American Isis (20 page)

In her 2 October letter to Aurelia, Sylvia made a point of saying that she and Ted were not part of an “arty world,” and that all they needed was one another. But the very sense of their uniqueness also put pressure on her. Thinking she had missed a rendezvous with Ted in London, she panicked and gave way to a “fury of tears,” she told Aurelia. Although he turned up soon enough, Sylvia's extreme reaction showed how much he meant to the equilibrium of her everyday life.

Ted was well aware of Sylvia's investment in him, and from London, where he often stayed overnight or longer when employed by the BBC, he reinforced their bond with frequent affectionate and encouraging letters, as well as expressions of anxiety that jibed with her own moods. On 1 October, he wrote about how restless he felt without her. He wandered about like “somebody with a half-completed brain-operation.” He enjoined her to “keep watch” on their marriage as he was doing, saying that way their happiness would be preserved. He had nicknames for her (“Puss-Kish-Ponky,” for example) that served to intensify their intimacy and exclusivity. Anticipating a rendezvous with Sylvia, Ted announced that he would kiss her “into blisters.” The man who had cared nothing about clothes, and was known to stuff newly caught fish in his jacket pockets, extolled a suit Sylvia had bought for him, saying he could now descend on London “sleek, sleek, sleek.”

A day later Ted wrote about how he missed Sylvia's “ponky warmth.” He sent her plots that she might use for her fiction. One involved a young newly married couple that set off for the country to avoid the distractions and complications of urban life. “They want to keep each other for themselves alone and away from temptation,” Ted wrote, without a sign that he was basing this story line on their own lives. In an eerily prophetic twist, Hughes has friends of the couple visit and urge them, so good at entertaining, to open an inn. Although the inn is successful, the upshot of their venture is that they have brought the city, so to speak, back into their lives. Even worse, the wife turns jealous and suspects the husband's involvement with an old girlfriend. The story has a happy ending, in that the couple sells the hotel and buys another cottage closer to the city, reflecting their awareness that they cannot entirely escape modernity, but they can work on keeping their marriage solid. Hughes called it a “rotten plot,” but was that all it was? “Can you pick any sense out of that?” he asked Sylvia. Was the question directed toward the meaning of the story, or the meaning of their lives? At any rate, Hughes was happy to say in a later letter that he was glad she liked the “inn-plot.”

In “The Wishing Box,” a story about the woman who is envious of her husband's fertile imagination as expressed in his dreams, Plath may have been articulating her concern that at this point Hughes seemed way ahead of her as a writer. At least that is one way—the Edward Butscher way—of looking at Sylvia's response to Ted's teeming creativity, so fecund that he was sending his newborn ideas to a half-grateful, half-resentful collaborator. Sylvia's letters, though, not only do not begrudge him, they positively exult in his productivity.

Hughes certainly gave Plath no reason to doubt her desirability. Hughes bid her good night, thinking of Puss's “little soft places” and how he wanted to kiss her “slowly from toe up,” sucking and nibbling and licking her “all night long.” Missing her, he felt like an amputee, dazed and shocked, because he had lost half of himself. Sometimes he just baldly broke out with: “I love you I love you I love you.” Only her “terrific letters” comforted him. If more than a few days went by and Ted had not heard from Sylvia, he grew uneasy: “No letter from my ponk. Is she dead? Has half the world dropped off?” He imagined the desirable Sylvia welcoming the charms of knaves, while he sat staring at the skyline “like an old stone.” Unable to work, he consoled himself by reading Yeats aloud.

In his letters, Hughes predicted greatness for Sylvia, just as she had for him. Without her, he wrote on 5 October, he could not sleep and was wasting his time. He walked about like a strange beast, and had even been stopped by the police because he looked like a suspicious character. Somehow, he wrote Sylvia, they had to turn all their “lacks” into good poems. He advised her on studying for exams at Cambridge, sensibly saying, for example, that the six books on Chaucer she had to read each contained some value but they surely overlapped, and there was no need to give them more than a note or two for each chapter she read. Similarly, he critiqued her poetry, offering straightforward advice—one professional to another—and praise. “Your verse never goes ‘soft' like other women's,” he wrote on 22 October, although he seemed to worry a bit that she might be searching for a formula that magazines like
The
New Yorker
followed. But he wondered if such a formula existed. How to account for Eudora Welty or J. D. Salinger, two originals quite dissimilar, and yet both published in
The
New Yorker.
If she wrote about what really attracted her, she could not miss, Ted told Sylvia. Like Plath, Hughes seemed to take rejections in stride, saying that at least
The
New Yorker
might remember his name, even if they rejected his animal fables.

To Olwyn that October, Hughes touted Sylvia's successful publications in
The
Atlantic Monthly
and
Poetry.
She was not a “blah American.” Indeed, she was very like an indefatigable German, without affectations, and had a “startling poetic gift.” He plotted her horoscope, which he drew in the letter for Olwyn's benefit. He was now showing Plath's poems to his contacts at the BBC. Ted clung to Sylvia as a renewing force, even as he spurned London, calling it “murderous,” a ghost of itself, and so depleted that it had no “aura” left. It seemed utterly exhausted, he wrote to her on 23 October.

In late October, in a near state of collapse because Ted spent so much time in London that they could not live as husband and wife, Sylvia confessed her secret to Dorothea Krook, who rightly predicted that if Plath consulted the Fulbright advisor on campus and the Fulbright committee in London and made a full and contrite confession of her marriage, she would be allowed to keep her scholarship. And it was so. An elated Sylvia told Krook that no criticism whatsoever had been forthcoming; indeed, she had been congratulated on her marriage. But Krook, who still did not feel she knew her student that well, felt a twinge of concern because Sylvia seemed to depend on her marriage for so much of her own well-being. “I am living for Ted,” Sylvia had written her mother on 22 October. In “Epitaph for Fire and Flower,” a poem she enclosed in a letter to Aurelia, one line says it all: The lovers have a “touch” that will “kindle angels' envy.” Well, not quite all, since the concluding lines evoke the “ardent look” that “Blackens flesh to bone and devours them.”

By early November Ted had found a job near Cambridge teaching secondary school students, and the couple moved into a flat only five minutes from Newnham. He did not like Cambridge very much, and certain of his professors there apparently felt the same about him. The dons regarded Ted as a rather louche character and seemed surprised that the cheerful and well-scrubbed Sylvia would be attached to such a ruffian. Residing in Cambridge indicated that he was doing everything possible to allay Plath's easily aroused anxieties. They played out their evenings with tarot cards.

The Suez crisis and Britain's ill-fated invasion of Egypt after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal brought out Plath's innate disgust with militarism and materialism. Even more importantly, her reaction reflects a sensibility that rejected narrow nationalism. She viewed politics as she did poetry, in cosmic terms. That Britain was in league with France and Israel only demonstrated to her that the world was out of joint. She cared nothing for the British Empire, for face-saving measures, for the niceties and duplicities of diplomatic negotiations. She did praise Hugh Gaitskill, leader of the Labour Party, for eloquently opposing the invasion, but she really had no interest in political parties as such. She was the same person who had written to Hans about world peace. It made her feel no better that her country held nuclear superiority. Other British policies on Cyprus and the emerging African states were no better, and she hoped America would put pressure on her ally to withdraw from Suez. She now regarded her own land as the proper place for her and Ted. Britain was dead. In a rare chauvinist moment, she declared to her mother on 1 November, “God Bless America!” Six days later she wrote again to say she was sickened at the news of the Soviet Union's invasion of Hungary. She continued to reiterate her opposition to all war, saying she hoped Warren would become a conscientious objector.

Sooty old England had become a drag, and Sylvia primed Ted with pictures of a sumptuous summer on Cape Cod. She had also set him up for a poetry contest sponsored by
Harper's
and adjudicated by Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, and Marianne Moore. Winning the prize and publication of his first book would be the making of Ted Hughes in America and Britain. He wrote his friend Lucas Myers on 16 November about the contest, expressing “small hopes” for his success, although he was obviously a writer who thought of himself as in the running. He and Sylvia tried to work out their future on a Ouija board, with mixed results. Strenuous efforts on their part put them in contact with a spirit, who rightly predicted which magazines would accept their work. But relying on the Ouija board to predict the winners of football pools did not yield the fortune they anticipated.

