In her journal, she wondered whether Ted’s presence was to blame for her block. She began to think of their configuration at the writing table as a face-off. In her short, ironic vignette “Mr. and Mrs. Ted Hughes’s Writing Table,” Plath portrayed Hughes as the more serious writer:
At the head of the table, Ted sat in a squarely built grandfather chair with wicker back and seat; his realm was a welter of sheets of typing paper and ragged cardboard-covered notebooks…A bottle of blue ink, perpetually open, rested on a stack of paper. Crumpled balls of used paper lay here and there, to be thrown into the large wooden crate placed for that purpose in the doorway. All papers and notebooks on this half of the table were tossed at angles, kitty-corner and impromptu.
In Plath’s description, her side of the table “was piled with tediously neat stacks of books and papers, all laid prim and four-squared to the table corners…a ragged brown covered Thesaurus…a bottle of jet black ink, scrupulously screwed shut.”33 She needs a thesaurus; he does not. Her ink bottle is shut; his is open. He sits at the head of the table; she seems strangely disembodied. Despite Sylvia’s exclamations of marital bliss in her letters home, “Mr. and Mrs. Ted Hughes’s Writing Table” suggests that she was aware of the partnership’s creative complications—the potential for both influence and rivalry—from the earliest days of her marriage.
Plath returned to the image of the writing table again in “The Other Two,” written in 1958–59 but set during the Benidorm honeymoon. The poem speaks to creative tension as much as it does to a lovers’ quarrel. The speaker feels haunted by a pair of lovers she sees in the wood of the “baronial” dining room table:
He lifts an arm to bring her close, but she
Shies from his touch: his is an iron mood.
Seeing her freeze, he turns his face away.
They poise and grieve as in some old tragedy.
This ghostly couple follows the real lovers, invading their dreams. They seem harbingers of trouble.
At night, Plath and Hughes studied languages and translated Le Rouge et le Noir, then walked amid the almond trees toward the shadowy, purple hills. They fantasized about a future in Spain or teaching Spanish at an American university. Yet Sylvia’s calendar reveals fatigue, creative frustration, and discontent throughout July and August. She recorded her fury over a letter from Olwyn, her bouts of fever and diarrhea, sleepless nights, and “depressing” siestas.34 At Cambridge, she had eaten in hall and had a housekeeper. Now she did all the daily shopping, cooking, laundry, and cleaning. In her calendar she wrote of her exhaustion after boiling sheets and towels and scrubbing the bathroom and kitchen floors on her hands and knees.
The couple quarreled on July 23. “Bad evening after Ted’s letter home,” Sylvia wrote cryptically in her calendar. “Wild, full moon-walk toward mountains in glare of moonlight—sour wrongness continuing through morning of shopping—tears, synthesis & good dear love—day of recovering.”35 Her journal entry is equally ambiguous as to the cause of the row:
No sleep, smothering. Sitting in nightgown and sweater in the dining room staring into the full moon, talking to the full moon, with wrongness growing and filling the house like a man-eating plant. The need to go out. It is very quiet. Perhaps he is asleep. Or dead. How to know how long there is before death. The fish may be poisoned, and the poison working. And two sit apart in wrongness….Two silent strangers.36
This was the first time Sylvia had written so despairingly about her relationship with Ted. In the letter that troubled her, Ted told his parents he and Sylvia would be married by the time they visited Yorkshire in September. He added, “Don’t be frightened of Sylvia being a drag. It’s obvious from what’s happened since I met her that she is anything but.” He reassured them that Sylvia was “very very bright,” “a very fine cook and a much more certain money-earner than myself.”37 Sylvia’s calendar entry suggests that she had come across this letter before Ted sent it. She may have been angry about his decision to reveal the secret marriage, and troubled by her in-laws’ skepticism about her character.
