Nom de Plume (21 page)

Plath, volatile to say the least, was once described by the poet W. S. Merwin as “a cat suspended over water.” Like many others who knew her, he found her a “determined, insistent, obsessive person who snapped if things did not go her way, and flew into sudden rages.”

T
he manuscript of
The Bell Jar
is another interesting manifestation of Plath's fragmented selves. Here she had produced the most shocking work of her young life, filled with harrowing insights into her own psyche—yet she typed these words on dainty pink Smith College memo paper. “Got a queer and most overpowering urge today to write, or typewrite, my whole novel on the pink, stiff, lovely-textured Smith memorandum pads of 100 sheets each,” Plath wrote in her journal on March 3, 1958, while she was back at Smith, working as an instructor in the English department. She proudly noted that she'd helped herself to plenty of school stationery: “Bought a rose bulb for the bedroom light today & have already robbed enough notebooks from the supply closet for one & 1/2 drafts of a 350 page novel.”

Well before the novel came out, the phrase “bell jar” had popped up in Plath's writings. At Smith, she described feeling overwhelmed by her own mind, by the demands made on her, socially and otherwise—and admitted that she found things especially hard without a prescribed routine to follow. She could never give herself a break:

Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing—singing, laughing, learning. The responsibility, the awful responsibility . . . is rather overwhelming when there is nothing, no one, to insert an exact routine into the large unfenced acres of time—which is so easy to let drift by in soporific idling and luxurious relaxing. It is like lifting a bell jar off a securely clockworklike functioning community, and seeing all the little busy people stop, gasp, blow up, and float in the inrush (or rather outrush) of the rarefied scheduled atmosphere—poor little frightened people, flailing impotent arms in the aimless air. . . . What to do? Where to turn?

Elsewhere, she wrote that “it's quite amazing how I've gone around for most of my life as in the rarefied atmosphere under a bell jar.” And a 1959 journal entry recorded feelings of frustration and gloom: “The day is an accusation. Pure and clear and ready to be the day of creation, snow white on all the roof tops and the sun on it and the sky a high clear blue bell jar.”

The few years leading up to the publication of
The Bell Jar
had brimmed with creativity. That period provided an argosy of material, but it may have ultimately contributed to her death. In the spring of 1959, she was writing the searing poems of
The Colossus.
Those took a toll, and the book's themes would inform her novel as well. She also had an appendectomy, and in 1960 she gave birth to a daughter, Frieda. After suffering a miscarriage, she became pregnant again, and in January 1962 gave birth to her son, Nicholas. (He would have his own lifelong battle with depression; he died in 2009 by hanging himself.) By the fall, her marriage had fallen apart: Hughes left her for another woman. This time, recovery was not possible.

The following January, as an overwhelmed, exhausted, and isolated young mother, Plath numbly witnessed her novel's debut. She was living in a dreary London flat (where W. B. Yeats had once lived) at 23 Fitzroy Road in St. Pancras. There was no telephone and electricity was intermittent. That winter in England, following a “bone cold” autumn, was bleak, snowy, and icy, one of the worst on record. Plath and her children had the flu, and she was terribly anxious about money.

At night, she could not fall asleep without medication. She was waking at four o'clock each morning to crank out the poems of
Ariel
. (Several drafts had already been handwritten on the reverse of the “lovely-textured” pink Smith College stationery on which she had typed her
Bell Jar
manuscript.) On February 11, 1963, as her children lay sleeping, she sealed off the door to their bedroom with wet towels and opened their window wide. She left them milk and bread. Then she put her head inside that infamous gas oven and ended it all.

A
s she'd immersed herself in the early stages of her novel, Plath had been understandably secretive with her mother about writing
The Bell Jar,
but she had openly shared her fiction-writing ambition with a friend: “I have been wanting to do this for ten years but had a terrible block about Writing a Novel. Then suddenly . . . the dykes broke and I stayed awake all night seized by fearsome excitement, saw how it should be done, started the next day & go every morning to my borrowed study as to an office & belt out more of it.” This was a real breakthrough, considering Plath constantly berated herself for not having accomplished enough. “Prose writing has become a phobia to me: my mind shuts & I clench,” she wrote in her diary in 1957. “I can't, or won't, come clear with a plot.” Her self-flagellation is present throughout her journals. “Why can't I throw myself into writing?” she wrote. “Because I am afraid of failure before I begin.”

In an entry dated December 12, 1958, Plath wondered, “Why don't I write a novel?” Following that question, she'd gone back a mere three years later and giddily amended the entry: “I have! August 22, 1961: THE BELL JAR.”

To describe the writing of it as cathartic is an understatement. Plath called
The Bell Jar
“an autobiographical apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the past.” She had found a safe alter ego in Esther Greenwood—rendered even more secure by the mask of Victoria Lucas—through which the author could exorcise, among other things, her electroshock therapy, mental breakdowns, repressed sexual desires, and hatred of her mother. In one scene, Esther expresses revulsion at watching her mother awaken: “My mother turned from a foggy log into a slumbering, middle-aged woman, her mouth slightly open and a snore raveling from her throat. The piggish noise irritated me, and for a while it seemed to me that the only way to stop it would be to take the column of skin and sinew from which it rose and twist it to silence between my hands.” With such cruelly drawn characters, Plath could malign anyone who'd ever caused her pain or failed to give her what she craved—and her mother above all would be punished.

Years after Plath's death, Aurelia refused to accept her daughter's dark feelings toward her, attributing the lapse to mental anguish. “My mother was always my best friend and I'd hoped that my daughter would be too,” she said. “She became ashamed of our friendship during her breakdown. I don't want to accuse anybody. I don't want to blame anybody, but . . . somebody had to be the scapegoat.”

The American edition of
The Bell Jar
wasn't published until April 1971, and it would remain on the
New York Times
best-seller list for six months (fueled no doubt by the author's posthumous fame). Finally, the novel also achieved critical acclaim. When the paperback was issued a year later, three editions sold out within a month.

Aurelia had done her best to stop publication. The year before, she implored Plath's editor at Harper & Row to reconsider. “I realize that no explanation of the
why
of personal suffering that this publication here will create in the lives of several people nor any appeal on any other grounds is going to stop this, so I shall waste neither my time nor yours in pointing out the inevitable repercussions,” she wrote. Nearly every character in
The Bell Jar
, she claimed, “represents someone—often in caricature—whom Sylvia loved; each person had given freely of time, thought, affection, and, in one case, financial help during those agonizing six months of breakdown in 1953 [the year in which the novel is set] . . . as this book stands by itself, it represents the basest ingratitude.”

To Aurelia, the novel also gave the world a gross distortion of her daughter's supposedly true self, undone by mental illness. “Sylvia never wanted it to be published here,” she told a
New York Times
reporter in a 1979 interview, which took place in the white frame suburban house where Sylvia and Warren grew up. “She'd had two babies and an appendectomy and needed money. ‘I have to write a best-seller,' she told me. ‘I want to write a potboiler. What would you suggest for a subject that wouldn't fail?' I suggested a child-parent conflict. I little knew what shape it would take.” As usual, Aurelia made everything all about her, and she came across as self-absorbed and self-pitying. She spoke repeatedly of her vulnerability and painted herself as a victim. “When
The Bell Jar
came out in 1971, it became a very hard time for me,” she said. “It was accepted as an autobiography, which it wasn't. Sylvia manipulated it very skillfully. She invented, fused, imagined. She made an artistic whole that read as truth itself.”

Just a few days before Plath died, she had written optimistic letters about her future—including horseback riding again, an activity she loved. When she committed suicide, the first rumor in the United States was that she had died of pneumonia, a rather sunnier cause of death that Aurelia Plath, always in willful denial of monstrous truths, wanted to believe. (The official cause was deliberate carbon monoxide poisoning.) Ted Hughes handled the grim task of identifying his wife's body and confirming her name, age, occupation, and address. Their children did not attend the funeral. Plath's tombstone inscription read,
EVEN AMIDST FIERCE FLAMES THE GOLDEN LOTUS CAN BE PLANTED
.

Sixteen years after her daughter's death, Aurelia continued to reckon with the grotesque portrait of herself that was presented in
The Bell Jar.
“Can you imagine what it is like to relive it over and over and over again?” she said of her daughter's crippling legacy. “It is only because I've been compelled to. It is because I have the name Plath. Anytime I meet anyone, the same thing happens. It happens to my daughter-in-law, their two girls, my son, of course. I was on Nantucket recently having a joyous time with a dear friend. She introduced me at a party and the other woman said: ‘Oh . . . you are, aren't you?' I just can't escape it. The warm greeting until the name strikes them and they think of
The Bell Jar
, and of Mrs. Greenwood, the uncaring mother. ‘Oh so you are Mrs. Greenwood,' they say.”

