Hughes Vs. Hitler: The Absurdity of Keyboard Researchers

 

Early this morning, during my usual Facebook perusal, I noticed a particular comment on a friend’s post. Don Levy is a fine poet, and an active reader who shares his interests with others on the web. He’s been posting about a different poet every week, and last week his poet of choice was Ted Hughes, former Poet Laureate of the UK and widower of Sylvia Plath.

Hughes’ role in Plath’s suicide has been debated for decades now. An ardent band of Plath devotees has gone so far as to regularly chip his surname off her headstone, blaming him entirely for her sad ending. Whether these folks take into account her long history of mental illness prior to meeting Hughes is unknown.

Even here in 2023, Don got so much flack for his choice that he felt the need to apologize. Many people supported him, and made the argument for the work and the poet as being separate entities to be considered apart from each other. One gentleman however, with research on Wikipedia to support his opinion, declared Hughes a “psychopath,” and likened his so-called killing spree to that of Hitler.

Anyone’s suicide is a long reaching tragedy that affects many more than can be anticipated. To make Hughes’ case more complicated, his lover, Assia Wevill, lived with for several years afterwards, and ended her own life and that of their small daughter in a similar fashion to Plath. Hughes’ son with Plath, Nicholas Hughes, committed suicide as well, in 2009 and well after the deaths of both his parents.

Considering her long history of mental health struggles in particular, it is difficult to blame Hughes directly for Plath’s suicide. Theirs was a marriage fraught with struggles, the plight of artists as well as husbands and wives. Only those two know the full stories, and we are left to piece together the truth, or some sensible version of it, from diaries, letters, and most unreliably, their poems.

Certainly comparing Hughes to Hitler is an absurdity not even worth discussing with Professor Wiki. Hopefully his next source of “facts” won’t be the wretched Gwyneth Paltrow film of several years ago that exploited the agony. Surviving daughter Frieda Hughes wouldn’t even give permission for their poems to be used, and the producers were reduced to fictional Sylvia and Ted quoting from Shakespeare like starry-eyed freshmen.

Full disclosure- for almost a decade I was the host of an annual event I called, “The Sylvia Plath Bake-Off.” Looking to draw attention to a monthly open mic here in the Hudson Valley, I came up with several themes, and this one took off with a life of its own. I don’t regret the events now, although as I age I do become more acutely sensitive the pain that drove Plath to the oven. No one came in laughing about her method of suicide, although the usual levity was present, the same that one often experiences at funerals. Poems were sympathetic odes, not satirical rants. I have no plans to revive the series, although many remember it with great fondness. I am too old to find much more to ask of Plath and Hughes, having given all I could expect to my selfish cause.

The Thrill Is Gone: Bookstores and Me

          Back in the day, after college and before the lost decade I spent at Cosmodemonic Communications, I had a long career in the retail book industry. Beginning with a short stint at the old Waldenbooks in the barely-there Hudson Valley Mall, to three years at the dearly departed Ariel Booksellers in New Paltz, to a couple of years at Norman Levine’s Editions in Boiceville, books were my close companions, night lights of the mind, portals to times and lives I wanted to dip into without commitment, return to without hesitation. 

            I’m feeling lately like maybe I’ve read too many books. I can’t tell you the last novel I finished, or even collection of poetry. I used to spend hours in the stacks, happily pawing through the shredded covers for one treasure, a new poet or an old one I hadn’t read enough of, a magazine printed the year I was born, or even a few craft or cookbooks I’d spend more time reading than emulating. 

            I can still straighten a shelf up like nobody’s business. I remember dusting the fronts, the tops, filling the carts with new arrivals to merge into an already bursting shelf, and figuring out how to make them all fit. I knew the business. But who knew the business would change so drastically in my lifetime. I’m sure the clues were there, while I had my nose buried in Sylvia Plath’s journal or Allen Ginsberg’s collected works. The Internet. Before my current position, I had a final fling at the book business, and failed at my post badly. Unsupported, with a staff of just one (me), I spent my days alone washing windows, mopping the floor, making coffee, and doing just about everything but working with books. 

            The store is still open, and the owner is still breathing, both facts equally depressing. It was a used bookstore, but I was often instructed to sift through piles of buy-backs for books in good enough shape to pass as new. I spent too much money (really, money) on new titles, a mistake I wasn’t aware of until after the fact. The books were an afterthought, shoved onto shelves without thought or philosophy. Being fired was a stroke of luck, since I’d resigned myself to the mess, but the books were no comfort. They were helpless themselves in the murky wood and coffee grounds of the joint. 

            A couple of weeks ago we stopped at an outlet mall in Central New York, one where sneakers were the star. In the far corner was a bookstore of sorts, remainders and lesser known titles deeply discounted. Even with a decent salary, no longer having to rely on strips or bargain books to fill my shelves, I found nothing I wanted to take home with me. I knew the end of all the fiction, the rhyme schemes of the few poetry books on hand. I have plenty of cookbooks I already don’t use, although I’ve read them all several times. Even the books on CD didn’t interest me—what good is a book on CD once you’ve listened. I’ve no interest in the ghostwritten pop autobiographies, or the bodice-ripping romances, the simplistic craft manuals written for those who need written instructions for tying their shoelaces every morning. There was not one book in the whole store I was willing to take home. 

            I’m more interested now in clearing my shelves, my walls, my closets. It’s almost as if I’ve moved the library inside my head. I need the physical space these days to make some headway on the few projects I intend to go forward with. I have my Handler’s companionship day and night, so perhaps the books resent our drifting apart. But like old lovers, I’ll keep in touch with some, part amicably with others. Some will be dropped off at the thrift shop where they’re given away, because that’s the option I like best. Time grows a little short, and I hate to think of the clean up after I’ve dropped the body if I don’t do some of it myself ahead of time. It is time to pare down and focus. If only I can put down this Harriet Carter catalog… anybody need a wall phone with really, really big numbers?

           

Forever Plaid: Auctioning Sylvia

In March, the surviving child of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, painter and poet Frieda Hughes, sold at auction a number of her mother’s personal effects, to the tune of $551,862. The items included such mundane offerings as a yellow sundress, a costume jewelry necklace whose source is unknown, and of course, one of her mother’s signature plaid skirts from her days at Smith College. Hughes’ reasoning, as if she needed to provide one, was that being the last in her family (her brother Nicholas, an infant at the time of their mother’s suicide in 1963, committed suicide himself in 2009), she was fearful that the provenance of some unique items would be lost after her passing.

Of course, many do not live to provide the history of significant artifacts after their own death, and yet the information is passed on. And Frieda Hughes of all people has a right to seek some profit, after all her mother’s life and death have cost her. Little known is the fact that profits from the publication of Plath’s Collected Poems went to her and her brother, and not the so-called villain Ted Hughes. Yet, it doesn’t all sit right with me. A chair? A few bits of cloth? Sylvia Plath, like Marilyn Monroe, has transcended what fame she’d achieved in life to rise to a supernatural status straddling the literary and pop star worlds. The significance of these things because they belonged to Sylvia has multiplied exponentially, and their monetary value at auction clearly prove this.

I am not walking in Frieda Hughes’ sad, heavy shoes. I can’t imagine what she remembers of her mother, if anything. To carry that legacy into the art world, let alone life, must be an unimaginable burden. She paints, she writes, but always with the specter of the giants that bore her hovering overhead. But I can’t imagine either that many of us would part with such personal tokens. An exorcism of a kind? Frieda Hughes is herself a survivor, and that is something to be proud of in this realm. How she does it is her business.