Seducing the Demon by Erica Jong Read Free Book Online

Plath’s voice was already exultant. “Hardly a woman at all, certainly not another ‘poetess’ but one of those . . . great classical heroines,” Robert Lowell wrote. “These poems are playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder.” We had found our sixties Sappho—just after she leapt from the Leucadian cliff.

    Now the brilliant, bipolar Lowell is dead and so is the fierce, sexy Ted Hughes. Now the children he raised are grown. Frieda is a painter and poet who somehow survived her childhood. She gets to tell her mother’s tale, as is only right. The edition of Ariel published by her father was not identical to the manuscript her mother left, so at her publisher’s suggestion Frieda Hughes resurrected that manuscript, even giving us facsimiles of the poems in typed and handwritten form ( Ariel : The Restored Edition, 2004). We immediately see that Plath nearly called her second collection Daddy and Other Poems instead of Ariel. We feel Frieda Hughes’s restraint in trying to be fair to both parents yet tell the truth as she sees it. “My father had a profound respect for my mother’s work in spite of being one of the subjects of its fury,” she writes.
    The reticence of the dutiful daughter (Frieda is in her midforties) trying to make sense of her family history is riveting. Frieda is still trying to bring her parents back together again; all children of ruptured love stories want to. She speaks of the distortion of Plath’s character and work by strangers, and in her stunning self-control you feel her pain. “The collection of the Ariel poems became symbolic to me of this possession of my mother and of the wider vilification of my father,” she calmly says.
    The reference, clearly, is to self-appointed defenders of Sylvia Plath who never knew her or Hughes, perhaps never even read their work. Plath’s gravestone in Yorkshire was often defaced to obliterate “Hughes.” What a child named Hughes might make of this we can only guess. “Criticism of my father was even leveled at his ownership of my mother’s copyright, which fell to him on her death and which he used to directly benefit my brother and me,” Frieda notes. “My father’s editing of Ariel was seen to ‘interfere’ with the sanctity of my mother’s suicide, as if, like some deity, everything associated with her must be enshrined and preserved as miraculous.... I did not want my mother’s death to be commemorated as if it had won an award. I wanted her life to be celebrated.”
    I once took the brunt of the Plath industry’s assault myself. Talking about her poetry and suicide at the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in 1971, I was picketed by an angry posse because I refused to mouth the feminist orthodoxy of the time, that Hughes had murdered Plath. That Plath had a history of breakdowns in her college years was of no interest. My hecklers wanted to believe that a cruel husband done ‘er in, whatever the “facts.”
    And the facts were hard to come by. Ted Hughes was shellshocked himself, and wanted to hide. He was also in love with the poet Assia Wevill, who committed suicide in 1969; their daughter also died by her mother’s hand. Her suicide is often thought of as a copycat act (indeed, the method was the same). Reading about Plath and Hughes, I often feel I am watching a Shakespearean tragedy where most of the cast lies dead on the stage before the curtain comes down.
    Aurelia Schober Plath, Sylvia’s mother, must have felt angry and betrayed by both Sylvia and Ted. But surely she loved her grandchildren. Olwyn Hughes, the children’s aunt, was called back from her life in France to help raise them. They were miraculously alive, after all, despite the gas, and Sylvia was dead. What would you do?
    So the Hugheses walled off. They declined to let anyone reprint Plath, set Plath to music, novelize Plath, or perform Plath, except under their strict supervision. Three years ago, the Manhattan Theatre Club asked me