"Her Husband"

It must have been fascinating, having written a biography of Sexton, who is so often connected with Plath. I was struck by how different these two women are, and how different their marriages were, if you want to look at that part of their lives.

Yes. Sexton had a wife, so to speak. (Her husband, Kayo Sexton.) Actually she had something better. She had the extended family in which the other people were caretakers. And thank god! Because women have to be able to hand off child care, if they're going to be able to do other things. If you're going to be creative you have to be able to hand it off. In Plath's case, she had a man who acknowledged, without apparent difficulty: We've got this child to take care of, so you get the morning and I get the afternoon.

They shared child-care 50-50!

Which he does mention to Aurelia Plath -- somewhat annoyed, like he doesn't get proper credit for this -- that Plath regarded her writing time as the most important writing time in the house. That was the most important writing time in the house! Now if we want to talk about selfish, my dear.

OK. Let's talk about sex. There's a lot of sexuality and sensuality in your book in talking about their marriage, and especially their courtship.

Which she wrote about so often. So vividly.

Especially in that amazing, famous journal entry you spend a lot of time on. Clearly they turn each other on from the beginning, if bleeding is any sign. How important was sex to their relationship?

Well, it was an instant test that they gave each other.

The poetry first --

Yes, poetry first, then sex. They established the priorities right away. I don't know much time elapsed from the time that she said, "I did it, I," till she bit his cheek and he grabbed her earrings and walked out of the door. But it wasn't very much time. Right away they knew that they were attuned to each other. They didn't follow up right away. It took a little while for things to clarify.

But that first encounter and the way they physically interacted with each other that first time was pretty telling ...

It was a paradigm, I think. At least it was the paradigm that Plath chose to write about. And we have to be aware that many of the things we think we know about Sylvia Plath come from her journals, and she's always heightening things.

The journals are one of the things Paul Alexander uses -- just to bring him up again -- to put forth his understanding of their story, in which Ted Hughes is somewhat abusive. They had rough sex.

Well, Kamy, may I just politely observe that "abusive" is another loaded cultural term? It's a huge umbrella! And it doesn't fit very well over sexual transactions, it seems to me. Because aggression is very important in people's sexuality, one way or another. In the spectrum of possible aggression-expression in sex, they seemed to have been on the heavy-duty end. But there is no sexual encounter that does not have some aggression in it. None! According to Freud, according to experience! And their sexuality seemed to have been most gratifying when it licensed some expression of the primitive. This is where D.H. Lawrence is very important.

We should talk about that. Lawrence was very important to both of them.

Like Lawrence, Hughes held the view that the authentic experience of sex is an expression of animal force, vitality -- animal vitality, that is. And in his lexicon there's a metaphorical violence to it. But sex is not experienced in words. It's experienced in physical sensation and the urge to do it! What flows from that intensity is language, of course, because we need to capture it. But I don't think the terms "abusive" and "violent" and even "masochistic" and "sadistic," "S/M," I don't think they can justifiably be applied to the register of their sexuality. It definitely was an expression of great importance -- given the frequency -- to both of them.

I love the New Year's resolution to have Friday afternoon blowups, followed by makeup sex.

That's right! Friday afternoon blowups, because the sex is better when you've had a blowup to stimulate you!

And they seem to be in sync.

Very much. And the pleasure principle seems to be the point there. I personally think that people who are trying to put together a brief against Ted Hughes can go to those things and say "violent and abusive," missing the point entirely. Their sexuality was a core expression of their bond, and it had a lot of intensity and negative charge in it.

And mutuality. That's probably the most important thing.

It is the most important thing.

I was struck by Plath being, for 1956, or the mid-1950s, a very sexual person.

Me too!

And that she was sexually active, before marriage.

I was interested in tracking her discovery of her sexuality. And we can track it because of letters in her archive addressed to Eddie Cohen, a man she began corresponding with just before she went to college. Plath published a story in Seventeen magazine, and he wrote her a fan letter that initiated an active correspondence. After she confided to him her feelings about the injustice of the double standard, he more or less became her consultant on sex, giving her a man's point of view.

She was very angry about that idea that --

Men could have sex and women couldn't.

Right. Before marriage.

Right, for fear of pregnancy.

You get the feeling she'd be happy about your husband's invention of the pill.

She was happy enough when she got a diaphragm! But Cohen encouraged her to practice, practice, practice. He encouraged her to masturbate, and to experience orgasm. He said you had to learn how to do it.

That's very forward-thinking.

I'll say. And she did learn. I paraphrased the juiciest things I could find in her journal, about the way she achieved satisfaction by rubbing against her partner -- rubbing together their "tender pointed slopes."

Ooh, a very poetic description of a dry hump.

Right, a dry hump, as we would say. See? What a put-down, eh? But she gives it poetic language because she really loved it, it was delicious. And it was what she felt safe doing.

I have to say, I mean, on Hughes' side of things, he did seem to have a distinctive sexual style. It wasn't just in his relationship with her. When he went on after she was gone with other women, he seemed to think of himself as a hunter. Is that true?

Well, that's my account of him. I don't believe he applies that to himself and his sexuality, although his account, in a consistent, ongoing way, of men's sexuality is that they're driven by what he calls the zest of the sperm. There's this principle of vitality in you that's always looking for an expression of itself. And it has no interest in any social contract.

That's the heart of the matter.

It's biological. But Hughes knows that the zest of the sperm is also embedded in the religious tradition in the story of creation. God created Adam, and two women. There's Eve, and for her there's only one man. But there's Adam, and for him, there's Lilith!

His wife and his mistress, from the beginning.

From the beginning. And Hughes doesn't spell it out, by the way. I'm attributing to him an interpretation I made of his use of Lilith in the poem I'm thinking of, which was written to Assia, the "other woman" in his life with Plath.

I guess this brings us to one of the other things we've talked about before, which is the adultery dispensation for the rich, talented and famous. Mostly for men, but women, too -- Sexton, notably. If you look at the biographies of major artistic figures, or just of ambitious, extraordinary people, there's a lot of adultery there.

Yes, there's a lot of adultery in their biographies. And there's a lot of adultery in the literary world of London. It wasn't just adultery. There is a different social, sexual milieu of Englishness that makes Americans look puritanical. Now Ted Hughes was raised in a puritanical environment himself. But in the world of literary London, where people just freely exchanged partners and there was just a lot of casual sex, adultery was an expression of being a bohemian, so to speak.

In that sense he was almost behaving in a more conventional way than she was.

In a very conventional way! And that's why, his friends said at the time, and even put in their memoirs now, that she really made far too much of it. What she needed was some good advice from a maternal figure, you know: Let him get it out of his system. And that would have been the way a family-oriented advisor would have spoken to her.

Or a literary-bohemian-oriented advisor. There's some notion that a monogamous, rule-bound marriage is not functional for artists.

It's not functional for anybody, in my view.

That's controversial.

You know what the rules are, and then you see that -- it depends on what "is" is. If only it were clearer what you should do in any given situation. If only it were! If only it were, how happy we would -- or no, how dull it would be. This is why people are interested in reading about other people's marriages. What do they actually do when push comes to shove, and people make -- I almost said "make mistakes," but I won't say that. Let me put it this way. When one person hurts another person, but actually loves them, too, how do both of them deal with it? Because the rules just don't cover all the cases.

I know in the book that you're really trying to look most closely at Ted Hughes' creative development and his creative crisis. But we do get to see that he marries again, and within that marriage he does find a woman who seems to be at least tolerant of his need to continue pursuing affairs --

Hughes doesn't have another marriage until 1970. Instead he finds a variety of rather unsatisfactory circumstances under which to take care of the children. Aurelia Plath wants to take care of them on her daughter's behalf, and Hughes refuses this. He hires nannies, he gets help from his sister, he involves Assia [the woman Hughes had the affair with while he was married to Plath], who has a baby, and as I say, he creates a tribe in which he's the chief. So the solutions are really kind of fluid until 1970 when he marries a woman who really has the ability and the desire, apparently, or the will, to take care of the children with him. He hasn't solved the problem of his creativity, though. That's what I'm talking about in my book. How is Ted Hughes going to solve the problem of being a poet on the scale he aspires to? A poet on the scale of Yeats, on the scale of T.S. Eliot. How did he get there? That's my question. Because he indubitably did. And I don't know what role his last marriage played in his achievement, but I do know what role his relationships outside his marriage played in it.

And you do know what role his marriage to Plath played in it.

Yes, I do know what role his marriage to Plath played in it. He referred to the marriage to Plath as a marriage that was his contact with what he would have called the feminine principle, the "goddess of complete being." Which doesn't mean she was complete in herself, but that his being is completed in conjunction with her.

So even after Plath's death, it remains important to talk about the two marriages, which you introduced at the very beginning of our conversation. Because while the reproductive unit marriage failed, and truly ended with her death, the other marriage continues.

It continues to the end of his life. And there is a poem which is the last poem in the marriage, which I designate: "The Offers." In this poem Plath returns to Hughes in a dream, younger than she's ever been, flawless, and she says to him, "This time, don't fail me." That marriage goes on, and he doesn't fail it.

Hence, "Her Husband."

Yes.

So, I'm still hung up on this adultery thing.

That's OK.

One of the things I've been writing about, that I write about in my book, parts of which you've read, was my struggle as I contemplated getting married with the idea of fidelity, and my fear of failing at it. I felt like I had to believe that I could stop pursuing sexual relationships with other men, for the rest of my life, or I couldn't marry. I felt like I had to believe I could stop doing that.

OK, but can I interrupt you and say, presumably, that you were projecting into the future. But to be businesslike, how long is the future?

Till you die!

My dear! You have no idea how long you're going to live. I think if you're a serious person you understand that you are doing your best.

Yes.

And you don't know what's going to happen in your life, but you are going to try your best.

I promise to try my best. Well, back to Plath and Hughes.

But you see, I wrote this book because I think this is so fundamental: Marriage is a commitment to form coping mechanisms with which to handle the unintended consequences!

I sensed that reading the book. It's a very literary book, but at the same time it's really dealing with marriage, not just Hughes' and Plath's marriage, but ideas about marriage itself. Do you see it as a book for people struggling and prospering in their own marriages?

Yes, because I've had three of them!

And your ideas about marriage were basically the same as Sylvia Plath's?

Pretty much. I was born in 1939 and she was born in 1932. But the world of Spokane, Wash., let's say there was a bit of cultural lag there. But marriage was the destiny of a girl; and nice girls did not have sex outside of marriage. I had sex outside of marriage so I married the guy I had sex with. Then I got a fellowship and I left the man that I'd had sex with and gotten married to. The conflict between my writing and my life, so to speak -- what a muddle. So I sympathized with Sylvia Plath's struggle very much. But I won't go on personalizing Sylvia Plath's script. I'll just say that as I got older myself I got more interested in the fact that men and women have different stakes in marriage.

What was it like writing about two people who have been so written about?

I limited myself to writing about their marriage, partly because it turns out to be such an important theme in the work of both of them. The availability of Hughes' papers after his death made it possible to probe this subject without inhibitions.

It is really a biography of a marriage.

Theirs was one of the most important literary marriages ever. And one of the reasons is that as her survivor, and as her executor, Hughes made Plath famous. He did! And then he wrote himself into the story of their marriage, and made them inseparable.

Would you ever do a biography of someone who was still living?

Never. No.

You didn't start this project until after Hughes' death.

Not just after he died, but also with the knowledge that Hughes himself had selected everything in the archive he sold to Emory University in Atlanta. I thought, well, Ted Hughes has a reputation in the world of a man who doesn't want to be known ... I don't think so! I really understood, too, how Ted Hughes got the reputation of being a man who didn't want to be known. He was protecting is privacy, but in addition, he wanted to write about his life. And he did. He didn't want journalists writing about his life. You make talk and journalists turn it into writing. And as Janet Malcolm says in "The Journalist and the Murderer," it's the journalist's story, not yours.

And it's the biographer's story.

Yes.

What's next for you?

My next project is a biography of somebody who's been dead for 2,000 years, the Roman poet Ovid.

You couldn't be much deader than that!

No estate, nobody to interview, and actually, no history. Just me and him!

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