Rough Magic

by Paul Alexander

  As September progressed, life at The Beacon became increasingly difficult for Sylvia. On the 4th, she observed on her calendar that she and Ted had not made good love since Paris, that she felt isolated and lonely, and that she resented Ted’s reluctance to understand her un-happiness. She described the 10th as an oddly depressing day, the 18th as a nightmare because of horrible feelings of jealousy and forces of witchcraft and black magic within the Hugheses’ household. But the 21st was the worst of all: on that day, Ted’s mother blundered into Ted’s bedroom while Ted and Sylvia were making love. After this, Sylvia became more than eager to leave The Beacon. On the 26th, she happily accompanied Ted on a trip into London so he could audition at the BBC. That day, Ted read so well that the BBC invited him to record a program on Yeats. On returning to Yorkshire, Sylvia resolved herself to stick it out there until the Michaelmas term began. She was distracted, in part, by the idea of writing a novel. The book would center on the experiences of a young American coed who comes to Cambridge to study; its structure would be episodic, almost like a set of interconnected short stories. She would work on the novel in earnest this fall, she decided, when she was not reading and studying.

  Plath’s letters indicate that, during September, she did not leave England. But one reliable eyewitness account places her on the Queen Elizabeth II, sailing from America to England. Kenneth Pitchford, a first-year Fulbright student at Oxford and himself an aspiring poet, struck up a brief friendship with Plath on the ride over. “She was accompanied on the boat by a very tall broad-shouldered American football player sort. Rugged and square-cut and dark,” Pitchford remembers. “I didn’t know who it was; it was certainly not Hughes. He was with her all the time, as if he had some special function.” Pitchford did not learn the reason Plath was on board the ship until years later. “Of course, she and Hughes spent the summer in Spain after they were married at which time Plath learned that she was pregnant. And then she came back to America for an abortion because she could not be known as married yet, for fear that she would lose her Fulbright. So she came back, got the abortion, and was permitted to ride over on the boat with the first-year students. This is how I met her.”

  On the ship ride, Sylvia was not forthcoming about why she was there. Nor did she ever openly discuss this pregnancy, if she was pregnant, with friends. But years later, when she listed in her journal emotions and situations she had known—among them love, hate, and madness—one she included was abortion.

  Plath and Pitchford’s short acquaintance ended in mystery as well. Plath continued with the Fulbright students into London. “After a welcoming lecture one day, she and I were walking across Regent’s Park,” Pitchford recalls, “when I said to her, Tve heard there’s a new movie playing—War and Peace. Would you like to go?’ My question had sort of extracted her from this guy who still escorted her and she looked at me and said, ‘Listen, some day I’ll marry a poet like you and kill myself.’ “

  From wherever she came, Plath arrived in Cambridge on October 1— alone. Ted remained at home with his parents. At Whitstead, Sylvia found an acceptance letter from Poetry’s Hemy Rago, who bought all six poems she had submitted to him. Thrilled, Plath mailed off more poems to The Atlantic Monthly, on whose staff Peter Davison now worked, having left Harvard University Press. Over the next few days, Sylvia received from Ted long passionate love letters in which he characterized himself as restless and eager to be with her. He also offered advice about Plath’s writing, telling her to create poems that would startle the reader. In October, a month during which she saw little of her husband, Plath finished two short stories, “The Invisible Man” and “The Wishing Box,” and several poems, among them “Spinster” and “On the Plethora of Dryads.” Towards the end of the month, she met with more literary success. Granta published her story “The Day Mr. Prescott Died,” The Nation accepted Ted’s poem “Wind,” and The Christian Science Monitor bought her “Sketchbook of a Spanish Summer.” All of this did not blunt the pain of two more New Yorker rejections—one for Ted and one for her. Defiantly, she mailed the magazine three new stories.

  Despite her activities at Cambridge, Sylvia missed Ted too. During the summer, they had “shared” themselves night and day. Now separated, they became so lonesome that they met for a quick weekend in London on the 12th. Back in Cambridge on Monday, Sylvia fell into a depression that lessened only on the 23rd, when Ted came to Cambridge. Because they were so unhappy living apart, they started to have second thoughts about the whole idea of a secret marriage. Sylvia had learned that three women Fulbright students were married, and Dorothea Krook, whom Plath had told about her marriage, had vowed to defend her at Newnham. Soon after Ted recorded his program on Yeats for the BBC—a session, for which he was paid seventy-five dollars, that went so well that the BBC invited him back for a second session at the same price—Sylvia met with Fulbright and Newnham officials, who, when she told them she was married, only congratulated her.

  For her birthday, Ted gave Sylvia a pack of tarot cards, which she planned to put to good use: she now believed that her horoscope indicated she should become a practicing astrologist. Lately, she and Ted had frequently read a Ouija board they had constructed from cutout letters, a coffee table, and a wineglass. Some nights, as they worked the board, they met an assortment of spirits, with names like Keva, Pan, and Jumbo. She and Ted, Sylvia wrote to her mother, one day hoped to equal Mr. and Mrs. W. B. Yeats. Ted would be the astrologer, she the tarot expert. And later, when the money came rolling in from their writings, she would buy a crystal ball with which to tell their future.

  In the days following her birthday, Sylvia and Ted searched for a place to live. They settled on 55 Eltisley Avenue, where, for four pounds per week plus utilities, they rented all of the first floor of a row house. The flat had only one drawback: they had to share a bathroom with the upstairs couple, who just happened to be Siegfried Sassoon’s only son—Richard’s distant cousin—and his wife. Ted would move into the house immediately, but Sylvia would wait until December 7, the end of Michaelmas term.

  With their private lives in order, Plath and Hughes focused on their careers. On November 5 and 6, the Monitor ran Plath’s article on Benidorm, each installment illustrated by her pen-and-ink drawings. Afterwards, Granta published Plath’s poem “Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats,” a piece Ted had assigned her to write, and Lyric ran two of her poems, Chequer four. As one of his poems was printed— “Wind” in The Nation—Hughes had two more accepted, “The Drowned Woman” by Poetry and “The Hawk in the Storm” by The Atlantic Monthly. With several publications to Hughes’s credit, Plath now submitted large batches of his poems to magazines like Harpers, the Kenyon Review, Nimbus, The Paris Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. In mid-November, the Atlantic Monthly Press, the house to which Plath had submitted Hughes’s children’s book, How the Donkey Became, rejected it. “There is too much viciousness—the animals are portrayed as beasts rather than animals to respect and be comfortably afraid of,” wrote Emilie McLeod, editor of children’s books. “Also the rather cavalier treatment of God might well strike horror into the soul of librarians.’ However, if Hughes wanted to rework the fables, McLeod assured him, she would reconsider. Plath too received her share of rejection letters in November—from The Nation, Mademoiselle, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker, which she now considered disdainful.

  Undeterred, Plath continued to plot out their professional lives. She typed her poetry manuscript, Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea, which she planned to submit to the Yale series, and Hughes’s The Hawk in the Rain, which she intended to enter in a first-book contest sponsored by the Poetry Center of the Ninety-second Street Y in New York City. Its winner, to be chosen by Marianne Moore, Stephen Spender, and W. H. Auden, would be published by Harper and Brothers. Plath felt sure that Hughes would win, since the volume represented, as she wrote her mother, the “most rich, powerful” poetry since Yeats and Dylan Thomas.

  While Plath mailed out t
heir poetry, which translated into little cash when it was accepted, she and Hughes worried about money. Their most innovative scheme to produce income centered on the Ouija board. They had recently contacted a new spirit, G.A., who assured them of his ability to predict the weekly British football pool, which had pots of up to seventy-five thousand pounds. Beginning in November, Ted and Sylvia bet in the pools, sure that they would win with G.A.’s help. To establish a more reliable cash flow—G.A.’s first predictions were wrong—Ted landed a teaching job in a local school for wayward boys. The modest salary would at least pay for the rent on their flat. Nevertheless, because cash was tight, Sylvia became angry when Olwyn dropped by for a weekend, since she could see firsthand how Olwyn foolishly wasted money on expensive clothes and cigarettes, this while she owed Ted fifty pounds. Sylvia’s displeasure with Olwyn underscored a larger concern in her own life: though she had now been married for almost six months, she still felt a drive to establish herself as Ted’s wife.

  To do this, Sylvia moved into 55 Eltisley Avenue promptly in December. Soon afterwards, when she wrote R. G. Davis, Smith’s present English-department chairman, to inquire about a teaching position for the next year, she used that letter as an opportunity to announce her marriage. She even signed her name “Sylvia Plath Hughes,” something she had just now started to do. Finally, she revealed her marriage to family and friends, even ex-boyfriends. Besides Peter Davison, with whom she now corresponded in his post as editor at the Atlantic Monthly Press, she told Sassoon, to whom she referred to her wedding as “the crime.” The contents and tone of Sassoon’s response testified to his shock. Sassoon wrote:

  There is really no reason for me not to believe that you are happier now than you ever were or could have been with me, or indeed that you have now found the man that you really desire in spite of all difficulties to make a home with and that joy is yours. Except your letter to me was not the letter of a happy woman. At least, not to me, and as you . . . are a good letter writer I may accept my reactions as feasible. And so it is that night after night I am with, amongst all that there is between us to accept and to accept the less of, and as you say to have the guts not to damn (which is hard enough in itself), there is in the midst the final. . . fact of a bitter and unhappy letter. Doubtlessly I deserve it. But you are wise and woman enough to know that I—above all I—am not one who needs to be blamed for the attitude. Indeed, however you might have put it, even if you had not chosen to speak aptly of “the crime,” I shall have my years to live in the structure of loss, in regret and even in shame. For the angel is dead, the red god dead and I am like a carcass from which the interior has been taken.

  7

  After Christmas, her first one with Ted, Plath saw several pieces of her work published. In January 1957, Poetry printed six poems, The Atlantic Monthly “Pursuit,” Granta her story “The Wishing Box.” Plath also began, at Ted’s suggestion, to memorize one poem by an established poet each day. This, Ted believed, would help improve her writing. During January, besides a poem, she finished two love stories, which she planned to try on the New York “slicks.” In addition to her writing, Plath typed both Hughes’s How the Donkey Became, which he had revised for the Atlantic Monthly Press, and her Two Lovers, which she was going to submit to the Yale series. Then, in late January, as she started her next term, Plath wrote to Radcliffe, Tufts, and Bran-deis to ask about jobs. From those colleges, she received only form letters telling her that all positions were filled. Because of this, she felt relief when R. G. Davis wrote from Smith, in response to her recent letter, and encouraged her to “definitely . . . make formal application for an appointment here.” Following a January 28 coffee date with Mary Ellen Chase, who happened to be in Cambridge, Plath became even more confident that Smith would offer her a position for the coming year. Though Plath never knew it, after the coffee date, Chase wrote Davis a letter in which she guaranteed him that “Sylvia would be a fine addition to our staff.” However, Chase could not be so approving about Hughes, whom she still had not met. According to his former instructors, Hughes was “solitary” and unlikely to become “a scholar.” Indeed, Chase had already formed an overall negative opinion of him. While Plath waited for Smith’s decision on her application, she finished the poems “Sow” and “The Lady and the Earthenware Head” and brainstormed on her novel, which she had not yet started but described in her journal as the journey of a young woman who endures “destruction, hatred and despair” on her search for the “redemptive power of love.”

  On February 23, just two days before the anniversary of what Sylvia called “that fatal party where I met Ted,” the Hugheses’ lives were permanently changed. For on that date, at ten-thirty in the morning, a telegram arrived for Ted:

  OUR CONGRATULATIONS THAT HAWK IN THE RAIN

  JUDGED WINNING VOLUME POETRY CENTER FIRST

  PUBLICATION AWARD. LETTER WILL FOLLOW.

  Signed by John Bleibtreu, of the Ninety-second Street Y, the telegram stunned Plath and Hughes, who started jumping about their tiny flat and shouting. Impulsively, they telephoned Aurelia in Boston, forgetting that it was well before 6:00 a.m. The next day, Plath wrote her mother a nostalgic letter in which she recalled reading Ted’s poems in The St. Botolph’s Review for the first time. Even then she envisioned that she could do much for and with him. And now this—the acceptance of his collection, which she believed would be a “best-seller.” “I am more happy than if it was my book published!” Sylvia said. “I am so happy his book is accepted first.”

  Days later, when Hughes received Bleibtreu’s letter, it contained one unpleasantness. “The only difficulty facing us at the moment is a request from Miss Moore,” Bleibtreu wrote. “In her letter announcing The Hawk in the Rain as her first choice, she praised your work, saying the ‘talent is unmistakable’; ‘The work has focus, is aglow with feeling, with conscience; sensibility is awake, embodied in appropriate diction. Besides The Hawk there are three striking pieces: The Thought Fox, Griefs for Dead Soldiers, The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar.’ “ But, Bleibtreu pointed out, Moore had also included the following sentence: “however, I would ask, if not insist, that The Little Boys and the Seasons, The Drowned Woman, and Bawdry Embraced be omitted.” Hughes responded to Bleibtreu with a detailed letter in which he agreed to the deletion of “The Little Boys and the Seasons,” which he had written early in his career, but opposed the elimination of “Bawdry Embraced” and “The Drowned Woman” since they represented an important (yes, sexual) part of his poetic vision. This said—and he stated it in a way that sounded final—he moved on to other matters. He wanted the new poems “The Horses” and “The Ancient Heroes and the Bomber Pilot” included, four other poems replaced with updated drafts, and the dedication page of the book to read “To Sylvia.”

  Soon after Bleibtreu’s letter came, R. G. Davis offered Plath a job at Smith. To teach three sections of Freshman English each term, she would earn an annual salary of forty-two hundred dollars. Plath accepted the position immediately.

  At the same time as Plath’s term ended, Hughes began to question the wisdom of sending his letter to Bleibtreu. It might be foolish to buck Moore, regardless of whether his own position was right. So Hughes wrote Bleibtreu a second letter. His new—but final—verdict was this: besides “The Little Boys and the Seasons,” Hughes now wanted to cut “Bawdry Embraced” and “The Drowned Woman,” the two other poems that bothered Moore. These poems certainly reflected an important part of his poetic voice, Hughes stated, but each book did not have to stand as a complete articulation of the mind that had imagined it. On April 8, Elizabeth Lawrence, Hughes’s editor at Harper and Brothers, wrote Hughes to implore him to keep all three poems that Moore disliked, should he wish to stand by his original manuscript. Even so, Hughes allowed the poems to be omitted. In short, he changed his mind because he did not want to jeopardize the successful publication of his book. For, though he and Plath had calculated that the book could not be expected to earn them much money—at
his royalty rate of 15 percent of 43 percent of the retail price, he would earn only about ten cents per book—Hughes understood that the American publication of The Hawk in the Rain would open countless doors for him. In April, the Hugheses received more rejection slips—from The Paris Review, the Sewanee Review, and The Saturday Review. The harshest, however, came from the Atlantic Monthly Press’s editors, who decided Hughes’s revised children’s book was “too sophisticated” for children but not sophisticated enough for adults. Before long, the Hugheses’ disappointment was lessened: The London Magazine bought Plath’s “Spinster” and “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” and Hughes’s “Famous Poet"—their first professional British acceptances. Throughout much of April, when she did not attend her final term’s lectures and he was free from teaching, Plath and Hughes wrote. Plath finished the story “All the Dead Dears” plus—finally—a substantial chunk of her novel. As of April, she had produced approximately eighty single-spaced pages of a planned three-hundred-page rough draft. Also, she decided that Hill of Leopards, the novel’s working title, would be controversial, since it would expose numerous people and places in Cambridge. At the end of the month, with only about five weeks to go before examinations, Plath stopped writing in order to devote her full energies to reading as much as she could of the Greeks, Corneille, Racine, Ibsen, Strindberg, Webster, Marlowe, Tourneur, Yeats, Eliot. To work more on the novel, she would just have to wait until summer: for their wedding present, Aurelia had rented them a cottage on the Cape for seven weeks. Ted too anticipated a summer of creative work. On May 10, he received a vote of support when Faber and Faber, to whom The Hawk in the Rain had been submitted, accepted the book for publication in England. “Mr. [T. S.] Eliot”—one of the company’s directors—“has asked me to tell you how much he personally enjoyed the poems,” the letter of acceptance read, “and to pass on to you his congratulations on them.”