Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  With the wreath of weather

  The wreath of hills

  The wreath of stars

  Upon your shoulders.26

  Most of the reviews of Remains of Elmet were lukewarm. Godwin’s starkly beautiful photographs garnered more praise than Hughes’s chiselled poems, which critics tended to fault for ‘a muscle-bound galvanism expressing itself in packed and tensile phrases listed down the page, often with no verb at all’.27 The allusions to Sylvia went unnoticed.

  A dozen years later, in the early Nineties, Ted told Faber and Faber that he was no longer satisfied with his existing Selected Poems but not yet ready for a new selection. And he certainly didn’t want a Collected, which would be like a coffin. So how about republishing his poems in groups of three: Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal and Wodwo without the prose stories would make one trio, Cave Birds, Remains of Elmet and River (his next collection) another.28 Faber knew that the first three books, his universally acknowledged masterpieces, still sold enough to be worth keeping in print as freestanding volumes, but they liked the idea of gathering together the latter trio and in 1993 they published Three Books: the Elmet, Cave Bird and River poems, though with many a variant (revisions, additions) from the earlier collections, and without any Fay Godwin photographs. Faber’s marketing ploy was to explain that the three books were all ‘central texts in Ted Hughes’s output’ and that by gathering them together, ‘unadorned’ (which is to say, without the cost of illustrations), ‘each can now be read as part of a larger visionary enterprise, with family resemblances and shared concerns freshly accentuated’.29 The argument works well enough for Remains of Elmet and River: when read together they form a diptych in which Yorkshire contrasts with Devon and ravaged community with restorative nature. But the arcane ritual of Cave Birds is a chasm, not a bridge. Where the first and third books brought Hughes’s elegiac voice to a wide audience for the first time, the middle one feels like the last gasp of the tired, overworked mythic voice.

  In several respects, the version of Remains of Elmet included in Three Books was significantly different from that published back in 1979. Most obviously, the absence of the photographs not only made it a normal – and affordable – pocket-sized paperback, it also marked the collection as being truly Ted’s, the product of his rather than Godwin’s vision and memory of the Calder Valley. His father was dead by this time, so it could now be dedicated to the memory of both his parents, not just his mother. Ted also took the opportunity to add an explanatory note, partly drawing on his introduction to Glyn Hughes’s Where I Used to Play on the Green, in which he linked his own upbringing to the decline of the valley: the emptying chapels, the closing mills, the abandoned farms, the sense of ‘living among the survivors, in the remains’.30 The note gives context and added poignancy to some of the best poems in the collection, such as ‘First, Mills’, in which the land is gradually drained and quietened until at last all that is left is ‘two minutes silence’ (alluding to cenotaphs and Remembrance Day) ‘In the childhood of earth’.31

  There is also an increased personalisation. ‘Hardcastle Crags’, which was not explicitly about Hughes’s mother, is replaced by ‘Leaf Mould’ from Wolfwatching (another intermediate collection), which vividly places her in this place that she loved. ‘What’s the first thing you think of?’, a poem about Gerald and his model glider, first published casually in the Spectator in 1985, is now gathered into the family setting of the collection. ‘Football at Slack’ is brought nearer the beginning, in honour of Ted’s footballer father. Above all, reordering of the sequence also makes the presence of Sylvia more apparent. ‘Emily Brontë’ and finally ‘Heptonstall Cemetery’, with its explicit naming of her, now form the climax of the collection.

  And a new poem is added: ‘Two Photographs of Top Withens’. In the original Remains of Elmet, precisely because of the presence of Godwin’s photographs, Hughes avoided writing about photographs or even using the word in the poems. Now, in the absence of actual photographs, he conjures up the memory of two of them. One is Godwin’s photo of a pair of trees by Top Withens, which had been on the back cover of Remains of Elmet. The other is that precious snapshot belonging to Ted: Wuthering Heights, ruined but with roof slabs still in place, and ‘you’ (Sylvia) smiling, halfway up one of the sycamore trees beside it. Emily Brontë is below the earth,

  But you smile in the branches – still in your twenties,

  Ear cocked for the great cries.

  ‘We could buy this place and renovate it!’32

  The ‘great cries’ are presumably those of Cathy and Heathcliff, calling their passion for each other across the moor.

  The lovely thought of Ted and Sylvia restoring Wuthering Heights and making it their home is then modified by images of bleakness and horror, ‘Mad heather and grass tugged by the mad / And empty wind’. No, Sylvia would have gone mad living on the moor. The only thing that endures in this bleak environment is stone. Even ‘the spirit of the place’, like that of Emily, is ‘Hidden beneath stone’. By the end of the poem Walt, their guide, has gone into the earth too. But the trees remain, in the second photograph, and in them the camera-lens of Ted’s poetic memory captures, if only for an instant, the ‘ghost’ of Sylvia.

  24

  The Fisher King

  Wild Steelhead & Salmon: Do you bring that same intensity to your fishing?

  Hughes: I think now it’s just focused on rivers and fishing. I would never stop fishing because I do not want to lose what goes with fishing [pauses] This last connection.

  WS&S: To what?

  Hughes: To this whole – to everything, I guess. The stuff of the Earth. The whole of life.1

  In the lead-up to Christmas 1979, Ted reflected in a letter to Gerald and Joan, and another to Richard Murphy, on an exhausting year of late nights, storms (both literal and emotional) and tiring, if rewarding, fishing holidays with Nick. Despite the dislocated hip and the flu and the exhaustion, his appetite for travel was unabated.2 There were two ways of witnessing the world, he would tell his brother in a later letter: from a tent in the wild with his son and from an expensive hotel on the tourist trail with his wife. Plans for 1980 were Mexico with Carol, Alaska with Nick and perhaps Florida for some big fish with Barrie Cooke. Ted was about to turn fifty and it was time, he thought, to do exactly what he wanted before it was too late. The good news was that on their return from Iceland Nick had helped him build a wonderful new writing hut in the garden. He had cleared the decks of the Elmet project and was in the right place for something new and important. The Mexico visit, for a literary festival, was postponed and Florida didn’t happen, but Alaska did.

  They had finally come up with the money to move his father into his sister-in-law’s nursing home, but Bill was becoming ever more difficult, sometimes creating embarrassing scenes. Meanwhile, following the break-up of her marriage, Olwyn moved out of Chetwynd Road and bought a house in Cambridge, near her friends Arnold and Elaine Feinstein. The sale of the Chetwynd Road house yielded a tidy profit, even though its basement flat was retained. On one occasion when Ted was in Cambridge, checking that Olwyn was coping, her ex-husband Richard turned up and voices were raised again. After more on–off dramas over the next two years, Olwyn moved back to north London and eventually took up residence in another terraced house in Chetwynd Road, where she would remain for the rest of Ted’s life and well beyond.

  William Hughes weakened rapidly after a fall, when he broke his hip. He may have had a minor stroke while under anaesthetic. His mind had been wandering for some time. He was moved to hospital and Ted would visit, sitting in silence. Early in 1981, Ted and Carol went to Yorkshire for the funeral of Uncle Walt’s daughter Barbara, who had died in her early fifties, having always suffered from physical and mental-health problems. They stayed on for a few days after the funeral, especially enjoying the company of Anne Duncan, one of the daughters of Uncle Tom’s only son David and his wife Rita. Ted told Gerald that she and her sister Ellen were both beauties and that
Anne had great comic gifts – she had joined them for dinner with some old friends and had them all in fits of laughter until the small hours of the morning. Then on the Sunday, in rain and snow, they took their friend Roy Davids, the manuscripts man from Sotheby’s, to the desolate ruins of Top Withens. They came down from the moors and were taking tea with Aunt Hilda when the telephone call came. Ted’s father had died, in the nursing home owned by Carol’s sister.

