Most Recent Photograph of That Guy That Plath Popped Out
(bottom right; circa 1962)

Sylvia Plath’s son died yesterday. That’s how it was reported, even by the BBC. The dead man’s name was Nicholas Hughes, not Plath, but in death we learn which parent really mattered. For the record, he was also the son of a poet far greater than Plath, a man named Ted Hughes.

Hughes has been snubbed and despised for most of my lifetime, on both sides of the Atlantic. The American response is typically simple-minded and moralistic: “He killed poor Sylvia!” The British scorn for Hughes is (also typically) bitchy and disingenuous. But the result has been a boycott of serious appreciation of his work throughout the English-speaking world, and so powerful in England that they’re willing to lose the services of the best man on their team rather than give Hughes his due, while cheering their cheesiest and most worthless literary lights, like the pitifully untalented W. H. Auden.

First, a little disclosure, as they say: Hughes was the reason I became a poet. Which, come to think of it, gives me a real reason to hate him. When I was young the only poets I truly loved were Browning and Hughes-and now I could do without the Browning. I had Hughes’s first four books memorized. I remember the sequence of titles, long afternoons in the Pleasant Hill Public Library, learning to worship the fauna of the British Isles with him: Hawk in the Rain. Lupercal. Wodwo. Crow.

Crow, of course, was his concept album, his jump into pop stardom, and it cost him, as those concept albums of the hippie era usually did cost their makers. He made his creed accessible to the hippies, too accessible, and entered a cheaper and more ephemeral world. But even Crow has moments of sheer magnificence (like “Crow Paints Himself into A Chinese Mural”: “the grass camps in its tussocks…the spears, the banners wait.”), nerdy male greatness you normally find only in science fiction or in the rare moments Stevens was willing to tell stories (eg “Page from A Tale”).

Hughes wrote like a young man. Not like a bombastic fool in the Whitman/Hemingway tradition, but a man who liked animals and gore-a normal nerd, in other words. This was a great sin in twentieth-century poetry. If you were going to write from your loins in modernism, you were well advised to be an exhibitionist closet case; if that was unavailable to you, you could try the Henry Miller schtick and stick to (apologies to French and Saunders) Raw Sex, because that at least might have the merit of offending the bigwigs. (This was of course gross naivete about the nature of the elite; cut to the young Queen Mother giggling, drunk, as Eliot tries to shock her and her equally debauched friends at a reading.)

Hughes, a respectable lower-middle class kid, was loath to talk dirty until Crow pushed him over the edge. He was happier at the zoo, enjoying the jaguars and the hawks. This was all wrong; it was too cheerful and obvious and gross.

To make it in high modernism, you were better off affecting the epicene voice of a very old man-say, Teiresias, Eliot’s official spokes-dotard, or if you were too randy to pull that voice off, like Pound, blithering on with cut-and-paste erudition made bearable only by wholesale thefts from Browning. Hughes was too straightforward and talented to notice these fickle breezes; he, like his friend Thom Gunn, did something very un-modernist: he wrote as well and as clearly as he could about the things he loved. This was unforgivable; it was a profound rejection of Modernism.

Hughes thought and wrote in the mode of an honest word nerd who loved what we all love: fierce talk and animals. A few plants, too; as with Hughes’s poem to a fern: “Like the plume of a warrior returning, under the low hills, to his own kingdom.” Hughes is an animist, and his pantheon, like the Egyptians’, is a zoo. Literally a zoo in some of his most famous early poems, like the song to a caged big cat, “Second Glance at A Jaguar”: “Skinful of bowls, he bowls them….” His most famous poem, “Hawk Roosting,” anticipated by decades Gary Larson’s animal-worship (“Birds of prey know they’re cool”). That poem drew a lot of flak from critics who found it too gory and too cheerful about it, lines like “For the one path of my flight is direct through the bones of the living….”–as if a hawk should speak like a neurotic Quaker, like Robert Lowell. I read that poem as a furious testosterone-poisoned adolescent and all but frothed at the mouth for sheer dark joy:

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.

