Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  By self-denying ordinance, they did not include any of their own poems, but several of Plath’s are there. Since the arrangement was alphabetical by title, to avoid the ‘textbook’ feel of chronological order, the final poem is, touchingly, ‘You’re’, that loveliest of lyrics addressed to Frieda in the womb. Reviewers delighted at the book’s success in restoring the ‘thrill in reading’ that was ‘forfeited by most conventional anthologies’. This was that rare thing, a hugely varied collection of poems that had its reader ‘laughing out loud, springing from his chair in delight, rushing to other books to supplement new discoveries, and beaming with remembered pleasure at odd moments of the day’.13 Thanks to the respect in which Heaney and Hughes were held, especially among schoolteachers, the anthology was tremendously successful, with the paperback edition quickly selling out and being reprinted.

  Ted’s work for young people during this phase of his career also included a volume entitled Moon-Bells in a series published by Chatto and Windus called ‘Poets for the Young’. This brought together a mix of new and previously published poems, mostly about animals and various moon-beings. Some were taken from Earth-Moon, a limited-edition sequence for the Rainbow Press, others from older collections. Confusingly, there is also a volume called Moon-Whales and Other Moon Poems, with drawings by Leonard Baskin and a dedication to Frieda and Nicholas, for the Viking Press in New York, which combines the complete contents of Earth-Moon and the much older collection of children’s (or were they?) poems, The Earth-Owl. This (with some omissions) was republished in England by Faber more than a decade later. Each poem takes something from the earth – a whale, a lily, a wolf, a mirror, a theatre, an oak, haggis, a tulip, a nasturtium, a snail, a witch, a hyena, a foxglove, a clock, a walker, a bell, a hare, a bull, and more – and reimagines an inverted or surreal moon version of it.

  Some of the poems are written in jogging rhyme: ‘A man-hunt on the moon is full of horrible sights and sounds. / There are these foxes in red jackets, they are their own horses and hounds’ (‘A Moon Man-Hunt’). Others have the darkness of Hughes’s poems for grown-ups. In the poem that gave the title to the Rainbow Press edition, a burning full moon rolls slowly towards a human out on a walk. It crushes boulders and dwelling-places as it goes. The man shuts his eyes against the glaring brightness, draws a dagger and stabs and stabs and stabs until ‘The cry that quit the moon’s wounds / Circled the earth’. The punctured moon shrinks to the size of a handkerchief, which the man picks up as a trophy which he carries ‘Into moonless night’. Still others, such as ‘Moon Marriage’, begin in doggerel (‘Marriage on the moon is rather strange. / It’s nothing you can arrange’) and end in a tone that, coming from Hughes, is to say the least pointed: ‘On the moon it is all a matter of luck / Is marriage. / And the only offspring are poems.’14

  Early in the Seventies, around the time he was determining to live in Devon rather than Yorkshire, Ted had suggested to Charles Monteith that he might write a series of poems memorialising his place of origin, accompanied by the landscape work of the distinguished photographer Fay Godwin. In 1970, she had been commissioned to take a new portrait photo of him as part of the publicity campaign for Crow. Ted usually loathed photo shoots, but he and Godwin hit it off. Her portrait became his preferred image for reproduction: brooding, looking straight down the camera, with lick of hair over forehead and leather jacket unzipped. With his hooked nose and cragged demeanour, there is something of the hawk or crow about him. They struck up a friendship and he suggested that she should create images of the Calder Valley that would stir him into poetry. She became excited by the scheme and fell in visual love with the area, taking dozens of photos. It was Ted who stalled on the project, feeling inner resistance to the idea of moving from simple evocation of place to ‘autobiography and history’. He didn’t want to give away what he called his ‘capital and the medicine bundle’.15

  In the summer of 1976, helped by the release into elegy that had come with the poems in memory of Jack Orchard, he was ready. Then he heard news that Fay had been diagnosed with cancer. Once again, a woman to whom he had become close was in danger of slipping into death. In fact, she was treated successfully and went on to outlive Ted by seven years. But the prospect of losing her before he had done justice to her images gave him the added spur that he needed. He wrote her a long letter describing how he was getting to work on an ‘episodic autobiography’ that linked personal memory to the history of the place – its wildness, its centrality to the Industrial Revolution, its decline and the shadow of the First World War. A black history to match her stark black-and-white images of bleak landscapes, hard stone and blackened buildings.

  He dug out his copy, received in uncorrected proof, of a book about the valley that had been published in 1975: Millstone Grit by Glyn Hughes.16 It described the Calder Valley as ‘the English Siberia’, a place where the punished old have been left to die while the young go adventuring.17 Glyn Hughes told of how the area created wealth in the nineteenth century for wars in the twentieth, how that wealth benefited London traders far more than the local people, how (as Karl Marx said) the only good that came of the Industrial Revolution was that it released the working class from ‘the idiocy of rural life’, how the Calder Valley was a place of broken walls and dead farms, a hilly enclave between two packed industrial areas, a man-made desert, yet with raw beauty. It had a particular grip upon Glyn Hughes, as it did upon Ted, ‘because its arraignment against poisonous, dirty and ugly towns destructive of the human spirit, is a symbol of the human condition, balanced between the impulses of inspiration and destruction’.

  The whole book is steeped in the mood of D. H. Lawrence, Ted-like in its account of how geology defines temperament (‘dour’), prose-poetically evocative of millstone grit oxidising from its original orange and gold with glassy crystals of silica to the ‘black, black, that makes your eyes ache everywhere in West Yorkshire, so that you think of dirt, no matter how clean and bright the day’. Houses back to back or back to earth, hanging on the edge of the valley. Houses now boarded up, clog factories slowly going broke, mills half demolished. Terraced rows where you hear the sounds of life next door. And the people: the Brontës, who were the first to give the region a literary consciousness; the fearsome Parson Grimshaw who went from Todmorden to Haworth, who once wore a horned mask to impersonate the Devil in order to frighten a young man into marrying a girl he had seduced, and who increased the congregation in the Methodist chapel at Haworth a hundredfold through the sheer theatricality of his fire-and-brimstone sermons; Billy Holt, self-taught writer and artist, also from Todmorden, who rode around Europe on a grey horse called Trigger bought from a rag-and-bone man. A little further afield was Saddleworth Moor, a place of ‘violent conflicts that were, perhaps, as much products of that violent weather over the denuded uplands, as they were a product of social forces. And these conflicts were expressed, from time to time, in murders’ – including the Moors Murders that Ted had gestured obliquely towards in ‘Crow’s Song about England’.

  A few years later, Glyn Hughes turned Grimshaw’s life into a novel called Where I Used to Play on the Green. Ted contributed an introduction linking the perverted parson to the Brontës and implicitly, by way of reference to ‘sexual sacrifice’, to his own Reverend Lumb. He noted that, like William Blake (whose poem ‘The Garden of Love’ gave the novel its title), Glyn Hughes saw the links between Puritanism and the factory, the psychosis of the minister passed to the millmaster. ‘It is the story of a spiritual genocide, and the historical evidence for it is there, in the barren island bounded by Halifax, Todmorden, Colne and Keighley: the broken fragments of a cruel decalogue, tumbled about a giant graveyard.’18 And yet Glyn Hughes’s books – both Millstone Grit and the novel – are full of light, of glitter in the landscape created by pace in the writing.

  All these aspects of Glyn Hughes’s Calder Valley writing corresponded with Ted’s feelings about the place. He was at last able to forge ahead with his collection
, bringing together geology, meteorology, community, history and autobiography. People emerge as a product of place and weather. The spirit of Billy Holt is invoked. The poems are full of chills, hot food, clothes manufactured for money and employment but also worn for warmth. The moor becomes his mother. The child wanders on hillside and by water. Fishing for tiddlers, sheltering from a storm, throwing stones into the canal on the way to school, poaching, communing with birds, dreaming fearfully, meeting old men on the road, finding bones and thinking about ancient Britons. This is Ted as another Wordsworth, but a Wordsworth transported from the gentle bosom of the English Lake District to an edgier terrain.

