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It’s a question as old as time: is suffering a prerequisite of art? At least of good art? Or perhaps a better question is: if there were no suffering, would there even be any art?
And I mean all the forms: music, poetry, sculpture, theater. Obviously literature and painting. Clearly every one of these genres have yielded awesome works birthed from overwhelming pain and suffering. Rebellion. Despair. I don’t need to list any classic works who owe their existences to the darkest and sorest parts of the human soul.
But clearly it’s not the whole story. Michelangelo’s David wasn’t carved with tears. Mona Lisa looks bemused rather than forlorn. And Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s How do I Love Thee? is nothing less than celebration and joy. Suffering indeed holds no monopoly over human creativity. But it does seem to have a stranglehold on certain artists and I have to admit I’m drawn to those types sometimes.
Clearly Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes fit that suffering archetype. Their tragic relationship reappeared in my life after I’d casually happened upon an article about their daughter, Frieda. After reading about her I went on a search for something new about her mother, Sylvia Plath. As so often happens, I found tons of interesting articles and a biography that I hadn’t yet read, Red Comet. About one-third of the way through that, the name Assia Wevill came up (I already knew of her from several years ago) and off I went to unearth Lover of Unreason in my kindle library. About forty-eight hours later I came up for air.
I’d read Lover of Unreason several years ago and it was riveting. That biography of Assia, who was Ted Hughes’s side chick when Plath killed herself, was filled to the brim with drama, ego, cruelty, and heartache. It was scrupulously researched. It cited journals, letters, and personal notes of Assia, Ted, and Sylvia. And it included those of their contemporaries and family members as well. I actually learned as much about Sylvia from it as I did about Assia.
What was so compelling about the book? Part of it, no doubt, is that I’m no different than many other gawkers. Sylvia’s suicide was so stark, outrageous, and eventually public that it attracted the voyeur in many of us. When I found out, a few years ago, that Ted had a mistress at the time of Plath’s death, I was astounded. When I learned that she, too, had gassed herself (and her four-year-old daughter) to death, there was no turning away. I had to know. Who the hell was Ted Hughes and why had two women who had loved him killed themselves?
Surprisingly, my curiosity about Ted waned very quickly as I read Unreason. The guy was, in simple language, a hound. He considered sexual and familial commitment stifling. Who knows how long he remained faithful to Plath (if at all). But he told friends after her death that he could never limit himself to one woman ever again.
He was the classic sweet talking, sweep her off her feet type. And he knew it. Everywhere he went he left a trail of poetry groupies, like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs. I’m not ridiculing those women: the guy wasn’t bad looking. And he (arguably) had talent, although many insist his success was mostly due to his connection to Plath.
But what of these two women who were not star-struck teenagers? They were both intelligent, talented, and accomplished adults. Surely they could see through him. So why did they fall so hard for the dude? Unreason answered a number of my questions as it told Assia’s story. In doing so, it described Ted, Sylvia, and their closest family members as well. It had to; they were all wound together. As the best books always do, the biography spellbindingly lay open the woman’s family, upbringing, education, and ventures into adulthood.
It spared no detail about Assia’s relentless sense of entitlement nor her voracious appetite for male attention. Not that such an appetite is so horrible; a woman can certainly live the way she wants. But Assia was a man-eater as much as Hughes was a womanizer. She cheated on her husbands but when Hughes couldn’t commit to her, she eventually fell apart. She depended on successful men to make her feel whole. Without that, she was destitute.
Of course when Hughes began to slip away from her she was hurt. But I was not impressed that it never crossed her mind that she was finally experiencing what she had been dishing out for years. After all, she was pregnant with Hughes’s child while still married to and living with her third husband. And she had met that husband and moved in with him while still married to her second husband. I wish so much she’d had a friend who could help her see that irony. Or that she herself might have grown enough to see that the man she loved was just like her—seeking an image of a relationship, not a real one. If only she had seen she could become an adult and took care of herself and her little girl.
Plath, however, battled different demons. While Assia was swept up in drama, angst, and ego, Sylvia was fighting the darkness of the depression that had plagued her throughout life. Her death was the result of at least her third suicide attempt. In the years between her first gesture and her final one, she endured the hideous “therapies” of the day: insulin shock and electroshock treatments, as well as various medications that didn’t work well.
That she survived such interventions at all was amazing. That she then went back to college and finished her senior year was simply miraculous. Not to mention she obtained a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College, a women’s college at the University of Cambridge. Far from being a trembling twig, Plath was a dynamo who pursued her dreams and accomplished them. By the age of barely thirty years, she had earned professional respect, published a book of poetry and a novel, found her soulmate and had two beautiful children.
I’m not judging or shaming either woman. I understand pain and fear. I know how vulnerable a woman can feel when she has a child and is not sure if the marriage or the relationship with the father of that child will last. But I also wondered: would their lives have been better if, like me, Assia and Sylvia had been treated with fluoxetine (i.e., Prozac) and become bullet proof?
Yeah, I know: it may not have worked for them. As I wrote in “The View from Prozac,” the medical world doesn’t really understand why it works at all (although studies definitely exist that say it does.) So perhaps Prozac (or any of the other SSRI’s) might not have helped. Plath and Wevill may have killed themselves anyway, even if not immediately. But what if an effective treatment method had been available?
Would Sylvia have moved into a new place with her kids, divorced Ted, and still taken the world of poetry by storm as a living writer? Might she have met someone new or decided she was fine with no one at all? And would her son, Nick, not have taken his own life after Hughes’s death if his mother were still alive and able to help?
Perhaps Assia would have found strength to raise her little girl by herself as she tentatively began her own literary journey. After all, she was a capable artist and a talented linguist famous for translating poetry from Russian, German, and Hebrew. Her daughter, Shura, may have developed close ties with her half-siblings and could very well have become an artist, poet, or both—like her half-sister, Frieda.
Could the right prescription have led to better adventures and art than the sorrowful dead ends that fate imposed on Sylvia and Assia? I certainly think yes. Having lived through some pretty dark times myself, I know that recovery can happen; that it’s possible to feel good and strong again. More than anything, I just wish they had found capable help. That they could simply have felt better. Stronger. Fully confident that they could cast Hughes onto the scrap heap with nary a backward glance. Then show him, and the rest of the world, just what he’d passed up.
In fact, I want that for everyone: to know that you matter; that you can take care of yourself. That you can heal and still produce beautiful work. That drama, intrigue, or anxiety don’t have to rule one’s life. Art and creation can, and do, arise from circumstances other than sorrow and suffering.
I so wish Sylvia and Assia had learned that, too.