Red Comet

by Heather Clark

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  When Mary Ellen Chase learned of Ted’s success, she told Sylvia she would “stake her reputation” on them and so earned her way back into Sylvia’s good graces.103 A few days later, on March 12, Robert Gorham Davis offered Sylvia a one-year, renewable position teaching three sections of freshman English at Smith for $4,200. (The class, George Gibian noted, was “the very bottom bottom of the pecking order.”)104 Chase had written a four-page letter to Davis full of praise for Plath and Hughes in early February. She had spoken with Morris, Burton, and other Cambridge professors who had taught her. “All write in highest praise of her.” She said Sylvia would be “a fine addition to our staff” and implied that she had made a complete recovery from her breakdown.105

  Despite her earlier reservations about returning to Smith, Sylvia felt enormous relief: “I am just walking on air.”106 The dynamic within the marriage had shifted again; Sylvia was now the earner. She hoped that Ted might get a position at Amherst, but she noted that with her “good salary,” he need not teach at all.107 To Marcia she wrote, “I know now that if I want to keep on being a triple-threat woman: wife, writer & teacher (to be swapped later for motherhood, I hope) I can’t be a drudge, the way housewives are forced to be here….no promising jobs, starvation wages.”108 Her future was looking brighter, and Hughes’s book would make them the talk of the “poetry-conscious university communities.”109 Aurelia had given Sylvia and Ted a summer cottage rental in Eastham, on Cape Cod, as a wedding present. “I can’t wait to run up my beloved Nauset beach in the sun,” Sylvia wrote.110 She told her mother again about her “secret campaign to make Ted love America”: “one must never push him: he’ll come round of his own accord.”111

  That March, Plath worked “daily” on her Cambridge novel, provisionally entitled Falcon Yard.112 She wanted to have “300 single-spaced pages” by the time she sailed for America, then to rewrite the novel over the summer and send it to Peter Davison at the Atlantic Press. She worried about achieving a “subtle structured style” that would be both literary and suspenseful.113 Ideally, the novel would be a best seller about “the voyage of a girl through destruction, hatred and despair to seek and to find the meaning of the redemptive power of love.”114 It would be a paean to Hughes. In her diary she outlined the plot, which was based almost entirely on her own experience and the people she had met at Cambridge. She called the female protagonist “a femme fatale in her way.”115 But she was racked by insecurity about her ability to make the work come together: “the horror is that cheapness and slick-love would be the result of the thing badly written.”116 For “courage,” she read Virginia Woolf’s diary. “I feel very akin to her…Her moods & neuroses are amazing.”117 In her journal she admitted that she felt she had been “reduplicating” Woolf’s suicide “in that black summer of 1953,” but that she now looked to her as a guide. “Bless her. I feel my life linked to her, somehow. I love her.”118 Yet Plath did not want to emulate Woolf’s writing style. Her own voice would be more like J. D. Salinger’s or Joyce Cary’s—wry, dry, and self-deprecating. She wanted her prose style to be poetic, too, “Like Stephen Dedalus walking by the sea: ooo-ee-ooo-siss.”119 By early April 1957 she had written eighty single-spaced pages of the novel.

  D. H. Lawrence was still her biggest prose influence. Plath was studying his novels with Dr. Krook that term as she worked on Falcon Yard. In February, she had written a paper titled “D. H. Lawrence: The Tree of Knowledge Versus the Tree of Life,” which suggests that she had begun to read Lawrence through the lenses of Hughes and Graves.120

  Science has robbed the sun and moon of magic, leaving a spotted ball of gasses and a dead crater-pocked world in place of gold god and silver queen: a poor trade. Worse, men and women no longer live by intuition, but by ideas. The chittering dictums of the head and the will block out the spontaneous voices of the blood and the impulse….Deprived of the rhythm of savage song, the meaning of the animal yell, we exist for the mechanical screak of steel on steel….

  We must get back “in touch.”121

  She went on to praise Connie Chatterley, who “identifies herself with life. She chooses the spontaneous, intuitive expression of her own woman’s nature. And becomes linked again with the creative rhythms of the universe.”122 These were ideas that Plath hoped to incorporate into her poetry and “female aesthetic.”123

  Plath’s alliance with Hughes deepened her allegiance to Lawrence. In her 1957–58 teaching notes for freshman English at Smith, she would discuss Lawrence’s “great religion…belief in the blood” and quote from one of his essays: “Life is only bearable when the mind and the body are in harmony, and there is a natural balance between them.”124 In February 1958, she would reread Lawrence’s novels and linger on the parallels between his fictional lovers and herself and Hughes.

  I opened The Rainbow which I have never read & was sucked into the concluding Ursula & Skrebensky episode & sank back, breath knocked out of me, as I read of their London hotel, their Paris trip, their riverside loving while Ursula studied at college. This is the stuff of my life…I felt mystically that if I read Woolf, read Lawrence—(these two, why?—their vision, so different, is so like mine)—I can be itched and kindled at a great work: burgeoning, fat with texture & substance of life….125

  Hughes would later write, “If SP and I managed to get through it all, it was because for crucial years we defended each other, we were a sufficient world to each other: our poetic folie à deux saved us from being isolated, surrounded and eliminated.”126 Lawrence sanctioned and sanctified the couple’s passionate commitment to love, art, sex, nature. Plath, Hughes once said, was “Laurentian” rather than “women’s lib.”127 Yet Lady Chatterley’s Lover, like Wuthering Heights, was a strange marital touchstone. Plath could not have foreseen that Lawrence’s “belief in the blood,” upon which her marriage and her artistic partnership was built, would also provide—for Hughes—the justification for its dissolution.

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  THE CAMBRIDGE SPRING bore fruit. Poetry accepted four of Plath’s poems and four of Hughes’s.128 The symmetry pleased her. She noted that out of the forty-two poems in her new book, twenty had been published, “10 of these in blessed Poetry.”129 John Lehmann at The London Magazine accepted “Spinster” and “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” and Hughes’s “Famous Poet.” The London Magazine was, according to Hughes, the “true sanctum sanctorum of English letters,” the British equivalent of The Atlantic.130 The influential London critic G. S. Fraser wrote to Hughes “cursing himself” for not having discovered him.131 (Ted told Olwyn that Fraser thought him “the Jesus Christ come to redeem Modern Poetry.”)132 Sylvia gloated to Aurelia, “Ted’s leaving just as London realizes (too late) that they’ve been ignoring a genius & their only true living poet (young) is perfect.”133 Hughes’s poem “The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar” was broadcast on the BBC’s Third Programme The Poet’s Voice on April 14 (and rebroadcast two days later), which perhaps prompted Plath to write to Carne-Ross at the BBC on April 21, asking if she could try out for a spot on The Poet’s Voice. When the couple’s work appeared in the same issue of Granta that May, they became the talk of literary Cambridge.134 Ted chalked his success up to Sylvia, telling his brother Gerald in May, “Marriage is my medium. Also my luck thrives on it, and my productions. You have no idea what a happy life Sylvia and I lead…We work and walk about, and repair each other’s writings. She is one of the best critics I ever met and understands my imagination perfectly, and I think I understand hers. It’s amazing how we strike sparks.”135

  Hughes’s contract for the British publication of The Hawk in the Rain came with an astonishing note from Charles Monteith: “Mr. Eliot has asked me to tell you how much he personally enjoyed the poems and to pass on to you his congratulations on them.”136 All of Plath’s predictions about Hughes’s success had come true. “I guaranteed 15 poems sold in a year if he let me be his agent when I first met him & he’s written his be
st since we’ve been working together.”137 Hughes had indeed sold fifteen poems since June, plus “a broadcast poem and a book to two countries.” He had already started his second collection. Plath, too, had sold fifteen poems since their wedding, and begun her novel. “If only I can get my book accepted in the next few months it will be perfect,” she told Aurelia.138

  Given the good fortune that had come their way that year, both were surprised when Marianne Moore, one of the judges of the Harper’s contest, asked Hughes to cut “The Little Boys and the Seasons,” “Bawdry Embraced,” and “The Drowned Woman” from The Hawk in the Rain. (The word “whore” appeared in the latter two poems.) To her mother, Plath invoked Lawrence as she defined herself and Hughes against the prevailing modes of British and American poetry, especially the Movement:

  We feel, strongly, that to cut these two out would be to silence a large part of Ted’s voice: which is raised against the snide, sneaking, coy weekend-review poets whose sex is in their head, & the prissy abstract poets who don’t dare to talk about love in anything but mile-distant abstractions….

  Ironically enough, I opened Marianne Moore’s book of critical essays to see if she ever treated poets who wrote about sex directly & honestly, and the page fell open to this letter from D.H. Lawrence to Miss Moore when she edited the Dial: “I knew some of the poems would offend you. But then some part of life must offend you too, and even beauty has its thorns and its nettle-stings and its poppy-poison. Nothing is without offense & nothing should be: if it is part of life, & not merely abstraction.”

  Naturally, Ted & I agree with Lawrence. I think he puts his finger on her blind spot most eloquently.139

  Three days later, Sylvia wrote again to her mother, “We want logic, but not without blood feeling; music without vague emotion….They think they can ignore us in their magazines, because we are too disturbing. In a year, the whole picture will be changed.” She told Aurelia that she and Ted were “alone, really alone…among young modern poets”—few shared their commitment to “the great subjects of life: love, death, war.”140 Yet in the end Hughes agreed to cut the three poems, chastened by how they “would read to Ma & Pa.”141

  When the Poetry Book Society chose The Hawk in the Rain as one of its top choices for 1957, Hughes would famously write in its bulletin, “What excites my imagination is the war between vitality and death, and my poems may be said to celebrate the exploits of the warriors of either side.”142 He was staking out his poetic territory; he and Plath would continue to position themselves against the Movement. Sylvia wrote to Aurelia that spring of the “cheap, flat ‘new movement poetry’…the meanings are dull, often superficial ‘top-of-the-head’ philosophizing, and there is no music, no sense picturing.”143

  That May, Plath spent long days at the university library “steadily reading…Corneille, Racine, Ibsen, Strindberg, Webster, Marlowe, Tourneur, Yeats, Eliot.”144 Her letters home were all about America. To Ted’s brother Gerald she wrote of her dream landscape: “I am dying to show Ted Cape Cod…scrub pines, lakes, sand cliffs & tons of icy green-blue Atlantic ocean pounding 20 miles of almost deserted shoreline.”145 Dreams of the Cape sustained her. “I will not feel at all ‘guilty’ in indulging in sun & sea there,” she wrote Aurelia.

  You know, I think that through our years of family scraping to get money for scholarships etc. we three developed an almost Puritan sense that being “lazy” and spending money on “luxuries” like meals out, or theater or travel was slightly wicked! And I think all three of us are being given the rare chance of changing into people who can experience the joys of new adventures and experiences.146

  Aurelia now had her driver’s license and had been promoted to associate professor at Boston University. Sylvia began to feel that her grandmother’s death, painful as it had been, had forced her mother to grow. She wrote Marcia that Aurelia was now “entertaining, driving to work,” adding, “I am so proud….she is making a life at the age of 50.” Sylvia hoped for a new chapter in their relationship when she returned to America as a married, professional woman, able to share her “active life” with Aurelia.147

  In late May, Sylvia sat six three-hour exams for the English Tripos II—a second bachelor’s degree—and submitted her poetry manuscript, Two Lovers and a Beachcomber, as an “original composition” in partial fulfillment of the degree.148 When she returned home her fingers were so cramped she could hardly bend them. Ted heated hot water and prepared her bath, and served her steak and wine in bed. Her French, Tragedy, and Chaucer exams had been “stimulating” and “fair,” but the Criticism & Composition and English Moralists exams were, she felt, “horrors.”149 She was too exhausted to feel much excitement upon learning that her poetry collection had made the final round of the Yale Younger Poets contest. Ted, too, was tired; he had recently finished his teaching duties and felt despondent about the fate of his working-class boys. There had been small successes, like the Elizabethan play he had directed, yet the daily drudgery of keeping order had depleted him. When he left the school he felt as if he were abandoning a sinking ship with the most vulnerable passengers still on board.

  Sylvia would not receive the First she had hoped for but, instead, a 2.1—essentially, magna cum laude. She was disappointed, but reminded herself that she had completed her second BA in two years while most British undergraduates did it in three. (This was false logic—Fulbrighters were allowed to skip the first year of the degree entirely—but it boosted her morale.) The couple packed up their belongings, including more than three hundred books, and left for Yorkshire on June 5, shunning her graduation and Cambridge’s extravagant May Balls. Sylvia would later tell Jane Baltzell that she felt “much more partisan” about Cambridge than Smith. The “misery & weariness & confusion” of her first year had receded, leaving only memories of “a green Eden…that delicate baby blue sky and the ducks at the mill race and every detail bright and haunting as stained glass….I still endow it with the light of gone, very gone youth.”150

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  Sylvia spent her entire first day at the Beacon in bed, recovering from the “desperate tenseness of the past month” as well as from a vitriolic attack on one of her poems by a “young don” who had pronounced her verse “hollow” compared to John Donne.151 The anonymous writer tore into Plath’s poem “Epitaph for Fire and Flower,” which she had published in the Winter 1956–57 edition of Chequer, saying that she had produced “disconnected sparks” rather than a “richness of meaning.”152 Sylvia thought the John Donne comparison absurd, as did Ted. The “vicious abuse” left her spent and shaken. Once she regained her strength, she and Ted took long walks on the moors. “We walk for miles & meet not a soul: just larks & swallows & green green hills and valleys.”153 Olwyn, who was home on a ten-day visit, remembered the couple reading the war poet Keith Douglas together outside on a blanket in a nearby field. “Two poets communing with a precursor whose work had many affinities with their own…I always saw this as an image of Sylvia and Ted’s central shared allegiance to poetry.”154

  Sylvia had not read half the novels on the syllabus for Smith’s freshman English, and was already worried about the number of books she would have to master for her new teaching job. Her anxiety and homesickness led to some antisocial behavior. According to Olwyn, Sylvia left abruptly when Ted’s old English teacher, Mr. Fisher, stopped by the Beacon one afternoon. Sylvia’s behavior probably had nothing to do with Fisher, but rather a perceived slight from Olwyn. Ted later apologized to his sister en route to America: “The days at home were ill-starred.” Sylvia was still wound up from her exams, he said, and the house was too small for five people. Ted sympathized with his wife’s sense of displacement, and he asked Olwyn to give her another chance:

  Her immediate “face” when she meets someone is too open & too nice—“smarmy” as you said—but that’s the American stereotype she clutches at when she is in fact panic-stric
ken. Or perhaps—and I think this is more like it—her poise & brain just vanish in a kind of vacuous receptivity—only this american [sic] stereotype manner then keeps her going at all. She says stupid things then that mortify her afterwards. Her second thought—her retrospect, is penetrating, skeptical, and subtle. But she can never bring that second-thinking mind to the surface with a person until she’s known them some time. She’s hard to bring out, in fact. You saw how much better she was the last day. Don’t judge her on her awkward behaviour. I’m sure you see what she’s really like.155

  Hughes suggested that Plath’s “real” self—the self that was “penetrating, skeptical, and subtle”—was at odds with her “false” American self.156 He seemed to understand that American culture, and the limitations it placed on women, was poisonous for her.

  On the morning of their first wedding anniversary, Ted presented Sylvia with an enormous bouquet of pink roses. They packed a picnic of chicken, steak, and wine and spent the afternoon on a shady hillside overlooking the moors, reading and talking about “the tough times past & good times to come.” This was the only place Sylvia did not miss the ocean: “the air is like clear seawater: thirst-quenching & cool, and the view of spaces, unlike anything I’ve seen in my life.” She sketched out her future to Aurelia. They would support themselves teaching while they published books and won Pulitzers, Saxons, and Guggenheims and have “3 or 4 children.”157 Sylvia skipped over the challenges that awaited: Ted had no job, and they had barely $100 between them. But she had reasons for optimism. She was returning to America with a Cambridge degree, a poet-husband on the verge of real fame, an academic position, and more publications to come. “All from now on should be literally clear sailing!” she wrote Aurelia on June 20, the day she left England. She boarded the Queen Elizabeth filled with visions of Nauset, the black edges of her past dissolving in the clean emerald surf of her future.