Текст книги "American Isis. The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath"

Автор книги: Carl Rollyson

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In 1991, on 11 February, the anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s suicide, Janet Malcolm met with Olwyn Hughes to discuss a projected book, which became The Silent Woman (1994). Like Judith Kroll, Malcolm describes Olwyn as “forbidding and imposing.” Disdaining the plodding earnestness of biographers who pretend to be neutral or objective, Malcolm then dispatches Olwyn with gusto: “She is like the principal of a school or the warden of a prison: students or inmates come and go, while she remains.” Indeed, in Malcolm’s film noir, Olwyn becomes Mrs. Danvers welcoming Rebecca (the callow biographer) to Court Green, the Mandalay of Plath biography. One half expects Malcolm to include the Daphne DuMaurier line, “Last night I dreamed I went to Mandalay again.”

But Malcolm is rewarded only with Olwyn’s grudging agreement to take the importunate writer for a look at the exterior of the Fitzroy Road flat. Much of their conversation centers on how Olwyn had to “nanny” Anne Stevenson along to no avail, since Anne still got Sylvia “wrong.” Malcolm notes that suicide always leaves the survivors in the wrong. Nothing can be done about it, because Plath remains “silent, powerful”—and in the right. Malcolm characterizes Olwyn’s demand that Anne remove an account of Sylvia’s attack on Olwyn as the only available method of replying to Plath—even though Sylvia’s harsh words can themselves be interpreted as a bias the reader is perfectly capable of detecting. Olwyn, Malcolm implies, is unable to let the biographer and the reader do their work. In spite of Malcolm’s criticism, Olwyn and her brother left Malcolm alone—perhaps because she had such obvious scorn for biographers who do not trouble to make the Hugheses into fully rounded human beings coping with an impossible situation, wishing both to protect their privacy and do justice to Plath’s work. Ted Hughes realized that Malcolm was on the estate’s side, and yet prior to publication he still tried to ferret out what she would write about Olwyn. Malcolm replied on 16 September 1992 that of course Olwyn figured in the narrative, but she was not the “central figure.” The cagey biographer added, “I feel by telling you this I am saying more than I should (you may feel I am saying too little)…”

A brilliant stylist, Malcolm evokes the problematics of biography. How can biographers possibly know the truth? As Dido Merwin said, they were not there. Of course, by this logic, Malcolm, too, is suspect. But presumably she is more honorable because at least she concedes (indeed wallows in) the fallibility of biography. But memoirs written after the fact are no less fallible, which is why Malcolm focuses on Hughes’s letters, showcasing him as a brilliant interpreter of Plath’s work. Malcolm is right to emphasize that in his letters Ted expresses virtually no animus toward Plath. But it is hard to see why his later letters should be taken as the last word. In the end, Malcolm seems to have put herself in thrall to Ted Hughes, wishing, like Olwyn, to safeguard him from predators.

Ted Hughes, however, did not see matters this way. To him, Malcolm had adopted the guise of an objective truth-teller, painfully and regretfully revealing the “bad as well as the good because that’s the truth.” Her concoction of psychoanalytical commentary and “self-doubt” conveyed an impression of “helpless verisimilitude.” Malcolm knew her audience and knew how it would eagerly devour a controversial book written with the patented Malcolm style. And Ted understood, as he warned Olwyn, that she was the “main target.” By now, Ted was just part of the “trampled field.”

In Birthday Letters (1998), poems addressed to Plath and written over a thirty-five year period, Ted Hughes finally provided his own apologia. The work is difficult to assess as biography, since it bears the same relation to reality as Plath’s creative work. And yet a poem like “Fulbright Scholars” is hard to resist, because it is such an antidote to the sour memoirs of his friends. By mentioning Plath’s “Veronica Lake” bang, he evokes not only Sylvia’s glamour in postwar Cambridge, but also how she exuded so much more style than his contemporaries. She was so American and so romantic, a dream girl coming to him off the movie screen, his own Marilyn Monroe. Birthday Letters is not a record of what happened, but a crafted memory of what Sylvia Plath meant to Ted Hughes.

