kicking in. ‘We are amazingly compatible,’ Sylvia reassured herself. ‘But I must be myself – make myself and not let myself be made by him.’ She was beginning to tire of his tendency to give mutually exclusive ‘orders’. He would tell her to – or, to put it more moderately, suggest that she should – ‘read ballads an hour, read Shakespeare an hour, read history an hour, think an hour’. But then he would say that no proper reading could be done in one-hour chunks; you had to read a book straight through to the end without distraction. There was an almost fanatical ‘lack of balance and moderation’ in his habits and his fads. He decided that, since he sat writing for much of the day, he should do some particular exercises for his back and his neck. They only made his neck stiffer, but that didn’t stop him doing them.35
On the eve of Independence Day, they went for a walk and found a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. Ted took it home and nursed it, just as he always used to care for injured fauna in his childhood. After a week, it became clear that the bird would not survive. Sylvia could not bear the thought of Ted strangling it, so he fixed their rubber bath hose to the gas jet on the cooker and taped the other end on the inside of a cardboard box. The bird was laid to rest, but unfortunately he removed it from the makeshift gas chamber prematurely and it lay gasping in his hand. Five minutes later, he took it to Sylvia, ‘composed, perfect and beautiful in death’.36
In early September they moved to a tiny sixth-floor apartment at 9 Willow Street in the Beacon Hill district of Boston, with all its literary associations. Ted’s poem named for the address evokes the claustrophobia they felt there, the sense that they were holding each other back instead of inspiring each other’s work as they had done before. The main memory within the poem is a variant replay of the baby-bird incident. This time it is a sick bat that has fallen out of a tree on the nearby Common. In front of a bemused audience of passersby, he tries to restore it to its home and has his finger bitten for his pains. Then he remembers that American bats carry rabies, so he starts thinking of death.37 His other Birthday Letters poems commemorating their residence in Willow Street are equally gloomy: visiting Marianne Moore, Sylvia devastated because the distinguished poet did not like her work; Sylvia and her ‘panic bird’; the ‘astringency’ of the Charles River in a bitterly cold Boston winter.38
One day, looking over a letter from his wife to his parents before posting it, he misread the signing off as ‘woe’ instead of ‘love’.39 This seemed symbolic of the new mood in the marriage. Sometimes when his writing was not going well, he would while away the afternoon making a wolf mask. But that did nothing to keep the wolf from the door: the plan to live for a year off their savings, together with such casual literary earnings as they could muster, meant that they sometimes fought, because it wasn’t always clear where the next month’s dollars were coming from. They both sensed that the marriage had no future in America; Ted had not settled and Sylvia did not want to go back to teaching. There were days when they both suffered from ‘black depression’, relieved only by sporadic absorption in Beethoven piano sonatas.40
This was when she began seeing Dr Ruth Beuscher, her old psychoanalyst from McLean. Among her many worries was the fear that she was barren. Beuscher was a Freudian. She suggested that the main focus of their sessions should be Sylvia’s ‘Electra complex’, the daughterly equivalent of the Oedipus complex. They explored the hatred that Sylvia had projected on to her mother following her father’s death. That anger was by this time mixed up with a feeling that Aurelia was undermining the marriage by means of her constant complaints about Ted not having a proper job. ‘I’ll have my own husband, thank you,’ Sylvia wrote in her diary, as if addressing her mother. ‘You won’t kill him the way you killed my father.’ Ted had ‘sex as strong as it comes’. He supported her in body and soul by feeding her bread and poems. She loved him and wanted to be always hugging him. She loved his work and the way he was always changing and making everything new. She loved the smell of him and the way their bodies fitted together as if they were ‘made in the same body-shop to do just that’. She loved ‘his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and his stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy’. ‘And’, she goes on, ‘how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles’.41
Life wasn’t all bad. There was fresh fish. Luke Myers came through on a short visit, and they reminisced about Cambridge days. Ted and Sylvia were both getting poems accepted. Ted heard that he had won the Guinness Poetry Award (£300) for ‘The Thought-Fox’. He received a treasured letter of congratulations from T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber. The grand old man said how impressed he had been when he first read the typescript of the book and how delighted he was to have Ted on the Faber list.42 And in Boston there was the proper literary scene that they craved: a reading by Truman Capote, dinner-parties with Robert Lowell, intense discussions about poetry at the apartment of poet Stanley Kunitz (Ted did most of the talking, Sylvia sitting quietly with a cup of tea), a meeting with the now old and rather deaf but still legendary Robert Frost. Ted loved hearing stories about one of his favourite poets, the very English Edward Thomas, who had been inspired by Frost to turn from prose to verse only a couple of years before his death on the Western Front.
Sylvia sat in on Lowell’s poetry classes at Boston University, and he read both her work and Ted’s. Lying on the bed in the Elm Street apartment earlier in the year, Ted had written a poem called ‘Pike’. Lowell said it was a masterpiece.43 Leonard Baskin admired it too, and reproduced 150 copies of it privately under his personal imprint, the Gehenna Press. This was Ted’s first ‘broadside’. The title was in red, the poem in black, and there was an illustrative woodcut by an artist friend of Baskin’s, portraying two pike, one in black and the other in green. ‘Pike’ also appeared in a group of five immensely powerful Hughes poems in the summer 1959 issue of a magazine called Audience: A Quarterly of Literature and the Arts. The four others were ‘Nicholas Ferrer’, ‘Thrushes’, ‘The Bull Moses’ and ‘The Voyage’. A couple of months earlier, another magazine had published ‘Roosting Hawk’, which he had written sitting at his work-table one morning in Willow Street. He told his parents that he was finding that the key to a creative day was an early night and an early start. He was hitting his stride and would soon have enough good poems for a second collection. He was also starting work on a play. They went to tea with Peter Davison in his apartment across the Charles River in Cambridge. He gave Ted a copy of Jung’s The Undiscovered Self, which chimed perfectly with the ideas he was exploring. ‘The Jung is splendid,’ he told Davison in his thank-you letter, ‘one of the basic notions of my play.’44
In January 1959 they acquired a tiger-striped kitten and called it Sappho. She was said to be a granddaughter of Thomas Mann’s cat, a suitably literary pedigree. In April, Ted won a $5,000 award from the Guggenheim Foundation, in no small measure due to the support of Eliot. He wrote to thank him, signing off the letter with a dry allusion to the famous opening line of The Waste Land: ‘I hope you are well, and enjoying April.’45
While living in the cramped Willow Street apartment, they were visited by Rollie McKenna, a diminutive Texan portrait photographer who was a genius with a Leica III camera fitted with a Japanese Nikkor screw lens of the kind used by Life magazine photographers in the Korean War. She had immortalised Dylan Thomas in two images, one with pout and cigarette, the other ‘bound, Prometheus-like, in vine-tendrils (his idea), against the white wall of her house
