Jonathan Bate is in hot water. Our youngest literary-critic knight rode out, Quixote style, to do the first full-length biography of Ted Hughes, now canonised as one of Britain’s greatest poets.
Hughes’s estate — controlled by his widow, Carol — didn’t “authorise” the project but was understood not to disapprove. Believing himself “symbolically anointed”, Bate plunged into four years of eye-aching research.
When, however, the estate got wind of what he was going to write it abruptly withdrew permission. Bate must have felt like a deep-sea diver whose airline had been severed.
The most vexatious areas of Hughes’s life are no secret: the suicides of two women he loved and his own rampant promiscuity. Bate’s biography deals with these with considerable tact and explores how the poetry flowed from Hughes’s wounds. But I’m afraid he is just the latest victim of the “keepers of the flame” who guard the reputations of our literary greats with something bordering on obsession.
Cassandra Austen, a very vigilant keeper, destroyed Jane’s letters, and the family conspired to suppress many things we would love to know about our greatest woman novelist (particularly the two marriage offers and, of course, was she gay?)
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Thackeray’s deathbed ban on a biography was echoed by George Orwell (three days before he died), TS Eliot and WH Auden. Larkin encouraged his friend Andrew Motion to write his biography but his last instruction to his partner and muse Monica Jones was to destroy his voluminous diaries. Thank goodness his filthy letters to Kingsley Amis survived.
Dickens took no chances. He made a bonfire of his private papers in the garden at Gad’s Hill. His children roasted onions in the embers. Claire Tomalin imaginatively fills the gaps with The Invisible Woman but we’ll never know whether Ellen Ternan was Dickens’s secret lover.
Thomas Hardy appointed his young wife his biographer and then dictated what should be allowed to posterity. JD Salinger went to court to obstruct his would-be biographer Ian Hamilton from paraphrasing his letters. Sonia Orwell thought that by authorising Bernard Crick to do what her husband had expressly forbidden she had her biographer on a short lease. Alas no. Crick probed uncomfortably on whether Orwell really did shoot that damned elephant. His strictness contributed to Sonia dying a wretched alcoholic.
Carol Hughes has not read Bate’s biography other than the 16 pages of it serialised in The Times. Her lawyers claim that those pages are riddled with factual errors. There are 656 to go. Battle has been joined.
Bate’s predicament illustrates a perennial problem for the literary biographer. If you’re unauthorised you have freedom. Graham Lord, for example, discovered in his research on Dick Francis that the bestselling novels were in fact written by his wife. But “fair use” — a right that has never been properly defined in law — restricts you to snippets of quotation. If you can’t quote Hughes’s poetry freely you’re in the business of serving up a bacon butty without the bacon.
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Authorisation has its own manacles. Ten years ago I published the authorised biography of Stephen Spender. The poet’s widow, Natasha, decided to relax her husband’s prohibition but it was clear there were areas that were out of bounds. Principally Spender’s sexual life — something that seeps, significantly, into his poetry.
A couple of months ago, Matthew Spender, who now controls the estate, published a much more revealing memoir of his dead parents than I was able to while his mother (whom, frankly, I adored) was living. He has done it, in my view, very well.
Is our desire to know what happened in the last hours of Sylvia Plath’s life (about which Bate has new things to say) prurient? Or does it enrich our readings of the great poetry this horribly conflicted couple have left us? I’m with Bate: the less obstructed our view of Hughes the man, the better our understanding of Hughes the poet.