Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  With his love of exotic travel, Ted took the opportunity to visit the Sundarbans in the hope of seeing a Bengal tiger. He also viewed with amazement the sixty-domed historic mosque at Bagerhat. And at Hiron Point, the southernmost point of Bangladesh, he looked out on the Bay of Bengal and wrote a delicate poem called ‘Dreams Like Deer’, in which he told of chaotic dreams spreading through the forest, meeting real tigers, and then a vision of the sea at dawn, looking like ‘a bed of pink rose petals / Where somebody very beautiful had slept / A perfect sleep’.31 The image of a deer, there in the simile of the poem’s title, is one of his markers for the memory of Sylvia. She was very much on his mind at this time, as may be seen from another encounter on the trip.

  Carolyne Wright was an attractive forty-year-old American poet in Dhaka on a two-year Fulbright fellowship, translating Bengali verse into English. She and Ted met during the mid-morning tea break on the first day of the festival, where he towered ‘head and shoulders above the clusters of Bangladeshi journalists and the Thai and Indonesian and Bhutanese guest poets resplendent in their national dress’. Wright admired his broad-shouldered ‘solid gravitas’, writing later that ‘in his dark woollen suit, he could have been a former American football player turned professor of English literature’. Ted fixed her with that ‘warmth and focused concentration’ that he gave to everyone he met, making them think they were the centre of his universe. ‘It seems we’re the only native English speakers here,’ he said. This meeting with an American Fulbright Fellow unlocked something in him.

  On the last day of the festival, the two poets, senior and junior, man and woman, leaned on the rail of the pleasure-launch Rangapalli, as it chugged along on the noubihar, the river cruise which was customary for guests of honour in Bangladesh. The conversation turned to accents and Ted said, as if from nowhere, ‘that he had become very familiar with American English when he lived for two years in the United States with – and here he hesitated ever so slightly – “with, you know, my late wife, Sylvia”’. He then spoke, dreamily, of how the river landscape before them might have figured in her poetry. And as they stood at a distance from the other guests on the crowded launch, the floodgates opened and he spoke of Plath ‘with respect, admiration, affection’. ‘I’ve been writing my own version of events,’ he continued, ‘but it will be published posthumously. If people knew the full story, when they learn what really happened between us, they’ll be surprised that it’s so mundane, so ordinary.’ With a poet’s sensitivity, Wright understood ‘that Hughes would go on living with Plath in the only way now possible – in words, in memory – perhaps to the end of his days’:

  In his reserved, understated manner, he was making a profound expression of the undying nature of love – of his love and respect and sorrow for the brilliant and tormented poet-wife of his youth. In his words to me, as in the poems he was even then writing, he was seeking a resolution to his own and their children’s loss and grief, some way of coming to terms with his beloved’s abrupt, irreversible departure – from him, from her children, from herself. He seemed to seek no less than a reconciliation across the very boundary between life and death.32

  Thanks to the presence of another woman, he seemed to recover Sylvia. It had occasionally happened with Brenda, as once when he returned to Court Green: ‘I seemed to take a loop and recapture absolutely lost life, – coming up the path from the front gate, seeing toys on the lawn and the front door open, when I expected only the everlasting locked-up decayed gloom, of everything finished. Like dreams of S. returning.’33 It happened again with a friend of Olwyn’s, in a visionary moment immortalised in his achingly sad late poem ‘The Offers’. And it happened here, during this peaceful moment in a beautiful alien place, with the Fulbright poet. ‘But [he] who never felt that absoluteness of loss then found it again’, he wrote in his journal on one such occasion, ‘has missed the sweetest, strongest feeling in life.’34

  23

  Remembrance of Elmet

  Emma Tennant tells a story, not recorded elsewhere, in which Ted Hughes recounts how his father once took off for London in order to have an affair with a pretty nurse, but got little further than King’s Cross station before his pursuing wife caught him and marched him home.1 On the Greek tragic principle of the sins of the fathers being visited upon – or replayed by – the children, this tale says something about Ted’s feelings regarding the double life he was now living in Devon and London. The pretty nurse is clearly an inverted projection of his own guilt at his desire to escape the boredom of country life.

  Like many men in their late forties, Ted spent a lot of time worrying about family and money. The investigation into the back taxes due on Sylvia’s posthumous earnings was as interminable as a Dickensian legal case. By early 1977, the old tax inspector had died and the case was taken on by a fierce woman who rejoiced in the name of Mrs Skinner. ‘Why does everything have to be so symbolic?’ Ted asked Luke Myers when telling him of these woes.2 Two and a half years later, he was still waiting for the assessment on the Plath earnings for the period between 1971 and 1975.

  Carol was a worry. He wanted to sell the farm, but she didn’t. He believed that she regarded its retention as a sign of faith in the future of their marriage. She was, he confided, not happy about his ‘follies’ (the term he always used when writing to Myers about his dalliances). He did not want her to be wholly dependent on him, to devote herself merely to doing the books and bookings in relation to his literary career. There was an overture about some work for her as a television presenter. He dissuaded her from pursuing the opportunity, then regretted doing so, thinking that she would have been very good at it. Then he tried to persuade her to become an acupuncturist.3

  Frieda was a worry. When she left school, she spent all her time with the local bikers, tearing around the high-banked lanes of North Devon. On one occasion there was a chimney fire when she was at Court Green with her boyfriend, a handsome motorcyclist called Des. Ted came home from a happy Saturday’s fishing at Slapton Ley to find fire engines in the lane outside, blue lights flashing on the house and the thatch soaked with water. He gave whisky to the firemen and ordered a barrel of beer that they drank when they came back a few hours later to check that all was damped down and to clear up some of the mess. Soon after this, Frieda left home and moved in with Des, who was a cowman living in tied accommodation on a big farm near Exeter. They married in the summer of 1979, Frieda aged just nineteen.

  Nick was not a worry. The boy was doing superbly at Bedales, excelling in every endeavour from (non-motorised) cycle racing to academic work. The English and History teachers wanted him to do A Levels in Arts subjects. They had him writing wonderfully imagin-tive stories and poems. He was equally good when it came to practical skills such as carpentry and pottery. But his great love was the sciences and that was the direction in which he went for A Levels. He would secure straight-A grades and a place to read Zoology at the Queen’s College, Oxford.

  Father and son worked together composing Centaur type on an Albion hand printing press given to Nick by Olwyn and set up in an outhouse of Court Green. In the spring of 1979, they printed three of Ted’s poems – ‘Night Arrival of Sea-Trout’, ‘The Iron Wolf’ and ‘Puma’ – each on a single sheet of thickly textured Italian paper, thirty signed copies only, proudly branded as coming from ‘The Morrigu Press’. The Morrígu or Morrígan, meaning ‘great queen’ or ‘phantom queen’, was a goddess of battle in the ancient Ulster Cycle of mythical tales. She would sometimes appear in the form of a crow, flying above warriors as they went into battle, but she could also take the form of eel, wolf or cow. Sometimes she was imaged as triple goddess, three weird sisters. Robert Graves described her as a death goddess who often took the form of a raven and whom he linked to the figure of Morgan le Faye.4 Ted’s three poems for Nick’s hand press metamorphose her into various characteristically Hughesian forms. As Iron Wolf with iron fate, she conjures up Ted’s own grimmer histories. As puma sleeping in the sun, �
�half-melted / in the sheet-flame silence’, she opens ‘one jewel’ of an eye and there is a glimmer of the word that Ted habitually used for Sylvia’s eyes and of the big cat poem in which she first wrote about him.

  Printing was shared craft, but the greater bond was fishing. The passion passed from father to son, and would eventually lead to a distinguished academic career in the field of stream salmonid ecology.5 Shared fishing trips became an annual treat. These often brought challenges. Jill’s presence was an awkwardness in Ireland in the autumn of 1977. A week on a high-class stretch of the Dee in Scotland in April 1979 was marred by daily snow and no salmon (Nick half hoped for an invitation to fish on an even higher-class stretch at Balmoral with his school friend David Linley, son of Princess Margaret). Iceland that summer was full of natural beauty, but all the salmon runs were either too expensive or fully pre-booked. They had more success with sea-trout. Whenever Ted was cast down, Nick cheered him up with wise observations and funny stories. He also developed the art of cooking ingenious suppers with very limited ingredients. They made plans to venture further afield the following year: to Alaska, a place that would draw Nick back and hold him for the rest of his life.

  Olwyn was a worry. For some time, she had been in an on–off relationship with a handsome Irishman called Richard Thomas, who had something of the look of Ted about him. He was a heavy drinker, who became violent when under the influence. Again and again, he would dry out, then lapse. By 1978 he was in hospital, critically ill with pancreatitis. He had been apart from Olwyn for some time, living with a teacher who was also an alcoholic. Olwyn heard that he was dying and went to say goodbye in hospital. Richard swore that he was going to get better, would never touch another drop, study at the Open University to become a History teacher. He had the Irish blarney as well as the good looks, and she was hooked. She discharged him from hospital and kept him financially while he began his degree. For nine months he kept off the booze. They travelled to Russia and Turkey, and for the first time Olwyn seemed to have found genuine happiness in a relationship with a man. On an impulse, they got married in June 1979, a few weeks before Frieda also tied the knot.

  Things started to go wrong within a month. Richard tried to control Olwyn: what she could and what she couldn’t do, no housework allowed, fury if a meal was not on the table at exactly the right time. He tried to stop her buying a house in Wales at a bargain price, simply because he didn’t like the man from whom she was buying it – who happened to be an old boyfriend. It did not help when the New York comedian Marvin Cohen came to dinner and said, ‘Where’s that fire-eating Marxist Irish Nationalist that used to live here, that great fiery wonderful drinker? And who’s this little quiet University student?’ This provoked Richard to go and get a bottle of vodka. A week later, he went to an Open University residential course in Bath and came back after two days, blind drunk. After that, he did not stop. He took Olwyn’s money, threatened her, pawned her jewels, shouted all night, smashed up her home. She was at her wits’ end, so Ted went to stay with her. For two nights, nothing was seen of Richard. Then he appeared, drunk out of his mind. There was an evening of high drama, lasting into the small hours of the morning, when Richard gashed his wrists and disappeared, bloodily, into a taxi, presumably to go to the other woman in his life. By the end of the year, the marriage just six months old, Ted was helping Olwyn prepare her divorce papers.

  Most of all, Ted’s father was a worry. He was depressed, debilitated and difficult. He could not go on living on his own. Every time Ted left home – to go on a reading tour, to spend time in London with Jill, to pick up an OBE at Buckingham Palace in the summer of 1977 – there was the nagging anxiety about what Bill might do or fail to do. In May 1978, while Ted and Carol took a two-week holiday in Wales, they placed him in the private nursing home run by Carol’s sister Jean. This was a success. Ted wrote to Gerald saying that their father would have to move in with one or other of them, or with Olwyn (which was hardly likely), or go into a horrible state-funded nursing home that would be little better than a prison for the dying. Unless the money could be found – a far from cheap £70 per week – to enable him to go permanently to Jean’s, where he had fared so much better during his brief stay. Gerald did not rise to the bait and offer a financial contribution. Several months later Ted was still worrying about the impossibility of funding the nearly £4,000 a year it would take to secure a place for his father with his sister-in-law – he was terrified of how the sum would accumulate in the event of Bill staggering on for years.

  As usual when faced with a financial challenge, Ted came up with various schemes. One of them was to professionalise his schedule of poetry readings for schools. Instead of going to them one at a time, he would do bigger events, creating a large audience by getting lots of different schools to send groups of sixth-formers along at £30 a time. Carol’s brother Robert Orchard was recruited to organise the process. But then, as a result of too many readings and runnings about, Ted’s body gave way. His left hip lifted itself out of its socket in the middle of a reading at a Poetry Book Society event on the Isle of Wight, causing him greater physical agony than he had ever known. He was laid up for weeks, and had to slow down when he went back on the road.

