American Isis (19 page)

But didn't Aurelia wonder whether Sylvia was rushing into a momentous undertaking? Aurelia was never able to tell in print the full story of what she thought of Ted Hughes. Wanting to remain a part of her grandchildrens' lives, she feared alienating their father. He held the copyright to Sylvia's letters, which meant that in order to publish
Letters Home,
Aurelia had to secure his permission. As a result, she scrupulously avoided direct comments on Ted and his marriage to her daughter. But even in private, according to Aurelia's friend, Richard Larschan, she maintained a deep respect for Ted and a sober awareness that her daughter's troubled psyche had contributed to the couple's breakup.

In
Letters Home,
Aurelia introduces her daughter's precipitous behavior with a sweeping sentence: “To my complete surprise, three days after landing at Southampton on June 13, 1956, I found myself the sole family attendant at Sylvia's and Ted's secret wedding in the Church of St. George the Martyr, London.” Why secret? Sylvia thought that by openly announcing her marriage to Ted she might forfeit her Fulbright scholarship, since she assumed the award was meant for single students. Why surprise? After all, Sylvia had talked up marriage in letters to her mother. But initially the marriage was to have been put off until Sylvia completed her studies, when she would have the opportunity to return home and present her noble man. Now, however, Aurelia had been invited to join in their intrigue, just as Sylvia had always shared with her mother notes and reports about her gentlemen callers and their relative merits and deficiencies. Now, Aurelia was part of her daughter's conspiracy, one that not even Ted's parents knew about. And Ted played his own part very well, confiding in Aurelia his concerns about having to teach in order to generate an income. Aurelia had been doing that much of her life, and she candidly told him that sometimes she felt like no more than a jailer.

Why Hughes did not inform his parents or Olwyn, in whom he was wont to confide, has been a puzzle for biographers. Was his sudden involvement with an American student so overwhelming that he wanted more time to figure out what to say? His first letters to Olwyn sound like those of a younger brother with a lot of explaining to do. No one—certainly not Ted's Cambridge cronies—ever expected him to become a conventional husband, let alone marry an American who seemed to have such a different sensibility from his own. Lucas Myers, profoundly skeptical of Sylvia, saw the secrecy about the marriage as a way for Plath to take complete control, making sure no one could come between her and Hughes. Ted let Sylvia take charge and seemed at no point resistant—even to the idea of setting off on a honeymoon with his mother-in-law. How better to demonstrate his biddable side than to ease himself into Sylvia's energetic arrangements? This passive side of Hughes (if the couple had any quarrels before their marriage, neither of them vouchsafed as much to others) permitted, indeed encouraged Plath to project an idealized picture of their marriage.

Two days after the marriage, Sylvia wrote to Warren, presenting her union with Hughes as a predictable result of their three months of togetherness, reading and hiking and cooking and writing, side by side. Aurelia had endorsed her daughter's commitment, and Ted already loved and cared for Aurelia “very much,” said Sylvia, who later told Marcia Brown that her mother behaved “like a young girl—taking pictures, drinking wine etc.” To Warren, Sylvia presented the secret marriage as a necessity. She seemed to revel in the exclusivity of this match: The couple kept to themselves and liked it that way, she wrote her mother on 4 July, shortly after Aurelia had said good-bye to the newlyweds in Paris.

From Madrid on 7 July, Sylvia wrote a letter to Aurelia describing her procession through Europe with Ted as a kind of royal tour: “Wherever Ted and I go people seem to love us.” Working people were drawn to this unaffected couple in a landscape of bold colors and brightness. For the first time in her life, Sylvia felt her sinuses clear. Like Rebecca West in Yugoslavia, Plath claimed to find a paradise in which she was no longer clogged with the factitious burdens of Anglo-American modernity.

On the same day, Ted wrote to his brother in Australia, once and for all renouncing his dream of starting life anew there. It was not the right country in which to develop his writing. Neither was England. Like Plath, Hughes believed Spain had set him free. In the company of an “American poetess” (he seemed to use the word as though describing a princess), he was writing better than ever and more continuously. Sylvia astutely analyzed his work, he reported, and found the faults that he had not yet been prepared to acknowledge. In fact, as part of the Plath program of submissions, he had been successfully published in
Poetry
and
The
Nation.

Sylvia continued to write her mother about a fairy-tale honeymoon in Benidorm, a sparkling Spanish coastal town beside the blazing blue Mediterranean Sea. Sylvia was delighted with their quarters in a house even closer to the sea than Grammy's place in Winthrop. They had a balcony terrace overlooking a seascape that stimulated Sylvia's sketching and writing. Ted was working on animal fables, while Sylvia plotted stories about Americans abroad that she hoped to place with women's magazines. The same day (14 July) she wrote to Warren, describing Ted as the “male counterpart” of herself.

In her journal, Sylvia luxuriated in descriptions of the living room they had “consecrated” to their writing. They built their days around composing stories and poems, Ted working on a big oak table and Sylvia on a typing stand. They went out early to shop
,
she reported to Eleanor Friedman Klein, and in the peasant market picked out live rabbits that they were obliged to slaughter for dinner. Sylvia and Ted then returned home to write for the rest of the morning, breaking for lunch and a siesta, then a swim and two hours of writing in the late afternoon, followed by a few hours of reading before bed. Travel, adventure, and romance—her life had turned into a movie, Sylvia wrote her mother.

Still involved in Sylvia's intrigue, Ted wrote his parents after the couple arrived in Benidorm that he intended to marry Sylvia and would do so by the time he visited them in September. He swore them to secrecy, mentioned Sylvia's concerns about losing her scholarship if the truth were known. As he later made clear to Olwyn, they needed the scholarship money to live on. He had already signed on to Sylvia's plan to spend a year teaching in America, followed by a return to Europe. His parents should not worry, he added, because not only was Sylvia a good cook, she was great with money and a better earner than he was. He had met and liked her mother.

Ted devoted most of a long letter to his parents to describing a bullfight the young couple had seen in Madrid. It was a sorry affair that nevertheless commanded his full attention. Hughes's fascination with the violent ceremonial aspects of this gruesome contest overshadowed any repugnance he may have expressed to Sylvia, although the forthrightness of the unflinching description he gave his parents compels disgust. His analytical, even cold comment on the entire episode is simply an expression of surprise at the bull's ability to adapt to the duel, although in the end the beast died, drained of its blood.

Sylvia had sickened at the sorry spectacle, and in “The Goring” evokes the rather sordid atmosphere of the truculent crowd, the picador's awkward stabbing and artless, unwieldy maneuvers. Only in the final moments of the deadly duet between bullfighter and bull did the grim ritual take on the look of a kind of ceremonious art redeeming the “sullied air.” The poem's restrained tone disguises how ill at ease Sylvia was in Spain. To her mother she wrote about the “horrid picador” and the messy slaughter. Although she tells Aurelia that Ted shared her feelings, her language reveals a markedly different sensibility. Hughes would later write a poem, entitled “You Hated Spain,” about her reaction. As his biographer Elaine Feinstein observes, Ted was at home with the primitive side of Spain, whereas the sort of blood consciousness that had thrilled Sylvia in D. H. Lawrence's writing repulsed her in person.

The idyllic aerie by the sea gradually became a battleground between the landlord and a wary, cagey Sylvia trying to outmaneuver this witch-like presence, who kept barging in to lecture her renter about how to operate the freakish petrol stove, and against taking interruptions of electrical power and running water “too seriously.” “That Widow Mangada” provides a virtually verbatim version of Sylvia's journal entries, which recorded her growing disillusionment with her Spanish heaven.

That Sylvia ignored or did not appreciate Ted's different take on the bullfight suggests some of her exultant happiness was a rather forced affair. This, at least, was Richard Sassoon's conclusion after he received a letter announcing her marriage to Hughes. Sounding rather like Eddie Cohen, the reserved Sassoon replied that he saw no reason why Sylvia should not be as happy, or happier, with Hughes than she had been with him—except that what she had written did not appear to him to be the letter of a “happy woman. At least, not to me, and as you know me extremely well and are a good letter writer I may accept my reactions as feasible.” The sinuosity of his prose reflects how fraught and convoluted their relationship had become, but also, perhaps, how conflicted and unresolved Sylvia's feelings really were, in spite of her protestations to the contrary. He did not doubt he deserved her harshness. But she was “woman enough to know that I—above all I—am not one who needs to be blamed.… Long before I was your
bien aimé,
I was something else to you, and I think always I was somewhat more than a paramour, always.… You tell me that I am to know that you are doing what is best for you; it is so if you believe it, Sylvia, and if it is so—then it is—‘very simply' it. Even though I might wish it otherwise…” And so Sassoon exited, refusing to allow himself to be wrapped up in her version of their affaire de coeur.

A mysterious passage in Plath's journal for 23 July, written after an encounter with Hughes that left her dreading the “wrongness growing, creeping, choking the house,” hints at the twisted nature of her affections, which Sassoon had detected. She could suddenly turn a personal disappointment into a cosmic sense of disenchantment, declaring that the “world has grown crooked and sour as a lemon overnight.” Her estrangement, moreover, was not resolved but merely dispelled by a visit from Marcia Brown and her husband, Mike, and by delightful exchanges with a group of Spanish soldiers on a train to Madrid, as they learn to drink wine from a leather flask.

On 25 August, approaching the end of their summer sojourn, Sylvia and Ted met up with Warren in Paris, a rendezvous that Sylvia did not say much about. Warren had spent a summer in Austria and was returning to the States for his final year at Harvard. Sylvia and Ted were on their way to visit his family in what Sylvia referred to as their
Wuthering Heights
home. For all her rapturous references to Spain and plans to write about it, the results were meager. Except for “That Widow Mangada,” a handful of poems and stories that are unremarkable, and notes in her journal, she produced only a bland travelogue sort of article that was published in
The
Christian Science Monitor.

On 2 September, Sylvia wrote to her mother about her stay at the Yorkshire home of Ted's family. As she put it, she was now part of the “Brontë clan.” Her journal reveals that this was more than a casual allusion for a writer who immersed herself in literary lives so that she could live one. The bare hills, black stone walls, wicked northern winds, and coal fires that she describes in her letter evoke the atmosphere of
Wuthering Heights,
with Sylvia cast as the interloper entering the mysterious, ineffable world that perplexes and frightens Mr. Lockwood. She climbed the wild and lonely moors, just as Catherine and Heathcliff had. Did she recall the Hollywood version of
Wuthering Heights
(1939), with its iconic shot of Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon huddled together on a hill rise, two passionate souls bound to one another, yet doomed to part?

In her 2 September letter, Sylvia continues in her guise as Mr. Lockwood, calling Ted's parents, William and Edith, “dear, simple Yorkshire folk.” She loved them both. They liked her. Nothing untoward had happened yet. William, judging by what his son said about him, would have been quiet, even subdued. He had gone through the trauma of the trenches of World War I and now owned a tobacconist's shop. Edith, as portrayed by other Plath biographers, had a deep interest in magic and the occult—although Olwyn later chided Diane Middlebrook for saying so. (Actually, Ted's fascination with astrology and necromancy far outstripped anything his mother could possibly have known or cared to impart to her son.) She was quite conventional and genuinely appreciated Sylvia, who obviously relished the domestic side of life and brought with her a high-spirited and romantic embrace of the land.

Sylvia would soon be returning for her second and final year at Cambridge. Ted would go to London, where his reading of poetry for the BBC was successful and remunerative (they had spent nearly all their money in Spain). Hughes had one of the finest voices in modern poetry. He believed that only part of the brain registered the impact of poetry when it was not read aloud. He often read Shakespeare to Plath and encouraged her to spend part of her day reciting poetry. Her own recorded voice grew in authority and power, as did her awareness of audience, and for that Hughes deserves considerable credit.

Sylvia prepared to write a novel based on her Cambridge experiences. She and Ted were hoping to get teaching positions for a year, and perhaps do a reading tour as well when Sylvia brought Ted home to America. Her hopes were high.
The
Atlantic Monthly
had bought “Pursuit” for fifty dollars. More good news followed on 2 October, when
Poetry
accepted six of her poems for another seventy-six dollars. And Peter Davison, now at
The
Atlantic Monthly,
was encouraging her to submit more of her work. She wrote him a long letter explaining her plans for a novel, as well as touting Ted's poetry. He gratified her with a quick response that included his wish to see Hughes's work.