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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 would have liked to have seen some business letters, whether on the subject of money, publishing matters, or indeed farming, of which there are some but not enough; Hughes emerges from this selection as a much less practical man than he must have been. There are some letters here to his publisher, but most are screamingly mad ones about what the star-signs say about propitious dates for publication. When practical and insightful letters do enter they are transfixing. I never thought I would read at such length and with such pleasure letters dealing with the minutiae of fishing. The one of 23 October 1983 to Barrie Cooke about his visit, with his son Nicholas, to a fishing community on Lake Victoria is a stunning anthology piece. A thunderstorm breaks:

We got into a race with another canoe … under those great vertical 15-second rivers of orange or blue or green lightning, & great skyfulls of blazing thorns, & continuous overhead thunder, with great long swells coming along the gunwales, pouring in on both sides, one man bailing like mad, the rest paddling & yelling, and our sail like a map of the world in giant rips & holes, and those fish, unbelievable, their eyes glaring like orange torches . . .

Hughes’s gift for the visual can hardly be examined in isolation from all his other effects. Sylvia Plath’s, on the other hand, has now inspired a scholarly work. Very few people have ever attained originality at both writing and the visual arts; Michelangelo, Cocteau, D. G. Rossetti and De Chirico’s brother Alberto Savinio are real rarities. Plath took a good deal of trouble over her drawings, actually publishing some of them in a small-scale way, and a lavish OUP volume now examines them, and the art of ekphrasis, or literary descriptions of paintings, in her poetry.

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