The Last Days of Sylvia Plath

By Carl Rollyson

In her last days, Sylvia Plath struggled to break out from the control of the towering figure of her husband Ted Hughes. In the antique mythology of his retinue, she had become the gorgon threatening to bring down the House of Hughes. Drawing on recently available court records, archives, and interviews, and reevaluating the memoirs of the formidable Hughes contingent who treated Plath as a female hysteric, Carl Rollyson rehabilitates the image of a woman too often viewed solely within the confines of what Hughes and his collaborators wanted to be written.

Rollyson is the first biographer to gain access to the papers of Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse at Smith College, a key figure in the poet’s final days. Barnhouse was a therapist who may have been the only person to whom Plath believed she could reveal her whole self. Barnhouse went beyond the protocols of her profession, serving more as Plath’s ally, seeking a way out of the imprisoning charisma of Ted Hughes and friends he counted on to support a regime of antipathy against her.

The Last Days of Sylvia Plath focuses on the train of events that plagued Plath’s last seven months when she tried to recover her own life in the midst of Hughes’s alternating threats and reassurances. In a siege-like atmosphere a tormented Plath continued to write, reach out to friends, and care for her two children. Why Barnhouse seemed, in Hughes’s malign view, his wife’s undoing, and how biographers, Hughes, and his cohort parsed the events that led to the poet’s death, form the charged and contentious story this book has to tell.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Feb 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781496826879

Carl Rollyson

Carl Rollyson is professor emeritus of journalism at Baruch College, CUNY. He is author of many biographies, including Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volumes 1 & 2; William Faulkner Day by Day; The Last Days of Sylvia Plath; A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan; Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews; and Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, Revised and Updated. He is also coauthor (with Lisa Paddock) of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated. His reviews of biographies have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New Criterion. He also writes a weekly column on biography for the New York Sun.

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NARRATIVE

1

In her last days Sylvia Plath struggled to break out of a tightening cordon sanitaire that formed around the towering figure of her husband Ted Hughes. In the antique mythology of his retinue she had become the gorgon threatening to bring down the House of Hughes.

The recent publication of Plath’s letters to her therapist shows a beleaguered Plath fending off an abusive Hughes who wished her dead. This terrorizing of Plath, told in her last letters, formed the story that two female biographers, Harriet Rosenstein and Elizabeth Hinchliffe, wished to tell but could not because of the coercive conspiracy against their work headed by Hughes himself. Hinchliffe, after uncovering new material about Plath’s suicide, retreated from pursuing a biography. Rosenstein, for a time, held on, gathering new material, including interviews with sixty-four principals in Plath’s life (fifty-three cassette tapes and two reel-to-reel recordings), and forming a friendship with Plath’s therapist, Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse (married name Beuscher). When Rosenstein first interviewed Barnhouse on June 14, 1970, she concluded that the psychiatrist had a massive vested interest in Plath. The same could be said for Rosenstein, who to this day has not disclosed what she knows, and like Barnhouse before her, has protected a hoard of material just as Ted Hughes and his estate have done, shielding the extant Plath from public view. Even when Rosenstein put up her papers for sale, her broker’s website overlayed one document upon another—offering Google-like snippets, a glimpse of a redacted Plath, teasing and taunting us to edge in at the margins of a life that has been censored by public archives and private hands, beginning with Ted and Olwyn Hughes. Under their watch: missing pages from Plath’s 1962 annotated calendar, torn out journal pages from existing journals, two missing or destroyed journals covering 1960–1963, and a missing fragment of a novel manuscript. Because no careful accounting of Plath’s remains was ever made while her work remained in Hughes’s possession, we cannot be sure if Plath removed or destroyed some of this material. Certain poems Plath wrote in her final months at Fitzroy Road may also have gone missing. By his own account, Hughes left in open view Plath manuscripts that others may have pilfered. Plath scholar, Judith Kroll, observed the disarray and reported on it firsthand in her outstanding book, Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (1976).

This book focuses on the train of events that plagued Plath’s last seven months when she tried to recover her own life in the midst of Hughes’s alternating threats and reassurances. In a siege-like atmosphere a tormented Plath continued to write, to reach out to friends, to care for her two children, and to remodel her life.

Drawing on court records, archives, and interviews, while interrogating the memoirs of the formidable Hughes contingent who treated Plath as a female hysteric, I seek to rehabilitate the image of a woman too often viewed solely within the confines of what Hughes and his collaborators wanted to be written. At her funeral, Ted blurted out: Everybody hated her. Jillian Becker, one of the important witnesses to Plath’s last besieged days, replied: I didn’t.

2

What happened to Sylvia Plath in the last seven fateful months of her life will never be entirely known. But virtually every year, and with each biography, we edge closer to understanding the fraught circumstances that culminated in her suicide. A key figure in the poet’s final days is her therapist, Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse, then married to William Fredrick Beuscher. She had two children from a previous marriage, and by 1960, she had six sons by Beuscher, whom she divorced in 1968. Her sense of motherhood and family had a profound impact on Plath. In 1980 Barnhouse became an ordained Episcopal priest, and her belief in the spiritual dimensions of psychotherapy, as I will show, had a significant impact on her understanding of what happened to Sylvia Plath. Barnhouse may have been the only person to whom Plath believed she could reveal her whole self. Barnhouse went beyond the protocols of her profession, serving more as Plath’s ally than her doctor, seeking for her former patient a way out of the imprisoning charisma of Ted Hughes and the phalanx of friends he counted on to support a regime of antipathy against her.

After Plath’s death Ted Hughes and his sister Olwyn engaged an authorized biographer, Lois Ames, to write an anodyne biography, never completed. Ames said: It became increasingly difficult for me to do this, as other biographers have found out. And I finally decided for the sake of my own sanity and my family that it was better to pay back the advance to Harper’s. I always felt it was a wise decision. Ames may also have realized that she was a placeholder, a convenient tool for Ted and Olwyn, who could say to other biographers, We can’t help you, we are already working with an official biographer. Who knows what material that Ames, too, has sequestered?

What exactly troubled Ames? Like every Plath biographer, she encountered an effort to suppress even the most fundamental facts not only about the poet’s life but about the sources of her achievement. In February 1965, almost exactly two years after her death, Ted Hughes wrote about Ariel and the last two years of his wife’s life, observing that she underwent a poetic development that has hardly any equal on record, for suddenness and completeness. How had it happened? He believed that the birth of her first child started the process. All at once she could compose at top speed, and with her full weight. Her second child brought things a giant step forward. All the various voices of her gift came together, and for about six months, up to a day or two before her death, she wrote with the full power and music of her extraordinary nature. This explanation is biographical, but you can see what is missing: Mention of the marriage breakup and the fraught last seven months of her life, when, by her husband’s own account, she became an even greater poet. Hughes did not want Ames, or any other biographer, to reveal what he felt he had a right to conceal. But could such a right be enforced, let alone defended, when Hughes went into business as Plath’s impresario, managing the timing and profits of her publications, and providing, when he chose, the bare minimum of biographical details? He commandeered her literary estate as his property, as if she belonged to him alone, even though, by the end of her life, she did not want to be his at all—or certainly not on the terms he proposed to her. In one of her letters, Plath said that when Hughes moved out, the muse moved in. His presence had stifled her ability to write, and his absence created the Plath voice he still insisted on owning. Out of the simple need to know what happened, to understand the suddenness and completeness of her poetic development, biography was born. In Kindness, Plath wrote that The blood jet is poetry, / There is no stopping it. The blood jet is also biography. There is no stopping it.

