Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE‘Gripping and at times ineffably sad, this book would be poetic even without the poetry. It will be the standard biography of Ted Hughes for a long time to come’ Sunday Times‘Seldom has the life of a writer rattled along with such furious activity … A moving, fascinating biography’ The TimesTed Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He is one of Britain’s most important poets, a poet of claws and cages: Jaguar, Hawk and Crow. Event and animal are turned to myth in his work. Yet he is also a poet of deep tenderness, of restorative memory steeped in the English literary tradition. A poet of motion and force, of rivers, light and redemption, of beasts in brooding landscapes.With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet who has lived, he was also a prolific children’s writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter-writer since John Keats. With his magnetic personality and an insatiable appetite for friendship, for love and for life, he also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. At the centre of this book is Hughes’s lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, the saddest and most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry.Ted Hughes left behind him a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes’s inner life, preserved by him for posterity.Renowned scholar Sir Jonathan Bate has spent five years in his archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, his book offers for the first time the full story of Ted Hughes's life as it was lived, remembered and reshaped in his art. It is a book that honours, though not uncritically, Ted Hughes’s poetry and the art of life-writing, approached by his biographer with an honesty answerable to Hughes’s own.
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William Collins
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First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2015
Copyright © Jonathan Bate 2015
Jonathan Bate asserts his moral right to
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Source ISBN: 9780008118228
Ebook Edition © October 2015 ISBN: 9780008118235
Version: 2016-03-23
Contents
6. ‘a compact index of everything to follow’
16. ‘Then autobiographical things knocked it all to bits, as before’
The Principal Works of Ted Hughes
For Paula Jayne, again and always
And for Barrie and Deedee Wigmore,
because the shepherd’s hut unlocked it
I am most grateful to Anne Donovan, Peter Fydler, Brenda Hedden, Carol Hughes and Rowland Wymer for pointing out a number of errors, ambiguities and contested memories, which have been addressed in this edition.
Jonathan Bate, January 2016
As an imaginative writer, my only capital is my own life
Ted Hughes (1992)
When you sit with your pen, every year of your life is right there, wired into the communication between your brain and your writing hand … Maybe all poetry, insofar as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of something that the writer doesn’t actually want to say but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of. Perhaps it’s the need to keep it hidden that makes it poetic – makes it poetry. The writer daren’t actually put it into words, so it leaks out obliquely, smuggled through analogies … we’re actually saying something we desperately need to share. The real mystery is this strange need. Why can’t we just hide it and shut up? Why do we have to blab? Why do human beings need to confess? Maybe if you don’t have that secret confession, you don’t have a poem – don’t even have a story.
Ted Hughes, interviewed for The Paris Review (Spring 1995)
Prologue
Q. Would you state your full name for the record?
A. Edward James Hughes.
Q. What is your residence address?
A. Court Green, North Tawton 11, England.
Q. Have you a business address?
A. That’s it. I work from home.
Q. And what is your occupation, sir?
A. Writer.
The Yorkshire accent is unfamiliar. ‘Eleven’ is the stenographer’s mishearing of ‘Devon’. The date is 26 March 1986.
Q. And could you state your age for the record?
A. 55. I shall be 56 this year.
Q. Now, sir, were you at some time in your life married to a woman named Sylvia Plath?
A. Yes.
Q. Can you tell me when you first met her?
A. The 25th of February 1956.
Q. And where did you meet her?
A. Cambridge, England.
Q. And what were the circumstances of that meeting?
A. I met her at a party.
Q. Do you know what she was doing in England?
A. She was on a Fulbright scholarship.
Q. Do you know where she was from?
A. Did I know then?
Q. Yes.
A. I just knew she was American.
The details are established. Her home town was Wellesley, her college was Smith. And then:
Q. Do you know whether or not she had been ill?
A. She told me she had been ill later in the spring.
Q. Did she tell you she had been mentally ill?
A. She told me that she attempted to commit suicide.
Q. Did she tell you the circumstances of her having done that?
