But she was productive in Yorkshire. She typed up “Remember the Stick Man,” “The Black Bull,” “That Widow Mangada,” and “Hardcastle Crags” and sent the latter three to Mademoiselle on September 17. (She also typed up Hughes’s stories and poems.) She wrote another short story there, “All the Dead Dears,” and at least two poems, “November Graveyard” and “Obstacle Course” (since lost). Still, Hughes remembered her weariness:
When we walked North
Across Crow Hill Moors to Wuthering Heights
You were still learning what I was like.
I was still learning the same. You weren’t sure
What you felt about the Blackstone West Riding.
It amused and depressed you. It was color
For a novelist’s eye, you diligently noted—
But your soul shrank from it. And I was part of it.
Your salt-scoured, Cape-Cod spinnaker sparkling spirit
Was depressed. Sometimes appalled. But we walked
Out across that ocean of skylines
Not all that much unlike North Dakota.
It was prairie wide, and wild, & good.
And Wuthering Heights was there romantically
Somewhere ahead. And the sky
Was vast gulfs of blue, and the air
Lifted us like alcohol70
Hughes recalled that on one of these walks, they came across a half-dead grouse that had been wounded by a fox. He crushed the grouse’s head with a stone, “gently,” in an “instant.” But Sylvia was appalled. Ever since a stranger on a bus had told her about “heather-birds” on the moors—a detail she used in her story “Initiation”—the grouse had symbolized the artist’s solitary path. Hughes later wrote, “I saw you saw in what I had just done / Something incredible, inconceivable.”71 Plath wept, horrified.
At the Beacon, Sylvia was no longer Isis but a duty-bound daughter-in-law. She felt suddenly alienated from her husband, and missed America and her family as she realized the enormity of the step she had taken. Wilfrid Riley grew up in Heptonstall and became close to the Hughes family. He used to visit the Beacon when Ted and Sylvia were staying there and remembered Sylvia’s difficulty fitting in.72 She was, he recalled, “a very clever person, but you couldn’t be at ease with her some way. She wasn’t with you. She was up in the clouds, always studying poetry, what have you….You couldn’t sit with her and converse with her like you can normal people.” It wasn’t pride, he thought, that made her this way. “Shyness came into it. She couldn’t lend herself to people. She was a little bit aloof from people, and I don’t think she intended to be.”73
As usual, Mrs. Prouty saw straight into the heart of things. She wrote Sylvia on September 12, “So often a girl has to go through a disturbing period when visiting her fiancé’s people—& many an engagement goes onto the rocks after such an upsetting test.” Prouty admitted that she had been worried, when Sylvia first wrote to her about Ted, “that there might be a tragedy ahead,” but that Aurelia had reassured her he was “a most gentle and understanding person.” She did have one lingering concern: “It is most interesting that you find that satisfied love is conducive to writing. I think most creative writers are spurred more by unsatisfied love, unfulfilled yearning and untold wants than by the satiating effect of complete emotional happiness.”74
Plath’s moor poems, which she wrote in the late fifties and early sixties, reflect an ambivalence about Hughes’s home ground. In “Hardcastle Crags” (1957), a young woman walks out alone to confront a violent, alienating landscape. The cottages she sees are “dark, dwarfed” as in a sinister fairy tale, while the “long wind” pares “her person down / To a pinch of flame.” Plath writes, “the weight / Of stones and hills of stones could break / Her down to mere quartz grit in that stony light…” In “Wuthering Heights,” the sky is “pale,” the sheep stare blankly, and the speaker feels the wind “trying / To funnel my heat away.” The air communicates only two words: “Black stone, black stone.” In “The Snowman on the Moor” (1957) the speaker flees onto the moors after quarreling with her lover. There, she meets a surreal snowman wearing a belt of women’s skulls—women whose “wit made fools / Of kings, unmanned kings’ sons.” The speaker returns home “humbled,” “crying”—silenced for her feminine rebelliousness as she makes her way through a landscape haunted by Lear, Heathcliff, and Hughes himself. In 1961 Plath would write “Wuthering Heights,” where the horizons “ring” the speaker, then “dissolve and dissolve / Like a series of promises.” The dissolving promises, constricting “ring,” and doomed love story suggest, perhaps, something more than the poet was willing to admit.
