In the latter part of the Easter vacation, she travelled with Lameyer to Munich, Venice and Rome. Their relationship was disintegrating. Sassoon was giving no sign of returning. On Friday 13 April, her late father’s birthday, Sylvia Plath boarded a plane in Rome, the ticket paid for by Lameyer. She had told Ted to expect her that night. In her possession was a prize: he had written her a poem. Though the first line read ‘Ridiculous to call it love’, it revealed that she had touched him to the quick, that he felt her absence as if it were a wound, that without her he was like a dying man, that ‘Wherever you haunt earth, you are shaped and bright / As the true ghost of my loss.’12 Even if this was a jeu d’esprit, a little act of seduction intended to bring her back to his bed for a second time, it is still an uncanny anticipation of the future haunting that would determine the course of his later life.
Sylvia wrote about their second night together in her incomplete novel ‘Falcon Yard’. In the surviving draft, Ted is called Gerald – hardly a disguise – but her ‘Character Notebook’ for the novel calls him Leonard, a ‘God-man, because spermy’, a creator, ‘Dionysiac’, a Pan who has to be led into the mundane world of ‘toast and nappies’.13 ‘What I need’, she writes in the voice of Jess, the autobiographical protagonist, is ‘a banging, blasting, ferocious love’. But a voice tells her that it will hurt. Her counter-voice replies, ‘So what … better bleed.’ She needs to stop being ‘the Girl Who’s Never Been Hurt’. She tells herself to get hurt and be glad of it, to take his desire ‘even though he’ll never love you but will use you and lunge on through you to the next one’. She determines to ‘blast his other girls to hell and back’. After an encounter with another man on the bus from the airport, Jess heads for Rugby Street, ‘blazing’, ‘letting the wet wind blow her hair back’, only too glad to look wild because ‘The recklessness came banging up in her: stronger and fiercer than she had ever known it’. She is greeted by the Ted character – his name now changed from Gerald to Ian – who observes that it is Friday the 13th as he takes her suitcase upstairs.
His voice, she notices this time, is ‘UnBritish’, almost ‘Refugee Pole, mixed with something of Dylan Thomas: rich and mellow-noted: half sung’. They exchange small talk with Jim, the commercial artist from the flat upstairs – this is Jim Downer, with whom Ted was working at this time on an illustrated children’s book called Timmy the Tug. The Sylvia character is pleased to be called ‘Jess, not Judy’, an allusion to the wound of Ted having called her Shirley not Sylvia when they were first making love back in March. Then he tells his dreams of white leopard, burnt fox and pike. He kisses her on the throat, loving the incredible smoothness – fish- or mermaid-like – of her skin. They openly discuss the violence of the first time:
‘I went to Paris all scarred. Black and blue …’
‘But you liked it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I was furious with myself. I don’t know what happened to me …’
She has it out with him about the wrong name being blurted out. He defuses the tension with an account of that moment of morning grace when he left her, the Wordsworthian epiphany that would be recaptured years later in ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’: ‘I’ll never forget it. When I came out into the streets, the air was all blue, like blue water, and the buildings were covered, just thick, with thrushes. Everything clear and blue. Not a sound. The air isn’t like that in London at any other time.’
Then they read poetry to each other. First, her ‘Conversation among the Ruins’. ‘You love one-syllabled words, don’t you?’ he says, setting the template for their relationship by mingling literary criticism with love-talk, ‘Squab, patch, crack. Violent.’ She replies that she hates the abstraction of ‘-ation’ words: ‘I like words to sound what they say: bang crash. Not mince along in singsong iambic pentameter.’ He responds by reading an old English ballad and his voice reaches to the core of her being: ‘The way he took words, rounded, pitched them. It was holy. I will learn this by heart, she told herself … part of her vibrating to the sound of his voice. I will learn it, and hear his voice every time, reading it.’ She convinces herself that she will never forget the sound of his voice or a single syllable of the verse that passes his lips. Her bare arms ‘go stippled with goose flesh’, he tells her the poem is ‘an altar to spill blood at’, and the surviving fragment breaks off before they go to bed.14
‘I can make more love the more I make love,’ he said to her. ‘The more he writes poems, the more he writes poems,’ she was soon reporting to her mother.15 Three days after the night in Rugby Street, Sylvia wrote in her diary of ‘his big iron violent virile body, incredible tendernesses and rich voice which makes poems and quirked people and music’. He is a ‘huge derrick-striding Ted’. He makes her feel safe but he makes her feel scared:
Consider yourself lucky to have been stabbed by him; never complain or be bitter or ask for more than normal human consideration as an integrated being. Let him go. Have the guts. Make him happy: cook, play, read … keep other cups and flagons full – never accuse or nag – let him run, reap, rip – and glory in the temporary sun of his ruthless force.16
With Sylvia back in Cambridge for the summer term, Ted’ s problem was Shirley. His relationship with her came to a bitter end in an encounter that he recorded in several drafts of a poem that, sensitive to her privacy, he never published. It tells of how he turned up in Cambridge with a bottle of wine and two pounds of rump steak intended for a ‘love-feast’ with Sylvia at Whitstead. He went the long way round so as not to be seen outside Newnham College, only to turn the corner and see Shirley coming for him like ‘an electrical storm’, beautiful in her red-haired anger. He hid the wine and the parcel of meat in a privet hedge. He never forgot the pain of their exchange. He remembered her ‘furious restraint’ and ‘her outraged under-whisper’. He ‘refused’ her and his memory is that as he did so he thrice denied that he had slept with Sylvia, even though he was only 50 yards from her door. The triple denial is an allusion to the disciple Peter denying his knowledge of Jesus; Shirley’s memory, by contrast, is that Ted had always been true to himself and honest with her during their affair, and he was candid with her in their parting.
In Ted’s colourful dramatisation of their blazing row, the wine bottle (‘uncontrollable, bulbous / Priapic’) rolls on to the pavement between them. It is as if even the world’s inanimate objects are on the side of his new love. Shirley’s green eyes fill with tears and she walks away across Newnham playing fields. He stands and watches her walk out of his life. It was as if she had turned not to the playing fields but the other way, into the road, ‘And gone under a lorry’.17 He never saw her again.
With the help of friends, she struggled through her last term at Cambridge and her final exams. She knew that nothing could change what had happened, but confronting her loss, accepting it, she found almost impossible. Ted had a deep and lasting impact on her life.
Both now free from serious relationships that might have led to marriage, Ted and Sylvia became inseparable. For much of the Easter term, he camped out on a mattress in a bare-boarded room on the top floor of Alexandra House, a soup-kitchen run by the Women’s Voluntary Service just off Petty Cury. He found himself sharing a blanket with one of the volunteers, ‘a lovely girl escaped freshly / From her husband’. For a month, they slept nightly in each other’s arms, naked but never once making love. She tenderly traced her hands over the love-scratches that Sylvia had ‘inscribed’ across his back, while he ‘never stirred a finger beyond/ Sisterly comforting’. Sometimes they were joined in the bed by a ‘plump and pretty’ friend of hers, who ‘did all she could’ to get Ted ‘inside her’ – without success.18 Like a medieval knight lying between two naked temptresses, he was proving himself in the art of fidelity. He did not fail.
Cambridge is at its loveliest in the Easter term. According to Jane Baltzell, Sylvia’s rival and housemate, one warm day Ted and Luke sat in a haystack in a field just outside town, drinking wine and making litera
ry plans. Ted then walked to Whitstead with another bottle of wine, intending to share some of their dreams with Sylvia. She did not have a corkscrew, so Ted went down from her attic room to borrow one. The first door on which he knocked happened to be that of the resident don whose job it was to keep an eye on the Whitstead girls. Baltzell’s version of the incident has the door opening and a face, ‘framed in tight braids of dark hair’, peering out. Ted asks if she has a corkscrew that he can borrow. Almost before she can reply that she ‘most certainly has not’ – she happened to be a teetotal Methodist – Ted loses patience, strikes ‘the neck of the bottle off on her doorknob’ and bolts back upstairs.19 One never knows quite how much embellishment there is in the telling of such myth-making tales about Ted: Luke Myers was convinced that this story was pure invention, probably on the part of Sylvia.20
The lovers listened to Beethoven and Bartók in record shops. They went into the moonlight to find owls, and Sylvia immediately composed a poem called ‘Metamorphosis’. They were both writing at an unprecedented rate, Sylvia being inspired by Ted to take on ‘the vocabulary of woods and animals and earth’ and creating poems for him in pastiche of his own style, such as an ‘Ode for Ted’ that begins:
From under crunch of my man’s boot
green oat-sprouts jut;
he names a lapwing, starts rabbits in a rout …
stalks red fox, shrewd stoat.21
They wandered the meadows around Grantchester, made love in the open air. Having at last found a man who loved food as much as she did, Sylvia cooked steak and trout on her single gas ring. Ted taught her – as he had once taught Shirley – how to cook herring roes and how to read horoscopes. He took her to ‘the world’s biggest circus’.22 They shared improvised recipes:
He stalked in the door yesterday with a packet of little pink shrimp and four fresh trout. I made a nectar of Shrimp Newburg with essence of butter, cream, sherry and cheese; had it on rice with the trout. It took us three hours to peel all the little tiny shrimp, and Ted just lay groaning by the hearth after the meal with utter delight, like a huge Goliath.23
They read and wrote and revised their poems in the garden of Whitstead, quoting swathes of Dylan Thomas and Shakespeare that Ted knew by heart. Each immediately became the other’s best critic. He sharpened her style, made her feel she was writing from her truest and deepest self for the first time. She organised his poems, typed them up and began sending them to American periodicals. He taught her to punt on the Cam. She took him to a Fulbright reception in London, where they met the American ambassador and the dashing Duke of Edinburgh who, mistaking Ted for a student, asked him what he was doing, to which Ted replied that he was ‘chaperoning Sylvia’ and the Duke smiled and said, ‘Ah, the idle rich.’24
She told of all this in effusive letters to her mother Aurelia. Otto Plath had died shortly after Sylvia’s eighth birthday. He had gone to have his leg amputated as a result of gangrene, and died of an embolism while still in hospital. On being told the news, Sylvia had announced that she would never speak to God again. Mother and daughter were inevitably drawn intensely close by their loss. When Sylvia moved to England, her letters were a lifeline to her mother. She also kept in touch with her brother Warren, who was two and a half years younger than her. Ted, she wrote to tell him, was the one man worthy of becoming his brother-in-law, though he would benefit from Warren giving him some American-style training in how to buy himself a decent wardrobe.
Her Fulbright scholarship having been renewed for a second year, she arranged for her mother to visit England at the end of term. Aurelia arrived in London on Wednesday 13 June and the three of them went to a cheap but good German restaurant called Schmidt’s, in honour of the Teutonic Plathian heritage. Sylvia was delighted that her mother and lover immediately hit it off. That night, Sylvia suggested to Ted that they should get married and he agreed.25
They rushed to make arrangements before Aurelia left town. This involved getting a special Archbishop’s licence, tracking down a local vicar, buying new shoes and trousers for Ted, and spending the last of their money on gold wedding rings. The night before the wedding Ted dreamed that he had caught a pike from an enormous depth in the pond at Crookhill. As it rose to the surface, its head filled the entire lake. He backed away, straining to control it.26
By good fortune, Aurelia had in her luggage a pink wool knitted suit dress that she had never worn. Adorned with a pink hair ribbon and a pink rose from Ted, this served as a wedding dress. The hurried ceremony, conducted by a twinkle-eyed old clergyman who lived opposite Charles Dickens’s house, took place at the church of St George the Martyr in Bloomsbury, just across the square from the offices of Faber and Faber, on 16 June 1956 (‘Bloomsday’, Ted noted – the date of the action of James Joyce’s Ulysses). Ted wore his RAF tie and the corduroy jacket that he had three times dyed black. It rained. Aurelia was the only guest, so the curate was requisitioned as best man, delaying him from taking a busload of children to the zoo. ‘All the prison animals had to be patient / While we married,’ wrote Ted in Birthday Letters, where he turned the curate into a sexton, grimly foreshadowing Hamlet’s macabre dialogue over Ophelia’s grave. The vicar read an off-the-shelf printed marriage sermon entitled ‘Unto Your Lives’ End’.27 Sylvia’s eyes were like jewels, their brown glistening with tears of joy.28
