BIRTHDAY LETTERS
By Ted Hughes
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
198 pages, $20
Since Sylvia Plath’s suicide on Feb. 11, 1963, the literary world has scarcely ceased stirring, with scholars and friends from the two countries that were her homes-the United States and England-offering a plethora of interpretations of her work, life and final act. Some have leveled impassioned accusations against Plath’s estranged husband, Ted Hughes, now poet laureate to Queen Elizabeth II, for his infidelity and for his mismanagement of her then-unpublished works.
Hughes’ publication of “Birthday Letters,” poems written during the 35 years since Plath’s death (all but a few of which had never before been made public), marks a crucial moment in this volatile and always controversial debate. In all the prickly discourse since Plath’s suicide, Hughes’ voice has remained, for the most part, uncomfortably silent. Now, perhaps having waited until their two children, Frieda and Nicholas, were fully grown, Hughes permits entry into the fevered world of his relationship with Plath, while also expressing an enduring tenderness for her.
Hughes uses Plath’s poetic persona as a doomed, difficult woman and the structure of her works for many of his own poems, and he echoes some of her distinctive moon-bone-and-death imagery as well. Needless, to say, these poems seem a bit self-serving and the metaphors tired-too much like thin shadows of Plath’s more astonishing, if extreme, late work. Yet other poems by Hughes express a tender sadness, giving a view of a more complex network of emotions and circumstances that shattered the lives of these two extraordinarily gifted poets.
By directly addressing Plath, Hughes lends a haunting sense of immediacy to the poems, expressing a sadness and grief for her that appears unmitigated by time. Hughes sympathizers have often characterized Plath as a spoiled, selfish American girl, crazy with grief for her father (he died when she was 8) and with unrewarded literary ambition, a woman whose extreme behavior made her impossible to live with.
Fortunately, some of the poems in “Birthday Letters” substantially enlarge this picture as they reflect a far more nuanced portrait. The most successful poems in the collection relinquish Plath’s own self-mythologizing posture, which tended toward a narrow determinism leading-practically non-stop-to the conclusion that the failure of the marriage and Plath’s suicide were inevitable. The poems that maintain this posture are better left to the archives of such like-minded (and in my mind, reductive) positions, while we look instead at works offering richer, more-layered observations.
In the following, from “God Help the Wolf After Whom the Dogs Do Not Bark,” Hughes describes the difficulties Plath encountered as an American poet studying at Cambridge, where the couple first met:
The Colleges lifted their heads. It did seem
You disturbed something just perfected
That they were holding carefully, all of apiece,
Till the glue dried. And as if
Reporting some felony to the police
They let you know that you were not John Donne.
. . .
Nobody wanted your dance,
Nobody wanted your strange glitter-your floundering
Drowning life and your effort to save yourself,
Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil,
Looking for something to give
Hughes sympathetically explores Plath’s deep sense of alienation as an American poet trying to fit in, to succeed on foreign turf. Her strangeness and “floundering” are presented less as contrived theatrical behavior and more as genuine efforts to come to terms with her fears and her wishes to gain acceptance. With the word “Nobody,” Hughes seems implicitly (and regretfully) to include himself among those who did not, or could not, finally, embrace her “strange glitter.” Yet in the poem “Drawing,” written about their trip to Spain, Hughes also observes Plath in peaceful moments:
Your patience,
Your lip-gnawing scowl, got the portrait
Of a market-place that still slept
In the Middle Ages. Just before
It woke and disappeared
Under the screams of a million summer migrants
And the cliff of dazzling hotels. As your hand
Went under Heptonstall to be held
By endless darkness. While my pen travels on
Only two hundred miles from your hand,
Holding this memory of your red, white-spotted bandanna,
Your shorts, your short-sleeved jumper-
One of the thirty I lugged around Europe-
And your long brown legs, propping your pad,
And the contemplative calm
I drank from your concentrated quiet,
In this contemplative calm
Now I drink from your stillness that neither
Of us can disturb or escape.
The saddest irony is that the “contemplative calm” that once brought Plath peace, nourishing Hughes as well, had tragically become a permanent and inescapable stillness, nurturing no one. Moments of companionability, often lost in the flurry of mutual accusation, reveal the flip side of the brittle tensions that came to characterize the couple’s marriage. In “Epiphany,” Hughes introspectively explores those mysterious components that can weave marriages permanently together, despite times of abrading stress:
Then I walked on
As if out of my own life.
I let that fox-cub go. I tossed it back
Into the future
Of a fox-cub in London and I hurried
Straight on and dived as if escaping
Into the Underground. If I had paid,
If I had paid that pound and turned back
To you, with that armful of fox-
If I had grasped that whatever comes with a fox
Is what tests a marriage and proves it a marriage-
I would not have failed the test. Would you have failed it?
But I failed. Our marriage had failed.
As metaphor, the fox cub symbolizes those mysterious givings and takings necessary for any marriage to survive, something Hughes feels they both failed to bring to their marriage. Through his self-examination and acceptance of responsibility, Hughes necessarily deflates some of the hype surrounding Plath’s personality, and her death, leaving us instead with a far more wrenching sense of tragedy. Continuing to address his dead wife and the mother of his children in a quiet, intimate voice, Hughes goes on to describe the effects of her absence on their family in this excerpt from “Life After Death”:
What can I tell you that you do not know
Of the life after death?
Your son’s eyes, which had unsettled us
With your Slavic Asiatic
Epicanthic fold, but would become
So perfectly your eyes,
Became wet jewels,
The hardest substance of the purest pain
As I fed him in his high white chair.
Great hands of grief were wringing and wringing
His wet cloth of face. They wrung out his tears.
But his mouth betrayed you-it accepted
The spoon in my disembodied hand
That reached through from the life that had survived you.
Day by day his sister grew
Paler with the wound
She could not see or touch or feel, as I dressed it
Each day with her blue Breton jacket.
By night I lay awake in my body
The Hanged Man
My neck-nerve uprooted and the tendon
Which fastened the base of my skull
To my left shoulder
Torn from its shoulder-root and cramped into knots-
I fancied the pain could be explained
If I were hanging in the spirit
From a hook under my neck-muscle.
Dropped from life
We three made a deep silence
In our separate cots.
Plath scholars and readers have long grieved the premature curtailment of her brilliantly promising work, and there has no doubt been an immeasurable loss in this respect. Yet the gathering of tender, contemplative and mournful poems that is a part of “Birthday Letters” speaks of the more deeply personal and human loss suffered by Hughes and by the two poets’ children, a loss so grave and unbounded it can neither be contained nor explained by sensationalistic renderings-constructed by Hughes or anyone else-of the troubled woman who came, one harsh winter morning in London, to find her life unbearable.
Often blamed for her husband’s abandonment of her, Plath has been depicted as an overly jealous wife who drove her husband away. One of her biographers quotes Assia Wevill, the woman for whom Hughes left Plath, as saying that Sylvia “had picked up on a current of attraction between them and had reacted badly.” Had Plath not made so much of it, both Wevill and the biographer implied, nothing further would have likely gone on between Wevill and Hughes. Yet in “Dreamers,” an odd, rather unappealing poem about an early visit Wevill made to the couple, Hughes acknowledges, “That moment the dreamer in me/Fell in love with her, and I knew it.”
Surely Plath knew it too.
