4.0
Ted Hughes
ByPublisher Description
Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He was one of Britain's most important poets.
With an equal gift for poetry and prose, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter-writer since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship, love, and life also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. His lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, is the saddest and most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry.
Hughes left behind a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems, and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes's inner life, which he preserved for posterity. Renowned scholar Jonathan Bate has spent five years in the Hughes archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. His book offers, for the first time, the full story of Hughes's life as it was lived, remembered, and reshaped in his art.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesTed Hughes Reviews
4.0
“When Ted Hughes published Birthday Letters in 1998 it became the fastest selling work of poetry in history. Critics were astounded, readers old and young were converted, prizes were scooped. Comparisons were drawn with erupting volcanoes. There was a feeling of immense pressure forcing the poems upwards, outwards. These were poems that had to be written. The story of how that pressure gathered and why is the burden of this engaging biography.
Though not the first biography of Ted Hughes, it is the most detailed. The journey it traces from Number 1 Aspinall Street, Mytholmroyd to Buckingham Palace is remarkable. Like his close friend Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes' parents were neither wealthy nor highly educated and lived far from the centres of power. Nearly all their street's houses were made of millstone grit, stained by over a century of industry. A tin bath was stored under the kitchen table for washing.
There were compensations. Hughes' Mother Edith was something of a mystic, complaining since childhood of spectral hands touching her own. In June 1944 she woke to the sight of crosses flashing in the sky above the local chapel, alerting her to a terrible battle being fought in which thousands were being killed. The following day the radio announced the D-day landings had begun that morning.
Little Hughes loved animals made of lead and the outdoors, thrilling to ‘the silence of the hills’, the untamed Yorkshire moors and its wildlife. Early hunting expeditions did not always run smoothly. After borrowing his brother’s air rifle, a shot by Ted ricocheted, bloodying his forehead. Fishing trips went better when the boys trawled the canal using old curtains for nets. Hughes' favourite childhood book seems to have been Tarka the Otter. Unsentimental and frequently violent, the book refused to cast animals as mere human stand-ins. When Hughes read it, it hit him with the force of revelation.
Hughes' flair for writing and reading saw him through Grammar School and later to Cambridge. Much of what he learned was an elaboration of his early reading: bits and pieces of Jung, D.H. Lawrence, large chunks of Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. Hughes switched from studying English to anthropology after his famous dream of seeing a human-sized fox enter his room, burnt and remorseful, telling the budding writer ‘You’re killing us’. This provoked his signature poem ‘The Thought-Fox’ and the rest, you might think, is history.
Bate doesn’t have a historian’s vice of spotting inevitability around every corner. Whatever Hughes claimed in later years, the poem, in fact, was not written until years after leaving university and was repeatedly revised. To readers that can barely imagine a world before the poem existed, the messy process of how it arrived is interesting reading. The famed last line ‘The window is starless still; the clock ticks, / The page is printed' went through many variants, such as ‘And the page where the prints have appeared’ and ‘The clock crowding and the whitening sky / Watch this page where the prints remain.’ It's a fine example of the book’s fascination with how easily history might have taken a different course, the countless fords in the river of time.
Also different was Hughes’ approach to poetry. At the time, the ‘Movement’ poets were in vogue. Hughes style, as Seamus Heaney put it, with its ‘sensuous fetch, its redolence of blood and gland and grass and water, recalled English poetry in the fifties from a too suburban evasion [...] his diction is consonantal, and it snicks through the air like an efficient blade, making and carving out fast definite shapes; but within those shapes, mysteries and rituals are hinted at. They are circles within which he conjures up presence.’ You long for a second volume of Hughes' correspondence, filled solely with letters between the two.
The ritual, shamanistic aspect of poetry certainly appealed to Hughes. Though it's a mark of how seriously Hughes took his role as poet, Bate seems to imply that it also papered over his glaring lack of responsibility, especially when it came to sex. Hughes had a reputation as a seducer and Bate makes no attempt to excuse it. Hughes’ affair with Assia Wevill is well known, but less so were the dalliances he was enjoying well into his sixties. There are hints of even further affairs, including a possible tryst with Angela Carter. The feminist writer Erica Jong (she who coined the phrase ‘zipless fuck’) and her attraction to Hughes is weirdly fascinating.
We learn that Hughes was in bed with another woman at roughly the same time Sylvia Plath was placing her head in the gas oven. This is the point that most biographies have already covered, often to the exclusion of everything else. Bate is careful to give this event its full measure, but also careful to place it into context and with some sobering details.
To the fledgeling feminist movement, Plath served as a ready-made victim and martyr. Hughes was swiftly caricatured as a violent, profiteering tyrant. It was a crude view, hence its reliance on strict binary opposites, on black and white. Although Plath’s Journals and Letters Home helped bring some shades of grey into that view, her more hysterical fans had little time for facts. Bate politely terms them ‘Plathians’. Some may take offence at that. Others might point out that, while Hughes’ actions were ugly and selfish, at least he never defaced another person’s grave, or wrote poems demanding someone’s dismemberment.
We also learn that when The Bell Jar appeared in America, it was prompted by an oddity of US copyright law. Work by a deceased American citizen published outside their own country forfeits protection after seven years. This meant that any publisher could bring the novel out without paying a cent in royalties. As the money from Plath’s estate was paid into a Trust for her two children, less the price of a modest family house, Hughes sensibly opted to release an official edition. Accusations of profiteering duly ensued. Protests at Hughes’ readings grew more frenzied and vicious.
There were other difficulties. After Crow in 1970, even devoted fans could spot the decline in quality. Bate serves up some astute criticism and quotes many examples of Hughes at his most overblown and pretentious: ('Oracular spore-breath’, ‘goblin clump’, ‘ectoplasmic pulp’, ‘half a drugged Oglala’. ) Hughes’ voice, as Bate puts it, became a ‘parody self', a rehash of the worst of Crow without the directness and clarity of its best. Official recognition didn't help. 'Rain-Charm for the Duchy' aside, Hughes’ laureate poetry was awful.
What broke the deadlock? Hughes was dismissive of ‘confessional’ poetry but had learned more than he was willing to admit from Plath. Yet the Birthday Letters poems addressed to his wife's shade didn’t arrive as a late shower of creativity: they were written over thirty years. Some appeared in the 1981 and 1994 editions of Hughes' Selected Poems without comment. Besides their emotional richness, they seemed to most as altogether different from Hughes’ other work.
In fact, as Erica Wagner says in Ariel’s Gift the style of the book had more in common with Hughes’ superb 1979 collection Moortown Diary - looser, dialogic, more willing to risk feeling. Not all the Sylvia poems made the cut, and not all saw publication even in limited editions afterwards. Perhaps one day that will be rectified, but I think Bate is right when he says that releasing the burden of grief helped Hughes in more ways than one.
Bate also unearths some interesting finds. Plath attended the Lady Chatterley Trial at the Old Bailey, and named her role models as Brigit Bardot and Lolita, in apparent seriousness. Although Hughes sister Olwyn wrote scathingly about Plath, she barely knew her in real life. The Vicar that baptised Hughes and Plath’s children preached a sermon heralding the H-bomb as a sign of the Second Coming, attacking 'the stupid pacifists and humanists’ that feared incineration.
When Plath submitted the manuscript of Hughes’ first book The Hawk in the Rain, Faber returned it with the acid comment that they didn’t publish first books by unknown US authors. After Plath pointed out Hughes was an Englishman, an acceptance letter and a glowing note of praise from T.S. Eliot immediately followed.
Although Hughes worshipped Eliot’s work, he found the senior poet distant, always looking down to the ground when talking, and smiling like ‘a person recovering from some serious operation’. Hughes’ comments about American poets still seem accurate over fifty years later: their only real grounding was their selves and their family, ‘Never a locality, or a community, or an organisation of ideas, or a private imagination.’
I have some gripes. I doubt many will agree that Hughes was one of the great Poet Laureates. I don’t think hypnotism performed by amateurs helps much with the agony of childbirth. Oxford isn’t in ‘the North’; nor is Nottingham. I don’t see why readers that disliked Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being actually should ‘atone’ for that opinion, or why Bate thinks they should.
These flaws aside, this is an engaging, level-headed biography, fair to its subject, and with a proper respect for the human suffering it probes. Seamus Heaney compared reading Birthday Letters to a ‘tribute paid / By what we have been true to. A thing allowed.’ Bate has been true to Hughes.”
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