A fresh fall of snow blanketed the asylum grounds–not a Christmas sprinkle, but a man-high January deluge, the sort that snuffs out schools and offices and churches, and leaves, for a day or more, a pure, blank sheet in place of memo pads, date books and calendars.
In a week, if I passed my interview with the board of directors, Philomena Guinea’s large black car would drive me west and deposit me at the wrought-iron gates of my college.
The heart of winter!
Massachusetts would be sunk in a marble calm. I pictured the snowflaky, Grandma Moses villages, the reaches of swampland rattling with dried cattails, the ponds where frog and hornpout dreamed in a sheath of ice, and the shivering woods.
But under the deceptively clean and level slate the topography was the same, and instead of San Francisco or Europe or Mars I would be learning the old landscape, brook and hill and tree. In one way it seemed a small thing, starting, after a six months’ lapse, where I had so vehemently left off.
Everybody would know about me, of course.
Doctor Nolan had said, quite bluntly, that a lot of people would treat me gingerly, or even avoid me, like a leper with a warning bell. My mother’s face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me.
“We’ll take up where we left off, Esther,” she had said, with her sweet, martyr’s smile. “We’ll act as if all this were a bad dream.”
A bad dream.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
A bad dream.
I remembered everything.
I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig tree and Marco’s diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon’s wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the Negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a gray skull.
Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover
them.
But they were part of me. They were my landscape.
“A man to see you!”
The smiling, snow-capped nurse poked her head in through the door” and for a confused second I thought I really was back in college and this spruce white furniture, this white view over trees and hills, an improvement on my old room’s nicked chairs and desk and outlook over the bald quad. “ A man to see you!” the girl on watch had said, on the dormitory phone.
What was there about us, in Belsize, so different from the girls playing bridge and gossiping and studying in the college to which I would return? Those girls, too, sat under bell jars of a sort.
“Come in!” I called, and Buddy Willard, khaki cap in hand, stepped into the room.
“Well, Buddy,” I said. “Well, Esther.”
We stood there, looking at each other. I waited for a touch of emotion, the faintest glow. Nothing. Nothing but a great, amiable boredom. Buddy’s khaki-jacketed shape seemed small and unrelated to me as the brown posts he had stood against that day a year ago, at the bottom of the ski run.
“How did you get here?” I asked finally. “Mother’s car.”
“In all this snow?”
“Well,” Buddy grinned, “I’m stuck outside in a drift. The hill was too much for me. Is there anyplace I can borrow a shovel?”
“We can get a shovel from one of the groundsmen.” “Good.” Buddy turned to go.
“Wait, I’ll come and help you.”
Buddy looked at me then, and in his eyes I saw a flicker of strangeness–the same compound of curiosity and wariness I had seen in the eyes of the Christian Scientist and my old English teacher and the Unitarian minister who used to visit me.
“Oh, Buddy,” I laughed. “I’m all right.”
“Oh, I know, I know, Esther,” Buddy said hastily.
“It’s you who oughtn’t to dig out cars, Buddy. Not me.” And Buddy did let me do most of the work.
The car had skidded on the glassy hill up the asylum and backed, with one wheel over the rim of the drive, into a steep drift.
The sun, emerged from its gray shrouds of cloud, shone with a summer brilliance on the untouched slopes. Pausing in my work to overlook that pristine expanse, I felt the same profound thrill it gives me to see trees
and grassland waist-high under flood water–as if the usual order of the world had shifted slightly, and entered a new phase.
I was grateful for the car and the snowdrift. It kept Buddy from asking me what I knew he was going to ask, and what he finally did ask, in a low, nervous voice, at the Belsize afternoon tea. DeeDee was eyeing us like an envious cat over the rim of her teacup. After Joan’s death, DeeDee had been moved to Wymark for a while, but now she was among us once more.
“I’ve been wondering…” Buddy set his cup in the saucer with an awkward clatter.
“What have you been wondering?”
“I’ve been wondering…I mean, I thought you might be able to tell me something.” Buddy met my eyes and I saw, for the first time, how he had changed. Instead of the old, sure smile that flashed on easily and frequently as a photographer’s bulb, his face was grave, even tentative–the face of a man who often does not get what he wants.
“I’ll tell you if I can, Buddy.”
“Do you think there’s something in me that drives women
crazy?”
I couldn’t help myself, I burst out laughing–maybe because of
the seriousness of Buddy’s face and the common meaning of the word “crazy” in a sentence like that.
“I mean,” Buddy pushed on, “I dated Joan, and then you, and first you…went, and then Joan…”
With one finger I nudged a cake crumb into a drop of wet,
brown tea.
“Of course you didn’t do it!” I heard Doctor Nolan say. I had
come to her about Joan, and it was the only time I remember her sounding angry. “Nobody did it. She did it.” And then Doctor Nolan told me how the best of psychiatrists have suicides among their patients, and how they, if anybody, should be held responsible, but how they, on the contrary, do not hold themselves responsible….
“You had nothing to do with us, Buddy.” “You’re sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well,” Buddy breathed. “I’m glad of that.” And he drained his tea like a tonic medicine.
“I hear you’re leaving us.”
I fell into step beside Valerie in the little, nurse-supervised group. “Only if the doctors say yes. I have my interview tomorrow.”
The packed snow creaked underfoot, and everywhere I could
hear a musical trickle and drip as the noon sun thawed icicles and snow crusts that would glaze again before nightfall.
The shadows of the massed black pines were lavender in that bright light, and I walked with Valerie awhile, down the familiar labyrinth of shoveled asylum paths. Doctors and nurses and patients passing on adjoining paths seemed to be moving on casters, cut off at the waist by the piled snow.
“Interviews!” Valerie snorted. “They’re nothing! If they’re going to let you out, they let you out.”
“I hope so.”
In front of Caplan I said good-bye to Valerie’s calm, snowmaiden face behind which so little, bad or good, could happen, and walked on alone, my breath coming in white puffs even in that sun-filled air. Valerie’s last, cheerful cry had been “So long! Be seeing you.”
“Not if I know it,” I thought.
But I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure at all. How did I know that someday–at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere–the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?
And hadn’t Buddy said, as if to revenge himself for my digging out the car and his having to stand by, “I wonder who you’ll marry now, Esther.”
“What?” I’d said, shoveling snow up onto a mound and blinking against the stinging backshower of loose flakes.
“I wonder who you’ll marry now, Esther. Now you’ve been,” and Buddy’s gesture encompassed the hill, the pines and the severe, snow- gabled buildings breaking up the rolling landscape, “here.”
And of course I didn’t know who would marry me now that I’d been where I had been. I didn’t know at all.
“I have a bill here, Irwin.”
I spoke quietly into the mouthpiece of the asylum pay phone in the main hall of the administration building. At first I suspected the operator, at her switchboard, might be listening, but she just went on plugging and unplugging her little tubes without batting an eye.
“Yes,” Irwin said.
“It’s a bill for twenty dollars for emergency attention on a certain date in December and a checkup a week thereafter.”
“Yes,” Irwin said.
“The hospital says they are sending me the bill because there was no answer to the bill they sent you.”
“All right, all right, I’m writing a check now. I’m writing them a blank check.” Irwin’s voice altered subtly. “When am I going to see you?”
“Do you really want to know?” “Very much.”
“Never,” I said, and hung up with a resolute click.
I wondered, briefly, if Irwin would send his check to the hospital after that, and then I thought, “Of course he will, he’s a mathematics professor–he won’t want to leave any loose ends.”
I felt unaccountably weak-kneed and relieved. Irwin’s voice had meant nothing to me.
This was the first time, since our first and last meeting, that I had spoken with him and, I was reasonably sure, it would be the last. Irwin had absolutely no way of getting in touch with me, except by going to Nurse Kennedy’s flat, and after Joan’s death Nurse Kennedy had moved somewhere else and left no trace.
I was perfectly free.
Joan’s parents invited me to the funeral.
I had been, Mrs. Gilling said, one of Joan’s best friends.
“You don’t have to go, you know,” Doctor Nolan told me. “You can always write and say I said it would be better not to.”
