Writing to happily married Gerald in Australia, Ted was evasive in describing his entanglement. He merely dropped a few hints about ‘calamitous confrontations with all sorts of bogies’ and the conflict between ‘puritan tendencies’ and the ‘irregularities’ that he needed in order to exist.1 He particularly stressed the way in which fame had changed his life. He needed to get away from London to escape the pressures and demands that literary celebrity had placed upon him. Court Green was the creative haven that he required. But almost as soon as he was there, he was drawn back to London, not only for the necessity of BBC work and meetings with editors, but also because he could not help enjoying the adulation he received there.
Writing some time later to unmarried and much closer sibling Olwyn in Paris, he was more candid. The letter is undated, but it must have been written either around the same time as Sylvia’s letter to her mother announcing that ‘I am going to try to get a legal separation from Ted’ (27 August 1962), or, more probably, immediately after Ted left Court Green ‘with all his clothes and things’ and Sylvia ‘piled the children and two cats in the car’ and drove to Cornwall to stay with the Kanes, the occasion that inspired the poem ‘Lesbos’ (16 October 1962).2
‘Grave news,’ he began his confession, ‘Sylvia and I have decided to part ways, in spite of the obstacles.’3 Something began to happen to him in ‘April or so’, he explained, deliberately not mentioning Assia’s visit on the third weekend of May. Since then, the marriage, the house and Sylvia had all seemed like ‘the dead-end of everything’. So he ‘blew up – very mildly’ (the kiss in the kitchen?) and then ‘went on the spree’ (the month of vigorous sex with Assia, presumably). But this was ‘no substitute for the real thing’, which was to go and live where he liked, ‘working uninterruptedly’, choosing his friends as he pleased and seeing them as often as he liked, and ‘generally changing’ himself ‘without the terrible censorship of somebody like Sylvia’ confining his ‘every impulse and inclination’. The jaguar, in other words, was trapped in the cage of marriage.
Now he was making his bid for freedom. The cage was soul-destroying. They had been ‘good for each other’ in the first couple of years of their marriage, but then things had deteriorated until ‘finally the mutual destruction has been too obvious and open to ignore’. He told Olwyn that during the previous two years the only decent things he had written were during the ten days when Sylvia was in hospital. This suggests that Assia may, after all, have been telling the truth when she informed Nat Tarn that Ted had said this to her during the weekend at Court Green – she just made the incorrect assumption that he was referring to Lupercal, since it was the only book he had published in the previous few years.
Village life in Devon, Ted went on, was like living in an old people’s home. The 10,000 desires that he had repressed for six years ‘in a gentlemanly considerate way’ (for which the usual phrase would be ‘out of marital fidelity’) had ‘suddenly appeared in full bloom, absolutely insatiable’. He would give Sylvia Court Green, the Morris Traveller and as much cash as he could send. The fewer his possessions, the better for his work. He would live in London till December, fulfilling his many reading engagements, then it would be off to Germany, Italy, wherever. He was beginning to write good poetry again. Sylvia had assisted in that by refusing him access to Court Green since he had become ‘so sinful’ (not strictly true – he was returning home at weekends). He wanted to break the mould of tedious, conventional English middle-class life. To be a kind of bohemian. The risk was that he would become a ‘drifter’, but he thought that he had the willpower and ‘inner direction’ to avoid this – besides, the need for cash would keep him working. Yes, his plan sounded like ‘terrific egoism’, but the alternative was – a phrase that reads with bitter irony in the light of subsequent events – ‘suicide by wishi-washiness’. Sylvia would be ‘O.K.’, she was ‘tough’. The only thing he says against her is that she ‘made some terrible mistakes’ and he ‘let her make them’. He does not say what they are, but he was probably thinking of the outbursts of rage and the awkward incidents on social occasions. The loss of Frieda would be ‘a problem’; as for Nick, being only a few months old, they hardly knew each other. He signed off by saying that he had written some film outlines – not mentioning that he and Assia were talking about collaborating on scripts. The letter does not mention Assia at all.
When a man has an affair, his classic defence is to say that there had long been cracks in the marriage anyway. A big part of the Birthday Letters project was an attempt to ask when things began to go wrong. Selection and retrospection, the rear-view-mirror perspective, meant that it was easy to highlight symbolic moments of foreboding – auguries and portents – from the start and all the way through. But some of the poems seek to pinpoint specific moments of crisis. Was there one as early as their first walk across the moors to ‘Wuthering Heights’, when they had seen an injured grouse and he had put it out of its misery with a crisp blow to the head, and she had been sorry for the poor bird and afraid of the ease with which, like Heathcliff, he could perform a casual act of violence? ‘The Grouse’ was not included in the published Birthday Letters, but probably should have been. It describes Sylvia ‘shaking’ and ‘weeping, staring in horror’, then verbally attacking Ted as if had done ‘Something incredible, inconceivable’. The grouse was, for Sylvia, ‘like the Rosenbergs’ in the opening paragraph of The Bell Jar, with its foreshadowing of Sylvia’s own electro-convulsive therapy:
All the stupid murders of this earth
Had moved into my hand to crush the eyebrows
Of the heather-bird.4
Sylvia’s reaction to the killing of the grouse echoes in Ted’s mind with the later incident of the rabbit-catcher.
More plausibly: did the first crack appear at the time of the incident with the girl at Smith? Like ‘The Grouse’, the poem about this was excluded from the published version of Birthday Letters. It tells of how Ted was a little envious of the sexual freedom of his colleagues in the relaxed college world of the late Fifties. Sylvia was keeping him on a tight leash, suffocating him under her bell jar. He began to fight for air, to ‘de-mesmerise’ himself, to ‘be normal’. This ‘shattered no glass’ – an allusion to the glass that Sylvia threw across the room at him, which so bizarrely refused to shatter but bounced back, hit her in the face and made her see stars. It did not shatter the glass, but it ‘almost / Shattered’ Sylvia. The poems tells of how his two pretty students arrived with their bottle of wine to celebrate the end of term, how he refused their offer, in the knowledge that Sylvia was ‘waiting / Aggrieved’, and of how ‘They walked with me – till you saw them.’ He ‘could not understand’ her ‘frenzy’.5 This was ‘the first’ in ‘a series of lessons’. He humoured Sylvia, nursed her, spoiled her ‘strange fits of possessive passion’ (a neat twist on Wordsworth’s ‘strange fits of passion’ in his ‘Lucy’ poem about his dead love). By doing all this, he ‘cultivated a monster’ or ‘released a monster’: ‘Yes, it was monstrous in you.’
So did the point of no return arrive when Sylvia’s rages became uncontrollable – perhaps when she smashed the mahogany-topped table that was a Farrar family heirloom (‘The Minotaur’)? Or did it occur on the April evening in 1960, just after the birth of Frieda, when Ted walked over Chalk Farm Bridge, ‘slightly light-headed / With the lack of sleep and the novelty’, and was offered a fox cub for a pound and did not buy it? Was that the failed test?
If I had grasped that whatever comes with a fox
Is what tests a marriage and proves it a marriage –
I would not have failed the test. Would you have failed it?
But I failed. Our marriage had failed.6
As Heaney recognised, these lines have great poetic power. Biographically, however, this is nonsense: their marriage had not failed by the time of Frieda’s birth. They were often blissfully happy in Chalcot Square. How could their marriage possibly have failed when eight months after this they wrote an ecstatic and hilarious joint Christmas card to Sylvia’s undergraduate friend from Smith, Ann Davidow, in which Sylvia tells of how Ted ‘got a wicked telegram from ABC television this morning (heaven knows how they knew where he was) asking him to appear as poet-of-the-year’ (he refused) and Ted jokes about the three kings on the card holding caskets of ‘petrol for their vespa’, ‘fuel of brandy’ and cocaine, before signing off by saying that he would leave space for Sylvia to tell her ‘how surpassingly indescribably dissectingly unearthingly collapsingly bisectingly beautiful her daughter is, because it is all true and needs to be told’?7
Symbolically, the failure of the fox-cub test is a retrospective version of the choice described in the letter to Olwyn. For Ted, ever since ‘The Thought-Fox’, a fox had meant the gift of poetry. The rejection of the fox cub signals that the choice to have children was a rejection of a life devoted wholly to poetry. It is the ‘pram in the hall’ argument.
Then again, could the crack in the marriage be dated to the time when Ted started suffering from fibrillations of the heart, while digging the garden at Court Green (‘The Lodger’)? Was that some kind of sign that his heart was not really in the marriage?
The most honest answer in Birthday Letters to the question of when and why it all went wrong is the poem called simply ‘Error’, which is filled with totemic images out of literary romance:
I brought you to Devon. I brought you into my dreamland.
I sleepwalked you
Into my land of totems. Never-never land:
The orchard in the West.
That was the beginning of the end: taking Sylvia away from the city, from the cocktail parties at Faber, the dinner-parties with Mr Eliot, the BBC, the theatre, the cinema and the art galleries, the buzz around the publication of her work. Trying to make her live his dream, burying her in the country, taking her to the ‘vicarage rotting like a coffin, / Foundering under its weeds’, where she would stare at her blank sheet of paper, silent at her typewriter, ‘listening / To the leaking thatch drip, the murmur of rain, / And staring at that sunken church’.8 That was the error.
Ted’s imagining of a rural idyll came from the loveliest poem in the English language, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’, in which a poet in a peaceful cottage in a village in the West Country watches lovingly over his infant by moonlight as ‘eave-drops’ fall from the ‘thatch’.9 The line in ‘Error’ about the dank and depressing drip from the thatch of Court Green negatively rewrites this image in recognition that the idyll had turned into a nightmare. In sharp contrast to Coleridge’s inspirational Nether Stowey, Mr and Mrs Hughes’s North Tawton has become a place where the entire world seems to come to an end in a field of bullocks ‘Huddled behind gates, knee-deep in quag, / Under the huddled, rainy hills’.10 Court Green: they thought it was paradise, but it had become hell.
Sylvia’s own analysis of the reasons for the end of the marriage was expressed most clearly in letters to her dear friend and sophomore roommate Marty Brown, written in the last few weeks of her life. Her reasoning is remarkably similar to Ted’s in his half-acknowledgement of the state of affairs in his letter to Gerald and his explicit account in the letter to Olwyn. First, there was the fact that fame had changed him: ‘he lives just for himself without a care in the world in a Soho flat, flying to Spain on holiday and so on and universally adored. You have no notion how famous he is over here now.’11 And secondly, there was his desire for freedom from family ties: ‘Ted’s suddenly decided he doesn’t want any children, home, responsibility etc.’12
Soon after the break-up, she anticipated his poem ‘Error’: burial in the country was a dream for him, but a kind of death for her. To her friend Clarissa Roche, she wrote, ‘I loved London life and did not want to leave – coming to the country was his idea, his “dream”, as he said. I guess he thought we could live on potatoes and apples.’13 And to her mother, ‘I miss brains, hate this cow life, am dying to surround myself with intelligent, good people. I’ll have a salon in London.’14 Back amid the life and culture of the city in December 1962, she felt like kissing the paintings in the art galleries.
Though Assia may have been what a psychoanalyst would call the ‘presenting problem’, behind which there were deeper reasons for the breakdown of the marriage, had she not entered their lives Sylvia would not have thrown Ted out and he would not have stayed away. On the whole, a man does not leave his wife, home and two tiny children unless he has another woman’s bed to go to. From the point of view of Ted’s desire to live alone and do exactly what he pleased, it was advantageous that Assia was married to someone else. An affair was exciting and carried none of the drudgery or the compromises necessary when two people live together.