  The freelance literary life meant constant juggling of priorities. His notebooks are filled with To Do lists. One typical February day, he listed the eight tasks in hand: completing his edition of Sylvia’s Collected Poems; getting her manuscripts ready for Sotheby’s to sell them; selecting the poems for an anthology on behalf of PEN, the organisation supporting oppressed writers; writing to Ted Cornish and two doctors, to fix a meeting in relation to plans for a book on Cornish’s faith-healing (the doctors would monitor a selection of his patients to see if they really were getting better); completing a poetry anthology for children; writing to David Pease, the warm and energetic director of the Arvon Foundation (by now a great friend), to organise their poetry competition; and ‘Write about ten letters, fending people off etc.’6

  Some of these tasks would make him money. The manuscript experts Felix Pryor and Roy Davids had come down from Sotheby’s and been very encouraging about the potential price that an American library or collector would pay for Sylvia’s archive. Other tasks were associated with personal obsessions, notably his desire to write a biography of Ted Cornish. He tried to interest Prince Philip in Cornish’s remarkable powers. And others were duties incumbent upon him as the country’s leading missionary for the importance of poetry. The Arvon International Poetry Competition, which was Ted’s idea, had great potential to raise the profile of as well as funds for the foundation, which was in severe financial difficulty.

  He gave the competition a high profile by persuading three of the most distinguished poets of the day – Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney and Charles Causley – to join him as judges. His letter to Larkin asking him to be a judge took the opportunity to offer congratulations on the recently published ‘Aubade’, a first venture back into print after long public silence. Larkin replied glumly that the act of writing the poem had staved off his fear of death for a few months but that it was creeping back. He in turn congratulated Ted on being ‘our best/most popular/or whatever it was poet’.7 Well over 30,000 people paid to enter the competition, providing much-needed income. The judges read every poem. Ted claimed that the whole process was so consuming that he wrote nothing for the next six months.8

  It was interesting to observe Larkin (whose literary taste Ted described as ‘spermicide’)9 and a pleasure to work with Heaney and Causley, a poet whose work he greatly admired. With his tongue only partly in his cheek, Ted said that the only submission he really liked among the thousands of entries was a thirty-five-page piece by Kenneth Bernard, founder of a movement called Theatre for the Ridiculous back in the late Sixties. The poem was a priapic celebration of a baboon in a nightclub having complicated and various sex with a beautiful woman. Ted was green with envy when he read it. He claimed that Larkin said that if it won he would d
issociate himself from the prize, though in his notes on the short-listed poems Larkin actually described it as ‘potentially funny and potentially lyrical and moving’, though too long.10 Causley thought that it was simply obscene. Heaney quite liked it.11 The £5,000 first prize went to the young poet Andrew Motion, Ted’s eventual successor as Poet Laureate, though not before a debacle in which the judges tried to change the rules and have six joint winners instead, at £1,000 each. This led the sponsor, the Observer newspaper, to threaten to withdraw the prize money and caused embarrassment to Ted’s friend Melvyn Bragg, who was devoting a special edition of his television South Bank Show to the award.

  The children’s anthology was eventually published in 1982 under the title The Rattle Bag (‘The Medicine Bag’ was considered, but rejected). The origin of this project was a suggestion by Charles Monteith at Faber that Seamus and Marie Heaney – both teachers – should edit an anthology called The Faber Book of Verse for Younger People. The project lay dormant because Marie was not keen, so in 1978 Monteith suggested that it should be a Heaney–Hughes collaboration. To begin with, they worked independently. Then they would compare selections. The process continued through 1980, in conjunction with the judging of the biennial Arvon poetry competition. The two poet-editors made a conscious decision to omit many of the canonical authors. The selection was deliberately personal, eclectic, intended for enjoyment rather than edification. The title, chosen at the last minute, nicely evoked the sense of the volume as a carnivalesque ragbag in which, as Heaney later put it, ‘Gaelic charm and African oral poetry turned up alongside highly literary work by Elizabethan courtiers and contemporary Americans’. There were translations from Hungarian, Russian and modern Greek poets; ‘Celtic monks and medieval hunters’ were corralled alongside cosmopolitan high modernists and hippyish San Francisco beat poets.12