Chapter 1I Will Never Speak to God Again

Foreword

Every subject I have taken before this one lived to see herself become a name. Didion watched it happen; she arranged it, some of it, on her own terms, in front of the cameras she had learned to use. Sontag argued with her image while the image was still soft enough to argue with. They were present at the making of their own celebrity, and my work, for years, was the work of watching a woman watch herself be watched. That was the beat. I knew its rules. I knew where the woman ended and the figure began, because in each case the woman had been there to draw the line.

Sylvia Plath drew no line. She could not. She was thirty when she died and she had sold, in her lifetime, fewer than a thousand copies of a single book of poems. The fame — the vast, sixty-three-year, still-accumulating fame — arrived at a flat she had already left, to a person who was no longer in the room to correct it. That was the fact I could not get past. I had spent my working life among women who negotiated their own legends. Here was one who never got the chance to negotiate at all.

That was why I wanted her. Not the myth, which I distrusted, and not the death, which the culture had already picked so clean that there seemed nothing left on the bone. I wanted the one subject whose reckoning with celebrity had happened entirely without her — whose image was assembled, after the fact, out of poems she never saw in a book and letters she never meant for a reader and a marriage she did not live to have the last word on. I wanted to know what a life looks like when you subtract the one thing all my other subjects had, which was the chance to answer back.

I expected to write about the Suicide Poet, because that is the figure the culture hands you at the door, and I expected to spend the book arguing with it. I did less arguing than I thought. What I found in the record — the journals she kept with a discipline that frightened me, the letters home, the memoirs of the people who outlived her, the press files, the long public archive that has been opening in installments for six decades — was not the figure at all. It was a beekeeper. A mother cooking with the oven door open to warm a flat in the coldest English winter in two hundred years. A woman who wrote in the coldest room in the house because it was the only room that was hers, and who got up at five in the morning to do it, and who was, in the last October of her life, producing at a rate almost no American poet has matched. The legend is about how she ended. The record is about how she worked.

The title of this book is a kitchen. I want to say why. The kitchen at Fitzroy Road is where she died, and the culture has never been able to see it as anything else. But it was also a kitchen — a place where a woman fed two small children through a freezing January, where she left the gas on to keep them warm, where she kept the domestic life running past the point where anyone should have been asked to keep it running. The keeping was the thing. She had kept things her whole life: the sentence she said at eight, the ocean she lost at ten, the poems, the letters, the ledger of a self recorded in more pages than any American poet of her generation left behind. The kitchen is where the keeping and the ending happened in the same room, at the same hour. I could not write around it. I decided to write toward it instead.

What makes her worth a book is the gap. One thousand copies in life; millions after. A woman who saw, of her own afterlife, nothing — not the Pulitzer finalist life of her, not the film, not the daughter grown old, not a single one of the ways her name got loose and went to work in the world. The legend the world built on that absence is enormous, and it is not the person, and the whole labor of this book has been to set the person back down underneath it, where she was, before she became the figure the rest of us have found so useful.

I came to her expecting to defend a poet from her own death. I leave having met a writer at her desk in the cold, which is harder, and takes longer to finish thinking about, and is the only version of her I can now believe.

— Eleanor Whitlock, New York

Chapter 1 · I Will Never Speak to God Again

She was eight years old. She had been eight for nine days. The room was small, on the second floor of the house at 92 Johnson Avenue in Winthrop, Massachusetts, a little east of Boston, and the morning came in through the window like any other morning.

The mother stood in the doorway. She had been awake all night. She told the daughter that the father had died. Then she went out and told the son, who was five years and six months old. Then she came back.

The daughter, in her bed, said: "I'll never speak to God again."

That sentence is the only thing she said that morning that anyone preserved. It survived because her mother kept it. Her mother kept everything.

Otto Emil Plath had died of an embolism a few hours past midnight, on the fifth of November 1940. The proximate cause was a clot dislodged from the leg that had been amputated three weeks earlier. The deeper cause was the diabetes he had refused to acknowledge for years; the deepest cause was the conviction, which he had carried unspoken from at least 1936, that what was wrong with him was lung cancer of the kind that had killed a colleague at Boston University, and which he had decided in advance was not the kind of thing one consented to be examined for. The body that had walked from Grabow on the Polish border to a steamship at Hamburg in September 1900, that had crossed the Atlantic at fifteen with no English and a contract for the Lutheran ministry he later refused, that had earned a doctorate at Harvard on the social organization of bumblebees, that had stood at a lectern at Boston University lecturing on entomology and the German language to undergraduates who could not follow either: this body had finally stopped.

He was fifty-five years old. His widow was thirty-four. The two children were eight and five.

