Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life by Jonathan Bate

Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life Reviews

• 
  Ryan

  When Ted Hughes published Birthday Letters in 1998 it became the fastest selling work of poetry in history. Critics were astounded, readers old and young were converted, prizes were scooped. Comparisons were drawn with erupting volcanoes. There was a feeling of immense pressure forcing the poems upwards, outwards. These were poems that had to be written. The story of how that pressure gathered and why is the burden of this engaging biography.
  
  Though not the first biography of Ted Hughes, it is the most detailed. The journey it traces from Number 1 Aspinall Street, Mytholmroyd to Buckingham Palace is remarkable. Like his close friend Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes' parents were neither wealthy nor highly educated and lived far from the centres of power. Nearly all their street's houses were made of millstone grit, stained by over a century of industry. A tin bath was stored under the kitchen table for washing.
  
  There were compensations. Hughes' Mother Edith was something of a mystic, complaining since childhood of spectral hands touching her own. In June 1944 she woke to the sight of crosses flashing in the sky above the local chapel, alerting her to a terrible battle being fought in which thousands were being killed. The following day the radio announced the D-day landings had begun that morning.
  
  Little Hughes loved animals made of lead and the outdoors, thrilling to ‘the silence of the hills’, the untamed Yorkshire moors and its wildlife. Early hunting expeditions did not always run smoothly. After borrowing his brother’s air rifle, a shot by Ted ricocheted, bloodying his forehead. Fishing trips went better when the boys trawled the canal using old curtains for nets. Hughes' favourite childhood book seems to have been Tarka the Otter. Unsentimental and frequently violent, the book refused to cast animals as mere human stand-ins. When Hughes read it, it hit him with the force of revelation.
  
  Hughes' flair for writing and reading saw him through Grammar School and later to Cambridge. Much of what he learned was an elaboration of his early reading: bits and pieces of Jung, D.H. Lawrence, large chunks of Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. Hughes switched from studying English to anthropology after his famous dream of seeing a human-sized fox enter his room, burnt and remorseful, telling the budding writer ‘You’re killing us’. This provoked his signature poem ‘The Thought-Fox’ and the rest, you might think, is history.
  
  Bate doesn’t have a historian’s vice of spotting inevitability around every corner. Whatever Hughes claimed in later years, the poem, in fact, was not written until years after leaving university and was repeatedly revised. To readers that can barely imagine a world before the poem existed, the messy process of how it arrived is interesting reading. The famed last line ‘The window is starless still; the clock ticks, / The page is printed' went through many variants, such as ‘And the page where the prints have appeared’ and ‘The clock crowding and the whitening sky / Watch this page where the prints remain.’ It's a fine example of the book’s fascination with how easily history might have taken a different course, the countless fords in the river of time.
  
  Also different was Hughes’ approach to poetry. At the time, the ‘Movement’ poets were in vogue. Hughes style, as Seamus Heaney put it, with its ‘sensuous fetch, its redolence of blood and gland and grass and water, recalled English poetry in the fifties from a too suburban evasion [...] his diction is consonantal, and it snicks through the air like an efficient blade, making and carving out fast definite shapes; but within those shapes, mysteries and rituals are hinted at. They are circles within which he conjures up presence.’ You long for a second volume of Hughes' correspondence, filled solely with letters between the two.
  
  The ritual, shamanistic aspect of poetry certainly appealed to Hughes. Though it's a mark of how seriously Hughes took his role as poet, Bate seems to imply that it also papered over his glaring lack of responsibility, especially when it came to sex. Hughes had a reputation as a seducer and Bate makes no attempt to excuse it. Hughes’ affair with Assia Wevill is well known, but less so were the dalliances he was enjoying well into his sixties. There are hints of even further affairs, including a possible tryst with Angela Carter. The feminist writer Erica Jong (she who coined the phrase ‘zipless fuck’) and her attraction to Hughes is weirdly fascinating.
  
  We learn that Hughes was in bed with another woman at roughly the same time Sylvia Plath was placing her head in the gas oven. This is the point that most biographies have already covered, often to the exclusion of everything else. Bate is careful to give this event its full measure, but also careful to place it into context and with some sobering details.
  
  To the fledgeling feminist movement, Plath served as a ready-made victim and martyr. Hughes was swiftly caricatured as a violent, profiteering tyrant. It was a crude view, hence its reliance on strict binary opposites, on black and white. Although Plath’s Journals and Letters Home helped bring some shades of grey into that view, her more hysterical fans had little time for facts. Bate politely terms them ‘Plathians’, though I find ‘Plath cultists’ more apposite. Hughes’ actions were ugly and selfish, but he never defaced another person’s grave or wrote poems demanding someone’s dismemberment.
  
  We also learn that when The Bell Jar appeared in America, it was prompted by an oddity of US copyright law. Work by a deceased American citizen published outside their own country forfeits protection after seven years. This meant that any publisher could bring the novel out without paying a cent in royalties. As the money from Plath’s estate was paid into a Trust for her two children, less the price of a modest family house, Hughes sensibly opted to release an official edition. Accusations of profiteering duly ensued. Protests at Hughes’ readings grew more frenzied and vicious.
  
  There were other difficulties. After Crow in 1970, even devoted fans could spot the decline in quality. Bate serves up some astute criticism and quotes many examples of Hughes at his most overblown and pretentious: ('Oracular spore-breath’, ‘goblin clump’, ‘ectoplasmic pulp’, ‘half a drugged Oglala’. ) Hughes’ voice, as Bate puts it, became a ‘parody self', a rehash of the worst of Crow without the directness and clarity of its best. Official recognition didn't help. 'Rain-Charm for the Duchy' aside, Hughes’ laureate poetry was awful.
  
  What broke the deadlock? Hughes was dismissive of ‘confessional’ poetry but had learned more than he was willing to admit from Plath. Yet the Birthday Letters poems addressed to his wife's shade didn’t arrive as a late shower of creativity: they were written over thirty years. Some appeared in the 1981 and 1994 editions of Hughes' Selected Poems without comment. Besides their emotional richness, they seemed to most as altogether different from Hughes’ other work.
  
  In fact, as Erica Wagner says in Ariel’s Gift, the style of the book had more in common with Hughes’ superb 1979 collection Moortown Diary - looser, dialogic, more willing to risk feeling. Not all the Sylvia poems made the cut, and not all saw publication even in limited editions afterwards. Perhaps one day that will be rectified, but I think Bate is right when he says that releasing the burden of grief helped Hughes in more ways than one.
  
  Bate also unearths some interesting finds. Plath attended the Lady Chatterley Trial at the Old Bailey, and named her role models as Brigit Bardot and Lolita, in apparent seriousness. Although Hughes sister Olwyn wrote scathingly about Plath, she barely knew her in real life. The Vicar that baptised Hughes and Plath’s children preached a sermon heralding the H-bomb as a sign of the Second Coming, attacking 'the stupid pacifists and humanists’ that feared incineration.
  
  When Plath submitted the manuscript of Hughes’ first book The Hawk in the Rain, Faber returned it with the acid comment that they didn’t publish first books by unknown US authors. After Plath pointed out Hughes was an Englishman, an acceptance letter and a glowing note of praise from T.S. Eliot immediately followed.
  
  Although Hughes worshipped Eliot’s work, he found the senior poet distant, always looking down to the ground when talking, and smiling like ‘a person recovering from some serious operation’. Hughes’ comments about American poets still seem accurate over fifty years later: their only real grounding was their selves and their family, ‘Never a locality, or a community, or an organisation of ideas, or a private imagination.’
  
  I have some gripes. I doubt many will agree that Hughes was one of the great Poet Laureates. I don’t think hypnotism performed by amateurs helps much with the agony of childbirth. Oxford isn’t in ‘the North’; nor is Nottingham. I don’t see why readers that disliked Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being actually should ‘atone’ for that opinion, or why Bate thinks they should.
  
  These flaws aside, this is an engaging, level-headed biography, fair to its subject, and with a proper respect for the human suffering it probes. Seamus Heaney compared reading Birthday Letters to a ‘tribute paid / By what we have been true to. A thing allowed.’ Bate has been true to Hughes.
• 
  Roman Clodia

  Bate's title 'the unauthorised life is a neat pun that encapsulates his approach: on one hand it's referring to the extensive Hughes archive, the place where Hughes is his unadorned and naked self; on the other, it foregrounds the way in which the Hughes estate, after agreeing to Bate's proposal, withdrew their support for this book, feeling that it was too intrusive.
  
  It may well be - but isn't that what we want from a biography? a sense of intimacy, however voyeuristic? And to what extent is any author (any person?) ever truly 'unauthorised'? Even writing for ourselves, in a private journal, aren't we still telling a story, subliminally aware of an ideal reader, even if only (especially?) ourself?
  
  One of the things that comes over very strongly in this book is Hughes' mythologising of his own life, and his life with women - Plath, of course, but also Assia Wevill, the second of his women to commit suicide through gas, and this time superseding Plath by taking their daughter with her. Hughes' own internalised story was that he was cursed, a way of both amping up his own significance while also slipping away from any sense of blame. That this psychic strategy didn't altogether work is one of the strands unpicked in Bate's narrative, until the unblocking of the semi-confessional Birthday Letters gave Hughes back a strong poetic voice.
  
  Bate's own admiration, empathy for, and identification with, Hughes is often to the fore, and leads to some uncomfortable moments where he derides 'feminists' or, stronger, 'the feminists' as if this is an all-encompassing category that speaks with a simple, univocal voice, and one which is implicitly female - a position which would disturb me were I one of Bate's students or supervisees, male or female.
  
  Nevertheless, apart from some quibbles, this is a strong and balanced biography that makes extensive use of the archives and Hughes' own poetry - and one of its strengths is Bate's ability to read verse critically.
  
  The early chapters taking in the Plath years is undoubtedly the most intense and engaging; the final chapters where Hughes becomes increasingly reactionary and Conservative, aligning himself with Thatcher, Michael Heseltine and Kenneth Baker perhaps a bit uncomfortable, until Hughes redeems himself with Birthday Letters and Tales from Ovid. Bate even manages to find some merit, though he has to work pretty hard, in Hughes' wildly eccentric Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (a bit Robert Graves mixed with The da Vinci Code!).
  
  Overall, a compulsively readable biography wherever you stand on Hughes.
• 
  Nicola Pierce

  I have just finished this book in the last twenty minutes or so and am still in the throes of reading it. This was a glorious read for many reasons but perhaps the most important one is that it has given me a brand new and utterly rounded account of Ted Hughes as a poet, father, lover and husband.
  
  I have never read his poetry and only knew him as the dubious Mr Sylvia Plath who presumably was the cause of her suicide. Then I learned his second wife went the same way but this time involving their four year old daughter in her own version of Plath's suicide. Based on assorted scandalous tit bits - that I knew little about - I joined the legions of ("feminist") women in believing he must surely be some kind of monster.
  
  This is not true though it is not simply a case of stating the opposite. Most women - I think - have known "a" Ted Hughes and even loved "a" Ted Hughes.
  
  Apart from all this, his many, many women and flamboyant sexual appetite, this is an incredible and electrifying account of the life of a writer ... a man who constantly stove to learn and dissect, write and rewrite - and rewrite once more.
  
  I cannot recommend it highly enough in this regard. I will confess that I did not always followed the intense analysis on offer, of Hughes poetry and plays, (I know feck all about poetry) but it did not take away from my enjoyment of this biography.
  
  Thanks to Bate, I am now going to start a biography of Wordsworth, a book that has sat on my shelves for well over a decade. And I will definitely be getting myself a copy of Hughes's 'Birthday Letters'.
  
  This is surely the power of a bloody good biography - to send the reader on an unexpected journey in the aftermath of turning the last page.
  
  
• 
  Annette

  Fascinating and clearly well-researched from the biographical point of view. But the thing that really excites me for the rest is Bate's obvious scholarly and literary understanding of Hughes' poetry and why and how he wrote it.
  
  Sadly, I had to sit with my Collected Poems of Ted Hughes as Bate wasn't allowed to quote from Hughes' poetry directly except in a few careful sections using fair dealing. He's paraphrasing. This is a huge shame and the Hughes estate has made quite a blunder in refusing quotations. Bate wanted to write a more literary biography closely examinging the work with reference to the life. I hope he hasn't been forced to flip it the other way and look too closely at the life, which was sensational.
  
  Reading deeper in to this biography and one of its great joys is Bate's understanding of Hughes' individual creativity and his lifelong fascination with the creative process. I'm almost dreading the Plath marriage/suicide section to come; the creative process and how it evolved with Hughes is so carefully and intelligently discussed and described and I'm not a blind fan of Plath. Her poetry was extraordinary but reading her journals I'm worn out, at times bored by her, and often find her vicioiusly nasty. Hughes' letters on the other hand are always fascinating on so many subjects, ok the occult stuff is a bit bonkers though mostly he kept this to himself, but he's much more illuminating and enjoyable to be with on the page than Plath. I almost dread him meeting her in the biography, about to get to that.
  
  Continues to be superb. For once, as I read, I feel I'm getting to hear Ted's side of the story. Though his love crimes do stack up considerably, at least in this version you can appreciate what he was up against dealing with Sylvia Plath. If you've lived through a marriage like theirs (not the poetry collaborative part which was worthwhile for both) but the personality disorders you'll appreciate why things went the way they did. And I had always suspected Al Avarez (who previously seemed to me to protest too hard on Plath's behalf thereby expressing his own sense of guilt) had more to do with it all than he let on, though one revelation in this biography was a surprise but explains the rancour directed against Hughes even as recently as 2010 in The Guardian.
  
  Hughes' literary/poetic life was hugely affected by his personal life and Bate does a terrific job of showing that inter-relationship even though he's largely handicapped by being unable to quote from most of Hughes' writing.
  
  A literary biography well worth reading for so many reasons and gets 5 stars from me because Bate has managed to overcome a lot obstacles and still make this a fascinating read.
• 
  John

  Although I did not have this book on my list here, I did purchase it several months back and completed it this weekend.
  
  First off -- any book by Jonathan Bate, in my experience, is an excellent experience. I can recommend his two biographies of Shakespeare, one on John Clare, and another favorite of mine that he edited called Stressed, Unstressed (a book of poetry for help in life).
  
  Hughes is a great poet with a very complicated life. I won't say tragic life, although there were tragedies that have been well written of. Bate brings a nice balance to the story, thoroughly researched, well-written, non-judgmental. If the poet Ted Hughes interests you, then this biography should as well. It seems to be that someone like Bate, a scholar from England who has written extensively about literature, was the right writer for this story. What I liked about this book is it also provides a good grounding in and explication of the poetry. There has to be some of that; otherwise a biography of a poet like Hughes would only half work.
  
  If a book piques a person's interest after a reading, they go back to it, for either more details, more questions answered, or just the pleasure of another look. I plan to with this one.
• 
  Carl Rollyson

  What a rueful concession for a biographer to make: Ted Hughes remains “her husband,” the poet who presided over what — in a remorseful moment — Hughes himself called the murder of Sylvia Plath.
  
  In an exculpatory narrative, Jonathan Bate tries to reverse the momentum of literary history, making Plath the wife of Ted Hughes, poet laureate and winner of virtually all the important poetry prizes. This canny biographer succeeds in his aim, but at a terrible cost to his subject. Plath continues to overpower Hughes on every page. Bate is taken prisoner by her myth even as he tries to rectify the distorted narratives of Plath biographers who put her first.
  
  For Hughes and his biographer, Plath is too much, and every page of this biography on which she does not appear is weakened by her absence — notwithstanding Bate’s wit and gift for putting other biographers in their place.
  
  On the final page of his book, Bate declares defeat: Neither Hughes nor his biographer can deny that Plath’s death was the “central fact” of the poet’s life. In “Birthday Letters,” published shortly before his own death, Hughes gave his account of the marriage, declaring his own doom. He was never able to move beyond the boundaries for their lives and poetry that Plath’s own writing enforced.
  
  As Bate demonstrates, Hughes began his elegy for himself and Plath not so long after her suicide, but for more than 30 years he could not bear to publish his autobiographical verse, dreading the outcry from those who considered him responsible for her demise.
  
  Bate’s narrative is unfortunately dulled all too often by accounts of Hughes’ second-rate work. So put out is Bate with Hughes’ dramaturgical ineptitude that the biographer offers advice on how the work could have been improved. Bate is conspicuously relieved when he is able to end with Hughes’ well received translation of Ovid and the recovery of poetic power all too often stifled in the decades after Plath’s death.
  
  But Hughes’ culpability in Plath’s death ultimately overwhelms the biographer, who seeks out other guilty parties, charging critic Al Alvarez with failing Sylvia at a critical moment when she sought his love. Alvarez, in Bate’s roman noir, is also the spurned lover of Assia Wevill, whom Hughes went to when he left Plath. Thus Alvarez’s moving account in “The Savage God” of Plath’s last days becomes, in Bate’s questionable telling, a revenge plot against Hughes, who nobly never exposed Alvarez’s role in Plath’s death.
  
  That Bate has provided new depth to Ted Hughes’ biography and drawn on sources unavailable to other biographers is indisputable, but many of his touted revelations — for example, that Hughes was sleeping with another woman the night Plath died — have been reported elsewhere. (This fact was included in my book, “American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath,” which was published in 2013.)
  
  He also only hints at shadowy stories in the Hughes archive that are bound to emerge. We still need to know why Hughes — so attractive to women— constantly fell under their thrall as emanations of the “white goddess” he first read about in Robert Graves, who located the origins of civilization in a matriarchy that men would eventually find ways to overturn.
  
  
• 
  Helen

  I feel slightly guilty filing this on my 'Sylvia Plath' shelf, but having read this brilliant biography, I feel somewhat justified. I've admired Bate's writing on Shakespeare and related subjects, and he's done a masterly job of writing about Ted Hughes - a great poet who wrote a lot of bad poetry and a man with more than his fair share of flaws - in a manner that is neither hagiographical nor spiteful.
  
  Plath runs through the book like blood through a vein. I think this is right. I agree with Bate that Plath was the ghost who never left him, the Cathy to his Heathcliff. There were many times when I disliked the man drawn by Bate, but also times when I pitied him and even came close to understanding him. Any biography is, of course, as much about the biographer as it is about his/her subject. No one can be entirely objective even if they try. Bate admits as much. He shows us the power of Ted's writing, and also its weaknesses. Deeply flawed, deeply talented, his life and writing - taken as a whole - never quite delivered as much or as well as he wished. He was often very generous to other poets, and his slight envy when his good friend Seamus Heaney won the Nobel is understandable (although I feel Heaney was a better and more consistent poet than Hughes).
  
  What shines through above everything is the respect he felt for Plath's work. In many respects he let her down badly, but in his appreciation of what she achieved in her late poems, he never wavered.
  
  I've always struggled to find a way in to Hughes's poetry. This biography makes me want his read his work again. That's what all the best biographies do.
• 
  Rory G.

  Repetitive, down to the very phrasing of sentences. ‘A poet aware he is dying is careful about which poems are last published in his name.’ How many times are we to read this same sentence? It’s as if this book had no editor, and besides that, as if the author himself never bothered to read through the whole thing. How many times do we hear the same phrase about Ted’s travel journals being more detailed than his domestic ones? My goodness, the (defensively) nonchronological switchbacking left me whip-lashed and time-wasted. All the content is repeated twice, if you’re lucky, and more than twice if you’re not. And worse. It’s repeated with almost the same vocabulary... ironic in a biography of one of the most creative wordsmiths.
  
  At first, this book promised to be evocative and careful. The beginning section describing Ted’s dark, cliff-walled village home was visually rich and bleak; I could almost picture him as a young Tom Riddle, the seeds of something—evil or greatness—planted in that coal-soot soil on which he fascinated over animals, some of them he’d shot dead, himself... And I appreciated the thesis about examining Ted’s life, especially his life with Sylvia, only as it illumined his writing.
  
  However, of course, the rest of the book both lost its evocative style and flagrantly betrayed its ostensibly noble intent, even at a structural level (probably following the author’s loss of the family’s authorization for the biography.. instead of editing-out the family-placating pleasantries with which the book began, the lazy author left them in, just merging them with later unauthorized, ‘freer’ —read more Sylvia-centric—writings).. Let’s examine how this Sylvia-centricity works, structurally. What is poised as Ted’s best work? What is positioned as the climax of the biography, the work which ‘needed to be written,’ the ‘roadblock’ work which was career-changing and left lamentably late in life? What work is poised as Ted’s ‘fate’? Of course, for this author, that’s Birthday Letters, the autobiographical poems ... about Sylvia. Funny conclusion for a book which begins by lamenting how Ted has become ‘Sylvia’s husband,’ how other biographies are so Sylvia-centric, and which continuously bashes those darned feminists who hate Ted Hughes for domestic abuse which—of course—could never have really happened. Really ironic.
  
  And yet, despite the Sylvia-centricity, this biography is not Sylvia-friendly. When we read the sections about Sylvia, we hear how unreasonable she is, how socially pouty she is. Memorably, Ollwyn is quoted, lamenting how Sylvia makes every social engagement so unpleasant.... and this is introduced with anti-Sylvia bias, of course, and yet, when Ollwyn later has problems with Assia, with all of Ted’s women...... Oh whoops! It’s as if the author has a ‘oh, well maybe, just maybe, Sylvia wasn’t the problem’ realization.... and yet THE AUTHOR DOES NOT EDIT-OUT THE BIAS IN HIS PREVIOUS SYLIVA SECTION. It’s infuriating. It’s as if his lament about the Sylvia-centricity in Hughes scholarship isn’t about Sylvia’s prominence, but about the respect her figure is given. The belief it’s shown.
  
  The other odd and off-putting thing about this biography is its insistence on relating Ted Hughes to Wordsworth and Coleridge. Why? Why do we have to draw mystical connections between the biographies of these three? Unless we’re talking about stylistic influences, how is it informative or interesting to make comments about having attended the same universities or lived in the same villages???? There’s this unsettling ‘Great Poets’ Reincarnation agenda in all of the writing, especially in the arbitrary and downright weird choice to relate his work to these Romantic poets. I would have learned much more if the biography had examined how Hughes’ work adapted to local, contemporary influences. How did he change his style in response to his poetic peers? I don’t know, since all I read was canon-solidifying drivel and superficial, biographical connections to Wordsworth.
  
  Interesting, also, the Assia-bias. Assia Wevill KILLED her child. ‘Murder,’ ‘killing,’ ‘evil.’ These are not words I have ever read in connection to Assia Wevill, despite the fact that she is a murderer who killed her own child. Murder. Kill. There: I am the only one to say it. Let’s not let the poetry of it obscure the cruel reality of it.
  
  This biography is useful mainly for giving us some insight into Ted Hughes’ circle of other poets. As a man, he was a scummy one. One of those men who claim to ‘love and respect women so much... that they can’t bare to choose just one of them! You’re all such goddesses... and really it’s in deference to my dead wife that I can never be with one woman! Even though she died because I was unfaithful! I have no sense of irony! And, funnily enough, nor does my dry and uncreative, doddering biographer!’
  
  My goodness, I’ve met my fair share of Ted Hugheses. I advise you to avoid this substandard, bloated and unedited biography as keenly as you should avoid any flop-haired Hughesians you meet at the local pub. No matter how beautiful their poems, their lives—and their devotees lives, if this plain-languaged little tome is to suggest—do not match.
• 
  James Murphy

  Great poets like Ted Hughes deserve great biographies. This is a very good one, if not great. The qualifier seems necessary because there were limitations placed on the biographer Jonathan Bate. The first to be given access to the huge archive of Hughes's unpublished writings, permission was later revoked by the widow, Carol Hughes, ostensibly because he was uncovering too much of the libertine and not enough of the literary. Hughes famously--or infamously--was a womanizer and had many affairs, some with writers whose names are well-known and some whose names can only be hinted at. Bate provides enough detail to satisfy the voyeur in us while at the same time, being an intelligent critic, gives us a full and fascinating portrait of the poet and his work.
  
  Hughes, as we all know, was the husband of the suicidal poet Sylvia Plath. Their marriage was one of the most interesting unions and collaborations in literary history. Hughes's love for her and his loss of her were the defining events of his life. Bate isn't able to add much to a story already so well known. It's all covered by him rather quickly considering the importance of those years to Hughes and their impact on the poetry to follow. Still, there's much story left, many sides to Ted Hughes--outdoorsman, eco-warrior, Poet Laureate, Shakespearian scholar, expert on myth and the shamanistic--and the biography makes a full man of him.
  
  If this isn't the biography Bate wanted to write, it's still an excellent one. I doubt there will be a better one until Carol is gone.
• 
  Ruth Hunt

  Outstanding!
• 
  Ophelinha

  A touching, extraordinarily well written biography. A must read for Plath lovers hellbent on discovering the other side of her moon - impossibly charming, prolific, complicated dark knight Ted Hughes.
• 
  Simon

  An impressive feat of scholarship to mine through the archive and come up with something resembling the definitive biography. A real tour-de-force! Certainly a massive step forward on the partial efforts that have come before. The strongest point is that he lets the story tell itself: it is a hell of a story: a true great tragedy of a life and a glorious achievement of a life at the same time. The scholarly element is actually superbly discreet (in that it hides itself in the story). The works are analysed without you particularly noticing and he treads the balance between the autobiographical influences and the existence of a collection of poetry that stands alone and apart. (In other words he's cognisant of all the intentional fallacy and biographical fallacy stuff).
  
  I was obliged to re-read my Hughes (and came out with a clearer view and an enhanced admiration) and my Plath along side the Bate. It's taken up far more time than I originally thought it would but it has turned out to be one of the great reading projects of the year.
  
  If I have a quibble (and I actually have a few) it is that Bate (understandably) misses the full significance of Hughes coming from a true working class background. Life is seen differently (even after middle class values set in and affluence changes the mind-set) and Bate appears unaware of this. He also skirts over the Mexborough years with indecent haste. If he'd only been there for a year or two this might be understandable. (After all Bate was pursuing a line of bleak rural splendour (Heathcliff/Cathy) on the wuthering tops above Hebden Bridge and Mytholmroyd - and a coal mining community and a newsagents shop in the Dearne valley didn't suit this argument). But Hughes moved to Mexborough when he was 8 and stayed there until he did his national service. I think those 12 years may have had a bigger influence than our esteemed academic allows. (To bridge this short-fall I strongly recommend Steve Ely's book. Ely covers this ground thoroughly and is not only a fine writer and poet but is a genuine member of the Yorkshire working class bloodsports and lurcher brigade. The problem is his book costs a ridiculous £44! But taken together you'll have a pretty good understanding of one of our greatest poets.
  
  And I mean one of our greatest ever poets. Hughes truly does stand alongside Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning and TS Eliot.
• 
  Amber

  Good to read, but I still have a low opinion of him personally. More of a gathering of information from the Plath side.
• 
  Gunther Martens

  May come across as trying to redeem a serial philanderer beyond the grave. Good grasp of personal mythology, but not always very sensitive in its dealings with feminist approaches to Plath (shorthand notation: 'the Plath fantasia'). The storyline about Plath continuing to be on his every single thought may make for a compelling read, but strikes me as rather implausible. A life more scandalous than that of Lord Byron: OK, but a very bookish life too, and in the end: poetry inspired by a very traditional canon after all (Shakespeare, Wordsworth, ...), but not many lines get cited. Read in tandem with Heather Clark's biography of Plath (and other takes on troubled geniuses and their 'muses'). Life-destroying tendencies not completely grasped in this one: stay tuned for my hypothesis soon!
• 
  Katie Marquette

  This is honestly the best biography I have ever read. Bate has written an honest, clear, account of a phenomenal poet and complex, troubled man - no easy feat. Over the years I have come to appreciate Hughes' poetry, although it is often too veiled in myth and symbol for me to fully grasp. I have also come to admire Hughes as a man of immense intelligence and feeling. This has been an evolution over time - At one point in my life, I was absolutely enamored with Sylvia Plath - I read her poems obsessively, read and reread The Bell Jar throughout High School, buried myself in her journals, her letters... So naturally, I dismissed and even despised Ted Hughes. In the mythology of Sylvia Plath, he is an easy villain - the womanizer, the cheater, the deserter. Plath, I thought, was the genius - Hughes only held her back. As always, it was much more complicated than this.
  
  This biography is a biography of Hughes, not Plath, and yet she is everywhere. I was refreshed to find that at only a 150 pages or so into the book, Plath was dead. Finally, I thought, a book that will truly be about Ted Hughes, not about his first marriage. This, for the most part, proved to be true - Bate has written an elegant and complete account of Hughes' poetic developments, personal relationships, inner struggles, family dramas, etc. And yet the thesis ends up being that Hughes' tragic marriage to Plath completely dominated his life. A man obsessed with myth and meaning, he saw Sylvia as a shade from the underworld, a wraith come to haunt him... She was Cathy, he was Heathcliff. Sometimes he wanted to bury himself with her. This is made painfully clear to readers - that however flawed the marriage was, their connection was so deep that her death could not break it.
  
  I love Ted Hughes the way I love so many writers whom I have never known. He now occupies a heavy and important part of my mind - his life, so rich in poetry, music, and love, and also, yes, in tragedy, death, destruction, remorse, loss... It is a life one cannot easily forget. And in true 'Hughesian' fashion his life has taken on mythic proportions in my mind.
  
  I don't think I have ever read a biography that has moved me as much as this one.
  
  "I hope one has the right to one's own life," Hughes said, while in the midst of legal disputes of Sylvia Plath's work. This tension between being a public figure (Poet Laureate, "myth-maker," "prophet," etc.) and a highly private person dominated Hughes' life. Clearly this contradiction has plagued Bate as well - a lengthy section at the end of the book is devoted to justifying the existence of this "unauthorized life" (a type of biography, Bate insists, Hughes would have preferred). Yet, whether or not Hughes would appreciate what has been written about him is ultimately irrelevant - but for what it's worth, I think Bate can rest easy knowing he has written a candid, thorough, and respectful account of such a monumental figure. HIGHLY recommended.
• 
  Beth

  Having come of age in the 1980s when there was still a lot of Hughes hate by American feminists, I wasn't sure what to expect from this book. In fact, I had little plan to read it entirely. I planned instead to read the interesting bits (read, that is, the bits about his life with his wife, the poet Sylvia Plath) and be done with it. Instead, I found here a nearly masterful biography that tells the story of Hughes's biographical and literary life, yes. But according to this author--whose biography was meant to be authorized until Hughes's second wife became uncomfortable with the personal details the author explored (namely the affairs, oh, there were a lot of them!)--the bulk of Hughes's adult life was haunted by the spectre of his famous, suicidal first wife and the fall-out from her literary fame, which skyrocketed after her death. Those earlier ideas I had of him as callous and cold were quickly dis-proven. Instead, what I found here was a love story as obsessive and haunting as Heathcliff and Cathy's, a husband who had his own literary aims but who was a staunch supporter of and respecter of his wife's legacy, and of a father who loved and wanted to protect and nurture the offspring of that famous union. At times, I felt guilty for prying into their lives by reading this book, though of the many books I've read on Plath, this is one of the least tabloid-esque. Scholars will use this to build-upon and react against for decades.
  
