Narcissism in Ted Hughes

book Birthday Letters

At first, Birthday Letters is interesting. Many passionate descriptions of moments with Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath together, along with a few seemingly objective and discomforted feelings Ted has about Sylvia’s state of mind. But after awhile, a pattern appears. Ted is in a state of memory, and he waves his searching flashlight on moment to moment with propaganda. It begins to read less as poetry and more as finely worded cover-up. It appears as if Sylvia is the only one with problems, and Ted is perfect. It begins to be clear that Sylvia feels unacknowledged and demeaned by Ted, who is wholly concerned with protecting his own ambitious ego. What Ted writes is several layers deep, as he is a mastermind of persuasion with words. It is not easy to see what Ted is doing. He sounds concerned for Sylvia but presents no evidence of action for proof other than perfunctory care. Ted Hughes is the ultimate narcissist, charming and disarming. In Birthday Letters he reviews a life game he plays with his own wife, how the moves went, how he played against his own wife like an enemy, and how things did not go well for her — and, here is the kicker — how it sadly affected Ted’s life. What about the other life? There is no mention of any loss with Sylvia no longer living, no mention of what Sylvia lost or what she could have done with more time alive.

And your words like bits of beetles and spiders retched out by owls. …

One day, I thought, I shall understand this tomb-Egyptian,

this talking in tongues to a moon-mushroom. …

Never wake a sleepwalker. Let the blame hit the olive trees.

First, note how the subjects in the lines above are in Ted Hughes’ mind. Note the process in any line of writing. He is describing how he sees her, and never broaches how Sylvia might see things. In other words, Ted is saying Sylvia’s poetry is dark and talking in tongues and one day he will understand it — but in the meantime he says little because he doesn’t want any blame. This is antipathy toward another. And he is saying that her words are “retched out.” Hidden in this is the term ‘words’ as opposed to writing or poetry. He breaks her writing down to ‘words.’ This is open insult. He doesn’t say, “… and your poetry…” Now, to interject, if someone does not like another’s writing, it is fine to say so, but criticize another openly, not in subterfuge. Adding, when you marry a person — well, you get the idea — you don’t expect the other person to actively work against you, and in the quoted description, Ted Hughes is describing how he actively worked against Sylvia, his own wife. He systematically destroyed Sylvia’s dreams. This becomes obvious as Ted’s own descriptions are assembled in their energy directions. This approach is not literary, it is forensic analysis. The more one talks, the more the speaker reveals their true self.

It is important here to add: Ted Hughes at the time of events, while with Sylvia, was young and no doubt driven and ambitious. Not that this is any excuse, I do not intend an excuse to be brought up, but, would Ted Hughes had been older, let’s say wiser — would things have been different? Possibly, but then we know of the future and Ted seems to be the same with others in his life —  and in Birthday Letters. Think of the blatant righteousness Ted Hughes had to put in writing and in print his own fully explicated state of personality and character! He thought he was garlanding himself with roses when in reality he punctured himself with barbwire as he tries to escape and rewrite history, when in reality he exposes himself. Narcissists, by nature, cannot see themselves. Also it is important to point out that Sylvia did have psychological problems — she did attempt suicide before ever meeting Ted Hughes, and Sylvia’s father did die while she was young, and this is a known traumatic event for young people and one which will often have long lasting psychological effects. So, here we have the crossing of stars, a crash of fate, Ted and Sylvia. So, the point is that, even with problems, Sylvia sadly chose to be with a man who only fed the problematic psychological fires with his own psychological fuel. Don’t so many have an empty hole in their heart that they try to fill somehow? Art can no longer be discussed in 2022 without psychology being part of the discussion. Art is made by humans and all humans are various psychologies of some sort or anther. Many tragic events are culminated by more than one factor. Sylvia Plath had several, the family history, the possible chemistry problem, meeting Hughes, bad pharmaceuticals, divorce, co-dependency, societal status ramifications, women’s rights at the time, and possibly more. No one is perfect around here and this essay is not to sit around and merely bash Ted Hughes but to point how to notice narcissism in Ted Hughes’ writing. Here is a fair description of a narcissist:

“There is no true healthy communication and problem solving with narcissists. Narcissists run from confrontation, because they don’t want to take responsibility for their part in anything. They gas light, and manipulate the conversation. They bring the focus back on you, by bringing what you did wrong in the past. They get mad at you, for getting mad at them. Anything to take the focus off of them, and avoid taking responsibility.” - Maria Consiglio

Nothing I could think of could explain

your shock and crying.

