Written out of history



January 19, 1998

Ted Hughes at Last Recounts Life With Sylvia Plath

[pic]By SARAH LYALL

ONDON -- It has been nearly 35 years since the poet Sylvia Plath put her head in a gas oven, killing herself at age 30 soon after her husband left her for another woman. And for all that time, her widower, the poet Ted Hughes, has maintained an implacable silence about their life together, emerging from his self-protective cocoon only occasionally, mostly to correct errors or to write prefaces to Plath's work.

| | | | |

| | |You were the jailer of your murderer| |

| | |-- | |

| | |Which imprisoned you. | |

| | |And since I was your nurse and your | |

| | |protector | |

| | |Your sentence was mine too. | |

| | |• • • | |

| | | | |

| | |You fed your prisoner's rage, in the| |

| | |dungeon, | |

| | |Through the keyhole -- | |

| | |Then, in a single, stung bound, came| |

| | |back up | |

| | |The coiled, unlit stairwell. | |

| | | | |

| | |• • • | |

| | | | |

| | |Excerpts from "The Blackbird" by Ted| |

| | |Hughes | |

It is Plath who has filled the resulting vacuum, as a larger-than-life feminist heroine, the subject of numerous biographies and memoirs and an enigmatic figure whose searing prose, powerful poems and early death raise as many questions as they answer.

And if many students of Plath have tended to see her as a brilliant but tragic artist, they have cast Hughes, Britain's poet laureate since 1984, as the villain whose callousness drove her to suicide.

But Hughes, who is 67, has decided to break his long silence by publishing a collection of poems about his relationship with Plath. The collection, "Birthday Letters," which is to be published in the United States next month by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is the result of work done quietly by Hughes during the last 25 years.

By turns harrowing, touching and raw, it describes the couple's passionate meeting, their tempestuous marriage and Plath's increasing obsession with her dead father and, finally, with death itself.

Hughes said through his British publisher, Faber & Faber, that he wanted his work to speak for itself and did not want to be interviewed. Faber's chairman, Matthew Evans, said that Hughes decided to publish the work now because, after returning in private to Plath again and again for years, he finally felt he had written enough.

"He said he had felt a compulsion to write on that subject, but that the compulsion had gone and he had said all he wanted to say," said Evans. "When he finished writing them, or they finished with him, that was the moment to close that chapter in his life," Evans said. "And I do think he sees it as a chapter that is now over. The fact that it wasn't over sooner is something of a regret to him."

A handful of the 88 poems in "Birthday Letters" have been published before, but the rest are new. Students of Hughes' work said they had no idea that he was working on what his publishers are calling a definitive volume.

And as "Birthday Letters" begins to circulate, readers of the poetry of Plath and Hughes are asking whether this new work finally fills in the blanks in a love story that has elicited intensely passionate interpretations since Plath's death in 1963.

Hughes, who controls Plath's estate and has sometimes seemed to want to control her memory and reputation as well, has provoked intense hatred at times. He was once greeted on a trip to Australia by demonstrators holding placards accusing him of murdering Plath.

And Plath's grave in Yorkshire, England, has been repeatedly defaced by people chipping the word "Hughes" from her name on the gravestone. Rather than responding himself, Hughes has usually let his sister, Olwyn Hughes, represent his case.

"I think he's been treated to the most extraordinary amount of rubbish and abuse," the British poet and biographer Andrew Motion, a friend of Hughes, said. "His story has dovetailed with a particular moment in feminist thinking, a surge of political correctness and the tendency of people to read poems as life transcripts, which have all helped produce this unique cocktail of attitudes which were very prejudicial to him. If this does anything to stop that, that would be wonderful."

In the United States, Fran McCullough, who, as an editor at Harper & Row in the 1960s, published Plath's poetry and journals after her death, said she was intrigued by news of Hughes' unexpected book. "He's consistently kept silent," she said. "It's been a huge mystery, and as far as I know there's a lot to say."

Ms. McCullough said that Hughes, with whom she had worked closely while editing Plath's work, "was very concerned about not saying anything, because he felt it was private." He wanted to protect his children, who are now in their 30s, Ms. McCullough said, and also to insulate himself from painful emotions.

"I would guess that he was self-protective, in the sense of protecting himself from feeling it," she said. "He threw himself into all kinds of other things so as not to have to deal with it, although maybe he has been dealing with it through these poems."

Together, the poems form a comprehensive narrative of Plath's relationship with Hughes, after they met at Cambridge where she was studying on a Fulbright scholarship. He describes their wedding in 1956 -- "You were transfigured/So slender and new and naked,/A nodding spray of wet lilac" -- and their honeymoon, in which "Spain frightened you. Spain/Where I felt at home."

Hughes describes the birth of their two children, which briefly kept Plath's despair at bay, and he describes their first encounter with Assia Wevill, the woman for whom he would leave Plath. (Wevill killed herself five years later, also by putting her head in an oven, an event that has added to the near-hysteria surrounding Hughes' history.)

Many of the poems read like short stories and describe day-to-day events that reveal the tangled threads of the couple's relationship. Students of Plath's own work will find added layers of meaning: Many of Hughes' poems are written as direct responses to her poems, while others describe events she recorded in her journals.

The volume is sprinkled with references to "The Bell Jar," Plath's autobiographical novel, and to many of the poems in her famous volume "Ariel."

As the volume goes on, the poems become increasingly sad, as Plath's instability threatens to destroy the couple's love and her life. Hughes describes her flying into a rage when he is 20 minutes late, and alternately pushing him away and begging him to come back.

He builds her an elm table, but finds that nothing he does can alleviate her fixation with her father, Otto, who died when she was 8. "I did not know/I had made and fitted a door/ Opening downwards into your Daddy's grave," he writes.

"His effort to explain what happened is fantastically tied up with his interpretation of her feelings toward Otto," Motion said. "One of the greatest psychological fascinations is seeing that, long before he walked out of the house to be with someone else, it was already pretty clear that Plath had left him for her father."

Most of the poems are written in the second person, speaking directly to Plath, and some are almost unbearably poignant. "Remember how we picked the daffodils?/ Nobody else remembers, but I remember," Hughes writes. And the poems seem as immediate as if the events being described happened last month, not more than 30 years ago.

"The really amazing thing is that it's written in this continuing present tense, as if she'd just left the room or was just about to come back into the room," Motion said. "It makes you feel that he never stopped loving her."

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