Текст книги "American Isis. The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath"

Автор книги: Carl Rollyson

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On the same day, Ted wrote to his brother in Australia, once and for all renouncing his dream of starting life anew there. It was not the right country in which to develop his writing. Neither was England. Like Plath, Hughes believed Spain had set him free. In the company of an “American poetess” (he seemed to use the word as though describing a princess), he was writing better than ever and more continuously. Sylvia astutely analyzed his work, he reported, and found the faults that he had not yet been prepared to acknowledge. In fact, as part of the Plath program of submissions, he had been successfully published in Poetry and The Nation.

Sylvia continued to write her mother about a fairy-tale honeymoon in Benidorm, a sparkling Spanish coastal town beside the blazing blue Mediterranean Sea. Sylvia was delighted with their quarters in a house even closer to the sea than Grammy’s place in Winthrop. They had a balcony terrace overlooking a seascape that stimulated Sylvia’s sketching and writing. Ted was working on animal fables, while Sylvia plotted stories about Americans abroad that she hoped to place with women’s magazines. The same day (14 July) she wrote to Warren, describing Ted as the “male counterpart” of herself.

In her journal, Sylvia luxuriated in descriptions of the living room they had “consecrated” to their writing. They built their days around composing stories and poems, Ted working on a big oak table and Sylvia on a typing stand. They went out early to shop, she reported to Eleanor Friedman Klein, and in the peasant market picked out live rabbits that they were obliged to slaughter for dinner. Sylvia and Ted then returned home to write for the rest of the morning, breaking for lunch and a siesta, then a swim and two hours of writing in the late afternoon, followed by a few hours of reading before bed. Travel, adventure, and romance—her life had turned into a movie, Sylvia wrote her mother.

Still involved in Sylvia’s intrigue, Ted wrote his parents after the couple arrived in Benidorm that he intended to marry Sylvia and would do so by the time he visited them in September. He swore them to secrecy, mentioned Sylvia’s concerns about losing her scholarship if the truth were known. As he later made clear to Olwyn, they needed the scholarship money to live on. He had already signed on to Sylvia’s plan to spend a year teaching in America, followed by a return to Europe. His parents should not worry, he added, because not only was Sylvia a good cook, she was great with money and a better earner than he was. He had met and liked her mother.

Ted devoted most of a long letter to his parents to describing a bullfight the young couple had seen in Madrid. It was a sorry affair that nevertheless commanded his full attention. Hughes’s fascination with the violent ceremonial aspects of this gruesome contest overshadowed any repugnance he may have expressed to Sylvia, although the forthrightness of the unflinching description he gave his parents compels disgust. His analytical, even cold comment on the entire episode is simply an expression of surprise at the bull’s ability to adapt to the duel, although in the end the beast died, drained of its blood.

Sylvia had sickened at the sorry spectacle, and in “The Goring” evokes the rather sordid atmosphere of the truculent crowd, the picador’s awkward stabbing and artless, unwieldy maneuvers. Only in the final moments of the deadly duet between bullfighter and bull did the grim ritual take on the look of a kind of ceremonious art redeeming the “sullied air.” The poem’s restrained tone disguises how ill at ease Sylvia was in Spain. To her mother she wrote about the “horrid picador” and the messy slaughter. Although she tells Aurelia that Ted shared her feelings, her language reveals a markedly different sensibility. Hughes would later write a poem, entitled “You Hated Spain,” about her reaction. As his biographer Elaine Feinstein observes, Ted was at home with the primitive side of Spain, whereas the sort of blood consciousness that had thrilled Sylvia in D. H. Lawrence’s writing repulsed her in person.

The idyllic aerie by the sea gradually became a battleground between the landlord and a wary, cagey Sylvia trying to outmaneuver this witch-like presence, who kept barging in to lecture her renter about how to operate the freakish petrol stove, and against taking interruptions of electrical power and running water “too seriously.” “That Widow Mangada” provides a virtually verbatim version of Sylvia’s journal entries, which recorded her growing disillusionment with her Spanish heaven.

