The Letters of Ted Hughes , as weighty as it is, documents only a small portion of the British-born writer's epistolary output. A concise and illuminating "Editor's Introduction" by fellow poet and countryman Christopher Reid, who selected the entries for this volume, acquaints the reader, at the outset, with the physical territory and psychic terrain covered by Hughes's correspondence.
This long, wide, and sprawling compilation provides readers with rare and monumental insight into the poet's relationships, preoccupations, views, ideas, plans, and dreams (or nightmares).
Only months after the death of his American wife and mother of two of his three children (Frieda and Nicholas), poet and novelist Sylvia Plath (27 October 1932-11 February 1963), Hughes writes: "All I've ever been interested in is simplifying my existence so I could write, & all I've ever done is so involve myself with other people that now I can't move without horrible consequences of all kinds, on all sides." Of the consequences of involvement with others, those issuing from his marriage to Plath seem to haunt him disproportionately. On the one hand, he accepts guilt and assumes an eternal burden of co-dependent responsibility; on the other, he somewhat slyly alludes to the qualities in Plath that seemingly set the stage for her demise. A series of letters written to Plath reveals little about the woman and much about the individual born Edward James 17 August 1930 in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire (of the famed broody, moody Moors). In truth, it's a stunning puzzler how little new information we actually do glean concerning either Plath's personality or her writerly processes.
For bitter or worse, Hughes's communiqués to Plath (as opposed to numerous famous, infamous, and just plain folks) will most likely provoke the keenest interest among the majority of readers. The Danse Macabre in which the two poets found and lost themselves possesses an endless fascination (in that the multiple perspectives we are offered do not combine in satisfactory fashion to render their story comprehensible). Hughes's point of view seems, at times, so defensive he conceals more than he reveals.
He relates, in a letter to Plath's mother, Aurelia, that his "love for her simply underwent temporary imprisonment by something which can only be described as madness, as much an attempt to free myself from the strangling quality of our closeness as by any outer cause."
Her obscenely premature death continues to attract an inordinate amount of attention and, indeed, still holds the chattering classes in thrall: "On Monday morning, at about 6 a.m. Sylvia gassed herself. The funeral's in Heptonstall next Monday. She asked me for help, as she so often has. I was the only person who could have helped her, and the only person so jaded by her states & demands that I could not recognise when she really needed it."
Years later, in 1971, Hughes was to respond to the esteemed Observer's serialisation of sections of poet, critic, and suicidologist A. Alverez's book — The Savage God , a study of self-annihilation which examined Plath's tragedy — with an angry and contemptuous letter decrying the preposterous notion posited by the respected anthologist that there may have been "some sort of artistic jealousy" between the pair.
And, yet . . . there is much more to unearth in these letters. We glimpse the painstaking gestation of poems, children's books, and plays; we're made privy to the poet's preoccupations with the occult, numerology, astrology, the visionary, the arcane, the near-mythical natural worlds (both wild and domestic); and, as a bonus, we witness his ongoing fascination with the contrast between city and country landscapes and mindsets. The pastoral becomes a practical as well as a poetic interest. Hughes expresses his dislike of London; but, he wanes poetically when it comes to his disgust with America. Of the States in general, writes he: "If America is good for nothing else, it is good for my composing strophes & antistrophes to the real world. The real world retreats a bit here. Sterilised under cellophane."
The letters offer a unique perspective on an era and its outstanding contributors to The Tradition, yielding fascinating — often eerily telegraphic — vignettes. On T.S. Eliot: "He talks staring at the floor between his feet—when he's sitting—& looks up only to smile at his wife." W.H. Auden? The incomparable one sports "a strangely wrinkled face, like a Viking seaman." Elsewhere, his face — which obviously has little to do with how well he writes — resembles a reptile's. Gads, poor ground-breaking modernist non-pareil Allen Tate. That chap "wasted his gifts more or less on whisky & criticism." And, yep, you guessed it. Robert Frost meanders through mazes of "monologuing" and runs his "horn into everything."
In attendance at a dinner party (with the spirits flowing freely), Stephen Spender "chattered so much that he wrote us a letter afterwards apologising—but he was charming, I didn't expect to like him at all & found him almost congenial." Robert Lowell, whose Boston University poetry classes Plath attended, ranked as "easily the best of all the Americans under fifty—easily & far away. He goes into the mental hospital now & again and occasionally gets dangerous . . . However, he's about the most charming & likable American I've ever met . . .." (Huh? Howwwwllll!) Of course,
In his Acknowledgements, Reid points out that "despite [Hughes's] undoubted literary eminence, his true stature has not yet been recognised" and, for most of his life, "he was the most crudely vilified of writers." To be fair to all sides, Reid pleads for a righting of this injustice while maintaining a degree of objectivity rarely found in compendia created by parties involved in their subjects' lives. Whether or not this is deserved remains for each reader to decide (while all may persist in forwarding their personal s/take on the truth evidenced in Plath's oeuvre, Hughes's body of work, the copious literary scholarship surrounding the duo and, now, the judiciously delivered Letters of Ted Hughes).
Judith Fitzgerald Adagios Quartet Leonard Cohen: Master of Song (and is pleased to report Mr. Cohen, in his correspondence with her, never stoops to conquer; rather, he graciously rises to communicate).
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