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Plath & Hughes
Ted Hughes draft of "Last Letter"
Newly released by the British Library archive, and published in the New Statesman, Ted Hughes’ poem “Last Letter” recounts the three days leading up to his wife Sylvia Plath’s suicide, ending with the moment he is informed of it. Fervent Plath fans, of the kind who vandalized her tombstone to remove his name from its inscription, may or may not receive his anguish well, for he is commonly blamed for her suicide, given that their break-up (initiated by him) immediately preceded it.
It is dangerous when fans, readers, and critics meddle in the private lives of writers, for their biographies, poetry, and nonfiction are all a kind of fiction; we can never know them, let alone judge them, the way we can never know ourselves. For anyone who thinks words, of any sort, lead to truth, I say: look outside. It is odd how Ted Hughes can finally be vindicated, as if such a pardon was ever needed. He had a severely depressed wife who killed herself, much like Leonard Woolf, except the former was also famous, so more meaning was attributed, relished, to their drama. Biographies are highbrow soap operas.
After Tao Lin’s reading, someone had mentioned how disturbed by Haley Joel Osment she was, how she now — key word “now,” meaning a revision had been made — had difficulty respecting Tao Lin as a person, given the implicitly “autobiographical” novel. (Short of a spoiler, let’s just say there are many overlaps between Richard Yates and the Plath-Hughes story.) Blurry categories such as memoir, non-fiction, “creative” non-fiction, fiction, biography, and autobiography are breeding grounds for presumption and judgment.
Aesthetics end inside an oven, at the edge of a razor or building, a shotgun hole in the face. Suicide — not talking about philosophers or cultural theorists who happily pontificate it during a panel discussion — is, essentially, not philosophical but psychiatric. Plath suffered from bipolar depression, and that is why she killed herself. The feminists who blame Hughes, ironically, give him too much influence and power over her. Of recent controversy, Ted Genoways is probably a dick, but Kevin Morrissey killed himself because of severe depression. Nothing that happens to a person’s life can make them kill themselves; it is what happens, biochemically, inside their brain. Biochemistry does not need a narrative. Science is amoral.
Ted Hughes’ draft of “Last Letter” shows a deft and worried hand, finally crossed out with a harsh X, the way transpired days are marked in the calendar. Perhaps he was just trying to brace himself for the next day, as we all are.
Tags: sylvia plath, ted hughes
not everyone can be super rad like you steven pine!
i like how you aren’t really concerned with suicide, but concerned with proving you are semantically superior.
you won. good job. jimmy didn’t write it perfectly.
he’s an idiot. thank you for being the champion of nothing.
“Every brain is the crossroads of many narratives, many happenings. I’d say biochemistry does need a narrative…” Well said, Tim. The unfortunate implication of your biochemical postulate, Jimmy, is that the teleological endpoint of such a claim is that, “she would have eventually topped herself,” if you are in fact right about it being 100% brain-chemical. This is not to say you aren’t right about instability, a propensity to breakdowns. Tim has the answer I think. Don’t we all have some kind of biochemical stability (or lack thereof) that remains the conduit through which experience is translated/understood? Why is it some psychotics only hurt others and not themselves during a breakdown? Why is it self-harm sometimes provides that balance, drawing emphasis away from severe mental trauma, a harming method that requires the human body stay alive, however maimed? And although I agree with Jimmy on the fallibility of our distant understandings of an event of a highly personal nature that contemporarily can only be a site for partial supposition and conspiracy theory, surely the narrative of your partner’s impregnating another woman is severe enough to imagine killing oneself. To claim her suicide after this was purely psychiatric is a fairly suprising assumption considering. I think this claim about biochemistry needs rethinking; Heidegger’s postulate that underpinning every scientific (ontic) position lies an ontology, a certain interpretation of being’s multiplicity, is worth considering. If science is as you say, without ontological presupposition, then Plath would have amorally been utterly unaware of the meaning of her partner’s new charge, perhaps would have protected it as a communal mother as member of a pack, or simply assaulted her female competition if she ever approached her and Hughes’s territory, or perhaps, given the manic propensities, killed the child. Surely the amorality of science would have translated as this if biochemistry is as you say. Surely a certain current in history could help us explain the suicide. The famous, like Hunter Thompson or Kurt Cobain, when losing an aspect of the formerly, seemingly invulnerable aspect of their control over life (fame must give you, as is evidenced, a narcissistic, irrational sense of control over existence, how your creative spew can make a temporary world) especially those characteristics that can’t be won back (Thompson’s coruscating, incisive journalistic mind; Cobain’s cult status as rock experimentalist now faded into pop dust) sometimes kill themselves at these junctures. Plath no longer had Hughes as her own, surely that is a momentous, worthy tragedy that would wreck-ball anyone’s biochemical equanimity. Surely.
“Every brain is the crossroads of many narratives, many happenings. I’d say biochemistry does need a narrative…” Well said, Tim. The unfortunate implication of your biochemical postulate, Jimmy, is that the teleological endpoint of such a claim is that, “she would have eventually topped herself,” if you are in fact right about it being 100% brain-chemical. This is not to say you aren’t right about instability, a propensity to breakdowns. Tim has the answer I think. Don’t we all have some kind of biochemical stability (or lack thereof) that remains the conduit through which experience is translated/understood? Why is it some psychotics only hurt others and not themselves during a breakdown? Why is it self-harm sometimes provides that balance, drawing emphasis away from severe mental trauma, a harming method that requires the human body stay alive, however maimed? And although I agree with Jimmy on the fallibility of our distant understandings of an event of a highly personal nature that contemporarily can only be a site for partial supposition and conspiracy theory, surely the narrative of your partner’s impregnating another woman is severe enough to imagine killing oneself. To claim her suicide after this was purely psychiatric is a fairly suprising assumption considering. I think this claim about biochemistry needs rethinking; Heidegger’s postulate that underpinning every scientific (ontic) position lies an ontology, a certain interpretation of being’s multiplicity, is worth considering. If science is as you say, without ontological presupposition, then Plath would have amorally been utterly unaware of the meaning of her partner’s new charge, perhaps would have protected it as a communal mother as member of a pack, or simply assaulted her female competition if she ever approached her and Hughes’s territory, or perhaps, given the manic propensities, killed the child. Surely the amorality of science would have translated as this if biochemistry is as you say. Surely a certain current in history could help us explain the suicide. The famous, like Hunter Thompson or Kurt Cobain, when losing an aspect of the formerly, seemingly invulnerable aspect of their control over life (fame must give you, as is evidenced, a narcissistic, irrational sense of control over existence, how your creative spew can make a temporary world) especially those characteristics that can’t be won back (Thompson’s coruscating, incisive journalistic mind; Cobain’s cult status as rock experimentalist now faded into pop dust) sometimes kill themselves at these junctures. Plath no longer had Hughes as her own, surely that is a momentous, worthy tragedy that would wreck-ball anyone’s biochemical equanimity. Surely.
Jimmy Chen is smart. I wish my handwriting looked like Ted Hughes’.
i do not believe in fate, i am no determinist. biology is a strong science, but once we descend under its silver mesh of syllogism, into people-ology, we find ourself in a limitless chasm. a person is a person, not a category. a mewling neurochemistry does not discern anything (but indeed can, i personally admit, present difficulties). i like the label: “labelless”. it’s fine to call a shrill patriarch a jerk, but it’s sad so many are compelled to state apellations of causality. a mind is complex, a mind is not a mold, it is a cloud. and insteada coulda-shoulda’s, i wish we’d learn: when you see someone sad, hold their hand, say something lovely.
Fair enough that Hughes’s leaving his wife doesn’t even call for “vindication”, that his responsibility for Plath’s self-murder is negligible in the light of her care for herself.
Jimmy, what do you think of Hughes destroying many pages of his wife’s writing?
the same as with kafka and nabokov’s estate, and other posthumous legacies over dispute — that it’s the family’s right to do what they wish. ted destroyed much of her work ostensibly to protect their children, but my whole point is that we don’t know, and shouldn’t judge.
Every time someone commits suicide it is because they had a psychiatric problem? A biochemistry imbalance? That is rather reductionist and obviously absurd.
i never said ‘every time.’ just saying that most suicides are from chronic/severe depression, which is a clearly diagnosed psychiatric condition. if you do the research, which i have, you’ll find that reactionary suicide (being cheated on, losing all your money, etc.) and philosophical/ritualistic suicide (zen, seppuku) or ‘logistical’ suicide (terminal illness, unmedicatable pain) is much more rare than the former.
“It is odd how Ted Hughes can finally be vindicated, as if such a pardon was ever needed. He had a severely depressed wife who killed herself, much like Leonard Woolf, except the former was also famous, so more meaning was attributed, relished, to their drama. Biographies are highbrow soap operas.”
