rounded up her year in a pre-Christmas letter to her dearest friend, Marty Brown, her sophomore roommate at Smith. She had found a husband who was ‘the most magnificent man ever’, a ‘roaring hulking Yorkshireman’ who had put the sound of a ‘hurricane’ in her ear at the Falcon Yard party. From that first instant, she ‘just knew’ that he was the one. She rescued him from a ‘slum’ in London, where he had told her that Dylan Thomas used to stay, and now they were writing ‘like fury’, each the other’s best critic. He was ‘a crack shot and fisherman, discus thrower and can read horoscopes like a professional’. He shot rabbits and she stewed them. They had nothing to their name but ‘a wood coffee table, a travel rug and very sharp steak knife’, but they wanted nothing more. They had each other. She loved that he was the only man she had ever met whom she could ‘never boss’ – she just knew that if she tried, ‘he’d bash my head in’.29
They spent Christmas with Ted’s family at the Beacon, all getting on well, then returned to Cambridge for the freezing-cold Lent term. Dorothea Krook, Sylvia’s generous college supervisor, lent them a paraffin heater, at which Sylvia warmed her hands as she worked on an autobiographical novel about her Cambridge experiences. The ‘greasy-grimed shelves’ and ‘tacky, dark walls’ of 55 Eltisley ‘confirmed’ her ‘idea of England’: ‘part / Nursing home, part morgue / For something partly dying, partly dead’.30 The contrast between dirty, dying England and pristine, newborn America was a recurrent image in Ted’s work. Sylvia cleaned the kitchen in a frenzy of scouring.
Ted brought in some income by getting a job as an English teacher at the Coleridge Secondary Modern School for Boys. The name had suitably inspiring literary connotations, but he found the work tiring. Because it was a school for boys who had failed to get into the more academic grammar schools, he worked across the curriculum, teaching basic Maths as well as English, History, Drama and Art. He brought the students’ work home in the evening and read out samples to Sylvia as he was marking. It was not an easy school. Sylvia was only mildly exaggerating for comic effect when she told her friend Marty that his class consisted of ‘a gang of 40 teddy-boys, teen-age, who carry chains and razors to school and can’t remember their multiplication tables for 2 days running: a most moving, tragic and in many ways rewarding experience’. It took a lot out of Ted ‘to maintain physical and emotional discipline (they still use the cane here!)’.31 But the boys loved him, especially when he read out ballads and encouraged them to write their own. And still more when he made them stage little Elizabethan plays.
In February, three days before the anniversary of their first meeting at Falcon Yard, came winter cheer: Ted had won the competition. The Hawk in the Rain was going to be published in America. The distinction of the judging panel almost certainly assured English publication too. Ted told Olwyn that his first reaction on hearing the news was a tremendous sense of guilt – partly, though he did not say so, at the fact that he owed the breakthrough to Sylvia finding out about the competition, and yet it was his poems, not hers, that would be published. He went straight back to read the poems and immediately found all sorts of things he wanted to change. He was appalled at himself for letting Sylvia send them out ‘in such an unfinished state’.32 Sylvia had no such hesitation: the book was magnificent, Ted was a genius, the poems combined ‘intellect and grace of complex form, with lyrical music, male vigor and vitality, and moral commitment and love and awe of the world’. He had everything and she was blissfully happy with him, happy indeed that his book had been accepted first. She rejoiced, she told Aurelia, that he was ahead of her: ‘There is no question of rivalry, but only mutual joy and a sense of us doubling our prize-winning and creative output.’33 She was proud to have been the one who had pushed Ted to make the selection and then typed up the poems.
Sylvia promptly sent a copy of the typescript to Faber and Faber, Britain’s premier poetry publisher, mentioning the prize and the prospect of publication by Harper in America. Faber returned it with a curt note saying that they did not publish first volumes by American writers. With characteristic persistence, she sent it back, saying that Ted was actually English. They agreed to publish a UK edition. Mr T. S. Eliot himself very much liked the poems. Within a week of acceptance, Faber sent the poems in proof – well before Harper had set up the New York edition in type. Ted would, he proudly told his parents, be ‘the first poet ever to publish his first book in both countries’.34 Indeed, only Auden and Dylan Thomas had gone before him in having a volume of poems published simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic.
More good news arrived from America: Sylvia was offered a teaching job at Smith, her old college. Ted would go too. Plans for language teaching in Spain or further afield were abandoned. To show her husband her own country was a much more exciting plan. In the better weather of Easter term, they walked on Grantchester Meadows, sometimes getting up early enough to watch the sun rise. One morning Sylvia sat on a stile and recited Chaucer to the cows: ‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote …’.35 Soon she was preparing for her final exams. Ted helped her to revise.
In May, he wrote to Gerald and Joan – they now had two children, Ashley and Brendon – saying that ‘marriage is my medium’.36 He and Sylvia worked and walked and repaired each other’s writing. She was one of the best critics he had ever met and they understood each other’s imagination ‘perfectly’. She was ‘the most responsive alert creature in the world’. They struck sparks, sitting by the river, just watching for water-voles, Sylvia thrilled when the little animals came close. Ted would let out a squeal in imitation of a rabbit, and out they would come. The sound was so realistic that once an owl flew down and tried to sit on his head.37
His visa and the necessary blood test were arranged. Before leaving Coleridge, he directed a school play and Sylvia attended, her only visit to his place of work. They would sail on 20 June, as soon as Sylvia had graduated. The plan was that they would be in New York for the launch of his book in August (in fact it appeared a couple of months later than that).
They went up to Yorkshire to say goodbye to the family. During this visit they happily corrected the Harper proofs of The Hawk in the Rain, but there was an embarrassing incident when Ted’s old schoolteacher John Fisher and his wife Nancy drove up from Mexborough to see them. Olwyn, who was also over from Paris for a summer stay, remembered the visit as follows:
Sylvia was very ‘gushy’ when they arrived. This clearly disconcerted the Fishers, and possibly their inadequate response offended her. Well on in the afternoon, when the talk was deep in reminiscences, she suddenly rose and left the room. We heard the outside door open and banged shut. When she didn’t return after about ten minutes, during which time Ted had become rather silent, he rose in turn and said he’d better go and see where she was. Quite a while later they returned, Sylvia rushing straight upstairs.38
For the family, this was a first glimpse of Sylvia’s emotional volatility.
Then it was off to Southampton to cross the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth. The best thing about the crossing was the food: ‘all included in the fare’, ‘steak, steak, steak – if you wish’ (a real treat, in those years when post-war rationing was still a recent memory), ‘Five courses to each meal and many choices of dish’.39 For Sylvia, who always had a very hearty appetite, the only problem was the combination of this with the Atlantic swell. On one occasion she found herself ‘kneeling on the floor of the little cabin under the electric light’ with ‘the vomit shooting out across the room from the rich dinner, the
