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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
I don't mean to belittle the genuine harm and lasting scars inflicted on Frieda Hughes and her brother by losing their mother in their infancies, and by stupid people who demonized her father or crudely politicized and misunderstood Sylvia Plath. It must, in fact, be hell to know that one's loved ones and remote, unremembered past are relentlessly scrutinized and that one's parents' most humiliating flaws and fatal mistakes remain the subject of public attention long after their deaths. Surely there have been insane, grave-robbing readers of Plath and unjust, hysterical accusers of Hughes. But they are, for all their vituperations and loud-mouthing, the minority, especially as our cultural understanding of and appreciation for Sylvia Plath has matured with time, moving away from the prurient voyeurism that accompanied Plath's meteoric launch into the public literary arena with "Ariel" in the 1960s.
Rather than obsessing over Plath's suicide and her biographical apocrypha, contemporary readers of Plath tend to be interested in her life in context, to better understand her artistic achievement. My experience in meeting and hearing from hundreds of Plath and Hughes readers has been that by far the vast majority of them are drawn to the story of Frieda Hughes' parents because of the immediacy and vigor of their literary gifts, rather than the sordid details of their failing of each other. Plath's readers are not ghouls; they revere the written word as Plath and Hughes did, and respond to the power and complexity of the poetry. They struggle with the frustration and helplessness they feel at the premature loss of Plath, and for her unearned sense of failure, and for Hughes' bravery in trying, however late in life, to understand his culpability and guilt. And as with the reports of Mark Twain's death, their potential for diverting income from the Hughes children to themselves is greatly exaggerated. I can attest personally to the fact that the residual benefit of writing about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, no matter how well received (outside of, ahem, England), is modest at best; the real money belongs to the copyright holders of the poetry and prose -- the words that, for all Plath's ultimate loss of faith in herself, have never become "dry and riderless."
The exception to this rule, however, may be the makers and stars of a major feature film about Sylvia Plath, which is perhaps why "Sylvia" elicited Frieda Hughes' ferocious outrage while my novel, virtually contemporaneous to the movie, merited no more than Hughes' frowning grumble. The job of judging the artistic success of this film is for someone more objective than I can be. However, there is no denying that "Sylvia" will make money off the lives of Plath and Hughes, which is where Frieda Hughes' prickly stance becomes most problematic. No one can fault Hughes for distancing herself from a project that will depict her mother's death, or, in her own words, blame her for not wanting to be "involved in moments of my childhood which I never want to return to."
But every major player in the making of "Sylvia," from producer Alison Owen to screenwriter John Brownlow, from director Christine Jeffs to stars Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig and even composer Gabriel Yared, has characterized his or her part in this film as a "labor of love" born of admiration for the works of Plath and Hughes. Owen, Paltrow and Jeffs have been lifelong readers of Plath; Brownlow switched from math to English at Oxford University because of Plath's poetry. Craig was given a copy of Ted Hughes' book "Crow" when he was 12 years old and remembers sneaking into a Hughes reading when he was in grammar school. Yared wrote the elegiac score with a sense that he was composing "for" Plath. In an interview during her recent stop in San Francisco for the premiere of "Sylvia" at the Mill Valley Film Festival, director Jeffs revealed that she, like Paltrow, would read Plath's poetry late into the night before a morning film shoot, selecting individual lines from Plath's "Ariel" poems to focus the tone and emotional temperature of the next day's filming.
It is difficult, then, to find fault with the impulse behind the film, despite Frieda Hughes' claim that the filmmakers refused to take her objections or her "feelings" into consideration. One has to wonder if Hughes' feelings might have more to do with the siphoning off of income from the Plath estate than with the sensitivity or fairness or accuracy of the film itself.
Is it reasonable for an artist -- or in "Sylvia's" case, a group of artists and investors -- to benefit financially from the work, or even the reputation, of another artist? Isn't that exactly what Frieda Hughes is doing by accepting her fat NESTA grant and writing her life story? Would NESTA have given Frieda Hughes $80,000 if she hadn't been the daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath?
Hughes has every right to feel proprietary over her mother as her mum and her father as her dad. But it is foolhardy for her to attempt to control either the general reader's response to her parents' work or to prevent the creative interpretation of her parents' work by other artists. As Hughes is a poet and artist herself, it is confounding that she seems to refuse to acknowledge the natural attraction that artists feel for the works of other artists, often to beneficial effect for both the subject and the interpreter.
It is doubly confounding that Hughes seems to believe that by clinging to a misapprehended sense of nepotistic "privacy" she alone has the right to artistic response to one -- two -- of the major literary figures of the 20th century. This is the kind of schizophrenic attitude that has characterized the Plath estate for many years: The desire to realize the income created by making Plath's works available to the public, coupled with active distaste at the possibility that those same works might elicit some response other than A) a narrowly circumscribed, family-approved interpretation, or B) the ringing of a cash register.
What might "Sylvia" be like if Frieda Hughes and her family had granted the filmmakers liberal use of Plath's words, placing poetry at the heart of the relationship of their version of Sylvia and Ted, as it was in real life? "I know the bottom," Plath wrote in the poem "Elm" in April 1962, when Frieda had just turned 2 years old. "It is what you fear." What Frieda Hughes may continue to fear is that letting go of the stranglehold the Plath estate maintains on Plath's work will force her to forever revisit the terrible specter of her mother's death and the nasty spectacle that followed for her family when that death became the crux of public knowledge about Plath. But Frieda Hughes' mother continued, almost prophetically, in that same poem: "I do not fear it: I have been there." The genius of Sylvia Plath was her courageous willingness to face her inner demons, excruciating as it was, and to come to know herself profoundly in the process. Her poetry continues to resonate far beyond her personal struggle to become, as her daughter recognized in September 2000, "her own woman, defined not by others, but by the words she left behind."
In those last anguished, exhilarating, fruitful months before Plath's suicide, she became a woman whose sole proprietor was herself. That's the Plath her readers know, and that's the Plath who will last: the ardent, defiant, fierce and nimble writer, not the miserable woman who inscrutably and with hopeless finality took her own life. All secondary Plathian roads, whether biographical or critical or fictional or celluloid, will lead surely and inevitably back to the genuine article. As an artist and a poet, but most important as Sylvia Plath's daughter, it's time for Frieda Hughes to trust not just her mother's readers but her mother's words, and the profound power they have to transcend her death. Until she does, Sylvia Plath will never be truly hers.
