Ted Hughes
Page 3
Hughes spoke repeatedly of the ‘inner life’. And it is the story of his inner life that is told in the documents he preserved for posterity. However, as he observed in an early letter to Olwyn, the inner life is inextricable from the outer: ‘Don’t you think there’s a deep correspondence between outer circumstances and inner? … the people we meet, what happens to us etc., are a dimension of the same and single complication of meanings and forces that our own selves are.’27 His close friend Lucas Myers said that Hughes attended to and developed his inner life more fully than anyone he had ever known, save for advanced Buddhist practitioners. ‘Poetry was the expression and the inner life was the substance.’ But the context of Myers’s remark was Hughes’s material life:
The first poem of Ted’s I saw in draft and easily the least accomplished of any I have seen began ‘Money, my enemy’ and continued for six or seven lines that I do not recall. I think it doubtful that the poem survives. Before I met him, Ted had determined to devote his life to writing. ‘Scribbling’ was ‘the one excuse.’ Or ‘the one justification.’
But money was his enemy because generating it displaced the time and energy needed for the creation of poetry and the development of his inner life.28
The poem ‘Money my enemy’, written when Hughes was in his twenty-fifth year and eking out a living as a script reader for a film company, does in fact survive, because a manuscript of it was preserved by Olwyn. The poet represents his relationship to the world of money in the form of a great war. He imagines his own body cut into quarters, his brain carved up, his hands on the market with the heads of calves and the feet of pigs. Street dogs drag his gut, but his blood – mark of his true poetic vocation – sings of mercy and rest, cradled beneath the bare breast of a woman, satisfied with the food of love.29
Money was the enemy, but it cannot be neglected. Ted Hughes was perhaps the only major English poet of the twentieth century who, despite coming from humble origins, supported himself from his late twenties until his death almost entirely from his literary work. After a period of casual work upon graduating from Cambridge, and a brief university teaching stint in America, he never again had to take a day job as a librarian, teacher or bank clerk in the manner of other poets such as Larkin and Heaney, or for that matter T. S. Eliot.30 His financial endurance was a heroic endeavour, albeit with moments of prodigality. The nitty-gritty of how it was sustained has to be part of the story of his literary life.
Ted Hughes wrote tens of thousands of pages of personal letters, only a small percentage of which have been published, sometimes in redacted form. He preserved intimate journals, appointment diaries, memorandum books, accounts of income and expenditure, annotations to his publishing contracts. The journals are of extraordinary value to the biographer. They were kept very private in Hughes’s lifetime: Olwyn, his sister, agent, gatekeeper and confidante, did not even know that he kept a journal. It must be understood, though, that his diary-keeping was sporadic and erratic. The traces of his self-communion survive in fragmented and chaotic form. There is no equivalent of Sylvia Plath’s bound journals of disciplined self-presentation. Ted’s journal-style writings are scattered across a huge number of yellowing notebooks, torn jotter pads and thick sheaves of loose leaves.
The wealth and the chaos of his thoughts may be glimpsed from an account of just a very few items among the hundreds of boxes and folders of personal papers that were left in his home at his death. There was a box file inscribed ‘Memory Books’, containing prose notes on subjects ranging from Egyptian history and archaeological discoveries, to Hiroshima, to a book about Idi Amin called Escape from Kampala, to the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, to sagas, history, and notes for a metamorphic play on the Cromwells. Not to mention the Old Testament king Nebuchadnezzar, a park in West Glamorgan, and the German Romantic poet and short-story writer Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist. Another box file, with ‘WISE WORDS’ written on it, contained dozens of prose fragments, diary entries from between 1970 and 1982, episodic passages that seem to be a draft for a first-person story, dreams involving Ted’s children, quotations from books gathered for a planned but never finished ‘Wisdom Book’, photocopies of mind maps for classical subjects, and a drawing of a head with a cabbalistic legend. One could open a folder at random and find within it material as eclectic as a letter about a Ted Hughes impostor, an autograph translation of a poem by the Spanish dramatist Federico García Lorca, and a smoke-stained photocopy of a publicity questionnaire regarding the poet Laura Riding.
At the time of his death, he had already sold tens of thousands of pages of poetry and prose drafts, and many valuable notebooks, to the library of Emory University in America, but he retained a collection of twenty-two notebooks, mostly of pocket size, in which there were over 500 pages of poetry drafts and over 800 pages of autobiographical material, all mingled together. Again, he kept a thick buff-coloured quarto folder bulging with old partially used school exercise books, salvaged to save the cost of buying new notebooks. Here we find reading notes on the eighteenth-century English prophetess Joanna Southcott, the French Revolution, existentialism, China and anti-Semitism, together with thoughts on Sylvia Plath, memories of Frieda Hughes’s birth, accounts of travels in America with Plath, of fishing with her in Yorkshire and going to London Zoo with the children. Precious personal memories are mingled with notes on Albert Camus, a stomach ache, yoga, ghosts, horoscopes, magic, Othello and Macbeth (both Shakespeare’s villain and the poet George MacBeth, who was very involved with Ted’s radio broadcasting), memories of a holiday in Egypt with his second wife, records of dreams in 1962, Scott of the Antarctic, and a visit in January 1964 to the weird woman at Orley House in Bideford. It was into this folder that he slipped an account of the last few days of Sylvia Plath’s life, written within days of her death.
Another filing box was filled with loose sheets organised into roughly chronological sequence and amounting to nearly 500 pages of closely written manuscript prose: self-interrogation, descriptions of places and seasons, reflections on people, events and ideas. This was Hughes’s preliminary attempt to put together a journal.31 Given that he preserved it, the possibility of posthumous publication must have been on his mind.
Using all this raw material, it would be possible to write almost a day-by-day ‘cradle to grave’ account of his life. But the very wealth of the sources would make a comprehensive life immensely long and not a little tedious to all but the most loyal Hughes aficionados. Besides, certain portions of the archive will for some time remain closed for data protection and privacy reasons. The task of the literary biographer is not so much to enumerate all the available facts as to select those outer circumstances and transformative moments that shape the inner life in significant ways. To emphasise on the one hand the travails, such as the nightmare of the Bell Jar lawsuit, and on the other the joyful moments such as the mid-stream epiphany of ‘That Morning’.32
In writing of the inner life, it is sometimes necessary to track a theme, criss-crossing through the years. Subjects such as Hughes’s late work in the theatre, his curatorship of Sylvia Plath’s posthumous works and his obsession with Shakespeare are best treated as stories of their own, rather than scattered gleanings that would all too easily disappear from sight if dispersed across many different chapters. This approach has the added advantage of breaking up the potentially deadening march of chronological fact-listing.
So, for instance, in the summer of 1975, Ted Hughes was farming in North Devon, revising his long poem Gaudete, corresponding and negotiating with his mother-in-law about excisions from Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home, and reading an advance proof copy of Millstone Grit, a memoir of his native Calder Valley by Glyn Hughes (no relation). A strictly chronological biography would gather these four facts in a chapter on 1975. But the significance of the four facts is better demonstrated by placing them in separate strands of narrative: respectively, in chapters on ‘Farmer Ted’, ‘The Elegiac Turn’ in his poetic development, his ‘Arraignm
ent’ by feminists and Plathians, and his own autobiographical ‘Remembrance of Elmet’ (the old name for the Calder district).
The biographer of Hughes faces the peculiar difficulty that he has been portrayed over and over again as Sylvia Plath’s husband rather than his own self. In the United States he is known almost exclusively as ‘Her Husband’ (which happens to be the title of one of his own early poems). This has meant that his marriage to Sylvia is much the best-known part of his life. Because they were barely apart, day or night, from the summer of 1956 to the autumn of 1962, every biography of Sylvia – and they are legion – is in effect a joint life.33 Furthermore, Olwyn Hughes contributed so much to Anne Stevenson’s authorised Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (1989) that it became, as its prefatory Author’s Note put it, ‘almost a work of dual authorship’. Bitter Fame covered the first twenty-three years of Sylvia’s life in just 70 pages, leaving nearly 300 for the seven years with Ted. It was a scrupulously detailed narrative of the marriage, checked for accuracy by Hughes himself. The marriage is also the subject of an entire book: Diane Middlebrook’s sensitive and balanced Her Husband (2004). Elaine Feinstein, meanwhile, in the first biography of Hughes (2001), devoted 125 pages to the seven years from the meeting with Sylvia at that party in Cambridge to her suicide in London, but only 110 to the remaining thirty-five years of Ted’s life. For this reason, my chapters on the years with Plath do not attempt a day-to-day record but focus instead on their joint writing life and on those moments that are caught in the rear-view-mirror perspective of the marriage in the published and unpublished Birthday Letters poems.
The cardinal rule is this: the work and how it came into being is what is worth writing about, what is to be respected. The life is invoked in order to illuminate the work; the biographical impulse must be at one with the literary-critical. The novelist Bernard Malamud’s biographer puts it well: the first aim of an authentic life of a writer is ‘to place the work above the life – but to show how the life worked very hard to turn itself into that achievement’. The second objective should be ‘to show serious readers all that it means to be a serious writer, possessed of an almost religious sense of vocation – in terms of both the uses of and the costs to an ordinary human life’.34 It was the assuredness of the sense of poetic vocation that most struck Seamus Heaney when he first met Ted Hughes: ‘the certainty of the calling from a very early stage … the parental relationship to writerly being is rarely so intimate’.35
In a journal entry written in 1956, Hughes quoted W. B. Yeats, an immensely significant poet for him: ‘I wished for a system of thought that would leave my imagination free to create as it chose and yet make all that it created, or could create, part of one history, and that the soul’s.’36 Hughes’s poetry was the history of his own soul.
Yeats also wrote, apropos of the question of what made Shakespeare Shakespeare, that ‘The Greeks, a certain scholar has told me, considered that myths are the activities of the Daimons, and that the Daimons shape our characters and our lives. I have often had the fancy that there is some one myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought.’37 For Ted Hughes, who had a soul as capacious as that of any poet who has ever lived, there were many controlling myths. None, however, was more important or all-consuming than that of the figure whom he called the Goddess. He quoted this passage from Yeats as the epigraph to his longest (and itself almost all-consuming) prose work, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being.
Whether or not that book sees truly into the heart of Shakespeare, it unquestionably reaches to the core of Hughes’s myth. His Daimon took the form of a woman and for that reason, if no other, women play a huge part in the story of his metamorphosis of life into art. It has accordingly been necessary to include a good deal of sensitive biographical material, but this material is presented in service to the poetry. His sister Olwyn said that Ted’s problem, when it came to women, was that he didn’t want to hurt anybody and ended up hurting everybody.38 His friends always spoke of his immense kindness and generosity, but some of his actions were selfish in the extreme and the cause of great pain to people who loved him. I seek to explain and not to condemn. Plath’s biographers have too often played the blame game. Instead of passing moral judgements, this book accepts, as Hughes put it in one of his Birthday Letters poems, that ‘What happens in the heart simply happens.’39 It is for the biographer to present the facts and for readers to draw their own conclusions.
There will be many biographies, but this is the first to mine the full riches of the archive and to tell as much as is currently permissible of the full story, as it was happening, and as it was remembered and reshaped in art, from the point of view of Ted Hughes. His life was, he acknowledged, the existential ‘capital’ for his work as an author. His published writings might be described as the ‘authorised’ version of the story, the life transformed and rendered authorial. His unpublished writings – drafts, sketches, abortive projects, journals, letters – are the place where he showed his workings. He kept them for posterity in their millions of words, most of which have now been made available to the public. The archive is where he is ‘un-authored’, turned back from ‘Famous Poet’ (the title of another of his early poems) to mortal being. Together with the memories of those who knew and loved him, the archive reveals that the way he lived his life was authorised not by social convention or by upbringing, but by his passions, his mental landscape and his unwavering sense of vocation. His was an unauthorised life and so is this.
1
‘fastened into place’
Coming west from Halifax and Sowerby Bridge, along the narrow valley of the river Calder, you see Scout Rock to your left. North-facing, its dense wood and dark grey stone seem always shadowed. The Rock lowers over an industrial village called Mytholmroyd. Myth is going to be important, but so is the careful, dispassionate work of demythologising: the first syllable is pronounced as in ‘my’, not as in ‘myth’. My-th’m-royd.1 For Ted Hughes, it was ‘my’ place as much as a mythic place.
His childhood was dominated by this dark cliff, ‘a wall of rock and steep woods half-way up the sky, just cleared by the winter sun’. This was the perpetual memory of his birthplace; his ‘spiritual midwife’, one of his ‘godfathers’. It was ‘the curtain and back-drop’ to his childhood existence: ‘If a man’s death is held in place by a stone, my birth was fastened into place by that rock, and for my first seven years it pressed its shape and various moods into my brain.’2
Young Ted kept away from Scout Rock. He belonged to the other side of the valley. Once, though, he climbed it with his elder brother, Gerald. They ascended through bracken and birch to a narrow path that braved the edge of the cliff. For six years, he had gazed up at the Rock – or rather, sensed its admonitory gaze upon him – but now, as if through the other end of the telescope, he was looking down on the place of his birth. He stuffed oak-apples into his pockets, observing their corky interior and dusty worm-holes. Some, he threw into space over the cliff.
Gerald, ten years older, lived to shoot. He told his little brother of how a wood pigeon had once been shot in one of the little self-seeding oaks up here on the Rock. It had set its wings ‘and sailed out without a wing-beat stone dead into space to crash two miles away on the other side of the valley’.3 He told, too, of a tramp who, waking from a snooze in the bracken, was mistaken for a fox by a farmer. Shot dead, his body rolled down the slope. A local myth, perhaps.
There was also the story of a family, relatives of the Hugheses, who had farmed the levels above the Rock for generations. Their house was black, as if made of ‘old gravestones and worn-out horse-troughs’. One of them was last seen shooting rabbits near the edge. He ‘took the plunge that the whole valley dreams about and fell to his death down the sheer face’. Thinking back, the adult Hughes regarded this death as ‘a community peace-offering’.4 The valley, he had heard, was notable for its suicides. He blamed the oppression cast by Scout Rock.
He wrote his essay about the Rock at a dark time. It was composed in 1963 as a broadcast for a BBC Home Service series called Writers on Themselves.5 Broadcast three weeks earlier in the same series was a posthumous talk by Sylvia Plath (read by the actress June Tobin) entitled ‘Ocean 1212-W’. The letter in which BBC producer Leonie Cohn suggested this title for the talk was possibly the last that Plath ever received.6 Where the primal substance of Ted’s childhood was rock, that of Sylvia’s was water: ‘My childhood landscape was not land but the end of land – the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic … My final memory of the sea is of violence – a still, unhealthily yellow day in 1939, the sea molten, steely-slick, heaving at its leash like a broody animal, evil violets in its eye.’7
Though a suicide far from the Calder Valley preyed on Hughes’s mind as he wrote of the Rock, there is no reason to doubt his memory of its force. Still, whenever writers make art out of the details of their childhood, a part of the reader wonders whether that was really how they felt at the time. Is the act of remembering at some level inventing the memory? William Wordsworth was the great exemplar of this phenomenon. He called his epic of the self a poem ‘on the growth of the poet’s mind’. And it was there that he pondered questions that we should always ask when reading Hughes’s poetry of recollection. What does it mean to dissolve the boundary between the things which we perceive and the things which we have made? What is the relationship between the writing poet and the remembered self? Is a particular memory true because it is an accurate account of a past event or because it is constitutive of the rememberer’s consciousness? Each member of a family remembers differently. Reading a draft of this chapter, Olwyn Hughes was angry: she did not recognise her own childhood, which in her memory was filled with light and laughter, happy family life and the absolute freedom of outdoor play. ‘Hard task’, writes Wordsworth, ‘to analyse a soul.’8