Two Lovers had fared so poorly with publishers that Plath decided to eliminate all of the poems written in her old—she thought sweet— voice and keep only those she had produced lately—poems for which she had either consciously or unconsciously used Teds as a model. Then she would rename the collection The Earthenware Head and submit it to other presses. To divert her thoughts from the failure of her poetry manuscript—its fate certainly contrasted with that of Ted’s book—she also contemplated (although she did not work on) her novel. From what she had written so far, she particularly admired “Friday Night in Falcon Yard,” a thirty-page chapter which she considered the book’s core. She hoped to have a rough draft of the novel finished soon after Christmas.
She and Ted may have decided what to do next year—spend it writing in Boston—but Sylvia still had sleepless nights, which left her so tired that she had to take naps when she came home from school in the afternoon. Sylvia also realized that she was again drinking more than she would have liked, usually with friends but sometimes at home by herself. And, of course, she still could not write. As her emotional state worsened, she depended on Hughes more and more. In one journal entry, she recorded that on that day alone she sought out Ted in the apartment some one hundred times, on each occasion to kiss or, merely, smell him. Soon she concluded that her desire to be near Ted had become as fundamental to her as eating. On his good days, Ted indulged her even when she was complaining about familiar subjects, like her job. Alfred Kazin, now teaching at Amherst College, noticed this psychological interplay between the two of them on the night he ate supper with the Hugheses in early March. “From being the proud boast and great love of the English Department she had become just another overworked and overlooked junior instructor,” Kazin later wrote; “she could not wait to get away. But on the surface she was a cheery young newlywed, studying the latest cookbook, and eager to give a good dinner to her old teacher, to whom she owed nothing whatever. At dinner we talked, we prattled, and the dark Yorkshire poet, her ferociously talented and surly husband, listened with contemptuous patience to her woe in teaching at Smith and my woe in teaching at Amherst.”
Finally, at the end of the month, Smith recessed for spring vacation and Plath broke out of her writer’s block. On her first free morning, March 20, an unstoppable urge to write overtook her. With the paintings of Paul Klee firmly in her mind, she produced not one but two longish poems, “Virgin in a Tree” and “Perseus.” The next day, she finished two more Klee-influenced poems, “Battle-Scene” and “The Departure of the Ghost” (later retitled “The Ghost’s Leavetaking”). Over the following six days, she completed four additional poems— “The Disquieting Muses,” “On the Decline of Oracles,” “Snake-charmer,” and “The Dream.” The first two were informed by De Chirico, the latter by Rousseau. In eight days, possessed by a manic energy she had not experienced since summer, she had written eight poems, all of which came to her so effortlessly she seemed to be transcribing—not writing—them. The poems were among the best she had written to date. As a result, Plath concluded that she had happened upon her deepest source of inspiration—art—and through that inspiration broken new ground in her poetry. Certainly, the poems’ voice represented one wholly different from any she had used in the past.
On the night of the 28th, after she had mailed five of the eight poems to The New Yorker (three were sure things, she believed), she celebrated by drinking martinis with Ted. The next morning, hungover though still emotionally charged by her recent writing, Plath listed in her journal the poets whom she considered rivals. In history: Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Amy Lowell, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Of her own generation or of the one before: Edith Sitwell, Marianne Moore, May Swenson, Isabella Gardner, and Adrienne Rich. At the time of this journal entry, Sylvia Plath, twenty-six years old, had not released a book, had not in fact published a single poem in almost a year. But for her these eight March poems had put to rest, at least temporarily, any doubts she felt about her ability to write.
The writing stopped the day she resumed teaching in early April. Though she planned various future projects (in one scheme she would churn out slick women’s-magazine short stories under the pseudonym Sylvan Hughes), Plath could do no more than plan.
On the 11th, she accompanied Hughes to a reading he gave at Harvard University. In March, Hughes and Harvard’s Jack Sweeney had agreed that Hughes would speak at the school on a Morris Gray readership, which paid one hundred dollars plus expenses. But neither could have foreseen the April 11 winter storm that left much of Massachusetts covered with snow and ice. The Hugheses drove down from Northampton to Boston as sleet pounded the car’s windshield. When they met Jack Sweeney in Cambridge, the three took a taxi to Radcliflfe’s Longfellow Hall. Because of the bad weather, Plath was sure they would find a vacant auditorium. In fact, the room held a smallish crowd, made up primarily of Sylvia’s family and friends.
As Hughes began his reading, which would include “The Thought-Fox,” “To Paint a Waterlily,” “Acrobats,” and “The Casualty,” among others, he looked out onto the sparse crowd, most of whom he recognized from Aurelia’s welcoming party—Mrs. Cantor, Olive Higgins Prouty, Marcia and Mike Plummer, Carol Pierson, Peter Davison, Gordon Lameyer, Philip McCurdy, and Aurelia. The audience also contained a handful of people from Harvard: Harry Levin, a Joyce scholar; Philip Booth, the poet; Al Conrad, an economist; and Conrad’s wife, Adrienne Rich. Hughes stood at the podium before them. A dark, compelling figure, he spoke in a voice, warbly and off-pitched, that seemed to defy the body from which it came. Though understated, his delivery conveyed the energy and violence of his poetry. After Hughes completed his last poem and the audience’s applause faded, Plath took her place down front beside him to greet her friends. Sylvia spoke briefly to McCurdy, Lameyer, and Davison, no conversation moving beyond salutations. Olive Prouty stopped by to gush, “Isn’t Ted wonderful.’ Then, once Plath and Hughes had chatted with Aurelia, the couple retired to Jack and Maire Sweeney’s, where they met Al Conrad and Adrienne Rich for a drink. Afterwards, they all went on to supper at Felicia’s Café with Philip Booth.
Later in the month, Plath met with more mixed career news. On the 17th, the Hugheses traveled to Springfield, Massachusetts, and Plath recorded first an interview with Lee Anderson, who had set up the session for Yale, and then a selection of thirteen of her poems. The next day, Anderson conducted a similar program with Hughes. Plath enjoyed being Hughes’s equal on this trip, but she felt a new surge of discouragement on her return to Northampton, for there she discovered a letter from The New Yorker rejecting her latest submission—those sure things. Suddenly this refusal caused her to doubt the very skill she was so confident about only a month ago. Whereas many publish in The Saturday Evening Post and The New Yorker, Plath wrote in her journal, “[M]aybe [I] can’t.” Her lack of belief in herself swayed her overall mood, which affected the way she dealt with Ted, whose confidence, bolstered by the reception of The Hawk in the Rain, had never been stronger.
Lately a noticeable friction had developed between Plath and Hughes. Initially, the scrimmages had been minor. Sylvia would complain about his manners—the way he scratched himself or picked his nose—and Ted would accuse her of nagging. By late April, their disagreements had escalated. One Sunday night, Ted claimed Sylvia had thrown away an old set of his cuff links and one of his books about witches (because she could not stomach reading the parts about torture, he said)—an accusation Sylvia denied. Finally, Ted would not stop complaining, so Sylvia stalked out of the apartment. When she returned, he was gone. Soon Sylvia had to get out for a while and walked to a neaby park, where, eventually, in the distance, she spotted Ted wandering down a street under the lamplights. Sneaking along a row of trees, Sylvia approached him. Then he stopped and glared at her, she later wrote, and if he had not been her husband she would have “run from him as a killer.”
Early in May, the friction between Plath and Hughes less
ened a bit. They visited Leonard Baskin, the sculptor (and a friend of Ted’s) who lived in Northampton. They attended a poetry reading given by Robert Lowell at the University of Massachusetts. And Plath—again—renamed and reordered her poetry manuscript. She now called it Full Fathom Five after a recent poem. Using a line from The Tempest’s “Ariel’s Song,” Plath had approached a subject that would soon dominate her poetry more and more—the death of a father. In this poem, the narrator mixes memories of her dead father with those of the ocean. The two clusters of imagery blur at the end of the poem, when the speaker declares that she will “breathe” water.
At mid-month, Plath and Hughes began to quarrel again. Their differences peaked on May 21, the date on which Hughes had agreed to participate in a public reading of Paul Roche’s translation of Oedipus. Sylvia had not confronted Ted about his walks around Paradise Pond with students, nor had he mentioned them to her, but when, mysteriously, Ted insisted that Sylvia not come to the reading, she became suspicious. Rushing to campus, Sylvia sneaked into the auditorium once the reading had begun. When he saw her slip in, Ted became so furious that his performance deteriorated into an unrecognizable mumble, causing more than one person to wonder what had gone wrong.
The next day was to be Plath’s last day of teaching, so she wanted Ted to meet her after she had finished her final class. Because Ted had said that he would, Sylvia was puzzled when she walked through the parking lot to their car to find it empty. She thought momentarily about driving home to see if Ted had gone to the apartment by mistake, but, as she would later write, she had not happened upon anything unseemly in the apartment yet—she had, though, prepared herself for it—and did not want to today. Instead, she checked in the library reading area—no Ted. Then, emerging into the cool May air, she felt a compulsion to rush to Paradise Pond and walked quickly across campus. She arrived at the road to which Smith girls took their dates to make out on weekends, and there she saw, coming up the road, her husband strolling with a young Smith student dressed in khaki Bermuda shorts. How she remembered Hamish’s description of Ted Hughes— “the biggest seducer in Cambridge.” And now she had caught him red-handed.
When she approached the couple, the student ran off, leaving Ted face to face with Sylvia. Who was she and what was he doing with her? Sylvia demanded. Her name was Shila, he thought—he wasn’t sure— and they had been taking a walk, only taking a walk. Sure that Ted was lying, Sylvia tried to force the issue—to no avail. He stood by his story, regardless of her questioning. Finally, Sylvia bolted off, heading for the apartment alone. That night, writing in her journal, she could not control her rage. To whom would Ted dedicate his second book? His navel? His penis? In her mind he had become a “smiler"—nothing more. Yet she would not “jump out of a window or drive Warren’s car into a tree, or fill the garage at home with carbon monoxide and save expense, or slit my wrists and lie in a bath,” Sylvia wrote. Even so, Ted’s behavior had caused her to think about suicide.
Several nights later, Ted and Sylvia, still mad, got into a physical fight. Sylvia ended up with a sprained thumb, Ted raw fingernail marks on his face. “I got hit,” Sylvia remembered, “and saw stars—for the first time—blinding red and white stars exploding in the black void of snarls and bitings.” The aftershock of the fight lasted for days. As a result of the confrontation, Sylvia understood something disturbing. Under certain circumstances, she could become so violent that she could kill another person, or herself.
3
In early June, once she had concluded her official duties at Smith, Sylvia patched things up with Ted enough to make a five-day trip to New York. In the city, they had an expensive supper with Ted’s editors at the Biltmore; attended a Fifth Avenue party at which Plath met Lionel and Diana Trilling and Ralph Ellison; had a drink— Drambuie—at the home of Oscar Williams, best friend of Dylan Thomas and husband of Gene Derwood; dropped in on Babette Deutsch, who had written glowingly of Hughes’s work; ate lunch with Dave Keightley, an editor at the World Publishing Company who wanted to read Plath’s poetry manuscript (eventually he too rejected it); and visited Brooklyn to see Marianne Moore, who served them strawberries and sesame-seed biscuits while she chatted about how much she admired Ted’s poetry. For Plath, none of these meetings compared with one that occurred completely by accident. One night, as she and Ted headed for the subway, Sylvia spotted Dick Wertz, to whom she was about to speak until she noticed the person he was walking with—Richard Sassoon. For an instant, Sylvia did not know what to do. Since neither Wertz nor Sassoon had seen her, the move remained hers to make. Clutching Ted’s hand, she pressed on hurriedly towards the subway, leaving Sassoon—and her old life-—behind.
A few days after they returned to Northampton, the Hugheses went to Wellesley for a long weekend. In Boston, after Plath recorded poems for Jack Sweeney at Harvard and she and Ted ate with Olive Higgins Prouty, they searched until they found an affordable apartment to rent. In an elevator building that faced the Charles River, they located a sixth-floor, two-room apartment which was available for one year at $115 per month.
On June 16, the Hugheses celebrated their second wedding anniversary, in Wellesley, with a supper prepared by Aurelia. It was at this quittime that Aurelia voiced her dissatisfaction over Sylvia and Ted’s decision to quit their jobs to write full-time. Since Otto’s death, Aurelia had scrimped and saved to make ends meet, yet she somehow saw to it that both of her children had the best educations America and England could offer. And she had supported her family by working for years in a job that, truth be told, she considered far beneath her talents. Now Sylvia and Ted, who had acquired enviable and lucrative jobs (their combined income for the next year would have been over six thousand dollars, a handsome sum at the time), had simply walked away from positions that other young writers would have given anything to have. Sylvia interpreted Aurelia’s comments as both an attack and an attempt to control her and Ted’s lives. Though harsh words were never exchanged, each knew the others view of the matter.
In June, Plath witnessed demonstrable evidence that she had made the right decision. First, The London Magazine published “Spinster” and “Black Rook in Rainy Weather"—encouragement enough, but nothing compared with what came on the 25th. While she sat at her typewriter that morning, she glanced up from her work to see the mailman, rushed out to the box as she always did, and extracted some envelopes. When she did, she noticed a thin envelope with The New Yorkers address printed in the top lefthand corner. Immediately she ripped open the envelope and scanned the letter. Certain phrases caught her eyes—“Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor,” “marvelous poem,” “happy to say were taking it,” “Howard Moss.” Thrilled, she dashed upstairs, told Ted, and began leaping up and down. Only after she calmed down and read the letter again did she realize Moss had accepted a second poem, “Nocturne” (later renamed “Night Walk” by the magazine). For these two poems, because no magazine pays better than The New Yorker, Plath earned a stunning $338. As she proudly pointed out to her mother, the amount was sufficient to cover three months’ rent on their Boston apartment. She might have had to endure ten years of rejections, Plath wrote to Prouty, but she had finally done it. She had cracked the magazine in whose pages she most wanted her work to appear.
Despite this acceptance, Plath sensed another depression coming on, in large part because she was still not able to write. At the end of June, she observed that her life seemed “magically run by two electric currents"—"joyous positive and despairing negative.” She also understood that whichever one seemed in control at any given time “dominated [her] life.” As July unfolded, she was controlled less by the positive, more by the negative. She tried to work—she ground out one poem, “Lorelei,” after she and Ted had done the Ouija board one night and Pan, who predicted she would publish a book of poems with Alfred A. Knopf, suggested that she write about the subject—but did not achieve the kind of results she wanted.
She cried easily, frequently with no provocation. Minor d
aily tasks sometimes overwhelmed her. Once, unable to fix a veal-chop supper, she turned to Ted and burst into tears. Since this behavior made her too dependent on Ted, she resolved to change—and not to rely on him as much. Around the 25th, she broke out of her slump somewhat and wrote at least four poems, two of them about Benidorm.
On August 9, The New Yorker published “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor.” When she first saw the poem in print at the home of a Northampton friend who had telephoned as soon as her issue arrived in the mail, Plath simply marveled at it. Soon afterwards, the Sewanee Review’s Monroe Spears accepted “The Ghoshs Leavetaking.” Then, on the 14th, The Christian Science Monitor ran Plath’s article “Beach Plum Season on Cape Cod,” which it had accepted earlier that month. Illustrated by two of her pen-and-ink drawings, the article concluded: “And perhaps even those who have simply spent long afternoons under blazing Indian summer skies, picking beach plums from the waist-high bushes and hearing them ring with a pleasant metallic sound in the bottom of tin pails, can once more savor the fragrant grasses and the richness of the early harvest air in the clear red sweetness of homemade beach plum jelly—preserved not only as breakfast food but as food for memories of a Cape Cod summer also.”
Sylvia did not visit the Cape in the summer of 1958. She remained in Northampton until early September when she and Ted packed their car, said good-bye to their friends, and moved into their tiny apartment on Beacon Hill in Boston.
Rough Magic Page 27