As for poetry, something could be achieved by a return to bird and beast, flower and tree, nature sometimes burgeoning with green shoots and sometimes red in tooth and claw: the subject matter that had established his reputation. Back in 1968, he had written ‘Five Autumn Songs for Children’s Voices’ to be performed by schoolchildren at the Harvest Festival in the village of Little Missenden. In 1974, he added five poems for each of the other seasons and published the sequence in a little private edition via Olwyn’s Rainbow Press under the title Spring Summer Autumn Winter. He then added ten more poems and renamed the collection Season Songs. He dedicated it to Carol and published it with the Viking Press in New York in October 1975, in a handsome hardback with illustrations by Leonard Baskin and no indication of its origin as a work for children. Faber and Faber published the British edition the following spring, without the Baskin line drawings. The jacket quoted Hughes saying ‘Season Songs began as children’s poems but they grew up.’ When he read a selection on the radio he said that they were written as if ‘within hearing of children’.19 He was pushing at the boundary between his adult’s and his children’s poetry. The collection does not contain material to distress a child as ‘February 17th’ would, but there is a reasonable smattering of death and blood: this is nature as it is, not the soft pastoral of idealising poetic greenery.
‘A March Calf’ opens the first season, spring, delightfully:
Right from the start he is dressed in his best – his blacks and his whites.
Little Fauntleroy – quiffed and glossy,
A Sunday suit, a wedding natty get-up,
Standing in dunged straw.20
And throughout the collection there are lovely details for the hearing of all ages: a ‘spurt of daffodils’ stiff as ‘Guardsmen’, birds and insects coming alive in April (‘You just can’t count everything that follows in a tumble / Like a whole circus tumbling through a hoop’), the children excited because the swifts have returned in May (‘Look! They’re back! Look!’), a harvest moon, an autumn chestnut splitting its ‘padded cell’.21 Yet for most of the time one gets the sense that Hughes is operating on autopilot, writing nature notes instead of penetrating to the forces behind nature and in himself. At times, too, he relies excessively upon the tricks and tones of the poets he admires: ‘The crocuses are too naked’ is derivative of Plath, ‘Water-wobbling blue-sky-puddled October’ of Hopkins.22
For some critics, Season Songs was merely a ‘lovely collection of lyrics for children’. For others, it represented a true return to form: if Crow and Cave Birds were ‘full of sub-Amerindian apocalyptic gibberish’, then ‘salvation came with Season Songs’.23 Ted sometimes looked back on the collection as one of his favourites, but he also knew that he had to do something different, something more difficult. In December 1974, with only half-ironic self-deprecation, he described the collection as nothing more than ‘a book of seasons’ poems for senile children and infantile adults’.24
Nineteen-seventy-five. A typical letter to Gerald, Joan and their family in Australia. Ted thanks them for the python skin that has just arrived, then gives advice on how to test the quality of a tiger skin: tear it at the edge and if it rips in the manner of cardboard, avoid; whereas, however tatty it appears, if painful to tear it is good quality. He was also still hoping that his brother might send him the foot of an eagle. There was a new building on the farm at Moortown: great improvement. He had reached a decision on the kind of pedigree cow he wanted. The price was right, with a downturn in the livestock market, but with his usual bad luck he was out of money. Over the course of the previous year, Lumb Bank renovations had eaten up £20,000, the taxman another £9,000 – factoring in the oil-led inflation of the next few years, those two figures add up to the equivalent of more than a quarter of a million pounds ($400,000) at 2015 values. The other business for Gerald to consider was the need for their father to sell the Beacon and move to North Tawton. A perfectly sized and located, if overpriced, cottage had come up in the village. Ted drops a heavy hint that Gerald might like to assist.25
Farming was immensely hard work, but there was joy in physical labour. That summer he wrote to Frieda, now fifteen and still at Bedales. Having asked how her exams had been and whether she had raced through her answers, and before telling a story about Ginger-dandelion the cat and a ‘great metropolis of mice’ in the upper part of the orchard near the overgrown tennis court, he told her how the rain had come pouring down as they finished baling: ‘we had a wild rush to get them in, bales into the landrover … bales in the horse-box, bales into our ears, bales into the backs of our necks, bales in our boots, bales down our shirts. So we tottered home towering & trembling & tilting & toppling & teetering.’26 Each of his letters to Frieda and Nick at boarding school is like a little story, vivid in observation, with love and tenderness spilling from the boundless energy of the prose.
Nineteen-seventy-six. The prognostication for the new year was good. As a Leo, Ted was a creature of the sun, which in July would transit Cancer, the house of his Muse and his doppelgänger. Saturn had hemmed him in, blocking sustained writing for two years, but now he was going to be free of that oppression. His plan was to put together all the bits and pieces he had drafted in the first years of his second marriage into a collection called Clearing the Decks. He hoped for an Arts Council bursary to assist with the process. Once the decks were cleared of both poetic patchwork and domestic obligation, he could get down to the real thing.27
Carol was busy lambing. The pipes and water-troughs froze. Ted wrote with his usual cheery advice to the children at boarding school – work hard and don’t forget to take vitamin C and halibut oil28 – while also bombarding newspapers and politicians with letters about the ‘cod war’ against Icelandic overfishing of the North Atlantic.
All that winter Ted had spent his days getting his hands dirty, being kept from his writing. Then a shadow fell. Six months earlier, his father-in-law Jack Orchard had been diagnosed with cancer of the bronchus. In mid-February, after long treatment and partial remission, the secondaries took him, suddenly. After the business of funeral, cremation and private committal came the realisation that the pastoral dream of farmer Ted had come to an abrupt end. Jack had been a father to Ted, a mentor in the art of tending land and beast.29 They did not want to let an outsider run the farm. They decided to get rid of the livestock, but retain the land and sell the grass. Money was a serious concern, not least because Ted’s lengthy dispute with the taxman, which mainly concerned his royalty earnings from The Bell Jar, was still rumbling on. He also arranged for a valuation of Lumb Bank, with a view to a sale – though that would have been a blow to the Arvon Foundation.
20
The Elegiac Turn
‘I started again at the beginning’1
‘Song’, the earliest poem that Hughes wished to see preserved, written at three o’clock in the morning while on National Service in 1950, may be read in two ways. In its conscious origin, it was a love song for Jean Findlay. In the personal mythos that, he believed, spoke from his unconscious, it was his first encounter with the White Goddess. All his published collections from The Hawk in the Rain to Prometheus on his Crag sought to tap into the unconscious, to depersonalise and universalise his experience. Seeing the jaguar cage while he worked in the kitchens of the cafeteria at the zoo and hearing the howling of the wolves from the flat on Primrose Hill: these were occasions for literary inspiration, but the poems are not ostensibly about himself as a jaguar or the memory of Sylvia’s suicide as a howl. Rather, jaguar and wolf are embodiments of natural forces that far transcend individual experience. So too, although Crow was dedicated to Assia’s memory (and Shura’s), Crow’s temptress Eve is not in any direct sense a representation of Assia.
Ted Hughes became a poet under the influence of T. S. Eliot’s insistence on the impersonality of great art. His reading of Jung and of Robert Graves’s The White Goddess led him to cultivate a poetry of archetypes and myths, not of domestic minutiae
and autobiographical recollection. The discovery of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies with Sylvia in 1959 made him think again. But he shied away from a change of approach to his own poetry, regarding the new autobiographical or ‘confessional’ style as something distinctively American, Sylvia’s domain and not his own. Hughes knew, as no one else upon earth did, exactly how closely the Ariel poems were elaborated from Sylvia’s life and marriage: ‘To me those poems open alphabet – every nuance, I know its whole history and connection, every phrase,’ as he wrote in that journal entry in the summer of 1969.2 But the inevitable consequence of Ariel’s publication was the opening to public scrutiny of his own private life, and in particular the circumstances leading to the end of the marriage and Plath’s suicide. His resistance to autobiography in poetry was accordingly hardened.
