But she had lost her momentum. Ted, too, became restless. He developed an ear abscess, which caused pain, fever, and severe facial swelling. Sylvia endured another setback in early August when she learned that her manuscript had not won the Yale Younger Poets contest. John Hollander had won. For over two months she had fantasized about her own moment in the sun—the introduction by Auden, the ensuing New Yorker acceptances. She confided in her journal:. Now she would have to begin again.
By late August, Sylvia had begun counting down the days until they could leave the Cape. She felt lazy and unproductive, and hardly realized that she had experienced two creative breakthroughs. An image: weird, of another world, with its own queer habits, of mud, lumped, under-peopled with quiet crabs. To be published October 27, by Alfred A. Contact us at letters time. Sylvia Plath with her husband Ted Hughes in England, By Heather Clark. Plath typing in the backyard, Wellesley, Massachusetts, Hughes and Plath in Massachusetts, May 20, TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture.
We welcome outside contributions. In late , the couple bought Court Green, a sprawling thatched-roof house on a small estate in Devon, and settled in just in time for Plath to give birth to Nicholas in January The Hugheses had sublet their London flat to David and Assia Wevill, another literary couple though less accomplished. Then the fawning stopped. I am just desperate. The letters Plath wrote to Barnhouse would be her most revealing. When the existence of 14 surviving letters — long, detailed dispatches totaling about 18, words — was discovered last year, it warranted national media attention.
He tells me now it was weakness that made him unable to tell me he did not want children. The legal separation she insisted on in August and September — Hughes agreed to pay 1, pounds a year in maintenance — turned into a planned divorce by October. Hughes was speaking, specifically, about his relationship to Sylvia Plath. He understood that after his death the story of their marriage would belong to the cultural history of the twentieth century.
As he knew, the totality of his work contained a unique and poignant account of how they struggled together to become writers: what each gave, what each took; how their marriage floundered and their art did not. Her Husband threads together the story Hughes told and the history that surrounds the story. Drawing from his books and papers, it follows a single line of inquiry through the maze of Hughes's life as he enters into the partnership, struggles and prospers in it, loses the partner but not the relationship, and turns the marriage into a resonant myth.
Meeting Ted Hughes believed that destiny had singled him out to become the husband of Sylvia Plath. The date was Saturday, February 25, , under the sign of Pisces, in the zodiac; the place was Cambridge University, from which Hughes had graduated a year and a half earlier.
During the week he was living in a borrowed flat in London, working at a glamorous-sounding day job as a reader of fiction submissions at the film company J. Arthur Rank. But he continued to spend his weekends in Cambridge, hanging out with friends, mainly poets who were still enrolled at the university.
They were ambitious, idealistic, apprentice artists, and that winter Hughes joined them in putting together a very small, very literary magazine, St. Botolph's Review. One of the contributors, an American named Lucas Myers, lived in a repurposed chicken coop behind the rectory of St. Botolph's Church, off campus. His residence inspired the cheeky title these poets were ultra-anti-establishment.
Friends began peddling copies of St. Botolph's Review around the Cambridge colleges on publication day, spreading word that a launch party would be held at rooms in Falcon Yard that night. Sylvia Plath bought a copy from an American cousin of one of the poets, and he invited her to the launch. Plath accepted immediately; here was an opportunity she had been waiting for. She was studying literature at Cambridge on a two-year Fulbright Fellowship after graduating from Smith, a prestigious women's college in New England.
Her writing had won minor literary prizes in the United States and was beginning to appear in such American magazines as Harper's, Mademoiselle, The Nation, and Atlantic Monthly.
Arriving at Cambridge, she had quickly learned that the literary world was tightly networked in Britain; even the limpest student publications were scouted for new talent by London publishers, who were often themselves Cambridge graduates. She immediately began submitting work to college publications. In January, two of her poems had been printed in a little magazine called Chequer and not only published but, to her amazement, scoffed at, in a fierce little low-budget paper called Broadsheet, which was produced every two weeks on a mimeograph machine by some of the St.
Botolph poets. The men who reviewed Plath's poems disliked on principle the formal verse at which she was very skillful, and on principle they derided what they disliked.
The stapled pages of Broadsheet were read avidly by the local poets, and Plath was mortified at being so manhandled. This had been her first exposure to the blokishness of English literary culture.
What bothered her most, though, was that little refrain "fraud, fraud. Yet the critic's rhetoric gave her an opening. Did he want to see whether she was beautiful? She would introduce herself. She put on a pair of red party shoes and smoothed back her pageboy with a red hair band, then went to a bar with her date for the evening, where she fortified herself with several whiskeys.
But before getting high she had fortified herself another way: she had memorized some of the poems in St. The party was well under way by the time Plath arrived in Falcon Yard and climbed in her red shoes up the stairs to the Women's Union, where a jazzy combo hammered music into the babble of raised voices.
Plath started working the room, getting noticed. She immediately sought out the reviewer who had called her a fraud; he turned out to be a little chap, "frightfully pale and freckled," quite unimposing in person, after all Plath too judged poets by their looks. She cut in on men she wanted to dance with, bantering at the top of her lungs. At the end of the long hall, she spotted a good-looking fellow, and learned his name: Ted Hughes, one of the two poets whose work she had memorized that afternoon.
He caught her watching him and slouched across the room, staring into her eyes. She began yelling over the dance music, and he recognized that she was reciting lines from a poem he had written.
He shouted back, "You like? They sparred a bit, Plath nervy and exhilarated. He suddenly kissed her, hard, and she retaliated she bit him on the cheek until blood ran. He snatched off her hair band and her silver earrings, and walked out. Ted Hughes left the party with his current girlfriend.
He didn't know, yet, that the solar system had married him. But he was wearing a wedding ring of tooth marks, and for the next several weeks, one of his cheeks would display a scar as did one of hers, a scar just under her right eye, about which he would learn much more during the ensuing months. Hughes wasn't looking for a wife that night. Quite the contrary he was in a profound dither about where his life was heading.
At the time of his graduation from Cambridge, Hughes had decided somewhat impulsively that he would apply for immigration to Australia, where his older brother, Gerald, had settled.
The Australian government provided free passage to British men who agreed to work there; Hughes envisioned taking up a life of shooting and fishing with Gerald, an avid sportsman.
But Hughes deferred his application for the allotted period of two years he was in no hurry. In March maybe between jobs he suddenly wrote to Gerald that he was coming "without delay," but again he delayed. By February , the deferral period was almost up, so Hughes reactivated the application, hoping that the long waiting list would give him as many as nine more months in England.
Nonetheless, he knew he could be assigned a ticket at any time, and the question came home to him, urgently: What was he actually going to do, in Australia, anyway? Work as a teacher? On the other hand, how much longer could he tolerate the hand-to-mouth existence he was leading in London and Cambridge?
Given these unmanning worries, Hughes may have been especially receptive to the kind of flattery Plath lavished on him at the launch party. She had plucked from St. Botolph's Review a poem that glorifies male aggression. It opens with the line, "When two men meet for the first time," and goes on to observe that male strangers sometimes attack each other on slight provocation, as animals do, because the animal is still alive in them:.
Lawrence that were fundamental to a literary education in those days. Hughes had read Lawrence avidly in his teens, and Lawrence's notorious celebration of "blood consciousness" appears undisguised in this poem that Plath picked out to memorize.
Plath had read the same books, and had undergone a similar literary infatuation with Lawrence she couldn't miss the allusion. The first, telegraphic exchange that passed between Plath and Hughes that night was both a party game and a discovery scene in six syllables. Ted Huge Ted Hughes may not have been looking for a wife that night, but Sylvia Plath was looking for a husband, and Ted Hughes met her specifications exactly.
In winter he liked to wear a heavy, brown leather army-issue topcoat that had survived the Great War, which gave his shoulders extra bulk and cloaked his shabby clothes in a bohemian glamour. An extremely unkempt appearance was unusual at Cambridge in his day. Hughes was acutely aware of the class anxieties expressed in bizarre clothing at Cambridge: grammar school boys like himself attempting to counter the contempt of public school boys through displays of eccentricity.
Hughes's contemporary Karl Miller recalled that the most spectacular students "dressed in a weird exacerbation of Edwardian chic pipe-stem tweed trousers, lapelled and brocaded waistcoats, wilting bow-ties, wafer-thin flat caps.
He bought his corduroy cheap from a factory owned by one of the prosperous members of his mother's family, up in West Yorkshire, and dyed it black himself. His classmate Glen Fallows thought he looked "as though he'd just climbed out of a fishing smack after a stormy night.
He had smelly old corduroys and big flakes of dandruff in his greasy hair. Hughes was actually quite self-conscious and shy in company, but he hid his unease behind mesmerizing talk. For sociability, he gravitated to the Cambridge pubs where students passed their time singing folk songs.
Hughes had a big, distinctive voice, rich and sonorous, the mannerisms of his native Yorkshire detectable under the influence of his elite education. Many anecdotes about this voice appear in the memoirs of people who knew him when he was young. The American writer Ben Sonnenberg tells one of the best stories, about being invited to dinner with Hughes sometime during the early s at the home of the American poet W. While listening to Hughes, "I did indeed fall off my chair.
Over the years, a lot of women would want to interrupt Ted Hughes long enough to initiate an affair with him. According to some, Hughes was "the biggest seducer in Cambridge" it was the chief topic of gossip about Hughes at the time Sylvia Plath met him, and she heard about it the night she met him, from the man who accompanied her to the party.
But even before she laid eyes on the man, Plath thought she had learned something essential about him by reading his work, and she was right. He had published only a few poems and essays, only in the smallest magazines, and usually under pseudonyms. But from the time he was sixteen, Hughes believed he was destined to become a poet on the grand scale.
He wanted to be a poet like W. Yeats, whose work he studied passionately, beginning in grammar school and right through his years at Cambridge. After discovering D. Lawrence, Hughes wanted to be a poet like D. Lawrence too; eventually he fulfilled both wishes in a highly original way.
In he was still feeling his way toward his vocation it was the sense of having a vocation that underlay his friendship with the somewhat fanatical undergraduates whose work appeared in St. One of these was the poet Daniel Weissbort, with whom Hughes later founded a journal to publish translations of poetry.
At the time they met, Weissbort recalls of himself that he was awkwardly attempting to imitate Dylan Thomas. The poet Peter Redgrove recalled his first encounter, as an undergraduate, with Hughes's Beethoven obsession. He later transferred to anthropology and archaeology, both of which would later influence his poetry. His earlier work is rooted in nature and he frequently wrote of the mixture of beauty and violence in the natural world. Hughes served as Poet Laureate from until his death.
He was married twice, first to American Sylvia Plath from and then to Carol Orchard from to his death. Hughes met American poet Sylvia Plath in , at a party he and his friends held to launch a review containing four of his poems.
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