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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

I used to think that perhaps that last volume of Plath’s journal, which he said he had destroyed so that her children would never have to read it, might in reality be sealed away somewhere. Having read this volume, it is clear that not just her reputation, which he did so much to further, but his reputation as well came a long way behind their welfare. He was obviously a wonderful father: the letters to their offspring, both as children and as adults, are full of love and engagement, talking frankly about almost everything, giving the sort of solid advice anyone would be happy to get. He probably did burn that last journal, and he was probably right to do so. And perhaps he did have powers of divination: in the early 1960s, he proposed to publish a volume under the pseudonym of ‘John Major’. That was an odd and inexplicable glimpse into the remote future.

I’m not mad about the editing of this volume. The dating of each letter has been guessed at, generally plausibly, but it would often be helpful to know where each letter was sent from, too, particularly when, halfway through a letter, Hughes turns out to be talking about Iran, where he mounted a play at Persepolis with Peter Brook. Sometimes the explanatory notes blunder: a letter to a Jack Brown of Barnsley, dated November 1982, can’t refer by the words ‘political impasse’ to the miner’s strike, which started much later.

The selection, too, could be much more varied. I find that a little of Hughes’s explanations of his poetic methods and mythologies, which he was very generous with to inquiring students, goes a very long way. It is impressive that Hughes wrote back to near or total strangers at such length on literary matters — the biscuit is taken here by an 8,000-word letter of, really, no ultimate value on the subject of Measure for Measure to an unknown Swedish director. Too much of the volume altogether is taken up with expansions of the ideas set out in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, a theoretical-critical-typological work of unusual eccentricity, occupying the same place in Hughes’s work as A Vision does in Yeats’s, and, in my view, of only doubtful interest to the study either of Hughes or of Shakespeare.

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