Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life by Jonathan Bate - review

Thereafter, Hughes, undeterred by the fact that he had been unfaithful to Plath before their marriage ended, took the ingenious line that for the rest of his life “his infidelity to others was a form of fidelity to her”. In 1968, he decided, in a note left on the kitchen table, that “the right balance was three” — three women for him, A, B and C. They were Assia, who in 1969 gassed herself and their small daughter Shura, news which Hughes himself acknowledged led to his own mother’s death; a pretty blonde neighbour, Brenda Hedden, whose open marriage had blown up; and Carol Orchard, a farmer’s daughter, 18 years his junior, who as a teenager had helped him with childcare. He married her just after his 40th birthday — then a few days later returned to see Brenda, “made love to her and then told her he had married Carol”.

Some may have dimly assumed that this marriage, after such disaster, offered him greater stability. Not at all. Women fell all over him. “He reeked of virility,” said Erica Jong. “Her recollection of his charisma may stand for the experience of dozens of females, of all ages, who attended his readings,” says Bate a bit wearily (he has an unfortunate preference for the disdainful word “females”).

On a trip to Australia in 1976 he picked up, among others, the press officer Jill Becker and, after she had been sick from drink, “he made forceful love to her”. She followed him to London, he not having mentioned he was married. And so it went on, with a few names like Angela Carter, Emma Tennant (who to her credit got Burnt Diaries from the experience) and Edna O’Brien dropped in. Hughes eventually, as he aged, found that “fishing could stand in for sex”. The poet Anthony Thwaite once told me that at Hughes’s memorial service at Westminster Abbey he wished the Dean had, at a certain point, said those who did not sleep with Ted Hughes may now be seated, just to see.

And where does the poetry stand? Bate knows well he cannot be too severe on Hughes’s work if his book is to be worthwhile, even though, as a Shakespearean scholar, he despises Hughes’s magnum opus Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being as no more than a crazy self-portrait, and doesn’t care much for a good deal of his other work.

He musters some enthusiasm for the late Tales from Ovid translations but surprisingly states that his slim second volume, Lupercal of 1960, was his best and most characteristic. He presents in schoolmasterly fashion a theory that he was always torn between the mythic or symbolic (Coleridge) and the elegiac or confessional (Wordsworth) tendency and at the end laments “how different his life might have been” if he had found the courage to be more confessional earlier on.

For myself, I agree absolutely with what Philip Larkin wrote to Kingsley Amis after he had declined the laureateship Hughes so proudly took and served: “No, of course Ted’s no good at all. Not at all. Not a single solitary bit of good. I think his ex-wife, late wife, was extraordinary, though not necessarily likeable. Old Ted isn’t even extraordinary.”

Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life is not a good book but it is what its subject deserves.

Go to eveningstandard.ca/booksdirect to buy this book for £25, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p