In May, Plath had to sit for her written examinations. “I [bike] home for lunch between my daily intellectual safaris at the Univ. Library where I am crystallizing my opinions on 2000 years of tragic drama (that started to be trauma) and 2000 years of moral philosophy from Socrates to D. H. Lawrence. . .,” Plath wrote Lynne Lawner, who had just been granted a Henry Fellowship to Cambridge. In ten days, her examinations would start, Plath continued, and the idea of writing all day for three days seemed overwhelming, although she would have to be up to the task. “I should be practising penmanship even now,” she added.
Between May 27 and 31, Plath wrote her exams. By the time she finished, she was so exhausted she could hardly work up any excitement over Two Lovers reaching the finals of the Yale competition. (Auden would select a winner during the summer.) After Plath received her results—she earned a II-I, the equivalent of a high B in America— she and Hughes packed their belongings and traveled to Heptonstall, to visit Ted’s parents before leaving for America. In Yorkshire, when they were not reading and writing, Sylvia and Ted corrected the proofs of the American Hawk in the Rain, examined the syllabus for Smith’s English 11, and socialized with Olwyn, there on a ten-day holiday from Paris.
On June 16, their first wedding anniversary, Sylvia awoke to the sight of Ted lugging a huge vase of pink roses into their bedroom. Later that afternoon, they had tea with Ted’s family, who gave them presents, the most impressive of which was a gift of fifty pounds from Ted’s wealthy Uncle Walt. Sylvia was again contemplating her novel, which she had renamed Falcon Yard, but only with half a mind. Homesick, Sylvia longed to sail to America, to an old life that she knew would be changed in many ways, now that she would be bringing a husband with her.
FIxed Stars
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They had arrived in New York only after she had endured a horrendous case of mal de mer on the trip over, Plath wrote on July 1 to Lynne Lawner, for whom she had left in Cambridge her bicycle and black gown; Ted lugged off the ship their thousand pounds of trunks and suitcases. In Wellesley, Sylvia and Ted were greeted by family and friends, all anxious to see her and meet Ted. On June 29, Aurelia hosted a catered reception for the couple in the backyard of 26 Elm-wood Road. Because their marriage had become public knowledge, a second wedding seemed unnecessary, so the reception took on the quality of a welcome-home party. In total, over seventy guests attended, among them Gordon Lameyer and his mother, Philip McCurdy, the Crocketts, the Cantors, the Freemans, Elly Friedman, Marcia and Mike Plummer, and Peter Davison. To Gordon, Sylvia appeared “cordial but understandably distant"; to others, effusive and happy. Either way, she was proud of the opportunity to show off Ted, and stood by his side through much of the afternoon. Since Ted displayed the good humor and charm of which he was capable, most of Sylvia’s friends appeared to like him.
Following the party, Sylvia and Ted visited for two weeks with Aurelia, who had just been promoted to associate professor at Boston University. Also, Sylvia arranged for Ted to see her dentist, who was, according to Ted, an improvement over British dentists. While in Wellesley, Hughes received a telegram telling him that the London Poetry Book Society had selected The Hawk in the Rain as its autumn choice, an honor that meant a sale of eight hundred books and excellent publicity within the poetry community. Finally, the time arrived for the couple to take advantage of Aurelia’s wedding present—seven weeks alone on the Cape. On July 13, Warren, who had been awarded his own Fulbright, drove Sylvia and Ted from Wellesley to Eastham in the family car, their bicycles strapped to the car’s roof.
During their writing vacation in Eastham, Teds poems appeared in numerous periodicals in England and America—The Spectator, The Nation, Poetry, Harpers, and the Times Literary Supplement. Also, The New Yorker, who had received an advance copy of The Hawk in the Rain in late July from Harper and Brothers, bought “The Thought-Fox,” even though the magazine had rejected the same poem a year before, when Plath had submitted it for him. Because of these accomplishments, Hughes worked that much harder on a second collection of poems. Meanwhile, Plath, who had neither written a poem in the last six months nor published a short story in a national magazine in the last five years, met with mixed results when she tried to write. At first, she eased into what she hoped would be a productive period by following a comfortable reading schedule, finishing novels by Wolfe, Faulkner, and Henry James? Even so, she composed only one story, “The Trouble-making Mother,” and rewrote another, “The Laundromat Affair.” (Neither was accepted for publication.) Completing these stories, she then tackled “Dialogue over a Ouija Board,” a long poem consisting of dialogue between two people arguing as they sit around a Ouija board. But when Plath read the final draft, she realized that she had produced a poem so odd—nearly six hundred lines of rhymed dialogue between its two characters, Sibyl and Leroy—that no magazine would print it. She did not even bother to mail it out.
Following “Dialogue,” Plath dabbled with her novel, which brought her more frustration, because she felt the book was bogged down. Then, on August 8, anxious and upset, Plath received the worst insult of her career. After holding Two Lovers for almost six months, the Yale Series of Younger Poets glibly informed her in a letter that her manuscript had not won that year’s competition. Devastated, Plath became angry not only at Yale but at herself, for in her mind she had already decided she would win the prize.
In early September, leaving the Cape behind, Sylvia and Ted moved to Northampton, where, for the coming academic year, they would rent a small apartment at 337 Elm Street, not far from campus. A “rear” apartment attached to a larger main house, it stood across the street from the Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church and Northampton High School, buildings Plath passed each day when she walked or drove to school. (The Hugheses had acquired a secondhand car for the year.) On campus, Plath shared an office on the library’s top floor with one other professor, a Miss Hornbeak; all three of her Freshman English classes met in Seelye Hall. Her responsibilities required several days of faculty meetings, orientations, and welcoming teas. She met her first class on September 25, an event that the Daily Hampshire Gazette previewed nine days earlier in an article about Plath entitled “Ex-Gazette Writer Returns as Smith Faculty Member.”
From the start, Plath found teaching painful. She felt inadequate for the task, overwhelmed by the material, and intimidated by the girls. Also, she did not understand why her fellow faculty members, these same instructors who had encouraged her so when she was a student, treated her coldly. By October 1, Plath was nearing a state of panic. “Last night I felt the sick, soul-annihilating flux of fear in my blood switching its current to defiant fight,” she wrote in that date’s journal entry, which she titled “Letter to a demon.” She lay in bed unable to sleep, her nerves “shaved to pain & the groaning inner voice: oh, you can’t teach, can’t do anything. Can’t write, can’t think.” Continuing, she named “this murderous self"—the part of her personality that tore down her confidence and made her feel inferior—"my demon.” Her demon, she wrote, wanted her to believe that she was “so good” that she “must be perfect. Or nothing.” Instead, she viewed herself as someone who becomes exhausted and who has trouble “facing people easily.” Her demon would destroy her, she decided, unless she fought it, which she could do only by carving out victory after victory. And she had. The first was accepting Smith’s job offer; the second, actually beginning the school year; the third, teaching her classes following a sleepless night; the fourth, confronting her demon the night before with Ted and “spitting in its eye.” Though “Letter to a demon” summed up her emotional state, it also demonstrated a larger psychological concern. Part of her needed to control every aspect of her existence, which meant being the perfect wife-teacher-writer, while another part wanted simply to live life as it came.
As she struggled from day to day with her teaching, Plath lost all drive to write; an emotional—not a physical—exhaustion set in. Because she wrote only in fits and starts, she mailed out f
ewer of her manuscripts. During the whole fall term of 1957, she made only one sale, two poems to The London Magazine. She enjoyed some successes—Accent printed her poems “Recantation” and “Tinker Jack and the Tidy Wives,” The Grecourt Review ran “All the Dead Dears,” and, in early October, Poetry’s Henry Rago wrote her that she had won the magazine’s one-hundred-dollar Bess Hokin Prize that year—but mostly Plath produced little and received few acknowledgments.
At the same time, Hughes wrote and published with a vengeance. Early in September, after minor achievements (his poems appeared in The London Magazine and The Spectator), he reached a watershed in his career when Faber and Faber issued The Hawk in the Rain in England, Harper and Brothers in America. And though he was confident about the quality of the poems, he could not possibly have anticipated the critical acclaim the volume would receive. Library Journal contended that Hughes’s poems had a “striking field of vision"; The New Statesman called Hughes a “clearly remarkable poet.” In the months following the book’s release, The Hawk in the Rain was reviewed, almost always positively, in countless periodicals, among them The New York Times, the London Times, and the Times Literary Supplement.
While Hughes basked in the glow of this critical praise, Plath, in a hell of lecturing and paper-grading, became jealous of him for the first time. To help divert her mind from the drudgery of teaching, Plath forged new friendships, most notably with Paul and Clarissa Roche. A one-time cleric and former protégé of Bloomsbury painter Duncan Grant (for whom in his twenties in London he had frequently posed nude), Paul Roche had published The Rat and the Convent Dove and Other Tales and Fables (1952) and the novel O Pale Galilean (1954). In the mid-fifties, Paul left England and Duncan, married Clarissa, and, after an aunt in Clarissa’s wealthy family had lined up a job for him there, came to Smith College to teach English and creative writing. When Plath arrived in Northampton, Roche was entering his second year of teaching. “Paul and I saw Ted and Sylvia quite often, and we were friends,” Clarissa Roche would write. “Paul and Ted had their Englishness in common. And they were both poets who had been trawled across the Atlantic by willful young wives. Sylvia and I were much the same age, we shared an affinity to Europe, particularly England, and we were both disdainful of the culture we were supposed to revere.”
Despite her friendship with the Roches, Plath became more depressed as October began. “I have been exhausted, frustrated, etc. and find it very different to ‘teach’ a story than to ‘know’ it in my own head. . .,” Plath wrote to Lynne Lawner, now studying at Cambridge. Also, Plath went on, she felt buried by paper-grading and class preparation, alienated from the faculty, and “chomping at the bit to do my own writing.” She ached “to cook pineapple upside-down cakes & write on a book of poems,” both of which would have to wait until June. Plath’s spirits were hardly improved by a trip to New York so Hughes could give a thirty-minute reading at the Poetry Center of the Ninety-second Street Y on the afternoon of the 20th. At the postreading reception, the purpose of which, like the reading itself, was to commemorate the Harper and Brothers release of The Hawk in the Rain, Plath met Ted’s editor, Elizabeth Lawrence, and members of the Poetry Center’s staflF. As she talked to these people, all there to celebrate a book that would not have been published if she had not submitted it to the Y contest, Plath had to wonder if she would ever have a book accepted.
In November, Plath became more distressed. She wrote to her mother that, because she squandered the energy she needed to write by teaching, her talent was deteriorating. On the 5th, after she had graded a set of sixty-six papers on two Hawthorne short stories, Sylvia wrote Warren a letter in which she characterized herself as hovering in a dark mood caused by her unsuccessful attempts to teach Smith’s coeds, whom she called bitches. Now, she considered herself so inadequate in her role as instructor, she told Warren, that she did not want to teach next year—she might even quit at Christmas. “If I fainted, or paralyzed myself"—or told Mrs. Hill, acting department chairman, that she could no longer teach—"I’d probably escape all right: but how to face myself . . . after that?” she wrote in her journal. That trauma would be even more damning, “although escape looked very sweet & plausible.” Other people, however, did not share Plath’s poor opinion of her teaching abilities. Generally, her students enjoyed her classes and respected her as an instructor; years later, some would even remember her as brilliant. Then, in late November, the English department voted unanimously to renew her contract. In short, Plath had allowed her groundless feelings of inferiority to dominate—and ruin— her life. Not surprisingly, she declined the departments offer. By doing so, she angered many of her sponsors, in particular Mary Ellen Chase, who through the years had been one of her strongest advocates at Smith.
Secretly, Sylvia wanted to leave Northampton for a second reason, one that had less to do with teaching than with Ted. Writing her mother from England, Sylvia had confessed to Aurelia that she feared exposing Ted to Smith girls, since she remembered all too well the way many Smithies availed themselves of male professors—young and old. Apparently, Sylvia had reason to worry about Ted. “[Hughes] would be seen walking along Paradise Pond communing very seriously with a very attractive blonde pageboyed student—there were several of them—and the gossip was that he was going to replace Fisher, who was the Chairman of the Department and who had married [numerous] Smith wives [students],” remembers Lee Camp, a student of Plath’s that year. “And we all thought that it was rather rotten. Here they were newly married, [and we thought] he should mind his p’s and q’s and at least not embarrass her publicly. He just lapped [the girls’ attention] up. Incredibly egotistical. [There was a lot of student gossip about faculty affairs, but] whenever we talked about seeing Ted Hughes walking along Paradise Pond Road with yet another blonde pageboyed wonder, it was always in very hushed tones. We really didn’t want anybody else to hear us talking about it. I think we were tremendously protective of [Plath]. Somehow we instinctively felt some land of fragility in all this.”
As much as possible, Plath tried to forget about this new, threatening development. Just before Thanksgiving, she recorded a group of her poems in Boston at the Beacon Hill studios of Stephen Fassett. For the holidays themselves, Sylvia and Ted joined Aurelia in Wellesley; the highlight of their vacation was a Wednesday-night supper at the home of Olive Higgins Prouty, who liked Ted immediately and promised to arrange for him to appear on American television. After Thanksgiving, Sylvia and Ted returned to Northampton while Aurelia checked into the hospital for still another stomach operation. As Aurelia recuperated at her sister’s, Sylvia worked hard to finish out the term. Oddly enough, now that she had reached the decision not to return to Smith, she took teaching more in stride. She would eventually revise her opinion of Smith’s students; they were not bitches at all but hard workers. Nevertheless, before the semester was over, Plath became sick. On December 15, lethargic and feverish, she canceled the rest of her classes—five days’ worth—and drove with Ted to Wellesley. The moment Sylvia walked in the front door, Aurelia, who had just returned from her sister’s, knew her daughter was seriously ill. She took her temperature (it was 102 degrees), then Aurelia telephoned their family doctor, who examined Sylvia at home and diagnosed her as suffering from viral pneumonia and physical exhaustion. Placed on antibiotics, Sylvia improved enough to join in with other family members as they trimmed the tree on Christmas Eve.
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While Sylvia suffered from pneumonia, Ted met with more professional accolades. For the spring term, Chairman Max Goldberg offered him a position teaching English and creative writing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The Sewanee Review and The New Yorker accepted poems, and Jack and Jill bought one of his children’s stories, “Billy Hook and the Three Souvenirs.” Though Plath said that she was happy over Hughes’s accomplishments, she still had to fight off jealousy. On January 14, 1958, to cheer herself up—magazines were rejecting her poetry and Two Lovers could not find a publisher�
�she typed a whole stack of Teds new poems. But a week later, Plath read the work of the six women poets in New Poets of England and America, and became angry. None had published more than she had, she complained to her journal, except maybe May Swenson and Adrienne Rich. She had written better poems than other women who had more established reputations—without comparable recognition.
In February, Plath’s publishing drought lifted somewhat. The Smith Alumnae Quarterly ran her poem “Spinster” alongside a photograph of her sitting out in a field typing. “No spinster is Sylvia Plath Hughes,” stated the picture’s caption, “who teaches English at Smith, here shown typing out of doors in Yorkshire.” Also, ARTnews made her a proposal—it would pay her fifty to seventy-five dollars to write a poem about a piece of art—which sent her to the library to pore over books of reproductions of paintings by Gauguin, Matisse, Rousseau, Klee, and De Chirico. Finally, Mademoiselle bought her poem “November Graveyard,” her first acceptance in about a year.
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