…She sobbed a little, and then she sat quietly on a rock in the roadside ditch. “I will wait until they let me in.”
“Very well! I will see to it.”156
And in Plath’s 1956 short story “The Matisse Chapel,” the character of Sally accuses Richard:
“You are so selfish that you went to see it without me. You knew that reporting about it wouldn’t mean anything. You wouldn’t even tell the Mother Superior: ‘No, I will not see it without my girl.’ You didn’t even have the courage for that.”
“Remember, I got you in,” Richard said.
“They let you in because you looked miserable,” Sally said. “And they let me in because I was crying. Simply because I was crying.”
The radiance of the day was going. It was getting colder, approaching four o’clock, and the sky was thickening from blue to gray, curdling over with clouds. Animosity rankled between them. Stubbornly, Sally made the decisive gesture and withdrew her hand from Richard’s arm.157
Sally wonders “if anything could save them now, after they had turned their backs on the colored chapel and fallen to squabbling.”158
In real life, the two parted after “good farewell love.”159 Mallory—to whom Sylvia had written romantic letters from Paris—met her at Victoria Station, and she spent the night at his London home. But her feelings for him had receded; she would soon find excuses to turn down his invitations at Cambridge. England itself seemed paler after the riotous colors of the Mediterranean. She was disgusted with the “harsh Cockney” accents she heard, and the “bored, impersonal, dissatisfied faces of the working class, the cold walls between people in train compartments.”160 She felt better once she reached Cambridge on January 9, where she fortified herself with fresh fruit and flowers from the market.
She would soon receive a crushing letter from Sassoon. He felt she wanted more from him than he could give. Sylvia quoted his letter to Ellie: “ ‘two years of army…and I must make a fortune and only then found a family, and always in the holy skies our love is and will be: someday; meanwhile, I must be noble and give you your freedom.’ ” Heartbroken, she begged him to reconsider—or at least agree to see her in Paris over the coming spring break. He responded with “a kind of promise to come crashing out of the aether in countless years hence and claim me amidst blood, thunder, and apotheosis as his woman and all the rest of it.”161 Sylvia was distraught. She wrote Sassoon, “I have found that it is beyond your power ever ever to free me or give me back my soul; you could have a dozen mistresses and a dozen languages and a dozen countries, and I could kick and kick; I would still not be free.”162
Her world began to diminish. Her reading list was so arduous she felt she could read for the next ten years and still not complete it. Yet she kept up a “spartan siege”: during the last week of January she read eighteen Strindberg plays and wrote a fifteen-page paper.163 The following week brought supervisions and lectures on Chekhov, Racine, Woolf, Aeschylus, and the Jacobeans. “So you see,” she wrote home, “the pressure is constant.”164 If only she could write more—when she wrote she felt a “spiritual calm”: “I would smother if I didn’t write.”165
Jane never saw Sylvia depressed at Cambridge, and only later learned about her breakdown and suicide attempt from a Smith graduate, May Collacott, who arrived at Whitstead in the fall of 1956. But Sylvia was more depressed than she let on. “Moon—sad—destructive—lonely,” she wrote in her calendar as the weather raged. Throughout January, her calendar entries shared a disturbing despondency: “snowy, rainy sickish day”; “rain, smoky fog”; “miserable cold still—frost—bitter”; “tired, wet day.” A film about unrest in Northern Ireland, Odd Man Out, caused her “catharsis” and “tears”; two days later, on January 29, she wrote, “Tremendous sense of Guilt & pressure.”166
Sylvia’s burgeoning depression began to take a physical toll. On January 31 she awoke with “excruciating pains and was violently sick.” She was taken by ambulance to Addenbrooke’s Hospital, where she was put under watch for acute appendicitis in a large, crowded ward. She told Aurelia she felt “deserted and precarious (no medecine [sic], not even water)” and went home the next day with a diagnosis of “colic,” which meant “absolutely nothing” to her.167 In her calendar, she described the experience as a “nightmare,” but she assured her mother that she was resilient: “I know I have already faced The Worst (total negation of self) and that, having lived through that blackness, like Peer Gynt lived through his fight with the Boyg, I can enjoy life simply for what it is: a continuous job, but most worth it. My existence now rests on solid ground; I may be depressed now and then, but never desperate.”168 Yet the next day she wrote in her calendar, “life miserable—suicidal.”169
Mallory and Nat no longer interested her. She was, she told Mallory, a “disagreeable, idiosyncratic, pseudo-misanthrope.”170 Mallory’s Israeli friend, Iko Meshoulam, recalled that Mallory experienced “great agony” after Sylvia dropped him, for he had been “in love like a schoolboy….Very tragic.”171 Despite his heartbreak, Mallory considered himself “pretty lucky. To meet somebody rare—in some ways nasty—but still a rare person, is not everybody’s lot.”172 But Sylvia, too, was desolate. She wrote her McLean friend Jane Anderson, “there have been very dark days, however rosy a mere skimming summary may sound.”173 The only Cambridge man who interested her now was Christopher Levenson, who was on sherry-drinking terms with Stephen Spender and E. M. Forster. She and Christopher spent the weekend of February 17–18 together in London, where they saw, at her suggestion, W. S. Merwin’s play Darkling Child. But the weekend only reminded her that he was not Sassoon.
