Birthday Letters

Ted Hughes

This unit was prepared by David Eldridge, Hornsby Girls High School.

Simply stated biography means “a written account of a person’s life” and autobiography means “an account of a person’s life written by himself (sic)”. (The Macquarie Dictionary).

Read the extract from The English Studies Book which will assist in broadening your perspective and facilitating your exploration of this unit.

Read the newspaper article A Fiction of the Truth by J.M.Coetzee, (Sydney Morning Herald, 27/11/99) and answer the questions which follow.

Read the extract from The Silent Woman which provides an excellent insight into the nature of biography. Janet Malcolm invites the reader to reflect on the growing awareness that the author is not an objective adjudicator collating the events of a life, but a subjective agent of choice.

When Alvarez's memoirs first appeared in the Observer Hughes protested in a letter to Alvarez:

“There are quite a few things more important than literature - more important even than great poetry, let alone memoirs.” (The Silent Woman, pp. 155-156)

And yet the artist in him has published Sylvia Plath's works and written forewords and commentaries on her poetry. Hughes has said that he destroyed Sylvia Plath’s last journal, written during the final months of her life and whilst she was writing Ariel, because he wanted to protect their children.

Do you think he was justified in doing this?

Do you think the ‘truth’ is always more important than people’s feelings?

Do you think the value of ‘art’ takes precedence over the value of human feeling?

In The Silent Woman Janet Malcolm quotes from a letter written by Ted Hughes to Jacqueline Rose:

“Critics established the right to say whatever they pleased about the dead. It is an absolute power, and the corruption that comes with it, very often, is an atrophy of the moral imagination. They move onto the living because they can no longer feel the difference between the living and the dead. They extend over the living that licence to say whatever they please. They stand in front of classes and present this performance as exemplary civilised activity - this utter insensitivity towards other living human beings. Students see the easy power and are enthralled, and begin to outdo their teachers. For a person to be corrupted in that way is to be genuinely corrupted.”

Students should also read a letter Ted Hughes wrote to Anne Stevenson in November, 1989. It is quoted at length in The Silent Woman, pages 141 - 143. Hughes not only gives his reasons for remaining silent but he also comments on his relationship with Sylvia Plath, saying among other things, “that she never did anything that I held against her”.

An Amazon.com Editorial Review has described The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes as “a postmodern biography par excellence, which is less about the drama of Plath’s life and still controversial death than about their continuing effect on the living.”

What does the reviewer mean?

Read ONE example of each of the following types of text:

brief biography

review

feature article

obituary

How do the various types of texts represent the truth about Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Birthday Letters?

You should look not only at what is being said, but how it is being said. (e.g. examine the language features and how this influences meaning)

By R. Pope

It is conventional to distinguish between autobiography (a life of the self) and biography (a life of another). Conventional, too, is the expectation that autobiography will be written in the first person singular by an “I” who is both subject and object of the narrative, while biography will be written about a third person “she” or “he” who is quite distinct from a more or less invisible narrator. Often such conventional distinctions hold: the autobiography and biography sections of large bookstores are full of examples. However, there are also plenty of instances where writers choose to write about themselves as or through third persons (James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas are famous modern examples). It is therefore important to recognise that there is a continuous and complex relationship between writing about oneself and writing about another. The processes are closely analogous, even if not identical. Both autobiographers and biographers select and combine elements as they see fit. The result in both cases is “a life” (i.e., one of many possible lives) not “the life” (i.e., the one and only definitive life). Nor is autobiography necessarily any more “subjective” and biography any more “objective”: both can be equally (un)reliable and (im)partial. There is thus no necessary link - though one is often assumed - between literary fiction and autobiography on the one hand and historical fact and biography on the other hand. It all depends upon what kind of “truth” the reader is prepared to accept.

More generally, it also depends upon the notion of self and other in play. In PSYCHOLOGICAL terms, for instance, the self is split into a variety of roles: *conscious and *unconscious, *expressive and *repressive. In later Freudian terms there is ceaseless negotiation between the “I”, the “above-I” and the “that (other)” (ego, superego and id)... Meanwhile, in socio-political terms the person can be seen not as a fixed entity but as a changing and changeable identity ... Who “I am”, “we are” “and “s/he is” then depends as much upon social-historical conditions as upon psychological predispositions. Most pointedly, in a “them and us” situation, this comes down to who counts as one of us (identified with self) and who counts as one of them (identified as other).

For all the above reasons, many contemporary theorists and practitioners prefer to talk more capaciously of life-writing or use the slashed form “auto/biography”. Both leave open the matter of precisely who is writing whose life. (For much the same reasons, some postmodernist writers and discourse analysts prefer to talk of all writing as faction rather than some as “fiction” and some as “fact”... or of hi/story) as to suggest the radical continuity between forms of “story” and “history”

I take an autobiography to be a personal narrative distinguished from narrative fiction by the assumption on its readers’ part that it adheres to certain standards of truthfulness, and perhaps distinguished as well by an inspiration on the part of its writer to tell the truth. For that reason I take auto- biography to be at least an intention, a kind of history rather than a kind of fiction.

The kind of verifiability to which autobiographical narratives are subject is limited, however, since much of the time, perhaps most of the time, they will be concerned with events, thoughts and feelings that are known to one person alone in all the world.

For that reason, the element of trust on the part of the reader has to be strong: there has to be a tacit understanding, a pact, between autobiographer and reader that the truth is being told.

Such a pact is, I would guess, rarely observed to the full. There are many reasons why the writer should lapse. There may be actions or thoughts which he feels it is simply too shameful to make public, or which he feels could destroy the reader’s good opinion of him.

There may be things he decides against putting down on paper because (as he rationalises) they are not important enough (when in some sense they really are important). There may be things he simply does not understand about himself, or has forgotten, or suppressed.

There are also more complex and interesting reasons for surreptitiously breaking the pact. The autobiographer may decide that the ultimate goal of the work, the truth about himself, can be served by inventing stories that encapsulate that truth more neatly, more pointedly, than strict adherence to the facts ever could - parables, so to speak.

Or he may break the pact by deciding, from the beginning never to adhere to it. He may invoke the pact by calling his book an autobiography or memoir simply to create a positive balance of credibility in the reader’s mind that will be extremely convenient for him in his storytelling, and which, in the case of his more naive readers, may not be exhausted even by the time the story ends, so that these readers will go away thinking they have read a true history when they have read nothing but a fiction. All of which can be done in no particular spirit of cynicism.

The purest examples of this last procedure are to be found in the writings of Daniel Defoe. Most children who read Robinson Crusoe think it is the autobiography of a man named Robinson Crusoe. And, I believe Defoe would say, where is the harm in that?

Most fiction writers, or at least most fiction writers with serious pretensions, go along with Aristotle on the subject of truth, that history tells one kind of truth and poetry (that is to say, works of the imagination) another kind of truth. Secretly they may even agree that poetic truth is in some sense a higher truth, or at least a truth with more general applicability. The history of Alexander Selkirk and the years he spent shipwrecked on an island off South America tells us more about Selkirk than about us, we say to ourselves; the so-called history of Robinson Crusoe tells us more about ourselves than about Crusoe, if only because Crusoe never existed.

So, along with Defoe, we conclude it is no bad thing to invoke the autobiographical pact for our own fictional ends, and break it, even if we must recognise that the act of invoking and then breaking the pact time and again cheapens the currency and has a diminishing-returns effect that cannot be good for autobiography in general as a mode of writing.

There is another angle from which we can approach the question of autobiographical truth, an angle that I associate with Freud’s paper "Therapy Terminable and Interminable".

The intellectual roots of autobiography, at least in the West, are bound up with soul-searching and the confession of sins. The ultimate reader of one’s autobiography is God, from whom it is idle to try to hide the truth. In fact, there is no point in hiding the truth, since the autobiographical endeavour is ultimately for one’s own benefit, as confessing subject, rather than for God’s benefit or that of the confessor priest who acts for him.

Whether or not somewhere in the history of Judaeo-Christian religion there is a pessimistic heresy that questions whether the confessing subject can ever know about himself all that God knows, I cannot say, but let me, for my present purposes and in the spirit of the great Jorge Luis Borges, postulate such a heresy.

In our post-religious age the corresponding heresiarch would be the Freud of the pessimistic moments when Freud wonders whether the talking cure can be a cure in all cases, whether there might not be cases in which therapy is interminable, in which the therapeutic goal of getting the subject to speak the truth of himself is unattainable, since the time needed to get past all the screens of lies and self-deception would be longer than a lifetime.

I think it may sometimes be necessary to approach an autobiographical project in some such spirit as Freud’s: that getting to the core of yourself may not be feasible, that perhaps the best you can hope for will not be the history of yourself but a story about yourself, a story that will not be the truth but may have some truth-value, probably of a mixed kind - some historical truth, some poetic truth. A fiction of the truth, in other words.

Autobiography is very much about beginnings: how did I come to be? Where do I come from? Serious autobiography reflects upon the question of beginnings, realising that the beginning is a more difficult concept than may at first sight seem.

The most thoroughgoing reflections, at least in English, on autobiographical beginnings belong not to true autobiography at all but to a parody of an autobiography, Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, in which the vexing theoretical question of where to begin the story of his life fills the first third of Tristram’s book.

A story, says Aristotle, has a beginning, a middle and an end. An autobiography, by definition, does not have an end. As a story it is therefore inherently unsatisfactory. It lacks a shape.

How does one give a life story a shape? In practice, giving a shape to one’s story and finding a pattern in one’s life turn out to be the same thing. Is the pattern really there? Is a pattern something that resides in your life, that you discover by dint of introspection, or is it something that you create in the process of recollecting the past, selecting details, bringing them together, writing them down?

Autobiography, as we usually understand the term, has to do with writing and publishing; but there is a wider sense in which we are, almost daily, telling ourselves and others the story of our life, and in the process either discovering or creating a pattern in it. In this respect, autobiography is very much like history: a way of explaining the present in terms of its origins.

Autobiography, talking about oneself at length, requires a huge egoism. In 1892 a book was published in England under the title The Diary of a Nobody. Intended as a humorous book, it is less funny today than when it was written. But the very fact that I am mentioning it today, over 100 years later, points to an odd fact. Publishing your autobiography turns you from a nobody into a somebody. It makes you into an author, and we should not neglect the immense prestige attached to authorship in Western culture.

One way of becoming an author and ceasing to be a nobody is to write and publish the one story that you alone in the world can write: the story of your life.

Yet if on the one hand penning one’s autobiography may be the expression of a rather pathetic ambition to be a writer, the last and most desperate recourse of a storyteller without a proper story to tell, on the other hand it attests to a certain faith that no-one is really a nobody, that every life story deserves a hearing.

"I am commencing an undertaking hitherto without precedent," writes Rousseau on the first page of his Confessions, the book that laid down the ground rules for modern autobiography, "and in which I will never find an imitator."

This is not the first autobiography. It is certainly not the first confession. It is not even the first autobiography called "Confessions" (Rousseau could not have been ignorant of Augustine’s Confessions, though he nowhere mentions them). So if Rousseau announces that the book whose first page he is penning is without precedent, he must have a certain slant of meaning in mind that is not obvious.

I will never find an imitator, he goes on. On the contrary, Rousseau has had thousands of imitators - imitators not only of the project of writing a record of one’s life without holding back anything (which is what Rousseau will shortly say he is planning to do) but even imitators who will cite Rousseau himself as the model. The fact is, no ambitious writer, and certainly not Rousseau, would be happy to think that no-one will want to imitate him.

So again, when Rousseau says he will have no imitators, his meaning is less than obvious.

I know the feelings of my heart, he proceeds, and I know men. I am not made like any of those I have seen; I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better than other people, at least I am different.

Here we arrive at the point where Rousseau is, morally speaking, on the shakiest ground. He is still responding to the unspoken question, "Why a book about you, Jean Jacques?" The implicit contrast he draws is between people about whom it is justifiable to publish books, and people about whom it is not. If being different from everyone else is the justification you produce for publishing a book about yourself, then does the idea of publishing oneself to the world not put pressure on one to be different, or exaggerate one’s difference?

The imperative behind confession is to tell the truth; but is the imperative behind the kind of project Rousseau is undertaking to tell the truth about himself or merely to display what is different about him? In passing over this question without confronting it, is Rousseau not in effect saying that what is most different about him constitutes his truth, that truth is mere difference?

Questions:

How does Coetzee define autobiography?

Coetzee speaks of autobiography as a “pact” between writer and reader. a) In your own words, describe this “pact”. b) List the various reasons why this “pact” is never fully observed by the writer. c) For what reasons do you think a reader might never fully observe such a “pact”?

Why do you think fiction writers might “secretly” agree with Aristotle that poetic truth is “in some sense a higher truth than historical truth”?

Coetzee says that “getting to the core of yourself may not be feasible, that perhaps the best you can hope for will not be the history of yourself but a story about yourself, a story that will not be the truth but may have some truth-value, probably of a mixed kind – some historical truth, some poetic truth. A fiction of the truth, in other words.” In the poem “Visit” (p.7) Ted Hughes says much the same when he writes that the story of his relationship with Sylvia Plath is essentially two stories: “Your story. My story.” – thus implying two versions. Is Hughes saying that the truth is relative and whoever has the authority to tell the story is telling the truth? In other words, how can we ever know whether the writer is telling the truth or not and how then can we ever know the truth? This question needs to be uppermost in your mind as you read the poems set for study.

What is Coetzee saying about the nature of truth, or telling of the truth, in his reference to Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions?

The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm, pages 7-11

Life, as we all know, does not reliably offer — as art does — a second (and a third and a thirtieth) chance to tinker with a problem, but Ted Hughes’s history seems to be uncommonly bare of the moments of mercy that allow one to undo or redo one's actions and thus feel that life isn’t entirely tragic. Whatever Hughes might have undone or redone in his relationship to Sylvia Plath, the opportunity was taken from him when she committed suicide, in February of 1963, by putting her head in a gas oven as her two small children slept in a bedroom nearby, which she had sealed against gas fumes, and where she had placed mugs of milk and a plate of bread for them to find when they awoke. Plath and Hughes were not living together at the time of her death. They had been married for six years—she was thirty and he was thirty-two when she died—and had separated the previous fall in a turbulent way. There was another woman. It is a situation that many young married couples find themselves in—one that perhaps more couples find themselves in than don’t—but it is a situation that ordinarily doesn’t last: the couple either reconnects or dissolves. Life goes on. The pain and bitterness and exciting awfulness of sexual jealousy and sexual guilt recede and disappear. People grow older. They forgive themselves and each other, and may even come to realize that what they are forgiving themselves and each other for is youth.

But a person who dies at thirty in the middle of a messy separation remains forever fixed in the mess. To the readers of her poetry and her biography, Sylvia Plath will always be young and in a rage over Hughes’s unfaithfulness. She will never reach the age when the tumults of young adulthood can be looked back upon with rueful sympathy and without anger and vengefulness. Ted Hughes has reached this age—he reached it some time ago—but he has been cheated of the peace that age brings by the posthumous fame of Plath and by the public’s fascination with the story of her life. Since he was part of that life—the most interesting figure in it during its final six years—he, too, remains fixed in the chaos and confusion of its final period. Like Prometheus, whose ravaged liver was daily reconstituted so it could be daily ravaged, Hughes has had to watch his young self being picked over by biographers, scholars, critics, article writers, and newspaper journalists. Strangers who Hughes feels know nothing about his marriage to Plath write about it with proprietary authority. “I hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life,” Hughes wrote in a letter to the Independent in April, 1989, when he had been goaded by a particularly intrusive article. But, of course, as everyone knows who has ever heard a piece of gossip, we do not “own” the facts of our lives at all. This ownership passes out of our hands at birth, at the moment we are first observed. The organs of publicity that have proliferated in our time are only an extension and a magnification of society’s fundamental and incorrigible nosiness. Our business is everybody’s business, should anybody wish to make it so. The concept of privacy is a sort of screen to hide the fact that almost none is possible in a social universe. In any struggle between the public’s inviolable right to be diverted and an individual’s wish to be left alone, the public almost always prevails. After we are dead, the pretense that we may somehow be protected against the world’s careless malice is abandoned. The branch of the law that putatively protects our good name against libel and slander withdraws from us indifferently. The dead cannot be libelled or slandered. They are without legal recourse.

Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world. The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away. The voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity. The biographer is portrayed almost as a kind of benefactor. He is seen as sacrificing years of his life to his task, tirelessly sitting in archives and libraries and patiently conducting interviews with witnesses. There is no length he will not go to, and the more his book reflects his industry the more the reader believes that he is having an elevating literary experience, rather than simply listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people’s mail. The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography’s status as a popular genre. The reader’s amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole.

Every now and then, a biography comes along that strangely displeases the public. Something causes the reader to back away from the writer and refuse to accompany him down the corridor. What the reader has usually heard in the text—what has alerted him to danger—is the sound of doubt, the sound of a crack opening in the wall of the biographer’s self-assurance. As a burglar should not pause to discuss with his accomplice the rights and wrongs of burglary while he is jimmying a lock, so a biographer ought not to introduce doubts about the legitimacy of the biographical enterprise. The biography-loving public does not want to hear that biography is a flawed genre. It prefers to believe that certain biographers are bad guys.

This is what happened to Anne Stevenson, the author of a biography of Sylvia Plath called Bitter Fame, which is by far the most intelligent and the only aesthetically satisfying of the five biographies of Plath written to date. The other four are: Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (1976), by Edward Butscher; Sylvia Plath: A Biography (1987), by Linda Wagner Martin; The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (1991), by Ronald Hayman; and Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath (1991), by Paul Alexander. In Stevenson's book, which was published in 1989, the cracking of the wall was all too audible. Bitter Fame was brutally attacked, and Anne Stevenson herself was pilloried; the book became known and continues to be known in the Plath world as a “bad” book. The misdeed for which Stevenson could not be forgiven was to hesitate before the keyhole. “Any biography of Sylvia Plath written during the lifetimes of her family and friends must take their vulnerability into consideration, even if completeness suffers from it,” she wrote in her preface. This is a most remarkable—in fact, a thoroughly subversive—statement for a biographer to make. To take vulnerability into consideration! To show compunction! To spare feelings! To not push as far as one can! What is the woman thinking of? The biographer's business, like the journalist's, is to satisfy the reader's curiosity, not to place limits on it. He is supposed to go out and bring back the goods—the malevolent secrets that have been quietly burning in archives and libraries and in the minds of contemporaries who have been biding their time, waiting for the biographer’s knock on their doors. Some of the secrets are difficult to bring away, and some, jealously guarded by relatives, are even impossible. Relatives are the biographer’s natural enemies; they are like the hostile tribes an explorer encounters and must ruthlessly subdue to claim his territory. If the relatives behave like friendly tribes, as they occasionally do—if they propose to cooperate with the biographer, even to the point of making him "official" or "authorized"—he still has to assert his authority and strut about to show that he is the big white man and they are just the naked savages. Thus, for example, when Bernard Crick agreed to be George Orwell's authorized biographer he first had to ritually bring Orwell's widow to her knees. “She agreed to my firm condition that as well as complete access to the papers, I should have an absolute and prior waiver of copyright so that I could quote what I liked and write what I liked. These were hard terms, even if the only terms on which, I think, a scholar should and can take on a contemporary biography,” Crick writes with weary pride in an essay entitled “On the Difficulties of Writing Biography in General and of Orwell’s in Particular.” When Sonia Orwell read excerpts from Crick’s manuscript and realized the worthlessness of the trinkets she had traded her territory for (her fantasy that Crick saw Orwell exactly as she saw him, and viewed her marriage to Orwell exactly as she viewed it), she tried to rescind the agreement. She could not do so, of course. Crick’s statement is a model of biographicalrectitude. His “hard terms” are the reader’s guarantee of quality, like the standards set by the Food and Drug Administration. They assure the reader that he is getting something pure and wholesome, not something that has been tampered with.

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