Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes

Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes, The Unauthorised Life (William Collins)

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.

 

Oh Babe, What Would You Say

Usually, reading Jonathan Bate's Ted Hughes, An Unauthorized Life would be amazing enough. It could be time to review it this time next week, all being well. I have noted many page references as I go; I have spent too much time in my life forlornly looking through books for the bit I want to quote thinking,
Surely it was in this chapter, around about here, halfway down the left hand side. 
But it never is.
So now I have to remember to insert a sheet of paper in any book I might want to write about to avoid that debacle. An elementary piece of the book reviewer's methodology, one might have thought, but I've learnt the hard way.
We will wait until then for some thoughts on Bate's Ted which would be amazing enough were I not also reading another book, more slowly, less highbrow and for some louche relief at bedtime, which is Graham Lord's Just the One, The Wives and Times of Jeffrey Bernard. Oh, My Giddy Aunt. It would make anybody with bohemian aspirations feel completely outclassed. It makes even Ted look as if he wasn't even trying to attract women. It makes Dylan Thomas look like a discerning wine-taster. Each page has more delinquency and vagabond ruin than any other book can muster in its entirety. I can't recommend it highly enough except to say that its monumental decadence is magnificent beyond all imagining until you realize quite how sad it is. He surely makes Baudelaire look lke Freddie Bartholomew. I can think of no higher tribute.
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But tune in next week for the Hughes as well as, either on Thursday night or Friday (who's to say these days), the Saturday Nap as Bookiebasher goes for the hat-trick.
Not spending much time in betting shops now in the internet age, I've found the magic one, Betfred in Cosham, on whose telly my horses never lose. Traditions are quickly established and, slipping out for a late lunch from the office, the highlight of a Friday is now going there to see the selection win as easy as you like, as Onefitzall did today. And if Betfred is The Bonus King, the bonus is where you have another tenner just to establish one's bona fides and not get thrown out as a vagrant.
Let's get carried away on a temporary wave of tipping success while we can on the day that Peter O'Sullevan was remembered. This is what the Saturday Nap was supposed to be like, not a litany of excuses but a page in my notebook where the results column says WW, for 'won, won' and genuinely thinks we can extend it to W Six Times, the old formbook comment  that is shorthand for 'waited with will win when wanted'. You see, there is poetry everywhere, even in the formbook.
--
It's not good news that Stephen Fry is standing down from the chair of QI but I think he might return as a guest one day and then we'll see. Sandi Toskvig, of the Women's Party, will take the show into the second half of the alphabet while, I dare say, Stephen does something More Interesting instead. Like, whatever happened to that film about Handel he was supposed to be making. Get on with it, lad.
But we must give Sandi her chance. She had a good story on an old episode I saw this week in which she was to make a programme about sailing round the coast of Britain and had to go to be measured for a life-jacket. She still has the business card from the life-jacket expert who measured her for it at the prestigious life-jacket company. And his name was Will Drowne.
       

The Saturday Nap

It's quite possible the Saturday Nap could become the Friday Nap. It is a truth universally acknowledged by me that Saturday's racing is the hardest, with more competitive, big races easier to get wrong than the weekday races when only the racing people are watching. It has often been the case that one can win money throughout the week only to give it all back on Saturday and the last few weeks have been a case in point.
Friday seems a good compromise, where some good races are often available in a two-day meeting where the biggest races happen on Saturday when the bookmakers pick the pocket of the weekend mug punter.
I can't see what will win the Charlie Hall at Wetherby or the tricksy hurdle race but I do like a few tomorrow.
I'll point out that to a level ten pound stake, the Saturday Nap is now 7.50 up and so I'd suggest a treble of 2.50 of that goes on
Onefitzall, Uttoxeter 1.15
Hadfield, Wetherby 1.40
Leoncavallo, Wetherby 2.50

and a fiver goes on the nap, Onefitzall.
But that's the one that counts.

Donned Impersonality

There is a commonly held assumption that poetry is about finer feelings, the personal expression of profound emotion and even that, perhaps somehow, poets have finer feelings than most and that is why they express them. It is presumably a Romantic invention, from when the artist was released from the rigours of discipline to swoon and indulge themselves in sweeping gestures and melodramas of heightened awareness.
While we owe much to them, we also still suffer from the hangover of their excesses.
Geoffrey Hill assured us a few years ago that 'poetry was not expression'. But, thankfully, we are not all as austere as he is. On the other hand, someone else's love, grief, rapture or anxiety is often a lot like our own or anybody else's and not necessarily of interest to us. We know about it already and it is somewhat presumptuous of a poet to think that we might be interested in theirs. We can be just as self-centred as them and only take from them those things they say that correspond to our own experience.
There is no reason to believe that a poet's personality is any more captivating than a reader's and I'm sure in many cases it might be less so. So although I'd always want to swerve the temptation to suggest any manifesto for poetry, I would like to speak up for the modernist idea of impersonality. Although the poet is welcome to be present in their own poetry should they see fit, there are many advantages to be had by not being present, or at least removing oneself as far as possible from one's poems. It may not be an impersonal poem at all and so 'impersonality' can be 'donned' in Thom Gunn's phrase in On the Move. The least you can do is pretend not to be there.
What poetry is about is the words. Painting is about the paint and Music is about the music. It may or may not mean anything but what it means is not the most important thing, not what makes it potentially of interest and not where the 'poetry' is. Poets who think that their poetry is all about them are likely to be the first to come unstuck. 

Keith picks Gregory

It was an excellent selection of records by Keith Richards on Desert Island Discs yesterday.
The Etta James, the Doo-Wop, the Vivaldi but, most outstandingly, the Gregory Isaacs.
And then, he went further and chose to save Gregory when all the others got washed away.

I don't listen to my very favourite music often enough. I sometimes think I could survive forever with just Bach, and maybe I could survive with just reggae, too. But one doesn't have to.

So, here's Extra Classic, quite surprisingly a track I don't have among the 30-dd LP's and half dozen CD's of Gregory. It's reassuring to know one keeps such bad company.
There is a story in these parts that some local church people went round knocking the doors of their local community in the Witterings/Selsey area, collecting for their church roof fund. Keith answered the door, listened and then asked how much they needed.
Thirty-five thousand pounds.
Hold on a minute. And he went and got his cheque book and wrote them a cheque for that.
And I understand his new album is good, too.
It's funny how one can suddenly take to people on the merest whim.

Where on Earth is Everybody Going

I moved offices three weeks ago now. Rather than a 20 minute walk through downtown Portsmouth, mainly through sidestreets, to one of those buildings that looks like the one in The Office, I now have a 35-40 minute walk up the leafy Copnor Road that ends with an inevitable encounter with traffic to which there is no obvious answer.
If I still drove a car it would be a bit pathetic to drive it two miles there and back each day. Yesterday I tried the bus which was great to get there but awful coming back. Getting back on a bike would be more dangerous than walking.
So it looks like I'll be walking 20 miles a week which should at least please the blood pressure lady. It will either cure me or finish me off.
But, from this 'new' building, I can, if I care to, glimpse through a distant window the traffic on the M27 above that on the Hilsea roundabout below. It is mindlessly hypnotic and endless. White van, grey car, grey car, bus, lorry, bus, white van, grey car. This is on the outskirts of a not particularly big, or significant, city on the south coast of England. It's not Spaghetti Junction, Manchester, Glasgow or London.
And that's just our tiny island. It's not the rest of Europe, Mumbai, Asia, all those vast Chinese cities you've never heard of. I once took a boat ride and saw how far Istanbul sprawls. It's not Mexico City, Sao Paolo, Tokyo, or even Los Angeles and I understand that there is more to the USA than that.
So, how much petrol is there left in the world, then. I thought it was running out as quickly as the fish are being drained from the oceans. Apparently not, apparently there are several gallons still left.
We look back at how things used to be- outside toilets, belief in witchcraft, rationing, pardoners, slavery, Tony Blair and things like that- and wonder how it could ever have been so but we don't notice the things that informed future readers of classic texts of our time, like Jeremy Clarkson's thought-provoking dissertations, are likely to question. They might speculate on where all those motor vehicles were going and how we ever arrived at a time when it was no longer required for somebody to walk in front of each of them waving a flag. Because they might have arrived at a time in which nearly everybody can stay where they are and do everything they need to do there. Of course, it might be necessary for a few trips to be made from Gloucester to Cheltenham, Inverness to Elgin or Liverpool to Manchester but it should be possible to do that safely even though the countryside in between is wild with wolves and bears, hawks, jaguars and lots of other things in Ted Hughes poems.
But, as usual, it's my fault in some way. Every book I buy these days, every record and several other things, need to be delivered and there's not much chance I can find very many of the ones I want in Waterstones or a record shop, if the High Street still has any of those. Somewhere in one of those vans are books coming to my house, the inappropriately described 'walking shoes' from Cotton Traders that don't look like they're going to stand up to very much walking, or one day, when I land a proper gamble, the Opera Omnia, the Complete Works of Buxtehude. But apart from that, it's like those films set to Philip Glass music, like Koyaanisqatsi, which means 'life out of balance'.
On the other hand, one might ask if there was ever a time when it was 'in balance' and, if so, why did it all go wrong. Those motor vehicles are going to be going round that roundabout for much longer than it will be a trouble to me.     

Oh Babe, What Would You Say

Penglai Pavilion at Cheltenham today

Apologies to anybody tuning in for the Saturday Nap but it ran today. I delayed my luncheon break until two o'clock so that I could go and watch the 2.10 on Mr. Betfred's telly and was rewarded not only with a classy performance, Coleman only having to push a bit before going comfortably clear, but also a remarkable return of 11/4 after last night's snapping up of 2/1 saw it as short as 6/4. Some Irish raiders are going home the poorer for that.
The performance only made Paddy shorten Penglai to 20/1, from double carpet, to win the equivalent race in March and that's an optimistic call but one might as well have a share in the hope and the hype, some of which has been generated by me here, I'd like to think.
It will be worth sticking with the Ferguson/Coleman horses tomorrow because the advent of some proper races has not found them out. Qewy might have been last of three today but not by much. So, Devilment, High Bridge, etc. Have a look.
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It will be a week or two before I can say a few words about the new Ted Hughes biography but 600-plus pages will fly by, one week seeing me a third of the way through. But, congratulations to Jonathan Bate on the knighthood I only found out about by reading the blurb inside the dustjacket. If you like knighthoods, that is. It's unlikely I'll be offered one, or even the British Empire Medal that I might just qualify for, but I would be in a better position to disdain such honours if I were thought worthy. I would say that I have a first name and a second name and no use for my middle name or the commonplace letters I can put after them (as a joke, if I wanted to) so why do I want to clutter it up with an ersatz medieval prefix.
Literary biography is a dubious industry, though, forever delving into the dark side, and the Hughes dark side was as dark as most. In the 35 years since I was doing just enough as a deshabille student, the fashion has turned about completely from the text being the object of attention in literary studies to the text being treated as evidence for investigation and the prosecution of the author. I wonder how many life stories do not reveal difficulty, darkness and tragedy. Perhaps it is not only artists whose lives are like that, it might be the same if you read the life of your local greengrocer. But those lives don't get written,
Arthur had a particularly bad year the price of carrots went up, his customers all complained and then his wife left him.
But it's possible that eventually we won't want to know, we might start to feel more guilt than curiosity reading the private parts, as it were, of a life, and English departments all over the world might go back to the literature. Meanwhile, Prof. Bate brings some of that customary speculation across from his work on Shakespeare with an anecdote about Hughes forgetting his scarf when leaving a reception at Faber where he had met T.S. Eliot,
Either the newly famous poet was still nervous at the end of the evening with the world's most famous poet or he and Sylvia were rushing because the babyminder's time was almost up.
Blimey. Yes, that is what life is like sometimes but until somebody finds an oblique reference to forgotten scarves or the hourly rate for a babysitter at the time in Lupercal, we may never know.
I sometimes don't wonder why I found horse racing more captivating than academia.