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As if out on a moor in a high wind, they shouted about Dan’s review of her poems, Ted flirtatiously suggesting that his mate had only said what he did because she was beautiful. He explained that he was working in London, earning ten pounds a week, and that he had ‘obligations in the next room’ – meaning Shirley, who was not happy. Neither was Hamish, who supposedly punched Ted before the evening was out, which is hardly surprising in view of what happened next:
And I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband off, my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never again find, and my favorite silver earrings: hah, I shall keep, he barked. And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face. His poem ‘I did it, I.’ Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists.13
For Sylvia, he was the ‘one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunk of words’. Both his spoken and his written words were ‘strong and blasting like a high wind in steel girders’. She ‘screamed’ to herself, ‘oh, to give myself crashing, fighting, to you’.14 Her knees had gone ‘jelly-weak’ and ‘the room of the party hung in her eyes like a death’s-door camera-shot’.15 When she bit him and tasted his salty blood, he ‘shook her bang against the solid-grained substance of the wall’ and her attempt at another bite closed on thin air.16 Passion turned to embarrassment. She asked Hamish to take care of her – ‘I have been rather lousy,’ she explained.17
Shirley had entered the room at the moment of the kiss and the bite. Her friend and fellow-Newnham student Jean Gooder vividly recalled her figure framed in the doorway. Ted had his back to her as Sylvia came up to him, and his very height meant that Shirley did not see what happened.18
Ted had gone to the party with a sense of foreboding. He had cast the night’s horoscope and found it predicting ‘disastrous expense’. The launch was certainly not covered by the pitiful earnings of the magazine, but for Hughes it took the rest of his life to pay off the cost of that night:
First sight. First snapshot isolated
Unalterable, stilled in the camera’s glare.
Taller
Than ever you were again. Swaying so slender
It seemed your long, perfect, American legs
Simply went on up.19
The camera will be a key metaphor in Ted’s poems about Sylvia, an image of the gaze that fell upon their relationship. In this first snapshot, it is her bright confident American glamour and loudness that grab him and give him a glimpse of a very different world from that of Yorkshire Edna, Mancunian Liz and Liverpudlian Shirley.
His recall, in this Birthday Letters poem, may have been retrospectively shaped by the recollection of a famous photograph published in the Varsity student newspaper a couple of months later, in which ‘Sylvia Plath, American Fulbright Scholar at Newnham, reviews May Week fashions’. In one of the accompanying illustrations she wears a halter-neck swimsuit that reveals long muscular legs, honed by bicycling around Cambridge. She sent a cutting to her mother, calling herself Betty Grable. In her journals, she would compare herself to Grable in one sentence and Thomas Mann in the next.20 Glamour photography, movie stars, fashion, bright-red lipstick, sexually self-confident girls: in Fifties Cambridge, under grey skies and with memories of post-war rationing still alive, all these things were pure America. There was a vibrant but somewhat manic quality to them, as there was to this Fulbright scholar (‘full’ and ‘bright’ indeed). ‘The pure products of America’, wrote the poet William Carlos Williams, ‘go crazy.’21
‘You’re all there,’ Ted had said to her during their stamping dance. ‘Aren’t you?’22 She found him big and he found her tall. From the start, each was turning the other into a figure from myth. But here we need to be careful: Ted’s poem was written long after the moment. His memory was remade by subsequent events. It begins with astrological foreboding and ends with the knowledge, which he couldn’t possibly have had at the time, that the encounter in Falcon Yard would ‘brand’ him for the rest of his life: his ‘stupefied interrogation’ of her ‘blue headscarf’ and ‘the swelling ring-moat of tooth-marks’ that would mark his ‘face’ for a ‘month’ and his inner self ‘for good’. As the editor of Sylvia Plath’s journals, Hughes knew perfectly well that the scarf was red. He turns it blue as a sign of the sorrow that was to come. He would finally close Birthday Letters with a poem called ‘Red’ that begins ‘Red was your colour’ and ends ‘But the jewel you lost was blue.’23
What did he really think at the time? If he wrote a journal entry in the next few days, it is lost. Still, he could not but have been impressed and flattered that she knew his poems so well. She had quoted at him not only ‘I did it, I’, the punchline of ‘Law in the Country of the Cats’, his Saint Botolph’s Review poem about male sexual rivals, but also an image from another poem that had carved itself upon her mind: ‘most dear unscratchable diamond’.24 It was in answer to this quotation that he had said ‘You like?’ It comes from ‘The Casualty’, one of the best of his early poems. This wasn’t one of the new pieces released that very day in Saint Botolph’s: it had been published in that other Cambridge magazine, Chequer, over a year before. Sylvia’s memory of it is a mark of how Ted had impressed her on the page well before she met him in the flesh. It is also a mark of her critical acumen, for the two Hughes poems in the November 1955 issue of Chequer are much better than the four in the February 1956 Saint Botolph’s Review.
‘The Casualty’, about the body of a shot-down airman in the burnt-out fuselage of his plane, crashed in the English countryside, is quintessential Hughes. It is his first war poem, inspired by a combined memory of the droning warplanes over Mexborough and the RAF bomber on a pre-war training exercise that had run into fog over Mytholmroyd, from the wreck of which he and Gerald had salvaged tubing for their own model planes. This yoking of Mexborough and Mytholmroyd readied him to bring together his own childhood experience of the Second World War and his father’s traumatic survival of the First. In The Hawk in the Rain, he reprinted ‘The Casualty’ as the first of a sequence of war poems that ends the collection. There it is followed by ‘Bayonet Charge’, ‘Griefs for Dead Soldiers’, his finest Great War poem ‘Six Young Men’, ‘Two Wise Generals’ and ‘The Ancient Heroes and the Bomber Pilot’.25
For Plath, it wasn’t the military content of ‘The Casualty’ so much as the violent intensity of its language that bit into her spirit. An image that pierced her especially sharply was that of how the groans of the dying airman ‘rip / The slum of weeds, leaves, barbed coils’. Drunk and dancing in Falcon Yard, she quoted the poem to its author and the ‘rip’ magically went from art to life, as he tore off her headband and earrings. From the outset, there was an electricity between them, a barbed coil of passion within. The latter image carries a hint of barbed wire and all its connotations of violence and the infliction of pain: ‘Such violence, and I can see how women
