The Saturday Read: Lives and Letters
Inside: Ted Hughes on Sylvia Plath, the Hitch’s last interview, Edward Docx on the pandemic, Bryan Magee’s pensées, Kate Mossman, Kate Atkinson’s darktime, Hugh Grant and John Gray.
Good morning. Welcome to the Saturday Read, the New Statesman’s guide to politics, culture, books, and ideas. This is Jason.
Finn asked me to return to the Saturday Read for one more time, for one last time, to choose ten memorable pieces published during the 16 years of my editorship. I hope you enjoy the selection, which features essays, columns, poetry, fiction and interviews. Thank you for reading the Saturday Read and best wishes for Christmas and the New Year.
1—Ted Hughes: “The Last Letter”, 2010
I asked Melvyn Bragg to guest-edit an issue of the magazine in October 2010. We both wanted something special for it – and Melvyn duly delivered when he persuaded Carol Hughes, the widow of Ted Hughes, to allow us to publish a previously unseen poem by the late poet laureate. It was no ordinary poem. It was “The Last Letter”, about the final tormented days in the life of Hughes’s first wife, Sylvia Plath, who killed herself in 1963. “What happened that night? Your final night,” it begins. So personally painful was the subject of the poem that Hughes had excluded it from his 1998 collection of poems exploring his relationship with Plath, Birthday Letters. “You get a scoop like that once in a career,” a colleague said to me. The Ted Hughes estate has never granted permission for the poem to be published online but it was included in Statesmanship: The Best of the New Statesman, for which I wrote the introduction and edited (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2019; revised and updated 2021). Daniel Trilling, who worked closely with Melvyn on the issue, wrote about the poem’s publication here. A PDF of the page from the New Statesman is available below.
2—Hugh Grant: The bugger, bugged, 2011
In 2011, we had three guest-edited issues, the first of which being Jemima Khan’s (now Goldsmith) in the early spring, in what turned out to be a golden year for the New Statesman. Jemima asked her friend Hugh Grant to write a piece. He equivocated. For a long while, we did not think we would get anything from him. And then he had an idea. A good idea. He would go undercover to bug a former tabloid reporter who was now running a pub in Kent. He had once spied on and bugged the actor. Hugh would do the same to him – by secretly recording their conversation as they chatted in the pub. Let’s say the piece travelled!
3—Rowan Williams: Leader, 2011
As Jemima’s guest-edited issue was published, I was already at work on a special project with Rowan Williams, then archbishop of Canterbury. Rowan’s guest-edited magazine was wide-ranging – there were contributions from the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Gordon Brown and AS Byatt – but it was his lead editorial that received most attention. In fact, it dominated the news agenda for several days and led the main BBC bulletins. Rowan’s intervention caused a major rift between Lambeth Palace and 10 Downing Street – there were sackings! – after he denounced the Conservative-led coalition’s austerity programme. The “big society” was a “stale” slogan that was viewed with “widespread suspicion”, he wrote. He also accused Cameron and Osborne (and Clegg let’s not forget) of enacting “radical, long-term policies for which no one voted”.
4—Christopher Hitchens: The last interview, 2011
Another guest-edited issue to end 2011, this time by Richard Dawkins. Could he speak to Christopher Hitchens, who was dying from cancer at a hospital in Texas, we wondered. He could. The in-person interview was published the day after Hitchens died in December 2011. It was his last interview. As news of it travelled around the world, our website was overwhelmed with visitors and crashed repeatedly under the weight of traffic. Hitch’s final message was simple and direct: “Never be afraid of stridency.”
5—Kate Atkinson: “darktime”, 2011
We don’t publish much short fiction. But we did publish “darktime”, a dystopian satire by Kate Atkinson, in which the world is suddenly plunged into inexplicable darkness. I found the story so strange and compelling that I have often thought about it over the years, wondering whether it could have been expanded into a novel or could yet be made into a movie. You can read it in Statesmanship: The Best of the New Statesman.
To enjoy our latest analysis of politics, news and events, in addition to world-class literary and cultural reviews, click here to subscribe to the New Statesman. You'll enjoy all of the New Statesman's online content, ad-free podcasts and invitations to NS events.
6—Clive James: “Driftwood Houses”, 2014
We published several notable poems by Clive James during the final years of his life as he struggled with leukaemia, bouts of pneumonia and chronic emphysema. James had a late-career flourishing as a poet. He was too ill to travel or get out much and spent long days at home in Cambridge, reading, writing and re-evaluating his life. When you are waiting to die, one course of action, James said, was “inaction”. The other is “to go on working, as if you have all the time in the world”. In “Driftwood Houses” he recalls a distant family holiday and contrasts the happiness he felt then as his daughters gathered shells on a beach with his current plight: “I’ve hit a wall.” There are expressions of sadness and loss, but the final line suggests contentment: “As I lie restless yet most blessed of men.”
7—Kate Mossman: The curious afterlife of Terence Trent D’Arby, 2015
In 2015 our star interviewer Kate Mossman travelled to Milan to meet the man who used to be called Terence Trent D’Arby, a strikingly handsome pop-funk singer whose debut album sold one million copies in the first three days of release. But then in 1995 he changed his name to Sananda Maitreya after a series of dreams. “I was killed when I was 27,” he told Kate. And yet, he is still alive. But he is no longer Terence Trent D’Arby, and Kate was asked not to mention that name. Who was he now? Kate’s interview became an online sensation on publication and is one of the most read pieces on our website.
8—John Gray: The closing of the liberal mind, 2016
The great John Gray is liberalism’s most penetrating critic. In a series of essays in the New Statesman, published throughout my editorship, John has analysed why Western liberal elites kept losing elections they expected to win and why their policies and positions have created the blowback that they now call populism. From being the vanguard of the future, John wrote in 2016, the year of Brexit and Trump’s first presidential victory, the liberal order is crumbling. “But they insist that the solution to the crisis of liberalism is clear. What is needed is more of the same.” Well, Kamala Harris believed that too, with predictable results.
9—Ed Docx: The peak, 2020
Is this the best piece of creative non-fiction written during the pandemic years? The novelist Ed Docx writes from the perspective of Dr Jim Down, a consultant at a Covid ICU unit at University College Hospital in London during the first peak of the pandemic. It is a 7,000-word work of non-fiction but has the psychological complexity and imaginative power of fiction. Not only does Docx tell us what it is like to be Dr Jim Down, he imaginatively becomes him as people all around in the Covid ward are “ill with the same new disease”. Even as they work in the ICU unit, Docx writes, “the staff are all dealing with the fear of actually dying themselves”.
10—Bryan Magee: Pensées, 2021
I admired Magee for his work as a populariser of philosophy, public educator and communicator of complex ideas. This edited selection of some of the thoughts and observations written in his private notebooks (shared with me by his literary executor Henry Hardy) over many years reveals the interests and obsessions familiar to anyone who has read his books or watched his BBC TV series Men of Ideas and The Great Philosophers. I selected, ordered and numbered these thoughts, or pensées – Magee called them “notes” – as he would have wished. “If a day comes when I prepare them for publication, I shall try to put them into an order that adds to their readability, and will then renumber them,” he wrote. “If anyone else performs this task he should do the same thing.” He wanted each one numbered, “but only to make it possible to refer to it without having to quote it”. My selection reveals a mind working away at the same intractable dilemmas and grappling with the fundamental questions of being.
And with that…
Thanks to Jason for a wonderful list, and to all our readers and subscribers. The Saturday Read will return on 11 January. Merry Christmas.
—Finn
The New Statesman is home to the finest writing on politics, culture and ideas. To stay up to date, subscribe using the link above.
Always a gem somewhere in your collections!
On Kate Atkinson, Dark Time
I once dreamed the apocalypse was approaching so the scientists flooded the sky with chemicals to partially block sunlight. Unfortunately the chemicals combined in unforeseen ways that completely blocked out the sun. In a panic the US launched a rocket to punch through the darkness. It succeeded as a hole opened up letting in the life supporting sunlight. But equally as quickly the hole snapped shut and we were left in the cold blackness. Was this a dream or a nightmare?