To the Letter

by Simon Garfield

  He had an apprenticeship of sorts. ‘Those early letters, when he’s writing to Edna Wholey, the slightly older woman with whom he’s kind of infatuated, they’re very literary swaggering aren’t they?’ Reid suggests. ‘They’re him swanking and saying, “Here I am – I can be clever, I can be clever and wise”.’ Here, still a teenager in 1947, proudly, comically and incomprehensibly pretentious, he is indeed writing just for effect.

  Cherie Edna,

  I have seen many strange things in my 17 years . . .

  I have seen things, which, when placed before a camera that memories for posterity may wonder at their form, invariably shattered the lens, burnt the film and slew the photographer. I have seen things which, when taken within the city limits (To the extreme personal peril of the man responsible) stopped all traffic in the streets, paralysed the policeman and covered with green mould the money in the tills inside the shops.

  His point, and it’s some time coming, after many other things he’s seen, is that all these things can’t stack up against the ‘terror that is Edna, not exactly something which might endear her to him. If the approach is a little reminiscent of Dylan’s biblical-nuclear ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, the rain does indeed arrive some two years later, when Hughes is in RAF uniform in barracks on Merseyside. And it’s a fairly lyrical rendition: ‘Edna, I’ve seen rain and I tell you this isn’t rain, – a steady river, well laced with ice, tempest and thunder, covers all this land, and what isn’t concrete has reverted to original chaos of mud water fire and air. Morning and evening its one soak and the sun’s more and less a sponge.’

  ‘Once he learnt “how to do” a letter,’ his editor says, ‘the sense of how you make a letter interesting, whatever the topic, whether it’s writing to his son Nicholas to sort out a problem, or whether it’s just reporting a bit of literary gossip, he knows how to do it, he’s learned the technique.’

  The first proper example of this comes in letters to his bro-ther and sister-in-law Gerald and Joan Hughes, and to his sister Olwyn. There is no side to them, and they carry no attempt to impress. Instead they are straightforward, practical and gently scheming. In October 1955 Hughes is considering a property scheme that will earn him enough to write without diversion.

  My life lately has been such a turmoil I haven’t felt like writing to anyone, though I’m sure I don’t have to wait til I have special news . . .

  At present I work as a security guard – sitting in a little office at a girder factory all night – I spend the whole time writing and I draw £8 a week, so it’s OK till I get something better. I feel very angry at the bottom though . . .

  My idea is to save everything for about five years, then buy a house in Oxford or Cambridge & farm it out to students & nurses at £3 a room – offer a landlady free living in the basement. One of my acquaintances does this, and spends his time pottering about the world on the income. Then two and three houses. What different lives we would lead if we had a bit of money.

  Early the next year, at the age of 25, we glimpse both ambition and a hint of the extraordinary. ‘I have discovered my secret,’ he wrote to Olwyn,

  I only write poems when I am busy writing prose at the same time, and also when I am taking regular exercise. I published one or two poems in a magazine which were not very satisfactory, but they drew some very gratifying criticisms from the right kind of people. If I could write whole poems as good as odd little bits I’m sure I really would have something, and something quite different from the meanness and deadness of almost all modern verse – with which I feel not the slightest affinity.

  Within a few weeks his life had changed forever. At the end of February 1956 he met an American woman at a raucous party to launch a Cambridge magazine he contributed to with his friend Lucas Myers, and three weeks later he is asking for news.

  Dear Luke,

  I shall expect you any day.

  If you have time, drop me a note and tell me when you are coming. If you see Sylvia Plath, ask her if she’s coming up to London, give her my address. Get her somehow, free lodgings for her as for you.

  (He described his plans to go to Australia on a free passage as soon as possible, but that was before his meeting with Plath junked his schedule.)

  See you this week sometime.

  Don’t forget Sylvia, and discretion.

  Ted

  It took another 42 years for Hughes to express publicly all his joys and frustrations with Sylvia, and when he did so he elevated the form of the letter to the level of poetry. Birthday Letters, his celebration/explanation/evisceration of his life with Sylvia Plath, became an instant bestseller on publication in 1998, and is regarded by some as his greatest work. Written over about 25 years, the 88 poems – the same number as there are constellations, the number also representing a multiplication of Kabalistic ritual, none of this lost on the poet – have neither greetings nor sign-offs, but they are written with enough spontaneous eloquence for the reader to believe that Hughes was not using the word ‘letter’ in his title in a purely figurative way: they are indeed personal and directed addresses, albeit of the rhetorical, expository and open sort, and of a sort that have the tang of legal ‘he-said, she-said’ correspondence about them (the title ‘Birthday Letters’ on the other hand makes a wider point, given that so much about Plath stacks up against her death rather than her birth). Of the form, Hughes wrote to Seamus Heaney shortly before publication that ‘I hit on the direct letter as an illegal private transaction between her & me – then simply followed the clues, and they piled up’. Heaney reckoned that ‘to read [Birthday Letters] is to experience the psychic experience of “the bends”. It takes you down to levels of pressure where the undertruths of sadness and endurance leave you gasping.’ The red inferno of the book jacket was painted by Frieda Hughes.

