"Her Husband"

Diane Middlebrook talks about why the marriage of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes was a soaring success despite his infidelity and her suicide -- and why promising to be sexually faithful is folly.

By Kamy Wicoff

Nov 14, 2003 | Diane Middlebrook has never shied away from controversy. Her biography of the poet Anne Sexton was a critical success -- nominated for the National Book Award in 1991 -- but it was also a national sensation, drawing from transcripts of Sexton's sessions with one of her psychiatrists (with the family's and psychiatrist's consent) and revealing her affair with another. Her second biography, "Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton," explored the life of a female jazz musician, born in 1914, who lived as a man from the age of 19 until she died in 1989, having fooled Duke Ellington and five wives and having "fathered" three children. But controversy is decidedly not the point, or even of particular interest to a writer like Middlebrook. Instead, the heart of the mystery seems always to be: How do artists become?

In this respect her latest biography, "Her Husband: Hughes and Plath, Portrait of a Marriage," is no exception. It is not a biography of either Ted Hughes or Sylvia Plath, but a biography of their marriage, and it is safe to say that Middlebrook took this approach because within this first, youthful marriage, two of the 20th century's most important poets came into being. For a time they prospered together. Like many married couples they also struggled: with romance and ambition, sex and work, children and mothers-in-law.

I first met Diane Middlebrook at a book salon in London, where she lives for part of the year with her husband, the chemist and playwright Carl Djerassi. (The couple spend the rest of their time in San Francisco, where Middlebrook is a professor emerita at Stanford University.) I told her I was writing a memoir about my experience getting married; she told me she had just completed a book about marriage herself. At first glance it seemed that our projects were very different, but Middlebrook knew immediately that we would have a lot to talk about, and she was right. Recently, we talked about "Her Husband."

Most people know what went wrong in the marriage of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. He fell in love with another woman, leaving Sylvia with their two very young children; she fell into a deep depression and took her own life. It ended notoriously badly. But in the book you argue that it was an extraordinarily productive marriage for both of them, even a lucky one.

Well, the marriage was about two things: One of them failed and the other succeeded. What failed was the formation of a new family. It failed because Sylvia Plath was not psychologically prepared -- and by that I mean something quite respectful and descriptive -- to absorb and accommodate a dimension of the man she was married to, which was just as characterological in him as her refusal of it was in her.

His need to ...

His need to have sex partners outside the marriage for the continual restimulation of his creative powers.

Huh. But you could also say that it was Hughes' fault for entering into a contract that according to most people requires fidelity.

You move immediately to the question of whose fault it was.

Right.

And I'm trying to be descriptive. My book is trying to say that you can understand these people if you set aside the question of who are you going to blame, and look at what happened. Because if this is a book about marriage, then it's a case study of a failure, at one level, that is pretty interesting and common, in which the female in the pair is absolutely antagonized and threatened in her emotional security by the behavior of the male in the pair -- and vice versa. Sylvia Plath's sexual jealousy was a burden to Ted Hughes. It finally became an intolerable burden to him. His behavior cannot be admired, but it was, I argue, a lifesaving act on his part. But that's quite aside from what they contracted for. They contracted to become a family.

But in her mind they'd also contracted to be faithful to each other sexually.

Well ... can you contract for that?

A lot of people when they enter marriage believe that they are doing just that.

OK, let's go to that question. Because I think the relationship that people form inside the contract of marriage is dynamic, and they mature and go on maturing inside of it through their psychological interaction. The notion that the contract can cover with rules the behavior of the people in it is, I think, highly questionable. I don't believe you can ever, ever, ever predict how human beings will develop -- there are too many factors at play.

But it's a fundamental idea that a lot of people have about marriage, that it's possible to promise yourself and your behavior for the rest of your life. That you are standing up there saying: By entering into this contract and this particular relationship, I promise for the rest of my life to behave a certain way, and faithfulness is part of that. The vows explicitly cover the sex question.

I don't believe so. You can say, "I will be faithful to my pledge to understand you in your needs, which are different from mine." But people don't know what's going to be expected of them. For example, if you have a rigid code that absolutely spells out not only what you may and may not do but what the punishment will be -- and that's a definition of "contract," in my view -- I don't know of a single one that actually says to men: You can't have sex with other women. Honestly I don't. It's females who are forbidden to practice adultery. It's not men.

So in that context you could say that Ted Hughes, in his marriage to Sylvia Plath, did not breach the contract between them.

Yes, well. I don't know what the contract was, you see.

It's specific to each couple?

All I know for sure is that relationships are dynamic, and people don't know what's going to happen. They don't know what's going to happen in life, and they don't know what's going to happen inside their relationship, either. What he discovered, I believe, was that he had some needs that he didn't understand at the time he married Plath, or that he didn't think were important.

It's not like it was premeditated ... murder.

No! No. Well, as far as I know Hughes was not unfaithful to Sylvia Plath; he did not have sex with other women, during the first six years of their marriage. Their partnership was focused on their writing.

Next Page: In what sense was their marriage a success?

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