As I mentioned the other day, I've made a start on the Letters of Ted Hughes and the great poet's genius is obvious from the very earliest letters penned in his teenage years. Amusingly another obvious aspect of TH's character on regular display in these missives, a bit at odds with the usual stereotypes of literary brilliance, is his keen interest in how to get his hands on money - plenty of it - in as short order as possible. I remember Jonathan Bate pointing out in his biography of the poet just how often Hughes got involved in money-making schemes, usually of his own contriving, but it's striking to witness this at first hand, as it were. And the schemes are invested with as much imaginative zest as his verse, as in one early letter to his older brother extolling the virtues of breeding mink in the British Isles.
Mind you, it's important to bear in mind that in these early years TH is looking for a way to forge a poetic career - and doing so with the relentlessness of Joyce. I don't think we can characterise the Hughes family as being working class, but they're not that much better off, so financial survival is an enormously real concern to allow room for writing, yet one that is obviously going to be dealt with somehow.
Just in general terms, TH's confidence in his gifts is wonderfully bracing. I love his passing reference in a letter to his sister Olwyn, to the children's stories that were to be collected in How the Whale Became, a favourite book of mine. He just knows what he has achieved: Since I came here I've written nine animal fables. They are original and I think they are very good. I have written them absolutely simply.
Hope he earned a few bob from that book alone!
No comments:
Post a Comment