When Harriet Rosenstein began to make significant progress on a Plath biography, an alarmed Olwyn Hughes wrote to Ruth Barnhouse on December 16, 1971: This seems to be a very difficult situation and I’d be awfully grateful if you could clarify it all for me. Lois Ames, who is an absolutely charming woman and is doing solid and careful research about Sylvia in preparation for the biography she will be bringing out in some years time, tells me that she phoned you and that you were rather off putting. Hughes said Rosenstein was not to be trusted. If by any chance you did happen to give—under whatever pretext from Harriet—any papers or records or anything of your relationship with Sylvia to Mrs Rosenstein and if these are at Brandeis as it is rumoured I trust you’ll give us all assistance in getting them back. Barnhouse does not seem to have replied.

Not until Al Alvarez, a poet, critic, and friend of Plath and Hughes, published The Savage God (1971) did the circumstances of Plath’s death become widely known and the subject of much speculation. An infuriated Hughes, still trying to block a truthful biography, began his first efforts to waylay any biographer other than Ames, enforcing on friends, publishers, and family a code of silence broken, in the first instance, by Edward Butscher, who published the first Plath biography in 1976, when it became apparent that Ames had withdrawn from the minefield of Plath’s life history in disgust. Butscher’s biography, while opening up Plath biography for the first time, nevertheless faltered, since he had limited access to letters and to interviews with many of those closest to Plath. Others shied away from Butscher after the admonitions of Olwyn and Ted Hughes, who threatened lawsuits and conducted campaigns against other contending Plath biographers.

Rosenstein persisted, for a time, turning to Barnhouse, in the belief that by forming an accord with the poet’s most trusted confidant, the biographer could penetrate to the core of Plath’s life and death. Barnhouse became, Rosenstein realized, Ted Hughes’s rival. Later the spurned Hughes would vent his rage in a poem, Howls and Whispers, which turns on Plath as the one who had deserted him for Barnhouse: And from your analyst: ‘Keep him out of your bed. / Above all, keep him out of your bed.’

The Barnhouse-Rosenstein entente is apparent in the therapist’s May 22, 1990, letter to what one Hughes accomplice, his editor Frances McCullough, later called Harriet the Spy: I can hardly believe myself that it has been more than twenty years since we spent such intense time together reviewing what each of us knew about Sylvia Plath. Barnhouse had chosen to seek out Rosenstein because another biographer, Paul Alexander, had begun to probe deeply into the Barnhouse-Plath relationship, realizing that as yet another unauthorized biographer he would also need to break through the formidable palisade Hughes and his retinue had built around Plath and that had even resulted in the entombing of Harriet Rosenstein’s work, sealed away in a dissertation that to this day is unavailable.

Barnhouse, who said she destroyed some of her correspondence with the poet, sought to retrieve from Rosenstein the remaining letters from Plath, consisting of forty-five pages for a total of 18,000 words, which the therapist had vouchsafed to the biographer, and the tape recordings the two of them had produced. Barnhouse now sought to resurrect the body of her knowledge, including a tape recording of the notes she had made at McLean hospital about Plath’s treatment and recovery from her first suicide attempt. Barnhouse, wishing to refresh her recollections said to Rosenstein: You did ask awfully good questions.

Rosenstein never replied to Barnhouse’s letter. Indeed, in the Smith College lawsuit against the biographer Rosenstein claimed never to have received the letter asking for return of the Plath correspondence and other materials generated in the interviews with the therapist. At issue was who properly owned those letters—Smith College, which holds Barnhouse’s papers, or Harriet Rosenstein, who had decided to sell the letters as part of her archive. A settlement brought the letters to Smith College just in time to be included in The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2.

How it is that Sylvia Plath’s last days remain occluded? Why does it matter so much—not only to Plath biographers, readers, and scholars, but to Plath’s own principles? As Barnhouse wrote in a letter to Dr. John Horder, the poet’s physician at the time of her suicide, Sylvia Plath would have been sensitive to the academic dishonesty involved in suppression or withholding of facts and impressions.

Barnhouse believed in Rosenstein’s mission and in a properly safeguarded archive at Brandeis University, as she told Dr. Horder. She urged him to speak with the biographer. Barnhouse never contemplated, however, that her own record would be for sale, or that access to such a crucial understanding of Plath’s last days would remain, for so long (close to fifty years now) buried and then resurrected in a public sale that was halted until the lawsuit was settled. Rosenstein still possesses interview recordings and other materials pertaining to Plath’s biography that have not been sold or shared with other scholars. All efforts to gain Rosenstein’s cooperation, including my own, have been rejected, and she continues to rebuff all requests for an interview, as she communicated to me in an email response to my invitation to allow her to see what I have written.

During Plath’s last seven months she confessed to an intermittent depression and then, in her final extant letter, a madness reminiscent of what drove her to attempt suicide a decade earlier. We will never know how many letters Plath wrote to Barnhouse, since the therapist said she burned them at a time when she was making a fresh start after a failed marriage and regarded the correspondence as an excruciating burden. That the letters constituted a formidable cri de coeur is indicated in Barnhouse’s putting her hands a foot apart to indicate the volume of the poet’s pleas to her therapist.

Why Sylvia Plath felt so alone, and why her therapist became a lifelong friend, who seemed, in Ted Hughes’s malign view, his wife’s undoing, coupled with the roles biographers like Rosenstein and her successors played in parsing the events that led to the poet’s death, form the charged and contentious story this book has to tell.

3

In the spring of 1970, Harriet Rosenstein began to interview Ruth Barnhouse about the four-month period Sylvia Plath spent at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. Seventeen years earlier, in September 1953, Plath was recovering from a suicide attempt that occurred shortly after her summer internship at Mademoiselle magazine in New York City, and Barnhouse had taken over her treatment.

After Plath’s release from McLean, she continued a course of therapy with Barnhouse resulting in a friendship that included social interactions and correspondence that went on until a week before Plath died on February 11, 1963. No other medical professional invited such intimacy with Plath or formed a bond that bolstered the poet and enraged her husband, who considered himself her only worthy partner and collaborator.

In Hughes’s poetry and letters, it is clear, especially in her last days, that he was still struggling for Plath’s heart and that even decades after her death, in Birthday Letters, he could no more let go of her than Plath could sever herself from Barnhouse, who, in turn, clung to Plath and responded to Rosenstein almost as a kind of surrogate for the relationship that ended with the poet’s suicide.

The Barnhouse-Rosenstein collaboration began with the skeptical therapist interviewing the biographer about her motives and methods, but this initial wariness soon segued into in-depth conversations, a word that seems more appropriate than interviews, since the two women seemed alike in sensibility and outlook. In fact, Rosenstein would go on to a thirty-five-year career as a licensed social worker with a private psychotherapy practice.

Rosenstein recorded Barnhouse reading from Plath’s medical history and all the notes the therapist made about her patient’s case not only at McLean but in private sessions conducted after Plath’s release from McLean hospital. Barnhouse recommended key texts about depression and loss and arranged meetings between the biographer and suicidologists and psychiatrists. Just before Rosenstein’s departure for England to do more interviewing for the Plath biography, Barnhouse entrusted the biographer with fourteen letters Plath had written to Barnhouse between 1960 and 1963. During this period Plath worked on her novel, The Bell Jar, creating a character, Dr. Nolan, based on Barnhouse.

Barnhouse broke down while attempting to read the Plath letters to Rosenstein. In fact, only three of the letters were read aloud. The therapist, overwhelmed, began weeping and could not go on. She needed an alter ego, and the biographer served as the therapist’s only way of continuing a relationship with Plath that at times had seemed simply too painful to bear. The letters, as Rosenstein put it in her court affidavit, expressed extremities of feeling, thought and content. The trauma of possession that had prompted Barnhouse to burn earlier Plath letters now returned, but with a difference. Now she believed she had found someone to preserve Plath’s legacy—someone apart from the coterie that protected Hughes and disparaged Plath. According to Rosenstein, biographer and therapist agreed that the letters would not be released during Barnhouse’s lifetime but would eventually become available to scholars and biographers as soon as those named in the letters were also deceased.

For three years, beginning with the move to England in 1960, Plath struggled to overcome her misgivings about Hughes and raise a family, often presenting in letters to her mother only the cheerful side of the marriage. The couple had moved from Boston, where Plath had hoped her husband would find a new land in which to create great poetry. Instead Hughes had closed up, disparaging America and Americans, and returned to a Britain he had previously said was decadent and without a future. Yet Plath accompanied her husband to London, first, and then to a country home. When Al Alvarez first visited the couple at their Chalcot Square flat in London, he noticed that Plath had receded into the background. Indeed, at first he did not recognize her as the poet he had published when he was employed as poetry editor at The Observer. Even worse, Ted’s friends seemed unable to empathize with Sylvia’s increasing feelings of isolation. Their incomprehension is best revealed in Dido Merwin’s malicious memoir included as an appendix to the Hughes-approved biography by Anne Stevenson. Rosenstein interviewed poet W. S. Merwin, then Dido’s husband, on April 15 and 16, 1974, and recorded his conviction that Plath had a purely destructive influence on Ted Hughes. Merwin called her a finagaler and better at getting her way than Ted. In her notes, Rosenstein expressed her amazed response to Merwin’s dismissal of what the biographer called Hughes’s flagrant, adolescent acting-out and up with Assia [Wevill]. Merwin said, So what! Big deal. And yet Merwin admitted he had never even met Assia Wevill, whose flagrant pursuit of Hughes was witnessed by Al Alvarez, who quoted to me from the journal he kept at the time.

In such hostile company, Plath relied on Barnhouse as a lifeline. Plath’s mother, in the view of Plath and her therapist, was part of the problem, since Aurelia Plath had subordinated herself to her autocratic husband, Otto, and seemed not to fully take in the strains Plath experienced herself as mother, poet, and wife, doing her best to accommodate herself to a foreign land that lionized her husband. What Barnhouse actually said about Aurelia Plath is not yet available, although it may be divulged if Harriet Rosenstein’s work is ever publicly released. We can, however, glean something of Barnhouse’s attitude toward Plath’s mother in her discussion of how women form a negative image of femininity. Speaking of another case, she mentions the emotional incompetence of the mother who was unable to defend either herself or her daughter from male brutality.

Plath’s American friends supported her, and a few British women commiserated with her plight, but only Barnhouse understood the trajectory, the rise and fall, of Plath’s hopes for a new life, pinned so desperately on Hughes, her poetry, and her children. As Plath wrote in one of her journals, she believed in Barnhouse because she is a clever woman who knows her business & I admire her. She is for me ‘a permissive mother figure.’ I can tell her anything, and she won’t turn a hair or scold me or withhold her listening which is a pleasant substitute for love.

Nearing a complete collapse in her last days, Plath wrote to Barnhouse, asking to stay with the therapist, who worried that the poet was approaching a crisis similar to the one that had resulted in her 1953 suicide attempt. In fact, Plath had alluded to her suicidal feelings when she said her state of mind was like the way she had felt before when she had done that. Her therapist knew what that meant but also agonized about what it would mean for her own marriage, and decided, in the end, not to invite Plath into her home. This was a stunning blow to Plath, who had already rejected her mother’s plea to come home from England. Unable to reject Plath outright, the therapist chose not to answer some of her patient’s letters, thus setting up a lifelong train of regret. When Rosenstein showed Plath’s letters to her therapist to Karen Kukil, the esteemed editor of Plath’s journals, Kukil concluded Plath had shared personal details about Hughes and her children with a profound honesty that went far beyond what she felt able to convey to others, no matter how close they were to her.

Barnhouse confided to Rosenstein that this harrowing last period in Plath’s life continued to trouble the therapist, who believed she had let the poet down. This feeling that some kind of intervention, some change in the terms of Plath’s life, might have saved her is part of what has propelled so many biographers, beginning with Rosenstein, to get the story of Plath’s life right. Barnhouse looked to Rosenstein for a kind of salvation or redemption, as Plath herself had sought a savior. The ironies and parallels and plights of patient, therapist, and biographer converge in a triangulated tragedy that is only now emerging.

