The Art of Infidelity

...By 1978, the seventeen-year-old was addicted to heroin...

...Both lived near the edge...

...What eyes waited at the back of the class To check your first professional performance Against their expectations...

...Before she reached fifty, her hair had turned white, and her face had coarsened beyond all recognition...

...It had to have that kick...

...Days later, she turns on the gas...

...I told them he always lived like that...

...Blackwood began writing late in her thirties...

...There was work, there were books, adorable children, a picture-book cottage in Devon...

...Curiously, Caroline Blackwood's next affair also began with housing in London...

...The strain could be immense...

...Plath was bourgeois, Blackwood bohemian...

...And your body Barred your passage And your family Who were your flesh and blood Burdened it...

...Plath was insecure, Blackwood self-confident...

...She conveyed a "negative excitement...

...They were both drinkers, and clever," said Xandra Gowrie...

...Sylvia always makes too much of a fuss...

...And then, the perfect world is blown apart...

...There were panics, outbursts, bad dreams of her father, dark fears...

...Caroline (one struggles to phrase this delicately) had three children while married to Citkowitz, and she seems to have married him in hopes of reviving his dormant creative abilities...

...Lowell often went over it, into manic delusions...

...From her father's side came descent from a line of lords and landowners (and the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan...

...In 1955 she won a Fulbright scholarship to England, and she impressed the British, still drained from the war, with her American vigor and bounce...

...Distraught, feverish, losing weight, Sylvia begins to pour out her Ariel poems, long screams of rage at her husband and father...

...Lady Caroline Blackwood was born in Ireland in 1931, into the tranche of society that gave us the Mitford sisters: original, arrogant, gifted, and bent...

...She was published at eight in local newspapers, given a scholarship to Smith College, and awarded a guest editorship in the annual college issue of Mademoiselle magazine...

...In his poem "The Blue Flannel Suit," Hughes catches the edge of her terror: Costly education had fitted you out...

...And it was at a party in 1979 at the home of Emma Tennant that Blackwood's oldest daughter, Natalya, was given by Tennant's nephew the dose of heroin from which she would die...

...In fact, it was Emma Ten-nant's brother, Lord Glenconnor, who first owned Girl in Bed, Lucian Freud's most famous painting of Caroline Blackwood, which he later sold to Robert Lowell...

...They both smoked endlessly, and didn't wash much...

...Sylvia starts an affair that does not make her happy...

...Blackwood came from the aristocracy: monied, cold, and overripe...

...He began work on volumes of poetry that celebrate Caroline as an enchantress—and enrage many by including passages from letters from his anguished wife, Elizabeth Hard-wick, and Harriet, their little girl...

...We're like two eggs cracking," Lowell wrote...

...Plath's life was broken by a femme fatale, who walked off with her husband...

...always with a bad ending...

...having one's husband get another woman pregnant does not make a girl happy...

...Plath was not technically beautiful, but still fit the mold of mid-1950s good looks, while Blackwood had stunning and "heart-stopping" beauty...

...Lost once again in emotional transit, he began to be worn down by anxiety...

...The first biography of Caroline Blackwood, Dangerous Muse, by Nancy Schoenberger, has recently been pub-lished—joining at the bookstores the unexpurgated version of Sylvia Plath's journals and Sylvia and Ted, a novel about Hughes and Plath's marriage by British writer Emma Tennant, who, in the 1970s, had an affair with Ted Hughes...

...He devoted himself to the children, while Caroline drank...

...And so, she chose to have nothing at all...

...In his first poems, Hughes cites her endless legs, her "American grin," her "long hair, loose waves—your Veronica Lake bangs...

...Having broken him down to the status of floor mop, Caroline moved back to London in 1970...

...Her first husband was Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund, darkly handsome, and none too stable...

...Once I stopped by and couldn't find him, so Caroline said I should call the police...

...What assessors Waited to see you justify the cost...

...In Sylvia's eyes, the whole thing was heaven...

...In the spring of 1962, Ted and Sylvia invited the Wevills for a weekend in Devon...

...In 1974, Anne Sexton closed her garage door and turn on the ignition, gassing herself to death at forty-seven—following down the road her friend had traveled in 1963, when, at age thirty, Sylvia Plath turned on the gas oven in her London apartment, having first blocked the cracks in the doors so the fumes would not hurt her two children, and thoughtfully set out their morning milk...

...When Plath died at thirty, she looked much like a schoolgirl...

...By NOEMIE EMERY In 1959, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, successful poets and failed suicides, took a course given by Robert Lowell, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and manic depressive, in the art of confessional poetry, the form in which all three would specialize...

...Caroline's nihilism was deepened and darkened by guilt...

...In the next weeks," Tennant says, "Sylvia wrenches the telephone cord from the wall . . . makes a bonfire of her husband's manuscripts . . . feeding the flames with his hair clippings, nails . . . drives the station wagon off the road...

...Six years after that, she too gassed herself, killing also her small daughter, Shura, the out-of-wedlock child that she bore to Ted Hughes...

...Lowell entered McLean for the first time in 1958, and would return three more times after that...

...It always looked burgled...

...The girl who insisted on having it all could not bear to have less than everything...

...As a friend noted, "Caroline . . . was a learner...

...For Hughes, as Tennant pictures him in her novel, the picture was blacker...

...For the rest of her life, she would shuttle between London and the house that she bought on Long Island, writing amid her chaos and squalor...

...Blackwood was a sloven, turning any home into a hovel in short order...

...What it hid" was the scar from electric-shock treatment...

...The connections and parallels among them seem almost infinite...

...She chose her men for their instability and their looks," said one observer...

...But near the end of the 1970s he began to write the verses that make up Birthday Letters, the long sequence of eighty-eight poems that trace his relationship with Sylvia Plath from before their first meeting (when he sees a picture of the Fulbright scholars) to the years after her suicide, as he tries to cope with their distracted children, listening to the howling of wolves...

...The darkness inside had at last become visible...

...She saw Natalya's death as a suicide she had caused," a friend said, correctly...

...Hughes slights his own role in her suicide, seeing himself, Assia, and Sylvia as victims of destiny, actors performing roles in a prescripted drama: You wanted To be with your father In wherever he was...

...Instead, he became a housemaid...

...A moralist might say she had the face she deserved...

...Her subjects would always be grim and depressing...

...Empty bottles were the usual décor of her dwellings, and she was put on a list of unwelcome visitors by some of the country's leading hotels...

...Caroline looks anxiety-ridden, and Lucian Freud put himself in the picture "as if he had been skinned alive with his own hand...

...This scar, masked by the blonde sweep of normalcy, was his permanent image of Plath...

...They arrived on Friday and left on Sunday, and on Monday, Hughes was on the train to London to begin his affair with Assia Wevill...

...Said one close friend, Xandra Gowrie, "At every crossroad she saw someone being run over and mangled...

...there was an extraordinary quality which I can only describe as a brilliant darkness...

...She makes a surprise visit to Hughes's flat and sees that Assia is pregnant...

...You felt scared, sick, lethargic . . . not wanting to cope . . . colossal desire to escape, retreat, not talk to anybody . . . . Fear of not succeeding...

...She was also becoming a serious writer, starting with a request from Stephen Spender to review movies for his magazine...

...What certainly changed was his opinion of women: The tender portraits of his early years gave way to repellent and monstrous nudes...

...When Blackwood died in 1996 at age sixty-four, she resembled a crone...

...So, Gowrie reports, "I turned to Caroline and said, 'Caroline, you've got lots of room, you have him,' and they left together, and that was that...

...Both Plath and Lowell did time in McLean, a mental hospital speNoemie Emery is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Two years after that, Caroline left him...

...But, with her aristocratic entrée and her bankbook, Blackwood could afford to be dissolute...

...But even before his infidelity—even before their marriage—Sylvia Plath had been more than half in love with easeful death...

...Almost every minute of her life, she saw an appalling disaster happening right in front of her eyes...

...Both Plath and Blackwood had a drive toward darkness and death...

...Lowell went home with Caroline Blackwood and, in some senses, never moved out...

...Plath was American, born to Austrian immigrants, from the cash-strapped and striving middle class...

...Another recalls her talking brilliantly, with empty bottles rolling at her feet...

...Back home in Welles-ley, after her stint in New York, she was rejected by a writing class at Harvard's summer school, and she went into a tailspin, attempting suicide...

...As Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald had proved decades earlier, alcoholics and the mentally ill may enchant one another, but do not wear well...

...Plath was a perfectionist, an early Martha Stewart, who kept house by the rule of the women's magazines she loved and devoured...

...Sylvia Plath was a brittle reed, waiting to break whenever a rejection hurt the image of her own perfection— as the 1953 rejection by Harvard broke her temporarily, as the 1962 rejection by Hughes broke her forever...

...Lying awake at night, it's like counting sheep, trying to figure out who his children are...

...Sylvia Plath had no leeway at all...

...To a certain kind of male artist, this combination would prove irresistible, and Caroline began at eighteen her lifelong career of attracting men who were not in great shape when she met them, thrilling them for a while, and leaving them burned out, embittered, or dead...

...In particular, the novel is a savage portrait of her daughter Natalya, her least gifted child, and the one least able to cope in her chaotic household...

...Sylvia, Tennant says, could not laugh or relax...

...Lucian was a very unfaithful husband," one of her friends notes...

...She even briefly dyed her hair blonde...

...In September 1971, Caroline bore Lowell a son named Sheridan, a year before they married...

...In 1976, she had produced a short novel, The Stepdaughter, which was widely praised...

...Indeed, according to Sexton, it was Plath who first brought up the topic, telling "the story of her first suicide in sweet and loving detail...

...I did, and when they came in they were alarmed, and thought that the place had been burgled...

