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Her Husband: Hughes and Plath, a Marriage

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When I first began reading Diane Middlebrook's "Her Husband," I was disappointed.

"This is all the stuff I already know," I thought. "St. Botolph's...black marauder...pushy American girl...I've read this all before. Where's the new stuff?"

Plath fans like myself, who've read every biography and scrutinized every poem, need to hang in there for a bit. It takes a while to tap the riches in this book, but once you hit pay dirt, you'll be buried in it. You can expect nothing less from Diane Middlebrook's exhaustive research and crisp, yet sensitive writing.

The book is essentially a biography of Ted Hughes, but it is a biography of Hughes in relation to Plath -- possibly the only kind of biography that could ever be written about Ted Hughes.

Middlebrook takes what has been said over and over about Hughes and Plath -- that they were larger-than-life, highly charismatic, very intense people -- and digs deep with research and literary analysis. The result is two fully-fleshed mythical figures, with the history of -- and reasons for -- the shaping of their mythic status.

Speaking of the literary analysis, it is incredibly detailed, dissected to a dizzying extent. Middlebrook is quite a scholar, and makes bold connections between various Plath and Hughes poems (some of which were written on opposite sides of the same piece of paper -- a practice Middlebrook calls Plath & Hughes's "hand-to-hand combat"). The poems take on squirming new life in the illumination Middlebrook provides.

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were complex, inscrutable people. They believed their relationship was fated, and that indeed seems to have been the case. They goaded each other to produce writing that was better and more unique than anything else being written at the time. The destruction of their marriage was the catalyst for Plath's final poems, the ones that would guarantee her immortality.

It's hard to know how to feel about Ted Hughes. I have a lot more interest in, and respsect for, him after reading this book. One thing is certain -- he is the only man who could have endured life in the shadow of Sylvia Plath. A hunter, a creator of myths, only his questing, questioning nature could have been strong enough to stand up to all Plath threw at him, in life and in death.

Diane Middlebrook's book about the ill-fated marriage of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes is an extraordinary combination of biography and literary criticism. Rather than focusing on Plath's depression and subsequent suicide, the author offers a valuable, unsentimental analysis of both their work and the influence they had on each other's lives and creative processes.

She portrays Hughes, not as an egotistical, philandering husband who abandoned his wife and family, but as a man and a poet, struggling with his failed marriage. In fact, how marriages fail, and the men and women who fail in making their relationships work, are part of the book's central theme. Hughes' inspired and encouraged his wife's creativity, but he also contributed to the anguish which led to her suicide. Living with Sylvia Plath was not an easy task though. Her work, her life and her death profoundly changed Ted Hughes' perspective on his own life and work.

Plath, more than thirty years after her death, has evolved into an icon of martyred feminism and is revered by her passionate following. Many believe that her tragic suicide was a result of the overwhelming societal demands placed on a woman/wife/mother/artist at the midpoint of the last century. However, Sylvia Plath is, foremost, one of the most brilliant poets of that century, with her roles as daughter, wife and mother taking second place to her art. Her death was a tragedy, not a personal statement or rebellion. Her history of mental illness, and the barbaric treatment she received for the disease, is a known fact. Her pain was a violent presence in her life, especially during the last months. There was nothing passive, quiet or calculating about it. Plath was a victim of her demons, perhaps the Furies, who finally claimed her.

During his lifetime Hughes was very reluctant to disclose information about his turbulent relationship with his poet wife, especially about their break-up and her months alone with her two children during a terrible London winter. He explained his silence as wanting to protect his children. Finally, in 1998, "Birthday Letters" was published, a volume of verse-letters about his relationship with his wife. Weeks after publication Hughes died. In this volume, Hughes breaks his silence and responds to critics, scholars, and in a sense to Sylvia. This material provided literary scholars with the perspective they had lacked for so long. Hughes, at last, describes his struggle to love and live with a beautiful, talented woman suffering from serious clinical depression. Middlebrook draws heavily on the book, as well as Hughes' papers at Emory University, Sylvia Plath's journals and papers at Smith College, and an abundance of written material heretofore unavailable.

Ms. Middlebrook also analyzes the profound effect both poets had on each other's work. She writes, "One of the most mutually productive literary marriages of the 20th century lasted only about 2300 days. But until they uncoupled their lives in October 1962, each witnessed the creation of everything the other wrote, and engaged the other's work at the level of its artistic purposes. They recognized the ingenuity of solutions to artistic problems that they both understood very well." Hughes believed that he and Plath had similar dispositions and often felt as if he was drawing on a "single shared mind." They shared tastes in literature, authors and poets. They sketched together, wrote together and were physically a passionate, well-matched pair. The author documents the descent of their happiness to drama and despair, while showing the effect of these emotions on their work.