“I’ll go,” I said, and I did go, and all during the simple funeral service I wondered what I thought I was burying.
At the altar the coffin loomed in its snow pallor of flowers–the black shadow of something that wasn’t there. The faces in the pews around me were waxen with candlelight, and pine boughs, left over from Christmas, sent up a sepulchral incense in the cold air.
Beside me, Jody’s cheeks bloomed like good apples, and here and there in the little congregation I recognized other faces of other girls from college and my home town who had known Joan. DeeDee and Nurse Kennedy bent their kerchiefed heads in a front pew.
Then, behind the coffin and the flowers and the face of the minister and the faces of the mourners, I saw the rolling lawns of our town cemetery, knee-deep in snow now, with the tombstones rising out of it like smokeless chimneys.
There would be a black, six-foot-deep gap hacked in the hard ground. That shadow would marry this shadow, and the peculiar, yellowish soil of our locality seal the wound in the whiteness, and yet another snowfall erase the traces of newness in Joan’s grave.
I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.
The doctors were having their weekly board meeting–old business, new
business, admissions, dismissals and interviews. Leafing blindly through a tatty National Geographic in the asylum library, I waited my turn.
Patients, with accompanying nurses, made their rounds of the stocked shelves, conversing, in low tones, with the asylum librarian, an alumna of the asylum herself. Glancing at hermyopic, spinsterish, effaced–I wondered how she knew she had graduated at all, and, unlike, her clients, was whole and well.
“Don’t be scared,” Doctor Nolan had said. “I’ll be there, and the rest of the doctors you know, and some visitors, and Doctor Vining, the head of all the doctors, will ask you a few questions, and then you can go.”
But in spite of Doctor Nolan’s reassurances, I was scared to
death.
I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and
knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead–after all, I had been “analyzed.” Instead, all I could see were question marks.
I kept shooting impatient glances at the closed boardroom door. My stocking seams were straight, my black shoes cracked, but polished, and my red wool suit flamboyant as my plans. Something old, something new….
But I wasn’t getting married. There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice-patched, retreaded and approved for the road, I was trying to think of an appropriate one when Doctor Nolan appeared from nowhere and touched me on the shoulder.
“All right, Esther.”
I rose and followed her to the open door.
Pausing, for a brief breath, on the threshold, I saw the silver- haired doctor who had told me about the rivers and the Pilgrims on my first day, and the pocked, cadaverous face of Miss Huey, and eyes I thought I had recognized over white masks.
The eyes and the faces all turned themselves toward me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.
Sylvia Plath:
A Biographical Note
(i) By
Louis Ames
With eight drawings by Sylvia Plath
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The Bell Jar was first published in London in January 1963 by William Heinemann Limited, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Sylvia Plath had adopted the pen name for publication of her first novel because she questioned its literary value and did not believe it was a “serious work”; she was also worried about the pain publication might cause to the many people close to her whose personalities she had distorted and lightly disguised in the book.
The central themes of Sylvia Plath’s early life are the basis for The Bell Jar. She was born in 1932 in Massachusetts and spent her early childhood years in Winthrop, a seaside town close to Boston. Her mother’s parents were Austrian; her father, a distinguished professor of biology at Boston University (and an internationally known authority on bees), had emigrated to the States from Poland as an adolescent; she had one brother, two and a half years younger. A radical change occurred in Sylvia’s life when she was eight: in November 1940, her father died after a long, difficult illness, and the mother and grandparents moved the family inland to the town of Wellesley, a conservative
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upper-middle-class suburb of Boston. While the grandmother assumed the care of the household, Mrs. Plath taught students in the medical-secretarial training program at Boston University, commuting each day, and the grandfather worked as maitre d’hotel at the Brookline Country Club, where he lived during the week. Sylvia and her brother attended the local public schools. “I went to public schools,” she wrote later, “genuinely public. Everyone went.” At an early age she began to write poems and to draw in pen and ink–and to collect prizes with her first publication of each. By the time she was seventeen, her interest in writing had become disciplined and controlled. Publication, however, did not come easily; she had submitted forty-five pieces to the magazine Seventeen before her first short story, “And Summer Will Not Come Again,” was published in the August 1950 issue. A poem, “Bitter Strawberries,” a sardonic comment on war, was accepted and published in the same month by the Christian Science Monitor. In her high school yearbook, The Wellesleyan, the girl who later described herself as a “rabid teenage pragmatist” was pictured:
Warm smile…energetic worker…Bumble Boogie piano special…Clever with chalk and paints…Weekends at Williams Those
fully packed sandwiches… Future writer…Those rejection slips from
Seventeen Oh, for a license.
