at Sylvia’s copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. She had often joked that in Ted she had found her own gamekeeper.
‘Ted is wonderful: how to get it down? All of a piece, smelling lovely as a baby, a hay field, strawberries under leaves, and smooth white, browning to tan, with his great lion head of hair erupting.’41 It was July 1957. Cape Cod. They had washed off the spiders and dust and coal-sludge and smeared windows of Eltisley Avenue, bathed and freshened themselves, rebaptised their marriage in the great salt tides of the Atlantic, under the summer sun.
Brother-in-law Warren drove them there a few days after a garden party at which Sylvia proudly introduced her handsome husband to more than seventy friends and family. Bicycles were strapped to the roof of the car. Aurelia’s wedding present could not have been better judged: a summer rental of a cottage belonging to friends at Eastham, a short bike ride from Nauset Light and Coast Guard beaches. For seven magical weeks they could write, before heading inland for Sylvia to take up her position at Smith. It was a little wooden house in ‘a Christmas tree forest’,42 fully fitted out with squirrels on the roof and chipmunks under the floor. ‘That’s my first ever real chipmunk,’ cried Ted. The little creature lodged in his memory as a ‘midget Aboriginal American’, a ‘snapshot for life’. Especially as Sylvia would sometimes make a face like a chipmunk.43
He recorded his first impressions of America in long, journal-like letters sent to his parents in Yorkshire, Gerald and Joan in Australia, and Olwyn in Paris. In comparison with dour, confined Fifties England, everything was large, opulent, brash. Even the robins were as big as thrushes. Sociability was compulsory. As was cleanliness, which he joked that he felt like reacting against: ‘My natural instinct is to practise little private filthinesses – I spit, pea [sic] on shrubbery, etc, and have a strong desire to sleep on the floor – just to keep in contact with a world that isn’t quite as glazed as this one.’44 Wellesley seemed to him very suburban, so he was glad to return to nature on the Cape. He didn’t like the way that things were homogenised and packaged. ‘What a place America is,’ he wrote to Olwyn. ‘Everything is in cellophane. Everything is 10,000 miles from where it was plucked or made. The bread is in cellophane that is covered with such slogans as de-crapularised, re-energised, multi-cramulated, bleached, double-bleached, rebrowned, unsanforised, guaranteed no blasphemin. There is no such thing as bread. You cannot buy bread.’45 What he liked was the kindness of everybody. Reading the literary reviews, which in England were ‘bittermost gall to boil the heads and hearts of everyone’, he was impressed by the tone of civility. The style was ‘surprisingly honest, outspoken, but not venomous’: ‘They attack each other mercilessly – but openly.’46 There was none of the sarcasm, the snide remarks, the backbiting that characterised the literary establishment back home.
Ted sat and wrote – or poised himself over a blank page – from seven in the morning until two in the afternoon. The poems weren’t really coming, but his children’s stories were exciting him. He hatched a grand plan to produce a great compendium – 5,000 fables, perhaps – which would bring together all the situations, characters and themes out of all the fairy tales and animal stories that he had ever read. And there weren’t many that he hadn’t read.
Then they would explore: sunbathing, swimming, fishing. Once, their little boat was swept out to sea and they were stranded on a reef until a motorboat rescued them. On another occasion, they went mussel-hunting at Rock Harbor, watching with fascination ‘the weird spectacle of fiddler crabs in the mud-pools’.47
Sylvia started a new journal. She too was aching to fill a blank page. She would begin with short stories in which to work herself up towards a novel. She would aim for a ‘jewel prose’ akin to poetry. Little paragraphs. Vignettes. Memories of the cold, the food and the eccentricities of Cambridge. Then she would be ready for ‘Novel: FALCON YARD: central image: love, a falcon, striking once and for all: blood sacrifice: falcon yard, central chapter of book: the irrefutable meeting and experience.’ There would be an emblem out of the traditions of medieval courtly love: a lord and lady on horseback, smiling. A falcon on the wrist, not a hawk in the rain. The bird of prey tamed. She was struggling with writer’s block, but was sustained by ‘the endless deep love’ in which she was living that second honeymoon summer. And by ‘the unique and almost bottomless understanding of Ted’.48
As always, she had dark dreams, but there were joyful ones too: of Ted’s rosy-cheeked mother holding a baby, with two older children by her side. Sylvia wondered whether this was a memory of a photograph of Ted and his elder siblings or a vision of the grandchildren that she would one day give to Edith.
Ted was teaching her the art of poetic economy. Choose something very particular: a pig, say, or a cow by moonlight. Describe with words that ‘have an aura of mystic power’. Name the names of a quality: ‘spindly, prickling, sleek, splayed, wan, luminous, bellied’.49 Repeat the words aloud and the incantation will make them strong.
She felt that a new era had begun. After the months of exam-cramming, ‘slovenly Eltisley living, tight budgeting, arranging of moving’, she was becoming whole, stretching her writerly wings. Ted brought her cold orange juice to quench sleep-thirst and they exchanged dreams. In hers she was back at Newnham but this time surrounded by wild flowers instead of having her old bad dream about exams. In his, they walked a meadow in which there was a baby tiger and another tiger beyond a hedge. A tiger-man knocked at the door with a gun and Ted defended her, ‘bluffing with an empty rifle’.50
Sylvia was reading Virginia Woolf, learning to write prose poetry, to follow the stream of consciousness and not worry about realistic detail. This was how she could turn ‘Judith Greenwood’, her autobiographical character, into a symbolic figure. ‘Make her enigmatic: who is that blond girl: she is a bitch: she is the white goddess. Make her a statement of the generation. Which is you.’51 But was it possible to be both the eternal feminine of the White Goddess and the symbol of a new materialistic, carefree generation?
Before long, she would be blocked again. And then the anxiety would kick in, the jealousy of Ted’s success. She wanted him to have it, she felt in her gut that he was the better poet and that he deserved it. The reason she could marry him and him alone was the knowledge that she would never have to restrain her own talent. With a lesser poet, she would have had to rein herself in so as not to emasculate him by overtaking him and becoming the successful one. With Ted, she told herself, however high she flew he would always be ahead. For all this, she could not but envy his prize, his winning of Mr T. S. Eliot’s admiration, his forthcoming publication on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ted knew that ‘the waters off beautiful Nauset’ – a phrase from ‘Daddy’ that he quotes back in ‘The Prism’, his Birthday Letters poem about her grave – were the cradle of Sylvia’s self. He kept her talismanic stone in which, like a prism, he imagined seeing the Cape’s ‘salty globe of blue, its gull-sparkle, / Its path of surf-groomed sand’.52 In the prism and in the Birthday Letter named from it, both her childhood – pre-depression, pre-suicide attempts – and their second honeymoon summer of 1957 were intact. Their sunlit seaside love was the antithesis of the snow-covered, windswept Brontë moors.
10
