{"id":8475,"date":"2008-10-08T14:14:48","date_gmt":"2008-10-08T18:14:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=8475"},"modified":"2015-06-19T07:11:04","modified_gmt":"2015-06-19T11:11:04","slug":"letters-of-ted-hughes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=8475","title":{"rendered":"<i>Letters of Ted Hughes<\/i>:"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&#038;OneJS=1&#038;Operation=GetAdHtml&#038;MarketPlace=US&#038;source=ac&#038;ref=tf_til&#038;ad_type=product_link&#038;tracking_id=thesheivari-20&#038;marketplace=amazon&#038;region=US&#038;placement=0374185301&#038;asins=0374185301&#038;linkId=7X62KZHDABEY4HX3&#038;show_border=true&#038;link_opens_in_new_window=true\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/10\/03\/books\/03book.html\">A fascinating review in <i>The New York Times<\/i> on a book<\/a> I have been dying to read:<\/p>\n<p>the massive <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0374185301?ie=UTF8&#038;tag=thesheivari-20&#038;linkCode=as2&#038;camp=1789&#038;creative=9325&#038;creativeASIN=0374185301\">collected letters of Ted Hughes<\/a><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=thesheivari-20&#038;l=as2&#038;o=1&#038;a=0374185301\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" style=\"border:none !important; margin:0px !important;\" \/>, edited by Christopher Reid.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve wanted to read it since it came out, for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=7171\">obvious reasons<\/a>. And then <a href=\"http:\/\/baroqueinhackney.wordpress.com\/\">Ms. Baroque <\/a>was reading it, and posting about it &#8211; and I ate her posts up like a lunatic.  This is when it wasn&#8217;t even out in the States yet, I believe!  <a href=\"http:\/\/baroqueinhackney.wordpress.com\/2008\/02\/11\/about-suffering-they-were-never-wrong-the-old-masters\/\">Ms. Baroque posted on February 11, 2008<\/a>:  &#8220;Well, please allow me to say this now. It\u00e2\u0080\u0099s still the first half of February, and this is my book of the year.&#8221;  And then of course there was <a href=\"http:\/\/baroqueinhackney.wordpress.com\/2008\/02\/05\/i-am-my-own-work-of-art\/\">this post of hers <\/a>, also referencing Hughes&#8217; collected letters &#8211; which I found shattering.  Shattering to consider his position in all of that, but then shattering, too, to think of what will be &#8220;left&#8221; in me, of my personality, when life has finished with me.  What will be &#8220;intact&#8221;?<\/p>\n<p>I love to read people&#8217;s letters, and Hughes &#8211; with his implacable persona for so many years &#8211; his participation in the psychodrama of Plath&#8217;s poems, his hovering presence over <i>everything<\/i> &#8211; has always been a mysterious man.  Mysterious not just because he desired and demanded privacy after the personal madness of the 60s and all of the events therein &#8211; but mysterious because he was so vilified and demonized (to this day) &#8230; that there is no possible way he could ever defend himself.  Why try?  It was a personal matter between two highly volatile people, and if she hadn&#8217;t committed suicide, it wouldn&#8217;t have resonated in the larger culture at all. So Hughes paid MORE than a price for simple infidelity &#8230; not to mention the absolute horror of what went down a couple of years later with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5479\">his lover Assia and their daughter<\/a>.   Now.  This is not to say that Hughes does not bear some responsibility for, you know, enjoying the company of unstable women &#8230; there is definitely that.  But isn&#8217;t all of that just a bit overkill?  We can never know Hughes&#8217; private agony, we can never experience it as our own &#8230; and while yes, I am curious to read the letters from those mad years &#8230; I am more curious to read the collection as a whole.<\/p>\n<p>For example, in a letter to Anne Sexton, he began discussing favorable reviews and some of the dangers of them.  And his words to Sexton are:  \u00e2\u0080\u009cThey separate you from your devil, which hates being observed.\u00e2\u0080\u009d  Wow.  Wow. Wow.  This reminds me of Ellen Burstyn&#8217;s workshop (which I go into in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=8314\">this post<\/a>, as well as in the comments section) having to do with the &#8220;shadow side&#8221;, and the great lengths that the shadow side will go to to avoid being revealed.  Any time you see overtly fake acting you can bet that it&#8217;s either a complete and utter lack of talent &#8230; or it is the shadow-side trying to hide itself, throwing up a smokescreen of bad-acting to throw everyone off the trail.  This is a deep conversation, and perhaps here is not the place &#8230; but that comment to Sexton blew me away.  <em>The devil hates being observed<\/em>.  I think lots of things &#8211; like writer&#8217;s block &#8211; and other types of artistic struggles &#8211; have their origins in some kind of demonic interference.<\/p>\n<p>And then, the review in the Times closes with a ringing endorsement from Hughes of Plath&#8217;s final searing poems &#8211; put together by him after her death in the collection <i>Ariel<\/i>.  Donald Hall, another poet, had expressed reservations about the Ariel poems, thinking they were too &#8220;sensational to be first-rate&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Here is Hughes&#8217; response to Hall:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Whatever you say about them, you know they&#8217;re what every poet wishes he or she could do.  When poems hit so hard, surely you ought to find reasons for their impact, not argue yourself out of your bruises.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Incredible.<\/p>\n<p>Can&#8217;t wait to read the book.  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/10\/03\/books\/03book.html\">Here&#8217;s a link to the review again<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\n<iframe style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&#038;OneJS=1&#038;Operation=GetAdHtml&#038;MarketPlace=US&#038;source=ac&#038;ref=tf_til&#038;ad_type=product_link&#038;tracking_id=thesheivari-20&#038;marketplace=amazon&#038;region=US&#038;placement=0374185301&#038;asins=0374185301&#038;linkId=7X62KZHDABEY4HX3&#038;show_border=true&#038;link_opens_in_new_window=true\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><br \/>\n.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A fascinating review in The New York Times on a book I have been dying to read: the massive collected letters of Ted Hughes, edited by Christopher Reid. I&#8217;ve wanted to read it since it came out, for obvious reasons. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=8475\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15,9],"tags":[88,607],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8475"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8475"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104027,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8475\/revisions\/104027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}