In October, Sylvia had to return to Cambridge for her second year of study. Ted remained for a fortnight with his parents at the Beacon, then went back to Dan Huws’s flat in Rugby Street. They still had not told the college authorities, or indeed the Fulbright Commission, about their marriage. Sylvia was unnecessarily worried about getting into trouble. So they were apart for a few weeks, one of the very few times that they were not together during the six years before the marriage broke down. They wrote each other love letters every day, alive with longing and playfulness and writing ideas and smart criticism of each other’s work and dreamy plans for the future. Ted sometimes took to typing instead of using his favoured black fountain pen, as if in homage to Sylvia’s love of the new Olivetti typewriter she had bought in the month of their marriage. They were not averse to sentimentality. ‘Darling Dearest Sylvia kish puss ponk’, Ted would begin, and he would end, ‘I love you I love you, I love you I love you your Ted’ or ‘My kiss puss All my lovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelove lovelove from top to tow [sic]’ – followed by a postscript with the promise that ‘I shall see you Friday and we shall make up for all these interims.’23
His literary career was beginning to take off. Not least thanks to Sylvia’s organisational skills, his poems were being sent out to magazines in both Britain and America, and some were being accepted. It made a difference that the submissions were neatly typewritten; one can guess from the American spellings who was responsible for that. News came from Carne-Ross of provisional acceptance of the Yeats programme. ‘Darling darling Teddy,’ wrote Sylvia, ‘I read your letter over breakfast … and fought and conquered a huge urge to … leap up in the center of the table and shout: MY HUSBAND IS GOING TO READ OVER THE BBC! With appropriate whoopdedos. I AM SO PROUD.’24 As it turned out, he was paid, but the Yeats readings were never broadcast. The first time Ted’s voice was heard on the radio was on 14 April 1957, when a recording made on 24 October the previous year of him reading his poem ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’ was included in an episode of a series called The Poet’s Voice.
By the time he had done his recordings, the Governing Body of Newnham and the Fulbright Commission had been told about the marriage. Far from taking away Sylvia’s scholarship or throwing her out, they congratulated her. The Fulbright took the view that the union was a boost to Anglo-American relations, which was their raison d’être. Ted was free to move to Cambridge. Mr and Mrs Hughes had found a ground-floor flat in Eltisley Avenue, in Newnham village, on the edge of the city, nicely placed between Sylvia’s college and the green spaces of Grantchester Meadows. The rent was low (£4 per week) and they had a living room, dining room, cavernous kitchen and bedroom. Like many houses in west Cambridge, it was a single residence that had been divided into flats. This meant that they had to share a bathroom with the occupant of the flat upstairs; by a curious coincidence, that was George Sassoon, son of the First World War poet Siegfried, and thus a relative of Richard Sassoon (though Sylvia never mentioned him). Ted moved in first, with Sylvia following at the end of the academic term in December. She had sent a batch of their work to the prestigious American magazines the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly. All of hers had been rejected, but a poem of Ted’s called ‘The Hawk in the Storm’ was accepted by Peter Davison, editor of the Atlantic. Ted thought it was the worst of the poems that they had submitted.
In November, Olwyn stopped by for a weekend on the way back to Paris after a break with her parents in Yorkshire. Her first impression of Sylvia was of ‘American-classic’ clothes, good manners, blonde hair, fair skin, brown eyes (‘deep, watchful and intelligent’), elegant limbs (‘her best feature’) and an attractively low-pitched voice (‘deepening engagingly when she was amused’). She thought that her new sister-in-law was ‘poised and controlled, with a hint of reserve or constraint’.25 They went to Heffers bookshop and Sylvia bought an impressive pile of literary texts with her generous Fulbright book allowance. In the evening, Sylvia cooked a large dinner of roast beef, followed by strawberries and cream. They drank wine. Sylvia thought Olwyn was ‘startlingly beautiful with amber-gold hair and eyes’, but felt that she was ‘quite selfish and squanders money on herself continually in extravagances of clothes and cigarettes, whilst she still owes Ted fifty pounds’.26
That same month, Sylvia spotted the announcement of a competition for a best first book of poems. It came from the American publisher Harper Brothers, in conjunction with the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association of New York (YMYWHA), which had a renowned Poetry Center at its headquarters on 92nd Street. The judges were figures of immense distinction in the poetry world: W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and the American Marianne Moore. Since Sylvia did not think she had quite enough good poems of her own to create a book, she and Ted selected what they thought were the best forty of Ted’s. Six of them already had magazine acceptances. She typed them up and submitted them, with a renamed version of the Atlantic poem as the title piece: The Hawk in the Rain. He had for some time been intending to put together a collection of his poems, taking the title from a recurrent dream he had been having: ‘A Hill of Leopards’.27 The trouble was, he had not yet been inspired to write the poem that would go with the title. So he was happy to go with Hawk and to let his wife take the lead on the process. Sylvia was convinced that Ted would win the competition, and gain the prize of publication. She assured her mother that it was the best collection of any poet since W. B. Yeats and Dylan Thomas.28
Sylvia rounded up her year in a pre-Christmas letter to her dearest friend, Marty Brown, her sophomore roommate at Smith. She had found a husband who was ‘the most magnificent man ever’, a ‘roaring hulking Yorkshireman’ who had put the sound of a ‘hurricane’ in her ear at the Falcon Yard party. From that first instant, she ‘just knew’ that he was the one. She rescued him from a ‘slum’ in London, where he had told her that Dylan Thomas used to stay, and now they were writing ‘like fury’, each the other’s best critic. He was ‘a crack shot and fisherman, discus thrower and can read horoscopes like a professional’. He shot rabbits and she stewed them. They had nothing to their name but ‘a wood coffee table, a travel rug and very sharp steak knife’, but they wanted nothing more. They had each other. She loved that he was the only man she had ever met whom she could ‘never boss’ – she just knew that if she tried, ‘he’d bash my head in’.29
They spent Christmas with Ted’s family at the Beacon, all getting on well, then returned to Cambridge for the freezing-cold Lent term. Dorothea Krook, Sylvia’s generous college supervisor, lent them a paraffin heater, at which Sylvia warmed her hands as she worked on an autobiographical novel about her Cambridge experiences. The ‘greasy-grimed shelves’ and ‘tacky, dark walls’ of 55 Eltisley ‘confirmed’ her ‘idea of England’: ‘part / Nursing home, part morgue / For something partly dying, partly dead’.30 The contrast between dirty, dying England and pristine, newborn America was a recurrent image in Ted’s work. Sylvia cleaned the kitchen in a frenzy of scouring.
Ted brought in some income by getting a job as an English teacher at the Coleridge Secondary Modern School for Boys. The name had suitably inspiring literary connotations, but he found the work tiring. Because it was a school for boys who had failed to get into the more academic grammar schools, he worked across the curriculum, teaching basic Maths as well as English, History, Drama and Art. He brought the students’ work home in the evening and read out samples to Sylvia as he was marking. It was not an easy school. Sylvia was only mildly exaggerating for comic effect when she told her friend Marty that his class consisted of ‘a gang of 40 teddy-boys, teen-age, who carry chains and razors to school and can’t remember their multiplication tables for 2 days running: a most moving, tragic and in many ways rewarding experience’. It took a lot out of Ted ‘to