and bare thick legs in khaki Bermuda shorts’. When Sylvia appeared, the girl made a very hasty exit. Ted made no effort to introduce her. ‘He thought her name was Sheila’ (actually it was Susan).29 Had he not once, Sylvia wrote in a bitter diary entry, thought that her name was Shirley? Everything seemed to fall into place: the unfamiliar smile, the excuses for returning home late. Suddenly, the God, the great poet, the only man she could ever want, was ‘a liar and vain smiler’. They made up and made love, but afterwards, as he snorted and snored beside her, she lay awake, wondering, doubting. Why was his ‘great inert heavy male flesh hanging down so much of the time’? Yes, there were ‘such good fuckings’ when they did make up, but why had he been sexually ‘so weary, so slack all winter’? That had not been characteristic. Was he ‘ageing or spending’? ‘Fake. Sham ham. No explanations, only obfuscations’: she was seeing again ‘the vain, selfish face’ she had first seen. The ‘sweet and daily companion’, the lovely ‘Yorkshire Beacon boy’, was gone. Now she could only think of his sulks, his selfishness, his greasy hair, the foul habits that she could not stand, obsessed as she was with personal hygiene (picking his nose, ‘peeling off his nails and leaving them about’). Their marriage was over. She wouldn’t slit her wrists in the bath or drive Warren’s car into a tree or, to save expense, ‘fill the garage at home with carbon monoxide’, but, ‘disabused of all faith’, she would throw herself into her teaching and writing.30
Ted never published his side of the story, but many years later he did scribble a note about it. The ‘big handsome girl’ was in his creative writing class. She called herself ‘Spring’. He had always found her very friendly, but she ‘kept her distance’. He did feel a certain ‘affinity’ with her (having admitted this, he scored it out). He liked all his students in the little creative writing group. After his last class, this girl and her friend produced a bottle of red wine and three glasses, just as he was hurrying off to drive back from Amherst to Northampton. He excused himself and left them standing crestfallen. He did not expect ever to see any of his students again. By sheer coincidence, when he went to meet Sylvia on the Smith campus the following day, he bumped into the girl, coming out of the library with a bunch of other girls. So he walked with her for a few minutes. And that was when Sylvia appeared.31 From his point of view, the encounter was entirely innocent and Sylvia’s rage worryingly irrational.
They fought violently. There were ‘snarls and bitings’. Sylvia ended up with a sprained thumb and Ted with ‘bloody claw-marks’ that lasted a week. At one point, she threw a glass across the room with all her might. Instead of breaking, it bounced back and hit her on the forehead. She saw stars for the first time.32
The fight cleared the air. They were intact. ‘And nothing,’ Sylvia wrote, ‘no wishes for money, children, security, even total possession – nothing is worth jeopardizing what I have which is so much the angels might well envy it.’33 If she could learn not to be over-dependent, not to require ‘total possession’, things would work out.
Reflecting on the incident when undergoing psychoanalysis six months later, she recognised that Ted was not habitually spending time with other women. There was no reason not to trust him. She had reacted so forcefully because the end of her exhausting teaching year was a big moment and she had wanted him to be there for her, and he wasn’t. His absence, she reasoned, with the assistance of her analyst, must have made her think of her father, who had deserted her for ever by dying when she was eight. Insofar as he was ‘a male presence’ – though ‘in no other way’ – Ted was ‘a substitute’ for her father. ‘Images of his faithlessness with women’ accordingly echoed her father’s desertion of her mother upon the call of ‘Lady Death’.34 Any act of male rejection or desertion, however temporary, would have an extreme effect because it would take her unconscious back to the primary trauma of Otto’s sudden disappearance into death. This line of thinking would crystallise in some of her later poems and give Ted lifelong food for reflection in both prose and verse.
That summer they had a week’s holiday in New York and a fortnight revisiting Cape Cod, but otherwise they were in the apartment on Elm Street, writing. Or trying to write – they both suffered from bouts of block. In search of inspiration or relaxation, they took to experimenting with a Ouija board, conjuring up a spirit called Pan.
Two years after the whirlwind romance and the rushed wedding, the reality of married life was kicking in. ‘We are amazingly compatible,’ Sylvia reassured herself. ‘But I must be myself – make myself and not let myself be made by him.’ She was beginning to tire of his tendency to give mutually exclusive ‘orders’. He would tell her to – or, to put it more moderately, suggest that she should – ‘read ballads an hour, read Shakespeare an hour, read history an hour, think an hour’. But then he would say that no proper reading could be done in one-hour chunks; you had to read a book straight through to the end without distraction. There was an almost fanatical ‘lack of balance and moderation’ in his habits and his fads. He decided that, since he sat writing for much of the day, he should do some particular exercises for his back and his neck. They only made his neck stiffer, but that didn’t stop him doing them.35
On the eve of Independence Day, they went for a walk and found a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. Ted took it home and nursed it, just as he always used to care for injured fauna in his childhood. After a week, it became clear that the bird would not survive. Sylvia could not bear the thought of Ted strangling it, so he fixed their rubber bath hose to the gas jet on the cooker and taped the other end on the inside of a cardboard box. The bird was laid to rest, but unfortunately he removed it from the makeshift gas chamber prematurely and it lay gasping in his hand. Five minutes later, he took it to Sylvia, ‘composed, perfect and beautiful in death’.36
In early September they moved to a tiny sixth-floor apartment at 9 Willow Street in the Beacon Hill district of Boston, with all its literary associations. Ted’s poem named for the address evokes the claustrophobia they felt there, the sense that they were holding each other back instead of inspiring each other’s work as they had done before. The main memory within the poem is a variant replay of the baby-bird incident. This time it is a sick bat that has fallen out of a tree on the nearby Common. In front of a bemused audience of passersby, he tries to restore it to its home and has his finger bitten for his pains. Then he remembers that American bats carry rabies, so he starts thinking of death.37 His other Birthday Letters poems commemorating their residence in Willow Street are equally gloomy: visiting Marianne Moore, Sylvia devastated because the distinguished poet did not like her work; Sylvia and her ‘panic bird’; the ‘astringency’ of the Charles River in a bitterly cold Boston winter.38
One day, looking over a letter from his wife to his parents before posting it, he misread the signing off as ‘woe’ instead of ‘love’.39 This seemed symbolic of the new mood in the marriage. Sometimes when his writing was not going well, he would while away the afternoon making a wolf mask. But that did nothing to keep the wolf from the door: the plan to live for a year off their savings, together with such casual literary earnings as they could muster, meant that they sometimes fought, because it wasn’t always clear where the next month’s dollars were coming from. They both sensed that the marriage had no future in America; Ted had not settled and Sylvia did not want to go back to teaching. There were days when they both suffered from ‘black depression’, relieved only by sporadic absorption in Beethoven piano sonatas.40
This was when she began seeing Dr Ruth Beuscher, her old psychoanalyst from McLean. Among her many worries was the fear that she was barren. Beuscher was a Freudian. She suggested that the main focus of their sessions should be Sylvia’s ‘Electra complex’, the daughterly