Diane Middlebrook’s Her Husband (2003) presents a meticulous and compassionate exploration of what the two poets owed one another. Indeed, Middlebrook’s book is the best answer to those who cudgel biographers with the assertion, “You weren’t there.” Benefiting from the perspective afforded by earlier biographies, and from a close reading of the Plath and Hughes texts, Middlebrook easily surpasses in insight the memoirists who claim the privileges of proximity. Eschewing much biographical speculation, Middlebrook seemed to earn even the grudging respect of Olwyn Hughes, who took issue with some of the biographer’s facts but also praised her insights. But Middlebrook, reverent in her treatment of Ted Hughes’s devotion to literature—especially to his reading of Robert Graves’s The White Goddess—ultimately lets Hughes off the hook: “Hughes’s marriage was the doing of the White Goddess, who had laid claim to Ted Hughes through the agency of Sylvia Plath: Hughes had no choice.” This sense of predestination suffuses Birthday Letters, absolving Hughes by making him no more than a figure in an allegory. Plath herself was aware of Hughes’s tendency to turn away from ratiocination in favor of horoscopes and predestination. In “Hill of Leopards,” an alternative title for Plath’s aborted novel, “Falcon Yard,” Jess, modeled after Plath, challenges her lover, clearly a version of Hughes, over his reliance on horoscopes to suss out human character. “It’s so deterministic,” she observes.
Conspicuously absent from Birthday Letters is any reckoning of Plath’s final days and hours. On 11 October 2010, the New Statesman published “Last Letter,” Hughes’s own coda, unearthed from his British Library archive. The poem, apparently never finished, is a departure in tone, which is perhaps why Hughes chose not to complete it for Birthday Letters. “Last Letter” is very much of the moment, focused on the contingency of events as he wonders about the timing of his last meeting with Plath—and why she called him, burned her letter to him, and acted as though he had somehow thwarted her design. She had apparently expected her letter not to be delivered on a Friday, but after the weekend was over. When Hughes arrived at her flat that Friday, two days before her death, she was upset. What did her note say? Did it announce her suicide, or was it just the cry for help that Hughes later mentioned to Aurelia? Judging by the murkiness of Hughes’s verse, his visit to Plath produced no resolution. Like all her other exegetes, he can only speculate about what happened. He imagines her phoning his empty flat. At the time, he was, in fact, bedding another poet, Susan Alliston, in the same building where he first bedded Plath and later spent his wedding night. Alliston was apparently a relief from Sylvia and Assia the two “needles,” as they are referred to in “Last Letter.” He imagines Plath hearing the ringing in her receiver, a scene reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe attached to her phone, simultaneously reaching out to and saying good-bye to the world she had wooed and lost. Just a few hours later, a telephone call informs him of his wife’s death.
Ted Hughes, who died on 28 October 1998, remained evasive to the end, providing no corrective to the myth he had done so much to foster, even as he decried its development—and never for a moment analyzed his role as renegade priest. Elaine Feinstein’s biography of Hughes, published in 2003, was not much help to Olwyn. On 25 May, Olwyn wrote to filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski, charging that Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet was “wildly inaccurate” and “gossipy.”
Ted’s daughter, Sylvia Plath’s sole surviving child (Nicholas committed suicide on 16 March 2009, after struggling with periodic depression), has adopted her father’s attitude, accusing the BBC producers of the film Sylvia (2003) of voyeuristic motivations, creating a “Sylvia suicide doll” for the “peanut eaters.” In 2004, in a preface to the restored edition of Ariel, which rectified the changes Ted Hughes made in the first published version of Plath’s masterpiece, Frieda relayed her father’s explanation that he had omitted some poems because they would hurt living persons, and others because they were weaker than those he added to Plath’s original arrangement. Frieda also attacked Aurelia, claiming that as “small child” (she was little more than two years old) she observed her grandmother encouraging Sylvia to order Ted out of Court Green. The Hughes Papers at Emory University include other examples of Frieda’s animosity toward Aurelia. And exhibiting considerable animosity toward the “strangers” who have possessed and reshaped her mother, Frieda describes a caring father who helped her keep the memory of her mother alive. That bond with him makes her disdainful of others who have enshrined her mother in their own pantheon. She is aghast that her “more temperate [compared to her mother] and optimistic” father has been vilified. Hughes never liked seeing Assia’s name in print next to his, and Frieda’s fealty to him results in turning Assia into “the other woman” in the preface.
When English Heritage proposed putting a blue commemorative plaque on the Fitzroy Road building, Frieda insisted that it be placed on the wall of 3 Chalcot Square, where her parents had lived for nearly two years and where they wrote some of their best work. The ensuing attacks from those who believed the plaque should be at the Fitzroy Road residence exacerbated Frieda’s anger about the way her mother has been “dissected, analyzed, reinterpreted, reinvented, fictionalized, and in some cases completely fabricated.” Still, like her father, Frieda has come forward with an Ariel—only this time it is exactly what those analyzers and reinventors have desired for nearly five decades: a Sylvia Plath composed by the poet herself, silent no more.
APPENDIX A
Sylvia Plath and Carl Jung
The Smith archive includes several pages of notes Plath took while reading Carl Jung’s The Development of Personality. Unfortunately, no dates are affixed to the passages that Plath copied out, and she does not annotate her responses to them. Plath scholar Judith Kroll suggests this material dates from late 1962, because it deals with “many topics relevant to her concerns near the end of her life.” Uninterested in dealing with Plath in biographical terms—or at least unwilling to do so—Kroll, like Diane Middlebrook and Jacqueline Rose, is more concerned with exploring how both Plath and Hughes made use of Jung in their work. As Margaret Dickie Uroff notes, Plath wrote her mother about reading Jung for her senior thesis on Dostoevsky, and Plath herself notes in a 4 October 1959 journal entry that reading Jung confirms her use of certain images in her “Mummy” story—especially that of the child dreaming of a “loving, beautiful mother as a witch or animal,” and another image of the “eating mother … all mouth.” Although critics like Kroll and Rose shy away from the biographical approach, Plath herself had no problem with it, concluding that she was the “victim” of what she wrote and not an “analyst. My ‘fiction’ is only a naked recreation of what I felt, as a child and later, must be true.”
Less fastidious than her academic commentators, Plath realized that her “fiction” could be read both ways: as stories and as accounts of her own life. The problems for the biographer, however, are chronology and causation. It would be illuminating to know if Kroll is right about the passages coming so late in Plath’s development as an individual and as a writer. Then Jung is a kind of “proof” for Plath, and also, perhaps, a catalyst for her final burst of creativity. If the passages come earlier, a case could be made for them as influences, writing that shaped her psyche and her style. Critic Tim Kendall argues that Jung served as Plath’s vindication while she also becomes “her own case history.” It is the same dual role—both victim and analyst of her victimhood—she plays in “Daddy,” Kendall concludes.
This discussion of Plath and Jung appears in an appendix precisely because her handwritten quotations from Jung cannot be dated and thus cannot be confidently inserted into a narrative of her life. Even so, what Plath copied explains certain mysteries that appear in her journals and letters. To begin with, what exactly did Aurelia do to Sylvia that made her both grateful and hostile? Both the Smith and Emory archives contain letters from a mystified Aurelia, who emphasized how tactful and tolerant she tried to be with Sylvia.
