Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  She and Feinstein were then invited to teach on a weekend Arvon course down in Devon, where she registered the sweetness, loveliness and youth of Carol. Yevtushenko, who was staying at Court Green, picked them up and drove them over for Sunday lunch. Broad planks were propped up in the cobbled yard outside the thatched house, resembling up-ended coffins. ‘I could make you a table, if you like,’ said Ted, ‘a work-table.’ This was another echo of his life with Sylvia: the elm plank which he and Warren had made for her when they first moved to Court Green and which in Ted’s imagination merged with the elm of her coffin as it was lowered into her Heptonstall grave. Emma Tennant left with a copy of Ted’s Pilinszky translations, marked with a personal inscription in his ‘black, barbed-wire handwriting’.

  In the summer of 1977, now a year into his relationship with Jill, he invited Emma to lunch at Julie’s Bar in Notting Hill. At the very least, she was hoping for a poem or story for Bananas. Alone with him for the first time, she found him magnificent. His face, ‘like an Easter Island statue’, seemed to dominate the room, as ‘anger, certainty and pride’ gave ‘an unchanging air to his features’ while, ‘as if unwilled by himself, a smile, thin and nervous’ played on his lips. He launched into tales of his ‘love disasters’: his being reported to the police following the M1 sex murder, the time he ran over a hare on the way to a girlfriend’s house, picked up the body and read the future from its entrails in the girl’s kitchen. He mesmerised her with his stories, including one about a woman who had taught him ‘how to make the hairs on a person’s neck stand up even if they are miles away’. Then they went to look at the peacocks strutting in Holland Park before going to his flat in Fortess Road, where they made love, unsatisfactorily. She was surprised by the paleness of his body.

  Afterwards, he drove her back to Notting Hill. They passed the mansion block on Baker Street where Sue Alliston once had a flat: ‘I knew a pretty woman of forty who lived there,’ he said. ‘She died.’ When he dropped her off, he asked her if she knew of the habits of the greylag goose. ‘They are faithful to their first mate, I may be,’ he said, hesitating a moment, ‘I may, after all, be a greylag goose.’

  All these details are from Tennant’s memoir Burnt Diaries. As a carefully contrived work by a novelist, it is shaped with a degree of artistic licence. Did Ted really say ‘I want you for no more than a year’ before their second assignation (rougher and much more satisfying, she recalled), this time in a hotel in Bayswater? Did Emma really think of herself at the time as a ‘sub-mistress’, or was that witty term invented retrospectively in the act of writing the memoir? There is no reason to doubt, though, that he was more than half serious in proposing that they should go off together to Scotland – even as far as the Hebrides. As a scion of the Scottish aristocracy, the Honourable Emma was another person who embodied a place, in this instance a wild landscape with fresh air and great fishing, far from the stultifying stuffiness of Anglo-Saxon society and the gossipy backbiting of literary London. This remained one of his unfulfilled dreams of a different life, another Frostian road not taken. He sent sporadic postcards between long silences as he visited schools to enthuse children about poetry, was knocked out with the flu on a trip to Paris, and went backwards and forwards between Devon and London. They occasionally met up again, but the sexual relationship petered out before it really got going.

  Emma could never claim, as Jill did, that she effectively lived with Ted during his time in London in the late Seventies. As a writer, though, she was able to turn each meeting with him into vivid anecdote and imagery. His flat in Fortess Road, where they made love for the first time, is starkly drawn: furnished only with a Fifties-style basket chair, a large bed with rumpled sheets and ‘piles of typescripts and notebooks everywhere, floor, chair and bed’. The seedy hotel room in Bayswater where they go for the second assignation has a ‘pink nylon frilly lampshade on the mock-mahogany bedside table’. She alleges that in Regent’s Park he once put his hands tightly round her neck, the gleam of the rabbit-catcher in his eye. She records that he never wanted to talk about Sylvia, but once when they saw a child with a baby fox on a lead in the park, he told of the incident on Chalk Farm Bridge. Again, on an autumn evening he looked out of the window, saw a girl walking past and said that she looked how Shura would have looked then, had she lived. Passing Sue Alliston’s flat a second time, he said, ‘All the women I have anything to do with seem to die.’

