February 26, 2009
When Sylvia bit Ted (1956)
To Sylvia Plath, he was “the one man in the room who was as big as his poems.” To Ted Hughes, their meeting was as if “the solar system had married us / whether we knew it or not.” Whether they intended it or not, their encounter at a party in Cambridge was charged with a mythic power that would resonate the rest of their lives.At the time, Plath was a college graduate studying at Cambridge as a Fulbright scholar. She had published her poems and short stories in magazines such as Seventeen, Mademoiselle — where her experiences as a guest editor would resurface in her novel “The Bell Jar” — and Atlantic Monthly. She tried to break into English magazines, but her first attempt — two poems in a Cambridge literary magazine — had been panned in another student publication.
Then she came across the St Botolph's Review, a new magazine co-founded by Hughes. She was impressed with his poems, memorized bits of them, and hope to meet him, or at least the reviewer who panned her poems, at the launch party on this night.
As for Hughes, he had graduated from Cambridge and was living in London, doing odd jobs and contemplating a move to Australia. Although two years older that Plath, he had not advanced nearly as far as a poet, although his first published efforts showed promise. Particularly one poem that impressed Plath, about the competition men feel when they encounter each other, that ended in a killing and “one man bursting into the police station / Crying … ‘I did it, I’”
So when Plath spied the tall, handsome Hughes across the crowded room, she waved and cried out, “I did it, I!” “You like?” he called. He took her to another room, she wrote in her journal: “bang the door was shut … he kissed me bang smash on the mouth. I bit him long and hard on the cheek … blood was running down his face. His poem ‘I did it, I”. Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists.”
He responded by stealing her scarf and an earring.
By June, they were married. The solar system had been right after all.
Born: Christopher Marlowe, poet, playwright, Canterbury, Kent, 1564; Victor Hugo, novelist, playwright, poet, Besaçon, France, 1802; Rudolph Dirks, cartoonist, Heide, Germany, 1877; Mabel Dodge Luhan, salon keeper, memoirist, Buffalo, N.Y., 1879; Tex Avery (ps. Fred Bean Avery), animator, Dallas, 1908; George Granville Barker, poet, Loughton, Essex, 1913; Theodore Sturgeon (ps. Edward Hamilton Waldo), sci-fi author, Staten Island, N.Y., 1918; Chaim Bermant, humorist, novelist, Breslev, Poland, 1929; Sharon Bell Mathis, author, Atlantic City, N.J., 1937.
Died: Taras Shevchenko, poet, essayist, St. Petersburg, Russia, 1861; William Inge, essayist, theologian, Wallingford, Berkshire, 1954; Karl Jaspers, philosopher, essayist, Basel, Switzerland, 1969.
Quote for the Day: “An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.” — Victor Hugo
Also from “Writers 365”:
- Dylan Thomas meets his match (1937)
- Howl’s Moving Telegram (1955)
- Lolita Breaks Out (1956)
- Malcolm Lowry’s mysterious death (1957)
- The Battle Over Doctor Zhivago (1958)
- Sylvia Plath bids for immortality (1963)
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