There is a degree of truth in Ted’s claim that he had done his best work early in the marriage, though he should have said in the first three years, not the first two. Lupercal, the dazzling product of those years, was dispatched to Faber and Faber just after their third anniversary and just before they set off on their journey across America. By the time they were on the road in early July 1959, it was in the admiring hands of T. S. Eliot. Only one poem was added after Yaddo. But he did also write good poems in Chalcot Square and Court Green. They were not collected in book form until Wodwo of 1967. The main difficulty in 1960–2 was not so much the drying up of poetry as the need to write plays and stories, mainly for broadcast, because the BBC was the best source of income. It was also the case that Ted was distracted from his adult work by his children’s writing. Sometimes, it wasn’t clear to him whether a particular poem was for adults or children. His collection The Earth-Owl and Other Moon-People, sent to Faber and Faber just as he was leaving his marriage, was submitted as a children’s book, moved to the adult list because some of its contents seemed rather grotesque and grown-up for children, then later returned to the roster of his children’s works.
The uncomfortable truth was that, since her breakthrough at Yaddo, Sylvia’s poetry had been getting better and better while Ted’s had remained more or less the same. This was hard for him to admit, but perhaps a subliminal reason for his moving out. The great irony of the next four months was that he achieved very little by way of advance: he continued busily with radio plays, including one called Difficulties of a Bridegroom, an inauspicious title at this time in his life. Sylvia, on the other hand, launched into the best writing of her life, arguably (and certainly in Ted’s opinion and Al Alvarez’s) the best poetry by any woman since Emily Dickinson (whose work Ted was really discovering at the time).
The parting of the ways was supposed to help Ted with his work, but in fact it helped Sylvia. And, of course, it was her anger at his behaviour that fuelled her imagination. 12 October 1962, ‘Daddy’: the fascist brute, the boot in the face and the marital words ‘I do’ spoken to a ‘model’ of the father who is ‘A man in black with a Meinkampf look’.15 How could Ted not see himself as the ‘man in black’ to whom Sylvia said ‘I do’ on Bloomsday 1956 and who lived with him for ‘Seven years, if you want to know’?
17 October 1962, ‘The Jailor’: ‘My night sweats grease his breakfast plate … I have been drugged and raped … I wish him dead or away … what would he / Do, do, do without me?’16 20 October 1962, ‘Fever 103°’: ‘Greasing the bodies of adulterers / Like Hiroshima ash’.17 21 October 1962, ‘Amnesiac’: ‘Name, house, car keys, / The little toy wife – / Erased, sigh, sigh … I am never, never, never coming home!’18 29 October 1962, ‘Nick and the Candlestick’: ‘The pain / You wake to is not yours.’19 Nick and Frieda were of course her prime concern. She kept herself cheerful through horseback riding and by writing to her mother about Nick cutting his first tooth, pushing around Frieda’s building blocks as he learned to crawl.
She worried about money and raged about Ted in this regard, but there were many times when she felt as he did: that, for the sake of their art, it was better for them to be without each other. ‘Living apart from Ted is wonderful – I am no longer in his shadow, and it is heaven to be liked for myself alone, knowing what I want.’20 She voiced this feeling on one of her trips to London in early November. The Irish fantasy behind her, she was looking for a place in the city. A dream came true when she discovered that a flat was available in a house with a blue heritage plaque on the façade. It was in Fitzroy Road, just round the corner from Chalcot Square. She had noticed it when living in London before, and had fantasised about moving into it: the great W. B. Yeats had lived there as a child. Was it not a sign that, having been to his tower at Ballylee, now she had the opportunity to commune with his poetic spirit? At some level, she must also have hoped that the lure of the shade of his beloved Yeats might bring back Ted.
She was still thinking about divorce, urged on by various female friends. By coincidence, she was asked to review for the New Statesman a forthcoming book on Lord Byron’s Wife. Her essay, filled with wit and praise, was published on 7 December 1962, under the headline ‘Suffering Angel’, three days before she moved with the children from Devon to London. The wronged but strong-minded wife of the handsome, famous, wildly promiscuous poet who has all London, and in particular all women, at his feet, and then the controversial, high-profile divorce case that brought exile and grief. Perhaps there was a lesson to be learned there. Divorce would have been an irreversible step. Perhaps she should wait it out. Various possibilities were opening up. She was seeing a lot of Al Alvarez. Ted invited her to bring the children for Christmas at the Beacon, but she declined. She offered herself to Alvarez on Christmas Eve instead.
After she moved to London in early December, it was much easier for Ted to see the children. Though he was giving everybody the Beacon as his postal address, he was spending most of his time in London. Initially, he had slept on the floors and sofas of friends. Then he was able to borrow a flat in Soho that Dido Merwin was selling for her mother. Then, some time after Sylvia moved to 23 Fitzroy Road, he found the little flat in Fitzrovia about which she would be so scathing in the letter to her college friend in which she also alluded to his holiday in Spain with Assia. The flat was a studio on Cleveland Street, north of Charlotte Street, just off the Tottenham Court Road, in a predominantly Greek and Cypriot area. It was ‘spic’ (clean), he told Olwyn, and well done up, a ‘bit like a hotel room, big desk, ground floor, gas fire, one room’, a little kitchen and a bigger bathroom than the one at Chalcot Square (a useful asset for lady guests). It had a phone.21
By the end of October, David and Assia were doing their best to repair their marriage. At least, he was. He would attentively open car doors and light cigarettes for her. They became ‘very lovey-dovey, arm in arm all the time’.22 They carried on through Christmas and into the New Year, pretending that nothing was happening. ‘She has been seeing H. regularly,’ Nathaniel Tarn noted early in January 1963, ‘and D. knows it, though they have stopped talking about it.’23 Tarn could not understand why Wevill had not kicked his wife out.
Ted Hughes was also seeing someone else.
Susan Alliston was born in London in 1937 and educated in a class of just four girls at Queen’s Gate School in South Kensington. Her classmate Vanessa Redgrave remembered that they ‘argued for hours over the meaning of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and the French symbolists that Sue was studying’.24 At a young age, she married an American called Clem Moore, who by strange Hughesian coincidence had been Warren Plath’s roommate at Harvard.25 In the late Fifties, Sue began work as a secretary at Faber and Faber, also serving as a reader for other publishers. In May 1960, a poem of hers called ‘St Martin’s Lane, London’ was published in America in the Nation.
Yes, and on the one hand were the jagged teeth of walls
And starred red paper screaming
Paper pasted with a host’s eye
Screaming where it hung like flesh,
Torn away by a demolition plan
They felled the bricks and dust
Streamed about them,
Rose from the rubble – inevitable ghost
Haunting their mouths with grit …26
Ted Hughes read and admired this and enquired about the author. He was told by someone connected with Faber that it was by ‘a gorgeous English girl with extraordinary hair’. Some time later, he met her in a lift at Faber and Faber. As he wrote in a brief introduction when he was hoping to get her poems published after her death: ‘It was one of those faces you do not forget. She was tall, and seemed pale, with a shoulder-length dense mane of slightly crinkly hair the colour and seemingly almost the texture of that dark-bronzed fine wire on electrical transformers. It stood out thickly like the mane on an ancient Egyptian figure.’ She spoke with ‘comic flair and zest’. There was ‘a disturbing blend of plangent resonance and aggressive edge’ in her voice. She passionately plunged herself into ‘situations and adventures and collisions’. Everything that she did, she did with her ‘whole excitable body’.27 She also had a dash of Welsh blood, which attracted him.
It was not until two years after reading the poem set in St Martin’s Lane that he discovered she was its author. He got to know her among his circle of friends who drank in the Lamb in Lamb’s Conduit Street, round the corner from Rugby Street. She had separated from Clem Moore and her constant companion was Tasha Hollis, daughter of White Russian émigré intellectuals. She too had recently separated from her husband. Hughes sensed that Sue ‘was searching for a new direction’: ‘She talked a good deal about poetry and continually promised to show me poems. But she seemed to write rarely and with little confidence. She preferred to dance, to eat curry, to drink beer, and to wallow in talk about the peoples and politics of the world. She read a lot of anthropology and spoke of becoming an anthropologist.’28 The latter interest was of course a Hughesian passion.
She eventually showed him a poem called ‘Samurai’, which astonished him with its power:
Aïe – my head is severed
By the sword of a samurai.
Catch it before it falls! …
I go down, down.
A noble swipe, Jap!
Carry my scalp.
My hands, twitching, feel
the three elegant arches of your feet.29
On the basis of poems such as this, Ted would one day write admiringly of the ‘active, down-to-earth, almost aggressive streak’ that gave vitality to Sue’s work. Her poems were ‘sinewy, intricate and real’, with ‘nimble penetration, nightmare, and a weird lucidity’. ‘Even at their most abstract’, he argued, they had ‘the concreteness of an actual voice’. One senses that he is remembering her voice even as he writes this: ‘Behind them we feel her rich insecurity, turmoil, a person plunged in the open world.’30
From 1956 until the summer of 1962, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath lived and worked together with utter loyalty and extreme intensity. They wrote joint letters to friends and families, they wrote poems and prose on the reverse side of sheets filled with drafts of the other’s writing. They were inseparable. One of the reasons why there are so few letters between them is that they hardly ever spent a day or a night apart. Plath’s temperament, exacerbated by her depression, made her possessive and jealous. It is hardly surprising that, having cut himself free by going to live a single life in London, and with Assia only available for hasty assignations, Ted enjoyed flirting with other attractive women among his circle of literary friends in the Lamb.
According to Susan Alliston’s journal, her first conversation with Ted, other than the brief encounter in the lift at Faber, took place on 1 November 1962, a fortnight after he had packed his things and left Court Green. This was the moment when David Wevill was doing his best to re-woo Assia. The banter in the pub included an exchange in which Ted said, ‘Marriage is not for me – nor you, I think.’ Sue replied, ‘Perhaps at forty,’ a statement which takes on sad irony in the light of subsequent history.31 Clearly Ted was signalling that, having just left an all-consuming marriage, not to mention two young children who still held his heart, he did not want to commit to anyone else. Assia, he told Susan some months later, was the most physically attractive person he had ever met (everyone who encountered Assia agreed upon her phenomenal sexual charisma). But he was unwilling to give himself wholly to her as he had to Sylvia. He needed the escape valve of other company.
For Ted Hughes, who was always Philip Larkin’s mighty opposite, sexual freedom began in 1962, between the Chatterley trial and the Beatles’ first single, ‘Love Me Do’. For him, Sue Alliston and her flatmate Tasha Hollis were embodiments of the bohemian life he was ready to embrace. Not feeling the loyalty towards the still-married Assia that he had for so long felt towards Sylvia, he was determined to enjoy the vitality of these equally beautiful but less intense and demanding young women. In January and early February, he saw as much of Sue as of Assia.
But he had not given up on Sylvia either. In early December, when she was in town making plans for Fitzroy Road, they went out to dinner with Eric White, the head of the Poetry Book Society, at a restaurant called L’Epicure in Dean Street. They ate beef stroganoff and got drunk on red wine. After saying goodbye to Eric at midnight, Ted and Sylvia walked round and round Soho Square, talking and talking. In ‘Soho Square’, a long poem about that night, drafted and redrafted on numerous occasions, but finally omitted from Birthday Letters, Ted read the moment as a precious opportunity: ‘This was an invitation to the angel / Of reconciliation between us.’
Sylvia accused him of having an affair with Dido Merwin as well as Assia. Wasn’t he living in her flat? He assured her that Dido was the last person he would take to bed. Then the floodgates opened. Sylvia’s words of accusation ‘stumbled’ tipsily out, her defensive ‘front’ collapsing. Then her ‘tears gushed’, her face melted. It was like a bursting of the dam that had been holding everything in for months, a release of ‘dreadful abandon’ – abandon, such a potent word in the context of his departure from the marital home. She cried ‘like a child who had become / The river-bed of infinite crying’. It was as if she had ‘found the truth’ and the truth was nothing but tears. He put his arm around her and tried to calm her. Her body crumpled under the support of his arm. He ‘hung on’, out of his depth. He could not ‘check’ her ‘torrent of grief’, could not ‘escape it, or see any way out of it’. The railings and doorways of Soho Square spun dizzily past: in later years, he would go back and examine ‘it all closely’, note it ‘detail by detail, blankly’, like ‘a murderer listening’ for the ghost of his victim (one version of the poem was called ‘The Ghost in Soho Square’). Everything that they ‘had shared’, the seven years since Falcon Yard, ‘Came adrift in the flood’ and poured over them, Sylvia crying in great waves, a ‘drowning vision’ of their ‘whole life’, the pair of them clinging to each other in the wreckage.32
The time reached two in the morning and Soho Square, in the middle of heaving London, was deserted. There wasn’t even a policeman or a prostitute (the usual denizens of Soho) in sight. Ted took the plunge and invited Sylvia into Dido Merwin’s mother’s flat. He hoped that she might sleep. But the overwhelming flood of Sylvia’s emotion could not be stopped. They had a night of blazing anger and sorrow, and perhaps love, much to the annoyance of the neighbours. Then came ‘the bitter care’, at the top of Sylvia’s voice, the ‘Volcanic’ emotion that she could not control. The people in the flat beneath banged on the ceiling to no effect. The screaming went on, Ted rolling beneath it all,
A boulder, insensate, irrelevant,
While that tidal wave, that eruption
From your childhood, swamped and buried our world.33
Emotionally, poetically, perhaps erotically, it was a climax. It was his chance to ‘launch an ark’, but he did not take it. They parted in the morning.
One cold December day, after Sylvia and the children had moved to the Yeats flat in London, Ted drove down to Court Green and back, braving the icy 200 miles each way on the A30, sliding at ‘Twenty miles an hour’ through ‘The worst snow and freeze-up for fifteen years’. He dug potatoes from beneath snow and straw, gathered apples from the store in the courtyard. Victorias and fat Bramleys for cooking, Pig’s Nose Pippins for eating. It was twilight by then. He crept through the house, feeling like a ghost or an intruder. He looked at each thing, as if for the last time: the living room, his and Sylvia’s bedroom, which they had painted red, their books and ‘white-painted bookshelves’, a battered old desk he had bought for £6 and a ‘horse-hair Victorian chair’ that had been an even greater bargain (five shillings). The house was made ‘newly precious’ by the thought of Sylvia’s ‘lonely last weeks there’. How clean she had kept it, despite her sorrows. Court Green was like a sealed casket, from which the treasure was already lost. He said goodbye to the house and crawled back through the night, along the ice-treacherous A30. He took the bag of potatoes and the bag of apples to Fitzroy Road for Sylvia and the children.34
Ted Hughes said that he visited Sylvia Plath in Fitzroy Road almost daily in the last weeks of her life, taking the children for walks or to the zoo in the mornings, and talking to Sylvia, comforting her, in the evenings. Sylvia said that he came ‘once a week like a kind of apocalyptic Santa Claus’.35 The truth was somewhere between the two. When a marriage breaks down, the truth is usually somewhere between the two competing narratives of despair and blame, guilt and self-justification, confrontation and compromise. When only one partner is left to tell the story, it is more difficult to balance the narrative. There have been many tellings of the last days of Sylvia Plath. What follows is Ted’s telling, in his makeshift journal, in the immediate aftermath.36
On Sunday 3 February, Sylvia called to ask him to go over and have lunch with her. He was supposed to be at the BBC for a recording. He told her he would get to Fitzroy Road at two o’clock in the afternoon. Because of retakes and so forth, he was forced to send a BBC messenger to tell her that he could not be there for another hour. He arrived at ten past three. She had cooked meatloaf. They had their ‘pleasantest’ and ‘most friendly open time’ since the break-up. Sylvia read her most recent poems aloud. Ted thought her voice was ‘stronger, calmer’. She seemed ‘more whole and in better shape than at any time since she came to London’. They ‘planned’, they ‘conspired’. When he played with Frieda, ‘she wept’. He ‘held them both’ and Sylvia wept. She continually repeated that sooner or later he would be bound to desire someone else, but he denied this completely. For the last few days he had been calling everybody Sylvia. He had been wanting ‘to turn back but not knowing how to stay out of the old trap’. He told her that he wanted to take up their old life, ‘but that it had to be different’. He ‘couldn’t be a prisoner’. He also told her that he thought she was ‘strengthening in her independent life’. He was thrilled that her writing was taking off again. He gently suggested that her work was ‘disabled’ when she saw too much of him. It would not be good for her work if ‘her centre of gravity’ returned to him. She promised to visit him on Thursday night. He stayed till two o’clock in the morning.
On the Monday lunchtime, she telephoned. Her tone had changed completely. He had to swear to quit the country within a fortnight. He was ‘ruining her life’ by living in London. She could not stand hearing all the gossip about him. He asked who was gossiping. She refused to tell him. She was overwrought, all the rebuilding of the previous day having vanished. He told her that he could not possibly leave England. He was broke and where would he go? She made him promise. Finally he said he would go, but that he did not see how he could. Sounding ‘terribly excited’, she said that she wanted him ‘never to see her again’. He promised to leave as soon as he could.
On the Wednesday, he saw Assia. She told him that Sylvia had told her friend Gerry Becker all about their affair and the end of the marriage. She was putting about a story that Ted had deserted her in Devon, and left her with no money. Ted wrote Sylvia a note to tell her that she must stop spreading lies. If necessary, he would threaten Becker with a solicitor’s letter. He took the note round to Fitzroy Road. Sylvia begged him not to do anything drastic; she couldn’t help what people said. But it was obvious to him that she had been spreading the rumours. They talked again about moving to Yorkshire and she kept asking him if he ‘had faith in her’, which seemed ‘new and odd’.
The next morning she telephoned, ‘freshly upset’. She came round to his little Cleveland Street flat for the first and last time. One moment she was telling him in no uncertain terms to leave England forthwith. The next she was telling him the exciting news that she had been asked to go on the prestigious radio programme Critics on Sunday (a weekly review of the latest offerings in the arts). Did he have faith that she would have the confidence to do it? They talked for a long time. He wondered if one reason she had come was in order to check out his flat. She noticed everything, even the fact that he had a new edition of Shakespeare. When she left in the afternoon, things were still in the air: was he to go abroad immediately or were the two of them to go to Yorkshire? Plans for reunion in one breath, demands for permanent separation in the next: it was this volatility and unpredictability that made Ted doubt whether he could go to back to life with Sylvia.
He wrote a poem about this Thursday visit, the last time he saw her face to face for any length of time. It was published in Birthday Letters as ‘The Inscription’. It describes her contradictory demands – Yorkshire together versus abroad alone – and her inquisitive inspection of the flat. Its bed, its telephone (‘she had that number’). But the main focus is on the edition of Shakespeare. In the poem, it is his old red Oxford edition, the one that she had partially shredded, back in the days when ‘happiness’ seemed ‘invulnerable’, when he was late coming back from his meeting with Moira Doolan of the BBC. Now the book is ‘Resurrected’. What the poem does not say is that it was actually a different Shakespeare, a new one. Given to him by Assia, with a loving inscription. The poem also reports an exchange in the course of the conversation that always haunted him, because these were among their last words. The painful memory is distanced into the third person: ‘Yes, yes. Tell me / We shall sit together this summer / Under the laburnum. Yes, he said, yes yes yes.’37
The next day, Friday, at about half past three in the afternoon a letter came from her. She had posted it that morning, thinking he would get it on Saturday, but the London post was so efficient that it arrived the day it was posted. ‘It was a farewell love-letter, two sentences. She was going off into the country, and intended never to see me again. Very ambiguous.’
He went straight to Fitzroy Road. Sylvia was ‘there alone, tidying the place up’. Ted was ‘upset and crying’: ‘What did she mean, what the hell was going on?’ Sylvia was ‘very cool and hostile’. She ‘Took the note, burned it carefully in the ash-tray’ and told him ‘to go’. He ‘could not get her to talk’. She had a bag packed. It was a long time before he found out where she had gone. Later that evening, she returned to her friends, Gerry and Jill Becker, with whom she had been staying in order to get some help with the children. She remained with them all weekend, until Gerry took her and the children home to Fitzroy Road on the Sunday night.
Ted spent the weekend with Sue. On the Saturday night, Sylvia phoned him at his flat in Cleveland Street. Sue heard her voice. Early on the Sunday morning, she phoned again. She did not know that Sue was there with him. Sue wrote in her diary the next day:
Ted leaned over the telephone, saying ‘Yes, yes’ – being non-committal, saying ‘Take it easy Sylvie’. He came back to bed, turned his back, clasped his head in his arms, ‘God, God’, he said. And said how she seemed drugged or drunk and wanted him to take her away somewhere. ‘But if I go back, I die’, he said. And he starts talking about his family: the uncle forced to marry a cripple out of loyalty & also ‘£2000 on marriage the legacy is,’ says her mother. The one who hanged himself. How they thought Sylvia like this a bit – grasping, destructive.38
Ted and Sue spent the Sunday together: ‘That day – beautiful. All day freely an[d] lot in between and the need of company in the evening. The coffee drinking and then to Tasha and Aant [a Dutch friend] and then he reads my poems, edits “Hill behind Tunis” and we buy wine and go to David [Ross]’s and Gill [Preston]’s. And he tells his poems of moon animals and plants.’39
But they did not want another night of painful phone calls from Sylvia, so instead of returning to Cleveland Street, Ted took Sue to Dan Huws’s spare flat in 18 Rugby Street. He was back in the very house where he had first spent a night with Sylvia, seven years earlier. Sue wrote in her diary that they ‘slept like the dead, side by side on this narrow bed’. There was ‘A great tendresse in the morning’, by which she presumably meant gentle lovemaking. Then Ted drove her to work.
At four in the afternoon, her best friend Tasha called. Sue’s ex-husband Clem had rung to say that Sylvia was dead. Various people had received telegrams from Ted saying ‘Sylvia dead’ and giving details of the funeral. It would be in Yorkshire in exactly a week’s time. Sue sent a telegram to Ted, saying ‘Sorry sorry sorry if I can do anything’. She rang Clem, but knew that it was wrong to probe. The following morning, she was frightened. She was worried that Ted might not be OK. She called Al Alvarez, who knew the news but had not seen him. Alvarez said that maybe they should all get together later in the week. Desperate to see Ted, she went round to Fitzroy Road for the first time. He wasn’t there, but she noted that it was a ‘nice house’. Later in the afternoon, he rang. He told her everything. She said that she would go to the funeral. ‘She’s free,’ she said. ‘Yes,’ replied Ted, ‘but O God.’40 Than Minton, one of their friends, remembered her walking towards him as he stood on the corner of Lamb’s Conduit Street near their favourite pub. She was screaming, ‘Sylvia is dead, Sylvia is dead.’41
Thinking back on the phone call and the chain of events, the full truth dawned on Sue: ‘We slept while she died in each others arms.’42
Ted parked his Morris Traveller on the north side of the Euston Road and walked over to Cleveland Street. Discoloured snow had been banked by the roadside for weeks. He went into his ground-floor flat, ‘filled with snowlit light’. He lit his fire. He got out his paper and had just started to write when the phone rang, like ‘a jabbing alarm of guilt’. He imagined that it had been ringing all night – Sylvia calling from the phone booth on the corner of Primrose Hill. This would probably be her again. The voice at the other end was, what: calm? quiet? – or crisp, yes, that was the tone. The voice of someone used to delivering bad news. It announced: ‘Your wife is dead.’43
He walked the short distance to University College Hospital, where he went into the morgue and formally identified the body. Then he sent telegrams to everybody he could think of and a short letter to Olwyn in Paris, telling her that Sylvia had gassed herself at about six o’clock in the morning on Monday 11 February. ‘She asked me for help, as she so often has,’ he wrote. ‘I was the only person who could have helped her, and the only person so jaded by her states and demands that I could not recognize when she really needed it.’44
Her GP, John Horder, who examined the body at 10.30 and then phoned Ted, concluded that the time of death was probably closer to four o’clock in the morning, the low point in the body’s circadian rhythm. Sylvia had been ill with a virus and struggling with depression. Horder had recently prescribed her some new anti-depressants. He felt that she was responding well, apparently understanding her struggle against the suicidal depression and faithfully reporting any side-effects. But response to such drugs takes about two weeks. He was worried about her, and had arranged for a live-in nurse. She was the one who arrived for her first morning at 9 a.m. that Monday and discovered the body, and the children, who were cold but safe. Looking back, Horder came to the conclusion that Sylvia ‘had reached the dangerous time when someone with suicidal tendencies is sufficiently roused from disabling lethargy to do something about it’.45
The coroner’s inquest recorded a verdict of ‘Carbon Monoxide Poisoning (domestic gas) whilst suffering from depression’.46 Sylvia had taped up the kitchen and bedroom doors, and placed towels underneath, to stop the gas from spreading through the rest of the flat. Then she had placed her cheek on a kitchen cloth folded neatly on the floor of the oven and turned on the taps of the cooker. The bedroom window was wide open and she had left bread and milk by Frieda and Nick’s high-sided cots.
Ted said farewell to Sylvia’s body one more time, in the funeral parlour, where he was accompanied by Al Alvarez and another friend, the Australian painter Charles Blackman.47 The following Sunday, Alvarez published four of her poems in the Observer, together with a brief announcement of her death. He described her as the most gifted woman poet of the age and wrote that the loss to literature was ‘inestimable’.48
On the morning of Monday 18 February 1963, Jill Becker and her husband Gerry, with whom Sylvia had spent her last weekend, took the train to Yorkshire for the funeral. Aunt Hilda’s daughter Vicky ferried them, and other mourners, from Hebden Bridge railway station up the hill to the dark stone village of Heptonstall. Over tea and sandwiches at the Beacon, Edith Hughes asked Jill about her friendship with Sylvia. ‘We all loved her, you know,’ said Edith. Bill Hughes was silent. There was a short service in the gloomy church a few hundred yards further up the hill from the house. ‘For a few moments,’ Jill Becker remembered, ‘sunlight came through a stained-glass window, enriching the yellow in it.’49 They followed the coffin out to the exposed graveyard on the hillside, with its view away to the moor. It had been the worst winter for a generation. Even down in London, pipes had frozen and snow had been banked in the street for weeks. The grave was ‘a yellow trench in the snow, its banked-up mud the same colour as the stained glass’. When the rites were complete, they all walked away. ‘I’ll stay here alone for a while,’ said Ted.50
They went to a private upper room in a pub in the village, about fourteen of them, mostly Ted’s friends and relatives, though Warren Plath and his wife Margaret had flown over from America. According to Jill Becker, at various times Ted said, ‘Everybody hated her’ (‘I didn’t,’ Jill replied), ‘It was either her or me,’ ‘She made me professional,’ and ‘I told her everything was going to be all right. I said that by summer we’d all be back together at Court Green’ – which is indeed what he had said during that conversation in his Cleveland Street flat eleven days before.51
On the cover of one of the numerous recycled school exercise books filled with drafts towards the poetry sequence that was eventually published as Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes wrote the title ‘That Sunday Night’.52 Inside, there are just four poems. The first begins: ‘What did happen that Sunday night? / Your last night?’ It tells the story of Sylvia’s farewell letter, how it arrived on the day that it was sent, thus throwing her plans, and of how she burnt it before his eyes. On the next page, the poem is redrafted and expanded. This time, he tells of how he spent the weekend following that last brief encounter in Fitzroy Road. The Saturday and Sunday represented a hiatus, a time taken out from the calendar of ordinary life, hours stolen from some other life. Into the gap came the drive of his love-life (‘My numbed love-life’), in which he found himself pulled by the magnetic force of ‘Two mad needles’. These compass-needles then become the sewing needles of ‘two women’, obsessively performing their own selves by sewing colourful tapestries made from his own ‘nerves’. They are like classical Fates, Norns or perhaps tricoteuses at the guillotine of his reputation. They are, presumably, Assia Wevill and Susan Alliston. That weekend it was Susan.
He then tells of how, not knowing why, he took Susan to 18 Rugby Street and made love to her in ‘our wedding bed’ – a bed in which he had not lain since his wedding night with Sylvia. There is denial in the phrase ‘not knowing why’: it must have been to escape the telephone in Cleveland Street. The poem turns on the paradox that he was hiding from Sylvia in the very bed in which he had consummated his love for her. There is poetic licence here: on this occasion, he was actually in Dan Huws’s father’s other flat in the house. Later, Susan would live in 18 Rugby Street, and it would be from there that she would be taken to die, in the very same hospital where he had gone to formally identify Sylvia’s cold body.
Some elements of ‘That Sunday Night’, or ‘February 10th’ as he called it in the exercise book’s brief contents list, would eventually be worked into ‘18 Rugby Street’, a last-minute addition to the typescript of Birthday Letters that he sent to Faber and Faber a year before his death. The bulk of it, with the final title ‘Last Letter’, would lie among Hughes’s unpublished papers for more than ten years after his death. Only in 2010 would readers discover the words with which Dr Horder broke the news on the telephone when Ted was back in his Cleveland Street studio flat on the Monday morning. As published, the closing lines of the poem imagined the doctor’s voice as a ‘weapon’ or perhaps ‘a measured injection’. Just four words, spoken without emotion, penetrating deep into his ear: ‘Your wife is dead.’53
The remainder of the ‘That Sunday Night’ exercise book contains ‘The Gypsy’, which did appear in Birthday Letters (the one about the ominous words spoken in Reims), the immensely moving ‘Soho Square’, and finally a short poem called ‘Walking in the Snow Alone’. Although there was a telephone in Ted’s flat in 110 Cleveland Street – which may have rung unanswered on the night of 10–11 February, because he was in Rugby Street – there was not one in Fitzroy Road. Sylvia had been phoning the Cleveland Street number all weekend. Ted did not know that some of the calls were from the Beckers’ place. He assumed that, each time she called, Sylvia had to put on her long black coat and walk ‘in the snow alone / Along Fitzroy Road’. She would have had to turn ‘right down / Down Primrose Hill’, cross the road and pass a sinister gateway ‘At the North West corner of Primrose Hill’ before reaching the telephone box. He could only assume that on her last night she had made that walk again, perhaps repeatedly, on the slippery pavement in the dark, in the depth of the coldest winter in living memory. It was 6 degrees below zero centigrade in London that Sunday night. The imagery, partially incorporated into the version of the scene that was eventually published in ‘Last Letter’, is some of Ted’s most haunting:
You walked it alone, over the packed snow,
Between the barricades of snow
Coarsened to dirty ice, with frozen slush,
You walked it in your long black woollen coat –
How many times?
With your plait coiled up at the back of your head, you walked it
Alone. That is the point. I see you
In the dark,
Walking it – alone.54
That is what he saw in his imagination, and what he heard was the sound of the telephone ringing and ringing in the empty Cleveland Street studio flat as he and Sue slept in each other’s arms in Rugby Street.55
Ted had been reading Sylvia’s last poems. Al Alvarez had been publishing some of them. They both knew that her art underwent an extraordinary transformation into greatness in her last months. The separation had liberated her voice, not Ted’s.
Early in 1963, he seems to have made a decision. At Yaddo, he had helped Sylvia to advance. Lowell’s Life Studies and Roethke’s example had helped too. But he had resisted ‘confessional’ poetry himself. The style was too American for him. Now, though, seeing what Sylvia was achieving by turning her own life, his own marriage, into poetry of such power, he thought again. Maybe it was time to follow her example, shattering as poems such as ‘Daddy’ were for him to read. Maybe he should write more directly about his own experience.
Three weeks before Sylvia’s suicide, his radio play Difficulties of a Bridegroom had been broadcast on the BBC Third Programme. That same week, he wrote to Olwyn in Paris.56 He enclosed two new poems. Though he called them mere ‘bagatelles’, they actually represented his own breakthrough into a new voice. A more personal voice: they were his first truly confessional poems, written under the influence of Sylvia. He worked at them repeatedly.
One of them was a poem of life, ‘Frieda’s Early Morning’. After numerous redrafts and extensive revision,57 it was eventually published in Wodwo as ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’. It beautifully combines Ted’s own experience as a watchful father with a voice learned from Sylvia’s lovely mothering poems ‘Morning Song’ and ‘Nick and the Candlestick’. ‘Moon!’ baby Frieda suddenly cries. ‘Moon! Moon!’ And ‘The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work // That points at him amazed.’58 As so often, Ted is at once personal and literary: even as he turns a real paternal experience into poetry, the image of father and infant and the first word ‘moon’ is a reprise of Coleridge carrying his little child out to greet the moon in ‘The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem’, a companion piece to ‘Frost at Midnight’.
The other piece sent to Olwyn was a poem of death. It was called ‘Uncle A’. It begins: ‘My uncle made of catapult rubber hung by the neck’. It calls the family suicide ‘A mystery’. It fondly remembers Uncle Albert being able to ‘turn a somersault on a hearth-rug / Dangle his entire weight from any one finger and do pull-ups’. It ends: ‘His wife sold all his clothes before he was buried.’59
Immediately after his very last conversation with Sylvia, the phone call when he was in bed with Sue Alliston on the morning of Sunday 10 February 1963, which he had ended by saying ‘Take it easy Sylvie,’ he had spoken to Sue of family troubles as well as marital ones. Uncle Albert, the subject of this poem, written just three weeks before, was still very much on his mind: ‘The one who hanged himself’. The news of Sylvia’s suicide came twenty-four hours after he had spoken of Albert to Sue.
It was more than twenty years before he published this poem, much expanded and revised as a tender elegy. It was called ‘Uncle Albert’s Suicide’ in manuscript but ‘Sacrifice’ in print. In early 1963, Ted Hughes was on the brink of finding a quiet, touching, cathartic and elegiac voice by way of a poem about a family suicide. But how could he pursue such a line after Sylvia’s suicide? How could he dare to trespass on the territory of the typescript of poems that she had left on her desk in 23 Fitzroy Road? His confessional voice would be silenced, or at least heavily disguised, for a full decade.