In an interview on Adultery

Your last book is Ted Hughs’s Birthday Letters. Sylvia Plath said that he smelled like a butcher in bed, and she meant it as a compliment. And yet Birthday Letters is a very tender collection. It’s a retrospective piece published long after Plath’s suicide, and I think it reinvented Hughes in the popular imagination, or ensured one side of him would be remembered over the other. Instead of the butcher he became this very tender, wounded person.

I never bought the whole Sylvia Plath thing from the beginning. I think he’s a fantastically interesting poet. I loved his first book The Hawk in the Rain – but this is a lovely, tender chronological collection in which he relives their original love affair and then their marriage. And he incorporates her work in his poetry, and everything is about “remember when we did this” and “remember when I bought you daffodils”, “remember when I made you a table”, “remember when we had chickens”. It’s this wonderful, elegiac re-evocation of their relationship. And one could be cynical about it but I’m not. He does represent himself as much more fragile than you would have imagined. He says “you were auditioning me for the part of your father”. She was obviously a very sick, very rapacious, very hostile person.

I once thought I’d write a play about Sylvia Plath called "This Bell Jar Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us”.

I think that’s true. She was impossible to live with. The depression has to have been genetic and powerful – her son just killed himself. Isn’t that awful? He was in Alaska researching fish, which was a love he inherited from his father. Just an awful story. Some of the poems in “Birthday Letters” talk about what it was like for Hughes after she died and they’re so heartbreaking. Feeding his little son in his high chair, noticing the glitter in his eyes. Seeing the daughter, Freda, becoming paler and more wounded. Seeing the legacy of that horrible feud for your children. Brutal. And then of course he chose another woman who went and did the same thing.

Coincidence?

I think you do have to be a little curious about that. There’s one poem in the collection about the adultery – the woman who he’s brought into their lives. He talks about her as a “filthy erotic Jewess” and you know that that’s something he must have said to her. And of course there’s a huge, erotic historical charge there.

Well that’s the erotic fascination of revelation maybe - dirty talking. But what about the dull stuff? Because if you reveal yourself honestly, you reveal yourself at every level. In savage anal sex, perhaps, but also in other things ...

In mundane things, paying the bills, table manners.

Exactly.

Perhaps that’s why people opt for marriage.