In January, Hughes had his first acceptance from a British magazine, Nimbus, though the editor informed him the magazine might well collapse before his poem was published. (Indeed, it never appeared.) The couple hardly cared—the attention from the British literary world after so many rejections put them in a “gay mood,” as did the January publication of Plath’s “Pursuit” in The Atlantic, her six poems in Poetry, and “The Wishing Box” in Granta.61 Gemini, an Oxford-Cambridge literary magazine, had also accepted two of Plath’s poems, “Spinster” and “Vanity Fair,” and a short story, “All the Dead Dears,” while The Antioch Review had accepted “Black Rook in Rainy Weather.” Four other poems of hers appeared in Chequer that winter; “our fame has spread around Cambridge,” she told Aurelia.62 Ted made her memorize a poem a day and drew up a “huge chart of English writers & their dates,” which he hung on the wall of their bedroom in preparation for her exams.63
She eased the pressure of reviewing the whole of English literature by writing more poems—in January 1957, “Sow,” “The Snowman on the Moor,” “Mayflower,” and “The Lady and the Earthenware Head.” The last poem, which she called “the best verse I’ve ever written,” was based on a clay model that her former Smith friend, Mary Derr, had made of her head.64 (Sylvia had brought it with her to Cambridge and, on Ted’s advice, placed it high up in a tree near Grantchester Meadows.) Hughes did not like the poem, but he was otherwise encouraging. “Her book is startling,” he wrote to Aurelia that January. “The individual poems are dazzling and disturbing enough, but more than that, they add up to each other—most books of poems stale their effect because the poems somehow break each other down, betray each other, outyell each other—Sylvia’s are cumulative. This is especially surprising because her individual poems have such a brilliant and emphatic finish.”65 In mid-February, Plath sent her fifty-five-page poetry manuscript Two Lovers and a Beachcomber to the Yale contest, judged by Auden.
Sylvia hoped that Ted would fall in love with America and want to stay, especially as American magazines continued to show more interest in his poems than British ones did. She and Ted were disgusted, she wrote, by “the trash published by the Old Guard, the flat, clever, colorless poets here.”66 Sylvia’s dislike of England became even more pronounced in her letters home that spring. “I gather, from reading Blake & D. H. Lawrence, the deadness has been growing for a long time. Everything is frozen, stratified….I can’t wait to get Ted out, & he can’t wait to go.”67 Yet she conceded that England had given her the one thing she treasured most: “the husband of my whole life & love & work.”68
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That January, a new couple moved into the upstairs flat at 55 Eltisley Avenue. Sylvia was taken aback when the young husband introduced himself as George Sassoon. She asked him “idly” if he were related to the First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon. “It turned out that the boy was his son. And a pale, sick looking runt of a wealthy stock he is, too,” she wrote Aurelia.69 This quiet, unassuming young couple (“pathetically eager to please,” Sylvia wrote) would become the target of Sylvia’s wrath over the next few months. She lashed out at them in letters, berating them for their “pampered, paid life” and their health problems.70 She raged to her mother about the couple’s wealth, and wrote self-righteously about her own need to work for money: “we despise the Sassoon couple upstairs. They live like pigs…They are unbelievable & don’t deserve to live.”71
Sylvia’s nastiness was out of all proportion. The target, of course, was not George but Richard Sassoon, with whom George shared a family connection, a slight frame, and a fragile constitution. George’s presence was a constant reminder of Sylvia’s old lover, and, perhaps, her unresolved feelings for him. She had never given herself the chance to properly mourn Sassoon; instead, she had headed straight to Hughes’s flat the day she returned to London from her disastrous spring break. It was the first time she had been left by a man—normally she did the leaving. Ted had been a life raft in a sea of potentially suicidal misery, and she had clung to him tightly. Indeed Sylvia had written Sassoon that her relationship with Ted need not “have happened” had he not abandoned her.72 Her malicious comments about George’s wife’s miscarriages suggest jealousy of a woman who had become a “pampered” Sassoon. Such comments foreshadowed those she would make about Assia Wevill.
Mrs. Prouty noted Sylvia’s tendency to mock barren women in her poems that spring, and warned her that this line of thinking showed no “kindness.” She was distressed by Plath’s poem “Two Sisters of Persephone,” in which one sister “works problems on / A mathematical machine” and ends up a virgin, “bitter // And sallow as any lemon,” while the other sister “Burns open to sun’s blade” and “bears a king.” Mrs. Prouty told Sylvia she was too “scornful” of the childless sister. “I felt sorry for her—& if I were writing a short story she would be my heroine—not her fruit-bearing sister. Most women who bear no children are victims and are to be treated with compassion.”73 Sylvia ignored her. Channeling Lawrence, she continued to write poems that extolled fertility and sexual love, and mocked barrenness.
