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Ted gets his own tricky spot in the spotlight, Nov 8 2008
She was an American girl, he was a Yorkshire boy. She was a domestic paragon who read The Joy of Cooking as if it were "a rare novel," he could not (or would not) be domesticated, he was too wild, too predatory. She was one of the greatest poets who ever lived, he was a gifted but much more minor poet who both helped her and harmed her. Her need for him was so intense it was pathological, but she didn't write her truly great poems until after he left her for another woman. And when they were asked during a BBC interview in 1961 if theirs was a marriage of opposites, he said they were "very different" at the same moment that she said they were "quite similar."
Ted and Sylvia: we know their story, so why would we want to read anything more about them? But Diane Middlebrook, in her biography of Ted Hughes, Her Husband: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, A Marriage, is easily able to revive excitement about them once again. She is also incredibly fair to both of them and so is able to see their marriage as the dynamic and creative partnership it so remarkably was.
The parts of her memoir that are devoted to the childhood of Ted Hughes and to the clairvoyant visions of his mother (the night before the Battle of Britain she dreamed she saw waves of crosses on fire in the sky), as well as to his love of myth, even make his obsession with the occult easy to fathom. The village he was born in even had a "myth" in its name: it was Mytholmroyd, a village in the Upper Calder Valley in West Yorkshire. It was here that he was delivered by a midwife on August 17, 1930, at exactly "solar midnight," for in the Upper Calder Valley that night the sun (the astrological sun) reached its lowest point in the zodiac. In fact, when Hughes, many years later, turned down a request to lend his hand to good works, he wrote in his letter of refusal that his natal horoscope predicted that he was destined for fame, but ill-suited to it, and "fated to live more or less in the public eye, as a fish does in air."
Hughes's life as an artist was "ruled by his need to secrete meanings in his writing that only he would know about." Middlebrook also comments that "withholding from others something important to himself by hiding it in plain sight" was a defensive stance so deep in his character "that you might as well say it is his character."
It also helps us understand his many problems with women. Women fell for him, left their husbands for him, adored him, cooked for him, but also bitterly turned against him when he turned away from them. Sylvia Plath must have sensed his ladykiller instincts, too, soon after meeting him while they were both still students at Cambridge. Her lines in "Pursuit" catch her apprehension, her fascination:
The panther's tread is on the stairs,
Coming up and up the stairs...
Years later, Hughes wrote:
You scrambled into the car,
Scattering oxygen like a drenched bush
But these lines weren't written to Sylvia Plath, no matter how much they sound as if they must have been, they were lines in a poem Hughes wrote as Britain's Poet Laureate for the christening of Prince Harry, the second son of the Prince of Wales. And yet they are incredibly reminiscent of the poems in memory of his young wife that he wrote even later, in Birthday Letters, and they particularly evoke the poem he wrote about their secret wedding in London, on Bloomsday, June 16, 1956, in St. George the Martyr Church, in Bloomsbury, they are that dewy and radiant.
Plath turned against him too after he left her in the summer of 1962. Alone in Devon (except for their two very young children) her violent reaction to being seduced and abandoned spurred her to write the incandescent poems that made her name, including the poem that the following lines belong to:
The blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it.
You hand me two children, two roses
The first two lines of this trio are iconic, but they are also clairvoyantly autobiographical, seeming to speak not only of poetry, but also of Plath's future suicide, even if the method she chose when she killed herself the following winter was death by gas, not slit wrists.
But what Diane Middlebrook points out in her perceptive and often profoundly thoughtful memoir is that the third line of this trio of lines had a history. After Plath had written her brilliant poem, "The Rabbit Catcher," a pivotal poem in which her imagination seemed to be "alone with its own wildness," Hughes echoed its imagery in Difficulties of a Bridegroom, a radio play he wrote that summer or fall about a man driving to a sexual liaison who sees a rabbit on the highway and accelerates in order to kill it. When he gets to the city, he sells the dead rabbit for two shillings and buys two roses for his mistress.
There was an actual mistress in Ted's life by this time, Assia Wevill, a married woman who was so seductively luscious that a London poet, recalling first meeting her, described her as "Babylonian." In the photos that survive of her she has a discontented mouth and Elizabeth Taylor eyes. She also pampered herself, Middlebrook writes, with frequent manicures and the sort of stylish clothes that could conceal her short waist and wide hips as she walked in clouds of Chanel. When she decided to seduce Hughes she joked to a friend that she was setting out for Devon in her "war paint." Sylvia, aware of what was going on, had "ears to hear" when the play was broadcast on the BBC. And so she wrote the lines in which the roses appear along with the blood jet of poetry, responding to the secret taunt Hughes had planted in what he had written, the rabbit having "acquired exchange value: they were playing an obsessive game of tag with each other's images."
But they were also doing something much more final than that. Hughes's "Rabbit Catcher" was not an acknowledgment of guilt or a plea to be forgiven, Middlebrook writes. "Instead, it registers his retrospective recognition that he and Plath had reached, simultaneously, the end of their apprenticeships as poets."
Middlebrook fills in the blanks concerning the Greek tragedy Ted's life became after Sylvia's death: not all that many years later, depressed over the fact that she was gaining weight and Ted had begun seeing another woman--this time a woman from the Calder Valley named Brenda Hedden--Assia Wevill gassed herself along with Shura, the little daughter she'd had with Ted, in a copycat version of Sylvia's suicide (but with this important difference: Sylvia, who'd loved her children, spared them).
This second suicide was such an angry and terrible farewell to Ted that it's hard to believe he could survive it. He barely could, he felt ruined, he was so convinced that he'd caused his mother's death (it quickly followed Assia's suicide) and he was equally convinced that he'd destroyed all the women he loved. And so he fled to Ireland hoping to find a place where he could live in peace with his children. But soon after this, with the windfall from a poetry prize, he bought a huge old house called Lumb Bank, close to his parents' house in West Yorkshire. And not long after his arrival, Brenda Hedden left her husband to be with him and to become-officially, at least-his housekeeper.
"This arrangement," Middlebrook writes, "did not last long." In August, 1970, Ted married Carol Orchard, a beautiful Devon woman who'd trained to be a nurse and who was not much interested in literature and who (therefore?) was, he wrote to his brother, "exceedingly good for me." For several years after this, Ted and Carol and Frieda and Nicholas lived a peaceful and orderly life, thanks to Carol who, Ted wrote to Mrs. Plath, "has pulled us all from the fire."
At least until Ted tossed them all into it again when, at a literary festival in Australia in 1976, he fell in love with Jill Barber, his bright and "foxy" publicist. But Jill eventually understood that he would never divorce Carol and since she was feeling "broody" she made the painful decision to leave him and move her literary agency to the US. "I knew my role in his life," she later said, "was to love him, love him, love him." There were other women in the years after Jill's departure, among them Emma Tennant, who in 2001 wrote a novel about Ted and Sylvia and who finally concluded that Ted was a very excitable person and that he "fancied himself."
Ted wasn't only careless about women, he was often careless about Sylvia's work as well. One of her journals notoriously went "missing" but of the journals that survived he was a remarkably fine editor and wrote perceptively about them, ranking The Journals of Sylvia Plath even above the stunning Ariel whose poems he also edited. In The Journals of Sylvia Plath, Sylvia writes that the headband Ted tore from her head at the wild party where they met was red, but in one of the poems in Birthday Letters Hughes remembers it as blue. But as Middlebrook tells us, "blue is the colour Hughes introduces like ritual magic at the end of the book, to restore balance."
In November,1962, Middlebrook writes, Plath's spirits soared when she found a large flat on the upper two stories of 23 Fitzroy Road in a part of London where both she and Hughes had friends. The apartment was even--thrillingly--in the house where W.B. Yeats had lived as a boy. Two months later, The Bell Jar was published, and less than a month after that, Sylvia Plath, slipping into a deep depression and living with two small children and no phone in the coldest winter England had seen in over a hundred years, killed herself. She was only thirty years old when she pulled down the oven door and knelt deep into the gas on the morning of February 11, 1963. And Ted was only...
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