Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  20

  In Midas’ Country

  Cape Cod and Smith College, June 1957–June 1958

  Photographs show Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes smiling and at ease on the deck of the Queen Elizabeth as it sailed into New York Harbor on June 25, 1957. But the crossing had been difficult. Sylvia became seasick after indulging in martinis and lobster Newburg, and vomited all over the coffin-sized bunks in the tiny cabin. Ted began to worry that life on the luxury liner was a preview of what awaited him in the land of plenty. He felt sickened by all the rich food—“three five course meals a day,” which he could not stop himself from eating. He found the Atlantic “uninteresting” and compared the voyage to living on a “desert island with a thousand howler monkeys.” By the third day at sea, his “depression was black and absolute. It was difficult even to speak.” The couple’s mood improved after they spotted a whale alongside the ship. They ran to the bow and finally felt “the sensation of crossing the Atlantic—the heroic bid.”1 Plath took descriptive notes of her fellow passengers, jotting down snippets of dialogue for later use. She wrote long, painterly passages of the ship and sea: “blue swimming light…Clear blue shadows on white paint…a wake of rainbows—.”2 She was going home.

  Ellie Friedman, Lynne Lawner, Russ Moro, and Robert Bagg were waiting for the couple when they docked in Manhattan at Pier 92.3 Ted got off the boat without Sylvia, who was, Robert remembered, “badly sunburned, and still ministering to herself in their cabin.” Robert, who knew Russ, Ted’s Cambridge friend from Amherst, was impressed with Hughes’s dramatic cadences. “Sylvia’s arms are ‘BLISTERED LIKE BULLION,’ he told us.” Manhattan seemed “ ‘MASSIVE AS MADRID.’ ” Sylvia soon disembarked. “She was also tall,” Robert remembered, “her blonde hair reined in under a kerchief, and all business in dealing with officialdom. My impression of Sylvia that day was of her hyper-intensity, her unconcealed sensuality, and her fierce devotion to Ted.”4 Ellie knew Russ through the media and publishing world, and wanted to introduce him to Sylvia. She thought he could be helpful.5

  Hughes later wrote home about the skyscrapers that made “terrific dark caverns of their streets. And all the streets are crawling with these gaudy cars.”6 Even Sylvia felt that “everything seemed immensely sparkling & shiny & fast-paced & loud after my bucolic existence on the Backs and the Bronte moors.”7 Ted walked to the pier-side bulletin board full of messages for arriving passengers, and found, under “H,” a telegram informing him that The Hawk in the Rain had been chosen as a selection by the Poetry Book Society.8 But the celebration would have to wait. When a suspicious customs officer asked Sylvia to open a trunk packed with three hundred books, he unearthed The Nude, by Kenneth Clark, and the banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover.9 She wept as she explained that she was teaching Lawrence in her college course. The customs officer told her she looked much too young for such a job but let them through with the books. It was not the homecoming she had imagined, but she was relieved to be back in America after two years. “God shed his grace,” she told Lynne. “We are here.”10

  Sylvia squeezed into the back of a yellow cab between Robert and Russ and immediately drew Robert into a conversation about young poets. “Who did I think was the best of the new ones, she prodded, after stating with conviction that her husband was already the best of ‘our generation.’ ” When Robert told her that he liked James Merrill and W. S. Merwin, she dismissed Merwin as “much too vague and dreamy.” She pressed on. “Who won the Glascock this year?” she asked. “I did,” Robert said. “Who were the judges,” she wondered. “Nemerov, Hecht, and Andrews Wanning of Bard.” “Lucky you,” she said.11

  They headed to Russ’s family townhouse on the Upper East Side for Hughes’s first American dinner, served by an Italian maid. There, Sylvia met the future sinologist David Keightley, Russ’s Amherst classmate, who was then editor of World Publishing.12 She eagerly agreed to send him her poetry manuscript. Robert recalled that Ted already had something of a reputation in America, and that “The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar” had made a deep impression on him and his literary friends. Struck by Ted’s “spondaic detonation” of “charged verbs,” he wondered about the effect it had on Sylvia’s poems. “That’s what she heard daylong, his staccato speaking habit, which sought out arresting alliterative combinations.”13 He gave Ted a sheaf of his poems that night and asked him to take a look.

