Ted Hughes
Page 36
But perhaps the last word on the book’s reception should be left to the local paper of Hughes’s place of origin, the Mytholmroyd Courier: ‘Crow will hardly outsell the collected poems of Mrs Harold Wilson. But, with one flap of its monstrous black wing, it has swept Mytholmroyd-born Ted Hughes head and shoulders clear of the current generation of British poets, alike in reputation, daring and achievement.’28
Despite its distance from the versifying of the Prime Minister’s wife, Crow, which cost twenty shillings (one pound), sold well. The first edition of 4,000 copies sold out within weeks; Faber brought out two further editions of the same quantity before the end of the year and two more the following year. Seven further poems were added to the 1972 reprint of another 4,000 copies (£1.40 in the new decimal currency). This too sold out. A further 5,000 copies were printed the next year and a paperback edition of 20,000 the year after that, with 20,000 more in 1976.29
There were also the usual Hughesian limited editions, beautifully crafted and intended for deep pockets. Olwyn established her own imprint, the Rainbow Press, at this time, though Ted was also collaborating with other fine printers. Following a number of broadsides early in the year (‘A Crow Hymn’ in March for three guineas, four further crows in August for £4), 150 copies of A Few Crows, at £5 signed or a guinea unsigned, were issued from the Rougemont Press in Exeter on the originally planned publication date of 1 October 1970. In April 1971 twelve further poems, ‘excluded for personal reasons’ from the public edition, were privately printed in Essex under the title Crow Wakes.30 The title poem ‘Crow Wakes’ was extracted from Eat Crow, which appeared in full in 150 copies on Olwyn’s Rainbow Press for the considerable sum of £16.80. And finally, in 1973, the project came full circle to its origins with a de luxe, hand-set limited edition of 400 copies of the full augmented collection illustrated with twelve drawings by Leonard Baskin. This also included three further poems, two that had first appeared in another of Olwyn’s Rainbow Press limited editions, a selection of Poems by Ted and their friends Ruth Fainlight and Alan Sillitoe,31 and one (‘Crow’s Song about Prospero and Sycorax’) which had been published with a limited-edition text of the introduction to the selection of Shakespeare’s verse that was his other major project at this time.32 The price of the volume with the dozen clawed, hooded and visceral Baskin illustrations was £30. In the light of the rampant inflation of the Seventies, forty years on this equates to more than £300 per copy. A rare-book dealer might ask more than twice that sum for a second-hand copy.
The limited editions were not only about beauty, rarity and profit – which was not always substantial, given that the market was tiny and the production values of the highest, while the raw materials of fine-woven paper, bevelled boards and gold leaf for the spines did not come cheap. These special collections were also a form of catharsis, an opportunity to release poems of particular rawness to a very limited readership more interested in the look and value of a book than the inner life of the tormented Crow. So, for example, ‘Crow’s Song about England’ appeared only in the Rainbow Press selection of Hughes, Fainlight and Sillitoe. It tells of a girl who ‘tried to give her mouth’ but found it ‘snatched from her and her face slapped’. Then ‘She tried to give her breasts / They were cut from her and canned’. And finally, ‘She tried to give her cunt / It was produced in open court she was sentenced’.33 This was the debased England of tabloid sex-crime headlines and a macabre national obsession with Myra Hindley and the Moors Murders. In the very month that this poem was published by Olwyn, Hughes blackly joked (or only half joked) that he had been put in the frame as a suspect in a high-profile Yorkshire sex crime. In October 1970 a twenty-three-year-old schoolteacher called Barbara Mayo, hitchhiking on the M1, had been picked up by a dark-haired man in a Morris 1000. He raped and strangled her. The ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ Peter Sutcliffe later became a suspect, though DNA evidence thirty years after the event pointed to another man who had by then emigrated to Canada. The photofit picture of the murderer did, unfortunately, bear a vague resemblance to Hughes, who had a Morris Traveller.
In the trade edition, Crow is always ‘he’, not an ‘I’. He should not be mistaken for Ted Hughes. But a poet’s persona is an essential part of that poet’s inner self. In the poem ‘Crow Tries the Media’, where the verb in the title has a double sense, ‘He wanted to sing about her’ but a ‘tank had been parked on his voice’. He wants to ‘sing to her soul simply’ but the media horde is waiting so he cannot release his inner voice, with the result that ‘her shape dimmed’.34 This is the elegiac voice, the desire to write about Sylvia struggling for release. Again, Crow’s ‘Lovesong’ is not only one of many battles with the maw of the White Goddess but also an intensely felt yet oblique poem for Sylvia:
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever.35
The bite cannot but be a memory of Falcon Yard, the complete and all-consuming desire a recollection of Sylvia’s strenuous and emotionally demanding lovemaking.
Only in the very last line of the trade edition of Crow does the he become a me, so allowing the open self to rest upon the page: ‘Sit on my finger, sing in my ear, O littleblood.’36 And only behind the veil of the limited edition does the mask slip and the ‘I’, the first-person voice, emerge, hounded and broken, in an explosion, ‘a bombcloud’: ‘I became smaller than water, I stained into the soilcrumble. / I became smaller.’37 He became smaller: Elizabeth Compton remembers that Sylvia described Ted as having become a little man by virtue of his affair with Assia.
These lines actually go back to the very beginning of the Crow project: they belong to Eat Crow and were first published as early as July 1965, under the enigmatic title ‘X’, in Encounter magazine – the very place where such devastating poems as ‘Daddy’ and ‘The Jailor’ had first appeared. The truth is that from the outset Crow was a means of coming to terms, indirectly and ‘through a symbol’, with Sylvia’s death. But Hughes did not openly acknowledge this until the last year of his life, after the publication of Birthday Letters.38
18
The Savage God
Just before Easter 1970, as he was preparing Crow for publication and wrestling with the choices in his personal life, Ted published a review in the Spectator of a book called The Environmental Revolution. This intervention heralded a highly important new direction in his work. The book was a history of the conservation movement by Max Nicholson, former director general of the government agency the Nature Conservancy. In his review, Hughes dates the modern awareness of impending ecological catastrophe to the publication in 1961 of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s indictment of the effects of the pesticide DDT. He writes with authority about vanishing songbirds, the erosion of topsoil, the pollution of rivers and the threat to biodiversity presented by the monoculture of the Forestry Commission’s conifer plantations.
But in typical Hughesian vein, he places the scientific facts in the context of a bigger picture, a story about Western man’s increasing alienation from nature. Christianity, especially in its Reformed version, sees the earth as a heap of raw materials given by God to man for ‘his exclusive use and profit’. It has no time for creepy-crawlies and almost as little respect for women: ‘The subtly apotheosized misogyny of Reformed Christianity is proportionate to the fanatic rejection of Nature, and the result has been to exile man from Mother Nature – from both inner and outer nature.’ Here Hughes pulls together several threads: the idea, derived from his Anthropology course at Cambridge, that human society has evolved from matriarchy to patriarchy; the narrative he had developed from The White Goddess, in which the fecund female earth goddess is displaced by quarrelsome male sky gods; and his reading, via Shakespeare and Milton as well as Graves, of the Reformation and its suppression of the cult of the Virgin Mary. He finds hope in the stirring of ecological consciousness, the emerging Green movement, since it represents ‘something that was unthinkable only ten
years ago, except as a poetic dream: the re-emergence of Nature as the Great Goddess of mankind, and the Mother of all life’.1
Along with some friends, he set about launching a magazine called Your Environment, intended to alert the public to questions of conservation – the disposal of nuclear waste, for example – by gathering all the scientific evidence and making it accessible, though with more rigour and detail than there was room for in the Sunday papers and in debates on radio and television. For the rest of his life, Hughes pored over research papers, clipped out news stories, wrote to politicians and became involved in local environmental campaigns. His ecological mission was of a piece with his poetic vision. In his essay on ‘The Environmental Revolution’, he writes of the ‘mental disintegration and spiritual emptiness’ that characterise ‘the soul-state of our civilization’: this is the dark spirit of Crow. But he also writes of the true (the ‘mediumistic’) artist’s capacity to ‘see a vision of the real Eden’, to release the spirit of Pan, to restore humankind to nature. ‘While the mice in the field are listening to the Universe, and moving in the body of nature, where every living cell is sacred to every other, and all are interdependent,’ he rhapsodises, ‘the Developer is peering at the field through a visor, and behind him stands the whole army of madmen’s ideas, and shareholders, impatient to cash in the world.’2 Poet and conservationist, he believed, must unite and rise up against the spirit of the Developer.