Carl Jung ratified much of what Sylvi
a (and her fictional alter-ego, Esther) felt, observing that parents “set themselves the fanatical task of ‘doing the best for the children’ and ‘living only for them.’” As a result, parents never develop themselves, so focused are they on thrusting their “best” down their children’s’ throats. “This so-called ‘best’ turns out to be the very things the parents have most badly neglected in themselves. Thus children are goaded on to achieve their parents’ most dismal failures and are loaded with ambitions that are never fulfilled.” Precisely so. Aurelia writes in the introduction to Letters Home that after the first year of her marriage, she realized she would have no peace with Otto unless she did exactly as he said. Her own proud independence, her literary interests, would have to be subordinated to his work. In a letter to Ted Hughes that is in the Emory archive, an agonized Aurelia tells Ted (years after Sylvia’s death) how she longed to share her joy in literature, instead of constantly playing the nurturing mother—not only to Sylvia, but also to Ted when the couple visited—and she did everything in her power to make them comfortable, never demanding any time for herself. One of Aurelia’s notes in the Smith archive welcomes Ted and Sylvia home with the announcement that the refrigerator is not only full, it is stocked with ready-made meals. She did not want a dependent life for Sylvia, and yet Sylvia found it hard not to replicate her mother’s marriage to a powerful man. She “inherited” the desire to abase herself—which haunted her even as she arose from her bed with Ted to become her own person and poet.
Aurelia’s insistence that she did not project herself onto Sylvia is countered by Jung: “The infectious nature of the parents’ complexes can be seen from the effect their mannerisms have on their children. Even when they make completely successful efforts to control themselves, so that no adult could detect the least trace of a complex, the children will get wind of it somehow.” Jung told the story of a mother with three loving daughters who were disturbed about their dreams, which all had to do with her turning into a ravening animal. Years later, the women went insane, dropping onto all fours and imitating the sounds of wolves and pigs. All this and more Plath noted in four pages of verbatim passages.
Plath copied out other passages in Jung that attacked the “sanctity of motherhood,” noting that mothers had produced their share of lunatics, idiots, and criminals. As much as Plath embraced motherhood, she also found she had a profound need not to sentimentalize it. She pointed out in letters to Paul and Clarissa Roche that taking care of children was an exhausting enterprise. No wonder she became enraged when her husband told her family life was becoming too much for him. Her death, in a way, finally forced fatherhood on him, making it his inescapable fate.
A final page of passages on marriage may indicate why Kroll believed Plath was reading Jung in the latter part of 1962. Jung describes marriage as a return to childhood and to the mother’s womb in an effort to recapture the community of feeling that adults so rarely achieve. As parents, husband and wife become part of the “life urge.” But this initial harmony inevitably turns to anguish and pain for anyone who puts a premium on individuality and independence. Sometimes the Jung quoted in Plath’s copied-out passages sounds very like her own verse, as here, where he describes the trajectory of marriage: “First it was passion, then it became a duty & finally an intolerable burden, a vampire that battens on the life of its creator.” In Ted Hughes, in other words, Sylvia had created a monster.
APPENDIX B
Sylvia Plath’s Library
Plath underlined, starred, and annotated the following passages in books now part of her collection at Smith College. These selections reflect her wide reading in literature, philosophy, and theology that led her to believe in the primacy of the poet. In literature, especially in the work of D. H. Lawrence, she could read the prophecy of her own life and the means by which she would accomplish her own death.
[W]hile all of us, at bottom, pursue only our private interest, we wear these fair disguises in order to put others off their guard, and expose them the more to our wiles and machinations. [In the right-hand margin, Plath wrote, “good.”]
—David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding
[T]he hateful white light of understanding which floats like scum on the eyes of all white, oh, so white, English and American women, with their understanding voices and their deep, sad words, and their profound good spirits. Pfui! [Plath wrote, “ouch!”]
—D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature
The artist must be inhuman, extra-human, he must stand in a queer aloof relationship to our humanity … Literature is not a calling, it is a curse, believe me!… It begins by your feeling yourself set apart, in a curious sort of opposition to the nice, regular people … the poet as the most highly developed of human beings, the poet as saint.
—Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger
Everything seemed to have gone smash for the young man. He could not paint.… Everything seemed so different, so unreal. There seemed no reason why people should go along the street, and houses pile up in the daylight. There seemed no reason why these things should occupy the space, instead of leaving it empty. His friends talked to him: he heard the sounds, and he answered. But why there should be the noise of speech he could not understand. [Next to this passage, Plath wrote, “cf. July 1953”]
—D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
O strange happiness, that seeketh the alliance of Death to win its crown.… It must needs be a forcible evil, that has power to make a man (nay, a wise man) to be his own executioner.… A wise man is indeed to endure death with patience, but that must come ab externo from another man’s hand and not from his own. [In the left-hand margin, Plath wrote, “Why?”] But these men teaching that he may do it himself, just needs confess that the evils are intolerable which force a man to such an extreme impropriety. [Plath wrote, “yes.”]
—St. Augustine, The City of God
[T]hose who pursue philosophy right study to die; and to them of all men death is least formidable.
—Plato
Marriage was a ghastly disillusion to him [Herman Melville], because he looked for perfect marriage. [Plath wrote in the margin, “All our grievances come from not being able to be alone.” And on the next page she put an exclamation mark next to the following passage.] Melville came home to face out the long rest of his life. He married and had an ecstasy of a courtship and fifty years of disillusion.
—D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature
It was her deep distrust of her husband—this was what darkened the world.
—Henry James, Portrait of a Lady
APPENDIX C
David Wevill
On 10 July 2010, I wrote the following to David Wevill:
I wonder if I could try your patience and ask if you would reply to a few questions via email. I know it was a long time ago, but I would very much like a sentence or two about how Sylvia Plath appeared to you. What was it like to be in her physical presence? Even a vague impression would be helpful. A related question: Do you remember noticing any change in her from the first time you met her to the last? For example: Did she look thinner? I’d be very grateful for even a sentence or two, which I would not use without getting your explicit permission.
On 19 July 2010, David Wevill replied:
I did not notice a change in Sylvia’s appearance while I knew her: she was slender (lean), looked fit, bore herself well. Personally she was witty, affable, had a quick smile, her conversation was bright and covered a wide range, she seemed interested in people and their lives, she could gossip but not cruelly. She and Ted seemed to complement each other, not contradict. I sensed no tensions there. Later I came to think some effort went into this—not so much an act, as a willed self-control? We four got on well, it seemed the start of a friendship, with much in common. As for the Assia biography, I came to know Eilat and Yehuda and liked them. They had done their homework and talked with many people. The story they had to tell was hard, tragic,
and I think there were problems of tone and judgement as to what to include and leave out, and parts I found too sensational. Inaccuracies, some. I never threatened to kill anyone; I did not walk the streets at night with a knife; or plead with Assia to stay (rather, the other way around).… As for Sylvia, I wish I could help you. For nearly half a century I’ve tried to keep from getting involved in what became almost an investigative industry.
On 22 December 2011, I wrote to David Wevill again, saying I wished to reprint his 10 July 2010 reply to me, and that I wanted to do so without any comment of mine attached to his statement. He agreed that I could do so.
APPENDIX D
Elizabeth Compton Sigmund
On 14 January 2012, I journeyed to Cornwall to see Elizabeth Sigmund for a two-day talk about Sylvia Plath. Elizabeth was married to the writer David Compton when she became a good friend of Sylvia’s during the Court Green period. Elizabeth also had a good opportunity to observe Ted and the Hughes-Plath marriage. She has become one of the major players in a conflict that unfortunately is likely to go on as long as the Punic Wars, arraying Olwyn, Ted—and even Ted’s second wife, Carol, and Sylvia’s daughter, Frieda—against Elizabeth, Al Alvarez, and Clarissa Roche, joined later by biographers Linda Wagner-Martin and Ronald Hayman. The latter side, appalled at Olwyn’s handling of the Plath estate, and critical of Assia’s role in seducing Ted away from his Devon home and family, identifies with Sylvia’s grievances and deplores the vitriol in Anne Stevenson’s biography. Elizabeth showed me a letter from Olwyn to Clarissa Roche, written on 24 March 1986, which sums up the war in two brief sentences: “You liked her. I think she was pretty straight poison.” I went to Elizabeth seeking some understanding of why Ted left Sylvia. Virtually nothing in reports of his behavior while living with Plath—and certainly nothing in letters of his that have so far surfaced—signals anything like the depth of unhappiness that he expressed to his sister Olwyn shortly after he left Sylvia.
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