While other Cambridge undergraduates imitated Sebastian Flyte from Brideshead Revisited, Ted loathed flashiness. Contemporaries like Brian Cox, who later founded the influential literary journal Critical Quarterly, remembered him as tall and “craggily handsome.” (Anne Sexton would later call him “Ted Huge.”) He wore gray flannel trousers and a black corduroy jacket, or, in inclement weather, his uncle’s World War I leather jacket. Cox said he “radiated an extraordinary dynamism.”49 He was already adept at the Ouija board, and developed a college reputation for his forays into the occult. Jean Gooder, who was close to Ted’s then girlfriend Shirley, remembered him as a “very striking person”: “You’d notice him if you walked into a room. He had an immense capacity for being still. He was just immensely intelligent….a man who thought for himself. He was absolutely uninfluenced by fashion, or the current Cambridge scene. In that sense, Sylvia was a black-and-white contrast. She wanted to suss out the entire map, and read her way through it. He didn’t give a damn what the map was. He was creating his own.”50
Christopher Levenson similarly recalled, “Like almost everyone else I found Ted broodingly impressive, physically overpowering….someone one could easily see as Heathcliff.”51 Christopher’s Downing College room was next to Luke Myers’s, and he often heard Luke, Ted, Huws, Danny Weissbort, and a few others bellowing out Irish ballads. Patrons at the Mill or Anchor pubs along the banks of the Cam would have heard much the same around closing time, led by Terence McCaughey.52 No one had any idea, of course, that they were in the company of the future poet laureate of England, the man to whom Prince Charles would one day create a shrine at Highgrove.53
Though Hughes suffered trauma after the suicides of Plath and his lover Assia Wevill, and the death of his daughter Shura, the blackness never swallowed him. He had, as Cox put it, “Enormous potency.”54 Still, as his friend Helder Macedo remembered, “There was something dark about Ted.”55 His life, as his biographer Jonathan Bate noted, was hardly less scandalous than Lord Byron’s. Huws, one of Ted’s closest friends, understood how the dark legend took hold. “Ted was given to wild and fantastic and exaggerated talk and action—his friends expected it of him. A colouring of cruelty might at times be part of it. He could use it to shock people. And his manner was naturally blunt. But in this there was already a large element of acting a part, as though he wished to conceal his tender side.”56 Another Cambridge friend, D. D. Bradley, agreed that Ted “delighted to play Heathcliff” and that his speech was “gnomic…designed to startle.”57
Terence McCaughey remembered evenings spent listening to Beethoven in Ted’s Pembroke room, watching Buster Keaton and Marx Brothers movies, or sitting outside in the dusk while Ted hooted at owls. Ted, a year before his death, wrote to Terence that at Cambridge he’d been “going through some curiously controlled nervous breakdown….Without you, I doubt if could have lasted the first year out.”58 Than Minton, who suffered anti-Semitism at Cambridge, found in Ted a “deeply human” friend who was outraged by such slights.59 Than felt he owed his Cambridge degree—and hence his future medical career—to Hughes: after a wild party, Ted roused him from his hangover and persuaded him to show up for his final biochemistry exam.
Luke Myers, an American, became one of Ted’s best friends at Cambridge. They met through a mutual friend, James Affleck, who edited Chequer, and were soon exchanging poems. The first (and worst) poem that Luke remembered receiving from Hughes was “Money, My Enemy.” Later, he wondered how the author of such verse could be swept away by (in his opinion) a high-maintenance American woman.60
Ted’s Pembroke College room, above the College Library, was, as he described it, full of medieval “worm-eaten” beams, crannies, and deep recesses. There was a sloping roof, windows facing out over busy Trumpington Street, and an imposing oak fireplace in which he sometimes roasted raw meat. He painted giant leopards in “black, yellow, and green, big as alsations [sic]” on one wall, a “great-headed stopping hawk, bison and horses” on the other. (His college senior tutor made him repaint the walls white.) Beethoven’s death mask hung on a beam; Ted once played Beethoven’s pieces, loudly and in chronological order, from eleven p.m. until five a.m. on his gramophone. There was a settee and chairs, but visitors preferred the floor. His desk was covered with papers and was therefore “inaccessible.” He used candles rather than electric light. “The mice were so plentiful that I grew tired of trapping them,” he wrote Plath in 1956.61
The room was down a long hallway, cut off from the rest of the college—a perfect place for parties. Ted later boasted to Sylvia that he’d had so many parties during his undergraduate years that empty bottles filled “half the corridor” outside of his room. Even English faculty dons attended his parties, he said, playing “bawdy songs” on his hired piano.62 Hughes told Plath these “parties were never interrupted until the police complained of the bottles coming out of the windows and the people hanging by their hands which happened once.” (One drunken visitor had scaled the windows to enter.) The dons, Hughes felt, were Cambridge’s true eccentrics—F. R. Leavis, reciting to himself on his bicycle, and George Rylands, “the only man left alive who slept with Rupert Brooke.”63 But he felt only scorn for the grammar school boys who tried to cultivate their eccentricities. In a long letter to Sylvia in early October 1956, he described different types of Cambridge men with anthropological precision.64 “The whole of Cambridge was regarded as a big joke,” Huws recalled.65 They tried to avoid anyone wearing a blazer and tie.
Harold Bloom, who later became the preeminent literary critic in America, sometimes joined Hughes and his friends at the Anchor pub. The discussions, remembered Iko Meshoulam, were “tremendously earnest.” (“These boys could drink 12 Guinness without moving an eyelash.”)66 Harold impressed everyone with his encyclopedic knowledge of English literature, though Ted did not much care for him. Hughes ignored his studies to while away hours at the Anchor talking politics and philosophy; Bloom lectured him about becoming more organized, and less lazy.67 The men were, Luke recalled, “temperamentally incompatible” but equally adept at identifying obscure lines of verse. One night, over pints, someone recited a poem that stumped even Bloom. “That’s Meredith,” Hughes answered casually. “One of his sonnets.”68
Although Hughes read English during his first two years at Cambridge—tutored by the sympathetic and approachable Matthew Hodgart, who encouraged his interest in James Joyce and Irish ballads—he was appalled by what he considered the excoriating, life-denying analysis practiced by Leavis and his ilk. Hughes’s frustration was not misplaced: the joke then was that the point of the Cambridge English Tripos was to allow students to understand “The Waste Land.” Leavis did not endorse the kind of bardic, Gravesian approach to literature that Hughes and his friends valued. And though Leavis loved D. H. Lawrence, he excoriated the Bloomsbury writers. Christopher Levenson remembered, “T. S. Eliot he termed ‘a male spinster’ while at times he would simply say ‘Well, I mean, Virginia Woolf…’ whereupon the class would join in the sneer.” A friend told Levenson he was the only student he ever heard ask Leavis a question that dared to imply that “a different interpretation was possible.”69
After a long night spent writing a literary essay during his second year, Hughes famously dreamed that a fox put a bloody paw on his paper and said, “Stop this—you are destroying us.”70 The dream inspired him to switch his course of studies, in his third year, from English to archaeology and anthropology. (Luke made the same decision.) It also inspired one of Hughes’s most famous poems, “The Thought-Fox”:
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is
printed.71
Hughes later told the critic Keith Sagar, “I connected the fox’s commands to my own ideas about Eng. Lit., & the effect of the Cambridge blend of pseudo-critical terminology & social rancour on creative spirit & from that moment abandoned my efforts to adapt myself….it seemed to me not only a foolish game, but deeply destructive of myself.”72 Plath would reach a similar conclusion. As she wrote to her mother in March 1956, “I am going to revolt from this critical world (which can dry one’s blood, if one isn’t careful: I see it in all the women around me)….I fly to the saintly, religious, intuitive.”73
Hughes graduated from Cambridge in 1954 with a third-class degree—a “Gentleman’s C.” He had submitted a satirical poetry collection in partial fulfillment of his degree, titled, “The ear-witness account of a poetry-reading in Throttle College, before the small poets grew up into infinitesimal critics.” It bears heavy traces of Jung. The key to sanity, Hughes argued throughout the collection, was getting back in touch with our primitive instinct; we must “meet the beast halfway” lest we be “devoured” by our neuroses.74
Hughes’s Cambridge degree could have led to a professional career in education, publishing, or journalism. Instead, he worked at a steel factory as a night security guard and washed dishes at the London Zoo. He fantasized about working on a North Sea trawler but knew his family expected more. “I shall have to get a proper respectable job, because if I don’t Ma will just worry herself away,” he wrote to Gerald in 1954.75 During the summer of 1955, he traveled to Paris and dabbled in the Left Bank life, writing poetry in cafés and subsisting cheaply on wine, baguettes, and cheese. Like Plath, he dreamed of traveling and writing his way through Europe, though applying for grants and fellowships would not have occurred to him. It was not until he met Sylvia, who acted as his agent, that he made a reputation outside of Cambridge. Without her managerial zeal, as he later told Aurelia, he would have been little more than a minor poet.
By the autumn of 1955 Ted was living at Daniel Huws’s father’s flat at 18 Rugby Street (where Dylan Thomas had once slept) in London’s Bloomsbury district. Hughes’s friend Philip Hobsbaum, who had published Hughes’s poem “The Woman with Such High Heels She Looked Dangerous” in delta, eventually secured him a job reading novels at London’s Pinewood Studios for a film company, J. Arthur Rank. Hughes was supposed to write up synopses of the novels he thought would make good films, but he worried that the potboilers were contaminating his creative impulses. He told Terence McCaughey, “Everybody there is…as far up everybody else’s arse as they can get.” He quit in the spring of 1956, admitting to Terence, “I’m not very well equipped really to live outside a college.”76 He came up to Cambridge on weekends and stayed at Queens’ College with his friend Michael Boddy or camped on the Saint Botolph’s rectory lawn. He sometimes dropped in on Hobsbaum’s London Group, which met at Philip’s bedsit off the Edgware Road. Philip remembered Ted’s booming renditions of “Lord Randall, My Son,” and his recitations of Gerard Manley Hopkins. “Ted was the lyric poet par excellence and we all knew how good he was.”77 By this time, Hughes had written “The Thought-Fox,” though he did not attempt to publish it until he met Plath.
Hughes would eventually apply for a postgraduate diploma in education, but he did not want a “proper” job that would interfere with his writing. He made serious plans to start a mink farm in Yorkshire and tried to lure Gerald back to England with promises of mink fortunes. Gerald was unswayed, and Ted applied for a visa to join his brother in Australia.78
* * *
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Bert Wyatt-Brown came to Cambridge from America, like Plath, in the fall of 1955 to read English. Suitcases in tow, he found his way to the Saint Botolph’s rectory, where his childhood friend Luke Myers had talked Mrs. Hitchcock, the former rector’s widow, into renting him a broom closet.79 Bert found a “band of poets” in the back garden smoking Gauloises and Woodbines, dressed in the “workingman’s style” of grays, blacks, and browns. He joined them, a bit intimidated, and passed around his American Marlboros; the friendship was sealed. Getting to know this group would prove “intoxicating”—literally and figuratively.80
By the time Sylvia arrived in Cambridge in the fall of 1955, Ted, Bert, Luke, Joe Lyde, Daniel Huws, Danny Weissbort, Than Minton, and David Ross formed a loose, literary “gang” based around the Saint Botolph’s rectory—“a gang around Ted in many ways,” as David remembered. Not all of them lived at the rectory, but it was, in a sense, their spiritual home. The Anchor and Mill pubs were their other gathering places. Philip Hobsbaum, who presided over a rival literary faction, called them a “rough crowd”: “there were poets such as [Peter] Redgrove and myself who wore suits and ties, and poets such as Hughes and his associates who, to put it mildly, did not.”81 (Daniel Huws countered that he had no interest in conversing with Philip, who was an ardent Leavisite. “He was just too earnest…deadly serious.”)82 During Hughes’s second year at Pembroke, Redgrove invited him to one of a series of poetry readings that he and Hobsbaum had set up. Hughes based his farcical “Throttle College” poem on this experience. “He was so horrified,” Huws said. “There’s nothing Ted would have regarded more absurd than undergraduates reading each other’s poems.”83 The Botolphians, as Bert called them, shared his antipathy. When a swan that the Chinese government had presented to the university disappeared, Jean Gooder recalled, “We knew very well that it was roasted in the vicarage garden. That was such an embarrassment to the university. But that was the kind of absolute daredevilry—recklessness—that they could get up to. They were anarchic.”84
