The Last Days of Sylvia Plath by Carl Rollyson

Author:Carl Rollyson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2020-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

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By November 7, 1962, Plath had found the perfect place, “so happy I can hardly speak,” she wrote her mother. The flat had a blue plaque on it. Yeats had lived there, and she would live there, “blessed” in the “house of a famous poet.” The location, near Primrose Hill, on the northern side of Regents Park, around the corner from the Chalcot Square flat, was a part of London she loved, with wonderful views of central London and Hampstead. She had been happy there once. Ted had even helped her on the flat search. “Now he sees he has nothing to fear from me—no scenes or vengefulness.” As usual, it was all or nothing with her: “Now I am free from Ted everybody loves me—I mean everyone I deal with.” She fashioned her sense of herself as a royal, privileged figure with a destiny—how else to explain her consanguinity with Yeats?—in a new haircut: “From the front I look to have short hair & from the back, a coronet,” heralding her entrance as a new sovereign. “Ted didn’t even recognize me at the train station!” She had confected a startling look, both contemporary and traditional. “Men stare at me in the street now, I look very weird & fashionable.” Truck drivers whistled. Ted had always scoffed at her interest in clothes, but she would now adorn herself in a new ensemble. Sylvia’s expressions of joy, so familiar to Aurelia, were nerve provoking. How different were they from the joy Sylvia had also expressed in the early letters from Court Green? But Sylvia could see only that she was no longer in Ted’s “shadow” and “lived for myself alone, knowing what I want.” Sounding again like Her Majesty, Sylvia said “I may even borrow a table for my flat from Ted’s girl—I could be gracious to her now, & kindly.” Poor Assia, Sylvia sighed, “She has only her high-paid ad agency job, her vanity & no chance of children & everybody wants to be a writer, like me.” Sylvia was wrong about “no chance of children,” but not so wrong otherwise, as Assia found it difficult, as did all of Ted’s women until the day he died, to compete with Sylvia Plath.

The happy shift in mood is reflected in “Letter in November,” completed November 11, and dedicated to Al Alvarez. She sent him the poem and a rose petal. He had become the champion of her work and as responsive to it as Ted had been. Over drinks they had discussed the poems she read to him, which, perhaps became a kind of wooing. She had turned thirty and turned heads. The poem begins: “Love, the world / Suddenly turns, turns color.” The poem is about love, but its first word, “Love,” is also a form of address, perhaps to a lover, to Al. She is walking her property in her Wellingtons “stupidly happy … Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.” The sound of walking in muck is also

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