  Birthday Letters covers not only Hughes and Plath during their courtship and marriage, but Plath’s many torments and their aftershocks. In many of his verses he analyses her verses, like letters bouncing back and forth. Writing in the New Yorker, Al Alvarez, once a close friend of both poets when he was the influential poetry editor of the Observer in the 1960s, clocks the unique biographical picture of Plath that Hughes has unleashed, just as he once unleashed her malign genius. ‘He takes the bare bones on which the biographies have been hung – Cambridge, Spain, America, Devon – and does what no biographer, however diligent and impartial, could ever do: he describes what it felt like to be there with her.’

  Birthday Letters suggests it felt fairly terrifying, and no less so with the passage of time. As readers we feel privileged for the insight, and – more than with his actual letters to the living – we feel as if we’re intruding on private matters. It was this, perhaps more than anything, that helped Christopher Reid press on with his own collection. ‘To my mind the publication of Birthday Letters gave me licence to enter the same territory, and to try to do everything as tactfully and as kindly as Ted would have wished.’

  He began compiling the letters in 2003, four years before publication. ‘What happened was that Carol, his widow, wrote to a number of people who had had associations with Ted, and asked, “What do I do next, how do I handle future publications?” I wrote back, and I imagine other people did too, saying, “actually a volume of letters would be amazing, and change the public notion of Ted completely, and give people a truer picture”. About nine months later she came to me and asked whether I would think of doing a volume, and how could I say no?’

  Reid had never edited a collection of letters before, but he did play a significant role in the publication of the Philip Larkin letters following his death in 1985, one of his first jobs as poetry editor. ‘Anthony Thwaite [the man commissioned to edit Larkin’s correspondence] came in with a great bag of letters that would have made a volume of some 2,000 pages. He said, “I’m up against a brick wall – I don’t know how to make this any smaller.” And obviously it had to be
smaller. As I came to it fresh it was much easier for me. I just slashed out letters which would have been perfectly printable but there were just too many. So a cruel culling had to be done.

  ‘When I came to do Ted I had a similar problem. I had about 2,000 pages of brilliant stuff, and I just thought, “Well how do I make something that’s publishable out of this?” What I learned was that when you’re making such a drastic selection, it helps to keep in mind that there’s a story being implied by the letters if they’re in chronological order, implied if not actually stated, and that actually keeps your mind on the straight and narrow. You’re just thinking, “Story, narrative.” That’s the most sensible guiding principle – you don’t make a leap from one thing to another thing entirely different – you try to smooth things out, paint the fullest picture. But I thought, “This is a literary story, rather than a story about tragedies and love affairs. Although very obviously they come into the picture.”’

  The vast majority of the letters were handwritten, and there were no carbon copies. So how does one gather such a collection?

  Mostly by post. Reid visited Carol Hughes at Court Green, her home with Ted where she still lives, and she gave him Ted’s address book. ‘I copied out as many addresses as I thought might be useful, which was pretty well nearly all of them. And then I just wrote to everybody. I got a fairly good response. A lot of people wrote back saying, “We were friends but we didn’t correspond”, and one or two people said, “I regard this as an intrusion on Ted’s privacy and I’m not going to help you”. I thought that was fair enough. I think they were being protective of Ted. I can think of one or two cases where I doubted the motive, but in most cases, and there were half a dozen at the very most, they’d seen what a rough time he’d had when his privacy had been breached in his own lifetime, and they thought, “May he rest in peace and we can keep on protecting him.” I didn’t do much arguing with people. In most cases I don’t imagine that I missed a great deal. I may have done.’

  That first trawl landed him with at least half of what he wanted. He also visited the collections at university archives and posted a request for letters in the Times Literary Supplement. ‘I did tell people not to send originals but to send photocopies, although one or two disobeyed me. I did worry about my custodianship of them – some of them were very frail and vulnerable. But it was thrilling enough to see Ted’s hand in photocopy. It varied a great deal, and the hand of a person tells you a lot about their emotional state and circumstances – you get plenty of information about that that you don’t get from a typewriter or email.’

  The collection of letters was published to widespread acclaim, but the early focus – the glare, really – was on one thing: on what Hughes, in a letter to the Guardian and elsewhere, had called the public’s ‘fantasia’ with Sylvia Plath, by which he meant the volatility of her torment, the occasion of her death, her mythically heroic life beyond it, and the demonisation of her supposed tormentor (Hughes). And there was much to get excited about. Hughes had maintained an exasperated public silence about Plath, for he soon became aware that almost everyone regarded anything he said as self-serving. Apart from the poetry he was writing in secret, Hughes made it clear that he had officially withdrawn from the Plath industry.