In September 1950, Sylvia entered Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, the largest women’s college in the world. She went on scholarship–one from the Wellesley Smith Club and one endowed by Olive Higgins Prouty, the novelist and author of Stella Dallas) later a friend and patron. These were the years in which Sylvia wrote poetry on a precise schedule, circled words in the red-leather thesaurus which had belonged to her father, maintained a detailed journal, kept a diligent scrapbook, and studied with concentration. Highly successful as a student, she was also elected to class and college offices; she became a member of the editorial board of The Smith Review) went for weekends to men’s colleges, and published stories and poems in Seventeen. But at the time she wrote in a letter: “for the few little outward successes I may seem to have, there are acres of misgiving and self-doubt.” Of this period a friend later said: “It was as if Sylvia couldn’t wait for life to come to her…. She rushed out to greet it, to make things happen.”
As she became increasingly conscious of herself as a woman, the conflict between the life-style of a poet/intellectual and that of a wife and mother became a central preoccupation, and she wrote: “…it’s quite amazing how I’ve gone around for most of my life as in the rarefied atmosphere under
a bell jar.” In August 1951 she won Mademoiselle magazine’s fiction contest with a short story, “Sunday at the Mintons,” and in the following year, her junior year in college, Sylvia was awarded two Smith poetry prizes and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and to Alpha, the Smith College honorary society for the arts. Then in the summer of 1952 she was chosen to be a guest editor in Mademoiselle’s College Board Contest. In her scrapbook, she described the beginning of that month in New York in the breathy style of the magazine:
After being one of the two national winners of Mademoiselle’s fiction contest ($500!) last August, I felt that I was coming home again when I won a guest editorship representing Smith & took a train to NYC for a salaried month working–hatted & heeled–in Mlle’s air conditioned Madison Ave. offices….Fantastic, fabulous, and all other inadequate adjectives go to describe the four gala and chaotic weeks I worked as guest managing Ed…living in luxury at the Barbizon, I edited, met celebrities, was feted and feasted by a galaxy of UN delegates, simultaneous interpreters & artists…an almost unbelievable merry-go- round month–this Smith Cinderella met idols: Vance Bourjaily, Paul Engle, Elizabeth Bowen–wrote article via correspondence with 5 handsome young male poet teachers.
The poets were Alistair Reid, Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, George Steiner, and William Burford, whose pictures were accompanied by biographical notes and comments on poets and poetry.
After 230-odd pages of advertising, the bulk of the August 1953 college issue was introduced by Sylvia as Guest Managing Editor with “Mile’s last word on college, ‘53.” Under a vapid picture of the guest editors holding hands in star formation, dressed alike in tartan skirts with matching Eton caps and openmouthed smiles, she wrote:
We’re stargazers this season, bewitched by an atmosphere of evening blue. Foremost in the fashion constellation we spot Mlle’s own tartan, the astronomic versatility of sweaters, and men, men, men–we’ve even taken the shirts off their backs! Focusing our telescope on college news around the globe, we debate and deliberate. Issues illuminated: academic freedom, the sorority controversy, our much labeled (and libeled) generation. From our favorite fields, stars of the first magnitude shed a bright influence on our plans for jobs and futures. Although horoscopes for our ultimate orbits aren’t yet in, we Guest Eds. are counting on a favorable forecast with this sendoff from Mile, the star of the campus.
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No doubt she was far more pleased with page 358–”Mlle.
finally published ‘Mad Girl’s Lovesong’–my favorite villanelle”:
1) MAD GIRL’S LOVE SONG
A VILLANELLE
By Sylvia Plath Smith College, ‘54
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head. )
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head. )
God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan’s men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I fancied you’d return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head. )
I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head. )
That summer, too, Harper’s Magazine paid $100 for three poems which Sylvia identified as “first professional earnings.” Later, assessing these bubbling achievements, she wrote, “All in all, I felt upborne on a wave of creative, social and financial success–The six month crash, however, was to come–”
These were the events which took place in her ‘life in the summer and autumn of 1953–at the time of the electrocution of the Rosenbergs, at the time when Senator Joseph McCarthy was forcing his power, at the beginning of the Eisenhower presidency–these were the events which Sylvia Plath reconstructed in The Bell jar. Years later she described the book she wanted to write:
the pressures of the fashion magazine world which seems increasingly superficial and artificial, the return home to the dead summer world of a suburb of Boston. Here the cracks in her [the heroine, Esther Greenwood’s] nature which had been held together as it were by the surrounding pressures of New York widen and gape alarmingly. More and more her warped view of the world around–her own vacuous domestic life, and that of her neighbors–seems the one right way of looking at things.
For Sylvia then came electroshock therapy and finally her well-
publicized disappearance, subsequent discovery and consequent hospitalization for psychotherapy and more shock treatment. She wrote: “A time of darkness, despair, disillusion–so black only as the inferno of the human mind can be–symbolic death, and numb shock–then the painful agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration.”
Subsequently Sylvia returned to Smith College and reconquered “old broncos that threw me for a loop last year.” At the
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beginning of the next summer she wrote that “a semester of reconstruction ends with an infinitely more solid if less flashingly spectacular flourish than last year’s.” By the end of the next academic year, she had sold more poems, earned additional prizes, and written her long paper for English honors on the double personality in Dostoyevski’s novels. In June 1955 she graduated from Smith College summa cum laude with the prospect of an English Fulbright year in Newnham College at Cambridge University. There Sylvia met the British poet Ted Hughes, whom she married in London on June 16, 1956: Bloomsday. Sylvia’s Fulbright was renewed and, after a vacation in Spain, Ted and Sylvia lived in Cambridge for another year. Then, in the spring of 1957, they moved to the United States, where Sylvia was
assessed by her colleagues as “one of the two or three finest instructors ever to appear in the English department at Smith College.”
It is probable that Sylvia already had a version of The Bell Jar in her trunks when she returned to the States, but she was concentrating on poetry and on teaching. In June 1958, she applied for a Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Fellowship to complete her book of poems. The Saxton Fellowship had been established “to honor an outstanding editor of Harper & Brothers”; the trust, at the discretion of the trustees, gave outright grants of money to writers for living expenses. Agreement of all three trustees was necessary to make the grant, and one of them, who called the sample poems “beyond reproach,” noted that “in looking over Mrs. Hughes’ history, I see that she has had valuable awards dropped into her lap during most of her adult life. Perhaps it would not do her any real harm to continue her work for a while as a teacher in a fine college. My impulse is rejection, though I think the quality of her work entitles her to serious consideration.” In October 1958 the application was rejected with a special letter from the secretary to the trustees, who wanted Mrs. Hughes to know that “your application aroused more than ordinary interest. The talent–which is marked–was not a matter for dispute but rather the nature of the project.”
Meanwhile the Hugheses had moved to a small apartment on Beacon Hill, “living on a shoestring for a year in Boston writing to see what we could do.” Sylvia had made the difficult decision to give up teaching, and to discard an academic plan for which she had been groomed since childhood, in exchange for a less certain existence but one which she hoped would give her more time to write. However, as the year progressed, and her book of poems was repeatedly submitted and rejected under everchanging tides, she wrote:
Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing, which remark I guess shows I still don’t have a pure motive (O it’s-such-fun-I-just-can’t- stop-who-cares-if-it’s-published-or-read) about writing….I still want to see it finally ritualized in print.