In the above, Ted is saying that he has to think of something to explain Sylvia’s emotions — since when does another person have to explain another’s emotions — he is structurally saying that her emotions do not exist outside his thoughts.

Only maybe you’d picked up a whisper I could not hear,

before our glass could stir, some still small voice:

‘Fame cannot be avoided. And when it comes

you will have paid for it with your happiness,

your husband and your life.’  (p. 56)

In the above memory description, written many years after, Hughes describes, if true or not, Sylvia becomes suddenly upset while playing Ouija. Hughes projects backwards his view that fame will come for Sylvia, fame cannot be avoided, and that she will have paid for the fame with Sylvia’s own happiness, husband and her life. Written from the future, it is an overlay of partial truth — but what is missing? Apparently, in Ted Hughes’ mind, he had nothing to do with it, whatever happened. I am not arguing the issues here — I am arguing to show the evidence that Ted Hughes sacrosancts himself from culpability, and lays all the “blame” on Sylvia. Was Sylvia perfect? No. Does Ted Hughes mention his own faults? No. In my view, clear cover-up.

The style of writing in Birthday Letters is highly disarming. The lines are a breezy prose, raised up in a direct voice as to be personal, and address in a casual manner, to pull in the reader with convincement to agree.

These are tactics used by snake-oil salesmen/saleswomen, used car salesmen/saleswomen, and pathologic criminals. Narcissists do not feel empathy for others.

They coldly objectify anything and everything of any other person. And there are lots of narcissists around and often they are hard to spot, and again, they can be charming and appear as good people at first. There are lower levels of narcissists, people who are just dumb dolts and who will never get out of their own pea-minded world, but here we are talking about a person considered a worthy poet among literary people.

Sylvia no doubt had a psychological wound with the loss of her father, and it became her fate to get involved with a narcissist who no doubt sensed that wound and picked at that wound to make it fatally bleed — why? Because that is what narcissists do.

It is important to add here: Many poets are self-centered. Many poets have a form of Asperger’s syndrome of some level.

You weren’t too logical about it.

Ted Hughes, in the line above, is defining Sylvia Plath, boxing her into limited awareness.

You only knew it had come and had gripped you

by the roots of the hair and held you down on the bed … (p. 82)

… and bowed my head

over the thing we had found. Your dead face.

Your dead lips, dry, pale. And your eyes

 as when you gazed across that incandescence

unmoving and dead. (p. 88)

In the quote above, Ted Hughes is writing as if talking to Sylvia, and says, your dead face / your dead lips / and your eyes unmoving and dead. This is almost macabre. And it certainly lacks compassion and it has no respect. Read it for real in real time: ‘Hey, Sylvia, your dead face…’ There is something disrespectful in this approach.

At that time

I had not understood

how the death hurtling to and fro

inside your head, had to alight somewhere

and again somewhere, and had to be kept moving,

and had to be rested

temporarily somewhere. (p. 94)

Again, Ted Hughes says he did not understand at the time some such aspect in Sylvia Plath, yet he describes what he sees perfectly. Ted is contradicting himself. And again, Ted Hughes is not part of Sylvia’s life? ‘Oh, it was some inner problem she had — nothing to do with me?’

[A description of bats returning to their cave]

Those bats had their eyes open. Unlike us,

they knew how, and when, to detach themselves

from the love that moves the sun and the other stars. (p. 101)

Notice that Ted Hughes is describing, at first, how the bats knew how “…to detach themselves from the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” But — he does not say that the love is between him and Sylvia. He does not say, for example, ‘our love.’ The reader may be induced to read it that way, with the “Unlike us, …” but then the words go in the opposite direction. The “love” becomes general and impersonal.

I did not feel

how, as your lenses tightened,

he slid into me.  (p. 102)

The poem “Black Coat” quoted above, claims Sylvia began to see Ted Hughes as a psychological target for Sylvia’s traumatic loss of her father when young. Here it is important to add: this kind of trauma, loss of a parent while young, is real and may or may not be disputed as a factor in the lives of Ted and Sylvia, but it is possible. There are many books about support for people who lose a parent while young. Once again, Ted Hughes is distancing himself from the situation from the perspective of the future. At the time, remember the events are late 1950’s - early 1960’s, psychological help was not as easy or ubiquitous or as advanced as today, 2022. However, the narcissism in Ted Hughes helped exacerbate the underlying unconscious pseudo-attempt to resolve the trauma. This is summary, not clinical analysis of the situation. Take your pick of views, but Ted and Sylvia were surely a sad crossing of bad stars. In other words, if someone does have psychological issues to be worked on or figured out, patterns negative to happiness, the hope is that person begins to associate with people who will be supportive not detrimental.

I saw it with horrible premonition.

You were alone there, pregnant, unprotected

in some inaccessible dimension

where that creature had you, now, to himself. …

… ‘Beautiful!’ That’s what I cried. “Look, Howard, beautiful!

So intense it’s hypnotic!’ Howard laughed.

Snakes are snakes. ‘You like it,’ he said,

‘because it’s evil. It’s evil, so it thrills you.’

… a music that only you could hear, you had sat there,

bowed as over a baby.

Conjuring into its shrine, onto your page,

this thing’s dead immortal doppelganger.  (p. 105)

Ted is describing Sylvia as somehow possessed of an unconscious oppressive state of mind.

But, why is she “alone” “pregnant” and “unprotected?” Is Ted describing a fact, that although with Sylvia, married to her, father of their children, that he is not with her, not protecting her?

Sounds like he is admitting his own distancing and abandonment of Sylvia. The more the guilty talk the more they incriminate themselves — which is exactly why lawyers, when their client is arrested and call the lawyer — they lawyer says, ‘Don’t say anything until I get there.’

A house of our own

answering all your problems was the answer

to all my problems.  (p. 107)

In the line above Ted is focused on his problems, not Sylvia’s. Read it carefully. If Sylvia’s problems are answered, Ted’s problems are answered. In other words, Ted is saying that Sylvia is the problem — and once again — Ted himself is no problem. He is saying Sylvia has problems, and that he has problems because of Sylvia.

On page 113 starts the poem Epiphany, and Ted Hughes describes meeting a man on the street who is willing to sell a baby fox for a pound. The last portion;

If I had grasped that whatever comes with a fox

is what tests a marriage and proves it a marriage —

I would not have failed the test. Would you have failed it?

But I failed. Our marriage had failed.

Ted says he would not have failed the test. Then he says he failed. Then he says “Our marriage had failed.” And where is the why? He leaves out how he failed.

… you swung that day

demented by my being

twenty minutes late for baby-minding.  (p. 120)

Well, let’s go with it. Ted is late for baby-minding, or watching the baby while Sylvia had something to do which was important to her? Note how Ted calls her “demented” not, angry. In other words, Sylvia has no right to be angry without being considered demented? Once again, the emphasis is on how Sylvia is ‘off’ and Ted is ‘on.’ Many know how stressful it is to be a parent of a baby or toddler, and it is Sylvia who is being derailed from her own writing and not Ted. In all openness, being a parent can be stressful and can slow down a career. But Ted is not acknowledging Sylvia. Ted continues in the same poem,

“Marvelous!” I shouted. “Go on,

smash it [furniture] into kindling.

That’s the stuff you’re keeping out of your poems!”

So, Ted has the audacity to turn the table, and to take his own being late to mind the baby into a poetry critique on Sylvia’s poems! This is the kind of thing which shows that Sylvia’s spirit was being ignored and insulted by her own husband, and Ted is putting it here clearly for all to see. Of course, fact and implication are two different things, so we don’t know the actual events as they occurred, but the description is true to the patterns well known in narcissism. The blame the victim, the gas lighting, the undermining of another.

The poem, The Rabbit Catcher,  (p. 144)   is a poem which describes Sylvia, now with two babies, almost drives off with the two babies and to leave Ted behind — but he gets in the car with her because he says she might do something crazy — yet they somehow have prepared lunch for a picnic — and they drive to the ocean side. She ends up in an emotional state of hating the place, and, as Ted writes;

You had to be away and you went.

Ted follows her and they find rabbit snares. Sylvia becomes infuriated with the animal cruelty, while Ted sees poor people feeding themselves and ancient tradition. What Ted Hughes is describing is displaced anger. Sylvia is angry with Ted, and she displaces the anger on the rabbit snares, avoiding her true feelings. This is not uncommon. Ted describes Sylvia’s anger as coming from her own tortured self. Once again, Ted is describing himself as not a participant in the cause of the negative energy.

Those terrible, hypersensitive

fingers of your verse closed round it and

felt it alive. The poems, like smoking entrails,

came soft into your hands.

So Ted Hughes calls Sylvia’s poems, “smoking entrails.” Is that nice? No. No one is fond of

smoking entrails. Hear the tone in “Those terrible…” “hypersensitive…” “your verse…” “your hands.” Hear it? Ever slightly derogatory.

Your flames fed on rage, on love

and on your cries for help.

…that sucked the oxygen out of both of us.  (p. 149)

Once again, Ted Hughes blames Sylvia. Where have we heard of this before? It is the classic plan of the abuser, blame the victim. Here it is important to add, other factors may also have been in the mix. Post partum depression, clinical depression, pharmaceutical prescriptions by Sylvia’s doctor? Is there only one factor in the story? Probably not. Remember, this is not to be a bashing of Ted Hughes.

By the time the poem Dreamers appears,  (p. 157)  Hughes introduces another woman into the narrative;

…a witch’s daughter

out of Grimm.

A creature from beyond the fringe of your desk-lamp.

Who was this Lilith of abortions

touching the hair of your children

with tiger-painted nails?

Ted invites or allows in or chooses another woman into their life. Utter insult again.

Ted Hughes belittles Sylvia for pages, then writes sudden praise for another woman.

You were astonished, maybe envious.

I refused to interpret. I saw

the dreamer in her

had fallen in love with me and she did not know it.

That moment the dreamer in me

fell in love with her, and I knew it.  (p. 158)

Ted has abandoned Sylvia by heart and mind. He says another woman has fallen for him and he has fallen for her. Sylvia is put aside. And Ted Hughes is so interested in his own self that he deems it of interest to put this new interest into a poem in Birthday Letters. He is actually saying, ‘I have two children with you, my wife, and now I am going with another woman’ — this is the narrative is as written by Ted Hughes. He seems proud of this narrative.

You went off, a flare of hair and a plunge

into the abyss.

Every night. Your Ogre lover …  (p. 159)

And then, from the future, he writes that he reads her journals.

…of all your earlier lovers —

you never told even your secret journal

how many, who, where, when.

…Meanwhile, that Ogre was more than enough.

As if you die each night to be with him,

as if you flew off into death.  (p. 159)  [The Ogre, her father]

So here, he is describing and putting into poetry references to his dead wife’s private journal?

And he, essentially, accuses Sylvia of running off with another man? But Ted Hughes just admitted falling for another woman.

The rest of the poems go much more obscure and vague. And whenever a poet goes vague it is because they have lost direction, have fewer ideas, or are covering up what they know, but want to to write about it, but not too much.

What most want to do, fair enough, is to read a poem, enjoy it, understand it, and let their opinions be what they are. However, poetic forensic analysis is also insightful, but the first objection is always — do not take poems apart or take words or lines out of context. Another view is that much can be gleaned about the poetry and the poet. Subject in art is often revealing

of the author. Somewhere, somehow, Ted Hughes in Birthday Letters tries to exorcise his own guilt, exonerate himself at the same time. I lost count of how many times Sylvia is described as crying, weeping. Here are a few excerpts and when put together, point to a general direction, how Ted saw things. (page numbers omitted)

It was the only poem you ever wrote

that I disliked through the eyes of a stranger.

…your flaring gestures, your misfit self-display.

You are ten years dead. It is only a story.

That was where you were found — and promptly hated.

They let you know that you were not John Donne.

Their contempt for everything you attempted,

under the threshold of our unlikely future

You waited mistaken.

You were a camera

recording reflections you could not fathom.

…what you excused as your gushy burblings — which I decoded

into a language, utterly new to me

with conjectural, hopelessly wrong meanings —

with the whole world too late to help.

You were overloaded. I said nothing. I said nothing.

The burning woman drank it.

And she was

despairing, depressed, pathetic.

You ransacked thesaurus in your poem about it.

            This is overt belittling. He is describing Sylvia

            ‘ransacking’ a thesaurus — as if she has poor

            talent with words. Apply in reverse — would Ted

            describe himself as ‘ransacking’ a thesaurus? No.

            Ransacking implies hurried desperation.

Surely your deathless head, fired in a furnace,

face to face at last, kisses the Father

mudded at the bottom …

             Ted has no remorse. He is vengeful. He picks at Sylvia’s wound.

This is what you called the head. Evil.

You breathed it all in

with jealous, emulous snifflings. Weren’t you

twice as ambitious as Emily? Odd

to watch you, such a brisk pendant

             …you, such a brisk…

of your globe-circling aspirations,

among those burned-out, worn-out remains

of failed efforts, failed hopes —

            …your failed efforts…

iron beliefs, iron necessities,

iron bondage, already

crumbling back to the wild stone.

And your huge hope?  Your huge

mortgage of hope. The moor-wind

came with its empty eyes to look at you.

And the tanned

almost green undertinge of your face

shrunk to its wick, your scar lumpish, your plaited

head pathetically tiny.

…the unhealable face-wound

which was all you had for courage.

Now, I see, I saw, sitting, the lonely

girl who was going to die.

            Her mortgage of hope? Ted says his wife was lonely? And she was going

            to die? And where was Ted? Having an affair?

…unable to fathom what stilled you

as I looked at you, as I am stilled

permanently now, permanently

bending so briefly at your open coffin.

             Here Hughes is saying he does not understand
            what ‘stilled’ Sylvia to die. Yet he repeatedly
            has described the father-trauma in great detail.
            Then he moves on with “permanently/briefly”
            looking at Sylvia in her coffin. This is a tactic
            used by the guilty to diffuse the tracking of action
            they have taken. Forensic optics does not miss this tactic. It says,
            ‘I feel bad about it, but I wasn’t there.’ Ted also says,
            “…as I am stilled permanently now, …” Hold on there!
            She is dead and your are not! But, oh, pity for Ted.

I hurried you off.

I stepped back. That glare

flinging your old selves off like underthings

left your Eden radioactive.

            Ted repeatedly describes Sylvia as angry, upset, glaring.
            It becomes apparent that Sylvia was angry — at Ted Hughes.
            She began to see him for what he really was, a narcissist.
            (There is Silvia’s poem which states her anger toward
            “…daddy…” but read it again. It is clearly a misdirection,
            a means to not be obvious — not the father, but Hughes.)

You had no idea what I was talking about.

             Ted is saying here, that he understands—not Sylvia.

Where I saw so clearly my vision house, you saw only blackness,

black nothing, the face of nothingness…

What did you make of it

when you sat at your elm table alone

staring at the blank sheet of white paper,

silent at your typewriter, listening to the leaking thatch drip…

…into the poems you polished as into this or that or the other…

…which your dead fingers so deftly unpicked.

            Do you hear the mean sarcasm in …the poems you polished
            into this or that or the other… more belittling.

And only 30 years old.

And to think of the sadness, the loss, the energy spent on the negative in life, the constant unnecessary pain. And only 30 years old. Hardly a chance to live yet beaten down. Men have been brutal to women for ages and the brutality will not stop. Half the books do not end well for women. Nature, humans as animals, has a mean aspect no one can deny. The male swings wide his protective territorial grabs, his fight to defend and to conquer, and in order to be such, uses evil as a flag for the cause, and empathy diminishes for collateral damage in any direction, close or far, personal or unknown, stranger or family, friend or love.

Many men are aberrant dogs and are to be held warily. “Mankind” prevails, towns are built, children are born, vessels sail, and war occurs again and again, and women scramble in their various ways often no better than hungry conscripts in an unclaimed war, unwilling participants.

So, as I read Ted Hughes, I find I don’t like the person. I would not want to know him. Separating art from the artist is a foolish choice.

In the meantime, when reading a poem, discern what the poem has to say, read what the words actually say.