Intellectual Equals: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

The Meeting

And your face
A rubbery ball of joy
Round the African-lipped, laughing, thickly
Crimson-painted mouth. And your eyes
Squeezed in your face, a crush of diamonds,
Incredibly bright, bright as a crush of tears
That might have been tears of joy, a squeeze of joy.
You meant to knock me out
With your vivacity. I remember
Little from the rest of that evening.
– St. Botolph’s, Ted Hughes

On the night of February 25, 1956, a party celebrating the launch of St. Botolph’s Review was held at Cambridge University. It was named after the nearby church, where Ted Hughes and Lucas Myers, the magazine’s founders, rented rooms. They decided to host it at the Women’s Union office on campus because it was sure to bring female students into attendance. It would be the first and only edition of the literary magazine published, but that night was made immortal by the fateful meeting of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.

Hughes had just graduated from Cambridge with a degree in anthropology. Plath was there on a Fulbright scholarship. They were both aspiring and already talented poets. She had read a copy of St. Botolph’s Review earlier that day and recognized the name Ted Hughes when he was pointed out to her. At the sight of him, her first words were, “I did it, I,” quoting from one of his poems she had memorized.

Astonished and flattered, he stole her to a quieter room, away from his own girlfriend and Plath’s date. They talked for a while, and when he leaned in for a kiss, she turned her head and bit him on the cheek. He pocketed her headband as a promise for a future meeting.

I slid away with my girl-friend. Nothing
Except her hissing rage in a doorway
And my stupefied interrogation
Of your blue headscarf from my pocket
And the swelling ring-moat of tooth-marks
That was to brand my face for the next month.
The me beneath it for good.

In her journal, she writes that she “shall never see him again” or “could never sleep with him.” This was the 1950s and while Plath had dated often, there was a Puritanism expected of her (as all women). Sex always came with guilt, and she had called herself, deprecatingly, “a drunken amorphous slut” having already had a number of boyfriends. She was 23, feeling the pressures of having to find and keep a man. Most women her age were married by then, not getting a second college degree at a university where male students outnumbered female students ten to one.

To her mother, she described Hughes as “the only man I’ve met yet here who’d be strong enough to be equal with.” Her last boyfriend, Richard Sassoon, who was also British and studied history and literature at Yale, was someone she also felt her intellectual equal. But he had been aloof regarding their relationship. Plath was in the throes of heartbreak when she met Hughes – a gifted poet with a mesmerizing voice, handsome and magnetic, a graduate of anthropology who knew ancient folklore and mythology by heart. His British upbringing in Yorkshire was filled with hunting and nature, adding to his allure. They wrote poems for each other and, despite rumors that he was “Cambridge’s biggest seducer,” Plath fell very much in love.

The Honeymoon

You were transfigured.
So slender and new and naked,
A nodding spray of wet lilac.
You shook, you sobbed with joy, you were ocean depth
Brimming with God.
You said you saw the heavens open
And show riches, ready to drop upon us.
Levitated beside you, I stood subjected
To a strange tense: the spellbound future.
– A Pink Wool Knitted Dress, Ted Hughes

Plath and Hughes were married four months later, on June 16 – the famed Bloomsday in Joyce’s Ulysses. Her mother, Aurelia, made her wedding dress, inspiring the poem by Hughes. It was the perfect summer for a honeymoon. They spent a week in Paris, then six weeks in Benidorm, Spain.

They rented quaint seaside villas with balconies where they could sit and write. In the mornings, she’d wake up to make coffee con leche and Ted’s brandy milk, go to the market and cook elaborate meals. Inspired, she wrote rough drafts for short stories in her journals. It was one of her happiest times – “Never in my life have I had conditions so perfect – a magnificent handsome brilliant husband, gone are those frayed days of partial ego-satisfaction of conquering slight men who fell easier and easier.”

The Poetry

Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
– The Colossus, Sylvia Plath

After Plath graduated from Cambridge, she moved back to Boston with Hughes. They got teaching jobs at Smith College and the University of Massachusetts. They had a small attic apartment with a corner writer’s space overlooking the rooftops and the river. Their lives were dominated by poetry. She was his muse, and he became her mentor. In the same way that Lee Krasner put aside her paintings to support Jackson Pollock’s, Plath took the role of Hughes’ secretary and literary agent.

She typed his poems, arranged them into a collection, and sent off the manuscript. The Hawk in the Rain won the Harper and Brothers First Publication Award, a major literary prize. It was judged by W.H. Auden, no less, and established Hughes’ reputation as a poet at once. T.S. Eliot himself recognized the artistry and encouraged one of Britain’s top publishers, Faber and Faber, to acquire it. It was hailed by the Poetry Book Society as one of the year’s best. To this day, it remains one of his most famous, most accomplished works.

In the meantime, Hughes would give Plath, directly and indirectly, subjects for her poetry. When she was livid or angry at him (at times even setting his papers on fire), he would tell her to channel those emotions into her writing.

