In Public

I've recently got myself back on track with regard to my on-going reading of Letters of Ted Hughes and the second volume of The Complete Poems of A.R. Ammons. For some reason I neglected both texts towards the end of last year (I don't think I read anything of substance in December) and it needed quite some effort to get going again. 

To be honest, I'm finding Ammons's 1996 collection Brink Road hard work. Somehow I'm not connecting with any of the poems. It's the level of abstraction involved, I think. But Hughes's letters are wonderfully accessible and sympathetic at every level - and so varied in their concerns, such that I'm finding them an easy read and often powerfully compelling.

That certainly applies to the letter addressed to Al Alvarez from November 1971 complaining about the chapters devoted to Sylvia Plath's suicide in The Savage God. I read the letter with quite a degree of guilt having found those chapters thoroughly engrossing, and was especially stung by Hughes's question to Alvarez: What makes you think you can use our lives like the text of a novel - something on the syllabus - for facile interpretations to keep your audience of schoolteachers up on the latest culture? Yes, that was how I'd read the account as if just a particularly striking text at the level of superior fiction.

The letter as a whole served as a reminder of the costs paid by all those who find their private struggles becoming public property - and of how far journalistic accounts fall short of the complexity of lived experience.