Kate Moses

This realization — that one door opening might mean another one
closing forever — might stand as a metaphor for Eudora Welty’s entire
career. When she wrote “The Winds,” Welty was 32, and had just sold her
first book. Around the same time she confided to her friend and mentor,
Katherine Anne Porter, that she was still a virgin. “And you always will
be,” Porter replied.

Porter may have been right. That door may never have opened for
Eudora Welty the woman. But whether it did or not, another door — one that
leads into a strange and beautiful imaginative world — opened for Eudora
Welty the writer.

Today, April 13, 1999, is Eudora Welty’s 90th birthday. In some
minds the question of America’s greatest living short story writer’s
virginity is still worth wondering about, made all the more tantalizing by
Welty’s famed, lifelong silence on the details of her private life. It’s
not just prurient interest that drives curiosity about Eudora Welty (though
in this age of confession prurience is hard to escape). How, one might ask,
could an unmarried, childless woman who spent her entire life living in the
home of her parents, who acknowledges having lived “a sheltered life,” have
known so much about life? That she did is undeniable. Many qualities have
gained Welty her exemplary standing in American fiction — her perfect
pitch for Southern dialect and culture; her comic, satirical extravagance;
her range of tone and form; her experimentation with folklore and myth –
but it is her exploration of the gift and burden of aloneness, what Welty
has termed the “human mystery,” that keeps her work so vital. Yet Welty is
herself, deliberately, something of a human mystery.

“I’d rather you didn’t talk to her” was Welty’s ladylike directive
to her friends and colleagues, according to Ann Waldron, author of the one
and only biography of Welty (“Eudora, A Writer’s Life,” Doubleday),
released this year. It’s not that Welty has had nothing to say about her
life — she has, in fact, said plenty, submitting graciously to countless
interviews over the years and publishing her own bestselling memoir of her
early life, “One Writer’s Beginnings,” in 1984. One of the oft-repeated
stories about Welty as a child is that she would appear in the room when
her mother’s friends would come to the house to visit, commanding them,
“Now, talk.” Though she remembers riding her bicycle around the
rotunda of the state Capitol in the city where she has spent
virtually her entire life, Welty has said that she sometimes felt like an
outsider in the South, an observer whose ancestral home did not burn during
Sherman’s March — her West Virginian mother and Ohioan father, both
schoolteachers, settled in Jackson as newlyweds. It’s well known that Welty
traces her aspiration to be a writer to her brief stint as a reporter for
the WPA during the Depression, which gave her the opportunity to travel all
over Mississippi for the first time, interviewing and photographing people
of all social classes in their everyday lives.

Welty is even on record about her conflicting feelings of guilt and
loyalty toward her mother, with whom she lived for 57 years. In
her memoir, Welty recalled her mother’s puzzlement over Welty fighting with
her younger brothers — “I don’t understand where you children get
it,” Chestina Welty had said. “I never lose my temper. I just get hurt.”
“But that was it,” Eudora wrote. “A child has no greater burden to bear
than a mother who ‘just gets hurt.’” She transformed her sorrow over the
deaths of both parents into her last novel, “The Optimist’s Daughter,”
which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. But Welty has always carefully
steered interviewers away from questions about her marital status, family
affairs and sexuality, insisting politely that certain subjects are simply
private. (Asked by one questioner why she never married, she replied, “I
wasn’t brought up to answer questions like that. And I don’t think you
were, either.”)

Welty’s biographer, however, suffers from no such scruples. Waldron
is endlessly fascinated by the nature of Welty’s relationship with her “adored”
friend John Robinson, to whom Welty dedicated the novel “Delta Wedding” and
who was perhaps the only man with whom she may have had a romantic
attachment, though he is known to have been homosexual. Waldron also
suggests — without offering any evidence — that Welty’s devoted
friendship with sexually predatory writer Elizabeth Bowen may have been
more than platonic. But the most tiresome and offensive of Waldron’s
speculations is her insinuation that despite her infectiously charming
personality, it was Welty’s “ugliness” — which Waldron greatly
exaggerates, if photographs can be trusted — that prevented her from
attracting a romantic partner. No doubt this type of personal intrusion is
exactly what Welty hoped to protect herself from by discouraging
biographers.

Flawed, unfounded or silly as many of Waldron’s personal analyses
of Welty may be (for example, there are several catalogs of the details of
minor social events that end meaningfully, “but Eudora didn’t attend”),
hers is the only work to gather so much of the vast trove of secondary
sources — letters, interviews and various other papers — together in one
volume, and for this reason alone it is indispensable for students of
Welty. It is worthwhile to consider, for instance, Welty’s comment about
“hurt” mothers and her own guilt within a broadened context of
information: Waldron notes that several of Welty’s early, unpublished
stories deal with protagonists trying to escape from powerful mothers; that
Chestina Welty had breast surgery for a malignant tumor on the night before
young Eudora’s piano recital but didn’t tell her daughter for fear she
“wouldn’t do herself justice”; that Welty’s love of travel led to her
mother’s cutting comment shortly before her death, “I’ll be right back –
when you die, those words ought to be engraved on your lips — ‘I’ll be
right back.’”

In fact, Welty’s experience of the world was anything but
parochial. From her early 20s onward Welty made innumerable trips
east, especially to New York, where she was an avid theatergoer and struck
up enthusiastic friendships with writers and editors, even working at the
New York Times Book Review for a spell. She also lived for a few months in
San Francisco (one of the stories in “The Golden Apples” is a veritable
walking tour of the city and describes her daily streetcar ride to the
beach) and traveled in Europe, the inspiration for many of the stories in
“The Bride of the Innisfallen.”

But if travel opened Welty’s mind, her true subject was always her
inner landscape. Welty would not have earned her status in the American
canon if she had merely invented traveling salesmen or provincial
beauticians or old black grandmothers or little girls dreaming through
storms. What distinguishes her fiction is the way she parts a curtain for
her characters — often observers, outsiders, travelers like herself –
allowing them fleeting glimpses of some truth they’ll never be able to hold
onto. In one of many eloquent soliloquies delivered by a Welty character,
an adolescent camper on the cusp of adulthood in the story “Moon Lake”
thinks of how pears begin to turn brown as they are eaten: “It’s not the
flowers that are fleeting,” she thinks, “it’s the fruits — it’s the time
when things are ready that they don’t stay.”

Welty’s legendary powers of observation — undoubtedly honed during
her travels, camera in hand, for the WPA — were obvious from her first
book, “A Curtain of Green and Other Stories.” In this strange and affecting
collection, Welty laid virtually all of her stylistic and thematic cards on
the table: her knife-edged ability to render place, her fascination with
journeys, her virtuosity with metaphor and description and her
characteristic plot, a meandering, nonlinear story that resolves itself –
or doesn’t — in ways wholly impossible to anticipate. The effect is that
of entering an elevator in which a fateful conversation is already taking
place — and your only choice is to get off at your own floor. Most of
Welty’s best-known stories, including “Why I Live at the P.O.,” come from
this book, which also displays how acutely she understood the stilted
mysteries of relationships between men and women. “Women?” the
then-admittedly virginal Welty wrote in “Death of a Traveling Salesman,”
“He could only remember little rooms within little rooms, like a nest of
Chinese paper boxes, and if he thought of one woman he saw the worn
loneliness that the furniture of that room seemed built of.”

There is nothing of the prudish old maid, nothing innocent, about
Welty’s fiction. Not only does she not flinch at the most vivid of sexual
situations, she exhibits an almost frightening insight into the nuances of
sexual conduct and married life. In “Sir Rabbit,” a young wife is raped in
the woods by a Pan-like character with whose twin boys she once literally
rolled in the hay. Another young wife, reuniting with her husband after a
year’s separation, “slid in her hand and seized hold of him right at the
root.” In “Music From Spain,” a year after a beloved child’s death a
husband slaps his stunned wife across the breakfast table, “without the
least idea why he did it.” And in a fantastically pagan, archetypal scene
in the novel “Losing Battles,” a bride is forced to the ground by her
assembled female relatives, who cram her mouth and smear her wedding dress
with watermelon.

“The Optimist’s Daughter” is the most overtly autobiographical of
her books. Written in response to the recent deaths of her mother and
younger brother, the book’s protagonist is Laurel McKelva Hand, an artist
nursing a complicated, long-buried grief. Laurel has returned to her family
home to be with her father during his eye surgery, but he dies while
convalescing in a New Orleans hospital, leaving Laurel to contend with his
selfish, oblivious second wife, her mother’s wretched death years before
and her widowhood — Laurel’s young husband was killed shortly after their
marriage during World War II. As the novel opens, Laurel remarks that “some
things don’t bear going into”; by book’s end, after her father’s funeral
and an inescapable pull back into memory, Laurel has removed herself from
the category of “those who never know the meaning of what has happened to
them.”

Welty seems to have used “The Optimist’s Daughter” to discover for
herself the meaning of what had happened in her own life. Laurel’s mother,
Becky McKelva, is clearly based on Chestina Welty: Like Chestina, Becky
missed the West Virginia mountains where she grew up with a widowed mother
and five banjo-playing, storytelling brothers. At 15, Chestina had
taken her father, whose appendix had ruptured, by river raft and then train
to Baltimore, where he died; Becky makes the same terrible journey. “Your
mother died a crazy!” Laurel’s stupid stepmother taunts, and Laurel is
forced to think back on her mother’s angry suffering, described in terms
not dissimilar to Chestina Welty’s final years, during which Eudora was
completely occupied by the needs of her family. Laurel’s father’s optimism
– a reference to his determined desire for his wife’s torments to turn out
all right, an unrealistic hope that only caused her mother more frustration
and that Laurel cannot easily forgive — is clarified further in “One
Writer’s Beginnings,” in which Welty recalls her mother labeling her
father “an optimist” with a sigh. “You’re a good deal of a pessimist,
sweetheart,” Welty’s father replied.

Looking back over her parents’ “blunders,” Laurel is ultimately
freed by disturbing the “old perfection” of the past, despite the losses
and regrets that rise to the surface. And yet, knowing how closely linked
the emotions, if not the fictionalized events, in this book are to Welty’s
own life, it’s hard to ignore the autobiographical sting of its most
sorrowful moment: when Laurel dreams up her dead husband, “wild with the
craving for his unlived life,” crying out, “I wanted it!” “I tell my
innermost secrets through my fiction. It’s all there,” Welty stated in a
late interview. How can one not imagine her, then, weeping like Laurel
McKelva Hand “for what happened to life,” the voice of her lost love rising
with the wind in the night and becoming a roar?

Back in 1943, when what Welty wanted most was to succeed as a
writer, she got a fan letter. She had just published her third book, “The
Wide Net,” in which many of the characters are somehow isolated, cut off
from the world; most of the reviews were disheartening, calling her work
“puzzling” and “obscure.” But a letter came that assured Welty that “You
are doing fine. You are doing all right …” It was signed “Faulkner.”

Forty years later, Eudora Welty gave a speech honoring the memory
of her fellow Mississippian, whose work she once characterized as “twice as
true as life” and whom she admired more than any other writer. “Faulkner sees
with the eyes of the artist and can make us see what is here and at the
same time through it to the truth about it, the human truth,” Welty said.
The same could be said of her own work, though her famous modesty would
never allow her to say it. Eudora Welty sees with the eyes of an artist,
but her vision has always been that of a woman who has lived.

For days on end as Billy and John and I had raced our bikes in the cul-de-sac with the neighbor kids or gone swimming with Mary Anne or to movie matinees chaperoned by one of the other moms, my mother had been packing up in preparation for the moving van and driving us across the country by herself. When we reached Ohio, she would leave us for a couple of weeks with relatives we knew only by name, my father’s younger brother Don and his family, while she and our dad found us a new place to live in Pennsylvania.

My father had already taken an airplane to Philadelphia, where he had a new job working for the government in the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. He’d sent us presents made by the tribes he was working for: I got a beaded doll without a face, which was hard to love though I tried. I’d asked my mother why he didn’t want his little adobe office on the Plaza anymore, with its crackly leather chair and the enticing hot cinnamon from the bakery wafting through the open windows. She’d answered in terms that she must have thought were appropriately concrete but free of confusing details: His job in Sonoma made him sad. Years later I learned that most of his private practice work had been filing divorces.

—–

My mom had been promoting our trip across America as a great adventure. Since she was about to drive 3,000 miles by herself with three children, two dogs, and three cats, one of whom was going to give birth again any day, her only hope for survival was to whip us into an enthusiastic frenzy and pray the spirit of fun would carry us through.

I couldn’t wait. Seven solid days of McDonald’s, A&W, Kentucky Fried, Shakey’s Pizza, International House of Pancakes, Arby’s, Foster’s Freeze — nothing could be better. And every night in a new motel: My mother, I knew, had left room in her suitcase for all the hotel towels we would be collecting for our new house in Pennsylvania. Holiday Inn’s bath linens had a better color scheme, but by dint of some carefully timed wheedling I’d extracted the promise that we’d stay at a Howard Johnson’s whenever we had the chance. If there was anything that could beat McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish it was HoJo’s crispy fried clams, and I saw the entire cross-country trip as an opportunity for reunion with Howard Johnson’s coconut cake.

In those innocent days before car seats and seat belt laws, kids could roll all over a car unrestricted, so my mother put the back seat down in the station wagon and made our car into a big playroom. She padded the floor with a chenille bedspread, and she lined the edges with board games and coloring books and pillows and the camping cooler. Jean-Tom and Robespierre yowled in one mesh-sided cat carrier and pregnant Musette had a second to her preoccupied self, but the dogs were free to wander the interior, on the lookout for unattended sandwiches, ready to press their damp noses against my mom’s neck as she drove. Our suitcases and an enormous bag of dog food were strapped onto the luggage rack under a canvas dropcloth.

“Your tail is riding kind of low,” one of the teenage Verboten boys snickered from the curb when we’d gotten into the car. My mom sat in front by herself in her red bandanna, the Triple A Triptiks sharing the passenger seat with her purse and files of important papers and boxes of breakables she hadn’t trusted to the movers. She checked her lipstick in the rearview mirror and beamed at us over her shoulder.

“This is going to be fun!” she cried, and we all hooted and waved as she laid on the horn and pulled away, the younger neighborhood kids racing after us on their bikes, handlebar tassels flying, to the end of the street.

That first day out, somewhere near the high-desert town of Winnemucca, Nevada, a freak flash flood washed out the highway. We turned back to the only motel we could reach; the proprietor put us in an upstairs room, as the creek we were on was expected to keep rising.

We sat on the lumpy beds and ate the rest of the baloney for dinner, listening to the endless surge of water pouring down the creek, the bar’s neon sign throbbing red all night through the curtains.

“A flash flood — now, that’s exciting!” my mom said, peering out the motel’s window at the churning creek. “This’ll be something you can write on a postcard to your friends. I bet they’ve never been in a flash flood before!”

