Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  She worried about money and raged about Ted in this regard, but there were many times when she felt as he did: that, for the sake of their art, it was better for them to be without each other. ‘Living apart from Ted is wonderful – I am no longer in his shadow, and it is heaven to be liked for myself alone, knowing what I want.’20 She voiced this feeling on one of her trips to London in early November. The Irish fantasy behind her, she was looking for a place in the city. A dream came true when she discovered that a flat was available in a house with a blue heritage plaque on the façade. It was in Fitzroy Road, just round the corner from Chalcot Square. She had noticed it when living in London before, and had fantasised about moving into it: the great W. B. Yeats had lived there as a child. Was it not a sign that, having been to his tower at Ballylee, now she had the opportunity to commune with his poetic spirit? At some level, she must also have hoped that the lure of the shade of his beloved Yeats might bring back Ted.

  She was still thinking about divorce, urged on by various female friends. By coincidence, she was asked to review for the New Statesman a forthcoming book on Lord Byron’s Wife. Her essay, filled with wit and praise, was published on 7 December 1962, under the headline ‘Suffering Angel’, three days before she moved with the children from Devon to London. The wronged but strong-minded wife of the handsome, famous, wildly promiscuous poet who has all London, and in particular all women, at his feet, and then the controversial, high-profile divorce case that brought exile and grief. Perhaps there was a lesson to be learned there. Divorce would have been an irreversible step. Perhaps she should wait it out. Various possibilities were opening up. She was seeing a lot of Al Alvarez. Ted invited her to bring the children for Christmas at the Beacon, but she declined. She offered herself to Alvarez on Christmas Eve instead.

  After she moved to London in early December, it was much easier for Ted to see the children. Though he was giving everybody the Beacon as his postal address, he was spending most of his time in London. Initially, he had slept on the floors and sofas of friends. Then he was able to borrow a flat in Soho that Dido Merwin was selling for her mother. Then, some time after Sylvia moved to 23 Fitzroy Road, he found the little flat in Fitzrovia about which she would be so scathing in the letter to her college friend in which she also alluded to his holiday in Spain with Assia. The flat was a studio on Cleveland Street, north of Charlotte Street, just off the Tottenham Court Road, in a predominantly Greek and Cypriot area. It was ‘spic’ (clean), he told Olwyn, and well done up, a ‘bit like a hotel room, big desk, ground floor, gas fire, one room’, a little kitchen and a bigger bathroom than the one at Chalcot Square (a useful asset for lady guests). It had a phone.21

  By the end of October, David and Assia were doing their best to repair their marriage. At least, he was. He would attentively open car doors and light cigarettes for her. They became ‘very lovey-dovey, arm in arm all the time’.22 They carried on through Christmas and into the New Year, pretending that nothing was happening. ‘She has been seeing H. regularly,’ Nathaniel Tarn noted early in January 1963, ‘and D. knows it, though they have stopped talking about it.’23 Tarn could not understand why Wevill had not kicked his wife out.

  Ted Hughes was also seeing someone else.

  Susan Alliston was born in London in 1937 and educated in a class of just four girls at Queen’s Gate School in South Kensington. Her classmate Vanessa Redgrave remembered that they ‘argued for hours over the meaning of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and the French symbolists that Sue was studying’.24 At a young age, she married an American called Clem Moore, who by strange Hughesian coincidence had been Warren Plath’s roommate at Harvard.25 In the late Fifties, Sue began work as a secretary at Faber and Faber, also serving as a reader for other publishers. In May 1960, a poem of hers called ‘St Martin’s Lane, London’ was published in America in the Nation.

  Yes, and on the one hand were the jagged teeth of walls

  And starred red paper screaming

  Paper pasted with a host’s eye

  Screaming where it hung like flesh,

  Torn away by a demolition plan

  They felled the bricks and dust

  Streamed about them,

  Rose from the rubble – inevitable ghost

  Haunting their mouths with grit …26

  Ted Hughes read and admired this and enquired about the author. He was told by someone connected with Faber that it was by ‘a gorgeous English girl with extraordinary hair’. Some time later, he met her in a lift at Faber and Faber. As he wrote in a brief introduction when he was hoping to get her poems published after her death: ‘It was one of those faces you do not forget. She was tall, and seemed pale, with a shoulder-length dense mane of slightly crinkly hair the colour and seemingly almost the texture of that dark-bronzed fine wire on electrical transformers. It stood out thickly like the mane on an ancient Egyptian figure.’ She spoke with ‘comic flair and zest’. There was ‘a disturbing blend of plangent resonance and aggressive edge’ in her voice. She passionately plunged herself into ‘situations and adventures and collisions’. Everything that she did, she did with her ‘whole excitable body’.27 She also had a dash of Welsh blood, which attracted him.

  It was not until two years after reading the poem set in St Martin’s Lane that he discovered she was its author. He got to know her among his circle of friends who drank in the Lamb in Lamb’s Conduit Street, round the corner from Rugby Street. She had separated from Clem Moore and her constant companion was Tasha Hollis, daughter of White Russian émigré intellectuals. She too had recently separated from her husband. Hughes sensed that Sue ‘was searching for a new direction’: ‘She talked a good deal about poetry and continually promised to show me poems. But she seemed to write rarely and with little confidence. She preferred to dance, to eat curry, to drink beer, and to wallow in talk about the peoples and politics of the world. She read a lot of anthropology and spoke of becoming an anthropologist.’28 The latter interest was of course a Hughesian passion.

  She eventually showed him a poem called ‘Samurai’, which astonished him with its power:

  Aïe – my head is severed

  By the sword of a samurai.

  Catch it before it falls! …

  I go down, down.

  A noble swipe, Jap!

  Carry my scalp.

  My hands, twitching, feel

  the three elegant arches of your feet.29

  On the basis of poems such as this, Ted would one day write admiringly of the ‘active, down-to-earth, almost aggressive streak’ that gave vitality to Sue’s work. Her poems were ‘sinewy, intricate and real’, with ‘nimble penetration, nightmare, and a weird lucidity’. ‘Even at their most abstract’, he argued, they had ‘the concreteness of an actual voice’. One senses that he is remembering her voice even as he writes this: ‘Behind them we feel her rich insecurity, turmoil, a person plunged in the open world.’30

  From 1956 until the summer of 1962, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath lived and worked together with utter loyalty and extreme intensity. They wrote joint letters to friends and families, they wrote poems and prose on the reverse side of sheets filled with drafts of the other’s writing. They were inseparable. One of the reasons why there are so few letters between them is that they hardly ever spent a day or a night apart. Plath’s temperament, exacerbated by her depression, made her possessive and jealous. It is hardly surprising that, having cut himself free by going to live a single life in London, and with Assia only available for hasty assignations, Ted enjoyed flirting with other attractive women among his circle of literary friends in the Lamb.

  According to Susan Alliston’s journal, her first conversation with Ted, other than the brief encounter in the lift at Faber, took place on 1 November 1962, a fortnight after he had packed his things and left Court Green. This was the moment when David Wevill was doing his best to re-woo Assia. The banter in the pub included an exchange in which Ted said, ‘Marriage is not for me – nor you, I think.’ Sue replied, ‘Pe
rhaps at forty,’ a statement which takes on sad irony in the light of subsequent history.31 Clearly Ted was signalling that, having just left an all-consuming marriage, not to mention two young children who still held his heart, he did not want to commit to anyone else. Assia, he told Susan some months later, was the most physically attractive person he had ever met (everyone who encountered Assia agreed upon her phenomenal sexual charisma). But he was unwilling to give himself wholly to her as he had to Sylvia. He needed the escape valve of other company.

  For Ted Hughes, who was always Philip Larkin’s mighty opposite, sexual freedom began in 1962, between the Chatterley trial and the Beatles’ first single, ‘Love Me Do’. For him, Sue Alliston and her flatmate Tasha Hollis were embodiments of the bohemian life he was ready to embrace. Not feeling the loyalty towards the still-married Assia that he had for so long felt towards Sylvia, he was determined to enjoy the vitality of these equally beautiful but less intense and demanding young women. In January and early February, he saw as much of Sue as of Assia.

  But he had not given up on Sylvia either. In early December, when she was in town making plans for Fitzroy Road, they went out to dinner with Eric White, the head of the Poetry Book Society, at a restaurant called L’Epicure in Dean Street. They ate beef stroganoff and got drunk on red wine. After saying goodbye to Eric at midnight, Ted and Sylvia walked round and round Soho Square, talking and talking. In ‘Soho Square’, a long poem about that night, drafted and redrafted on numerous occasions, but finally omitted from Birthday Letters, Ted read the moment as a precious opportunity: ‘This was an invitation to the angel / Of reconciliation between us.’

  Sylvia accused him of having an affair with Dido Merwin as well as Assia. Wasn’t he living in her flat? He assured her that Dido was the last person he would take to bed. Then the floodgates opened. Sylvia’s words of accusation ‘stumbled’ tipsily out, her defensive ‘front’ collapsing. Then her ‘tears gushed’, her face melted. It was like a bursting of the dam that had been holding everything in for months, a release of ‘dreadful abandon’ – abandon, such a potent word in the context of his departure from the marital home. She cried ‘like a child who had become / The river-bed of infinite crying’. It was as if she had ‘found the truth’ and the truth was nothing but tears. He put his arm around her and tried to calm her. Her body crumpled under the support of his arm. He ‘hung on’, out of his depth. He could not ‘check’ her ‘torrent of grief’, could not ‘escape it, or see any way out of it’. The railings and doorways of Soho Square spun dizzily past: in later years, he would go back and examine ‘it all closely’, note it ‘detail by detail, blankly’, like ‘a murderer listening’ for the ghost of his victim (one version of the poem was called ‘The Ghost in Soho Square’). Everything that they ‘had shared’, the seven years since Falcon Yard, ‘Came adrift in the flood’ and poured over them, Sylvia crying in great waves, a ‘drowning vision’ of their ‘whole life’, the pair of them clinging to each other in the wreckage.32

  The time reached two in the morning and Soho Square, in the middle of heaving London, was deserted. There wasn’t even a policeman or a prostitute (the usual denizens of Soho) in sight. Ted took the plunge and invited Sylvia into Dido Merwin’s mother’s flat. He hoped that she might sleep. But the overwhelming flood of Sylvia’s emotion could not be stopped. They had a night of blazing anger and sorrow, and perhaps love, much to the annoyance of the neighbours. Then came ‘the bitter care’, at the top of Sylvia’s voice, the ‘Volcanic’ emotion that she could not control. The people in the flat beneath banged on the ceiling to no effect. The screaming went on, Ted rolling beneath it all,

  A boulder, insensate, irrelevant,

  While that tidal wave, that eruption

  From your childhood, swamped and buried our world.33

  Emotionally, poetically, perhaps erotically, it was a climax. It was his chance to ‘launch an ark’, but he did not take it. They parted in the morning.

  One cold December day, after Sylvia and the children had moved to the Yeats flat in London, Ted drove down to Court Green and back, braving the icy 200 miles each way on the A30, sliding at ‘Twenty miles an hour’ through ‘The worst snow and freeze-up for fifteen years’. He dug potatoes from beneath snow and straw, gathered apples from the store in the courtyard. Victorias and fat Bramleys for cooking, Pig’s Nose Pippins for eating. It was twilight by then. He crept through the house, feeling like a ghost or an intruder. He looked at each thing, as if for the last time: the living room, his and Sylvia’s bedroom, which they had painted red, their books and ‘white-painted bookshelves’, a battered old desk he had bought for £6 and a ‘horse-hair Victorian chair’ that had been an even greater bargain (five shillings). The house was made ‘newly precious’ by the thought of Sylvia’s ‘lonely last weeks there’. How clean she had kept it, despite her sorrows. Court Green was like a sealed casket, from which the treasure was already lost. He said goodbye to the house and crawled back through the night, along the ice-treacherous A30. He took the bag of potatoes and the bag of apples to Fitzroy Road for Sylvia and the children.34

  Ted Hughes said that he visited Sylvia Plath in Fitzroy Road almost daily in the last weeks of her life, taking the children for walks or to the zoo in the mornings, and talking to Sylvia, comforting her, in the evenings. Sylvia said that he came ‘once a week like a kind of apocalyptic Santa Claus’.35 The truth was somewhere between the two. When a marriage breaks down, the truth is usually somewhere between the two competing narratives of despair and blame, guilt and self-justification, confrontation and compromise. When only one partner is left to tell the story, it is more difficult to balance the narrative. There have been many tellings of the last days of Sylvia Plath. What follows is Ted’s telling, in his makeshift journal, in the immediate aftermath.36

  On Sunday 3 February, Sylvia called to ask him to go over and have lunch with her. He was supposed to be at the BBC for a recording. He told her he would get to Fitzroy Road at two o’clock in the afternoon. Because of retakes and so forth, he was forced to send a BBC messenger to tell her that he could not be there for another hour. He arrived at ten past three. She had cooked meatloaf. They had their ‘pleasantest’ and ‘most friendly open time’ since the break-up. Sylvia read her most recent poems aloud. Ted thought her voice was ‘stronger, calmer’. She seemed ‘more whole and in better shape than at any time since she came to London’. They ‘planned’, they ‘conspired’. When he played with Frieda, ‘she wept’. He ‘held them both’ and Sylvia wept. She continually repeated that sooner or later he would be bound to desire someone else, but he denied this completely. For the last few days he had been calling everybody Sylvia. He had been wanting ‘to turn back but not knowing how to stay out of the old trap’. He told her that he wanted to take up their old life, ‘but that it had to be different’. He ‘couldn’t be a prisoner’. He also told her that he thought she was ‘strengthening in her independent life’. He was thrilled that her writing was taking off again. He gently suggested that her work was ‘disabled’ when she saw too much of him. It would not be good for her work if ‘her centre of gravity’ returned to him. She promised to visit him on Thursday night. He stayed till two o’clock in the morning.

  On the Monday lunchtime, she telephoned. Her tone had changed completely. He had to swear to quit the country within a fortnight. He was ‘ruining her life’ by living in London. She could not stand hearing all the gossip about him. He asked who was gossiping. She refused to tell him. She was overwrought, all the rebuilding of the previous day having vanished. He told her that he could not possibly leave England. He was broke and where would he go? She made him promise. Finally he said he would go, but that he did not see how he could. Sounding ‘terribly excited’, she said that she wanted him ‘never to see her again’. He promised to leave as soon as he could.

  On the Wednesday, he saw Assia. She told him that Sylvia had told her friend Gerry Becker all about their affair and the end of the marriage. She was
putting about a story that Ted had deserted her in Devon, and left her with no money. Ted wrote Sylvia a note to tell her that she must stop spreading lies. If necessary, he would threaten Becker with a solicitor’s letter. He took the note round to Fitzroy Road. Sylvia begged him not to do anything drastic; she couldn’t help what people said. But it was obvious to him that she had been spreading the rumours. They talked again about moving to Yorkshire and she kept asking him if he ‘had faith in her’, which seemed ‘new and odd’.

  The next morning she telephoned, ‘freshly upset’. She came round to his little Cleveland Street flat for the first and last time. One moment she was telling him in no uncertain terms to leave England forthwith. The next she was telling him the exciting news that she had been asked to go on the prestigious radio programme Critics on Sunday (a weekly review of the latest offerings in the arts). Did he have faith that she would have the confidence to do it? They talked for a long time. He wondered if one reason she had come was in order to check out his flat. She noticed everything, even the fact that he had a new edition of Shakespeare. When she left in the afternoon, things were still in the air: was he to go abroad immediately or were the two of them to go to Yorkshire? Plans for reunion in one breath, demands for permanent separation in the next: it was this volatility and unpredictability that made Ted doubt whether he could go to back to life with Sylvia.

  He wrote a poem about this Thursday visit, the last time he saw her face to face for any length of time. It was published in Birthday Letters as ‘The Inscription’. It describes her contradictory demands – Yorkshire together versus abroad alone – and her inquisitive inspection of the flat. Its bed, its telephone (‘she had that number’). But the main focus is on the edition of Shakespeare. In the poem, it is his old red Oxford edition, the one that she had partially shredded, back in the days when ‘happiness’ seemed ‘invulnerable’, when he was late coming back from his meeting with Moira Doolan of the BBC. Now the book is ‘Resurrected’. What the poem does not say is that it was actually a different Shakespeare, a new one. Given to him by Assia, with a loving inscription. The poem also reports an exchange in the course of the conversation that always haunted him, because these were among their last words. The painful memory is distanced into the third person: ‘Yes, yes. Tell me / We shall sit together this summer / Under the laburnum. Yes, he said, yes yes yes.’37