The next day Plath learned that Hughes and two other chaps had again thrown clods against the wrong window. She seemed fated never to meet him, and this time imagined herself as Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Name Desire, becoming mired in the mud with drunken soldiers seeking her company. She thought of herself as a woman of the night whom Hughes and his cronies would not confront in daylight. She ached, though, to make him real, since he existed now simply as a figure of her imagination, a panther on the “forest fringes of hearsay.”
On 18 March, Sylvia wrote her mother, “I’d be happiest writing, I think, with a vital husband.” A good deal of her angst over Sassoon surely had to do with her rush to implement the next phase of her literary career: Husband, home, family, write. She would be all set, but not so Sassoon. That same day, Hughes wrote to his close friend, Lucas Myers, asking Myers to arrange for Sylvia to meet him in London.
On 21 March, as Sylvia was about to embark on her Easter vacation, she wrote a cheerful letter to Marcia Brown, omitting any reference to the drama with Sassoon and her first encounter with Hughes, except to say that she was on her way to London to meet “two erratic” poets. Lucas Myers, cousin of poet Allen Tate, she mentioned by name, but Hughes remained anonymous in this ebullient depiction of life at Cambridge, where world politics got debated and America now seemed so provincial that Sylvia dreaded her return, dreaming instead of spending a year writing in southern Europe. And yet, just a day earlier she had been dreaming of a home in the Connecticut Valley and summers on Cape Cod. This nostalgia was what her mother wanted to hear, but it was also what Sylvia wanted to write. America/Sassoon, Europe/Hughes—Sylvia seemed to be sidling in two very different directions.
On 23 March, on her way to France, Sylvia Plath ran up the stairs to Ted Hughes’s grimy flat at 18 Rugby Street. Three days later in her Paris hotel, she noted their “sleepless holocaust night” in her journal. Even as she was preparing to beard Sassoon, she mentioned the marks Hughes had left on her “battered” face, including a purple bruise, and her raw and wounded neck. For his part, Hughes wrote her a short note, saying the memory of her smooth body went through him like brandy. He would be in London until 14 April, he informed her, and would see her there or come to her in Cambridge after her holiday in France.
But Sassoon, not Hughes, had Plath’s full attention. At his apartment, prepared to deliver her plea, she learned from the concierge that Sassoon was gone and would not return until after Easter. Her journal describes a scene worthy of a weepie. Outside, an old beggar woman is singing in a “mournful monotone,” while inside the radio blares, “Smile though your heart is breaking.” Through her tears, Sylvia writes and writes a long disorganized missive, as she gazes at her unopened letters to Sassoon, “lying there blue and unread.” The color of aerograms and her mood coalesce. In a reaction shot, a black poodle pats the disconsolate lover with a paw. A stunned Sylvia notes, “Never before had a man gone off to leave me to cry after.” Gamely, she patted the poodle and set off wandering the Paris streets.
There is no indication that Plath was writing parody or sending herself up. Her self-dramatizing was real enough to her, but at the same time it bears all the marks of the popular romantic melodrama of her time, the kinds of films that starred Merle Oberon and Susan Hayworth in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Sassoon may well have debouched from the melodrama of her passion to avoid just this kind of scene.
Sylvia compounded her misery by imagining that Ted was regaling his Cambridge cronies with tales of his Plath conquest. One of his friends, Michael Boddy, had come upon her and Ted in the Rugby Street flat. Now the word would be out that she was Hughes’s mistress, she imagined. Ted himself became an object of suspicion: In the height of their lovemaking he had called her Shirley, making Sylvia feel like one of his interchangeable lovers.
Plath’s journal makes it seem as though Boddy had caught the couple in the act of love. But Boddy told Hughes’s biographer that the two were simply sitting in chairs, leaning forward, whispering, and “virtually oblivious of me.” After walking Plath to her hotel, Hughes returned to awaken Boddy, who recalled that his friend was deeply agitated in a way that Boddy had never witnessed before. Sylvia Plath, in fact, had made a profound impression upon Ted Hughes. Sylvia, however, was still very much immersed in her fantasy world. She took long walks through Paris streets and was accosted by men in much the way she imagined in her dreams, although she was not raped and decided to forego the risk of a chance sexual encounter. She might be mourning her loss of Sassoon, but she ate heartily and saw plenty of friends, including one from Cambridge, who seemed to grow more attractive hour-by-hour, until she had him in bed, only to be disappointed when he decided he better not—a result, she opined, of his too proper breeding and desire to be associated only with distinguished families.
Sylvia sent her mother a letter emphasizing the “gay side” of her Paris excursion. A journal fragment for 1 April 1956 refers to her “Sally Bowles act.” Sounding also like the Americaine Doris Day, Sylvia loved her room in a small hotel that had accommodating people in charge. Her lovely little garret overlooked rooftops and gables and was crowned with an artist’s skylight. The journal and the letters to Aurelia jibe in expressing Sylvia’s newfound delight in being on her own without the male escorts she had always relied on. She gazed in shop windows and decided that as a wealthy woman she would indulge in a closet full of colored shoes, a rainbow array of princess opera pumps. Back in her room in the “blue wash of moonlight,” she succumbed to crying once again over Sassoon. The next day, though, she recovered her spirits with a big lunch of onion soup, a chateaubriand rare, two glasses of wine, and an apple tart. Sylvia rarely did without dessert—or without fantasies of the “black marauder” who had “split into many men” lurking on stairs, streets, under beds, at her door, on a park bench. She seemed frustrated that Hughes had not pursued her to Paris in order to become the one palpable man, instead of the several that she had to conjure up. One night with him had not been enough.
Four days later, Sylvia met Gordon Lameyer in Paris for their trip to Germany. While not exciting, their reunion might be safe and soothing like her times with Gary Haupt, she thought, now that she and Gordon were just friends. Still, she resented the idea of looking forward to leaning on a man. She would have put off leaving Paris if Sassoon had suddenly appeared. She even thought of cutting short her trip and returning to London and Ted. Switching moods from one sentence to another, she monitored her own life the way another person obsessively checks a wristwatch. In yet another move, Sylvia dollied back for a panoramic shot: “It is the historic moment,” she records in her journal entry for 5 April, “all gathers and bids me to be gone from Paris.”
Sylvia’s irritation with herself would be taken out on Lameyer, who began, even as a “friend,” to give her a wide berth. In Edward Butscher’s The Woman and the Work, Lameyer’s remembers shying away from his erstwhile showboating almost-fiancé. Their time together was a fiasco. They quarreled incessantly.
On 9 April, Hughes sent Plath a note and a love poem, the latter containing an exquisite line about a bird gathering the world in its throat in one note. “Ridiculous to call it love,” the poem began, but there it was. He felt haunted by the “true ghost of my loss.” He awaited her arrival. A fragment of Plath’s journal indicates her return to Ted Hughes on Friday, 13 April, expecting a welcome—if rough—ride as she submitted herself to his “ruthless force,” which had stabbed her into accepting his “being.” She seemed struggling still for some kind of perspective, since she enjoined herself not to forget others, like Dorothea Krook (who reminded her of Dr. Beuscher) and even the memory of Sassoon, who could be tender as well as virile. But Hughes had a sun-like energy that she decided to absorb for as long as their time together lasted.