How Black Magic Killed Sylvia PlathTed Hughes' dabbling in the occult enabled his wife to write some of her greatest works. But, says Al Alvarez, ex-poetry editor of the Observer and a friend of the doomed couple, inspiration came at a terrible costGuardianWednesday September 15, 1999Sylvia Plath was a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge when she first met Ted Hughes, in 1956. For him, she was "beautiful, beautiful America", the land of impossible plenty, and he never quite lost his sense of her foreignness and freedom, as though she had been cast in some more generous mould that made him feel shabby. When they married he was "a post-war, utility son-in-law" and she was "transfigured./ So slender and new and naked./ A nodding spray of wet violet."
In fact she was a girl with a load of troubles on her back, as everyone now knows: a suicide attempt that had almost succeeded, a nightmare series of electro-convulsive shock treatments and, behind all that, an adored Prussian father who scared her stiff and died when she was eight. Hughes calls her father "The Minotaur" and a large number of the poems in his book Birthday Letters (1998) chart Plath's gradual, fatal descent into his lair. It was Hughes who showed her how to get there and he did it in the name of poetry. The weird mishmash of pagan superstition and Celtic myth that got him to where he wanted to be worked fine for him and even made sense, given his unreconstructed Cold Comfort Farm view of the world, but for Sylvia it was a foreign country in every sense. Ted's background was rural and relatively poor. Sylvia's background was academic, middle-class.
Her sensibility was altogether different from her husband's and, on one level, saner: more urban, more intellectual, more governed by nerves than by instincts - in a word, more American. Belief in dark gods and shamans and the baleful influence of the stars didn't come naturally to her, but she had always been good at things, a fast learner and high achiever, fiercely ambitious; anything her husband could do she could do better.
So she went along willingly when they played spooky games with the Ouija board and read each other's horoscopes, or when Ted hypnotised her to help with the birth of their first child. By the end, the pseudo black magic which Ted used cannily to get through to the sources of his inspiration had taken her over.
When her husband left her for another woman, she took his manuscripts, mixed them with a debris of fingernail parings and dandruff from his desk, and burned them in a witch's ritual bonfire. As the flames died down, a single fragment paper drifted on to her foot. On it was the name of the woman he had left her for: Assia. "Her psychic gifts, at almost any time," Ted wrote, "were strong enough to make her frequently wish to be rid of them."
With Sylvia's personal nightmares to contend with, Hughes's creative strategies would have worked on her like, say, the "recovered memory" games untrained rogue psychotherapists play on unwary patients - releasing the inner demons then stepping aside with no thought of the consequences. Because he truly believed in her talent he did it in the name of poetry. He handed her the key she had been looking for to find her dead father and, always the good student, she went down into the cellarage, key in hand. But the ghouls she released were malign. They helped her write great poems, but they destroyed her marriage, then they destroyed her.
As far as Sylvia was concerned, I was a figure in the background, an attendant lord, yet the fact that I was an established critic who responded to her late poems and published them in the Observer made our friendship seem important to her - for the time being, at least, until she got back on track. She was on her own artistically as well as socially, exploring territory where no other poets had been, and I think she was glad to know there was someone out there making a critical case for the new style of poetry she was writing.
She needed someone to listen to her poems but, even more, she needed someone to live with her and take care of her. And that was something I was not willing to acknowledge. I loved Sylvia in the way I loved other friends - for her gifts and intelligence and liveliness, for her fine brown eyes that seemed always drenched with feeling, for the disinterested passion for poetry we shared - but I was neither willing nor tough enough to shoulder her despair. It wasn't a role I wanted, especially since Anne, who was to become my wife, had walked into my life a few weeks after Sylvia's first visit to my studio. So I stuck to the poetry and tried not to hear what else she was telling me.
She called me on Christmas Eve: would I like to come and see the new flat, eat a meal, hear some poems? I said I'd drop by. I hardly recognised Sylvia when she opened the door. The bright young American house wife with her determined smile and crisp clothes had vanished along with the pancake make-up, the school-mistressy bun and fake cheerfulness. Her face was wax-pale and drained: her hair hung loose down to her waist and left a faint, sharp animal scent on the air when she walked ahead of me up the stairs. She looked like a priestess emptied out by the rites of her cult. And perhaps that is what she had become. She had broken through to whatever it was that made her want to write, the poems were coming every day, sometimes as many as three a day, unbidden, unstoppable, and she was off in a closed, private world where no one was going to follow her.
While her children slept upstairs, Sylvia sat with her back to the uncurtained night, sipping wine and reading some of the poems she'd written in the past couple of weeks. They were all in the minor key, grief-stricken but pared down, without a flicker of self-pity, and hearing them in that stark, cold sitting-room - made doubly forlorn by the flimsy Christmas decorations - made me listen in a different way. This time there was no way of shutting my ears to her desolation. One of them was called Death & Co. I remember arguing inanely about one phrase. I was only trying, in a futile way, to reduce the tension and take her mind momentarily off her private horrors.
We kept up the pretence - she read, I listened and nodded and made the right noises - until I looked at my watch and said, "I've got to go." She said, "Don't, please don't" and began to weep - great uncontrollable sobs that made her hiccup and shake her head. I stroked her head and patted her back as though she were an abandoned child - "It's going to be OK. We'll meet after Christmas" - but she went on crying and shaking her head. So I went on to my dinner party and never saw her alive again.
I left knowing I had let her down unforgivably. I told myself she was Ted's responsibility and Ted was my friend. But that wasn't the whole story. I wasn't up to her despair and it scared me. Seven weeks later [February 11 1963] she committed suicide.
I had always believed that genuine art was a risky business and artists experiment with new forms not in order to cause a sensation but because the old forms are no longer adequate for what they want to express. In other words, making it new in the way Sylvia did had almost nothing to do with technical experiment and almost everything to do with exploring her inner world - with going down into the cellars and confronting her demons. The bravery and curious artistic detachment with which she went about her task were astonishing - heartbreaking, too, when you remember how lonely she was. But when it was all over, I no longer believed that any poems, however good, were worth the price she paid. And I've sometimes wondered if all our rash chatter about art and risk and courage, and the way we turned rashness into a literary principle, hadn't egged her on.
• This is an edited extract from Al Alvarez's autobiography Where Did It All Go Right?, published by Richard Cohen Books on September 23 at £20.
