Although Sylvia told Marcia that neither she nor Ted could get any work done during the previous two months, in fact, as letters to Aurelia reveal, Sylvia was working on a new book of poetry that would find a publisher in February. She was also typing some of Ted’s work. As usual, Sylvia treated her mother to an anodyne version of events, emphasizing the coziness of the Hughes home and socializing with his family—especially with the beautiful Olwyn, blonde, as tall as Sylvia, and at thirty-one looking no more than twenty-one. Ted’s sister already loved her, Sylvia declared in her fairy-tale version of her stay with her in-laws. Sylvia’s first pregnancy, she assured her mother, was going well. Other than some backaches, heartburn, and a kicking baby, she felt surprisingly comfortable, perhaps because she gained relatively little weight. She estimated she walked three to five miles a day. She wondered if the birth of her child would coincide with the publication date (18 March) of Ted’s second book, Lupercal.
On 18 February, Sylvia wrote optimistically about living in England to Lynne Lawner, a friend acquired during a poetry contest several years earlier. Heinemann had accepted her first book of poetry for publication: “I think I shall be a very happy exile & have absolutely no desire to return to the land of milk & honey & spindryers.” A Somerset Maugham award for Ted (about $1,400) had them dreaming of a writing holiday the following winter somewhere in southern Europe. Sylvia was still cooking a full meal the day after her official due date of 27 March. A. Alvarez’s positive review of Lupercal in the Observer seemed to add to their anticipatory excitement on 31 March, when Sylvia predicted in a letter to her mother that the baby’s arrival could not be much more than a day away. Sylvia had swelled to 155 pounds, about twenty more than her usual weight.
Sylvia went out for an evening walk, watching a thin moon hover over the magical landscape of Primrose Hill, strewn with daffodils, and then retired for the night. She awakened just after midnight, when, as she wrote her mother, “everything began.” The first labor pains started at 1:15 a.m. The doctor arrived around 4 a.m., but without anesthetics, since no one had anticipated the rapid birth, which Sylvia called violent and painful, but also amazing. It was all over by 6:00 a.m., a remarkably easy first birth, nothing like Sylvia had anticipated. By the next day, she was sitting up in bed typing letters to her mother and Marcia Brown, detailing the epic event and describing Frieda Rebecca Hughes, “dozing and snorkeling” since dawn and already bathed by the midwife in Sylvia’s largest Pyrex baking dish. Ted had held her hand throughout the ordeal. She had avoided the horror of a hospital stay, a fear of Sylvia’s that Nancy Hunter Steiner has described in her memoir. Even though Sylvia had been advised to stay in bed, she got up to call her mother, announcing the birth of “Ein wunderkind, Mummy. Ein wunderkind!” Months later she would write a beautiful poem, “Morning Song,” that began with Frieda’s “bald cry,” announcing herself to the world, and ending with a tribute to a child already shaping a language for herself, “clear vowels” that “rise like balloons.”
Sylvia gave Ted full credit for all his support. For weeks he had been putting her to sleep in trances, predicting an “easy, short delivery.” At a time when squeamish men paced hospital corridors removed from the anguish and complications of childbirth, Ted Hughes was on the spot, relishing the moment when the baby crowned and began to emerge from Sylvia’s body. He told Lucas Myers all about it three weeks later in a long letter. Ted praised Sylvia’s active participation in the birth, unlike passive, immobilized mothers, “stupefied with drugs,” worked over by doctors in American hospitals. He likened her pushing the baby out of herself to “backing a lorry around a tight bend in a narrow alley full of parked cars.” Sylvia had absorbed Ted’s rejection of American know-how. A week after Frieda’s birth, Sylvia reprimanded her mother for taking a chauvinistic attitude: “No more about growth hormones and growth stopping, please! I’m surprised at you. Tampering with nature! What an American thing to feel measuring people to ideal heights will make them happier…”
On 21 April, a weeping Sylvia watched what became known as the Aldermaston marchers line up in a seven-mile-long column with “Ban the Bomb!” banners and signs, heading toward Trafalgar Square. She was proud that her baby should be part of this protest against the poisoning of the atmosphere with fallout from nuclear tests. Sylvia never wavered in thinking of the atomic bomb as civilization’s great misfortune. Politically and culturally, she felt much closer to England than to America, especially when she watched friends like the Merwins join the march. She hoped that neither Aurelia nor Warren was thinking of voting for the Machiavellian Richard Nixon. She wondered what they thought of Kennedy, expressing no opinion of her own about him.
“Frieda is my answer to the H-bomb,” Sylvia wrote Lynne Lawner. Plath was a very happy mother. She looked forward to having a large family. Wendy Campbell came from Cambridge to visit and saw a radiant Sylvia taking to motherhood with impressive assurance. Jane Truslow, a friend at Smith who had married Peter Davison, also visited the Chalcot Square flat, after which she expressed her astonishment that a prima donna like Sylvia had adapted to family life with such aplomb. Truslow told Edward Butscher that it was the first time she saw Sylvia able to get outside of herself. Peter Davison, always apt to see the negative side of his former lover, noted her intense restlessness. Dido Merwin, up to then a warm supporter of Sylvia, began to withdraw her affection, appalled at what she saw as a virago who hounded her long-suffering husband, who did everything possible to placate her. It seems true that Ted almost never complained to his friends about Sylvia and went out of his way to excuse her moody periods and rudeness. It troubled Sylvia that she did not have “a good American girlfriend,” and Ann Davidow’s visit in early May was more than welcome. They took up where they had left off ten years earlier. Plath felt an instant rapport with Ann’s husband, Leo Goodman, and noted that his astrological sign was Leo, just like Ted’s.
After a month at home, Sylvia relished a dinner party with T. S. Eliot, who had first recommended that Faber & Faber publish Ted’s work. Ted described Eliot to Olwyn as “whimsical” and yet “remote.” He kept staring at the floor, looking up only to smile at his wife, Valerie. But Sylvia enjoyed drinking sherry with the “wry and humorous” poet near a coal fire. He immediately put her at ease, even though she thought of herself as in the presence of a “descended god.” Valerie, just as welcoming, showed Sylvia her husband’s baby pictures: a handsome man right from the start, Sylvia wrote Aurelia. Then Stephen Spender and his wife arrived. Intimate gossip ensued about W. H. Auden, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf—virtually all of Sylvia’s favorites got the full treatment. Sylvia did not walk, she “floated” into dinner. Spender admired Ted’s “craggy Yorkshire handsomeness combined with a certain elongated refinement.” He remembered that Sylvia talked more than her husband and that he liked this pretty, intelligent woman, later writing her and apologizing for talking too much at dinner when Eliot’s conversation began to lag.
During this period, Sylvia met A. Alvarez for the first time. As poetry editor of The Observer, he had accepted both her work and Ted’s. He was, in biographer Elaine Feinstein’s words, a “kingmaker,” a critic who could establish reputations. He held a position of prominence on a major daily paper that no one else occupied—then or now. When he first visited their flat, Sylvia played the part of proper wife so well that he was embarrassed to learn that Mrs. Hughes was the Sylvia Plath he had published. She had to bring up the subject of her work when she realized he did not recognize her. But Alvarez detected no note of grievance or resentment in her behavior.
On 21 June in a letter to Olive Higgins Prouty, Hughes called Sylvia a marvelous mother who calmly fed her baby and exhibited endless patience. Sylvia returned the compliment three days later in a letter to Aurelia, extolling Ted as a “marvel of understanding” who was “wonderful with the baby.” They took turns working in the Merwin study—mornings for Sylvia and afternoons for Ted. Both poets gave public readings, and Ted continued to ea
rn good fees for reading his poems and those of others on the BBC, which also produced two of his verse plays. He had also begun selling his manuscripts to dealers and to Indiana University. In this way, the couple cobbled together an income. They attended a Faber & Faber cocktail party, where a proud Sylvia watched while Ted was photographed next to W. H. Auden, establishing Ted’s place in the next generation of Faber poets. That her destiny seemed bound up with London seemed confirmed on the day she happened to walk down Fitzroy Road and saw a freehold house for sale, an unusual occurrence since most dwellings went for ninety-nine year leases. This was the street on which Yeats lived, Sylvia told her mother. The couple, still relying on Ted’s Guggenheim money and a thousand dollars she drew out of their Wellesley bank account, could not afford to buy a house, but she hoped that someday they would find just such a residence to own.
On 22 August, Ted wrote Aurelia and Warren a chatty letter about visiting his parents in Yorkshire. He needed a respite from the hurly-burly of London. He described a fetching Sylvia, who had been reading Alan Moorehead’s book about the Gallipoli campaign and eagerly questioned his father, a survivor of that catastrophe. Father and son rarely spoke about this traumatic episode from William Hughes’s youth, so watching his usually taciturn father open up to Sylvia proved quite entertaining to Ted. Long walks and time spent in Edith Hughes’s garden soothed Sylvia, she reported to her mother.
Returning to London a fortnight later, Sylvia received a BBC invitation to read her work on the radio. With Ted’s work in demand and her hope that he might write a popular play, they dreamed of a car and a country home, complete with a loom, a kiln, a book press, and other items of handcraft. They both thought they might strike it rich if he could write a play to suit the volatile spirit of the times, as Arnold Wesker and the other “angry young men” were doing. Sylvia even had Ted read Clifford Odets to absorb the working class, proletarian ethos.
On 17 December, just as the couple departed for another holiday in Yorkshire, Sylvia and Ted wrote separate letters to Aurelia and Warren. Ted confirmed Sylvia’s reports of the significant attention his work continued to receive. He also made a point of saying that fatherhood was as much an adjustment for him as motherhood had been for Sylvia. He welcomed the change to family man, but seemed quite taken aback at his status as a public figure. He spoke of his fame as though a great cruelty had been done to him and showed no sign of the exultation that Sylvia experienced in the wake of his literary celebrity. He felt depleted, while Sylvia felt more full of herself. Literary life imprisoned Hughes even as it liberated his wife, but she honored his desire to reject certain kinds of media attention. He turned down, much to his mother’s regret, an invitation to appear on a television program featuring the “poet of the year.” He did not like the idea of being watched. But in the main he believed he had escaped the worst effects of his renown and had emerged, as out of “battlesmoke,” still his own man. In the last month, Sylvia had recovered her momentum, writing five superior poems and energetic stories aimed at the women’s magazine market, Ted reported. He thought these commercial outlets would be good for her, ridding her once and for all of the “arty” mood pieces her Smith professors had promoted. Sylvia really needed to put more action into her stories with killings, births, marriages—stories, in other words, in which things actually happened and were not just thought about. They were working together on plots that would get her stories going. As for his own work, he provides quite a long précis of a play, The House of Aries, which sounded very much in the vein of D. H. Lawrence: an exploration of the tensions between the logical, rational mind and the instinctive animalistic self which, if in conflict within the individual, lead to malaise and yearning for an undaunted savior, a dream figure, an “ideal accomplisher.” Ted worried that his play was excessively abstract. It is, but it also projects precisely the kind of sensibility that moved Sylvia to write that notorious line in “Daddy”: “Every woman adores a fascist.”
The Christmas visit did not go that well, as Sylvia related in part of a letter Aurelia chose not to include in Letters Home. According to Anne Stevenson’s biography, the trouble started when Olywn expressed dismay over Sylvia’s highly critical commentary about someone Olwyn did not know, but who was a poet she admired. To Olwyn, her sister-in-law’s furious reaction only proved the “unwritten rule”: Sylvia was not to be criticized. But surely another interpretation occurred to Sylvia: Why was Olywn judging her, when Olwyn did not even know the party concerned? Wasn’t Olwyn the one who was too quick to judge? Stevenson, working under the heavy burden of Olwyn’s hectoring letters expressing exasperation with the biographer’s handling of events, cut short this acrimonious scene. But the unauthorized Paul Alexander dilates upon it. Sylvia accused Olywn of degrading her and Ted. An enraged Olwyn called Sylvia a “nasty bitch,” and apparently disgusted with Plath’s hearty appetite, made remarks about her overeating at Christmas dinner. And why had Sylvia not put Olwyn up at the Chalcot Square flat when Olwyn has visited London in the spring? Referring to Sylvia as “Miss Plath,” Olwyn announced that she was the “daughter of the house.” A silent Sylvia took Frieda out of Olwyn’s hands, even as Ted’s sister was evidently trying to calm down.
Olwyn later told Alexander that Sylvia had “overreacted to their charged dialogue.” But anyone not beholden to Olywn, anyone who had observed her over many years—and who was willing to speak to a biographer (as Marvin Cohen did with me)—can readily observe that even years after Sylvia’s death, Olwyn still hated her brother’s wife. Indeed, anyone Olwyn perceived as standing in the way of her close connection to Ted was bound to be rejected. Edward Butscher reports that Sylvia told Clarissa Roche that the bond between Olwyn and Ted amounted to “intellectual incest.” In her angrier moments, Sylvia omitted the adjective, Roche confided to Butscher. The higher Sylvia stood in Ted’s estimation—especially after the publication of The Colossus—the more jealous Olwyn became. Never again, Sylvia vowed, would she stay in the same home with Olwyn Hughes.
Sylvia attached great importance to A. Alvarez’s review of The Colossus, which The Observer published on 18 December. “She steers clear of feminine charm, deliciousness, gentility, supersensitivity and the act of being a poetess,” Alvarez wrote. “She simply writes good poetry.” Welcome praise indeed for a poet who believed that, like Ted, she had broken through the constraints that Alvarez thought crippled a good deal of postwar British poetry. That she was holding her own in the intense competition of London literary life (from which Ted Hughes was now retreating, as he dreamed of a country refuge) emboldened her and may have accounted for her caustic expression of superiority that set Olwyn off.
Reviews of The Colossus were outstanding. Critics in prestigious journals and newspapers praised the “virtuoso qualities of her style,” calling her “clever” and “vivacious,” poised and cool, and deserving to be ranked with Ted Hughes and Theodore Roethke. Some of these adjectives could be interpreted as condescending, but read in full the reviews reveal respect and admiration. Of course, even supporters like Alvarez saw certain faults—a desire sometimes to indulge in rhetoric for its own sake, for example—but in the main Plath attracted the approval of important poet-critics like John Wain, Roy Fuller, and A. E. Dyson. A scene in the film Sylvia, in which an English critic dismisses The Colossus as merely the product of a wife married to a more important poet, does not do justice to Plath’s place in the literary world of her time. Ted Hughes, writing to Lucas Myers on 21 January, expressed his satisfaction with Plath’s excellent reviews. Both Ted and Sylvia wrote to Olive Higgins Prouty about their successes, and she, in turn, wrote back warmly, enclosing a check for $150.
Sylvia was pregnant again, and besides her usual wintertime colds and flu, she suffered from appendicitis. Surgery, she was advised, could be done safely long before the baby was due in late August. She would probably enter the hospital in early February, but in the meantime she started on a part-time copyediting job at The Bookseller, a trade organ.
And she and Ted appeared in a BBC program, “Two of a Kind,” in which they described their lives and work. He depicted a couple so in sync with one another that they had become almost one sensibility. Sylvia, calling herself “more practical,” provided a soberer account of their collaboration.
Then on the morning of 6 February, Sylvia had a miscarriage. There seemed to be no explanation, she wrote her mother, assuring her that Ted was taking wonderful care of her. Sylvia felt especially awful, because she had asked Aurelia to change her travel plans so as to be present around the time of the child’s birth. Undaunted, however, Sylvia was looking forward to her next pregnancy after scheduling removal of her appendix for late February. Given her horror of hospitals and concerns about the pain and recovery from surgery, she did remarkably well, enjoying Ted’s hospital visit and substitution of rare steak sandwiches and Toll House cookies for the frightful hospital food. To the adoring Sylvia, he looked like a giant, trolling the hospital corridors next to people half his size. He seemed to be courting her as in their first days together.
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