Letters from Vienna #132
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
St Botolph’s
The launch of the “St Botolph’s Review” on 26 February 1956 was an auspicious event; it was also the first time Sylvia Plath met Ted Hughes.
“One Newnham girl” Elaine Feinstein tells us “…had already bought a copy of the “St Botolph’s Review”. Even as the party got under way, she was sitting in Miller’s Wine Parlour on the King’s Parade, nervously drinking whisky macs with a young man called David Hamish Stewart, a Canadian reading English at Queens’ College. She was Sylvia Plath, known to Ted and his friends as a good-looking American Fullbright scholar whose poems had appeared in several university magazines. One of these, “Three Caryatids”, had appeared in “Chequer” and had been subsequently singled out for a savage attack in “Broadsheet” by Daniel Huws.”
“Both Lucas Myers and Ted Hughes brought girlfriends to the party. Myers’ girlfriend, Valerie, was black-haired and pretty, a “sweet flower of London’s bohemia and a good painter”. Ted Hughes arrived with a girl whom David Ross remembers incorrectly as a nurse. Myers confirms in his memoir her name was Shirley and describes her as “a sensitive, hand-some, light brown-haired and deep-eyed woman, quite English, quite reserved and the polar opposite of Sylvia”, but he points out that, far from being a nurse, she shared a weekly supervision with Jane Baltzell (later Kopp) another postgraduate student living in Whitstead, whom Sylvia regarded as a rival. Hughes was sufficiently involved with Shirley at the time to have taken her to stay for a weekend with his parents in Yorkshire, where he introduced her to his sister Olwyn…”
“Everyone was dressed with deliberate informality; Myers was wearing black and white checkered baggy pants and a loose, swinging jacket. Hughes had ignored ominous astrological portents to be at the celebration…The party was both noisy and drunken and so thoroughly out of control that by the end “the windows of the Women’s Union Bar Building were smashed”.”
“Plath entered the party “with brave ease”: a tall, slender girl with long legs, blonde hair falling loose over her face, and a mouth painted with thick crimson lipstick. She was dressed in red and black. She approached David Huws with animation almost at once and challenged him about the criticism of her poem. As she spoke, she gestured with “balletic, monkey-elegant fingers” and when she laughed her eyes became as bright as a “crush of diamonds”. Myers pays tribute both to her red shoes and her “flash”. Ted Hughes noticed her at once. That “flash” was rare among Cambridge girls of the period.”
“Lucas Myers, already drunk, was dancing – his own version of a jitterbugging – with a girl in a green dress, but quite soon Sylvia also began to dance with him, quoting some of the verse he had published in the “St Botolph’s Review”, while he smiled in a way she described in her journal as “satanic”. For all her evident interest in Lucas, she was curious about Ted Hughes even while she was dancing with Myers. By this time her vivacity had interested Hughes enough for him to approach her. Although she had picked out Myers first, Plath had already asked the name of “that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one huge enough for me”, and she knew by heart the poems of Hughes from the “St Botolph’s Review”. The excitement of this encounter enters the wild syntax of the journal entry itself. The noise of the party was shattering but they shouted at one another “as if in a high wind” nevertheless: “I started yelling again about his poems and quoting: “most dear unscratchable diamond” and he yelled back, colossal, in a voice that should have come from a Pole, “You like?” and asking if I wanted brandy, and me yelling yes and backing into the next room.”
“For a time, they talked about the review Daniel Huws had written of her poem, with Hughes claiming that Daniel knew she was beautiful and would not have written as he did about a cripple. Her reply seems to have convinced him that she was “all there”. They spoke about the job he was doing in London and then, though he explained he had “obligations in the next room”, he kissed her, “bang smash on the mouth”, as she describes it in her journal, then ripped her hairband off and her favourite silver earrings. The journal entry continues with him “barking” his intention to keep what he had taken and kissing her neck. In response, Plath bit him so long and hard on his cheek that blood was running down his face when they returned to the other room.”
“When he returned to Cambridge on 9 March, he found out Sylvia’s address from Luke’s cousin, Bert Wyatt-Brown, and he and Luke tried to wake her that night by throwing stones up at her window in Whitstead. He went back to London without seeing her, since they had been throwing stones at the wrong window, but Sylvia continued to occupy his thoughts.”
“Ted had been given an ultimatum by the Australian immigration authorities. His application had been approved two years earlier, but he had deferred the date of his departure…”
“…he wrote to Lucas of postponing his departure for as long as nine months and made a point of asking Myers to give Sylvia Plath his London address, as well as arranging some free lodging for her…”[1]
“(Sylvia Plath’s) journals reveal both the intensity of her sexual arousal by Hughes and the limits of the relationship she anticipated. Learning that Ted had returned to Cambridge, she implored on 10 March: “let me have him for this British spring. Please, please…Oh, he is here; my black marauder; oh hungry, hungry. I am so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love: I am here; I wait; and he plays on the banks of the river Cam like a casual faun.” Yet even as she is waiting “in hell” for a footfall on the stairs that might be Hughes, another part of her is hatching a plan to travel to Paris to look for (Richard) Sassoon. Nor did she give up that plan even after Sassoon wrote her a letter saying their relationship was at an end.”
