The Books: Birthday Letters, by Ted Hughes

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry

The next book on my poetry shelf is Birthday Letters: Poems, by Ted Hughes.

I keep writing this and that, but it seems painfully little for the time I spend pursuing it. I wonder sometimes if things might have gone differently without the events of 63 & 69. I have an idea of those two episodes as steel doors shutting down over great parts of myself, leaving me that much less, just what was left, to live on. No doubt a more resolute artist would have penetrated the steel doors – but I believe big physical changes happen at these times, big self-anaesthesias. Maybe life isn’t long enough to wake up from them.
— Ted Hughes, letter to Lucas Myers, September 29, 1984

In Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes at last “penetrated the steel doors”.

It’s rare that a book of poetry is an event. A headliner. Treated as “breaking news”. Ted Hughes’ 1998 collection, The Birthday Letters, the last book he published before he died, was an event. There was a ghoulish aspect to much of the response to it (I suppose that is to be expected), and Hughes knew that going in, but after decades of silence (and who could have withstood the onslaught of hatred that he did that lasted for decades after his wife, Sylvia Plath, killed herself in 1963?) he made what had to be an anguishing decision to speak his peace, in the best form for him: poetry. He had been writing the poems in the volume for years. Every poem in the collection (except for two notable exceptions) are addressed to “you”, the “you” being Sylvia Plath. The image of Ted Hughes having an ongoing yet one-way conversation with the wife he knew he had hurt so badly, is very moving to me. This book was an “event” for me, too. It was a big BIG deal.

An entire book of letters FROM Ted Hughes TO Sylvia Plath? Have I honestly lived to see the day?? Well, yes, I have.

Sylvia Plath and I go way way back. Here is just one of the many giant posts I have written about her. I have read everything. Every poem that has ever been written (or at least published), scholarly analysis, her journals (including the “unedited” ones that recently came out – unedited my ass – where are the last 2 years?), her letters to her mother (a very very creepy volume), every major biography every written about her. This is a lifelong study of mine. You say to me “pink wool dress” and I know that you are referring to her wedding day. That’s the level we’re talking here. (Incidentally, there is a poem in Ted Hughes’ book entitled “Pink Wool Dress”). Ted Hughes has suffered enough at the hands of rabid Plath fans, who would periodically show up at her grave and deface the stone, nutballs that they were. How dare you. How dare you. In recent years, Frieda Hughes (daughter of Sylvia and Ted) has been speaking out more, and very eloquently indeed. Sticking up for her father who was, after all, the one who stuck around. Sadly, Nicholas Hughes (son of Sylvia and Ted) killed himself last year. Sylvia Plath’s death still reverberates. Because her husband was so damn famous, and his fame just grew and grew after her death, their private grief as a couple could never remain private. The posthumous publication of Ariel cemented Plath’s position as a major poet, but also as a flaming-out martyr. The fact that Hughes (and his grim gate-keeper sister Olwyn) were the executors of Plath’s literary estate poured gasoline onto an already-raging fire. He made literary decisions about Plath’s work (he rearranged the order of Ariel, for example), and this was seen as unforgivable by the Plath-ites. He did not defend himself. I have no idea what that must have cost him. Obviously, when you read Birthday Letters, it cost him a LOT.

The “62” he references in his letter to Lucas Myers above is, of course, the year his marriage to Plath broke up. Plath killed herself in February of 63. Brutal. Her problems pre-dated him, she had tried to commit suicide before, 10 years earlier. She obviously had problems. No one here is wholly to blame. It was a MESS. The “69” he references in the letter to Lucas is even more haunting to me. Assia Wevill, the woman who broke up the Hughes-Plath marriage (and, it seems, deliberately), bore him a child, and then, in a horrifying copycat act, killed herself AND their little girl in 1969. (Wrote a little bit about her here). I cannot imagine Hughes’ pain. What is extraordinary to me is that he was still able to work. He went on to have 30 more years of not only productivity but success, accolades. He was always good. But he just got better. But the price that this man paid … for an affair. I elaborated on that here, so I won’t go into it too much again. Obviously, Ted Hughes liked women who were a little bit crazy and intense. Lots of men like women who are a little bit crazy and intense, especially when they are young (as Hughes was at the time). But to paint him as some sort of cunning villain is, to me, the height of unfairness. Dude fucked up. Everyone fucks up. But to think he somehow WANTED Plath to kill herself, WANTED Assia to kill herself AND their daughter? Are you people cracked? He must have felt himself in a howling wilderness. And the backlash against him has been nonstop and continues to this day.

I haven’t read much critical response to Birthday Letters, actually. Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets, echoes some of my thoughts when he writes:

[The Birthday Letters] is a partial triumph, lacing in intimacy, a confession that must assert and reassert its sincerity, a candor that wants to be believed. At the root of the poems is love, of course, but also a complex set of angers that, in order to keep them under control, Hughes had to convey in a largely matter-of-fact prosody, writing against his cadential instincts. It is a fascinating experiment, a candor that is cold, calculated and only marginally vulnerable, the ultimate in his poetry of survival, counting the cost and discounting (obliquely) the lies that have grown around the story of two young poets and their marriage.

Each poem is addressed directly to Plath. He relives, in poem after poem, the events of their lives. He knows that people like me, the Plath fans, will recognize the events, because we have read about them in her poems/journals/letters. Their famous first meeting at the drunken St. Botolph’s Party when she bit his cheek. Their wedding on a rainy day 4 months later. The honeymoon in Spain. The sojourn in America and Plath’s debilitating writer’s block. But then, on a more minute level, he addresses her POEMS. Plath wrote a poem about seeing teenage girls hacking azaleas off a bush carelessly, and her response of rage frightened her – she wanted to tear them to bits. There is also a journal entry about the azaleas. Ted writes a poem about that event. It is his “side”. He uses titles that she used – so it’s like the poems themselves are talking to each other. This is shockingly intimate stuff. It could come off as unseemly, if you don’t like confessional stuff. But if you don’t like confessional stuff, then what are you doing reading Sylvia Plath in the first place? He knows that the Plath fans out there only know bits. We know of the honeymoon in Spain. We’ve seen Plath’s sketches in her journals of Spain. Hughes has a poem called “You Hated Spain”, which I thought was funny, and kind of endearing. It’s another filter, another angle. He knows his words will be scrutinized for self-pity or self-justification. He doesn’t care. This is a PRIVATE conversation that he is letting us listen in on. It is an act of exhibitionism (exhibitionists are often very shy people). Hughes’ poems were always gritty and down-to-earth and real. He was a guy who tromped around in the mud, bird-watching and animal-watching. That was his background. He was already on his way up the poetry ladder when he met Plath. He saw something in her. They met when she was on a Fulbright scholarship in Cambridge. It is interesting to read the poems about his impressions of her before he met her. He read a poem she wrote about “caryatids” and thought it arch, rather ridiculous. She was made fun of. The gleaming-haired American with the daunting precocious vocabulary. But he saw something in her. They had a passionate and immediate response to one another. There were no cooler heads to prevail. They were both broke poets, he was a notorious womanizer already, and she was a highly-strung suicidal girl who was experimenting recklessly with the “zipless fuck”, in an attempt to sever the ties with her puritanical mother. This was not a match made in heaven. But they were young, they were both poets, and they decided to make a go of it.

These letters are amazing to read. I remember when it came out, my friend Maria (married to my brother at the time, and mother of my wonderful nephew Cashel) and I had a get-together at their place in Brooklyn. She is a Plath obsessive on the level I am. She understands the “pink wool dress” level of knowledge. We sat on her couch and spread out around us Plath’s letters, journals, and collected poems, and read through Hughes’ book, poem by poem, cross-referencing. Yes, an insane thing to do. But it was thrilling. This may seem ghoulish, and perhaps it was, but these people matter to us. Their work matters to us.

An extraordinary and courageous work of confession, Hughes’ Birthday Letters is angry at times, very angry – at her, for denying their children a mother, at her acolytes who want to own the memory of Plath, and also – at those who hurt Plath while she was alive. He has a vicious poem about Marianne Moore, and her condescension to Plath when they met for the first time. He does not forgive. He does not forgive those who made fun of the fragile intense girl who wowed him completely by declaring Chaucer to a field of cows as the two of them floated by in a rowboat. He fell in love with her then.

I would not suggest Birthday Letters as the starting-point for those who want to familiarize themselves with Ted Hughes’s work. This is for the initiated only. Go back and read Wodwo, Crow, to see what the fuss was about with Hughes. His milieu is nature. He is not a domestic confessional poet. But the poems in Birthday Letters have an urgency, a naked vulnerability, not present in the rest of his work. He allows everything to be present. He is open about his need to be a caretaker. He is also open about his ignorance of how deep her issues went. He was blind, in many ways. He thought his mere presence could heal her. I think this is the case with a lot of people who fall in love. Men, in particular, especially those men who like to fix things. This is not a criticism. Men who like to fix things are a blessing. I come from a family full of such men. I have said before that you have to be careful what you say to the O’Malley Men, because if you say, innocently, “Shit, I lost my gloves”, they very well may Fed-Ex you some gloves that very minute. It is a beautiful quality. Hughes had it in spades. But her death-wish was too deep for him to touch. It pre-dated him. She yearned for it. He didn’t recognize the signs until it was too late. He was a young man, after all.

I feel for the guy, reading this volume. There were poems here that made me cry.

It’s shocking stuff, but I suppose only shocking if you follow the Plath Universe, and if you follow how Hughes has been handled and derided. On the flip side, his sister Olwyn is a nasty piece of work, and Plath biographers tell horrible stories about having to deal with her. (Janet Malcolm wrote an entire book about “writing about Sylvia Plath”, and having to deal with the Hughes’ – it’s called The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes). As a Plath fan, it did grate that honest biographies could not be written because Olwyn Hughes – who was such a snotty BITCH to Plath during life – put the kibosh on the project. Outrageous. “No, no, you can’t say that about Plath – what would her children think? no, no, you can’t speculate that she may have had lesbian fantasies – nope” – that’s a real example. Excuse me, Olwyn, but who the hell are you? Don’t you think you might have a little bit too much personally riding on this? It is a total conflict of interest. Plath is a public figure, a famous poet. To have her dead husband’s family control what we got to hear about her was not right. Very frustrating. I think Birthday Letters was Hughes’ opening salvo in correcting that situation. Olwyn Hughes could not tell HIM that he “couldn’t say that”.

Here is one of the Cambridge poems. This dynamic is something that Plath did not really reveal in her work, her letters, her journal. Perhaps she was unaware of how much she was made fun of and hated. Or perhaps her behavior at Cambridge was a sort of “Fuck off, haters” performance-piece. She was highly sensitive and very very Type-A ambitious. She had been a star at her high school, a star at Smith – one of the best and brightest. But she plummeted to the bottom of the pecking order in the more rough-and-rowdy poet’s atmosphere in Cambridge, not to mention the fact that she was a girl, and there was plenty of misogyny floating around.

Hughes saw it all and he’s still pissed.

God Help the Wolf after Whom the Dogs Do Not Bark

There you met it – the mystery of hatred.
After your billions of years in anonymous matter
That was where you were found – and promptly hated.
You tried your utmost to reach and touch those people
With gifts of yourself –
Just like your first words as a toddler
When you rushed at every visitor to the house
Clasping their legs and crying: ‘I love you! I love you!’
Just as you had danced for your father
In his home of anger – gifts of your life
To sweeten his slow death and mix yourself in it
Where he lay propped on the couch,
To sugar the bitterness of his raging death.

You searched for yourself to go on giving it
As if after the nightfall of his going
You danced on in the dark house,
Eight years old, in your tinsel.

Searching for yourself, in the dark, as you danced,
Floundering a little, crying softly,
Like somebody searching for somebody drowning
In dark water
Listening for them – in panic at losing
Those listening seconds from your searching –
Then dancing wilder in the darkness.

The colleges lifted their heads. It did seem
You disturbed something just perfected
That they were holding carefully, all of a piece,
Till the glue dried. And as if
Reporting some felony to the police
They let you know that you were not John Donne.
You no longer care. Did you save their names?
But then they let you know, day by day,
Their contempt for everything you attempted,
Took pains to inject their bile, as for your health,
Into your morning coffee. Even signed
Their homeopathic letters,
Envelopes full of carefully broken glass
To lodge behind your eyes so you would see

Nobody wanted your dance,
Nobody wanted your strange glitter – your floundering
Drowning life and your effort to save yourself,
Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil,
Looking for something to give –
Whatever you found
They bombarded with splinters,
Derision, mud – the mystery of that hatred.