Laid bare, the agony of Sylvia Plath’s final years
INTENSELY personal new insights into the 20th century’s most tragic literary love story are revealed today.
An extraordinary new volume of Sylvia Plath’s letters describes the ultimately fatal breakdown of her marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes.
In unseen letters to her psychiatrist, Plath says Hughes ‘beat me up’ and ‘wished me dead’. Only a week before her suicide she writes of ‘the return of my madness’.
The book will be serialised in the Daily Mail next week. And in today’s paper the couple’s daughter Frieda Hughes explains why she took the difficult decision to make the letters public.
She also tells for the first time of her reaction to reading them – until two years ago she was unaware of the existence of the 14 previously unpublished letters, written by Plath to her former psychiatrist Dr Ruth Beuscher between 1960 and 1963.
Frieda says her mother’s comments have to be taken in the context of her parents’ deteriorating relationship and that balancing arguments are needed to defend her father from being labelled a wife-beater, as he was when some isolated quotes from the letters appeared online last year.
American-born Plath was treated by Dr Honeymoon: Plath and Hughes in 1 5 Beuscher after her first suicide attempt in 1953, before she left the States and moved to England – meeting Hughes at Cambridge – but continued to write to her. By the early 1960s Plath’s marriage was disintegrating. She killed herself in 1963, aged 30.
Hughes, later to become Poet Laureate, died in 1998 aged 68.
Frieda said she ‘ simply wept over the contents’ when she first read the letters which to begin with are ‘snapshots of my parents’ passionate relationship’, followed by her mother’s suspicion of Hughes’s affair and their separation.
In September 1962 she wrote that ‘ Ted “got courage” and left me’. She also wrote about her miscarriage earlier that year, saying: ‘Ted beat me up physically a couple of days before.’
Frieda found this ‘ intensely painful to read’ as ‘in all my life with my father, I had never seen this side of him’.
But she points out that her mother went on to write: ‘I thought this an aberration, and felt I had given him some cause. I had torn up some of his papers in half, so they could be taped together, not lost, in a fury that he made me a couple of hours late to work at one of the several jobs I’ve had to eke out our income when things got tight.’ Later, Plath wrote that Hughes ‘told me he openly he wished me dead’.
Frieda said: ‘I had to remind myself that there were two sides to this: Exaggeration and hyperbole had been employed regularly in any case, and these were two people fighting over their ending.’
But she had to brace herself to read her mother’s last letter, written on February 4, 1963, sent from the London flat into which Plath had recently moved with the young Frieda and her brother. Seven days later Plath killed herself.
In it, Plath described Hughes as ‘a beautiful, virile, brilliant man’ who had ‘said he is sorry for the lying, and shows concern that we get on on our own’.
But she also wrote: ‘What appals me is the return of my madness, my paralysis, my fear and vision of the worst – cowardly withdrawal, a mental hospital, lobotomies.’
Frieda said of the letters: ‘While my father does not come out of them as a saint, neither does my mother. In my view, they are both flawed and impassioned human beings, and I love them more for this.’