A Novelist’s Deep Dive Into Sylvia Plath Pays Off

‘The Daffodil Days: A Novel’By Helen Bain Scribner, 304 pages“I wandered lonely as a cloud,” begins William Wordsworth’s famous poem, as “a crowd, / A host of golden daffodils” comes into view, an enchanting vision that returns at times of “vacant” or “pensive mood,” so that the flowers “flash upon that inward eye” and “then my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils.”So it was for those weary Wordsworthians, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, after a long day of house hunting in the Devon countryside, discouraged after visiting dilapidated domiciles that estate agents deemed full of “potential.” Then they spotted Court Green in a land of daffodils that decided them, two refugees with a young daughter, seeking to escape their cramped London flat.Several novels have depicted the marriage, but none are like this one that takes the viewpoint of villagers who wonder at the aggressive talkative female poet and her taciturn poet-husband. It is refreshing to see the couple from the outside, to relish English observations of Americans: “They’ve got a sort of veneer, haven’t they? Like a top coat of lacquer. Just better put together, I suppose.”In such descriptions, Plath appears almost like a well-operated American machine— efficient, organized, and running not only her household but her husband, whom, as the end of the novel nears, is outed as the weaker half of the marriage, unable to hold on to a dynamic wife. This novel spares us the tragic end of the marriage and of Plath’s life, concentrating on what seemed to be the couple’s happiest days.Plath is seen through the prism of a young, tentative, female employee in a dress shop startled by her customer’s forthright manner and sharing of confidences, of the skeptical men who ring the village church bells and gradually warm to Plath’s interest in them as she is offered a rope to have her own pull at them, and of my favorites, a Bendix washing machine agent who more than most Englishmen and women enjoys dealing with her busy, inquiring salvos. I included an advertisement for a Bendix in “The Making of Sylvia Plath” to emphasize a material girl — her youth is often commented on in this novel — who might just as well sing: “Experience has made me rich /And now they’re after me.”Critic Al Alvarez comes calling on Mr. and Mrs. Hughes and doesn’t recognize the poet in Plath, treating her simply as the wife, although as soon as he knows better, she is posing questions to him about his rock climbing, so that he realizes she is as much of an adventurer as he is. Similarly, the local doctor, is challenged to exert all his skill bandaging the top of a thumb she has nearly severed during cooking as she dispassionately looks on, displaying the sang froid that makes her brilliant world historical poem “Cut” such a tour de force of personal testimony, with the bloodletting reminding her of British redcoats and the bandage hooding her thumb the costumery of the Klu Klux Klan.The acknowledgments reveal that Helen Bain has spent her time among the locals who rarely get that much space in Plath biographies. The novelist has also put in her time at the Smith College archive where so many Plath items are stored in a setting that retains some vestige of the 1950s that help to shape her character.Eschewing Plath’s final days, and Ted Hughes’s role in her demise, Ms. Bain heightens our sense of how much Plath lost when her husband no longer felt equal to her, and to a marriage that took him away from his friends. As the novelist puts it, “They take their love for him and they use it against his wife. He cannot make them understand and he does not try.” Ms. Bain, avoiding the commentary prevalent in biographies, does not add that by not trying Hughes left the impression that his devotion to his wife was indefensible.Hughes wanted Court Green for the fishing nearby and for a respite from the hectic London literary world, but he did not know how to settle nor how to involve himself in country living that his American wife understood better than he did. It’s as if Ms. Bain decided, “Let’s leave him alone. He’s never going to figure it out.”Mr. Rollyson’s forthcoming collection, “Searching For Sylvia,” includes interviews with Plath biographers and novelists.

A Novelist’s Deep Dive Into Sylvia Plath Pays Off

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