31 JANUARY 1998, Page 42

They learn in suffering what they teach in song

Hugo Williams

BIRTHDAY LE 1 I hRS Iremember wondering vaguely why the Faber catalogue was shy of poetry this season. The first I heard of the shotgun publication of Birthday Letters, the Poet Laureate's 88 poems to and about his first wife, Sylvia Plath, was during the final judging session of the T. S. Eliot Prize. Newsnight rang up to ask if the winner, Don Paterson, could come to the studio to talk about Plath. I understood how Hughes himself must have felt over the last 35 years. No matter what he said, there she was waiting. The mystery is how he held off until now. He must have known he had a potential world-beater at his fingertips.

The publicity, eked out daily in the Times last week in the manner of the latest Diana revelations, can do Hughes nothing but good this time around because the poems themselves live up to the wildest expecta- tions. Just how good they are may take longer to emerge. At the moment, the sensational element works strongly in their favour, like an accompanying film running through your mind. The fact that you already know the actors and the tragic out- come of the story adds greatly to the fasci- nation. As one relives the doomed seven years of their marriage, from Cambridge in 1956 to London, Paris, Cape Cod, London again, Spain, then finally Devon, the sense of prying is ameliorated by the beauty and difficulty of the writing and the knowledge that something good has come of it at last, for this is certainly Hughes's magnum opus.

In September 1958, following Plath's term of teaching at Smith, both writers attended Robert Lowell's poetry seminars at Harvard. Lowell's influence on Hughes was never as evident as it was on most writ- ers of his generation, but he has called on it here to help him cope with a subject Lowell knew all about: mania, madness, mayhem. The handout tells us that the poems were written over a period of 25 years, the first a few years after Plath's suicide in 1963. We know that at least seven were written before 1994, because they were included, without much notice, in his New Selected Poems of that year. But the experience of reading them all together, while totally overpowering in the Hughes manner, sug- gests more of a sudden outpouring than the many (unhappy) returns evoked by the title and blurb. His method is the Lowell method of the Notebook period: tantalising documentary footage intercut with sudden visionary comment and interpretation from a bewildering variety of disciplines, from astrology to psychopharmacology. Mostly he follows the classic formula of leaning a particular experience up against a strong visual image, then letting them fight it out on the page under his tolerant umpireship. Dress: casual, come-as-you-are, heat-of- the-moment, get-it-down-quick, which pro- vides the essential air of vulnerability and spontaneity, as well as a very Nineties modernity. For instance, in the very first poem, he remembers seeing, before he even met Sylvia, a photograph of the Ful- bright scholars for 1955 in a window in the Strand and matches the memory with that of buying a peach on the same day: 'It was the first fresh peach I had ever tasted.'

An incidental fascination of the book is the post-war Britain, dark and austere, which Hughes is so much part of and which so infuriated and depressed his clean-cut bobby-soxer wife: 'England/ Was so poor! Was black paint cheaper? Why/ Were English cars all black — to hide the filth?/ Or to stay respectable, like bowlers and umbrellas?' It is in keeping with the period that we see a virginal Hughes lobbing soil clods at Sylvia's darkened window. There is a strong sense of the eroticism the younger country held for us back then in the year of Elvis and Jimmy Dean: 'Your long, perfect American legs/ Simply went on up' — a sexual power, which, when harnessed to a demonic nature, proved dangerous, as when she bites his face at a party: 'The swelling ring-moat of tooth-marks/ That was to brand my face for the next month./ The me beneath it for good.' In the poem 'Trophies' this bite comes from a panther, leaping through her at him: 'Little did I know/ The shock attack of a big predator/ According to survivors numbs the target/ Into drunken euphoria . . . 'In 'The Shot', Plath is a bullet with his name on it: 'Your Daddy had been aiming you at God/ When his death touched the trigger...'

Hughes hears a warning voice, but pays no attention. 'On a bombsite becoming a building site' (that post-war nowhere-to-go feeling five years before the Pill) . . . 'I heard/ Without ceasing for a moment to kiss you/ As if a sober star had whispered it/ Above the revolving, rumbling city: Stay clear'. It is a 'poltroon of a star' and he smuggles himself into her hotel. 'You were a new world. My new world./ So this is America, I marvelled./ Beautiful, beautiful America!' It wouldn't be long before he became 'a post-war utility son-in-law . . . subjected to a strange new tense: the spell- bound future ...'

Their differences start to emerge on honeymoon, Sylvia off in some 'euphoric American Europe' of Impressionist paint- ings, Ted locked into a Paris 'only just not German. The Capital/ Of the Occupation.' They visit Benidorm 'Just before/ It woke and disappeared/ Under the screams of a million summer migrants. .. ' where Sylvia gets a bug, 'a real ailment', and cries for 'America and its medicine cupboard.'

So much for the time-warp documentary thrill of the book (and that is barely a third of the way through). Mixed in with the facts and mildly self-justifying chat — 'her friend/ Did all she could to get me inside her/ And you will never know the battle I fought.. are shafts of phosphorescent insight that make any justifying unneces- sary. Lots of it is 'bad' in the sense of chuck-everything-in and see what happens, but that is exactly how Hughes gets his effects — through hurry and stumble, gaps and jolts and repetition, which mimic the mind's processes. Everything that comes to hand is thrown into the maelstrom as into some mad turntable painting. Every domestic detail is placed under the tower- ing metaphorscope of Hughes's vision until it yields up its horrifying dream-truth. Even a home-made rag rug is a snake Sylvia must drag out of herself. A wounded bat is nothing less than death itself. Perhaps this is what poetry is? Perhaps the burning subject-matter of Plath's extreme life and death is the only licence needed for such beyond-everything language, because suicide demands an explanation from those who survive?