Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  Hughes constantly sought measures for his own work in the achievements of other writers. On the next page of his journal, following the account of Dove Cottage and John Ruskin’s equally atmospheric house, Brantwood on Coniston Water, he notes that while in Cumbria he has been reading the journal of the Italian poet Cesare Pavese and finding in it a model for a writer’s ‘talent for sexual embroilment, effectively recorded, convincing pain and desolation’.15

  Just as his journal was especially detailed when he travelled, his letters about his travels resemble nothing so much as the great ‘journal-letters’ of John Keats to his brother and sister-in-law in America. He explained to his Cambridge friend Karl Miller, who was by this time editor of the Listener magazine, that the idea of his travel journals was to ‘record every moment and detail just as it occurs’. This, he thought, would ‘create an interesting kind of record’. As a poem captured a moment, a feeling, a thought, so this recording of impressions of a place would capture a sequence of details, a journey through a landscape and the passage of a life.16 The letter to Miller was written on leaving for Alaska in June 1980. While he was away, Miller collected on Ted’s behalf a prize from the Royal Society of Literature, awarded to Moortown. When Ted returned the following month, he told Miller that Alaska was the ‘most fantastic land’ he had ever been in.17 Later in the summer he sent Barrie Cooke a detailed account of his fishing successes there. He loved the light, the atmosphere, the blue of the sky against the white of the snow, the clarity and the sound of the water, the sparseness of the population, the expanse of emptiness, the loyalty of the people to the place (they called America ‘the outside’). He loved travelling by small plane and canoe rather than road. And he loved that Nick loved it too.

  Three years later, he and his son went on another great fishing adventure, this time to Lake Victoria, where Nick was studying the Nile perch. Barrie Cooke was again treated to a journal-letter with all the details of huge 80-kilo perch and tiny dazzling silver omena (which resembled whitebait). Ted had an epiphany on an island on the lake. The group of fishermen there lived in mud huts with nothing but their nets and canoes. They sold their fish and lived off maize and sweet tea and chapatis. Spending a fortnight with them, Ted felt free of every care. To what avail were furniture and a clean carpet, polished shoes, appointment diaries and worries about money? These ‘blacks’ laughed and lived. They were happy ‘because they didn’t want anything’.18 In both his unpublished journal of the trip and his published letters about it, Ted wrote prose of extraordinary vigour. In a single sentence of explosive energy he told of racing across the lake against another canoe under a thunderstorm at night. It was ‘the most exciting half hour’ of his life, with the lightning flashing in ‘great vertical 15 second rivers of orange or blue or green’, as if the sky were full of ‘blazing thorns’. The swell poured into the boat, so one of the crew had to bail out for dear life as the others paddled and yelled, and the sail was ‘like a giant map of the world in giant rips and holes’, and the canoe was piled with huge fish, including two giants caught by Nick. Their eyes seemed to glare like ‘orange torches’ even though they had been dead for hours. They won the race and spent the rest of the evening decapitating the perch.19

  Fishing was becoming more and more important to Ted. He told Luke Myers, the correspondent with whom he was most honest about his own failings, that it was ‘a symbolic pursuit that swallows every impulse to folly in a primaeval stupor’.20 Shakespeare’s Leontes, in some lines of The Winter’s Tale much admired by Ted, described extramarital sex as fishing in a neighbour’s pond. For Ted in the Eighties, by contrast, fishing was not a metaphor but a substitute for the ‘follies’ of the Seventies. He was moving in a new circle of acquaintances, among ‘Colonels, Group Captains, one or two Lords, a newspaper owner who perpetually dines and relaxes with Cabinet Ministers’. They all gave him top-of-the-range fishing access. Before he knew it, he was a guest on the best salmon rivers. In the light of his humble origins this was in one way a most curious, indeed comical, development, but he found that his hosts all turned out to be ‘very amusing, engaging chaps’.21 Fishing in all its aspects became a complete obsession. He bought the finest rods and most intricate flies, purchased a small boat for fishing in the estuaries, and devoted himself to campaigns to eradicate the pollution of the Devon rivers, from where fish were vanishing at an alarming rate.

