Content provided in partnership with
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath—a marriage examined
Contemporary Review, Feb, 2005 by Richard Whittington-Egan
Her Husband: Hughes and Plath--A Marriage. Diane Middlebrook. Little, Brown. [pounds sterling]20.00. xx + 361 pages. ISBN 0-316-85992-3.
The story of the fiasco of the Hughes-Plath coupling is as well known as the tragic sequence of the happier Browning-Barrett union; two classic poetic comings together, both have inspired sheaves and shelves of books. Miss Middlebrook escorts us over the well-ploughed-up battleground of the Hughes-Plath uni-lethal mesalliance, but then, descending to the furrows, proceeds to analyse the soil, and dig cathartically below the surface.
- Most Popular Articles in News
- The Ten Best Laptop bags
- Tata plans cheapest-ever car for Indian market
- GLOBALIZATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT OF THE THIRD WORLD
- Corn is good for you; Corn is not only a tasty treat, but also a cereal that ...
- THE 50 BEST STYLISH HANDBAGS TO CARRY
- More »
Shortly before Ted Hughes' overdue death, aged 68, on 28th October, 1998, just one day after what would have been Sylvia Plath's sixty-sixth birthday, he published two books, Birthday Letters and Howls and Whispers. While the former, an autobiographical matrimonial apologia in verse, achieved wide recognition, the latter has remained largely unknown and unreviewed. There is good reason for this. Only 110 copies were issued in an expensive limited edition.
The volume was made up of eleven poems, reserved from the manuscripts that became Birthday Poems; poems set aside, Miss Middlebrook observes, 'as a winemaker sets aside the choicest vintage for special labelling'. However, the central, most important, most revelatory poem in the book, 'The Offers', was released to, and published in, The Sunday Times of October 18th, 1998-ten days before Hughes' death. An eerie accident of timing! In this poem the ghost of Sylvia appears to her errant husband three times. Each visitation is made an occasion for his testing, and on her last visit she warns: 'This time, Don't fail me'.
'This startling phrase sends', says Miss Middlebrook, 'a pulse of light back through every page Hughes had published since Plath's death', and she points to the significantly recurrent theme in his post-Sylvian work of 'how marriages fail, or men fail in marriage'. In his latter-life translations of Racine's Phedre, Tales from Ovid, and the Euripidean Alcestis, Hughes treats empathically of marriage under duress, importing to all his own passionate story, exploring it, albeit inexactly, 'within the dynamics of a venerable classic'. That sentence of Sylvia's, spoken through Hughes--'This time, Don't fail me', published on that October Sunday in 1998, can, by only the most moderate stretch of poetically licensed imagination, be regarded as both Sylvia's and Hughes' last (published) words.
It is hard to quarrel with Miss Middleton's diagnosis of the aetiology of Howls and Whispers as a 'work of self-mythologizing', following upon 'Plath's angry departure for the underworld'. Returned to the flat in Fitzroy Road to look after his now motherless children, Hughes, lying there in Sylvia's bed, could hear at night the howling of the wolves in their cages at nearby Regent's Park Zoo; and, of superstitious turn, considered them as messages. The whispers are perhaps the half-stifled murmurings of his conscience. Heaven knows, he had enough upon it.
Preserved in the Woodruff Library at Emory University, is copy No. 7 of ten copies only of a very special limited, boxed edition of Howls and Whispers, each of which contained an engraved copper plate of one of Leonard Baskin's etchings and a draft page of one of Hughes' poems. The holograph poem in No. 7 is 'The Minotaur', and, scratched out by Hughes, are the words, unique and telling, 'our secret quarrel suddenly a public show'. In that library, too, there lies, deposited there by Hughes himself, a sealed trunk that waits until the year 2023 to be opened. It is tempting to speculate as to what long-hidden secrets it may at the appointed time reveal. These, the two last books and the trunk, were the means by which, as he felt the cancer gnaw and the heart's rhythm falter, he sought at the end to preserve his persona as a poet for the future. Having spent half a lifetime mythologising his marriage, Hughes seems to have determined upon a death-time demythologisation.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
