Sylvia prepared to write a novel based on her Cambridge experiences. She and Ted were hoping to get teaching positions for a year, and perhaps do a reading tour as well when Sylvia brought Ted home to America. Her hopes were high. The Atlantic Monthly had bought “Pursuit” for fifty dollars. More good news followed on 2 October, when Poetry accepted six of her poems for another seventy-six dollars. And Peter Davison, now at The Atlantic Monthly, was encouraging her to submit more of her work. She wrote him a long letter explaining her plans for a novel, as well as touting Ted’s poetry. He gratified her with a quick response that included his wish to see Hughes’s work.

In her 2 October letter to Aurelia, Sylvia made a point of saying that she and Ted were not part of an “arty world,” and that all they needed was one another. But the very sense of their uniqueness also put pressure on her. Thinking she had missed a rendezvous with Ted in London, she panicked and gave way to a “fury of tears,” she told Aurelia. Although he turned up soon enough, Sylvia’s extreme reaction showed how much he meant to the equilibrium of her everyday life.

Ted was well aware of Sylvia’s investment in him, and from London, where he often stayed overnight or longer when employed by the BBC, he reinforced their bond with frequent affectionate and encouraging letters, as well as expressions of anxiety that jibed with her own moods. On 1 October, he wrote about how restless he felt without her. He wandered about like “somebody with a half-completed brain-operation.” He enjoined her to “keep watch” on their marriage as he was doing, saying that way their happiness would be preserved. He had nicknames for her (“Puss-Kish-Ponky,” for example) that served to intensify their intimacy and exclusivity. Anticipating a rendezvous with Sylvia, Ted announced that he would kiss her “into blisters.” The man who had cared nothing about clothes, and was known to stuff newly caught fish in his jacket pockets, extolled a suit Sylvia had bought for him, saying he could now descend on London “sleek, sleek, sleek.”

A day later Ted wrote about how he missed Sylvia’s “ponky warmth.” He sent her plots that she might use for her fiction. One involved a young newly married couple that set off for the country to avoid the distractions and complications of urban life. “They want to keep each other for themselves alone and away from temptation,” Ted wrote, without a sign that he was basing this story line on their own lives. In an eerily prophetic twist, Hughes has friends of the couple visit and urge them, so good at entertaining, to open an inn. Although the inn is successful, the upshot of their venture is that they have brought the city, so to speak, back into their lives. Even worse, the wife turns jealous and suspects the husband’s involvement with an old girlfriend. The story has a happy ending, in that the couple sells the hotel and buys another cottage closer to the city, reflecting their awareness that they cannot entirely escape modernity, but they can work on keeping their marriage solid. Hughes called it a “rotten plot,” but was that all it was? “Can you pick any sense out of that?” he asked Sylvia. Was the question directed toward the meaning of the story, or the meaning of their lives? At any rate, Hughes was happy to say in a later letter that he was glad she liked the “inn-plot.”

In “The Wishing Box,” a story about the woman who is envious of her husband’s fertile imagination as expressed in his dreams, Plath may have been articulating her concern that at this point Hughes seemed way ahead of her as a writer. At least that is one way—the Edward Butscher way—of looking at Sylvia’s response to Ted’s teeming creativity, so fecund that he was sending his newborn ideas to a half-grateful, half-resentful collaborator. Sylvia’s letters, though, not only do not begrudge him, they positively exult in his productivity.

Hughes certainly gave Plath no reason to doubt her desirability. Hughes bid her good night, thinking of Puss’s “little soft places” and how he wanted to kiss her “slowly from toe up,” sucking and nibbling and licking her “all night long.” Missing her, he felt like an amputee, dazed and shocked, because he had lost half of himself. Sometimes he just baldly broke out with: “I love you I love you I love you.” Only her “terrific letters” comforted him. If more than a few days went by and Ted had not heard from Sylvia, he grew uneasy: “No letter from my ponk. Is she dead? Has half the world dropped off?” He imagined the desirable Sylvia welcoming the charms of knaves, while he sat staring at the skyline “like an old stone.” Unable to work, he consoled himself by reading Yeats aloud.

In his letters, Hughes predicted greatness for Sylvia, just as she had for him. Without her, he wrote on 5 October, he could not sleep and was wasting his time. He walked about like a strange beast, and had even been stopped by the police because he looked like a suspicious character. Somehow, he wrote Sylvia, they had to turn all their “lacks” into good poems. He advised her on studying for exams at Cambridge, sensibly saying, for example, that the six books on Chaucer she had to read each contained some value but they surely overlapped, and there was no need to give them more than a note or two for each chapter she read. Similarly, he critiqued her poetry, offering straightforward advice—one professional to another—and praise. “Your verse never goes ‘soft’ like other women’s,” he wrote on 22 October, although he seemed to worry a bit that she might be searching for a formula that magazines like The New Yorker followed. But he wondered if such a formula existed. How to account for Eudora Welty or J. D. Salinger, two originals quite dissimilar, and yet both published in The New Yorker. If she wrote about what really attracted her, she could not miss, Ted told Sylvia. Like Plath, Hughes seemed to take rejections in stride, saying that at least The New Yorker might remember his name, even if they rejected his animal fables.

To Olwyn that October, Hughes touted Sylvia’s successful publications in The Atlantic Monthly and Poetry. She was not a “blah American.” Indeed, she was very like an indefatigable German, without affectations, and had a “startling poetic gift.” He plotted her horoscope, which he drew in the letter for Olwyn’s benefit. He was now showing Plath’s poems to his contacts at the BBC. Ted clung to Sylvia as a renewing force, even as he spurned London, calling it “murderous,” a ghost of itself, and so depleted that it had no “aura” left. It seemed utterly exhausted, he wrote to her on 23 October.

In late October, in a near state of collapse because Ted spent so much time in London that they could not live as husband and wife, Sylvia confessed her secret to Dorothea Krook, who rightly predicted that if Plath consulted the Fulbright advisor on campus and the Fulbright committee in London and made a full and contrite confession of her marriage, she would be allowed to keep her scholarship. And it was so. An elated Sylvia told Krook that no criticism whatsoever had been forthcoming; indeed, she had been congratulated on her marriage. But Krook, who still did not feel she knew her student that well, felt a twinge of concern because Sylvia seemed to depend on her marriage for so much of her own well-being. “I am living for Ted,” Sylvia had written her mother on 22 October. In “Epitaph for Fire and Flower,” a poem she enclosed in a letter to Aurelia, one line says it all: The lovers have a “touch” that will “kindle angels’ envy.” Well, not quite all, since the concluding lines evoke the “ardent look” that “Blackens flesh to bone and devours them.”

By early November Ted had found a job near Cambridge teaching secondary school students, and the couple moved into a flat only five minutes from Newnham. He did not like Cambridge very much, and certain of his professors there apparently felt the same about him. The dons regarded Ted as a rather louche character and seemed surprised that the cheerful and well-scrubbed Sylvia would be attached to such a ruffian. Residing in Cambridge indicated that he was doing everything possible to allay Plath’s easily aroused anxieties. They played out their evenings with tarot cards.