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BITTER FAME | PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Several of the finer poems center on Plath's obsessive relationship with her powerful father, Otto, who died when she was 8. In "The Shot," Hughes writes: "Your Daddy had been aiming you at God/When his death touched the trigger." Otto is called "The god with the smoking gun." "The Minotaur," another high point in the sequence, pinpoints the problem. It tells of a rage that Plath flew into when Hughes came home "Twenty minutes late for baby-minding" and found her smashing a mahogany tabletop that had been his mother's "heirloom sideboard --/Mapped with the scars of my whole life." Hughes cried: "Go on,/Smash it into kindling./That's the stuff you're keeping out of your poems!" This is amazing stuff. Hughes portrays himself as his wife's poetic mentor here; but he also pictures himself as the one who begins to unravel the skein that led to Plath's undoing:
The bloody end of the skein
Otto becomes the Minotaur lying at the base of the labyrinth, ready to devour his daughter. And he does. Another astounding poem is "The Table," which opens: "I wanted to make you a solid writing-table/That would last a lifetime." Hughes explains how he fashioned this table from a "broad elm plank two inches thick/The wild bark surfing along one edge of it/Rough-cut for coffin timber." Plath was delighted, even euphoric, as she sat there with her cup of Nescafé each morning, settling down to write. But always, it was Daddy who hovered, who beckoned from the nether world as his daughter wrote. "It did not take you long/To divine in the elm, following your pen,/The words that would open it," writes Hughes. "Incredulous/I saw rise through it, in broad daylight,/Your Daddy resurrected,/Blue-eyed, that German cuckoo/Still calling the hour/Impersonating your whole memory." Hughes gets inside of Plath's hauntings as only he could, discerning "the terror's goblins" in "Apprehensions," those fears that would surface and eventually confiscate everything that the young poet held dear: "Your wedding presents, your dreams, your husband." Plath's downward spiral into madness is traced meticulously, eerily, as in "The Bee God," where Daddy once again emerges to plague his bedeviled daughter. We also learn from many of these poems, as in "Being Christlike," that Plath did not relish the role of martyr:
You did not want to be Christlike. Though your father
Plath is ensnared by madness, wrestling with demons every day as she struggles to write. In "The Beach," another stunning poem, she is compared to "a migrant eel in November," someone who "lashed for release" and "needed the sea." The poem recounts one of many breakdowns that made life with Plath unbearable in the end for Hughes, who, despite his love, found himself helpless in the face of her misery. The sequence culminates in a poem called, ironically, "Fairy Tale," a terrifying tour de force. "You went off, a flare of hair and a plunge/Into the abyss," writes Hughes. In a dazzling finale, which includes such terror-suffused poems as "Night-Ride on Ariel," "Telos" and "The Ventriloquist," Hughes summons the specter of Death repeatedly, facing it down, evading it, coddling it, scorning it. One has not seen such ferocity in the face of extinction since Plath herself wrote the great death poems of "Ariel." Hughes is, undoubtedly, siphoning off some of Plath's creative fluids here. His tone, the kinds of imagery he evokes, even the diction, will seem familiar to readers of Plath. This was, perhaps, inevitable. But it seems justified in these circumstances. Hughes was there, and he shared the terror of her last years as she teetered on the edge of oblivion. His tenderness for her -- most explicit in "Robbing Myself," a gorgeous elegy -- is evident on every page. One begins to understand, for the first time, the nature of their love, and its tragic dimensions.
When the news value of "Birthday Letters" has run its course, and the volume takes its place on the library shelf, grateful readers will return, will linger in its pages. Poetry cannot be understood in one fell swoop, and this seems especially true of this complex, moving and unbearably painful sequence. It will take years to assimilate it properly. In the meanwhile, Ted Hughes has given us a huge gift here, one that has cost him dearly. We should rejoice.
Jay Parini, a poet and novelist, will publish his fourth book of poems, "House of Days," in April. His book of essays, "Some Necessary Angels," was released recently. |
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