Sylvia Plath’s letters from the brink

same time, she was slowly coming to terms with the new reality. She wondered if once the ‘kicking, killing passion is past, & he is free,’ he may not be ‘ such a bastard’. She admitted: ‘our marriage had to go, okay.’

She was also talking of future plans and how and where she wanted to live — in London, with the Devon house as a holiday home. She wrote how she was ‘in my good minutes, excited about my new life’.

By the time my mother wrote her thirteenth letter to Dr Beuscher, on october 21, 1962, she seemed to be taking a more objective view of her marriage and its dissolution; she couldn’t wait to get divorced.

After dropping my father off at Exeter Station for the last time, she returned home not to misery, but to ecstasy: ‘My life, my sense of identity, seemed to be flying back to me from all quarters, buried hidden places.

‘I knew what I wanted to do, pretty much who I was, where I wanted to go, who I wanted to see . . . I was my own woman.’

Although still taking sleeping pills, my mother was now writing ferociously every morning when she woke in the early hours. Her emotions were mustered and she was more in control.

She was writing a poem a day: poems that would become Ariel, the poetry collection that, under the auspices of my father, made her name.

Her letter stated: ‘ He told me openly he wished me dead . . .’

Something my father had apparently said, but in what way? And what was the context?

I had to remind myself that there were two sides to this: exaggeration and hyperbole had been employed regularly in any case, and these were two people fighting over their ending.

What had she said to prompt his devastating remark? My mother would not have been without comment. So, there I was, sitting in bed, reliving the onesided end of my parents’ marriage through my mother’s words — although it could have been any marriage, as messy and cruel as endings are.

If there is no passion in the beginning, then there would be little to burn off at the end. Where there is great passion, as in my parents’ case, surely there must be great pain, great argument, great rage and great sorrow before there is great clarity?

My mother now seemed to question her previous devotion to the very domesticity that she had initially embraced: ‘I am ravenous for study, experience, travel.’

She was craving life, but wanted it made easy with more money.

She also wrote that she didn’t think she could be with any one man for too long, as she liked being alone too much — being her ‘own boss’.

She was already thinking beyond my father, who appeared to be rapidly sinking into the background of this new and exciting life; no more than an inconvenient anchor to something old, tired and out-of-date.

‘It is as if this divorce were the key to free all my repressed energy, which is fierce from six years of boiling in a vacuum.’

In this, she might also have been describing how my father felt.

I had got this far; now I had to brace myself to read my mother’s last letter, which was written on February 4, 1963, and sent from 23 Fitzroy Road, the London flat into which she’d moved with my brother and me only a few weeks earlier.

Seven days after writing the letter, she took her own life.

Encouraged by Dr Beuscher, she had been reading the psychologist Erich Fromm and thought that she had been guilty of what he calls ‘idolatrous love’.

She had lost herself in my father, she wrote, instead of finding herself as she once imagined she had. There was some compassion and understanding: ‘I had a beautiful, virile, brilliant man & he still is, whatever immaturities there may be in his throwing over everything in such a violent way. He has said he is sorry for the lying, and shows concern that we get on on our own.’

I was moved by this admission. In my mind, it was a counterbalance to all the fury that had gone before.

But then: ‘What appals me is the return of my madness, my paralysis, my fear & vision of the worst — cowardly withdrawal, a

SHE mental hospital, lobotomies.’

feared that this might be accentuated by seeing my father once a week when he comes to visit me (she doesn’t mention my brother), because she could imagine what good friends they could be ‘if I could manage to grow up too’.

Her feelings confuse her: she tries to follow Fromm’s advice for concentration, patience and faith, but keeps ‘slipping into this pit of panic and deep freeze’.

She wants to ‘ die and be done with it’; it is becoming too difficult to keep going and her selfadmitted defeatist thoughts are allowed free rein.

She feels a ‘lack of center, of mature identity . . .’ and, in the end, she writes, ‘ I am incapable of being myself and loving myself . . .’ — and that she must take Nick and me out for tea, because we are crying.

As miserable as I might feel in reading a first-hand account of the collapse of a relationship that should have seen my brother and me into adulthood, I was struck by the sensation of standing in the room with my mother; I could almost smell her.

Smith College would soon be calling me to see how I felt her letters should be handled for scholars to study; there would be no undoing the knowledge that this correspondence existed.

Raw, honest, happy, exuberant, tragic and angry, they would sit in a library and be pored over by more strangers; the sensationalist phrases that had already leaked into the public domain would remain without context or explanation, warped and distorted by the views and impositions of other people’s agendas and theses.

This scenario left me feeling suffocated.

While my father does not come out of them as a saint, neither does my mother.

In my view, they are both flawed and impassioned human beings and I love them more for this.

They both suffered, they both made mistakes, they were going through the same kind of hell that literally thousands of other couples go through every day.

yet, in the beginning, there was great goodness and generosity and the kind of love that some of us never find in our lifetimes.

It struck me sharply that, if the final volume of my mother’s correspondence were to be published without her letters to Dr Beuscher, I would forever feel that it was unfinished.

So I decided to let people make up their own minds and, hopefully, find the kind of understanding that my mother was working towards near the end, despite the return of the ‘madness’ that took her anyway.