Just as her old landscape poems conveyed a hidden, often painful, emotional truth, so too does “Two Campers in Cloud Country.” Plath’s talk of frozen conception links the poem to her anxieties about her potential barrenness. Nearly two years after “Two Campers,” she would write another ambiguous poem about Rock Lake, “Crossing the Water” (April 1962), in which both the water and the poem reflect the thoughts of barrenness and the dark impulses that were tormenting her. In a characteristically cheerful postcard to Aurelia, she wrote that she and Hughes had been the only ones rowing on the “huge lake” at night “under the stars & new moon on mirror-clear water.”31 But Plath’s poem presents a different version of the experience: “Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people” rowing to nowhere. “Cold worlds shake from the oar. / The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.”
They left Rock Lake on July 11, alternating time at the wheel. Sylvia reported to Aurelia on “the unbelievable stretches of country, unpeopled, green, with lakes and rivers everywhere,” but was equally “amazed at the terrible shoddiness of Canadian towns,” which mainly consisted of gas stations, tar-paper shacks, and aluminum trailers.32 Four hundred miles later, they arrived at Brimley Park in Michigan. After a sponge bath, Sylvia faced her typewriter toward Lake Superior and wrote Aurelia about the many “tests” she had “passed.”33 For two people who had no camping experience, they were getting along very well—the equipment made cooking and washing simple and she had no trouble making pancakes and bacon for breakfast.
On July 14, on their way to Wisconsin, they saw their first bear, which, Sylvia told Aurelia, “made our day.” She said they had “fallen in love with Wisconsin—it is so uncommercialized—unlike Michigan—all bluegreen woods & lovely farms.”34 There, they visited Northwestern College, where Otto had been a student, and camped for two nights on the Nozal family’s hilltop in Cornucopia, with its view of Lake Superior through the birch trees.35 A phone call to Aurelia yielded good news—The London Magazine had accepted Plath’s “In Midas’ Country” and “The Thin People” while The Times Literary Supplement had taken “The Hermit at Outermost House” and “Two Views of a Cadaver Room.” She was proud of her first acceptance by the TLS.
Next came the Badlands of North Dakota, the state Sylvia’s paternal grandparents had once called home. She described the eerie landscape to Aurelia as a “beautiful spot” that “literally lept [sic] at us out of the prairies.” They camped in a grove of cottonwoods that offered a view of the Missouri River and the rocky, striated hills. Yet Hughes described this setting in Dantean terms in his poem “The Badlands”: “A landscape / Staked out in the sun and left to die.” Plath, he claimed, was “overwhelmed / By the misery of the place, like a nausea….‘This is evil,’ / You said. ‘This is real evil.’ ”36 She could not settle into the landscape, so far from the ocean.
Montana proved more welcoming. They camped on the grounds of a Congregational church and feasted on steak and flaky boysenberry pie. Sylvia described the landscape to her mother as “yellow wheat & black earth fields stretching in alternate ebony & gold bands to the purple mesas on the horizon.”37 At Yellowstone, they dined on trout they caught themselves and marveled at the geysers. But a bear smashed their rear car window one night at three a.m. and ransacked their food supply. The couple waited nervously in their tent until dawn, when a park ranger ran the bear off. They moved to another campsite, smeared their car windows with kerosene, and took a tranquilizer each (Sylvia had been “saving” them for the Donner Pass).38 She gave Aurelia and Warren a detailed account of the incident, which she drew on in “The Fifty-Ninth Bear,” a story she wrote that fall at Yaddo. She would add one important detail to her fiction: the bear kills the husband. In his Birthday Letters poem “The 59th Bear,” Hughes wrote that he had not understood “what need later / Transformed our dud scenario into a fiction,” and attributed the ending to Plath’s need to exorcise her own death wish.39 The couple camped at Yellowstone for five days, and eventually saw a total of sixty-seven bears during their trip.
The drive across America unsettled both of them. Sylvia’s worries about infertility, plus the actual symptoms of a first-trimester pregnancy—nausea, exhaustion, and mood swings—had increased what Ted called her “worsening nerves.”40 He was disturbed by the vast, impenetrable rock formations at places like Karlsbad and the Badlands. Yet he wrote Aurelia, “This is the greatest experience I ever had. America doesn’t really start before about Wisconsin—from there on it’s true Paradise.”41 Sylvia gives no hint of marital tension in her letters home, but her poems and story from this time suggest that traveling had become increasingly stressful. The couple often camped for free on church grounds, behind gas stations, on beaches, and in farmers’ fields without access to bathrooms. Sylvia did laundry in lakes. Though she was an experienced Girl Scout, “roughing it” while pregnant—and in heat that sometimes topped 100°—was exhausting.
