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Today’s post is in three parts: A mediation on Sylvia Plath and what killed her. A tribute to the sexiness of Leonard Cohen. And a little flash piece I thought I’d throw in.
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
Name a male artist with talent and ambition who felt—from his earliest memories!—that his life would be incomplete without a woman mate of equal or surpassing power. In fact, he wanted to be number two! You can’t think of one. There aren’t any. It’s not how men were formed in the vast before-now and very likely now.
Sylvia Plath—an artist conned by the urgent female striving to become a number two—bagged Ted Hughes during a year she spent in Cambridge on a Fulbright. They met at a party in February, 1956, and were married in June. Between these two dates, another boyfriend of Plath’s skipped out of a rendezvous with her in Paris. When Plath and Hughes got married, they couldn’t be said to know each other well. They shared grand, mythic ideas about poetry and life.
In time he would feel trapped by her emotional needs. She would feel cheated and betrayed. He had affairs. She killed herself. At the time of her death in 1963, Hughes was acclaimed and well published. Ariel, the poetry collection that would anchor Plath’s reputation as an artist, appeared posthumously, so she didn’t taste her fame or see it eclipse her husband’s.
They split up after he began an affair with Assia Wevill. Wevill, too, after seven years with Hughes, committed suicide by gassing herself and their little girl. Following Plath’s death, battle lines were drawn about what Hughes did to Plath and what Plath did to Hughes. Almost everyone who has written about them has taken a side.
Today, in writing this piece, I'm not stressing the writing of Plath and the writing of Hughes. I'm not entering the blame business as far as individuals are concerned. I'm interested in considering how much of the fakakte ethos that did Plath in still moves women to take course A rather than course B.
I’m interested in the fraudulent concept of exceptionalism—the idea that individuals can lift off from the stultifying social structures of their times. We dwell on Plath’s lousy suicide at 30 because she was otherwise exceptional, an accomplished artist, but the things that made her unexceptional, things I sum up in the phrase “the romance of being number two,” are what killed her, as I see it. When we think about her story, we feel the ideas that killed her moving up and down our bodies. By “we,” I mean women. (If you are not a woman and feel this, too, well, lovely.)
Exceptionalism doesn't do any favors for individual women because it doesn’t do any favors for women as a group. Women such as Plath and many others of great talent wind up drinking the same Kool-Aid—about what a woman is and what a woman needs in order to feel whole—as all the other women who are unexceptional. Individual women can't create a different world for women. That comes only through the collective gathering of a movement for social and political change. A social movement isn't going to whiz bang solve all the tsouris of a psyche, and psychoanalysis—the treatment of individual mental problems—isn’t going to address the massive damage of normalized sexism and misogyny, especially because so much psychoanalytic theory normalizes sexism and misogyny.
Plath loved Hughes for being a big, meaty bloke, roughhewn as the Yorkshire moors he was raised on, as quick to kill an animal for sport as to promote his career. A handsome hunter, a poet Brando, an adherent of the Tarot and the occult. She fell hard. She was 23.
They were together five minutes when she went to work typing up his poems and sending them to publishers. In her diary and letters, she described Hughes as a god she wanted to put first. In domesticity as in pornography, it’s often more exciting to imagine a scene rather than enter it. In Story of O, for example, O works hard to be the best submissive in the chateau, and she winds up in a corner wearing an owl mask.
The Plath who decided to kill herself on February 11, 1963, had a husband in love with another woman. Her writing was receiving lukewarm reviews. She had two small children to care for, and she was facing a freezing winter in London. According to her writing at the time, she felt ashamed at her failure to make everything work.
In The Savage God, A. Alvarez, who knew Plath, contends she wanted to be found and saved. She died the year The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan, was published and launched the fledgling women’s movement of the mid-1960s. Oh, Sylvia, we all say, it’s right there, it’s coming, a way for you not to loathe what you are and we find beautiful. Will you listen to us? I think you will if enough of us show you you are already there. Ish. You’re there in the great poems in Ariel, where the speaker in “Daddy,” for example, says, “I eat men like air.”
Actually, you don’t eat men like air. You can’t. No woman can eat men like air on an individual basis. What might Sylvia’s life have been had she lived past 30 and entered the women’s movement as it was forming? That’s the question impossible not to ask about her life because it’s the only question to ask about the life of any woman. Hughes, as an individual man, is not the thing that did her in. The thing that did her in is the thing in the culture and the society they both came from that said, “You, Ted, you’re a god, and your shit smells like perfume,” and “You, Sylvia, are nothing without a mister god boy to serve.”
Had Sylvia lived long enough to enter the women’s movement, she might have seen that the grand, mythic ideas she shared with Hughes about what a man is and what a woman is were the last things in the world that made them extraordinary. These ideas were a dime a dozen. They were the zeitgeist of their time, the carapace of their reality, the episteme that individuals can’t see around the edge of, or, if they can, they come out feeling alone and doomed. Had Sylvia lived long enough, she might have realized that Hughes didn’t love her differentness from him—her interest in politics and autobiographical poetry, for example. She was never going to please him in these areas. Hughes died of cancer in 1998, and it doesn’t appear he understood the downside of being worshipped. He didn’t understand that if you find someone willing to surrender completely to you, in time you are going to feel contempt for them.
