American Isis (22 page)

 

CHAPTER 5

QUEEN OF THE OCEAN

(1957–59)

1957:
Plath and Hughes summer at Cape Cod before Sylvia begins teaching freshman English at Smith, while Ted obtains a part-time teaching position at University of Massachusetts, Amherst;
1958:
The couple moves to Boston, and Sylvia resumes treatment with Dr. Beuscher;
1959:
Sylvia befriends Anne Sexton in a poetry class taught in the spring semester by Robert Lowell. Sylvia and Ted spend a summer at Yaddo, the writer's colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, and then sail in December for England.

In early June, after the ordeal of exams that earned Plath the equivalent of about a B
+
and a master's degree, the couple headed for Yorkshire to stay with Ted's parents before sailing to America. On 8 June, Sylvia described for her mother's benefit a cozy family get-together with Olwyn, who had just arrived from France. Sylvia had cast aside what she thought of as the false, artificial world of Cambridge with T. S. Eliot's line about “preparing a face to meet a face.” The couple took long walks on the moors.

A letter Ted wrote to Olywn on 20 June aboard the RMS
Queen Elizabeth
on the way to America suggests that not everyone was as simpatico as Sylvia said they were. “Don't criticize Sylvia too badly about the way she got up and came after me,” Ted exhorted Olwyn, who thought Sylvia had been rude to John Fisher, Ted's old and beloved teacher. When Sylvia abruptly rushed out of the room, an awkward silence ensued until Ted said he'd better look after her. Then, as he returned to his company, she had rushed down the stairs after him. Olwyn was clearly impatient with Sylvia's moods, which shifted from high-pitched animation to sullen silence. Ted expatiated: A “nervy” Sylvia was still recovering from her exams and found company disturbed her need to rest. The “smarmy” behavior Olywn despised was Sylvia's response to panic, when she was trying too hard to be “open & too nice.” Ted had seen a carefully hidden side of Sylvia that moved him to say apologetically, “She says stupid things then that mortify her afterwards. Her second thought—her retrospect, is penetrating, skeptical, and subtle. But she can never bring that second-thinking mind to the surface with a person until she's known them some time.” Ted could have been Arthur Miller apologizing for Marilyn Monroe, whose erratic behavior often placed him in the same embarrassing situations. Both men felt deeply protective of the women who had inspired them far more than anyone in a superficial social setting could imagine. On the surface, it seemed to Olwyn that her brother had married a woman unworthy of him. Ted worked hard to bring Olwyn round: “You saw how much better she was the last day. Don't judge her on her awkward behavior.” Like Miller, Hughes made his excuses, mentioning Sylvia's “miserable past,” which he would in due course tell Olwyn about. Sylvia could be a harsh judge of people, Ted told his sister, but his wife had already developed considerable respect for Olwyn and prized her. How much Hughes was placating his sister, and how much he believed what he said, is impossible to tell.

The letters to his sister Hughes wrote aboard the
Queen Elizabeth
mention a period of depression, although aside from his complaints about the sumptuous food and boring sea, the reasons for his dejection are not clear. Of course, he was embarking on a new phase of his life, which in itself could have seemed daunting. But when Sylvia so often referred to him as her male counterpart, she may have been acknowledging a similar arc of mood swings that could make living together both wondrous and fraught.

Her journal entries written aboard ship focus mainly on the other passengers, whom she was sizing up as characters for her stories. She did mention, however, the “coffin-like bunks” and her difficulty sleeping in their cold cabin. A dreary sort of sameness seems to have overtaken Sylvia and Ted, who did not really have much to do on a ship monotonously rolling in the waves. Sylvia's journal does not do much with the rather conventional fellow travelers she described.

Writing in late June to his brother, Gerald, and Gerald's wife, Joan, Hughes described his first impressions of Wellesley and of the party Aurelia had arranged. He produced a classic description of 1950s conformist America, where everyone was expected to “mix,” join the “rat-race,” and put on a happy, “well-adjusted” face. The opulent food dismayed him, the meet and greets wearied him, and the fastidious surroundings made him want to engage in “private filthiness.” This world had too much glaze for him. “But I'll learn my position,” he noted, as though these new surroundings constituted a sort of game. “It's good for me to be surrounded by a world from which I instinctively recoil. I mightn't waste quite so much energy here.” He enjoyed observing new birds, and he was on the lookout for the skunks he had heard about. And there was always fishing, one of his favorite pastimes. The huge cars—the materialistic culture of what he called “85ft long Cadillacs”—amused him. But what really pleased him was the lack of cruelty in literary life. Even the literary reviews, a notorious haven for the nasty, were “surprisingly honest, outspoken, but not venomous,” as they were in London, where Hughes despised the vicious, inbred, and underhanded clubbishness of literary life. As Sylvia approached with more abundant food—chicken and lobster sandwiches—Ted marveled that he had landed in the lap of luxury. Like Sylvia, he believed in his own destiny, which he had charted in horoscopes. “There is no explanation for it,” he said in a concluding line to Gerald and Joan, “though astrology, of course, explains it all.”

Accounts of Hughes's behavior at the party differ, with some remembering a generally friendly, if taciturn, Ted, and others depicting a somewhat condescending, aloof figure. Of course, such impressions of him that survive have been refurbished with retrospection—not to mention suffused with the personalities of those who met him and later reported on his behavior. His letters suggest mixed emotions capable of sustaining nearly every available version of his American debut.

In
Letters Home,
Aurelia remembers a radiant Sylvia greeting her seventy guests and introducing her husband to them. Warren then drove the pair to the summer cottage Aurelia had rented so that they could have seven weeks or so of rest and quiet and time for their writing. A week later, Sylvia wrote to Marcia Brown, describing their “small gray cabin hidden in the pines” and their “easy living, no phones, simple meals,” which allowed them to dress like hermits in dungarees. They wrote in the morning, biked in the afternoon to the beach, and read a good deal in the evening. For Sylvia, this meant Virginia Woolf's novels. Sylvia had trouble resuming “Falcon Yard,” although in late July she had better luck writing stories, which she regarded as warm-up exercises for more serious work.

Ted's version of the Cape summer in a letter to Gerald and Joan was a little different. He attributed his own writer's block as well as Sylvia's to a paralyzing response to Aurelia's generosity: seventy dollars a week for the cottage. Although Ted did not explain himself, it seems that the couple's sense of self-sufficiency attenuated. And what Sylvia regarded as simple meals seemed to Ted virtual banquets, as she plied him with Himalayan heaps of food. Sylvia cooked to relax. She was a “princess of cooks” who delivered “fairy palace dishes,” a bemused Ted noted, regarding eating only as a necessity. But he grew to enjoy browning on the beach and even appreciated the kitchen, with all its modern conveniences. He liked the verandah, where they took their meals. And when Sylvia really got going with her writing, they actually did eat rather simply.

Sylvia loved walking on the beach and imagining Ted as a seagod, the perfect consort to her as earth goddess, she avowed in her journal. Plath associated her newfound maturity with her marriage to Hughes, just as Monroe, likewise married in June 1956, linked her yearlong break from Hollywood and journey to New York to be with Miller with her fulfillment as an actress. Just 160 miles southwest from Ted and Sylvia and at virtually the same time, Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe were walking along Amagansett beaches near the tip of Long Island—he treating her as a goddess to be cherished, and she looking up to her tall husband as her towering hero. Sylvia and Marilyn, both survivors of suicide, saw their mates as saviors. Having produced no notable work in the previous six months, Sylvia was sure that without Ted's constant support, she would have gone mad. Marilyn, in virtually the same downward cycle and deeply disappointed over the outcome of her last picture,
The Prince and the Showgirl,
wanted to believe, as did Sylvia, that she was storing up energy for a new burst of creativity. But Sylvia Plath, like Marilyn Monroe, could in a matter of a few days, or even hours, execute a reverse angle shot of her marriage, or complaining in her 18 July journal about a “lousy day … No more dreams of queen and king for a day with valets bringing in racks of white suits, jackets, etc. for Ted & ballgowns and tiaras for me.”

A brooding Sylvia worked on a story about a troublemaking mother who wants her daughter to be a social success. The plot might as well have been stolen from
Stella Dallas,
although Plath made no mention of her mentor or her work. Ultimately, the mother is redeemed in the story, just as Stella is, both in Prouty's novel and in its radio serial. Living in the wonderful cottage for the summer, how could Sylvia help but be grateful to Aurelia? At the same time, though, she hated the feeling of obligation, the sense of being beholden that Ted, too, disliked. The story, which seemed to her slick but good—exactly what a magazine like
The
Saturday Evening Post
would publish (they later rejected it)—apparently did wonders for Sylvia's mood. Ted reappeared in her journal as the salt-air seagod, smelling as fresh as a newborn.

But what followed was a horrifying two weeks during which Plath thought she was pregnant. She had been rather casual about contraception, she admitted in her journal, and now her period was overdue. How could she possibly handle her writing, teaching at Smith, and the responsibilities of motherhood? She wanted children, but not now! The energy they would have to devote as parents would put them into debt, robbing them of the time they needed to hone their talents. Even worse, they would regard the infant as an intruder. Ted referred to this period as their “black week” in a letter to Gerald and Joan, without specifically mentioning the dreaded pregnancy. Then all Sylvia's worries dissipated in the “hot drench” of blood, two weeks late, that relieved her misery, and they both began writing at great speed, applying their brains “like the bits of electric drills,” a relieved Ted told Gerald and Joan.

On 6 August, Sylvia wrote her mother in some excitement over a short verse play, “Dialogue Over a Ouija Board,” later included in the notes section of
The Collected Poems.
She was suggestible and skeptical, indulging Ted in his occult occupations, which often had a materialistic motivation. He was a poet, like Sylvia, who thought a good deal about money and how to get it. To say that he had made an investment in Sylvia, this go-ahead American, may sound crass, but he loved her no less for it, and for being a canny woman who could figure out how to make five pounds go a long way toward paying their rent in Cambridge and feeding them as well. The Ouija board, in other words, became for both of them a conversation about how to generate capital, as it does for Sybil and Leroy in “Dialogue Over a Ouija Board.” Sybil is resigned to Leroy's obsession with a “bare board” that has yielded contradictory results. Leroy wonders if perhaps Sibyl will be included in her white-haired benefactress's will—a revealing gloss, perhaps, on why Sylvia was so assiduous about keeping open lines of communication with the wealthy Olive Higgins Prouty, and making sure that Prouty was among the first to meet Ted when he alighted on the American shore. “She was very amusing though she's old now and her mind wanders a bit—still she's plain and direct. I got on with her well,” Ted wrote to his sister, Olwyn.

“Dialogue” reveals a good deal about Hughes, who often portrayed himself as an amateur Plath shaped up for worldly competition. As Leroy, though, he is the one who wants to know from the Ouija spirit if he is to have his “fling at fame.” For Sibyl, the future is best left unknown. She is fixated on the afterlife and asks about her father, but she receives a garbled transmission. Though Leroy seems the more credulous of the two, Sibyl doubts his fealty to the supernatural, saying that if a bush began to speak to him he would kneel but then check for the wiring. “Dialogue” marvelously captures the playful, querulous strain in the pairing of these two sensibilities, who seem to agree in this instance that they are in thrall to imps, since neither Sibyl nor Leroy can believe that any major gods would come at the call of a glass maneuvered over a board. As Sibyl shrewdly points out, Leroy has no real need of spirits because, “You'd presume your inner voice god-plumed enough / To people the boughs with talking birds.”

Leroy teases Sibyl about her “inklings” of “doom.” He accuses her of opportunism—even when it comes to calling spirits, which she will placate if they prognosticate what she wants. It “pays to be politic,” Sibyl replies. The overlay of heroic lavender Plath used to scent Ted's entrance into her life—not only in letters, but also in personal introductions of him to friends and family—is stripped away in the hard, if still good-natured give-and-take of “Dialogue.” Sylvia Plath had plenty of illusions about Ted Hughes, but she also had startling insights into the real man. After all, Sibyl calls the Ouija board “our battlefield.”

The piece ends with Sibyl and Leroy returning to the reality of their daily life. “[T]he dream / Of dreamers is dispelled,” he concludes. She wishes for the “decorum” of their days to “sustain” them, and he wants their actions to reflect that they mean well. As the lights go out, they make the same wish: “May two real people breathe in a real room,” perhaps a recognition of just how powerfully Sylvia and Ted could project their imaginations so as to create an unreal world. “Dialogue” confirms Oscar Wilde's adage that art is a lie that tells the truth. Sylvia's play seems so much more revealing than the performances Plath and Hughes put on in their letters.