Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  Elsewhere, Cox described the collection as undoubtedly the most important poetry book of the year.30 An element of puzzlement did not stand in the way of critical acclaim. Typical plaudits were ‘Hughes’ poetry is the real thing,’ ‘the best British poet since Dylan Thomas’, and, from Alvarez, ‘he is the most powerful and original poet now writing in this country’.31 The most insightful review, entitled ‘As deep as England’, was by the canny poet and critic Donald Davie, in the Guardian. He focused particularly on the short story ‘Sunday’, relating it to the ‘remarkable poem’ (unknown to him, one of the very few written after Sylvia’s death) ‘Song of a Rat’. ‘The wolves which hunt through the boy narrator’s mind,’ Davie wrote of ‘Sunday’, ‘the rats, the hawks, the otters and crabs – all the predatory and preyed-upon beasts which figure in the other poems – are projections of the predatory violence which is the only guise through which the English tradition is mediated to the poet through his war-shattered father.’32

  Though Ted was well pleased with the reception of Wodwo, he was acutely conscious that almost all the poems in it had been written before Sylvia’s death. The real test of his development would be the Crow project – which kept growing but from which he kept being distracted.

  Since Hughes was one of Faber and Faber’s leading poets, and Wodwo was his first book for adults in seven years, his publishers mounted a strong publicity campaign. Together with the good reviews, this ensured that he was the centre of attention during the first Poetry International Festival in London in July 1967. The festival was indeed his brainchild, hatched in collaboration with the theatre director Patrick Garland. Since the previous autumn, Ted had been busy inviting major overseas poets, ranging from Lowell in America to Zbigniew Herbert in Poland to Israel’s leading poet, Yehuda Amichai. The offer, laid out on Poetry Book Society notepaper, was not munificent: five pounds a day for the five days of the festival, up to fifty pounds for travel expenses and, if the funding could be scraped together, a further fee of perhaps forty pounds. Funding constraints meant that Ted had to scale back his ambitions. ‘The Poetry Festival has lost a lot of feathers,’ he told Richard Murphy. ‘I was all set to cram London with geniuses, when John Lehmann etc [that is, the management board of the Poetry Book Society] decided I ought to be restrained – evidently. So the festival could only be five foreigners, five Americans, five English. It was those five English I was trying to avoid.’33 It wasn’t the particular English poets he objected to, but rather the fact that he did not want so many Anglophone voices. One of his main aims was to showcase the Eastern European poets whose work he and Danny Weissbort were publishing in their magazine Modern Poetry in Translation. He was disappointed that Herbert could not come, delighted when he made a late appearance in response to an urgent, pleading telegram.

  The fifteen names lined up were impressive: from America, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Allen Ginsberg and Anthony Hecht (a friend since New England days and a poet whose work Ted greatly admired); Pablo Neruda came all the way from Chile; Bella Akhmadulina from Russia; Hans Enzensberger from Germany; Yves Bonnefoy from Paris; Giuseppe Ungaretti from Italy; Yehuda Amichai from Israel; Hugh MacDiarmid from Scotland; and Patrick Kavanagh from Ireland. Eliot having died in 1965 (Ted was surprised how deeply he felt the loss), the three elder statesmen of English poetry were there: W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Robert Graves, who was now frail. The event was held in the brand-new ‘brutalist’ concrete Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room on the South Bank of the Thames. The programme was a success, though by no means on the scale of the more radical ‘International Poetry Incarnation’ that had been held at the Royal Albert Hall two summers before, when the wild man of San Francisco Ginsberg had appeared drunk on stage in front of an audience of 7,000, recited a very explicit poem about an orgy and been heckled for refusing to read his signature poem ‘Howl’.34

  Looking back on an exhausting five days, Ted felt that the whole thing had been almost too much of a poetry orgy, but very good ‘dramatic entertainment’. Neruda and Bonnefoy read for far too long but Ginsberg kindly told Ted that the old professionals Spender and Auden had saved the day (this was on the one evening when he was absent).35 Reflecting in his journal after the event, Ted expressed some regret at having got involved. Once he had started writing the letters of invitation, he had felt duty bound to follow through and effectively be the host. The Queen Elizabeth Hall had not really been a suitable space, the actor reading some of the translated poetry had not been very good, and so on. The whole process had taken an immense amount of time and emotional energy. Lessons would have to be learned if they were going to do it again. Renewal of his old friendship with Zbigniew Herbert and the start of a new one with Yehuda Amichai were the high points for Ted. He and Assia, who stayed with the Sillitoes for the duration of the festival, were much admired. A guest at one of the numerous parties during the week remembered the door opening and a couple emerging. She had never seen such beauty in her life. ‘Who are these gorgeous people?’ she asked Ruth Fainlight, who replied, ‘Ted Hughes and Assia Wevill.’36

  Back at Court Green, all was not well. Ted’s mother was ill again and his father was continuing his ‘cold war’ with Assia. They talked about getting a nurse for Edith. The ideal would have been to find someone who could both mother his children and nurse his parents. Brenda Hedden was not a candidate for this role. In the summer of 1967, she gave birth to her second daughter, Judith. Assia visited with Ted, and gave a silver chain and a jewel box made of abalone.

  It was a difficult summer for Ted. The day before visiting Brenda, he had driven Aurelia Plath to Exeter railway station at the end of a very uncomfortable visit to see the grandchildren, her first for two years. She had spent much of her time at Court Green talking with great bitterness about the effect of the publication of Ariel in the United States. Her life had become a ‘torment’, as she had to deal with endless correspondence about ‘Daddy’ and the humiliation of watching the critics publicly psychoanalysing her relationship with Sylvia. What Aurelia could not understand was how there seemed to be such venom in her daughter’s poems and yet how when she had visited Sylvia at McLean she had been greeted with the words ‘I don’t hate you, it’s not true, they tell me I hate you and I don’t.’ Aurelia reasoned that Sylvia must always have loved her because she asked her to come to England each year to visit her. Ted asked why she had not come for Christmas 1962.

  Frieda and Nick saw that their grandmother had ‘a heavy, terrifying will – which they respond to and yet see through at the same time’. They felt ‘immense relief’ at ‘escaping her’, though their response to her ‘discipline and teaching’ was also ‘extremely energetic’. Ted concluded his journal note by summing up the paradox that was Aurelia Plath: ‘She is a sweet, charitable, brave, very strong woman – but simply too pedagoguic [sic] in her insistence on the good, falsifying reality, protecting her charges from the wicked and the sorrowful and the real.’37 One night later that week he dreamed of rats invading Court Green, then meditated in another journal note on a phrase used of people going to a mental hospital: ‘to get sorted out’. Didn’t dreams have the same function? And poems? Did poetry grow from neurosis but come to fruition as a form of healing? Could poetic experience be ‘the vital, medical operation’? Was it in some sense ‘the correction of God’?38

  For some time he had been increasingly relying for childcare on a teenage girl from the village called Carol, who was training to be a nurse. Her father, to whom she was devoted, was Jack Orchard, born in the Devon village of Walston Barton in the summer of the Somme and raised to a farming life. Mrs Orchard was Welsh. Born Minnie Evans in Swansea, she had trained as a nurse in Devon. Carol was born in Crediton in March 1948 and was intending to tread in her mother’s footsteps, though she also loved the life of the farm. She had an elder sister, Jean, who had just got married and joined her new husband in running a local nursing home for the elderly. There was also a younger brother, Robert, who later became a
parliamentary correspondent for the BBC while staging musicals in the summer recess.

  Assia moved out. She had had enough, and was going to look for a job in London. A Pickfords van collected her belongings in mid-September. The children did not want her to go, Frieda saying so vociferously, Nick concurring but more silently. It was as if they were losing a second mother, and a sister (though in his journals Ted hardly ever mentions Shura). Ted’s own feelings were a blank, the future a case of watching and waiting. He was taking comfort – stoicism, good sense, acceptance – from the essays of Montaigne. He was beginning to think that he should write more like Thomas Hardy than W. B. Yeats: instead of turning the real into an imagined world, life into myth and his inner self into a symbolic persona, he should ground his writing in reality, in experience: ‘That is the weight behind his [Hardy’s] poems – the real world, and especially the pathos of the past, of time passing. Even his tinpot love-plots have a kind of woman’s magazine relevance – their triviality is awfully real.’39 This was something he could also have learned from the ‘woman’s magazine’ element of Sylvia writing, about which until this point he had always been sceptical. The Birthday Letters project would indeed entail a turn to a Hardyesque voice (‘the pathos of the past’ – his own past with Sylvia), but he was not yet ready for it while he was still working through his inner darkness in the mythic and apocalyptic voice of Crow.

  In the same journal note, he recorded a dream of murderous rage about Olwyn. His unconscious was blaming his sister for the breakdown of his relationships with other women. And Assia’s departure was also reminding him of the loss of Sylvia: ‘dreamed: in bath – feeling somebody behind me, stunning shock, it was Sylvia, very young and happy’. That dream would play a part in ‘The Offers’, his greatest elegy for Sylvia, made public only in the week of his death.

  There was a happy day soon after Assia’s departure when Carol accompanied him and the children to Bideford Zoo. Where Ted saw only ‘death-camp misery’ in the face of the chimp behind bars and a ‘greasy pool with a foul fish’ for the seal to churn away in, Nick and Frieda loved their pretty, youthful companion, as she pointed out the parrots, the mynah bird, ‘the spider monkey; the owl; the axolotl’ (otherwise known as the Mexican salamander); ‘the baby crocs; the brisk fox; the mountain lions’.40

  Just before Christmas, Ted sent Luke Myers a letter with his news. Wodwo was out in the States (with slightly different content from the English version), his mother was rather better, Frieda and Nicholas were doing very well – Frieda, now seven and half, had started writing wonderfully imaginative poems. And, by a series of ‘Napoleonic moves’, he had got himself some ‘qualified peace’ in which to work. The main move, he explained, was Assia’s back to London, where she had (Luke would be astonished to hear this) reconciled with Olwyn. ‘Two local women come in to do the housework,’ Ted added. That was true, but it was also the case that two other local women, Brenda and Carol, were now playing a big part in his life. His writing was at last going well. Crow was ‘getting his feathers’. He was turning a play called Vasco into an opera libretto. And he was working on a version of Seneca’s Oedipus for the director Peter Brook, to be staged at the National Theatre in the New Year. He was excited by the style he was finding, which was not so much verse as a new sort of hardened, compacted prose, written in chunks or ‘gobbets’.41

  Oedipus: not the famous Greek tragedy of Sophocles, but the little-known, more static and rhetorical Roman version of Seneca, dramatist of blood, ghost, revenge, explosive anger and stoic resilience. Ted explained to his Cambridge friend Peter Redgrove that the National Theatre had asked him to perform a light makeover on an existing translation by a Scotsman called David Turner, which had been broadcast on the radio by the BBC in Northern Ireland. But as he got deeper and deeper into the text, and worked with Peter Brook in the rehearsal room, it became a completely new version.42

  Brook was at the height of his powers, the most highly regarded director in London. He had started directing for the Royal Shakespeare Company when he was only in his twenties and had conjured extraordinary performances out of Laurence Olivier in Titus Andronicus and Paul Scofield in King Lear. Then he had scandalised the British establishment but amazed the New York critics with his violent and sexually explicit production of Peter Weiss’s The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (known for convenience as the Marat/Sade). After this, there was his improvisatory-documentary anti-Vietnam agitprop evening, US, unprecedentedly political for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

  In early January 1968, Ted asked Brook if he could be joined in the rehearsal room by a friend ‘who helps a lot in these things’.43 This was Assia. Ted was fascinated by the intensity of Brook’s directing method. His rehearsals were ‘like prolonged group-analysis of everybody concerned’. Ted, meanwhile, was working further on the ‘abbreviated style’ that seemed to him right for Seneca’s muscular Latin. Director and cast made contributions to the evolution of the text. In the rehearsal room, Ted felt that he was drawing on a ‘single battery of energy’. Brook was helping him to release the Oedipus story in its ‘plainest, bluntest form’ while at the same discovering ‘ritual possibilities’ in it. The great thing about the Seneca version was that it lacked the clear Hellenistic ethical imperative of Sophocles. These versions of the characters were even more ‘primitive’ than ‘aboriginals’. They were ‘a spider people, scuttling among hot stones’. Seneca’s descriptive language somehow contained ‘the raw dream of Oedipus, the basic, poetic, mythical substance of the fable’. The tragedy created an almost religious experience, ‘the sacred, ritual progress under the marriage of love and death’.44

  Ted was fascinated by the London theatre world, but repelled by some of the people in it. He did not like Kenneth Tynan, the National Theatre’s flamboyant literary manager. When Tynan invited him to a dinner party, he declined. ‘What a pity,’ Tynan replied, ‘Elizabeth Taylor is coming.’ Ted, who regarded Taylor as the sexiest woman on the planet, was furious.

  The production opened at the Old Vic on 19 March 1968 with the silver-tongued Sir John Gielgud as Oedipus and Irene Worth as Jocasta. She was fifty-one, fourteen years older than Ted, but still exceptionally attractive, with high cheekbones and dazzling eyes. She was as renowned as Ted for sexual charisma and the two of them shared several intimate evenings. She was a woman not easily discomposed, but on one occasion when he read out to her some of his still-unpublished Crow poems during a break in rehearsals, she had shaken with fear and pleaded with him not to write any more.45

  As the audience entered the theatre, they saw actors in black rollneck sweaters and casual trousers perched all over the auditorium, clinging to pillars every bit as though they were Hughesian crows. They droned out a single note, then the players on stage turned over the cubes on which they were sitting and beat out a tattoo at ever-increasing pace. The drumming cut out and the play began. Throughout the performance, the actors would ‘hiss, throb, vibrate and intone’, interrupting the long Senecan speeches with ‘group-sounds’.46

  It was an evening of auguries, nightmares, priestly incantations, dark transgressions and a blighted land, with references to ‘organs pulled bleeding alive from deep in the bodies of animals’ and lines such as:

  my country rots / but it isn’t the gods

  it is this / a son and a mother

  knotted and twisted together / a son and a mother

  a couple of vipers bodies twisting together

  blood flowing back together in the one sewer47

  The script had lengthy blank spaces between phrases to help the actors with their rhythms and their pauses. Gielgud, used to flowing Shakespearean iambic pentameter, struggled a little with the fragmentary movement of such speeches as:

  birth / birthed / blood take this / open

  the earth bury it / bottom of the darkness

  under everything / I am not
fit for the light

  Thebans your stones / now put a mountain on

  me / hack me to pieces / pile the plague fires

  on me / make me ashes / finish me / put me

  where I know nothing / I am the plague48

  Two days before the opening night, Brook lined up the cast on stage and told them to go through the play at double speed, ‘without moving a muscle, and with flat, uninflected voices like robots’. Ted said that it was the most astonishing theatrical experience of his life. The tension was so great that one of the actors collapsed and a stagehand sitting in the front row passed out. At the end, Hughes and Brook looked at each other with ‘wild surmise’. It had been an ‘amazing auditory experience’, but they couldn’t repeat it for the theatregoing public because ‘it had only taken about 35 minutes and our audience wanted a night out’.

  The next evening was the final dress rehearsal in the presence of Sir Laurence Olivier, director of the National Theatre, who had originally been going to direct the production but had fallen ill, which is why the job had been passed to Brook. At the finale, ‘a spike was fixed in the middle of the stage, point upwards, and Jocasta killed herself by squatting on this and writhing downwards – a terrifying piece of acting by Irene Worth’. An enormous column draped in silk was then carried on, ‘erected over the spike, and unveiled to reveal a giant golden phallus’. Olivier was so appalled that he said this effect had to be removed. Peter Brook ‘exploded with such a shattering display of anger that Sir Laurence finally had to accept it’.49 Ted described the end of the play as ‘a sort of prodigious formal fuck and rebirth’. At the planning stage, he had suggested to Brook that a female figure should appear in the position of a ‘Sheila-na-gig’, a kind of ancient Irish stone carving of a woman with her knees more or less over her shoulders and her fingers pulling wide ‘a very large cunt’. The Irish name, he explained, meant ‘Woman of the Tits’. The giant phallus could perhaps, he thought, go up into the woman and then be seen on a ‘sort of spider’s web of veins, like the drapery of the placenta’.50