On the second day, a salt storm kicked up while we were crossing the Great Salt Lake Desert. We waited it out for hours, pulled to the shoulder of the highway like every other vehicle on the road, visibility nil as the storm continued to hiss at the windows, sandblasting the paint off our car. The wind blew so hard it knocked a livestock truck on its side, and giant hogs came bursting out of the opacity, lifting their pink snouts and squealing in panic as they trotted past us on either side of the station wagon, men chasing after them wearing their shirts tied over their faces.

“A salt storm!” my mother marveled, gazing out the blind white windshield as Billy and John and I played checkers in the back. “What are the chances we’d be lucky enough to see something like this?”

On the third day, after arriving in Denver long after dark, too late and too tired to look for a Howard Johnson’s or any other cheap motel, my mother awoke in the middle of the night in our expensive downtown hotel room to discover that Musette was having her kittens inside my mom’s open suitcase — on top of all of her clothes, except for the grubby outfit she’d dropped on the carpet after wearing it for two days straight. Two kittens, three kittens, a fourth; then the fifth kitten started to be born breech. My mother went into veterinary midwife action. She tried to help Musette ease that kitten out, but it was stuck.

“What’s going to happen, Mommy?” we asked, creeping out from under the covers to lean across the end of the bed, where our mother was hunched in front of her suitcase, muttering “geez louise, geez louise” over and over, telling us to stay back, the hotel’s towels bloody all around her.

“I don’t know — ” she said, her response unusually curt, then softening, as if she suddenly remembered us. “But it’s going to be okay, don’t you worry …”

Throwing on her dirty clothes, a smear of blood across her cheek from pushing her hair off her face, my mother loaded us back into the car with Musette and the kittens. She drove up and down Denver’s deserted streets in a futile search for a veterinarian’s office, enlisting us all in a joint prayer to Saint Jude. Finally she was able to flag down a policeman, who escorted us to the only emergency vet in the city. We got back to our hotel and the other animals as the sun was rising behind the bright sharp edges of the downtown buildings. Musette survived, and the first four kittens. My mom’s hands trembled as she packed us all into the station wagon to head for Kansas.

“That was the worst of it,” she said, shooting us a weak smile in the rearview mirror and starting the engine.

After we’d passed through Topeka, the midday sky closed up and went black. As the local radio station we were listening to announced the tornado warning, the cars in the opposite lane of the highway pulled squealing onto the shoulder, the entire lane of traffic turning around and merging into ours, all of us heading east at increasing speed. Behind us, we could see the tornado’s funnel sucking all the blackness toward itself.

“Put the leashes on the dogs now, Billy,” my mom said, her voice brittle with false calm as she outlined detailed instructions for each of us in case she decided to pull into a ditch. The speedometer was showing 90 miles per hour, both lanes of the highway bumper-to-bumper with vehicles racing eastward, some cars and trucks passing us neatly by along the shoulders. “Not until I tell you to, okay? But here ‘s the plan — Billy, you take the dogs. Cissy, you take the boy cats in their carrier. John — John, you sit right by the door, Mommy will hold your hand and bring Musette. If I stop, we’ll all crawl under the car, got it? Billy, tell me what it looks like now.”

“It’s closer, Mommy. It looks bigger.” The radio had stopped working, broadcasting only a deafening spray of static.

My mom gunned the engine and drove. One hundred miles an hour, 110.

“That’s fast, isn’t it, Mommy?” John piped up.

“Yeah, that’s fast,” Billy and I confirmed, nodding our heads up and down.

When we rattled to a halt in Lawrence, Kansas, a couple of hours later, our engine was blowing billows of smoke almost as black as the tornado, which my mother had outrun at a sustained 115 miles an hour.

We spent the next day splashing in the pool of a motel in Lawrence while the station wagon was being serviced, my mother lying prone on a lounge chair in the shade, a wet washcloth draped over her face.

“Don’t talk to me,” she said when we came over and poked her shoulder to see if she was still breathing, “I just outran a tornado. Wait until Sally Verboten hears about this.”

On the last day of our trip, we were finally closing in on our cousins in Dayton, my brothers and I campaigned heavily for McDonald’s. Again. There’d been exactly one HoJo’s on our entire route, and pancakes with blueberry syrup at IHOP had launched us every morning; otherwise we ‘d stayed in whatever motels we could find and eaten every meal courtesy of McDonald’s.

Not again, my mother said, but finally we wore her down. It didn’t hurt that she realized we would reach Dayton well after dinnertime and a McDonald’s sign appeared up the highway, beckoning in the distance like a mirage oasis in the desert, as we’d all begun to whine.

“Okay,” she said wearily, flicking on her turn signal for the exit ramp, “but we ‘re not sitting inside. We’ll go to the drive-through.”

If you had a strawberry milkshake and a packet of fresh french fries, the best way to eat them, to my eight-year-old mind, was to munch a few fries, drink a bit of the milkshake, and dip the rest of the fries into the milkshake to taste the thick icy sweetness of the shake against the hot salt of the fries. The straw and the plastic lid on the shake, therefore, were impediments to complete satisfaction.

I was enjoying my first handful of fries and just prying the lid off my strawberry shake, humming noisily and perched cross-legged right behind the driver’s seat, when my mother swung around to face me, her unwashed hair flying out from under her sweaty bandanna, which she’d worn every day since my dad left for his new job.

“DON’T –” she started to threaten through clenched teeth, her face contorted with menace, too exhausted and ground down to pretend anymore, this close to the finish line. “Don’tyoudare,” she warned me, pointing a long, skinny finger at me, “takethetopoffthatmilkshakeit’llspillallover.”

Chastened, I snapped the milkshake lid back onto the waxed cup. I sucked demurely on the straw. But after a while I just sort of forgot. As I started to pry the lid off my milkshake a second time, the cup somehow exploded in my hand, sending a pink tsunami of milkshake toward the back of my mother’s head. In the rearview mirror I watched her eyes grow wide and black when the cold sting of milkshake splashed over her neck and started dripping down her dirty, five-days-worn collar, down her back between her shoulder blades.

For an hour she raved. “I hate this goddamned family — nobody helps me — I have to do everything myself — I wish I could run away –” She wept and swore, her hands shaking with rage on the steering wheel. We were blown back by the force of her fury and frustration, huddled together at the tailgate of the station wagon, hugging the dogs. We escaped the car as if it were on fire as soon as we pulled to a stop in front of Uncle Don and Aunt Virginia’s house, and I peeped through a window curtain in their living room and watched my mother continue to stammer and weep as she stood on the driveway rinsing herself off with the garden hose, holding the gushing end down the back of her filthy shirt.

“C’mon, kids,” my aunt Virginia said cheerfully, luring me away from the window, rounding my brothers up from the couch where they sat next to each other, mute and paralyzed and white-faced. Her own two toddlers were already asleep in their bedrooms. She’d started running a bath for our mom; we could hear the water pounding into the tub. “Let’s go in the kitchen,” she said. “We can make popcorn balls.”

—–

Ohio rained.

The only thing for us to do in the inclement weather was to sit in the living room while our little cousins took their endless naps, eating popcorn and watching soap operas with Aunt Virginia as she ironed her clean laundry.

Some days we made popcorn balls with corn syrup that seeped at its own slow pace out of the bottle, and I paid attention as Aunt Virginia buttered the inside of the saucepan so the boiling sugar concoction wouldn’t stick.

Sometimes we colored them red or green or blue. Sometimes we made caramel corn with brown sugar and salted nuts and it was better than Cracker Jack. Other times we made popcorn à la Rice Krispie Treats, glued together with marshmallows and margarine melted into a stretchy goo. We buttered our hands, too, when we helped shape the popcorn into balls big enough to last through an entire episode of “General Hospital” or “Guiding Light.”

“Maybe tomorrow we’ll go outside,” Aunt Virginia would say hopefully, gazing out the kitchen window at the perpetually unpromising sky, even-tempered and patient though she undoubtedly had not anticipated being stuck inside with five bored children for two weeks when she agreed to watch us while my mom and dad house-hunted.

At last we were escorted to our new house in Chester County, Pennsylvania, in a rural township of gently sloping fields and Amish dairy farms that was the last stop on the Main Line. What had my mother done without us? Though my father had disappeared every day for as long as I could remember, doing his job or going to the dump with carloads of grass clippings, my mother had always been close by.

This was the first time my brothers and I had ever been truly away from her. She’d found us a place to live, Uncle Don and Aunt Virginia had told us, but how long could that take? I pictured her with my dad driving up to unknown but comfortingly familiar motel rooms with HoJos towels on the bathroom rack, eating fried clams in the restaurant with no one to share them with, packing the HoJos towels into her suitcase all by herself, with no one to help her squeeze them down while she zipped the suitcase shut. Beyond that I had no idea how she might have spent her time.

Now I wonder if she might have taken a walk alone, or an uninterrupted bath. Maybe she read a book. Maybe she finished the thoughts in her head, or lost track of where she was altogether. Maybe she spent every minute going from bank to phone booth to hardware store, unpacking, organizing, cleaning a kitchen and bathrooms that weren’t left quite clean enough by the people who’d lived there before. Maybe she found herself sitting in the middle of a wide green lawn in Pennsylvania, watching shadows bend the fading light under a vast old black walnut tree, and in the distance her three children were shambling out of a car and approaching her, shyly, and she didn’t look back to how beleaguered she felt the last time she saw them but, instead, without thinking, she swung her arms out to hold her sweet bumbling kids, her skinny blond boys and her newly tubby, graceless little girl — who made her feel lucky to wake up every morning, who were running toward her across a vast space, relying on her to show them what it felt like to be home.

—–

RECIPE: CARAMEL CORN

6 cups freshly popped corn
2 cups roasted, salted mixed nuts: a combination of peanuts, almonds, pecans, cashews, macadamias, and/or walnuts, to your taste
½ cup unsalted butter
1 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
¼ cup light corn syrup
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon vanilla

• Generously butter a baking sheet and set aside. Combine the popcorn and nuts, spread them on the baking sheet, and place in a low oven (200°) to warm while you make the caramel.

• In a heavy- bottomed, medium saucepan, melt the butter over low heat, then stir in the brown sugar, corn syrup, and salt. Turn the heat to medium and bring to a boil, stirring, then clip on a candy thermometer. Continue to cook, stirring frequently, until the temperature reaches hard-ball stage, or 250° to 260°. Turn off the heat, stir in the baking soda and vanilla, and quickly pour over the popcorn, tossing with wooden spoons to coat evenly. Return the caramel corn to the oven to further crisp the caramel, about 30 to 45 minutes (it will still feel soft when warm, but it will become crisp as it cools). Remove from the oven and allow to cool completely before eating. The caramel corn will keep, stored in an airtight container, for about a week.

Makes about 8 cups of caramel corn. The recipe can easily be doubled for a crowd. 

Kate Moses is the author of “Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath” (St. Martin’s.) She was the co-founder, with Camille Peri, of Salon’s “Mothers Who Think” site, and she and Peri also co-edited the award-winning book “Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenting.” She lives in San Francisco. This was excerpted from her new book, “Cakewalk: A Memoir.” 

Following a gruesomely detailed description of how “they” dug up and roasted and ate her mother’s corpse (an image fueled, unfortunately, by the real Plath fanatics who regularly defaced Plath’s grave over the years, even stealing the pebbles left as decorations by Frieda and her younger brother, Nicholas), Frieda Hughes’ poem ends:

They called her theirs.
All this time I had thought
She belonged to me most.

There was no denying that “Readers,” particularly its conclusion, was the raw, anguished cry of a child. It seemed curious that the poem’s final two lines were dropped when it appeared the next year in “Wooroloo”: as if even Frieda Hughes’ claim to ownership of her mother, let alone ownership itself, had been stripped away.

Hughes’ anguished cry turned to bitter fury earlier this year when she responded to news that “Sylvia,” a major feature film about her parents, was in production. To explain her poem “My Mother,” which was published in the British magazine Tatler, Hughes suggested that she had been all but stalked by producers of the film in pursuit of a “collaboration” — maybe a daughterly endorsement, or at the very least permission to quote from her mother’s poetry in the film. “My Mother” was her response: a blistering, scornful attack not just on the makers of the film but on its viewers, who, she imagined, might make themselves a quick cuppa while leaving the video paused with her mother’s head in the oven.

This is where I showed up. As the author of “Wintering,” a novel about Sylvia Plath during her final cold London winter, I walked straight into the British media’s ice storm of proprietary outrage on behalf of the late Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and their very much alive children, who were raised in England. In London, Cambridge, Reading and Bath, and on radio and television airwaves all over the U.K., people wanted to know if I had considered the children’s feelings, and how I came by the cheek to think I was entitled to tell Plath’s story.

My chilliest critics were those who seemed to forget that the “children” are now in their 40s, no longer fragile, impressionable tots; others were sure that by virtue of my being an American woman, my only motivation for writing “Wintering” was to “get” the unfairly maligned Ted Hughes, so successfully rehabilitated worldwide by “Birthday Letters” and his death a few months after the book hit international bestseller lists. Interestingly — especially because my book came out at the height of the Iraq war protests, when Tony Blair was contemptuously termed “Bush’s poodle” and Americans abroad had (as they still do) every reason to cringe when they pulled out their passports — I had my own rehabilitation in the eyes of some wary English critics when they noticed in my bio that my father had been a Brit. Oh, well then, she might be all right …

The literary editor of the London Sunday Times, Erica Wagner, sniffed that while she could concede that I was a “good writer” and sometimes “interesting” (damned with the faintest of praise!), she also wondered what the point of my close attention to Plath might be, and “when the eternal raking over of Plath’s life will pall,” suggesting finally that it was about time to leave poor Sylvia and her descendants in peace. Wagner deemed my novel about Plath “trivial” and “reductive,” and insinuated that I was perhaps a bit nuts for writing “Wintering.” The final lines of her dismissal explained, in scrupulous detail, how one might go about purchasing, over the phone or online, discounted copies of the very same Erica Wagner’s book of microscopia on Sylvia, Ted and “The Birthday Letters.”

What did Frieda Hughes think of “Wintering”? I don’t actually know, and surely never will. All I do know is that the Guardian’s weekend magazine had requested permission to use a photo of Plath as illustration for a feature article I wrote on her obsessive love of baking. The notoriously uncooperative Plath estate had been contacted and had given a preliminary (and unexpectedly blasé) OK. By the time the photo editor went back to the estate with a formal permissions contract, the film storm had blown up, Frieda Hughes had denied the filmmakers permission to use her mother’s poetry, and for good measure (following the lead of Alice in Wonderland’s Queen of Hearts: “verdict first, trial afterwards!”) denied the use of the photograph for my Guardian article. It was relayed to me that Hughes disliked the very idea of my having written “Wintering,” as its subject was “private.”

Private? Sylvia Plath’s creation of the “Ariel” poems and her assembly of the “Ariel” manuscript — the work that she rightly predicted would “make her name,” and which became one of the bestselling books of poetry of all time — is private? The creative process of the most famous female American poet, whose unmatched artistic gaze was directed most pitilessly at herself, is private?

Well, I guess Ted Hughes might have argued that his destruction of his estranged wife’s final journal, which presumably detailed her thoughts and feelings as the “Ariel” poems were being written and their marriage fell to pieces, was justified because it was “private” — though he put it in other words, saying that he destroyed the journal because he never wanted his children to have to read that “sad” document. But if Plath’s life, creative and otherwise, is truly private, how does one account for Hughes’ subsequent decision to publish Plath’s remaining journals, with all their extra-literary personal details and acidic sniping? Or Hughes’ thoughtful critical writings on Plath’s poetic legacy, which both compared her in stature to Emily Dickinson and stressed the vital importance of understanding her creative development within the context of her domestic life during her last two years?

How does one explain the Plath estate (then controlled by Ted Hughes but agented by his sister, Olwyn) strong-arming Plath’s mother, Aurelia Plath, into consenting to the U.S. publication of “The Bell Jar,” her daughter’s semi-autobiographical novel? Aurelia Plath was mortified by “The Bell Jar,” as so many of the novel’s distasteful characters were thinly veiled caricatures of the Plath family’s dearest friends, relatives and neighbors; the Plath estate resorted to a sort of irresistible blackmail by simultaneously dangling the possibility of overseas visits with Plath’s children while offering Aurelia Plath permission to publish her daughter’s letters in return for her promise not to interfere with “The Bell Jar’s” U.S. release. (Hughes published the abridged “Journals of Sylvia Plath” in 1982 as a corrective to the chirpy “Sivvy” depicted through Aurelia Plath’s 1975 “Letters Home by Sylvia Plath,” just as Aurelia Plath put together “Letters Home” as the corrective to the black-humored malice of “The Bell Jar”: a calculated game of familial one-upmanship.)

How to justify the Plath estate’s sale of the poet’s archive to Smith College, making not just manuscripts and poem drafts available to the public but also personal memorabilia, such as Plath’s Girl Scout uniform, or doll furniture she hand-painted as a gift for Frieda’s second Christmas? Indeed, how does one account for Sylvia Plath’s ransacking of her own life and psyche for literary ends, or Ted Hughes breaking his official silence about his dead first wife with the release of “The Birthday Letters”? Has it never occurred to Frieda Hughes that the only reason anyone’s had the chance to finger her mother’s “mental underwear” is because her family, beginning with her mother and father, made it available?

Since taking on the responsibility of active control of her mother’s literary estate (shared with her reclusive brother) shortly before the death of Ted Hughes in 1998, Frieda Hughes has done a single-handedly remarkable job of further muddying the Plath privacy waters while protesting against public intrusion into her “personal” history at the same time. Frieda and Nicholas Hughes’ first significant act as literary executors of the Plath estate was to arrange for the preparation and publication of their mother’s “Unabridged Journals,” a literary event deemed so newsworthy that galleys of the book were embargoed until the very last minute. Recognizing the international interest the “Journals” were guaranteed to generate, both the Guardian and the New Yorker serialized the book upon its U.K. publication, though the U.S. edition was almost a year from release. Among other revelations, the “Unabridged Journals” included what must surely be considered the most “private” of writings by Sylvia Plath: Her vivid description of Nicholas’ 1962 home birth. Given that Nicholas was barely a year old at the time of Plath’s death, his mother’s candid account of his arrival could be considered a precious family heirloom made public.

In June 2002, Frieda Hughes further complicated her proprietary stance over her family’s story by accepting an $80,000 grant to be distributed over three years from Britain’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. Hughes’ NESTA grant, which is funded through national lottery money and is therefore rightly considered a public charity, is intended to give her the “opportunity and means” — apparently without regard to the fact that she is one of the two sole copyright holders and financial beneficiaries of the works of her mother, whose poetry and fiction has been in constant, vigorous print around the world for four decades — to write her life story, charting her first 40 years through poetry and painting. Just four months later, Hughes announced her bitter rift with her stepmother, Carol Hughes, over control of the income from her father’s estate, said to be worth $3.5 million at the time of his death.

A strange, tortured feature by Frieda Hughes in the Sunday Telegraph — published with advantageous timing upon the 70th anniversary of her mother’s birth, the fourth anniversary of her father’s death, and the occasion of the British release of her third poetry collection — explained in wounded detail how her father’s widow refused to honor a letter intended to make her brother, her aunt and herself equal beneficiaries of the earnings from the copyrights to Ted Hughes’ poems. Hughes explained that the dispute over her father’s money left her “not only without my father, whose loss devastated me, but also without the stepmother whom I had loved, and trusted, as my father did.” “I walk into bookshops and see my father’s astonishing works on the shelves,” Hughes continued, “and have to acknowledge that I now feel they have been disconnected from me.” Hughes’ pained airing of relational dirty laundry ended with an apologia on her newly published book (complete with “how to purchase” info, á la Erica Wagner), lending the entire article an opportunistic, advertorial whiff.

The familial umbilicus, for Frieda Hughes, seems not to be simply the convenient notion of “privacy” but the distribution of money. From the time of her death the income from Sylvia Plath’s estate has been designated for her children’s benefit. Having lost her mother before she could have more than the haziest memories of her, Hughes has known Sylvia Plath’s tangible maternal attention only through the good schools, ability to travel, and material comforts her mother’s estate made possible. All children feel a sense of “ownership” of their mother’s corpus — but in this case that corpus was nothing but words on paper and quarterly statements tallying the sale of those words.

Like the baby laboratory monkeys who clung desperately to sharp metal edifices substituted for their warm monkey mothers, it seems that Frieda Hughes, lacking a living embodiment of Sylvia Plath, projected her daughterly emotional need onto the financial comfort provided by her mother’s (and now her father’s) lucrative writings. Those writings, however, have to be shared with others in order to get the “mothering” that the Plath estate’s income symbolizes. Yet Plath’s daughter seems to maintain a psychic disconnection between the financial security supplied by the estate she controls and the book buyers whose investments in Sylvia Plath find their way into her checkbook.

It’s not surprising that Frieda Hughes — who claimed in an article on Britain’s National Poetry Day that “poetry is for everyone,” only to deny access to her mother’s words a year later when approached by the “Sylvia” filmmakers — maintains such a disdainful stance toward her mother’s readers. Children and art require the same resources of ceaseless, undivided attention and wholehearted commitment; it is part of Sylvia Plath’s audacious brilliance that she so successfully, though for so regrettably short a time, juggled the competing needs of her tiny children and the demands of her muse during the first 34 months of Frieda Hughes’ life. Nevertheless, Hughes’ continuing antagonistic, distrustful rivalry with Plath’s readers reminds me of my 5-year-old daughter’s response to how my attention was divided for a time between the writing of “Wintering” and herself: On the last day of kindergarten, which followed the day I finally overnighted my novel’s manuscript to my publisher, my daughter announced to her class, “I want to share that my mommy finished her book, and I’m pleased to announce that Sylvia Plath is finally dead.”

I don’t mean to belittle the genuine harm and lasting scars inflicted on Frieda Hughes and her brother by losing their mother in their infancies, and by stupid people who demonized her father or crudely politicized and misunderstood Sylvia Plath. It must, in fact, be hell to know that one’s loved ones and remote, unremembered past are relentlessly scrutinized and that one’s parents’ most humiliating flaws and fatal mistakes remain the subject of public attention long after their deaths. Surely there have been insane, grave-robbing readers of Plath and unjust, hysterical accusers of Hughes. But they are, for all their vituperations and loud-mouthing, the minority, especially as our cultural understanding of and appreciation for Sylvia Plath has matured with time, moving away from the prurient voyeurism that accompanied Plath’s meteoric launch into the public literary arena with “Ariel” in the 1960s.

Rather than obsessing over Plath’s suicide and her biographical apocrypha, contemporary readers of Plath tend to be interested in her life in context, to better understand her artistic achievement. My experience in meeting and hearing from hundreds of Plath and Hughes readers has been that by far the vast majority of them are drawn to the story of Frieda Hughes’ parents because of the immediacy and vigor of their literary gifts, rather than the sordid details of their failing of each other. Plath’s readers are not ghouls; they revere the written word as Plath and Hughes did, and respond to the power and complexity of the poetry. They struggle with the frustration and helplessness they feel at the premature loss of Plath, and for her unearned sense of failure, and for Hughes’ bravery in trying, however late in life, to understand his culpability and guilt. And as with the reports of Mark Twain’s death, their potential for diverting income from the Hughes children to themselves is greatly exaggerated. I can attest personally to the fact that the residual benefit of writing about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, no matter how well received (outside of, ahem, England), is modest at best; the real money belongs to the copyright holders of the poetry and prose — the words that, for all Plath’s ultimate loss of faith in herself, have never become “dry and riderless.”

The exception to this rule, however, may be the makers and stars of a major feature film about Sylvia Plath, which is perhaps why “Sylvia” elicited Frieda Hughes’ ferocious outrage while my novel, virtually contemporaneous to the movie, merited no more than Hughes’ frowning grumble. The job of judging the artistic success of this film is for someone more objective than I can be. However, there is no denying that “Sylvia” will make money off the lives of Plath and Hughes, which is where Frieda Hughes’ prickly stance becomes most problematic. No one can fault Hughes for distancing herself from a project that will depict her mother’s death, or, in her own words, blame her for not wanting to be “involved in moments of my childhood which I never want to return to.”

But every major player in the making of “Sylvia,” from producer Alison Owen to screenwriter John Brownlow, from director Christine Jeffs to stars Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig and even composer Gabriel Yared, has characterized his or her part in this film as a “labor of love” born of admiration for the works of Plath and Hughes. Owen, Paltrow and Jeffs have been lifelong readers of Plath; Brownlow switched from math to English at Oxford University because of Plath’s poetry. Craig was given a copy of Ted Hughes’ book “Crow” when he was 12 years old and remembers sneaking into a Hughes reading when he was in grammar school. Yared wrote the elegiac score with a sense that he was composing “for” Plath. In an interview during her recent stop in San Francisco for the premiere of “Sylvia” at the Mill Valley Film Festival, director Jeffs revealed that she, like Paltrow, would read Plath’s poetry late into the night before a morning film shoot, selecting individual lines from Plath’s “Ariel” poems to focus the tone and emotional temperature of the next day’s filming.

It is difficult, then, to find fault with the impulse behind the film, despite Frieda Hughes’ claim that the filmmakers refused to take her objections or her “feelings” into consideration. One has to wonder if Hughes’ feelings might have more to do with the siphoning off of income from the Plath estate than with the sensitivity or fairness or accuracy of the film itself.

Is it reasonable for an artist — or in “Sylvia’s” case, a group of artists and investors — to benefit financially from the work, or even the reputation, of another artist? Isn’t that exactly what Frieda Hughes is doing by accepting her fat NESTA grant and writing her life story? Would NESTA have given Frieda Hughes $80,000 if she hadn’t been the daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath?

Hughes has every right to feel proprietary over her mother as her mum and her father as her dad. But it is foolhardy for her to attempt to control either the general reader’s response to her parents’ work or to prevent the creative interpretation of her parents’ work by other artists. As Hughes is a poet and artist herself, it is confounding that she seems to refuse to acknowledge the natural attraction that artists feel for the works of other artists, often to beneficial effect for both the subject and the interpreter.

It is doubly confounding that Hughes seems to believe that by clinging to a misapprehended sense of nepotistic “privacy” she alone has the right to artistic response to one — two — of the major literary figures of the 20th century. This is the kind of schizophrenic attitude that has characterized the Plath estate for many years: The desire to realize the income created by making Plath’s works available to the public, coupled with active distaste at the possibility that those same works might elicit some response other than A) a narrowly circumscribed, family-approved interpretation, or B) the ringing of a cash register.

What might “Sylvia” be like if Frieda Hughes and her family had granted the filmmakers liberal use of Plath’s words, placing poetry at the heart of the relationship of their version of Sylvia and Ted, as it was in real life? “I know the bottom,” Plath wrote in the poem “Elm” in April 1962, when Frieda had just turned 2 years old. “It is what you fear.” What Frieda Hughes may continue to fear is that letting go of the stranglehold the Plath estate maintains on Plath’s work will force her to forever revisit the terrible specter of her mother’s death and the nasty spectacle that followed for her family when that death became the crux of public knowledge about Plath. But Frieda Hughes’ mother continued, almost prophetically, in that same poem: “I do not fear it: I have been there.” The genius of Sylvia Plath was her courageous willingness to face her inner demons, excruciating as it was, and to come to know herself profoundly in the process. Her poetry continues to resonate far beyond her personal struggle to become, as her daughter recognized in September 2000, “her own woman, defined not by others, but by the words she left behind.”

In those last anguished, exhilarating, fruitful months before Plath’s suicide, she became a woman whose sole proprietor was herself. That’s the Plath her readers know, and that’s the Plath who will last: the ardent, defiant, fierce and nimble writer, not the miserable woman who inscrutably and with hopeless finality took her own life. All secondary Plathian roads, whether biographical or critical or fictional or celluloid, will lead surely and inevitably back to the genuine article. As an artist and a poet, but most important as Sylvia Plath’s daughter, it’s time for Frieda Hughes to trust not just her mother’s readers but her mother’s words, and the profound power they have to transcend her death. Until she does, Sylvia Plath will never be truly hers.

The fifteenth of June. Sylvia climbs the stairs in her dirty canvas work pants, wet through the knees from a morning of scrubbing floors, carrying Nicholas on her hip and a tin of baking soda with a spoon balanced in a cracked teacup in her other hand. Minutes ago she was wearing a beekeeper’s veil, the whole contraption, all new. The cloud of cheesecloth spread out before her over the picture-frame brim of the straw hat beneath, giving her a dreamer’s view of the low mist of wood smoke curling about the ankles of the apple trees. As never before, she saw her world through a veil — she’d eschewed even a hat at her simple wedding. Their sixth anniversary is tomorrow.

It is the new queen who is the bride today. The bee man is still in the orchard searching for her, pumping his bellows in a hazy landscape of fern and meadow grass and purple-tufted thistles. The bees grow sleepy as he checks the brood combs with his smoker, puffing the nurses and the workers to the edges of the frames, looking for the sleek auburn body of the young queen. When he finds her he’ll mark her with a drop of nail polish, a little red drop on her back. She’ll take her bride flight, chased by the drones; then she’ll never leave the hive again. Like a bridesmaid in attendance, Sylvia painted the hand-me-down beehive herself, a green gabled house positioned under the semaphoring trees.

