Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  According to Jane, who had no desire to involve herself in Sylvia’s romantic affairs after their disastrous shared history with Dick Norton, Sylvia soon dropped the subject and began pointing out historical buildings. They stopped in a pub for a quick sherry, where it became clear to Jane that Sylvia resented her silence. Sylvia left brusquely, saying she had to meet Mary Ellen Chase (Plath recorded a 1:15 lunch date with Chase in her calendar that day). In the past, the two had always parted on good terms and exchanged addresses. This time, Sylvia simply said goodbye and walked away, leaving Jane to explore Cambridge on her own. For weeks Sylvia had longed for a female friend to confide in about her love for Ted and her wedding plans; “I miss a good woman,” she had written in her journal that April.150 Now, someone with whom she had shared a harrowing, intimate history declined to listen. Jane knew Sylvia was angry with her, and sensed, correctly, that they would never see each other again.

  * * *

  —

  The idea of a Wellesley wedding receded as the weeks passed; Sylvia and Ted could not wait. The couple wanted to marry at Westminster Abbey, but the dean there informed Hughes that the ceremony must be performed at his parish church of Saint George the Martyr, tucked inside a charming Bloomsbury square. There was some hassle with the marriage license, and arrangements were rushed. They spied a priest near the church, and Ted shouted, “That’s him!” He then followed the sixty-nine-year-old Reverend Wilson home (across from Dickens’s house, Plath noted) and learned that “he was the right one.”151 Ted spent the night before his wedding with Michael Boddy and Joe Lyde at their flat in Cambridge. He said nothing to them about what awaited him the next day.152

  On Bloomsday, June 16, at one thirty in the afternoon, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes married. The hushed interior of Saint George’s, with its red and gold finery and gleaming icons, was unusually bright in a nation of damp, gray stone churches. Outside it was raining, but inside, the candlelight illuminated the yellow walls and stained-glass windows, while above the gilded columns, painted saints stared impassively from the golden reredos.

  Aurelia, who had arrived in London only three days before, stood in disoriented attendance. Sylvia and Ted had announced their “decision to get married” to her at dinner at Schmidt’s, a German restaurant, on the night she arrived in England.153 She had been sick during dinner the night before and still felt unwell. Now, impossibly, her daughter was about to be married to a man she had just met.154 Sylvia, dressed in a new pink wool knitted suit she borrowed from Aurelia, had bought gold wedding rings and new shoes and trousers for Ted. Yet he still felt, as he later wrote in “A Pink Wool Knitted Dress,” like a “post-war, utility son-in-law” with his “drab” old tie and corduroy jacket, “thrice-dyed black, exhausted, / Just hanging on to itself.”155 He had given Sylvia a pink ribbon and a pink rose and thought she looked “transfigured” in the “echo-gaunt, weekday chancel”:

  So slender and new and naked,

  A nodding spray of wet lilac.

  You shook, you sobbed with joy, you were ocean depth

  Brimming with God….

  Levitated beside you, I stood subjected

  To a strange tense: the spellbound future.156

  Only Aurelia and Warren were to know of the secret marriage, for Sylvia feared the Fulbright Commission would rescind her scholarship if word leaked. The risk and the secret ceremony heightened the drama.

  Afterward, the three adjourned to Schmidt’s, where they had, as Sylvia put it, their “wedding breakfast.”157 They also celebrated Hughes’s first magazine acceptance, by the prestigious Poetry—“Bawdry Embraced,” which he dedicated to Sylvia—as if poetry itself had blessed their union. Plath would speak of the coincidence often.158 “Sylvia is my luck completely,” Ted wrote his brother.159

  Husband and wife returned to 18 Rugby Street, where Sylvia was once again disgusted by “the dust & grease and carrot peels.”160 It was not the wedding night she had once imagined, as she slow-danced under white marquees in America. Yet she had escaped a suburban life as a doctor’s wife. Her instinct to flee had been correct, she now felt sure. Her desire to please had almost killed her, and now Hughes would give her a gift more precious than cars and houses: freedom to write. He expected her to out-earn him.161

  Six years later, in her 1962 review of Lord Byron’s Wife, Plath wrote that the author “begins, as might many a shrewd marriage counselor, with a meticulous investigation of the bride’s mother.”162 Plath was writing suggestively about her own marriage. Her wedding was meant to be a surprise “gift” to Aurelia, but in fact it was Sylvia’s checkmate. Ted knew he was the antithesis of the all-American Wellesley boys Aurelia had quietly encouraged her daughter to marry. He described himself that day as “the Swineherd / Stealing this daughter’s pedigree dreams / From under her watchtowered searchlit future.”163 He was not wrong. Ted’s joblessness worried Aurelia and would remain a source of grievance for years to come. She did not trust him to care properly for her daughter, who was more vulnerable than he knew.164 “You will be kind to her?” she asked him, just before the ceremony.165 Sylvia knew Aurelia would frown on Ted’s manners, his poverty, and his shaky prospects. She could not give her mother time to voice her doubts, lest she herself become dissuaded.

  18

  Like Fury

  Spain, Paris, Yorkshire, Cambridge, July–October 1956

  “At last I have found my native country,” Sylvia wrote her mother in July 1956 on a train bound for Madrid. Just four months earlier, she had wept for Richard Sassoon in Paris as he traveled through southern Spain.1 Now she hurtled through the same dry landscape alongside her “magnificent handsome brilliant” poet-husband, sharing wine with Spanish soldiers.2 As she stared out the window, she marveled at the “violent colors” and the “blinding white pueblos.”3 In Andalucía, workers lounged with jugs of wine beside donkey carts, and widows covered El Greco faces with black lace mantillas. In the small seaside village of Benidorm, Sylvia and Ted would walk along dirt lanes through hills of almond groves, barter with fishermen at the morning market, and buy their milk straight from a neighbor’s goat. For Sylvia, no other European country would compare to Spain’s “primitive unspoilt dreamland.”4

  After their Bloomsday wedding, Sylvia, Ted, and Aurelia had returned to Cambridge until June 21. The three of them then traveled to Paris on the 22nd.5 Ted established a friendly rapport with Aurelia, and did not seem to mind spending the first part of his honeymoon with his new mother-in-law. Sylvia minded more, but she could hardly leave Aurelia behind after begging her to come to England.

  In Paris they met up with Luke, and Sylvia was treated to drunken ballads on the banks of the Seine. She found Aurelia a surprisingly relaxed traveler—“she was like a young girl—taking pictures, drinking wine, etc.,” she wrote Marcia.6 Hughes was more somber. “Your Paris, I thought, was American,” he later wrote in “Your Paris”:

  Under the chestnut shades of Hemingway,

  Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein,

  I kept my Paris from you. My Paris

  Was only just not German. The capital

  Of the Occupation and old nightmare.

  His wife, he thought, saw none of this, just “frame after frame, / Street after street, of Impressionist paintings.”7 Yet she was less giddy than he knew. Newly married to her creative and physical ideal, she had expected happiness at full tilt. Instead, Paris exhausted her—“felt drugged & slow,” “Absolutely wicked, futile day,” “sad day,” she wrote in her calendar throughout late June and early July. She had not counted on sharing her honeymoon with her mother, who traveled with them until June 29, and Luke, who kept “barging in” on her and Ted.8

  To complicate matters, she found a long, bitter letter from Sassoon waiting for her at the American Express office on July 2. He had felt “shock” when he received her letter telling him about her engagement, and
he mourned the end of their relationship. “There is really no reason for me not to believe that you are happier now than you ever were or could have been with me…Except that your letter to me was not the letter of a happy woman.” Sylvia had earlier reminded him that he had abandoned her in Paris—she referred to it as “the crime”—and told him she was doing what was best for her. Sassoon accepted the new reality, along with dawning awareness of the life they might have lived together. “I shall have my years to live in the structure of less, in regret and even in shame. For the angel is dead, the red god dead, and I am like a carcass from whom the interior has been taken.”9 He reassured her that he would soon be out of her life for good when he sailed to New York that June. There he would find work until the Army called him up.

  Reading this dramatic letter from Sassoon in Paris—on her honeymoon—must have been deeply discomfiting for Sylvia. Only four months had passed since she had traveled to Paris for Sassoon’s sake and found herself “deserted” for the first time in her life. Heartbroken, she flew back to Ted. But Sassoon’s letter suggests his own heartbreak and regret; Mel Woody and Dick Wertz said that it took Sassoon years to get over Plath, who had been his first love.10 His letter likely upset Sylvia’s equilibrium, and helps explain the melancholy she noted in her calendar that July. Ted knew about Sassoon—he testified in his Bell Jar trial deposition that Sylvia had mentioned him—but he would not learn of her despondent search for Sassoon in Paris until he read her journals after her death. Shortly after Sylvia received Sassoon’s letter, she wrote “The Shrike,” a poem about a wife who is jealous of her husband’s dreams; it was the first iteration of a story—“The Wishing Box”—that she would start in Benidorm and finish in Cambridge.

  Sylvia had once longed to visit the great capitals of Europe, but now she found that traveling produced “great fatigue.” She and Ted needed “several hours” of quiet writing time each day. Otherwise, she told Aurelia, who was traveling in Amsterdam, “we get cold on paper, cross, or nervous….We are really happiest keeping to ourselves, and writing, writing, writing.”11 They could hardly afford to gallivant across Europe, and her Olivetti typewriter was heavy.

  The couple arrived in Madrid on July 7. The city’s “eerie hot night streets” and throngs of evening crowds heightened Plath’s sense of Spain as a surrealist spectacle.12 In the “dry blazing heat” her sinus problems abated, leaving her, she wrote, with “a light clear head that I never knew was possible.”13 Ted was amazed by their hotel’s private shower, as his last bath had been “in a public hole in London” on his wedding day.14 Sylvia wrote home that he yipped with glee at the prospect of private ablutions.

  Following in Hemingway’s footsteps, they attended a bullfight at Las Ventas, but they left “disgusted and sickened by such brutality.”15 Sylvia was almost happy to see the bull gore the matador in the thigh. She later wrote a story, “The Black Bull,” about a chauvinistic husband and an angry, patronized wife.16 It was a theme she had already used to good effect in “Sunday at the Mintons” and would explore again in “The Wishing Box,” “The Fifty-Ninth Bear,” and “The Perfect Place.” But it was an unusual honeymoon story.

  After five days in Madrid, they traveled eight hours south to Alicante, which Sylvia thought “worse than any Coney Island.” But the seaside fishing village of Benidorm, an hour north of Alicante on the Costa Brava, exceeded her expectations with its “blaze of blue sea, clean curve of beach, immaculate white houses and streets, like a small sparkling dream town.” Dry, ochre hills framed white Moorish buildings atop cliffs that fell dramatically to the sea, where fishing boats listed on a wide sandy beach. The village seemed to have escaped the twentieth century; donkeys pulled wooden carts past women washing clothes in the public fountain. There were flowers and palm trees everywhere. “I felt instinctively with Ted that this was our place,” Sylvia wrote home.17

  A woman on the bus to Benidorm who overheard Sylvia and Ted talking introduced herself as Señora Mangada, and offered to rent them a room in her house overlooking the beach. The señora’s colorful garden and large, well-stocked kitchen charmed Sylvia, as did the señora herself as she spoke, in French, about the romance novels and poems she had written and the Spanish lessons she could offer. Though Sylvia found the room itself “too small,” its French doors opened onto a large, private balcony terrace with a stunning view of the sea.18 The balcony convinced them to stay. On July 12, they settled in for ten weeks of creative discipline.19

  In the mornings they breakfasted on café con leche, brandy milk, and bananas. Lunch—often on the beach—was bread, butter, tomatoes, herring, eggs, potatoes, sardines, and fruit; dinner was fresh fish and cheap wine on their balcony. In the evening sea breeze, they fantasized about buying their own villa in Benidorm. “We have such fun,” Sylvia wrote Aurelia, “and both agree that we don’t feel we’re living with ‘another’ person, but only the perfect male and female counterparts of our own selves, very whole and happy.”20 Her children would be “lucky” to be “bred on original fables!”21

  As usual, Sylvia gave her mother the “gay side.” In her journal she called her first morning in Benidorm “a nightmare.”22 The señora’s kitchen was infested with ants; there was no hot water or refrigeration; the small single bathroom had temperamental plumbing; the tap water was not potable. Sylvia had to boil milk and clean dishes with cold water and straw. “But how I long for a good american [sic] kitchen,” she despaired.23 They soon realized that the balcony, which had seemed so quiet during the siesta hours, overlooked a crowded boulevard. Ted took to writing inside the small bedroom to avoid the tourists’ stares. The lack of refrigeration meant that food spoiled easily, and the two were often sick with fever and diarrhea. Both suffered terribly from sunburn. Their Lawrentian fantasy was coming apart at the seams.

