Condolences to Frieda Hughes

Dear Frieda:


Sylvia Plath with Frieda and Nicholas

Please accept my greatest sympathies and condolences on the 48th anniversary of your mother’s death. Each year on February 11 when I am celebrating my oldest child’s birthday and embracing the joy that his arrival brought me, I briefly reflect upon the enormous loss that occurred on February 11, 1963 – the loss of not only a brilliant poet but the loss of a mother for an almost three-year-old and a one year old. Frequently, on this date when poetry fans and scholars remember Sylvia Plath the Poet, they overlook Sylvia Plath the Mother who left two young children behind when she succumbed to her depression and took her own life.

As a young woman, I was drawn to your mother’s poetry due to her haunting images, maudlin themes and tragic tone; her complex relationship with her mother that she so richly captured in her poetics made me reflect upon my own turbulent relationship with my mother. Just like your mother’s absence probably felt like a strong presence in your life, my mother’s presence always felt like an absence. Much of that inexplicable absence subsided when I became a mother and replaced longing with an abundance of love. I hope that you too have found abundance of love despite all the tradegy in your life.

Sylvia Plath with Frieda and Nicholas

So today, it is with sadness that I think about your mother’s maternal experiences cut short and your experiences without a mother in your life. I think about how you, the daughter of two brilliant poets, have persevered and have honored the reputations of both your mother and father. You have been dignified and poised over the years as you have shared details about the Plath-Hughes family. And even though the Plath-Hughes relationship was filled with turbulence, you and your late brother Nicholas were beautiful results of that union -- a union that lives on in their masterful poetry and in you. So today on the anniversary of your mother’s death, I wish you peace, comfort and an abundance of love.

Sincerely,

Garbageman’s Daughter

Ted Hughes’ “Last Letter”: Raw and Unfinished

There are just some things that are not meant for public consumption. A man’s suffering. A man’s grief. A man’s guilt. These things should be kept private. But unfortunately, greed or personal glory prevails over privacy sometimes, especially when there is a captive audience waiting for any delicious tidbit of confession, gossip, or proof. It is true that the literary world’s ravenous appetite for anything and everything related to Sylvia Plath afforded Carol Hughes the opportunity to expose the personal torment of her late husband, Ted Hughes. There has been no shortage of critics, scholars and poetry readers ready to consume and scrutinize not only Plath’s work but also the work of Hughes in order to comprehend her tragic life that ended so abruptly when she gassed herself on February 11, 1963.

Thanks to scholar Melvyn Bragg with the assistance of Carol Hughes, the followers of the Plath/Hughes saga have received the most important document to date, “Last Letter.” This poem was published in the New Statesman recently. The poem was intended to be a part of the Birthday Letters, an award-winning collection of the poems that explores Hughes and Plath’s relationship. The collection was published a few months before his death and is considered to be his masterpiece. Critics and scholars are describing the “Last Letter” as the “missing link” that completes the collection.

Although it is may be the missing link, “Last Letter” is not exactly a poem and not exactly a diary entry. “Last Letter” exists within the menacing shadows of the confessional poem. This work is confessional but not in the confessional style seeped with the dark metaphors that Plath helped make famous along with Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and John Barryman. Hughes’ poem is part diary entry, part biographical sketch, part remembrance, and part admission of guilt. It is confessional in terms of actual confession. It fully recounts the horrendous missteps and horrific oversights that occurred during the days leading up to Plath’s suicide. According to the poem, Plath mailed her estranged husband a suicide note that was intended for arrival after her death. As Hughes explains:

Your note reached me too soon---that same day,
Friday afternoon, posted in the morning.
The prevalent devils expedited it.
That was one more straw of ill-luck
Drawn against you by the Post-Office

After receiving the note, he rushed to her home where they had some type of argument. She convinced him that she was no longer suicidal and she burned the letter, according to Hughes, “with that strange smile.” Based on his poetic re-telling of events, she begged him to leave and promised to call the doctor. Hughes did not bother to put up a fight. He left Plath and his two children that day to meet his lover, poet Susan Alliston. Hughes and Alliston travelled to Rugby Street where Plath and Hughes were married; they stayed in the same hotel and in the same bedroom where Plath and Hughes honeymooned, according to the poem.During his weekend with Alliston in the Hughes/Plath marital bed, he claims to be haunted by imagined phone calls from Plath. His imaginary is haunting:

Did the phone ring there in my empty room,
You hearing the ring in your receiver---
At both ends the fading memory
Of a telephone ringing, in a brain
As if already dead. I count
How often you walked to the phone-booth
At the bottom of St George’s terrace.
You are there whenever I look, just turning
Out of Fitzroy Road, crossing over
Between the heaped up banks of dirty sugar.
In your long black coat,
With your plait coiled up at the back of your hair
You walk unable to move, or wake, and are
Already nobody walking
Walking by the railings under Primrose Hill
Towards the phone booth that can never be reached.
Before midnight. After midnight. Again.
Again. Again. And, near dawn, again.

She never did call for his help, and his worry was never enough for him to leave his lover in order to rescue Plath. Instead he stayed in the arms of his lover while Plath suffered through her final days. On her final morning, Plath taped the doors of the bedrooms where her one-year-old son, Nicholas, and her three-year-old daughter, Frieda, slept. She placed biscuits and milk beside their beds and then proceeded to use the carbon monoxide from her oven to end her life. Hughes remained unaware of the situation until the phone finally rang and he answered. He writes: 

Then a voice like a selected weapon
Or a measured injection,
Coolly delivered its four words
Deep into my ear: ‘Your wife is dead.’

This is the ending that we all know but have never seen in such detail from Hughes. This is the document that has the Plath/Hughes community abuzz. But, it is hard to be exuberant about a work so raw and tragic. It is stated that Hughes excluded this poem from the Birthday Letters because it was too personal. This poem has an unfinished feel to it. Moments in the poem are glorious and evocative, but it is clear that he grappled and struggled with every line. How does one convey their darkest hours in exquisite artfulness? Hughes really does not create high art with this poem and, therefore, this work should be examined more in terms of a biographical document than poetry. So, the question becomes: Are there some documents just too personal to share?

This poem is infinitely fascinating and revealing but incredibly personal. I felt like a voyeur reading this work, and I couldn’t help but think of the effect that the release of this poem will have on Frieda Hughes. Over the years, she has given many interviews to change public opinion about her father. She speaks highly of her mother as poet, not as a parent. Frieda was just toddler and Nicholas was an infant when their mother abandoned them through suicide. Hughes is the only parent that they knew and for that reason Frieda vehemently defends her father. She has pointed out that Hughes was not the only volatile and difficult figure in that explosive marriage. Plath, who suffered from mental illness, destroyed Hughes’ poetry on two different occasions. Their marriage was complex, passionate and hostile. Their marriage was not as simple as the critics, scholars and readers would like it to be. She was hardly the dutiful poet/housewife who tolerated his constant cheating. But unfortunately, this guilt-ridden poem portrays their marriage in exactly those terms. This poem will be damning to Hughes’ already sullied reputation. It does not show him as a great man or a great poet. This poem is personal art and private ruminations. It is does not congeal in either style or tone with the other exceptionally polished poems in Birthday Letters. Although it may be caused for celebration among biographers and scholars, the tremendous tragedy that devastated the Plath-Hughes family resonates in this poetic confession. 

Author’s Note: This poem along with two early handwritten drafts of this poem appear in the October 11 issue of the New Statesman. Many unreliable versions of this poem appear on the Internet. For an authoritative and legal version of the poem, I recommend purchasing the periodical or going to your local public or academic library to access it in print or electronic form. I found the full version of the poem, from the comfort of my office chair, by using my library card and remote access to the EBSCO Database, Academic Search Premier .

Advice: Check Out His Books Before His Looks

Less than eight days to get a copy of Jean Paul Sarte’s No Exit and Existentialism Is a Humanism. Huge presentation due for a literature class on “Alternative Realities in Modern and Post-Modern Literature.” (Title of the class clearly made up by a nearly senile professor with more tenure than sense). Agreed only to be the first presenter to intimidate my other classmates and to establish myself as a real presence in graduate school. Figured the university library would own such seminal titles. Nope, they were not owned by the library. Interlibrary loan was about a two to four week process and the only two local books stores in town would also have to order the book (This was 1995 prior to popular online book stores).

Out of desperation, I asked classmates if they owned the books. One of the graduate assistants said, “I know a guy.” The guy came through with the books. My presentation earned me a fantastic grade, numerous accolades from the professor but mostly pity from my classmates who were not awed or intimidated, just shocked that I had nothing better to do with my time than study. Out of sympathy, they offered a half-hearted invitation to bar grand opening in the downtown. They really didn’t want me there and I didn’t really want to be there. But since I completed my entire semester’s worth of papers in the first three weeks of school and just finished re-reading Wuthering Heights for fun, I had absolutely nothing to do but go to a bar.

Turned out that the guy with books and I were the only ones without dates that night. Just plain awkward. I was the only Northerner among a bunch of Texans that called every drink “Coke” even if it was Sprite, orange juice, or beer. As I was trying to figure out what hell “fixin” meant, the guy with the books asked me about my presentation which led to more literature which led to poetry talk which led to Sylvia Plath. This guy loved Plath more than me. He knew way more than the average smart, poetry guy who feigns interest in Plath and quotes “Daddy” to get in young ladies’ pants.

The guy with the books knew enough Plath to get me to say “yes” forever.

Separation of Art and Life

When Michael Jackson was accused of pedophilia for the second time, I donated my copies of Thriller and Bad to the Friends of the Library. I removed him from our family playlists and changed the radio stations on the first beat of his songs. I do not watch Roman Polanski's movies and my husband has a firm stand against anything by Woody Allen. When I turned 30 and realized I was the same age as Sylvia Plath was when she abandoned her children, I stopped re-reading her work and started reading Ted Hughes. She was the better poet, but he was the better parent. Child abandonment through suicide is tragic, not artful or romantic. Plath’s crime is not necessarily her suicide, but instead her confessional poetry that dwells in depression, self-loathing, blame, and anger. These are not places that I want to visit anymore, so her art no longer captures me.

Plath as well as her contemporaries Anne Sexton and John Berryman, who all committed suicide, are great examples of how artists aren’t known for their stability. Substance abuse problems, divorce, adultery, spousal abuse, child neglect, mental illness and suicide run rampant in the art community. Unfortunately, the more tragic an artist’s life is the more appealing he or she becomes to the masses. There has been a longstanding belief that good art can only be born out of great tragedy, simply not true. But, are there tragedies so sad and crimes so awful that the artist’s work should not be separated from the artist’s life? Is there a point that you should say, “You are not a good person and I will no longer support your art,” or does art always supersede life?

The New Ted and Sylvia

Sylvia Plath, in speaking about life with her husband, British poet, Ted Hughes, once said: “We drink coffee in the morning in concession to America , and we drink tea in the afternoon in concession to England. “

My husband and I listen to Willie Nelson on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to pay homage to Texas, and we listen to Prince on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday to pay homage to Minnesota (for absolutely no reason since I am not from Minnesota and have never been there).

But, anyway we are the new Ted and Sylvia – well minus the adultery, the divorce, the mother’s abandonment of the children through suicide, the shacking up with the mistress who later gases herself and her daughter who could be the kids’ illegitimate half-sister , the abandonment of the adult children by the father due to cancer, which results in the youngest child’s depression and ultimate suicide.

Okay, so we are nothing like Ted and Sylvia.

Anyway, we listen to Willie Nelson on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and Prince on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday unless my husband is out of town then I listen to Prince every day. Well actually even if he is home, I go to the basement and listen to Prince every day when I am drinking tea. I drink tea and my husband drinks coffee. Okay, we are nothing like Ted and Sylvia. We are just a couple who listens to Willie and Prince and drinks our daily coffee and tea.

I Weep for a Man that I Do Not Know

It’s the middle of the night, and I cannot sleep. I gave my baby a bottle and never made my way back to bed; I felt an urgency to edit, revise, and add a quote to the posting that I wrote about Sylvia Plath on February 11 (the anniversary of her suicide).

In searching for 2007 interview that Frieda Hughes gave Time magazine, I made an unexpected discovery. Frieda’s brother Nicholas Hughes, who is also the son of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes committed suicide a few weeks ago.

So in the middle of the night, I weep for man who I do not know. A man who killed himself 46 years after his mother took her life when he just a one-year-old, sleeping in the room beside the kitchen where the poet ended her suffering; a man who grew up without a mother; a man who watched hundreds of scholars, critics, and biographers scavenge through his parents lives and poetry looking for anything that would sell; a man who like his mother battled depression; a man, who unlike his sister, didn’t write poetry and openly talk about his parents but instead dedicated his life to the study of ecology. A man who found poetry in nature; a man who could not overcome the legacy of suicide.

This is why I cry in the middle of the night.

If you need someone to talk to you, please call The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

The Poetry of Life and Death on February 11

In her iconic poem Lady Lazarus, Sylvia Plath writes:

Dying
Is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

She succeeded in her calling on February 11, 1963 – her second suicide attempt. She was 30.

My first child was born February 11, 1999. I was 25.

Now every February 11 as I celebrate the anniversary of my son’s birth; I take moment to think about Plath, an amazingly talented but deeply-troubled writer, probably known more for her tumultuous personal life and mental health struggles than her poetry, written in the confessional style. This just means she wrote diary entries in stanzas with rhyme, meter and a Smith College educated vocabulary.

On the anniversary of her death, I also wonder about the children who she left behind. The children who miraculously did not die on the day their mother ended her life. Plath carefully sealed the rooms between herself and her sleeping children before she took her life by turning on her gas oven. Frieda was 2 and Nicholas was 1.

Many interesting facts exist about Plath and appear repeatedly in publications: Married to English poet Ted Hughes; posthumously awarded a Pulitzer for her Collected Poems; completed a guest editorship at Mademoiselle; first tried to commit suicide at the age of 20; father died when she was 8; and, she experienced a difficult relationship with her mother. Typically, the children are nothing more than a footnote for the hundreds of publishers, scholars, and biographers who have profited and made careers by capitalizing on Plath’s struggle with mental illness, her disastrous marriage to Hughes, and her tragic death,

With so much drama, the innocent are easily forgotten. I was guilty of the oversight too. During my 20s, when I didn’t make much distinction between leaving behind 2 children and leaving behind 2 books of unpublished poetry, I would have believed that not being around to receive a Pulitzer was a far greater tragedy than not seeing some kids reach adulthood. In those days, I consumed Plath’s poetry, the way Lady Lazarus consumed men, like air. I was a self-indulgent college student who hated my mother for no good reason; wrote horribly bad self-absorbed poetry; and, amused myself by scaring friends and family with vague insinuations about suicide. Whining, not dying, was my art.

Being a good Catholic girl, I feared a vengeful and wrathful God who takes self-murder pretty seriously. And even more terrifying than the threat of an eternity in hell was the possibility of not succeeding and dealing with my vengeful and wrathful mother. My mother was much like Aurelia Plath but meaner. I imagined that she would hand me knife and say: “Do it until you do it right.” Or, she would lock my crazy ass up indefinitely and tell people that her loving, selfless daughter became a missionary in Afghanistan—never to be heard from again. With those thoughts to guide me, I stayed far away far from sleeping pills and gas ovens. I made it into adulthood safely and eventually became both less whiny and a mother of four children.

Now when I read Ariel, I am still amazed by the urgency, the beauty of language and unrelenting tragic desperation in each verse, but that is where my celebration of her poetry now ends. Ariel immortalizes for Frieda and Nicholas their mother’s history of depression, anger, hopelessness, tragedy, and suicidal obsessions.

In her forward of Ariel Restored, Frieda Hughes writes about her mother: "She used every emotional experience as if it were a scrap of material that could be pieced together to make a wonderful dress." For her children, Plath’s wonderful dress is more like corset that is fascinating and strangely beautiful on the exterior but brings excruciating pain to the core.

In a 2007 interview with Time, Andrea Sachs asks: If all of this had happened to your mom now, what people know now, do you think it would have resulted in her death? With modern pharmacology, could somebody have helped her?

Frieda replied: “I think there's no doubt about that. The advancements in the past 30- or 40-odd years are huge. I don't believe there's any way that that situation would have arisen now. She'd still be here.”

If Plath would have gotten the medical attention that she needed, chances are the literary world would have been denied one the best poetry collections of the Twentieth Century. And without her illness, there probably wouldn’t been much art from Plath and most likely no great art. Sylvia Plath would have been another 1960s mother on mood-altering drugs. Frieda and Nicholas Hughes would have just been kids with a mom, who was living with a little help from antidepressants.