Ted Hughes and John Carey: a healing

The poet, Ted Hughes, we are told by the editor of his letters, never again spoke to the Sunday Times reviewer and polemical Oxford professor, John Carey, after a row over Hughes's critical work 'Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being'.

Carey admired Hughes's poetry but considered his trespassing on to this professorial patch as 'critically worthless'.

There followed one of those acid exchanges of letters in The Sunday Times, much beloved by all literary editors  - and then, it seems, silence.

The newly published selection of Hughes's massive correspondence reveal a touching attempt by the Poet Laureate to put the matter to rest.

Hughes concludes a letter to Carey just before he died: 'Please don't write back. Let's just leave things to heal over as for me they have done'.

Carey did write back, the book's editor Christopher Reid tells us. But Hughes may have been too ill to read what he wrote.

Yesterday in the Sunday Times Carey wrote back in public, powerfully praising Hughes's poetic legacy and touching gently too his somewhat eccentric views on the links between poetry and the body.

"He could tell, just from reading the plays, that Shakespeare “obviously” suffered from irregular heart rhythm. Poetry, like the “magnetism” of a faith healer, could repair damaged cells, whereas prose could do the opposite.

After being diagnosed with cancer, he came to think that writing his prose treatise Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being had destroyed his immune system.

Ever since the 17th century, English society had, he believed, mounted a systematic campaign of censorship and prohibition to stamp out truths like these, and to impose its puritanical restrictions on sexuality, which alone “carries the seeds of humanity and joy”.

He knew his beliefs exposed him to ridicule, but his letters make us see how vital they were for his poetry".

Carey does not mention his own part in this late-life drama for Hughes. But the passion of it comes through all the same.

Curiously, I had thought of mentioning the row in the review of the Letters I wrote the day before in The Times.

I'm very pleased I did not.

A healing over?

Yes, a very elegant healing.

Comments

[Andrew Kenneally]

I confess to having lost all esteem for John Carey after he used what was supposed to be a review of a biography on Aldous Huxley as an opportunity to write an extended character assasination on one of the great figures of the last century, described as "One of Western intellectualism's finest flowerings" by Thomas Mann, and in the words of Cyril Connolly, "He radiates both intelligence and serene goodness."
Every word of Carey's "review" was aimed at attacking Huxley, including, in the presumed absence of anything of substance, resorting to mentiuoning Huxley's wearing of good suits.
What is it about such a man who towers way beyond Carey's very meagre intellectual capacities that provokes such antipathy. Perhaps much of the truth is revealed in the words of another great 20th century figure- the Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky- from his film Stalker:
"Calling themselves intellectuals, these writers and scientists. They believe in nothing. The organ with which one believe is atrophied for lack of use."
Huxley as the incarnate opposite of this squalid vision had the honour of being the target of the Careys of this world.

[Dion Per Sona]

What good are the Arts? Quite good, actually : http://www.worldcantwait.net/images/ads/iran_quiz_ad_poster.pdf

[Candadai Tirumalai]

Unlike Matthew Arnold, Professor John Carey does not write poetry. All the same I think of him as a figure in the Arnoldian tradition, linking criticism and literature in a wide and long perspective. During my twenty years of residence in Oxford, he was for me one of its vital, memorable presences. He is known for speaking his mind in reviews; at the same time, as his relationship with Ted Hughes shows, he is a man of humane feeling.