Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Real Sylvia Plath

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

** TW: This episode contains themes of suicide **Sylvia Plath was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.During and since she died, she became known for her volatile relationship with fellow poet, Ted Hughes, as much as her own beautiful, confessional writing.What was Sylvia Plath like as a woman? What drew her and Ted Hughes to each other? And how did sex and sexuality influence her personality and writing?Joining Kate today is Emily van Dyne, author of Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation, to dispel some of the myths and help us get to know this remarkable woman.This podcast was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code BETWIXTYou can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Oh, my lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister, and you are listening to Betwix the Sheets. And just in case you are new here, or in case you are old school, but recent world political events have knocked out your frontal cortex and now your memory is suffering,

I have to tell you that this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. We call this the fair do's warnings. because if we tell you these things, then fair do's, you can't actually get angry with us if you keep listing and happen to get offended.

But on a serious note, as if that wasn't serious enough, we are actually dealing with some pretty difficult subjects today, including suicide. So you might not want to listen to this one today, in which case, give this one a skip and we'll see you next time. For everyone else, on with the show. The date is February the 25th, 1956, and we've snuck our way into the raucous launch party

of St. Botolph's Review at Cambridge University. And it is very, very swanky. In front of us is a crowd of intellectuals, and we can see none other than Ted Hughes, an ex-student who by this time is a published poet, and he's there with his girlfriend Shirley. Making a beeline for him is 23-year-old Sylvia Plath. She's a published poet in her own right

and is in no way intimidated by Hughes. This would transpire to be a very intense, first meeting, the fitting of their volatile and ultimately tragic relationship. But who is the real Sylvia Plath? What was her relationship with Hughes really like? I certainly want to find out more about this woman, and I know you do too. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course.

You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I feel for them. Goodness, has nothing to do with it, Terry. Hello, and welcome back to Patricks the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. In a letter sent to her mother, Sylvia Plath wrote that she'd met a brilliant ex-Cambridge poet, who she would probably never see again.

She says, I wrote my best poem about him afterwards, the only man I met here who would be strong enough to be equal with, such his life. Ted, meanwhile, said in a letter to his parents, I went to a party in Cambridge the weekend, which was very bright and everything got smashed up. Not quite as romantic as Sylvia's take on the night. But what is the truth about their tumultuous relationship? What was Sylvia really like? What was Ted really like? How did her confessional writings revolutionise the art form, and what is her legacy? Joining me is Emily Van Dine, author of Loving Sylvia Plath, a reclamation to help us find out more about this remarkable woman. I am ready if you are.

Oh, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Emily Van Dyne. How are you doing? I am doing so well, Dr. Kate Lister. Thank you so much for having me. How could I not have you on after you emailed us to tell us about your new book, Loving Sylvia Plath, a reclamation? I am such a Plath fan. I know as soon as I saw your email, I can't believe that we haven't discussed Sylvia Plath before. But what was it that made you want to write this book? And what is the reclamation about? Well, I've always been a big Plath fan myself.

So I started reading Plath quite literally 30 years ago when I was 14 years old. That's peak Plath age, isn't it? The teenage years. Yeah. Teenage years. Well, it is. But I think that's also part of why I wanted to write the book, because we have this idea that, you know, like, you peak with Plath when you're an

angsty teenager and she's not like a mature writer. You think that. Yeah, I think that we do. And I think that Plath has stayed with me my whole life. You know, I've been reading her for 30 years. And so I felt like part of the reclamation was getting people to understand, like, what a canonical, mature writer she is. Like, she's for everybody. You know, she's an extraordinary writer.

But the other part of the reclamation, and I think this might be especially poignant for you being British and for other people in the United Kingdom. is she's very much in the shadow of her famous husband, the British poet laureate Ted Hughes. And I felt that there was a lot of misconceptions about their marriage and the role that he played in the editorial process of her work because, of course, she got quite famous after she died. Yeah. And so it was also about that as well. Wow. She is an author that is surrounded by myth and mystery. And I think she's somebody that people project onto a lot. And there is a narrative that she's this tortured artist driven mad by a philandering terrible husband. And she's become kind of iconic as sort of like feminine,

feminist rage almost. When you first encountered her, was that something that you saw in her work? Or have you developed over time to sort of challenge that? Because there's a lot of anger in there. We couldn't say that there isn't. Oh, there's a lot of anger. And then, in fact, no, my goal is never to neutralize the anger out of Sylvia Plath. Instead, I'm much more interested in talking about the legitimate reasons that she had that anger and that rage, which are, you know, partly to do with philandering, but are also to do with her position as a woman, you know, coming of age in the 1950s, in the McCarthy era, in the United States, in this sort of terribly restrictive, almost like a return to Victorian times in many ways. I mean, you know, not only in

terms of the social mores and the sexual mores, which were so regressed at that point is to be absurd, but also in the clothing, like, like the women in 1950s, I mean, everywhere, but, you know, Plath grew up in America, we're wearing like corsets and, you know, conical bras and, you know, sort of like having to train their bodies to be these outrageous shapes and sizes. So Plath, on the one hand, she loves being a woman. She loves being feminine and she sort of goes along with lots of that. And on the other hand, she's actively writing in her journals about how she hates this. Like, she hates the fact that her sex has restricted her to this very particular kind of life and that she wants to live like a man.

She wants to be, and not, I want to be clear, like not in a transgender way because Plath did not identify as transgender. her, but she wants the kind of liberatory actions that masculinity gives somebody. And she can't have them, right? And especially as a budding writer, she started publishing her work when she was eight years old. Didn't know that. Wow. Yeah, she published her first poem with the Boston traveler when she was eight years old. And her mother has this extraordinary memory that she talks about in this one documentary about Plath that you can find on YouTube where she says when I think Plath was like four.

She took her out to see the new moon rising, and Sylvia looked at her mother, and she said, The moon is a lock of witch's hair, tawny and golden and red, and the night wind stops and stares at the hair on the witch's head. And, you know, her mother's just like, astounded. I know. Wow. I know. That's amazing. It's totally amazing.

So for anyone, because I've just realized that I've kind of got, oh, and my producers just mess. message me a load of headblown emojis as well. Yes, Stu, it is headblown. She's amazing. I've just realised I'm kind of getting ahead of myself. I'm so keen to talk about Sylvia Plath, but there will be people listening who aren't familiar with her, who didn't go through a Plath phase, which I'm sure that every teenage girl who's kind of into arts and poetry at some point does go through a Plath phase. But for anyone thinking, what are we talking about? What's happening here? Can you give me just like a potted biography? Who was Sylvia Plath? Well, first of all, let me say to your listeners that it's never too late to have a Plath face.

Never too much. So I encourage everyone, regardless of age or gender, to have a Plath face. But yeah, so Sylvia Plath was an American writer and poet. She was born in 1932 in Boston. She died by suicide quite famously in London in February of 1963. Although she was American, she went to Cambridge University on a two-year Fulbright Fellowship, which, Fulbright for your listeners who are unfamiliar is a fellowship program run by the United States government. It's almost like an educational ambassadorship. And so there's all different kinds of Fulbright's, but you can, like I did one as a professor where I went to Greece and taught a couple years ago, but Plath was a student. And so they paid for her to do two years of graduate study at Oxbridge.

And she ended up going to Newdenham College, which was the woman's, still is the women's college at Cambridge. And when she was there in the spring of her first term, she met the poet Ted Hughes, who had finished his degree at Cambridge in archaeology and anthropology a couple of years back. And they met at a party at the Women's Union in February of 1956 on, I believe, February 25th. And Plath saw him from across the room, and he was there with his girlfriend, Shirley. And she wanted to make a move on him. And so she walked up to him and she started quoting his own poems at him because she had read his poems in a like a little broadsheet student. newspaper. She was bold. She was really bold. Yeah. And so he said, you like. And they went into a private

room and they were talking and sort of yelling at each other. And then he kissed her. And then she bit him on the face and blood started running down his face. And then he stole the silver earrings out of her ears and took her red a bando headband and said ha I shall keep and that's how they met that is just full of I mean like when you say like that it sounds like my god it's like kind of romantic and prophetic but if you were like there you'd be going Sylvia like red flag like this is this is not good already why are you biting this man and he's stealing your earrings and he's here with another girl and he's there with another girl oh god of course yeah no and nothing about this is good no it's really bad and he's there with his very serious girlfriend named Shirley who was also a student at Cambridge

and then like a couple of weeks later they have their first flat and Hughes have their first sexual trist and he calls her Shirley oh no oh that's bad yeah I mean when you read their relationship through the modern lens of how we understand like red flags and romantic relationship it's just a disaster yeah she certainly didn't see it like that did she she did not see this as red flags as somebody that has studied this woman, because the temptation is as well, from a modern perspective, is to frame her as this perpetual victim of Ted Hughes. And I don't want to excuse the fact that he's behaved very badly. But when we look at Plath's behaviour, it wasn't completely innocent herself in all of this, was she? What do you think she thought

of Ted when they first met and they had this really intense encounter? Well, I mean, we know what she thought because she wrote about it in her diaries and she wrote about it in letters to different people and she felt very ambivalent um she was fascinated by him and she was extraordinarily physically attracted to him plath was really tall she was almost five foot ten and yeah yeah yeah she was like a fashion model i mean um i can email you some pictures at some point of the please do yeah yeah In fact, she modeled for the local Cambridge newspapers and bathing suits and high heels. And she sent the photos home to her mother in America. And she wrote with love from Betty Grable.

So, yeah, she was really, she was really quite a minx, you know. Is it okay to say that? I don't know. Am I going to get canceled? Oh, yeah. You can, no, you're not going to get canceled. You can say far worse than that. I think because that's something as well that I think is overlooked by a lot of people when it comes to this woman.

She was highly, at least it seems to me, highly sexual. Like, you see that in her work, you see that in the Belja. Well, you tell me how you think that sort of manifested in Sylvia Plath. Well, she loved sex. She really loved it. I mean, even before she actually had, like, penetrative hetero intercourse, she wrote in her diaries in high school about how much she loved just the physical act of dancing and kissing.

And she writes about, like, feeling very frankly, you know, about like leaning up against a boy and like feeling his erection and how much it turns her on and how she feels this like groaning in her breasts in the pit of her stomach and she wants to be taken under by these feelings. And even like she would write about like lying on the beach and like the hot sunshine and, you know, feeling deliciously raped by the sun. I mean, she she used very sexual language in her diaries from this and her poetry from the time she was a very young woman. And it always feels odd to say anything about Plath as a very young woman because she died at 30. So like she was kind of always a very young woman. But even as a teenager, she was writing,

frankly, about those things. And she felt really angry because she wanted to experience life as much as she possibly could. This is a recurring theme in all of her, her personal writing that she wants to like live life, live every experience, you know, take it all in and then spit it out in writing. and she felt, I think, up to a certain point, like she couldn't because she had to be a virgin when she was married, which is, of course, the standard of the day for a white, you know, middle class, highly educated, like sort of genteel woman. Both of Plath's parents had, you know, advanced degrees. They were really, like, educated people. They went to the Unitarian Universalist Church. So that's kind of the bill of goods that she's being sold. But then what ends up happening is she has what they call Ben a nervous breakdown. She tries to kill herself in between her junior and senior years of college. And she ends up in McLean Psychiatric Hospital in the late summer and fall of 1953. And then after that, she kind of decides like, you know what the hell with this? And she begins to actually sleep with her boyfriends.

