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| Ted Hughes:
He was a nicely brought-up English boy, fond of animals, polite to women. His parents were warm-hearted Yorkshire folk - dad a carpenter, mum famous for her jams and gooseberry pies. He jumped through all the required hoops - passed the 11-plus, wrote poems his teachers admired, won a scholarship from grammar school to Cambridge. The snobbery there upset him for a bit, but he got a good second-class degree. Then, at a student party, the tornado struck. An American girl, very drunk, came up and bit him on the cheek, really hard. It bled. Nobody had ever behaved like that in Yorkshire. She was his opposite in every way - sexually predatory, rabidly ambitious, mentally unstable, a quivering morass of self-doubt behind her brash front. They married four months later. For the next six years - in London, in America, and at the farmhouse they bought in Devon - he nursed and cosseted her through black depressions, sulks, violent rages. He never reproached, never complained, even when she ripped up his half-finished poems and his cherished copy of Shakespeare, because she suspected him, falsely, of infidelity. She was desperate for poetic fame, and he encouraged her unstintingly, buoying her up when publishers rejected her work. He insisted on taking an equal share in the household chores, and in caring for their two children, so she had time to write. Then came the second tornado. Once more, it was a pre-emptive strike, and he was the chosen victim. This time, the woman was altogether more sophisticated, German-born, cosmopolitan, immaculately groomed and manicured, with film-star looks. She had already been married three times, but she was determined to add him to her trophies. She joked with women friends about putting on her "war paint" when she went to see him. It worked, and he succumbed. That, in outline, is the story of Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill, as remembered by those who knew them, and as retold in Elaine Feinstein's biography. It has the makings of a bedroom farce. What turned it into tragedy, of course, was that Sylvia killed herself soon after Hughes began his affair with Assia, and Assia killed both herself and her daughter, Shura, whom Hughes had fathered. As Feinstein points out, it was not just these unforeseeable deaths, but Plath's writing that created the myth of Hughes as a monster. She represented him in one poem as a fascist, a "brute", with a "love of the rack and the screw". All the evidence indicates that, on the contrary, he was gentle and considerate. But Plath's masochism demanded she should see herself as a victim. Feinstein cites her poem Pursuit, read to Hughes during their first night of lovemaking, where he is already a "panther", a "black marauder", who has left "charred and ravened women" in his wake and will one day kill her. The feminists who espoused Plath's cause in the 1970s took these heated, wishful fantasies as the truth, and pursued Hughes with insults and death threats. They also believed Plath's complaint, in letters to her mother, that he had left her in poverty after their separation. In fact, he gave her all their joint savings. But with the publication of Letters Home, her lies became the accepted version. What her biography does bring out is his total devotion to the poetic craft. He had no idea of getting a job. He did not care about money or fashion or reputation. He was resolved to write. For a time, poverty reduced him to sleeping in a chicken coop. It is hard to think of an English poet since Milton so obstinately self-confident. His reward was that he was able to develop a poetic style of devastating power - a kind of enormous, versifying hedge-cutter, with which he attacked the whole tradition of Wordsworthian nature poetry and reduced it to violence. His greatest poems exhibit huge technical expertise and no beliefs. That is what makes them modern. Plath confessed to Hughes that divorce was the last thing she wanted, and realised he was prepared to come back to her. A mutual friend thinks they would have been together again in a week if she had not died. With Wevill, fear of losing Hughes was probably a factor. But he was negotiating to buy a house where they could be together when she suddenly took her life and their child's. What we can be sure of is that we shall never know the truth, and that the deaths were shattering to nobody more than Hughes. |
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