Did poet Ted Hughes’s deserve the hate?

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Ted Hughes faced immense backlash from the feminist movement following Sylvia Plath's suicide in 1963 and Assia Wevill's suicide in 1969.

Do you think he deserved it? I’m asking because someone was taking to me about this and she thought he did, while I didn’t think he deserved all the vitriol which at times included death threats, physical attacks on his property, and being branded a murderer.

I felt very sorry for his children Frieda and Nicholas, as they both suffered and Nicholas later died by suicide, and Shura, who was murdered by her mother Assia Wevill at age 4.

Sorry, only just saw this -- got permission from the estate to edit it and brought out an edition with her intro and notes.

It is perfectly possible for two things to be true at the same time, ie

1. Ted Hughes was an abusive and neglectful husband and
2. Ted Hughes was not responsible for the suicides of his wife and mistress, because suicide can only ever be the responsibility of the deceased person who makes that choice. Life isn't black and white - it's many shades of grey.

Not wanting to derail the thread but nobody would have heard about Vincent Van Gogh if it hadn't been for Vincent's brother Theo's widow, Jo Bonger, who was left having to bring up a small child (Theo died of syphillis about a year after Vincent) with nothing but hundreds of VVG's canvases and set about promoting his works and publishing the letters between the two brother. Otherwise they would have starved. Without her efforts, the two brothers would have sunk to oblivion.

Back to Ted Hughes. They all seemed quite selfishly monstrous and destructive. Perhaps it was the 1960s. I once met a woman who worked for the BBC and claimed to have met Sylvia P and described her as 'a right cow with a huge superiority complex. Very American'. Assia Wevill obviously didn't give a stuff for SP to be carrying on with her husband. I did read the book, Lover of Unreason, and she seemed as unstable as SP, eventually becoming obsessed with SP, writing poetry, killing herself (and their child) to get back at TH. She'd been married 3 times before. He obviously liked fragile and flawed women that he could get into bed easily - although by all accounts there never seemed to be a shortage of women wanting to go to bed with him. The Mick Jagger of the poetry world.

I do wonder if the decade had a lot to do with their behaviour - Richard Burton & Liz Taylor were pretty awful people too and to their respective partners.

Sylvia Plath was perhaps a Meghan Markle figure. Though blessed with considerable literary talent.

On the one hand, that's a terrible insult to throw at Plath! On the other hand, I think there's a kernel of truth there -- certainly lots of responses to her when she moved to England were very much 'Here's a ghastly American with glaringly new luggage, the idea that a still-war-battered Europe is a cute, Ye Olde World themepark, and no idea how things are done.'

SP was certainly horrified by lots of what she saw as the grime and old-fashionedness and lack of mod cons of Cambridge and later their various London flats, and her diaries and letters are full of complaints about the food and dirt and lack of central heating and snobbery. You can see her enthusiasm for the place waxing when she meets and marries TH, where suddenly it's all worthwhile and the history and nature wins out over the grime and the not-Americannness, and then waning again when their marriage runs into trouble, and suddenly TH is not longer her great strong Adam with a voice like God, but a scruffy philanderer who doesn't wash enough and has terrible manners.

Olwyn Hughes and Dido Merwin both essentially saw SP as a Ghastly Brash American. Dido Merwin's piece on her ('Vessel of Wrath', which is, I think, an appendix in the AS biography) is absolutely hilarious, for sheer spite, complaining about her tantrums, prickly ego and enormous appetite. .

Janet Malcolm's book on the Anne Stevenson Plath biography is good on the 'two cultures' stuff.

It's been mainly years since I've willingly read anything on SP, but I seem to recall her neighbour in the flat below not having particularly kind words about her - I think he said that she was very self-obsessed and entitled, had no interest in him, his kids, paintings - I think he was an artist, etc, despite coming down to repeatedly ask him for stuff (did she use his phone on numerous occasions?). Normally people are quite empathic after a death, especially given the circumstances. It struck me as odd, and gave the impression that she wasn't a particularly likeable person at all.

Celebrity tends to obscure what people may be truly like. Vincent Van Gogh is another that came across as truly awful when you read in depth about his life.

BBC iPlayer currently has a 3-part series on SP. www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002z73s?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile