This was the location of Smith College, where Sylvia taught as an instructor for freshman English throughout the 1957–8 academic year. They lived in an apartment at 337 Elm Street, near a church, a high school and the green oasis of Childs Memorial Park. After a nervous first day, fastened in the straitjacket of a blue flannel suit that Ted remembered in a Birthday Letters poem, Sylvia threw herself into her teaching. Busy as she was preparing and taking classes, she continued to plan ‘Falcon Yard’, her Cambridge novel. Ted helped to steer her away from the superficial externals of her magazine-style prose, towards his own more inward territory. ‘Place doesn’t matter – it’s the inner life: Ted & me,’ she reminded herself in her journal.1 But for Ted, place did matter. ‘So this is America’ was his memory of his thought on first making love to Sylvia.2 Now he was in America with his American wife.
In her imagination, Sylvia was still in England. She planned short stories. One of them, ‘Four Corners of a Windy House’, sketched out in ‘physical, rich, heavy-booted detail’ their bracing hike across the moors to Top Withens:
blisters, grouse – picnic – honey soaking through brown paper bag – fear, aloneness – goal – cairn of black stones, small, contracted – their dream of each other, she & he … Strength – each alone – bracken, marsh – tea in deep cleft of valley – dark, cats – story of lost woman – match-flare of courage in the dark – moor sheep – bus-wait opposite spiritualists – ghosts & reality on moor … house: absolute reality, but clustered with ghosts – eternal paradox of identity.3
Before his eyes, Ted’s life was being transformed into art through his wife’s magical gift for words.
He, on the other hand, felt blocked. With Sylvia as the breadwinner, he was free to write full time, but the poems had dried up. He would sit for hours ‘like a statue of a man writing’.4 The only difference between him and an inanimate figure was that after a few hours a bead of sweat would drip down his forehead. For the first time, he was trying to write as opposed to writing down the words that just came to him. And it was the trying that proved the impediment. What was more, the fact of having published all the decent poems he had written meant that he had to move on to a new style. There would be no point in producing a second book that was just like the first – and it was on the basis of a second book that his long-term literary future would be judged. He cooked Sylvia both breakfast and lunch, but the life of idleness was not for him. He wandered around Northampton and was disconcerted by the Smith girls, who went around in gaggles, all looked like each other, and had a ‘machined glaze of hyper-health’.5 Later in the year, an encounter with some of them in Childs Memorial Park seems to have provoked an angry outburst from Sylvia.6
Ted sensed that, paradoxically, he would be more productive if he had less time on his hands. So he began to look for a job. The trouble was, there was nothing interesting for him to do in the dull town of Northampton. He made some enquiries about part-time work for the college radio station in nearby Amherst.
The Hawk in the Rain was published in London by Faber and Faber on 13 September 1957, at a price of ten shillings and sixpence, in an edition of 2,000 copies in a yellow dust jacket with narrow blue stripes, the title in blue and ‘poems by Ted Hughes’ in red.7 The American edition appeared five days later, in a smaller edition, at a price of $2.75. A month later, Ted and Sylvia went to New York for a reading and launch party at the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y, which had been the country’s leading venue for live poetry since 1939. Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood had had its premiere there.
Sylvia wrote to his parents afterwards, telling them that Ted had done a wonderful job, looking extremely handsome in his only suit (dark grey) and the golden yellow tie she had bought him in Spain for his birthday the previous year. She had persuaded him, much against his will, to have a haircut, so he looked like ‘a Yorkshire god’. There were about 150 people in the audience, and he ‘read beautifully’.8 Some members of the audience bought the book beforehand and followed the poems on the page as he read. Afterwards, he signed autographs, using Sylvia’s shoulder as a writing-desk. In the same letter, she thanked her in-laws for the mother-of-pearl earrings they had just sent her for her twenty-fifth birthday: these would go perfectly with the pink woollen dress that she had worn on her wedding day. She also told them that she had persuaded Ted to write an autobiographical children’s story about a little boy who lived on the moors that he so loved.
Ted in turn wrote excitedly to Dan Huws, saying that the 92nd Street Y had been packed for his reading and that afterwards he was ‘swamped by dowagers’ who wanted to know why ‘Bawdry Embraced’ – those rollicking verses from their Cambridge days – had not been included in the book. The answer was that Marianne Moore had considered them ‘too lewd’ and insisted on the poem being dropped.9 An assortment of ‘maidenly creatures’ asked him to sign their fresh copies of his slim volume. One of them took the book back after he had signed it, looked at him with wide eyes and said, ‘And what I want to say is “Hurrah for you”.’10 This was his first full experience of the effect his poetry readings would have on females in the audience.
Reviews came more quickly in Britain than America. One of the first was by the distinguished Orcadian poet Edwin Muir in the New Statesman: ‘Mr Ted Hughes is clearly a remarkable poet, and seems to be quite outside the current of his time.’ His voice was very different, that was to say, from the urbane tones of the poets of the so-called Movement – the anti-romantic, anti-Dylan Thomas group, including Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Donald Davie, whose work had been gathered the previous year in an anthology called New Lines. ‘His distinguishing power is sensuous, verbal and imaginative; at his best the three are fused together,’ Muir continued. ‘His images have an admirable violence.’ All in all, The Hawk in the Rain was ‘A most surprising first book, and it leaves no doubt about Mr Hughes’s powers.’11 He said that Hughes’s ‘Jaguar’ was better than Rilke’s ‘Panther’, praise so high that Ted thought it would be more likely to provoke ‘derision than curiosity’.12
The reviews that counted most were those in the New York Times and the London Observer. They appeared on the same day, 6 October. The New York account was by a poet who would soon become a very good friend, W. S. Merwin. He could hardly have been more positive. The book’s publication, he wrote, gave reviewers ‘an opportunity to do what they are always saying they want to do: acclaim an exciting new writer’. The poems were more than promising. They were ‘unmistakably a young man’s poems’, which accounted for ‘some of their defects as well as some of their strength and brilliance’, but ‘Mr Hughes has the kind of talent that makes you wonder more than commonly where he will go from here, not because you can’t guess but because you venture to hope.’13
Later in the autumn, they met Merwin. Ted found him impressively ‘composed’. His English wife Dido was, according to Sylvia, ‘very amusing, a sort of young Lady Bracknell’; to Ted, she seemed ‘bumptious garrulous upper class’.14 They were introduced through Jack Sweeney, director of the Woodberry Poetry Room in the student library at Harvard. Sweeney gave lively dinner-parties for local and visiting poets at his home on Beacon Street in Boston. Ted arrived with a limp and his foot in plaster, because he had fractured the fifth metatarsal in his right foot when jumping out of an armchair in the Elm
