Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes, Faber & Faber, 109pp, £14.99 in UK
This awesome book has already been the subject of news stories in the media on both sides of the Atlantic, and has occasioned editorials in a couple of British newspapers. The interest was generated by the sensational nature of the book's contents - poems by the Poet Laureate of England addressed to the shade of his former wife, the American poet Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963 and swiftly became one of the legendary figures of the century.
Almost immediately after Plath's death, Hughes was cast in the role of guilty party, since the suicide occurred shortly after he had left Plath for another woman - she appears in the new book as an erotic visitant with whom "the dreamer in me fell in love". Hughes also bore the brunt of more generalised feminist ire, at a moment when the women's movement was beginning to articulate its arguments and gather its full force. Inevitably, Sylvia Plath was perceived as a martyr for the new feminist cause.
The fact is that from the beginning Hughes was assiduous in the cause of Plath's poetry. Her truest confirmer and best inspirer when she was alive, he has been since her death her poetry's most important editor and interpreter: it was through him that Plath's achievement was first helped into existence and then had its essential poetic character defined.
After thirty-five years, the image of Plath as the woman poet emerging from all kinds of false selves and false consciousnesses to go pure and uninhibited into the "cauldron of morning" remains more or less the same image that Hughes adumbrated in his earliest notes on her development. But during those same thirty-five years, as a counterpoint to the clear literary commentary provided in his writings, there has been this steady wash of gossip, journalism, speculation, investigation and accusation against him. I myself will never forget a reading by him in The Roundhouse at Chalk Farm in London when persons erupted from the audience during the intermission bearing placards with slogans such as "Ted Hughes Fascist" and distributing attacks on him in the form of broadsheet "poems".
Now comes Birthday Letters, a book of poems as solid as a sandbagged wall, as miraculous and yet as inevitable within the geology of imagination as a volcanic island. The immediate impression is one of wounded power healing and gathering and showing its back above the depths where it has been biding. To read it is to experience the psychic equivalent of "the bends". It takes you down to levels of pressure where the undertruths of sadness and endurance leave you gasping. When I closed the book I felt like the swimmer whom Dante describes in the opening canto of The Divine Comedy, cast up on a lonely shore, looking back in astonishment at the immensity of the ocean from which he has just been delivered.
Of the eighty-eight poems here, one is addressed to Sylvia Plath's dead father, one to her living children; all the rest speak to a "you" who, as Sylvia Plath, is the other half of Hughes's consciousness in more ways than one. By having been his wife, she is his intimate at the level of shared personal experience, but at the level of poetic experience, she is the equivalent of his magic crystal, his "mirror, mirror on the wall". In life together, both were mythopoeic writers, and understood the world in terms of archetypes and omens, dreams and revelations. Their poems give credence to all kinds of telepathies and invite the reader to understand them as divine messages of a sort, like things "from some far region sent,/To give me human strength by apt admonishment". Consequently, whatever appears as a focus of attention in these Birthday Letters is transformed by the action of this uncanny magnetic field and immediately becomes charged with an aura and force and potential for revelation.
The very first poem, for example, has the poet in London gazing at a photograph of that year's intake of Fulbright Scholars from America - the time has to be late 1955 or so - "just arriving -/ Or arrived . . . Were you among them? I studied it./ Not too minutely, wondering /Which of them I might meet." This plain speech, this up-front, clear presentation, is typical of the writing all through, and the combination of straight story-telling and ominous import is also typical. Because of what the poet and reader know through hindsight, a simple rhetorical question such as "Were you among them?" sounds a deeper note than usual.
And then the real poetic stroke happens as the story homes in on Hughes's sharp actual memory of buying the first peach he had ever tasted. It remains simply and tangily a peach, but because Hughes is the kind of poet he is, it carries with it memories of Persephone eating the pomegranate and hence notions of somebody being bound at that moment to the kingdom of the dead. And so the sense of the final two lines has both an autobiographical and an archetypal resonance:
I could hardly believe how delicious.
At twenty-five I was dumbfounded afresh
By my ignorance of the simplest things.
Over and over again, these poems move through vivid memories of the life that Hughes and Plath led together. What comes across from the start is Plath's American shine and allure in the glum weather and drab surroundings of Fifties England. There is a great sense of what it was like for these two gifted young poets to encounter not only their own sense of destiny in each other, but what it was like also to come from (or go to) England or America in those days. The poems are alive with the contest as well as the contrasts of it all, and much of the spiritual drama is played out in relation to the spirit of place, be it on a visit of Paris ("Your Paris, I thought, was American . . .,/My Paris was a post-war utility survivor,/ The stink of fear still hanging in the wardrobes") or on their honeymoon in Spain ("You Hated Spain . . .") or on the home ground of their own dream places. Indeed, the sense of abundant love and generous youth comes out most powerfully in passages such as the one about Plath's beach-world in New England:
The waters off beautiful Nauset
Were the ocean sun, the sea-poured crystal
Behind your efforts. They were your self's cradle . . .
I can look into it and still see
That salty globe of blue, its gull-sparkle,
Its path of surf-groomed sand
Roaming away north . . .
