Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  That greatness was apparent from the black spring-loaded binder that Sylvia had left on her desk. When Sue Alliston and Ted’s Cambridge friend David Ross came round, among Fitzroy Road’s first visitors since the funeral, Ted read out some of the forty-one poems that it contained. Shivers went down Ross’s spine. All three of them saw that Ted had in his hands something of a power far surpassing anything Plath had achieved before. There was no doubting the genius of the work. In response to a condolence letter from Robert Lowell, Ted wrote that Sylvia had written many ‘marvellous’ poems in the weeks leading up to her death. He typed out two of them, ‘Sheep in Fog’ and ‘Words’, for her mentor to see.3 Publication was simply a question of time: how many of them should be released and how soon? He knew that Aurelia for one would be devastated by the anger of some of them.

  Meanwhile, David Wevill flew to Canada, where his mother was dying of cancer. In her husband’s absence, Assia started visiting Ted and the children when she finished work. To begin with, she still slept at home in Highbury. She did, however, take the opportunity to read Sylvia’s last journal and her unfinished Devon novel. The portrayal of herself as an ‘icy barren woman’ and her husband as a weak-willed man called Goof-Hopper was not flattering. On 12 March, she went to lunch with Nathaniel Tarn and told him that she was now living in the flat in the Yeats house with Ted and the children, and that Sylvia’s novel, which she hoped Ted would destroy, contained only ‘saints and miserable sinners’ – and a portrait of ‘SP’ herself, ‘full of poems, kicks and kids’.4

  She also shared with Tarn her dilemma in deciding between her husband and her lover. The ‘anti-T.H.’ case was, first, his ‘voracious sexual appetite’; secondly, his ‘superstitions about remarriage’; thirdly, his ‘black moods’; fourthly, his ‘lack of contact and showing his work’ (David was always sharing his poetry drafts with her, creating a special intimacy); and fifthly, his ‘puritanism’ (which, unless it is intended to suggest stinginess, is hard to reconcile with the ‘voracious sexual appetite’). The ‘anti-D.W.’ case was that ‘sex is out now: D. is also a puritan and can’t stand the idea of T.H. & A.’; that ‘A. is pregnant by T.H. and D. appears to have known this’; and that ‘D. will not work and make his living like a man.’5 Tarn would have liked to reconcile the married couple, but saw that if their sex life had been poisoned and there was now going to be a child by Ted, then he would be fighting an uphill battle. Nine days later, Assia found an old Polish doctor in Maida Vale, who performed an abortion (illegal at the time). One of her colleagues at the advertising agency, Australian poet Peter Porter, was married to a nurse called Jannice. Assia asked her to visit Fitzroy Road, ‘the ghost house’, the following day, to check that she was not still haemorrhaging.6

  Elizabeth Compton, whom Sylvia had befriended in Devon, also visited Ted in Fitzroy Road that month. She remembered him giving her a copy of The Bell Jar, just published and dedicated to her and her husband, and him saying, ‘It doesn’t fall to many men to murder a genius.’ He told her how right it seemed that he was kept awake all night by the wolves howling in Regent’s Park.7

  At the end of the month, Ted told Assia that she would have to choose between him and her husband. She chose her husband and they went to Ireland together on his return from Canada. But they fought like cat and dog, and came to the conclusion that the best way forward would be a six-month trial separation. By early May, she was back with Ted, ensconced in Fitzroy Road but far from happy: ‘I’m immersed now in the Hughes monumentality, hers and his.’ She described herself as ‘The weak mistress, forever in the burning shadows of their [Ted and Sylvia’s] mysterious seven years’, and castigated herself for the ‘crazy compulsion’ that drove her to leave her ‘third and sweetest marriage’ and condemn herself to ‘this nightmare maze of miserable, censorious, middle-aged furies, and Sylvia, my predecessor, between our heads at night’. In her diary, she lamented that painful cystitis was interfering with her love-life and noted that Ted had taken to ‘inspecting with pleasure’ a bruise on her left breast.

  Yet she watched him work with delight and awe. He would sit cross-legged, at an angle, too big for Sylvia’s desk, mug of tea or sandwich in one hand and pen in the other, writing at speed, never getting a word wrong, ‘His nostrils flared, his hair feathery, and leaping forward like a peacock’s back train in reverse, swaying a little as he writes’.8 Sylvia’s ghost was everywhere: in Ted’s dreams, in his preparation of her work for publication, in photographic form – Rollie McKenna’s image from 1959 – when a copy of The Modern Poets: An American–British Anthology arrived in the post.

  Ted, meanwhile, took Sue for a drink in the Lamb and told her that he was going to ‘try with Assia’. He had never in his life found anyone so physically attractive. And there was a degree of creative collaboration in the film scripts they were plotting out. Assia was a rare person and they might save each other. Sue gamely said that his choice was ‘a good thing’, but she felt the rejection like the twist of a knife in a wound. She burnt Ted’s hand with a match or a cigarette.9

  Things got complicated when Aurelia announced that she was coming to see her grandchildren and visit her daughter’s grave. Ted prevaricated. Should he sell Court Green and find a cheaper place in the North? Was it a good or bad idea to live close to his parents? Or should he make a completely fresh start somewhere far away – China, for instance? Perhaps he could sub-let the London flat. The nanny had not, after all, worked out: she was spending too much time out of town with her boyfriend. Having dispensed with her services, he took Assia and the children on a tour of the Lake District, keeping an on-the-road narrative of their encounters. Then they went to Yorkshire, so that Aunt Hilda could renew her assistance with childcare. Aurelia’s awkward visit was successfully negotiated, with Assia being kept well out of the way. At the Beacon, in order not to offend the puritan sensibilities of his parents, Ted and Assia slept in separate bedrooms.

  Court Green was being looked after by David and Elizabeth Compton. Ted sent them updates of his news, telling of how his parents were worried that the shame of Sylvia’s death would prevent him from ever doing poetry readings in grammar schools again and have him permanently blackballed from getting a knighthood. Knowing that Sylvia had grown close to Elizabeth, he wrote movingly of his own sense of purposelessness without her: ‘When somebody who has shared life with you as much as Sylvia shared it with me, dies, then life somehow dies, the gold standard of it is somehow converted into death, and it is a minute by minute effort to find any sense in life, or any value.’ He had never understood Sylvia’s ‘wish to be with her father, as it appeared in her poems’, but now, ironically, he was coming ‘under the same law’ – having his life determined, that was to say, by someone who was dead.10

  In July he put Court Green on the market and an offer was agreed. On an impulse, he decided to put in an offer for a big house called Lumb Bank, down in the valley just below the Beacon. He described it with great enthusiasm in a letter to Gerald in Tullamarine. It was the original Heptonstall village manor house, secluded in a very private valley. The main house had a long frontage and a terrace, with the fields dropping steeply away to a stream at the bottom. There were three substantial living rooms and a long thin kitchen with a pantry. Some other rooms had been converted into a two-car garage with a self-contained flat above. There was a wonderful cellar with stone arches, as in a crypt. The bedrooms had window-seats and a view. There was a great stone barn and a coach house and a coachman’s cottage (currently full of hens). The outside yard was carved into the hillside and there was a walled garden with fruit trees and traditional stone-socket beehives. Then there was another stone cottage, not to mention 17 acres of land – a dozen meadows and some fine woodland. He suggested that Gerald should come back to England so that they could share the place and start farming together.11

  He reflected in his improvised journal on whether it would be possible to live in Heptonstall with Assia so soon after Sylvia’s death. He t
old himself that Ma and Pa would get used to the scandal, if it was a scandal, but Aunt Hilda was the main problem: she was horrified by Assia, jealous, angry, panicked, afraid of what people would say, anxious about the effect on Ted’s reputation and about whether Assia would drain him of cash and leave him bankrupt. She constantly sniped about Assia, ‘with her 3 husbands, her gypsy looks’ and her part in Sylvia’s death.12 The two women fought bitterly, Hilda convinced that she had the best interests of Ted and the children at heart. As for Lumb Bank, Hilda said that it would be nothing more than a white elephant. Could he deal with the local gossip by pretending that Assia was his housekeeper? Perhaps, but it was clear that Assia was never going to be one of the family. She had, he noted in his journal, like Sylvia before her, a ‘great and final hatred of Olwyn’.13 Or was it more that Olwyn had a hatred of any woman who came between her and Ted?

  They went to an antique auction in Halifax. One of Ted’s recurring schemes was to become an antiques dealer. He took it as a sign of his recovery from Sylvia’s death that he was feeling once again his ‘fever for pretty possessions’. With Sylvia, periodic retail therapy had a manic quality. With Assia, there was ‘the temper of reality, as never with S.’ Having known poverty, and knowing what she wanted, Assia was, he reassured himself, wary of unnecessary expenditure. He filled page after page of his journal with accounts of his dreams, sometimes mingled with details of his daytime life. So, for example, in August 1963: ‘Letter from Pa to A[ssia]. Bewildered amusement rather than serious shock and dismay. Dreamed – for first time in 2 years – of Crookhill pond, catching big fish with flies that bit me.’14

  When he really talked to himself in his journal, he reached his best resolutions with the recognition that what mattered most was giving a happy rural childhood to Frieda and Nick. But to be a good father was not enough. The self-communion by journal-writing was also a way of goading himself to live his own life: ‘all it needs is action’, he writes again and again.15 Inaction – the overbearing sense of the impossibility of doing anything – is the prime mark of depression, and there is a powerful sense in which writing of all kinds was Hughes’s way of staving off depression, private journal-writing being the most overt manifestation of this. Those entries that are most self-analytical seem to come at the moments when he is closest to fearing that he might share the depression of his Uncle Albert and of Sylvia.

  For Ted’s thirty-third birthday on 17 August, Assia gave him the stories of Thomas Mann in two volumes, inscribed with the words ‘Love is not love until love’s vulnerable’, a quotation from a powerful love poem called ‘The Dream’ by the depressive Theodore Roethke, whose confessional voice Ted greatly admired.16 He had died from a heart attack in a friend’s swimming pool a few weeks before. By this time, Ted was thinking it would be better if Assia stayed in the London flat. He would see her when he came down to work and she could come to Heptonstall at the weekends. But then the sale of Court Green fell through and the price of Lumb Bank went up, so the plan changed again. What with family tensions and local gossip, Yorkshire wasn’t working. In late September he took the children back to Court Green.

  Ted stuck to the idea of a commuting relationship, but from Devon instead of Yorkshire. Olwyn left her job in Paris and moved to Court Green to help with the children. Hilda, ever the supportive aunt, assisted as they settled in. She wrote to reassure Aurelia that all was well: ‘Frieda adjusts rapidly and is quite at home already, Nicky is not so easy and does not like to be put in his cot for some reason, but as soon as Ted holds him he is content. I shall not leave until he is quite used to his new surroundings.’17 The trees were laden with fruit and they busied themselves making damson jam.

  It would be two and a half years before Ted and Assia lived together again. Their relationship was largely conducted by correspondence. Ted spilled a great deal of ink reassuring her of his love and calming her down after quarrels and misunderstandings: ‘My sweet Assia, sweetest, sweetnessest, sweetnesistest, your letter came this morning. Stop all your thoughts about manoeuvres – I don’t like manoeuvres. If you just show me what you feel, nothing can go wrong. It’s when you leave me to misinterpret, that things go wrong.’18 By this time, Assia had moved back in with her husband. She was unashamed of loving both men, but jealous when she discovered that Ted had invited Sue Alliston and Tasha Hollis to spend Christmas at Court Green. Olwyn, who was tremendously fond of these two spirited divorced ‘girls’ (her term), remembers it as a Christmas of great warmth and liveliness. Luke Myers was also there, on a four-month stay in England, and Ted was always at his best in the company of his Cambridge friend. Olwyn had the short straw. All Sue and Tash wanted to do was sit around, talking with Ted. They were not interested in cooking or babies, so, despite having the flu, Olwyn had to do all the childcare. One evening Nick was crying and she took a long time to settle him. When she came down, Frieda was crying. ‘Has anyone fed her?’ ‘No.’19

  Christmas was not Sue’s only visit to Court Green. She went down for several weekends, both before and after. In early December, she had met Ted’s sister-in-law Joan, who was over from Australia, and also staying for the weekend.20

  Assia’s reaction to the discovery that Ted was seeing Sue again was to say that the only revenge she could take would be to go to bed with any attractive man who asked, in order to hurt the sensation of him out of her body.21 Pregnant again, she was feeling especially vulnerable at this time. She miscarried and was briefly hospitalised the following month. In his journal Ted made a brief reference to her miscarriage as he observed the sound of a curlew on a drystone wall, the smell of a stagnant pond and the sight of a rusted tractor. Was it part of his curse that both his first wife and Assia, whom some were already assuming was now his wife, had miscarried?

  The desire to appease Assia led him to write about Sue with most uncharacteristic cruelty. ‘As for that Sue – I’ve seen her for the last time if this upsets you. She must have gushed a great gush about Xmas & said & hinted Christ knows what but she’s out.’ If Sue started spreading rumours about their relationship he would ‘never speak to her again’. He ‘could kill’ Sue and Tash for telling people that he was seeing them ‘practically every weekend’. Then he let rip: ‘And she’d stare at you with those horrible lobster eyes – for Christ’ sake Assia Assia Assia – you’re always telling me to believe you why don’t you believe me. I love you & as far as I’m concerned no other women exist.’22

  When he was in London three weeks later he had a blazing row with Sue, during which she hit him. She described it in her journal as ‘an impossible and awful evening’. She drafted a letter of apology in which she opened her heart about the ups and downs of their relationship. ‘One year ago, in the morning, Sylvia died,’ wrote Sue in her journal a few days later, on 11 February 1964. She then described a nightmare that had come to her on the exact anniversary of the early morning when she had lain in Ted’s arms as Sylvia was taking her own life. She starts talking to Sylvia: ‘my poems – some of them modelled on yours … Sylvia, why didn’t we meet? I am neither as extreme gifted nor as honest as you.’ Ted, she said, had a ‘stupid propensity to identify me with you’. He had said that Sue spoke as if she were married to him, as if she were the reincarnation of Sylvia. But she knew that she was not Sylvia, that they were ‘completely different’ in their personalities. ‘I am nothing beside you,’ she concludes. ‘I wish you were alive.’23

  Why did Ted find it so difficult to choose between Assia and Sue? One reason was that he glimpsed aspects of Sylvia in each of them but knew in his deepest self that neither of them was Sylvia. His infidelity to others was a form of fidelity to her. Another reason was that he had made himself so vulnerable by trying to share everything, exterior life and interior, with Sylvia that he could not imagine making himself so vulnerable again. His only self-defence was to split himself between two women.

  Through all these twists and turns, he spent many hours writing. But he felt blocked. At the end of August 1963 he
told Luke Myers that all he had managed since Sylvia’s death were some ‘stupid’ book reviews, a radio play and one poem.24 The latter was a skewed elegy for Sylvia. First it was called ‘The Horrors of Music’ and then ‘Primrose Hill’, before he finally settled on ‘The Howling of Wolves’.25 Lying in Sylvia’s bed in Fitzroy Road at night he heard the eerie call from the wolf enclosure at London Zoo. It was like the howl of pain in his own heart. There may also be a covert allusion to the unhappily apt coincidence of the coroner’s inquest on Sylvia’s death having taken place on 15 February, the date of the Roman festival of Lupercalia, with all its associations of Sylvia’s part in the inspiration of his book named for that festival and the whole business of the Lupercal cave where Romulus and Remus, children of Rhea Silvia, were suckled by a she-wolf.26 He revisited the memory of the wolves, making them more like benign guardians, in the poem ‘Life after Death’ in Birthday Letters, where Frieda and Nick become the Romulus and Remus orphans, ‘Beside the corpse of their mother’, nurtured by the wolves. The singing of the wolves was a kind of consolation: