"Her Husband"

Well, let's talk some more about that. We talked about how the marriage was in one sense a failure -- in what sense was it a success?

Was it a success! It was the success that made them people you and I know the names of. Unlike most married people. Why? Because they became poets together. At the time that they met -- I love this part of the story -- neither one of them had brilliant prospects for success as artists. They were pretty good, but they were college students, and they were good at the college-student level: full of promise without much testing in the real world. But when they met each recognized the other's talent and formed exorbitant expectations about where that talent might lead. When Sylvia Plath met him, the first thing she did was quote to him what he had written and published in a literary journal, that she had memorized. It was a magical moment for him and for her, too. It was the basis of their bond. Hughes calls it luck. In a letter to his brother, he says: Sylvia is my luck entirely.

That's beautiful.

He was mad about her! And one of the things he loved was that she had exactly the kind of literary education that could appreciate everything he did, everything without exception. She had not only a kind of daffy goofy appreciation of him, such as one has for objects of desire when one is desiring them, but she also had the same education he did, and very good literary judgment.

And you point out in the book that they were exceptionally good critics for each other, while being incredibly supportive.

Yes. They provided the lab conditions for each other in their purposeful pursuit of a ridiculous professional decision. You know? I mean ridiculous! You don't become a poet with any expectation of success in the material world. So how are you going to become a poet at all? How poets become poets always has a story of this kind somewhere in it. Somebody whose judgment matters to you keeps you going while you get to be good at it, which usually takes a hell of a long time even if you're very talented.

Plath was incredibly ambitious. But one of the very interesting things I found out about in the book was her conventionality, too, her very 1950s husband-hunting while she was at Cambridge.

Well, they were both conventional in the assumption that they should marry.

Although she proposed to him.

She proposed to him, but he said, why not? I think. Remember, he came out of a family where people married or they weren't respectable, or there was something wrong with them. Plath held the same view, as we know from her journals and from her poems. She thought that to be married was the only socially acceptable mature position for a woman. But he made a kind of unconventional marriage, and she did too.

They were a dual-career couple in the 1950s.

Yes. She figured out how it was going to work for her, and he figured out how it was going to work for him right away, because Sylvia Plath was not only a wonderful critic, she was a wonderful typist! So there was this ordinary side to their marriage, and then there was the extraordinary side, which was their discovery of each other as perfect counterparts in their developing vocations, the partner that luck had handed them. He said as much in "Birthday Letters," where he makes the astrological claim that the solar system married them the night they met.

Obviously this is an exhaustively written-about and thought-about couple. Paul Alexander's play "Edge" was performed in New York recently. He takes a very different view of their relationship. He presents it in a way that paints Hughes as the villain.

But Alexander is writing a play, which is a different genre entirely; it requires a dramatic arc. A biography is something else.

He's written a biography as well ["Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath"].

Well, to be charitable about the question, he didn't have the advantage of the Ted Hughes archive. I believe that that archive absolutely once and for all changes the base for making a judgment about him. Lots of things can be found out about Ted Hughes in 2003 that couldn't be known before.

So is it your belief that this entrenched view that has been so reinforced about Sylvia Plath as a victim of a husband who left her -- and a father who died and left her, I'm thinking of her poem "Daddy" and of Alexander's play -- is it your belief that with the Ted Hughes archive being opened that that view will change?

Who knows? Society, culture absorbs information in the form of stories. And in the 20th century, we had a favorite story, the victim story, which was widely distributed in our culture. "Sylvia Plath was a victim of a bad man."

She was made into a sort of victim poster girl.

I never thought that fit her very well, personally, but it was easily absorbed. Then too whenever people get a divorce, other people choose sides against one of the pair. Somebody is always to blame.

And when one member of the couple takes her life ...

Well, yes, and then Sylvia Plath kills herself, and people think she killed herself because he left her. How do they know that? Sylvia Plath had already tried to kill herself. The available evidence suggests that she was having a repetition of the major clinical depression that she had had when she was 18. Her obsessional suicidal thoughts were symptoms of her illness. Suicide was a solution to the problem.

Which she wrote about in "The Bell Jar."

"The Bell Jar" had just been published when she killed herself. I envision it as sitting in plain sight during the hours when she was deciding what to do. She had a suicide in her. And the options that Sylvia Plath might have seen would have been A) hospitalization, which she had been through before, and B) that her children might be taken away from her. I have never seen a shred of writing about this, but I feel pretty sure that that would have crossed her mind. Mental illness was held to be a very, very bad thing, and you definitely wouldn't want children being raised by "a nut case." As a British woman said to me, "Cut to the chase! Was Sylvia Plath a nutter or not?"

A nutter. That's nice.

It was an important question to hear put so bluntly. Honestly, I can hardly bear to think about those last hours of Sylvia Plath's life. I have a real rescue fantasy about this. If somebody had just put her in a place where she was safe, until she got better, and could come back to her children, I think she could have survived the breakup of her marriage.

And that marriage would have been a good thing for her. Just because a marriage ends doesn't mean it's a failure.

Yes, that's what I think. Though I used to say to my female students, men can marry, but women shouldn't.

Really. Were you married at the time?

No. I had observed in myself that I could have a relationship to a man that was pretty satisfactory, consoling, and even conflict-oriented, and that was fine as long as I wasn't married to him. But as soon as I got married to him, all of a sudden I had a script playing in my head all the time. And feminism was saying: Let's just take a look at this stuff. The personal is political, so where's the politics? Well, the politics was the politics of being the wife, in my head. When I married my current husband, my last husband, I had outgrown the script. I wasn't going to have children with him, and we both were well-established in our professional worlds.

You were beyond the script.

Literally beyond it. So we can make it up as we go along. I can't tell you how gratifying it is to make it up as you go along. It's wonderful! Because at any given moment you can say, I think we're doing this all wrong. I'm not happy with this. Or, what would happen if we did this? The conventions don't rule you the way they do when you're a reproductive pair. Because there's no question that women bear a different kind of emotional responsibility for child raising from men.

And still you think this is true? I'm certain it's true right now.

I just realized who I was talking to.

The three-months' pregnant writer. I think about this all the time. About how my husband and I will handle it, and what will happen to my work. One of things I was feeling, being a newly pregnant woman writer reading your book, was Sylvia Plath's worry and anxiety over whether she had to make a choice between her writing, her career, and being a wife and mother. And even now, in this post-feminist universe, I worry over it too.

The way she formulates her options in her journal is that marriage will probably require that her writing become secondary, so there's the conflict. She gives caps to writing and to life. For life, she needs to be married --

And to be a mother.

And to bear children. Let's preserve that distinction if we may, because childbearing is what she thinks about; she doesn't think about children. She's thinking about accessing her fertility, if you want to put it that way. That's not her phrase for it, but the consistent references in Plath have to do with a celebration of her fertility.

And with confirming it. She needs to know she's fertile.

And confirming it! But the outcome of being fertile is really not in her imagination. She's not drawn to children, she doesn't fantasize about them, their little shining faces.

She does seem, for awhile, to have it all.

Yes. And Plath truly enjoyed caring for her children.

She's so different from Anne Sexton in that regard.

And boy, I'm on Sexton's side in a lot of ways on this one. Let somebody else take care of the children! Women aren't good at taking care of children just because they're female. That is very important to know in life. It doesn't come with the territory of being female, at all. Plath understood this. Her poetry contains recognition of the biological bond, which is endocrinological, between herself and the baby while she breast-feeds. But what's voluntary, what has to be created inside her because it doesn't come with the breast milk, is love. Is fascination, is benign, benevolent curiosity.

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