  Money, too, was a constant concern. Sylvia told Warren she had almost nothing until her next Fulbright check came in September, while Ted had only the £50 Olwyn owed him. Yet Sylvia told others she was “daring to live the way most people dream of living when they are fifty: to sacrifice all for our ideal of a good life, not other people’s cars & securities & 10-year leases.”24 She boasted to Aurelia that they ate “perfectly well” on one dollar a day—but then admitted her anxiety. “I hope never again in my life I will have to be so tight with money. We will one day have a great deal, I am sure of it.”25 She claimed that they had no money for air-mail stamps and could not send out manuscripts. Aurelia, who was traveling in Europe and would join Mrs. Prouty in London in early August, promptly sent her $100.

  Surprisingly, Sylvia asked her mother to come to Benidorm. It was an odd request for a honeymooning daughter, yet she longed for the comfort and security of her mother’s presence as she tried to make the best of a deteriorating situation. Hughes later wrote of Plath’s unease in his poem “You Hated Spain”: “Spain frightened you,” he wrote. He thought Plath recognized a familiar darkness—“the blood-raw light,” “the Goya funeral grin”—and “recoiled.”26 Yet Plath was as fascinated as she was disturbed. Hughes would come to feel that Federico García Lorca’s duende—the otherwordly force of pain, blood, and lust that pulsed within Spanish music and poetry—was the antidote to “colorless” English poetry, which he and Plath intended to shock out of submission.27

  After one week, Señora Mangada told Plath and Hughes they needed to leave so she could rent the whole house to another family. Sylvia excoriated her in a letter to Aurelia, but that night, she and Ted went for a walk and, on a hunch, followed a road into the mountains. There, they came upon a large white stucco house for rent. They promptly secured the ground floor for the same price the Señora had charged for just one room—about $175 for ten weeks. The house, in the “native quarter” at 59 Tomás Ortuño, had a private kitchen and seemed to them “a grand mansion” with its three bedrooms, dining room, living room, and lovely vine-covered porch.28 They were farther from the sea, and there were cockroaches,
but they had escaped the noisy bustle of fishmongers and tourists.

  The change benefited their writing. The two worked in cool, quiet solitude facing each other from the ends of the large dining room table. The floor was tiled with stone, “giving the effect,” Plath wrote, “of living at the cool bottom of a well.”29 They wrote until noon, then lunched, sketched, and swam until the late afternoon, when they wrote again until dinner. Sylvia was increasingly proud of her sketches, and thought she was developing an original “primitive” style.30 She sold several pieces to The Christian Science Monitor. Hughes worked on the fables “How the Animals Became” and “O’Kelly’s Angel.”

  Plath was determined to write prose rather than poetry, for she thought she had not written a good story in three years. Between July 22 and 27 she wrote two drafts of “The Black Bull” but felt her mind “an impressionist blur.” (Whereas Hughes’s vision, she said, was “photographic.”)31 She began “The Hypnotizing Husband” on July 24, a story based on Hughes’s hypnosis of her when she was ill; she would publish a darker version in Granta later that year as “The Wishing Box.” She also worked on an outline for her Cambridge novel; a doppelgänger story about Nancy Hunter called “The Fabulous Roommate”; and a story outline, “Remember the Stick Man.” She finished a poem on August 19, “Epitaph for Fire and Flower,” and a twenty-five-page piece about their former landlady, “That Widow Mangada.” She hoped to sell the stories to Ladies’ Home Journal or McCall’s.

  Ted read her Shakespeare while she cooked (he was “shocked” that she had read only thirteen of his plays) and set her concentration and observation exercises as he had for Luke and Daniel.32 Sylvia appreciated the exercises at first, but she would come to resent them. When he awoke each morning, he told her of his dreams about animals and William Blake—a detail that found its way into “The Wishing Box.” Her nightmares receded, but she wrote little in Spain—at least, by her standards. She had composed more poems during her busy last term at Cambridge. Plath’s imagined ideal conditions for writing had ironically produced writer’s block, a pattern that would continue—with the exception of her Yaddo residency—whenever she set aside full weeks to write.