To the Letter

by Simon Garfield

  Ted

  These letters might have served his reputation well had they been made public at the time of writing, but that would have given them precisely the sort of self-justifying air his detractors accused him of. More than a month after her death he wrote to Plath’s mother Aurelia, and there is a timid, regretful and still grief-stricken tone. But he was already writing against a reputation created by letters from Plath, a pre-emptive reconciliation:

  Dear Aurelia,

  It has not been possible for me to write this letter before now.

  . . . I shall never get over the shock and I don’t particularly want to. I’ve seen the letters Sylvia wrote to my parents, and I imagine she wrote similar ones to you, or worse.

  . . . We were utterly blind, we were both desperate, stupid and proud – and the pride made us oblique, she especially so. I know Sylvia was so made that she had to mete out terrible punishment to the people she most loved, but everybody is a little bit like that, and it needed only intelligence on my part to deal with it. But the difficulties caused by that, the fact that on the surface the situation was no more difficult than the normal one for separated couples – it was better than most in that she had money, fame, prospering plans and many friends – all these things delayed the workings of our conciliation.

  I don’t want ever to be forgiven. I don’t mean that I shall become a public shrine of mourning and remorse, I would sooner become the opposite. But if there is an eternity, I am damned in it.

  To us now, weighing the value of letters through years, this is another revelation: letters change their power (to shock, to explain, to placate) over time; the expectation that they become less powerful is – only too clearly here – plainly reversed. At the time he wrote of his wife’s death, letters were not history-in-the-making for Hughes; they were private matters, the full fantasia not yet begun. Things changed after it did: letters became tipped arrows.

  When Hughes wrote to Frieda about hay-baling in 1975, he was shielding her from other things on his mind. Only a few weeks before, he had written to Aurelia Plath in an attempt to contain the publication of Plath’s own letters. After ten months of apparently amicable negotiations by letter and phone with Aurelia and Frances McCullough (the editor of the letters at publishers Harper & Row), solicitors have become involved. Hughes feels his attempt at control slipping from his grasp, and at the end of April 1975 he repeats what he had requested when he first saw a rough assemblage of Plath’s letters in the summer of the previous year. It’s an attempt to protect his own privacy and that of his children and their friends, but in so doing he is curtailing, and perhaps corrupting the true record.*

  I’d be very grateful Aurelia if you could ask your lawyers to make the necessary moves on the two points I’ve mentioned. First of all, the agreement about not publishing in England except in a form I’ve approved (that would be called an abbreviated version of your book for English readers and the friends of Sylvia’s children). Second, that you allow me to settle with Frances exactly which and which parts of the letters describing Sylvia’s first meeting with me we cut out. I’m sure you like those letters, but you will see they are for me somewhat sacred documents which I would prefer not to have every kid and viperous reviewer and thesis writer pawing over.

  Plath’s Letters Home was published by Harper & Row in 1975 and by Faber in the UK the following spring. We do not know – because we don’t have the first draft of the collection – how many letters Hughes succeeded in withdrawing from the British edition, nor the extent of his edits in both editions. But it is not a short book, running to 500 pages. Plath is not as good a letter-writer as Hughes – that is to say, she is neither as studied at it nor, paradoxically, as relaxed. Her imagery is not as intense, and there is a great neediness too. But if it often seems as if she is straining for effect, either to impress her reader or prove something to herself, there is also more raw emotion – more unfettered gusto, more exclamation marks – on display when she writes to others (her mother, her brother Warren) than Hughes manages when he writes to anyone but Plath. Her first account of him to her mother may be one of the most frequently quoted passages of modern breathlessness: ‘I met the strongest man in the world, ex-Cambridge, brilliant poet whose work I loved before I met him, a large, hulking, healthy Adam, half-French, half Irish (and a good deal of Yorkshire farming stock, too), with a voice like the thunder of God – a singer, story-teller, lion and world-wanderer, a vagabond who will never stop.’

  But this idolatry passage has a preceding line that is less familiar: ‘The most shattering thing is that in the last two months I have fallen terribly in love, which can only lead to great hurt.’