These are completely different situations. Woolf had ongoing, severe breakdowns all through her life, and Leonard Woolf was, by all accounts, a good caretaker. In fact, he was able to help Woolf for many years and was a great stabilizing force in her life. Plath had two breakdowns, one when she was in her early 20s and then the last one, which was, at the very least, exacerbated by Hughes cheating on her and getting another woman pregnant, and then the marriage breaking down, which led to Plath ending up alone in an apartment with two small children in one of the coldest winters in English history. It was a depressing situation, and yes, she was an unstable person, but the point is: other factors contributed to her death. To say that “Nothing that happens to a person’s life can make them kill themselves; it is what happens, biochemically, inside their brain” is just as extreme as the people who blame Hughes 100 percent for her suicide. Suicide is complex and encompasses a lot of factors, and not all of those factors are pure brain chemistry.
That said, I do agree that no one should be blamed for someone else’s suicide. Hughes was obviously devastated. The situation really does deserve the word tragedy, and it is a tragedy that just keeps on going, all these years later.
so in other words you are disavowing your own post?
“Nothing that happens to a person’s life can make them kill themselves; it is what happens, biochemically, inside their brain. Biochemistry does not need a narrative. Science is amoral.”
any chick not worth dating is a big plath fan.
I think you make things too simple here. It might be nice and hygienic to divorce writers from their lives but one thing that was so brilliant about Plath is the way she broke down that nice, clean wall, muddle the New Critical paradigms; and one of the reason she has for so long proven so problematic to so many critics. The result is perhaps “soap operas.” There is something lowbrow about art that leaks into life; for serious art should maintain its autonomy. Plath of course was very interested in soap operas and other forms of lowbrow culture. I think it’s fascinating. And it’s interesting in Tao’s case too (a little less so, but still at least interesting). I think Tao does a lot to muddle these distinctions.
Johannes
to quote Lewis Lapham, in response to someone bringing a magnifying glass to Harper’s, “it’s called rhetoric.”
that is well said joy, however, ‘shit like that happens all the time’ to both women and men, and people don’t all kill themselves. my goal is simply to attribute her suicide to something deeper than environment; but yes, i do see how she got fucked over
well then, thanks for being another idiot.
not everyone can be super rad like you steven pine!
i like how you aren’t really concerned with suicide, but concerned with proving you are semantically superior.
you won. good job. jimmy didn’t write it perfectly.
he’s an idiot. thank you for being the champion of nothing.
something tells me you aren’t being sincere when you say thanks.
He is an idiot for hiding in rhetoric. And I am concerned with suicide, the first thing I wrote was, more or less, what others are writing, that suicide cannot be reduced to amoral science. Chen’s post is weak writing originating from weak thoughts.
And thanks, I’ll take champion of nothing, but I still don’t feel super rad -_-
to quote Billy Joe Armstrong, in response to our nation’s current milieu, “don’t want to be an american idiot.”
Not sure I agree with the separation between what happens to the person and the brain. There are complicated intersections and interactions. Every brain is the crossroads of many narratives, many happenings. I’d say biochemistry does need a narrative…it is just not one we know enough how to tell. That is why the clinical concepts shift over time, historically. The DSM IV gives way to the V to the VI and so on ad infinitum. But we base diagnoses, clinical ones, on observed behavior, not merely by taking a census of neurotransmitters and peptides. We cluster characteristics in a very story-like fashion and we give that a label. We name an antagonist–Wellbutrin, Ritalin–to those behaviors, a drug which reshapes brain, but we note and appraise that shift in terms of behaviors: more story.
re: “Biochemistry does not need a narrative. Science is amoral.”
cf. Sam Harris’ “The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values”
Notwithstanding eloquent rebuttals, such as this: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/books/review/Appiah-t.html?_r=2&ref=review&pagewanted=print
Jimmy, not at all “the same”![many redundant exclamation marks signifying excited disagreement]
Kafka left unpublished stories (he had published quite a few, as is little remembered) and three unfinished novels that he’d asked a friend (no quarrel: practically “family”) to destroy. That friend, Brod, reckoning (I’m guessing) his friend’s express wish to be in accordance with his friend’s disappointment(s) in life and distraction at his own morbidity, and against the quality of those texts, and decided that Kafka’s wish was ill-considered and that it would be more of a violation to obey it than to go against it.
To me, it’s selfish, but not simply selfish, “to judge” that Brod did well. (You’ll note that we know what Kafka’d asked of Brod – Brod didn’t hide his misexecution of Kafka’s wish.)
Plath’s case is different. As far as I’ve heard, she never left instructions concerning her estate – whatever whoever actually handled the paper decided to do was, more than in Brod’s case, their own decision, especially – Hughes being the relevant “whoever” – with the material she wrote after she and Hughes were split.
