American Isis

by Carl Rollyson

  Four days later, Sylvia met Gordon Lameyer in Paris for their trip to Germany. While not exciting, their reunion might be safe and soothing like her times with Gary Haupt, she thought, now that she and Gordon were just friends. Still, she resented the idea of looking forward to leaning on a man. She would have put off leaving Paris if Sassoon had suddenly appeared. She even thought of cutting short her trip and returning to London and Ted. Switching moods from one sentence to another, she monitored her own life the way another person obsessively checks a wristwatch. In yet another move, Sylvia dollied back for a panoramic shot: “It is the historic moment,” she records in her journal entry for 5 April, “all gathers and bids me to be gone from Paris.”

  Sylvia’s irritation with herself would be taken out on Lameyer, who began, even as a “friend,” to give her a wide berth. In Edward Butscher’s The Woman and the Work, Lameyer’s remembers shying away from his erstwhile showboating almost-fiancé. Their time together was a fiasco. They quarreled incessantly.

  On 9 April, Hughes sent Plath a note and a love poem, the latter containing an exquisite line about a bird gathering the world in its throat in one note. “Ridiculous to call it love,” the poem began, but there it was. He felt haunted by the “true ghost of my loss.” He awaited her arrival. A fragment of Plath’s journal indicates her return to Ted Hughes on Friday, 13 April, expecting a welcome—if rough—ride as she submitted herself to his “ruthless force,” which had stabbed her into accepting his “being.” She seemed struggling still for some kind of perspective, since she enjoined herself not to forget others, like Dorothea Krook (who reminded her of Dr. Beuscher) and even the memory of Sassoon, who could be tender as well as virile. But Hughes had a sun-like energy that she decided to absorb for as long as their time together lasted.

  It was not easy. Sylvia still craved what she called in her journal “older seasoned beings” who could advise her in a loving way. Her grandmother, dying of cancer, made Plath feel especially vulnerable and worried that her overtaxed mother, who suffered repeatedly from gastric ailments, would be so weakened that she, too, might die. Cut off from the “ritual of family love,” Sylvia blamed Sassoon for the “hell” that seemed to overtake her suddenly, and seemingly without warning. She wrote a long letter to Warren reaffirming her love for him and more letters to her mother that counted on a visit from Aurelia soon.

  Hughes’s biographer believes that he had already decided to make Sylvia Plath a part of his life. He now dropped his plans to join his brother, Gerald, in Australia. In late April, the couple set off on long walks. He learned of her suicide attempt and quickly perceived, as he later wrote to his sister, Olwyn, that Sylvia’s sometimes gushing and brash Americanism resulted from her eagerness to make a good impression. Indeed, in a journal fragment written on 1 April, she had exhorted herself to “be more subdued” and quiet. “Don’t blab too much.” In other words, “listen more.” In sum, “be nice but not too enthusiastic.”

  Hughes’s friends were baffled by his interest in Plath. They disliked her polished and engineered poetry, which was nothing like his vivid and vehement verse, and they deplored her forwardness. In Crow Steered/Bergs Appeared, Lucas Myers mentions telling Hughes that Varsity, a Cambridge magazine, had commissioned Sylvia to write about Paris, owing to the entertainment value of her florid style. Hughes appeared hurt and clearly wanted to spare Sylvia ridicule. Such comments made Ted want to take hold of Sylvia and protect her. Just as important, though, he valued her supportive and perceptive reading of his poetry. He was an amateur compared to her, especially with regard to the tectonics of the publishing world, but Sylvia had as much to learn from Hughes, whom she regarded then as the superior poet.

  Ted quit his shit-shoveling job and hurried to Cambridge to be near Sylvia in order to imbibe exactly what his friends drew back from: all that American vibrancy. As he put it in a Paris Review interview, “She was not only herself, she was America and American literature in person.” Sylvia’s version of these first days with Ted is told mainly in letters to her mother and brother. She presented Hughes as one of the wonders of the world. She held back nothing from him, and their partnership resulted in some of her most forceful writing. That announcement alone, sent to Aurelia on 19 April, suggests how swiftly Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes had aligned their stars to form a constellation out of reach of his friends or hers. Of course, she made Hughes huge, just as he created her.

  If Hughes associated Sylvia with his discovery of a new world, she associated him with her sudden discovery of “all nature,” as she put it in a 21 April letter to Aurelia. Sylvia enclosed “Ode To Ted,” a portrait of man in nature, out crunching oat sprouts as he walks in woodland, naming creatures and splitting open the earth to reveal the habitats of moles and worms, even as birds seem to chorus his arrival. He moves through fen and farmland among grazing cows and onto a bed of ground where, “I lay for my love’s pleasing.” The poem refers to “this adam’s woman,” and an unembarrassed Sylvia invited Aurelia to visit the shining Eden her daughter had made for herself with Ted.

  Eden included a thoroughly domesticated life. Ted taught Sylvia how to cook on the gas ring in her fireplace, bringing her shrimp that he helped her peel. When she received the terrible news of her grandmother’s death, she and Ted “consecrated” their May Day to her memory. He seemed, in all things, at her disposal. He spent all afternoon on a couch reading her copy of The Catcher in the Rye, while she wrote up her thrilling meeting with Nicolai Bulganin, the Russian premier, at a reception that Varsity reporters attended (The New Yorker rejected her report, and then the Smith Alumnae Quarterly published it in the fall of 1956). The couple planned to spend a summer in Spain, during which she would begin her novel about Cambridge while writing short stories for The New Yorker and Mademoiselle. On 4 May, Sylvia mentioned marriage to Ted for the first time in a letter to her mother. By 9 May, Sylvia was proposing a trip home the following year to give Ted his coming-out party, a barbecue in Wellesley. Sylvia believed that her stay in McLean Hospital had prepared her for this new life. All she had suffered was building toward this denouement with Ted. He was her reward for waiting. She wrote her mother in tones that suggested she had settled down for good. She was at peace. He had become her life’s work. She predicted greatness for both of them.

  On 22 May, Ted wrote Olwyn that both his life and work were “peaking” in the company of a “first-rate American poetess” he wanted his sister to meet. This American believed that his work was as good as he thought it was. She knew the top American journals and was busily sending his work to them. But he did not mention just how close they had become or that they were planning to marry.

  Sylvia’s sessions with Professor Krook had been so brilliant, Sylvia told Aurelia, that Krook was revising her student’s lecture notes on Plato. Sylvia described their sessions as fierce and thoroughly enjoyable arguments, suggesting she was putting nearly as much energy into her time with Krook as she was into her relationship with Ted. Wendy Campbell, a friend of Krook, sat in on Plath’s sessions with Krook and saw Sylvia at her best: brilliant and charming, “so alive and warm and interested.” Campbell’s memoir leaves an indelible impression of Plath, one that no photograph has ever quite captured: “She seemed to be entirely collected and concentrated and in focus … Tall and slender and delicate wristed, she had pale honey hair, fine, thick, and long, and beautiful dark brown eyes. And her skin was pale gold and waxy, the same even colour.” Campbell observed that Sylvia and Ted “seemed to have found solid ground in each other.” She found their company heartening. She felt “understood and received,” which meant a good deal, since she found the conventional expressions of sympathy after her husband’s death nearly unbearable. But Sylvia and Ted had a “spontaneous empathy with my state of mind which was very liberating to me.”

  In a visit to Cambridge, Mary Ellen Chase, one of Sylvia’s mentors, strongly hinted that there might be a position open at Smith. Plath began considering the possibility of a teachin
g post, although she would not accept it without a husband to accompany her. She did not want to be another one of those spinster professors with no real role in the social life of the campus and community. It may have been Chase’s visit that galvanized Plath into moving up the marriage date, even though a letter from Olive Higgins Prouty advised Sylvia to slow down.