In Utah they swam in the Great Salt Lake and heard an organ concert at the Mormon Tabernacle before camping “among Sagebrush & grazing bulls.”42 Plath learned in Utah that Knopf had rejected her poetry manuscript, and she instructed her mother, via postcard on July 25, to mail it immediately to Harcourt, Brace. Publishing her manuscript was now more important than ever, as she worried she could not have a baby. Aurelia encouraged her to tinker with some of her poems before sending the manuscript out again, but Sylvia dug in. “PLEASE don’t worry about my poetry book but send it off….I also have gone over it very carefully and am not going to try to change it to fit some vague abstract criticism. If an editor wants to accept it and make a few changes then, all right. You need to develop a little of our callousness and brazenness to be a proper sender-out of mss.”43 They drove on to Nevada, Sylvia’s “least favorite state,” and passed through Reno, the site of Otto’s divorce and her parents’ marriage, without stopping. Sylvia told her mother she thought it an “awfully ugly place.”44
After a stop in Lake Tahoe, they camped on the beach near San Francisco. They drove over the Golden Gate Bridge, called Aurelia from Drake’s Bay, and learned that Faber and Faber had accepted Lupercal. Hughes was staring out over the Pacific when he received the news, which he thought fitting.45 They drove down the coast through Big Sur and Los Angeles to Pasadena, where Aunt Frieda welcomed the weary couple with a feast. Aurelia had secretly sent Frieda money to entertain the couple after Frieda had written to her of their “limitations.”46 (Frieda thanked Aurelia profusely and, abashed, admitted that she felt like a “cheat” for keeping Aurelia’s “indulgence” to herself.)47 Sylvia loved Frieda’s “little green eden of a house,” which was “surrounded by pink and red and white oleander bushes” and avocado, persimmon, fig, and peach trees. She marveled at her aunt’s resemblance to her father—“the same clear piercing intelligent bright eyes and face shape.”48 Sylvia felt a connection with her “young-spirited” aunt in the short time she was in Pasadena.49 Frieda, too, was extremely moved by her brief meeting with her brother’s child. She sensed that there were deeper things Sylvia wanted to discuss with her, yet those things were “somehow lost in the scramble.”50 After two nights in a “luxurious” Pasadena hotel, the couple headed south again. Sylvia told Aurelia she wept when saying goodbye to Frieda and remarked again that she “looks like a feminine version of Daddy.”51
Private showers soon became a distant memory as Sylvia and Ted began pitching their tent again. Near Needles, California, they “sweltered among hordes of huge rubber-eating crickets” who ate holes in their mattress and sleeping bag.52 The heat during the day could reach 115°. It all became too much for Sylvia; after their tent nearly blew away in a sweltering wind and thunderstorm, they began staying “on occasion” at $5 motels.53 She would capture the desert’s disquieting surrealism in July 1960’s “Sleep in the Mojave Desert”:
The desert is white as a blind man’s eye,
Comfortless as salt. Snake and bird
/>
Doze behind the old masks of fury.
We swelter like firedogs in the wind.
They continued on to the Grand Canyon, Tucson, El Paso, and Juarez, Mexico, and Sylvia stopped writing detailed letters. She and Ted had been on the road for nearly six weeks. In the French Quarter in New Orleans, Ted sent Warren and Aurelia a poem that made light of their exhaustion:
As we crawled over Nevada’s oven top
Honky tonks & mirages drank our drop;
God knows California was one itch
Of sunburn lotion, bugs and the lousily rich.
