She felt “joy” leaving “Rome & Gordon” for Ted and London.56 She had found another letter from Hughes at the American Express office in Rome. This one came with a poem:
Ridiculous to call it love.
Even so, fearfully did I sound
Your absence, as the shot down feels to the wound,
Knowing himself alive
Only by what most frightens, the suddenly
Anxious and kneeling sky, clouds, trees,
The headlong instant that halts, stares, comes close
With an incredulous ghastly eye.
………………………
Wherever you haunt earth, you are shaped and bright
As the true ghost of my loss.57
Ted expected her at his flat at nine p.m. on Friday the 13th, with a bottle of smuggled brandy.
On the plane from Rome to London, Sylvia met a “charming” South African man, Michael Butcher, who took her out to a steak dinner at his “posh London club.”58 There, she washed up and made herself presentable. Michael paid the bill and bought her a carnation, but she had other plans. Scrubbed and sated, she took a taxi to 18 Rugby Street and presented Hughes with his brandy, which they promptly drained. “Exhilaration,” she wrote in her calendar. “Bloody exhausting night of love-making.”59 In the morning, they ate steak and eggs while they listened to recordings of poems. And then: “back to bed in dirty gray rain twilight—sleep & longing for magnificence of Ted—lovely horizontal talk.”60
Plath later wrote about this night in a fragmentary chapter called “Venus in the Seventh,” likely an early draft of Falcon Yard, one of her lost, unfinished novels. The fragment hints at the erotics of violence the couple enjoyed. The first few pages recount the escapades of Jess Greenwood, an American Cambridge student and poet, as she travels through Munich and Venice during her Easter vacation. Jess travels with her old boyfriend Winthrop, who is based on both Gordon and Dick. Winthrop annoys her, and she looks forward to her reunion with her British lover Gerald back in London. Jess’s language echoes Lawrence’s in Women in Love: “The newness of Gerald caught at her. She knew nothing much. But he was hard, and cruel. And if she could take it without whimpering…then she might take life, after a fashion….Just feel, stride along with him, until he bashed her head in and went off with the next.”61
At his flat, the Hughes character opens the door and “hulked there, in his black sweater, with the collar up, unshaven. He stepped back to let her in….And his voice. UnBritish. Refugee Pole rather, mixed with something of Dylan Thomas: rich and mellow-noted. Half sung.” They talk with his neighbor Jim upstairs, but Jess is impatient. “She could swim in him: that incredible violent presence of his: leashed. Too much man for this island. The only man on it. He didn’t think: he was.” Later, the Hughes character tells Jess about his dreams of white leopards and foxes, while Jess describes her “black dreams…Nightmares, all dark and sultry with the air yellow as sulphur.” They speak haltingly of the violent passion that gripped them during their first night together, before Jess left for Paris.
“If you hadn’t come back, I would have come to Cambridge to find you again. To make up for that last time…”
She shivered, holding herself up against him, their toes touching. “Oh,” she laughed ruefully. “It was terrible, that. I went to Paris all scarred. Black and blue…”
“But you liked it?”
“Yes.”
“I was furious with myself. I don’t know what happened to me…”62
Jess recites her poem, “Conversation Among the Ruins”—an actual poem by Plath—which she has dedicated to him. This poem is a strange choice, as it foretells the lovers’ doom. He says, “You like one-syllabled words, don’t you? Squab, patch, crack. Violent.” She answers, “I like words to sound what they say: bang crash. Not mince along in iambic pentameters.” Plath suggests in “Venus in the Seventh” that she was attracted to Hughes not only for his “incredible violent presence” but for the force of his language.
* * *
—
Sylvia returned to Cambridge on April 14 to find news of her grandmother’s rapidly deteriorating health and several letters from Sassoon. She wept as she read, wishing she had received them in Paris. But she refused to descend into emotional turmoil again. She must accept her grandmother’s imminent death, forget Sassoon, and give all of herself to Ted Hughes. The next day, Sunday, April 15—which she called the “Best day in World”—Ted came to her in Cambridge.63 They walked to Grantchester under a sunny sky, proclaiming Chaucer to the cows. At Luke’s flat, they dined on steak and caviar, brandy and wine. After “good violent love,” they read poems and spoke of Isis and horoscopes; at night they drank and talked at the Anchor. The morning was a “dawn of tenderness & miracle.”64
Ted stayed in Cambridge most of that week, but by Tuesday Sylvia was already feeling as if “he’d slept with 5 girls since I last saw him.”65 She had spent less than a week with Ted and still barely knew him. He exaggerated his misanthropic side for her, just as she exaggerated her Dionysian side for him: “cold Grey night by starlit river—revelation of his lack of care—horror, revulsion sad walk by self in cold,” she wrote in her calendar on April 17, just four days after their reunion night in London. She ricocheted between feelings of exhilaration and fear. Just as Hughes refused to “stay clear,” so too did Plath. In her calendar on April 18, she declared, “incredible feeling of own faith & integrity that will come through—Ted cannot ever annihilate me—I can see his flaws—egoism, bombast & lack of care for others are worst.”66
On April 17, Sylvia revealed her new love to her mother, and thereby made it real:
The most shattering thing is that 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, half French, half Irish, with a voice like the thunder of God; a singer, story-teller, lion and world-wanderer & vagabond who will never stop. The times I am with him are a horror because I am then so strong & creative & happy, and his very power & brilliance & endless health & iron will to beat the world across is why I love him and never will be able to do more, for he’ll blast off to Spain & then Australia & never stop conquering people & saying poems. It is very hard to have him here in Cambridge this week & I am terrified even to have known him, he makes all others mere puny fragments. Such a torment & pain to love him.67
Sylvia had nearly settled for Dick, then Gordon, “in a splurge of contrived social-conscience.”68 She had humiliated herself with Sassoon, groveling at his doorstep like a “begging-dog” in March.69 All that was behind her now. The man she had waited for like a messiah had come to deliver her. And yet, two days after she had revealed her love for Ted to Aurelia, Sylvia wrote a letter to Sassoon that suggests how forcefully his “desertion” of her in Paris had determined her fate—and the course of literary history:
something very terrifying too has happened to me, which started two months ago and which needed not to have happened, just as it needed not to have happened that you wrote that you did not want to see me in paris [sic] and would not go to italy [sic] with me. when [sic] I came back to london [sic], there seemed only this one way of happening, and I am living now in a kind of present hell and god knows what ceremonies of life or love can patch the havoc wrought. I took care, such care, and even that was not enough, for my being deserted utterly.70
* * *
SYLVIA SLEPT LITTLE while Ted visited her at Cambridge. She busied herself during the day writing articles for Varsity and poems she sent off to The Atlantic, Harper’s, Poetry, and The New Yorker. She was experiencing a “tremendous creative surge,” and resented having to “read philosophy” when there were “poems, articles, stories—nudging at fingertips.”71 On April 17, the day she told Aurelia
she had fallen in love with Ted, she sent off seven poems to Poetry.
She wrote another seven poems, most of them about Hughes, between April 18 and April 29: “Faun,” “Ode for Ted,” “Song for a Summer’s Day,” “The Queen’s Complaint,” “Firesong,” “The Glutton,” and “Strumpet Song.”72 Plath portrayed Hughes as a creator and destroyer of worlds, who spared little sentiment for the women he loved and left. In the Hopkinian homage “Ode for Ted,” Hughes is a Yorkshire Adam: “For his least look, scant acres yield…/ at his hand’s staunch hest, birds build.” “Complaint of the Crazed Queen,” like “Pursuit,” imagines a strong man full of “fury,” “on his prowl,” who leaves his love crazed and her world diminished. Sylvia boasted to Aurelia that these poems would “hit the critics violently” and that her voice was “taking shape, coming strong; Ted says he never read poems by a woman like mine: they are strong and full and rich, not quailing and whining like Teasdale, or simple lyrics like Millay: they are working sweating heaving poems born out of the way words should be said.”73 She and Ted were, she wrote, each other’s best critics. She would not be dismissed as a lady poet, and felt she was finally leaving the preciousness of her earlier poems behind. But Plath’s comments (“working sweating heaving”) also suggest that she believed she needed to write like a man in order to make her mark. After all, men controlled the Anglo-American literary and academic worlds, and they took few women poets seriously. Even Virginia Woolf was mocked in Leavis’s classroom. The odds against Plath were staggering.
In her letters home that April, Sylvia described Ted in a torrent of wild emotion. He was, she told Warren,
tall, hulking, with rough brown hair, a large-cut face, hands like derricks, a voice more thundering and rich than Dylan Thomas, a force that breaks windows when he stalks into a room, half-Irish and half-French with a gift of story-telling that spellbinds; he writes poetry that masters form, bangs and smashes through speech to go better than Yeats, better than Hopkins at its best: none of this pale niggling cerebralizing. We are both strong and healthy as blazes. He throws the discus, hunts, shoots, plows, grafts roses, writes for film studios, knows the name of every bird and beast hopping over the moors: I am learning a new vocabulary from him. He hikes into the room, yanks out Chaucer or Shakespeare or Hopkins or Blake and begins to read in a voice that shakes the house.74
Variations on these themes colored nearly all Sylvia’s letters home that spring. “I shall never again find his like in the world….never have two people, too strong for most in one dose, lived so powerfully & creatively!” It was “a lifelong fight to forge a vital life,” and she hoped she had “the guts and grace to do it.”75 She and Ted, she told Aurelia, were meant for each other; she promised that “the world will come to see him in the light of my look, even as I shall be the most beautiful woman in the blazing sun of his belief in me.”76
Together they read Siberian and Magyar folk tales, took long walks to Grantchester “yelling poetry and words and stories at each other.”77 They punted down the Cam amid “arabesques of bird trills,” and made love in hidden spots in the meadows.78 They searched for owls in the night. When the weather turned raw, they cooked trout on Sylvia’s gas ring, listened to Beethoven, discussed horoscopes, Cuchulain, and Snatchcraftington. He drew witches, wolves, and ghosts; she sketched landscapes and cottages. Her letters overflowed with a joy she could not contain. “I’ve never been healthier: radiance and love just surge out of me like a sun,” she wrote Aurelia.79 “I love others, the girls in the house, the boys on the newspaper….I give and give; my whole life will be a saying of poems and a loving of people and giving of my best fiber to them.”80
By late April her mind was “racing.” In her calendar she wrote, “love for Ted still astounding—inner dialogues—whole future gathering—accelerating—taut balance.”81 She reached a crescendo in May. “All the blood spilt, the words written, the people loved, have been a work to fit me for loving Ted,” she wrote Aurelia.82 Sylvia warned her mother that Ted “may shock you at first, unless you imagine a big unruly Huckleberry Finn: he hasn’t even a suit of clothes, he is so poor.”83 If he seemed “rough” on the outside, he was “lovely” on the inside.84 “Oh, mother,” she pleaded, “rejoice with me and fear not.”85
Hughes’s Australian voyage receded as the couple planned a summer writing together in Spain. He was now bunking in Cambridge again, at Alexandra House in an upstairs bedroom that he shared with two young women who ran a soup kitchen below. In his poem “Fidelity,” he claimed that he shared a bed each night, naked, with a “lovely girl” for a month. But they never made love. “It never seemed unnatural. I was focused, / So locked onto you, so brilliantly, / Everything that was not you was blind-spot.”86 Sylvia, though, dated other men throughout April. On April 28, Michael Butcher, the South African she had met on the plane from Rome, took her out to the Mill, where she had two “fatal” cocktails, then to Miller’s for wine and lamb chops despite her “pang at vision of dear Ted.” There were “dozens of kisses” with the future historian Keith Middlemas and a “disastrous debach [sic]” at Alexandra House that night.87 The next day Keith visited her; she also saw Granta editor Ben Nash. But she felt guilty and wrote a “long ecstatic letter” to Aurelia about Ted.88 Soon after, the two committed themselves to each other for good: “miraculous switch & promise of life together,” Sylvia wrote in her calendar on April 29, a little over two weeks since reuniting with Hughes in London.89 This was the same day Sylvia learned that her grandmother, always a source of comfort and stability, had died.
On May 5, Betty and Duane Aldrich—Sylvia’s Wellesley neighbors—visited Sylvia and Ted on their trip to England. Betty had once driven Sylvia to her disastrous shock treatments at Valley Head; now Sylvia and Ted took her punting to Grantchester on a sunny spring day. That night, Betty and Duane treated the young couple to roast duck, cheese, Chablis, and cognac at Miller’s. The Aldriches liked Ted, and Sylvia began to hope that her other American friends—Marcia, Claiborne, Louise, Pat—would “accept this man of mine” despite his poverty.90 And of course, she hoped that Betty would bring back a good report to Aurelia. In her calendar, Sylvia wrote that after dinner with the Aldriches, she “got guts to face Ted in honest brave statement of concern for next year.” She also noted that she had written a “long letter” to Dr. Beuscher that morning (since lost), which suggests she was seriously considering marriage.91
Still, Sylvia hedged her bets: during the first week of May she recorded two evening dates with Ben Nash in her calendar, and on May 5, she reminded herself to write to Michael Butcher. But after May 7, the names of the men who had crowded her calendar since October all but disappear. “Sweet dear Ted: god I love him,” she wrote that day. On May 10, she wrote for the first time of a wedding in her calendar: “Afternoon of best love yet: created wedding plans—great joy—planning.”92
Ted told Luke that Sylvia had asked him to marry her, and he agreed. Luke was worried but not surprised. “I had seen it developing force since he said to me several times…in April and May of 1956 that he was falling ‘too much’ in love with Sylvia.” Luke thought Ted was strangely “passive” about it all, though he noted that Ted had a similarly passive relationship with his “gifted and strong-willed elder sibling” Olwyn.93 Sylvia was anything but passive. After so many years of searching for a supportive, literary husband—time wasted on Dick, Gordon, Sassoon, and Mallory—she was quick to act. She spelled out her desire for Hughes as plainly as she could to Aurelia, the last hurdle: “For the first time in my life, mother, I am at peace; never before, even with Richard, did I cease to have little opportunist law courts in session in my head whispering: look at this flaw, that weakness; how about a new man, a better man? For the first time I am free.”94
Sylvia continued to press her case in letters that May: “All the social questions about money, family position, bank accounts, blow off like chittering irrelevancies in a cyclone before two pe
ople who depend solely on their native talent and love of honesty.”95 She vowed that they would live simply and write in a cheap Mediterranean outpost, where they would support themselves by teaching English. They needed nothing more than their typewriters and each other. Sylvia asked Aurelia not to judge Ted on the basis of “wealth, or a slick 10-year guarantee for a secure job, or a house & car.”96 Yet she herself worried about introducing him to the American ambassador and the Duke of Edinburgh (Queen Elizabeth’s husband, Prince Philip) at an upcoming Fulbright reception in his “ancient” eight-year-old suit.97 Sylvia claimed that she did not care what it looked like: “I look at him and he is dressed in purple and gold cloth and crowned with laurel.”98
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