Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  They wound us and enmeshed us

  In their wailing for you, their mourning for us,

  They wove us into their voices. We lay in your death,

  In the fallen snow, under fallen snow.27

  The double sense in the ‘wound’ (both embrace and injury) is a stroke of genius.

  He kept himself going with children’s stories that connected him to Frieda and Nick. The first book he published after Sylvia’s death was How the Whale Became, the series of sometimes surreal variations on Kipling’s Just So stories that he had written all those years ago on his honeymoon in Benidorm. It received a rave review in the New York Times from the artist, fashion designer and millionaire Gloria Vanderbilt, in which she identified the essence of so much of Hughes’s work for children: ‘These 11 enchanting stories deserve to take their place among the classic fables. They come alive because they are rooted in the fundamental truth of the need for identity, and they illustrate the happiness that comes when we stop pretending to be something we are not and start being ourselves.’28

  The next book, published in November 1963, was The Earth-Owl and Other Moon-People, a collection of poems with titles such as ‘The Adaptable Mountain Dugong’ and ‘Moon-Nasturtiums’. The trade paper British Book News announced the volume laconically: ‘This is a curious but enjoyable book. Mr Hughes, one of the most prominent of the younger generation of poets, has written twenty-three poems about the inhabitants of the Moon, most of whom, it appears, are vegetables.’29 Both books were dedicated to Frieda and Nicholas. In 1964 there followed the comic verse narrative Nessie the Mannerless Monster. It was judged favourably by the novelist Robert Nye in the Guardian – ‘Seemingly slap-happy, awkwardly off-rhyming, often very funny verse’ – but the Daily Telegraph was mildly discomposed by its politics: ‘The story is up-to-the-minute, with Nessie being used for “Ban the Bomb” processions before reaching her goal.’30 On first seeing the illustrations, by Gerald Rose, as the book went into production, Ted had a curious dream: ‘making love to the Queen on a carpet in the palace. – This assoc[iation] with the illustrations to Nessie which I saw yesterday, when Nessie, after eating Sir etc, lies on carpet.’31

  As a widower with two very young children, it was entirely fitting that Ted should have been writing such things at this time. But it was not until 1967 that he produced a new volume of poetry for adults.32 That was partly because of the devastation of his inner life as a result of Sylvia’s death, but also because he had to spend a lot of time on money-making projects in order to support the children. He tried his hand at a number of film scripts, among them the story that eventually became Gaudete, as well as a farcical treatment concerning an American ornithologist in the Hebrides, and a collaboration with Assia (who was concurrently dramatising Turgenev’s novel First Love as a screenplay) involving a Spanish beauty, a mob of prostitutes in Venice and an encounter with a beautiful art student at the Acropolis.

  He was also feeling gloomy about the state of the nation. In the summer of 1963 the bestselling novelist Arthur Hailey made a brief return to England from Toronto, where he was living as an expatriate grown wealthy on his literary earnings. In the September issue of the magazine Saturday Night he published an article excoriating the old country as paralysed, miserable and class-ridden. The magazine received a torrent of outraged response: what right had Hailey to criticise his native land on the basis of one short visit? The editor fought back by inviting ‘one of Britain’s leading young literary lions’ to read Hailey’s article and write a response. The choice was Ted. His article, ‘a pessimistic document, rooted in a depth of feeling conveyed by his exciting style’, was published in the November issue, ‘not to add fuel to the flame but to stir the hearts of those many readers who really do care about Britain’s future’. It was entitled ‘The Rat under the Bowler’.33

  ‘Can anything definite be said about England and the English at present?’ Hughes asked. First and foremost, Hailey was right about the importance of class. For most of the population, the working class, it was ‘a bad place to be’: ‘They feel oppressed, cheated, exploited.’ For the middle class, England was a place of ‘goodish opportunities, enviable (they think) education, comfortable living, decent self-respect, all the amenities’ – though with a certain uneasiness. As for the tiny ruling class, for them England was a paradise. These basic facts, Ted suggested, were insufficiently acknowledged because the lowest classes have very few spokesmen. When a lower-class boy managed to climb the ladder (usually via a grammar school education), he tended to become transformed and to lose his anger, his drive, his rooted memory of his origins. The ‘angry young man’ (Alan Sillitoe and David Storey in fiction, John Osborne and Arnold Wesker in the theatre) spoke up, ‘but the rest of the country reads their books and plays as most people go to a museum, in amused incredulity’.

  The other thing that Hailey was right about, Ted argued, was that the English were a drab race. He recalled his own incredulity at the sheer ‘sooty grime’ of England when he returned from America in 1960. He had originally thought it was confined to South Yorkshire but it seemed to have spread across the whole country. He was depressed by the ‘funeral colour and antique design of the cars’, the grubby clothes and café menus and house façades and newspapers. The perpetual rain and low dark cloud also depressed him ‘after the vast, staggeringly brilliant skyscapes of America’.

  The problem was, England had never recovered from the war. Come to think of it, it had never recovered from the Civil War: the country had been divided ever since the battle between Oliver Cromwell and the Crown. The monarchy had been restored in 1660, bringing back from France a ‘hatred and contempt of the lower classes’. Ever since then, the downtrodden masses had been reduced to ‘homicidal rage’ – primal class hatred – which forever emerges ‘two or three drinks down’. England is not really a democracy: ‘the much boasted legal system is, in practice, just as in all other countries, highly adjustable, with different readings for richer or poorer’. The recent Profumo scandal had revealed just how different life was within the ‘establishment’.

  ‘The Rat under the Bowler’ was Ted’s most explicitly political publication. It clearly positions him, at this point in his life, as a man of the left. How did this positioning relate to his poetic vocation? The answer to that question may come in a passage of the essay in which he argues that the key characteristic of the ruling class, cultivated in their ‘big expensive Public Schools’, was snobbery. All the qualities of the public school ‘gentleman’ were apparent from his manner of speech: ‘The aloof, condescending superiority, the dry formality, the implicit contempt, the routine thought and extinction of feeling – above all, that pistol-shot, policing quality. It is a voice for a purpose, an instrument.’ The purpose of a posh voice was to elicit ‘instant obedience and fear’. This worked well enough when there was an empire – the function of the public school system had long been to mould the character of the men who would administer the colonies – but with the Empire having crumbled, things would have to change at home. He was not optimistic that they would.

  Almost exactly a year after Hughes wrote this essay, the Labour Party won the October 1964 general election by the tiniest of majorities, bringing to an end thirteen years of Conservative rule. At 10 Downing Street, the plummy voice of Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home (formerly the Earl of Home) was replaced by the distinctively northern long vowels of Harold Wilson, a grammar school boy from the West Riding. A Yorkshire voice, like Ted’s own. It was the beginning of the end of that upper-class manner of speech which he had nailed so decisively in the essay. There was change ahead, and possibly trouble. The rat was about to be released from beneath the bowler hat.

  Listening to Ted’s radio broadcasts – there were more than 300 of them in the course of his life – one notices that his voice becomes if anything more, not less, Yorkshire as he grows older. The longer he was away from the vowel sounds of his home valley, the more he held on to that voice as
a way of grounding himself as a poet of the people. The great Caribbean poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite once wrote that he was liberated into writing poetry in his own dialect by hearing the cricket commentator John Arlott on the radio. Arlott’s deep, musical Hampshire burr showed him that one did not have to speak ‘BBC English’ – ‘the Queen’s English’ – in order to have a poetic voice. In this sense Ted Hughes was the John Arlott of English poetry. Listen to the clipped tones of T. S. Eliot reading his Four Quartets, having turned himself into an English gentleman. Then listen to the long vowels of Ted reading the same poems (‘cont – ai – ned in time future’).34 He was the man who democratised poetry by showing that you could publish with Eliot’s Faber and Faber, and be heard on the BBC, while staying true to your own voice, your own people.

  For much of 1964, when Assia was living with her husband David in Belsize Park, Ted sent her clandestine love letters addressed to a certain ‘F. Wall Esq’, supposedly a resident in one of the other flats into which their house was divided, but actually a private joke – he was the fly on the wall in her marital home. But most of the time he was in Court Green with Olwyn and the children. He loved fatherhood, what with the excitement of Frieda starting nursery school and Nicky enjoying full-on attention at home. But every now and then he dreamed of escape: he thought of just taking off for a couple of months, ‘going to find the loneliest place’ imaginable, perhaps ‘in the Hebrides or Yugoslavia’.35

  Ted’s journal entries are dark at this time. On his thirty-fourth birthday he complained that he was tired. The previous night he had stayed up until four in the morning reading (and not being impressed by) Jung on Sacred Marriage. During the day he had worked on and off on his plays, had some precious moments making up stories for the children, and been to a soirée where there had been talk of politics and theatre. Now he was in reflective mode. The last twelve months had been ‘the worst, most confused, most distracted, most superficial, least productive, most evasive, most desperate’ of his life. He wished them good riddance and said that his only desire for the next year was to summon his willpower and to work. But the struggle went on. Three months later, he returned to the page and scrawled a parenthesis to the effect that the bad year was continuing.36

  There was potent imaginative life in his dreams. A typical example has him wandering through a circular library, then handling a precious piece of porcelain in the shape of a woman’s head. He catches his finger in a sharp lock of the figure’s hair and is afraid he will break it. Then suddenly a woman is serving tea, among the shelves. He cups his hand to receive the sugar lumps and finds to his embarrassment that he is cupping her breasts, which are very small, while she explains that he will get tea only if he gives his name, because he is a visitor in the library, not the owner of it. After a series of further twists, in which a vulgar and pushy businessman enters the dream, he finds himself outside a wood, holding a shotgun. It is the wood at Old Denaby, that place of magic in his memory. Two other men are there, the businessman and the ‘fop son’ of the lord of the manor. They stand in for a mysterious ‘other’ who has shadowed him throughout the dream. He tries to shoot some birds, his aim difficult to steady in the high wind. Then he confronts the smouldering fragments of a crashed motorbike and the body of the rider, smashed up, legless, his head almost torn off. It is both the business entrepreneur and the fop, yet it is also neither of them. In another episode of the same dream – or was this another dream merging in his memory? – he is first a rabbit-catcher and then he is hunted by a boar. Analysing the dream, he saw the various figures – entrepreneur, fop, ‘other’ (‘the mysterious element that wants a changeover’) – as dimensions of his own self. The glaringly obvious thing he does not mention in his analysis is that the motorcyclist is manifestly Gerald and that a major aspect of the dream is what he would later call the theme of ‘the rival brothers’.37

  Sometimes the work of the night was less complicated: ‘Extraordinarily vivid dream of Sylvia’s return – ecstatic joy of her and me. Love, complete reality. In a hotel room. The next morning, I went to collect her in her room. Her bags were there, a meal that she had had in her room and not eaten – but she was not.’ The next evening he described this as the most vivid dream experience of her that he had ever had. It had stayed with him all day.38 A few weeks later, visiting his parents at the Beacon, he tried to find her spirit by walking to Top Withens in warm autumnal light. He noted every detail in his journal – streams, thorns, tumbling walls, grouse, waterfall noise – but everything seemed ‘shadowy’, so halfway up the hill he turned back.39

  He also dreamed of flying. And of being able to make portraits in which all the poets could come alive, except – however hard he tried – for Shakespeare. He dreamed in bright colours.40

  He continued to derive income from radio broadcasts, ranging from his talks aimed at schools to such projects as ‘Dogs: A Scherzo’, broadcast on the Third Programme a year and a day after Sylvia’s death and described in the Radio Times as follows: ‘Cases of possession by the spirit of an ancestor or of a historical personage have often been recorded. There is also possession by Heroic Fury and by the Furies. A small and seemingly irrelevant incident may be enough to start any of these. On the other hand, a large relevant incident may trigger off what is merely a case of possession by Dogs.’41

  Like all freelance writers, he had to get used to irregular payments and keeping his own accounts as opposed to relying on a regular monthly pay cheque. His tally at this time is both precise in its recording of pounds, shillings and pence, and revealing in its ups and downs. May 1964: £133 8s 11d. June: £165 15s 8d. July: £428 18s 0d (including a £250 Arts Council grant). August: £122 9s 8d (plus £45 10s 0d rent for sub-let of 23 Fitzroy Road). September, down to £45 13s 6d. November was a good month: £634 14s 5d (including £172 for his radio play The Wound). The following February a bad one: £33 5s 6d. March 1965 was equally lean, redeemed only by £87 11s 6d for a broadcast of The Wound on German radio.42

  Another project, with no earnings potential, was also keeping him busy at this time. Together with Cambridge friend Danny Weissbort, he started planning the launch of a magazine that would introduce English readers to Modern Poetry in Translation. He was becoming convinced that Eastern Europeans such as Zbigniew Herbert, Miroslav Holub, Czesław Miłosz and Vasko Popa, struggling under the pressure of Soviet occupation, were producing the most exciting new writing of the age. After lengthy planning, the first issue appeared in the autumn of 1965. Ted co-edited the first ten issues with Danny, choosing poems and contributing introductory editorials. The aim, he explained in the opening manifesto, was to honour the original poems by translating as closely as possible, but without pedantry: ‘The type of translations we are seeking can be described as literal, though not literal in a strict or pedantic sense. Though this may seem at first suspect, it is more appropriate to define our criteria negatively as literalness can only be a deliberate tendency, not a dogma.’43

  A steady stream of book reviews also occupied him. Just occasionally, there would be a title that provided him with inspiration as opposed to distraction. In the autumn of 1964, the Listener sent him the English translation of Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.44 This became his bible on the subject of everything from sickness-initiation and dreams to the acquisition of shamanic powers to the descent into the underworld to ‘Magical Flight’ to ‘The Three Cosmic Zones and the World Pillar’. It was as great an influence as The White Goddess in shaping the mythic and ‘ecstatic’ strand of his work. Eliade furnished him with a wealth of symbolic interpretations that resonated with his own poetic bestiary: ‘The shaman encounters the funerary dog in the course of his descent to the underworld, as it is encountered by the deceased or by heroes undergoing an initiatory ordeal.’ So much for the dog. As for the horse, it ‘enables the shaman to fly through the air, to reach the heavens … the horse is a mythical image of death and hence is incorporated into the ideologies and techniques of ecs
tasy’.45

  All this was food for thought as he contemplated the images of infernal descent, the real and symbolic deaths, in Sylvia’s poems, not to mention the ecstatic horse-ride of the title poem of her collection. He was pushing Ariel in the direction of Charles Monteith at Faber and Faber, having persuaded Heinemann, who had published The Colossus and The Bell Jar, not to exercise an option on her posthumous work.

  Before the release of Ariel there was another editorial task. In November 1963 Faber agreed to publish a selected edition of Keith Douglas, regarded by Ted as the greatest English poet of the Second World War. He provided a fine introduction in which, without knowing it, he rehearsed his future writings about Sylvia. Douglas was cut off in his prime: killed in action during the Normandy invasion, aged just twenty-four. His poetry has an exceptional bluntness, an ‘impatient, razor energy’. He developed rapidly during his brief nine-year poetic career, going at astonishing speed from ‘virtuoso juvenilia’ to a phase in which ‘the picturesque or merely decorative side of his imagery disappears; his descriptive powers sharpen to realism’. He became a ‘renovator of language’, renewing ‘the simplicity of ordinary talk’ and ‘infusing every word with a burning exploratory freshness of mind – partly impatience, partly exhilaration at speaking the forbidden thing, partly sheer casual ease of penetration’. Then in his maturity – a maturity achieved in a brief blaze of creativity in the months leading up to his death – he found the truth of the doomed man in the doomed body. His subject was ‘the burning away of all human pretensions in the ray cast by death’. His late poem ‘Simplify me when I’m Dead’ was the consummation of his genius.46 Every aspect of this account is as apt for Plath as it is for Douglas: from the early development to the peculiar death-ray quality to the culminating poem that envisions the poet’s own end (as in Plath’s ‘Edge’).