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ON FEBRUARY 23 at ten thirty in the morning, Sylvia and Ted received a life-changing telegram. Hughes’s manuscript, The Hawk in the Rain, had won the Harper’s/YMHA First Book Contest out of the 387 manuscripts submitted. The judges—W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Marianne Moore, whom Plath thought “the 3 best living & practicing poets in the world today”—had recognized Hughes’s “poetic genius” without being “scared of it as small jealous poets & frightened poetry editors are.”74 A pot of milk burned on the stove as the two danced deliriously around the flat. They called their mothers, and Aurelia burst into tears. That night, they celebrated over turkey, lemon mousse, and chablis at Miller’s. Sylvia vowed to return for venison and snails when her own book won a prize.
To Luke Myers, who hardly needed persuading, Sylvia wrote that The Hawk in the Rain was a book “to read in wild reverence, & built [sic] a great rock altar for in the middle of wild islands.”75 She told Aurelia it would change the direction of British poetry:
Ted writes with color, splendour & vigorous music about love, birth, war, death, animals, hags & vampires, martyrdom—and sophisticated intellectual problems, too. His book can’t be typed: it has rugged violent war poems like “Bayonet Charge” & “Griefs for Dead Soldiers,” delicate, exquisite nature poems about “October Dawn,” & “Horses,” powerful animal poems about Macaws, Jaguars, & the lovely Hawk one….He combines intellect & grace of complex form, with lyrical music, male vigor & vitality, & moral commitment & love & awe of the world.
O, he has everything.76
Plath soon sent Hughes’s manuscript to Faber and Faber, who returned it with a brusque note saying they did not publish first volumes by American writers. When she replied that Ted Hughes was British, they accepted the manuscript. It was another triumph for Ted—and for Sylvia. She had helped him choose the final poems for The Hawk in the Rain, and would limit his revisions for the Faber edition. She told Aurelia that if not for her restraining hand “he would rewrite a poem to eternity.”77 Edits in Plath’s handwriting to “Griefs for Dead Soldiers” and “The Ancient Heroes and the Bomber Pilot” appear on the Faber proofs, while Plath helped Hughes with many short story and drama plots around this time. In one letter he apologized for stealing her material,78 while elsewhere he wrote that she supplied the “exercise” that inspired his short story “Snow.”79 Letters also reveal that Plath suggested major revisions to Hughes’s children’s book, How the Whale Became (originally entitled How the Donkey Became).80 It’s little wonder Sylvia felt proprietary pride in his work.
Christopher Levenson remembered how the Harper’s prize opened doors for Hughes, whose success in Britain had been “only sporadic” beforehand. “It was a salutary early lesson in literary disillusion to see how quickly the leading London magazines and the quality Sunday
newspapers changed their tunes once Ted won the award.”81 The book’s phenomenal success was due, in part, to its highly charged aesthetic. Hughes’s magnificent poem “Wind” embodied his first collection’s sensibility:
This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet
Til day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.82
Hughes has traveled far from William Wordsworth’s bucolic, restorative Lake Country, where man and nature achieve mutual harmony. Here, as in “The Hawk in the Rain,” nature is an amoral, primeval force that mocks faith in shelter.
The Hawk in the Rain would be published by Faber and Faber in London, and Harper’s in New York, in mid-September 1957.83 It marked a watershed in Anglo-American postwar poetry. Peter Davison remembered that the “book’s reception was extraordinary and changed the couple’s life.”84 In the British and American papers, W. S. Merwin, Philip Booth, Al Alvarez, and Edwin Muir compared Hughes to Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and Rilke. Muir’s review in The New Statesman would set the tone for Hughes’s critical reception: “Mr. Ted Hughes is clearly a remarkable poet and seems to be quite outside the currents of his time. His distinguishing power is sensuous, verbal and imaginative; at his best the three are fused together. His images have an admirable violence.”85 Merwin, too, wrote of the poems’ “capacity for incaution” and “strength and brilliance” in The New York Times Book Review.86 Robin Skelton of The Manchester Guardian noted Hughes’s “masculine vigour,” while in The Observer Alvarez, fast becoming England’s most important young poetry critic, drew attention to his “anti-poetical toughness,” “belligerent ugliness,” and “heroical, misanthropic swagger.”87 John Press, who had told Plath about the contest, compared Hughes’s words to “a hard, relentless assault-weapon” in The Sunday Times.88
These terms would later come to haunt Hughes, who critics would increasingly identify as a “poet of violence.” In 1959, for example, Tony Dyson expounded on Hughes’s fascination with power in an article for the Critical Quarterly:
For Ted Hughes, power and violence go together: his own dark gods are makers of the tiger, not the lamb. He is fascinated by violence of all kinds, in love and in hatred, in the jungle and in the arena, in battle, murder and sudden death. Violence, for him, is the occasion not for reflection, but for being….89
By the early sixties, the morality of Hughes’s “violence” was frequently debated in the pages of magazines, academic journals, and anthologies. After Plath’s death, in an essay called “Poetry and Violence,” Hughes situated himself as one in a line of poets who glorified the primal energy that animates the life force:
…does it make any sense whatsoever to say that in these poems—Blake, Yeats, or Popa were “celebrating violence”? Or does it make more sense to say: “these sacred animals emerged into the field of vision of these poets, charged with special glamour, ‘terrible beauty’ and force, and the poets simply felt compelled to make an image of what they saw—at the same time trying to impose some form of ethical control on it.” In this sense, such poems simply bear witness. And I would have thought, any culture that would prefer to be without poetry of this kind—one would prefer to be without.90
Hughes asserted that “positive violence” is “a life-bringing assertion of sacred law which demolishes, in some abrupt way, a force that oppressed and violated it.” He mocked the notion of “humanitarian” values, which he believed had prevented humans from facing “our extraordinary readiness to exploit, oppress, torture and kill our own kind.” Hughes understood why his poems might be interpreted as glorifying violence, yet he insisted they did not: “If the Hawk and the Pike kill, they kill within the law and their killing is a sacrament.” He later defended his collection Crow along similar lines in one of his notebooks: “That he explodes is positive. It is not an image of ‘violence’ but an image of breakthrough….That he pushes to the point where he is annihilated means that now nothing remains for him but what has exploded him—his inner link with his creator, a thing of spiritfire.”91
Feminist critics would nevertheless remain skeptical of Hughes’s intentions. Jacqueline Rose, for example, criticized Hughes poems like “Hawk Roosting” and “Thrushes” as verse that appeared “pure identity in its fascist mode,” “complicit with what it condemns.”92 Yet Hughes was not venerating the fascist mind-set—he was exposing it, and exploring its traces in ourselves.
