Ted sat and wrote – or poised himself over a blank page – from seven in the morning until two in the afternoon. The poems weren’t really coming, but his children’s stories were exciting him. He hatched a grand plan to produce a great compendium – 5,000 fables, perhaps – which would bring together all the situations, characters and themes out of all the fairy tales and animal stories that he had ever read. And there weren’t many that he hadn’t read.
Then they would explore: sunbathing, swimming, fishing. Once, their little boat was swept out to sea and they were stranded on a reef until a motorboat rescued them. On another occasion, they went mussel-hunting at Rock Harbor, watching with fascination ‘the weird spectacle of fiddler crabs in the mud-pools’.47
Sylvia started a new journal. She too was aching to fill a blank page. She would begin with short stories in which to work herself up towards a novel. She would aim for a ‘jewel prose’ akin to poetry. Little paragraphs. Vignettes. Memories of the cold, the food and the eccentricities of Cambridge. Then she would be ready for ‘Novel: FALCON YARD: central image: love, a falcon, striking once and for all: blood sacrifice: falcon yard, central chapter of book: the irrefutable meeting and experience.’ There would be an emblem out of the traditions of medieval courtly love: a lord and lady on horseback, smiling. A falcon on the wrist, not a hawk in the rain. The bird of prey tamed. She was struggling with writer’s block, but was sustained by ‘the endless deep love’ in which she was living that second honeymoon summer. And by ‘the unique and almost bottomless understanding of Ted’.48
As always, she had dark dreams, but there were joyful ones too: of Ted’s rosy-cheeked mother holding a baby, with two older children by her side. Sylvia wondered whether this was a memory of a photograph of Ted and his elder siblings or a vision of the grandchildren that she would one day give to Edith.
Ted was teaching her the art of poetic economy. Choose something very particular: a pig, say, or a cow by moonlight. Describe with words that ‘have an aura of mystic power’. Name the names of a quality: ‘spindly, prickling, sleek, splayed, wan, luminous, bellied’.49 Repeat the words aloud and the incantation will make them strong.
She felt that a new era had begun. After the months of exam-cramming, ‘slovenly Eltisley living, tight budgeting, arranging of moving’, she was becoming whole, stretching her writerly wings. Ted brought her cold orange juice to quench sleep-thirst and they exchanged dreams. In hers she was back at Newnham but this time surrounded by wild flowers instead of having her old bad dream about exams. In his, they walked a meadow in which there was a baby tiger and another tiger beyond a hedge. A tiger-man knocked at the door with a gun and Ted defended her, ‘bluffing with an empty rifle’.50
Sylvia was reading Virginia Woolf, learning to write prose poetry, to follow the stream of consciousness and not worry about realistic detail. This was how she could turn ‘Judith Greenwood’, her autobiographical character, into a symbolic figure. ‘Make her enigmatic: who is that blond girl: she is a bitch: she is the white goddess. Make her a statement of the generation. Which is you.’51 But was it possible to be both the eternal feminine of the White Goddess and the symbol of a new materialistic, carefree generation?
Before long, she would be blocked again. And then the anxiety would kick in, the jealousy of Ted’s success. She wanted him to have it, she felt in her gut that he was the better poet and that he deserved it. The reason she could marry him and him alone was the knowledge that she would never have to restrain her own talent. With a lesser poet, she would have had to rein herself in so as not to emasculate him by overtaking him and becoming the successful one. With Ted, she told herself, however high she flew he would always be ahead. For all this, she could not but envy his prize, his winning of Mr T. S. Eliot’s admiration, his forthcoming publication on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ted knew that ‘the waters off beautiful Nauset’ – a phrase from ‘Daddy’ that he quotes back in ‘The Prism’, his Birthday Letters poem about her grave – were the cradle of Sylvia’s self. He kept her talismanic stone in which, like a prism, he imagined seeing the Cape’s ‘salty globe of blue, its gull-sparkle, / Its path of surf-groomed sand’.52 In the prism and in the Birthday Letter named from it, both her childhood – pre-depression, pre-suicide attempts – and their second honeymoon summer of 1957 were intact. Their sunlit seaside love was the antithesis of the snow-covered, windswept Brontë moors.
10
With summer gone, they took up residence in the town of Northampton, on the banks of the Connecticut River in western Massachusetts. This was the location of Smith College, where Sylvia taught as an instructor for freshman English throughout the 1957–8 academic year. They lived in an apartment at 337 Elm Street, near a church, a high school and the green oasis of Childs Memorial Park. After a nervous first day, fastened in the straitjacket of a blue flannel suit that Ted remembered in a Birthday Letters poem, Sylvia threw herself into her teaching. Busy as she was preparing and taking classes, she continued to plan ‘Falcon Yard’, her Cambridge novel. Ted helped to steer her away from the superficial externals of her magazine-style prose, towards his own more inward territory. ‘Place doesn’t matter – it’s the inner life: Ted & me,’ she reminded herself in her journal.1 But for Ted, place did matter. ‘So this is America’ was his memory of his thought on first making love to Sylvia.2 Now he was in America with his American wife.
In her imagination, Sylvia was still in England. She planned short stories. One of them, ‘Four Corners of a Windy House’, sketched out in ‘physical, rich, heavy-booted detail’ their bracing hike across the moors to Top Withens:
blisters, grouse – picnic – honey soaking through brown paper bag – fear, aloneness – goal – cairn of black stones, small, contracted – their dream of each other, she & he … Strength – each alone – bracken, marsh – tea in deep cleft of valley – dark, cats – story of lost woman – match-flare of courage in the dark – moor sheep – bus-wait opposite spiritualists – ghosts & reality on moor … house: absolute reality, but clustered with ghosts – eternal paradox of identity.3
Before his eyes, Ted’s life was being transformed into art through his wife’s magical gift for words.
He, on the other hand, felt blocked. With Sylvia as the breadwinner, he was free to write full time, but the poems had dried up. He would sit for hours ‘like a statue of a man writing’.4 The only difference between him and an inanimate figure was that after a few hours a bead of sweat would drip down his forehead. For the first time, he was trying to write as opposed to writing down the words that just came to him. And it was the trying that proved the impediment. What was more, the fact of having published all the decent poems he had written meant that he had to move on to a new style. There would be no point in producing a second book that was just like the first – and it was on the basis of a second book that his long-term literary future would be judged. He cooked Sylvia both breakfast and lunch, but the life of idleness was not for him. He wandered around Northampton and was disconcerted by the Smith girls, who went around in gaggles, all looked like each other, and had a ‘machined glaze of hyper-health’.5