Page 118 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

CHAPTER TEN

Sylvia Plath

1.

In the fall of 1962, the American poet Sylvia Plath left her cottage in the English countryside for
London. She needed a fresh start. Her husband, Ted Hughes, had abandoned her for another woman,
leaving her alone with their two small children. She found an apartment in London’s Primrose Hill
neighborhood—the top two floors of a townhouse. “I am writing from London, so happy I can
hardly speak,” she told her mother. “And guess what, it is W.B. Yeats’ house. With a blue plaque
over the door saying he lived there!”
At Primrose Hill she would write in the early-morning hours while her children slept. Her
productivity was extraordinary. In December she finished a poetry collection, and her publisher told
her it should win the Pulitzer Prize. She was on her way to becoming one of the most celebrated
young poets in the world—a reputation that would only grow in the coming years.

But in late December, a deadly cold settled on England. It was one of the most bitter winters in
300 years. The snow began falling and would not stop. People skated on the Thames. Water pipes
froze solid. There were power outages and labor strikes. Plath had struggled with depression all her
life, and the darkness returned. Her friend, literary critic Alfred Alvarez, came to see her on
Christmas Eve. “She seemed different,” he remembered in his memoir The Savage God:
Her hair, which she usually wore in a tight, school-mistressy bun, was loose. It hung straight to
her waist like a tent, giving her pale face and gaunt figure a curiously desolate, rapt air, like a
priestess emptied out by the rites of her cult. When she walked in front of me down the hall
passage…her hair gave off a strong smell, sharp as an animal’s.
Her apartment was spare and cold, barely furnished and with little in the way of Christmas
decorations for her children. “For the unhappy,” Alvarez wrote, “Christmas is always a bad time:
the terrible false jollity that comes at you from every side, braying about goodwill and peace and
family fun, makes loneliness and depression particularly hard to bear. I had never seen her so
strained.”

They each had a glass of wine, and following their habit she read to him her latest poems. They
were dark. The new year came and the weather grew even worse. Plath feuded with her ex-husband.
She fired her au pair. She gathered her children and went to stay at the house of Jillian and Gerry
Becker, who lived nearby. “I feel terrible,” she said. She took some antidepressants, fell asleep, then
woke up in tears. That was a Thursday. On Friday she wrote her ex-husband, Ted Hughes, what he
would later call a “farewell note.” On Sunday she insisted that Gerry Becker drive her and her
children back to their apartment. He left her in the early evening, after she had put her children to
bed. At some point over the next few hours, she left some food and water for her children in their
room and opened their bedroom window. She wrote out the name of her doctor, with a telephone
number, and stuck it to the baby carriage in the hallway. Then she took towels, dishcloths, and tape
and sealed the kitchen door. She turned on the gas in her kitchen stove, placed her head inside the
oven, and took her own life.

2.