In the light of his personal relationships at this time, there is a certain irony to his view that Christianity since the Reformation had shown little respect for women. The year since the shattering deaths of 1969 had been chaotic, as he shuttled backwards and forwards between Brenda and Carol, speaking words of commitment to them both but in his darker moments confiding to friends that he might do better without either of them. He had become a divided self. It was all very confusing for the children. He was still moving restlessly between Court Green, the North Devon coast and Olwyn’s place in London NW3. There were periods when he resorted to staying with friends, in order to avoid facing his choice at home. In the early summer, he stayed with the clergyman-scholar Moelwyn Merchant, then he went to Alan and Ruth Sillitoe.
A decision had to be made, if only to bring stability to the children. He called a family meeting and asked whether he should marry Carol or Brenda. ‘Marry Carol,’ said Nick and Frieda, who had long adored the pretty, kind, gentle young nurse. Frieda, aged ten, wanted Carol for her mother more than anything else on earth, so dearly did she love her.3 Olwyn’s reply was more worldly-wise: ‘If you have to ask that question, you shouldn’t marry either of them.’4
He listened to the children. In his journal he castigated himself for his dishonesty in relation to the two women, then wrote that he was convinced that the choice of C as opposed to B was the correct one. So ‘full tangle with B’ was to be ‘suspended and pushed into a cupboard’.5 Yet a mere three days after convincing himself of this, he was writing to Brenda again, addressing the letter to the house that he had rented for her and saying that he was missing their lovely times together and would be back in a few days.6 In May, Brenda was the one whom he asked to move into Court Green. Over the following few months, she and Ted entertained several of his closest friends: the Sillitoes, the Heaneys and Peter Redgrove and his partner Penelope Shuttle. Seamus Heaney wrote a blessing for the house and its new chatelaine, but at times Ted’s mood was dark. While Nick and Frieda were in America for a summer visit to their grandmother Aurelia, he went briefly to London, leaving Brenda and her little girls in Devon.
On 19 August 1970, two days after his fortieth birthday, in a register office ceremony as quiet as the first one, Ted Hughes married twenty-two-year-old Carol Orchard. As with his wedding to Sylvia, he did not hurry to tell family and friends that he was a married man.
A few days later he wrote from Danny Weissbort’s house in London to Brenda at Court Green. He addressed her as his dear love, told her that a horrible thing had happened and that they urgently needed to meet. He returned to Court Green, made love to her and then told her that he had married Carol. He stayed for about a week, then went north, alone, to Lumb Bank. In the middle of September, he wrote to Brenda, telling her that in the circumstances it would be better if he did not return to Devon for the time being. By this time, she had decided that it was not appropriate to continue living in Court Green. She had found herself a job as a social worker in Sussex, far away to the east. But before her move, they would have a week together in Ireland. Once again, he was hoping to find some kind of root there. A friend wryly remarked that Brenda was the one who got the honeymoon, but that was not how it felt to her.
Court Green was closed up. Ted spent the next few months dodging about. In October, he was back in Yorkshire, writing to Brenda, who was by this time in rented accommodation in Lancing, Sussex. He complained that the children were running rather wild and that he would soon be down to fix a school and buy a house. His behaviour was becoming increasingly erratic. Visiting her in Lancing, as he sat waiting for her to come back from work, he sketched an imaginary animal, described it as Henry Williamson’s Muse, and then dedicated it to the one he loved most in his wretched life. But, he complained, all she was interested in was conditions. Among the conditions he proposed was that she should not continue with her job in Brighton. He wrote her a cheque for a thousand pounds, the equivalent of her annual salary, but she gave it back, explaining that she needed to work. He signed himself ‘from the loser’, but, as Brenda perceived it, ‘his ego then required him to concede nothing, so he continued “to the loser”’.7
After one of his visits, Brenda’s Lancing landlady drew her aside and told her that she recognised her gentleman caller: it was someone very famous, wasn’t it? Brenda asked her who she thought it was and she replied, ‘Engelbert Humperdinck,’ the pop star whose ‘Release Me’ was one of the biggest hits of the era and who hosted his own television show at the time.8
Ted set about making arrangements to rent a flat in Hove. Then he put in a successful offer to buy a house there.9 He proposed that Brenda should live in the main part of it with her daughters, while he would be in a self-contained flat that would combine easy access to her with privacy in which to write. But then a telephone conversation with Olwyn revealed that something serious had happened. In late October, on the very day that contracts were to be exchanged, he pulled out of the house deal. He wrote to Brenda from London, saying that his life was in another horribly ironic mess, that he regarded himself with contempt, that the two of them had broken up their whole lives in order to have each other, but that it was not going to work. He had lost both himself and her, lost the love that was the most wonderful thing in his life (this kind of language is familiar from some of his letters to Assia). He would go to Ireland, put the children into school there, try to win back some self-respect.
Despite writing all this, he went back to Sussex for another try. But four weeks later, he was writing again, telling Brenda that she had shown him what he was. He could not go on living a dismantled life. He loved only her and he was horrified by his mismanagement of the situation. She had been his only chance for happiness and it was a horror to him that he had destroyed it. He would be out of England by the time she got the letter.
It is doubtful whether, after Sylvia, he would ever have found complete happiness with just one woman for any length of time. Part of the attraction of Brenda was that she did not necessarily want marriage. She had been there with Trevor and come out the other side. But a double life was never going to be an entirely satisfactory solution to the problem of the divided self. Over Christmas Ted took stock.
In the new year of 1971, Nick and Frieda were sent to Ibstock Place, a progressive boarding school in south-west London, a decision about which Ted later expressed qualms. To some of his friends, it seemed curious that he should have agonised over the question of which of his two women would be a better stepmother for the children, made his choice, and then within six mon
ths sent them off to boarding school, thus reducing parental care to a half-yearly responsibility.
With the children out of the way, he wondered about permanently leaving behind both Lumb Bank and Court Green in order to make a fresh start. Once again, he looked to Ireland for a home without the ghosts of the past. He wondered whether Carol would like to live there. But a trip to Waterford was not a success. He wrote to Brenda, telling her that he was a free man now that the children were in boarding school. She did not respond.
Before long, he and Carol were in Israel, in company with several other poets, for a reading tour organised by the British Council. Ted was deeply impressed both by the place, with its rugged beauty and profound history, and by the people, with their resilience in the face of their Arab neighbours. His friendship with Yehuda Amichai, which had begun in the time of Assia, grew stronger. It was built on their shared gifts for poetry, their bantering wit and the fortitude that enabled them to bounce back from adversity. Ted kept one of his vivid travel journals, noting the orange crush of the bazaars in Jerusalem, the abundance of Crusader crosses, the holy sites of the three Abrahamic religions, and the scorching heat. He could not face a visit to the Holocaust memorial (neither could fellow-poet Danny Abse, a Jew). This offended one of his hosts at the university.10
He then spent two weeks doing campus readings in America, with Richard Murphy and Tony White, an actor friend from Cambridge days, but without Carol. There was an especially memorable reading of Crow at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. He was delighted to meet up with old friends such as Luke Myers. And he was deeply taken with the energy of the new people whom he met, notably the writers Susan Schaeffer and Erica Jong. The former would become a close friend, though not a lover. The latter – who had something of Assia in her dark good looks – was soon to be author of the work of unashamed sexual liberation Fear of Flying. It was there that she coined the phrase ‘zipless fuck’, which, it has to be acknowledged, is what many women wanted when they met Ted Hughes. Her recollection of his charisma may stand for the experience of dozens of females, of all ages, who attended his readings: