Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  The 1979 trade printing of Moortown once again carried the dedication ‘To the memory of JACK ORCHARD’. Earlier that same year, Ted had published another collection with an equally telling dedication: ‘Poems in memory of Edith Farrar’.36 First father-in-law overtly remembered and memorialised, then mother. How long before it would be wife?

  21

  The Arraignment

  One may as well begin with the book that Ted was reading in proof on the day when, for the first time since he had formally identified Sylvia’s body in the morgue, he returned to University College Hospital to see the dying Sue Alliston. Published by Faber and Faber, The Art of Sylvia Plath reprinted the reviews of Ariel by Alvarez, Rosenthal and Steiner, together with a mix of critical essays, memoirs by acquaintances, an overview of the state of Plath’s reputation, and a piece by Ted called ‘Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath’s Poems’. This was his first substantial published essay on her work. It is where he wrote about ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ in terms of inner ‘suffering and decision’. Implicitly, this is an acknowledgement that his own poetry – Crow in particular – was made out of his own inner torment.

  The Art of Sylvia Plath went into print in January 1970. That same year, a rather more high-profile book appeared from the Viking Press in New York: Sisterhood is Powerful, subtitled An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement. That movement was in full stride. This was the era of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, of the burning of bras and the march to take back the night. The editor of Sisterhood is Powerful was Robin Morgan, who had been a leading figure in the campaign to disrupt the annual Miss America beauty pageant. She had written a ten-point protest called ‘No More Miss America’, point one being ‘We Protest: The Degrading Mindless-Boob-Girlie Symbol’.1 It was in 1970 that the movement came to prominence in Britain when the Miss World contest at the Royal Albert Hall was heckled by ‘Women’s Libbers’ holding up placards, blowing whistles, and throwing smoke, stink and ink bombs on to the stage.

  In Sisterhood is Powerful, Morgan coined the term ‘herstory’ to replace ‘history’. The contents of the anthology included polemical essays with titles such as ‘The invisible woman: psychological and sexual repression’, ‘Madison Avenue brainwashing: the facts’, ‘The politics of orgasm’, ‘Unfinished business: birth control and women’s liberation’, ‘Sexual politics (in literature)’, ‘Double jeopardy: to be Black and female’, ‘Institutionalized oppression vs. the female’, ‘The politics of housework’, ‘The feminists vs. the institution of marriage’ and ‘Women against Daddy’. A few poems were included, among them one called ‘Song of the fucked duck’. And sandwiched between an essay on the menopause and the SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) manifesto was Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘The Jailor’. If there was a single moment when Sylvia Plath was transformed from Fifties girl who loved lipstick and baking and Mademoiselle into icon of the oppressed woman brought to the edge and beyond by domestic drudgery, motherhood and male infidelity, but redeemed by the power of her poetic voice, this was it. Suddenly it became somehow symbolic that she had taken her own life in the year when the old myths about housewifery and a woman’s place were exploded by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. For thousands of women, the Ariel poems became a venting of rage at, and a song of liberation from, ‘The smog of cooking, the smog of hell’.2

  This vision of her was compounded by Alvarez’s account in The Savage God, in which he quoted from her note for a BBC reading that was never broadcast, where she spoke of writing the Ariel poems ‘at about four in the morning – that still blue, almost eternal hour before the baby’s cry, before the glassy music of the milkman, settling his bottles’.3 The anti-Hughes backlash, stirred by images such as this, was beginning in earnest, even as he was continuing his curatorial work, preparing further selections of Sylvia’s poems for publication under the titles Crossing the Water and Winter Trees. The first of these he described as a collection of transitional poems written between The Colossus and Ariel, the second as late poems written around the same time as those included in his text of Ariel. Winter Trees, he explained in an essay in the Observer, brought into print ‘all but about six of the Ariel and after poems that were not in Ariel’.4 He also gave Sylvia the private-press treatment at this time. Nineteen-seventy-one was the inaugural year of Olwyn’s Rainbow Press, and two of its first four publications were Crystal Gazer (twenty-three Plath poems previously unpublished in book form) and Lyonnesse (a further twenty-one of Sylvia’s poems). Each gave an initial high-price, finely bound, limited-circulation outing to poems that were published in trade form soon afterwards, a pattern that Ted and Olwyn would also use for the Rainbow Press fine editions of his own poems.5

  On a rainy New York day in June 1972, Robin Morgan received a telephone call from her editor at Random House. She had just corrected the proofs of a volume of her verse called Monster. But now, she was told, the lawyers were going to have a look at one of the poems. Entitled ‘Arraignment’, it began as follows:

  I accuse

  Ted Hughes

  of what the entire British and American

  literary and critical establishment

  has been at great lengths to deny

  (without ever saying it in so many words, of course):

  the murder of Sylvia Plath.

  Aside from the catchy opening rhyme, the language of the poem is prosaic. The content is anything but. The charge sheet is recited: ‘mind-rape’, ‘body-rape’, sexual unfaithfulness, the ‘abduction and brainwashing’ of Frieda and Nick, plagiarism of Plath’s imagery, suppression of her last journals, financial exploitation by way of editing the poems, writing bad poetry himself, and, ultimately, not just metaphorical but real murder: ‘if he’s killed one wife, / he’s killed two’. Morgan then names Assia (misspelling her married surname and incorrectly asserting that she was the woman in Plath’s poem ‘Lesbos’). She also names Shura and reveals that Assia took her with her. Playing on Assia’s Jewishness and Sylvia’s allusions to the Holocaust, made notorious by George Steiner’s review of Ariel, she describes Ted as a ‘one-man gynocidal movement’. She arraigns the male critical establishment, naming Alvarez, Steiner and Lowell. They are charged with aiding and abetting Hughes the ‘legal executor’ (a clever pun), with engaging in a conspiracy to celebrate Plath’s genius while patronising her madness, diluting her rage and suppressing her (alleged) feminist politics. Robin Morgan then imagines a group of Hughes’s female fans knocking at his door, liberating Frieda and Nick, cutting off his penis, stuffing it in his mouth, sewing his ‘poetasting lips’ around it and blowing out his brains. Meanwhile, the poems ends, ‘Hughes, sue me.’6

  Arthur Abelman, consulting counsel for Random House, feared that Ted might do just that. But could it be libel if the accusations were true, responded Morgan? And what about freedom of speech? Her female editor, Hilary Maddux, came under pressure from James Silberman, Random House’s editor-in-chief. Did Morgan really wish to risk being injuncted, or poet and publisher being sued, just for the sake of one poem? Morgan brought in her own female attorney, Emily Goodman, who pointed out that the accusation of rape was surely not libellous since marital rape was not a crime (feminist campaigners were, of course, arguing that it should be). Morgan held firm over the summer. The poem was central to the politics of the book; if it were suppressed, she would withdraw the entire collection. A compromise was reached: a revised version would be included. Fifteen different attempts were made in the course of the summer. Eventually, in November, Monster appeared in print. ‘How can / I accuse / Ted Hughes’, it now began, before acknowledging that the accusation of rape ‘could be conceived as metaphor, / and besides, it is permissible by law for a man to rape his wife, in body and in mind’. The story of Assia remains, as does the arraignment of Alvarez, Steiner and Lowell. At the close, ‘Hughes, sue me’ becomes a less brazen but still fierce (and intrusive) provocation: ‘Hughes / has married
again.’7

