Ted Hughes Biographer Aims to Redeem His Subject
A new biography of Ted Hughes has stirred some controversy, with writer Jonathan Bate (scholar also of Shakespeare and John Clare) now closing in on Sylvia Plath’s suicide. In a new piece for The Guardian, Bate writes of his desire to shift and reduce the cause of death to "another man":
The story I have heard is this. It is not in my biography because it is based on hearsay and a lost document: biographers should only fix in print those things that they have fully corroborated. But Sinclair is convinced of the story’s truth because the source, who is no longer alive, was a woman of unimpeachable integrity, a much-loved editor named Frances Lindley at the publisher Harper & Row in New York. At a book party in the city, she spoke to someone who said that they had seen Plath’s last letter. It allegedly revealed that she did telephone another man that last weekend, in a desperate bid to renew their brief liaison. He told her that he was now in a relationship with another woman. Yet one more male rejection: this could have been the thing that tipped her over the edge.
The last person who saw Sylvia alive was the neighbour in the flat below hers in Fitzroy Road, Primrose Hill. She asked him for some airmail stamps a few hours before her suicide. If she needed stamps, there must have been a last letter. The story at the party in New York was that it was a suicide note addressed to her mother, Aurelia; that at some point it went astray; and that it named the other man.
Hughes did not kill Plath. Nor did the other man. Mental illness killed her. But biographic closure will not be achieved until we know what was in the last letter. I recently heard of a private collector who is alleged to own “literary jewels such as a signed first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Vladimir Nabokov’s personal, annotated copy of Lolita, and a letter written by Plath the day before the American poet killed herself”. He has not replied to my request to take a look at it.
Meanwhile, at The Independent, the focus is on Bate's rights to Hughes's archive, which were limited and eventually not "authorised" by Hughes's estate, forcing Bate to a land of less quotation and more "life." As for this relook at Plath, Jonathan Gibbs writes that "Bate doesn't explicitly convict or exculpate Hughes for Plath's death, but this is broadly a redemptive book." More:
The section covering those fateful days in the bitter winter of 1963 is based on those previously unseen journals and draft poems; it is, in Bate's words, “Ted's telling”. This is certainly the fullest account yet of that time, with Hughes shuttling between Plath, Wevill and, unknown to both of them, another woman, Susan Alliston. Sometimes he and Plath seem close to reuniting – she cooks him dinner; they talk of being together in Devon in the summer. The next day she phones him to tell him he must leave the country. Seven days later, she's dead.
Whatever the personal reasons for Hughes's infidelities, which continued after his marriage to Carol in 1970, and included a “serious affair” in the last decade of his life, Plath's death would mark him for life. At one point Bate suggests that “his infidelity in later relationships was partly a function of his fidelity to the memory of Sylvia”, which makes a brilliant kind of sense if you squint at it for long enough.
Birthday Letters was a shock, but in retrospect it shouldn't have been. It was not the sudden, late outpouring of grief from a dying man, Bate argues, but the product of half a lifetime's writing. Hughes had long wanted to write confessional poetry – to make the same breakthrough that Plath made in her final months, when she wrote the Ariel poems. He wanted to respond to the facts of his own life with the vigour and facility he found when writing about the natural world, about pikes, hawks and jaguars, the wilds of the Yorkshire and Devon moors.
Following Plath's death, and the bleak, brilliant poems that went into Crow, he may have been on the point of doing just this, when he was hit by a further quartet of deaths. Wevill gassed herself, like Plath, along with Shura, her daughter by Hughes; then Hughes's mother Edith died (killed, he thought, by the revelation of Wevill's suicide) and then Alliston – all within six months of each other.
Throughout the book, Bate traces the moments when Hughes was not silent on private matters: not just in the Birthday Letters poems that he sneaked into his New Selected Poems in 1995, but in the quiet epilogue poems to the otherwise lurid Gaudete (1977) and in poems about his own family in Wolfwatching (1989) and Elmet (1994). Then there are the private press collections that, because of their small runs and high prices, wouldn't become widely known. Hughes wasn't silent, but he muttered.
What Bate gets most excited about is the sheer amount of writing about Plath in the Hughes archive, sometimes poetry, sometimes journal entries, sometimes hard to tell which.
A review posted last week at The Evening Standard has even less feeling for the subject matter. Writes David Sexton:
For myself, I agree absolutely with what Philip Larkin wrote to Kingsley Amis after he had declined the laureateship Hughes so proudly took and served: “No, of course Ted’s no good at all. Not at all. Not a single solitary bit of good. I think his ex-wife, late wife, was extraordinary, though not necessarily likeable. Old Ted isn’t even extraordinary.”
Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life is not a good book but it is what its subject deserves.