Ellie Friedman thought Ted’s unsuitability as a husband—at least from Aurelia’s perspective—made Sylvia “run straight into his arms.”99 Meanwhile, Hughes’s old friends could hardly believe that their “wild ruffian,” as Pembroke’s dean had once called him, was engaged to an American.100 They assumed that Sylvia came from money, and that she would expect Ted to produce more of it; they even made up a ditty that went “I’d rather my Ted as he used to be / Than with Sylvia Plath and her rich Mammy.”101 Bert Wyatt-Brown and David Ross rather liked Sylvia—she struck David as “one tough lady…determined, strong.”102 But to Luke she personified American materialism; he was skeptical that Sylvia was the right wife for the author of “Money, My Enemy.”
Ted had no such doubts. He felt Sylvia understood his literary vocation, which she shared, and would not pressure him to become a conventional breadwinning husband—just as Sylvia felt he would not pressure her to abandon her writing for homemaking. His life, too, had changed. That summer he told Olwyn that he had committed himself to Sylvia and his writing, whatever the cost.
I have met a first-rate American poetess. She really is good. Certainly one of the best female poets I ever read, and a damned sight better than the run of good male. Her main enthusiasm at present is me, and she thinks my verses are as good as I think they are and has accordingly and efficiently dispatched about twenty five to various immensely paying American Mags. So. She has published stories and poems in some of the top American journals. If you’re in Paris on the 22nd I’ll introduce you….has her Mars smack on my sun, which is all very appropriate.
My life is peaking, and my writing at last going with me [sic] method….
Postscript: Later tonight. For the last month I’ve lived about the strongest life I ever did live. The main thing about it—and the thing that has saved it from being just absurd—is that I’ve written quite a bit. As I’m miserable and fit for nothing if I don’t write continuously, I shall from now on shape my life round writing instead of squeezing writing into my life where I can.103
Ted canceled his autumn passage to Australia. He now planned to teach in Spain while Sylvia finished her final year at Cambridge; then they would marry and teach in America together. Sylvia reassured her mother that she would soon be “a proud grandmother yet!”104 She began drawing up a wedding invitation list that included Mrs. Prouty, Dr. Beuscher, the Cantors, the Aldriches, the Crocketts, and Mary Ellen Chase. Pat O’Neil was her choice for maid of honor. If Pat’s Catholicism precluded her from serving, Ruth, Marcia, and Ellie were her second, third, and fourth choices; otherwise, they would be bridesmaids, along with Joan Cantor. They were people who “really know what this means to me; sort of an apocryphal dedication to a tough, honest, creative life full of love and giving to the world of books and babies.”105 Aurelia’s reaction might be guessed. Sylvia and Ted had been dating continuously for less than a month.
Newly engaged, Sylvia traveled to Rugby Street on May 11 and, after “love,” cleaned Ted’s “greasy filthy kitchen.”106 That night she and Ted attended the Fulbright reception, where they spoke with Prince Philip. When the Duke asked Ted his occupation, he replied, “Chaperoning Sylvia.” “Ah,” the Duke smiled, “the idle rich.”107 Sylvia brought up this meeting years later in 1962 when an English friend, Elizabeth Compton, tried to explain the “terrible, crushing” British class system to her, and how Hughes had “suffered” under it in ways that were not always obvious to Americans. “I asked her if she didn’t think that, somewhere, Ted had a feeling of inferiority,” Elizabeth wrote. Sylvia answered with a bitter laugh. “ ‘Ted has lunched with the Duke of Edinburgh,’ she said.”108
Sylvia got so drunk on “countless sherries” at the reception that she blacked out and vomited; she wrote of “Ted’s care & solace through bad night.”109 Back at Cambridge, she paid for her leisurely weekend by staying up all night on Monday to finish her Plato paper for Dr. Krook. As the birds began their morning song, she felt “tense, tired—electric wires trilling in blood—green milky dawn.”110
Sylvia and Ted had sexual freedom at Whitstead, where they spent long afternoons in Sylvia’s room. But Ted’s presence did not endear Sylvia to her fellow Whitstead residents. Philippa Forder Goold felt less free to wander the halls in her dressing gown for fear of running into Ted, and she grew annoyed at how Sylvia commandeered the kitchen’s “common stock” to cook for him.111 She resented, too, the way Sylvia expected her fellow residents to hide Ted’s presence from the house mother. Jane Baltzell Kopp remembered that one afternoon after Ted and Luke had been “lying in a field” dreaming up a Utopian society, they rushed back to Whitstead in a “brain fever” with a bottle of wine. Sylvia had no corkscrew, so Ted went round knocking on doors. When the house mother, Christine Abbott, told him she did not have a corkscrew, he opened the wine by “wildly” smashing the bottle’s neck on her door handle. Abbott, shocked into silence, simply shut her door. Jane was astounded there were no repercussions.112
