Like Hughes and Plath, Alvarez was obsessed with D. H. Lawrence; he had even made a pilgrimage to New Mexico to visit Lawrence’s widow Frieda in 1956. He ended up marrying Frieda Lawrence’s granddaughter Ursula Barr that same year, a fact that impressed Sylvia and Ted immensely. Alvarez, who described himself as a “London Jew,” had been trained as a Leavisite but had decided to pursue freelance criticism rather than scholarship; he abandoned his fledgling doctorate at Oxford in 1956 to begin his influential ten-year stint at The Observer.133 He later wrote, “if the young woman I was marrying was to be my Frieda, then I wanted to be her Lawrence, not her Professor Ernest Weekley.”134
Alvarez was not keen on “the Group,” the creative writing group Philip Hobsbaum had once run in Cambridge and now ran in London. “I don’t think I ever went to one of their meetings, which was really an achievement,” Alvarez recalled.135 He thought the most exciting new poetry was coming from America in the form of Lowell’s Life Studies, which he had praised highly in his Observer review of April 1959.136 “I was useful,” he recalled.137 Indeed, Alvarez’s review helped shore up support for Lowell in Britain.138 (Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Bishop in April 1959, “I’ve gotten a rave review from Alvarez in England, so I guess the book won’t be ignored.”)139 The two eventually became friends.140 More than fifty years later, Alvarez still rated Lowell as without question the most important American poet of his era.141
The Group had been moving in a similar aesthetic direction. At their meetings, Edward Lucie-Smith wrote, “Very frank autobiographical poems—the poetry of direct experience—have been frequent.”142 As were dramatic monologues, which members often read aloud. It was the dawn of the 1960s, and a freer aesthetic was in the air. But there were more personal reasons Alvarez was drawn to the new poetics of Lowell and Sexton. “Nineteen sixty was, I suppose, the worst year of my life. My marriage was on the rocks, I was chronically depressed, and I celebrated Christmas by attempting to take my own life,” he wrote in a memoir.143
Alvarez had already pronounced Hughes “a real poet” in his review of The Hawk in the Rain. He praised Lupercal even more highly that March.144 In December, he would single out Lupercal in The Observer as one of the best books of 1960, indeed “the best book of poems to appear for a long time” and “a first true sign of the thaw in the dreary freeze-up of contemporary verse.”145
Alvarez came round to Chalcot Square not long after Frieda’s birth to interview Hughes, who immediately reminded him of Heathcliff: “He was a man who seemed to carry his own climate with him, to create his own atmosphere, and in those days that atmosphere was dark and dangerous.”146 Yet Hughes also seemed to Alvarez “quiet-spoken, shrewd and modest. He was not a man to give himself airs and never came on as a poet. It was not a line of work that would have cut much ice with his neighbours in Yorkshire or Devon and he had no taste for the literary world. But he was utterly sure of his talent.”147 When Alvarez entered the Chalcot Square flat, he had no idea that the woman who greeted him was Sylvia Plath, whose poems he had already published in his newspaper. When Plath—whom he described as “briskly American: bright, clean, competent, like a young woman in a cookery advertisement”—shyly revealed her identity, both were embarrassed. Alvarez thought that his mistake “depressed” her.148 The three forged a tentative alliance that day with ramifications none of them could foresee.
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In early May, Frieda emerged out of her “bleak world of cries, hungers & air bubbles” to give Ted her first smile. Plath’s proofs for The Colossus arrived on May 4, and she lingered over every detail in a letter to Aurelia: “The poems look so beautifully final. The printers-publishers page says: William Heinemann Ltd. London Melbourne Toronto Cape Town Auckland The Hague. c Sylvia Plath 1960 All rights reserved. And of course says For Ted on the dedication page. I can’t get over it.”149
That same evening, Sylvia and Ted dined at T. S. Eliot’s home with Stephen Spender and his wife, Natasha Litvin. Eliot put them “immediately at ease” as they spoke of America and sipped sherry by the coal fire.150 Hughes found him mild, traditional, and impeccably mannered; he wrote to his old teacher John Fisher that Eliot had a habit of looking at the floor while he spoke in “funereal & measured” tones.151 But he could also be “whimsical & pleasant,” Spender “almost congenial.”152 Plath thought Spender “Wonderfully wry & humorous….Talk was intimate gossips about Stravinsky, Auden, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence…I was fascinated. Floated in to dinner, sat between Eliot & Spender, rapturously & got along very well.”153 Hughes was overwhelmed by the gestures of support from the world’s most famous poet. He wrote Olwyn, “I felt to get on so well with him though he’s charitable & tactful & no doubt gives most people the feeling—that I must send him my play then go talk to him about it, as he invited me to.”154
Eliot et al., as their elders, posed no threat, but Plath and Hughes were competitive with their contemporaries. In early 1960, the poet David Wright, who had won a Guinness award that year, turned down Lupercal for the Poetry Book Society choice. Hughes ran into him at the Lamb pub one night in Bloomsbury, where Wright told him he thought his book “too American,” and “oughtn’t to be encouraged.” “This to my face,” Hughes wrote to Luke Myers. “What a dim muddy glow there is lighting this goldfish bowl of the English intelligentsia. Nothing exists for them later than 1948….America—the word itself, pronounced, acts on them like an obscene private joke.”155
Sylvia saw several American friends that spring. Most cherished among them was her old Smith friend Ann Davidow. “I have so missed a good American girlfriend,” she told Aurelia, an oft-repeated sentiment that suggests Sylvia’s relative isolation in London.156 Ann was visiting her fiancé, Leo Goodman, a math professor on a Guggenheim at Clare College, Cambridge. Together the two couples drove out to Stonehenge that May in balmy spring weather and picnicked among the buttercups near the “ominous upright stones.” Sylvia called it an “exquisite day.”157 She also saw her old beau Myron Lotz, who annoyed her, as did Peter Davison and his wife, Sylvia’s Lawrence House peer Jane Truslow, who, like her, had endured a breakdown and shock therapy. Over dinner at an Indian restaurant in Soho, the couples spoke about the BBC, T. S. Eliot, and American friends. Ted, who had seemed so silent in Boston, was now in good humor, telling the Davisons that advertising slogans were much simpler in the North than in London. (“In the North there’s a great sign: ‘Drink Wells Beer. Makes You Drunk.’ ”) Though Sylvia began the evening “very gushy” (“Oh, how in-teresting!”), Jane remembered that as the night wore on, Sylvia became increasingly worried about Frieda, who was back at the flat with a sitter. The two women spoke about “this Great Experience of Motherhood,” and Sylvia extolled the virtues of breastfeeding. “I thought she would bend over backward not to have this coming into the conversation. I was really surprised to find a sort of LaLeche-y League thing going on.” When Sylvia’s milk came in, the four cut the meal short so that Sylvia could get back to Frieda as quickly as possible.158 Sylvia wrote to Aurelia that as they left Jane and Peter on the bus, “he yelled desperately after us: ‘Look for the Hudson Review, I have a long poem coming out in it.’ Pity & shame compelled me from yelling back ‘I have four coming out in it.’ ”159 (Davison would have the last word when, as an editor at Houghton Mifflin, he published Anne Stevenson’s hostile Plath biography Bitter Fame, which was coauthored by Olwyn Hughes and advertised as a “Peter Davison Book.”)
After entertaining the Davisons, Janet Burroway, Ann Davidow, Myron Lotz, and Lee Anderson, Sylvia implored Aurelia not to give out their address to London-bound Americans, “all but Ann a distraction & expense.” Hiring sitters was also expensive, and they decided that Ted would no longer give readings unless he was paid. Now time was truly precious: the new baby and Ted’s growing fame meant that Sylvia’s workload had doubled.
