It was probably in early June that Plath wrote “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor,” which she proudly sent to Warren on June 11. In the “syllabic” poem, which comprised seven lines of seven syllables, Plath writes of finding “The husk of a fiddler-crab, / Intact, strangely strayed above // His world of mud…” The speaker ponders whether the crab “Died recluse or suicide,” and comes to her stunning, lyrical conclusion:
The crab-face, etched and set there,
Grimaced as skulls grimace: it
Had an Oriental look,
A samurai death mask done
On a tiger tooth, less for
Art’s sake than God’s. Far from sea—
Where red-freckled crab-backs, claws
And whole crabs, dead, their soggy
Bellies pallid and upturned,
Perform their shambling waltzes
On the waves’ dissolving turn
And return, losing themselves
Bit by bit to their friendly
Element—this relic saved
Face, to face the bald-faced sun.
The artist-speaker admires the “relic,” which, even in death, has “saved” itself. It has not perished: it has become art. The poem is elaborately formal, yet its highly structured meter does not distract from its imagistic power. Moore’s syllabic verse and Hughes’s “Relic” (“I found this jawbone at the sea’s edge: / There, crabs, dogfish, broken by the breakers or tossed…”) were both major influences.16 But there is no place for a meditative encounter between the self and nature in Hughes’s “Relic”: “The deeps are cold: / In that darkness camaraderie does not hold: / Nothing touches but, clutching, devours.”17 As in “The Hawk in the Rain” and “Wind,” Hughes’s version of nature is more brutal and amoral than Plath’s. She may have used “Relic” as a philosophical foil when she wrote “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor,” which inaugurated a new creative phase.
Hughes had applied for a Eugene Saxton fellowship, which he and Plath assumed he would win with a letter of support from Moore. But he soon learned that the fellowship was run by trustees of his American publisher, Harper & Brothers. The conflict of interest made him ineligible—a “supreme & rather distressing irony,” Sylvia wrote Warren.18 She decided that she would apply for a Saxton and would also ask Moore for a letter, while Hughes would apply for a Guggenheim, “marshal [sic] TS Eliot et al. behind him.”19 She and Ted were still determined to spend a year writing in Italy or Germany before starting a family, and she hoped to finish a novel there. She asked Warren not to tell Aurelia about any of their plans.20
By the summer of 1958, The Hawk in the Rain had sold 1,700 copies in America and 1,600 in England, earning the couple about $1,500. Sylvia knew that they needed a steadier income. Neither wanted a full-time job—she thought of applying to the MacDowell Colony for writers and artists, or house sitting on the Cape for free rent—but they resigned themselves to waitressing and bartending if necessary. Their money problems vanished for the moment on June 25, when The New Yorker accepted Plath’s poems “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor” and “Nocturne.”21 The couple jumped up and down after reading poetry editor Howard Moss’s words: “Mussel Hunter” was “a marvelous poem” and “Nocturne” “extremely fine.” After ten years of rejections and “the usual New Yorker coolness,” Plath had finally scaled her Annapurna.22 The acceptance gave her “great courage” to continue writing full-time. She earned $377 for the two poems, nearly four times what she had made for “half a year of drudgery” correcting papers for Newton Arvin. They had recently signed a lease to move into a small sixth-floor apartment in Boston’s Beacon Hill on September 1. “You see what happens the minute one worships one’s own god of vocation & doesn’t slight it for grubbing under the illusion of duty to Everybody’s-Way-Of-Life!” she wrote triumphantly to Aurelia in June.23 She noted that her New Yorker check would cover three months of rent in Boston.
By early July, Plath and Hughes had earned more than $2,000 from their writing since September 1957—“magic money” they kept in a separate bank account and did not spend.24 Money no longer meant new clothes, but freedom to write. When Poetry bought three of Plath’s poems in late July for $44, she “added up the lines right away: two more weeks groceries.”25 Hughes had written twenty-eight poems for his second collection, Lupercal, by mid-July, and had already sold seventeen. He was making such a name for himself that a university in New York offered to buy some of his manuscripts for their archive, while his children’s story “Billy Hook and the Three Souvenirs” appeared in the mass-market magazine Jack & Jill that July. The couple always hoped to break into the children’s market and use the proceeds to subsidize the less lucrative practice of poetry. That September, Hughes would check “stacks” of children’s books out of the Boston Public Library with the aim of writing one himself.26 (Faber and Faber published Meet My Folks! in 1961.)
