Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship

"Your Sentence Was Mine Too”: Reading Sylvia Plath in Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters

The sudden publication of Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters in February 1998 made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. This fact was no sooner noted than it was assimilated by the media back into the reception of the poems. Most considerations of Birthday Letters opened just as I began mine, namely, by registering the singularity of a collection of poems ever becoming front-page news in the first place. The media thus helped make the collection famous, remarked upon its fame with surprise , and reincorporated that surprising fame into its coverage. In this essay I want to argue that this feedback loop of writing, reading, and reception is the same one that produced Birthday Letters itself. Although it has consistently been represented in the popular press as a collection of “secret” poems that “directly” reveal Hughes’s “private” memories of his life with Sylvia Plath—to whom he was married and from whom he was estranged when she killed herself in February 1963—Birthday Letters can also be read as a public response to disputes over the politics of publication , representation, and literary authority.1 Ghosts of many other texts haunt Birthday Letters, which is not simply a “direct, private, inner” 260 “Your Sentence Was Mine Too” Reading Sylvia Plath in Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters   A secret! A secret! How superior. You are blue and huge, a traffic policeman, Holding up one palm—. . . You stumble out, Dwarf baby, The knife in your back. “I feel weak.” The secret is out Sylvia Plath, “A Secret” (1962) presentation of Hughes’s memories of Plath but also a response to the problems of publication. Birthday Letters was sold as Hughes’s “unknown side” of a thirty-fiveyear battle of the sexes.2 While it is certainly Hughes’s only published chronicle of his marriage to Plath, Birthday Letters is also a citational, intertextual account that is ambivalent about its own status as a text. Kaleidoscopically reassembling particularly fraught moments in a long public controversy, Birthday Letters responds to many audiences: to Plath and to a shifting public that fought battles in and over her name for more than thirty-five years. Equivocal moves between revelation and concealment characterize this best-selling volume of poetry, which was always flanked by the words “secret,” “private,” and “direct” in a media that tirelessly mediated between it and its audience. Birthday Letters, too, can be read as a mediation, a collection that couples the poetic voices of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Less biography than biographical criticism , Birthday Letters entangles the woman and her work so that reading Plath is inextricably bound up with remembering her in Birthday Letters. Hughes plays on the idea of revision throughout the collection in order to read, remember, and correct Sylvia Plath. In this essay I will sketch some of Hughes’s “re-visionary” strategies in melding his words with Plath’s, focusing in particular on the intricacies of his representation of her poem “Daddy.” These necessarily brief readings are not meant to be conclusive but rather suggestive of a method of interpretation. Ultimately I want to propose that Birthday Letters is best understood as an “open secret,” a volume hesitating uneasily between disclosure and encryption, unsettled by its inability to fix the boundaries between life and art. Publishing Sylvia Plath To begin with, it is necessary to recall some of the more familiar aspects of the controversies surrounding Plath and Hughes. In doing so, I do not wish to reconstitute what has been reductively misrepresented as a two-sided argument but rather to reconsider its stakes. Though admittedly selective, these examples culled from an immense history of dispute provide Birthday Letters not only with its themes but also with its very language; they are the conversation from which Birthday Letters is, so “Your Sentence Was Mine Too” 261 to speak, sampling. The more a given incident was rehearsed in competing accounts, the more it accrued sufficient citational intensity to warrant public response from Hughes.3 Thus if readers familiar with Plath’s reception encounter here some familiar, even stock, examples, that is precisely the point. I opened this essay with an epigraph from Plath’s poem “A Secret”4 because it suggests, in condensed form, much of the strife, both public and private, to which Birthday Letters responds. Like most of the poems Plath intended for the collection she would entitle Ariel, “A Secret” was written...