Seducing the Demon Read Online Free PDF Page B

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