  In short, I feel a little guilty that I spent my early twenties maligning Ted Hughes. He was not perfect, and this author does not sugarcoat Hughes. He was a philanderer. He had an ego. He was, at times, self-involved to a point of blindness. His poetry could be near perfect at times, clunky or embarrassing at others. But he was also a human, reacting in a volatile situation, spending much of his life feeling guilt about his wife's suicide (as well as a similar suicide by a woman with whom he had a child). It's all here in this well-researched biography that includes and explains lines of poetry, uses letters, journals, and notes from Hughes, Plath, and all the other players in this literary love story/tragedy.
  
  Readers who are interested in Plath or Hughes will find much here to chew on. Also, anyone interested in studying the lives of writers and artists, will find much here to revel in, as well as those Anglophiles who would like to spend several hundred pages in England.
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  Domhnall

  This biography provides a readable and informative account of the life of Ted Hughes with a good introduction to much of his writing. I have been aware of Ted Hughes' poetry since my schooldays in the Sixties. It is accessible enough - albeit intimidating - but this biography opens layers of meaning that add enormously to its interest and impact. It offers an explanatory arc for the work of a lifetime which, in important respects, it says fell short of the poet’s ambitions.
  
  One of the threads running through the book is the question of writing poetry that is confessional or personal on the one hand, objective and impersonal on the other. If Ted Hughes published poetry that appeared thoroughly impersonal, he was in the meanwhile writing and endlessly revising material that was intimately confessional. Only a few such poems slipped out, barely noticed. This reticence harmed his writing on many levels but it was arguably forced upon him.
  There are some very dubious books and articles out there about the marriage of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath; this one is serious and trustworthy in my opinion, handling contentious material in a tasteful and balanced manner, identifying and disapproving of important character flaws while demanding that these be considered in a rational and proportionate way. It is rarely unkind and that alone is a good quality in this field. It makes it clear, though, that Ted Hughes was utterly blasted by the experiences of his life and that he was horribly damaged by the abuse to which he became subject. It is very hard to write and publish honest poetry while being subject to an ongoing campaign of vilification. It was only with the publication of Birthday Letters that he seems to have established a way to deal with that abuse and still proceed in his work and by that time, sadly, it was already too late.
  
  I started out reading this alongside the collected poems (2003) and even, briefly, Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems. Madness to think I can absorb so much material in a reasonable time, though I am not new to either. Nevertheless, the best testament to a poet’s biography is that it lights a pathway into the work of the poet and in this respect I am hugely grateful to this book by Jonathen Bate.
  
• 
  Sarah

  This is a ground-breaking biography by the Oxford academic Jonathan Bate. He gives a fully balanced portrait of very complex and multi-faceted personality. In view of the estate's withdrawal of co-operation Bates has pulled off the impossible - the first biography of Hughes that dares to go where previous authors feared to tread out of deference to the widow. Using previously unavailable archive material Bates presents us with unedifying aspects of Hughes' character - that Hughes was a sexually magnetic lady killer with a harem of women and subject to black moods and violence is not denied. He was also a tenderly devoted father who delighted children with magical stories of the natural world. His charismatic personality inspired such devotion that some resorted to suicide rather than live without his presence in their lives. Even Prince Charles has a shrine to his deceased guru. Hughes felt disdain for the conventions of society and yet became a fully signed up member of the establishment upon his appointment as Poet Laureate. Hughes remained obsessed with Plath to the end - she was Cathy to his Heathcliff. On the publication of Birthday Letters shortly before his death, Hughes finally set himself free.
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  Mervyn Whyte

  I bought this book, not because I'm a Ted Hughes or Sylvia Plath fan, but because I so admired Jonathan Bate's biography of John Clare. And because Waterstones had reduced the price of the book to £3. Like all of Bate's writing, the book is excellent, although I understand that the Hughes estate was not happy with the finished product. Hughes' widow, Carol, has attacked the book for its inaccuracies. Not being an expert on Hughes, I can't say who is right and who is wrong in this dispute. As to the man himself, I'm not a massive fan of poetry, so I can't say what is good and what is bad. All I can say is that given Hughes' love of blood sports and the monarchy, and his admiration of Margaret Thatcher and Kenneth Baker, he's not my sort of person. Much of Hughes' writing quoted in the book I found to be opaque. It certainly hasn't made me want to go out and find out more. Nevertheless, a meticulously researched and comprehensive account. Although, like with just about all modern biographies, the latter years are sporadically and episodically covered.
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  Lori Tatar

  Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life by Jonathan Bate is an insightful and candid tome that reveals the subject's relationship with his wife, Sylvia Plath, author of "The Bell Jar", among other works, and the profound effects of her suicide on him, in many ways. It is a celebration of his life and work, but is also somewhat sad and depressing. When reading, expect to get a greater sense of the profound darkness that haunted Mr. Hughes after his wife's death. He survived and even thrived in many ways but the suicide was always with him. I recommend this biography for anyone who is a Ted Hughes or a Sylvia Plath fan, and especially fans of Jonathan Bate, the author. Thanks, Goodreads!
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  Lisa Tuttle

  As a long time Plath obsessive, this was a book I had to read. Previously my knowledge of Hughes was pretty much limited to his relationship with her, and this excellent unauthorized biography greatly expanded that. The author's critical reading of Hughes' work is very insightful; I found the comparisons with Wordsworth to be especially interesting. Ultimately the impression I had of Hughes is that his life was forever linked to and overshadowed by Plath's; their brief marriage the core of his existence. A detailed and believable portrait of a complex and fascinating man.
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  Amanda

  This book is very thorough in both its biography and literary criticism. It's a bit uneven in structure (for example, the will be a section of biography and suddenly will diverge into critical analysis of work). While I enjoyed the larger scope of this work, I can only recommend it to readers who are serious about Plath/Hughes scholarship. The casual reader might be put off a 600+ page tome of intensive analysis of these lives and their combined works.
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  Lisa

  There are many things that are impressive about this biography, but above all, it is absolutely beautifully written. Never a word of out place.
  
  Jonathan Bate does not judge Ted Hughes. He explains a very tragic and complicated personal and creative life with consummate skill and a singular lack of moral or social judgement.
  
  
  
  
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  Joan Colby

  An authoritative biography that gives equal weight to Hughes personal life and his literary achievements. Intelligent and thoughtful, Bate addresses controversial issues and corrects many misapprehensions.
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  Louise Dean

  I am lost for words. Lost in thought. Still digesting this majestic read. In one word 'Sublime'
  When I go back and remember Dec. 1st 2015 I will always remember reluctantly returning this elgant book back to my local library. I now am off to buy a copy.
• 
  Jennine

  Stunning. It's rare that a biography is this well written - not just in terms of its incredible grasp of subject but also its beautiful and suitable prose. I was compelled to read even the Notes at end.
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  Lucy Shiels

  Read my review here:
  http://wp.me/p4uwix-2e
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  Kate

  I thought this biography was heavy on gossip and short on critical acumen.
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  Suzanne

  In the last chapter of this book, musing on 'The Legacy', Bate suggests that Hughes most admired those biographies of writers that honoured 'the complicated relationship between art and life'. This is clearly what he has set out to do in this unauthorised life, although he acknowledges that no biographer can tell the whole truth and what results is (quoting Hughes himself) "never more than provisional, distorted by human interprepation."
  
  Although there is some controversy about this interpretation, I find it to be a thoughtful and sensitive
  rendering of the life, closely linking it with Hughes's development as both a poet and a dramatist and children's author. Initially keeping close to the chronological story, Bate later focuses on themes important to Hughes, as in the chapter on The Fisher King which both gives the background to some of his most successful nature poems and also identifies a close bond between father and son.
  
  The centrality of Hughes's relationship with Sylvia Plath and the aftermath of her suicide to his poetry is rendered clearly with a remarkable suspension of judgement and succeeds in presenting what seems likely to have been Hughes's position. More interesting to the reader less familiar with the details of Hughes's life is the impact of the deaths of Assia and their daughter Shura, of his mother and of Susan Alliston. The violent deaths of so many of the women who had been close to him find their echo in the darkness of much of his work.
  
  Bate illustrates the importance of myth to Hughes's poetry and reveals an exceptionally well-read and thoughtful man. He even provides some justification for Hughes's very personal interpretation of Shakespeare given in The Goddess of Complete Being. We also see the loving father and the deep appreciation of nature which led to Hughes's championing of what would now be termed 'green' causes - he was an eco-warrior long before it became fashionable.
  
  Bate has delved into a mass of information, much of which Hughes conscientiously preserved for posterity, and taken advantage of encounters with many of those who were close to the poet. In the interests of privacy, the one woman with whom Hughes was involved the longest, Carol his second wife, remains a shadow, but this is an acceptable lacuna in what is otherwise an exceptionally thorough exposition of the man and poet, Ted Hughes.
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  Andrew Macfarlane

  Many reviews have said this was unreadable. I didn't find that. I wasn't always motivated to pick it up but that was more to do with the nature of the story unfolding. No matter how consensual the roughness, the urging and incessant driving motivation of each of them, by each of them, the affairs both attempted and had, the unpredictable polar volatility of one party and the womanising of the other by both in the Hughes Plath marriage it was just so saddening and unedifying. The book sometimes falls into a pattern of the bad and eventually rather tiresome Description of Hughes's failings and affairs to pointing out his good social awareness, inclusivity, firm friendships and support for friends, obvious love and care for his children and of course literary genius before slipping back to another less endearing aspect. Those with a polarised view of Hughes will not be that satisfied. There is not, as there actually in reality is not, any serious or halfway credible evidence of violence, wife beating or rape to satisfy those so dumb as to believe "semi autobiographical" means "autobiographical" and everything and everyone in The Bell Jar is Gospel. However there is nothing to absolve the incomprehensible, to me, actions of the serial womanising Hughes. So a book for people wanting to weigh up facts and in that respect very readable though I came out wishing there had been more analysis of the poetry