Ted Hughes: please Discuss

Hmm…I didn’t know he was quite so disloyal. I’d dipped into various biographies, but never read any thoroughly enough. I had thought he was loyal to Plath until her mental illness became too much and he sought comfort elsewhere. I’m kind of disappointed. Then again, his daughter speaks of him with deep love and affection, so he can’t have been that bad. Seamus Heaney loved him as well.

Still, I think we’re way too quick to judge artists on their private life. Some make the case that we shouldn’t pry at all, and should judge them purely on the work (I doubt the men who built the Taj Mahal, for example, were nice human beings - they probably beat their wives and keep slaves and god knows what). It’s the same with outdated views. It’s ridiculous to pull books from the shelves because someone writing in 1780 didn’t share the views of a 21st-century Guardian-reader. Aristotle was one of the greatest thinkers of all time (James Joyce thought him the greatest), yet he believed in slavery! In the future, people may regard the killing and eating of animals as barbaric and refuse to read any contemporary author who eats meat.

Are people really that pathetic and weak minded that they can’t sort through a book and like some bits but dislike others??! (I don’t mean you btw!). I’m an agnostic, but I still love reading CS Lewis. I also love Evelyn Waugh, but know he would have despised a working class oik like me. None of us like every single opinion of every single friend. But they’re still our friends. Go too far down the road of judging an artist on their private life and political opinions and there’ll be nothing left.

The thing I most admire about Hughes is the ambition. He really believed in poetry. For him, it was a profound and visionary art - something that revealed deep truths about the world.

I don't think TH was simply a quiet country man with an extraordinary gift for poetry. (I should have said earlier that I met him once, when I was a student and invited him to give a reading for the literature society in the mid 1990s, and while he invited one of the postgraduate tutors back to his hotel room (she said no), he was in his 60s and mostly obsessed with fishing -- he only accepted the invitation because there was locally excellent fishing...) I don't remember forming much of an impression of him, other than that he read his own work well, which is far from guaranteed. Still very physically striking, and aware of his effect.

But it's pretty clear from Jonathan Bate's biography (which began as authorised by TH's widow Carol Hughes, so that he got full access to all the diaries, letters etc in Emory and London, and was later 'deauthorised', which meant he couldn't quote from them) that his affair with Assia Wevill when married to Plath was far from a one off. He was a serial bedhopper for much of his life, and always had several women on the go. They either didn't accept it, like Plath or Wevill, or they did, as his second wife presumably did in remaining both alive and married to him.

It's horribly ironic that while Plath was eating her heart out over Assia Wevill, on the night of her death Hughes wasn't even with Assia, but sleeping with one of the secretaries at his publishing house, and that while Assia felt he remained permanently in the grip of Plath after her suicide, he was in fact sleeping with lots of other women.

This gives a flavour.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/09/ted-hughes-the-authorised-life-jonathan-bate-review-poet

I think he's a fine, though uneven, poet, but was a serial shagger in a way that caused a lot of damage.

If you're interested in Olwyn and her take on Plath, do read Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame, which I think is probably still the best Plath biography (AS was a poet, born the year after Plath, was born in the UK, grew up in the US and then moved back to the UK and stayed, so I think is better than most on cultural differences, how Plath would have found England and England found her, and the particular gendered social pressures of being a young woman in 1950s America) and alongside it, Janet Malcolm's brilliant The Silent Woman, which is a study of Plath biographies, their various biases, and the subjective testimonies of people who knew her, and how those have been interpreted in the various biographies. She talked to AS in depth about what it was like to write her biography, and the tense relationship she had developed with an initially cooperative Olwyn.

Bitter Fame has (I think) Olwyn's brilliantly unfiltered memoir of the times she met Plath and how awful she thought she was as an appendix -- it always reminds me of a CF post on Mn AIBU, with Plath as the houseguest from hell, but, like many of those AIBUs, you recognise that there's a huge issue of culture clash ('least said, soonest mended' 1950s Yorkshire meets American with very different ideas) and misunderstanding.

Yep readingparty has it right. I’ve been following the ‘story’ via most of the biographies since the late 1980s and find it really interesting to track how literary/ historical understanding of them has moved on - and how mine has too as I’ve got older! The biography of Assia Wevill was particularly eye opening and very sad.
Frieda Hughes has actually written a poem about her mums suicide and the whole image of them being left with bread and milk etc, which is pretty crushing to read. I found it in a bookshop a couple of years ago but haven’t found it again online to share. I mean what a story to have to carry.

That really isn't the case. Plath was his de facto manager in the early years of their marriage. She was the one who forced him to take his career seriously, typing up his poems for submission to magazines and to Faber, applying for residencies and entering his work for prizes. She was streets ahead of him when it came to the professionalisation of being a writer starting out. I don't think The Hawk in the Rain would have happened as soon as it did if not for her.

One of the things Hughes says (possibly in his foreword to his heavily expurgated The Journals of Sylvia Plath in 1982) which struck me as both terribly naive and, looking back from 2025, deeply old-fashioned, is something like 'I would hope that each one of of us owns the facts of his own life'.

Alas for him, when those facts are closely related to the facts of someone else's life, and that person is both celebrated and beloved, and dead by their own hand, AND a brilliant, copious and self-mythologising writer in her own right, he doesn't 'own' them in the slightest.

