American Isis

by Carl Rollyson

  On 15 December, Sylvia wrote to Marcia Brown to tell her all about the magnificent Ted, a “roaring hulking Yorkshireman.” As usual, she described him as “looming” and ferocious. This time, though, she also associated Ted with the “sound of hurricanes,” a neat way to absorb him into her earliest memories of a mythological life by the sea. She positively reveled in reporting that she could not boss him around, declaring he’d bash her head in if she tried. Even when she discussed his teaching, she said he terrified his pupils into admiration. She described Ted as “staunchly British,” but she hoped he might consider settling in America, since Britain was a country that had no future.

  Sylvia now believed she had overcome her demons. When Aurelia wrote at the end of the year about a young man in a suicidal state, Sylvia replied on 29 December with a heartfelt description of her own six-month ordeal, when she could not bear to read or write and detested the optimism of her doctors. Sylvia wanted her mother to tell him about Sylvia’s case and what Aurelia had said to her at the time: that it was most important to open yourself to life, to be easy on yourself, to get out in nature, and to see that you are valued for yourself, not for your achievements. Tell him, she urged Aurelia, that Sylvia had thought her case was hopeless, but she had nonetheless recovered. But, she warned, do not minimize what he feels; agree with him even if he thinks his plight is dire, she reiterated. She wanted her mother to give him as much time as she could afford. “Adopt him for my sake (as the Cantors did me)” and make no demands, Sylvia instructed.

  In end-of-the-year letters to Aurelia and Warren, Ted mentioned that he was encouraging Sylvia to get started on that novel she kept announcing. She was pouring a good deal of energy into her cooking, he noted. The film Sylvia suggests meal preparation and baking were the diversions of a blocked writer. And it is true that over the next year Sylvia would produce relatively little prose or verse. But her energies had to go somewhere, and it is hard to see how forcing the novel at this point would have done her much good. She needed more time to work out a major project than was available while studying for her courses; her interrupted writing routine induced considerable anxiety and even depression.

  Sylvia began 1957 by adhering to her two-hour-a-day writing regimen, beginning at 6:00 a.m., before Ted went off to teach at a nearby secondary school. At his urging, she memorized a poem a day while working on love stories for women’s magazines. She also typed some of Ted’s work and assembled poems she planned to submit to the Yale Younger Poets series. For the first time, in a letter to Aurelia on 9 January, Sylvia mentioned “violent disagreements” with Ted, but she assured her mother that he was kind and loving and so good about bringing discipline to her work. Ted resisted the idea of teaching on a permanent basis, as some poets were now doing, securing sinecures that would, in his view, stifle creativity. Writing came first. He taught, temporarily, to earn an income. Sylvia sounded less sure about renouncing an academic career, confiding to her mother on 19 January that she would not argue with her husband about it, mainly because she had such confidence in his future.

  On 21 January, Ted wrote to Aurelia and Warren to thank them for Christmas presents and to extol Sylvia’s poetry—especially the cumulative power of the poems in the book she was putting together. Evidently he really did terrify his pupils into submission, since he mentions beating their heads for their “insolence.” Terror tactics, even rages, got the attention of boys who actually had good hearts, Ted insisted, although he seemed less confident of his methods than Sylvia had suggested. He thought he lacked authority and behaved more like an older brother than the father figure they needed. Teaching these recalcitrant lads was a sobering experience, he admitted, evincing none of the all-conquering hero aspect Sylvia liked to tout.

  Teaching at Smith for a year was no sure thing, but Mary Ellen Chase’s visit to Cambridge buoyed Plath, who had thought that without a PhD she would get nowhere, judging by the first responses to the inquiries she sent to colleges. But Chase said Plath’s publications more than made up for the lack of a PhD. Sylvia worried, however, about Ted, then not well known in the United States. He would probably have to settle for teaching in a private preparatory school, Chase suggested. Hughes had not changed his mind about teaching, but the idea of voyaging to America and earning a tidy sum to support them through a year of full-time writing seemed desirable. And they both wanted to get away from “stuffy” and “cliquey” England, as Sylvia put it in a letter to Aurelia on 3 February.

