In August 1961, Plath and Hughes had moved to Court Green, a heritage property in Devon where they intended to raise a big family. No half-measures for Sylvia. Frieda had been born in London in April 1960, and, with one miscarriage in-between, Nicholas arrived in January 1962. Both were born at home.
Frieda's painting illustrates Birthday Letters. Nicholas now works as a marine biologist in Alaska. Hughes made furniture, Plath baked and sewed. Dig and delve, a picture postcard image. They were writing poetry too, with Hughes's reputation in particular making him seem unstoppable, while Plath was earning a quiet but steady measure of respect for her relatively small-asyet published output.
But the marriage was more than shaky. Plath's self-destructive perfectionism, along with her insatiable need to please - and be pleased - was fast wearing them both out, and her demons were determined to have their day. Hughes couldn't fix things up for either of them. "Alone/ Either of us might have met with a life," he writes. "Siamese-twinned, each of us fester- ing a unique soul-sepsis for the other,/ Each of us was the stake impaling the other." (9 Willow Street)
Hughes had long before made the mistake men often do of telling her about his many bachelor conquests, and of course Plath remembered for the whole of their marriage, as most women would. But Plath had always been tortured. That sofine mind which made a gift of all its artful dodgems, and somehow managed to decorate and bake and paint hearths and cupboards with her signature little heart motifs too, went into overload at the prospect of Hughes's infidelity. As things turned out, her instincts were correct. What had once confirmed his desirability - he was a prize and, hey, she had won him - now became ultimately threatening. In May 1962, Assia and David Wevill came to stay for a weekend, and Assia set her cap at Ted. She tearlessly helped Sylvia plant onions, and later was ever-sooohhelpful, finding the exact tapestry pattern she had been searching for and then sending it on with a sweet little note that must have made Sylvia retch.
What Assia really wanted was the handsome Ted, as she told friends at the time. And seven years on, Ted wanted her too. It's an old cliche. "Who was this Lilith of abortions/ Touching the hair of your children/ With tiger-painted nails?" Hughes imagines Sylvia characterising her in Dreamers. "She sat there, in her soot-wet mascara,/ In flame-orange silks, in gold bracelets/ Slightly filthy with erotic mystery". Blame Assia then? Not so simple. After Sylvia's death, Assia had a daughter with Ted, a girl called Shura, the name collapsing her Russian/Prussian roots with that purchase on certainty all lovers claim as their own. In 1968, Assia killed Shura, aged two, and then committed suicide. No one goes to such lengths simply for the sake of one-upmanship.
Later, Plath's suicide would make her a beacon for the lonely, the worried, for feeble folk who found it easier to hate Hughes than face their own demons - tales of her meticulous attention to detail in sealing up the doorways of her children's nursery, opening the window wide, and leaving portions of bread and milk as if they were baby robins in this coldest of English winters; the way she placed her head in the oven, and died there in her own kitchen, overcome by gas.
Now Hughes for the first time, writing of her death in Fishing Bridge, says how he lifted her eye-lids all the better to see her rich brown eyes. "Your dead face./ Your dead lips, pale. And your eyes/ (As brown- bright, when I lifted the lids,/As when you gazed across that incandescence)/ Unmov- ing and dead."
But that was the life. Plath was no literary homecoming queen, famed for her surface achievements and the depth of her grief. Instead, her work, published posthumously under the directorship of Olwyn Hughes, her sister-in-law, with Hughes's own editing, became a major force in contemporary poetry, standing as its own Statue of Liberty in a manner quintessentially American and undeniably new.
She spoke, as an emigrant in a strange and class-bound culture, of times that people had hardly begun to anticipate - of rebellions against Father and Mother yet to be signalled by anti-Vietnam war protests, of revolutions against authority in all its meanest forms which would mark Western culture throughout the 1960s. If Yeats was right in saying that each of us nurtures "some one scene, some one adventure that is the image of his secret life," then for Plath it was that neverland where death meets life.
Plath died, after all, in 1963, Philip Larkin's Annus Mirabilis, when sexual intercourse began, somewhere "between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP." But if the world lost its innocence in the nine months' gestation between her death and the murder of President John F. Kennedy, that search for self and identity which was so important - and ultimately so dangerous - for Plath, now became a badge of honour.
For Hughes, she was the ultimate brown-eyed girl. Birthday Letters honours the breadth of territory she established with due respect to her poetic powers, as well as to his memory of her. Staking her work in the tradition of John Donne, he writes in 18 Rugby Street: "You were a new world. My new world./ So this is America, I marvelled./ Beautiful, beautiful, America!" The land of the brave.