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 Regina Marler on Ted Hughes’ LettersPosted on Nov 21, 2008
Eight years ago, after poring over the Ted Hughes archive at Emory University, scholar Diane Middlebrook said she would “love to be around in 50 years’ time when Hughes’ collected letters are published. I think he’ll be remembered as one of the great letter writers of the 20th century.” Three hundred of these vivid and endearing letters are now available in “Letters of Ted Hughes,” edited, selected and slightly sanitized by Christopher Reid, the poet laureate’s last editor at Faber & Faber. Initiated and authorized by Ted Hughes’ widow, Carol Hughes, “Letters” is described by Reid as part of the “process of restitution” needed for this “most crudely vilified of writers.” As an intellectual autobiography, the book is unmatched. As an entry in the Hughes Recovery Canon, it is a smash hit. Are we ready to forgive Ted Hughes? For many readers, this is in the nature of surrendering a gnarled, beloved pair of boots, out of style but molded exactly to the foot. As the faithless, domineering ogre who sparked the fury of the “Ariel” poems, Hughes inspired a delicious resentment in a generation or more of Sylvia Plath enthusiasts. His name was repeatedly chipped off of Plath’s gravestone in Yorkshire; his poetry readings and public appearances marred by feminist protesters chanting the likes of “You murdered Sylvia!” In a much-quoted summary of a heady era, Germaine Greer said, “Ted Hughes existed to be punished—we had lost a heroine and we needed to blame someone, and there was Ted.”
Letters of Ted Hughes
By Ted Hughes
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 784 pages
Later, when it was understood that he had reordered the poems in Plath’s “Ariel” manuscript before publication (and omitted what he called “some of the more personally aggressive poems”) and when he declared that he had lost one of Plath’s late journals and destroyed the other, Hughes came in for a higher, finer degree of anger—especially in America, where he is best known not for his poetry but his marriage to Plath. It was one thing to fail Plath in life, another to tamper with a great poet’s literary remains. The destruction of her final journal felt to Plath’s readers like a re-enactment of her death—this time with no doubt of Hughes’ guilt—and became such an engaging motif in scholarship and journalism that Ted’s protective older sister, Olwyn Hughes, who had regarded Plath as “pretty straight poison,” tried to quell the uprising. “The final Journal covered the last few weeks of Sylvia’s life, spiralling down, in 1963, to death wishing, grey depression, much of it searing, some of it ugly,” she wrote to The New York Review of Books. “Can I use your columns to ask commentators to give this eternal recourse to jibes about these missing journals a rest? Their loss is regrettable, but there is nothing that the Estate can do about them.” From only a few months after Plath’s suicide, Hughes’ letters begin to touch on his public relations problem—greatly exacerbated by his publication of “Ariel” in England in 1965 and in America the following year—and one can sense dismay and annoyance vying for primacy among his emotions. He battened down the hatches. Aurelia Plath, Sylvia’s grieving mother, would have to stop prying into his private affairs or “forego a close relationship to the children.” To his girlfriend, Assia Wevill—the third party in his breakup with Plath—he said, “Do you know what oppresses me? The thought that you save my letters.” If she was going to leave them available for “bloody eavesdroppers & filchers & greedy curiosity,” he couldn’t write freely. This anxious patrol of his boundaries is everywhere in Hughes’ “Letters.” He wanted Plath’s earliest rapturous letters about him to her mother deleted from the collection “Letters Home.” He asked that scholars of his own work keep “the biographical element” to a bare minimum. Even photographs could do harm: “This concerns me directly,” he told Keith Sagar, author of “The Art of Ted Hughes,” in 1974. “This mass exposure intensifies my sense of being ‘watched’—(which maims all well-known writers, & destroys many.) It sharpens, in any readers, their visual image of me, making the telepathic interference correspondingly more difficult to counter.” While Hughes assiduously cultivated Plath’s reputation—promoting her work through reprints and new editions and trying to shape critical discourse through his introductions to these volumes—he kept a famously tight grip on Plath biography, chiefly through denying permission to quote from her writings, but also by pressuring friends not to expose personal history, ostensibly because of the harm it could cause Plath’s children. Partly as a result of his chill hand as executor, corrective narratives hostile to Ted Hughes began to appear in the late 1980s. These unveiled for the public the staggering second tragedy in Hughes’ life: that Assia Wevill had also killed herself, in 1969, at the same time killing her daughter by Hughes. The chain of association beginning with Ted Hughes’ name now led to two suicides, an infanticide, adultery, diary-burning, editorial meddling and the suppression of scholarly inquiry—all complicated by the violence in his poetry. Eventually, Hughes discouraged friends from asking for book jacket blurbs, since he felt that any praise from him only drew fire.
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By Paracelsus, November 24, 2008 at 4:49 pm #
Well if you are going to end it all, I think it is always the polite and nice thing to do if you go out with a song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbhvoYYIdnQ&feature=related
Also be considerate enough not to make a big mess. I like how Jean le Carré‘s character in A Perfect Spy, Magnus Pym, drew down the dénouement to his own life: he wrapped a towel around his head before shooting himself so as to spare his landlady any additional aggravation in cleaning up his leavings. So much of time suicides do the inconsiderate act by inconveniencing others in their thanatic quests. For example, Anna Karinna of Leo Tolstoy slowed down a locomotive when she contrived her exit. It must be the holidays for I have taken a journey down a moribund path, much like the forest trek that Virgil took with his sightseeing guide. Enough of of that, I am going to listen to some happy music.
Report thisBy Paracelsus, November 23, 2008 at 8:04 am #
A Second Thought
He doesn’t sound like a nice guy at all.
http://www.geocities.com/arsenio_grilo/jill_barber.html
...
I had believed him when he told me in 1977: ‘If you f*** another man I will never see you again.’ His sex drive was unquenchable and he was definitely attracted to unstable women. He told me with glee of how he had driven a previous lover, Brenda Heddon, to near madness.
When he broke off their relationship, he would wake up in the morning to find her hair twined around the front doorknob and the doorhandle of his car.
He loved women to be obsessed with him, even if he did not love or care for them any more.
Report thisBy diamond, November 23, 2008 at 5:59 am #
Whenever I read any of Hughes’ forewords to Plath’s writings, or essays he’s written on her poetry, which seem, on the face of it, to be so civilized and so objective, I remember what Hughes is supposed to have said when he turned up at Helder and Suzette Macedo’s “totally devastated” after learning of Plath’s suicide: “Helder,” he said, “you must know it was either her or me” . Even taking into account grief and shock this is a cruel and curious thing for him to have said. The Macedos were Hughes’ friends and seem to have remained his friends so it’s hard to imagine they had any reason to make this up.
To say Hughes had a hidden agenda in nearly everything he writes about Plath is to understate the case. Whatever he discusses he is simply pursuing his vested interest in finding that Plath was in love with death. Would a woman who was in love with death have taken a tonic to help her appetite? Would she have sought medical help when she realized how ill she was? So much of what Hughes writes about Plath in the guise of literary theory is sheer nonsense when seen in the light of compassion and commonsense. Racked with guilt after Plath’s suicide he wrote to her mother in 1963 that his affair with Assia Wevill was “madness” and even went so far as to claim that if there is an eternity he “would be dammed in it” for what he had done. He probably meant it at the time, but it has to be remembered that he continued to sleep with Wevill for at least five years after this.
What really lifts this story into the realms of the fantastic is what eventually happened to Assia Wevill. After Plath’s suicide, Wevill was defiant and contemptuous of critics of her relationship with Hughes, but it couldn’t last. She moved to Devon and into Court Green after giving birth to Hughes’ daughter (while still living with her husband David Wevill); but by the end of 1967, “Ted had decided that the only way to engineer some peace for HIMSELF was for Assia to move back to London”. Wevill had wanted marriage but Hughes refused to commit himself. Wevill went back to work as a copywriter in London, put on weight and had to live with the fact that Ted Hughes had another woman in his life: Brenda Hedden, another married woman and mother of two pre-school age children. With bitter wit Wevill described Hedden as “an emaciated Marilyn Monroe”. The novelist Fay Weldon, who was Wevill’s friend at this time, remembers that Assia’s life revolved around Ted Hughes’ phone calls.
By 1969 Wevill, like Plath before her, was seriously depressed. She had put all her hopes into buying a house with Hughes on the outskirts of Newcastle but when she phoned him to discuss it on the last day of her life, there was an argument on the phone. Not surprising when Hughes was planning to marry Carol Orchard, a woman many years his junior, after refusing to marry Wevill for five years. The most likely explanation for the argument is that Hughes told her about the upcoming nuptials. Elizabeth Compton Sigmund also believed that Plath suicided after Hughes told her that Wevill was pregnant. Apparently this pregnancy was later terminated. After putting the phone down Assia Wevill sent her German au pair out to do some shopping, gave her daughter Shura sleeping tablets in a drink, took some in whisky herself and lying down with Shura in her arms, she turned on the gas. She was forty years old.
It never ceases to amaze me that people talk about Plath’s selfishness but not about Hughes’ egomaniacal behaviour. No one was more responsible for the myth of the death crazed harpy of Court Green than he was. And no one was more responsible for Plath’s suicide. He felt as if he was in court and only one of them could be found guilty and by God it wasn’t going to be him. Losing one woman to suicide could be bad luck: losing two to suicide starts to look like carelessness. Or something worse.
Report thisBy troublesum, November 22, 2008 at 9:32 pm #
Three of the greatest poets of the confessional school - Plath, Ann Sexton, and Robert Lowell - all committed suicide within a seven year period. Their penetrating examination of self ended in self loathing and disgust for life.
Report thisBy Paracelsus, November 22, 2008 at 6:08 pm #
I don’t now true this is in the case of Sylvia Plath, but many suicides comfort themselves in sorrow they cause their friends and relations. It is a sort of vengeance. I find it interesting that many women faced with the same troubles would endure for the sake of the children. I suppose Ms. Plath had her depressions and her bruised ego, but her solution was a selfish one. A good many artists and poets have a certain narcissism that impels them to think that they are unique their deuil, their grief. Narcissism is the thorn we must accept for the fruit of the muse, I suppose. I think though I could respect Plath more if she was blatantly evil in narcissism, then to take a path that reflects shame and guilt upon her husband, Ted Hughes. After all if Picasso could be ungrateful and vile to his ex-lovers, then I see no reason for Plath not taking the same path. I could respect her audacity, her ego manic pluck for being a bad girl. True her children may hate her, and Ted Hughes would have a good sheen to his aura, but the people concerned would not be plagued by especial grief of a suicidal mother. They could go on without the horrid chains they have now.
Report thisBy troublesum, November 22, 2008 at 3:39 pm #
Allen Ginsburg’s letters were also published this year and may be of more interest to people here, but I think it’s probably hopeless to get these people interested in poets or poetry.
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