The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes by Keith Sagar (review)

Abstract

approaches. While our critical practice reveals something of a developing critical hierarchy,itssignificanceis a questionleftlargelyforfurtherdebate. UNIVERSITY OF LETHBRIDGE, CANADA CRAIG MONK The Laughterof Foxes. A Studyof TedHughes. By KEITHSAGAR. (Liverpool English Texts and Studies, 38) Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 2000. xxxiv + 196 pp. k727.50 (paperbound I14.95). It is a sad comment on the state of Hughes criticismthat many readers,on picking up thisbook, will turnfirstto the Acknowledgementspage. There theywill findthat it contains material from unpublished sources 'by kind permission of Ted Hughes and the Ted Hughes Estate'. The Hughes/Plath Estate is not notorious for its kindnessto critics,so one anticipatesa respectfulbook. It is, in fact,a ferventeulogy. Keith Sagar's version of Hughes is perfectly coherent, which in itself is an achievement. The first of his four chapters describes the 'healing power' of the poet's 'mythic imagination', which offersthe best hope for 'the health of the race', 'at the threshold of a new and dark millennium'. Sagar's final chapter traces the redemptive movement in Hughes's poetry from the 'world made of blood' of his first two volumes, to a 'world made of light'. Central here is the mythic quest of Crow (continued in Cave Birdsand beyond) to cast off his mistaken'singlevision' of a world of opposites (predator/prey; man/woman). He suffers'dire punishments for his errors,failuresand crimes',and learnsat last 'to get into a rightrelationwith the female, who is also Nature and his own true demon' (p. I25). Hughes's protagonistthus achieves a fourfold,holisticvision, 'correctingboth his own errors and those of Western Man'. The culmination is an 'alchemical marriage, or coniunctio': 'not only a marriageof male and female but of all the polarized elements of the divided self. [.. .] The goblin is the offspring.The couple must not attemptto kill or tame or disown the goblin' (p. I43). It is fitting that this vision, which 'redeems Nature', should be achieved most convincingly in River,since, as Hughes has said: 'Any kind of fishing provides [a] connection with the whole living world.' Sagar's story is told with conviction, and is supported by references to unpublished letters from Hughes to the critic himself. Nothing he says, however, will speak to those readers who find Hughes disturbingly lacking in self-irony, or who distrust his didactic insights into 'Nature' (Sagar uses this word with the same confident freedom as the Pope). The real strength of Hughes, for such readers, lies in the intense pathos of his personal guilt and suffering, painfully dressed up as shamanic messianism and bookish anthropology. In this reading, the achievement in Riverof the 'alchemical marriage', which acknowledges the goblin, is a coded expression of Hughes's relief that his second wife, unlike his first, was willing to indulge his passion for hunting and fishing. Some will feel that Hughes's relations with women are best understood in these less highfalutin terms of sexual politics, and secular jealousies and satisfactions. Sagar contemptuously dismisses such readings: 'The media kept to their own agenda, in which sex, suicide and guilt are far more interesting than poetry, so that the general impression [. . .] remained intact, that Hughes' greatest claim to fame was as the husband of Sylvia Plath' (p. x). It is, indeed, irresistible to speculate how many copies BirthdayLetterswould have sold had it not been about Plath. Sagar's second chapter deals, fascinatingly, with different mythic interpretations of their relationship. Hughes began by seeing himself as Prospero, but soon began to feel more like Caliban. In the end he cast himself as Orpheus. All three versions (though Sagar does not say so) place man-as-artist centre-stage. Eurydice has no lyre. Elsewhere Sagar quotes Hughes's comment on a poetic exercise of Plath's of approaches. While our critical practice reveals something of a developing critical hierarchy,itssignificanceis a questionleftlargelyforfurtherdebate. UNIVERSITY OF LETHBRIDGE, CANADA CRAIG MONK The Laughterof Foxes. A Studyof TedHughes. By KEITHSAGAR. (Liverpool English Texts and Studies, 38) Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 2000. xxxiv + 196 pp. k727.50 (paperbound I14.95). It is a sad comment on the state of Hughes criticismthat many readers,on picking up thisbook, will turnfirstto the Acknowledgementspage. There theywill findthat it contains material from unpublished...