Bog Myrtle & Peat

You Hated Spain was published in Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters. It’s a reflection on the poet’s honeymoon in Benidorm with Sylvia Plath in 1956, and it seems like everything that people hate of Hughes is here – the strutting misogynist, the mansplaining boor and the sneering bully. Even the title is an imposition of taste which may or may not be Plath’s – it doesn’t matter whether she hated Spain or not because Hughes has decided for her. 

For those of us who would forgive Ted Hughes almost anything, the poem is enough to make you wince at first glance. It feels like a bitter jibe, but there’s too much of a spotlight upon Plath here; her reactions and horrors are described in such vivid detail that they end up speaking as much of him as her. Spain is not so much a value-judgement but the fault line against which the two poets grind and differ. As the poem advances, Hughes becomes the dark, mercurial Frestón (el sabio), coiling himself in loops around the railings – while Plath is the wide-eyed, gentle explorer who knows more from looking than living. Within that context, while Hughes might begin with “Spain frightened you”, Plath could match him with an opening line of her own – “You frightened me”.

I can’t tell whether I’m fixated by Spain because I’m stuck on Ted Hughes, or whether I was already fixated on Spain and Hughes simply reinforced the link. But the Spain that is revealed in relief by this poem is the same Spain that I find so compelling; the Spain which rears up before me like a beautiful, terrifying cobra. Unlike Hughes, I don’t feel at home in Spain, but I am magnetically drawn to the “African/Black edges”, “The wrought-iron grille, death and the Arab drum”. Hughes is reflecting on a trip almost forty years before the poem was written – it’s now been seventy, and his Spain could be an artefact or a cliché of itself by comparison with modernity – but it isn’t. The immediacy persists, and even in 2024 the country has an unblinking directness which lies between every brick and splash of shade. Only in this context could the deliberate and glorified killing of bulls survive into the twentieth century, and it doesn’t matter if you hate the brutishness of it. Spain is engaged in a conversation with itself, and while I have found the slash and horror of the bullfight puzzling, it surely makes sense to itself.

When Hughes appears to sneer at Plath’s naïve reaction to a country which “No literature course had glamourised”, he seems to mock her over-reliance on academia – and her consequent lack of physical worldliness. Here’s another bone of contention between the two, but it’s really nothing personal. I start to wonder if Spain can be taught or glamourised as an abstract in any sense. Much as I tried to learn Spanish at school, I was never completely convinced of how the effort would be repaid – until I suddenly felt the pastel-tone limitations of an English vocabulary. And how glad I am that nobody tried to press me with Federico Garcia Lorca as a “set text” with the transparent slide of an overhead projector gathering dust in the classroom. Lorca can’t save your life until you have a life to save, and some things exist to be discovered in tandem with the world itself – you aren’t supposed to have them packed in a box from childhood and ready to use when the moment invades you; you’re supposed to find them as you go. 

So if Spain can’t be taught, I’m not surprised that the immediate, intuitive Hughes felt at home there. But if he is “at home”, it’s surely his failure as a host to study Plath’s discomfort in such detail without any gesture or attempt to soothe it. Even that’s a small cruelty, but it’s equally off-beat to expect him to respond by saying “but then I gave you a big cuddle and you felt much better”. He has to let her twist in the wind, and their relationship cannot be coloured by how it turned out in the end. If you’re looking to back-analyse Hughes and Plath for signs of his inherent wickedness, you’re going to be outraged by anything which seems to be less than soppish adoration – even at their best, they were always watching each other with hawk-like acuity.

The poem explores strong reactions, and it’s not entirely helpful to ascribe them to the actual biographically pin-sharp figures of Hughes and Plath. The “I” and the “You” are simply rhetorical devices, and the truth is probably that Hughes was meeker and Plath more bold than the poem lets on. Hughes appears at the end of the poem as the seer of a single thing; he’s watching his wife in the darkness as she walks on an empty wharf – he’s become a predator, and that word has recently been used to denigrate the poet. To him, Plath is lost and vulnerable as a fawn, “still not understanding” the world around her – but he understands that she will. 

It would be far too simple for Hughes to write a poem called “here’s how my honeymoon showed me that I married a lesser person”. Instead, it’s the guts of Hughes and the dynamic between the young couple – why I love his writing and why Spain appeals to me. But I also share Plath’s nervousness. I am also frightened and timid in the face of such outrageous primary colours, and when I read Hughes, I remember that the world in all its parallel strands of wonder and ugliness is there to be engaged with and not simply studied. I have to be brave, or at least act into the part of bravery.