Sylvia Plath’s letters from the BRINK
Written to her psychiatrist as her marriage to poet Ted Hughes imploded amid his infidelity and her ‘madness’, extracts from them are being exclusively published by the Mail. Here, in part one of an historic series, the couple’s daughter describes the tumult of emotions she felt as she read them for the first time
UnTIL the end of 2016, I didn’t know of the existence of 14 extraordinary letters that my mother had sent in the final years of her life to her former psychiatrist.
And when I did find out about them, it transpired that they were in the possession of someone who had once worked on a biography of my mother in the Seventies (unpublished) and who had been allowed by the psychiatrist to see them. So I believed it might be years before I discovered what revelations they might contain.
There was something deeply saddening about this. I felt excluded from my own mother’s personal feelings at a time when her world was disintegrating and she was at her most vulnerable. And the lack of any information persuaded me to fear the worst. I imagined the terrors and anguish my mother could well have expressed — heightened emotions and tortured thoughts all spilling out to a trusted recipient.
Then, to my dismay, some of the contents of her letters to Dr Ruth Beuscher were part- exposed on the internet in March last year, when they were put up for sale by a U.S. book dealer — acting for the person who’d worked on the unpublished biography and who’d had the letters in their possession for several years.
And so began a sort of rollercoaster hell as heart- rending quotes from them were bandied about, including:
‘ Ted beat me up physically a couple of days before my miscarriage: the baby I lost was due to be born on his birthday.’ Ted ‘seems to want to kill me’. Ted ‘ told me openly he wished me dead’.
‘What appals me is the return of my madness, my paralysis, my fear.’
In my mind, the letters had been written by my distraught mother in the throes of real emotional pain; her side of the argument was the only side and I knew that was the side everyone was sure to take.
There would be no balancing argument; the quote that rendered my father [the poet Ted Hughes] a wife- beater had already been seized upon. He might be no angel, but where was the perspective? What else was said? Having no idea what was in those letters, other people were now writing my MonTHS worst fears into them.
passed and Smith College, where my mother had studied, eventually came into possession of the letters. They contacted me to discuss how academics and students might get access to them.
I asked to read them and was sent scans. At last, my fears were going to be addressed.
It was a Sunday morning and I took the scans of the worn and faded letters to bed to work my way through them — it seemed a more comforting environment.
I simply wept over the contents. Those 14 letters were snapshots of my parents’ passionate relationship and subsequent marriage: the finding of a London home, the birth of children, their move to Devon and the adoption of what would be an unsustainable idyll.
This was followed by my mother’s suspicion of my father’s affair, the confirmation of that affair, her decision to separate, the strengthening of that resolution. Then came the apparent realisation that they had been living in what I think of as a hermetically sealed bubble in which they ran out of oxygen and the decision that divorce was the best option.
And, finally, the letter I feared most — the letter in which my mother’s ‘madness’ returns just before she kills herself.
The first is dated February 18, 1960, almost exactly three years before she died. In it, she describes how she and my father found their new home, a tiny flat at 3 Chalcot Square, in Primrose Hill, London.
She was pregnant with me, had just received an acceptance from Heinemann for her first book of poems, The Colossus, and was overjoyed to be in London: ‘I can’t think of anywhere else in the world I’d rather live . . .’
This letter, I thought with some relief, was wonderfully positive and full of hope.
It was followed by one written on April 2, announcing my home birth the day before.
The picture I had of my parents solidified — it was mutually supportive and intensely close. They were working together for common goals and I could see the hulk of my father writing away in the ‘windowless hall’, my mother holding me as she slipped him cups of tea.
I’ve visited the flat in Chalcot Square only once, when an English Heritage blue plaque was put on it in 2000 and my late brother nicholas and I unveiled it together.
It is so tiny that when I stepped into the hallway, it was one pace past the bathroom, two paces into the kitchen, turn right and one pace into the tiny living room, one pace across the living room, turn right and one pace into the bedroom — so small that it wasn’t possible to swing a gerbil.
In the third letter, which was dated november 7, describing scenes of domesticity and industry, my mother explains my father is being ‘an angel about my excursions, feeds Frieda lunch and so on’.
So far, so good, I thought, dreading the impending dissolution of my family as I continued to read. . .
The fourth letter, written on January 4, 1961, concerns ‘an old and ugly problem . . . namely Ted’s sister’. In this long letter, my mother describes my Aunt olwyn’s abusive behaviour towards her over the previous Christmas. She writes: ‘My presence is intolerable to her’ and correctly surmises that
olwyn dislikes all the ‘ other’ women in my father’s life, being irrationally possessive of him.
So I had not been the only recipient of my aunt’s excoriating remarks and furious verbal attacks over the years — my mother had suffered them, too.
It was strangely comforting reading my own experiences through my mother’s words: her description of my aunt was NExT, disturbingly familiar to me.
in the fifth letter, dated March 27, 1962, she writes about discovering the house in which my brother was born — in north Tawton, Devon. The rooms are ‘huge’, my mother writes.
She goes on to describe my brother’s character: while I am ‘lively, hectic, & a comic’, he is ‘dark, quiet, smily’.
Life was full of promise, it seemed, and all my parents had to do was survive what some would find a stifling proximity as they both lived and worked at home, now with two babies.
