Mourning Eurydice: Ted Hughes as Orpheus in Birthday Letters

The task is now carried through bit by bit . . . while all the time the existence of the lost object is continued in the mind. Each single one of the memories and hopes which bound the libido to the object is brought up . . . and the detachment of the libido from it accomplished. Why this process of carrying out the behest of reality bit by bit . . . should be so extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to explain. . . . The fact is, however, that when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again.¹

I see you there, clearer, more real

Than in any of the years in its shadow—

As if I saw you that once, then never again.

(p. 15)²

Reviewers of Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters have understandably been absorbed with biographical issues. Addressed to his American poet-wife Sylvia Plath thirty-five years after her death, these verse-letters hold the promise of providing answers to the many questions that biographers and critics have asked about the circumstances of their marriage, his desertion of her and their children for another woman in October 1962, and her suicide on 11 February 1963. Why, after a prolonged and obdurate silence about these matters has Hughes suddenly decided to tell what is presumably his side of the story—what A. Alvarez calls “scenes from a marriage, Hughes’s take on the life they shared?”³ Are the poems, as Jacqueline Rose suggests, “calling for a response. Of understanding? Of sympathy?”⁴ and assuredly not from Plath, but more likely, from her readers and admirers who have found his silence “another sign of callousness”⁵ and his handling of her estate—the writing which she left unpublished when she committed suicide in 1963—highly suspect. His editing of her journals, his reconstruction of her Ariel volume, and his infamous disclosures about losing or destroying her final journals and an unfinished novel have all been seen as self-serving in one way or another. For many critics, Hughes censored those parts of Plath’s journals which implicate him as a domineering husband; he mutilated her artistic intentions in Ariel to obscure his role as a villain in its poetic narrative; he destroyed valuable information about her final months in the journal which he burned; and he carelessly lost another journal and an unfinished novel because these works accuse him, point to him as the unfaithful one, the philandering and unfeeling husband.⁶ Are Hughes’s Birthday Letters a confession? an apology? a catharsis? Do they provide information about Plath’s final months and days? These are the questions initially raised in critical responses to their publication.

Symptomatic of reviewers’ preoccupation with biographical accuracy is Katha Pollitt’s description of the dilemma for Hughes’s readers: “Inevitably, given the claims that these poems set the record straight, the question of truth arises.”⁷ And Pollitt, with several other reviewers, is not convinced that Hughes is capable of objectivity and impartiality, or even of a modest and limited personal truth, especially not over the stretch of eighty-eight poems and two hundred pages of verse:

that intimate voice . . . is overwhelmed by others: ranting, self-justifying, rambling, flaccid, bombastic. 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.⁸

In a blistering review for the New Republic titled “Muck Funnel,” James Wood likewise denounces Birthday Letters as boringly repetitious minor tantrums: “His poems are little epidemics of blame”⁹ that endlessly rebuke the dead Plath and her poems, and it’s “like listening to one half of a telephone call.”¹⁰ The other side of the conversation is missing.

Even when a reviewer offers a more positive view of Birthday Letters as poetry rather than biographical evidence, as in Jack Kroll’s praise of Hughes’s “masterly...