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Hughes Reviews

Gillian Groszewski, Trinity College Dublin

Lucas Myers, An Essential Self: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, A Memoir (Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications, 2011), 114 pp., ISBN: 978-1-907869-01-3 and Daniel Huws, Memories of Ted Hughes: 1952 – 1963 (Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications, 2010), 54 pp., ISBN: 978-1-905512-75-1.

In 1993, Lucas Myers replied to a letter from Ted Hughes which seemed to have been asking for advice on whether or not he should publish personal poetry about Sylvia Plath. Myers wrote back encouraging his friend to embrace the idea. Hughes appeared to have taken Myers' advice to heart. Seven months after their correspondence on this issue, on December 27, 1993, Hughes published "Totem," a confessional poem that responds to Plath's "Daddy," in The New Yorker.

Despite his correspondence with Hughes on this complex subject, the preface to Myers" memoir demonstrates that Myers labours under the impression that Birthday Letters was written as a character study of Plath:

The straightforwardness of Ted's other poems contrasted with those in Birthday Letters. They were first-rate poems but, because I had known Sylvia, to me they were not convincing. The Sylvia of Birthday Letters was not a believable human being. What was believable was Ted's acceptance that someone of her intelligence could be without self-questioning – that she could put one side of her personality under close scrutiny and yet ignore the other side. (Myers 9) At the beginning of Birthday Letters, Hughes portrays himself as desperately trying to get to know the "real" Sylvia Plath. Describing his first encounters with her, in the photograph of "Fulbright Scholars" and at the "St Botolph's" party, Hughes uses photography in order to demonstrate the distance that was still between them then: "First sight, first snapshot isolated" (Collected Poems 1052). It is not until the poem "18 Rugby Street," when Myers engineers a meeting between the two, that Hughes describes himself and Plath spending a significant amount of time alone and getting to know one another better: "now at last I got a good look at you" (1057). After this poem, Hughes feels he knows the "real"

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Plath. However, the rest of the collection demonstrates just how difficult it is to ever really know someone and that Hughes' search for the "real" Plath was futile. In a letter to his son, Hughes wrote that the poems of Birthday Letters were "simple, unguarded, quite private for the most part, unsophisticated bits of writing" (Selected Letters 712). However, with all their allusions and uncertainty, the poems of Birthday Letters are not straightforward. Throughout his memoir, Myers seems to wish that they were. Of "Epiphany" he writes, "I did not accept Ted's explanation in the poem as factual when I read it – or as anything other than delusional" (Myers 10).

Despite its own delusions regarding the "factual" nature of Birthday Letters, Myers' memoir is interesting for its distinctively American perspective. According to Myers, he and Hughes talked "about the countryside, Yeats and American poets" and it was through reading Myers' twin copies of their books that Hughes gained access to the poetry of John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate (Myers 21, 34). In his section on Hughes' time in America, Myers writes:

I never worked out why Ted did not foresee what he would find in America. In part, it was because he liked American poets, especially John Crowe Ransom, and his "fox" did not like postwar British poetry. Ransom had devised a personal voice to which he responded and other American poets of the period were much more alive than their British contemporaries, who had not felt, or had declined to feel Ransom's influence. (Myers 45)

Hughes was certainly unhappy in America. Following his time there, Myers appropriately concludes that Hughes was an "unwilling American" (Myers 22). Dealing with Hughes' relationship to America, however, Myers makes an important point: that Hughes' first impression of the country had been made by the American poetry that he had read and through his notion of Plath as "beautiful, beautiful America" (Collected Poems 1058). His disappointment and disillusionment on reaching the new world is made more understandable by Myers' emphasis on Hughes' literature-based introduction to the U.S.

Despite its claim only to be dealing with Ted Hughes, Memories of Ted Hughes: 1952 – 1963 by Daniel Huws provides a more sympathetic insight into the relationship between Hughes and Plath than Myers achieves. This memoir will itself be eternally memorable

Groszewski 358 for the information it provides about Hughes' love of books. Praising Cambridge University Library's generous policy of allowing external readers access to its stacks, Huws writes:

For a student such as Ted, already beyond anything the university curriculum could offer him, pursuing his own interests so hungrily, this enlightened policy of the Library must have been Cambridge's greatest contribution to his education. […] Ted used to say that whenever he entered the Library he got an erection. The two splayed wings of the building, the vaginal entrance and the phallic tower had some complementary suggestiveness. What a tribute to the power of books. (Huws 19)

Unfortunately, however, this memoir is not all sexual excitement. Like Myers' book, it also takes pains to emphasise Hughes' developing interest in American literature during the late 1950s. Huws recalls that he and Hughes had "separately, both developed a passion for the poems of Emily Dickinson" (Huws 22). Huws also suggests the importance of Rachel Carson's writings to Hughes, remembering that, "way back at the beginning of the 1960s, [Hughes] was the first person I remember talking of the perils of factory farming and of additives to foods. He had perhaps picked up some of this in America" (Huws 47). This memory demonstrates just how ahead of his time Hughes was in his thinking about the environment.

Unlike Myers' book, Huws' memoir demonstrates his changing opinion of Sylvia Plath over the years that he knew her. Remembering their Cambridge days, Huws writes of his and his friends' early misconception that Plath was from a rich family and of Hughes' reluctance to have her mix with them:

Ted kept [Sylvia] apart from his old friends. He must have been aware that to them, imbued with anti-American prejudice, she was the brash American girl who sought attention for herself in such unspeakable places as Varsity (the students" weekly newspaper), and that she of course would have felt singularly ill at ease among them. (Huws 34-5)

Myers' memoir depicts no redemption for the brash character of Sylvia Plath and his book concludes that "it was not Ted's adultery that caused the break-up of their marriage [….] It was two characteristics within Sylvia herself. One was narcissism, the second was the readiness to say anything which would fit her story" (Myers 110). In contrast, towards the end of his memoir, Huws writes of a meeting with Plath in London in 1962 and a conversation about marriage and divorce which seemed to have softened his feelings towards her (Huws 47-8).

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Although they both set out from the same historical point and deal with the same people, it is difficult to compare these two memoirs as like-for-like. Each comes to vastly differing conclusions regarding the person and personality of Sylvia Plath. Nonetheless, both are extremely valuable for what they tell us about Hughes' interest in American literature and poetry in general. Above all, the anecdotes contained within these memoirs, which we recognise as the kinds of stories that make up all of our memories about friends, are highly entertaining and enlightening.

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Works Cited

Hughes, Ted. Collected Poems. Ed. Paul Keegan. London: Faber and Faber, 2003. Print.

---. The Letters of Ted Hughes. Ed. Christopher Reid. London: Faber and Faber, 2007. Print.

Huws, Daniel. Memories of Ted Hughes: 1952 – 1963. Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications, 2010. Print.

Myers, Lucas. An Essential Self: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, A Memoir. Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications, 2011. Print.