much of the life of a writer appears in one way or another in the work, I have used every known fragment of Plath’s writing, the manuscripts and work sheets of her poetry and fiction, her journals, and her correspondence. Most of these materials are now housed at either the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington, or the Rare Book Room at Smith College. At the estate’s mandate, one group of Plath’s papers at Smith has been sealed until the year 2013; another is closed until after the deaths of both her mother and her younger brother. Publication of the Plath materials in these libraries is controlled by Ted Hughes, Plath’s husband, from whom she was estranged at the time of her suicide.

  Unfortunately, the draft of her last novel, Double Exposure, “disappeared somewhere around 1970,” in Ted Hughes’s words. And, as he explained in his 1982 introduction to The Journals of Sylvia Plath, a collection which is less complete than its title suggests, “Two more notebooks [the journals] survived for a while, maroon-backed ledgers like the ’57-’59 volume, and continued the record from late ‘59 to within three days of her death. The last of these contained entries for several months, and I destroyed it because I did not want her children to have to read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival). The other disappeared.” The “other” notebook is, of course, the one that would chart Plath’s life during the period of her greatest accomplishment as a poet, the fall of 1962 when she wrote many of the poems that would comprise Ariel.

  So far as possible, I have used available materials in these collections as well as those held privately by Plath’s friends. I am grateful for access to this wealth of information, and to the more than two hundred people who agreed to be interviewed or otherwise helped so graciously and with such keen interest in Sylvia Plath and her work. The notes include a complete listing of sources, personal and published. As is his usual practice, Ted Hughes would not allow interviews.

  *

  When I began researching this biography in 1982, I contacted Olwyn Hughes, who is literary executor of the Sylvia Plath estate. Olwyn was initially cooperative, and helped me in my research by answering questions herself and referring me to others who could be of assistance, As Olwyn read the later chapters of the book, however, and particularly after she read a draft of the manuscript in 1986, her cooperation diminished substantially. Olwyn wrote me at great length, usually in argument with my views about the life and development of Plath. Ted Hughes responded to a reading of the manuscript in draft form in 1986 with suggestions for changes that filled fifteen pages and would have meant a deletion of more than 15,000 words.

  Of necessity I continued to correspond with Olwyn Hughes in order to obtain permission to quote at length from Plath’s works. But on every occasion Olwyn objected to the manuscri
pt, frequently citing Ted Hughes’s comments (although, as mentioned earlier, Ted Hughes refused to be interviewed directly for the book). I did make many changes in response to these comments. However, the requests for changes continued, and I concluded that permissions would be granted only if I agreed to change the manuscript to reflect the Hughes’ points of view. When I realized that this tactic would continue indefinitely, I had to end my attempt to gain permission to quote at length if I was ever to publish this book. As a result of this circumstance, I have had to limit quotations. Consequently, this biography contains less of Plath’s writing than I had intended. The alternative would have been to agree to suggestions that would have changed the point of view of this book appreciably.

  December 10, 1986

  Linda Wagner-Martin

  East Lansing, Michigan

  Special thanks to Andrea Wagner, Sarah Fryer, Marcellette Williams, Cathy N. Davidson, Clarissa Roche, Elizabeth Compton, Jo Hollingsworth, Margaret Petrak, Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse, Karen Williams, Cheryl Vossekuil, Betty Uphaus, Emily Toth, Elaine Markson, Fred Eckman, Alan M. Hollingsworth, Howard O. Brogan, Sam S. Baskett, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Michigan State University AURI grants program. My editor, Bob Bender, is responsible in good part for whatever grace the book achieves.

  1 - Childhood

  1932 - 40

  “The Center of a Tender Universe”

  If her early childhood was not idyllic, it came close. Sylvia Plath was the daughter of loving and highly educated parents. Born October 27, 1932, in Robinson Memorial Hospital in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston, Massachusetts, she was the first child of Otto and Aurelia Schober Plath. Weighing eight-and-a-half pounds at birth, although she was supposedly three weeks early, Sylvia became a sturdy child. She was bright, too, eager for information about anything, and she loved food, the sea, being read to, and attention.

  In the Plaths’ first house in Jamaica Plain, near the Arnold Arboretum which her father loved, the family led a simple life. Their energies were devoted to work and family. Otto, Professor of Entomology at Boston University, did his professional writing at home. Quite withdrawn from the daily life of the family, he loved his daughter deeply and insisted she be treated as a unique personality. Reminiscent of Bronson Alcott’s involvement with his children’s education, Otto urged his wife to read books on education — among them Froebel’s Education of Man and writings about Maria Montessori’s life and work. His urging was hardly necessary: Aurelia Plath prepared for motherhood with her customary diligence, reading, as she said, “all the books available on child rearing.” She had taken a number of courses in psychology, and the Plaths often discussed theories of child psychology.

  As a result, Sylvia was one of the few infants born during the 1930s to be fed on demand, although her mother sometimes pretended to be as rigid about feeding schedules as most of her neighbors were. Aurelia did encourage an early bedtime for Sylvia, between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m. She wanted time free so that she could help Otto with his research. Otto and Aurelia feared having a “spoiled” or unmanageable child, but both Plaths had great confidence in their abilities to rear children.

  When Sylvia was six months old, Otto held her up to a rope tied to the porch awning and saw — as he had predicted — that her feet grasped the rope in the same way her hands did. Although her father occasionally experimented with Sylvia, more often the baby was the responsibility of her mother. Sylvia was rocked and sung to, and Aurelia systematically and energetically recited poems and rhymes to her. Whenever Sivvy, as Sylvia was called, cried, she was picked up and held.

  The Plaths believed in a natural, healthy existence for their daughter. She was fed well and often. She weighed ten pounds at one month and thirty-one pounds at two years. She was frequently taken to the ocean, which she loved from an early age, and she was as frequently sunned. Aurelia wrote in Sylvia’s baby book — crowded with notes and observations — that during the first spring of Sivvy’s life she lay in the sun daily, and sometimes twice daily, so that by summer, only eight months old, she was deeply tanned. According to Aurelia, the baby walked alone at ten-and-a-half months and said four or five recognizable words even before that time.

  Her mind was as active as her body. One of her early games was asking her mother for “a many” — seeds, beans, small objects all alike — from which she made patterns and designs.

  Sylvia looked much like her mother. She had prominent cheek bones, wide features, and a gentle, alert expression. She also had her father’s ruddy complexion, straightforward stare, and tall, slender body structure. As a child she wore her hair in short curls, with a ribbon around the crown of her head tied in a bow to the side. Her dark eyes sparkled. The energy fairly sparked from her, and she was consistently adventurous. No wonder Aurelia spent hours taking her on walks and telling her stories. And in a household where one parent studied and wrote at home, the natural exuberance of a restless child could be enervating.

  Aurelia was adept at making up stories, and Sylvia was responsive. She had a delightful and fantastic sense of humor, which showed in the stories she told and in the jokes she played on her parents and grandparents. She would hide her grandfather’s pipe in a large rubber plant and call it a pipe tree. She spun long stories about Sunshine School, her kindergarten, and about favorite times at her grandparents’ house in Winthrop, Massachusetts. The house fronted on a bay of the Atlantic Ocean. Even before she was a year old, Sylvia was creeping on the sand, wading, being carried into the blue-green waves. One of her first memories was crawling out on the sandy edge of the water, heading into those waves, and being saved from exploring right into the ocean by her mother’s firm hold on one foot. She was already the curious, daring Sylvia she would be later in her life.

  She may well have learned those traits from both her parents. Her father, Otto Plath, had struggled to reach goals through a life that was neither easy nor predictable. Born on April 13, 1885, in the town of Grabow (or Grabowo) in the Polish Corridor, he was the oldest of six children of German parents, Theodore and Ernestine Kottke Plath. His grandparents went to America and settled on a small farm in Watertown, Wisconsin. They then offered to house Otto, their bright grandson, if he wanted to attend small Northwestern College in that city. Otto went to Wisconsin by way of New York City, spending a year there to improve his English. He attended adult education classes, promoting himself from one grade to the next when he felt he knew the vocabulary and accent of the grade level he was then studying. (He already spoke fluent German, Polish, and French.) After that year in New York, when he also worked in an uncle’s combination food and liquor store, he began school at Northwestern, majoring in classical languages.

  Unfortunately, Otto’s grandparents expected him to become a Lutheran minister, as most Northwestern students did. For them, such a vocation justified going to college. Otto, however, had also studied philosophy and science, particularly the work of Charles Darwin. He was filled with doubts, and when he found that Darwin’s writings were forbidden at the seminary he changed his vocation to education. He seemed genuinely surprised when his grandparents grew angry and accused him of breaking their trust. The anger was permanent. Otto’s name was stricken from the family Bible. Even later, when his own parents had come to America, Otto saw them infrequently. By the time of his marriage to Aurelia, he had not seen his relatives for years. His education had cost him dearly.

  From 1912 to 1914, Plath was a teaching fellow in German at the University of California. He did some graduate work at the University of Washington and then moved east. From 1915 to 1918, and again from 1921 to 1923, he was an instructor in modern languages at M.I.T. During the 1920-21 academic year, he was an assistant in zoology at Johns Hopkins University, but he left there to begin graduate work at Harvard. Somewhere between 1914 and 1920, Otto Plath married a woman named Lydia, with whom he lived for about a year.

  Once in the graduate program at Harvard, Plath
taught in the Boston area most of the time. In 1922 he became an instructor in German at Boston University. In 1925 he received his Master of Science degree and in 1926 began teaching biology in addition to German at Boston University. When he received his Sc. D. in Entomology in 1928, his appointment at Boston became permanent. His years as a student had been marked by poverty and self-discipline. He was forty-three when he received the doctorate and nearly forty-seven when he and Aurelia Schober were married. If not a driven man, he certainly was diligent and conscientious. It also seems clear that he thought of himself first and foremost as a college professor and a scholar, rather than as a husband and a father.

  Aurelia Schober shared Otto’s traits of perseverance and ambition. Born in 1906, her life was somewhat easier because of her parents’ ambition and love for her, but she too had known early privation. Both her parents were Austrian immigrants. Everyone in the Schober family worked hard; money was never plentiful. When Aurelia started elementary school, she spoke only German. Other children made fun of her, and she in turn was sometimes punished at home for repeating idiomatic English phrases like “shut up.” Bright and serious, the oldest Schober child remained something of a misfit among her American peers. At fourteen she began working in the public library; throughout her college years she worked as a typist and secretary.

  Aurelia met Otto Plath when she was his student in a Middle-High German class at Boston University. Twenty-one years younger than he, she was then teaching German and English at Brookline High School, as well as studying for her M.A. degree. A tall, thin, pretty woman with piercing deep-set eyes and strong features, her eager manner complemented an obvious intelligence. She feared being known as “a green stocking”: Aurelia had been salutatorian of her high school graduating class and valedictorian of her college class. Raised as a Catholic, as an undergraduate she had broken with the Church because of what she thought of as repressive and controlling ideology. By the time she met Otto, a Protestant who had already been married, she was a practicing Methodist.