While Sylvia Plath’s verse is peppered with allusions to the tempestuous domesticity of her marriage to Ted Hughes, he has retained his reputation. Beyond legal concerns, there are tricky factors to consider: the ambiguity of intimacy in general, the fragile and synergistic creativity of both poets, and the ultimate decision of the one who remained – Hughes – to destroy the last journal and correspondence of Plath, who didn’t. The sum of it all has been the calcification of two camps: those who do not see Hughes’s poetic genius as exculpating his behaviour, and the others who see it as exactly that.
Those questions have returned with the news of a hitherto unknown trove of Plath’s letters written to her friend Dr Ruth Barnhouse between 1960 and 1963 – with the last written in the week before her death. Amassed by feminist scholar Harriet Rosenstein, who planned but never finished a biography of Plath, they include correspondence in which Plath alleges that Hughes had told her that he wanted her dead, and that he had beaten her two days before she had a miscarriage in 1961.
It is, of course, as marital-fairness-championing literary historians will point out, still only Plath’s version of events. It is a version discredited with some ferocity over the decades: her mental illness, her pre-Hughes depressive episodes and her poetic (and literal) romance with doom and gloom have all provided ammunition. Even Plath biographers have sympathised with this view; in Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, Anne Stevenson declared that Plath constructed herself as a martyr in the marriage, even suggesting that Hughes’s infidelity with Assia Wevill was somehow provoked by Plath’s before-the-fact jealousy. (Wevill’s offer to make potato salad during a visit to the Hughes home, Stevenson writes, had been taken by Plath as an indication of infidelity.)
The he-said, she-said indictments of the Plath-Hughes marriage could be discarded, with or without the new letters, if they did not hold so many commonalities with so many other literary figures. Even a deficiently diligent survey of the male of the poet species produces a wealth of abusive poets with traduced wives. As Edna O’Brien writes in Byron in Love, the great Romantic’s wife Annabella’s desperation was “evident in her letters”. Not only did Byron torment her by repeatedly delaying their marriage, when they did marry their wedding night featured “a crimson curtain catching fire, a hallucinating bridegroom believing he was in hell and then pacing the long ghostly gallery with loaded pistols”. By morning, Annabella described “the deadliest chill having fallen over her heart”. Like Plath, she became jealous of the other claims on Byron’s affections and felt summarily tossed aside as he pursued new conquests. No problem for Byron: however poor his treatment of women, he remains “one of the most celebrated physical beings of the early 19th century, with the possible exception of Napoleon”. In 2015, the Telegraph counted his poem She Walks in Beauty as one of the 10 best love poems; in 1988, a New York Times column bemoaned the fall from fashion of the term “rake”, so perfectly embodied by Byron.
They needn’t have done so. At least where male poets are considered, what may affectionately be called “rakish”, but is simply misogynistic and abusive, is entirely excusable. Consider Robert Lowell, whose abuse toward his wife Elizabeth Hardwick is rarely mentioned in the effusive paeans to his verse. It is written about in Jeffrey Meyers’s biography Robert Lowell in Love, which describes how “when drunk or manic Lowell would become violent”; when he calmed down, Hardwick would gently remind him that “other men don’t hit their wives”.
Other men are also not poets, and male poets with celebrity. So long as they continue to dazzle with their lyric genius or perhaps simply with their celebrity, their legacy goes untarnished. While Plath’s depressive state may be the basis of her discrediting, for Lowell it was simply a substantiation of his genius. The double standard would make one mourn, if mourning were any use. It isn’t.
Last month, the poet Derek Walcott’s obituary in the New York Times barely mentioned allegations of sexual harassment against him, implying that they had been only part of the smear campaign against the poet’s candidacy for Oxford professor of poetry. Years earlier, the Times had reported how the allegations, made by a female student who received a C after refusing the poet’s advances, had been investigated and found to have merit by Harvard University. Lowell had been one of Walcott’s early champions, Hughes one of his great friends. What a coincidence; if she had lived, Plath would have laughed.
