I wonder if anybody was there when Geoffrey Chaucer sat back from his desk, stood up to stretch his legs, looked out of the window to see an April shower piercing the drought of March to the root and said,'Yes, I know, I'll do a set of stories told by different characters on a pilgrimage to St. Albans.'Obviously not all great works turn out as they were originally conceived.
Or perhaps someone was with John Donne when he batted off a fly and remarked that the next person it landed on might be one of his many girlfriends.
I don't know if I've ever been anywhere nearby when the idea for a major work has occured to an author. Perhaps an idea was suggested to Sean O'Brien, Anthony Thwaite or one of the other luminaries when I was on the same train as them coming out of Hull in 1997 but in Oxford in 2006, I might have witnessed the very first inklings of a major book that is now due out shortly.
At the first British and Irish Poetry Conference, held at St. Anne's College, one of the big lectures was Prof. Jonathan Bate's at the end of which he took questions. One of the questions made reference to Ted Hughes. Prof. Bate moved thoughtfully about the stage, remarked that he had never written on Hughes but mused upon the possibility and seemed to think it was not out of the question. And now, next week, Ted Hughes:The Unauthorized Life is published in all its glory. So that's how long it takes for such a book to grow from the merest passing thought to a big, fat 672 page book.
Hughes is already well served by Elaine Feinstein's excellent life and the generous helping of letters, which are as entertaining as they are grim. There is something about the tragic, dour Yorkshire shaman that is a little bit comic, perhaps mostly to those of us who take Larkin's side in any debate about gentility, but much of the ribaldry is in the letters where we see his endless money-making projects and obsession with horoscopes and all kinds of superstition. But it's probably not going to be possible to not read Prof. Bate's account.
Amazon's blurb - I don't know if the publishers have had the nerve to put it on the book- says,
A magisterial life of Ted Hughes – identified recently as the only English poet since the First World War with a claim to true greatness
It's a big claim, and somewhat arbitrary. I wonder who did the identifying.
But perhaps this book is required to balance the account in the biography department because Larkin's already had three.