From the Guggenheim, the couple had set aside a year’s rent, six months’ food budget, and $650 to buy furniture. But the future was precarious. Even with the looming publication of Lupercal and Ted’s inclusion in a new Faber and Faber anthology, Sylvia wrote to Marcia, “nothing makes any money.” She hoped to “stretch” the Guggenheim until early September.44 After that, they would have to live solely on income from their writing and the BBC—and some help from Aurelia and Mrs. Prouty, who was concerned enough to send Sylvia a $300 check that fall for a private doctor. After the January 30 publication of “Two Views of a Cadaver Room” in The Nation, Plath would not see another poem in print until April.
Back at the Beacon (the “express” train from London to Yorkshire took nearly six hours, with three connections), Sylvia took her first bath in two weeks and marveled at the sun shining on the “dazzling, snow-covered moortops.”45 She finally felt warm in the thick wool bathrobe Edith Hughes had knit for her. Her baby was due on March 27, in about six weeks, and her thoughts turned to motherhood. She and Ted, guided by the stars, were sure the baby was going to be a boy, Nicholas. If a girl, she would be Frieda Rebecca. Sylvia asked Aurelia to send her the Harper’s acceptance letter for “Mushrooms”—“I need to see that kind of mail now.”46 She was thrilled to learn that another Yaddo poem, “Medallion,” had tied for a first-place award from the Critical Quarterly.47 Plath was then unknown to the editors, Brian Cox and Tony Dyson, but the magazine would become an important promoter of her work. When she met Dyson and Cox—who had known Hughes at Cambridge—by chance at a 1960 Guinness prize party, she expressed delight that they did not know she was married to Ted Hughes. “Because obviously,” Cox remembered, “we might have given her the prize for that reason.” Philip Larkin was one of the judges, and Cox had the impression that the prize buoyed Plath, for she hadn’t “had a lot of success” yet.48 Mademoiselle and The Atlantic had recently rejected three “slangy” stories, which she dared not now send to Faber and Faber—Ted’s publishers—for inclusion in one of their anthologies lest she “embarrass” him, and them.49 The fact that Plath was now holding her work back from the most prestigious publisher in England for fear of embarrassing her husband suggests how the creative marriage was beginning to stymie her own ambitions. Indeed, she had inaugurated this worrisome trend in 1956 when she chose to enter Hughes’s manuscript in the YMHA/Harper Brothers contest rather than her own. She had apparently decided, early on, not to leverage Ted’s poetry contacts at Faber, either, and sent the manuscript of The Colossus—forty-eight poems, nearly one-third of them written at Yaddo—to James Michie at Heinemann on January 25.
She had written only one poem since arriving in England, “You’re,” about the child she was carrying. The baby is like “A creel of eels, all ripples. / Jumpy as a Mexican bean,” yet there is a Gothic tinge. The baby is also “moon-skulled,” “Trawling your dark as owls do,” “Mute,” “Vague as fog.” The skulls and owls add heaviness to a poem that wants to lift and jump. The speaker grasps at buoyancy, but cannot elide the undercurrent of fear that presses at her from another angle. The next poem Plath wrote, nearly five months later in June 1960, was “The Hanging Man.”
* * *
—
Sylvia and Ted moved into their Chalcot Square flat on February 1 and began a three-week frenzy of scrubbing, waxing, and painting. Ted built cupboards, kitchen shelves, counters, and bookcases, and did all the heavy lifting. Tools and timber littered the staircase and living room. “The place looks like a railroad station now,” Sylvia told Aurelia. But she loved “the spanking newness of everything…nobody’s old stove to clean or toilet to scrub!”50 They put up rose-colored wallpaper and green cord curtains in the bedroom, and hung a large print of Isis and the illustrated Gehenna Press broadside of “Pike” on their living room wall. They painted the floorboards gray. Sylvia checked in with the sympathetic Dr. Hindley and wept in his office. She had endured much strain over the past month, and she was tired. He prescribed a sedative. Aurelia, meanwhile, worried about her daughter’s exposure to paint fumes.
