telephones, the electricity, the Thames, London falling back on Dickensian candlelight, snow on the ground every day in England until the first week of March, the country ground to a halt, and spring an impossibility. Until the end of February 1963, the weather will remain incommensurate to the island it strands, the ungovernable heavens bringing out their big guns against so mild a target, the echoing gunshot of snow slumping off rooftops seeming the voice of an unmoved God. But on Innocents’ Day the Napoleonic dimensions of the winter are yet unknown, the snow as yet a delight, an unusual wonder. London is a palace in ivory, tigers cavorting in their outdoor enclosures at the zoo, lions dragging their horsemeat into the snow to eat. And Sylvia, too, smiles up at the snow, like everybody, at the heaven-sent tabula rasa, at the sledders on their cardboards on Primrose Hill. In the nearly undetectable warmth of two portable heaters running at once, Frieda rides the springing gee-up horse, her nose crusty, and slides off to give her babies rides. And Nicholas wriggles in Sylvia’s lap, slapping her typewriter keys and squealing and grabbing, quick to imagine being unfairly thwarted, grumpy with his lingering cold. And before the view of a snow-marbled sky stilled under chimney smoke, Sylvia retypes the table of contents for her manuscript, her new book, her heart racing, her cheeks hot. Her book begins with “love.” It ends with “spring.” The bees will fly from their combs past winter, housekeeping at the door of the hive, sipping the roses. The hellebore, the snow rose, will bloom out of the darkest months—the legend of a simple faith. The little shepherdess watched the wise men pass with their rich gifts, the shepherds with their fruit and honey and doves. The little shepherdess wept to have nothing, not even a flower. And seeing her tears, an angel swept away the snow. There was the Christmas rose: a single white bloom, its petals tipped pink. Rolling out Christmas cakes, lebkuchen and gingerbread and springerle, the anise-scented springerle dough imprinted with a thorny
rose pattern, Sylvia’s Catholic grandmother had told her the story, the cresting December waves of the Atlantic grinding ice on the beach outside. Her granny sang an old chorale in German and English, “Est ist ein Ros’ entsprungen,” as she gathered scraps of dough to reroll: Lo, how a Rose e’er blooming from tender stem hath sprung! Of Jesse’s lineage coming, as those of old have sung. It came, a floweret bright, amid the cold of winter, When half spent was the night … This Flower, whose fragrance tender with sweetness fills the air, Dispels with glorious splendor the darkness everywhere … Bring us at length we pray, to the bright courts of heaven, And to the endless day. Bring us we pray, Sylvia thinks, to spring, rolling the typed sheet off the platen, rescuing it from Nicky’s quick hands. She aligns another sheet of paper in her Olivetti and types a new title page for the manuscript. The inscription she types reads “For Frieda and Nicholas,” but the title is for herself only: Ariel. Her new book will not be The Rabbit Catcher, not Daddy, not The Rival. It is not for him, not for them—it is solely for herself, her words true in a slipstream of memory, desire, and flaw. True to herself. To keep faithful to that understanding, pure as this accreting sanction of snow: Ariel. She reads her new pages over, held up and away from clutching Nicholas, struggling to focus beyond him as he bounces in her lap. She reads through the titles of her forty-one poems, their order as familiar and automatic as her every breath, until she gets to “The Swarm.” What is it about this poem that alerts her disease? She has caught the allegorical cycles of fruition and decay, has limned her satiric resistance to a single truth, a violent will to control. Yet something about it gnaws at her. She marks it with parentheses and leaves it, feeling queer, where it is.
And Ted is driving with his plunder, his progress tectonic in the lumbering van, the snow catching up to him early, blowing him back as he crawls up the arduous A30, the A303, the A30 again. He will drive day into night through snow, arriving, bone weary and cramped and cold, to dump his pirated goods in the chill corners of his eremitic room, to fall into bed at Montagu Square, not noticing the contents of the parcel brought to the empty flat in his absence, left unwrapped, squared in the center of the borrowed table he uses as a desk so that it would be the first thing he would see. But he won’t see. It will remain unnoticed, missed by Ted, in its unmissable place through the next morning until Sylvia arrives, slim and incandescent as a candle, flushed, her cheeks bright with cold and fever, her skin translucent with all her sleepless nights, like new and gilded wax; her heart in the hands she keeps jammed in her pockets, trying to imagine how to begin to speak of faith. Not her faith in him, not an exterior faith, but her faith, newborn, and tender still, in herself. Not a solution, yet, not an answer to the questions their spoiled marriage has left unsettled, but something to hold on to. Struggling at her dumbness, veiling her struggle with a panicked critical eye, assessing the precise tone of the green walls of the room, the provenance of the Della Robbia crown moldings, his unmade bed, the burlap sacks lumpy with the onions and potatoes and apples that had gotten her here, her red corduroy in an unfolded heap, a glint of glass and honey-gold out of the top of one of the sacks, and on his desk the red leather binding of the complete Oxford Shakespeare. His Oxford Shakespeare: immediate, perfect, the patina of its red leather deepened with age, like wine or brandy or apples; unbelievably reincarnated, as if her mistakes had truly, with the snow, been erased. And she will step toward it, this miraculous recovery, and draw her hands, empty, from her pockets, to touch it, to open it, an act of faith, a confirmation. And as he looks on, uncomprehending, and as she grasps
the leather-bound cover in her fingers and lifts it, revealing the scrolled Florentine endpapers and the new bookplate from a shop on Regent Street and the inscription barely dry, she will remember her days of playing the anagram game with Mr. Crockett at McLean after her breakdown. It was winter then, as well, at least in her mind, until she got the game. She will get it now, too, the letters swimming up from this replacement and its inscription. The anagram will read you are ash. OceanofPDF.com
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE “Wintering” DECEMBER 29, 1962 LONDON She rose from her bath on the morning of their meeting. The children were still asleep, Millie hours from arrival. She had been able to linger, then, over her ablutions, her preparations seeming almost bridal in her anxious excitement. Soaking in the hot tub laced with lavender salts, supplementing the swiftly cooling water with a steaming teakettle. Shaving her legs, buffing her feet with pumice, washing her thick hair and binding it in a towel. Rubbing rosewater and glycerine into her pale skin. Before the full-length mirror in her bedroom, dropping her wool robe to dress; her long body leaner than ever, delicate boned and frail, but purified, milky and translucent, like a candle left long burning. As she dressed, sorting through her closet, drying her hair before the courageous little heater, braiding the long plaits and pinning them up into a crown, her heart fluttered like a bird caught at a window, yearning at a freedom it could see beyond the glass. It was something between them, she and Ted, something inextinguishable—it was blood and more, not so simple as love—through the children (coming awake now, needing their own baths, needing breakfast and entertainment), through the intuitive, alchemical blending of their imaginations, of their lives. It’s what has burned her down, burned through her, alembic to her heart.
What she does not know is how to say it. What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent. How to say that whatever had combined them, really married them, had revealed her to herself. That the manuscript on her desk shows her progress in solving her problem—the problem of herself, a lifetime’s work. That there must be something left for them, for each of them, that only the two of them could learn. We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage: / When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down / And ask of thee forgiveness. That there is honey still, insulated and deep. She knows she’s grown thin, and she’s shaky; not feeling heedless anymore, but admittedly vulnerable and resolved. Maybe that means brave. She pulls out blocks and children’s books while the oatmeal burps on the stove, scribbles a list of emergency numbers for Millie. She was never good at being patient, at moving with grace through the seasons, at waiting. But she’s going to try, to have patience for the cycling back. She’s got her honey to get her through: this manuscript finished, The Bell Jar coming out in two weeks, the BBC still holding fire, news of a nursery school only a couple of blocks away. Was it honey’s immoderate sweetness, coming at such a bitter time, that made it so precious? Of the six jars that were her legacy, one she’d already used; Ted, if he’s remembered it, should have one in his custody this minute at Montagu Square. The last four are in the wine cellar: the tangible promise of her return to springtime. Four more jars—four months left until she plans to go home. A jar for each of them: herself, Ted, Frieda, Nicholas. Her honey is waiting for her, for all of them, at Court Green. Her hive would make it through winter’s dumb chill, enough honey to last until spring, hoarded, secreted away. A hope she can cling to, shimmering in the dark of the cellar. She is getting ready to leave, giving instructions to Millie, newly arrived in her snowy wraps; pulling out more decoy toys, pulling out the lunch things and leaving them on the table. Giving a lipstick kiss to Frieda,
busy with her buggyful of zoo animals, and to Nicholas, in Millie’s arms. Putting on her coat, gathering her scarf and gloves and pocketbook. Millie agenting for Nicholas, perching on the edge of a wicker chair in the parlor, trying to jolly Frieda into sharing a zebra with her little brother. Palpable, beating, her life: the only life she’ll ever have. Taking a deep breath, taking heart as she leaves, closing the door of the flat behind her, listening for its muted catch and click, heading down the stairs, she carries with her the soft, unknowing faces of her children, hot against her own hot cheek as she kissed them; the image of their mild little faces welling her eyes. Snow, still, is sifting her world, the sky dense with it, and morning bruised and smoky. It falls steadily through the fooled lamppost’s light, falls from somewhere so far away it can’t be seen, from a heaven she can hardly imagine. She’ll have to be patient. She’d like to walk. Not the tube at Chalk Farm, or a bus or a taxi, nearly impossible anyway, she would guess, due to the weather—but to walk through the hush of falling snow, along the graceful sloping shoulders of Primrose Hill, past the zoo, through Regent’s Park, the snow new and unblemished, only her own feet marking a trail of moonstone blue over the buried pathways, buried again behind her, in a moment, after she passes. The snowflakes are falling on her face, melting in her hair, dusting the thick wool of her winter coat as she stands, ready, on the step outside her house on Fitzroy Road. She’ll have to be patient. She can’t expect miracles. Not like Cordelia: Love, and be silent. But still she can close her eyes and see it all: the dripping feathered yellows of the laburnum brushing her skin. The daffodils waving, sturdy on their stems. The tulips and the lilacs and the poppies. Her cherry blossoms, pure and white. Her apple trees in bloom, their hypnotic spring perfume, the tender blossoms snowing down on her shoulders, in her hair. She can imagine her family on the sand near
Appledore, at the northern mouth of the Taw, the Atlantic sun edging her daughter, her son, and Ted in gold—their shoulders, the crowns of their heads—and the loud pounding and sighing of the waves. If she could stand where the sun stands, would they be fronted entirely in gold, their souls exposed? Frieda runs and runs, chased by the waves and Ted, and little Nicholas drags a stick in the sand, her family’s footprints, blue before the tide, so quickly erased. And when they turn to her, carrying shells and pebbles to her, running ahead of the foaming waves, they are still golden in the late light. Snowflakes catch in her eyelashes at each step. There is no more waiting. It’s here. Here, now, her moment of truth. And it falls like grace, only for her. OceanofPDF.com