The baby’s feedings & keeping the house clean & cooking & taking care o
f Ted’s voluminous mail plus my own have driven me so I care only for carving out hours where I can start on my own writing….even a modest fame brings flocks of letters, requests, schoolgirls asking for “the author’s own analysis of the symbols in his stories” etc. ad nauseam. If Ted didn’t have his study he’d be distracted by the phone, the mail, & odd callers so he’d get no work done at all. And as his secretary and my own I have a personal reason for being strict. So please help us by not steering anyone our way.160
Exceptions would have to be made for Ted’s family, however. When Edith Hughes finally visited, more than two months after the baby’s birth, Sylvia could sense her storing up every detail for a letter to Aurelia, which she indeed sent: “They both looked very well, Sylvia tall & slim & said she felt fine. She is so efficient handling the baby, no fuss or flurry, just goes quietly on. They both look very comfortable and happy.” Edith noted that the flat was “spotlessly clean. She makes a lovely mother.”161
Ted’s career had “rocketed”—Lupercal sold so well that Faber and Faber did a second printing just two months after the first.162 “My one aim is to keep Ted writing full-time,” Sylvia declared to her mother.163 He had finished a new verse play, The House of Aries, which the BBC’s Third Programme accepted for production in the fall.164 (T. S. Eliot had offered to “read & discuss” any more plays he wrote.)165 Sylvia noted that nothing like the BBC existed in America, and that it had become a lifeline for them; it had paid Ted $3 a minute for various broadcasts since February.166 He had begun a novel about Yorkshire (apparently never finished), which she was convinced would be a success if he were spared the deadening routine of office work. But she expected something for her sacrifice—namely, commercial success that would allow them to buy a London townhouse.
Sylvia knew that they would be worth much more someday, but they needed money now. The $5,000 nest egg in their American bank account was savings for a down payment on a house, to be touched only in an emergency.167 They were “stretching” the Guggenheim—which officially ended on May 31—until September. Ted had even set up a meeting with a rare-book dealer, Ifan Fletcher, to sell some of his manuscripts to Indiana University for $450. Sylvia wanted nothing more than to buy her own house in London, but knew they would not get a mortgage unless Ted had a “ ‘regular job.’ ” “Damn his uncle anyway,” she wrote to Aurelia. She resented Walt Farrar for not helping them with money as her own mother did, and wished Ted “could adopt Maugham as uncle”—likely reflecting on her own financial relationship with Mrs. Prouty.168
When Sylvia saw a charming townhouse for sale around the corner at 41 Fitzroy Road, she began hatching plans. It was £9,500—about $25,900 (roughly $257,000 in 2020 dollars)—which they could just manage with a $5,000 down payment. But Ted was reluctant; the house was expensive, they had no regular income, and he did not want to be tied to a large mortgage at 5 percent interest. Sylvia knew he was right, and her initial elation subsided. She wrote of the house to Aurelia, who she probably hoped would offer financial assistance. But Aurelia was skeptical; at the bottom of Sylvia’s letters, Aurelia calculated the price in dollars, and the interest. “$1295.00 int alone annually,” she wrote.169 Sylvia decided that it was a good time to send a letter to Mrs. Prouty, and instructed Ted to write, too. His ten-page explanation of his poems delighted Prouty, who asked Aurelia, on cue, what they were living on.
Sylvia had a practical solution to their financial dilemma: she would get a job. This was an audacious decision for a breastfeeding mother in 1960. But no bank would give them a mortgage without a steady income. She needed a break from child care and housework, and felt that part-time work might stimulate her writing again as it had in Boston. She enjoyed office life—she liked dressing up, gossiping, observing, and performing practical tasks. Though the set-up likely infuriated Aurelia, it was a progressive arrangement that many husbands of the time would not have sanctioned. Sylvia wrote to the Smith vocational office asking for references and transcripts, and began scanning ads.
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On a hot and humid June 23, the Hugheses traveled to Faber and Faber in Bloomsbury’s Russell Square, where they were ushered inside a high-ceilinged room with long windows that opened out onto a balcony. The evening soiree was in honor of W. H. Auden, who had left Britain for America under a cloud before the war. Now London’s literati offered an apology of sorts. “I drank champagne with the appreciation of a housewife on an evening off from the smell of sour milk and diapers,” Sylvia wrote Aurelia.170 At one point, Charles Monteith called Sylvia over to see Ted, “flanked by TS Eliot, WH Auden, Louis MacNeice on the one hand & Stephen Spender on the other, having his photograph taken.” “ ‘Three generations of Faber poets there,’ Charles observed. ‘Wonderful!’ ” Sylvia added, “Of course I was immensely proud.”171 A Sunday Times photographer took a now-famous photograph of the distinguished lineup, which was captioned “A Pride of Poets.” Plath told the Merwins she thought MacNeice “a bit of a mess, but nice,” Spender “very drunk,” Eliot “amiable.”172 To Dr. Beuscher she was more starstruck over Eliot: “I honestly felt in the presence of a holy being.”173
The poet Ruth Fainlight, who became close to Plath, later wondered how Plath truly felt as she watched her husband assume his place—literally and figuratively—in the twentieth-century British poetic tradition, which was solely male. “And of course you could feel proud, but more importantly and much more onerously, ‘Where do I fit into this? What does this have to do with me?’ ” Fainlight felt that she herself had no poetic role models at the time, and certainly no female poet friends until she met Plath. “Eliot, Yeats, Graves, and Lawrence….It was dispiriting, the fact that there weren’t any women, actually. I mean, Edith Sitwell? No.” She acknowledged that there was Teasdale, Millay, Bishop, and Moore, “but they weren’t as thrilling to me as Lawrence or Yeats.”174 The literary sexism of the time was pervasive. “No matter what one thought, no matter how critical one’s thoughts, it still saturated one, sank in, and was horribly influential.”175
Hughes’s anxieties were different. In his notebook, he revealed his view of the photo shoot:
Auden just inside the door, reptile wrinkles lively warm brown eyes, shortish, thick. Face almost immobile in its heavy wrinkles. Said hello—too much noise etc to comfortably say more and he quickly turned to some new person (which turned out to be Cyril Connolly). Later had photo taken on stairs: spoke with his wife, & Eliot joined. Asked when he did his reading while he worked at Lloyd’s—he said most of it he had done before, but he continued to read for the Criterion articles. I asked if he had more of the landscape poems—no they were all. I said I imagined this was the sort of poem he worked on all the time—no they came to him some time after visiting the places. Spoke of jobs. He has been ill. Herbert Read told someone that Eliot has always been the ill one of the group—from the beginning. Chest trouble—or trouble breathing.176
The photo and the diary entry suggest Hughes’s desire for recognition from an establishment he ostensibly rejected. T. S. Eliot would become Hughes’s main living literary model. When Hughes learned of Eliot’s death in 1965, it affected him deeply: “like a crash over the head, exactly, followed by headache. Heavy after-effects. I’ve so tangled him into my thoughts, as the guru-in-chief & dreamed of him so clearly & unambiguously that this will have consequences for me. At once I felt windswept, unsafe….His being my publisher simply sealed his paternity. How often I’ve thought of going to ask for his blessing—and I would have once if I’d done as much as I could.”177
Sylvia was gratified to see her husband “enshrined between The Great.”178 But with the arrival of her newborn daughter, the prospect of matching Ted’s achievement had diminished. When a reporter at the Faber party asked her about Ted’s Maugham award—“My dear, I’m so pleased your husband won the award. When are you going abroad to celebrate it?”—she answered, “Well, not till the baby can
appreciate Europe a bit better.”179 Horizons were no longer boundless. They had imagined a utopian marriage in which they would both produce from the fiber of their being—and, indeed, after the Faber party, they gave a joint reading at the Institute of Contemporary Art—but their positions were becoming stratified along traditional lines. Jetting off to Italy with a toddler was not an attractive option. Sylvia’s domestic workload was much heavier now, and her letters make clear that Ted’s career took precedence at this time despite her casual mentions of New Yorker acceptances, first-book proofs, and requests for poems from the BBC. Still, Sylvia felt she was lucky. She wrote Aurelia in June that Ted was “wonderful” with Frieda, helped with housework a good deal, “& is strongly behind my having 3-4 hours of writing & study time a day.”180 Other Newnham graduates, such as the authors Claire Tomalin and Jessica Mann, recalled their isolation and hopelessness raising children in the 1950s as they watched their husbands advance professionally. This was a time, Mann noted, when fathers refused to push strollers (“regarded as a symbol of unmanliness”), much less mind their own baby.181 Hughes did so every day.
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