Like Jung, Graves then went on to apply his system across cultures and ages. Hughes immersed himself in chapters with titles such as ‘Fabulous Beasts’, ‘The Return of the Goddess’ and ‘The Roebuck in the Thicket’ (a vital motif for the very first version of Birthday Letters). He took special pleasure in the Celtic material, which added Welsh traditions to the Irish myths he had already encountered in Yeats. Here was the ninefold Muse Cerridwen who was originally the Great Goddess in her poetic or incantatory character, who had a son who was also her lover, the Demon of the Waxing Year, before she was courted by the Thunder-god (‘a rebellious Star-son infected by Eastern patriarchalism’), by whom she had twins, Merlin the magician and his sister Olwen. Ted lapped up all this and regurgitated much of it forty years later in his heftiest tome, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. He once told Graves that The White Goddess was ‘the chief holy book on poetic conscience’.12
All developed cultures, Graves suggests, eventually destroy the Goddess and replace her with a patriarchal sky god. ‘This stage was not reached in England until the Commonwealth, since in mediaeval Catholicism the Virgin and Son – who took over the rites and honours of the Moon-woman and her Star-son – were of greater religious importance than God the Father.’13 This idea chimed nicely with one of the tenets of certain prominent members of the English Faculty where Ted Hughes was now heading: that during the Civil War, just after the age of Shakespeare, a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ fractured English culture and society, and that it was the job of the poet to repair it.
In October 1951 he went up to Cambridge.
5
Burnt Fox
Cambridge is a city of water and history. Pembroke College, where Ted Hughes matriculated in the autumn of 1951, is at the top end of Trumpington Street, which leads out to the village where Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale was set. Immediately outside the college was Fitzbillies bakery, which had served Chelsea buns to generations of students. Turn right and you are in King’s Parade, dominated by the most glorious Gothic chapel in the world. Crossing the road from Pembroke, you pass the Pitt Building, which housed Cambridge University Press, the oldest publisher in the world. Then you are in Mill Lane, where gowned undergraduates attended lectures by such luminaries as Dr F. R. Leavis and (until his death in the year that Hughes went up) Ludwig Wittgenstein. In summer, you could hire a punt at Scudamore’s Boatyard by the mill pond, beside which were two much-frequented and watery-named pubs, the Anchor and the Mill. From there, the river Cam meandered via Byron’s Pool towards the village of Grantchester that had been immortalised by King’s College student Rupert Brooke.
In Michaelmas term, when freshmen arrived, Cambridge was bitterly cold and shrouded in fog. According to student lore, the wind came straight off the Ural mountains. Ted wrapped himself in his Uncle Walt’s Great War leather topcoat and fed all his change into the guttering gas fire in his room. But walking around town, among the colleges, there was something in the air that made everyone seem wide awake. He dressed in black, dying his own corduroy from the Sutcliffe Farrar factory. One contemporary said that he looked like a fisherman on a stormy night, while another – a jealous fellow-poet – remembered his ‘smelly old corduroys and big flakes of dandruff in his greasy hair’.1
Ted Hughes and Evelyn Waugh could hardly have been more different as writers,2 but they had one thing in common: the friends they made at university became friends for life. Ted’s best friend in college was an Irishman called Terence McCaughey. They were supervision partners, which is to say that they had their weekly tutorial together in the room of the Pembroke College English Fellow, M. J. C. Hodgart, an authority on medieval ballads who also had a passion for James Joyce. McCaughey recalls how he and Ted bumped into each other in Heffers bookshop, where they were supposed to be buying set texts in their first or second week as freshmen. One book on the list was an anthology of Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose. Ted explained that he already had a copy, passed down to him by his sister, but that it was an older edition lacking the vocabulary list. He proposed selling this to McCaughey and buying himself a new one, complete with vocabulary, thus simultaneously getting a bargain and doing a favour.
They soon became fast friends, their Yorkshire and Irish accents contrasting with the self-entitled voices of the public schoolboys who lorded it over Cambridge. They shared a love of music, nature and words. They would spend their evenings in one or the other’s room, reading poetry aloud or listening to Beethoven on 78rpm records. They went to the cinema together, especially enjoying the comedies of the Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton. Sometimes at dusk they walked along the Backs of the colleges or strolled on to Coe Fen, where, among the grazing cows, Ted blew mimic hootings to answering owls. They supplemented college food – which was no better than that of the National Service mess – with brown bread, cheese mixed with marmalade and, a particular Yorkshire delicacy, treacle sandwiches. Olwyn came to visit and Terence was amazed at the seriousness with which she and Ted discussed their friends in terms of horoscopic compatibility.
McCaughey went on to become a clergyman. They kept in touch by letter and occasionally visited each other. On Ted’s last trip to Dublin, just four months before he died, Terence took him to the recently renovated University Church, built at Cardinal Newman’s behest for the Catholic college. Quietly, Ted said, ‘This fairly closely persuades me to become a Catholic or a Christian.’3 But this was a sentiment felt in the moment: there was no subsequent deathbed conversion to orthodox faith.
About two-thirds of the Pembroke undergraduates were from public schools, one-third from grammar schools. Ted inevitably gravitated towards the latter group. Brian Cox was a typical example. Born in Grimsby into a frugal, lower-middle-class Methodist household, he grew up an avid reader, burying himself in the Grimsby public library after his mother died of tuberculosis when he was ten. After National Service, during which he wrote half a novel, he won a scholarship to Pembroke. With his friend Tony Dyson, another Pembroke man, he attended a term of Dr Leavis’s classes but was disillusioned by the narrowness of his taste and the seeming puritanism of his critical method. Cox blamed Cambridge English for killing his own creativity and driving him to become a critic rather than an imaginative writer. Looking back on his time at college, he felt that he had learned more from his contemporaries than from the English Faculty: breakfast, lunch and dinner were taken in the college hall and the students who were ‘in passionate love with literature’ sat together, arguing ‘over the long wooden tables about Shakespeare or Donne or Dickens meal by meal’.4
In his first year, Ted had to prepare for the ‘Preliminary’ examinations, which had to be passed but did not count towards the final degree. He took a medieval paper, in which his special delight was the anonymous alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with its green giant carrying away his own chopped-off head, its seductive enchantress and wintry northern English landscapes (including a journey across ‘the wilderness of Wirral’ where Ted had begun his National Service). For the Shakespeare paper, Richard III, Othello and Measure for Measure were set texts, but with his voracious literary appetite he habitually woke at six in the morning and read a complete play by nine. The whole canon was at his command.
Then there was a compulsory language paper (‘use of English’ and translation from either French or Latin) and a paper offering, first, passages for detailed explanation and comment from the Metaphysical poets and Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, and second, essay topics on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors. ‘Swift is the only stylist,’ he opined, the exemplar of ‘clarity, precision, concisenesss and power’.5 The Irish satirist taught Hughes the art of entering a word as if it were a world, of writing prose that is instantly accessible and memorable yet wild in imaginative reach. There was also a paper on literary criticism and, indeed, underlying all the work was the distinctive Cambridge method of practical criticism: close reading of the words on the page, dating of passages by their s
tyle, discrimination of good poetic writing from bad. In everything that he wrote, Hughes chose his words with care. He judged his own writing by the high standards instilled by John Fisher and reinforced by the Cambridge school of criticism. His letters to Olwyn are prose poems in themselves: ‘Sometimes I think Cambridge wonderful, at others a ditch full of clear cold water where all the frogs have died. It is a bird without feathers; a purse without money; an old dry apple, or the gutters run pure claret.’6
In his second term, King George VI died and there was a sense of national excitement and new hope projected on to the young Queen. He exclaimed to Olwyn that they were the new Elizabethans, the first since the time of Hamlet; he wrote a masque in which the first Elizabeth met the second; he dared to dream that he might become the poetic soul of a new English Renaissance. His principal extracurricular activity was the university Archery Club – a suitably Elizabethan sport.
Six feet two inches, dark and handsome, he cut a figure striding along King’s Parade in his long dark coat. Reminiscing, he told of an occasion when an undergraduate called out, ‘Ted, Ted,’ ran up to him, shook his hand and said ‘Thank you for saving England.’ He had, he explained, been mistaken for Ted Dexter, the charismatic university cricket captain who made his Test debut while still an undergraduate. The two men did indeed share the same dark good looks. Whether or not there is embellishment in the telling,7 the spirit of the tale is true: saving England by re-embodying the heady spirit of Elizabethan poetry was indeed our Ted’s mission. He believed that a person’s whole biography was visible in their walk.8 All who knew him at Cambridge remembered the long coat and the confident stride, whereas his poetic ambition was, at least in his first year, kept under wraps.
The end of the academic year was marked by a May Ball, held in June. Ted was still in touch with Edna Wholey, who was now living with her husband in nearby Bedford. He had been to stay with them for a weekend and, though he confided to Olwyn that their company now bored him, he went over again and asked Edna to accompany him to the Ball. She declined, probably because her husband disapproved of the idea, but a visitor happened to present, a stunningly beautiful dark-haired Italian called Carina, niece of a Bedford celebrity, boxer and bit-part movie actor Tony Arpeno. So Ted asked her instead. Since they had never met before, everyone was rather startled when Carina accepted. Her parents booked a hotel room in Cambridge, waited up anxiously all through the night of the Ball and whisked her off to the station at dawn. A surviving photo from Ball night shows Ted with his trademark lock of hair falling over the eyes. He has the facial expression of a cat that got the cream.
Summer back home in Woodlands Avenue, Todmorden, was dull in comparison, with Gerald far away in Australia and Olwyn working in London. After graduating, she had taken a secretarial course at Pitman on the Bayswater Road in order to make herself employable. Ted set up a study for himself in the attic and prepared for his second year.
When he returned to Pembroke in the autumn, he had different accommodation. It was a good-sized first-floor room with large windows, tucked away in a building that had once been the Master’s Lodge, reached via an opulent staircase and looking out over the Fellows’ car park. He was screened from street-noise, but annoyed by a loud public schoolboy on the floor above. He took revenge by playing Beethoven far into the night.
Music was a serious passion. Olwyn moved to Paris that autumn to take up a secretarial job at the British Embassy, and he wrote to tell her of many a concert. His standards were high: at a recital by the legendary pianist Solomon (Cutner) there were some disappointingly slight encore pieces and then, in response to the cry ‘More Beethoven!’, a rendering of the Waldstein sonata which Ted did not consider up to scratch. He expressed a good deal more enthusiasm for his new academic supervisor, a graduate student called Eric Mottram, who was a poet and an enthusiast for avant-garde American poetry. ‘I never knew anyone so forceful in his flow,’ Ted told Olwyn. Supervisions were heated, argumentative, energising, extending well beyond the appointed hour’s length.9
By day, Ted took charge of the reorganisation of the Archery Club. He kept a great bow in a corner of his room, and practised for hours. By virtue of representing the university against Oxford, he won a ‘half-blue’. In the evenings, besides concerts, there were films and plays – and the pub. The highlight of Michaelmas term was a poetry reading by Dylan Thomas, at the Cambridge Union under the auspices of the English Society. For the first time, Ted witnessed a charismatic poet in the flesh, holding an audience rapt with his word music. Afterwards, together with McCaughey and a couple of other friends, he followed Dylan Thomas and the society committee to the Eagle in Bene’t Street so as to listen in on their conversation. Thomas and his acolytes spoke of filling Swansea Bay with beer. Elated, Ted and his friends then returned to Pembroke and burst into the room of Francis Holmes à Court, a literary-minded undergraduate of aristocratic pedigree (he subsequently succeeded his father, the 5th Baron Heytesbury). There they met another Welshman, a freshman called Daniel Huws who had been at school with Holmes à Court and had now come up to Peterhouse, just across the road. Ted, still high on the oxygen of Thomas’s poetry, didn’t really notice him, but the following year their respective circles of friends conjoined in the Anchor pub, with its dark-brown bar, table-football machine and, downstairs, benches by the landing-stage beside the punts waiting for hire.
In the Anchor, Ted was a brooding silent presence, content to let others make the conversational running. The most opinionated was Roger Owen, Liverpool Welsh, all politics and sociology. But when Ted spoke, everyone listened. He wasn’t interested in politics but was an oracle on matters literary and was scathing about many of the dons in the English Faculty. Everyone in the group had a store of anecdotes, mostly mocking, about the lectures of Dr Leavis. Ted especially loathed the one on his beloved Yeats. In the Cambridge system, it was the weekly college supervision that counted. Lectures were an optional extra. Ted went to fewer and fewer as he progressed through his degree, but he thought well of both the theatrical Dadie Rylands and the sometime surrealist poet Hugh Sykes Davies on Shakespeare.
Towards the end of the pub evenings, much beer consumed, Terence McCaughey, with his seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of Irish ballads, led them in singing. Ted would eventually be cajoled into participation. ‘He had a soft, light voice,’ Huws recalled, ‘with the slight tremolo which later characterized his reading voice.’10 His party pieces were traditional numbers such as ‘Eppie Morie’ and Coleridge’s favourite, the grand old ballad of ‘Sir Patrick Spens’. Then they would all join in a round of ‘Waltzing Matilda’.
Others who joined the Pembroke group at the Anchor were Fintan O’Connell and Joe Lyde, Northern Irish grammar school boys, one a Catholic and the other a Protestant. Lyde was loud and sometimes rude, a trumpeter and jazz pianist with the best band in Cambridge. A ladies’ man, he would get to play in New Orleans, aggravate Sylvia Plath with his outlandish tales and brash words, and die young, of drink.
As for Ted’s studies, there were supervisions on the Victorians and a special paper on Wordsworth and Coleridge, very much to his taste. Always able to read poetry with close attention, he jumped easily through the hoop of Cambridge practical criticism and achieved a 2.1 classification in Part I of the English Tripos, the honours examination at the end of the second year. Only nine candidates achieved first-class honours in English that year, and over 120 got a 2.2 or a Third. Ted and three of his Pembroke contemporaries were among the thirty 2.1s, outshining the four other Pembroke students, so this was a very creditable if not an outstanding performance.
The Cambridge degree is very flexible: it was perfectly possible to take one part of the Tripos in one subject and the other in something completely different. After Part I, half the Pembroke English students changed course. Ted’s choice was Archaeology and Anthropology. He thus missed out on the paper that he would most have enjoyed had he stuck with English: the study of Tragedy from the ancient Greeks via
Shakespeare and Racine to Ibsen, Chekhov and Yeats, a course in which Sylvia Plath would immerse herself a couple of years later.
Many times over the years Ted Hughes told the story of why he switched away from English. It was one of his party pieces, often used to introduce public readings of his best-known poem, ‘The Thought-Fox’ – though that poem was not written until well after he graduated. He was not always consistent in the details of the tale, so there may well be a characteristic element of invention, or at least embellishment, in the telling. But there is no doubting the centrality of the story to his personal myth.
A cornerstone of Cambridge undergraduate life is the ‘essay crisis’. Terms are short, reading lists are long and extra-curricular distractions are legion. The essay for the weekly supervision is accordingly left to the last minute, written deep into the night. Ted sometimes wrote with great facility, especially if the subject was one of his passions, such as William Blake. But sometimes he could not get going on his essay. He’d stare at the blank page on his desk, write and rewrite an opening, cross it out, give up and go to bed.
One night when this happened, he dreamed that he was still at his desk, in his ‘usual agonising frame of mind, trying to get one word to follow another’. The lamplight fell on the page. In the dream the door slowly opened. A head appeared in the dim light: at the height of a man but with the form of a fox. The creature descended the two or three steps down into the room. With its fox’s head and ‘long skinny fox’s body’, it stood upright, as tall as a wolf reared on its hind legs. The hands were those of a man: ‘He had escaped from a fire – the smell of burning hair was strong, and his skin was charred and in places cracking, bleeding freshly through the splits.’ The creature walked across the room to the desk, placed the paw that was a human hand on the page and spoke: ‘Stop this – you are destroying us.’ The burns were worst on the hand, and when the fox-man moved away there was a bloody print upon the page. The dream seemed so wholly real that Ted got up and examined his essay for the bloody mark. He determined forthwith to abandon his course in English Literature. In some versions of the story, he dreams again the following night. Either the fox returns and nods approvingly, or the creature returns in the variant form of a leopard, again standing erect.
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