Plath criticized Hughes’s poems insightfully and confidently. “How about another word for ‘hideous’? I’d like better something that showed the eyes hideous, as in the fine ‘Snake’s twisted eye.’ ”125 At times she sounded professorial. “I don’t think ‘horrible void’ is the best you can do; I’m eternally suspicious of editorializing with horribles, terribles, awfuls and hideouses; make the void horrible; let your reader have the sweet joy of exclaiming” ‘ah! Horrible!’ ” “Explicate this, please.” “Couldn’t you do better for either ‘vegetative’ or ‘immensity’? Try like you showed me in Shakespeare, some monosyllabic concrete word to wed one or the other of those four-syllabled colossi.”126 She praised his lines that were “athletic,” musical, and psychologically arresting, and encouraged him to attack her own poems “brutally” in return.127
Hughes responded in kind. He liked her lines that were “firm, discreet, passionate…not tortoised in imagery.”128 He was wooing her away from the elaborate rhyme and syntax she had mastered at Smith. He knew she was capable of less imitative verse, and he wanted her to find her own voice: “If you write whatever attracts you, and you write it as hard as you can, and as rich, then you can’t miss….Just write it off, in your own way, and make it stand up off the page and jump about the room.”129 As she had done for him, he advised her to dispense with unnecessary adjectives (“fierce flaring,” for example, should be changed to simply “flaring”) and encouraged her to move beyond “smooth manners”: “Everything goes perfectly here until ‘Pierced side’…Something like ‘Open’ would give a much rawer more vulnerable terrible sense.” Her lines should be, above all, “clear and vivid.”130 He questioned language like “watery radiance” and “verdant” as too “vague” and “18th century.”131
In late October, Hughes assured her that her poems were “masterly” and that her current verses were the best he had ever seen. His praise underscored his generation’s biases—“Your verse never goes ‘soft’ like other women’s”—but he never doubted that Plath had the talent and the drive to become one of the best poets of the era.132 He exclaimed at her brilliance in letters to his brother in 1956: “As a result of her influence I have written continually and every day better since I met her. She is a very fine critic of my work, and abuses just those parts of it that I daren’t confess to myself are unworthy.”133 He wrote Olwyn from Spain that Sylvia was “as fine a literary critic as I have met.”134 Hughes’s praise of Plath, and his admission of her influence on him, was unusual in an era when women poets were not taken as seriously as their male contemporaries.
He delighted in her gossip from Cambridge, especially when it concerned pompous literary types—“midden metre-farters” he called them. When Sylvia told him about the “Cambridge Makers,” a new literary society run by Christopher Levenson, he could hardly contain himself.
O delicious, succulent, what a prime plum for my vindictive and most contemptuous critical palate….All these phoney sub-spender people have the naivest sense of what the ancient poets were really like, and what they underwent to get that name….So any modern poet who feels he can be an important man in society by divine operation of his metrical genius, arrogates the old title.135
She should not be fooled: “You, believe it or not, are more famous, and more respectably established as a poet, and with more real authority…than anyone at Cambridge certainly since I went up there.”136 Even Thom Gunn and Auden, he now thought, were “95% trash.”137 Levenson recalled that Plath and Hughes indeed kept their distance from the more established literary cliques at Cambridge: “as far as I could tell both Sylvia and Ted were sui generis, not part of the scene except for the one Ted created for himself with the single issue of St Botolph’s Review.”138
Sylvia did not need to be reminded of her superior résumé: “how free I feel…having direct commerce with the best editors in the world—America, America, God Shed His Grace On Thee.”139 She was more worried about the “death of an inner life”; “that obsesses you,” Hughes wrote.140 She was reading about schizophrenia and “manic-depressive geniuses” like Beethoven, Dickens, and Tolstoy in her abnormal psychology book.141 When she asked Ted what he thought about “mental cases,” he told her that Keats, Chaucer, and Shakespeare were all “delicately mad,” and that “going nuts” meant “your thoughts have autonomous life, whereas sane people have them in harness, under their will, in slavery, depersonalized with convict number and shaved head, not themselves.”142 This unconventional view of mental illness probably reassured Sylvia, who had worried about the “lasting scar” McLean would leave on her “future associations.”143 The British psychiatrist R. D. Laing would soon popularize a similar sentiment.
Plath never mentioned her history with suicide in her love letters, though she was writing about it, obliquely, in her stories. On October 7, she finished “The Wishing Box,” in which a woman loses her power to dream in the face of her husband’s superior imagination, and eventually kills herself. Plath thought the story “rather good,” while Hughes, seemingly unperturbed by this fictional turn of events, thought it excellent material: “This is the kind of poetic theme you could make exclusively your own ground.”144
Each morning, Harold relays his vivid dreams to Agnes, the story’s narrator, who listens with envy and bitterness since her own dreams cannot match the radiance of her husband’s, which are “meticulous works of art.”145 While Harold tells her of evenings spent in the company of William Blake, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams, Agnes simply “smoldered in silence.”146 She confesses to Harold that her dreams are dull and mundane, and he directs her in an imaginative exercise. But his efforts only make matters worse; soon Agnes turns to sherry, the cinema, and television to distract herself from her imaginative void. The story ends with Agnes dead on the sofa, an empty pillbox by her side, dressed in an emerald evening gown.
Plath outlined the plot to Hughes in amusing terms, calling the husband “a complete escapist who accepts his vivid dreams as reality,” while Agnes’s dream life is “sordid and sparse.” There is a sinister edge to the story, for Sylvia herself had gone through a similar depression—Agnes “gets worried about her powers of imagination,” loses her power to sleep and read, and commits suicide with sleeping pills. Harold seems partly to blame for Agnes’s breakdown, which begins directly after he says, “Every day, just practise imagining different things like I’ve taught you.”147 Ted sometimes hypnotized Sylvia using similar language.148 He told Olwyn in 1957, “I practise huypnotising [sic] Sylvia, and am gradually getting better. I can now remove slight pains, relax her so completely that after five minutes she feels to have had a night’s sleep,—and soon I shall move onto other things, such as make her write poems and stories, then to write them down without difficulty.”149
Agnes is not Sylvia, but rather the woman Sylvia vowed not to become. To Ted she admitted that Agnes, “poor thing, is certainly an aspect of one of my selves now,” and vowed to drink only one glass of sherry a day so as not to become like her. Plath apologized to Hughes for “plagiarizing” his “magnificent” dreams. “Are you angry? It’s actually a very humorous terrible little story.”150 She was also at this time writing “The Invisible Man” (since lost), about a young man named Oswald McQuail who becomes invisible at the height of his college career. That story, too, featured a suicide. “It must be funny, but terribly serious,” she wrote Ted; indeed, black humor would animate The Bell Jar.
When Sylvia heard that J. D. Salinger had entered a mental hospital, she wrote to Ted, “I am sure insanity is the most necessary state for a fine artist—that ‘divine madness’ where the terror & piercing insights he has daily are not locked in retreat or raving but made into works of art.”151 These words suggest that she had begun to absorb Ted’s more positive view of “madness” as creative vision, and perhaps regard her own experience with mental illness with less shame. Yet she was suffering terribly from nightmares a
s she worked on “The Wishing Box.” “God, it’s terrible; the daily world I can wrest, amid great hurt and void, more and more to my will, but I get to dread the night so.”152 Ted tried to reassure her that they were manifestations of the duende: “peaceful sleeps go with minds shut to the visitation.” He too was beginning to fear the loss of his poetic powers, away from Plath, for he had read in Freud that the loss of a loved one could dry the well. “I can’t stay in England and not be with you. I do nothing here. And I try. I think of you constantly and just don’t sleep any more.”153
* * *
IN EARLY OCTOBER the BBC formally accepted the Yeats program that Hughes had proposed during his September audition. Sylvia was triumphant. “MY HUSBAND IS A GENIUS AND WILL READ YEATS ON THE BBC!” she wrote Aurelia.154 She hoped the reading would help him get a teaching job at Amherst and told Ted not to sail for Spain just yet. Now that he had his foot in the door, she coaxed, he might get more work. After a “tearful reunion” on October 12, the couple returned to Rugby Street, where Sylvia had her “first deep sleep in 2 weeks—all knots dissolved.” She was seized by a “new polished potential feeling.”155 The couple wandered through Charing Cross and browsed at an occult book shop, where Sylvia bought Painted Caravan, a book on tarot, which would inform her poem “The Hanging Man.”156
Hughes’s BBC work raised his profile, as Plath had predicted. The editor of Nimbus, a respected English literary magazine that published Auden, asked Hughes to send poems, while Peter Davison at the Atlantic Press invited Hughes to submit his book of fables. Plath spent two days typing it into a neat manuscript and sent it off to Davison in mid-October. The couple learned that The Nation had accepted Hughes’s “Wind” on October 22. To Aurelia, Sylvia wrote, “we are different from most couples…our writing is founded in the inspiration of the other, and grows by the proper, inimitable criticism of the other, and publications are made with joy of the other; what wife shares her husband’s dearest career as I do? except maybe Marie Curie?”157 She continued forging her own aesthetic: “my poems and stories I want to be the strongest female paean yet for the creative forces of nature, the joy of being a loved and loving woman; that is my song; I believe it is destructive to try to be an abstractionist man-imitator, or a bitter sarcastic Dorothy Parker or Teasdale.”158
Plath wrote more poems—“Spinster” on October 19, “Sheen & Speck” and “Evergreens” on October 22, and “Sonnet After Squall” and “On the Plethora of Dryads” on October 24—and The Christian Science Monitor bought her Benidorm article and accompanying sketches. But she had little real social life now that dating was out. The monasticism was good for her writing; she told Aurelia that she had only scorn “for those that are drinking and calling themselves ‘writers’ at parties,” when they “should be home writing and writing; everyday, one has to earn the name of ‘writer’ over again, with much wrestling.”159 Still, she saw Ben Nash on October 19 for tea; the next afternoon they saw two art house movies together, followed by wine and dinner. She may have felt the expectation of a quid pro quo since Ben, whom she had dated before Ted, had recently accepted her story “The Day Mr. Prescott Died,” which appeared in Granta on October 20. Sylvia would have found herself in an awkward situation, as her marriage was still a secret. She could not reveal it; neither could she alienate an important editor.
Sylvia did not tell Ted that she had spent the afternoon with Ben, though she mentioned she had given him “The Wishing Box” and “The Invisible Man” for consideration. The day after her date with Ben, she typed up ten of her poems for Ted to give to Donald Carne-Ross at the BBC, and wrote Ted a “frenzied tearstained letter begging him to come to Camb.”160 Later that October, Sylvia wrote in her calendar, “terrible afternoon of sorrow & anguish over Ben Nash episode—microcosm of nightmare of lax faithlessness.” In the same entry she quoted someone—either Ben or Ted—admonishing her: “only one way to come across.”161 Ted may have been aware of temptations at Cambridge. In early October he had written, “You keep watch on our marriage Sylvia as well as I shall and there is no reason we shouldn’t be as happy as we have said we shall be. Don’t let any stupid thing interfere. Good night darling darling darling darling.”162
The nightmares receded, but Sylvia still had “queer dreams” in which she levitated to the sun, feasted in the streets of Winthrop, and slept with Ira Scott. Warren gave her a birthday card that read, “join me in sin,” and Dr. Krook became a witch.163 In another dream, she and Ted
found a very vivid green lawn, with a dark willow, squat dark trunk, smack in the middle, and I was showing this to you, with our manuscripts laid out under the tree, as the place of peace where at last we could practice rising together….it came as close to any dream I’ve had for years in giving me the delight and breathless soaring I used to have in my flying dreams.164
She was finding their separation increasingly intolerable. “It is so hard for me to be deprived of doing all the woman-things for you—cooking & bedding & listening & telling you how fine you are & how all my faith is in you.” Yet in the next breath, she wrote of her annoyance with Schopenhauer’s “ridiculous essay” “On Women”: “what poverty of experience he must have had to deny us minds & souls—& make us mere procreating animal machines!”165 Plath’s embrace, in the same paragraph, of both wifely servitude and female equality may sound irreconcilable, but she didn’t see it that way. Subservience, for her, meant renouncing a husband, children, and rich domestic life in order to write. She refused; she wanted it all. “I am amazed you live,” she wrote Hughes in late October, “that I didn’t just make up your being warm and talking and being my husband.”166
In late October, she told Aurelia, she read through the Fulbright roster and saw three married women; she got up her courage to reveal the marriage. Isabel Murray Henderson remembered a different story. When Sylvia received mail addressed to “Mrs. Sylvia Plath Hughes,” the college secretary and house mother, Christine Abbott, asked her to report the change to her “moral” tutor, Irene Morris.167 On October 23, Sylvia sent Ted a “desperate telegram” asking him to come to Cambridge. When he did not answer, she sent another.168 Ted finally responded by telegram: “DANGEROUS TO RING LETTER FOLLOWING.”169 (He thought the college porters would eavesdrop.) He wrote that he too had decided that their separation “seems mad.”170 He worried that her Fulbright money would be confiscated or at least halved, but he was hopeful. “If I were to stay in England and earn wouldn’t all our problems be solved? It will be time to go to Spain etc when we both go together and are not faced with a financial steeplechase.” They would discuss their future on Saturday. “I can hardly remember you without feeling sick and getting aching erections. I shall pour all this into you on Saturday and fill you and fill myself with you and kill myself on you.”171 But neither could wait until Saturday. Ted phoned and told her he would come to Cambridge that very night to “hash this out.”172 Sylvia was ecstatic. “DAY OF TRAUMA, DECISION & JOY,” she wrote in her calendar on October 23: “Ted’s coming like a miracle—inarticulate—decision to make marriage public & live together—steak dinner, warm love & release—weary love.”173
Sylvia soon revealed the secret to Dr. Krook, who told her not to worry about giving up her scholarship. Krook was correct: the Fulbright officials “scolded” Sylvia for worrying, and joked that the marriage was a boon for Anglo-American relations; they treated Sylvia “like Grace Kelly having just been married to a Dark Foreign Prince.”174 Irene Morris likewise reassured her that nothing would change on account of the marriage, and was surprised when Sylvia hugged her in a decidedly American display of affection.175 Both Morris and Kay Burton invited the couple out for a celebratory sherry, and Sylvia was given permission by the College Council to continue her studies on November 10. Sylvia dramatized the confession, telling Ted’s parents, “I felt like an orator on the creative virtues of marriage before a jury of intellectual nuns.”176 She realized that she should not have been
so anxious, yet “the ingrained English maxim that a woman cannot cook and think at the same time had me dubious.”177 She told Aurelia to make an announcement about their engagement in The Wellesley Townsman, and instructed her to send out engraved invitations to a “gala party” in June. There would be “no strain” on Aurelia “to keep up pretenses any more.”178 Ted moved, unofficially, into Sylvia’s Whitstead room, where he hung his Beethoven death mask above her map of Boston.
19
Itched and Kindled
Cambridge University, October 1956–June 1957
On Sylvia’s twenty-fourth birthday, she and Ted splurged on sherry, smoked salmon, duck, pheasant, and chablis at Miller’s—“an orgy of optimism and self-encouragement,” Ted wrote Aurelia, “which will carry us for months.”1 That autumn, he had secured more BBC work, and learned that Poetry had accepted “The Drowned Woman” and The Atlantic had taken “The Hawk in the Storm” (later retitled “The Hawk in the Rain”). Sylvia’s red sleeveless velvet dress was a revelation to him—“She looked as I’ve never seen her…magnificent magnificent nine-times magnificent.”2 He gave her a tarot pack, a gift she thought would start her “on the road to becoming a seeress.”3
Sylvia hoped to read horoscopes and practice astrology alongside Ted. They even made their own Ouija board and, when they were not trying to contact the dead, asked about potential poetry acceptances. Sylvia told her mother that she and Ted would “become a team better than mr. & mrs. yeats [sic],”4 but in her calendar that October, she wrote that the struggles with the Ouija board filled her with “depressing exhaustion.”5 Sue Weller, who visited the couple in Cambridge in 1957, felt that Sylvia did not believe in the Ouija board but was “catering” to Hughes’s “idiosyncrasies.”6 Hughes remembered how the nightly sessions with Pan, as they named their guiding spirit, unnerved her. In a Birthday Letters poem, “Ouija,” he wrote that when he asked Pan whether they would be famous, Sylvia began weeping. “Don’t you see—fame will ruin everything,” he remembered her saying through tears.
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