Ted Hughes

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Ted Hughes Page 33

by Jonathan Bate


  YEHUDA AMICHAI: Poems by an Israeli poet translated and introduced by ASSIA GUTMANN and read by TED HUGHES. Yehuda Amichai was born in Wurzburg in 1923, left Germany in 1937, and is now a citizen of Israel. During the 1950s he became the best known of the generation who freed Hebrew poetry from its traditions, and made it colloquial and supple enough to cope with the complexities of modern life.9

  Assia provided spoken introductions and talked about Amichai’s life, while Ted read a selection of the poems.

  On 6 August 1968, Ted took Frieda and Nick to Heathrow in a taxi. They were off to see their grandmother Aurelia in America. The taxi took them to the wrong terminal, and he panicked that they might miss their flight. But it was delayed. While they were waiting, eight-year-old Frieda told her little brother Nicholas that Daddy ought to marry both Carol and Brenda, so they would have one mother each. He waved goodbye and watched the plane take off: ‘Dropping skirts – motor-boat, nose-up, nearly horizontally before climb grips.’10 Then he ate some foul food at the airport’s Lyons café and took a bus to Clapham, where Assia now had a flat near the common. They made love. The next day, he was back at Heathrow with Assia and Shura. They took a BEA flight to Germany for a week’s holiday. On the first day, they visited Beethoven’s house in Bonn. For Ted, this was like paying homage at the shrine of a god. He noted down every detail: Beethoven’s last piano, his viola, his three hearing aids, the manuscript of the Ninth Symphony. The rest of the week could only be an anticlimax after this, though they enjoyed sending Amichai a postcard from his birthplace. Ted was intrigued (and Assia horrified) by a conversation on the train from Frankfurt to Würzburg during which a retired SS man, living on his pension, told them of his adventures on Hitler’s Russian campaign. Ted was prompted to write a death-camp poem for Crow. Assia noted in her journal that the trip was sometimes ‘bleak with T’s chemistry gone amok, an ugly impatient mood setting in’, but that on other occasions he was delightful with Shura, rowing her on the Schluchsee in the Black Forest, buying her little wooden birds and playing imaginative games. Assia was delighted that their daughter was now calling Ted ‘Daddy’.

  Having said goodbye to Assia at the end of the holiday and returned to Court Green, he dreamed that Sylvia had returned to life. She hoped to see the children. A certain drug made it possible, so she spent a whole day with her old friends from Smith, and Frieda and Nick. She fell asleep at the end of the day and died again in her sleep.11 In another version of the dream, Ted met her back at Smith, with all her college friends: ‘She greatly surprised and pleased by the success of Ariel, knowing she was back only for a day. She dug a hole in the main path at Smith (one that doesn’t exist) and there we buried her manuscript – the black book. It was her mother’s decision to bring her back briefly in this way.’ He wrote about the ‘insanity’ of the dream and its effect on him. He could not get over the strangeness of the sensation of ‘her presence after so much death’.12

  He gave Brenda a heart-shaped gold bracelet inscribed with their names, identical to one he had given to Assia. He also gave them both copies of an intimate and highly erotic poem that reads as if it were originally written for Sylvia. It was first published in July 1968 with the title ‘Second Bedtime Story’ and later reprinted in Crow as ‘Lovesong’.13 Brenda’s copy is a typescript with her name written in giant capital letters across the page on top of the text. She recalls that at this point Ted’s three loves were ‘nicely spaced out’, with Assia in London, Carol just outside North Tawton at Nichols Nymet, her family’s large and handsome late-Georgian house, and herself in Welcombe. He had told her that ‘after Sylvia, he no longer wanted to be dependent on one woman; he felt it was weakening and suffocating him’.14 He left one of his lectures to himself on the subject of A, B and C on the kitchen table in Court Green. It came to the conclusion that the right balance was three.15 But was he really enough of a God to maintain a trinity? He crisply summed up his dilemma in a journal entry: ‘3 beautiful women – all in love, and a separate life of joy visible with each, all possessed – but own soul lost.’16 He also drafted a poem that began ‘Which bed? Which bride? Which breast’s comfort?’17

  Assia was the one he took to a poetry reading in Dublin. The promising young Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney was there. He remembered being mesmerised by her huge eyes. He had never met a woman with such sexual charisma. ‘I think poets should be like bishops,’ she said to him: ‘they should have their own diocese and meet irregularly and formally.’18 The next day they went up to Belfast for another reading. Afterwards, they went for a Chinese meal and Ted, ever the teacher, insisted that Seamus should use chopsticks for the first time in his life. Heaney had by this time published his very Hughesian first collection, Death of a Naturalist, which included his signature poem ‘Digging’, highly influenced by ‘The Thought-Fox’ in the way that it was a poem about the act of writing a poem. After the Chinese meal, they returned to the Heaneys’ house in Ashley Avenue, where Ted and Assia and Seamus and his wife Marie drank poteen late into the night in the half-furnished front room: ‘Marie singing Irish folk songs, Assia singing Israeli songs, Ted singing “The Brown and the Yellow Ale”’.19

  The evening with the Heaneys was the beginning of one of the most important friendships of Ted’s life. But Assia was close to despair by this time. ‘The bottle-opener has left a small rosy map-lake on my wrist,’ she had written to Ted the day before his birthday. ‘Bring a post-card with you, and on it a short manifesto, and a razor-blade – and we’ll celebrate your birthday so fabulously – there won’t ever be another like it.’ On 6 September 1968 she confided to her journal: ‘It is only inevitable that the life I have lead [sic] should end like this. That I should be supplanted (sub-planted!) by others. I was endowed with too many minor qualities, but with neither the will nor huge intelligence to bring them a life of their own.’20

  Late in life, looking back on his poetic development, Ted Hughes wrote that ‘View of a Pig’, ‘Pike’ and ‘Hawk Roosting’ were the most important poems in Lupercal, his second volume of poetry and the one where his distinctive poetic voice, with its ‘broad inclusive concentration’ on the facticity – the intractable condition – of the world, truly emerged. Writing ‘Hawk Roosting’ in particular was one of the best moments of his life. Wodwo, he went on, was the ‘fall-out’ from the ‘Pig-pike-Hawk Roosting vein’. But the progression towards that collection was ‘broken up by autobiographical events’ – Sylvia’s death meant that his poems of 1960 to 1962 were not published until 1967. The ‘next conscious real step was Crow’, in which he resimplified his language and broke it into a new form of ‘lyrical-dramatic’ narrative. But ‘Then autobiographical things knocked it all to bits, as before’. His poetry came to an abrupt halt until, in the early Seventies, he started again with ‘ABC language’ in the ‘diary pieces’ that became Moortown, his farming book.21 The autobiographical things to which he was referring here were the events of 1969. Hard as it may be to imagine, this was an even worse year than 1963. It was indeed the worst of his life.

  In the autumn of 1968 his ailing mother had been taken back to Yorkshire by ambulance, his father following. Ted at last had Court Green to himself. Then in December Gerald, Joan and their children Ashley and Brendon, along with Joan’s mother, came over from Australia. They spent a white Christmas at Court Green, meeting Carol for the first time. Gerald found her ‘very attractive’, shy but welcoming. His whole family took to her. Ted, Nick and Frieda then travelled north to the Beacon with Gerald and his entourage for a New Year’s visit to their parents. There was a reunion with the extended Farrar family and it was on this occasion that Ted, Gerald and Nick drove down to Mexborough for the ‘ceremonial farewell’ to the pike pond at Crookhill.

  The day after this, he wrote to Assia, talking about them finding a new place and moving back in together, with the three children. The perpetually on–off relationship appeared to be on again. The return visit to the Beacon seemed to have had the effect of drawin
g Ted back to A and to the North, far away from the complications of B and C in Devon. Charles Monteith at Faber had asked him to edit a selection of Emily Brontë’s poems and this inevitably had him thinking again about Top Withens and the moors and Sylvia’s snow-covered grave in Heptonstall.

  On 18 March 1969 Ted went to Manchester to record a reading of his poetry for a television broadcast. He met Assia at the station. She had left Shura with her au pair. He was nervous. He had read and spoken on the radio dozens of times, but never done television before. He didn’t want Assia in the room where the recording took place at Holly Royde College, so she waited in a corridor. She was annoyed not to be allowed into the monitoring van, where she would have been able to see how Ted looked on screen. He introduced and read eleven of his best poems, including ‘The Thought-Fox’, ‘Wind’, ‘An Otter’, ‘Wodwo’, ‘Hawk Roosting’, ‘Six Young Men’ and ‘View of a Pig’. Assia was miserable at the meal after the recording, Ted stroking her shoulder to try to comfort her. They had a heart-to-heart in the dingy lounge of the Elm Hotel. Why could he not commit? ‘It’s Sylvia,’ he said, ‘it’s because of her.’22

  The next day, they drove to Yorkshire. Ted left Assia in, of all places, Haworth. He went to see his mother in hospital and spent the night at the Beacon with his father. That afternoon, Assia walked down the precipitous High Street towards the Brontë parsonage. The snow on the ground was hardening and deep. It felt, she wrote in her journal, like a town made of iron. She went to the local doctor’s surgery and obtained a prescription for thirty-five Seconal sleeping pills. That night, feeling lonely, she read some of Zbigniew Herbert’s poems. But it was cold and then the bedside light packed up. She lay in the dark, listening to the radio. First there was a programme on Radio 4 entitled Exquisite Sister. It told the story of Dorothy Wordsworth and how she had helped her brother with his poetry, how intimately she lived with him, but how she ended up, as Assia put it in her journal, ‘mad and old’. The thought of a great poet and his intimacy with his sister inevitably brought to mind the strong influence that Olwyn always exercised over Ted. Then she turned over to Radio 3 and fell asleep listening to the Hollywood String Quartet playing Beethoven’s late quartet in B flat major, Opus 130.23

  But she had not taken the pills. She woke in good time in the morning. The Brontë parsonage had been closed to tourists the previous day. She tried again, but it was too early. Having asked the landlady at the pub where she was staying if she knew of any houses for sale, she strolled around the little town as the snow slowly thawed, wondering what it would be like to live there with Ted and the three children. He then arrived to pick her up and they spent the next two days house-hunting. They looked at places as far north as Hexham in Northumberland, where they saw a dower-house that was available for rent. It belonged, Ted later recalled, to ‘Lord Whatsisname’. Assia was keen that his Lordship should know how important Ted was, which embarrassed him. They also saw a place called Green Farm, a lovely house available at low rent with salmon in a river close by. On the way back to Manchester, where they returned for Assia to get her train back to London, they inspected some less desirable properties. Assia had the feeling that by this time Ted was just playing along, that, as ever, he was not really serious about making a commitment. They said goodbye on the station platform and he headed off on the long journey down to Devon. ‘Last embraces,’ he would later scribble in a notebook, ‘clear memory of her going off on the London train.’24

  She phoned Court Green the next day, Sunday 23 March 1969. A friend of Olwyn’s was staying. She picked up the phone. Assia assumed it was ‘another woman’. Ted came in tired and it was several hours before he got the message that Assia had phoned.25 He called back and tried to give her hope with regard to their future – there was talk of a house up for let in Barnstaple – but in a way that was insufficiently ‘emphatic’.26 Fatally, he misjudged the extent of her vulnerability. Her divorce from David Wevill had been finalised (he moved to Texas and started a new life). She had always been conscious that her body was not nearly so beautiful as her ravishing face; now she felt that she was losing her looks altogether, running to fat.27 She no longer walked into a room and turned every head. If Ted was not going to give her hope, there was no future. In a small notebook, she wrote down his words: ‘It was no good thinking they could live together in a house – it’s because of Sylvia.’ Then she wrote, ‘I have no answer to that, so die soon … execute yourself and your little self efficiently.’28

  That evening, a Mrs Jones in the neighbouring flat in the house in Clapham sensed the distinctive smell of gas. Some time later, Assia’s au pair, Else, who had been to visit a friend, came home. Before leaving, she had checked that Shura, four years and three weeks old, was asleep in bed.

  When Else opened the door, she was almost overcome by the gas fumes. Mrs Jones summoned a male neighbour from upstairs. He went into the kitchen of the darkened flat, switched on the light and saw the bodies of mother and child. He turned off the gas, opened the windows and called the police. Another neighbour, who happened to be a nurse, was called down. ‘Mrs Wevill was lying on some blankets on the floor on her left side’, she said in her police statement, ‘and her daughter was lying on her back, with her face inclined towards her mother.’ There was no pulse in either of them and the pupils were dilated. ‘The little girl was much colder than her mother.’29 It had not taken long for the fumes to overcome the sleeping child, whom her mother had carried into the kitchen. A post-mortem would reveal that Assia herself had taken whisky and the sleeping pills she had obtained in Haworth.

  The police officer attending the scene found an envelope on the bedside which was addressed to Ted, together with another to Assia’s father in Canada. As a result of this, Ted was contacted by the local police in Devon and asked to go to Southwark Mortuary to identify the bodies. He gave a statement to the police, explaining that he had met Assia seven years before, having known her husband David Wevill ‘through the profession’. He and Assia had become ‘very close friends, and eventually the friendship blossomed into love’. They ‘became intimate, and there was a girl born of this union’.30

  Ted took charge of the funeral arrangements, delaying the date so that there was time for Assia’s father to fly over from Canada. Her sister Celia could not afford a ticket. At the end of March, Assia and Shura were cremated. Ted had managed to round up most of her friends. He asked Peter Porter and his wife Jannice to share the front taxi with him and Assia’s father for the journey across the river to Lambeth Cemetery, where the brief funeral service took place. Porter thought that this was Ted’s way of thanking Jannice for all the support she had given Assia, going back to her visit after the abortion in 1963 (five years later, Jannice killed herself, her husband believing that the example of Assia was in her mind). Colleagues from the advertising agency were also there. Edward Lucie-Smith remembered the tears pouring down Ted’s face. Porter was haunted for the rest of his days by ‘the memory of the two coffins waiting before the fire curtain, the one an adult coffin and the other a diminutive shape’.31 Nathaniel Tarn thought it was wrong to have a Christian ceremony. There was no Hebrew Kaddish. He atoned for its absence in a lengthy verse requiem written soon afterwards and dedicated ‘in memoriam Assia & Shura’. Here, as Ted would in poems written many years later, he used the fire of the crematorium to give ‘these daughters of the people gone’ back to their Jewish heritage:

  With lungs still full of gas

  with nostrils bruised by her last breath

  she lies oak-packaged on a pedestal

  beside her / in white cloth

  the child she took into the oven with her …

  We give her up now / to the lapping fire

  To Terezin / Auschwitz / and Buchenwald.32

  After the cremation, Edward Lucie-Smith took Ted and Olwyn out to lunch with a group of Assia’s friends. Among them was a jewel-maker called Pat Tormey. Afterwards, on the way back to Olwyn’s flat (she was living in Hampst
ead at this time), Ted noticed an exquisite gold ring on Pat’s finger. She had recently made it. Ted asked her for it because it seemed more right for Assia than any piece of jewellery he had ever given her. If she had been alive, he would have bought it without hesitation. It seemed uncanny that Pat had just made it and was wearing it. She willingly handed it over. ‘I don’t know what I shall do with it,’ Ted wrote in thanks. ‘When I saw it I thought I must bury it with her ashes and I think I shall.’33 He repaid Tormey with a gift of one of his precious netsuke.

  On 14 April 1969, Ted wrote to Celia Chaikin in Canada. He said what he could about the complications of his life with her sister. He cursed himself for not being more sympathetic in the final phone call – ‘But I was exhausted, and nearly off my head with other distractions.’ He mourned for Shura: ‘the most wonderful little girl, full of fire’. And for Assia: ‘my true wife and the best friend I ever had’.34 Her memory was with him every minute of every day, every night.

  He had no idea what his next move should be. On the same day, he wrote to Aurelia, saying that he planned to go to Ireland, where he would put the children in a famous Quaker school that had been recommended to him by friends who were professors at Trinity College Dublin. Ireland, as always, was the dream of escape and a fresh start. Leaving the children in Devon, he headed to Waterford to check out the school. From there, he drove north to County Kilkenny to stay overnight with Barrie Cooke, who had never seen him looking so terrible. He went on alone – one of his first days fully alone for many years – to Cashel in County Tipperary. Over a glass of brandy, looking out on the Rock of Cashel, associated in legend with St Patrick and the coming of Christianity to Ireland, he took out a spiral-bound shorthand notebook and began composing prose and poetry for the ‘dead souls’ of the women he had lost.

 

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