Nexus 24 2015

NEXUS MAGAZINE Arts
Poetry, Sex
and Suicide
Peter Dornauf
Frieda Hughes is not a name to initially conjure with until one remembers
that she is the daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. What a family!
The story of their lives reads like some Greek tragedy. Murder and
suicide abound along with a touch of madness and mayhem.
Her mother, the famous poet, was always a little unhinged, half in love
with death and tried several times to kill herself before she actually
succeeded, taping up the door where the children slept and then
downstairs turning on the gas in the kitchen, her head in the oven.
Ted was off with another woman at the time, which no doubt
precipitated the suicide. The “other” woman was Assia Wevill, strikingly
beautiful, but herself a little fragile. She went one further and killed
herself and her daughter when it seemed that Ted would not commit
to her after the death of Sylvia. Ted’s mother died from shock after
hearing the news.
Then later in life, Frieda’s brother, Nicholas, after a distinguished career
in marine biology, followed the path of his mother after a bout of
depression and hung himself at age 47.
Frieda, married three times and onto her fourth, has had to wrestle
with her own demons. It’s small wonder. She was only three when her
mother succumbed to the lure of death. Her father put it about that
she’d died of pneumonia but the truth came out when a school friend
spilled the beans. Frieda was 14 at the time.
She spent a long spell hiding in the outback of Western Australia as an
adult, as far away from England as possible, writing poetry (surprise)
and painting. I purchased a volume of her verse many years ago, called,
Wooroloo. One of her paintings decorates the cover. It’s a picture of a
towering blood-red sky, which takes up almost all of the canvas, beneath
which two diminutive sheep graze. Shades of Edvard Munch and Caspar
David Friedrich, both arch romantics from the nineteenth century.
The poetry possesses some startling imagery. One can’t, of course,
help but read them through the eyes of events and people that were
part of her tragic life. “Her days were as lost as marbles”, she writes in
one poem. And speaking of the place called Wooroloo, she says – “In
this valley I have been hollowed out/And mended. I echo in my own
emptiness like a tongue/In a bird’s beak.”
Herself childless, she records in another poem entitled, Hysterectomy,
of having her disease stripped out, “Like the rotten lining of a leather
coat”. One can almost hear echoes of both her mother and father in
these lines.
She is back in Britain now, practicing as a grief counsellor (Surprise).
No doubt the sessions work both ways. But she has recently released a
new collection of poems called Alternative Values, in which one of the
pieces directly confronts that terrible moment when her mother was in
the process of taking her own life.
Did I watch my mother’s face
As she left us bread and milk before
She shut us in and Sellotaped the door?
Ted Hughes has a lot to answer.
14 N.24 / V.47 SUMMER