They spent their wedding night in 18 Rugby Street. Ted then cleared his stuff from the flat and took it to Yorkshire. He still did not tell his parents that he was married. The story was that he would be off to Spain in search of work teaching English as a foreign language. Sylvia took the opportunity to show her mother round Cambridge. There was talk of a visit to the Beacon in early August so that the family could meet Sylvia and Aurelia, though this did not come off.1
They met up back in London and flew to Paris, with Aurelia. After a week’s exhausting sightseeing, she went off on her European tour, while Ted and Sylvia stayed another week. They met up with Luke Myers, who had never seen either of them looking so happy. Ted was conscious that Sylvia’s was an ‘American’ Paris of Impressionist paintings, chestnut trees and the shades of ‘Hemingway, / Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein’. Also of the memory of her failed attempt to reconcile with Richard Sassoon just a couple of months earlier. His Paris, by contrast, was shaped by the memory of his earlier visit to Olwyn and the sense he had then of the shadows of the war – ‘walls patched and scabbed with posters’, the ghosts of SS men sitting in pavement cafés, the sense that the waiter serving you bitter coffee might have been a collaborator.2
Paris was proving too expensive, so they took a train to cheaper Spain, with nothing but a rucksack and Sylvia’s typewriter. First stop was Madrid, where they attended a bullfight. Fascinated by the rituals and the blood, Ted wrote an enormously detailed account of it in a letter to his parents. Sylvia felt disgusted and sickened by the brutality, though recognised that the experience was good material for a story. ‘I am glad that Ted and I both feel the same way,’ she reported to her mother, ‘full of sympathy for the bull.’ The most satisfying moment was when ‘one of the six beautiful, doomed bulls managed to gore a fat, cruel picador’.3 He was lifted off his horse and carried away with blood spurting from his thigh. ‘You could see great holes in him,’ wrote Ted. ‘Whether he died later or not I don’t know.’4
From Madrid it was on to Benidorm, which was in the early stages of its transformation from fishing village to tourist resort. They began by lodging in a widow’s house. There was no hot water or refrigerator and the dark kitchen cupboard was full of ants. They cooked – ‘fresh sardines fried in oil, potato and onion tortillas, café con leche’5 – on an ancient paraffin burner with a blue flame. Ted got sunburnt on the first day. Soon they moved to a rental house set back from the sea, away from the noise of the main hotels on the neon-lit tourist strip. They decided to stay all summer and write.
Sylvia filled her journal with detailed observations of fishermen, markets brimming with fresh food, and day excursions. Ted carried on with what he had started in Paris: a collection of fables for children, in the manner of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. The first was called ‘How the Donkey Became’. Myths of origin were a peculiar obsession throughout his writing career. He was very pleased with his narratives, though it would take several years before he found a publisher for them. He told Olwyn that Sylvia rated them, too: ‘Sylvia is as fine a literary critic as I have met, and she thinks about my ordinary prose narrative style just as you do. But my fables she cries over and laughs all together.’6
He always remembered their big cool house and the hotels under construction in ‘The moon-blanched, moon-trenched sea-town’ where a ‘hook of promontory’ halved ‘The two wings of beach’.7 One of Ted and Sylvia’s favourite devices was to apply the bleaching light cast by the moon as a filter upon their poetic lenses. They wrote all morning and bathed in the afternoons, ‘played and shopped, maybe wrote again in the evenings’.8 On some evenings, Ted worked to improve his Spanish while Sylvia translated Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir from the French. He tried to teach her the art of hypnosis, which gave her the idea of writing a story called ‘The Hypnotising Husband’. She sketched in pen and ink, catching the outline of kitchen pots, an old stove, white-plastered tenements on the cliffs above the fishing bay, bowls of fruit, and her new husband in profile.9
Sylvia told her mother that they were utterly happy. She could not imagine how she had lived without him: ‘I think he is the handsomest, most brilliant, creative, dear man in the world. My whole thought is for him, to make a comfortable place for him.’10 She was just as effusive to her brother: ‘He knows all about so many things: fishing, hunting, birds, animals, and is utterly dear … What a husband!’11 Ted in turn told his brother in Australia that he had never been writing so well, that this ‘American poetess’ was the making of him.12 In her journal, she described their writing table: 5 foot square, in the centre of the stone-tiled dining room, made of ‘glossy dark polished wood’, with a gap in the middle. At one end Ted sat ‘in a squarely built grandfather chair with wicker back and seat’:
His realm was a welter of sheets of typing paper and ragged cardboard-covered notebooks; the sheets of scrap paper, scrawled across with his assertive blue-inked script, rounded, upright, flaired, were backs of reports on books, plays and movies written while at Pinewood studios; typed and re-written versions of poems, bordered with drawings of mice, ferrets and polar bears, spread out across his half of the table. A bottle of blue ink, perpetually open, rested on a stack of paper. Crumpled balls of used paper lay here and there, to be thrown into the large wooden crate placed for that purpose in the doorway. All papers and notebooks on this half of the table were tossed at angles, kitty-corner and impromptu.13
A cookbook rested open by his right elbow, where Sylvia had left it after reading out recipes for rabbit stew. These are the sort of conditions in which he would write for the rest of his life. On Sylvia’s half of the table, by contrast, everything was neat, well ordered, carefully stacked. He wrote in longhand; she typed.
Though one would not guess it from the brightness of her journal-writing, if Ted is to be believed, Sylvia hated Spain. He said this in retrospect, on account of what he perceived as the darkening in the style of the poems that she wrote while they were there, of her reaction to the bullfight, and of a glimpse of her by moonlight walking alone by the sea in Alicante, looking out towards America like a lost soul. He loved Goya; she found something disturbing in the ‘Goya funeral grin’ of Spanish culture.14
A single brief shadow passed across their honeymoon summer under the Benidorm sun. Sylvia’s fragmentary journal entry for 23 July speaks of ‘The hurt going in, clean as a razor, and the dark blood welling’.15 The first part of that day’s diary is missing, apparently torn from her notebook. Years later, when her marriage to Ted was at rock-bottom, she allegedly told a friend that one afternoon he turned violent as they made love in the open air on a hillside. The – unverified – story went that his hands tightened around her neck and she nearly choked.16
After six hot weeks in Spain, they returned via Paris. Olwyn had been away on a conference when they passed through in July and this time she was away again, on holiday. They were, however, able to see Sylvia’s brother Warren, who was about to take up a Fulbright himself. He took some photographs of the newlyweds, arm in arm. In the city, everything seemed rushed, and tiring, after their summer by the sea. Sylvia was ready to head north to ‘Ted’s wuthering-heights home’.17
