Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted - Hardcover

Andrew Wilson is an award-winning journalist and author. His work has appeared in a wide variety of publications including the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Sunday Times, and the Smithsonian Magazine. He is the author of four acclaimed biographies, a book about the survivors of the Titanic, and the novels, The Lying Tongue, A Talent for Murder, A Different Kind of Evil, Death in a Desert Land.

Mad Girl’s Love Song Introduction

On February 25, 1956, twenty-three-year-old Sylvia Plath stepped into a roomful of people and immediately spotted what she later described in her diary as a “big, dark, hunky boy.” She asked her companions if anyone knew the name of this young man but she received no answer. The party was in full swing and the free-form rhythms of the jazz—the “syncopated strut” of the piano, the seductive siren call of the trumpet—made conversation difficult.1 Sylvia, in Cambridge studying on a Fulbright Fellowship, had been drinking all night: a lethal line of “red-gold” Whisky Macs at a pub in town with her date for that night, Hamish Stewart. The potent combination of scotch and ginger wine had left her feeling like she could almost walk through the air.2 In fact, the alcohol had had the opposite effect; as she had been walking to the party she had found herself so inebriated that she had kept banging into trees.

On arrival at the Women’s Union—the venue in Falcon Yard chosen to celebrate the first issue of the slim student-made literary journal the St. Botolph’s Review—Sylvia saw that the room was packed with young men in turtleneck sweaters and women in elegant black dresses. Counterpointing the jazz, the sound of poetry was in the air: great chunks of it being quoted back and forth like rallies in a game of literary dominance and seduction.

Sylvia was in a bullish mood that night. One of the contributors to St. Botolph’s Review, Daniel Huws, had sneered at two of her poems that had appeared in another Cambridge literary magazine, dismissing her work as too polished and well made. “Quaint and electric artfulness,” he had written in Broadsheet. “My better half tells me ‘Fraud, fraud,’ but I will not say so; who am I to know how beautiful she may be.”3 Plath felt justifiably angry; after all, she had been writing for publication since the age of eight and she had already earned sizable sums for poems and short stories from Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, Mademoiselle, and Seventeen. She walked up to Huws, a pale, freckle-faced undergraduate at Peterhouse, and said in a tone of “friendly aggression,”4 “Is this the better or worse half?”5 Huws, who later regarded the words as a “fair retaliation” for his “facetious and wounding” remarks, did not know quite how to respond.6 From Sylvia’s point of view, Huws looked too boyish. She was equally as dismissive of the rest of the St. Botolph’s set, describing Lucas Myers, who was studying at Downing College, as inebriated and wearing a “satanic smile,” and Than Minton, reading natural sciences at Trinity, as so small-framed you would have to sit down if you wanted to talk to him (in Plath’s world a short man was about as useful and attractive as a homosexual).7

By this point, Sylvia had knocked back another drink, emptying its contents into her mouth, down her hands, and onto the floor. She then tried to dance the twist with Myers and, although her movements may well have been less than smooth, her memory was razor sharp. As she danced, she proceeded to recite the whole of Myers’s poem “Fools Encountered,” which she had read for the first time earlier that day in St. Botolph’s Review.8 When the music came to a temporary halt, she saw out of the corner of her eye somebody approaching. It was the same “hunky boy,” the one who had been “hunching” around over women whom she had seen earlier.9 He introduced himself as Ted Hughes. She recalled the three poems he had published in St. Botolph’s Review, and in an effort to dazzle him with her vivacity, she immediately began reciting segments of them to him. In retrospect, it’s ironic that one of the poems she declaimed, “Law in the Country of the Cats,” addresses the violent, irrational sense of enmity and rivalry that can often exist between individuals, even strangers.10 On first meeting, the attraction between Hughes—who had graduated from Cambridge in 1954 and had a job in London as a reader for the J. Arthur Rank film company—and Plath was instant. But Sylvia sensed something else too. “There is a panther stalks me down: / One day I’ll have my death of him,” she wrote in “Pursuit,” a poem that she composed two days later.11

Plath recorded this encounter—now one of the most famous in all literary history—in her journal the next day. Suffering from a terrible hangover—she joked she thought she might be suffering from the DTs—she described the sexual tension that had flared up between them. After she had quoted some lines from his poem “The Casualty,” Hughes had shouted back over the music at her, in a voice that made her think he might be Polish, “You like?” Did she want brandy, he had asked. “Yes,” she yelled back, at which point he led her into another room. Hughes slammed the door and started pouring her glassfuls of brandy, which Plath tried to drink, but she didn’t manage to find her mouth.12 Almost immediately, they started discussing Huws’s critique of her poetry. Hughes joked that his friend knew that Plath was beautiful, that she could take such criticism, and that he would never have attacked her had she been a “cripple.” He told her he had “obligations” in the next room—in effect, another Cambridge student, named Shirley—and that he was working in London and earning £10 a week. Then, suddenly, Hughes leaned toward her and kissed her “bang smash on the mouth.” As he did so he ripped the red hair band from her head and ravished her with such force that her silver earrings came unclipped from her ears. He moved down to kiss her neck, and Plath bit him “long and hard” on the cheek; when the couple emerged from the room, blood was pouring down his face.13 As Plath bit deep into his skin, she thought about the battle to the death that Hughes had described in “Law in the Country of the Cats” and the perpetrator’s admission of the crime: “I did it, I.”14 Hughes carried the “swelling ring-moat of tooth marks” on his face for the next month or so, while he admitted that the encounter and the woman remained branded on his self “for good.”15

Hughes left his mark on Plath and her reputation too. After her suicide, in February 1963, as her estranged, but not divorced, husband, he became Plath’s literary executor, the guardian of her writings and, in effect, responsible for how she was perceived. A great deal has been written about the way Plath’s posthumous journals were edited; since they were first published in abridged form in 1982, questions have been raised about Hughes’s influence and motivation. At what point did editorializing (the understandable deletion of information because of repetition or legal problems) mutate into the altogether more sinister act of censorship? What part did he take in excising certain sensitive parts of the diaries? Why did he destroy one of the later journals? In his defense, he said he did so because he didn’t want his children, Frieda and Nicholas, from his marriage with Plath, to read them. “In those days,” he claimed, he “regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival.”16

Sylvia viewed Ted as something of a colossus, and to this day his enormous shadow obscures many aspects of Plath’s life and work. The sensational aspects of the Plath-Hughes relationship (from that intense first meeting, through to their marriage only four months later, to the birth of their children, followed by Ted’s infidelity, their separation, and then Sylvia’s death at the age of thirty) have dominated the cultural landscape to such an extent that their story has taken on the resonance of a modern myth. In addition, Hughes’s determination to market Ariel—a volume of poetry that was published in 1965, three years after Plath’s death—as the crowning glory of her poetical career has caused her other work to be marginalized. In Hughes’s view, the poetry she wrote toward the end of her life was the most important; anything that came before was a mere dress rehearsal. Stories, letters, journal entries, poems—hundreds of them—were nothing more than “impurities,” “by-products” of a process of transformation.17 Hughes cited the backstory of Shakespeare’s The Tempest to draw an analogy between Plath’s long-imprisoned creative talent and its sudden liberation during the writing of the Ariel collection. Her poetry, he said, was the “biology” of Ariel, the backstory of the airy spirit who was once trapped in the pine until she was set free by Prospero.18

The implication is clear. Plath, as a poet (perhaps even as a woman), did not exist—so the argument goes—before she created these late poems. During the process of crafting them, she finally becomes, in the words of Robert Lowell, who wrote the introduction to the American edition of Ariel (published in 1966), “herself.”

Lowell’s essay set the tone for Plath studies for the rest of the twentieth century. In writing Ariel, Plath “becomes something imaginary, newly, wildly and subtly created—hardly a person at all, or a woman, certainly not another ‘poetess,’ but one of those super-real, hypnotic, great classical heroines . . . The voice is now coolly amused, witty, now sour, now fanciful, girlish, charming, now sinking to the strident rasp of the vampire—a Dido, Phaedra, or Medea.” The work is distinct because of its “controlled hallucination, the autobiography of a fever. She burns to be on the move, a walk, a ride, a journey, the flight of the queen bee. She is driven forward by the pounding pistons of her heart . . . She herself is a little like a racehorse [the collection’s title is a reference to the name of a horse Plath used to ride], galloping relentlessly with risked, outstretched neck, death hurdle after death hurdle topped . . . Suicide, father-hatred, self-loathing—nothing is too much for the macabre gaiety of her control. Yet it is too much; her art’s immortality is life’s disintegration.”19

It is one thing for Hughes to argue that the writing that came before Ariel was a product of Plath’s “lesser and artificial selves”20 and quite another to believe that her “mature” work only began in 1956. Yet in his introduction to Plath’s Collected Poems, this is the date that Hughes gives as the year in which Plath started to move away from the “juvenilia” he associates with her early years. It also happens to be the year in which the couple met.

Hughes, in his role of editor, chose to confine a selection of fifty poems written before 1956 to a small section at the end of the volume, a gesture that almost feels like an apology or an afterthought. Defending his decision, Hughes said that Plath, had she lived, would have rejected these poems. Yet in the same paragraph, he added a number of reasons why he decided to include fifty of them in the Collected Poems. At their very best, he said, they possessed a lyrical quality that rivaled the poems she wrote later in life. They also showed, he added, traces of the “super-charged system of inner symbols and images,” that made up her creative universe.21 In the end, Hughes, like all editors, had to make a value judgment and selected what he thought were Plath’s “best” early poems. Yet for those “specialists” who really wanted to investigate the links between her late and early work, he said he would accompany the “juvenilia” with a list of poems, arranged alphabetically, of all the poems she wrote before 1956.22

There is only one problem: the list is far from complete. One of the missing poems is her 1953 villanelle “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” which Plath described as one of her favorites.23 The poem is written from the perspective of a young woman who is waiting for her date to turn up. When she closes her eyes, the “world drops dead” and she is forced to question whether her lover is real or a projected fantasy. Has she really just made him up inside her head, she asks herself. The form of the villanelle—the repetition of the first and third lines of the first stanza—lends itself to the peculiar intensity of the poem’s emotional content. The refrains echo throughout the poem like obsessional thoughts that refuse to be dispersed by the reality of the world around her. The mad girl of the title suffers from a double solipsism, imprisoned both within the boundaries of herself (when she shuts her eyes, the world simply disappears; when she opens them again, external reality is restored) and the confines of her feelings for her absent lover. In her journal, she recalled how she had been inspired to write the poem after a boyfriend, “Mike,” didn’t turn up for a date.24

The Mike she refers to is Myron Lotz, one of a myriad of Plath’s early boyfriends who, over the years, have been obscured by the “dark, hunky” presence of Ted Hughes. Yet these men—figures who have not been explored in any depth in any previous biography—influenced and shaped both Plath’s life and her work in a way that has not been fully appreciated. Although Hughes was “her husband” (as he once described himself in the third person),25 he was not the only man in her life: before she met him she had gone out with literally hundreds of men—some who were innocent dates, others who were more serious. As she said herself in an early poem, “Adolescence,” she knew she would never be able to confine her love to just one man.26 These men inspired both her poetry—for instance, Gordon Lameyer, who was unofficially engaged to Plath in August 1954, was the source of “Sonnet for a Green-Eyed Sailor”—and her prose: she regurgitated her toxic feelings for boyfriend Dick Norton by penning a vicious portrait of him as the unimaginative Buddy Willard in her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar.

Dick Norton (whom Plath dated between 1951 and 1953) became a symbol of everything Plath hated about the American hypocritical attitude toward sex. In an unpublished letter she wrote to her friend Ann Davidow in January 1952, Plath talks of her anger at learning that Dick was not a virgin (after pretending he had been). In the letter, she outlines how she did not object from a moral point of view but because she wished she could have enjoyed the same pleasures herself.27 Plath was an addict of experience, and she could not bear the fact that young women like her were denied something so life-enhancing. In the same letter she goes on to write of her deep envy of males, anger she describes as “insidious, malignant, latent.”28

Sex—or rather the constraints and repressions surrounding it—played a central role in Plath’s creative and psychological development. She realized, as she wrote in her journal in the autumn of 1950, she was too well brought up to disregard tradition, yet she hated boys who could express themselves sexually while she had no choice but to “drag” herself from one date to the next in “soggy desire.” The system, she added, disgusted her.29

If too much has been made of the symptoms of Plath’s mental illness, so too little attention has been paid to its possible causes. Sylvia Plath was an angry young woman born in a country and at a time that only exacerbated and intensified her f...