  But now the letters to Plath enriched the picture beyond measure. His first letters to her were full-blooded, hurtling and vulnerable. We read them now with too much baggage, but they still disarm with their freshness and momentum. And so much happens so fast. In the first, from March 1956, he writes:

  Sylvia,

  That night was nothing but getting to know how smooth your body is. The memory of it goes through me like brandy.

  About a fortnight later:

  Sylvia,

  On Friday I shall be home about 8 – expect you then.

  On the principle that to every sentence of prose there should be six of verse –

  Ridiculous to call it love.

  Even so, fearfully I did sound

  Your absence, as one shot down feels to the

  wound,

  Knowing himself alive . . .

  A month on, on 22 May 1956, he writes to his sister Olwyn:

  I have met a first-rate American poetess. She really is good. Certainly one of the best female poets I ever read, and a damned sight better than the run of good male. Her main enthusiasm at present is me, and she thinks my verses are as good as I think they are and has accordingly and efficiently dispatched about twenty five to various immensely paying American Mags.

  The pair married secretly three weeks later. Her mailings paid off, with Hughes winning a prize not long afterwards that kick-started his career. In the same letter, his work perhaps set free by love, he concludes that he is ‘miserable and fit for nothing if I don’t write continuously. I shall from now on shape my life round writing instead of squeezing writing into my life whenever I can.’

  The couple were separated after their marriage – Hughes living with his parents in Yorkshire, Plath living as a student in Cambridge. It is now – in the autumn of 1956, when all the brief extracts below were written – that their correspondence flourished, as both energised careers begin to take off. She has poems published in influential magazines, he is writing poetry, fables and a play, and there’s a sense of ‘us against the world’. His greetings are still crush-like: ‘Darling Sylvia Push-Kishy’; ‘Dearest Sylvia kish and puss and ponk’. His tone is all thrill, the God-like Hughes (as Plath described him to her mother) brought down to the level of mortal teenage lovesickness. He writes of the rabbits he saw on his walks, the Yeats he is reading for an hour a day, and what the horoscope has in store for them – this latter news brought forth like an act from the grand stage at Maskelyne’s Theatre of Mystery: ‘Sums of money, heavy expenditure, outbursts of passion all likely it says as always. I shall buy no more but go now on my own predictions where I can. One excellent thing I predict about you is that you will be famous and another is that you come into vast fortunes and happiness by marriage to an amazing strange provider of these.’

  But there is unease too, a vague admonition. ‘I must go to Spain,’ he writes at the beginning of October. ‘Then we shall have all our lives. You keep watch on our marriage Sylvia as well as I shall and there is no reason we shouldn’t be as happy as we have said we shall be. Don’t let any stupid thing interfere. Goodnight darling darling darling darling’

  Frequently he records the joy in receiving her letters. Sometimes a new letter arrives while he is in the middle of a reply to an earlier one. In this alone their letters are typical; a passion in ink, both showy and tender, that marks out exploratory passions. The value that the letters hold to Hughes are immediate – their current news, their current crush – but Hughes sees that they may also be valuable in the future; not for the biographer or a collector at auction, but for their children. On 3 October 1956 he writes to Sylvia of wasting a day doing nothing, roused only ‘by the nearest thing to your own ponky warmth, which was the wonderful letter. A relic for our fifteenth child’s fifteenth child.’ If we read these letters unencumbered, we could well ask: why shouldn’t their love endure?

  Hughes’s letters immediately following Plath’s death are amongst the plainest and shortest he composed. They are not literary affairs, and, as far as one can read, they were not written with posterity or reputation in mind. But they have, instantly upon publication, taken on the mantle of historical documents. ‘Dear Olwyn,’ he wrote a day or two after Plath’s death on 11 February 1963,

  On Monday morning, at about 6 a.m. Sylvia gassed herself. The funeral’s in Heptonstall next Monday.

  She asked me for help, as she so often has. I was the only person who could have helped her, and the only person so jaded by her states & demands that I could not recognise when she really needed it.

  I’ll write more later,

  Love

  Ted

/>   And then to their friends Daniel and Helga Huws shortly afterwards:

  Dear Dan & Helga,

  Sylvia killed herself on Monday morning.

  She seemed to be getting in good shape, she was writing again, she was making enough money, getting all sorts of commissions, good reviews for her novel – then a series of things, solicitors letters etc, piled up, she flared up, the doctor put her on very heavy sedatives – and in the gap between one pill and the next she turned on the oven, and gassed herself. A nurse was to arrive at 9 a.m. – couldn’t get in, & it was 11 a.m. before they finally got to Sylvia. She was still warm.

  The Funeral’s in Yorkshire on Monday.

  I was the one who could have helped her, and the only one that couldn’t see that she really needed it this time. No doubt where the blame lies.

  I shall look after Frieda & Nick here, & get a Nurse of some sort.