Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (review)

Abstract

Psychology. She interviewed researchers , psychoanalysts, psychiatrists and sports psychologists. Accident-proneness, Dunn learned, is a symptom of something else: lefthandedness , a brain tumor, a penchant for risk or a desire for self-destruction . Right-handed and tumor-free, she at first concluded that she was a "rakish" risk-taker but eventually recognized and set out to redirect the self-destructive impulse behind her "accidental" behavior. A chance magazine assignment to interview a wellknown yogi started her on a path of spiritual recovery as remarkable as the healing ofher leg. Not byAccident is a thoughtful meditation on the consequences of choice in everyday life. With intelligence, compassion and wit, Dunn delivers a poignant memoir remarkably devoid of sentimentality. Don't be put off by the book's cover shot of Dunn bareback on Harley. You don't have to love horses to love this book. (PU) Ted Hughes: The Life ofa Poet by Elaine Feinstein Norton, 2001, 273 pp., $29.95 The tempestuous six-year union of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, the Taylor and Burton of poets, polarized readers in the wake of Plath's suicide at age thirty in February 1963. Yet the weight of public opinion has always been on Plath's side. After all, evidence shows that the handsome Hughes left the vulnerable Plath and their two young children for a beautiful but equally troubled woman (Assia WevUl was also to commit suicide eventually, in a fashion eerily reminiscent of Plath). AU four of Plath's biographers cast Hughes as the villain, except for Anne Stevenson in her 1989 biography, Bitter Fame. Stevenson's reputation suffered when she portrayed Plath as insecure, difficult and fiercely ambitious and Hughes as a patient, long-suffering husband who held up as best he could. Despite wild, often unsubstantiated accusations regarding the ill treatment of his wife and her literary estate, Hughes refused to defend himself to journalists, critics, biographers and scholars. He broke his silence with the publication of Birthday Letters in 1997, thirty-five years after Sylvia's death. In a collection of short poems that reads like a novel, England's then poet laureate dramatized key moments from his complicated marriage to the woman who posthumously became a cult figure for poets and a symbol for feminists. Slowly public opinion has softened toward Hughes, who died of colon cancer in October 1998 after a lengthy career as one of the best twentiethcentury English poets. Elaine Feinstein 's biography, Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet, the first written since his death, tells about the man who grew up a country boy in northern England , the son of hardworking, downto -earth Yorkshire parents. Mostly self-educated and bohemian in temperament , Hughes studied in the '50s at Cambridge but did not pursue an academic career. He preferred to write and study subjects of his own choosing: the natural world of his childhood landscape and the preternatural world he accessed through astrology, hypnosis, a Ouija board and Jungian psychology. Later in life he became a scholar and supporter of 178 · The Missouri Review Eastern and Central European authors , including Miroslav Holub, Vasko Popa and János Pilinszky. A long-time friend of Hughes, Feinstein tries to resist taking sides, yet in the end, as with Plath biographers , her stance of fair-mindedness slackens. The biography's underlying argument is that Hughes has been misrepresented. The Hughes she knew for thirty years was a magnetic , large-spirited man who gave generously to his children, friends and fellow poets. Not only does her biography give another perspective; it also reveals the richness of detail in his papers left to the University of Emory's Robert Woodruff Library and the power of his poetry as he grapples with the pain and brutality of the twentieth century. (KS) The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001, 568 pp., $26 Jonathan Franzen's third novel maps the world of the Lambert family —their complex and strained relationships with each other and their inner struggles to deal with life on their own terms. At the heart of the novel is the question of how one might "correct" oneself or others. Personal action? Designer drugs? The biotech...