From here on Hughes seems to withdraw himself from Plath’s imago, dreading in “Dream Life” her descent into the crypt of her imagination, and sensing the futility of his efforts to hypnotize her into courage and calm. She was, in his retrospective sense of destiny, preparing herself for the gas chamber. In “The Rabbit Catcher” he pictures himself once again trailing after Plath like a dog, trying to attune himself to her volatile moods. Prey to her hostility, he wonders if she is expressing her own “doomed self,” or responding to something “Nocturnal and unknown to me”—the closest Hughes comes to reflecting on his own culpability. Yet he capitulates to the “new myth,” as he calls it, which would take her back to her father—as surely as the beekeeping she performs in “The Bee God” as a bow to her “Daddy.”
Assia Wevill makes her fated appearance in “Dreamers” as a Lamia-like demon that entrances Hughes, who recovers the dreamer in himself by falling in love with her. The poem seems too pat, part of a mythology, but not part a record of what actually happened. A hard-pressed Hughes writes as though he can only succumb to Assia, “filthy with erotic mystery,” the antithesis of his well-scrubbed wife, who in “The Beach” sought the sea as a means of scouring away the dinginess of a grubby England still camouflaged in wartime grime.
The Hughes who said reconciliation with Plath remained a possibility emerges briefly in “The Inscription,” which reflects his confusion over the signals she gave him—demanding that he remain with her, or insisting he “vanish off the earth.” In “Night-Ride with Ariel,” he attributes her unwillingness to recommit to him as having been influenced by the constellation of women in her life: her mother, Mrs. Prouty, Ruth Beuscher, and Mary Ellen Chase—all of whom he labels jammers of Plath’s “wavelengths,” confusing her with their advice. Hughes adds his own rueful insight in “A Picture of Otto”: “I was a whole myth too late to replace you.” After that, Birthday Letters trails off in an enigmatic ending, and Hughes never comes to terms with his role in the marriage’s final phase. In Howls and Whispers, published the same year in a limited edition and overlooked except by a few scholars, Hughes addresses several more letters to Plath. This time he makes even less room for his own psychology and responsibility, producing unpolished work that is “excessively vituperative or self-pitying,” to use the words of critic Lynda K. Buntzen, who notes the poet’s “lack of control.”
Responses to Birthday Letters were mixed, ranging from high praise for its poetry and candor, to dismissals of its rather flat prose-like lines and exculpatory thrust. Some thought Hughes placed the burden of failure on Plath’s own Electra complex—although he does not explicitly indulge in Freudian explanations. In the main, Hughes seems to have done himself some good by finally delivering his own diagnosis of Plath’s life and death. In Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters (2000), Erica Wagner seemed to start a new trend in Plath exegesis, arguing that Hughes “honors the work and the person of Sylvia Plath. There is no greater gift of love than that honor.”
Diane Middlebrook’s Her Husband (2003) presents a meticulous and compassionate exploration of what the two poets owed one another. Indeed, Middlebrook’s book is the best answer to those who cudgel biographers with the assertion, “You weren’t there.” Benefiting from the perspective afforded by earlier biographies, and from a close reading of the Plath and Hughes texts, Middlebrook easily surpasses in insight the memoirists who claim the privileges of proximity. Eschewing much biographical speculation, Middlebrook seemed to earn even the grudging respect of Olwyn Hughes, who took issue with some of the biographer’s facts but also praised her insights. But Middlebrook, reverent in her treatment of Ted Hughes’s devotion to literature—especially to his reading of Robert Graves’s The White Goddess—ultimately lets Hughes off the hook: “Hughes’s marriage was the doing of the White Goddess, who had laid claim to Ted Hughes through the agency of Sylvia Plath: Hughes had no choice.” This sense of predestination suffuses Birthday Letters, absolving Hughes by making him no more than a figure in an allegory. Plath herself was aware of Hughes’s tendency to turn away from ratiocination in favor of horoscopes and predestination. In “Hill of Leopards,” an alternative title for Plath’s aborted novel, “Falcon Yard,” Jess, modeled after Plath, challenges her lover, clearly a version of Hughes, over his reliance on horoscopes to suss out human character. “It’s so deterministic,” she observes.
Conspicuously absent from Birthday Letters is any reckoning of Plath’s final days and hours. On 11 October 2010, the New Statesman published “Last Letter,” Hughes’s own coda, unearthed from his British Library archive. The poem, apparently never finished, is a departure in tone, which is perhaps why Hughes chose not to complete it for Birthday Letters. “Last Letter” is very much of the moment, focused on the contingency of events as he wonders about the timing of his last meeting with Plath—and why she called him, burned her letter to him, and acted as though he had somehow thwarted her design. She had apparently expected her letter not to be delivered on a Friday, but after the weekend was over. When Hughes arrived at her flat that Friday, two days before her death, she was upset. What did her note say? Did it announce her suicide, or was it just the cry for help that Hughes later mentioned to Aurelia? Judging by the murkiness of Hughes’s verse, his visit to Plath produced no resolution. Like all her other exegetes, he can only speculate about what happened. He imagines her phoning his empty flat. At the time, he was, in fact, bedding another poet, Susan Alliston, in the same building where he first bedded Plath and later spent his wedding night. Alliston was apparently a relief from Sylvia and Assia the two “needles,” as they are referred to in “Last Letter.” He imagines Plath hearing the ringing in her receiver, a scene reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe attached to her phone, simultaneously reaching out to and saying good-bye to the world she had wooed and lost. Just a few hours later, a telephone call informs him of his wife’s death.
Ted Hughes, who died on 28 October 1998, remained evasive to the end, providing no corrective to the myth he had done so much to foster, even as he decried its development—and never for a moment analyzed his role as renegade priest. Elaine Feinstein’s biography of Hughes, published in 2003, was not much help to Olwyn. On 25 May, Olwyn wrote to filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski, charging that Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet was “wildly inaccurate” and “gossipy.”
Ted’s daughter, Sylvia Plath’s sole surviving child (Nicholas committed suicide on 16 March 2009, after struggling with periodic depression), has adopted her father’s attitude, accusing the BBC producers of the film Sylvia (2003) of voyeuristic motivations, creating a “Sylvia suicide doll” for the “peanut eaters.” In 2004, in a preface to the restored edition of Ariel, which rectified the changes Ted Hughes made in the first published version of Plath’s masterpiece, Frieda relayed her father’s explanation that he had omitted some poems because they would hurt living persons, and others because they were weaker than those he added to Plath’s original arrangement. Frieda also attacked Aurelia, claiming that as “small child” (she was little more than two years old) she observed her grandmother encouraging Sylvia to order Ted out of Court Green. The Hughes Papers at Emory University include other examples of Frieda’s animosity toward Aurelia. And exhibiting considerable animosity toward the “strangers” who have possessed and reshaped her mother, Frieda describes a caring father who helped her keep the memory of her mother alive. That bond with him makes her disdainful of others who have enshrined her mother in their own pantheon. She is aghast that her “more temperate [compared to her mother] and optimistic” father has been vilified. Hughes never liked seeing Assia’s name in print next to his, and Frieda’s fealty to him results in turning Assia into “the other woman” in the preface.