Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  Sylvia told her mother that they were utterly happy. She could not imagine how she had lived without him: ‘I think he is the handsomest, most brilliant, creative, dear man in the world. My whole thought is for him, to make a comfortable place for him.’10 She was just as effusive to her brother: ‘He knows all about so many things: fishing, hunting, birds, animals, and is utterly dear … What a husband!’11 Ted in turn told his brother in Australia that he had never been writing so well, that this ‘American poetess’ was the making of him.12 In her journal, she described their writing table: 5 foot square, in the centre of the stone-tiled dining room, made of ‘glossy dark polished wood’, with a gap in the middle. At one end Ted sat ‘in a squarely built grandfather chair with wicker back and seat’:

  His realm was a welter of sheets of typing paper and ragged cardboard-covered notebooks; the sheets of scrap paper, scrawled across with his assertive blue-inked script, rounded, upright, flaired, were backs of reports on books, plays and movies written while at Pinewood studios; typed and re-written versions of poems, bordered with drawings of mice, ferrets and polar bears, spread out across his half of the table. A bottle of blue ink, perpetually open, rested on a stack of paper. Crumpled balls of used paper lay here and there, to be thrown into the large wooden crate placed for that purpose in the doorway. All papers and notebooks on this half of the table were tossed at angles, kitty-corner and impromptu.13

  A cookbook rested open by his right elbow, where Sylvia had left it after reading out recipes for rabbit stew. These are the sort of conditions in which he would write for the rest of his life. On Sylvia’s half of the table, by contrast, everything was neat, well ordered, carefully stacked. He wrote in longhand; she typed.

  Though one would not guess it from the brightness of her journal-writing, if Ted is to be believed, Sylvia hated Spain. He said this in retrospect, on account of what he perceived as the darkening in the style of the poems that she wrote while they were there, of her reaction to the bullfight, and of a glimpse of her by moonlight walking alone by the sea in Alicante, looking out towards America like a lost soul. He loved Goya; she found something disturbing in the ‘Goya funeral grin’ of Spanish culture.14

  A single brief shadow passed across their honeymoon summer under the Benidorm sun. Sylvia’s fragmentary journal entry for 23 July speaks of ‘The hurt going in, clean as a razor, and the dark blood welling’.15 The first part of that day’s diary is missing, apparently torn from her notebook. Years later, when her marriage to Ted was at rock-bottom, she allegedly told a friend that one afternoon he turned violent as they made love in the open air on a hillside. The – unverified – story went that his hands tightened around her neck and she nearly choked.16

  After six hot weeks in Spain, they returned via Paris. Olwyn had been away on a conference when they passed through in July and this time she was away again, on holiday. They were, however, able to see Sylvia’s brother Warren, who was about to take up a Fulbright himself. He took some photographs of the newlyweds, arm in arm. In the city, everything seemed rushed, and tiring, after their summer by the sea. Sylvia was ready to head north to ‘Ted’s wuthering-heights home’.17

  The photographs were taken by a colleague from the trouser factory who was an enthusiastic amateur with a camera. In the most famous image, she holds with both hands the strong arm that is around her. His other hand is casually in his pocket. The light bounces off their white shirts on to their fresh faces and high cheekbones. He has just turned twenty-six and she is not quite twenty-four. They look impossibly beautiful, impossibly happy. In another snapshot, Edith is between them, proud of the son who has brought an American bride instead of going off to have a family in Australia. In a third, Sylvia is in the bosom of the family, sitting on a garden bench between Ted and Edith, with Uncle Walt and Bill Hughes standing behind.

  On 2 September, she wrote to her mother, describing herself as ‘a veritable convert to the Brontë clan’, with warm woollen sweater, slacks, socks to her knees and a steaming cup of coffee, sitting in Ted’s bedroom looking out over the beautiful landscape of moorland criss-crossed with drystone walls, as the wind whipped the rain against the side of the house and the coal fires glowed within.18 On a never-to-be-forgotten day, Uncle Walt drove them over to Top Withens, the alleged original of Wuthering Heights. They had a picnic and walked over the moor to the ‘lonely, deserted black-stone house, broken down, clinging to the windy side of a hill’.19 Ted photographed her halfway up a tree, just by the ruin. She re-read Wuthering Heights and then on a day of freezing wind they hiked 10 miles over the moors to visit Top Withens again. They also went to the Brontë parsonage in Haworth, where they marvelled at Charlotte Brontë’s little water-colours and the miniature books in which the sisters had written their earliest stories. Sylvia was full of hope and ambition. A poem ‘unfurled’ from her ‘Like a loose frond of hair’ from the nape of her neck, ‘To be clipped and kept in a book’.20 The moors and the Brontë connection would inspire two fine Plath poems, ‘Two Views of Withens’ and, later, ‘Wuthering Heights’.21

  Towards the end of September, they went down to London for a couple of days. Ted auditioned as a reader of modern poetry for the BBC’s highbrow Third Programme (the station that a decade later was rebranded as Radio 3). At Sylvia’s suggestion, he slipped in a couple of his own poems among selections from W. B. Yeats and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The producer, Donald Carne-Ross, sat with Sylvia in the listening room and murmured his approval of Ted’s voice: ‘Perfect, superb’.22 There was the possibility of a programme about Yeats, if the commissioning committee agreed. He would be in touch.

  In October, Sylvia had to return to Cambridge for her second year of study. Ted remained for a fortnight with his parents at the Beacon, then went back to Dan Huws’s flat in Rugby Street. They still had not told the college authorities, or indeed the Fulbright Commission, about their marriage. Sylvia was unnecessarily worried about getting into trouble. So they were apart for a few weeks, one of the very few times that they were not together during the six years before the marriage broke down. They wrote each other love letters every day, alive with longing and playfulness and writing ideas and smart criticism of each other’s work and dreamy plans for the future. Ted sometimes took to typing instead of using his favoured black fountain pen, as if in homage to Sylvia’s love of the new Olivetti typewriter she had bought in the month of their marriage. They were not averse to sentimentality. ‘Darling Dearest Sylvia kish puss ponk’, Ted would begin, and he would end, ‘I love you I love you, I love you I love you your Ted’ or ‘My kiss puss All my lovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelove lovelove from top to tow [sic]’ – followed by a postscript with the promise that ‘I shall see you Friday and we shall make up for all these interims.’23

  His literary career was beginning to take off. Not least thanks to Sylvia’s organisational skills, his poems were being sent out to magazines in both Britain and America, and some were being accepted. It made a difference that the submissions were neatly typewritten; one can guess from the American spellings who was responsible for that. News came from Carne-Ross of provisional acceptance of the Yeats programme. ‘Darling darling Teddy,’ wrote Sylvia, ‘I read your letter over breakfast … and fought and conquered a huge urge to … leap up in the center of the table and shout: MY HUSBAND IS GOING TO READ OVER THE BBC! With appropriate whoopdedos. I AM SO PROUD.’24 As it turned out, he was paid, but the Yeats readings were never broadcast. The first time Ted’s voice was heard on the radio was on 14 April 1957, when a recording made on 24 October the previous year of him reading his poem ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’ was included in an episode of a series called The Poet’s Voice.

  By the time he had done his recordings, the Governing Body of Newnham and the Fulbright Commission had been told about the marriage. Far from taking away Sylvia’s scholarship or throwing her out, they congratulated her. The Fulbright took the view that the union was a boost to Anglo-American relations, which was their raison d’�
�tre. Ted was free to move to Cambridge. Mr and Mrs Hughes had found a ground-floor flat in Eltisley Avenue, in Newnham village, on the edge of the city, nicely placed between Sylvia’s college and the green spaces of Grantchester Meadows. The rent was low (£4 per week) and they had a living room, dining room, cavernous kitchen and bedroom. Like many houses in west Cambridge, it was a single residence that had been divided into flats. This meant that they had to share a bathroom with the occupant of the flat upstairs; by a curious coincidence, that was George Sassoon, son of the First World War poet Siegfried, and thus a relative of Richard Sassoon (though Sylvia never mentioned him). Ted moved in first, with Sylvia following at the end of the academic term in December. She had sent a batch of their work to the prestigious American magazines the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly. All of hers had been rejected, but a poem of Ted’s called ‘The Hawk in the Storm’ was accepted by Peter Davison, editor of the Atlantic. Ted thought it was the worst of the poems that they had submitted.

