Plath had her usual trouble settling into a new environment. She loved Yaddo’s traditional furnishings and the sumptuous meals, but she spent the balance of September reading Eudora Welty and Jean Stafford and writing story ideas in her journal. She sent three stories to Peter Davison, now an editor at The Atlantic Monthly. She doubted this weak-willed male, as she deemed him, would accept her work. Sylvia put in a good seven hours a day on her writing, enjoying her top-floor view of the “dense pines.” Ted had his own writing studio in the woods. Sumptuous breakfasts and box lunches kept them going for a whole day.

Sylvia read Arthur Miller while Ted was writing a play, which is perhaps why in early October she dreamed of Marilyn Monroe. Aurelia had wished she could be the fairy godmother in her daughter’s life, and Plath was working on a “mummy” story when she dreamed the fairy godmother scene with Marilyn. Only with Monroe could Plath unbend, even though Monroe and Miller “could, of course, not know us at all,” Sylvia noted. And she still could not write her novel. And she still called Ted her “salvation.” Maybe in England, she confided to her journal, she would have more luck. Harcourt had just turned down her first book of poetry.

Sometime during her stay at Yaddo, Plath realized she was pregnant, although her journal is surprisingly silent on the subject. In early November, in her fourth month, she sped up her creation of new poems. “It’s wonderful how the prospect of such responsibilities concentrates one’s mind,” Ted wrote to a friend in early December. But then Sylvia’s output abruptly stopped, and she wondered what had happened to the confident writer of “Sunday at the Mintons.” She worried that in spite of all efforts to the contrary she had relied too much on Ted. Now Yaddo seemed like a nunnery that locked her away from the world, and she thought of beating it back to Boston before settling in London—or perhaps in the English countryside, not far from the city. She was terribly confused, alternately elated and enervated, reflexively thinking that a baby would prevent her from being herself, and then spending a happy day with a stomach that felt fat with life—only to have another disturbed by a dream of dying in childbirth.

The couple decided Sylvia would give birth in England, where they arrived in mid-December. An ebullient Ted, writing to Daniel Huws, declared he had escaped petrification and was already renewing himself in England. In her journal, Sylvia welcomed her return to a country that had been receptive to her poems and stories and seemed to share her sensibility. On 9 December, Ted wrote to Lucas Myers that Sylvia, now six months pregnant, had written a dozen spectacular poems that reflected an entirely new phase—all done as wild monologues. “I’ve already stolen several things from them,” he boasted.

CHAPTER 6

THE UNIVERSAL MOTHER

(1960–62)

1960: Plath and Hughes rent a London flat; 1 April: Frieda Rebecca, their first child, is born; October: The Colossus, Plath’s first book, is published; 6 February 1961: Plath suffers a miscarriage; 28 February: Plath undergoes an appendectomy; March: Plath begins writing The Bell Jar; July: the couple purchases a manor house in Devon; 17 January 1962: Nicholas Farrar Hughes is born; May: David and Assia Wevill visit Court Green.

On 3 February, Sylvia sent a round-up letter to Marcia Brown, explaining what it had been like to move back to England. She and Ted had stayed part of the time with Hughes’s parents in Yorkshire, but with Olwyn visiting and other relatives dropping by, Sylvia had little time to herself or space in which to read, let alone write. Ted’s mother, a messy housekeeper who left greasy pans in the oven and cupboards, got on Sylvia’s fastidious nerves. Sylvia wanted to help out, but Mrs. Hughes resisted. Sylvia felt hurt, she later told her friend Elizabeth Compton. Mrs. Hughes, Compton felt sure, did not want to exclude Sylvia, only wanting to pay respect to this well-educated woman of a different class.

Then there had been a ghastly three-week search for a furnished flat. The awful rainy, cold, and windy weather—always sure to depress Plath—and the appalling, dingy condition of the housing stock that cost more that twenty-five dollars a week (out of their price range), made her feel adrift in the large city, especially since she wanted to be near a good doctor and hospital. The American poet W. S. Merwin and his English wife, Dido, tried to be helpful, making phone calls and using their contacts, but they also agreed with Sylvia that the English were the “most secretly dirty race on earth.” Even new items in department stores looked shabby to Sylvia. To get anything decent seemed to involve “key money,” a form of large bribe to a real estate agent or landlord. Welcome to England, which had yet to boom itself out of its postwar blues.

Thanks to the Merwins, Sylvia and Ted finally found a flat on Chalcot Square near Primrose Hill, a very pleasant, almost country-like setting. The place needed a lot of work (Sylvia was applying her third coat of paint), but they were happy to have a home on a three-year lease—and relieved, since the baby was due in late March. They had a sunny kitchen and a view of the square, where Sylvia watched birds and children playing. They had to buy appliances, but the Merwins lent them some furniture. At the equivalent of eighteen dollars a week, plus charges for gas and electricity, they could budget enough using Ted’s Guggenheim Fellowship money. And of course the National Health Service would cover all costs associated with childbirth. Ted’s letters share Sylvia’s enthusiasm for their new home, as well as her dismay over what he called the “frightful competition for flats.” Sylvia reported to her mother on 7 February that Ted had just finished painting the living room walls in white over textured paper, and that they intended to have an engraving of Isis, enlarged from one of his astrology books, mounted on one wall. To Olwyn, Ted wrote that he liked “the feel of living in London. My stay in America seems to have greatly objectified my sense of England.”

Sylvia decided to have her baby at home with the assistance of a midwife, not an unusual practice in England, but one forced on Sylvia because it was too late to register at a hospital under the National Health Service. She could be admitted as an emergency patient, but Sylvia preferred to plan ahead. She was comforted to have the assistance of Dido’s obstetrician. Natural childbirth—still an unusual choice for a woman in the States—had the blessing of her English doctor, who promised to be on call should there be complications. Sylvia was also practicing relaxation exercises, and although she did not mention it to Marcia, Ted had also experimented with hypnotizing her and with teaching her self-hypnotic states that relieved stress. She was counting on him to be on hand, to cook and generally to bolster her—although she wished a friend like Marcia could also be around. Sylvia, probably more fearful than she let on, wanted to know what Marcia thought of this setup.

Dido Merwin, Lucas Myers, and other British friends of Ted Hughes have portrayed Sylvia as rigid, self-absorbed, and hopelessly American. And yet here was an aspect of her that they did not seem to appreciate. Her American doctor had advised against natural childbirth. And indeed, everything in Sylvia’s suburban background cried out against this old world way of doing things. For all her nightmares about childbirth gone wrong, Sylvia showed considerable flexibility and courage in approaching this momentous change in her life. Her husband seems to have had qualms. To Lucas Meyers, Hughes showed the first sign that not all was well. Out for a drink with his friend from Cambridge days, Ted “confided to me what seemed not to be manageable in the marriage,” Myers recalls in Crows Steered/Bergs Appeared. To Myers, Hughes had never before been critical of married life with Sylvia, and like many of his friends, Myers perceived Hughes to be a “mostly willing prisoner” of the marriage. But in one instance, he told Myers, he had decided to count the number of times Sylvia had interrupted his work in the course of a morning: The total had reached 104.