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February 13, 1998

Books of the Times

'Birthday Letters': A Portrait of Plath in Poetry

for Its Own Sake
Related Articles 

 A Divided Response to Poems of Ted Hughes (Jan. 27, 1998)

 Ted Hughes at Last Recounts Life With Sylvia Plath  (Jan. 19,
1998)
 Read "Apprehensions," "St. Botolph's," and "18 Rugby Street"
 Read "A Short Film"

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

o literary couple has been so mythologized

as Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. In her BIRTHDAY
LETTERS
own fierce, slashing poems, Plath By Ted Hughes
dramatized herself as a terror-stricken 198 pages. Farrar,
victim, a doomed Electra, a "Lady Straus & Giroux. $20.
Lazarus," eating "men like air," and she
depicted her husband alternately as her
"savior," as her "muse and god-creator"
and as her "jailer" and betrayer.
In the years since her death -- in 1963, she stuck her head inside
her kitchen oven and turned on the gas -- feminist critics have
canonized Plath as a martyr while reviling Hughes as a villain: the
callous husband, who left her for another woman, the ogre who
drove her to suicide and took over her literary estate in an effort to
shape her memory.

Throughout all this, Hughes has remained silent, turning aside

inquiries from biographers and reporters while editing
posthumous collections of Plath's various writings. With
"Birthday Letters," his astonishing new volume of poems, he
finally shatters that silence, giving us an extraordinarily intimate
portrait of their relationship, from their first meeting in 1956
through their marriage and her suicide.

Written over the last few decades, the poems seem remarkably
free of self-pity, score-settling and spin; rather, they draw a deeply
affecting portrait of the couple's marriage while attesting to
Hughes' own impassioned love for Plath. Poems, however, are not
biography, and these should not be read simply for the light they
shed on the Hughes-Plath relationship. They should be read
because they constitute the strongest, most emotionally tactile
work of Hughes' career.

Urgent, tensile and harrowing, these poems recapitulate all the

major themes that have animated Hughes' earlier work -- violence,
death and survival, a Darwinian view of nature, a Hobbesian view
of the world -- while revealing just how rooted this appetite, in
Helen Vendler's words, "for naming and ornamenting disaster"
was in his own experience of life.

At the same time, the poems in "Birthday Letters" evince a new

directness and vulnerability. Burned free of the detachment,
condescension and contrivance that cramped much of his earlier
work, they dazzle not only with verbal dexterity but also with
clear- hearted emotion. They are clearly the work of a poet writing
out of the deepest core of his being.

Almost every poem in the volume is written as a letter addressed

directly to Plath, and many allude to Plath's own favorite images
(the sun, the moon, the sea) and her vocabulary as a poet.
In fact, one of the things that is so fascinating about "Birthday
Letters" is how persuasively Hughes grapples with the memory of
his former wife, both with his own remembrances of their
experiences together (their wedding, their honeymoon, a trip to
the United States, the birth of their two children) and with the
mythologized versions of those experiences as they have come
down to us in Plath's own poems, journals and letters.

Hughes gives us his own version of the first kiss famously

mythologized by Plath ("he kissed me bang smash on the
mouth . . . And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard
on the cheek").

He remembers her eyes, "a crush of diamonds, incredibly bright,

bright as a crush of tears," and her tooth marks that were "to brand
my face for the next month./The me beneath it for good."

He conjures her up on their wedding day, "so slender and new and
naked,/A nodding spray of wet lilac." And he describes her
"exaggerated American/Grin for the cameras, the judges, the
strangers, the frighteners."

As Plath's own writings attest, there were at least two faces she
showed to the world: the sunlit American girl, a straight-A
student, the picture of friskiness and vitality and ambition; and the
shadow side, the haunted woman, trapped in a bell jar, plagued by
nighttime terrors and quickening rages, and drawn ineluctably,
like Persephone, toward an underworld of despair and death.

Hughes gives us both Plaths: the magical, kinetic girl he fell in

love with and the sad, frightened woman he felt he could no
longer reach.

Hughes, for his part, plays Ferdinand to her Miranda, and later
Leonard to her Virginia. He feels unworthy marrying her, "the
Swineherd/ Stealing this daughter's pedigreed dreams/From under
her watchtowered searchlit future," but embraces their marriage as
a fated match dangling the promise of Edenic bliss.

There are quick, bright snapshots of their very ordinary happiness

-- playing at being tourists in Paris, setting up house together,
picking daffodils in the garden -- but there are hints, too, of strain
and stress. The pressure of living with another poet -- all that
observing and annotating, all that extrapolating of the ordinary
into metaphor -- begins to take a toll.

We see in these poems, as we saw in Plath's most famous "Ariel"

poems, Plath's growing obsession with her father, Otto, who died
when she was 8, and we are also made to feel Hughes' own
growing sense of helplessness, his inability to save or soothe his
wife.

In "The Table," he writes, "I wanted to make you a solid writing-

table/That would last a lifetime" but found instead that he had
"made and fitted a door/Opening downwards into your Daddy's
grave."

In poem after poem, Otto is depicted as the Minotaur, a rough,

dark beast waiting to snatch Plath away from happiness and
youth, while Plath, in turn, is seen as a maiden, intent on entering
his labyrinth and meeting her self-appointed fate.

There are verses in this volume where Hughes' penchant for

parables and animal metaphors can feel forced: especially strained
is one poem that tries to find an omen of the author's marriage in
his encounter with a wounded bat. These, however, are the
exceptions.

Most of the poems in "Birthday Letters" have a wonderful

immediacy and tenderness that's new to Hughes' writing, a
tenderness that enables him to communicate Plath's terrors as
palpably as her own verse, and to convey his own lasting sense of
loss and grief.

"But then I sat, stilled," he writes, "Unable to fathom what stilled

you/As I looked at you, as I am stilled/Permanently now,
permanently/Bending so briefly at your open coffin."

 
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