Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  He was fiercely sexy, with a vampirish, warlock appeal. He hulked. He was tall and his shoulders were broad. His hair fell against his broad forehead. He had a square jaw and an intense gaze and he reeked of virility. Moreover, he knew how irresistible he was in the Heathcliff fashion, and he did the wildman-from-the-moors thing on me full force when we met. He was a born seducer and only my terror of Sylvia’s ghost kept me from being seduced.11

  She sat across a bar table with Ted and Luke while Ted ‘put the poetic moves’ on her. Knowing she would want a signed copy, he grabbed her Crow and sketched inside it a lascivious serpent entwining a Garden of Eden tree. ‘To Erica, a beautiful Surprise,’ he inscribed it. ‘You could inhale the man’s pheromones across the table,’ she recalled, ‘this stink of masculinity and musk that must have worked on countless girls.’ His eyes ‘held you in his gaze as if you were the only person on the planet’. The only other man of such intensity whom Jong had met was the film director Ingmar Bergman, ‘another born seducer – in the gloomy northern style’. She wondered whether ‘these men from the cold and gloomy north’ were ‘so sexy because they taunt you with the promise of sex that can melt icebergs’? Or was it the intensity of their genius – that strongest of aphrodisiacs – which made so many women swoon?

  Jong treasured the inscribed Crow. In retrospect she wished she had given in to his charms, though in another way she didn’t, since by not consummating the flirtation she could keep Ted as her ‘secret demon’: ‘My temperature rose and with it my panic. I taxied home to my husband on the West Side, my head full of the hottest fantasies. Of course we f— our brains out with me imagining Ted.’

  The Heathcliff motif is by now familiar. Jong is smart: she gets that Ted is playing Heathcliff. But she still can’t resist the fantasy. ‘Secret demon’ is the key phrase. Where Ted had his vision of the all-consuming White Goddess, Jong projects herself as, in the words of Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, a poem with which Ted was obsessed, a ‘woman wailing for her demon lover’. In her memoir, she goes on to note that after Ted’s death ‘dozens of women’ (a bit of an exaggeration) came forward to claim that he was their secret lover. Some were telling the truth and others were fantasising, dreaming of submission to his charisma. In a typical Ted Hughes dream, there is an orgy in which he is offered first choice of partner.12 For most men, this would be a fantasy of wish fulfilment. For Ted, it was but a stepped-up dramatisation of a reality that he knew and that caused him as much difficulty as pleasure. Once, a woman who met him at a party was so viscerally attracted to him that all she could do was go to the ladies’ room and vomit.13 The attention of women was, furthermore, a distraction from work. As he noted to fellow-author Peter Redgrove, the gift of poetry was something that a lot of women found very attractive with the effect that it could all too easily be converted ‘into fucking, exclusively’.14

  While in New York, he also had discussions about Sylvia’s legacy with Fran McCullough, his publisher at Harper and Row. In Britain, The Bell Jar by ‘Victoria Lucas’, published a month before Sylvia’s death, had been reissued in 1966 with the true author’s name on the cover. At that time, Ted and Olwyn well understood that, for the sake of Aurelia’s feelings, it should not be published in the United States. But there had been rumours that they might lose control of the right to withhold it. A curious provision in the copyright law of the United States meant that a work by a deceased US citizen published outside the country did not have protection at home for longer than seven years. Any unscrupulous publisher had only to get hold of a copy of the English edition, print their own and create a publishing sensation. What were the options, Olwyn asked Aurelia: to have no say in the novel’s presentation and get no money, or to publish an authorised version with editorial control and make some money for the children? Put like this, it was a no-brainer: Aurelia agreed to publication, with dread in her heart.

  As an exercise in damage control, a biographical essay was appended. This was written by Lois Ames, who had known Sylvia at Smith. She was the daughter of Elizabeth Ames, the director of Yaddo. In 1969 Ted and Olwyn had commissioned her to write Sylvia’s official biography. The essay acknowledged The Bell Jar’s autobiographical content and sketched the outline of Sylvia’s life, including her attempted and her actual suicide. In order to soften the blow of the novel’s cruel portraits of real people, the essay included extracts from a letter written by Aurelia to Fran McCullough as the book was being prepared for publication. Here Aurelia explained that Sylvia had won an award to write a novel, but during the time she had been given to finish it she had undergone miscarriage, appendectomy and the birth of Nicholas. It was hardly surprising that the novel was a ‘pot boiler’. Aurelia recalled Sylvia saying that she had merely thrown together events from her own life, ‘fictionalizing to add color’, with the intention of showing ‘how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown’: ‘I’ve tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar.’ This, Aurelia explained, is why the reader should make allowances. ‘Practically every character in The Bell Jar represents someone – often in caricature – whom Sylvia loved; each person had given freely of time, thought, affection, and, in one case, financial help during those agonizing six months of breakdown in 1953’: the strain of the circumstances in which the novel was written had caused it to give the impression of harbouring ‘the basest ingratitude’, which is why Sylvia insisted to her brother Warren that it ‘must never be published in the United States’. The duty of the sensitive reader was to understand about the distorting lens of the bell jar of depression, and not to jump to conclusions about the true character of either Sylvia or her friends and family.15

  Like many a damage-limitation exercise, the inclusion of the biographical essay backfired. The novel was perceived as entirely autobiographical. The fact of Sylvia’s first attempted suicide, until then not widely known or discussed in America, became public knowledge. Sylvia’s complicated life and relationships were reduced to two headlines. Summer 1953: nervous breakdown and attempted suicide. Winter 1963: marital separation and successful suicide.

  The Bell Jar was published in New York in February 1971. It went straight into the bestseller list, where it remained for twenty-four weeks. Over the next few months, extracts appeared in McCall’s and Cosmopolitan magazines. There was a big Book Club edition and the following year a mass-market paperback, which was reprinted twenty-four times over the next seven years. The movie was optioned. The American paperback edition alone sold more than 3 million copies during Ted’s lifetime.16 He and his children made a lot of money from all this, but the exponential leap in Sylvia’s fame would taint all his future visits to America. The country associated with her and with his youthful dreams of life and energy and youth and escape, with the summer on Cape Cod and the road trip and the intense creative flourishing of the weeks at Yaddo, would subsequently become a place of nightmare, of furious heckling women and cancelled poetry readings.

  During his time in America, Carol went to Lumb Bank and packed up most of his books and manuscripts. He then returned home in time for the children’s Easter holidays. He and Carol took Nick and Frieda on a chilly camping tour around the Scottish lakes. They went on the ferry to Stromness and Ted kept one of his vivid travel journals, describing memorable adventures, sublime landscapes, daily fishing and quirky encounters (though not, he regretted, with the Loch Ness monster). They drove back via the Lake District, where Ted’s heart leapt up on seeing William Wordsworth’s grave in Grasmere churchyard. Frieda and Nick rowed on the lake while their father fished with no success.

  They arrived back at the Beacon in the evening. Ted’s father greeted them with the news that there had been a fire at Lumb Bank. They drove down the hill. The electricity was off, so they went in by torchlight and were hit by the smell of fire the moment they opened the door. In the middle of the floor there was a heap of charred rubbish immediately below a 2-foot-wide hole in the ceiling. The
re were boxes of burnt papers and clothes. All the signs pointed to arson.

  In the morning, they searched the house more fully. A curious selection of items, together with much of the bedding, had been removed. Two detectives arrived and took the details. One of them thought that the fire must have been set by local kids, but the other was convinced that there was personal malice in the case. The police were not given sufficient information to conclude an investigation. In a letter to Peter Redgrove, with whom he had not been in touch for some time, Ted told of the fire, explaining that by good fortune he had recently taken all his books down to Devon, so there was not much left in the house other than piles of manuscript drafts and other papers which he had not been able to face when clearing out. Because the house was damp and unventilated, the fire had smouldered, burning carpets and floorboards, instead of taking full hold. He told Redgrove that it did not seem coincidental that the arsonist’s attention had been directed ‘with nearly amusing exclusiveness at my writings, my private gods, my poetical stockpiles etc’.17

  For Ted, the burning of manuscripts – including some of Sylvia’s – was just one more disaster to add to the heap. But with typical resilience, he went on to take something positive from his year of ‘very strange darknesses’. Since Assia’s death ‘the whole of my life so far, the world, all the great works, have undergone a simultaneous re-interpretation on an infinitely bigger scale than before’: turning all that had happened to poetical account would give him imaginative work for the rest of his life. In the meantime, he expressed great satisfaction over Carol: ‘She’s from Devon, daughter of a farmer, half Welsh, very young, not very interested in literature but with perfect taste and judgement for what really counts in what she does read. Part gypsy – family name was Orchard, which is a West Country gypsy name. Exceedingly good for me.’18

  Straight after Easter, Ted moved to Paris, where he resumed his working relationship with Peter Brook. It was a relief to be in a different country. In May, he made a brief visit to Court Green, then closed it up. He returned to Peter Brook, and Carol joined him in June. Paris had happy associations from his past, but the theatre work was arduous. Brook was notorious for the demands, both physical and mental, that he placed upon everyone in his ensemble. In the three years since he and Ted had worked together on Oedipus, he had experimented on Shakespeare’s Tempest in the abandoned railway-shed of the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, staged a triumphant Chinese-circus-influenced ‘white box’ Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company, completed the King Lear film, and got funding for a new International Centre for Theatre Research on the Rive Gauche in the concrete-slabbed Mobilier National off the rue Croulebarbe (a resonant street name for a director who had explored the ‘theatre of cruelty’).

  The first task was to prepare material for a three-month residence in Persia that summer, climaxing in performances at the Shiraz-Persepolis Festival of Arts. Brook and Hughes were both fascinated by the myth of Prometheus, with its links between the gifts of fire and of artistic creativity, between freedom and imprisonment, light and darkness. But instead of simply staging, say, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, the company of actors from many different countries and theatrical traditions was tasked with creating a devised piece pulling together material from Aeschylus, Seneca’s Madness of Hercules, passages of Spanish from Calderón’s Life is a Dream, an Armenian play called The Chained One, Manichean myths, and the ancient Zoroastrian language of the Avesta. This then metamorphosed into a scheme for Hughes to write a new play in an invented language, to answer the challenge set by Brook in his manifesto for a new theatrical style, The Empty Space: ‘Is there another language, just as exacting for the author as the language of words, a language of sounds – a language of word-as-part-of-movement … of word-as-contradiction, of word-shock or word-cry?’19 That is to say, a primal language of the body. Food-loving Ted began with ‘GR-’ for ‘eat’, ‘KR-’ for ‘devour’ and ‘ULL’ for ‘swallow’. He incorporated baby talk: MAMA (its meaning inferred from the sucking shape of the lips, he explained) and DADA, which he glossed, perhaps with half-conscious awareness of Plath’s figurations of ‘daddy’, as ‘that person over there, who doesn’t give me food, is strange, and comes to represent the outside world’.20 Soon, a destructive king emerged – KRogon – and a name for both the language and the play: Orghast (ORG and GHAST, ‘the fire of being’).

  The best new words, Hughes said when interviewed about the project by Tom Stoppard for the Times Literary Supplement, were those that he ‘fished out of the air’, invented without conscious thought, his mind ‘completely fixed on the thing or state’ he wanted to express. These, he said, were sounds that tapped into the nervous system and the primal animal brain. Stoppard recognised that the aim was not to drop linguistic clues enabling listeners to pick up some discernible ‘sense’, but rather to create in a theatre audience ‘the instinctive recognition of a “mental state” within a sound’. Inevitably, though, the invented words were inflected with what Ted called the ‘North of England Anglo-Saxon–Norse pattern’ of sound that was also present in much of his own verse.21

  To begin with, the actors were given translations:

  BULLORGA OMBOLOM FROR / SHARSAYA NULBULDA BRARG

  darkness opens its womb / I hear chaos roar

  IN OMBOLOM BULLORGA

  in the womb of darkness

  FREEASTAV OMBOLOM / NILD US GLITTALUGH

  freeze her womb / rivets like stars

  ASTA BEORBITTA / CLID OSTA BULLORGA

  icy chains / lock up the mouth of darkness

  IN OMBOLOM KHERN FIGYA GRUORD

  in her womb I make my words iron.22

  But eventually this was no longer necessary. Actors’ bodies, diaphragms and vocal cords were inhabiting the new language.

  In early June, Ted, Brook and the acting company flew into Tehran, walking into the terminal at Mehrabad airport under the blaze of TV lights – the state television service was sponsoring the visit to the tune of £60,000. They were driven out to a dusty desert hotel, owned by the Shah, in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains. One of the actors said that the landscape was like that of Spain. Another replied that it was more like limbo. In air-conditioned isolation, they felt disconnected from the culture they had hoped to explore. The hotel offered expensive and flavourless international cuisine, not local food. This didn’t stop Ted from working his way through the menu, something, he confessed, that had been an ambition ever since his childhood of wartime rationing.

  The work was coming together. Persian actors and musicians had joined the company. Several directors were involved and local poets drifted in. Ted elaborated upon the Orghast mythology. The entire story was to be imagined as taking place within the body of Prometheus chained on his rock, ‘just as all languages originated in the physiology of man’. Different story elements and different sounds were assigned to different parts of the body: ‘The figure of Krogon, a great bird of prey, squatted on the shoulders of Prometheus, blotting out the light – Orghast – which, however, was repeated inside him, in the womb, surrounded by fertile, female darkness.’23 Ted drew a sketch to explain, all the time gesturing with his huge hands, which were ink-stained from invention and raw from a nervous skin complaint.

  There was a White Goddess type called Moa. Krogon withers under the light, croaks like Crow and is caged. Ted was asked what the vulture meant. Different things to different characters: ‘To Krogon it is his prisoners, the earth, his own body, his bond with animal life on one hand, with spirit on the other; a compound crime he refuses to recognize, which is slowly dementing him.’24 And so on, through the cast: a sickness at heart, a mysterious dilemma, suffering in time, the commitments of the body, the divided self, a hope for a cure, some ultimate reconciliation. Hughes was again wrestling with his own demons. Peter Brook wryly remarked that Orghast was turning into the most labyrinthine work since James Joyce’s Ulysses.

  Then it was time for reconnaissance of the ‘found spaces�
� where the performances would take place. They bought sun-hats and were shipped by minibus into the desert, past camels, donkeys, eagles ‘and an army camp ringed by barbed wire and mines’. At Persepolis, Brook led them up a mountain to the tomb of Artaxerxes II, carved into the rock, with a terrace in front of it and a sheer drop below. Ted climbed higher still, and eventually his giant figure loomed above the tomb, like ‘a vulture in a Digger hat, speaking Orghast’ and at that very moment ‘a bluish hawk left its nest, in a hole by the carved sun’. Then they moved on to another site, a few miles out of Persepolis: Naqsh-e Rustam, a 200-foot wall of mountain out of which the cruciform tombs of Darius and Xerxes has been hollowed. A fire temple known as the Cube of Zoroaster stood opposite and vultures circled above. ‘This is the dimension it requires,’ said Ted.25

  Back in the rehearsal room, there was more work to be done. To contrast with the epic and tragic scope of Orghast, Brook asked Ted to devise an improvised comedy of sexual competition and courtship. He based it on the scenario of Difficulties of a Bridegroom, the radio play which had been produced just before Sylvia’s death, with its shy lover and his misadventures.26 The surviving drafts include such stage directions as ‘Hero wakes. He has had the most fantastic dream – rapturous description of a girl’s visit etc, all that occurred.’ Another girl is carried away by a King Kong figure. Before an ecstatic closing reunion, there is much sexual activity, including a game of strip poker with an invisible antagonist and a man falling in love with an empty box before some girls take out his heart as he sleeps.27