Notes on The Killer

Ted Hughes

Notes on "The Killer"

“Energy is created by
every activity that resembles
the pursuit of quarry.”
—Ted Hughes,
Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband:
Hughes and Plath—A Marriage

“I feel that my poems are obscure,
I give the secret away without giving
it. People are so dumb they do not
know I’ve given the secret away.”
—Ted Hughes,
Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, Lover
of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath’s
Rival and Ted Hughes’s Doomed Love

“He was a real hunter. The moment
I drew away from him and became
independent, I was more attractive
in his eyes, and he chased me and
pleaded that I could come back. It
was the same with Assia: when she
tried to break away and was out of
his reach, he became motivated. But
when they were together, he did
terrible tings. I feared I would end
up like her, and resisted his temptations.
Her terrible suicide saved my life.”
—Brenda Hedden,
Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, Lover
of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath’s
Rival and Ted Hughes’s Doomed Love

“I was the only woman
who ever walked away from him.
You can have no idea of what it
was like to be the focus of his
love. But Hughes was an ambitious
man, and he knew that his reputation
couldn’t survive the scandal of
divorce. He just wanted things to
go on as they were between us.
But I was broody. So in 1980 I
moved my business to New York.”
—Emma Tennant,
Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband:
Hughes and Plath—A Marriage

“On one of their free evenings, Peter
Porter suggested that they attend the
Israeli Philharmonic performance of
Fauré’s Requium, while Ted proposed
Euripides’ Bacchai in Hebrew at the
Kameri Theater. “He had guaranteed
that real blood (animal) would grace
the staging,” commented Porter.
—Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, Lover
of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath’s
Rival and Ted Hughes’s Doomed Love

“He was mesmerized when the tour
guide showed them the rock where
Abraham went to sacrifice his only
son Isaac: it “must be the most
electrical place on earth.”
—Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, Lover
of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath’s
Rival and Ted Hughes’s Doomed Love

“Remembering the Dome of the Rock,"
he said, “It’s the most sacred and
important place, where rites were
probably performed, a place of
shamans, and visionaries. In any
culture, mountaintops are very
sacred and a cave on a mountaintop
is more sacred than anything.”
—Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, Lover
of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath’s
Rival and Ted Hughes’s Doomed Love

“But like a Russian doll, the truth was
revealed layer after layer. In his study
of suicide, The Savage God, Al Alvarez
described Plath’s renewed drive to write
as “demonic possession,” which could
have been the reason why she and Ted
temporarily parted. However, he made
no mention of the adultery, even though
he was a close witness to Ted’s affair
with Assia.”
—Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, Lover
of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath’s
Rival and Ted Hughes’s Doomed Love