All men are bastards, the Irish Woman's Yearbook used to shout, and if you bought into that old chestnut, poet Ted Hughes was one of the biggest bastards of them all. Even though she'd once tried to kill herself, he left his wife, poet Sylvia Plath, buried in the country with two babies under three, and headed off for London with a particularly steamy brunette. Five months later, Plath committed suicide. That was February 11th, 1963. Since then, Hughes has stayed mute before a barrage of questions about his relationship with Plath - and allegations about his role in her death. Did he really love her? Should he have stayed? Had his leaving cut the last chord that tied her into life?
Gossip thrived under the guise of academic investigation. Hughes became a hate figure to some people. His surname, shared with her, was hacked off her tombstone, the daffodil bulbs he planted exhumed from around her grave. Appointed Poet Laureate in 1984, he published like there was no tomorrow, winning the 1997 Whitbread Prize and the respect of his peers, but still the whispers buzzed that somewhere, Plath lay hidden in his attic achievement, playing spectre while Hughes played Dorian Grey. Strange as life is, art can at times be stranger. Hughes's sensational surprise publication of the epic Birthday Letters - the best-kept publishing secret of our time - burrows into his life with Plath and transforms that story into one of the most exceptional correspondences of post-War literature. Dedicated to their children, Frieda and Nicholas, the book puts Hughes on the record in the form he knows best: 86 poems to Plath - plus two more - break his vow of silence and finally reclaim Plath as the partner, wife and lover of his younger self.
IT started with memory and desire, just as T.S. Eliot might have prescribed. Sylvia reminded Hughes of "the first fresh peach I had ever tasted"; Ted put her in mind of her then-adored dead father, Otto Plath. Later, the mix would hurt them both, her fatally, but that first night, their fast-andfurious attraction sizzled with sexual chemistry.
Knowing they were both hot young poets made it even better. Sylvia was 23 and a Fulbright scholar when she met Yorkshire-born 25-year-old Ted at a Cambridge party in February 1955. Already, he was reputedly the best poet of his generation. She nearly devoured him. "and I was stamping and he was stamp- ing on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hair band off . . . And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face." (Journals, p. 112) What Hughes recalls are Plath's "long, perfect American legs", and "the swelling ring-moat of tooth-marks/ That was to brand my face for the next month./ The me beneath it for good." (St Botolph's) And her extraordinary brown eyes.
Hughes had a girlfriend - he always had a girlfriend - but Plath was competitive as only a 1950s woman could be, her dating arsenal honed to military perfection. One April Fool's Day, she'd acted as her very own agony aunt, listing in her journal the qualities likely to attract men without antagonising women unduly. Sisterhood then was for siblings.
Chief among her sexual swat strategies were vivacity (that most precious commodity of the 1950s and 1960s), allure and a modestly-spiced wit. She practised zealously on a posse of guys who never quite measured up to the still-unarticulated vision of a Chaucer-Brando strongman in wolf's clothing. But when she met Ted, she peaked. By Bloomsday four months later, they were married.
Such a desperately good girl. She couldn't help it. Plath's form was to be Daddy's sweetheart, Mommy's apple pie and still devise a Phi Beta Kappa lifestyle. Her father Otto, an expert on bees, still sounds like a nightmare. His rigid, authoritarian, paterfamilias style dominates his wife Aurelia's account of their family written as the introduction to Letters Home - only by being pumpernickel perfect could Aurelia keep him happy. In Daddy, Sylvia makes him a Nazi.
Otto died when Sylvia was eight. She had tried to mind him, but not well enough, it seemed to her. One leg had already been amputated, and it haunted her for years. Contemporary photos showing the little girl in her pre-teen nurse's outfit are almost obscene when you consider the serious psychic damage their relationship caused her.
What made things worse was that Otto's refusal to consult a doctor - he misdiagnosed himself instead - made it inevitable that a treatable medical problem would prove fatal. In a way, he died of pique. "Your daddy," Hughes calls him, "the god with the smoking gun."
From then on, Plath did everything expected of her pumpernickel perfectly too. She excelled academically, won a guest editorship at Mademoiselle magazine, and was getting to know the right kind of boys at college when she was turned down by Frank O'Connor for his creative writing course. Her first suicide attempt followed swiftly.
In August 1953, she took an overdose at the Plath home in Wellesley, Massachsetts and crept into a bunker underneath the house so that her mother and brother Warren wouldn't find her. The police searched for her, but she seemed to have dematerialised.
Two days later, Warren heard a moan, and followed the sound down to the bunker where his sister lay covered with grit and bug bites. She spent the winter in a psychiatric institution, being wired by the fashionable ECT, and drip-fed insulin to keep her sweet. Those times formed the meat of her posthumously published novel, The Bell Jar. That first attempt was the start of her next life, one in which Hughes describes his role as that of "midwife". Plath acted as her own mother.