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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
How to justify the Plath estate's sale of the poet's archive to Smith College, making not just manuscripts and poem drafts available to the public but also personal memorabilia, such as Plath's Girl Scout uniform, or doll furniture she hand-painted as a gift for Frieda's second Christmas? Indeed, how does one account for Sylvia Plath's ransacking of her own life and psyche for literary ends, or Ted Hughes breaking his official silence about his dead first wife with the release of "The Birthday Letters"? Has it never occurred to Frieda Hughes that the only reason anyone's had the chance to finger her mother's "mental underwear" is because her family, beginning with her mother and father, made it available?
Since taking on the responsibility of active control of her mother's literary estate (shared with her reclusive brother) shortly before the death of Ted Hughes in 1998, Frieda Hughes has done a single-handedly remarkable job of further muddying the Plath privacy waters while protesting against public intrusion into her "personal" history at the same time. Frieda and Nicholas Hughes' first significant act as literary executors of the Plath estate was to arrange for the preparation and publication of their mother's "Unabridged Journals," a literary event deemed so newsworthy that galleys of the book were embargoed until the very last minute. Recognizing the international interest the "Journals" were guaranteed to generate, both the Guardian and the New Yorker serialized the book upon its U.K. publication, though the U.S. edition was almost a year from release. Among other revelations, the "Unabridged Journals" included what must surely be considered the most "private" of writings by Sylvia Plath: Her vivid description of Nicholas' 1962 home birth. Given that Nicholas was barely a year old at the time of Plath's death, his mother's candid account of his arrival could be considered a precious family heirloom made public.
In June 2002, Frieda Hughes further complicated her proprietary stance over her family's story by accepting an $80,000 grant to be distributed over three years from Britain's National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. Hughes' NESTA grant, which is funded through national lottery money and is therefore rightly considered a public charity, is intended to give her the "opportunity and means" -- apparently without regard to the fact that she is one of the two sole copyright holders and financial beneficiaries of the works of her mother, whose poetry and fiction has been in constant, vigorous print around the world for four decades -- to write her life story, charting her first 40 years through poetry and painting. Just four months later, Hughes announced her bitter rift with her stepmother, Carol Hughes, over control of the income from her father's estate, said to be worth $3.5 million at the time of his death.
A strange, tortured feature by Frieda Hughes in the Sunday Telegraph -- published with advantageous timing upon the 70th anniversary of her mother's birth, the fourth anniversary of her father's death, and the occasion of the British release of her third poetry collection -- explained in wounded detail how her father's widow refused to honor a letter intended to make her brother, her aunt and herself equal beneficiaries of the earnings from the copyrights to Ted Hughes' poems. Hughes explained that the dispute over her father's money left her "not only without my father, whose loss devastated me, but also without the stepmother whom I had loved, and trusted, as my father did." "I walk into bookshops and see my father's astonishing works on the shelves," Hughes continued, "and have to acknowledge that I now feel they have been disconnected from me." Hughes' pained airing of relational dirty laundry ended with an apologia on her newly published book (complete with "how to purchase" info, á la Erica Wagner), lending the entire article an opportunistic, advertorial whiff.
The familial umbilicus, for Frieda Hughes, seems not to be simply the convenient notion of "privacy" but the distribution of money. From the time of her death the income from Sylvia Plath's estate has been designated for her children's benefit. Having lost her mother before she could have more than the haziest memories of her, Hughes has known Sylvia Plath's tangible maternal attention only through the good schools, ability to travel, and material comforts her mother's estate made possible. All children feel a sense of "ownership" of their mother's corpus -- but in this case that corpus was nothing but words on paper and quarterly statements tallying the sale of those words.
Like the baby laboratory monkeys who clung desperately to sharp metal edifices substituted for their warm monkey mothers, it seems that Frieda Hughes, lacking a living embodiment of Sylvia Plath, projected her daughterly emotional need onto the financial comfort provided by her mother's (and now her father's) lucrative writings. Those writings, however, have to be shared with others in order to get the "mothering" that the Plath estate's income symbolizes. Yet Plath's daughter seems to maintain a psychic disconnection between the financial security supplied by the estate she controls and the book buyers whose investments in Sylvia Plath find their way into her checkbook.
It's not surprising that Frieda Hughes -- who claimed in an article on Britain's National Poetry Day that "poetry is for everyone," only to deny access to her mother's words a year later when approached by the "Sylvia" filmmakers -- maintains such a disdainful stance toward her mother's readers. Children and art require the same resources of ceaseless, undivided attention and wholehearted commitment; it is part of Sylvia Plath's audacious brilliance that she so successfully, though for so regrettably short a time, juggled the competing needs of her tiny children and the demands of her muse during the first 34 months of Frieda Hughes' life. Nevertheless, Hughes' continuing antagonistic, distrustful rivalry with Plath's readers reminds me of my 5-year-old daughter's response to how my attention was divided for a time between the writing of "Wintering" and herself: On the last day of kindergarten, which followed the day I finally overnighted my novel's manuscript to my publisher, my daughter announced to her class, "I want to share that my mommy finished her book, and I'm pleased to announce that Sylvia Plath is finally dead."
