Another filing box was filled with loose sheets organised into roughly chronological sequence and amounting to nearly 500 pages of closely written manuscript prose: self-interrogation, descriptions of places and seasons, reflections on people, events and ideas. This was Hughes’s preliminary attempt to put together a journal.31 Given that he preserved it, the possibility of posthumous publication must have been on his mind.
Using all this raw material, it would be possible to write almost a day-by-day ‘cradle to grave’ account of his life. But the very wealth of the sources would make a comprehensive life immensely long and not a little tedious to all but the most loyal Hughes aficionados. Besides, certain portions of the archive will for some time remain closed for data protection and privacy reasons. The task of the literary biographer is not so much to enumerate all the available facts as to select those outer circumstances and transformative moments that shape the inner life in significant ways. To emphasise on the one hand the travails, such as the nightmare of the Bell Jar lawsuit, and on the other the joyful moments such as the mid-stream epiphany of ‘That Morning’.32
In writing of the inner life, it is sometimes necessary to track a theme, criss-crossing through the years. Subjects such as Hughes’s late work in the theatre, his curatorship of Sylvia Plath’s posthumous works and his obsession with Shakespeare are best treated as stories of their own, rather than scattered gleanings that would all too easily disappear from sight if dispersed across many different chapters. This approach has the added advantage of breaking up the potentially deadening march of chronological fact-listing.
So, for instance, in the summer of 1975, Ted Hughes was farming in North Devon, revising his long poem Gaudete, corresponding and negotiating with his mother-in-law about excisions from Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home, and reading an advance proof copy of Millstone Grit, a memoir of his native Calder Valley by Glyn Hughes (no relation). A strictly chronological biography would gather these four facts in a chapter on 1975. But the significance of the four facts is better demonstrated by placing them in separate strands of narrative: respectively, in chapters on ‘Farmer Ted’, ‘The Elegiac Turn’ in his poetic development, his ‘Arraignment’ by feminists and Plathians, and his own autobiographical ‘Remembrance of Elmet’ (the old name for the Calder district).
The biographer of Hughes faces the peculiar difficulty that he has been portrayed over and over again as Sylvia Plath’s husband rather than his own self. In the United States he is known almost exclusively as ‘Her Husband’ (which happens to be the title of one of his own early poems). This has meant that his marriage to Sylvia is much the best-known part of his life. Because they were barely apart, day or night, from the summer of 1956 to the autumn of 1962, every biography of Sylvia – and they are legion – is in effect a joint life.33 Furthermore, Olwyn Hughes contributed so much to Anne Stevenson’s authorised Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (1989) that it became, as its prefatory Author’s Note put it, ‘almost a work of dual authorship’. Bitter Fame covered the first twenty-three years of Sylvia’s life in just 70 pages, leaving nearly 300 for the seven years with Ted. It was a scrupulously detailed narrative of the marriage, checked for accuracy by Hughes himself. The marriage is also the subject of an entire book: Diane Middlebrook’s sensitive and balanced Her Husband (2004). Elaine Feinstein, meanwhile, in the first biography of Hughes (2001), devoted 125 pages to the seven years from the meeting with Sylvia at that party in Cambridge to her suicide in London, but only 110 to the remaining thirty-five years of Ted’s life. For this reason, my chapters on the years with Plath do not attempt a day-to-day record but focus instead on their joint writing life and on those moments that are caught in the rear-view-mirror perspective of the marriage in the published and unpublished Birthday Letters poems.
The cardinal rule is this: the work and how it came into being is what is worth writing about, what is to be respected. The life is invoked in order to illuminate the work; the biographical impulse must be at one with the literary-critical. The novelist Bernard Malamud’s biographer puts it well: the first aim of an authentic life of a writer is ‘to place the work above the life – but to show how the life worked very hard to turn itself into that achievement’. The second objective should be ‘to show serious readers all that it means to be a serious writer, possessed of an almost religious sense of vocation – in terms of both the uses of and the costs to an ordinary human life’.34 It was the assuredness of the sense of poetic vocation that most struck Seamus Heaney when he first met Ted Hughes: ‘the certainty of the calling from a very early stage … the parental relationship to writerly being is rarely so intimate’.35
In a journal entry written in 1956, Hughes quoted W. B. Yeats, an immensely significant poet for him: ‘I wished for a system of thought that would leave my imagination free to create as it chose and yet make all that it created, or could create, part of one history, and that the soul’s.’36 Hughes’s poetry was the history of his own soul.
Yeats also wrote, apropos of the question of what made Shakespeare Shakespeare, that ‘The Greeks, a certain scholar has told me, considered that myths are the activities of the Daimons, and that the Daimons shape our characters and our lives. I have often had the fancy that there is some one myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought.’37 For Ted Hughes, who had a soul as capacious as that of any poet who has ever lived, there were many controlling myths. None, however, was more important or all-consuming than that of the figure whom he called the Goddess. He quoted this passage from Yeats as the epigraph to his longest (and itself almost all-consuming) prose work, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being.
Whether or not that book sees truly into the heart of Shakespeare, it unquestionably reaches to the core of Hughes’s myth. His Daimon took the form of a woman and for that reason, if no other, women play a huge part in the story of his metamorphosis of life into art. It has accordingly been necessary to include a good deal of sensitive biographical material, but this material is presented in service to the poetry. His sister Olwyn said that Ted’s problem, when it came to women, was that he didn’t want to hurt anybody and ended up hurting everybody.38 His friends always spoke of his immense kindness and generosity, but some of his actions were selfish in the extreme and the cause of great pain to people who loved him. I seek to explain and not to condemn. Plath’s biographers have too often played the blame game. Instead of passing moral judgements, this book accepts, as Hughes put it in one of his Birthday Letters poems, that ‘What happens in the heart simply happens.’39 It is for the biographer to present the facts and for readers to draw their own conclusions.
There will be many biographies, but this is the first to mine the full riches of the archive and to tell as much as is currently permissible of the full story, as it was happening, and as it was remembered and reshaped in art, from the point of view of Ted Hughes. His life was, he acknowledged, the existential ‘capital’ for his work as an author. His published writings might be described as the ‘authorised’ version of the story, the life transformed and rendered authorial. His unpublished writings –