If the weather was warm, the Botolphians would gather in the garden and read aloud from whatever book was at hand: Michael Boddy remembered Orwell, Joyce, Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas, Blake, Hemingway, Graves, Salinger, and Ovid. When Ted wasn’t drawing up horoscopes, he was writing poetry, or commenting on his friends’ work. Sometimes Ted took Michael to the university library and pointed out the “occult books” that interested him; he taught Michael “about astrology and how to cast horoscopes.” At night there was hypnotism, more reading aloud, and drink. Iko Meshoulam thought “Ted believed he had powers.” His presence was so powerful that others thought he had powers, too.85 Ted was generally reserved, but he relished the stray shocking phrase. He joked with Michael that his passion for literature was erotic, telling him about a young woman with whom he had “a root” at the Brontë Parsonage. They had started against a glass case holding memorabilia and then, “with increased confidence,” moved to Emily Brontë’s death couch. He told Michael, who thought Ted was “embellishing,” that he hoped to do the same in the Jane Austen museum. Hughes also joked that he got an erection every time he walked into the Cambridge University library.86
Friends remembered that Ted could switch easily from “ ‘bloke’ to ‘bard.’ ”87 Michael remembered his “tremulous expressive tone when reading” and was surprised to learn that Hughes recorded himself reading Shakespeare in order to perfect his own reading technique.88 Ted always considered Michael’s poems with “care” and diligence—an observation many of Ted’s friends shared. “He was very good at that—responding,” Peter Redgrove said.89 But there was another side. When Michael spent the night at 18 Rugby Street in 1956, he remembered Ted settling into his room to write, “A bit like a resting volcano, collecting itself for a blow.”90
* * *
THE IDEA TO START a new literary magazine came to the Botolphians in 1955 as they drank wine in Huws’s Peterhouse College room, awaiting news of a disciplinary proceeding involving a young woman caught in Daniel’s bed. He was innocent—he had been in London when a friend had parked his girlfriend in his vacant room—but the details did not much matter to those in charge. Banished from Peterhouse, the woman would spend the night with Hughes in his tent on the Saint Botolph’s lawn.
The young men were tired of Cambridge’s Victorian prohibitions. There were penalties for breaking curfew, for
getting to wear one’s subfusc gown, or entertaining women in college rooms—particularly galling to men who had already spent two years fulfilling their national service. Cambridge was then, as Daniel remembered, “like a monastery.”91 Following the Peterhouse incident, the young woman’s boyfriend was expelled, Daniel and David Ross were suspended, Luke was told to leave his shed at the Rectory, and Ted was forbidden from setting foot within a three-mile radius of Great Saint Mary’s University Church—a decree he promptly ignored. (Luke simply moved from the rectory chicken coop to the rectory dining room.) They wanted to rebel without getting into more trouble, but in those days, subversive pamphlets could get one expelled, or “sent down”—as Mark Boxer, the editor of Granta, had been, for publishing a poem the university deemed blasphemous. (Boxer staged a mock funeral procession on the day he left, complete with a hired hearse, coffin, and eulogies.) But Cambridge’s conservatism gave them something to rebel against, and in that way, it shaped them. Jean Gooder remembered, “It was a terrible place, Cambridge, then, except there were very extraordinary things happening, and very brilliant people.”92
None of Cambridge’s literary magazines—Chequer, Granta, or delta—appealed to the Botolphians, who felt that a new magazine would provide a platform for their kind of poetry. They shared Christopher Levenson’s sentiment that Granta, the university’s oldest literary magazine, “represented…the whole ethos of flowered waistcoats, effeminancy and extravagant living.”93 Peter Redgrove, who felt Granta was “very snooty and very exclusive,” decided to start his own literary magazine, delta, whose editorship Philip Hobsbaum eventually passed on to Levenson.94 But delta, as Levenson said, “took itself very seriously, indeed solemnly,” as if protesting the extravagance of Granta.95 The Botolphians solidified plans for their own new literary venture on a trip to the East Anglian coast in January 1956.96 “In a freezing cottage belonging to David Ross’s parents,” wrote Bert, “we ate fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, drank the local brew, and planned a new chapter in the history of English literature.”97
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