The next day, Friday, at about half past three in the afternoon a letter came from her. She had posted it that morning, thinking he would get it on Saturday, but the London post was so efficient that it arrived the day it was posted. ‘It was a farewell love-letter, two sentences. She was going off into the country, and intended never to see me again. Very ambiguous.’
He went straight to Fitzroy Road. Sylvia was ‘there alone, tidying the place up’. Ted was ‘upset and crying’: ‘What did she mean, what the hell was going on?’ Sylvia was ‘very cool and hostile’. She ‘Took the note, burned it carefully in the ash-tray’ and told him ‘to go’. He ‘could not get her to talk’. She had a bag packed. It was a long time before he found out where she had gone. Later that evening, she returned to her friends, Gerry and Jill Becker, with whom she had been staying in order to get some help with the children. She remained with them all weekend, until Gerry took her and the children home to Fitzroy Road on the Sunday night.
Ted spent the weekend with Sue. On the Saturday night, Sylvia phoned him at his flat in Cleveland Street. Sue heard her voice. Early on the Sunday morning, she phoned again. She did not know that Sue was there with him. Sue wrote in her diary the next day:
Ted leaned over the telephone, saying ‘Yes, yes’ – being non-committal, saying ‘Take it easy Sylvie’. He came back to bed, turned his back, clasped his head in his arms, ‘God, God’, he said. And said how she seemed drugged or drunk and wanted him to take her away somewhere. ‘But if I go back, I die’, he said. And he starts talking about his family: the uncle forced to marry a cripple out of loyalty & also ‘£2000 on marriage the legacy is,’ says her mother. The one who hanged himself. How they thought Sylvia like this a bit – grasping, destructive.38
Ted and Sue spent the Sunday together: ‘That day – beautiful. All day freely an[d] lot in between and the need of company in the evening. The coffee drinking and then to Tasha and Aant [a Dutch friend] and then he reads my poems, edits “Hill behind Tunis” and we buy wine and go to David [Ross]’s and Gill [Preston]’s. And he tells his poems of moon animals and plants.’39
But they did not want another night of painful phone calls from Sylvia, so instead of returning to Cleveland Street, Ted took Sue to Dan Huws’s spare flat in 18 Rugby Street. He was back in the very house where he had first spent a night with Sylvia, seven years earlier. Sue wrote in her diary that they ‘slept like the dead, side by side on this narrow bed’. There was ‘A great tendresse in the morning’, by which she presumably meant gentle lovemaking. Then Ted drove her to work.
At four in the afternoon, her best friend Tasha called. Sue’s ex-husband Clem had rung to say that Sylvia was dead. Various people had received telegrams from Ted saying ‘Sylvia dead’ and giving details of the funeral. It would be in Yorkshire in exactly a week’s time. Sue sent a telegram to Ted, saying ‘Sorry sorry sorry if I can do anything’. She rang Clem, but knew that it was wrong to probe. The following morning, she was frightened. She was worried that Ted might not be OK. She called Al Alvarez, who knew the news but had not seen him. Alvarez said that maybe they should all get together later in the week. Desperate to see Ted, she went round to Fitzroy Road for the first time. He wasn’t there, but she noted that it was a ‘nice house’. Later in the afternoon, he rang. He told her everything. She said that she would go to the funeral. ‘She’s free,’ she said. ‘Yes,’ replied Ted, ‘but O God.’40 Than Minton, one of their friends, remembered her walking towards him as he stood on the corner of Lamb’s Conduit Street near their favourite pub. She was screaming, ‘Sylvia is dead, Sylvia is dead.’41
Thinking back on the phone call and the chain of events, the full truth dawned on Sue: ‘We slept while she died in each others arms.’42
Ted parked his Morris Traveller on the north side of the Euston Road and walked over to Cleveland Street. Discoloured snow had been banked by the roadside for weeks. He went into his ground-floor flat, ‘filled with snowlit light’. He lit his fire. He got out his paper and had just started to write when the phone rang, like ‘a jabbing alarm of guilt’. He imagined that it had been ringing all night – Sylvia calling from the phone booth on the corner of Primrose Hill. This would probably be her again. The voice at the other end was, what: calm? quiet? – or crisp, yes, that was the tone. The voice of someone used to delivering bad news. It announced: ‘Your wife is dead.’43
He walked the short distance to University College Hospital, where he went into the morgue and formally identified the body. Then he sent telegrams to everybody he could think of and a short letter to Olwyn in Paris, telling her that Sylvia had gassed herself at about six o’clock in the morning on Monday 11 February. ‘She asked me for help, as she so often has,’ he wrote. ‘I was the only person who could have helped her, and the only person so jaded by her states and demands that I could not recognize when she really needed it.’44
Her GP, John Horder, who examined the body at 10.30 and then phoned Ted, concluded that the time of death was probably closer to four o’clock in the morning, the low point in the body’s circadian rhythm. Sylvia had been ill with a virus and struggling with depression. Horder had recently prescribed her some new anti-depressants. He felt that she was responding well, apparently understanding her struggle against the suicidal depression and faithfully reporting any side-effects. But response to such drugs takes about two weeks. He was worried about her, and had arranged for a live-in nurse. She was the one who arrived for her first morning at 9 a.m. that Monday and discovered the body, and the children, who were cold but safe. Looking back, Horder came to the conclusion that Sylvia ‘had reached the dangerous time when someone with suicidal tendencies is sufficiently roused from disabling lethargy to do something about it’.45
The coroner’s inquest recorded a verdict of ‘Carbon Monoxide Poisoning (domestic gas) whilst suffering from depression’.46 Sylvia had taped up the kitchen and bedroom doors, and placed towels underneath, to stop the gas from spreading through the rest of the flat. Then she had placed her cheek on a kitchen cloth folded neatly on the floor of the oven and turned on the taps of the cooker. The bedroom window was wide open and she had left bread and milk by Frieda and Nick’s high-sided cots.
Ted said farewell to Sylvia’s body one more time, in the funeral parlour, where he was accompanied by Al Alvarez and another friend, the Australian painter Charles Blackman.47 The following Sunday, Alvarez published four of her poems in the Observer, together with a brief announcement of her death. He described her as the most gifted woman poet of the age and wrote that the loss to literature was ‘inestimable’.48
On the morning of Monday 18 February 1963, Jill Becker and her husband Gerry, with whom Sylvia had spent her last weekend, took the train to Yorkshire for the funeral. Aunt Hilda’s daughter Vicky ferried them, and other mourners, from Hebden Bridge railway station up the hill to the dark stone village of Heptonstall. Over tea and sandwiches at the Beacon, Edith Hughes asked Jill about her friendship with Sylvia. ‘We all loved her, you know,’ said Edith. Bill Hughes was silent. There was a short service in the gloomy church a few hundred yards further up the hill from the house. ‘For a few moments,’ Jill Becker remembered, ‘sunlight came through a stained-glass window, enriching the yellow in it.’49 They followed the coffin out to the exposed graveyard on the hillside, with its view away to the moor. It had been the worst winter for a generation. Even down in London, pipes had frozen and snow had been banked in the street for weeks. The grave was ‘a yellow trench in the snow, its banked-up mud the same colour as the stained glass’. When the rites were complete, they all walked away. ‘I’ll stay here alone for a while,’ said Ted.50
They went to a private upper room in a pub in the village, about fourteen of them, mostly Ted’s friends and relatives, though Warren Plath and his wife Margaret had flown over from America. According to Jill Becker, at various times Ted said, ‘Everybody hated her’ (‘I didn’t,’ Jill replied), ‘It was either her or me,’ ‘She made me professional,’ an
d ‘I told her everything was going to be all right. I said that by summer we’d all be back together at Court Green’ – which is indeed what he had said during that conversation in his Cleveland Street flat eleven days before.51
On the cover of one of the numerous recycled school exercise books filled with drafts towards the poetry sequence that was eventually published as Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes wrote the title ‘That Sunday Night’.52 Inside, there are just four poems. The first begins: ‘What did happen that Sunday night? / Your last night?’ It tells the story of Sylvia’s farewell letter, how it arrived on the day that it was sent, thus throwing her plans, and of how she burnt it before his eyes. On the next page, the poem is redrafted and expanded. This time, he tells of how he spent the weekend following that last brief encounter in Fitzroy Road. The Saturday and Sunday represented a hiatus, a time taken out from the calendar of ordinary life, hours stolen from some other life. Into the gap came the drive of his love-life (‘My numbed love-life’), in which he found himself pulled by the magnetic force of ‘Two mad needles’. These compass-needles then become the sewing needles of ‘two women’, obsessively performing their own selves by sewing colourful tapestries made from his own ‘nerves’. They are like classical Fates, Norns or perhaps tricoteuses at the guillotine of his reputation. They are, presumably, Assia Wevill and Susan Alliston. That weekend it was Susan.