Sylvia’s kitchen was the flat’s pièce de résistance. They purchased a new gas oven at a discount and, her “pride and joy,” an American-sized refrigerator. She was smug about its superiority—“The British are still afraid of Big things”—and kept rubbing the stove and refrigerator with a cloth “just to see them sparkle.”51 All of it amounted to a little over $500. Dido Merwin would later chastise Plath in a vicious essay, included in Anne Stevenson’s biography, for buying new appliances instead of getting them secondhand. In fact Sylvia fretted over the cost of these big-ticket items, asking Aurelia several times to compare their prices to American models and to reassure her that she was not overspending. She had considered getting them secondhand but worried that she did not have enough mechanical knowledge to judge their true condition.
They met their upstairs neighbor, Mrs. Morton, who worked as a French interpreter for a telephone company. Sylvia described her as a “warm-hearted,” “widowed older woman…an aged Bohemian” in her “Russian-novel antique attic.”52 Spinsters, along with barren women, were one of Plath’s targets, for these were the two fates she herself feared. That September, Plath would satirize Mrs. Morton and her gentlemen callers in a mean-spirited poem, “Leaving Early.”
The Merwins, when they visited, were alarmed to see that Ted’s only writing space was a small windowless foyer in which he had set up a rickety card table. They assumed that Sylvia—who now seemed, in the wake of her appliance purchases, a spoiled American—had commandeered the rest of the apartment. They offered Ted the use of Bill’s study while they were away in France from late April through the summer, in exchange for his mowing their lawn. As they lived around the corner, the situation was ideal. Yet Ted told Olwyn he liked his hallway study, with its “3 doors & red walls.” “The result is very good—no distractions whatsoever, and the proof is the enormous amount I’ve got through.”53 Twenty-five years later, he still remembered the “windowless cubicle just big enough for a chair” as one of “the best places I ever had” to write in.54 Although the Merwins had not thought to extend their study offer to Sylvia, Ted did: the poets would share the quiet retreat after Frieda was born. (Bill Merwin later expressed outrage that Sylvia had used his study.)55 Sylvia wrote there in the morning, Ted in the afternoon.
About a week after moving into their new flat, Plath received the letter she had been waiting for all her life. Just two weeks after she had submitted her manuscript to Heinemann, James Michie wrote on February 5 to accept The Colossus.
Dear Miss Plath,
I have your poems and Heinemann would like to publish them.
Can you ring the line and drop in to see me any time, any day this month?56
A few days later, on February 10, Sylvia dressed carefully in a black wool suit and cashmere coat, and donned her Parisian gloves and Italian calfskin bag. She looked, she wrote, “resplendent” as she walked into the York Minster pub on Soho’s Dean Street to meet with Michie, who presented her with a contract for The Colossus and Other Poems. “She signed it on the glass-crowded bar-top,” Ted wrote Olwyn. “You can’t imagine how euphoric she is.”57 Afterward, she and Ted celebrated over champagne, veal, and mushrooms at Bianci’s Italian restaurant on Frith Street in Soho—the same restaurant in which she had sat “in misery a month back, homeless & cold & very grim.” Everything had changed. Ted brought her The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence to mark the occasion.58
The Colossus, dedicated to Ted, would come out in October. Plath would receive 10 percent of the royalties, which she knew would “amount to nothing.”59 Yet the prestige of signing with a firm that published Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Somerset Maugham mattered more to Plath than money; Hughes thought Heinemann “one of the most powerful publishers in England.”60 On that February day, it must have seemed that she had achieved nearly every goal she had set herself—she had
married a brilliant poet; she was soon to become a mother; she had found a charming flat in central London; she had just signed a contract for her first book. She took much satisfaction in succeeding where Aurelia had quietly predicted failure. In her letter home, Plath exulted in her triumph, describing every detail of her exquisite outfit, the “notorious” pub, and the signature itself. She was finally in command of her personal and professional destiny.