“Ted had not yet become the fixed star in Sylvia’s life. She longed for him, certainly, but it is interesting to read in her journals that after their first encounter she climbed into Queens’, with Hamish and made love to him in his college room, even though she later regretted her sluttish behavior. And even when she travelled to London to visit Hughes at Myers’ suggestion, she was on her way to Paris, where she hoped to find Richard (Sassoon). The misery of that search and the hopelessness of it were not known to Hughes until he read her journals after her death. As he saw the matter, however, there was an oracular destiny in their meeting.”
“Ted was still living at 18 Rugby Street, a small Georgian house in Bloomsbury, where he occupied a living room with two windows facing south. There was a tiny kitchen and a small bedroom, but no running water, and the only bathroom was three floors below, beneath the street pavement…It was Myers who brought Sylvia there. Hughes heard her running up the stairs to his room and, more than fifty years later, could recall, writing “Birthday Letters”, her exhilaration, her cobalt-blue aura, her sparkling eyes and her effervescence. In “18 Rugby Street”, he evokes her physically: the “aboriginal thickness” of her lips, the rubbery, changeable quality of her “roundy” face.”
“Ted walked Sylvia back to her hotel in a trance. Somehow she smuggled him into her hotel room near Fetter Lane and there he was able to marvel at her naked beauty for the first time.”[2]
“Once I got to know her and read her poems,” Hughes later wrote, “I saw straight off that she was a genius of some kind. Quite suddenly we were committed to each other and to each other’s writing…I see now that when we met, my writing, like hers, left its old path and started to circle and search. To me, of course, she was not only herself: she was America and American literature in person.”[3]
“When Mrs. Aurelia Plath was putting “Letters Home” to press in 1975, Hughes wrote a letter explaining that marriage was originally Sylvia’s suggestion: “Did she sacrifice anything in marrying me? She wanted to teach, I wanted to go off round the world. I didn’t even ask her to marry me. She suggested it as a good idea and I said OK, why not?”[4]
Marriage
The seeds of the later discord and divorce were there from the very start. So, when on Bloomsday, 16 June, 1956, they were married in the church of St George of the Chimney Sweeps in Bloomsbury, it was an inauspicious event, a marriage doomed from its inception.
In 1957 Plath typed up forty of Hughes’ poems and sent them off to a competition judged by Marianne Moore, Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden, where it won first prize; it was the beginning of Hughes’s career. The “Hawk in the Rain” won the Somerset Maugham Award in March 1960 and his second book: “Lupercal” won the Hawthornden.
At the same time: “It was a period when Sylvia’s own acceptance as a poet was growing. She had had several poems published in “Granta”, one of which – “Spinster” – had even been reviewed in the “Sunday Times”…”[5]
Both Hughes and Plath didn’t enjoy teaching in America, which is why they resolved to return to England. There they first lived with the Hughes family in Yorkshire, then London, in 18 Rugby Street and next: in Chalcot Square.
When their first child, Frieda, was born in 1960, Sylvia was forced to “take a back seat as mother and housewife.”[6] To cut down on expenses the couple moved to North Tawnton in Devon and a second child, Nicholas, was born in 1962. In the same year the marriage began to fall apart, which wasn’t helped by Hughes’ infidelity with Assia Wevill.
One thing Hughes taught Plath was speed. “She wrote her early poems very slowly,” Ted Hughes tells us, “thesaurus open on her knee, in her large, strange handwriting, like a mosaic, where every letter stands separate within the work, a hieroglyph to itself…Every poem grew complete from its own root, in that laborious inching way, as if she were working out a mathematical problem, chewing her lips, putting a thick dark ring of ink around each word that stirred her on the page of the thesaurus.”[7] Another thing he taught her was to trust her own instincts and her own imagination, however violent or disturbing they might be. For him: there were no taboos. She had to embrace her own fears and ride her own demons, regardless of possible emotional ramifications. This led to the break in her “bourgeois”, “cerebral” “academic” style, which was essential for her later, enduring success.
“Ted Hughes has written about Sylvia Plath’s breakthrough into her deeper self and her poetic fate: he locates the critical moment in her writing at the composition of the poem called “Stones”. This is the latest of the poems (4 November 1959) printed in “The Colossus”, and the one which we can with hindsight recognize as promising those epoch-making “Ariel” poems that began in October 1962…a phase of Sylvia Plath’s which holds in happy equilibrium the recognized procedures of what Eliot called “the mythic method”, and the terrible stresses of her own psychological and domestic reality.”[8]
Whatever can be said about whether Hughes used or abused Plath or not or whether he proved to be a terrible husband or not, which tends to be the Feminist narrative, one thing is certain: without his influence she would never have become a great poet; he was central and essential to her career.
Was the price she paid too high? Possibly, but that is another matter entirely. Ultimately: as to their private life: nobody but them knew what really happened and, at the end of the day: it is nobody else’s business.
[1] pp.47-49 Ted Hughes, Elaine Feinstein
[2] pp.56-57 Ibid
[3] p.59 Ibid
[4] p.60 Ibid
[5] p.69 Ibid
[6] p.106 Ibid
[7] p.152 The Government of the Tongue, Seamus Heaney
[8] p.160 Ibid