Probing the myth of a powerful marriage
Her Husband: Hughes and Plath - A Marriage, By Diane Middlebrook Viking, 416 pp., $25.95
The marriage of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes may have lasted just 6 1/2 years, but, as with most myths, the fabled pairing -- the poet and poetess locked in a universal struggle -- outlasted the pair. In order to carve out a place on Olympus, each needed the other's chisel.
A central event in that mythmaking, of course, was Plath's shocking suicide in 1963, which haunted Hughes -- the unfaithful husband whom many blamed for her death -- for the rest of his life. But as Diane Middlebrook argues in her fascinating new book about their marriage, "Her Husband," to focus too much on what happened or what didn't -- to concentrate on the earthly aspects of the marriage at all -- is to miss the point.
"Their story is forever simplifying itself into a tragedy and rushing toward its horrible ending," Middlebrook writes. "But we, the heirs of their work, can now observe that -- aside from their lives -- nothing ended!" No, she says: What ended was flesh, breath. What lived, even flourished, from the couple's rises and falls, was art, poetry, myth. In that, "Her Husband" argues, the matrimony was wildly successful.
They made it so. Hughes published his own esoteric works after her death, but Middlebrook argues that he was, more importantly, the guardian of Plath's literary legacy, Plath's husband. It was in that role, she writes, that he would build -- knew he would build -- his posterity. Plath's writing, so much of it autobiographical and molded by this marriage, made her an icon of American literature, more so posthumously. Together, they left a compelling account of the orbits of two huge minds -- how they crossed and tried to make room in the same universe.
Hughes and Plath met at a party in Cambridge, England. She went right for him: the hunky, larger-than-life poet. She found his violent, primordial poems sexually arousing and approached him quoting his work. "I can see how women lie down for artists," Plath would write the next morning. In the first of many exchanges blurring life and literature, she bites him when he kisses her -- a scene, Middlebrook notes, right out of D.H. Lawrence. "For behind the improbable momentum of their 112-day dash into wedlock, on both sides, was a big literary education that had taught each of them how to live, and what to do."
Each needed each other, needed a marriage with all its ingredients -- the good parts and the wounds -- for art. Later, Hughes would write to Plath's mother that the relationship allowed both of them to sublimate everything for writing. Ultimately, what seems to have been sublimated was the sustenance that fed the union.
But as artists, that sublimation made sense to them -- and it made great art. Their split, as their introduction had done, charged their professional lives, Middlebrook argues. It put the rage back into Plath, leading, Middlebrook writes, to some of her best work. It forced Hughes to confront his life, his past, his future. The marriage gave them both definition.
A crucial work Middlebrook cites is Hughes's "Birthday Letters," published in 1998, which Hughes himself described as "my own drama with the dead." He deliberately released that poetry collection, Middlebrook argues, in a way to cement his and Plath's place in the literary pantheon. It helps build the case, she writes, that "Ted and Sylvia each stumbled into the other's power to transform mere human beings into characters in a myth."
Drawing on recently archived papers, Middlebrook is a thorough and careful guide through this brief but endlessly intriguing marriage. Her knowledge of the poets' work, her ability to trace currents and themes, and her singular vision in synthesizing it all is downright mystifying.
As a 16-year-old, Plath penned a prescient poem, "To Ariadne, Deserted by Theseus." Based on a Greek myth, the poem chides a princess for lying despondent after being deserted by her prince. Plath implores her to get up: "Why do you stand and listen only to/ The sobbing of the wind along the sand?"
Middlebrook suggests that it's not clear that Plath, in killing herself, meant to lie down next to Ariadne and give up. What did she mean? As with most details of her life with Hughes, it adds to the mystery, adds to the myth. As Middlebrook makes clear, it also adds to her immortality.
