Sponsored by
Seeking poetic justice for a great man of letters
TED Hughes once described letter-writing as "excellent training for conversation with the world" and for most of his life he was a prolific correspondent.
Christopher Reid, himself a poet, says the task of editing the former laureate's letters was surprisingly straightforward.
"I was given his wife's address book and plundered it for names and wrote off to lots of people, almost all of whom replied very enthusiastically, and within weeks I had hundreds and hundreds of letters."
Reid was Faber & Faber's poetry editor during the last eight years of Hughes's life, and says the book pretty much wrote itself.
"It was plain from the outset that the material was so wonderful that nothing could go wrong unless I cocked it up, and I wanted the letters to choose themselves where possible. There are many great letters I had to leave out but I don't regret that, because the ones there form a complete picture."
The Letters of Ted Hughes took Reid, who teaches creative writing at Hull University, three years to complete.
"I hope it corrects a lot of misconceptions about him, particularly the myth of his relationship with Sylvia Plath which was based on his rather dignified silence. For 30 years, he refused to comment until Birthday Letters, and that silence allowed people to invent all kinds of fantasies about their life together."
Reid first met Hughes while working for Faber. "I was in awe of him before I met him, but he was incredibly friendly, and immediately you were invited into a very trusting relationship by him.
"There's this idea he was a stern, reclusive, hard man, but, in fact, he was great company, he loved gossip and he's not the Ted Hughes that people have in their imaginations at all, and I hope his true character comes through in these letters."
One thing that surprised him while piecing together the book was how focused Hughes was on his literary vision.
"The main revelation for me was how, almost from the first letter, he had this literary idea of himself and always knew he was going to be a writer.
"This surprised me because I thought he might have wandered into it as vaguely as most of us do."
Much has been made of some of Hughes's more controversial interests but Reid believes they were simply part of his fascination with the world.
"My feeling about his interest in astrology and the occult and some of the more mysterious regions of science, is that he was afraid of the terrible despotism of the rational mind and he knew, as a poet, that he had to find his ideas at another level."
Reid believes, though, that readers will warm to Hughes.
"His letters are very intimate and he wrote to a lot of people, even those he didn't know. There's an amazing one from an Oxford student who wrote several questions and got a 20-page letter in response, and it's the most marvellously revealing letter in which he talks about his own vision and how he developed as a poet."
Although Hughes was aware that one day such a book was likely to materialise, Reid doesn't believe his letters were written with this in mind.
"They don't feel as though they're written for some other person to read, they're solely directed to the recipient," he says.
"I think Ted Hughes is up there with people like Blake and Wordsworth as a central part of our literary story."
Reid has his own reason to thank him.
"About a week before he died, Ted rang me up. I knew he'd been ill, but at the end of the conversation he asked me about my own writing and I said it wasn't getting a look-in because I was too busy.
"So he typed a load of aphorisms on four or five pages and faxed them to me. They included two by Goethe, the first one said, 'Unless you give yourself wholeheartedly to a project nothing will come of it', which is obvious in a way.
"But the second one said, 'When you give yourself wholeheartedly to a project, providence will step in and help you'. This is arguable, but it's a nice thought.
"Then, a week later, he died, and I think he was trying to tell me something about getting on with my poetry. A few weeks later, I resigned."So, I owe him an awful lot and this book is an act of homage, of thanks."
TED HUGHES
Born: Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire, August 17 1930
Died: Devon, October 28, 1998
Poet Laureate: 1984-98
Selected poetry: The Hawk in the Rain (1957); Lupercal (1960); Crow (1970); Tales from Ovid (1997); Birthday Letters (1998)
Children's Books: How the Whale Became; The Iron Man; Under the North StarRevealed – the real Ted Hughes
REVIEW
The Letters of Ted Hughes
Selected and edited by Christopher Reid
Faber , 30
Margaret Speak
Ted Hughes's own account of his life in letters has been eagerly awaited, and in no way disappoints.
Christopher Reid achieves a fine balance of public and private persona, of references to family and friends and the creative work. For many readers, the central interest is in Hughes's account of his marriage to Sylvia Plath. There are only a few letters to her; most of their time as a couple was spent together.
But there are letters to others in which Plath is mentioned or Hughes describes what the two of them were then doing and achieving.
Hughes and Plath met in February 1956 at a magazine launch party at Oxford. Hughes's first letter to her, the following month, begins:
"That night was nothing but getting to know how smooth your body is. The memory of it goes through me like brandy."
Quickly marrying in secret – Sylvia feared losing her grant – the two of them lived separately for a while. In a longer letter, in October, Hughes discusses their precarious finances and says:
"One excellent thing I predict about you is that you will be famous, and another is that you will come into vast fortunes and happiness by marriage to an amazing strange provider of these...Lonely bed. The way I miss you is stupid. I have wandered about today like somebody with a half-completed brain operation...You keep watch on our marriage, Sylvia, as well as I shall and there is no reason we shouldn't be as happy as we have said we shall be. Don't let any stupid thing interfere. Goodnight darling, darling, darling."
Two days later, Hughes writes in response to news that Poetry (Chicago) had accepted six of her poems. There is no professional jealousy, only praise.
Hughes is reticent in his letters about the demise of the marriage, never criticising Plath, but occasionally excusing her to his sister and a friend. Until her suicide, he believed they would be reconciled, and his major consideration was to protect their children, Frieda and Nicholas, from harm. Both parents loved their children unreservedly.
There are many warm letters to them. In one, Hughes details payments he will make to them for writing or painting: one shilling if the work is good; sixpence if it's quite good; one penny if it isn't good.
The letters provide evidence that Hughes worked hard to ensure Plath's writing was published. It culminated in Ariel, the poetry collection, which realised her great talent.
Just before his death, Hughes's Birthday Letters traced the evolving relationship from a male perspective, warts and all. And in a letter to Keith Sagar, in 1997, he wrote:
"I'm putting together a vast pile of pieces about SP and me...Basically, my model was 'a letter'. Very self-exposing, I suppose, unguarded – my attempt to write about those things without aesthetic exploitation or concern for my artistic reputation. I no longer give much thought to that. Except to write clearly and expressively."
Assia Wevill, the woman who Plath blamed for the failure of the marriage, also committed suicide, killing Hughes's daughter, Shura. But Hughes eventually met and married Carol Orchard, in 1970. He told friend, Bill Merwin, in 1988:
"Carol is a wonder – after 18 years' marriage, I'd do anything to marry her tomorrow."
Hughes worked tirelessly for the promotion of poetry and helping young writers he felt merited publication. In the letters, there is evidence of shrewd critical appraisal of himself and others. He wrote to Aurelia Plath, in 1958:
"This is one of the main problems in poetry writing, I think, bringing your style to unity with your experience. It would be easy if your experience weren't continually out-growing itself."
He knew and worked with the famous literary people of his day. He met early in his career Auden, Spender and TS Eliot, and his friends included Seamus Heaney, who approved the first draft of Birthday Letters, which mirror his life as he constantly explored what he was trying to achieve.
He received the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 1974 and discussed his poem, An Otter, with the Queen, writing a vivid letter to Frieda about it. Although becoming Poet Laureate sealed his public career, he found it daunting, too. As he wrote to Terence McCaughey, in 1985:
"Obviously, it's best if I now become a silent recluse."
He remembered his Yorkshire roots and the people who helped him. There are tributes to family, friends and teachers. He writes intense evocations of the countryside and the people; one piece, in 1997, shows the extent of his memory and the value he felt for his roots.
Fishing is a passion he shared with his son in different places in the world and it was Nicholas to whom he wrote, in 1998, about Birthday Letters:
"It was when I realised my only chance of getting past 1963...that I decided to publish...let the feminists do what they like, let people think what they like about me, let critics demolish and tear to bits...let your mother's Academic armies of support demolish me… So I did it, and now am getting the surprise of my life. What I've been hiding from all my life, from myself and everybody else, is not terrible at all"
Email to a friend
Print this page- Leeds lose Ward to Palace: Is there anyone they can afford now?
- Sheffield Wednesday leaving it late to hijack Leeds United over Ward
- As Snodgrass dithers over Leeds, Warnock throws a lifeline
- Ball is in Leeds United’s court over contract - Snodgrass
- Police turning blind eye to Asian voter fraud, says MP
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Yorkshire
Saturday 26 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 9 C to 21 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
Wind direction: East
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 9 C to 22 C
Wind Speed: 13 mph
Wind direction: East