  Less than three weeks later, on 23 February, Ted received a telegram at 10:30 a.m. telling him he had won the New York City Poetry Center/Harper’s prize for his first book, The Hawk in the Rain. Now his hopes for a proper reception in America soared. They put in a long-distance call to Aurelia, forgetting it was not yet 6:00 a.m. in Wellesley, and in a follow-up letter the next day Sylvia gloated, dismissing the “frightened poetry editors” who had been rejecting his work. The major poet-judges recognized Ted’s talent. “Genius will out.” She was sure his book would be a bestseller.

  Characteristically, he wrote Olwyn to tell her about his good fortune, even as he regretted the poems were not better. As Sylvia told her mother, Ted was modest about his work. Sylvia, as his agent, loved to talk him up. Her sense of destiny overwhelmed her as she noted 23 February was the first anniversary of the “fatal party” when she first met him. She took a proprietary pride in his work, declaring that she had typed and retyped those poems, and felt no sense of rivalry—only certainty that their award-winning output would increase. She believed that, in fact, she had made Ted as keen on competition as she was. In Letters Home, Aurelia commented that all her life Sylvia had sought such a man, and that from the age of four she had boosted male egos, always choosing boys who deserved her cheers. While Ted Hughes certainly did not lack confidence, Sylvia’s “unshakable” (to use Aurelia’s word) faith in him may well have accelerated his ambition. Intellect, vigor, grace, moral commitment, and a lyrical style, “O, he has everything,” Sylvia concluded. In a letter to his brother, Gerald, and Gerald’s wife, Joan, Ted simply said, “Sylvia is my luck completely.”

  Hughes’s sudden success in America coincided with a tirade against his native land. In an aside that does not appear in the published collection of his letters, he gave Gerald and Joan his contemptuous opinion of a declining England, declaring the Anglo-Saxon “less worthy to live than any evil thing on earth.” Hughes decried the British Imperial Army, in which he had served, and the public schools that produced a uniformity typified in the blazers worn at weekends, and in “cut glass accents” resulting in a “complete atrophy of sensitivity and introspection. You can never correct them, because you can never wound them into seeing how foolish they are.”

  Sylvia was beginning to torment herself about her unwritten novel, tentatively titled “Falcon Yard.” Where was her plot? Why had she not made more of her travels to Cambridge, London, Yorkshire, Nice, Benidorm, Madrid, and Munich? Basing the protagonist on herself, a sort of femme fatale who “runs through several men,” and featuring characters derived from Gary Haupt, Richard Sassoon, Gordon Lameyer, Mallory Wober, and others, she wanted to explore a character torn between playing it safe and a “big, blasting, dangerous love.” Other female characters, based on Nancy Hunter and Jane Kopp, would serve as foils or alter egos, apparently providing the kinds of alternatives the protagonist confronted. But then her journal breaks off to consider life with Ted, and her concern that she may “escape into domesticity.”

  Sylvia turned to Virginia Woolf, whose diary comforted Sylvia because Woolf, too, got depressed. Indeed, Sylvia thought that in the dark summer of 1953 she had been channeling Woolf and emulating her suicide by drowning. But Sylvia had been resilient and had bobbed to the surface. Although she had dreamed of a traditional, grand wedding in Wellesley, she now reveled in the memory of the simple and spare ceremony in the “church of the chimney sweeps with nothing but love & hope & our own selves.” Ted had worn his old black corduroy jacket and Sylvia
a pink knit dress Aurelia had bought for her. In Sylvia’s ecstatic prose, she and Ted were now the first couple, and like a new Adam and Eve they were destined to people the world with brilliant offspring. The marriage to Hughes transformed all that had gone before, so that earlier suitors would appear in her projected novel only to be dismissed as weak, flabby, and lacking in purpose.

  For all her professions of pride in Ted, his success did take its toll on Sylvia, as she recounts in her journal, saying his criticism of her work came at a bad time. She seemed blocked, unable to write the novel. She did grind out three pages a day, but what she wrote was “blither.” Part of the problem derived from studying for her June exams. She tried to relieve the pressure by biking, but she still beguiled herself with her novel about a self-destructive young woman who is redeemed by the power of love. Sometimes it sounded to her like she was producing a potboiler, a true-confession story, and not the “noble, gut-wrenching” account she had dreamed of writing. Part of Sylvia’s problem, she realized, was her earnest heavy-handedness. The antidote, she confided to her journal, might be a style resembling Joyce Cary’s in The Horse’s Mouth, a delightful, informal, foray into an artist’s mind that was vivid, funny, and yet an entirely serious aesthetic effort. She envied his popularity and wanted to emulate his other supple novels, such as Herself Surprised.

  On 12 March, an elated Sylvia Plath learned that she had been offered a teaching position at Smith with a salary of $4,200, then a respectable yearly income for a college instructor. Although Sylvia had all along had reservations about teaching at Smith, now she could not imagine anything she would rather do, she told Aurelia. Teaching three courses a semester might prove daunting, but Plath supposed she would do well with good students and have lively discussions.

  On 29 March, Olive Higgins Prouty replied to Plath’s good news, sending along what Aurelia deemed in Letters Home “intuitive remarks”: “There is no end to the thrilling things happening. It frightens me a little. I am very proud of you, Sylvia. I love to tell your story. Someone remarked to me after reading your poem in The Atlantic, ‘How intense.’ Sometime write me a little poem that isn’t intense. A lamp turned too high might shatter its chimney. Please just glow sometimes.”

  A week later Plath completed a poem, “All the Dead Dears,” an extraordinary meditation on the skeleton of a woman in a stone coffin the poet had seen in Cambridge’s archeological museum. The poem’s speaker notes that “this lady” is no “kin” of hers, and yet “she’ll suck / Blood and whistle my marrow clean” to prove otherwise. What would Henry James have given to imagine a character like Sylvia Plath, so steeped in the past that she could sometimes feel it was eating her alive? The speaker imagines this figure of the ancient past hauling her in and making her feel the presence of other old souls who usurp the armchair—that is, make themselves at home in a kind of death-in-life scene that drives the speaker to think of humanity as “each skulled-and-crossbones Gulliver / Riddled with ghosts.” The living will lie with relics like the woman in the stone coffin, “deadlocked with them, taking root as cradles rock.” This extraordinary Gothic evocation of recurrence and continuity has the kind of brooding, brilliant, and haunting acuity that disturbed Prouty.

  Sylvia now had written eighty single-spaced pages of “Falcon Yard” and hoped to complete a first draft of the novel before departing in June for America. Only fragments of the work survive, including a page titled “Character Notebook.” She was trying to work out a trajectory for her heroine, Peregrine, a “Voyager, no Penelope.” Another character, Lisa, is called a “male-woman” and is associated with Nancy Hunter and Olwyn Hughes. Kate, described as an older passionate woman and a priestess, seems derived from Dorothea Krook. A Mrs. Guinea would be introduced as a sort of Wife of Bath figure. Jess, an “honest dowd,” would be comforting in a sort of stodgy Victorian way. This would be a novel about a woman of the world, an “Isis fable,” Plath noted.

  The women would be set against the Dionysian Leonard, a hero, a “God-man,” who is “spermy” and creative. Adam Winthrop, a version of Gordon Lameyer, a mama’s boy (Sylvia said as much in her journal), is dominated by women. She had it in mind to create a Cambridge fop based on Christopher Levenson, an acquaintance, and another frail suitor, Maurice, was a ringer for Sassoon, “a dark, sickly, lover-type.” Warm and intuitive like Mallory Wober, Maurice is too cerebral, and like Sassoon, too worried about money (he had, in fact, rejected marrying Sylvia before he had earned a fortune). Why the title “Falcon Yard”? This was the place on the Cambridge campus where Sylvia and Ted first met. Apparently love would be portrayed as a “bird of prey,” with “victors and victims.” The novel would be characterized by “depravity and suffering” that would give rise to “a fable of faithfulness.” The auras of the Brontës seem to preside over this work.

  Even in its truncated form, “Falcon Yard,” is a revelation. Peregrine is clearly the dominant, even prey-driven woman that ruffled Eddie Cohen, who deplored Plath’s disdainful treatment of men. In her notes for Peregrine, Plath makes her character a goddess born out of a “perfect dream of love.” Like Isis, she roams the world assembling the parts of the god-man who will fulfill her love. The god-man becomes for Peregrine/Isis a father, lover, and priest, promising the “perpetually possible.” Plath, however, realized Peregrine’s plight: How can she accept the “fallible man as divine”? It is the question D. H. Lawrence asks in “The Man Who Died,” when the priestess of Isis wishes to believe that the man who died is Osiris. Unlike the Plath of Letters Home and correspondence with her closest friends, Peregrine expresses doubt in the god-man she has made. Peregrine identifies herself not only as Isis, but also as Lamia, the “sperm-sucking serpent” of Keats’s poem, and with Medusa, the “Mother of Madness, the Mother of Death.” Eventually Ted Hughes would flee Sylvia Plath, declaring she had a kind of “death ray.”

  If Plath had trouble actually writing the novel, it may be because of its monumental nature. How to live the perfect life in a fallen world? Peregrine asks. The question of how to write the perfect female epic was evidently just as daunting. No wonder Plath responded with elation to Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest, the very epitome of the heroine Plath wanted to create. Sylvia broke off writing the novel as she prepared for exams, then worked fitfully on it while teaching at Smith. And she returned to it again after completing The Bell Jar.

  On 9 April, Sylvia wrote Elinor Friedman Klein and Marcia Brown to catch them up on the news. While dreaming of the summer cottage on the Cape that Aurelia had rented as a wedding present, and anticipating her arrival on 25 June in New York—to be followed by a gala reception for her and Ted on the 29th in Wellesley—Sylvia was preparing for her grueling five days of exams covering two thousand years of “tragedy, morality, etc. etc.” She regarded her appointment at Smith as both exciting and terrifying. And oh how she relished her return to the land of modern appliances after two years of dealing with dodgy British models. Good-bye to coal stoves and wretched dental care.

  To Marcia Brown, Sylvia described Ted teaching forty Teddy boys (gang members), who carried chains and razors but could not remember their multiplication tables. This was her English version of The Blackboard Jungle (1955), the film starring Glenn Ford as a neophyte English teacher determined to teach in a violent inner city school. As always, in her letters to American friends, she gave Ted Hughes the Hollywood treatment. He could not teach school without Sylvia making it a “moving, tragic, & in many ways rewarding experience.”

  To both Elinor and Marcia, Sylvia spread the news of Ted’s prize, which had his publisher, Harper’s, wondering if success would spoil Rock Hunter—yet another allusion to a film, this one released in 1957 and starring Tony Randall as an ad executive, whose first success involves pretending to be the lover of a movie star in a campaign to sell lipstick. Only Sylvia Plath could glamorize Ted’s receipt of a publishing prize as though a new Clark Gable had suddenly been discovered and relieved of his obscurity. As for her, she drew o
n a sports metaphor, calling herself a “triple-threat woman: wife, writer, and teacher”—although she said she would trade in that epithet for motherhood.

  London Magazine’s acceptance of poems by both Plath and Hughes had Sylvia dreaming of catapulting to fame, as she wrote her mother on 13 April. Ted now had a British publisher for The Hawk in the Rain. Faber & Faber had taken the book on the recommendation of T. S. Eliot, who had passed on a complimentary message to Ted, Sylvia reported to Aurelia on 10 May. At the same time, Plath was still hoping to “break into the slicks,” since a sale of several commercial stories could earn them a year’s income.

  Sylvia’s ecstatic letters to her mother might be discounted, except that Ted’s to his brother, Gerald, were almost as rhapsodic. “Marriage is my medium,” he declared. He wrote about his and Sylvia’s working and walking about in incandescent terms: “We strike sparks.” He described them sitting by the river and watching water voles. The “unconscious delight” he attributed to her makes Sylvia seem very much like the sensitive Marilyn Monroe that Arthur Miller described in his memoirs and stories. “She’s the most responsive alert creature in the world, about everything,” Hughes concluded. And like Sylvia, he enthused about an America taking him into its embrace. Even when it came to family, he really did sound like Sylvia’s male counterpart, saying that his prize and the praise for him were all the more pleasing because they had fulfilled his mother’s dreams for him.