Reclaiming Ted Hughes

Before preparing this essay, I began where many Americans seem hesitant to tread: with the poetry. I read and reread every poem I could find by Ted Hughes, as well as the slender oeuvre of Sylvia Plath, taking notes and contemplating both deeply. I recommend the experience. The two are so utterly brilliant, and so different, that imbibing their work together delivers a kind of psychic blow, breaking open a tectonic fault in the soul in the shape of the rupture that must have attended their harrowing romance. He, the manly midland mystic with his animist longings and strange bloodstained verse; she, the sturdy Cape Cod rhapsodist with her alluring shouts of aesthetic terror. What a thing it is when geniuses collide.

But the sensuousness can fade fast under shadow of the undying and unfounded characterization of Ted Hughes as fatal domestic abuser. My first entry into the contentious Hughes-Plath Universe was when I published a review some years ago that included commentary on the oft unequal phenomenon of the literary marriage (Zadie Smith and her lesser known poet husband Nick Laird, for example, or Raymond Carver and the poet Tess Gallagher). My inclusion of Hughes-Plath was struck down on moral grounds, removed with the mournful editorial comment: “Plath’s star has burned brighter, but at what cost?” The implication being that Hughes was somehow responsible for her death, therefore his name verboten. This vexed me, but I didn’t know enough then—I relented. The (redacted) page was printed.

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:

Something else is alive

 Beside the clock's loneliness

And this blank page where my fingers move.

 

 Through the window I see no star:

Something more near

Though deeper within darkness

 Is entering the loneliness:

 

Cold, delicately as the dark snow

A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;

Two eyes serve a movement, that now

And again now, and now, and now

 

Sets neat prints into the snow

Between trees, and warily a lame

Shadow lags by stump and in hollow

Of a body that is bold to come

 

Across clearings, an eye,

A widening deepening greenness,

Brilliantly, concentratedly,

Coming about its own business

 

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox

It enters the dark hole of the head.

The window is starless still; the clock ticks,

The page is printed.

In the UK, that editor would be surprised to learn that Hughes occupies a place roughly equivalent to Plath’s stature in the US. He appears in high school textbooks and is considered among the greatest of 20th-century English poets. Americans, even highly literate ones, simply do not know this fact. In Europe, the death of his wife is seen as a deeply sad turn in the difficult life of a snakebit genius (he also lost to suicide his son and his lover, Assia Wevill—who also murdered their small daughter). I doubt you’ve met more than two or three average educated Americans who even know his name, let alone his poetry. Such is the nebulous capacity of moral propaganda to black out a brilliant man’s existence, a sort of spectral censor lounging at America’s cultural customs house stamping minds clean before they wander into Plath country. An online search for “Ted Hughes books” in North America produces result after result of recent biographies, letters, reissues, and “reclamations” of … Sylvia Plath.

This year’s Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation was written by scholar Emily Van Duyne. This forgettable book is typical of Plath industry flotsam. The Sun Queen finds herself, via soul wounded panegyrics, elevated among the cottony clouds of Mount Parnassus, while her hellhound husband’s name is muttered through gritted teeth. Van Duyne is explicit about her method, which demands that she “examine” her own “emotions” in order that they will “give up some of the information” about Plath’s truth. The result is as laughable as it is a disservice to Plath’s work. The book is not written by someone in love with poetry, but only with Plath’s afflicted personal life and with sticking it to Ted Hughes. Part memoir, part literary history, part flagrant misreading of select poems (or “at the crossroads of theory, imaginative literature, and biography”), the result is dull indeed. Importantly, it’s also indicative of a very dated and misguided anti-Hughes movement that has run out of steam.

Despite what you may have heard, the two enigmatic artists locked in a fatal matrimony loved each other deeply and, despite reams of letters and journals—and much like any other passionate but ill-fated love affair—they could leave little evidence of who was at fault for what. Was Hughes physically rough with her? There is some minimal, unconvincing evidence for it. Was Plath, as with her poetry, distressingly inventive with her claims and erratic in her behavior? There is some evidence of this, too. With the aid of a fount of literary theory and one excitable imagination, however, it’s possible to dispense with reasonable doubts and pretend to have, if not actual knowledge, at least a kind of political conviction that Plath’s innocent soul fell victim to this thumping Yorkshire brute’s blazing theurgic compulsions.

The known truths behind all this are as unexciting as they are necessary to accept. Sylvia was depressed, suicidal, impulsive, deeply neurotic. Ted was womanizing, unfaithful, also depressive and busy with his growing success. The erotic chaos inherent in these two falling in love was apparent in their very first meeting, when within minutes he laid a kiss on her and she bit his cheek bloody. Four months later they were married. “I think he is the handsomest, most brilliant, creative, dear man in the world. My whole thought is for him … What a husband!” The famed line from her 1962 letter which reports that “Ted beat me up physically” is the sole moment in over one thousand pages of her published letters indicating that this “gentle giant” (he was 6’2” and reputed to be kind) committed physical abuse—and it’s something that Plath in the very next sentence calls “an aberration.” Plath regretted demanding a divorce and the two had spoken about reconciling in her last days. Had she not taken her life, insists her friend Al Alvarez, the two may well have been back together within a week.  

In his memoir Ted & I, Hughes’s brother Gerald, among others, reports convincingly that Plath had been deeply pained by the flop of her debut novel and was on a mixture of British and American anti-depressants that somewhere included a side effect of increased suicidal tendencies. So: imminent divorce, professional failure, depression, pills—a lethal combination even to this day.

The brilliance of Plath is not in doubt. She had a unique but not prolific talent, which, as she tells us in her letters, Hughes helped to nurture. She with Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell helped to launch a movement of American poetry that has redounded through recent literary history and touched the work of many a poet since Ariel was published. 

But nor is the brilliance of Hughes in doubt.

Her Husband

Comes home dull with coal-dust deliberately

To grime the sink and foul towels and let her

Learn with scrubbing brush and scrubbing board

The stubborn character of money.

 

And let her learn through what kind of dust

He has earned his thirst and the right to quench it

And what sweat he has exchanged for his money

And the blood-weight of money. He’ll humble her

 

With new light on her obligations.

The fried, woody, chips, kept warm two hours in the oven,

Are only part of her answer.

Hearing the rest, he slams them to the fire back

 

And is away round the house-end singing

 ‘Come back to Sorrento’ in a voice

 Of resounding corrugated iron.

 Her back has bunched into a hump as an insult.

 

For they will have their rights.

Their jurors are to be assembled

From the little crumbs of soot. Their brief

Goes straight up to heaven and nothing more is heard of it.

There are, very occasionally, books about Hughes as well.   

Eight years ago, the most recent, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorized Life by Jonathan Bate was published. Fifteen years before that, and three years after his death, Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet by Elaine Feinstein appeared. The two books do what scads of Platholalia do not. They treat the poet seriously, for his work and life and complexity. And for his faults. He was not, in fact, a confessional poet in the American style so popular at the time; his work far more often explored the darkness of man in nature and the mystery at the core of our dealings in the nonhuman realm. His poems can follow hawks, crabs, ferns, pike, wind, and bears, tracking the spoor of submerged consciousness therein, bringing as-yet unknowable truths briefly to the surface. These examinations of Hughes often include enlightening commentary on the influence his brilliant first wife had on his life and writing. But as for the irresponsible and frankly offensive (to Plath) suggestion that Hughes somehow drove her to suicide (through black magic?), the question does not arise. As it shouldn’t. Plath, like his mistress, was suicidal before she met Hughes. If Hughes were guilty of anything, it was of falling for difficult, tortured women. 

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.

It took the whole of Creation

To produce my foot, my each feather:

Now I hold Creation in my foot

 

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly –

I kill where I please because it is all mine.

There is no sophistry in my body:

My manners are tearing off heads –

 

The allotment of death.

For the one path of my flight is direct

Through the bones of the living.

No arguments assert my right:

 

The sun is behind me.

Nothing has changed since I began.

My eye has permitted no change.

I am going to keep things like this.

Plath wasn’t considered a literary star until her famous husband, in control of her estate after she was gone, published and strongly promoted her work. “Sylvia was not yet famous enough for her death to arouse press interest,” writes biographer Elaine Feinstein. Her lovely but not superb 1963 The Bell Jar, first published under a pseudonym, didn’t garner sustained interest until it was reissued in the United States in 1971 under her own name. “Sylvia had enjoyed only moderate success in her lifetime; her worldwide fame was entirely posthumous.” At first Hughes waffled on the idea of even submitting her last poems; when he came to pass around her final manuscript, it was rejected twice. When Ariel finally hit the shelves in America in 1966, three years after her death, the cauldron of anti-Hughes mania heated up. But the crisis didn’t come to a boil until the early 1970s, when feminist poet Robin Morgan wrote a ludicrous poem accusing Hughes of “murder” and threatening to disembowel the grieving man and stuff his penis in his mouth.  

What’s interesting about bigoted attitudes is that they never know when they’ve won. Plath dominates in America. Yet still, when her name comes up it’s as if the obscure work of this fragile poetess were drowning in a Hughes-controlled cosmos.

In a more sensible world, the two great artists may be sometimes—sometimes not—studied together with readers taking interest in how they did—and did not—influence each other in a literary era in which poetry was growing less symbolic and more personal (read Jonathan Bate’s biography for more on this). Even better, the brilliant work of Ted Hughes would be included by itself, perhaps alongside that of Philip Larkin and Thom Gunn, as necessary reading in its own right and as part of every American university course on 20th-century British poetry. 

Despite Hughes’s brawny game-hunting midcentury masculinity, now so out of style, he seems to have been a decent enough fellow. A bit of cad with a penchant for the occult and for manipulating women? Maybe, yes. But during their rupture, he emptied his own accounts of cash to help Sylvia, and he was devastated by her death. Later, as noted, it was due to his work behind the scenes that her poems became so deservedly famous. Anyhow, all of these minor issues are ultimately debatable in their finest details—but what of literature? What, I ask you, does any of this private stuff have to do with great poems? The much-abused Ted Hughes is due for a renaissance in the United States. His poetry is magnificent. Read him. It’s been fifty years of slander and “reclamations.” Let us reclaim an unmolested Ted Hughes back into our penitent American embraces.

Tyson Duffy is a writer living in Atlanta.