  By the spring of 1978, Ted was able to tell Gerald that the collection was nearly complete. Remains of Elmet was published by Faber and Faber a year later, in May 1979 (with the usual de luxe edition from the Rainbow Press a month before). Ted dedicated the poems to the memory of his mother. Fay Godwin dedicated the photographs to Ted. Immediately after the dedication page comes a poem, printed in italics, beginning:

  Six years into her posthumous life

  My uncle raises my Mother’s face

  And says Yes he would love a cup of tea.19

  For readers accustomed to the style of Gaudete and Crow, even that of the early poems, this feels like a new voice: quiet, matter-of-fact, above all deeply personal. Uncle Walt stands in for Edith as the repository of family memory, the connector that attaches Ted (in both senses of ‘attach’) to his ‘inheritance’. Walt, now frail himself, holds the fragile, crumbling ‘treasures’ of the past; they must be captured and preserved before it is too late. The poem was written in 1975; the retention of the present tense for his voice when publishing it after his death the following year gives it added poignancy.

  On turning the page, the reader finds a prefatory note that distances the poems from the personal. Here Hughes explains that the Calder Valley was ‘the last ditch of Elmet, the last British Celtic kingdom to fall to the Angles’. It was a place of wilderness and outlaws, then ‘the cradle for the Industrial Revolution in textiles’, then a place of decay. Hughes notes that throughout his life he had watched the mills and chapels fall into disuse, the population – rooted and settled for centuries – change, the spirit of the place become elegiac. Godwin set out to capture that spirit in her photographs, he says, and it was the photographs that inspired the poems.

  This depersonalisation is a screen. The first poem in the main body of the text is entitled ‘Where the Mothers’. Godwin’s photograph, on the page opposite, shows Abel Cross in Crimsworth Dene, a pair of stone markers associated with a local legend of rival brothers. Given the closeness of the spot to the place where Ted and Gerald camped, there can be no doubting the autobiographical resonance. So too with the second poem, ‘Hardcastle Crags’. There is no explicit autobiographical reference, but Ted knew that this was his mother’s favourite place, the site of family picnics and the walks with Olwyn and little Ted that first exposed him to the beauty of the natural world. The third poem, ‘Lumb Chimney’, inevitably, though again not explicitly, evokes Lumb Bank and the Reverend Lumb of Gaudete.

  Then there is ‘Open to Huge Light’, printed immediately below a stark Godwin photograph of two bare trees at Top Withens. One of Hughes’s most treasured possessions was another photograph, of Sylvia in one of these very trees, taken on the memorable day when Ted and his bride and Uncle Walt went in search of Wuthering Heights. Again, though, the personal association is not made explicit. Similarly, ‘Football at Slack’ contains but does not reveal the memory of his father’s prowess as a soccer player.

  ‘Crown Point Pensioners’ has two old men – with ‘Old faces, old roots. / Indigenous memories’ – sitting, each with flat cap and favourite walking stick with polished knob, looking down on ‘The map of their lives’, reminiscing by way of the landmarks of the valley. What the poem does not say is that Crown Point is just a few yards up the road from the Beacon. The corresponding Godwin photograph was not actually taken at Crown Point (and it shows one old man, not two). Hughes is not so much turning the photographs into verse as using them as a springboard into his own memories. Crown Point is effectively a personal trig station, symbolically located between the Beacon, Lumb Bank and Heptonstall graveyard. At the end of the poem ‘An America-bound jet, on its chalky thread, / Dozes in the dusty burning dome.’20 The thread of memory is drawing him back to Sylvia.

  Turn two leaves and there is a poem called ‘Heptonstall’. Turn one more and there is a title that begins with a word that has occurred in only two poems in the previous hundred pages (and in these only glancingly, not flagged up in the title): ‘You Claw the Door’. There is no doubting the identity of ‘you’: it is Sylvia, trapped in the Hughes family home. The image of the lights twinkling from the valley at night is borrowed from one of her poems remembering her time at the Beacon, ‘Wuthering Heights’.21 Like so many of Ted’s most telling and powerful poems, this one has a complicated textual history. It first appeared in print the previous year in Orts, that privately published collection full of coded autobiographical musings not meant for public consumption. But in that first outing, Sylvia was veiled within a veil: here the poem was called ‘Hathershelf’, the alternative name of Scout Rock, the cliff that loomed over Ted’s childhood home in Mytholmroyd. With that title, a reader in the biographical know might assume that it is Hughes himself – or a member of his immediate family – who is clawing the door.

