Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life

22. Sunstruck Foxglove (#litres_trial_promo)

23. Remembrance of Elmet (#litres_trial_promo)

24. The Fisher King (#litres_trial_promo)

25. The Laureate (#litres_trial_promo)

26. Trial (#litres_trial_promo)

27. A (#litres_trial_promo)

28. Goddess Revisited (#litres_trial_promo)

29. Smiling Public Man (#litres_trial_promo)

30. The Sorrows of the Deer (#litres_trial_promo)

31. The Return of Alcestis (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue: The Legacy (#litres_trial_promo)

Notes (#litres_trial_promo)

The Principal Works of Ted Hughes (#litres_trial_promo)

Suggestions for Further Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Jonathan Bate (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Dedication (#u24f31813-fb83-545e-b3fe-5c4fb4df7297)

For Paula Jayne, again and always

And for Barrie and Deedee Wigmore,

because the shepherd’s hut unlocked it

Note to the Paperback Edition (#u24f31813-fb83-545e-b3fe-5c4fb4df7297)

I am most grateful to Anne Donovan, Peter Fydler, Brenda Hedden, Carol Hughes and Rowland Wymer for pointing out a number of errors, ambiguities and contested memories, which have been addressed in this edition.

Jonathan Bate, January 2016

Epigraph (#u24f31813-fb83-545e-b3fe-5c4fb4df7297)

As an imaginative writer, my only capital is my own life

Ted Hughes (1992)

When you sit with your pen, every year of your life is right there, wired into the communication between your brain and your writing hand … Maybe all poetry, insofar as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of something that the writer doesn’t actually want to say but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of. Perhaps it’s the need to keep it hidden that makes it poetic – makes it poetry. The writer daren’t actually put it into words, so it leaks out obliquely, smuggled through analogies … we’re actually saying something we desperately need to share. The real mystery is this strange need. Why can’t we just hide it and shut up? Why do we have to blab? Why do human beings need to confess? Maybe if you don’t have that secret confession, you don’t have a poem – don’t even have a story.

Ted Hughes, interviewed for The Paris Review (Spring 1995)

Prologue

The Deposition (#u24f31813-fb83-545e-b3fe-5c4fb4df7297)

Q. Would you state your full name for the record?

A. Edward James Hughes.

Q. What is your residence address?

A. Court Green, North Tawton 11, England.

Q. Have you a business address?

A. That’s it. I work from home.

Q. And what is your occupation, sir?

A. Writer.

The Yorkshire accent is unfamiliar. ‘Eleven’ is the stenographer’s mishearing of ‘Devon’. The date is 26 March 1986.

Q. And could you state your age for the record?

A. 55. I shall be 56 this year.

Q. Now, sir, were you at some time in your life married to a woman named Sylvia Plath?

A. Yes.

Q. Can you tell me when you first met her?

A. The 25th of February 1956.

Q. And where did you meet her?