Is there anything more to be said about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath? I didn’t think so, but Helen Bain’s debut novel The Daffodil Days proved me wrong. I did not expect to be absorbed, on the first page, by a woman cleaning a house (Court Green in Devon), the home Plath had just vacated with her two young children for London, where a couple of months later, in February 1963, she would gas herself.
Working backwards from December 1962, the novel describes the last 18 months of Plath’s life, glimpsed through some friends – writers and poets such as Al Alvarez, Bill Merwin and Marvin and Kathy Kane – but mostly through local people in or near the small Devon town of North Tawton. These are Winifred, a midwife and beekeeper; the doctor, Hugh, who ‘blundered’ by tackling Hughes on his ‘unravelling marriage’; the ambitious Jenny from the farm, selling dresses in Kestrels boutique; Phyllis Redwood, a riding instructor; the fishing enthusiast land agent, John, who sold the Hugheses Court Green in summer 1961; and my favourite, the elderly demonstrator of the Bendix Hoover, who ‘spent the whole war testing fuselage parts’ and who loves going on to Dartmoor, where he grew up. Explaining the Bendix to Plath in October 1962, he understands: ‘She wants everything to be perfect… and hasn’t learned yet that, in life, nothing can be.’ He ‘hopes her husband knows how to look after her’. (Hughes had already begun his affair with Assia Wevill.)
Through these compassionate vignettes, Plath appears difficult, joyful, sympathetic, exacting (‘no half measures,’ her friend Clarissa says), volatile and childlike.
After Stella Woodhouse records her reading her poems at Broadcasting House in June 1962, Plath says: ‘I love the thinginess of things.’ Bain, too, is a visual, sensual writer. A dying pub landlord, whose ‘budgies endlessly chirp and whistle’, ’sees ‘daffodils, white and orange. He can smell the sourness of hops in early morning air.’
And here is Phyllis, before taking Plath out on the horse Ariel: ‘The moor is like the sea… and riding across it is like being on the deck of a yacht, lifted into wind and moving light.’ Plath longs to ride on the moor. Her poem ‘Ariel’ – with the line ‘the brown arc of the neck I cannot catch’ – in her 1965 posthumous collection is something positive in this sad story. She never saw daffodils bloom a second time in the place where Hughes lived for the rest of his life.
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