Of course all through history there had been a few men (mostly in lovely Mediterranean countries that seem to glide on olive oil) who knew how to please a woman, but unless you moved to Italy at puberty there were apparently not enough to go around. Besides, you had to put up with their omnipotent mothers. So Hite’s book caused a sensation. A few years later, it was supplanted by the G-spot, which everyone was determined to find whether they had one or not.
So back to the elderly publisher—whom I’ll call Wagstaff, may he rest in peace. He had published many books about the triumphant clitoris. He said he loved my first two books of poetry,
Fruits & Vegetables
and
Half-
Lives. He took me to the Rose Room at the Algonquin to see if I was writing a novel. I was.
We ordered jellied consommé and crab salad and too much wine. We were sitting side by side on a banquette and his mottled fingers crept toward my bare thighs. It was midsummer and the micro-miniskirt was in fashion. I moved away—which was not easy to do on the sticky banquettes of the Rose Room. The waiter came by and brought more wine. (Those were the days when publishing lunches were bibulous rather than ostentatiously abstemious.)
“So you’re writing a novel?”
“About a psychiatrist’s wife who takes off on a mad picaresque adventure with—”
“If it’s anything like your poems, I’m your publisher.”
“Well, maybe you should see it first.”
“I don’t need to see it. My gut tells me it’s great. How do I get it?” His old eyes glittered like a lizard’s. “I’ll pay anything.”
I thought of the biggest advance I could. I had read in
Publishers Weekly
that a first novelist got $500,000.
“Half a million,” I said sheepishly. That would make my father proud—my father who had left show business to go into the tchotchke biz and always regretted it.
“Done,” said the glittering lizard.
What had I said? I had an agent. I was not allowed to bargain with an old reptile at lunch.
“Best not to discuss money with me,” I said, hastily backpedaling. What if I could get more? “Talk to Anita, my agent.”
He licked his dry and crumbling lips. “I shall. All the best novelists started as poets,” he said. “Hemingway wrote poems. James Joyce. Thomas Hardy. D. H. Lawrence. It all starts with metaphor. You know, my other passion is rare books.”
“It is?” I adored rare books myself—even though I had never owned any (I had coveted them in the Rare Book Room at the Butler Library). To me they were the sexiest things in the world. Sexier than “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”—that made F. Scott Fitzgerald’s heart beat faster.
“I’ve just bought a very fine copy of Keats’s
Endymion.
I would love to share it with you.”
“Keats is my absolutely favorite poet.”
“And I have a first of
Leaves of Grass
I’d love to show you too.”
My heart was racing. My body was becoming electric. “I love
Leaves of Grass.”
“My office is just down the street,” the old roué said.
Now, this was not his
real
office in his publishing house. It was an additional little office he kept in the building
The New Yorker
was in, right down the block.
He led me there. We went up in the elevator as he rattled his keys. There, on a high floor, was an office that was more like a book depository (with all the associations that conveyed to someone of my generation). One room with a sooty window, a metal desk and book stacks like a public library. He went to these stacks and pulled out two volumes encased in what I now know are called “clamshells.” Carefully, and with ceremony, he pulled
Endymion
from its clamshell and placed it before me on his desk.
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep ...
I read this and remembered my college adoration of Keats, how I had visited his house in Hampstead when I was nineteen and written a poem about it, how I had gone on to visit the house where he died in Rome and written about that too. I was enchanted. I read on:
... in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old, and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in ...
I was living in a green world even in that dusty room. I could have been that young Greek shepherd falling in love with Cynthia, the moon goddess.
Wagstaff then produced
Leaves of Grass
with its frontispiece of good gray Walt Whitman. He spread it out on his desk and flipped it open:
There was a child went forth every day;
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.
The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebebird,
... curiously below there—and the beautiful curious liquid,
And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads
—
all became part of him.
So I became part of the book. Its creamy pages became my flesh and its greenness entered my heart and before I knew it, the mottled old publisher was embracing me from behind and then turning me around to kiss his wrinkled lips. Somehow, in unison with Walt Whitman, who became everything he looked upon, who merged with the people on the street who caught his empathic gaze, I was on my knees before the elderly publisher. Then somehow I was sucking his flabby prick (how did it get to my mouth?) for every atom of him as well belonged to me.
It took him forever to come. He was old and the sap was congealed. It wasn’t running. It was limping. It was creeping. But the social worker in me felt sorry for his age and his avid desire, so I persevered. (Besides, once you’re on your knees it’s tough to escape gracefully.) Visions of rare books in my library sustained me. What madness was going through my addled brain? Surely he would give me a first edition—or two—in exchange for this arduous blow job? It went on and on. This was the era of
Deep Throat,
but I can assure you my clitoris was not anywhere in the vicinity of my tonsils. He would lose his erection, and then torturedly get it back. If I had been looking at a clock, it would surely have been going backwards. But I was looking at those first editions, which had turned me on in the first place. Finally, he came, dribblingly—and full of apologetic palaver.
“What can I do for
you
?” he asked. “A first edition or two would be nice,” the gold-digger girl I never was would have said.
“Is it true that Keats died a virgin?” I asked, getting up, without replying to his offer. I couldn’t bear for him to touch me. It was Keats I wanted.
“Sad if he did. So sad. What a waste of poetry!” the elderly publisher said. Did he think of poetry only as a means of seduction? Well, it worked, didn’t it?
The next day a large brown package arrived at my house on Seventy-seventh Street.
It was so carefully wrapped, it
must
be a first edition. First there was this note:
“I cannot thank you enough for your bravado, your intelligence, your sheer joyousness. You are a true Whit-manic spirit.”
So I unwrapped and unwrapped and unwrapped, dreaming of first editions. There within the bubble wrap and plastic and brown paper was a facsimile 1855 edition of
Leaves of Grass.
I felt as if I’d been betrayed.
I didn’t give him a facsimile blow job!
What’s more, he totally forgot about the pricey advance.
So I broke my own rule: Never get sexually involved with a publisher. I was to break it once more, to my consternation. And I was to make a most inconvenient enemy in Martha Stewart. But that was much later, when I had already published three novels and five books of poetry. First, I need to continue with the lives of the poets.
I met Ted Hughes around the same time I met the elderly publisher—early seventies. He had just published his deathward poem cycle called
Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow.
In these astonishing poems, a crow with a bloody beak sits in a tree looking down on a world in love with death. The poems were gory and fierce, full of nature red in tooth and claw—not surprising for a poet whose two lovers had committed suicide, the second taking their child along.
The reasons were different for each—if suicide can ever have a reason. Assia Wevill, whom Ted Hughes apparently fell for while he was still with Sylvia Plath, was the child of Holocaust survivors—a group at great risk for suicide. Sylvia Plath had suffered depressions and suicide attempts during her adolescence, as she recounted in her novel,
The Bell Jar.
Both women were in love with Ted Hughes—who cannot have been an easy man to love but was compelling. When I met him, I understood why both these brilliant women fell.
He was fiercely sexy, with a vampirish, warlock appeal. He hulked. He was tall and his shoulders were broad. His hair fell against his broad forehead. He had a square jaw and an intense gaze and he reeked of virility. Moreover, he knew how irresistible he was in the Heath-cliff fashion, and he did the wildman-from-the-moors thing on me full force when we met. He was a born seducer and only my terror of Sylvia’s ghost kept me from being seduced.
I remember sitting across a bar table with Ted and his friend Luke while Ted put the poetic moves on me. Knowing I’d want an autographed book, he snatched my copy of
Crow
and drew, on the title page, a lecherous snake climbing an Edenic tree. “To Erica, a beautiful Surprise,” he scribbled flirtatiously, as he must have done with every woman he met. You could inhale the man’s pheromones across the table—this stink of masculinity and musk that must have worked on countless girls. His eyes held you in his gaze as if you were the only person on the planet. The only other man I’ve met who had such intensity was Ingmar Bergman, another born seducer—in the gloomy northern style. Are these men from the cold and gloomy north so sexy because they taunt you with the promise of sex that can melt icebergs? Or is it the intensity of genius that attracts? Genius is a strong aphrodisiac.
I have treasured Ted’s inscription for years and wished we had fucked. But Hughes’s flirtations were legendary. Since his death, from cancer in 1998, dozens of women have come forward to claim that he was their secret lover. Perhaps I was lucky the flirtation was never consummated. At least that way I could keep him as my secret demon.
“In lapidary inscriptions, a man is not upon oath,” Samuel Johnson wrote. Nor in book inscriptions, I would add, especially those penned after the adrenaline rush of reading one’s poems to adoring female fans. My temperature rose and with it my panic. I taxied home to my husband on the West Side, my head full of the hottest fantasies. Of course we fucked our brains out with me imagining Ted.
I had become friends with an old friend of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes who’d brought me to Ted’s reading. His name was Luke and he’d been at school with them. He told me that on their first meeting at a Cam-bridge party, Sylvia and Ted disappeared into a room to “make out” (as we said in the fifties) and emerged several minutes later with Ted bleeding copiously from a bite Sylvia had given him on the cheek.
Sylvia Plath recounts the same tale in her journal (
The Journals of Sylvia Plath
, 1982).
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 came in the room, but nobody told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes. I started yelling again about his poems and quoting
...
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, about the review, and he saying Dan knew I was beautiful ... and then it came to the fact that I was all there, wasn’t I, and I stamped and screamed yes ... and he was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hair band off, my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never again find, and my favorite silver earrings: hah, I shall keep, be 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 . . . I can see how women lie down for artists. The one man in the room who was 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: oh to give myself crashing, fighting to you.
This is practically Molly Bloom’s soliloquy—but with an overtone of masochism and violence—and if there is a better description of seducing the demon, I haven’t found it—not even in Singer.
So Sylvia Plath seduced her demon, had two children with him, and then he strayed and then she died, but the simple causal relationship this implies is too pat, too neat. Life is never neat.
Sylvia Plath redefined what it meant to be a woman poet. No neurasthenic “toast-and-teasdale” (as Carolyn Kizer called the women poets of the early twentieth century), but a full-blooded woman, seeking a full-blooded man, and children—a life of creativity leavened by sex, love, parenthood.
For those of us who grew up longing to be writers in the fifties, there was no obvious female template. Creativity was portrayed as a mandrake root—male, with a large gnarled phallus buried in the earth. Pull it out. Its virility was unmistakable. Female writers didn’t exist on our critical radar or were cruelly mocked. Theodore Roethke, a wonderful poet, complained of our tendency “to stamp a tiny foot against God.” Anatole Broyard, the writer and critic, told my writing class at Barnard we hadn’t the sort of experiences that
made
writers. We didn’t get drunk at bars in Pigalle or pick up hookers in seedy Left Bank hotels or run with the bulls in Pamplona. Our lives were too circumscribed. We didn’t drink enough. (Not yet, anyway.) We didn’t puke in the street. (Not yet, anyway.) We were “doomed” to be future mothers. Domesticated animals, future wives (many times over, as it turned out), we didn’t ride the painted bus with Neal Cassady, or chant Blake with Ginsberg or even poach on Barnard girls as Broyard did. We were too ladylike.