In 1960, The Colossus and Other Poems was published. While the poems she wrote in Ariel right before her death would eclipse her other poetry, The Colossus is varied and genius. Odes to her dead father in The Beekeeper’s Daughter, lashes at her mother in The Disquieting Muses, premonitions of death in Suicide Off Egg Rock, metaphors for love and loneliness in Lorelei and Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond, all the essences of nature inspired by Hughes in Departure and Moonrise, and the frustrations of being a writer in the title poem, eerie in its clairvoyance – The Colossus and Other Poems was completely overlooked, and would not find much of an audience until after her death.

The Marriage

When I got off the train, expecting to find you
Somewhere down at the root of the platform,
I saw that surge and agitation, a figure
Breasting the flow of released passengers,
Then your molten face, your molten eyes
And your exclamations, your flinging arms
Your scattering tears
As if I had come back from the dead
– Fate Playing, Ted Hughes

When the excitement wore off, as usual with new lovers, the monotony of marriage set in. While Plath loved being Hughes’ wife, decorating the home, and preparing elaborate meals for him, soon, she began to feel resentful at having to do the housework, the shopping and the cooking while also working which left her little time to write. When the new school year came, they both turned down teaching contracts so they could focus on writing full-time.

As Hughes’ poetic career began to take off, he started to treat her more as a housewife, sometimes even berating her when the housework was incomplete. Plath would often succumb to depression and illness. So she decided to keep herself occupied with academics, taking a job at Harvard and attending a poetry workshop at Boston University.

Headed by Robert Lowell, Plath found the classes cathartic. Lowell himself had battled mental illness, wrote about it openly, and became a pioneer in the sub-genre of confessional poetry. There, she also met Anne Sexton, whose poetry described her bouts of bipolar depression, suicidal tendencies, and abuse of her own children. Plath found inspiration in their stories and styles of writing. Sexton would later go on to receive a Pulitzer for her poetry and then commit suicide in 1974 at the age of 45.

In 1959, Plath and Hughes returned to London. The following year, Plath gave birth to their daughter Frieda and afterward suffered from post-partum depression. The year after, she suffered a miscarriage, but it would become one of the most productive times in her writing. She received a contract for The New Yorker, one of her lifelong goals, won a Saxton Fellowship grant, and wrote The Bell Jar in just six months. Amidst a seemingly ordinary world of housework, marriage and children, Plath wrote what would become seminal pieces of Western literature.

When Plath became pregnant again, they decided to move to the countryside. They found a large ten-bedroom home in North Tawton, in southwest England. Originally built as a rectory, the Court Green house was bordered on one side by a graveyard. Plath and Hughes held interest in the mystics and found the open and quiet surroundings inspiring for their writing. When their son, Nicholas, was born, Hughes helped with caretaking to give Plath more time to write.

While they were productive times, their poetry reflected their inner moods. Plath wrote of loneliness and the trials of marriage, while Hughes wrote of death and having female adversaries.

The Affair

There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
– Daddy, Sylvia Plath

After settling in Court Green, Plath and Hughes had to sublet their London flat for the remainder of their lease. They found David and Assia Wevill, an attractive couple who worked in advertising. David was also an aspiring writer, and the Hughes would recommend him to their own contacts. They hosted dinners for one another and became friends.

Meantime, Hughes was complaining to his friends and family that he felt stifled in the marriage, and his writing was suffering for it. The darker turn of Plath’s mood and poetry coincided with this time and Hughes’ infidelities, though it’s hard to decipher what came first to cause their demise. And the more the jealous Plath accused him, the more he was driven to live up to the accusations. Women found Hughes irresistible, and he felt likewise. When Plath discovered that Assia had been calling on Ted, a fight ensued, and he moved out, all too gladly.

In a brief reconciliation in September 1962, Hughes planned a trip to Ireland with Sylvia. But after three days, Hughes said he was going hunting and never returned. Plath returned to Court Green alone. On October 1st, Hughes finally returned after spending two weeks with Assia in Spain (where he and Plath had honeymooned). He admitted to the ongoing affair, and once again, they separated.

The Suicide

Dying
Is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.
– Lady Lazarus, Sylvia Plath

Alone and isolated, Plath decided to leave Court Green for the winter. She returned to London with their children and moved into a flat once occupied by W.B. Yeats, one of her favorite poets. It was the worst winter London had seen in over 200 years. England was covered in snow for two months, the River Thames froze, slush piled up on the sidewalks, electricity went out, and stores ran out of candles. The cold and darkness worsened Plath’s disquiet and anxiety. She feared she would end up a single parent unable to care for her children. It was a sad, cold holiday spent with family friends without Hughes.

Driven by creative frenzy, it was also this time that Plath was her most productive. In the last few weeks of that winter, she often worked from seven to four and wrote two to three poems a day. Depression became her constant companion and anguish her best subject. Her poetry was a glimpse of a woman scorned and her descent into darkness.

In the early pre-dawn hours of February 11, 1963, Plath left milk and cookies in her children’s bedroom, sealed herself in the kitchen, turned on the gas stove, knelt down on the floor, rested her head in the oven, and never woke up.

The Aftermath

All round me that midnight’s
Giant clock of frost. And somewhere
Inside it, wanting to feel nothing,
A pulse of fever. Somewhere
Inside that numbness of the earth
Our future trying to happen.
I look up – as if to meet your voice
With all its urgent future
That has burst in on me. Then look back
At the book of the printed words.
You are ten years dead. It is only a story.
Your story. My Story.
– Visit, Ted Hughes

The collection of poems Plath wrote in her last months would be published posthumously and hailed as a masterpiece. Ariel was the culmination of a life lived in sadness and depression. In the title poem, she lets out a howl of blood and fury with its images of a “God’s lioness” and “black sweet blood mouthful shadows.” She writes of anger and adultery, death and killing in Rival, Cut, and Edge, her final poem.

All her life, Plath had been a perfectionist, confounded to the pressures of being a good daughter, a good student, a good wife, a good mother. Towards the end, she let loose her true self – a tortured soul, a brilliant mind, a woman far ahead of her time. Male artists had always been excused their infractions as byproducts of their genius. Since her suicide, Plath has been no less revered and mythologized.

Because there was no will, Hughes, as her husband, was left to be her literary executor. He destroyed some of her journals, rearranged some of her manuscripts, and refused to authorize biographies that paint him in a harsh light. A professor, translator, children’s writer and no less gifted poet, his life and career were overshadowed by Plath’s ghost.

To make matters worse, six years after her death, Assia Wevill, the woman who Hughes left Plath for, also killed herself. It was amidst another one of Hughes’ affairs, and she mimicked Plath in turning on the gas in her kitchen, but this time also taking her and Hughes’ daughter, four-year-old Shura, with her.

In March 1998, months before his death, Hughes published Birthday Letters. The collection of 88 poems – from three decades worth of manuscripts – transcends over their love and time together. It is a beautiful and heartbreakingly brilliant tribute, at long last, to Plath. It was also, in a way, the only time he ever “talked” publicly about the two of them.

The Inheritance

Your alarm clock, your new sentence
Tortured you, a cruelty computer
Of agony niceties, daily afresh –
Every letter a needle, as in Kafka.
While I, like a poltergeist fog,
Hung on you, fed on you – heavy, drugged
With your nightmares and terrors. Inside your Bell Jar
– 9 Willow Street, Ted Hughes

As mythologized, it wasn’t poetry, or the loneliness of a life in literature, or a broken heart, or Ted Hughes that killed Sylvia Plath. She already had a long history of depression, of self-mutilation, and attempted suicide.

In her early twenties, she was put through electro-shock treatments. ECT was common then to treat madness and depression. In some instances, it was used to simply “subdue” troubled or difficult women as punishment. Plath described the experience in detail in The Bell Jar, likening it to being electrocuted, and suffered nightmares from it throughout her life. After her attempted suicide in 1953, she was given insulin shock therapy, a coma-inducing treatment believed to treat schizophrenia at the beginning of the 20th century. She was also put on cocktails of antidepressants and sleeping pills to treat her moods. Doctors prescribed them easily. At the time of her death, codeine was available over the counter in London.

And only decades later would it surface that her paternal grandmother, Ernestine Plath, who had mysteriously vanished from family records after moving to the U.S. from Germany, had died at an Oregon hospital for the insane. Her daughter had once admitted to Plath’s mother that several female members of the family have been hospitalized for depression, but claimed, falsely, that they all made a recovery.

That this genetic predisposition was kept from Plath when it could’ve helped put her illness into context is part of the tragedy. In 2009, their son, Nicholas, also committed suicide, hanging himself in his home in Alaska. Like Plath, he battled depression throughout his life and was described as being absolutely brilliant in his field.

Simply put, it was depression that killed Sylvia Plath. And that kind of depression – a lethal mixture of genetics, a tortured and brilliant mind, the lasting effects of archaic treatments, a day-to-day cycle of barbiturates, the dreary London weather, the pressures of being a woman, and ultimately, yes, the lost of someone you love – can be unbearable.

The Ghost

Outside, onto the platform, in this dream
Which was the whole of London’s waking life.
I watched you move away, carried away
Northwards, back into the abyss
– The Offers, Ted Hughes

It isn’t just over her loved ones and family that Sylvia Plath left her mark and who’s had to live with her ghost. I am one of the countless readers whose lives and minds were forever changed by her writing. Her chronicle of her own experiences of mental illness and depression, which were taboo in her time, gave the rest of us something to relate to, which she didn’t have. I have read and reread her poetry, especially in my darkest times, to help pull me through. And I often wonder how much longer she might have lived, how much more literature she could have written if only she had found someone whose words might’ve done the same for her. She has been this constant presence in my mind that, in some ways, has saved and haunted me.

In one of the final poems Hughes published, The Offers, Plath comes to him in three separate dreams. In the first one, she ignores him from the underworld. In the second, she reminds him of their life together. Each one is a test, and in the third, she addresses him with a grave warning –