As Sassoon receded, she attached herself more fiercely to his image. She would wait for his return as if he were a sailor on a long voyage, and keep herself pure for him. In her journal, she wrote,
I am rather high, and distant, and it is convenient to be led home across the snow-fields. It is very cold, and all the way back I am thinking: Richard, you live in this moment. You live now….I want to write you, of my love, that absurd faith which keeps me chaste, so chaste, that all I have ever touched or said to others becomes only the rehearsal for you, and preserved only for this.174
Not only was Plath losing Sassoon, she was losing ground as a college poet. The Cambridge literary scene, dominated by the Granta, delta, and Chequer cliques, was intensely competitive and entirely male. Sylvia was naive about the obstacles she would have to overcome to break into these small, privileged worlds. Philip Hobsbaum, Ted Hughes’s Cambridge contemporary and Seamus Heaney’s mentor (and, in 1955, a delta editor), ran a writing group that Hughes attended. When Sylvia applied, she was refused admittance. She sent Philip four “meticulously typed” poems, but they seemed to him immature, like “college girl stuff.”175 He later admitted that he had made a sexist mistake.176 Christopher agreed that the sexism at Cambridge was pervasive, but Sylvia seemed to transcend it: “because of her personal energy and vivacity I doubt if that in itself would have created literary obstacles for someone like Sylvia.” Yet his words suggest the very sexism she had to overcome—and that Plath was welcomed into the delta and Chequer fold because she was an attractive, clever young woman, not because she was a respected campus poet: “She wrote articles for Varsity, the weekly newspaper and altogether her flair for publicity, and her self-assertiveness seemed much more professional than most of our fellow would-be writers. She appeared very self-assured and glamorous…but almost too clever, too sophisticated in our eyes.”177
Chequer had published two of Plath’s poems, “Epitaph in Three Parts” and “Three Caryatids Without a Portico by Hugh Robus: A Study in Sculptural Dimensions” in its Winter 1956 issue. Now, at the end of January, she was horrified to see that Daniel Huws, a close friend of Ted Hughes, had mocked her poems in a review. Daniel and his friends scoffed at the New Critical tricks Sylvia had mastered. They subscribed to a Neoromantic aesthetic that
sought to resurrect the incantatory rhythms of Yeats and Dylan Thomas. Sylvia had expected to take Cambridge poetry by storm; instead, she had become a laughingstock. In her calendar that February she wrote repeatedly of her doubt about her literary career.