The book's contents are unfailingly interesting, but what makes Birthday Letters a poetic as opposed to just a publishing landmark is the valency of the poetry itself. The sequence was composed over a period of twenty-five years, but this is no leisurely inspection of old, unhappy, far-off things. The poems give the impression of utterance avalanching towards vision. They often seem to have been written swiftly, as if the writer's nose had taken up a scent and had run with it more or less blindly, astonished to be led back so unerringly into the moment-by-moment reality of what happened. But then suddenly the poem will take an extra jump, sure-footed and decisive, and land upon the thing that had been drawing it down the memory path towards itself all along.
The endings are amazing; time after time we witness the simple and mysterious transition from reported truth to achieved poetry, as in "Epiphany", where the poet passes up a chance opportunity to buy a fox-cub for a pound ("How could we fit it/Into our crate of space? With the baby?/What would you make of its old smell . . .?"). The poem ends:
My thoughts felt like big, ignorant hounds
Circling and sniffing around him.
Then I walked on
As if out of my own life.
I let the fox-cub go. I tossed it back into the future
Of a fox-cub in London and I hurried
Straight on and dived as if escaping
Into the Underground. If I had paid,
If I had paid that pound and turned back
To you, with that armful of fox -
If I had grasped that whatever comes with a fox
Is what tests a marriage and proves it a marriage -
I would not have failed the test.
Would you have failed it?
But I failed. Our marriage had failed.
In one of many wise and riveting statements made in the course of his writings on Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes suggests that the origin of all true poems is in a place which he calls "the place of ultimate suffering and decision in us". And it is to that fatal place that Birthday Letters conducts us, sometimes with a novelist's richness of circumstantial detail, as in "Fever", "The 59th Bear" and "Grand Canyon", and sometimes with a psychic's clairvoyance, as in "Chaucer", "Freedom of Speech" and "Fingers". Nearly all of these poems - like the book itself - "gather to a greatness".
From beginning to end, Ted Hughes focuses on his subject through two lenses and each produces a different kind of reading. On the one hand, there is the lens of personal recollection where the writing is a view-finder with telescopic and even microscopic powers of concentration. Images and events appear in these poems either magnified or contracted or aligned in a long view or close-up until they are finally brought to a point where illumination and definition coincide and everything seems to stand clear, backlit by a new transcendent understanding.
On the other hand, there is the lens which Hughes has fashioned out of his overall diagnosis of Sylvia Plath's pyschology/pathology, in which the poet sees himself reincarnated by his wife in her unconscious as her dominant father, Otto Plath, a figure who also represents at that dream level her first betrayer (he had died and left her when she was a child). When the second lens is used on its own, it tends to produce some schematic versions of the story, but when it comes into play bifocally, as it were, as the second sight behind the scene which the first lens is presenting, then it produces brilliant and terrifying visions, such as "Black Coat" and "The Table":
I wanted to make you a solid writing table
That would last a lifetime.
I bought a broad elm plank two inches thick . . .
With a plane
I revealed a perfect landing pad
For your inspiration. I did not
Know I had made and fitted a door
Opening downwards into your Daddy's grave.
Mention of "Daddy" there and in other poems is calculated to set off a chain reaction of responses that will lead back into Plath's own poems and is bound, in some quarters, to stir up old resentments against Ted Hughes. Known for three decades and more as the man who was having an affair when his wife committed suicide, doubly notorious after the "other woman" also committed suicide and killed their little daughter at the same time, he has been under a scrutiny by the media and the academy which has been mostly unsympathetic and on some occasions fiercely vindictive. As a result, there is a tendency within sections of the media and the academy (obvious in their response to the appearance of this book) to regard Hughes as someone more or less in thrall to them, answerable to their accusations, however veiled. Many of the headlines concerning Birthday Letters and much of the non-literary commentary finally add up to an overall question such as "Why did the Poet Laureate wait until now to tell his side of the story?"
What the book does is remind us of something so obvious that it is astonishing it has been for so long ignored: namely, that the hounding Hughes has undergone from the outside has been a conventional enough affair compared with the hounding he must have suffered within himself. The deaths of a wife, a lover and a child would have had traumatic repercussions in any situation, but where the surviving party is a poet, it is more or less a genetic necessity that he himself tend to the personal wound he has been dealt, the dark embryo of sorrow and need, by giving it expression. Yet the work of poetry is also necessarily a work of the purest self-absorption and must therefore be inhibited by conditions such as those in which Hughes found himself.
The sad fact is, there has been an element of spectator sport about the attention accorded to Hughes's work. With the best will in the world, it was impossible not to read the vehemence of Crow (1969), for example, or the mythological fantasia of Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992) as a writer's attempts to fly beneath the critical radar. In such books, the indirection of his handling of his own autobiography was not an evasion of the reality but an attempt to get at it without importing a prurience factor or awakening the tabloid reader who lurks deep in even the most aesthetic critic.
Hughes, in other words, was impaled on the horns of a creative dilemma: to write directly about that which most desperately craved expression could seem like an exploitation of something sacrosanct, but not to write about it must have felt like an abdication of spiritual and imaginative responsibility. For somebody who has always been one of those who only did, as a poem in Birthday Letters says, "what poetry told us to do", it was a particularly cruel fate, but one which poetry has finally and absolutely resolved. In this book, the quotidian and the sacrosanct embrace and exult and spring repeatedly and unfailingly into the unshakeable order of the totally imagined.
Seamus Heaney's latest collection of poetry is The Spirit Level