Birthday+Letters+and+the+Minotaur

Extracts from “Ted Hughes and the Minotaur Complex” by David Berry. (Modern Languages Review Vol 97, No 3)


 * In a key passage in Racine's Phedre the tragic heroine subverts the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur to express her adulterous passion for her stepson, Hippolytus. Her speech brings into conjunction the mythological and emotional elements of the monster, the labyrinth, desire, and death. In Ted Hughes's translation of the play, his last publication before his death in October 1998, performed to great acclaim by the Almeida Theatre Company with Diana Rigg in the title role, this passage is of particular significance. It elicited a personal response from the poet in his own version and helps to illuminate other aspects of his translation. At the same time it carries within it reverberations from other areas of his writing, particularly from certain poems in his final confessional collection, Birthday Letters. **


 * A variety of anachronisms appear in Hughes's version of Phedre, suffusing his dramatic language with striking modern connotations: 'remedes impuissants' (1. 283) becomes 'futile placebo' (p. 14); 'tes pleurs ont prevalu' (1. 836), 'your tears came like anaesthesia' (p. 42); 'l'insolent'(l. Ioo8), 'This thug' (p. 50); 'l'ingrat'(l. 176), 'this rapist' (p. 58). There is, however one curious example, when Oenone speaks of the moderate punishment Theseus is likely to give Hippolytus: 'Un pere, en punissant, madame, est toujours pere' (1. 9oi), Hughes uses the apparently innocuous anachronism 'daddy' in 'When a father judges his own son he remains a daddy' (p. 45), obviously suggesting that, whatever the circumstances, a father will always be an eternally indulgent daddy to his own little boy. Hidden in this anachronism is an unsettling allusion to one of Sylvia Plath's most celebrated and harrowing poems: 'Daddy' from Ariel, published after her death in 1963, in which she analyses and mythologizes her relationship with her own dead father. George Steiner has called it 'the Guernica of modern poetry'.5 She explains how, in an earlier suicide attempt at twenty, she had tried to reunite herself with him: At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you I thought even the bones would do. She goes on to compare him with a vampire who has sucked the blood of her memories and whose presence she seems to have rediscovered in her husband, a surrogate father who has also betrayed her; the poem ends with his symbolic execution: 'There's a stake in your fat black heart [. . .] I Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.'6 Hughes could not possibly have used the word 'daddy' here without intentionally embedding within it a reference to his late wife's poem, with all its surcharge of contradictory and lacerating emotions. Indeed, in his last and revelatory collection, Birthday Letters,in the poem, 'The Bee God', Hughes shows how, to his horror, his wife's sudden apicultural interests signify a symbolic reunion with the ghostly figure of her father, who was an authority on the bumble bee:7 'When you wanted bees I never dreamed I It meant your Daddy had come up out of the well'. It contains disturbing elements of a psychological incestuous marriage: 'But when you put on your white regalia, ****| ****Your veil, your gloves, I never guessed a wedding. **


 * The imagery of the labyrinth occurs in various poems in BirthdayL etters, all of which were written before Hughes became involved with his version of Phedre, which, as we have seen, precipitated similar metaphorical accretions. As can be discerned from Erica Wagner's recent book, which, in a most illuminating manner, connects Birthday Letters to other areas of the couple's writing, notably their correspondence and private journals, the labyrinth is a perfect image for the complicated and fraught relationship that developed between them (p. 13), not simply on the biographical level but also on the creative level, where Plath in particular, as Hughes points out, became possessed of a poetic daemon, a persona quite distinct from her real self, which ultimately overwhelmed ****her.13 ****The entry into the labyrinth is first shown to take place in ' 8 Rugby Street', the house in London where Hughes and Plath spent their first night together. Hughes recalls the excitement of their union but, in retrospect, realizes its ominous consequences; he should have heeded certain inauspicious signs, the scar, for instance, on Plath's cheek, a trace of her first suicide attempt. Already apparently haunted, the house, once Plath had crossed its threshold, took on the aura of catastrophe. In the opening lines the place is seen as a setting for a psychodrama, with images suggestive of a ceaselessly thickening plot and an increasingly tangled web: I think of that house as a stage-set [.. .] [.. .] the love-struggle In all its acts and scenes, a snakes and ladders Of intertanglingan d of disentangling Limbs and loves and lives. The playful connotation of'snakes and ladders' is reinforced as Hughes, in an act of poetic ventriloquism, expresses his feelings of mock terror through the mouths of the other residents, who, with hyperbolic glee, echo his own mythological obsessions, taking us back to Crete and the birth of the legend: They told me: 'You Should write a book about this house. It's possessed! Whoeverc omesi nto it neverg etsp roperlyo ut! Whoever enters it enters a labyrinth- A Knossoso f coincidence! And now you'rei n it.' The legends were amazing. I listened, amazed. 13 'In her poems and stories, throughout this period, she felt her creative dependence on that same process as subjugation to a tyrant. It commandeered every proposal'( Hughes ,Ariel Ascending: Writingsab outS ylviaP lath, ed. by Paul Alexander( New York:H arper and Row, 1985),p . 156). **


 * In Birthday Letters the psychic force that helps to inspire Plath's poetry and takes control of her to the exclusion of all other responsibilities is described in several poems, 'Portraits', 'Apprehensions', and 'Dream Life': The swelling terror that would any moment Suddenly burst out and take from you Your husband, your children, your body, your life, You could see it, there, in your pen. ('Apprehensions') **
 * After Plath's visit,(to the house in London where they first spent the night together,) however, the legends become more personally fateful, as if a powerfully destructive genie has invaded the atmosphere, transforming Hughes's earlier sense of thrilled amazement into, as he now retrospectively imagines, a sense of grim foreboding and sucking other inhabitants into the drama. He refers to a mutual friend who lived on the floor above and who would be enveloped in the eventual turmoil when she is confronted by both sexual desire and death: 'Susan I Who still had to be caught in the labyrinth, I And would meet the Minotaur there'. She would later die of leukaemia in this house. He feels, on that first visit, that Plath drew upon all her witchlike powers to bend him to her immediate necessities, to conjure him, as he says, into a new existence. On that night he became a balm for her feelings injured by another lover Were you conjuring me? I had no idea How I was becoming necessary, Or what emergency surgery Fate would make Of my casual self-service. After their encounter in 8 Rugby Street their fates would be inextricably entwined, sealed on that night by what Hughes calls 'a poltroon of a star', not bright or brave enough to warn him what the future held, eclipsed by the glowing presence of the woman who had come 'panting' up the stairs, the new world incarnate, the 'Beautiful, beautiful America' of the final line. A few poems later, in 'Your Paris', the city of light is shown to have unhappy memories for Plath, who had once gone there, via I8 Rugby Street, on a fruitless quest to find an earlier lover. Not long afterwards she returns there on honeymoon with Hughes. At first the poem reveals how she responded enthusiastically as a typical American in Paris: 'your ecstasies ricocheted I Off the walls patched and scabbed with posters'; as an amateur artist who 'wanted ****| ****To draw les toits', she brightly calls her husband Aristide Bruant, who was Toulouse-Lautrec's patron. Hughes humours what he feels is her shallow and romantic perception of a city which for him still bears traces of the Nazi occupation, 'where the SS mannequins ****| ****Had performed their tableaux vivants I So recently the coffee was still bitter As acorns'. However, as Hughes subsequently discovered in her journals, all this tourist excitement was a camouflage for what the glittering city really represented for her, a personal Golgotha, a dead end of rejection where her letters to her former lover had remained unopened on a desk in a pension, a place where, even though married to the man of her dreams, she still smarted with remembered resentment. Beneath its picturesque facade, Plath's Paris becomes yet another mental labyrinth where she failed to find the sexually desirable monster-lover father-figure for whom she craved: a labyrinth Where you still hurtled, scattering tears. Was a dream where you could not Wake or find the exit or The Minotaur to put a blessed end To the torment. What he thought was a perfect honeymoon destination was for his wife a place of suppressed nightmare. Once again Hughes is forced to come to the sad realization that he had no idea of what thoughts were in his new bride's head. 547 **
 * 548 **


 * However, what is most striking is that, in Birthday Letters, in a poem significantly entitled 'The Minotaur', the figure of Daddy is seen by Hughes as the monster within his wife's increasingly tangled psyche, a necrophiliac obsession that ultimately resulted in family disintegration and death. The opening stanzas describe incidents in a marital dispute, caused by Plath's frustrations as a wife and mother who does not have enough time to spend on her poetry. Furniture is smashed as her anger is released: 'The high stool you swung that day I Demented by my being I Twenty minutes late for baby-minding'. At the same time, marriage and motherhood have still not released her from her Oedipal fixation with her dead father, a fixation that, once creatively metamorphosed and transformed into a personal myth, will become, as Hughes himself understands, the very stuff of her poetry: '"Marvellous!" I shouted. "Go on, I Smash it into kindling. I That's the stuff you're keeping out of your poems!"'. In the midst of this conjugal violence his admonishment would provide, as he says: The bloody end of the skein That unravelled your marriage, Left your children echoing Like tunnels in a labyrinth, Left your mother a dead-end, Brought you to the horned, bellowing Grave of your risen father And your own corpse in it. We discover here the same configuration of monster, maze, desire, and death that appears in Phedre's crucial speech in Act ****i **** i. **