the real hughes escapes

ted hughes: the life of a poet by elaine feinstein (weidenfeld & nicholson, (pounds) 20) "WHAT can I tell you that you do not know/Of the life after death?" Ted Hughes wrote in Birthday Letters, the 1998 collection in which he belatedly offered his account of life with Sylvia Plath more than three decades after her suicide in 1963. Poem after poem in that book found him returning obsessively to Plath's work, as though concerned to give his side of the story before he too fell victim to the "life after death" he had seen inflicted on his wife by prurient biographers. Paul Muldoon has used the word "shitepokes" to describe the purveyors of tittle-tattle about Hughes and Plath, and with the death of Hughes it was inevitable that they would come poking about in his life too. His first biographer, Elaine Feinstein, is anything but a muckraker, though: a respected poet and biographer, as well as a long-time friend of Hughes's, she has written a sympathetic book that goes to considerable lengths to avoid acrimony and the apportioning of blame, even if the end result is more than a little insipid.

Ted Hughes was born in the West Yorkshire village of Mytholmroyd in 1930. His father was one of only 17 soldiers in his regiment to survive the Gallipoli landings of 1917; horrified at such senseless slaughter, Hughes would later refuse to wear a poppy on Remembrance Day. While he was still a child the family moved to the mining town of Mexborough, from which he longed to escape to the country, but unlike his beloved brother Gerald, who became a gamekeeper, Hughes chose university, studying anthropology at Cambridge. In February 1956 he went to a party to launch a student magazine. At the party was Sylvia Plath, a visiting Fulbright scholar. They married four months later.

The story of what happens next has been told innumerable times, to the point of having become a ghoulish soap opera. Hughes's Yorkshire childhood is dispatched in a mere 16 pages, with his early years at Cambridge taking up another short chapter before we get down to the central drama of the encounter with Plath, the couple's marriage, the disastrous affair with Assia Wevill on which it foundered and the suicides of first Plath, and then Wevill.

From his student days he was obsessed with spiritualism. He found a fellow addict in Plath, with whom he shared long sessions on the Ouija board. Many years later this side of Hughes seduced him into the melodramatic cult of fate that scars Birthday Letters, where merely human explanations for the collapse of his marriage take second place to myth-spinning.

Of Hughes's life after Plath and Wevill, Feinstein has little of interest to tell. The poet laureateship came in 1984, and at the end of his life the late rally that produced Tales From Ovid and Birthday Letters, but by the end of the book it is impossible not to suspect that the real Hughes escapes the biographer's efforts. Then again, I'm not sure I have the stomach for the sort of book Muldoon's "shitepokes" would have wanted anyway. There may be some final paydirt of revelations awaiting us in the famed sealed box in Emory University, not due to be opened until 2018; personally, I wouldn't be unduly perturbed if it stayed sealed until Doomsday. What will endure is the best of The Hawk In The Rain, Lupercal, Wodwo and Moortown Diary. As for the private tragedies and agonies of remorse that animate Crow and Birthday Letters - emphatically not his best books - maybe they should be allowed to stay private.

Copyright 2001
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