‘Steady terrible pain’, he wrote. ‘How much remorse, how much sentimental pain at what I have missed, and am missing. Much much much more complicated. The face, the millionfold life, & Shura.’ He dreamed of Assia every night. He castigated himself for their bitter misunderstandings. He began sketching a long poem about Orpheus and his attempt to recover his beloved Eurydice from the underworld. He turned into verse a recurring dream about being hauled into court and accused. With this second death, his sentence was doubled. He wrote of his prison, his desire to break out into the wilderness. ‘I will get free. I summon the cunning fox / He will set me free. He will dig, / He will find freedom for me, find it, find it. / Fox, fox, in the wild open.’ He blamed himself bitterly for the ‘mistake’ that ‘cost two lives – three’. He wrote that he was not composing for readers, but for himself. He asked himself whether the ‘momentary pleasure’ of some stranger would one day ‘pay’ him for ‘ruining’ his own life ‘and causing the deaths / of those I have loved best / and who loved me best, and who were my life’.35 He did not consider this to be real poetry. He was only writing as a way of attempting to ‘get out of the flames’.
He thought that he was at his nadir. He wrote to Peter Brook with an apology for his long silence, explaining that ‘the most horrible thing has happened’: ‘In a fit of depression and a crush of wretched far-fetched coincidences Assia killed herself and our little four year old daughter.’36 He included a note for Irene Worth, which is lost: it probably urged her not to feel any responsibility for Assia’s jealousy of other women.
Then, before he could implement the plan to move back to Ireland with the children, there was bad news from Yorkshire.
On 13 May 1969, he was still wrestling with the dilemma of the choice between B and C, Brenda and Carol. He went to bed late and said a prayer for his mother, who was in hospital following a knee operation. At one o’clock in the morning he woke suddenly with a sensation of ‘awful horror’.37 His immediate apprehension was that his mother had died. Having banished the thought – she was supposed to be convalescing – he managed to get back to sleep. He was up at 8.30 in the morning because some electricians were coming to work in Court Green. He tinkered with some writing, and then at 10.15 Olwyn called. Edith had died in the night.
Later that day, he drove north with the children. Nicky had shown no reaction, but as they got close to Yorkshire, Frieda, who had been in tears for the first hour of the journey, said, ‘My stomach is getting very excited at meeting Grandad but I myself am getting sadder.’ Bill was quite lively when they arrived. The subject was not broached for about a quarter of an hour. Then he said, ‘Well this is a sudden business,’ and explained that Edith had been recovering well, expected to be out of hospital soon, but had then suddenly developed breathing problems.38
Ted had not written to his mother since Assia’s death eight weeks before, partly because he could not help blaming his parents, who had been so horrible to her, for the downward spiral that led to her death. His father had accordingly asked Olwyn what was wrong with Ted: why had they not heard from him for so long? She told him the terrible news, making him promise that he would not tell Edith while she was still in hospital. But Bill couldn’t keep the awful burden to himself. He had no one else to tell, so he broke his word and told his wife. ‘Well, aren’t you glad I told you?’ he asked her, as she digested the appalling reality of it. And she had replied, ‘Well, – I’m not sure.’ She was dead within a few days. Ted convinced himself that the news of this second suicide was responsible for her demise. As he told Aurelia Plath, ‘I’ve no doubt that the shock and the agitation was fatal, she reacted violently to any news on that front, which is why I had not told her.’39 His mother’s death seemed like a terrible requital for all the harsh words that had passed between Assia and his family: ‘A’s death removed Sylvia’s to a great distance, swamped everything,’ he wrote in his makeshift journal. ‘Now Ma’s death has somewhat removed A’s. Yet A’s comes back.’ He struggled to grasp his own ‘stupefaction in face of all this’. ‘Must not go numb,’ he told himself. ‘Terribly tired.’40 The writer must never allow himself to go numb, but in the face of these successive hammer blows Hughes was struggling not to go under. He said goodbye to his mother’s body in the chapel of rest in Hebden Bridge.
That summer, he spent a lot of time in London, leaving Nick and Frieda in Devon. He travelled up by train on 29 May. It was an unusually hot day and he couldn’t help noticing the near-naked girls with long legs, strolling through the streets. He was flooded with erotic memories, then overwhelmed by the ‘black dog’ of depression, the sense of ‘walking on air over a black gulf’. He thought one moment about the Neoplatonic philosophy of Jacob Böhme, the next about his multiple sexual entanglements. Then he noticed a hair on his pullover and realised that it was Assia’s, a symbolic rope or ‘hawser’ mooring him to the memory of her.41 Later in the summer, he scattered her ashes in a rural Kentish graveyard, doing what he could to fulfil her last wish for her body.
Nor could he escape the memory of Sylvia. On 13 July, he was staying with Olwyn in London. The second Poetry International Festival was under way, though this time he was not so centrally involved. While Olwyn took a siesta, he read through the proofs of an academic essay collection called The Art of Sylvia Plath. Reading about her poems brought everything back with absolute freshness and a sense of ‘total recall’. ‘To me,’ he wrote, ‘those poems open alphabet – every nuance, I know its whole history and connection, every phrase – its exact weight and angle.’42
With the memory of Sylvia thus freshened, he went in the late afternoon to visit Sue Alliston in University College Hospital. Back in 1967, inviting Zbigniew Herbert – who was very fond of Sue – to the first Poetry International, he had explained what had happened to her. She had enrolled for a degree in Anthropology, done well, and gone to North Africa to study the Bedouin. Ted imagined her ‘setting out in her usual style – her long scarf ends dangling and her handbag swinging and colliding with things and her skirts in a swirl round her long, beautiful legs’.43 The Bedouin chiefs tried to ‘entangle her in marriage’ – a nice irony, given her role in Ted’s disentanglement from marriage. She returned after a few months with Hodgkin’s disease, a lymphoma that had until recently been incurable, with a maximum life expectancy of five years. After several months of treatment, she had apparently responded, though she was painfully thin.44 She and Ted had resumed their close friendship, now without a sexual element. But the remission was temporary. Now she was back in hospital, and dying.
It was the first time he had been in the hospital since going there for the formal identification of Sylvia’s body in the mortuary. He went into the ward and saw Sue asleep, her tear-swollen face fallen sideways over a book. As he walked towards her, she woke in that half-amazed, half-alarmed manner that is familiar to anyone who has visited a dying loved one as they drift in and out of consciousness in a hospital bed. She said that she had been having such strange thoughts, strange dreams. She stared at Ted, composing her face, ‘trying to remember’. She was utterly exhausted. He had brought cherries. She ‘tries to eat some, then drink lime juice – later goes yellowy green, last 15 minutes she is wanting to vomit – I eventually go so she can vomit in private’. A little later, a nurse injects her and she notices Ted looking at her arm, that arm which was around him at the moment of Sylvia’s death. She told him that she was tired of living alone. He said that she could recuperate in Court Green, his empty house. She wept, she talked emptily about work. He knew that it was to no avail: ‘Very bad feeling about her. Kept seeing her dead. Felt her hopelessness & loneliness, her despair about future. I feel hollow and fake – since I betrayed her too, though not drastically.’ She wanted love, ‘somebody to live with and care for her’. He knew that he was the one person she really wanted. But it was too late for him to give her a home. ‘Half-wave, half-smile. Farewell.’45 This key journal entry gave him the raw material for one of the most importan
t poems on his trajectory towards a personal voice.
As he walked to the Festival Hall for the poetry festival afterwards, the city seemed spectral and the river filthy. After the evening’s readings, he went to a party but felt disengaged. Back at Olwyn’s, he read the book about Sylvia deep into the night. He then returned to Devon, staying at Court Green with the children but also visiting Brenda in Welcombe. They fought and made up in the summer heat. His behaviour was becoming increasingly volatile.
At the end of the month, he was back in London, visiting Sue again, bearing roses and carnations. Into University College Hospital by the morgue entrance, with its memory of Sylvia. The antiseptic smell and polished floors. As soon as he saw Sue, he sensed that it was her last day: ‘Her eyes huge in shrunken clay face. Her arms wasted and colourless, except for bruisemarks everywhere, and vein marks, skin tissue-thin.’ It almost seemed as if one eye were trying to recognise him and the other did not care. She was too tired to speak, her mouth so numb that she could only mumble. With her wide eyes and inability to articulate, he couldn’t help thinking of his mentally incapacitated niece Barbara. Sue didn’t really register the flowers, so he gave them to a nurse who put them in a vase by the bed. Sue’s hair was ‘brushed to a tight crumpled dark material skullcap – that marvellous forest of auburn. Her pony face more so – sick, staring, like a sick animal.’ She reached out to touch his leather jacket, did not have the strength to turn over, so he helped her. He found it hard to say anything. He kissed her and made to leave. The nurse told him that the bloods were not too bad, it was the ‘strange awful drowsiness’ that was puzzling the doctors. Perhaps, Ted mused, she wanted to die. Her dear friend Tasha Hollis had died, horribly, of alcoholism. What was there left for Sue to live for, all her lovers having fallen away? One death ‘infects another’, he wrote in his journal account of the terrible day. Tasha was somehow infected by ‘the German girl’ who took her own life in 18 Rugby Street. Then Tasha’s death had infected Assia. Sue had reacted terribly on hearing of Assia’s suicide. Now, with Tasha gone, Sue had no motivation to fight on. As he was speaking to the nurse, ‘She waved an exhausted spread hand. I went back, kissed her again – left.’46 He returned to Devon, and would not see her again.
On 7 August 1969, Ted and his father caught an early train to London. Ted put Bill on an onward train to Yorkshire, then met up with Olwyn and took a taxi to Golders Green Crematorium, where they attended Susan Alliston’s funeral beneath a blue sky on a hot summer’s day.
On an impulse on the day of his mother’s funeral in May, he had bought the house that back in 1963 he had so nearly bought with Assia: Lumb Bank. He planned to close up Court Green, rid himself of all its associations. Frieda and Nick would be taken north, put in touch with their Yorkshire origins. Now he made his choice: it would be Brenda and her daughters that he would take with them. The two little girls would do something to fill the place left by Shura.
Frieda and Nick were sent on one of their summer visits to Aurelia in the States while their father prepared for the big move. By the autumn his new extended family was ensconced in Lumb Bank. ‘It is very beautiful – marvellous house,’ he told Richard Murphy, ‘I’m pleased with all of it.’ Ever mindful of Murphy’s hospitality in Cleggan, he added that, despite this, he was still thinking of a place in Ireland: ‘I need another pole – not Devon or London, out of England.’47
One piece of good news came during these bad times: Ted was awarded the 5 million lire City of Florence Prize for poetry, which was worth about £3,000. But as far as publications were concerned, 1969 was, understandably, an exceptionally lean year. There were only two works of any substance. The text of Seneca’s Oedipus appeared from Faber in December: a showcase for Ted in mythic mode, a turmoil of violent passions but at a defensive distance from anything personal. Earlier in the year, he had published an essay in a very different voice, in the form of an introduction to an English translation of the selected poems of the Yugoslavian Vasko Popa. He described Popa as one of that ‘generation of mid-European poets – Holub of Czechoslovakia, Herbert of Poland and Amichai of Germany/Israel are perhaps others of similar calibre – who were caught in mid-adolescence by the war’ and who accordingly developed a new kind of poetry of survival which succeeded in yoking the suffering of the mid-century generation to ‘their inner creative transcendence of it’. Ted recalled a remark of Czesław Miłosz, another of these poets, to the effect that ‘when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him’, he realised ‘that most poetry is not equipped for a world where people actually do die’. ‘But some is,’ Ted replied, and Popa’s was a supreme example.
The introduction then explores the characteristics of Popa’s work, and its influence on Ted’s own development quickly becomes apparent. Popa’s poetry is a landscape in which ‘heads, tongues, spirits, hands, flames, magically vitalized wandering objects, such as apples and moons, present themselves, animated with strange but strangely familiar destinies’. There is a ‘surprising fusion of unlikely elements’; the ‘sophisticated philosopher’ is also ‘a primitive, gnomic spellmaker’. A ‘desolate view of the universe’ is opened up by way of ‘childlike simplicity and moody oddness’. ‘The wide perspective of elemental and biological law is spelled out with folklore hieroglyphics and magical monsters.’48 This account of Popa’s poetic world was also a template for Crow. By the end of 1969, Ted had selected the poems to include in the published sequence and sent them to Leonard Baskin for illustration: ‘Crow was your suggestion remember,’ he wrote. ‘Whether people like them or not, they are my masterpiece. Insofar as I can manage the likeness of a masterpiece.’49
A decade later, Ted updated his introduction for a new edition of Popa’s Collected Poems. He noted a change of style in the late collection, Raw Flesh (1975). Though it included some overspill in the mythic vein from the earlier Wolf-Salt (the wolf was Popa’s totemic beast), most of the poems were ‘unlike anything Popa had published before: simple direct jottings evoking memories of the poet’s childhood and youth, memories of the war years and the town of Vershats’. These poems were ‘without mythical dimension’, yet they still stretched their wings ‘towards the wider legendary worlds of the other books, setting themselves into the bigger settings’.50 Here Ted could just as well have been writing of his own change of style in the Seventies.
He anticipated his new direction in a letter written in the autumn of 1969 to Danny Weissbort, with whom he had worked so closely in bringing the Eastern European poets to English readers: ‘I’ve decided I’ve been trying to write verse in completely the wrong way for some years. I’ve been excluding the real thing. I institutionalized the mode of one or two successes in 1962 – and got myself stuck on the board of management. So my best 7 years have passed in error and futile strife.’ But of course they were the worst, not the best, seven years. Perhaps everyone in their thirties lived through a time of ‘special chaos’: ‘you reap what the innocent eagerness of your twenties sowed, and before you can wise up’.51 After the trauma of 1969, Ted was ready to wise up. For that to happen, he would need a stabilising female influence.
17
The Crow
One day, Ted Hughes looked at the sky and saw an aircraft crossing in one direction, a crow in the other. The plane drew his mind to Gerald and the receipt of airmail letters from the other side of the world. But what of the crow’s flight? Would it be possible to see into that? To put aside the aircraft, the world, the sky, the self and to enter the full, the deep, ‘crowiness’ in the crow’s flight: its ‘ominous’ quality, ‘the bare-faced, bandit thing, the tattered beggarly gipsy thing, the caressing and shaping yet slightly clumsy gesture’. You could try to capture all that in words and still you might miss the crowiness, the essence – the ‘inscape’ as Gerard Manley Hopkins had it – of the way in which a knowledge of the human world might be derived in an instant from a glimpse of a crow’s wing-beat, as it was derived by Shakespeare when
Macbeth says ‘Light thickens, and the crow / Makes wing to the rooky wood.’ In seeing into the life of things, poets, probably always but certainly since the time of Wordsworth and the Romantics, have also been looking into their own selves, surveying their inner universe. When Ted Hughes writes about the crow’s wing-beat, he says, echoing the language of Wordsworth, that the moment of its observation unlocks the doors ‘of all those many mansions inside the head’. The words that he writes about the crow offer ‘something of the inaudible music that moves us along in our bodies from moment to moment like water in a river’; they are ‘the vital signature’ of his own being. The long gestation of Hughes’s writing about the crow was his struggle ‘truly to possess his own experience, in other words to regain his genuine self’.
Human imagination, says Hughes, works in ‘scenes, things, little stories and people’s feelings’.1 Crow is a series of scenes, a ragbag of things, a collection of dark little stories written over a period of years and given new and even more bitter meaning in retrospect as they displace into myth the raw cry of the barely imaginable feelings that are summoned by the book’s spare dedication: ‘In Memory of Assia and Shura’.
Nineteen-seventy was the year when the crow poems – or at least a selection of them – became a book. It was also a year of turmoil in his personal life. Just before Christmas 1969, leaving Brenda and her daughters in Yorkshire, he took his father, Frieda and Nick back south to Court Green for the holiday season. Then, in January, they returned to Lumb Bank, this time bringing Carol. But at the beginning of February, Ted changed his mind about living in what he called the Yorkshire battleground. So they all returned to Devon. Having deposited his own children at Court Green, he drove back to Yorkshire to collect Brenda and her children. He escorted them to a large farmhouse that he had rented for them on the North Devon coast and spent several days settling them in there. Over the coming months, he paid the rent for her to live in a succession of cottages. She was beginning to feel like a kept woman on a Yorkshire budget.
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