`She faced a task in herself, and her poetry is the record of her progress in that task. The poems are chapters in a mythology, where the plot, seen as a whole and in retrospect, is strong and clear - even if the origins of it and the dramatis personae, are at bottom enigmatic." (Ted Hughes's introduction to The Journals of Sylvia Plath, published only in the US, to date)
Common-sense rages against it. How can a life be honestly seen as having had a "plot"? Did the grief caused by his wife's suicide force Ted Hughes into imagining that her life could not have been different, or did his 1960s paganism really make him believe that "fixed stars/ Govern a life"?
In his last, startling collection, Birthday Letters, which was the publishing sensation of last year and will, almost certainly, tonight be named Whitbread Poetry Book of the Year, he seems to defer to those "fixed stars" in Plath's terrible late poem, "Words". In "Words" the stars shine "from the bottom of the pool", in Hughes's "The Bee God", they are "at the bottom of the well". You could argue that Hughes's image is less cosmic, more psychological - the well is man-made - but it spells out much the same message.
Birthday Letters is astonishing in many ways. It is shocking that Hughes, after decades of rigid silence, should suddenly have burst into such, yes, confessional poetry about Plath, 30 years dead; it shows what a pose Hughes's voice as Plath's editor was, with what effort this must have been achieved. Birthday Letters also shocks by its sheer excellence, the story of a complex love, baldly and beautifully told. But for any close reader of Plath, what was also astonishing is its cannibalising of Plath's images. Her poetry is invoked as a ghostly sub-text at every step. The work arose out of a unique relationship, and its relationship with a second body of work is also unique. It could almost be said to represent a new literary form.
The dialogue between the two bodies of work is endless, and throws new reflections on both the lives and the poems of both poets. But mostly Hughes does not stray beyond Plath's images of her own life, and does not reinterpret those images. He writes in the shine of her "fixed stars", as he was forced to live in the shine of her notoriety after her suicide. Early in Birthday Letters, his poem "Sam" works from a brush with death Plath had on a stampeding white horse which became fundamental to her imagery - from the fairly lame version, "Whiteness I Remember" (1958), to the galloping thoroughbred, "Ariel" (1962).
"That gallop/", writes Hughes, "Was practice, but not enough, and quite useless." Only Ariel's final death ride into the "cauldron of morning" would be enough, he intimates, but he counts the cost of her suicide, in the wake of his infidelity, to himself: "When I jumped a fence you strangled me/ One giddy moment, then fell off/ Flung yourself off and under my feet to trip me/ And tripped me and lay dead. Over in a flash." Plath always travelled, in her poetry, with the same tool-kit of images - they became less images, and more symbols. Hughes takes the tools out, one by one, and tries them. His "Nightride on Ariel" plays on Plath's moon imagery, which she worked into a frightening picture of cold, sterile, female power, surely containing an attack on her mother: "Your moon", he writes, "was full of women/ Your moonmother there, over your bed/ The Tyrolean moon, the guttural/ Mourning and remaking herself." For Hughes, the succession of mother-figures which Plath beckoned to her life - her patron at college, her psychiatrist, her mentor at Smith College - contributed to the "criss-cross of messages" which killed her. In his poem, these moons are undeniably evil, "crackling and dragging their blacks"; in "Edge", Plath's last poem, sterility has won and has formed beauty out of death: "The women is perfected", she begins, and ends, "The moon has nothing to be sad about/ Staring from her hood of bone./ She is used to this sort of thing./ Her blacks crackle and drag."
Anyone who has read Plath's pathetic Letters Home, gushingly designed to please her mother, will agree that attempting to be what she thought a woman should be, rather than what she actually was, tore at the centre of her identity. In hindsight, this was part of the larger social ill of women's constrained role in 1950s America, and in English intellectual life. Plath made the most ludicrous contrasts between the moon-mothered intellectual woman, and the sun-fired fertile mother; she just couldn't tack them together.
However, Plath seemed far more interested in and convinced by the perfect Freudian myth of her love for her father, who died when she was nine. She did not seem to doubt for a minute the Freudian narrative, which had her in competition with her mother for her father, who demanded death as a love-price. This was satisfyingly complete and surely highly suspect. It seems as though she did not have in Hughes a husband who forced her to question her own myth of herself. Or perhaps, after her death, he found the myth too comforting to question. "The Table" is made up of the images with which Plath built this myth in her poetry. He writes of the writing table he made her from an elm plank: "I did not/ Know I had made and fitted a door/ Opening downwards into your Daddy's grave."
He calls on her blue-eyed "Daddy" from Plath's famous poem of the same name, on "Lady Death, your rival", from Plath's "The Rival", on the "peanut-crunchers" from Plath's "Lady Lazurus", as well as on mirrors, cuckoo-clocks and any amount of flotsam and jetsam from the poems he calls "your letters to him" to craft his poem about her poetic access to her father leading to her death. It's the popular version, but many would see the instinct to write as being antithetical to the desire to die, and would see her suicide as stemming from her loneliness and depression after her marriage breakup, rather than her desire to join her father. Those late poems made her exult: "I am a genius of a writer. I am writing the best poems of my life. They will make my name", Letters Home) but she had stopped writing six days before she committed suicide.
Sometimes Hughes's poems make Plath's suddenly clear. "Stings" is a famous, late Plath poem, in which she finds an identity in the queen bee's death-flight - her father, Otto, was an expert on bumble bees, and bee imagery is frequent in her poems about him. That the "third person" she mentions so slightingly is the unfaithful Hughes is made obvious in Hughes's poem, "The Lodger", when he writes of being attacked by her swarm of bees. Plath had interpreted cruelly: "the bees found him out/ Moulding onto his lips like lies/ Complicating his features."
Perhaps his use of images from her early poems is more interesting, however; many of the poems were poor and Hughes explores the cultural and psychological fear in Plath which strait-jacketed her. Her "The Lady and the Earthenware Head", about ridding herself of an ugly ceramic model of her features, is lifeless; in "The Earthenware Head", Hughes tells how she: "ransacked thesaurus in your poem about it,/ Veiling its mirror, rhyming yourself into safety . . ." She was hiding behind her writing, he intimates; "The 59th Bear" sketches in the background behind Plath's story of the same name, which told of a murderous bear acting out the impulses of a subjected wife in a happy, clappy American camp-site. However, her story is stone-dead, squeezed of its blood, writes Hughes, "Through your type-writer ribbon."
Despite the intrigue of this literary symbiosis, both poets are at their best outside the mythical structures which they evolved together. Perhaps they both worked with elaborate myths because they were both so sensitive to, and so startled by, the miracle of the material world. Perhaps they needed myths more than most because they suffered more pain then most. In "Setebos", Hughes quotes Plath's terrible line in "Event", her poem about the physical reality of a relationship breaking down: "Who has dismembered us?"
Plath should be principally remembered, not for her deathride on Ariel, nor for her metamorphosis as "Lady Lazurus", but for what are possibly the greatest poems about childbirth and children ever written in English. Her children, a different sort of collaboration with Hughes, burst into her intellectual world, which was formed in the stern, male tradition of Western philosophy, and she made the flesh into words: "You are the one solid/ The spaces lean on, envious/ You are the baby in the barn" ("Nick and the Candlestick).
Similarly, the greatest poems in Birthday Letters do not retreat from the shock of the physical loss of love gone. In "Daffodils", nature grinds remorselessly on, regardless, pushing the flowers in her garden out of the earth, year after year. The greatest poems open themselves to the tragic fact that Plath's death was not just the way the myth inevitably ends, but rather a desperate, careless waste: "In my position, the right witchdoctor/ Might have caught you in flight with his bare hands/ Tossed you, cooling, one hand to the other/ Godless, happy, quieted./ I managed/ A wisp of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown." ("The Shot")
The winners in each category of the Whitbread awards will be televised tonight on BBC 2 at 10.30 p.m.
