Nobody's Looking at You

by Janet Malcolm

  Q. Was she saying that he was sadistic towards her?

  A. My recollection is she described him as someone who was very sadistic.

  The stage is now set for the examples of Hughes’s sadism that give Bate’s book the sensational character that caused the estate to withdraw from it in horror. The most shocking of these examples is a scene of sex in a London hotel between Hughes and Assia Wevill, the beautiful woman with whom he began an affair in the last year of his marriage to Plath, and who killed herself and her four-year-old daughter with Hughes (by gas, presumably in imitation of Plath, after living with him intermittently for five years). At the hotel, Bate writes, Hughes’s “lovemaking was ‘so violent and animal’ that he ruptured her.” Bate’s source is a diary kept by Nathaniel Tarn, a poet, anthropologist, and psychoanalyst in whom, unbeknownst to each other, Assia and her husband David Wevill confided.

  Tarn would write down what they said to him and his papers, including the diary, found their way to an archive at Stanford University, where anyone can read them. Bate was not the first to do so. The scene of the violent and animal sex appeared in a biography of Assia Wevill, A Lover of Unreason, by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev. Bate writes condescendingly of Koren and Negev as “touchingly literalistic” in their interpretation of a poem of Hughes about Assia, but he is not above quoting from their interview with David Wevill in which he told them that Assia told him that Sylvia caught Hughes kissing her in the kitchen of his and Plath’s Devon house during their first visit to the couple.

  * * *

  Like the evidence of Olwyn’s memory, the evidence of Tarn’s diary or of David Wevill’s interview is not evidence of the highest order of trustworthiness. The standing that the blabbings of contemporaries have in biographical narratives is surely one of the genre’s most problematic conventions. People can say anything they want about a dead person. The dead cannot sue. This may be the least of their troubles, but it can be excruciating for spouses and offspring to read what they know to be untrue and not be able to do anything about it except issue complaints that fall upon uninterested ears.

  Hughes’s widow Carol recently issued such a complaint, in the form of a press release written by the estate’s lawyer, Damon Parker, citing eighteen factual errors in the sixteen pages of the book she had been able to bring herself to read. The “most offensive” of these errors concerned Bate’s account of the car trip Carol Hughes and Plath and Hughes’s son Nicholas made from London to Devon with the hearse carrying Ted Hughes’s coffin: “The body was returned to Devon, the accompanying party stopping, as Ted the gastronome would have wanted, for a good lunch on the way.” Parker quotes an outraged Carol Hughes: “The idea that Nicholas and I would be enjoying a ‘good lunch’ while Ted lay dead in the hearse outside is a slur suggesting utter disrespect, and one I consider to be in extremely poor taste.”

  If poor taste is uncongenial to Mrs. Hughes, she will do well to continue not reading Bate’s biography. Among the specimens of tastelessness lodged in the book like the threepenny coins in a Christmas pudding, none may surpass Bate’s quotation from Erica Jong in her book Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life, about meeting Hughes in New York and resisting his advances (“He was fiercely sexy, with a vampirish, warlock appeal.… He did the wildman-from-the-moors thing on me full force”), after which “I taxied home to my husband on the West Side, my head full of the hottest fantasies. Of course we f______our brains out with me imagining Ted.”

  But beyond tastelessness there is Bate’s cluelessness about what you can and cannot do if you want to be regarded as an honest and serious writer. Here is what he does with an article in the Daily Mail called “Ted Hughes, My Secret Lover” by a woman from Australia named Jill Barber. Barber wrote: “His first act of love was to hold me tenderly, mopping my brow with a wet flannel as I threw up the cheap champagne into his sink.… He lay me on the bed and tenderly unbuttoned and unzipped me and gazed admiringly at me.… He was rough, passionate and forceful.” Bate writes: “He mopped her brow with a wet flannel as she threw up the cheap champagne into his sink, then he tenderly unbuttoned and unzipped her, gazed admiringly at her body and made forceful love to her.”

  * * *

  In 2000 Bate came to Faber and Faber, which acts as agent for the Ted Hughes estate, proposing to write an authorized biography of Hughes, who was “the obvious choice for my next literary biography after I had done with two of his favourite poets, Shakespeare and John Clare.” He was told that Hughes had left instructions opposing an authorized biography, so that was that. But in 2009, emboldened by Carol Hughes’s sale to the British Library of documents that Hughes had held back when he sold his papers to Emory University in Atlanta, and by the publication of a book of his letters, Bate approached Faber and Faber again and proposed to write not a biography, but a work of literary criticism in which the life would merely figure.

  This time the estate accepted. In his Guardian piece Bate recalled a delightful initial lunch with an editor from Faber and Faber and Carol (who “expressed herself ‘totally happy with my idea of using the life to illuminate the work’”) at a restaurant “in, of all places, Rugby Street—where Ted first made love to Sylvia Plath. I took this to be my symbolic anointing.” After the deal hideously unraveled, Damon Parker wrote in The Guardian:

  At the risk of disillusioning him, there was no significance to the restaurant or the street chosen for a lunch with Mrs. Hughes and the poetry editor. The restaurant just happened to be a favourite haunt of Faber & Faber executives at that time. Nor was there any “symbolic anointing” of him in anyone’s mind other than his own.

  The estate and Faber and Faber had begun to smell a rat early on. “The tone and style of a draft article Professor Bate wanted to submit to a respected literary magazine here soon after he was commissioned, based on his initial researches, led to concerns that he seemed to be straying from his agreed remit,” Damon Parker wrote in reply to my inquiry about what had got their wind up. (He could say nothing further about the article.) Also

  despite what had been previously agreed Professor Bate then resisted repeated requests to see some of his work in progress, from that time in 2010 right up until the Estate withdrew support for his book in late 2013.… The Estate could no longer cooperate once it seemed increasingly likely that his book would be rather different in tone and content from the work of serious scholarship which he had initially proposed.

  Bate and Faber and Faber parted company and HarperCollins became the book’s publisher.

  Bate’s claim that withdrawal of permission to quote forced him to write the distasteful book he has written is hard to credit. In “How the Actions of the Ted Hughes Estate Will Change My Biography,” he writes of the “pages and pages of detailed analysis of the multiple drafts of the poems” that will now “have to go,” and of how “the new version will be much more biographical.” What Bate writes about Hughes’s poetry in the HarperCollins text is of staggering superficiality. He tells you what he does and doesn’t like. When he likes a poem he uses terms like “aching beauty” and “achingly sad.” When he dislikes a poem he will talk of Hughes “operating on auto-pilot, writing nature notes instead of penetrating to the forces behind nature and in himself.”

  It is odd to read that last awkward phrase. Bate should be the last person to complain about the absence of unseen forces. For the mystical and mythic influences that inform Hughes’s understanding of imaginative literature and shape his poetic practice, Bate has only contempt, writing of his “sometimes bonkers ideas about astrology and the occult; his use of ancient ideas and obscure literary sources as a way of explaining, even justifying, what most reasonable people would simply describe as bad behavior.”

  * * *

  In a letter of 1989 to his friend Lucas Myers, published in Letters of Ted Hughes, Hughes writes about how “pitifully little” he is producing and goes on to

  wonder sometimes if things might have gone differently without the events of 63 & 69 [
the years of Plath’s and Wevill’s suicides]. I have an idea of those two episodes as giant steel doors shutting down over great parts of myself, leaving me that much less, just what was left, to live on. No doubt a more resolute artist would have penetrated the steel doors—but I believe big physical changes happen at those times, big self-anaesthesias. Maybe life isn’t long enough to wake up from them.

  Hughes’s feeling of not writing enough is common among writers, sometimes even among the most prolific. In Hughes’s case it was certainly delusory. The posthumous volume of Hughes’s collected poems is over a thousand pages long and there are five volumes of prose and seven volumes of translations. But without question Hughes suffered blows greater than those it is given to most writers to suffer. His life had been ruined not just once, but twice. It has the character not of actual human existence but of a dark fable about a hero born under a malign star.

  That it was Bate of all people who was chosen to write Hughes’s biography only heightens our sense of Hughes’s preternatural unluckiness; though the choice might not have surprised him. Ancient stories about innocents delivered into the hands of enemies disguised as friends were well known to him, as was The Aspern Papers. He emerges from his letters as a man blessed with a brilliant mind and a warm and open nature, who seemed to take a deeper interest in other people’s feelings and wishes than the rest of us are able to do and who never said anything trite or obvious or pious or self-serving. Of course, this is Hughes’s epistolary persona, the persona he created the way novelists create characters. The question of what he was “really” like remains unanswered, as it should. If anything is our own business, it is our pathetic native self. Biographers, in their pride, think otherwise. Readers, in their curiosity, encourage them in their impertinence. Surely Hughes’s family, if not his shade, deserve better than Bate’s squalid findings about Hughes’s sex life and priggish theories about his psychology.

  The New York Review of Books, 2016

  _________________

  Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life, by Jonathan Bate

  REMEMBER THE LADIES

  Among the many oddities of Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series is its unabashed sexism. McCall Smith treats the weaker sex—men—with pitying condescension. “Boys, men. They’re all the same,” a woman Sunday school teacher says when she learns that a boy has been exposing himself to a girl in the next seat. “They think that this thing is something special and they’re all so proud of it. They do not know how ridiculous it is.” Another female character dryly observes, in another context: “We are all human. Men particularly.” She is Precious Ramotswe (known as Mma Ramotswe), the regally fat, brilliantly sensible, and preternaturally good and kind private detective around whom the series, set in the young republic of Botswana, revolves. “The Miss Marple of Botswana,” a book jacket quote says of her. But this is wrong. Mma Ramotswe resembles Christie’s character as little as the books resemble Christie’s mysteries. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books aren’t really mysteries at all. There are no murders in them and little suspense. When asked about what the agency does, Mma Makutsi, Mma Ramotswe’s assistant, replies (as a psychoanalyst might), “Most of the time we are just helping people to find out things they already know.”

  The Sunday school teacher admonishes the boy who exhibits his penis by creeping up behind him and hitting him over the head with a Bible. McCall Smith similarly uses the Bible to fix the reader’s attention. The laconic, fast-paced stories of the Old Testament are the ur-texts for Mma Ramotswe’s clean-edged cases, whose solutions have an air of mythic inevitability. In his classic study The Art of Biblical Narrative, Robert Alter identifies the “type-scenes” of the Hebrew Bible—notably, the betrothal that takes place at a well—and the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series is ordered by a similar repertoire of set pieces.

  One of the most charged of these occurs at a rural orphanage and involves a fruitcake. Mma Potokwane, the bossy head of the orphanage, serves the cake to people from whom she wishes to extract favors; no one who eats the cake can refuse her. In the fifth book of the series, The Full Cupboard of Life, McCall Smith spells out the reference that has obscurely hovered over the scene: “Just as Eve had used an apple to trap Adam, so Mma Potokwane used fruitcake. Fruitcake, apples; it made no difference really. Oh foolish, weak men!”

  But lest it appear that McCall Smith is himself a foolish and weak author, writing heavy-handed parables, he pushes the scene to an extreme that illustrates the quality that is perhaps the chief reason for the appeal of these books: his playfulness. In the sixth and latest book, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies, McCall Smith moves the cake scene to the waiting room of a famous Johannesburg surgeon to whom Mma Potokwane has brought—with no appointment—an orphan with a clubfoot. When the surgeon appears, Mma Potokwane whisks the primal fruitcake out of her bag and thrusts it into “the astonished man’s hands”—and he, of course, after accepting his second slice, can do nothing but helplessly agree to operate on the orphan. At the end of the tall tale, Mma Potokwane reports that “he did not charge anything either. He said that the fruitcake was payment enough.”

  Good comedy requires villains—they give the game its high stakes—and McCall Smith provides his feminist comedy with an especially chilling one in the form of Note Mokoti, a sociopathic trumpet player, whom Mma Ramotswe as a very young woman makes the terrible mistake of marrying. This man is not weak and foolish; he is strong and evil. He regularly hits Mma Ramotswe, sometimes so hard that she has to go to the hospital for stitches. He abandons her after the death of their newborn baby and disappears from her life—and from the series. But he remains a sinister background presence, the touchstone of the capacity men have for reducing women to primitive fear and helplessness. In the new book, he reappears and threatens to destroy Mma Ramotswe’s successful career and happy second marriage.

  Of course, Note is routed in the end (I will not say how), but his reappearance has deepened our sense of the seriousness of these light books and strengthened our bond with its heroine. She is the only daughter of Obed Ramotswe, a man of exquisite virtue—there are deviants from the weak and foolish majority on the good as well as on the evil side—from whom she inherits her own moral poise and also the means to set up her detective agency. McCall Smith does not render her realistically. Although he repeatedly cites her fatness (traditional build, he calls it) and the tiny white van she drives and the bush tea she drinks, we see her more at the majestic distance from which we view characters in the Bible rather than in intimate novelistic closeup. However, in contrast to the Bible’s rather bloodthirsty feminist heroines (Judith and Jael, for example) Mma Ramotswe is an entirely benign instrument of justice. She exacts no revenge from the errant men (and the occasional errant woman) she catches out. Her impulse is always to spare the sinner and find some kindhearted way of exacting retribution.

  “She was a good detective, and a good woman,” McCall Smith writes of his heroine in the first book, and adds: “A good woman in a good country.” The goodness of Botswana is crucial to McCall Smith’s enterprise, and the source of much of its comic inspiration. McCall Smith follows the satiric literary tradition in which a “primitive” culture is held up to show the laughable backwardness of Western society. But, as McCall Smith is aware, the goodness of Botswana, a former British protectorate that gained its independence in 1966, has a hybrid character. The country’s unspoiled natural beauty and the unhurried, kindly ways of its people are only a part of what makes Botswana the paradise of Africa. After independence, Botswana rapidly became one of the most prosperous and progressive—and Westernized—countries in Africa. (The prosperity is a result largely of the discovery of diamonds.)

  McCall Smith gamely takes on the task of distinguishing between the good and the bad things that have come to Botswana from the West. Among the unarguably good things, for example, are the antidepressants that rescue Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, a gifted automobile mechanic and the trans
cendently kind husband-to-be of Mma Ramotswe, from incapacitating clinical depression; and among the unarguably bad things is the fashion for thinness that is telling ladies of traditional build that a slice of Mma Potokwane’s fruitcake has seven hundred calories. To illustrate the brilliant evenhandedness with which McCall Smith plays the two cultures against each other, here is a conversation between Mma Potokwane and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni that takes place in Tears of the Giraffe, the second book of the series. Mma Potokwane has been on the telephone with a grocer who took an irritatingly long time to agree to donate some cooking oil to the orphanage.

  “Some people are slow to give,” she observes, and continues, “It is something to do with how their mothers brought them up. I have read all about this problem in a book. There is a doctor called Dr Freud who is very famous and has written many books about such people.”

  “Is he in Johannesburg?” asked Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.

  “I do not think so,” said Mma Potokwane. “It is a book from London. But it is very interesting. He says that all boys are in love with their mother.”

  “That is natural,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “Of course boys love their mothers. Why should they not do so?”

  Mma Potokwane shrugged. “I agree with you. I cannot see what is wrong with a boy loving his mother.”

  “Then why is Dr Freud worried about this?” went on Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “Surely he should be worried if they did not love their mothers.”

  Mma Potokwane looked thoughtful. “Yes. But he was still very worried about these boys and I think he tried to stop them.”