“Pursuit,” with its “taut thighs” and “black marauder,” was the most sexually charged poem Plath had ever written. Yet she thought it literary enough to send to Aurelia with a detailed explication:
It is, of course, a symbol of the terrible beauty of death, and the paradox that the more intensely one lives, the more one burns and consumes oneself…I am hypnotized by this poem and wonder if the simple seductive beauty of the words will come across to you if you read it slowly and deliberately aloud. Another epigraph could have been from my beloved Yeats: “Whatever flames upon the night, Man’s own resinous heart has fed.” The painter’s brush consumes his dreams, and all that.7
In her journal, Plath wrote that “Pursuit” was “triggered” by Ted, “but written for Richard.”8 The poem’s style is of a piece with the searing, dramatic love letters she wrote Sassoon on March 1 and 6, begging to live with him in Paris and pledging to give herself to him forever. “More than anything else I want to bear you a son and I go about full with the darkness of my flame, like Phedre, forbidden by what auster [sic] pudeur, what fierté?”9 Yet “Pursuit” also answers back to Hughes’s “The Jaguar” (itself influenced by Rilke’s “The Panther”) and his “Law in the Country of the Cats.” The themes of competition, erotic struggle, and violence at the heart of “Pursuit” would become touchstones of Plath and Hughes’s poetic dialogue. This decidedly ungenteel poem was a breakthrough for Plath and heralded the beginning of a new creative direction.
Despite her vow to Sassoon to become a “consecrated single woman,” Sylvia dated several men that March. She joined Christopher Levenson for tea with Stephen Spender on March 1, and saw films with Hamish and Iko, the Israeli friend of Mallory Wober’s. Although she had struck sparks with Hughes, her journal is full of anguish over Sassoon. Indeed, Iko said that around this time, Sylvia came to his room “in a state of upheaval” (she had been drinking) and told him she was “confused” by her feelings for both Ted and Sassoon. She said she “needed a man to lean on” as she kissed him and asked him to make love to her. Although he was “highly stirred,” he declined—he was still loyal to Mallory—and she fell asleep on his bed. When she awoke, she was calm. Neither ever mentioned the incident again.10
Sylvia had come down with another sinus infection that made her “despair” (she longed for cocaine sprays), and she was frustrated by her professors’ inaccessibility.11 Daiches, Leavis, Willey, and Redpath all impressed her, but she complained to Aurelia that “there is no personal interplay,” no “reciprocal current of ideas” as there had been at Smith. She had met one “vivid, brilliant, opinionated young woman”—Dr. Dorothea Krook—whom she wanted as a supervisor. “I feel I could ‘grapple with’ her mind, she seems the kind one would work like mad for, and I miss this among the women here so much: their grotesqueries and sublimations as people undermines a really deep complete admiration of them.”12 Plath read D. H. Lawrence’s The Man Who Died, a novella about Christ’s resurrection, with Krook that March. She “felt chilled” as Krook read parts of it out loud, “as if [an] angel had hauled me by the hair in a shiver of gooseflesh.” It was the same feeling she had experienced reading Joyce’s “The Dead.” “I have lived much of this,” she wrote in her journal, for she too had come back from the dead. The story made her think of Otto, and how he had “gone into the dark; I rail and rage against the taking of my father…I would have loved him; and he is gone….I lust for the knowing of him.” After a coffee session with Professor Redpath at the Anchor, she had “practically ripped him up to beg him to be my father.”13 She warned herself not to marry an older man as a father substitute.
Ted returned to Cambridge on March 9, consumed by thoughts of Sylvia. He had asked Luke (who asked Bert) to find out her address. It was not like Ted, Luke thought, to show so much interest in a woman. Late that night, the two threw stones up at what they thought was Sylvia’s Whitstead window, though they were mistaken. She was not home anyway; she was out drinking with Hamish.14 When Bert told Sylvia about Ted and Luke’s visit the next day—after she had seen her psychiatrist, Dr. Davy, that morning—she was overjoyed. “HE is here; in Cambridge,” she wrote in her journal. “Please let him come; let me have him for this British spring….Oh, he is here; my black marauder; oh hungry hungry. I am so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning love…The panther wakes and stalks again.” She “lay, burning, fevered with this disease” as she waited for Ted and became furious as she watched the hours tick by.15 Luke and Ted returned the next night, again throwing clods of dirt at the wrong window while Sylvia slept and dreamed of Winthrop. Hughes could have left Plath a note in her pigeonhole at the Newnham porter’s lodge, but that was not his style. His gestures were more Shakespearean.
