Hughes’s mother Edith was a Farrar. The family featured prominently in English literary history. Nicholas Ferrar, after whom Hughes would name his son, published George Herbert’s The Temple and helped found the village of Little Gidding, which inspired T. S. Eliot’s famous poem in Four Quartets. The Puritans eventually destroyed the contemplative community; Hughes traced his opposition to English Puritanism, in all its forms, to this ancestral rupture. The Farrars would rise to prominence in West Yorkshire, too. Hughes’s mother and her siblings grew up on the edge of poverty—Edith was one of six children raised in a tiny rented two-bedroom cottage in Hebden Bridge (two siblings died in infancy)—but her brothers, Walter and Thomas, became two of the wealthiest men in the Calder Valley. Hughes’s uncle Walt, whose eldest son died of pneumonia, developed a close relationship with his teenage nephew, whom he took on driving trips to Ireland and the Continent; he occasionally stuffed wads of cash into Ted’s pocket.
Walter and Thomas Farrar fought in the First World War, while Edith left school at the age of thirteen to become a machinist at a local mill. She met William (Billy) Hughes when he was home on leave from the war in 1916, and they married in 1920. The family settled in Hebden Bridge in a row house by the railroad tracks, where Gerald was born; Olwyn followed eight years later. The family then moved to Mytholmroyd, where several other Farrar relatives were already living. Ted was born there on August 17, 1930, at 1 Aspinall Street in a second-floor bedroom overlooking a muck-filled lane.11
A few miles east of Hebden Bridge, the smaller village of Mytholmroyd lay at the base of the Calder Valley, surrounded by rolling green hills and high moorland that promised respite from the factory smog below. Hughes would later mythologize this area as Elmet, Britain’s last Celtic kingdom, in his collection Remains of Elmet. Here, among the steep hills and shifting light, young Ted spent hours hunting and exploring with his older brother, Gerald. Together they scrambled up the footpaths to the imaginary grave of the “Ancient Briton” in Redacre Wood, slid down the steep packhorse slopes in winter, and listened to their echoes under the “long tunnel ceiling” of the nearby canal bridge. Ted’s boyhood friend Donald Crossley remembered Ted’s propensity for mischief: he put mice and frogs down girls’ backs, threw rocks at the derelict Empress Foundry, and once tied Donald up to a tree for hours during a game of “Red Indian.” Ted and Donald fished in the Rochdale Canal, just a few feet from Ted’s house, with homemade nets made from old lace curtains. (They tried to keep the fish as pets in jam jars, but they always died.) Once Ted painted a skull and crossbones on the outside of his house and, upon completion, let out a booming laugh. That laugh, and the bravado of its timbre, astonished and delighted the neighborhood boys. The memory of it stayed with Donald all his life.12 He recalled his friend’s magnetism: “Ted had that great lock of black hair when he was younger—Errol Flynn he was, really. Smart looking lad. So we can understand that lots of women would fall for him. Even myself, I must admit—goodness knows what it was like for a woman; if you fell in love with Ted it were God help them, really….if a room were full of people it was much more valuable when Ted was in that room.”13
Hughes always remembered the Calder Valley as a childhood paradise, the Heaneyesque omphalos of his psycho-geography. He eventually purchased a home there in 1970 called Lumb Bank (now the Ted Hughes Arvon Centre). But his relationship to the area grew more complicated as he matured. He encouraged Donald’s teenage daughter Ruth to get out of the Calder Valley and see the wider world. “I remember him telling me that if I was curious about something, I should get on a bus and go and see it first hand—get experience of it myself, even if my parents couldn’t take me,” Ruth said. “My overwhelming memories of him were of a very generous, caring and locally well-liked man, but who had a definite mysterious side.”14 Wilfrid Riley, the son of “Dick Straightup,” a local character Hughes immortalized in Lupercal, remembered Ted as warm, “not at all standoffish,” good company in the pub. But he seemed to have a different set of “morals” and “ways” that set him apart from the locals.15 As much as Hughes’s family and community drew him back to the Calder Valley, they prevented him from living freely and anonymously. In later years, after Plath’s death, Hughes would turn to the west of Ireland, and Irish friends like Barrie Cooke and Seamus Heaney, for restoration and solace.