Sylvia’s physical and mental health continued to deteriorate. She feared an impending breakdown that January as she read Shirley Jackson’s 1954 novel The Bird’s Nest, about a young woman with multiple personalities.178 She was, she told Aurelia, “stoically inured to the winter, and working hard so that the spring will be a true and deserved flowering.”179 But privately she was haunted by the prospect of another depression—“The fear that all the edges and shapes and colors of the real world that have been built up again so painfully with such real love can dwindle in a moment of doubt, and ‘suddenly go out’ the way the moon would in the Blake poem.”180 She did not want to return to America, which seemed to her now provincial and materialistic. She fantasized about a writing fellowship, living in Italy, reporting for an international newspaper—anything that put her in the midst of “vital” people and events. “I am just about through with the academic community,” she told her mother.181 But she knew she had little chance of joining a newspaper with no practical experience. She had won nearly every prestigious academic prize it was possible for a young woman to win, yet she had few career prospects outside the field of education. Without the salve of Sassoon’s love, and with the harsh review of her poems still ringing in her ears, she feared the emptiness would engulf her again: “The horror is the sudden folding up and away of the phenomenal world, leaving nothing. Just rags.”182
She felt better—briefly—after she learned that her Smith friend Sue Weller had received a Marshall Scholarship to Oxford. She also learned, in early February, that her Fulbright Fellowship had been recommended for renewal. “Complete reversal of desperate & depressed mood” she wrote in her calendar on Valentine’s Day.183 She reassured Aurelia, “I am solidly, realistically joyous; I like living in hope of publication; I can live without the actual publication.”184 Her hope was rewarded that week when The Christian Science Monitor bought one of her drawings and an article about Cambridge life.185
She and Christopher Levenson saw each other nearly every day in February, and she made time for tea and coffee dates, films, and plays with friends—among them The Bacchae (in Greek), Dalí’s L’Age d’Or, and Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête. Yet by mid-February she was rehearsing her “old doubts re superficiality in expression (words) & in experience”: “cold inferior feelings re writing & thinking”; “very depressed & antagonistic & hollow…close to blackness again.”186 She longed for “stoic courage,” and made a “new resolution to be accessible and sweet.”187 Between February 20 and 23 she was able to channel her suffering into art; she wrote “Winter Landscape, With Rooks,” “Tale of a Tub,” and “Channel Crossing.” But on February 24, the day before she met Ted Hughes, she wrote in her calendar, “miserablest of days—awful wet cold—drugs—far off—no sleep—great depression.”188
Sylvia missed her mother’s healing hand and her grandmother’s chicken soup; the English food disgusted her. At Cambridge, no one made a fuss over her. “I miss that very subtle atmosphere of faith and understanding at home where you all knew what I was working at, and appreciated it, whether it got published or not,” she wrote Aurelia on February 24 in an unusually despondent letter. She apologized to her mother for “overflowing,” but it was necessary to “spew out those thoughts which are like the blocked putridity in my head.”189 Other areas of her life started to fall apart; she couldn’t prepare for her new classes, and she couldn’t rouse herself to socialize. Her professors, she felt, thought she was stupid, and the students in her college surely thought she was mad. Years later, Jane wrote that Sylvia had been wrong. “None of us knew anything at the time about her history in America and in the general array of psyches in Whitstead at the time, she seemed decidedly one of the healthy ones.”190
Sylvia wrote desperate letters to Sassoon, asking him “to tell me if he would not see me in paris, italy [sic], etc.”191 His response was “disquieting,” but he promised that he would return for her someday. She ignored him, and declared she would visit him in Paris during her Easter vacation regardless of whether he wanted her there or not. As she told Ellie, “I have from somewhere got the guts to go to paris [sic], stand in his door, rouse him from whatever mistress it is now, and say, smiling ‘here I am darling. How about coffee?’ ” But even as she concocted plans to see him, she longed, she told Ellie, for someone to “break richard’s [sic] image & free me”: “I am committed, until some big, brilliant combination of all the men I have ever met…comes and transforms me into the Woman I am with richard [sic]: writer, poet, reader, sleeper, eater, and all.”192
Sylvia did not mention that she had already met such a man the week before. His name was Ted Hughes.
16
Mad Passionate Abandon
Cambridge University, February 1956
Before Sylvia Plath knew Ted Hughes, she knew his poems. She had read them in the November 1954 issue of Chequer, and in the short-lived Saint Botolph’s Review.1 Plath was struck by Hughes’s brazen voice, so radically different from the well-wrought verse then fashionable in English and American literary circles. This poet wrote of seething jaguars and dark figures who obeyed the laws of nature, not man:
When two men meet for the first time in all
Eternity, and outright hate each other,
Not as a beggar-man and a rich man,
Not as cuckold-maker and cuckold,
Not as bully and delicate boy, but
As dog and wolf because their blood before
They are aware has bristled into their hackles,
Because one has clubbed the other to death
With the bottle first broached to toast their transaction
……………………………………….
Then a flash of violent incredible action,
Then one man letting his brains gently to the gutter,
And one man bursting into the police station
Crying “Let Justice be done. I did it, I.”2
This was the voice of King Lear rather than The Faerie Queen. Hughes preferred, as a Cambridge friend later wrote, “the strong stress patterns of native Anglo-Saxon poetry. He was an intensely English poet, whose England is a tough country of snowfalls, mud and biting tempests. Its farms cling perilously to barely fertile hillsides, scraped from the eternal rocks beneath.”3 Plath recognized in Hughes an explosive talent at a time when he had published fewer than a dozen poems in college magazines. Her belief in him was uncanny, and prescient.
By the time Plath read “Law in the Country of the Cats” in the 1956 Saint Botolph’s Review, Hughes had graduated from Cambridge, but he was still a regular presence there. He famously camped out in a tent in the garden of the Saint Botolph’s rectory, where his friend Lucas (Luke) Myers—a Tennessee man and distant relation of the poet Allen Tate—bedded down in an old chicken coop.4 Most of Ted’s friends were outsiders who, like him, felt disdain for the clipped accents of the British upper class: Luke Myers and Bertram (Bert) Wyatt-Brown were American; Daniel Huws was Welsh; Colin White was a Scottish communist; Terence McCaughey was Irish. Daniel Weissbort, whose Polish parents had brought him to England from Belgium in the 1930s, was Jewish, as was the medical student Than Minton. Despite the fact that several of these young men had gone to elite private schools, Wyatt-Brown remembered “lengthy discussions about the mannered snobs in various colleges,” the “crumbs” they “despised.”5 (The Duke of Buckingham’s son, who once served sugared violet petals at a tea party, was a favorite target.) David Ross called his friends “a sort of socialist group” and remembered Hughes being “very well aware of class…it was virtually impossible not to notice it.”6 Indeed, when Christopher Levenson went round selling issues o
f his literary magazine delta at “certain colleges,” he was struck by “the number of Lords and Viscounts on the nameplates beside their doors.”7
Hughes was friendly with several Englishmen, such as Ross, Peter Redgrove, Philip Hobsbaum, and Brian Cox, but his Yorkshire background marked him as northern and, in the prejudice of the day, provincial. Redgrove, a poet, was amazed that Hughes did not try to tone down his Yorkshire accent, which could be a professional liability; when Redgrove later submitted an early recording of Hughes reading his poems to the BBC, they rejected it because of Hughes’s regional cadences. His refusal to change his accent was a gesture of indifference rather than defiance, Redgrove felt; Hughes simply “lacked” the sense of himself as inferior.8 Hughes later told a friend, “I lay low, because I felt, I suppose, that I was in enemy country.”9
* * *
HUGHES HAD COME UP to Pembroke College, Cambridge, in October 1951 after winning an Open Exhibition. Like Plath, he came from a family that worked hard to make ends meet—his father was a journeyman carpenter turned newsagent, his mother a thrifty homemaker. Both sides of the family were from the Calder Valley in West Yorkshire, near Brontë country. While Plath’s family had fallen down the class ladder after Otto’s death, Hughes’s family had worked its way up. Hughes’s paternal Irish grandfather, John Hughes, had come to Yorkshire around 1870 from Manchester with a wave of Irish laborers to build a local reservoir. Because he lived in Cragg Vale, he was nicknamed “Cragg Jack,” and he married a local woman named Polly Major. Polly’s father had been a major in the British Army, stationed in Gibraltar; her mother was Spanish.
Hughes’s paternal grandparents moved into a small row house on King Street, across from the Calder River, in the mill town of Hebden Bridge. Cragg Jack frequented the nearby Stubbing Wharfe pub, where he was known for his Irish ballads. The Calder River flooded often, and with it the family’s low-lying home. Jack died in 1903 at forty-seven of a respiratory infection, leaving Polly to raise three children—including Hughes’s father, William, almost ten—on her own, while cleaning houses. Money was so tight that Hughes’s father once had to attend school wearing a pair of ladies’ boots, a gift from one of Polly’s employers. Polly brought in extra income by selling sweets out of her living room, where she made her young customers read a Bible passage before they could buy their “spice.”10
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