  From Ted’s point of view, even the revised version was actionable. But to sue in America would have been high risk. A lawsuit would not only cost a fortune; it would also draw massive attention to what might otherwise turn out to be a small-print-run volume of imperfect verse. Besides, anything that could be perceived as an attack on the First Amendment right of free speech would damage his reputation still further. He would stand a much better chance in Britain, where the libel law was stricter. And this was the place that mattered, the home of his family, his friends and his literary reputation. An agreement was reached with Random House: if the book were not distributed in Britain and the Commonwealth, he would not sue in the United States. However, cyclostyled or cheaply printed samizdat editions (‘pirated’ with the author’s permission) began appearing in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Some of them included both versions of ‘Arraignment’. In November 1973, an ‘English Feminist Edition’, complete with images of Sylvia and her grave, appeared in women’s centres and counter-culture bookshops, at considerable legal risk. Ted did not dignify or publicise it with a court action. But from this point on, he would be a marked man. Even some of his friends found themselves conflicted: Doris Lessing, revered in the women’s movement as author of The Golden Notebook, wrote enigmatically that ‘Since a great deal of effort has gone into trying to keep the Hughes scandals out of the limelight, it is a shame that Morgan’s poem has provoked such emotional reaction.’8

  Unsurprisingly, given Morgan’s prominence in the movement, the poem made a considerable stir in feminist circles. Ted’s hope that it might not be noticed proved vain: Monster sold 30,000 copies within six months of publication, a remarkable figure for a first volume of verse. Morgan’s public readings played to packed houses across America. The Hughes name was vilified. Plath was turned into a martyr of a movement of which she was not really a part.

  Ted was now in an impossible position. His inner voice was telling him that, having confronted Sylvia’s death indirectly and mythically in Crow, his next poetic move should have been to face it openly in confessional and elegiac mode. Only then could his verse progress beyond the easy pieces of the Moortown diary poems and Season Songs. But to release his version of the story of his marriage would now inevitably look like a response to the arraignment, a laying of his defence before the court of public opinion. The voice of the defendant, however dignified, would only give the oxygen of publicity to the less restrained tones of the female prosecutors. Above all, he wanted to protect the feelings and the privacy of his wife and his children. He imposed upon himself a vow of silence that would endure for more than two decades: no published poems about Sylvia (unless sufficiently oblique to go under the radar of biographical reading). At the same time, he remained determined to honour Sylvia’s legacy by continuing to curate her work and her posthumous reputation with all the care that he could muster.

  Family mattered to Ted more than anything else other than writing. He wanted to be a good son as well as a good father. He worried about his own father, even as he was exasperated by him. He greatly admired the strength and the farming skills of his father-in-law. But he also had to contend with his first mother-in-law. Aurelia was bitterly hurt by the American publication of The Bell Jar in 1971. For the inside story of Sylvia’s suicide attempt in the crawl space below the family home to have been shared with her friends and family, let alone with the media and the wider public, added deep insult to the injury of such poems as ‘Daddy’ and ‘Medusa’. Soon after the novel’s publication Aurelia had a heart attack.

  During her convalescence, she made a proposal to Ted. There was clearly a huge appetite for Sylvia’s work, so what about a collection of her letters? Sylvia was such a wonderful letter-writer, and so many of her letters home were full of joy. Would this not balance out The Bell Jar and create a more rounded picture? Aurelia’s thinking, of course, was that to reveal Sylvia’s openness and enthusiasm and eagerness to confide in her mother would shine a much more favourable light on the mother–daughter relationship. She set about gathering all the letters she could find and writing an interlinking commentary. The book would be like the ‘life and letters’ volumes with which great writers had been immortalised in Victorian times. She worked for two years, eventually producing a thousand pages of material, enough to fill two volumes.

  In the summer of 1974 Ted Hughes lived a double life as farmer in collaboration with his father-in-law and literary editor in collaboration with his ex-mother-in-law. Three American women came to Court Green for extended visits. First there was Judith Kroll, who had recently completed a doctoral thesis on Plath, which Ted thought was full of amazing intuitions. He approved of Kroll’s work not least because her argument was grounded in literary sources more than biographical events. In particular, the thesis suggested that Plath used psychoanalytical and mythological theories in order to create a controlling myth that underlay her poetry. Beginning from Sylvia’s senior thesis at Smith on the figure of the ‘double’ in Dostoevsky, Kroll argued that her interior life was shaped by such sources as James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, which had been so important to T. S. Eliot and the first generation of modernists and which introduced her to the figure of the Fisher King and the idea of a cycle of death, rebirth and transcendence.

  Even more attractively from Ted’s point of view, Kroll suggested that one of the keys to Plath’s personal mythology was Graves’s The White Goddess – to which he had introduced her. Furthermore, Kroll astutely perceived that both Ted and Sylvia had read Carl Gustav Jung and that another key to their shared poetic vision was the Jungian idea of the true inner self projecting its wound on to a false self embodied in an external hate figure:

  The actual process of individuation – the conscious coming-to-terms with one’s inner centre (psychic nucleus) or Self – generally begins with a wounding of personality, and the suffering that accompanies it. This initial shock amounts to a sort of call, although it is often not recognised as such. On the contrary, the ego feels hampered in its will or desire and usually projects the obstruction onto something external. That is, the ego accuses God, the economic situation, or the boss, or the marriage partner of being responsible for whatever is obstructing it.9

  The notion that the oppressive male figures in Sylvia’s poetry were not so much Otto Plath and Ted Hughes as mythic archetypes, and that the speaker of her poems was more White Goddess than Aurelia Plath’s daughter, promised to swing interpretation away from the biographical line that had been created by the influential early reviews of Ariel and above all by The Bell Jar. On the basis of Judith Kroll’s doctoral dissertation, Ted and Olwyn had decided that she was the right person to help with the daunting task of preparing a scholarly edition of Sylvia’s complete poems.

  She stayed for several weeks. Ted discussed Plath’s work in detail with her, showed her books that he and Sylvia had shared and even seems to have given her information, presumably derived from the lost last journal, that there was some kind of religious dimension to the crisis in the final weeks of her life.10 And they started work on Sylvia’s manuscript drafts, beginning by seeking to put all her surviving poems in chronological order, a task upon which – as was clear from his contribution to The Art of Sylvia Plath – Ted had been engaged for many years. In time, though, it became clear that Kroll’s strong suit was critical interpretation, not the minutiae of textual bibliography and the investigation of manuscript drafts. Ted completed his work on the collected poems alone.

  The second visitor in the summer of 1974 was Fran McCullough, who was preparing Aurelia’s edition of the letters for Harper and Row in New York. Ted proposed various cuts, some in the interest of economy, others in that of privacy. McCullough relished her time at Court Green. Ted did not. He wrote in his journal of her paleness and ‘monotone stillness’, unflatteringly seeing in her ‘Something resembling Sylvia as a zombie’.11 After her departure, Ted continued wrangling with both her and Au
relia about what should and what should not be included. The process took a full further year. In January 1975, for example, Ted sent Aurelia one of many long lists of ‘Notes for final cuts to letters’.

  This document survives. Even as it proposed substantial cuts, it provided all sorts of fascinating biographical material not available elsewhere. Ted mentioned in passing that the true nature of his marriage to Sylvia would be revealed only ‘when somebody produced her journals of the time and mine’ – ‘That could well be a long time coming,’ he adds, but it is intriguing to overhear him mentioning that he kept a journal. Again, he revealed what she was reading at the time of her death: she was halfway through a re-reading of A. E. Ellis’s The Rack, an extremely depressing book about the suicide of a young man in a tuberculosis sanatorium. Ted did not mention that it was published by Heinemann and edited by James Michie, who was also the in-house editor responsible for The Colossus and The Bell Jar. He went on to disagree with many of Aurelia’s interpretations. ‘Next point: “renouncing the subservient female role” sounds strange to me. One thing she never was, as I believe you know, was subservient.’ Sylvia would never have allowed her cookery and homemaking to be described as ‘subservient’: ‘She was “Laurentian” [sic], not “woman’s lib”.’ And what on earth was this about her drying the dinner plates with her own ‘dense hair’? ‘As you probably remember, the washing up in our establishment was generally done by me, until maybe the last month of two.’12