Her Husband
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath: A Marriage
by Diane Middlebrook
List Price: $15.00
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0142004871
Publisher: Penguin
Diane Middlebrook is the author of two highly praised, bestselling biographies, Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton and Anne Sexton: A Biography, which was a National Book Award and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.
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Q: Her Husband is an unusual type of biography, a portrait of a collaboration rather than of a single individual. Why did you want to write a biography of their marriage?
DM: Hughes's death in 1998 made it possible to be decently inquisitive about the aspect of his relationship to Plath that interested me most-namely, how did they function as a literary couple? Like Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, Hughes and Plath are poets whose individual names cannot be mentioned without the name of the other coming to mind. Their romance and marriage, and her premature death, are fundamental to the cultural meaning of their work, and always will be, as long as they are remembered. And did they ever want to be remembered! Each of them left to posterity a vast treasure house of papers that permit a patient reader to grasp and follow the red thread of their formative influence on one another during the six years they lived together. And Hughes's papers show beyond the shadow of a doubt that Plath's influence on him never ended.
Q: Getting inside the secrets of a marriage seems infinitely more complicated than writing a life of just one person. What was the most difficult part of writing this kind of intimate portrait?
DM: Achieving a balance of the two points of view. This was difficult because Plath wrote so much about the marriage in her published journal (which covers the years 1956 through 1959 of their marriage) and in letters to her mother written from the time she met Hughes until a couple of days before her suicide in 1963. Excerpts from these letters were published in Letters Home (1975); the outtakes can be read at the Plath archive in the Lilly Library at Indiana University. So a diligent researcher can winkle out a lot of details about the day-to-day life of this couple through Plath's vivid accounts of domestic arrangements. Hughes's frankest thoughts about the marriage are harder to lay hands on, but they too can be sieved out of his correspondence. Some can be found in letters he wrote to his brother, which can be read at the Hughes archive at Emory University; some can be found in letters at the British Library. But much of Hughes's correspondence has been embargoed by his estate until the deaths of family members. In order to give fair weight to both sides, I had to select details for which there were some comparison sets: for example, details about money, time management, child care, division of labor in the household, and-very telling-what each found difficult about the behavior of the other.
Q: The marriage of Hughes and Plath has been a polarizing subject for some critics. Feminists have tended to embrace Plath, while reviling Hughes. It must have been at least a little intimidating entering into the fray of Hughes/Plath scholarship. How did you maintain balance?
DM: I was equally curious about each of them, and because Hughes was dead, I did not feel that I was intruding on his privacy by gathering as much personal information about him as I could find among his papers. I think I came to understand his most disturbing behavior-disturbing to me, as a woman-which was his sexual pursuit of women. I tried to render a complex and empathic account of this trait in Her Husband, and to explain the role it played in his creativity.
Q: In defining Hughes by his relationship to Plath, you accomplish a bit of gender role reversal; traditionally, it has been women who were defined by their relationships to men. Were you conscious of the subversion in naming a book about a famous male poet Her Husband?
DM: It was Hughes's subversion! I draw the title from the way Hughes labeled himself in the notes he wrote to the Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, where he writes with insider knowledge of the daily life in which Plath produced the work he admired so deeply. The fact that he identified his social role as that of a partner made me alert to the quite radical consciousness in Hughes. He compared himself to Shakespeare, as a man living in a time of extraordinary social change, in which relations between the sexes were undergoing a historical shift. He explored this situation as both personal and political, not only in his creative writing-Birthday Letters, for example-but also in his translations of the works of other writers, and in his criticism, especially Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being.
Q: You spend a lot of time on detailed, close reading of poems by these two venerated writers. Which poems are among your favorites? Did that change as you read them in the context of this biography?
DM: I wrote in Her Husband only about poems that I admire very much, by each of the poets-works that have put them on the map as artists. In the course of positioning these works biographically, I made some discoveries about layers of meaning that had not been identified before, especially in Plath's "The Rabbit Catcher" and "Daddy," and in Hughes's poems about wolves, culminating in his beautiful act of mourning for Plath in the poem "Life after Death," in Birthday Letters.
Q: You seem to agree with Hughes's theory, developed late in his career, that all poets have a single subject, a story and persona, which is the source of all of their creative work. Can you talk more about this? Have you always believed this, or was it something that was revealed through the research and writing you did for the book?
DM: I had observed the motivation to create a self-consistent and coherent autobiographical persona in writers such as W. B. Yeats, Theodore Roethke, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, and other modern poets who follow in the footsteps of the Romantic poets (Wordsworth, most notably). But it was Hughes himself who gave me the thesis I apply in Her Husband. In his essay "The Great Theme: Notes on Shakespeare," Hughes claimed that every important poet conveys, in the central poems of his or her oeuvre, a "knot of obsessions" that are not only deeply personal but also reflective of the central conflicts in the poet's society. I applied this insight to Hughes, and found his own "knot of obsessions" to lie within his experience of himself as a violent and sexually driven animal, destined both to suffer from his own instincts and to explore them in his art. Hughes's training in anthropology gave him intellectual guidance; from an early stage, he identified his work as a poet with the work performed by shamans in other societies: investigating his own darkness was a significant spiritual contribution to the health of his tribe.
Q: Hughes's interests in astrology and the occult were very influential in his life. You even mention his drawing up an astrological chart in order to determine the best time to put a manuscript in the mail. What do you think about this unconventional force in his life? Did you do any astrological analysis yourself during the writing of the book?
DM: I am not a believer in astrology or magic rituals of the kind Hughes practiced. But as a biographer, I wanted to understand what his interest in the occult meant to him personally, and how it was expressed in his art. I found some additional layers of meaning in his important poem "Pike," for example, by investigating Hughes's own horoscope, which I was able to do because in the course of reading Hughes's papers I accidentally discovered Hughes's birth hour, a personal detail that he had not disclosed in his writings about himself.
Q: You write very sympathetically about Hughes's "animal impulses," his desire to maintain a connection to the uncivilized world and his occasional antipathy to the domestic-both of which fed into his betrayal of Plath. Can you talk a little bit more about Hughes as a man struggling for identity and authenticity in both writing and life?
DM: Struggles for identity are too complex and dynamic to cram into a nutshell! My whole book is an answer to this question. It describes the influence of family life on the development of Hughes's character, and attempts to account for the significance of Hughes's relationships to his mother and father and brother as influences on his imagination and on his relationships with other women and men. These fundamental psychological dynamics played out over time in very specific situations, and those situations give the story in Her Husband its plot. I show Hughes first living through these formative experiences and then, in middle age, turning them into a myth that comprehends his catastrophes. The plot turns on his loss and then his recovery of his intimate creative exchange with Sylvia Plath.
Q: Most women probably instinctively feel empathy for Plath in her difficulties, not just with Hughes but in balancing career and motherhood. Do you think she suffered in part simply by being a woman a little ahead of her time?
DM: On the contrary, I think Plath experienced her womanhood in a positive way. Of course motherhood complicates a woman's life enormously, especially during the child's early years, but Plath was very keen on becoming a mother, wrote vivid letters home about her infants, and intended to have a lot more of them. They gave her enormous satisfaction. She was also a rigorously disciplined writer; she insisted on getting a daily share of time for work, which she used very efficiently. Time management was the key to her productivity, and Hughes appears to have been very cooperative and understanding in partnering her. Their separation-which Plath instigated as a response to his infidelity-was tremendously damaging to her work life, as well as to her emotional well-being.
Q: Plath has become an emblematic figure for writing about taboo, often very female subject matter in her poetry. Her writing about mental illness was groundbreaking, as was the material of some of her later poems, such as "Daddy," and these are the works she is best known for. Did anything about her personality, her lesser-known poems, or her inner preoccupations surprise you?
DM: Yes. I was interested in finding out about Plath's habits and daily occupations: not the big dramas, which have been written about so frequently, but the ordinary character traits that flavored her personality and thus her marriage to Hughes. I observed that Plath was a woman with large sensual appetites, and that her appetites were attractive to Hughes.
I paid a lot of attention in Her Husband to Plath's sense of smell, for example; I think it yields some insight into her enjoyment of sex. I was also interested to notice how alert she was to her own aggressiveness impulses: those too, I think, were valued by Hughes.
Q: Many people believe that Hughes hid some of Plath's writing, and many feminists in particular have expressed concern over the amount of control he held over her legacy. As executor of Plath's estate, he certainly had a strong editorial influence on how Plath's writing was revealed to the world. Do you think he was a good custodian?
DM: In point of fact, he made her famous. And he remains one of her shrewdest critics.
Q: ou've cut an unusual swath through twentieth-century cultural figures-from Anne Sexton to Billy Tipton, and now Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. What are you working on now?
DM: I'm beginning work on a biography of the Roman poet Ovid (43 BCE-18 CE), one of the very few writers in the whole history of literature whose work has managed to engage audiences continuously for two thousand years. Astonishingly, every era has discovered Ovid's relevance to its own time. And this was just what Ovid predicted for his work at the end of his greatest poem, Metamorphoses: "I shall be living always." Such a claim whets the appetite of a biographer. How did he do it?
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Excerpted from Her Husband © Copyright 2008 by Diane Middlebrook. Reprinted with permission by Penguin. All rights reserved.
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