As February drew to a close, Plath learned that the Critical Quarterly had taken “Blue Moles,” “The Beggars,” and “The Manor Garden” (they would appear in the summer issue) while The London Magazine had accepted Hughes’s story “The Rain Horse.” She and Ted now traded full days in bed; one read, wrote, and slept while the other handled all domestic duties. In the evenings they socialized with the Merwins or attended plays. “Now we are ‘at home,’ London is a delight,” she wrote Aurelia. Sylvia was excited to see Ibsen’s Rosmersholm in late February, her first staged Ibsen play, and Racine’s Phèdre in early March. “I find I am made much happier by tragedy, good tragedy, classic tragedy, in movies and on stage than by so-called ‘hilarious musicals and/or farces,’ ” she wrote home. Tragedy, she wrote, “really purifies & liberates me.”61 Hughes, too, wrote of the play’s “tremendous” effect in terms that suggest discontent with an increasingly bourgeois life: “Totally cathartic. I have not often felt it. Catharsis is what we more & more lack. There is less & less in our lives that satiate our spiritual powers….As our lives grow drier & more timid, our art does not compensate….Something like this Phèdre, every other day, would cure me.”62
Hughes’s first copies of Lupercal arrived on February 23 (the official release date was March 18), and while Plath was displeased with the jacket’s color combinations, she felt that it was “a handsome affair.”63 Ted inscribed a copy to her: “To Sylvia, its true mother, with all my love, Ted,” dated February 25, 1960. (He noted in the inscription, “4th anniversary of St Botolph’s.”)64 Already, publicity was building. Hughes was written up in Queen, which Sylvia called “a sort of Harper’s Bazaar,” as one of Britain’s most important new writers.65 Meanwhile, Sylvia whiled away long hours reading Bill Merwin’s American history books. The two couples spent many nights drawing up their astrology charts; Bill remembered that Sylvia, a Scorpio, took pride in hers.66 “Hope to be writing soon again, too,” she told Aurelia. “I feel much freer (and appreciated, by publishers at least) here to write than I ever did in America.”67 Since she had signed her contract with Heinemann, two other British publishers, including Oxford University Press, had asked to see a manuscript. She told Marcia that April that the British were “much kinder & open to poetry than in America, where loss of money is such a phobia.”68 Yet she still wanted a homecoming for The Colossus—“it is a good, fat solid 50-poem book now & deserving of print there. I naturally would be very happy to be recognized in my own country!”69 She instructed Aurelia to keep sending their manuscripts out to American magazines.
Luke Myers visited Chalcot Square in March, but he spent only one night at the Hugheses’ flat before retreating to the other Huwses at 18 Rugby Street. He remembered Sylvia as tense and testy during the visit. While she cooked dinner, he and Ted stepped out to a local pub, where Ted, he later remembered, said he had a hard time working through all of Sylvia’s interruptions. They returned from the pub to find half-filled bowls of lukewarm clam chowder waiting for them. Sylvia seemed angry and “demanding,” Luke said, in the “style of some American women of the period.”70 (He apparently was oblivious about why a heavily pregnant Sylvia might resent making dinner while they relaxed at the pub.) Daniel Huws remembered that Sylvia preferred socializing in small, intimate, “domestic” gatherings: “She relaxed. She became herself.”71 “The timeless, anarchic nature of pubs—a quality of Irishness…something Ted loved, in his younger days, was anathema to Sylvia, with her strong need to feel that everything was under control, even her social pleasure, and with her businesslike dedication of her time.”72 Indeed, British pubs at that time were mostly the domain of men, a fact that might also account for Sylvia’s preference for dinner parties and explain her annoyance at being left behind by Luke and Ted that night.
There was more aggravation to come. When Olwyn visited Chalcot Square that March with a girlfriend, Janet Crosbie-Hill, the two women chain-smoked. Sylvia suspected that the smoke was not good for her or her baby, and opened the windows. Olwyn thought her rude. But the child-care authority Dr. Spock had recommended limiting visitors in his book Baby and Child Care, which Sylvia consulted regularly; she underlined his passage about the importance of time alone and rest. As she told her mother after Luke’s and Olwyn’s visits, “Ted is, if anything, too nice to his relatives and friends, and I get weary sitting for 8 hours at a stretch in our smokefilled rooms waiting for them to leave—impossible to nap or relax with so many people around. I feel very unlike entertaining anyone just now, simply ‘in-waiting,’ wanting to read, write in my diary, & nap.”73 Sylvia was now the most important person in Ted’s life, and his sister and close friend resented her coup (Olwyn and Luke exchanged letters about Sylvia’s “aggression” in March of 1960). Sylvia was hospitable to friends she liked—in March she threw three separate dinner parties for the Huwses, the Merwins, and the Rosses. She would later offer an apology to Olwyn in a friendly April letter after the baby’s birth; she said she had been under a “cloud” during her visit, about to come down with a flu and sinus infection that would keep her in bed for the last two weeks of March.74
Sylvia finally got the attention she yearned for at Selfridge’s flagship department store, on busy Oxford Street, where she ventured alone by bus in March. The bubbly salesladies sat her down and displayed their wares. Sylvia bought practical rubber sheets but indulged in a handmade Scottish shawl. This was the closest she would come to an American-style baby shower in London, as she had no close friends or family of her own to make a fuss. The baby was coming soon: at her next doctor’s appointment, she finally heard its heartbeat and was reassured that “Frieda/Nicholas” was in the correct position. Aurelia sent diapers and many other gifts, while Sylvia picked out a pale pink crib. “I keep wondering what it will be like to see a breathing infant in it. This seems an enormous milestone to pass: three of us instead of two.”75
Lupercal was published on March 18. Ten days later, on the baby’s due date, Al Alvarez delivered a resounding review in the Sunday Observer titled “An Outstanding Young Poet.” Sylvia quoted it proudly to Aurelia: “ ‘Hughes has found his own voice, created his own artistic world & has emerged as a poet of the first importance…What Ted Hughes has done is to take a limited, personal theme and, by an act of immensely assured poetic skill, has broadened it until it seems to touch upon nearly everything that concerns us. This is not easy poetry to read, but it is new, profound & important.’ We cooed & beamed all day.”76 The Daily Telegraph agreed: “Mr Hughes at 30 is…the most strikingly original, technically masterful, poet of his generation.”77 Another review, in The Observer, compared Hughes to Thom Gunn and used language that would set the terms for Hughes’s future reception: “a tall, craggy Yorkshire poet of thirty, who is not afraid of Strong Feelings,” in “romantic revolt against the dry, cerebral verse of the ‘Movement’ of the fifties (Conquest, Larkin, Amis, Wain, etc.).” Hughes was “earthy and emotional; more close to the land and farm.”78
Lupercal contains many of what are now regarded as Hughes’s best poems, and best lines—“Hawk Roosting” (“I am going to keep things like this”); “View of a Pig” (“Scald and scour it like a doorstep”); “Thrushes” (“More coiled steel than living”); “Relic” (“Nothing touches but, clutching, devours”); “Mayday on Holderness” (“The nightlong frenzy of shrews”); and “Pike” (“deep as England”). The poems had mostly been written in New England, but their imaginative hinterland is Yorkshire—Old Denaby, Crookhill, Roche Abbey. Nearly all the book’s reviewers regarded it as a watershed in po
stwar British poetry. Ted’s success made Sylvia wonder, again, if her own book would ever appear in America. At least the short Observer article had included, she told Aurelia, “a note about me ‘his tall, trim American wife…who is a New Yorker poet in her own right.’ ”79
There was more good news that month: on March 24 Hughes learned that he had won the Somerset Maugham Award for The Hawk in the Rain—about $1,400, to cover three months of travel abroad. Sylvia began dreaming of the French Riviera, Rome, the Greek Islands—“all sorts of elegant sun-saturated schemes.”80 The prize gave Ted great confidence, he told Olwyn: “the awful abstract murderous supersonic brain-paralysing tension which I was under in America & until this last month seems to be lifting. I’m writing with a new sort of energy & a heat that reminds me of myself again….I have never had more ideas.”81 The BBC offered him more work, and Sylvia was relieved by the prospect of “very good fees.”82 They stopped worrying about money for the moment when an editor at Harper’s Bazaar offered Hughes $275 for the American publication of “The Rain Horse.”
Sylvia’s due date, March 27, came and went. She spent “cosy” days indoors cooking, reading Sartre and Camus in French, and watching children play cricket in the square through her window. “We hear the clear song of a certain thrush at dawn each morning….The daily icecream truck jingles to a stop & the little ones all rush up. Oh, I am so impatient!”83 Their Irish midwife and Dr. Hindley came round every few days to reassure her that “everything was ripe & ready.” She would be glad to have an April baby, for April was the “Plath month” (Warren, Aurelia, and Otto were all born in April) and offered more promise than March, “an exhausted, grubby end-of-the-year month.” She and Ted took an evening walk to Primrose Hill on the last night of March “under the thin new moon…all blue & misty, the buds a kind of nimbus of green on the thorn trees, daffodils & blue squills out on the lawns & the silhouettes of wood pigeons roosting in the trees.”84
Red Comet Page 87