That Sylvia ignored or did not appreciate Ted’s different take on the bullfight suggests some of her exultant happiness was a rather forced affair. This, at least, was Richard Sassoon’s conclusion after he received a letter announcing her marriage to Hughes. Sounding rather like Eddie Cohen, the reserved Sassoon replied that he saw no reason why Sylvia should not be as happy, or happier, with Hughes than she had been with him—except that what she had written did not appear to him to be the letter of a “happy woman. At least, not to me, and as you know me extremely well and are a good letter writer I may accept my reactions as feasible.” The sinuosity of his prose reflects how fraught and convoluted their relationship had become, but also, perhaps, how conflicted and unresolved Sylvia’s feelings really were, in spite of her protestations to the contrary. He did not doubt he deserved her harshness. But she was “woman enough to know that I—above all I—am not one who needs to be blamed.… Long before I was your bien aimé, I was something else to you, and I think always I was somewhat more than a paramour, always.… You tell me that I am to know that you are doing what is best for you; it is so if you believe it, Sylvia, and if it is so—then it is—‘very simply’ it. Even though I might wish it otherwise…” And so Sassoon exited, refusing to allow himself to be wrapped up in her version of their affaire de coeur.

A mysterious passage in Plath’s journal for 23 July, written after an encounter with Hughes that left her dreading the “wrongness growing, creeping, choking the house,” hints at the twisted nature of her affections, which Sassoon had detected. She could suddenly turn a personal disappointment into a cosmic sense of disenchantment, declaring that the “world has grown crooked and sour as a lemon overnight.” Her estrangement, moreover, was not resolved but merely dispelled by a visit from Marcia Brown and her husband, Mike, and by delightful exchanges with a group of Spanish soldiers on a train to Madrid, as they learn to drink wine from a leather flask.

On 25 August, approaching the end of their summer sojourn, Sylvia and Ted met up with Warren in Paris, a rendezvous that Sylvia did not say much about. Warren had spent a summer in Austria and was returning to the States for his final year at Harvard. Sylvia and Ted were on their way to visit his family in what Sylvia referred to as their Wuthering Heights home. For all her rapturous references to Spain and plans to write about it, the results were meager. Except for “That Widow Mangada,” a handful of poems and stories that are unremarkable, and notes in her journal, she produced only a bland travelogue sort of article that was published in The Christian Science Monitor.

On 2 September, Sylvia wrote to her mother about her stay at the Yorkshire home of Ted’s family. As she put it, she was now part of the “Brontë clan.” Her journal reveals that this was more than a casual allusion for a writer who immersed herself in literary lives so that she could live one. The bare hills, black stone walls, wicked northern winds, and coal fires that she describes in her letter evoke the atmosphere of Wuthering Heights, with Sylvia cast as the interloper entering the mysterious, ineffable world that perplexes and frightens Mr. Lockwood. She climbed the wild and lonely moors, just as Catherine and Heathcliff had. Did she recall the Hollywood version of Wuthering Heights (1939), with its iconic shot of Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon huddled together on a hill rise, two passionate souls bound to one another, yet doomed to part?

In her 2 September letter, Sylvia continues in her guise as Mr. Lockwood, calling Ted’s parents, William and Edith, “dear, simple Yorkshire folk.” She loved them both. They liked her. Nothing untoward had happened yet. William, judging by what his son said about him, would have been quiet, even subdued. He had gone through the trauma of the trenches of World War I and now owned a tobacconist’s shop. Edith, as portrayed by other Plath biographers, had a deep interest in magic and the occult—although Olwyn later chided Diane Middlebrook for saying so. (Actually, Ted’s fascination with astrology and necromancy far outstripped anything his mother could possibly have known or cared to impart to her son.) She was quite conventional and genuinely appreciated Sylvia, who obviously relished the domestic side of life and brought with her a high-spirited and romantic embrace of the land.

Sylvia would soon be returning for her second and final year at Cambridge. Ted would go to London, where his reading of poetry for the BBC was successful and remunerative (they had spent nearly all their money in Spain). Hughes had one of the finest voices in modern poetry. He believed that only part of the brain registered the impact of poetry when it was not read aloud. He often read Shakespeare to Plath and encouraged her to spend part of her day reciting poetry. Her own recorded voice grew in authority and power, as did her awareness of audience, and for that Hughes deserves considerable credit.

