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Her Husband. Hughes and Plath: A Marriage
Diane Middlebrook
London: Little, Brown, 2004.
£20.00, 361 pages, ISBN 0-316-85992-3

Aileen La Tourette
Liverpool John Moores University

 

‘The Anatomy of a Marriage,’ maybe—‘anatomy’ implies a decision to remain on the outside, even while venturing within. But this "biography of (their) marriage," as Diane Middlebrook’s book is described on the sleeve, promises something else. A biography gets right inside its subject—or at least tantalizes us with the possibility that it can.

The title Her Husband further implies that Ted Hughes will occupy somewhat more space within this marriage, at least as described in the book, than Sylvia Plath. It quickly becomes clear that this is the case not because Middlebrook believes him to be dominant in any way, but because she is primarily interested in both Hughes and Plath as poets, and the poet Hughes not only outlived the poet Plath but also wrote Birthday Letters, published seven months before his death in 1998.

The publication of Birthday Letters (BL) was a major literary event. And if our appetite for reading it was not entirely governed by literary concerns, if a trace of queasiness crept in as we queued up at bookshops to acquire it, we were rewarded by an epic—or rather, mythic—tale of two Titans. Middlebrook sums up the importance of BL to her own book near its end, when she says: "The way Hughes formulated his mythic relationship to Plath, during the…era of his Laureateship…required the affirmation of her undiminished energy as the defining influence of his life" [273].

Far from marginalizing or diminishing Plath in any way, Middlebrook enshrines her at the centre of Hughes’ life and work. Though the Laureateship is generally considered to be of questionable value at best in helping a poet fulfil himself creatively (they have all been men, though Carol Ann Duffy was held to be the popular choice when the present Laureate, Andrew Motion, was appointed) Middlebrook has an interesting take on it in Hughes’ case: "Arguably, the position he filled as Poet Laureate provided Hughes with the confidence to complete a self-mythology that accounted for the vocation he had conducted as a poet-shaman" [272]. He had berated himself, she says, for what he termed a “diabolical fear of subjectivity” [272] and was finally ready to write himself into his poems, as son and husband.

As man, then. He will speak of himself, from himself, as human rather than through the close observation of and intimacy with animals that comes from a life lived in proximity with them. Oddly enough, for a book that concentrates on Hughes’ self-mythologizing, this one brings us closer to him as a human being than any other volume I have read. It does so without shying away from any of the issues raised by the details of his history with Plath, including what Middlebrook, surely correctly, describes as "the ethical scar on his life, his desertion of Plath" [240]. It is a tribute to her truly balanced passion for her subject—an oxymoronic-sounding quality singularly lacking from many other accounts—that she allows elements of mere muddle and mess—the stuff of any marriage, any life—to show through the drama.

We know, or think we know, what Sylvia Plath’s wounds were. Partly because of Hughes’ own writing about her, about them, but more particularly because of Plath’s own poems and journals, we know about her father’s dark haunting. We know about the way Otto Plath let himself die when it seems he could have lived—a slow suicide, as opposed to her quick one. We’ve read The Bell Jar. We know how driven Plath was, what a perfectionist she was raised to be, how she had to shine as poet, wife, mother, lover—all at once, or not at all. We also know that she overcame all this to write the Ariel poems that Hughes published after her death, the poems on which her reputation rests. Middlebrook quotes Hughes, a great lover of Dickenson, as testifying on behalf of Ariel that “no other woman poet except Emily Dickenson can begin to be compared to her” [218]. There is, it seems, no end to our knowledge of Plath. But what do we actually know about Ted Hughes?

Plath’s wounds have been identified as specifically, almost generically female. But what of the specific, generically masculine wounds of Hughes? It is here that the book is most original. Of his older brother, Gerald, Middlebrook quotes Hughes as saying “ He was ten years older than me and made my early life a kind of Paradise” [74]. Gerald taught him to hunt for grouse and snipe, stoats and rabbits on the moors above the Calder Valley in Yorkshire, where they grew up. His role was a lowly one. Gerald shot and Ted fetched the dead game, acting as the gun dog Gerald didn’t have. Gerald opened up the wilderness to his small brother, taking him camping and showing him how to cook in the open. He was also a storyteller and began the process of mythologizing that would rule Ted Hughes’ life, comparing their excursions and escapades to Longfellow’s Hiawatha. The boys’ father had memorized long passages of the poem, and recited them to his sons. “I lived in his dream” [71], Ted Hughes said of his beloved brother; he might just as easily have meant their father.

This masculine dream of a life in the open, hunting and eating the kill, makes the brothers into heroes, twin gods. Despite his Longfellow recitations, their father Billie Hughes was not a hero, far less a god. Billie had joined the Lancashire Fusiliers in 1915, and been sent to Gallipoli. From there he went to the trenches of France and Flanders, where he performed an act of heroism for which he was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal, carrying a wounded man from the battlefield and not dropping him even when a shell burst in front of him. He returned a silent man who would not tell his sons what he had seen, though he cried out at night from nightmares. What Middlebrook refers to as Billie Hughes’ ‘’trances of agony’ [63] were clearly a presence in the household, one that spoke loudly of what Hughes began to see, after the Laureateship had freed him to speak of personal things, as knowledge passed down from father to son, over time, when the son was ready. In his poem "Dust As We Are" he writes of receiving this knowledge directly into his skull from a father who came back from the dead to impart it, directly, to him. It is Billie Hughes, wounded by the war, diminished, as Hughes had seen him all his life, made passive and even abject, who returns as a shaman to initiate his son. In order for Hughes to write this poem in this way, he had to leave behind an attitude that had sustained him even while it limited him. As Middlebrook so acutely comments "For an Englishman to abandon his irony in public takes courage indeed" [273].

I have always thought Robert Graves had a lot to answer for, with his moony White Goddess and the mythology of muses that acts for male poets as a kind of libertine’s charter. Ted Hughes believed his mother, with her Celtic lineage, to be his first muse. But Gerald was her favourite. Edith Farrar had married beneath herself, and there’s a hint of D.H. Lawrence, about whom Hughes was passionate, in his early relationships with his parents. His mother was lively, articulate, engaged and ambitious. But she and all the women of the Calder Valley looked for a man who never came back, literally or figuratively, from the Great War, in Middlebrook’s interpretation, "some ideal form of man who had disappeared. In the Hughes family, that role was to be played by Ted’s older brother, Gerald" [70].

The sense of a test which he fails and must fail, haunts Hughes. In Birthday Letters, he tells the story of a boy who offers him a fox cub at Chalk Farm underground station in North London. Hughes refuses, then regrets his refusal and traces the end of his marriage to Plath to that refusal. The fox is a totem animal for Hughes across many of his poems. In “The Thought -Fox,“ the animal acts as "his youthful metaphor for poetic creation" [102]. In the last line of Hughes "poem 'The Offers,' Plath’s ghost warns him ‘This time/ Don’t fail me’ " [282].

It’s hardly surprising that Hughes would imagine rage and vengefulness from Plath’s spirit. But it’s the sense of failure that dragged at his life as, in another way, it dragged at hers, that haunts me after reading this book. It’s as if they had matching wounds, and the perfect fit of Plath’s father’s desertion of her by death and Hughes’ mother’s inaccessibility to him because of his father’s plight and his brother’s prowess, made them what they were to each other. Enormous influences—as Hughes writing back to Plath at he end of his life demonstrates. We know the tale of destruction. This book, without shying away from that story, puts it beside another story of two poets who made each other into poets, in some sense, from the day they met until the days they died.


 

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