  In August 1980, he told Gerald of a new project, which had in fact been brewing for a number of years. In 1976, Ted had directed a keen angler called Peter Keen to some of his sacred spots on the Taw and Torridge.22 Keen had taken a large number of colour photographs of rivers and the life around rivers. Ted casually suggested that a selection of them, printed alongside a series of his river and fishing poems, would make an attractive book (Keen claimed that the collaboration was his idea). The project might do for Devon rivers what the collaboration with Fay Godwin had done for the Calder Valley in Remains of Elmet. Keen took Ted’s encouragement as a serious proposition, and pressurised him into making the project a reality. Ted was sceptical: with colour plates, it would be an expensive book. Anglers didn’t read poetry, poetry readers didn’t like expensive large-format volumes, and Keen wasn’t a major enough figure to appeal to photography connoisseurs. Did he really want to produce a coffee-table book, and only receive half the royalties?23

  James MacGibbon of the Devon publisher David and Charles had expressed interest and by 1978 Olwyn, acting as usual as Ted’s agent, was negotiating with him. Discussions foundered over American rights. There was talk of Faber taking over the project, but they could not make the numbers work: the production cost of colour photographs was very high. MacGibbon then moved to another publisher, James and James. He still wanted to be involved. Perhaps the solution to the high production cost would be to get sponsorship. One possibility would be a Shell Book of the River, on the model of other natural history works that the petrochemical giant Shell had bankrolled in the name of good public relations. Another possibility was British Gas. MacGibbon explained to Olwyn what the deal would be: ‘the Corporation concerns itself with conservation when it comes to laying pipe lines across the country including under rivers and the book could be a subtle way of demonstrating their concern. They would however want to have two or three photographs illustrating their care of the landscape.’24 Faber and Faber agreed to publish the book on condition that an arrangement was reached.

  As the book went through production, Michael Wright of Faber and Faber found himself in the unusual position of negotiating with David Butler of the Public Relations Department at British Gas: ‘As the theme of the intended photograph is presumably to underline the theme of re-landscaping after the submergence of gas pipes, I suppose plate 45 makes the point quite graphically.’25 The whole process of choosing the photographs, waiting for Ted to have the right selection of poems, and negotiating with publishers and sponsors meant that the book was not ready until 1983. Even then, there was a further delay. Faber originally announced that October Salmon: River Poems and Photographs would be published in June, but it was not until September that the volume appeared, now entitled simply River. It cost £10, twice as much as the much thicker but unillustrated New Selected Poems that had appeared the previous year.

  Two pictures were added late in the process, to give more credit to British Gas. They were described in the notes on the photographs at the back of the book. First, ‘The Scottish Dee has been called “the river flowing out of Paradise”. A British Gas pipeline crosses the Dee, unseen and unheard, at this point.’ And then, ‘A salmon, undisturbed by the large gas pipelines in the river bed, moves in a pool on the river Don. British Gas, in close consultation with river authorities, has crossed many rivers in bringing the pipeline southwards.’ The image on the back cover of the book, which in the main body appeared beside Ted’s poem ‘August Evening’, was given a similar description: ‘On the river bed beneath the quietly flowing Aberdeenshire Don a high-pressure pipeline carries lar
ge quantities of North Sea gas – unseen and unheard – to the south.’26

  There was, though, an unspoken pathos about Ted’s association with the great scheme to bring North Sea gas across the land by pipeline. In 1966, the decision had been taken to convert Britain to natural gas, and a year later the first North Sea gas was brought ashore. There was then a ten-year national programme in which every appliance in the country was converted from the old toxic ‘town gas’ to run on the new carbon-monoxide-free natural supply. British Gas visited 13 million homes and factories, converting some 34 million individual appliances. The benefits of the great conversion were not just economic. Immediately after Assia Wevill had killed herself and Shura, F. W. Lucas, a service supervisor at the South Eastern Gas Board, visited the flat in Clapham and determined that there was no fault in the gas installation or appliances. He calculated that ‘a normal healthy person would be expected to succumb to CO poisoning within one and a quarter hours’.27 Principally as a result of conversion from town gas to natural gas, deaths in Britain by gas (either accidental or suicidal) fell from over 1,000 in the year that Sylvia was one of them to under 300 in 1970, when the supply to Clapham was converted, a year too late for Assia.

