With a few poignant and persuasive sentences, Alvarez set the terms of Plath’s posthumous reputation: “In the last few months she had been writing continuously almost as though possessed.” He called her a “genius” and claimed that her recent poetry “represents a totally new breakthrough in modern verse, and establishes her, I think, as the most gifted woman poet of our time….The loss to literature is inestimable.” Although Hughes would later publish and promote Plath’s poetry, he was too shell-shocked in the days after Plath’s suicide to speak publicly about her death. As her estranged husband, his involvement with her poetic legacy would be complicated and controversial. Alvarez’s slate was clean—or so it seemed. He, too, of course, was haunted by guilt. He would later ponder his own role in Plath’s suicide, wondering “if all our rash chatter about art and risk and courage, and the way we turned rashness and despair into a literary principle, hadn’t egged her on.”6 Privately, he may have wondered if his romantic rejection of Plath had also played a part. But in those early days and weeks, it was Alvarez who rescued Plath from obscurity and who staked his reputation on hers. He would broadcast The Poetry of Sylvia Plath on the BBC in July 1963 and discuss her again on the BBC’s prestigious Third Programme the following year, whetting readers’ appetites for more.7 Alvarez’s Observer article helped create the conditions by which Plath achieved one of her deepest ambitions—a mass audience, best-sellerdom. The public became fascinated by the doomed genius. Who was this “fresh” “untortured” young mother staring back at them? What had gone wrong?
In early March 1963, the controller of the BBC Third Programme sent an internal memo to Douglas Cleverdon—who had taken Plath’s children to the zoo the day before she died—suggesting that they tone down their coverage of Sylvia Plath: it was not as if T. S. Eliot had died.8 But momentum was building, and negotiations proceeded quickly. In mid-March, David Machin asked Hughes about publishing another collection of Plath’s poetry. Heinemann also wanted to print four thousand more copies of The Bell Jar as a Book Club selection; a second Heinemann edition of the novel, under the name Victoria Lucas, was published in 1964 (though Hughes gave Heinemann permission to drop the pseudonym in March 1963).9 The pseudonym was finally dropped in 1966 when Faber and Faber republished the novel under Plath’s real name. Because Plath had died intestate, Hughes was her literary executor—a source of great bitterness to Aurelia.
Hughes began sending out Plath’s work, or what remained of it. He hinted that “so-called friends” had stolen many of Plath’s manuscripts in the weeks following her suicide.10 He may have destroyed her last novel, as Assia had wished, as well as her journals from 1960 to 62, though in 1981 Hughes told Alvarez that the journals had “walked, not too long ago.”11 Hughes himself gave mixed messages: he said publicly that he had destroyed Plath’s final 1963 journal to protect her children, though he later hinted to the critic Jacqueline Rose that it might still exist.
He was a better steward of Plath’s late poems, which began to appear in print in 1963. After Alvarez’s article, editors who had turned down Plath’s recent work began to reconsider. In April, Peter Davison published “The Arrival of the Bee Box” and “Wintering” in The Atlantic, while The London Magazine published the seven poems they had accepted before Plath’s death. In August, more major poems trickled into publication: “Fever 103°,” “Purdah,” and “Eavesdropper” in Poetry; seven, including “Elm” (“The Elm Speaks”) and “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” in The New Yorker. In October a slew of new poems appeared in Encounter and The Review, including “Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,” and “Ariel.”12 Hughes began negotiations with Faber and Faber in the fall of 1963 to publish Ariel. Plath had discussed the cover with Hughes before her death, telling him she wanted a red background with large black print. She had “played with” the idea of having the emblem of a Mongolian horseman riding into a sunrise, or of a rose, on the cover. (She told Hughes she had a distant Mongolian ancestor.)13 Plath’s legacy was now largely in the hands of Alvarez and Hughes, two of the most influential literary men in England. Only T. S. Eliot could have done more for her.
Plath’s new poems stunned and confused readers. When Donald Hall demurred in a 1963 review that some of them were too “shocking,” Hughes defended Plath. “What a feat! For a change, and at last, somebody’s written in blood. Whatever you say about them, you know they’re what every poet wishes he or she could do….When poems hit so hard, surely you ought to find reasons for their impact, not argue yourself out of your bruises.”14 Hughes wrote similarly to Keith Sagar about Ariel in 1981: “You suggest you find much of it a language of disintegration. I see it as footwork & dexterity—the honest (nakedness) to meet the matter on its own terms, & the brave will to master it—which she did.”15
The poems achieved exactly what both Plath and Hughes had worked for during the years of their marriage, and Hughes could not help but regard them with a certain propriety. In a letter to his old English teacher John Fisher, he wrote, “Nobody writes like that or ever has done. If any of it is thanks to me, as it may be a little bit, then some of it is thanks to you.”16 In October 1963, Robert Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Bishop—the two were then America’s most influential poets—of the poems’ force:
Have you read the posthumous poems by Sylvia Plath? A terrifying and stunning group has come out in the last Encounter. You probably know the story of her suicide. The poems are all about it. They seem as good to me as Emily Dickinson at the moment. Of course they are as extreme as one can bear, rather more so, but whatever wrecked her life somehow gave an edge, freedom and even control, to her poetry. There’s a lot of surrealism which relieves the heat of direct memory, touches me, and I’m pretty sure touches your quiet and humor. She is far better certainly than Sexton or Seidel, and almost makes one feel at first reading that almost all other poetry is about nothing. Still, it’s searingly extreme, a triumph by a hair, that one almost wished had never come about.17
Lowell had picked up on something essential in Plath’s work—its “surrealism”—but the word that would most often be used to describe these new poems was “confessional.” In death Plath would be repatriated. Critics, including Alvarez, would link her with fellow American “confessionals” like Lowell and Sexton, rather than the British husband with whom she had shared her life and work for six years. Alvarez’s admiration for Plath only increased with time. When Hughes sent him Plath’s Collected Poems in 1981, he wrote back, “It’s a wonderful book & confirms what I’ve always believed: she’s a major poet—by any standards of any age.”18 Alvarez came to feel that Plath’s poetry had stood the test of time much better than Hughes’s.19
In 1965, Hughes published Ariel with Faber and Faber. While he largely preserved the original order of Plath’s poems, he removed “The Rabbit Catcher,” “Thalidomide,” “Barren Woman,” “A Secret,” “The Jailer,” “The Detective,” “Magi,” “Lesbos,” “The Other,” “Stopped Dead,” “Purdah,” and “Amnesiac.” Most of these poems were personally damaging to him and Assia—though he did not cut “Daddy.” He also added thirteen poems that Plath had written, though not included in Ariel, in 1962–63, among them “Sheep in Fog,” “Balloons,” “Kindness,” “Words,” and “Edge.” Plath had ended Ariel with the hopeful poem “Wintering,” whose last word is “spring.” The last three poems Hughes chose for the first published edition of Ariel—“Contusion,” “Edge,” and “Words”—suggested, instead, depression and suicide. Because Hughes had omitted many of the fiery, taunting poems aimed squarely at him (Plath told Mrs. Prouty, for instance, that “Amnesiac” was about Ted: “The little toy wife— / Erased, sigh, sigh”), the tone of Hughes’s Ariel was bleaker than Plath’s original manuscript. Feminist critics such as Marjorie Perloff took note, and the decision would come to haunt him.
Ariel sold fifteen thousand copies in ten months. (The loose poems Plath had left on her desk, presumably the beginnings of a third book of poetry, would e
ventually be collected in her 1981 Collected Poems.) There was no mention of Plath’s suicide in the short biography that appeared on the book jacket. The 1966 U.S. Harper & Row edition, however, included a melodramatic introduction by Robert Lowell, who characterized Plath as Medea hurtling toward her own destruction, “playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder.”20 M. L. Rosenthal, the critic who coined the term “confessional poetry,” published a review of Ariel titled “Poets of the Dangerous Way,” in which he suggested that the extremities of the age were enough to kill a “sensitive” poet who was “brave enough to face it directly.”21 George Steiner wrote a now-famous review, “Dying Is an Art,” in which he wondered whether Plath had the right to appropriate the Holocaust in poems like “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus.” A 1966 Time magazine article, “The Blood Jet Is Poetry,” sealed the myth. “Daddy” appeared alongside an article about “a pretty young mother of two children…found in a London flat with her head in the oven and the gas jets wide open.”22 Sylvia Plath was soon a household name, and Ariel would go on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies.
Alvarez had planted the seeds of this myth in his Observer article with loaded phrases like “peculiar genius” and “possessed.” He would later characterize Plath as a “priestess emptied out by the rites of her cult.”23 In the 1970s, the British poet James Fenton pushed back against Alvarez’s “extremist” aesthetic:
He tells you, in the somberest notes,
If poets want to get their oats
The first step is to slit their throats,
The way to divide
The sheep of poetry from the goats
Is suicide.24
Other poets and critics, including even Rosenthal, began to deride this “extremism” in literary essays and reviews. But the public perception of Plath as witchy death-goddess had been born and would not soon die.
In 1971, The Bell Jar was published in America by Harper & Row under Plath’s real name. To date, the novel has sold almost four million copies; about 100,000 copies are sold each year in the U.S. It has become an American classic. In the 1970s, the women’s movement began to embrace Plath, whose poems and prose started to appear in McCall’s, Ms., Cosmopolitan, and Redbook as well as The New Yorker. Hughes felt that the movement had misunderstood Plath when they made her their “Patron Saint” and that she was being used as a pawn to suit political goals she would not have supported.25 Plath was, he said, “ ‘Laurentian,’ not ‘women’s lib.’ ”26 Gravesian muse, warrior saint, or avenging angel, Plath had become a cipher for competing visions of the woman artist. “The notion that she, S., can ever be anything but a mythological figure, adaptable to everybody’s metaphysics, has long passed,” wrote Hughes to Ruth Fainlight and Alan Sillitoe in the 1980s.27
Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Ted and Olwyn made life difficult for hopeful Plath biographers. Hughes detested the biographical genre. “But how can people who boast of their integrity have the effrontery to draw conclusions about the lives of people they never met—how can they float those assured statements on such an absolute lack of any sense of the truth!” he wrote the Sillitoes.28 His opinion hardly mattered to the protesters who began showing up at his readings. After the feminist poet Robin Morgan accused him in verse of Plath’s murder, he stopped going to America, which he called in a 1989 letter to Bill Merwin “enemy country,” and leaned on a circle of close, protective friends that included Daniel Huws, Luke Myers, Ruth Fainlight, Alan Sillitoe, the Macedos, Bill and Dido Merwin, Susan Schaefer, Seamus Heaney, and Doris Lessing.29
In 1976, Aurelia released Letters Home, a selection of Sylvia’s letters to her. Hughes, who held Plath’s copyright, had allowed her to do so to offset the indignities of The Bell Jar, which he still felt guilty about publishing in America. Plath scholars soon discovered that portions of many letters in which Plath expressed anger or complained of illness had been cut. The book seemed a betrayal, for it gave the impression of a cheerful young woman who had never known depression, much less attempted suicide. This was exactly Aurelia’s point—the world knew Sylvia Plath as a dark, cynical depressive “case,” and she wanted to show that her daughter was not Esther Greenwood.
Her efforts backfired, and Aurelia again became the woman who silenced Plath’s mercurial voice in death as she had in life. Ted later blamed himself for allowing Aurelia to reinvent “Sylvia as the ideal & angelic daughter” at the expense of her “diabolical side.” He had conspired to create this image in his “long defence of Aurelia’s feelings” as well as his children’s “image of their mother.” In doing so, he wrote Luke Myers, he had unwittingly “promoted the cult which interpreted my continued silence in the blazing martyr-light shed by Sylvia’s consecrated image. In which light I could only appear as a demon, the villain, the cause of all Sylvia’s pains.”30
Aurelia maintained that Ted had pressured her to make the cuts.31 She wrote to Miriam Baggett in 1974 that she submitted a full, uncensored one-thousand-page manuscript to the publishers. Although she knew it would be cut down substantially, she expressed frustration with the final product. “There are many cuts over which I sorrow, but I keep telling myself that I must remember I could have been forbidden to do the job at all.” She complained too of the endless hair-splitting over the identities of Sylvia’s friends and associates, and the editor’s constant fear of libel lawsuits. “The next book I write,” she told Miriam, “will be free of all censorship.”32 In fact, Aurelia, Ted, and the book’s editor, Frances McCullough, were collectively responsible for the cuts, but Aurelia bore the blame for the book’s shortcomings. When Ted allowed Sylvia’s abridged journals to be published in 1982, Aurelia again felt betrayed, this time for different reasons: “the entire contents of THE JOURNALS were a terrible shock to me,” she wrote to Ted’s wife Carol. “She kept one part of her ‘double’ experience completely private.”33
Ted felt increasingly haunted by Sylvia’s ghost, anxious about her growing fame and its effect on her children: “instead of letting go of the past and living for the future, you find your past in front of you. A monument, sitting on your head.”34 In 1969, he began writing secret poems to and about his dead wife. Some of them were intimate memories—picking daffodils, walks through Grantchester. Others blamed people and places for Sylvia’s death: Otto, Assia, Ruth Beuscher, Court Green itself. Still others registered Hughes’s discomfort with his own fixed place in Plath’s glare. “So here we sit in your mausoleum / While they swing their cameras across / So here we act you / Our lives displaced by your death.”35
After Assia’s suicide, he began to admit that he, too, struggled with, as he put it, “depressions.” “It has occurred to me that I am at bottom the gloomy one,” he wrote his brother Gerald in 1969. “People who live with me contract the gloom from me, but they don’t have the supports that I have to defend themselves from it.”36 His archived notebooks contain unpublished poems of self-admonishment:
Heart anchors in yesterday, maybe has sunk.
Why am I compelled to this same
Crime over and over like a ghost
Trying to expiate?
I have no eternity to wear out—
Just a few years.
Why can I not say: it was a mistake.
Before God, it was a mistake.
Yes, it cost a life. It was a mistake.
It cost two lives—three. It was a mistake.
Why go on slavishly leaving her
Leaving my happiness, which she is, she is.
Leaving her over and over. Going back
And leaving her weeping again, over and over.
It feels like bewilderment and it is.
It moves me like a puppet, and I am.
In this I have lost freedom.
I have lost power to dream, I am my dream.37
When Jane Anderson sued the Sylvia P
lath estate for libel in 1982—Anderson objected to the portrayal of Joan Gilling, based on herself, as a lesbian in the 1979 film adaptation of The Bell Jar—Hughes was deposed in Boston.38 The barrage of legal questions on the nature of fiction versus autobiography brought back memories of Plath writing The Bell Jar in 1961. These memories prompted poems, some of which Hughes wrote during the trial itself in Boston in 1987 and which he collected in a long sequence called “Trial.” The poems were full of ruminations about the psychological pressures he believed Plath tried to tame as she wrote her novel.
Publishing poems about his dead wife had once seemed “unthinkable” to him—“so raw, so vulnerable, so unprocessed.”39 The Oxford don Craig Raine initially dissuaded Hughes from publishing one of them, and Hughes responded that he might as well “burn the whole lot.”40 Raine convinced him not to burn them in 1997, and Hughes finally published many of these poems (though not those in the “Trial” sequence) as Birthday Letters in 1998, a few months before his death from cancer. By then, he had been poet laureate for fourteen years, and become friendly with Prince Charles; he was appointed a member of the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II in 1998. He had all the recognition Sylvia had ever hoped for him, but it was not until he published Birthday Letters that he began to feel unburdened by Sylvia’s and Assia’s suicides. “My high-minded principal [sic] was simply wrong—for my own psychological & physical health,” he wrote Keith Sagar in 1998. “It was stupid.”41 He felt a great sense of relief and wished that he had published the book sooner. “If only I could have got it off my back thirty years ago!” he told the poetry critic Michael Schmidt. “But then I was full of high-minded reasons not to. Getting sick made it all clear, finally.”42 As he wrote to his son Nicholas in 1998, since Plath’s suicide he had been “living on the wrong side of the glass door.
Red Comet Page 135
