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THE ARTS/BOOKS | MARCH 2, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 9 |
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Breaking the Silence British laureate Ted Hughes finally offers a poetic meditation on his marriage to Sylvia Plath By PAUL GRAY
It was 35 years ago that Plath, then 30, put her head into a gas oven and committed suicide. Hughes, her husband of a little more than six years, had left her and their two small children for another woman three months earlier. This domestic tragedy might have remained largely private had not Plath, already an established poet, left behind a powerful and searing sequence of poems, published posthumously as Ariel, that ensured her lasting fame. The nascent feminist movement in the '60s enlisted her as a martyr and vilified Hughes as her oppressor and, intentionally or not, her murderer. Hughes' silence about this matter over all the succeeding years puzzled some and infuriated others, particularly since he owned the rights to Plath's writings and admitted destroying and suppressing some of them out of concern for his children's feelings. While censoring some of his dead wife's words, had he nothing at all to say for himself? Birthday Letters answers that question, but not in a way that will satisfy those looking for gossip or breast-baring confessions. The 88 poems assembled--all but two of them, The Pan and The Inscription, addressed to Plath as "you"--combine to form an often harrowing and poignant narrative in which the central characters are doomed to their fates before the story begins. "What happens in the heart simply happens," Hughes writes at one point, a comment that can serve as an epigraph or epitaph for all the words surrounding it. For Hughes' account of his life with Plath rests on two complementary premises: she was destined to kill herself because of her preoccupation with her father, who died when she was eight; and Hughes was powerless to help her. This argument is established early in Birthday Letters, when Hughes records meeting Plath, a Fulbright scholar, at Cambridge University in 1956: "I was being auditioned/For the male lead in your drama." A tempestuous courtship gives way to an equally stormy marriage: two ambitious poets--one English and reserved, the other American and outwardly exuberant but secretly troubled--yoked together in an initial ecstasy that eventually subsides into mutual misery. Hughes, in his telling, learns that Plath has brought problems along with her "long, perfect, American legs." He becomes acquainted with her "homicidal/ Hooded stare," her "dybbuk fury" at his alleged failures as husband and father ("What had I done?"). Many passages in Birthday Letters achieve genuine eloquence. Hughes demonstrates again why he is widely regarded as the foremost nature poet of his era. Here is his description of daffodils in the spring: "Baby-cries from the thaw/Ballerinas too early for music, shiverers/In the draughty wings of the year." He recalls a trip he and Plath made to the American southwest, conjuring up the dry, blazing heat, so alien to anything he had ever experienced in England: "When Aztec and Inca went on South/They left the sun waiting,/Starved for worship, raging for attention,/Now gone sullenly mad." But the best moments in the poems almost always come when Hughes is looking at the natural world around Plath and not at her, or his memories of her, directly. Staring at the mystery of their marriage and her fate leaves Hughes unusually tongue-tied: "I was the gnat in the ear of the wounded/Elephant of my own/Incomprehension." Hughes' account of this shared history and Plath's ruinous effect on it may or may not be accurate--and only a fool would attempt to parse another person's marriage--but it makes a poor premise for poetry. Lyric poems draw their energy from an active voice discussing the life choices, good or bad, it has made. Hughes portrays himself as a fern in a hurricane beyond his control. He gives only one poem, Dreamers, to the woman who broke up his marriage to Plath. In it he writes: "The Fable she carried/Requisitioned you and me and her,/Puppets for its performance." Who wants to read about puppets? Hughes' insistence that he was only "a fly outside on the window-pane/ Of my own domestic drama" rings false, whatever the irretrievable facts of the matter.
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hen a new book of poems makes front-page headlines on both
sides of the Atlantic, chances are that the reason for such a
hubbub lies somewhere outside the realm of aesthetic
appreciation. That is certainly the case with Ted Hughes'
Birthday Letters (Faber and Faber; 198 pages). Although Hughes,
67, Britain's poet laureate since 1984, commands a wide and
respectful audience among readers of serious contemporary
poetry, the appearances of his books have not, until now, been
stop-the-presses affairs. What makes Birthday Letters different
is its subject matter: Hughes' poetic meditations on his
marriage with Sylvia Plath.