With her Fulbright renewed, she could now afford to visit several European cities over her spring break. She had decided to visit Sassoon in Paris (invited or not), but meanwhile made plans to spend her spring vacation with Gordon, who was touring German universities in April. Young women generally did not travel alone through Europe at the time, and she admitted to Aurelia that she felt she needed Gordon’s protection.
In any case, Sylvia had no close female friends at Cambridge with whom she could travel. “I really long for a woman confidante,” she wrote Aurelia that term.16 Jane was perhaps her closest friend, but they had quarreled after Sylvia saw that Jane had underlined passages in some books she had lent her. They were both “American girls who write,” as Sylvia put it, and each thought of herself as the “queen” among men. Sylvia knew Jane was connected through Bert to the Saint Botolph’s men, and it is clear that she wanted no competition from the other tall, attractive, literary American. (Jane, indeed, admitted she was attracted to Ted at the time.)17 Sylvia also understood that she had to align herself with a man, whether it was Ted, Christopher, Nat, Luke, or Granta editor Ben Nash, to gain entry to literary Cambridge. There was no comparable female group of “rebel-poets,” as Bert called the Botolphians, with whom Sylvia could while away afternoons over pints at the Anchor.
In mid-March, Sylvia got a splinter in her eye and had to undergo emergency surgery at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. She was fully conscious during the operation, which fascinated and horrified her. “I looked on (couldn’t help it) and babbled about how Oedipus and Gloucester in King Lear got new vision through losing eyes, but how I would just as soon keep my sight and get new vision too.” Sylvia put up a brave front for Aurelia and her friend Gary Haupt, who stood by her during the ordeal, but she must have been terrified; she now felt she deserved “Paris and pampering.”18 She would write a poem about the experience in 1959, “The Eye-Mote.”
Around this time, Sylvia got to know Luke better. Together they saw Juno and the Paycock, ate at the Anchor, shared supper in his flat, and spoke of Wallace Stevens.19 She called him a “nice guy” in her calendar.20 He was likely doing reconnaissance for Ted, who wrote Luke on March 18 asking him to invite Sylvia to Rugby Street in London. Ted was thinking of postponing his departure for Australia for another nine months, presumably on account of Sylvia, who was ecstatic about the prospect of seeing him again.
She arrived at 18 Rugby Street on March 23, the night before she was due to leave for Paris. It had been nearly a month since she and Ted had seen each other. Sylvia was alarmed by the conditions at the sagging Bloomsbury townhouse, which were considerably worse than those at the rectory. She called it a “slum.”21 Hughes lived on the second floor of the old Georgian building in a flat with no electricity or running water and only a coal fire for heat. There was no place to bathe, and the building’s only toilet was in the coal cellar underneath the street, “always black with coal dust,” as Ted’s friend and neighbor Jim Downer remembered.22 There was no sink in the bathroom, just a cold-water tap on the landing. The kitchen was a bucket and a single gas ring, which, Jim said, leaked so badly that visitors often grew lethargic. Plants died within a few days.
A small band of art
ists congregated at Rugby Street: Ted; Jim, a visual artist; the French filmmaker Jacques Tati; Lucie Rie, a potter whose work Plath admired; and Peter O’Toole, studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and supremely confident in his future. The others were not, though they pretended otherwise. Everyone was broke, and they spent their nights discussing art over candlelight, drinking instant coffee and, when someone was “flush,” bottles of Bulls Blood beer. They all pitched in for radio batteries when the BBC’s Third Programme aired Richard Burton reading Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. Jim remembered Peter O’Toole singing songs from West Side Story and practicing his lines from Juno and the Paycock. Michael Boddy, a sometimes visitor, was struck by O’Toole’s dapper appearance, “very much out of place in Rugby Street.” One night O’Toole taught them all how to rip up phone books—an “old vaudeville trick”—which they burned for heat in the fireplace.23
Ted was as impatient for Sylvia as she had been for him at Whitstead. In his Birthday Letters poem “18 Rugby Street,” he wrote, “I invoked you, bribing Fate to produce you”:
I can hear you
Climbing the bare stairs, alive and close,
Babbling to be overheard, breathless.
…A great bird, you
Surged in the plumage of your excitement,
Raving exhilaration. A blueish voltage—
Fluorescent cobalt, a flare of aura
That I later learned was yours uniquely.
About her arrival, Plath later wrote in her calendar: “recited Panther—acted same—disturbing.”24 In an unpublished draft of “18 Rugby Street,” Hughes wrote, “Imagining / It was written for me, I tried to live up to it. / You held off. I recited / Graves’ full version of Tom a Bedlam’s song. / We got wilder, but you would not stay.”25 In the final version, he wrote, “I held you and kissed you and tried to keep you / From flying about the room.”26
After a supper of wine and eggs, they spoke of poetry and listened to verse recordings. Michael was spending the night and remembered entering the flat to find the two sitting close to each other in the living room in separate chairs. Sylvia had her knees drawn up in an armchair as she touched Ted’s face and looked into his eyes. Ted’s knees touched Sylvia’s chair. The two whispered to each other, oblivious of him, then left without saying goodbye. “It was like a vision, here one minute, gone the next.”27
Ted walked Sylvia back to her hotel, the historic Clifford’s Inn on Fetter Lane, where she smuggled him into her room. “Wild wandering night,” she wrote in her calendar the next day, “wounded and shaken from ruthlessness of Ted who called me wrong name at 5am.”28 In her journal: “sleepless holocaust night with Ted.”29
Just before sunrise, Ted returned from Fetter Lane to Rugby Street. In an unpublished poem, he described hearing “blackbirds and thrushes,” “Their dawn chorus awash through the whole city.” He was “floating / On air…”30 Michael awoke to Ted “shaking” him and shouting “in fierce triumphant tones: ‘When a man’s been with a woman he must eat! Cook me the sausages!’ ” Michael had never seen Ted so “agitated.” “He was always pretty calm. But he was restless, couldn’t settle.” Michael cooked breakfast while Ted continued to move about, muttering phrases he “couldn’t catch.” When Ted finally relaxed and sat down to eat, he spoke lustily about the sexual satisfaction he had found with Sylvia the night before. He seemed to be in an altered state.31
Much later, Hughes, with his deep-seated beliefs in astrology and fate, would recall the night differently. In a Birthday Letters poem, “18 Rugby Street,” he conjured a latent doom:
Opposite the entrance
On a bombsite becoming a building site
We clutched each other giddily
For safety and went in a barrel together
Over some Niagara. Falling
In the roar of soul your scar told me—
Like its secret name or its password—
How you had tried to kill yourself. And I heard
Without ceasing for a moment to kiss you
As if a sober star had whispered it
Above the revolving, rumbling city: stay clear.32
* * *
SYLVIA LEFT TED for Paris the following morning, March 24, with a fellow Fulbright scholar who dropped her at the Hotel Béarn on rue de Lille at dusk.33 Exhausted, she washed her “battered face, smeared with a purple bruise from Ted and my neck raw and wounded too.”34 The sex, she suggested, had been rough—though perhaps not so different from what she had enjoyed with Sassoon. As Hughes wrote in his draft of “18 Rugby Street,” he was trying “to live up” to “Pursuit,” which Plath had recited upon entering his lair. They seemed determined to shock each other, to prove how far they had traveled from the traditional mores of their respectable upbringings. Yet Sylvia also wrote, in the night’s aftermath, of Ted’s “big iron violent virile body, incredible tendernesses & rich voice which makes poems.”35 Still, she was furious that he had called her “Shirley” before he left her hotel room. She was annoyed, too, that Michael had shown up at 18 Rugby Street unannounced. She wouldn’t have “minded just Luke,” but now she worried that Michael would gossip about her back at Cambridge. Above all, she was upset with herself for not spending more time with Hughes. “He suggested we go to Jugoslavia; if only he knew me rightly! I foolishly did not give him time….Such mistakes I make.”36
But Hughes was not yet a serious prospect, for Plath was still trying to resurrect her relationship with Sassoon. She believed that she could talk him out of joining the Army if he would only see her in person. When she arrived in Paris, she forced herself not to run straight to Sassoon’s apartment and instead went in search of dinner. On the street, she met Giovanni Perego, the Paris correspondent for an Italian communist newspaper. They dined together, and Sylvia went to bed early feeling “terribly alone.”37
In the morning, when she arrived at Sassoon’s flat, the curt landlady told her that Sassoon had left and would not be back until after Easter. Sylvia wept as she wrote him a letter in the living room. “He had left no address, no messages, and my letters begging him to return in time were lying there blue and unread. I was really amazed at my situation; never before had a man gone off to leave me to cry after.”38 Distraught, she headed to the brasserie where Sassoon had taken her on her first night in Paris. She ordered a drink and read Antigone.
She tried to forget him as she sketched along the Seine, drank in cafés, and explored Montmartre. She ran into her Cambridge friends Tony Gray and Gary Haupt, and other Fulbright scholars she knew—Ted Cohen and Carl Shakin, her “shipboard romance.” This time Carl’s wife was in tow, and the encounter was brief. It seemed incredible to her that she should meet so many men by chance, yet Sassoon failed to appear. To Aurelia, she “gave” only “the gay side” of things, but she was lonely.39 She and Tony ended up in bed together at her hotel, though he drew back at the last minute. Sylvia thought that she had “scared” him with her “need and volcanic will.”40 She resolved to “Be chaste” and not drink too much, for she now bitterly regretted her drunken behavior at the Saint Botolph’s party and her wild night with Hughes in London. In her journal, she worried constantly that she would be the subject of gossip at Cambridge: “let no one verify this term the flaws of last!”41
Back in London, Ted could not stop thinking of Sylvia. He wrote her on March 31 that if she did not come to London to see him on her way back, he would return to Cambridge to see her: “Sylvia, That night was nothing but getting to know how smooth your body is. The memory of it goes through me like brandy.”42
On April 3 Sylvia ran into Gordon at the American Express office—a fortuitous coincidence, as the office had been sending her mail back to Whitstead and she had no way of communicating with him. Relieved, they made plans to leave for Germany on April 6, and saw Cocteau’s ballet of Racine’s Phèdre at the opera, which revived t
he “black marauder” fantasy of “Pursuit.” Before they left, they toured Notre Dame and Sainte-Chapelle. She was “brave & desolate” without Sassoon, whom she willed daily to appear.43
Sassoon later wrote a short story, “The Diagram,” based on his 1956 Easter vacation in Spain. The narrator claims that he has left Paris in order to make a clean break with a serious girlfriend:
I was at the time running north-south, east-west and diagonally over Spain…because I was trying to make up my mind about a girl I most genuinely loved who was coming to Paris to see me, where I wouldn’t be because of having gone away to try to make up my mind, and from whose letters I understood was going to start having an affair with a certain fellow so as to make me jealous and give me a mind to marry her, which I was unwilling to do just because of this imminent unfaithfulness—all very complicated. I kept writing her telegrams and not sending them.44
Sassoon would, in fact, send several “long letters” from Spain to Plath at Whitstead, where she received them, as she wrote her mother, “too late.”45
In February, Sylvia had practically begged Gordon to travel with her around the Continent. Now she had misgivings. She felt awkward about letting him pay for her meals and hotel, and insisted on paying her train fare and some of her plane ticket home.46 But she was desperate to see Italy and knew she could not travel there alone. She had become so “sick of dark sleazy men at my elbow” that she had stopped leaving her hotel for dinner.47 Gordon served a useful purpose, even if, as she claimed, she preferred the company of her typewriter.48
Together they left Paris by train on the morning of April 6. Sylvia felt desolate: “terrible sick sorrow re Richard—temptation to jump,” she wrote in her calendar.49 In Munich, she was embarrassed by Gordon’s stammering attempts to speak German; his father was from Germany, and he had often intimated that he knew the language well. Now she knew his German was no better than hers. As the mutual goodwill dissolved, they left Munich on April 7 and traveled by train through Austria and the Tyrolean Alps. Sylvia had wanted to see her grandparents’ hometown of Innsbruck, but there was no time to stop. She pressed her nose to the window and “almost cried” as the train rushed through the city.50 In Venice, they took gondola rides past pink palaces and beheld the gilded grandeur of Saint Mark’s. “How ridiculous this is. It must look to others as if we were lovers,” Sylvia said to Gordon.51 They stayed only one day, leaving for Rome on the 9th. Sylvia lounged on the sunny Spanish Steps and toured the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel, at whose ceiling she “stared for hours in reverence.”52 At the Colosseum, she ate oranges and bananas in the sun “while speculating on Christians & wild beasts.”53 She and Gordon ran into her old Wellesley friend Don Cheney, who had gone to Choate with Gordon and was on a Fulbright in Rome. Sylvia was relieved to have an escort who spoke Italian and provided a buffer between her and Gordon, with whom she was now barely on speaking terms. Drunk after “too much wine for lunch,” Sylvia and Gordon fought; “barbs,” she wrote in her calendar on April 11. “I should know by now that there is always bound to be a hidden rankling between the rejector and the rejected,” she told Aurelia.54 Gordon, too, was relieved to say goodbye; he never wanted to see Sylvia again. (He later apologized for his behavior during the trip and assumed all responsibility for things turning sour.)55
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