He had ‘sex as strong as it comes,Sylvia Plath said, and there’s plenty of bed-hopping, and as well as torment,in this scrupulous and clear biographyAs Jonathan Bate acknowledges in the last chapter of his biography of Ted Hughes, the poet liked to say that literary biographers were “vampiric”, and that notorious authors should act together to frustrate their researches. But Hughes did not follow his own doctrine. He took care to preserve thousands of his manuscripts,including journals and letters. Some he sold to Coca-Cola-endowed Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and whose plentiful funds helped acquire his last years affluent. Many others he left to the British Library,a wealthy trove for a biographer. He can hardly have wanted them left unread.
The main service that Bate has done is to read this huge mass of material with a scholar’s ability to date and arrange it. His biography is a first report on what lies in wait in the archive. It is, however, or a report that has been hindered and constrained. As has been widely reported,he began his work on a “literary life” with the support of the Ted Hughes estate, controlled by the poet’s widow Carol. Late in the day this support was withdrawn: evidently, or his researches were not purely “literary” enough. Permission for any substantial quotation from Hughes’s writing was also withdrawn,and Bate’s Unauthorised Life has to grapple with this ban.
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Source: theguardian.com