Hughes later wrote a poem about this quarrel called “Moonwalk.” In an early, more personal draft that differs considerably from the final poem, he wrote that Plath had run outside in a “dumb rage,” and he had followed, bewildered. “I came after you to catch you, maybe / As you walked into the sea / Or off the edge of a cliff.” They walked along on a “moonlit hill with its contorted olives” overlooking the harbor. In the poem, he tries to calm her. “ ‘Look,’ I said, ‘the lamps of the sardine fleet.’ ” He felt as though they were floating in space. “Your mask was bleak as cut iron,” he wrote.
I had no idea what was going on behind it.
I still hardly knew you. No idea
What might come flapping out of your cupped hands.
I watched.
Doctor of all difficulties, I humored.
Your attempt to kill yourself long since
Was meaningless to me as my own death.
I tended the life of the survivor which had nothing to do with the dead one’s.38
This quarrel seems to have troubled Sylvia for the next two weeks. On July 27 she wrote in her calendar of her “relieved decision to leave Spain early,” and on August 9 she noted her “inability to write poetry—sad and sick—view of uncertainties.”39 She often rocked herself calm in a favorite chair on the house’s “viny porch.”40 One afternoon, she had a “talk with self in water alone” while Ted was at a Spanish lesson.41
On August 14, they hitched to Alicante, where Ted applied to teach English at the Instituto Vox. He impressed the faculty, who practically promised him a position beginning that fall. Sylvia was relieved that they would be able to support themselves while she finished her last year at Cambridge, and began to feel more secure about their future; she wrote in her journal that she had never experienced such “Perfect mental and physical well-being.”42 When she suffered food poisoning that August, Ted sat vigil through the night, cooling her body with damp cloths and cradling her head as he fed her watermelon and broth. She had never been so sick, and she called Ted “an absolute angel.”43 But Hughes had been unnerved by his wife’s panic. In his Birthday Letters poem “Fever,” he wrote,
You cried for America
And its medicine cupboard….
…“Help me,” you whispered, “help me.”
…Your cry jammed so hard
Over into the red of catastrophe
Left no space for worse. And I thought
How sick is she? Is she exaggerating?
And I recoiled, just a little,
Just for balance, just for symmetry,
Into sceptical patience, a little.
If it can be borne, why make so much of it?
“Come on, now,” I soothed. “Don’t be so scared.
It’s only a bug, don’t let it run away with you.”
What I was really saying was: “Stop crying wolf.”
Other thoughts, chilly, familiar thoughts,
Came across the tightrope: “Stop crying wolf,
Or else I shall not know, I shall not hear
When things get really bad.”44
If Hughes sensed a more lethal depression to come, he seems to have underestimated the severity of Plath’s “bug” that August. She would remember it as one of the worst illnesses of her life and would tell others she had almost died. Ted was used to the spartan conditions of postwar British life, but Sylvia was tired of pretending she found such conditions quaint. She began dreaming of “refrigerators & pasteurized milk and drinkable tap water…Now that I have lived without icebox or variety of food or any convenience whatsoever, any place in America will seem like luxury to me,” she wrote Aurelia that August. “I only hope that subtly I can convince Ted to love it as much as I do.”45
Their money was running out, and they had already decided, in July, not to stay through September in Spain. They would spend four days with Warren in Paris, then September at Hughes’s parents’ home in Yorkshire. By their last week in Benidorm, both felt attuned to the town’s rhythms, which Plath captured in her detailed, black-ink sketches of peasant markets and sardine boats. Yet the brutal Spanish heat had begun to fray her nerves; she now claimed she preferred the “gray weather” of Paris, telling Aurelia that under “the blank blazing sun…there is a lack of intellectual stimulus in countries as hot as Spain.”46
On August 21 the couple traveled by train to Paris through Barcelona, where they stopped off to see the monkeys and crocodiles at the zoo. In Paris, they met up with Warren and saw Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. Warren told Aurelia he was “Very, very pleased” with Ted, and thought the couple looked brown and healthy.47 Sylvia had not needed Aurelia’s $100 check after all, and returned it to her through Warren.
