He was right. As Hughes slowly released her posthumously published works -- which succeeded in winning for her an enormous readership as well as entry into the canon of American 20th century poetry, status she had decidedly not held during her lifetime -- he was viciously attacked by scholars and critics, feminists in particular, who read the blistering "Ariel" poems and later the judiciously pruned 1982 journals as an indictment against him. He was controlling, egotistical, faithless and selfish; he had tried to shame Plath, a poetic genius, into sewing on his buttons.

Hughes has since been consistently criticized for his "censoring" and "stifling" of Plath through his editorial decisions, which notably included trimming and reordering the "Ariel" manuscript, thereby changing its tone and theme from one of transformative rebirth to one of inevitable self-destruction, and his most condemned deed of all, destroying Plath's final journal from the last three months of her life. "I did not want her children to have to read it," Hughes wrote in his introduction to the journals in 1982. Another journal, covering late 1959 through the fall of 1962, or the pivotal "Ariel" period, was said by Hughes to have "disappeared," though it "may ... still turn up."

Hughes' actions -- destroying or losing Plath's final journals and rearranging "Ariel" -- represent a crux of moral ambiguity that readers and scholars have battled over for decades. Did his actions simply reflect, as he consistently maintained, his obligations toward his children? Or were they motivated by self-interest -- an emotion which under the circumstances could be considered reasonable?

It is hard not to feel sympathy for a man who famously wrote of the lost journals, "In those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival." Yet it is undeniable that by destroying them Hughes forever silenced the record of the process he considered so essential to Plath's poetic achievement, and to Plath herself, of whom he wrote in 1971, "I feel a first and last obligation to her."

Since the late 1970s, Hughes had maintained that all of Plath's writings, no matter how private, were vital insofar as they shed light on the "true" Sylvia Plath. Plath's central project and problem, Hughes believed, was the creation of herself. He likened Plath's creative process to an alchemical one in which her immature writings, her highly mannered early poetry and the stiff stories into which she desperately tried to breathe life were "like impurities thrown off from the various stages of the inner transformation, by-products of the internal work." "Ariel" and the related final poems, by dramatic contrast, were the voice of her true self, "the proof," he wrote in the 1982 journal's foreword, "that it arrived. All her other writings, except these journals, are the waste products of its gestation." According to Hughes, the journals were Plath's private record of her many camouflages, the stylistic personalities she tried on, the identities and defenses she assumed. The journals reveal "the day to day struggle with her warring selves."

By 1998, Hughes had come to defer to the judgment of his children, who no longer needed his protection, about publishing the journals. "This was really Frieda's and Nicholas' decision in conjunction with their father," said Karen Kukil, editor of the unabridged journals, in a recent interview with Salon. Frieda Hughes called Kukil, curator of Smith College's 4,000-page Plath collection since 1990, in the spring of 1998 to ask Kukil to edit a complete, unexpurgated volume of all of her mother's journals in the Smith library.

When news broke earlier this year that the British publisher Faber & Faber intended to release those unabridged journals, the announcement engendered a flurry of speculation about what other Plath bombshells might be in the offing. Perhaps the disappeared journal would emerge, or more likely, all of the imagined juicy details of insufferable husbandly domination and adulterous calumny that Hughes had witheld from the journals in 1982 to save his own reputation. Hughes' admission that he'd destroyed the journal had predictably nurtured the assumption among his critics that the editing of the journals had been for his own benefit, rather than to eliminate what Frances McCullough, editor of the 1982 journals, characterized as the less relevant material as well as "the nasty bits" that would have caused unnecessary pain or embarrassment to Plath's surviving relatives, friends and colleagues.

Earlier this month, Faber & Faber released those journals in Britain (the American edition will appear this fall from Anchor Books). Unlike the 1982 journals, which were shaved down to about a third of their actual volume, Faber's "unabridged" edition brings together every extant journal from 1950 onward. (The famously missing journal from 1959-1962 isn't included.) The Faber edition is a meticulous preservation of Plath's misspellings, grammar, spot illustrations, capitalization and punctuation, and an absolutely faithful rendering of her words -- pure, unadulterated Sylvia Plath for the first time.

The unabridged journals include material that vindicates both the anti- and pro-Hughes camps. More importantly, they give Plath's readers their first-ever opportunity to experience the uncensored breadth of Plath's imagination in its richest medium, the private testing ground of her relentlessly self-reflective artistry. As the anti-Hughes camp had always protested, they contain material with scholarly rather than merely prurient value. But it is also obvious that much of the deleted material was justifiably censored to spare the feelings of Plath's friends and family.

The volume includes in their entirety Plath's two consecutive journals from 1957 to 1959, when Plath returned with Hughes from England to teach miserably for a year at Smith followed by a year spent living in Boston, where she resumed psychoanalysis with Ruth Barnhouse Beuscher, who had treated Plath during her recovery from the 1953 suicide attempt. It was a time of revisiting old ghosts and old haunts. Plath uncovered first her scornful disdain for her Smith friends and colleagues ("Botany professors forking raw tongue with dowdy seat-spread wives" is one of her milder observations), and second her deep hatred and resentment of her "vampire" mother, whose death in 1994 presumably made publication of this vitally illuminating portion of the journals palatable to the Plath estate.

The unabridged journals confirm the anti-Hughes camp's assumption that Hughes censored details about himself, but his elisions appear to be dictated by a concern for basic privacy rather than the need to conceal damning information. Nothing about Hughes that is new to the unabridged journals reveals him as any worse than he already had allowed himself to be seen in earlier books. It's easy, though, to imagine why anyone, especially England's future poet laureate, might have wanted to censor his wife's nattering on about his "delicious skin smells," infrequent hair washing and "hairy belly."

To be sure, all of the major themes of the journals were present in the 1982 journals -- among them, Plath's precocious and unwavering ambition as a writer, which drove her mercilessly toward artistic growth and publication; her boy-crazy social whirl in college and her attendant preoccupation with the limitations of marriage and gender roles in the cramped cultural mind of the '50s; the familial demons of her childhood -- her father's death from a complication of diabetes when she was 8, and her conflicted relationship with her widowed mother; the emotional, psychological and artistic enormity of her relationship with Hughes; and most compelling, her indefatigible struggle to wrestle control over her chaotic emotional life, what Hughes 20 years ago called "her will to face what was wrong in herself, and to drag it out into examination, and to remake it."

And yet the 1982 journals didn't feel whole. Despite Hughes' stated intentions, Plath still seemed vague and fragmented, her poems only dimly illuminated. The 1982 journals felt figuratively as well as literally elliptical, and into those ellipses could be injected all sorts of strange and dark and terrible fantasies, possibly stranger and darker than the truth. "More terrible," the Plath of "Stings" might say, "than she ever was."

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