Aurelia Schober Plath, the widow, had been Otto's student. She had taken his graduate seminar in Middle High German in the spring of 1929. He had been forty-four; she had been twenty-three. He was tall and Prussian and held the lectern with a certain courtly weight; she was the daughter of Austrian immigrants who had insisted, against the family inclination, that she go to college rather than secretarial school. They had married on the fourth of January 1932. The bride was twenty-five. The groom was forty-six. By the time Sylvia arrived, on the twenty-seventh of October that same year, Aurelia was already keeping the household accounts in a small green ledger and Otto was already at the kitchen table after dinner with the bee specimens he was preparing for the manuscript that became, two years later, Bumblebees and Their Ways, a book that Macmillan published in March 1934 and that is still cited, in the technical literature on social Hymenoptera, in 2026.

The book did not make him rich. The professorship at Boston University did not make him rich. The household was not rich.

Aurelia had taken on, before the wedding, the unspoken understanding that she would manage the domestic life such that Otto could have his evenings and his weekends for the bees. The understanding had held. It had held through Sylvia's birth, and through Warren's birth on the twenty-seventh of April 1935, and through the move from Jamaica Plain on Boston's south side to the coast at Winthrop, the small peninsula northeast of the city where the Atlantic comes in cold and where Aurelia's parents, Frank and Aurelia Schober, lived in a house on Shirley Street that was almost on the seawall. The house at 92 Johnson Avenue, which the Plaths bought in 1936, was three blocks inland; it had two stories and a small study where Otto could keep the slide drawers and the bee photographs and the German poets he read for pleasure. From Sylvia's bedroom you could not see the ocean. From the grandparents' house you could.

When the foot turned black, in September 1940, Otto had still refused to be examined. By the time Aurelia's brother-in-law, a physician, came to the house and forced the issue, the gangrene was past stopping. The amputation took place at a Boston hospital in the second week of October. Otto came home, restless, propped on pillows. Sylvia and Warren were sent to the grandparents' for the duration. Sylvia would write later, in the prose memoir she dictated to the BBC in 1962, that the nine years before her father's death had sealed themselves off "like a ship in a bottle — beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth." The bottle was sealed by the embolism on the fifth of November. The ship was already inside.

She did not see her father after the amputation. She did not see the body. She did not go to the funeral, which was held privately on the eighth of November at the cemetery in Winthrop. There was no headstone. Aurelia could not afford one and she was not, that week, in any condition to think about granite. The grave was marked, for the next nineteen years, by a flat metal plate.

The plate read: Otto Emil Plath. 1885 — 1940.

Sylvia did not visit the grave for the first time until she was twenty-six.

The morning Aurelia came into the bedroom on Johnson Avenue — November the sixth, 1940 — she had decided, on the advice of friends and on her own judgment, that the children should not see the body and should not attend the burial. The decision was a mistake. She would say so herself, late in life, in interviews she gave after the publication of Letters Home in 1975, when she was the only living principal of the family and the world was already past the point where any single principal's testimony could fix the legend. She had wanted, that morning, to spare them. She had thought that without the visible body the death would settle as a fact they could carry; instead it became, for Sylvia, an absence that never resolved into a fact.

The line "I'll never speak to God again" is preserved in two places. It is in Aurelia's preface to Letters Home (1975). It is also in Sylvia's own handwriting, in a journal entry she made twenty years later, on the eighteenth of December 1958 (she was twenty-six, in Boston, in psychotherapy with Ruth Beuscher, recovering the sentence as part of a season of grief work) and in that entry she wrote that what she remembered was not so much the moment of being told as the morning that came after, and the morning that came after that, and the silence in the house, and the small hard fact that she had, on her own initiative, said the sentence and meant it.

She had said it to her mother. She had said it about her father.

She did not, then or later, mean it about her writing. She wrote her first surviving poem on the same kind of dime-store paper less than a year later, in the late summer of 1941. By the time she was eight years and nine months old she had a poem in print: "Poem," eight lines, in the children's section of the Boston Sunday Herald on the tenth of August 1941. The poem is about what she sees from her window at night: the moon, the stars, the dew. It is competent. It is also a child's. The child had begun, on her own, to keep the line that the mother had begun, on her side, to keep.

The keeping was the point. It was already the point.

The widow's life that year, and through the next two years, was the work of staying solvent. The Plath family had no savings. The mortgage on Johnson Avenue could not be paid on a widow's pension. Aurelia took a position teaching shorthand and business correspondence at Boston University (at the same campus where Otto had stood at the lectern in evening jackets) and the children were boarded, when school was in session, with the Schober grandparents on Shirley Street. The grandfather, Frank, was a maître d'hôtel at the Brookline Country Club. The grandmother kept the house. The arrangement gave Sylvia and Warren two homes, and then a third when the household pooled itself at the end of 1942 into a single house in the inland town of Wellesley, twelve miles west of Boston.

The new address was 26 Elmwood Road. The house was small. Three adults, two children, one bathroom. The grandparents took the front bedroom. Aurelia took the back bedroom. The children shared the small bedroom over the staircase. The house had a sloped backyard and a single elm. From no window in any room could you see the ocean.

Sylvia would call this, two decades later in the BBC memoir Ocean 1212-W, the moment her childhood ended.

The dates do not quite agree on the moment. Aurelia, in Letters Home, dates the move "in the autumn of 1942." The Wellesley town records preserve the deed of purchase on the twenty-sixth of October 1942, the day before Sylvia's tenth birthday. The Schober grandparents, with whom Sylvia and Warren had been living in Winthrop, came along. Aurelia bought the smaller house in Wellesley because Wellesley had, she had been told, the best public schools in eastern Massachusetts. She had decided that her children would not pay, for the loss of their father, with the loss of their education. She would do whatever was necessary to make them not pay that price.

The cost of that promise was the cost of the promise. It was a large cost. It was the cost Sylvia would understand and resent, equally, for the rest of her life.

She moved into the small bedroom over the staircase at 26 Elmwood Road. Warren took the smaller alcove off the bedroom. The grandparents came to the door of the bedroom each night to say goodnight. The mother, often, came late. She had been grading papers at the kitchen table. She had been answering correspondence on the brown Royal portable that would, twenty years later, become the typewriter on which Sylvia herself wrote The Bell Jar.

Sylvia, at ten, did not know any of this would matter. She knew only that the ocean was no longer at the window, and that she missed it more than she missed the father whose grave she had not been allowed to see.

The bottle was sealed, the ship was inside, the wreckage (as she would write of the September 1938 hurricane that had bowed the windows of Otto's study) was, "literally, all one could wish."

She would carry that line for twenty-two years.

She would set it down, as a sentence in print, only twice: once in 1962, in the prose memoir for the BBC, and once, two months later, in the kitchen at Court Green in Devon, as she was beginning to write the poems that would become Ariel.

It would survive, both times, the surviving she put it through.

She was eight years old and she had said she would never speak to God again. By the time she was thirty she had not said another word to God that anyone preserved. She had said many other words instead. She had built, sentence by sentence, a body of work that ran past God and around God and underneath God, and that arrived, in early 1963, at a small flat at 23 Fitzroy Road in London where the ocean was again two miles away and the children were again asleep in the next room. The bottle was still sealed. The ship was still inside. The morning would come; the wreckage would, again, be literally all one could wish.

But the morning that the wreckage came, that mattered for everything: that morning fell some eight and a half months before her thirty-first birthday, and she would not see it.

The morning that mattered was this one: November the sixth, 1940, in a small bedroom on Johnson Avenue, where an eight-year-old girl told her mother she would never speak to God again.

She kept her word.

The house on Johnson Avenue and the grandparents' house on Shirley Street were the two poles of Sylvia's first geography, and geography was, for her, a form of argument. The ocean at the Shirley Street seawall was the better argument. She would return to it (in language, in metaphor, in the specific sensory vocabulary of the cold Atlantic) for the rest of her life. In October 1962, sitting at the desk in the back bedroom at Court Green in Devon, she would begin a BBC prose memoir about that coastline with the line: "When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it." She had thought well of it. She had thought of it without interruption for twenty-four years.

The Winthrop peninsula is a narrow strip of glacially-deposited land, three miles long and half a mile wide at its widest, curling northeast from Boston Harbor toward the harbor entrance at the outer channel. In the 1930s it held about twelve thousand people in a dense arrangement of wood-frame houses, each lot small, each yard running close to the next. The Atlantic was never more than a quarter-mile away, in any direction. The sound of the sea was, in any house on the peninsula in any season, the ambient sound: the particular Atlantic wash of the cold November swell against the stone jetties, the summer surf on Winthrop Beach, the foghorns from Boston Harbor in the early morning. The child Sylvia knew this sound so well that when it was taken from her (when Aurelia moved the household inland to Wellesley, twelve miles west, in October 1942) the absence registered for her not as the absence of a sound but as the presence of a wrong one. The wrong sound was silence. The wrong sound was the inland quiet of a suburb that had nothing to say.

She had been given, in those first nine years, a sensory life of exceptional intensity, and she had built her imagination from it. The sea was the primary fact. The secondary facts were the grandfather's cigar smoke and the cut flowers from the Brookline Country Club's Saturday banquets and the formaldehyde smell of Otto's bee specimens in the back study on Johnson Avenue. Three houses, two coastlines (the seawall and the slightly more exposed stretch of Winthrop Beach two blocks east), one ocean. The child organized her perceptions with precision; the adult writer would still be drawing on the Winthrop inventory in 1962, in the Devon farmhouse, in poems that had no surface resemblance to the Massachusetts coast but that had, underneath, the same cold salt-water scaffolding.

Aurelia, who was thirty-four when Otto died and thirty-eight when the household moved to Wellesley, would carry the Winthrop years in a different register than her daughter carried them. For Aurelia, Winthrop was the house on Johnson Avenue, the ledger, the teaching schedule at BU, the chronic management of an academic household whose head had refused to manage himself. The Winthrop years were the years of the marriage's final illness: the years of the slow progressive deterioration Aurelia had been watching since 1936 and which she had been unable, for four years, to arrest. She had brought the children to the seawall and to the beach because the seawall and the beach were free and because the grandmother's house was right there; she had not, in the same way her daughter had, loved the sea. Aurelia had been raised in a Boston neighborhood, then Winthrop, then Wellesley: all sensible urban and suburban addresses for the daughter of an Austrian immigrant who had made it to the middle class. The ocean was the pleasure of a summer. It was not, for Aurelia, the argument.

For Sylvia it was the only argument, and it would remain so. The BBC memoir of 1962, Ocean 1212-W, is the written-up argument: an eleven-minute prose poem about the coastline as a form of primal consciousness, as the first and best mother, as the thing that could not die or abandon her or stop running on its own terms at any time of night or season. The title is the grandmother's telephone number, the Atlantic exchange on the Shirley Street line that Sylvia could still recite thirty years later, in a Devon kitchen, because the telephone number was the code for the argument, the way to call back the place where the sea had been both of the things she had needed, on the morning of the sixth of November 1940, it to be: constant and impersonal. The sea would not, in any calculation, care that Otto had died. The sea would not, in any calculation, stop.

She had understood that, at eight. She had understood it before eight. The understanding was what, in the years after the move to Wellesley, she would keep reaching back toward, through the inland quiet, in poem after poem: the attempt to recover the sound that the inland suburb had taken.

The transition from Winthrop to Wellesley was accomplished in stages that Aurelia designed and the children absorbed without being consulted. The first stage was the school year 1940–41, when the household continued on Johnson Avenue but the children stayed most weeknights with the Schober grandparents on Shirley Street: a logistical arrangement to give Aurelia, who was now commuting to Boston University and teaching the five sections, a manageable morning. Sylvia was in third grade at the Winthrop Center grammar school. Warren was in the first. The grandmother, Aurelia Schober senior, walked them to school each morning and met them at the door at three.

The second stage was the summer of 1941, when the family's finances had been sufficiently reorganized (the widow's pension, the Boston University instructor's salary, a small contribution from Aurelia's brother-in-law in Providence) that the immediate housing crisis was past. Sylvia finished third grade in June with marks that the Winthrop Center school records preserved (now in the Plath archive at Smith) show as entirely composed of A's and A-minuses. She had begun, by then, the pattern of performance that would not break for the next fourteen years.

The third stage was the move itself, in late October 1942. Aurelia had been house-shopping in Wellesley for three months, with the residue of Otto's modest savings and the proceeds of the entomological library sale. The house at 26 Elmwood Road was the fourth house she inspected and the first she could afford. She signed the deed on the twenty-sixth of October 1942. Sylvia turned ten the next day. The family celebrated the birthday in the new house, with a small cake the grandmother had baked and brought from Shirley Street in a tin. It was the last birthday Sylvia would celebrate in Winthrop. It was, in some practical sense, the last birthday of her childhood's first geography.

She would not return to the Winthrop coastline, except for brief visits to the Schober grandparents on Shirley Street, until the spring of 1959, when she and Hughes, in the Boston year on Willow Street, had occasion to take a Sunday drive out to the peninsula. She had been twenty-six. She had looked at the house on Johnson Avenue from the street without stopping the car. She had not gotten out. Hughes had driven on.

The coast, in the spring of 1959, was still the coast. The cold salt smell had come through the car window. The foghorn had been sounding at the outer channel. She had not, on that particular afternoon, said anything to Hughes about any of it. The journal entry for that Sunday is one of the shortest in the Boston-year record: six lines, listing what they had seen on the drive, ending with the word Winthrop underlined once.

She had kept the argument in the underlining. She always kept the argument. The keeping was, and had been since the morning of the sixth of November 1940, the point.