In hindsight, Hughes describes himself in “Visit” as auditioning for the lead role in Plath’s drama. Hughes evokes the power of the “brand” her teeth marks left for nearly a month after she bit him. The blood rite of their first meeting is subsumed in “The Shot” in Plath the “god-seeker,” an Isis looking for an Osiris to worship—although Hughes does not name his god. He remains first among the god-candidates after she jettisons the “ordinary jocks,” but it is remarkable in these poems how he subjects his persona to her quest, replicating precisely the pattern of those biographies of her that he abhorred.

Birthday Letters also reveals how little Hughes knew of his wife’s inner turmoil until, like her biographers, he could read her journals and accompany her on that last desperate pursuit of Richard Sassoon in Paris. And like Plath’s biographers, Hughes can only re-create her suffering. He, too, was not there. He guesses and speculates, presuming that poetry, rather than biography, has license to re-create Plath’s life. And he falls for the Plath myth just like so many others, in “18 Rugby Street” imagining her visiting the “shrines” of her sojourns with Sassoon. How, Hughes wonders, was Plath “conjuring” him?

Was it Plath’s death that made Hughes write in such a supplicating way? In an astonishing scene of abasement, he refers not to his weapons but to her “artillery,” as he imagines her climbing the stairs of his flat after her failed effort to secure Sassoon. Plath practically gives off sparks with the “pressure” of her “effervescence,” suggesting an eruptive nature that fairly overwhelmed Hughes. Even if this is the hyperbole of hindsight, it reveals how all encompassing the Sylvia Plath myth had become for more than just her biographers. It is Plath, a goddess with “aboriginal” thick lips, who initiates Hughes into the mysteries. She flies about his London flat like a spirit he cannot contain, her face like the sea, subject to all sorts of weather and the play of sun and moon. A devotee of astrology—its vocabulary suffuses Birthday Letters—Hughes seems bound by the charts of her moods, merely “hanging around” until she can shape him. What is odd here is the absence of Sylvia’s Ted Hughes—at least the one she thought of as a god. Why is the titan Plath described in her letters, poems, and journals absent from Birthday Letters?

Hughes occasionally provides striking vignettes of their mythologized daily life, such as one involving Sylvia’s distress when she does not find him at their meeting place and rides a taxi like a chariot, in search of him. He marvels in “Fate Playing” at her “molten” eyes and face when she greets him as though he had “come back from the dead,” the answer to a priestess’s prayer. Then he “knew what it was / To be a miracle.” Here Hughes discloses why Sylvia Plath was so irresistible. He even turns her taxi driver into a “small god,” treating her eruption of joy as an act of nature drenching the “cracked earth” in the “cloudburst” of her emotions. In “The Owl,” the childlike abandon Plath took in nature awakened Hughes’s own “ecstatic boyhood,” bringing back to him an elemental rapture he had previously experienced only with his beloved older brother. In “A Pink Wool Knitted Dress,” Hughes pictures his wedding as the marriage of the swineherd to the princess, the postwar threadbare “not quite … Frog-Prince” bound to Plath’s transfigured and flaming personage. On their honeymoon, described in “Your Paris,” he is like her dog, sniffing out the fear and corruption in the collaborationist city, while she basks in the aura of her expatriate predecessors: Miller, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Stein. While he is mired in history, she soars into the mythos of her own making.

During their Benidorm honeymoon in Spain, Hughes seems for the first time to emerge from Plath’s spell, noting in “You Hated Spain” how the primitive cult of the bullfight frightened her. In contrast, he felt quite at home, perceiving clearly—perhaps for the first time—the part of her that was still a “bobby-sox American.” Drawing calmed her and was also an assertion of her mastery that had a beneficial impact on Hughes, who felt “released”—an apparent allusion to the stress her fluctuating moods inflicted on him. When Plath fell ill (a case of food poisoning) he felt empowered, enjoying the role of mothering her as he had been mothered—although her fevered fear of death, her crying “wolf,” aroused his distrust of her overwrought sensibility. How would he know when she was truly at the last extreme? That question haunts the persona Hughes creates for himself in Birthday Letters, as he tries to read Sylvia Plath, who has tied him to her quest for fame. Otherwise, he might have been, as he puts it in “Ouija,” “fishing off a rock / In Western Australia.”

In “The Blue Flannel Suit,” Hughes describes Sylvia aboard a liner taking them off to America, once again invoking a life that seemed plotted for him. In “Child’s Park,” Plath is so potent that she has a “plutonium secret”—a phrase reminiscent of those 1950s articles that saluted Marilyn Monroe as the “atomic blonde.” It seems from these poems that what really undid Hughes in America was his feeling that he was feeding off of Plath. His humiliation is palpable in “9 Willow Street,” where he calls himself a “manikin in your eyeball.” Unlike his wife, Hughes explains in “The Fifty-Ninth Bear,” he had no need to make their “dud scenario into a fiction,” aggrandizing their brief brush with the beast outside their tent in Yellowstone Park into a story of a husband hounded to his death by his importunate wife. There is in Hughes, as there was in Arthur Miller, a primordial dread of becoming entirely absorbed in his wife’s imago. He treats their trip to the Grand Canyon as Plath’s pilgrimage to the Delphic oracle, seeking a sign about the fate of her six-week old pregnancy. Is it any wonder that this couple came to grief, trying to live on the level of the gods? Before their embarkation for America, Sylvia had dreamed that country would make Hughes an even greater poet. But poems like “Grand Canyon” suggest the vastness of American geography only made him yearn for the narrow cobbled streets of home.

“Haunted” is hardly the word for what Hughes has to say in “Black Coat” about Plath’s penetrating “paparazzo sniper” eye, as she lined him up against a seascape, pinioning him with her camera, and transforming him—in his imagination and hers—into her father, crawling out of the sea and sliding “into me.” This poem amplifies the thrust of Plath’s autobiographical essays, which transform Otto Plath into a powerful sea beast that in Hughes’s retrospective poem sends a shiver through him, freezing him forever in her lens. Caught in Plath’s double vision, Hughes realizes he has become a palimpsest of her memories and desires.

Hughes concedes in “Stubbing Wharfe” that Plath had a reach like the Atlantic, but that whereas he reveled in the idea of a home in the dark valleys of his boyhood, she saw there “blackness,” the “face of nothingness.” She triumphed because, as he announces in “Remission,” she submitted to an “oceanic” pregnancy, becoming the very type of the fruitful woman of time immemorial, the Venus of Willendorf. When Hughes mentions Plath’s Indian midwife, who appears to be a deity from the Ganges, the image of voluptuous female idols hanging off of Indian temples comes to mind. No wonder, then, that in “Isis” Hughes imagines childbirth as his wife’s stripping of her “death-dress”—or was this only an interruption of her attraction to death as the father of herself? Hughes can be no more certain than her biographers, but he pictures her here as a vessel of life, an Isis carrying “what had never died, never known Death.”

In “The Lodger,” the move to Court Green becomes an announcement of Hughes’s disintegrating life, which makes him feel “already posthumous.” The change of venue is part of the “wrong road taken” theme that pervades this part of Birthday Letters. Images of him digging a garden are transformed into images of him digging his own grave. He treats his betrayal of himself very much like the story of the self and its double that so entranced Plath. Indeed, Hughes presents himself as being overtaken by another, an “alien joker.” In “The Table,” his double becomes her father, so that Hughes pictures himself not as Plath’s salvation, but as her doom, an actor deprived of his script on an “empty stage.” He had lost, in other words, his own conception of their marriage.

From here on Hughes seems to withdraw himself from Plath’s imago, dreading in “Dream Life” her descent into the crypt of her imagination, and sensing the futility of his efforts to hypnotize her into courage and calm. She was, in his retrospective sense of destiny, preparing herself for the gas chamber. In “The Rabbit Catcher” he pictures himself once again trailing after Plath like a dog, trying to attune himself to her volatile moods. Prey to her hostility, he wonders if she is expressing her own “doomed self,” or responding to something “Nocturnal and unknown to me”—the closest Hughes comes to reflecting on his own culpability. Yet he capitulates to the “new myth,” as he calls it, which would take her back to her father—as surely as the beekeeping she performs in “The Bee God” as a bow to her “Daddy.”

Assia Wevill makes her fated appearance in “Dreamers” as a Lamia-like demon that entrances Hughes, who recovers the dreamer in himself by falling in love with her. The poem seems too pat, part of a mythology, but not part a record of what actually happened. A hard-pressed Hughes writes as though he can only succumb to Assia, “filthy with erotic mystery,” the antithesis of his well-scrubbed wife, who in “The Beach” sought the sea as a means of scouring away the dinginess of a grubby England still camouflaged in wartime grime.

The Hughes who said reconciliation with Plath remained a possibility emerges briefly in “The Inscription,” which reflects his confusion over the signals she gave him—demanding that he remain with her, or insisting he “vanish off the earth.” In “Night-Ride with Ariel,” he attributes her unwillingness to recommit to him as having been influenced by the constellation of women in her life: her mother, Mrs. Prouty, Ruth Beuscher, and Mary Ellen Chase—all of whom he labels jammers of Plath’s “wavelengths,” confusing her with their advice. Hughes adds his own rueful insight in “A Picture of Otto”: “I was a whole myth too late to replace you.” After that, Birthday Letters trails off in an enigmatic ending, and Hughes never comes to terms with his role in the marriage’s final phase. In Howls and Whispers, published the same year in a limited edition and overlooked except by a few scholars, Hughes addresses several more letters to Plath. This time he makes even less room for his own psychology and responsibility, producing unpolished work that is “excessively vituperative or self-pitying,” to use the words of critic Lynda K. Buntzen, who notes the poet’s “lack of control.”

Responses to Birthday Letters were mixed, ranging from high praise for its poetry and candor, to dismissals of its rather flat prose-like lines and exculpatory thrust. Some thought Hughes placed the burden of failure on Plath’s own Electra complex—although he does not explicitly indulge in Freudian explanations. In the main, Hughes seems to have done himself some good by finally delivering his own diagnosis of Plath’s life and death. In Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters (2000), Erica Wagner seemed to start a new trend in Plath exegesis, arguing that Hughes “honors the work and the person of Sylvia Plath. There is no greater gift of love than that honor.”

Diane Middlebrook’s Her Husband (2003) presents a meticulous and compassionate exploration of what the two poets owed one another. Indeed, Middlebrook’s book is the best answer to those who cudgel biographers with the assertion, “You weren’t there.” Benefiting from the perspective afforded by earlier biographies, and from a close reading of the Plath and Hughes texts, Middlebrook easily surpasses in insight the memoirists who claim the privileges of proximity. Eschewing much biographical speculation, Middlebrook seemed to earn even the grudging respect of Olwyn Hughes, who took issue with some of the biographer’s facts but also praised her insights. But Middlebrook, reverent in her treatment of Ted Hughes’s devotion to literature—especially to his reading of Robert Graves’s The White Goddess—ultimately lets Hughes off the hook: “Hughes’s marriage was the doing of the White Goddess, who had laid claim to Ted Hughes through the agency of Sylvia Plath: Hughes had no choice.” This sense of predestination suffuses Birthday Letters, absolving Hughes by making him no more than a figure in an allegory. Plath herself was aware of Hughes’s tendency to turn away from ratiocination in favor of horoscopes and predestination. In “Hill of Leopards,” an alternative title for Plath’s aborted novel, “Falcon Yard,” Jess, modeled after Plath, challenges her lover, clearly a version of Hughes, over his reliance on horoscopes to suss out human character. “It’s so deterministic,” she observes.

Conspicuously absent from Birthday Letters is any reckoning of Plath’s final days and hours. On 11 October 2010, the New Statesman published “Last Letter,” Hughes’s own coda, unearthed from his British Library archive. The poem, apparently never finished, is a departure in tone, which is perhaps why Hughes chose not to complete it for Birthday Letters. “Last Letter” is very much of the moment, focused on the contingency of events as he wonders about the timing of his last meeting with Plath—and why she called him, burned her letter to him, and acted as though he had somehow thwarted her design. She had apparently expected her letter not to be delivered on a Friday, but after the weekend was over. When Hughes arrived at her flat that Friday, two days before her death, she was upset. What did her note say? Did it announce her suicide, or was it just the cry for help that Hughes later mentioned to Aurelia? Judging by the murkiness of Hughes’s verse, his visit to Plath produced no resolution. Like all her other exegetes, he can only speculate about what happened. He imagines her phoning his empty flat. At the time, he was, in fact, bedding another poet, Susan Alliston, in the same building where he first bedded Plath and later spent his wedding night. Alliston was apparently a relief from Sylvia and Assia the two “needles,” as they are referred to in “Last Letter.” He imagines Plath hearing the ringing in her receiver, a scene reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe attached to her phone, simultaneously reaching out to and saying good-bye to the world she had wooed and lost. Just a few hours later, a telephone call informs him of his wife’s death.

Ted Hughes, who died on 28 October 1998, remained evasive to the end, providing no corrective to the myth he had done so much to foster, even as he decried its development—and never for a moment analyzed his role as renegade priest. Elaine Feinstein’s biography of Hughes, published in 2003, was not much help to Olwyn. On 25 May, Olwyn wrote to filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski, charging that Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet was “wildly inaccurate” and “gossipy.”

Ted’s daughter, Sylvia Plath’s sole surviving child (Nicholas committed suicide on 16 March 2009, after struggling with periodic depression), has adopted her father’s attitude, accusing the BBC producers of the film Sylvia (2003) of voyeuristic motivations, creating a “Sylvia suicide doll” for the “peanut eaters.” In 2004, in a preface to the restored edition of Ariel, which rectified the changes Ted Hughes made in the first published version of Plath’s masterpiece, Frieda relayed her father’s explanation that he had omitted some poems because they would hurt living persons, and others because they were weaker than those he added to Plath’s original arrangement. Frieda also attacked Aurelia, claiming that as “small child” (she was little more than two years old) she observed her grandmother encouraging Sylvia to order Ted out of Court Green. The Hughes Papers at Emory University include other examples of Frieda’s animosity toward Aurelia. And exhibiting considerable animosity toward the “strangers” who have possessed and reshaped her mother, Frieda describes a caring father who helped her keep the memory of her mother alive. That bond with him makes her disdainful of others who have enshrined her mother in their own pantheon. She is aghast that her “more temperate [compared to her mother] and optimistic” father has been vilified. Hughes never liked seeing Assia’s name in print next to his, and Frieda’s fealty to him results in turning Assia into “the other woman” in the preface.

When English Heritage proposed putting a blue commemorative plaque on the Fitzroy Road building, Frieda insisted that it be placed on the wall of 3 Chalcot Square, where her parents had lived for nearly two years and where they wrote some of their best work. The ensuing attacks from those who believed the plaque should be at the Fitzroy Road residence exacerbated Frieda’s anger about the way her mother has been “dissected, analyzed, reinterpreted, reinvented, fictionalized, and in some cases completely fabricated.” Still, like her father, Frieda has come forward with an Ariel—only this time it is exactly what those analyzers and reinventors have desired for nearly five decades: a Sylvia Plath composed by the poet herself, silent no more.