And yeah, she really likes it. And kind of the most serious of those boys prior to Ted Hughes boys, I mean, they were young men, right? But is a young man named Richard Sassoon who was a distant cousin of the British poet Siegfried Sassoon. And he had, his mother was French and he spoke fluent French. And he was at Yale University when she was at Smith College. And so they started this hyper-sexual affair in her senior year at Smith. And, you know, she writes about then and then later in letters to her psychiatrist about how, you know, she's a good French tart who was trained by her French lover.

And I think they engaged in some very light bondage, some spanking and stuff like that. Yeah. So, no, I mean, she was really interested in sex. It was something she absolutely loved. In fact, when her marriage to Hughes eventually broke up, my favorite line that she says about the whole thing is, again, in a letter to her psychiatrist, she says, what I don't want to be is an unfucked wife. Wow, Sylvia. Yeah. Amen to that sister.

I think we can all right. But I'm trying to think back to her novel, The Belja, which I think is where a lot of younger women encounter her. Because it is told from the perspective of a teenage. How old is she in that? It's like 19, 20, 18. She is 19, about to be 20. So yeah, she in that, they call that, you know, a Romano clef. Like it's based very closely on her experience of nervous.

break down and suicide attempt and then her time at the hospital. So yeah, it's very much about her own life. Because sex plays quite a big part of that as well. She seems to be surrounded by quite predatory men, but like she wants something from them, but she can't get what she wants, and it's all very confusing for her. Yeah. And in fact, there's quite a number of episodes about predatory sex and sex where she's Esther, the character who's based closely on Plath, is attempting to experience sex in like a free and enjoyable way and really struggling to do so. And also there is, to my mind, one of the most important elements of that book in terms of sex is Plath really taking to task the double standard. And this was based very closely on events from her own life. So Plath dated

throughout her freshman year of college and then sort of into her sophomore year, a young man named Dick Norton. And he was her, like Dick's mother was Plath's mother's best friend. They lived down the street from them in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and he was the oldest of three boys. He was at Yale, and then he went to Harvard Medical School. So he is a character in the Beljar, or I should say a character in the Beldar is based on Dick. Buddy Willard. He's sort of her, like, noxious boyfriend. Buddy. Yeah. Yeah. There's several episodes, but there's one in particular in the novel that actually did happen where Plath finds out or Esther finds out in the novel that Buddy is not a virgin, that he had been sleeping with this waitress named Gladys at his

like, you know, summer job the summer prior. And Esther is furious. She's so hurt and she's so let down because she's been like saving herself for this young man who she frankly doesn't even really like very much, but who's been presented to her by everyone in her family and kind of society is like the perfect match. And, you know, she just cannot believe that this is the case. And that that actually happened in Plath's life. And people, I think, were really surprised by how angry she was. But I think it's such a good reason to be angry. I think so. Absolutely. And you know, we should talk about as well. And because another framing of Plath's life, and we'll get to Ted in a little bit. But before we get to Ted, she's often framed as a victim of her father as well,

because her father died when she was quite young. And that this trauma seems to to have impacted her life, shaped her life. It certainly comes out in her most famous poems, Daddy, the most famous poem. Can you tell us a little bit about what happened and what your understanding of what this event was on Plath? Well, I'm really glad you asked about that because stories like that are part of the reason that I wrote the book and called it a reclamation

because Plath's father died very tragically and very unnecessarily when she was eight years old. he thought that he had cancer and he had a friend who had died from treatments for lung cancer or not died from the treatments but endured the treatments and died anyway. And so he figured like, well, I don't want to go through that and I'm going to die. So he didn't get treated and it turned out he didn't have lung cancer. He had a really treatable form of diabetes. And by the time he went for treatment, yeah, it's really awful.

It was too late. His leg had to be amputated. and then the standard treatment at the time for amputees was to keep them completely still, which of course we know now is deadly because of embolisms, and so he died of a pulmonary embolism. Now, I don't want to in any way, you know, detract from the idea that losing one's father at the age of aid is traumatic. Of course it is. This idea that that is kind of the singular wound of Plath's life and that she's killing herself in some ways to get back to her dead father is totally. ludicrous and one that was functionally invented by Ted Hughes. He wrote many poems about that

that were published in birthday letters, which he published six months before he died in 1998, and which sold a quarter million copies, I think, in the first like two years that it was out, which for a book of poetry is unheard of. And, you know, was it won every major literary prize for poetry in the UK. And, but it's just, it's just not true. In terms of the poem, Daddy, I think that's sort of the other way that Plath's relationship with her father got into the wider literary and popular consciousness. But Daddy is a poem that is much more broadly about throwing off the teachings of powerful men who've been trying to kind of engineer your talent for a really long time.

And of course, it's also about romantic love. I mean, if you think back to the poem, it ends with the speaker. saying, and then I knew what to do, I made a model of you, a man in black with a mind count look and a love of the rack and the screw. And I said, I do, I do. So, Daddy, I'm finally through, the black telephones off at the root, et cetera, et cetera. So it ends with a marriage to a disastrous, sadistic, vampiric man who the speaker doesn't kill. Instead, she sort of hands him over passively to the villagers and then they put a stake through his heart and kill him. And so the other important thing I think that has been little talked about in the literature

about Plath and Hughes is, of course, she wrote that in October of 1962 when their marriage was on the rocks and he had left. He was living in London. She was living in Devon in this country house that they had bought together. Hughes was really interested in fascism and Nazism at that time. Didn't know that. Okay. I know. Yeah. And Plath wrote about that in these letters to her therapist. But the problem was the letters that we now have, there's 14 letters that total almost 30,000 words in length that she had written to her therapist. They were stolen by a biographer and they did not reemerge until 2017. So like all of this really critical information about their marriage from that time was under wraps because we didn't have it.

and also because Hughes either lost or burned Plath's journals from her last years. So in terms of primary sources, really all we had was the poems. And so it's quite interesting, I think, to revisit that poem with all of its images of Nazism with the knowledge that Hughes was so interested in Hitler. In fact, he wrote a letter to his sister in the late summer of 1962, where he said that he'd had a dream where Hitler came to him and ordered him to leave, Sylvia and the children, and so he knew he had to obey. Oh, well, that's a sensible rationale.

Well, done, Ted. Well, yes, I, yeah, well, who among us, right? I mean, yeah. Who has not, right? And her dad was German as well, wasn't he? Which kind of plays into that. He was from what they then called the Polish corridor. It would be like mainland Austria today.

But he left as a very young man. He went to college and graduate school in the United States. He spoke fluent English. She got a doctoral degree at Harvard University. Her mother was first generation Austrian as well. So both of her parents did speak fluent German and they spoke it at home. So she grew up listening to both German and English. But Plath was not fluent in German. It was like the one thing she tried to master and could never quite get. I'm really pleased to hear you say that sort of like it is a bit of a not that you want to downplay the trauma of losing a parent, but this idea that these, because she did try to kill herself a number of times, that it was all linked. back to her father. It's much more complex than that. But she meets Hughes at a party.

They have this weird, face-bitey, earring-stealingy episode. Was he famous at that point? Famous enough for her to know his poems, I suppose, but... No, he wasn't famous at all. And that is the other thing that is mythologized and frequently reprinted, not in scholarly sources, because, you know, you've got people that are doing a lot of research. But for instance, when those letters reemerged in 2017, there was a big flurry of press. And in all of the UK press, it said in those articles, like in the Guardian and in the Irish Times and The Spectator and other places, it says Hughes was the established poet at the time. I mean, that's a lie, right? Which I don't mean to imply that people are lying on purpose,

but it's just, it's totally false. He, I think, had published maybe three or four poems and he had published them under pseudonyms in student magazines, whereas Plath had published in the Atlantic Monthly. She had published in Harper's Bazaar. She was one of the winners of the Madame Woiselle summer editorial contest. That's what the Belder is based on. She had gone and been the managing editor for a month at Madame Wiesel, which was like one of the biggest women's magazines in the country.

And at the time, she had worked with Marianne Moore and W.H. Auden at Smith. she was like yeah she was extremely well published and um and well known like as a as a she's the big deal at that point yeah and in Heather Clark's big 2020 biography of Plath actually she says this I was so glad to read that that part of the book because she says that Plath was she had blonde hair she was American she wore red lipstick she was really tall and fashionable and so at Cambridge in the 50s she was like a film star so in fact Hughes knew who Plath was right right? Because, like, everybody knew who Plath was. And Plath had just read his poems in that little student broadsheet, which was, he had put together with his friends.

It was called St. Botolph's Review, which was named after the, they were living in, like, the rectory of a church. I'll be back with Emily and Sylvia after this short break. Why do you think that that story has gained, I mean, there's a lot of stuff about Plath that you're trying to reclaim, and I'm rightly so. But what does that serve to the Plath mythology, the idea that she was this kind of starry-eyed, oh my God, he's so famous. I wish I could be a poet too. What does that bring to the myth? Why do you think we've kind of held on to that?

Oh, I just think it like fits so perfectly into all of these gendered ideas that we have, right? Like, oh, Plath is this nobody? And she's really lonely and sad at Cambridge. and then, you know, she just goes to this party to sort of try and find this man and get him to notice her. I mean, that's like every movie, you know, every romance novel. And it has nothing to do with reality. I mean, Plath dated like every hot man she was interested in essentially throughout college and graduate school. And she was dating a number of men throughout the spring of 1956 before she finally

decided, okay, I'm going to marry Ted Hughes, and that's going to be that. They married four months after they met, by the way. So again, with the red flag. I know. You're just waving them, aren't you? Just Sylvia. I should have brought them. Come back. Oh, so that's a red flag. Four months when they first meet. Yep. Wow. Okay, so what was the wedding like? Oh, they, it was very small. It was so Plath's mother was visiting from America and they got married at, uh, church in Bloomsbury in London and Plath wrote something in a letter about like, oh, that was Ted used his parish church and by law he had to be married there. It's a lovely church. I've been there. I know. I don't know. How true that is or not true. Apparently it was pouring rain. And so, yep,

they had, you know, one witness and Plath wore her mother's pink wool knitted dress, which is Hughes who has a poem in birthday letters called a pink wool knitted dress. And it was, you know, pouring rain and they got married and she cried the whole time, you know, beatific tears coming down her face. This sounds so intense. The both of them actually. So like what was the marriage like? So they've got married after four months, after this super passionate get together.

