A L S O++T O D A Y
- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E++T A L K Are women more violent than men? Defy or defend stereotypes in Table Talk
- - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Second Thoughts
Hot Flash
Drama Queen
City of Light (and laundry) Time for One Thing
A mom's guide to college admissions
- - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto
|
______- - - - - - It all began with a picture of incoming Fulbright Scholars. It was 1956. England was still recovering from the war, and good food was rare, houses were cold and money was hard to get. Ted Hughes, a brilliant and talented undergraduate at Cambridge University, saw a photograph of the latest crop of scholars from America in the newspaper: "Were you among them?" he asks. He is referring, of course, to Sylvia Plath, the poet who became his wife and later committed suicide, thus passing into legend. Hughes writes:
I was waking
This stunningly fresh and original poem, written in a diarylike style, gives way to poem after poem about the young couple -- their first meeting and falling love, their life together as students, as young poets, as newlyweds, as burgeoning literary figures in America (Plath was from Massachusetts, where they lived briefly in the Amherst area), as struggling husband and wife, as parents. Hughes tells the whole story of their love and its harrowing aftermath from the inside in a book of 88 poems as beautiful, fierce and vivid as any to have appeared on either side of the Atlantic since Robert Lowell's "Life Studies" rocked the world of letters in 1959. A major new book of poems by an unquestionably major poet is always good news, but it is rarely "real" news -- the stuff of newspaper columns. Nevertheless, "Birthday Letters" has made waves on both sides of the Atlantic. On Jan. 19, the New York Times published a Page 1 story about the book. The New Yorker ran full-page photographs of Hughes and Plath in their heyday. In England, the book was the subject of headlines and lead editorials (including one in the Times). When was the last time a volume of poetry attracted so much attention? The reasons for the attention are, of course, extra-literary. When Plath committed suicide in her little flat in London on a cold February morning in 1963, with her children nearby, the legend was born. There would, indeed, have been no legend without the poems that Plath wrote about her decline into mental illness: poems collected in "Ariel." This posthumous volume was followed by "The Bell Jar," a searing autobiographical novel. It was widely assumed that Hughes was a demon who drove his young wife to suicide by ignoring her, then running off with another woman, Assia Wevill -- who bizarrely committed suicide in exactly the same way five years later. The Plath-Hughes story fed the imagination of biographers and would-be biographers. The feminist movement also co-opted the story, turning Plath into a victim, Hughes into a monster. I can recall a reading that Hughes gave at Oxford University some years ago where women held up placards in the hall that denounced him as a misogynist and wife-killer. The ins and outs of the Plath story reached a kind of crescendo a few years ago when Anne Stevenson, an American poet who knew Plath and has lived in England for several decades, published (with the cooperation of Hughes) a biography of Plath called "Bitter Fame." Stevenson's admirable book was judicial, and fair to both Plath and Hughes, giving the poetry center stage. But Janet Malcolm (in the New Yorker) and others attacked Stevenson mercilessly as a pawn of the Hughes camp. For 35 years, Ted Hughes has kept his own counsel, refusing to talk to journalists or scholars or biographers (he did speak to Stevenson, but revealed little). This silence on his part was considered arrogant by some, noble by others. It was certainly taken by many as a sign that he did not care what people thought. Now, with the publication of "Birthday Letters," we see that indeed he did care, a great deal. He has been quietly, secretly, writing these poems since her death. He has shaped the story into a coherent, brilliant, evocative sequence of poems -- his best work since "Crow," that gnarled, difficult volume that took the poetry world by storm in the '70s. Hughes made his mark early, publishing "The Hawk in the Rain" in 1957. That volume was selected for publication in a contest judged by W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Marianne Moore. The poems were marked by a raw, almost feral, intelligence and a powerful alliterative style that harked back to the Anglo-Saxon poets. Hughes wrote famously about animals: hawks, otters, foxes, horses. He was, after all, a Yorkshireman, a country boy; he knew a lot about the animal kingdom and the workings of nature, as was obvious from this work. But the animals in his poems were more than animals; they were embodiments of the spirit. They become creatures in a complex mythmaking. Plath stunned Hughes with her intelligence and beauty, her freshness, her bite. She was, he writes, "a new world. My new world" -- made all the more appealing by her Americanness, by her poetic sensibility. "I saw my world again through your eyes," he writes to her in "The Owl." Through her eyes, the world became "foreign./Plain hedge hawthorns were peculiar aliens./A mystery of peculiar lore and doings." From the beginning of their marriage, it was obvious to him that she had access to another, terrifying level of consciousness: "You were never/More than a step from Paradise," he writes in "Child's Park." "You had instant access, your analyst told you,/To the core of your Inferno --/The pit of the hairy flower." Hughes evokes the academic world of Cambridge with the ring of perfect recollection. Exactly how he viewed Plath is seen, for instance, in "St. Botolph's," where he writes of their initial meeting:
First sight. First snapshot isolated
In subsequent poems, Hughes traces the heady pilgrimage of himself and Plath from Cambridge to Spain (on their honeymoon) to America to Devon. Landscapes become dreamscapes. In America, where several fine poems are set, the Grand Canyon is evoked with peculiar resonance, pictured as "America's Delphi," a place where Sylvia "wanted a sign." Similarly, the Badlands are summoned eerily as a "landscape/Staked out in the sun and left to die." Hughes' own visionary poetry is concentrated here, focused by all the light of his strong imagination to a white-hot point of fire. My guess is that readers who do not normally find poetry a genre that attracts them will find something worthwhile in "Birthday Letters." The dense thickets of language and oblique myth and metaphor that have marked this poet's earlier work give way, in this volume, to poetry of unusual -- even breezy -- readability. The poems are all relatively short -- few of them extend to more than three pages -- and each one is constructed as a further installment in an overarching story, which has something of the narrative feel of fiction. Readers who know nothing about Plath and Hughes will still find it compelling, but those familiar with the story and with Plath's poems will find extraordinary riches here. (Hughes covertly and overtly refers to many of Plath's poems here, sometimes -- as in "The Rabbit Catcher" -- offering his own version of an anecdote already written about by Plath.) The poems about their courtship comprise my favorite part of the collection. And these include a vivid poem about indefidelity, aptly named "Fidelity":
She and I slept in each other's arms.
The self-justifications for this act of infidelity are the stuff of ordinary irrationality: "A holy law/had invented itself, somehow, for me." Somehow, Hughes' self-consciousness about this infidelity only makes the affair with Plath all the more vexed and poignant. N E X T+P A G E: Sharing the terror of Plath's last years |
Arts & Entertainment | Books | Comics | Life | News | People
Politics | Sex | Tech & Business | Audio
The Free Software Project | The Movie Page
Letters | Columnists | Salon Plus
Copyright © 2000 Salon.com All rights reserved.
