In his own right
It takes a brave man to take on writing a life of British poet Ted Hughes, and Jonathan Bate, professor of English literature at Oxford University, certainly demonstrates valor among a host of other fine qualities in his masterly biography, “Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life.” A recognized authority on the life and works of Shakespeare and the brilliant but troubled poet John Clare, Bate is eminently qualified to evaluate those of Hughes, regarded in his native country as the pre-eminent poet of the late 20th century and its poet laureate for 14 years before his death in 1998.
So no bravery needed on this front. That attribute and then some is necessary because of Sylvia Plath, the American poet whose suicide during a marital separation from Hughes has been widely blamed on him, particularly by those in the feminist school of criticism where she is an iconic martyr. One even went so far as to accuse him of murder.
And Plath’s death is not the beleaguered poet’s only tragic baggage: Only a few years later, his mistress, with whom he was already involved when still married to Plath, played a deadly game of one-upmanship by not only killing herself but also their young daughter. (Plath had gone to elaborate lengths to see that their two children were unharmed when she gassed herself early in 1963.)
It is, I think, entirely to Bate’s credit that he unflinchingly accepts the centrality of the tragedy, which struck Hughes still in his early 30s, to the remainder of his life and the rest of his poetry. When there is the proverbial elephant sitting in front of you, there’s no point pretending it isn’t there, and this biography begins and ends memorably with Plath’s suicide. There are references, never gratuitous or prurient, to it throughout the text. These range from the bald statement that the house in Devon found by Plath and Hughes where he lived for much of the rest of his life (including nearly 30 years with his second wife) “was, he wrote, Plath’s mausoleum” to Bate’s equally stark avowal on the last page: “Sylvia Plath’s death was the central fact of Ted Hughes’s life.” He goes on to admit that “however the biographer broadens the picture, it is her image that returns.” And, more poetically, as befits his subject and his own intuitive erudition, the words that actually conclude the volume: “Before him stands yesterday.”
There is certainly no sugarcoating of Hughes’ less attractive traits, his toughness, his rocklike character and yes, his cruelty. But it is clear that these all played a large part in Plath’s instant attraction to him. This famously began with her biting his cheek and drawing blood after he first kissed her neck and culminated shortly thereafter in their first bout of lovemaking, which, she wrote, left her “exhausted from sleepless holocaust night with Ted in London … washed my battered face, smeared with a purple bruise from Ted and my neck raw and wounded too.”
Bate notes pungently “Love-bites: for Plath, desire was always a purple bruise; for Hughes, poetry was the healing of a wound.” So it is clear that this relationship was a folie a deux from its outset, but one with two consenting adults both looking for trouble. Which they got in greater and more tragic measure than perhaps either may have expected. But except for that preternatural toughness that enabled him to survive, they were very much a match for one another, the muse each passionately and enthusiastically desired and embraced.
The poetic healing of that wound, which culminated in an outburst of emotion in “Birthday Letters,” published only a few months before Hughes’ death, is brilliantly explored and illuminated in this probing, always insightful biography.
But the man as well as poet certainly gets his due. There is a palpable sense here of a felt life here. Indeed, Hughes jumps off its pages, his presence sometimes even dominating his verse. We learn all manner of things about him, from his size and strength to his Yorkshire-accented vowels; his lifelong interest in animals and in hunting them; his peacetime service in the Royal Air Force (where he had plenty of spare time to read poetry); his travels everywhere from Alaska to East Africa and Australia (where he considered emigrating as a young man). And winning the scholarship to Cambridge University that set the course of the rest of his life, for that is where he met Sylvia Plath as well launching his career as a poet.
Some discoveries are surprising: Who would have guessed that he was not only good friends with the Prince of Wales, with whom he went deerstalking, but was even closer to the prince’s grandmother, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, with whom he frequently fished for salmon? Reading through this terrific biography, the cadences of “If” by Rudyard Kipling (Hughes’ “first poetic favourite”) kept running through my mind. Clearly Hughes could walk with royalty “nor lose the common touch,” but it’s those lines near the beginning that could serve as his epitaph:
“If you can keep your head when all about you/ Are losing theirs and blaming it on you ...
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two imposters just the same.”
And such is Bate’s biographical empathy that, with all his flaws, Hughes emerges in the final analysis, to use “If”s’ final image, as “a Man” — in all the multifarious senses of that term.