  Four days later, in the cool, late-afternoon hours, Aurelia held a small, catered wedding reception for her daughter and son-in-law under a white tent in her Wellesley backyard. Sylvia wore a green-blue linen dress with a full skirt and a white stephanotis corsage on her shoulder. Aurelia thought she looked radiant as she greeted her seventy guests. Perry and Shirley Norton remembered her as “gorgeous,” introducing “my Ted,” holding tightly to his arm.14 But Wilbury Crockett was not impressed. He sensed a “hauteur,” an arrogance in Ted, and wanted to kick him.15 Ted was, no doubt, out of his element, but he had not married down. He stood by his wife’s side, struck speechless by the wealth he observed. “What a neighborhood!” he wrote to his parents. “All the houses are in their own little grounds.” He described the wedding party in great detail, recounting their gifts and the probable cost—a “very elite looking” tray, a “huge” pressure cooker, a salt and pepper shaker that was “very modern and pleasant to handle.” He loved his new silk suit, made, he noted, of “Wonderfully expensive material.”16 Hughes was not immune to bourgeois pleasures. “Imagine how I enjoy this,” he wrote, after tallying all the fifty-dollar bills they received.17 “This land literally does flow with milk and honey.”18 Robert, who was at the reception with Russ, cornered Ted and asked what he thought of the poems he’d given him earlier. Hughes said he admired one about a Great War soldier, then he changed the subject to astrology. He told Robert that if he knew the exact minute he had been born, he could predict whether or not he would become a successful poet. Russ, meanwhile, looked on the proceedings with dismay. He did not like Sylvia and thought “the coupling risky, a Fitzgerald-esque time bomb.”19

  Karen Goodall, who lived next door to Sylvia’s aunt Dot and uncle Joe in Weston for many years, remembered that the Plath-Schober family hoped Ted, as husband, would now “shoulder the nervous burden of Sylvia.” No one in the “quiet, conservative” family seemed to know how to handle this brilliant, “not sufficiently placid” young woman. There was still bitterness about her suicide. “What people would say is, ‘That ungrateful child. She does so well in school. She has a family that adores her. Everything was going right. Why does she have to do this?’ ” The family “wrongly invested” their expectations in Ted as “caretaker.”20

  A few days after the reception, Sylvia and Ted drove to Northampton to look for an apartment. They ended up renting a furnished one-bedroom on the top floor of a stately white house at 337 Elm Street, an elegant block near Smith. It was a cut above their student digs, Sylvia thought, and “very cool in the sun-swelter.”21 Dan Aaron, director of Smith’s freshman English course, treated the couple to gin and tonics later that day at his home. There, for the first time, Sylvia saw books and engravings by Leonard Baskin, an artist and Smith professor who would eventually become Ted’s lifelong friend. Hughes warmed to Aaron, who knew some of his Cambridge friends, and the prospect of a social life at Smith. Plath liked Aaron, too, but she felt awkward about teaching alongside her former professors and worried about meeting their high expectations.

  The couple was thrilled that the Poetry Book Society chose The Hawk in the Rain as a top selection. Hughes—whose first poem had been published only a year before—wrote his parents, “It means my book will…challenge everything being written in England.”22 His poems had been accepted by the “posh intellectual” Sewanee Review, The Spectator, and, finally, The New Yorker, which took “The Thought-Fox.” Sylvia marveled at how a reputation could open doors: a year before, The New Yorker had rejected the same poem. She had been publishing her poems si
nce she was eight, but Ted, after less than two years, already had a prize-winning poetry collection and a New Yorker acceptance—her two life goals. “I knew this would happen from the minute I read his first poems, but it is blissful to have it come so soon,” she wrote Marcia. “And he just sits, unshaved, his hair every which way, munching raw steaks & writing more.”23

  Plath took her role as Hughes’s agent seriously. She sent his poems, and hers, to dozens of magazines, and tried to muster up as much free publicity as she could. She asked Ellie, now working for CBS, if she knew any New York editors who might want to publish an article about him. “How about a real dark Heathcliffe [sic] picture of Ted in ‘People are Talking About’ with all his book prizes???” And yet, Sylvia maintained that she and Ted were above such hustling. When the 92nd Street Y wanted to make a short film about Hughes, she wrote airily to Ellie, “Ted wants no personal circus, only poem readings & whatever magazine notes will help the book. Peace & Cape Cod.”24 But even on Cape Cod, peace would prove elusive.

  * * *

  ON JULY 13, Warren drove the couple to Eastham, a small village on the outer Cape, near Nauset Beach. Aurelia had rented them a shingled cottage amid the pines at the Hidden Acres Cottage Colony for six weeks.25 Nauset was three miles to the east, Cape Cod Bay three miles to the west. They had no phone and no car, just their bicycles, Sylvia’s new Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter (a gift from Aurelia), some books, and clothes. Ted found the two-bedroom cottage comfortable and modern. He especially liked the screened-in porch. “When you step from the doorway pine needles touch your head, and as you sit there you see chipmunks & little red squirrels among the house-high trees,” he wrote Olwyn.26

  For the first few days, they luxuriated in silence and ate simple meals Sylvia prepared in their single frying pan. She was delighted to see four of her poems in that July’s Poetry.27 Yet soon a neighbor began playing his radio too loudly, and the biting horseflies became a nuisance. “God has to remind us this isn’t heaven,” Sylvia wrote in her journal.28 The cottage itself proved rather too rustic—Sylvia sent Aurelia a long list of “suburban” supplies they needed (eggbeaters, pillowcases, facecloths, nail clippers, coffee mugs), while the lack of a car proved a major inconvenience. They had to rely on the colony’s caretaker, Mrs. Spaulding, for frequent rides into town. Mrs. Spaulding, in turn, felt free to drop by for coffee and conversation—just the kind of suburban mingling they had longed to escape. And even in paradise, Sylvia had disturbing dreams, all “diabolically real.” “Why these dreams?” she wrote in her journal. “These last exorcisings of the horrors and fears beginning when my father died and the bottom fell out. I am just now restored. I have been restored for over a year, and still the dreams aren’t quite sure of it. They aren’t for I’m not. And I suppose never will be.”29

  Everything would be better, Plath reassured herself, once she began “the painful process of getting writing again after nine months.”30 Her first day back at the typewriter produced only one “good image”: “This bad beginning depressed me inordinately.” As she and Hughes walked to the beach along busy Route 6, the cars seemed to her “deathly…like killer instruments from the mechanical tempo of another planet.” The “badly begun poem” weighed on her all day.31 She vowed to “never get in this rusty state again, for writing is the prime condition of both our lives & our happiness: if that goes well, the sky can fall in.”32

  As in Benidorm, this American honeymoon yielded little in the way of new writing. She had not published a story in a women’s magazine in five years, and she spent much of her time in Eastham trying to write fiction that would sell. She wanted to show the editors at the “slicks” that the twenty-year-old adolescent writer had transformed into a more mature literary voice. But she feared that creative paralysis would bring on another depression.

  While Hughes began writing the poems that would go into his second collection, Lupercal, Plath worked on four stories.33 None would be published, but it was during this time that Plath outlined the plot and themes—in “The Trouble-Making Mother”—that would become the basis for The Bell Jar:

  Get tension of scenes with mother during Ira and Gordon crisis. Rebellion. Car keys. Psychiatrist. Details: Dr. Beuscher: baby. Girl comes back to self, can be good daughter. Sees vision of mothers [sic] hardship. Yes yes. This is a good one. A subject. Dramatic. Serious. Enough of the hyphenated society names. Mental hospital background. Danger. Dynamite under high tension. Mothers [sic] character. At first menacing, later pathetic, moving. Seen from outside first, then inside. Girl comes back: grown bigger, ready to be bigger. Like mother, yet furious about it. Wants to be different. Bleaches hair. Policemen. Annoying her. Story in newspapers. After suicide attempt. Earthy Dr. Beuscher….MOTHER-DAUGHTER. Troubles. Graphic. A real story.34

  The girl’s name would be Judith Greenwood—like Esther Greenwood, the future heroine of The Bell Jar—and she would be “a statement of the generation. Which is you.”35 After starting this story during the third week of July, Plath felt the “old fluency” return “at last, at last.” The story, as her confident, fast-moving outline suggests, was writing itself. In her journal she wrote, “I must say, I’m surprised at the story: it’s more gripping, I think, than anything I’ve ever done.” She finished on July 25 and sent the piece off to The Saturday Evening Post, where it was quickly rejected. Yet the writing restored her faith: “And now, aching, but surer and surer, I feel the wells of experience and thought spurting up, welling quietly, with little clear sounds of juiciness. How the phrases come to me.” Plath thought it her “first good story for five years” and later realized that it contained the seeds of a novel.36

  Each afternoon, after four hours of writing, Sylvia and Ted biked to Nauset. There, they swam along a sandbar halfway between Nauset Light Beach and Coast Guard Beach, with “clear level water & long rollers.”37 The sand and the blue horizon stretched in both directions for miles; Sylvia had fantasized about such summer afternoons during the long Cambridge winters. In the evening, they read. Plath immersed herself in Virginia Woolf’s diary, The Waves, and Jacob’s Room. She reread and underlined the end of The Waves, which chilled her as much as the end of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” “Virginia Woolf helps,” she wrote in her journal. “Her novels make mine possible.” Woolf’s writing inspired her to believe in her own vocation and even to “go better than she.” She promised herself: “No children until I have done it….My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time.”38

  When it rained, Sylvia cooked and baked cakes. She knew she tended to “escape into cooking,” as Hughes put it, when “faced by some tedious or unpleasant piece of work.”39 Now she mined her baking habit for dramatic potential in “The Day of the Twenty-Four Cakes,” which she outlined in her journal:

  woman at end of rope…quarrel with husband: loose ends, bills, problems, dead end. Wavering between running away or committing suicide: stayed by need to create an order: slowly, methodically begins to bake cakes, one each hour….Husband comes home: new understanding. She can go on making order in her limited way: beautiful cakes: can’t bear to leave them.40

  Plath was aware of her story’s parodic elements, and she wondered whether she should use a “Kafka lit-mag serious” tone, or a style more appropriate for The Saturday Evening Post.41 In the end she decided to experiment with both. The story has not survived, but its outlines point to Plath’s unsettled approach to domesticity. In her stories about housewifery and motherhood—“The Visitor,” “Sunday at the Mintons,” “Home Is Where the Heart Is,” “The Wishing Box,” “Sweetie Pie and the Gutter Men,” “Day of Success”—wives respond to their subordination with murderous fantasies, suicidal unhappiness, or smug superiority over “career women.” They are painful referendums on dreams deferred.

  These tensions came to a head in “Dialogue Over a Ouija Board,” the first poem she had written in six mo
nths. She found the form liberating: “strict 7 line stanzas rhyming ababcbc,” which she challenged herself to make sound “like conversation.”42 The poem had a biting undercurrent. Just as she had written about unhappy, ghostly doubles in Benidorm (“The Other Two”), she now wrote about another glowering married couple.

  Although Plath frequently gave the impression to others that she shared Hughes’s interest in the occult, “Dialogue Over a Ouija Board” reminds us that she was more ambivalent.43 In the poem, the wife, Sybil, is skeptical of her husband Leroy’s ability to interpret “messages” from Pan. (The couple’s names add a layer of irony to the proceedings: Sybil suggests a divine seer, while Leroy loosely translates, in French, to “the king.”) “Pan’s a mere puppet / Of our two intuitions,” Plath writes, a “psychic bastard / Sprung to being on our wedding night.” The couple fights about the meaning of Pan’s “messages”:

  How can we help but battle

  If our nerves are the sole nourishers

  Of Pan’s pronouncements, and our nerves are strung

  To such cross-purposes?

  The poem speaks to creative tension within the marriage. To others, and herself, Sylvia always described Ted as her ideal. In her journal that July she wrote, “he sets the sea of my life steady, flooding it with the deep rich color of his mind and his love and constant amaze at his perfect being: as if I had conjured, at last, a god from the slack tides.”44 But her work suggests a more complex professional relationship, even a burgeoning rivalry. As Sybil says, “I glimpse no light at all as long / As we two glower from our separate camps, / This board our battlefield.”45