The word “tragedy,” which is employed nowadays to designate any very sad event, can be used with some justice to describe the tangled lives and legacies of the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Separated at the time from her husband, Hughes, Plath committed suicide in 1963. In 1969, Assia Wevill, the woman for whom Hughes left Plath, killed herself in the same manner as Plath, taking along Wevill’s and Hughes’ infant daughter. And in 2009, Plath and Hughes’ only son, Nicholas, committed suicide.
Additionally, it emerged that Plath, who killed herself by inhaling gas from a stove, might have staged the suicide attempt, hoping to be rescued, and that Hughes, who believed that trauma was at the root of poetic inspiration, had encouraged the unstable Plath to explore what was most combustible within her.
After Plath’s death, the very private Hughes became a public and polarizing figure, and Plath’s legacy the object of a still-ongoing cultural war. For feminists, Plath’s suicide was the fault of a patriarchal society that forced female writers into constricting domestic roles. For conservative critics, Plath’s poetry, which appropriated the Holocaust to describe private trauma, was the logical culmination of a cult of the self.
For reasons that are not entirely admirable, Plath is now a major literary figure, still showing considerable influence in our confessional age. Her poetry is the endpoint of the Romantic poet’s blurring of the line between the world and the self. Every pathographic memoir (such as Lena Dunham’s recent bestseller) bears the imprint of Plath’s example. What’s more, Plath had a talent much valued in our reality-TV age: the ability to bring high drama to the description of ordinary events: a cold, a visit to the zoo, a marital argument.
Hughes’ poetry, by contrast, has not aged well. The early poems that made his reputation read like period pieces, bearing the imprint of the ’50s obsession with mythmaking and the ’50s cult of D.H. Lawrence. The later, more autobiographical poems are heartfelt but inert. Hughes appears destined to be one of those writers whose life overshadows his art.
Of the countless biographies, plays, documentaries, films and critical studies devoted to Hughes and Plath, surely the most tenderly innocuous is “Ted & I: a Brother’s Memoir,” by Ted Hughes’ older brother Gerald.
Unlike their sister Olwyn, who is Plath’s highly partisan literary executor, Gerald Hughes has no interest in entering a critical battle. His references to Plath (with whom he corresponded but never met) are uncontroversial, as are his accounts of feminists disrupting Hughes’ appearances in Australia in the ’70s and vandalizing his grave. The entire memoir is written with a touching combination of tact and artlessness.
“Ted & I” is a reminder of the humbleness of the Hughes’ origins. Their father, a veteran of the First World War, was first a carpenter-joiner, then the proprietor of a small newsagent’s shop. The photographs accompanying the book show the modest house where Ted was born, with its front door opening onto the street.
This is very much an older brother’s memoir. The Ted Hughes of popular imagination, a combination of Bluebeard and Heathcliff, is nowhere to be found. Ted emerges as a vulnerable character: curious, guileless, generous, more comfortable in the outdoors than anywhere else.
There is a lovely account of the time 15-year-old Gerald takes 5-year- old Ted on his first overnight camping trip, within shouting distance of the family farm:
“We climbed through the wire and erected our Butka tent, then made a fire and put on the billycan. I remember the long row of very interested cows at the fence, watching every move we made.”
Gerald reminds us that Ted, unlike your average poet, was superbly handy: he could hunt, fish, sculpt, draw, do carpentry and run a farm. These qualities come out in Hughes’ best poems, which have a tactile immediacy that banishes all rhetoric.
Is there any reason to doubt Gerald’s account of his brother? Perhaps not. Like most complicated people, Ted Hughes was many different things to different people, and it’s quite possible that he needed his brother’s company because it brought to life something that was otherwise dormant in his character.
“Ted & I” has few of the virtues but also none of the faults of the contemporary memoir. It takes people at their own self-evaluation, leaves them alone with their private miseries and seeks to smooth out rather than to probe.
MEMOIR: LITERATURE
Ted & I: A Brother’s Memoir
by Gerald Hughes (Thomas Dunne Books)