Ellie Friedman’s visit to Heptonstall that September cheered Sylvia. Ellie and her friend John met Sylvia for tea at the grand, Tudor-style Sutcliffe’s Inn, where Ellie updated Sylvia on Smith gossip. (When Sylvia heard about the recent affairs between students and professors, she vowed not to let Ted teach there.) Ellie found Ted “warm and somewhat withdrawn.” She did not quite know what to make of him. He insisted that the four visit a witch in the valley at midnight, but all they found was a “gnarled” old woman sitting by the fire. “We talked about farming, neighbors and wildlife rather than eye of newt and mandrake root,” Ellie said.75 He worked on her horoscope while she was there but refused to share the results before she left. He didn’t like what he saw. “It was an odd thing to do,” she recalled.
One day they visited Haworth parsonage, then hiked to Top Withens. Ellie remembered Sylvia sitting down to sketch the ruined farmhouse and its lone, bare tree. On the way back to Heptonstall—a much longer trek—Ted got them lost. Ellie was surprised, as Ted had intimated he knew the wild terrain well.76 As darkness dropped, they found a farmer who offered them tea and directions home. “That night,” Ellie remembered, “Sylvia made rabbit stew and we ate like starved prisoners.” Ted had hunted and killed the rabbit, an act that seemed both to repulse and attract Sylvia. “It bothered her,” Ellie recalled, “but she liked the fact of it….Freed at last of our intellects, of addressing ourselves to logic.”77 (Plath drew upon this experience in her later poem “The Rabbit Catcher.”) They spent the next few days taking long walks in the high country. Ellie had never seen Sylvia “so delighted with life, love and optimism dangling from her like jewels.” Sylvia told her that Ted was the most magnificent man she had ever met, “ ‘Aside from the fact that he’s not a Jew,’ she winked.”78 Ellie understood what Sylvia saw in Ted. “Wuthering Heights, the movie, with Laurence Olivier—that was our idea of the ‘great love.’…The brooding genius who would die for us….That was formative in our lives.”79
Despite the pleasant days with Ellie, Sylvia’s “dull dead feeling” soon returned.80 Edith blundered in on the couple while they were making love, and Sylvia felt a “growing sickness & jealousy & oppression—sense of rivalry with women—cut off from proper privacy.”81 On Edith’s birthday, September 18, Sylvia recorded a “smothered chocking [sic] feeling of frustration & uncertain future just out of reach…horrid imaginings of rivalry & sickening voodoo forces.”82 She took a long walk with Ellie on September 21, and wrote in her calendar, “tears & cows…sloppy dominating intruding mother—tears, sickness, final relief & blame on intolerable situation.” She felt better the next morning—“depression lifting”—and spent her last few days in Yorkshire reading Hemingway, revising her story “All the Dead Dears” (based on stories she had heard from Hughes’s parents), and sitting before the fire listening to Beethoven, “the only music big enough for Ted.”83
* * *
BEFORE THE NEW TERM at Cambridge began, Sylvia accompanied Ted to a poetry-reading audition at the BBC in London on September 27 that had been arranged by Peter Redgrove.84 She was full of wifely pride—“eager, alive talk with dear Ted—Optimism & excitement,” she wrote in her calendar.85 At the studio, Sylvia encouraged Ted to read one of his own poems in addition
to Yeats and Hopkins. She sat in the listening room with Donald Carne-Ross, who nodded along as Hughes spoke, muttering “superb” and “perfect.” He offered Hughes a spot on the BBC’s “erudite” Third Programme reading Yeats.86 This opportunity almost made up for the separation the couple was about to endure. The marriage was still a secret, lest Plath lose her Fulbright, and so she returned to Cambridge to finish her final year alone while Hughes returned to his parents’ house in Yorkshire. He still had vague plans to teach in Spain.
On October 1, Sylvia’s first day back at Whitstead, she learned that Poetry had accepted “Two Sisters of Persephone,” “Metamorphosis,” “Wreath for a Bridal,” “Strumpet Song,” “Dream with Clam-Diggers,” and “Epitaph for Fire and Flower.” She was pleased that these were mostly “happy poems” that celebrated her love for Ted. Poetry was, she told Aurelia, “a magazine of poets…and not commercial!”87 Christopher Levenson had told Plath that she “wouldn’t sell much of such poetry,” and she was thrilled to prove him wrong. “So there is a god afterall [sic]; and it isn’t, praise be, Stephen Spender,” she wrote Ted in Yorkshire. She told him the Poetry acceptance was “the consecration of my new writing, which, properly, began with you and ‘Pursuit.’ ”88 Ted congratulated her without jealousy: “Joy, Joy as the hyena cried. Now you are set. I never read six poems of anyone all together in Poetry….It will spellbind every Editor in America. It will also be a standing bottomless battery to charge what you write from now on…Joy, Joy.”89 He predicted she would win the Borestone poetry award, but worried that her success would make her “open to every knave’s nice manners and charming conversation while I sit here and stare at the skyline like an old stone.”90 Away from her in Heptonstall, he felt paralyzed. “I love you, Sylvia, all day, all night when I can’t sleep. Thinking about you and just blankly missing you has brought me to a standstill. I love you I love you I love you.”91
Alone in Cambridge, Sylvia found her fellow students abrasive and the food more “gruesome” than she remembered.92 But she forced herself to work, and began to write again—“Monologue at 3 AM” on October 3, “Street Song” on October 4, and “Touch & Go” on October 5. She tried to settle into “this queer ascetic way of life,” and spent much of her time walking in Grantchester, drawing birds and cows.93 She told Ted, “it gives me such a sense of peace to draw; more than prayer, walks, anything….It is as if, by concentrating on the ‘inscape’, as Hopkins says, of leaf and plant and animal, I can know the world in a new and special way.”94
Jane Baltzell and Isabel Murray had grown closer in Sylvia’s absence, and their tight friendship gave her an “outside feeling.”95 Jane remembered that Sylvia was quieter, more self-contained, after she met Ted. He “had reached her very deeply.” Sylvia was used to being in control in her relationships, but now, Jane thought, “she might have been a little amazed and perhaps slightly alarmed at how much he meant to her.”96
Sylvia avoided the other students, especially the Americans, whom she now saw as “extrovert, surface, blithering.”97 She told Ted she felt sick without him. She wept; she couldn’t eat; she had terrifying nightmares about tribal ceremonies and purifying rituals. “I think if anything ever happened to you, I would really kill myself,” she wrote to Hughes on October 9. “I shall never leave your side a day in my life after the exams.”98 Before bed each night, she knelt by the window and threw all her “force and love” toward Ted’s bed in Yorkshire. “I can’t believe any body ever loved like this; nobody will again.”99 The ritual made her feel more connected to her husband: “my whole life, being, breathing, thinking, sleeping, and eating, has somehow…become indissolubly welded to you.”100
Sylvia lived chastely, but it was during this time that she committed herself to a poetry of the body. She called herself “a female lyricist who sings the glory of love…We shall be living proof that great writing comes from a pure, faithful, joyous creative bed….I love you like fury.”101 She was reading Augustine and Saint Paul, but found their stances against the body (“flesh means sin”) “intolerable.” “The blind leap” of Christianity appalled her, and she called God “a rat.”102 But she was enjoying herself: “God how these writings stimulate my thinking.”103 She quoted “blessed Yeats” in defense of her new “strong blood-faith,” and invoked Chaucer’s Wife of Bath as her model: “Bless the strong loving body.”104 She was impressed, too, with Sartre’s concept of existentialism. Hughes advised her to maintain her skepticism about academia in general and Christian authors in particular, and to read Blake as “antidote” to Augustine—“all your christian [sic] philosopher trash, and it is trash, all completely crooked.” The entire church, he felt, was “the perch of avarice, greed, cruelty, and tyranny.”105 She was forging a creative philosophy in the crucible of love.
