“Mad Passionate Abandon” – Sylvia Plath’s First Encounter with Ted Hughes

On the 25^th of February 1956, Sylvia Plath, a Fulbright scholar in Cambridge met Ted Hughes for the first time and their steamy encounter went on to become part of the literary folklore surrounding their lives. To cut a long story short, they fell for each other with a mad passion and Plath ended up biting his cheek and drawing blood. All this while Hughes was accompanied by his then girlfriend Shirley, who allegedly witnessed all that transpired. Plath’s obsession with Hughes was almost immediate. “Ted Hughes – mad passionate abandon’” was how she marked the date on her calendar. Both Plath and Hughes wrote about this night in their journals and poems. Plath recorded:

Then the worst 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 into my eyes and it was Ted Hughes. I started yelling again about his poems and quoting: “most dear unscratchable diamond” and he yelled back, colossal, in a voice that should have come from a Pole, “You like?” and asking me if I wanted brandy, and me yelling yes…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…and my favorite silver earrings: hah, I shall keep, he barked. And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face. His poem “I did it, I.” Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists. The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words; his poems are strong and blasting like a high wind in steel girders. And I screamed in myself, thinking: oh, to give myself crashing, fighting, to you. The one man since I’ve lived who could blast Richard.

Jonathan Bate, in his biography of Hughes, reminds us of the similarity with the Cathy-Heathcliff dynamic of Wuthering Heights:

Her repeated use of the word ‘blast’ when writing about their first encounter and her image of them shouting passionately at each other as if in a high wind reveal where she is going: to a ‘blasted heath’ – the location of the opening of Shakespeare’s most northern play – and more specifically to a Yorkshire moor. She is already, unconsciously, projecting herself as Cathy and Hughes as Heathcliff.

Hughes, in his Birthday Letters (a collection of poems documenting the time he spent with Plath, published just before his death in 1998) recollected the night as:

That day the Solar System married us

Whether we knew it or not

Falcon Yard:

Like the tilting deck of the Titanic:
A silent film, with that blare over it. Suddenly—
Lucas engineered it—suddenly you.
First sight. First snapshot isolated
Unalterable, stilled in the camera’s glare.
Taller
Than ever you were again. Swaying so slender
It seemed your long, perfect, American legs
Simply went on up. That flaring hand,
Those long, balletic, monkey-elegant fingers.
And the face—a tight ball of joy.
I see you there, clearer, more real
Than in any of the years in its shadow—
As if I saw you that once, then never again.
The loose fall of hair—that floppy curtain
Over your face, over your scar. And your face
A rubber ball of joy

Round the African-lipped, laughing, thickly
Crimson-painted mouth. And your eyes
Squeezed in your face, a crush of diamonds,

Incredibly bright, bright as a crush of tears
That might have been tears of joy, a squeeze of joy.
You meant to knock me out
With your vivacity. I remember
Little from the rest of that evening.
I slid away with my girl-friend. Nothing
Except her hissing rage in a doorway
And my stupefied interrogation
Of your blue headscarf from my pocket
And the swelling ring-moat of tooth-marks
That was to brand my face for the next month.
Then me beneath it for good.

Heather Clark in Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, weighs in on Plath’s passion:

This was a relationship that was, from its first violent, theatrical moments, soldered on the work of D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Emily Brontë, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Plath was already conducting a literary dialogue with Hughes—proving herself as his reader, playing a role out of one of his poems, and daring him to play back. Her performance succeeded. Hughes thought he recognized a fellow traveler who was as disdainful of propriety as he was. What other woman would dare to draw blood with a kiss? He saw in Plath the same things she had found in his early poems—a fascination with what he would later call “positive violence,” and a contempt for gentility. Critics have often assumed that Plath adopted such poses after she met Hughes, but in fact both poets embarked on their courtship with a mutual sense of aesthetic purpose. A deep interest in poetry and violence marked Plath and Hughes’s relationship from their first meeting. Their understanding of positive violence—a vital, elemental, and liberating force—evolved through their engagement with the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung; the war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Keith Douglas; and modernist literature by Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and, especially, D. H. Lawrence.172 When Plath says she will give herself “crashing, fighting” to Hughes, she presciently describes the central role that the themes of violence and competition would play in their poetic dialogue

Each time I read about this encounter, a quiet heaviness engulfs me. Seven years later, on 11th February 1963, Sylvia Plath gassed herself to death—after sealing her children’s room and placing bread and milk beside their beds She was 30. One of the reasons, apart from her long battle with clinical depression, was Hughes’ affairs.

Two days after meeting Hughes for the first time, she wrote ‘Pursuit’ which begins with these prescient lines:

There is a panther stalks me down:
One day I’ll have my death of him;

His greed has set the woods aflame,
He prowls more lordly than the sun.
Most soft, most suavely glides that step,
Advancing always at my back;