Aurelia once wrote to the scholar and poet Judith Kroll, who had published the first full-scale critical study of Plath's poetry,
Chapters in a Mythology
. It was evident in her letter that Aurelia's trauma would never heal. (She died at the age of eighty-seven in 1994.) “[Sylvia] made use of everything and often transmuted gold into lead,” she explained. “These emotions in another person would dissipate with time, but with Sylvia they were written at the moment of intensity to become ineradicable as an epitaph engraved on a tombstone. . . . She has posthumous fame—at what price to her children, to those of us who loved her so dearly and whom she has trapped into her past. The love remains—and the hurt. There is no escape for us.”

He was a stinky drunkard with brown teeth and dirty hair

Chapter 11

Henry Green &
HENRY YORKE

H
e's the best writer you've never heard of. If you have read any or all of Henry Green's nine novels, you know that you're in on a too-well-kept secret. You probably wish that everyone with fine literary taste (such as yours) could experience the intense pleasure of reading him for the first time. That's no easy feat, since most of his books are out of print and the few that aren't are nearly impossible to find. Quiz a bunch of people who consider themselves well read, and a surprising number will admit that they have never read Green's books and are not even familiar with his name. Depending on your temperament, this response will leave you feeling disappointed or smug.

Henry Green was the nom de plume of Henry Vincent Yorke, an Englishman born on October 29, 1905, in Gloucestershire. He grew up in a fourteenth-century manor, called Forthampton Court, on a 2,500-acre estate. Henry came from fancy stock: his handsome, athletic father, Vincent, had attended Eton and Cambridge and was a former archaeologist and explorer turned businessman; his mother, Maud, was the daughter of a baron who owned one of the grandest houses in England, a man who was among the richest British aristocrats of his era. One of her uncles was prime minister. Her great-grandfather was an earl and a well-known patron of the arts, one of the first supporters of J. M. W. Turner. Although Maud was an affectionate mother to her three sons—Henry and his older brothers Philip, who would die at sixteen of lymphatic leukemia, and Gerald—she preferred spending time with her beloved dogs and horses and indulging in her great love, reading. She was born with a curvature of the spine, yet had been quite athletic in her youth—shooting pheasants, hunting avidly, and breeding racehorses. (She'd continued riding horses well into the sixth month of her pregnancy with Henry; he later insisted this had undermined his health and been the source of his neurotic temperament.) Maud, who spoke in a clipped military diction, was a witty, intelligent woman who loved to gossip. She was an eccentric character, said to have instructed her gardener to bowl turnips down a grass slope so that she could shoot at them. Maud almost always wore black or navy blue, and because she was a chain-smoker (of Turkish cigarettes), she was left in old age with only one brown-stained tooth. She refused to wear dentures.

In childhood, the Yorke boys were left largely in the care of nannies and servants who taught them proper manners and reined them in when necessary. Their father was an aloof presence in their lives. “We were well brought up and saw our parents twice a day,” Henry later wrote, “that is to say my father worked in London and we only saw him at weekends.” When he was there, Vincent was taciturn to the point of hostility. Unlike Maud, he lacked a sense of humor, and he envied her social ease. Most often, Vincent behaved toward his family like an irascible bully. Affection played no part in his emotional repertoire.

Philip and Gerald appeared somewhat more in the mold of their father—brash, confident, excellent athletes and hunters—but their younger brother was timid, awkward, lonely, and plump. He had no knack for academics or sports. (Henry described gym class as “harrowing.”) He took his family's wealth for granted, yet he also felt estranged from it, identifying with servants, butlers, and working-class men far more than with his fellow aristocrats, whose company he found boring. Opulence was lost on him, which partly explained why Vincent found Henry such an awful disappointment.

Nicknamed “Goosy” at home, Henry was educated at Eton and Oxford but was not able to match the impressive academic records of his brothers. His time at Eton was unremarkable. Philip in particular had been a star there, and after his death in 1917, Henry felt even more inadequate. “I needed praise badly,” he wrote later, “and if I had had it might be even less of a person now, but from the lack of it at that time found everything pointless, so blind that no effort at work or play ever seemed worth while.”

But he and some friends did form a Society of Arts, a creative outlet that gave him a sense of belonging, and he began writing short stories. “This point is a watershed, after this there was no turning back,” he later wrote. “I determined to be a writer . . . and a nom de plume was chosen, of all names Henry Michaels.” He published a few pieces in
College Days
, the school literary magazine, an accomplishment his parents regarded with suspicion and disdain. One of his stories, “Bees,” which appeared in 1923, follows a clergyman from “a slum parish in Liverpool” who suffers from malaise in a “sleepy, unenthusiastic” village. Though brief and spare, it is well written and reveals a certain psychological acuity; one wouldn't necessarily guess that the story had sprung from the mind of an eighteen-year-old:

All day long he thought of how he was to stand the blow of his daughter's death, and, although it was eighteen months since she had died, he was still composing answers in his mind to the letters of condolence that never came. In the busy buzz of his bees he detected the sympathy he could not discover in the world outside. His wife, whom he always regarded as a drone, could do nothing with him. He was sure that every man's hand was against him. He detected an insult in the butcher boy's whistling as he delivered the meat. So he turned to his bees, who always sympathized, and were so practical, and who were not useless like his family.

Without telling Henry, his mother sent his stories to a friend, the Scottish writer John Buchan (most famous for
The Thirty-nine Steps
, adapted into a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock). Buchan offered encouraging words about Henry's work. “Whatever your boy's stories are, they are not a waste of time,” he wrote. “They are curious stories, rather like the kind of thing that Hans Christian Andersen wrote in his youth. They show great powers of observation, great sensitivity to scenery, and the nuances of temperament, and a strangely mature sense of the irony of life.” He added, however, that one ought to use writing as a hobby rather than a profession, and that Henry “seems to have literary gifts of a high order, but he wants the discipline of more normal subjects. It would be exceedingly good for him to try his hand at concrete objective narrative for a change.” Concreteness, as readers would later discover, was perhaps the quality most absent in Henry's writing—and perhaps most abhorred by him.

Henry became close to one of his Eton classmates, Anthony Powell, who would become an author as well. The boys shared their enjoyment of storytelling and even began (but abandoned) collaborating on a novel. Years later, Powell recalled his friend as “always interested in words, repeating unfamiliar ones (e.g., hirsute) over to himself, laughing at them, discussing them.” Another close friend, Robert Byron, admired Henry's peculiarity and shared his irreverent humor. Byron later said of him, “He can talk like no other person I've ever met.”

In 1924, Henry began writing a draft of what would become his impressionistic first novel,
Blindness
, published when he was just twenty-one. The original typescript was signed “Henry Browne.” Eventually he would settle on the bland pseudonym “Henry Green”—never publishing a book under his real name. That choice may have had to do with his aristocratic upbringing, which frowned upon such a self-centered vocation. His friend and classmate Harold Acton did not approve of his pseudonym. “There are Greens of so many shades writing novels that one wishes he had selected another colour,” he said. (Henry “Green” later befriended the novelist Graham Greene, whose full name was Henry Graham Greene.) Henry was forever caught between the desire for revelation, for confession, and the reticence expected of someone of his class. He wanted to remain enigmatic and private while at the same time fully exploring human emotion and experience. Anonymity seemed to offer a comfortable compromise. “Names distract, nicknames are too easy, and if leaving both out . . . makes a book look blind then that to my mind is no disadvantage.” Perhaps he meant that in making a book “blind,” cloaking it cleverly enough, more distance would be placed between reader and writer; keeping the reader slightly “in the dark” was not a bad idea. The author himself could not be examined too closely—only his work.
Res ipsa loquitur
: the thing speaks for itself.

At Oxford, Henry's tutor was C. S. Lewis, who had no respect for Henry's literary interests, especially for his appreciation of “experimental” writers. Henry regarded Lewis as “rude and incompetent.” Studying was not Henry's priority, anyway. He estimated that he put in no more than six hours of academic work a week. Most nights he was drunk. He played billiards, stayed up late, and slept until around noon. His first meal of the day, accompanied by a brandy and soda, was always fried sole and sausages because “I thought that by not varying my food I was giving my stomach less to do.” He had another routine: going to the cinema every afternoon, sometimes twice a day, and returning to his room to write; he admitted that “it became the last foothold to write just one more page a day, the last line of defence because I was miserable in fits and starts and felt insane.”