  Her letters in Letters Home are more domesticated than Hughes’s, and more descriptive of the daily round. The account of a gentle outing on 31 March 1960 tells of a natural and treasured freedom she may have detected was drifting away: ‘Ted and I took a lovely, quiet walk this evening under the thin new moon, over the magic landscape of Primrose Hill and Regent’s Park; all blue and misty, the buds a kind of nimbus of green on the thorn trees, daffodils and blue squills out on the lawns and the silhouettes of wood pigeons roosting in the trees.’

  Daffodils and smiles: Sylvia Plath with Frieda and Nick

  in the early 1960s.

  Perhaps it was a bliss she would never quite know again. The following day, at 1.15 p.m., she wrote to her mother again, filling in the detail of news she had just communicated by telephone.

  Ted brought me breakfast – I’d vomited up all that meat loaf at the start of labor – and a tuna salad, cheese and V-8 lunch, which I have just finished with gusto. I feel light and thin as a feather. The baby is, as I told you, 7 pounds, 4 ounces, 21 inches long and, alas, she has my nose! On her, though, it seems quite beautiful. [Her birth was a fairly straightforward affair, with Hughes in attendance throughout.] Well, I have never been so happy in my life. The whole American rigmarole of hospitals, doctors’ bills, cuts and stitches, anesthesia etc., seems a nightmare well left behind. The midwife came a second time at 11 a.m. and will come again at tea time to wash me and care for the baby.

  She signed off with love from Sivvy (her childhood nickname), from Ted, and, newly blinking in the light, from Frieda Hughes.

  Hughes does not write often about letters as a form or a tool, for the same reason that a squirrel rarely contemplates trees; they are so much a natural part of his world. But there is one notable exception, an observation that underlines the power of the letter to come back at you, to harm the future.

  On 9 February 1964, one year after Plath’s suicide, the emotional exhumation in full dig, he wrote to the woman who catalysed their break-up. Assia Wevill was described by Hughes as dark and dangerous, and he detected that their letters held similarly combustible properties. ‘Sweetmouth,’ he began, ‘all our difficulties blow up out of these long absences.’ She was in London expecting her only child, Shura, while he was in Devon, and things were clearly tempestuous when they spoke on the phone.

  ‘Do you know what oppresses me?’ Hughes asked.

  the thought that you save my letters. You said recently – I forget what, but enough to make me think some day somebody might get hold of those letters & make hay. Assia, I’m foolishly oppressed enough as it is with bloody eavesdroppers & filchers & greedy curiosity, & if you’re going to be sitting on all that for some Suzette suddenly to lay her hands on, then I can’t write freely.

  This is the first and only indication we have of Hughes holding back his pen, but he claims he’s been doing it for a while.

  As it is I’m always expecting my notes to get intercepted so I don’t write a fraction of what I would.

  Past experience is bad enough to cope with, but it clears itself – it doesn’t really oppose our present lives, whereas those letters & that diary of yours do. They’re in our way. They’ve already caused enough trouble. So please burn all my letter
s.

  If it ever strikes you that my letters are cool or cramped, now you know why. In fact, in my letters I sometimes get perverse about that reader over your shoulder.

  He may be talking about you and me here. Of course, she didn’t burn his letters. The week before, he wrote about getting the flu, with an interesting side-effect. ‘The train back was tropical forest inside. Arctic outside – so yesterday dragged by half-conscious, – today’s a sore throat, & Monday will be a cough with pains, & Tuesday tuberculosis – Anyway, it’s good for letters. My life has gone over completely to the production of letters.’

  So what makes Ted Hughes’s letters so compelling, the ones that got through? And what makes them, like the letter to Frieda, still so alive decades after he dropped them in the post? One answer is that they were essential in the development of character and ideas, a working out. There was news too, but seldom mundanity. As his fame and public stature grew, the letters became more self-aware, more conscious of the future biographer’s drumming fingers; the belief that an honest letter may not also be a self-serving one is illusory, and no letter-writer, famous or not, could claim otherwise.

  But imagine trying to describe a whole life without them. Despite their limitations, letters are still, in the parlance of the rapper, dropped bombs – explosions of life and criticism, urgent observations, repeated evidence of a questing, clarifying mind – and, in Hughes’s case, certainly highly pleasurable. The poet Simon Armitage, to whom Hughes wrote towards the end of his life, has written of the thrill of finding a handwritten envelope on the doormat with a Devon postmark: there was always going to be something vital in there. In the introduction to his collection, Christopher Reid writes of receiving his own letters from Hughes with no less delight: ‘They were like none I had ever received before. Dealing with publishing affairs, they were invariably direct and businesslike, with an extra ingredient of confidentiality and candour that at first surprised me. In addition, though – the extra extra – they were written with so much more concentration, force, choiceness of expression, vocal immediacy, grace and wit than the occasion usually, if ever, demanded.’ Above all, Reid found them ‘generous’.

  ‘Luxury is stuffed down your throat’: Ted and Sylvia write to Olwyn Hughes.

  In the archives at Faber there is a perfect example of just such a letter. A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse, chosen by Hughes, was originally published in 1970 but had now been republished, and he was not impressed with the results.

  ‘Between you and me Christopher,’ he writes, (a phrase always guaranteed to engender a large readership)

  handling the 1970 Shakespeare paperback Choice and the 1991, leafing through them as a reader might, aren’t you startled at the change – typeface half the size, book twice the thickness and weight. Instead of a subtle, elegant bold typeface that enfolds the whole nervous system like a bedful of Geisha girls – a hard spattering of gravel from under the back wheels of an articulated truck on a dark night.

  Had his letter been a poem, the image of the truck may have been reworked before we knew about it. But because it is a letter, we know about it. ‘Back wheels of an articulated truck wouldn’t spatter, would they. Back wheels of an Autobahn bus maybe, the reader a sort of racing cyclist tucked in behind, gulping the carbon monoxide, and all these gravelly letters coming up between his teeth and under his eyelids.’

  ‘What Ted Hughes is doing with his letters is keeping trim,’ Reid says, ‘and the same with Henry James and Virginia Woolf. They’re writing for the sake of writing, by and large at the best of their ability. And then there’s the intimacies you wouldn’t get in a work of literary fiction. But that’s less important to me than just hearing the sound of the voice.’

  Reid also noticed something else: Hughes’s letters almost always ended, perfectly formed, at the foot of the page. As with a good verse, nothing is wasted; this is not a consideration we require with email. ‘I think in a case like his,’ Reid says, ‘when you’re half way down the last page you’re thinking, “the coda has got to happen now”. So you get into the right gear for that. Something like a musician – a sense of shape comes into play.’

  The letters in Reid’s 2007 collection are not the final word – far from it. In 2010, the British Library purchased (for £29,500) a great box of tricks from Olwyn Hughes, including an unpublished play, early drafts of poems that later appeared in Lupercal and The Colossus, and 41 letters written between 1954 and 1964, a few written by Hughes and Plath jointly. Writing from Massachusetts in 1957, he observed how ‘luxury is stuffed down your throat – a mass-produced luxury – till you feel you’d rather be rolling in the mud and eating that’.

  Perhaps one day, with all letters gathered and sold, there will be the definitive collection.* Not that Christopher Reid hasn’t already been pushing for one. ‘I had been attempting to persuade all those the people with an interest in it to do a much more complete Ted Hughes Letters. Not to be edited by me, because I’ve done my bit with him, but it seemed to me that it would be the ideal project for some young academic who would give 10 years of their life to putting everything in order. But I’ve given up now because publishers aren’t interested, the universities who hold these letters aren’t terribly interested. It’s the longer vision that’s lacking – they can’t see beyond the horizon of a couple of years, and the idea of commissioning something that could take much longer than that just doesn’t fit with the publishing mentality.’

  Should we regret such a shift in values? Or the fact that the Observer no longer has a poetry editor? Is Hughes not worthy of the further attention, or is it that we no longer have the appetite, patience or purse for a life in letters in such detail?

