Elaine Showalter

Elaine Showalter
Talking about American Women Writers

Sunday, October 24, 2010

THOSE TWO OLD VAMPIRES



I was very surprised that the American media paid almost no attention to the discovery and publication of Ted Hughes's poem about Sylvia Plath's suicide, in the New Statesman  on October 11. The British press exploded with coverage and commentary, but American papers were silent save for a few brief notices. I wrote on my Facebook page about it, and Professor Dianne Hunter of Trinity College wrote back: "Oh, those two old vampires!" I guess in some sense Ted and Sylvia are the Great Undead of literary history, impossible to keep down, always resurfacing with some new poem, or revelation, or family tragedy. And this poem was never finished; Hughes left it  in drafts and fragments. It's certainly not one of his best; Al Alvarez, a friend of both poets, wrote with uncomfortable phrasing (considering Plath's suicide by gassing herself in the oven), that is was "somewhat uncooked."

But it's not uninteresting; on the contrary, it's a poem of personal confession and strong emotion. Hughes tells that Plath sent him a suicide note which arrived too early, thanks to the efficient London post office, he rushed to her house, and she assured him that it was not serious and burned it in an ashtray before his eyes. Hughes then spent the weekend at a hotel with yet  another lover, a writer named Susan Allison  (unmentioned in the biographies of Hughes by Elaine Feinstein and Diane Middlebrook)---in other words, he was already cheating on Assia Weevil, the mistress he and Plath had separated over. Yet Hughes's tone throughout the poem is angry; he is bitter that  that Plath had planned the whole event in order to torment and haunt him. The telephoned  news of her death is a deliberate, deliberated blow to his life and sanity:

"Then a voice like a selected weapon
Or a measured injection,
Coolly delivered its four words
Deep into my ear: 'Your wife is dead.'"

A weapon selected by Plath? An injection of poison she had measured? Is she the victim or the vampire?


1 comment:

  1. Hughes went not to a hotel but back to digs on Rugby Street he had shared with with Plath: "Susan and I spent that night/ In our wedding bed. I had not see it/ Since we lay there on our wedding day." (This sounds like regression to me.)--Dianne Hunter

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