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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
Only they have nothing to say to anybody. I have seen to that.
Sylvia Plath, "Burning the Letters"
What was in those manuscripts, the one destroyed like a Jew in Nazi Germany, the other lost like a desaparecido?
Steven Gould Axelrod, "The Second Destruction of Sylvia Plath"
Sticks and stones may break your bones, But words can never harm you.
In his foreword to The Journals of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes confessed to destroying one of Sylvia Plath's "maroon-backed ledgers" and losing another. They "continued the record from late '59 to within three days of her death. The last of these contained entries for several months, and I destroyed it because I did not want her children to have to read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival). The other disappeared" (xiii). As Steven Gould Axelrod's comparison of Plath's missing journals to a Jewish victim of the Holocaust shows, many critics regard Hughes as committing an act of desecration worse than Hitler's burning of the books. Indeed, Hughes's handling of Plath's work has aroused endless critical fury, and he has responded in myriad ways--at times with scorn, defensively, at others with cool detachment, as if he were only her editor.(1) In a piece titled "Sylvia Plath and Her Journals," Hughes refers to himself as "her husband" when he describes the destruction and disappearance of the final two journals and even says, "Looking over this curtailed journal, one cannot help wondering whether the lost entries for her last three years were not the more important section of it. Those years, after all, produced the work that made her name. And we certainly have lost a valuable appendix to all that later writing" (177-78). Hughes the editor criticizes Hughes the husband for an unnecessary appendectomy on Plath's corpus.
Acts of textual violence or abuse, if so they might be called, were, as it turns out, habitual in the Plath-Hughes marriage, although Plath was customarily the perpetrator. Plath's biographers describe more than one incident in which Plath destroyed her husband's work, and Plath's "Burning the Letters" is about one of those times, when she pillaged and burned the contents of Hughes's study. A more covert form of sabotage and vandalism is apparent only when one views Plath's manuscripts at Smith College's Mortimer Rare Book Room. Smith paid for one corpus when it bought Plath's manuscripts but received tattered remnants of another body of work--that of Ted Hughes. Many of her final poems are written on his backside, so to speak: Plath recycles old manuscripts and typescripts by Hughes, and often she seems to be back talking, having the last word in argument. The friction between these two bodies is palpable at times, as text clashes with text, and one intuits Plath's purposeful coercion and filleting of Hughes's poems and plays as she composes. Even some of Plath's phrases--"The tongue stuck in my jaw. //It stuck in a barb wire snare" ("Daddy," Collected Poems 223) and her obsession with "hooks" ("The air is a mill of hooks" ["Mystic," Collected Poems 268])--may well allude to Hughes's sometimes indecipherable handwriting, clotted with a thicket of curlicues, hooks, flourishes, and, like barbed wire, backward, snarelike strokes. These allusions often suggest how a tongue, a feminine voice, finds itself stuttering to express itself in the presence of a stronger masculine one: "Ich, ich, ich, ich" ("Daddy").
If Plath's "rare" body is skillfully re-membered for public viewing and scholarly dissection, Hughes's seems at times hopelessly dismembered, scattered, and disordered. Her words are on top and one peeks at the other side, often finding her ink has bled through, indelibly splotching and staining Hughes's work. One cannot help but interpret Hughes's book cover for Winter Pollen, his 1994 collection of critical essays (some of them on Plath), in light of this practice by his wife. His photograph on the cover is defaced on one side with Plath's manuscript for "Sheep in Fog," covering him from pate to cheek to chin--an acknowledgment of how thoroughly he has been "overwritten" (humbly "effaced") by his wife? how hopelessly his own immortal body of work is inscribed/entombed with that of his wife?
One of the more striking moments of simultaneous entanglement of textual bodies and of marital violence occurred in Plath's composition of "Burning the Letters." According to The Collected Poems, it was the only poem written during the month of August 1962, when marital discord was moving toward the Plath-Hughes decision to separate. At Smith, there are six heavily reworked drafts of the poem before a final typed copy dated August 13.(2) Then, more than a month passed before Plath composed "For a Fatherless Son" (its title speaks for itself), dated September 26, 1962, the poem that initiated a phenomenal outpouring of creativity. By the end of October, Plath would have composed twenty-seven poems, among them some of her most famous: "Ariel," "Daddy," "Lady Lazarus," the bee poems. Against this later achievement in October, "Burning the Letters" appears paltry, both as an odd blip on the flat line of poetic activity for August, and because it seems so thoroughly embedded in biographical circumstance, unlike the poems she was about to write, where personal grievance is raised to the level of myth. Unlike these October poems, too, Plath did not intend to include "Burning the Letters" in her version of Ariel, and although she sent it off to The New Yorker and The Hudson Review, it was not published until 1973 in the collection of poems titled Pursuit, a limited edition of one hundred copies by the Rainbow Press.(3)
"Burning the Letters" is halting in its rhythms, enervated in its tone, and misshapen on the page, its unwieldy verse paragraphs alternating very long lines--"They would flutter off, black and glittering, they would be coal angels"--with short, blunt assertions--"They console me" (Collected Poems 204). Though it certainly fits Ted Hughes's category of "personally aggressive" poems, it also sounds weary and flat, as in its opening line of explanation, "I made a fire; being tired," repeated a few lines later as an excuse: "Love, love, and well, I was tired."(4) Instead of the incendiary rage that fuels a poem like "Lady Lazarus," here Plath is just fed up with feeling stupid, like a "Dumb fish" mocked by
the white fists of old
Letters and their death rattle
When I came too close to the wastebasket.
What did they know that I didn't?
"Burning the Letters" is, I believe, important precisely because of its crudities, its poetic...
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