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

Автор книги: Carl Rollyson

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CHAPTER 7

QUEEN ALSO OF THE IMMORTALS

(1962–63)

July 1962: The call that kills a marriage—Plath discovers her husband’s infidelity; October: The couple separates, and Hughes moves to London; December: Plath moves to a London flat with her two children; January 1963: The Bell Jar is published in England under a pseudonym; 11 February: Plath commits suicide.

9 July 1962: The double ring of doom—Sylvia raced to catch the call before Ted could intercept it. To American ears, the harsh doorbell-like sound seemed insistent—not like the plodding, monotonous tones of an American phone. She recognized the woman asking for Ted, even though Assia lowered her voice, pretending, Sylvia thought, to be a man. She had been on edge ever since David and Assia Wevill’s May visit to Court Green. Sylvia would later mythologize Assia as a Jezebel, a harlot queen, an evil woman bent on taking away her Ted.

Aurelia, then staying at Court Green, saw her daughter clutch the phone, blanch, then turn it over to Ted. This was the moment Sylvia’s life sped up, the second her poetry erupted like a Greek necessity and became palpably autobiographical. Two days later, she could still write to Clarissa Roche, asking her to come for a visit as if nothing had happened. But in her poetry she described her defilement by words pouring out of the phone like mud. Court Green, the Devon home she had created as a haven for their family and their writing, now seemed polluted: “O god, how shall I ever clean the phone table?” Aurelia watched her fastidious daughter, a homemaker who believed in a spotless house—the same way she believed in impeccable poetry—rip the phone line out of the wall, treating it like a monster’s threatening tentacle. It was too late, and the poet felt infected, sensing the caller’s words were like a monster’s spawn percolating in her heart.

Ted talked into the phone briefly and hung up, but Sylvia believed he had summoned this speaking abomination: “It is he who has achieved these syllables,” she declared in her cryptic poem, “Words heard, by accident, over the phone.” “Now the room is ahiss,” wrote Sylvia, transforming the vowels and sibilant s’s of Assia’s name into a threatening noise. It is a scene from a 1950s science fiction movie, the imagination of disaster that Susan Sontag saw as a prevalent theme of the decade. The awful horror of being swallowed up resonates in the poem’s last hysterical lines: “Muck funnel, muck funnel– / You are too big. They must take you back!” The nameless “they,” Sylvia’s being dragged into this swamp of feeling, dramatizes her engulfment by the terror of her decomposing marriage.

The typical criticism of Plath then held her poetry to be overwrought, both in terms of technique and of temperature. The reader who withdraws from her work cries out, as she does, “They must take you back!” But Plath’s great achievement is precisely her refusal to be temperate, to exercise the restraint the British deem “good form.” Just as understatement can be a powerful literary tool, overstatement, like an optometrist’s overcorrection, can compel greater perception.

Charged words were a tonic for Sylvia Plath—no matter whether they expressed her highs or her lows. What Sylvia said on the day of the phone call—that she had never been happier with her husband, her children, her home, and her writing—was neither a ruse, nor wishful thinking meant to deflect the tension between the couple that troubled Aurelia. Sylvia’s moods rose and fell, day-by-day—sometimes moment-by-moment, like the voices in “Three Women.” Words were how she persuaded herself. Words—as her poems reiterate—were the very stuff of life to her: “[T]he blood jet is poetry.” Using words, she could create that blissful union with Ted, and with words she could demolish it. She could not, however, permanently secure herself with words, and her recognition that poetry was only a momentary stay against confusion undid her. She wanted more than words could give her.

The magical property Sylvia ascribed to words is evident in the bonfire she proceeded to make of Ted’s papers—adding for good measure her second novel, in which he figured as the hero. All these words had to be destroyed in order for her to continue composing her life and work. That her immolation of his writing did not disturb Hughes suggests he understood what words meant to her. To see burning of the papers as merely an act of revenge—or even as the act of a disturbed woman—does not do justice to the kind of writer Sylvia Plath was. As her husband knew, she could live again only if she destroyed those words, which now seemed a lie. In “Burning the Letters” (13 August), Plath wrote of flaking papers that “breathe like people,” deriving a savage sort of energy from the fire in veins that “glow like trees.” This ignition of rising flames mingles with the sound of dogs tearing apart a fox, the image of a life consumed, its oxygen supply depleted. The papers memorializing the life were now merely particles of immortality, seeming to satisfy her even as her rage reddened the very air.

Sylvia demanded that Ted move out. The next day he decamped for London. He returned occasionally to see the children. An angry, humiliated Sylvia hated to see her mother witness her disintegrating marriage. Confiding in her friend Elizabeth Compton, Sylvia called Ted a “little man.” This sounded to Elizabeth like an anguished cry over a fallen idol. Sylvia had trouble sleeping. “Poppies in July” reflects her exhaustion and search for relief. The flowers appear as “little hell flames” and seem to emit a dark energy that the poet craves, picturing a mouth unable to “marry a hurt like that!” Sylvia had drawn blood when she first kissed Ted Hughes, and she had married a hurt like that. Now she craved an alternative, “liquors” that would dull and still her. During this time of turmoil, Al Alvarez wrote her two letters (dated 21 and 24 July), responding to her demand that he tell her frankly what he thought of her new poems. She could take any criticism he wished to offer, she emphasized. But all he could say was, “They seem to me the best things you’ve ever done. By a long way.”

On 21 July, Sylvia wrote to Irish poet Richard Murphy, asking if perhaps he could help arrange for a visit in late August for her and Ted. Apparently she still hoped that the marriage could be repaired. She “desperately” wanted to be near the sea and boats and away from “squalling babies.” The ocean had been the center of her life, and its appearance in Murphy’s poetry attracted her. “I think you would be a very lovely person for us to visit just now,” she added, without explaining the crisis in her marriage.

Aurelia left for home on 4 August. She recalled in Letters Home, “There was a great deal of anxiety in the air” as the conflicted couple bid her a stony good-bye, an epilogue to the “oppressive silences” between Sylvia and Ted that Aurelia had noticed from the beginning of her stay. Yet the couple continued to speak to one another. Indeed, they continued to fulfill their professional commitments in London and elsewhere, not keeping their breakup a secret, exactly, but behaving like amicable husband and wife when they appeared in public.

Sylvia puzzled over what to tell people. A mid-August letter to her mother did not even mention the troubles with Ted. But on 27 August, she wrote in the hope that Aurelia would not be too shocked that Sylvia wanted a legal separation agreement. She did not believe in divorce, but she could not abide the degrading and agonizing days that had destroyed her well-being. Her language is melodramatic, evoking the doomed romances and marriages that her mentor, Olive Higgins Prouty, memorably portrayed in Stella Dallas and Now, Voyager. Made into films starring, respectively, Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis, Prouty’s works belonged to Plath’s store of tearjerker tales like Jezebel (another Bette Davis vehicle) that she could call up without irony.

Evidently Ted could not abide this side of Sylvia, for she reported to Mrs. Prouty at the end of September, “He says all the kindness and sweetness I loved & married him for was mere sentimentality.” To Aurelia, Sylvia added, “He now thinks all feeling is sentimental & womanish.” That Plath scorned Prouty’s sentimental novels is beside the point; they infected the poet’s temperament the same way a tune you do not like keeps playing in your head. Culture is fixed in the human psyche like the grooves of a long-playing record.

Ted’s mood can be gauged from the letter he sent to Olwyn in the late summer of 1962. The “prolonged distractions” of the previous nine months had depleted his bank account and diminished his productivity. So he was grateful when his sister offered her help. “Things are quite irrevocable,” he added. He had deferred too long to “other peoples’ wishes.” But now he seemed to feel a new burst of energy, with several promising projects in the works. The problem, his letter indicates, had been the “awful intimate interference that marriage is.” The language is startling, especially after reading so many earlier Hughes letters conveying just the opposite sentiment. But with Olwyn he could express himself without the need for excuses or rationalization. He was appalled at how he had circumscribed his existence.

During the second week of September, Sylvia left the children with a nanny to join Ted on an excursion to Ireland. Was the journey an effort to settle the terms of a separation or divorce? Ted wasn’t sure, he told Olwyn. The trip ended abruptly when he disappeared. Afterward he wrote to Olwyn, claiming, in contradictory fashion, that Sylvia had reverted to the immature state he had observed when he first met her, and that she reminded him of Aurelia, whom he said he detested. It wouldn’t hurt for Sylvia to grow up, he concluded. An unsympathetic Murphy did not know what to make of Sylvia, who wrote him upon her return home that his sudden coolness perplexed her, since he had shown her some cottages she might wish to rent. She assured him her interest was only in finding a place to write and to care for her children, accompanied by a nanny. The idea that she might be invading Murphy’s literary territory in order to write about it was preposterous, she assured him. “Please have the kindness, the largeness, to say you will not wish me ill nor keep me from what I clearly and calmly see as the one fate open. I would like to think your understanding could vault the barrier it was stuck at when I left,” she concluded. There is no record that he replied.

