Two Lives

By Martha Duffy

LETTERS HOME

by SYLVIA PLATH

Edited with preface by AURELIA PLATH

512 pages. Harper & Row. $12.50.

When Aurelia Plath told her eight-year-old daughter Sylvia that her father was dead, the child said, "I am never going to speak to God again." When she came home from school that day she presented her mother with an oath to be signed: "I promise never to marry again."

Sylvia took all of life with terrifying seriousness; the words "never again" came only too quickly to her. She was capable of emotional fixity that makes the poems written just before her suicide in 1963 nearly unbearable: pictures of rage and despair drawn virtually in words of one syllable. Her novel The Bell Jar, while written in quasi-Salinger style, is a remorseless account of adolescent breakdown.

Little Bayonets. The book was also a painful blow to Aurelia Plath. Like all the other characters in The Bell Jar, the narrow-minded, hard-working mother is ferociously cartooned. Shortly before trying to kill herself, the heroine watches her sleeping, "the pin curls on her head glittering like a row of little bayonets."

Partly to adjust the image that the novel created of both mother and daughter, Mrs. Plath is publishing an edited edition of Sylvia's copious letters home, from the time she entered Smith College in 1950 until her death. The correspondence will not erase The Bell Jar --those caricatures are indelible. But they do give a different, lively, poignant picture of Sylvia.

The Smith letters are the frankest.

Sylvia arrived trailing three scholarships and several writing prizes. The Plaths had no money, and she worried continually about it. She owed her "charmed Plathian existence" to her schoolteacher mother's efforts, and she was driven by gratitude. "You are the most wonderful mummy that a girl ever had," she wrote, "and I only hope I can continue to lay more laurels at your feet."

It also appears that Sylvia took to heart every bit of propaganda ever put out by the Protestant ethic, college deans of admission and the slick fashion magazines of the '50s. In addition to grinding out straight A's and submitting potboilers to True, "to keep our pot of caviar boiling," she wanted desperately to be "well-rounded." Thus during weekends at Yale or Princeton Sylvia undertook her blind-date excursions cheerfully, and tried to include them in her mother's vicarious life. "Picture me then," she gloats, "in my navy-blue bolero suit and versatile brown coat, snuggled in the back seat of an open car."

With her blonde good looks and long legs (which she considered her best feature) Sylvia was popular, but none of the dates measured up. She wanted a "colossus." She thought such a man might be found in England and applied for a Fulbright grant ("If only I get accepted at Cambridge! My whole life would explode in a rainbow!").

Mental Agony. Sylvia was accepted, and in 1956 found her colossus in the young British poet Ted Hughes. Even in her first ecstasies, there are forecasts of trouble: "I have fallen terribly in love, which can only lead to great hurt. I met the strongest man in the world, a large, hulking, healthy Adam with a voice like the thunder of God."

The next two years were probably her happiest. She sent bulletins of social success ("Your daughter shook hands with Bulganin"; "We rode up in the elevator with Lionel and Diana Trilling"), and accounts of travel in France and Spain, which show a capacity for wonder and joy unreflected in her work. After marrying, she and Hughes came back to the U.S. to teach. Life was never easy. They lived in tiny apart ments and worked ceaselessly to clear a little time to write.

Restless, they moved back to Eng land where two children, Frieda and Nicholas, were born. Shortly afterward the marriage collapsed. Hughes' formidable powers to charm were turned on other women and Sylvia was consumed by jealousy. Sensing a return of the ear lier breakdown, Aurelia begged her daughter to come home. Though sick, broke, alone and in mental agony, she refused. "If I start running now," she predicted, "I will never stop, I shall hear of Ted all my life, his success, his genius." At times in the last months of her life she dreamed of "a salon in Lon don. I am a famous poetess here." But there was another reason for not seeking shelter. "I haven't the strength to see you for some time," she informed her mother. "I cannot face you again until I have a new life."

Household Despot. Sylvia never did face Aurelia. It was one more blow to someone who had never had much of a life. Aurelia's husband, a Boston University entomologist, was a house hold despot who died from complications of diabetes because he refused for years to consult a doctor (he considered his own diagnosis of lung cancer sufficient). At 34, Aurelia was a widow with two small children and a chronic ulcer.

Years later she was driven to the Smith commencement-- where her daughter graduated summa cum laude -- lying on a mattress in a friend's station wagon.

The time of Sylvia's death must have been hell. The posthumous publication of The Bell Jar can only have added to the pain.

Now 68, Mrs. Plath has retired and spent the past two years working on this essential volume. Her preface and connecting notes -- plainspoken, styleless and intelligent -- give the outlines of the bleaker, less event-ridden life that Sylvia's letters tried to fill. Though differ ent in temperament, mother and child recognized that they were very close. Be fore her first suicide attempt when she was 20, Sylvia had grasped Aurelia's hand and cried, "Oh Mother, the world is so rotten! I want to die! Let's die to gether!" It is now clear that the end came for Sylvia not only because she lost Hughes but because she could no longer grasp that hand.

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