Pain, poetry and death

Like a grotesquely bloody car crash that replays itself over and again, the story of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes continues to fascinate us four decades after her death. Plath and Hughes’ exultant sexual passion and artistic drive; his betrayals; her suicide; the motherless children....Who can look away?

Yet it is not only lurid attraction, or schadenfreude, or some inchoate sense of relief (no matter how bad things get, for most of us they haven’t gotten quite that bad) that draws us to this tale. The catastrophic marriage of Hughes and Plath -- a catastrophe that, not coincidentally, produced great art -- also raises fundamental questions that we need to ask and can never answer: about how love grows and why it dies; about the relationship between madness and creativity; about the power of men and the power of women; about the price of staying in a marriage, and of leaving it; about depression and despair, and whether either love or art can heal them. As literary critic Jacqueline Rose wrote, thinking about Plath means thinking about “some of the most difficult points of contestation in our contemporary cultural and political life.... She writes at the point of tension -- pleasure/danger, your fault/my fault, high/low culture -- without resolution.”

Not surprising, then, that a widely variegated literature has grown up around Plath and Hughes, centering sometimes on their lives and sometimes on their work but almost always, by necessity, considering the relation between the two. At the lowest end of the spectrum is the shamelessly voyeuristic novel “Sylvia and Ted” by Emma Tennant, who has dined off her affair with Hughes far too long. But there are works of subtle intelligence too, such as Rose’s “The Haunting of Sylvia Plath” and Erica Wagner’s “Ariel’s Gift.” Diane Middlebrook’s “Her Husband,” a provocative and compelling attempt to understand the marriage of these poets by looking at their work, places itself firmly in this best tradition. It is a mark of Middlebrook’s skill as a writer and her insight as a thinker that her book is a pleasure to read though her subject is tragic.

Middlebrook never shies away from the emotional torment at the heart of this tale, but she knows that the stakes are not those of a soap opera. “How mock-heroic is the war between the sexes,” she writes. “It’s a real war, though, which is why the marriage of Hughes and Plath is of enduring interest.” The author of an acclaimed biography of Anne Sexton, Middlebrook places the Hughes-Plath marriage, and the work it produced, within “a thick cable of twentieth-century texts” by Yeats, Joyce, Eliot and Lawrence: “Each of these great modernists attempted to wrest ordinary marriage into a myth.” In the years 1956 to 1962, Middlebrook claims, Hughes and Plath created “one of the most mutually productive literary marriages of the twentieth century” -- albeit one of the briefest and most disastrous.

Because so much bad work has been done on Hughes and Plath, Middlebrook’s approach is impressive, first, for what it rejects. She does not adhere to the reductive feminist line that Plath, who killed herself at age 30 in 1963, was a helpless victim of Hughes’ infidelities in particular or patriarchal oppression in general. But she rejects in equal measure the idea that Plath was simply a chronic depressive whose life and poetry address no reality larger than her own.

Middlebrook’s vision is more complex; take, for instance, her discussion of the Hughes-Plath honeymoon (a ritual, she notes, that “gives newlyweds plenty of opportunity to discover the ways they are going to make each other unhappy”). Hughes brought along his Shakespeare, Plath “The Joy of Cooking.”

At this point many a reader will groan, and there is no doubt that the conflict between housework and intellectual work (and between wife-muse, mother-artist, etc.) is very much a part of Plath’s story. But not the whole story. Middlebrook writes, “Nothing illuminates Plath as a figure of her historical moment better than do these entries [in her journal] on her womanly competence, written as if under the aegis of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. But Plath also viewed cooking as a practice that advanced her aim of developing a writing style grounded in womanly experience.... She spent several hours one day avoiding the philosophy of John Locke by studying [Irma Rombauer’s] ‘The Joy of Cooking,’ ‘reading it like a rare novel.’... Plath’s journal entry provides some context for understanding the hidden pathway of association that glides from Locke to Rombauer. She is groping for a specifically female version of moral philosophy.”

The thorniest question in evaluating Hughes and Plath is the relationship between the poetry they made and the lives they lived. Here too Middlebrook is admirably graceful in her approach, weaving together -- and where necessary separating -- the two realms. Plath’s poetry is unabashedly personal; one of its great glories is its transformation of everyday experience into art. (Think, for instance, of the opening lines of “Cut”: “What a thrill -- / My thumb instead of an onion.”) But the key word here is “transformation”: Like all artists, Plath took experience and made it into something else. And this something else is to be found, too, in her voluminous letters and journals; these were not, Middlebrook reminds us, raw confessions but, rather, artful constructs through which Plath perfected the authorial voice she called the “diary I.”

With Hughes the art-life problem is in some ways simpler, others not. He adamantly rejected directly autobiographical poetry, and he loathed biographers. (The suicide of the woman for whom he left Plath, and her murder of their young daughter, could only have reinforced what may have been an already existing proclivity toward privacy.) Yet he too produced, and saved, literally tons of letters and other personal papers that are now archived (and on which Middlebrook draws).