In September 1962 he had written to Olwyn about the ‘self-imposed curfew’ he had placed upon the subjective voice in poetry.3 There is a lot of himself in Wodwo, but he is there very indirectly. ‘The Howling of Wolves’, the only poem in that book to have been written in the flat in Fitzroy Road where Plath committed suicide, might be read as his first elegy in her memory, but there is nothing explicitly personal about it.
Steeped in the classics as he was, Ted took a Greek view of the origins of poetry. There was epic, the domain of myth, creation tales, heroes and descents to the underworld. The Crow project was his epic, reduced to craggy fragments. Then there was drama: the embodiment of myth on stage, as exemplified by the tragedians studied by Sylvia in Part II of the Cambridge English Tripos. For writers who wish to be ‘impersonal’, dramatic form is especially attractive. Shakespeare has often been held up as the ideal of the poet who brings to life all his different characters but never reveals his own self. Like T. S. Eliot in his later years, Hughes devoted much energy to the attempt to revive verse drama. There was, for example, the Yaddo project adapting the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thödol) in verse as a libretto for the Chinese composer Chou Wen-chung. That story’s dramatisation of ‘the progress of the soul during the 49 days between death and rebirth’4 was reworked, many years later, in Cave Birds. Another big project was the radio play The Wound, broadcast in 1962 and published five years later in Wodwo. It came to him, he claimed, in a dream as if it were a full-length film during the time he was working on Bardo. After this, he metamorphosed his verse drama based on Johann Valentin Andreae’s The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz into Difficulties of a Bridegroom, the radio play broadcast in January 1963 and repeated on Sylvia’s last Saturday night. Then there was Eat Crow, the early version of Crow in dramatic form. Radio was an excellent medium for symbolic dramas of this kind. Yet another of his early excursions in the field was The House of Aries, a tale of Freudian family romance set against a background of violent revolution, written in an array of different verse forms and broadcast on the Third Programme in November 1960.5
It was in this early ‘dramatic’ phase that Ted began work on what became his major Faber and Faber publication of the mid-Seventies: Gaudete. In the early Sixties, he developed a film script that began from the premise of the play he had begun at Yaddo, which is to say a drama of erotic intoxication and dismemberment loosely based on The Bacchae of Euripides. This was a period when the movies were the one place where a writer could make serious money. A detailed scenario was typed up by the end of January 1964.6 Ted thought it beyond the scope of any English director. Ingmar Bergman would have been his ideal reader for it, but his Swedish contact, the literary editor Siv Arb, who had come to Court Green before Sylvia’s death, sent it instead to Vilgot Sjöman, a director who later became famous for the sexually explicit avant-garde movie I am Curious (Yellow). Sjöman was not interested, so Ted wondered instead about turning his idea into a novel. He then put it aside for several years.
His personal summary of the narrative went as follows: ‘A nimble vicar organizes all the women in his parish – he is to father the saviour on one of them, so has to keep at it all the time with all of them, and has them hooked up in a witchy cult to promote the right sort of spirit.’ He is then ‘hunted down across the county by the husbands and shot in a lake’ before being buried in his own church.7 Were there ever to have been a pitch to a Hollywood producer (never a likely event), the strapline might have gone along the lines of ‘orgiastic Bacchic women out of Greek tragedy meet naughty rural vicar out of the News of the World’. Ted had become an amused connoisseur of salacious red-top Sunday newspaper stories about the sexual misdemeanours of the English clergy.
