Life wasn’t all bad. There was fresh fish. Luke Myers came through on a short visit, and they reminisced about Cambridge days. Ted and Sylvia were both getting poems accepted. Ted heard that he had won the Guinness Poetry Award (£300) for ‘The Thought-Fox’. He received a treasured letter of congratulations from T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber. The grand old man said how impressed he had been when he first read the typescript of the book and how delighted he was to have Ted on the Faber list.42 And in Boston there was the proper literary scene that they craved: a reading by Truman Capote, dinner-parties with Robert Lowell, intense discussions about poetry at the apartment of poet Stanley Kunitz (Ted did most of the talking, Sylvia sitting quietly with a cup of tea), a meeting with the now old and rather deaf but still legendary Robert Frost. Ted loved hearing stories about one of his favourite poets, the very English Edward Thomas, who had been inspired by Frost to turn from prose to verse only a couple of years before his death on the Western Front.
Sylvia sat in on Lowell’s poetry classes at Boston University, and he read both her work and Ted’s. Lying on the bed in the Elm Street apartment earlier in the year, Ted had written a poem called ‘Pike’. Lowell said it was a masterpiece.43 Leonard Baskin admired it too, and reproduced 150 copies of it privately under his personal imprint, the Gehenna Press. This was Ted’s first ‘broadside’. The title was in red, the poem in black, and there was an illustrative woodcut by an artist friend of Baskin’s, portraying two pike, one in black and the other in green. ‘Pike’ also appeared in a group of five immensely powerful Hughes poems in the summer 1959 issue of a magazine called Audience: A Quarterly of Literature and the Arts. The four others were ‘Nicholas Ferrer’, ‘Thrushes’, ‘The Bull Moses’ and ‘The Voyage’. A couple of months earlier, another magazine had published ‘Roosting Hawk’, which he had written sitting at his work-table one morning in Willow Street. He told his parents that he was finding that the key to a creative day was an early night and an early start. He was hitting his stride and would soon have enough good poems for a second collection. He was also starting work on a play. They went to tea with Peter Davison in his apartment across the Charles River in Cambridge. He gave Ted a copy of Jung’s The Undiscovered Self, which chimed perfectly with the ideas he was exploring. ‘The Jung is splendid,’ he told Davison in his thank-you letter, ‘one of the basic notions of my play.’44
In January 1959 they acquired a tiger-striped kitten and called it Sappho. She was said to be a granddaughter of Thomas Mann’s cat, a suitably literary pedigree. In April, Ted won a $5,000 award from the Guggenheim Foundation, in no small measure due to the support of Eliot. He wrote to thank him, signing off the letter with a dry allusion to the famous opening line of The Waste Land: ‘I hope you are well, and enjoying April.’45
While living in the cramped Willow Street apartment, they were visited by Rollie McKenna, a diminutive Texan portrait photographer who was a genius with a Leica III camera fitted with a Japanese Nikkor screw lens of the kind used by Life magazine photographers in the Korean War. She had immortalised Dylan Thomas in two images, one with pout and cigarette, the other ‘bound, Prometheus-like, in vine-tendrils (his idea), against the white wall of her house in America’.46 Now she would capture Ted and Sylvia in images that would be published in the year of Plath’s death in a book called The Modern Poets: An American–British Anthology, which included a real rarity in the form of a photograph of T. S. Eliot that he liked. The photograph of Ted, somewhat in Fifties Teddy-boy mode, shows him tanned, relaxed, leaning back, his tie artfully dishevelled but his hair for once swept back without the trademark lick over his forehead. His eyes melt the spectator. Ted and Sylvia were also photographed at work together: husband and wife as Team Poetry.
That spring saw the publication of Life Studies, Robert Lowell’s first new volume for eight years. It was immediately recognised as a literary landmark. For one thing, it contained a distinctive mix of poetry and short prose memoirs. For another, in contrast to the intricate formality of Lowell’s earlier work, the poems moved seamlessly between metrical regularity and free verse. The language had a new informality and the subject matter was frequently very personal.
A review in the Nation by the critic M. L. Rosenthal described the book as ‘confessional’. The name stuck and Lowell, quite unintentionally, found himself labelled as the leader of a new school of American poetry. For Ted and Sylvia, it was exciting to be around Lowell at this time. Sylvia found in Life Studies a licence to write more direct poetic confessions of her own. Ted deeply admired the technical accomplishment, but was more sceptical about the personal content. ‘He goes mad occasionally,’ Ted told Danny Weissbort in a letter about Lowell, ‘and the poems in his book, the main body of them, are written round a bout of madness, before and after. They are mainly Autobiographical.’ At the heart of the collection was ‘Waking in the Blue’, Lowell’s great poem about his period of confinement in a secure ward at the McLean mental hospital: ‘We are all old-timers, / Each of us holds a locked razor.’47 ‘AutoBiography [sic]’, Ted concluded his sermon inspired by Life Studies, was ‘the only subject matter really left to Americans’. The thing about Americans was that their only real grounding was their selves and their family, ‘Never a locality, or a community, or an organisation of ideas, or a private imagination’.48 He was thinking about Sylvia as well as Lowell.
In a letter to Luke Myers written a couple of months later, he focused on a different aspect of contemporary American poetry, reflecting on William Carlos Williams’s preoccupation with ‘sexy girls, noble whores, the flower of poverty, tough straight talk’ and describing E. E. Cummings (whom he considered a genius, a fool and a huckster) as ‘one of the first symptoms and general encouragements of the modern literary syphilis – verseless, styleless, characterless all-inclusive undifferentiated yelling assertion of the Great simplifying burden-lifting God orgasm – whether by drug, negro, masked nympho or strange woman in the dark’.49 His own recent poetry, by contrast, was combining a tough American assurance with the earth-grounded English eye of Hawk, without going into free form or confessional mode.
If there was a like-minded American poet, it certainly wasn’t someone in the tradition of ‘electronic noise’ coming out of the suicidal Hart Crane, whom Lowell in Life Studies called the Shelley of his age. Rather, it was the Southern agrarian John Crowe Ransom. Behind every word of Ransom’s poetry, Ted told Luke, repeating some of the Leavisite language of their Cambridge days, ‘is a whole human being, alert, sensitive, reacting precisely and finely to his observations’. As for British poetry, it needed to get back to this kind of wholeness, the tight weave of ‘the thick rope of human nature’, which had been found in the old ballads, in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Webster, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, the dialect poems of Burns, but virtually no one since. For a century and a half the English sensibility had got too hung up on ‘the stereotype English voice’ of the gentleman.50 What was needed was a distinctly ungentlemanly tone and matter, a new poetry of working-class roots and rural rootedness. This is what he was developing in his new book, which was nearing completion. The name of D. H. Lawrence is strikingly absent from the genealogy outlined here: perhaps out of a certain ‘anxiety of influence’, Ted is suppressing the name of the writer who came immediately before him as a northern, working-class voice with a sensitivity to the raw forces of nature, an interest in myth and archetype, an unashamed openness of sexual energy, and a distinctly lubricious attitude to the female body (Lawrence was the poet who compared the ‘wonderful moist conductivity’ of a fig to a woman’s genitals).51
Leonard Baskin agreed to consider doing a design for the cover of the new book. Ted gave him a lead by suggesting that the ‘general drift’ of the poems could be summed up as ‘Man as an elaborately perfected intestine, or upright weasel’.52 Ted proposed Baskin to Faber, but did not get the response he wanted; they went for a geometric dust-wrapper design instead. In a separate development, though, Faber did accept ‘a book of 8
poems for children’, each of which was about a relative: a sister who was really a crow, an aunt devoured by a thistle, and so on. It was published under the title Meet My Folks!
Ted jokingly told Charles Monteith, his editor at Faber, that it was his own equivalent of Lowell’s Life Studies, which had included intense poems of family memory and marital discord with such titles as ‘My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow’, ‘Grandparents’ and ‘Man and Wife’. It would be a long time before Ted started publishing pieces about his family, let alone his marriage, in this ‘confessional’ voice.
Ted and Sylvia received a joint invitation to spend two months in the autumn at Yaddo, a rural retreat for writers in upstate New York. Though invited to apply, their proposals still had to be graded by the writers who were Yaddo’s assessors (Richard Eberhart, John Cheever and Morton Zabel). Both applications received a good mix of As and Bs.53 They were in.
They decided that, before taking up residence and then returning to England, they should set off to see America. They packed boxes for the journey, boxes in readiness for Yaddo and boxes for home. Ted wrote to his parents, telling them in great detail (complete with a little drawing) about the tent they had bought, discounted from $90 to $65. It had a sewn-in waterproof groundsheet, something unheard of in the camping days of his youth, and even a meshed window. Aurelia Plath bought them air mattresses that folded down to the size of pillowcases and thick puffy sleeping bags with zips all round (meaning that they could be joined together for cuddles on chilly nights in the wild). She threw in an assortment of other camping gadgets for good measure, and they had a trial night sleeping in the tent on the back lawn of her house in Elmwood Road, Wellesley. Ted pronounced it as comfortable a night as he had ever had. Any apprehensions that cleanliness-minded Sylvia would not be the camping type were swiftly dispelled. They said goodbye and off they went in Aurelia’s car, on a ten-week road trip through mountain, prairie and desert, all the way to California and back.
First they headed for the Great Lakes, crossing the Canadian border into Ontario. They took snapshots of each other by the tent and the waterside. In the Algonquin Provincial Park, Sylvia looked happier than she had ever looked, as a deer took blueberries from her hand. Then they went west to Wisconsin, where they camped by Lake Superior in the field of a kindly Polish fisherman near a village with the wonderful name of Cornucopia. His daughter took them fishing, but there wasn’t much in the way of catch, since lampreys had eaten nearly all the trout in the lake.
Then it was across the prairies, under big skies and through the Dakota Badlands. There were fierce electric storms, the earth was a sinister red. It was a place where seams of lignite ignited spontaneously, burning slowly for years or even centuries, turning the clay soil to brick shale. The land reeked of sulphur and tar. ‘This is evil,’ Ted remembered Sylvia saying. ‘This is real evil.’ There seemed to be some strange consonance between this America and the dark recesses of her mind. ‘Maybe it’s the earth,’ she said, or ‘Maybe it’s ourselves.’ The emptiness seemed to be sucking something out of them, the dark electricity within ‘Frightening the earth, and frightening us’.54 ‘The Badlands’, which went through dozens of drafts before reaching its final form in Birthday Letters, was one of his first poems in the loose style of a journal.
Stepping further westward, they crossed Montana. This was real cattle country, empty wilderness, not unlike the Yorkshire Moors, but with grass and richer soil, and without any valleys. At roadside cafés, you got ‘steak the size of a plate, home-made berry pie piled with icecream, your coffee cup filled up as fast as you emptied it (for the price of just one cup)’.55 This was the real America, the generous and friendly people real Americans. After a long drive southwards, they arrived at the Yellowstone National Park, which was becoming more famous than ever with the advent on television the previous year of the animated cartoon character Yogi Bear. Ted told his parents that it was like the Alps, but with bears. They counted nineteen on the road in the first 30 miles after entering the National Park. The bears would wander up to people’s cars and stand on their hind legs, hoping for food. ‘People get regularly mauled, trying to feed them,’ Edith and Bill were informed.56 On their first night in the park, Ted heard one sniffing round their tent, which was only 10 feet from a trash can.
On the second night they returned at dusk from a drive around the Grand Loop of the park, seeing the geysers and the hot pools, only to find a large black bear standing over their trash can. It lumbered off when it was caught in their headlights. They locked their food in the boot of the car and washed down the picnic table and benches. At ‘the blue moonlit hour of quarter to three’ Sylvia was woken from a dream in which their car was blown to pieces with a great crash. The crashing sound was real: her first thought was that a bear had smashed open the car with a great cuff and started eating the engine (a seed here for Ted’s story about the metal-devouring Iron Man?). Ted, also woken by the crash, had the more prosaic thought that the bear had knocked their cooking pans off the picnic table. They lay listening to ‘grunts, snuffles, clattering can lids’. Then there was ‘a bumpity rolling noise as the bear bowled a tin’ past their tent. Sylvia peered out of the tent screen and, ‘not ten feet away’, saw a huge bear ‘guzzling at a tin’. In the morning they discovered that the noise was that of ‘the black-and-gilt figured cookie tin’ in which they kept their fruit and nut bars. Though they had secured most of their food in the boot, this had been on the back seat of the car inside Sylvia’s closed red bag. The bear had smashed the car window, torn the bag open and found the tin, which it had also managed to open. The bag had also contained Ritz crackers and Hydrox cookies, which had been eaten, and a selection of postcards, which she found in the morning among the debris left from the visit. The top card, a picture of moose antlers, was turned upside down. And a postcard of a bear was face up on the ground with the paw print of an actual bear on it.57
Having consumed the contents of the cookie tin, the bear had gone away. Ted and Sylvia had lain awake, terrified that it might come back and rip its way into their tent. It did indeed return, just as dawn broke. Ted stood up and looked out of the window of the tent to see it slurping away at the oranges that they had left on the ledge behind the back seat of the car. ‘It’s the big brown one’, he told Sylvia. They had heard that this was the nasty sort. Scared off by the sound of ‘The Camp Ranger’s car, doing the morning rounds’, it ran away, tripped on a guy rope and nearly tumbled into Ted and Sylvia’s tent.58
The story went around the camp. A Yellowstone regular told them to smear the tent with kerosene because bears hated the smell. Someone else suggested red pepper, but they decided that the best thing would be to move to a campsite higher up the hillside and not too close to any garbage cans. Ted appended a handwritten postscript to Sylvia’s typewritten letter home: ‘Well, I wanted to tell about the bear, but Sivvy’s done that better than I even remembered it.’59
In the washroom, Sylvia told the story to another woman, who replied that the bears were particularly bad that year. On the Sunday night, just before Ted and Sylvia’s arrival in the park, another woman had tried to scare one off with a flashlight and been mauled to death. This gave Sylvia the idea of, in Ted’s later phrase, transforming their own ‘dud scenario into a fiction’.60 ‘The Fifty-Ninth Bear’ is one of her most effective short stories. It concerns a couple called Norton and Sadie. Norton was the surname of both a former boyfriend and the character in the television sitcom The Honeymooners whose vocal mannerisms inspired Yogi Bear.61 Sadie was one of the names Sylvia thought of using for the autobiographical protagonist of ‘Falcon Yard’. They count fifty-eight bears as they drive round the Grand Loop at Yellowstone. When they are woken in the night by the sound of another bear, Norton goes outside and sees the smashed car window. He waves a flashlight to scare the bear away, but is cuffed over the head and killed: ‘It was the last bear, her bear, the fifty-ninth.’ The sinister aspect of the story is that Norton’s arroganc
e has in some sense made Sadie want him to die: in daydreams, he imagined himself as a widower,
a hollow-cheeked, Hamletesque figure in somber suits, given to standing, abstracted, ravaged by casual winds, on lonely promontories and at the rail of ships, Sadie’s slender, elegant white body embalmed, in a kind of bas relief, on the central tablet of his mind. It never occurred to Norton that his wife might outlive him. Her sensuousness, her pagan enthusiasms, her inability to argue in terms of anything but her immediate emotions – this was too flimsy, too gossamery a stuff to survive out from under the wings of his guardianship.62
Ted gave his own version of the story in the longest poem in Birthday Letters, also called ‘The 59th Bear’. In the rear-view mirror of memory, he vividly revisited ‘the off rear window of the car’,
Wrenched out – a star of shatter splayed
From a single talon’s leverage hold,
A single claw forced into the hair-breadth odour
Had ripped the whole sheet out. He’d leaned in
And on claw hooks lifted out our larder.
He’d left matted hairs. I glued them in my Shakespeare.63
Whereas Sylvia’s story exits the husband to death, pursued by the fifty-ninth bear, Ted captures a trophy of the animal encounter and gives it to his Shakespeare. One may assume that he pasted the matted hairs somewhere near the famous stage direction in The Winter’s Tale. He ended the poem by reflecting on Sylvia’s short story, reading the bear as an image of the death that was hurtling towards her rather than her husband.
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