The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘Now, I shall grow out of his shadow…’
Sylvia Plath’s heartbreaking final letters find her, days before her death, looking to a future that she’d never reach
One may as well begin with the end. The last letters of Sylvia Plath are unquestionably difficult to read.
The second and final volume of Plath’s correspondence is itself cleaved in two. The first 790 pages, which begin in late 1956 with her impending marriage to Ted Hughes, reek of adoration. They are tireless, repetitive, almost entirely un-nuanced in their joy over the new couple’s life, and over the fantasy of who they will be together. “I really don’t know how I existed before I met Ted,” she writes; then, “we will […] belong to the aristocracy of practising artists, with our families, too!” The remaining 179 pages start harshly six years later, with a letter to Plath’s psychiatrist, Ruth Beuscher, after she has discovered Hughes’s affair with Assia Wevill (or, as Plath calls her, “Weavy Asshole”).
This section covers the next seven months, until Plath’s suicide on February 11 1963. Inevitably, this is the material for which the Plath-reading public has been waiting, and reveals, in particular, details about her life with Hughes that she confided to Beuscher and which have never previously been made known in their entirety. The letters to Beuscher – which, as the couple’s daughter Frieda Hughes points out in her introduction, should never have left the precincts of confidentiality – emerged for sale last year. The decision to include all 14 of them was Frieda’s, and the result is both staggering and sobering. Not only does this section make for extremely painful reading, it also turns the letters into something structurally closer to a novel, upending the plot of all correspondence thus far, and calling the narrator into question.
Towards the end of the first volume of Plath’s letters, published last year, we witnessed her falling in love with Hughes, and beginning a life with him. Crucially, readers could put together for the first time letters between the two during a brief period in 1956 when they were apart. These letters – in the first volume of Plath and in the Letters of Ted Hughes, published a decade earlier – showed them to be astute and productive critics of each other’s work. In the second volume there is no such exchange, because Plath and Hughes are never apart for long enough. (In that alone, some readers might intuit a stifling.) In the earlier volume, you could feel Plath finding a language, and here too there are many lovely phrases.
She describes “great lacy flakes” of snow and “a dense wet blue moon-fog”. Occasionally, there is something tauter: “Sometimes I think I am a sleepwalker”.
Writing to other authors, Plath is arch and witty. “Last night we went to the Faber party for Auden,” she tells the poet WS Merwin and his wife. “I go mainly for the champagne, which I find more interesting than Auden.” To Stevie Smith she writes, of Smith’s A Novel on Yellow Paper, “I am jealous of that title, it is beautiful, I’ve just finished my first, on pink, but that’s no help to the title I fear.”
Yet overall, the letters are emphatically different from the poems. In her raw epistolary despair over Hughes’ infidelity, there is nothing comparable to the control of “sulphurous adulteries” (“The Other”, written in July
1962); nothing in her October 1962 letters like the lines in “Ariel”, dated the 27th of that month: “White/ Godiva, I unpeel – / Dead hands, dead stringencies”. And in an important sense, it’s no use looking for poetry in the prose because many of these missives are essentially PR.
The bulk of the letters are written to Aurelia Plath, her mother, and these, it later transpires, are a masterclass in unreliable narration. The language is at almost all times one of cheerful domesticity. Hundreds of pages are devoted to accounts of meals cooked, and requests for piecrust mixes or kitchen equipment. Even her references to Virginia Woolf are upbeat: “Her moods and neuroses are amazing.”
If her letters to Aurelia are suspiciously one-dimensional,
Plath is at her most transparently complex when writing to Hughes’s parents. She always begins with a too-cute form of address – “Dear Ted’s mother & dad” – before attempting to explain their son to them, as if they were too stupid to understand why he is a significant human being. (“The prestige and reputation of this… You should see what an impressive book it is! It is called The Hawk in the Rain.”) And then, on the whole, she takes credit for his greatness (“I typed it all up
‘Last night we went to the Faber party for Auden. I go mainly for the champagne’
on special paper.”) Because clearly there’s a slim chance they might think he’s wonderful after all, in which case she must not be good enough for him.
Together, these interlocking letters to elders suggest some of the friction that accompanied Plath’s forging of herself as a writer and wife, then as a mother too.
In the interests of taste, it’s best to mention only glancingly the conspicuous references to Plath’s various gas ovens – the dodgy one that left the gingerbread soggy in the middle, the better one with the high-end hob. But to us, there is something unavoidably black about these specifics, and about the kitchen as the location of her adoring spousal identity. “I can’t wait to make him cakes, feathery pies, broiled chicken, parfaits etc etc,” she writes to her mother, of cooking for Hughes. When she is pregnant with Frieda, the midwife comes to assess her cake tins as possible receptacles for afterbirth. On page 323 (look it up, try it out) there is a whole recipe for funnel cake sent to Hughes’s sister Olwyn, who had a notoriously fraught relationship with Plath.
What story is the food telling, or not telling? There is the story about women and wifeliness, in the Fifties and in general. In that sense the story of the food is the same as the story of the typing: Plath typed up all of Hughes’s poems, as well as her own. But there’s also everything Plath was saying to her mother, in place of much else. In her letter to Beuscher of July 11 1962, Plath tells the psychiatrist that her mother has been staying during the period in which she has found out about Hughes’s infidelity.
But she hides the thing that hurts her most. “I can talk to no one about this,” she writes, “mother, of course, least of all. She does not even know I have written a novel.” Plath only gets on with Aurelia, she says, as long as “I keep off the great controversies”. That one sentence explains the cakes.
The last letter here ends: ‘Now the babies are crying, I must take them out to tea’
The very first letter in this volume is full of future. Hughes has given Plath a pack of tarot cards for her birthday, and they are experimenting with a Ouija board too. As a narrative device, sculpted by the editors Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil, it suggests to the reader that the entire volume is hurtling towards a future we think we can see. We know how this ends; Plath and Hughes do not.
But do we really know? Even as she describes the “return of my madness”, Plath’s last letters to Beuscher lay bare an incredible acuteness of mind, a feverish articulacy, and a broad, grounded sense of what it would take to recover. She has written recent letters proclaiming her happiness; she has taken out an insurance policy on Hughes’s life; she has found a new hairdresser. In her last letter, she writes: “Now I shall grow out of his shadow, I thought, I shall be me.” When Frieda Hughes read these newfound letters by her mother, she writes, she found them so vivid, “I could almost smell her”.
The revelations about Hughes – that he beat up Plath, which precipitated a miscarriage; that he “told me openly he wished me dead” – are severe, and new. But for balance, anyone who reads them should read too Hughes’s nowfamous letter to Aurelia Plath after her daughter’s death. “I don’t want ever to be forgiven,” he writes. “If there is an eternity, I am damned in it.”
On February 4, 1963, seven days before she took her life, Plath wrote several letters: to her mother, to Beuscher, to an American reverend who was studying at Oxford, to her college friend Marcia Stern.
She informs her mother that she has been “feeling a bit grim” but that she has found a new doctor on the NHS. The letter to Stern looks forward – “I am dying to see what you think of my little Frieda and Nick” – and contains an extraordinary description of her trouble: “Everything has blown & bubbled & warped & split […] I am in a limbo between the old world & the very uncertain & rather grim new”. The order in which she wrote them is, presumably, unknown, but the editors have placed the letter to Beuscher last. It is, openly, a struggle with death, and ends: “Now the babies are crying, I must take them out to tea”.
This difficult material – of which I have quoted an intentionally small proportion – should perhaps make us question our complicity. For every act of openness on the part of Frieda Hughes, is there a corresponding act of prurience on the part of the reader? It’s hard to say. These letters are offered up in honesty, accompanied by a poignant introduction; why would it be better to shield ourselves?
Yet the tyranny of interpretation asserts itself – makes you wonder what you are bringing to the book, and whether there is a way to read it responsibly.
The issue, I think, is to do with tenses, and the problem of reading lives backwards. It seems particularly important in this case to guard against the supposition that Plath’s suicide was prewritten. These later letters reveal above all that her difficulties were not necessarily progressive. Another letter, on another day, might easily have followed.
What Plath’s last words lacked was finality.