  Ted was indeed superstitious in this regard, believing that any lover he made his Muse or White Goddess might then be taken from him. In this sense, he felt that he was doing his wife a great service by dedicating books to her but not actually writing poems about her. He also knew that he was doing her a disservice in his behaviour. Tennant claimed that Hughes referred to his home in Devon as a hospital, taking this as a cruel reference to Carol’s nursing background. She was angry with herself for conniving at his infidelity. ‘We did harm,’ he once said to her on the phone the morning after an evening party when Carol had suffered the pain and embarrassment of being in the same room as her husband’s ‘sub-mistress’. At the same time, Emma wondered what Ted was thinking of – or whether he knew what he was thinking of – when he wrote the story ‘The Head’, with its ‘silent and illiterate’ wife.

  She tells of how he gave her books and she gave him a beautiful and expensive Mont Blanc pen. And of how she witnessed something of the drama of his life. On one occasion after lunch they left a plush restaurant in Notting Hill, aptly named La Pomme d’Amour. They walked towards Holland Park, where Ted’s car was parked. Suddenly a man grabbed his arm. It was the schizophrenic homosexual poet Harry Fainlight, brother of Ted’s friend Ruth. Emma recognised him because he had once turned up in the Bananas office in the hope of getting some of his work published. On that occasion, Harry had opened a black briefcase. It was empty save for a kitchen knife with a fearsomely long blade.

  Ted managed to open his car door with his one free hand. He told Emma to get in the back (not easy, since the car only had two doors). According to Emma, Fainlight was ‘literally foaming at the mouth’. Ted coolly told his lunch companion to open his battered old satchel, which was on the back seat, and get out a piece of paper. Meanwhile, he explained that Harry – now forcibly buckled into the front seat – had been stalking him, sleeping in his Devon barn for a year, then in a field, and now following him to London. A moment later he was holding Fainlight firmly by the shoulder as he got out a penknife, said ‘Look at this,’ and slit the sheet of paper diagonally ‘into two identical halves’. He then released the now terrified-looking Fainlight, who ‘shambled off aimlessly into the Holland Park crowd’. ‘He won’t trouble us again,’ said Ted.

  The story is probably exaggerated in order to dramatise Ted’s quasi-occult powers, but it is absolutely true that mentally ill Harry Fainlight, who died alone in a field in 1982, did periodically stalk and send threatening letters to Ted, blaming him for Faber’s rejection of his poems.21 Ted, always protective of his friends and their loved ones (and Ruth Fainlight and Alan Sillitoe were among his closest friends), did his best to conceal all this, and would never have dreamed of reporting Harry to the police.

  Elaine Feinstein told Emma Tennant that a poetry sequence in ‘Earth-Numb’ described all the women Ted had ever loved. The sequence begins ‘I went into a worse chamber’. This led Emma to suppose that in the darker reaches of Ted’s psyche – so scarred by Sylvia’s death – all women were torturers and anything to do with women ‘demanded a return form of torture’. If he could transform the women in his life into White Goddesses, creatures of myth and symbolic torturers, then why should she not transform him into an equally Gothic literary character for the purposes of her memoir? It would be a mistake to treat some of the stories in Burnt Diaries as reportage rather than quasi-mythic narrative. At the same time, Tennant understood many aspects of Hughes exceptionally well: his love of sea-bass, Dom Pérignon champagne and tall tales; his sometimes bonkers ideas about astrology and
the occult; his use of ancient ideas and obscure literary sources as a way of explaining, even justifying, what most reasonable people would simply describe as bad behaviour.

  Ted’s affairs sometimes created difficulty for his friends. Most of his London friends were very good at not taking sides. Whatever they thought privately, they understood his need to have both a calm, well-managed house in Devon and a very different life in London. It is testimony to his capacity for friendship, and the loyalty he inspired, that he hardly ever lost a friend and that those who were close to him remained discreet, so that – although there were always rumours – much remained unknown outside his immediate circle until his death. Occasionally, though, there was tension, especially with Devon couples who were loyal to Ted and Carol as a couple.

  The Baskins had moved to Devon so as to be close to Ted. On one occasion, Elaine Feinstein was visiting Court Green. Baskin offered to do a cover drawing for her latest volume of selected poems. She went to watch him at work. He drew ‘a flat-faced woman with small mean eyes’ and as he did so he began to ask questions about the affair with Jill Barber. Feinstein told him to ask Ted himself. ‘You know all about it, don’t you?’ Baskin replied. ‘Who is it? Has Olwyn arranged it?’ Feinstein was stunned. Olwyn? ‘She likes to involve herself,’ Baskin went on. ‘That witch! What does she do for Ted?’22 Feinstein, who was one of the very small group of writers other than Ted whom Olwyn represented as an agent, defended his sister for the effort she put into arranging fees and contracts, promoting his work, running the Rainbow Press. Baskin was not satisfied. When Feinstein left, he dismissed her invitation to visit her in Cambridge, where she lived with her husband. Despite this, Baskin remained friends with Olwyn, though his letters to her contain some barbed remarks about Ted’s extramarital life.

  Ted Hughes was immensely generous in his championing of women writers, his assistance in getting such poets as Jennifer Rankin into print. But there was also a part of him that seems to have wanted to possess women writers. It is not always clear whether he succeeded. In contrast to those women who chose to advertise their affairs after his death, some subtle writers have been deliberately teasing. Angela Carter, brilliant and beautiful magic realist, hinted that there had been ‘something’ between her and Ted.23 Edna O’Brien – sexually awakened Irish country girl and very much Ted’s type – flirts delicately with the reader in her memoir. Early in the book she gives a hilarious account of a poetry evening at a suburban house in Dulwich around 1960 where ‘the living Orpheus’, ‘the reincarnation of Heathcliff’, is expected. The host has donned an orange velvet jacket and laid out suitably decadent yellow liqueur bottles with long yellow spires (totally empty – purely for show). A pair of Canadian lesbian poets turn up, then an earnest and bashful poet from Crystal Palace called Archie. But Orpheus Hughes proves a no-show and the evening dissolves into drunken, pretentious anticlimax.

  Later, though, O’Brien tells of a vertiginous love affair that was written in the stars. At a party in Pall Mall she meets a man who emanates power and shares her love of Dylan Thomas. She leaves, weak-kneed, and soon he calls at her house and says what every woman yearns to hear: ‘I will know you for a long time.’24 From the high trapeze of the commencement of love, she descends to the mistress’s familiar story of ‘surprise meetings, cancelled meetings, devouring jealousies, the rapture and the ruptures of an affair’. She receives a phone call describing a party at which her lover is the principal guest, all the women swooning around him; she wanders the streets of Italy one summer, hoping vainly for a chance encounter, since she knows that he is on holiday there with his wife; they break off the affair and then start it again when they meet on a train, tossed from side to side at the place where two carriages join; she lives off ‘emotional crumbs’ until it comes to an end again. O’Brien emphatically does not identify the lover as Hughes, but the rollercoaster she describes is a fine evocation of what an affair with Hughes would have been like. Jill Barber recalls: ‘When collecting material for Kristina Dusseldorp’s literary magazine Mars, we were invited to Edna O’Brien’s terraced house off the King’s Road in Chelsea for tea. She opened the door resplendent in a floaty kaftan, still very beautiful. She was flirtatious with Ted and kept telling him about her erotic dreams, asking for his interpretation of them. It was a distinct come-on and I was not sure if he had invited me along to protect him or to witness yet another woman desirous of taking him to bed.’25

  Other encounters, some of them friendships, others rather more, some fleeting and casual, others felt in the heart, went below the radar even of his close friends. They will remain private, perhaps for ever, certainly for the time during which a number of archives, including a significant part of Ted’s own, remain closed.26 Though he never fully broke from Devon, he relished the personal freedom afforded by reading tours, fishing trips and overseas travel. Seamus Heaney, reminiscing about his fellow-poet’s times with Barrie Cooke on the rivers and loughs of the west of Ireland, spoke with soft voice and twinkling eye of ‘trysts’.27 And Ted always had an eye for the women he met abroad. As late as April 1996, in Berlin for a reading, in his mid-sixties and with his health failing, he wrote appreciatively in his journal of the ‘bewitching’ allure of his guide Francesca, an ‘Italian Madonna model’ with a ‘caressing voice’ and ‘mercury mind’.28

  All his life he loved women, but his reputation as a womaniser did not endear him to Plathians. There is an irony to that: his infidelity in later relationships was partly a function of his fidelity to the memory of Sylvia. After the end of his first marriage, never again would he let a woman possess the whole of him. Never again would he allow himself to be fully caged. And it was when he was away from the cage, in sight of new horizons, that he sometimes found it possible to speak of Sylvia.

  In November 1989 he was guest of honour at the second World Poets Festival in Dhaka. He remained in Bangladesh for a week, fascinated by the subcontinent, discovering the richness of Bengali language and literature and the finer aspects of the local cuisine. He and his hosts talked and joked. He ran through a selection of his favourite set-piece stories. His account of ‘the amazing island of monkeys near Japan where they had an organized social life’, his belief in ‘the aggressive nature of men through the ages’, his rueful admission of the failure of his farming career, the story of his rise from ‘dairy hand to the plumed and plum post of Poet Laureate’, which gave him ‘great liberty’ in exchange for the small price of donning ‘formal attire on rare occasions’.29

  He gave an interview, in two sweltering sessions, one during a tea break at the festival venue and the other in his room at the Sonargaon Hotel. He was on excellent form, loquaciously offering some of the most cogent summaries of his work. With regard to that defining early poem, ‘Hawk Roosting’, he explained that the hawk represented the natural world, ‘the whole biological kingdom’ which was ‘unaware of death’. Picking up on a powerful thought in a poem by Yeats, he remarked that ‘only man knows of death, knows beforehand of death’. The hawk does not know that the death it inflicts on other beasts will one day come to it. ‘In the early phases of writing it out,’ he added, ‘I had in my mind the notion of the Egyptian Horus, who was the hawk … who was the rising sun; so he was the sun in its positive phase, so he was the first original living energy in its positive phase. But that means a very destructive phase.’ Then he turned to that strange hybrid volume, Wodwo, explaining that it was the product of his search for his own self in a modern Western world where people ‘very easily lose touch with themselves’. Going on to Crow, he identified The Conference of the Birds and its quest-form as the model: Crow is a bird without any attribute other than ‘the will to keep searching’.

  In answer to a question about whether poetry has a role to play in society, he launched into his theory of poetry as ‘the psychological component of the auto-immune system’:

  So you have the physical auto-immune system and in stress, in any stress, in any disaster, in any grief or
mourning or just simply the stress of life, just the day-to-day biological response to the problems of your life, your immune system is in constant activity to repair the effect of this on your own body, on your own system. Your whole chemistry of your body is constantly under bombardment from external things, and your immune system is constantly repairing and renewing it. And that is a physical component of that which is actually a chemical process. But it seems to me that there is also a psychological component of it. And the psychological component is the strange business that we call Art.

  He believed that poetry was ‘simply the verbal form of that process’.

  And did he think that the materialism and rationality of the modern West were crippling to the soul? ‘Yes, I do, yes, yes, I would like to see the West completely injected by the East.’ The West needs the spirit of the East because there was ‘an easy acceptance throughout Eastern society that existence is based on spiritual things’. That was what had been lost in the West, which is why for all the material prosperity of the West, people were fundamentally miserable: ‘they don’t have the important thing, which is to be happy, and they know what they are lacking is something, some sort of spiritual foundation’.30 The East was the place to find that foundation, or at the very least a resource to be used by the West in its reinvention. It was this sense of alienation from modernity and this yearning for the spirituality of the East that had by this time made the Poet Laureate into a guru for Prince Charles.