Sylvia described her last day of teaching (22 May) in a letter to Warren, reporting rounds of applause, ranging from tepid to thunderous in direct proportion to her own reactions to each class. Daniel Aaron, who observed her teaching earlier in the semester, described her as “rather schoolmarmy, prim and neat,” but overall, an effective instructor. To Warren, she confessed her disillusionment with her colleagues, a weak, vain, jealous, and petty lot. She called Smith an “airtight” community of gossipy, pot-bellied tenured males, sparing the women any specific epithets. She had adopted Ted’s scorn for go-ahead Americans with their ten-year plans—even though she was surely one of them and would find the next months of freedom a trial precisely because she had no long-term, institutionally based program or regular job. She rather prided herself on having no charge accounts, TV, car, or other items purchased on the installment plan. Ted did not need immediate signs of success, she told Warren. But Sylvia always did, despite what she told her brother. For all their scorn of American appetites, Sylvia and Ted seemed very American indeed in their assurance that they would become wealthy and famous.
By late May, the ghost of Sylvia Plath, withdrawing from her all-too-terrestrial time at Smith, saw herself and Ted as practiced, smiling liars—he the vain and navel-gazing male, penis proud. He was going out alone, telling her not to come along. She was sure he was ashamed of something. Another day, as told in her journal, she spotted him near Paradise Pond on the Smith campus, smiling broadly in the company of a grinning undergraduate, whose appearance assaulted Sylvia in “several sharp flashes, like blows.” This was a man seeking adulation, and the girl served it up like soup, then bolted when she saw Sylvia bearing down on her. Ted wasn’t even sure of her name. Was it Sheila? Just like him, thought Sylvia, who remembered their first long night together when he called her Shirley.
No biographer has identified “Sheila,” except to say that she was a student Ted had taught on the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus. What, then, was she doing at Smith? No biographer has been able to establish that Hughes was unfaithful to Plath during this period of her marriage, although A. Alvarez, who often talked about women with Hughes, has no doubt that Hughes was constitutionally incapable of fidelity. At any rate, Sylvia now believed she understood why Ted had been arriving home late. She rejected his explanations and got angrier when he snored and snorted in his sleep—another complacent male—while she remained awake. In her journal tirade, she admitted that she had divined this side of him when they first met, but had capitulated to the vulgar heat of their coupling. Why had she tidied up this messy man, now sulking in her disapproval?
Plath left a blank of nearly three weeks in her journal, not resuming until 11 June with the admission that she had taken that much time to deal with her last “nightmarish entry.” They had fought. Sylvia had sprained her thumb and had scratched and bloodied Ted. He hit her hard enough that she saw stars. Hughes would later tell his American editor, Frances McCullough, that he tried slapping Sylvia out of her rages, “but it was no good,” McCullough wrote. “And once she turned into his slap and got a black eye, & went to the doctor & told him Ted beat her regularly.” To Warren, Sylvia described, with typical hyperbole, “rousing battles every so often in which I come out with sprained thumbs and Ted with missing earlobes.”
Ted rejoiced in finding a flat in the Beacon Hill section of Boston (they would not move in until September). The narrow streets and cobbles appealed to his sense of human scale. Better, evidently, to live in a cramped two-room apartment than in the indulgent luxury of the suburbs or the brassiness of New York City, with its “pathetic Bohemian district, called The Village,” he wrote Olwyn in early June. The robust Ted Hughes found America at midcentury too tame, undoubtedly influencing Sylvia’s aside to Warren on 11 June that she was working on “overcoming a clever, too brittle and glossy feminine tone.”
By 20 June, Sylvia’s journal records her battle with depression. She simply did not have the sense of self-sufficiency that she so admired in Ted, who she compared to an iceberg with a depth and reality that constantly surprised her. She admitted that the thought of having a child was tempting, since caring for a baby would divert a reckoning with her demons—which in better days she called her muses. Summoned to writing, she nevertheless quaked at the wide gap that now opened up between her desire to write and the anxiety that desire provoked. She hoped to relieve her paralysis by revisiting the site of her early childhood, Winthrop by the sea, which she always associated with a life-giving power and creativity.
Then on 25 June, a miracle. After years and years of rejections, The New Yorker had accepted two poems, “Mussel-Hunter at Rock Harbor” and “Nocturne.” Sylvia positively yipped with joy, exclaiming that the good news would carry her through the summer like the “crest of a creative wave.” That same day she wrote to Aurelia announcing her good fortune, which would amount to something like $350. That would pay for three months’ rent.
The New Yorker poems showed the vulnerable side of Plath, somber and overwhelmed with composing a life outside of the academic boundaries that protected her. “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor” moves relentlessly toward the husk of a fiddler crab that has wandered out of its element to high ground among grasses. This stranded creature stimulates an inquiry: Is this the fate of a recluse, a suicide, an intrepid discoverer of new worlds? These alternatives occur to a poet seeking to renew her inspiration by returning to the seashore, figuring out her options, and trying to become her own woman, her own poet. “Night Walk,” published in The New Yorker and later retitled “Hardcastle Crags” in Collected Poems, brought Plath back to a “deep wooded gorge” in the Yorkshire valley of Hebden River. The landscape looms at night like the “antique world” that overwhelms the walker, who turns back toward the “stone-built town” before she is broken down into the quartz grit of the stones and hills. Sylvia was trying to save herself, even while wondering what kind of fate might pulverize her hopes. Could she build her work, like the town, out of the hard material of existence? Her haunting journal passages about a wounded bird she and Ted tried to nurse—and their failure, which ended in Ted gassing the bird to put it out of its misery—read like an unintended forecast of Sylvia’s own fate. She marveled at how beautiful, perfect, and composed the asphyxiated bird looked in death.
During this period, “my father’s spirit” (as Sylvia put it in her journal) seemed to preside over the poems she was assembling, once again, for a book that would eventually be called The Colossus, its eponymous poem dealing with her mythologizing of Otto Plath. If Sylvia had become an actress, she would have been attracted to the role of Hamlet, beseeched by his father, a spirit “doomed to walk the night.” Reckoning with her powerful father’s image was gradually becoming a Shakespearean struggle with existence itself, with the claims of the past upon the present. Even as Sylvia tried to liberate herself from her father’s call, she was also suffocating. That sense of becoming bereft of and haunted by a father who will not let go, experienced by a child grown strong in the dominion of the father, bedeviled Sylvia Plath as she sat down beside Ted at the Ouija board during the summer of 1958, half-believing she really was in communion with Otto Plath, who appeared as “Prince Otto.”
Sylvia could not sleep. She felt paralyzed, her novel appearing in her mind’s eye like a ghost that could not materialize. For the first time, she regarded Ted as an obstacle. He was powerfully didactic about his own ideas, as she began to see when they were in the company of others. They were still remarkably compatible, she confided to her journal, but she had to admit that she enjoyed herself during those times he was away from her. He liked giving orders, making him sound like the peremptory Otto Plath. Ted’s stiff neck, resulting from too much exercise, seemed indicative to Sylvia of his rigid personality.