I found his passionate love poems to her and I think I’m just dying...
Our riveting series of newly discovered letters by Sylvia Plath – by turns erotic, despairing and raging – lay bare her agony at Ted Hughes’s infidelity
WHILE Sylvia Plath looked after their two young children in Devon, her husband Ted Hughes was having a secret affair in London with the stunning Assia Wevill. In July 1962, the poet confessed. Here, in previously unpublished letters to her former psychiatrist in America, Sylvia reveals the agony of their break-up . . .
To Dr Ruth Beuscher Friday, July 20, 1962
FIRST of all, please charge me some money. i feel a fraud and a heel to be cadging time and advice out of you for nothing . . . My last New Yorker poem [tulips] earned me $270, so i can afford the luxury of a good psychiatrist, which is you.
i wrote to you in the middle of my agony-week, when i was half begging you to reassure me that at least my old dream-idyll was a right one even if it worked out wrong. the virginity, as it were, of our marriage ended Friday the 13th (Oh we are very superstitious in our house) & i went to a friend’s with the baby leaving mother here with [two-year- old] Frieda & went through the whole bloody thing minute by minute.
At first i thought, why did he have to f*** this woman in this nasty way? then, after i had got over the nausea, got the doctor to knock me out for 8 hours after a week of no eating or sleeping, i thought: thank God. i am free of so much. And this was probably the most economical way to do it, although at the time of my misery i thought it the cruellest.
i remember you almost made me hysterical when you asked me, or suggested, that ted might want to go off on his own. this was heresy to me then, the Worst. How could a true-love ever ever want to leave his truly-beloved for one second? We would experience Everything together.
i began to worry about the purity & strength of my love when i found myself thinking: Why doesn’t the bastard leave the house and let me put my hair up & dust & sing. i think obviously both of us must have been pretty weird to live as we have done for so long.
i was always having nightmares about ted dying or being in accidents & for this reason could hardly bear to let him out of my sight. For fear he would desert me forever, like my father [who died from diabetes when sylvia was eight], if i didn’t watch him closely enough. And he must have had enough desire for womb-comfort to stick it out. Well, we are 30. We grow up slowly, but, it appears, with a bang.
Anyhow, ted came back. it occurred to me almost immediately that he felt a lot worse than i did. Not sorry- worse. He just wasn’t purged, because he hadn’t had my particular wild agony.
the bloody girl is beautiful, smart, but absolutely uncreative & cold. When i was at my lowest, thinking grimly: What has this Weavy Asshole ( her name is actually Assia Wevill) got that i haven’t, i thought: she can’t make a baby, can’t make a book or a poem, just ads about bad bakery bread, wants to die before she gets old & loses her beauty, and is bored. Bored, bored, bored. With herself & her life.
she literally moved into our London flat (after we left!). she came down here [to the house in Devon, for a weekend with her husband] & wanted to move into my life. Well, the old girl has done me a big favor. the funny thing is, i don’t think she must really enjoy sex, except in her head.
i’m damned if i’m going to be a wife-mother every minute of the day. And as i am a pretty faithful type, and have no desire left for malice or revenge on ted, to ‘get back at him’, i’d just as soon make love with ted. But coming from a distance, from a space, a mutual independence.
ironically, this great shock purged me of a lot of old fears. it was very like the old shock treatments i used to fear so: it broke a tight circuit wide open, a destructive circuit, a deadening circuit, & let in a lot of pain, air and real elation. i feel very elated.
the little conventional girl-wife wanted ted to come back & say: My God, how could i hurt you so, it will never happen again. But i knew i really couldn’t stand him to say that, & he didn’t. He told me the truth about the femme fatale. And i didn’t die. i thought my capacity for conventional joy & trust & love was killed, but it wasn’t. it is all back.
And i don’t think i’m a suicidal type any more, because i was really fascinated to see how, in the midst of genuine agony, it would all turn out & kept going. i really did believe it was the Worst thing that could happen, ted being Unfaithful; or next worst to his dying. Now i am actually grateful it happened, i feel new.
i have no desire for other men. ted is one in a million. sex is so involved with me in my admiration for male intelligence, power and beauty that he is simply the only man i lust for.
i know men feel differently about sex, but i thought they, too, were capable of deep and faithful love. it is not very much consolation to me that te d really deeply & faithfully loves me, while he follows any woman with bright hair, or an essay on shakespeare in her pocket, or an ability for flamenco dancing.
the thought of ted making physical love to them, registering them under my name in hotels, letting all the people we know see this, hurts and nauseates me horribly. i feel if he really loved me he would see how this hurt damages my whole being, makes it barren, & deprives me of joy in lovemaking with him.
All the stupid little things i did with love — baking bread, making pies, painting furniture, planting flowers, sewing baby things — seem silly and empty without faith in ted’s love. And the children who so delighted me are like little miasmas, crying for daddy.
SYLVIA PLATH’S LETTERS FROM THE BRINK
‘The bloody girl is beautiful, smart – but absolutely cold’
Monday, July 30
I HAVE been at a nadir, very grim, since my last letter to you. What, above all, does Ted think I am? his mother? a womb? What can I do to stop him seeing me as a puritanical warden?
anyhow, Ted is on the rampage — writing letters and even radio broadcasts about the advantages of destruction, breaking one’s life into bits every ten years, and damn the pieces. his favorite poem of his own is pure ego-Fascist, about a hawk ‘I kill where I please because it is all mine’.
I realise now he considered I might kill myself over this (as did the wife of someone we knew) and what he did was worth it to him. The real crux to me now is what to do about the Other Woman business. am I an idiot to think that there is some purpose in being bodily faithful to the person you love? In riding through infatuations without always indulging yourself, if you know it hurts someone?
I mean, my pleasure in lovemaking is spoiled by thinking: is he comparing my hair to this one, my shape to that one, my talents to the other?
how can I have any self-respect? I hate the idea of living here in the country with the children & having Ted go off & sleep with various women & come back exhausted & refreshed to write, be fed etc. It humiliates me. I simply can’t laugh and blow smoke-rings.
he hates me to be tearful, but my god, the prospect of this makes me cry.
When I think he wants to follow every infatuation into bed, shall I just let him? This is what freedom, it seems, means to him.
he is handsome & fantastically virile & attractive. I am not beautiful. When I am happy, I can glow & burn, but what have I in this to make me happy?
I don’t want to be sorrowful or bitter, men hate that, but what can I do in face of these prospects?
What I see now I could not have stood, what would to me have been the real worst, was for Ted to come & say: I want this girl for my wife & to bear my children. I at one point told him: I am saving you from ever getting mucked up with a wife & children again: you can have tarts & bastards, but if any other woman gets refrigerators & nappies in her eyes, you can say you have a really good old wife at home who is saving you to be free & not get stuck in the wallow of domesticity again.
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.
What I also need is wisdom for him. he takes a lot of understanding. he is, I am sure, a genius. a really great writer, a handsome and great man. I have been so hurt this week I feel like upchuck-ing at the thought of his laying about with other women just this minute.
But I would like to be able to cope with this again, if it came up. If he needed to test his freedom, to test me. and believe me, women are dying to get their hands on him. and on me, too.
I honestly don’t ever, by cowardice, boringness, accusation, limitedness, ever want to give Ted the chance to think he should trade us in for a better family model. I have come to this country town because Ted said it was his dream — apples, fishing, peace, clean air, etc etc.
I had wanted to stay in London, because I liked all the social life, movies, art exhibits & rush. Well now I love it here, & this is the first home I’ve had, very beautiful.
But I am damned if I want to sit here like a cow, milked by babies. I love my children, but want my own life. I want to write books, see people & travel. I want, eventually, to make over our separate cottage & hire a nanny.
So I’ve got to work hard. I refuse the role of passive, suffering wife. I think your advice about not having any more children for years a good one. I think I’d like a couple more someday, but only when I’ve got a nanny to free me.
I get a terrific sensual pleasure in being pregnant & nursing. But I must say, I get a terrific sensual pleasure in being light & slender & f***ing as well.
Can you think of any other discontents of Ted’s I might foresee? I think he will need to prove conclusively & perhaps several times (soon), then maybe less often, that he is ‘free’.
he says this means travel, not tarts, but I feel naturally now the two go together.
What I don’t want to be is an unf***ed wife. I get bitter then, & cross. and I feel wasted. and I don’t just mean the token american what-is-it twice a week, front to front, ‘thank you darling’ either. It might simplify things if I could desire other men, but I need to admire them, too, & find them attractive, & there are very few of these, & I’m not likely to meet them in cow country.
Saturday, September 22
YOUR letter came today, at a most needed moment, and I feel the way I used to after our talks — cleared, altered, renewed. I am really asking your help as a woman, the wisest woman emotionally and intellectually, that I know. You are not my mother, but you have been midwife to my spirit. [Plath first met Beuscher ten years earlier.]
The end — the end for me at least — just blew up this week. I have been very stupid, a bloody fool, but it only comes from my thinking Ted could grow up, and my wanting to give us a new and better and wider start.
I was prepared for almost anything — his having the odd affair, traveling, getting drunk — if we could be straight, good friends, share all the intellectual life that has been meat and drink to me.
I was ready for this, to settle for something much different and freer than what I had thought marriage was, or what I wanted it to be.
even our professional marriage — the utterly creative and healthy critical exchange of ideas and publication projects and completed work — meant enough to me to try to save it. But Ted made even this impossible, and I am appalled.
I am bloody, raw, nerves hanging out all over the place, because I have had six stormy but wonderful years, bringing both of us, from nothing, books, fame, money, lovely babies, wonderful loving, but I see now that the man I loved as father and husband is just dead.
I realize, stunned, that I do not like him. although he is handsome, I can hardly look at him, I see such ugliness.
after the first blow-up, Ted came home and said the affair was kaput. I believed this.
he said he would be straight, now that I wouldn’t be tearful or try to stop him from anything — he only wanted to go up to London on drinking bouts with a few friends.
he went up half the week every week. The minute he came home he would lay into me with fury — I looked tired, tense, cross, couldn’t he even have a drink, what sort of a wife had he married etc.
I was dumbfounded — his fury seemed all out of proportion. Then I found out by accident that this little story & that about what he’d been doing weren’t true.
Mrs Prouty [american novelist and poet Olive Prouty] treated us to a night & a day at the fanciest hotel in London & I never had such good loving, felt it was the consecration of our new life. he went to have a bath & I next saw him coming in fully dressed with a funny pleased smile.
he had called some friends to have a drink. Fine, said I, I’d love a drink. No, I was to go home on the next train.
he didn’t come back for a couple of days and even then I thought he was doing what he said. Now, of course, I see this saying the affair was over was just an elaborate hoax.
We had an invitation to go to Ireland to a poet’s house in the wilds of Connemara. Well Ted lasted four days. he left while I was in bed one morning saying he was going grouse shooting with a friend.
I haven’t seen him since. he left me with all the baggage to carry back, and I got a telegram when I got home, [saying] he might be back in a week or two. I am going to London this Tuesday to see a very kind- sounding solicitor in order to get a legal separation.
Ted seems to need to come home every week to make my life miserable, kick me about & assure himself that he has a ghastly limiting wife, just like his friends do, three of whom have left their wives this year.
[he] beat me up physically a couple of days before my miscarriage [in February 1961]. I thought this an aberration, & felt I had given him some cause, I had torn 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.
Money is a great problem. We are doing fine, the house paid up, a car, starting to save a bit; [he] says all he wants is to live his
own life & send us 2/3 of what he earns. I am so bloody sane. I am not disasterproof after my years with you, but I am proof against all those deadly defences — retreat, freezing, madness, despair — that a fearful soul puts up when refusing to face pain & come through it. I am not mad; just fighting mad.
the worst thing is, as you say, psychologically, the fear and danger of being like my mother. Lucky for me, I love my writing, love horse- riding, love bee-keeping and can expand the area of my real interests so that I think my children will have a whole mother who indeed loves them, with vigor and warmth.
I don’t want Frieda to hate me as I hated my mother, nor Nicholas to live with me or about me as my brother lives about my mother . . .
I remember asking my mother why, if she discovered so early on she did not love my father, that her marriage was agony, she did not leave him.
She looked blank. then said halfheartedly that it was the depression & she couldn’t have gotten a job. Well. No thanks.
It is the uncertainty, the transition, the hard choices that tear at me now. I think when I am free of him, my own sweet life will come back to me, bare and sad in a lot of places, but my own, and sweet enough.
Saturday, September 29
I THINK I am dying. I am just desperate. ted has deserted me, I have not seen him for 2 weeks, he is living in London without address.
tonight, utterly mad with this solitude, rain and the wind hammering my hundred windows, I climbed to his study out of sheer homesickness to read his writing, lacking letters, and found them — sheafs of passionate love poems to this woman, this one woman to whom he has been growing more & more faithful.
Many are fine poems. Absolute impassioned love poems — and I am just dying.
I could stand tarts. She is so beautiful, and I feel so haggish & my hair a mess & my nose huge & my brain brainwashed & God knows how I shall keep together.
I am just frantic. If I had someone living with me, I would not break down & talk to myself, cry, or just stare for hours. But I have no one — no friends, no relatives.
the shock of this has almost killed my heart. I still love ted, the old ted, with everything in me & the knowledge that I am ugly and hateful to him now kills me.
Once I asked if he wanted a divorce and he said no, just a separation, he might never see me for 50 years but might write once a week. I am drowning, just gasping for air.
What kills me is that I would like so much to be friends with him, now I see all else is impossible. I mean my God my life with him has been a daily creation, new ideas, new thoughts, our mutual stimulation.
Now he is active & passionately in love out in the world & I am stuck with two infants & I have no one. My god I can’t see to thinking straight. How can I tell the babies their father has left them. How do you put it? Death is so simple.
I had my life set as I wished — beautifully and happily domestic, with lots of intellectual stimulus & my part-time writing. I feel ted hates us. Wants to kill us to be free to spend all his money on her.
I feel so trapped. Every view is blocked by a huge vision of their bodies entwined in passion across it, him writing immortal poems to her. And all the people of our circle are with them, for them.
How and where, O God do I begin? I can’t face the notion that he may want me to divorce him to marry her.
And how to stop my agony for his loved body and the thousand assaults each day of small things, memories from each cup, where we bought it, how he still loved me then — then, when it was not too late.
PS: Bless you for your advice about a divorce which arrived this morning — just in time as ted arrives too, for the last time. there is a dignity & rightness to it. the divorce like a clean knife. I am ripe for it now.
THE Letters Of Sylvia Plath Volume II: 1953-63 edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil, to be published by Faber at £35 in the UK on September 6. To buy this book for £28 (20 per cent discount) call 0844 571 0640 or go to mailbookshop.co.uk/ books. P&P is free on orders over £15, offer valid until September 5, 2018.