Larkin, with his grumpy self-abnegating pose, was Hughes’s mighty opposite among the major English poets of the second half of the twentieth century. He liked to tease his rival over his reputed effect on women: ‘How was Ilkley? I am sure you were as big a success there as here. I hope all these stories about young girls fainting in the aisles are not exaggerated.’ And to rib him for his interest in astrology: ‘Dear Ted, Thank you for taking the trouble to send my horoscope which I shall carefully preserve, though I don’t know whether it is supposed to help me or frighten me; perhaps a bit of both. I never thought to ask what time of day I was born, and the information by now is gone beyond recall. I should guess about opening-time.’25
In order to be the object of strong parody, poetry must be memorable. What Larkin and Hughes had in common was the ability to write deeply memorable lines. Though none of Hughes’s turns of phrase has become as famous as one or two of Larkin’s, he is with Wordsworth and Tennyson in the very select company of Poet Laureates who have written line after line that passes the ultimate critical test of poetry, to be once read and never forgotten: ‘His stride is wildernesses of freedom’, ‘It was as deep as England’, ‘a sudden sharp hot stink of fox’, ‘I am going to keep things like this’, ‘Your wife is dead’.26
The argument of this biography will be that Ted Hughes’s poetic self was constantly torn between a mythic or symbolic and an elegiac or confessional tendency, between Coleridgean vision and Wordsworthian authenticity. His hostility to Plath’s biographers was partly defensive – he wanted to protect his children and himself, to stave off the haunting memory of her death. But it was also based on the principle articulated in his Deposition: that it is a great pity and wrong to translate an artist’s works into their life. And yet at the end of his career he finally published Birthday Letters, which became the fastest-selling volume in the history of English poetry precisely because it was a translation of his and Sylvia’s shared life into a literary work. The tragedy of his career was that it took so long for the elegiac voice to be unlocked. But how could that have been otherwise, when the work and death of his own wife were turned before his very eyes into the twentieth century’s principal myth of the fate of the confessional poet?
Hughes spoke repeatedly of the ‘inner life’. And it is the story of his inner life that is told in the documents he preserved for posterity. However, as he observed in an early letter to Olwyn, the inner life is inextricable from the outer: ‘Don’t you think there’s a deep correspondence between outer circumstances and inner? … the people we meet, what happens to us etc., are a dimension of the same and single complication of meanings and forces that our own selves are.’27 His close friend Lucas Myers said that Hughes attended to and developed his inner life more fully than anyone he had ever known, save for advanced Buddhist practitioners. ‘Poetry was the expression and the inner life was the substance.’ But the context of Myers’s remark was Hughes’s material life:
The first poem of Ted’s I saw in draft and easily the least accomplished of any I have seen began ‘Money, my enemy’ and continued for six or seven lines that I do not recall. I think it doubtful that the poem survives. Before I met him, Ted had determined to devote his life to writing. ‘Scribbling’ was ‘the one excuse.’ Or ‘the one justification.’
But money was his enemy because generating it displaced the time and energy needed for the creation of poetry and the development of his inner life.28
The poem ‘Money my enemy’, written when Hughes was in his twenty-fifth year and eking out a living as a script reader for a film company, does in fact survive, because a manuscript of it was preserved by Olwyn. The poet represents his relationship to the world of money in the form of a great war. He imagines his own body cut into quarters, his brain carved up, his hands on the market with the heads of calves and the feet of pigs. Street dogs drag his gut, but his blood – mark of his true poetic vocation – sings of mercy and rest, cradled beneath the bare breast of a woman, satisfied with the food of love.29
Money was the enemy, but it cannot be neglected. Ted Hughes was perhaps the only major English poet of the twentieth century who, despite coming from humble origins, supported himself from his late twenties until his death almost entirely from his literary work. After a period of casual work upon graduating from Cambridge, and a brief university teaching stint in America, he never again had to take a day job as a librarian, teacher or bank clerk in the manner of other poets such as Larkin and Heaney, or for that matter T. S. Eliot.30 His financial endurance was a heroic endeavour, albeit with moments of prodigality. The nitty-gritty of how it was sustained has to be part of the story of his literary life.
Ted Hughes wrote tens of thousands of pages of personal letters, only a small percentage of which have been published, sometimes in redacted form. He preserved intimate journals, appointment diaries, memorandum books, accounts of income and expenditure, annotations to his publishing contracts. The journals are of extraordinary value to the biographer. They were kept very private in Hughes’s lifetime: Olwyn, his sister, agent, gatekeeper and confidante, did not even know that he kept a journal. It must be understood, though, that his diary-keeping was sporadic and erratic. The traces of his self-communion survive in fragmented and chaotic form. There is no equivalent of Sylvia Plath’s bound journals of disciplined self-presentation. Ted’s journal-style writings are scattered across a huge number of yellowing notebooks, torn jotter pads and thick sheaves of loose leaves.
The wealth and the chaos of his thoughts may be glimpsed from an account of just a very few items among the hundreds of boxes and folders of personal papers that were left in his home at his death. There was a box file inscribed ‘Memory Books’, containing prose notes on subjects ranging from Egyptian history and archaeological discoveries, to Hiroshima, to a book about Idi Amin called Escape from Kampala, to the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, to sagas, history, and notes for a metamorphic play on the Cromwells. Not to mention the Old Testament king Nebuchadnezzar, a park in West Glamorgan, and the German Romantic poet and short-story writer Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist. Another box file, with ‘WISE WORDS’ written on it, contained dozens of prose fragments, diary entries from between 1970 and 1982, episodic passages that seem to be a draft for a first-person story, dreams involving Ted’s children, quotations from books gathered for a planned but never finished ‘Wisdom Book’, photocopies of mind maps for classical subjects, and a drawing of a head with a cabbalistic legend. One could open a folder at random and find within it material as eclectic as a letter about a Ted Hughes impostor, an autograph translation of a poem by the Spanish dramatist Federico García Lorca, and a smoke-stained photocopy of a publicity questionnaire regarding the poet Laura Riding.
At the time of his death, he had already sold tens of thousands of pages of poetry and prose drafts, and many valuable notebooks, to the library of Emory University in America, but he retained a collection of twenty-two notebooks, mostly of pocket size, in which there were over 500 pages of poetry drafts and over 800 pages of autobiographical material, all mingled together. Again, he kept a thick buff-coloured quarto folder