The poet and the peasant

There is a fateful view of Ted Hughes, as someone whose destiny was derailed by his relationship with Sylvia Plath. There he was, innocently writing nature poetry in his old corduroys, when the full force of 20th century female frustration and need crossed his path, trailing toxic clouds of feminist fury. What might have happened if he hadn't, as it seems his astrological chart warned him not to, gone to that Cambridge party where Plath malignly waited? Mythic status has adhered to both sides of this possibility: men and women, for whom Plath and Hughes's relationship signifies universal difficulties in establishing blame, will at least agree that it would have been better if they had never met.

Elaine Feinstein, unusually for her sex, is an unapologetic Hughesite, a position that is the fruit not of any new moral or artistic reasoning but of personal association. The public image of Hughes as "a callous husband whose infidelity drove (Plath) to kill herself " is one she disputes. "Those of us who knew him recognised this as a caricature of a man whose life, if far from conventionally blameless, was always lived with warmth and generosity."

The convention in question would seem to be that of exercising objectivity: the mother of a criminal suspect might find the police's attitude similarly conventional. Feinstein did not, it seems, know Hughes at the height of his infamy, and so her relationship with his reputation is in any case inauthentic. I don't doubt that she found him warm and generous in his later years on the literary circuit: the increasingly uneasy haste with which she makes her way through the mire of Hughes's life suggests that this cosy association has been severely overtaxed.

But even the most apposite biographer would find Hughes insoluble. He requires a feat not of retelling but of interpretation; he requires some imagination. One of the most striking things about his life is that the few years he spent with Sylvia Plath, and the poetry that later issued from them in the form of Birthday Letters, are utterly distinct from everything else. What distinguishes them is moral and intellectual sophistication, and those who, like Elaine Feinstein, style Plath as an unbalanced harpy who wreaked havoc upon her husband's plotted course fail to see the far finer hand in which those years were written. Plath told a friend that Hughes's infidelity had altered her perception of him at a stroke: he "now appeared to her as a massive, crude, oafish peasant".

Hughes's dereliction of Plath in part seems to have been his derelictionof the domestic and intellectual-equality on which their relationship was founded. The reversion in her eyes to inchoate oaf was in fact real: his later destruction of the last volume of her journal, his ambiguous relationship to her literary estate and its profits, his unkind claims that he had not wanted to have children in the first place, his increasing misogyny and manic infidelities seem to be the work of a divided self.

Hughes believed that the world was essentially violent, and by association that human beings were creatures of instinct: fated, primitive, driven by appetite. He was drawn to the occult and to pagan systems of thought. He seems to have sought out and committed himself to a reality that was opposed to reason, and because it was a reality he saw reflected in the organic world he was perhaps slow to perceive its effect on his art and his life, to see that he was not general, natural, but singular and isolated and capable of driving other people mad.

In Birthday Letters, describing his unhappy attempts to write poetry in an inimical Boston, he uses a striking image to convey his feeling that his sensibility had been overwhelmed, indeed temporarily murdered, while Plath was rather more in her element: "You hammered your new Hermes,/Your Panic Bird chipping at the old egg,/While I rolled in my sack, with my lumber,/Along the bottom of the Charles."

For all its poignancy, Birthday Letters is clearly the testament of a man who knows that he's got some explaining to do. His biographer faces the same task, but in this case does not even begin to accomplish it.

Feinstein's vague, distracted account does justice to nobody - indeed, it frequently impugns where it ought to show compassion - but rather plods incomprehendingly behind fate in much the same way as its subject appeared to do.