Ted Hughes: please Discuss

[wildfellhall]

Serpenting and I wanted to stop interrupting a TV thread to discuss Ted Hughes and his burning of Sylvia Plath's last journal/s as her executor soon after she took her own life.

His explanation was plausible - that he wanted to make sure that their two children would never be able to read them.

I have never got over discovering that not only did Plath take her life after being with him but also the woman he left Plath for, Assia Weevil (?), also took her own life and the life of her very young daughter with Hughes, Shura.

His suffering must have been very great but still; as a writer he might have put more aside to preserve her legacy.

I'm also interested in people who love his poetry & whether people can separate the artist from his life.

I'm quite ambivalent about his poetry but I love 'Thought Fox'

I didn’t say he wasn’t perfect. I said he was flawed. There’s a big difference.
He’s also not a monster though. I choose to put neither of them on a pedestal.

Of course, none should be put on a pedestal.

I'm not at all a grave desecrator or a rampant feminist in the old school sense.

I'm just interested in how his work is full of these huge, oblique forces of nature and it seems to me to be a legitimate question - did he use his work, consciously or subconsciously, to somehow justify his persistent and evidently destructive promiscuity with women?

Is that an illegitimate question? Yes or no?

Because he did not stop the promiscuity after Plath's death. So I am interested that he didn't appear to learn from it and therefore maybe he thought it was beyond his control, maybe part of his artistic life like Picasso appeared to have done.

I think these are legitimate questions.

I think art and sex and promiscuity often go hand in hand, certainly in the western world. Look at the Bloomsbury set, Georg Sand and her salons in France in the 19th century, so I don’t think his promiscuity is particularly surprising.

I am not sure about his rights to destroying her journals. Only he knows what they said, and as a man, at a time when women and mental health and women’s mental health in particular was denigrated and not well understood, I think he could spin whatever was in them as a result of her illness I would have thought.

I don’t believe it was a selfless act for his children, but it may well have been the best action. We can’t know.

Many people famous and not burn letters etc on death, it’s the reason as historians we often only have one side of the correspondence.

Yes I'm really interested in the reassessment of artists in the light of how we understand ourselves now. Of course times were different but I still wonder whether he isn't due a bit of a Picasso like reconsideration.
I was really struck by how we might see Picasso now as a predator of very young women and a destructive force. I used to just look at the art - now I can't help but see the women too.
The art can still be mighty but, to me, it doesn't come out of nowhere.

In a way my question is - how do we see Ted Hughes now? I was so shocked when I first heard about Assia and Shura it's so distressing and the destruction of those two people must have taken time. It seems as if she slowly diminished as a person. Just heartbreaking.

Reading Wifedom by Anna Funder had a big impact on how I look at the artistic output of men. Orwell's wife was aggressively deleted by Comrade George and all his ass kissing biographers. Terrible.

I feel as if it's time Ted got some light shone on him and some questions asked.

.wild fell you should read the book I mentioned earlier - Loving Sylvia Plath by Emily Van Duyne. Like I said it’s a bit of a polemic but I think it would give you good for thought for a lot of your questions.
interesting discussion! Grammarteacher I agree that Ted Hughes encouraged Sylvia to write. But he didn’t get her published - it was more the other way round. She was in fact the better known/ published poet when they met. Heather Clark’s biography is good on this.

someone up thread mentioned her being bipolar - il not aware she was ever diagnosed that we know of.

Hope this doesn’t sound picky but I do think it’s important to keep abreast of what’s now known - given how much hyperbole has surrounded the story.

Thanks Marthasmum
I did read the other day that she pushed him to send in the Hawk in the Rain poems and typed them all up for him - was it for a competition?

"he also encouraged Plath to publish in the first place."

I'm not really familiar with them ...did she end up more famous than him?

"She needed people to come and help also so she could write." Again, I'm not familiar with the story..did he facilitate childcare help so she could pursue her art as well as him? Or was she left the artistic equivalent of barefoot and pregnant?

One of the things Hughes says (possibly in his foreword to his heavily expurgated The Journals of Sylvia Plath in 1982) which struck me as both terribly naive and, looking back from 2025, deeply old-fashioned, is something like 'I would hope that each one of of us owns the facts of his own life'.

Alas for him, when those facts are closely related to the facts of someone else's life, and that person is both celebrated and beloved, and dead by their own hand, AND a brilliant, copious and self-mythologising writer in her own right, he doesn't 'own' them in the slightest.

I think his destruction of Plath's last journal was an attempt to wrest back control of some, at least, of those facts by permanently denying access to them, but it's hardly coincidental that much of the destroyed journal dealt with his total inability to keep it in his trousers. (And this is an established 'fact', not just the speculation of a betrayed wife -- he wasn't even with Assia Wevill the night Plath died, he was shagging a Faber secretary called Susan Alliston. AW had to 'share' him with two other women. He was sleeping with someone else a few days after he married his second wife Carol Orchard. He told one of these women that he felt it was suffocating to be dependent on only one woman.)

There's a conflict of interest, ultimately, between the husband/soon-to-be-ex-husband (angry, grieving, conflicted, guilty, dealing with two tiny children) and the literary executor, in charge of preserving and promoting Plath's legacy, publishing work left unpublished at her death, ordering poems in Ariel, preserving diaries, drafts etc. (Note that while he badmouthed literary scholars and biographers all his life as 'vampires', he preserved all of his own diaries and letters and drafts, selling many to Emory University whose Coca-Cola endowment meant they had huge amounts of cash, hence TH made a lot of money,. His estate sold more material to the BL for half a million £. He definitely wanted them to be read).

The whole Plath/Hughes legacy story comes down in part to a tangled story of literary executorships entangled with emotions. His widow Carol refused to let his biographer Jonathan Bate quote from his work after initially supporting the biography, presumably because she didn't like what he was saying.

There's also the considerable baleful influence of Olwyn Hughes, Ted's sister, who was Plath's de facto literary executor, very protective of her brother, and who'd disliked Plath intensely on the comparatively few times they'd spent time together, had a huge fight on their last meeting in 1960, and who came to live with him to help bring up the children after Plath's suicide. I warmly recommend Janet Malcolm's book The Silent Woman, which is about different people's memories of/mythologies of Plath, especially Anne Stevenson's Plath biography Bitter Fame, written with Olwyn looking over her shoulder and continually interfering. Olwyn thought Plath was an awful, rude American princess with a 'difficult personality', no manners, and sick in the head, who killed herself out of spite and she was vitriolic to anyone who didn't share that view. According to Hughes' biographer Jonathan Bate, she softened her position after her nephew, Plath and Hughes's son Nicholas died by suicide in 2009. Then she started to believe depression was real.

As regarding both Plath and Hughes' stature as poets, I think it feels like a difficult comparison when he had such a long career and she died so young. I think her best work, though there's comparatively little of it, stands up to anything he wrote. I think Hughes was at times brilliant, but also enormously uneven, as you would expect from someone who wrote so much, and there are real blips (like Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, and some of his royal ass-kissing, to mention only two). It's hard to know what she would have been writing by the time of life he was writing Birthday Letters. I think TH was wrong to think her fiction was inferior. I think she would have written more novels, and they may have been extraordinary.

That really isn't the case. Plath was his de facto manager in the early years of their marriage. She was the one who forced him to take his career seriously, typing up his poems for submission to magazines and to Faber, applying for residencies and entering his work for prizes. She was streets ahead of him when it came to the professionalisation of being a writer starting out. I don't think The Hawk in the Rain would have happened as soon as it did if not for her.

Readingparty

Thank you for your wonderful, ass kicking post! Awe and respect to you. I read those journals years ago - Oh yes Olwyn - what a piece of work I remember now.

The conflict of interests is a key ethical issue here. He was absolutely too close to the material IMO and a profound threat to its contents particularly if she expressed the desire for a different literary executor or called him on all the sh**-baggery.

Poor Freida, Nicholas and little Shura. And Sylvia and Assia. Unlucky in the man they loved.

Also Nicholas may well have inherited a tendency for depression but not all depressives kill themsrlves.
It's evident TH loved his and Plath's children but who will ever know how traumatic their early childhood was? Being brought up by women your mother didn't like, your father away a lot. And it is impossible to imagine the impact of finding out how your mother died and who Assia and Shura were in relation to them and about their deaths. I mean just these things would be a brutally heavy psychological legacy for him.

www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/18/olwyn-hughes-sylvia-plath-literary-executor

This interview with Olwyn Hughes is fairly jaw dropping.

No one has ever said Plath was easy or mentally robust; she was unwell but she may have overcome her struggles with right support. That is still something that can be asserted.

He wasn't forced to marry her.

Olwyn's characterization of Plath is as extreme as she seems to have found some opinion on her brother.

Another very surprising thing is that TH's widow and Olwyn and Feida fell out over his estate. He couldn't even leave his affairs in a way that supported the women he might have claimed to love the most.

www.thenation.com/article/culture/loving-sylvia-plath-review/

Writers like this do provide a balance to the image of TH as flawed but wronged.

Yep readingparty has it right. I’ve been following the ‘story’ via most of the biographies since the late 1980s and find it really interesting to track how literary/ historical understanding of them has moved on - and how mine has too as I’ve got older! The biography of Assia Wevill was particularly eye opening and very sad.
Frieda Hughes has actually written a poem about her mums suicide and the whole image of them being left with bread and milk etc, which is pretty crushing to read. I found it in a bookshop a couple of years ago but haven’t found it again online to share. I mean what a story to have to carry.

If you're interested in Olwyn and her take on Plath, do read Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame, which I think is probably still the best Plath biography (AS was a poet, born the year after Plath, was born in the UK, grew up in the US and then moved back to the UK and stayed, so I think is better than most on cultural differences, how Plath would have found England and England found her, and the particular gendered social pressures of being a young woman in 1950s America) and alongside it, Janet Malcolm's brilliant The Silent Woman, which is a study of Plath biographies, their various biases, and the subjective testimonies of people who knew her, and how those have been interpreted in the various biographies. She talked to AS in depth about what it was like to write her biography, and the tense relationship she had developed with an initially cooperative Olwyn.

Bitter Fame has (I think) Olwyn's brilliantly unfiltered memoir of the times she met Plath and how awful she thought she was as an appendix -- it always reminds me of a CF post on Mn AIBU, with Plath as the houseguest from hell, but, like many of those AIBUs, you recognise that there's a huge issue of culture clash ('least said, soonest mended' 1950s Yorkshire meets American with very different ideas) and misunderstanding.

I don't think TH was simply a quiet country man with an extraordinary gift for poetry. (I should have said earlier that I met him once, when I was a student and invited him to give a reading for the literature society in the mid 1990s, and while he invited one of the postgraduate tutors back to his hotel room (she said no), he was in his 60s and mostly obsessed with fishing -- he only accepted the invitation because there was locally excellent fishing...) I don't remember forming much of an impression of him, other than that he read his own work well, which is far from guaranteed. Still very physically striking, and aware of his effect.

But it's pretty clear from Jonathan Bate's biography (which began as authorised by TH's widow Carol Hughes, so that he got full access to all the diaries, letters etc in Emory and London, and was later 'deauthorised', which meant he couldn't quote from them) that his affair with Assia Wevill when married to Plath was far from a one off. He was a serial bedhopper for much of his life, and always had several women on the go. They either didn't accept it, like Plath or Wevill, or they did, as his second wife presumably did in remaining both alive and married to him.

It's horribly ironic that while Plath was eating her heart out over Assia Wevill, on the night of her death Hughes wasn't even with Assia, but sleeping with one of the secretaries at his publishing house, and that while Assia felt he remained permanently in the grip of Plath after her suicide, he was in fact sleeping with lots of other women.

This gives a flavour.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/09/ted-hughes-the-authorised-life-jonathan-bate-review-poet

I think he's a fine, though uneven, poet, but was a serial shagger in a way that caused a lot of damage.

Thanks again readingparty.

Speaking as the child of a pretty useless father I look at TH and think he did have a choice about how he behaved. When she was so fragile, sleeping around was his choice - it was not like he left her to get food or shelter; it was optional. He didn't leave Sylvia and go to a friend's house desolate looking for emotional support and maybe someone to help him make plans to support her. No he was shagging around. Like a teenager.

Another approach that some men might have taken would have been to learn from his selfishness and devote the rest of his life to creating stability in a very calm loving home for his children.

I cannot imagine that the deaths of Assia and Shura had no impact on TH's children.

The more I read the more I am persuaded by the idea that this passionately mythical primeval world view absolved poor TH of ever having had to keep his sword of nature in his trousers. He must needs thrust it into all of the available nymphs for the sake of poetry. The destruction he left in his wake was obviously the fault of these awful crazy mental women who drove him away with their madness and Assia even had the temerity to put on weight - outrageous.

There is a very moving interview with his daughter about how all she wanted was a steady home and a pet but they moved constantly.

Now, there are poets who have a steady home life, I just wonder why he couldn't have put the kids first to make up for their loss. It was an option.

I think Assia and Shura need to be remembered as more than some strange collateral post Plath suicide damage. I think it was not bad luck that they died I think it was related to how he treated them.

Hmm…I didn’t know he was quite so disloyal. I’d dipped into various biographies, but never read any thoroughly enough. I had thought he was loyal to Plath until her mental illness became too much and he sought comfort elsewhere. I’m kind of disappointed. Then again, his daughter speaks of him with deep love and affection, so he can’t have been that bad. Seamus Heaney loved him as well.

Still, I think we’re way too quick to judge artists on their private life. Some make the case that we shouldn’t pry at all, and should judge them purely on the work (I doubt the men who built the Taj Mahal, for example, were nice human beings - they probably beat their wives and keep slaves and god knows what). It’s the same with outdated views. It’s ridiculous to pull books from the shelves because someone writing in 1780 didn’t share the views of a 21st-century Guardian-reader. Aristotle was one of the greatest thinkers of all time (James Joyce thought him the greatest), yet he believed in slavery! In the future, people may regard the killing and eating of animals as barbaric and refuse to read any contemporary author who eats meat.

Are people really that pathetic and weak minded that they can’t sort through a book and like some bits but dislike others??! (I don’t mean you btw!). I’m an agnostic, but I still love reading CS Lewis. I also love Evelyn Waugh, but know he would have despised a working class oik like me. None of us like every single opinion of every single friend. But they’re still our friends. Go too far down the road of judging an artist on their private life and political opinions and there’ll be nothing left.

The thing I most admire about Hughes is the ambition. He really believed in poetry. For him, it was a profound and visionary art - something that revealed deep truths about the world.

I totally agree that the artist's moral life shouldn't necessarily have anything to do with our judgement of their art.

But inevitably we see Caravaggio in the light of his actions, Woody Allen, Picasso. When the artist's life is their subject it becomes more complex.

The argument for judging his behaviour is because of the impact of his actions on another artist, Assia and Shura & not least his own children.

Because Plath launched Hughes's career as we can see now from the record, and he was her executor and beneficiary and he because he destroyed and lost key written testimony of hers (2 x journals) which could have said very significant things to her children and to posterity.

He silenced her for all time; it's this act which I think any reader of Plath has the right to question.

His promiscuity was evidently destructive. Don't you think if he had been an accountant that there would be less understanding for the deaths he left in his wake?

My main question is why didn't he learn anything from the first death? Maybe he doubled down on being sybaritic, why not? It was all very painful and miserable so why not go a-shaggin to cheer mysen' up until the fishing gets as sexy as the nymphs and then I'll just do that.

I mean, he silenced her final words for all time.

Of course he published and promoted her poetry - why not when he made a living from her. And all her other writings along with Olwyn - a very prejudiced person to give so much power to.

He could have kept her final words closed until after his death. It would have been perfectly possible, he did that with some of her other letters and writing.

Destroying her writing is completely indefensible and it amazes me that he basically got away with it.

There's a long tradition of unforgiveable literary destructions by survivors, often with the best of intentions! Cassandra Austen burning Jane's letters. Charlotte Bronte possibly destroying Emily's second novel. Hobhouse, Moore and co burning Byron's memoir.

I think Hughes genuinely didn't think much of her prose at all. I think he was wrong, and that she was definitely a fiction writer as well as a poet, but I imagine he genuinely didn't think he was destroying the work of a considerable diarist.

And he was so hostile to literary scholarship in general that I don't think it would have registered with him that he was destroying information about the genesis of her major poems (though one can't help noticing that he carefully preserved his own, and sold them for a lot of money.)

I don't know if we know when he destroyed the journal he admitted to destroying. Perhaps more understandable if it was at the height of the hostility to him, when feminist critics discovered Plath and people were continually attacking her gravestone to chisel off the 'Hughes'.

But less sure about the reason given, so that her children didn't have to see it. Frieda Hughes says she was 14, incredibly, when she found out her mother had died by suicide, and found out from a stranger reading The Bell Jar on a weekend study course. Hughes had always said she'd died from pneumonia, and that, having told a three year old something she could cope with, he didn't know when to disclose the truth.

I find his destruction of her journal far more unforgiveable than his infidelities, if I'm honest.

Most of his work isn't appealing to me but I can't deny that he was a great, even brilliant, talent. However, I defy anyone to say that his Laureate poems have merit and some of the sycophantic things he wrote as private gifts for the royal family, especially the Queen Mother, are execrable. Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage are of course not above criticism but their Laureate work is in another league from his (IMO)

One of my teachers knew "Ted and Sylvia" early in their marriage, I think at Cambridge, she told us when we were studying his poems for O level in the 70s. Her comment was that in her opinion Sylvia had many problems long before she met Ted, but his behaviour didn't help. She felt that had he not been quite so goodlooking and charismatic that he would have been judged even more harshly than he was.

He shouldn't have destroyed her journal. He could have had it sealed in an academic archive until after the deaths of their children if he thought they would not cope with its contents, such things happen. Ted Hughes was a man much possessed by myth and I think the one that meant most to him was possibly his own and tarnished and battered though it was, there were those around him(Carole, Olwyn) happy to do service for what was left.

I know the bit you mean and it was clear reading it that Plath 's mental health was already unravelling badly. I believe the seeds of her eventual bipolar disorder were planted age 9 after her father died and she never recovered from that trauma.

Ted Hughes was a bastard, there is no doubt about it but bipolar disorder is a hell on earth and is )and especially was then), notoriously difficult to treat.

I really don’t think she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I’ve never read that anywhere. Sorry to make the point again, but I think there is danger in thinking we ‘know’ stuff about these people that we just don’t.
happy to stand corrected (and informed!) if anyone can point me to a source saying she had bipolar.

@TheGroovingDucksOfItchycoo oh I’m glad I wasn’t imagining it. I think it’s been 20 years since I read it! Not sure why that bit stuck in my head. I think it was because I thought it was so sad she wanted to harm herself through her first sexual experience.