In 1911, Egon Schiele painted a self-portrait of himself as Eros – in his left hand a terrific, salmon-pink erection, somewhat (I imagine) larger than life. Height 56cm, width 32cm, the gouache used to belong to Victor Lownes, the erstwhile Editor of Mayfair. I don’t think Schiele is painting what Ted Hughes, in a letter to his painter brother Gerald, disparagingly calls “transfers”: “any fool can become a mirror if he practise hard”. Schiele’s gouache is not mimesis. It is frank subjectivity. That is how erections feel – larger than life. That is why men like them. They enlarge us.

Let me begin with Ted Hughes’s erections – with a commendably indiscreet moment in this commendably discreet selection of his letters, tactfully chosen and scrupulously, unostentatiously annotated by Christopher Reid, formerly Hughes’s editor at Faber & Faber, as I had been before him. (I have only two improvements to offer for the paperback: on p153, Hughes writes, “Sylvia detests Lyde”: he must mean Joe Lyde whose jazz is played in “St Botolph’s” from Birthday Letters (1998). On p658, Hughes is speculating about the euphoria felt by the surprised prey of wild animals: maybe a cross reference to “Trophies”, also in Birthday Letters, would be in order?) On October 23, 1956, Hughes was in Yorkshire at his parents’ house. Sylvia Plath, his new wife, was in Cambridge. Their marriage was a secret because the couple feared (needlessly, as it proved) that Plath’s Fulbright Scholarship would be withdrawn. They met at the weekends.

"Above all, save every whisper until Saturday, save every little bit of you. I can hardly remember you without feeling sick and getting aching erections. I shall pour all this into you on Saturday and fill you and fill myself with you and kill myself on you."

Let’s be clear about what Hughes is saying. He is telling her not to masturbate, to restrain herself as he is evidently restraining himself.

There may also be a suggestion that their pillow talk should be saved till Saturday and not committed to the page. Not that much is committed to the page. Compared to, say, James Joyce’s erotic letters to his wife, Nora, this sequence of intimate letters is strangely continent, strangely literary. (Perhaps strangely only to non-writers. There is an apocryphal story told about Brian Friel that illustrates the central, defining importance of writing to writers. Friel is said to have asked his wife of many years whether she would have loved him had he not been a writer at all. Of course, she reassuringly replied. It is mischievously said that the dramatist was so offended he didn’t speak to her for a month.) But then Plath was a writer too, as Nora was not. This sequence is full of schemes, poetic regimens, technical tips, pinpoint particular criticisms of poetic weaknesses, and a stockpile of “saleable”, somewhat tedious plots – with only odd moments of passion. “I shall kiss you into blisters.” “I could crush you into my pores.” “That night was nothing but getting to know how smooth your body is. The memory of it goes through me like brandy.”

We read writers’ letters for two reasons – high-mindedly, for the light they shed on the finished writing and, less laudably perhaps, but undeniably, for what Hughes, in a letter to his mother-in-law Aurelia Plath, accurately calls “the inside-dope”. Christopher Reid, constrained by considerations of length – these 700-odd pages represent the tiniest sliver of Hughes’s total correspondence – has properly opted for a narrative of his writing: “the story is above all that of Hughes the writer”. He specifically tells us that this is not “a biography in disguise”. He tells us that he has not been constrained by conditions of propriety. I believe him when he says he has had “unimpaired editorial freedom”. But however correct his preference for art over gossip, the effect overall is slightly deadening, even a bit dull. Of course we are grateful for indispensable glosses and authorial commentary on the work. Yet the effect is to turn Hughes into a slight monomaniac – banging on, justifying, explaining, bent on leaving a paper trail for posterity. Here there are several pages of commentary, for instance, on The House of Aries, a play produced by the BBC. They end, “So much for the House of Aries. I’m afraid I’ve been very obscure. And tedious”. Too true. What Hughes says to Aurelia Plath about her selection of Sylvia’s letters applies equally here: “all these letters exist within a single relationship, and this entails, eventually, beyond a certain critical mass of text, a feeling of monotony and narrowness”. In that case, the claustrophobia of Sylvia talking and talking to her mother. Here, Ted Hughes filibusters on the subject of poetry.

Nevertheless, inevitably, the suicides of Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill are touched on, often movingly, but with this proviso, shrewdly formulated by Reid: these terrible episodes, he says, are “retailed as fully as the partial – in a double sense – nature of the telling will allow”. Hughes found these events completely intractable: as who wouldn’t. It is one thing to accept blanket blame, as he does, unflinchingly, in a letter to Aurelia Plath – “I don’t want ever to be forgiven. I don’t mean that I shall become a public shrine of mourning and remorse, I would sooner become the opposite. But if there is an eternity, I am damned in it”. It is another to confront the less cosmic, actual circumstances, the whys and the hows, and the how exactlys. In his play Old Times, Harold Pinter (whose The Caretaker Hughes disliked, mysteriously, as a trite outing for Jung’s ego/id polarity) ends with a trio of characters unable to reconstruct more than the charred remnants of their actual, shared, damaged sexual experience. Much the same thing happens with Ted Hughes.

When Sylvia Plath kills herself, Hughes’s adultery is assigned a minor role in his letter to Aurelia Plath (May 13, 1963): “my love for her simply underwent temporary imprisonment by something which can only be described as madness, as much an attempt to free myself from the strangling quality of our closeness as by any outer cause” (my italics). Assia Wevill gets the same short shrift in Birthday Letters, where she is “Slightly filthy with erotic mystery”, but absolved of blame, as everyone is absolved of blame in Birthday Letters, because she is the agent of Fate – Fate that she, Ted and Sylvia are, dreamers all, sleepwalking towards. It is hard not to be impatient with the facile broad brush of Birthday Letters, hard not to invoke Edmund in King Lear, Act One, Scene Two:

"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, – often the surfeit of our own behaviour, – we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, . . . drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence . . ."

There is a biography in embryo in this volume – or trace elements of one, which are easy to miss. Writing to Terry Gifford on January 16, 1994, Hughes writes about putting “the human being back in contact with the human animal” and adumbrates the possible situations that help this procedure. They include having a child (reasonably enough, to anyone who has seen a child being born) and the “hectic bout of adultery”. On p296, a footnote tells us that a letter to Richard Murphy, dated October 10, 1969, was written “from Lumb Bank \[a remote house Hughes had bought in Yorkshire\] where TH had moved with his children, and with Brenda Hedden, with whom he had been conducting an affair, and her children”. Assia Wevill killed herself on March 25, 1969. In a letter to her sister, Celia Chakin, dated April 14, 1969, Hughes writes: “Assia was my true wife and the best friend I ever had” – just as he had written to Aurelia Plath, on May 13, 1963, “My love for her \[Sylvia\] simply continues, I look on her as my wife and the only one I shall ever marry . . .”.

I don’t mean to be censorious or moralizing. It is easy to find contradictions and complications in a lifetime’s correspondence. (For example, in Autumn 1986, to Anne Stevenson, Sylvia’s biographer-in-waiting, Hughes denies ever having been bothered by fame at the beginning of his marriage. On the contrary: “I would have liked a bit of fame in those days, but it seemed far off”. We can check. In early December 1960, Hughes is complaining to his in-laws Aurelia and Warren Plath that his induction into London literary life, “becoming something of a public figure”, has left him drained of energy. Again, on April 22, 1961, he notes ruefully: “I’ve been in the news a bit too much lately, I’m beginning to feel news-burned”. QED. The fact of his sexuality – that erection again – is something neither he nor the majority of his readers ever quite face. He uses his lifelong belief in astrology as an alibi: to his sister Olwyn in the late summer of 1962, he makes plans for a private bank account, an exit strategy, his marriage to Plath being over for practical purposes: “I’m aghast when I see how incredibly I’ve confined & stunted my existence . . . . However, by progression I now have Leo in the Ascendant instead of Cancer, which just about expresses the change I feel”. He glances at it now and again in this correspondence. To his son Nicholas (who has just ended a relationship) he hints at the unreasonable restrictions Sylvia imposed (undated 1986):

"It meant, Nicholas, that meeting any female between 17 and 39 was out. Your mother banished all her old friends, girl friends, in case one of them set eyes on me – presumably. And if she saw me talking with a girl student, I was in court. Foolish of her, and foolish of me to encourage her to think her laws were reasonable . . . one person cannot live within another’s magic circle, as an enchanted prisoner."

The poet as Proust’s Albertine, La Prisonnière. On the one hand, Sylvia is unreasonably jealous – and, therefore, we assume, has nothing to fear. On the other hand, implicitly, a man needs more than one sexual partner. Isn’t there a covert appeal to male camaraderie here? Nothing is quite spelled out.

In Birthday Letters, “Fidelity” touches, rather bafflingly, even crassly, on this subject. The poem is constructed around a chivalric ideal in which Hughes, the knight, undergoes a kind of test – sleeping with two naked women every night without making love with either – because he is so “focused”, so “locked onto” Sylvia. The two naked women exist invisibly in a blind spot created by Sylvia’s brilliance. One woman respects his continence. The other “Did all she could to get me inside her”. The sexual stupidity here is striking. Were you wishing to demonstrate fidelity, you couldn’t choose a more unpromising, unreassuring scenario than sharing your bed with two other naked women.

The fox-cub poem “Epiphany” in Birthday Letters is an allegory of wildness, which is also about Hughes’s untamed sexuality. Hughes meets a man with a fox cub inside his jacket. The price is £1. He decides against buying the cub – weighing the cramped domestic conditions, a new baby, against the potential “mannerless energy” of “an unpredictable / Powerful bounding fox”. By refusing the cub, Hughes “walked on / As if out of my own life”. And he concludes, enigmatically, “our marriage had failed”. Enigmatically, that is, if it is only a fox cub. If it symbolizes something untamed, undomesticated, unruly and animal – something that a good marriage could accommodate – it becomes relatively straightforward. But the young Hughes is censoring his own behaviour – and therefore denying, as he sees it, his true inner self.

According to Elaine Feinstein’s biography, in “real life” Hughes was more candid about his requirements – and her conclusions are based on interviews with Brenda Hedden and on correspondence in the Hughes archive at Emory University in Atlanta. He was frank about his need for more than one sexual partner: Brenda Hedden told Elaine Feinstein that “Ted was a man who needed several women . . . . other men do, don’t they? He isn’t unique”. Carol Orchard married him in August 1970 and therefore overlapped with Brenda Hedden, whose involvement began in 1968 and seems to have petered out in September 1970, ending finally in 1971. Carol accompanied Ted on literary trips to Israel and Persia. Just as well. In Australia, at the Adelaide Literary Festival, in 1976, Hughes began an affair with Jill Barber, the press co-ordinator, who actually lived in London. At the same time, Hughes was having an affair with the novelist Emma Tennant. Jill Barber knew about this and was unworried by it. Emma Tennant discovered the rival relationship by seeing the obviously intimate pair at a party. Meanwhile Carol Hughes was at Court Green, their house in Devon (where Ted had also lived with Sylvia), mourning her father, Jack Orchard, who died in February 1976. Hughes visited at the weekends. The affair with Jill Barber continued until she went to live in New York in 1980.

It is too easy to be censorious. We simply don’t know enough. The affair with Jill Barber probably began as a counterweight to the hatred expressed by militant feminists who hounded Hughes at Adelaide, accusing him of having murdered Plath. Public vilification is hard to bear on your own. Thereafter there was loyalty, gratitude, sexual attraction, sexual imprinting, fear of fatal consequences should he attempt to leave. Philanderer, a word sometimes applied to Hughes, even by friends, seems inadequate. His letters to Assia Wevill, for example, are tender and loving in the face of her sometimes exasperating behaviour. We forgive serial marriages, one love replacing another. But why is this more commendable than continuing to love one person while also loving another? It is more normal, of course, but is it more commendable? Serial adultery we understand, are familiar with. Multiple adultery seems beyond our comprehension for no good reason. Kindness and habit must play their part – doubling in ways that are not unthinkable. Habit, for instance, will hold you and slacken the hold on you.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to write sheer, pure, impure sexual energy out of the picture. In Passion Play (1981), one of the great plays of the last century, Peter Nichols has the courage to voice the male sexual imperative. James, a picture restorer, is addressing a painting of Christ:

"I’m an unemotional man who’s inspired a passion in my partner. And I needn’t tell you what passion means. Suffering, self-inflicted torture, masochism, all that’s holy. Like that exquisite depiction of a bleeding corpse that’s waiting for me in Zurich. By day I’ll patch it up, repair the blood and wounds where they’ve been knocked around over the years, but every night I’ll fuck as though life depended on it. Which of course it does."

He doesn’t just mean reproduction. He means being alive, feeling alive. As for the analogy with Christ’s Passion – his wife, Eleanor, sings in Bach’s St Matthew Passion – we can compare Kipling’s “the joy of an old wound waking” (in “The Oldest Song”). Or Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, where the middle-aged Housman, smitten still by Moses Jackson, parses the middle-aged Horace faced with Venus waging war. It is no accident that we favour the word “smitten” to describe sexual passion.

Of course, we would like not to succumb. We would like to behave impeccably. Nineteenth-century literature is founded on the conflict between passion and duty, from Jane Eyre to The Mill on the Floss. Sense and susceptibility. In all of us, there is a real struggle between the Puritan and the Hedonist. Hughes’s own nature, and his attractiveness to women, ensured that this struggle was more real for him than for most, so much so that it informs his reading of Shakespeare in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being – where he is on the side of completeness, of licence, of pagan candour, a Nietzschean immoralist. As he is in Gaudete, where, mutatis mutandis, the Rev Lumb gets to go with nearly every female in sight. Rejoice.

In a letter to Daniel Weissbort (undated, 1976), Hughes writes: “the real subject of poetry might be what we really feel about what really happens to us, and the real language might be a very plain & direct business”. To Anne Sexton (August 9, 1967) he writes: “Anyway, you’ve no need to worry. When you’ve got it you’ve got it – you don’t have to bother about poetry, you just have to be truthful (which is where the brain and all its hideous lies leap in, I know)”. It seems so simple: tell it how it is. As an imperative, it is simple. But what really happens to us isn’t. We tell the story of ourselves to our own advantage, from our own confusion. In Hughes’s case, his openness was as illusory as our own.

His essay “Superstitions” (in Winter Pollen, 1994) mounts a concessive defence of astrology: “To an outsider, astrology is a procession of puerile absurdities. A Babel of gibberish”. It has no way of shedding its mistakes as science does. Yet, reviewing Louis MacNeice’s Astrology, Hughes offers up Evangeline Adams as testable data, showing that astrology works, whether as magic or as a science. In this volume of letters, astrology is a persistent point de repère, a significant example of what Bridget Jones calls “mentionitis”. Page 14, “astrological maps”; page 19, “I’ve worked it out by parental temperaments, zodiacal, and such”; page 22, “my host – a monstrously built Gemini”; page 30, Sylvia is “Scorpio Oct 27th, moon in Libra, last degrees of Aries rising and has her Mars smack on my sun”; page 47 (of his brother Gerald’s children), “with two Leos you will have to look out”; page 49, “I had to stay at Leeds for an hour, so I bought a glass of milk and a HOROSCOPE and read our different fortunes for the month – all very non-committal & unconvincing as usual”; page 62, “I can put it down to the conjunction of the moon and saturn”; page 78 shows us Sylvia’s astrological chart; on page 94 Hughes is trying, unsuccessfully, to place a newspaper advertisement as a professional astrologer. I could go on. But there is a comic thread through these letters that conveniently epitomizes Hughes’s astrological obsession and the rational world’s refusal to accede to his belief. The rational world in this case is Faber and Faber. When Wodwo is accepted, Hughes asks his editor, Charles Monteith, if the book can be published on May 9, “the day of days”, as he knows from “thousands of hours studying Astrology”. Christopher Reid notes dryly that “Wodwo was in fact published on 18 May 1967”. Frank Pike at Faber was asked if Crow could be published on October 1, because “Newton and Kepler are in agreement, that is a great day in heaven”. Reid notes: “Crow’s eventual publication date was 12 October”. It wasn’t until the publication of Season Songs on May 13, 1976, that Faber obliged Hughes.

There is a revealing sentence on p104: “There is no explanation for it, though astrology, of course, explains it all”. Hughes believed that rationality was limiting. It is obvious from these letters that astrology, in fact, shut down far too much. In a key letter to Lucas Myers (June 19, 1959) Hughes advances the theory that “most poetry, particularly modern poetry, is quite without this wholeness – men make their whole style out of one filament of the thick rope of human nature”. This is one with the title of Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. Joyce leaves behind him a record of his complete being in his work. Hughes’s record is short-circuited by astrology – by the autocomplete of astrology as the explanation for everything.

Which is why, despite Hughes’s moving last letters about the final, painful disclosure of the Sylvia Plath saga – complete disclosure that he hoped would cure his cancer – Birthday Letters are a failure as a full record and therefore as poetry. Virtually every poem is a memory arranged to reflect a tragic telos. It makes for falsity and formal monotony. Fixed stars govern a life – as Plath wrote in her poem “Words”. The danger for Hughes is that they are fixed like the World’s Series is fixed by Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby.

Of course, there are great things in these letters – a marvellous account of receiving the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, written for Hughes’s daughter Frieda, and completely different from the account he gave me. He is genuinely modest about his work: “the poems in my book [The Hawk in the Rain] seem crude in pitch for the most part”; of his next book, Lupercal, “much better than my earlier ones, but gravely crippled by the awful emotional dryness I’ve felt over here [the USA]”. Regularly, if not as frequently as you might expect, you encounter delightful touches: on Fortnum and Mason’s, “deep carpets, sturgeon’s tongues, bowing uniformed attendants, cassowary brains in melon syrup”. This is Frieda learning to speak: “issuing a stream of Japanese, with the beginnings of translation – app-uh, for apple, ooo-en, for open . . .”. The famous are brought before us: “Neruda – he read torrentially for about 25 minutes off a piece of paper about 3" by 4". Then he turned it over, & read on”. T. S. Eliot: “His smile is like that of a person recovering from some serious operation . . . . Eliot isn’t at all unguarded in his remarks. He has huge thick hands – unexpected”. You might think letters were Hughes’s forte, his natural mode, since the Shakespeare book emerged from letters written to the Swedish director Donya Feuer, and given the epistolary template of Birthday Letters. However, letters are only letters finally.

However many miraculous touches letters contain, finished writing is better for second thoughts, and we should curb our expectations. Sometime in the summer of 1959, Hughes wrote to his parents an account of the bears in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. “Tuesday we went round the park looking at the geysers, whole valleys full of these things – most are just holes in the caked white ground – steaming, & bubbling water, a really hellish landscape, sulphur smells”. Compare Kipling in Japan in From Sea to Sea: “In the end we found an impoverished and second-hand Hell . . . . Water, in which bad eggs had been boiled, stood in blister-lipped pools . . .”. Of course, Kipling’s Letters of Travel were composed for publication. In this case, it is possible to compare Hughes’s roughed-out original letter with the finished version, “The 59th Bear”, published thirty-odd years later in Birthday Letters. The writing is better but the incident is worked up – the bear allegorized to stand in for the death pursuing Plath. In the letter, Ted and Sylvia count sixty-seven bears. In the poem, the lethal bear that suddenly displaces the amiable bears fed by the tourists is the fifty-ninth. The original has details “missing” from the final poetic narrative: “we heard it sucking our oranges”; a car comes and “the bear ran to hide behind our tent – hitting a guy rope & shaking the whole place”. On the other hand, generally the detail is improved: “He’d left matted hairs. I glued them in my Shakespeare”; the hiding bear’s “breathing / Heavy after the night’s gourmandizing, / Rasped close to the canvas – only inches / From your face that, big-eyed, stared at me / Staring at you”. This is a reprise of the close of “Full Moon and Little Frieda” – “The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work / That points at him amazed” – yet it is tremendous, all the same. Tremendous, but about to be pressed into a thesis. Just a little reminiscent of a politician, gifted with oratory, but burdened with a party agenda.

Craig Raine is Editor of Areté. His stidy of T. S. Eliot appeared earlier this year, and a collection of essays, In Defence of T. S.. Eliot, appeared in 2000.

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