‘The Casualty’, about the body of a shot-down airman in the burnt-out fuselage of his plane, crashed in the English countryside, is quintessential Hughes. It is his first war poem, inspired by a combined memory of the droning warplanes over Mexborough and the RAF bomber on a pre-war training exercise that had run into fog over Mytholmroyd, from the wreck of which he and Gerald had salvaged tubing for their own model planes. This yoking of Mexborough and Mytholmroyd readied him to bring together his own childhood experience of the Second World War and his father’s traumatic survival of the First. In The Hawk in the Rain, he reprinted ‘The Casualty’ as the first of a sequence of war poems that ends the collection. There it is followed by ‘Bayonet Charge’, ‘Griefs for Dead Soldiers’, his finest Great War poem ‘Six Young Men’, ‘Two Wise Generals’ and ‘The Ancient Heroes and the Bomber Pilot’.25
For Plath, it wasn’t the military content of ‘The Casualty’ so much as the violent intensity of its language that bit into her spirit. An image that pierced her especially sharply was that of how the groans of the dying airman ‘rip / The slum of weeds, leaves, barbed coils’. Drunk and dancing in Falcon Yard, she quoted the poem to its author and the ‘rip’ magically went from art to life, as he tore off her headband and earrings. From the outset, there was an electricity between them, a barbed coil of passion within. The latter image carries a hint of barbed wire and all its connotations of violence and the infliction of pain: ‘Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists.’
Sylvia was sexually precocious and unusually adventurous for a Fifties girl. One reason why she was aroused by the hunk and heft, the ‘flash of violent incredible action’, in the poem about man standing up to man which she had read earlier that day, with its punch-up in the street and its cocky ending (‘I did it, I’), is that she had a history of creating rivalry between men. During her final undergraduate months at Smith College the previous year she was coming to the end of a love affair with a gentle boy called Gordon Lameyer even as she was sleeping with a dangerously bohemian Yale student called Richard Sassoon. Over the summer she had a brief but sexually blazing liaison with Peter Davison, a New York editor working at a publishing house in Boston. Coming over to take up her Fulbright, she had a shipboard romance with another scholar aboard the Queen Elizabeth. Since her arrival in Cambridge on 1 October, she had flirted round many boys, made passionate love to Sassoon in Paris during the Christmas vacation and then been rejected by him after a huge row outside the Matisse Chapel near Nice.26 She was ready for something new and big and preferably involving a fight.
After leaving Falcon Yard, she and Hamish stumbled around the foggy streets of Cambridge. She whispered Ted’s name to the lamp-posts. She could not get out of her head how he had said her name, Sylvia, ‘in a blasting wind which shot off in the desert’ behind her eyes and his, and how ‘his poems are clever and terrible and lovely’. Hamish tried to put her off by saying that he was the biggest seducer in Cambridge and that all the St Botolph’s crowd were phoneys.
Then they found themselves surrounded by a group of undergraduates who were also out after college lock-up. The boys, reimagined in her journal as a symbolic group of potential boyfriends (or worshippers), were checking that she was all right, telling her how nice she smelt, asking to kiss her. Then Hamish was hoisting her over the railings into Queens’, his college. A spike pierced her tight skirt, exposing her thighs, and another dug into her hand, creating stigmata that did not bleed because the air was freezing. Then she was lying on the floor of his room by the fire, with him on top of her. She liked his kisses on her mouth and his weight on her body, but she told him that he should scold her for her behaviour at the party. At two-thirty in the morning, he walked her back to Whitstead, the house on the other side of the river, at the far end of the Newnham playing fields, where she lodged with eleven other girls. Though she was pleased that Hamish had proved himself able to fight for her, it was Ted who now consumed her imagination. He entered her life as a rival to Sassoon: ‘The one man since I’ve lived who could blast Richard.’27
Falling in love is often about place and placing yourself. Sylvia needed a proper Cambridge boyfriend in order to prove to herself that she had arrived in England and in English literature. Housemate Jane (‘the blonde one’) was content to go out with other American boys such as Bert. Though Sylvia would not have said no to handsome Luke from the Deep South, she sensed a fatal magnetism pulling her towards the huge man from the north of England. One of the attractions of Sassoon had been that he was collaterally descended from the First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon. One of the attractions of Davison had been that he was a literary publisher with British connections. Now she was on the brink of the thing itself: a great English poet. Her mind was steeped in the language of the English literature that had been her study for years. Her repeated use of the word ‘blast’ when writing about their first encounter and her image of them shouting passionately at each other as if in a high wind reveal where she is going: to a ‘blasted heath’ – the location of the opening of Shakespeare’s most northern play – and more specifically to a Yorkshire moor. She is already, unconsciously, projecting herself as Cathy and Hughes as Heathcliff.
For Ted, thinking over and rewriting these events, again and again through the course of thirty-five years after her death, there was a fatalistic quality from the start. In their myth of themselves, Ted and Sylvia were Heathcliff and Cathy from the first instant, but in reality each of them spent the immediate aftermath of Falcon Yard in the company of another.
Ted had come to Cambridge that weekend to be with Shirley and to make love to her. He never wrote about what they said to each other that night. All she remembers is that she did not speak to Sylvia and that, though Ted was still attentive, she quickly became aware of a deliberate ‘distancing’ on his part. She returned to Falcon Yard the next day to search for an earring lent by a friend. She found the earring but knew that somehow she was losing Ted.
On the Monday, with Ted back at work in London, Sylvia Plath wrote ‘a full-page poem about the dark forces of lust’. Its title was ‘Pursuit’. ‘It is not bad,’ she told herself. ‘It is dedicated to Ted Hughes.’28 It began from a line in Racine’s Phèdre, the play she was studying for the essay she had to write for the Tragedy paper that week: ‘Dans le fond des forêts votre image me suit’ (‘In the depth of the forests your image pursues me’). This was a line that haunted her. She believed that it captured the inextricable relationship between desire and death. It sprang her into a poem that she believed to be her best yet, one which offered ‘a symbol of the terrible beauty of death, and the paradox that the more intensely one lives, the more one burns and consumes oneself’.29
There is a panther stalks me down:
One day I’ll have my death of him;
His greed has set the woods aflame,
He prowls more lordly than the sun.30
Writing about the poem to her mother, Plath acknowledged the strong influence of Blake’s ‘Tyger, tyger’ on its rhythms, its questions and its elemental force. When she first told her mother that she had written it, she acknowledged that it was directly inspired by the encounter in Falcon Yard with ‘the only man I’ve met yet here who’d be strong enough to be equal with’, but whom she would probably never see again.31
What she did not acknowledge, in either her journal or her letters, was that the most direct inspiration behind ‘Pursuit’ was the other poem that Hughes had published in Chequer a few months before: his compact index of everything to follow, ‘The Jaguar’. Ted as panther, animal force, sexual marauder; Sylvia willing her own death of him. In mythologising their relationship from the start, she was in some sense creating the conditions for her own tragedy – and laying the ground for the posthumous dramatisation of her story, his story.
Now she knew what she wanted: ‘a life of conflict, of balancing children, sonnets, love and dirty dishes; and banging banging an affirmation of life out on pianos and ski
slopes and in bed in bed in bed’.32 Ted proceeded in a more circumspect manner. All he said about the party was that ‘it was very bright, and everything got smashed up’.33 He was preoccupied with the approach of the final deadline on the option to take up the cheap passage to Australia.
Two weeks later he was back in Cambridge, staying with Luke. He came up on the bus from Victoria after work on the Friday and late that evening the two of them threw stones at what they thought was Sylvia’s window. Bert told her the next day and she spent the weekend longing to hear the tread of the black panther on the stair, aching with desire for a new life. The boys tried again in the small hours of Sunday morning – mud as well as stones this time – but once again they got the wrong window.34 Sylvia was in a little attic room, which she had tastefully decorated with art books artfully stacked or opened, a tea set of ‘solid black pottery’ and bright pillows on the couch.35 The stones and earth could hardly have reached that high.
The next weekend, conscious that the Easter vacation was upon them, Ted asked Luke to ask Sylvia to come and see him in London. The timing was propitious. She was about to go to Paris, for another make-or-break visit with Sassoon. She called at 18 Rugby Street on the evening of Friday 23 March 1956, prior to her Channel crossing the following day.
8
18 Rugby Street
Rugby Street is in the Holborn district of central London, halfway between the elegant squares around the British Museum where the Bloomsbury Group once lived and the legal and financial district that spreads east and south from Gray’s Inn. Among the local landmarks were the Great Ormond Street children’s hospital, the old Foundling Hospital in Coram Fields, and the Lamb, a pub in Lamb’s Conduit Street much frequented by poets. Rugby Street itself was a Georgian terrace that had seen better days. The freehold was owned by Rugby School and, with rent controls keeping the price of an apartment down to £2 per week, maintenance of the block was not a priority. Some of the houses were occupied by locals whose families had been there for generations. Others were divided into scruffy flats, occupied by bohemian types – graphic designers, actors, photographers, young men and women trying to make their way in what we now call the ‘creative industries’. Number 18, where Ted was living in the flat belonging to Dan Huws’s father, was lit by gas, had a single lavatory in the basement and the only water supply was a tap in a basin on the half-landing.1 To Sylvia, raised on American plumbing and her mother’s cleanliness, it was disgusting. But the occupant held irresistible allure.
She booked into a hotel in New Fetter Lane, the other side of Holborn, then met Ted for the evening. The following Monday morning, she wrote up her memories of the weekend: ‘Arrived in Paris early Saturday evening exhausted from sleepless holocaust night with Ted in London … washed my battered face, smeared with a purple bruise from Ted and my neck raw and wounded too.’2 Love-bites: for Plath, desire was always a purple bruise; for Hughes, poetry was the healing of a wound.
She called it her ‘wild destructive London night’. She was anxious because Hughes’s paunchy friend Michael Boddy had come up the stairs at one point, and he was a gossip, so all Cambridge would soon know ‘that I am Ted’s mistress or something equally absurd’.3 She was also upset that once during their lovemaking he had called her Shirley instead of Sylvia.4 She wanted to see him again, so that she could ‘rip past’ Shirley and prove her capacity to be as ‘tender and wise’ as Shirley was, while also being a better, fuller, wilder, more extreme lover. Regardless of Boddy’s gossip, she wanted Ted’s body and it was inextricable from his poetry: ‘I lust for him, and in my mind I am ripped to bits by the words he welds and wields.’5
Ted shaped the night retrospectively, in a poem that he worked on for many years. It is a central pillar of Birthday Letters, though he nearly left it out, because it was too raw and was indiscreet in mentioning a third party who would enter their story later but whose posthumous privacy he wished to preserve. He begins by mythologising the house: as so often in his work, location is given symbolic force. ‘18 Rugby Street’ is imagined as a stage-set and a Cretan labyrinth. Each of the four floors was the scene of the love-struggle of its inhabitant: a car-dealer who shared the basement with a caged bird and a mistress, a lovelorn Belgian girl (elsewhere he wrote that she was German) trapped in the ground-floor flat with a manic barking Alsatian which protected her from everything except her own oven in which she would one day gas herself.
His memories of the night were of waiting at his battered carpenter’s bench that was both dining-table and work-desk; of Sylvia’s breathless voice as she panted up the uncarpeted stairs with Luke (he could not remember how and when Luke excused himself and disappeared); of his sense of Sylvia as a great blue bird charged at high voltage, ‘Fluorescent cobalt, a flare of aura’. He would always associate her with electricity, the positive pole being her innate energy and sex appeal, the negative that emotional volatility that took her to the darkest places and then the temporary cure that came from electro-convulsive therapy. Ted saw vulnerability in the temples above her bright brown and somewhat hooded eyes. In the theatre of her face, those temples were at first sight upstaged by her glamorous and fashionable bangs, but with knowledge of her history they elicited special tenderness because this was the place where the electrodes had been attached. The reference to her temples also evokes a place of worship, befitting this pagan goddess coming, with ‘Sexual Dreams’, from another world.
