Sylvia Plath: A Biography (15 page)

Her litany of praise continued. To Warren she called Hughes:

the only man in the world who is my match.... His voice is richer and rarer than Dylan Thomas, booming through walls and doors. He stalks into the room and yanks a book out of my case: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Thomas, and begins to read. He reads his own poems which are better than Thomas and Hopkins many times, better than all I know: fierce, disciplined, with a straight honest saying. He tells me endless stories, in the Irish spinning way, dropping his voice to a hush and acting some out, and I am enchanted: such a yarn-spinner. He is 25 and from Yorkshire and has done everything in the world: rose-grafting, plowing, reading for movie studios, hunting, fishing.... He is a violent Adam.

She had some worries, however. She had written to Olive Higgins Prouty, whom she consistently saw as a more worldly and experienced woman than her mother, that Ted’s behavior was sometimes unruly, and that she suspected that he loved to drink and make conquests of women. Much as Sylvia admired what she called Ted’s “ruthless force,” she knew that she named it accurately: “He is a breaker of things and people,” she wrote. When Mrs. Prouty replied in early June, she warned Sylvia not to marry Ted — at least not so soon. “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?”

That spring Sylvia and Ted saw each other nearly every day. They ate together, and read books — plays and poems — together, often aloud. Ted would recite a line of poetry or drama and — to Sylvia — shout “Finish!” They drank with Ted’s friends and partied with their poetry friends, but most of their time they spent alone together.

Sylvia was her most dynamic. She brought Ted all the love and affection, all the talent and curiosity, all the childlike winsomeness and contrasting sophistication she possessed. She loved him and poured all her energy into the relationship. But she was also idealizing. She was not only romanticizing Ted; she was idealizing her own powers to change that already wonderful man into someone more impressive. As she boasted to Aurelia, loving Ted had changed her for the better: “I have become a woman to make you proud.... Although this is the one man in the world for me, although I am using every fiber of my being to love him, even so, I am true to the essence of myself, and I know who that self is.”

On June 16 (James Joyce’s Bloomsday) in 1956, Edward James Hughes and Sylvia Plath were married in the Church of St. George the Martyr, Queen Square, a five-minute walk from Ted’s London flat. Aurelia Plath was present, a curate was witness, but otherwise the marriage was secret, even from Ted’s family and friends. Despite rain and Sylvia’s anxiety about the haste of the wedding (they had spent the morning shopping for shoes and trousers for Ted), she thought the ceremony was beautiful. She wore Aurelia’s new pink knit dress with a matching hair ribbon and carried a pink rose from Ted, and she cried when he placed the gold ring on her finger.

Because Sylvia was afraid she would lose her Fulbright if people knew she was married, the ceremony remained secret. After a summer honeymoon in Spain, they planned to live separately — Ted was going to teach in Spain, and Sylvia would return to Newnham. Because of the marriage, Aurelia’s long-planned visit to England changed dramatically. She and Sylvia spent a few days in Cambridge together, while Ted returned to Yorkshire to tell his family he was going to Spain, but not that he was traveling with Sylvia or that she had become his wife. Then Aurelia and the Hugheses went to London and then to Paris, where she saw Ted and Sylvia off for Madrid and then Benidorm, a remote fishing village on the coast. Aurelia traveled alone in Europe from June 29 till August 5, when Ted and Sylvia returned from Spain to see her off from London.

Sylvia loved almost everything about Spain — the sun, the colors, the air, the people, the food. Early in July, she wrote Aurelia that she had never been so happy: she was proud of Ted; she was reveling in the sea, the hills, her perfect health. She wrote that she and her husband were “fantastically matched; both of us need the same amount of sleep and food and time for writing; both are inner-directed, almost anti-social.” Some bad experiences in Spain, however, where Sylvia felt that she was being asked to keep house in primitive conditions, upset her, and she wrote very little. Even after she and Ted had moved into a pleasant stucco house with a yard, grape arbor, and fig tree, she resented having to do the marketing and cooking as well as the housework. In a late July journal entry she recorded the anger that she did not otherwise express.

The hurt going in, clean as a razor, and the dark blood welling.... Sitting in nightgown and sweater in the dining room staring into the full moon, talking to the full moon, with wrongness growing and filling the house like a man-eating plant. The need to go out. It is very quiet. Perhaps he is asleep. Or dead. How to know how long there is before death....

For someone so recently married, the words of this entry — in which she and Ted are described as “two silent strangers” — are ominous. The progression in Sylvia’s thoughts to Ted’s death might have suggested her childhood days, when she wished her father dead so that she would not have to play quietly — only to have him in fact die. Whatever the association, in July of 1956, Sylvia was in angry turmoil, sorting through feelings of love marred by disappointment that she had not known since she was a child. And she felt alone in her quandary — far from her therapist, far from her family, far from her country. Being married to the most wonderful man in the world was not the consistent bliss she had envisioned. Her July journal entry closed, sadly, “The world has grown crooked and sour as a lemon overnight.”

9 - Marriage

1956-57

“I Am Learning Peacefulness”

Sylvia’s humor was not improved when she and Ted returned from Spain completely broke. Partly because their funds were depleted, in September, after Aurelia had gone back home and Warren had come and gone with the Hugheses to Paris, she and Ted went to visit Ted’s family.

Sylvia had thought Cambridge was cold, but in Yorkshire she would experience England at its chilliest. And at its most historic: Heptonstall, where the Hughes family lived, was one of the last villages to have fallen to the Angles. A part of Elmet, the last Celtic kingdom, the whole Calder valley had for centuries been considered a desolate wilderness, a hide-out for criminals. Steep roads led to the area; narrow path-like streets wound at odd, fortifiable turns through the village; and ferocious winds off the Pennine moors waited just beyond the village walls.

Traveling by train and bus, Ted and Sylvia finally arrived, dragging their cumbersome luggage as best they could. The breathtaking expanse of moor, dotted with somnolent sheep, extended to the clouds. It was Brontë country (the Haworth parish where the Brontës lived and wrote was only a few miles away) — wild, beautiful, trackless, and colored at times with a fragile, almost fantastic, light.

At first, Sylvia loved it. A walker, she enjoyed the seemingly chartless distance, the loping fields, sometimes hidden in woods, then etched by deep blue rivers and accented with rock formations. Heptonstall was the land of the unexpected. For Sylvia, it was as good as the sea.

She wrote to Aurelia about the kindness of Ted’s parents and their welcome at the news of the marriage, about her sharing Ted’s room and writing in it during the days while he worked downstairs. Mostly she wrote about the long walks, picnics at old ruins, and a day’s trip to the Brontë house with Ted and his Uncle Walt, who became a favorite of Sylvia’s. As she described Wuthering Heights:

Imagine yourself on top of the world, with all the purplish hills curving away, and gray sheep grazing with horns curling and black demonic faces and yellow eyes ... black walls of stone, clear streams from which we drank; and, at last, a lonely, deserted black-stone house, broken down, clinging to the windy side of a hill.

During the last week of their visit, Sylvia and Ted were joined by Ellie Friedman, Sylvia’s friend from Smith who had planned to travel with Sylvia during the summer. They took Ellie, at midnight, to see the neighborhood witch, a wise old woman who did little but gossip about the villagers. They talked about astrology, went on long hiking trips (to and from the Brontë house, barely finding their way home) and to local pubs. While much of the Yorkshire life was exotic and interesting, Ellie was as attracted by Ted’s commentary on it. At all times, Ted was in charge; this was his home territory. Born nearby in Mytholmroyd, he had lived near the imposing Scout Rock, which might have been the site of Celtic ceremonies. At times, Ted played the part of the primitive Celt telling the story of a dream he had had his second year at Cambridge. Then an English major, he was writing countless critical essays, not very happily. One night in a dream, a fox (Ted’s totem) appeared — erect, man-sized, and with human hands. It walked to Ted’s essay and put a charred hand on it, saying sternly, “Stop this. You are killing us.” The next day, Ted said, he changed his major to archaeology and anthropology.