Inaction, no falsifying dream

Between my hooked head and hooked feet:

Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

This was the language of everything a normal boy loved: the beautiful predators of the nature documentaries celebrated in words worthy of them for the first time. It was such a cleansing shower of un-morality, after being suffocated with the dismal quasi-Buddhism of West Coast poetry. The last lines of the poem constituted some of the very few post-war arrangements of words in this language worthy of the Nietzschean almost-world of Europe before 1945:
Nothing has changed since I began.

My eye has permitted no change.

I am going to keep things like this.

The utter flatness of those assertions, one after another, managed to find the “less and less human” voice that Stevens had prophesied, without being able to deliver (because Stevens was equidistant from every living creature, human or not).

What’s amazing, in retrospect, is that Hughes managed to be celebrated in the first place, not that he inspired hatred among literary people. How did they let that hawk onstage, in the squeamish world of the 1950s?

Hughes brought Darwin to Nature poetry (“Terrifying are the alert sleek thrushes on the lawn,/More coiled steel than living….” Without losing the forest-worship of the old island, where a squirrel could go from Land’s End to John o’ Groats without touching the ground. That was what Hughes wanted, dreamed of, and that made many breeds of humanophiles uneasy. His Britain wasn’t real because it didn’t have enough chip shops, false teeth and divorces in it, they said. That hawk of his was a fascist, a bloody fascist! (To which the answer is obvious: why yes, of course; have you ever actually seen a hawk?)

Ted in better days

Hughes knew well enough about the false teeth and soggy socks of the actual postwar Britain. He grew up in it, the son of peasants turned shopkeepers. Like most such people who’ve actually experienced that life, he didn’t much want to talk about turnips and tuppences-though he could, brilliantly, when he felt like it, as in his early poem detailing the wordless struggle over tea between a miner and his wife. To call up the early denunciations of Hughes now is to be sickened by the crude hypocrisy of rich kids lecturing an actual Yorkshire plebe on his duty to be more proletarian.

Beyond this was the whisper that Hughes took himself too seriously. He wrote about animals like he liked them; he had no interest in garbling his verses; they contained no in-jokes, allusions, or tips of the hat to fellow poets. He was suspect on many vague charges of the sort British people take very seriously: being up himself, not playing the game, being sentimental about things not on the approved maudlin list. And above all, there was a sense that somehow, he was a bad man-that hawk, you know, a bit too Wyndham Lewis, something a little too enthusiastic about it.

Odd, it seems to me, that moral objections should be used to suppress this particular English poet, when you consider the list of charges that could be brought against every other English poet who ever lived.

Pick a moral test at random-oh, say, Victorian poets’ response to the Great Famine. Start with Wordsworth, whose only comment on the Irish Famine was an irritated mention of certain namby-pambies who were following M. Necker in appeasing the dangerous, ungrateful hordes; Tennyson whose tour of Ireland took place in a closed carriage, and even then only after his hosts had agreed that there would be neither mention nor view of “Irish distress”; Stevie Smith’s little charmer “The Celts,” Spenser….but the list is far too long to finish here. Just google English Writer’s Name plus “Irish” and see how long your faith in the essential goodness of human nature lasts.

Of course, you’re not supposed to mention that, and if you do, you get, “Oh, not again!” An interesting reaction, because I can’t find anyone mentioning it at all. On the contrary; it’s one of those taboo topics so overdone and talked out that no one ever, ever speaks of it at all. A Wodehouse phrase comes to mind, something about “a conscience as tender as a sunburned neck.” And determined never to mention, let alone regret, its foul history, yet always ready to shout down anyone who mentions it with the cry, “Oh, we’ve heard all that before!” Next time somebody tries that on you, ask them where they’ve heard it before. The real answer would be, “In my head! Make it stop!” but if they’re forced to name actual published texts, they’ll say, “Uh…Terry Eagleton (that sad trusting fuck)…and….” And that will be the end of the list.

The fact is that, with the shining exception of Prometheus Himself, George Gordon Lord Byron, who can never be sufficiently praised, the Pantheon of English poets consists of provincial bigots with very meager talent. Name the English poets of Hughe’s generation who wrote some worthwhile poems: Gunn, Larkin…that’s about it. Contrary to popular belief and its own vast self-importance, English poetry, as opposed to British-Isles poetry-poetry by born-and-bred English folk like Hughes, does not have talent to spare.

Odd, then, that they are determined to ignore their best man. It can’t just be the fact that he took the laureateship, because here again we hit that strange double standard, finding hosts of English poets who took the stinking money and kept their reputations. (Everybody thought Andrew Motion’s zippy poem on the wedding of Prince Whatever-His-Name-Is was just Cool Britannia Bananas.) Something else is at work here, and in the best English tradition you don’t have a hope of hearing the real reason. Instead you get their usual display of misdirection plays, the old conjurers. Craig Raine recently published an odd, grannyish un-appreciation of Hughes accusing him of being less than forthcoming about his vile lusts.
It seems Hughes liked to have sex with women. Granted, this places him well outside the main stream of British literary life, but I had not been aware it was actually considered a crime, especially when placed in historical context. Hughes was, after all, the preeminent British poet of the 1960s, and there are rumors that during this period, there was a certain amount of sexual license in both American and British literary circles. Surely Mr. Raine has heard of these rumors, in that he himself was one of Hughes’s rivals for poetic prominence during that era? Not that he himself could possibly have been involved in such antics.

Raine differs from Hughes in another manner, of course: he never had a hundredth of Hughes’s talent. When the talentless outlive the great, such articles are inevitable.

What a wonderful thing it would be if some bored alien deity would visit Earth for a while-one of Raine’s stoned sixties Martians, perhaps-and let us borrow a machine that would rank writers by their real crimes. I suspect the pious crone Wordsworth would fry the circuitry, and other bastions of respectability score far into the red zone. But Hughes? What exactly is this terrible thing he did?

In a sense, what Hughes did that no one will forgive is this: he wrote like a man, rather than a thwarted nobody, and there was really no call for that sort of voice in English-language poetry. It had nothing to do with how he actually lived. As Andrew Motion’s biography of Larkin revealed, Larkin, the “watch-chain-wearing” representative of the Establishment, who wrote as if he’d never kissed anybody but his mummy, was having affairs with every female in the Civil Service. But he didn’t write like it. Hughes wrote like somebody who was getting off, and it didn’t go over too well. not what poetry is for. All these oblique moralistic critiques fed, on this side of the Atlantic, into a much, much simpler, not to say downright retarded, campaign of persecution that resembled nothing so much as a grad-school version of the hounding of Fatty Arbuckle. It came down very quickly to this: “Ted Hughes killed Sylvia Plath!” And his sentence was to be snubbed for life. Way back when I was a Berkeley student, I mentioned his name adoringly to an earnest Midwestern woman in my workshop. She recoiled and said in all seriousness, “You shouldn’t say his name.” I made some snorty noise of the sort overconfident young men like to make in front of earnest women, and she amended her advice with a final warning: “At least don’t say his name anywhere near Wheeler Hall.” Wheeler Hall was the HQ of the horrible UCB English Department, and she was deadly serious; she was trying to save my life.

It wasn’t the pedantic ferocity of the Hughes-hating cult I minded; that’s usually a sign of a healthy art. Like when this punk woman who was interested in me got right down to business on her first visit to my apartment by vetting my LP collection. After a few grunts of agreement she stopped, looked up in horror, and howled in disgust, “The STRANGLERS?” Now that was healthy bigotry, a sign of how much music mattered, how closely it was linked to mating. (Luckily, the next record in the stack was Crass, which almost made up, in her mind, for the Stranglers-though it’s the fact that I owned a Crass record which makes me flinch now.)

The problem with the boycott of Ted Hughes is that it had nothing to do with his poetry. As if anybody at Berkeley cared about that; the number of people on that campus who could tell the difference between good and bad verse…well, as they say, “One hand grenade…” He was a bad man; he killed Sylvia; they rested their case.

The fact that Hughes wrote like a young man, in a recognizably male voice, made it easy to cast Hughes as the satyr-villain in the big victim-melodrama of 1970s feminism, with Sylvia as his martyred virgin victim. (Of course, he was a villain they loved to hate, too, a Dracula many Plath-cult girls masturbated to”Kill me Teddie!”–but that never made it into the public discussion.)

Without that mass hysteria it would be impossible for any sane person to assert that Hughes “killed Sylvia.” Sylvia Plath, a lifelong depressive, killed herself. Hughes didn’t give her the idea for that; it’s laid out in loving, sick detail in her youthful novel, The Bell Jar. I yield the floor to the fine people at Bantam Books, who supplied this jacket summary to The Bell Jar, from which they have managed to cull a big chunk of female first-year college students’ allowances for several generations:

“A vulnerable young girl wins a dream assignment on a big-time New York fashion magazine and finds herself plunged into a nightmare. An autobiographical account of Sylvia Plath’s own mental breakdown and suicide attempt….”

It’s hard not to laugh now, at what drove those pampered Freud-steeped elite Yankees to suicide in the years of their power. Oh no. a dream assignment to an NYC fashion magazine! Naturally she wants to die! I guess she had, um, “fear of success” or one of those other 70s syndromes that go along with a rising market, and vanish instantly once good ol’ fear of poverty and death return to slap us into acting serious again.

I read the Bell Jar back in its glory days, hating its pampered heroine on every page. The suicide attempt is the high point of the novel, its climax, and I use that word advisedly. By her teens, Sylvia was more than half in love with easeful death. She was head over heels for the man in black. If you redid those old “Death and the Maiden” paintings with Sylvia as the maid in question, they’d have to show a sturdy college girl yanking the old skel out of his recliner to dance down the path with her, while he grumbles that Wheel of Fortune is coming on, can’t she wait?

So, to belabor the obvious (the kind of obvious nobody ever mentions), when she first tried suicide, Plath had never even heard of Ted fucking Hughes, let alone been driven to her death by the heartless cad. Death was her first love and the love of her life; she just tried out sex with mortal men before going back to her main squeeze for good-and poor Hughes was the patsy she chose.

The story went that Ted drove her to her death with his affairs. Another insane lie by people who must know they’re lying. It was the Sixties! At a university campus! In the fucking, and I do mean fucking, English Department! Every heterosexual male on every university campus in the English-speaking world with the possible exception of New Zealand was under constant siege by eager female students who wanted to check off the “picaresque adventure #17: Affair with Professor/Poet” from their to-do lists. I remember a certain wizened Berkeley prof of my acquaintance, a malign dwarf who vaguely resembled Woody Allen but was even sicker than the Manhattan cradle robber waxing nostalgic about the hordes of gorgeous students who threw themselves at him back in the Bergman era. You were supposed to be having affairs left and right. Those were the rules, and they applied to men and women. If Sylvia didn’t console herself with affairs to match Ted’s, there’s a simple reason: she was already involved with the guy with the scythe and not interested in men with a pulse.

No doubt she had clinical depression, a condition I understand all too well. Indeed, the fact that “her” son just killed himself suggests-unless we want to blame this one on Ted too-that depression ran in her family. It usually does. It fucking gallops in mine. So fine, OK; just don’t keep saying that it was all Hughes’s fault.

Of course Hughes’s next wife killed herself as well, and their daughter too. This is supposed to prove that he was some kind of telepathic Blackbeard who got his wives to kill themselves. What it really proves is (a) most of the people in poetry during that time were unstable, to put it mildly; (b) Hughes liked’em crazy; (c) if you really wanted to hurt a man who was already wrecked over his ex-wife’s suicide, and you were crazy and selfish enough to take your daughter with you, what would you come up with?

And all because Hughes fucked around? If Hughes had not been promiscuous during that period, there would have been something deeply wrong with him, just as any American of that generation who claims never to have taken drugs proves that there’s something very wrong about him or her–either a habit of telling absurd lies or the fact that he or she was a hopeless dweeb.

Promiscuity was the norm, for men and women. I remember when I saw Hughes read his own verse, at the Center for Fine Arts in San Francisco. This was when Crow had come out and Hughes was as close to a rock star as any poet was going to get, so there was a big crowd, excited, way better looking than the typical poetry crowd. Hughes came to the stage, bigger and more impressive than I’d expected-he had that ex-RAF look that I thought only existed in movies-and before he could get started, this hippie guy stood up and screamed toward somebody several rows back, “You are still my wife, Karen! You are STILL MY WIFE!” His target audience, shall we say, was this tall dark-haired gypsy-looking woman who flipped him off and laughed at him while he ranted. Tough crowd, is what I’m saying here, and not always the guys who won. Martyred virgins…you didn’t see too many of those. If Sylvia took that road, it was because she wanted to. I ‘spec’ poor ol’ Ted had very little idea what was going on; that’s what usually happens when you play straight man to a suicidal drama queen.

He certainly looked bemused while the cuckolded hippie screamed, simply waiting at the podium until the hippie’s buddies made him sit down and shut up. I suspect he was bemused by Sylvia in much the same way. Ain’t nobody who can chew scenery like an American with a saleable symptom-I should know-and it’s hard to stop us once we get a head of crazy up. All we want you to do is look concerned and weep when we’ve finished our big threnody. And that, I think, is all Sylvia wanted from Ted. Odd, then, very, very odd, that we’re supposed to glorify her monogamous devotion to self-extinction while demonizing Hughes’s appetite for sex with consenting adults.

But we’re not talking about a great moment in Western intellectual history here, we’re talking 70s feminism, Victimology 101, a required first-year course. Later they altered the undergrad requirements so you could substitute a lesbian affair instead of actually Vic 101 for credit, and most cool first-years opted for the work experience rather than the course credit. But back in the 70s the taboo was still more or less in force, so for every one who had the good genetic luck or sheer moral rigor to switch to lesbianism fulltime and for good, there were a thousand who felt they had no choice but to be angry hetero victims, at least while in class. After sundown, they changed–but in the daytime, in class discussion, they were angry.

Literary fortunes soared on that stylized public anger. If you were a wealthy American woman with no talent, a massive ego, and a willingness to simplify the world’s most lax gender rules into a simple passion play where the girl plays Jesus, your literary future was assured, as shown by the lionization of a whole coven of rich, dumb American women like Erica Jong and Marilyn French (author of The Women’s Room), along with a dozen-odd Canadian ladies like Atwood who were included on the grounds that they were so mopey and sulky that they must be, at the least, fellow travelers, and a few genuinely talented outsiders like Doris Lessing and Jean Rhys, whose nihilism was overlooked because at least she agreed with the “men are bums” part of the group song, if not its second line:

Men are bums.
We’re better than they are.

(From the “Adrienne Rich” entry in the Brand X Poetry Anthology.)

By that time Sylvia was safely dead, suitable for canonization. Her poetry was often explicit in stating her preference for death over male company; that’s the whole fucking point of “Lady Lazarus,” for God’s sake. And as for quality-and I realize this is at best a side issue for most literary consumers-Plath’s poems are typical Whitmanesque boasting larded with the gaudy catachreses popular in the 1950s. They stink of the lamp, of the workshop, but they strike a simple and very imitable pose, like a good pop song. And like that song, they were worshipped for their ability to sketch a pose, an entire life. If you really like that kind of stuff, I recommend the lyrics of Iggy Pop, which do this sort of thing much better using about one-twentieth as many words-and with a great bassline, too. But of course highbrows will be served, and they were too insecure and pretentious to embrace the elegant simplicity of the Stooges, and far, far too soft to appreciate the real talent among man-haters, the great Jean Rhys. Those suckers always swoon for boasting with linebreaks, and Saint Sylvia was their dead poster girl.

She took the easy way out; Hughes lived on, through the miserable 1970s. The hippie era was bad enough, but this was when the hangover took over. A hungover self-righteous American crowd, a hungover bitchy Brit-Lit clique…you wouldn’t want to be judged by a jury consisting of that scum–but Hughes was, judged and found guilty of murder, writing far too well and too clearly to be a real poet. To these charges was added, much later, the felony of accepting the laureateship and thus attempting to climb out of those modest roots into which he needed to be shoved early and often.

Imagine living out a long life as punchline widower for a crowd like that. Hughes lived a long, long time in that foul atmosphere-he was a big tough bastard, after all, and the body doesn’t want to die. To the end, he tried to act properly, keeping silent on Plath until his own death was near, only then mentioning that he had been her nurse in a sexless marriage where all attention was focused on Sylvia’s sacred complexes.

When I think of him now I see him on that stage in San Francisco, waiting for the lunatic in the third row to finish ranting so he could read his poems. He died waiting, and was probably glad to be gone.

***

Buy John Dolan’s novel “Pleasant Hell” (Capricorn Press).

Read more: Nicholas Hughes, poetry, suicide, Sylvia Plath, ted hughes, John Dolan, Books, Fatwah

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