The letters to his sister Hughes wrote aboard the Queen Elizabeth mention a period of depression, although aside from his complaints about the sumptuous food and boring sea, the reasons for his dejection are not clear. Of course, he was embarking on a new phase of his life, which in itself could have seemed daunting. But when Sylvia so often referred to him as her male counterpart, she may have been acknowledging a similar arc of mood swings that could make living together both wondrous and fraught.

Her journal entries written aboard ship focus mainly on the other passengers, whom she was sizing up as characters for her stories. She did mention, however, the “coffin-like bunks” and her difficulty sleeping in their cold cabin. A dreary sort of sameness seems to have overtaken Sylvia and Ted, who did not really have much to do on a ship monotonously rolling in the waves. Sylvia’s journal does not do much with the rather conventional fellow travelers she described.

Writing in late June to his brother, Gerald, and Gerald’s wife, Joan, Hughes described his first impressions of Wellesley and of the party Aurelia had arranged. He produced a classic description of 1950s conformist America, where everyone was expected to “mix,” join the “rat-race,” and put on a happy, “well-adjusted” face. The opulent food dismayed him, the meet and greets wearied him, and the fastidious surroundings made him want to engage in “private filthiness.” This world had too much glaze for him. “But I’ll learn my position,” he noted, as though these new surroundings constituted a sort of game. “It’s good for me to be surrounded by a world from which I instinctively recoil. I mightn’t waste quite so much energy here.” He enjoyed observing new birds, and he was on the lookout for the skunks he had heard about. And there was always fishing, one of his favorite pastimes. The huge cars—the materialistic culture of what he called “85ft long Cadillacs”—amused him. But what really pleased him was the lack of cruelty in literary life. Even the literary reviews, a notorious haven for the nasty, were “surprisingly honest, outspoken, but not venomous,” as they were in London, where Hughes despised the vicious, inbred, and underhanded clubbishness of literary life. As Sylvia approached with more abundant food—chicken and lobster sandwiches—Ted marveled that he had landed in the lap of luxury. Like Sylvia, he believed in his own destiny, which he had charted in horoscopes. “There is no explanation for it,” he said in a concluding line to Gerald and Joan, “though astrology, of course, explains it all.”

Accounts of Hughes’s behavior at the party differ, with some remembering a generally friendly, if taciturn, Ted, and others depicting a somewhat condescending, aloof figure. Of course, such impressions of him that survive have been refurbished with retrospection—not to mention suffused with the personalities of those who met him and later reported on his behavior. His letters suggest mixed emotions capable of sustaining nearly every available version of his American debut.

In Letters Home, Aurelia remembers a radiant Sylvia greeting her seventy guests and introducing her husband to them. Warren then drove the pair to the summer cottage Aurelia had rented so that they could have seven weeks or so of rest and quiet and time for their writing. A week later, Sylvia wrote to Marcia Brown, describing their “small gray cabin hidden in the pines” and their “easy living, no phones, simple meals,” which allowed them to dress like hermits in dungarees. They wrote in the morning, biked in the afternoon to the beach, and read a good deal in the evening. For Sylvia, this meant Virginia Woolf’s novels. Sylvia had trouble resuming “Falcon Yard,” although in late July she had better luck writing stories, which she regarded as warm-up exercises for more serious work.

Ted’s version of the Cape summer in a letter to Gerald and Joan was a little different. He attributed his own writer’s block as well as Sylvia’s to a paralyzing response to Aurelia’s generosity: seventy dollars a week for the cottage. Although Ted did not explain himself, it seems that the couple’s sense of self-sufficiency attenuated. And what Sylvia regarded as simple meals seemed to Ted virtual banquets, as she plied him with Himalayan heaps of food. Sylvia cooked to relax. She was a “princess of cooks” who delivered “fairy palace dishes,” a bemused Ted noted, regarding eating only as a necessity. But he grew to enjoy browning on the beach and even appreciated the kitchen, with all its modern conveniences. He liked the verandah, where they took their meals. And when Sylvia really got going with her writing, they actually did eat rather simply.

Sylvia loved walking on the beach and imagining Ted as a seagod, the perfect consort to her as earth goddess, she avowed in her journal. Plath associated her newfound maturity with her marriage to Hughes, just as Monroe, likewise married in June 1956, linked her yearlong break from Hollywood and journey to New York to be with Miller with her fulfillment as an actress. Just 160 miles southwest from Ted and Sylvia and at virtually the same time, Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe were walking along Amagansett beaches near the tip of Long Island—he treating her as a goddess to be cherished, and she looking up to her tall husband as her towering hero. Sylvia and Marilyn, both survivors of suicide, saw their mates as saviors. Having produced no notable work in the previous six months, Sylvia was sure that without Ted’s constant support, she would have gone mad. Marilyn, in virtually the same downward cycle and deeply disappointed over the outcome of her last picture, The Prince and the Showgirl, wanted to believe, as did Sylvia, that she was storing up energy for a new burst of creativity. But Sylvia Plath, like Marilyn Monroe, could in a matter of a few days, or even hours, execute a reverse angle shot of her marriage, or complaining in her 18 July journal about a “lousy day … No more dreams of queen and king for a day with valets bringing in racks of white suits, jackets, etc. for Ted & ballgowns and tiaras for me.”

A brooding Sylvia worked on a story about a troublemaking mother who wants her daughter to be a social success. The plot might as well have been stolen from Stella Dallas, although Plath made no mention of her mentor or her work. Ultimately, the mother is redeemed in the story, just as Stella is, both in Prouty’s novel and in its radio serial. Living in the wonderful cottage for the summer, how could Sylvia help but be grateful to Aurelia? At the same time, though, she hated the feeling of obligation, the sense of being beholden that Ted, too, disliked. The story, which seemed to her slick but good—exactly what a magazine like The Saturday Evening Post would publish (they later rejected it)—apparently did wonders for Sylvia’s mood. Ted reappeared in her journal as the salt-air seagod, smelling as fresh as a newborn.

But what followed was a horrifying two weeks during which Plath thought she was pregnant. She had been rather casual about contraception, she admitted in her journal, and now her period was overdue. How could she possibly handle her writing, teaching at Smith, and the responsibilities of motherhood? She wanted children, but not now! The energy they would have to devote as parents would put them into debt, robbing them of the time they needed to hone their talents. Even worse, they would regard the infant as an intruder. Ted referred to this period as their “black week” in a letter to Gerald and Joan, without specifically mentioning the dreaded pregnancy. Then all Sylvia’s worries dissipated in the “hot drench” of blood, two weeks late, that relieved her misery, and they both began writing at great speed, applying their brains “like the bits of electric drills,” a relieved Ted told Gerald and Joan.