Sylvia was fascinated by the stories Ted’s mother told about ghostly appearances and mysterious deaths on the moors. While in England, Sylvia had discovered the British interest in what she called “scientific mysticism, probability in foreknowledge in cards, hypnotism, levitation, Blake.” This treatment of the occult was a comfort to Sylvia, who had long thought of herself as clairvoyant. Since she had come to England, she was having what she called mystic experiences regularly. She described an Advent service at King’s College Chapel in Cambridge in that way, and connected it with the way she felt when literature struck her hard — “as if an angel had hauled me by the hair in a shiver of gooseflesh” — as it did when her mother had read her a Matthew Arnold poem, or when she read the ending of James Joyce’s story “The Dead,” or when Dr. Krook read from D. H. Lawrence’s “The Man Who Died.” Sylvia insisted that “The Man Who Died” was
her
story, that many of the events were similar to happenings in her own life, and that the temple of Isis had long been one of her key images: “All seemed shudderingly relevant.... I have lived much of this.” With Ted, Sylvia could share these experiences, as she could not with some of her intellectual friends. For instance, she and Ted enjoyed astrology, and when Ted gave her tarot cards for her birthday in 1956, Sylvia wrote her mother that the two of them would become a “better team than Mr. and Mrs. Yeats.”

The Yorkshire visit gave Sylvia a sense of Ted’s home territory in the rural and sometimes brutal country that was so different from London and Cambridge, and showed him to be a part of a highly traditional culture. His good-humored father drove to his tobacco shop in Hebden Bridge every day. His mother cooked and kept house, visiting with friends and trying to forget her debilitating arthritis. Neither was a workaholic. Both were capable of spending long hours in conversation. Because the atmosphere of The Beacon was different from that of the Plaths’ efficient Wellesley household, Sylvia did not always appreciate it.

In October, Sylvia and Ted left Yorkshire to return to Cambridge. Ted stayed briefly, but since the Newnham College authorities did not know that Sylvia was married, he returned to Yorkshire to live when she moved back to Whitstead. Their separation lasted not quite four weeks. Ted’s letters to Sylvia during that time show a tender, passionate love, full of concern for her health and her ability to work. Sylvia, meanwhile, was undergoing what she called “a hectic suffocating wild depression.” The first week she was at Whitstead, she said she could not read at all.

After Ted had been in Yorkshire several weeks, he came to London to read a program of Yeats’s poems for the BBC. He was paid $150, money he badly needed. He and Sylvia spent two days and nights together and by the end of that time, realized that they could not live apart again. It was not much of an exaggeration when Sylvia wrote to her mother, “Both of us have been literally sick to death being apart, wasting all our time and force trying to cope with the huge, fierce sense of absence.... It is impossible for us to be whole or healthy apart.”

Near tears, Sylvia went to Dorothea Krook with the situation. When she told Dr. Krook she was married, her mentor urged her to talk with her tutor, Irene Morris. Morris went to the authorities on Sylvia’s behalf, and both Newnham College and the Fulbright committee agreed that she could complete her year. She would stay in university housing until December, and then move to 55 Eltisley Avenue, several blocks beyond Whit-stead in the Grantchester Meadows area, where Ted began living in November.

Happy as she was to be living with Ted, Sylvia was disappointed in the apartment. She and Ted shared a bathroom with the couple upstairs. More upsetting were the layers of dirt and grime. Even though the landlord allowed them to paint, Sylvia never felt that the place was clean (“How I long to get away from the dirt here. Everything is so old and dirty; soot of centuries worked into every pore”). Their £4-a-week apartment was a far cry from the houses with immaculate modern kitchens in the women’s magazines that Sylvia had grown up reading. She rode her bicycle to market, cooked with erratic heat, and — acting as Ted’s agent and business manager — tried to keep at least twenty of his poems and stories out to magazines at all times. By the second term, Ted had found a job teaching adolescent boys in a day school. For relatively low pay, he taught nearly every subject, including physical education. Now his days, too, were long. When he had time at home, he used it to write. (Sylvia wrote to a friend that, over spring holiday, she and Ted got up early and worked from 7:00 a.m. to 12:00 on their own writing, “very hard.”)

The first year of his marriage was a culmination for Ted. Although as a teenager he had written poetry and had read English when he was first at Cambridge, he felt that he had written his first successful poetry only a year or so before his marriage. In 1955 he had come across a copy of the Penguin collection of modern American poets and became fascinated with the work of Robert Lowell, W. S. Merwin, Richard Wilbur and, somewhat anachronistically, John Crowe Ransom. (Hughes was one of the few Ransom admirers to see the strikingly personal voice in that poet’s work.) With these writers as models, Hughes had written the poems Sylvia admired in
St
.
Botolph’s
Review
. He was working toward the forceful, sometimes violent, wrenchings of speech that would mark his early mature work. Meanwhile, he was having considerable success; he had published poems in
Poetry
,
The
Nation
, and
The
Atlantic
Monthly
as well as in the British journals
Granta
,
Gemini
,
Nimbus
, and
London
Magazine
. Sylvia had promised him that she would be a great agent, and would place at least fifteen poems a year for him — and she did.

At this time, Sylvia felt that Ted’s writing was more important than her own. She shopped, cooked, kept house, typed Ted’s manuscripts, and studied for her exams. She could do little more. As she wrote to Aurelia, “It is heaven to have someone like Ted who is so kind and honest and brilliant — always stimulating me to study, think, draw and write. He is better than any teacher, even fills somehow that huge, sad hole I felt in having no father.”

But as her marriage satisfied one of her lifelong dreams, it took away time from her other roles. Sylvia dragged through the winter, working hard, worrying about money, and behaving erratically at times. Sue Weller, a Smith friend who was also studying abroad, remembered visiting Ted and Sylvia that win-er, only to find Sylvia “wandering around the house with tears streaming down her face.” She was upset because a paper she had turned in was not up to her standards. Although her marriage necessarily took time away from her scholarship, Sylvia could not adjust to that situation. In Weller’s words, Sylvia “was very, very driven.”

This strain to be excellent at everything she did was not apparent to everyone. One friend thought Sylvia
could
do it all:

She had a sort of natural excellence at whatever she turned her hand to. If she wrote an essay it was effortlessly good, if she kept house it was done easily and well, and she even cooked superbly, with enthusiasm and discrimination, and she enjoyed it almost as much as she enjoyed eating. But her very remarkable efficiency was also very natural to her and was never accompanied by any sense of strain.

Sylvia’s journal entries show all too well, however, the difference between that surface impression and the truth. There she was writing about her frustration with no time to do anything right, feeling her mind “shut off like an untidy corpse under the floorboards during the last half year of exam cramming, slovenly Eltisley living, tight budgeting ... a space of paralysis.”

Despite the pressures that Sylvia was feeling, her marriage was a source of great satisfaction and happiness to her. She and Ted loved each other. They worked hard, wrote seriously, and explored London, especially the British Museum with its rare treasures of art and archeology. Together they read mythology and anthropology, including Robert Graves’s
The
White
Goddess
, a book that became a source of poetic symbols for both of them. They saw Luke Myers, Dan and Helga Huws, and other friends from Ted’s Cambridge years, but they were happiest at home, sharing their lives with each other.

Sylvia remained as keenly interested in politics as ever, angry now over both the Suez crisis and the Russian invasion of Hungary. Her outspokenness about politics marred friendships with some of her British acquaintances. When she wasn’t worrying about international affairs, Sylvia worried about money. Writers both, she and Ted did not want to take permanent jobs, but the lure of college teaching was appealing. So Sylvia wrote application letters for both of them to any school that had available positions. Following a suggestion from Mary Ellen Chase, who was spending time in England after her retirement from Smith, Sylvia applied to her alma mater. In April of 1957, Robert Gorham Davis, Chair of the English Department, invited Sylvia to teach three sections of freshman English at Smith, at a salary of $4000 for the year. Sylvia accepted, thinking that Ted could perhaps get a job at Amherst or the University of Massachusetts nearby. (Fearful of the predatory Smith students, Sylvia said she thought it best that Ted not teach at Smith, even had he been asked.)

With the Smith job secured, Sylvia made plans for returning to the United States. After a winter of financial worry, she and Ted would have money to enjoy. And Aurelia planned a garden reception for them on June 29, where Ted could be displayed like a jewel in Sylvia’s crown. To follow the party, Aurelia had rented a cottage for them at Eastham, on Cape Cod, as a belated wedding present. For seven weeks, Sylvia and Ted could live in the sun and the sea, write, and be alone. After the year of inconvenient housekeeping and hard studying, Sylvia saw those seven weeks as an oasis.

As it happened, Ted would be coming to America with some fanfare. His poetry manuscript,
The
Hawk
in
the
Rain
, had won the first book prize of the prestigious Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y in New York, which meant that Harper’s would publish the collection. The judges for that international competition — who chose Ted’s book from 286 entries — were W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, and Stephen Spender. (Later, Faber & Faber would agree to bring the book out in England, and Ted would receive a letter of praise from T. S. Eliot.)