In her journal, Sylvia luxuriated in descriptions of the living room they had “consecrated” to their writing. They built their days around composing stories and poems, Ted working on a big oak table and Sylvia on a typing stand. They went out early to shop, she reported to Eleanor Friedman Klein, and in the peasant market picked out live rabbits that they were obliged to slaughter for dinner. Sylvia and Ted then returned home to write for the rest of the morning, breaking for lunch and a siesta, then a swim and two hours of writing in the late afternoon, followed by a few hours of reading before bed. Travel, adventure, and romance—her life had turned into a movie, Sylvia wrote her mother.
Still involved in Sylvia’s intrigue, Ted wrote his parents after the couple arrived in Benidorm that he intended to marry Sylvia and would do so by the time he visited them in September. He swore them to secrecy, mentioned Sylvia’s concerns about losing her scholarship if the truth were known. As he later made clear to Olwyn, they needed the scholarship money to live on. He had already signed on to Sylvia’s plan to spend a year teaching in America, followed by a return to Europe. His parents should not worry, he added, because not only was Sylvia a good cook, she was great with money and a better earner than he was. He had met and liked her mother.
Ted devoted most of a long letter to his parents to describing a bullfight the young couple had seen in Madrid. It was a sorry affair that nevertheless commanded his full attention. Hughes’s fascination with the violent ceremonial aspects of this gruesome contest overshadowed any repugnance he may have expressed to Sylvia, although the forthrightness of the unflinching description he gave his parents compels disgust. His analytical, even cold comment on the entire episode is simply an expression of surprise at the bull’s ability to adapt to the duel, although in the end the beast died, drained of its blood.
Sylvia had sickened at the sorry spectacle, and in “The Goring” evokes the rather sordid atmosphere of the truculent crowd, the picador’s awkward stabbing and artless, unwieldy maneuvers. Only in the final moments of the deadly duet between bullfighter and bull did the grim ritual take on the look of a kind of ceremonious art redeeming the “sullied air.” The poem’s restrained tone disguises how ill at ease Sylvia was in Spain. To her mother she wrote about the “horrid picador” and the messy slaughter. Although she tells Aurelia that Ted shared her feelings, her language reveals a markedly different sensibility. Hughes would later write a poem, entitled “You Hated Spain,” about her reaction. As his biographer Elaine Feinstein observes, Ted was at home with the primitive side of Spain, whereas the sort of blood consciousness that had thrilled Sylvia in D. H. Lawrence’s writing repulsed her in person.
The idyllic aerie by the sea gradually became a battleground between the landlord and a wary, cagey Sylvia trying to outmaneuver this witch-like presence, who kept barging in to lecture her renter about how to operate the freakish petrol stove, and against taking interruptions of electrical power and running water “too seriously.” “That Widow Mangada” provides a virtually verbatim version of Sylvia’s journal entries, which recorded her growing disillusionment with her Spanish heaven.
That Sylvia ignored or did not appreciate Ted’s different take on the bullfight suggests some of her exultant happiness was a rather forced affair. This, at least, was Richard Sassoon’s conclusion after he received a letter announcing her marriage to Hughes. Sounding rather like Eddie Cohen, the reserved Sassoon replied that he saw no reason why Sylvia should not be as happy, or happier, with Hughes than she had been with him—except that what she had written did not appear to him to be the letter of a “happy woman. At least, not to me, and as you know me extremely well and are a good letter writer I may accept my reactions as feasible.” The sinuosity of his prose reflects how fraught and convoluted their relationship had become, but also, perhaps, how conflicted and unresolved Sylvia’s feelings really were, in spite of her protestations to the contrary. He did not doubt he deserved her harshness. But she was “woman enough to know that I—above all I—am not one who needs to be blamed.… Long before I was your bien aimé, I was something else to you, and I think always I was somewhat more than a paramour, always.… You tell me that I am to know that you are doing what is best for you; it is so if you believe it, Sylvia, and if it is so—then it is—‘very simply’ it. Even though I might wish it otherwise…” And so Sassoon exited, refusing to allow himself to be wrapped up in her version of their affaire de coeur.
A mysterious passage in Plath’s journal for 23 July, written after an encounter with Hughes that left her dreading the “wrongness growing, creeping, choking the house,” hints at the twisted nature of her affections, which Sassoon had detected. She could suddenly turn a personal disappointment into a cosmic sense of disenchantment, declaring that the “world has grown crooked and sour as a lemon overnight.” Her estrangement, moreover, was not resolved but merely dispelled by a visit from Marcia Brown and her husband, Mike, and by delightful exchanges with a group of Spanish soldiers on a train to Madrid, as they learn to drink wine from a leather flask.
On 25 August, approaching the end of their summer sojourn, Sylvia and Ted met up with Warren in Paris, a rendezvous that Sylvia did not say much about. Warren had spent a summer in Austria and was returning to the States for his final year at Harvard. Sylvia and Ted were on their way to visit his family in what Sylvia referred to as their Wuthering Heights home. For all her rapturous references to Spain and plans to write about it, the results were meager. Except for “That Widow Mangada,” a handful of poems and stories that are unremarkable, and notes in her journal, she produced only a bland travelogue sort of article that was published in The Christian Science Monitor.
On 2 September, Sylvia wrote to her mother about her stay at the Yorkshire home of Ted’s family. As she put it, she was now part of the “Brontë clan.” Her journal reveals that this was more than a casual allusion for a writer who immersed herself in literary lives so that she could live one. The bare hills, black stone walls, wicked northern winds, and coal fires that she describes in her letter evoke the atmosphere of Wuthering Heights, with Sylvia cast as the interloper entering the mysterious, ineffable world that perplexes and frightens Mr. Lockwood. She climbed the wild and lonely moors, just as Catherine and Heathcliff had. Did she recall the Hollywood version of Wuthering Heights (1939), with its iconic shot of Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon huddled together on a hill rise, two passionate souls bound to one another, yet doomed to part?
In her 2 September letter, Sylvia continues in her guise as Mr. Lockwood, calling Ted’s parents, William and Edith, “dear, simple Yorkshire folk.” She loved them both. They liked her. Nothing untoward had happened yet. William, judging by what his son said about him, would have been quiet, even subdued. He had gone through the trauma of the trenches of World War I and now owned a tobacconist’s shop. Edith, as portrayed by other Plath biographers, had a deep interest in magic and the occult—although Olwyn later chided Diane Middlebrook for saying so. (Actually, Ted’s fascination with astrology and necromancy far outstripped anything his mother could possibly have known or cared to impart to her son.) She was quite conventional and genuinely appreciated Sylvia, who obviously relished the domestic side of life and brought with her a high-spirited and romantic embrace of the land.
Sylvia would soon be returning for her second and final year at Cambridge. Ted would go to London, where his reading of poetry for the BBC was successful and remunerative (they had spent nearly all their money in Spain). Hughes had one of the finest voices in modern poetry. He believed that only part of the brain registered the impact of poetry when it was not read aloud. He often read Shakespeare to Plath and encouraged her to spend part of her day reciting poetry. Her own recorded voice grew in authority and power, as did her awareness of audience, and for that Hughes deserves considerable credit.
Sylvia prepared to write a novel based on her Cambridge experiences. She and Ted were hoping to get teaching positions for a year, and perhaps do a reading tour a
s well when Sylvia brought Ted home to America. Her hopes were high. The Atlantic Monthly had bought “Pursuit” for fifty dollars. More good news followed on 2 October, when Poetry accepted six of her poems for another seventy-six dollars. And Peter Davison, now at The Atlantic Monthly, was encouraging her to submit more of her work. She wrote him a long letter explaining her plans for a novel, as well as touting Ted’s poetry. He gratified her with a quick response that included his wish to see Hughes’s work.
In her 2 October letter to Aurelia, Sylvia made a point of saying that she and Ted were not part of an “arty world,” and that all they needed was one another. But the very sense of their uniqueness also put pressure on her. Thinking she had missed a rendezvous with Ted in London, she panicked and gave way to a “fury of tears,” she told Aurelia. Although he turned up soon enough, Sylvia’s extreme reaction showed how much he meant to the equilibrium of her everyday life.
Ted was well aware of Sylvia’s investment in him, and from London, where he often stayed overnight or longer when employed by the BBC, he reinforced their bond with frequent affectionate and encouraging letters, as well as expressions of anxiety that jibed with her own moods. On 1 October, he wrote about how restless he felt without her. He wandered about like “somebody with a half-completed brain-operation.” He enjoined her to “keep watch” on their marriage as he was doing, saying that way their happiness would be preserved. He had nicknames for her (“Puss-Kish-Ponky,” for example) that served to intensify their intimacy and exclusivity. Anticipating a rendezvous with Sylvia, Ted announced that he would kiss her “into blisters.” The man who had cared nothing about clothes, and was known to stuff newly caught fish in his jacket pockets, extolled a suit Sylvia had bought for him, saying he could now descend on London “sleek, sleek, sleek.”
A day later Ted wrote about how he missed Sylvia’s “ponky warmth.” He sent her plots that she might use for her fiction. One involved a young newly married couple that set off for the country to avoid the distractions and complications of urban life. “They want to keep each other for themselves alone and away from temptation,” Ted wrote, without a sign that he was basing this story line on their own lives. In an eerily prophetic twist, Hughes has friends of the couple visit and urge them, so good at entertaining, to open an inn. Although the inn is successful, the upshot of their venture is that they have brought the city, so to speak, back into their lives. Even worse, the wife turns jealous and suspects the husband’s involvement with an old girlfriend. The story has a happy ending, in that the couple sells the hotel and buys another cottage closer to the city, reflecting their awareness that they cannot entirely escape modernity, but they can work on keeping their marriage solid. Hughes called it a “rotten plot,” but was that all it was? “Can you pick any sense out of that?” he asked Sylvia. Was the question directed toward the meaning of the story, or the meaning of their lives? At any rate, Hughes was happy to say in a later letter that he was glad she liked the “inn-plot.”
In “The Wishing Box,” a story about the woman who is envious of her husband’s fertile imagination as expressed in his dreams, Plath may have been articulating her concern that at this point Hughes seemed way ahead of her as a writer. At least that is one way—the Edward Butscher way—of looking at Sylvia’s response to Ted’s teeming creativity, so fecund that he was sending his newborn ideas to a half-grateful, half-resentful collaborator. Sylvia’s letters, though, not only do not begrudge him, they positively exult in his productivity.
Hughes certainly gave Plath no reason to doubt her desirability. Hughes bid her good night, thinking of Puss’s “little soft places” and how he wanted to kiss her “slowly from toe up,” sucking and nibbling and licking her “all night long.” Missing her, he felt like an amputee, dazed and shocked, because he had lost half of himself. Sometimes he just baldly broke out with: “I love you I love you I love you.” Only her “terrific letters” comforted him. If more than a few days went by and Ted had not heard from Sylvia, he grew uneasy: “No letter from my ponk. Is she dead? Has half the world dropped off?” He imagined the desirable Sylvia welcoming the charms of knaves, while he sat staring at the skyline “like an old stone.” Unable to work, he consoled himself by reading Yeats aloud.
In his letters, Hughes predicted greatness for Sylvia, just as she had for him. Without her, he wrote on 5 October, he could not sleep and was wasting his time. He walked about like a strange beast, and had even been stopped by the police because he looked like a suspicious character. Somehow, he wrote Sylvia, they had to turn all their “lacks” into good poems. He advised her on studying for exams at Cambridge, sensibly saying, for example, that the six books on Chaucer she had to read each contained some value but they surely overlapped, and there was no need to give them more than a note or two for each chapter she read. Similarly, he critiqued her poetry, offering straightforward advice—one professional to another—and praise. “Your verse never goes ‘soft’ like other women’s,” he wrote on 22 October, although he seemed to worry a bit that she might be searching for a formula that magazines like The New Yorker followed. But he wondered if such a formula existed. How to account for Eudora Welty or J. D. Salinger, two originals quite dissimilar, and yet both published in The New Yorker. If she wrote about what really attracted her, she could not miss, Ted told Sylvia. Like Plath, Hughes seemed to take rejections in stride, saying that at least The New Yorker might remember his name, even if they rejected his animal fables.
To Olwyn that October, Hughes touted Sylvia’s successful publications in The Atlantic Monthly and Poetry. She was not a “blah American.” Indeed, she was very like an indefatigable German, without affectations, and had a “startling poetic gift.” He plotted her horoscope, which he drew in the letter for Olwyn’s benefit. He was now showing Plath’s poems to his contacts at the BBC. Ted clung to Sylvia as a renewing force, even as he spurned London, calling it “murderous,” a ghost of itself, and so depleted that it had no “aura” left. It seemed utterly exhausted, he wrote to her on 23 October.
In late October, in a near state of collapse because Ted spent so much time in London that they could not live as husband and wife, Sylvia confessed her secret to Dorothea Krook, who rightly predicted that if Plath consulted the Fulbright advisor on campus and the Fulbright committee in London and made a full and contrite confession of her marriage, she would be allowed to keep her scholarship. And it was so. An elated Sylvia told Krook that no criticism whatsoever had been forthcoming; indeed, she had been congratulated on her marriage. But Krook, who still did not feel she knew her student that well, felt a twinge of concern because Sylvia seemed to depend on her marriage for so much of her own well-being. “I am living for Ted,” Sylvia had written her mother on 22 October. In “Epitaph for Fire and Flower,” a poem she enclosed in a letter to Aurelia, one line says it all: The lovers have a “touch” that will “kindle angels’ envy.” Well, not quite all, since the concluding lines evoke the “ardent look” that “Blackens flesh to bone and devours them.”
By early November Ted had found a job near Cambridge teaching secondary school students, and the couple moved into a flat only five minutes from Newnham. He did not like Cambridge very much, and certain of his professors there apparently felt the same about him. The dons regarded Ted as a rather louche character and seemed surprised that the cheerful and well-scrubbed Sylvia would be attached to such a ruffian. Residing in Cambridge indicated that he was doing everything possible to allay Plath’s easily aroused anxieties. They played out their evenings with tarot cards.
The Suez crisis and Britain’s ill-fated invasion of Egypt after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal brought out Plath’s innate disgust with militarism and materialism. Even more importantly, her reaction reflects a sensibility that rejected narrow nationalism. She viewed politics as she did poetry, in cosmic terms. That Britain was in league with France and Israel only demonstrated to her that the world was out of joint. She cared nothing for the British Empire, for face-sa
ving measures, for the niceties and duplicities of diplomatic negotiations. She did praise Hugh Gaitskill, leader of the Labour Party, for eloquently opposing the invasion, but she really had no interest in political parties as such. She was the same person who had written to Hans about world peace. It made her feel no better that her country held nuclear superiority. Other British policies on Cyprus and the emerging African states were no better, and she hoped America would put pressure on her ally to withdraw from Suez. She now regarded her own land as the proper place for her and Ted. Britain was dead. In a rare chauvinist moment, she declared to her mother on 1 November, “God Bless America!” Six days later she wrote again to say she was sickened at the news of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary. She continued to reiterate her opposition to all war, saying she hoped Warren would become a conscientious objector.
Sooty old England had become a drag, and Sylvia primed Ted with pictures of a sumptuous summer on Cape Cod. She had also set him up for a poetry contest sponsored by Harper’s and adjudicated by Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, and Marianne Moore. Winning the prize and publication of his first book would be the making of Ted Hughes in America and Britain. He wrote his friend Lucas Myers on 16 November about the contest, expressing “small hopes” for his success, although he was obviously a writer who thought of himself as in the running. He and Sylvia tried to work out their future on a Ouija board, with mixed results. Strenuous efforts on their part put them in contact with a spirit, who rightly predicted which magazines would accept their work. But relying on the Ouija board to predict the winners of football pools did not yield the fortune they anticipated.
Sometime in late November, Sylvia Plath had her first encounter with Olwyn Hughes, who visited her shortly before Sylvia relinquished her Cambridge room for the flat she would share with Ted. Olwyn was then twenty-eight, tall and strikingly “handsome,” to borrow Elaine Feinstein’s word. Olwyn had served in various secretarial positions in Paris and may have struck her sister-in-law as the very type of career woman Sylvia abjured. The confident Olwyn, single and with a hearty laugh, seemed utterly self-contained and without a permanent male companion. Olwyn found Sylvia to be somewhat reserved. But, according to Anne Stevenson, nothing much happened in this first meeting that would have given either woman pause.
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