The Birthday Letters Myth By Andrew Derek Armitage A thesis submitted to the Victoria University ...

298 Pages·2011·2.45 MB·English

by  Andy Armitage

The Birthday Letters Myth

By

Andrew Derek Armitage

A thesis
submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington
in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in English

Victoria University of Wellington

2010

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Abstract

Ted Hughes‘s Birthday Letters (1998) has, for the most part, been judged in terms of its
autobiographical content rather than for its poetic achievement. The poems are addressed
to Hughes‘s first wife Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963 shortly after they
separated. The poems describe their relationship and deal with the aftermath of her
suicide and Hughes‘s role in managing and promoting her writings, in many of which he
was characterised as a villain. Hughes has been criticised for his subjective treatment of
these events in Birthday Letters. Furthermore, the drama of the poems takes place in an
apparently fatalistic universe which has led to accusations that Hughes uses fatalism in
order to create a deterministic explanation for Plath‘s suicide and absolve himself.

In The Birthday Letters Myth I will be arguing that Hughes‘s mythopoeia in
Birthday Letters is part of his overtly subjective challenge to the discourses that have
hitherto provided the ―story‖ of his life. In Birthday Letters, there are two versions of
Hughes: the younger Hughes who is character involved in the drama, and the older
Hughes, looking back on his life, interpreting ‗omens‘ and ‗portents‘ and creating a
meaningful narrative from the chaos. By his own method, Hughes highlights the
subjectivity and retrospective determinism of those narratives (or ‗myths‘) about his life
that often uncritically adopt the dramatic dialectic of ‗victim‘ and ‗villain‘ in Plath‘s
poems.

In Birthday Letters, Hughes adopts the symbols and drama from Plath‘s writings
in order to create his own dramatic ―myth‖ that resists contamination from the other
discourses that have perpetuated the drama within her poems. The underlying myth of
Birthday Letters is the shamanic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Hughes believed the
role of the poet and that of the shaman were analogous and in Birthday Letters, as
Orpheus, he goes on an imaginary journey to recover his private assumptions and
conclusions about his relationship with Plath. In doing so, he achieves a redemptive,
cathartic healing image for himself and the reader.

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Acknowledgements

I am extremely grateful for the support, criticism and encouragement from my
supervisors Anna Jackson and Harry Ricketts throughout the writing of this thesis. They
have been a great help in helping me to develop and formulate my ideas coherently.

Thank you to Victoria University of Wellington for providing me with funding towards
my trip to the Ted Hughes literary archives in Emory, Atlanta in 2005, and more recently,
in providing me with a completion scholarship in the last months of writing.

I am also grateful for assistance from a large number of scholars who have provided me
with encouragement and support, helped me locate articles, radio broadcasts and books,
and so on, during the completion of this thesis. I am particularly indebted to Claas
Kazzer, Ann Skea, and the late Diane Middlebrook.

Thanks to the staff at Emory University for their assistance in my research, and to Mrs
Carol Hughes and Seamus Heaney for permissions to copy materials from the archives.

Thanks also to Greg Martin and my partner Bec Edwards who read earlier drafts of this
thesis and provided helpful feedback and advice.

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Contents

1 Introduction.......................................................................................... 6
2 Myth ....................................................................................................58
3 Subjectivity .........................................................................................96
4 Fate ................................................................................................... 124
5 The Plath Myth ................................................................................. 161
6 Re-writing the Myth ......................................................................... 201
7 The Shamanic Journey ................................................................... 244
8 Epilogue ............................................................................................ 279
9 Appendices....................................................................................... 287
10 Bibliography ..................................................................................... 292
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction

When Birthday Letters first appeared in 1998, the majority of the book‘s reviewers
focussed on the autobiographical aspect of the poems.1 This is not surprising, given
Hughes‘s silence about his marriage in the preceding years. However, it has also meant
that Birthday Letters has often been judged in terms of its autobiographical content rather
than its poetic achievement. Katha Pollitt was one of Birthday Letters‘ most forceful
critics. In her New York Times review, she suggested that getting to the ‗truth‘ of the
Birthday Letters story was the reader‘s objective:

Inevitably, given the claims that these poems set the record straight, the question
of truth arises. Plath‘s letters and journals present her as struggling hard to be a
dutiful literary wife – typing her husband‘s poems, promoting his work, rejoicing
in his success and also resenting it. The difficulties – practical, social and, most
of all, psychological – of being a woman of burning literary ambition preoccupied
her from earliest childhood. None of this struggle is reflected in Birthday Letters.
Nor does Hughes engage with the fury that suffuses Plath‘s late poems – and with
which many women have identified – about being stuck at home with the babies
and the housework and the boring neighbours.2

1 For reviews of Birthday Letters see: Alvarez, Al. The New Yorker. 7 February 1998; Blakely, Dianne.
‗The Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes‘. Antioch Review (Yellow Springs, OH). Winter 1999. 57:1. 117;
Churchill, Sarah. ‗Secrets and Lies: Plath, Privacy, Publication and Ted Hughes‘ Birthday Letters‘.
Contemporary Literature. Vol. 42, 1. 102; Fenton, James. New York Review of Books. 5 March 1998;
Glover, Michael. New Statesman. 30 January 1998; Grossman, Judith. ‗Broken Silence‘. New England
Review. Fall 1998. 154-60; McManus, James. ‗Black Magic‘. The American Poetry Review. Oct/Nov.
1998; 27. 6; Morgan, Robyn. Newsweek. 2 February 1998; Motion, Andrew. The Times. 17 January 1998;
Pollitt, Katha. ‗Peering Into the Bell Jar‘. The New York Times. 1 March 1998; Sen, Sudeep. ‗Birthday
Letters‘. World Literature Today. Summer 1998. 72-3; Warn, Emily. Seattle Weekly. 5 March 1998;
Whittington-Egan, Richard. The Life After Death of Sylvia Plath. Contemporary Review. May 1998; 272,
1588; Williamson, Alan. ‗A Marriage Between Writers: Birthday Letters as Memoir and as Poetry.‘ The
American Poetry Review. Sept/Oct 1998; 27, 5; Wood, James. ‗Muck Funnel: Birthday Letters by Ted
Hughes‘. The New Republic. Mar 30, 199; Wright, Carolyne. ‗The Poet‘s Inquest‘ The American Scholar.
Summer 1998; 67. 3.
2 Pollitt, Katha. ‗‗Peering Into the Bell Jar‘. The New York Times. 1 March 1998. Hereafter referred to as
‗Peering into the Bell Jar‘.
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1 Introduction
In her analysis, Pollitt overlooks poems such as ‗The God‘ and ‗Suttee‘, in which Hughes
depicts Plath as ―a woman of burning literary ambition‖, because these poems do not
contribute to her reading of Hughes as ―the most notorious literary spouse in history‖. In
Pollitt‘s view, Birthday Letters is a public relations exercise and an attempt to divert
attention from Hughes‘s responsibility for Plath‘s suicide:

Here, we are to believe is the Truth About Sylvia, which can be summarised as:
she was beautiful, brilliant, violent, crazy, doomed; I loved her, I did my best to
make her happy but she was obsessed with her dead father, and it killed her…
Incident after incident makes the same point: she was the sick one, I was the
―nurse and protector‖. I didn‘t kill her – poetry, Fate, her obsession with her dead
father killed her. The more Hughes insists on his own good intentions and the
inevitability of Plath‘s suicide, the less convincing he becomes. One starts to
wonder what it means to blame a suicide on Fate, on a father who died, after all,
when Plath was 8 years old, or on ―fixed stars‖. Inadequate as it is to see Plath‘s
life in wholly sociological, political terms – the plight of a young female genius in
the pre-feminist era – it makes more sense than astrology.3

For Pollitt, the ―astrology‖ and ―Fate‖ in Birthday Letters are ways for Hughes to depict
himself and Plath in a universe in which human will is subjected to, and overwhelmed by,
some cosmic force, which enables him to avoid the accusations of those who have
suggested his actions drove Plath to suicide. Pollitt‘s reading indicates how the story in
Birthday Letters exists within a number of discourses that each vie for status as the ‗true
version‘. For Pollitt, Hughes‘s subjectivity and his intimate access to Plath do not make
him a valuable witness who can tell us ‗what really happened‘ because his need to
exonerate himself damages the veracity of his account.

Against Birthday Letters, Pollitt offers another account of Hughes‘s and Plath‘s
lives that she believes is crucially missing from Birthday Letters but can be constructed
from ―Plath‘s letters and journals‖. However, Pollitt does not acknowledge the

3 ‗Peering into the Bell Jar‘.
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1 Introduction
problematic subjectivity of Plath‘s writings, their internal contradictions or their
inconsistencies. Although Pollitt acknowledges the ―inadequacy‖ of her own version of
Plath‘s story as ―the plight of a young female genius in the pre-feminist era‖, she appeals
to the reader‘s reason to suggest that her version of this story ―makes more sense than
astrology‖.

James Wood was another reviewer concerned with the ‗truth‘ of the Birthday
Letters story. Like Pollitt, he criticises Hughes‘s use of Fate and astrology in the poems,
but on aesthetic, rather than ethical, grounds. For Wood, the problem with Hughes‘s
mythopoeia in Birthday Letters is that it denies readers access to the ‗real‘ and
‗particular‘ Hughes and Plath:

The aura of pre-destination is certainly this book‘s strongest texture. The poems
find different ways to accuse destiny… Certain readers, noting Hughes‘s fond
marriage to Fate, to bravuras of pre-destination, have charged him with self-
absolution. But Hughes was not responsible for Plath‘s death, and so he has no
need to absolve himself. That is not the problem here. His pagan doom, the
suckling gods and bloody crypts, do not absolve, but dissolve. A real particular
Plath disappears, and a real, particular Hughes disappears too, drowned in a sud of
images that are borrowed from their own poetry, or borrowed from the most
familiar dirty magics. Particularity is secular, and these dark poems show us
why.4

Wood suggests that a ―secular‖ poetic would have more closely resembled the ‗truth‘ of
Birthday Letters story than the mythic drama that frames the narrative. Wood points out
that ―it is not Fate that stages these bitter dramas, but the poet, who chooses to write them
up‖,5 as though he feels it is necessary to highlight to the book‘s readers that Hughes is
imposing an imaginative order on the story.

4 Wood, James. ‗Muck Funnel: Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes‘. The New Republic. Mar 30, 1998; 218,
13. 30. Hereafter referred to as ‗Muck Funnel‘.
5 ‗Muck Funnel‘. 30.
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1 Introduction
Pollitt‘s and Wood‘s objections to the mythopoeic treatment of biographical
events in Birthday Letters are characteristic of contemporary critical responses to the
sequence, and it is this form of response I will be addressing in the chapters that follow.
I will be arguing that the mythopoeia in Birthday Letters is part of the sequence‘s subject
matter, rather than simply a formal aspect of the poems. Hughes‘s overt mythopoeia in
Birthday Letters should be seen as an advertisement of the subjective and imaginative
nature of the poems rather than a strategy to avoid or conceal ‗truth‘. Birthday Letters
should be approached, understood and judged as a subjective work of art rather than as an
objective autobiographical record. The poems are subjective in that they involve a
selection and presentation of events by a single author and are driven towards personal
assumptions and conclusions. In this sense, Birthday Letters is no different to Plath‘s
writings, or the secondary interpretations of these writings by her readers. However, in
acknowledging this aspect of the Birthday Letters story, Hughes highlights the
impossibility of writing objectively about himself and Plath. He also draws attention to
the subjective nature of Plath‘s own writings and of the discourses, or ‗myths‘, that
surround and give meaning and context to her (and his) life and writings.

From the opening poem of Birthday Letters, Hughes foregrounds the fallibility of
his vision in the poems. These are not so much an historical record as a loose collection
of subjectively and imaginatively ordered experiences. These poems are usually
provoked by, or refer back to, events described in Plath‘s writings. Hughes engages
directly with Plath‘s words, symbols and drama in order to contend for the ‗truth‘ of the
events (both real and imaginary) that Plath describes. In Birthday Letters, Hughes has
been prompted into dialogue by the voice of Plath‘s writings, and the two poets struggle
for possession of the meaning and significances of their shared experiences. In this
sense, Birthday Letters can be seen as an interpretation, or reading, of Plath‘s writings in
dramatic terms. But Hughes also extends the vision of a relationship in Plath‘s subjective
drama to include his own experiences by introducing new symbols, or describing other
events, that do not appear in Plath‘s writings, and do not rely upon her writings for their
meaning and significance.

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1 Introduction
In Poetry in the Making (1967), a guide Hughes wrote for aspiring young writers,
he spoke of the subjective nature of human experience and the problem of
autobiographical writing:

Most of us just retain a vague impression of an event, with one or two details that
affected us directly, and when we ask someone else to give their account of the
same event it is highly probable that their memory will contradict ours. This
could mean we both saw different aspects of the event and are both, in our way,
right. But it is certain that we both saw almost nothing and made our judgement
of all the facts after only seeing one or two of them. How would you like to be
condemned by a jury who when they go into the jury room remember about as
much of your case as you do of the lessons you had last week?6

In this courtroom analogy, Hughes anticipates the way in which he would be judged in
the Plath biographies that began to emerge in the early 70s when feminists interpreted the
archetypal drama in Plath‘s poems (based around a dialectic of victim and aggressor) as a
description of the suffering of women in patriarchal society. In this feminist reading of
Plath‘s work and life, Hughes is reduced to a caricature of all that is wrong with
patriarchal society and his struggle in Birthday Letters, to free himself from the narratives
of the feminist movement, mirrors this reading of Plath‘s poems as her struggle to free
herself from the narratives of patriarchy. In an autobiographical sense, both Ariel and
Birthday Letters offer partisan visions of a marriage in which the speaker is trapped and
limited by his or her spouse. However, the subjective manner of these writings means
that if they contradict one another, this is not to say that one version of events is false,
but, as Hughes wrote in Poetry in the Making, that the authors ―both saw different aspects
of the event and are both, in [their own] way, right.‖7

In the chapters that follow, I will be arguing that, in Birthday Letters, Hughes
revisits a story that has become a ‗myth‘ in the sense that the symbols and drama within

6 Hughes, Ted. Poetry in the Making. London: Faber and Faber. 1967. 88. Hereafter referred to as ‗Poetry
in the Making‘.
7 ‗Poetry in the Making‘. 88.
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