Fishing Led To Interview With Poet Hughes

Ted Hughes is one of the luminaries of late-20th-century British poetry. His poems are intense, masculine, mythic, even brutal, and reflect Hughes' fierce identification with the workings of the natural world.

Now the last interview with this famously private man appears in the current edition of a Seattle-based magazine, a revealing talk with the celebrated poet who bonded with his interviewer, not over poetry, but his love of fishing.

Thomas R. Pero, editor of the fishing magazine Wild Steelhead and Salmon, didn't know much about Ted Hughes until he heard him read four years ago in Vancouver, B.C. "He was just electric in person," Pero recalls. "He held the entire room enrapt in a way I'd never seen before - never. It's almost as if he were possessed."

Pero found out that night that he shared an intense interest in fishing with the British poet laureate. Through a mutual friend he learned that Hughes often visited British Columbia in the summers to fish the salmon streams. Pero figured that a sports fisherman who was such a charismatic speaker would make a great interview for Wild Steelhead and Salmon, so he asked his friend to propose it. To his surprise, Hughes agreed.

When Pero got the news, he knew he had something special. What he didn't know was how revealing and sought-after their talk on sports fishing would be. Pero, somewhat naively, had just landed the final interview with a man famous for not talking to the press.

Over the years, Hughes' excellence as a poet never caused as much furor as the story of his marriage to the American poet Sylvia Plath. Their relationship was itself a kind of poetry: primal, inexorable and ill-fated as Greek tragedy.

The two met at a literary party in Cambridge in 1956, while Plath was in England as a Fulbright scholar. Sparks flew and they married soon afterward. For a while, they were a golden couple - beautiful, vibrant, superbly gifted. Their poetry began to draw acclaim.

Plath, however, had attempted suicide before she met Hughes and was still struggling with emotional problems. During the next several years the couple had two children, but the marriage grew increasingly turbulent. Finally, Hughes moved out and two months later, in February 1963, Plath killed herself. In 1969, Assia Wevel, the woman Hughes left Plath for, committed suicide, also taking the life of their young daughter.

Hughes withdrew from public contact. He remarried in 1970 but refused to speak to reporters about his personal life, and never defended himself against the blame heaped on him for Plath's death. Then, a year ago, without explanation, Hughes for the first time revealed some of his feelings about Plath in his book "Birthday Letters," a collection of intimate poems devoted to the abiding power of his connection to her. The book instantly refueled an international debate about the couple's private life.

At the time "Birthday Letters" was published, no one outside the poet's immediate circle knew that he was terminally ill with cancer. He died in October.

Meanwhile, a few years had already elapsed since Pero had interviewed Hughes at his friend's home in Vancouver, B.C. Pero was in New York planning upcoming issues of Wild Steelhead and Salmon with his associate editor when he heard the news of Hughes' death. They had just scheduled the Hughes interview for an upcoming edition.

In the interview, Hughes spoke at length about his childhood passion for fishing and hunting, how it connected to his dreams and his poetry - and his marriage to Plath. "I remember the day before I got married the first time," Hughes told Pero. "I hooked a pike in my dream. I hooked it at tremendous depth. As it came up, its head filled the lake. I brought it out and its girth filled the entire lake . . . And I was backing up, dragging the thing out. And this great pike was . . ."

Hughes stopped and Pero couldn't resist asking: "And you still got married?"

Realizing now how important the interview had become, Pero decided it deserved a larger audience than his fishing magazine could offer. He sent it to a few editors, who quickly snapped it up. The Guardian in Britain and the German paper Die Welt have since published excerpts from the interview - which appears in full in the current edition of Wild Steelhead and Salmon. The New Yorker wanted to publish the interview, but insisted on an exclusive deal. Pero turned down the prestigious magazine. He couldn't give up the biggest story his magazine had ever had.

Pero has already received more than a hundred responses to the interview from an array of people, including the European Bureau Chief of Forbes magazine, who called the interview "one of the best literary coups I've seen in recent years." Another e-mail came from British composer and music director Adrian Lee, currently rehearsing the Royal Shakespeare Company in a dramatization of Hughes' "Tales From Ovid."

What everyone wonders is why would Hughes, who almost never gave interviews, have such an extensive talk with the editor of a little-known fishing magazine? Simple, Pero said: because he loved fishing. But even more because he knew he wasn't going to be tricked into talking about Plath. "Hughes opened up and revealed so much of himself because we were talking about the source of his enjoyment and passion," Pero said. "It gave me an edge somebody else wouldn't have had. Over the years he turned down countless, countless interviews - went out of his way to avoid in some cases horrifying question-and-answer sessions all leading to Sylvia Plath. He was sick of it . . . He was just treated like a dog. There's no question he carried this huge burden."

Pero said that talking to Hughes changed the way he saw Hughes' work. "My ability to speak with him in that one brief session, the way he addressed the questions, demonstrated to me that this guy was the genuine article - that he was authentic and that everything he wrote - at the risk of cliche - was from the heart. He slit a vein and it came out. He didn't hold much back. He put everything into his work. Maybe that explains his reticence, in addition to all the harassment that he was forced to endure. It's there; it's in his poetry. If you want to know Ted Hughes, read his poetry."