Ted had told Olwyn that he had met a first-rate American female poet, ‘a damned sight better than the run of good male’, and that they were going to come to Paris in the summer.29 But he didn’t tell anyone in his family about the decision to marry. Sylvia, by contrast, poured out every detail in an ecstatic letter to her brother Warren. She explained that, because of the Newnham and Fulbright authorities, and the fact that Ted was probably about to go to Spain to get a job teaching English, the big wedding reception would be postponed for a second ceremony in Wellesley the following summer. For now, the official line was that they were engaged. The marriage was in keeping with their situation: ‘private, personal, legal, true, but limited in its way’. She did not hesitate to write that she could now be addressed – Warren could take his pick – as Mrs Sylvia Hughes, Mrs Ted Hughes, Mrs Edward James Hughes, or ‘Mrs E. J. Hughes (wife of the internationally renowned poet and genius)’.30
9
‘Marriage is my medium’
They spent their wedding night in 18 Rugby Street. Ted then cleared his stuff from the flat and took it to Yorkshire. He still did not tell his parents that he was married. The story was that he would be off to Spain in search of work teaching English as a foreign language. Sylvia took the opportunity to show her mother round Cambridge. There was talk of a visit to the Beacon in early August so that the family could meet Sylvia and Aurelia, though this did not come off.1
They met up back in London and flew to Paris, with Aurelia. After a week’s exhausting sightseeing, she went off on her European tour, while Ted and Sylvia stayed another week. They met up with Luke Myers, who had never seen either of them looking so happy. Ted was conscious that Sylvia’s was an ‘American’ Paris of Impressionist paintings, chestnut trees and the shades of ‘Hemingway, / Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein’. Also of the memory of her failed attempt to reconcile with Richard Sassoon just a couple of months earlier. His Paris, by contrast, was shaped by the memory of his earlier visit to Olwyn and the sense he had then of the shadows of the war – ‘walls patched and scabbed with posters’, the ghosts of SS men sitting in pavement cafés, the sense that the waiter serving you bitter coffee might have been a collaborator.2
Paris was proving too expensive, so they took a train to cheaper Spain, with nothing but a rucksack and Sylvia’s typewriter. First stop was Madrid, where they attended a bullfight. Fascinated by the rituals and the blood, Ted wrote an enormously detailed account of it in a letter to his parents. Sylvia felt disgusted and sickened by the brutality, though recognised that the experience was good material for a story. ‘I am glad that Ted and I both feel the same way,’ she reported to her m
other, ‘full of sympathy for the bull.’ The most satisfying moment was when ‘one of the six beautiful, doomed bulls managed to gore a fat, cruel picador’.3 He was lifted off his horse and carried away with blood spurting from his thigh. ‘You could see great holes in him,’ wrote Ted. ‘Whether he died later or not I don’t know.’4
From Madrid it was on to Benidorm, which was in the early stages of its transformation from fishing village to tourist resort. They began by lodging in a widow’s house. There was no hot water or refrigerator and the dark kitchen cupboard was full of ants. They cooked – ‘fresh sardines fried in oil, potato and onion tortillas, café con leche’5 – on an ancient paraffin burner with a blue flame. Ted got sunburnt on the first day. Soon they moved to a rental house set back from the sea, away from the noise of the main hotels on the neon-lit tourist strip. They decided to stay all summer and write.
Sylvia filled her journal with detailed observations of fishermen, markets brimming with fresh food, and day excursions. Ted carried on with what he had started in Paris: a collection of fables for children, in the manner of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. The first was called ‘How the Donkey Became’. Myths of origin were a peculiar obsession throughout his writing career. He was very pleased with his narratives, though it would take several years before he found a publisher for them. He told Olwyn that Sylvia rated them, too: ‘Sylvia is as fine a literary critic as I have met, and she thinks about my ordinary prose narrative style just as you do. But my fables she cries over and laughs all together.’6
He always remembered their big cool house and the hotels under construction in ‘The moon-blanched, moon-trenched sea-town’ where a ‘hook of promontory’ halved ‘The two wings of beach’.7 One of Ted and Sylvia’s favourite devices was to apply the bleaching light cast by the moon as a filter upon their poetic lenses. They wrote all morning and bathed in the afternoons, ‘played and shopped, maybe wrote again in the evenings’.8 On some evenings, Ted worked to improve his Spanish while Sylvia translated Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir from the French. He tried to teach her the art of hypnosis, which gave her the idea of writing a story called ‘The Hypnotising Husband’. She sketched in pen and ink, catching the outline of kitchen pots, an old stove, white-plastered tenements on the cliffs above the fishing bay, bowls of fruit, and her new husband in profile.9
Ted Hughes Page 14
