Poet as predator

In Testaments Betrayed, Milan Kundera says: ‘Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal’s or Faulkner’s.’ In The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Janet Malcolm says: ‘The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography’s status as a popular genre.’ She also shrewdly remarks on the ‘mantle of judiciousness’ that biographers are forced to deploy.

Jonathan Bate informs us that over a period of five years he has read and taken notes on nearly 100,000 pages of Ted Hughes manuscripts. He piously tells us at the end of his ‘Prologue’ that ‘the cardinal rule is this: the work and how it came into being is what is worth writing about, what is to be respected. The life is invoked in order to illuminate the work…’ His biography is scurrilous. It is also badly written, insensitive to the poetry, analytically inspissated, unerringly mistaken in its judgments, and incompetently narrated.