Gerald Hughes, ten years older than Ted, remembered the Depression years in Mytholmroyd as a “desperate period, which cannot be imagined by anyone who has not experienced it….How we managed to exist on such a low income I do not know.”16 The textile industry that had been the area’s main economy for centuries had collapsed, and the whole of the Calder Valley—decimated by horrific losses during the First World War—seemed to Hughes a graveyard. Nearly half the thirty thousand local men who had joined the Lancashire Fusiliers never came home. He captures the gloom in “First, Mills”:
The whole land was quietly drained.
Everything became very quiet.
Then the hills were requisitioned
For gravemounds.
The towns and the villages were sacked.17
Ted’s father, Billy, was one of only seventeen regimental survivors of Gallipoli (a book in his shirt pocket had stopped a bullet). He was later awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal at Ypres, where he rescued wounded men from no-man’s land. In his poems, Hughes sometimes portrayed his father as a stoic, taciturn Yorkshireman, though Gerald remembered him “casually” telling war stories.18 Contemporaries remembered Billy Hughes as talkative and gregarious. He was a legendary local footballer—Wilfrid Riley remembered him as “a great sportsman in his day, very well known about here.”19 He might have played professionally, but chose the steadier (and, at that time, better paying) route of work and family. He was traditional, and considered his son’s literary achievements with a mixture of pride and skepticism. Wilfrid Riley remembered Billy talking about how he had grown up working with his hands and complaining that the new generation wasn’t “producing something in a solid form.” Referring to Ted’s writing, Billy said, “I don’t understand getting all this pay for such little effort after the way we worked.”20
Gerald remembered that the family “ate lots of porridge” and the occasional rabbit he shot. Hunting was not for sport: it was a necessity. Gerald left school at fourteen to work at his uncle Walt’s clothing factory. Walt had joined forces with a partner, John Sutcliffe, to found one of the most successful businesses in the area, while Edith supplanted the family’s “sparse budget” by taking in extra sewing.21 There was no plumbed bathroom or central heating at 1 Aspinall Street, but there was a large bathtub in the small kitchen. Ted and Gerald shared the attic room, with its skylight overlooking Scout Rock, a local landmark that exerted a strong pull on Hughes’s imagination. The immense stone bulk of the Mount Zion Primitive Methodist Church, where the family worshipped, sat across the street. It blocked the sun and moon and provided Hughes with a perfect metaphor for Christianity’s antagonistic relationship to nature. As a child in the 1930s, he longed to get up the valley and escape the pollution of the dark satanic mills below. The air grew clearer and quieter the higher he climbed. Up near Sugarloaf, the sounds of birds, sheep, and cows replaced lumbering trains and mill clatter.
When Ted was young, there were children’s encyclopedias on the family bookshelf and not much else. But Edith had a literary bent—she loved Wordsworth and told elaborate stories to her children. Later, Ted would impress Sylvia with his ability to “spin a yarn” in the Irish tradition. He inherited, too, his mother’s interest in the sixth sense. Her family believed that she had the “second sight”: she had seen a cross burning in the sky on D-Day. Edith, whom Gerald described as selfless and “marvellously even-tempered,” wrote poetry about the Yorkshire countryside, while Billy enjoyed reciting Longfellow’s Hiawatha.22 (Ted would later recite it to local tuberculosis patients.) Gerald remembered that his mother was “always keen t
o try and develop our artistic abilities.”23 When one of Ted’s teachers told Edith of his writing ability, she bought him, he remembered, a “whole library—second hand—of classic poets.”24 She was nearly as ambitious for her talented son as Aurelia was for her daughter.
Billy Hughes had worked for his brother-in-law at the Sutcliffe-Farrar textile factory, but his hours were cut during the Depression. He then worked as a migrant joiner in Wales, coming home once a month to see his family. Though Edith’s mother, sister, and brother all lived in Mytholmroyd, hers was a difficult life. As a child, Ted sometimes heard her weeping to herself as she sewed. In 1938, after carefully considering several local opportunities, the Hugheses bought a newsagent’s shop in Mexborough, in southeast Yorkshire, with a family loan of £340.25
Mexborough—surrounded by mining pits and inhabited by colliers prone to drink and violence—was so polluted that the stars in the night sky were always obscured. (Ted was amazed by his first clear, star-filled night during a school trip to Switzerland.) Yet its location in “England’s Ruhr Valley” meant that it had almost no unemployment during the late 1930s. It was home to twenty thousand people, most of whom worked in the coal, steel, and rail industries and had some disposable income to spend on candy, magazines, and tobacco. The Hughes children were never hungry, even during wartime rationing, when Billy Hughes bartered tobacco for meat. Poorer local boys envied Ted, who sat on his family’s store counter sucking on candy and reading magazines while they delivered newspapers for his father.26
The move from Mytholmroyd to Mexborough shocked Ted’s siblings. His older sister, Olwyn, cried for two weeks. Gerald had no intention of living in a place where the air still reeked of the emptied pits and old men spat black phlegm onto the streets. He headed south for Devon to become a gamekeeper and would eventually immigrate to Australia. Ted, just seven, was less troubled by the move. Boys’ adventure magazines and cowboy films replaced hunting expeditions in the Calder Valley, though he soon found country retreats around Mexborough—the pastoral farmland near Old Denaby and the secluded private park of the Crookhill sanatorium, where he became close with the caretaker’s family, the Wholeys. There, he would shoot, fish, or relax under a shady tree with a book. Edna Wholey, whom he courted in the 1940s, remembered idyllic summer days at Crookhill spent with her head in Ted’s lap as he read to her from Greek translations.27
Edith Hughes was determined to send her gifted son and daughter to Mexborough Grammar School, which charged a modest fee and catered to the area’s brighter pupils. There, Ted thrived under the tutelage of two English teachers, Pauline Mayne and John Fisher, who taught him about poetry and tutored him for the Cambridge exams. Fisher’s influence was as important to Hughes as Crockett’s was to Plath—perhaps more, as Ted was a rather lazy student who did his best work for teachers he liked. Hughes’s biographer Steve Ely described Fisher, an ex-Navy man, as “quirky, unconventional…a non-conformist” who often wore a “bohemian” turtleneck instead of the usual schoolteacher’s jacket and tie. Fisher wore his hair in “a floppy fringe that frequently fell across his forehead,” which lent him an air of “Byronic frisson”—a look Hughes made his own.28 On Sunday evenings, Ted and Olwyn often visited the Fishers, with whom they discussed art and literature and listened to Beethoven, much as Plath did with the Crocketts. As a teenager, Hughes took up Fisher’s aesthetic obsessions—“Shakespeare, Yeats, Beethoven, Hopkins, the Bible, mythology, the war poets.”29 It was Fisher who presented Hughes with Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, which, Hughes later told Graves, became “the chief holy book of my conscience” before he went up to Cambridge.30
Ted, who had been obsessed with Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter as a boy, had also been “swallowed alive by Yeats”; discovering The Wanderings of Oisin in the Mexborough school library had been something akin, he said, to “trauma”—such was the force of the revelation. “From that point, my animal kingdom, the natural world, the world of folktales and myth, and poetry, became a single thing—and Yeats was my model.”31 He eventually learned all of Yeats’s poems by heart. D. H. Lawrence was Hughes’s other “holy” writer in his teens. “His writings coloured a whole period of my life,” Hughes recalled.32 Lawrence’s poem “Glory” left a foundational mark on some of Hughes’s most famous animal poems, “The Hawk in the Rain,” “Hawk Roosting,” and “The Jaguar”:
Most of his time, the tiger pads and slouches in a burning peace.
And the small hawk high up turns round on the slow pivot of peace.
Peace comes from behind the sun, with the peregrine falcon, and the owl.
Yet all of these drink blood.33
Ted liked to present himself as a maverick, but at Mexborough he became a school proctor and sub-editor, along with Olwyn, of the school literary magazine, The Don and Dearne, where he published his work from 1946 to 1950. He also wrote, cast, and directed the annual Christmas revue in 1948, which featured the kind of “Pythonesque” humor that Fisher favored.34 Hughes’s high school record shows, if not a stellar performance like Plath’s, a concentrated effort to succeed where it mattered most. Like Sylvia, he valued success.
After Gerald left home, Ted “came under the influence,” as he put it, of his older sister—precocious and literary, with a “forceful personality.”35 Olwyn gave him Jung’s Psychological Types, which, like The White Goddess, deeply influenced his burgeoning aesthetic. From Jung, Hughes learned, as he later told a critic, “that most neuroses, of individuals and of our cultures,” were the result of “loss of contact” with the “primitive human animal.”36 He later owned seventeen volumes of Jung.
Between Olwyn’s influence and his teachers’ prodding, Ted grew “totally confident” that he would become a poet.37 By high school he had devoured the work of Lawrence and could recite long stretches of Shakespeare, Kipling, Yeats, Longfellow, Shelley, Eliot, Thomas, and Hopkins by heart. He filled teenage exercise notebooks with Irish folklore, proverbs, and myth (“If a warrior drinks the milk of a fairy woman he is invulnerable”) and wrote, like the young Sylvia, a considerable amount about fairies.38 He was writing his own poetry too, “long lolloping Kiplingesque sagas.” When his teacher Pauline Mayne singled out his description of a gun “breaking in the cold ‘with frost-chilled snap,’ ” Hughes thought, “well, if that’s poetry that’s the way I think so I can give you no end of it.”39 He became known as the school poet; he and another friend called themselves “the intelligentsia.”40
Despite the headmaster’s skepticism, Mr. Fisher decided to put Hughes up for a spot at Cambridge in 1948. Hughes passed the Cambridge entrance exams, but Fisher included a book of Ted’s poems with his Pembroke College application for good measure. Hughes always felt that his poems tipped the balance, and credited Fisher with his admission to Cambridge. Recent scholarship has debunked this myth: Ted had to earn his place at Cambridge just like everyone else.
Hughes spent the next two years, October 1949 to October 1951, fulfilling his national service as a Royal Air Force ground wireless mechanic at a remote radar station in Patrington, East Yorkshire. The work was “undemanding, solitary, often nocturnal,” and left him with many hours to read.41 Little action came to Patrington: one night Hughes panicked after he heard what he thought was the sound of a nuclear bomb exploding over the radio, later to learn it was the sound of sheep being sheared. He wrote short stories and an early Gravesian poem, “Song,” which he dedicated to a young local woman who remembered him as “moody,” “a thinker.”42 (He signed it “Disciple of the Daemonic.”) He wrote the poem before he read Graves’s The White Goddess and before, as he later told a friend, “I stepped into the actual psychological space of contemporary literature, smogged as that is by the critical exhalations and toxic smokestacks and power stations of Academe….It is the one song I sang in Arcadia.”43 He devoured Shakespeare, but also Yeats and Irish folklore. His sense of his Celtic roots and identity deepened in Patrington, whe
re he became close friends with three young servicemen from Ireland and Scotland.
The fact that my father’s father, whom I never knew, was Irish, had never figured in the family mythology….However, once out of Yorkshire I found myself drawn to Scots and Irish, but particularly to Irish people….When after National Service I moved to Cambridge University, and found myself a “guest” of a people that were every bit as strange to me as they were to any Irish or Scotsman, I immediately, the first day, attached myself to an Irishman [Terence McCaughey].44
As the critic James Underwood has noted, Hughes arrived at Pembroke College, Cambridge, in October 1951 “already resistant to what he found there”—and willing to challenge the very foundations of the English literary establishment.45
* * *
IN FEBRUARY 1952, Ted described Cambridge to Olwyn as at turns “wonderful” and a ditch “where all the frogs have died.”46 He had already decided to become a poet, even if it meant poverty, and experienced none of the torturous, gendered conflicts that made Plath doubt her literary ambition. Writing was holy discipline to him, just as it was to Plath, yet he cared little about his future prosperity. Nor did he make much attempt, unlike Plath, to publish his poetry at Cambridge. When Granta finally published his poem “The Little Boys and the Seasons” in June 1954—his first acceptance—he used a pseudonym, Daniel Hearing. He published “Song of the Sorry Lovers” that same month in Chequer under another pseudonym, Peter Crew.47 He did not have, as his friend Daniel Huws put it, “American expectations.”48
Red Comet Page 60