Soul Murder By Toxic Astro-Babble: Ted and Olwyn

Space bathmat with dust clouds, Walmart.com

 

Olwyn Hughes gloried in playing malicious games to shut out her brothers’ wives and girlfriends and redirect their attention to herself. Sylvia Plath said that on a visit to her in-laws Olwyn talked around and through her as if she were not there, and Ted Hughes, as if mesmerized, ignored Sylvia’s desperate signals to end it. Olwyn’s hostility drove Gerald Hughes’s wife to pack her bags and head for the train station. On occasion Olwyn snagged Ted’s attention by “talking astrology,” highly technical discourse that astrologers Olwyn and Ted understood, but Sylvia and most people did not.

Suzette Macedo, friend to both Sylvia and Assia Wevill, told interviewer Harriet Rosenstein that Olwyn shut out Sylvia by saying, “‘Ted, Teddy—you remember Neptune in the seventh house.” They’d continue to talk astrology as if no one else was present. Macedo said, “It creates an entity, a mystery, binding them together. And she spins this and draws him in.” Macedo guessed that the siblings had shared a private language in childhood.

Monopolizing Ted was the point. At a gathering in the 1960s, Macedo saw Olwyn triangulate Ted’s girlfriend Assia, who broke down crying:

Nobody could say actually what had happened. It sounds completely crazy and irrational but everybody who was present had felt it. . . All that was happening was that Olwyn was talking to Ted in this code language. Unless you’ve seen her do it—it’s something you have to experience to see what it is—she calls up a time in their lives when they communicated through—I don’t know what it is—and it’s just horrible, absolutely horrible. Everybody in that room was ill. [1]

Olwyn taught Ted astrology. That is not so weird given their time and place and their mother’s interest in the occult. British astrologers gave astrology its modern form. Sun-sign astrology dawned when a London paper in 1930 had an astrologer read Princess Margaret’s character and future through her birth chart. [2] In the 1950s Ted sent Olwyn letters studded with astrological symbols and hand-drawn astrological charts as spot-on as today’s computerized charts. But whoever taught Olwyn how to chart did not convince her that astrology ought never to be weaponized.

Yes, astrologers have ethics. Professionals learn they must do no harm. They may not share the birth data of living private individuals, precisely because this data, revealing a person’s proclivities, can be weaponized. [3] Ted shared with Olwyn Sylvia’s birth chart soon after they married, pointing out Sylvia’s “suicidal” Saturn placement. [4] Maybe Hughes thought it casual, but a chart is private info you don’t want a jealous sister-in-law to know and savor.

When Olwyn said in Sylvia’s presence, “‘Ted, Teddy—you remember Neptune in the seventh house,’” she was covertly criticizing Sylvia as a wife and reminding him she was a mental case. Sylvia’s birth chart in fact has Neptune in the astrological seventh house that represents marriage and partnerships. In astro-lore that signifies inflated expectations or delusions regarding marriage and the spouse. Sylvia really did say that she had found the perfect husband and marriage was to her “the central experience of life.” [5] But responsible astrologers don’t judge character using only one factor in a birth chart. If they did, they’d point out that Olwyn had a pretty sad Neptune herself.

Sylvia was angered, and Assia very hurt, by the Hughes’s astro-babble, which Macedo says Ted did not call a halt to. It made Olwyn smile. Macedo called it evil.

[1] Collection 1489, folder “Macedo, S.” Rose Library, Emory.

[2] https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/princess-margaret-horoscopes. Both Olwyn (b. 1928) and Ted (b. 1930) were born before Sun-sign astrology was invented, but as an adult Ted came under its influence.

[3] So well known for astrological references in his art, Ted Hughes closely guarded his own birth data. See Diane Wood Middlebrook, Her Husband, chapter “His Family.”

[4] Ted Hughes to Olwyn Hughes, October 1956.

[5] Sylvia Plath to Aurelia Plath, May 7, 1957.

Sylvia Was Fat? No, It Was Assia

Seeking reviews of Letters Home I found in the Sydney (AU) Morning Herald, April 3, 1976, page 18, a review by novelist Jill Neville titled "The Sylvia Plath Industry." Neville didn't say who her "great friend" of Plath's was, but it was Al Alvarez; Neville was his girlfriend from 1960 to 1962. Neville wrote:

"A great friend of hers was my great friend. I glimpsed those surrounding her at the final drama; even the woman who acted as the detonator of her own life, I knew. She was too fat and not particularly young but when she came into a room men swayed like wheat in an evening breeze. To look into her perfect Russian-Jewish face was to hear a singing in the ears."

I misunderstood her to be saying Plath was fat and not young and had a Russian-Jewish face. I found it puzzling that Neville would so describe her. The "She" is Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes's "other woman" who in 1976 could not be publicly named.