American Isis (27 page)

Then there had been a ghastly three-week search for a furnished flat. The awful rainy, cold, and windy weather—always sure to depress Plath—and the appalling, dingy condition of the housing stock that cost more that twenty-five dollars a week (out of their price range), made her feel adrift in the large city, especially since she wanted to be near a good doctor and hospital. The American poet W. S. Merwin and his English wife, Dido, tried to be helpful, making phone calls and using their contacts, but they also agreed with Sylvia that the English were the “most secretly dirty race on earth.” Even new items in department stores looked shabby to Sylvia. To get anything decent seemed to involve “key money,” a form of large bribe to a real estate agent or landlord. Welcome to England, which had yet to boom itself out of its postwar blues.

Thanks to the Merwins, Sylvia and Ted finally found a flat on Chalcot Square near Primrose Hill, a very pleasant, almost country-like setting. The place needed a lot of work (Sylvia was applying her third coat of paint), but they were happy to have a home on a three-year lease—and relieved, since the baby was due in late March. They had a sunny kitchen and a view of the square, where Sylvia watched birds and children playing. They had to buy appliances, but the Merwins lent them some furniture. At the equivalent of eighteen dollars a week, plus charges for gas and electricity, they could budget enough using Ted's Guggenheim Fellowship money. And of course the National Health Service would cover all costs associated with childbirth. Ted's letters share Sylvia's enthusiasm for their new home, as well as her dismay over what he called the “frightful competition for flats.” Sylvia reported to her mother on 7 February that Ted had just finished painting the living room walls in white over textured paper, and that they intended to have an engraving of Isis, enlarged from one of his astrology books, mounted on one wall. To Olwyn, Ted wrote that he liked “the feel of living in London. My stay in America seems to have greatly objectified my sense of England.”

Sylvia decided to have her baby at home with the assistance of a midwife, not an unusual practice in England, but one forced on Sylvia because it was too late to register at a hospital under the National Health Service. She could be admitted as an emergency patient, but Sylvia preferred to plan ahead. She was comforted to have the assistance of Dido's obstetrician. Natural childbirth—still an unusual choice for a woman in the States—had the blessing of her English doctor, who promised to be on call should there be complications. Sylvia was also practicing relaxation exercises, and although she did not mention it to Marcia, Ted had also experimented with hypnotizing her and with teaching her self-hypnotic states that relieved stress. She was counting on him to be on hand, to cook and generally to bolster her—although she wished a friend like Marcia could also be around. Sylvia, probably more fearful than she let on, wanted to know what Marcia thought of this setup.

Dido Merwin, Lucas Myers, and other British friends of Ted Hughes have portrayed Sylvia as rigid, self-absorbed, and hopelessly American. And yet here was an aspect of her that they did not seem to appreciate. Her American doctor had advised against natural childbirth. And indeed, everything in Sylvia's suburban background cried out against this old world way of doing things. For all her nightmares about childbirth gone wrong, Sylvia showed considerable flexibility and courage in approaching this momentous change in her life. Her husband seems to have had qualms. To Lucas Meyers, Hughes showed the first sign that not all was well. Out for a drink with his friend from Cambridge days, Ted “confided to me what seemed not to be manageable in the marriage,” Myers recalls in
Crows Steered/Bergs Appeared.
To Myers, Hughes had never before been critical of married life with Sylvia, and like many of his friends, Myers perceived Hughes to be a “mostly willing prisoner” of the marriage. But in one instance, he told Myers, he had decided to count the number of times Sylvia had interrupted his work in the course of a morning: The total had reached 104.

Although Sylvia told Marcia that neither she nor Ted could get any work done during the previous two months, in fact, as letters to Aurelia reveal, Sylvia was working on a new book of poetry that would find a publisher in February. She was also typing some of Ted's work. As usual, Sylvia treated her mother to an anodyne version of events, emphasizing the coziness of the Hughes home and socializing with his family—especially with the beautiful Olwyn, blonde, as tall as Sylvia, and at thirty-one looking no more than twenty-one. Ted's sister already loved her, Sylvia declared in her fairy-tale version of her stay with her in-laws. Sylvia's first pregnancy, she assured her mother, was going well. Other than some backaches, heartburn, and a kicking baby, she felt surprisingly comfortable, perhaps because she gained relatively little weight. She estimated she walked three to five miles a day. She wondered if the birth of her child would coincide with the publication date (18 March) of Ted's second book,
Lupercal.

On 18 February, Sylvia wrote optimistically about living in England to Lynne Lawner, a friend acquired during a poetry contest several years earlier. Heinemann had accepted her first book of poetry for publication: “I think I shall be a very happy exile & have absolutely no desire to return to the land of milk & honey & spindryers.” A Somerset Maugham award for Ted (about $1,400) had them dreaming of a writing holiday the following winter somewhere in southern Europe. Sylvia was still cooking a full meal the day after her official due date of 27 March. A. Alvarez's positive review of
Lupercal
in the
Observer
seemed to add to their anticipatory excitement on 31 March, when Sylvia predicted in a letter to her mother that the baby's arrival could not be much more than a day away. Sylvia had swelled to 155 pounds, about twenty more than her usual weight.

Sylvia went out for an evening walk, watching a thin moon hover over the magical landscape of Primrose Hill, strewn with daffodils, and then retired for the night. She awakened just after midnight, when, as she wrote her mother, “everything began.” The first labor pains started at 1:15 a.m. The doctor arrived around 4 a.m., but without anesthetics, since no one had anticipated the rapid birth, which Sylvia called violent and painful, but also amazing. It was all over by 6:00 a.m., a remarkably easy first birth, nothing like Sylvia had anticipated. By the next day, she was sitting up in bed typing letters to her mother and Marcia Brown, detailing the epic event and describing Frieda Rebecca Hughes, “dozing and snorkeling” since dawn and already bathed by the midwife in Sylvia's largest Pyrex baking dish. Ted had held her hand throughout the ordeal. She had avoided the horror of a hospital stay, a fear of Sylvia's that Nancy Hunter Steiner has described in her memoir. Even though Sylvia had been advised to stay in bed, she got up to call her mother, announcing the birth of “Ein wunderkind, Mummy. Ein wunderkind!” Months later she would write a beautiful poem, “Morning Song,” that began with Frieda's “bald cry,” announcing herself to the world, and ending with a tribute to a child already shaping a language for herself, “clear vowels” that “rise like balloons.”

Sylvia gave Ted full credit for all his support. For weeks he had been putting her to sleep in trances, predicting an “easy, short delivery.” At a time when squeamish men paced hospital corridors removed from the anguish and complications of childbirth, Ted Hughes was on the spot, relishing the moment when the baby crowned and began to emerge from Sylvia's body. He told Lucas Myers all about it three weeks later in a long letter. Ted praised Sylvia's active participation in the birth, unlike passive, immobilized mothers, “stupefied with drugs,” worked over by doctors in American hospitals. He likened her pushing the baby out of herself to “backing a lorry around a tight bend in a narrow alley full of parked cars.” Sylvia had absorbed Ted's rejection of American know-how. A week after Frieda's birth, Sylvia reprimanded her mother for taking a chauvinistic attitude: “No more about growth hormones and growth stopping, please! I'm surprised at you. Tampering with nature! What an American thing to feel measuring people to ideal heights will make them happier…”

On 21 April, a weeping Sylvia watched what became known as the Aldermaston marchers line up in a seven-mile-long column with “Ban the Bomb!” banners and signs, heading toward Trafalgar Square. She was proud that her baby should be part of this protest against the poisoning of the atmosphere with fallout from nuclear tests. Sylvia never wavered in thinking of the atomic bomb as civilization's great misfortune. Politically and culturally, she felt much closer to England than to America, especially when she watched friends like the Merwins join the march. She hoped that neither Aurelia nor Warren was thinking of voting for the Machiavellian Richard Nixon. She wondered what they thought of Kennedy, expressing no opinion of her own about him.

“Frieda is my answer to the H-bomb,” Sylvia wrote Lynne Lawner. Plath was a very happy mother. She looked forward to having a large family. Wendy Campbell came from Cambridge to visit and saw a radiant Sylvia taking to motherhood with impressive assurance. Jane Truslow, a friend at Smith who had married Peter Davison, also visited the Chalcot Square flat, after which she expressed her astonishment that a prima donna like Sylvia had adapted to family life with such aplomb. Truslow told Edward Butscher that it was the first time she saw Sylvia able to get outside of herself. Peter Davison, always apt to see the negative side of his former lover, noted her intense restlessness. Dido Merwin, up to then a warm supporter of Sylvia, began to withdraw her affection, appalled at what she saw as a virago who hounded her long-suffering husband, who did everything possible to placate her. It seems true that Ted almost never complained to his friends about Sylvia and went out of his way to excuse her moody periods and rudeness. It troubled Sylvia that she did not have “a good American girlfriend,” and Ann Davidow's visit in early May was more than welcome. They took up where they had left off ten years earlier. Plath felt an instant rapport with Ann's husband, Leo Goodman, and noted that his astrological sign was Leo, just like Ted's.

After a month at home, Sylvia relished a dinner party with T. S. Eliot, who had first recommended that Faber & Faber publish Ted's work. Ted described Eliot to Olwyn as “whimsical” and yet “remote.” He kept staring at the floor, looking up only to smile at his wife, Valerie. But Sylvia enjoyed drinking sherry with the “wry and humorous” poet near a coal fire. He immediately put her at ease, even though she thought of herself as in the presence of a “descended god.” Valerie, just as welcoming, showed Sylvia her husband's baby pictures: a handsome man right from the start, Sylvia wrote Aurelia. Then Stephen Spender and his wife arrived. Intimate gossip ensued about W. H. Auden, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf—virtually all of Sylvia's favorites got the full treatment. Sylvia did not walk, she “floated” into dinner. Spender admired Ted's “craggy Yorkshire handsomeness combined with a certain elongated refinement.” He remembered that Sylvia talked more than her husband and that he liked this pretty, intelligent woman, later writing her and apologizing for talking too much at dinner when Eliot's conversation began to lag.

During this period, Sylvia met A. Alvarez for the first time. As poetry editor of
The
Observer,
he had accepted both her work and Ted's. He was, in biographer Elaine Feinstein's words, a “kingmaker,” a critic who could establish reputations. He held a position of prominence on a major daily paper that no one else occupied—then or now. When he first visited their flat, Sylvia played the part of proper wife so well that he was embarrassed to learn that Mrs. Hughes was the Sylvia Plath he had published. She had to bring up the subject of her work when she realized he did not recognize her. But Alvarez detected no note of grievance or resentment in her behavior.

On 21 June in a letter to Olive Higgins Prouty, Hughes called Sylvia a marvelous mother who calmly fed her baby and exhibited endless patience. Sylvia returned the compliment three days later in a letter to Aurelia, extolling Ted as a “marvel of understanding” who was “wonderful with the baby.” They took turns working in the Merwin study—mornings for Sylvia and afternoons for Ted. Both poets gave public readings, and Ted continued to earn good fees for reading his poems and those of others on the BBC, which also produced two of his verse plays. He had also begun selling his manuscripts to dealers and to Indiana University. In this way, the couple cobbled together an income. They attended a Faber & Faber cocktail party, where a proud Sylvia watched while Ted was photographed next to W. H. Auden, establishing Ted's place in the next generation of Faber poets. That her destiny seemed bound up with London seemed confirmed on the day she happened to walk down Fitzroy Road and saw a freehold house for sale, an unusual occurrence since most dwellings went for ninety-nine year leases. This was the street on which Yeats lived, Sylvia told her mother. The couple, still relying on Ted's Guggenheim money and a thousand dollars she drew out of their Wellesley bank account, could not afford to buy a house, but she hoped that someday they would find just such a residence to own.

On 22 August, Ted wrote Aurelia and Warren a chatty letter about visiting his parents in Yorkshire. He needed a respite from the hurly-burly of London. He described a fetching Sylvia, who had been reading Alan Moorehead's book about the Gallipoli campaign and eagerly questioned his father, a survivor of that catastrophe. Father and son rarely spoke about this traumatic episode from William Hughes's youth, so watching his usually taciturn father open up to Sylvia proved quite entertaining to Ted. Long walks and time spent in Edith Hughes's garden soothed Sylvia, she reported to her mother.

Returning to London a fortnight later, Sylvia received a BBC invitation to read her work on the radio. With Ted's work in demand and her hope that he might write a popular play, they dreamed of a car and a country home, complete with a loom, a kiln, a book press, and other items of handcraft. They both thought they might strike it rich if he could write a play to suit the volatile spirit of the times, as Arnold Wesker and the other “angry young men” were doing. Sylvia even had Ted read Clifford Odets to absorb the working class, proletarian ethos.