Though Hughes would later rue some of these early reviews, in 1957 he and Plath were thrilled that his poems—and his “capacity for incaution”—had been received in such crashing terms. He frequently quoted his reviews in letters to his siblings and friends, while Sylvia carefully saved each cutting in a scrapbook. “You see how honest talent & faith work out!” she wrote Aurelia, reveling in her triumph. “Neither Ted nor I married for money, social position, or family heritage. Just love, & worshipping the gifts in each other & wanting to spend our lives fulfilling them in each other. & now we will have money, social position, & belong to the aristocracy of practicing artists, with our families, too!” Ted, she continued, was relieved that his father no longer needed to apologize for his son’s artistic ways: “Writing is looked down upon as ‘arty’—until it brings publication & Money [sic]. Well, the money doesn’t matter to us.”93 But of course, it did. Later, when they received the book’s contract, Sylvia calculated that with their royalties they would make only about ten cents a copy.94 They could make much more by selling poems to magazines. Ted’s next book, she decided, would not go to a publisher until all the poems had been sold off individually.
Plath elegantly sidestepped the issue of marital rivalry in a letter home, though her comments suggest that it hung in the air. “I am more happy than if it was my book published!” she told Aurelia.
I have worked so closely on these poems of Ted’s and typed them so many countless times through revision after revision that I feel ecstatic about it all. I am so happy his book is accepted first. It will make it so much easier for me when mine is accepted—if not by this Yale Series, then by some other place. I can rejoice then, much more, knowing Ted is ahead of me. There is no question of rivalry, but only mutual joy & a sense of us doubling our prize-winning & creative output.95
Still, Plath had published much more than Hughes, and may have been surprised to find herself the trailing spouse. In the same breath with which she declared the rivalry nonexistent, she began to ponder how she might catch up. Indeed, on the day she learned about Hughes’s prize, she bought Virginia Woolf’s “blessed diary” and “a battery of her novels.”96
Plath was suddenly seized by another writing block. “I am stymied, stuck, at a stasis,” she wrote in her journal on March 4.97 In the wake of Ted’s triumph, she worried about carrying even more of the household burden. Now all her blithe talk about “Books & Babies & Beef stews” seemed terribly naive as she saw her future as a series of “domestic chores” that had, throughout history, prevented all but the wealthiest women from fulfilling their creative potential.98 She resented having “3 jobs—writing, cooking & housekeeping” and vowed to “have children only after I have a poetry book & a novel published, so my children fit into my work routine & don’t overthrow mine with theirs.”99 Yet in her journal she worried that she would simply give up, “escape into domesticity & stifle yourself by falling headfirst into a bowl of cookie batter.”100 She likely doubted that she could ask her husband to share those chores now that he was famous. If she did not win an equally prestigious prize—and soon—she would never reclaim her poetic equity within the marriage.
Sue Weller visited Sylv
ia and Ted at Eltisley Avenue that spring and remembered Sylvia weeping copiously over her stove as she cooked. “Ted did nothing to console her,” and Sue, taking her cue from Ted, likewise said nothing. Sylvia had told her she was upset about receiving a middling grade on a moral philosophy paper, but Sue had the sense that Sylvia’s unhappiness had more to do with the “artistic rivalry” between her and Ted. Though Sue thought Sylvia was full of life and vitality, she also found her friend’s need for constant reassurance exhausting. “It was an enormous burden to be really close to her,” she said.101 She speculated that Ted may have decided, by that point, that he would not—or could not—deal with Sylvia’s “emotional problems” anymore. He could not be her Leonard Woolf.
Mrs. Prouty, perceptive as always, warned Sylvia not to push herself too hard: “the person who wants to write enough will make time. So will you. But I hope you won’t have to make it at dawns, before breakfast….Someone remarked to me after reading your poem in the Atlantic—‘How intense.’ Sometime write me a little poem that isn’t intense. A lamp turned too high might shatter its chimney. Please just glow sometimes.”102
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