As a hallucination in the heaving air buoyed
Like a hallucination in the swamping air to its sides
Like a hallucination the running air
Like a hallucination that the scene rides and it hangs
Like a hallucination that the scenes rides <vivid> through …
After these six failed attempts, he got to ‘Steady as a hallucination in the bursting sky’, but still that was not quite right.19 Again, it was a long time before he achieved ‘The window is starless still; the clock ticks, / The page is printed’ at the end of ‘The Thought-Fox’. First he had to create and reject such variants as ‘And the page where the prints have appeared’ and ‘The clock crowding and the whitening sky / Watch this page where the prints remain.’20
There were warning signs. Sylvia was exhausted by her duties at Smith. Ted told Olwyn that she was working twelve hours a day and cracking under the strain. Sometimes she would descend from the manic energy of her writing into days when she struggled to get out of bed, what with coughs and colds, fevers and flu, or sheer torpor. Christmas with Aurelia was marred by Sylvia suffering from viral pneumonia, exacerbated by her exhaustion from teaching and marking. In the new year, she told her head of department that she wanted to leave at the end of the academic session instead of accepting her option to stay on for a second year. Ted, meanwhile, got a similar teaching position for the semester over at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
He had to teach two classes three times a week on a ‘Great Books’ course. This meant mugging up on Milton’s shorter poems, including Samson Agonistes, reading Goethe’s Faust for the first time (opportune because he had been enthusing about Goethe and Nietzsche in a letter to Olwyn the previous autumn), getting advice from Sylvia about Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (they both heavily annotated their battered copy of the Penguin paperback of the English translation),21 plunging into that quintessentially New England book, Thoreau’s Walden, and going back to some of his favourite poetry – Wordsworth, Keats and Yeats. He also had to teach freshman English twice a week and a creative writing class in which he could do more or less what he liked. As a handsome young instructor with a relaxed teaching style, a rich English accent and a prizewinning first book of poems just published, he was an immediate hit with his students, especially the female ones. In the creative writing class, there were just eight of them, ‘3 beautiful, one brilliant & a very good person’.22
Back at Elm Street, despite all the preparation and marking, there was plenty of time for reading. Ted had some success in persuading Sylvia to share his Yeatsian occult interests, though these were more to Olwyn’s taste. He read through the Journals of the Psychical Research Society from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and wrote to her of ‘wonderful accounts of hypnoses, automatic writings, ghosts, double personalities etc’. He was delighted to find an anticipation of his own belief that the left side of the brain (in right-handed people) controlled ‘all consciously-practised skills’, whereas ‘the subconscious, or something deeper, a world of spirits’ was located in the right lobe.23
In April, Ted gave a poetry reading at Harvard. They drove down in the car they were borrowing from Warren Plath while he was away in Europe on his Fulbright scholarship. Sylvia’s ex-lover, the poet and publisher Peter Davison, remembered the ‘emphatic consonant-crunching of Hughes’s voice’ when he read.24 The effect was to emphasise the nouns and underplay the verbs. As his poetry developed, Ted would often take the opportunity to omit some of the verbs altogether, even on paper. At a reception afterwards, they were introduced to several poets and writers. The literary scene in Cambridge and Boston was much more lively than that in Northampton and Amherst, so they felt justified in a plan they were hatching to move there in the summer.
Not that they had failed to find a few like-minded people during their teaching year. Several would remain particular friends: the poet Anthony Hecht was a member of the Smith faculty and the British poet and classical scholar Paul Roche was on a visiting fellowship, accompanied by his American wife Clarissa. Then in May 1958, they met the artist Leonard Baskin and his family. Eight years older than Ted, and with a comparably dark imagination, he taught printmaking and sculpture at Smith. ‘How I love the Baskins,’ Sylvia would write in her journal the following summer. They were ‘a miracle of humanity and integrity, with no smarm’.25 For Ted, too, Baskin would always remain the model of uncompromising artistic integrity. His volatile temper and forceful opinions were a necessary part of the package.
Sylvia’s adoration of Ted and his poetry was undimmed. In March he did a public reading at the University of Massachusetts, coming on third, after two very inferior local poets. He ‘shone’, she wrote, ‘the room dead-still for his reading’. Her eyes filled with tears and the hairs on her skin stood up like quills: ‘I married a real poet, and my life is redeemed: to love, serve and create.’26 When her own writing was going well, she dared to imagine that she might one day be ‘The Poetess of America’ as Ted would certainly be ‘The Poet of England and her dominions’. She thought he was infallible in his suggestions for improvements in her poems, even down to the alteration of odd words such as ‘marvelingly’ instead of ‘admiringly’.27
Just before the end of the semester, the mood suddenly changed. Their new friend Paul Roche, the visiting poet and classicist, had arranged a public reading of his new translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. Ted agreed to play the part of Creon, but he told Sylvia that he would prefer it if she did not attend. There had been no rehearsals and he did not have any confidence in the production. At the last minute, Sylvia did decide to go. She slipped into a seat at the back. For the first time, she didn’t like the look of Ted: he appeared slovenly, ‘his suit jacket wrinkled as if being pulled from behind, his pants hanging, unbelted, in great folds, his hair black and greasy’ under the stage lights. Afterwards, he went backstage, frustrated with himself for agreeing to be inveigled into the evening. Paul Roche wondered whether he was grumpy because he thought he could have done a better job on the translation himself. With one finger, Ted banged out a tune on an old piano. It was probably a mistake not to have greeted Sylvia straight after the show: she was beginning to grow suspicious of Ted, not wanting to be apart from him for even an hour at a time. That semester there were rumours about all sorts of affairs going round the English Department. Something about his manner wasn’t right. He wouldn’t speak to her, but wouldn’t leave. He had what she called an ‘odd, lousy smile’ of a kind she hadn’t seen since Falcon Yard – was this the smile of the man who had taken Shirley to the party and ended up in a fierce embrace with Sylvia? In her journal she asked herself whether his behaviour could really be explained by his being ‘ashamed of appearing on the platform in the company of lice’.28
The next day was the final day of teaching before the long summer break. Sylvia got a great round of applause from both her morning and her afternoon classes. Ted agreed that he would drive down to the Smith campus, return his library books and meet Sylvia to celebrate the end of term. He had time on his hands, since he had taught his last class at Amherst a day or two before. Sylvia had twenty minutes to spare before the afternoon class, so she went into the campus coffee shop. She noticed one of her male colleagues deep in flirtatious conversation with a very pretty undergraduate. This got her thinking about liaisons between professors and their students, which were not at all uncommon, especially in an English department at an all girls’ college. After class, she went to look for Ted in the car park. Their car was there, but it was empty. Thinking he had gone to return his books, she drove it towards the library.
Suddenly she saw Ted, ‘coming up the road from Paradise Pond where