Ted Hughes' Letters

Letters of Ted Hughes, selected and edited by Christopher Reid (Faber)

It doesn't feel quite right reading 'letters', many of which were surely private and not intended for publication, but the book got such good reviews when it came out and Hughes was such a major figure that one feels one might have a look at something so prominently now in the public domain. Now in paperback, one can hardly help but compare them with Larkin's letters, and contrast the flippant, juvenile, larky Larkin with the deeply serious, iconic and iconoclastic Hughes. Except, of course, it's not quite so simple.

Christopher Reid explains in the introduction that the manuscripts aren't quite as immaculately spelt as one might have expected from someone who went to Cambridge University in 1951 to read English. He is idiosyncratic in consistently spelling certain words wrong, sometimes clearly when charging down a torrent of thoughts in some haste but also, one suspects, prefering his own versions. Reid's selections begin with teenage accounts of primordial nature around Heptonstall that set the Hughes world view of powerful and mysterious energies in place.

While at first the seriousness and focus of his ideas is as impressive as one had hoped, a number of themes and attiudes emerge and are sustained throughout the heavy 750 pages that one begins to suspect them and tire of them after a while. I had expected it to be a book to dip into but it is better than that and much of it was read from page to page, not skipping any detail until well into the second half. While obviously a companion volume to the biography (by Elaine Feinstein and a fine book), it becomes an autobiography in itself with Reid's useful notes to letters and brief introduction to each calendar year providing context.

Hughes was a poet set against the 'literary world's' fashions and established conventions and clearly didn't see his British contemporaries as any kind of stablemates. He feels more kinship with myths, ancient wisdom and what he sees as more engaged poetry, from further East mainly, than with the likes of Larkin and Donald Davie (who comes in for some particularly vitriolic denouncements). So it is interesting to see 'poetry wars' being engaged in at the very top level, and possibly even more so to find traces of a certain two-faced personality when poets who have been the subject of derogatory remarks to others are then sent polite and respectful letters later. Having assumed that Larkin had long been regarded as the inevitable 'establishment' choice for Poet Laureate after Betjeman, Hughes is surprised to be offered it and that Larkin hadn't been asked. Or so he thought.

It is perhaps surprising how few of the letters selected by Reid cover the suicides of Sylvia Plath and Assia Weevil and so it is going to be a disappointing book for those who might trawl it to satisfy prurient interests. It is obvious how much Hughes admired Plath as a poet and what a creative partnership they had for a time- she was arguably or potentially the better poet. Their time in America and working together was perhaps Hughes' happiest time. But from Sylvia's death onwards, he finds himself emerging from dark periods and hoping for more equanimity on repeated occasions. Although at least ostensibly blaming himself at times he is apparently unable to see that a possible common factor in the tragedies that beset him is him.

The dubious fascination with astrology and other such unscientific mysticism is given one of those chilling twists (for those more sceptical among us) when in 1956 he finds an indication of suicide in Sylvia's horoscope.

Longer letters, most notably rambling about shamanism and a letter on Measure for Measure (which seems to become the template for his Shakespeare book) are prolix and tedious and suggest that a limit on seriousness needs to be set. But if one might doubt the validity of some of his more far-fetched beliefs, his disparaging of the literary world and its conventions carries more weight when he explains how much he has been impressed with the children's poetry he has judged when involved with competitions and how much talent enters university to study English Literature compared to how few poets of worth come out of universities. His implication is that Eng Lit at university has destroyed the poets, one way or another. And he may have a point. I doubt if he'd have been very impressed with the trend in recent years to install poets onto Creative Writing programmes that make sure young aspiring poets all do it properly.

But it's not all grim. For someone who admires the natural world so much, he seems to take rather too much pleasure in killing large sections of it and one wonders if it is life he wants to celebrate, or death. But he goes further than I had ever done in finding parallels with Shakespeare's biography in King Lear; he fiercely defends the legacy of Sylvia Plath against perceived mis-representations by the likes of Alvarez; he tells a great story about being fitted out by Moss Bros on his way to the Palace to receive the Queen's Medal for Poetry and then he tries his best (though unsuccessfully) to persuade Thom Gunn to change his mind about declining the same award.

He doesn't have a bad word for Seamus Heaney and he can be supportive to the speculative sort of submissions from hopeful new poets looking for a few kind words. I don't know if his farming activities were ever profitable but it is striking how, despite being on the exam syllabus and selling books in amounts beyond the dreams of most poets, he was never far away from thinking up the next money-making edition or scheme. Given the size of the pile of boxes of laureate oloroso sherry he is photographed in front of, one would hope he didn't have to spend much on booze.

But the insights to the man made available by this big but only highly selective edition of his letters didn't make me like or admire him any more than I did already and I thought it would. I thought my horizons might be expanded by finding sympathy with a great and impressive man who hadn't previously been one of my topmost heroes in C20th poetry. I'm afraid he still isn't but the book did provide an engaging read for a week or two. It can be just as rewarding to disagree with someone most of the time than to find everything to one's taste. In many ways these letters are better than Larkin's but they were both primarily known as poets and it's far too late now for me to be unpersuaded of the opinion that Larkin was the finer poet.