Burned black, bled white, we fled fast into Texas,
There dust & dullness came near to annex us…54
Years later, he recalled their true weariness in a Birthday Letters poem, “Grand Canyon”:
We were numbed by the shock-waves
Coming off the sky-vistas at us—
The thunder-beings that swept against us and through us
Out of the road’s jackrabbits and the beer-can constellations
We drove into after dark.55
They rested for a week in Sewanee, Tennessee, where they stayed with Luke Myers’s mother in her mansion, Bairnwick, and met the editor of The Sewanee Review, Monroe Spears, at a party. The connection was an important one, as Spears had published Plath’s “Point Shirley” and “The Departure of the Ghost” in their current issue, and would accept her short story “The Fifteen-Dollar Eagle” in late August. They headed back to Massachusetts through Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, where they stayed with Sylvia’s uncle Frank. When Sylvia and Ted finally arrived in Wellesley on August 28, Aurelia “sensed a great weariness” in her daughter, who had begun to hope she was pregnant.56
* * *
ON SEPTEMBER 9, Plath and Hughes arrived at Yaddo, America’s preeminent artists’ colony, set on four hundred pine-filled acres in Saratoga Springs, New York. Since the colony’s founding in 1900, a stint at Yaddo had become a rite of passage for American artists, many of whom had gone on to win Pulitzer and MacArthur prizes. Sylvia and Ted would stay until November 19. “They were very fond of each other, very quiet, kept much to themselves. Pleasant, hard working and appreciative of the kind of life Yaddo offered them,” the poet Pauline Hanson, Yaddo’s resident secretary, remembered.57
Yaddo’s director, Elizabeth Ames, had heard about Plath from Alfred Kazin, who had written to her in 1955, “The best writer at Smith, and a very remarkable girl in every way, is Sylvia Plath, she is the real thing.”58 Four years later, Sylvia and Ted moved into a large first-floor bedroom, Room 1, at West House, the wood-and-stucco guest house just a short walk from the main mansion. Its grandeur impressed Sylvia: “The libraries and living rooms and music rooms are like those in a castle, all old plush, curios, leather bindings, oil paintings on the walls, dark woodwork, carvings on all the furniture. Very quiet and sumptuous.”59 Each day after breakfast, the couple parted: Sylvia to her sunny third-floor studio, Room 8, in West House; Ted to his small, one-room cottage, “Outlook,” in the woods. From nine to four, Sylvia sat at her “huge heavy dark-wooded table,” typing on her new Swiss-made light green Hermes 3000 typewriter, before four east-facing windows overlooking the “tall dense green pines.”60 The acres of Norway spruce, balsam firs, and white pine suggested the Black Forest more than the Adirondack woods. Former resident Hortense Calisher thought the towering pines looked like something out of a German opera.61
Sylvia read in the Yaddo authors’ library and took breakfast and dinner communally in the mansion’s baronial dining room, with its “diamond-paned windows overlooking green gardens and marble statuary, golden, deep rugs and antique velvet cushions, heavily gilt-framed paintings, statues everywhere.”62 The meals were rich; she had not eaten so well since the Sassoon days. “Honey oozing out of the comb, steaming coffee on the hot-plate,” she wrote in her journal, “sweetbreads, sausages, bacon and mushrooms; ham and mealy orange sweet potatoes; chicken and garden beans.”63 Elizabeth Ames was the grande dame of Yaddo at the time, and she required guests to dress formally for dinner. The erudite and witty conversationalists who gathered after cocktails around the long dining table intimidated the painter Howard Rogovin, the youngest guest that season. “I don’t think I can do this,” he confessed to the English writer Martin Green, who sat next to him on his first night. He thought he might have to leave Yaddo. Green told him not to worry, and to follow his lead. “This was nothing,” Green told him, compared to High Table at Cambridge.64
Sylvia and Ted, both Cantabrigians, were more comfortable in the gilded surroundings. Yet Howard recalled that Ted wanted him to know that he was very much a Yorkshireman. On one of their daily walks through the woods, Ted told him that as a member of the British working class, he would never have ended up at Cambridge if not for a government Education Act that broadened school access. Sylvia felt no such compulsion to discuss her own scholarship years and basked in the “great countryhouse, a fine library, fine grounds, fine cooking,” as she wrote Ted’s parents.65 Memories of Yaddo may have influenced the couple’s decision to later purchase their own “great countryhouse,” Court Green, in Devon.
Yaddo’s monasticism allowed Plath to focus on her art. “The only sound is the birds, and, at night, the distant dreamlike calling of the announcer at the Saratoga racetrack,” she wrote home. “I have never in my life felt so peaceful and as if I can read and think and write for about 7 hours a day.”66 Hughes, too, relished the solitude as he worked on his play “The House of Taurus,” a modern version of Euripides’ The Bacchae. A five-minute walk separated the couple during their working hours, but it was enough to make Sylvia feel a new independence. “I am so happy we can work apart, for that is what we’ve really needed,” she admitted to Aurelia and Warren.67
There were only twelve other artists at Yaddo that fall, and the grounds were quiet.68 Sylvia and Ted walked the winding, wooded trails through the estate, and lingered in the European-inspired rose garden. Each morning Ted woke early to go fishing; he caught bass in the small lake but threw them back since the estate’s food was so fine. Sylvia was still trying to learn German, “painstakingly” studying the language for two hours a day.69 The outside world intruded only by mail—rejections and acceptances, and letters from Aurelia full of anxiety about her heavy teaching load.
Sylvia, Ted, and Howard formed a trio. They did not socialize much with the poet May Swenson, who arrived in November, and the other two West House guests. Swenson met Plath only once, when she was curled up in bed recovering from a sinus cold. “Books and notepads, papers, pens, magazines” were strewn across the blankets, along with apples and grapes. Swenson was struck by how “well paired” the tall, attractive couple was, and how Plath “sounded very British.” “A handshake and the flash of smile, then Sylvia’s head drooped, her blue eyes lidded, and she looked down into her lap.”70
Howard became especially close to Ted. They went fishing together on Yaddo’s lakes, and walked down to the Saratoga racetrack to watch the horses. (Once, when a horse had to be put down, Ted stayed to watch the whole drama, telling Howard he was going to write a poem about it.) Ted was always “congenial, friendly, very open, very smart.” He did not often talk about poetry, but he mentioned his admiration for Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, and his friend Leonard Baskin. Howard found Sylvia much quieter, and less relaxed. She never joined them for walks, although she was invited. Howard, who stayed on the second floor at West House, heard Sylvia’s typewriter going all day long above him. She dressed smartly, “like a Smith girl,” he remembered, in sweaters and wool skirts. He found her calm, serious, and beautiful. He was attracted to her, but her demeanor warned him off. She never spoke to him of anything personal.71
In the evenings, the three retreated to West House’s ornate sitting room, a luxurious retreat with a grand fireplace, immense Persian rug, stained-glass windows, art deco lamps
, and grand portraits. There, they sometimes listened to music with the composer Gordon Binkerd. One evening, Howard remembered, Sylvia read her poem about a Brueghel painting, “Two Views of a Cadaver Room,” which she had written the previous summer, out loud to them. Ted sometimes drew up astrology charts of great writers and Yaddo guests. (He saw something he didn’t like in Howard’s chart and never finished it.) But the three of them—and sometimes Pauline Hanson, Yaddo’s secretary—spent most of their time sitting at the Ouija board. Ted was the ringleader; Sylvia seemed less excited but went along. Howard was sure that Ted cheated—his answers were too interesting.72
Ted convinced Howard to paint portraits of himself and Sylvia.73 She was reluctant, but Ted finally persuaded her. She sat for three or four sessions of about forty minutes each, dressed conservatively in a sweater and wool skirt. Ted recited poems and read D. H. Lawrence aloud while Howard painted in the style of contemporary German painters Max Beckmann, Lovis Corinth, and Ernst Kirchner. At one point Sylvia became frustrated. “I don’t know what we’re doing here,” she said. “Why do it?”74 Howard joked that one of them might become famous. Plath was a talented visual artist and had painted self-portraits. But she did not like ceding control of her image and instinctively recoiled before the male gaze. Hughes later wrote the poem “Portraits” about the sessions, published in Birthday Letters. According to Howard, Ted added several ominous details, like the dark human figure in the painting’s background, which he interpreted as Sylvia’s “demon.” “He thought I sensed her instability, but I was just swirling some paint around,” Howard said. Nor did Howard remember the appearance of a snake, which Hughes turned into a dark symbol in his poem. “There was no snake. That’s Ted.”75
Sylvia told Aurelia that Yaddo was heaven, but her journal records a different truth. She was still experiencing pregnancy-related nausea and mood swings, as well as depression and anxiety; in late September, she had a long, heart-shuddering panic attack that lasted on and off for two days. She diagnosed “the old fall disease.”76
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