Vol. 1, Number 3	Fall 1998 issue

 

Save $6.00 at Amazon.com! Read chapter 1

In the foreword to the Journals of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes wrote, in 1982, "I destroyed [the last of her journals] because I did not want her children to have read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival)." This act always seemed to me an unforgivable betrayal, both of Plath herself and of her contribution to the literary world, since the journal that Hughes destroyed would probably have been written around the same time as Plath's most significant poems. I wondered whether his decision wasn't a little selfish: did he have a sense of the potential public importance of the document he destroyed, or had he thought only of his own well-being? Now, with the publication of Birthday Letters, we have, for the first time, a collection of Ted Hughes' poems about Sylvia Plath, written in the years since her suicide in 1963. The eighty-eight poems in the volume, with their constant allusions to Plath's poems and journals, leave no trace of doubt that Hughes has treated Plath's work with an almost religious respect. More importantly, they show that Hughes has become a master navigator of the no-man's-land between public and private in poetry.

One of the most interesting features of Birthday Letters is its structure. The poems appear to be arranged chronologically, not by when they were written, but by the date of the event which they describe--a stroke of brilliance that enriches both the momentum and the significance of the poems. It adds depth to the landscapes, letting the dust and flavor of Spain, described so richly in "You Hated Spain," permeate the remaining three poems about the Hughes' honeymoon there. And, fascinatingly, it highlights the way the poems change in pace and tone as they approach the moment of Plath's death.

The poems' progression bears a breathtaking resemblance to the way Plath's own writing changed over the course of her career. Her early poems were stilted, despite their ingenious images and flawless form; later, they grew fevered and searing, and their careful crafting only clarified their intensity. Similarly, the poems that make up the first half of Birthday Letters often seem forced. Powerful images get bogged down by too much exposition, or by Hughes' odd tendency toward sentences without predicates. Or subjects, for that matter: Hughes often lapses into descriptive phrases decapitated, lopped off from their nouns. In "Astringency," for example, he says,

"A goldfish! Thick, deep and very frisky.
Nine inches long - obviously thriving.
Somebody's apartment darling - flushed?
But caught again!"

This kind of jotted-note speech is present throughout the book, and, while it is certainly a distinctive style, it's also a little bit arrogant. It gives the sense that the poet didn't think it worth his time to craft his descriptions, sure that his observations alone were enough to move the poem. They're not, and each time Hughes tacks on one or more of these adjective sentences, his writing loses steam.

But, regardless of its flat spots, the beginning part of the book does have remarkable power, especially in the poems where all the realistic sketches are focused on a single emotional event. "Fidelity" is such a poem. In it, Hughes describes at length how, while he was courting Plath, he slept naked and chaste with two girls in his rooming-house. The poem is sweet and well-lit, but its real strength is in the underlying urgency of the speaker's growing love. His anxiety for his future drives the entire poem, which finishes,

"I was afraid, if I lost that fight,
Something might abandon us. Lifting
Each of those naked girls, as they smiled at me
In their early twenties, I laid them
Under the threshold of our unlikely future
As those who wanted protection for a new home
Used to bury, under the new threshold,
a sinless child."

The kind of emotional truth present in "Fidelity" becomes almost overwhelming towards the end of the book. Like Plath in her last Ariel poems, Hughes seems to be writing faster and faster, letting his poems come from closer to the bone. The excess of play and contrivance present in the first poems is stripped away, as if the intensity of the emotional material has burned off anything that might have tried to cling to it. The rawest poem in the book is "The Afterbirth", in which Hughes compares his wife's afterbirth in a bowl to a slaughtered hare. The poem is full of a dread that is terrible in this context of a birth:

"You would eat no more hare
Jugged in the wine of its own blood
Out of that bowl. The hare nesting in it
Had opened its eye. As if some night,
Maybe with a thick snow falling softly,
It might come hobbling down from under the elms
Into our yard, crying: 'Mother! Mother!
They are going to eat me!'"

This terror, juxtaposed with the description of Plath "weeping [her] biggest, purest joy," forms the fundamental contrast of this collection. Birthday Letters is a book of layered intensities: wild, weeping joys in the foreground, and a killing, unstoppable fear behind.

If Hughes is reminiscent of Plath in the progression of these poems, he is even more so in the content of the poems themselves. His themes are similar to hers, of course—much of her work was about experiences they shared, and so the bullfights and bee boxes that we see in her poems are naturally the subject of his own. But Hughes also takes his language itself from a kind of great Plath dictionary: the "Panic Bird" from her journals is the subject of "The Bird"; the "dismal-headed fairy godmother" in "Night Ride on Ariel" is an almost direct quote from Plath's "The Disquieting Muses". But it's there in more subtle ways, too, a whole vocabulary of "egg" and "nimbus" that exudes Sylvia. This shared nuance, created by six years of marriage, has always been present in Hughes--but it has never been more rich than in Birthday Letters.

The ways in which Ted Hughes works from Sylvia Plath's vocabulary, the rich emotional subtext of his poems, and the relentless progression of this collection all contribute to the portrait that Birthday Letters creates of Mr. and Mrs. Hughes' life together. That is why the book is so remarkable: it takes two private lives and a private love and gives them over wholly to literature. The act of writing those lives into poetry is especially appropriate since the Hughes' marriage was a working one, where both partners dedicated themselves to writing as much as to each other.

But, while Birthday Letters does allow a remarkable fusion of life with literature, it is also, strangely, a statement in favor of privacy. In "The Table," Hughes writes of the "peanut crunchers" who are now free to examine Plath's writing desk and her life. This crowd of onlookers, peanuts included, comes directly from Plath's poem "Lady Lazarus," in which they come to gawk at her suicide attempt. Both poems insist that the onlookers are far removed from the actuality of Plath's suicide and her life with her husband.: despite the way the Hughes' lives get written down, they remain private--and things of the past.

Reading these Birthday Letters, I get the sense that we are all peanut crunchers, trying to see through these lines into a life that just can't be gleaned from them. In that light, my earlier judgments about the destruction of Plath's journals seem presumptuous, made from an impossible distance. If Hughes allows us a window into his life with this new book, he also asserts his ownership of it--his irrevocable right to show only what he wants to show, and to keep secret all that he does not speak.

But readers of Birthday Letters aren't the only ones bound to feel their distance from the lives described in the book: the writer, it seems, has the same sentiment. The saddest moment in the book comes in the poem "Visit", where Hughes aligns himself not with Plath, but with the crowd of onlookers, trying to conjure life from artifacts, pages, letters. This attempt to pull memory from pages is far removed from the impulse toward oblivion that once caused Hughes to destroy a journal. As he bends over another of Plath's journals in "Visit", he acknowledges the final victory of forgetfulness, and how unreachable even his own past has become:

"I look up - as if to meet your voice
With all its urgent future
That has burst in on me. Then look back
At the book of the printed words.
You are ten years dead. It is only a story.
Your story. My story."