  In November, Olwyn stopped by for a weekend on the way back to Paris after a break with her parents in Yorkshire. Her first impression of Sylvia was of ‘American-classic’ clothes, good manners, blonde hair, fair skin, brown eyes (‘deep, watchful and intelligent’), elegant limbs (‘her best feature’) and an attractively low-pitched voice (‘deepening engagingly when she was amused’). She thought that her new sister-in-law was ‘poised and controlled, with a hint of reserve or constraint’.25 They went to Heffers bookshop and Sylvia bought an impressive pile of literary texts with her generous Fulbright book allowance. In the evening, Sylvia cooked a large dinner of roast beef, followed by strawberries and cream. They drank wine. Sylvia thought Olwyn was ‘startlingly beautiful with amber-gold hair and eyes’, but felt that she was ‘quite selfish and squanders money on herself continually in extravagances of clothes and cigarettes, whilst she still owes Ted fifty pounds’.26

  That same month, Sylvia spotted the announcement of a competition for a best first book of poems. It came from the American publisher Harper Brothers, in conjunction with the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association of New York (YMYWHA), which had a renowned Poetry Center at its headquarters on 92nd Street. The judges were figures of immense distinction in the poetry world: W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and the American Marianne Moore. Since Sylvia did not think she had quite enough good poems of her own to create a book, she and Ted selected what they thought were the best forty of Ted’s. Six of them already had magazine acceptances. She typed them up and submitted them, with a renamed version of the Atlantic poem as the title piece: The Hawk in the Rain. He had for some time been intending to put together a collection of his poems, taking the title from a recurrent dream he had been having: ‘A Hill of Leopards’.27 The trouble was, he had not yet been inspired to write the poem that would go with the title. So he was happy to go with Hawk and to let his wife take the lead on the process. Sylvia was convinced that Ted would win the competition, and gain the prize of publication. She assured her mother that it was the best collection of any poet since W. B. Yeats and Dylan Thomas.28

  Sylvia rounded up her year in a pre-Christmas letter to her dearest friend, Marty Brown, her sophomore roommate at Smith. She had found a husband who was ‘the most magnificent man ever’, a ‘roaring hulking Yorkshireman’ who had put the sound of a ‘hurricane’ in her ear at the Falcon Yard party. From that first instant, she ‘just knew’ that he was the one. She rescued him from a ‘slum’ in London, where he had told her that Dylan Thomas used to stay, and now they were writing ‘like fury’, each the other’s best critic. He was ‘a crack shot and fisherman, discus thrower and can read horoscopes like a professional’. He shot rabbits and she stewed them. They had nothing to their name but ‘a wood coffee table, a travel rug and very sharp steak knife’, but they wanted nothing more. They had each other. She loved that he was the only man she had ever met whom she could ‘never boss’ – she just knew that if she tried, ‘he’d bash my head in’.29

  They spent Christmas with Ted’s family at the Beacon, all getting on well, then returned to Cambridge for the freezing-cold Lent term. Dorothea Krook, Sylvia’s generous college supervisor, lent them a paraffin heater, at which Sylvia warmed her hands as she worked on an autobiographical novel about her Cambridge experiences. The ‘greasy-grimed shelves’ and ‘tacky, dark walls’ of 55 Eltisley ‘confirmed’ her ‘idea of England’: ‘part / Nursing home, part morgue / For something partly dying, partly dead’.30 The contrast between dirty, dying England and pristine, newborn America was a recurrent image in Ted’s work. Sylvia cleaned the kitchen in a frenzy of scouring.

  Ted brought in some income by getting a job as an English teacher at the Coleridge Secondary Modern School for Boys. The name had suitably inspiring literary connotations, but he found the work tiring. Because it was a school for boys who had failed to get into the more academic grammar schools, he worked across the curriculum, teaching basic Maths as well as English, History, Drama and Art. He brought the students’ work home in the evening and read out samples to Sylvia as he was marking. It was not an easy school. Sylvia was only mildly exaggerating for comic effect when she told her friend Marty that his class consisted of ‘a gang of 40 teddy-boys, teen-age, who carry chains and razors to school and can’t remember their multiplication tables for 2 days running: a most moving, tragic and in many ways rewarding experience’. It took a lot out of Ted ‘to maintain physical and emotional discipline (they still use the cane here!)’.31 But the boys loved him, especially when he read out ballads and encouraged them to write their own. And still more when he made them stage little Elizabethan plays.

  In February, three days before the anniversary of their first meeting at Falcon Yard, came winter cheer: Ted had won the competition. The Hawk in the Rain was going to be published in America. The distinction of the judging panel almost certainly assured English publication too. Ted told Olwyn that his first reaction on hearing the news was a tremendous sense of guilt – partly, though he did not say so, at the fact that he owed the breakthrough to Sylvia finding out about the competition, and yet it was his poems, not hers, that would be published. He went straight back to read the poems and immediately found all sorts of things he wanted to change. He was appalled at himself for letting Sylvia send them out ‘in such an unfinished state’.32 Sylvia had no such hesitation: the book was magnificent, Ted was a genius, the poems combined ‘intellect and grace of complex form, with lyrical music, male vigor and vitality, and moral commitment and love and awe of the world’. He had everything and she was blissfully happy with him, happy indeed that his book had been accepted first. She rejoiced, she told Aurelia, that he was ahead of her: ‘There is no question of rivalry, but only mutual joy and a sense of us doubling our prize-winning and creative output.’33 She was proud to have been the one who had pushed Ted to make the selection and then typed up the poems.

  Sylvia promptly sent a copy of the typescript to Faber and Faber, Britain’s premier poetry publisher, mentioning the prize and the prospect of publication by Harper in America. Faber returned it with a curt note saying that they did not publish first volumes by American writers. With characteristic persistence, she sent it back, saying that Ted was actually English. They agreed to publish a UK edition. Mr T. S. Eliot himself very much liked the poems. Within a week of acceptance, Faber sent the poems in proof – well before Harper had set up the New York edition in type. Ted would, he proudly told his parents, be ‘the first poet ever to publish his first book in both countries’.34 Indeed, only Auden and Dylan Thomas had gone before him in having a volume of poems published simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic.

  More good news arrived from America: Sylvia was offered a teaching job at Smith, her old college. Ted would go too. Plans for language teaching in Spain or further afield were abandoned. To show her husband her own country was a much more exciting plan. In the better weather of Easter term, they walked on Grantchester Meadows, sometimes getting up early enough to watch th
e sun rise. One morning Sylvia sat on a stile and recited Chaucer to the cows: ‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote …’.35 Soon she was preparing for her final exams. Ted helped her to revise.

  In May, he wrote to Gerald and Joan – they now had two children, Ashley and Brendon – saying that ‘marriage is my medium’.36 He and Sylvia worked and walked and repaired each other’s writing. She was one of the best critics he had ever met and they understood each other’s imagination ‘perfectly’. She was ‘the most responsive alert creature in the world’. They struck sparks, sitting by the river, just watching for water-voles, Sylvia thrilled when the little animals came close. Ted would let out a squeal in imitation of a rabbit, and out they would come. The sound was so realistic that once an owl flew down and tried to sit on his head.37

  His visa and the necessary blood test were arranged. Before leaving Coleridge, he directed a school play and Sylvia attended, her only visit to his place of work. They would sail on 20 June, as soon as Sylvia had graduated. The plan was that they would be in New York for the launch of his book in August (in fact it appeared a couple of months later than that).

  They went up to Yorkshire to say goodbye to the family. During this visit they happily corrected the Harper proofs of The Hawk in the Rain, but there was an embarrassing incident when Ted’s old schoolteacher John Fisher and his wife Nancy drove up from Mexborough to see them. Olwyn, who was also over from Paris for a summer stay, remembered the visit as follows: