What We Don’t Know About Sylvia Plath

Plath’s masterful Ariel poems are often discussed as an enigma, or some kind of otherworldly miracle. A lot of writing about her is laden with the “How did they do that?!” tone we use to describe magic acts: a 1999 article in the Guardian claims that “black magic” enabled her to write her poems. On the surface, this is a high compliment. In actuality, it’s nefarious, denying the possibility that a 1960s housewife could be skilled or talented enough to produce some of the most lasting poetry of the century. “Mary Ventura” provides us with further evidence that Sylvia’s last work is not an otherworldly miracle. It’s the result of someone who began to focus their talents and energy into writing about the conditions of post-war America, about the experience of being the daughter of a European immigrant and an American many years before she produced Ariel.

Writing about Plath as though she is a sorceress rather than a human being further alienates a woman already in exile. Because she died in England (during a famously frigid winter), our access to markers of her—where she wrote her famous poems, died, is buried—is limited to her estranged husband’s homeland. In other words, her American fans continue to experience, in a small way, the kind of exile Plath did during her lifetime, and which arguably helped hasten her death by suicide. She is cut off from maternal America, silent and forever banished to Europe—the site of a war that started between Sylvia and Ted, was taken up by their fans, and now continues between their estates.

*

I arrived at the Hebden Bridge depot in West Yorkshire late in the afternoon, in the rain. I had been traveling—and awake—for 24 hours. I felt like Paul Alexander, like Anne Stevenson, like Janet Malcolm, the New Yorker writer who famously tramped all over England by train and bus and hired car, talking to Plath’s survivors and friends to write The Silent Woman—cold and wet and weary. For the first time, I thought, maybe this is a crazy thing to do—flying to another country to see the grave of a dead woman unrelated to me, who died 17 years before I was born.

The sociologist and Plath scholar Gail Crowther writes in her book The Haunted Reader about exactly this feeling—she is going to see Plath’s grave again—Crowther is British, and lives in the North—carrying red tulips wrapped in paper, on a snowy winter day. “What was I doing offering tulips in the snow?” Crowther asks herself and her reader.

It’s a question that drives Crowther’s work, my own, and so many others who love and write about Sylvia. What are we doing here, folks? What pulls me across this vast ocean? What calls to me from beyond the grave? Who’s driving this northbound train?

*

Sylvia is buried in the churchyard of St. Thomas a Becket and St. Thomas the Apostle Church, a medieval, stone parish that dates to 1256. The next morning, I set out for the churchyard on foot. I brought tracing paper and crayons, so I could send a grave etching to the writer Anne Theriault, a friend and fellow Plath fanatic, who lives in Canada and won’t fly. I carried three pink roses in a nod to Plath’s lines in “Fever 103 Degrees”:

[I] Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses

By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean!

I wrapped them in my red paisley bandana, worn from a thousand washings, and worn in the first place because Plath is wearing one in my favorite picture of her and Hughes, taken in 1960, just after they’ve clearly had a rotten fight. My good friend Jenn tattooed a portrait of it on my back, left shoulder—all in black and white, except for Plath’s red headband, Hughes’ red tie, and two beautiful red roses she added in the foreground, as a nod to the last line in one of Plath’s last poems, “Kindness”: “You hand me two children, two roses.”

Like Mary Ventura, I had no idea I was on a pilgrimage. I had to take my cues from others.

Before I set foot on the path, a half-dozen friends and “Plathies” messaged me luck; each of them used the word “journey” or “pilgrimage,” and I laughed out loud. I am not religious, or especially superstitious. I’m on a research trip, I kept telling myself, to still the nerves I felt as I began to climb the wonky stone footpath from Hebden Bridge to Heptonstall.

The footpath is old, and exceedingly English. Midway up the path is a mossy 17th-century cemetery, in some lucky York’s backyard. I stepped off the path, and heeded the sign, which warned that the footing in the graveyard was not steady.

The view was stunning. The Pennines rose in the distance; the valley beneath. One does not wonder, being in West Yorkshire, why it produced so many genius writers (the Brontes lived and died ten miles up the road). At the top of the footpath is a narrow, two-lane country road; one of those very European, very high-speed-limit streets terrifying to cautious Americans. I crossed it, hoping to find another footpath in green growth behind it.

I did not find another footpath, and ended up tramping accidentally through various English backyards, like an idiot American who thinks private property is a tourist site. Finally, I caught site of the road again, and made my way out. Two little boys were collecting conkers. The church was in view. A graveyard was to my right, and I walked in.

A woman was playing fetch with her Labradoodle; I said, “Excuse me…” and she said, “You’re looking for Sylvia Plath? I thought so…” I was, it turned out, in the “old” churchyard—old as in pre-19th century. I needed to find the “new” churchyard, where Sylvia is buried. She sent me on my way with directions: She’s in the third row, toward the far end. You’ll find her.

I found the “new” churchyard just across the way. The sun was out—not the gray “flat disc” of the receding sun in “Mary Ventura,” but a beautiful fall sunshine falling on the stones, making my sweatshirt obsolete. I stripped down to my t-shirt and walked. Halfway to Sylvia, I noticed a tall white stone, with a small, plastic Christmas wreath on it—Edith and William Hughes.

Ted’s parents. I hadn’t even thought. My breath caught in my throat. I took one pink rose carefully from the red bandana and laid it against the stone.

Sylvia is buried about 50 feet away. My stomach was knotty as I searched. But when I saw the grave, littered in pens and poems and flowers and paper, the “Hughes” a tellingly different color than the other letters, I felt happy.

A visit to a grave should feel like a visit to someone’s end. But Sylvia Plath’s work, and life, has only ever offered me, and countless others, endless new starts. A fat green caterpillar crawled up the stone. I thought of my two beautiful children. I handed Sylvia two roses.

*

I was hungry. I stood to go, and leaned down once more to touch the granite stone. My vision was entirely filled with her name—Sylvia Plath Hughes—when I heard an English voice, familiar to me from various documentaries and interviews, say, “I can never remember where grandmum and grandad are buried.”

I thought, It can’t be, it can’t be, it can’t be, like the wheels of a huffing train.

But there was Frieda Hughes, Sylvia and Ted’s only daughter, in the churchyard, looking for her grandparents’ stone.

She was nowhere near it. I thought, I can’t talk to her. If I try to talk to her, I will sound like a lunatic.

I thought, If I don’t try to talk to her, I will regret it for the rest of my life.

I began to walk toward her, breathing deeply to try and slow my racing heart. When I was about ten feet away, I called out, “Excuse me—they’re right over there. I was just there. I left them a rose.” My voice shook.

She turned around and looked straight at me. There was silence.

I said, “I’m sorry—I’m not—I recognized your voice from the documentaries about your parents—I’m a—scholar of your mother’s work, and a fan of—both of your parents’ work… I’m here doing research…”

She came closer. She eyed me, warily. I held up both hands, palms out. I said, “I don’t have a chisel.” She smiled, reluctantly. She put out her hand.

I shook it, and said, “I’m Emily.” She said, “I’m—well, I’m Frieda, obviously,” and rolled her eyes, pleasantly. She said, “Would you take off your sunglasses? They’re mirrored, all I can see is myself.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, my daughter liked them, they were ten dollars at the grocery store, so I got them,” I babbled, frantically removing them and folding them into the v-neck of my shirt. I looked back at her.

“Much better,” she said, smiling.

Then, we talked.

*

“Mary Ventura” is a story about a young woman who recognizes her fate where all those who share it fail to do so, about a young woman who sees she has the power to change her own life. As she begins to see that the train she rides is headed for disaster, she refuses to accept it. She protests. Her voice becomes “high and shrill,” in much the same way Plath’s late voice, as it hits its stride, has been characterized. Like her heroine, Plath has been disbelieved, attacked, maligned—and her fans and scholars have often suffered the same fate.

As I spoke to her daughter that day, I wanted nothing more than to apologize for myself. I did apologize for myself, to her, for occupying that sacred space. What right did I have to call it that? What right did I have to be there at all? Guilt, guilt, guilt, like the wheels of a huffing train: I’m sorry. I am not crazy. I love your mother’s work. I’m sorry.

Sylvia Plath wasn’t crazy, either, although the image, and everything that goes with it, persists. After I left the graveyard, dazed, I found out the Ted Hughes Festival was happening that weekend, in Hebden Bridge, where I was staying; Frieda was there to read alongside the British poet Simon Armitage. As we had finished our conversation, I asked Frieda for a photograph, promising in the same breath I would never post it on social media. As soon as the words left my mouth, I regretted them—we were standing where her mother, who had died down the hall from her as a small child, was buried. She said, “No, not here. If we were anywhere but here, I would.”

“Of course, I’m so sorry,” I said, a little ashamed at the impulse. A little ashamed I had spoken to her at all, that I couldn’t just let her go about her day. I told her I had just reviewed the Letters, that I admired her introduction.

“You didn’t read them all, did you?”

“I did, I had to,” I said, laughing. “I reviewed the book.”

“But all of them? There’s over a thousand pages!” she cried, laughing merrily. I thought back to being told about how she had asked for dispensation to not study her parents’ poetry when she was at school. I imagined the slog of trying to read 1,000 pages of something written by either my mother or my father, and laughed back.

*

When I told other Plath scholars that I had met Frieda, they were unanimously shocked. None of us had ever met her in person. Maeve O’Brien, the Northern Irish scholar who organized the Belfast Conference said, “Does she look like Sylvia, Emily?” and the sheer yearning of the question broke my heart.

Sunday morning, as I boarded a bus back to the train station at Leeds, I found myself sitting with a woman who was there for the Hughes Festival. She was a fan who was thinking about doing a PhD on Hughes’ poetry; she lived in London. I told her about my experience in the graveyard. I was still giddy, still in disbelief.

She stared back at me, and shrugged. “Oh yeah, Frieda, I’ve met her a bunch, most of us have,” she said, with a wave of her hand meant to indicate Hughes fans and scholars. The prosaic bus trudged through the rainy, industrial North, and I resumed my place as an American, a Plath fan, in exile.