LettersIn 1956, Ted Hughes wrote to his American friend and fellow Cambridge graduate Lucas Myers about entering an American poetry prize, sponsored by Harper's magazine.
The judges were illustrious: W H Auden, Marianne Moore and Stephen Spender. "I have small hopes. But all kinds of people are beginning to show an interest in a few poems I gave to [ Peter] Redgrove." In the same letter he tells Myers that he and Sylvia Plath had married ("secretly" so that Plath could retain her scholarly bursary); that his South African neighbour, a chemist, "hates the English because they will have nothing to do with his discoveries"; and that he had conjured a familiar spirit, Pan, with a ouija board: "we asked it to predict whether certain magazines would accept poems - and it got these right. This week we've had it give us the results of the football pools". This letter's subjects - poetry and Sylvia Plath, but also, surprisingly, England's narrow mind and the paranormal - are the recurring themes of this generous selection of letters.
When he won the Harper's prize, Hughes was teaching in a Cambridge secondary school but considering alternative careers. He had a visa to Australia, where his older brother, Gerald, lived, but his poetry's success and recent marriage ruled out a move. A letter to his older sister, Olwyn, reports his "news and a half" about the contest but also mentions another possibility: "I have had a setback about my astrology. I tried to put the advert in, but they wouldn't take it. There are all kinds of laws about witchcraft and fortune-tellers". The poems of that first manuscript, published in 1957 as The Hawk in the Rain, established that he needed to follow no other occupation.
Hughes came from a different world to the other English poets of his generation: the letters are superb on the lifelong enthusiasms prompted by his Yorkshire family; his idolised older brother, whose career as a gamekeeper was ended by the second World War and who subsequently emigrated to Australia; his father, a survivor of the first World War and subsequently a professional footballer, carpenter and shopkeeper; his mother and well-read older sister, ambitious for the boy who took it into his head to read every comic and newspaper that would arrive in the family shop.
The letters also explain Hughes's retrospective disappointment with his education at Cambridge, which seemed more like a narrowing of his interests: all his life, he read poetry as a miraculous off-shoot of a folk or mythological tradition which was larger and, to Hughes, more important than any academic reading could grasp.
Its diminishment of poetry is one of the letters' criticism of modern England, but the tragedy of Sylvia Plath's suicide, a subject to which he returns again and again, also deepened his antipathy towards the Anglo-American world.
Many letters respond to and correct the hounding and repeated lies and myths with which university syllabi attempted to re-write his life, or explain their marriage, as if that were possible. The letters collected here, though, are as likely to re-ignite as settle old arguments and nowhere achieve the temperate power of the late poem The City:
Your poems are a dark city centre.
Your novels, your stories, your journals are suburbs
Of this big city.
The hotels are lit like office blocks all night
With scholars, priests, pilgrims. It's at night
Sometimes I drive through. I just find
Myself driving through, going slow,
simply
roaming in my own darkness . . .
Hughes's isolation in the Anglo-American cultural landscape was stubborn and chosen. His letters to Philip Larkin insist, hilariously, on challenging the older poet's urban rationality and aversion to the "myth kitty": in one letter, as a gift, Hughes encloses a horoscope he has cast for Larkin; in another he invokes the example of "Celtic poetry contests in the good old days" as he invites Larkin to judge a poetry competition (an offer which Larkin, ever eager for a day out, accepted).
HIS RESISTANCE TO English norms made Ireland a regular retreat and Irish poets, including Richard Murphy and Seamus Heaney, his natural allies. In a late poem, Familiar, he identifies with his Irish grandfather, "a seed of the Great Hunger" and in one of a number of late, revealing, autobiographical letters (this to his son, Nicholas), he remembers a time after Plath's death when he had been caring for his ailing parents: "Going to Ireland broke me out of that arid sterile alienation from myself that my life at Court Green [ in Devon] had trapped me into, and with a single stride plunged me right into the productive, fruitful thick of my best chances".
In a letter to Seamus Heaney, he sees Yeats's "greatness" in the tribal function that Ireland forced on him (and which England forced on Blake and Wordsworth and Shakespeare). And, writing to Peter Redgrove, Hughes admired Yeats's "all-embracing vision" that took its premise from seemingly defunct national and spiritual traditions.
These same traditions obviously offered Hughes useful structures for his work but the letters show how they came to dominate and undermine the poet laureate poems. These poems and, now, his explanatory letters protest too much and risk bathos when they use the royal family as a stick with which to beat modern rationalism.
This is a fascinating book whose tone is typically one of enthusiastic counsel: its many nooks and crannies include advice to his daughter on writing, to his editor on dry fly fishing, to his publisher on typeface and publication dates (which had to coincide with horoscope predictions), to newspapers on pollution, to critics who miss or misinterpret his ideas about Shakespeare, to collaborators on his groundbreaking theatrical and Eastern European translations, to government ministers on educational policy, to himself (most regularly) on neglecting his poetry.
Its weaknesses are its omission of any material relating to Hughes's long marriage to Carol Orchard and, less forgivably, its terrible indexing: where Larkin's Letters ends with a 30-page index, Hughes's has 10. A browser of the index will never know that poet Norman Nicholson encouraged Hughes's teenage writing, never come across his repeated definition of his contemporaries as "post-Auden", or even his one-time aspiration to write solely in the manner of Brian Merriman. The book is insightful about these and other writers but, most of all, it should return or guide readers to Hughes's natural habitat, the Collected Poems of 2003, and remind them of the heights Hughes reached in great collections such as Lupercal, Wodwo, Crow, Season Songs, Remains of Elmet, Moortown Diary and River.
John McAuliffe's second book of poetry is Next Door (Gallery Press). He co-directs the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester
This collection of the letters of Ted Hughes reveal, among other things, his penchant for Ireland Letters of Ted Hughes Selected and edited by Christopher Reid Faber, 756pp. £30