Plath’s teaching style drew mixed reviews. One former student, Sally Lawrence Kauder, called her “one of the best teachers at Smith,” who inspired in her a lifelong love for Henry James. Another student, Martha Resnik Siderowf, recalled, “As a teacher, she was unusually sensitive to her students.” Martha was impressed that Plath knew all her students’ names and nicknames—a rarity in a large freshman English class. Plath was “graceful, gracious, and always seemed ready to smile. She was not at all intimidating and encouraged us to express ourselves without the fear of being chastised.” Martha and another student, Judy Hofmann, invited Plath and Hughes to dinner at their dorm one night and found the couple “delightful guests.” Sylvia regaled them with stories of freezing Cambridge lecture halls and cake-baking mishaps, while Ted joked that he preferred the cakes that didn’t come off to those that did.93
Another former student, Ellen Nodelman, had a completely different experience. “Everyone in the class hated her,” she said, echoing Plath’s own sense that the students in her nine a.m. section did not like her. “She didn’t joke with us. She didn’t encourage us. She just walked into the classroom, put her things down on her desk, fixed a steely gaze on us, laid down the law for an hour, gathered up her things and stalked out.”94 Other students recalled her as “conservatively and sternly dressed, with her hair pulled back,”95 “cold,”96 “extremely controlled,” “clipped,” with a slight British accent.97 Plath did most of the talking, sometimes using the Socratic method of cold-calling, which intimidated some of her students. Yet Ellen also said the consensus was that Plath was “a very good teacher….She was rigorous, demanding, and thorough in her approach both to her students and to the literature we were reading.”98
Plath’s “impersonality” in the classroom reflected not only the masculine pedagogy of Cambridge, but a central tenet of the modernist texts she was teaching. T.S. Eliot, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” had argued for the separation of personality and poetry: “Poetry…is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”99 Plath—who would, ironically, be labeled an emotional, “confessional” poet—adhered rigidly to this dictum in her classroom. Only six years older than her students, and without the protective armor of a PhD, she believed she had to embody decorum and gravity. Another former student, Phyllis Chinlund, remembered her as “the image of bottled up energy. Total control and intellectual discipline.”100
Plath’s own description of her teaching resonates with her students’. In late September, she outlined her pedagogical strategies to Dorothea Krook, reflecting on what had worked and what had not:
I am, by philosophy, I think, more dictatorial than is proper for an American. After I managed to work out a reasonably forceful discussion-maneuvering, I had an exciting time. Many of the girls will never need to take another English course; many of them would perhaps never read a poem again; I felt, now and then, like a missionary among the heathen. My texts were my salvation.101
On November 6, Plath learned that one of her students, Deborah Coolidge, had hung herself by Paradise Pond. (News of the suicide appeared in The Sophian, which carried Plath’s article about Cambridge in the same issue.)102 Plath said nothing about it in class. “She just forged on ahead,” Ellen remembered.103 Plath did not mention the incident in her journal.
Ellen remembered knowing about Ted Hughes’s existence, but she recalled that he was by no means the Famous Poet on campus—that title was reserved for Anthony Hecht (though Hughes was “considered madly sexy”).104 Plath never discussed her own work, or anything remotely personal, in class.105 She could have benefited from the bump in status that came with publishing in The Atlantic and Poetry, but to make such facts known would have been immodest and, by the standards of the day, unfeminine. Although she participated in one college poetry reading, students were much more aware of the male professors who “wrote,” like Hecht and Fisher.106 Ellen recalled that most of the women in Plath’s class would have preferred a male professor.
Hughes had a second poem accepted by The New Yorker (“Bull Frog”), while The Hawk in the Rain had already sold more than one thousand copies in America. He read at the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center in New York that October, where Plath thought he looked like a “Yorkshire god.” She guessed there were about 150 people in the audience, many of whom asked Hughes to sign copies of the book. (Plath lent him her “shoulder for a writing desk.”)107 Hughes was disappointed that no one of importance came. He began to feel trapped and unable to write once they returned to Northampton.
Plath was thrilled to learn that she had won the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine for her ten poems published in 1957, but she was too exhausted to enjoy her success. She tried to hide her anxiety, “To bear my Visitor alone.”108 She took sleeping pills throughout October. Hughes noticed her unhappiness and told Olwyn she was “creaking under her burdens” and “works every hour she wakes almost.”109 Sylvia again poured out her frustrations to her brother: “How I long to write on my own again! When I’m describing Henry James [sic] use of metaphor to make emotional states vivid and concrete, I’m dying to be making up my own metaphors.”110 By Thanksgiving she had heard that her Smith contract would likely be renewed and that she would be promoted, but she had already decided to “get out while the gettings [sic] good.” The “security and prestige of the academic life” was not worth the death of her imagination.111
* * *
THOUGH SYLVIA FELT STYMIED all semester, she made important literary connections on several trips to Boston that fall. Foremost among them was the genial Jack Sweeney, head of the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard, who, as Dido Merwin remembered, “liked nothing better than to bring poets together in his home on Beacon Street in Boston.”112 Sweeney invited Hughes to record some poems for the Poetry Room at Stephen Fassett’s Beacon Hill studio around Thanksgiving; afterward, Plath and Hughes dined with the Sweeneys and the Merwins at Sweeney’s home. The poet Bill Merwin, who had written an influential review of The Hawk in the Rain in The New York Times, had wanted to meet Hughes when he learned he was living in Massachusetts, and Sweeney had arranged the dinner. Plath described Merwin to her mother as “the most lucrative & machiavellianly-succesful of young (30) American poets, rather unpleasant in many ways.” But he was worth cultivating: he knew “all the producers, poets etc. of London & America,” called Robert Lowell “Cal,” and had recently refused the position of poetry consultant to the Library of Congress.113 Ted described both Bill and Dido, in a long letter to Olwyn, as a literary couple that had met on Majorca, where they had been part of Robert Graves’s entourage. He called Dido “bumptuous garrulous upper class…very amusing.” She struck him as someone who liked to profess. Bill Merwin he found too serious. “No play in his mind…No irony.”114 Merwin was equally put off by Hughes during their first meeting, when he sat “very gloomily in the corner and was silent.” Sylvia seemed to him “charming, rather nervous and bubbling…slightly tinkly and high-pitched.”115
The Merwins invited the Hugheses to lunch the next day at their fifth-floor walk-up on West Cedar Street (rather a challenge for Hughes, who was on crutches after jumping out of a chair and fracturing his foot). There, Dido recalled, “the all-absorbing topic” was “how to survive without having to teach.”116 Bill supported himself through freelancing jobs, though he and Dido would soon move to London, where the BBC provided more regular work; the Merwins’ presence there would help convince Sylvia and Ted to follow. That day, as Sylvia admired their “rickety heavenly” apartment with its distant view of the Charles River, she wondered if the “slummy” side of Beacon Hill might be turning into Boston’s Left Bank.117 She became determined to hold court in her own Beacon Hill apartment.
Sylvia and Ted spent their Thanksgiving break in Wellesley. They dined with Mrs. Prouty, who, Sylvia told Warren, was now “obsessed with Ted,” and spent T
hanksgiving at Aunt Dot’s home in Weston. Sweeney invited them to the Woodberry Poetry Room on November 27 to hear poetry recordings, including Hughes’s own. Sylvia was angry that she had needed “special permission” to enter Harvard’s Lamont Library, which housed the Poetry Room; “it’s ridiculous they don’t allow women, isn’t it?” she wrote to Warren.118 Her letter to him was sunny, but in her journal she called the week in Wellesley “a black-wept nightmare.”119
Back in Northampton, the couple felt “the jinx of depression” break—at least, that is what Sylvia told Aurelia, who was recovering in the hospital from a hysterectomy. They had been at her bedside while she recovered, and the experience spooked Ted. “She’s just a bag of nerves,” he told Olwyn, “like someone permanently in a desperate situation & with 5 minutes to think her way out of it.”120 Sylvia plied her mother with good news, as always: Ted had written six new poems, had a third New Yorker acceptance, and had a first prose acceptance from a children’s magazine, Jack & Jill. Best of all, The Hawk in the Rain had been chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of the year. It was probably around this time that Plath wrote “The Thin People,” a surreal nightmare poem that draws on imagery of famine, war, and depression. Although Plath wrote the poem in rhyming couplets, her rhymes are subtle; the overall effect is, as Plath might say, “ugliness”: “They were wrapped in flea-ridden donkey skins, // Empty of complaint, forever…” Indeed it was the “ugliest” poem Plath wrote that year, and thus a triumph for a poet who was trying to shed her decorous, well-mannered tics.
Near the end of the fall semester, Sylvia came down with pneumonia and spent her Christmas vacation recovering while Ted rested his fractured foot. Exhausted and moody, neither wrote much. “I get more & more bored with these Smith people,” Ted wrote Olwyn. “They dare not say a word that would not be admired & let pass by the whole assembled committee for advancement & faculty promotion.”121 After a fitful convalescent break, Sylvia returned to Smith in January and informed her department chair that she would be leaving at the end of the year. She wrote Warren, “he was very sorry & surprised but I practically skipped out.”122 When Alfred Fisher heard the news he summoned Plath to his office. He told her, as a friend, that she was expected to stay for two years and that if she left early, “the Institution will regard you as irresponsible.” He himself had resigned twice (due to gossip about “sleeping with students”), but each time the president had asked him back. Now he was trying to extend the same favor to Plath. “It’s all in your mind,” he told her, “about anxiety. I have it from various sources.”123 He had heard she was an excellent teacher.
Plath’s old thesis adviser George Gibian also questioned her decision. “What do you need to write?” he asked her over tea. Plath knew that her old professors “mean vaguely well,” but they had “no idea what is for my own good.”124 Fisher and Gibian had wives (or ex-wives) who took care of their children and domestic affairs while they pursued their writing. Plath did not have the same luxury; teaching, writing, and running a home left her spent. Another female professor, Marie Borroff, confessed to Plath that she, too, felt teaching “a great psychic exhaustion”—as did Edna Williams, who had been teaching English for decades.125 Plath now understood why so many female professors remained unmarried.
In late February, Dan Aaron took her to lunch and entreated her to stay at Smith, conjuring up visions of a part-time position for her, a position for Hughes, even a grant. Perhaps she could find, as Gibian suggested, a way to reconcile writing and teaching, like Anthony Hecht. She began having second thoughts, which she admitted to Olwyn:
Ironically, now that I feel casual and masterful about the whole thing…one part of me feels sad to leave. I love the power of having 70 girls to teach, & get what is surely a dangerous enjoyment from shocking them into awareness, laughter & even tears….But it’s only been since I decided officially to leave that I’ve enjoyed it.126
She later told Dorothea Krook that she and Ted were invited to house dinners by the students in her classes once a week—“and only with effort did we keep it down to this.”127 In her journal she admitted she felt a “great nostalgia for my lost Smith-teacher self” and anxiety about starting over in a new city “at the one trade which won’t be cheated.”128 Yet she still maintained to Olwyn that teaching was “dangerous” to her “own writing”:129 “What is it that teaching kills? The juice, the sap—the substance of revelation…I am living & teaching on rereadings, on notes of other people, sour as heartburn, between two unachieved shapes: between the original teacher & the original writer: neither.”130 Paul Roche, a British poet on the Smith faculty, thought that what decided Sylvia, in the end, was Ted’s lack of reputation at Smith. “He was totally ignored, and that upset her.” She told Paul, “Ted is being just wasted here.”131 His wife Clarissa agreed. Sylvia always gave the impression that her work “was of less importance” than Ted’s.132
Her love for Ted, with his “queer electric invisible radiance,” still burned.133 “I need Ted to smell & kiss & sleep with & read by as I need bread & wine,” she wrote in her journal. “He is my life now, my male muse, my pole-star centering me steady & right.”134 That winter, they hiked up a Hadley hill, tracking rabbit and fox prints in the snow, “breathing rarer and rarer air” until they ascended the summit. There, they found “a vast god’s eye view…Of all this, the world in our heads, we word-stitch and make fabrics.”135 Aurelia had warned her she was “too critical” and would end up “an old maid,” but she had proven her wrong. “I feel, miraculously, I have the impossible, the wonderful—I am perfectly at one with Ted, body & soul…our vocation is writing, our love is each other,” she wrote in her journal. “What other husband would cook her veal chops, bring her tea and coffee and iced pineapple, do the dishes, nurse her through her sicknesses?”136 When Mademoiselle accepted a poem from each of them on the second anniversary of the day they met—her first acceptance in almost a year—Plath saw it as symbolic confirmation of their literary future.137 They ransacked Graves’s The White Goddess for “subtle symbolic” names for their children. Yet the prospect of a baby still seemed “too strange and fearful.”138 Sylvia knew how easily she might surrender her dreams to motherhood.
In April they had an “absurd” quarrel—Ted accused Sylvia of throwing away his old cuff links, coat, and book about witches (she hated the parts about torture). Sylvia denied it all and ran out of the apartment “sickened.” She headed to the park next door, where she sat until she spied him walking along a nearby path. Furtively, she paralleled his course, hiding behind pine trees, wagging their branches with humorous flair until he came to her. They forgot their quarrel over oysters and white wine at Wiggins Tavern, though the supper itself was “spoiled by our extreme budget consciousness….Lucky we’re both puritans & great misers.”139
She had a harder time reconciling with her Smith colleagues, who, she was sure, resented her for leaving. After an uncomfortable run-in with some faculty members, Sylvia could barely contain her anger. But, she noted in her journal, “In polite society a lady doesn’t punch or spit.” She calmed herself preparing dinner for Ellie and her friend Leonard Michaels:
Violence seethed. Joy to murder someone, pure scapegoat. But pacified during necessity to work. Work redeems. Work saves. Baked a lemon meringue pie….Set table, candles, glasses sparkling crystal barred crystal on yellow woven cloth. Making order, the rugs smoothed clean…tables cleared. Shaping a meal, people, I grew back to joy.140
She vowed to find “Salvation in work” and busied herself with various plots, some set in Yorkshire, some in New England, that included versions of herself, Hughes, and Ellie Friedman.141 She planned a short story for The New Yorker about coming of age and “Ilo’s kiss,” the memory of which still moved her.142
The new title of her poetry manuscript, The Earthenware Head, was Lawrentian. For her, it symbolized “Rough terracotta color, stamped with ja
gged black and white designs, signifying earth, & the words which shape it.”143 As always, she wanted to write in a “bigger, freer, tougher voice: work on rhythms mostly, for freedom, yet sung…No coyness, archaic cutie tricks.” It was the same determination that had gripped her at Cambridge after she had read the poems in the Saint Botolph’s Review. Her voice, she surmised, was “Woolfish, alas, but tough. Please, tough, without any moral other than that growth is good. Faith too is good. I am too a puritan at heart.”144 Plath dreaded the label of “lady poet.”
* * *
THE “BLACK YEAR” had turned out to be “the most maturing & courage-making year yet—I could have dreamed up no test more difficult.” Yet Sylvia’s subconscious continued to drag her under. Throughout the winter and spring she suffered “miserable tense knotted sleepless nights,” punctuated by nightmares of the London Plague and the Holocaust.145
Ted, for his part, found Northampton stuffy and insular, and had spent much of the fall trying to conquer a writer’s block that made his “days as dull as an empty house.” Smith girls, “Chromium dianas” with their “machined glaze of hyper-health,” unnerved him.146 “I shall not quickly be caught in a small American town again,” he told Luke Myers in early 1958.147 Clarissa Roche remembered that Hughes “wasn’t interested in charming anybody….Nobody disliked him—everybody liked him, it was just that nobody considered him anything special.” It was Plath, their “most famous graduate,” they fawned over. Clarissa remembered one night toward the end of 1957, after dinner at their Elm Street apartment, when Ted “went completely silent…just made the atmosphere so heavy. Sylvia was talking more and more quickly, louder and louder. She was sitting on the floor, which we often did, and he literally snuffed out the evening. And apparently he did that—Sylvia called them ‘white hot silences.’ ”148 George Gibian, too, remembered Ted as a “hulking silent dark Yorkshireman.”149 Marcia and her husband Mike visited the Hugheses in Northampton and Boston, and found Ted witty and garrulous, “devastatingly charming, booming laughter.” But Marcia also felt “that he could really turn off and tune out, sit in a black funk with Sylvia embarrassed and saying, ‘Now, Teddy, be nice.’ ” Sylvia and Ted seemed very happy together—she was her usual “affirming” self—but Marcia sensed “great intensity and great volatility, just under the surface, and that might explode.” It bothered her how “absolutely worshipful” Sylvia was of Ted and his work. “She felt her poetry was inferior.” And she saw that Sylvia “was carrying a great deal of the marriage,” not just in terms of the housekeeping, but “the nuts and bolts—the plans and the filling out of forms and the taxes.”150
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