The relationship between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath is scarred terrain by now, a battleground gone over by armies of biographers and commentators taking either side or, just occasionally, claiming to take neither. Jonathan Bate's unauthorised account is not endorsed by the Hughes estate but seems to find a balanced approach among the welter of unbalanced evidence. While certainly not an apologist for Ted, as one might read Elaine Feinstein's biography, Bate is most critical of the feminist campaign against him but very early on one is already taking the point that the personalities in the mix, at first a great creative partnership, were too dangerous when put together for anything but a tragic outcome.For those of us not there at the time (which is by now most of us), it's hard to appreciate the impact of Hughes' first poems on the literary world. Although he had forebears in the likes of D.H. Lawrence and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the like of him had not been seen before. Bate draws parallels between Hughes and Plath and Wordsworth and Coleridge where the former are 'elegiac' and the latter 'mythic'. I think he was right the first time when he made Hughes 'mythic' but it's a useful register to keep in mind.
Hughes' early celebrity puts the ambitious Sylvia under some pressure but by the end of the book, and long after Sylvia's death, the point has been made more than once that, after Crow, Hughes was producing uneven poetry not redeemed until the Tales from Ovid, his reputation substantially dependent on his first three volumes after which he was 'blocked' and it is only some release found in writing the Ovid, published in 1997, that recovers his best work with the realization that he had been suffering from Sylvia's suicide for that long, 35 years. For me, and I'm sure for many others, Sylvia was always the better poet.
There are some fine paradoxes to be found in comparisons to be made between Hughes and his polar opposite and great 'rival' in poetry, Philip Larkin. When Hughes is having difficulty choosing between three girlfriends, one can't help but remember that, for some time. so was Larkin; they both developed into right-wing political 'thinkers' and were the two most influential English poets of their generation representing two very different attitudes. But for all that Hughes' charisma, animal magnetism and intense charm made him a hugely successful sexual predator, Larkin dithered and spent as much time trying to keep women out of his life as in it. Judging the Arvon Poetry Competition together (with Seamus Heaney and Charles Causley), Hughes finds it,
interesting to observe Larkin (whose literary taste Ted described as 'spermicide')
but we might now consider the relative merits of the overwhelming in relation to the ironic and understated and realize the inevitable limits of machismo and credit Larkin with more than enough scepticism to forego the obsession with horoscopes, mysticism and other assorted hokum. The restlessness of Hughes' life contrasts with Larkin's administrative, provinicial professional life not tainted with quite the same thoroughgoing lurid detail of the most alpha of alpha males.
Ted's first meeting with Sylvia, at the literary launch party, is on page 103. By page 111 we are already aware that it has become dangerously passionate on both sides and by page 141, Sylvia is already suspicious of Ted's affairs with other women. That didn't take long but one might not have been aware of it at all thus far in Elaine Feinstein's equivalent book.
Ted's sister, and henceforth agent, Olwyn, doesn't like Sylvia, who is 'high maintenance', and perhaps sees any of Ted's lovers as an unwelcome intrusion, but the irresistable Assia Weevil is an affair that can't help itself either in an awful Shakesperean hendiadys, the sort of doubling that complicates a plot endlessly, but not quite as endlessly as when we later realize that the influential critic, Al Alvarez, was involved with both Sylvia and Assia as well. It is no wonder that Nathaniel Tarn is credited with saying how it brought to mind a Greek play. There would have been plenty available to make the same observation if he hadn't.
Ted is the 'caged jaguar', wanting to be free of domestic responsibilities, and also presumably wanting to be free of threats to kill him from Assia's husband, David, who apparently had the knife to do it with. But although Ted might long for some imagined 'bohemian' life for himself, he was ready enough to propose a 'constitution' full of rules by which he and Assia could live together. It involved cooking duties, bedtime for the children, getting up time, to only be altered 'by agreement', cataloguing of expenses, none of which suggest a carefree way of living, and one must admire Assia's resilient reply,
Teddy dear, forget the detail.
But however much faith one puts in Bate's scholarly accumulation of such intimate domestic detail, that which is not evidenced by such documents is as unreliable as any other rumour or gossip because Ted is a habitual liar when it suits his purposes and so, it seems, do most other witnesses only see their own partial view of complicated goings on and give their version of them.
Ted's good taste is proven by the need for a mention here of his liking for Maddy Prior's singing as he published his own book, Gaudete, as well as the inclusion of Spem in Alium, a favourite piece of music, in his memorial service but Gaudete is surely one of the most misogynist poems in the language, not somehow surprisingly the only piece in the Collected Poems represented in extracts. This is unfortunate material to have to report in the chapter before Bate has to narrate the 'Arraignment' in the dreadful poetry but incendiary accusation of Robin Morgan,
I accuse
Ted Hughes
of.....
...
the murder of Sylvia Plath
and, yes, there still are people who think that if they've found a suitable rhyme like that 'accuse/Hughes', then they already have a poem.
But it is perhaps under the legal, personal and political pressure like this, unbearable as it must have been, that one might feel some sympathy for the failure of machismo, the inability to do the right thing, the innate inability that we all have to be anything other than what we are, that eventually we feel some sympathy for Ted, which was supposedly endorsed by the publication of the Birthday Letters.
However, tremendous best seller that it was, those poems were still more free verse confession and an attempt at absolvement than they were great poetry and their best-seller status was more about voyeurism than an appreciation of art for art's sake.
Before a very useful precis of Hughes' elaborate argument in the Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, which makes its very personal interpretation of Shakespeare seem in some ways plausible (although, of course, everybody finds themselves in Shakespeare and Hughes only does so at much greater length), Bate devotes a chapter to a litany of lovers in later life, not only suggesting as possibilities Angela Carter and Edna O'Brien but a very significant one in a flat in South London who, thankfully, remains unnamed.
At last, there is a stone unturned, something not to be known because, quite honestly, who would want to ever write a poem that was any good if your life was going to be investigated to this degree.
As with Larkin, every available letter is scrutinized, every rumour is investigated, every casual remark or greeting on a birthday card has to be published. In thirty five years or so, we have moved from an orthodoxy in which the text of the poems was the only object of enquiry to an intense investigation of the author and every nuance of all their traumas. Ted Hughes might have had more traumas than most but everybody has them.
Not much of this sheds light on the composition of The Thought-Fox or Hawk Roosting because Sylvia was still alive when they were written. Not long after that, the rest, for Sylvia, was silence but Ted's pain went on for decades, fishing for salmon with the Queen Mother on the choicest rivers, publishing special editions for as much money as he could ask but generally not being much of a Poet Laureate. Not his fault but neither did he deserve either the acclaim or quite the approbrium that he received. Whereas Sylvia, as far as we can tell, under the pressures that she was under, was quite some extraordinary talent and much of the credit for preserving and editing that work must go to Ted.
Jonathan Bate has done us a great service in providing this book which one, as ever, feels some guilt reading. It wanders a bit towards the end, losing its chronological thread, trying to tie up loose themes and then adds a coda that perhaps could have been shorter but, if you want to be as definitive as you're allowed, it has to be done.
It's unputdownable but I can't possibly go through it all again so now it's also unpickupable.
Ted Hughes will surely be remembered in future times as a significant poet of the C20th but, more than that, I hope and think, What will survive of us is Larkin.