Sometime in late November, Sylvia Plath had her first encounter with Olwyn Hughes, who visited her shortly before Sylvia relinquished her Cambridge room for the flat she would share with Ted. Olwyn was then twenty-eight, tall and strikingly “handsome,” to borrow Elaine Feinstein's word. Olwyn had served in various secretarial positions in Paris and may have struck her sister-in-law as the very type of career woman Sylvia abjured. The confident Olwyn, single and with a hearty laugh, seemed utterly self-contained and without a permanent male companion. Olwyn found Sylvia to be somewhat reserved. But, according to Anne Stevenson, nothing much happened in this first meeting that would have given either woman pause.

On 15 December, Sylvia wrote to Marcia Brown to tell her all about the magnificent Ted, a “roaring hulking Yorkshireman.” As usual, she described him as “looming” and ferocious. This time, though, she also associated Ted with the “sound of hurricanes,” a neat way to absorb him into her earliest memories of a mythological life by the sea. She positively reveled in reporting that she could not boss him around, declaring he'd bash her head in if she tried. Even when she discussed his teaching, she said he terrified his pupils into admiration. She described Ted as “staunchly British,” but she hoped he might consider settling in America, since Britain was a country that had no future.

Sylvia now believed she had overcome her demons. When Aurelia wrote at the end of the year about a young man in a suicidal state, Sylvia replied on 29 December with a heartfelt description of her own six-month ordeal, when she could not bear to read or write and detested the optimism of her doctors. Sylvia wanted her mother to tell him about Sylvia's case and what Aurelia had said to her at the time: that it was most important to open yourself to life, to be easy on yourself, to get out in nature, and to see that you are valued for yourself, not for your achievements. Tell him, she urged Aurelia, that Sylvia had thought her case was hopeless, but she had nonetheless recovered. But, she warned, do not minimize what he feels; agree with him even if he thinks his plight is dire, she reiterated. She wanted her mother to give him as much time as she could afford. “Adopt him for my sake (as the Cantors did me)” and make no demands, Sylvia instructed.

In end-of-the-year letters to Aurelia and Warren, Ted mentioned that he was encouraging Sylvia to get started on that novel she kept announcing. She was pouring a good deal of energy into her cooking, he noted. The film
Sylvia
suggests meal preparation and baking were the diversions of a blocked writer. And it is true that over the next year Sylvia would produce relatively little prose or verse. But her energies had to go somewhere, and it is hard to see how forcing the novel at this point would have done her much good. She needed more time to work out a major project than was available while studying for her courses; her interrupted writing routine induced considerable anxiety and even depression.

Sylvia began 1957 by adhering to her two-hour-a-day writing regimen, beginning at 6:00 a.m., before Ted went off to teach at a nearby secondary school. At his urging, she memorized a poem a day while working on love stories for women's magazines. She also typed some of Ted's work and assembled poems she planned to submit to the Yale Younger Poets series. For the first time, in a letter to Aurelia on 9 January, Sylvia mentioned “violent disagreements” with Ted, but she assured her mother that he was kind and loving and so good about bringing discipline to her work. Ted resisted the idea of teaching on a permanent basis, as some poets were now doing, securing sinecures that would, in his view, stifle creativity. Writing came first. He taught, temporarily, to earn an income. Sylvia sounded less sure about renouncing an academic career, confiding to her mother on 19 January that she would not argue with her husband about it, mainly because she had such confidence in his future.

On 21 January, Ted wrote to Aurelia and Warren to thank them for Christmas presents and to extol Sylvia's poetry—especially the cumulative power of the poems in the book she was putting together. Evidently he really did terrify his pupils into submission, since he mentions beating their heads for their “insolence.” Terror tactics, even rages, got the attention of boys who actually had good hearts, Ted insisted, although he seemed less confident of his methods than Sylvia had suggested. He thought he lacked authority and behaved more like an older brother than the father figure they needed. Teaching these recalcitrant lads was a sobering experience, he admitted, evincing none of the all-conquering hero aspect Sylvia liked to tout.