Electric Currents Sylvia Plath
The War Between Red & Blue Sylvia Plath’s favorite color was red. When Ted Hughes left her for another woman, Plath installed a red rug under her writing desk. But she also loved red’s opposite, blue—and other polarizations. Plath’s duality—as a happy-go-lucky American girl and a deeply depressed, deathly ambitious writer—stirs up the darker parts of her audience. We either revile Plath for her cowardice or we celebrate her for her bravery. It depends on whether you look and see blue or red. Born in Boston in 1932 to a German biology professor and his former student, Plath entered the school of hard-knocks at the young age of eight, when her father passed away. The day he died, she told her mother, “I’ll never speak to God again.” His absence would lead to poor choices in men and eventually to Ted Hughes. The disintegration of their marriage would confirm the first abandonment by her father. In “Daddy,” she writes, “Daddy, I have had to kill you...If I’ve killed one man I’ve killed two / the vampire who said he was you / and drank my blood for a year / seven years, if you want to know.” Reading Plath is a bipolar experience. The Bell Jar’s depiction of Plath’s nervous breakdown in the summer of 1953 is certainly horrifying, but Plath’s observations on her peers both in and out of the mental institution are quite funny. The poems of The Colossus, her first collection, are traditional and revelatory. Her lyricism is beautiful but her diction is alien. Her personal writing seems like it was written by two distinct and separate women: the Plath that writes home to her mother that she’s doing fine and the real Plath—the blood red Plath of her journals.
This is a woman who, after coming upon two teenage girls destroying a garden (the subject of her poem “The Fable of the Rhododendron Stealers”) she writes in her journal “I have violence in me that is hot as death-blood. I can kill myself or—I know it now—even kill another.” This is the Plath that will change you, the author of Ariel, and the author of these journals. In reading her journals there is no doubt of Plath’s talent, her ferocity and her courage. She is so close to the reader, you can hear her whispering and giggling in your ear, crying on your shoulder; you look behind you as you read the journals, sometimes in fear, sometimes in hope. There’s an ongoing struggle: Plath wants to be a mother-goddess, she wants to cook and clean and provide a safe-haven for her husband and her babies, but the poet in her can’t stand being in the shadows. Standing aside while Ted receives praise from T.S. Eliot and his ilk, being simply “the wife.” Meanwhile, Plath can’t find a publisher in the states for her novel, The Bell Jar. Her anguish in the journals is palpable. Hughes’ last collection of poetry, Birthday Letters, is about his relationship with Plath. In the poem “Red,” he describes his resentment of the ‘red’ side of Plath: ‘red was your color,’ and he tells us Plath insisted on decorating their bedroom ‘as red as a judgment chamber,’ or ‘a shut jewel case,’ with fabrics ‘ruby corduroy blood’ and curtains ‘sheer blood-falls from ceiling to floor.’ Red was the dangerous side of Plath, the powerful side Hughes could not control. “The blood jet is poetry,” she famously wrote, “there is no stopping it.” Plath was torn between this side of her personality and the call to the calmer, domestic existence: the role of the wife and mother, Plath needed the right man to have both lives. She wanted the babies, the cooking.
She wanted to be both muse and artist. Hughes prefers Plath’s blue side, her ‘guardian, thoughtful,’ and he ends this poem, the last in the collection, telling Plath ‘the jewel you lost was blue.’ It’s no surprise, then, that Plath wrote “Daddy,” her most recognizable poem, from her most celebrated collection, Ariel, when she was finally able to escape all the ties that bound her to her blue self: her mother, her bleach blonde hair, her husband. Plath terrifies many because, through her legacy, she remains very much alive. Thinking or speaking of Plath, relating to her, brings her immediately to life. Like many writers, she struggled, and like many of us, she wanted much out of life—so much that she found herself burning alive. In “Lady Lazarus,” she tells us “Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.” Her dramatic ending, if anything, is an honest answer to the promise and threat of power and violence throughout her work, the best of which was created in the struggle between two halves. Picture her, in the morning at 5 a.m., before her children were awake, floating on a concoction of ineffectual sleeping pills and coffee, bleary-eyed and exhausted; picture her typing away at the Ariel poems, watching the sun come up—watching the morning change from blue to red.
“Red” by Ted Hughes Red was your colour. If not red, then white. But red Was what you wrapped around you. Blood-red. Was it blood? Was it red-ochre, for warming the dead? Haematite to make immortal The precious heirloom bones, the family bones. When you had your way finally Our room was red. A judgement chamber. Shut casket for gems. The carpet of blood Patterned with darkenings, congealments. The curtains—ruby corduroy blood, Sheer blood-falls from ceiling to floor. The cushions the same. The same Raw carmine along the window-seat. A throbbing cell. Aztec altar—temple. Only the bookshelves escaped into whiteness. And outside the window Poppies thin and wrinkle-frail As the skin on blood, Salvias, that your father named you after, Like blood lobbing from the gash, And roses, the heart's last gouts, Catastrophic, arterial, doomed.
Your velvet long full skirt, a swathe of blood, A lavish burgandy. Your lips a dipped, deep crimson. You revelled in red. I felt it raw—like crisp gauze edges Of a stiffening wound. I could touch The open vein in it, the crusted gleam. Everything you painted you painted white Then splashed it with roses, defeated it, Leaned over it, dripping roses, Weeping roses, and more roses, Then sometimes, among them, a little bluebird. Blue was better for you. Blue was wings. Kingfisher blue silks from San Francisco Folded your pregnancy In crucible caresses. Blue was your kindly spirit—not a ghoul But electrified, a guardian, thoughtful. In the pit of red You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness. But the jewel you lost was blue.
“It’s as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative—which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it. I am now flooded with despair, almost hysteria, as if I were smothering.” Sylvia Plath on Ted Hughes’s abandonment.
Last Days They were “dawn poems in blood,” those lines stormed onto paper while the children slept; several of them were written through fevers, and the heat seared onto the pages, those old memorandum sheets marked Smith College, or the back of a manuscript marked The Calm. That had been a radio play, drafted by Ted Hughes in their flat in London early the previous year; now Sylvia Plath was in the Devon farmhouse they’d bought soon afterward, and Hughes was back in London, banished, their marriage over. It was late 1962, and in the space of eight weeks, it brought Plath forty of what would become her Ariel poems. They were, she wrote to the poet Ruth Fainlight, “free stuff I had locked in me for years,” and now they were out. And they were astonishing. Only pain could have released them, only fury and outrage and jealousy and panic of the sort into which Plath’s daily universe had plunged. “I kept telling myself I was the sort that could only write when peaceful at heart,” she told Fainright, “but that is not so, the muse has come to live here, now Ted is gone.” All of these poems would be in the black binder found in Plath’s London flat following her suicide just three months later.
july 9, 1962 Sylvia Plath raced to catch the phone call before Ted Hughes could intercept it. She recognized the woman asking for him, even though Assia Wevill lowered her voice, pretending, Sylvia thought, to be a man. She had been on edge ever since Assia and her husband’s May visit to their home; to Sylvia, the attraction between Ted and Assia had been palpable. Sylvia clutched the phone, blanched, then turned it over to Ted. This was the moment her life sped up, the second her poetry erupted like a Greek necessity and became palpably autobiographical. In her poetry, she described her defilement as words pouring out of the phone like mud. Court Green, the Devon, England, home she had created as a haven for their family and their writing, now seemed polluted: “O god, how shall I ever clean the phone table?” Aurelia Plath, then staying at Court Green, watched her fastidious daughter rip the phone line out of the wall, but it was too late. The poet felt infected, sensing the caller’s words were like a monster’s spawn percolating in her heart. 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. Words were how she persuaded herself. 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. These words had to be destroyed for her to continue composing her life and work. She demanded that Ted move out. He decamped for London, returning occasionally to see the children. Yet the couple 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. Privately, Sylvia puzzled over what to tell people. Confiding in her friend Elizabeth Compton, she called Ted a “little man.” This sounded to Elizabeth like a cry over a fallen idol. Ted’s own mood can be gauged from a letter he sent to his sister, Olwyn, in the late summer. The “prolonged distractions” of the previous nine months had depleted his bank account and diminished his productivity. The problem, his letter indicates, had been the “awful intimate interference that marriage is.”
september 24, 1962 Sylvia wrote her mother that she realized Ted “wasn’t coming back.” This realization seemed to liberate her: “My own life, my wholeness, has been seeping back.” “For a Fatherless Son,” written two days later, is foreboding: “You will be aware of an absence, presently.” Her happiness was temporary; her son’s smiles appeared as “found money.” She did not tell her mother about her crying jags and weight loss. She started smoking.
“Daddy” by Sylvia Plath You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. 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 And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off the beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene An engine, an engine, Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—— Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who
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Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I'm finally through. The black telephone's off at the root, The voices just can't worm through. If I've killed one man, I've killed two—— The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There's a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
Every morning, when my sleeping pill wears off, I am up about five, in my study with coffee, writing like mad—have managed a poem a day before breakfast. All book poems. Terrific stuff, as though domesticity had choked me.
Sylvia Plath, letter to her mother, October 12, 1962
october 12, 1962 The month she turned thirty, Sylvia experienced a burst of inspiration resulting in two dozen of her most powerful poems. On the day she composed “Daddy,” she apologized to her mother: “Do tear up my last [letter]. It was written at what was probably my all-time low, and I have had an incredible change of spirit; I am joyous, happier than I have been in ages.” Ted seemed amenable to a divorce, and she was writing every morning at five, a poem per day completed before breakfast. This revival turned her toward London: “I miss brains, hate this cow life, am dying to surround myself with intelligent, good people. I’ll have a salon in London...I am a famous poetess here—mentioned this week in The Listener as one of the half-dozen women who will last — including Marianne Moore and the Brontes!”
october 16, 1962 She remained ecstatic, writing, “I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.” By coming to London, Sylvia was going to best Ted Hughes at his own game. Peter Porter, a poet in their circle, concluded that Ted really left Sylvia because he could all too clearly see her rising star: “Leaving Plath must have been not just an imperative for someone who wished to love other women whenever it suited him, but also a move to defend his own talent from competition with a superior one.” On destiny’s doorstep, Sylvia discovered her dream home: 23 Fitzroy Road in Primrose Hill. She was alone as she read the plaque noting that W.B. Yeats had lived there. This was it. She immediately got to work securing a five-year lease and raced home to open her edition of Yeats’s Collected Plays, which obliged her with this passage: “Get wine and food to give you strength and courage, and I will get the house ready.”
november 16, 1962 Sylvia was hard hit in the second week of November when The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly rejected several of her recent poems—the very ones that would appeal to posterity. But she rebounded, assembling forty of her best works into a manuscript with the title Ariel, and other Poems. That fraught telephone call in July continued to gnaw at the poet, who in “The Fearful,” brooded on a woman who would pretend to be a man. The woman thinks that a baby would rob her of her beauty (Sylvia had heard that Assia, worried about losing her beauty, did not want children). “She would rather be dead than fat,” so fearful is this woman who has turned her body over to a man. After Plath’s death, Assia would have access to her journals and see firsthand how the poet had nailed her.
december 14, 1962 Two days after moving out of Court Green, Sylvia wrote her mother that she had never been happier. Even dashing about to get the electricity and gas connected, while her door blew shut with the keys inside, was transformed into a “comedy of errors.” She imagined Yeats’s spirit blessing her. And why not? Al Alvarez, poetry editor of The Observer, had just told her that Ariel should win the Pulitzer Prize. She had a study that faced the rising sun. At night she joyously watched the full moon from her balcony.
january 2, 1963 But by the new year, the snow began to pile up. Everything had turned to sludge and then had frozen. No plows swept through streets in a land that rarely saw appreciable snow. It seemed like England had been engulfed in a new ice age. Sylvia wrote dejectedly to her friend Marcia Brown that she felt “utterly flattened” by the last six months of life without Ted. She was lonely and feeling like a “desperate mother.” And yet Sylvia was not without resources. She continued to write, finding time by putting daughter Frieda in nursery school for three hours a day and catching moments for composition while son Nicholas napped. It was a virtuoso performance that kept her going—for a while. She had something to prove. To give up the flat—even temporarily—when the writing was going so well meant becoming a patient again, the Sylvia of ten years earlier. Midway through the winter siege, Sylvia wrote to her mother, admitting flu-induced exhaustion but claiming she was pulling out of it. Sylvia leveled with Aurelia: She realized she had lost her “identity under the steamroller of decisions and responsibilities of this last half year, with the babies a constant demand.” How awful to realize that she was “starting from scratch” in this “first year” of her new life. Time was running out. “But I need time,” Sylvia told her mother. Mixed reviews of The Bell Jar began appearing and did little to hearten Plath. To her neighbor Trevor Thomas, Sylvia complained about her incarceration in a flat with two children while Ted was free to enjoy his affair with Assia and travel.
january 28–february 4, 1963 During this time, Sylvia wrote ten poems. But she seemed to be turning in on herself: “People or stars / Regard me sadly, I disappoint them” (“Sheep in Fog”). On February 3, Sylvia called Ted and invited him to lunch. His diary notations, written the week after Sylvia’s death, record that he remained with her until 2 a.m. They had not enjoyed such a good time since July, he remarked, as he listened to her read her new poems. Sylvia seemed to have regained her equilibrium, although she wept when he played with Frieda and embraced them. The next day, according to Ted’s diary, Sylvia rang him from a public call box and demanded that he promise to leave England in two weeks. She could not work so long as she had to hear about him. The same day, she penned her last letter to her mother. “I just haven’t written anybody because I have been feeling a bit grim — the upheaval over, I am seeing the finality of it all,” she wrote. She saw no way out. “I shall simply have to fight it out on my own over here.”
february 5, 1963 Sylvia’s last two poems, completed on February 5, a Tuesday, perfectly express the plight of someone who seemed poised between life and death — between the airy buoyancy of the balloons her children played with, a world of wish fulfillment, and the finality of “Edge,” in which the inevitability of death is articulated with profound satisfaction. “Balloons” ends with a burst balloon, “A red / Shred” in the child’s “little fist.” “Edge” expresses a bitter but nevertheless peaceful acceptance: “We have come so far, it is over.”
being catapulted from the cowlike happiness of maternity into loneliness and grim problems is not fun. Sylvia Plath, final letter to her mother, February 4, 1963
february 6, 1963 Nothing changed in Sylvia Plath’s last week of life, and perhaps that is what bothered her. On Wednesday, still angry that Sylvia’s friends were spreading tales about his ill treatment of her, Ted wrote her a note and visited, announcing that he was going to engage a solicitor to stop the lies. She implored him not to do that. She was very upset, but not more so than on previous occasions, he wrote his diary. But she kept asking him if he had faith in her, and that seemed “new & odd.”
february 7, 1963 On Thursday, she sacked her au pair — why is not clear, although one version has Sylvia discovering her in bed with a man. Sylvia became so distraught that she actually struck the woman. Without other help at hand, Sylvia phoned a friend, the writer Jillian Becker, and asked if she and the children could come over. In Giving Up, Becker describes how the desperate visitor arrived around 2 p.m. on Thursday and announced, “I feel terrible.” Sylvia asked if she could lie down. Jillian led her to an upstairs bedroom while Frieda and Nicholas played with Jillian’s youngest daughter. At 4 o’clock, Sylvia came downstairs and said she would “rather not go home.” After dinner, Jillian watched her friend down several sleeping pills and waited until Sylvia slept. By 3:30 a.m., Sylvia had awakened and was weeping. For two hours she cataloged her woes — her father’s death, Ted’s betrayal, her mother’s judgment. Sylvia finally took an antidepressant and dozed off.
february 8, 1963 According to Ted’s diary, he met Sylvia at the Fitzroy flat Friday night after receiving what he called a “farewell love letter” from her. In just two sentences, she announced that she was leaving the country and would never see him again. But what she really intended to do baffled him. When he demanded an explanation, she coldly took her note away from him, set fire to it in an ashtray, and ordered him to leave.
february 10, 1963 On Sunday, Sylvia announced to the Beckers that she wanted to return home. Jillian’s husband, Gerry, drove her, and on the way Sylvia began to cry. He importuned her to return to his home, but she refused. He left her around 7 p.m., after she had fed the children and put them to bed. Then her doctor called to make sure she was all right. Near midnight, Sylvia rang Trevor Thomas’s bell and asked him for stamps. She wanted to get some letters in the post before morning. As he gave her the stamps, she asked him when he left for work in the morning. Why did she want to know? Just wondering, she replied. Not long after closing his door, Thomas noticed the hall light was still on. When he opened the door, Sylvia had not moved. He told her he would call her doctor. She did not want him, she answered. She was just having “the most wonderful dream.” It is likely that Sylvia was on an antidepressant. However, the euphoric sense of wholeness that is common in drug-induced states would wear off perhaps around 5 a.m., when Thomas could hear Sylvia still pacing above as he fell asleep. That wonderful but evanescent moment of transcendence, akin to what she experienced when writing poems, seeped out of her.
“Edge� by Sylvia Plath The woman is perfected. Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment, The illusin of Greek necessity Flows in the scrolls of her toga, Her bare Feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over. Each dead child coiled, a white serpent, One at each little Pitcher of milk, now empty. She has folded Them back into her body as petals Of a rose close when the garden Stiffens and odors bleed From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower. The moon has nothing to be sad about, Staring from her hood of bone. She is used to this sort of thing. Her blacks crackle and drag.
february 11, 1963 Sylvia Plath prepared to die. She left food and drink for her children in their room and opened a window. In the hallway, she attached a note with her doctor’s name and number to the baby carriage. She sealed the kitchen as best she could with tape, towels, and cloths. Then she turned on the gas and thrust her head as far as she could into the oven.
selected bibliography Ferri, Jessica. “Sylvia Plath: Red and Blue.” This Recording. Squarespace, 6 May 2010. Web. McKeon, Belinda. “Birthday Letter: Sylvia Plath and ‘Daddy’.” The Paris Review. The Paris Review, 12 Oct. 2012. Web. Rollyson, Carl. “The last days of Sylvia Plath.” The Boston Globe. Boston Globe Media Partners, 20 Jan. 2013. Web.