While he had paper materially in his hand, of course, any choice was ‘his’ to make, but I don’t think the decision was his in the way that he seized it. You know, one builds a bridge or fits a pipe or shoots an enemy, and the consequences are ‘here’ after that person checks out of the big hotel. It might sound, what, totalitarianly possessive, but I think the community owned whatever Plath left – perhaps excluding only personal letters, and even then . . .
By burning the work of whom had become a brilliant poet, Hughes did a Really Destructive Thing, in my view, and the special pleading of ‘I did it for the kids‘ – bah.
I’m pretty sure you’ve heard this argument x to the nth times, but willing oneself not “to judge” is judgement in the form of permission.
But even in the case of reactionary suicide, doesn’t it still come down to psychiatry? If two people go through the exact same trauma, they can still react to the situation differently, according to how their brain works. So really, if we’re talking about voluntary (not logistical or socially-based) suicide, it’s not “reductionist” to say it’s due to a psychiatric condition.
Right?
i’m tired. i hate how i inherit the obligation to “fight” after any post i make, to defend my writing, with its inherent cracks, against those who seek to exploit such cracks. an essay is an opinion rhetorically veiled as truth, that’s all. on a blog, it’s not even an essay, but a…blog post. i’m tired
I’m a big Plath fan, so I guess the chok lit newtons weren’t from you.
“Every brain is the crossroads of many narratives, many happenings. I’d say biochemistry does need a narrative…” Well said, Tim. The unfortunate implication of your biochemical postulate, Jimmy, is that the teleological endpoint of such a claim is that, “she would have eventually topped herself,” if you are in fact right about it being 100% brain-chemical. This is not to say you aren’t right about instability, a propensity to breakdowns. Tim has the answer I think. Don’t we all have some kind of biochemical stability (or lack thereof) that remains the conduit through which experience is translated/understood? Why is it some psychotics only hurt others and not themselves during a breakdown? Why is it self-harm sometimes provides that balance, drawing emphasis away from severe mental trauma, a harming method that requires the human body stay alive, however maimed? And although I agree with Jimmy on the fallibility of our distant understandings of an event of a highly personal nature that contemporarily can only be a site for partial supposition and conspiracy theory, surely the narrative of your partner’s impregnating another woman is severe enough to imagine killing oneself. To claim her suicide after this was purely psychiatric is a fairly suprising assumption considering. I think this claim about biochemistry needs rethinking; Heidegger’s postulate that underpinning every scientific (ontic) position lies an ontology, a certain interpretation of being’s multiplicity, is worth considering. If science is as you say, without ontological presupposition, then Plath would have amorally been utterly unaware of the meaning of her partner’s new charge, perhaps would have protected it as a communal mother as member of a pack, or simply assaulted her female competition if she ever approached her and Hughes’s territory, or perhaps, given the manic propensities, killed the child. Surely the amorality of science would have translated as this if biochemistry is as you say. Surely a certain current in history could help us explain the suicide. The famous, like Hunter Thompson or Kurt Cobain, when losing an aspect of the formerly, seemingly invulnerable aspect of their control over life (fame must give you, as is evidenced, a narcissistic, irrational sense of control over existence, how your creative spew can make a temporary world) especially those characteristics that can’t be won back (Thompson’s coruscating, incisive journalistic mind; Cobain’s cult status as rock experimentalist now faded into pop dust) sometimes kill themselves at these junctures. Plath no longer had Hughes as her own, surely that is a momentous, worthy tragedy that would wreck-ball anyone’s biochemical equanimity. Surely.
Ok. It is a “blog post” – wagging a thread-tail.
I think you’re right that blaming someone for someone else’s suicide is often specious. (Of course, it’s an . . . exciting topic.) I also think Hughes did a violent, crazy thing in destroying another poet’s notebook.
No “inherit”, no “obligation”, no “‘fight'” (from me, here), no “cracks”, no “exploit”. Plenty of rhetoric – there’s a way not to be rhetorical??
Just – for me, here – a conversation, I thought: not unfriendlily proceeding.
??
jessica,
suicide is a learned concept.
you are missing the point by a wide margin.
no, the first thing you wrote wasn’t direct. you were being pissy and circuitous.
you don’t feel super rad because you hate yourself.
you know, dead god, this would work a lot better if you reacted hysterically and called me a name.
geez.
why cant you spel my naem right, tentacular-rectum’d bacteria-fuck
haha exactly!
I’ll bite, here is what I wrote:
Every time someone commits suicide it is because they had a psychiatric problem? A biochemistry imbalance? That is rather reductionist and obviously absurd.
