Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  As the Irish ballads grew louder and off-key, Bert and Jane watched the Saint Botolph’s “bacchanalia” at an American remove. Jane put down the debauchery to the terrible winter that had left “everyone’s nerves…cranked up pretty tight.”146 The party was likely the wildest Sylvia had ever attended, and she too was eager to play her part. Bert remembered that her “fervor immeasurably intensified the Dionysian air.”147 Sylvia wrote in her journal that she was already “very, very beautifully drunk” when she ascended the stairs and entered the hall “with brave ease.”148 Jane recalled her wearing a black subfusc gown—a detail Sylvia included in her short story about the night, “Stone Boy with Dolphin.” Jane was surprised to see her there, as Sylvia did not know anyone in the Saint Botolph circle besides Bert. Ted, Jane thought, looked like an “eagle in a pet shop…bored, melancholy, discontent.”149 She had been so impressed by Hughes’s poems in the Review that she had come to the party to meet him. But his “dyspepsia” put her off, and she avoided him. “He was large and alarmingly powerful, both physically and in psychological presence.”150 Contradicting Hughes, she remembered that the crowd was mostly male.151 Sylvia, Jean Gooder remembered, “was pretty sloshed. But she was gunning for what she thought was the top poet”—Ted. “She’d done her homework.” Jane remembered Sylvia’s bright red hair band, a “scarlet streak.”152

  Fortified by drink, Sylvia first approached Bert, then found Daniel (Hamish introduced them) and spoke the “immortal line of introduction” she had planned ever since she read his “clever precocious slanted review”: “Is this the better or worse half?”153 Daniel remembered her tone of “friendly aggression” as she defended her poem.154 She moved on to Luke, whose poems she had singled out in the Review. They began dancing the twist while she quoted his lines from his poem “Fools Encountered.” Luke’s English girlfriend Valerie sat alone as he and Sylvia bantered, and he worried that Valerie “must have been thinking that I had deserted her in favour of a more aggressive compatriot, but Sylvia tired of me and asked where Ted Hughes was.”155 Sylvia was likely less interested in Luke once she heard his American accent.

  Ted’s girlfriend Shirley was a Newnham student reading English. Luke described her as “a serious and attractive young woman, intelligent, reserved and very English.” (Ted had dated another woman at Cambridge, Liz Gattridge, a nurse, before Shirley; he had written Liz passionate love letters and considered marrying her, but the relationship ended when she moved abroad.) Shirley was the inspiration for the “beautiful” girl in “Fallgrief’s Girl-Friends.” “Ted’s friends thought he would do well to marry her,” Luke said.156 Presumably so did Ted, who had brought her to Yorkshire for a week to meet his parents. She, too, had introduced Ted to her parents. Jean remembered, “She came from a relatively humble northern background, and faced with some of public school self-confident casual manner, retreated into herself, didn’t like it. She was absolutely smitten with Ted. It went very, very deep.”157 In the fall of 1955, Ted had asked her to come with him to Spain; the plan seemed impractical, and she declined. But whatever commitments Ted may have made to Shirley receded as he approached the tall, vivacious American woman dressed in red and black, her eyes “a crush of diamonds.”158

  This was not the first time Ted had seen Sylvia. Daniel recalled that there were some women at Cambridge who were “very glamorous,” “public figures…a bit like film stars…you knew some of them by sight.”159 Sylvia was one of those women. She and Jane cut such a striking pair that Shirley—who had seen the two around Newnham—pointed them out to Ted, who thought they looked “Swedish.”160 Christopher Levenson said that Sylvia “seemed to possess all that easy social charm and savoir-faire that as diffident, awkward Englishmen we expected from Americans.”161 Indeed, Jane recalled that Sylvia’s fashionable, American clothing set her apart, as trendy collegiate styles had not yet crossed the Atlantic.162 The poet David Wevill, Assia Wevill’s husband, had just one memory of Plath while he was at Cambridge, “walking in Trinity Lane, standing out in her spring dress among students in their rumpled clothes.”163

  Sylvia asked Luke to point out Ted Hughes. And suddenly there he was, looking straight into her eyes. She began quoting his poem, “Fallgrief’s Girl-Friends”; they “shouted as if in a high wind” above the music.164 In an unpublished draft of his poem “St Botolph’s,” Hughes wrote that he and Plath retreated to the quieter “stove-room” where crates of alcohol were “hoarded from the rabble.”165 Ted reassured her that Daniel would never have written so harshly about her poem if she had not been beautiful. Sylvia already suspected that her gender had made her an easy target, and she told Ted that a woman practically had to sleep with the editor to get a poem published at Cambridge. Ted, amused, said she was “all there,” wasn’t she. They spoke of his dull job in London, and he told her he had “obligations” in the next room—Shirley.166 But then he kissed her and grabbed her earrings and red hair band. When he tried to kiss her again, this time on the neck, she bit his cheek. Hughes later wrote:

  Behind the door, I poured more brandy. We drank.

  I kissed you. Whether you were drunk

  Or concentrated for a masterpiece, suddenly

  You fastened to me, your limbs steely,

  Like a trap. Our kiss developed

  Till my left cheek was in your teeth

  And your screwed-up ball-face of joy

  Bit & held with all your strength. I broke free,

  I was laughing & you were laughing…167

  Luke, Daniel, and Bert did not see the kiss or the bite, which suggests that it happened in a more private space. Jean, who had come to the party with Shirley, saw it but remembered the scene differently: “I saw Sylvia coming in. She’d been in a different room. It was in full swing and Ted was standing very centrally in the room. Shirley was standing in the doorway. Sylvia went straight up to him and bit him on the cheek. I literally saw it happen. Shirley was right behind. Ted had his back to her. She didn’t see what had happened, but I could see her face framed in the doorway.” Jean had lent Shirley some earrings, and she had lost one. When Shirley returned to the room to retrieve it, Jean said, “She knew something had happened. It was just one of those electric moments.”168

  Plath recorded her own version of events in her journal in Wagnerian prose:

  Then the worst happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard into my eyes and it was Ted Hughes. I started yelling again about his poems and quoting: “most dear unscratchable diamond” and he yelled back, colossal, in a voice that should have come from a Pole, “You like?” and asking me if I wanted brandy, and me yelling yes…and I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband off…and my favorite silver earrings: hah, 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. His poem “I did it, I.” Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists. The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words; his poems are strong and blasting like a high wind in steel girders. And I screamed in myself, thinking: oh, to give myself crashing, fighting, to you. The one man since I’ve lived who could blast Richard.169

  This was a relationship that was, from its first violent, theatrical moments, soldered on the work of D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Emily Brontë, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.170 Plath was already conducting a literary dialogue with Hughes—proving herself as his reader, playing a role out of one of his poems, and daring him to play back. Her performance succeeded. Hughes thought he recognized a fellow traveler who was as disdainful of propriety as he was. What other woman would dare to draw blood with a kiss? He saw in
Plath the same things she had found in his early poems—a fascination with what he would later call “positive violence,” and a contempt for gentility.171 Critics have often assumed that Plath adopted such poses after she met Hughes, but in fact both poets embarked on their courtship with a mutual sense of aesthetic purpose. A deep interest in poetry and violence marked Plath and Hughes’s relationship from their first meeting. Their understanding of positive violence—a vital, elemental, and liberating force—evolved through their engagement with the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung; the war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Keith Douglas; and modernist literature by Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and, especially, D. H. Lawrence.172 When Plath says she will give herself “crashing, fighting” to Hughes, she presciently describes the central role that the themes of violence and competition would play in their poetic dialogue.

  Plath and Hughes would each come to see the other as an embodiment of an aesthetic as much as a real person—“chapters in a mythology,” as Hughes once put it.173 They saw themselves as Cathy and Heathcliff, Oliver Mellors and Connie Chatterley. As Plath wrote in her journal in April 1956, “I lust for him, and in my mind I am ripped to bits by the words he welds and wields…and glory in the temporary sun of his ruthless force.”174 Sylvia sensed immediately that he was “the only man I’ve met yet here who’d be strong enough to be equal with.”175 For Ted, Sylvia’s American identity was connected to her sexuality from the start: as he recalled in his Birthday Letters poem “St Botolph’s,” her “long, perfect, American legs / Simply went on up.”176 Later he told an interviewer “To me, of course, she was not only herself: She was America and American literature in person. I don’t know what I was to her.”177 To Ellie Friedman, it was obvious who Ted was to Sylvia. When Ellie met Ted in 1956, she was not surprised by Sylvia’s choice of husband. She recalled that the 1939 film Wuthering Heights, in which Laurence Olivier played Heathcliff, had made an enormous impression on her and Sylvia, and, indeed, many young women of her generation. At Smith, the two had often spoken dreamily about someday finding their own Heathcliff.178

  Plath became “obsessed” with Hughes almost immediately. “Ted Hughes—mad passionate abandon” she wrote in her calendar on February 25.179 Hughes later wrote his own version of events in “St Botolph’s”:

  Falcon Yard:

  Girl-friend like a loaded crossbow. The sound-waves

  Jammed and torn by Joe Lyde’s Jazz. The hall

  Like the tilting deck of the Titanic:

  A silent film, with that blare over it. Suddenly—

  Luke engineered it—suddenly you.

  First sight. First snapshot isolated

  Unalterable, stilled in the camera’s glare.

  ……………­……………­…

  You meant to knock me out

  With your vivacity. I remember

  Little from the rest of that evening.

  I slid away with my girl-friend. Nothing

  Except her hissing rage in a doorway

  And my stupefied interrogation

  Of your blue headscarf from my pocket

  And the swelling ring-moat of tooth-marks

  That was to brand my face for the next month.

  The me beneath it for good.180

  Ted returned to Shirley—whom he still called his girlfriend in a letter to Terence a few weeks after the party—and Sylvia decided to leave. In yet another literary re-creation of this night written three years later, “Stone Boy with Dolphin,” Plath wrote that the kiss and bite happened, as Hughes remembered, in a smaller, quiet back room. When Leonard (Ted) tells Dody (Sylvia) that he has obligations in the next room, she bites him. He shakes her off, turns his back on her without a word, and leaves her alone. Plath’s language is ambiguous, and suggests that Leonard pushes Dody to the ground. Hamish (Plath did not bother to change his name in her story) peers through the door and asks if she is all right. He tells her they are going and quickly grabs her coat. Dody is deeply embarrassed as she leaves and imagines everyone talking about what she has just done. The story is much less triumphant than Plath’s journal passage.

  There, Sylvia wrote that Hamish told her Ted was “the biggest seducer in Cambridge” before he swept her away from the “orgy.”181 (Daniel and Luke both heard that Ted had punched “a protesting Hamish,” though they did not see it happen.)182 Sylvia was now very drunk, and, as they approached Queens’ College, she found herself surrounded by five young men asking if they could kiss her. Hamish drove them off but persuaded her to climb Queens’ locked, iron gates. She tore her tight skirt as she scaled the iron spikes “in an act of sublime drunkenness and faith.”

  In Hamish’s room, Sylvia was too drunk and exhausted to stop what was about to happen and blamed herself for the evening’s progression. She lay under him, “damn grateful for his weight,” and “begged” him to scold her—didn’t he know she was a “whore” and a “slut”? He remonstrated her for being a “silly girl”; he “kind of liked” her. He asked her when she would learn her lesson. “When? When?” Sylvia chided herself in her journal.183 He walked her back to Whitstead before dawn through the dark, silent campus. Sylvia was freezing and terrified as they crossed the iced-over Cam, which she thought would break under their weight. Back in her room at last, she made hot milk to warm her frigid hands.

  Plath’s fictional—but autobiographical—account of this night in “Stone Boy with Dolphin” suggests that she regretted sex with Hamish. During the act, Dody tries to dissociate herself from what is happening:

  What I do, I do not do. In limbo one does not really burn. Hamish began kissing her mouth, and she felt him kiss her. Nothing stirred. Inert, she lay staring toward the high ceiling crossed by the dark wood beams, hearing the worms of the ages moving in them…and Hamish let his weight down on top of her, so it was warm. Fallen into disuse, into desuetude, I shall not be. (It is simple, if not heroic, to endure.)184

  It would take Sylvia two days to “recuperate” and feel anything but “worthless and slack.” She hoped to see Ted again, she wrote in her journal. “But I want to know him sober.”185

  Sylvia’s bite left marks on Ted’s cheek for a month. “The next day everybody gossiped about Ted’s bloody cheek,” Bert remembered. “One and all we dismissed Sylvia as overly dramatic, un-English, and, who could deny it, stereotypically and vulgarly American. But a measure of ferocity had been lurking in all of us, not just Sylvia.”186 Christopher Levenson also recalled that “the next morning everyone knew about it,” but that “the bite and ensuing relationship seemed to us at the time entirely ‘right,’ they deserved each other, and I remember wondering out loud as to which of them would influence the other most. Would Sylvia tame and domesticate Ted and introduce neat, witty mannerisms into his poetry or would he rather liberate Sylvia’s previously repressed passions?”187 Hughes would not soon forget Plath, though she assumed that he would. In a draft of “St Botolph’s,” he wondered:

  What is quietening [sic] to remember

  Is the speed of your express

  And the speed of mine and our meeting

  Not knowing if we were one express, two become one,

  Or one following the other, or one

  Overtaking & somehow all in the one line

  And maybe none of these, maybe collision…188

  17

  Pursuit

  Cambridge and Europe, February–June 1956

  Sylvia recovered slowly. The day after the Saint Botolph’s Review party, hungover, she wrote a despondent entry in her calendar that bears little resemblance to the blazing prose of her journal: “weary & gray—chills—simply spent—desperate / re-work—obsessed re Ted—dark giant—lust & anger—nap.”1 She felt bad about the sex with Hamish—Dody feels “stained” in “Stone Boy with Dolphin
”—and worried that Ted was lost to her.2 She began to sketch a story in her journal about shock treatment, which she intended to submit to the Review. It would be bold and taboo. She embarked on a bolder kind of poetry, too.

  Sylvia told her mother that she had met a “brilliant ex-Cambridge poet at the wild St. Botolph’s Review party last week, will probably never see him again (he works for J. Arthur Rank in London) but wrote my best poem about him afterwards.”3 This poem, “Pursuit,” was about sexual arousal and “the dark forces of lust,” as Plath put it in her journal. “It is not bad,” she admitted to herself. “It is dedicated to Ted Hughes.”4 She felt it was superior to the “small, coy love lyric” she had been writing, and sent it, along with “Channel Crossing” (written on February 23), to Aurelia. “I am most scornful of the small preciousness of much of my past work,” she wrote home on March 9. Now, she was “making a shift.”5

  Plath had been reading Jean Racine’s plays for her Tragedy supervision with Kay Burton in late February—she would finish her Racine paper on March 5—and the material inspired her. (Burton herself remembered that Plath displayed a “mature and wise” “grasp of human values.”)6 She used an epigraph from Racine’s Phèdre—“Dans le fond forêts votre image me suit”—to launch “Pursuit,” finished on February 28:

  There is a panther stalks me down:

  One day I’ll have my death of him;

  ……………………….

  Insatiate, he ransacks the land

  Condemned by our ancestral fault,

  Crying: blood, let blood be spilt;

  Meat must glut his mouth’s raw wound.

  The poem continues for three more stanzas in which the speaker, “Appalled by secret want,” tries to “rush / From such assault of radiance.” She shuts the “doors on that dark guilt.”