The Art of Not Falling Apart

by Christina Patterson

  Death – and the poem – is talking about Ted Hughes. He died in 1998, just before the publication of his masterpiece, Birthday Letters, which talks about his first meeting with Sylvia Plath. In 1963, Sylvia Plath laid out bread and milk on a table in her children’s bedroom, sealed the door of the kitchen and then placed her head on a folded cloth in the oven, switched on the taps and waited to die. When she did this, she unleashed a myth and a legacy. The myth was of a fragile creature crushed by a monstrous man. The legacy was an obsession with Plath and her death that seems to have made her the queen of suicide and depression.

  The real legacy of Sylvia Plath is her poetry, which will last for as long as poetry is read. Anyone who thinks it’s all about misery and rage and ‘skin / Bright as a Nazi lampshade’ or ‘The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you’ has obviously chosen to ignore the love that ‘set you going like a fat gold watch’, the baby ‘Like a sprat in a pickle jug’, the tulips ‘opening like the mouth of some great African cat’. Plath’s poems do speak of rage and grief. But they also speak of love, joy, babies, poppies and potatoes.

  Plath’s other legacy, with Ted Hughes – who was, by the way, at least on the occasions I met him, an unusually kind and gentle man – is that baby ‘Like a sprat’, Frieda Hughes. It was Frieda, aged nearly three, and her one-year-old brother Nicholas, who were left in that flat with the milk and bread as their mother took her last few breaths. Frieda grew up in the shadow of her mother’s death, and of a myth that turned her parents into public property.

  ‘I tried in my own ways to accommodate what had happened around me,’ she told me, ‘because the interesting thing is, it sort of wasn’t done to me in that I wasn’t physically damaged. It was all psychological and almost as though what I felt was a by-product of everybody else’s pain.’ We were drinking coffee, and eating home-made cake, in the huge kitchen of her house in Wales. Staring out at us across the room were two white-faced scops owls, not in a cage. In a vast aviary outside, there were more owls. In the kitchen, there was a vivarium containing a royal python and a box of dead chicks. When Frieda Hughes says she loves the natural world, she isn’t joking.

  I’ve met Frieda a few times since that poetry reading in Ledbury. She invited me to the launch of her book of poems and paintings, Alternative Values, and afterwards agreed to talk to me about her experience of living in the shadow of depression, suicide and grief. By now, she pretty much has a PhD in grief. She has, in fact, trained as a bereavement counsellor. But what strikes you when you meet her is her almost electric energy and her passion for life.

  Frieda hardly ever talks about her parents, so I felt honoured when she said I could come to her house in Wales and that she would talk openly to me. ‘When I first came here,’ she said, ‘somebody dropped some potting mixture off and said, “You’re the daughter of that dead poet, aren’t you?” I just said, “Oh, put the potting mix over there.”’ Frieda has had plenty of practice in batting away unwanted questions. Some of her friends didn’t find out who her parents were until years after Frieda had been their friend. ‘A long time ago,’ she told me, ‘there was some conversation I was having with somebody and she said “so and so is studying Ted Hughes”, and I finally thought: if I don’t say something now, it’s going to be embarrassing later.’

  You can see why Frieda ended up spending seven years living in the Australian bush. It started, she told me, with a visit to her uncle in Melbourne and a friend in Perth. ‘I looked down from the aeroplane window,’ she said, ‘and for the first time in my whole life I felt like I was coming home.’ She moved there in 1991 and only came back to London when her father was diagnosed with cancer. It was just a few years before, when she was thirty-four, that she had finally acknowledged that she had to write poems. Writing poetry is hard. I have been too scared even to try. And when you’re the daughter of two of the finest poets of the twentieth century? That, you’d really have to call balls.

  ‘I started saying to myself,’ said Frieda, ‘that if I want to really be “me”, then the real “me” is the daughter of Plath and Hughes, so I have to accept that. Once I’d stopped rejecting it, then it became a lot easier. It’s like saying I’ve got three legs. If I just accept the fact that I’ve got a third leg, I’ll stop falling over it.’

