Have they read the poems?

Nicholas Hughes, son of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, killed himself in Alaska. The New York Times asked a few old boilers and a couple of nonces to react. Two (one boiler, one nonce) rehashed the old chestnut that Hughes drove her to her death. Two others (boiler/nonce) wrote quite well about death and suicide. Most surprisingly one of the best pieces was by that aged boiler, Erica Jong. Wow, she must have improved since she feared flying and had sex with many dirty footed freaks. One boiler was so far up her own intellectual fundament she seemingly forgot the topic and babbled on in praise of Plath’s poetry, not even mentioning Nicholas. Read them if you must, but better yet, read the poems.

I defy anyone who has read The Bell Jar to conclude anything other than that Plath was (a) barking mad – hell, barking, flea scratching and butt sniffingly mad; (b) obsessed with her dead father well beyond healthy bounds; (c) severely depressed and (d) as far as it is ever possible to be, destined to suicide.

But it’s too easy to resort to that collection. Instead, try these for size, from Ariel (1965).

From Lady Lazarus:

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me.

And I am a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

Would a quote from Death & Co help? No need when there’s this, from Daddy:

I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

And from Edge:

The woman is perfected.
Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment…

Nearly every poem in the collection features, death, skulls, bones, blood and blackness. She was married to Hughes at the time, so the charge could be that he made her this way, but Daddy, at least, suggests a pre-existing malaise.

The Birthday Letters (1998) does nothing to contradict this opinion as when Hughes writes of making a writing table for his wife (The Table):

…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.

Ted could be a miserable git too – his Crow poems are so depressing as to be almost unreadable. But, for this reader, The Birthday Letters most powerful message is that Ted Hughes loved Sylvia Plath.

The only people who know what goes on in a marriage are the parties to it. The rest is gossip and arid speculation. So, boilers and nonces, hold your tongues and judgment and revel in their language.

Perhaps the third boiler got it right after all.