The final few rehearsals of Orghast took place on site. Under the vertical cliff of Naqsh-e Rustam they worked by the light of torches, the actors climbing on ladders amid swirling bats. Four oversized mottled vipers were killed in one night. Ted cut off their heads and skinned them.
And then the festival opened. The first performance took place just after sunset on Saturday 28 August 1971. Peter Brook gave his final words of advice to the actors: ‘We are not setting out to teach the audience anything, do anything to them, explain anything, but, as we did at the village, to create a circle in which the impulse can go round.’28 Hughes’s working typescript survives. The scene was set at the tomb of Artaxerxes II or III, above the ruins of Persepolis. The cast was instructed to stand scattered on the platform below and on the hillside, with the audience seated on cushions on both sides of the platform: to one side of them, ‘the carved face and entrance of the tomb’; to the other, ‘the view out over Persepolis and the valley, south and west’. It began. The voice of ‘LIGHT’ was heard from above, repeatedly calling ‘HOAN’. Then:
MAN: (from below platform) GA-VE
LIGHT: call HOAN
MAN: GA-VE
LIGHT: call (continues under MOA)
MOA: (from tomb) GAVE
CHORUS: AMEM
MAN: GAVE
CHORUS: NEMEM
MOA: GAVE
CHORUS: UKHDHEM.29
The audience was for the most part absorbed but puzzled. At the end of the show, Ted and the rest of the company walked down a mountain path marked by bowls of fire. They partook of a buffet in the Harem Garden, then returned up the hill for a second performance by moonlight. A Yugoslav musician in the audience said that it was the most beautiful spectacle he had witnessed in a decade.
Questions were asked at the festival press conference. An English critic had misheard the opening cry of GA-VE as YAHWEH. This was good, said Brook, since gaveh meant both ‘cow’ and ‘soul of man’. That was what they were trying to do: ‘exploding atoms of sense’. A scholar of the Avestan language scornfully replied that ‘cow’ was gav, nothing to do with gaveh. A Persian chipped in: ‘Gaveh also means nonsense.’ ‘Even better,’ replied Brook. A drama expert asked if his method was related to the ‘poor theatre’ of Jerzy Grotowski. No, the only model to which he was completely committed was the theatre of Shakespeare. Would there be a dictionary of the Orghast language? ‘Where is the dictionary of music?’ replied Ted. ‘There is one – in your body. We use music only for itself, not for debate.’30
The performance at Persepolis, repeated in the presence of the Queen of Persia, was only Part I. They moved on to Naqsh-e Rustam for Part II. There, under the tomb of Xerxes, the White Goddess figure of Moa stood in a fissure that slashed the rock. Ted, who sometimes shared King Lear’s dark view of women’s genitals, named it Vulvig. Moa screamed her Orghast curses at the murderous Krogon to the sound of amplified drums. And so it went on, until as dawn broke over the rocky tomb a solitary figure with a cow, a bell tolling on its neck, chanted in Avestan and walked the length of the valley into the rising sun.
Carol joined Ted for some of the time, as did the children. After three months in this extraordinary environment, Ted returned to Devon, only to find that Court Green had been broken into, and some of the Plath manuscripts stolen. His head was still full of Iran and Orghast. He wrote enthusiastically to Luke Myers, telling him that the entire adventure was packed with mystery and excitement. Thanks to the actors, most notably Malick Bagayogo from Mali, who performed like a man possessed, he had fulfilled a dream and created ‘the sort of cave-drama’ he would never have thought possible: ‘One of the performances was so completely stupefying the audience sat afterwards for 15 minutes in dead silence.’31
In the same letter, he asked Myers to try to get hold of an article that Alvarez had published in the New American Review. For some reason, Al was proving ‘very cagey’ about showing it to Ted. In November, it became obvious why. Alvarez was about to publish a book called The Savage God and he had been trailing it in the magazines and newspapers. The subtitle was A Study of Suicide and the prologue was a thirty-page essay about the last days of Sylvia Plath. An extract was published in the Observer and a second one announced as forthcoming.
Ted was devastated, not least by the ill timing. He had finally achieved a sense of equilibrium, with the children in a good school, Carol making a home, himself free of ‘all entanglement’ (that is, no more double life with Brenda) and thus free to work properly for the first time since 1966. All this was undone by Alvarez’s unforgivable ‘re-invention of the inner life’ of his marriage to Sylvia. The story was ‘dynamite’ for the children and ‘insufferable’ for Ted.32
He responded immediately. ‘Dear Al,’ he began, ‘As a friend, please reconsider your writings, talks etc about Sylvia’s suicide. It was enough before, without the details. Obviously you can’t unwrite them, but I do ask you to set a quick limit on how far you popularize them.’ Had he not thought about the effect on Ted, on Sylvia’s family and above all on the children of his exhumation of her for the purposes of classroom discussion? Over 2,000 words long, the letter is among the most powerful that Ted ever wrote. At its centre is his concern for Frieda and Nick. ‘For you’, he says to Alvarez, Sylvia is ‘a topic for intellectual discussion, a poetic/existential phenomenon’. A topic, moreover, spiced with macabre details that were not only little better than gossip, but also pressed into the service of a tendentious reading of her work and her death. For instance, Alvarez gave an exaggerated sense of the supposed poetic rivalry between Ted and Sylvia. For the family, Ted movingly wrote, Sylvia was not a literary-critical problem but a loved and still-mourned being: ‘she is an atmosphere we breathe’. Above all, she was the lynchpin of Frieda’s and Nick’s sense of identity: ‘they have made her very important, the more so because of her obvious absence throughout the mess I’ve made of replacing her these last years’. Their image of her – of what she did and was – would decide their lives: ‘You know these things work out seriously. Yet you’ve defined their mother’s pose – and set it up as the official final public version (the schools will make sure of that) – in an absolutely disastrous way.’33
Alvarez defended himself, saying that his interpretation of the events was a great deal more considerate than the stories doing the rounds in the cloud of feminist-inspired rumour. The piece was a tribute to Sylvia and it would be better for the children to see his sympathetic account than some of the other things that were circulating. He agreed to withdraw the second pre-publication extract, but the damage was done.
Ted had not told the children the true circumstances of their mother’s death. He had let them assume that Sylvia had succumbed to pneumonia. Now there was the risk that they might hear it in the form of malicious school gossip culled from the papers. As a result of what Ted described as Alvarez’s ‘treachery’, Nick and Frieda were brought home from Ibstock for a week, to be shielded from the story. Ted even wondered if he might need to move them to another school, where they could start again with a degree of anonymity.34
Alvarez, of all people. What Ted knew but could not tell was that the memoir of Sylvia in The Savage God was a little economical with the truth. It presents a beautifully executed cameo of Alvarez’s final encounter with Sylvia on Christmas Eve 1962, when she offered herself to him and he rejected her. But his account of their earlier evenings together is sparing. Ted and Olwyn knew rather more from what they had read in Sylvia’s last journal before it was destroyed. ‘Alvarez’, she scribbled on her calendar for 29 October 1962: that was the night she read her latest poems to him and he thought they were extraordinary. A week later, on the day that she found Yeats’s house in Fitzroy Road, she rushed round in a fever of excitement to tell Al. That evening, she noted in her journal with her usual acerbic wit, they were engaged in a certain activity when the telephone rang. She put her foot over his penis so that, as she phrased it, he was appropriately attired to receive the call.35
Ted asked himself who had the right to speak and who had the right to be hurt by the publication of intimate details of Sylvia’s last days. He penned some bitter lines, seemingly intended for ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’, the autobiographical epic that he never published: ‘Al hurt by my reaction to his account / Of S. death’, the fragment begins. Who was Alvarez to claim ‘perfect understanding’ of these events? What was his compulsion to reveal ‘That he too tended the final days / How he too performed on that stage / And shall now forever perform’?36 Alvarez’s performance extended beyond his revelation of the power of Sylvia’s later voice, his eulogy in the Observer on the occasion of her death, and his vivid retrospect in The Savage God. Though Ted could not say so, it reached to the very heart of the story.
