Sylvia Plath: A Biography (14 page)

For Krook, Sylvia’s chief strength as a student was not her brilliance — although she wrote solid, intelligent essays — but rather her responsiveness. “I felt the things I said, we said, her authors said, mattered to her in an intimate way, answering to intense personal needs, reaching to depths of her spirit to which I had no direct access.” Krook observed that Sylvia loved literature, loved to study it and talk about it, and loved the humaneness of discussion with her tutor. Meeting with Krook at her house at 111 Grantchester Meadows was the high point of Sylvia’s week, and she accumulated a long row of alphas (A’s) for her essays.

Because her lecture schedule seemed light in comparison to her days at Smith, and because studying was only one of the reasons Sylvia was in Cambridge, she tried out for the Cambridge Amateur Dramatics Club (ADC). She was one of only nine women chosen to be a part of that elite group. She played minor roles during fall term, the comic part of a mad poetess and that of a screaming whore in
Bartholomew
Fair
. She also joined a political group, the Labour Club. Men were plentiful and Sylvia dated a good deal. For the first time in her life, she had money to spend without guilt. She was living on what the Fulbright committee thought students in her position should spend.

And Sylvia was always in love — and always with some giant of a man. This was the perception of her friends, anyway. In fact, according to her journals, Sylvia avoided serious relationships at Cambridge by telling men there about “this boy in France.” Sassoon was the subject of much conversation, the object of much correspondence. They did spend the Christmas holiday together, traveling in Europe and staying at the Sorbonne in Paris, reviving their former intimacy. Sassoon, however, also loved women in Switzerland and France. After their holiday together, he asked Sylvia not to write to him until he had sorted through his future plans.

She did write to Sassoon, but she did not mail the letters, and some of them appear as entries in her journals for 1956. Being forbidden to write while separated from him was a restriction she could hardly bear. Once again, she had idealized a situation so that it bore little resemblance to reality: Sassoon clearly was not ready for marriage but Sylvia was looking for permanence. She not only wanted to love Sassoon; her repeated references to wanting to bear his child would have frightened the hardiest playboy.

Returning in January from her romantic vacation, Sylvia was faced with the depths of the English winter. She learned what room heaters were for. As she wrote to Aurelia, “I wear about five sweaters and wool pants and knee socks and
still
I
can’t keep my teeth from chattering. I was simply not made for this kind of weather.” Soon after winter term began, to add discomfort of a different type, Sylvia got a splinter in her eye. She went to the infirmary in great pain, afraid of being blinded. She also had the flu, more colds, and depression. Her grand plan — to conquer Cambridge academically and socially — seemed as impossible as her dream of conquering New York had been during the summer of 1953.

By mid-February of 1956, Sylvia was in the same kind of inert, angry depression that had preceded her earlier breakdown. The language of her 1956 journal entries echoes that of her writing in 1953. According to that journal, her behavior was a mixture of rash impulses. She wore only black clothing, with red gloves and a hairband; she was aggressive, sexual, shrill; she scolded herself for doing little studying. She admitted that she was unbearably lonely (“I long for Mother, even for Gordon”), fighting what she called “the old beginning-of-the-week panic,” wanting to cry “to Richard, to all my friends at home, to come and rescue me. From my insecurity, which I must fight through myself.” Physically, too, she was far from being at her best: “I am tired and have been very discouraged by having sinus for so long.”

Her letters to Ellie Friedman, as well as those to her mother, did not suggest depression, however. Comedy was Sylvia’s pattern on paper, and every love affair, every adventure, became the stuff of good stories. Socially Sylvia was sometimes less than polite to the students who surrounded her. Ildiko Hayes invited Sylvia to tea to meet Hilary Bailey, but Sylvia was remote and taciturn. (Bailey remembers, “We crouched by a gas fire, gnashing crumpets.”) It was as if Sylvia’s attention was on students who could do her some good, male students for the most part, or those who were already established. She did go to the poetry readings held in Chris Levenson’s rooms, partly because Levenson was editor of
Delta
. There, Plath criticized fellow poets freely. According to Philip Gardner, a Cambridge student and poet, at one meeting Sylvia read a poem that she had already published in the United States as though it were new work, and she just smiled when listeners criticized it. Gardner felt that Sylvia’s practice showed her need to be successful on the British literary scene and belied her apparent self-confidence. The work that Sylvia submitted to the local poetry magazines —
Granta
,
Delta
,
London
Magazine
— was, for the most part, rejected. Levenson described the poems Sylvia sent to his magazine as being “too tricksey, too self-consciously clever.”

On February 20, 1956, Sylvia was back to her old habit of analyzing everything in her journal. She listed as her problems: “men (Richard gone, no one here to love)” and “writing (too nervous about rejections, too desperate and scared about bad poems)” and “girls (house bristles with suspicion and frigidity)” and “academic life (have deserted French and feel temporarily very wicked and shirking, must atone: also, feel stupid in discussion; what the hell is tragedy? I am).” Another journal entry, all too reminiscent of those 1953 prebreakdown entries, began,

Dear Doctor: I am feeling very sick. I have a heart in my stomach which throbs and mocks. Suddenly the simple rituals of the day balk like a stubborn horse. It gets impossible to look people in the eye: corruption may break out again? Who knows. Small talk becomes desperate.

Hostility grows, too. That dangerous, deadly venom which comes from a sick heart. Sick mind, too. The image of identity we must daily fight to impress on the neutral, or hostile, world collapses inward: we feel crushed.

Burdened with her self-imposed responsibility, Plath turned every event into a symbol. When a group of young boys threw snowballs at her, she concluded that they had chosen to attack her because they could see the rottenness within her.

On February 25, recognizing the old symptoms for herself, she went to see Dr. Davy, a psychiatrist, a fatherly man who impressed her. Her guilt, in that day’s journal entry, turned to anger against Sassoon. He was responsible for her being this age — 23 — and single. But the chief problem was that Sylvia had not yet found that “blazing love” she had believed would surround her: “My God, I’d love to cook and make a house, and surge force into a man’s dreams, and write, if he could talk and walk and work and passionately want to do his career. I can’t bear to think of this potential for loving and giving going brown and sere in me. Yet the choice is so important, it frightens me a little. A lot....”

As if in answer to her journal entry, that very afternoon she bought a copy of the first issue of the new literary magazine,
St
.
Botolph’s
Review
. Bert Wyatt-Brown, an American acquaintance of hers, was selling copies down by the Anchor at the Queen’s Street bridge. Several hours later she returned and asked where she would meet Ted Hughes. His poems particularly impressed her.

Sylvia turned up that night at the
St
.
Botolph’s
celebratory party in Falcon Yard, and she met Hughes. Yelling exuberantly at each other, stamping their feet and drinking brandy as they talked about poetry, Ted and Sylvia exchanged kisses in a remote room. As she described it in her journal,

then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband, off my red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never find again, and my favorite silver earrings: ha, I shall keep, he barked. And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face.

The incident quickly made the rounds of the Cambridge gossips.

For several weeks, however, the only place the romance existed was in Plath’s journal. Hughes worked in London as a reader for the film production company of J. Arthur Rank. Sylvia wished that he would come to Cambridge. She lamented that he did not, worried that he had a girlfriend. Finally Ted and Luke Myers, an American poet friend, did come to Whitstead. They came, however, to the back of the house, calling the name Shirley. Sylvia never knew they were there. When the students who lived on that side of the sprawling house told her of the incident, Sylvia was furious. He had no respect for her, that was clear. She wanted nothing to do with him.

But of course she did. Spring was spinning through the chill British air, and Sylvia was apprehensive about her travels in Europe. She had heard from Sassoon; he would not be able to see her. She had plans to meet Gordon Lameyer for a trip through Germany, but she knew her spring break was going to be less than idyllic. The night before she was to leave for vacation, however, she saw Ted. They spent the night at his second-floor flat on Rugby Street in London, reciting poetry, making love, finding their alter ego in each other — rebellious and isolated, strong and erotic and gifted. The “twentieth-century Brownings”, as friends later called them, loved the power each seemed to command, the promise each had in writing, the sensual responses each was capable of.

Tired but euphoric, Sylvia rose early and left. It was March 24, 1956. She traveled to Paris only to find that, indeed, Sassoon was gone. She tried to enjoy her isolation, the superb French food and drink. She was tempted to pick up men to be companionable with but not to love. As she later wrote to Aurelia,

In the last two months I have fallen terribly in love, which can only lead to great hurt. I met the strongest man in the world, ex-Cambridge, brilliant poet whose work I loved before I met him, a large, hulking, healthy Adam ... with a voice like the thunder of God — a singer, story-teller, lion and world-wanderer, a vagabond who will never stop.

She had difficulty not thinking of Hughes, especially when she received his March 31 love letter, telling her that her memory went through him like brandy. He would come to her in Cambridge if she did not come to London. Her impulse was to return immediately, but Gordon was planning to meet her so she stuck it out. Besides, there might be some chance that Sassoon would return. She had some happy times, and the loneliness finally brought tranquility.

Several days later she began her travels with Lameyer. On April 12, she could resist no longer. As she later wrote her old friend Marcia Brown, “I flew back from Rome to London on a black Friday the 13th of April, and we haven’t been apart a day since.”

Born August 17, 1930, in West Yorkshire, Ted Hughes was the youngest of three children. He had served as a radio operator in the RAF and was a 1954 anthropology graduate of Pembroke College, Cambridge. Hughes was somewhat outside the academic tradition: his father was a tobacconist. His family home, The Beacon, in Heptonstall village, was both comfortable and secluded. Six feet tall, a hunter and fisherman, Hughes was primarily a writer. He had begun writing poetry at fifteen, and knew Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Yeats, Hopkins, Lawrence, and Dylan Thomas better than Sylvia did. She and Ted shared these writers. They also shared a deep understanding of the power of language (especially Ted, with his boyhood in the Yorkshire dialect), as well as that of mythology and folklore. They prowled the British Museum, listened to Beethoven, and read Nietzsche and — in Ted’s case — Schopenhauer. Ted kept himself steady through a balance of mind and body, the natural and the sophisticated.

At Cambridge, Ted had rejected the preciousness of some of the students and the English faculty and had managed to remain himself. He did not try to become a literary figure, and he avoided most of the campus writers. He instead chose his friends from other Cambridge outsiders, people who were Irish, Welsh, and American. According to a friend, Ted was bound to his companions through a love of “talk, song, and outrageousness.” Ted’s Cambridge was not the one Sylvia was trying to conquer. In fact, the appearance of
St
.
Botolph’s
Review
was meant to state a new order of business for the poets of England — a more vital and rigorous effort than that which Levenson, Spender, and Leavis represented. Prior to the party for the publication, Ted’s friends complained of Sylvia’s association with the
Granta
crowd, although they did not know her personally. David Ross, the editor, Daniel Weissbort, Luke Myers, and others told each other that Sylvia’s writing was superficial. They belittled the appearance of her poems in American middle-brow journals. Male jealousy was part of the criticism. But there was also the feeling that she was “on the make” and that her pursuit of Ted (as the courtship was interpreted) was yet another manipulative attempt to promote her career by attaching herself to someone as promising as Hughes seemed to be. While that opinion did not dissipate at once, Ted’s response to her as well as a better acquaintance with Sylvia herself led to that crowd’s eventual welcoming of her as a poet and friend.

For her part, Sylvia thought that she had found exactly the sort of man she had long sought for a husband. Her letters home that spring were rapturous. In April, her beloved grandmother died of cancer, but even that great loss did not dampen her happiness. And then her mother was coming to England in June and would get to meet the “huge derrick-striding Ted,” who, according to Sylvia, knew everything, had done everything, was willing to try everything, and wrote expert poems besides.