  ‘One day it will happen I don’t doubt,’ Reid says of the grander Hughes project. ‘But it will probably be printed online rather than in book form – it’s the way it’s going.’

  The Coming Home Question

  4232134 SIGMN. BARKER H.C., 30 WING SIGNAL SECTION, G COMPANY, AIR FORMATION SIGNALS, CMF.

  28 January 1945

  Dearest,

  The return to writing in ink (and with your pen) is an indication that things are a little more normal. We had a short sea trip from Volos to Athens where we are at present. I have only had a truck ride through the town at the moment. It seems very little damaged.

  Athens is only a temporary resting place for us. What happens depends on decisions already taken [that] may be altered in the light of opinion. All the R.A.F. personnel have been informed (in a printed Order which I have seen) that ‘– as soon as possible you are being returned to Italy and thence to England’. It would be quite unfair for unequal treatment to be meted out to different branches of the service who have suffered precisely the same, and I know that those at home will represent this view as forcibly as possible. It is a little difficult for me to write very well when within me there is the jumping thought that soon – very soon – I may be actually telling you these things. But I will make some attempt and know you will not mind any deficiencies.

  You were right in your interpretation of the news para. ‘I was there’ alright. I spent some bad hours lying with my brother in a shallow trench outside the hotel, while all sorts of fire was [aimed?] in our direction. Mortars were the worst, and when we returned to the hotel an hour before the surrender, we counted ourselves lucky to be alive. We were attacked for a day and a half. Well, when the ‘Ceasefire’ was given we laid down our warm weapons and came out with our hands raised (just like the pictures!) past a bearded partisan who pleasantly said ‘Hail Comrade’. We lost everything. I had £7 or so on me, and my two most desired (I think) possessions – my Overseas Record of Events and my ‘Unfamiliar Quotations’. I still have them, and am delighted accordingly.

  I have just received your mail, 6 letters and four packets (2 coffee, 2 socks), a bit of luck as had they arrived before ‘the day’, they would have been lost. More about your d
ear letters later. I know how you must have suffered. But now it is alright. (The socks seem wonderfully well knitted.) (The photo was great.)

  We spent the first ten days marching. About 120 miles, through rain, snow, hail at times, always very cold, always hungry. Our overcoats were taken, and we had no blankets. Jack Crofts, Bert, and I had terrible nights. No sleep, very cold. It was best during the day when we could get some warmth through keeping on the move. The three of us regard ourselves as fortunate in our experiences. Many chaps had very bad times, boots stolen (you can imagine how this affected one, stockinged feet in the snow), underclothes taken, trousers and blouse removed and very thin, ragged clothes given in exchange. You should be wary of believing all that you hear. Many chaps with small minds are anxious to be thought heroes or martyrs or something, and we had enough press correspondents to interview them all. Everyone has a story. Nevertheless, I must tell you that very few people take the same view of the ELAS as myself. As a matter of fact, most of my prisoner colleagues would like to shoot the whole of the Greek population.

  I have read your letters and been moved by your concern and the power of your love. Please have no worries concerning my condition. I am not as fit as I was, but my rheumatics are my only complaint and I shall soon control that.

  I hope you have been spared the worst of the rocket bombs, which (now that we see the newspapers again) were so active recently, and that your general health is as good as mine. I think of you. I think of you. I think of you. I will write as much as I am able, but bear with me as I have much to do. I love you.

  Chris

  27 WOOLACOMBE RD, LONDON SE3

  3rd February 1945

  Dearest,

  ‘How do I feel?’ – such a large question sweetheart, oh such a large question! So difficult for me to tell you. When I received your telegram, I sat down and wrote immediately but nothing would really come, I was like a sleep walker suddenly awakened, didn’t know where I was, felt all soft and pappy, tremulous and bubbly inside, and today with your letter, oh Christopher, all this warmth melting inside me, that I somehow want to wrap around you, to make up for all your sufferings of the past weeks, it seems a lifetime. I knew you wouldn’t be warm enough, or have enough to eat, but I didn’t think it would be quite so bad. Oh Chris, I wish I could have a damn good howl, but I can’t, I am all het up and tense, wondering whether you might come home.