He then tells of how, not knowing why, he took Susan to 18 Rugby Street and made love to her in ‘our wedding bed’ – a bed in which he had not lain since his wedding night with Sylvia. There is denial in the phrase ‘not knowing why’: it must have been to escape the telephone in Cleveland Street. The poem turns on the paradox that he was hiding from Sylvia in the very bed in which he had consummated his love for her. There is poetic licence here: on this occasion, he was actually in Dan Huws’s father’s other flat in the house. Later, Susan would live in 18 Rugby Street, and it would be from there that she would be taken to die, in the very same hospital where he had gone to formally identify Sylvia’s cold body.
Some elements of ‘That Sunday Night’, or ‘February 10th’ as he called it in the exercise book’s brief contents list, would eventually be worked into ‘18 Rugby Street’, a last-minute addition to the typescript of Birthday Letters that he sent to Faber and Faber a year before his death. The bulk of it, with the final title ‘Last Letter’, would lie among Hughes’s unpublished papers for more than ten years after his death. Only in 2010 would readers discover the words with which Dr Horder broke the news on the telephone when Ted was back in his Cleveland Street studio flat on the Monday morning. As published, the closing lines of the poem imagined the doctor’s voice as a ‘weapon’ or perhaps ‘a measured injection’. Just four words, spoken without emotion, penetrating deep into his ear: ‘Your wife is dead.’53
The remainder of the ‘That Sunday Night’ exercise book contains ‘The Gypsy’, which did appear in Birthday Letters (the one about the ominous words spoken in Reims), the immensely moving ‘Soho Square’, and finally a short poem called ‘Walking in the Snow Alone’. Although there was a telephone in Ted’s flat in 110 Cleveland Street – which may have rung unanswered on the night of 10–11 February, because he was in Rugby Street – there was not one in Fitzroy Road. Sylvia had been phoning the Cleveland Street number all weekend. Ted did not know that some of the calls were from the Beckers’ place. He assumed that, each time she called, Sylvia had to put on her long black coat and walk ‘in the snow alone / Along Fitzroy Road’. She would have had to turn ‘right down / Down Primrose Hill’, cross the road and pass a sinister gateway ‘At the North West corner of Primrose Hill’ before reaching the telephone box. He could only assume that on her last night she had made that walk again, perhaps repeatedly, on the slippery pavement in the dark, in the depth of the coldest winter in living memory. It was 6 degrees below zero centigrade in London that Sunday night. The imagery, partially incorporated into the version of the scene that was eventually published in ‘Last Letter’, is some of Ted’s most haunting:
You walked it alone, over the packed snow,
Between the barricades of snow
Coarsened to dirty ice, with frozen slush,
You walked it in your long black woollen coat –
How many times?
With your plait coiled up at the back of your head, you walked it
Alone. That is the point. I see you
In the dark,
Walking it – alone.54
That is what he saw in his imagination, and what he heard was the sound of the telephone ringing and ringing in the empty Cleveland Street studio flat as he and Sue slept in each other’s arms in Rugby Street.55
Ted had been reading Sylvia’s last poems. Al Alvarez had been publishing some of them. They both knew that her art underwent an extraordinary transformation into greatness in her last months. The separation had liberated her voice, not Ted’s.
Early in 1963, he seems to have made a decision. At Yaddo, he had helped Sylvia to advance. Lowell’s Life Studies and Roethke’s example had helped too. But he had resisted ‘confessional’ poetry himself. The style was too American for him. Now, though, seeing what Sylvia was achieving by turning her own life, his own marriage, into poetry of such power, he thought again. Maybe it was time to follow her example, shattering as poems such as ‘Daddy’ were for him to read. Maybe he should write more directly about his own experience.
Three weeks before Sylvia’s suicide, his radio play Difficulties of a Bridegroom had been broadcast on the BBC Third Programme. That same week, he wrote to Olwyn in Paris.56 He enclosed two new poems. Though he called them mere ‘bagatelles’, they actually represented his own breakthrough into a new voice. A more personal voice: they were his first truly confessional poems, written under the influence of Sylvia. He worked at them repeatedly.
One of them was a poem of life, ‘Frieda’s Early Morning’. After numerous redrafts and extensive revision,57 it was eventually published in Wodwo as ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’. It beautifully combines Ted’s own experience as a watchful father with a voice learned from Sylvia’s lovely mothering poems ‘Morning Song’ and ‘Nick and the Candlestick’. ‘Moon!’ baby Frieda suddenly cries. ‘Moon! Moon!’ And ‘The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work // That points at him amazed.’58 As so often, Ted is at once personal and literary: even as he turns a real paternal experience into poetry, the image of father and infant and the first word ‘moon’ is a reprise of Coleridge carrying his little child out to greet the moon in ‘The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem’, a companion piece to ‘Frost at Midnight’.
The other piece sent to Olwyn was a poem of death. It was called ‘Uncle A’. It begins: ‘My uncle made of catapult rubber hung by the neck’. It calls the family suicide ‘A mystery’. It fondly remembers Uncle Albert being able to ‘turn a somersault on a hearth-rug / Dangle his entire weight from any one finger and do pull-ups’. It ends: ‘His wife sold all his clothes before he was buried.’59
Immediately after his very last conversation with Sylvia, the phone call when he was in bed with Sue Alliston on the morning of Sunday 10 February 1963, which he had ended by saying ‘Take it easy Sylvie,’ he had spoken to Sue of family troubles as well as marital ones. Uncle Albert, the subject of this poem, written just three weeks before, was still very much on his mind: ‘The one who hanged himself’. The news of Sylvia’s suicide came twenty-four hours after he had spoken of Albert to Sue.
It was more than twenty years before he published this poem, much expanded and revised as a tender elegy. It was called ‘Uncle Albert’s Suicide’ in manuscript but ‘Sacrifice’ in print. In early 1963, Ted Hughes was on the brink of finding a quiet, touching, cathartic and elegiac voice by way of a poem about a family suicide. But how could he pursue such a line after Sylvia’s suicide? How could he dare to trespass on the territory of the typescript of poems that she had left on her desk in 23 Fitzroy Road? His confessional voice would be silenced
, or at least heavily disguised, for a full decade.
14
The Custodian
‘Ariel’ by Sylvia is in a class apart. She truly became the most phenomenal genius just before she died. In English, there is nothing quite so direct & naked & radiant – yet complicated & mysterious at the same time. As you will see.
(Ted Hughes to János Csokits)1
The children were kept away from the funeral. Aunt Hilda remained in London, looking after them. She stayed for a further month as Ted settled into Fitzroy Road. Frieda was clearly delighted that Daddy had returned. To begin with, the nanny, a Dorset girl called Jean, did very well.
In the middle of March, Ted poured out his heart in a letter to Aurelia. He said that he would never get over the shock of Sylvia’s death and did not want to. He had seen her bitter letters to his parents and could only imagine the content of those to her mother. Aurelia had to understand that it had always been a marriage of two people ‘under the control of deep psychic abnormalities’. By the end, they were literally driving each other mad. But Sylvia’s madness then took the form of insisting on a divorce, which was the last thing she really wanted. The irony of her last days was that they had come to a point where he had thought there was a serious prospect of giving the marriage another chance. She had agreed not to divorce. They had spoken of going away together. But now that she was dead he did not want to be forgiven. If there was an eternity, he would be damned in it: ‘Sylvia was one of the greatest truest spirits alive, and in her last months she became a great poet, and no other woman poet except Emily Dickinson can begin to be compared with her.’2
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