Daddy, and Sylvia

Middlebrook’s intention, it seems, is to popularize Plath and Hughes, to make them accessible — not a bad thing in itself. More than anything, she wants her readers to relate to her protagonists. “When relationships break down, the fault lines can usually be glimpsed by the way the pieces fall,” she writes. The literary criticism is in a similar vein — regrettably unintimidating. Of Plath’s masterful “Daddy” she writes: “Her poem assumes that other women were going to find in the nursery rhymes of ‘Daddy’ an explanation for their own love-hate relationships with strong men. The ‘I’ in the poem gives the reader a place to stand to get a good angle on the mirror. . . . It’s about a girl’s collusion with a man’s sense of entitlement to be in charge of her; and it’s a brutal work of art that — riffing on a single vowel sound and offending left and right — has a lot in common with rap lyrics. How many things can you find to end in ‘ooo’?” Elsewhere, the slapdash sentences seem flecked with a malicious glee: “In her abundant notes about their domestic life, it is the food that elicits the most sensual entries. About the joy of sex, not a syllable.” And more dispiriting, if extremely silly, are salvos like: “If Sylvia Plath had been hit by a bus during the time they lived in London, from February 1960 to September 1961, we would never have heard of her.”

The reason for the book, presumably, is the new material made available by the publication of Plath’s unabridged journals and in Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters, a collection of poems that came out a few months before he died. (Erica Wagner, the literary editor of the Times of London, drew from this same well for Ariel’s Gift, which appeared several years ago.) Birthday Letters was Hughes’ only retort to the kinds of people who protested his readings by chanting “You murdered Sylvia.” The tender, anguished poems refract what he once said in a letter to a biographer of Plath: “All those fierce reactions against her — which she provoked so fiercely — from people who thought, perhaps, sometimes, that they were defending me — were from my point of view simply disasters from which I had to protect her. It was like trying to protect a fox from my own hounds while the fox bit me. With a real fox in that situation, you would never have any doubt why it was biting you.”

Hughes’ detractors have always demonized him, figuring him as a domineering brute and Plath as a fragile genius. Middlebrook, to her credit, dismisses this — “Depression killed Sylvia Plath,” she writes sensibly in the last sentence of her chapter on Plath’s death, thereby dispensing with the Plathists’ most dearly held tenet. But by choosing to concentrate her analysis of Hughes’ poems on the domestic theme of “how men fail in marriage,” she ends up diminishing him. To Hughes, this biography might have felt like one of his own hounds going after him.

Her Husband: Hughes and Plath — A Marriage | By Diane Middlebrook | Viking | 361 pages | $26 hardcover