4

She had never wanted to live in the country! It was his idea. What was a home to him? No more, it seemed, than a waystation. When she had met him, he was a scruffy ex-student, still hanging around Cambridge, not getting on with much, really, except a dillentantish dabbling in poetry. He had a great voice, one that he worked hard on perfecting, so that he could hold a room with his verse. Ben Sonnenberg became so rapt in listening to Ted Hughes that he fell off his chair, and as Ted picked him up, still talking, Ben felt the vibrations of Ted’s voice running down his arm. It was a voice as deep as England, Sonnenberg recalled, quoting from the famous Hughes poem, Pike. Plath was not the only one Hughes could hypnotize with his voice.

But washing his hair and suiting up for a career seemed to Hughes like a sell-out. But of what, really? She had to ask him. Wasn’t he, in fact, selling himself short as a poet by keeping it all to himself and his mates? He shrugged and shuffled and wore a smile that lighted up his darkly handsome looks. Later, all of this overwhelmed him: that first poetry prize Harper had awarded him, the country home (Court Green), the BBC jobs in London. She had pushed him into it, and that is exactly how he saw it, too, telling her You made me a professional, as if she had robbed him not only of his amateur standing but of his innocence. He was the aggrieved one! She suspected what those trips from Court Green to London amounted to. Al Alvarez had hinted as much. But Ted had treated her as a nagging housewife, scorning her suspicions. It had been the same at Smith. What was that Amherst student doing by his side, seventeen miles from his campus on Sylvia’s home grounds? Again, he said she was hysterical, beside herself with jealousy, even though it was plain to her that even her friends who did not like Ted would bed him if he made the first move. Then the phone rang at Court Green and it was her: Assia Wevill, lowering her voice, trying to sound like a man, Sylvia thought, and asking for Ted, this woman who had entered Court Green like Keats’s Lamia, this woman who had so agitated a usually mild-mannered professor at her school in British Columbia that he had stood up in the middle of lunch and shouted: You bitch! And walked out. Sylvia ripped the phone wire out of the wall and Ted out of her life, telling him to go, NOW, in front of her mother. It was humiliating and aggravating but the only way to deal with this passive aggressive man who never appeared to do anything on his own and seduced his friends and (now she knew) lovers to see her as the gorgon, turning the fun-loving, spontaneous Ted, the independent one they all cherished, into her stony pillar of a husband.

Even the way he left her had been infuriating. No protests. He just took the train to London to his confidants, sleeping on their sofas, reveling in the freedom of the boy-poet in all his ruffled charm taken in by the women and men worried about him. She had thrown him out, he would say in his hangdog way. What was a fellow to do? She was so demanding, so unrelenting, so responsible. He had fled, banished. He was the desperate one. He was making the moves to repair their rupture. He took the blame, of course, but that was just it: He shouldered her hurts. And it infuriated her to see how well his confessions of failure, of how he had let her down, beguiled his friends, only too willing to confer over poor Ted, unable to perform according to her exacting standards. How well his plight played with them. He was the grieving one! She had abandoned him to his own devices. He flailed himself. His self-recrimination played better than her outrage, which his friends regarded as another sign of the high-handed perfectionist Plath they could not abide. She offered no succor, and so Ted, as always, turned to them as the faithful friend, their leader, and

Reviews for The Last Days of Sylvia Plath

[Roselyn Tee · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Carl’s biography approaches Sylvia’s life from a psychological perspective. On many pages I had to stop and note the very deep perspective from Sylvia or another that Carl had quoted. These perspectives included a woman’s need for soul-connection with a man, a woman’s tunneling and drowning response to stress, the sensual pleasure a woman receives from reflecting on her own slight slender build, a man being a woman’s front-line anti-depressant, and every woman adoring a man’s Fascism. Most history seldom informs our own lives and loves, but I appreciated this psychological approach as it shed light not only on Sylvia but myself as well.