How do they work out as a couple, Emily? What a good question. It's interesting. It depends on who you talk to. I should say at the forefront, and of course I write about this in my book, that I am a survivor of intimate partner violence. And I, you know, read Plath for decades before I went through that experience after I got away from that person and we had a child together. So I was a single mom and I was trying to put my life back together. And I was teaching part-time at a bunch of

different universities and trying to write again. And when I went back to Plath after that, it was astounding to me because all of a sudden I could see these patterns in her relationship with Hughes that I never would have seen before. You know, I would have thought it was romantic or kind of weird or, you know, maybe a little red flaggy in that jokey way. But then I was like, my God, you know, I've lived, I've lived through my own version of this because the thing is, like the playbook for coercive control and intimate partner violence is really shallow. And, you know, you said something earlier about like you know we don't want to think about Plath purely as a victim and I should just be clear that like I never think of anyone purely as as anything right and so the kind of whole of my sermon is that Plath like anyone is a complex person all relationships are complex and so it's very possible in my mind to be in love with someone and also to abuse them or to be in love with someone and be abused by them and I think you know that Plath is both the victim and sometimes you know not an aggressor in her relationship with Hughes per se, but, you know, she loves him and she wants it to work.

And so it's quite complex. But yeah, they married in June of 1956 and then they went off to Paris and then Spain for an extended summer honeymoon. I think almost immediately it became clear to her that perhaps she had acted hastily. But she was married, you know, and also she was in a foreign country. And she wasn't even in her sort of home base foreign country of safe Cambridge, beautiful Cambridge. She was in Spain. And it was the 1950s. It wasn't, you know, very long after the Spanish Civil War. And, you know, it's kind of a brutal landscape, I think.

There was one incident, at least, that happened on their honeymoon that did not get reported until much later. Plath told a friend in November of 1962 that while they were on a hillside in Benadorm, which is this little fishing village they were staying in in Spain, which now is like a big resort, but then was a little fishing village that they were lying side by side on the hillside, and then he leaned over and began to strangle her, and she thought that she was going to die. And then just at the moment, yeah, that she had resolved that she was going to lose consciousness. He stopped. Fuck.

Yeah. It's really complicated because that was first reported in a biography that came out in 1991. by an American writer named Paul Alexander. And it was roundly criticized by the literary establishment. Hughes was still living at the time as, you know, being libelous and, and what were your, who's your source. And, you know, he said, well, I have to protect my source because this person fears retribution from Ted Hughes.

And Hughes was litigious. I mean, he wouldn't, you know, blink before he would threaten to sue you or sue you. And so that story just got really written off by lots of different people. but I was always quite curious about it. So there's a whole chapter of the book that's in part dedicated to, first of all, finding out who the source was, which I did. And then also looking for more evidence of, you know, how that might have happened and had it ever happened to anyone else that knew Ted Hughes.

And it turned out that it did. In fact, the writer Emmett Tennant was his lover. And she published a memoir in 1999, which also includes a story of him strangling her while they're on a trist. That's not part of the story, is it? I mean, they can't get away with the fact that he cheated on other people because that's in, cheated on it with other people because that's in the public domain. But the domestic violence bit, that's even quite, quite new to me.

I didn't know that. There's quite a lot of it. Yeah, that's, I think, probably the most egregious story. But, yeah, I mean, when those letters came out, the most shocking, I'm using air quotes here, because to me, as someone who had been working on Plath and Violence for quite some time, it was not shocking. But she wrote to her therapist that in 1961, he, Hughes had beaten her and she had miscarried the next day.

And so, yeah, and that has also been written off by many people as completely. So when they're talking about, or they had a really passionate, tempestuous relationship, that's not what we're talking about here at all, really, is it? This is violent and abusive. I think that it's both, right? And I think that's the other thing. Like I read somebody on Goodreads gave me a lovely review. of the book, but then said, like, oh, I was disappointed that she didn't explore the possibility of

BDSM. My feeling is, like, that's not my area of expertise. Like, my area of expertise is, is gender studies and intimate partner violence. So that's what I was looking at. It's totally possible that there were some elements of BDSM in their relationship, although based on how they both write about their consensual sex, like that, I doubt it. It doesn't really come up, and I don't think that's what was going on there. And also, it's possible to have BDSM. DSM and also intimate partner violence, right? Like these two things can coexist in a relationship. But yeah, no, there's a lot of different incidents of violence and there's a lot of evidence.

So, for instance, Hughes is American editor and Plath's American editor in the wake of Plath's Steph was a woman named Francis McCullough. And in her archive at the University of Maryland, she has this handwritten note that she made while she was visiting Hughes in 1974. And she says like, oh, we were driving. And he got really agitated and angry. And he started talking about this time that he would try to slap Plath out of her rages,

but it wouldn't work. And then one time she leaned into the slap and got herself a black eye. So, you know, there's quite a written, voluminous written record of this stuff. It's just that it, for whatever reason, didn't make it into books for the most part. I wonder why it didn't make it into the books.

I have some ideas. They have two children together and Plath, well, you might be able to explain it more than me because I'm realizing that I don't know anything about this woman actually. But she seems to love being a mother. One of my most favorite poems by hers is the balloon one when she talks about the little shred of the balloon left in a hand. And red shred. And it's just such a sweet image. And the one where she's talking about the baby being like a pickled,

like in, and it's just this amazing imagery, being like a fat sprat pickled in all this stuff. She seems to love being a mother. Sure. Oh, she very much loved being a mother. Yeah. Balloons, you know, that's one of the last poems she wrote in her life. She wrote that like days before she killed herself.

I know it's heartbreaking. She had two children. Frida was born April 1, 1960 in London. And then she had a second child, Nicholas, and he was born January 17, 1962. So he was barely a year old when she died and Frida was not quite three. And she had a miscarriage in between in spring, 1961. So motherhood was central to her life. It was something that she always wanted.

Hughes later wrote in various letters that he was surprised when she decided she wanted to be a mother. And I just, that enraged me when I read it because I was like, how could that have surprised you? I mean, you know, she writes about it in her diaries and she writes about it in her letters. And she has a kind of ambivalence about childbirth, partly because one thing that happens and she, you know, immortalized this in the bell jar is her her noxious boyfriend, Buddy Willard slash Dick Norton. He was a medical student at Harvard. And he took her to see a baby being born. Well, American hospital births in the 1950s were, I mean, yeah. So what she witnessed, you know, really horrified her.

But she got really clear of that because she was able to have children in England. And so she had a midwife who she adored and she had Frida at home. And it was a, you know, fairly easy birth. And so she just, she really, after that, especially, she really embraced the idea of motherhood. And she wanted to have many children. That's actually why they moved from London to the country because she wanted a big house with lots of bedrooms for children. And there's a market. shift. Like I don't want to ever say that one event like changes someone forever, changes their

writing forever, but there is this market shift in the tone and the depth of feeling, I think, in her poetry after she has Frida. Yeah. So let's talk about fidelity within the relationship that they've got. This is clearly, it's a complex relationship that seems to be quite abusive. It's certainly very destructive. Who was faithful to who, who was unfaithful? As far as we know, they were both faithful to each other up until Hughes was no longer faithful. And depending on who you talked to, that either began in the late spring, early summer of 1962, or it began in the summer of 1961. There is some evidence, and I wrote about this in loving Sylvia Plath, that the woman who Hughes first began an affair with that ended their marriage, her name was Asia Wevel,

and she's a fascinating figure in her own right. I hope you learn more about her because she's quite amazing. They met actually for the first time in the summer of 1961, and there's some archival evidence that they probably slept together for the first time in the summer of 1961. And then the way that they met is that the Wevels, Assey and her husband, David, who was a Canadian poet, they let the Hughes flat in London when they bought the country house.

So they took over their flat. And then the Hughes moved to Devin, and they live there for, you know, 1961 into 1962 and then they invited them for the weekend. So Plath and

Hughes said, oh, come on out to our country house and spend the weekend. Apparently Hughes and Asia

either fall in love or rekindle this prior spark and Plath catches them kissing over the kitchen sink and she gives them the heave-ho

and, you know, says you got to, you have to go, you have to leave. And then Hughes goes to London under the kind of like guys of doing

some stuff BBC and he leaves Asia a note that says, I've come to see you at the advertising agency where she worked. He left her a note that said, I've come to see you despite all marriages. Right. Yeah. Yes. Another part of the Sylvia Plath narrative that people cling to is that she was beyond devastated by her husband's infidelity, that she couldn't cope and that that was the reason why she ultimately took her life. But in your research, how do you?

think Sylvia Plath reacted? Did he leave Plath for her that they'd sort of broken up? No, that's not true either. Okay. Depending on who you believe, either she kicked him out or he left. I think it was in some ways a mutual decision really and truly because I just think she thought I can't live like this because he was, so beginning in July of 1962, he comes clean and tells her that he's begun to sleep with Asia, but he very, in short order, he was sleeping with at least two other women that we know of. Like he was in bed with a different woman, a woman named a poet named Susan Allison, the night that or the morning that killed herself.

Yeah. So and some of this is start to come out like in other biographies, but it's still not part of the like overarching accepted narrative. And then Plath wrote to her therapist in I believe September of 1962 that like he was like picking up, she's picking up fins at coffee bars and taking them to hotels. So, like, he was clearly sleeping around. I mean, he was just sort of, and he wrote to his sister too, like, oh, I've lived like a something for six years. And now, you know, I'm done with that.

I'm going to go off and kind of live my life. He was planning at the time to, like, move to Europe, get away from England. He really thought he was going to become, like, the most important writer in the world. I mean, at one point, Plath writes to her therapist that Ted says he wants to be an international catalyst. And every time I read that line, I laugh so hard because I just imagined him saying that to her. Well, she's got like one baby in either arm and being like, are you fucking kidding me, buddy? Yes. Yeah, I can see that.

Yeah. And so then he left. He goes to London. She stays in the country for a few months right before he leaves. They try to reconcile in Ireland. It goes really badly. He goes to Spain with Asia Webel. He lies to Plath.

She finds out. he's lying. She's just like done. She's like, that's it. I'm done. You know. And so he moves away. She feels when he moves away in early October of 1962 that, you know, her life is going to be over. She's like, how am I going to get through this? Because she's now like a single mom. She doesn't have dependable child care. She's a freelance writer. And he's wildly running through their savings, too. Like he's overdrawing his bank account. Jack. Yeah, totally. His mother writes to her daughter, his sister and says, like, I'm worried about Ted. I think he's having a nervous breakdown. And that's the other part of it is that Plath is always, her mental health is always like on display

for the world to see. But he was equally, if not more unstable at the time. When he left and she came back to her house, she actually wrote that she couldn't believe how free she felt suddenly he was out of the house. And she could write for the first time. She could really say the things that she'd always wanted to say about so many different things, their marriage included. And she wrote 25 poems and 31 days and that is uh you know makes up the bulk of the book aerial which is her most famous collection so yeah she actually did quite well for a long time after he first left she actually started a romantic relationship in late october early november of 1962 with ted hues's friend and her friend the critic l al-alvarez and so she was like kind of falling in love

she was getting back out there she was yeah i say in the book, you know, in Pygmalion, when Eliza Doolittle uses her cockney accent again for the first time, and she says, I've got a bit of my own back. Yeah, that's how I feel that Plath is living again in the fall of 1962. I'll be back with Emily and Sylvia after this short break. It's a very difficult question to answer. There'll never be a definitive answer because she's not here to explain. But what happened? How did she go from being reasonably optimistic, dating people, writing about feeling free, to the situation where she took her own life? It's such a good question. I don't think there's one single answer. So in that way, there's no definitive answer. But we have a lot

of really good answers at this point because a biographer named Harriet Rosenstein, who never wrote her book, but she did all of her research in the early 1970s. And she recorded a lot of her interviews, with Flaas, neighbors and friends. And we have that now finally, like 50 years past, but it emerged. And so it's in an archive in the United States at Emory University. So we've all been able to listen to those. And what I think happened, and I think a lot of people would corroborate this, is Plath decided in late November that she wanted to move back to London.

So she packs up the house December 10th with the children, and she drives back to London. And the whole idea is that she wants to spend winters in London and then springs and summers in Devon and then like let the flat and, you know, rent the house in the offseason. And it's a really good plan. A lot of people do this, right? But she also feels really cut off from the world in the winter when she's in Devon. Like she's in this big drafty house. It was built in the 17th century. There's no central heating. And being there without another adult is like, oh, God, like this is really going to be taxing. And so, of course, the, you know, the winters in London are pretty mild. So she gets a full.

and she, you know, brings the children back. And she's trying to line up work primarily with the BBC because they paid freelance writers really well at that time. Like you really could make a living. And in fact, that's why Plath and Hughes moved back to England from a brief stint in the U.S. Because they wanted, they didn't want to teach. They wanted to write. And they felt that they would be able to support themselves in freelance in England. So it's going okay for a while, but almost immediately a number of things start to go wrong. So, It turns out that it's the coldest winter in a century. It's absolutely freezing in London in the winter of 1962, 63.

Her pipes are freezing. She can't get the water to work. The heat in her apartment is not working. The kids get really sick. Then she gets really sick. And then they just keep sort of passing these terrible sinus infections and flus back and forth to each other. She can't get a telephone installed. So in this like terrible irony, she's even more cut.

off in London in Primrose Hill like this you know central London that she would have been maybe from her neighbors in Devon she can't get a good nanny like they there's an agency that sends over a nanny because she's got a right in the morning she has to produce something to sell it in order to be able to survive financially and she's not wealthy and like the first nanny they send over she finds her in bed with her boyfriend in the apartment and she's like okay this is it going to work yep okay you're gone yeah And then the other problem is that she did have a number of friends in literary London, right? Because she and Hughes are this kind of like hip young couple, one by one, not all of them,

but most of them start to sort of side with Ted Hughes, right? And he's, by this point, Hughes is quite famous. And Plath is not. Like, she has a book out. She has a novel about to come out. She's like a writer's writer. She's well known within the writing world, but she's also well known as Ted Hughes's wife, right? right and so now hughes is has become uh quite famous he's got two big books out and he's got a lot of

cultural capital and clout in the literary world and so you know people are kind of on his side because it probably behooves them to be on his side in terms of their own literary success also plath is american hues is english they're in england and the other problem is that assia webb one of the women that he's having an affair with, she's friends, they're all part of the same circle. And so if she goes to various parties, like it's very likely that Wevel is going to be there, right? And she's sort of feeling, like, awful about that.

And then she'll go to see, like, a friend, like, Suzette Mosedo is one of her friends at the time. And, like, Susette will be like, do you want to hear the gossip about Hughes and Asia? And it's like, on the one hand, I guess, and on the other hand, it's agony, right? It's just a terrible, terrible feeling. And she had been having this affair with Al-Al-Alvarez, who was this prominent critic.

He kind of turns cold on the affair for any number of reasons, probably partly because he's also friends with Hughes. He also, at this point, has met the woman who he's going to marry. It's like, it's a mess. But also, Hughes and Alvarez begin to kind of cut her out professionally. And she feels like she's having trouble getting work. So now she's starting to panic because she's like, oh, okay, you know. And so, I mean, Heather Clark wrote in Red Cross. comment that, you know, by the time that she died, I think she had 200 pounds left in her bank account

and not any steady source of income coming in. She's feeling like she's got to borrow money from her mother. And then this, I think, is underreported and really important. One of the women that Hughes is having affairs with is an American poet living in England working at favor and favor Hughes' publishing house named Susan Allison. Through the strangest coincidence, Susan Allison's ex-husband is Sylvia Platt's brother's college roommate and best friend. Okay. So where Plath is from, it's small town outside of Boston. It's like a posh suburb, Wellesley. It's really gossipy. It's really everybody knows sort of everybody's business. Her mother is writing her at this point, like, just come home, get the kids and come home. I really

think she felt like, I can't go home because there's, like, in other words, if you can't escape. I can't escape. I'm going to go home and everyone's going to know everything that's happening because Ted is sleeping with Clement Moore's ex-wife, right? And Susan Alliston, because she had this other connection to Plath, was like writing Plath, like social notes, like, oh, I'd love to have lunch. I love your poetry. And so it's just sort of all closing in on her. And also one of the sort of steadfast friends that Plath has at this time is a South African novelist named Jill Becker. And she's spending quite a bit of time with Becker and sort of telling her all the awful goings on with Hughes. And some of this gets back to Hughes. And on the Thursday before Plath kills herself,

