Her Husband: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath--A Marriage

Love at the barre

"The courage of the shut mouth, in spite of artillery!" opens Sylvia Plath's "The Courage of Shutting-Up", a poem about the vicious circularity of anger, the way it makes "the disks of the brain revolve, like the muzzles of cannon", "a needle journeying in its groove". One of the poems Plath composed in her legendary outburst in the autumn of 1962 after learning of Ted Hughes's infidelity, this poem in search of self-command was itself part of the fusillade Plath let fly during the course of the twentieth century's most famous poetic tirade. When Hughes betrayed Plath, she sharpened her pen into a knife and went surgically to work. Intimacy became her weapon: being under someone's skin made it easier to flay him. Six months later, Plath died intestate, leaving Hughes holding the pages of a manuscript she called Ariel; when he published it in 1965, Hughes omitted twelve poems -- including this one -- that were, in his words, "aimed too nakedly", a decision which triggered accusations that he was shutting Plath up. And the argument has revolved ever since. For some, the image of Plath and Hughes as a couple seems frozen into a kind of perverse Grecian urn, for ever stabbing each other in the heart and in the back. But Her Husband: Hughes and Plath, Diane Middlebrook's entry into the lists, demonstrates that the story is evolving -- by means of punctuated equilibrium.

Ten years ago, in The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm took what had become a feminist cautionary fable about a gifted woman destroyed by patriarchy in general and one perfidious man in particular, and transformed it into a post-feminist exemplum. Malcolm's method was simple but effective: she made it about the man. The story of Plath and Hughes had, for thirty years, been focused on the subjectivity of Plath. Some praised her; some buried her; but she was the one to watch. Malcolm shifted the story to Hughes, and turned him into an object of desire. Always a protagonist, he has become the lead, in part because he has become the victim. Her Husband shares this trend; it is grounded -- occasionally mired -- in Hughes's ostensible point of view.

Once the protagonist changed, so did the tale: the legend of a tragic heroine dying for love metamorphosed into the myth of a tragic hero devoured by harpies, Actaeon ravaged by hounds; The Silent Woman was really about the erotically charged "silent man" at its centre. Middlebrook offers the latest variation on this theme, but she has admitted into the tale a crucial determinant -- namely, Hughes's active role in its invention. The legend of Plath and Hughes was produced largely by Plath and Hughes themselves: especially in youth, they represented themselves, and each other, in mythical terms. Both particularly fancied the idea of Hughes as Lawrentian gamekeeper and bard of the primitive urges, whose animal magnetism drives women mad. Too many women writers, Middlebrook and Malcolm included, affect to share in this nonsense (although they will have to get in line behind Plath: no one could swoon over Hughes as she could). If Her Husband is any indication, there is little reason to believe that the era of Hughes-as-Heathcliff is ending -- but Plath, for a refreshing change, is viewed matter-of-factly. "Depression killed Sylvia Plath", Middlebrook bluntly declares, and so unarguable does this conclusion now seem it is hard to remember that it was once the subject of intense debate. It turns out that we needed to look away from Plath and towards Hughes to see her clearly: close-up distorts. Which is why, although Middlebrook offers one of the most balanced, fair-minded portraits of Plath to date, her representation of Hughes increasingly loses its focus as it leaves Plath behind.

If the first half of this uneven book is the sanest version of their story so far, Middlebrook adds little that is new. And rehearsing the familiar tale of their marriage leaves the book only gesturing in its last third towards its ostensible raison d'etre: how assiduously Hughes "husbanded" Plath's work and his relation to it -- and her. The man represented by many as a casualty of Plath's writing (already a simplistic view, since he published most of it, a point Middlebrook neglects) defined himself, Middlebrook rightly suggests, for the rest of his life, as "her husband". This important idea gets lost in the margins, however; the narration of Hughes's life after Plath's death is so patchy as to be potentially confusing. For example, Middlebrook reports that Hughes married Carol Orchard in 1970, then cuts to his affair with Jill Barber, discussing his promises to marry her, asserting that "they were openly a couple", and then moves to another relationship, without stopping to clarify that he remained married throughout all this philandering.

If she had finished what she started, reinstating Hughes's agency in Plath's posthumous career along with his perspective, Middlebrook might have balanced the books by restoring accountability. Instead, she tends to liberate Hughes from it -- frequently on the basis of his own peculiar justifications. Middlebrook can skewer character with a pointed phrase ("at the time he met Plath, Hughes didn't really have plans, he had soothing notions"); but she is also given to reductive declarations: having asked whether Plath could have been Hughes's muse, she pronounces: "Well, Ted Hughes believed that she was, and that was the reason he fell in love with her". Middlebrook accuses Plath (accurately) of occasional "magic thinking", but when reporting some of Hughes's weirder notions, her voice seems to collapse into his. For example, he used astrology to determine -- or validate -- many of his decisions in life. "To the astrologer, geography is destiny", Middlebrook explains, and reprints Hughes's natal horoscope, as if its significance were self-evident. Those of us to whom geography is contingency, and such statements are casuistry, however, might wonder if choice were being camouflaged in fatalism. Middlebrook simply asserts that "as Hughes's talent matured", the "muscular influence" of Neptune "could be expected to assist his project of shaping an imaginary self within a work of art". Could it?