I think his destruction of Plath's last journal was an attempt to wrest back control of some, at least, of those facts by permanently denying access to them, but it's hardly coincidental that much of the destroyed journal dealt with his total inability to keep it in his trousers. (And this is an established 'fact', not just the speculation of a betrayed wife -- he wasn't even with Assia Wevill the night Plath died, he was shagging a Faber secretary called Susan Alliston. AW had to 'share' him with two other women. He was sleeping with someone else a few days after he married his second wife Carol Orchard. He told one of these women that he felt it was suffocating to be dependent on only one woman.)

There's a conflict of interest, ultimately, between the husband/soon-to-be-ex-husband (angry, grieving, conflicted, guilty, dealing with two tiny children) and the literary executor, in charge of preserving and promoting Plath's legacy, publishing work left unpublished at her death, ordering poems in Ariel, preserving diaries, drafts etc. (Note that while he badmouthed literary scholars and biographers all his life as 'vampires', he preserved all of his own diaries and letters and drafts, selling many to Emory University whose Coca-Cola endowment meant they had huge amounts of cash, hence TH made a lot of money,. His estate sold more material to the BL for half a million £. He definitely wanted them to be read).

The whole Plath/Hughes legacy story comes down in part to a tangled story of literary executorships entangled with emotions. His widow Carol refused to let his biographer Jonathan Bate quote from his work after initially supporting the biography, presumably because she didn't like what he was saying.

There's also the considerable baleful influence of Olwyn Hughes, Ted's sister, who was Plath's de facto literary executor, very protective of her brother, and who'd disliked Plath intensely on the comparatively few times they'd spent time together, had a huge fight on their last meeting in 1960, and who came to live with him to help bring up the children after Plath's suicide. I warmly recommend Janet Malcolm's book The Silent Woman, which is about different people's memories of/mythologies of Plath, especially Anne Stevenson's Plath biography Bitter Fame, written with Olwyn looking over her shoulder and continually interfering. Olwyn thought Plath was an awful, rude American princess with a 'difficult personality', no manners, and sick in the head, who killed herself out of spite and she was vitriolic to anyone who didn't share that view. According to Hughes' biographer Jonathan Bate, she softened her position after her nephew, Plath and Hughes's son Nicholas died by suicide in 2009. Then she started to believe depression was real.

As regarding both Plath and Hughes' stature as poets, I think it feels like a difficult comparison when he had such a long career and she died so young. I think her best work, though there's comparatively little of it, stands up to anything he wrote. I think Hughes was at times brilliant, but also enormously uneven, as you would expect from someone who wrote so much, and there are real blips (like Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, and some of his royal ass-kissing, to mention only two). It's hard to know what she would have been writing by the time of life he was writing Birthday Letters. I think TH was wrong to think her fiction was inferior. I think she would have written more novels, and they may have been extraordinary.

"he also encouraged Plath to publish in the first place."

I'm not really familiar with them ...did she end up more famous than him?

"She needed people to come and help also so she could write." Again, I'm not familiar with the story..did he facilitate childcare help so she could pursue her art as well as him? Or was she left the artistic equivalent of barefoot and pregnant?

.wild fell you should read the book I mentioned earlier - Loving Sylvia Plath by Emily Van Duyne. Like I said it’s a bit of a polemic but I think it would give you good for thought for a lot of your questions.
interesting discussion! Grammarteacher I agree that Ted Hughes encouraged Sylvia to write. But he didn’t get her published - it was more the other way round. She was in fact the better known/ published poet when they met. Heather Clark’s biography is good on this.

someone up thread mentioned her being bipolar - il not aware she was ever diagnosed that we know of.

Hope this doesn’t sound picky but I do think it’s important to keep abreast of what’s now known - given how much hyperbole has surrounded the story.

I think art and sex and promiscuity often go hand in hand, certainly in the western world. Look at the Bloomsbury set, Georg Sand and her salons in France in the 19th century, so I don’t think his promiscuity is particularly surprising.

I am not sure about his rights to destroying her journals. Only he knows what they said, and as a man, at a time when women and mental health and women’s mental health in particular was denigrated and not well understood, I think he could spin whatever was in them as a result of her illness I would have thought.

I don’t believe it was a selfless act for his children, but it may well have been the best action. We can’t know.

Many people famous and not burn letters etc on death, it’s the reason as historians we often only have one side of the correspondence.

I didn’t say he wasn’t perfect. I said he was flawed. There’s a big difference.
He’s also not a monster though. I choose to put neither of them on a pedestal.

Ted Hughes was not perfect. He was a flawed person, we all are. However, he also encouraged Plath to publish in the first place.
It is fascinating to read Birthday Letters alongside Plath’s work. She trusted him enough to make him her literary executor. The obsession with the burning diaries seems misplaced to me. Her published work stands. Not all diaries are intended for publication.

The thing is we aren’t talking about depression or anxiety (valid mental health conditions), which are often helped by things like support/talking/therapy. I talk as the very close relative of someone who lived with schizophrenia - bipolar and schizophrenia are so far removed from anything we can even begin to imagine. The person in my life was someone I had no choice but to support (that close), it was horrific for them and honestly I felt borderline manic myself at times.

I don’t know enough about Hughes and Plath specifically, but the little I do know about them and what I experienced leads me to give him some of the benefit of the doubt.

In terms of art, I think separating art from the artist is the only way really - unless their art is offensive.