If Sylvia noticed the resentment building around her, she probably felt that the trade-off was worth it. She always referred to sex as “love” and described these times in her calendar with words like “tender” and “quiet,” though in late May she and Ted had a row—“wrong love & hard talk.” They made up quickly, “another step front—sense of growing through hardness & hurt.”113 She spent lazy afternoons lying on the banks of the Cam with him, reading poetry, sketching, or drinking outside at the Anchor. Throughout that May, a “wonderful well being” descended on her, and she told everyone she had never been happier.114 She had at last found the place, she wrote Aurelia, “that whistling desert where human beings stand naked before the sun and the earth and give in full honesty and faith of all their being.”115
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Sylvia felt she knew enough about philosophy now to impress Dr. Krook, who, as she admitted to Aurelia, had become a substitute for Dr. Beuscher. She was sailing effortlessly through her supervisions, “now coming into the full of my power.”116 Discussing Plato’s Gorgias with Krook, Plath felt “pure delight”; she had never felt so “whetted” and “keen.”117 Years later, Krook remembered those supervisions with particular pleasure. She called Plath “one of the most deeply, movingly, responsive pupils I had ever had. I felt the things I said, we said, her authors said, mattered to her in an intimate way, answering to intense personal needs, reaching to depths of her spirit.”118 With Plath, Krook “let herself go” and pursued Plato “further than I had done with any other student.” She remembered that there “was nothing wild, feverish or defiant” about Sylvia, whom she found “extraordinarily modest, self-effacing, unassuming, unspoilt.” When Krook eventually met Hughes—whom she described as “very shy, very taciturn, very much a Yorkshireman”—she was unnerved by Plath’s ecstatic happiness and shuddered to think what might happen should something “go wrong with this marriage of true minds.”119
Sylvia’s academic confidence spilled over into her creative life; she worked furiously on her poetry manuscript, which she hoped to enter in a contest judged by Richard Wilbur and May Sarton. To Aurelia, she claimed, “I am learning and mastering new words each day, and drunker than Dylan, harder than Hopkins, younger than Yeats in my saying.”120 She wrote several poems—“Bucolics” on May 5, “Wreath for a Bridal” on May 17–18, and “Two Sisters of Persephone” on May 24. “Aerialist” followed on May 30, “Dream with Clam-Diggers” on June 1, “Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats” on June 2, “Tinker Jack and the Tidy Wives” on June 7, and “Letter to a Purist” on June 8.121 These were minor poems, but they pleased Plath. She told Warren, “I am writing poetry as I never have before.”122
She was getting better reporting assignments, too: on April 24 she “gorged” herself on caviar at the “posh” Claridge Hotel, where she reported on Khrushchev and Bulganin’s visit for the Cambridge paper Varsity.123 She met the Soviet ambassador and British Prime
Minister Anthony Eden, and discussed Dostoevsky with Russian officials. She shook Bulganin’s hand and invited him to Cambridge, then sang along to “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” while a British guest joked that she would never be let back into America. Two weeks later, she published a more serious piece in Oxford’s Isis about the difficulties women faced at Cambridge, followed by an article on May Week fashions for Varsity for which she modeled a bathing suit, a cocktail dress, and a ball gown (which showed “how hard up they are!” she quipped to Aurelia).124 Varsity also published Plath’s impressions of Paris, with her accompanying sketches.125 When Luke suggested to Ted that Varsity had published this piece to mock Sylvia’s American sensibility, his eyes “took on a protective, hurt expression at the thought of Sylvia being set up for mockery.”126 (Indeed, Michael Boddy remembered the Varsity editors “snickering” about Plath’s “Caryatids” poem and her fashion spread.)127 Meanwhile, Hughes taught her about horoscopes, and she began planning a novel about Cambridge. She awoke each morning to “thrushes caroling” on the branches of a pink cherry tree in full bloom just outside her window.128 “God, such a life!” she wrote home.129
In mid-May, Sylvia’s Smith professor Mary Ellen Chase and her partner Eleanor Duckett visited Cambridge and took Sylvia out to long “divine” lunches.130 Chase had worked tirelessly to secure Plath a spot at Cambridge, and was happy to see her star pupil thriving. Chase hinted that Smith would hire Plath as an English instructor after she graduated from Cambridge. The prospect thrilled Sylvia, and made her reconsider her earlier plan of “world-wandering” and itinerant English teaching. She hoped, despite herself, that Ted would get a job at Amherst.
Sylvia continued to tell Aurelia she did not mind that Ted was “penniless,” yet in the same letter she asked for help choosing the nicest “stainless steel patterns” for her pans, and hoped that the couple would receive enough wedding gifts in Wellesley “to start us on a home.”131 She wondered whether they could get summer waitressing and bartending jobs on Cape Cod, or whether Ted might be employed as a “chauffer with a millionaire family.”132 She soon had another idea: she began sending Hughes’s poems out to American magazines in May. “I want the editors to be crying for him when we come to America next June.”133 Ted had “commissioned” her his “official agent,” she joked, but it was true; he would owe his career to her. She typed Hughes’s poems in Whitstead’s sunny backyard as he sat beside her, revising his now famous poem “The Jaguar.” She felt his work was, like him, “fierce, disciplined with a straight honest saying,” and predicted that “the world will be a different place” once he began publishing.134
Sylvia was upset that she could not return to Wellesley for her grandmother’s funeral and worried Aurelia would cancel her June visit to Cambridge. Sylvia had never been apart from Aurelia for so long and was desperate to see her mother again. She asked Warren to “convince her subtly” that it was her moral duty to come, and she told Aurelia that out of sorrow would come strength.135 (“If anyone had asked me what time of my life was most invaluable, I would say those 6 terrible months at McLean: for by re-forging my soul, I am a woman now the like of which I could never have dreamed of.”)136 Sylvia mustered all of her rhetorical force to convince her mother not to cancel her trip, guessing correctly that the language of martyrdom would be most effective:
You, alone, of all, have had crosses that would cause many a stronger woman to break under the never-ceasing load.
You have born daddy’s long hard death, and taken on a man’s portion in your work; you have fought your own ulcer-attacks, kept us children sheltered, happy, rich with art & music lessons, camp and play; you have seen me through the black night when the only word I knew was No and when I thought I could never write or think again; and you have been brave through your own operation….Think of your trip here as a trip to the heart of strength in your daughter who loves you more dearly than words can say.
Together, Sylvia assured her mother, they would “walk through green gardens and marvel at this strange and sweet world.”137 Aurelia booked her trip.
If Aurelia had reservations about Ted, she kept quiet. Mrs. Prouty was more candid. Sylvia’s and Ted’s backgrounds were too different, she wrote Aurelia, and they hardly knew each other. Prouty asked Sylvia not to make a decision about marriage until she was less infatuated, and reminded her that other boyfriends had once stirred similar feelings. She should regard them all as “warning examples.”
You anticipated that I would feel skeptical. I think “skeptical” isn’t quite the word. Fearful more closely describes it. He sounds too much like Dylan Thomas for me to think he would make a satisfactory husband and father. Dylan Thomas’s attitude towards women was much like that you describe…Thomas’s wife was marvelous about his various love affairs and came to his rescue when he broke down physically and morally. Are you ready to do this for this second Dylan Thomas?
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?138
Sylvia was very much in love with Ted, but she relished shocking the dowagers in her life. Her early depictions of Hughes were perhaps encouraged by his own attempts to strike a misanthropic pose. But they were also self-consciously literary: Plath had spent her first two terms at Cambridge engrossed in tragedy, reading Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Synge, Yeats, Racine, Corneille, and Marlowe. She read more than fifty tragic plays in her second term alone. She told others she was fascinated by the “destructive love-hate relations between men & wives” in the plays, and intrigued, in Ibsen, by “the need for the artist to sacrifice life to his creation and the deadly retribution he must pay, laying waste to the creative lives around him, yet having to follow his call.”139 Plath’s reading influenced her perception of Hughes, which she dramatized for maximum effect in her letters. When she told Aurelia he was “a violent Adam,” “a breaker of things and people,” “arrogant, used to walking over women like a blast of Jove’s lightning,” she had spent less than a week with him.140
The work of D. H. Lawrence, especially, had inspired Plath to look for a partner who, like Oliver Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, would match her strength.141 The writer Claire Tomalin left Newnham a year before Plath, but remembered the impact “Lawrence via F R Leavis” had upon romantic relationships of her literary generation, of “sex within marriage being passionate, serious and sacramental….something entirely different from the bloodless, easygoing style of Bloomsbury.”142 Indeed, Lawrence’s novels had convinced Plath that, as Rupert Birkin put it, man and woman could exist in “mystic conjunction” without sacrificing themselves to the other’s ambitions or desires.143 It was as if Lawrence himself had predicted Ted Hughes. Echoing a scene from Women in Love, Plath had written in her journal in 1952:
two over-lapping circles, with a certain strong riveted center of common ground, but both with separate arcs jutting out in the world. A balanced tension; adaptable to circumstances, in which there is an elasticity of pull, tension, yet firm unity….I do not believe…that artistic creativity can best be indulged in masterful singleness rather than in marital cooperation. I think that a workable union should heighten the potentialities in both individuals.144
Dick, Gordon, and Sassoon had all been gods. Now Sylvia applied elements of her Sassoon mythology to Ted: he was her Byronic hero, her Manfred, whom she would save from himself. She told Aurelia she would “teach him care.”145 Later, she congratulated herself: “You should see how Ted is changing under my love and cooking and daily care! Gone is the tortured black cruel look, the ruthless banging gestures; he is mellowing, growing rich and kind and dear and tender and caring of me as he would be of a delicate bird.” Without her love, she wrote Aurelia, he would have become “bitter & cynical, and destructive.”146 But Sylvia also wanted Ted to save her—and her poetry—from dull conformity.
She would find the “guts” to rise to Hughes’s challenge and devote her life to writing. The ascetic in her relished the idea of living frugally, while the Romantic in her sought a stance against the world. Together, they would fly close to the sun: “no precocious hushed literary circles for us: we write, read, talk plain and straight and produce from the fiber of our hearts and bones.”147 Yet Claire Tomalin recalled how “those Lawrentian marriages of total commitment worked out uncomfortably…I don’t recall that many of our supposedly Lawrentian husbands took on the cooking.”148
Sylvia boasted of Ted’s contempt for convention the way her Smith peers boasted about their fiancés’ Ivy League pedigrees. But Jane Anderson, Sylvia’s friend from her McLean days, thought she detected hints of unease when she visited Sylvia in Cambridge midmorning on June 4. In her Bell Jar trial deposition, Jane said that as soon as she got off the train, Sylvia began telling her about her new love, Ted Hughes. Jane remembered that Sylvia called him “sadistic,” but she assured Jane that she could “manage” him.149 Jane thought this was a strange way to introduce one’s fiancé, but she kept quiet while Sylvia continued talking in a “pressured” way. To Jane, Sylvia seemed tense, anxious, and “ambivalent” about her decision to marry Hughes; she sensed that as much as Sylvia enjoyed the drama of playing Cathy to Ted’s Heathcliff, she wanted someone to talk her out of the marriage.
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