One of the painters, Howard Rogovin, did portraits of both Sylvia and Ted. For Sylvia, he set up his easel in the old greenhouse. To the sound of ‘rain in the conifers’, he painted Sylvia lifted out of herself ‘In a flaming of oils’, her ‘lips exact’. But he also seemed to catch a shadow on her shoulder, a dark marauding ‘doppelgänger’.71 At one point, a graceful snake slid across the dusty floor of the hot greenhouse. Both this portrait and the one of Ted, which was said to be less successful, are lost.72
The composer was Chou Wen-chung, a United States immigrant from Shandong in China. A protégé of the radical experimentalist Edgar Varèse, he sought to integrate Eastern and Western classical (and modernist) musical traditions. They struck up a friendship and Ted began work on a libretto for him, for an oratorio based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The original title, Bardo Thödol, literally means ‘Liberation through Hearing during the Intermediate State’. These ‘intermediate states’ included the dream state, the moment of death in which the clear light of reality is experienced, and the ‘bardo of rebirth’, which involved hallucinatory images of men and women erotically entwined. The project was never finished, but it took Ted into territory that he would make his own in almost all his later mythic works.73
His main project at Yaddo was his play (now lost, save for a few fragments), ‘The House of Taurus’. Sylvia described it in a letter home written in early October: ‘a symbolic drama based on the Euripides play The Bacchae, only set in a modern industrial community under a paternalistic ruler’.74 She hoped that it would at least get a staged reading, but explained that she had not yet typed it up.
During the weeks at Yaddo Ted also revised one or two of the poems in his forthcoming ‘Lupercalia’ collection, but for poetic development it was more of a breakthrough moment for Sylvia. Before Yaddo, her verse had been highly accomplished but somehow brittle. A self-description in a journal entry of late 1955 was harsh but apt: ‘Roget’s trollop, parading words and tossing off bravado for an audience’ (Roget’s Thesaurus was the vade mecum of writers looking for unusual words for ordinary things).75 Very few Plath poems written before Yaddo stick in the mind; almost all the hundred or so that Sylvia wrote thereafter sear themselves into the consciousness of the attentive reader. Years earlier, Plath had dreamed of gathering forces into a tight tense ball for the artistic leap. At Yaddo, she made that leap.
On 10 October 1959, she wrote in her journal: ‘Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. When will I break into a new line of poetry? Feel trite.’ It was certainly odd to feel barren when she was at last pregnant. Then on the 13th: ‘Very depressed today. Unable to write a thing. Menacing gods. I feel outcast on a cold star.’ Ted told her to ‘get desperate’. On the night of the 21st, she felt ‘animal solaces’ as she lay with him, warm in bed. The next day, walking in the woods in the frosty morning light, she found the ‘Ambitious seeds of a long poem made up of separate sections: Poem on her Birthday. To be a dwelling on madhouse, nature. The superb identity, selfhood of things. To be honest with what I know and have known. To be true to my own weirdnesses.’76 Madhouse, nature, identity, self, weirdness: in ‘Poem for a Birthday’, Sylvia began for the first time to write poetry overtly about her suicide attempt, mental breakdown and electro-convulsive therapy, albeit refracted through a symbolic narrative of descent and rebirth.
Within a fortnight the sequence was ‘miraculously’ written. The title came from the fact that her birthday fell halfway through the process of composition. What was it that released the flow? The example of Lowell confronting his nervous breakdown in Life Studies was crucial. Ted, who was convinced that this was indeed the turning point in her poetic career, pointed to the influence of the poetry of Theodore Roethke, which she read in the Yaddo library (where she also renewed her acquaintance with the wonderfully confident and supple poetry of Elizabeth Bishop). Conversations with Ted about the death and rebirth structure of Bardo Thödol would also have played a part. But her journal offers other clues. It reveals that she was ‘electrified’ by the consonance between the imagery she was developing and the language of Jung’s Symbols of Transformation, another book in the well-stocked Yaddo library. And a couple of days earlier, her creativity released by some breathing exercises that Ted taught her, she had written two poems that pleased her, one to ‘Nicholas’, the name they had chosen for their child if it proved to be a boy, and the other on ‘the old father-worship subject’.77 The father who had died when she was eight and the unborn child in her womb. She was on a cusp, about eighteen weeks pregnant. Did the baby quicken and give its first kick at this time? Before her stood tomorrow.
They returned to Wellesley just before Thanksgiving. Sylvia was now noticeably pregnant. Aurelia later remembered Ted working away in the upstairs bedroom while Sylvia ‘sorted and packed the huge trunk’ that they had set up in the breezeway. On the day they left, ‘Sylvia was wearing her hair in a long braid down her back with a little red wool cap on her head.’ She looked like a teenage girl going off to boarding school. As the train pulled out of the station, Ted shouted out, ‘We’ll be back in two years!’78 He was looking forward to home, and English beer, having found the American variety ‘unspeakable and unspewable’.79
On a clear blue day in March 1959, Ted and Sylvia had gone out from their little Willow Street apartment to Winthrop, the southernmost point of Boston’s North Shore. In the morning, Sylvia had been with her psychoanalyst, probing further at her feelings about her dead father. It was time, they decided, for her to visit Otto Plath’s grave in Winthrop for the first time. When they found it, she felt cheated by the plain and unassuming flat stone, tempted to dig him up in order to ‘prove he existed and really was dead’.80
Then they walked over some rocks beside the ocean. The wind was bitter. Their feet got wet and they picked up shells with cold hands. Ted walked alone to the end of the bar, in his black coat, ‘defining the distance of stones and stones humped out of the sea’.81 Afterwards, Sylvia wrote a poem called ‘Man in Black’. It was soon accepted by the New Yorker, one of her first big successes in getting her work into high-profile print. It catches the moment: the breakwaters absorbing the force of the sea, the March ice on the rock pools, ‘And you’ – Ted, that is – striding out across the white stones:
in your dead
Black coat, black shoes, and your
Black hair …82
There he stands, a ‘Fixed vortex’ on the edge of the land, holding it all together, the stones, the air, Sylvia’s life and her father’s death. The line-break catapults the word ‘dead’ into double sense. At one level, Ted’s coat is dead black in the sense of pitch black. At another level, it is black because black is the colour of death. Sylvia’s black imagination has indeed dug Otto out of his grave – and reincarnated him in her husband.
That is how Ted read the poem. In Birthday Letters, he made a point of placing his reply-poem, which he called ‘Black Coat’, after the long journal-like poems about the road trip. In terms of strict chronology, it should have been before. But he wanted to make it into a summation of their time in America. He places himself looking across the