''Then the worst thing happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes….and bang the door was shut and he was sloshing brandy into a glass and I was sloshing it at the place where my mouth was when I last knew about it.
''We shouted as if in a high wind … and I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband off, my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never find again, and my favorite silver earrings....And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when he came out of the room, blood was running down his face….Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists….And I screamed in myself, thinking: oh, to give myself crashing, fighting, to you.''—Poet Sylvia Plath, February 26, 1956, on meeting future husband and betrayer Ted Hughes the night before, in The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kulik (2000)
Some years ago, Edward and Nancy Caldwell Sorel collaborated on a text-and-illustration series for The Atlantic Monthly called “First Encounters.” I forget if this fateful meeting between star-crossed poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes ended up in the series. In a way, it shouldn’t have: the sheer violence of the event, and our knowledge of the horrifying end of their union, would have overwhelmed every other meeting of illuminati that the Sorels chronicled.
Most of what I’ve omitted, indicated here by ellipses, relates to other people at the wild literary party in Cambridge attended by the American Plath and the Briton Hughes. I deleted it because it would be of limited interest to my readers; 30 years ago, when the first version of the journals appeared, much of this was omitted, I think, because Hughes feared that the people mentioned (many still alive) would be all too interested in how they appeared.
But that early expurgated edition, though it included much of the alcohol-fueled groping and violence between the pair, also deleted the details about Hughes ripping off Plath’s hairband and earrings. That, in a way, is telling, because looked at in its entirety, it becomes clear that this passage is not just about sex but also possession: possession of objects, possession of another human being, and possession of one’s self.
That theme starts subtly. Plath had inquired about the handsome, dark mysterious stranger as soon as she saw him, “but no one told me.” It’s hard to resist the inference that many of these uncommunicative people were women who might have wanted Hughes for themselves (including, as it happened, Hughes' girlfriend of the time, who was understandably upset at how he looked after Plath got through with him for the night).
Instead, Plath engages in what, in its immediacy and violence, can only be thought of as what Charles Darwin termed “sexual selection”—the principle that determines the winners in the struggle for existence.
This passage becomes compelling not merely because of its all the emotion and energy that Plath invests in this act, but in the objects that mean so much to her: her hairband, itself symbolic of nature (it has “weathered the sun and so much love”), and her “favorite silver earrings.”
Already, foreboding pulses beneath the wild instincts on display (she writes of the hairband “whose like I shall never find again”), but everything is given over to the moment and its fervid remembrance several hours later. A mere four months later, the two married.
“These violent delights have violent ends,” Friar Lawrence ineffectively but accurately warns in Romeo and Juliet. For all of Plath’s astonishment in her journal that “the worst thing happened” the night she met Hughes, the truly awful events--the “violent ends” of their union--would occur later: Plath’s suicide, following Hughes’ infidelity and separation, in 1963; the suicide four years later of the woman for whom he left Plath, Assia Weevil, and her murder of their child; and, like a bomb going off nearly a half century after the initial fuse was lit, the 2009 suicide of the son of Plath and Hughes, Nicholas.
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