She recited the poem about the black panther that she had written for him. As she did so, he held her and kissed her and tried to keep her still. His poem then jump-cuts to their walk back to her hotel in New Fetter Lane. Opposite the entrance, there was a wartime bombsite on which some building work was being started. It was there that they ‘clutched each other giddily’ and took the plunge. She told him of the reason for her scar: her suicide attempt. In the poem of his memory, even as he is kissing her a part of him is sensing the danger and telling him to stay away. Something is being built, but there is also a bomb liable to explode. Somehow, she smuggled him into the hotel and they made love, her body ‘slim and lithe and smooth as a fish’. For the first time in his life, he is making love to a girl who is not English, a girl who embodies the energy and hope of Shakespeare’s ‘brave new world’, John Donne’s ‘my America, my newfound land’. ‘Beautiful, beautiful America’ has taken possession of him.6
Walking back to his flat at first light, he had an epiphany. His fullest account of that hour is excluded from ‘18 Rugby Street’ but included in a version of Birthday Letters that he never published, a 4,000-line blank-verse autobiography of his relationship with Sylvia called ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’. It was his equivalent of William Wordsworth’s posthumously published autobiographical blank-verse epic, The Prelude. He tells of how he left her hotel and walked back across Holborn to his flat at about five o’clock in the morning. He felt himself ‘floating / On air spilling in over the city / Off the Surrey gardens and orchards’. Then he heard ‘London’s hidden blackbirds and thrushes’, ‘a million singers’, singing a blessing upon the ‘sleeping millions’. It was like ‘a high tide at dawn, the top of the tide, / Their dawn chorus awash through the whole city’. Meanwhile, his totemic birds, the crows, accompanied him at ground level.7
Like every young romantic after such an encounter, he is walking on air, every one of his senses refined, every detail of the moment etched in his memory for ever.
Back in Rugby Street, he penned a short letter and sent it for Sylvia to pick up at the American Express office in Paris. It had been a night, he wrote, consumed by the discovery of the smoothness of her body. The memory of it went through him with the warming glow of brandy.8 This could be described as his first ‘birthday letter’: the letter of the birth of their love. He asked her to come back to him, telling her that he would be in London till 14 April, and that if she did not come to him he would go to her in Cambridge.
In Paris, Sylvia poured her confusion into her diary. From one point of view, Te
d was a diversion. She had got drunk at Falcon Yard and kissed (and bitten) him. She had got drunk in London and slept with him. That was that. Now it was time to give herself to Richard Sassoon, of whom she had written – after meeting Ted – ‘I love that damn boy with all I’ve ever had in me and that’s a hell of a lot.’9 But on arriving in Paris, she discovered that Sassoon had gone south in order to avoid a confrontation with her. He needed time to make up his mind as to whether their long, passionate on–off relationship should turn to marriage or be finally ended. She was devastated. She had always been used to getting her own way with men: ‘never before had a man gone off to leave me to cry after’.10 She sat in the living room of the concierge of his apartment building on the rue Duvivier and wrote him a long, incoherent letter while the radio blared out ‘Smile though your heart is breaking’.
Then she made a bad error. She wrote again to Sassoon, telling him about Ted. As Sassoon put it, she ‘was going to start having an affair with a certain fellow so as to make me jealous and give me a mind to marry her, which I was unwilling to do just because of this imminent unfaithfulness’.11 She cheered herself up with sightseeing and an afternoon in a hotel room with an Oxford student called Tony Gray. She juggled her options in her diary. To play it cool and wait for Ted to come to her? To go to him, for one night only, then go back to Sassoon? To play safe and marry her devoted friend Gordon Lameyer? Or even to join Ted in one of his hare-brained schemes, such as teaching English in Yugoslavia?
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