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

Автор книги: Carl Rollyson

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

But at the same time, Sylvia emphasized to Warren and Maggie that she could not face her mother yet. Written four days later, lines in “Medusa” read like a companion piece to “Daddy”—this time an exorcism of the mother, the epithet “God-ball” recalling the “bag full of God.” Aurelia appears as an ancient “barnacled umbilicus” and “Atlantic cable.” Images from horror films again haunted Sylvia’s imagination: “Off, off, eely tentacle!” Instead of shouting “I’m through,” the poem ends on a flat, defiant note that seems less than convincing: “There is nothing between us.” Or is the last line less emphatic because it can also mean there is no longer anything separating mother and daughter, that the daughter has thrown off her mother’s hold on her only to reestablish a bond on the daughter’s terms? The aim of both poems seems clear: to re-invent Sylvia Plath the poet, an act that entailed putting her parents in their places. In reality, Sylvia could not reject her mother, but in poetry her creative survival depended on the conceit that she had done just that.

Even though Sylvia’s flu appears to have returned on the morning of 16 October, with her fever reaching 101 degrees, she remained ecstatic, writing her mother, “I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.” She anticipated finishing her novel in less than two months and was already inspired to write another. The Bell Jar had been accepted for British publication, and she looked forward to her “leap to London.” But she fretted over household arrangements and an unsatisfactory nanny, and she still hoped that her Aunt Dot or Warren’s wife, Maggie, could come to help with the children. Sylvia needed a respite, especially since she also had the ordeal of the divorce to confront. Although full of plans, she admitted she was struggling against “hard odds and alone.”

In another letter to her mother written the same day, Sylvia pressed her case for Maggie, suggesting her sister-in-law join her for a six-week convalescence in Ireland. It was asking a lot, Sylvia conceded, for Warren’s new wife to embark so soon on a trip abroad. Almost delirious from her 4:00 to 8:00 a.m. writing regimen, Sylvia pleaded, “I need someone from home.” Aurelia, for her part, was holding out for her daughter’s return, although she sent money to procure household help.

Sylvia’s grimmer mood emerged the next morning in “The Jailor,” in which a nameless man poisons the feverish speaker, who declares she has eaten “Lies and smiles.” Sylvia had condemned Ted many times for his lies, although the poem seems more about betrayal per se than about her disloyal husband. “Lesbos,” written the next day, was even more explicit about her misery, mentioning a “stink of fat and baby crap … The smog of cooking.…” Yet neither of these highly allusive poems seems fully developed, as if in deciding not to be so explicitly autobiographical she had truncated her art.

Plath’s dilemma was not much different from that of her contemporary, Marilyn Monroe. Each of Monroe’s screen performances, beginning with Bus Stop (1956) and concluding with The Misfits (1961), was built on scripts that blatantly exploited many of her own characteristics and experiences. In those films, Monroe gave her greatest performances, but like Plath, she did so at great cost to her psyche. To make yourself your own material is both exhilarating and exhausting. The exposure can be gratifying but also denuding.

Writing on 18 October, Sylvia expressed shock at what she had sent her mother two days earlier. It had been the fever speaking. After a visit to the doctor, effective medication, and a good night’s sleep, she was feeling better and taking back her plea for help. She felt strong enough to write Paul and Clarissa Roche, announcing that Ted had left her and that she would divorce him. He had confessed to a want of courage in not telling her earlier that he had never really wanted children. She was disgusted because it was his idea to move to the country, and now she was stranded, hoping they would have an opportunity to visit her.

Sylvia was gradually building up a persona, one she loosed in her next hectoring letter to her mother (21 October 1962): “Don’t talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen—physical or psychological—wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is.” For Plath, the Holocaust was both literal and metaphorical—she did not want the two separated in her poems. She wanted to feel like a Jew and like the cigarette-tortured “negress with pink paws” in “The Jailor.” Sylvia was a cynosure for suffering, “going through hell,” and her agony would mean far more to people than Ladies’ Home Journal “blither” about happy marriages.

Emerging from another cycle of sickness two days later, Sylvia wrote yet another apology to Aurelia, asking forgiveness for her grumpy, fever-induced letters. She now could count on Susan O’Neill-Roe, “dear to the children” and a love to Sylvia. The next day, Sylvia would dedicate “Cut” to Susan. Sylvia wrote in gushing tones about wanting to “study, learn history, politics, languages, travel. I want to be the most loving and fascinating mother in the world,” she declared to Aurelia. To Clarissa Roche, on 25 October, Sylvia wrote an equally buoyant letter announcing, “things were calming down,” and that she was happily planning her future now that Ted with his scornful comments about her novel writing was no longer in the way.

Sylvia Plath not only aggrandized her life, she also made her body into a historic and mythic battleground, the site of an epic contestation. Perhaps better than any poem she wrote, “Cut” exemplifies her grandiosity of purpose, the thrill of cutting her “thumb instead of an onion.” These lines bespeak a persona intent on watching itself with excited yet clinical detachment. The shocking accident becomes a vignette of a pilgrim scalped by an Indian, and then—like a CinemaScope feature—the landscape broadens outward to encompass the image of a million soldiers, “Redcoats,” an allusion, apparently, to the blood flowing from the thumb Plath almost cut off. This virtual severing of a digit makes her wonder whose side these Redcoats are on, as if some treachery is involved in what she has done to herself. Thus she allegorizes her digit as a homunculus, a saboteur, a kamikaze man (a curious locution reminiscent of “panzer-man” in “Daddy”). Even more outlandish is the gauze bandage reddened with blood, which looks like a Ku Klux Klan hood over the thumb. The poem ends in a salute to the “trepanned veteran, / Dirty girl, / Thumb stump,” the poet’s yoking of the literal to the metaphorical, the personal to the political, and the moment to history. Allusions to mutilation, war, subversion, and persecution echo what she said in more prosy terms about wanting to study history, politics, language, travel. She had to bring it all to bear on the stuff of her life, the material of her writing, and present it on a world stage. It is not difficult to imagine Plath, with electrodes on her head and undergoing electroconvulsive therapy, identifying with the “trepanned veteran”—a “head case” with a hole in her skull.

Such poems emboldened Sylvia. She looked forward to cutting a figure on her way to the city. As she wrote her mother the day before writing “Cut,” she planned to use the money Aurelia had sent to buy a Chagford dress (a reference to a clothing shop in Devon, which today still advertises “snazzy” dresses). She was going to put her hems up and get a fashionable short haircut. “Just wait till I hit London,” she announced. Sylvia Plath had to present a certain “look.” She was as acutely conscious of appearance as a public figure, as Marilyn Monroe, and like the actress, she craved public display of her prowess after the failure of her marriage. In a sense she was a mad girl who could not help herself, but she had the confidence to give in to her torment. As a result, she was now giving the performance of her life, going from strength to strength as she built up to a crescendo of poetic outpouring.

Sylvia mentioned to her mother that her “riding mistress” had said she was “very good.” A woman riding a horse named Ariel appears in a poem by the same name, one in a series produced in late October culminating in the hard-won triumph of “Lady Lazarus,” in which the female protagonist exclaims, “I eat men like air.” Sylvia would show these verses in London, she told her mother. She would be announcing to one and all her intention to divorce Ted. She refused to play the “country wife” he had left behind. A woman betrayed was also a woman avenging herself. Or as the speaker in “Ariel” puts it, “I / Am the arrow.” Yet just two lines later, the word “suicidal” is attached to this same speaker, so that as in “Lady Lazarus,” near-death experience is deemed vital to rebirth. The late October poems building toward Plath’s birthday on 27 October enact an ascent, Lady Lazarus rising “out of ash,” the flames of rebirth suggested by her red hair. As grand as the poem sounds, Sylvia prefaced a planned reading of this poem on the BBC with a comment mixing the mythic and the down to earth: “She is the phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a good, plain, very resourceful woman.”

In Plath’s poetry, in her letters to her mother, in what she was telling others she wrote and spoke to, Sylvia declared her need for an audience. On 29 and 30 October, she met in London with Al Alvarez and read him her recent poems. He seemed then the only editor who could appreciate her bold new work. When Alvarez encountered New Statesman editor Karl Miller on the street, a stunned Alvarez learned that Miller had rejected Plath’s new work, including “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” as “too extreme.” Many years after Sylvia’s death, Olwyn, who had access to her sister-in-law’s so-called lost journal, would imply in a letter to Alvarez that Sylvia began to think of him as more than a supporter of her work. Olwyn didn’t make the connection, but perhaps Sylvia did: As Sylvia’s lover, Alvarez would also represent part of her new life, just as Ted Hughes had done after Richard Sassoon had rejected her.

Sylvia’s powerful new voice emerged in a program produced by Peter Orr of the British Council. She sounded older than her thirty years and gave a commanding performance. The poems she read were designed for the ear, she had insisted to Alvarez, who championed her as a bold new voice that shattered the English sense of propriety. Sylvia Plath dared to be intense and violent, the “dirty girl” of “Cut.” Like Plath, Alvarez had attempted suicide. Like her, he was a risk-taker, a rock climber and vigorous athlete. He was a fellow poet who likened the force of her work to “assault and battery.”

By coming to London, Sylvia was going to best Ted Hughes at his own game. Peter Porter, a poet in the Hughes circle who also knew David and Assia Wevill, concluded that Ted really left Sylvia because he could all too clearly see her rising star:

It has always seemed to me that Hughes, though formidable, was not as strong and imaginative a force as Plath.… Leaving Plath must have been not just an imperative for someone who wished to love other women whenever it suited him, but also a move to defend his own talent from competition with a superior one. Such a notion might seem doubtful given the greater recognition he enjoyed than she did, but it is one which has begun to convince readers of her poetry since the true scale of its achievement has become known. Judging the completed course of the two poets’ productions, it is tempting to see Hughes’s attitude as resembling Alexander Pope’s Turk, who will suffer no rival next to the throne.

In The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, Alvarez mentions that in June 1962, even before Assia’s call to Ted at Court Green, the balance of power had shifted to Sylvia. But Alvarez, mistaking the amity the couple showed him, supposed that Ted did not mind this turn of events.

From the moment Sylvia ripped the phone cord out of the wall, she was declaring open hostilities. The wife who had put her husband first, made sure he entered poetry competitions, cooked and cleaned for him, held her career in abeyance and raised his children—all that was over for Ted Hughes, and he knew it. He knew it because he had seen how Sylvia could turn on people, and he knew she was merciless—caricaturing even mentors like Mrs. Prouty and her own mother. The question was, “What wouldn’t Sylvia do to Ted now that she was aroused?” This was, after all, the woman who had drawn blood the first time they kissed. Sylvia could play the victim, but no victim writes the kind of poetry she mustered in her last seven months.

Sylvia returned to her Devon home on 30 October only long enough to make preparations for her flat-hunting trip the first week of November. Although very much on her own, she accepted monetary support from Hughes, and he joined her on 4 November in the search for London lodgings. These fitful meetings upset her. Friends saw her cry and then surmount her grief with rage over his treachery. This behavior, like the poems she was then writing, played like a piece of music, the descending and ascending notes reflecting a huge emotional range. At parties, events, and various get-togethers, Sylvia, a prodigious performer, orchestrated her break with Ted, making it an operatic public affair. Like her urge to publish, to make herself known to the world, which had begun at such an early age, the compulsion to brand her husband in the open got the best of her.

Ted was behaving in a similar fashion, announcing his separation from Sylvia and attracting the attention of other women. On 1 November, he met anthropologist and poet Susan Alliston, who recorded in her journal his declaration that “Marriage is not for me.” Alliston thought he had “got it in for Anglo Saxon women, perhaps too cold. He’s now with a non-Anglo-Saxon”—a reference, no doubt, to Assia. He was already sizing up Alliston, though, admiring her long legs, which he later mentioned in his romantic introduction to her poems and journals. He told her that marriage was not for her either (she had recently separated from her husband). Two weeks later, she was at The Lamb, a Bloomsbury pub, trying to “beautify myself up a little” and hoping Ted would turn up.

On destiny’s doorstep, Sylvia discovered her dream home: 23 Fitzroy Road in Primrose Hill, not far from Dr. John Horder, who was treating her infected thumb. She was alone as she read the plaque noting that W. B. Yeats had lived there. This was it. She immediately got to work securing a five-year lease and raced home to open her edition of Yeats’s Collected Plays, which obliged her with this passage: “Get wine and food to give you strength and courage, and I will get the house ready.” Although the obstacles for a single mother obtaining a flat that others wanted were formidable, and negotiations would prove complicated, the flat represented the assertion of a new, insurgent self. She contrasted herself with Ted, whom she now portrayed as an establishment man caught in “petty fetters” and “bribes,” the world of London silks he had always scorned—a rather prophetic vision of a man who would become poet laureate.

On 7 November, readying herself for the move to London, an exultant Sylvia wrote Aurelia from Court Green about the new flat, which included “two floors with three bedrooms, upstairs, lounge, kitchen, and bath downstairs and a balcony garden!” As usual, she could not help overdoing it, vowing to be a “marvelous mother” who regretted nothing. She spent more than a page on domestic details, including her discovery of a “fabulous hairdresser.” She loved her look, and it had cost her only $1.50. She liked to measure out her happiness in monetary terms, an aspect of the practical Plath that Hughes had deplored but depended upon. Ted had not even recognized her at the train station. No longer in his “shadow,” she would make it on her own and be recognized for her own genius. She even felt magnanimous, if dismissive, about Assia, who had only her well-paid ad agency job and her vain wish to be a writer. Sylvia envied Ted and Assia “nothing.” Men now stared in the street at her new fashionable self. She would appear a “knockout” at the Royal Court summer theater program devoted to poetry. Ted had disdained her love of stylish clothes and thought spending sums on ensembles extravagant. Sylvia, on the other hand, was a center court poet. She dreamed of eventually buying a London home if she ever published a “smash-hit novel.”

Sylvia was hard hit in the second week of November when The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly rejected several of her recent poems—the very ones that would appeal to posterity. But she rebounded, assembling forty of her best works into a manuscript with a title that would make her name, “Ariel, and other Poems,” a seeming tribute to Shakespeare’s freewheeling and enchanting androgynous sprite. The poems reflected a fiercely feminine spirit abetted by a regiment of women, including her old friend Clarissa Roche, her nanny Susan O’Neill Rowe, and Ruth Fainlight (a writer and the wife of novelist Allen Sillitoe). These women stimulated Sylvia to write about motherhood as in itself a courageous, life-affirming choice—precisely the decision that a woman like Assia, so Sylvia believed, had avoided.

That fraught telephone call in July continued to gnaw at the poet, who in “The Fearful” (16 November), brooded on a woman who would pretend to be a man, hollowing out her voice so that it sounded dead. The woman thinks that a baby will rob her of her beauty (Sylvia had heard Assia, worried about losing her beauty, did not want children). “She would rather be dead than fat,” so fearful is this woman who has turned her body over to a man. Plath would have made an excellent biographer. She had scoped out Assia and had a shrewd understanding of her rival’s tastes and temperament. Later, after Plath’s death, Assia would have access to Plath’s journals and see firsthand how the poet had nailed her.

When Clarissa arrived the next day at Court Green for a visit, Sylvia embraced a friend she had previously called an “earth mother,” exclaiming more than once, “You’ve saved my life.” “The Fearful” had brought on another round of rage against Ted. Clarissa caught her at a weak moment, when the burdens of caring for Frieda and Nicholas, for all Sylvia’s bravado, were wearing her out. And yet Clarissa also recalls their raucous laughter. Plath had a hearty laugh. By the time Clarissa departed on 19 November, Sylvia was again in high spirits, writing to her mother that same day as a busy professional woman, assembling her book of poetry and dealing with all manner of correspondence related to her work. She had time, however, to deck herself out with several new outfits and jewelry that she described in detail. These items were essential, making her feel “like a new woman,” although she remained in suspense about the London flat, since her references and financials were still being reviewed.

On Thanksgiving Day, Sylvia wrote again, mentioning her bad cold, made worse by chores such as lugging coal buckets and ashbins. She still worried about obtaining the flat, since she had “so much against me—being a writer, the ex-wife of a successful writer, being an American, young, etc., etc.” She was working like a navvy to prepare for her move, and that activity had disrupted her writing schedule, except for production of potboiling stuff that brought in some income. She was reviewing children’s books for New Statesman, but also reviewing Malcolm Elwin’s Lord Byron’s Wife, which seemed to reflect her state of mind. Although she acknowledged that “Byron the lion was undeniably poor husband-stuff,” she attributes the trouble in his marriage not only to his insufferable wife, Anna Isabella Milbanke, who always had to be “in the right,” but also to Byron’s sister, Augusta, with whom he had an incestuous relationship not unlike what Sylvia had insinuated (without any proof) was the case with Ted and Olwyn. Did Sylvia see that in her more self-righteous moods she resembled Anna Isabella—as Sylvia memorably put it—fixed in the “ego-screws of pride”? Sylvia, who would drop as much as twenty pounds during her separation from Ted, quotes Augusta’s account of Annabella’s wasting away in Byron’s absence: “She is positively reduced to a Skeleton—pale as ashes—a deep hollow tone of voice & a calm in her manner quite supernatural.”

Sylvia’s description of Augusta as a “hectic if unsuccessful Pandarus” seems eerily prophetic of the role Olwyn would later play vis-à-vis Assia Wevill (see chapter 8). Sylvia deplored Annabella’s “refusal to grant her spouse an interview (she never saw Byron again), let alone try to make a second go of it.” Is it too much to suppose that Sylvia, seeing the unfortunate consequences of Annabella’s adamantine attitude, decided not to cut off contact with her own lion simply because he was in the wrong? Trevor Thomas, who occupied the flat downstairs, would later observe her rages, which were an “ambivalent blend of blame, jealousy and wanting him back. She had not entirely given up hope of paradise regained.”

It never seemed to occur to Sylvia that it would be difficult to replicate the support group she could call on at Court Green. Neighbors, a nanny, and visits from friends had done nicely for her, but she was bent on this London adventure and expected, as she told her mother, to be “self-sufficient.” She was lining up readings and broadcasts, phone service for the flat (she had now reached the final stage of contract negotiations), a stove, and other amenities. During this period she impressed Ted Hughes, who while still decrying her “death-ray quality,” also told his brother, Gerald, that they had worked out a more amicable relationship after she arrived in London. Did Sylvia’s attraction to Alvarez also figure in her resurgence?

Between 12 December, the day Sylvia moved out of Court Green, and the end of January, she wrote little poetry, concentrating instead on a novel, “Doubletake,” that dealt with Ted’s desertion. She read biographies and contemporary women novelists, including Doris Lessing, whose new novel, The Golden Notebook, had just been published. When Plath met Lessing, the latter retreated from her importunate admirer. A better match was made with Emily Hahn, a New Yorker writer treasured for her ebullient, welcoming attitude. Hahn, a single mother and a shrewd survivor of hardship, a world traveler and a hardy raconteur, would have been a tonic for Plath, who was searching for new role models.

As Plath told interviewer Peter Orr in late October, she was shifting her attention to prose, wishing to engage with a broad range of subjects—stimulated no doubt by the historical biographies she had been reading. Some of her greatest poems were yet before her, but she seems to have sensed that this phase of her career might be winding down. She awaited the appearance of The Bell Jar, to be published in mid-January as the work of Victoria Lucas. Owing to the novel’s autobiographical nature, Plath thought it best to use a pseudonym.

Sylvia had reason to believe her London life would be a success. It was easier than ever for friends to visit, she had the trusted Dr. Horder close by, the zoo minutes away for the children’s amusement, and proximity to the BBC, where she had good connections. Delays in furnishing the flat, acquiring phone service, and finding an au pair did little to dampen her enthusiasm. She happily painted and cleaned her new home. The weather had not yet turned against her, and Ted’s visits to the flat to see the children had not yet riled her up. Even so, her life seemed to take on a relentless, unremitting quality that she tried to interrupt with lively letters home.

On 14 December, Sylvia wrote to her Aunt Dot about the children’s delight at the zoo, and the shopkeepers who remembered her from the days she had spent in the neighborhood with Ted just a few years earlier. It was like a village really, but with all the conveniences of London. She made even the hassles of moving seem elevating. Sylvia sounded English, but she craved connection with her homeland. “You have no notion how much your cheery letters mean!” she told her aunt. Aurelia sent chatty letters about family and friends and assured Sylvia she was updating Mrs. Prouty about recent developments.

That same day Sylvia wrote her mother that she had never been happier. Even dashing about to get the electricity and gas connected, while her door blew shut with the keys inside, was transformed into a “comedy of errors.” At the time, though, locking herself out had undone her, according to her neighbor Trevor Thomas, who recalled Sylvia’s hysteria. Yet she spoke as though having a five-year lease guaranteed five years of happiness. She imagined Yeats’s spirit blessing her. And why not? Al Alvarez had just told her that Ariel should win the Pulitzer Prize. She had a study that faced the rising sun. At night she joyously watched the full moon from her balcony. Everyone, it seemed, was a darling—or at least obliging—in her catalogue of good fortune.

A week later nothing had changed, as Sylvia detailed for Aurelia the new furnishings and furniture and flowerpots, and more new clothes (made possible by Aunt Dot’s generous seven hundred dollar gift and a one hundred dollar check from Mrs. Prouty). “You should see me nipping around London,” she assured her worried mother. Aurelia suspected that all this frenzied activity simply masked her daughter’s depression—or so Aunt Dot had confided in a letter to Sylvia. Sylvia amped up her enthusiasm: “The weather has been blue and springlike.” That would change.

Then came Alvarez’s devastating Christmas Eve visit, which he has written about in The Savage God. Sylvia wanted more than supportive criticism from him. His understated published account suggests she wanted an affair. But other evidence suggests that the bond between them was much deeper than that. In a letter Olwyn Hughes wrote to Alvarez on 9 June 1988, in an effort to secure an interview for Anne Stevenson, Olwyn mentions reading Sylvia’s journal, written just before her Christmas encounter with Alvarez. Olywn tells Alvarez about a journal entry in which Sylvia cautions herself to relax so as not to “scare you [Alvarez] off.” Sylvia’s admonition to herself, as Olwyn reports it, is remarkably similar to the poet’s 1 April 1956, journal entry, in which she exhorts herself to “be more subdued” and quiet. “Don’t blab too much.” Olwyn refers to the “lost” journal, full of Sylvia’s suffering but also her “jubilation” over her work, including two chapters—one of which recounted the traumatic Wevill weekend visit in May 1962—she had drafted of a new novel. Then Olwyn mentions the “episode with you [Alvarez]” and Richard Murphy’s failure to respond to Plath’s plans to secure a cottage in Ireland for the winter. Olwyn clearly alludes to Plath’s romantic attachment to Alvarez, which Olwyn regards as “one of the keys” to understanding Sylvia’s final days. In effect, Olwyn complicates the story considerably, making it not just about her brother Ted, but also about Alvarez. What exactly is Olwyn saying when she adds that she could understand why Alvarez “wouldn’t want to descend to such indiscretion”? Olwyn assures him that Sylvia told no one about her personal relationship with Alvarez—although how Olwyn could know this is not clear, unless Sylvia said so in that lost journal.

In his reply of 10 June 1988, Alvarez adamantly refused to see Stevenson and “tell all,” expressing disdain for her “languidly researched” work. What else is there to tell? When I put the question to him for this book, he replied, “She was in love with me.” He would say no more, except to repeat what he has already written: He could not sleep with Sylvia because he was then involved with Anne, his future wife. Alvarez regarded Ted as a friend he would not betray; in fact, Ted had slept a few nights on Alvarez’s sofa, talking over his troubles with his estranged wife. And Sylvia wanted more from Alvarez than he was willing to deliver and more than he is willing to say, even now.

Sylvia’s response to Alvarez’s relative coolness was surely more than just disappointment. Like Hughes, Alvarez had championed the poet and the woman. In the most searching study of the Plath/Alvarez affaire, an article that Alvarez himself endorses, William Wooten writes: “Alvarez was now appreciating poems Plath’s husband had not read. Sending poems to Alvarez had become both an intimate act, making the editor a confidant in a marriage breakdown, and an act that defied intimacy, first of the marriage, then of the confidence.” That Plath could no longer draw near to Alvarez made the last six weeks of her life all the more agonizing.

The children had colds when Sylvia next wrote to her mother on 26 December after Christmas dinner with friends. The holiday made her homesick. Snow was falling, a winter scene she compared to an “engraving out of Dickens.” At first, this change from the soggy, wet winter she had anticipated cheered her. But by 2 January, the snow began to pile up. Everything had turned to sludge and then frozen. No snowplows swept through streets in a land that rarely saw appreciable snow. Still no phone. Still 103 degree fevers for Sylvia. No central heating. Dr. Horder prescribed a tonic for Sylvia, who had lost twenty pounds over the summer. “I am in the best of hands,” Sylvia assured her mother. But the chill had set in. It seemed like England had been engulfed in a new ice age. That same day, Sylvia wrote dejectedly to Marcia Brown that she felt “utterly flattened” by the last six months of life without Ted. As she had done with Warren and his wife, Maggie, she wrote to friends, urging them to come for a spring visit. She was lonely in London and feeling like a “desperate mother.”