Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  The notes also suggest that Sylvia was exaggerating when she talked of snowdrifts 20 feet deep in the winter of 1962. He recalls the occasion when he drove down from London and back in a day in order to stock her up with home-grown potatoes and apples and two strings of their onions: yes, it had been snowing, but there were thousands of cars on the road. He also mentioned that in London in her final weeks she was not as lonely as some of her letters home made out: he visited her every other night and several times during the day and sometimes spent two or three evenings in succession in her company. When she wasn’t seeing him, she was usually seeing somebody else.

  Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963, ‘selected and edited with commentary by Aurelia Schober Plath’, was finally published in late 1975. The following year, it was reviewed in the New York Review of Books by Ted’s Cambridge contemporary Karl Miller. His review essay, under the editorial title ‘Sylvia Plath’s Apotheosis’, treated the letters alongside Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, the book of Judith Kroll’s thesis, and a biography by Edward Butscher called Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness. Like many an NYRB review, Miller’s piece provoked some lively correspondence. A feminist writer called Mary Folliet had written a Morgan-influenced poem about Plath called ‘Ten Years Cold’. She complained that Miller had quoted, as an example of the sort of thing Ted now had to put up with, her line ‘Hughes has one more gassed out life on his mind.’13 Olwyn also weighed in. She made some remarks about ‘the lunatic fringe of Women’s Lib’, but what was really on her mind was the biography.

  She explained that in 1969 Ted had signed the agreement with Lois Ames that appointed her Sylvia’s official biographer. The contract stipulated delivery by 1975 and Ted had offered her exclusive assistance until 1977. Ames had been Ted’s third Sylvia-researching visitor at Court Green in the summer of 1974. There had been a lot of talk about the journals, but very little progress towards the book. Olwyn pointed out in her NYRB letter that as a result of the exclusivity agreement, she had been unable to help Edward Butscher with his biography other than to correct the most egregious of his numerous factual errors. She had been unable to do anything about what she regarded as his naive belief in the inventions and exaggerations of unreliable witnesses, his ‘outrageously dramatized versions of events’ and his ‘novelettishly sensationalized’ portraits of just about everyone in Sylvia’s life. She suggested that it was time for Lois Ames to throw in the towel and let someone else write ‘a properly researched biography of Sylvia’.14

  At the end of 1976, Ted told Dan Huws that he was having to waste so much time and emotional energy on this plethora of new Plath books that he was seriously considering getting the whole story of his first marriage off his chest by publishing his own account.15 The first thing to do, though, was to publish the primary materials, so that readers did not have to rely on the second-hand and distorted perspective of biographers and critics. His selection of her short stories, under the title Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, appeared in 1977. Four years later, his edition of the Collected Poems was finally published. There are few precedents – only Mary Shelley springs immediately to mind – for a creative artist taking on the academic role of textual editor of their dead spouse’s works. The combination of personal knowledge and patient scholarship enabled Hughes to complete his arrangement of Plath’s poems in chronological order. To the chagrin of some feminists, he took it upon himself to relegate her early work to the status of ‘juvenilia’, beginning the run of her mature poems in 1956 – the year of their first encounter at Falcon Yard. By Hughes’s reckoning, Plath wrote 224 poems between 1956 and her death, her breakthrough into that uniqueness of voice which constitutes poetic greatness coming with the seven-part ‘Poem for a Birthday’ composed in late 1959 while they were in residence at Yaddo. The title of Birthday Letters is, among other things, a tribute to this turning point in Plath’s career.

  The year after Collected Poems came The Journals of Sylvia Plath, for which he was credited as consulting editor, along with Frances McCullough, and to which he contributed a brief foreword. He struggled to complete it, knowing it would be an important piece of work that would begin to reveal her poetry as ‘the X-ray record of the history of a purely impersonal process’, something akin to the paintings produced by Jung’s psychiatric patients.16 His foreword duly explained that, although he had been with her for six years ‘and was rarely separated from her for more than two or three hours at a time’, he never saw Sylvia ‘show her real self to anybody – except, perhaps, in the last three months of her life’. That real self began to speak in her poetry at a moment in Yaddo when she ‘recited three lines as she went through a doorway’. From that point on, she would ‘throw off the artificial selves’ of her earlier verse: ‘It was as if a dumb person suddenly spoke.’

  He developed this claim in a longer version of the foreword, published in his friend Ben Sonnenberg’s magazine Grand Street contemporaneously with the appearance of the journals. Here he outlined his own version of the Judith Kroll argument about Sylvia’s ‘death–rebirth’ cycle. His essay came to the conclusion that all her poems were in a sense ‘by-products’ of her ‘real creation’, which was ‘that inner gestation and eventual birth of a new self-conquering self, to which her journal bears witness, and which proved itself so overwhelmingly in the Ariel poems of 1962’.17

  But it was the end of the foreword that attracted the attention of Hughes’s accusers. Ted explained that Sylvia’s journals consisted of ‘an assortment of notebooks and bunches of loose sheets’. His selection consisted of about one-third of the total sum of the manuscripts, which were held at Smith College. But two notebooks were absent from that collection. They were ‘maroon-backed ledgers’ similar to a surviving volume that covered 1957–9. They ‘continued the record from late ’59 to within three days of her death’. The first of them had ‘disappeared’. The second contained entries for the final months of her life, ‘and I destroyed it because I did not want her children to have to read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival)’.18 For anti-Hughesians this was another devastating indictment to add to the charge sheet: he had burnt the vital clue, destroyed the evidence, silenced Sylvia even as she was in the grave.

  What was more, the edition was incomplete. There were extensive cuts, and two notebooks from the period August 1957 to November 1959 were excluded. It was Hughes’s intention to keep them sealed until the fiftieth anniversary of Plath’s death, probably because they contained such dark matter as some disturbing matricidal notes from the time of her psychoanalysis. As it was, he relented at the time of Birthday Letters and the unabridged journals were published just over a year after his death.

  Soon after Edward Butscher had published Method and Madness, that first biography of Sylvia, he threw together a collection of essays entitled Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work. It included critical essays on her poetry, including distinguished work by the critic Marjorie Perloff and the novelist Joyce Carol Oates, together with a number of memoirs by people he had interviewed during his research for the biography – lover Gordon Lameyer, fellow-Mademoiselle intern Laurie Levy, Cambridge supervisor Dorothea Krook, fellow-Whitstead resident Jane Baltzell Kopp, and friends from later years, Clarissa Roche and Elizabeth Compton (now Sigmund). It was a line-up that entrenched the Plath narrative: carefree Smith girl with boyfriends aplenty, crack-up following the New York summer, scholarship student at Cambridge, deserted wife and mother in the bitter winter of 1962–3.

  The thesis of the collection was that Plath was a writer in whom there was a peculiarly close connection between the woman and the work. ‘Indeed’, wrote Butscher in his preface, a little dramatically, ‘a poet’s life and art have never appeared so intimately related before, with the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe’s own horror tale.’19 The prize exhibit in support of this argument came from Gordon Lameyer, who contributed not only his memoir but also an analytic essay entitled ‘Th
e Double in Sylvia’s Plath The Bell Jar’. The latter began by noting the prevalence of mirrors and ‘doubles’ – psychological projections of some aspect of the speaker – in Plath’s poetry. Picking up on Plath’s own explanation, in her BBC interview, that the poem ‘Daddy’ was to be imagined in the voice of a girl with an Electra complex, Lameyer suggested that it was indeed ‘spoken by the author’s evil double, resenting her father’s death and consequent loss of love’. He linked this idea to ‘The Magic Mirror’, Sylvia’s 1954 Smith College senior honours’ thesis on the figure of the double in Dostoevsky, most notably ‘in the great study of parricide, The Brothers Karamazov’. Dostoevsky’s fiction, Lameyer suggested, gave Plath ‘a deeper understanding of her own nervous breakdown, attempted suicide, and recuperation’ than she achieved from ‘her limited psychoanalysis at McLean’.20 Lameyer’s perceptive analysis of Plath’s reading of Dostoevsky provided a springboard into The Bell Jar, itself a novel full of doubles. Towards the end of the essay, he referred to the biographical ‘original’ of one of them:

  The terrible irony of The Bell Jar is that the original of Joan Gilling, the double that Sylvia kills off so that Esther can live, is very much alive, and that it is Sylvia who has been successful in killing herself … The girl whom Sylvia knew in Wellesley and at Smith College and whom she felt had followed her to McLean is actually very unlike the Joan Gilling who has lesbian leanings toward another inmate. In fact, Sylvia very much admired and liked the original girl. Was Sylvia, then, projecting her deepest fears onto the double of her heroine?21

  Lameyer then stopped to think. Clearly there was a very strong case for the argument that one of those deep fears – the will to suicide – was a projection, that Joan’s success in hanging herself was a proxy for Esther/Sylvia’s failed suicide attempt. But, he asked himself, were the ‘lesbian leanings’ also a projection? His conclusion was that ‘Sylvia was trying to free herself from certain negative attitudes that she recognized within herself, puritanical attitudes … which she projected in a perversion of sexual purity upon her double.’ But then he hastened to inform the reader that this projection did not have a biographical origin:

  I knew her too well at the time of the incidents related in The Bell Jar ever to conclude that she had lesbian tendencies. Aside from the original of Buddy Willard, I am the only person, I believe, who has ever dated both Sylvia and the original of Joan Gilling. Although certainly neither girl was inclined towards lesbianism, Sylvia understood enough of the love–hate duality of rivals to suggest this characteristic in her artistic double.22

  This is a very unusual moment in the history of literary analysis: the critic substantiates his argument on the grounds that he must be right since he has dated the two central female characters in the book he is writing about. In addition, Lameyer let slip the information that Dick Norton, the original of Buddy Willard, also dated both Sylvia and the original of Joan Gilling. The sharing not only of residential treatment at McLean but also of two boyfriends did indeed suggest that the two women were ‘doubles’.

  Just over a year after the publication of this essay, Avco Embassy Pictures released their film adaptation of The Bell Jar. It received dismal reviews, but had enough life to become a videocassette and to be shown on television. The screenplay took a fair a number of liberties with the novel. Plath’s rigorously autobiographical account of the overdose and the crawl space beneath the deck of the family home were turned into a woozy dance in the basement followed by a collapse on the floor. And, in keeping with the tawdriness of late Seventies Hollywood, the novel’s unrealised hints of lesbian desire in the character of Joan Gilling were fleshed into a scene where Joan kisses Esther’s breasts as they kneel together in a field. She begs her friend to join her in a lovers’ suicide pact, and it is Esther’s rejection of this proposal that leads her to hang herself from a tree.

  The ‘very much alive’ original of Joan Gilling was Jane Anderson. Like Sylvia, she was born in Wellesley. As girls, they went to the same junior high school and the same church. They both went to Smith. They both had intense relationships with Dick Norton as well as dating Gordon Lameyer. They both had complicated relationships with their fathers, though Sylvia’s father was dead and Jane’s alive. And they were fellow-inmates at McLean. Here, though, their paths diverged. Electro-convulsive therapy was remarkably effective for Sylvia, leading to her rapid discharge from the hospital, whereas Anderson was sucked in by the talking cure. She chastised Sylvia for not taking psychoanalysis seriously enough and she eventually became a psychoanalyst herself, engaging in private practice and teaching at Harvard. The explicitly lesbian scene in the film of The Bell Jar came as a shock to her. She began reading around the subject and alighted upon Lameyer’s essay. In due course she would file a lawsuit that would engulf Ted Hughes.

  22

  Sunstruck Foxglove

  In March 1976, with Jack Orchard barely cold in the ground, Ted flew to Australia. He had been invited to the Antipodes’ foremost literary gathering, the Adelaide Festival. With his father-in-law gone, it was an opportunity to take his own father to see brother Gerald. He rather hoped that Bill might stay on for a few months with Gerald and Joan, to relieve the pressure at home.

  The trip proved to be another turning point in Ted’s life. As on many occasions when he was travelling, he kept a more systematic journal than usual. After a stupefying train journey with watery food under a March sun, a wait at Reading station and a dreary taxi ride, he and his father arrived at Heathrow. They had asked for a seat with extra leg-room, so found themselves at the front by the toilets, which proved disruptive but sometimes amusing. Bill Hughes, who had never flown long haul before, was amazed at the size of the plane’s wings. They stopped to refuel in the desert landscape of Bahrain where some ‘incredibly black small ugly Arabs’ came aboard to clean the plane.1 They stopped again in Singapore, brilliantly lit and gaudy, a ‘sinful Eastern city’ with an unutterably boring airport, where the only relief in the hot wet air was the sight of ‘Pretty Waitresses everywhere – Indonesians, Malays etc.’ Then in a dazzling dawn they found themselves above the landmass of Australia, looking down on mountain forests, scattered homesteads, a tangle of dirt roads and periodic water-holes.

  They arrived in a daze at Gerald and Joan’s neat home in Tullamarine near Melbourne. Ted admired his brother’s Japanese sword carefully stowed in a steel box in his den. He had earache from the flight. Then they were shown a telegram with more bad news: while they had been in the air, Uncle Walt had died. Walt, the patriarch of the family, in many ways more of a father to Ted than his own father – memories of that first journey abroad and of the visit to Top Withens with Sylvia. To have been absent at the time of his death felt like another manifestation of the curse upon Ted’s life.

  Later, from Gerald and Joan’s seaside second home overlooking miles of empty beach on the Mornington peninsula, they managed to phone Aunt Hilda: Walt had eaten nothing for three weeks, then finally asked for a bottle of whisky, which he drank through the night in the front room while Hilda slept upstairs. When she came down in the morning he was dead on the living-room floor, having laid himself out with arms folded.

  They reminisced and drank cold Australian beer. Ted peeled some bark from an ancient gum tree as a keepsake of his visit, while Gerald carved the name of his house on an ancient piece of tea-tree wood.2 Ted asked if there were foxes and Gerald showed him snake tracks. For a fleeting moment, they were two boys in the wild once more. Then Gerald drove his brother to the airport and Ted took a little plane to Adelaide.

  He liked the cleanness of the city, the lazy and innocent atmosphere, the extraordinary bird cries. Walking through empty streets and parks in the early morning, he saw quail-crested doves, a grey-brown and yellow thrush-like bird with a ‘rear-eye corner like Groucho Marx’, budgerigars taking flight, and ‘the giant rubber trees like acrobatic elephants copulating’. Above all, the heat: being down under, he did not have to wait for July to sense the tr
ansit of the sun into the sign of his Muse. Something was stirring.

  Fellow-poet Adrian Mitchell, who had been on the same plane from London, had arrived in Adelaide a day before Ted, the time agreed with the festival organisers. He was met at the airport by a vivacious press officer in a white limousine with green-tinted windows, hired to impress the visiting writers. Mitchell told her that Hughes would be arriving the next day, since he was staying with his brother in Melbourne. She thought that it was cheeky of him not to arrive at the appointed hour, so she made a point of not fetching him from the airport. Ted challenged her over this when he was standing in the drinks queue at a barbecue hosted by the Writers’ Week Committee, sweltering in his heavy leather jacket. She said that she would make it up to him by bringing him wine straight away. She brought him four glasses, each with a different vintage. Telling him that he could not drink four glasses at once, she motioned to him to sit, where she joined him, unworried about the prospect of grass stains on her starched antique white dress. He asked her how she knew that he was a wine buff and she replied that she was psychic. He liked this.3 Her name was Jill Barber.

  The following day, she met him at the Hotel Australia in her role as press officer. She was discomposed when they were forced to confront a crowd of anti-Hughes ‘libbers’ bearing placards, so he let her rest in his room. That evening, at the gala opening of the festival, they drank champagne and left early. Jill tipsily drove the limousine over a cement bollard in the parking lot and Ted let himself go in raucous laughter. Back at the hotel, he mopped her brow with a wet flannel as she threw up the cheap champagne into his sink, then he tenderly unbuttoned and unzipped her, gazed admiringly at her body and made forceful love to her. He told her that she reminded him of a woman whom he had loved very much. The night after he made love to her, he had a strange dream in which he was taking the caps off the poison chimneys at Auschwitz.4