I was stunned. I thought I had joined
Your association of ambition
To please you and your mother,
To fulfil your mother’s ambition
That we be ambitious. Otherwise
I’d be fishing off a rock
In Western Australia. So it seemed suddenly. You wept.
You wouldn’t go on with Ouija. Nothing
I could think of could explain
Your shock and crying. Only
Maybe you’d picked up a whisper I could not hear,
Before our glass could stir, some still small voice:
“Fame will come. Fame especially for you.
Fame cannot be avoided. And when it comes
You will have paid for it with your happiness,
Your husband and your life.”7
* * *
OLWYN CAME TO VISIT in mid-November, slightly suspicious of her brother’s new bride. Ted had written to her about Sylvia in May, calling her his “secretary in chief” and assuring Olwyn she was “Very unpretentious, very German in some ways—works herself till she drops. And she certainly has a startling poetic gift.”8 Sylvia thought Olwyn a beautiful “changeling” and half forgave her for the money she still owed Ted.9 Yet when Olwyn returned to Paris on November 18, Sylvia felt “queer,” “locked in,” and distant from Ted, as if Olwyn meant more to him.10
Indeed, Sylvia’s calendar suggests tension in the marriage that fall. Her notes there hinted that her birthday was a less joyous affair than Ted had described to Aurelia. That night, she wrote cryptically about her “sorrow & anguish” over the Ben Nash episode, and, two days later, “fight w. Ted re our lurid pasts.”11 On October 31, Sylvia wrote of a “lousy afternoon” in a London pub after announcing their marriage to the Fulbright officials: “utter waste—tearful dinner at Schmidt’s—hectic, sick trainride back…sense of tension insecurity & longing for love expressed.”12 November 1 was a “rough day”; November 2, “grueling worst day”; November 3, “Exhausting aftermath day”; November 4, “uneasy day”; November 5, “Horrible day”; November 7, “tedious tense day…jealousy, feeling of division—tightrope walking steps—wish for wisdom of Eve”; November 10, “grim day…casualty ward—back Xrays—slipped disc…grim rainy evening & pain.” And so it continued as the winter weather began its yearly onslaught on her health. Still, there was usually good “love” even during these low times.
Though Plath was deep into Hume, Hobbes, Mill, and Bentham that term and enjoying her supervisions with Dr. Krook, she quickly found herself “back in obsessive state of writing poems under pressure to put off work.”13 Between November 17 and 19, she wrote the marvelous “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” one of her strongest early poems. It was likely influenced by Hughes’s “The Hawk in the Rain,” in which the hawk becomes an emblem of humanity in its futile attempt to master the elements, while nature is a malevolent force bent on extinguishing life:
I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up
Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth’s mouth,
From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle
With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk
Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.
His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet,
Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air.14
Escape is impossible; the hawk, like the speaker, will eventually “mix his heart’s blood with the mire of the land.” Plath’s “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” on the contrary, exhibits an optimistic hope for grace—or poetic inspiration—in a “dull, ruinous landscape”:
…I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my sense, haul
My eyelids up, and grant
A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content
Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait’s begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent.15
Plath borrows elements of Hughes’s poem to quietly dismantle his vision. While Hughes’s understanding of nature resembles Shelley’s in “Mont Blanc,” Plath’s here is closer to Thoreau’s Walden. Her American “Emersonian” vision positions itself against Hughes’s British Romantic sublime.16 It was another literary face-off, like “Mr. and Mrs. Ted Hughes’ Writing Table,” “The Black Bull,” “The Fifty-Ninth Bear,” and “On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad.” They had been married for less than six months, but Plath had already written several works that speak to her anxiety about her own role within the marriage. By “doubling” Hughes’s poem with her own, she outwardly paid homage to Hughes; by undermining his poem’s premise, she asserted her own artistic vision.
She wrote another five poems during this November 17–19 period—“Soliloquy for a Solipsist,” “April Rhapsodies,” “Letter to a Purist,” “Ode on an Onion,” and “On the Extra”—and sent all six to The New Yorker (all were rejected). On November 21 she wrote the poems “Item” and “Megrims,” which Peter Steinberg, who discovered the poem, called a “monologue addressed to a ‘Doctor’ by a paranoid, yet fairly casual speaker.”17 “Natural History” followed on November 23. “Black Rook” was the best of the surviving group. Plath had recently begun work on her Cambridge novel, and polished the fifty-odd poems in her poetry manuscript, Two Lovers and a Beachcomber, which she intended to enter in the Yale Younger Poets Contest that February. Hughes “experienced something like a bang on the head” after he read it. “It’s a wonderful book,” he told Aurelia and Warren, “and when it’s published I shall write a long review, and make sure that its excellencies are what hit the public first, and set the tone for a dizzy enthusiasm.”18
Sylvia, in turn, had her own plans for Ted. On October 18 she had met John Press, who worked for the British Council, at a Fulbright reception. Plath asked Press if he knew the poet Ted Hughes. He did not, but he invited her to dinner with his wife, where they discussed various strategies for getting Hughes published, and gossiped about Auden, Spender, and MacNeice (“oh god,” Plath wrote Hughes, “how I chortled inside and begged them to go on”).19 They told Sylvia about an American first book contest sponsored by Harper’s publishers and the New York Poetry Center at the YMHA (now known as the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan). She wrote to Ted immediately, “I’m sure you’ll win this; I feel very queer about it.”20
A month later, Plath typed up Hughes’s poetry manuscript and entered it in the contest.21 She did not enter her own manuscript, which she felt was not yet complete. She thought that Ted’s poems were more accomplished, riskier, and less imitative than her own. She continued writing poems throughout the next week, but her calendar showed the strain of reconciling married life with her academic requirements: “tired,” “very depressed,” “bad tempered,” “exhausted,” “caffeine tense numb day,” she wrote throughout the last week of November. But her days often ended happily once she reunited with Hughes: “steak, mushroom & string bean supper, red wine, good love.”22
In early November the couple settled on a cheap ground-floor flat in a Victorian terraced house at 55 Eltisley Avenue, a short walk from Newnham. The flat was close to Grantchester Meadows but still convenient to town. After a winter in wool sweaters at Whitstead, Sylvia vowed to keep the new flat “extravagantly warm!”23 She was overly optimistic—the house had neither central heating nor hot water, and they had to share a bathroom with a Canadian couple. Sylvia hated the small kitchen, “a little dank cell smelling suspiciously of mushrooms.”24 Even T
ed found the house dispiriting. In his Birthday Letters poem “55 Eltisley,” he wrote about how he had “looked for omens” when they first moved in, and found blood on a pillow sheet. He knew a widow had lived there, and he began to worry that the former couple’s “old griefs” would hang like “a miasma” around their new married life.25
They set about banishing the old ghosts. They covered kitchen shelves in white-and-red-checkered oilcloth and painted the living room walls a cool blue-gray. Sylvia hung her Braque still life over the mantel and bought a blue secondhand sofa; together they built five large bookcases and decorated the living room with yellow lampshades and pillows. Hughes remembered Plath in “a fury of scouring”; she resolved to “make it like an ad out of house and garden [sic].”26 She asked Aurelia to call as soon as they moved in “to bless it.”27
Ted wrote Aurelia chummy letters about Sylvia’s writing and cooking, and he thanked her for sending an American bounty—steak knives, meat thermometers, Flako pie crust, a vegetable peeler, a shaving kit. Sylvia planned to move out of Whitstead in December, at the end of term. A Smith alumna, May Collacott, would move into Sylvia’s old room and hear that Sylvia “cut quite a swath through Whitstead.”28 May became friendly with Jane and Isabel, taking over Sylvia’s old spot in the trio.
Plath hardly noticed. She was deeply in love with her creative and physical ideal, a man she had practically conjured. She was also distracted by politics. The Suez crisis and the Hungarian revolution that autumn appalled her. She felt that Britain and France were aggressors, and that “Eden is, in effect, helping murder the Hungarians.” She and Ted went for long walks along the Cam feeling “stunned and sick; the whole world, except us, we felt was utterly mad, raving mad.”29 The Suez crisis resurrected Sylvia’s old pacifism and her growing contempt, fueled by Ted, for England. “Britain is dead,” she wrote Aurelia that November. Everything seemed “so old and dirty; soot of centuries worked into every pore,” and the food “without any nourishment whatsoever.”30 Even chicken was “a luxury” in England—“you should see the scrawny, bony ‘boiling’ chickens that appear in butchers [sic] windows—how I miss our lovely delicate toasty golden-brown fryers!”31 To Marcia, she complained of the two hours it took to heat hot water for their baths. “Oh God Bless America, land of the Cookiesheet, Central Heating & Frozen Orange Juice!”32 She “secretly” hoped that Hughes would find “America the wonderland I feel it is.” She told Aurelia, “I would never want to live in England or bring up children here; it is a dead, corrupt country.”33
Sylvia could hardly wait to show off her new “roaring hulking Yorkshireman” who wrote poems with “raging power & violence.”34 He was, she told Marcia, “the only man I’ve ever met whom I could never boss; he’d bash my head in.” Still, she missed “woman-talk”; she had only one real “woman friend,” Dr. Krook, who was “incandescent with brilliance,” her “salvation among the grotesque female dons at Newnham.”35 Ted suspected that Sylvia had pulled away from her few female friends on his account. Only Dr. Krook was exempt. In “55 Eltisley,” he wrote, “I pitied your delirium of suspicion.”36 Yet Sylvia’s dwindling circle of Newnham friends was a natural consequence of her marrying and moving out of Whitstead.
Hughes sold poems to The Atlantic, Poetry, and The Nation that November, but he wasn’t making much money. He nearly took a “laboring job” but then instead accepted a position teaching English at the Coleridge Secondary Modern School for Boys in Cambridge.37 The students’ poor test scores had kept them out of the more academic grammar schools; many would leave before graduation to work in the trades. Hughes had grown up with similar working-class boys, and he tried hard to inspire them. He read them W. H. Auden and Robert Frost, assigned poetry-writing exercises and World War II history readings, and asked them to close their eyes while he told stories. “But what an experience! Life purely as a writer would be suicidally narrow,” he told Aurelia.38
Sylvia officially moved to 55 Eltisley Avenue on December 7, after Michaelmas term ended. She gushed about cooking a shoulder of lamb with her new meat thermometer; swishing around in her new aqua silk bathrobe; and polishing furniture with her new duster.39 “I am regarded as a Phenomenon by the virginal victorians [sic] at Newnham—‘Think & cook at the same time?’ They titter incredulously.”40 Her Joy of Cooking was “a blessing,” and she included intricate descriptions of her meals in nearly every letter home.41
Ted is so appreciative about my cooking it makes kitchen work a joy; we have steak, fish-in-milk; rich vegetable stews; marvellous Italian spaghetti with meat-sauce; pork & sweet breads, fruit all the time heaped on the sideboard (we take your super-vitamins religiously). But I can’t wait to make him cakes, feathery pies, broiled chicken, parfaits etc etc.42
There was no irony—yet—in her blissful depictions of housewifery. But she was already tiring of “practical business” that crept up on her.43 She had not counted on the three-mile round trip to the laundromat, or the long daily walks to the grocer and butcher. Money was a constant worry; she hoped life would become “less hand-to-mouth” soon, she told Aurelia.44
Her sinus troubles returned, and the flat’s spare electric heater did not provide much warmth. She found the coal fire “filthy,” “either too hot or too cold,” and waxed nostalgic to Warren about “America’s material conveniences.”45 She still bundled up in wool socks and multiple sweaters. Ted told Aurelia that it was “like living at the bottom of a stagnant swamp.”46 He knew the prospect of America kept Sylvia’s courage up, as he wrote in a later poem:
But you were happy too, warming your hands
At the crystal ball
Of your heirloom paperweight. Inside it,
There, in miniature, was your New England Christmas,
A Mummy and a Daddy, still together
Under the whirling snow, and our future.47
Mrs. Prouty wondered whether Sylvia was telling the whole truth about her perfect marriage in her letters. To Aurelia, Prouty confessed, “I’m always a little fearful that Sylvia’s high spirits have flagged—come down from her high altitude, & that she may be going through a downward dip.”48 Both women hoped the couple would end up like Elizabeth and Robert Browning, but they had their doubts. “I wonder how you really feel about it,” Prouty wrote.49
* * *
—
Sylvia and Ted spent Christmas 1956 at the Beacon in Yorkshire. When they returned to Cambridge, they found gifts waiting for them: checks from friends and family; more modern kitchen tools from Aurelia; and, alarmingly, chocolates, fruits, and crepes from Sylvia’s old beau Ira Scott. All the tangible reminders of home made Sylvia long to return to Wellesley and surround herself with people who believed in her, like the Cantors, the Aldriches, and the Crocketts.
The couple soon settled into a writing routine. They went to bed at ten p.m. and rose at six a.m. to write for two hours before Ted left for work. (“The moral boost it gives outweighs an hour’s sleep,” he told Aurelia.)50 Plath was writing short stories for women’s magazines—“I will slave & slave until I break into those slicks”—and applying for teaching positions for herself and Hughes at New England colleges.51 She had not realized how difficult it would be to obtain a teaching position without a PhD, a published book, or any real teaching experience, “brilliant and rare as we are.” When Aurelia lightly suggested that Ted pursue a PhD, Sylvia reiterated their disdain for more academic qualifications. “Ted does not want to be a university professor for a career. He wants to write, now & for the rest of his life. And in marrying a writer, I accept his life.” Yet she hinted that she too had hoped for “the American dream of a secure sinecure writing on campus…I know Ted’s mind is magnificent, not hair-splitting or suavely politic—but employers may find Phd’s more convincing.”52 Sylvia was torn between supporting her husband and pleasing her mother. “Our problem is that we are primarily writers…and only secondarily academic.”53 When
Mary Ellen Chase came to Cambridge in January, she told Sylvia that she and Ted would “be crazy to get doctorates!” “They would rather have me have poems & essays published in the Atlantic than a Phd,” Sylvia wrote Aurelia after the visit.54 Chase told Plath not to apply to any other colleges before she had written to the head of Smith’s English department about an appointment. Chase also hinted that Smith might take Hughes on in a year.
Sylvia had heard that Jane Baltzell was her “main rival” for the Smith position, and began to wonder whether Chase was “playing” her off against Jane because she had committed the sin of marrying. Plath knew Chase lived with a woman, Eleanor Duckett, and she started to resent what she interpreted as her “peculiar dismissal of men.” She was angry when Chase told her that she and Hughes could see each other on weekends if they taught in different cities. “That is not the kind of woman I want to fix up our jobs,” Sylvia told Aurelia.55 She began to hope Jane would get the position so she would not have to turn it down. “I was not interested,” Jane recalled.56 She had been “chilled” by the “proprietary way” in which Chase and Duckett had spoken of Sylvia one day at tea. They had called her marriage to Hughes a “blunder.” Chase had nothing against Hughes, but thought “for a woman of Sylvia Plath’s stature this is simply a disaster of the first order.”57 At a garden party that May, Sylvia would confide to Jane her “apprehensions about letting herself into their grips, being put in a bottle.”58 Jane thought Sylvia was right to hesitate about working with “sponsors and benefactors to whom she owed much.”59 Yet Jane also knew there was “a side of Sylvia that cared a great deal about security,” and an offer from Smith “easily validated success.”60
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