What We Don’t Know About Sylvia Plath

Many biographies of Sylvia Plath end with the author making a visit to her grave. They are largely grim accounts. Paul Alexander, in his controversial biography Rough Magic, describes a barren place on a cold November day; at the time of his visit, the stone, which has famously been repeatedly defaced by people chiseling the “Hughes” off “Sylvia Plath Hughes,” had been removed entirely. A (presumably) local person had erected a handmade wooden cross with “stout two-foot long sticks tied … with a piece of cord.” They had written her name in green felt pen across the wood. Anne Stevenson, in her equally controversial Bitter Fame, the biography “authorized” by the Plath estate, ends the book by visiting “a pathetic patch of garden, a wind-beaten rose, and a chip of flat rock with ‘SYLVIA PLATH’ inscribed on it in black paint.” Stevenson writes that the “vandals who made the temporary removal of her tombstone necessary were women for whom the legacy of Sylvia Plath was no more than a simplified feminist ideology.”

No one knows who has repeatedly defaced the grave (no one has ever been caught in the act). I imagine, given its now famous nature, that it’s not the same person, again and again over the course of the last 50 plus years—although I am admittedly tickled by the idea of a serial Plath grave-defacer, huffing and puffing up that steep hill in the middle of the night with a lantern, ready to go to work. And men love Sylvia Plath just the same as women. When I met her two-time biographer, Carl Rollyson, for coffee last spring he told me, “I wrote about Sontag, too, and she fascinates—but Plath was firing on all cylinders.” The co-editor of both volumes of her Letters, and arguably the leading Plath scholar alive, is Peter Steinberg. Yet somehow, when we think or write about someone so devoted to Plath that they would smash Hughes’ name off her headstone, we think about women—“feminists” in scare quotes, too blind or stupid to understand the subject of their own obsession, armed with a hammer, instead.

This past October, I flew to London to attend an event about the publication of Plath’s Letters at the British Library. But I was also in the planning stages for a novel about a queer Plath scholar, which takes place partly at her grave in Heptonstall, West Yorkshire; so the day I landed, I boarded a train for Leeds at King’s Cross.

*

Sylvia Plath died without a will. She was 30 years old at the time of her death, and a fairly well-off woman, thanks to an almost religious devotion to penny-pinching and considerable financial success from writing—both her own and her husband’s. Plath was famously married to the British poet Ted Hughes, although the two were estranged, as a result of Hughes’ infidelity, at the time of her death. According to the final chapter of Carl Rollyson’s 2013 American Isis, reports from Plath’s lawyer to her brother Warren, after her death, confirmed that Sylvia was seriously pursuing a divorce as recently as a week before her death. She and Hughes were both living in London, apart, when Plath died by suicide in her flat at 23 Fitzroy Road.

Because of her lack of a will, everything Plath owned went to Ted Hughes. In addition to the considerable monies she left behind, Hughes was now the rightful owner of everything Sylvia had ever written.

“Everything Sylvia had ever written” is often reduced, in our cultural imagination, to her unpublished, poetic masterpiece Ariel. Plath famously left the manuscript out on her desk in a “black spring binder”—now a set piece of Plath biographies and critical studies. When we think of what Plath didn’t publish in her lifetime, we tend to think of the famous poems in typescript in that binder—“Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Lesbos,” “Sheep in Fog.”

But the reality is, we still don’t know all of what Plath left behind, which was never more clear than when I encountered archivists at the conference “Sylvia Plath: Letters, Words, Fragments” in November 2017 at Queens University in Belfast. I mentioned to an archival scholar there that I had an idea for an anthology involving all of the short fiction prompts Plath sets out for herself, but never writes, in her Journals.

“Or which we think she never wrote,” she said, in a gentle rebuttal.

“Well, I mean… we can assume…”

“No,” she said, “we can’t. We never know what else might turn up.”

Later, after the first day of papers had concluded, and we were winding down with dinner and wine, I discussed what turned out to be an error in my paper. Descriptions of Plath’s appearance at the time of her death are rife with references to the two braided coronets she wore around her head; I assumed Hughes had cut her braids before she was buried. Today, they are housed at the Lilly Library in Indiana University. Now it was time for another gentle correction, from a different archival scholar—they were actually Sylvia’s childhood braids, which her mother cut and kept when she was an adolescent, then sold to the Lilly alongside her papers. “But I mean,” the scholar said, “Hughes may have cut her hair before she died, it’s totally possible. He was obsessed with her hair. There’s only one way to know.”

