Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  In March, he opened his heart in a letter to Assia’s sister. Since the previous summer, he had been in a stupor and had done ‘the most insane things’. Getting Lumb Bank, which he and Assia had come so close to buying, had been some kind of attempted atonement for her lonely death at a time when they had been searching for a house. Assia would have made Lumb Bank beautiful but in her absence it was merely bleak. The whole of England was bleak because of her absence, London ‘unbearable’. Only a long journey far away would jolt him back to life. As it was, he was endlessly vacillating – going to and fro like a ping-pong ball – between schools for the children, between houses to live in, between north and south, between Brenda and Carol.2

  Writing to Gerald from Court Green, he apologised for being out of touch, explaining that he had been trying to piece together his broken life. But he acknowledged that he perhaps didn’t really know himself well enough to have done so more than provisionally. Nor were his planetary alignments encouraging. Still, he had come to a number of realisations. That Carol, who cared so well for the children, was the backbone of his survival. And that the purchase of Lumb Bank was an understandable impulse at the time of his mother’s death (‘ensuring my roots maybe’), but that it so stirred up the hornet’s nest of family and memory that he now had a ‘psychic horror of the place’ and would do best to let it out for a couple of years and reconsider its future when his mind was more lucid. The other thing was that a house had come on the market near Bideford in North Devon. This was an area he loved because it was a pretty town with good schools, located near the sea and the estuary where he fished.

  The house was to be auctioned in the summer, but the owners said that they would settle before then, for about £15,000. Two miles out of town, it was a beautiful Elizabethan manor house with a central tower, light rooms, a big dining hall, a walled garden with fruit trees and nearly 40 acres of sheltered hilly grazing land leading down to the sea. It was secluded along a private lane and surrounded by mature woodland. He sketched it for Gerald, pointing out the location of pastures, cedar tree and a badger sett. He told himself that he would never see another house like it. Built in the time of Shakespeare, this was his dream of England incarnate: the great hall in which to eat, the symbolic tower like that of Yeats, the surrounding landscape.

  How to afford it? An American library had offered him £20,000 for Sylvia’s manuscripts. But that money was rightfully the children’s. He justified the temptation by saying that it would do them more good to live in such a wonderful home than to wait for an unknown amount of cash when they were grown up. But he didn’t convince even himself with this argument. The better alternative would surely be for Gerald to come home and take a half-share in the house. He could keep bullocks and they could fish together: ‘What the hell else are you going to do – you’re 50 this year. I’m 40. What are we saving life up for? We could live here like barons – it’s a kingdom.’3 But Gerald had no intention of returning to the old country and its miserable weather.

  Money was, as ever, the problem, given that Ted did not want to let go of Court Green (because of all the memories of Sylvia), or of Lumb Bank (because there would be a heavy tax hit if he sold it so soon after buying it), or of the manuscripts (his children’s birthright). With Gerald unwilling to come in on the scheme, he turned to Aurelia, which proved to be a fatal mistake. Just before Easter, he wrote to tell her about the house and proposed that its purchase could be financed by the royalties on an American edition of The Bell Jar. Seven years earlier, the book would have seemed ‘terribly raw and inflammatory’, but now that ‘Sylvia’s eruption into American consciousness’ was ‘pretty well digested’, the book would not be a bombshell at all – ‘The poems were the bombshell.’ Passages causing direct offence would naturally be quietly removed. If the book were not to be published soon, it would diminish in value until there came a point when it would be no more than ‘a curiosity for students’. The children loved the house, he told Aurelia – what with the badgers and the lobsters under the rocks on the beach – and it was their immediate happiness that was paramount.4

  Things did not work out as planned. A year later, Aurelia scribbled a bitter annotation on the fold of the wafer-thin airmail paper: ‘Children said this was a “horrible house” and they didn’t want to live there. Ted did send me $10,000 from the royalties (I protested the publication which Sylvia would not have allowed) and deposited $5,000 each in accounts for Frieda and Nick – Ted never bought the property!!!’ The damage was done: Aurelia and, through her, several of Sylvia’s biographers came to believe that Ted had opened the wound of The Bell Jar merely for the sake of a big house by the sea.

  He was in no mood for new writing. The important task was to get those crows into print. Leonard Baskin, who had originally suggested the idea for a crow sequence, was commissioned to do the engravings for a de luxe edition on his Gehenna Press. For the trade edition, Ted identified 1 October as an astrologically auspicious date, though Faber missed this by eleven days. At the beginning of the year, the plan was to include forty-five poems. By Easter it was sixty.5 The subtitle, From the Life and Songs of the Crow, was introduced in order to indicate that this was a selection, not the entire epic sequence.

  To Ben Sonnenberg in New York he explained how, at the moment of Assia’s death, when Crow was at ‘the bottom of the inferno’, the sequence had come to a halt. He had, he said, not written a word for a year. ‘In piecing together the fragments of the beloved he himself is reduced to a scattered skeleton’: this was as true of himself as of the Crow.6

  He knew that the stakes for his reputation were very high. Setting aside private-press work, he had not published a volume of original poetry since Wodwo in 1967, and most of the poems there had been written before Sylvia’s death. Crow, furthermore, had an immensely long gestation. It had begun from a request by Baskin to write a poem called ‘The Anatomy of Crow’ to go with a collection of his trademark Crow drawings – a request made just three weeks after Sylvia Plath’s death, with the explicit intention of propelling Ted ‘from despair to activity’.7 A rendering called Eat Crow came first, in 1964, as ‘part of a long waddling verse drama’ based on Andreae’s The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (a Renaissance alchemical fantasia that Hughes considered to be ‘a crucial seminal work – like Parzival or The Tempest – a tribal dream’).8 Then there was a plan for a folktale, initially for children, with the Crow in a similar role to that of the Raven in North American Indian tales. Hughes recalled making his first attempt before going to Ireland in 1965, then starting the sequence in earnest after his completion of the series of ‘Skylarks’ lyrics published in 19669 – a trajectory from an ascending bird long associated with lyric song to a descent into carrion. Things had started to flow on the trip along the Rhine with Assia, but had then been halted by the work of organising the first Poetry International Festival. A contract had been signed early in 1967. He had tried to grow the work into a saga, an epic poem, a creation myth, a counter-theology. He continued on and off, as his relationship with Assia imploded.

  The Crow was many things and required many explanations. One of the most revealing was a gloss on the poem ‘Crow on the Beach’, in which he explained that the guiding metaphor of the sequence came from his reading of the ‘Trickster’ tale familiar from many different folk traditions. The Trickster – Ted knew a whole array of examples, from Loki in Norse sagas to the anthropologist Paul Radin’s study of the ‘Trickster Cycle of the Winnebago Indians’ – is a part-god, part-human, part-animal figure who has some secret knowledge or power that is used to play tricks in order to disrupt the normal rules of nature and question the conventional behaviour of society. Though the intentions may be malicious, the outcome is ultimately valuable for humanity. The Trickster is cheater of death, hero and clown. He is both good and evil, affirmer and denier, destroyer and creator.10 Trickster and sexuality, Ted alleges in his commentary, are ‘connected by a hotline … Trickster literature corresponds
to the infantile, irresponsible naïvity [sic] of sexual love, as if it were founded on the immortal enterprise of the sperm.’ The Crow, like the Trickster, has a kind of tragic joy, is ‘repetitive and indestructible’, a ‘demon of phallic energy’. He makes fatal mistakes, indulges tragic flaws, but ‘refuses to let sufferings or death detain him’. Never despairing, however low he falls, he ‘rattles along on biological glee’.11

  At the same time, he explained elsewhere, ‘crow’ is another word ‘for the entrails, lungs, heart etc. – everything extracted from a beast when it is gutted. What is extracted, when this is done, is the vital organism of the creature – lacking only the brain and nerves.’ At a profound and symbolic level, Crow is a skeletal autobiography: ‘The Crow of a man, in other words, is the essential man – only minus his human looking vehicle, his bones and muscles.’12 Ted Hughes was looking into the heart of his own darkness. The colour of the collection is the black of crow and death; the outlines are of blood, claw and bone.

  God has a nightmare about a crow dragging him around. Crow is then born. He is questioned in an examination. His answers? The word ‘death’ is repeated, fifteen times, more. Then ‘who is stronger than death? – Me, evidently.’ The narrative proceeds with a series of poems reworking images of the Garden of Eden and our expulsion from it. A serpent plays a prominent part. There is a morbid wit: ‘God crushed the apple and made cider.’ At times the imagery is intensely violent or sexually charged. Of words as weapons: ‘Crow turned the words into bombs – they blasted the bunker.’13 Of laughter: ‘People’s arms and legs fly off and fly on again.’14 And of lovers: ‘In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs … In the morning they wore each other’s faces.’15 The journey extends via a river-crossing and strange encounters. Figures out of Greek mythology. A hyena and an elephant. Later, a white owl.

  On numerous occasions, in letters, in published and unpublished notes, in broadcasts and at poetry readings, Hughes explicated the meanings of his sequence, told of how during his long tribulations Crow ‘gradually develops some purpose in his life, which becomes a quest to find who created him’: ‘he’s forever, through one clue and another, approaching his creator. And when he gets there, it always turns out that it’s some female or other.’ Some of these females seem human, but more often they are demons, serpents or versions of the Gravesian White Goddess. ‘And so throughout his tribulations he’s involved with all sorts of females’ – which is something that Ted’s friends noticed about him.16

  The ways in which these females are represented can be startling. When God tries to teach Crow the word ‘Love’, Crow retches. ‘And woman’s vulva dropped over man’s neck and tightened.’17 In ‘The Battle of Osfrontalis’, words come ‘in the likeness of a wreathed vagina pouring out Handel’. In ‘Criminal Ballad’, there is a ‘woman of complete pain rolling in flame’. And in ‘Truth Kills Everybody’, Crow holds ‘a screeching woman’ by the throat.18 But Hughes hastened to reassure a sceptical reviewer that these poems intended no violence against women. The violence was internal to Crow’s psychology: the images are not of ‘violence’ per se but serve rather as metaphors of ‘breakthrough’ into self-knowledge. The poems are always grasping towards some dark mystery of the inner life: the creative tension out of which they are born is the incompatibility between the speaker’s ostensible mentality and what Hughes calls ‘the hidden thing’ which fleetingly escapes. Like dreams, poems offer momentary glimpses of the inner mystery. The images in ‘Truth Kills Everybody’, he confided, ‘are all from a series of dreams I once had, memorable to me for the shock they came with and the interpretation of them that presented itself’.19

  Rarely has a volume of modern poetry had such a mixed reception as Crow. Al Alvarez set an authoritative, positive tone in a review in the Observer the day before publication. He said that the collection marked the end of Hughes’s faith in animals, which is certainly true insofar as the sequence has little to do with the natural history of crows, little similarity with the earlier collections in which each animal poem stood in ‘isolated perfection’. Alvarez compared Hughes’s development to Freud’s move from the pleasure principle to the death-drive after the First World War. The collection is described as an epic folktale in which ‘The tone is harsh but sardonic and utterly controlled. The poet will not yield an inch to sentimentality.’ The writing ‘could easily slop over into melodrama’, but it does not (in contrast to the less successful poems in Wodwo). Astutely, Alvarez identified the vivifying influence of Eastern European poetry, Vasco Popa especially: ‘From him Hughes has learned to control his private horrors and make them public by subjecting them to arbitrary rules, as a psychotic child repeats and controls his terrors by turning them into play.’ It is a collection, Alvarez concluded, ‘equipped for life in a world where people do die’. ‘With Crow, Hughes himself now joins the select band of survivor-poets whose work is adequate to the destructive reality we inhabit. I think he is the only British poet to have done so.’20 The memory of the Holocaust, not fully grasped in Britain until the Sixties, and the anxieties of the Cold War, with its threat of nuclear annihilation, hang more heavily over the review than any intimations of Hughes’s private life. The fear of real bombs is highlighted: there is no hint of the bombshell regarding Sylvia’s death that Alvarez was priming even as he wrote the review.

  Two poets admired by Hughes took a balanced view, admiring but more modest in praise than Alvarez. For Peter Porter, Hughes’s achievement was ‘to use legendary material as old as Gilgamesh or Eden and make it apply to modern genocides and the smaller disasters of individual human lives. The plot has disappeared and the poems in their isolation seem exaggeratedly misanthropic. The language is simpler than Hughes usually employs (the influence of folk legends) but it can still flower into violent eloquence.’ The quality of the writing, Porter suggested, was by no means all good: ‘Hughes has got stuck with a lot of traditional properties (emotive nouns, stale vocabulary, litanies, and catalogues) and for the first time he oversimplifies and coarsens some of his poems.’ On the other hand, ‘English poetry has found a new hero and nobody will be able to read or write verse now without the black shape of Crow falling across the page.’21 And for Stephen Spender, ‘By using his extraordinary gifts to project a state of consciousness which sees the destruction of the world behind everything, Hughes may well be speaking for what many of his contemporaries really do feel. Some of the most terrifying (and terrifyingly funny) passages in Crow give one the sense that this is the nightmare reality behind the American or world dream of salesmanship and television.’ On the minus side, though, ‘The defect of the poem, it seems to me, is that he tends to use the “end-of-civilization” situation – which is the contemporary one – as a metaphor for the whole of life.’22

  Conservative critics did not hesitate to describe Crow as ‘the assertion of a nihilistic violence’.23 But fortunately for Ted, just as a rearguard action against the volume was being mounted in the English press early in 1971, the American edition was published to high acclaim. Newsweek said that ‘Crow is one of those rare books of poetry that have the public impact of a major novel or a piece of super-journalism’: ‘Ted Hughes has created one of the most powerful mythic presences in contemporary poetry. Crow is the blackness of all of us, including the whiteness that was.’24 And the influential New York Times Book Review trumpeted that ‘this is no mere book of poems, but a wild yet cunning wail of anguish and resilience, at once contemporary, immediate, and as atavistic as the archaic myths it resembles’, while astutely adding – without knowledge of the importance of the experience of Ted’s father – that ‘Among British poets, Hughes is the most haunted inheritor, from Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves, of the sensibility shaped by the appalling slaughter in World War I.’25 In Boston, the Christian Science Monitor caught the humour as well as the darkness. ‘Part of the fun’, the reviewer suggested, was that, though the form was childlike and the topic often ‘a myth of origin’, the subject matt
er was ‘anything but childlike’. It was a ‘grim kind of fun’: ‘Black-humor poetry to be sure, but programmed to awaken man to what he is doing to his planet, warring, polluting, destroying its natural balance. Mr Hughes has a vision of what life on earth could be, and if he shows us its negative side, it is a stratagem to make us demand the positive.’ Some commentators in England had hailed it ‘as a work of genius, a seminal book which will change the direction of English poetry, a new Waste Land for the ’70s’. Whatever the final critical reckoning might prove to be, Crow was a book ‘too powerful to be ignored, too passionate to be overlooked; a marriage of primitive fantasy and sophisticated knowledge too rare to miss’.26 The Eliotic comparison could not have pleased Ted more. He cut out the review and preserved it.

  The retrospective judgement upon the collection has been equally mixed. For some readers, it represents Hughes at the height of his powers. So, for example, the experimental novelist Nicola Barker looked back from the vantage point of the Nineties and described the collection as ‘a skinny Bible dedicated to life’s stupid gory ugliness, but also a vindication, as joyous, as bubbly, as fizzy and nose-tickling as a glug of liver-salts’. Crow, she said, was a ‘raddled, mangy, empty creature’ who wasn’t ‘so much a bird as a smudge on the page, a blot of ink which links the collection of poems together, staggers between the poems and barks at them, eyes them up, tips his head, picks them apart, one by one … Hughes booked his ticket to immortality in 1970, and the way I see it, that ticket’s not refundable’ (despite, she meant, the weakness of some of the Laureate poems).27 For others, though, the collection marked the beginning of a descent into poetic self-indulgence, misogyny and all too parodiable blackness. There are good critics who argued that Ted Hughes’s best work was already behind him.