Sylvia sat on the banks of the Seine and remembered why she loved Paris; she had missed “the continuous fine movies and plays and art exhibits.”48 Ted wrote a pleasant letter to Aurelia about their travels, and how Spain had released his wife’s creative imagination. “I try to keep her writing and drawing—the more she does, the more she can do, and the better she feels.”49 They hoped to sell everything they had written and drawn; he was optimistic that Sylvia’s sketches would fetch a considerable price. Sylvia, too, wrote to others of her idyllic honeymoon. But when she returned to Cambridge that fall, she would finish the story she started in Benidorm, “The Wishing Box,” about a wife who commits suicide rather than endure another day in her magnificent husband’s shadow.
* * *
“I WISH YOU COULD see your daughter now,” Sylvia wrote Aurelia from West Yorkshire that September. She was staying at the Beacon, Ted’s parents’ home, just outside the small hilltop village of Heptonstall, high above the mill town of Hebden Bridge where the Hugheses now ran a tobacconist and “fancy goods” shop.50 Heptonstall, with its commanding views and plentiful light, was the most desirable place to live in the Calder Valley.51 Billy and Edith Hughes were proud of their upward trajectory, but when Aurelia visited them in 1961 she would find that years of soot pollution had blackened the town’s gritstone homes, and the sky seemed tombstone gray. Several of the village’s cottages were derelict, abandoned for the warmer, plumbed council houses built nearby in the late 1930s. Ellie Friedman, who visited Sylvia in Heptonstall in September 1956, was unsettled by the town’s quiet insularity. Ted told Ellie that villagers watched what was going on outside their homes in strategically placed mirrors. He may have been joking, but she began to feel watched as she walked along Heptonstall’s narrow cobbled lanes.52 Indeed, a longtime resident whose family had known Sylvia and Ted remembered that when strangers came to the town “the curtains would twitch open.”53 Sylvia told Ellie she felt “very tall and blond and foreign” amongst the villagers.54 Young American women were rare visitors in that high country.
Where Aurelia saw soot stains, Sylvia saw Gothic charm. The Beacon, perched atop one of the highest points in Heptonstall, had heart-expanding, panoramic views of the Pennine hills and moors: Shackleton, Crimsworth Dean, Colden, and the wooded valley of Hardcastle Crags. Sylvia set the scene for Aurelia soon after arriving: “a wicked north wind is whipping a blowing rain against the little house and coal fires are glowing.” Outside her bedroom window she could see “an incredible wild green landscape of bare hills” covered with stone walls, sheep, cows, and clear streams. She said she had become “a veritable convert to the Brontë clan, in warm woolen sweaters, slacks, knee socks.”55 Rooks’ caws and wingbeats punctuated the silence as she wandered around the ruins of the thirteenth-century village church and its Gothic graveyard (coincidentally full of Greenwoods, her grandmother’s Anglicized maiden name). The atmospheric church grounds—along with the cemetery at nearby Haworth—would help inspire a fine poem, “November Graveyard,” which Plath began on September 9.56 She did not know, when she wrote the last stanza of “November Graveyard,” that she was contemplating her own burial ground:
At the essential landscape stare, stare
Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind:
Whatever lost ghosts flare,
Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor
Rave on the leash of the starving mind
Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air.
Sylvia was condescending toward Ted’s family, calling them “dear, simple Yorkshire folk.” She described Edith as the “plump” mistress of a “tiny kitchen” where she made “starchy little pottages and meat pies.”57 By the end of her stay, she would abandon her reserve and tell Aurelia that Edith was “a messy pottering kitchen-keeper and atrocious cook…it is all I can do not to rearrange her sloppy cupboards etc.”58 Yet she wanted Edith’s approval. After the couple separated, Edith expressed sadness to Aurelia and praised Sylvia’s strength of character. Yet she also told Ted’s brother Gerald she thought Sylvia had been “strong-willed” and “possessive.” Gerald and his wife always seemed to be surrounded by sunshine, she said, but Ted and Sylvia were more “sober” together.59 Edith thought Sylvia’s German heritage accounted for her serious disposition, yet she never doubted that Ted and Sylvia were happy together in the early years of their marriage.
The couple spent their mornings walking on the moors, which Sylvia began to love as much as the ocean, “striding on top of the world…with the great luminous emerald lights changing always.”60 Hughes’s uncle, Walt Farrar, led them over the moors to Top Withens, the ruined farmhouse reputed to be the site of the original Wuthering Heights. Sylvia was more impressed with the landscape than the broken-down building itself, but she reread Wuthering Heights and told her mother she “really felt it this time more than ever.”61 The relics at the nearby Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth moved her. “They touched this, wore that, wrote here,” she wrote in her journal.62 She described herself and Ted as “a happy Heathcliffe [sic] and Cathy! Striding about in the woods and over the moors.”63 In late September the two again hiked over the moors behind the Beacon to Top Withens, but this time, without Uncle Walt, they got lost. They made love in the heather, and then flagged a bus home.
Sylvia had received good news on September 1—The Atlantic had taken “Pursuit” for $50; it would appear in the January 1957 issue.64 But she felt depressed and restless for nearly her entire month at the Beacon. The word “weary” appeared often in her Yorkshire calendar that September. She was jealous of her mother-in-law, to whom she seemed to have temporarily “lost” her husband; “no good love since Paris—growing sense of suffocation & loneliness,” Sylvia wrote in her calendar on September 4. She walked out onto the moors alone, weeping, filled with “fury at Ted’s lack of understanding.” The next day was “grim warped blocked,” “mind caught in cog somewhere,” “depressed and sterile.” She took a walk with Ted to a ruined mill through “green glooms of heather” but felt “wet, never-cheerful.” She began to fear she was losing herself—to Hughes, to the vast weather of his person and his horizonless home: “sick, sterile fear in face of his great creativeness,” she wrote in her calendar on September 6.65 On September 7, Plath began what she called a “secret story, slight & subversive” titled “Hardcastle Crags” (the title refers to a wooded trail and park near the Beacon):
Cold, she resolved, I shall go cold as he. She lay in the grass, not daring to get up for fear Gerald would spot her and spoil her perfect fury of self-pity. Daylong he sat tousled in his mother’s parlor in his old RAF sweater, writing poems about water drops and martyred bishops and playing his battered, cracked Beethoven records over and over. Beethoven’s deathmask hung waxen and eerie in their bedroom. She had married a genius….
…Oh, she would make him sorry this last time. She heard the police demanding sternly: “Gerald, what have
you done with your wife?” “Why,” Gerald said, gnawing absent-minded on a slice of buttered malt bread, “she lost herself on the moor one day about a week ago. Careless girl.” Perhaps, Olwyn thought, she would only stay out overnight. She tried to remember the direction back to Gerald’s mother’s house.66
While Sylvia frequently bragged to others about Ted’s “genius,” here it is a source of irony.
Plath wrote another “secret” “subversive” work around this time.67 In “On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad,” Plath frames her speaker’s sense of artistic inadequacy through the metaphor of psychoanalysis:
“My trouble, doctor, is: I see a tree,
And that damn scrupulous tree won’t practice wiles
To beguile sight:
E.g., by cant of light
Concoct a Daphne;
My tree stays tree.”
The relationship between doctor and patient here parallels that of the male and female writer as Plath slyly challenges Hughes’s Neoromantic, shamanistic version of artistic creation with her own less “visionary” style. “On the Difficulty” suggests creative tensions within the marriage even at a time when Plath told her mother, “There is no question of rivalry.”68 To Aurelia, Sylvia wrote blithely from Yorkshire, “I can’t for a minute think of him as someone ‘other’ than the male counterpart of myself, always just that many steps ahead of me intellectually and creatively so that I feel very feminine and admiring.”69 Given that it was Plath, in fact, who was “ahead” of Hughes professionally, her comment suggests the gendered tightrope she was walking. Plath had hoped that this ideal marriage of true minds would help her writing, but this poem, and her stories “Hardcastle Crags” and “The Wishing Box” suggest that she was already anxious about sublimating her talent and ambition to Hughes.
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