in the flat belonging to Dan Huws’s father, was lit by gas, had a single lavatory in the basement and the only water supply was a tap in a basin on the half-landing.1 To Sylvia, raised on American plumbing and her mother’s cleanliness, it was disgusting. But the occupant held irresistible allure.
She booked into a hotel in New Fetter Lane, the other side of Holborn, then met Ted for the evening. The following Monday morning, she wrote up her memories of the weekend: ‘Arrived in Paris early Saturday evening exhausted from sleepless holocaust night with Ted in London … washed my battered face, smeared with a purple bruise from Ted and my neck raw and wounded too.’2 Love-bites: for Plath, desire was always a purple bruise; for Hughes, poetry was the healing of a wound.
She called it her ‘wild destructive London night’. She was anxious because Hughes’s paunchy friend Michael Boddy had come up the stairs at one point, and he was a gossip, so all Cambridge would soon know ‘that I am Ted’s mistress or something equally absurd’.3 She was also upset that once during their lovemaking he had called her Shirley instead of Sylvia.4 She wanted to see him again, so that she could ‘rip past’ Shirley and prove her capacity to be as ‘tender and wise’ as Shirley was, while also being a better, fuller, wilder, more extreme lover. Regardless of Boddy’s gossip, she wanted Ted’s body and it was inextricable from his poetry: ‘I lust for him, and in my mind I am ripped to bits by the words he welds and wields.’5
Ted shaped the night retrospectively, in a poem that he worked on for many years. It is a central pillar of Birthday Letters, though he nearly left it out, because it was too raw and was indiscreet in mentioning a third party who would enter their story later but whose posthumous privacy he wished to preserve. He begins by mythologising the house: as so often in his work, location is given symbolic force. ‘18 Rugby Street’ is imagined as a stage-set and a Cretan labyrinth. Each of the four floors was the scene of the love-struggle of its inhabitant: a car-dealer who shared the basement with a caged bird and a mistress, a lovelorn Belgian girl (elsewhere he wrote that she was German) trapped in the ground-floor flat with a manic barking Alsatian which protected her from everything except her own oven in which she would one day gas herself.
His memories of the night were of waiting at his battered carpenter’s bench that was both dining-table and work-desk; of Sylvia’s breathless voice as she panted up the uncarpeted stairs with Luke (he could not remember how and when Luke excused himself and disappeared); of his sense of Sylvia as a great blue bird charged at high voltage, ‘Fluorescent cobalt, a flare of aura’. He would always associate her with electricity, the positive pole being her innate energy and sex appeal, the negative that emotional volatility that took her to the darkest places and then the temporary cure that came from electro-convulsive therapy. Ted saw vulnerability in the temples above her bright brown and somewhat hooded eyes. In the theatre of her face, those temples were at first sight upstaged by her glamorous and fashionable bangs, but with knowledge of her history they elicited special tenderness because this was the place where the electrodes had been attached. The reference to her temples also evokes a place of worship, befitting this pagan goddess coming, with ‘Sexual Dreams’, from another world.
She recited the poem about the black panther that she had written for him. As she did so, he held her and kissed her and tried to keep her still. His poem then jump-cuts to their walk back to her hotel in New Fetter Lane. Opposite the entrance, there was a wartime bombsite on which some building work was being started. It was there that they ‘clutched each other giddily’ and took the plunge. She told him of the reason for her scar: her suicide attempt. In the poem of his memory, even as he is kissing her a part of him is sensing the danger and telling him to stay away. Something is being built, but there is also a bomb liable to explode. Somehow, she smuggled him into the hotel and they made love, her body ‘slim and lithe and smooth as a fish’. For the first time in his life, he is making love to a girl who is not English, a girl who embodies the energy and hope of Shakespeare’s ‘brave new world’, John Donne’s ‘my America, my newfound land’. ‘Beautiful, beautiful America’ has taken possession of him.6
Walking back to his flat at first light, he had an epiphany. His fullest account of that hour is excluded from ‘18 Rugby Street’ but included in a version of Birthday Letters that he never published, a 4,000-line blank-verse autobiography of his relationship with Sylvia called ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’. It was his equivalent of William Wordsworth’s posthumously published autobiographical blank-verse epic, The Prelude. He tells of how he left her hotel and walked back across Holborn to his flat at about five o’clock in the morning. He felt himself ‘floating / On air spilling in over the city / Off the Surrey gardens and orchards’. Then he heard ‘London’s hidden blackbirds and thrushes’, ‘a million singers’, singing a blessing upon the ‘sleeping millions’. It was like ‘a high tide at dawn, the top of the tide, / Their dawn chorus awash through the whole city’. Meanwhile, his totemic birds, the crows, accompanied him at ground level.7
Like every young romantic after such an encounter, he is walking on air, every one of his senses refined, every detail of the moment etched in his memory for ever.
Back in Rugby Street, he penned a short letter and sent it for Sylvia to pick up at the American Express office in Paris. It had been a night, he wrote, consumed by the discovery of the smoothness of her body. The memory of it went through him with the warming glow of brandy.8 This could be described as his first ‘birthday letter’: the letter of the birth of their love. He asked her to come back to him, telling her that he would be in London till 14 April, and that if she did not come to him he would go to her in Cambridge.
In Paris, Sylvia poured her confusion into her diary. From one point of view, Ted was a diversion. She had got drunk at Falcon Yard and kissed (and bitten) him. She had got drunk in London and slept with him. That was that. Now it was time to give herself to Richard Sassoon, of whom she had written – after meeting Ted – ‘I love that damn boy with all I’ve ever had in me and that’s a hell of a lot.’9 But on arriving in Paris, she discovered that Sassoon had gone south in order to avoid a confrontation with her. He needed time to make up his mind as to whether their long, passionate on–off relationship should turn to marriage or be finally ended. She was devastated. She had always been used to getting her own way with men: ‘never before had a man gone off to leave me to cry after’.10 She sat in the living room of the concierge of his apartment building on the rue Duvivier and wrote him a long, incoherent letter while the radio blared out ‘Smile though your heart is breaking’.
Then she made a bad error. She wrote again to Sassoon, telling him about Ted. As Sassoon put it, she ‘was going to start having an affair with a certain fellow so as to make me jealous and give me a mind to marry her, which I was unwilling to do just because of this imminent unfaithfulness’.11 She cheered herself up with sightseeing and an afternoon in a hotel room with an Oxford student called Tony Gray. She juggled her options in her diary. To play it cool and wait for Ted to come to her? To go to him, for one night only, then go back to Sassoon? To play safe and marry her devoted friend Gordon Lameyer? Or even to join Ted in one of his hare-brained schemes, such as teaching English in Yugoslavia?
In the latter part of the Easter vacation, she travelled with Lameyer to Munich, Venice and Rome. Their relationship was disintegrating. Sassoon was giving no sign of returning. On Friday 13 April, her late father’s birthday, Sylvia Plath boarded a plane in Rome, the ticket paid for by Lameyer. She had told Ted to expect her that night. In her possession was a prize: he had written her a poem. Though the first line read ‘Ridiculous to call it love’, it revealed that she had touched him to the quick, that he felt her absence as if it were a wound, that without her he was like a dying man, that ‘Wherever you haunt earth,