memory, a playful fantasy or even a self-conscious adaptation of Jung’s story about the scarab beetle? Or was the poem a free translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘The Panther’ rather than a memory of witnessing a real caged jaguar? The imagery is remarkably similar – the animal pacing endlessly behind its bars, then achieving a momentary vision of freedom. These questions cannot be answered with any certainty. Hughes was good at covering his tracks and laying false scents. And his belief in synchronicity and archetype would lead him to say that the details do not matter, provided the poem penetrates to the core of the reality embodied by the jaguar.
The young man drinking in the sensation of claret and Gruyère in that Paris café in 1954 sensed that there was more to life than anything he had yet found in Cambridge or London, in academic work or casual labour. He was ready to burst the bars, but didn’t yet see how to do so. Something was needed to take his writing to another level. A stronger imagination was required in order to free the beast, to widen the horizon. In 1956, it came. A new ending, as powerful and sinuous as the jaguar’s footfall: the ‘stride’ a wilderness of ‘freedom’, the ‘world’ rolling ‘under the long thrust of his heel’, the horizon coming ‘Over the cage floor’.31 In a scribbled note, Ted Hughes remembered the moment of achievement: ‘Finished on Whitstead Lawn, Cambridge, with Sylvia.’32
7
Philip Hobsbaum was working for a television and film production company. He wrote a letter on his friend’s behalf to the story editor at the film company J. Arthur Rank, which had studios at Pinewood in the London suburbs. Ted duly got a job reading dozens of novels, histories and biographies, summarising the plots with a view to their potential as movie scripts. Many of his treatments survive in his notebooks: the Battle of Stalingrad, the Life of Robespierre, even James Joyce’s Ulysses.1 Summarising other people’s work made him all the more eager to find a way of devoting himself to his own writing. He kept his complete Shakespeare in the drawer of his desk in the office and got it out when the supervisor wasn’t around.
The movie people were not to his taste; he thought that they were all up their own or each other’s ‘arses’.2 He lived for the weekends. Sometimes Shirley went down to London and stayed with him in Rugby Street. Ted, convinced that his talents lay only in poetry and that he had no aptitude for prose, suggested to her that he might give her some of the plot outlines he was reviewing at Pinewood for her to turn into narrative. They would part with a farewell drink at Dirty Dick’s pub opposite Liverpool Street station before she got on the train to return to college. On other weekends, Ted would visit Cambridge and test Shirley’s ability to identify brief quotations from Marlowe and Shakespeare. He recited Dylan Thomas to her, and gave her an inscribed copy of Deaths and Entrances. He also gave her a handwritten copy of a poem inspired by her, which was later included in The Hawk in the Rain.
Shirley began to detect a subtle change in their relationship, hard to pinpoint, but impossible not to feel. Two newly arrived blonde Americans were cutting a figure in Newnham. Shirley didn’t get to know them, but she saw them weekly, waiting their turn, as she and her supervision partner left the room of Enid Welsford, author of the renowned study of The Fool: His Social and Literary History, who was taking them for the paper on the English Moralists. Shirley thought that they looked supremely all-American, so was surprised when Ted eyed them up and said that he thought they looked ‘Swedish’.3
On Saturday 25 February 1956 a launch party was held for Saint Botolph’s Review. During the day, the contributors and their friends sold copies on the streets and in cafés and pubs. Bert Wyatt-Brown, an American student at King’s, sold a copy to a fellow-American Fulbright scholar from Newnham. She raced off on her bicycle, only to seek him out again a few hours later in order to ask him where she might meet these St Botolph’s poets. She had been especially impressed by the work of Lucas Myers and Ted Hughes. If her very lightly fictionalised account of the day and night is to be believed, she crashed her bike into Bert in the market place, ‘spilling oranges, figs, and a paper packet of pink-frosted cakes’.4 He gave her an invitation to the launch party.5
They had hired a big upstairs room in Falcon Yard, just off Petty Cury in the centre of town. It belonged to the university Women’s Union (female undergraduates were excluded from the bastion of the historic Union Society, where future politicians developed their debating skills). This was one of the few places in Cambridge where you could guarantee a party with more women than men. It had a polished floor for dancing and stained-glass windows as in a church. They hauled a piano up the stairs and Joe Lyde brought along his top-class jazz men. Luke Myers danced the ‘hot-wild jitterbug’.6 His recollection was that everybody was drunk except for Ted, who liked to stay in control.
The party was in full swing when the Newnham girl arrived, in the company of Hamish Stewart, a pale Canadian from Queens’ College. She had left her essay on ‘Passion as Destiny in Racine’s Plays’, with particular reference to Phèdre, half finished in her Smith Corona typewriter.7 They were already drunk, having spent an hour slugging whisky in Miller’s bar near his college. She was wearing a red hairband, red shoes and bright-red lipstick. Her fingernails were varnished in Applecart Red.8 Her name was Sylvia Plath. She was one of the two ‘Swedish-looking’ girls who had caught Ted’s eye. Bert Wyatt-Brown was dating the other one, who lodged in the same student house: Jane Baltzell (even more blonde and in several respects a rival). Bert introduced Sylvia to the men of the hour: Luke, with his ‘dark sideburns and rumpled hair, black-and-white checked baggy pants and a loose swinging jacket’; Dan Huws, with whom she had a bone to pick because of his lukewarm review of the poems she had published in the student magazine Broadsheet; Than Minton, ‘so small and dark one would have to sit down to talk to him’; Danny Weissbort with his curly hair; and David Ross, ‘immaculate and dark’. They were all dark. She was exhilarated by this bohemian world of turtleneck sweaters and the jazz getting under her skin. She grabbed Myers from his girlfriend and danced with him, shouting about his poems, in particular his ‘Sestina of the Norse Seaman’, which took a highly complex poetic form and crashed through its rules and its line-endings.9
‘Then’, as she wrote in her diary when the morning finally came, ‘the worst happened’: ‘That big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes.’ She didn’t know him, ‘but she knew him by heart’.10 Though she did not admit so much in her diary, she had come to look for him. Always obsessed with rivals and doubles, she was determined to take him off the Newnham girl she knew he was going out with. On arriving in the room, she noticed Shirley straight away: ‘Pale, freckled, with no mouth but a pink dim distant rosebud, willowed reedy, wide-eyed to the streaming of his words … Silent, fawn-eyed. Clever.’11 She too was a ‘statue-worshipper’, putting the dark poet on a pedestal.
Shouting to be heard above the band and the crowd, Sylvia enthused to Ted about his poems:
And he yelled back, colossal, in a voice that should have come from a Pole, ‘You like?’ and asking me if I wanted brandy, and me yelling yes and back into the next room
