Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  Ted may have been bothered by the same dynamic. In America, Sylvia was in the driver’s seat, and he was along for the ride. By early January, when Ted accepted a fourteen-week position at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for $2,200, he was ready for a distraction: “it will be to the mortification of idleness.”151 He saw the value in teaching himself new works and felt it was “a great means of coming at a type of maturity….especially if you’re a younger brother.”152 Sylvia wrote Aurelia that the position had been offered “out of the blue,” though Sylvan Schendler, who was teaching at Smith, claimed he helped get Ted the job. He would teach a creative writing course, Freshman Composition, and two sophomore Great Books classes (“Milton, Moliere, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Eliot, etc”).153 Plath had the more prestigious, full-time position, yet she wished she could teach a creative writing course. This was not an option until she published her own book. But to do so required time, and money. She earned $100 for grading sixty exams for Newton Arvin’s American literature class. (Arvin, she quipped, was “too august” to do it himself.)154 She later regretted taking on the extra work, which she had thought paid $300. “I’d have been better off writing two poems for that price,” she wrote Warren.155 Sylvia frequently plundered reams of Smith College memorandum paper to save money. She would grow so fond of the pink sheets that they became “a fetish”: “somehow, seeing a hunk of that pink paper, different from all the endless reams of white bond, my task seems finite, special, rose-cast,” she wrote in her journal.156 She also entered jingles in numerous contests sponsored by Dole Pineapple, Heinz Ketchup, French’s Mustard, and Libby Tomato Juice in hopes of winning cars and cash. For the first time, though, she and Ted were not living hand to mouth; they would manage to save $1,400 by the summer.

  Ted found teaching at UMass surprisingly pleasant: “I do it so easily and confidently…the whole lesson just pours into my head,” he wrote to Olwyn. “I wonder where all this was when I was at Cambridge.”157 Yet he was wary of becoming too comfortable. Like Plath, he felt that full-time work “is the death of the artist.”158 Hughes still found most American poetry—apart from John Crowe Ransom and Wallace Stevens—too precious. But he told Olwyn that he was “enjoying America more” since he had started teaching and learned to drive. They became determined to leave Northampton for Boston. Sylvia asked Aurelia to look into the possibility of a job at Boston University for Ted, who already had full-time job offers from Amherst College and Mount Holyoke College. To Olwyn he wrote, “They are graves.”159

  Plath’s productivity suffered during her teaching year: in 1957, she wrote about half the number of poems she had written the previous year. But Hughes’s writing picked up during the spring of 1958. He devoured old issues of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research and wrote more of the poems that would eventually end up in Lupercal. “Pike,” one of his best-known poems, came to him one day in bed at Elm Street. “All the poems for my second book,” he wrote Olwyn, “are a little hard-headed. I have tried so hard to take nothing for granted in matters of cadence & rhythm, that sentiment & warmth has seemed like a proscribed outlaw. In an effort to express myself trenchantly & controlledly, I have kept out softness.”160 He would encourage Plath, too, to keep softness out of her own poems, to make them “direct and ‘unliterary.’ ”161 By early February, Hughes had written twenty new poems, but he was in no rush to publish a second book when he could earn more money publishing the poems in magazines.

  Sylvia sought inspiration in the modern art class she audited that spring at Smith, mining the paintings for images she could use in her poetry. An art magazine, Art News, had asked her to contribute poems about paintings. The assignment galvanized her. She told Aurelia that her “deepest source of inspiration” was “the art of primitives like Henri Rousseau, Gauguin and Paul Klee and De Chirico….Once I start writing, it comes and comes.”162 During her spring break, March 22–28, she wrote eight new poems, which she proclaimed to be the best she had ever written. She felt that she had broken through the “rococo crystal cage” to describe her “real experience.” They were “thunderous.”163 “I feel like an idiot who has been obediently digging up pieces of coal in an immense mine and has just realized that there is no need to do this, but that one can fly all day and night on great wings in clear blue air through brightly colored magic and weird worlds,” she wrote Aurelia that March.164

  Plath’s “art poems”—“Virgin in a Tree,” “Perseus: The Triumph of Wit Over Suffering,” “Battle-Scene,” and “The Ghost’s Leavetaking,” all based on Paul Klee paintings—were syntactically dense and elaborately formal. Klee expressed a lucid, minimalist aesthetic that Plath wanted to imitate in her poems, but she was still caught in syntactical webs and faulty lines, as in “The Ghost’s Leavetaking”: “the raw material / Of our meat-and-potato thoughts assumes the nimbus / Of ambrosial revelation.” Still, she reiterated her belief in her vocation and destiny that March. “Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America (as Ted will be The Poet of England and her dominions).” The only women poets who rivaled her were “Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Amy Lowell, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay—all dead. Now: Edith Sitwell & Marianne Moore…May Swenson, Isabella Gardner, & most close, Adrienne Cecile Rich—who will soon be eclipsed by these eight poems.” In her mind, only women were her competitors, as if men and women played in different leagues. She was “eager, chafing, sure of my gift, wanting only to train & teach it.”165

  If Klee led Plath further into the rococo labyrinth she meant to escape, Giorgio de Chirico led her out. Plath’s most successful art poem from this period was “The Disquieting Muses,” inspired by an abstract, surrealist painting of that title by de Chirico—“three terrible, faceless dressmakers’ dummies in classical gowns,” as Plath told the BBC, “seated and standing in a weird, clear light.”166 Plath compared the women to Macbeth’s weird sisters, the Three Fates, and de Quincey’s Sisters of Madness. In the poem, the speaker suggests that these sinister muses have haunted her since birth, when her mother failed to invite an “illbred aunt” or “unsightly / Cousin,” who “sent these ladies in her stead.” Her mother has tried to banish the muses—her “witches always, always / Got baked into gingerbread”—but the muses cast their heavy shadows across her life:

  Day now, night now, at head, side, feet,

  They stand their vigil in gowns of stone,

  Faces blank as the day I was born,

  Their shadows long in the setting sun

  That never brightens or goes down.

  And this is the kingdom you bore me to,

  Mother, mother. But no frown of mine

  Will betray the company I keep.

  “The Disquieting Muses” hurt Aurelia deeply. “Oh the way she said it, it broke my heart: ‘Mother, mother.’ Oh it was awful.”167 She thought Plath’s lines about being forced to take piano lessons were particularly galling. In reality, Aurelia claimed, Sylvia had begged to take piano lessons at the New England Conservatory as a child, and Aurelia took on weekend tutoring to pay the tuition. When she confronted Sylvia about the poem, she laughed (“Oh, that,”) and told Aurelia she had been angry at her for making light of her depression at McLean.168

  That spring Hughes was writing some of the best poems of his career, yet he found life in America increasingly hard to bear. He fell ill; Plath wrote that there was “no clear malady, no clear remedy.”169 She described him as “flagging in discontent” in her journal; he told her, “I want to get clear of this life: trapped.”170 He complained to Gerald again that American culture was “anti-mental, anti-solitary-study, anti-thinking for yourself.”171 His dismal spirits affected Sylvia, who now reversed course. “America wears me, wearies me,” she wrote in her journal. “All America seems one line of cars, moving, with people jammed in them, from one-gas-station to one diner and on….I am, in my deep s
oul, happiest on the moors—my deepest soul-scape, in the hills by the Spanish Mediterranean, in the old, history-crusted & still gracious, spacious cities: Paris, Rome.”172 In England, she had longed for America. Now in America, she longed for Europe. Hughes had already decided they would move back to England at the end of their Boston year. “Neither country is fit to live in,” he wrote Daniel Weissbort. “Yet who wants to be an exile.”173 When Sylvia asked Luke Myers, in a 1957 Christmas card, when he was coming back to America, Hughes wrote underneath, “She doesn’t mean ‘will you ever come home,’ she means ‘will we ever get back to Europe.’ Our hope.”174

  Hughes feared the fate Graves had laid out in The White Goddess: “the woman whom he took to be a Muse, or who was a Muse, turns into a domestic woman and would have him turn similarly into a domestic man.”175 By December 1959 he would write to Daniel Huws of Graves’s influence on his new collection: “I was noting the other day which ones had reference to Graves’ White Goddess, and out of 41 pieces there are only about 6 that are not direct representation of her or her victims.”176 He added that his “exile” in America “has driven me to nostalgic themes.” Most of the poems in Lupercal, though set in British landscapes, were written in America; living in Massachusetts had not dulled Hughes’s senses as much as he suggested to others. (Plath would later use the same word—“exile”—to describe her life in England in the early sixties while she was writing The Bell Jar.)

  Jack Sweeney invited Ted to give a poetry reading at Harvard on April 11. He and Sylvia drove through a storm with one broken wiper; as the sleet blurred their vision, each passing car seemed to Sylvia “a possible death.” They arrived nervous and jittery to the deserted “sepulchral” Longfellow Hall on the Radcliffe campus. Soon a steady stream of familiar faces entered—Peter Davison, Mrs. Cantor, Mrs. Prouty, Marcia and Mike Plumer, Phil McCurdy (now married with a baby son), Aurelia (“thin & somehow frail”), and Gordon, whose presence rankled Sylvia. She thought he was “jealous as hell, but noble, in his way, to come.”177 Sylvia also noted the presence of Philip Booth, Harry Levin’s wife (Levin, ill, had sent her in his place) and, “at last,” Adrienne Rich and her husband, the Harvard economist Al Conrad.178 Sweeney introduced Hughes, telling the audience that before he had won the Harper’s contest he had been employed as a night watchman at a steel factory. (There would be no mistaking Hughes for a Cambridge fop.) Hughes read “The Thought-Fox,” “To Paint a Water Lily,” “Acrobats,” and “The Casualty,” among others, while Sylvia felt “the foolish tears” spring to her eyes. She thought the applause had been “warm and genuine,” though Aurelia observed that because there was no microphone, no one beyond the second row could hear him.179

  After the reading, Hughes, Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Al Conrad decamped to the Sweeneys’ apartment, where Plath drank two bourbons on ice and admired original paintings by Picasso, Juan Gris, and Jack Yeats. She described Rich as “little, round & stumpy, all vibrant short black hair, great sparkling black eyes and a tulip-red umbrella: honest, frank forthright & even opinionated.”180 Plath left no record of what she and Rich discussed; the silence suggests Rich impressed her, as Plath was usually unkind to rival poets. She felt ill at ease, almost “feverish” as the bourbon kicked in, and wondered whether her “trusted” lavender tweed dress was gauche.181 Later they headed out to Felicia’s Café on Hanover Street in the Italian North End, where Plath sat between Conrad and Sweeney. Everything seemed a blur until Sweeney asked her to make a recording for Harvard’s Poetry Room in June.182 That got her attention, though she noted ruefully that the date he suggested was Friday the 13th.

  * * *

  ON APRIL 18, at the invitation of Lee Anderson, Plath recorded some of her poems in Springfield, Massachusetts, for the Library of Congress files.183 Plath read with a deliberate, clipped, mid-Atlantic accent, graced with the Kennedy cadences of Boston (“stubborn” is “stubbohn,” “rare” is “raheh”). The recording is the closest thing we have to Plath’s ars poetica, and worth quoting at length. When Anderson asked her what poets she read for pleasure, she answered, without hesitation,

  Yeats, Ted Hughes continually, and Yeats, Eliot, John Crowe Ransom especially. I have started reading Robert Lowell. I like a good deal in Robert Lowell….Shakespeare, Chaucer, who else, Thomas Wyatt, who else, Ted, you know, Hopkins. Let’s see, what others, I think Yeats I like very very much….I learned my first changing in sound—assonance and consonance—from Yeats, which actually is technical. I was very excited when I discovered this. I also read Dylan Thomas a good deal for the subtleties of sound. I’d never worked with anything except rhyme before, and very rigid rhyme, and so I began developing schemes and patterns of sound that were somehow less obvious, you get them through your ear if not through your eye. And I think that I just happened to learn this from Yeats, Thomas too in a way.

  When she taught Yeats, she told Anderson, she finally felt a synthesis between her teaching and writing: “the scalp crawled, the hair stood up,” as she prepared the poems for class. Yeats was “genuine: an anti-type of Eliot, and I do enjoy Eliot, Yeats is lyrical and sharp, clear, rock-cut.” But teaching her favorite poet only reminded her that she was not fulfilling her potential. “The kind of analysis I do with my classes is somehow inimical to the kind of work I do by myself.”

  Anderson asked her if it was “necessary to write in a strict form to get music.” Plath answered:

  I like to work in forms that are strict, and yet the strictness isn’t uncomfortable. Sort of like a comfortable corset or something, I suppose [laughs], that isn’t really noticeable and obvious, but it’s there. There’s some bone, some skeletal structure to the poem. And I think that for me at least I’m very much lyrically inclined, and I lean very strongly toward forms which are, I suppose, quite rigid in comparison certainly to free verse. I’m much happier when I know that all my sounds are echoing in different ways throughout the poem than if I just forget about it.

  After Plath read “On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad,” Anderson asked, “What is your working philosophy?” Plath seemed surprised.

  PLATH: [laughs] My working philosophy? You mean as far as writing poetry goes?

  ANDERSON: Your own.

  PLATH: About what poetry should be?

  ANDERSON: Yes.

  PLATH: Well it’s hard to say. My own poetry technically, as I said, I’d like to be extremely musical and lyrical with a singing sound. I don’t like poetry that just throws itself away in prose. In other words I don’t like poetry that you could, that is bad prose, and I think a lot of poetry is bad prose. I think there should be a kind of constriction, a kind of tension which is never artificial, and yet keeps in the meaning, and a kind of music too. And again, I like the idea of managing to get wit in with seriousness, and contrast, ironies, and I like visual images, and I like just good mouthfuls of sound which have meaning. I think that’s another thing. I don’t like just ramping about in sound but having a very strong meaning come through the first time….But I have really no idea, I haven’t read aloud enough, very few people have read my poems anyway. [laughs] So I have no idea how they affect other people.

  Plath’s self-deprecating remarks suggest that she was unused to being asked about her “working philosophy.” But someone was finally taking her thoughts on poetic composition—especially the important relationship between form and music—seriously. She had come a long way since 1953, when a Mademoiselle photographer had posed her on a sofa with a rose.

  Plath knew she had poems waiting to be unleashed that would put “the neat prosy gray-suited poems of Donald Hall, et. al. [sic]” to shame. Ted knew it, too. He wrote Gerald that May that Sylvia was “one of America’s brightest” poets.184 She was upset that she remained “unrecognized,” despite an acceptance that spring by Ladies’ Home Journal, which took a sonnet, “Second Winter,” that she had written at Smith. The New Yorker rejected her latest submis
sions in April, causing “sobs, sorrow: desire to fight back,” but she was confident that in a year (or two) she would be “ ‘recognized.’ ” She was “all itch & eager fury” to write again, and teaching continued to drain her, despite her new confidence at the lectern.185 She wrote to Warren that her colleagues “depressed” her more than ever: “it is disillusioning to find the people you admired as a student are weak and jealous and petty and vain as people.”186 Academics, she told him, would always treat writers with suspicion. Aurelia, too, needed convincing.

  I can talk to you freely about our plans, if not to mother: she worries so that the most we can do is put up an illusion of security: security to us is in ourselves, & no job, or even money, can give us what we have to develop: faith in our work, & hard hard work which is spartan in many ways. Ted is especially good for me because he doesn’t demand Immediate Success & Publication, and is training me not to. We feel the next five years are as important to our writing as medical school is to a prospective surgeon.187