Half a Truth in Jonathan Bate’s Biography of Ted Hughes

Any biographer worth anything knows that you do the best you can. There is no whole truth, because there’s always one more source you could interview, one more unseen text you could track down or one more familiar text you could read in an unfamiliar way, one more way to alter the context or the point of view.

Even so, some of the truths of biography are half-truths at best, and that’s the case with the passage in Jonathan Bate’s new biography of Ted Hughes about how Hughes came to make his translation of the Metamorphoses, published as Tales from Ovid and later awarded the Whitbread Prize.

I was involved in the process, as an editor with FSG, who worked on the book with the editor-in-chief, Jonathan Galassi, and there’s simply more to the story – a good deal more – than Bate reports in his biography (which is already being challenged by Ted Hughes’ widow, Carol, as thick with factual errors).

There’s a whole American side to the Ovid story that Bate, a don in England, overlooks.

Bate sets up the story well enough: the poets Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun invited Hughes “to contribute to a book in which some three dozen eminent British poets (and a handful of Americans) would each translate one or two Ovidian tales,” and Hughes, “offered a choice of three stories, did them all. And a fourth …

“Suddenly in Ovid he found a way of writing myth with a lightness of touch – something that had eluded him in the dark years of Crow and Cave Birds.”

Here’s where there is more to the story. Bate quotes Michael Hofmann’s story – told in the Times – that Hofmann read Hughes’s contributions with awe, and that, “standing by the telephone to appease his sense of urgency, he read the thirty or forty pages straight through and scribbled a note to Ted urging him `to go on and do an Ovid book all of his own.‘”

I don’t doubt that Hofmann felt that awe and wrote that note. But as I understand it, Tales from Ovid didn’t come about at Hofmann’s instigation. It happened this way.

Jonathan Galassi and I were at lunch at a sidewalk table near Union Square. I had spent the previous summer working on Robert Pinsky’s translation of The Inferno of Dante. Published over Christmas, the book had become a bestseller of a kind. Over lunch, Jonathan – a translator himself – mused aloud about how we could follow it up with another strong translation.

The previous summer, I’d also worked on Hofmann and Lasdun’s After Ovid, making a typescript from the translations that came in, generally by fax machine, many directly from the poets – a complicated business, because, as English writers, they were using A4 paper, and it gummed up the fax machine, which was set for the shorter 8 ½ by 11-inch paper. It was aesthetically involving but practically tedious work, especially in summertime – and recognizing this, Paul Muldoon, one of the contributors, called late one afternoon and offered me his spare ticket to a Pink Floyd concert at Yankee Stadium in order to get me out of the office.

So it was that I had stood by the fax machine for long stretches as Ted Hughes’ contributions to After Ovid came in: in four batches, as I recall, which left the impression that Hughes, emboldened by the first, couldn’t stop, and went right on to the next one.

Over lunch, I told Jonathan about this, and right away the idea was there: Let’s ask Ted Hughes to do the whole Metamorphoses . . .

Back at the office, Jonathan sat right down at his desk and rapped out a letter to Ted, indicating that it would be a book we would do in partnership with Faber & Faber (as was usual with Ted’s books) and one that we could actually pay a decent amount of money for. I faxed the letter to Ted at Court Green, his house in Devon.

The reply came the next morning, and Jonathan came into my office, exultant: “He’s going to do it! He’s going to do it …”

A second reply came not long afterward – from Christopher Reid, Faber’s poetry editor. Of course, Christopher was pleased that the house’s most famous poet was committing to do a major new book. But he was amused, and even a bit miffed, that the suggestion had come from FSG, not from Faber – which had published Hughes since 1957. He said that it was as if he had asked Joseph Brodsky – FSG’s most famous poet – to translate Eugene Onegin and Joseph had said yes straight off.

Hughes translated a big batch of Tales from Ovid. Faber, sensing a bestseller and prizewinner – and rightly – rushed it out. Hofmann reviewed it for the London Times, telling how it had come about.

And the rest is (literary) history.

At FSG we set the book in fresh type, and our tallish, narrow edition caught Hughes’s fancy: a couple of weeks before he died in 1998, he sent a fax asking me to send a batch of our edition for him to inscribe to friends and people he loved – the people he was leaving behind.

Those faxed letters are probably in the FSG archives, awaiting a future biographer.

16 October 2015