In this letter, there is also mention of her miscarriage: ‘I had lost the baby that was supposed to be born on Ted’s birthday this summer at four months, which would have been more traumatic than it was if I hadn’t had Frieda to console and reassure me. no apparent reason to miscarry, but I had my appendix out three weeks after, so tend to relate the two.’
I was hugely relieved: there was no mention of ill-treatment by my father. Surely, if my father had been abusive, she would have mentioned something to Dr Beuscher at this point?
But, by the sixth letter, dated July 11, the cracks were beginning to show. My mother had noticed a change in my father’s behaviour, as if he had found a new lease of life sparked by people and situations she did not know about and could only guess at: the woman who took
over the lease on Chalcot Square kept phoning my father, ‘seeming almost speechless when she got me’. Now there was anguish, paranoia and suspicion.
She was, however, certain that she didn’t want a divorce: she wanted to ‘kill this bloody girl to whom my misery is just sauce’.
Looking at my parents’ relationship from the outside, you could say it was so claustrophobic that something inevitably had to give.
By the seventh letter, dated July 20, 1962, my mother admits: ‘I think obviously both of us must have been pretty weird to live as we have done for so long.’ She calls my father’s love interest, Assia Wevill, ‘this Weavy Asshole’.
Flashes of defiance, as well as imaginings of what might be going on in Wevill’s head, fill the pages.
My father was drifting away; he no longer did ‘any man’s work about the place’. But she sounded stronger: ‘ I don’t think I’m a suicidal type any more . . .’
I only wish that had been the truth.
In her eighth letter, written on July 30, she compared my father to the hawk of his favourite poem, which kills where it pleases. ‘I realise now he considered I might kill myself over this,’ she wrote, ‘and what he did was worth it to him.’
I consoled myself that this was
what she thought of as the truth, but it was not his truth — because, as we work through adversity, we conjecture and suppose and imagine and can drive ourselves into the floorboards like a nail in this way.
She added: ‘And he does genuinely love us. He says now he dimly thought this would either kill me or make me, and I think it might make me. And him too.’
By letter nine, dated September 4, 1962, and suffering from apparently never-ending influenza, my mother was more resolute about a separation. She was impatient, angry at her illness and determined to forge ahead despite my father’s prospective absence from her life.
A childhood memory is the basis of my belief that my mother asked my father to leave, but in her tenth letter to Dr Beuscher, dated September 22, my mother wrote: ‘Ted “got courage” and left me.’
Undoubtedly, my father would have made it easy for my mother to ask him to leave, through his behaviour, his affair and his deceit.
Then here was my mother, writing how for weeks she had been on a liquid diet, apparently highly- strung, volatile, paranoid culpability and accusatory.
lay with both of them. There was nothing new or ground- breaking in this. It was simply a case of two people tearing one another apart in the emotionally messy way that thousands of other couples do.
But these were my parents, which made their situation all the more harrowing for me.
They were also writers, who focused and directed their experiences through words; individuals whose emotions were the driving force behind their creativity.
As a result, in reading my mother’s letters, I felt to be taking part in a breathtaking — albeit one- sided — race through the evolution and collapse of a powerful love affair.
It seemed to me that the spark of my parents’ first meeting had ignited a fire, which then burned so brightly in the microcosmic universe they constructed for themselves that they ran out of oxygen.
Suddenly, the outside world with all its temptations could not be held at bay, because these two people were no longer on the same side, supporting and loving each other.
My mother now found my father ‘ugly’ and his apparent preoccupation with Assia Wevill tore at her like a hungry dog.
It was in this letter that my mother again wrote about her miscarriage. Only this time, she wrote: ‘Ted beat me up physically a couple of days before my miscarriage: the baby I lost was due to be born on his birthday.’
It was intensely painful to read this. In all my life with my father, I had never seen this side of him. What, I asked myself, would qualify as a physical beating? A push? A shove? A swipe?
This assault had not warranted even a mention in that earlier
letter, when my mother had written there was ‘no apparent reason to miscarry’.
But, of course, now that the relationship was disintegrating, what woman would want to paint her departing husband in anything other than the darkest colours?
I almost laughed when I read what came next.
It showed that context is vital, and confirmed in my mind that my father was not the wife-beater that some wish him to have been. My mother had written:
‘I thought this an aberration, & 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.’
I’d hazard a guess that leaving the papers relatively intact would not have been uppermost in my mother’s mind as she tore into them.
In 1962, manuscripts could not be photocopied or scanned. If work was torn up, all the sticky tape in the world would not save the writer from having to retype the whole thing — pages and To pages of it.
My mind, tearing up my father’s papers seemed an excessive punishment. My mother had hit out at the very thing they both knew was most precious: typescripts of their own work.
In the eleventh letter, dated September 29, my mother writes that she thinks she is dying; she hadn’t seen my father for two weeks and had just found the love poems my father had written about Assia.
Worse still, she found herself describing them as ‘fine poems. Absolute impassioned love poems’. Even in the face of betrayal, the writer in her could not ignore the veracity of the work.
In her twelfth letter, dated october 9, 1962, she wrote of situations resolving: my father was moving out.
‘He seems to want to kill me, as he kills all he does not want.’ But this was metaphorical, not actual.
He was giving her the house in Devon, the car and £1,000 a year, but this was not enough — she wanted more.
She painted one scenario after another and, in all of them, she was the martyr — but I don’t know if there is a woman alive who, in the same situation, wouldn’t feel that way. At the