  In early June, Sylvia’s patron wrote a sobering letter, treating Sylvia’s over-the-moon description of Ted as a sign of infatuation with a new love. Ted sounded too much like Sylvia’s poet-hero, Dylan Thomas, Prouty pointed out. She was not merely skeptical, as Sylvia suspected she would be. Prouty was downright dismissive of Ted as a potential husband and father. She predicted he would be unfaithful. Would Sylvia be able to tolerate his love affairs, as Thomas’s wife had tolerated her husband’s? Sylvia’s obsession with Thomas had been upsetting to the levelheaded Gordon Lameyer, who was distrustful of the poet’s flamboyance and Sylvia’s defense of him. Now Prouty detected a similar recklessness in Sylvia, which the older woman attempted to restrain. After all, Prouty was exactly what Sylvia supposed she wanted: an older advisor to steer her past the pitfalls. Prouty astutely fastened on the distressing words Plath used to praise Ted. “You don’t really believe, do you, that the characteristics which you describe as ‘bashing people around,’ unkindness and I think you said cruelty, can be permanently changed in a man of 26?” Wasn’t Sylvia just going through another round in her perpetual building up of the men she loved? This was a warning that Sylvia chose to ignore as she wrote letters to her mother designed to cast Ted as the kind of overpowering man Aurelia herself had submitted to. The letters Sylvia wrote to her mother in May seem like briefs for Ted, overwhelming accumulations of superlatives that would make it virtually impossible for Aurelia to do anything other than support her daughter’s choice.

  But did Sylvia have misgivings? On 4 June, Jane Anderson, having received a warm invitation in March from Sylvia to visit Cambridge, arrived to behold a very “pressured” Plath. Anderson later recalled in a sworn deposition (she was suing Ted Hughes because of a character in the movie version of The Bell Jar based on her) that Sylvia confessed she was in love with a poet who was also a “very sadistic man.” Although Sylvia was concerned about Ted’s relationships with other women and his sadism, she believed, “I can manage that.” To Anderson, Plath appeared to remain anxious over her decision. And Anderson did not know what response to make: to second Sylvia’s decision or to ask her to reconsider it? So Anderson just listened. After a brief tour of Cambridge, the two women parted, leaving Anderson with the impression that Plath, still under considerable tension, was relieved to see her go. They never communicated again. Anderson interpreted the caricature of her as Joan Gilling in The Bell Jar as revenge for her lack of a response to Plath’s momentous plans.

  On 13 June, an enraptured couple welcomed Aurelia to London, and at dinner that night they broke the news that they wished to marry immediately. In person, Hughes seemed to be the superman Plath had portrayed with an almost comic book flourish in her correspondence. Tall, dark-featured, and powerfully built, he also seemed in the presence of these two adoring women a gentle giant who had swept down on Sylvia like a god, an Osiris to her Isis. For all his strength, he seemed—then—a pliable consort. He had apparently forsaken the rather dissolute life Sylvia had earlier imagined for him in her journal, and he seemed to have become thoroughly domesticated. He had opened his heart to Sylvia and identified with her dreams and ambitions as no other man had done. Richard Sassoon had thwarted her, Gordon Lameyer had quarreled with her, Eddie Cohen had questioned her, and Myron Klotz and all the rest had let her down by failing to set the bold course of a writing life that Ted now held out to her. All those men were dead to her—or rather pieces of them, like the pieces of Osiris, had now been reconstructed into the stalwart and scintillating figure of Ted Hughes.

  Even with Aurelia’s predilection for powerful men, it is still somewhat surprising that she took so quickly to Ted Hughes, whom her daughter had known for just a few months. To be sure, it would have been devastating to deny Sylvia her joy of Ted, especially when the couple put their plans to Aurelia in person. That they had done so, rather than simply announcing their decision in a letter, probably carried weight with Aurelia, who had, in effect, been summoned by this royal couple. She was the queen mother, who would accompany them on the first phase of their European honeymoon and then proceed to visit the sites of her own mother’s early years in Austria.

  But didn’t Aurelia wonder whether Sylvia was rushing into a momentous undertaking? Aurelia was never able to tell in print the full story of what she thought of Ted Hughes. Wanting to remain a part of her grandchildrens’ lives, she feared alienating their father. He held the copyright to Sylvia’s letters, which meant that in order to publish Letters Home, Aurelia had to secure his permission. As a result, she scrupulously avoided direct comments on Ted and his marriage to her daughter. But even in private, according to Aurelia’s friend, Richard Larschan, she maintained a deep respect for Ted and a sober awareness that her daughter’s troubled psyche had contributed to the couple’s breakup.

  In Letters Home, Aurelia introduces her daughter’s precipitous behavior with a sweeping sentence: “To my complete surprise, three days after landing at Southampton on June 13, 1956, I found myself the sole family attendant at Sylvia’s and Ted’s secret wedding in the Church of St. George the Martyr, London.” Why secret? Sylvia thought that by openly announcing her marriage to Ted she might forfeit her Fulbright scholarship, since she assumed the award was meant for single students. Why surprise? After all, Sylvia had talked up marriage in letters to her mother. But initially the marriage was to have been put off until Sylvia completed her studies, when she would have the opportunity to return home and present her noble man. Now, however, Aurelia had been invited to join in their intrigue, just as Sylvia had always shared with her mother notes and reports about her gentlemen callers and their relative merits and deficiencies. Now, Aurelia was part of her daughter’s conspiracy, one that not even Ted’s parents knew about. And Ted played his own part very well, confiding in Aurelia his concerns about having to teach in order to generate an income. Aurelia had been doing that much of her life, and she candidly told him that sometimes she felt like no more than a jailer.

  Why Hughes did not inform his parents or Olwyn, in whom he was wont to confide, has been a puzzle for biographers. Was his sudden involvement with an American student so overwhelming that he wanted more time to figure out what to say? His first letters to Olwyn sound like those of a younger brother with a lot of explaining to do. No one—certainly not Ted’s Cambridge cronies—ever expected him to become a conventional husband, let alone marry an American who seemed to have such a different sensibility from his own. Lucas Myers, profoundly skeptical of Sylvia, saw the secrecy about the marriage as a way for Plath to take complete control, making sure no one could come between her and Hughes. Ted let Sylvia take charge and seemed at no point resistant—even to the idea of setting off on a honeymoon with his mother-in-law. How better to demonstrate his biddable side than to ease himself into Sylvia’s energetic arrangements? This passive side of Hughes (if the couple had any quarrels before their marriage, neither of them vouchsafed as much to others) permitted, indeed encouraged Plath to project an idealized picture of their marriage.

  Two days after the marriage, Sylvia wrote to Warren, presenting her union with Hughes as a predictable result of their three months of togetherness, reading and hiking and cooking and writing, side by side. Aurelia had endorsed her daughter’s commitment, and Ted already loved and cared for Aurelia “very much,” said Sylvia, who later told Marcia Brown that her mother behaved “like a young girl—taking pictures, drinking wine etc.” To Warren, Sylvia presented the secret marriage as a necessity. She seemed to revel in the exclusivity of this match: The couple kept to themselves and liked it that way, she wrote her mother on 4 July, shortly after Aurelia had said good-bye to the newlyweds in P
aris.

  From Madrid on 7 July, Sylvia wrote a letter to Aurelia describing her procession through Europe with Ted as a kind of royal tour: “Wherever Ted and I go people seem to love us.” Working people were drawn to this unaffected couple in a landscape of bold colors and brightness. For the first time in her life, Sylvia felt her sinuses clear. Like Rebecca West in Yugoslavia, Plath claimed to find a paradise in which she was no longer clogged with the factitious burdens of Anglo-American modernity.

  On the same day, Ted wrote to his brother in Australia, once and for all renouncing his dream of starting life anew there. It was not the right country in which to develop his writing. Neither was England. Like Plath, Hughes believed Spain had set him free. In the company of an “American poetess” (he seemed to use the word as though describing a princess), he was writing better than ever and more continuously. Sylvia astutely analyzed his work, he reported, and found the faults that he had not yet been prepared to acknowledge. In fact, as part of the Plath program of submissions, he had been successfully published in Poetry and The Nation.

  Sylvia continued to write her mother about a fairy-tale honeymoon in Benidorm, a sparkling Spanish coastal town beside the blazing blue Mediterranean Sea. Sylvia was delighted with their quarters in a house even closer to the sea than Grammy’s place in Winthrop. They had a balcony terrace overlooking a seascape that stimulated Sylvia’s sketching and writing. Ted was working on animal fables, while Sylvia plotted stories about Americans abroad that she hoped to place with women’s magazines. The same day (14 July) she wrote to Warren, describing Ted as the “male counterpart” of herself.