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'

Her symptoms seemed to me like bipolar. I am not sure what other diagnosis would fit. Possibly schizophrenia?

He sounds like a narcissist that chose vulnerable women as partners. The fact that he may have been a brilliant writer is clouding people's judgement of him as a controlling character.

I seem to recall she wanted to feel alive. She suffered depressive episodes so probably felt numb inside a lot. Hence the risky self destructive behaviour.

@marthasmum you're right . I've just looked it up, and seems she was not formally diagnosed with manic depression, but more likely depression. I had always read or heard things describing her as manic-depressive.

‘I killed a genius.’

Hughes thought that was to be his legacy.

None of us really know what happened, and I’m not sure I want to - very, very black. Hughes and Plath dealt in savagery with their poems, but she already had form for serious suicide attempts. Her mother rescued her aged 17 when she’d ODd in the cellar and was still alive after two days.

Plath’s suffering beggars belief. Larkin said her poetry was hysterical, which is rich coming from a man who coined ‘That vase’.

It’s quite sad to think how her illness might have been treated now, isn’t it? I mean I know our mental health services are pretty shit in many ways. But when I read Heather Clark’s account of the treatment she received after her first breakdown, it was really shocking. Clark was basically saying she discharged herself and felt no better from the treatment. I think she had insulin therapy which is completely discredited now, and of course ECT which was badly managed, and was on a huge cocktail of drugs before she died, some of which were contraindicated. It’s very sad to think she might have lived with better treatment.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC539515/

This article makes a case for various attitudes to what she was suffering with; It looks like they cannot be certain now.

Interesting that it looks like her friend, a GP (?) was prescribing her antidepressants.

He was also trying to get her a psychiatric appointment, some in-hospital treatment and even a nurse to be with Plath and help her with the kids.

I guess TH couldn't help with all these practical approaches to her final illness because he was very busy.... ummm... oh we know what he was busy doing.

It's interesting that the narrative has always been that her extreme illness drove him away but I think it was maybe her jealousy and anger at his betrayal. If she was as ill as the narrative has maintained - there would have been more concern about her having the children with her surely?

Oh god, agreed, @Uricon2 — some of those royal poems make me die inside. Hughes was quite the Establishment type in later years, for all his ‘simple primal countryman’ reputation. The Philip Larkin joke poem of what he imagined Hughes would write as a royal poem is quite funny.

I think the self-harming sex in The Bell Jar is partly about the conflicting cultural pressures put on girls in the 1950s — it was clearly a dreadful decade to be an intelligent, ambitious woman who liked sex, as Plath did.

I think it’s hard to retro-diagnose someone, especially psychiatrically. Diagnostic categories and treatments are so different now. Think of all the preventable early literary deaths we could now hold off…

It's terrible how her grave is defaced all the time. I used to live near there and the verger told me it really upsets her family.

I think it is bad but it's literally just the Hughes of her name. It's just the letters.

There are also flowers and tributes I think.

I can understand a bit why so many are angry. It's a terrible irony that he, as her literary executor, largely created the narrative of her image and controlled a good deal of what people wrote about her. His position, given her death, was IMO a total conflict of interest and the proof of that is the 'loss' hmm 🤔 and destruction of her last two journals.

The 'protecting the children' defence seems like real BS to me. He was protecting himself and his power over the income from her work and the way her work was published for the future alongside his sister who evidently hated her. More and more indefensible the more I read about it.

His destruction of the journals seems to me to be proof that they would have harmed his reputation and maybe threatened his control over her work.

I read yesterday that he reordered the poems of Ariel to make her death seem more inevitable. Yeah, let's blame the planets shall we or amorphous dark forces.

I didn't think about it much until I saw it regularly, and now, no, I think it's a terrible thing to do.

He's dead, after all, so who is it being done to? The people that loved her, by people who never knew her at all. I think that's wrong. A gross intrusion.

That is always a risk with publicly-accessible famous people's graves, though -- Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Elvis, Marylin Monroe, Bruce Lee etc. Wilde's kept having the penis of the statue cut off and stolen, and was so eroded from people leaving lipstick kisses that it was eventually covered in perspex.

Note that Hughes' memorial is three miles from the nearest road on Duchy of Cornwall land, also used by the armed forces, and required a stone to be helicoptered in by special permission of Prince Charles, the Dartmoor National Park and English nature , and was only known about when hikers saw it, years after it was installed.

I read this thread and a few days ago and I really need to comment on the euphemisms you have used to talk about the murder of a child @wildfellhall.

Assia Weevil (?), also took her own life and the life of her very young daughter with Hughes, Shura

Her demise and that of her child is pretty horrible to even contemplate

Poor Freida, Nicholas and little Shura. And Sylvia and Assia

I think it was not bad luck that they died I think it was related to how he treated them.

Assia Weevil murdered her daughter. You seem to want to avoid this fact and to portray this as some sort of double suicide. It wasn’t. It was murder and suicide. The person who murdered Shura was her mother. You seem to have as much sympathy for Assia as for Shura. I find this very strange.

The tone of your posts is that Ted Hughes’ behaviour was awful but Assia Weevil’s was totally understandable and reasonable. Is infidelity really worse than child murder? I don’t believe it is. But if you do (strangely) really believe it is, isn’t the fact that Assia was unfaithful to at least two of her husbands of some relevance?

Many people have to face infidelity of their partners, there are many reasonable ways of responding to this. Murdering a child is not one.

I don't agree with retrofitting diagnoses, but Plath is as close as it's possible to be to the textbook definition of female autism.

Autistic women are routinely diagnosed with personality disorders and have MH conditions slapped on them, when they're just struggling immensely with neurodivergence.

If this highly creative, intelligent, mercurial but extremely vulnerable woman were in her prime today, she (and others) would have a much deeper understanding of her experience of the world.

Ted Hughes reminds me very much of D H Lawrence. Like Lawrence, he isn't interested in describing nature from the outside (the pretty flowers and mountains and so on). What he really wants is to get behind the scenes. Like Lawrence, he wants to capture the forces or energies that move the living world around.

ARoseisaRose

You're absolutely right, I think I read somewhere that she didn't feel anyone would care for her properly. That Ted valued his older children more.

You're, right, I should have distinguished the act. I think Shura is inevitably a baffling casualty of her mother.

It's all very grim. Sylvia at least spared her children.

wildfellhall I wonder if you have read the biography of Assia. It’s suggested in there that she might have thought she was protecting Shura because she felt Ted wouldn’t look after her. It’s all very sad.

Yes marthasmum, I had read something like that.
My dd said to me the other day 'it's not fair to blame a person for their partner's suicide!', and I thought that she does have a point; but it's the destroying her journal that I am left with. Such a monumental act and as he executor such a loaded one. I can't get around it or past it.

Didn't Hughes also destroy all 150 pages of her second novel Double Indemnity (also a Roman à clef I believe, like The Bell Jar)... or is that still simply thought to be "missing"?

I haven't read about that. It seems he felt literally entitled to destroy her writing. Despite having the reputation for
protecting it.

And yet all his papers have been carefully kept and sold to university libraries.