Until shortly before his death, Hughes remained silent about his relationship with Plath. He felt hounded, and he sometimes lashed out bitterly against feminist critics. He destroyed one of Plath’s diaries from the last period of her life and claimed to have lost another one. Even the people who hated him must sometimes have squirmed on his behalf as more and more details of his private life were publicized and the man felt himself disappearing into the public understanding of him. Who wants that? Nobody. He stuck to his style of impersonal, myth-centered poetry until, knowing he was dying (he died on October 28, 1998) he published Birthday Letters, poems about Plath he had written over several decades.
Ostensibly in this book, he was reversing his stand against autobiographical poetry—Plath’s form. He thought he’d made a sea change he described in a letter read at an award ceremony by his daughter Frieda: “I think these letters do release the story that everything I have written since the early 1960s has been evading . . .. But then I just could not endure being blocked any longer. How strange that we should have to make these public declarations of our secrets. But we do. If only I had done the equivalent 30 years ago, I might have had a more fruitful career—certainly a freer psychological life. Even now the sensation of liberation—a huge, sudden possibility of new inner experience. Quite strange.” [Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters, Erica Wagner, W. W. Norton, P. 17]
The poems show, indeed, Hughes has come to see private experience as a worthy subject for art. Unfortunately, he assumes the role of a hero-victim, blaming Plath for being so damaged she came to the marriage equipped with a suicide kit—a means to get back to and get back at her dead father. Hughes blames himself only for misperceiving his helplessness. In publishing this work, he may have wished to clear his name and set the record straight. What he showed, instead, is that Ted was going down still being Ted.
I’m Your Man
People say to me, “What was it about Leonard Cohen every woman wanted to fuck him?” I say, “Let's take the song, ‘I'm Your Man’ and perhaps that will explain.”
Leonard:
If you want a lover
I'll do anything you ask me to
And if you want another kind of love
I'll wear a mask for you
Laurie:
Great!
Leonard:
If you want a partner, take my hand, or
If you want to strike me down in anger
Here I stand
Laurie:
Not angry. We're good. Let's go with the hand thing.
Leonard:
I'm your man
Laurie:
Fab. Music to my ears.
Leonard:
If you want a boxer
I will step into the ring for you
And if you want a doctor
I'll examine every inch of you
Laurie:
Let's go with the doctor thing.
Leonard:
If you want a driver, climb inside
Or if you want to take me for a ride
You know you can
I'm your man
Laurie:
The car deal is really turning me on.
Leonard:
Ah, the moon's too bright
The chain's too tight
The beast won't go to sleep
Laurie:
Excellent!
Leonard:
I've been running through these promises to you
That I made and I could not keep
Ah, but a man never got a woman back
Not by begging on his knees
Or I'd crawl to you baby and I'd fall at your feet
And I'd howl at your beauty like a dog in heat
And I'd claw at your heart, and I'd tear at your sheet
I'd say please (please)
I'm your man
Laurie:
Leonard, get serious, like you have ever had to beg anyone for anything in your life. I know it's a song, but I mean, really.
Leonard:
And if you've got to sleep a moment on the road
I will steer for you
And if you want to work the street alone
I'll disappear for you
If you want a father for your child
Or only want to walk with me a while across the sand
I'm your man
Laurie:
I like the steering idea while I sleep. Really thoughtful. I’m going to take a hard pass on the baby.
Leonard:
If you want a lover
I'll do anything you ask me to
Laurie:
Yeah!
Leonard:
And if you want another kind of love
I'll wear a mask for you
Laurie:
You mentioned the mask earlier. All good. Very excited. When do we start?
Lake
Peter wasn't liked at the colony. He was aloof and maybe pompous a bit. I can't remember, exactly. His first book was coming out in the fall. One night after dinner, he proposed to a group of us a drive to the lake and a midnight swim. No one took him up on it but me. In the car, he said his father had cancer. I said my father had died. It was August, and a layer of insects hovered over the water. The water was the same warm temperature as the air. We swam through reeds, then into a clear space, really to say we'd done it and come back smelling of lake. We floated on our backs, looking at the trees and stars. Peter's book was about climbing a high mountain somewhere remote. He wore a silly sailor’s hat over thinning hair. He was killed in his car before his book was published and before his father died. I hadn't wanted to step in the mushy bottom of the lake. I'm glad I did.
A great piece! I loved the works of Plath and Sexton as a young poet myself. I did suffer from depression at the time. What a Rollercoaster ride it's been to concertedly rid myself of depression, stay away from men like Ted Hughes and forge a path far from the koolaid pushers. I hadn't heard that much like the Spanish crusaders burning all Mayan codices, Hughes had destroyed some of Plath's. I sometimes think that the greater suppression of women by patriarchy and complicit men boils down to jealousy that women can conceive, carry and deliver life. So they turn it around and treat women like chattel for centuries. And this subjugation of women works like a well-oiled machine to fuel the - what I call - corporatocracy. It's always great to come across an unapologetically fellow "woke" woman. Imagine feeling such despair about your circumstances that you decide to kill yourself. And stifle all that goddess-given talent.
Laurie, I appreciated this piece, and I’m not sure why because I’m not a huge Plath fan , but I envy poetry for its...everything. Your perspective here is beautiful and gives real meaning to the struggles of life (for a stereotypical female, as much as a stereotypical male). I think of how Plath may have responded to today’s world, with its kind of opposite problem of being unbound. Thanks for reminding me about the beauty of being human on a Monday morning!