Skip to main content

Signal to Noise: Reading Ted Hughes papers at the British Library

The following is a guest post by the poet and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes scholar Christine Walde. Thank you, Christine!

As a poet, librarian and researcher, I have been fortunate to visit Plath's archive at the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College and at the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Each site, owing to the scope and extent of their collections, has their own depth and complexity. And each time, whether I have expected it or not, each visit has bore new discoveries and revelations, both surprising and serendipitous.

It's not uncommon that a special kind of magic happens in the archive. What makes Plath's archive unique — with its drafts and diaries and letters and essays and art and ephemera— is that it is, quite literally, a hive, a site of noise, made all the more audible by her silence in death.

I admit to being seduced by this opposition of volumes. Reading poetry often involves the decoding of noise and silence, sifting through the information that is available to make meaning. In her 2011 essay "Noise that stays noise," Cole Swenson likens the first reading of a poem as noise — an experience of confusion or nonunderstanding — that works in concert with the information contained in the text. This state of suspension as the reader tries to decipher the information, attempting to find ground in the topography of its syntax, is a complex negotiation. When one visits the archive, a similar sensation embodies the visitor, conflating time and space. Looking to words to make sense of the moment, the researcher in the archive is a reader of poetry, suspended in history, between prolonged states of both being and becoming.

What makes Plath's archive all the more magical, then, is the presence of Ted Hughes; whose silence is just as complicit as Plath's, but for different reasons. Plath researchers exposed to Hughes' writing on the verso of Plath's manuscripts become uneasily accustomed to his presence: the chaotic black strokes of his handwriting underlying scores of her neatly typewritten pages. Together, Plath and Hughes orchestrate a unique sound in the archive: one that, like their individual poetry, is nothing less than extraordinary.

The last time I went to the UK was in 2008, and when I was there, I visited Primrose Hill, to see the neighbourhood where Plath and Hughes lived. It was a kind of pilgrimage: visiting addresses on Chalcot Square and Fitzroy Road, while wandering up to the top of Primrose Hill park, looking out over London. This May, I had the opportunity to go back to the UK, and decided this time I would visit the British Library, where I knew some of Plath's papers were held. What I didn't realize was that they were part of Ted Hughes' archive at the British Library, a labyrinthine collection of immense complexity.

Initially, I had a hard time trying to make sense of what it was that I was supposed to be doing at the British Library. I was on holiday with my husband. It was a gorgeous sunny day in May. What was I doing in a library? Something was wrong with me. And yet, when the folders came, I sat down dutifully at a desk and began sifting through them, carefully reading each piece of paper, trying to decode a new information, a new poetry.

At the recommendation of a friend and Plath scholar, I was looking into a collection of papers (MS 88918/129/2) that Hughes kept after Plath's death; a diary that was mentioned by Jonathan Bate in The Guardian, and not " organised and systematic like Plath's, but ... thousands of pages of memorandum books, loose leaves and pocket notebooks." (Bate, "How the actions of the Ted Hughes estate will change my biography," The Guardian, Wednesday, April 2, 2014)

As I held Hughes' papers in my hands —what Bate identified as being the real record of Hughes' inner life— I was astounded. On every page, Hughes was writing back to himself, in desperate urgency, to order the events of Plath's death within a way he could understand. Just like the researcher in the archive, Hughes was attempting to make sense of what happened; except that he was performing it within his own archive, in his own papers, conversing with the past — and not just to himself, but to an invisible audience that attends him in a future he can't possibly foretell.

After working previously with Plath's archive, and with other special collections, I thought I was somewhat immune to the experience of working in the archive, that I could somehow be safe, untouched by what I read. As I continued to read the diary, transcribing it as I went through it, I thought I knew the story of what happened to Plath and Hughes. I was wrong. As I sat in the reading room of the British Library, I found myself pulled into Hughes' writings, simultaneously angry and sympathetic to him; scared, confused, confounded, and awed.

In another part of the folder, Hughes talks about the last time he saw Plath, and the letter that she had written to him; a last farewell love letter to him, which Plath burned in an ashtray. I had read Hughes' poem "Last Letter": this was obviously the experience to which he was referring. But to read about the original moment, in Hughes' hand, was very moving. As a series of papers, they speak to Hughes' restless need to document events as he perceived them — and indeed, to the absence of Plath's diary from this time, which he famously destroyed.

I dangerously assumed that I would know what perceptions or emotions I would experience, and I underestimated how affected I could be by Hughes' papers. In many ways, his diary at the British Library is more than a recollection, but a way to summon the events of those hours and days leading up to Plath's death, and in his own life, as a kind of necromancy, an experience which profoundly affected me.

From the very beginning of her life, Sylvia Plath was, by her mother's hand, archived into a great existence. Every drawing, poem, essay, and photograph was collected, curated, and eventually, through Aurelia Plath's obsessive dedication to the memory of her daughter, classified and described within multiple libraries and archives. To this end, I've often thought that Plath's archive, as an entity, in all of its locations and as an entirety, is the last great modernist collection of pre-digital, analogue culture, which accurately memorializes the literary output of a remarkable 20th century writer. To this end, there's something pre-determined in Plath's archive, a self-conscious logic which manifests itself in an audience; or as a kind of theatre.

By contrast, Hughes' papers are vast, sprawling, deeply interior: a black lake with no bottom. Drafts of poems, readings of books, pages upon pages, are worked and reworked endlessly; leaving no stone unturned in his pursuit to fully explore whatever subject or topic he turned his hand, including himself. If Plath's archive is a site of noise, then Hughes' papers are a signal to that noise: validating, or interfering, with the signal they transmit.

What made reading these entries in the British Library all the more unbearable was that Hughes obviously wanted, somehow, in some way, to reconcile with Plath, but her anger and sadness —in being quite literally, broken by him and his heartlessness in his infidelity— also had no bottom, and was permanent, which only death could quell.

Later that day, I met my husband at Camden Town and we walked along the Lock to Primrose Hill, to visit Plath and Hughes' neighbourhood, as I had done in 2008. Coming up unto the street from the water was different from what I had previously remembered and nothing looked the same. When we got to Fitzroy Road, it felt strange to stand beside my husband, staring at the house where Plath died, someone who we had both never known, where now someone else obviously lived. He seemed so nonplussed about it all. The neighbourhood streets were eerily empty, and grey; filled with that flat, silvery white light of London. I felt a little bit lost and was still shaken from my time at the library: I hadn't properly identified my thoughts or feelings and was awash in raw emotion. We walked to the Chalk Farm tube station in silence.

In my notes from the experience, I wrote: "I did not take enough care to protect myself from the psychic energy of Hughes' papers, not knowing how deeply they could affect me." But what was I supposed to do? Refuse that power? The reality was that I had I felt similarly affected in Plath's archive. And when you are confronted in isolation by the hand of a stranger confessing their innermost thoughts, fears or desires, you cannot help but be affected.

Nothing prepares you for what you will find in the archive, or what you will encounter within yourself within it. This is the gift of doing archival research, of working with special collections. In working with original documents, you are lead to a way of seeing a new kind of reality, some other way of being. That is why research in the archive is so important: it moves us from our rational centres of intellect towards the unknown and the unexplainable, a noise that, like poetry, informs who we are as human beings.

Christine Walde's research interests range broadly within literature, libraries and archives, and intersect with her interdisciplinary work as a poet, artist and librarian. In addition to her work within the library, she has been published in a variety of print and online journals in both Canada and the US, including appearances in Branch, Carousel, The Fiddlehead, Lemonhound, The Malahat Review, The Rusty Toque, Plath Profiles and Vallum. In 2011, Baseline Press published the chapbook The Black Car, based on her research with Sylvia Plath's archives at Smith College and Indiana University, which culminated in the recent completion of a full-length poetry manuscript, Cloud Country, exploring Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes' camping trip to Canada in 1959. She lives in Victoria, BC.

Popular posts from this blog

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove

Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last