Sylvia prepared to write a novel based on her Cambridge experiences. She and Ted were hoping to get teaching positions for a year, and perhaps do a reading tour as well when Sylvia brought Ted home to America. Her hopes were high. The Atlantic Monthly had bought “Pursuit” for fifty dollars. More good news followed on 2 October, when Poetry accepted six of her poems for another seventy-six dollars. And Peter Davison, now at The Atlantic Monthly, was encouraging her to submit more of her work. She wrote him a long letter explaining her plans for a novel, as well as touting Ted’s poetry. He gratified her with a quick response that included his wish to see Hughes’s work.

In her 2 October letter to Aurelia, Sylvia made a point of saying that she and Ted were not part of an “arty world,” and that all they needed was one another. But the very sense of their uniqueness also put pressure on her. Thinking she had missed a rendezvous with Ted in London, she panicked and gave way to a “fury of tears,” she told Aurelia. Although he turned up soon enough, Sylvia’s extreme reaction showed how much he meant to the equilibrium of her everyday life.

Ted was well aware of Sylvia’s investment in him, and from London, where he often stayed overnight or longer when employed by the BBC, he reinforced their bond with frequent affectionate and encouraging letters, as well as expressions of anxiety that jibed with her own moods. On 1 October, he wrote about how restless he felt without her. He wandered about like “somebody with a half-completed brain-operation.” He enjoined her to “keep watch” on their marriage as he was doing, saying that way their happiness would be preserved. He had nicknames for her (“Puss-Kish-Ponky,” for example) that served to intensify their intimacy and exclusivity. Anticipating a rendezvous with Sylvia, Ted announced that he would kiss her “into blisters.” The man who had cared nothing about clothes, and was known to stuff newly caught fish in his jacket pockets, extolled a suit Sylvia had bought for him, saying he could now descend on London “sleek, sleek, sleek.”

A day later Ted wrote about how he missed Sylvia’s “ponky warmth.” He sent her plots that she might use for her fiction. One involved a young newly married couple that set off for the country to avoid the distractions and complications of urban life. “They want to keep each other for themselves alone and away from temptation,” Ted wrote, without a sign that he was basing this story line on their own lives. In an eerily prophetic twist, Hughes has friends of the couple visit and urge them, so good at entertaining, to open an inn. Although the inn is successful, the upshot of their venture is that they have brought the city, so to speak, back into their lives. Even worse, the wife turns jealous and suspects the husband’s involvement with an old girlfriend. The story has a happy ending, in that the couple sells the hotel and buys another cottage closer to the city, reflecting their awareness that they cannot entirely escape modernity, but they can work on keeping their marriage solid. Hughes called it a “rotten plot,” but was that all it was? “Can you pick any sense out of that?” he asked Sylvia. Was the question directed toward the meaning of the story, or the meaning of their lives? At any rate, Hughes was happy to say in a later letter that he was glad she liked the “inn-plot.”

In “The Wishing Box,” a story about the woman who is envious of her husband’s fertile imagination as expressed in his dreams, Plath may have been articulating her concern that at this point Hughes seemed way ahead of her as a writer. At least that is one way—the Edward Butscher way—of looking at Sylvia’s response to Ted’s teeming creativity, so fecund that he was sending his newborn ideas to a half-grateful, half-resentful collaborator. Sylvia’s letters, though, not only do not begrudge him, they positively exult in his productivity.

Hughes certainly gave Plath no reason to doubt her desirability. Hughes bid her good night, thinking of Puss’s “little soft places” and how he wanted to kiss her “slowly from toe up,” sucking and nibbling and licking her “all night long.” Missing her, he felt like an amputee, dazed and shocked, because he had lost half of himself. Sometimes he just baldly broke out with: “I love you I love you I love you.” Only her “terrific letters” comforted him. If more than a few days went by and Ted had not heard from Sylvia, he grew uneasy: “No letter from my ponk. Is she dead? Has half the world dropped off?” He imagined the desirable Sylvia welcoming the charms of knaves, while he sat staring at the skyline “like an old stone.” Unable to work, he consoled himself by reading Yeats aloud.

In his letters, Hughes predicted greatness for Sylvia, just as she had for him. Without her, he wrote on 5 October, he could not sleep and was wasting his time. He walked about like a strange beast, and had even been stopped by the police because he looked like a suspicious character. Somehow, he wrote Sylvia, they had to turn all their “lacks” into good poems. He advised her on studying for exams at Cambridge, sensibly saying, for example, that the six books on Chaucer she had to read each contained some value but they surely overlapped, and there was no need to give them more than a note or two for each chapter she read. Similarly, he critiqued her poetry, offering straightforward advice—one professional to another—and praise. “Your verse never goes ‘soft’ like other women’s,” he wrote on 22 October, although he seemed to worry a bit that she might be searching for a formula that magazines like The New Yorker followed. But he wondered if such a formula existed. How to account for Eudora Welty or J. D. Salinger, two originals quite dissimilar, and yet both published in The New Yorker. If she wrote about what really attracted her, she could not miss, Ted told Sylvia. Like Plath, Hughes seemed to take rejections in stride, saying that at least The New Yorker might remember his name, even if they rejected his animal fables.

To Olwyn that October, Hughes touted Sylvia’s successful publications in The Atlantic Monthly and Poetry. She was not a “blah American.” Indeed, she was very like an indefatigable German, without affectations, and had a “startling poetic gift.” He plotted her horoscope, which he drew in the letter for Olwyn’s benefit. He was now showing Plath’s poems to his contacts at the BBC. Ted clung to Sylvia as a renewing force, even as he spurned London, calling it “murderous,” a ghost of itself, and so depleted that it had no “aura” left. It seemed utterly exhausted, he wrote to her on 23 October.

In late October, in a near state of collapse because Ted spent so much time in London that they could not live as husband and wife, Sylvia confessed her secret to Dorothea Krook, who rightly predicted that if Plath consulted the Fulbright advisor on campus and the Fulbright committee in London and made a full and contrite confession of her marriage, she would be allowed to keep her scholarship. And it was so. An elated Sylvia told Krook that no criticism whatsoever had been forthcoming; indeed, she had been congratulated on her marriage. But Krook, who still did not feel she knew her student that well, felt a twinge of concern because Sylvia seemed to depend on her marriage for so much of her own well-being. “I am living for Ted,” Sylvia had written her mother on 22 October. In “Epitaph for Fire and Flower,” a poem she enclosed in a letter to Aurelia, one line says it all: The lovers have a “touch” that will “kindle angels’ envy.” Well, not quite all, since the concluding lines evoke the “ardent look” that “Blackens flesh to bone and devours them.”

By early November Ted had found a job near Cambridge teaching secondary school students, and the couple moved into a flat only five minutes from Newnham. He did not like Cambridge very much, and certain of his professors there apparently felt the same about him. The dons regarded Ted as a rather louche character and seemed surprised that the cheerful and well-scrubbed Sylvia would be attached to such a ruffian. Residing in Cambridge indicated that he was doing everything possible to allay Plath’s easily aroused anxieties. They played out their evenings with tarot cards.

The Suez crisis and Britain’s ill-fated invasion of Egypt after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal brought out Plath’s innate disgust with militarism and materialism. Even more importantly, her reaction reflects a sensibility that rejected narrow nationalism. She viewed politics as she did poetry, in cosmic terms. That Britain was in league with France and Israel only demonstrated to her that the world was out of joint. She cared nothing for the British Empire, for face-saving measures, for the niceties and duplicities of diplomatic negotiations. She did praise Hugh Gaitskill, leader of the Labour Party, for eloquently opposing the invasion, but she really had no interest in political parties as such. She was the same person who had written to Hans about world peace. It made her feel no better that her country held nuclear superiority. Other British policies on Cyprus and the emerging African states were no better, and she hoped America would put pressure on her ally to withdraw from Suez. She now regarded her own land as the proper place for her and Ted. Britain was dead. In a rare chauvinist moment, she declared to her mother on 1 November, “God Bless America!” Six days later she wrote again to say she was sickened at the news of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary. She continued to reiterate her opposition to all war, saying she hoped Warren would become a conscientious objector.

Sooty old England had become a drag, and Sylvia primed Ted with pictures of a sumptuous summer on Cape Cod. She had also set him up for a poetry contest sponsored by Harper’s and adjudicated by Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, and Marianne Moore. Winning the prize and publication of his first book would be the making of Ted Hughes in America and Britain. He wrote his friend Lucas Myers on 16 November about the contest, expressing “small hopes” for his success, although he was obviously a writer who thought of himself as in the running. He and Sylvia tried to work out their future on a Ouija board, with mixed results. Strenuous efforts on their part put them in contact with a spirit, who rightly predicted which magazines would accept their work. But relying on the Ouija board to predict the winners of football pools did not yield the fortune they anticipated.

Sometime in late November, Sylvia Plath had her first encounter with Olwyn Hughes, who visited her shortly before Sylvia relinquished her Cambridge room for the flat she would share with Ted. Olwyn was then twenty-eight, tall and strikingly “handsome,” to borrow Elaine Feinstein’s word. Olwyn had served in various secretarial positions in Paris and may have struck her sister-in-law as the very type of career woman Sylvia abjured. The confident Olwyn, single and with a hearty laugh, seemed utterly self-contained and without a permanent male companion. Olwyn found Sylvia to be somewhat reserved. But, according to Anne Stevenson, nothing much happened in this first meeting that would have given either woman pause.

On 15 December, Sylvia wrote to Marcia Brown to tell her all about the magnificent Ted, a “roaring hulking Yorkshireman.” As usual, she described him as “looming” and ferocious. This time, though, she also associated Ted with the “sound of hurricanes,” a neat way to absorb him into her earliest memories of a mythological life by the sea. She positively reveled in reporting that she could not boss him around, declaring he’d bash her head in if she tried. Even when she discussed his teaching, she said he terrified his pupils into admiration. She described Ted as “staunchly British,” but she hoped he might consider settling in America, since Britain was a country that had no future.

Sylvia now believed she had overcome her demons. When Aurelia wrote at the end of the year about a young man in a suicidal state, Sylvia replied on 29 December with a heartfelt description of her own six-month ordeal, when she could not bear to read or write and detested the optimism of her doctors. Sylvia wanted her mother to tell him about Sylvia’s case and what Aurelia had said to her at the time: that it was most important to open yourself to life, to be easy on yourself, to get out in nature, and to see that you are valued for yourself, not for your achievements. Tell him, she urged Aurelia, that Sylvia had thought her case was hopeless, but she had nonetheless recovered. But, she warned, do not minimize what he feels; agree with him even if he thinks his plight is dire, she reiterated. She wanted her mother to give him as much time as she could afford. “Adopt him for my sake (as the Cantors did me)” and make no demands, Sylvia instructed.

In end-of-the-year letters to Aurelia and Warren, Ted mentioned that he was encouraging Sylvia to get started on that novel she kept announcing. She was pouring a good deal of energy into her cooking, he noted. The film Sylvia suggests meal preparation and baking were the diversions of a blocked writer. And it is true that over the next year Sylvia would produce relatively little prose or verse. But her energies had to go somewhere, and it is hard to see how forcing the novel at this point would have done her much good. She needed more time to work out a major project than was available while studying for her courses; her interrupted writing routine induced considerable anxiety and even depression.

Sylvia began 1957 by adhering to her two-hour-a-day writing regimen, beginning at 6:00 a.m., before Ted went off to teach at a nearby secondary school. At his urging, she memorized a poem a day while working on love stories for women’s magazines. She also typed some of Ted’s work and assembled poems she planned to submit to the Yale Younger Poets series. For the first time, in a letter to Aurelia on 9 January, Sylvia mentioned “violent disagreements” with Ted, but she assured her mother that he was kind and loving and so good about bringing discipline to her work. Ted resisted the idea of teaching on a permanent basis, as some poets were now doing, securing sinecures that would, in his view, stifle creativity. Writing came first. He taught, temporarily, to earn an income. Sylvia sounded less sure about renouncing an academic career, confiding to her mother on 19 January that she would not argue with her husband about it, mainly because she had such confidence in his future.

On 21 January, Ted wrote to Aurelia and Warren to thank them for Christmas presents and to extol Sylvia’s poetry—especially the cumulative power of the poems in the book she was putting together. Evidently he really did terrify his pupils into submission, since he mentions beating their heads for their “insolence.” Terror tactics, even rages, got the attention of boys who actually had good hearts, Ted insisted, although he seemed less confident of his methods than Sylvia had suggested. He thought he lacked authority and behaved more like an older brother than the father figure they needed. Teaching these recalcitrant lads was a sobering experience, he admitted, evincing none of the all-conquering hero aspect Sylvia liked to tout.

Teaching at Smith for a year was no sure thing, but Mary Ellen Chase’s visit to Cambridge buoyed Plath, who had thought that without a PhD she would get nowhere, judging by the first responses to the inquiries she sent to colleges. But Chase said Plath’s publications more than made up for the lack of a PhD. Sylvia worried, however, about Ted, then not well known in the United States. He would probably have to settle for teaching in a private preparatory school, Chase suggested. Hughes had not changed his mind about teaching, but the idea of voyaging to America and earning a tidy sum to support them through a year of full-time writing seemed desirable. And they both wanted to get away from “stuffy” and “cliquey” England, as Sylvia put it in a letter to Aurelia on 3 February.

Less than three weeks later, on 23 February, Ted received a telegram at 10:30 a.m. telling him he had won the New York City Poetry Center/Harper’s prize for his first book, The Hawk in the Rain. Now his hopes for a proper reception in America soared. They put in a long-distance call to Aurelia, forgetting it was not yet 6:00 a.m. in Wellesley, and in a follow-up letter the next day Sylvia gloated, dismissing the “frightened poetry editors” who had been rejecting his work. The major poet-judges recognized Ted’s talent. “Genius will out.” She was sure his book would be a bestseller.

Characteristically, he wrote Olwyn to tell her about his good fortune, even as he regretted the poems were not better. As Sylvia told her mother, Ted was modest about his work. Sylvia, as his agent, loved to talk him up. Her sense of destiny overwhelmed her as she noted 23 February was the first anniversary of the “fatal party” when she first met him. She took a proprietary pride in his work, declaring that she had typed and retyped those poems, and felt no sense of rivalry—only certainty that their award-winning output would increase. She believed that, in fact, she had made Ted as keen on competition as she was. In Letters Home, Aurelia commented that all her life Sylvia had sought such a man, and that from the age of four she had boosted male egos, always choosing boys who deserved her cheers. While Ted Hughes certainly did not lack confidence, Sylvia’s “unshakable” (to use Aurelia’s word) faith in him may well have accelerated his ambition. Intellect, vigor, grace, moral commitment, and a lyrical style, “O, he has everything,” Sylvia concluded. In a letter to his brother, Gerald, and Gerald’s wife, Joan, Ted simply said, “Sylvia is my luck completely.”

Hughes’s sudden success in America coincided with a tirade against his native land. In an aside that does not appear in the published collection of his letters, he gave Gerald and Joan his contemptuous opinion of a declining England, declaring the Anglo-Saxon “less worthy to live than any evil thing on earth.” Hughes decried the British Imperial Army, in which he had served, and the public schools that produced a uniformity typified in the blazers worn at weekends, and in “cut glass accents” resulting in a “complete atrophy of sensitivity and introspection. You can never correct them, because you can never wound them into seeing how foolish they are.”

Sylvia was beginning to torment herself about her unwritten novel, tentatively titled “Falcon Yard.” Where was her plot? Why had she not made more of her travels to Cambridge, London, Yorkshire, Nice, Benidorm, Madrid, and Munich? Basing the protagonist on herself, a sort of femme fatale who “runs through several men,” and featuring characters derived from Gary Haupt, Richard Sassoon, Gordon Lameyer, Mallory Wober, and others, she wanted to explore a character torn between playing it safe and a “big, blasting, dangerous love.” Other female characters, based on Nancy Hunter and Jane Kopp, would serve as foils or alter egos, apparently providing the kinds of alternatives the protagonist confronted. But then her journal breaks off to consider life with Ted, and her concern that she may “escape into domesticity.”

Sylvia turned to Virginia Woolf, whose diary comforted Sylvia because Woolf, too, got depressed. Indeed, Sylvia thought that in the dark summer of 1953 she had been channeling Woolf and emulating her suicide by drowning. But Sylvia had been resilient and had bobbed to the surface. Although she had dreamed of a traditional, grand wedding in Wellesley, she now reveled in the memory of the simple and spare ceremony in the “church of the chimney sweeps with nothing but love & hope & our own selves.” Ted had worn his old black corduroy jacket and Sylvia a pink knit dress Aurelia had bought for her. In Sylvia’s ecstatic prose, she and Ted were now the first couple, and like a new Adam and Eve they were destined to people the world with brilliant offspring. The marriage to Hughes transformed all that had gone before, so that earlier suitors would appear in her projected novel only to be dismissed as weak, flabby, and lacking in purpose.