Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

The Keith Douglas book was also important because it marked a turning point in Olwyn’s life. She loved Ted so much that she had been prepared to give up her career for him. But residence at Court Green as substitute mother for her niece and nephew was dull indeed, in comparison to her life in Paris. She kept her professional self stimulated by taking an interest in the contractual side of her brother’s publications. She happened to be opening the post one day in late 1963 and found herself looking at the contract from Faber and Faber for the Keith Douglas selection. Being familiar with contractual negotiations for film and stage work, thanks to her job at the Martonplay agency in Paris, she was astonished to see that Ted was to receive a one-off payment of £25 for making the selection and writing the introduction. Furthermore, Faber intended to recoup that sum by deducting it from the royalties payable to the fallen Douglas’s widowed mother. Ted in turn was surprised to learn from his sister that contracts could actually be negotiated. Hitherto, simply grateful to be published, he had just signed whatever contract he was sent. He agreed, however, that he could do better with the Douglas book, so he asked Olwyn to negotiate the contract on his behalf and she achieved some improvements, not least for the widow. So began her career as his agent. During her time in Devon, she rounded up the novelist Jean Rhys, who lived near by, and a couple of other authors, who agreed that she could represent them too. For thirty years, Olwyn would go into battle on her brother’s behalf with publishers, promoters and people requesting quotation rights. She earned a reputation as a fearsome, difficult gatekeeper and negotiator.

  Olwyn also recognised the particular importance of Keith Douglas’s poetry to both Ted and Sylvia. She thought back to a beautiful summer’s day at the Beacon when Ted and Sylvia lay on a rug in the field beyond the low garden wall, engrossed in the edition of Douglas’s collected poems that had been published in 1951: ‘Two poets communing with a precursor whose work had many affinities with their own’. She always saw this ‘as an image of Sylvia and Ted’s central shared allegiance to poetry’. She reckoned that ‘Douglas’s skills and the presentiment of his death that haunted him must have deeply affected Sylvia’. Olwyn believed that his poem ‘The Sea Bird’, ‘with its dazzling flight and doom’, mirrored Sylvia’s ‘inmost fears and her own soaring achievement and end’.47

  It was no coincidence that Hughes was preparing the Ariel manuscript for Faber at the same time as the Keith Douglas poems. Nor that this was also the moment when he wrote a review of Poet Laureate C. Day Lewis’s edition of The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, another war poet whose slender body of work developed in astonishing leaps and bounds in the few months before his premature death, combining technical innovation with a sense of words as weapons and an ‘extraordinary detachment from the agony’ which allowed his work to reveal both ‘immediate suffering and general implication, as nobody else did’. Nobody else before Douglas, before Plath, that is to say.48

  In October 1963 he had released ten of Sylvia’s late great poems, including ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘Thalidomide’ and ‘Daddy’, to the magazine Encounter, introducing them with a brief eulogy signed ‘T.H.’ and ending with a poignant paragraph in which he wrote of how people who met Sylvia tended to be either ‘alarmed or exhilarated by the intensity of her spirits’. ‘Her affections were absolute,’ he continued. ‘Once she had set her mind to it, nothing was too much trouble for her.’ Her every action was of a piece with ‘the lovely firm complexity of design, the cleanly uncompromising thoroughness that shows in her language’. Above all, in ‘spite of the prevailing doom evident in her poems, it is impossible that anybody could have been more in love with life, or more capable of happiness, than she was’.49

  The Encounter selection was a bold harbinger of what was to come. Eighteen months later, on 11 March 1965, Ariel was published by Faber and Faber, in a yellow dust jacket printed in a bright pattern of blue, black and red. Ted was initially shocked by the design, but it grew on him. ‘What an insane chance’, he wrote to Richard Murphy on the eve of publication, ‘to have private family struggles turned into best-selling literature of despair and martyrdom, probably a permanent cultural treasure.’50 A further poignancy came from the way that the book seemed as much a part of him as of Sylvia: his other titles were promoted on the flap of the dust jacket and his name was on the copyright page.

  The typescript of forty-one poems which Sylvia had left on her desk at the time of her death, with a dedication ‘for Frieda and Nicholas’, had four title pages. Below the clean one marked ‘ARIEL and other poems by Sylvia Plath’ were two others, in which she experimented with other titles: ‘The Rival’, then ‘A Birthday Present’, then ‘Daddy’. It was clearly a work in progress, subject to revision. Ted had also read the nineteen poems that Sylvia had written after its completion, and he knew that they were some of her best. He was also aware that some of the poems in the typescript would have been very offensive to living people, such as the actor Marvin Kane and his wife Kathy, who were portrayed so savagely in ‘Lesbos’, and his own Uncle Walt, who was described in ‘Stopped Dead’ as ‘pants factory Fatso, millionaire’.51 He accordingly left out thirteen poems from Sylvia’s prepared manuscript and added in ten others instead – ‘Sheep in Fog’, which he hugely admired, near the beginning of the collection and the remaining nine at the end. This meant that the book concluded not, as the typescript had done, with the uplifting promise of spring in ‘Wintering’, but with the death-ray of the poems of Sylvia’s very last days, such as ‘Contusion’ (‘The rest of the body is all washed out … The mirrors are sheeted’) and ‘Edge’ (‘The woman is perfected. / Her dead // Body wears the smile of accomplishment’).52

  Among the omissions were some poems that, if read autobiographically, did not reflect well on Ted himself, notably ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ (‘It was a place of force’) and ‘The Jailor’ (‘I have been drugged and raped … Lever of his wet dreams’).53 When these editorial decisions became apparent upon his publication of Plath’s collected poems in 1981, Hughes was vilified. The feminist line was that the husband was trying to control the posthumous voice of the woman for whose suicide he had been responsible. This argument was not entirely fair, given that he had already published some of the rejected poems, including ‘The Jailor’, in Encounter. The counter-argument would be that he and Sylvia had collaborated on each other’s work and relied on each other’s judgement during their marriage, and Ted was merely continuing this process after her death.54

  Ted knew that there was more work to be done in securing Plath’s permanent reputation. In about four years’ time, he told Murphy, he would prepare a complete edition. For now, Ariel was enough to honour her memory and satisfy himself in his role of custodian of her work as well as her children. At publication time, he gave an interview to the Guardian, telling of how he and Sylvia were ‘like two feet, each one using everything the other did’. Their partnership was all-absorbing; ‘There was an unspoken unanimity in every criticism or judgment we made.’55

  Prior to this, he wrote a detailed note introducing the volume in the Bulletin of the Poetry Book Society, which had made it a ‘Spring Choice’. ‘The truly miraculous thing about her’, he wrote, ‘will remain the fact that in two years, while she was almost fully occupied with children and house-keeping, she underwent a poetic development that has hardly any equal on record, for suddenness and completeness.’ He dated the great leap forward to the birth of her first child and in this sense it was fitting that Ariel began with the wonderfully gentle ‘Morning Song’, written for baby Frieda. But he did not shy away from the toughness of the collection: ‘She was most afraid that she might come to live outside her genius for love, which she also equated with courage, or “guts”, to use her word.’ Ariel had guts. It was unlike any other poetry. It was Sylvia. ‘Everything she did was just like this, and this is just like her – but permanent.’56

  He dispatched copies of the book to his friends and mentors. Richard Murphy was deeply moved and sent an elegy for Sylvia
in return. In the covering letter with the copy sent to his old teacher John Fisher, Ted generously acknowledged a chain of influence: ‘Nobody else writes like that or ever has done. If any of it is thanks to me, as it may be a little bit, then some of it is thanks to you.’57 He then copied out a story by three-year-old Nick about a wolf who lived inside a giant mouse and drank its blood and drowned and was shot by a hunter and another wolf was then shot by a shark with a sun between its teeth and the second wolf was turned to ice and the mouse was turned to stone and a man came with a big sword and chopped its head off. Nick had recently met his Uncle Gerald, who had purchased two antique swords, one to leave at Court Green and the other to take back to Australia. Ted was hinting to John Fisher that Sylvia’s, and his own, creative juices had flowed into the next generation.

  Al Alvarez in the Observer hailed the publication of Ariel as a major literary event. His review was entitled ‘Poetry in Extremis’.58 It drew on a radio talk he had given on the BBC shortly after Sylvia’s death. He had spoken there of the bravery of her writing, of the terrible unforgiving quality of ‘Daddy’, and of how the poems written in her last months tapped the ‘roots of her own inner violence’ (‘violence’, that word which was so often applied to Ted’s work). ‘Poetry of this order’, he had ended the talk, ‘is a murderous art.’59

  Meanwhile in the Spectator, a magazine with especially influential book pages, Ariel was reviewed alongside Robert Lowell’s latest poetry collection, For the Union Dead, under the headline ‘Poets of the Dangerous Way’. The reviewer was none other than M. L. Rosenthal, who had coined the phrase ‘confessional poetry’ with regard to Lowell’s Life Studies. For Rosenthal, the true confessional poet embodies the trauma of the age within their own psychological torment. ‘If a poet is sensitive enough to the age and brave enough to face it directly,’ he wrote, with regard to such poems as ‘Daddy’ and ‘Fever 103°’, ‘it will kill him through the exacerbation of his awareness alone.’60 The use of the male pronoun was unfortunate in the context of Ariel, but Rosenthal was astute in predicting that Plath’s death would become the stuff of legend. Between them, Alvarez and Rosenthal established a connection, which has never been broken, between Plath’s last poems and her suicide. The link was solidified in a review-essay of exceptional power by the brilliant young Cambridge critic George Steiner. Its title took a phrase from ‘Lady Lazarus’: ‘Dying is an Art’.61 Its content dwelt heavily on the Holocaust imagery of Sylvia’s poetry – Steiner, of Viennese Jewish descent, wrestled throughout his writing life with the question of what it meant to create poetry ‘after Auschwitz’.

  The 3,000 copies of the first edition of Ariel sold out in less than a year. Hardback reprints followed, and in 1968 two paperback runs of 10,000 copies each. By the Seventies, the slim collection had come to be regarded as one of the century’s most significant volumes of poetry, its impact on a par with that of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

  The first American edition appeared in the summer of 1966, with a foreword in which Plath’s genius was hailed by no less a figure than Lowell himself. ‘Her art’s immortality is life’s disintegration,’ he wrote. In her ‘last irresistible blaze’, her ‘appalling and triumphant fulfillment’, she broke the bounds of tradition in poems that were ‘playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder’.62 Newsweek picked up on that phrase for the title of its review, while Time, the other weekly magazine with a circulation in many millions, reprinted the whole of ‘Daddy’ and published a review entitled ‘The Blood Jet is Poetry’ (a line from ‘Kindness’), which begins with the uncompromising sentence ‘On a dank day in February 1963, a pretty young mother of two children was found in a London flat with her head in the oven and the gas jets wide open.’63 For all that the majority of critics in the more highbrow outlets concentrated on the brilliance, but also the shocking quality, of the poems themselves, it was this image combined with the venom of ‘Daddy’ that laid the ground for the cult of Plath, what Ted called the Sylvia Plath fantasia.

  Eight days before Faber and Faber ushered Ariel into the world, Assia Wevill gave birth to a daughter, Alexandra Tatiana Elise, to be known as Shura.64 On the birth certificate, the father was named as Edward James Hughes, author, of Court Green, North Tawton, Devon.

  15

  The Iron Man

  The day after St Valentine’s in February 1965, Ted Hughes scribbled one of his journal notes. That day, as on so many days, he had struggled to clear a few hours for poetry writing. He had fought for fifteen years to get time for himself, but was still ‘losing heavily’. The best moments were those when he was alone in the quiet, solid thatched house. Or when it was just him and the children. Did that mean that to be a writer one had to live alone? But how could he live alone when he was a father and when he so loved the company, the cooking and the lovemaking of women? He was beginning to feel that his words were slowly coming alive again, as they had not since Sylvia’s death. But the Muse had not yet awakened. He was still processing his loss. Three nights after the second anniversary of her suicide he had a ‘terrible grief dream about Sylvia, long and unending. In a house, large stone, on the moor’s edge – the garden was also a cemetary [sic]’.1

  The strain of what he described as his ‘domestic game of chess’2 was showing. Gerald, in England for an extended visit over the Christmas and New Year period, found his brother ‘in a poor state, mentally and physically: he complained of feeling unwell, which was very unlike him’.3 Ted was still close to Sue Alliston. He took Gerald to meet her in London. ‘You met Joan,’ Ted said. ‘I like things to be symmetrical.’ She found Gerald ‘large and warm’, but uncomfortable in the London literary environment. ‘He uses bits of Ted’s vocabulary, is uneasy with it, uses it like a new toy,’ she noted in her journal. ‘Tells stories at great length … He seemed somewhat simple at times – (not simple in a derogatory way) and very knowledgeable about archaeology and such things.’4 Gerald told Sue that he was going back via Bombay and that he hoped to come to England again, but Australia was his home.

  With Sue, there was a (relatively) pain-free transition from lovers to friends – ‘OK,’ she wrote, ‘there’s a lot Platonic in our relationship.’5 The relationship with Assia was more complicated, especially after the birth of Shura. She told her friends that she was sure her daughter was Ted’s. Olwyn’s memory is that Ted told her that he could not be sure that he was Shura’s father, but that he would treat her as if he were. Always jealous of anything that bound Ted more closely to another woman than her, Olwyn convinced herself that the baby girl had the facial features of David Wevill. Assia was still living with David, who undertook much of the baby care. Though emotionally absorbed in her newborn child, she was not the earth-mother type. Friends were impressed with David’s fathering and somewhat startled when Assia took them aside and whispered that Shura was really Ted’s.

  They were engaged on a literary collaboration by correspondence. Like Sylvia before her, Assia was a talented artist. She and Ted worked on a book for which he would write poems and send them to her. She would then send back illustrations. The plan was to have a poem and a drawing for each card in a pack of playing cards. So, for example, for the three of hearts Assia drew three maidens dancing. The royal cards would each be a figure out of history, myth or the Bible. Queen Victoria was the Queen of Clubs, Nebuchadnezzar the King of Hearts, Don Juan the Knave of Hearts.6 The title would be ‘A Full House’. The scheme was eventually abandoned, though Ted revived a version of the idea many years later, giving the title to a cycle of poems in which the royal cards were made to represent Shakespearean characters.7

  Financial prospects improved with the news that the German Embassy had established an annual three-month residency in Germany for an English poet, in honour of T. S. Eliot, and Charles Monteith had persuaded the awarding committee that Ted should be the first holder of the post, which would commence the following year. In his thank-you letter to Monteith, Ted mentioned that he was getting to work on
a selection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry for Faber. It was three years before this was published. He was deeply drawn to her vision of ‘final reality, her own soul, the soul within the Universe’, a nameless vision of something deep, holy, terrible, ‘timeless, deathly, vast, intense’.8 This is Emily as poetic big sister to Sylvia.

  In June, leaving little Shura with the long-suffering David Wevill and a nanny, Assia accompanied Ted to the Festival dei Due Mondi (Festival of the Two Worlds) in Spoleto, an ancient town on a foothill of the Apennine Mountains. Stephen Spender had asked Ted if he would like to travel with him, but Ted explained that he was going with ‘a friend’, so he would drive down in leisurely fashion and return via Germany, to improve his language before taking up his residency. Founded by the composer Gian Carlo Menotti in 1958, the annual Spoleto event had become one of the great arts festivals, in which Europe met the Americas and practitioners from every field of the creative arts came together in the Umbrian sunshine. The world’s top poetic talent was there: the father of modernism, Ezra Pound, about to turn eighty, his face a map of trenched wrinkles, in Italian exile after his long imprisonment in an American mental hospital following his fascist collaboration in the war; Pablo Neruda from Chile, embodiment of communism at its most idealistic; Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Ted’s contemporary, the rising star of Russian poetry, voice of the Khrushchev cultural thaw and now, in the more difficult era of the crackdown on dissent following the deposition of Khrushchev, agitating for the release of fellow-poet Joseph Brodsky from his sentence of hard labour in the far north. Pound spoke to no one. Assia, who enjoyed the food and the fact that the trip was expenses paid, said that old Ezra looked ‘hand-dressed and about to die like a new magnolia’.9 Ted described him as a ‘resurrected Lazarus’ with ‘dead button eyes’. Neruda, meanwhile, ‘read torrentially for about 25 minutes off a piece of paper about 3" by 4". Then he turned it over, and read on.’10