More important, near the end of his life Hughes published “Birthday Letters,” a volume of 88 poems about his relationship with Plath and her death; its desolate, unveiled intimacy astonished lay readers and critics alike. Even in these poems, though, as Middlebrook rightly warns, “all details are metaphorical even when they are factual.... He is not remembering her words; he has been prompted by her words to enter into dialogue with that self she made in language.” Hughes’ “letters,” then, are not addressed to a dead woman but rather to “the vivid persona,” still very much alive, that Plath created in her poems.

And what of the actual marriage, the focus of Middlebrook’s book? Hughes and Plath shared a passionate love. But in Middlebrook’s view, the marriage’s raison d’etre -- whether consciously articulated or not -- wasn’t love or sex or children. It was work; that is, Hughes and Plath’s major, mutual aim was to make themselves into poets, and they needed each other to do so. “And we / Only did what poetry told us to do,” Hughes wrote in “Birthday Letters.” One can view this as romantic self-exculpation, but Middlebrook views it as true.

Seen in this light, the partnership was a fertile undertaking, and far more successful than either spouse could have hoped. Especially in their early years, Plath and Hughes lived and worked in close quarters and, perhaps because they were poor, sometimes wrote their poems back-to-back on the same sheet of paper. They thought of themselves symbiotically too; even after Plath’s death, Hughes claimed they shared “one single mind.” Through textual analysis, Middlebrook shows the literary results of this collaboration -- shows, that is, the way the couple’s poems called up, spoke to, challenged and answered one another. As the marriage shattered, this artistic conversation continued, though it took on darker meanings: “They were playing,” Middlebrook writes, “an obsessive game of tag with each other’s images.”

Middlebrook doesn’t view Plath’s suicide as inevitable, and she seems impatient with Hughes’ insistence on doom-laden destiny in “Birthday Letters.” But she does view the end of the couple’s creative collusion as unsurprising and strongly implies that it had to mean the end of the marriage as well. By the spring of 1962, Middlebrook writes, Hughes’ “imagination had abandoned Plath, just as her imagination was deserting Hughes.... He and Plath had reached, simultaneously, the end of their apprenticeships as poets. In actual life their romance had ended.”

Still, simultaneity is not equality, and the cost for Plath was overwhelming pain -- though perhaps a necessary pain. In Middlebrook’s view, the psychological task Plath had to face to become an adult and an artist -- “divesting herself of an idealization of a fatherly male” -- was set in motion by Hughes’ infidelity and desertion. The process was searing, but it worked; discussing one of Plath’s harshest poems, written as the marriage dissolved, Middlebrook observes: “Her art had begun moving out from under Hughes’s influence.... ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ is an elegy for everything that had to be outgrown in her femininity to acquire such clarity, such mastery within the medium of the distinctive poetic method and subject matter that would make her name.”

Middlebrook never addresses, and rightly so, the absurd question of whether such poems were “worth” such pain, but she does point to the inescapably horrible irony of Plath’s life: As her psyche disintegrated, she bloomed as a poet. Plath’s masterpiece, “Ariel,” written largely in the months before her suicide, is the record of her breakage and her triumph, which is why it can simultaneously devastate and thrill; she had found, finally, what Middlebrook calls “a creative pathway into the negative emotions that stirred her eloquence.” Plath’s tragedy wasn’t her anguish per se but her inability to live through it; she died giving birth to herself.

The Hughes-Plath marriage continued, for each partner, until death did them part. Middlebrook makes a convincing case -- as does “Birthday Letters” -- that Plath’s suicide bound Hughes to her for the rest of his life: “Plath’s suicide had sunk into his imagination,” Middlebrook writes. “The main subject of his art had now been consolidated by Plath’s angry departure for the underworld.” Indeed, “Birthday Letters” and a simultaneous, limited-issue book by Hughes called “Howls and Whispers” cause Middlebrook to reevaluate his oeuvre. A major theme, she now writes, is “how marriages fail, or how men fail in marriage.”

There is much to argue with in “Her Husband,” and Middlebrook deserves readers who will. Her interpretation of a key Hughes poem, “The Offers,” in which Plath hauntingly beseeches Hughes not to fail her, is wildly optimistic: Where Middlebrook finds renewal and reunion, I see the finality of utter loss. More generally, many readers will bristle at the claim that a marriage that ended in infidelity, separation and suicide was a success. But one needn’t agree with all of Middlebrook’s arguments. The journey that she takes us on exhilarates, even as it also makes us tremble.

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From Her Husband

A letter Hughes wrote to his sister-in-law complains that visitors have walked off with “everything that had her or my signature, her manuscripts, towels, sheets, tools -- whenever I wasn’t actually on watch, something was pinched.” ... In 1967, sending Gerald [his older brother] a limited edition of a book of poems, Hughes cautioned him to keep it in a safe place, a lesson he says he learned the hard way by watching personal copies of his first editions disappear on “centipede legs.”