Diane Middlebrook's insightful, literate, well-crafted biography must have been difficult to write. The amount of grief and pain contained in the literary work she researched and the lives she wrote about boggles the mind - and hurts the heart. She is a partisan of poetry - not of Ted Hughes nor of Sylvia Plath. She remains as objective as possible when drawing her conclusions. And most importantly, her focus is on the impact that Sylvia Plath's life and death had on her husband and his writing, allowing Plath's legacy to live on posthumously.
JANA

Having read biographies and criticism about Plath for the past 15 years, this is the first book that gives an unsympathetic account of Plath and Hughes' lives as artists, as mentors to each other, and as a couple. If you are interested in Plath and Hughes as writers, not merely the circumstances surrounding Plath's suicide, then this is a book you must read. Middlebrook is a wonderful biographer. She gives insights into poems, intellectual interests and belief systems of Plath and Hughes. By the end of the book, I felt I had a more well-rounded view of their lives together, as well as Plath and Hughes as artists and individuals in their own right. Well done.

She was an American girl, he was a Yorkshire boy. She was a domestic paragon who read The Joy of Cooking as if it were "a rare novel," he could not (or would not) be domesticated, he was too wild, too predatory. She was one of the greatest poets who ever lived, he was a gifted but much more minor poet who both helped her and harmed her. Her need for him was so intense it was pathological, but she didn't write her truly great poems until after he left her for another woman. And when they were asked during a BBC interview in 1961 if theirs was a marriage of opposites, he said they were "very different" at the same moment that she said they were "quite similar."

Ted and Sylvia: we know their story, so why would we want to read anything more about them? But Diane Middlebrook, in her biography of Ted Hughes, Her Husband: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, A Marriage, is easily able to revive excitement about them once again. She is also incredibly fair to both of them and so is able to see their marriage as the dynamic and creative partnership it so remarkably was.

The parts of her memoir that are devoted to the childhood of Ted Hughes and to the clairvoyant visions of his mother (the night before the Battle of Britain she dreamed she saw waves of crosses on fire in the sky), as well as to his love of myth, even make his obsession with the occult easy to fathom. The village he was born in even had a "myth" in its name: it was Mytholmroyd, a village in the Upper Calder Valley in West Yorkshire. It was here that he was delivered by a midwife on August 17, 1930, at exactly "solar midnight," for in the Upper Calder Valley that night the sun (the astrological sun) reached its lowest point in the zodiac. In fact, when Hughes, many years later, turned down a request to lend his hand to good works, he wrote in his letter of refusal that his natal horoscope predicted that he was destined for fame, but ill-suited to it, and "fated to live more or less in the public eye, as a fish does in air."

Hughes's life as an artist was "ruled by his need to secrete meanings in his writing that only he would know about." Middlebrook also comments that "withholding from others something important to himself by hiding it in plain sight" was a defensive stance so deep in his character "that you might as well say it is his character."

It also helps us understand his many problems with women. Women fell for him, left their husbands for him, adored him, cooked for him, but also bitterly turned against him when he turned away from them. Sylvia Plath must have sensed his ladykiller instincts, too, soon after meeting him while they were both still students at Cambridge. Her lines in "Pursuit" catch her apprehension, her fascination:

The panther's tread is on the stairs,
Coming up and up the stairs...

Years later, Hughes wrote:

You scrambled into the car,
Scattering oxygen like a drenched bush

But these lines weren't written to Sylvia Plath, no matter how much they sound as if they must have been, they were lines in a poem Hughes wrote as Britain's Poet Laureate for the christening of Prince Harry, the second son of the Prince of Wales. And yet they are incredibly reminiscent of the poems in memory of his young wife that he wrote even later, in Birthday Letters, and they particularly evoke the poem he wrote about their secret wedding in London, on Bloomsday, June 16, 1956, in St. George the Martyr Church, in Bloomsbury, they are that dewy and radiant.

Plath turned against him too after he left her in the summer of 1962. Alone in Devon (except for their two very young children) her violent reaction to being seduced and abandoned spurred her to write the incandescent poems that made her name, including the poem that the following lines belong to:

The blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it.
You hand me two children, two roses

The first two lines of this trio are iconic, but they are also clairvoyantly autobiographical, seeming to speak not only of poetry, but also of Plath's future suicide, even if the method she chose when she killed herself the following winter was death by gas, not slit wrists.

But what Diane Middlebrook points out in her perceptive and often profoundly thoughtful memoir is that the third line of this trio of lines had a history. After Plath had written her brilliant poem, "The Rabbit Catcher," a pivotal poem in which her imagination seemed to be "alone with its own wildness," Hughes echoed its imagery in Difficulties of a Bridegroom, a radio play he wrote that summer or fall about a man driving to a sexual liaison who sees a rabbit on the highway and accelerates in order to kill it. When he gets to the city, he sells the dead rabbit for two shillings and buys two roses for his mistress.

There was an actual mistress in Ted's life by this time, Assia Wevill, a married woman who was so seductively luscious that a London poet, recalling first meeting her, described her as "Babylonian." In the photos that survive of her she has a discontented mouth and Elizabeth Taylor eyes. She also pampered herself, Middlebrook writes, with frequent manicures and the sort of stylish clothes that could conceal her short waist and wide hips as she walked in clouds of Chanel. When she decided to seduce Hughes she joked to a friend that she was setting out for Devon in her "war paint." Sylvia, aware of what was going on, had "ears to hear" when the play was broadcast on the BBC. And so she wrote the lines in which the roses appear along with the blood jet of poetry, responding to the secret taunt Hughes had planted in what he had written, the rabbit having "acquired exchange value: they were playing an obsessive game of tag with each other's images."

But they were also doing something much more final than that. Hughes's "Rabbit Catcher" was not an acknowledgment of guilt or a plea to be forgiven, Middlebrook writes. "Instead, it registers his retrospective recognition that he and Plath had reached, simultaneously, the end of their apprenticeships as poets."

Middlebrook fills in the blanks concerning the Greek tragedy Ted's life became after Sylvia's death: not all that many years later, depressed over the fact that she was gaining weight and Ted had begun seeing another woman--this time a woman from the Calder Valley named Brenda Hedden--Assia Wevill gassed herself along with Shura, the little daughter she'd had with Ted, in a [...] version of Sylvia's suicide (but with this important difference: Sylvia, who'd loved her children, spared them).

This second suicide was such an angry and terrible farewell to Ted that it's hard to believe he could survive it. He barely could, he felt ruined, he was so convinced that he'd caused his mother's death (it quickly followed Assia's suicide) and he was equally convinced that he'd destroyed all the women he loved. And so he fled to Ireland hoping to find a place where he could live in peace with his children. But soon after this, with the windfall from a poetry prize, he bought a huge old house called Lumb Bank, close to his parents' house in West Yorkshire. And not long after his arrival, Brenda Hedden left her husband to be with him and to become-officially, at least-his housekeeper.

"This arrangement," Middlebrook writes, "did not last long." In August, 1970, Ted married Carol Orchard, a beautiful Devon woman who'd trained to be a nurse and who was not much interested in literature and who (therefore?) was, he wrote to his brother, "exceedingly good for me." For several years after this, Ted and Carol and Frieda and Nicholas lived a peaceful and orderly life, thanks to Carol who, Ted wrote to Mrs. Plath, "has pulled us all from the fire."

At least until Ted tossed them all into it again when, at a literary festival in Australia in 1976, he fell in love with Jill Barber, his bright and "foxy" publicist. But Jill eventually understood that he would never divorce Carol and since she was feeling "broody" she made the painful decision to leave him and move her literary agency to the US. "I knew my role in his life," she later said, "was to love him, love him, love him." There were other women in the years after Jill's departure, among them Emma Tennant, who in 2001 wrote a novel about Ted and Sylvia and who finally concluded that Ted was a very excitable person and that he "fancied himself."

Ted wasn't only careless about women, he was often careless about Sylvia's work as well. One of her journals notoriously went "missing" but of the journals that survived he was a remarkably fine editor and wrote perceptively about them, ranking The Journals of Sylvia Plath even above the stunning Ariel whose poems he also edited. In The Journals of Sylvia Plath, Sylvia writes that the headband Ted tore from her head at the wild party where they met was red, but in one of the poems in Birthday Letters Hughes remembers it as blue. But as Middlebrook tells us, "blue is the colour Hughes introduces like ritual magic at the end of the book, to restore balance."

In November,1962, Middlebrook writes, Plath's spirits soared when she found a large flat on the upper two stories of 23 Fitzroy Road in a part of London where both she and Hughes had friends. The apartment was even--thrillingly--in the house where W.B. Yeats had lived as a boy. Two months later, The Bell Jar was published, and less than a month after that, Sylvia Plath, slipping into a deep depression and living with two small children and no phone in the coldest winter England had seen in over a hundred years, killed herself. She was only thirty years old when she pulled down the oven door and knelt deep into the gas on the morning of February 11, 1963. And Ted was only thirty-two. After her death he moved into her apartment to look after the children, and he slept in her bed. But remorse often kept him awake, along with the howling of the wolves in the nearby zoo. It was a case of life outdoing art yet once again. But it is Middlebrook's astute analysis of the life and work of the twentieth century's two most rock star poets that will be most compelling and useful to all who revere Sylvia Plath and who either love or hate--or love to hate--Ted Hughes.

