Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  In his fullest recounting of the story, Hughes says that the essay he was (not) writing was on Samuel Johnson, a personality he greatly liked. Johnson and Leavis are the only two English writers habitually referred to as ‘Doctor’ (the critic George Steiner once quipped that theirs were the only two honorary doctorates conferred by the Muses). Dr Johnson and Dr Leavis were archetypes of the critical spirit, so at this moment the former was standing in for the latter: ‘I connected the fox’s command to my own ideas about Eng. Lit. and the effect of the Cambridge blend of pseudo-critical terminology and social rancour on creative spirit, and from that moment abandoned my efforts to adapt myself.’ Hughes explained that he had a considerable gift ‘for Leavis-style dismantling of texts’, indeed an almost ‘sadistic’ aptitude for it, but the procedure – surgical and objective, the antithesis of schoolmaster Fisher’s spirit of ‘husbandry and sympathetic coaching’ – seemed to him both a ‘foolish game’ and inimical to the inner life.11 The critical impulse cauterises the creative spirit.

  Given his interest in folklore and comparative mythology, fostered by The White Goddess, Archaeology and Anthropology was an obvious choice for Part II of the Tripos. He was able to focus on the anthropological side. An added advantage of changing subject was that, in order to mug up his new discipline, he was encouraged to come into residence during the ‘Long Vacation term’ (an opportunity to study in Cambridge for part of the three-month summer break). This was an escape from the boredom of home. There were a demanding eight papers to prepare for. General Ethnology was an introduction to race, culture and environment, exploring different types of human economy in relation to habitat. Two papers on prehistory gave him an introduction to the archaeology of the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic Ages, and the ‘origins of higher civilization’. Then there was Physical Anthropology: man’s zoological position in relation to the animal world, a subject of considerable interest to Hughes. Social Anthropology was less attractive to him, but it was compensated for by a special paper in Comparative Ethnography that gave him the opportunity to read such classics as Margaret Mead’s Growing up in New Guinea and Bronisław Malinowski’s Coral Gardens and their Magic. The course was rounded off with an essay on a subject of the student’s choice and a practical examination, ‘being a test of the candidate’s power of recognizing and describing bodily features and artifacts, ancient and modern, including those drawn from the culture or area specifically studied’.12 Ted enjoyed identifying bones.

  Promising as the prospect of such a course seemed, he quickly grew bored with the slog of factual learning. He attended very few lectures and instead borrowed the notes of his supervision partner. Pembroke did not have an ‘Arch & Anth’ don, so he was farmed out to St John’s College, where he was supervised by Glyn Daniel, who later became a highly successful populariser of prehistory while writing Cambridge-based murder mysteries in his spare time. Ted spent most of his final year in the University Library, pursuing his own course of reading. Unlike the Bodleian in Oxford, the Cambridge UL housed most of its stock on open stacks, with an arcane classification system that led to serendipitous juxtapositions. It was perfect for browsing, for following one’s nose, for the gathering of eclectic wisdom. Ted had a lust for free-range intellectual enquiry: he told a friend that he got an erection every time he entered the library.13

  For his Finals, he leaned heavily on Graves’s White Goddess, a book mistrusted by professional ethnographers, and he scraped a third-class result. Academically, he would have done better to stay with English Literature. Nevertheless, Mead’s work gave him fascinating insights into alternative views of sex, marriage, the rearing of children and the supernatural, while Malinowski’s ‘ethnographic theory of the magical word’14 could be read as an endorsement of his own attitude to the supernatural: its argument was that the magical spells of the Trobriand islanders had an essentially pragmatic function. Like all forms of language, they must be regarded as ‘verbal acts’ intended primarily not to communicate thought but to bring about practical effects. This was very much Hughes’s view of the horoscope and the Ouija board (several of his contemporaries expressed some alarm at his attempts to conjure up the spirit world). Another set text – of which he would have got the gist, even if he didn’t read it through – had the potential to contribute to his sense of modern civilisation’s damaging alienation from nature: Ian Hogbin’s Experiments in Civilization was a report on how the arrival of European culture severed a native community in the Solomon Islands from its ancient ways.

  Cambridge had its own social anthropology. There were divides between the posh colleges and the more middling, between the hearties and the aesthetes, between the entitled public school crowd and the meritocratic grammar school boys. Cavalry twill and flamboyant hacking jackets were set against grey flannel trousers and tweed. Ted and his provincial friends, drinking in the Anchor, looked with a mixture of awe and scorn upon the metropolitan sophisticates who dominated the Union, the Amateur Dramatic Club and the student literary magazine Granta. Among the stars of their Cambridge were Peter Hall, future founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company and first artistic director of the National Theatre; Karl Miller, who would be literary editor of the Spectator, the New Statesman and the Listener and then found the London Review of Books; Thom Gunn of Trinity, regarded as the best student poet in Cambridge; and, most glamorous of all, Nick Tomalin, president of the Union and editor of Granta. Tomalin would marry a literary-minded Newnham College girl, Claire Delavenay, daughter of a French academic and an English composer. He became a journalist who was killed on the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War, she a leading biographer.

  Ted published a couple of poems in Granta, hiding himself under the pseudonym Daniel Hearing. He also submitted work to new, smaller literary magazines. Peter Redgrove, something of a loner with unfashionably short hair and a leather jacket, set up delta explicitly to rival Granta. He took on Philip Hobsbaum, one of Leavis’s Downing men, as an assistant editor. Hobsbaum, who could be malicious, recalls Hughes sidling up to him in that other pub, the Mill, where the preferred beverage was strong Merrydown cider. Ted muttered out of the corner of his mouth, ‘I hear you and Redgrove are starting a poetry magazine. Here are some poems I’d like you to look at.’ With that, ‘he shuffled off to the gents’:

  The wad of manuscript he had thrust at us was greasy and typed in grey characters, as though the ribbon in the typewriter had been used a great many times over a period of years, and never been changed. Redgrove looked at this dubiously, and uttered these memorable words: ‘Ted’s a nice chap, but I don’t think we ought to publish his poems.’15

  After Ted had graduated, delta did publish one of these poems. Entitled ‘The Woman with Such High Heels She Looked Dangerous’, it tells of a woman slick with makeup coaxing a man into the darkness and stabbing him: ‘Men become wolves, but a wolf has become a woman.’16

  The inaugural issue of another little magazine, Chequer, appeared, in a bright yellow cover, in his final term. Daniel Huws, who had had a poem accepted there himself, was surprised to see Ted with a copy in his hands when he turned up in the Anchor one evening. Neither knew that the other wrote poetry. Ted quietly asked Dan his opinion of a poem by one Peter Crew. ‘I wrote it,’ he then explained.17 Entitled ‘Song of the Sorry Lovers’, it features a couple in bed, a hyena laughing outside and a rousing of the ‘animal faculties’.18 Later that night, Hughes and Huws went to see Redgrove, who also had a poem in Chequer. There were six bottles of German wine in his room at Queens’. They got drunk, crashed a party on another staircase and Ted got into a fight and damaged his thumb. On another occasion, he received a police caution for being drunk and disorderly after an undergraduate escapade involving a purloined road sign.

  He was growing in confidence. Stories about him began circulating in college. His final-year room was on the top floor of the eastern side of Pembroke’s front court. He painted life-size pumas and what his bedmaker referred to as ‘bacchanalian
orgies’ on the sloping ceiling. The Tutor, a benign classicist called Tony Camps, came to investigate. Ted suggested that the Tutor should lie down on the floor in order to appreciate the frescoes fully. He did so, then ordered whitewashing at Ted’s expense. Camps noted in the Tutor’s file that Hughes was often tipsy and that his manner had a bearish quality, but he still wrote him enthusiastic and affectionate job references.19 An even better story was that a college porter informed the Tutor that Mr Hughes was entertaining a lady in his rooms. Camps went to investigate, knocking on the heavy old door. After a few moments, it opened slowly to reveal Mr Hughes ‘stark naked with his arms outstretched like a cross’. Ted spoke: ‘Crucify me.’20

  As with most undergraduates, there was many an incident involving climbing into college at night. Gallingly for ex-National Service men, it was like being in the forces again: lock-up at 10 p.m., fines for staying out late (twopence, doubled to fourpence if it was after eleven), and no overnight female guests. All the Cambridge colleges were single-sex and many girls at Newnham and Girton, the only two female colleges, kept to themselves or were intimidatingly bluestocking. Outnumbering female students by fifteen to one, male undergraduates looked to the town, and in particular to the nurses training at Addenbrooke’s Hospital on Trumpington Street, conveniently close to Pembroke. Ted started going out with a nurse called Liz Grattidge. Tall and blonde, from Manchester, she sat quietly in the Anchor, when she was free at weekends, ‘smiling indulgently at the proceedings’.21 Coming from a northern city of industrial grime and rain that was forever scudding in off the Pennines, she dreamed of making a new life in Australia – which she eventually did.

  Ted was up for this. It would take him back to Gerald, who was now settled in Tullamarine, a suburb of Melbourne. He was married to a woman called Joan and sending home wafer-thin light-blue airmails filled with easy living and Australian light, perfect for painting (Gerald was showing a talent for watercolour). Just before sitting his Finals in May 1954, Ted surprised his mother and father with a letter. He had filled in emigration papers for Australia. Like Gerald, he would become a Ten Pound Pom. He told his parents that he was going to take a girl with him – she was up for anything. They would probably get married before going. He didn’t mention her name, but explained that she was a nurse and that all his friends said that from certain angles she looked just like him (apart from the fact that she was blonde and he was dark). There was something comforting about the idea of marrying a nurse who was happy to submit to his will: ‘I kick her around and everything goes as I please.’22

  6

  ‘a compact index of everything to follow’

  After graduation, Ted treated himself to a trip to Paris. Olwyn had been working for various international organisations there and eventually settled into a job as a secretary-cum-translator for a theatre and film agency called Martonplay, where she would encounter such legendary figures as the Absurdist dramatist Eugène Ionesco. Ted had previously been on a motoring tour of Spain with Uncle Walt, but this was his first self-sufficient time abroad. At the end of his life he looked back at this young man in a Paris café, drinking claret and eating Gruyère cheese, experiencing their taste for the first time. Sophistication, cosmopolitanism, sensuality. A world away from Calder Valley and Cambridge fen. In a poem, he tried to recover the immersion and innocence of that moment, the sense of hope, of being on the threshold of a life not yet lived. The young man has no idea what is about to hit him: ‘He could never imagine, and can’t hear / The scream that approaches him.’ A scream in the shape of a panther, a scream in ‘the likeness of a girl’.1

  He also had a wonderful holiday in Switzerland with his girlfriend Liz, whose sister lived out there. They rowed on the lakes, fished and walked. Their plans had slightly changed. He would go to Gerald in Australia, and get a job, while she went to Canada with her parents to visit her brother there, then she would return to the United Kingdom and join him ‘down under’ some time later.2

  He kept his options open, applying not only for a passage to Australia but also for a postgraduate diploma in Education that would have qualified him as a teacher. Then he dreamed up one of his schemes: to make a fortune out of mink-farming. It would be an extension of the animal-trapping of his wanderings around Old Denaby. But Australia House informed him that mink would be out of the question down under. He contemplated Canada instead. Canada House told him that the climate for mink was much better in Britain. So for a while he would go back home and get some experience on a big mink farm. He made notes in his Collins Paragon pocket diary: ‘30 buckets for 1250 mink. In every 30, 4 buckets wheatmeal and bran or oatmeal etc., with grass-meal. 2 buckets milk and chemical feed.’3 Before and after work, he could write poetry and – like the young Shakespeare – do a little poaching now that there were deer up on Hardcastle Crags.4 Mink, though, did not inspire him into poetry in the manner of fox and fish, hawk and crow, or big cat.

  Nor did he really want to return to Yorkshire. Friends and girlfriend were in the south. Over the course of the next year, he drifted. The passage to Australia came through, but he asked to defer it for a year. Dan Huws’s father let him use a flat that he owned in Rugby Street in the Holborn district of London. Having made a little money doing casual work, Ted got into the habit of returning to Cambridge and reading in the University Library until the money ran out, at which point he would go back to London to earn some more. In Cambridge he stayed with his girlfriend Liz in her unheated ground-floor flat in Norwich Street, conveniently near the station and a favoured address for nurses and students in ‘digs’. Most of his friends were still at the university. Terence McCaughey was pursuing graduate work in Celtic studies, while Dan Huws and the others were in their final undergraduate year.

  At various times in the spring and summer terms of 1955 Ted slept on a camp bed in the room of a Queens’ student called Michael Boddy or pitched his tent in the garden of St Botolph’s Rectory, beside a converted chicken coop occupied by an American student who had placed an advertisement in the Varsity newspaper seeking accommodation, to which he had received a reply from the rector’s widow asking ‘whether you would be interested in a sleeping hut in my garden, which you could have rent free with free light and electric fire and radiator, in return for the stoking of two fires – an Aga cooking stove and a Sentry boiler’.5

  Boddy of Queens’ – a twenty-stone-plus trombonist, son of the Dean of Ripon – shared Hughes’s love of country life and the writings of Henry Williamson. He was bemused when Ted took him on a tour of the occult section of the stacks of the University Library and intrigued by his advice on how to treat women. The theory was ‘to build up the relationship gently stage by stage’ so that the woman would be subjugated before she knew what was happening: ‘First say “Bring me that cup.” Then say, “Bring me that cup full of tea,” until, I suppose, the woman was cooking a five-course meal, feeding the goldfish, walking the dog, and doing the laundry without argument.’6 None of this was entirely serious: Ted was still playing the undergraduate. One night they commandeered a punt and stole along the Backs, Ted towering in the rear with the pole, until they reached St John’s College, where Chinese geese grazed on the lawn. Boddy jumped out of the punt, caught one and broke its neck. Ted said that since it was dead it should be eaten, so the body was taken back to St Botolph’s and boiled in a pot. It stunk out the kitchen and proved too tough to eat.7 During exam season, Ted helped his friends prepare. He told Olwyn that Boddy wrote an entire set of answers on the basis of quotations he had selected. His gift of recall was coming in handy: he provided further assistance by recovering the argument of Shelley’s Defence of Poetry from his recollection of a lesson at Mexborough Grammar.8

  His horizon was becoming more cosmopolitan. Assorted Americans appeared in the Anchor crowd, among them the pot-bellied future critic Harold (‘Hal’) Bloom, who, like Ted, seemed to hold the whole of English literature within his prodigious memory. The two of them did not get on. Another new arrival wa
s Danny Weissbort, who brought polyglot credentials. He was the son of Polish Jews who had arrived in Britain in the 1930s by way of Belgium. At home they spoke French and Danny answered them in English. He had come up to read History at Queens’ while writing poetry under the influence of Dylan Thomas: ‘I went up to Cambridge the year after Thomas died and I very much remember trying to write like him – and, of course, the idea of the poet as a bohemian wild boy was very attractive, even though I didn’t really know what it all meant.’9 The premature death of Thomas, in the Michaelmas term of Ted’s third undergraduate year, had struck them all like a thunderbolt, though no one knew to what extent it could be attributed to his legendary drinking. After graduating, Weissbort went to work for a while in the family clothing factory (a similar path was open to Hughes), but then took up research on the subject of poetry in post-Stalinist Russia. He made a significant return to Hughes’s life a decade later, when they launched the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation.