Seducing the Demon Read Online Free PDF

?” 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