Upstairs, Ted sits on a chair in their bedroom, his hair dusted yellow with pollen, his forearms and collar sticky with propolis, his fingertips green-stained from mowing the lawn. He was up first thing, bringing the baby to Sylvia in the bed before she even awoke, then off to the Taw at dawnlight with his tackle in his old army rucksack. He’s been outside all morning as she’s been in, scouring the house until the bee man arrived. The bee man brought the swarm humming furiously inside a vibrating box.

Ted is holding ice cubes wrapped in a tea towel to his purpling lips. His forehead is lurid, lumpy and hot, his eyes swollen almost totally shut. When he shifts his weight in the chair, dead bees fall out of his loose cotton shirt and skitter crisply on their velvet over the grey floorboards. They stung him six times, swarming his head. They chased him as he ran, the bee man pumping his smoker uselessly, trying to mask the banana scent of fear.

“We smell of smoke,” Sylvia says quietly as she sits down on the edge of the bed beside Ted’s chair, propping Nicholas into a sitting position among the pillows. Nicholas sucks his fat hands and a large wooden bead.

The yeasty aroma of burnt twine and peanut shells drifts from their clothes and their hair. Sylvia scans her husband’s mottled, darkening face. He looks wretched, a miserable Cyclopean monster. The curtains exhale behind them at the open windows.

“I thought you said they didn’t like white,” Ted mumbles, his mouth swollen, his voice pulpy and slow.

“That’s what the rector told me. He said they’re attracted to black. But you didn’t put on the hat. Did you think you could keep them away with that napkin?”

“Not a napkin. My handkerchief,” he answers gloomily.

“Even so.”

They listen as Nicholas smacks his toy. Sylvia opens the tin of baking soda with the edge of the spoon and knocks a few clumps of powder into the cup. She leans forward toward the bedside table, pours a bit of water from the drinking glass there into the cup.

“Where’s Frieda?” Ted asks.

“Feeding her babies downstairs,” Sylvia answers, stirring the baking soda and water into a paste. They can just hear Frieda from the playroom, the rise and fall of her toddler prattle mimicking with disquieting accuracy the fawning neighborly emptiness and bitter private remonstrances of adult conversation.

“What did the bee man say?” Ted asks.

“Not to run,” Sylvia answers.

“It’s too late for that now, isn’t it,” he responds wearily, his words thick.

“I’m sorry,” she says, giving him a weak smile. “I was just trying to cheer you up.”

“What did he say for the stings?” Ted asks, unamused by Sylvia’s risk at humor.

She holds up the cup. “Baking soda and water paste.”

Ted sighs, pressing the ice pack lower, to his chin and jaw. “All right then. Shall I keep the ice on?”

“Yes, for a moment more.” She continues to stir the paste, the solids of which continuously separate from the liquid and settle in a silty clog at the bottom of the cup.

“Did the dentist give you any painkillers?” Sylvia asks as she stirs.

“What?” Ted replies, his voice muffled and distracted.

“For your bad teeth. Did he give you anything yesterday in London, a prescription?”

Ted looks at her. She can’t gauge his expression; his face and his eyes are too swollen. His countenance is unreadable.

“No,” he finally answers.

Sylvia gapes at him, scoffing. “Unbelievable, the dentistry in this country. It’s barbaric. I thought the whole reason you went into London and not just Exeter was to see a better dentist. And still they didn’t give you anything?” She shakes her head, indignant for him. “How do your teeth feel?’

Ted’s chin drops; he looks at the floor. “My face is worse.”

They are quiet for a moment, listening to Nicholas, Frieda in the background, the scraping of the spoon in the cup.

“Did they fill your teeth, at least?” Sylvia asks, her tone more gentle.

Ted’s breathing is slow and measured. He sighs and pauses. “Yes.”

“Gold, I hope,” Sylvia mumbles.

Ted shrugs vaguely.

They give you sedatives, things to relax you. Then they scoop it out and you’re done.

Sylvia looks up at her husband, his weirdly colored, oddly distant face. “Does it hurt?” she asks quietly.

“Yes,” he answers, not moving his mouth.

“I’ll get you some aspirin in a moment,” she says tenderly. “I’ll finish the mowing, too. Can you take the ice away now?” she asks.

Ted withdraws the ice pack from his mouth, resting his hands in his lap. He sits utterly still as she surveys the welts on his head. On his ears, his neck, his lips.

“You look fine,” the nurse said nervously. “Just a little swollen.”

But they wouldn’t give her a mirror. She could feel the right side of her face under the bandages. She was sure she was blind in that eye. It felt like a meteor had crashed there.

“You’re going to look a fright for my mother,” she says, her voice low.

“When’s that, now,” he mutters unhappily.

“Thursday,” she answers. “And Rose says Percy is worse next door. She’s sent for their daughters. I listened to her braying into the phone all yesterday while I hung the laundry. July is going to be a long month.” She taps the spoon against the edge of the cup and drops it the last few inches to the floor; it hits the softwood with a flat contracted ping. Holding the cup in one hand, Sylvia dips two fingers into the slushy paste and gently begins to smooth it over the hard, knotted bee stings.

Her fingers on his skin. His softness, the radiating heat of his burning face. It feels oddly different to her, new in a way. New as the stranger who came back to her hotel in London six years ago, as she was leaving Cambridge for spring break. The ex-Cam poet with the broody cowlick, with the voice she could hear in the soles of her feet. The one with Shakespeare in his pocket who met her at the train station with his friend. His friend, his groomsman, who soon disappeared. All the next week in Paris, magnolias blossoming along the river, she could think of nothing but him. His fingers on her throat, her ribs. Magnolias blossoming, flushed and heavy scented, parting like lips as she walked through the gravel of the Tuileries.

The cool milky paste is dripping down his neck. Into his thick dark eyebrows, down his shirt collar. Neither of them says a word. She holds her hand to this new face. Ted doesn’t even look up. He doesn’t move. She catches the drips with her hand. She wipes them away with her finger.

Sylvia rakes the lawn her husband mowed, the blades cut down like overrun soldiers, broadcast with random finality over the yard. Her shadow looms over the clipped grasses. She covers their shocked faces with a bag.

Old Percy across the lane, blue-faced, wheezing, is dead. Three months ago he had stooped through her April daffodils in his billowing jacket, waving, his eyes soupy in his collapsing face. He had called to her through the window glass. She couldn’t understand what he was trying to say: the wind was eating his voice, as something else had eaten the rest of him. What was he doing in her garden? It wasn’t a public park. She couldn’t hear, and turned away.

All that is left of his flesh pools into the satiny cushions of the coffin, his nose flinty and steep, his eyes like currants baked into a fallen cake. His wife has had him set up for viewing in the parlor in front of his telly, that dead too. The villagers troop by to gawk at the corpse, holding their hats as they shove in to the box. So lifelike, they yop to the widow. They gabble with sock-puppet sincerity, they trade recipes. Rose has colored her hair. Sylvia slides her eyes over Percy’s dead face: the powder that chinks his wrinkles, the book wedged under his chin to keep his mouth shut. So lifelike, she nods as she backs out the door.

Already the mattress has been slumped down the staircase and tumbled outside to air; it lists in defeat against the cottage wall. A freshly laundered sheet flaps at the window like an escapee. Parakeets hang from a hook in the doorway, whistling and butting their bells, bobbing their senseless cucumber heads.

Sylvia cleans. She paints and weeds and mends. She scrubs, echoing through her house, her yard, in wet-kneed pants, alert to signs of corruption, wary of anything frayed or soured or askew. She drags the ash cans, freighted with grass clippings, out to the lane.

She glues the shredded edges of the wallpaper in the parlor. She washes every window in the house, sunk with age in their wormy casements. She hangs garlic in a braid along the mahogany sideboard in the kitchen, a dented horseshoe in the back hall. She throws netting over the ripening cherries, cushions the melon vines with hay. She whitewashes her children’s furniture, trims it with small painted hearts. She sends for more of the pink memo paper from Smith, her covert fetish, its pages stiff like the face of a shield.

Workers have cemented the playroom floor, sealed off the cold stones from inside. Still she knows they are there: the stones that never change. Under her house, muttering below the linoleum. She puts down a rug; she hears nothing. She hems the checkerboard curtains and pulls them shut.

Hearts on the sewing machine, hearts on the beehive. Little painted hearts, sometimes flowers and leaves or a bird. On the trestle table in the playroom. On the piano. On Frieda’s little rocker, on the doll bed made by Ted. Pink hearts a tripwire over the doorways. Hearts on the mirror in the hallway. Hearts and a garland on the baby’s cradle.

Sylvia stands on a chair outside the guest room. She holds her fine sable brush; she paints a glossy red heart on the threshold. Downstairs, the nail-studded door opens in the back hall. She listens, her heart ticking like a bomb. Has it come? Is it over? Soft voices foam into the house: it’s only Ted, Frieda, Nick. The heavy oak door groans on its hinges and clicks into the lock. Her fat black anxiety rolls back, for a moment, like a stone. She paints a leaf, flowers, steps down off the chair and checks her work. It looks just perfect; it looks just as it should.

“I can hardly bear to watch.” Aurelia Plath is hamster flat against the warm red vinyl seat of her daughter’s car, clutching her pocketbook in her lap. With her other hand she grips the door handle, darting a worried glance in Sylvia’s direction.

“Mother, please stop it,” Sylvia asks tensely, her neck craned over the seat as she drifts the car slowly backward. “I’ve done this for years, I know what I’m doing.”

Sylvia’s easing the clutch and reversing out of their parking spot on Cathedral Close, the lane that runs alongside Exeter’s thirteenth-century cathedral. The opposing traffic approaches around the curve that rounds the cathedral green, the cars hidden until the last moment by the jaywalking crowds of sweaty summer tourists and by flickering patches of leaf shadow thrown from the mature hawthorns and plane trees shielding the cathedral from the street.

“You’re right, it’s my fault,” Aurelia apologizes. “It’s just so hard to get used to English driving on the wrong side.”

“It’s only wrong to you,” Sylvia mumbles under her breath. “Could you please roll your window down? It’s stifling in here.” She pulls into the street and steers herself into the steady wave of traffic. Aurelia cranks down the window glass but pretends not to have noticed her daughter’s rudeness. She gazes out the window, concentrating on the negligible view through the full trees.

Sylvia drives the short arc of Cathedral Close, past the lathe-and-plaster façade of Mol’s Coffee House and the Georgian Royal Clarence Hotel. She pulls to the stop sign at the High Street intersection and prepares to turn left, her signalling arm out the window, into what would be oncoming traffic anywhere but England. The insistent blinker clicks like a surfacing memory.

A long parade of cars is inching narcoleptically down High Street, keeping Sylvia waiting at the intersection. She watches the traffic continue to pass, willing it to stop. Three more weeks; she needs to get a grip on herself. This is all her mother wants to see: the picturesque thatch. The baby skin. The pink-checked curtains. The hollyhocks. She’s here for a tour of her daughter’s heart, the nice part; she wants to see everything nice. There’s no need to give her anything more. She can protect herself; it’s only three more weeks.

“I’m sorry the day isn’t turning out as planned,” she apologizes stiffly, keeping her eyes on the passing cars.

“It’s just fine, darling, there’s no need to apologize,” Aurelia responds, relaxing at the milder tone in Sylvia’s voice. “I don’t know that you could see that cathedral in one afternoon anyway, and we’ve had a full day as it is. I’ll have a chance to study my Michelin before we go back. We still have lots of time this summer.”

“Right,” Sylvia replies with scant enthusiasm. The cars clear ahead of her. She steps lightly on the gas and pulls onto the High Street, heading west toward the river.

“I’m just glad we found that charming toy shop — was that on Gandy Street, with the iron oil lamps on the walls of the buildings? I do hope Frieda will like the paper dolls. Don’t you? They’re not as pretty as the ones you used to paint –”

“I’m sure she’ll be very excited, Mother. But we should reinforce them with tape before you give them to her. Frieda’s a little young for paper anything. She’s still at the stage where ripping things up is endlessly fascinating.”

“Well I hope not — they were expensive,” Aurelia says, a trace of hurt in her voice.

Ignore it, she thinks, both hands on the wheel.

“I would have thought they would carry more baby things in a toy store,” Aurelia says, veering the topic in a safer direction. “I did want to find something for Nick also.”

“He’s a baby, Mother,” Sylvia says. “He doesn’t need anything.”

“I don’t know about that,” Aurelia protests. “When you could hardly walk you formed your blocks into the shape of the Taj Mahal –”

Sylvia sighs. Here it comes.

“– just like the image on our bathroom rug. Babies are brighter than you think.”

“Mother, I know,” Sylvia says, growing exasperated. “I know about babies. But you gave both of the children piles of presents a week ago. They don’t need anything more. They’re too young to know the difference.”

“I wanted to bring a few other treats, just little things,” Aurelia continues with a wistful pang, groping for a benign connection. “But I didn’t have any more room. The suitcase was getting too full of chocolate chips and molasses and fluoride toothpaste. I can’t imagine why they don’t sell molasses in England, or fluoride toothpaste. So peculiar –” She glances at Sylvia for a nod, any signal, of friendly commiseration. Sylvia keeps her eyes on the road. Aurelia moves on. “– But my true preoccupation was that box of dishes. I never took my eyes off it from the time I left Wellesley until you picked me up from the train station. I was afraid one of the stewardesses on the plane or one of the porters would kick it, though I labeled it ‘fragile’ on every side.”

“Mother,” Sylvia replies, trying to let her genuine gratitude for her mother’s gifts soften the annoyance she feels at yet again having to express her gratitude, “I really do appreciate all that you brought for us. I love the dishes especially. You know I always wanted them.”

“You always liked that forest green border,” Aurelia notes with satisfaction. “It’s hand painted, you know. I think the color caught your artist’s eye.”

“I think you’re right.”

“And they’re quite valuable now, also. They’re nearly antique. I doubt you could buy a set like that at all, even if you’d kept your job at Smith.”

“I’m sure they’re irreplaceable, Mother.” Just ignore it, she tells herself.

“I would have given anything for a job like that,” her mother sighs.

Sylvia doesn’t respond, gripping the wheel.

“And I was looking at your garden. There’s a nice sunny spot to plant the corn right by your trellis of broad beans,” Aurelia says.

“Mother, it’s July. It’s too late to plant corn.”

“Oh,” Aurelia says, her voice pinched with disappointment. “Well then, you can save the seeds and get an earlier start next year.”

“Right,” Sylvia replies automatically, watching the road. Always — something she could do better. Some way that she’s let her mother down. They are driving alongside the Roman walls of old Exeter and out toward the banks of the river, which they will follow north and west for much of the trip home, along the same route across Devon that Vespasian’s legionnaires had followed. Hundreds, no thousands, of years on this road. She feels its pull under her, fundamental, innate. An ancient path; they’d been following it all her life. Whatever she did, whatever pearl she dropped at her mother’s feet, it would never be enough.

“Well, it will be so soothing to get back to Court Green after the morning bustle of Exeter,” Aurelia blathers, bridging the stiff little gap in the conversation. “Though I’m sure you really don’t have to worry about Ted or the children,” she offers reassuringly. “I’m sure they’re just fine without you.”

“What do you mean?” Sylvia asks, braking at the next stoplight. “I never leave them. I never leave Nick.” Her voice goes suddenly tremulous; she flashes a tiny fearful look at her mother.

“Sylvia, I didn’t mean anything,” her mother replies blandly. “I just meant that Ted has been gone so much this week — ”

“What do you mean by that?” Sylvia asks, defensive, gathering herself up on the seat. “Don’t criticize Ted. He’s got to go to the dentist for his teeth. He has things he must do whether you’re here or not. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Sylvia, of course I’m not criticizing Ted,” Aurelia answers, puzzled, quick to explain herself. ” I only meant that I’m sure he doesn’t mind keeping the children alone for a day. I just meant that I don’t think you need to worry about them.”

“I worry about them all the time, Mother,” Sylvia says, her voice welling despite herself. “All I do is worry about them.” She is gripping the steering wheel, staring ahead now at the lozenge of Exeter trapped in the windshield, one foot on the brake, the other poised over the gas.

“Darling, of course you do, I’m sorry,” Aurelia says, scrabbling for balance. “I don’t mean you don’t worry about them at all. I just meant that you could take a day for yourself and they would be fine. Ted said it would be fine.” Uneasy, she watches the side of Sylvia’s face, which has receded into impenetrable shadow. Sylvia stares at the traffic signal, which urges her mindlessly to caution.

They’d been gone all morning. She maneuvered her mother first through the shops along the flower-potted sidewalks of the Princesshay markets, then to an early cream tea on the quay. Aurelia, who had been appalled when Sylvia and Ted quit their teaching jobs to move back to England and live, they hoped, solely by their writing, insisted on picking up the check: her thin bony fingers feeling around the inside of her little coin purse, her eyes sliding around with anxiety. St. Peter’s Cathedral, thank god, was free. It reposed dramatically in fawn-colored stone beyond its copse of protective trees, humbler buildings crowding in on all sides of the grounds. They crossed the sunbeaten green to the Gothic western entrance, as tall as Court Green’s trio of elms. The carved saints were stacked up to the windows, standing on each other’s shoulders with their faces ground away by the centuries, shimmering grittily in the heat.

Inside, the cathedral was brilliant with uncharacteristically hot July sun, a kaleidoscope of golden light ratcheting through the stained glass windows on either end of the vault, as if honey were pouring, liquid, through the glass. The immense stone room was blinding in the light, a world of amber-toned compartments magnified and mathematical under the ribs of the flying buttresses. The whole glowing interior seemed to be respirating in the heat. A sweet waxy musk of incense seeped out from deep in the pores of the stone. It was like being inside a hive: the capped windows in their gilded hexagonal fittings, the marble-skinned martyrs writhing like pupas up the walls.

“Watch.” Her father stood in sepia light by the fence of their house in Winthrop, across the bay from Boston. The coarse-textured sand inched right up into the yard, blowing in little eddies between the salt-bleached pickets, drifting over the shells that bordered the grass. It was 1937; she was four years old, almost five. He would be dead in three years, and they’d move away from the ocean. The door of her childhood would close.

Her father waited, perfectly still before a snaggle of battered geraniums, tall in his nubby brown suit, his hands held out and stiff. He was uncompromising; he could wait forever. Suddenly he clapped his hands together in a trap, then folded down onto one knee. Flecking his head to one side, beckoning her over. He held his cupped hands to her ear. From inside came a stifled, frantic vibrato. “A bee,” he said, smiling down at her like a god. “It won’t sting me. I know which ones to catch.” The bee buzzed and buzzed in its cramped black cave. Slowly her father opened his blunt fingers. The bee shot out, sputtering like a backfiring motor; it droned again and was gone.

She watched it fly, amazed.

Her father watched it too, grinning. Then he tugged one of her sun-blonde plaits and stood, his broad hand cantilevered on his knee.

The cathedral was humming with holy, golden judgment. It sizzled at the back of her eyes. She held their bags from Jaeger and the toy shop, the library renewals for Ted that she’d forgotten to drop off at the car before they entered the church. Her mother was gawking at the long Gothic ceiling in the nave. All that light pouring in. Sylvia was ill; it was making her ill. The barefoot saints muttering at the door, the honeyed light bucketing down on all their heads. All that sorrow, all the wringing of hands. What made all that gold so bright was the blackness yawning behind it.

She stepped quickly out of the pew where she was resting the bags. “Mother, let’s go.” She took hold of her mother’s elbow, began pulling her down the side aisle and out of the cathedral. “I have to go home. I have to go now.” Confused, her mother fumbled for the toy bag and the library books, trying to help. She jerked her mother’s arm, gripping it hard. “Forget it. Let’s just go.”

“They are fine. But I’m not fine.” Sylvia stares now at the traffic signal. Stop, it says. Stop,

Her mother is watching Sylvia with mounting fear, holding her face steady, trying not to betray her own flailing emotions. Is it back? Is it over?

“I have everything,” Sylvia says, her voice breaking into little chunks. The light turns green, and she eases the clutch, turning right onto the road that lies along the river, waving her arm cursorily out the window to signal. “I never thought I would have all this. My beautiful children,” she says. ” My husband. I have everything. My house and my writing. I never thought I would have it.”

“But of course you were going to have it, my darling,” Aurelia blurts, reassured by what she misreads as a simple overflow of emotion. “Of course you were.”

“No –” Sylvia says. “I wasn’t going to have it. I didn’t think I would ever have it. I was afraid I was going to have nothing.” She pauses, bracing herself for the words her mother has never been willing to hear. “That’s why I broke down. That’s why I tried to kill myself.”

There is a moment of thick, airless silence.

“But that’s over now, Sylvia,” Aurelia finally replies, her words measured and motherly, calmly declarative. “That was so long ago. You put so much pressure on yourself. You didn’t really want to die.”

“What?” Sylvia says, incredulous. “What?” she says, stabbing furious glances in her mother’s direction while watching the road. “Of course I wanted to kill myself! I wanted nothing else but to kill myself.”

Aurelia’s face drains of all color.

“You know I did, Mother. You know I did,” Sylvia says, her voice both pleading and insistent. “That’s why you locked up the knives. That’s why you locked up my sleeping pills.”

“No, Sylvia,” says Aurelia, scrambling. “You didn’t really. You didn’t really want to die. That’s how you gashed your head, that’s why you’ve got this scar –” She reaches toward Sylvia’s temple to brush aside her bangs with a finger. But Sylvia’s arm flies reflexively off the steering wheel to block her mother’s touch. Aurelia recoils, stunned; her face begins to melt off its bones. “Sylvia, no,” she insists, her eyes brimming. “You were trying to get up. You were trying to help yourself, you were vomiting up the pills. You were crying. That’s how we found you.”

“I was dead for three days!” Sylvia cries out. She swings the wheel and pulls over, the tires spitting stones on the narrow grassy shoulder of the road as she brakes at the edge of the river. “How can you deny it? I was dead for three days under your house! The only thing I did wrong was to take too many sleeping pills!” She glares at her mother, who is trying not to cringe. Aurelia’s eyes are glossy with tears; she is too frightened to cry.

“I was trying to help you,” Aurelia trembles. “We were all trying to help you. You were so hard on yourself.”

“Help me!” Sylvia says, shrill, disdainful. Her voice has grown rich, echoing; she feels it moving over a dark plane, blank and windswept. “You killed. You’re the one who gave them permission to electrocute me. You told that quack doctor to give me the shocks.”

“No,” Aurelia says, quietly beginning to sob into her chest. “No. I was trying to help you. Everything I’ve ever done has been for you.”

“Help me?” Sylvia repeats, bitter, her voice caustic with mocking sarcasm. “You won’t even admit what happened. If you won’t admit the truth, how can that help me?”

Aurelia is slumping against the door, holding her purse over her chest, quietly crying. Sylvia’s hands are still on the steering wheel as she watches her mother’s collapse. She is breathing fast, her heart pumping. She’s aghast, amazed by the ominous force of the words as they come out. “I should be dead, Mother. I’m living a resurrected life. Everything I have is a miracle. My whole life is a miracle –”

Aurelia is sobbing harder, nodding her head, tears dripping off the underside of her nose as she nods, clicking open her purse and looking for a handkerchief.

Let’s just pretend it never happened, Sylvia says. “That’s what you told me when I got out of the hospital. But I’m telling you now, it’s all a miracle. You have to understand. This is why it’s so precious to me — ” precious to me. It scares her even now to say it. She says it. “I should be dead.”

Her mother is crying helplessly, wedged between the car seat and the door, a cowering animal. She is nodding her head and wiping her nose with her hankie. She doesn’t look up; her mouth hangs open in a gash. It awes Sylvia to see it, this stunning, unspeakable power.

She turns her head, searches the dashboard to locate the car’s starter. Her hands are still gripping the steering wheel. She turns the key in the starter and steps on the gas; there is a loud metallic grind from the engine, and she jumps. It’s still running. She never turned it off. She flicks on her signal and glances into her rear-view mirror, preparing to reenter the line of traffic.

She listens to her mother’s quiet, steady keening beside her as she pulls onto the single lane road. The green Devon landscape revolves past the windshield and away.

She enters the house blinded, as by a bright explosion.

Her pupils flare, adjust, and the rooms of her house emerge, washed in the submarine light of summer afternoon. Her life takes tangible shape again, returned to her in high relief: the curtains she’s sewn wavering at the windows. Her pewter candlesticks, her braided rug; her Chesterfield sofa and its worn blue velvet undulating like a reef at the edge of the parlor. The playroom abandoned for naptime, the debris of toys and storybooks scattered over the floor. Her mother follows behind, brittle, carrying more packages, her face wrung like a rag. The ringing of the telephone begins to surface. The house is otherwise still.

“Ted?” Sylvia calls, peeling off her purse and bags. She hears his chair’s faint scrape across the floor of his attic study. Another ring stiffens in the air. “I’ll get it,” she says to no one, anxious to pull her life close, crossing the parlor and turning into the hall, where the phone table is centered against the wall between the main staircase and the kitchen. Ted’s feet are clattering down the attic steps.

“I’ve got it,” she calls as she reaches the phone table, rounding her voice: calm, efficient. As her hand extends toward the black receiver she sees Ted turn the corner at the top of the carpeted stairs and hesitate in the blue shadows. She raises her chin to him and sends him a tight, hopeful little smile — a tiny intimate motion between people long married, almost a reflex, almost benign. She picks up the telephone, cutting off its shrill pulse. She brings the receiver to her ear. “Hullo?”

A second of dead air, then another, hisses at the other end of the line.

“Hullo?” Sylvia says again, her hand already tensing to hang up, her swiftly shaped composure going liquid at its center.

Ted is walking quickly from the second-floor landing down the remaining flight of stairs.

The line crackles with the oceanic suck of a hand covering the mouthpiece. The hand slides back, and the caller speaks into a tinny void. “Hello,” says a deep, gravelly voice devoid of affect. “I’m calling for Ted Hughes.”

The muscles and joints and pearly taut sinews of Sylvia’s body go slack with immediate relief — it’s nothing, it’s only for Ted — and then something in the caller’s muffled, genderless voice sets off a rush of blood from deep in the cage of her being. The voice has a Germanic edge.

“Who is calling, please?” Sylvia asks, her vocal cords tightening.

There is no answer; just the vibration of air in the line.

“Who is this?” she asks, her voice suddenly gummy with fear. Ted stops halfway down the stairs, listening, his head bowed like a mourner’s.

The caller hesitates. “I’d like to speak to Ted Hughes,” it asks with sudden, false briskness.

Sylvia grips the phone and holds it tight to her ear. The bones of her hand whiten under the skin. She twists to face Ted, her face an appeal of helpless terror. He does not meet her terrified eyes; he cannot look at her. He listens, his head bowed, his shoulders sagging, as if he holds the ancient weight of the rafters on his back.

“Who — is — this,” Sylvia demands, drawing herself up, her desperation mounting, throwing off panic and dread like sparks.

The caller says nothing.

She knows this voice: it is the voice of her nightmares. Not the voice itself, but the ceaseless void it comes from.

Sylvia’s voice rises up in a wave, crashing into the receiver of the phone, flooding the mouthpiece, the full force of her fear transforming, becoming an unchallengeable furious anguish. She has been betrayed. “I know who this is, Assia,” she says. “I know it’s you.” She jerks the phone away from her face, as if it stung her, and stabs it at arm’s length into the air at Ted. “It’s for you,” she says to him, looking away, her face contorting.

For a second, for hours, no one moves.

Ted descends the remaining stairs slowly, as if walking through a wall of water. He takes the phone.

Sylvia’s mother is trying not to tremble by the front door, hitching herself as close to the parlor furniture as she can, trying to disappear. It doesn’t matter; Sylvia has ceased to notice her. She’s been absorbed, become part of an already operating machinery. Sylvia is pacing away from the phone table, into the kitchen streaked by thick bars of dusty sunlight, her back to the stairs where Ted has carried the phone up the steps to the second floor landing and is whispering hoarsely and clearing his throat. Sylvia’s bare arms are crossed over her chest; she is gripping her arms with her hands, squeezing with her long fine fingers.

Within seconds, Ted has finished speaking. He begins to again descend the stairs, the receiver still in his hand, the base of the phone at his side, his fingers curled under the cradle. As he takes a step, another down the stairs, Sylvia turns and swings her hands down and out to her sides, regnant. Everything, suddenly, goes dry. The sea light slides back, evaporated. In the potent, magnetic air everything looks bleached and static — the walls, their faces, everything but the pitch-black, glossy phone. Sylvia’s upper arms glow white with the imprints of her own hands. She rushes forward, the blood blooming under her skin, her face febrile, lit by a ghastly inner radiance, to meet Ted at the phone table.

The receiver is still in his hand. As he sets the phone down on the table and readies to fit the receiver onto the cradle, Sylvia snatches the telephone’s cord out of the air and pulls, grimacing, yanking the telephone itself off of the table, yanking again, the table falling, the drawer crashing out and the pens and pencils and scraps of paper tumbling and sliding to the floor, the cord ripping out of the wall socket and snapping into the air, its wires bursting like a coppery flower out of the end of the striped fabric cording. Sylvia pulls the phone out of the wall and feels a surge of electric current, a charge, the million filaments of the wires exploding, burning all along the line from London, all along her nerves, electrocuting her, burning the shadow of the moment into place. Shocking her again with their lightning stroke, straight to her electrified heart. He had betrayed her.

As Sylvia pulls the telephone out of the wall, the cells in her brain are charging, the synapses going off like cannons, like fireworks, setting off little tails of smoke, the scent of scorch electric in the air, and silence behind, everything over. Sylvia pulls the telephone out of the wall: dead air. The voice on the other end cut off, severed, extinct. Dead air. And that’s not all that’s dead. In the moment the cord sails up and snaps and shoots its sparks in the potent hall Sylvia knows how futile all of her protections have been, all she did to sandbag her slipping hold. What’s dead is the life she saved from herself. The moment has cut her loose, stripped her of everything that tied her to her perfect, ordered, resurrected life. In the eye blink of a god, in a heartbeat, all that she clung to rises up with her like smoke, like ash, into the charged, dead air: The cakes of soap. Her wedding ring. His gold filling.

- – - – - – - – - –

Excerpted with permission from “Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath,” by Kate Moses, published by St. Martin’s Press. All rights reserved.

It’s repetition that feeds obsession, cutting a groove in your head that you just can’t get out of. Regardless of developmental imperatives, the same principle holds true when little kids want to hear the same story over and over again. And again.

Thus began my relationship with Frances, the whimsical heroine of Russell Hoban’s ’60s-era series of children’s books about a family of badgers. It started simply enough: Last year, “Bedtime for Frances” was the book my then-2-year-old wanted me to read to her ad nauseam. There are (mostly craven) ways around a lot of repetitive behavior; we all know that books and blankies “get lost.” Solar-operated organs with microchips preprogrammed to play polka tunes can be jammed into a deep, dark closet or given away.

But I read about Frances obligingly, even relievedly — at least hers wasn’t a story created to serve the mindless television and movie character product market. It wasn’t foolish, insipid or boring. It was far from any of those things. It was, in fact, irreverent, sly, droll and enigmatic, the product of a superior children’s-book-creating mind and an earlier age, a book in which parents could sit in front of the television eating cake, offer a piece to a kid who should already be in bed or threaten to spank — and still, everybody was perfectly well adjusted. This was a book I could read a lot. In fact, the Frances books, all seven of them, are the only books I can read over and over again without wanting to puke like a marathoner.

Why I never read Frances when I was a kid in the ’60s, I don’t know. But I did read another of Hoban’s fictions in a college lit class. “Riddley Walker” is a post-apocalyptic fable set in the fifth millennium, when nuclear holocaust has catapulted civilization back to an Iron Age (the iron, in this ominous case, is dug up and salvaged from the machines of our own time) and language has been corrupted into a degenerated but tellingly poetic pidgin. Described by the New York Times as “lighting by El Greco and jokes by Punch and Judy,” “Riddley Walker” tells the story of a 12-year-old who stumbles into a quest for the answer to one of the essential human questions: How did we get here, and how do we get out?

Mulishly dismissive of anything that might be construed as science fiction, I resisted “Riddley Walker.” And yet it drew me in. I just couldn’t shake off Riddley’s epiphanic discovery of the hart of the wood in the ruins of Canterbury Cathedral — in Hoban’s resonant linguistic purling, the “hart of the wood” is the “heart of the would,” the human will. It’s both our grace and our downfall. Five millenniums of my life and two children later, I thought of Riddley Walker and his search for existential understanding while I was reading “Bread and Jam for Frances.” “Aren’t you worried that maybe I will get sick and all my teeth will fall out from eating so much bread and jam?” Frances, after several meals of bread and jam on demand, asks her mother. “I don’t think that will happen for quite a while,” replies her mother. “So eat it all up and enjoy it.”

Frances is, in a way, a sunnier precursor to Riddley Walker. At the heart of her would is the age-old challenge of childhood: becoming socialized. Joining the human race is never easy, and the delight of Frances is that we get to watch her jostle with her conflicting desires and feelings with all the gracelessness and longing that we felt ourselves when we were small, and that we now witness so often in our own evolving children. Everything does, eventually, turn out OK for Frances, but hers are the types of everyday OK that ring true: A candy bar meant as a birthday present for her sister is squeezed to mush before Frances can finally bear to give it up. A sleepless night, with all of its attendant spooks and threats, ends when she finally gets sleepy. And betrayed by a crafty playmate, a sadder but wiser Frances finally decides she’d rather be friends than be careful. In this age of waning skepticism and entrepreneurship, isn’t that the same sentiment that makes marriage and business partnerships possible?

Demonstrating the evolution of Frances’ ego and superego against the delicious tidal pull of her id is the recurring theme of sibling rivalry with cute little Gloria, who is introduced as a newborn in the second of the Frances tales. At first Gloria is nothing but a tiny furry face in swaddling, but her influence in Frances’ world is immediate and huge. As if preempting the possibility of being forgotten by demanding to be noticed, Frances escalates her bids for attention — first she sits forlornly beneath the kitchen sink, then she marches through the living room shaking gravel in a can and singing lustily. Finally, disgusted by a lack of clean laundry and a dearth of breakfast raisins, Frances announces she’ll run away. And she does, provisioned with Oreos, to a secluded spot under the dining room table until she overhears her parents’ sotto voce lament regarding her absence.

As Frances’ mom and dad know, love-bombing an ambivalent older sibling is the standard approach when the new child is a fairly oblivious baby. But as Gloria grows and her relationship with Frances gains complexity, Frances’ sense of Gloria’s personhood as well as her own gains problematic depth. In “Best Friends for Frances,” Frances easily shrugs off the plaintive weeping of playmateless toddler Gloria for the greener pastures of baseball with her friend Albert — only to have to resort to playing with Gloria after all when Albert dumps her for a “no girls” game. In “A Birthday for Frances,” the title itself is a sly comment on Frances’ psychological growth, since the birthday in question is Gloria’s, now nearing school age. Frances’ jealousy takes root in pitiful asides to her imaginary friend (“That is how it is, Alice … your birthday is always the one that is not now”), kicks under the table and a long memory for past slights, but her grudging resolve finally disintegrates at the prospect of being the only one not to give a present to her little sister. An epic struggle ensues in Frances’ tormented conscience when the cake is brought glowing to the party table. After singing under her breath, “Happy Chompo to me/is how it ought to be …,” Frances demurs, but it takes the entire party’s encouragement to get her to relinquish the coveted Chompo bar in her grasp. The scene resembles nothing so much as an emergency crew coaxing someone down from a building ledge.

By the time “A Bargain for Frances” rolls around, Gloria is a person whose opinion has enough clout to sway Frances’ worldview. In this penultimate Frances story, Frances is saving her allowance money (all $2.17 of it) for a real china tea set painted with blue flowers. The cunning Thelma bilks Frances out of her savings by persuading her to trade for Thelma’s old plastic tea set. Though an equivocating Frances cheers herself on the walk home with another of her inimitable songs (“Plastic cups are all right too/Just as good as china”), it’s Gloria’s pronouncement that Thelma’s tea set is “very ugly” that clarifies Frances’ opinion. And it’s Gloria who tips off Frances that Thelma too covets a china tea set with blue flowers — just like the one for sale in the window of the local candy shop for $2.10 — and moves Frances to retaliatory action.

As these dramas unfold over and over again at bedtime in my house, I’m struck just as frequently by the understated wisdom of Frances and Gloria’s parents. In fact, I’m fascinated by their admirably nonchalant and sometimes seemingly retrograde parenting strategies. How was it that they learned to wield such sure authority with their children that, when a youngster stomps into the living room shaking a can of gravel, Father simply says, “Please don’t do that,” and the child just stops? There are no negotiations, no power struggles, no offerings of distractions or toned-down alternatives; there is no yelling. And how do they manage to stay so cool and productive in the midst of massive birthday party histrionics? Frances is known for regularly inserting a provocative comment into a conversation — a hint, say, that another child she knows gets an outrageous allowance, or a question about the unmentionable origins of certain foodstuffs then on the dinner table — but Father and Mother invariably deflect Frances’ fishing by changing the topic without missing a beat, not to mention forgoing the indulgence of some sort of “validating conversation” straight from the parenting handbook that will eventually turn her into a whiny brat. Frances’ parents understand that they’re the ones in control: They’re undeniably loving, but they’re also firm. Consequently, their children appear to be secure, creative and ultimately kind as well as perverse and clever.

Frances’ are parents who know to offer multiple kisses and pile everything from a “tiny special blanket” to a sled next to the bed of an insecure child, but they’re also not afraid to tell a kid to solve her own (minor) problem when it interrupts the television show they’re watching. What’s more, these are parents with no neurotic attitudes toward sugar — there’s cake or chocolate pudding or some other sweet in every book, always generously applied. “You may be sure that there will always be plenty of chocolate cake around here,” says Mother Badger, after Frances has already chowed down all of her Oreos under the dining room table.

And they spank. Or at least spanking is threatened in some way at some time in their household, enough so that in response to her sleepless father’s grouchy question, “And do you know what will happen to you if you don’t go to sleep?” Frances knows what the answer is likely to be. But the truth is, Frances’ parents never get caught spanking anybody. They only float the possibility, disembodied but ominous.

Last July, while stuck in rush-hour traffic, I listened to the audiobook version of Frances for over two hours. My daughter had long since fallen sweatily asleep in her car seat; I had plenty of other tapes, or I could have just switched on the radio. Instead, I inched my way across the Golden Gate Bridge while fantasizing about Father and Mother Badger and their brood. Why is Mother topless and aproned in “A Baby Sister for Frances” while she’s fully dressed in all of the other books? Why does Father ooze excessive compliments about the morning egg dishes and the attractive veal cutlets in “Bread and Jam”? Did Mother and Father argue the night before about how to handle Frances’ eating habits? Or over Father’s pipe smoking, or that apron? And what happened to Garth Williams?

Most people remember Williams as the illustrator of the “Little House” series and of E.B. White’s “Stuart Little” before the film industry ruined Stuart. Why, I wanted to know, is Williams the illustrator of the first Frances title but from then on another Hoban, Lillian, draws the badgers? Was there some sort of rupture? Didn’t Williams like Frances? Or did the Hobans want to keep her in the family? Therapists will tell you that they avoid giving out personal information to their clients because it sometimes leads to troublesome fantasies on the part of those clients. Even tiny nuggets of information — an appointment canceled because of an illness in the therapist’s family, say, or a client seeing his shrink in the deli aisle at Safeway — can get blown way out of proportion. I thought about this idea after I began dissecting the dedication pages in the Frances books. Who are Brom and Esme? Who is Julia? And why do they rate dedications? Why not me, of course, is the obsessive’s true question.

It took me some effort to find a copy of the last Frances book, “Egg Thoughts and Other Frances Songs,” the only one of the series that’s now out of print. Along the way I stumbled across a Web site devoted to the much-published and highly original Russell Hoban, who, it turns out, has written far more books on more far-reaching subjects than I ever imagined. (Think “Turtle Diary,” “The Medusa Frequency” and “The Mouse and His Child” among dozens of other titles.) I also discovered, via the Web site, more than I really wanted to know about the real-life history of Frances. It seems that Hoban and his wife, illustrator Lillian, had four children — that would be Brom, Esme, Julia and also Phoebe. In 1969, the year “A Birthday” and “Best Friends” were published, the Hobans moved to England. There was a divorce. Lillian took the kids back to the States, and Russell stayed behind. I’m not sure if my reading of “Egg Thoughts” would have felt more or less elegiac had I not found the Hoban Web site, but elegiac — as well as funny and shrewd — is how it feels.

Which is not to say that it’s any sadder a book than the other Frances titles: It’s mostly sad because it’s the last one. Frances’ personality — her wistfulness, her unmasked desires and her wonder — is distilled in this context, separated from the developed narrative dilemmas that drive the other stories. With “Egg Thoughts,” Hoban seems to be offering fans of Frances a chance to expand her story on their own, since he had closed that door for himself.

It’s hard not to love some of Frances’ koanlike epiphanies, such as the first line of “Homework”: “Homework sits on top of Sunday, squashing Sunday flat.” But the song that really gets to me, the one that sums up the whole of childhood, is “Lorna Doone, Last Cookie Song (I Shared It With Gloria).” Who else but Russell Hoban, through the pensive Frances, has thought to immortalize the humble resignation of eating the final, plain cookie, the one left behind after all the good ones have been taken? Set against this nearly ineffable backdrop, Frances makes me wonder if obsession, really, is not much more than our play against time, our struggle against losing something that left, however fleetingly, such a sweet taste in our mouths.

All the sandwich cookies sweet
In their frilly paper neat
They are gone this afternoon,
They have left you, Lorna Doone …
You are plain and you are square
And your flavor’s only fair.
Soon there’ll be an empty place
Where we saw your smiling face.
Lorna Doone, Lorna Doone,
You were last but you weren’t wasted.
Lorna Doone, Lorna Doone,
We’ll remember how you tasted.

Every child knows that you hang on to what makes you feel good. I know that Frances is out there somewhere, and she has graduate degrees and an amiable relationship with her first husband. She and Gloria chat on the phone nearly every week. Her dad still smokes that pipe, his chin, as always, thoughtfully tucked. Frances has a garden like her mother’s, abundant with tall waving snapdragons, and she subscribes to Utne Reader. I just know there’s always plenty of cake at her house. Mine, too.

As unmistakable as were Plath’s volatile emotions in the 1982 journals, the heavy editing of the text necessarily made it hard to discern the patterns to her moods. Even so, there did seem to be a detectable pattern, and it did not seem then, nor had it seemed to the people closest to her during the last years of her life, to be merely a function of temperament. In the weeks before her suicide, Plath’s physician, John Horder, noted that Plath was not simply deeply depressed, but that her condition extended beyond the boundaries of a psychological explanation.

In a letter years later to Plath biographer Linda Wagner-Martin, Horder stated: “I believe … she was liable to large swings of mood, but so excessive that a doctor inevitably thinks in terms of brain chemistry. This does not reduce the concurrent importance of marriage break-up or of exhaustion after a period of unusual artistic activity or from recent infectious illness or from the difficulties of being a responsible, practical mother. The full explanation has to take all these factors into account and more. But the irrational compulsion to end it makes me think that the body was governing the mind.”

For at least the past 10 years it has been generally assumed that Plath fit the schema of manic-depressive illness, with alternating periods of depression and more productive and elated episodes. In the epic 1990 textbook “Manic Depressive Illness” by Frederick K. Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison, Plath is footnoted in a table listing major 20th century poets with documented histories of manic-depressive illness. Though Plath was never treated for episodes of mania, the authors concur that she would probably have been diagnosable with bipolar II, one of the two types of manic-depressive illness.

The description in the first paragraph of the book sounds strikingly like Plath: “Manic-depressive illness magnifies common human experiences to larger-than-life proportions. Among its symptoms are exaggerations of normal sadness and fatigue, joy and exuberance, sensuality and sexuality, irritability and rage, energy and creativity … To those afflicted, it can be so painful that suicide seems the only means of escape; one of every four or five untreated manic-depressive individuals actually does commit suicide.” Dr. Jamison, a leading expert in the field of affective illness, also includes Plath in her 1993 book, “Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament.”

The hypothesis that Plath suffered from a bipolar disorder is persuasive. But in late 1990, another, even more intriguing medical theory emerged. Using the evidence of Plath’s letters, poems, biographies and the 1982 journals, a graduate student named Catherine Thompson proposed that Plath had suffered from a severe case of premenstrual syndrome. In “Dawn Poems in Blood: Sylvia Plath and PMS,” which appeared in the literary magazine Triquarterly, Thompson theorized that Plath’s mood volatility, depressions, many chronic ailments and ultimately her suicide were traceable to the poet’s menstrual cycles and the hormonal disruptions caused by PMS.

“Accurate medical knowledge of PMS has become available in the United States only in the last ten years, and Plath herself could not have known that her psychological experience was a result of a hormonal condition,” Thompson wrote. “Yet the concerns of her work and the imagery of her poems suggest that she did have at least an intuitive understanding of the relationship between her fertility and her suffering.”

In addition to cycles of death and rebirth and the motif of true and false selves, the major recurring themes to be found in Plath’s self-reflective and ritualized poetic mythology are those of female fertility and power, and the controlling force of a feminine moon goddess. Thompson cited extensive medical research, including that of pioneering PMS researcher Katharina Dalton, to corroborate the results of her examination of Plath’s symptoms in relationship to cyclic hormonal changes in PMS sufferers. She argued that some of Plath’s poems, in particular those of the “Ariel” period, were not just figurative, abstract expressions of Plath’s preoccupation with female fertility, but were directly correlated with Plath’s biology. “Metaphors for ovulation and menstrual blood are prevalent in her late work,” noted Thompson, “and the thematic oscillation from suffering to rebirth in these poems appears to follow the phases of Plath’s own menstrual cycle.”

The proposal that an important poet’s works were significantly influenced by PMS is likely to exercise a number of people, for quite different reasons. Aesthetic purists tend to attack all such biological-influence theories as reductive, while others dispute the scope — and even the existence — of PMS itself. Heated controversies continue to rage around PMS: whether it is a medical condition or a psychological one, whether its cause is a lack of progesterone or an inability to metabolize fatty acids, whether it is an admissible tool for legal defense or an excuse for criminal conduct, whether it is treatable by hormone therapy, Prozac or liberal doses of St. John’s Wort, whether it is a step forward in understanding women’s health or a politically retrograde tool for shoring up tiresome gender stereotypes.

While the controversy rages, the medical establishment has accepted PMS as a bona fide condition. According to the most current clinical handbook of psychiatric diagnoses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV, published by the American Psychiatric Association in 1994), “at least 75 percent of women report minor or isolated premenstrual changes.” The DSM-IV estimates that 20 to 50 percent of menstruating women suffer from some form of PMS (other sources put the number as high as 75 percent), while 3 to 5 percent of women are estimated to suffer from the most severe form of PMS, PMDD, or premenstrual dysphoric disorder.

Symptoms are considered premenstrual if they appear during the luteal phase of the cycle (the 14 days between ovulation and menstrual flow), begin to remit within a few days of menses and are totally absent in the week following menses. To meet the diagnostic criteria for PMDD, a woman must have at least one severe emotional (as opposed to physical) symptom each month, the severity of which must be great enough to have a major negative impact on normal functioning.

Thompson pointed out that Plath unwittingly recorded experiencing on a cyclical basis all of the major symptoms of PMS, as well as many others, including low impulse control, extreme anger, unexplained crying and hypersensitivity. She also suffered many of the physical symptoms associated with PMS, notably extreme fatigue, insomnia and hypersomnia, extreme changes in appetite, itchiness, conjunctivitis, ringing in the ears, feelings of suffocation, headaches, heart palpitations and the exacerbation of chronic conditions such as her famous sinus infections.

Thompson compared Plath’s reported mood and health changes with the journals, letters and biographies and found that her symptoms seemed to appear and disappear abruptly on a fairly regular schedule, with clusters of physical symptoms and depressive affect followed by dramatic changes in outlook and overall physical health. Those patterns can be directly linked to the dates of Plath’s actual menses, particularly in 1958 and 1959, when she most habitually noted her cycles. Judging from the pattern of Plath’s depression and health in late 1952 and in 1953 until her Aug. 24 suicide attempt, Thompson posited that “it seems reasonable to conclude that this suicide attempt was directly precipitated by hormonal disruption during the late luteal phase of her menstrual cycle and secondarily by her loss of self-esteem at being unable to control her depression.”

Thompson showed that a well-known journal entry from Feb. 20, 1956, is clearly traceable to Plath’s menses, to which she refers directly a few days later. The journal fragment takes on new meaning in light of having been written during the physically and emotionally debilitating luteal phase of Plath’s cycle: “Dear Doctor: I am feeling very sick. I have a heart in my stomach which throbs and mocks. Suddenly the simple rituals of the day balk like a stubborn horse. It gets impossible to look people in the eye: corruption may break out again? Who knows. Small talk becomes desperate. Hostility grows, too. That dangerous, deadly venom which comes from a sick heart. Sick mind, too.” On Feb. 24, the same day she notes in her journal that she has a sinus cold and “atop of this, through the hellish sleepless night of feverish sniffling and tossing, the macabre cramps of my period (curse, yes) and the wet, messy spurt of blood,” Plath wrote a letter to her mother blaming her dark mood on her physical health: “I am so sick of having a cold every month; like this time, it generally combines with my period.”

By perhaps fateful coincidence, Plath’s Feb. 24, 1956, period is the first she mentions specifically in her entire journal; the next day, she met her future husband, Ted Hughes, at a party. Thompson explains that disruptions in the menstrual cycle, particularly those caused by pregnancy and breast-feeding, can have a dramatic hormonal impact on PMS sufferers; in the two and a half years between June 1959 and January 1962, Plath experienced three pregnancies, one of which ended in miscarriage. In addition, she breast-fed both of her babies for lengthy periods (10 months for Frieda, about eight months for Nick, according to letters to her mother) and probably experienced very few normal menstrual cycles during that time.

Wrote Thompson, “Her reproductive history almost guaranteed some form of extreme emotional disruption once she began menstruating again after the birth of her second child, with a probable further disruption following the cessation of breastfeeding. Like many women with PMS, Plath seems to have experienced relief from cyclical symptoms during the last two trimesters of pregnancy and to have suffered from lengthy postpartum depressions.” That last disruption, in the fall of 1962 when she weaned Nicholas, would have coincided with the writing of the “Ariel” poems.

Thompson’s close reading of the “Ariel” poems in terms of Plath’s menses noted the discernibly cyclic pattern of rise and fall in mood and tone in the poems as well as their many images and themes of barrenness, fertility, psychic pain, bleeding and relief, always controlled by the overseeing influence of the inspiring but uncaring and all-powerful moon goddess. “If I could bleed, or sleep!” Plath wrote in “Poppies in July,” shortly after the discovery of her husband’s adultery in July 1962, presumably a time when Plath was not just emotionally distraught but also experiencing suppressed menstruation because of her young baby’s breast-feeding.

By the fall of 1962, the poems (which Plath carefully dated as they were completed) seem to follow a pattern of metaphorical renewals and optimistic transformations for roughly two to three weeks of artistic production, then jagged, seething accusations and aggression for a couple of weeks. (As can be seen in the unabridged journals, for at least two years prior to the beginning of her first pregnancy in 1959, Plath’s menstrual cycles had regulated to cycles of 30 to 35 days, which corresponds with the timing of the “cycles” of the Ariel poems.)

Thompson’s article closes on a note of tragic irony: Dalton, who had coined the term “premenstrual tension” in 1954 and who was the only physician successfully treating women for severe PMS in 1963, practiced in London. Plath, who had moved to London from her country home in December 1962, “died in the only city in the world where she could have received effective medical treatment.”

Thompson’s PMS theory has been largely ignored by Plath scholars. But it immediately gained two important supporters: Anne Stevenson, Plath’s controversial biographer, and Olwyn Hughes, Plath’s former sister-in-law, whose letters were published in a subsequent issue of Triquarterly. Though oddly defensive in tone, Stevenson’s letter does commend Thompson for her “invaluable contribution to Plath scholarship … Certainly no future study of Plath will be able to ignore the probable effects of premenstrual syndrome on her imagination and behavior.” And it states that she wishes she had been able to utilize Thompson’s insights in the writing of her own work on Plath.

A letter from Olwyn Hughes also congratulates Thompson for her scholarship, but unlike Stevenson, Hughes practically stumbles over herself in amazement at the PMS theory. Hughes, who was quoted in Janet Malcolm’s book “The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes” as characterizing her long-dead sister-in-law as “pretty straight poison,” wrote to Thompson: “It is quite a shock to digest all this — after thinking for so long that Sylvia’s subconscious mind was her prison, and to suddenly realise it may well have been in part, or wholly, her body. But it certainly tallies with Ted’s mentions — he has always felt some chemical imbalance was involved.”

Hughes further points out that Ted Hughes had spoken of Plath’s ravenous appetite just prior to her periods and asks, “I wonder if that is a known characteristic of PMS?” (According to the PMS literature, it is.) But most tellingly, Olwyn Hughes explains that “one of the reasons I was so bowled over by your piece is that Sylvia’s daughter, very like her physically, suffers quite badly from PMS but is, in these enlightened times, aware of it and treats it.”

Dr. Glenn Bair, one of the leading experts on PMS treatment and research in the United States, confirmed to Salon that PMS is typically passed from mother to daughter. In a rare interview about her parents, Frieda Hughes told the Manchester Guardian in 1997 that after the “collapse of her health,” including extreme fatigue and gynecological problems, she underwent a hysterectomy in her 30s.

Salon recently contacted Dalton, who had just retired from medical practice in London after 52 years. In that interview Dalton revealed for the first time that in early 1963 she had, in fact, been contacted by Horder to set up a consultation with Plath. According to the Plath biographies by Stevenson and Wagner-Martin, Plath only revealed her psychiatric history and the extreme nature of her current depression to Horder in late January 1963.

“John Horder and I had known each other for some time,” Dalton said. “He was fully aware of my work and was with me the first time I ever spoke in public about premenstrual syndrome in 1954, at the Royal Society of Medicine. We were on the Council of General Practice together for 25 years.” After calling her regarding his patient Plath, Dalton says that Horder “referred her to me. You don’t have to tell me about Sylvia Plath. I was to see her, but she had killed herself before I could.” After reviewing the information in Thompson’s article and asked her opinion of the possibility that Plath may have suffered from PMS, Dalton said, “There is quite a lot of evidence. Oh yes, I think she had it. But the only one who really did understand [Plath] was John Horder. That’s why he had called me.”

Both Wagner-Martin and Stevenson, as well as several other Plath biographers, have written that Horder set up an appointment for Plath with a female doctor, sometimes referred to as a psychiatrist, in the last few days of her life. Plath refers to her plan to see a female doctor in a letter written a week before her death. Whether Horder had contacted both a psychiatrist and Dalton is unknown; when reached for comment, Horder declined further statement on Plath’s death, citing his decision several years ago to say nothing more and expressing his lingering regret at what he considers his “breach of confidentiality” when he spoke publicly of Plath on an earlier occasion.

Bair, who has studied with Dalton, gave his opinion about Horder’s decision to contact a PMS specialist when Plath was in an acute state of distress. “You have to consider this about John Horder. He was very well connected,” said Bair. (Horder is the highly respected former president of the Royal College of General Practitioners in London.) “He most likely had access to 500 psychiatrists and 1,000 other specialists. The odds of him picking Dalton are very small — but you don’t send a patient to a colleague without having a strong belief that their specialty will help that patient. For one minor point, doctors don’t have the time to take blind referrals for patients not applicable to their specialty. Neither do the patients — especially patients in dire need of help.”

After a careful review of Thompson’s article, of a seven-page monthly breakdown of Plath’s symptoms for 1958 through 1959 and of the documented evidence of Plath’s pregnancies and postpartum symptoms of 1959 through 1962, Bair said, “If you hack through the PMDD criteria, I think that you’ll find that she fits the PMDD profile.”

With the publication of the unabridged journals, even more of Plath’s biographical record can be assessed in light of Thompson’s PMS theory. The more thorough and accurate dating of entries in journals for 1958 and 1959 in particular fleshes out the prevalence and patterning of Plath’s numerous references to her physical symptoms and feelings. Among the dozens of Plath’s commentaries that appear to be unique to the luteal phase of her cycles are these: “Am I living half alive?” “A peculiar hunger and thirst upon me.” “I have an ominously red, sore & swollen eyelid, a queer red spot on my lip — and this enervating fatigue like a secret and destructive fever.” “My eyelid’s hot stinging itch has spread … to all my body: scalp, leg, stomach: as if an itch, infectious, lit and burned, lit and burned. I feel like scratching my skin off. And a dull torpor shutting me in my own prison of highstrung depression … I feel about to break out in leprosy … my eyes are killing me — what is wrong with them.”

The notorious 1958 incident with Hughes and a female university student on Plath’s last day of teaching took place, as Thompson had earlier suggested and the unabridged journals now confirm, during the luteal phase of Plath’s cycle; so did the memorable “button quarrel” between Plath and Hughes. Plath’s “unexplained” fevers, which would recur and become immortalized in the “Ariel” period, are recorded exclusively in the luteal phase of her cycles, as are a vast majority of her chronic sinus troubles. Using both the unabridged journals to assess cyclical patterning and Plath’s calendars from 1952 and 1953 (housed in the University of Indiana’s Lilly Library), in which Plath recorded her periods through July 1953, it seems overwhelmingly likely that Plath was, as Thompson contended, in either the luteal or the perimenstrual phase of her menses at the time of her 1953 suicide attempt.

Even incidents that occurred during the time covered by destroyed or lost journals can be illuminated by Thompson’s PMS theory, coupled with outside documentary evidence. For example, the due dates of Plath’s second and third pregnancies and her weaning schedule for Frieda in 1960, all noted in her letters, clarify that three of Plath’s most disastrous episodes of violent or antisocial behavior occurred during the luteal phase of her cycles, which was made even more acute by pregnancy.

Plath’s December 1960 argument with Olwyn in Yorkshire, after which the sisters-in-law never saw each other again, took place when Plath was newly pregnant for the second time but in what was hormonally the late luteal phase of her cycle. One month later, in an irrational fit of jealous rage, Plath destroyed her husband’s most precious possession, his leatherbound copy of the Oxford Collected Shakespeare, as well as all of his papers and works in draft on his desk; a few days later, Plath miscarried. (Miscarriage is also considered a fairly common symptom of severe PMS.)

Five months later, now pregnant for the third time, Plath wreaked chaos during a vacation to France at the summer home of poet W.S. Merwin and his wife, Dido, a holiday from hell recounted with indelible animus by Dido Merwin in Stevenson’s Plath biography. Again, the trip’s date places Plath in the late luteal phase of her cycle.

The unabridged journals reveal that on March 20, 1959, Plath’s psychoanalyst told her that “cramps are all mental after arguing against natural childbirth, saying pain was real,” which could only have served to increase Plath’s inability to connect her symptoms to a cause that was beyond her control. Though Plath’s cramps and many more of her symptoms were physically, palpably expressed, their impact on her interior, “mental” life was equally real. Plath endlessly noted her agonizing symptoms, castigated herself for her inability to gain control over her life, even dreamed frequently about her periods, and yet could not make the connection between her cycles of fertility and cycles of torment.

“Yesterday was a horror,” Plath wrote during the luteal phase of her cycle in March 1958. “Ted said something about the moon and Saturn to explain the curse which strung me tight as a wire and twanged unmercifully.” A month later, Plath describes a nightmare in which she watches a “diamond moon” passing by before she becomes a moon herself: “I was lifted, up, my stomach & face toward earth, as if hung perpendicular in mid-air of a room with a pole through my middle & someone twirling me about on it … & my whole equilibrium went off, giddy, as I spun & they spun below & I heard surgical, distant, stellar voices discussing me & my experimental predicament & planning what to do next.”

Plath’s journal is crowded with references to the moon, which notably worked itself into her poetry; a journal entry from 1950 that had appeared in the 1982 edition takes on even greater metaphoric meaning in light of the PMS theory:

Tonight I wanted to step outside for a few moments before going to bed, it was so snug and stale-aired in the house. I was in my pajamas, my freshly washed hair up on curlers. So I tried to open the front door. The lock snapped as I turned it; I tried the handle. The door wouldn’t open. Annoyed, I turned the handle the other way. No response. I twisted the lock … still the door was stuck, white, blank and enigmatic. I glanced up. Through the glass square, high in the door, I saw a block of sky, pierced by the sharp black points of the pines across the street. And there was the moon, almost full, luminous and yellow, behind the trees. I felt suddenly breathless, stifled. I was trapped, with the tantalizing little square of night above me, and the warm, feminine atmosphere of the house enveloping me in its thick, feathery smothering embrace.

The unabridged journals now date Plath’s writing of “Moonrise,” a poem metaphorically meditating on the “boney mother” moon and hopes of pregnancy (“The berries purple/and bleed. The white stomach may ripen yet”), as having been written in Plath’s luteal phase. The poem “Metaphors” — the metaphors being those for pregnancy — was completed on March 20, 1959, in the perimenstrual phase, presumably begun when Plath still thought she might be pregnant. (“March 20, Friday. Yesterday a nadir of sorts … Pregnant, I thought. No such luck.”)

Another poem, “A Life,” in which a woman drags her shadow around the moon but has been exorcised of “grief and anger,” was completed on Nov. 18, 1960, and so was written during the week in which Plath (according to the dates she gave her mother) must have ovulated and become pregnant for the second time. Because Plath’s subject matter in these poems is so blatantly and directly linked to the phase of her menstrual cycle at the time the poems were written, their specific dating and the circumstances of their production give more credence to Thompson’s conclusions about Plath’s menstrual cycles affecting the creation of poems during the “Ariel” period, for which there is no dated evidence of menstrual cycles.

The unabridged journals reveal some problems with Thompson’s theory, but they are mostly minor dating mistakes that don’t ultimately undermine her findings. The more important point made evident by the unabridged journals is that Plath’s mood swings did not run on as predictable a schedule as Thompson assumed. Though Plath’s physical symptoms evaporate almost miraculously with the onset of her periods, her emotional turmoil remains unpredictable throughout the month. The diagnostic definitions for PMS and PMDD state that symptoms “are always absent in the week after menses”; however, Bair has noticed in his clinical practice that with PMS, depression “is the slowest symptom to clear, and in fact seems to build up over time,” coupled with the decline of a woman’s self-esteem as she finds herself unable to control her emotions. Several studies on PMS corroborate Bair’s observations.

The years for which we have the most consistent and detailed menstrual data for Plath, 1958 and 1959, are unfortunately years in which Plath was also sunk in a long-term depression over her teaching job and her consequent writer’s block. It is, then, almost impossible to sort Plath’s emotional responses to potential PMS from her ongoing depression.

The years 1952 and 1953, two years for which we also have accurate dating of Plath’s menses, are years in which Plath’s emotional life is far more varied and the trajectory of her deepening depression is easier to detect; and yet even during these early years Plath’s moods do not consistently correspond to her cycles in a way that points unquestionably at PMS. It may be, as is often the case with PMS sufferers, that Plath’s PMS worsened as she grew older; it may also be that something else was at work in Plath’s biological war with her selves.

There is a striking overlap and similarity between the symptoms of severe PMS and the depressive phase of bipolar II that apply in Plath’s case: insomnia and hypersomnia, appetite changes, low impulse control and irritability, mood lability, restlessness and anxiety, fatigue and lethargy, feelings of inadequacy and magnified guilt, and suicidal thoughts and action. Since a diagnosis of bipolar II fits Plath’s behavioral and hereditary profile without explaining her cyclical physical symptoms or her artistic preoccupation with her fertility, while PMS does not fully account for Plath’s overall fluctuation of moods and her hypomanic states, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that Plath may have suffered from both bipolar II disorder and a severe case of PMS.

Medical and psychiatric researchers have been investigating connections between affective illnesses and menstruation in recent years, particularly the overlapping nature of symptoms for PMS and mood disorders as well as the co-morbidity of the illnesses (the number and likelihood of women having both illnesses at once, as well as how the illnesses affect each other). The PMDD criteria of the DSM-IV state that women with recurrent major depressive disorder (MDD), bipolar I or bipolar II or even a family history of such disorders may be at greater risk for PMDD.

Other findings are that women with MDD or rapid-cycling bipolar disorder commonly experience “premenstrual exacerbation” of their mood symptoms; that PMS may trigger affective episodes and that PMS is possibly a unique form of affective disorder; that women with past or current psychiatric illness, principally affective disorders, report a higher incidence of PMS than normal controls; that PMS is not simply always a premenstrual worsening of affective illness but has validity independent of other affective syndromes; that there tends to be a cycle-to-cycle worsening of premenstrual symptoms and depression prior to prolonged episodes of MDD; that women with postpartum depression are more likely to develop premenstrual depressions several months after the resumption of menses; that some women may have a biological vulnerability for mood disorders that is “triggered” by menstrual changes; and that the relationship between PMS and bipolar illness does not always stay static over a woman’s lifetime. The cycles do not necessarily coincide, and in some phases the woman may have “pure” PMS/PMDD while at other times she has premenstrual worsening of her mood disorder.

One of the most disturbing similarities between bipolar II and severe PMS is the potentially lethal nature of both illnesses. Goodwin and Jamison’s “Manic Depressive Illness” reports that “patients with depressive and manic-depressive illnesses are far more likely to commit suicide than individuals in any other psychiatric or medical risk group.” The suicide statistics on PMS sufferers are equally catastrophic. Some studies have shown that up to one-third of severe PMS sufferers have attempted suicide. According to a 1993 study called “The Menstrual Cycle and Mood Disorders” by Dr. Jean Endicott of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, there is evidence that suicide attempts are more likely during the premenstrual phase of the cycle, and “there is evidence from autopsies that completed suicide is more likely to occur during the late luteal phase of the cycle.”

Another study, “Premenstrual Tension Syndrome in Rapid-Cycling Bipolar Affective Disorder” by William A. Price and Lynn DiMarzio, notes that “the paramenstruum, the 4 days preceding and the first 4 days of menstruation, is associated with increased rates of medical, surgical, and psychiatric hospitalizations; increased rates of suicide attempts; and increased severity of suicidal intent.” These findings support those of Dalton, whose studies of British women have shown that suicide attempts increase 17-fold during the luteal phase as opposed to the preovulatory phase of the cycle.

Though scientific researchers have noted that there is a relationship between bipolar illness and PMS, they have not yet clarified the parameters of that relationship. Nevertheless, it can be cautiously concluded that Plath suffered from some degree of both affective and premenstrual illness, even if how those two illnesses may have corresponded is impossible to detect.

Why does it matter? Why try to understand who Plath was beyond what rises immediately to the surface in her poetry? Perhaps the answer lies first with Plath’s ceaseless desire to understand the dendritic and operatic machinations of her psyche, her “million filaments,” and how that quest for self became not just the driving force behind her creativity but also the undeniable key to the richly textured artistry it produced.

Plath was ultimately as much an enigma to herself as she is now to us. During the weeks before her death she was fervently engaged in putting together the puzzle of her “Ariel” poems, giving them a logical sequence, a narrative cohesion that amounted to a mythic performative utterance. She was putting them in an order that would tell her the story of her own survival, her phoenixlike eruption from the ashes of her destroyed marriage and the shed skin of her “false” selves.

“Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas/Succeed in banking their fires/To enter another year?” she had asked herself in “Wintering,” the poem, almost a prayer, that she chose to end her “Ariel” manuscript in December 1962. “The bees are flying,” the poem concludes. “They taste the spring.” Plath wanted to know that she would survive that English winter; she willed herself, as she had done countless times before, toward the spring of her inner life.

Understanding Plath’s biology underscores her very human, as opposed to iconic, instinct toward self-preservation. If one accepts the possibility that Plath’s true demon was not something of her own making but a force, or forces, she was quite powerless against, her attempts to juggle the details of her daily life, to care for herself and her small children alone and furthermore to programmatically write “dawn poems in blood” to save her sanity seem nothing less than courageous.

It also hints at the possibility that Plath’s notable premonitory abilities (verging on telepathy), her seemingly numinous sensitivity, may have arisen in some part from a subconscious understanding that her psychological suffering was also the source, in a very material way, of her internal artistic fire — the fire that would finally burn hot enough to work the alchemical change that Hughes described.

What is breathtaking about the possibility that Plath may have suffered both bipolar II and PMS is that in tandem, those two illnesses totally integrate her daily and imaginative life, her artistic fascinations and her emotional despair, her life as a woman and as a writer, and they do so without diminishing Plath’s achievement in any way. Her ars poetica, not just brilliantly executed but brilliantly won despite unbelievable odds, leaps into focus in even more astonishing detail than ever before.

As Jamison remarks of mystic poet William Blake in “Touched With Fire,” “suggesting the diagnosis of manic-depressive illness for Blake does not detract from the complexity of his life; it may, however, add a different kind of understanding to it. Likewise, it does not render his work any the less extraordinary, or make him any less a great visionary or prophet. [The diagnosis] may not explain all or even most of who he was. But, surely, it does explain some.”

In Plath’s case, the conjectural diagnosis of manic-depression and PMS may explain almost everything. And it only makes more miraculous what Hughes once described as “the truly miraculous thing about her,” a thing he directly attributed to Plath’s fertility, an event precipitated by the births of her two children: “In two years, while she was almost fully occupied with children and house-keeping, she underwent a poetic development that has hardly any equal on record, for suddenness and completeness … All the various voices of her gift came together, and for about six months, up to a day or two before her death, she wrote with the full power and music of her extraordinary nature.”

In a stunning turnabout, her devastating illnesses may not have just inspired Plath but also enhanced her ability to apprehend her material and shape it. Plath’s subterranean connection to her female biology seems to have been aligned with the expansive flourish of hypomania’s supple thinking, its flights back into the caves and coves of the mind. While she was writing the poems of “Ariel” in the fall of 1962, being “pulled through the intestine of God,” as she called it in a letter, she was also carefully correcting the galleys for “The Bell Jar” — in other words, she was engaged in both a creative act requiring the limitless probing of psychic depths and the organizational feat of logic and objectivity demanded by editing.

When one considers the precision and feverish grace of Plath’s last six months of writing, it is impossible to imagine her as anything but utterly in control of that gift. One might say that Plath was able, for a finite and delicately balanced period, to use her illnesses to keen artistic advantage. “I feel like a highly efficient tool, or weapon,” Plath marveled that fall.

Plath’s fertility, to which she may have gained greater figurative access through bipolar illness, then became both her darkness and her glory — her artistic salvation and her downfall, a double-faced gift she thematized, whether consciously or unconsciously, in her poetry. No one has ever written more uncannily of motherhood than Plath, or captured so perceptively the shock of maternal otherness — its frightening and awesome complexity and distance, feelings as genuine and “normal” as love and connection.

Plath understood and experienced motherhood as “much deeper, much closer to the bone” than love or marriage, and yet her hypersensitive awareness of what is closest to the bone — the aspect of motherhood that is subjective and strange and dictated by blood — taps into a vein of truth not easily embraced by the usual exalted sentiments. “I’m no more your mother,” Plath wrote, “than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow/Effacement at the wind’s hand.” This recurring maternal imagery of chthonic separation, apparent even to a casual reader of Plath, is a clear manifestation, at some level, of the mixed blessing of Plath’s female body. It is also why so many critics have accused her of ambivalence toward motherhood — a crude misapprehension of Plath’s anguished and profound relationship to her own fertility.

Ultimately, the foremost reason to try to understand Plath is that it leads us unfailingly back to her poems, the work she knew qualified her as “a genius of a writer.” As insulated against easy access as Plath’s poetry remains, it is astounding to note how many passionately moved readers she has won over 40 years, and how often women, in particular, will say that they first read her in school, perhaps voyeuristically, and later came to “understand” her and value her writing on a deeply intuitive level only after marriage and children. Her poems continue to reward reading after reading, year after year; they remain as multifaceted, mysterious and bristling with life as the enigma of their creator, who was in her deepest being a woman, a mother and an artist.

“They saved me,” Plath told Hughes in December 1962, speaking of the fury and agony she poured into “Ariel.” “One can see a great revival of spirits in her letters,” Hughes wrote many years later to Aurelia Plath of those bleak months after Plath and Hughes split up, Plath insisting that she would settle for nothing other than a divorce. “And that was the front she presented to me at the time,” Hughes continued. “But as I’ve said it was only in that last week that her front crumpled and I realised the whole thing was a bluff. But then she was going off for the weekend and Monday morning was too late.”

When she wrote her last letter to her mother, Plath was on antidepressants, and Horder, who was scrambling to get her a hospital bed, was calling or seeing her daily. Plath’s friends in London have reported that she seemed distraught and desperate and was so distracted that she could no longer care for her children’s daily needs. On Feb. 4, 1963, one week before her death, Plath wrote reassuringly to Aurelia, “I am going to start seeing a woman doctor, free on the National Health, to whom I’ve been referred by my very good local doctor, which should help me weather this difficult time.”

On Feb. 7, she wrote with brisk efficiency to friends in Devon that she was coming back. (“I long to see my home,” she said.) Between those letters, Plath composed her final poem, “Edge,” in which the unmoved moon observes the “perfected” body of a dead woman:

The moon has nothing to be sad about,

Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.

Her blacks crackle and drag.

To the very end Sylvia Plath hid behind her masks, pulling her veils around her even into death. One can only wonder who, that last winter Monday, she thought she was then.