This was a time when Movement poets such as Donald Davie, Elizabeth Jennings, John Wain, Philip Larkin, and Kingsley Amis dominated the postwar British poetry scene. Luke would later describe the Movement as “an expression of logic rather than myth, ‘classical,’ and esteemed principally as an instrument of stability.”98 Hughes felt similarly. He associated Movement poems with “the post-war mood of having had enough”:
enough rhetoric, enough overwhelming push of any kind, enough of the dark gods, enough of the id, enough of the Angelic powers and the heroic efforts to make new worlds. They’d seen it all turn into death camps and atomic bombs. All they wanted was to get back into civvies and get home to the wife and kids and for the rest of their lives not a thing was going to interfere with a nice cigarette and a view of the park….Now I came a bit later. I hadn’t had enough. I was all for opening negotiations with whatever happened to be out there.99
Bert remembered many conversations at the Saint Botolph’s rectory about the “crabbed and moribund” Movement poetry.100 Indeed, Ted wrote to Olwyn in 1956 about the “meanness and deadness of almost all modern English verse—with which I feel not the slightest affinity.”101 English poetry after Auden, he felt, had abandoned “the whole historical exploration into spirit life…religion, myth, vision” and had embraced in its place “pedantic, frivolous, tea-and-biscuits Oxford High Anglicanism…which seems to me closer to the pride, pomp and circumstance of the High Table than to any altar of uncut stones.”102
The Botolphians’ contempt for the Movement was a manifestation of their obsession with Graves’s The White Goddess. Hughes said he “soaked the book up” during his three years at Cambridge and recalled his “slight resentment to find him [Graves] taking possession of what I considered to be my secret patch.”103 It became a talismanic text for Ted, Daniel, and Luke, who carried The White Goddess “in their hands as if it were their version of Holy Scriptures,” Bert remembered.104 Graves believed that the source of the poet’s inspiration was a seductive but ultimately dangerous muse, the White Goddess, and that poetry was “magically potent in the ancient sense.”105 Authentic poets were acolytes to this cruel muse, and the more one gave in service to the White Goddess, the larger the literary return. Poems were, in effect, offerings, though true devotion required complete sacrifice: “she will gladly give him her love, but only at one price: his life. She will exact her payment punctually and bloodily.”106 Graves’s themes of sacrifice, martyrdom, and primitive ritual resonated with the Boltophians’ Romantic understanding of the poet’s spiritual function. Hughes would have gleaned similar ideas from James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which he read and annotated at Cambridge.
Graves thought women were meant to be muses, not writers: “Woman is not a poet: she is either a Muse or she is nothing.”107 Plath was destined to become, for Hughes, the human embodiment of the White Goddess—a role she played happily for a time, but which she eventually chafed against.108 Yet Graves’s influence on Plath, too, should not be underestimated. According to Luke, he and Ted were in the process of “rereading” the book when Sylvia came into their lives.109 Daniel also remembered Sylvia’s interest in the book. Everyone’s fascination with Graves, Yeats, and Lawrence, Daniel said, was “taken for granted.”110 In a July 1957 journal entry, Plath contemplated inventing a heroine for her novel who is “a bitch: she is the white goddess. Make her a statement of the generation.”111 Many of Plath’s later poems show Graves’s influence—some ironically.112
But in the winter of 1956, Plath’s fashionable verse was very much a product of the New Critical aesthetic, full of the symmetry and preciousness that so riled the Botolphians. Ted and his friends wanted to resurrect the exuberant bombast of Thomas, the apocalyptic intensity of late Yeats, the ritualistic wisdom of Graves, the passion of Lawrence. Plath’s poem “Three Caryatids Without a Portico,” in the Winter 1956 issue of Chequer—studded with words like “tranquil,” “regal,” “serenity,” and “grace”—was an easy target:
In this tercet of torsos, breast and thigh
slope with the Greek serenity
of tranquil plaster;
each body forms a virgin vase,
while all raise high with regal grace
aristocratic heads;…113
“Cruel laughter greeted a reading of her work,” wrote Bert, who remembered the poets gathering in Luke’s room that winter to dissect the latest issue of Chequer. “We deplored her efforts as trivial and immature. After all, what women could ever write lasting poetry?…How hopelessly misguided and wrong we were.”114 Luke remembered that Ted stayed silent during the discussion. In his Birthday Letters poem “Caryatids (2),” Hughes remembered how they “had heard / Of the dance of your blond veils, your flaring gestures, / Your misfit self-display. More to reach you / Than to reproach you […] we concocted / An attack, a dismemberment, laughing.”115 Hughes later wrote that he found Plath’s poem “thin and brittle, the lines cold.”116
Bert knew Sylvia through his girlfriend Jane Baltzell, and “feebly defended” her “braininess, striking good looks, and lively personality” to the Botolphians. But the others could hardly contain their glee as they delivered a “scathing appraisal” of Plath’s genteel verse. Luke later called Sylvia a “flashy target” whose poems they disapproved of “in spite of their being well made, or rather partly because of it. Her ambition shined through them, or so we thought, and we also thought it was peculation to write poetry, which should come down on the poet from somewhere, out of sheer will.”117 Hughes wrote about the male condescension Plath experienced at Cambridge in his Birthday Letters poem “God Help the Wolf After Whom the Dogs Do Not Bark”:
The Colleges lifted their heads. It did seem
You disturbed something just perfected
…And as if
Reporting some felony to the police
They let you know that you were not John Donne.
……………………………………
Nobody wanted your dance,
Nobody wanted your strange glitter…118
Sylvia had been fêted for her writing at Smith, but her American accolades held little currency among the Botolphians. Bert remembered that they “grumbled ceaselessly how she was demeaning the poetic profession by publishing in The New Yorker, Ladies’ Home Journal, Mademoiselle, and other middle-brow and popular outlets.”119 The playwright Michael Frayn, who worked on the Cambridge Varsity editorial team, recalled her approaching him confidently and asking for assignments. “She was a fantastic chatterer. She talked very fast and very continuously. She was a very bright person.” He “warmed to her.”120 She also asked for an introduction to Ben Nash, who had a literary reputation as well as “a formidable reputation as a seducer of women.” Sylvia seemed “aware of this.” Michael took her to Ben’s room at King’s College, but he was out. Sylvia met Ben eventually, and, according to Michael, they became romantically involved.121 (Sylvia’s calendars suggest as much.) At one point, Sylvia lectured Michael and some other young men about how they could support themselves by writing for American magazines like Mademoiselle. They found her advice well intentioned but hilarious.122
Jane shared the men’s “Botolph” attitude, claiming that Sylvia seemed overly preoccupied with “commercial success.” She was so good at “marketing,” Jane felt, that Ted would never have become a successful poet without Sylvia’s help. But Sylvia did not seem, to Jane, interested in “the mystery and mysticism” that was “the primary thing” for the male poets in the group.123 Daniel put it more bluntly. “Sylvia wrote to publish. Ted didn’t….She had what I think of as American self-publicity. You noticed it.”124 Hughes’s letters suggest he was hardly ambivalent about success, but he cultivated an air of indifference. Plath’s ambition was held against her.
* * *
—
Bert was the initial link between Sylvia
and Ted.125 He sold Sylvia her copy of the Saint Botolph’s Review on February 25, 1956, from the corner of King’s Parade and Silver Street. (He could hardly believe he had passed off seventy-five copies by then, “some to clergymen misled by the title.”)126 Michael Boddy remembered that he and his friends “fanned out” to sell copies, hawking it at the women’s colleges in hopes of luring them to the launch party they had planned that night. He recalled how, on that cold, foggy day, a Heathcliffian Hughes would “loom out of the gloom” to ask a harried passerby for a shilling. “Invariably the apprehensive punter would pull out a shilling to get away, and Ted would give him a copy of the Review.”127 When Sylvia saw Bert hawking the pamphlet, she approached him; he promised she would like the poetry inside. She bought a copy for one shilling and six pence (the print run had been underwritten by David Ross’s father) and dashed back to Whitstead on her bicycle.
Bert was “still shivering” in the cold February dusk outside the Anchor pub when Sylvia returned to speak to him, flushed and pedaling “furiously.”128 Did he know Ted Hughes, author of “Fallgrief’s Girl-Friends,” and E. Luke Myers, who had written “Sestina of the Norse Seaman”?129 He did, and he invited her to meet them herself at the magazine’s launch party that night. As it turned out, Hamish Stewart, a Canadian at Queens’, had already invited her to the party as his date.
By evening, a strong, chilly wind was blowing through Cambridge. Sylvia, back at Whitstead, was excited and rattled by the poems she had just read in the Saint Botolph’s Review. Hughes, Myers, Huws, Weissbort, and Ross had all written poems that resonated more deeply with her aspiring creative vision than the neat, well-mannered verse she was then writing. Hughes’s “Fallgrief’s Girl-Friends” had especially impressed her:
…he meant to stand naked
Awake in the pitch dark where the animal runs,
Where the insects couple as they murder each other,
Where the fish outwait the water.130
Hughes’s poem “Secretary” probably also struck her, with its portrait of a woman afraid of her sexuality, trapped in a loveless life of servitude (at night she “lies with buttocks tight”), as reminiscent of the stories she’d written about lonely, single women in high school.131
Reading Hughes’s and Myers’s poems in the Saint Botolph’s Review was a moment of reawakening for Plath, a return to the swaggering poetic instincts of her adolescence—to poems like “Sea Symphony,” “I Have Found the Perfect World,” and “I Am an American.” This poetry was unadorned, unabashed, slightly savage—“vital,” as she might have put it. She felt something was missing from her own verse, and that the Saint Botolph poets had found it. In her journal she fixated not on Ted but on Luke. She compared his technique to “an athlete, running, using all the divine flexions of his muscles in the act” and predicted that he would “be great, greater than anyone of my generation whom I’ve read yet.” Later, she predicted the same for Ted. But it was Luke who drew her to the party, Luke she would approach first. She called his poems “tight and packed and supple and blazing.” This was how she wanted to write: “until I make something tight and riding over the limits of sweet sestinas and sonnets…they can ignore me.” She was right: Christopher Levenson remembered thinking that her verse “displayed great technical virtuosity but was brittle, not ‘serious’ enough.”132 Sylvia wrote how these poets’ “magnificent” writing made her own poems seem superficial, filled with “glib, smug littleness”—though she reminded herself that this diminutive tendency was “not me. Not wholly.” She knew that if she wanted to be taken seriously at Cambridge, she would have to abandon her poetry’s well-wrought decorum.133
* * *
ON FEBRUARY 25, 1956—in the hours before she read the Saint Botolph’s Review—Sylvia saw a university psychiatrist, Dr. Davy, whom she liked and thought fatherly. Her decision to seek psychiatric treatment spoke to the seriousness of her growing depression. She felt unburdened as she told Dr. Davy about her “past.” Sitting with him, she realized how few adults she really knew at Cambridge. She had no mentors like George Gibian or Mary Ellen Chase, no family friends like the Aldriches or the Cantors, and no one like Mrs. Prouty with a vested interest in her writing. “I am going to talk to this Dr. Davy again in a couple of weeks,” she wrote Aurelia, “because he is the first adult I’ve spoken with in Cambridge, and it is an immense relief to get away from these intense adolescent personal relationships.”134 Just knowing he was there made her feel better. Still, she was at a very low point in the hours before her life changed. To Aurelia she wrote,
Tonight I am going to a party celebrating the publication of a new literary review which is really a brilliant counteraction to the dead, uneven, poorly written 2 lit. magazines already going here, which run on prejudice and whim; this new one is run by a combination of Americans and Britains, and the poetry is really brilliant, and the prose, taut, reportorial, and expert. Some of these writers are Jane’s friends, and I must admit I feel a certain sense of inferiority, because what I have done so far seems so small, smug and little. I keep telling myself that I have had a vivid, vital good life, and that it is simply that I haven’t learned to be tough and disciplined enough with the form I give it in words which limits me, not the life itself.135
Plath had been devastated when she read Daniel Huws’s review of her Chequer poems in Broadsheet that February. “Of the quaint and eclectic artfulness of Sylvia Plath’s two poems,” Huws wrote, “my better half tells me ‘Fraud, fraud’; but I will not say so; who am I to know how beautiful she may be.”136 Daniel’s review reveals the flippant but deep sexism that permeated Cambridge literary circles. Sylvia hardly registered the “beautiful”; what upset her was Huws’s aesthetic judgment. She told Aurelia, “they abhor polished wit and neat forms, which of course is exactly what I purpose [sic] to write, and when they criticize something for being ‘quaintly artful’ or ‘merely amusing,’ it is all I can do not to shout: ‘that’s all I meant it to be!’ ”137
Frank O’Connor’s rejection had been private, but this rejection was public, and more humiliating. Worse, Plath believed it was true. Daniel Huws, she wrote in her journal, had been right to mock her poem. She turned her anger at him inward and prepared herself to fall at the feet of the “brilliant” male poets she would meet that night. Full of sadness and self-contempt, Plath was a disciple in search of a master the night she met Ted Hughes.
The Botolphians, too, were in a state of confusion. They felt “rejected” by Granta and Chequer and, despite their bombast, doubted their ability to “open up a new era in literature.” “Our desperation was acute—each of us with a different source of anguish,” Bert remembered. A spirit of “intense disillusion,” even “near violence,” haunted them, a postwar “fear that we were not up to the mark of our older, veteran brothers.”138 Alcohol quelled the panic. That night, Sylvia had dinner with Nat LaMar, Jane Baltzell, and Win Means, then met Hamish at 8:45 at Miller’s, where they got drunk on Whiskey Macs. (She described Hamish as “a rather impossible Canadian who drinks & smokes too much, but is aware of a certain pub-life & pub characters in Cambridge which I find occasionally refreshing after weak intellectual tea.”)139 The two eventually stumbled to the party at the Cambridge Women’s Union in Falcon Yard, where the Botolphians had rented a hall on the second floor. They, too, had been drinking all afternoon at the Anchor, and had shared a fifth of bourbon in the Saint Botolph’s rectory dining room before heading to the party.
“The birth of the Review should have inspired a bright festival of song and dance,” Bert later wrote. “Instead, it became a sinister affair, far out of control.”140 The party, like the poetry it celebrated, was raucous, even “unwholesome.” David Ross, too, remembered it as a “roaring affair.”141 Iko thought it “very wild,” and Ted “very drunk, very rambunctious.”142 The young poets were making a stand against the dryness and dullness of modern English verse, and they knew they must
play the part. By night’s end several Victorian-era stained-glass windows would be smashed and at least one argument about poetry would come to fisticuffs. The next day Michael Boddy told the police that some football “yobs” were responsible for the vandalism. (Iko remembered that it was in fact “the delta people” who had crashed the party and started the fight.) Luke was nevertheless disciplined by his Downing College tutor for the damage to the hall and forced to leave the rectory, though Ted told David years later that he was the one who had broken the windows. Jean, who was at the party with Ted’s girlfriend Shirley, recalled less chaos but lots of drink. “Speeches were made. Short and informal, and not in the least London manner. They weren’t launching something very grand. No, it was much more alternative.”143
Jane remembered the “mood of dejection” until the “manic rhythms of a first-rate jazz band filled the rooms.” She had been to an earlier rowing party where drunken students had set crew shells on fire. There was “latent violence” in the air that night, she wrote her parents.144 Ted wrote to Terence McCaughey, now in Dublin, about the new magazine—he was proud some thought it “obscene.” The “best thing about it,” he wrote, was the launch party. “Mac played, all drank, more women than men, we left the place smashed, windows out, polished floor like a dirt-track. The bill will come one day.”145 Indeed it would.
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