  In Remains of Elmet, the text of ‘Hathershelf’ is paired with an image of fallen leaves and tree roots – reaching tentacles on the surface of the earth – and, in the foreground, an oblong patch of compacted soil that looks somewhat like a freshly filled grave. But now the opening phrase has become the title: ‘You Claw the Door’. The poem is deprived of the name that placed it in Mytholmroyd. Ted comes one step closer to the acknowledgement that the ‘you’ of his most personal poems is Sylvia more often than anyone else. When Remains of Elmet was revised some years later as Elmet the phrase ‘You claw the door’ was returned to the text and a new title introduced, locking the memory of Sylvia – and her nearby grave – into the house on Heptonstall Slack: ‘The Beacon’.22

  Steeped in the English literary tradition, the poem’s ending – ‘While the world rolls in rain / Like a stone inside surf’ – echoes one of the greatest elegies in all literature, William Wordsworth’s mysterious, lapidary ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’. Wordsworth mourns for a dead girl called Lucy:

  No motion has she now, no force;

  She neither hears nor sees;

  Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,

  With rocks, and stones, and trees.

  Hughes, always a poet of motion and force, converts Wordsworth’s passive ‘rolled’ (Lucy’s body beneath the earth) to an active ‘rolls’ (the world goes on). The tree is, as it were, moved out of the poem into the Fay Godwin photograph, while the turf on Lucy’s grave becomes ‘surf’, suggestive of the restorative power of water.

  Turn the page again and the coded references to Sylvia multiply. The next poem in Remains of Elmet is a meditation on ‘Emily Brontë’ and her death: a Sylvia obsession. The one after that is called ‘Haworth Parsonage’. It uses the resonantly Plathian image of electrocution for the suicidal depression of Bramwell Brontë – though here Hughes’s memory is complicated by Assia’s lonely day and night in Haworth in the last week of her life. The image of the parsonage as ‘A house / Emptied and scarred black’ echoes the language of her journal.23

  Then comes ‘Top Withens’, enshrining the memory of the walk there with Walt. Next there is ‘The Sluttiest Sheep in England’, a deromanticised variation on Sylvia’s ‘Sheep in Fog’, that poem about which Hughes the critic-editor of his wife wrote at enormous length. Remains of Elmet ends with a return to Hughes’s mother, alluding to her dreams of angels. But the penultimate poem is called ‘Heptonstall Cemetery’. It evokes wind slamming over the tops and then repeats the formulation ‘You claw’. It ends with
swans flying westward, low across a stormy sky, towards the Atlantic, tracing the same path as the American-bound plane over Crown Point. Ted knew well that swans, like greylag geese, mate for life and know the meaning of grief. Some bereaved swans stay alone for the rest of their lives, while others take flight and rejoin their flock. Between the wind and the swans comes an explicit sequence of namings:

  And Thomas and Walter and Edith

  Are living feathers

  Esther and Sylvia

  Living feathers.24

  Here are Uncle Tom and Mother Edith joined in the family plot by Uncle Walt, who died while Ted was in Australia. And by Sylvia in double form, as both herself and as the Esther of The Bell Jar. Looking across the page, one sees a magnificent Fay Godwin photograph of radiant light and rising mist over a Yorkshire landscape with the silhouette of a church tower on the horizon. The list of photographic locations at the back of the book identifies it, needless to say, as Heptonstall Old Church. The geographically and biographically alert reader will come to the realisation that the focal point of the image is Sylvia’s grave. It is no coincidence that this is the image chosen for the front cover of the book. Nor that the back cover shows the two trees at Top Withens, one of which Sylvia had climbed on that never-to-be-forgotten day in 1956.

  The recognition that ‘You Claw the Door’ is about Sylvia, and that her ghost inhabits so many of the poems in the second half of the book, raises the possibility that she is the ‘you’ mentioned twice in poems placed earlier in the collection, ‘Churn-Milk Joan’ and ‘Bridestones’. The former, based on a stone above Mytholmroyd and the story of a rape and murder associated with it, ends with an image, reminiscent of Plath’s ‘The Rabbit Catcher’, of screams and ‘awful little death’.25 The latter imagines a marriage mystically consecrated upon the moors and then a grave in which the dead bride, again like Wordsworth’s Lucy, is rolled in earth’s diurnal course: