After Spoleto, Assia returned to her husband and her advertising job in London, where she was achieving considerable success. Ted went back to Court Green. He was beginning to think that it was time for them to live together. He desired and needed her. But there would have to be ground rules in order to protect their work. He proposed separate bedrooms, no sleeping together during the week, no visitors before seven in the evening, a banquet to usher in their lovemaking at the end of each five nights’ abstinence, and ‘Constant music’.
In order to prepare her for the dullness of life in the country, he then told her what a typical day in his life was like. Up at half past eight, to open the post and stare blankly at his correspondence for half an hour. Phone call from Doris Lessing who requires advice on her cottage. Ring builder and get price for new windows for Doris. Get down to work at ten o’clock. But it is not the proper work of poetry. He has to type up his next talk for BBC Schools (‘about how poetry is crime, and why theft is poetical, with poetical illustrations’). Write to Stephen Spender, who is on a grant committee. Write to Exeter University, returning a contract so that he could receive the fee for a poetry reading he has done. Write to the editor Donald Hall about the American edition of Ariel. At twelve-thirty, prepare a goat-meat stew for himself and the children. Go to post. Then to the bank and to pay for shoe repair. Take the cat to the vet ‘to have its sore tail chopped off’ (half an hour wasted in the waiting room). Return, put on the stew, start writing to Assia, fetch Frieda from nursery school. Look despairingly at pile of still-unanswered letters from Faber, Heinemann, the British Council, the Arts Council and others. At five-thirty, fetch the cat from the vet. Another day gone without any time for real writing. ‘Tomorrow & tomorrow & tomorrow’, he concludes in the vein of Macbeth’s lament that life creeps on in petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.11
Later in the summer, he did a poetry reading on a miserably wet day at the Edinburgh Festival, then visited the Beacon on the way back south. Edith’s health was in sharp decline. Ted feared that his parents could no longer cope on their own and would have to be moved down to Devon. Olwyn was getting restless. After the many months of childcare in the remote countryside, she wanted to go to London to start her literary agency. Ted came up with a scheme to move Edith and Bill into Court Green while he took the children to Ireland for a few months – with or without Assia and Shura. Richard Murphy offered his cottage in Cleggan, since he was off to America for a few months. Aurelia Plath was not pleased to hear that she would have to postpone her next visit to her grandchildren. ‘Bomb #1 Dec 1965’, she inscribed in thick black marker pen on the letter in which Ted broke the news.12 The letter made no mention of Assia, let alone Shura.
Ireland was delayed by various complications, including William Hughes’s attempts to sell his shop and a period when Edith was in hospital. By this time, Murphy had found a much better house than his own cottage: Doonreaghan in Cashel, a beautiful and remote area of Connemara on the far west coast. Ted so liked the sound of it that he started paying rent in December, even though it was far from certain exactly when he would be able to leave Devon and go there.
This time Ted did not want Elizabeth Compton to have access to Court Green. He suspected that she might be reporting back to Aurelia. So he asked some new friends to help his parents settle in. They were Trevor and Brenda Hedden, whom he had met through the Comptons. They lived 3 miles outside North Tawton at a place called Bondleigh, in open countryside. Trevor was studying as a mature student in Exeter, training to be a drama teacher. He felt that as a result of army service he had missed out on the chance to sow his youthful wild oats, so he was enjoying student life in the newly relaxed age of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the contraceptive pill. Brenda was nine years younger than Trevor and was influenced by his wider life experiences. She was a social worker who had studied psychodynamics. This sparked the interest of Ted, who had been fascinated by psychological theory ever since his youthful immersion in Jung.
In February 1966 Assia finally told David that she had made her choice. The marriage was over and she was going to live with Ted. She and Shura would go to Ireland with him. The night before they left, Ted went for a riverside walk alone. He clambered down an escarpment where the stream that he had been following joined the main river, and as he came down he saw salmon going upstream, leaping, shaking themselves in the air. On the riverbank he found himself ‘completely covered with milt and spawn from these leaping salmon’.13 From that night on, he claimed, his dreams were always of salmon instead of pike. Was Sylvia the devouring pike of the dream the night before their wedding and Assia a salmon running for home, drawing Ted to Ireland, the place where he always dreamed of finding peace?
Doonreaghan lived up to expectations. Light, spacious and well fitted, it nestled beneath a green hill and opened on a magnificent vista of the Atlantic. Ted could gaze across the ocean and imagine Sylvia’s spirit looking back from the shoreline thousands of miles away on the other side. The bay was sheltered and the air surprisingly warm. Here, for a few sweet weeks, they finally became a family. Ted was at last writing what he truly wanted to write, instead of merely what he had to write to earn some cash. Assia sketched. To the children, it was paradise. Frieda, who had the luxury of her own bathroom, made a little house for the one toy she had brought, her puppet Percy Panda. Her painting and drawing, Ted told Aurelia in a happy letter, were growing ‘like magic’.14 Nick loved the outdoors, especially the seashore. Soon Ted was teaching him to fish. And both children were very excited to be sharing their home with a new little sister. They celebrated her first birthday and Ted wrote a poem for her.
They hoped to stay on longer, but the winter lease ran out at the end of March, so they moved up to Cleggan, where Richard Murphy had found them a farmhouse a mile down the road from his own cottage. They dined regularly with Murphy, and had visits from Barrie Cooke, artist and fisherman, and his wife. Ted was hatching his Crow, as well as gathering and polishing a range of his other work. He knew that Faber were waiting for a third book. He planned to take up the German award later in the year. While he was in Ireland, some further good news arrived: thanks to the Abraham Woursell Foundation of New York, Ted was offered a five-year bursary from the Philosophy Department of Vienna University, amounting to the equivalent of two-thirds of a professor’s salary, a princely £1,500 per year (the equivalent of £25,000 or $38,000 in 2015). His sole duty would be to write poetry. Residence was not required. This was a much better prospect than commitment to a three-month residency in Germany.
The dream of making a permanent home in Ireland was ended by news from Court Green. Olwyn had finally had enough of domestic duties. She was off to London to start her agency. Edith’s health was getting worse and worse, with frequent periods of being bedridden and several stays in the hospital in Exeter. Towards the end of May, Ted and Assia took all three children to Devon. By this time, Brenda Hedden had given up work in order to look after her daughter Harriet, who was born the previous month.
Now, for the first time, Assia was living in Sylvia’s house. Bill and Edith accepted that Shura was Ted’s child, but they could not stand Assia. Their constant complaint to Trevor and Brenda Hedden was that she had seduced Ted; because of her three previous marriages, they called him ‘Edward the fourth’.15 There was a perpetual bad atmosphere. As a veteran of the Great War, Bill Hughes had a visceral dislike of the Germans. He found Assia’s upper-class English accent phoney in the extreme, and refused to speak to her. This was ironic, given her Jewish background: she, like him, was a survivor. Writing to her sister in Canada, Assia complained that Ted’s father even averted his eyes when she put a plate of food in front of him. Sometimes they resorted to eating separately, Assia with Shura and Ted with his father, Frieda and Nick.
Visitors sometimes helped to relieve the tension in the house. Alan Sillitoe and his wife Ruth Fainlight were loy
al as ever. Sylvia’s journals had often been at their funniest and liveliest when she wrote – sometimes cruelly – about people. So too with Ted’s. He was as hungry for human experience as he was for natural. On a day trip to Dartmoor with Assia and the Sillitoes (an outing marred by Frieda being car sick), he noted not only a lizard ‘trickling down into a clump of heather’ (the freshness of the description coming from the choice of verb), but also a ‘bus-load of post-menopause women – hats like whipped cream walnuts, their fussy lavenders, pinks, lilacs and browns. Silver hair wiring and whiskering … their faces anxious thoughtfulnesses’.16
Ted and Assia managed to escape for one brief return visit to Murphy in Cleggan, but most of the time they felt imprisoned by the demands of looking after Ted’s parents as well as the children. Ted turned his back on the civil war in the house, spending most days working in his writing hut in the garden, or fishing or playing snooker with friends, or visiting the Heddens. Assia, who had a history of depression and suicide attempts, began voicing dark thoughts. She could not help comparing herself with Sylvia. She wallowed in the manuscript notebooks among the Plath papers and typed a bitter journal piece about her strong sense of Sylvia’s ‘repugnant live presence’ – though elsewhere in her journal she wrote generously of Sylvia’s great literary gifts.
Finding the phrase ‘work at femininity’ in one of Plath’s lists of resolutions and things to buy (‘including a bathrobe, slippers and nightgown’), Assia asked ‘Were the elbows really sharp? the hands enormous and knuckled? or is this my imaginary shape-giving to the muscular brain, my envy of her splendid brilliance?’17 She wrote a will and stole some pages of Plath manuscripts, which she sent to her sister with the information that they would fetch a good price if the time came when Shura had to be supported. She also wrote a cheque for over a thousand dollars, which would pay for an airfare to Canada and the initial expenses of looking after a little motherless child.18
She could equally well feel overwhelmed with passion for Ted. In one extraordinary journal entry, she wrote of how his generosity and affection were ‘almost unsupportable’. His kindness and love reached such luxuriance that she would ‘buckle over, speechless’. She imagined his writing hut smoking ‘with the temperature of his presence in it’. She had ‘huge fits of love and admiration for him’. But it was two parts that and one part ‘memory of Ruthless’. And then she voiced a hymn to his beauty, manifestly imitating the style of the Sylvia journals in which she had been immersing herself:
There he is in his white shirt scything in the glossy Rousseau jungle. In sweet sweat. There he is coming down the orchard in his plaid shirt carrying something. His superb legs and thighs – the beautiful Anatomical Man. One of God’s best creations. Is God squandering him on me? He carries so many perfections that I would in all truth not begrudge him an affair or two with other women – as long as he remains loyal to me. I would suffer bitterly – but this in all truth is the only due thanks I could give him for all his grace. He ventures everything. His lovely, long risks of grasp. Sometimes little yaps of greed, but all accounted for. He is one of God’s best creatures. Ever. Ever.19
*
In May 1967 Faber and Faber published the mysteriously entitled Wodwo. Though presented in their usual format for poetry, it was in fact an unusual hybrid work, with poetry at the beginning and end, and five short stories and Ted’s 1962 radio play, The Wound, in the middle. Dedicated to his mother and father, perhaps in the expectation that Edith would not be around for many more years to have another work dedicated to her, it began with an author’s note explaining that the stories and the play should be understood as ‘notes, appendix and unversified episodes of the events behind the poems, or as chapters of a single adventure to which the poems are commentary and amplification’.20 Either way, the book should be read as a unity. Following the contents list, there was an epigraph which explained the title (though only to readers versed in Middle English): ‘Sumwhyle wyth wormeȝ he werreȝ, and wyth wolves als, / Sumwhyle wyth wodwos, þat woned in þe knarreȝ’ – this is Sir Gawain, encountering an array of monsters as he crosses ‘the wilderness of Wirral’ in his quest for the Green Knight, in the poem that Hughes had especially admired when taking the medieval paper at Cambridge. The wodwo was a hairy wild man of the woods. In the title poem, written in early 1961 and printed as the last in the collection, he noses around – ‘turning leaves over / Following a faint stain on the air to the river’s edge’ – like an adult version of one of the creatures in Ted’s children’s tales. He begins by asking who he is and where he belongs, concludes by deciding that he is ‘the exact centre’ of things, though he doesn’t really know what or where his ‘roots’ are, so he’ll just have to go on looking.21
Ted explained to his old schoolteacher John Fisher that Wodwo was a kind of completion of The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal, the end of the first phase of his poetic career. He said that it had a hidden narrative but did not say what that narrative was. To János Csokits, an exiled Hungarian known to Olwyn from her Paris days and now broadcasting for Radio Free Europe, he was more forthcoming. Csokits had sent him a detailed critical analysis of what he saw as the strengths and weaknesses of the book. Ted sent a response. The collection was a ‘transit camp’ on the way to the next big thing (which was Crow). The poems were ordered not in chronology of composition but so as to suggest an ‘undisturbed relationship with the outside natural world’ being disrupted by a call ‘from a subjective world’. The theme of the book, as of his own life ‘from 1961–2 onwards’, was ‘this invitation or importuning of a subjective world, which I refuse’. ‘The Rain Horse’, the first story in the prose sequence in the middle of the book, was ‘the record of the importuning, and the refusal’.22 That ‘refusal’ led to a ‘mental collapse into the condition of an animal’. The final short story, ‘The Suitor’, was written in January 1962, ‘almost under dictation’. ‘The Suitor is me,’ he told Csokits, ‘the man in the car is me, the girl is Sylvia, the Stranger is death, and the situation turns me into an animal – as Gog. Also, the girl is my spirit of light, my Ophelia.’ The poems in the latter part of the book were ‘poems after the event’. His overall feeling was that the book was too subjective. There was an awful lot of himself in it, which is probably why it was unsatisfactory. But he hoped that the ordering of the poems would lead him back to the ‘objective world’ where his talent really belonged.23
The ‘event’ he has in mind seems to be the moment of shamanic initiation that he had read about in Eliade. As with his discovery of Graves’s White Goddess, Eliade gave him a context and a history for ideas that he had evolved, if inchoately, in his own thinking and writing. ‘Both spontaneous vocation and the quest for initiation’, he read in Shamanism in 1964, ‘involve either a mysterious illness or a more or less symbolic ritual of mystical death, sometimes suggested by a dismemberment of the body and renewal of the organs.’24 Having undergone this painful process, the shaman descends to the underworld and emerges as a healer and sage. Thus the ‘poems after the event’ in Part Three of Wodwo use a symbolic and quasi-mythological apparatus – Adam and Eve with the serpent, Gog, a rat and the wodwo – to penetrate a black inner world. This is the mode that anticipates the Crow poems on which he was continuing to work as Wodwo went through the production process at Faber.
Ted certainly thought he was wrestling with his shamanic destiny. But the other ‘event’ with which he was wrestling was Sylvia’s death. The extraordinary thing about his account of the story ‘The Suitor’ is that it makes Sylvia into his ‘Ophelia’ – the girl who goes mad and kills herself because her Hamlet has rejected her – despite the fact that it was written well before his affair with Assia and its consequences.
The self-analysis of Wodwo prompted by János Csokits also hints at the struggle between Hughes’s ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ styles. By this account, the poems in Part One are ‘objective’ fresh looks at things in the world, in the style he had made his own in The Hawk
in the Rain and Lupercal, whereas those in Part Three are more closely bound to his inner self. There is an element of truth in this. Among the poems in Part One are cleverly angled and innovatively worded responses to thistles (the first poem, and one of the best), crabs, grass flashed by wind, Beethoven’s death mask, a bear and a jaguar – a ‘second glance’ at his totemic animal, written in front of the jaguar cage in the zoo in Regent’s Park. Equally, Part Three is more subjective in the sense of using more autobiographical elements: not only the wolves heard from the zoo as he sat writing on Sylvia’s bed in Fitzroy Road, but also little Frieda calling out ‘Moon!’ and his father sitting in his chair unable to forget the ‘gunfire and mud’ of the Western Front, ‘Body buffeted wordless, estranged by long soaking / In the colours of mutilation’.25
It is not, however, the case that the objective and subjective voices of Hughes are neatly split between the different parts of the collection, nor that his ‘brilliant physical particularity’ is associated with one voice and his ‘oracular rhetoric’ with the other.26 And although the title poem strongly suggested the idea of a quest for identity, no ordinary reader would be able to discern a narrative progression through Wodwo. The critics certainly didn’t. ‘What is this “single adventure”?’ asked the poet Anthony Thwaite in some exasperation with respect to the author’s note, as he reviewed the collection anonymously in the Times Literary Supplement.27 Derwent May in the London Times thought that ‘This wodwo haunting the countryside is a good, if whimsical, symbol for Mr Hughes as poet,’ but he couldn’t quite decide what the wodwo was questing for.28 ‘I’m not sure I properly understand Hughes,’ wrote his old Cambridge contemporary C. B. Cox, in a review that astutely began from Ted’s remark that ‘when he first read D. H. Lawrence he felt as if he was reading his own autobiography’. Wodwo is full of Lawrentian language and includes an explicit homage in the form of ‘Her Husband’, a poem about a coal-blackened miner coming home to his wife.29
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