Rough Magic

by Paul Alexander

  Now that she had met the only man who could make Sassoon pale by comparison, Sylvia had no reason to stay at the party, especially since she could not be with him. She found Hamish, who was more than willing to go. Outside, in Falcon Yard, Hamish coldly referred to the St. Botolph’s poets as phonies. But what about Ted Hughes—is he a phony? Sylvia wanted to know. And, in a statement that sounded more like a warning than a comment, Hamish replied, “He is the biggest seducer in Cambridge.”

  Still drunk, Sylvia and Hamish walked across campus. When they reached the gates of Queens, Hamish’s college, they climbed over a wall, sneaked through the yard, and crept into his residence hall. Up in his room, they were soon lying on the floor beside a fire Hamish built in the fireplace. When he kissed her, his mouth felt nice, Sylvia would remember. And after he rolled on top of her, his body pressing down heavily against hers, she begged him to scold her—because, she said, she was a whore and a slut. “You’re only a very silly girl,” he said, between kisses.

  At two-thirty, afraid that she would be caught out after hours, Sylvia asked Hamish to take her back to Whitstead. She crawled into bed at three, then awoke the next morning at nine with a hangover. To soothe her nerves, she wrote in her journal, lingering on an impassioned account of her meeting with Ted. That night, after plodding through Racine in the afternoon, she ate supper with Mallory—who was no Ted Hughes, she now realized. (In a reversal of her pledge to do nothing but write and study, a regimen that had probably made her more— not less—depressed, she had decided to go on dates again.)

  The following afternoon, she sat in her cold Whitstead room and wrote a poem that she dedicated to Hughes. Remembering “Jaguar,” his poem about a savage jaguar that she had read in a back issue of Chequer, Plath composed her poem, the central focus of which is a woman being stalked by a panther. Fleeing the animal, the woman believes that she has become his “bait.” A second afternoon of work, and she had finished the poem, which she entitled “Pursuit.” Right away, Plath submitted it, along with others to fill out a batch, to The Atlantic Monthly.

  In the coming days, Sylvia chatted with friends to find out more about Hughes. Having read English in his first two years and archaeology and anthropology in his third, he graduated from Pembroke College at Cambridge in 1954. Between June 1954 and February 1956, he held a series of menial jobs: a rose gardener; a night watchman; and, at present, a reader at J. Arthur Ranks Pinewood Studios, for whom he sought properties to be adapted into screenplays. When he was unemployed or had days off work, Hughes returned to Cambridge. He hated the university’s conservative traditions, but he loved the town. In Cambridge, he wrote, read in the library, and caroused with his friends at a local pub called The Anchor. Essentially, these friends composed the group of young men who would one day publish The St. Botolph’s Review: E. Lucas Myers, an American from Tennessee and a cousin of Southern poet Allen Tate; Daniel Huws, “just over six feet tall and Celt dark,” Myers would write of him, “[his] lips slightly pursed in a physiognomy of marked sensitivity”; David Ross, Daniel’s suitemate, whose father was a graphic designer in London; Than Minton, a talented prose-writer; and Daniel Weissbort, an American poet and fiction-writer who would years later write an unpublished sequence of short stories including one—“only slightly fictionalized”—that dealt with the interplay of the young men in this group. In the story, the narrator’s psychiatrist tries to explain the give-and-take of the young men. The group is, according to the doctor, “homosexually collusive”— a term that cast, the narrator says, “a somewhat ambiguous light over what I had regarded as a peculiarly heroic and male collection of individuals.”

  At the time Sylvia met Hughes, his best friend was Luke Myers, whom he had known since January 1955. Myers, Huws, and Hughes had all published poems in Chequer. On one of Hughes’s trips to Cambridge, the magazine’s editor had taken him around to Myers’s room. Myers’s initial glimpse of Hughes would linger in his mind for years. “He was an inch or so taller than Daniel and wore . . . the brown leather greatcoat that had been issued to an uncle in World War I,” Myers would write. “His brown hair fell across the right side of his forehead and his voice modulated curiously at certain significant points in his speech. His eyes and his mouth were powerfully expressive.’ Instantly, the two men formed a rare, intimate friendship. Their opinions and tastes coincided so completely that it seemed they inhabited the same body. The next time he came to Cambridge, Hughes, who usually spent nights with various friends, stayed with Myers, even though Myers lived in the Saint Botolph’s Rectory’s refurbished chicken coop, a space so tiny it held only a bed and a desk. When they were not holed up in the hut rehashing life and literature, Myers and Hughes drank with the rest of their friends at The Anchor. Often enthralling his listeners with tales from myths he had memorized, Hughes played his role, the center of the circle, for all it was worth. Once David Ross had decided to finance a literary magazine, Hughes, Myers, and the others offered to contribute poems and stories. They all seemed happy to name the magazine for the address of Luke’s hut. After all, if Hughes, the groups undisputed poetic genius, was in Cambridge—or so it was until university officials forced Myers to move into a residence hall— the hut in the garden behind Saint Botolph’s Rectory was his home too.

