What is so compelling about that story? How can I have turned those pages of Elaine Feinstein's biography of the late Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, compulsively yet again, after two years spent working on Sylvia Plath's poetry and more than a decade of waves of revelations?
Because Plath's abandonment by Ted Hughes in 1961 and her subsequent suicide is classic tragedy. And Hughes is, to paraphrase Yeats, "isolated by a deed", his adulterous affair with Assia Wevill. It's not fair, but it's a fact, and one thing this, the first biography of Hughes, makes clear is the degree to which Plath had her revenge. With her suicide, she lamed Hughes emotionally and artistically for most of his life.
Feinstein lends distinction to the shape of the tragedy as part of the old struggle between men and women by making clear that Sylvia's son Nick was five months old when Hughes began his affair with Assia Wevill; she was still breast-feeding and probably not much interested, physically, in Hughes. In the unwritten law of marriage, that's quite a crime.
Hughes certainly paid for it. He was, however, no everyday adulterer, rather a philanderer on a grand scale. Assia committed suicide - and killed her daughter by Hughes - when she, too, had been abandoned, and Ted was seeing at least two other women: ex-social worker, Brenda Hedden, and farmer, Carol Orchard. He married Carol and dashed off a note to Brenda assuring her that "nothing had changed" between them. Then, with Carol safely ensconced in Devon, he went on to pursue at least two other simultaneous affairs, with the novelist, Emma Tennant, and the Australian publicist, Jill Barber.
A good biography would try to get to the heart of this behaviour. Did the death of Plath maim Hughes's ability to bond, as he once suggested, as he looked at flying swans, mated for life? Did he have too strong a mother, or just a Yorkshire interpretation of marriage, which meant getting your jollies elsewhere, as Feinstein posits at one point?
Look elsewhere for insights into a fascinating poet and personality, for this biography provides none. Its worst flaw is that it descends periodically into limp-wristed valediction (Feinstein knew the poet well - she is a poet and novelist as well as a biographer, and Hughes's sister Olwyn was Feinstein's agent). Given the behaviour evidenced above, it comes across strangely to read of Ted suddenly that his "integrity was transparent", for instance.
Feinstein obviously doesn't like one of the most interesting facets of Hughes's personality - his belief in unalterable destiny (particularly as played out in astrology). He even used the stars to choose the dates for the publication of poems from Birthday Letters - his last, superb volume, which dealt with his relationship with Plath. She gingerly pokes the idea that Hughes may have made Plath's and Wevill's suicides psychologically inevitable in Birthday Letters and Capriccio, because he couldn't cope with them, but then drops it as if she can't cope either.
Or is the worst thing about this book the fact that it contains so little new information, despite many interviews with contemporaries and privileged access to the archive of Anne Stevenson, Plath's embattled official biographer? Or the standard of the editing - who are Susan Sonntag, Maria Heaney and Zbigniev, Herbert?
No, I say, the worst thing about it is how badly it is written. I could quote Feinstein's line about Hughes's poetry springing from him "as naturally as leaves from a tree", or her many references to "genius" as if it were a dissectable species of animal, but I prefer her description of the girlfriend Hughes brought to the party at which he met Plath: "far from being a nurse, she shared a weekly supervision with Jane Baltzell . . . whom Sylvia regarded as a rival . . ."
Victoria White is Arts Editor of The Irish Times