had been turned into a parking lot. Sylvia, desperately tired from yet another mammoth drive, was on the verge of tears. Ted suggested that they should try their luck in town. They had cold beer and fried chicken at a café and the generous owner suggested that they park their car in his lot and sleep under the stars on the beach. For Sylvia, it was one of the best nights of her life, not least because she sensed new life quickening inside her. Her period was due and it had not yet come. Away from the stress of Smith, she had become pregnant early in the summer.
Ted did not quite share the sense of climax. He wrote several drafts of a poem about Stinson Beach under the title ‘Early August 1959’, but did not include it in Birthday Letters. ‘We got to the Pacific,’ he wrote. ‘What was so symbolic about the Pacific?’ Whatever it was, they had made it. But the sunset wasn’t as spectacular as it should have been and it was foggy when they woke up in the morning. Still, they had ‘kept to the programme of romance / Slept in our sleeping bags under the stars / Tried to live up to the setting’. He was then cheered when ‘a phone-call from within sight of the sea’ brought the news that Faber and Faber had accepted his second volume of poetry.66 They were not sure about his proposed title ‘The Feast of Lupercal’, because there had been two recent novels of exactly that name (one of them a Faber bestseller), so he decided to call it ‘Lupercalia’ instead.67
They dipped into San Francisco to get the car window repaired. Then it was a beach camp halfway to Los Angeles, then a relaxing stay with Sylvia’s Aunt Frieda in Pasadena. Her hot water and other amenities were much appreciated and her name, with its echo of D. H. Lawrence’s feisty wife, gave them an idea for the baby, should it prove to be a girl. Their eastward journey began with the Mojave Desert and the Grand Canyon. At that grandest of all sights, ‘America’s Delphi’, they sought a blessing on the baby in Sylvia’s womb as a reward for their pilgrimage. Navajo dancers, standing on the rim of the greatest gorge in the world, beat a drum, sounding an echo that thirty years later Ted imagined he could hear, faintly, in the voice of his daughter.68 The primitive power of the drumbeat would become a key resource in his theatre work. More prosaically, when they returned to the car their water-cooling bag, which had crossed the Mojave slung under the front bumper, had been stolen.
From the Grand Canyon they drove all the way across to New Orleans, then north to Tennessee to stay with Luke Myers’s family. The gigantic trip ended with sightseeing in Washington DC and a stay with Sylvia’s Uncle Frank near Philadelphia, before they at last returned home to the hot tubs and home baking of New England. Aurelia thought that they both looked tanned and well, but Sylvia was tired and worried about the pregnancy. She had a history of gynaecological complications, so she still did not feel sure that there really was a baby growing inside her.
Yaddo is an artists’ community located on a 400-acre estate in Saratoga Springs. It was founded in 1900 by a wealthy financier called Spencer Trask and his wife, Katrina, who wrote poetry herself. Left without immediate heirs by the deaths of their four young children, the Trasks decided to bequeath their palatial home to future generations of writers, composers, painters and other creative artists. Katrina had a vision of generations of talented men and women yet unborn walking the lawns of Yaddo, ‘creating, creating, creating’. The idea was to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in peaceful, green surroundings. The great American short-story writer John Cheever would write that the ‘forty or so acres on which the principal buildings of Yaddo stand have seen more distinguished activity in the arts than any other piece of ground in the English-speaking community and perhaps the world’.69
When Ted and Sylvia arrived just after Labor Day, the main house had been closed for winter. They were given spacious rooms in the clapperboard West House, among the trees. Each of them had a separate ‘studio’, Sylvia’s on the top floor of the house and Ted’s out in the woods – the perfect place for him. ‘A regular little house to himself’, Sylvia wrote to her mother, ‘all glassed in and surrounded by pines, with a wood stove for the winter, a cot, and huge desk’.70 A writing hut away from the main house would be his salvation at Court Green in later years. The chance to live together but work apart was exactly what they needed. Meals were taken care of and the food was very good, a welcome change from the campground cookery of the summer. Breakfast was available from eight till nine, lunchboxes were then collected and taken to each resident’s studio, and in the evening they all gathered for dinner. Being a quiet season, there were only a dozen artists in residence, including painters, an interesting composer and a couple of other poets whose names were not familiar to them.
One of the painters, Howard Rogovin, did portraits of both Sylvia and Ted. For Sylvia, he set up his easel in the old greenhouse. To the sound of ‘rain in the conifers’, he painted Sylvia lifted out of herself ‘In a flaming of oils’, her ‘lips exact’. But he also seemed to catch a shadow on her shoulder, a dark marauding ‘doppelgänger’.71 At one point, a graceful snake slid across the dusty floor of the hot greenhouse. Both this portrait and the one of Ted, which was said to be less successful, are lost.72
The composer was Chou Wen-chung, a United States immigrant from Shandong in China. A protégé of the radical experimentalist Edgar Varèse, he sought to integrate Eastern and Western classical (and modernist) musical traditions. They struck up a friendship and Ted began work on a libretto for him, for an oratorio based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The original title, Bardo Thödol, literally means ‘Liberation through Hearing during the Intermediate State’. These ‘intermediate states’ included the dream state, the moment of death in which the clear light of reality is experienced, and the ‘bardo of rebirth’, which involved hallucinatory images of men and women erotically entwined. The project was never finished, but it took Ted into territory that he would make his own in almost all his later mythic works.73
His main project at Yaddo was his play (now lost, save for a few fragments), ‘The House of Taurus’. Sylvia described it in a letter home written in early October: ‘a symbolic drama based on the Euripides play The Bacchae, only set in a modern industrial community under a paternalistic ruler’.74 She hoped that it would at least get a staged reading, but explained that she had not yet typed it up.
During the weeks at Yaddo Ted also revised one or two of the poems in his forthcoming ‘Lupercalia’ collection, but for poetic development it was more of a breakthrough moment for Sylvia. Before Yaddo, her verse had been highly accomplished but somehow brittle. A self-description in a journal entry of late 1955 was harsh but apt: ‘Roget’s trollop, parading words and tossing off bravado for an audience’ (Roget’s Thesaurus was the vade mecum of writers looking for unusual words for ordinary things).75 Very few Plath poems written before Yaddo stick in the mind; almost all the hundred or so that Sylvia wrote thereafter sear themselves into the consciousness of the attentive reader. Years earlier, Plath had dreamed of gathering forces into a tight tense ball for the artistic leap. At Yaddo, she made that leap.
On 10 October 1959, she wrote in her journal: ‘Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. When will I break into a new line of poetry? Feel trite.’ It was certainly odd to feel barren when she was at last pregnant. Then on the 13th: ‘Very depressed today. Unable to write a thing. Menacing gods. I feel outcast on a cold star.’ Ted told her to ‘get desperate’. On the night of the 21st, she felt ‘animal solaces’ as she lay with him, warm in bed. The next day, walking in the woods in the frosty morning light, she found the ‘Ambitious seeds of a long poem made up of separate sections:
