One sorrow, though, continued to cloud Sylvia’s life—her grandmother’s failing health. Grammy’s illness recalled for Sylvia “my father’s slow long death.” She implored Aurelia—who had “borne daddy’s long, hard death,” “taken on a man’s portion in [her] work,” and endured ulcer attacks, stomach operations, and Sylvia’s breakdown—to watch her health. Sylvia hoped her mother would be able to come to England in the summer, as Aurelia then planned to do. On April 26, Aurelia’s fiftieth birthday, Grammy lapsed into a coma from which she did not recover. Three days later, she died. The death forced Sylvia to contemplate how she would feel if Aurelia died, leaving her with no one to turn to for love and advice.
By early May, even though they had known each other for less than eight weeks, Sylvia and Ted began to discuss marriage. That month, they spent almost every day together in Cambridge. On May Day, they punted up a nearby river to Grantchester for a picnic under an apple tree. On the 3rd, in Sylvia’s room, Ted read The Catcher in the Rye while Sylvia wrote articles—she had never before been able to work in the presence of a boyfriend—about the Russian reception, which she planned to submit to The New Yorker, and Paris, which she would try on The Christian Science Monitor. And, on the evening of the 19th, Sylvia took Ted, dressed in an old worn-out suit—his only one—to a Fulbright reception in London. At mid-month, Sylvia wrote to tell her mother that, next June, she and Ted wanted to come to America, marry, and celebrate their wedding with a huge barbecue. Sylvia also said that she and Ted wanted seven children so that the seventh child of their seventh child could be a rare white witch—an indication of just how much Ted now influenced her thinking.
One afternoon, Ted and Sylvia spent hours sitting out in Whitstead’s garden. While Ted looked on, Sylvia typed copies and carbons of Ted’s poems that she planned to submit to American magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harpers. She did this, she wrote to her mother, because Ted had just appointed her to a new job: she was to be his official literary agent.
In May, besides seeing Ted, Sylvia studied and wrote for Varsity. One of her articles, which previewed upcoming summer fashions, was illustrated with photographs of her modeling clothes and swimsuits. She also endured rejections—The New Yorker turned down her Russian-reception article—and sat in on tutorials and lectures. In Dorothea Krook’s philosophy supervision, she wrote two papers on Plato. Slowly, Plath had come to see Krook as her mentor in poetics, much as Barn-house had been her mentor in psychology. Krook thought highly of her pupil as well. “Sylvia was extraordinarily modest, self-effacing, unassuming, unspoilt,” Krook would write years later. “[She seemed] to want only [a] selfless intellectual relationship. I remember noting and appreciating it at the time; I think of it now—now that I know the full extent of the personality that refused to claim attention—with the utmost tenderness and admiration.”
In America, Mary Ellen Chase, Plath’s Smith professor, heard glowing reports—like this one—about her former student. When she visited Cambridge in mid-May, Chase had a two-hour coffee with Plath. She hinted that, once Plath had finished Cambridge, Smith might be willing to offer her a teaching position. Sylvia was honored, but, as she wrote her mother, she could not imagine teaching at Smith without a husband.
Recently, in a letter to Prouty, she had discussed marriage—and Ted. Early in June, Prouty mailed Sylvia her no-holds-barred response. “I can see you are going through the thrilling early stages of being again ‘in love,’ “ Prouty wrote. “Too bad the early stages are of limited duration.” She then launched into a stinging attack on Ted. “You anticipated that I would feel skeptical. I think ‘skeptical’ isn’t quite the word. Fearful more closely describes it. [Ted] sounds too much like Dylan Thomas for me to think he would make a satisfactory husband and father. Thomas’s attitude toward women was much like that you describe, his fascination to them and their fascination to him are similar. Thomas’s wife was marvellous about his various love affairs and came to his rescue when he broke down physically and morally. Are you ready to do this for this second Dylan Thomas?” Prouty expressed deep concern about Ted’s violent behavior. “You don’t really believe, do you, that the characteristics which you describe as ‘bashing people around,’ unkindness and I think you said cruelty, can be permanently changed in a man of 26?” She advised the obvious: “Your own experiences with the several men with whom you have felt you were ‘in love’ are warnings, don’t you think?”
Actually, she did not. Recently, she and Ted had made up their minds on the issue: they were going to get married—soon. So, when she traveled by train to London on June 13 to greet her mother, who had that day landed by ship in Southampton, Sylvia was ecstatic. That night, Sylvia and Ted took Aurelia to supper at a restaurant called Schmidt’s and told her their decision. They loved each other; why postpone the inevitable? Aurelia agreed. Now that she had met this young man about whom she had heard so much in Sylvia’s letters, she understood Sylvia’s enthusiasm. Handsome and sensual, he exuded a charm she herself found difficult to resist.
But there were problems. Sylvia feared Newnham College might argue that marriage would distract her from her academics. She also expected serious misgivings on the part of the Fulbright committee, who could terminate her grant renewal. As a result, Sylvia and Ted agreed that they should keep their marriage a secret. Next June, after Sylvia had graduated, they would stage a formal wedding at the Welles-ley Unitarian Church. Warren would serve as best man and Sylvia’s Uncle Frank would give the bride away. According to this plan, they could have the best of both worlds: they could be married now, without jeopardizing Sylvia’s position at Cambridge, and later have a public ceremony.
On the morning of June 16, Ted and Sylvia purchased two gold wedding rings. Then they bought a marriage license from the Archbishop of Canterbury, and, because Ted was required to marry in the parish in which he at present resided, Sylvia, Ted, and Aurelia went to the Church of Saint George the Martyr, near Queen’s Square. In the church, while a steady rain fell outside, Sylvia Plath married Ted Hughes at one-thirty in the afternoon. Sylvia wore a pink knitted suit, argjift from her mother. In her hands, she held a pink rose, a gift from Ted. A pink ribbon adorned her hair. The curate stood as second witness; Aurelia was the only guest. Because Ted had not told them he was marrying, Ted’s parents did not attend the ceremony. Once he had pronounced the couple man and wife, the minister leaned down and kissed Sylvia’s cheek, wet with tears.
Later that afternoon, Aurelia returned on the train to Cambridge, where she stayed for the next five days at the Garden House Hotel. After they spent their honeymoon night in the dingy Rugby Street flat, Sylvia and Ted joined her there. At Whitstead, Sylvia collected her mail and discovered that Poetry had bought Hughes’s “Bawdry Embraced"— his first American acceptance. On the 18th, Hughes left Sylvia long enough to go to Yorkshire to store some of his personal belongings at his parents’ home. By the 21st, he had come back to Cambridge, and the three of them—Sylvia, Ted, and Aurelia—boarded the train for London. The following morning, they all flew to Paris. There they amused themselves by sightseeing for several days, before Aurelia set out on her own to tour Europe. Remaining in Paris, Ted and Sylvia wandered about the city, wrote, and mailed their poems to American magazines. Finally, on July 5, they went on a grueling twenty-four-hour train trip that placed them in Madrid at nine o’clock on the evening of the 6th.
In Madrid, Sylvia and Ted rented a seventh-floor hotel room at $2.75 per night, a price that Sylvia considered expensive but worth it, since their room had a private bathroom with a tub and a shower, and a balcony on which she sunned in the morning and typed in the afternoon. The tub was a luxury for Ted, who, growing up in Yorkshire, had never before had regular access to such private facilities. He became so overjoyed as he took his shower each day that Sylvia could hear him squawking riotously in the tub. But Sylvia did not complain. These were the first baths Ted had taken since the morning of their wedding.
Af
ter three days in Madrid, during which they attended a bullfight (Sylvia was sickened and angered by the sight of the slaughtered bull), Plath and Hughes boarded a bus for Alicante, where they remained for two days before continuing on for Benidorm, a small town on the Spanish coast. On the bus ride, as olive orchards, desert hills, and patches of scrub grass flashed by the window, Sylvia and Ted struck up a conversation with a woman who rented out rooms for the summer in her home in Benidorm. In town, the woman led them through the slender streets, past row upon row of shops, to her house, huge and painted brown, which was built directly adjacent to the sea. In the house, Ted and Sylvia rented a room that contained two new maple beds, which they shoved together and turned to face French doors that opened out onto a balcony terrace overlooking the Mediterranean.
Their Benidorm honeymoon began poorly when, on their first day, Ted succumbed to sunstroke and Sylvia came down with a severe case of dysentery. Hypnotizing her, Ted planted in her mind a subliminal message: she should sleep soundly that night and wake up feeling better the next day. (They had recently been experimenting with hypnosis; Ted believed that the process helped him tap into his imagination.) The mind control worked. In the morning, Sylvia awoke with no symptoms of her illness whatsoever.
Once both had fully recovered, they took up a planned schedule of writing. Around the 18th, it was upset so that they could move. Upon realizing that their present living arrangements would not provide the privacy they wanted, Ted and Sylvia rented instead a small house that featured stone-tiled floors, white plaster walls, dark walnut furniture, a front porch roofed by a grape arbor, and, like their last room, a view of the mountains and the sea. Now, their days in Benidorm became quiet and simple. Rising at seven o’clock, they ate breakfast: Sylvia had cafe con leche, Ted brandy-milk with wild bananas and sugar. (Eventually, Sylvia realized how much sugar appealed tqTed, who sometimes ate it by itself.) Breakfast done, they walked down to the peasant market to buy their daily supply offish and vegetables. On these outings, Sylvia could observe the town firsthand. In a village where only the rich owned iceboxes, and displayed them proudly in their living rooms, she noticed that ordinary citizens lived, as she would write in a two-part article for The Christian Science Monitor, “as simply and peacefully as they have for centuries, fishing, farming, and tending their chickens, rabbits, and goats.” Plath liked the townspeople’s modest life-style, even if it meant that she too had to get by without a refrigerator and to cook on a one-ring petrol stove. By eight-thirty each morning, Plath and Hughes were back at their house, writing. At noon, they broke for lunch. In the afternoon, they swam in the sea and slept for two hours. After that, they both wrote for two additional hours, between four and six; ate a supper that Plath prepared; studied languages, between eight and ten; and (usually) took a stroll by the sea or through the village before they went to bed.
Certain images of Benidorm would stay with Plath for years. “Every evening at dusk the lights of the sardine boats dip and shine out at sea like floating stars,” Plath wrote in her Monitor article, her beautiful, subtle language reflecting the love she felt for her present surroundings. “In the morning counters are piled with silvery sardines [in the fish market], strewn with a few odd crabs and shells”—the food she bought fresh. One day, Plath simply sat down in the village and observed the town’s buildings. “The design of windows in a row of houses began to interest me. Some windows were dark, some boarded-up, some full of stained glass, some oblong in shape, some with a Moorish keyhole outline. In fact, I spent a whole afternoon discovering that the windows, balconies, doors and chimneys of the houses at the fishing harbor formed a kind of mosaic, with the oblong white walls balanced, broken and tilted in harmonious patterns.”
In this landscape, Plath found inspiration. As July melted into August, she wrote steadily. By mid-August, she had completed one story about the Madrid bullfights; was well into the writing of “That Widow Mangada,” a story about the strange woman from whom they had rented the room during their first week in Benidorm; and had come up with the idea for two more—“The Fabulous Roommate,” which would rely on Nancy Hunter as source material for the main character, and “The Hypnotizing Husband,” which would include what she was learning about hypnosis from Ted. Plath also wrote poems—“Alicante Lullaby,” “Dream with Clam-Diggers,” “Epitaph for Fire and Flower,” “Fiesta Melons,” “The Goring,” “The Beggars,” “Spider,” and “Rhyme.”
Only one episode, in Sylvia’s account of it, marred the well-ordered, productive rhythm of their days in Benidorm. Years later, she told a close friend that one afternoon while she and Ted sat on a hillside Ted was overtaken by an inexplicable rage. As Sylvia had described it, his face whitened, his body contorted, his gaze intensified. And, according to Sylvia, before she knew it, he was on top of her—not kissing her, as he usually did, but choking her. At first, she said, she fought him. Then, eventually, she merely gave in and allowed his superior strength to dominate her, his fingers to tighten more and more around her neck. Finally, at the moment when she began to lose consciousness—the moment she said she resolved herself to die—Ted released his grip and stopped his assault as abruptly as he had started it. When Sylvia told this story, her marriage to Ted was under enormous stress, and she claimed that this episode had made her question the wisdom of her decision to marry him. Whatever the case, whatever happened on the hillside in Benidorm, Sylvia did nothing.
As August dragged on, money ran out, and Sylvia and Ted had to cut their honeymoon short. On August 21, five days after their two-month wedding anniversary and four days after Ted’s twenty-sixth birthday, they loaded their suitcases onto a bus that would take them to Barcelona, one stop on their way to Paris. Sitting on the bus, Sylvia thought back over the past two months. In many ways, her honeymoon had been joyous and intellectually fulfilling—for years she would remember Ted reading Shakespeare to her while she cooked, the sight of the purple mountains at midnight, the smell of the fish she bought in the town’s open market—but it also contained the choking incident. She herself had described Ted as a “breaker of things and people.” But the scene on the hill scared her. Sylvia had known Ted barely three and a half months when she married him; seven months ago, they had not even met. Had she chosen a man who was too much for her? Should she tell someone about the assault? Was Mrs. Prouty right? Sylvia had gone too far to turn back. To family and friends, she had announced her love for Ted so emphatically that, if she cast him in a bad light now, she would look like a fool.
6
On August 23, Sylvia and Ted arrived in Paris. Checking into the Hotel des Deux Continents, they tried to rest up from their travels. The next morning, Warren, then in Austria as a member of the Experiment in International Living, arrived for a visit, his first with Sylvia since she had left America. For four days, they explored the city and caught up on what was happening in each other’s lives. On the 28th, Sylvia saw Warren off. The following morning, the Hugheses left on a rough Channel crossing to London, where they stayed to recover only one night before heading by train to Yorkshire, far to the north. For the first time, Sylvia saw the stark rolling landscape of the moors, the cold terrain that had pressed itself so vividly on the imaginations of the region’s most famous literary figures, Charlotte and Emily Bronte. In Yorkshire, Sylvia also met her in-laws, who did not know until now that Ted had married.
Over time, Sylvia learned about the Hugheses’ family history. Ted’s mother, Edith, descended from the Farrars, a West Yorkshire family that included Nicholas Farrar, who established the religious settlement Little Gidding. Ted’s father, William Henry, came from a family with roots in Spain and Ireland. When Edith and William married, they settled in the Calder Valley, a beautiful section of Yorkshire. Ten years after their son, Gerald, and four years after their daughter, Olwyn, the couple had their youngest child, Edward James Hughes, born on August 17, 1930. Then the Hugheses lived in Mytholmroyd, a village in Yorkshire where William worked as a carpenter. In 1938, the
y moved to the mining town Mexborough, after William had purchased a newsagent-tobacconist shop there. Years later, the children grown, Edith and William bought their final home—The Beacon—in Heptonstall, a hamlet in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire. Meanwhile, Gerald had emigrated to Australia. Olwyn, who earned a degree from the University of London, had ended up in Paris to work as a secretary for, at different times, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and a theatrical agency. And Ted had served as a ground wireless mechanic in the Royal Air Force for two years; graduated Cambridge; and worked as a chauffeur, gardener, and night watchman. What a brief history did not reveal, Sylvia soon learned, was the Hugheses’ involvement in the occult and witchcraft. Not unlike many inhabitants of Yorkshire, an isolated region in which the average citizen frowned on progress and clung to religion and superstition, Edith, it was rumored, studied magic, passing her knowledge on to her children. Finally, this explained Ted’s avid interest in horoscopes, hypnosis, and mind control.
In Yorkshire, Sylvia marveled at the lush countryside. She loved to stare out from Teds bedroom windows onto the curving hills broken up by stone walls into the pastures in which sheep and cows were put out to graze. Sylvia did not especially like the cold weather, which required her to bundle up in wool sweaters, pants, and knee socks, but she tried to adapt. During the day, if she was not admiring the landscape from The Beacon or tramping through the moors with Ted, Plath wrote. Usually, while Ted worked downstairs in the parlor on his children’s book, How the Donkey Became and Other Fables, which he had started in Spain, Plath worked upstairs in Ted’s bedroom on her poetry or prose. Early in September, she finished her Benidorm article (which The Christian Science Monitor would buy) and a ten-page sketch about Hardcastle Crags, an area landmark. By mid-month, Plath had produced a poem, “November Graveyard,” and a story, “Remember Stick Man.” At the end of the month, she completed the story “All the Dead Dears’ even as she started notes for another, “Dream Man.” In this flurry of writing, Plath often took time out to type Ted’s manuscripts, which he dictated to her from handwritten notes. Also, she conducted her and Ted’s literary business. After The Atlantic Monthly accepted her poem “Pursuit” on September 1, Plath submitted her poems to The New Yorker and Poetry, her stories to Mademoiselle, Ted’s poems to The Nation, Poetry, Encounter, The London Magazine, and Ted’s stories to The New Yorker. Finally, Plath was pleased to see in the Fall 1956 Smith Alumnae Quarterly her “B. and K. at the Claridge,” the article about the Russian reception that The New Yorker had turned down.
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