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