After Sylvia returned to Court Green, her midwife, Winifred Davies, wrote to Aurelia. Davies had placed her hopes on the Irish holiday, which to her dismay went awry. Sylvia had returned upset that Ted had not come home, and she resolved to seek a separation. Sylvia said her decision had lifted her spirits. But Winifred thought Sylvia had a “hard hill to pull.” Talking did seem to ease Sylvia and bring some clarity, Winifred assured Aurelia. Winifred found it hard to “judge fairly,” since she had heard only Sylvia’s side, but it seemed to Winifred that Ted had “never grown up,” and that “paying bills, doing income tax, looking after his wife and children” were beyond him. So Sylvia had to be the practical one in their partnership. Ted desired the freedom to go to parties, to travel. He might tire of this in time, but then it would be “too late,” in Winifred’s estimation. “It seems to me that success has gone to his head, and he is not big enough to take it.” Winifred summed up her sad conclusion: “I feel awfully sorry for them all, but I do not think Sylvia can go on living on a rack, and it will really be better for the children to have one happy parent rather then two arguing ones…” Ted’s mother also wrote Aurelia, expressing her sorrow over the ruptured marriage, but noting that Sylvia had Court Green, a car, and the ability to “write for a living.” Aurelia took the letter to mean the break between Sylvia and Ted could not be repaired.

On 17 September, responding to Sylvia’s plea for help, Dr. Beuscher was uncertain how to proceed. So much of their therapy had centered on Aurelia and on Beuscher as an alternative source of authority. Was Sylvia consulting her as a “woman (mother) (witch) (earth goddess), or as a mere psychiatrist?” In truth, Beuscher could no longer be objective. Too much of Sylvia’s plight as a daughter and as a woman paralleled Beuscher’s own experience. The psychiatrist admitted she was furious with Ted, who was acting like a “little child.” His talk of starting over every few years was not the mark of a mature man. He was like a child in a toy store who wants everything, and then throws a tantrum when his wishes are thwarted. Making choices, even if that limited your scope in some ways, is what every adult had to do. Isn’t this what Sylvia had done? Beuscher was afraid that Sylvia might pin her well-being on this one man, rather than on her own “oneness.” The poet had not exhausted her possibilities by picking one man “for life.” All was not lost if Sylvia lost Ted. Sylvia had to remember that her husband was suffering an identity crisis. She should not, Dr. Beuscher admonished her, go down in a “whirlpool of HIS making.” This meant resisting the urge to suffer in his company: “Do your crying alone.” Sylvia was in danger of repeating Aurelia’s role: playing martyr to a “brutal male.” If Ted really wanted a “succession of two-dimensional bitchy fuckings,” then Sylvia should get a lawyer to hit him in his pocketbook for child support, reminding him of his responsibilities. Play the lady, the psychiatrist urged her, and resist the temptation to go to bed with him. In closing, Beuscher dismissed Sylvia’s offer to pay for therapy: “If I ‘cure’ no one else in my whole career, you are enough. I love you.”

Beuscher’s follow-up letter on 24 September advised a divorce, since Sylvia evidently told her that she was not “moping” and had grown to detest Ted. Collect the evidence and get a divorce now, while he remained reckless, the psychiatrist urged her. It would be harder later, especially if in a fit of remorse he proposed a reconciliation. If Sylvia could find happiness, whether or not she found another man, her children would be happy. Just stay out of Ted’s bed, Beuscher reiterated, apparently concerned that Sylvia would backtrack. Read Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, the psychiatrist advised. She wanted to hear from Sylvia that she had done so. No love could really survive, Fromm argued, without the fundamental self-confidence that Beuscher wanted to see in Plath.

Right up to the end of September, Sylvia described herself as trying to hold on to the last vestiges of what she had with her husband. Yet during this period she also saw a lawyer and seemed about to make peace with the idea of life without Ted—reclaiming her own freedom is what she called it. On 24 September, she wrote her mother that she realized Ted “wasn’t coming back.” This realization seemed to liberate her: “My own life, my wholeness, has been seeping back.” Seeping? She had used this word in her poppy poem to describe the slow dulling of her emotions. Was she escaping, or just entering the trauma of her breakup with Ted? “For a Fatherless Son,” written two days later, is full of foreboding: “You will be aware of an absence, presently.” Her happiness was temporary, her son’s smiles appeared as “found money.” Two days later, in another note to Aurelia, Sylvia concluded that she had to exert control over what little life she had left. She did not tell her mother about her crying jags and weight loss. She succumbed to the flu. She started smoking.

Sylvia steadied herself with routines: breakfast with Frieda and the religious taking of tea at 4:00 p.m. in the nursery; invitations extended to visitors; outings with the children; and riding lessons twice a week. Having a nanny also helped. “I don’t break down with someone else around,” Sylvia assured her mother. Clarissa Roche, on a four-day visit, listened to Sylvia vilify Ted: The “strong, passionate Heathcliff had turned round and now appeared to her as a massive, crude, oafish peasant, who could not protect her from herself nor from the consequences of having grasped at womanhood.”

The nights were so awful that Sylvia resorted to sleeping pills. They took her somewhere deep, she said, and waking up with plenty of coffee stimulated her to write both prose and poetry in the early morning hours. No matter how much Sylvia blamed Ted, the idea of divorce revolted her. She believed in the sanctity of marriage. She suspected Ted had a bachelor pad in London. Not Sylvia—no man on the side. She treasured the proprieties: “Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus / Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules,” she wrote obsessively in “A Birthday Present” (30 September 1962). Without that sense of order, life did not matter: “After all I am alive only by accident,” she admitted. “I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.”

Plath was referring, of course, to the attempt to kill herself after her traumatic stint at Mademoiselle. Suicide was always a genuine option. She had said as much to Anne Sexton during some of her happiest days with Ted Hughes. The two women poets discussed their suicide attempts with aplomb. They wanted to take life on their own terms, and though suicide can be regarded as the action of someone out of control, the suicide might regard the act in quite a different light. In “Lady Lazarus,” Plath boasted that to her dying was an art: “I do it exceptionally well.”

Plath’s poems and extant journals show that death itself held no horror for her. They also reveal that as important as writing was to her, it could not, ultimately, salve her. She confessed ruefully: “A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. Nothing is real except the present, and already I feel the weight of centuries smothering me.” Her last poems are burdened with this sense of history and mortality. The passage of time imposed an unremitting pressure, and losing her father when she was so young made her consciousness of death inescapable. This mindfulness of mortality is probably why she said she lived every moment with intensity.

When she felt alone, nothing seemed real, and the present appeared an empty shell. Might as well commit suicide, she confided to her journal: “The loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering.” She did not believe in life after death—not in the literal sense. She thought instead of recently deceased writers such as Edna St. Vincent Millay and George Bernard Shaw, who “left something—and other people will feel part of what they felt.” Approaching her own denouement, she was confident of her own pitch to posterity. Life after death meant “living on paper and flesh living in offspring.” Or so she thought, pulling back with a “Maybe. I don’t know,” in a journal entry written in her nineteenth year.

By the autumn of 1962, Sylvia Plath was probing her connection to eternity. How would it come for her? Like an annunciation? She pondered the question in “A Birthday Present.” “My god, what a laugh” she heard the voice of immortality mocking her. This Pauline poem, with its references to veils, to what shrouds the human perception of a world elsewhere, built upon the superstructure of her fascination with what comes after death—not so much an end in itself as a transit to another realm. Death, in fact, is a seductive presence in this poem: “Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.” Has the coming of death ever been more grandly welcomed than in the final three stanzas of this poem, which evoke the “deep gravity of it,” as pristine as the “cry of a baby,” as the universe slides from her side. The scene is reminiscent of Brutus falling on his sword, rendered glorious in the Greco-Roman accents of “Edge,” perhaps Plath’s last poem, resulting from her recent reading of Greek drama.

In October, Sylvia experienced a burst of inspiration resulting in two dozen of her most powerful poems. Critics have been awed by their intensity and craft, but they have not done justice to their mordant humor. Even a poem as serious and daring as “Daddy” provoked raucous laughter when Sylvia read it to Clarissa Roche. To be sure, Sylvia remained angry and sometimes confused about her broken marriage and about what to do next. She could seem hysterical, reporting that Ted had told her about his and Assia’s speculation that Sylvia would commit suicide. Could Ted Hughes be quite that cruel? William Styron has noted in Darkness Visible that clinical depression often brings on overwhelming tendencies to create melodramatic scenes that express feelings, not facts. And the onset of depression is often not detectable by the afflicted one or by others because the depressed individual continues to function—at least on a basic level. Sylvia was doing better than that. Even at her worst, she continued to write.

Depression is a mysterious disease, Styron emphasizes, and so its origins and generalizations about it are both problematical. Individuals respond to the disease … well, individually. The literature on the subject, he concludes, contains no comprehensive explanation of the disorder. Why one person survives depression and another does not is a mystery, although Plath’s poetry reveals an attitude toward death that made suicide, in certain conditions, desirable—even just.

Death and dead bodies populate her poems. In “The Detective,” written on 1 October, she spoofs the detective story’s presentation of clues and explanations that wrap up a mystery. The confident detective tells Watson that they “walk on air” with only the moon, “embalmed in phosphorus” and a “crow in a tree. Make notes.” Existence is an enigma; the evidence is evanescent. Observation is all. Clearly Plath’s droll sense of fun—fun of a very high order—had not deserted her. And this is surely what is so thrilling about her life and work: its witty persistence, no matter the impediments.

Sylvia took to beekeeping, one of her many ways of honoring her father’s memory and feeling close to him, and in the first part of October she wrote her famous sequence about an insect world that had fascinated Otto Plath. The poems, like beekeeping, provide an all-encompassing experience—surely a welcome activity for a distraught writer, who had “seen my strangeness evaporate,” as she puts it in “Stings” (6 October), finding comfort in announcing her control of “my honey-machine.” In “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” the noisy swarm becomes Shakespearean, clustering in “unintelligible syllables … like a Roman mob.” Sylvia addresses herself as the “sweet God” that will set them free. More than one friend observed a more cheerful woman, still angry, but also liberated and thriving on animosity toward Ted and the ecstasy of composing poetry. Sylvia said that working on a poem gave her greater pleasure than any other activity. She lived for it and—she eventually realized—she was willing to die for it.

The bee poems also reflect a sense of powerlessness overcome. Sylvia knew this work was a triumph, but she knew she had a long way to go. Writing to her mother on 9 October, she wanted to believe that in a return to Ireland “I may find my soul, and in London next fall, my brain, and maybe in heaven what was my heart.” The last phrase echoes what she had told a friend, that she had given Ted her heart, and there was no getting it back—not in this life anyway. Ireland, the land of her hero, Yeats, she regarded as a fount of inspiration. London was “the city,” where poetry became commerce, where Al Alvarez at The Observer, now an indispensable reader of her work, published it.

Sylvia’s letter of 9 October can be taken as a kind of relapse. “Everything is breaking,” including her dinner set and her dilapidated cottage, she told Aurelia. Even her beloved bees stung her after she had upset their sugar feeder. But in that same letter she refused her mother’s invitation to come home, to be financially supported and looked after. The daughter demurred. She had made her life in England. If she ran away, she would “never stop.” Surely this refusal was a courageous act, especially since she recognized, “I shall hear of Ted all my life, of his success, his genius … I must make a life all my own as fast as I can … I am a fighter.” This was taking Ted on in his homeland, and given the superiority of the work she was now creating, her statement cannot be discounted as bravado. In retrospect, it is difficult not to see her suicide in terms of this letter, as a turning of the tables: “I shall hear of Sylvia all my life, of her success, of her genius.”

Sylvia signaled the fragile equilibrium of her life to Aurelia, expressing the hope that Warren or his wife or some other family member could come for a visit by the spring. Aurelia herself would not do—as an uncompromising Sylvia vehemently pointed out: “I haven’t the strength to see you for some time. The horror of what you saw and what I saw you see last summer is between us and I cannot face you again until I have a new life; it would be too great a strain.”

And so Sylvia regrouped, three days later writing her most famous poem, “Daddy.” A new life meant coming to terms with the old one. The autobiographical references are inescapable: The speaker is thirty, mentioning she was ten when her father died and twenty when she attempted a suicide that would reunite her with him; the father is German, and like the pontificating Otto, stands before a blackboard; a heavy marble statue has one gray toe (one thinks of Otto’s amputated leg). And, of course, the poem definitively addresses the longing to recover a father who presided with such authority over his household that he seemed, as the poem has it, “a bag full of God.” Anyone reading Sylvia’s vituperative letters about Ted would be hard put not to identify him as one of the poem’s “brutes.”

“Daddy” reverberates with twentieth-century history, especially echoes of the Second World War, and reflects the poet’s desire to imprint herself on world-shaping events—to insert herself into history like one of those Jews sent off to concentration camps. The child who vowed when her father died that she would never speak to God again includes a father in her list of rejected authority figures. Only by forsaking what she has loved and yearned for can she be her own person. The image of the victim identifying with her persecutor, the “panzer-man,” anticipates the thesis Hannah Arendt’s propounded a year later in “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” (Eichmann was put on trial on 11 April 1961, more than a year before “Daddy” was conceived, and he was executed on 31 May 1962, a little more than four months before the poem’s composition.) As critic Judith Kroll points out, Plath also anticipates Susan Sontag’s analysis of fascist aesthetics—especially the desire to exalt “two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude.”

Plath’s identification with victims of the Holocaust has offended some readers. But it is very American of Plath to appropriate the history of others and welcome that history into her heart. Rather than reducing history to the confines of her personal agon, she regards her own experience as a chapter in a story larger than herself: “Every woman adores a fascist.” This is the great gift of “Daddy”: its amalgamation of the provincial and the international, the personal with the mythology of modern life. References to the “rack and screw” expand the poem’s reach to the Middle Ages, and with an image of a father sucking the blood out of his child, to the vampire myth. A reader of Plath’s generation might well conjure up Bela Lugosi, the fatherly middle-aged man engulfing his victims in his black cape. Photographs of the hulking, wolfish Ted Hughes, invariably dressed in black, also come to mind.

Plath’s ironic, bitter poem draws on—even as it debunks—popular songs such as Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” (1938), sung by Marilyn Monroe in Let’s Make Love (1960). In the film, “Daddy” is slang for a woman’s older lover, who treats her so well. In the poem, child and adult merge in the disturbing closing line: “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” Through with Daddy? Through with the idea of an idealized daddy? Or through in the more complete sense of just giving up? Has Plath triumphed, or just destroyed what gave her life meaning? The poem is perfectly pitched to pivot either way.

But why did the poem make Sylvia and Clarissa Roche laugh? Was laughter a way to master the demons let loose in the poem, a therapeutic whistling past the graveyard? Certainly Sylvia’s mood lifted, for on the very day she composed “Daddy,” she wrote apologetically to her mother, “Do tear up my last one. It was written at what was probably my all-time low, and I have had an incredible change of spirit; I am joyous, happier than I have been for ages.…” Sylvia bustled with plans to remodel the cottage, Ted seemed amenable to a divorce, and she was writing every morning at five, a poem per day completed before breakfast. And these were “book poems. Terrific stuff.…” A novel was also in the works.

This revival turned her toward London: “I miss brains, hate this cow life, am dying to surround myself with intelligent, good people. I’ll have a salon in London … I am a famous poetess here—mentioned this week in The Listener as one of the half-dozen women who will last—including Marianne Moore and the Brontës!” Such letters could only have been written to a mother—not just to impress Aurelia, but also to perform for the one person who could utterly identify with this victory. Aurelia had given up her own literary ambitions to serve her husband and would clearly empathize with a woman rebuilding her life after the loss of a spouse.

To Warren and his wife, Maggie, Sylvia wrote on the same day, “The release in my energy is enormous.” She still believed in Ted’s genius, and it hurt no less to be “ditched,” but she was planning a London season full of freelance work, including broadcasting and reviewing. She still had to regain her health, she admitted, mentioning the black shadows under her eyes and a smoker’s hacking cough. She hoped she might join them on a trip. Their letters meant so much to her, she assured them, and as she had done with Aurelia, she spoke delightedly about her children, adding that she wanted Warren and Maggie to consider themselves Frieda and Nick’s godparents. In all, it sounded very much like Sylvia was reconstituting both her personal and professional worlds.