Even in its truncated form, “Falcon Yard,” is a revelation. Peregrine is clearly the dominant, even prey-driven woman that ruffled Eddie Cohen, who deplored Plath’s disdainful treatment of men. In her notes for Peregrine, Plath makes her character a goddess born out of a “perfect dream of love.” Like Isis, she roams the world assembling the parts of the god-man who will fulfill her love. The god-man becomes for Peregrine/Isis a father, lover, and priest, promising the “perpetually possible.” Plath, however, realized Peregrine’s plight: How can she accept the “fallible man as divine”? It is the question D. H. Lawrence asks in “The Man Who Died,” when the priestess of Isis wishes to believe that the man who died is Osiris. Unlike the Plath of Letters Home and correspondence with her closest friends, Peregrine expresses doubt in the god-man she has made. Peregrine identifies herself not only as Isis, but also as Lamia, the “sperm-sucking serpent” of Keats’s poem, and with Medusa, the “Mother of Madness, the Mother of Death.” Eventually Ted Hughes would flee Sylvia Plath, declaring she had a kind of “death ray.”
If Plath had trouble actually writing the novel, it may be because of its monumental nature. How to live the perfect life in a fallen world? Peregrine asks. The question of how to write the perfect female epic was evidently just as daunting. No wonder Plath responded with elation to Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest, the very epitome of the heroine Plath wanted to create. Sylvia broke off writing the novel as she prepared for exams, then worked fitfully on it while teaching at Smith. And she returned to it again after completing The Bell Jar.
On 9 April, Sylvia wrote Elinor Friedman Klein and Marcia Brown to catch them up on the news. While dreaming of the summer cottage on the Cape that Aurelia had rented as a wedding present, and anticipating her arrival on 25 June in New York—to be followed by a gala reception for her and Ted on the 29th in Wellesley—Sylvia was preparing for her grueling five days of exams covering two thousand years of “tragedy, morality, etc. etc.” She regarded her appointment at Smith as both exciting and terrifying. And oh how she relished her return to the land of modern appliances after two years of dealing with dodgy British models. Good-bye to coal stoves and wretched dental care.
To Marcia Brown, Sylvia described Ted teaching forty Teddy boys (gang members), who carried chains and razors but could not remember their multiplication tables. This was her English version of The Blackboard Jungle (1955), the film starring Glenn Ford as a neophyte English teacher determined to teach in a violent inner city school. As always, in her letters to American friends, she gave Ted Hughes the Hollywood treatment. He could not teach school without Sylvia making it a “moving, tragic, & in many ways rewarding experience.”
To both Elinor and Marcia, Sylvia spread the news of Ted’s prize, which had his publisher, Harper’s, wondering if success would spoil Rock Hunter—yet another allusion to a film, this one released in 1957 and starring Tony Randall as an ad executive, whose first success involves pretending to be the lover of a movie star in a campaign to sell lipstick. Only Sylvia Plath could glamorize Ted’s receipt of a publishing prize as though a new Clark Gable had suddenly been discovered and relieved of his obscurity. As for her, she drew on a sports metaphor, calling herself a “triple-threat woman: wife, writer, and teacher”—although she said she would trade in that epithet for motherhood.
London Magazine’s acceptance of poems by both Plath and Hughes had Sylvia dreaming of catapulting to fame, as she wrote her mother on 13 April. Ted now had a British publisher for The Hawk in the Rain. Faber & Faber had taken the book on the recommendation of T. S. Eliot, who had passed on a complimentary message to Ted, Sylvia reported to Aurelia on 10 May. At the same time, Plath was still hoping to “break into the slicks,” since a sale of several commercial stories could earn them a year’s income.
Sylvia’s ecstatic letters to her mother might be discounted, except that Ted’s to his brother, Gerald, were almost as rhapsodic. “Marriage is my medium,” he declared. He wrote about his and Sylvia’s working and walking about in incandescent terms: “We strike sparks.” He described them sitting by the river and watching water voles. The “unconscious delight” he attributed to her makes Sylvia seem very much like the sensitive Marilyn Monroe that Arthur Miller described in his memoirs and stories. “She’s the most responsive alert creature in the world, about everything,” Hughes concluded. And like Sylvia, he enthused about an America taking him into its embrace. Even when it came to family, he really did sound like Sylvia’s male counterpart, saying that his prize and the praise for him were all the more pleasing because they had fulfilled his mother’s dreams for him.
CHAPTER 5
QUEEN OF THE OCEAN
(1957–59)
1957: Plath and Hughes summer at Cape Cod before Sylvia begins teaching freshman English at Smith, while Ted obtains a part-time teaching position at University of Massachusetts, Amherst; 1958: The couple moves to Boston, and Sylvia resumes treatment with Dr. Beuscher; 1959: Sylvia befriends Anne Sexton in a poetry class taught in the spring semester by Robert Lowell. Sylvia and Ted spend a summer at Yaddo, the writer’s colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, and then sail in December for England.
In early June, after the ordeal of exams that earned Plath the equivalent of about a B+ and a master’s degree, the couple headed for Yorkshire to stay with Ted’s parents before sailing to America. On 8 June, Sylvia described for her mother’s benefit a cozy family get-together with Olwyn, who had just arrived from France. Sylvia had cast aside what she thought of as the false, artificial world of Cambridge with T. S. Eliot’s line about “preparing a face to meet a face.” The couple took long walks on the moors.
A letter Ted wrote to Olywn on 20 June aboard the RMS Queen Elizabeth on the way to America suggests that not everyone was as simpatico as Sylvia said they were. “Don’t criticize Sylvia too badly about the way she got up and came after me,” Ted exhorted Olwyn, who thought Sylvia had been rude to John Fisher, Ted’s old and beloved teacher. When Sylvia abruptly rushed out of the room, an awkward silence ensued until Ted said he’d better look after her. Then, as he returned to his company, she had rushed down the stairs after him. Olwyn was clearly impatient with Sylvia’s moods, which shifted from high-pitched animation to sullen silence. Ted expatiated: A “nervy” Sylvia was still recovering from her exams and found company disturbed her need to rest. The “smarmy” behavior Olywn despised was Sylvia’s response to panic, when she was trying too hard to be “open & too nice.” Ted had seen a carefully hidden side of Sylvia that moved him to say apologetically, “She says stupid things then that mortify her afterwards. Her second thought—her retrospect, is penetrating, skeptical, and subtle. But she can never bring that second-thinking mind to the surface with a person until she’s known them some time.” Ted could have been Arthur Miller apologizing for Marilyn Monroe, whose erratic behavior often placed him in the same embarrassing situations. Both men felt deeply protective of the women who had inspired them far more than anyone in a superficial social setting could imagine. On the surface, it seemed to Olwyn that her brother had married a woman unworthy of him. Ted worked hard to bring Olwyn round: “You saw how much better she was the last day. Don’t judge her on her awkward behavior.” Like Miller, Hughes made his excuses, mentioning Sylvia’s “miserable past,” which he would in due course tell Olwyn about. Sylvia could be a harsh judge of people, Ted told his sister, but his wife had already developed considerable respect for Olwyn and prized her. How much Hughes was placating his sister, and how much he believed what he said, is impossible to tell.