Hughes lied over Plath’s death
Frieda Hughes tells Matthew Stadlen why she forgave her father for keeping her mother’s suicide secret, and how she still misses him
FRIEDA HUGHES has told for the first time how she froze in shock when she discovered as a teenager that her mother, Sylvia Plath, had killed herself rather than dying of pneumonia as her father had claimed.
Both she and her younger brother Nicholas had been told the lie by Ted Hughes in an attempt to protect them.
Ms Hughes, 55, was two years old when Plath committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30, while in the grip of de- pression. But it was not until she was 14 that she discovered the truth by accident when a room mate on a writing course unwittingly blurted it out.
Ms Hughes said she had just been dropped off by her father and his wife, Carol Orchard, when she noticed her room mate was reading The Bell Jar. She told her it was written by her mother. “She said, ‘No it’s not because Sylvia Plath committed suicide and your mother’s still alive’ – thinking my stepmother was my mother,” Hughes said.
To lose one family member to suicide is difficult enough. To lose three – and a sister to murder – places the poet and artist Frieda Hughes in a most unenviable minority. When her brother took his own life in early 2009, the only surviving child of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath was asked by an American journalist whether she now wanted to kill herself, too. Her response has shaped her life since.
Just three months before her brother’s death, Hughes’s third marriage, to Hungarian artist László Lukács, had broken up. Now she was alone in Montgomeryshire, Wales, where the couple had moved in 2004.
“Suddenly I had no future family, no immediate family, there was just wasteland. I was trying to work out what I wanted and where I wanted to go next; why I wanted to go anywhere at all,” she says.
When the journalist called, she didn’t put the phone down. Instead, she says, “I thought, ‘What I need to do is live with passion and power. Somebody’s got to stay alive and make it worthwhile’.”
Death, like love, has its own section in Hughes’s new book, Alternative
Values, but it’s not something she fears. “What I’m worried about is not getting enough done before I get there,” she says.
Sitting in a Belgravia gallery, we are surrounded by the art that, together with poems, comprises her latest work. The book is, at heart, the story of an unusual life, but you can’t trace the tragedy of Hughes’s past in her face. Now 55 and with a lively sense of humour, she takes part in motorbike track days, trains with weights, volunteers as a part-time counsellor when she’s not painting and writing, and lives with her eight owls, nine ferrets, six chinchillas and two Maltese terriers. Her new partner, Martin Powell, is a retired policeman who lives 40 miles away.
Plath killed herself in the winter of 1963. She had left Ted Hughes after discovering his affair with Assia Wevill, who worked in advertising, although he later told his daughter he’d attempted a reconciliation with Plath before her death. Frieda, aged almost three, and her younger brother, Nicholas, were in the London flat when she died.
That there are those who have held Ted Hughes accountable for Plath’s suicide – some have even turned her into a martyr to feminism – has upset Frieda. “I don’t get why when people are in pain, or somebody has a difficult situation,” she says, “other people want to come in and be judgmental and just slam them down and not try and understand.”
She certainly hasn’t ever blamed her parents. “It never occurred to me to be angry with either of them. [My father] asked me whether I blamed my mother for leaving me, and I was able to say absolutely not. I felt if she was in so much pain, she had to go. And there are all sorts of factors. She was being given drugs she was allergic to [that] she should never have been given, which give you the energy to actually kill yourself before they get rid of the desire to do so. Funnily enough, feminists didn’t choose to ever use that as [an explanation]. That was one of the most important facts of my mother’s death because it was a driver.”
Growing up, Hughes sensed her father’s tendency towards guilt. “To me, as a child, my father seemed to blame himself for almost everything. It was awful. A child does not want to see their parents suffer. Thousands of people all over the world every day split up, thousands of people have affairs. Not everyone kills themselves.”
Nor does everyone respond to such trauma in the same way. Frieda Hughes developed amnesia around the time her grandmother tried to “steal” her from the family home in Devon. “She wanted my mother to leave my father, and her intention was he would come home and we would all be gone. That traumatised me so badly I sort of went blank, and didn’t come round until I must have been nearly five,” she says. “I remember going to the Bakelite telephone and thinking, ‘I’ve got to phone for help’.” Her fingers, though, were too small to dial, and anyway she didn’t have a number to call.
Looking back, Hughes thinks it can’t have been easy for the women in her father’s life to be confronted with a living representation of his dead wife. “There I was, this constant little reminder, and I can see how painful it may have been for them.”
Prompted by her father, Hughes remembers her mother with “great tenderness and love”. “He very much kept her alive in the room,” she says. “She was almost present as we were growing up. He never said a single negative thing about her. When I got older and I found out that, more than once apparently, she’s burnt his work – he never mentioned this – I was floored because I thought, ‘How could anybody who writes burn the writing of another person?’ And in those days, there were no copies.
“I realised my mother wasn’t a saint, which I felt he had painted her to be, and that she was a human being. Which in a way was quite comforting because, as a child, I’m sort of thinking, ‘I want to be like my mother and she’s a saint [so] how’s that possible?’” she says, smiling.
When she was close to 40, Hughes asked her father what Plath was like. “He laughed and said, ‘Sitting next to you here is like sitting next to her. Even your hands move the same way.’”
Wevill killed herself and her daughter (called Alexandra Tatiana Elise but nicknamed Shura) when Frieda was almost nine. One of Hughes’s new poems is called For
Shura, and writing it was a “really big deal” because although she was briefly brought up with her, as a child Hughes had not wanted to accept she had another sibling. “If I had a halfsister, then actually I’ve got a dead half-sister and let’s not have anybody else who’s close who’s dead,” she says.
Ted Hughes himself wasn’t sure whether Shura was his daughter. “I asked him once and he said, ‘I never knew for certain, I just treated her as if she were mine,’ because that’s the way he was,” she says. “People seem to think she was.”
Hughes told his children Plath died of pneumonia. It was the only lie he ever told her, Frieda believes. “I was probably about seven, and I never forgot the hesitation. Even as a kid, I knew the hesitation wasn’t good and that it meant that what we were being told was probably not the truth,” she says.
It wasn’t until she was 14 that she says she discovered, by accident from a roommate on a writing course, that Plath had taken her own life.
“A girl in the room I was sleeping in had The Bell Jar, and I would never normally say, ‘Oh, that’s my mother’. I wouldn’t say anything,” she says. “But for some reason I did. And – I never forget – she looked at the book and then looked out of the window where my father was walking away with my stepmother, and she said, ‘No it’s not, because Sylvia Plath committed suicide and your mother’s still alive’, thinking that my stepmother was my mother. And I remember sitting there, and you know that thing when you’re about to faint, you can’t hear anything and you can’t see anything for a bit?”
The thoughts rushed through her mind: why hadn’t her father told her?
“And then I think, ‘Well, God, it was just before my third birthday and when do you decide, ‘Oh, I’m now going to tell my daughter, who I adore, that her mother committed suicide and it’s going to really upset her possibly and I don’t want to see my daughter upset’? How old does somebody have to be? At what point?
“And the longer the deceit goes on, the harder it is. So I sat there and I thought, ‘Oh God, Daddy should have told me.’ And the moment I said that, I forgave him.” But she didn’t say anything to her father afterwards.
“I thought, ‘If he didn’t want me to know, he didn’t want me to know for a reason. He doesn’t need to know I know.’ I could see he had a tough life and so I wanted to protect my father from my unhappiness,” she says.
Ted Hughes died of cancer at 68 in 1998, and she still misses him. “I was really lucky to have a father who was so determined to be as protective and caring and loving as he was. He gave me curiosity. He was also a workaholic, so there were large gaps, but when he was with us, he was with us,” she says.
Despite barely knowing her mother, Hughes doesn’t chase after information about her parents (and she’s only just started reading the controversial unauthorised biography of Ted Hughes by Jonathan Bate, published last month). “If I did, how much of a life do you think I’d have of my own?” she says.
She also refused to read either of her parents’ poetry as an adult until her own first book of poems was accepted. “I didn’t want to be influenced,” she says.
While Hughes accepts she is, to some extent, the product of her parents’ histories, she refuses to live in their shadow. “I knew the comparisons were always going to happen, the wanting to read across from Plath to Hughes to Frieda. My attitude was, ‘If I just keep my head down, just keep painting and writing and I don’t go away, eventually maybe I’ll look up and be standing on my own piece of firmament.’
“And that’s where I feel I am. My parents are to my mind poetry greats. What I’m aspiring to is simply to have my voice.”
‘Feminists never used the drugs she was allergic to as an explanation’ ‘How old does one have to be to hear that their mother committed suicide?’