Sylvia, Olwyn reminded Alvarez in a letter written years later, ‘was an all or nothing at all girl’.37 For such a woman – especially one who was unusually sexually liberated for her time – an affair of her own was an obvious response to the discovery of her husband’s extramarital liaison. She was hurt when Richard Murphy rejected her advances in Cleggan. Alvarez was the man to make up for it. He was the first to see the greatness of the poems liberated in her by her anger towards Ted. She hoped for a more sustained relationship with him. On Christmas Eve, preparing to see him again, she wrote ‘a full page of tense instructions to herself’ in her journal: ‘to be patient, to be casual, not to show her feelings and scare [him] off’.38 He was her opportunity to restore her self-esteem.
But Alvarez, manic-depressive himself, did not want the responsibility of a relationship with a manic-depressive genius with two young children and a husband who was having an affair. His own marriage to Ursula, granddaughter of D. H. Lawrence’s wife Frieda, had disintegrated two years before. He had married her seven weeks after meeting her, a whirlwind romance of a similar duration to Ted and Sylvia’s; he cheerfully admitted that an obsession with Lawrence was the main driver of his desire. More recently, his affair with the charismatic Australian Jill Neville had come to an end. He declined the opportunity of turning a dalliance into a relationship. Sylvia was rejected again.39
She sensed that she had lost her old sexual magic. As a result of the mental scar left by her father’s sudden death when she was eight, she always reacted with extremity to the slightest hint of male rejection – as witnessed by the incident with the girl at Smith. Alvarez’s rejection may well have played its part in her suicide. It was hardly surprising that he did not admit as much in The Savage God and that his narrative focused instead on her parting from Ted.
But Ted could never write about this. It would have looked like self-exculpation and, besides, he was too loyal both to his friends and to the memory of Sylvia. Olwyn believes that one of the reasons why he burnt the last journal was so that Nick and Frieda could be spared the image of their mother being damaged further by other men.
And there was something else.
In Alvarez’s autobiography, Assia Wevill is accorded a single hostile paragraph. He suggests that her affair with Ted would have blown itself out if Sylvia had been able to give her husband a little more space and time. He claims that Assia wanted Ted partly for the same reason that a host of other women wanted him: ‘because he was gifted, subtle, handsome, manly’. Alvarez suggests that she also wanted Ted because ‘he was Sylvia’s husband and Sylvia was a woman to be reckoned with’. As an advertising copywriter and a translator of Hebrew poetry, Assia was enough of a writer to know that Sylvia was a much better writer. Alvarez accuses her of relentlessly badmouthing Sylvia’s poetry after her death. He subscribes to the view that ‘her only way of outdoing her dead rival was in the manner of her death’. In this interpretation, as Alvarez bluntly and rather clumsily phrases it, ‘When her affair with Ted turned out to be just another affair, Assia gassed the child she and Ted had had together when she gassed herself.’40
At the time of Sylvia’s death, a contemporary noted that Alvarez had a ‘hangdog adoration of T.H.’ and expressed the opinion that he was ‘stuck in Freudianism like an American teenager’.41 One does not have to share the Freudianism to see that in this sequence of his autobiography the pugnacious poker-playing boxer Alvarez is projecting on to Sylvia and Assia his own rivalry with Ted. The copywriter’s sense of inferiority to the poet stands in for that of the critic. Alvarez could make or break a poet, but his own poetry was thin gruel.
According to Alvarez, Assia wanted Ted ‘to add to her collection, because she saw herself as irresistible’. She was, he continues, ‘a rapacious woman with a delicate, sultry face that seemed out of proportion with her heavy figure, and she made a pass at every man she met so automatically that it was hard to feel flattered’.42 There is a back-story to this pronouncement. In July 1962 Assia told her friend Nat Tarn about her relationship with Alvarez, which she was keeping from her husband. Alvarez had pleaded with her to abandon David Wevill and go to America with him. She confided that she had by this time grown sick of him, which was hardly surprising since she was now with Ted. Alvarez was ‘vermouth’, she told Tarn in her sharply witty way. When Assia told David about Ted’s note inviting her to begin an affair, what she was concealing was the fact that she was already in very deep with another man.
Alvarez had not grown sick of her. He was in love with Assia to the point of obsession. He ‘cashed in’ (Tarn’s phrase) two weeks after the terrible day when Ted ruptured Assia and she told her husband that Ted had actually raped her, and David took an overdose of sleeping pills. On 27 July 1962, Al Alvarez asked Assia Wevill to marry him. She thought this was ‘rather sweet’ but of course she declined. She had not yet decided to leave David and her head was full of Ted. Alvarez took the sweetest revenge that was available to him. Nine days later, he published a column of new poems in the Observer: first one by Sylvia, then one by Ted, then, immediately underneath, a rather good David Wevill poem about being a cuckold. Nat Tarn wryly described this as ‘A fine piece of family history’.43
Alvarez and Sylvia. Alvarez and Assia. Ted kept quiet about all this all his life. And yet in 1971 Alvarez was the one who said that he was hurt by Ted’s reaction to The Savage God.
19
Farmer Ted
At daffodil time in 1972, Ted Hughes wrote one of his newsy letters to Gerald in Australia. He told of how he would try to sit in his writing hut in the garden of Court Green all day, only emerging in the evening. If the work went well enough, he could then reward himself with a day’s fishing. But it had been nearly four years since he had been able to devote three consecutive days to his writing. Without complete absorption, he could not break through beyond Crow. Perhaps, though, he was making distractions for himself because he could not bear to face the past more directly. Money was a perennial concern: the house on the north coast of Devon, which he had hoped to buy for £15,000, had now tripled in value. A plan to buy a working farm faced the hurdle of ever-increasing prices. And he was convinced that inflation would only get worse: he took justifiable pride in his prophetic powers with regard to the broader economy, but was frustrated by his own sense of financial powerlessness.
Meanwhile, renovations were made to Court Green. A new Aga replaced Sylvia’s old cooker. An ancient oak-beamed granite fireplace was exposed and the house filled with beautiful things. Ted contributed animal skulls and heads, kangaroo- and snakeskins sent by Gerald. He told his brother that Carol dreamed of wearing a coat made of red snake. Her father, Jack Orchard, tidied the orchard.
The old home was made new, but it remained the place associated with Sylvia, especially when the children were back for the holidays. They were pleased to acquire a pet badger, but Ted worried about them. Frieda seemed preternaturally adult, detached and insightful. She played at playing instead of playing as a child plays. Nicky had fads and obsessions; like his father, he was a great collector. Ted’s own father was a continual worry: he was grumpy, still struggling with being a widower, didn’t have a hobby and was altogether a model of how not to cope with reti
rement. The best plan, Ted told Gerald, would be to sell the Beacon and for Pa to live half the year in Australia and the other half in Devon. The cottage in the yard of Court Green could be renovated for him, though the burden of care would then have fallen upon Carol.1 When Bill Hughes did come to stay, he slept in till lunchtime and spent much of the rest of the day in the pub.
A further distraction came in the form of a new collaboration with Peter Brook. Ted returned to the International Centre for Theatre Research in Paris in order to work on the script of a dramatisation of the medieval Persian tale The Conference of the Birds. Drafts survive in the Peter Brook Archive of sixty-two linked tales in verse, with casting. Among the titles are ‘Exchanged Faces’, ‘The girl who wanted dawn’s dress’, ‘The jealous wife’, ‘Sleeping Lover’ and – at the close – ‘Ariel in the Oak’, featuring a bound and gagged female, the action to be played with long red material, a stick, two small bamboo canes, a box and a foam-rubber plug. Suffering is one of the great themes of the sequence. ‘Do not ask for suffering,’ Ted writes: a man asks what suffering is, his four sons kill each other, and a wise friend says, ‘You asked for suffering, and look at you now: it has totally overwhelmed you.’2
Despite the money on offer, this time he decided not to accompany Brook and his actors on their three-month circuit of the tribes and villages of West Africa. Instead, he sank into what he called ‘deep rural torpor’, shaking off the literary life of London.3 He complained that writing a hundred scenes for The Conference of the Birds had stopped him from writing anything else. In letters to friends he reiterated that he was hoping to collect his wits and go ‘through the door that Crow opened’ but was somehow blocked from taking the big next step.4
Ted Hughes Page 38