Hughes, celebrating Plath's poetry in his final book, Birthday Letters, also plunders her work, both her poetry and the revelations in The Journals of Sylvia Plath, for his own poems, and yet his poems in this book are uncannily very much his, hacked out of memory, and very vivid and male. But what his book as a whole revealed nearly forty years after Plath's death was that he still hadn't got over Sylvia: she was, as Middlebrook so brilliantly puts it, "still the guardian of his imagination's vitality." Close to his own death, he waded back into their star-crossed love affair. And this, in the end, makes sense if you take into consideration their extraordinary working relationship and their early adoration of one of another. And above all if you count all the ways, including the blazing and instructive manner of her death, that she changed his life.

This is the first biography that doesn't portray Ted Hughes as a monster,
but as a man with weakness like anybody else, although, he may have had more weakness than others. But then, Plath knew this before she married him, didn't she? This may have been a part of the fascination, attraction. After all, Plath was no angel herself.

"Her Husband" begins with the famous 'Meeting'... Plath sees Ted at a party, flirts with him, recites some of his own poetry from across the room.(Now,this would turn a man on!)
He rips off her headband, trys to kiss her, she bites his cheek, drawing blood. A lusty, sexual,intense first meeting. A memorable first meeting. Ted had the scar to prove it.

Middledbrook has broken her book down chronologically...the first meeting,the romance,struggling artists,prospering,
separating,etc...

I have read everything about Plath ... but this book adds new and fresh details into her intriguing life. For instance how she and Ted would annoy one another during the writing process..he picking his nose, she twirling the ends of her hair. Absolutely adore those kind of real-life elements.

"Her Husband" has allowed Ted Hughes to come out into the world as a human being, not just be remembered as the man who betrayed Sylvia Plath, caused her to throw her head into an oven, generated her darkness. No. He was more that that, and that is why Plath loved him.

My favorite chapters are those where Plath and Hughes are together, reading to one another, cooking great meals, talking about literature, having great sex, loving one another.

But... to be honest, Plath would not have written "Ariel" without the darkness and hopelessness that consumed her. She says so fittingling in her poem 'Edge' ... The woman is perfected/her dead body wears the smile of accomplishment.

Did you accomplish what you wanted Sylvia?

Sexton says in the book, "That was my death! She took it before I could." But then she took hers later, didn't she?

Loved "Her Husband" and would recommend it for all who appreciate Plath...

But beware...

you may appreciate Ted Hughes in this one too,
but that's alright.
With him and without him... Plath did her most brilliant work!

Having read just about everything on the Plath/Hughes partnership I have to say that Diane Middlebrook's book is simply the best in the lucid intelligence and even-handedness with which she tackles a subject which has hitherto excited a great deal of sensationalistic biography and shallow "analysis" . Her understanding of both poets' work and placement within the culture is a tour de force. I can't praise it highly enough!

Not exactly. He was a bit of a louche and picked his nose, and all, but living with Sylvia Plath was no walk in the park, either.

Diane Middlebrook's examination of this seemingly endless marriage and the joy, misery and poetry it produced is certainly the best and most informed of all the Plath/Hughes biographies extant.

I highly recommend it for its elegant and highly intelligent reading of the literary work of both subjects and its illumination of the woes of Plath, from the insidious form of personality disturbance that plagued her life to what may likely have been a particularly miserable and debilitating form of PMS.

Middlebrook's principle achievement here, however, is that she contextualizes and humanizes these iconic characters, particularly Ted Hughes, who has to so many, been the big, dark, cryptic hulking mass who shadowed Plath's life and somehow precipitated her suicide.

In these pages they come to life as does the marriage that is responsible in large part for the finest poetry either produced.
Their flaws and genii, brilliance, astonishing self-confidence,
selfishness and deep affection -- all are there and although it is more than we have known and hoped to know, there is at the end an enormous feeling that "Ahh-h--hh, yes. It must have been like that." One can't help but say a prayer for Hughes for the wounds and guilt that darkened his life for more than 40 years after Plath's death.

Like all other Plath aficionados, I read this book hoping to learn more about such an enigmatic and genius artist. I must say I was a little fooled by my own hopes when the book ended up being mostly about Hughes.