Hughes's role in Plath's literary reputation was highly involved, in every sense: he was simultaneously author, editor, reader, protagonist, occasional publisher and chief financial officer of Sylvia Plath, Inc. With Middlebrook we finally have a biographer who understands that after Plath's death Hughes was trying less to supplant her than to re-establish a partnership with her -- albeit as controlling partner. Middlebrook brings for the first time the tone of reconciliation that Janet Malcolm (influentially but fallaciously) argued could never be achieved. Middlebrook begins, implicitly, to show how hard Hughes worked at reuniting their poetry, restoring the literary collaboration that was intrinsic to their marriage.

Plath and Hughes didn't just use their relationship in their writing, they used writing to conduct their relationship: much of their poetry formed an extended, intricate ballet, from pas de deux to danse macabre. They were trying to create an art of privity; eventually it overwhelmed them. Drowning in intimacy, they couldn't rediscover separateness without separating. Middlebrook effectively decodes some of their more cryptic poems by linking them back together, finding an intertextual marriage on the page: one particularly persuasive reading aligns Plath's poem "The Rabbit Catcher", Hughes's "Difficulties of a Bridegroom" and Plath's "Kindness" in an indirect (and nasty) fight circling around D. H. Lawrence's "Rabbit Snared in the Night". Their allusions were crammed with subtextual meanings, explosive in their compactness -- which doubtless also made them more fun, if dangerous fun. Middlebrook neglects that part: Plath and Hughes were battling each other, but also playing word-games for each other's benefit, enjoying the frisson of the in-joke (Plath called herself "Roget's trollop"): their alliance was founded in a private language - for which both ultimately sought publication.

Sexual politics may steer the tale, but the story of Plath and Hughes is also driven by the politics of authorship. At one point, Middlebrook likens Plath's journals to a ballerina at the barre, private working exercises that are also warm-ups for a public performance and thus fundamentally self-conscious. Plath's writing always had a public aspect -- a consummate professional, she would sell any work she could, and after some initial resistance, Hughes seems to have caught on to the pragmatics of the enterprise. Writing wasn't just their art, it was their business.

Those who argue for returning the story of Plath and Hughes to "pure" questions of art (as opposed to sexual gossip) are thus missing the point. Their writing was never that innocent: both translated their experiences of each other into art, and then sold it. Plath's commercialism has long been part of the tale -- her vulgar American materialism contrasted with Hughes's supposedly loftier artistic aspirations. Middlebrook is one of the first to argue that Hughes, too, intended to be rich and famous: "Hughes felt entitled to prosper", she declares; one may resist the flat assertion, but not the fact that he saved, and then sold, two-and-a-half tons of his papers to Emory University; sold Plath's papers to Smith College; sealed and unsealed boxes, telling stories of lost and stolen manuscripts and destroyed journals; and dropped tantalizing hints about hidden caches of documents. He helped create and maintain a market for their writing, and prospered, leaving an estate of over 1.4 million Pounds. Nor should we see this as degrading. On the contrary, we might stop clinging so stubbornly to the ideal of an ars gratia artis that rises above the moneygrubbing market, and acknowledge the creative cognitive acrobatics that both Plath and Hughes used to reconcile their artistic aspirations with their commercial ambitions.

Hughes, in particular, liked to represent himself as an acolyte worshipping some aesthetic goddess or other (whether Poetry, Art, the White Goddess, Nature, or Eve "Goddess of Complete Being"), and Middlebrook seems surprisingly receptive to the poetry defence. He wrote in Birthday Letters that he and Plath "only did what poetry told us to do" - a claim which is not only pious, but specious. Diane Middlebrook goes further and accepts the risible faux-Lawrentian rationale that writing and rutting expressed the same primal unity with nature: "his life as an artist", she declares without tongue apparently near cheek, "would require his wife's acceptance of the sexual practices to which his deepest inspiration was attached". Hughes may have associated primitive, "instinctive" art with sexual predation, but that doesn't mean we should. Or that we should accept the premiss that art purifies the artist from some taint of interchangeable commercial or sexual promiscuity.

Both writers understood that art's commercial value depends on its maintaining a facade of aloof indifference to the market at which it beckons with one finger curled behind its back. Thus, when Hughes attacks Plath's readers in Birthday Letters as a pack of dogs savaging her corpse, anyone feeling sunk beneath reproach might remember that he published these poems, selling them to the audience he was vilifying. His reasons for this were complex, but nonetheless sentimentalized -- even misrepresented. Plath and Hughes were professional writers selling words about each other to readers whose opinions would become part of the story.

If we could see them clear of the mists and the myths -- which, pace Ted Hughes, were created as much by his and Plath's literary parthenogenesis as by what he considered a conspiratorial feminist "Fantasia" -- we might rediscover something important about this story: the reader. In early 1958, Plath spent a day reading Lady Chatterley's Lover "with the joy of a woman living with her own game-keeper", she sighed in her journal. "Why do I feel I would have known and loved Lawrence -- how many women would feel this & be wrong!". Plath had been seeing herself as a character in a great dramatic story all her life, but she was shrewd enough to recognize how common, and misguided, her fantasy was; that the erotic identification of the reader produces free-floating desire. This is not just the story of a couple, but rather of triangles, of overlapping sexual, fantasmic and commercial triangles of writers, representations and readers. Reading the story of Plath and Hughes in terms of exchange might enable us to break the vicious circle of anger, and lower our guards. Some day it will be, in Plath's words, "Difficult to imagine how fury struck -/ Dissolved now, smoke of an old war". For that to happen, we need to face facts -- not only about the art of intimacy, but also about the profession of art. Otherwise, we will keep "tattooing over and over the same blue grievances", without the courage to shut up.

Sarah Churchwell is a lecturer in the School of English and American Studies at the University of East Anglia. Her first book, The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, was published this year.

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