Book Review

Poet as a ‘country healer’

The Letters of Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes was a Yorkshireman, more Yorkshire than the famous pudding even, born in Mytholmroyd in the West Riding. His best work always had something of a Pennine quality about it - dark, brooding, craggy, the vivid phrases moving through the poems like pike in a pool. "His images have an admirable violence," wrote gentle, old Edwin Muir in a review which helped to establish the young poet's reputation, after his first volume The Hawk in the Rain had appeared in 1957.

The violence began to seem less admirable when its effects spilled over into the poet's personal life. His first wife, the American poet Sylvia Plath, committed suicide by gassing herself after Hughes left her to begin an affair with another writer, Assia Wevill. Six years later, Assia Wevill killed herself in a similar manner, taking her daughter by Hughes with her.

It is questionable whether Hughes ever got over these tragedies. He contracted another marriage a year after Assia Wevill's suicide, and managed for the most part to live quietly in the country, where his second wife's father managed a farm for him. But his work, always, as Muir had noted, violent in its favoured imagery, became one long howl of anguish. Crow (1970) had its admirers, and became something of a best-seller (for poetry), but more intelligent criticism deplored it as "a snarlingly opportunistic parody of despair", and questioned the crude misappropriation of Darwinian theory which underlay its celebration of the notion of "the survival of the fittest". Gaudete (1977) was worse, and another critic noted that if Hammer Films had still been in the blood business they would have snapped up the rights. Only with the nearly posthumous Birthday Letters (1998) did Hughes dare to express a little tenderness in addressing the ghosts of Plath and Wevill.

The Letters of Ted Hughes is the nearest we will ever get to the poet's own account of these matters since he chose never to write an autobiography. Hughes was a prolific letter-writer, with a private voice as compelling as that which speaks in his verse. His sometime editor at Faber, Christopher Reid, has made this generous selection from the thousands of letters which Hughes wrote over half a century. The book runs from the poet's time in the army, on National Service, to nine days before his death from cancer in 1998, when we find him writing to cheer up a sick aunt with an account of receiving the Order of Merit from the Queen at Buckingham Palace. It is a rich, wise, foolish, sprawling, excited and exciting book, full of the outpourings of a singular spirit. There is a lot to like in it, as well as plenty to irritate and disturb.

Curiously, despite the adult domestic dramas, and their repercussions, what I found most moving in these letters was the way Hughes keeps coming back to a certain small patch of ground in Yorkshire which he had known as a boy. It might not be too much to say that this was where he first found his poetry. A year before his death we find him writing to a critic: I knew that land better than any place I've ever known. I think I knew every inch. I had trap-lines of various kinds over it. I crawled over most of it. I knew every rat hole, let alone every rabbit hole.

It was here that Hughes' passion for hunting animals began, and where he began writing verse in late adolescence when it dawned on him that this passion ended in the possession of a dead animal or, at best, a trapped one. Hughes realised that he wanted to capture not just live animals, but the aliveness of animals in their natural state, their wildness, their quiddity, the foxness of the fox and the crowness of the crow. The writing of poems became for him then the making of verbal cages which might achieve this - or rather, as in the not dissimilar case of one of his main influences, D.H. Lawrence, the poem itself was intended to fit the quickness of the animal like another skin, a tegument of language.

A less happy running theme is the poet's lifelong interest in astrology. Hughes took the casting of horoscopes very seriously indeed, and at one point (admittedly early on) we find him trying to place a newspaper advertisement to set up as a professional astrologer. There is a comic side to this obsession, but also something sadly limiting and evasive. It might not be too much to say that Hughes used astrology to shift the blame for the tragedies in his life on to the stars. This does not prevent him making such declarations as this one, to Sylvia Plath's mother after Sylvia's suicide: I don't want ever to be forgiven. I don't mean that I shall become a public shrine of mourning and remorse, I would sooner become the opposite. But if there is an eternity, I am damned in it.

By the time he came to write Birthday Letters, forgiveness may have seemed more necessary to Hughes, and there is one poem called "The Offers", excluded from that book, in which the apparition of Sylvia Plath says to him: "This time/Don't fail me".

A formidable intensity of spirit informs this book of letters, as it informs even the most spasmodic of Hughes' poems. On directly religious matters, Hughes is not so forthcoming as he is in his insistence that astrology explains all, but the careful draft of a letter which he wrote to Lambeth Palace detailing the reasons for his reluctance to attend a lunch party with the Archbishop of Canterbury should be read with sympathy by any but the most dogmatic. "I regard poets such as myself as a sort of country healer, where the Church is Orthodox Medicine and the National Health Service."

In all, these letters stand testament to the integrity, sincerity, honesty and passion of their writer. The best of them increase one's interest in Ted Hughes as a poet and as a man. I did not know him well, but I knew him well enough to notice that there was about him an air of rather awkward courtesy which seemed to derive from what he was experiencing in his inner world. He was like a man suffering blows from an assailant invisible to all save himself, and treating his neighbours with a sort of bruised kindness as a result. His fame as a poet rests on the real merits of his verse, but I think it should surely be augmented by these letters which, for the most part, come from the same hand and heart as wrote the poems.

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