Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes
Tags: Ted Hughes, Domestic Violence, Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath, Poetry

In her tome A Poet’s Guide to Poetry, Mary Kinzie suggests that what poets keep out of their work is as crucial as what they let into it. In other words, “all good poetry fends something off.” In the case of Birthday Letters by Hughes, the poetry seems brilliantly crafted to fend off its own readers. Hughes was haunted by death; he was blamed for the suicide of his poet-wife Sylvia Plath, and he was almost certainly the occasion of the suicide of Assia Wevill, his mistress. People wanted answers from Hughes. How dare he cause so much ruin? Could he not see how his compulsive philandering crushed the lives of these gifted women? Published months shy of Hughes’ own passing, Birthday Letters is nearly an anguished, weary concession to the demands of others: if you get this collection, will you leave me alone? Will you finally stop clawing for more details?

Birthday Letters is certainly keeping a lot out of its own poetry. The poems are crafted around a lot of information already available to the public. Hughes does not use new personal information to inform his audience. He picks details from Plath’s poetry and her life and reworks them into stories that inspire the reader with feeling, but he takes care not to unearth new things for the public eye. For example, in his poem The Tender Place, he recounts Plath’s electroconvulsive therapy:

Your temples, where the hair crowded in,

Were the tender place…

Somebody pushed the lever. They crashed

The thunderbolt into your skull.

Plath’s ECT was not news to anyone. The novelty of the poem lies in the way Hughes sets off his wife’s softness and vulnerability against the fiery horror of the therapy. The overall effect of the poem is devastation — we know that from Hughes’ perspective, the ECT drove scars deep into Plath’s psyche. Something happened in the doctor’s room that could not be undone.

In 1956, Plath met Hughes at a party. What happened next would be recorded in Plath’s journals: “That big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me … kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband off, my lovely red hair band scarf.” In return, Plath bit Hughes so hard that she made blood run down his face. This ferocious encounter also finds its way into Birthday Letters:

… I remember

Little from the rest of that evening.

I slid away with my girlfriend. Nothing

Except her hissing rage in a doorway

And my stupefied interrogation

Of your blue headscarf from my pocket

And the swelling ring-moat of tooth-marks

That was to brand my face for the next month.

The me beneath it for good.

One cannot avoid the sense that Hughes constructed the work around a recognizable timeline for his audience, leading them down a checklist of iconic moments. This would not only satisfy the public’s common understanding of his life, but also allow him complete control over the way he represents Plath, her mental illness, their marriage, and her suicide. I write this not to suggest that we are owed intimate details from Hughes’ life, but to say that the craftsmanship exhibited in this collection carefully shows Plath in a certain light. It also keeps the readers a couple miles far-off from the deleterious ways Hughes affected the marriage. The poems themselves are remarkable accomplishments that deserve respect. The stories they tell, however, should not be uncritically embraced.

Plath is often portrayed here as a galloping force of nature swept unceasingly towards her doom. Hughes is a casualty of her intensity. One would never guess from Birthday Letters that he sought her out or even had a choice in his romantic encounters with her:

Little did I know

The shock attack of a big predator

According to survivors numbs the target

Into drunken euphoria.

When Plath takes a turn for the worse, she becomes a mad-woman under the watchful gaze of her husband:

You cried for certain

You were going to die.

I bustled about.

I was nursemaid. I fancied myself at that.

I liked the crisis of the vital role.

I felt things had become real. Suddenly mother,

As a familiar voice, woke in me.

She arrived with the certain knowledge. I made a huge soup.

We learn soon that it is all for naught, as Plath receives a vision of the price she must pay for her enduring legacy:

Fame will come. Fame especially for you.

Fame cannot be avoided. And when it comes

You will have paid for it with your happiness,

Your husband and your life.

I found that part to be one of the few failings of this stunning collection. It was very on-the-nose and almost lazy, though it capped off a rather virtuosic long poem predictably titled Ouija. When Hughes sings of his encounter with the siren Assia Wevill, we can barely blame him for his straying after years with Plath the cyclone:

We didn’t find her — she found us.

She sniffed us out. The Fate she carried

Sniffed us out…

She sat there, in her soot-wet mascara,

In flame orange silks, in gold bracelets,

Slightly filthy with erotic mystery-

A German

Russian Israeli with the gaze of a demon

Between curtains of black Mongolian hair.

In other words, Hughes did not stray — he was found by an erotic demon enchantress. He did not find Plath, she pounced on him and deluged him with her ravings. He is carried about by circumstance, eventually trapped by his wife’s awful death:

You were the jailer of your murderer-

Which imprisoned you.

And since I was your nurse and your protector

Your sentence was mine too.

Hughes’ helplessness in the face of these feral feminine beings makes for wonderful poetry. Indeed, these poems are luxuriously beautiful and sad. The language has the cultivated sheen of pure silk, but it somehow also feels effortless. A reader of this collection could naively assume that Hughes’ skill allowed the poems to quickly slip out onto paper within a few days. Birthday Letters was actually formed over a period of 25 years. Yet despite Hughes’ extreme efforts, I struggle to take Michiko Kakutani’s belief that these beautiful poems were written “out of the deepest core of [Hughes’] being.”

The facts are hard to verify, but Plath recorded being constantly unsafe around Hughes. She told her mother that he was “dangerously destructive” and that she needed to get her children someplace safe. She recorded instances of violent physical abuse: “Arrived in Paris early Saturday evening exhausted from sleepless holocaust night with Ted in London . . . I took myself in leash and washed my battered face, smeared with a purple bruise from Ted and my neck raw and wounded, too.” Hughes apparently subjected Plath to vicious mockery, even going so far to belittle her suicidal impulses: “Ted and his woman… have already wistfully started wondering why I didn’t commit suicide, since I did before… Ted has said how convenient it would be if I were dead, then he could sell the house & take the children whom He likes. It is me he does not like.” By the time Plath mentally collapsed and took her own life, Hughes was bedding three other women. All of this domestic cruelty does not feature in Birthday Letters. In the book, Plath is the one careening out of control, constantly getting away from the benevolent mastery of the bewildered Ted Hughes. The reality is likely to have been much different.

It makes sense, then, that Hughes would spend so much time working these poems into a tight narrative. We are given memories and references that build up to and seemingly explain Plath’s death, but this well-selected catalog is probably not coming out of the deepest core of Hughes’ being. The actual core of the author remains neatly concealed in other unseen materials and unpublished letters. The result of Hughes’ prudent craftsmanship is a remarkable body of 88 poems that exhibit technical finesse and thoughtfulness, but no vitality. A consistent sense of falsehood haunts Birthday Letters even during the book’s finest moments; I am not persuaded by the collection’s renderings of the always-baffled Hughes, the deranged, weepy Plath, or even the sorceress Wevill. I know that this book is not offering me something heartfelt. Because of this, I can only attribute the book’s extreme popularity to the mystery surrounding Plath’s last hours. The poems themselves are truly excellent, but they neither earn the sensation they caused upon publication nor provide Hughes with complete absolution.