The gray rock mocked me, bobbing on the water easy as a lifebuoy.
I knew when I was beaten.
I turned back.
Plath’s protagonist wasn’t looking to kill herself. She was looking for a way to kill herself. And not just any method would do. That’s the point of coupling: behaviors are specific. She needed to find a method that fit. And on that cold February night, the method that fit for Sylvia Plath happened to be right there in her kitchen.
If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.
To you they are only transparencies, clear air.
This is “A Birthday Present,” written in September 1962, at the beginning of Plath’s anguished final months in London:
But my god, the clouds are like cotton.
Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.
Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,
Filling my veins with invisibles…
Take a look at the following graph showing suicide rates from 1958 to 1982 for British women ages twenty-five to forty-four. (Plath was thirty when she died.)
In the early 1960s, when Plath committed suicide, the suicide rate for women of her age in England reached a staggering 10 per 100,000—driven by a tragically high number of deaths by gas poisoning. That is as high as the suicide rate for women in England has ever been. By 1977, when the natural-gas changeover was complete, the suicide rate for women of that age was roughly half that. Plath was really unlucky. Had she come along ten years later, there would have been no clouds like “carbon monoxide” for her to “sweetly, sweetly…breathe in.”
7.
In the fall of 1958, two years after their wedding, Sylvia Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes, moved to Boston. The poetry that would make her famous was still several years away. Plath worked as a receptionist at the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital. In the evenings, she took a writing seminar at Boston University. There she met another young poet by the name of Anne Sexton. Sexton was four years older than Plath—glamorous, charismatic, and strikingly beautiful. She would later win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book Live or Die, establishing her reputation as one of the most formidable contemporary American poets. Plath and Sexton became friends. They would linger after class, then go out for drinks with another young poet, George Starbuck.
“We would pile into the front seat of my old Ford, and I would drive quickly through the traffic to, or near, the Ritz,” Sexton recalled, in an essay written after Plath’s death:
I would park illegally in a LOADING ONLY ZONE telling them gaily, “It’s okay, because we are only going to get loaded!” Off we’d go, each on George’s arm, into the Ritz and drink three or four or two martinis.
Sexton and Plath were both young, preternaturally gifted, and obsessed with death:
Often, very often, Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicides; at length, in detail, and in depth between the free potato chips. Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem. Sylvia and I often talked opposites. We talked death with a burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb.
Sexton came from a family with a history of mental illness. She suffered from wild mood swings, anorexia, depression, and alcoholism. She attempted suicide at least five times. She stole a bottle of the barbiturate Nembutal—deadly in large enough doses—from her parents’ medicine cabinet and carried it around in her purse. As her biographer Diane Wood Middlebrook explains, Sexton wanted “to be prepared to kill herself anytime she was in the mood.”
In her early forties, she went into decline. Her drinking got worse. Her marriage failed. Her writing deteriorated. On the morning of October 4, 1974, Sexton had breakfast with an old friend, then lunch with another friend, as if saying goodbye.
Middlebrook writes:
She stripped her fingers of rings, dropping them into her big purse, and from the coat closet she took her mother’s old fur coat. Though it was a sunny afternoon, a chill was in the air. The worn satin lining must have warmed quickly against her flesh; death was going to feel something like an embrace, like falling asleep in familiar arms.
She poured herself a vodka and took her own life. Like her friend Sylvia Plath, Sexton will forever be in the category of doomed genius. “No one who knew Anne Sexton well was surprised by her suicide,” Middlebrook writes.
I hope by now, however, that you aren’t satisfied with this account of Sexton’s death. If suicide is a coupled act, then Sexton’s character and pathology should be only part of the explanation for what happened to her. The same is true for Plath. Her friend Alfred Alvarez believed that too many people have painted her as “the poet as a sacrificial victim, offering herself up for the sake of her art,” and he’s absolutely right. That distorts who she is: it says her identity was tied up entirely in her self-destructiveness. Coupling forces us to see the stranger in her full ambiguity and complexity.
Weisburd has a map that, I think, makes this point even more powerfully. It’s from Jersey City, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.
The dark area in the middle—bounded by Cornelison Avenue, Grand Street, and Fairmount Avenue—is a prostitution hot spot and has been for some time. A few years ago, Weisburd conducted an experiment in which he assigned ten extra police officers—an extraordinarily high number—to patrol those few blocks. Not surprisingly, the amount of prostitution in the area fell by two-thirds.
Weisburd was most interested, though, in what happened in the lighter part of the map, just outside the triangle. When the police cracked down, did the sex workers simply move one or two streets over? Weisburd had trained observers stationed in the area, talking to the sex workers. Was there displacement? There was not. It turns out that most would rather try something else—leave the field entirely, change their behavior—than shift their location. They weren’t just coupled to place. They were anchored to place.
We found people would say to us, “I’m in this area. I don’t want to move because it’ll make it hard on my customers.” Or, “No, I have to build up a business again.” There are all these objective reasons why they’re not moving. Another reason would be, “If I go someplace else, it’s good for drugs, to sell drugs. There’s already people there, they’ll kill me.”
The easiest way to make sense of a sex worker is to say that she is someone compelled to turn tricks—a prisoner of her economic and social circumstances. She’s someone different from the rest of us. But what is the first thing the sex workers said, when asked to explain their behavior? That moving was really stressful—which is the same thing that everyone says about moving.
Weisburd continues:
They talked about how hard it would be for business. They’d have to reestablish themselves. They talked about danger, people they don’t know. What do they mean by people they don’t know? “Here, I know who’s going to call the police and who won’t call the police.” That’s a big issue for them.…When they’re in the same place, they begin to have a high level of correct prediction about people. Going to a new place? You don’t know who these people are. Someone who looks bad could be good. Someone who looks good, from their perspective, could be bad.