Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life. Jonathan Bate

A shadow, a double, a whisper of death. He then imagines Sylvia taking a photograph of him. Perhaps she had brought a camera to snap her father’s grave, or perhaps it is the metaphoric photograph of the poem ‘Man in Black’ that is entering her mind at this moment. Either way, he feels as if he has stepped ‘Into the telescopic sights / Of the paparazzo sniper’ nested in Sylvia’s brown eyes. He feels as if she is pinning him with a ‘double image’, ‘double exposure’ (the name she would choose three years later for her lost novel about the disintegration of their marriage). He feels as if her dead father has just crawled out of the sea. He ‘did not feel’ Otto sliding into him as Sylvia’s ‘lenses tightened’.83

      Or at least all this is what he thought he thought when, years later, he began to write the series of letter-poems that first took their overall title from the deer, then from the black coat, and finally from the poem that Sylvia had written at Yaddo, ‘for a Birthday’.

11

       Famous Poet

      When I got here (having left in 1957 as a complete unknown) I found myself really quite famous and was deluged by invitations to do this, give readings, do that, meet so-and-so, etc, and many doors were comfortably wide open that I had never dreamed of being able to enter and places such as the B.B.C., which I had been trying to penetrate for years, suddenly received me as guest of honour.

      (Ted Hughes to Aurelia and Warren Plath, December 1960)1

      At Yaddo, Sylvia had a dream in which Marilyn Monroe appeared to her as ‘a kind of fairy godmother’, gave her an expert manicure and advice on hairdressers, invited her for Christmas and promised her ‘a new flowering life’.2 Dream Sylvia told Marilyn how much she and Arthur Miller meant to her and Ted: the dream couple. But perhaps because the new flowering life involved motherhood, Sylvia stopped imitating the Marilyn look. When Olwyn arrived to spend Christmas 1959 at the Beacon, the first thing she saw was Ted and Sylvia standing at the sitting-room door, waiting to welcome her. Sylvia’s hair was mousy brown. Olwyn thought that she had stopped bleaching it (in fact, the last time she bleached it had been in 1954; thereafter, it was naturally lightened by sun-worship). Olwyn had not realised until that moment that she was not a natural blonde. Sylvia, she thought, had become less the ‘good-looking girl’ and more ‘a contained individual’.3

      On Boxing Day, Sylvia sat by a roaring coal fire in the little second parlour of the Beacon, digesting a light supper of creamed leftover turkey and mushrooms that she had made for the family, and wrote to her mother as the rain lashed against the triple window and a gale howled. This was what the weather had been like for the entire two weeks of their stay. She told Aurelia that to feel the Yorkshire weather she should ‘reread Ted’s poem “Wind”: it’s perfect’. Olwyn, she said, was ‘very nice, a beautiful blonde, slim girl, my height and size, with yellow-green eyes and delicate, graceful bone structure’. Sylvia said that she liked Olwyn immensely and got on much better with her ‘now that she’s really accepted me as Ted’s wife’.4 Olwyn herself was not so sure. She thought that Sylvia overreacted to small incidents, such as some sharp words about a borrowed dressing-gown.

      After the Christmas and New Year festivities, Ted and Sylvia went to London. They began in a bed-and-breakfast, then stayed in one of Daniel Huws’s father’s flats back at 18 Rugby Street, which had had a makeover since they had been away. There were now sinks in each flat and running water in their tiny kitchens. They threw themselves into house-hunting, looking in various parts of London before deciding on the Primrose Hill area near Regent’s Park, where Bill Merwin and his posh English wife Dido had a lovely flat.

      After one or two disappointments, such as a lovely furnished ground-floor flat that they were going to take until the landlord said ‘no children’, Dido pointed them in the direction of a third-floor flat in a five-storey house in Chalcot Square. The area was rather run-down, but beautifully placed close to both the park and the gentle green slope of Primrose Hill itself. The flat, which was in the process of being refurbished, was small, with only a single bedroom. They would have to furnish it themselves. But it was cheap – six guineas a week – and the shops, the zoo and the green spaces were all within walking distance, perfect for a young mother with a pram. The Merwins were near by and Dido was friendly with the local GP, Dr Horder. They registered with the practice and the obstetrician took on Sylvia. Home birth was the norm in those days.