Seducing the Demon (6 page)

The reticence of the dutiful daughter (Frieda is in her midforties) trying to make sense of her family history is riveting. Frieda is still trying to bring her parents back together again; all children of ruptured love stories want to. She speaks of the distortion of Plath’s character and work by strangers, and in her stunning self-control you feel her pain. “The collection of the
Ariel
poems became symbolic to me of this possession of my mother and of the wider vilification of my father,” she calmly says.

The reference, clearly, is to self-appointed defenders of Sylvia Plath who never knew her or Hughes, perhaps never even read their work. Plath’s gravestone in Yorkshire was often defaced to obliterate “Hughes.” What a child named Hughes might make of this we can only guess. “Criticism of my father was even leveled at his ownership of my mother’s copyright, which fell to him on her death and which he used to directly benefit my brother and me,” Frieda notes. “My father’s editing of
Ariel
was seen to ‘interfere’ with the sanctity of my mother’s suicide, as if, like some deity, everything associated with her must be enshrined and preserved as miraculous.... I did not want my mother’s death to be commemorated as if it had won an award. I wanted her life to be celebrated.”

I once took the brunt of the Plath industry’s assault myself. Talking about her poetry and suicide at the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in 1971, I was picketed by an angry posse because I refused to mouth the feminist orthodoxy of the time, that Hughes had
murdered
Plath. That Plath had a history of breakdowns in her college years was of no interest. My hecklers wanted to believe that a cruel husband done ‘er in, whatever the “facts.”

And the facts were hard to come by. Ted Hughes was shellshocked himself, and wanted to hide. He was also in love with the poet Assia Wevill, who committed suicide in 1969; their daughter also died by her mother’s hand. Her suicide is often thought of as a copycat act (indeed, the method was the same). Reading about Plath and Hughes, I often feel I am watching a Shakespearean tragedy where most of the cast lies dead on the stage before the curtain comes down.

Aurelia Schober Plath, Sylvia’s mother, must have felt angry and betrayed by both Sylvia and Ted. But surely she loved her grandchildren. Olwyn Hughes, the children’s aunt, was called back from her life in France to help raise them. They were miraculously alive, after all, despite the gas, and Sylvia was dead. What would you do?

So the Hugheses walled off. They declined to let anyone reprint Plath, set Plath to music, novelize Plath, or perform Plath, except under their strict supervision. Three years ago, the Manhattan Theatre Club asked me to do a Plath poetry evening and the Hugheses refused to give permission for a reading of the poems by actors.

Maybe they were constrained by other contracts, but where openness was wanted, they closed down. And they’re still careful. The Plath sanctuary remains guarded, now with the help of Frieda, who has complained about the film version of her mother’s life and who wrote in a poem of her own, in the book
Wooroloo
(1998): “Wanting to breathe life into their own dead babies / ... They scooped out her eyes to see how she saw / And bit away her tongue in tiny mouthfuls / To speak with her voice.”

Frieda Hughes has had the courage to bring her mother back, not as a symbol but as a poet. Plath’s poems are now published in their original versions and will have the last word. They remain remarkable. Their time has not passed. The new generations who read them may not care about their biographical underpinnings the way we did in the sixties, but they will care about their strength and craft.

We can see in this new edition what a careful constructor of poems Plath was. She weighed her commas and semicolons. She cared about what Denise Levertov and Allen Ginsberg call “breath units.” She must have read her poems aloud to hear them in the air. It is touching that they were mostly written at four in the morning—“that still, blue, almost eternal hour before cockcrow, before the baby’s cry, before the glassy music of the milkman, settling his bottles,” as Plath put it for the BBC two months before she died, for a program that was never broadcast. “If they have anything else in common, perhaps it is that they are written for the ear, not the eye: They are poems written out loud.”

I adopted this habit too, when my daughter was an infant. I love that sky blue-pink hour, do my best writing then and read what I’m writing aloud to myself, especially poetry. But the suicidal women poets who make up my heritage still trouble me.

Sylvia’s suicide puts her clearly in the tradition of women who feel they must die for their transgressive acts, like Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina. In 1974, the year after I published
Fear of Flying
, the dazzlingly gifted poet Anne Sexton committed suicide too, wrapped in her mother’s fur coat, inhaling carbon monoxide in the backseat of her car in Weston, Massachusetts. She had become a friend of mine and had written in my copy of
Live or Die,
“Yes, yes, let’s live!”

I remember the night at the Algonquin Hotel that I sat and held her hand as she drank vodka gimlet after vodka gimlet and I struggled to keep up with her. She flirted with the waiter in case I left and she needed a companion. She would not let go of my hand. Finally at 3:30 a.m., I broke away, hoping she could sleep. I don’t know whether or not she fucked the waiter.

These two daredevil poets opened the road for me. Then they closed it in another way by their self-inflicted deaths. I loved their poetry and abhorred their deaths. I wanted to smash that paradigm. Why must women artists die for their talent and self-assertion?

I never knew Sylvia Plath, but Anne was a generous mentor to me in the two years before she died. Once, when I wrote to her about my terror of publishing a second book of poems, she answered:

So the people who come before you transmit the energy, the chutzpah, the fearlessness. This is a community effort. “Books continue each other,” as Virginia Woolf, another suicide, said in
A Room of One’s Own.
You are not doing it all alone. You are standing on the shoulders of the dead. You are writing love letters to the grave. The word is a link in a human chain. You are not in this lifeboat without provisions.

Why did I hate their suicides with such vehemence? Because it seemed that every time a woman transgressed—whether in writing honestly or in embracing her sexuality—she had to punish herself. I wanted to change that. I wanted to make the world a place where women could write about their lives and live.

And what a remarkable life it is! I remember once sitting next to Carolyn Kizer on a chartered bus going to a poetry festival in Massachusetts in 1972—after my first book of poetry was out, but before
Fear of Flying
hit and changed my world. We were sitting two by two right behind the bus driver, who didn’t
seem
to be listening to our conversation.

Carolyn regaled me with hilarious, possibly apocryphal, stories of famous writers she had met at literary festivals. Carolyn could be absolutely acid about the role of the woman writer as muse and literary cunt. We were allowed to be anything but colleagues.

“And then, I woke up, with Norman Mailer sitting on my face.”

The bus driver suddenly swerved off the snowy road and came to a stop in a shallow ditch. Carolyn and I were both convulsed with laughter.

“But what happened after that?” I asked when I realized we were going to live.

“I have absolutely no recollection,” Carolyn said. “I must have had too much to drink.”

“If one woman were to tell the truth about her life the world would split open,” Muriel Rukeyser had written. If proof was needed of Muriel’s veracity, this was surely it.

Without adultery, is there no novel? Without sex, is there no poetry? Surely sexual energy and creative energy feed each other. Often they feel the same.

Sexual energy provokes creativity. Do poets fall in love to write about it, or does love impel creativity?

Pablo Neruda writes this in the first of his
Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair. For the poet, the
lover becomes the world. The exploration of love becomes an exploration of life. Blood and love are the substance of poetry. What transmutes mere words into flesh? The power of sex. “‘Living and writing in heat’—and in fact the artist’s experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure,” said Rainer Maria Rilke, “that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss.”