  At the end of Alternative Values, she writes for the first time about the memory loss that hit her when her mother died. In the first poem, ‘Departure’, she remembers her grandmother’s visit to the family home in Devon, and her attempt to get Sylvia and her children to leave. ‘Unable’, she writes, ‘to put either parent back / Into the holes from which / They tore one another, / It was as if I went to sleep while still walking.’ In the next poem, ‘Separation’, she asks: ‘Did I watch my mother’s face / As she left us bread and milk before / She shut us in and Sellotaped our door?’ She can never know the answer. ‘I had’, she says, ‘already let myself slip through the gap / Between the floorboards of my consciousness.’

  In the next poem, ‘Waking Nameless’, she remembers waking ‘in the back of a strange car / In the middle of the night’, but ‘left without history / Or any memory of daylight, / Wiped clean like a beach’. In the front seats were Ted Hughes and his sister, Olwyn. Frieda was on the back seat with Nicholas. She didn’t know who the grown-ups were. I felt a wave of goose flesh when she told me this. Did she, I asked, really not recognize her father? ‘I knew I had parents,’ she said, ‘but I could not remember what they looked like. I never got that memory back. So I thought: what I’m going to do is, I’m going to sit and wait for something to happen. I waited,’ she said, and now I was fighting tears, ‘to be collected by my parents. But they never came.’

  For years, she thought she was adopted. It was only when she was fourteen, and read the poet and critic Al Alvarez’s famous piece about Plath, which mentioned both Nicholas and Frieda, that she finally accepted that she was indeed the daughter of Plath and Hughes. She had been told that her mother had died of pneumonia, but found out, through a classmate when she was eleven, just before Alvarez’s piece was first published, that she had committed suicide. Hughes later asked Frieda if she was angry with her mother. He knew that anger is often a big part of what people feel when someone takes their own life and rips a hole in the universe of the people they leave behind. No, said Frieda. She didn’t. She said her mother’s pain must have been unbearable for her to want to die.

  ‘But by then,’ she said, and for a moment she looked out of the window, ‘it was too late to undo those feelings that I didn’t belong. I used to stand on the sidelines. The interesting thing is, that sensation informed my whole life. One of the things I got from that as a child was being very conscious and very watchful and thinking: I don’t know anything, I need more information, but what can I do with what I do know and what I have got?’

  Frieda smiled. She has a dazzling smile. ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘how can I make things better? But also “make” is a very important word. I’ll make almost anything, if the components will sit still long enough. Creating something positive and new out of raw materials – even if those materials are simply experiences – is my challenge. I was thrown on to my own resources. It was literally sink or swim, in the psychological and emotional sense. But it also meant that I was sort of permanently unsupported, because there was no sense of feeling of genuinely belonging anywhere, or to anyone.’

  No wonder Frieda Hughes wanted to create a world of her own. No wonder she drew pictures of that world and later felt she could not live if she could not paint. And the poems came, even though she knew that with the poems would come pain. She didn’t read her parents’ poems until she was in her thirties, but still the poems came. ‘Poems,’ she said, ‘had leaked and I’d shoved them in a box and stuffed them away. They were in boxes all over the house, but I hadn’t admitted that I would write poetry, because I had made the decision not to, and it was a very conscious decision, that I would not follow my parents. And the idea of g
etting my head kicked in by the critics was just too painful to contemplate.’

  She tried not to write, but she couldn’t not write. In the end, she showed her poems to her father, who thought some of them were very good indeed. (When she told him that his poems were on her school syllabus, he offered to help her, but she thought his own interpretation of his poems could well lead her to fail her exams.) Her father was right. Her poems are powerful. They are not Sylvia Plath, but there was only one Sylvia Plath. ‘The thing was,’ said Frieda, ‘if I’m lying on my death bed, who would I have pleased by not living how I need to live, in order to have a happy, or reasonable, or successful, or productive, or even a completely non-successful, but, you know, quite muddling-along-in-an-OK-fashion life? It’s up to us how we get from A to B to C to D. I might never light up the sky. None of us might. It doesn’t matter. What matters is: did you do the best you could with the tools you had at hand?’

  The body speaks

  When Frieda Hughes was thirty-four, her body packed up. ‘I got this noise in my head,’ she told me, ‘it was like a “ping” and something breaking and after that “ping” I couldn’t move my limbs. It was as though somebody had snapped the string that made everything work. After that, it was like being a cripple. I thought I was dying.’

  Frieda’s day was cut to four hours, in twenty-minute stretches. ‘The lights went out,’ she said. ‘When I was conscious, I couldn’t read.’ At the time, she was writing children’s books, but she couldn’t even read back what she wrote. ‘I looked at the letters on the page,’ she told me, ‘and they didn’t make sense. I had thirty-six blood tests. They tested me for everything. They had given me a psychiatric test. They’d done brain scans. Then they came up with the magic bullet. They said, “You’ve got chronic fatigue.” I said, “Great, give me a pill!” And the doctor said, “You really don’t get it, do you? There is no cure.”’

  Something similar happened to me when I was twenty-five. It wasn’t as dramatic, but it was quite dramatic enough for me. I had just got back from a holiday when I felt a funny pain in my wrist. A few days later, I had a pain in my ankle. I wondered how I could have sprained it without falling over, but I laughed it off as I limped around. Within a few days, the pain had spread to both ankles and both knees. Within a week, I couldn’t walk more than a few yards without wanting to scream.

  They did tests. They did loads of tests, but they didn’t find anything wrong. I took painkillers. They didn’t work. I had steroid injections. They didn’t work. I saw a naturopath, which didn’t work, had acupuncture, which didn’t work, took medication they give people with arthritis, which also didn’t work. I had walking sticks, which didn’t help much. I would use them to hop down the alleyway from the bus stop to the office. I had to get a minicab to the bus stop in the morning. I couldn’t go out for a sandwich. A colleague would bring one back and I would eat it after everyone else had had their lunch. In the evening, kind Brian from sales would drop me off on his way home.

  I was working at Faber & Faber. It had been my dream to work at the place where T. S. Eliot had worked, the place that published him, and Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes and Ezra Pound. It had not been my dream to be stuck at a desk I couldn’t leave, find myself almost crawling to the loo and fighting to save my tears till I got home.

  I had left Faber and was still racked with pain when a receptionist told me over the phone that blood tests I’d had a year earlier had been found. I had, she told me, got lupus. By this stage, I knew a bit about lupus. I knew it was an autoimmune disease where the body attacks its own tissue. I knew it could give you a rash on your face that made you look like a wolf. I remembered from my Latin A level that lupus was the Latin word for wolf. I knew it could attack your organs: your kidneys, your heart, your brain. And I knew that there wasn’t a cure.

  More than twenty years on, I can tell you that I don’t look much like a wolf. My organs, as far as I know, are fine. I did hear recently that people who drink more than about a thimble of wine a week are being sent off to have tests on their liver, but I have so far managed not to have a test on mine. I can walk. I can talk. Well, most of the time I can walk. I had two years when I couldn’t really walk, or at least not without serious pain. And that first time I had the crippling pain in my knees and legs was by far the longest, but it wasn’t the last.

  So I shouldn’t have been surprised. I really shouldn’t have been surprised when I went for a run a few months after I lost my job and found I had a pain in my left foot. I wasn’t sure how I could have hurt it without falling over, or tripping up. I’m never sure how I could have hurt it without falling over, or tripping up. After a few days, I went to the minor injuries unit at my local hospital. I had an X-ray and they found nothing. By now, the pain was in both knees. It took me a while to realize that the pain in my foot had started just after I’d had a phone call saying that I’d failed to get a second interview for a part-time role I wanted a lot.

  When I’m upset, it’s my body that cracks up. I wish it didn’t, but it does. Freud would have loved me. He’d have looked at my medical history, slapped his thigh and yelled that he was right. The body, he would say, speaks when we can’t.

  For me, it started with spots. Spots are funny. In books, films and TV programmes, spots are funny, but spots aren’t all that funny when you’re the one who has them and you feel so ugly you just want to hide.

  Mine started with a sprinkling of tiny bumps on my face when I was thirteen. My forehead, I realized one day when I was washing my face, felt like an avocado. My parents were proud of our new avocado bathroom suite, but I didn’t feel proud of my new avocado face. Soon my cheeks and chin were peppered with tiny pink dots. I did everything Jackie magazine told me to do: cleansed and toned twice a day and plastered the dots in Clearasil, several shades darker than my skin. From the age of fourteen, I was on antibiotics all the time. They didn’t clear up the spots, but I thought if I came off them, they’d get worse.

  The spots were bad enough, but what happened on my face when I was twenty-three was more like an Old Testament plague. Now my face was covered in deep red lumps. They throbbed for days, and then turned into giant pustules. I couldn’t look in a mirror without feeling sick.

  My mother paid for me to see a dermatologist, who prescribed a drug called Roaccutane. He said my acne would get better, but first it might get worse. It certainly did get worse. Soon, I had red throbbing lumps in places I didn’t know you could get spots. I had them on my eyebrows, on the skin between the eyes and the hairline, and behind my ears. I had them on my chest, like a rash that was spreading down my body, and on my back. When I looked in a mirror, I couldn’t see my eyes, or nose, or mouth. All I could see was spots. I looked in mirrors all the time, and also in car wing mirrors, saucepan lids and spoons. Every time I looked, I hoped that what I would see wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. When I saw the face staring back at me, it was.

  At a hospital for skin diseases, the consultant invited a group of students in to stare. He prescribed a treatment called PUVA. This meant I had to go to hospital every day, and be blasted with a special kind of ultraviolet light in a metal box like an upright coffin. After a few weeks, the light had burnt off most of the spots, and several layers of skin. It didn’t burn off the scars.

  I wish I could say that that was the end of it, but up until my mid-thirties, I nearly always had spots on my chin. I was pretty good at covering them up, but I never wanted to be seen without make-up, or in bright light. There were times when my skin seemed relatively calm. At other times, it would explode in angry, weeping, pulsing lumps. My skin would explode, in fact, in what seemed to be a kind of rage.

  Over the years, I tried every drug the dermatologists could find. I tried a cream they use on lepers. I did weird diets, where you have to give up everything you like. I saw a homeopathic doctor, who gave me little white pills, which brought me out in boils the size of coins. I saw a Chinese herbalist, who made me boil up vats of twigs and herbs
and I tried not to retch as I forced the liquid down. I had a facial with a woman who used a metal cylinder covered in spikes. I saw a woman who did something called ‘body work’ and told me to imagine myself with clear skin. I did imagine myself with clear skin. The spots carried on coming anyway.

  I bought books with titles like The Acne Cure and Super Skin. I had a book called Acne: Advice on Clearing Your Skin. ‘Acne’, it said, in the first line of the first chapter, ‘is a skin disease that we still need to research.’ It is, in other words, a disease that doesn’t have a cure. Some skin conditions don’t. ‘Why did I marry so young?’ said the novelist John Updike, who had psoriasis from the age of six. ‘Because, having once found a comely female who forgave me my skin, I dared not risk losing her and trying to find another.’ He wrote this in a book called Self-Consciousness, in an essay called ‘At War with My Skin’.

  Skin is the membrane that contains our flesh, our blood, our hearts, our brains. It also contains our hopes, our dreams and our disappointments. Skin is what separates us from the world. No wonder it can feel like a battleground. It can feel like a secret battleground, in a war that fills you with shame. Sarah, from my yoga class, knows all about that war. ‘I’ve had skin problems since I was four,’ she told me. ‘It started with eczema and flaky, painful skin behind my ears. I’ve seen dermatologists over the years and there doesn’t really seem to be anything they can do, apart from prescribe steroid cream. I really don’t know what the cause is, and I really don’t know what the answer is. It’s something I have to live with.’

  When she said this, I actually felt grateful for my skin. My acne did go in the end, but some skin conditions don’t. ‘It’s like having permanent toothache,’ she said. ‘A dull ache. It’s always there. It can be quite debilitating and depressing, because you just think “why can’t I be normal?” It’s disruptive, it’s tiring, it keeps you awake at night.’ It has, she told me, affected her love life. Most of us aren’t confident that the best way to build desire is to rip off your clothes and reveal a nasty pink rash. She has no doubt that what happens on her skin is often related to what happens in her life. ‘It doesn’t flare up immediately,’ she said, ‘but even when you think you’re fine, if you’ve had a really severe emotional setback, it takes its toll somewhere.’