  They hurried south. Looking at his father’s body in an Exeter funeral parlour, Ted was reminded, he told Gerald, of ‘a noble old Spaniard’.3 He saw his father’s body on 11 February, eighteen years to the day from the time when he had seen Sylvia in the morgue of University College Hospital. As with Sylvia, the body was taken north for a bleak February funeral in Heptonstall. The grave was next to Edith’s, just along the row from Sylvia’s. Olwyn and Hilda, Carol and Frieda threw in freesias, Ted ‘a handful of wet, horrible Heptonstall soil’.4

  The previous year, he had heard the news of the death of another father-figure, his inspirational English teacher John Fisher, whom he had visited and corresponded with ever since Cambridge days. The cause was lung cancer, which the doctors had been slow to diagnose. Ted was not so much bitter about their failure as troubled that Fisher had never managed to fulfil his hopes of new adventures in retirement: ‘I think he died mainly of boredom – the depression of boredom, under the sulphur towers of that power station in Mexborough.’5 There is something of a ‘note to self’ here: beware of staying in the countryside, where you might die of boredom. There were indeed many times – especially in this phase of his life – when Ted sensed that he was declining into depression himself. His writing, he told Than Minton, one of his old Cambridge friends, was his personal therapy: ‘Without his unstoppable creative energy he could have collapsed into a state of chronic apathy.’ A time would come when Ted was reduced to asking Minton for a supply of anti-depressants.6

  Ted continued to talk to himself all through these years by stepping up his journal-keeping. He used it to work things out, to give himself a stock of raw material for future writing, and to remember experiences, people and places. The perpetual razor-sharp observations of the natural world are no surprise: the rise and fall of dippers by the bridge, Ginger the cat under an ash-pole at dusk, a flooded oak pot, the sense of wonder at watching a baby chestnut unfold. But the gift for character portrayal reveals another side of Ted, one that could have made him an extraordinary novelist. He writes with equal vivacity of casual acquaintances, whether a pretty girl sitting opposite him on a train to London or an accountant in his office with ‘mauve shirt, orange pullover, freckled bald head and ginger remains of hair’. The journals are also filled with glorious set pieces, often involving food (and friends – especially the Baskins – arriving late and being provocative in conversation). People are turned into characters. In November 1979, he saw Dido Merwin for the first time in nine years. She is fresh from her final separation and divorce from Bill Merwin. Her face – epically lifted – comes up to meet him and they kiss. She gushes, she babbles, she tells of how she would lay her life down for a great artist, would ‘sink in the vitamins’ of his radiance. He cannot help admiring how well preserved she is at the age of sixty. Her voice and laughter are controlled tornadoes, her spirit is undimmed despite the ‘soft kid-glove age-crumple’ round her eyes.7

  He experimented with the idea of turning his prose character sketches into poems. In the early Eighties he scribbled in manuscript a collection of light-hearted verse ‘Portraits’ of people he knew: Maurice Tibbles, wildlife photographer, who could equally well be compared to a ferret, a badger and a weasel; a seventy-eight-year-old thatcher who worked on the roof of Court Green; the great Peter Brook, with his eyes like a cold seagull, his small hands and his vision into the infinity of life and the infinity of death; Penelope Shuttle, Peter Redgrove’s wife, with her ‘ball-bearing oddity ideas’; Frieda’s first husband, Des Dawe, the farm worker; Dido, with her facelift and her explosive laughter. In the same folder, he filed away some jokily schoolboyish verses about the women of literary history, beginning ‘The Brontes / Ran over Hebden Moor without panties. / The wind blew on their triple bum / Till their toes went numb.’8 These are lines that he might have done better to destroy than preserve.

  With the ‘Portraits’ is a note in his journal-writing style about Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde as an exploration of the ‘exhaustive incursions of the sexual animal’. In sexual desire, we confront our deepest biological being, ‘we taste our own roots, come to fullest flower’. This somehow makes the passion associated with death ‘utterly desirable’. ‘Passion’, he concludes, ‘is the only teacher – and so Death comes to be the only school.’9

  Conscious of the march of the years, he wrote at length about physical illness: another bad hip episode after he fell when jumping overambitiously from a wall, the bad back that was almost inevitable when such a tall man had spent so many years bending over a page at his desk, Fisher’s last illness, the long and difficult decline of his own father. His preoccupation with bodily decay and ill health was matched by an equal and opposite fascination with the skills of local faith-healer Ted Cornish. For Hughes himself, writing in his journal was a form of catharsis, perhaps indeed of faith-healing. Many of the entries read as if they were prayers, in the tradition of the harsh spiritual self-examinations of Dr Samuel Johnson. ‘Forgive me for my mistakes: guide me and forgive me,’ Hughes wrote in a characteristic passage, accusing himself of being cowardly and ‘hospitable to evil’, of coddling his disasters, pains and misfortunes as an old soldier would coddle his medals. ‘No more of it,’ he repeats three times. What he must do is ‘reckon the reality of what occurred’, ‘trace out the cause and propagation of it’, and in so doing get beyond the idea that his life is so fated that disaster will follow disaster.10 The reckoning would have to come through writing, first in journal form, then in poetry. Increasingly, the journal entries themselves were written in loose blank verse. Fishing trips in particular were often remembered thus.11

  Journal-writing was also for speculation on such arcana as the artificial insemination of cattle, the interplay between the physical and the psychic, and the four realms of ‘psychedelic descent’ (the ‘sensory’, the ‘recollective-analytic’, the ‘symbolic’ and the ‘integral’). More mundanely, it was an opportunity to record anecdotes, which Ted loved. A typical example is a lengthy account of an evening in the Fainlights’ flat in London, where the conversation turned from Robert Graves, senile and stricken by a stroke, to the story of Ruth’s encounter at a remote petrol station in Finland with a ‘gypsy madonna’ in full Romany regalia, to Yehuda Amichai’s account of the great love of his life, an American girl for whom he left his first wife, only to leave her, though still in love with her, because she told him that she had so much money that he could write all the time, a prospect he could not endure.12 The journal entries are always honest about the copious consumption of alcohol on such occasions, and the morning hangovers.

  Above all else, the journals were in the literal sense an aide-mémoire. ‘Remember’ or ‘Rem’ or just ‘R’, he would write, before sketching out an image, a moment. Thus, on flying into Mexico City in the summer of 1982: ‘Remember. Flying in after sunset – the soiled fleece of cloud, bluish, lying over the mountains, below, solid and still and below the light in which we still flew.’ On the same visit, he fixed in his memory every detail of the figurines and sculptures in the Museo Nacional de Antropología. His lengthy journal of this trip, the second half of which is written in verse, would make a lovely little book in its own right.

  The following year, as every year, there was day upon day of rememberings. His appetite for experience was insatiable. On any one day he might remember a domestic detail (‘Remember’: an empty room, the television on, Wimbledon being broadcast – ‘school of brats’ he calls it, this being the John McEnroe era), a country walk (what was that levelled place? ‘Rem: … an old burial site; old te
nnis court?’), a field of flowers (‘Remember: … Iris and Ragged Robin. A marsh of Iris. The playful bullocks come to push their heads at us’), an embrace (‘Remember: Tricia’s tight breasts, and life-jacket of plumpness when I kissed her’) followed by a chance encounter (‘Roger’s sudden appearance in his woodland outfit, with binocs – been strolling in his trees, looking at birds’).13

  For the biographer, the journals are the most valuable of all sources because they provide an ‘access all areas’ pass to the inner life. They expose Ted at his most self-aware and self-critical, while at the same time they reveal his passions and his exultations in raw form. If anyone were to doubt the importance for Hughes of the Wordsworthian example, they would only have to turn to his journal for 30 April 1980 to have their questioning silenced. ‘Remember,’ Ted writes, ‘Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage: impressive.’ The ‘Deep clear atmosphere’, the cool slabs of floor slate, the tiny house in which the rooms are somehow ‘spacious’ and ‘sober’. A feeling of solidity to match that of Wordsworth’s poetry. ‘His ash-handled basket – for visitors’ cards. His door on to the steep garden. The perfect guide. His skates.’ Among Wordsworth’s books, Ted examined his copy of Milton, with its ‘testy reprovals’ in the margin. Among the manuscripts, he pored over The Prelude, noting William’s corrections of Dorothy’s fair copy and then the ‘endless correctings over the years’. And among the letters, three stood out: ‘requests for money’.14

  This is Wordsworth as he truly was, but also Wordsworth as Hughes. Court Green, like Dove Cottage, had a cool stone floor and a banked garden. Olwyn was a sister who helped her brother with his work. Requests for money jump out from dozens of Ted’s letters. All that is missing is a direct reference to the fact that, as Wordsworth spent more than half his life revising his autobiographic epic The Prelude, so Hughes was by this time many years into an analogous project.