Hughes shows up at Plath's Flat and says, you know, if you keep telling stories like this, I'm going to sue you. I'm going to sue Jill Becker. He kind of pulls this like legal card. And I think people underestimate how terrifying that was for her. So she takes her own life. She has sealed the kids in the room because she did it by gassing. herself in the oven, right? I have heard it said that maybe she hadn't intended to do it because there was supposed to be a cleaner

or a nanny or somebody coming in, but I don't know how true that one is. I don't think that's true. That is a story that Al-Al Alvarez told different people. And another woman named Dido Merwin, who is a British woman who was married

at one point to one of Hughes's good friends, the American poet, W.S. Merwin. She also told that story. She claimed that she heard that story from Plath's doctor because they had the same doctor. His name was John Horder. And he kind of was like Doctor to the Stars in London. And he was a wonderful doctor and a wonderful man. I actually have letters that he wrote to a Plath biographer in the 1980s where he steadfastly refutes that. He says, absolutely not. I never said that. I don't believe that. He was with Plath the night before she killed herself. He went over to the house to be with her.

and he actually wrote in that letter that she also took an overdose of sleeping pills in addition to gassing herself. That's pretty, yeah. Yeah, we call that a complex suicide, right? It's like when you kill yourself in two ways. And I think that's really important in a way that people discount because part of the mythology about her is related to this idea of this accidental suicide. Yeah. That she hadn't wanted to die and she was gambling with her life because Alvara has published a really famous. memoir that claimed that and people believed it and they also like they use that as another way to

sort of denigrate her as like oh she she gambled everything for her art she only cared about hughes she didn't care about the children when in fact if you know her history she took an overdose of sleeping pills in 1953 when she tried to kill herself the first time and the reason she survived is she took so many she threw them up and then she was you know missing for three days and it was this whole to do but anyway she did survive so when you look at how how she ended her life finally in 1963, she gassed herself and took sleeping pills. She was very, very serious, right? I mean, she was in a state of real despair. I mean, Hoarder termed it a psychotic depression. Those were the words that he used because he said, like, he had known her quite some time.

And he was like, for someone who she was as he knew her in her day-to-day life, the how much she cared for her children, the Sylvia Platt that he knew would never have made that decision. especially with the children in the house if she wasn't really in a state. Yeah. I suppose final question, although I could honestly talk about it forever, it's been so illuminating to have, well, her reclaimed and these kind of myths busted. But how do you think that Plath would want to be remembered? Because having spoken to you, I would put money on the fact that she wouldn't want to be

remembered a lot of the ways that she is. How do you think she would want to be remembered? She wanted to be remembered as a great writer. That's what she wanted her entire life. That's what she worked for her entire life. She forewent the life that people tried to lay out for her. She didn't marry Dick Norton. She didn't marry Myron Lotz, any of these all-American Yalys that, you know, were kind of held up on a silver platter for her.

She went to England. She married a poet that she believed in, you know, whatever Hughes did or did not do, whatever you think of him. She married him because of his talent and his extraordinary charisma. I mean, those were the things that were driving her love for him. She believed in him. And she sacrificed a lot for him. You know, she sacrificed a whole way of life. She left America to go make a life in England with him.

And she did that, you know, because she believed in him, but also because he supported her writing. He believed in her writing. I think his take on her writing in the wake of her death was pretty problematic, to say the least. But he did, he knew she was a great. great poet. And so that's how she wanted that. I mean, she said that. That's what she, she told us herself and her letters and her diaries that she wanted to be, you know, the poet of

America. And I think she became that in some ways. And her poetry will last. So we've got lots of time to keep reclaiming her. Absolutely. Emily, you've been wonderful to talk to. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Oh, thank you so much. Kate, I love this podcast so much. I've watched so many sun rises over the beach walking and listening to you. Talk to people. Oh, my God. It's just an absolute delight.

I'm sorry I don't have anything to say about like Tudor Condoms. But anyway. You've been amazing. You don't need to talk about Tudor condoms. No, I just, I love all the historical sex stuff. It's so fascinating and great. But you can find me on Twitter and Instagram at Emily Van Dyn. so E-M-I-L-Y-V-A-N-D-U-Y-N-E.

Give us the full title of the book again. Yeah, Loving Sylvia Plath, A Reclamation. It's out in the UK, August 23rd, and it's out right now in the U.S. With W.W. Norton & Company in both places. And, yeah, I've got lots of stuff on the internet you can read. Amazing. Thank you so much for coming to talk to me today. I've thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Thank you so much for having me. I have thoroughly enjoyed myself as well. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Emily for joining. me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like review and follow along whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or you just wanted to say hello, then please email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We've got episodes on everything from the sex lives of gladiators to the first in a new mini-series on the secret lives

of the six wives, all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound. Listen on BBC Sounds.