she made a bad error. She wrote again to Sassoon, telling him about Ted. As Sassoon put it, she ‘was going to start having an affair with a certain fellow so as to make me jealous and give me a mind to marry her, which I was unwilling to do just because of this imminent unfaithfulness’.11 She cheered herself up with sightseeing and an afternoon in a hotel room with an Oxford student called Tony Gray. She juggled her options in her diary. To play it cool and wait for Ted to come to her? To go to him, for one night only, then go back to Sassoon? To play safe and marry her devoted friend Gordon Lameyer? Or even to join Ted in one of his hare-brained schemes, such as teaching English in Yugoslavia?
In the latter part of the Easter vacation, she travelled with Lameyer to Munich, Venice and Rome. Their relationship was disintegrating. Sassoon was giving no sign of returning. On Friday 13 April, her late father’s birthday, Sylvia Plath boarded a plane in Rome, the ticket paid for by Lameyer. She had told Ted to expect her that night. In her possession was a prize: he had written her a poem. Though the first line read ‘Ridiculous to call it love’, it revealed that she had touched him to the quick, that he felt her absence as if it were a wound, that without her he was like a dying man, that ‘Wherever you haunt earth, you are shaped and bright / As the true ghost of my loss.’12 Even if this was a jeu d’esprit, a little act of seduction intended to bring her back to his bed for a second time, it is still an uncanny anticipation of the future haunting that would determine the course of his later life.
Sylvia wrote about their second night together in her incomplete novel ‘Falcon Yard’. In the surviving draft, Ted is called Gerald – hardly a disguise – but her ‘Character Notebook’ for the novel calls him Leonard, a ‘God-man, because spermy’, a creator, ‘Dionysiac’, a Pan who has to be led into the mundane world of ‘toast and nappies’.13 ‘What I need’, she writes in the voice of Jess, the autobiographical protagonist, is ‘a banging, blasting, ferocious love’. But a voice tells her that it will hurt. Her counter-voice replies, ‘So what … better bleed.’ She needs to stop being ‘the Girl Who’s Never Been Hurt’. She tells herself to get hurt and be glad of it, to take his desire ‘even though he’ll never love you but will use you and lunge on through you to the next one’. She determines to ‘blast his other girls to hell and back’. After an encounter with another man on the bus from the airport, Jess heads for Rugby Street, ‘blazing’, ‘letting the wet wind blow her hair back’, only too glad to look wild because ‘The recklessness came banging up in her: stronger and fiercer than she had ever known it’. She is greeted by the Ted character – his name now changed from Gerald to Ian – who observes that it is Friday the 13th as he takes her suitcase upstairs.
His voice, she notices this time, is ‘UnBritish’, almost ‘Refugee Pole, mixed with something of Dylan Thomas: rich and mellow-noted: half sung’. They exchange small talk with Jim, the commercial artist from the flat upstairs – this is Jim Downer, with whom Ted was working at this time on an illustrated children’s book called Timmy the Tug. The Sylvia character is pleased to be called ‘Jess, not Judy’, an allusion to the wound of Ted having called her Shirley not Sylvia when they were first making love back in March. Then he tells his dreams of white leopard, burnt fox and pike. He kisses her on the throat, loving the incredible smoothness – fish- or mermaid-like – of her skin. They openly discuss the violence of the first time:
‘I went to Paris all scarred. Black and blue …’
‘But you liked it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I was furious with myself. I don’t know what happened to me …’
She has it out with him about the wrong name being blurted out. He defuses the tension with an account of that moment of morning grace when he left her, the Wordsworthian epiphany that would be recaptured years later in ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’: ‘I’ll never forget it. When I came out into the streets, the air was all blue, like blue water, and the buildings were covered, just thick, with thrushes. Everything clear and blue. Not a sound. The air isn’t like that in London at any other time.’
Then they read poetry to each other. First, her ‘Conversation among the Ruins’. ‘You love one-syllabled words, don’t you?’ he says, setting the template for their relationship by mingling literary criticism with love-talk, ‘Squab, patch, crack. Violent.’ She replies that she hates the abstraction of ‘-ation’ words: ‘I like words to sound what they say: bang crash. Not mince along in singsong iambic pentameter.’ He responds by reading an old English ballad and his voice reaches to the core of her being: ‘The way he took words, rounded, pitched them. It was holy. I will learn this by heart, she told herself … part of her vibrating to the sound of his voice. I will learn it, and hear his voice every time, reading it.’ She convinces herself that she will never forget the sound of his voice or a single syllable of the verse that passes his lips. Her bare arms ‘go stippled with goose flesh’, he tells her the poem is ‘an altar to spill blood at’, and the surviving fragment breaks off before they go to bed.14
‘I can make more love the more I make love,’ he said to her. ‘The more he writes poems, the more he writes poems,’ she was soon reporting to her mother.15 Three days after the night in Rugby Street, Sylvia wrote in her diary of ‘his big iron violent virile body, incredible tendernesses and rich voice which makes poems and quirked people and music’. He is a ‘huge derrick-striding Ted’. He makes her feel safe but he makes her feel scared:
Consider yourself lucky to have been stabbed by him; never complain or be bitter or ask for more than normal human consideration as an integrated being. Let him go. Have the guts. Make him happy: cook, play, read … keep other cups and flagons full – never accuse or nag – let him run, reap, rip – and glory in the temporary sun of his ruthless force.16
With Sylvia back in Cambridge for the summer term, Ted’ s problem was Shirley. His relationship with her came to a bitter end in an encounter that he recorded in several drafts of a poem that, sensitive to her privacy, he never published. It tells of how he turned up in Cambridge with a bottle of wine and two pounds of rump steak intended for a ‘love-feast’ with Sylvia at Whitstead. He went the long way round so as not to be seen outside Newnham College, only to turn the corner and see Shirley coming for him like ‘an electrical storm’, beautiful in her red-haired anger. He hid the wine and the parcel of meat in a privet hedge. He never forgot the pain of their exchange. He remembered her ‘furious restraint’ and ‘her outraged under-whisper’. He ‘refused’ her and his memory is that as he did so he thrice denied that he had slept with Sylvia, even though he was only 50 yards from her door. The triple denial is an allusion to the disciple Peter denying his knowledge of Jesus; Shirley’s memory, by contrast, is that Ted had always been true to himself and honest with her during their affair, and he was candid with her in their parting.
In Ted’s colourful dramatisation of their blazing row, the wine bottle (‘uncontrollable, bulbous / Priapic’) rolls on to the pavement between them. It is as if even the world’s inanimate objects are on the side of his new love. Shirley’s green eyes fill with tears and she walks away across Newnham playing fields. He stands and watches her walk out of his life. It was as if she had turned not to the playing fields but the other way, into the road, ‘And gone under a lorry’.17 He never saw her again.
With the help of friends, she struggled through her last term at Cambridge and her final exams. She knew that nothing could change what had happened, but confronting her loss, accepting it, she found almost impossible. Ted had a deep and lasting impact on her life.
Both
