Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  They resumed their theatregoing. Ted loathed Harold Pinter’s much-praised The Caretaker at the Duchess Theatre. Some clever wit to begin with, but boring in the second half. Pinter’s usual theme: ‘the id emerging in some decrepit disgusting vindictive form and threatening the isolated dried-up ego’. The typically English assault on the ghastly English ‘public school ego-kit, the do-it-yourself gentleman kit’.33 He preferred Roots by Arnold Wesker, regarding it as a ‘pepped-up’ version of the kind of material found in the popular BBC radio soap opera Mrs Dale’s Diary.34

  On 23 June, there was another Faber and Faber cocktail party. This time Ted spoke to Eliot at length. He also met W. H. Auden for the first time, though ‘scarcely spoke to him, since he was overpowered by the Blue-haired hostesses that seem to run those meetings’. Sylvia, relishing an evening of champagne instead of ‘sour milk and diapers’, engaged in conversation with Stephen Spender (drunk) and Louis MacNeice – also drunk, and speaking, Ted told Olwyn, ‘like a quick-fire car salesman’. Sylvia proudly reported to her mother that at one point Charles Monteith, Ted’s editor, beckoned her out into the hall: ‘There Ted stood, flanked by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Louis McNeice [sic] on the one hand and Stephen Spender on the other, having his photograph taken.’ ‘Three generations of Faber poets there,’ said Monteith. ‘Wonderful!’35 Mark Gerson, one of London’s leading portrait photographers, was the man behind the camera. He took a whole series of photos of the five poets.

  Ted threw himself into radio plays, short stories and other broadcasts for the BBC, readings for schools, book-reviewing and all the drudgery of the freelance author’s life. He also considered the possibility of trading in antique chairs. When he needed to get away from the cramped flat with the baby, he borrowed the Merwins’ more capacious quarters (they had gone off to their farmhouse in France). In the summer Ted and Sylvia took a two-week holiday in Yorkshire, introducing the baby to the wider family. They went to the rather dingy seaside resort of Whitby with Ted’s cousin Vicky.

  Sylvia’s first volume of poems, The Colossus, was published in the autumn. It meant a lot to them both that Ted wasn’t the only one making an impression in literary London. It was an exciting time in the city, with a sense that the austere and stuffy Fifties were over – Sylvia attended the Lady Chatterley trial at the Old Bailey and was delighted by the verdict that D. H. Lawrence’s novel was not obscene, for all the prosecuting counsel’s infamous question to the jury as to whether it was the kind of book that one would wish one’s wife or servants to read. She was beginning to get a little broadcasting work of her own.

  They took the train to Yorkshire for Christmas. Edith moved the piano out of the sitting room so that there would be room for Frieda’s playpen. But things went wrong when Sylvia and Olwyn had a bad quarrel. It began when Sylvia made a tart remark about a poet who was a friend of Olwyn’s. ‘I say, you’re awfully critical, aren’t you?’ said Olwyn, who had – Sylvia alleges – been sniping ever since her arrival. Sylvia glared at her and drew Ted into the room, having whispered Olwyn’s remark to him. Olwyn lost her temper and asked Sylvia why she was always so rude and selfish. She called her sister-in-law a ‘nasty bitch’, said that she had eaten too much Christmas dinner, and criticised her for not letting her stay in Chalcot Square the previous March – which would not have been very practical, given that the flat had one bedroom and Sylvia was eight months pregnant. She then referred to Sylvia as ‘Miss Plath’ (a jibe at her having published The Colossus under her maiden name?) and reminded her who was the true daughter of the house. Sylvia should stop treating the Beacon as if it were her own home; she was intolerant, selfish and immature. During the shouting match, Olwyn had been holding Frieda. She ended the row by saying, ‘But we shouldn’t talk like this over her sweet head.’ Sylvia took her baby and went upstairs. She and Ted left early the next morning, sooner than planned. Olwyn would never see her sister-in-law again.

  Olwyn Hughes hardly knew Sylvia Plath. ‘I never either liked or disliked her. I didn’t feel to know her,’ she wrote, late in life.36 They met just six times: for the weekend in Cambridge in the autumn of 1956, on summer holiday in Yorkshire the following year, over lunch in Chalcot Square in March 1960, and for three family Christmases at the Beacon, this being the last one. Arguments during family Christmas gatherings are not exactly unusual and in Chalcot Square it was understandable that Sylvia was irritated by Olwyn’s smoking and the length of time she stayed in the tiny flat of her heavily pregnant hostess (though, from Olwyn and Ted’s point of view, they needed a good catch-up because they hardly ever saw each other).

  Olwyn’s impression of Sylvia was formed almost entirely on the basis of hearsay from Ted and others, including some malicious witnesses, together with repeated readings, over the years after her death, of her poems, letters and journals. In truth, Olwyn was not a major first-hand witness. At the same time, she was one of only three people to have read Sylvia’s last journals before one of them was destroyed and the other lost.37 This meant that Olwyn felt qualified to opine about Sylvia’s psychology. She spent nearly fifty years thinking, talking and writing about her. She bitterly regretted that their last meeting was so unpleasant, and this was her way of seeking justification and atonement.

  Sylvia wrote to her mother, speculating about the reason for Olwyn’s rage: it could only have been jealousy. Olwyn, she thought, was ‘pathologically’ close to Ted; they had even shared a bed as children. Perhaps this was why she had never married. There seemed – says Sylvia, a year on from her own course of psychoanalysis – to be something horrifyingly ‘Freudian’ about the relationship, so little wonder that Olwyn did not like to see her brother now putting his wife and child first.38

  Ted bottled up his feelings about the falling out between his wife and his sister. He delighted in his baby daughter, observing her standing up in her cot. His surviving personal journals begin at this point. As if in response to the new life embodied by Frieda, they are filled with observations of natural rebirth. On Christmas Eve at the Beacon, one of the earliest surviving entries, he noticed heather in flower, dandelions by a bus stop, the sun in the morning mist looking like a white disc suggestive of visionary apprehension, the line of the moor in radiant profile, ‘limpid and smooth in undulations like the edge of ice held up and melting’. And he noticed birds: a little owl on his parents’ washing pole, wrens, robins, a missel thrush and – a description that is a little prose poem in its own right – a magpie ‘tossing himself up with powerful rising flirts’ as it came up off the moor, ‘then breasting like an arrowhead, plunging like a closed dart, then another flirt catching him, tossing him again, down the dropaway slope’.39

  He observed people as acutely as landscapes and fauna. That Christmas, Ted noted that his parents lacked ‘the ceremony and style’ to be good present-givers. They preferred to hand over gifts discreetly, a few days early. This, he thought, showed a lack of poise. As often, he reached for a comparison in the terms of his own vocation: ‘its equivalent in writing is a slovenly direct thrusting across of the facts without nuance, without relationship to larger patterns or permanence’. Olwyn, by contrast, gave with style but without show, always surprising the recipient and gracing the gift: ‘the equivalent in writing would be an informal fresh true perfect style’.40 He wrote about Frieda, aged eight months, being fascinated by shoes and cups. He perceived the family row as Olwyn attacking Sylvia, not vice versa. It reminded him of a similar attack Olwyn had made on Gerald’s wife, Joan. ‘In the animal world,’ he noted, ‘the attacker always wins.’41

  Back in London, they went to the zoo – he had bought a season ticket and it became his regular outing with the pushchair – and he jotted down notes about the behaviour of elephants. Often he would walk alone on Primrose Hill and Hampstead Heath at dawn. Thus on 12 April 1961 at five in the morning he caught the moment through a lengthy diary description that began with ‘faint marble of blue heaven in a sieved rippled glazing of cloud’, came alive with a s
ea of blackbirds and the song of thrushes, then tracked his steps down to the Regent’s Canal where the water was quivering ‘as if the fish in it had first awakened, air beginning to spurt and shift on it’. In the park, his eye fell on a damp Daily Express on a bench, where he read of the first day of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem: the reality of history intruding upon the serenity of the morning. In their different ways, Ted and Sylvia were both trying to write poetry of the moment, to bridge their own concerns – for him, a hawk roosting or a pig destined for the oven; for her, a Germanic heritage and the oppression of domestic drudgery – with their consciousness of the momentous monstrosity of the recent past. Though they rarely admitted it in so many words, each of them shared the apprehension of Theodor Adorno that to write poetry after Auschwitz was to bear a heavy responsibility.

  Minute observations and particular phrases in their journals gave both Ted and Sylvia the opportunity to try out phrases and raw material for potential inclusion in their poems. A good diary entry is like a good poem, a crafting of the world into words: ‘wet dark blue pre-dawn push of slopping clouds’, ‘Daffodills [sic] blowing their dry zinc-green leaves seeming almost to boil’.42 When Ted wrote in his journal of a chestnut tree with huge-sleeved Pierrot arms holding candles daintily, he was grasping at a moment’s observation before it vanished, but there was always the possibility of such moments returning in a poem by one or other of them. By this time, they were becoming one soul. Within a few weeks of Sylvia writing the poem that begins ‘The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here,’ Ted was noting in his journal, ‘The red tulips – hearts terrifyingly vivid terrible. Organs pulsing something red and uncontrollable … Tulips the colour of blooded yolks.’43 They did not plagiarise each other; they achieved synchronicity of vision through their shared imagination and observation, their conversation, their healthy competition, their daily and nightly bond of love and work.

  In January 1961, they recorded a joint interview for BBC radio, broadcast under the title Two of a Kind: Poets in Partnership. They were asked how they had met and how Ted had proposed. By writing poems to each other, Sylvia replied. ‘The poems haven’t really survived, the marriage overtook the poems,’ interjected Ted. Apart from their mutual dedications, interviewer Owen Leeming observed, their published poems appeared not to be to or about each other. Marriage freed them for other subjects, they explained, but, Sylvia added, ‘I’d never be writing as I am and as much as I am without Ted’s understanding and co-operation.’ They liked the same things, lived at the same tempo, had the same rhythm in almost every way. ‘Two people who are sympathetic to each other and who are right, who are compatible in this spiritual way, in fact make up one person,’ said Ted, ‘they make up one source of power which you can both use and you can draw out material in incredible detail from this single shared mind.’44 Ted spoke of their telepathic union, Sylvia more practically of how Ted’s love of animals sent her back to her own father’s interest in bees, which gave her a new theme for her writing. They admitted that beneath, and in their poems, they had very different temperaments. But they spoke of their shared love of family. Sylvia envisioned a large house stocked with small children and small animals.

  In February, there was a repeat incident of the kind that had spoiled the end of the semester at Smith. Ted went for the meeting with the BBC producer Moira Doolan that would lead to the commissioning of the broadcasts for schools that eventually became Poetry in the Making. He seemed to be out for far too long. Sylvia, pregnant again, and feeling vulnerable, began to have suspicions. She had spoken to Moira Doolan on the telephone when the appointment was being arranged and formed the impression that the lilting Irish voice must belong to a great and seductive beauty, which was far from the case. When Ted came home, he found that the manuscripts of his work in progress had been ripped to shreds and the pages torn from his trusty edition of the complete works of Shakespeare. His reaction on this occasion is not recorded, but long after Sylvia’s death he admitted to his American editor, Fran McCullough, that sometimes when Sylvia was in a blind rage, all he could do was slap her, and that once ‘she turned into his slap and got a black eye, and went to the doctor and told him Ted beat her regularly’.45

  A few days later, Sylvia miscarried her second baby and soon after that she had to return to hospital for an appendectomy. Her diary recorded Ted’s visits to her bedside. One day he appeared in his familiar black coat, looking twice as tall as everyone else. She felt as ‘excited and infinitely happy’ as she had been in the first days of their courtship: ‘His face which I daily live with seemed the most kind and beautiful in the world.’46 Five days later she wrote, ‘Ted is actually having a rougher time than I – poor love sounded quite squashed yesterday.’ It was dawning on him just how tough housework and babycare could be: ‘How do you do it all?’ he asked. ‘The Pooker’ (their nickname for Frieda) ‘makes an astonishing amount of pots to wash … She wets a lot.’ He had no time to cook for himself, was forced to survive on bread. Hearing this, Sylvia felt very loved and needed.47 Back home, she wrote to her Aunt Dotty, raving about Ted: he visited every day, each time bringing ‘a pint of cream and a big steak sandwich’, together with ‘a glass bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice’ (which did not come cheap in the early Sixties). She added that ‘All the women in the hospital thought it was amazing he would take care of a baby so willingly and well and so do I!’48

  Ted’s tenderness when he visited her in hospital seemed to herald a rebirth of both their marriage and Sylvia’s work – the New Yorker offered her a ‘first refusal’ contract for each new poem she wrote, and a couple of months later the prestigious publisher Alfred Knopf agreed to do an American edition of The Colossus, though they left out several pieces because it was judged that their similarity to certain poems by Theodore Roethke ran the risk of a plagiarism suit. In particular, the strange and disturbing ‘Poem for a Birthday’ was deemed to be too close to Roethke’s ‘The Lost Son’.

  Shortly after this, in June, Ted won the Hawthornden Prize for Lupercal. This was the oldest and most distinguished literary prize in Britain, open to all genres, not just poetry. Previous winners had included Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Henry Williamson. At the prize-giving, Ted and Sylvia met the author of the previous year’s winning book, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Alan Sillitoe was the son of an illiterate Nottingham factory worker. His novels told of northern working-class life as it was, in tough, stripped-down prose. Though he did not like the term, he was one of the original ‘angry young men’. He was married to Ruth Fainlight, an American poet of Sylvia’s age. With so many similarities between them, the two couples quickly became fast friends.

  In the summer of 1961 they decided to make up for their failure to fulfil the requirement of the Somerset Maugham Prize to travel abroad the previous year. They left little Frieda in Chalcot Square with Aurelia Plath, who had come over to see her granddaughter for the first time. In May they had bought their first car, a Morris Traveller, thanks principally to the proceeds of Ted’s BBC work. His latest project was a play called ‘The Calm’, a modernised reworking of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in which everybody stayed on the magical island, and the main characters – Prospero, Caliban, Ariel and even Caliban’s witch-mother Sycorax – were all aspects of the same self.49

  They took the Traveller on the ferry and drove down to stay with the Merwins in the Dordogne. Their stops on the journey included Berck-Plage, which inspired a long and dark poem by Sylvia, and Reims, where a gypsy punished Sylvia for not buying a trinket by coming up close to her face and saying ‘Vous crèverez bientôt’ – you will croak soon.50 The visit to the Merwins was not a success. Sylvia, who was pregnant again, so always hungry, thought Dido was ‘the world’s best cook’. Dido found Sylvia lazy, greedy, obstreperous and altogether high maintenance. There were frequent ‘scenes’, which Ted found hard to cope with. On the way back, they stopped at Chartres; the detail remem
bered by Ted in Birthday Letters was Sylvia spending their last francs on a Breton jug for her mother. But he also sensed foreboding in the air (or was that only in retrospect?). It was around this time that friends such as Luke Myers began to hear – from others, never from Ted himself – stories of Sylvia’s ‘rages and passive aggression, with Ted standing by, apologetic and humiliated’.51 After each such incident, Ted would always say a few words, ‘not making any excuses – but simply to restore calm’.52 Sylvia herself would never apologise; it was as if the offending behaviour were simply ‘gone from her memory’.53

  Relieved to be reunited with Frieda, they took Aurelia to Yorkshire, where she got on well with Ted’s mother and Aunt Hilda. Back in London, she continued to look after Frieda while Ted and Sylvia drove the Morris Traveller to the West Country. They had decided to move to the country, confining their search to Devon and Cornwall. After rejecting eight houses, they found an old thatched house, being sold by a knight of the realm. Formerly a rectory and before that a manor house, it was located in a remote village called North Tawton, on the edge of Dartmoor. They both fell in love. The name of the house was Court Green.

  12

  The Grass Blade

  On 26 August 1961, Olwyn’s thirty-third birthday, Ted wrote to tell her that this was the day he was going to sign a contract and put down the deposit on a house. Thanks to a gift of £500 from his parents, an equivalent loan from Aurelia, and their savings of £2,000, they were able to buy it outright. He asked her to imagine ‘a very ancient farmhouse, white, with a steep thatch, adjoining a big thatched barn, along one side of a courtyard, 20 yards square, tightly cobbled with very tiny cobbles’.1 The cobbles actually reached into the house, peppering the little passageway between the kitchen and the dining room. Round the courtyard, there was a store for apples, together with a stable and a woodshed. Beyond that, there was a self-contained thatched one-bedroom cottage that could eventually be done up as a guest house for mothers-in-law and others. The garden extended to more than 2 acres, with a vegetable patch, a ‘prehistoric mound’ and an orchard with about fifty apple trees, a mix of eaters and cookers, not to mention an assortment of currant and berry bushes. A sloping lawn led down to a row of cherry trees and there was a little greenhouse and even an overgrown tennis court.