The book starts off rather well, gripping the reader. But so much about Ted Hughes and his every family member (compared to the scant information about Plath, her mother, and brother) was not what I was interested in, so the beginning was a bit tedious. Then Middlebrook finally gets to the goods: the actual marriage and partnership of these two literary giants. This section is the most interesting. Middlebrook's analysis of their poems and other writings make this book. But this wanes once Plath dies and Middlebrook gets tangled in the "muses" or carnal pursuits of Hughes. She manages to get back to the point, but not until the end.

Middlebrook obviously knows a lot of biographical information about these two, as well as an excellent perception for their poetry. Her writing is clear and engaging. My problem with the book was I was hoping for something more about the partnership of two intelligent, if eccentric, artists and their pursuit to achieve their poetic visions. It was more biography and "gossip" (as another reviewer put it) than that dissection of a fascinating marriage. My biggest problem with the book is that it was not what I was anticipating.

I do recommend this book, but insist that you stick with it. It is interesting, even if I was expecting something else.

I first read about 'Her Husband' on Salon.com - and was very excited to read a detailed study on the Plath/Hughes dissolution.

The book is excellently detailed. Middlebrook does a fantastic job in showing the slow-to-rapid erosion of the marriage. And its clear that Middletook took great pains not to take sides in her presentation.

But that's where the problem lies. This push to remain objective and neutral seems, at times, forced. There are several instances where it would have been smart to provide some sort of critique of either Plath or Hughes' behavior - but Middlebrook remains maddenenly neutral - and therefore robs the book of any emotional content.

In any relationship, there are key flashpoints that contribute to a dissolution - but Middlebrook shies away too much in an effort to appear impartial.

Despite that, the book is well detailed in the specifics of what went on. And to touch upon the above criticism - she doesn't resort to pointless (and unfair) finger-pointing.

A good read if you are interested in either poets.

I like Diane Middlebrook's writing, but this book is not one of her best. In general I thought it thin and shallow, and not very well structured. She didn't seem to have a point except gossiping and giving us a bland narration of the events. I felt like a voyeur reading this. I really felt she needed to do more analysis rather than just report on Plath and Hughes. For example, why did the birth of their son Nicholas send Hughes into such a tizzy? Its evident from several sources she cites that Hughes rejected the child unaccountably, and it seems that was a key event in the unravelling of their relationship. Well, why? She merely cites this evidence without analyzing it. Why did Hughes want "ten daughters" but could not tolerate one son? It seems rather obvious that the guy couldn't bear to have a male "competitor" in the family. If you're going to do a biography, then don't hold back! I felt Middlebrook repeatedly dropped the ball on a full analysis of Hughes and his psychology/behaviour.

For example, the way he treated Plath's estate was mind-boggling. Just randomly leaving it floating around his house so others could steal parts of it? Why does she not comment more on this! What a flagrant disrespect this shows for Sylvia Plath! That material should have been stored properly, at the very least! I've never read any in depth narrative of their marriage: this is the first one. I must say I formed an extremely negative view of Hughes from it--he seemed like a pure egomaniac underneath it all, and Middlebrook simply won't take a stance towards the evidence. Certainly, one could formulate a stronger critical stance without going to the extreme of blaming him for the behavior of the women who attached themselves to him. She seems blinded by a need to defend him while on the contrary, most of the material she cites paints a much more negative picture.

It bothers me that in some passages of the book Middlebrook celebrates the way Plath's poems after Hughes left her were able to help her heal and take responsibility for attaching herself to "dominant males," and for "collaborating in her own oppression" --yet then she goes on to (subtly) defend Hughes. Well which is it? She's read "Daddy"--it seems that Middlebrook wants to grant a feminist power to Plath for that poem and its sentiments but at the same time completely deny their truth. "Oh, he wasn't really that bad."

In general, a fuller account of the psychology and dynamics of both the main protagonists is needed in this book. Plath, also, is often rendered in a shallow and gossipy light.

I felt Middlebrook didn't have a clue about how to analyze the way Plath and Hughes helped each other write, and what the function of writing was in their relationship. I've read much much better analyses of creative marriages (i.e., by Susan Rubin Suleiman for example.) This was just superficial.

Another thing I found problematic was how Middlebrook does not do a better analysis of some of the events leading to Plath's suicide, such as, the publication of the Bell Jar. Why did this trigger Plath's last depression, as the evidence suggests, and why did Hughes resent that "damn" book so fiercely? The argument that it was just "brain chemistry" I found not convincing at all! Again and again I felt Middlebrook just drops out pieces of information but does not fully discuss them.

I think her bio of Anne Sexton is a much better book which I have read several times. This one I will never read again. For a better analysis of Sylvia Plath I think Rose's Haunting of Sylvia Plath is excellent.