Suffering vigorously

Erica Wagner, Ariel’s Gift: A Commentary on Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes, Faber & Faber, 14.99

There’s sure to be a film about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.  The question is, has Andie McDowell chutzpah enough to play Plath?  Or Ralph Fiennes the presence of Hughes?

Birthday Letters made more of an impact than any book of poetry in recent times.  Not quite The Lay of the Last Minstrel but real poetry, not just poetspeak; something substantial.

Germaine Greer pointed out how these last poems of Ted Hughes interlock with those of his dead wife.  The irresistible job of commentary falls to Erica Wagner, New York born, literary editor of The Times.  One Faber author commenting - respectfully - upon two deceased company colleagues.

The exciting thing about Sylvia Plath is how her best work represents a conjunction of English and American language values.  To pin these down you might say the looseness and vitality of American writing, the precision and sense of classical context (let’s hope) here.

Disappointingly, Erica Wagner, presumably better placed than anyone, doesn’t comment on this.  She is some way behind Plath in making the combination.  Although the book is nicely produced, thorough and well set out, some of Wagner’s sentences clunk onto the page.  She makes frequent use of the odd future perfect tense Americans are so fond of when they want to be portentous: “Plath will lecture herself sternly” (p.64) “she will come to be” (p.76)

By the time she killed herself in a London “barricaded by snow” on 11 February 1963, leaving two young children, Sylvia Plath had established herself as a minor figure on the English literary scene.  In her native US she was unknown.  Without the death what would the story amount to?  Her poems require the dark backdrop.

More needs to be explained about Plath’s obsessive feelings for her father, Otto, who died when she was eight.  Did he abuse her?  He was an overbearing perfectionist. There seem no grounds for identifying him with Nazism.  He is not reported to have been involved in the German-American Bund.  Anne Stevenson says he was a liberal and a pacifist.

Sylvia Plath didn’t just die, like the rest of us; she seems to have spent all day every day limbering up for Death with a capital d.  The poem ‘Lady Lazarus’ shows this clearly. All very Germanic.

Then there are Plath’s extraordinary outbursts of violence.  She smashed Ted Hughes’ mother’s “heirloom sideboard” when he came late for childminding.  The sight of young girls stealing flowers in a Boston park made her feel: “I could kill a woman or wound a man”.  She tore up Shakespeare.  Flowers and sonnets put her in mind of torture and atrocities.

What really gives the game away is Plath’s artwork.  Tight, coiled loops of black ink.  Drawings of markets and fishing-boats, painstakingly done but full of incredible evil and suppressed violence.  Hitler’s watercolours are much less worrying.

This seems the quality that appeals to some.  Wagner quotes feminist Robin Morgan, writing when she heard of Birthday Letters, “my teeth began to grind uncontrollably”. But did she know Sylvia Plath better than Ted Hughes who had been married to her for nearly seven years?  Her mocking description of lesbians in The Bell Jar is probably why Plath was excluded from The Feminist Encyclopaedia.

Another telling quote is from Al Alvarez who compared Ted Hughes to “the ‘recovered memory’ games rogue psychotherapists play on unwary patients”.

Hughes’ landscape of crags and cliffs and predators, his myth-making and subconscious delving evidently helped Plath as a writer but not as a human being.

It’s a gripping, disturbing story.  On the surface Sylvia Plath was apolitical, a professional neurotic, school of Robert Lowell, suffering vigorously.  But while nothing links her to Nazism it is clear her work springs from the same basic nihilism - with, for her own family, equally disastrous results.

On second thoughts they shouldn’t bother with the film.  No tacky dream sequences or cheap coups de theatre could match the vivid imagery of the original.

Tribune  26 May 2000