‘The subject was novel in 1964,’ he later ruminated, ‘charismatic priests, harem congregations, black magic or at least Old Religion magic in church precincts.’8 By the early Seventies, he felt that he was in danger of missing the boat. Similar narratives were appearing elsewhere: in The Magus of John Fowles, in Peter Redgrove, and in the film The Wicker Man, based on Ritual, a horror novel by cult author David Pinner in which a puritanical policeman investigates the ritualistic murder of a child in a secluded village in Cornwall, where he encounters mind-games, seduction and bloody pagan rites. Rather than revive his own idea for a film or novel, in an attempt to break into genres where he had no prior history of success, Ted reworked his treatment, introduced a doppelgänger for the protagonist, and sent Charles Monteith at Faber the resulting long poem, written in loose, almost prosaic lines which Seamus Heaney would compare to the style of Walt Whitman.9 After more than a year’s worth of revisions, a final version was dispatched in May 1976. He was determined to stick by the title Gaudete, despite – indeed, all the more because of – the folk band Steeleye Span’s recent top-twenty hit with their rendering of an early church chant under the same title (Ted was awed by the voice of Maddy Prior, their female lead singer). He told Monteith that the subtitle ever since the original film treatment had always been (with ironic intention) ‘An English Idyll’, though this was now dropped.10
Faber published Gaudete in May 1977, in an edition of 5,000 copies. The Guardian reviewer likened the poem to being given a pair of (D. H.) Lawrentian red trousers, which ‘seem to have come from the old Hammer Films wardrobe’: ‘There’s toadstool in the sandwiches, and they celebrate the ancient religion orgiastically in the basement of the church, a lot of naked women in animal masks, and the vicar in his antlers.’ The review’s overall verdict was not flattering: ‘This ridiculous hodge-podge could have made a campy horror-film, and indeed started life as a scenario. The trouble is that Hughes wants it to be taken much more seriously than that.’ Nevertheless, ‘Since Beauty, asleep, is still beautiful, there are careless strokes of genius on most pages, all at the level of rendering sensation.’11
For the Oxford critic Peter Conrad, the wonderful bestiary of the early poems had turned to bestiality and the work was of interest only ‘as a measure of Hughes’s degradation’. The Jaguar had become a Jaguar sports car and the thought-fox had been ‘gutted and looped around the neck of Maud the housekeeper as a fur wrap’. Gaudete, Conrad suggests, revealed a poet who had become cynically materialistic: ‘Hughes the myth-maker betrays himself as a moneyed worldling, adept in spotting the makes of cars and impressive in reciting the brand-names of his instruments of death.’12
In the Sunday Times the poet and crime writer Julian Symons was rather more favourably inclined, though ultimately baffled:
You might get an idea of Gaudete by imagining Under Milk Wood written by [Jacobean dramatists] Webster or Tourneur instead of by a chubby cheerful chappie of a Welsh verbal conjurer. Yet the effect is not at all depressing. Just as Webster’s Flamineo and Bosola come through to us as superb comic monsters, so a lot of Gaudete is ferociously jocose, intentionally funny. It is a pity that the poem should be so obscure, not passage by passage but in its ultimate meaning.13
The American edition, published at the end of the year, provoked a very mixed response. Donald Hall in the Washington Post proclaimed it Hughes’s best work, while other reviewers found its mixture of ‘lust for women and loathing for wo
men’ repulsive, or railed against it as ‘an obvious male fantasy rotted by unexplored misogyny in the dehumanization of the yearning women: “Already their eyes are glazed like young cattle. They are waiting for the first shiver of power.”’14
Gaudete is indeed something of a puzzle: 200 pages long, a sexed-up Lawrentian Under Milk Wood with an epigraph out of the Parzival myth and a prefatory note explaining that the central character, an Anglican clergyman called the Reverend Nicholas Lumb, is a spirit double since the real Lumb has been abducted to the underworld (though in the epilogue he turns up in ‘a straggly sparse village on the West Coast of Ireland’). It is written with an excellent eye for a filmic mise-en-scène. It is very good on male voyeurism. It is quite funny in the way that it turns the members of the Women’s Institute into a horde of maenads. But it is troubling in its persistent linking of sex and violence:
Inside Felicity a solid stone-hard core of honey-burning sweetness has begun to melt
And she knows this is oozing out all over her body
And wetting her cheeks and trickling on her thighs.
The sweetness is like the hot rough fur of the tiger as it bulges and bristles into presence,
A hot-throated opening flower of tiger, splitting all the leafy seams of her body …
Lumb is suddenly standing in front of her looking at her.
Ted Hughes Page 40