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he flashy Ted and Sylvia story is the big-screen biopic — with Gwyneth Paltrow in the starring role. For more serious students of literature, there are other stories. There is Ted’s version in his verse collection, Birthday Letters (1998), ostensibly written to Sylvia on birthdays long after her death. And there is Sylvia’s version, in The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000). I’d like to tell a different Ted and Sylvia story. It’s a literary story; it’s an American story — and it has a Horn Book connection. For the most part, my story takes place in Massachusetts, in Northampton and Boston, between the summer of 1957 and December 1959. It was there and then, at the beginning of their intimate creative partnership, that Ted and Sylvia negotiated the hazardous transformation from promising to professional writers; where they began to acknowledge formally the possibilities of writing poetry and prose for children as well as for adults.
Because beginnings make most sense when viewed from endings, my story begins at the end, in the archives at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where Ted’s papers and books are now housed. There, among the two-and-a-half tons of archival material he gave to Emory, are two files classified as unidentified notes on “children’s writing and teaching.” They contain loose sheets of yellow s***tch pad, unlined and undated (though they appear to be from a late stage in his career), on which Ted has written rough drafts for an apparently unproduced radio program. The rhythmically elegant phrase “writing poetry for children is a curious occupation” appears repeatedly as Ted tries out various ways of writing something that will resolve — as elegantly as the opening phrase — the inherent conflicts he sketches among producers, manufacturers, distributors, and consumers of children’s poetry. Here’s one version as Ted tries to articulate the problem:
And the most curious thing about it is that we think children need a special kind of poetry. Each writer for children has his own idea of what that is. . . . Publishers, of course, know that poetry is not sold to children — it is sold to their parents or teachers. So this is the barrier to publishing children’s poetry. The author thinks he knows what they want, or need, the teachers or parents think they know best. And the publisher thinks he knows best what poet & teacher think they know best. And we all think differently. Each author writing for children thinks the same — and all write differently.
Although Ted is talking about writing poetry for children, his remarks apply equally well to his prose. Poets always write as poets — tuned to rhythm, imagery, and feeling. Every phrase, every sentence, is carefully balanced so that it is held in perfect tension with the structure as a whole. But the main concern of this passage, as Ted tries to explain, is the problem of audience relations: Who is the text for? Adults or children? Who publishes it? Who buys it? Who knows best?
One ***ftily simple way Ted resolved the audience problem was by publishing, without comment, the same poem in different collections — some marked as being for children, some not. But that was a partial solution at best. He cared deeply about nurturing imaginative life and was attracted to the idea that children “are more fluid and alert” than adults. He was also troubled by the speed with which that openness was closed down and sealed up, hidden, as he says, behind a “space helmet.” That’s one reason Ted was so concerned with audience — and characterized that audience much as traditional storytellers might have characterized their undifferentiated audiences of adults and children. In a 1984 letter to me, Ted described the kind of writing that might reach such an audience as a “lingua franca” — that is, “a style of communication for which children are the specific audience, but which adults can overhear . . . and listen, in a way secretly — as children.” And it appears that Ted was attempting to compose in that style, that “lingua franca,” as early as 1956, on his honeymoon in Spain with Sylvia. That’s when he wrote the first drafts of little animal fables that ultimately grew into the collection How the Whale Became.
In that bright Spanish summer of 1956, Ted writes, enthusiastically, to his beloved older brother Gerald: “I have written a book of children’s & grown up animal fables which surprised even me.” Sylvia writes with equal enthusiasm in her journal:
Yesterday Ted read me three new fables he’d just written for his fine animal book about how all the animals became: the Tortoise one was the funniest and dearest yet; the hyena, more serious about a bitter perverted character, and the fox and dog alive with plot and marvelous Sly — Look and Four-Square. I have great hopes for this as a children’s classic. Even as I write, Ted is working at the main table on the elephant and the cricket stories. Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative, I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.
The celebration was a little premature. Though Ted received initial encouragement from publishers, in 1957 his new creation fables (eventually published in 1963) were rejected as being “too sophisticated” for children. So, as questions of audience relations began to simmer for Ted, the fables were temporarily put on the back burner. But I’ll return to them — Ted’s stories about animals becoming themselves serve as a poignant counterpoint to the story about Ted and Sylvia becoming writers.
By early 1957, that brief Spanish interlude with its dedicated writing time had become a golden memory. Ted and Sylvia were back in the gray cold of England. Sylvia was completing her Fulbright-sponsored degree in English at Cambridge. Ted, having completed his degree there in anthropology in 1954 and a master’s degree the following year, wrote and worked at odd jobs in the neighborhood. Among them was a stint, in the spring of 1957, teaching adolescents at what was called a secondary modern school — a school for the least able students, the ones putting in time between finishing elementary school and being legally able to leave. In the summer, Ted and Sylvia sailed for the United States. Sylvia began teaching freshman English at Smith College (her alma mater) that fall. In January 1958, Ted too took up an academic position, at the nearby University of Massachusetts, Amherst. By spring, both Ted and Sylvia knew that they’d had enough of teaching. Ted writes to Gerald: “Teaching is the deadly-friendly enemy of writing — so that while I am teaching I write nothing that’s much good.” Sylvia didn’t like teaching much either, though she was, as she knew, fulfilling her academic destiny: star student to star professor. But teaching was strangling her writing, too. In Birthday Letters Ted writes about how trapped she appeared in her “blue flannel” teaching suit: “I watched / The strange dummy stiffness, the misery, / Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, ugly / Half-approximation to your idea / Of the proprieties you hoped to ease into, / And your horror in it.”
Ted’s teaching experiences, both at the American university and at the British secondary modern, had alarmed him. Because he felt that the majority of the students he encountered had been “stupefied by mechanical entertainment, distraction,” he began to formulate the idea (learned from his knowledge of myth and folklore) that imaginative stories could act as antidotes, that they could potentially counteract the stultifying effects of modern life. Ted exhorts his brother, repeatedly, to tell stories to his two young sons. “You should be telling them stories continually,” says Ted, “the more ominous & frightful the better.” So it came to pass that “some time in the spring,” says Ted in his notes to Sylvia’s Collected Poems, “they made the decision to leave teaching and attempt to live on their earnings as writers.”
At that point several features that would shape their lives as writers — especially as writers for children and “secretly” listening adults — were already in place. Ted and Sylvia had saved scrupulously in order to afford the one crucial year they had allowed themselves to become full-time professional writers. They’d already recognized the contours of their mature writing lives and the role that children’s literature could play in it. They knew that the core subjects of Ted’s imaginative landscape — animals, nature, myth, fable, folktale, fairy tale, and ballad — were subjects considered suitable for children. Sylvia increasingly took on some of those subjects, which chimed, in a Wordsworthian way, with Romantic ideas of childhood as being in tune with imagination and the natural world. By 1957, both Ted and Sylvia had added writing for children to the growing repertoire of genres in which they were working. Sylvia, in fact, writes to her mother that year: “Ted wants to make children’s books his other field.”
Ted had taken to heart the criticism that his first animal fables were “too sophisticated” and started to work on ways of reconciling his imaginative landscape with the requirements of publishers. While on a brief writing holiday in Cape Cod, just before the teaching year began, Ted writes to Gerald:
I am writing one children’s story per day before 9 a.m. These are a sort that really should sell. The publishers showed such interest in my last year’s attempt [the first How the Whale Became fables written in Spain] — which I wrote without having a notion of what children read at what age, and which were hopelessly abstract. Now I’m doing better. I am writing for about age six. A paragraph of simple story to each full page picture. Maybe if I practice a bit each day I could do the drawings too within a year or two. Now if I can keep this up — one a day — and I can, and if I can sell them — as I shall soon — either because they are good, or become good through practice, or both & my shortly-to-be-bandied name as a poet — then that will be quite a wage, and leave my whole day after 8:30 or so for more strenuous lofty attempts. These stories come to me absolutely naturally, so I’m not prostituting my imagination. I would like to produce a classic volume — about 5,000 children’s stories. I shall bring in all the situations & characters etc. out of all the fairy tales, animal tales etc. that I have read & I have read millions in the last six years. Now, if I could do that it would be a classic because there would be so much in it for desperate parents. At present there are countless children’s books, mostly bad, all different, very few that you want to read 2X — so parents don’t know what to buy — they first buy one here & one there.
It’s clear that Ted had been learning a lot about the children’s book business. He and Sylvia had met the engraver and sculptor Leonard Baskin and his wife, Esther, who were both producing picture books for children. Another important source of information on writing for children is likely to have been Sylvia’s 1956 edition of The Writer’s Handbook, a collection of articles originally published in The Writer. (Sylvia’s copy, heavily underlined and annotated, is housed in the archives in the rare book collection at Smith.) The Writer’s Handbook contains several articles by children’s authors (including Eleanor Estes), all filled with practical, commonsense advice about manuscript presentation, subject matter, and audience. Lee Wyndham, for example, in “Writing for the Look ’n’ Listen Age,” makes comments that Ted seems to have adapted. “The child’s inner world,” Wyndham says, “can be a subject.” And here: “The young child wants the story in his book to reflect his everyday world because, familiar though it may be to us, to him it is still a thing of wonder, in each moment a new discovery.” And finally: “As a writer for the young, train yourself to see, hear, feel, taste and smell in words.”
Ted took those conventional instructions and transformed them into vital components in his own aesthetic. In Poetry in the Making (1967), Ted explains how a poem is like an animal, a living creature: “an assembly of living parts moved by a single spirit.” He goes on to say that “as a poet, you have to make sure that all those parts over which you have control, the words and rhythms and images, are alive”:
Words that live are those which we hear, like “click” or “chuckle”, or which we see, like “freckled” or “veined”, or which we taste, like “vinegar” or “sugar”, or touch, like “prickle” or “oily”, or smell, like “tar” or “onion”. Words which belong directly to one of the five senses.
The aesthetic sense Ted articulates here also reflects his deep understanding of the way traditional folktales link precise observation of the outer world with emotional response to the inner. In a letter to Gerald, he says, “The thing about imaginative stories is that they make an inner mind and activate it, populate it and become the brain with which the child lives.”
July 1958. Ted publishes his first story for children. Sylvia writes in her journal: “Vicarious joy at Ted’s writing which opens promise for me too: New Yorker’s 3rd poem acceptance & a short story for Jack & Jill. 1958: The year I stop teaching & start writing.” Sylvia regarded the acceptance as a kind of talisman, confirmation of their “promise” as writers. When the story is published, Sylvia writes in her journal: “In the A & P I rushed to the magazine rack & there was Ted’s story ‘Billy Hook and the Three Souvenirs’ in the July issue of Jack & Jill. The story was sumptuously presented: two fine lively color pictures & two half-tone drawings: gay & magic.” Ted was less sanguine. In a letter to Gerald, he dismisses the story in a sentence: “The children’s story I sold was so castrated when it finally came out that I don’t want to send it to you.” The story is a version of a famous Scottish border ballad, “Thomas Rymer,” about a man who disappears forever into “Elfland” when he marries the fairy queen. Ted loved this ballad, and others of its kind, famously collected in the nineteenth century by F. J. Child. My guess is that Ted’s ballad ending was cut, as the Jack and Jill version ends in a conventional way, with Billy Hook returning to the everyday world with his bride.
Despite Ted’s disappointment at the published version, it was still an important marker for Ted and Sylvia. Every story sold, every poem, every award, represented tangible proof that they could, in fact, support themselves as writers. When Sylvia typed up their combined earnings from writing for the period between June 1956 and June 1958, the total came to $2,100.34. The biggest sums were from prize money. Poems mostly sold by the line: nine dollars, ten dollars, fifteen dollars. The New Yorker paid Ted sixty-four dollars for “The Thought-Fox,” a sum significantly more than he received from poetry and literary magazines. And for “Billy Hook and the Three Souvenirs,” Jack and Jill paid Ted fifty dollars.
Sylvia too tried her hand at the Jack and Jill genre. In a 1958 journal entry she sketches a plot for a domestic fantasy tentatively titled “Changeabout in Mrs. Cherry’s Kitchen”:
Suddenly, Ted & I looked at things from our unborn children’s point of view. Take gadgets: a modern pot & kettle story. Shiny modern gadgets are overspecialized — long to do others tasks. Toaster, iron, waffle-maker, refrigerator, egg beater, electric fry-pan, blender. One midnight fairies or equivalent grant wish to change-about. Iron wants to make waffles, dips point for dents; refrigerator tired of foods, decides to freeze clothes, toaster tired of toast, wants to bake fancy cake. . . .
The story is rejected and Sylvia is disheartened, although even in the sketch it’s possible to glimpse the lost world of Sylvia’s imagination at work in 1950s America. But Sylvia kept trying to break into publishing for children.
In a letter to her friend, author Ann Davidson, Sylvia writes bravely: “We are plugging our children’s books. I go to see an editor at the Atlantic Press tomorrow, probably to get a rejection.” The two long verse narratives Sylvia wrote for children in 1959, The Bed Book and The It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit, were both rejected — and not published until long after her death. Yet Sylvia did make her debut in children’s literature that year — in The Horn Book Magazine. In January 1959, then-editor Ruth Hill Viguers writes:
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Hughes:
Your names had been familiar to me for some time when our good friend Mel Culbrandsen [Viguers’s neighbor] spoke of you. He knew of my interest in poetry and my wish to find unpublished poems for the magazine of which I am editor. Then this past week, my twin daughters in the Wellesley High School spoke of hearing Mr. Crockett [Sylvia’s high-school English teacher] read some poems by Sylvia Plath to their English class.
Later in her letter, Viguers explains the Horn Book’s mandate as “a literary magazine devoted to criticisms and evaluation of books and reading for children and young people. It is for adults — parents, librarians, teachers, artists, writers — anyone interested in the field of good children’s books.” In other words, she describes the way the Horn Book reaches children via adults — prefiguring the audience Ted later identifies as the one he wants to reach.
In February 1959, polite and enthusiastic young woman that she was, Sylvia writes a cheerful thank-you note to Ruth Viguers: “My husband and I enjoyed so much meeting you and having tea with you and your daughters when we were in Wellesley last.” Then she adds: “Both of us enjoy writing poems about birds, beasts and fish, so we are enclosing one from each of us, about an otter and a goatsucker . . . ” As an afterthought, Sylvia decides to include a few more, and in a postscript writes, “We’re adding to the zoo a bull and a field of horses.” What she’s indicating to Viguers is that she and Ted have recognized that their animal poems, in keeping with Romantic nineteenth-century traditions, are suitable subjects for children’s literature.
When published in the April 1959 issue of the Horn Book, Sylvia’s “The Bull of Bendylaw” begins with an epigraph, a ballad fragment from F. J. Child’s late-nineteenth-century collected English and Scottish Popular Ballads:
The great bull of Bendylaw
Has broken his band and run awa,
And the king and a’ his court
Canna turn that bull about.
But Sylvia creates a much more complex creature and international creature in the poem she spins out of the Child ballad fragment. In her journal, Sylvia records the ideas she has in mind for the composition.
The Bull of Bendylaw-King & court: ceremony & rule — tapestry meadow, dasies, marigolds — playing card
King & queen
Bull — Dionysiac force — inspiration
Male virility —
unbindable
Europa & bull
color: versus black bull
The detailed, conscious construction of the mythic world of her verse was typical of Sylvia. The poem itself presents her dense, filigreed approach to the crush of experience she brought to making poems. The bull, for example, is not just the bull of the ballad fragment but also the mythic Dionysian bull — and the bull of the bullfights Ted and Sylvia saw in Spain during their honeymoon — reconfigured as an “unbindable” sea creature:
The great bronze gate began to ***ck,
The sea broke in at every ***ck,
Pell-mell, blue-black.
The bull surged up, the bull surged down . . .
It’s a wonderful, mature poem, its first publication in the Horn Book hinting that her poems were to reach both adults and children. In Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems, edited by Ted and published in 1981,“The Bull of Bendylaw” leads off the publications for 1959, the year Ted marks as an important transitional period for Sylvia, when her first collection of “book” poems (as she liked to call the ones she considered good enough for books) began to take shape. For a time, she’d considered using “The Bull of Bendylaw” as the title poem of the collection ultimately published as The Colossus in 1960. Retrospectively, it’s possible to see “The Bull of Bendylaw” as a potential locus of Sylvia’s poems for both adults and children, poems redolent with mythic, ballad, and folkloric traditions. Sylvia never published formally for children during her lifetime, though there is a hint that she was developing such plans once she had children of her own. In a BBC broadcast produced in January 1963, just before her death, she identifies her poem “You’re” as “one of a growing series about a baby.” “You’re” is a riddle poem, of a piece with other traditional forms with which Sylvia had been working, the ones that communicate to children and adults, the ones that connect observed experience with inner emotion.
In the author note that accompanies “The Bull of Bendylaw” in the Horn Book, Sylvia is identified as having studied at Cambridge and taught at Smith, as having published in The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and as living in Boston “with her husband, Ted Hughes, who is also a poet.” That is, she appears promising. Ted does not appear again in the Horn Book until October 1964, when the influential children’s literature critic Ethel L. Heins favorably reviews How the Whale Became, the creation fables born in that honeymoon summer of 1956: “A completely new kind of ’how’ story,” she says, “written by a young English poet with imagination, philosophical wisdom, and perceptive insight into the ways of animals and men.” But even in 1959, Ted understood what kinds of stories he wanted to tell, what he wanted stories to communicate, and their value. In a letter to Gerald he writes:
The thing about imaginative stories is that they make an inner mind and activate it, populate it and become the brain with which the child lives. Without this inner world the child then becomes a mechanical reflection of his environment & responds to it — which is exactly as if he had been lobotomized or had some part of his brain cut away. Life has less meaning for such people, and is less interesting. Hence the in****ible boredom & mental vacuity of vast tracts of the American and English younger generation. The whole purpose of education — apart from the mechanical apprentice to certain necessary skills is in rousing mental activity, an inner world.
In the same letter, Ted explains that he had found that kind of vital inner life (“belatedly & remorsefully”) in what he describes as “the better sort of folk tale,” and offers a few for Gerald to try out on his sons. Ted explains the purpose:
The aim isn’t to turn them into writers or dreamers but to give them a bigger, stronger grasp of everything that comes up and a more flexible immunity and a supply of symbols to understand experience — explain it to themselves. Because these stories are composed of psychic symbols — unlike the run of nonsensical children’s books which are unreal, essentially false and sentimental.
The four short fables Ted includes in the letter all are redolent with folktale traditions, though not identifiable as being from any single tradition. My favorite is a trickster tale of sorts, with apparently Russian antecedents. It’s about a ploughman who unwisely wishes that a bear would eat his recalcitrant horse. When the bear appears, the ploughman is remorseful, but it’s too late. A fox comes to the rescue with an idea to trick the bear into thinking he’s being hunted. The bear falls for it:
“Save me,” [the bear] cried, “And I promise not to eat your horse.” At that moment the fox, without showing himself, shouted from the forest: “Ploughman, what’s that big dark thing beside you?” “Say it’s a stump,” whispered the bear. So the ploughman pushed the bear, and the bear kept very rigid, so that he seemed to topple over like a stump.
Ted’s poet’s eyes and ears are very much evident in the passage: the dramatic cry, “Save me,” and the image of the bear toppling “like a stump.”
The moral questions multiply. The bear, once in the cart pretending to be firewood, has his head smashed by the ploughman’s axe. And the fox (whom the ploughman initially says he’ll reward with a chicken) is tricked into a sack of chickens, supposedly to choose the best one. The ploughman smashes the sack “against a wall with all his strength.”
For twenty-first century readers — conditioned to school rules of zero-tolerance and a ruthless exclusion of violent stories from children — the story may seem shocking. But it’s supposed to. It provokes readers and listeners into thinking about moral actions and consequences. Ted explains to Gerald that “the sadistic element is very prominent in all genuine folk tales. They are a sort of therapy for it, they get it out of the system. It’s where repressed that it’s so dangerous. Unrepressed it can be converted to more useful ends.” That’s it. The story provides ideas to think with, tools for imaginative approaches to otherwise complex problems.
In the end, Ted was able to engage the therapeutic virtues of those tales. Besides How the Whale Became, he produced two more collections of creation fables: Tales of the Early World and The Dreamfighter. They stand alongside other important, mythic works (stories, poems, and plays) Ted wrote for children, including The Iron Man (called The Iron Giant in America), The Tiger’s Bones, The Iron Woman, Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth, and What Is the Truth? — all reaching for children and secretly listening adults. Sylvia’s death in 1963 necessarily precluded the fulfillment of her early promise as a children’s author, so evident in her writings of the late 1950s. What remains is the knowledge that her poem “The Bull of Bendylaw” saw its first published life in the Horn Book and that it was produced in that intensely creative period with Ted. It was a crucible of poetic achievement for both of them: volatile, productive — and destructive. But, in the end, the works stand. The promise is kept.
Because beginnings make most sense when viewed from endings, my story begins at the end, in the archives at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where Ted’s papers and books are now housed. There, among the two-and-a-half tons of archival material he gave to Emory, are two files classified as unidentified notes on “children’s writing and teaching.” They contain loose sheets of yellow s***tch pad, unlined and undated (though they appear to be from a late stage in his career), on which Ted has written rough drafts for an apparently unproduced radio program. The rhythmically elegant phrase “writing poetry for children is a curious occupation” appears repeatedly as Ted tries out various ways of writing something that will resolve — as elegantly as the opening phrase — the inherent conflicts he sketches among producers, manufacturers, distributors, and consumers of children’s poetry. Here’s one version as Ted tries to articulate the problem:
And the most curious thing about it is that we think children need a special kind of poetry. Each writer for children has his own idea of what that is. . . . Publishers, of course, know that poetry is not sold to children — it is sold to their parents or teachers. So this is the barrier to publishing children’s poetry. The author thinks he knows what they want, or need, the teachers or parents think they know best. And the publisher thinks he knows best what poet & teacher think they know best. And we all think differently. Each author writing for children thinks the same — and all write differently.
Although Ted is talking about writing poetry for children, his remarks apply equally well to his prose. Poets always write as poets — tuned to rhythm, imagery, and feeling. Every phrase, every sentence, is carefully balanced so that it is held in perfect tension with the structure as a whole. But the main concern of this passage, as Ted tries to explain, is the problem of audience relations: Who is the text for? Adults or children? Who publishes it? Who buys it? Who knows best?
One ***ftily simple way Ted resolved the audience problem was by publishing, without comment, the same poem in different collections — some marked as being for children, some not. But that was a partial solution at best. He cared deeply about nurturing imaginative life and was attracted to the idea that children “are more fluid and alert” than adults. He was also troubled by the speed with which that openness was closed down and sealed up, hidden, as he says, behind a “space helmet.” That’s one reason Ted was so concerned with audience — and characterized that audience much as traditional storytellers might have characterized their undifferentiated audiences of adults and children. In a 1984 letter to me, Ted described the kind of writing that might reach such an audience as a “lingua franca” — that is, “a style of communication for which children are the specific audience, but which adults can overhear . . . and listen, in a way secretly — as children.” And it appears that Ted was attempting to compose in that style, that “lingua franca,” as early as 1956, on his honeymoon in Spain with Sylvia. That’s when he wrote the first drafts of little animal fables that ultimately grew into the collection How the Whale Became.
In that bright Spanish summer of 1956, Ted writes, enthusiastically, to his beloved older brother Gerald: “I have written a book of children’s & grown up animal fables which surprised even me.” Sylvia writes with equal enthusiasm in her journal:
Yesterday Ted read me three new fables he’d just written for his fine animal book about how all the animals became: the Tortoise one was the funniest and dearest yet; the hyena, more serious about a bitter perverted character, and the fox and dog alive with plot and marvelous Sly — Look and Four-Square. I have great hopes for this as a children’s classic. Even as I write, Ted is working at the main table on the elephant and the cricket stories. Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative, I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.
The celebration was a little premature. Though Ted received initial encouragement from publishers, in 1957 his new creation fables (eventually published in 1963) were rejected as being “too sophisticated” for children. So, as questions of audience relations began to simmer for Ted, the fables were temporarily put on the back burner. But I’ll return to them — Ted’s stories about animals becoming themselves serve as a poignant counterpoint to the story about Ted and Sylvia becoming writers.
By early 1957, that brief Spanish interlude with its dedicated writing time had become a golden memory. Ted and Sylvia were back in the gray cold of England. Sylvia was completing her Fulbright-sponsored degree in English at Cambridge. Ted, having completed his degree there in anthropology in 1954 and a master’s degree the following year, wrote and worked at odd jobs in the neighborhood. Among them was a stint, in the spring of 1957, teaching adolescents at what was called a secondary modern school — a school for the least able students, the ones putting in time between finishing elementary school and being legally able to leave. In the summer, Ted and Sylvia sailed for the United States. Sylvia began teaching freshman English at Smith College (her alma mater) that fall. In January 1958, Ted too took up an academic position, at the nearby University of Massachusetts, Amherst. By spring, both Ted and Sylvia knew that they’d had enough of teaching. Ted writes to Gerald: “Teaching is the deadly-friendly enemy of writing — so that while I am teaching I write nothing that’s much good.” Sylvia didn’t like teaching much either, though she was, as she knew, fulfilling her academic destiny: star student to star professor. But teaching was strangling her writing, too. In Birthday Letters Ted writes about how trapped she appeared in her “blue flannel” teaching suit: “I watched / The strange dummy stiffness, the misery, / Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, ugly / Half-approximation to your idea / Of the proprieties you hoped to ease into, / And your horror in it.”
Ted’s teaching experiences, both at the American university and at the British secondary modern, had alarmed him. Because he felt that the majority of the students he encountered had been “stupefied by mechanical entertainment, distraction,” he began to formulate the idea (learned from his knowledge of myth and folklore) that imaginative stories could act as antidotes, that they could potentially counteract the stultifying effects of modern life. Ted exhorts his brother, repeatedly, to tell stories to his two young sons. “You should be telling them stories continually,” says Ted, “the more ominous & frightful the better.” So it came to pass that “some time in the spring,” says Ted in his notes to Sylvia’s Collected Poems, “they made the decision to leave teaching and attempt to live on their earnings as writers.”
At that point several features that would shape their lives as writers — especially as writers for children and “secretly” listening adults — were already in place. Ted and Sylvia had saved scrupulously in order to afford the one crucial year they had allowed themselves to become full-time professional writers. They’d already recognized the contours of their mature writing lives and the role that children’s literature could play in it. They knew that the core subjects of Ted’s imaginative landscape — animals, nature, myth, fable, folktale, fairy tale, and ballad — were subjects considered suitable for children. Sylvia increasingly took on some of those subjects, which chimed, in a Wordsworthian way, with Romantic ideas of childhood as being in tune with imagination and the natural world. By 1957, both Ted and Sylvia had added writing for children to the growing repertoire of genres in which they were working. Sylvia, in fact, writes to her mother that year: “Ted wants to make children’s books his other field.”
Ted had taken to heart the criticism that his first animal fables were “too sophisticated” and started to work on ways of reconciling his imaginative landscape with the requirements of publishers. While on a brief writing holiday in Cape Cod, just before the teaching year began, Ted writes to Gerald:
I am writing one children’s story per day before 9 a.m. These are a sort that really should sell. The publishers showed such interest in my last year’s attempt [the first How the Whale Became fables written in Spain] — which I wrote without having a notion of what children read at what age, and which were hopelessly abstract. Now I’m doing better. I am writing for about age six. A paragraph of simple story to each full page picture. Maybe if I practice a bit each day I could do the drawings too within a year or two. Now if I can keep this up — one a day — and I can, and if I can sell them — as I shall soon — either because they are good, or become good through practice, or both & my shortly-to-be-bandied name as a poet — then that will be quite a wage, and leave my whole day after 8:30 or so for more strenuous lofty attempts. These stories come to me absolutely naturally, so I’m not prostituting my imagination. I would like to produce a classic volume — about 5,000 children’s stories. I shall bring in all the situations & characters etc. out of all the fairy tales, animal tales etc. that I have read & I have read millions in the last six years. Now, if I could do that it would be a classic because there would be so much in it for desperate parents. At present there are countless children’s books, mostly bad, all different, very few that you want to read 2X — so parents don’t know what to buy — they first buy one here & one there.
It’s clear that Ted had been learning a lot about the children’s book business. He and Sylvia had met the engraver and sculptor Leonard Baskin and his wife, Esther, who were both producing picture books for children. Another important source of information on writing for children is likely to have been Sylvia’s 1956 edition of The Writer’s Handbook, a collection of articles originally published in The Writer. (Sylvia’s copy, heavily underlined and annotated, is housed in the archives in the rare book collection at Smith.) The Writer’s Handbook contains several articles by children’s authors (including Eleanor Estes), all filled with practical, commonsense advice about manuscript presentation, subject matter, and audience. Lee Wyndham, for example, in “Writing for the Look ’n’ Listen Age,” makes comments that Ted seems to have adapted. “The child’s inner world,” Wyndham says, “can be a subject.” And here: “The young child wants the story in his book to reflect his everyday world because, familiar though it may be to us, to him it is still a thing of wonder, in each moment a new discovery.” And finally: “As a writer for the young, train yourself to see, hear, feel, taste and smell in words.”
Ted took those conventional instructions and transformed them into vital components in his own aesthetic. In Poetry in the Making (1967), Ted explains how a poem is like an animal, a living creature: “an assembly of living parts moved by a single spirit.” He goes on to say that “as a poet, you have to make sure that all those parts over which you have control, the words and rhythms and images, are alive”:
Words that live are those which we hear, like “click” or “chuckle”, or which we see, like “freckled” or “veined”, or which we taste, like “vinegar” or “sugar”, or touch, like “prickle” or “oily”, or smell, like “tar” or “onion”. Words which belong directly to one of the five senses.
The aesthetic sense Ted articulates here also reflects his deep understanding of the way traditional folktales link precise observation of the outer world with emotional response to the inner. In a letter to Gerald, he says, “The thing about imaginative stories is that they make an inner mind and activate it, populate it and become the brain with which the child lives.”
July 1958. Ted publishes his first story for children. Sylvia writes in her journal: “Vicarious joy at Ted’s writing which opens promise for me too: New Yorker’s 3rd poem acceptance & a short story for Jack & Jill. 1958: The year I stop teaching & start writing.” Sylvia regarded the acceptance as a kind of talisman, confirmation of their “promise” as writers. When the story is published, Sylvia writes in her journal: “In the A & P I rushed to the magazine rack & there was Ted’s story ‘Billy Hook and the Three Souvenirs’ in the July issue of Jack & Jill. The story was sumptuously presented: two fine lively color pictures & two half-tone drawings: gay & magic.” Ted was less sanguine. In a letter to Gerald, he dismisses the story in a sentence: “The children’s story I sold was so castrated when it finally came out that I don’t want to send it to you.” The story is a version of a famous Scottish border ballad, “Thomas Rymer,” about a man who disappears forever into “Elfland” when he marries the fairy queen. Ted loved this ballad, and others of its kind, famously collected in the nineteenth century by F. J. Child. My guess is that Ted’s ballad ending was cut, as the Jack and Jill version ends in a conventional way, with Billy Hook returning to the everyday world with his bride.
Despite Ted’s disappointment at the published version, it was still an important marker for Ted and Sylvia. Every story sold, every poem, every award, represented tangible proof that they could, in fact, support themselves as writers. When Sylvia typed up their combined earnings from writing for the period between June 1956 and June 1958, the total came to $2,100.34. The biggest sums were from prize money. Poems mostly sold by the line: nine dollars, ten dollars, fifteen dollars. The New Yorker paid Ted sixty-four dollars for “The Thought-Fox,” a sum significantly more than he received from poetry and literary magazines. And for “Billy Hook and the Three Souvenirs,” Jack and Jill paid Ted fifty dollars.
Sylvia too tried her hand at the Jack and Jill genre. In a 1958 journal entry she sketches a plot for a domestic fantasy tentatively titled “Changeabout in Mrs. Cherry’s Kitchen”:
Suddenly, Ted & I looked at things from our unborn children’s point of view. Take gadgets: a modern pot & kettle story. Shiny modern gadgets are overspecialized — long to do others tasks. Toaster, iron, waffle-maker, refrigerator, egg beater, electric fry-pan, blender. One midnight fairies or equivalent grant wish to change-about. Iron wants to make waffles, dips point for dents; refrigerator tired of foods, decides to freeze clothes, toaster tired of toast, wants to bake fancy cake. . . .
The story is rejected and Sylvia is disheartened, although even in the sketch it’s possible to glimpse the lost world of Sylvia’s imagination at work in 1950s America. But Sylvia kept trying to break into publishing for children.
In a letter to her friend, author Ann Davidson, Sylvia writes bravely: “We are plugging our children’s books. I go to see an editor at the Atlantic Press tomorrow, probably to get a rejection.” The two long verse narratives Sylvia wrote for children in 1959, The Bed Book and The It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit, were both rejected — and not published until long after her death. Yet Sylvia did make her debut in children’s literature that year — in The Horn Book Magazine. In January 1959, then-editor Ruth Hill Viguers writes:
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Hughes:
Your names had been familiar to me for some time when our good friend Mel Culbrandsen [Viguers’s neighbor] spoke of you. He knew of my interest in poetry and my wish to find unpublished poems for the magazine of which I am editor. Then this past week, my twin daughters in the Wellesley High School spoke of hearing Mr. Crockett [Sylvia’s high-school English teacher] read some poems by Sylvia Plath to their English class.
Later in her letter, Viguers explains the Horn Book’s mandate as “a literary magazine devoted to criticisms and evaluation of books and reading for children and young people. It is for adults — parents, librarians, teachers, artists, writers — anyone interested in the field of good children’s books.” In other words, she describes the way the Horn Book reaches children via adults — prefiguring the audience Ted later identifies as the one he wants to reach.
In February 1959, polite and enthusiastic young woman that she was, Sylvia writes a cheerful thank-you note to Ruth Viguers: “My husband and I enjoyed so much meeting you and having tea with you and your daughters when we were in Wellesley last.” Then she adds: “Both of us enjoy writing poems about birds, beasts and fish, so we are enclosing one from each of us, about an otter and a goatsucker . . . ” As an afterthought, Sylvia decides to include a few more, and in a postscript writes, “We’re adding to the zoo a bull and a field of horses.” What she’s indicating to Viguers is that she and Ted have recognized that their animal poems, in keeping with Romantic nineteenth-century traditions, are suitable subjects for children’s literature.
When published in the April 1959 issue of the Horn Book, Sylvia’s “The Bull of Bendylaw” begins with an epigraph, a ballad fragment from F. J. Child’s late-nineteenth-century collected English and Scottish Popular Ballads:
The great bull of Bendylaw
Has broken his band and run awa,
And the king and a’ his court
Canna turn that bull about.
But Sylvia creates a much more complex creature and international creature in the poem she spins out of the Child ballad fragment. In her journal, Sylvia records the ideas she has in mind for the composition.
The Bull of Bendylaw-King & court: ceremony & rule — tapestry meadow, dasies, marigolds — playing card
King & queen
Bull — Dionysiac force — inspiration
Male virility —
unbindable
Europa & bull
color: versus black bull
The detailed, conscious construction of the mythic world of her verse was typical of Sylvia. The poem itself presents her dense, filigreed approach to the crush of experience she brought to making poems. The bull, for example, is not just the bull of the ballad fragment but also the mythic Dionysian bull — and the bull of the bullfights Ted and Sylvia saw in Spain during their honeymoon — reconfigured as an “unbindable” sea creature:
The great bronze gate began to ***ck,
The sea broke in at every ***ck,
Pell-mell, blue-black.
The bull surged up, the bull surged down . . .
It’s a wonderful, mature poem, its first publication in the Horn Book hinting that her poems were to reach both adults and children. In Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems, edited by Ted and published in 1981,“The Bull of Bendylaw” leads off the publications for 1959, the year Ted marks as an important transitional period for Sylvia, when her first collection of “book” poems (as she liked to call the ones she considered good enough for books) began to take shape. For a time, she’d considered using “The Bull of Bendylaw” as the title poem of the collection ultimately published as The Colossus in 1960. Retrospectively, it’s possible to see “The Bull of Bendylaw” as a potential locus of Sylvia’s poems for both adults and children, poems redolent with mythic, ballad, and folkloric traditions. Sylvia never published formally for children during her lifetime, though there is a hint that she was developing such plans once she had children of her own. In a BBC broadcast produced in January 1963, just before her death, she identifies her poem “You’re” as “one of a growing series about a baby.” “You’re” is a riddle poem, of a piece with other traditional forms with which Sylvia had been working, the ones that communicate to children and adults, the ones that connect observed experience with inner emotion.
In the author note that accompanies “The Bull of Bendylaw” in the Horn Book, Sylvia is identified as having studied at Cambridge and taught at Smith, as having published in The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and as living in Boston “with her husband, Ted Hughes, who is also a poet.” That is, she appears promising. Ted does not appear again in the Horn Book until October 1964, when the influential children’s literature critic Ethel L. Heins favorably reviews How the Whale Became, the creation fables born in that honeymoon summer of 1956: “A completely new kind of ’how’ story,” she says, “written by a young English poet with imagination, philosophical wisdom, and perceptive insight into the ways of animals and men.” But even in 1959, Ted understood what kinds of stories he wanted to tell, what he wanted stories to communicate, and their value. In a letter to Gerald he writes:
The thing about imaginative stories is that they make an inner mind and activate it, populate it and become the brain with which the child lives. Without this inner world the child then becomes a mechanical reflection of his environment & responds to it — which is exactly as if he had been lobotomized or had some part of his brain cut away. Life has less meaning for such people, and is less interesting. Hence the in****ible boredom & mental vacuity of vast tracts of the American and English younger generation. The whole purpose of education — apart from the mechanical apprentice to certain necessary skills is in rousing mental activity, an inner world.
In the same letter, Ted explains that he had found that kind of vital inner life (“belatedly & remorsefully”) in what he describes as “the better sort of folk tale,” and offers a few for Gerald to try out on his sons. Ted explains the purpose:
The aim isn’t to turn them into writers or dreamers but to give them a bigger, stronger grasp of everything that comes up and a more flexible immunity and a supply of symbols to understand experience — explain it to themselves. Because these stories are composed of psychic symbols — unlike the run of nonsensical children’s books which are unreal, essentially false and sentimental.
The four short fables Ted includes in the letter all are redolent with folktale traditions, though not identifiable as being from any single tradition. My favorite is a trickster tale of sorts, with apparently Russian antecedents. It’s about a ploughman who unwisely wishes that a bear would eat his recalcitrant horse. When the bear appears, the ploughman is remorseful, but it’s too late. A fox comes to the rescue with an idea to trick the bear into thinking he’s being hunted. The bear falls for it:
“Save me,” [the bear] cried, “And I promise not to eat your horse.” At that moment the fox, without showing himself, shouted from the forest: “Ploughman, what’s that big dark thing beside you?” “Say it’s a stump,” whispered the bear. So the ploughman pushed the bear, and the bear kept very rigid, so that he seemed to topple over like a stump.
Ted’s poet’s eyes and ears are very much evident in the passage: the dramatic cry, “Save me,” and the image of the bear toppling “like a stump.”
The moral questions multiply. The bear, once in the cart pretending to be firewood, has his head smashed by the ploughman’s axe. And the fox (whom the ploughman initially says he’ll reward with a chicken) is tricked into a sack of chickens, supposedly to choose the best one. The ploughman smashes the sack “against a wall with all his strength.”
For twenty-first century readers — conditioned to school rules of zero-tolerance and a ruthless exclusion of violent stories from children — the story may seem shocking. But it’s supposed to. It provokes readers and listeners into thinking about moral actions and consequences. Ted explains to Gerald that “the sadistic element is very prominent in all genuine folk tales. They are a sort of therapy for it, they get it out of the system. It’s where repressed that it’s so dangerous. Unrepressed it can be converted to more useful ends.” That’s it. The story provides ideas to think with, tools for imaginative approaches to otherwise complex problems.
In the end, Ted was able to engage the therapeutic virtues of those tales. Besides How the Whale Became, he produced two more collections of creation fables: Tales of the Early World and The Dreamfighter. They stand alongside other important, mythic works (stories, poems, and plays) Ted wrote for children, including The Iron Man (called The Iron Giant in America), The Tiger’s Bones, The Iron Woman, Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth, and What Is the Truth? — all reaching for children and secretly listening adults. Sylvia’s death in 1963 necessarily precluded the fulfillment of her early promise as a children’s author, so evident in her writings of the late 1950s. What remains is the knowledge that her poem “The Bull of Bendylaw” saw its first published life in the Horn Book and that it was produced in that intensely creative period with Ted. It was a crucible of poetic achievement for both of them: volatile, productive — and destructive. But, in the end, the works stand. The promise is kept.