“What,” I snorted into my rose, “dig her up?”

The archivist raised one eyebrow, and sipped their cabernet.

*

This past fall proved the first scholar right, when the forthcoming publication of a “new” Sylvia Plath story was announced. “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom” was published first in the United Kingdom on January 3 of this year; HarperCollins, Plath’s American publisher, followed suit this week. This continues a long tradition that has its roots in Plath’s intestate death. Ted Hughes opened the black spring binder and took his heavy editorial hand to Sylvia’s Ariel; then, he took it to Faber & Faber, his own publisher, who put out the first edition in 1965. HarperCollins (then Harper & Row) came out with their edition in 1966.

A trend was set. With only two exceptions—Aurelia Plath’s Letters Home, and 1982’s heavily abridged Journals—all of Sylvia Plath’s work was edited, during his lifetime, by Ted Hughes, and then published by Faber in the UK first. American publication comes after: a lagging, redheaded stepchild.

Hughes cast himself, for the rest of his life, as the gatekeeper of Plath’s work: a snarling, sexy Cerberus. Permission to quote from Plath’s texts was next to impossible to secure, with the estate refusing the right if they disagreed with anything the author wrote; some Plath biographies from the time rely almost entirely on paraphrasing. Hughes made it clear in multiple letters to scholars and friends, some of which were published in newspapers at the time, that his was the definitive stance on Sylvia’s life and work. Moreover, sexy Cerberus had an affair with at least one Plath scholar, the British journalist Emma Tennant.

In the wake of Hughes’ death, the venerated British publishing house remains firm at his post, with first rights to all of Plath’s work. In April of 2018, I was wandering through Bloomsbury, before I had to attend a conference reception at the British Library. London was resplendent in the early spring; the day was warm and mild. I was thinking of looking for St. George the Martyr Church, where Plath and Hughes were married in the spring of 1956, when I came across the Faber offices, on Great Russell Street.

I stood. I stared, reverent.

I never once considered knocking.

*

After Belfast, I had a nightmare.

In the dream, I was home. The phone rang. A British voice—a woman’s—answered when I picked up. She told me she was a rare books dealer, and she had Sylvia’s last journals, which Hughes claimed he had burned sometime in the 1970s. She wanted me to see them, but I had to go to England. So off I went, as we do in dreams, and the next thing I knew, I was in the pub of an old British inn. It was dusk. The ceilings were low, and the halls were narrow. Outside, green fields stretched for miles, darkening. I went to the pub to get a drink. Everything felt sinister. Everything felt wrong. I sat at the bar, next to a man who (of course) was Ted Hughes. A young Ted Hughes: tall, but hunched over his barstool, with an aura of the grim about him. He turned to me. He spoke.

What do you want?

I knew what I wanted. I wanted to see Sylvia’s last journals. I wanted to put my hands on the last things she wrote and thought before she died.

But I said nothing.

What do you want? he said again. His voice rose with menace. When he spoke, it was as though everything I knew, everything I thought, ever, about Sylvia Plath disappeared from my brain like ice melting—

That was my thought, in the dream.

I don’t want anything, I said, I want nothing.

Good, he said, and smiled at me, suddenly charming.

Then a barkeep said, Oh no, oh god, she’s coming, and ran out from behind the bar. He frantically closed and locked the door—an old-fashioned hook and eye—and began to shutter the windows, one by one. Then we heard it—a woman’s spirit which was made of a shriek rose and rattled the windows and doors, until the whole room was filled with the sound of the worst pain on earth—and it was Sylvia Plath’s banshee.

*

In Plath’s late work, America is the motherly sea, and Europe is a bloody, patriarchal hell; Sylvia is suspended between the two, gleefully walking this risky high-wire like a goddamn circus queen. In “Medusa,” the speaker of the poem can access her maternal bloodline through the “old barnacled umbilicus” of the telephone line; she can, importantly, talk. In “Daddy,” the “black telephone’s off at the root.” When the speaker tries to talk in her father’s foreign tongue, she stutters—“Ich, ich, ich, ich.” The language strangles in her mouth “in a barb wire snare.”

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.