Henry's debut novel, which he characterized three decades later as “mostly autobiographical,” follows the callow sixteen-year-old John Haye (“It sounds an awful thing to write, but I seldom meet anyone who interests me more than myself,” he admits). Like the author, John enjoys reading Carlyle, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky. On his way home from a repressive boarding school called Noat (a thinly disguised Eton, which was “Note” in earlier drafts), John is blinded. The account of his accident is clinical: a boy throws a rock at a train; the window smashes; John, sitting behind it, loses his sight. His stepmother (who is obviously Maud) spends her time hunting and horseback riding. She tries to marry him off to any girl of the “right” social class, so she won't have to spend the rest of her life caring for him. The story is told from multiple points of view, including those of a young girl and a drunken clergyman. Henry dedicated the novel to his mother.

A review appeared in the
New York Times
on November 14, 1926, shortly after the book was released in the United States: “It is reported to be the first novel of a very young man. In spite of certain defects of workmanship, of prolonged episodes, meandering dialogue and confusion of method, it does convey a sense of character under stress. It is a creditable performance.”

Blindness
doesn't have much of a plot—Green, like modernists such as Woolf and Joyce, was far more interested in the interior life, memory, emotion, language, and metaphor than in creating tidy, linear, plot-driven stories. “I write for about six people (including myself) whom I respect and for no one else,” he once said. In Green's work, there was no authorial guidance as to how a reader should “feel” about any character. Ambivalence reigned. Henry was already an eccentric and sophisticated thinker. He understood that less is more, and that sometimes, nothing is even more.

The gaps and flaws in
Blindness
, including its too-abrupt ending, could be attributed to the immaturity of the author (of which he was well aware), yet even in later novels he favored an oblique approach that did not fill in many narrative blanks. Of his nine novels, not one is like another. Motifs change from book to book. Likable characters are not considered crucial. There are no feel-good endings. And no character learns a moral lesson or is transformed by experience. Life simply goes on. In a sense, you might say that Green was the Jerry Seinfeld of his day. Calling to mind the comedian's approach to humor, with his “show about nothing,” Green believed that “the novel should be concerned with the everyday mishaps of ordinary life,” as he told an interviewer in 1950. (John Updike once proclaimed Green “a saint of the mundane.”)

With its knotty diction and odd syntax, his fiction, he knew, was not for everyone. Fortunately, Henry found a sympathetic ear in Nevill Coghill, an Irish don at Oxford who became a close friend; Coghill believed absolutely in the young writer's talent and proved a steady source of support and advice. In a 1925 letter, written while on holiday, Coghill was filled with regret as he reported that his brother and a cousin had picked up Henry's manuscript and were not so taken with it: “Alas they think it difficult, depressing, ungrammatical (!!!) carelessly written!!! This so infuriates me that I shout at them, telling them it is a work of undying genius and that they are too crapulous to understand it. To which they reply ‘Ah, but I like a good story.' Poor Henry. I am so sorry. But I am sure that your way of writing is a very good way and is right for you.”

At the time, Henry may not have been aware of Emily Dickinson's “Tell all the truth but tell it slant— / Success in Circuit lies,” but he certainly practiced it in his writing. He was keenly interested in playing with different stylistic techniques, and in applying Chekhov's notion of significant irrelevance, in which details were teased out through indirect means. “Irrelevancy means so much,” he wrote to Coghill, “it shows you what a person is & how he thinks, & conveys atmosphere in a way that is inconceivable if you have not seen Tchekov's Cherry Orchard.” He finished his novel on May 30, 1925, a few months before his twentieth birthday, noting the precise time and date of completion on the last page of the manuscript. He promptly (and rather boldly) sent it to Chatto & Windus, the distinguished London publishing house of authors such as Wilkie Collins and Samuel Beckett, and the first English translation of Marcel Proust's novel
À la recherche du temps perdu.
(Henry was a great admirer of Proust.) The editor who received Henry's novel was not impressed. “I do not make much of this MS., which depressed me at the start (by the boringness of the schoolboy mind) and went on depressing me (by the boringness of everything) to the end,” he wrote in a memo. “Nevertheless,” he added, “the author should not be lightly condemned, because he evidently is very fluent, and his talent may develop.”