From Yorkshire, Ted wrote loving letters addressed to his “Puss-Kish Ponky.” He sympathized with Sylvia’s desire to read for pleasure, but he exhorted her to buckle down on her tutorial reading and try for a First Class degree. He was ambitious for her; he knew she was capable, though he warned her the effort would entail hours of boredom. He predicted that she would become famous, and told her to read poetry aloud while walking back and forth in her room timed to “the metre” of her steps—if she did not think such advice “too ridiculous.”106 (Later, Plath would tell others her Ariel poems must be read aloud.) Without her, he felt “amputated,” like he had lost a “vital interior organ.”107 He promised to keep working on television plots, and told her to get three solid hours of thinking in a day—one hour for “remembering,” another hour for “discovering plots and themes,” and a last hour thinking about “some part of a theme” that interested her. He advised her to “think straight to the thing” without any “mental intervention” when she was composing.108 Hughes wanted her to keep her mind open, always, to “the demon, the poem dictator”—the duende.109 He was still convinced he had to work in Spain on his own before reuniting with Sylvia after she had finished her degree. “Then we shall have our lives.”110
That October, Hughes sent Plath several BBC radio and television play plots about unhappily married couples and spouse murderers. Many of these plots concerned marriages that self-destruct on account of jealousy. One, for example, revolves around a woman trapped in an abusive marriage who tries to poison herself but, on second thought, decides to poison her husband instead.111 Another tells of a husband who flies into a jealous rage after finding his wife with another man.112 And still another is uncannily prophetic: a newly married couple decides to move to the country in order to find solitude and escape the adulterous temptations of the city. Soon, however, they grow tired of the country and decide to start an inn. Before long, their city friends flock to the inn, and old lovers tempt both husband and wife. In the end, the couple buys a cottage closer to the city so that they will no longer feel so isolated.113 Was this plot a kind of warning, both to himself and Sylvia, of the potential dangers that awaited them? How could Hughes have known that he and his wife would move to Devon, that their city friends would later descend on them and wreak havoc on their marriage? The plot may have expressed Hughes’s subconscious anxiety that lovers who depended solely on one another, who did not allow others into their world, would soon find that world stifling rather than liberating.
In Heptonstall, Hughes spent his days in listless tedium, distracted with longing for Sylvia. He walked the moors, reading Yeats aloud and watching the tumultuous weather that would mark some of his best poems. In addition to the plots, he sent Sylvia long descriptions of moody skies. One evening, a policeman stopped him as he walked toward Hebden Bridge. They had been searching for a criminal and “checked me over as if I were some wild man,” he wrote Sylvia. “The fact is, I’m unrecognisable and look like a strange beast unless you’re with me.”114 Two young girls had run screaming away when they saw him approach. Sylvia wrote back, “Darling, you’re the wildest loveliest piece of flesh walking. If little girls scream, it
is only in a kind of Bacchic ecstasy; the police are just jealous.”115
Alone at Cambridge, Sylvia felt the same sense of “abnormality.”116 When she was not studying, she was writing, typing out Ted’s and Luke’s manuscripts, sending out their work to magazines, reading up on the tarot, and walking along the Backs. She wrote to Ted almost every day, a young revolutionary plotting to overthrow the established order. Sylvia thought The London Magazine and The New Yorker were within their sights. “They’ll be begging for us yet,” she wrote Ted in early October.117 Though she ridiculed typical New Yorker poems—“no blood and guts, just goldenrod and wistful crayfish”—she longed for an acceptance there and submitted her work often.118 Hughes had not yet published in a British magazine, but Plath had faith that he was on the brink of fame. She told him not to tear up his TV play or “go black” if his poems didn’t find a home: “THEY WILL.”119 She advised taking advantage of any opportunity, even if unpaid: “we are new, green yet, in their tremulous eyes…forget about the money, for god’s sake.”120 She urged him not to write “to sell,” yet sniffed out contests in The Observer and The Atlantic with her “incorrigible american [sic] weather-eye cocked for windfalls” and nagged Hughes to enter: “I have a project for you to work on this year, for the next 5 or 6 months, and I want you to give it all you’ve got.”121 She fantasized about fans and TV producers “flocking to the dock in hundreds” when they sailed into New York Harbor. She was only half joking. She suggested they find New York agents that summer, for they would soon need, she wrote, “movie rights, TV rights.”122 Plath was well ahead of her time in her explorations of other media forms beyond poetry. Her confidence in their future was astounding, and prescient. “Darling, be scrupulous and date your letters. When we are old and spent, they will come asking for our letters; and we will have them dove-tailable.”123 She told Hughes, “someday, I will be a rather damn good woman writer.”124
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