16-11-2001

Her Husband, by Diane Middlebrook, here    

                                                    The biography of

   TED HUGHES

                                                                            by Elaine Feinstein

Ted Hughes's secret mistress named

Book reveals that the late poet laureate had a fourth, unknown child and a string of affairs

Vanessa Thorpe, arts correspondent
Observer

Sunday May 6, 2001

The first major biography of Ted Hughes, the late poet laureate, has uncovered details of a previously unknown extramarital affair, as well as evidence that Hughes had an unacknowledged fourth child.

The author Elaine Feinstein, a friend of Hughes and a fellow poet, last week delivered her manuscript to publishers Weidenfeld and Nicolson amid tight security. Just days earlier, she had secured the first interview with Brenda Hedden, a former social worker from Devon who had a long secret relationship with Hughes.

The poet, who died of cancer two and a half years ago, was an object of feminist contempt until the publication of Birthday Letters, his poetic tribute to his first wife, writer Sylvia Plath. Feinstein's alarming new insights are likely to enrage them again.

Her research has provided startling confirmation of Hughes' many suspected affairs. The writer Emma Tennant is the only lover to have talked publicly of her relationship with the laureate. Hedden, who was described by Hughes' second wife Assia Wevill as 'my real enemy' and an 'emaciated Marilyn Monroe', has never before admitted to the relationship. The poet's life was marked by tragedy. His marriage to Plath ended in her suicide, and just six years later Wevill killed herself and their little girl.

Gill Coleridge, Feinstein's literary agent, could not confirm the final contents of the book, but she and the publishers know they are in possession of an explosive story.

'This book will cause ructions but, as a poet herself, Elaine was the right person to write it, and she set out to write a sympathetic biography,' said Coleridge. 'We are not expecting her to make any changes. It is not a sensationalist book.'

Feinstein sent a draft outline to Hughes' widow, Carol, but it is not certain whether all the author's revelations have yet been cleared with the family. 'Elaine has balanced it sensitively,' said Coleridge.

The laureate's own publisher, Faber, has not brought out an official biography because of objections from the family.

Ion Trewin, Feinstein's publisher, said: 'It would be pointless not to address Hughes' life head-on, and Elaine has done that.'

The revelatory interview with Hedden comes only days before the publication in this country of another new book - seen by The Observer - written by Tennant. The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted is an imaginative retelling of the troubled marriage between the two great writers. In it, Tennant, who has already chronicled her romance with Hughes in her 1999 memoir, Burnt Diaries, reconstructs the last days of Plath's life in her north London flat.

The novel describes how a neighbour overheard a violent argument between two women following a brief visit from Hughes himself. The married couple had already separated and Hughes was seeing Wevill, who was pregnant with his child.

'I have imagined the part of the book that surrounds Sylvia's death,' Tennant said from Greece this weekend. 'It is a mixture of fact and fiction - a difficult line to tread.'

Yet Tennant began the novel more than five years ago and has said previously: 'All the facts are true'.

Hughes admitted burning the last volume of Plath's journals so their two children, Frieda and Nicholas, would never see it. Another volume of the diary disappeared from her flat.

The books about Hughes come as the actress Cate Blanchett agreed to play Plath in a BBC film, Sylvia and Ted. The script has been written by Lee Hall, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Billy Elliot .

'We now have a script and Cate Blanchett is attached,' a a BBC spokesman said.

Tennant's book was due for publication in the US only but has been rushed into print by the Edinburgh publishers Mainstream, following its publication this month in the US. The British jacket design will eerily echo the Faber cover of Plath's acclaimed novel, The Bell Jar. It also bears the same dedication - to Plath's great friend Elizabeth Sigmund, who has helped Feinstein and Tennant with their research.

Sigmund said of Tennant's novel: 'The tone is just right. I was shocked by certain bits of it, but it has got a wonderful dreamlike quality and exactly gets a sort of sadness between them.'

Sigmund said Hughes had several long affairs, including the one with Hedden: 'Brenda had said she would never speak to anyone and has had a difficult time mentally since her affair with Ted ended.

'He used to have two or three on the go at any time,' said Sigmund. 'One of the women involved said to me that Ted told her he wanted to "get inside her dream".'

A year after Wevill's suicide in her home in Clapham in 1969, Hughes married Carol Orchard, a nurse 20 years his junior. He embarked on another serious affair during this marriage, as well as seeing Tennant in the summer of 1977, telling her bleakly 'I want you for no more than a year'. He also saw an Australian known as 'Sally'.

'Ted was a poetic genius,' Sigmund concedes. 'He was much more complex than just a Don Juan. He was fearful of women. After Sylvia, he never wanted any woman to have emotional control over him. Assia wanted to replace her completely, but that was impossible.'

October 14 2001

Elaine Feinstein Ted Hughes, the Life of a poet - 352 pages Weidenfeld; ISBN: 029764601X 

The poet caught in the eye of the tornado

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.

Hiding the truth: for eight years Hughes did not tell Frieda and Nicholas about how their mother died. Photograph: Camera Press

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.

Feinstein's biography breaks up rather in its second half. That is partly because people close to the later Hughes, including his second wife Carol, seem to have proved less willing to talk to her. But it is also because Hughes himself lost direction. He took up various causes - the preservation of salmon in British rivers, the royal family, eastern European poetry. But he never really recovered from Plath's death. To an outsider reading her journals, the marvel is he stayed with her so long. But she was his second self; they fed each other's poetry; they even dreamt the same dreams. With her gone, he drifted. He had several affairs, some prolonged. He told his partners he did not want to be in any woman's power again, and that one woman was not enough for him. It was another way of saying that he no longer had a centre.

Feinstein, while adept at gathering and sorting gossip, is not much help on Hughes's ideas. He was extraordinarily superstitious, a practising astrologer and devotee of the Ouija board, with a serious interest in shamanism, hermeticism, and all points east. The question is not just how he came to believe in this rubbish, but how it squares with the poetry. Crow, Ghost Crabs and other central poetic statements are utterly nihilistic - derisive rejections of all conceivable belief systems. The animal poems, too, assume a post- Darwinian universe, ravening, destructive, emptied of divinity. It is bizarre to think of their creator poring over horoscopes or imagining, as he seems to in Birthday Letters, that his life is directed by supernatural beings. Maybe he just could not think straight, but it would be good to know Feinstein's opinion.

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.

There will be many more biographies of Hughes, but this first one will remain useful not just for preserving survivors' testimonies but for its indecisions. Feinstein does not pretend to know why Plath and Wevill killed themselves, and she refuses to attribute blame. There is some evidence that in the last week of her life, 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.

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 24 2001

Ted Hughes

By Elaine Feinstein
Weidenfeld, £20; 352 pp
ISBN 0 2976 4601 X

Take a close look at the cover of this elegantly produced book: you will see a graphic demonstration of the difficulties the biographer of Ted Hughes confronts. The jacket is translucent - a device more fashionable in the United States than in Britain - and is printed with the author’s name, the book’s title and a picture of the young Hughes.

Underneath, on the actual cover of the book, the reader can discern what looks, at first glance, like a sample of Hughes’s own hand. The writing is strong and sloping, distinctive, apparently written with the black fountain pen the poet favoured.

But remove the jacket and look at the text closely: this is not Hughes’s writing, these are not Hughes’s words. They are Elaine Feinstein’s, got up to fool the eye - for her biography is unauthorised and, in this thoughtful and considered book, she has been allowed to use the poet’s own words only very sparingly indeed.

It is said that Hughes did not want a biography written; that is the line that his widow, Carol, takes, defending his estate against all-comers. Feinstein, speaking recently at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature, wondered - it seemed to me quite fairly - why it was then that he left an extensive archive (over 100ft of library shelving) at Emory University in Atlanta for scholars to consult.

And Feinstein is a scholar, not a scandal-monger, though a sensationalising serial in The Sunday Times might lead one to believe otherwise. Her book is a serious attempt to set out this complex poet’s life and to understand the poetic task he set himself. A fine poet herself (and a friend of Hughes; they first met in 1969), her readings of his work are sensitive and never over-psychologise.

Hughes’s background would not, in his day, have marked him out for a life in poetry. His family was in theory working-class (his father was a carpenter who later owned a tobacconist’s shop); but one of his mother’s ancestors was Nicholas Ferrar, who founded the monastic community of Little Gidding in the 17th century. He recalled his childhood - a time when he was already fascinated by animals - as being overshadowed by the First World War; his father was one of only 17 men to survive from his regiment at Gallipoli.

He was close to his sister Olwyn and his older brother Gerald; he was fortunate in his teachers, who recognised his academic talent early on. He won an Open Exhibition to Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1948, but didn’t go up until he’d finished his national service in 1951. It was at Cambridge - despite his dislike of academia - that his literary reputation began to grow; well before he was 30 years old he was a star of the then vibrant poetry scene.

At Cambridge, too, he met his first wife Sylvia Plath - and it is at this point that the poet’s work threatens to become overshadowed by the poet’s life. It is to Elaine Feinstein’s great credit that she never allows this to happen, despite her diligent cataloguing of his succession of mistresses.

For, as she remarks (in both instances quite rightly): “Dedication to writing and a belief in the power of poetry to heal the human spirit marks Hughes’s whole being as almost no other poet since Lawrence”; he was also, she says drily, not the only man in London to commit adultery.

Yet his infidelities, and the deaths by suicide of Plath in 1963 and then the woman for whom he left her, Assia Wevill, in 1969 created a firestorm of emotion around this apparently gentle man. Feinstein’s biography, which thankfully steers clear of emotional conjecture, adds to the impression given by the last book that Hughes published in his lifetime, Birthday Letters, of a kind of mystification at his own and others’ emotional states. Olwyn, it seems, found Plath rude and could not understand why Hughes would not take her to task for it, “but Ted only ‘replied with a helpless gesture’. It seems unlikely Ted could have succeeded in explaining the two women to each other . . .”

It does indeed. A picture grows of a man who was comfortable with the stark realities of the animal world (“Now I hold Creation in my foot,” he writes in Hawk Roosting, “Or fly up, and resolve it all slowly - / I kill where I please because it is all mine”) or the iconic structure of myth, but uncomfortable with the day-to-day realities of human interaction. It was perhaps that discomfort which led to his long silence over Plath’s death.

Feinstein ventures delicately: “Looking back across 30 years, he may have thought of his own years of silence as resembling those of his father, brooding over those who died at Gallipoli.”

What the biography is missing - and this is not Feinstein’s fault - is Hughes’s voice. Hughes was not only a prolific writer of poems, prose and criticism, he was a remarkable and voluminous correspondent. His letters could easily run to a dozen pages and his correspondence, as Feinstein says, revealed - as he changed his tone to suit his reader, as we all do - the different sides of his personality.

Some of that correspondence (particularly that between Hughes and his great friend, Seamus Heaney) remains sealed; but much of it does not - yet Feinstein is nearly forbidden to quote. This is a shame, for a writer’s real life is in his words, and paraphrasing will never quite convey Hughes’s essence.

That said, this is an admirable book, fond but fair; hard to believe it could be bettered any time soon.

Erica Wagner  

An important review of the biography in the main site about Ted Hughes here

27-10-2001

TED HUGHES (1930 – 1998)

"Every work of art stems from a wound in the soul of the artist... Art is a psychological component of the auto-immune system that gives expression to the healing process. That is why great works of art make us feel good. "

Birthplace
Yorkshire, England

Education
Hughes started writing by composing comic poems "for classroom consumption" at the age of 11. At Pembroke College, Cambridge he began studying English but, finding his own writing stifled, changed to archaeology and anthropology.

Other jobs
He did his national service with the RAF as a mechanic in Yorkshire, with "nothing to do but read and reread Shakespeare and watch the grass grow". Jobs to support himself while writing - though the urge to produce children's stories was also financial - included "rose gardener, night-watchman in a steel factory, zoo attendant, schoolteacher, and reader for J. Arthur Rank".

Did you know?
Having resisted all publicity, Hughes's last interview was given to the American fishing magazine Wild Steelhead and Salmon; he had felt confident he would not be asked about Sylvia Plath.

Critical verdict
Hughes took a magical, shamanic view of poetry: it is "a journey into the inner universe", "an exploration of the genuine self", "a way of making things happen the way you want them to happen". Always critically valued, his dense, bloody poetry of the natural world made him a surprise poet laureate in 1984. With his last works, Metamorphoses and Birthday Letters, published without fuss while he struggled with colonic cancer, he found runaway success (Birthday Letters was said to be the fastest-selling book of poetry ever, though this probably had a lot to do with the Plath myth).

Recommended works
Of his work for children, How the Whale Became offers ageless creation myths. Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, though leaning towards the New-Age, is criticism written from love; the translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses is a sustained tour de force. Of his original poetry, the Crow sequence, red in beak and claw, epitomises Hughes's vision; while Birthday Letters, a moving and redemptive literary document, sees the achievement of a new kind of poetry.

Influences
Blake and Yeats, with their mystical influences, conception of the poet as shaman and muscular relationship with the natural world are both strong influences.

Now read on
The Yorkshire Moors are as much a character in Wuthering Heights as they are in Hughes's poetry; many of Plath's poems are echoed or responded to in Birthday Letters.

Adaptations
The forthcoming The Iron Giant ("It came from outer space!") is loosely based on the children's story The Iron Man.

Criticism
The Epic Poise: A Celebration of Ted Hughes (ed Nick Gammage) contains tributes to Hughes, meditations on individual poems and new poems for Hughes, with contributors including Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion, Roger McGough and Marina Warner.

Poetry
Keeper of a stubborn faith

The first biography of Ted Hughes reveals the man behind the shaman, finds Blake Morrison in Elaine Feinstein's The Life of a Poet

Saturday October 27, 2001
The Guardian

Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet
Elaine Feinstein
273pp, Weidenfeld, £20

In one of his earliest poems, Ted Hughes describes the martyrdom of Bishop Farrar, who when burned at the stake by his enemies stubbornly kept the faith without once flinching:

... out of his eyes,

Out of his mouth, fire like a glory broke,

And smoke burned his sermon into the skies.

Ted Hughes was related to Farrar, on his mother's side; the stoical gene helped him get through his own years of trial and persecution. When feminists accused him of the murder of Sylvia Plath or critics rubbished his laureate poems, he took the punishment without complaint. There were occasional wounded letters, to protest that Plath's work was being distorted or the privacy of his children breached. But as to himself, he kept his trap shut. His one recourse was poetry, and on the central tragedies of his life (the suicides of Plath and Assia Wevill) the poetry had nothing to say.

Then in 1999, as though from nowhere, came Birthday Letters, a book less of self-discovery and self-exculpation than of self-healing, published because he couldn't "bear to be blocked any longer". After years of rancour and blame, of vicious rumour and tight-lipped evasion, the most mythologised literary marriage of the 20th century was seen through his eyes at last, in poems mixing vérité with folklore. Within months of the book's appearance, Hughes was dead. But Birthday Letters brought resolution and acceptance. A kinder, more candid era seemed about to begin.

How far is Elaine Feinstein's book, the first ever life of Hughes, part of this new era? In spirit, very much so. A contemporary of Hughes at Cambridge, a distinguished biographer and translator, and a poet in her own right, Feinstein is well placed to tell his story. When approached with the idea three years ago, she tells us, she quickly accepted, in part because she knew Hughes to be a man of warmth and generosity, not the callous predator or staring-eyed monster of legend. Her acknowledgments page, with its list of private letters consulted and interviews conducted, suggests that many friends of Hughes have been willing to talk to her.

But there are also those she thanks "who do not wish to be named", as well as others, likewise unnamed, who have refused to help - whose lips or letter archives remain sealed because they feel it's too soon, or fear being implicated, or think discussing their friend Ted would be disloyal, or regard any biography (however scrupulous) as prurient. Such mistrust is understandable; novelettish confessions - I Had That Ted in My Bed - will always find an audience, and there's a wish to do right by the subject. Birthday Letters may have cleared the air, but the ground is still a minefield - access strictly prohibited.

The innocent reader is made aware of this as early as the second page, when Feinstein describes photos of William Hughes, Ted's father, a survivor of Gallipoli, looking jolly. Then comes a reference to Edith, Ted's mother, having olive skin, the hair of a Native American and, "to judge from photographs", the good looks inherited by her three children. Unfortunately, the illustrations don't allow us to confirm the truth of these asides: neither William nor Edith appears (an omission made stranger by the inclusion of photos of Sylvia Plath's parents, though this is Ted's biography, not hers).

Making the best of it, Feinstein fills in the essential details of Hughes's 1930s upbringing in the Yorkshire Pennines, with emphasis on the parts played by his sister, Olwyn (a keen reader), and his brother, Gerald (who was 10 years older than Ted and taught him to shoot and fish). Until he was seven, the family lived in Mytholmroyd, little more than a village, where William worked as a carpenter. After Edith came into a legacy, they ran a newsagent's in the town of Mexborough, which boasted a cinema and library. An idyllic childhood, you'd have thought: first nature, then civilisation. But Ted perceived it as a fall. Partly this was because Gerald didn't join the family in Mexborough, moving to Devon to work as a gamekeeper and then emigrating to Australia, from where Ted, despite later efforts, failed to prise him.

It was Gerald who first took his kid brother up on the moors, and gave him a sense of life beyond the grim cradle of the valleys. Two years' national service, mostly spent reading, continued the process. But if he'd hoped that Cambridge would also broaden his horizons, Hughes was disappointed: he felt at odds with the smart young things there, and later described these as "years of devastation" which all but killed off his poetic gift. He was saved, so he said, by a dream in which a bleeding fox appeared and told him "Stop, you are destroying us" - after which he gave up Eng Lit and switched to Archaeology and Anthropology. More prosaically, he had the support of like-minded friends, to whom he played the roles of bard and bloke. The bard was into astrology, shamanism and ouija boards. The bloke dispensed advice on how to seduce and subjugate women until they were "doing the laundry without argument".

After graduating, Hughes slept rough in a shed that smelled of chicken shit. Tall, craggily good-looking and hugely talented, he was spoken of as a kind of Heathcliff. Though Feinstein, anxious to scotch the legend of the saturnine ladykiller, tempers the comparison, emphasising his gentleness and domesticity, Sylvia Plath certainly saw him in such terms ("Oh, he is here; my black marauder"). Her high excitement was matched by Hughes's sense of doom. An inner voice told him to "stay clear" of Plath, but he ignored it, with tragic consequences. "It doesn't fall to many men to murder a genius," he said later, in one of his fits of self-accusation.

The Hughes-Plath marriage has been ploughed over so many times that Feinstein is hard put to turn up fresh material. The latest theory - that Plath committed suicide after discovering Assia Wevill was pregnant with Ted's child - is one she rightly regards with suspicion. What does emerge is how hemmed in Hughes felt almost from the start: "wived, ringed and roofed". By the standards of most men in the 1950s, he was easy-going and enlightened, seeing his wife's work as equal in importance to his own. But the strain of living alongside the volatile Plath proved too strong, or the lure of other women did. Once he had strayed with Assia, Sylvia, stripped of her illusions, wouldn't have him back. "He's become a little man," she complained, and turned their intimate struggles into poetry, which he thought treacherous. At times she savoured her freedom: "It is as if life were being restored to me," she told one friend, before throwing that life away in the icy winter of 1963.

Assia, thrice married, still had a husband at the time, and her relationship with Ted, of which his parents strongly disapproved, was never likely to survive its torrid origins. She gave it her best shot, moving in with him in Devon, along with his parents, his two children, and her own child by him, Shura. But it was an uncomfortable set-up for a chic advertising copywriter with expensive tastes and aspirations, and within two years she moved back to London as a single parent, just as Sylvia had. When he wasn't in retreat in his garden writing hut, Ted continued to see her; but by now he was seeing other women, too. Worse, Assia felt blamed by everyone for Sylvia's death. Stolid with misery, afraid she'd lost her youth and beauty, she sank into depression - and in 1969 killed herself and Shura.

In his despair, Hughes decided that the true depressive must be him; that his darkness was a disease which any woman who lived with him might catch. His various liaisons around the time of Assia's death and afterwards border on the manic: as he told a friend, his entanglements grew two heads whenever he lopped one. Perhaps he needed to prove his attraction wasn't fatal, or to keep himself at a safe distance by loving more than one woman at once. Or perhaps he was just bad at saying no; as Al Alvarez says, he was oddly passive - "women went for him rather than he pursued them". Part of the problem was his intensity; he hadn't much interest in casual flings. He didn't pretend to be monogamous, but nor were his inamorata always aware of the others or willing to admit how attached he might be elsewhere. The confusion reached a pitch in August 1970, when Hughes married Carol Orchard, having been living with Brenda Hedden just weeks before. Thereafter things were simpler but hardly plain sailing, as the testimonies of Emma Tennant and Jill Barber, two lovers from the 1970s, bear out.

The complications of Hughes's heart aren't easily explained, and it's enough for now that Feinstein finds a tone that isn't glib or punitive. In a low moment, Hughes told his brother that his whole life had been "quite false"; the best he could hope for was the occasional holiday from public excoriation. But the remaining 30 years weren't all misery, either for him or for the women he loved. Those quoted here speak affectionately of him, as Carol, his widow, if ever she chose to speak, surely would too.

Even in the worst times, Hughes went on writing poems, and though it was late in the day before he regained his literary reputation, with Tales from Ovid, books from the 1970s such as Season Songs and Moortown Diary contain much of his best - and happiest - work. The great mistake, as he saw it, wasn't becoming poet laureate (he'd already met the Queen and fished at Balmoral by the time of the appointment), but spending five years writing a critical book about Shakespeare. Prose had destroyed his immune system and was killing him, he told friends - and he meant it.

I could read a lot more about Hughes's childhood, his male friendships, his politics and his life in Devon. But in the absence of an authorised biography or selected letters, Feinstein's book - pleasingly brief, even-tempered and unsensationalist - fills the obvious gaps. Well worth reading alongside it is the current issue of the magazine Areté (available from New College, Oxford at £7.99), which includes a fascinating piece by a young Devon neighbour, Horatio Morpurgo, on the "table-talk of Ted Hughes", with its inspiring, exasperating blend of blunt logic and cranky wisdom.

Birthday Letters was meant as Hughes's last word on himself. He'd rather we skipped the life and read the work. But the man himself was extraordinary, a rare instance of English genius. And the fire is far from extinguished yet.

 

Ted Hughes: the life of a poet by Elaine Feinstein

Michael Schmidt welcomes a perceptive portrait of a poetic legend

27 October 2001

Last time I went to visit my friends in Boulder Clough, Yorkshire, they took me for a long walk down Jumble Hole Clough, with its angry tarn, high foliage, craggy hills above and, at the heart of it, a ruined mill with the lumb or chimney still standing. It was Hughes country, a landscape as allegorical as anything in Narnia.

Hughes, more than most poets of his generation, is rooted in place, in the particulars of a landscape. The farther he travelled, the more insistently his imagination returned. Memory may exaggerate its extremes. But the landscapes of Canada and Alaska, the creatures real and imaginary that roost in his poems, all refer back to such cloughs, with their sounds and textures, seasons and times. Here social man encounters primitive fears and fulfilments. Nature repossesses history, overwrites mills and cobbles, hovels and chapels, with nettles, balsam, thorn.

After personal memoirs and kiss-and-tell revelations, Elaine Feinstein has written the first full biography of Ted Hughes. "She has a sinewy, tenacious way", he wrote, "of penetrating and exploring the core of her subject." Now, the subject of this "she" whose poems Hughes admired is the poet himself.

The risks involved in Feinstein's undertaking are considerable. As a woman, should she write the life of Sylvia Plath's vilified husband? As a friend, should she reflesh the skeletons in his cupboard? Judging from the book, she knows that as a woman she is qualified to write because she knew its subject well and can ask questions that a male biographer might miss. And, like most of Hughes's friends, she is weary of the lies that have silted up his reputation. Given a chance to tell the truth, or more of it than previous writers, she took it. Hughes said of her poems: "There is nothing hit or miss, nothing for effect, nothing false." That seems to me true of this book: it is intimate, interweaving her and others' memories, readings of poems and secondary sources in conversational engagement.

This is Feinstein's fourth biography (her fifth if we count her "faction" Loving Brecht). It must have been the most difficult. With Pushkin, Lawrence's Women (a subject close to Hughes's heart) and A Captive Lion: the life of Marina Tsvetaeva, much of the superstructure existed. Research could be conducted conventionally, and though there were jealous acolytes keen to rubbish the writer, the volatility of the material and its reception could not compare with this exercise.

Hughes and his family were jealous of their privacy. Biographers of Plath often mauled fact and defamed him. Journalists never tired of baiting him. He had children to protect. Feinstein, a friend for more than four decades, knows the story of his persecution. Her readers include not only critics, scholars, poetry-lovers and gossip-mongers but a surviving family and all the witnesses who contributed to her account: a host of severe readers.

She quotes sparingly from the poetry. Her extensive use of Hughes's archives results not in quotation of his vivid letters and essays, but in paraphrase. She was allowed unhindered access to most records, but in order to maintain independence (she is not "authorised") she chose not to submit her work to censorship by copyright. So Hughes's own voice as poet, correspondent, critic is unfortunately muted. It is hard to discuss poems not quoted in extenso. The life and the poems cannot quite come together.

As with Lawrence, Tsvetaeva and Brecht, she refracts Hughes through his lovers. There are rather more than expected, and they crop up just when one might have imagined that his libido had settled, for example at the time of his second marriage. It makes good copy, though the stories are troubling for their sense of waste and hurt. And one witness is significantly absent: the poet's widow, Carol, who sustained him for 28 years.

For all his passions, and despite his enthusiasm for Robert Graves, this inexhaustible lover was not a love poet. The biography might have probed more into the strained sexuality that mars, for example, Crow, with its hideous decapitating vulva. Crow was dedicated, Feinstein reminds us, to Assia and Shura, Hughes's partner who committed suicide, and his daughter who died with her. That dedication is one of the keys Feinstein provides, though she does not insert it into the lock.

Her Hughes is – like the man himself – larger than life, a force of nature among the bric-a-brac of the modern world. She sees him, as we must, from the perspectives of that world. Apart from his relations with his brother Gerald, his childhood and formative years – his Yorkshire, his family, his National Service – are remote, almost fictional. She is eager to get on to the poet she knew and understood. Feinstein's Hughes is the one who surfaces as a scholarship boy at Cambridge and begins there his inexorable development as a writer, comrade and lover. It is a story full of fascination, told with judicious candour. There are warts, she concedes, but they are not all, and it is her sense of that vigorous, abundant "all" with which the biography leaves us.

Michael Schmidt's 'Lives of the Poets' is published by Phoenix

The Colossus diminished

Elaine Feinstein tiptoes through Ted Hughes's turbulent life and hints at the harsh truths only in brackets

Nicci Gerrard
Sunday October 28, 2001
The Observer

Ted Hughes: The LIfe of a Poet
Elaine Feinstein
Weidenfeld & Nicholson £20, pp352

Ted Hughes died three years ago today. At his funeral, mourners - from his village and from over the Atlantic - were awed by his great coffin, for he was a huge man: a colossus, said his first wife, Sylvia Plath, when she met him, and 'the only man big enough for me' (others called him Heathcliff, perceiving him as elemental, with a forceful, unswerving genius).

He was tall and dark; he had a face like a granite cliff, an intense gaze, and a low, clotted voice. His poetry was savage, brutal, brooding, stunning. He had dominated English poetry for decades, since he was a Yorkshire teenager obsessed by hunting and fishing for pike. He was Wordsworth soaked in blood and cruelty, bleak and euphoric. He changed the face of English literature.

His memorial service in the May following his death was attended by the great and good. After all, he was the Poet Laureate. The final reading was from Cymbeline, and it was a recording of Ted Hughes's own rendition, in a slow, soft, deliberate voice: 'Fear no more the heat of the sun,/ Nor the furious winter's rages;/ Thou thy worldly task hast done,/ Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;/ Golden lads and girls all must,/ As chimney sweepers, come to dust.'

Ted Hughes had lived in the heat of the sun, and suffered winter's rages. For a man who wanted to dedicate himself to poetry, his life had been arduous and tempestuous; full of heat and chill, of injury and pain.

By the time he died, of colon cancer and a final heart attack, he was a myth and like many myths he had multiple meanings and contained multiple contradictions. He was a gentle giant and a monster. He was blunt and down-to-earth but believed in magic and cabbalistic meanings, seances and healers. He was a totemic male - in this book, as in others about Plath or Hughes, his maleness is often capitalised or put in italics. He represents the wild man of the North; he is endowed with an instinctive, fateful, towering, irresistible masculinity, dark-edged and blood-stained, like a creature out of the Ovid legends he re-wrote.

At the same time he is seen as a gentle giant, a confused and oddly passive male surrounded by harpies and masochistic neurotics. He is the murderer of his wife and he is her victim. He is a generous executor, a literary assassin. And it is as if readers must fall into one camp or another like zealots; a Hughes fan or a Plath supporter. It is impossible to read his poetry, or hers, without their lives flooding in.

Most people know some of the story, at least its central chapter - for Hughes and Plath were the Charles and Diana of the literary world, and when Plath killed herself, putting her head in a gas oven while her children lay sleeping next door, she lit a fuse that Hughes could never extinguish.

Hughes was a Yorkshire boy (born in Mytholmroyd, as if even his geography bears the imprint of destiny), the youngest of three, who always knew he was destined to be a poet. He roamed his countryside, hunted and fished and put words about nature together, encouraged by his English teacher.

He left home, did National Service, went to Cambridge. There he met a vivacious, lipsticked American girl, who talked about poetry and bit his cheek until it bled. 'Whoosh!' she wrote in her journal. They fell in love, and their love was a potent mix of desire, ambition, excitement, rivalry, a shared image of the world that waited them.

They married, struggled, travelled to America and back again, had two children (desired by her rather than him), quarrelled, made up. She was ferociously insecure and needy, a history of suicidal depression behind her; her gushy good-girl manner concealed a lava of emotions. He was unfaithful, with the beautiful Assia Weevil, and they separated. Out of Plath's despair, her anger, her sense of abandonment, she produced some of the most electrifying poems of the twentieth century - scorched and screaming and technically perfect. Then, one cold winter day in 1963, she gassed herself.

Her early death meant she would become an icon for generations of women readers, and fix Hughes in the role of brutal male. He lived thereafter haunted by Plath and her legacy (a legacy of which he was of course the executor) and went on to live with Assia, who had a child, Shura. But their relationship foundered. There were other women, and of course there was the woman, who, dead, became more powerful than she ever could have been alive. In 1969 Assia also killed herself, and her child. She drank whisky and pills and turned on the gas, in a spooky echo of Plath's death. These two women and their early deaths must dominate our understanding of Hughes's life.

Ted Hughes was a man who loved privacy. The crime he could not forgive Plath was the way she turned their lives and his betrayal into poetry, and mythologised domestic hurt. After her death, he rarely gave readings (and when he did, he was often heckled and abused from the crowd).

His sister, Olwyn, guarded him ferociously, and made life for biographers of Plath nearly impossible. But he knew he would be written about after his death; that his life would be picked over, his letters read, his secrets finally let out. The extraordinary sequence of poems about Plath, Birthday Letters, in which he lets grief and guilt finally find a confessional voice, is perhaps a way of getting his version in first, or of having the last word to set against all her last words.

Elaine Feinstein is a fine poet, novelist and biographer. She was also a friend of Hughes in his later years. She must have seemed the ideal choice for the US publishers, WW Norton, who commissioned her in 1998, a few days after Hughes's funeral. She says in the introduction: 'I knew there was an important story to tell. My hesitations lasted no more than a few weeks.'

But this biography should not have been written. Perhaps because she knew and admired Hughes, or was anxious about hurting his children and wife, or because she is a poet and Hughes towered over his generation of writers, or because she was intimidated by the enduring power of the Hughes-Plath myth, she is fatally constrained.

There is a story to tell, an appalling drama in which everyone suffered and great poetry was born, but she can't tell it because she must move so carefully among the recent dead and the still living, tip-toeing through the turbulent emotions. In a Freudian sense, her biography reads like an act of bad faith - it is drab and exterior because she was writing against the grain of her scrupulous conscience.

It is also curiously perfunctory. Hughes's childhood in Yorkshire, which was so important to him, is dealt with in less than 20 pages. By page 21, he is 21 himself and going up to Cambridge. The hold his mother had over him, and the grip nature held, are dealt with swiftly. The boy, waking at dawn to race over the moors in the wake of his adored older brother, is never summoned to the page. The savagery and beautiful bleakness of his poetry was evident early on; a biography should deal with it.

Cambridge is also galloped through. Hughes called his time here 'devastating', but the devastation never breaks the calm surface of Feinstein's prose, and she doesn't like to guess at its causes.

It is galling to be told, for instance, that because of his sexual experience, Hughes advised friends about women - for we've never been told of these sexual experiences. The book is full of odd parentheses, as if the most important things are wrapped in safe brackets so that they do not spill over into the book. For instance, on the weekend that Hughes begins his adulterous relationship with Assia he was, apparently, 'his usual generous and attentive self' to Sylvia and to Assia's husband, his friend.

Even the notorious destruction of Plath's final Journal is thus dealt with: 'It was Assia who found and read Sylvia's journal of the last months of her life, according to Suzette Macedo, and was overwhelmed by the spite and malice directed towards herself there. This may have been a factor in Ted's decision to destroy the journal.' If there are other references to an act that has so upset generations of readers and feminists, and made Hughes even more a target of hatred, I could not find them. This won't do: defend Hughes by all means, explain him, imagine his feelings, take sides - but don't corral the more uncomfortable moments of his life into underhand sentences.

Sylvia dies. Assia dies. Shura dies. They are put away in a few pages but loom up again in our minds. Feinstein fails to rise to their monstrous occasion. Writing of Plath's suicide, she says: 'A biographer has to admit that Sylvia's tears in the car with Gerry on her return to the flat remain unexplained, as does her decision to kill herself.' No, no and no. The tears are too easily explicable: Sylvia was alone with two children in the freezing English winter; her husband had gone off with her friend; she was wretched to the bone. And to couple the 'unexplained' tears with the later death is jarring. But Sylvia fares better than Assia, who remains a secondary figure, Sylvia's poor substitute and spooky echo, abandoned all over again by the narrative.

If Feinstein wanted to answer Hughes's critics and put the record straight (in her introduction, she says rightly that the image of him as callous husband is a caricature) she should have done it more boldly, imaginatively, passionately. She should have allowed Hughes to live on the page, seen whole and human. He was loving, he was unfaithful, he was passive, he was generous, he was consumed by guilt, tender, brilliant.

He was a man who wrote about myths and became trapped in his own myth. Feinstein's book does nothing to shatter that myth and let the man escape at last. Her words are like gravel thrown against a cliff wall. They fall harmlessly to the ground and the myth of Sylvia and Ted remains. And their words remain. Maybe one day, a long while from now, that is all we will have left: beautiful, terrible words, living long after the light has gone out.

 

Shelter from the storm: The true history of the writer remains elusive, argues Andrew Motion

FINANCIAL TIMES, Nov 3, 2001
By ANDREW MOTION

Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes dominated British poetry during the second half of the 20th century, and the stronger their authority became, the greater the differences between them seemed to be. Larkin was "genteel", Hughes was Heathcliff; Larkin was orthodox, Hughes was adventurous; Larkin was formal, Hughes was free; Larkin was shy ("the hermit of Hull"), Hughes was . . . Well, Hughes had been married to Sylvia Plath, so as the story of her life came to light, large parts of his own did as well.

Even when Larkin and Hughes were both alive, these distinctions seemed pretty daft. Now they're both dead, and the "long perspective" Larkin mentioned is starting to get longer, we can see just how unhelpful they really were. Larkin did indeed have strong anti- social instincts, but he also had a highly developed sense of community. And Hughes was indeed thrust into the jaws of the media - not only because of Plath but because he did, after all, accept the post of Poet Laureate. His wish to withdraw was nevertheless so strong that it makes Larkin seem gregarious by comparison.

Hughes's reserve, of course, had its foundation in the horrific dramas of his life - not only Plath's suicide in 1963, but also that of Assia Wevill, his next great love, who killed herself in 1969, after a six-year relationship, along with their five-year-old daughter. Although details of the Wevill story have never been well known, the bare facts have been in the public domain for years, and they combined with the Plath tragedy to make Hughes appear - for some - a monster, for others a self-justifying genius, for everyone a fascination. The marvellous reading voice - at once rolling and intimate - and the electric crackle of his physical presence, made his story even more compelling. Very few poets, in any century, have had to bear such a weight of curiosity about the circumstances surrounding their work.

In this respect, his reticence seems completely understandable. But as well as protecting him, it also encouraged rumour, and lies. Following Plath's death, he faced a steadily mounting barrage of criticism for the way he had treated her, and, although much of it was ill-informed, he seldom took the chance to put the record straight - until he published Birthday Letters in 1998, the same year that he died. Although not intended as self-exculpation, these poems did balance the Plath-orientated view of things - partly by showing the other side of many famous stories, and partly by demonstrating on virtually every page that he still loved her. It meant that by the time of his death, the public image of Hughes had in some senses softened, and in every way become more admirable: he'd kept his dignity all these years; he'd been silent to shelter his children; his reward was to end his life with a burst of writing that brought him to the top of his form.

Since then, the struggle between revealing and sheltering has resumed. On the one hand we've been treated to some venal kiss-and-tell stories from Emma Tennant and other less well-known girlfriends of Hughes; on the other, the Hughes estate has released nothing in the way of fresh material. In fact the most notable "new" publication over the past three years is a modest Selected Poems, chosen by Simon Armitage. There is no sign of a "Selected Letters", or of an "official" biography, though one would hope that a good big edition of the poems might appear soon.

Yet even without permission to quote from published or unpublished sources, and without the co-operation of many people who knew him best, it was inevitable that someone would have a go at telling his story - and, given the circumstances, Hughes would probably have thought himself lucky to have ended up with Elaine Feinstein. She was a friend of his for many years, she is level-headed when dealing with the Plath side of things, and she is generous in her judgments of almost everything. Furthermore, she is hardworking enough to have discovered the basic shape of Hughes's career, for which all his subsequent biographers will be grateful. Although the story is full of silences, very oddly paced (only 20 pages on his childhood), and unable to validate its literary opinions by showing us enough of the work, it at least makes sense as a narrative.

But in all honesty, that is not saying much. When Peter Ackroyd wrote his unauthorised life of T.S. Eliot, he proved how much could be done even without the support of a literary estate, and without quotes from the work or the letters. Feinstein comes nowhere near his mark. She doesn't create a coherent psychological portrait of Hughes, she doesn't show what is weak as well as what is good in the work, and she doesn't mould the various parts of his life into a whole. In other words, Hughes is crucially absent from his own story.

It's clear, for instance, that his Yorkshire boyhood, during which he was greatly influenced by his elder brother Gerald, combined the sensuous with the mystical to an exceptional degree. This became the foundation for all his best writing, and also the framework for his most interesting ideas - about spirit-life and shamanism, and about ecology and the environment, and about how they might combine. The trajectory of his thinking about these things shoots in a clear line through his undergraduate days at Cambridge, remains steady through the love-storms of his middle life, and endures into the complications of late prose works such as the essay on Coleridge and the book on Shakespeare.

Feinstein can't blame lack of access for this failure; she does not make the best of what she has. In the same sort of way, her account of Hughes's relationships with women is disappointing. It appears that by the time he met Plath he had already developed a distinctly two-sided attitude. Women were delicious passion-arousers (the first kiss with Plath led to the notorious biting episode, and the first time he slept with Assia he wrecked her nightdress), and they were also necessary because he wasn't that keen on doing his own laundry. In other words, the demon lover and the mild mother needed to co-exist - an impossible thought, since as soon as the former melted into the latter, she had to be reinvented as a separate creature. Hence the trail of seductions, which continued after Assia's death and his marriage, the following year, to Carol Orchard.

Hughes himself was canny and curious about psychologies - a brilliant observer of surfaces, and a great rootler in underworlds. But he was also someone capable of astonishing innocence, and therefore fated to repeat his experience over and over again. That is partly why his life has the force not just of tragedy but of myth, and why, one day, it will be so well worth reading. Feinstein was doomed from the start to seem limited, but has ended up even more diminished than she needed to be. For all that, the best that can be said of her book is significant. It is honourable.

Books: The real hughes escapes

ted hughes: the life of a poet by elaine feinstein (weidenfeld & nicholson, £20). Reviewed by david wheatley

'WHAT can I tell you that you do not know/Of the life after death?' Ted Hughes wrote in Birthday Letters, the 1998 collection in which he belatedly offered his account of life with Sylvia Plath more than three decades after her suicide in 1963. Poem after poem in that book found him returning obsessively to Plath's work, as though concerned to give his side of the story before he too fell victim to the 'life after death' he had seen inflicted on his wife by prurient biographers. Paul Muldoon has used the word 'shitepokes' to describe the purveyors of tittle-tattle about Hughes and Plath, and with the death of Hughes it was inevitable that they would come poking about in his life too. His first biographer, Elaine Feinstein, is anything but a muckraker, though: a respected poet and biographer, as well as a long-time friend of Hughes's, she has written a sympathetic book that goes to considerable lengths to avoid acrimony and the apportioning of blame, even if the end result is more than a little insipid.

Ted Hughes was born in the West Yorkshire village of Mytholmroyd in 1930. His father was one of only 17 soldiers in his regiment to survive the Gallipoli landings of 1917; horrified at such senseless slaughter, Hughes would later refuse to wear a poppy on Remembrance Day. While he was still a child the family moved to the mining town of Mexborough, from which he longed to escape to the country, but unlike his beloved brother Gerald, who became a gamekeeper, Hughes chose university, studying anthropology at Cambridge. In February 1956 he went to a party to launch a student magazine. At the party was Sylvia Plath, a visiting Fulbright scholar. They married four months later.

The story of what happens next has been told innumerable times, to the point of having become a ghoulish soap opera. Hughes's Yorkshire childhood is dispatched in a mere 16 pages, with his early years at Cambridge taking up another short chapter before we get down to the central drama of the encounter with Plath, the couple's marriage, the disastrous affair with Assia Wevill on which it foundered and the suicides of first Plath, and then Wevill.

From his student days he was obsessed with spiritualism. He found a fellow addict in Plath, with whom he shared long sessions on the Ouija board. Many years later this side of Hughes seduced him into the melodramatic cult of fate that scars Birthday Letters, where merely human explanations for the collapse of his marriage take second place to myth-spinning.

Of Hughes's life after Plath and Wevill, Feinstein has little of interest to tell. The poet laureateship came in 1984, and at the end of his life the late rally that produced Tales From Ovid and Birthday Letters, but by the end of the book it is impossible not to suspect that the real Hughes escapes the biographer's efforts. Then again, I'm not sure I have the stomach for the sort of book Muldoon's 'shitepokes' would have wanted anyway. There may be some final paydirt of revelations awaiting us in the famed sealed box in Emory University, not due to be opened until 2018; personally, I wouldn't be unduly perturbed if it stayed sealed until Doomsday. What will endure is the best of The Hawk In The Rain, Lupercal, Wodwo and Moortown Diary. As for the private tragedies and agonies of remorse that animate Crow and Birthday Letters -- emphatically not his best books -- maybe they should be allowed to stay private.

‘We were just kids'

Robert Hanks

 10 November 2001

 Here is a fresh and plausible attempt to sort out a poet's mythology

If any poet needs to have the facts about his life set in order, it is Ted Hughes. For all the public honours showered on him in this country before his death in 1998 - poetry prizes, the Laureateship, the Order of Merit - it remains true that his reputation has been distorted immeasurably by public perceptions of his marriage to Sylvia Plath and her suicide. As Elaine Feinstein is at pains to point out in her biography, his situation was made far worse by his courageous decision, as Plath's heir, to allow publication of all her later poems. Many of Plath's enthusiastic readers - especially American readers - were inclined to take literally allusions to Hughes as a brute and a Nazi; and, at least partly in consequence, his own work came to be neglected, if not treated with outright hostility, in America.

So some sorting out of the myths from the truth is welcome; and Elaine Feinstein has the CV for the job. She is a poet herself and an acclaimed biographer of poets - Marina Tsvetayeva and Pushkin (in both of whom Hughes was keenly interested) and D H Lawrence (whose life and poetry have many parallels with Hughes's). She knew Hughes, though not intimately; and while she never met Plath, she does know many people who did, and is at times crucially able to see her point of view.

Ted Hughes: the Life of a Poet has many good qualities. The tone is by and large cool and judicious, in an area where passions are easily inflamed. Feinstein has done her research carefully, and the picture she presents of Ted and Sylvia's marriage is fresh and plausible - apart from anything else, the reader feels the justice of Hughes's remark, years later, that the two precociously talented poets were in other respects "just kids". She also offers a remarkably full account of Hughes's affair with Assia Wevill, which precipitated the separation from Plath, and of Wevill's own suicide (she gassed not only herself but her two-year-old daughter by Hughes, Shura).

Yet it is also a flawed book. There are many loose ends, inconsistencies and unsupported assertions - in general, the signs of a book written a little too quickly and not edited quite thoroughly enough. There is occasional resort to slightly dogmatic psychobabble - the silliest instance comes when Feinstein tries to account for Hughes's reluctance to settle with Wevill:

In his north of England childhood, he would often have heard wives referred to as "Mother". At a verbal stroke, men would be claiming the indulgence of a child and be licensed to look elsewhere for their erotic pleasures . . .

This not only demonstrates a profound ignorance of the puritanical Northern non-conformist culture from which Hughes came; it overlooks the awkward fact that husbands were likewise referred to as "Father".

More damagingly, Feinstein too often accepts Hughes's version of events, sometimes using such loaded verbs as "confess" or "acknowledge" - a confession of weakness may well be an evasion of responsibility. She even has a habit of relying on Hughes's verse as an authoritative source of information. For example: a friend of Assia Wevill's recalls Assia saying, at the beginning of her affair with Hughes, that she had sent him a red rose pressed between two sheets of paper. Feinstein comments that this "does not accord with Hughes's own recollection", citing a poem from his 1990 volume Capriccio (explicitly about Assia) in which "She sent him a blade of grass". When, much later in the book, Feinstein comes to discuss Capriccio at greater length, the blade of grass seems to have become unquestioned fact.

Not only is a poetic transformation of events misclassified as a "recollection", it is privileged over other recollections. This is the most clearcut instance of this fallacious thinking, and perhaps not significant in itself; but similar, more subtle conflations occur at several points in Feinstein's account of Hughes's life with Plath, when she takes his book Birthday Letters (1998) at face value. Given the extent to which Hughes himself suffered as a consequence of over-trusting readings of Plath's poems, this seems particularly ironic.

When she reads the poetry simply as poetry, Feinstein is a sound critic, if rarely inspired - a reader who does not care for Hughes or Plath is unlikely to find any doors unlocked here. All the same, the life does throw light on the poetry, sometimes in unexpected ways: Plath has come in for much criticism over the concentration camp imagery in her poems "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" (both written in October 1962, within weeks of Plath's discovery of Hughes's affair with Wevill). The appropriation of victimhood seems to make more sense once you know that Assia was herself of German-Jewish origin, her family having fled Germany in the 1930s; what Plath is claiming is that her own situation - humiliated, death-haunted - brings her closer to Jewishness than the beautiful, predatory Assia. It is still not a palatable thought, but at least it is not gratuitous.

However much Feinstein's interpretations might be open to dispute, she provides enough facts to allow for informed disagreement, and that scrupulousness makes up for a lot. This is not always a good book; that does not mean it is not a useful one.

Issue six - Autumn 2001

Horatio Morpurgo

 THE TABLE TALK OF TED HUGHES

I remember him once teasing a young painter in front of other guests. The painter had taken to abstraction, of which Ted took a dim view. He mock-introduced him: '------ is an artist who used to do wonderful figurative paintings of mackerel'. The reference was to something done in his teens. The artist stood up for himself. 'Yes, I did a painting of some mackerel when I was seventeen - it was a good painting and Ted liked it too. Later I discovered abstraction and found my vocation.'

Ted groaned. 'Oh yes. Come on then, explain it again. For thickies like me.' The painter smiled, which Ted took as an invitation to re-start an old conversation: 'You have to begin with something people can recognise...' Abstract art, by contrast was too cerebral, detached from real life. It was unhappy art. The painter made to interrupt him now, but Ted had just thought of something: 'When you die, and all that's left of you is molecules, and then when the earth is involved in some final catastrophe, and those molecules and atoms that were you go streaming through space with the dust and the radiation, every single one of them will be shrieking - "Mack - er - el! Mack - er - el! Give us back those mack - er - el!" ' He did the voice of the molecules in a harsh whisper, indicating their flight through space with his arms outstretched, a glass of champagne in his right hand.

It made everyone laugh, the painter included, so he stopped badgering him. To everyone's relief, no more was heard of abstract-versus-figurative that evening.

*  *  *  *

He once told me the life-history of an English middle-aged poet, whose work he was trying to promote. This poet had always been the wordsmith of the family while his brother was the artist. He described to Ted a formative crisis in his late twenties: a complete and completely inexplicable block. He tried psychoanalysis: Freud, Adler, Jung. Nothing doing. Meditation, special diet - the works. Finally, after a car accident, he fetched up in a hospital ward, quite literally having his head examined. The doctors took their X-rays and studied his brain-wave patterns. There was no damage from the accident but the doctor was astonished by something else: 'You have the most repressed right hemisphere I have ever seen.' That was the clue the poet needed. He knew that spatial awareness is governed by the right hemisphere, language by the left. So he began to draw, to see if this would restore his creative abilities. And indeed they gradually returned. He had suppressed part of his brain as a concession to family feelings and it had almost destroyed him as an artist. Ted had a similar theory about Vitamin C. If it made all the difference for Olympic athletes, why not for writers? He would explain all this in dramatic, urgent detail. He turned up one evening with a video of two ganglions in a rat's brain actually forming a new connection - the birth of a thought captured on film.

When microwave ovens came in, he read up all about the Ôfree radicals' they activate in food and how dangerous these are. Or there was some theory of memory loss he had just read about. He enjoyed haranguing people, making them sit up with his tales of 'startling new evidence'. The more arcane and scientific-sounding his theory, the happier he was - all the better to brow-beat complacent neighbours.

And then the next time you saw him he'd sit there and solemnly inform you that the rational, scientific, Hellenistic part of the inheritance had ruined everything.

That said, he could get these things spectacularly right. He saw the BSE crisis coming years before it was news. He was for some years heavily involved in a campaign to stop a sewage filtration plant being built at the mouth of the Torridge estuary. And it was the science he talked about, not the aesthetic angle. Near the end of his life, the scope of the powers being transferred by governments to multinational corporations began to worry him. One of the last times I saw him, he said that what we recognise as civilisation had about forty years to run. I shook my head at his reflex pessimism.

He clearly needed this restless theorising. Perhaps it accounts in some way for the amazing range of his poetic voice. The restlessness went very deep. He would rather have lived in Ireland than England. Devon was 'the graveyard of ambition' - drab compared to Alaska, boring compared to London. 'Are we living in a museum?' he asked one evening, after someone had described the 'picturesque' life of a local small-holder, soon to retire. He would have preferred to be Jewish rather than question-mark Anglican. In some ways, he would rather have been a doctor rather than a poet. If only he hadn't wasted so much time running around with women when he was young he 'might have really achieved something'. And so on and on.

Whether the discontent was divine or not, it was certainly relentless. When he didn't get stuck on one of his pet-hates, sometimes it was as if he demanded of everyone around the table that they review their lives completely - reassess everything, start again, as of that evening, completely true to their actual selves this time. (Or his version of their actual selves.) It's how an artist operates - beginning afresh time after time. Otherwise why bother talking / writing at all?

If this mood of radical reassessment misfired, a curious atmosphere ensued. A laboured attempt to keep the great man amused. Everyone about to say something supremely witty. Everyone radically open about their lives, at long last. In other words, everybody double-locking the doors.

Or it could be exhilarating. One example: I was unsure of whether to take up my place at university. Ted went with the mood. Yes, undergraduates are like baboons, he said, all crammed into the same cage, all shouting 'Me! Me! Me!' And as for the teachers... He grew more serious. The underlying principle of university life, he said, is observation, rather than action. When he visited Cambridge now, it was full of people who, instead of plunging bravely into life, had 'held their breath somehow' instead. And gone on holding it, until at last they became incapable of breathing the harsher, truer air of the real world. Perhaps, he thought, that was what I was sensing and shying away from in the idea of university. It was a genuine attempt to engage with what was on my mind. As an idea it has stayed with me.

Still, his theory was probably more revealing about himself: the dichotomy between the writer trapped in his 'sedentary trade' and the man of action was one he struggled with. He admired action-man/woman politics. Mrs Thatcher was a big enthusiasm. Michael Heseltine became a friend. Kenneth Baker - Thatcher's ideologue-in-chief - was also a buddy. He liked Mrs T's belligerent business sense, her militarism, patriotism and all-round impatience with slackers. These were traits he shared and was proud of. Politics were not his forte but, for a while at least, he wouldn't leave them alone either. After Thatcher fell from power and Heseltine lost the leadership contest, his interest seemed to drop off. He began to complain about Thatcher's anti-European rhetoric. I suppose he thought that for a few years she was, in her way, 'making it new' - rather as his conversation sought to start afresh, liberated from the preconceptions that stifle and inhibit. Perhaps, though, there are some preconceptions we don't need to be 'liberated' from.

*  *  *  *

He used to talk affectionately about North Devon as he had known it in the early 60s - how he had chosen the area because it was upwind of the nuclear power stations, for the sea-trout in its rivers and the red deer on its moors. How in those days it was 'full of farms where nothing had changed since the Fourteenth Century, and you could buy them up for almost nothing'. For ages he kept the wreck of the Morris car he first came to Devon in. He was still driving it around into the early 80s. How he got it through its MOT remains a mystery. Partly, he reminisced like this because he liked to make 'new-comers' feel how much they'd missed by arriving too late or being born too late. And partly of course it was other things.

But his attachment to the history of his chosen home was serious. He loved talking about the Iron Age associations around North Tawton. He said the whole area had been some kind of sacred forest and liked to explain the (extremely good) evidence for this. The 'Nymet' place-name, for example, is common and comes from the Celtic word for sacred grove. River and field names also point to a marked persistence of un-Romanised Celtic populations and culture here - as do 'Devon rounds', a form of small late Iron Age fortification particularly common in the area. Ted used to say he knew a farmer nearby who turned up strange white stones in one of his fields - fragments of a pre-Roman temple-floor, he felt sure. I could never get any details out of him about this, though.

North Devon wasn't on the way to anywhere the Romans wanted to go. Their occupation of North Devon was brief and left almost no trace - other than a few mentions in Tacitus and the works of a Byzantine historian and one or two archaeological sites. The garden at Court Green is one of them: it contains part of the rampart of a Roman military camp (he said fox-cubs used to play on it some years.) The camp at North Tawton was set up by Vespasian during his campaign in the area in the 50s AD.

In other words, he had, literally on his door-step, and all around him, traces of this tension between a native culture more or less stamped out elsewhere, and an 'acquired', wider European one. He referred to rural England as his 'sub-culture' - it was what he knew best, it was where his voice was from - and yet it could never be the whole picture. There was always an acquired wider culture to integrate somehow. There was always a balance to be struck.

He liked Devonians, he said, because, assuming they are impressed at all, they are less impressed than most by celebrity - as if they have kept something that matters more to them. And a certain resistance to the passing crazes of the mainstream goes back a long way. Just as the Pilgrimage of Grace started in West Yorkshire, so North Devon was the centre of an armed uprising triggered by the introduction of Cranmer's Prayer Book. Many of its churches retain elaborately carved altar-screens - and other signs that the reformed, de-ritualised faith was received sceptically.

He admired a quality of resistance in foreign cultures too. Japan and Israel seemed to be favourites. He was fascinated by Mishima's On Hagashuke. He admired both Zen in the Art of Archery and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He advised a friend on a documentary he was making about Basho's Long Road to the Deep North. He was fascinated by netsukes and sometimes said that Japan's apparently unstoppable success was owing to its having adapted a genius for miniature ivory carvings and verse-forms to the world of electronics.

He admired Israel for its tenacity against the odds, but it was Singer's Israel, as well as Amichai's. He valued the spiritual tenacity and the receptiveness that had, over the centuries, kept the Jews culturally confident in spite of everything, making them so fertile in religious ideas. And he felt that the scientific, political and psychological ideas of Einstein, Marx, Freud were rebellious products of the same spiritual matrix.

This had another side. He thought the economic success of Japan was revenge being exacted. 'People wonder how they do it,' he once said, 'It's the atom bomb that's driving Japan.' Israel's continuous war-footing was also proof that it still had something sacred to fight for, even if it was only survival. He said he envied Amichai his having fought in three or four wars and exulted in the Falklands adventure as if he thought it might re-awaken the English to some comparable sense of themselves. There's no point in trying to air-brush this out of the picture. At a lunch once the hostess said her son, a pilot in the RAF, had decided not to come because he knew Ted was a poet and he knew that poets are anti-war. 'Oh no,' came the reply, 'I'm pro-war.' He wasn't just being funny.

He admired in Japan and Israel something he felt the English had lost - something he was constantly looking to re-discover anywhere and in any way he could. Perhaps he found it in monarchy at the end. His sense of English history - from the Tudors, through the Civil War to the Restoration, even up to the Industrial Revolution - was charged with a sense of Revelation betrayed. Rather like the Old Testament's mixture of history and prophecy. For Sinai read Shakespeare. Or Blake maybe. I'd heard a techno version of Jerusalem played at closing-time in a run-down pub on the South Coast. I asked at the bar why they were playing it. The girl said it was always played at the end of raves. 'Yes,'

Ted said, unsurprised, 'Jerusalem is the unofficial national anthem.'

He took pride in the wealth his work had brought him and his attitude to money probably helps to clarify some of his stranger politicking. He liked it and he liked people who had lots of it, especially if they had land along salmon rivers too. Next door to us the land belonged to an old farmer who had no children. It was a tumbledown place, full of wildlife, and I used to spend a lot of time birdwatching there. This farmer told me that when he sold up I could have first refusal on some marshy fields by the river, which were very good for wildfowl. He made the offer but never repeated it. I was worried he'd sell elsewhere and the new owner would drain the land. I shared my concerns with Ted, who said I should fill a sack with £5 notes matching the value of the land. Then I should take it down to the farmer's house, tell him it was for the promised land, and simply leave the money by the door. He might ignore it at first. He'd take a couple of fivers out to begin with, intending to replace them. But he wouldn't. Slowly but surely he would use up the sackful.

That was very much the Hughes approach to money - a combination of nonsense and no-nonsense, a bit cynical, tough, funny, like something out of a folk-tale. The only trouble being that money isn't like something out of a folk-tale. How serious was he? Does it matter? Maybe it does. One aspect of him became, for at least one admirer of his work, more and more off-putting - where money seemed to determine politics, to distort his natural inclinations. My family was on his well-to-do Devon list. He may have talked differently elsewhere. I can't say. But in our company at least, he went through a phase of slagging off the French in a way entirely worthy of some wit on The Spectator. And then translated Phædre. He introduced a generation to Yoruba poetry. Yet he could argue at length that British aid to the Third World was a waste of money. Africa, for example, was simply over-populated. Nature must take its course. He spoke of how much he owed to the fairness of Butler's 1944 educational reforms - then suddenly Kenneth Baker was coming to dinner and 50% of school-teachers were homosexual. Fact.

When I returned for Christmas 1989, from the revolutions in Prague and Berlin, Ted's greeting was characteristic: 'So did you see any cracking of skulls?' In other words, had I actually witnessed any policeman versus demonstrator punch-ups? It didn't seem that funny in the context of people still being beaten to death in Romania. He sneered at Vaclav Havel, said he wasn't up to the job. You could have been forgiven for wondering if he didn't rather regret the end of the Cold War. The environmentalist aspect of 1989 has been largely forgotten (conveniently so for western corporations). Even at the time it didn't seem to interest Ted.

In 1991 I'd heard Harold Pinter and others were helping to found and stock good libraries across Central and Eastern Europe. Harmless enough, you might think, and something a voracious reader might approve. I asked Ted if he'd heard about it. 'No,' he answered, in his definitely-not-interested voice, without even looking at me. Instead he caught the eye of the only woman present: 'Dreadful people...' (i.e. Pinter and anyone who might agree with Pinter about anything). Ted smiled winningly, got the giggle he wanted, and that was his answer.

Maybe he felt there was something distinguished in holding such downright views. Maybe he enjoyed trailing his coat, teasing an earnest young man. It's possible. He affected to find Liberalism and the whole area of 'public discourse' wearisome, though he subscribed to any number of magazines and newspapers. I mentioned some feature in the New York Review of Books about T S Eliot's alleged anti-Semitism. Ted's response was that you have to decide whether or not you're going to spend time getting worked up over these 'great literary debates'. As if it was clear which way he'd decided.

His suspicion of 'great literary debates' isn't hard to understand. They were neither literary nor debates in his experience - people climbing onto Court Green's churchyard wall to shout things at him in his own home. English postgraduates presumably, with queries about scansionÉ I remember one particularly vicious run-in with a British Liberal broadsheet, which claimed he'd been at a party in the flat downstairs on the night Sylvia Plath died. 'They wreck whole months of your life and then print an "apology" somewhere on the inside pages where no one can find it...' He had threatened court action and the threat prompted the 'apology'. You were aware of an atmosphere heavily charged with libellous accusations and pending law-suits. He always seemed just about to go to war with the whole of Fleet Street and/or Hollywood. He felt that most of the curiosity was simply prurience - tricked out as 'criticism' or 'theory'. Given this hypocrisy, why should he be 'balanced' about it? If he sometimes retreated into a kind of Tory Shires crustiness, who can blame him?

Sunday, May 20, 2001

Footnotes on Ted and Sylvia

Diane Middlebrook

Crow Steered, Bergs Appeared

A Memoir of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath

By Lucas Myers

PROCTOR'S HALL PRESS; 165 PAGES; $20 PAPERBACK

Sylvia and Ted

By Emma Tennant

HENRY HOLT/JOHN MACRAE; 192 PAGES; $22

Remember Gertrude Stein's crack about Ezra Pound: that he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village but if you were not, not? The sentiment applies to cult books, too.

Lucas Myers' little memoir, "Crow Steered, Bergs Appeared," is unashamedly a cult book, and Myers a congenial village explainer. He and Ted Hughes were students together at Cambridge University. Hughes stayed in Myers' digs while courting Sylvia Plath; and two years after Plath's suicide, Myers stayed in Hughes' home in Devon for several months. So Myers was a real insider.

His memoir is more or less a set of meditations on Hughes' own memoir of his marriage to Plath, "Birthday Letters," the book of poems Hughes published shortly before his death in 1998. Various phrases in Hughes' poems set off a process of reverie in which Myers fishes up details that serve as affectionate, eyewitness footnotes to "Birthday Letters," details that could arrive in the published record of Hughes' life by no other means.

Myers loved Hughes; the strongest passages in the book evoke the romance of being young men together, members of a sort of fraternal organization of poets.

(The odd title is excerpted from a dedication Hughes wrote into the flyleaf of a book for Myers, an affirmation of their special understanding.) Myers provides a lot of minutiae about life on the margins of a Cambridge education in the mid-1950s, the sort of thing we expect from a cult book. He also provides an insider's sketch of the home life of Hughes' paramour Assia Wevill and her husband, David Wevill, during her pregnancy with Hughes' child. (Myers stayed in their flat, too).

On the whole, this is not a gossipy memoir, though. An honorable loyalty to Hughes' living family appears to have inhibited Myers from exploiting his intimate knowledge of Hughes' foibles, so he settles for lionizing his friend. But Myers is a good writer, and occasionally seems itchy in the role of Prufrock that the memoir genre imposes on him, "one that will do / to start a progress, swell a scene or two," as Eliot put it so killingly.

So Myers lets himself go on Sylvia Plath. He doesn't just want us to know that he disliked her, he wants to be right. (Among Myers' more amusing judgments: Plath should have become a lawyer.) Plath's fans will find plenty to annoy them; the catfight is one of the generic components of the cult book.

Myers' deployment of his eye-witness status in "Crow Steered" is vastly preferable to what can be found in Emma Tennant's "Sylvia and Ted." The novel is a kind of sequel to Tennant's memoir of an affair with Hughes (1999's "Burnt Diaries"), which established Tennant as one of the cult's village explainers. In "Sylvia and Ted," an author's note asserts that the events described are based on facts, many of which "were previously concealed or unknown" but that the novel is nonetheless "a work of the imagination." Most of the scenes in the novel are keyed to the recently published unabridged edition of "The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962," and many of these scenes come complete with subtitles; you can look up Tennant's version in the index to Plath's journals.

But in case you should fail to understand that "Sylvia and Ted" is a work of, um, the imagination, you'll run into "facts" that are incorrect. For example, the chapter in which Plath attempts suicide at 18 is subtitled "Wellesley Massachusetts, June 2, 1953" -- the day of the coronation of Elizabeth II -- when the actual date was Aug. 24. Trivial substitutions are the novel's main claim to fictional status.

With several breathtaking exceptions, that is. In a section titled "Lolita 1962," Tennant invents an ugly little episode in which Hughes seduces and deflowers their Devon baby-sitter, a pubescent girl of 15. The real Ted and Sylvia didn't have a baby-sitter in Devon; this part of the novel appears to be a fantasy Tennant based on a couple of jealous notes Plath made in her journal about a 16-year-old neighbor who visited a little too often in April 1962. Equally fictional, one assumes, is the lover Tennant produces for Plath out of an ambiguous reference in one of Hughes' letters.

What an unusual line of criticism to take against a novel, that a few of the scenes appear to be authorial inventions! However, Tennant has made a career as a novelist writing books fastened like barnacles to greater outcroppings in the sea of literature. Her novel "Pemberley" continues the story of "Pride and Prejudice"; "Adela" is about the ward for whom Mr. Rochester hires Jane Eyre as governess; "Faustine" is a modern-day update of the Faust legend. Etc., etc.

Fair enough, if the "information" on which the new work is based circulates within closed systems of fiction. But what about the story "re-narrativized," as they say, from information about actual people? At no point in such a book can invention trump the play of fact; a coy author's note will not prevent readers from assuming everything is "true." No use trying to take refuge on Parnassus, now. "Sylvia and Ted" isn't a novel, it's dirt.

Diane Middlebrook is the author of "Anne Sexton, a Biography" and "Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton."

February 3, 2002

'Ted Hughes': In Sylvia's Shadow

By BROOKE ALLEN

It was Ted Hughes's misfortune to be indissolubly linked, throughout most of his career and even after his death, to his wife, Sylvia Plath. Her suicide in 1963 coincided with the birth of the so-called ''new feminism,'' which presented a powerful reinterpretation of marriage and the female role within it. The posthumous publication (by Hughes) of Plath's brilliant and deeply disturbing last poems under the title ''Ariel'' turned this doomed woman into an icon. Especially in Plath's native United States, Hughes was demonized as a monster who forced his wife into a life of domestic drudgery and suppressed her genius, then broke her fragile spirit when he ran off with another woman.

It was a usefully archetypal tale, but it had little to do with the reality of the Hughes-Plath marriage. As Germaine Greer later admitted, ''Ted Hughes existed to be punished -- we had lost a heroine and we needed to blame someone, and there was Ted.'' Until his own death in 1998, Hughes endured that punishment with a silence some saw as guilty, some as dignified. It was not until shortly before his death, when he chose to publish ''Birthday Letters,'' his own verse memoir on the subject, that he made any attempt to present the public with his version of the story.

To apportion blame to one partner or another in this marriage is, as ought by now to be evident, pointless. W. S. Merwin, coining a memorable simile, remarked that ''there was something in Sylvia of a cat suspended over water, but it was not Ted who had put her there or kept her there.'' This is a perspective largely shared by Elaine Feinstein, a poet and novelist and the author of well-received books on D. H. Lawrence and Pushkin, who has written the first biography to appear since Hughes's death. Although Feinstein is a longtime friend of the Hughes family, ''Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet'' is not a tactful authorized biography but an engaging and, on the whole, convincing narrative that manages to blend honesty with sympathy.

While Plath's poetic subject was, over and above everything else, herself, Hughes externalized his feelings: his poetry spoke of nature, landscape, myth, blood, magic. He wrote within the local, earthbound, British tradition of Lawrence and Hardy. In fact, A. Alvarez once commented that Hughes was ''Lawrence without the nerves and the preaching, but also without the flowers and the tenderness.''

Hughes was born in 1930 and grew up in West Yorkshire, a bleak, beautiful region that was still haunted by the Great War: his father, a carpenter who later turned news agent, was one of only 17 survivors from an entire regiment of Lancashire Fusiliers killed at Gallipoli. Hughes was enriched by the region's landscape, but chilled by the Puritan ethos that ensured, in his view, that ''everything in West Yorkshire is slightly unpleasant. Nothing ever quite escapes into happiness.''

Hughes went to Pembroke College, Cambridge, on a scholarship. As a working-class boy, he was aware of what he called the ''social rancor'' of the place, but made his mark with both his precocious poetic gifts and his strong natural presence. ''Craggily handsome,'' as one Cambridge friend remembers, ''he radiated an extraordinary dynamism, a power and integrity which later made his public readings so impressive. . . . He has often been compared to Heathcliff in 'Wuthering Heights.' '' But the resemblance was physical rather than emotional: Hughes is described by many who knew him as self-contained and easygoing.

Hughes decided very early on a life of writing and poetry, and after leaving the university took a series of menial jobs that would allow him to concentrate his mental energies on his own work. The fateful meeting with his future wife took place early in 1956 at a literary bash in Cambridge. Hughes and Plath, a Fulbright scholar, were the proverbial opposites that attract: in spite of her intelligence, Plath was ferociously conventional, desperate to achieve success on the world's terms as well as her own. As a result, her life was ruled, as her onetime friend Dido Merwin maliciously wrote, ''by the conflicting drives and priorities of Medea and Emily Post.''

The quiet Hughes was attracted by Plath's energy and focus, and by their shared creative excitement. ''Quite suddenly,'' he recalled, ''we were completely committed to each other and to each other's writing.'' They married on June 16 -- Bloomsday -- 1956, in the naive belief that they could enjoy a life together of freedom, travel and art: the Lawrence-and-Frieda fantasy.

It didn't work out that way. Sylvia felt threatened by Spain, their first destination, and suggested that they live in the United States, where she got a teaching post at Smith College. But Hughes hated Massachusetts, and they soon made their way back to England. Hughes was making a name as one of the most interesting young poets of the time. His collections ''The Hawk in the Rain'' and ''Lupercal'' won him widespread recognition. Plath too was gaining a following, but more slowly.

Plath was eager for children, Hughes wary but agreeable. Their daughter, Frieda, was born in 1960; their son, Nicholas, two years later. In an era when very few fathers took part in mundane domestic tasks, the couple shared the work of looking after their children. They supported each other professionally as well. But the idyll, if it ever was one, disintegrated quite rapidly. By 1962, Plath, who had survived a suicide attempt in 1954, was becoming dangerously unbalanced, exuding what one observer characterized as an ''unrelenting, omnipresent animosity,'' and Hughes eventually began to withdraw. Disastrously, he fell in love with Assia Wevill, a thrice-married woman who turned out to be as vulnerable as Plath. Hughes and Plath separated, and she took her own life soon afterward.

Hughes and Assia were left in a private hell, struggling to come to terms with their parts in the tragedy while raising Frieda and Nicholas, as well as Shura, Hughes and Assia's infant daughter. As Plath's heir, Hughes was heavily involved in editing her poems for publication. He was also trying desperately to keep his children out of the publicity circus that surrounded everything to do with Plath. Other women appeared, and Hughes could seldom resist them. ''All I've been interested in is simplifying my existence so that I can write,'' he wrote plaintively at the time, ''and all I've ever done is involve myself with other people so that now I can't move without terrible consequences of all kinds on all sides.''

Hughes and Assia's love did not survive the strain, and in 1969 Assia, in a grotesque replay of Plath's suicide, gassed herself and her daughter to death. Years later, Hughes wrote to a friend about the ''events of '63 and '69'': ''I have an idea of these two episodes as giant steel doors shutting down over great parts of myself.''

Always a private person at the best of times, Hughes increasingly avoided public life. In 1970, he published ''Crow,'' one of his better-known volumes of poetry, and got married, this time for keeps, to Carol Orchard, whose common sense and independent spirit proved tonic. On the death of John Betjeman in 1984, Hughes was selected as poet laureate. It turned out to be a wise choice: Hughes carried out his duties with dignity and a certain flair, even as he continued to work hard on his own poetry. He also spent a great deal of time on translation, an art he found exciting and fulfilling.

Elaine Feinstein is sensitive and discreet in her portrayal of Hughes. His worst sin seems to have been womanizing: Feinstein doesn't avoid the subject or its often unhappy results, but she treads lightly. Nor does she dwell on the nastier characteristics that Plath's various bio