They spent their final weeks in Northampton hiking on Mount Holyoke and walking in nearby, fragrant Child’s Park, the setting for Plath’s poems “Child’s Park Stones” and “Fable of the Rhododendron Stealers.” Plath wrote the latter poem after confronting two girls picking rhododendron blossoms in the park that June. Although she had stolen a rose from the park that very day, the girls’ copious pilfering enraged her. “I have a violence in me that is hot as death-blood. I can kill myself or—I know it now—even kill another,” she wrote in her journal. She wanted to tear one of the girls “to bloody beating bits.” Yet she also pondered her “split morality,” which she made the central question of her poetic “fable.”27
Free from grading and teaching prep, Sylvia read Shakespeare and Rachel Carson, and dabbled in anthropology, Aztec history, books on wildlife, demoniacal possession, spiders, and scorpions—all “fascinating and terrible.”28 The titles reflect Ted’s interests, which she was starting to share. Together they visited Wellesley and its environs, calling on Sylvia’s childhood friend Ruth Freeman Geissler, now mother to three young children, and Mrs. Prouty, who was uncharacteristically optimistic about Sylvia’s full-time writing plans. She had fallen under Ted’s spell, Sylvia frequently told others, and now believed that their future would be “dazzling.”29 But Sylvia knew that Aurelia did not approve of their plan to embark on a life of freelance writing, and tension between mother and daughter mounted throughout the summer. Sylvia told herself to “keep clear of confiding in mother: she is a source of great depression—a beacon of terrible warning.”30
In early July, Sylvia told Aurelia she wanted to visit Winthrop with Ted. Though the town was “run down,” memories of the weather-beaten streets still moved her. “I am writing some good poems about it, I think,” she wrote her mother.31 Plath was speaking mainly about “Green Rock, Winthrop Bay,” in which the speaker revisits one of her childhood totems to find the old landscape diminished.
No lame excuses can gloss over
Barge-tar clotted at the tide-line, the wrecked pier.
I should have known better.
Still, thoughts of Winthrop made her nostalgic for her childhood, and she tried translating her German copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, a gift from Aurelia. “I feel extremely moved [by] my memories of my German background, & Austrian, and also my ocean-childhood, which is probably the foundation of my consciousness,” she wrote her mother that July. Germanic and oceanic themes merged in her new, dark poem “Lorelei.” Aurelia had once sung her a German song about the Lorelei—the folkloric Rhine maidens—though Sylvia claimed that the poem came to her during a session at the Ouija board that July: “Pan” had called the “Lorelei” her “own kin.” She wrote Aurelia, “This had never occurred to me consciously as a subject & it seemed a good one: the Germanic legend background, the water-images, the death-wish and so on.”32 Plath wrote the poem quickly, and it became one of her favorites. Like “Full Fathom Five,” it is written in a-b-a tercets, and gives a glimpse of th
e more mature poetic voice of “Elm” and “Edge.” Plath begins hopefully, “It is no night to drown in: / A full moon, river lapsing / Black beneath bland mirror-sheen,” but ends on a darker note:
O river, I see drifting
Deep in your flux of silver
Those great goddesses of peace.
Stone, stone, ferry me down there.
Along with “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor” and “Full Fathom Five,” “Lorelei” was among the best poems she wrote that year.
Back in Northampton, Plath was restless as she worked on a story, “Bird in the House,” about a dead baby bird that became “a tormenting spirit & by its small sick pulse darkens & twists two lives.”33 Editors were on vacation, and the couple’s single fan—a gift from Aurelia—provided little relief from the humidity. Sweltering, Sylvia walked around the apartment in her bathing suit. Marianne Moore had written her a “queerly ambiguous spiteful letter” in response to her request for a Saxton grant reference.34 Plath thought she could count on Moore’s support, for she had awarded her co-first prize in the Glascock Poetry Contest in 1955. Moore had even written a generous and admiring inscription in Plath’s copy of her Collected Poems. (“Sylvia Plath’s turned down corners and underlinings make me feel that there was some reason for the collecting of these poems. I am grateful to have a reader.”)35 Now Plath felt that Moore’s cryptic messages were “resonant only with great unpleasantness.”36 Moore had written, “you are too unrelenting” about “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor,” which, ironically, Plath had written in Moore’s syllabic style. “Sylvia, don’t be quite so grisly,” she advised.37 Plath wept bitterly. She understood what it meant to lose support from one of America’s most influential women poets. Moore would eventually balk at The Colossus, writing to Knopf editor Judith Jones in April 1962 that Plath’s poems were “bitter, frost-bitten, burnt-out, averse.”38 When Plath applied for a Guggenheim in 1961, Moore criticized her for having a baby and told the committee to give the award to Hughes instead of Plath, saying he had “twice the talent she has.”39 Hughes never forgot that Moore made Plath doubt her talent. In his poem “The Literary Life,” he described Moore as spiteful and washed-up, her cheeks like “the crumpled silk / Of a bat’s wing.”40
Sylvia ran an intermittent temperature that summer and had X-rays taken to rule out lingering complications from her December pneumonia. Although she was pronounced healthy, she did not mention her checkup to Aurelia, who heard about it from her dentist and wrote a hasty, worried letter to Sylvia. Mother caught daughter off guard, and Sylvia wrote candidly about her doubts concerning her new freedoms:
I am finding it rather difficult to adjust to this sudden having-nothing-to-do. I realize that this is the first year of my life I haven’t “gone to school” & thus haven’t an imposed purpose to give direction to my days. My prose is quite painful & awkward to begin with, as my poetry is much more practiced & advanced: I haven’t written a proper story for several years & work each morning a few hours on exercises in description. I have always expected immediate success & am gradually inuring myself to slow progress & careful practise. I think I will need a part-time job in Boston to give my life a kind of external solidity and balance. I hope I can slowly & painstakingly develop writing as a part-time vocation, because I think I need a sense of purpose beyond cooking and cleaning house, and there is no other career I can feel really useful in and drawn toward that would combine with children.
She added the old, baleful coda: “I miss having any girl-friends to talk to & exchange gossip & advice with.”41
In her journal she was more forthright about her unhappiness. She understood its origin. “I have been, and am, battling depression,” she wrote plainly on June 20, and made an astute self-diagnosis:
It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative—which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it. I am now flooded with despair, almost hysteria, as if I were smothering. As if a great muscular owl were sitting on my chest, its talons clenching & constricting my heart.
She knew why the talons clenched—she was “ ‘completely free’ ” for the “first time” in her life. “So I have all this, and my limbs are paralyzed.” She thought again of having a baby “to elude my demanding demons & have a constant excuse for lack of production in writing.”42 But she vowed to wait.
Throughout July she wrote of “this queer suffocating hysteria on me,” the “sick feeling which won’t leave,” the “absolutist panic.”43 She continued to work on her novel, but the words would not come. “I must cure this very destructive paralysis & ruinous brooding & daydreaming. If I want to write, this is hardly the way to behave—in horror of it, frozen by it. The ghost of the unborn novel is a Medusa-head.”44 Plath saw poetry, which came easier, as “an excuse & escape from writing prose.”45 And, indeed, the summer of 1958 was a productive one: she wrote “Above the Oxbow,” “Fable of the Rhododendron Stealers,” “Child’s Park Stones,” “Incommunicado,” “Owl,” “Moonrise,” “Sculptor,” “Night Shift,” “Two Views of a Cadaver Room,” “The Beggars,” “The Goring,” “The Net-Menders,” “Memoirs of a Spinach-Picker,” and “Frog Autumn.” But none of these poems had the force of “Lorelei,” “The Disquieting Muses,” or “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor.” She felt “rejected by an adult world, part of nothing—of neither an external career of Ted’s…nor a career of my own, nor, vicariously, the life of friends, not part of motherhood.”46 She was emotionally and professionally adrift. Some days, she felt the “strangling noose of worry, of hysteria, paralysis” loosen; other days it returned, this “queer deathlike state” that brought continual exhaustion, self-doubt, and panic.47
Money was the worry that never disappeared. Sylvia realized that if she wanted children, she and Ted needed to “sacrifice.” “I find myself horrified at voicing the American dream of a home & children,” she wrote in her journal, fantasizing about an artist’s estate on the Maine coast. But she reminded herself of “the great fault of America…expectancy of conformity.”48 She knew that she needed routine and structure, and considered court reporting, which meant learning the stenotype. Aurelia, who made her living teaching secretarial skills, stood ready to help. But Sylvia was wary. She didn’t want to be “a conventional regular secretary,” and decided against the course.49 She knew that her mother, aunt, and uncle resented Ted because he would not get a job. Hughes was adamant. “I refuse to work for somebody else, merely to earn cash to keep alive to go on earning cash perhaps to keep alive infants for the same meaningless round,” he wrote his brother that summer. “When we have children, I want them to be rooted in a life with meaning.”50 Sometimes Sylvia resented him, too, but those moments were fleeting. “I know he is the great poet of our generation & feel that the most important thing is to somehow clear these next five years for a tough & continuous apprenticeship to writing,” she wrote Olwyn in late June.51 She understood that Ted’s refusal to conform to American “pressure” allowed her to opt out as well.52 For she too had her “own dream, which is mine, & not the American dream. I want to write funny & tender women’s storys [sic].” She admired Ted’s single-minded dedication to poetry and vowed in her journal to support him as he would her: “there are no rules for this kind of wifeliness—I must make them up as I go along & will do so.”53
When “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor” appeared in the August 9 issue of The New Yorker, Sylvia’s friend Florence Sultan—the wife of Stanley Sultan, a visiting writer at Smith—invited her over to read it. Plath was “awestruck”—“the first poem in the magazine, page 22, taking up almost a whole page,” she wrote in her journal. The two women drank wine and played with Florence’s baby, who did not interest Sylvia nearly as much as her poem, which she pondered “in a rapt contemplation.”54 She regarded the prospect of her own baby “fearfully, dimly.”55
Sylvia, Aurelia, and
Grampy Schober celebrated Ted’s twenty-eighth birthday on August 17 in Eastham. Ted enjoyed himself more on Cape Cod this time around, even though he and Sylvia were almost swept out to sea one day in their rowboat—an occasion he later memorialized in his Birthday Letters poem “Flounders.” Sylvia had asked Aurelia, who had a discount at the Boston University bookstore, to buy Ted Robert Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle as a birthday gift. (Unable to find Lowell’s book, Aurelia bought him a fishing rod instead.) Ted later gave Sylvia a copy of Lord Weary’s Castle for her own birthday that year. Both poets held Lowell in high regard, and hoped to meet him again soon in Boston.
The other book Sylvia asked Aurelia to buy for Ted was Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us. He had already read it, but he loved the book so much that Sylvia wanted him to have his own copy. The Carson request suggests Plath and Hughes’s growing awareness of environmental issues. In later years, Hughes told others he had been shocked into becoming an environmentalist in late 1959 when he read an article in The Nation about radioactive waste dumped into Boston Harbor. He was also enormously influenced by Carson’s Silent Spring, which he and Plath read when it was serialized in The New Yorker in summer 1962. After Plath’s death, Hughes founded one of the earliest environmental magazines, Your Environment, along with his old Saint Botolph friends David Ross and Daniel Weissbort. He used his literary celebrity to fund various environmental causes for the rest of his life, with some success. In 1985, a year after he became England’s poet laureate, he sent John Elkington’s The Poisoned Womb to then prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who took it under consideration. Prince Charles, another environmentalist, became a trusted friend. Plath shared Hughes’s environmental concerns; their daughter’s first outing would be to an anti-bomb protest march in London.
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