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Letters of Ted Hughes

This splendid, brave, mad imagination

Christopher Reid
Faber, 800pp, £30,

Philip Hensher

Wednesday, 24th October 2007

Philip Hensher

For Hughes, poetry was a matter of archetypes and of dreams transcribed — the account here, years later, of the dream which inspired ‘The Thought-Fox’ is mesmerising. A powerful spirit, he confidently engaged with the ouija-board which has destroyed less committed minds, and took professional advice from his spirit guide, called Pan. (Apparently, Pan gave him the numbers for the pools draw, one number out from top to bottom). He thought, as these letters and Birthday Letters clearly imply, that poetry, once written, creates as much as inspires a situation, and he may have been right. Crow, that terrifying statement of nihilistic madness, was not, as we all thought, driven by the terrible suicide of his lover Assia Wevill and her murder of their daughter, Shura; it was finished on the day before Assia’s final act.

That belief in immutable dark forces which weren’t, especially, worth trying to understand, just to accept, had good and bad effects on Hughes as a person. At his worst, and silliest, he wrote a long letter to Philip Larkin, a month or two before his death from cancer, telling him all about an Okehampton faith-healer who could cure him: ‘It isn’t absolutely necessary to meet him. All he seems to need is name, details of place — but best of all contact over the phone.’ It is all too easy to imagine what Larkin thought of this suggestion.

But he is seen at his best and most instinctive when dealing with the fall-out from Plath’s suicide. If, in retrospect, the letters written to friends immediately before her suicide seem self-deluding — ‘Sylvia and I are great friends’ — the letters subsequently are utterly clear-sighted. He takes on, even writing to Plath’s mother, what blame is due to him. What concerns him above everything else, especially as the Plath industry over the years takes on a sort of madness, is not that he should not be blamed, but that their children should not be affected. Every literary biographer ought to be required to read his excoriating letter to A. L. Alvarez on the publication of his suicide-enchanted study The Savage God, making Alvarez understand for what petty reasons he was dabbling in the stuff of other people’s souls.

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