"Letters of Ted Hughes": Revealing letters from a poet and a widower

"Letters of Ted Hughes"

Selected and edited by Christopher Reid

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 758 pp., $45

Since the British poet laureate Ted Hughes died of cancer in 1998, his estate has released a stream of new publications: his "Collected Poems"; translations of Greek plays; selections from Shakespeare; and now a whopping 758-page "Letters of Ted Hughes," chosen and edited by Hughes' longtime editor, Christopher Reid.

These letters are the most intimate look the public has had of Hughes, and the portrait they create is fascinating, exasperating and at times deeply moving. In the introduction, Reid says the book contains only a sampling of Hughes' tremendous output of correspondence. Naturally, readers will wonder about the ones that were left out — and Hughes, if he were alive, would likely still be infuriated by the public's relentless inquisition into his personal life. I can relate to both sides.

Hughes was born in 1930, and the selection begins in the late 1940s, concluding just days before his death. The letters go to friends, family members and colleagues, including fellow poets Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin, and famed director Peter Brook — there's even one to the Queen Mum. Some include long explanations of his work and motivations, the sources of specific poems and essays, rambling defenses of others. He tends to go overboard on the defensiveness, but there's much intriguing stuff. Conspicuously missing are any letters to Hughes' wife Carol, who shared his life from 1970 until the end, and is behind the publication of this book.

Much attention will obviously go to the letters Hughes wrote his first wife, the poet Sylvia Plath, through their fraught courtship and marriage up to her suicide in 1963. Those charged years of their relationship became the pivotal event of Hughes' life. Through his remaining 35 years, he raised their children Frieda and Nicholas; saw his relationship with Assia Weevel (the woman he left Plath for) end in a copycat suicide that also took the life of their young daughter; went on to remarry; and eventually become poet laureate, with its requisite public functions and attentions to the royal family. Yet Hughes' marriage with Plath — so creatively attuned, so unresolved and traumatic — remained a pervasive undercurrent of his poetry, prose and correspondence.

Reid says he chose these particular letters to shape a story that's "above all that of Hughes the writer." The first letter begins: "I have seen many strange things in my 17 years; ... I have seen things which, when placed before a camera that posterity may wonder at their form, invariably shattered the lens, burnt the film and slew the photographer."

The shock of those lines prefigures the testosterone-fueled voice that would grab attention in Hughes' first book of poetry, "Hawk in the Rain." It also eerily foreshadows the mythic-scale tragedies that would dominate Hughes' life. Obviously, the writer and the man can't be separated.

Hughes refused to publicly discuss his marriage to Plath until near the end of his life, when he released "Birthday Letters," a series of poems written to her. Later, he admits he withheld them "until I'd grown old enough to realize that the big logjam holding back any inside story of my first wife's death had gagged my whole life, arrested me, essentially right back there at that point. Like those First World War survivors who never climbed entirely out of the trench." As he explains in a heart-wrenching letter to his son:

"What I was needing to do, all those years, was deal with what had happened to your mother and me. That was the big unmanageable event in my life ... It was only when I realized that my only chance of getting past 1963 was to ... simply make it public — like a confession ... let the heavens fall, let your mother's Academic armies of support demolish me, let Carol go bananas, let Frieda and Nick bolt for their bomb-shelters — I can't care any more, I can't lock myself behind this glass door one more week." Oddly, after the huge release he felt on throwing open that door (he wrote of a "sense of gigantic, upheaval transformation in my mind ... a freedom of imagination I've not felt since 1962"), Hughes continued to hide the fact that he had cancer from all but a few intimates. He explained in a letter to family members that his need to keep his illness secret "is like the antelope's instinct that doesn't want the leopards and hyenas to notice its limp." Perhaps that overwhelming urge to hide his weaknesses was Hughes' Achilles' heel.