POSTSCRIPT On December 31, 1962, Sylvia Plath began writing poetry again, turning first to the revision of two poems left incomplete from the autumn: “Eavesdropper” and “Sheep in Fog.” During the next five weeks, she went on to write “Totem,” “Child,” “Paralytic,” “Mystic,” “Kindness,” “Words,” “Contusion,” “Balloons,” and finally “Edge” on February 4, 1963, which she composed on the back of a draft of “Wintering.” On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath took her own life. OceanofPDF.com
AUTHOR’S NOTE On December 10, 1962, Sylvia Plath left her home, Court Green, in rural Devonshire. Accompanied by her two small children and with the help of her temporary nanny, she moved to a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road, the former home of W. B. Yeats in the Primrose Hill district of London. Plath carried with her the poems she had written during the summer and fall of that year, inspired by the collapse of her marriage to Ted Hughes, and some of her earlier poems produced since the publication of her first book, The Colossus, in 1960. In his Introduction to Plath’s Collected Poems, Hughes says that “sometime around Christmas 1962” Plath made a careful selection of forty-one of those poems, arranged them in a specific sequence, and assembled the final manuscript in a black spring-bound binder. It was also around this time that Ted Hughes returned to Court Green to retrieve curtain material and apples at Plath’s request. These actual events lie at the heart of Wintering. Beyond the invention of the characters’ thoughts and conversations and the fictional particulars attributed to real events otherwise known only in sketchy detail, the most significant departure from the known historical record is the account of the meeting between Plath and Hughes during which Plath saw a new copy of The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works on Hughes’s desk. In the novel this event takes place at the end of December, but it may have taken place about a month later, just days before Plath’s death. It may also have occurred after Ted Hughes left Dido Merwin’s flat on Montagu Square and moved to Soho in London; on these
points the various sources conflict. The account of Hughes reading all of Plath’s new poems in chapter 22 also departs from what is positively known: Hughes did read some, probably most, of the Ariel period poems before Plath’s death, but it is not known whether he read them all. There is also no record of Plath speaking on the phone with her mother on December 21, as she is presented doing here. I have relied on numerous sources in creating the characters in Wintering and their place in time. Among my primary published sources are The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes; The Bell Jar and Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams by Sylvia Plath; and The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil. I have also relied on biographies of Sylvia Plath by Anne Stevenson, Linda Wagner-Martin, Edward Butscher, Paul Alexander, and Ronald Hayman, as well as Ted Hughes’s essays on Plath collected in Winter Pollen, Hughes’s Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, his early poetry collections, and Birthday Letters. I made extensive use of Letters Home by Sylvia Plath, edited by Aurelia Plath, as well as of Plath’s unpublished correspondence, memorabilia, and prose archived at the Lilly Library at Indiana University and in the Neilson Library, Mortimer Rare Book Room, at Smith College. The unpublished manuscript and drafts of Plath’s Ariel poems and her daily calendar for late 1962, collected at Smith, have been priceless resources. I have also relied on various audio recordings of Sylvia Plath, in particular those in the collection of the National Sound Archive at The British Library. Among the critical works I have turned to are Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems by Susan Van Dyne, The Other Ariel by Lynda K. Bundtzen, Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath by Judith Kroll, The Other Sylvia Plath by Tracy Brain, Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study by Tim Kendall, Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words by Stephen Gould Axelrod, The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath by Jacqueline
Rose, and essay collections edited by Paul Alexander, Gary Lane, Charles Newman, Linda W. Wagner, and Edward Butscher. Two essays that have been key to my understanding of Sylvia Plath have been Marjorie Perloff’s “The Two Ariels: The (Re)Making of the Sylvia Plath Canon” and Catherine Thompson’s uncollected “Dawn Poems in Blood: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems.” Anita Helle’s “Family Matters: An Afterword on the Biography of Sylvia Plath” was my revelatory introduction to Sylvia Plath fifteen years ago and remained acutely relevant during the writing of this book. Access to Diane Middlebrook’s work-in-progress and background research for her book Her Husband was invaluable. Other secondary works and sources that have significantly informed the pages of Wintering include Robert Graves’s White Goddess, Peter Davison’s The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston, from Robert Frost to Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath, 1955–1960, the poetry and autobiographical prose of W. S. Merwin, Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched with Fire and Night Falls Fast, A. Alvarez’s Savage God, Primrose Hill Remembered by The Friends of the Chalk Farm Library, the Dartmoor National Park Authority Web site, the archive of British Telecom, the Manuscripts Reading Room and Newspaper Library of The British Library, Emily Pollard’s www.plathonline.com, The Book of Apples by Joan Morgan and Alison Richards, The Beekeeper’s Handbook, 3rd edition, by Diana Sammataro and Alphonse Avitabile, and Bumblebees and Their Ways by Otto E. Plath. Details of daily life with babies and small children were gleaned from my own family documents. My most essential source was Sylvia Plath’s table of contents for the manuscript of her second poetry collection, a list that was published in 1981 within the Notes section in her Collected Poems. The structure of Wintering follows exactly Plath’s original sequence for that manuscript, which was edited by Ted Hughes and published three years after Plath’s death. Though Hughes reordered the poems into a more chronological arrangement and deleted several that Plath had intended for inclusion, he
kept the title Plath had typed onto her final title page: Ariel and Other Poems. Wintering, then, takes its ultimate inspiration from the manuscript that Plath arranged with her customary meticulous attention, but a manuscript that has never been published in its intended form. —Kate Moses San Francisco, California July 2002 OceanofPDF.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND PERMISSIONS I am enormously grateful to the following individuals and institutions for their assistance during the writing of Wintering: Karen Kukil, Associate Curator of the Sylvia Plath Collection at the Mortimer Rare Book Room, Neilson Library, Smith College, provided hours of assistance—at a distance and in person—with painstaking grace. The Lilly Library, Indiana University, provided me with an Everett Helm Visiting Research Fellowship, and the librarians there, particularly Rebecca Cape, came to my timely aid on several occasions. Thanks are also due to the intrepid and generous curators of the National Sound Archive located at The British Library. The scholars and critics Richard Larschan, Kathleen Connors, Marjorie Perloff, and Anita Helle kindly shared with me their expertise on Plath. Rosemary Hooley of Skaigh Stables, Belstone, Devonshire, provided me with detailed information about riding practices in Britain and, in particular, northern Dartmoor and its environs. For their unfailing support, their tireless curiosity and pride, and their myriad familial ministrations, I offer my appreciation to my extended family on every side—the various branches of Moses, Kamiya, and Alford clans, in particular Bob Alford, David Alford, Jonathan Alford, Season Jensen, Joe and Joanne Kamiya, Mark Kamiya, Adele Moses, Bill Moses and Tish Lee, Goldie Moses, John and Marina Moses, Nancy Moses, Ramona Pedersen, Kathleen and Fred Wagner, and Dorothy Walker.
More than thanks are due to the stalwart friends who shored me up as I wrote, offering me professional acuity, well-timed distraction, nourishment of every vital kind, and childcare: Galia Baron, Alexandra Berven, Tom Centolella, Karen Clark, Marni Corbett, Daphne de Marneffe, Jodi Douglass, Jaune Evans, Farhad Farzeneh, Robert Frumkin, Charo Gonzalez, Kelly Campbell Hinshaw, Stephen Hinshaw, Beth Kephart, Jeanie Kim, Yun Kim, Jean Hanff Korelitz, Sharron Lannan Korybut, Ed Lopez, Ruth Lopez, Christina Myers, Sultan Pepper, Camille Peri, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Susan Straight, and Katherine Whitney. Diane Middlebrook’s warm exuberance, camaraderie, and scholarship have defied the notion of writing as a solitary endeavor. I am forever indebted to our unique partnership. I thank Ellen Levine for her shrewd mind and her enormous heart, evident always, and her relentless belief in this book and in me. I am grateful for the work of the Ellen Levine Literary Agency on Wintering’s behalf; an unexpected phone call from Diana Finch or Allyson Giard or Louise Quayle has been better than Christmas. I was immensely lucky to have a team of astute, intuitive champions behind the publication of Wintering. In addition to Ellen Levine and her staff, I want to offer my enduring appreciation to Diane Higgins of St. Martin’s Press and Carole Welch of Sceptre, both perceptive, discerning editors with an amazing capacity for subtle and harmonious observations. Their wholehearted trust in me and complete faith in Wintering has been gratifying beyond words. Thank you, also, to Nichole Argyres and Amber Burlinson for their gracious, reliable, and eruditè stewardship of the vital details. I’d like to acknowledge the generosity of my children, Zachary Paris Tomlinson and Celeste Erice Kamiya, not just for sharing me with Sylvia Plath through four school years but also for allowing me to plumb their babyhoods for material.
No one has done more in support of this book than my husband, Gary Kamiya: first among my editors, and unmatched as an insightful critic. My heartfelt thanks for his unwavering sustenance, his love, and his tender care. Finally, I want to remember William John Moses (1936–1994), Arlen J. Hansen (1936–1993), and Wendy Alford Corpening (1940–2001)—my dad, my guide, my daffodil. Thank you for every minute. A line from Mother Goose appears here. The quotation from a children’s chant here is from “Little Cottage in the Wood,” author unknown. A line from The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle appears here. A line from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, “The Squyre’s Tale,” appears here. The New Testament, Matthew 8:12, inspired a line here; here is a quotation from I Corinthians 13:9–13. Lady Caroline Lamb’s description of Lord Byron is quoted here. “The bird flies itself to the hunter,” from The Double by Fyodor Dostoevsky, was quoted by Sylvia Plath within the text of ther senior honors thesis for Smith College; it appears here and here. “Sometimes one is so defenseless,” which appears here, is from Ingmar Bergman’s film Through a Glass Darkly. The quote “Seek all the fame you will among mortal men … but yield place to the goddess…” here is from Ovid’s myth of Arachne in his Metamorphoses, translated by Frank Justus Miller, Loeb Classical Library, first published in 1916. The quote by St. Thérèse here is from her autobiography, Story of a Soul, published in 1898. The passage here is from a fifteenth-century German chorale, author and translator unknown, entitled “Est is ein Ros’ Entsprungen.” Sylvia parodies a line form The Tempest by William Shakespeare here; The Tempest is also quoted here and here. King Lear is quoted here and opens chapter 34, through which appear four additional passages from the play. Two quotations form King Lear appear in chapter 41 as well.
A quotation from William Butler Yeats’s Unicorn from the Stars appears here as well as here. A line from “Two Songs from a Play” appears here. The poem “My House” is quoted here and, in longer form, here. Yeats’s epitaph appears here. The first three lines of the poem “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” appear here. here is quoted an inscription on the wall at Yeats’s home, Thoor Ballylee, in County Galway, Ireland. The quotation here is from “Coole Park & Ballylee, 1931.” “Leda and the Swan” is quoted here. I thank Scribner for permission to reprint passages from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume I: The Poems, Revised, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Full copyright information for works excerpted within this text can be found on the copyright page. OceanofPDF.com
ALSO BY KATE MOSES Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood OceanofPDF.com
Although Wintering portrays real people and is inspired by actual events, it is a work of fiction. With some exceptions, the events, broadly defined, and situations portrayed here actually took place, but the author’s rendering of those events and their particulars is invented. The characters’ thoughts, conversations, and actions are a work of imagination. Excerpts from “Two Songs from a Play,” “My House,” and “Leda and the Swan” by W. B. Yeats reprinted with the permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume I: The Poems, Revised, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1924 by The Macmillan Company; copyright renewed © 1956 by Georgie Yeats. An excerpt from “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931” by W. B. Yeats reprinted with the permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume I: The Poems, Revised, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1933 by The Macmillan Company; copyright renewed © 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. WINTERING. Copyright © 2003 by Kate Moses. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. www.stmartins.com First Edition: February 2003 eISBN 9781466869134 First eBook edition: March 2014 OceanofPDF.com