...Their lives were dominated by scenes of poetry, marital infidelity, divorce, and death...

...A headache, a tiny burn from the recipe she worries over hour after hour, is enough to bring grief, anger, hysteria...

...It's certain that Hughes is much to blame...

...she was like a radiant disease...

...She created a shambles wherever she went," said one acquaintance...

...By the time of his own death in 1977, Lowell had been married three times, to the short-story mistress Jean Stafford, the elegant essayist Elizabeth Hardwick, and the British aristocrat, Lady Caroline Blackwood—who had married three artists herself: the painter Lucian Freud, the composer Israel Citkowitz, and Lowell in 1972...

...This had been handled as well as possible by the stable and motherly Hardwick, but Blackwood was a different matter...

...Always, there is the need to seem perfect...

...By this time, Caroline no longer resembled the girl in that portrait, her beauty eroded by drinking and strain...

...From the start, Caroline showed a mordant sensibility wholly at odds with her angelic appearance...

...In the summer of 1970, Robert Lowell went to a party in London to see Xandra Gowrie and stayed too late to go back to Oxford, where he was teaching...

...From her mother's came the Guinness brewery fortune, on which she sustained herself and her series of indignant husbands...

...Hughes never wrote of this later catastrophe...

...The two were alike in nothing—and simultaneously alike in too much...

...The signal event of her life was her professor-father's death when she was eight years old...

...From then on, her mother sacrificed herself to her children—with the understanding that success would be enormous when it came...

...Need one point out that this was Sylvia Plath's complaint against Ted Hughes...

...In it, the heroine deeply resents the unlovely child foisted on her by her renegade husband...

...She strained to become the model of complete excellence: poet and prom queen, dazzling soul of the American coed...

...The cost was occasional bouts of "frozen inertia," as Plath wrote in her journals...

...Meanwhile, Caroline, too, had deteriorated, drinking heavily and living in squalor...

...Fear of failing to live up to the fast and furious prize-winning pace of these last years...

...Plath wrote from childhood and was nationally published while still a teenager...

...She was "disturbing but exciting," her friends report...

...Found in the cellar by her mother and brother, she was sent to McLean—and discharged five months later as cured...

...She had that magic thing that crossed the line of fantasy and metamorphosed into something creative...

...Freud painted a series of lyrical portraits, notably Girl in Bed (1952), which shows Caroline as fawn-like and luminous...

...She loved to tell stories...

...As with Hughes and Plath, Lowell and Blackwood seemed made for each other, sometimes in ominous ways...

...But two years later, in 1954, when he painted Hotel Bedroom, the mood had notably darkened...

...She died a year later, having drowned in her tub...

...At the time of her death, Plath was married to— and separated from—Ted Hughes, a young poet of infinite promise who would later become poet laureate of England before he died in 1998...

...Blackwood was such a femme fatale, who took two of her three husbands away from their wives and their children...

...It was not Ted Hughes who led her into that basement in Wellesley or who prompted the cheerful discussions of self-termination in her girl-talking sessions with Anne Sexton...

...In 1961, the Hugh eses left their London flat for a new house in Devon, subletting their apartment to David Wevill, a Canadian poet, and his wife, Assia Guttman, a ravishing beauty, thrice married, with an international and exotic past...

...She learned from her husbands...

...After class, Plath and Sexton would meet for drinks at the Ritz Carlton in Boston, to discuss poetry, Lowell, their various breakdowns, and past and future suicide attempts...

...The end came in 1996, from cervical cancer, though she had never recovered from the deaths of Natalya and Lowell, and from her own part in causing them...

...His apartment was "catastrophic," said Jonathan Raban...

...She saw how destructive and cruel she had been...

...Plath spent five months, from August 1953 to January 1954, after she had swallowed most of a bottle of sleeping pills and crawled into a basement to die...

...But Citkowitz followed her, moving into the second floor of her townhouse, where he lived more or less as a nurse...

...Lucian's painting changed violently after I left him," she later said...

...In the fall of 1962, both Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath move, separately, back to London...

...She was furious that her dream of love had not been realized in Lowell," said one of her lovers...

...It removed both an emotional stay and her family's main source of income...

...Three weeks after Plath's suicide, Assia Wevill aborted her child...

...cializing in Boston's best breakdowns...

...Caroline had Israel doing laundry," a friend of the couple complained...

...Tall and talented, hungry and fierce, the poets seemed made for each other...

...Not what it hid...

...In 1977, he died of a heart attack in a New York taxi on his way back to Elizabeth Hardwick— Lucian Freud's portrait, Girl in Bed, in his arms...

...She wanted to have it all, to be John Donne and Martha Stewart, to write great works, have a great love, be a great mother, and graciously run an immaculate home...

...Had they lived, Plath and Blackwood would today be seventy...

...Caroline's second husband was the American composer Israel Cit-kowitz, once a boy wonder, who looked almost identical to Lucian Freud— who himself resembled Robert Lowell in his younger years...

...Sylvia tried...