In December 1959, Ted and Sylvia returned to England to live. In April 1960 their first child, Frieda, was born. At last Sylvia’s book of poetry, The Colossus, was accepted for fall publication by William Heinemann Limited. Subsequently Sylvia suffered a miscarriage, then an appendectomy, and then became pregnant again. On May 1, 1961, she again applied for a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship; this time in order to finish a novel which she described as one-sixth completed–about fifty pages. On the application Sylvia had asked for money to cover “babysitter or nanny at about
$5 a day, 6 days a week for a year, $1,560. Rent of study at about $10 a week:
$520 for a year. Total: $2,080….(At present I am living in a two room flat with my husband and year old baby and having to work part time to meet living expenses. )” To a friend she wrote that she was “over one third through a novel about a college girl building up for and going through a nervous breakdown.” She wrote:
I have been wanting to do this for ten years but had a terrible block about Writing A Novel. Then suddenly in beginning negotiations with a New York publisher for an American edition of my poems, the dykes broke and I stayed awake all night seized by fearsome excitement, saw how it should be done, started the next day & go every morning to my borrowed study as to an office & belt out more of it.
In the summer, the Hugheses moved to Devon to live in a thatch-roofed country house, and on November 6, 1961, the secretary to the Saxton trustees wrote that they had voted to give her a grant in the amount of
$2,080, “the sum you suggested.” Sylvia replied, “I was very happy to receive your good letter today telling about the Saxton Fellowship. I certainly do plan to go ahead with the novel and the award comes at a particularly helpful time to free me to do so.”
On January 17, 1962, a son, Nicholas, was born. The days were divided among the babies, housework, and writing, but on February 10, 1962, Sylvia punctually delivered her first quarterly report on the progress of her novel to the Saxton trustees. “During the past three months the novel has progressed very satisfactorily, according to my drafted schedule. I have worked through several rough drafts to a final version of Chapters 5 through 8, completing a total of 105 pages of the novel in all, and have outlined in detail Chapters 9 through l2.” Then she gave in detail the plans for The Bell jar. Although the novel was going well, Sylvia complained to a friend that she felt she was doing little work: “a couple of poems I like a year looks like a
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lot when they come out, but in fact are points of satisfaction separated by large vacancies.” On May 1, 1962, in the next quarterly report to the Saxton trustees, she wrote, “The novel is getting on very well, and according to schedule. I have completed Chapters 9 through 12 (pages 106-166) and projected in detailed outline the next lap of the book.” By June 1962 she could tell a friend: “I’m writing again. Really writing. I’d like you to see some of my new poems.” She had begun the Ariel poems and was confident enough to want to show them, to have them read, to read them aloud. These poems were different: her husband has written that “Tulips” “was the first sign of what was on its way. She wrote this poem without her usual studies over the thesaurus, and at top speed, as one might write an urgent letter. From then on, all her poems were written in this way.”
On August 1, 1962, Sylvia sent her final progress report to the Saxton trustees:
The novel is rounding out now, shaping up pretty much as planned, and I have completed Chapters 13 through 16 (pages 167-221) and am hoping the last lap goes as well.
After a vacation in Ireland, Sylvia and Ted decided to separate for a while. The summer had been difficult. She had suffered repeated attacks of flu accompanied by high fever. Another winter in Devon seemed impossible. She began to commute to London, where she was “getting work with the BBC” and hunting for a flat. The manuscript of The Bell Jar had been sent to the trustees of the Saxton Fellowship in the States, and Heinemann had accepted the novel in England and was setting it into type. A few days before Christmas, Sylvia moved herself and the children to London, where she had signed a five-year lease on a flat:
…a small miracle happened–I’d been to Yeats’ tower at Ballylea while in Ireland & thought it the most beautiful & peaceful place in the world; then, walking desolately around my beloved Primrose Hill in London and brooding on the hopelessness of ever finding a flat…I passed Yeats’ house, with its blue plaque “Yeats lived here” which I’d often passed & longed to live in. A sign board was up–flats to rent, I flew to the agent. By a miracle you can only know if you’ve ever tried to flat hunt in London, I was first to apply I am here on a 5 year lease & it
is utter heaven…and it’s Yeats’ house, which right now means a lot to me.
