Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  Sylvia was very ‘gushy’ when they arrived. This clearly disconcerted the Fishers, and possibly their inadequate response offended her. Well on in the afternoon, when the talk was deep in reminiscences, she suddenly rose and left the room. We heard the outside door open and banged shut. When she didn’t return after about ten minutes, during which time Ted had become rather silent, he rose in turn and said he’d better go and see where she was. Quite a while later they returned, Sylvia rushing straight upstairs.38

  For the family, this was a first glimpse of Sylvia’s emotional volatility.

  Then it was off to Southampton to cross the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth. The best thing about the crossing was the food: ‘all included in the fare’, ‘steak, steak, steak – if you wish’ (a real treat, in those years when post-war rationing was still a recent memory), ‘Five courses to each meal and many choices of dish’.39 For Sylvia, who always had a very hearty appetite, the only problem was the combination of this with the Atlantic swell. On one occasion she found herself ‘kneeling on the floor of the little cabin under the electric light’ with ‘the vomit shooting out across the room from the rich dinner, the lobster and pecans and martinis’.40 Landing in New York, a customs officer looked with suspicion at Sylvia’s copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. She had often joked that in Ted she had found her own gamekeeper.

  ‘Ted is wonderful: how to get it down? All of a piece, smelling lovely as a baby, a hay field, strawberries under leaves, and smooth white, browning to tan, with his great lion head of hair erupting.’41 It was July 1957. Cape Cod. They had washed off the spiders and dust and coal-sludge and smeared windows of Eltisley Avenue, bathed and freshened themselves, rebaptised their marriage in the great salt tides of the Atlantic, under the summer sun.

  Brother-in-law Warren drove them there a few days after a garden party at which Sylvia proudly introduced her handsome husband to more than seventy friends and family. Bicycles were strapped to the roof of the car. Aurelia’s wedding present could not have been better judged: a summer rental of a cottage belonging to friends at Eastham, a short bike ride from Nauset Light and Coast Guard beaches. For seven magical weeks they could write, before heading inland for Sylvia to take up her position at Smith. It was a little wooden house in ‘a Christmas tree forest’,42 fully fitted out with squirrels on the roof and chipmunks under the floor. ‘That’s my first ever real chipmunk,’ cried Ted. The little creature lodged in his memory as a ‘midget Aboriginal American’, a ‘snapshot for life’. Especially as Sylvia would sometimes make a face like a chipmunk.43

  He recorded his first impressions of America in long, journal-like letters sent to his parents in Yorkshire, Gerald and Joan in Australia, and Olwyn in Paris. In comparison with dour, confined Fifties England, everything was large, opulent, brash. Even the robins were as big as thrushes. Sociability was compulsory. As was cleanliness, which he joked that he felt like reacting against: ‘My natural instinct is to practise little private filthinesses – I spit, pea [sic] on shrubbery, etc, and have a strong desire to sleep on the floor – just to keep in contact with a world that isn’t quite as glazed as this one.’44 Wellesley seemed to him very suburban, so he was glad to return to nature on the Cape. He didn’t like the way that things were homogenised and packaged. ‘What a place America is,’ he wrote to Olwyn. ‘Everything is in cellophane. Everything is 10,000 miles from where it was plucked or made. The bread is in cellophane that is covered with such slogans as de-crapularised, re-energised, multi-cramulated, bleached, double-bleached, rebrowned, unsanforised, guaranteed no blasphemin. There is no such thing as bread. You cannot buy bread.’45 What he liked was the kindness of everybody. Reading the literary reviews, which in England were ‘bittermost gall to boil the heads and hearts of everyone’, he was impressed by the tone of civility. The style was ‘surprisingly honest, outspoken, but not venomous’: ‘They attack each other mercilessly – but openly.’46 There was none of the sarcasm, the snide remarks, the backbiting that characterised the literary establishment back home.

  Ted sat and wrote – or poised himself over a blank page – from seven in the morning until two in the afternoon. The poems weren’t really coming, but his children’s stories were exciting him. He hatched a grand plan to produce a great compendium – 5,000 fables, perhaps – which would bring together all the situations, characters and themes out of all the fairy tales and animal stories that he had ever read. And there weren’t many that he hadn’t read.

  Then they would explore: sunbathing, swimming, fishing. Once, their little boat was swept out to sea and they were stranded on a reef until a motorboat rescued them. On another occasion, they went mussel-hunting at Rock Harbor, watching with fascination ‘the weird spectacle of fiddler crabs in the mud-pools’.47

  Sylvia started a new journal. She too was aching to fill a blank page. She would begin with short stories in which to work herself up towards a novel. She would aim for a ‘jewel prose’ akin to poetry. Little paragraphs. Vignettes. Memories of the cold, the food and the eccentricities of Cambridge. Then she would be ready for ‘Novel: FALCON YARD: central image: love, a falcon, striking once and for all: blood sacrifice: falcon yard, central chapter of book: the irrefutable meeting and experience.’ There would be an emblem out of the traditions of medieval courtly love: a lord and lady on horseback, smiling. A falcon on the wrist, not a hawk in the rain. The bird of prey tamed. She was struggling with writer’s block, but was sustained by ‘the endless deep love’ in which she was living that second honeymoon summer. And by ‘the unique and almost bottomless understanding of Ted’.48

  As always, she had dark dreams, but there were joyful ones too: of Ted’s rosy-cheeked mother holding a baby, with two older children by her side. Sylvia wondered whether this was a memory of a photograph of Ted and his elder siblings or a vision of the grandchildren that she would one day give to Edith.

  Ted was teaching her the art of poetic economy. Choose something very particular: a pig, say, or a cow by moonlight. Describe with words that ‘have an aura of mystic power’. Name the names of a quality: ‘spindly, prickling, sleek, splayed, wan, luminous, bellied’.49 Repeat the words aloud and the incantation will make them strong.

  She felt that a new era had begun. After the months of exam-cramming, ‘slovenly Eltisley living, tight budgeting, arranging of moving’, she was becoming whole, stretching her writerly wings. Ted brought her cold orange juice to quench sleep-thirst and they exchanged dreams. In hers she was back at Newnham but this time surrounded by wild flowers instead of having her old bad dream about exams. In his, they walked a meadow in which there was a baby tiger and another tiger beyond a hedge. A tiger-man knocked at the door with a gun and Ted defended her, ‘bluffing with an empty rifle’.50

  Sylvia was reading Virginia Woolf, learning to write prose poetry, to follow the stream of consciousness and not worry about realistic detail. This was how she could turn ‘Judith Greenwood’, her autobiographical character, into a symbolic figure. ‘Make her enigmatic: who is that blond girl: she is a bitch: she is the white goddess. Make her a statement of the generation. Which is you.’51 But was it possible to be both the eternal feminine of the White Goddess and the symbol of a new materialistic, carefree generation?

  Before long, she would be blocked again. And then the anxiety would kick in, the jealousy of Ted’s success. She wanted him to have it, she felt in her gut that he was the better poet and that he deserved it. The reason she could marry him and him alone was the knowledge that she would never have to restrain her own talent. With a lesser poet, she would have had to rein herself in so as not to emasculate him by overtaking him and becoming the successful one. With Ted, she told herself, however high she flew he would always be ahead. For all this, she could not but envy his prize, his winning of Mr T. S. Eliot’s admiration, his forthcoming publication on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Ted knew that ‘the waters off beautiful Nauset’ – a phrase from ‘Daddy’ that he quotes back in ‘The Prism’,
his Birthday Letters poem about her grave – were the cradle of Sylvia’s self. He kept her talismanic stone in which, like a prism, he imagined seeing the Cape’s ‘salty globe of blue, its gull-sparkle, / Its path of surf-groomed sand’.52 In the prism and in the Birthday Letter named from it, both her childhood – pre-depression, pre-suicide attempts – and their second honeymoon summer of 1957 were intact. Their sunlit seaside love was the antithesis of the snow-covered, windswept Brontë moors.

  10

  ‘So this is America’

  With summer gone, they took up residence in the town of Northampton, on the banks of the Connecticut River in western Massachusetts. This was the location of Smith College, where Sylvia taught as an instructor for freshman English throughout the 1957–8 academic year. They lived in an apartment at 337 Elm Street, near a church, a high school and the green oasis of Childs Memorial Park. After a nervous first day, fastened in the straitjacket of a blue flannel suit that Ted remembered in a Birthday Letters poem, Sylvia threw herself into her teaching. Busy as she was preparing and taking classes, she continued to plan ‘Falcon Yard’, her Cambridge novel. Ted helped to steer her away from the superficial externals of her magazine-style prose, towards his own more inward territory. ‘Place doesn’t matter – it’s the inner life: Ted & me,’ she reminded herself in her journal.1 But for Ted, place did matter. ‘So this is America’ was his memory of his thought on first making love to Sylvia.2 Now he was in America with his American wife.

  In her imagination, Sylvia was still in England. She planned short stories. One of them, ‘Four Corners of a Windy House’, sketched out in ‘physical, rich, heavy-booted detail’ their bracing hike across the moors to Top Withens:

  blisters, grouse – picnic – honey soaking through brown paper bag – fear, aloneness – goal – cairn of black stones, small, contracted – their dream of each other, she & he … Strength – each alone – bracken, marsh – tea in deep cleft of valley – dark, cats – story of lost woman – match-flare of courage in the dark – moor sheep – bus-wait opposite spiritualists – ghosts & reality on moor … house: absolute reality, but clustered with ghosts – eternal paradox of identity.3

  Before his eyes, Ted’s life was being transformed into art through his wife’s magical gift for words.

  He, on the other hand, felt blocked. With Sylvia as the breadwinner, he was free to write full time, but the poems had dried up. He would sit for hours ‘like a statue of a man writing’.4 The only difference between him and an inanimate figure was that after a few hours a bead of sweat would drip down his forehead. For the first time, he was trying to write as opposed to writing down the words that just came to him. And it was the trying that proved the impediment. What was more, the fact of having published all the decent poems he had written meant that he had to move on to a new style. There would be no point in producing a second book that was just like the first – and it was on the basis of a second book that his long-term literary future would be judged. He cooked Sylvia both breakfast and lunch, but the life of idleness was not for him. He wandered around Northampton and was disconcerted by the Smith girls, who went around in gaggles, all looked like each other, and had a ‘machined glaze of hyper-health’.5 Later in the year, an encounter with some of them in Childs Memorial Park seems to have provoked an angry outburst from Sylvia.6

  Ted sensed that, paradoxically, he would be more productive if he had less time on his hands. So he began to look for a job. The trouble was, there was nothing interesting for him to do in the dull town of Northampton. He made some enquiries about part-time work for the college radio station in nearby Amherst.

  The Hawk in the Rain was published in London by Faber and Faber on 13 September 1957, at a price of ten shillings and sixpence, in an edition of 2,000 copies in a yellow dust jacket with narrow blue stripes, the title in blue and ‘poems by Ted Hughes’ in red.7 The American edition appeared five days later, in a smaller edition, at a price of $2.75. A month later, Ted and Sylvia went to New York for a reading and launch party at the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y, which had been the country’s leading venue for live poetry since 1939. Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood had had its premiere there.

  Sylvia wrote to his parents afterwards, telling them that Ted had done a wonderful job, looking extremely handsome in his only suit (dark grey) and the golden yellow tie she had bought him in Spain for his birthday the previous year. She had persuaded him, much against his will, to have a haircut, so he looked like ‘a Yorkshire god’. There were about 150 people in the audience, and he ‘read beautifully’.8 Some members of the audience bought the book beforehand and followed the poems on the page as he read. Afterwards, he signed autographs, using Sylvia’s shoulder as a writing-desk. In the same letter, she thanked her in-laws for the mother-of-pearl earrings they had just sent her for her twenty-fifth birthday: these would go perfectly with the pink woollen dress that she had worn on her wedding day. She also told them that she had persuaded Ted to write an autobiographical children’s story about a little boy who lived on the moors that he so loved.

  Ted in turn wrote excitedly to Dan Huws, saying that the 92nd Street Y had been packed for his reading and that afterwards he was ‘swamped by dowagers’ who wanted to know why ‘Bawdry Embraced’ – those rollicking verses from their Cambridge days – had not been included in the book. The answer was that Marianne Moore had considered them ‘too lewd’ and insisted on the poem being dropped.9 An assortment of ‘maidenly creatures’ asked him to sign their fresh copies of his slim volume. One of them took the book back after he had signed it, looked at him with wide eyes and said, ‘And what I want to say is “Hurrah for you”.’10 This was his first full experience of the effect his poetry readings would have on females in the audience.

  Reviews came more quickly in Britain than America. One of the first was by the distinguished Orcadian poet Edwin Muir in the New Statesman: ‘Mr Ted Hughes is clearly a remarkable poet, and seems to be quite outside the current of his time.’ His voice was very different, that was to say, from the urbane tones of the poets of the so-called Movement – the anti-romantic, anti-Dylan Thomas group, including Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Donald Davie, whose work had been gathered the previous year in an anthology called New Lines. ‘His distinguishing power is sensuous, verbal and imaginative; at his best the three are fused together,’ Muir continued. ‘His images have an admirable violence.’ All in all, The Hawk in the Rain was ‘A most surprising first book, and it leaves no doubt about Mr Hughes’s powers.’11 He said that Hughes’s ‘Jaguar’ was better than Rilke’s ‘Panther’, praise so high that Ted thought it would be more likely to provoke ‘derision than curiosity’.12

  The reviews that counted most were those in the New York Times and the London Observer. They appeared on the same day, 6 October. The New York account was by a poet who would soon become a very good friend, W. S. Merwin. He could hardly have been more positive. The book’s publication, he wrote, gave reviewers ‘an opportunity to do what they are always saying they want to do: acclaim an exciting new writer’. The poems were more than promising. They were ‘unmistakably a young man’s poems’, which accounted for ‘some of their defects as well as some of their strength and brilliance’, but ‘Mr Hughes has the kind of talent that makes you wonder more than commonly where he will go from here, not because you can’t guess but because you venture to hope.’13

  Later in the autumn, they met Merwin. Ted found him impressively ‘composed’. His English wife Dido was, according to Sylvia, ‘very amusing, a sort of young Lady Bracknell’; to Ted, she seemed ‘bumptious garrulous upper class’.14 They were introduced through Jack Sweeney, director of the Woodberry Poetry Room in the student library at Harvard. Sweeney gave lively dinner-parties for local and visiting poets at his home on Beacon Street in Boston. Ted arrived with a limp and his foot in plaster, because he had fractured the fifth metatarsal in his right foot when jumping out of an armchair in the Elm Street apartment at a moment when his foot h
ad gone to sleep. He was still limping when he struggled up the stairs some time later to the Merwins’ fifth-floor apartment on West Cedar Street, for another dinner-party, at which Bill Merwin suggested that Ted and Sylvia should move back to England, because the opportunities for BBC broadcasting, together with newspaper and magazine reviewing, would give them much more time for their own writing than they would have staying in America, where the only way that poets could make a living was through distracting and debilitating university teaching. The Merwins were heading to London themselves.

  In London, it was Al Alvarez, poetry editor of the Observer, who could make or break a young writer. He wrote poems himself – Ted thought they were ‘very crabby little apples’ – and he wasn’t easy to please. His review dropped a lot of names in a manner that Ted considered ‘undergraduatish’ – D. H. Lawrence, Thom Gunn, Robert Lowell, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (from which he accused Hughes of stealing the word ‘dispropertied’).15 Alvarez criticised some of the poems for being excessively ‘literary’ or having a ‘misanthropic swagger’, but said that half a dozen of them could only have been written by ‘a real poet’.16

  Alvarez’s judgement was astute. Some of the poems in The Hawk in the Rain now read like period pieces. There is sometimes a clever literary allusiveness that does not feel real. And pieces such as ‘Secretary’ are unpleasantly misanthropic – or in this case, misogynist. Quite a lot of the poems are directly or indirectly about sex, viewed from a very masculine perspective. But there are indeed half a dozen pieces of true genius. Four of them are among the first five in the collection: ‘The Hawk in the Rain’, ‘The Jaguar’, ‘The Thought-Fox’ and ‘The Horses’. The two other highlights are ‘Wind’, which begins with the memorable line ‘This house has been far out at sea all night,’17 and ‘Six Young Men’. This was inspired by a photograph of a group of friends posing near the bridge at the top of Crimsworth Dene, that favourite spot of Ted’s. They are all ‘trimmed for a Sunday jaunt’ some time just before the outbreak of war. The ‘bilberried bank’, ‘thick tree’ and ‘black wall’ were all still there, forty years on, but the young men were not. ‘The celluloid of a photograph holds them.’ The image is ‘faded and ochre-tinged’, yet the figures themselves are free from wrinkles. ‘Though their cocked hats are not now fashionable, / Their shoes shine.’ A shy smile is caught in one of the faces, another of the lads is chewing a piece of grass. One is shy, another ‘ridiculous with cocky pride’. Little differences, but the same end: ‘Six months after this picture they were all dead.’18 The poem remains one of the two best retrospectives on the ‘never such innocence again’ motif of the beginning of the Great War, the other being Philip Larkin’s ‘MCMXIV’, published a few years later in The Whitsun Weddings.