From Madrid it was on to Benidorm, which was in the early stages of its transformation from fishing village to tourist resort. They began by lodging in a widow’s house. There was no hot water or refrigerator and the dark kitchen cupboard was full of ants. They cooked – ‘fresh sardines fried in oil, potato and onion tortillas, café con leche’5 – on an ancient paraffin burner with a blue flame. Ted got sunburnt on the first day. Soon they moved to a rental house set back from the sea, away from the noise of the main hotels on the neon-lit tourist strip. They decided to stay all summer and write.
Sylvia filled her journal with detailed observations of fishermen, markets brimming with fresh food, and day excursions. Ted carried on with what he had started in Paris: a collection of fables for children, in the manner of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. The first was called ‘How the Donkey Became’. Myths of origin were a peculiar obsession throughout his writing career. He was very pleased with his narratives, though it would take several years before he found a publisher for them. He told Olwyn that Sylvia rated them, too: ‘Sylvia is as fine a literary critic as I have met, and she thinks about my ordinary prose narrative style just as you do. But my fables she cries over and laughs all together.’6
He always remembered their big cool house and the hotels under construction in ‘The moon-blanched, moon-trenched sea-town’ where a ‘hook of promontory’ halved ‘The two wings of beach’.7 One of Ted and Sylvia’s favourite devices was to apply the bleaching light cast by the moon as a filter upon their poetic lenses. They wrote all morning and bathed in the afternoons, ‘played and shopped, maybe wrote again in the evenings’.8 On some evenings, Ted worked to improve his Spanish while Sylvia translated Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir from the French. He tried to teach her the art of hypnosis, which gave her the idea of writing a story called ‘The Hypnotising Husband’. She sketched in pen and ink, catching the outline of kitchen pots, an old stove, white-plastered tenements on the cliffs above the fishing bay, bowls of fruit, and her new husband in profile.9
Sylvia told her mother that they were utterly happy. She could not imagine how she had lived without him: ‘I think he is the handsomest, most brilliant, creative, dear man in the world. My whole thought is for him, to make a comfortable place for him.’10 She was just as effusive to her brother: ‘He knows all about so many things: fishing, hunting, birds, animals, and is utterly dear … What a husband!’11 Ted in turn told his brother in Australia that he had never been writing so well, that this ‘American poetess’ was the making of him.12 In her journal, she described their writing table: 5 foot square, in the centre of the stone-tiled dining room, made of ‘glossy dark polished wood’, with a gap in the middle. At one end Ted sat ‘in a squarely built grandfather chair with wicker back and seat’:
His realm was a welter of sheets of typing paper and ragged cardboard-covered notebooks; the sheets of scrap paper, scrawled across with his assertive blue-inked script, rounded, upright, flaired, were backs of reports on books, plays and movies written while at Pinewood studios; typed and re-written versions of poems, bordered with drawings of mice, ferrets and polar bears, spread out across his half of the table. A bottle of blue ink, perpetually open, rested on a stack of paper. Crumpled balls of used paper lay here and there, to be thrown into the large wooden crate placed for that purpose in the doorway. All papers and notebooks on this half of the table were tossed at angles, kitty-corner and impromptu.13
A cookbook rested open by his right elbow, where Sylvia had left it after reading out recipes for rabbit stew. These are the sort of conditions in which he would write for the rest of his life. On Sylvia’s half of the table, by contrast, everything was neat, well ordered, carefully stacked. He wrote in longhand; she typed.
Though one would not guess it from the brightness of her journal-writing, if Ted is to be believed, Sylvia hated Spain. He said this in retrospect, on account of what he perceived as the darkening in the style of the poems that she wrote while they were there, of her reaction to the bullfight, and of a glimpse of her by moonlight walking alone by the sea in Alicante, looking out towards America like a lost soul. He loved Goya; she found something disturbing in the ‘Goya funeral grin’ of Spanish culture.14
A single brief shadow passed across their honeymoon summer under the Benidorm sun. Sylvia’s fragmentary journal entry for 23 July speaks of ‘The hurt going in, clean as a razor, and the dark blood welling’.15 The first part of that day’s diary is missing, apparently torn from her notebook. Years later, when her marriage to Ted was at rock-bottom, she allegedly told a friend that one afternoon he turned violent as they made love in the open air on a hillside. The – unverified – story went that his hands tightened around her neck and she nearly choked.16
After six hot weeks in Spain, they returned via Paris. Olwyn had been away on a conference when they passed through in July and this time she was away again, on holiday. They were, however, able to see Sylvia’s brother Warren, who was about to take up a Fulbright himself. He took some photographs of the newlyweds, arm in arm. In the city, everything seemed rushed, and tiring, after their summer by the sea. Sylvia was ready to head north to ‘Ted’s wuthering-heights home’.17
The photographs were taken by a colleague from the trouser factory who was an enthusiastic amateur with a camera. In the most famous image, she holds with both hands the strong arm that is around her. His other hand is casually in his pocket. The light bounces off their white shirts on to their fresh faces and high cheekbones. He has just turned twenty-six and she is not quite twenty-four. They look impossibly beautiful, impossibly happy. In another snapshot, Edith is between them, proud of the son who has brought an American bride instead of going off to have a family in Australia. In a third, Sylvia is in the bosom of the family, sitting on a garden bench between Ted and Edith, with Uncle Walt and Bill Hughes standing behind.
On 2 September, she wrote to her mother, describing herself as ‘a veritable convert to the Brontë clan’, with warm woollen sweater, slacks, socks to her knees and a steaming cup of coffee, sitting in Ted’s bedroom looking out over the beautiful landscape of moorland criss-crossed with drystone walls, as the wind whipped the rain against the side of the house and the coal fires glowed within.18 On a never-to-be-forgotten day, Uncle Walt drove them over to Top Withens, the alleged original of Wuthering Heights. They had a picnic and walked over the moor to the ‘lonely, deserted black-stone house, broken down, clinging to the windy side of a hill’.19 Ted photographed her halfway up a tree, just by the ruin. She re-read Wuthering Heights and then on a day of freezing wind they hiked 10 miles over the moors to visit Top Withens again. They also went to the Brontë parsonage in Haworth, where they marvelled at Charlotte Brontë’s little watercolours and the miniature books in which the sisters had written their earliest stories. Sylvia was full of hope and ambition. A poem ‘unfurled’ from her ‘Like a loose frond of hair’ from the nape of her neck, ‘To be clipped and kept in a book’.20 The moors and the Brontë connection would inspire two fine Plath poems, ‘Two Views of Withens’ and, later, ‘Wuthering Heights’.21
Towards the end of September, they went down to London for a couple of days. Ted auditioned as a reader of modern poetry for the BBC’s highbrow Third Programme (the station that a decade later was rebranded as Radio 3). At Sylvia’s suggestion,