Sylvia took the finding of the Yeats house for a sign. She told a friend that when she went out to look for flats that day, she had “known” she would find it, and so, with that confirmation, she began to make plans with energetic assurance. She was working on a new novel, and the Ariel poems were continuing to flow. She told another friend that she thought of The Bell jar ‘‘as an autobiographical apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the past.” But the new novel, about more recent events in her life, she regarded as strong, powerful and urgent.
When The Bell jar was published, in January 1963, Sylvia was distressed by the reviews, although another reader, not the author and not under the same sorts of stress, might have interpreted the critics’ views of the novel far differently. Lawrence Lerner in the Listener wrote, “There are criticisms of America that the neurotic can make as well as anyone, perhaps better, and Miss Lucas makes them brilliantly.” The Times Literary Supplement observed that the author “can certainly write,” and went on to say that “if she can learn to shape as well as she imagines, she may write an extremely good book.” In the New Statesman) Robert Taubman called The Bell jar “the first feminine novel in a Salinger mood.”
In 1970, Aurelia Plath, her mother, wrote a letter to Sylvia’s editor at Harper & Row in New York about the anticipated publication of the first American edition of The Bell jar:
I realize that no explanation of the why of personal suffering that this publication here [publication of The Bell jar in the United States] will create in the lives of several people nor any appeal on any other grounds is going to stop this, so I shall waste neither my time nor yours in pointing out the inevitable repercussions I do want to tell you of one
of the last conversations I had with my daughter in early July, 1962, just
before her personal world fell apart. Sylvia had told me of the pressure she was under in fulfilling her obligation to the Eugene Saxton Fund. As you know, she had been given a grant by this fund to enable her to write a novel. In the space of time allotted, she had a miscarriage, an appendectomy, and had given birth to her second child, Nicholas.
“What I’ve done,” I remember her saying, “is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalizing to add color–it’s a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown….I’ve tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar.” Then she went on to say, “My second book will show that same world as seen through the eyes of health.” Practically every character in The Bell jar represents someone–often in caricature–whom Sylvia loved; each person had given freely of time, thought, affection, and, in one case, financial help during those agonizing six months of breakdown in 1953…as this book stands by itself, it represents the basest ingratitude. That was not the basis of Sylvia’s personality; it was the reason she became so frightened when, at the time of publication, the book was widely read and showed signs of becoming a success. Sylvia wrote her brother that “this must never be published in the United States.”…The very title The Bell Jar should imply what Sylvia told me and that is what the astute reader should infer….
It was the coldest winter in London since 1813-14. Light and heat went off at unannounced intervals. Pipes froze. She had applied, and her name was on the list, but a telephone had not yet been installed. Each morning before the children woke at eight, Sylvia worked on the Ariel poems. Here the sense of human experience as horrid and ungovernable, the sense of all relationships as puppetlike and meaningless, had come to dominate her imagination. Yet she wrote with intensity, convinced that what she was now writing could be said by no one else. Always there was the need to be practical, to find time for the deliberate expression of anguish. Sylvia wrote, “I feel like a very efficient tool or weapon, used and in demand from moment to moment….” She had seen a doctor who had prescribed sedatives and had arranged for her to consult a psychotherapist. She wrote for an appointment and had also written to her former psychiatrist in Boston. A recurrent problem of sinus infection developed. She had fired her au pair girl and was waiting for a replacement “to help with the babes mornings so I can write… nights are no good, I’m so flat by then that all I can cope with is music & brandy & water.”
In spite of the help of friends and anticipation of spring (she
was to return to the house in Devon around May Day), she was despairing and ill. But the poems continued to come, even in the last week of her life–several extraordinary poems. To those around her it appeared that she had not given up. Frequently she seemed bright, cheerful, full of hope.
However, on the morning of February 11,1963, she ended her life. Who can explain why? As Sylvia had written earlier in the last optimistic pages of The Bell Jar:
How did I know that someday–at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere–the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?
–that bell jar out of which she had once struggled brilliantly, successfully, apparently completely, but of which she could write with the clarity of one who has endured: “to the person in The Bell Jar, black and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”
