Although Paul Alexander attempted to enlist Ted Hughes’s cooperation—at least in so far as an interview was concerned—the biographer decided to steer clear of the Plath estate after Hughes turned him down. Alexander had one memorable encounter with Olwyn, who reported it to Frances McCullough: “Alexander really seems to me pretty hopeless … Did I tell you his big inspiration? Who do you think, he asks, those letters she wanted stamps for on the last night went to? I point out they were probably just an excuse to find out if neighbour would let nurse in next morning. I think he announces, eyes agleam, they were to … Sassoon! I advised him maybe he should stick to writing fiction.…” Alexander wrote a “fair use” biography, published in 1991, relying on summary and brief quotations. He produced a very detailed book, making extensive use of Plath’s archives and hundreds of interviews with those who knew her. On 19 August 1992, the Plath estate contacted Alexander’s publisher, Penguin USA. Penguin’s senior vice president and general counsel, Alan J. Kaufman, replied:
I have had the work in question carefully and thoroughly legally vetted prior to publication. I am therefore taken by surprise by your letter alleging that there are numerous passages which grossly defame your client, Ted Hughes.
As a responsible publisher we are interested to learn, with great specificity, exactly which passages in the work you allege to be defamatory to your client.
No legal action was taken. Ted wrote to Olwyn on 26 August, advising her not to get into a newspaper debate with Alexander, as no one remembers what is said in newspapers, which only want “hot copy.” Olwyn should write her own book. Stevenson’s was “catastrophic,” he added with rhetorical flourish, “because everything that was said there was heard as if you got her to say it—and as if I got you to get her to say it.” Only books get through to new readers, he argued. “Nothing else is accessible to them. Think of the advance too.” Although it has been said that Olwyn is working on her memoirs, she has yet to publish any.
Ronald Hayman’s The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (1991) took a bolder line than Alexander had done. Hayman argued that Plath had crossed the line between life and art, and that her greatest work virtually demanded to be read alongside her biography. In other words, the conventional biographer’s argument that the life helped to illuminate the work had been abrogated in favor of a fusion of the two, making the estate’s withholding of material and its efforts to control the flow of information about Plath all the more reprehensible. How exactly were biographers to distinguish between the private and public Plath? Although Plath scholarship has moved away from conflating the poet and her work, Hayman’s argument has been difficult to dismiss. Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley note in Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual (2007) that the “boundaries between Plath literary critics, biographers, and devotees” who worship at the “altar of Plath,” remain unclear.
In 1991, on 11 February, the anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s suicide, Janet Malcolm met with Olwyn Hughes to discuss a projected book, which became The Silent Woman (1994). Like Judith Kroll, Malcolm describes Olwyn as “forbidding and imposing.” Disdaining the plodding earnestness of biographers who pretend to be neutral or objective, Malcolm then dispatches Olwyn with gusto: “She is like the principal of a school or the warden of a prison: students or inmates come and go, while she remains.” Indeed, in Malcolm’s film noir, Olwyn becomes Mrs. Danvers welcoming Rebecca (the callow biographer) to Court Green, the Mandalay of Plath biography. One half expects Malcolm to include the Daphne DuMaurier line, “Last night I dreamed I went to Mandalay again.”
But Malcolm is rewarded only with Olwyn’s grudging agreement to take the importunate writer for a look at the exterior of the Fitzroy Road flat. Much of their conversation centers on how Olwyn had to “nanny” Anne Stevenson along to no avail, since Anne still got Sylvia “wrong.” Malcolm notes that suicide always leaves the survivors in the wrong. Nothing can be done about it, because Plath remains “silent, powerful”—and in the right. Malcolm characterizes Olwyn’s demand that Anne remove an account of Sylvia’s attack on Olwyn as the only available method of replying to Plath—even though Sylvia’s harsh words can themselves be interpreted as a bias the reader is perfectly capable of detecting. Olwyn, Malcolm implies, is unable to let the biographer and the reader do their work. In spite of Malcolm’s criticism, Olwyn and her brother left Malcolm alone—perhaps because she had such obvious scorn for biographers who do not trouble to make the Hugheses into fully rounded human beings coping with an impossible situation, wishing both to protect their privacy and do justice to Plath’s work. Ted Hughes realized that Malcolm was on the estate’s side, and yet prior to publication he still tried to ferret out what she would write about Olwyn. Malcolm replied on 16 September 1992 that of course Olwyn figured in the narrative, but she was not the “central figure.” The cagey biographer added, “I feel by telling you this I am saying more than I should (you may feel I am saying too little)…”
A brilliant stylist, Malcolm evokes the problematics of biography. How can biographers possibly know the truth? As Dido Merwin said, they were not there. Of course, by this logic, Malcolm, too, is suspect. But presumably she is more honorable because at least she concedes (indeed wallows in) the fallibility of biography. But memoirs written after the fact are no less fallible, which is why Malcolm focuses on Hughes’s letters, showcasing him as a brilliant interpreter of Plath’s work. Malcolm is right to emphasize that in his letters Ted expresses virtually no animus toward Plath. But it is hard to see why his later letters should be taken as the last word. In the end, Malcolm seems to have put herself in thrall to Ted Hughes, wishing, like Olwyn, to safeguard him from predators.
Ted Hughes, however, did not see matters this way. To him, Malcolm had adopted the guise of an objective truth-teller, painfully and regretfully revealing the “bad as well as the good because that’s the truth.” Her concoction of psychoanalytical commentary and “self-doubt” conveyed an impression of “helpless verisimilitude.” Malcolm knew her audience and knew how it would eagerly devour a controversial book written with the patented Malcolm style. And Ted understood, as he warned Olwyn, that she was the “main target.” By now, Ted was just part of the “trampled field.”
In Birthday Letters (1998), poems addressed to Plath and written over a thirty-five year period, Ted Hughes finally provided his own apologia. The work is difficult to assess as biography, since it bears the same relation to reality as Plath’s creative work. And yet a poem like “Fulbright Scholars” is hard to resist, because it is such an antidote to the sour memoirs of his friends. By mentioning Plath’s “Veronica Lake” bang, he evokes not only Sylvia’s glamour in postwar Cambridge, but also how she exuded so much more style than his contemporaries. She was so American and so romantic, a dream girl coming to him off the movie screen, his own Marilyn Monroe. Birthday Letters is not a record of what happened, but a crafted memory of what Sylvia Plath meant to Ted Hughes.
In hindsight, Hughes describes himself in “Visit” as auditioning for the lead role in Plath’s drama. Hughes evokes the power of the “brand” her teeth marks left for nearly a month after she bit him. The blood rite of their first meeting is subsumed in “The Shot” in Plath the “god-seeker,” an Isis looking for an Osiris to worship—although Hughes does not name his god. He remains first among the god-candidates after she jettisons the “ordinary jocks,” but it is remarkable in these poems how he subjects his persona to her quest, replicating precisely the pattern of those biographies of her that he abhorred.
Birthday Letters also reveals how little Hughes knew of his wife’s inner turmoil until, like her biographers, he could read her journals and accompany her on that last desperate pursuit of Richard Sassoon in Paris. And like Plath’s biographers, Hughes can only re-create her suffering. He, too, was not there. He guesses and speculates, presuming that poetry, rather than biography, has license to re-create Plath’s life. And he falls for the Plath myth just like so many others, in “18 Rugby St
reet” imagining her visiting the “shrines” of her sojourns with Sassoon. How, Hughes wonders, was Plath “conjuring” him?
Was it Plath’s death that made Hughes write in such a supplicating way? In an astonishing scene of abasement, he refers not to his weapons but to her “artillery,” as he imagines her climbing the stairs of his flat after her failed effort to secure Sassoon. Plath practically gives off sparks with the “pressure” of her “effervescence,” suggesting an eruptive nature that fairly overwhelmed Hughes. Even if this is the hyperbole of hindsight, it reveals how all encompassing the Sylvia Plath myth had become for more than just her biographers. It is Plath, a goddess with “aboriginal” thick lips, who initiates Hughes into the mysteries. She flies about his London flat like a spirit he cannot contain, her face like the sea, subject to all sorts of weather and the play of sun and moon. A devotee of astrology—its vocabulary suffuses Birthday Letters—Hughes seems bound by the charts of her moods, merely “hanging around” until she can shape him. What is odd here is the absence of Sylvia’s Ted Hughes—at least the one she thought of as a god. Why is the titan Plath described in her letters, poems, and journals absent from Birthday Letters?
Hughes occasionally provides striking vignettes of their mythologized daily life, such as one involving Sylvia’s distress when she does not find him at their meeting place and rides a taxi like a chariot, in search of him. He marvels in “Fate Playing” at her “molten” eyes and face when she greets him as though he had “come back from the dead,” the answer to a priestess’s prayer. Then he “knew what it was / To be a miracle.” Here Hughes discloses why Sylvia Plath was so irresistible. He even turns her taxi driver into a “small god,” treating her eruption of joy as an act of nature drenching the “cracked earth” in the “cloudburst” of her emotions. In “The Owl,” the childlike abandon Plath took in nature awakened Hughes’s own “ecstatic boyhood,” bringing back to him an elemental rapture he had previously experienced only with his beloved older brother. In “A Pink Wool Knitted Dress,” Hughes pictures his wedding as the marriage of the swineherd to the princess, the postwar threadbare “not quite … Frog-Prince” bound to Plath’s transfigured and flaming personage. On their honeymoon, described in “Your Paris,” he is like her dog, sniffing out the fear and corruption in the collaborationist city, while she basks in the aura of her expatriate predecessors: Miller, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Stein. While he is mired in history, she soars into the mythos of her own making.
During their Benidorm honeymoon in Spain, Hughes seems for the first time to emerge from Plath’s spell, noting in “You Hated Spain” how the primitive cult of the bullfight frightened her. In contrast, he felt quite at home, perceiving clearly—perhaps for the first time—the part of her that was still a “bobby-sox American.” Drawing calmed her and was also an assertion of her mastery that had a beneficial impact on Hughes, who felt “released”—an apparent allusion to the stress her fluctuating moods inflicted on him. When Plath fell ill (a case of food poisoning) he felt empowered, enjoying the role of mothering her as he had been mothered—although her fevered fear of death, her crying “wolf,” aroused his distrust of her overwrought sensibility. How would he know when she was truly at the last extreme? That question haunts the persona Hughes creates for himself in Birthday Letters, as he tries to read Sylvia Plath, who has tied him to her quest for fame. Otherwise, he might have been, as he puts it in “Ouija,” “fishing off a rock / In Western Australia.”
In “The Blue Flannel Suit,” Hughes describes Sylvia aboard a liner taking them off to America, once again invoking a life that seemed plotted for him. In “Child’s Park,” Plath is so potent that she has a “plutonium secret”—a phrase reminiscent of those 1950s articles that saluted Marilyn Monroe as the “atomic blonde.” It seems from these poems that what really undid Hughes in America was his feeling that he was feeding off of Plath. His humiliation is palpable in “9 Willow Street,” where he calls himself a “manikin in your eyeball.” Unlike his wife, Hughes explains in “The Fifty-Ninth Bear,” he had no need to make their “dud scenario into a fiction,” aggrandizing their brief brush with the beast outside their tent in Yellowstone Park into a story of a husband hounded to his death by his importunate wife. There is in Hughes, as there was in Arthur Miller, a primordial dread of becoming entirely absorbed in his wife’s imago. He treats their trip to the Grand Canyon as Plath’s pilgrimage to the Delphic oracle, seeking a sign about the fate of her six-week old pregnancy. Is it any wonder that this couple came to grief, trying to live on the level of the gods? Before their embarkation for America, Sylvia had dreamed that country would make Hughes an even greater poet. But poems like “Grand Canyon” suggest the vastness of American geography only made him yearn for the narrow cobbled streets of home.
“Haunted” is hardly the word for what Hughes has to say in “Black Coat” about Plath’s penetrating “paparazzo sniper” eye, as she lined him up against a seascape, pinioning him with her camera, and transforming him—in his imagination and hers—into her father, crawling out of the sea and sliding “into me.” This poem amplifies the thrust of Plath’s autobiographical essays, which transform Otto Plath into a powerful sea beast that in Hughes’s retrospective poem sends a shiver through him, freezing him forever in her lens. Caught in Plath’s double vision, Hughes realizes he has become a palimpsest of her memories and desires.
Hughes concedes in “Stubbing Wharfe” that Plath had a reach like the Atlantic, but that whereas he reveled in the idea of a home in the dark valleys of his boyhood, she saw there “blackness,” the “face of nothingness.” She triumphed because, as he announces in “Remission,” she submitted to an “oceanic” pregnancy, becoming the very type of the fruitful woman of time immemorial, the Venus of Willendorf. When Hughes mentions Plath’s Indian midwife, who appears to be a deity from the Ganges, the image of voluptuous female idols hanging off of Indian temples comes to mind. No wonder, then, that in “Isis” Hughes imagines childbirth as his wife’s stripping of her “death-dress”—or was this only an interruption of her attraction to death as the father of herself? Hughes can be no more certain than her biographers, but he pictures her here as a vessel of life, an Isis carrying “what had never died, never known Death.”
In “The Lodger,” the move to Court Green becomes an announcement of Hughes’s disintegrating life, which makes him feel “already posthumous.” The change of venue is part of the “wrong road taken” theme that pervades this part of Birthday Letters. Images of him digging a garden are transformed into images of him digging his own grave. He treats his betrayal of himself very much like the story of the self and its double that so entranced Plath. Indeed, Hughes presents himself as being overtaken by another, an “alien joker.” In “The Table,” his double becomes her father, so that Hughes pictures himself not as Plath’s salvation, but as her doom, an actor deprived of his script on an “empty stage.” He had lost, in other words, his own conception of their marriage.
From here on Hughes seems to withdraw himself from Plath’s imago, dreading in “Dream Life” her descent into the crypt of her imagination, and sensing the futility of his efforts to hypnotize her into courage and calm. She was, in his retrospective sense of destiny, preparing herself for the gas chamber. In “The Rabbit Catcher” he pictures himself once again trailing after Plath like a dog, trying to attune himself to her volatile moods. Prey to her hostility, he wonders if she is expressing her own “doomed self,” or responding to something “Nocturnal and unknown to me”—the closest Hughes comes to reflecting on his own culpability. Yet he capitulates to the “new myth,” as he calls it, which would take her back to her father—as surely as the beekeeping she performs in “The Bee God” as a bow to her “Daddy.”
Assia Wevill makes her fated appearance in “Dreamers” as a Lamia-like demon that entrances Hughes, who recovers the dreamer in himself by falling in love with her. The poem seems too pat, part of a mythology, but not part a record of what actually hap
pened. A hard-pressed Hughes writes as though he can only succumb to Assia, “filthy with erotic mystery,” the antithesis of his well-scrubbed wife, who in “The Beach” sought the sea as a means of scouring away the dinginess of a grubby England still camouflaged in wartime grime.
The Hughes who said reconciliation with Plath remained a possibility emerges briefly in “The Inscription,” which reflects his confusion over the signals she gave him—demanding that he remain with her, or insisting he “vanish off the earth.” In “Night-Ride with Ariel,” he attributes her unwillingness to recommit to him as having been influenced by the constellation of women in her life: her mother, Mrs. Prouty, Ruth Beuscher, and Mary Ellen Chase—all of whom he labels jammers of Plath’s “wavelengths,” confusing her with their advice. Hughes adds his own rueful insight in “A Picture of Otto”: “I was a whole myth too late to replace you.” After that, Birthday Letters trails off in an enigmatic ending, and Hughes never comes to terms with his role in the marriage’s final phase. In Howls and Whispers, published the same year in a limited edition and overlooked except by a few scholars, Hughes addresses several more letters to Plath. This time he makes even less room for his own psychology and responsibility, producing unpolished work that is “excessively vituperative or self-pitying,” to use the words of critic Lynda K. Buntzen, who notes the poet’s “lack of control.”
Responses to Birthday Letters were mixed, ranging from high praise for its poetry and candor, to dismissals of its rather flat prose-like lines and exculpatory thrust. Some thought Hughes placed the burden of failure on Plath’s own Electra complex—although he does not explicitly indulge in Freudian explanations. In the main, Hughes seems to have done himself some good by finally delivering his own diagnosis of Plath’s life and death. In Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters (2000), Erica Wagner seemed to start a new trend in Plath exegesis, arguing that Hughes “honors the work and the person of Sylvia Plath. There is no greater gift of love than that honor.”
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