Every love affair delivers a hostage to fortune. In the first full flush of passion it may seem that the beloved's name is "written in the stars", as Emma Tennant has it, but in time even the clearest night sky clouds over. From the beginning women have been weeping over men. Ariadne walks by the waves of Naxos bemoaning the loss of fickle Theseus, and Dido's lament for Aeneas echoes down the ages, living proof that men were deceivers ever, of themselves no less than of the girls they love and leave behind them.
Even the great ones among us can be fools for love. Rumours about Ted Hughes's womanising had been in the air since the controversial suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, 36 years ago, and the subsequent suicide of his partner Assia, who not only killed herself but also her daughter by Hughes. Now comes hard evidence of his philandering, from what many would consider an unlikely source. This is the third volume of Emma Tennant's diaries. She is a novelist of considerable talent, but as a diarist she is no Virginia Woolf, and these desultory records of her days and doings over the past 50 years or so are no literary landmarks, and probably are not meant to be. "Freshness" is the rather jaded word that springs to mind, for she writes in an almost teen-mag tone that is hard to resist.
The Tennants are an aristocratic if somewhat disreputable family; Emma's uncle was the eccentric Stephen Tennant, an exquisite and aesthete who as he grew older turned into a bedridden puffball, though famously he did not mind being fat, declaring that it could only be to the advantage of the world in general that there was now so much more of him. Emma Tennant has mixed with many of the great and good, and bad, in the English literary world of the 1960s and 1970s. The seeming frivolousness of her writing carries the reader so lightly through the corridors of literary power and privilege that only at the end, when in the closing pages the diary takes a leap forward to 1998, does one come to acknowledge that this young woman was for some two decades one of the true insiders at the court of contemporary English literature. Every aspiring scribbler dreams of getting into bed with great writing; Emma Tennant did so, literally.
This volume opens in the spring of 1973, when the diarist is about to move from ultra-fashionable Chelsea to the then still uncharted hinterland of Notting Hill. There is mention of "the new baby", and it is to be assumed that when she speaks of the "we" who will be moving house she is not employing the royal plural, but that is about all we are going to get of Tennant's private life, for which we should be thankful.
The first word she sets down is, appropriately, "Wham!" as the bundled manuscript of J.G. Ballard's subsequently notorious novel Crash crashes on to her bed. Her portrait here of the enigmatic Ballard is charming, and persuasive, as are the thumbnail sketches of the various eccentrics who inhabit the crepuscular little-magazine world over which she presides: Heathcote Williams, whose Afro hairstyle had been described as a "pubic explosion", Barry Miles, biographer of the Beats ("He is so hip he gives off no frequency"), the determinedly exotic Angela Carter ("her hair streamed or rather floated around her head, white and grey"), Caroline Blackwood, the novelist and widow of Robert Lowell, "who has the looks of a drowned beauty and drinks, drinks, drinks . . . "
In the 1970s Tennant edited the mildly subversive literary magazine Bananas, which published many fine writers including Ballard and Carter - and Ted Hughes. From the start, it seems, Hughes had fixed his basilisk eye on the blonde and beautiful Emma - she had once been a model - and she quickly realises that it is only a matter of time before the basilisk will get his claws into her too. She is understandably nervous, given the Hughes body-count, yet she knows, despite the "new baby" and the faceless other half of that "we", that she will not be able to resist this most fascinating of men. Hughes arranges for her to speak at the Arvon Poetry Foundation, "Ted's kingdom where his wonderful voice and extraordinary looks reign as in a fairy story, in bright, crude colours to which one can hardly fail to respond". There is quite a bit of this sort of gush - people in love are always embarrassing - though one cannot but admire Tennant's candour in leaving stand these passages written by a younger and more breathless self, even if she was in her late thirties at the time.
VERY soon Hughes has brought her to his love-nest, a grim little flat on Fortress Road in Tufnell Park - there is not much poetry in adultery - her first visit to which is affectingly described in a section headed "The Fiasco". Paralysed at finding herself in bed with a legend, she discovers that
I am, shamingly, no longer able to control my need to be seen not as a lover but as a promising pupil. `Can you explain metaphor to me?' I say in a high, forced voice. Ted pulls back. I tell myself to stop, but it seems I must expose my pathetic ignorance of the simplest terms and lose this moment of passion, as the women's magazines would surely have it, at the same time.
One hopes, though with misgiving, that the comedy here is not unintentional. Despite the fiasco, the affair eventually does get going, in an on-off sort of way. Then there comes on to the scene the "bouncy Australian" with whom Hughes has already been consorting on trips to London away from farm and wife. The high, or low, point of this section of the diaries is a grotesque dinner party to which Hughes invites Tennant, given by the Australian and her flatmate, both of whom are openly contemptuous of Ted's latest. The reader will find it hard to understand why Tennant consented to be humiliated in this way, but not harder than she finds it herself.
In her portrait of Hughes Tennant is at once dewy- and beady-eyed. Hughes's mesmerising attractiveness and sexual energy are amply attested to - though with admirable restraint - yet one cannot but wonder at his apparent willingness to use his poetic talent as a ploy for pulling girls. Reading these pages, one reflects that sometimes "shaman" is merely a long way of saying "sham". But then, does anyone's love-life bear close inspection? If Ted Hughes had known that his lover was not only keeping a diary, but would one day publish it, he would surely have been more circumspect.
Things turn dark, as they always do. Ted and Emma drift apart, meet again, inconclusively. In 1980, the "year of evil fortune", she finds a lump in her breast, and cancer is diagnosed. She recovers, but the light of those bright days of the 1970s is gone. When she hears of Hughes's death from cancer in 1998, she remembers his sister Olwyn saying of him, "Ted is very long-distance", and wonders if he will somehow get in touch with her again. Then one twilight, thinking of him, she encounters, of all things, a dog fox, Hughes's most emblematic creature of the wild. "I look at it; it looks unblinking back at me. Then I go home . . . "
This is a bittersweet little record of a charmed moment in the life of an unpretentious and loving woman, generously spiced with pungent anecdotes of the literary world. Whether she should have revealed the details of her affair with a fine poet and complicated man - and one so lately dead, at that - is a matter for the reader to decide. The title of this volume refers to Hughes's destruction of Sylvia Plath's diaries; perhaps Emma Tennant should have taken a leaf out of his burning book.
John Banville is a novelist and Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times