Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  The American who had moved to the chicken coop in order to escape the constriction of college lock-up was Lucas (‘Luke’) Myers from Tennessee. He had been drawn to Downing College by the reputation of F. R. Leavis. In later years, he would become the correspondent to whom Ted opened his heart most fully. They were the same age; they had both done military service before university; they both began with English Literature and switched to Anthropology. And they both had vigorous relationships with attractive girlfriends. They enjoyed exchanging stories of their escapades, Luke telling of sex in the chicken coop and Ted describing how he had been in bed with Liz in her lodgings one morning when the landlady came in with tea. He dived under the covers and in answer to the question ‘What’s that lump down there?’ Liz replied, ‘That’s Ted,’ with the result that she was obliged to find new lodgings the same day. On another occasion, Ted came up from London for a party and the first thing he and Liz did was dive into an unoccupied bedroom. He felt remorse for ‘violating hospitality’.10

  Ted was getting a somewhat exaggerated reputation as a ladies’ man. Myers recalled only a single one-night stand, but its circumstances had momentous consequences. It was the final week of the summer term, known in Cambridge as the Easter term, of 1955. A Peterhouse student, a friend of Dan Huws and his roommate David Ross, had invited a girl up from London for a few days. One night she was asleep in Dan’s bed while he and Ross were out on the town with Ted and Luke. A porter observed two figures preparing to climb the wall back into college after hours. He thought he recognised the culprits, so went up to their rooms with another porter to check if the beds were indeed empty. They observed a trail of long yellow hair on Dan’s pillow and a set of female underclothes draped over a chair. The girl was escorted out of college. The boys gallantly directed her across Coe Fen to the St Botolph’s Rectory garden and then entered college to face their fate. Later, Ted and Luke returned to find the bed in the coop occupied by an attractive eighteen- or nineteen-year-old (this time clothed). With true Southern hospitality, Luke offered to sleep on the floor. But Ted and the girl decided that there was plenty of room in the tent, so Luke had his usual bed to himself. In the morning, the girl took him aside and said, ‘Ted’s so big and hot.’11

  Huws, Ross and the student who had invited the girl in the first place were summoned before the Peterhouse authorities. Myers was implicated and his college informed. Ted’s name was also given, but since he had graduated he was not under college jurisdiction. However, the University of Cambridge had an ancient right to exclude miscreants among their graduates from an area within a radius of 3 miles from Great St Mary’s University Church. Peterhouse rusticated Huws and Ross, meaning that they had to leave the city for the remainder of the term (which was only a matter of days), while the boy who had issued the invitation was sent down permanently, thus losing the chance to get a degree. Downing decreed that Myers must move out of the debauched chicken coop and find other lodgings. The next term, the kindly widow allowed him to sleep in her dining room, so St Botolph’s Rectory remained his home a little longer. As for Ted, he was summoned before a specially convened university committee. After returning to London, he was informed that he would indeed be prohibited from setting foot within the prescribed radius of Great St Mary’s. He paid no attention. If he had done, he would probably never have met Sylvia Plath.

  In the interim between trial and sentencing, Huws, Ross, Myers, Danny Weissbort and a medical student called Nathaniel (‘Than’) Minton met over wine in the ill-fated rooms in Peterhouse. It was then that David Ross announced that he wanted to start a new literary magazine. His father had generously agreed to put up some money. In the light of the recent misadventure, there was an obvious name for the new publication: Saint Botolph’s Review. They would set to work on it when they returned after the Long Vacation.

  In that summer of 1955 Ted took an outdoor job as an assistant rose-gardener at a nursery between Baldock and Hitchin. In the autumn, he was back in Rugby Street, putting out feelers at the BBC, winning the odd sum of cash in newspaper competitions, taking on more casual work, for instance £8 a week as a security guard in a girder factory. When he wasn’t contemplating becoming a sailor on a North Sea trawler, he was dreaming up new money-making schemes: perhaps he could save up for five years to buy a house in Oxford or Cambridge and let it to students and nurses at £3 per head per week, with a landlady accommodated gratis in the basement. Or maybe rent out a string of garages, or act as agent for the sale of Gerald’s paintings, or teach English language in Spain or Hungary, where one could live cheaply.

  The deferred offer to become a Ten Pound Pom lapsed. He did not want to commit to the other side of the world if there was any chance of making it in literary life at home. Philip Hobsbaum of delta had moved to London and revived the evenings of poetry reading that he had begun at Cambridge. He and his friends called themselves ‘the Group’. Their first meeting was held on a wet October evening in Hobsbaum’s bedsitter off the Edgware Road. Peter Redgrove was there, along with an Anglo-Argentinian poet who had also been at Cambridge, his American wife, a couple of aspiring actors, Hobsbaum’s young fiancée and Ted, who read some poems that would soon appear in Saint Botolph’s Review.12 Over the following couple of years, Ted was a frequent, though not regular, presence at meetings of the Group, which was soon joined by the brilliantly inventive Australian Peter Porter and the talented Jamaican-born poet and artist Edward Lucie-Smith, an Oxford man.

  Hobsbaum never forgot the power of Hughes’s verse-speaking: ‘One night he read Hopkins’s “I wake and feel the fell of darkness, not day” in so vibrantly personal a manner that a young lady present took it to be a sonnet of his own recent composition.’13 He also recited a large chunk of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight into Peter Redgrove’s reel-to-reel tape recorder. A tape survives, now in the British Library, of an informal meeting of the Group and of Ted reciting some of his own poems as well as Yeats and Hopkins. His Yorkshire vowels are long but by today’s standards he sounds quite posh, his lilting incantation learned from Dylan Thomas.14

  Ted annoyed Hobsbaum’s Rhodesian landlady by cooking a black pudding in her frying pan and singing ballads in the small hours of the morning, cajoling a shy, plain schoolteacher poet called Rosemary Joseph to join in. Rosemary later had a poem called ‘Baking Day’ published in an anthology of the work of the Group.15 Hobsbaum believed that Ted portrayed her, with a change of profession though not of character, in the poem that was entitled ‘Secretary’ in his first book, The Hawk in the Rain.

  ‘Secretary’ first appeared, untitled, in Saint Botolph’s Review. It is a cruel little poem about a nervous, demure young woman who would ‘shriek’ and run off in tears if touched by a man. Hughes imagines her scuttling ‘down the gauntlet of lust / Like a clockwork mouse’, darning and cooking for her family, then going to bed early with buttocks clenched tight against the force of youth and desire.16 Hobsbaum’s identification of this despised virgin with Rosemary Joseph should be treated with caution. As a student of F. R. Leavis, he should have remembered that one of the first lessons of practical criticism was to distinguish the speaker in a poem – the written ‘I’ – from the poet himself. The reader’s business is to attend to the words on the page, to judge the authenticity of the feeling created by the verbal tone, the cadence and texture of the verse, not to suppose that the poem is a crude transcription of the writer’s personal experience. Furthermore, as T. S. Eliot taught, all poems are as much engagements with previous poems, with the literary ‘tradition’, as they are expressions of the self. Hughes’s ‘Secretary’ may have had one seed in his observation of a particular woman, or kind of woman, but it was also his reworking of the typist in her bedsit passively surrendering to the ‘young man carbuncular’ in Eliot’s The Waste Land.

  By the summer of 1955, Ted had broken up with Liz and was going out with a girl called Shirley who was reading English at Newnham. She was beautiful and clever, stronger and more interesting than L
iz, though shy and quietly spoken. They were serious about each other. When she appeared leaning over the railings of the Mill bridge, Ted would leave his friends in the Anchor and go off with her.

  Shirley was in her second year. She came from a suburban background in the north-west (her parents were both pharmacists), and had been to a mixed grammar school. At first she had been overawed by Cambridge, and most particularly by what seemed to her the supreme self-confidence of her fellow-undergraduates. Nevertheless, during her first year she had found some true friends at Newnham and come to feel more at ease.

  What attracted Shirley to Ted initially was his unorthodox lifestyle, his residence in the orchard of St Botolph’s Rectory, his poetry, his snatches of French picked up over his Paris summer the previous year (‘Zut, alors,’ he would say), his trademark black corduroy jacket – all part of a bohemian persona. He fried herrings in oatmeal for her; he taught her a betting system based on the form of three-year-old racehorses. He seemed rooted in reality – the antithesis of the rarefied and cerebral atmosphere of Cambridge. He made the conventionally ambitious men pale into insignificance. But what made her fall deeply in love with him was an intensity, a power, a sense of certainty, of sureness. He had a stillness, a watchfulness about him – not the watchfulness of a detached analytic observer; he was empathetic, he engaged with the world, but always retained an immutable inner ‘self’. This, it seemed to her, encompassed but was more than his belief in his vocation as a poet. She thought it had been with him always. She grew to feel she had become part of that certainty, that ‘self’. Later, when she had to accept that this was no longer true, the effect was devastating.

  With her auburn hair and pale freckled skin, she was his Deirdre of the Sorrows, his ethereal Celtic girl. In the warm summer of 1955, Shirley stayed up for the Long Vacation term. She had a lovely room looking out on Newnham greenery. Ted came over from his gardening job, bearing armfuls of roses. He invited her to the Beacon for a week. She found his father quiet and withdrawn, his mother warm and properly maternal: she made them real homemade lemonade. While there, Shirley, in his mother’s absence, made a disastrous attempt to cook Scotch eggs and left the kitchen a blackened mess. She feared that Ted’s house-proud mother would be enraged, but Edith just laughed it off. Olwyn then arrived from Paris for a brief visit. Like Ted, she towered over her parents. Shirley felt more than a little intimidated by this striking, blonde Viking goddess. Olwyn shook her hand, turned it over, examined her palm and said: ‘You have some very nasty moments coming.’ Shirley was chilled by an antagonism she could not understand. When she and Olwyn had to share a bed, Shirley balanced herself precariously on the extreme edge for the whole night.

  It was in his West Yorkshire home that Ted revealed his detailed knowledge of and passionate love for the natural world. He was truly himself there. When he took Shirley to Haworth Parsonage, she, who had always loved Wuthering Heights, felt that Ted, like Heathcliff, belonged to these moors. He himself was part of that landscape, elemental, unchangeable.

  From Yorkshire they went over to Liverpool. Shirley’s mother met them at the barrier at Lime Street station. They were both dressed in black, the uniform of rebellious youth. Her mother was shocked by Shirley’s appearance, and said: ‘You look as though you haven’t slept for a week.’ Shirley, of course, was secretly gratified by the remark. As they went down the avenue to her home, her mother walked a few paces ahead of them, not wanting the neighbours to associate her with this disreputable-looking pair. Shirley’s father was not impressed with Ted’s aspirations to be a poet. ‘I suppose you would go out to work,’ he said to his daughter, ‘and he would stay at home writing poetry.’ The following morning, Shirley, still in her nightdress, went into the guest room to bid Ted good morning. Her father saw her emerging, and Ted was asked to leave.

  At the beginning of the Michaelmas term, Ted made a proposal: why didn’t she leave Cambridge and everything else behind her and go to Spain with him? She was not quite enough of a bohemian to agree. Later in life she was to wonder how all their lives would have turned out if she had gone, but she also convinced herself that what was about to happen was meant to be – it would lead to the magnificent poetry of both Ted and Sylvia.

  As for Shirley’s appearance, Ted never forgot it. In an exquisite unpublished poem, the threads of memory are woven out of the ‘bushed mass’ of Shirley’s densely tangled hair that overwhelmed her ‘small-boned freckled / Irish face’. Her large green eyes were ‘Startling and nearly too pretty’ for her pretty and ‘silent’ face. ‘Baffled and loving’, she and Ted break out of themselves and into each other. A single strand of hair becomes his link, his bridge, to something he cannot forget, a world he never entered, a future that was not to be. Shirley offered him ‘a great richness’, but he was too young ‘To recognize one of those offers / Life makes only once’.17

  The poem was written many years later, as part of Hughes’s long process of coming to terms with his marriage to Sylvia Plath and her death. He was always fascinated by the idea of the road not taken, the possible alternative life story. What if he had taken that passage to Australia? Or obeyed the command of the university Proctors and stayed away from the launch party of Saint Botolph’s Review? Ireland – especially the west of Ireland, where W. B. Yeats had found his home – was always his land of lost content, the place to which he dreamed of escaping. If Shirley had accepted the invitation to Spain and then married him, his soul and body would have mingled with a child of Ireland.

  Shirley was the inspiration for ‘Fallgrief’s Girlfriends’, another of Ted’s poems published in Saint Botolph’s Review. The persona of Fallgrief, by this account a projection of Hughes himself, has a rather dim view of his girlfriends (‘admiration’s giddy mannequins / Lead every sense to motley’) and of sexual congress (‘insects couple as they murder each other’) until he is changed by finding ‘a woman with such wit and looks / He can brag of her in every company’.18 He was proud of Shirley. But still he was marking time, waiting for his real life to begin. Just before his twenty-fifth birthday he wrote in his journal of how he still felt like an ‘observer not yet called into the lists’. He sees himself as detached, idle, lacking in will, in need of some violent force to energise him and spark him into creative life.19

  The living colossus in the pantheon of Ted Hughes and his contemporaries was Thomas Stearns Eliot. After Hughes became Poet Laureate, he delivered a lengthy toast in Eliot’s memory on the occasion of the centenary of his birth. He wrote it up under the title A Dancer to God. Like his meditations on his other poetic heroes – Shakespeare, Coleridge, Yeats – this piece is a scarcely veiled manifesto for his own work. Its theme is ‘the voice of Poetry as the voice of Eros’, which is indeed the thrust of Hughes’s own poetry. Eros: the primordial Greek god of desire, son of Aphrodite (Roman Cupid, son of Venus), embodiment of the madness of erotic love, and in Freud the term for the sex drive or life-force that is the opposite of the death drive (Eros versus Thanatos).

  Even as a student, Ted was mapping out the argument that he later crystallised in what he called the ‘unified field theory’ of A Dancer to God.20 He and his friends believed that the two great English-language poets of modern times were unquestionably W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Each of them was deeply responsive to ‘the poetic Self – that other voice which in the earliest times came to the poet as a god, took possession of him, delivered the poem, then left him’. Yeats’s dabbling in the supernatural, like Hughes’s, though considered by many to be ‘at best a wilful indulgence, at worst a little bit crazy’, was of a piece with his belief in the magical spirit-force of the poetic self and with his attunement to Irish myth, legend and folklore. Yeats thus became the poet of the land and the spirit of place, the culmination of ‘the complex of autochthonous traditions in these islands’, the true Irish bard.21

  Eliot, by contrast, was the poet of deracinated modernity. His ‘unique position in the history of poetry’ came from the fact that he was
the first to see the ‘desacralized landscape’ of the world after the Great War, the first to give voice to ‘a new terror: the meaningless’. The Waste Land announced a rupture in the history of the world: it shores against our ruin fragments of civilisation in a time broken not only by the mass slaughter of the trenches but also by Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God and Freud’s reinvention of the poetic or second self as the dark unconscious within instead of a quasi-divine Muse descending from above. Eliot’s poetic career, Hughes suggests, followed a path from this new desolation to the redemption of Four Quartets, climaxing in the grace of the Farrar community at Little Gidding, ‘the rose-windowed, many-petalled choreography of the dance before God in an English chapel’.22 He also suggests that one of the key tensions in Eliot was that between the divine love embodied by Christ and the figure of ‘Eros/Dionysus, the androgynous, protean daemon of biological existence and the reproductive cycle’.23 Like many readers of Eliot, he links the imagery of desiccation and sterility in The Waste Land and elsewhere to some crisis of sexual frustration, to a failure of Eros concealed at the core of Eliot’s inner life.

  Hughes proposes that the richest revelation of the evolution of the poetic self in its hidden life often comes from a single early poem, ‘either because the interfering ego is weakest then, or because these creative visions are very like conventional serial dreams, in that the first successful representation is likely to be a compact index of everything to follow’. In Eliot’s case, the key was to be found in the early poem ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’ (‘Come in under the shadow of this gray rock, / And I will show you something different …’).24 So which early Hughes poem is the ‘compact index of everything to follow’ in his writing career?

  Eros is certainly a central feature of his early work. ‘Bawdry Embraced’ goes to it, with a vengeance: