Red Comet
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Whatever happened that night, the two women resented each other deeply; Olwyn later called Sylvia “straight poison,” “a monster,” “hurtful and bloody rude,” and “a complete bitch.”8 These two confident, literary, and cosmopolitan women might have been natural allies. Olwyn graduated with a 2.2 degree (cum laude) in English literature from Queen Mary College, London, in 1950, and then worked in Paris as a secretary at the British embassy and the Martonplay literary agency. In Paris, as Hughes’s biographer Jonathan Bate wrote, “She was having the time of her life, with French food and wine, freedom and boyfriends.”9 This was the kind of life Sylvia, too, had once dreamed about. But their similarities, and their love of Ted, pushed them toward rivalry. The cramped quarters at the Beacon could not have helped family harmony, and Olwyn may have sniffed out Sylvia’s snobbishness toward Edith. (Sylvia and Ted would stay in a separate cottage next door during a future visit.) The two women, as Sylvia predicted, would never meet again, though they would exchange a few friendly letters.10 In fact they met on only six occasions while Plath was alive; Olwyn admitted in 1976, “I really didn’t know her well at all.”11 Yet as Hughes’s literary agent, Olwyn would effectively control Plath’s copyright, and story, for almost four decades.
Ted could have tried to broker a peace between the two women, as he did in the summer of 1957, but he chose to leave the Beacon with his wife without saying goodbye. He told Sylvia Olwyn’s “outburst derived from an idiotic jealousy.”12 In his diary on January 3, 1961, he wrote, “Olwyn’s attack on Sylvia, like her attack on Joan. In the animal world the attacker always wins.”13 He tried to comfort Olwyn, too. “Don’t get too depressed about Xmas—we feel how we feel, apparently,” he wrote her on January 10. But he defended his wife; he didn’t agree that Sylvia had been “crusading.”14
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After the drama at the Beacon, Sylvia and Ted welcomed the clean slate of the new year. “Last year was a sort of death-march, except for Frieda,” Ted wrote Luke Myers in January. He had written “nothing,” been plagued by “exhaustions, nervous tics” and nightmares about being trapped inside “falling houses”—“the classical dream of the breakdown.” Sylvia, too, had “been going through a poor time, with bouts of flu…& sundry malicious planetary foistings.”15 Back in their warm flat, life seemed more bearable. They were on good terms with the Merwins again—Bill had secured them more reviewing for The Nation—and Sylvia described them to Aurelia as “really the nicest people we know here.”16 Meanwhile, Hughes’s old Pembroke friend Brian Cox, now running Critical Quarterly with Tony Dyson, asked Plath to select and edit a supplement of American verse for the magazine.17 She was delighted by the invitation and began planning her selection. She finally found a temporary part-time afternoon job doing copyediting and layout work at The Bookseller—work she enjoyed so much that she thought about becoming an editor when her children were school age. She hoped that the extra money would help them through “this bare time between grants.”18 Although she tried to write as much as possible while tending to the baby, it was difficult to find consecutive hours in which to concentrate. She was determined not to be an overindulgent mother, for her own sake as much as Frieda’s. “I want her to be a self-sufficient creature who can read or color or play with toys while I work nearby,” she told Aurelia, “none of this holding her on the lap all day as Mrs. Hughes did which was nearly the ruin of her.”19
Their social lives grew busier. Early in the year, they met the critic M. L. Rosenthal, poetry editor of The Nation (he had recommended that Macmillan publish The Colossus, which he thought “very good”). The first time they met, Sylvia seemed quiet, in the background, “effaced by her very powerful husband….It was he who did all the talking….One would never have guessed the power behind that rather overpolite façade.” She struck him as “Very American, very well-scrubbed.” Rosenthal remembered meeting the Hugheses again at a dinner party at Alvarez’s house in June 1961. He, Hughes, and Alvarez initially did most of the talking, but Plath “brightened up” when Rosenthal began speaking about his ideas regarding “Confessional” poetry. “She remarked on studying with Lowell, knowing Sexton, the openings for her own verse that their examples had provided.” She spoke about Life Studies. “She was terribly interested in Lowell but characteristically she didn’t say anything about him personally. What she was interested in and what she talked about quite a lot was the question of putting yourself right into the poem. And the problem of aestheticizing it, of transcending the material, of getting beyond the personal. We agreed about that: it could be done, it had to be done, it wasn’t worth it unless you get past the personal.” (By this time, Rosenthal had coined the term “Confessional poetry,” with which Plath’s name would be forever linked.)20 He also remembered Sylvia’s telling him about her shared child-minding arrangement with Ted, which he felt was “certainly unusual for that time and indicated an unusual flexibility in Ted…or an unusual will in Sylvia.”21
Eleanor Ross Taylor and her husband, Peter, both American writers close to Robert Lowell, invited Plath and Hughes to dinner at their Kensington Gate home that January. Thom Gunn came for lunch early in the month while he was traveling through London on his Somerset Maugham Award. Plath called him “a rare, unaffected & kind young chap.”22 He was Hughes’s Cambridge contemporary (Faber and Faber would publish a joint anthology of their work in 1962). But Plath was more excited to finally meet Theodore Roethke, whom she called “my Influence,” at a party on February 1.23 (Ted had given her Roethke’s Words for the Wind for Christmas.) Roethke told Hughes to “give him a nod” if he ever wanted to teach at the University of Washington, and Plath soon began planning “another American year.”24 Hughes was probably less excited about such a plan. The Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y—the cosponsors of the first book prize Hughes had won—asked Plath that spring to give a reading in New York. The opportunity for literary parity with her husband appealed to her, and she hoped to accept at a later date.25
Such parity was beginning to seem within her reach. On January 18, Plath and Hughes recorded Two of a Kind: Poets in Partnership on the BBC (it was broadcast on January 31).26 The program offered a fascinating account of their shared creative life, and suggests that Plath was becoming better known. Still, an internal BBC memo hinted that Hughes was the main draw: “What do we have on his wife?” someone wrote in the margin of Hughes’s letter confirming that he and Plath would record the program.27 The previous July, after Plath had sent the poet and BBC producer George MacBeth some of her poems, he told Anthony Thwaite she was “like her husband on an ordinary day”—that her best poems only matched Hughes’s average ones.28
Hughes spoke in broad Yorkshire cadences tempered by Cambridge while Plath, with her mid-Atlantic accent, sounded like Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story. Old American friends would be astonished by this voice when they heard recordings of Plath reading her work. This affected accent was perhaps a new strategy in the old struggle to transcend her class. When the program’s host, Owen Leeming, asked her about her background, she mentioned that she was born in Boston but was “in England to stay now.” The transformation from Smith girl to wry British poet was nearly complete.
Leeming was fascinated by this marriage. Did they need to write separately or together? How did they influence each other? Plath’s and Hughes’s answers were ambiguous, sometimes conflicting, and suggest a difficult balancing act. They presented a united aesthetic front and campaigned for a new direction in British poetry, yet they took pains not to present themselves as collaborators. When Leeming asked them whether their temperaments were “parallel or in conflict,” Hughes answered, “I think superficially we’re very alike…we live at the same tempo, have the same sort of rhythm in every sort of way, but obviously this is a very fortunate covering for temperaments that are extremely different but that lead secret lives, you see. They content themselves in an imaginative world so they never re
ally come into open conflict.” Plath averred that she was “much more distractable” and needed to separate from Hughes, who could write anywhere. Hughes seemed more at ease with this line of questioning than Plath:
Apart from the experiences of your own life and my experiences of my life, I also have in a way Sylvia’s experiences of hers, and all the experiences she’s had in the past….and in this way, two people who are sympathetic to each other…who are compatible in this sort of spiritual way, they in fact make up one person, they make up one source of power which you both use and you can draw out material in incredible detail from this single shared mind. And I’m sure that this is certainly a source of a great deal in my poetry. I don’t know whether it works the other way around. I suspect it does.
“It’s a very hard thing to put into words, isn’t it,” Leeming said. “Yes,” Hughes answered. “It’s a complicated idea to get across because you first of all have to believe that this sort of telepathic union exists between two sympathetic people, which of course a lot of people don’t believe.” Hughes would always believe that Plath had access to his unconscious. He later suggested it was no coincidence that they had written about similar themes in The Bell Jar and the Bardo Thodol while they were both working in Bill Merwin’s study during the spring of 1961: “for about three months we were both every day soaking our heads in the same death and expiation and rebirth myth, in the same cubic yard of space, she in the mornings, me in the afternoons.”29
Plath told Leeming she was more “practical” about mutual influence. Ted’s interest in animals had made her think more about her father’s interest in bees; as a result, she said, “the image of beekeeping has become part of my poems. And I think this is a direct result of knowing Ted. I somehow know more about my own past through him than I would otherwise. But I’m also influenced by art, by paintings and sculpture….A lot of my poems describe paintings and take off from a visual image.”
Leeming pressed on: “Don’t you find, the two of you, that being married, being in close contact like you are, and also having a basic similarity of approach, that there’s a great danger that your poetry will tend to almost collapse, the one into the other?” Plath protested, dropping her accent and sounding much more American. “I’ve always thought that our subject matter in particular and the form in which we write—the forms—are really quite, quite different, and I’d be interested to know where they coincide.” Leeming countered, “I don’t think they’re as different as all that.” He noted their “technical trick of vigor,” similar subjects (animals, rural landscapes), their frequent use of enjambment. Plath, clearly agitated, responded that this was true of their poems before they knew each other, not “a result” of their meeting. They were “writing for ten years” before they had ever heard of each other: the “toughness and knottiness that we both admire is something again we’ve always admired and perhaps that’s why we met in the first place.”
Hughes was more inclined to agree with Leeming. “I think it’s something we share with several other writers too, several other people writing now.” Plath conceded that they shared a “distaste for slack lyrical quality or floweriness,” as did all their young poet friends. But they reminded Leeming that they treated similar subjects differently, as in Plath’s “Sow” and Hughes’s “View of a Pig.” Plath laughed nervously as Hughes explained how his poem “was the complete reversal of Sylvia’s theme.”
Plath was breaking new ground in her marriage, yet Poets in Partnership revealed fissures of unease. Her literary ambitions and identity could have easily “collapsed” under the weight of Hughes’s fame. In 1961, married mothers’ artistic outlets did not extend much further than the church choir or the watercolor class. But Plath was determined to keep writing in the face of conservative societal expectations. Hughes allowed her that space; he believed that “she was a genius.”30 When Plath told Leeming, “I’d never be writing as I am and as much as I am without Ted’s understanding and cooperation,” she was expressing gratitude for what was in 1961—six years before abortion was legalized in Britain—a progressive marriage. Plath declined to add that Hughes probably wouldn’t be writing “as much” without her “cooperation,” for she brought a professional know-how to the creative marriage. She knew how to get published; Hughes did not. It was Plath, in her role as Hughes’s agent, who jump-started his career. They were both, equally, in each other’s debt.
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IN FEBRUARY, Anne Sexton sent Plath To Bedlam and Part Way Back. Plath’s response was flattering but brief. She seemed, already, to sense that Sexton would become for her what Thom Gunn was for Hughes. Plath thought it “terrific” to have her “favorites back again together with the newer ones you were doing when I left (‘Elegy in the Classroom’ among them!).” She thanked Sexton for her encouraging words about The Colossus, which she had sent to her. She and Ted were aware of “great burbles of success from Boston,” which included a third book and a Guggenheim for Adrienne Rich. (Sylvia would hear in March from Dido that Robert Lowell had been hospitalized for mania—“interned again.”)31 Sylvia made sure to include her own “burbles”: they were thriving in London; Frieda made them want to “found a dynasty”; they socialized with Spender, MacNeice, Auden, Gunn, Roethke, and Eliot. She wrote, “We thrive so in London we’ll probably stay forever & my children will no doubt talk back to me with clipped Oxford accents till I knock their jaws into proper shape for the old broad A.”32
Ted now had so much regular BBC work, Sylvia told Aurelia, that he earned as much as he would at a nine-to-five job. She was probably exaggerating, but the extra income had come just in time. Nicholas Farrar or Megan Emily (Emily for Otto’s middle name, Emil, as well as Brontë and Dickinson) was due on August 17, Ted’s birthday. Sylvia asked Aurelia to come over for the birth. “Oh, how I look forward to your coming! My heart lifts now that the year swings toward it.”33 With a second child on the way, she was even more determined to buy a London townhouse.
But Sylvia miscarried on February 6. “I lost the little baby this morning & feel really terrible about it,” she wrote to her mother. She estimated that she had been four months along. Ted tried to distract her with poems to type; work, he felt, was “a good cure for brooding.” Sylvia knew miscarriages were common, and her “lady” doctor assured her she would have another healthy pregnancy. “I am in the best of hands, although I am extremely unhappy about the whole thing,” she wrote Aurelia. She tried to move on, though they postponed their Italy trip until the fall. (In the meantime, they had applied for money from a Royal Literary Fund set up for “distressed authors” in financial hardship.) She told Aurelia to tell Mrs. Prouty about the miscarriage “in a casual way”: “I always make it a point to sound cheerful & wanting for nothing when I write her.”34
Sylvia was soon back to her daily routine, walking Frieda in the park—the weather was unusually sunny that February—reading The New Yorker, enjoying the theater and cinema. But she was bereaved and anxious; she dreaded an impending appendectomy at month’s end, and later wondered whether her bad appendix, which had been troubling her for months, was to blame for the miscarriage. And there was something else, an allegation she kept to herself until the fall of 1962.
In January, Hughes had written to Moira Doolan, the head of Schools Broadcasting at the BBC, with a proposal for a new radio series aimed at schoolchildren.35 Doolan was intrigued, and she called the Chalcot Square flat to arrange a lunch meeting with Hughes in early February. Sylvia answered the phone and was allegedly surprised to hear an Irishwoman’s voice. When Hughes returned, according to him, “1/4 hour late” from his lunch with Doolan, he found Plath furious. In 1974, Hughes told Frances McCullough, who edited Plath’s abridged journals, that Plath “had torn up all his writing into strips, his writing and his notes.” He said this was one of the times when he had seen Sylvia’s “rages,” her “demonic side, destructive, like ‘black electricity.’ ” Immediately after h
e told the story, he admitted, as McCullough recorded in her notes, that “he used to try slapping her out of her rages, but it was no good. And once she turned into his slap and got a black eye, and went to the doctor and told him Ted beat her regularly. But then as it began to heal, she decided it looked dramatic, and began to mascara the other eye to match.”36
Seamus Heaney unkindly described Moira Doolan as middle-aged and “dumpy,” and could not understand Plath’s jealousy.37 Yet Doolan was, according to Jonathan Bate, “a powerhouse of ideas at the BBC in the early sixties.”38 Suddenly, Hughes was on the cusp of an important relationship with a powerful female collaborator and patron. The meeting came at a time when Plath, among the most highly educated women of her generation, was knee-deep in laundry, dishes, and dirty diapers. As she had told Leeming in the Poets in Partnership interview, she spent her days on “shopping, dishes, and taking care of the baby and so forth. I think very few people have an idea I do anything at all except household chores.”39 Ted, she told the Merwins, was “relatively impervious” to the “innumerable little umbilical cords” that tied her to “icebox, phone, doorbell, baby and so on.”40
With time, Plath had a different story to tell. On September 22, 1962, about three weeks before Hughes left her for good, and in the midst of a volatile separation, she would write to Dr. Beuscher,
Ted beat me up physically a couple of days before my miscarriage: the baby I lost was due to be born on his birthday. I thought this an aberration, & felt I had given him some cause, I had torn some of his papers in half, so they could be taped together, not lost, in a fury that he made me a couple of hours late to work at one of the several jobs I’ve had to eke out our income when things got tight—he was to mind Frieda. But now I feel the role of father terrifies him. He tells me now it was weakness that made him unable to tell me he did not want children, and that his joyous planning with me of the names of our next two was out of cowardice as well. Well bloody hell, I’ve got twenty years to take the responsibility of this cowardice.41