‘Until I was 14, I thought I was adopted’
The daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Frieda Hughes tells Veronica Blake how she survived the traumas in her life
Interview with the daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath,
Having famous parents is not without its downsides. For every path it opens up, it inevitably brings with it almost endless comparisons between the two generations. Frieda Hughes knows this better than most. The 57-year-old daughter of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath lived in the shadow of the family name for so long, it almost threatened to engulf her.
The fact that neither parent is still alive has hardly reduced the public fascination with them; new light is ever being shed on their tumultuous and doomed relationship. Just this April, a cache of unpublished letters from Plath suddenly surfaced, and with them a volley of explosive accusations: Hughes beat her two days before she miscarried their second child, she alleged in the unseen correspondence written to her former psychiatrist a week before her death. The revered poet, she claimed, wanted her dead. (His estate said the claims were “as absurd as they are shocking to anyone who knew Ted well”.)
No sooner had this most recent furore died down than the following month Plath was back in the public eye, when a carbon paper tucked away in the back of an old notebook of hers revealed two hitherto unknown poems. A number of works abandoned by Hughes were also discovered, revealing his anguish over Plath’s death.
And this week sees a copperbottomed literary landmark, with the publication of Letters of Sylvia Plath: 1940-1956, a first volume of the poet’s complete letters, most of which have never been seen before. And so, for Hughes, the circus continues.
“Because of my parents, I’ve always felt that my life was very much under wraps, and it’s taken me years to feel slowly comfortable in sharing anything,” says Frieda.
We’re sitting in her beautiful garden in the heart of rural Wales, where she has finally put down roots and where, she suggests, she would happily grow old. It’s a perfect summer afternoon and we’re sharing a bottle of wine and admiring the view of the Brecon Beacons beyond. Hughes moved here in 2004, choosing the area for its beauty, its distance from London – and its affordability.
“But it was the house that sold it to me because I needed a space to paint in and write in. I looked at this and thought, ‘I should have enough work space here for most of my life, if not all of it.’ So here I am.”
Because, yes, Hughes writes, and has done so from a young age, the weight of the family history bearing down on her all the while. “I never published the poems because, basically, I knew I’d get my head kicked in,” she says. “People are always going to make comparisons to my parents, which is always the simple, easy and lazy thing to do.” One poetry editor wrote her a letter saying: “I can’t decide whether you’re more like your mother or your father.” Hughes asked him if he thought the styles of her two parents were similar.
“He said: ‘Oh no, they’re completely different poets, you couldn’t mix them up’. So I said: ‘Well, how could you say I could be like both?’ Actually, there is a third way, and that is I have my own voice.” As indeed she does: to date she has five poetry collections to her name and seven children’s books. But she was 35 before she showed her father her poems, instructing him: “‘I don’t want you to tell me how to write, I just want you to tell me, [if they’re] good, bad or could be better. Three piles: not bad, past hope and could be better.’ And out of the ‘good’ pile, I created my first book.”
She was not entirely well at the time, however: suffering from chronic fatigue, she was awake just four hours a day, during which she worked in 20-minute stretches. She credits the lack of time the illness left her to accomplish anything with helping focus her mind.
“What was I going to do with four hours a day?” she says. “Not do the things that mattered most because somebody I didn’t know might compare me to my parents? Or do the things I felt made me function more as myself? It was a bit like uncorking a bottle really, and I think that actually helped me. You could argue it was therapeutic.”
But if she felt she was being coerced into doing something she didn’t want to, she would pass out. “My whole brain would shut down. Chronic fatigue is non-negotiable. I used to think it was a joke until I had it. I had all the blood tests and it showed it was myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). The doctor said: ‘There’s no cure – you’ve got it for life’. If I get too stressed now, I might have a relapse, so I tend to watch what I do.”
She was in her mid-twenties when the illness first struck, but so fearful was she of provoking pity, she kept it to herself for many years. In her midthirties, she broke up with her then partner because the illness had put the relationship under so much strain. When she met her last husband, two years later, she was still suffering from it, but gradually recovered – a healing process helped by her work.
“If I’d just given up, I believe I’d still be suffering,” she says. “The mind has a huge part to play. I’m not saying you can cure yourself by thinking yourself
‘My grandmother wanted to take us all away. That caused my memory to go’
well, but certainly finding out what made me worse and what made me better helped. What made me better was a sense of achievement. I’ve been accused of being a workaholic. Well, if you take away a workaholic’s work, what happens to them? They fall over.”
Besides work, she has a veritable menagerie to look after: 11 owls, two dogs, six chinchillas, nine ferrets and a snake called Shirley (“she’s only bitten me once because she thought my fingers were a mouse”). She’s been married three times, but got divorced from her third husband in 2010.
So family life has not been straightforward for the adult Frieda. But nor was it so for the young girl she once was: her depressive mother famously committed suicide in 1963, when her daughter was not yet three. Plath had left Hughes the previous year after learning of his affair with Assia Wevill, who went on to kill herself and her daughter, known as Shura, when Frieda was almost nine. Frieda’s brother Nicholas took his own life in 2009, at the age of 47.
Some of this she has channelled into poetry. “Each book has been a little bit more of an unwrapping, a little bit more personal,” she says. Some poems have dealt specifically with her family’s deaths, “because, let’s face it, there’s been a bit of that,” she says, with a certain amount of understatement.
What about her poem on memory loss? This, too, she says, draws on her own experience as, aged four, she had what she calls a blank period.
“When I came round, I must have been four-and-a-half and I never got my memory back. I genuinely believed I was adopted until I was 14.
“I remember standing in a hallway not knowing this was my house which I had been living in. I had no memory of what [my parents’] faces were like.” She did not recover her memories until she was 30, when some recollections of her mother returned to her. “My grandmother wanted to take us all away from my father, and take us to America,” she recalls. “[I realised later that] that is what caused my memory to go.”
But Frieda is a survivor. Almost against the odds, she has come through her family’s litany of tragedies and emerged the other side, still bursting with creativity, constantly analytical and determined to put her experiences to good use. As for any slivers of time left over between her poetry, her art and her animals? There’s always the garden to tend to.
The Letters of Sylvia Plath is published by Faber (£35). To order your copy for £30 with free p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk