birthday letters. through a glass darkly

ted hughes never addressed the accusations of feminists and followers of his brilliant poet wife sylvia plath who claimed he had driven her to suicide. reportedly they scratched his name off her grave and booed him off stage on his tours. ‘birthday letters’ released the year of his death is his response.

the poems are like vividly remembered fragments of a life together. there is no apology (almost) – it is perhaps rightly assumed that it is not necessary – for whom does he have to answer to? the memories are searing like red hot embers. the poems follow the relationship between Hughes and plath like a distorted mirror - from the time that he sees the photograph of the years’ fulbright scholars among whom she was one, to the trips to different continents where distances and differences tear at the love that held them together, to her eventual death.

i respect hughes act of deference of the unavoidable act of voicing his piece in the sylvia plath suicide story until the year that he died. the bestseller lists had to wait for a long time to know about his side of the story.

what rescues the book from sinking into sentimentality and / or self justification is the alternate irony and anger, affection and bewilderment as he addresses her already dead –asking her why / reminding her when / telling her who.. like he is talking to her as if she is sitting there in person, in front of him, waiting for him on the other side.

how does one begin to look at ones own life as a work of art. what bridges art and life? biography as an art form? Or life as an art form?

in bergmans ‘through a glass darkly” a father toys with the idea of documenting the gradual disintegration of his daughter to mental illness as an act of love. perhaps – for him, a novelist, everything is a subject. his work makes him an armor; language provides him a safe space from by which his own life gains exotica.

karins mind is lunging between a reality where she is surrounded by love and her delusions where everyone is waiting in stillness for a god who finally turns up in the incarnation of a giant spider.

there are three men in this house on the edge of the ocean besides karin each having a strained but love-filled relationship with karin. there is the brother with the odd incestuous undertow to the filial love, the lover whose self-sacrificial martyrdom seems suspicious and the father caught between art and real life. the delusions are all around, each man making his own to be able to carry on living as is considered normal.