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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
England's longest-running literary soap opera enters a new chapter, as Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes' daughter wages war against ghouls, obsessives and the makers of "Sylvia" (as well as novelists like me).
Oct 17, 2003 | A few months before her father's "Birthday Letters" and her own first collection of poetry, "Wooroloo," were to be published, the daughter of literary icons Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes consented to a rare interview in which she discussed her childhood, her parents' famously failed marriage, and her own life as a visual artist and writer. "Readers," a poem by Frieda Hughes published alongside the November 1997 interview in the Guardian, was an indictment of those literary groupies of her mother's who had been "fingering her mental underwear" since Sylvia Plath's suicide in 1963, when Frieda was 2 years old.
Following a gruesomely detailed description of how "they" dug up and roasted and ate her mother's corpse (an image fueled, unfortunately, by the real Plath fanatics who regularly defaced Plath's grave over the years, even stealing the pebbles left as decorations by Frieda and her younger brother, Nicholas), Frieda Hughes' poem ends:
They called her theirs.
All this time I had thought
She belonged to me most.
There was no denying that "Readers," particularly its conclusion, was the raw, anguished cry of a child. It seemed curious that the poem's final two lines were dropped when it appeared the next year in "Wooroloo": as if even Frieda Hughes' claim to ownership of her mother, let alone ownership itself, had been stripped away.
Hughes' anguished cry turned to bitter fury earlier this year when she responded to news that "Sylvia," a major feature film about her parents, was in production. To explain her poem "My Mother," which was published in the British magazine Tatler, Hughes suggested that she had been all but stalked by producers of the film in pursuit of a "collaboration" -- maybe a daughterly endorsement, or at the very least permission to quote from her mother's poetry in the film. "My Mother" was her response: a blistering, scornful attack not just on the makers of the film but on its viewers, who, she imagined, might make themselves a quick cuppa while leaving the video paused with her mother's head in the oven.
This is where I showed up. As the author of "Wintering," a novel about Sylvia Plath during her final cold London winter, I walked straight into the British media's ice storm of proprietary outrage on behalf of the late Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and their very much alive children, who were raised in England. In London, Cambridge, Reading and Bath, and on radio and television airwaves all over the U.K., people wanted to know if I had considered the children's feelings, and how I came by the cheek to think I was entitled to tell Plath's story.
My chilliest critics were those who seemed to forget that the "children" are now in their 40s, no longer fragile, impressionable tots; others were sure that by virtue of my being an American woman, my only motivation for writing "Wintering" was to "get" the unfairly maligned Ted Hughes, so successfully rehabilitated worldwide by "Birthday Letters" and his death a few months after the book hit international bestseller lists. Interestingly -- especially because my book came out at the height of the Iraq war protests, when Tony Blair was contemptuously termed "Bush's poodle" and Americans abroad had (as they still do) every reason to cringe when they pulled out their passports -- I had my own rehabilitation in the eyes of some wary English critics when they noticed in my bio that my father had been a Brit. Oh, well then, she might be all right ...
The literary editor of the London Sunday Times, Erica Wagner, sniffed that while she could concede that I was a "good writer" and sometimes "interesting" (damned with the faintest of praise!), she also wondered what the point of my close attention to Plath might be, and "when the eternal raking over of Plath's life will pall," suggesting finally that it was about time to leave poor Sylvia and her descendants in peace. Wagner deemed my novel about Plath "trivial" and "reductive," and insinuated that I was perhaps a bit nuts for writing "Wintering." The final lines of her dismissal explained, in scrupulous detail, how one might go about purchasing, over the phone or online, discounted copies of the very same Erica Wagner's book of microscopia on Sylvia, Ted and "The Birthday Letters."
What did Frieda Hughes think of "Wintering"? I don't actually know, and surely never will. All I do know is that the Guardian's weekend magazine had requested permission to use a photo of Plath as illustration for a feature article I wrote on her obsessive love of baking. The notoriously uncooperative Plath estate had been contacted and had given a preliminary (and unexpectedly blasé) OK. By the time the photo editor went back to the estate with a formal permissions contract, the film storm had blown up, Frieda Hughes had denied the filmmakers permission to use her mother's poetry, and for good measure (following the lead of Alice in Wonderland's Queen of Hearts: "verdict first, trial afterwards!") denied the use of the photograph for my Guardian article. It was relayed to me that Hughes disliked the very idea of my having written "Wintering," as its subject was "private."
Private? Sylvia Plath's creation of the "Ariel" poems and her assembly of the "Ariel" manuscript -- the work that she rightly predicted would "make her name," and which became one of the bestselling books of poetry of all time -- is private? The creative process of the most famous female American poet, whose unmatched artistic gaze was directed most pitilessly at herself, is private?
Well, I guess Ted Hughes might have argued that his destruction of his estranged wife's final journal, which presumably detailed her thoughts and feelings as the "Ariel" poems were being written and their marriage fell to pieces, was justified because it was "private" -- though he put it in other words, saying that he destroyed the journal because he never wanted his children to have to read that "sad" document. But if Plath's life, creative and otherwise, is truly private, how does one account for Hughes' subsequent decision to publish Plath's remaining journals, with all their extra-literary personal details and acidic sniping? Or Hughes' thoughtful critical writings on Plath's poetic legacy, which both compared her in stature to Emily Dickinson and stressed the vital importance of understanding her creative development within the context of her domestic life during her last two years?
How does one explain the Plath estate (then controlled by Ted Hughes but agented by his sister, Olwyn) strong-arming Plath's mother, Aurelia Plath, into consenting to the U.S. publication of "The Bell Jar," her daughter's semi-autobiographical novel? Aurelia Plath was mortified by "The Bell Jar," as so many of the novel's distasteful characters were thinly veiled caricatures of the Plath family's dearest friends, relatives and neighbors; the Plath estate resorted to a sort of irresistible blackmail by simultaneously dangling the possibility of overseas visits with Plath's children while offering Aurelia Plath permission to publish her daughter's letters in return for her promise not to interfere with "The Bell Jar's" U.S. release. (Hughes published the abridged "Journals of Sylvia Plath" in 1982 as a corrective to the chirpy "Sivvy" depicted through Aurelia Plath's 1975 "Letters Home by Sylvia Plath," just as Aurelia Plath put together "Letters Home" as the corrective to the black-humored malice of "The Bell Jar": a calculated game of familial one-upmanship.)