  4

  Despite Hughes, Sylvia was still obsessed with Sassoon. On the night of March 1, only days after The St. Botolph’s Review party, Sylvia wrote. Sassoon a letter in which she asked if she could go with him to Italy over her spring vacation; the trip, she said, would “save [her] from death.” She admitted she could not extricate herself from “that abstract tyrant”—Richard—who had stolen her soul and murdered her flesh. The letter, which she never mailed, set the tone for March.

  Early in the month, Sylvia reflected back over the term. Already, she had read fifty plays; among the writers she had studied were Racine, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Synge, Yeats, Corneille, Chapman, and Marlowe. On the 4th, she had a blowout with Jane, who returned five books, which she had borrowed, without erasing her penciled notes from their pages. Apparently, Jane assumed that, because Sylvia had already underscored passages in black ink, she—Jane—could write in the books in pencil. On the contrary, Sylvia felt as if “my children had been raped, or beaten, by an alien.” Livid, she rushed to Janes room. “In a very vehement and dreadful way . . . she protested my marks in her books,” Baltzell would write. “I have never seen rage like it. More directly than in the [Paris] hotel incident she put it to me that I had acted maliciously.” After dressing Jane down, Sylvia left, somewhat mollified. But from then on, the two women were no longer friends.

  Not long afterwards, Sylvia received a letter from Sassoon that disturbed her. He had decided to return to America, he said, and—of all things—enlist in the army. Sylvia interpreted his move as yet another rejection. Reading his letter, she confessed to her journal that she loved him deeply—perhaps more than any of her other boyfriends. Happy she had not mailed the last letter she had written him, Sylvia composed a second. In this one—long, rambling, pleading—she stated that even if he had taken countless mistresses she would still love him and that she wanted to have his baby. She planned to come to Paris during spring vacation, Sylvia continued; was there any reason why she could not see him? Later that night, rereading Sassoon’s letter to her, Sylvia became disconsolate. She returned to her journal and wrote: “[I]t hurts, Father, it hurts, oh, Father I have never known; a father, even, they took from me.” Two nights after that, as she drank sherry alone in her room, she continued. “I rail and rage against the taking of my father, whom I have never known. . . . I would have loved him; and he is gone. . . . I must beware, beware of marrying for that [reason]"—that is, to have a boy “become” her father. Only now, as she wrote to herself, could she admit a fact about her personality that would become even more obvious to her in the future: when she felt abandoned by a male romantic figure, she subconsciously experienced the sense of loss she harbored over the death
of her father.

  To help fight her depression, Sylvia tried to remain active. As often as possible, she attended the lectures given by Dorothea Krook, a Cambridge professor for whom she held deep admiration. On March 9, the day on which The New Yorker rejected another batch of poems, Sylvia mailed her mother a letter in which she enclosed “Pursuit.” Though she had written her mother six days earlier about Hughes— in that letter, she had described him as the only man in Cambridge who could match her intellectually and creatively—she did not reveal that he had inspired “Pursuit,” her new, sexually charged poem. Instead, she brought up Sassoon, who was “saintly,” she told her mother. In this letter Sylvia avoided any mention of his rejection of her, her resulting depression, or the memories of her father now surfacing in her mind.

  That evening, on a date with Hamish, she drank five or six whiskeys. The next day, on her way to the college library, she ran into Bert, who told her that Hughes and Myers had come by Whitstead the night before and thrown stones at her window. She must have still been out drinking with Hamish, for she had heard nothing. But, as a result of Berts story, she stayed in her room that night, hoping that Hughes might return. He didn’t—or so she thought: downstairs the following morning, Sylvia learned that he had. Throwing mud instead of stones on the wrong girl’s window—yes, mud!—he had repeatedly called out Sylvia’s name.

  On March 13, a letter arrived that cheered Sylvia up considerably. Her Fulbright had been renewed—and for a whole year. This meant that she could stay in England for the summer without worrying about expenses. The letter also prompted her to make other career moves. Now, she would definitely apply for a Eugene Saxton Fellowship, with which she hoped to support herself for a year while she wrote a novel.

  Excited and encouraged, Sylvia momentarily forgot about a splinter of glass that, in a freak accident, had lodged in her eye the day before. By the end of the week, though, the pain had become unbearable. When her friend Gary Haupt took her to the casualty ward at Adden-brooke Hospital, a doctor determined that removing the splinter would require an operation. After anesthetizing her eye with drops, he cut the splinter from the tissue, an excruciating procedure whose aftermath was equally painful: for the next twenty-four hours, she had to stay awake to apply medicine to her eye so the hole would heal. On the 18th, she was exhausted as she wrote to Gordon, who had recently asked her to go with him to Europe during her spring break (he was coming to screen graduate schools in Germany). Agreeing to the trip, Sylvia suggested that they meet in either Paris or Munich.

  Before she could go to Europe, she had a rendezvous to keep. At coffee on the 13th, Myers had asked her to visit him and Hughes in London on her way to Paris. They would be staying near Bloomsbury, on Rugby Street, in a flat that Daniel Huws’s father kept, Myers said, and Sylvia was welcome to spend the night. Following her last week of lectures, she took the train from Cambridge to London. When she and Hughes met at the Rugby Street flat, a grungy, run-down place that did not have adequate lavatory facilities, their attraction to one another was even stronger than it had been during the St. Botolph’s party. All that night they made love. And the sex they had was so rough, Sylvia noted on her calendar the next day, that her face was left battered with purple bruises, her neck raw and injured. Yet only one thing truly upset her: at five in the morning, either because his mind was blurred by their hours of sex or because, as Sylvia suspected, he was ruthless and wanted to humiliate her, Ted called her “Shirley,” the name of his last girlfriend. If she had been excited by Sassoon’s spanking—and seemingly she had been—now she was involved with a man who so eclipsed Sassoon in power and strength that she had to pause, horrified yet fascinated.

  The next day, weary from lack of sleep, Sylvia traveled by car and ferry from London to France, sharing the ride with a fellow Fulbright student and his girlfriend. She arrived in Paris in the early evening and checked into the Hôtel Béarn on Rue de Lille, near the Louvre and one street away from the Seine. Over the next two weeks, she again saw the sights of Paris—the Tour Eiffel, the Champs-Elysées, Notre Dame—but this time without Sassoon. For, true to his promise, he had left the city, for Spain. On her first day in Paris, Sylvia had walked down the Rue du Bac beyond the Place des Invalides to Rue Duvivier and rung the bell for Number 4. The concierge broke the news: Sassoon would not be back until after Easter—well beyond the time Sylvia would be in Paris. Weeping, she sat in the concierge’s living room and wrote Sassoon an incoherent letter.

  Though Sassoon was gone, Sylvia did not have to see Paris alone. She frequently enjoyed the company of Giovanni Perego, a communist newspaper reporter (who was, to Sylvia, like a father) whom she had met this trip on her first night in Paris; or Anthony Gray, a British boy she had met before leaving England; or Gary Haupt, her Cambridge friend. Nor were these merely Platonic escorts. Following an afternoon on the town, Tony Gray ended up in Sylvia’s hotel room. Kissing at first, they were soon undressed and in bed. As they lay there, Sylvia admired his sensual and muscular body, but when she got up to go to the bathroom, Tony changed his mind and put on his clothes. In the future, they continued to see each other—but only as friends.

  On April 4, Gordon arrived in Paris. Immediately Sylvia realized that meeting him had been a mistake. After one night, which they spent at the ballet, Sylvia and Gordon began to argue bitterly; soon Sylvia was considering going back to London early. Ultimately, she did not, and on the 6th she and Gordon left Paris by train for Munich. They were barely out of the city before they were fighting again, this time over whether John Malcolm Brinnin could have saved Dylan Thomas from drinking himself to death in New York City. Interestingly, Sylvia thought so, Gordon not.

  As the train finally pulled into the Munich station, snow was falling heavily. Once they had checked into separate rooms at the Bahnhof Hotel, Sylvia and Gordon started to dress for supper, and Gordon sliced his thumb with a razor blade while shaving. The moment she heard him cry out in pain, Sylvia rushed into his room to help. She wrapped a towel around his thumb to stop the bleeding; then she sat down beside him on the bed. Eventually, without speaking, Sylvia rested her head on his shoulder. The quiet—overwhelming and poignant—spoke for itself. Whereas great love and compassion had once existed between them, now there was only silence.

  Sylvia and Gordon stayed in Germany, their fathers’ homeland, only one day. On the 7th, they boarded a train headed from Munich through Austria (Sylvia’s grandparents’ homeland) and the Tyrolean Alps to Venice, where they stopped for two days. On the 9th—Rome. There they discarded all pretense of friendship and went their separate ways. During the next four days, they rarely saw each other outside their pension on the street above the Piazza di Spagna, a site near the house in which Keats died. On her own or with Don Cheney, a Choate friend of Gordon’s now at Oxford, whom the two had bumped into at the American Express office, Sylvia visited the Etruscan art exhibit, the Sistine Chapel, Saint Peters, and the Vatican. On Friday the 13th, following a miserable week, Gordon took Sylvia to the airport, lent her money for a ticket, and told her good-bye. They were both relieved that their ordeal had finally ended.

  In London, Sylvia went straight to Ted, who had mailed her a brief note in Paris in care of the American Express. After he remarked the smoothness of her body, the thoughts of which still lingered in his memory, Ted told her that, if she did not come to him in London, he would come to her in Cambridge. Sylvia agreed on London, for the 13th. At his flat, they fell into bed for another sleepless night of sex. The next day, Sylvia took the train to Cambridge. The past three weeks had been disturbing yet clarifying. Sassoon had deserted her—for good. Gordon had disappointed her—to her way of thinking if not his. And, as bookends to these weeks, she had spent two nights in London with Ted—"the strongest man in the world,” she told her mother, a man who possessed “a voice like the thunder of God.”

  5

  In mid-April, to spend more time with her, Ted followed Sylvia to Cambridge. They lounged around Sylvia’s
Whitstead room, ate supper with Luke, and often took long walks through the nearby countryside. On these hikes, Ted would point out different types of birds, leaves, and flowers that Sylvia had never noticed before. Eventually, Sylvia found herself falling more directly under Ted’s influence. She wrote about him in her letters, journal, even poems. Of Ted’s many interests, one in particular intrigued her. His familiarity with horoscopes—how to read them, what they meant, how they predict (and control) one’s life—was equaled only by his fascination with the paranormal and the powers of the mind. Sylvia began to wonder where he had learned so much about the occult. After all, she considered herself a curious person, and she knew almost nothing about the subject. On the other hand, Ted seemed to have studied it all his life.

  But in her letters to her mother, Sylvia did not dwell on Ted’s taste for the supernatural. Instead, she rhapsodized about him, almost to the point of comic exaggeration. Ted was tall and “hulking,” had a “large-cut” face set off by blue-green eyes, possessed a Dylan Thomas-esque voice that “boomed through walls and doors.” Violent and arrogant, he commanded one’s attention, “like a blast of Jove’s lightning.” And, most dangerously, he was a “breaker of things and people,” someone who wildly caroused with his friends. He was this way, Sylvia believed, because he felt trapped by the claustrophobic country in which he had been born and raised. If he lived in a country large enough for him, a country like America, surely he would become a different man.

  While she saw Ted, Sylvia also tried to get on with her life at Cambridge. She attended lectures and sat in on Dorothea Krook’s supervisions, which she found intellectually stimulating. On April 21, the Cambridge newspaper Varsity published “An American in Paris,” an article by Plath about her spring vacation. Then, on the 24th, she and the Varsity features editor went to a London reception for Soviet leaders Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev. When Varsity wrote up the event in its article “Vodka and Caviar,” the reporter alluded to Plath in passing. “Sylvia Plath, American undergraduate at Newnham, took the Marshals hand—’You must come to Cambridge.’ ”