American Isis (37 page)

Hughes contributed biographical notes to the same
Tri-Quarterly
issue, excusing himself to Aurelia on 19 May 1966 by saying Sylvia had already become a “literary legend”—without assessing his own part in making her so. He rated her far ahead of Robert Lowell and even better than Hughes's touchstone, Emily Dickinson. His fervor belied his disclaimer that he did not want to portray himself as the “high priest of her mysteries.” But that, of course, is exactly what he had done by claiming total control not only over her work, but also over the manner in which her life should be revered.

After Sylvia had been given demeaning and malicious treatment in
Time,
Hughes commiserated with Aurelia in a 13 July 1966. The magazine's 10 June issue reviewed
Ariel,
focusing on “Daddy,” printing it in full, and labeling it an example of Plath's style, as “brutal as a truncheon.” The poem was “merely the first jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a living river of bale across the literary landscape.” Leave it to
Time
to come up with “bale,” the archaic meaning of which is associated with misery, woe, misfortune, evil, and harm. In Britain,
Ariel
had sold fifteen thousand copies in ten months, figures often associated with a bestselling novel,
Time
reported.

The remorse Hughes suffered over his part in Sylvia's suicide was now overshadowed by his outrage over her posthumous denudation. He regretted publishing
Ariel
in the United States—although how he could square his misgivings with his desire to promote her greatness is baffling, especially since he jiggered publication of the book with Robert Lowell's attention-getting introduction. Hughes deplored the too easy equation between Plath's poems and her suicide. Indeed, the poems had “cured” her, he argued.

In December, Aurelia wrote to Elinor Epstein, thanking her for publishing a memoir that honored her friendship with Sylvia without disclosing the intimacies they shared. Epstein's anodyne memoir, emphasizing what a cheery person Sylvia was, only served to launch a spate of reminiscences, pro and con Plath. Already, on 3 December 1966, Aurelia was writing to Epstein, “I am so sick of the ‘legend,' the ‘image.'”

Even as Hughes indulged himself in degrading the efforts of anyone—other than himself—who dared to depict Sylvia Plath, he was replicating the very domestic disarray that had contributed to her demise. A disheartened Assia Wevill began to conclude that not only could she never compete with the legend of Sylvia Plath, she could not even secure Hughes's commitment to find a permanent home she could call her own. Instead, she coped with a series of makeshift domiciles, beginning with the Fitzroy Road flat, then Court Green, followed by a brief period in Ireland—and then back to Court Green to confront the hostility of Hughes's parents, installed there as caretakers whenever Ted's marauding sensibility sent him off to the city and other locales that welcomed this controversial celebrity poet. By the end of the year, Assia was back in London with Shura, brooding over what to do about Hughes's broken promises.

To Daniel Weissbort in December 1966 Hughes revealed the mocking side of himself that revolted Sylvia Plath: first the bracing tonic of distraction-free country life, then the momentary sense of equilibrium it engendered, and then the flight to the city to “get the family lice combed out of you.” Plath understood the need to be off to London—she experienced the need herself—but to couch that need in such loathing, and to revel in dispatching the domesticity she treasured enraged her, especially since Hughes could turn from pliant to disdainful in a trice. Much has been written about Plath's mercurial moods, but Hughes in his own way could cut her a new one.

On 25 May 1968, Olywn wrote to Aurelia broaching the idea of publishing
The Bell Jar
in the United States—even though, as Olwyn admitted in her letter, Ted had told her that Aurelia was adamantly against such publication. Think how much more money a novel would bring in for the children's benefit than the poetry would, Olwyn argued. Aurelia's response, which she decided not to send to Olwyn, was a terse rebuttal: “Surely the children will respect their father, when they are grown, for having refused to make money for them at such a price to their mother's people!”

Olwyn persisted for the next two years, writing a series of letters Aurelia later deposited in her daughter's Smith College archive. On 2 July, Olwyn argued against exaggerated fears of publicity over publication of
The Bell Jar.
No one would care much about the real-life figures Sylvia had turned into her characters. Sylvia herself was disappointed that Knopf had not wanted to publish the novel. And as a capper, Olwyn suggested Aurelia was depriving Sylvia of her place in “our literary heritage.” A skeptical, infuriated Aurelia annotated this letter, noting what a ruckus “Daddy” had caused. She wrote Olwyn a week later that she had no idea of the “cupidity” of the American press and motion picture industry, which would only be interested in the sensationalistic aspects of
The Bell Jar
and Sylvia's suicide. Aurelia had obtained legal advice, which only confirmed her concerns. In an unsent note, dated 29 December, Aurelia let Olwyn have it: Aurelia was not only expected to suffer the publication of the novel, she was supposed to “sanction it!” Olwyn backed off, temporarily, even as she cited the opinions of writers like Alan Sillitoe, who deemed the novel a distinguished work. Olwyn's subsequent letters to an obdurate Aurelia asserted that the estate could control publicity about Sylvia by funneling all queries about her life to Lois Ames—who became, in effect, not merely the authorized, but also the proprietary biographer.

Then Frances McCullough announced that Random House planned to issue an American edition of
The Bell Jar,
capitalizing on the copyright law then in effect: “Plath or her publisher in England would have had to publish the book in the U.S. within 6 months, but because she never intended to publish it here, and because it was published under a pseudonym, that never happened.” McCullough contacted Random House and “managed to make an ethical case that they shouldn't do this because Ted Hughes had promised Sylvia's mother it would never happen.” Aurelia, worried about her deteriorating health and financial security, realized that nothing would stem the interest in all facets of her daughter's life and work. As a result, she went along with Frances McCullough's advice that to “protect the book,” they had to publish it. “Later it became possible to amend that copyright provision and it was registered in Frieda and Nicholas's name,” McCullough explained to Beth Alvarez, an archivist at the University of Maryland.

On 23 March 1969, Assia Wevill gassed herself and her daughter. In the past year, her life with Hughes had become a desperate affair. She had written to Aurelia on 4 January 1968: “Ted told me that I was no use to him as an invalid (this was during my post-flu depression and sinus and bronchitis and things), and I thought that was the most brutal thing he'd ever said to me, when I nursed him and his mother for three weeks of his slipped disc. I thought suddenly that that degree of brutality would slowly dement me. That I must perhaps think of living without him completely.” Hughes's reaction to the news was the same as it had been when Sylvia killed herself: “I cannot believe how I never knew what was really happening to her.” To Celia Chaikin, Assia's sister, he claimed that as a couple he and Assia were one, which is why her constant testing of him—right up to her telephone call shortly before her suicide—had not unduly troubled him. He had been too distracted and too exhausted to offer her the hope she craved. He might as well have copied the letters he wrote to Aurelia after Sylvia's death.

Writing to Aurelia on 14 April, an anguished Hughes alluded to the hellish atmosphere of Court Green, treating his home like a haunted Gothic castle. What could Aurelia have made of his insensitive comment that he and Assia had hoped they could make “some atonement” for Sylvia? And how did it help to tell Aurelia that since Sylvia's death his nature had turned “negative,” prompting him yet again to make a fresh start. It was exactly this notion—that he could just move on—that had so devastated Plath.

On 2 May 1969, Olwyn rang up Al Alvarez to talk about Assia's suicide. He noted in his diary: “According to Olwyn—who is scarcely impartial and probably lying—Assia was drunk … and had taken sleeping pills.” When Alvarez said the real crime was killing her little girl, Olwyn replied, “She could hardly have left Ted with
another
motherless child.” An aghast Alvarez listened as Olwyn said that it had been a particularly trying week for Assia. She was probably looking ghastly and was probably thinking, “I've lost my beauty. Ted will never love me.” In his diary, Alvarez wrote, “Olwyn could scarcely contain her triumph and contempt.” Writing to Peter Redgrove, a friend, in the spring of 1970, Hughes might as well have said he had become a ringer for Byron's Manfred: “I seem to have been populated by the deceased who go on requiring God knows what of me & permit me very little.”

In August 1970, Hughes married Carol Orchard, the daughter of a Devon farmer Hughes had befriended. Like certain other women who enter during the latter stages of a famous writer's career—Elaine Steinbeck and Mary Hemingway come to mind—Carol became the ideal consort. As caretaker of her husband's myth, she was anxious to make sure she did everything in her power to keep out of print the negativity that Hughes had identified in himself. From this point on, Carol and Olwyn joined forces to make certain their Ted was well defended and shielded from having to deal directly with the legend of Sylvia Plath. For his part, Hughes felt perfectly free to pursue love affairs, advising Marvin Cohen, one of Olwyn's writer friends, that the best way to get over the heartbreaking loss of a lover was to make sure that one always had another woman on hand as a replacement. Writing to Gerald and Joan Hughes, Ted announced that he had been leading a false life from about the age of sixteen and now had to start “from scratch.”

In September of 1971, Hughes wrote to Lucas Myers about the “Sylvia mania,” mentioning articles by A. Alvarez and Elizabeth Hardwick, and noting that in New York Plath was
the
topic of literary conversation. What Hughes did not say is that his decision to publish
The Bell Jar
in the United States had set off this passion for Plath. Alvarez boldly broke the silence, not only discussing Sylvia's suicide, but also refuting Hughes's claim that Plath's last poems had been analeptic. As Alvarez wrote in 1971 in
The Savage God,
“Art is not necessarily therapeutic … the act of formal expression may simply make the dredged-up material more readily available to [the artist]. The result of handling it in his work may well be that he finds himself living it out. For the artist, in short, nature often imitates art.”

In November 1971, Hughes wrote to Alvarez “as a friend,” asking him to stop contributing to popularization of Plath's suicide for an audience titillated by such revelations. Excerpts from
The Savage God
had just been published in
The Observer.
This humiliating exhumation, as Hughes put it, would only degrade discussion of Plath's poetry, and Alvarez well knew the work had to stand by itself. Such intrusive speculation was offensive to Hughes and to a few others who really knew the circumstances of Plath's suicide.

But what did Hughes know? Did he even know about the role Alvarez had played during Plath's last months? Over the years, what he knew would change as he developed his own theories and rationalizations for her actions and his. Like everyone else, Hughes had no access to her final hours and was not privy to her thoughts. Hughes also suggested that because Alvarez had supplied so many details, his version had become the “official text”—a preposterous notion, surely, since it is in the nature of biographical inquiry to be eternally provisional and subject to correction and revision. Hughes had demanded the right to vet Alvarez's work before publication. On what basis, then, could Alvarez have claimed an independent authority? But Hughes believed that Alvarez had no rights in the matter and should only feel ashamed that Plath's children now had to deal with what Alvarez had put into print. Alvarez had poisoned Frieda's and Nicholas's minds with words that entered their brains like electrodes, Hughes wrote in a frenzy of contumely. Alvarez responded in
The
Observer
(15 November) to Hughes's complaining letter that it seemed better for everyone, including her children, to have a forthright and considerate account of Plath's life and death than to put up with a “cloud of vague and malicious rumours.”

In 1972, Random House published
Monster,
Robin Morgan's radical feminist collection of poetry, which includes her all-out assault on Ted Hughes. In “Arraignment,” she labels him Plath's murderer. Her charge sheet includes lines that suggest Hughes had mentally and physically abused Plath, brainwashed her children, profited from her literary estate, and driven Assia Wevill, as well, to her death. And he had been supported in his nefarious deeds by a complicit literary establishment. Even Alvarez and other male critics and poets sympathetic to Plath were accused of patronizing her. As a credo for the women's movement,
Monster
attracted considerable attention, selling over thirty thousand copies, a remarkable success for a poetry collection. After Ted Hughes's threats of a lawsuit, however, Random House decided not to publish the book abroad. As critic Janet Badia observes in the most extensive account of Morgan's book and its aftermath,
Monster'
s hyperbole and irony—ending in the evisceration and murder of Hughes by a gang of feminists disguised as his groupies—epitomizes the militant feminist writing of the 1970s. Pirated editions turned up among women picketing Hughes's public readings and even his home. Morgan herself, as she relates in her memoir,
Saturday's Child,
received a call from Doris Lessing asking her to call off the protestors and to withdraw
Monster
from publication. But, as Badia points out, the more Hughes and his supporters sought to suppress the book, the more attention it received. Although Badia found remarkably little evidence of a widespread boycott of Hughes and his work, the press repeated the generally accepted story that he had become the victim of an unremitting feminist attack.