Towards the end of her stay at Yaddo, as she had for some time, Plath suffered from insomnia. For the last two months, when she did sleep, she had also been haunted by dreams. Without a doubt, one of her strangest dreams at Yaddo occurred in early October. Marilyn Monroe came to her one night as a “land of fairy godmother,” Plath wrote in her journal on the 4th. “I spoke, almost in tears, of how much she and Arthur Miller meant to us. . . .” Then, after Marilyn gave her a manicure, Sylvia asked Marilyn, because Sylvia “had not washed [her] hair,” about hairdressers, saying, “they always imposed a horrid cut on me.” Finally, in the dream, Marilyn invited Sylvia to visit her during the Christmas holidays, promising a “new, flowering life.”
With thoughts of a “new, flowering life,” and with a resolve to learn, under Ted’s guidance, more about hypnosis, astrology, and tarot cards, Plath left Yaddo with Hughes for a Thanksgiving in Wellesley. Following the holidays, Ted and Sylvia remained until their scheduled departure for England. During those weeks, Sylvia packed downstairs while Ted wrote upstairs in her bedroom. Sylvia also had a medical examination which confirmed what she had learned at Yaddo: she was pregnant, now five months along. On December 12, the date on which her poem “A Winter’s Tale’ appeared in The New Yorker, Plath and Hughes boarded a Boston train to New York, where they would sail for England on the S.S. United States. “On the day they left, Sylvia was wearing her hair in a long braid down her back with a little red wool cap on her head, and looked like a high school student,” Aurelia Plath would write. “As the train pulled out, Ted called, ‘We’ll be back in two years!’ ” It was the last time Sylvia Plath ever saw Wellesley.
England
1
In London, the Hugheses stayed briefly with Daniel and Helga Huws, Ted’s Cambridge friend and his wife. By December 17, they were in Yorkshire to visit Ted’s parents and Olwyn, on holiday from Paris. With her hair recently cut and curled, Olwyn looked chic to Plath, who liked her a great deal. Unfortunately, Sylvia could not work up the same enthusiasm for Ted’s mother, Edith. On previous trips, Sylvia had not criticized Ted’s family, in deference to Ted; only days into this outing, though, Sylvia told her mother in a letter that, because she could not eat Edith’s awful food, which Edith prepared in a kitchen that always seemed to be somewhat dirty, she worried about her unborn baby’s health. Sylvia became further disaffected when the Hugheses observed Christmas but did not, to her amazement, put up a Christmas tree. All in all, her reintroduction to England did not go as smoothly as she would have hoped.
At The Beacon, Plath read, thought about new poems, and fumed over the latest rejection letter for her poetry collection, this one from Farrar, Straus. Angered by that refusal, Plath retyped the manuscript, still called The Colossus and Other Poems, and prepared to submit it to Heinemann. While she worked, she also tried to get along with the Hugheses. Specifically, Sylvia attempted to establish a cordial relationship with Olwyn, who, overprotective of Ted, seemed threatened by the presence of a wife in his life. Olwyn had felt similarly towards Gerald’s wife, right after Gerald had married. On this issue, Sylvia would hear rumors in the future; apparently, Gerald had moved to Australia to escape Olwyn, who, as the story went, was so jealous that she repeatedly interfered with his marriage. For whatever it was worth, Olwyn seemed to be warming up to Sylvia.
On Sunday, January 3,1960, the Hugheses took the train to London to start looking for an apartment. Staying in an extra room in the Huwses’ Rugby Street flat, they searched for a week with no luck. When she learned of their problem, Dido Merwin, the wife of W. S. Merwin, whom Plath and Hughes had met in Boston, lined up some small but nice flats for them to consider. “Nice” implied hot water, central heat, and a refrigerator—all extras in some apartments. Finally, the Hugheses located a functional if tiny flat just off Primrose Hill, near Regent’s Park and the Charing Cross tube station. A third-floor (fourth in America) unfurnished walk-up in a five-story building, the flat, which overlooked Chalcot Square and a miniature park named Chalcot Square Gardens, was within a short walk of shops, a laundromat, and the doctor to whom Dido had introduced Sylvia. Consisting of a cramped living room, a modest bedroom, a bath, and a kitchen (which contained a sink—nothing else), the place was too small, but because the rent was affordable—eighteen dollars per week plus gas and electricity—the Hugheses happily signed the three-year lease, which stipulated that they could move in after February 1. They then returned to Heptonstall to begin packing.
While she was in London, Dido’s doctor, John Horder, and Horder’s obstetrician partner, Christopher Hindley, had examined Sylvia, who was, both doctors agreed, in excellent health. Since patients in England spoke for hospital beds eight months in advance, and since most British women delivered their babies at home under the supervision of a midwife, Sylvia resolved herself to giving birth at Chalcot Square—an outdated notion to Americans. In Yorkshire, fortified by the iron tablets and nonbarbiturate sleeping pills her doctors had prescribed, Sylvia enjoyed her first bath in two weeks. (The Huwses’ flat did not have a private bathroom.) Over the coming days, when they were not packing, Ted and Sylvia took walks along the moors, read, and anticipated Faber and Faber’s publication of two new books by Hughes. His second collection of poems, Lupercal, named after the Roman fertility festival, was scheduled for release in March, his children’s book, Meet My Folks!, the following winter.
Ted and Sylvia moved to London on February 1. Initially, they spent most of their time unpacking and overseeing the delivery and installation of a new stove, refrigerator, and bed. They borrowed furniture from the Merwins, who lived only a five-minute walk away and with whom they had become friends. To be accurate, Ted had become friends with Bill, principally because, as Ted wrote Olwyn, they praised each other’s poems and Merwin had Leo rising in his astrological chart—an appealing aspect to Ted. On the other hand, Sylvia and Dido struggled to maintain a superficial acquaintanceship. To Plath, who wrote about her to Lynne Lawner, Dido was “older, very energetic, very British, very thrice-married.” Other people were wary of Dido as well. “She had this feeling of being superior to everyone,” remembers Anne Stevenson, the poet and biographer. “She was European. She quoted French and Latin at the drop of a hat—in fact, she sort of weaved it into her conversations—in an effort to make you feel like a fool who doesn’t know anything, and make herself look superior. Dido considered Sylvia ‘the ugly American.’ Also, she was slightly jealous of Plath’s being a poet. While their hostility was not open, it was unspoken, under the surface.”
Regardless of Dido and Sylvia’s misgivings, the Merwins helped the Hugheses enormously. Bill, who often worked for the BBC, introduced Ted to Douglas Cleverdon, the legendary “Third Programme” producer best known for his radio presentation of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood, which starred Richard Burton. More practically, Bill offered Ted the use of his study when the Merwins left in April to spend the summer at their country home in France.
In early February, Plath anticipated the birth of her child, now so close that she was seeing her midwife, Sister Hannaway. While she tried to ignore the clanging and hammering of builders working on the house, Sylvia also helped Ted, in her own limited way, as he painted walls and floors and hung pictures. Mostly, she savored the arrival of a letter from James Michie. “I like your poems and Heinemann would like to publish them,” Michie wrote on February 5, referring to The Colossus. “Can you ring me here and drop in to see me any time, any day this month?” Joyous, Plath set up an appointment with Michie and signed a contract for the book on February 10. She accepted the offer of the first British house to read her manuscript because Heinemann, the publisher for Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, and D. H. Lawrence, released a small number of poetry collections and would therefore—she hoped—print the book well. As part of their deal, Heinemann would submit The Colossus—which she had dedicated to Ted and which contained, among its forty-eight poems, all of her Yaddo poems, about one-third of the text—to various houses
in the United States. She had suffered nothing but “cold shoulders” from American publishers, Plath wrote Lawner. The worst blow had come when she lost the Yale to “old cold gold” George Starbuck, she continued. So she would just remain an “exile” in England, never to return to the “land of milk & honey & spindryers.” Still, she would have to deal with American magazines. On February 22, she mailed out “Poem for a Birthday,” which Poetry had recently turned down because it displayed “too imposing a debt to Roethke.” Eventually, the Sewanee Review rejected it as well, finding it too long.
In late February, Hughes, who admired the six author’s copies of Lupercal he just received, read at the Oxford Poetry Society. Sylvia made this trip with him, because she had never been to Oxford. In the days after the reading, the Hugheses met social obligations. Visiting in London, Luke Myers often stopped by Chalcot Square to see Ted and remained for hours when he did. On February 29, the Hugheses went to a buffet with David and Barbara Ross; since Luke and Daniel and Helga Huws were also there, the occasion amounted to a St. Botolph’s Review reunion. The next day, the Hugheses had lunch at a Soho Greek restaurant with Hughes’s editors, who discussed with him possible choices for an illustrator for Meet My Folks! The day after that, the Hugheses were guests at a cocktail party given by John Lehmann, the editor of The London Magazine, who had accepted Plath’s poems “The Sleepers” and “Full Fathom Five.” At the party, Sylvia met the writers Elizabeth Jennings, Roy Fuller, and Christine Brooke-Rose. Then, during the first weekend in March, Olwyn arrived in London from Paris. Although she slept at a friend’s, she, like Luke, spent long stretches of time at Chalcot Square. By March 10, Plath, eight months pregnant, had become fed up with parties and, even more so, with houseguests. After an exhausting crossing to England, a horrid January, and an even more tiring February, Sylvia simply did not have the patience to deal with Ted’s friends and family holed up in her flat for hours. Writing to her mother, Sylvia confessed to being worn out from sitting hours on end in stuffy, smoky rooms, unable to take even a nap. These days, with the baby’s birth so close, Sylvia wanted only to rest and sleep.
On the 18th of March, Faber and Faber released Hughes’s Lupercal, a collection of forty-one poems which he dedicated to Sylvia. The reviews echoed those of The Hawk in the Rain. Of the many notices that ran in such periodicals as the Oxford Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and The Spectator, Donald Hall’s in The New Statesman was representative. “Ted Hughes’s Lupercal is better than The Hawk in the Rain, which was a superb first book. With energy and confidence, Hughes has extended the subject matter which his habitual turbulence of language can control. He is now the master of his metaphors and not their servant. His drive, his power and his gusto particularly delight me here.” On March 24, partly as a result of the book’s critical reception, Hughes won the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award, which brought with it a five-hundred-pound cash prize earmarked to be spent on travel abroad. With these achievements to his credit, Hughes merited even more public attention. A personality profile of Hughes—one of the first—appeared in The Observer in London not long after Lu-percaVs publication. Written by Observer poetry editor A. Alvarez, who had interviewed Hughes at Chalcot Square, the piece praised Hughes at length.
The new winner of the 500 pound Somerset Maugham award, Ted Hughes, is a tall, craggy Yorkshire poet of thirty, who is not afraid of Strong Feelings.
He was at Cambridge with last year’s Maugham prize winner, Thorn Gunn, and between them, Gunn and Hughes, although they do not know each other well, are two of the most exciting British poets.
They both represent a more romantic revolt against the dry, cerebral verse of the Movement of the fifties (Conquest, Larkin, Amis, Wain, etc.), though Gunn still partly belongs to the Movement; but their romanticism is tougher and stronger than the stuff of Dylan Thomas and the forties people.
Hughes is more earthy and emotional; more close to the land and farm. He comes from Bronte country and still breathes the Yorkshire moors. In London where he lives in Chalcot Square, near Camden Town, he has the look of a countryman, in gangling contrast to his tall, trim American wife, Sylvia Plath, who is a New Yorker poet in her own right.
Because of good publicity and strong reviews, Lupercal sold well. As of June, it had already entered a second printing. Mail for Hughes poured into Chalcot Square—letters from friends, requests for poems from editors, and invitations to give readings. When the correspondence piled up, Plath had to answer it, because, as she wrote her mother, if she didn’t Ted never would.
At the end of March, Sylvia could do little besides write letters, for she had reached full term. Finally, on the night of March 31, after she and Ted had taken a walk along Primrose Hill and Regent’s Park that had tired her enough so she fell asleep immediately, Sylvia awoke to labor pains. Then everything happened quickly. By two o’clock, when Ted called the midwife, Sylvia’s contractions were violent. By five, she was fully dilated. By five-thirty, when the nurse called the doctor, Sylvia believed the baby would come any minute. And it did—at five-forty-five. A girl, she weighed seven pounds and four ounces and measured twenty-one inches in length. Sylvia called her Frieda Rebecca, and the source of the name was clear. It was Otto’s sister Frieda, Sylvia’s aunt whom she had described as “resembl[ing] daddy—the same . . . blue eyes and shape of face.”
During labor and the actual birth, Ted remained at Sylvia’s side; he often held her hand and rubbed her back. As he had hypnotized her over the past few weeks, Ted had oflfered a posthypnotic suggestion that she have a quick and painless delivery. Though by no means painless, it was—at four and a half hours—relatively quick. Recovered somewhat, Sylvia placed a transatlantic telephone call to her mother, but the line was disconnected, so she called back an hour later. After telling Aurelia about the details of the birth, Sylvia hung up and went to bed. She fell into a heavy sleep, from which she did not wake for about two hours. That day, Ted served her breakfast and lunch in bed. They now began to think about who to name as godparents; Olwyn was one logical choice. The midwife stopped by at eleven and at teatime to check on both Sylvia and the baby. Because she now saw herself and Lynne Lawner as “emotional sisters on the other side of the moon,” Plath started her next letter to her by confessing that “[t]he whole experience of birth and baby seem[s] much deeper, much closer to the bone, than love and marriage.”
In England, for the first fourteen days of a baby’s life, the National Health provided the services of a midwife free of charge, just as it had prenatal care and delivery. In all, three different midwives saw Sylvia and Frieda. On April 3, Sylvia got out of bed to have a candlelight supper with Ted; it featured a casserole cooked by Dido. The next day, Sylvia took her first bath since the birth. Usually, the baby cried between midnight and 4:00 a.m.; Sylvia napped during the day so that she could care for the baby at night and let Ted sleep. On the 6th, Sylvia and Frieda received their first guest, Bill Merwin, who dropped in to see the baby and to confirm with Ted that he was coming over that evening to meet Bill’s publisher.
After two weeks of recovery, Plath tried to write, but she did not have enough energy. On April 9, The New Yorker published “Man in Black.” At mid-month, The Atlantic Monthly bought “The Manor Garden” and “A Winter Ship” for seventy-five dollars each. Certain that it had been Peter Davison who had been blocking her acceptances at the magazine, acceptances that she had started earning while at Smith and had continued to receive until he came to work there, Plath mailed her last batch of poems directly to Edward Weeks. This way, she could circumvent, as she called it, Peter’s “Iron Curtain.”
Yet, despite these successes, Plath could not write; she was still too tired. She could barely attend a handful of social functions with Ted. On the 19th, they had lunch with a woman from the BBC and Karl Miller, literary editor for The New Statesman; two days later, they went to a cocktail party at Faber and Faber; the following day, they ate dinner with Lee Anderson, currently in England to record Britis
h poets for Yale. Normally, the Hugheses would employ the Babyminder Service, for which they paid fifty cents an hour, but on Sunday the 17th they took Frieda on her first outing, a ban-the-bomb march. When she told her mother about it, Sylvia implored Aurelia not to vote for Richard Nixon in the upcoming presidential elections. To Plath, Nixon was a dangerous Machiavelli. Vote Kennedy, she demanded.
Up until now, the Hugheses had not openly embraced politics, although as early as her high-school years Plath had shown evidence of a growing political awareness. Perhaps their friendship with the Mer-wins, both of whom endorsed liberal causes, had provided the catalyst needed to get them to act on their beliefs. But none of their present activities compared to the event to which the Hugheses had been invited for May 4. That evening, they were scheduled to have supper, along with the Stephen Spenders, at the home of Mr. and Mrs. T. S. Eliot.
2
The Eliots lived on the first floor of a drab brick building in a functional, but expensive, flat. After they met Eliot’s wife, Valerie, the Hugheses were joined by Eliot himself in the living room for sherry; slowly Plath felt at ease, as Eliot talked about traveling through America. Eventually, Stephen Spender arrived with his wife, Natasha Litvin, the concert pianist, and the group’s conversation turned to gossip about friends of the Spenders and the Eliots, among them Stravinsky, Auden, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence. Next, they all moved on to supper, where Plath sat between Eliot and Spender. Not only did Plath have a new baby and a book contract for The Colossus, but here she was socializing with the Spenders and the Eliots, talking about Stravinsky and Woolf. She had certainly come a long way from that frightened Smith freshman who had actually received a B 4- in English.
Rough Magic Page 30