  Many of the River poems are about life and death, struggle and rebirth, purification by water, but also the ache of loss. The leading image is that of the salmon run, the journey upstream to spawn. From the first poem, on obstetric procedures in a salmon farm, to the last, on salmon eggs, the volume teems with sperm and egg, intricately exploring the mechanics of breeding. Fish stock mattered to Hughes the angler. And the biology of salmon fascinated Ted the father of Nicholas Hughes, who was destined to become one of the world’s leading experts on the subject. But at a deeper level, the story of the river and the cycles of aquatic life gave him an opportunity to come indirectly at his own feelings about those raw essentials of human life identified by T. S. Eliot’s character called Sweeney: birth and copulation and death.

  The first poem in the collection, ‘The Morning before Christmas’, ends with an image of a fox’s paw print on a flood pond. Any such trace in Hughes is inevitably evocative of his signature poem, ‘The Thought-Fox’. If there is a thought-fox, then there is also a Ted. The reader is thus alerted to the presence of a personal story beneath the stream-of-conscious reference. ‘New Year’, which appears opposite a photograph of a dead cock salmon, begins with the image of a Caesarean section. It moves swiftly from salmon redds (spawning nests) to hospital theatre, with surgeon at work, nurses busy in attendance, and the speaker of the poem – imaging himself as the husband of the woman on the operating table – pacing through the early hours of the day ‘in the blue glare of the ward’, empathetically feeling the anaesthetic, glimpsing ‘the gouged patient sunk in her trough of coma’. She is like an exhausted fish. The ‘ticking egg’ has gone.28 In the light of Hughes’s several references to the fish-like smoothness of Sylvia Plath’s body, there is a veiled memory here of her miscarriage. There may also be a glimmer of a more recent visiting of a similar hospital scene.

  ‘Only birth matters,’ says the river in ‘Salmon Eggs’, the closing poem.29 But the shadow of death also falls upon the water. Much later, Ted explained the origin of ‘October Salmon’, his favourite poem in the collection, the one originally intended as the title piece:

  I had gone to visit my father who was very ill at the time and I stopped by a nearby salmon river. This was in the autumn, in the early 1980s. And from a bridge, I saw this one fish, a little cock salmon, lying motionless i[n] the clear shallow water – the only fish in a long pool that in October 1961, when I first walked there and counted the fish waiting to spawn in the gravels above and below, had held more than 100. I don’t know if he’d spawned but, anyway, this was about him.30

  These were the last words of one of Hughes’s last interviews, published posthumously in the fishing magazine Wild Steelhead and Salmon.31 The dying fish of ‘October Salmon’, resting after his 2,000-mile journey home, ‘stitched into the torn richness’ of the world, is ineluctably associated not only with a past when Sylvia was still alive and Devon life a fresh dream, but also with the entropy of all things, and with his dying father. The ‘epic poise’ of the salmon, held ‘steady in his wounds’ and ‘loyal to his doom’, is also that of Bill Hughes.32

  Even more notably personal is the delicate lyric ‘Ophelia’, transplanted from Orts. It appears opposite one of Keen’s best photographs, a series of silver ripples on a field of black (one of the few images that shares the atmospheric artfulness of Fay Godwin’s black-and-white work for the Elmet project). ‘There she goes,’ Ted writes, evoking not only John Everett Millais’ famous painting of Ophelia floating downstream after her suicide, but also Plath’s frequent imagery of dark water, not least in ‘Crossing the Water’, the title poem of the selection of her later poems that Ted had published in 1971. ‘Darkfish’, he calls Ophelia, in an inspired coinage. With her ‘finger to her lips’, she goes ‘Staringly into the afterworld’.33

  Yet once more, the Plathian understory passed unnoticed by reviewers, who for the most part greeted River with respect but without ecstasy. The most enthusiastic response came from the poet Christopher Reid, Ted’s future editor at Faber and Faber, who opened his Sunday Times review with high praise, describing Hughes as a ‘great poet, whose gift has suffered innumerable changes of fortune’, sometimes losing itself in ‘pretentious aridities’, but who in this book has returned to his best form and proved himself still to be ‘the most exciting English poet of our day’.34

  River carried the logo of the Countryside Commission as well as that of British Gas, so Ted felt that his conservationist credentials were honoured. This was the period when he was becoming ever more exercised about water pollution. In a letter written just after the book’s publication, he noted that twenty years earlier the Taw and Torridge had produced a third of all the salmon caught in the West Country, but by his calculation the catch on the Torridge in the last year was a mere forty-three fish, whereas it used to be between 1,000 and 1,500. The river had become ‘a farm sewer’.35 The River project proceeded in tandem with Ted’s involvement in a campaign against a new sewage works at Bideford. Local anglers took the lead in forming the Torridge Action Group. They planned legal action against the South West Water Authority, and in September 1985 Ted spoke on their behalf at a public inquiry. Marshalling an array of evidence ranging from charts showing the decline in catches over half a century to concerned reports from local doctors, he held the room in mesmerised silence as he commanded the room, speaking with all the clarity and allegorical force of his children’s tales of how three-quarters of the visitors who came to the area for watersports left the estuary with stomach complaints:

  Bideford chemists prepare for the tourist season as if for a campaign. The chemist in Mill Street displays a window sign, advertising his cure for diarrhoea. And in spite of their conditioning the local population does not escape. In general, they complain of an endless grumbling epidemic of throat and chest complaints and stomach disorders … The effect of the estuary’s pollution on the state of mind of the local residents is subjective and elusive. However, this depression is very real.36

  Notwithstanding Ted’s impressive intervention, when the public inquiry came to an end the Inspector approved the new ‘fine screening’ sewage plant.

  Like Remains of Elmet, River was revised extensively when a decade later Ted republished it without photographs in his Three Books. The poems are reordered: ‘Salmon Eggs’ goes from the end to the beginning (a better place for a poem about birth) and the sequence now comes to a climax with ‘October Salmon’ (the original title poem) and the epiphany of ‘That Morning’, which in the original collection had been buried at the midpoint, lacking the breathing-space it needed. Several fishing poems are added and, again consistently with the treatment of Remains of Elmet, some prose notes are appended. Here, Hughes dates his awareness of water pollution caused by silage all the way back to t
he river Don of his wartime childhood. The new version of River was published in full consciousness that environmental concerns had become ever more pressing in the decade since the book’s first appearance. Ted’s correspondence files in the intervening years overflow with gatherings of relevant scientific research and contributions to numerous anti-pollution campaigns. Among the new poems in the Three Books version is an ironic rewriting of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’: ‘If you have infected the sky’ and if the earth has ‘caught its disease off you’, then you, modern Western man, disconnected from your mother earth, ‘you are the virus’.37 When he writes of earth rendered barren and water toxified, Hughes comes to resemble a cross between an Old Testament prophet crying in the wilderness and T. S. Eliot’s wounded Fisher King, dangling his rod in the dull canal as he waits in vain for the sterile wasteland to be healed.

  25

  The Laureate

  Taking stock at the end of 1981, Ted Hughes told Luke Myers that ‘My doings touched a low low this last year, many things coming to an end, many mistakes coming to an end too I hope.’ He looked back on the Seventies as a decade of ‘estrangement’ from himself, follies in his life and piddling about in his work. Nothing of ‘the real thing’ since Crow.1 He had prepared a new Selected Poems as a kind of ‘audit’ of his progress to date, a clearing of the decks before the next big move forward. But the move would not come, not least because money worries meant that he was as ever being forced to accept trivial commissions and distracting commitments. Mercifully, the lengthy tax case arising from the huge royalties on The Bell Jar was finally settled. The large cheque, received via Sotheby’s, for the sale of Sylvia’s manuscripts to Smith, her old college, arrived just in time.