How am I being circuitous, or pissy? What you first wrote however seems more pissy and circuitous to me:
not everyone can be super rad like you steven pine!
i like how you aren’t really concerned with suicide, but concerned with proving you are semantically superior.
you won. good job. jimmy didn’t write it perfectly.
he’s an idiot. thank you for being the champion of nothing.
~
First, the mocking tone is obviously pissy, and the ironic repetition of calling jimmy an idiot even though it doesn’t feel sincere is circuitous. As for me not feeling super rad because I hate myself that is more than likely correct.
this exchange made me lol and also think “oh, you two.” making my day on every thread you interact in.
I like some of the lines in this, Jimmy, but turning Plath-Hughes into a retort against “the Feminists” is twice as retroactively impositional as making the obvious point that Hughes was both a man of huge emotional intricacy and complex artistic field while also weilding a resolutely reactionary ‘family’ loyality over Plath’s life and memory – reactionary especially since he’d deemed such loyalty insufficient for himself and his own autonomy at the time he left her. Suicide is absolutely a philosophical issue, for biochemistry is a philosophical issue. If science is indeed amoral, then the science of amorality is philosophy.
i will play with you semideadgod.
i do agree Ted was a douche. Destroying another person’s work is mean and spiteful. But so is suicide.
Reactions of reactions.
My personal philosophy is that once a text is written it is no longer part of its creator: it becomes a living thing. Living things die. Its what they were born to do.
A lot of creators have egos, very large egos, and think counter. They probably think words are precious.
They aren’t.
Neither is a life already gone.
Those destroyed words are a life already gone. We can’t do shit about it. It is what it is.
But so is suicide.
As a comparison of “spiteful” actions, that’s to the discredit of Hughes’s magnanimity, to say the least. (He burned a notebook – in which, he says, his dumped wife made madly plain her emotions – in order to, what, get even with her for killing herself. ?? Don’t you wonder, just a bit, if Hughes wasn’t eliminating a problem for his reputation? – about which he cared intensely.)
a text is […] a living thing
Indeed: so a text is “precious” – in the way that living things are. In the l o n g view: if humanity survives, the day will come when the last person who knows anything about “Shakespeare” will die. So what did Hughes do? – he made one of those days come. The “life” of that notebook was “precious” – and less so than, but like, a human murder, burning it was wantonly destructive: to me, Ugly in a Bad Way.
We can’t do shit about it.
Truth. But it’s an occasion for thought about the stewardship of what’s worth doing shit about.
“If science is indeed amoral, then the science of amorality is philosophy.”
well shucks, that was beautiful. you win.
“That is rather reductionist and obviously absurd.”
Well, no. It’s true. Completely, unequivocally true.
People who manage a “reactionary suicide” are still chemically mixed to do so. People who engage in philosophical/ritualistic suicide are still chemically mixed to do so. People who are in unrelenting, unmedicatable pain or suffering through a terminal illness are still chemically mixed to do so.
Your brain is biochemistry, Steven.
Blaming Ted for Sylvia’s suicide is tantamount to pulling the ‘daddy issues’ excuse in a court of law.
Even assuming Ted is in any way deserving of our finger-wagging (for whatever reason most wags your finger), Sylvia gets her revenge by being a finer writer, in the end.
But she’s not so good I would worry about these things.
Though I read here all the time, this is the first time I’ve felt compelled to respond to this. As a therapist for 12 years, working with numerous suicidal patients for much of that time, and as student of Plath (I’m doing a dissertation on her), I find this post really poorly thought out — to put it mildly. First of all, everyone is at least partially responsible for every one else — the closer we are, the more responsible we are. We are not brains in boxes. No one exists in isolation. We are all part of an interconnected web. Yes, depression and mental illness influences people, and some of those people kill themselves. Some of those people don’t kill themselves. A large part of the difference between the two groups are the people who care for/interact with those with depression. Are you seriously going to say that all the gay teens who killed themselves were not influenced by how people treated them? Ted Hughes was a tremendous ass — constitutionally incapable of being faithful, as he proved by cheating on every single woman he was ever with, and he was a tremendous narcissist. Not only did he treat Plath poorly, he drove his next lover completely crazy, until she, too, killed herself and their daughter, who Hughes refused to acknowledge as his — because he was ashamed, mostly. The way he treated Assia, even after her death, when he refused to honor her will, or give her a Jewish burial, was just horrible.
dead god, i can tell you don’t have any ex-wives.
The comments got a little intense but I just wanted to I really enjoyed reading this post. I thought was very empathic and inciteful. that’s all.
I’m rationally embittered.