Wystan and Chester: A Personal Memoir of W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman Book

Whenever I try to say something, anything, about the Sylvia Plath-Ted Hughes situation, I sound like a marriage counselor - a very, very bad marriage counselor. Diane Middlebrook's efforts here are certainly better than anything I could come up with in way of making sense of it all. But nothing, really, is figured out really. But this is not to say that I don't have opinions - oh, I have opinions. After reading this book, then delving again into Plath's diaries, and reading her poems (and some of Hughes') I feel grubby, exhausted, ruddled by feelings of inferiority and a little cross, a little bedazzled.

I don't like Ted Hughes. And yet while reading Middlebrook's book, the more uncomfortable I was with my antipathy towards Ted "Huge" Hughes. I still don't like his poems, and I think he treated Plath badly (but didn't cause her suicide). But some of my disgust is sexual-animal (Hughes would love that) - his massive glowering handsomeness, that drooping forelock (a Hitlerian forelock - I think this might be where Plath got that "Mein Kampf look" from "Daddy.") He would've petrified me had a time machine allowed me to meet him, mano a mano, in 1956 at that party at Cambridge. I'm 6'2" so it is not size - but I got nothing on him in terms of looks and charisma or self-confidence. Had Plath stopped to chat me up - she was working the room, according to Middlebrook, sizing up the men - she would've spit me out after a minute or less. I know this, and I resent it. Not in a sharp way - I am too old for that - but I am pretty sure how I would've felt at 24 (and all the cover-ups I would've tried - "Yeah, Ted is a nice guy, but he is kind of a jerk. And dandruffy too."). But from the perspective of middle age, there are things about Hughes - the way he presented himself - which strike me as being very calculated, very much a product of a very handsome man who is also very smart and sexually ambitious. Take those grungy clothes: Middlebrook tells us "he bought his corduroy cheap from a factory owned by one of the prosperous members of his mother's family, up in West Yorkshire, and dyed it black himself" (p. 5)." Such a lot of effort to look slovenly! The black corduroy, the iffy grooming, the bad manners; a good-looking man can employ these things artfully - whereas those of us who aren't handsome can't really pull it off. Had Hughes, with his looks, been immaculately groomed, he would've appealed conventionally to conventional (I only mean non-artsy, non-Bohemian) women. Without dressing down, Hughes would've been the Literary Baldwin Brother. But Hughes knew what (and who) he wanted, and he turned himself into the rough beast slouching out of Yorkshire. It worked like a charm, again and again and again. As with Bill Clinton, I keep asking myself - as uncharismatic, ugly men will - why did women keep falling for this shtick?

Well, Plath famously fell for Ted Hughes, then tried to tame him. And sometimes I truly felt sorry for Hughes. She married him because of his raw magnetism and untamability - all the things she then spent the next six years trying to smooth out (she agonized over this in her diary). Ah, in mating we want strength and pizzazz, but in settling down we want reliability and consistency. And yet that Hughes stuck it out as long as he did is not, as he tried to portray it - subtly, cleverly - for years afterward, a product of his good character and capacity for love and patience. Mostly I think it was because Plath gave him what he wanted most - a stable platform (and a drive and focus he lacked) to become a famous poet. Once established and once the old lady started becoming too much of a nag, and as soon as the sexy neighbor's wife showed up, Hughes fled.

But let me clarify "nag" - Plath ran an orderly house, and to some extent used housework, purchases, and interior decorating, as a balm to her troubled soul. Not an uncommon thing. The way she ran her (and his) literary career was also well-organized, energetic, and perhaps relentless - and Hughes benefited enormously from this (Plath sent out his stuff and first got him noticed). Ted needed nagging and he was shrewd enough to know it. And then there was Plath's possessiveness, which was ferocious - something Hughes is a bit hypocritical to protest, since Plath was sort of doing the ferocious mate thing he professed to love (plus he cheats). Not in my burrow, apparently. Middlebrook sympathetically points out Hughes' side of things throughout the book - at one point, Hughes keeps count of how many times Plath interrupts him during a single morning's writing time - 104 times - a number said to be an actual count. His complaints about being held financial hostage for a new set of dining room chairs also struck me as a reasonable complaint.

So Hughes fled. Famously fled. And man, did he flee. I've read some Plath biographies, but the details are hazy. Middlebrook outlines it - Plath's assertion that Hughes "deserted" her is hard to argue with. During an attempt to reconcile during a trip to Ireland he ran away - for a prearranged trip to Spain with his new mistress Assia Wevill. He even prearranged to have a telegram sent and left at the house. The Plaths had two little kids by then, a toddler and an infant, and he just disappeared. Hughes later pled, to his ex-mother-in-law Aurelia Plath, "temporary insanity." Elsewhere, outrageously, Hughes also claims that his final decision to leave was because of his mother-in-law; he couldn't stand her sentimentality, he said (she was visiting - just for a month or so). This is preposterous, but I sympathized with Hughes when he accused his wife of sentimentality. Middlebrook makes a good case: "he may have feared what was portended by those little hearts and flowers Plath was painting so zealously on the cradles, the lintels, the thresholds to the rooms they shared...(p. 181). Yeah, my tolerance for "little hearts" painted all over the house is pretty low too. And yet let me defend sentimentality - it is, as Wallace Stevens said, a "failure of emotion." Some people spend their whole lives in a haze of sentimentality and it seems to work out for them - although I cannot help but thinking the deathbed experience must be a bit puzzling for them. But sentimentality can also serve as a kind of social lubricant, a way of keeping every encounter - love and hate - from turning into a towering conflict of Integrity and Honesty (and Selfishness). Most of us can't handle things at that pitch every single moment. Plath certainly couldn't and her writings are full of sentimentality of the goopiest sort (letters to her mother and elsewhere). But Plath knew the difference between sentimentality and real life - just read her poems. Did Hughes know she knew?

So what happened? It occurred to me, reading this book, Plath and Hughes lacked a sense of humor. Plath of course could be witty - but wit - her nasty, satirical portraits of people she met, such poems as "Face Lift" - is not what I mean. Wit is not really humor. Nowhere in the life of Hughes-Plath is there what I would consider humor. Self-deprecation - for sure Plath could practice self-loathing, Hughes perhaps a simulacrum of this - but humor? I just don't see it. Ambition, grim intensity, and, for a time, great sex. Apparently that'll only get you so far in a marriage... Once, Middlebrook reports Plath and a friend rolled on the floor with laughter after Plath read her newly-composed "Daddy" (which reminds me of similar stories about Kafka). In this case, sometimes things are so intense, so lacerating, that you have to laugh. Not sure this constitutes a sense of humor in the way I mean. They seemed incapable of just goofing. As for Hughes, he's as funny as an Easter Island statue. Looks like one too...

Now, before I get too self-satisfied here with my lack-of-humor observation, Robert Frost once said (in his Letters to Untermeyer) "I own that any form of humor shows fear and inferiority… (p. 166)" That rings true to me - people often think I am funny, by the way - Hughes and Plath were anything but fearful and they never felt inferior - self-loathing is not the same thing as feeling inferior. Humor, like sentimentality can be a dodge, a way to deflect seriousness, consequences....life. (Will I joke with the nurses on my deathbed, unable to do anything but joke?) So yeah, humor might've saved the Plath-Hughes marriage, but saved it for what?

***

Conventional wisdom has it that Ted Hughes had, at the beginning, the superior talent, while Plath "developed" more slowly, her genius released by the trauma of his desertion, etc. I just don't see it that way at all. Ted Hughes is a mediocre poet at best and always was. His early successes - as many literary successes are - were a product of time and place. Al Alvarez, in an important first critical piece, praised him extravagantly as an antidote to the fusty, conventional verse of the English establishment poets. This is probably a fair assessment (I don't know a lot about '50s UK establishment verse), but it doesn't necessarily mean Hughes' actual individual poems are enduring. And I think they are not. Hughes, with hard work, image-polishing, and literary networking, made for himself a most successful, and most conventional, English literary career (Poet Laureate - you don't get any more establishment than that). But it is not the career or success I object to - I just don't like Hughes' poems - I don't like their pomposity, their turn-it-up-to-eleven-all-the-time phony intensity; mostly I don't like the quasi-mythical quasi-religious hocus pocus. I detest his rhetoric of nature, those hawks and the rest of his corny menagerie. I think Plath (and Larkin) are far more aware of the animal inside all of us than Hughes ever is, despite all the rabbit-snaring and pike-angling. And as for "The Birthday Letters," I was not impressed. Talk about sentimentality! Those poems struck me as being the slack, old-guy stuff a lot of "difficult" poets resort to in old age when they realize nobody is really reading their earlier work - a family tragedy often triggers this - see Donald Hall's poems about his dying wife and Edward Hirsch's recent book in verse on the death of his troubled son.

This is not to say Ted Hughes wasn't talented. He was. But talent is a pretty common thing. It's what you do with it that matters, and Sylvia Plath should be the Patron Saint of Talent. She was talented, but she was not, the way, say, Yeats or Emily Dickinson were, a genius. But she wrote, towards the end, genius-level poems, and she did this - not merely because of the catastrophic emotional pressures she endured, both neuro-chemical and situational, but because she worked really, really hard. And, just as importantly, she developed a self-critical apparatus that was relentless (and may have to some extent destroyed her) and absolutely necessary to producing great - not good, not acceptable, not prize-winning - art. As for raw talent, I'd say Plath and Hughes were - as Middlebrook and others claim - about equally matched. But Hughes was a true believer - in himself, in his quasi-religious mishmash of astrology-nature-Jungian Archetypes-Robert Graves' White Goddess - and true believers can write anything, so long as it is orthodox, so long as the poet is being "true to themselves." But much of what we think is being "true to ourselves" is excuse-mongering in order to do whatever it is we want to do. Hughes' constant "falling in love" and all his passionate folderols strike me, again and again, as a justification of bedding beautiful ladies (Middlebrook does not see things this way). Plath was, despite her vast outpouring of chirpy self-assertions and achievement reckonings, deeply critical of her self and her work. A lot of her chirpiness (and sentimentality - see above) came, I'd guess, from just being tired at the end of the day, a day spent writing really good poems (and childrearing and housekeeping). Her self-lacerations are a key difference. Hughes too wrote a lot of poems, to the point where he got really good at Ted Hughes kind of poems. Let's see how long they last.

***

Before reading Middlebrook's book, I knew very little about Ted Hughes' post-Plath biography. She gives a very sympathetic view of those years, sometimes with lingering looks at his graying chest hair. And a lot of stuff about how his poetry grew and so on, which I found unconvincing. Assia Wevill's ghastly suicide-murder (of their four-year-old daughter Shura) remains inexplicable to me - Wevill seemed more resilient psychologically than Plath, but I can't figure out why she did what she did. That she was losing her looks seems to be Middlbrook's triggering event. Hughes' was predictably losing interest, and was sleeping around, but he did not seem to be making a break with Wevill. The horror of this is indescribable and it does make Ted Hughes' story fit for a Greek tragedy (so everybody says). But Hughes' libido marched on. He married Carol Orchard - a beautiful, young (of course) non-literary type who did the farm work on his cattle ranch (Hughes had returned to the country) while he carried on in the World of Literature with a couple of other women publicly. His wife apparently didn't mind - Middlebrook doesn't address this at all, beyond making a defense of Hughes' deep psychic need for "the hunt" - which she presents as something fierce and noble. I see it as the male biological urge for a harem manifested in a guy with the looks and cultural clout to get what he wants. Which is to say Ted Hughes' extramarital sex life was about as profound as a heavy metal drummer's. Quoting Robert Graves' White Goddess doesn't change this.

Two of these affairs are explored in some detail. First was press agent Jill Barber, whom he met on an Australian junket - after seeing his handsome mug on a brochure, she'd told a colleague she'd "bed Hughes before the festival was over." Assia Wevill did much the same thing (she put on "war paint" when first meeting him). Poor Ted, always getting gobbled by lady sharks! Barber dropped him when she got "broody" and Hughes wouldn't commit. Next was Emma Tennant, a writer, who, as Middlebrook reports, thought Hughes was a monster for his treatment of Plath, but who convinced herself that this was "the Bluebeard syndrome" - a need to "become involved with a man known for his terrifying and unacceptable treatment" of women. Uh huh. Sure. I love the word "unacceptable" in these contexts. Once again, Ted Hughes became another notch on a lipstick case, with Tennant ungraciously (but not unjustifiably) noting "I think he was a very over-excitable person....It was part of his carry-on. He fancied himself." (p. 252).

What his wife was doing, or his two children, during these times, Middlebrook doesn't say. Hughes had enough money for nannies and staff and fancy schools, and Carol Orchard seems to have been around, so I guess the kids were alright. The book dawdles off with a lot off attempts to secure Hughes' legacy - all those gazillions of poems, children's books, oratorios, prefaces and forwards, Shakespeare renderings, BBC broadcasts, and how "Birthday Letters" was a culmination and release of all his Sylvia Plath demons (or angels, or whatever). He also spent a lot of time editing Plath's journals, correspondence, and unpublished work. Middlebrook assures us this was difficult for Hughes, but he was well compensated - Plath's work is how he bankrolled himself - the Plath stuff is worth a fortune, and Hughes published it - shrewdly so - and died a wealthy poet. That doesn't happen very often!

His acceptance of the Laureateship was such a surprise - surely not Ted "Crow" Hughes! Hughes only got the job because Larkin turned it down; Poet Laureate is a ridiculous job but Hughes was apparently beyond ridicule by 1984. So much for hunting rabbits with a ferret in the Calder Valley. Was it the final act of self-betrayal? The wildman putting on a tie? Which is perhaps why his brother Gerald - just as handsome, apparently, and even more the wildman of the moors - exercised such an influence on Ted. Well into middle age, Ted was trying to get his older (by ten years) brother to move back to England and, apparently, live in some family compound. Gerald would have nothing of it, and remained in Australia dealing in rare animal pelts and whatnot, a true wildman living free. I think it possible Hughes wanted to tame his brother, then his own life wouldn't be the well-compensated compromise it became. And yet, as for Hughes' actual Laureateship, Middlebrook changed my mind - he was good at it, and, to my surprise, apparently very sincere and enthusiastic about the whole thing. He believed in royalty - kind of like T. S. Eliot without the Anglicanism - which tied into his Precambrian views of Man and England. To my delight he became "a sort of 'spiritual adviser'" to the Prince of Wales - isn't this a wonderful thing to know? I only wish Middlebrook had expanded on this some. He gushed, as I suppose I would, over the Queen and her Mum.

***

Middlebrook's prose is uneven. She'll be quite lucid and engaging when reporting the facts, but when she veer off into analysis - literary or psychological - she gets vaporous or banal. I had a tendency to just blip over these bits. For instance, there is an extended metaphor of that famous Escher etching of the two hands drawing each other - you know the one, some kid has it on her wall here and there in every dorm in America. Middlebrook makes some sort of conscious-unconscious point with it, which, although blipped over, kept turning up:

"Nonetheless, during her year at Smith, while the upper hand was fidgeting with names for characters, possible literary models, and possible markets for Falcon Yard, the lower hand finally set to work. It would have nothing to do with Falcon Yard. Instead, it began limning verbal portraits of Plath's colleagues at Smith...." (p. 122)

Those hands "limning verbal portraits" struck me as creaky Ego-Id stuff in disguise. Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, things got even worse:

"Sylvia Plath was more productive than ever before in her life, the negative circuit of her creative energy fine-tuned and running at maximum efficiency..." (p. 186)

Beyond the fact this is pretty much a cliché to begin with, what makes it worse is that it is a botched cliché: you can't fine tune a circuit, and circuits do not "run" at maximum efficiency or otherwise (running implying moving parts). For somebody of Middlebrook's obvious talents, this is just napping at the keyboard.

Yeah, but I couldn't put this book down. I'll probably even read her Anne Sexton bio., though I don't want to.