and unusually adventurous for a Fifties girl. One reason why she was aroused by the hunk and heft, the ‘flash of violent incredible action’, in the poem about man standing up to man which she had read earlier that day, with its punch-up in the street and its cocky ending (‘I did it, I’), is that she had a history of creating rivalry between men. During her final undergraduate months at Smith College the previous year she was coming to the end of a love affair with a gentle boy called Gordon Lameyer even as she was sleeping with a dangerously bohemian Yale student called Richard Sassoon. Over the summer she had a brief but sexually blazing liaison with Peter Davison, a New York editor working at a publishing house in Boston. Coming over to take up her Fulbright, she had a shipboard romance with another scholar aboard the Queen Elizabeth. Since her arrival in Cambridge on 1 October, she had flirted round many boys, made passionate love to Sassoon in Paris during the Christmas vacation and then been rejected by him after a huge row outside the Matisse Chapel near Nice.26 She was ready for something new and big and preferably involving a fight.
After leaving Falcon Yard, she and Hamish stumbled around the foggy streets of Cambridge. She whispered Ted’s name to the lamp-posts. She could not get out of her head how he had said her name, Sylvia, ‘in a blasting wind which shot off in the desert’ behind her eyes and his, and how ‘his poems are clever and terrible and lovely’. Hamish tried to put her off by saying that he was the biggest seducer in Cambridge and that all the St Botolph’s crowd were phoneys.
Then they found themselves surrounded by a group of undergraduates who were also out after college lock-up. The boys, reimagined in her journal as a symbolic group of potential boyfriends (or worshippers), were checking that she was all right, telling her how nice she smelt, asking to kiss her. Then Hamish was hoisting her over the railings into Queens’, his college. A spike pierced her tight skirt, exposing her thighs, and another dug into her hand, creating stigmata that did not bleed because the air was freezing. Then she was lying on the floor of his room by the fire, with him on top of her. She liked his kisses on her mouth and his weight on her body, but she told him that he should scold her for her behaviour at the party. At two-thirty in the morning, he walked her back to Whitstead, the house on the other side of the river, at the far end of the Newnham playing fields, where she lodged with eleven other girls. Though she was pleased that Hamish had proved himself able to fight for her, it was Ted who now consumed her imagination. He entered her life as a rival to Sassoon: ‘The one man since I’ve lived who could blast Richard.’27
Falling in love is often about place and placing yourself. Sylvia needed a proper Cambridge boyfriend in order to prove to herself that she had arrived in England and in English literature. Housemate Jane (‘the blonde one’) was content to go out with other American boys such as Bert. Though Sylvia would not have said no to handsome Luke from the Deep South, she sensed a fatal magnetism pulling her towards the huge man from the north of England. One of the attractions of Sassoon had been that he was collaterally descended from the First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon. One of the attractions of Davison had been that he was a literary publisher with British connections. Now she was on the brink of the thing itself: a great English poet. Her mind was steeped in the language of the English literature that had been her study for years. Her repeated use of the word ‘blast’ when writing about their first encounter and her image of them shouting passionately at each other as if in a high wind reveal where she is going: to a ‘blasted heath’ – the location of the opening of Shakespeare’s most northern play – and more specifically to a Yorkshire moor. She is already, unconsciously, projecting herself as Cathy and Hughes as Heathcliff.
For Ted, thinking over and rewriting these events, again and again through the course of thirty-five years after her death, there was a fatalistic quality from the start. In their myth of themselves, Ted and Sylvia were Heathcliff and Cathy from the first instant, but in reality each of them spent the immediate aftermath of Falcon Yard in the company of another.
Ted had come to Cambridge that weekend to be with Shirley and to make love to her. He never wrote about what they said to each other that night. All she remembers is that she did not speak to Sylvia and that, though Ted was still attentive, she quickly became aware of a deliberate ‘distancing’ on his part. She returned to Falcon Yard the next day to search for an earring lent by a friend. She found the earring but knew that somehow she was losing Ted.
On the Monday, with Ted back at work in London, Sylvia Plath wrote ‘a full-page poem about the dark forces of lust’. Its title was ‘Pursuit’. ‘It is not bad,’ she told herself. ‘It is dedicated to Ted Hughes.’28 It began from a line in Racine’s Phèdre, the play she was studying for the essay she had to write for the Tragedy paper that week: ‘Dans le fond des forêts votre image me suit’ (‘In the depth of the forests your image pursues me’). This was a line that haunted her. She believed that it captured the inextricable relationship between desire and death. It sprang her into a poem that she believed to be her best yet, one which offered ‘a symbol of the terrible beauty of death, and the paradox that the more intensely one lives, the more one burns and consumes oneself’.29
There is a panther stalks me down:
One day I’ll have my death of him;
His greed has set the woods aflame,
He prowls more lordly than the sun.30
Writing about the poem to her mother, Plath acknowledged the strong influence of Blake’s ‘Tyger, tyger’ on its rhythms, its questions and its elemental force. When she first told her mother that she had written it, she acknowledged that it was directly inspired by the encounter in Falcon Yard with ‘the only man I’ve met yet here who’d be strong enough to be equal with’, but whom she would probably never see again.31
What she did not acknowledge, in either her journal or her letters, was that the most direct inspiration behind ‘Pursuit’ was the other poem that Hughes had published in Chequer a few months before: his compact index of everything to follow, ‘The Jaguar’. Ted as panther, animal force, sexual marauder; Sylvia willing her own death of him. In mythologising their relationship from the start, she was in some sense creating the conditions for her own tragedy – and laying the ground for the posthumous dramatisation of her story, his story.
Now she knew what she wanted: ‘a life of conflict, of balancing children, sonnets, love and dirty dishes; and banging banging an affirmation of life out on pianos and ski slopes and in bed in bed in bed’.32 Ted proceeded in a more circumspect manner. All he said about the party was that ‘it was very bright, and everything got smashed up’.33 He was preoccupied with the approach of the final deadline on the option to take up the cheap passage to Australia.
Two weeks later he was back in Cambridge, staying with Luke. He came up on the bus from Victoria after work on the Friday and late that evening the two of them threw stones at what they thought was Sylvia’s window. Bert told her the next day and she spent the weekend longing to hear the tread of the black panther on the stair, aching with desire for a new life. The boys tried again in the small hours of Sunday morning – mud as well as stones this time – but once again they got the wrong window.34 Sylvia was in a little attic room, which she had tastefully decorated with art books artfully stacked or opened, a tea set of ‘solid black pottery’ and bright pillows on the couch.35 The stones and earth could hardly have reached that high.
The next weekend, conscious that the Easter vacation was upon them,
