Other than River, his publications in the early Eighties were desultory. There was Under the North Star, a bestiary of poems for children, with illustrations by Baskin. Some of these, such as ‘Puma’ and ‘The Iron Wolf’, first printed on Ted and Nick’s Morrigu Press, were by no means exclusively meant for – or easily understood by – young people. Around the same time he produced A Primer of Birds, also with Baskin, printed on the latter’s Gehenna Press, the first twenty-five copies with signed and numbered Baskin prints for a cool £450 or $900 each. It includes some fine vignettes that would also appear in more accessible volumes. The ‘Kingfisher’ of River was first published here and the first swallow of spring, slipping through ‘a fracture in the snow-sheet / Which is still our sky’ and then ‘Water-skiing out across a wind / That wrecks great flakes against windscreens’, would be given a second flight in an expanded edition of Season Songs published in 1985.2 But A Primer of Birds is a distinctly patchy little collection, with too many of the poems weighed down by excess Hughesian baggage: an evening thrush is not allowed to be heard in its own right, but is juxtaposed to the sound of a ‘church craftsman’ who is ‘Switing idols, / Rough pre-Goidelic gods and goddesses, / Out of old bits of churchyard yew’.3 It would have been a better poem if Hughes had simply listened to the thrush in the yew trees in the churchyard beside Court Green.
In the spring of 1982 Faber brought out a new Selected Poems, a well-judged selection from all his adult collections to date. Most of the Gaudete epilogue poems were there in their own right, but none of the main poem. There were poems from Season Songs and Under the North Star, those volumes on the borderline between children’s and adult work. Two of the River poems, one of them being ‘That Morning’, were included even though the volume itself had not yet been published. The most startling inclusion, though one unobserved by reviewers, was ‘You Hated Spain’, which was appended to Crow, despite the fact that it was a poem about his honeymoon with Sylvia which had nothing to do with the life and songs of the Crow.
The year after the appearance of River, he published another children’s book, What is the Truth? A Farmyard Fable for the Young, with drawings by Reg Lloyd, a painter, potter and printmaker who had previously done some limited-edition silk-screen prints with poems by Ted. The two of them ‘found common ground in childhood memories of a shop bell ringing: Reg’s parents had owned a draper’s shop’.4 What is the Truth?, developed from a farmyard-focused idea proposed by Michael Morpurgo and his wife, is like a gentle version of Crow. It begins with God saying that he will ask humankind a few simple questions. In their sleep, the people of the village, on which God and his Son are looking down by moonlight, will say what they truly know. Each then tells truly, in verse, of an animal that they know. Again, Hughes is coming at his central theme indirectly: the quest for the inner truth of things, and of self, which may be revealed first in dreams and then in art. The most moving poem in the collection is ‘Bees’, which turns on the image of a wedding and ends with a ‘Priestly bee’ that ‘in a shower of petals, / Glues Bride and Groom together with honey’.5 Beekeeper Sylvia would have loved this.
Throughout this time, he was writing essays and introductions, extremely variable in subject and tone, jobbing work one moment, private passions the next. He took on short pieces to give a leg-up to fellow-writers, commissions for friends, opportunities to make a little money for himself or for a worthwhile cause. He was equally happy writing about the relative merits of Stoat’s Tail and Silver Invicta flies for an essay on the Rivers Taw and Torridge in a volume called West Country Fly Fishing or offering a poem to a slim volume published in memory of the radiantly beautiful and dazzlingly clever poet Frances Horovitz, who died of cancer of the ear, aged forty-five, in October 1983 (Ted was a huge admirer of her work, and had hoped that his friend Ted Cornish might cure her).6 Typically, in the autumn of 1984 there appeared a poem on the river Nymet together with a polemic on the decline of the otter in the rivers of the West Country due to the pesticide dieldrin in the late Fifties and then the destruction of their habitat under the policies of the Severn-Trent Water Authority. This was published in a coffee-table volume extolling the natural beauties of, and environmental threats to, Britain: A World by Itself (‘Reflections on the landscape by eminent British writers’). Then a few weeks later, in completely different vein, there appeared a long, crabbed, inward-looking introduction to The Complete Prints of Leonard Baskin, arguing that his forms were ‘drawn from the hard core of human pain’.7 He determined to take from Baskin’s work the lesson that all art comes from a wound and the greater the pain the greater the art, because art was simultaneously ‘an anaesthetic and at the same time a healing session drawing up the magical healing electrics’.8
Accolades did not especially interest him. In 1982 Exeter University gave him an honorary doctorate and he wondered what such a thing was for, other than raising a smile. It did not feel important in comparison to the real Ph.D. that was clearly going to be Nick’s destiny after graduating from Oxford. In 1984, Nicholas Hughes duly went to the University of Alaska in Fairbanks to research the fish of the Yukon river system. Ted described him proudly to Luke Myers: 6 foot 3½ inches (just taller than Ted himself, who was beginning to stoop with age), immensely hard-working, very organised (far more so than Ted), strong and fit (a weightlifter), funny and happy, but with a touch of the Germanic quality of the Plaths. Frieda, meanwhile, had divorced her farm boy Des and set up home with an insurance salesman, whom Ted thought was a bit of a dodgy character. She now rejoiced in a superbly voluptuous figure, was the image of her mother, and had the energy of a rocket. She was writing surreal children’s stories, making dresses and painting in a bold abstract style.
In contrast to his pride in his children, Ted was despairing about his own work. In this same letter to Myers, he acknowledged that it was a quiet time as far as his poetry was concerned. The events of 1963 and 1969 had been like ‘giant steel doors shutting down over great parts of myself’.9 He still had not emerged from his ‘self-anaesthesia’. He worried that life wouldn’t be long enough to wake up from it. He knew that what he had to do was break through into direct confrontation with those two terrible years. His dreams were telling him to look to his own past. In one of them, a lion licked his face under a new moon and led him into the landscape of his childhood – Mexborough, the pond at Crookhill, foundry lights over Sheffield and the earth burning, an open wound, an ‘infernal crucible’. In a perfumed garden, he wept and mourned for his mother, half knowing that the real work of mourning was still to be done: germinations, gestation, but ‘prohibited sources’.10
And there were poetic models available to him. He was trying to persuade Faber to publish more of the poetry of Yehuda Amichai, in which he found the honesty and integrity of ‘the human being speaking like a human being about being a human being’.11 Amichai’s poetry, he said, opened him to his own life, enabled him to see his past freshly and to find richness at every turn. It freed him from his mental cage.
Then there was Seamus Heaney. Ted began to sense that he was being overtaken by the poet who had begun under his own strong influence. In the summer of 1984, Seamus had sent him his latest collection, Station Island, a volume that hit a new stride – some would see it as the apex of Heaney’s achievement. ‘Station Island itself must be what you’ve been pushing yourself towards. It obviously took some confronting,’ wrote Ted in response. ‘The passages where you tackle the greatest fright seem to me the most masterful successes. And I get the feel your real kingdom is in there – that’s your way in & forward.’12 The volume’s title sequence, which Ted saw as the key, was a run of poems in which personal memory, elegy and myth were held in moving and measured equilibrium. Heaney mediates his personal and political development through a series of Irish encounters, at the climax with the imagined ghost of James Joyce. The publisher’s blurb described the sequence as ‘an autobiographical quest’ concerning ‘the growth of a poet’s mind’ – Wordsworth’s des
cription of the epic poem that was posthumously entitled The Prelude. Was this the moment for Ted to publish something similar, to release the ghost of Sylvia as Heaney had released his family ghosts?13
That summer, Ted combined literary festivals and fishing trips in the west of Ireland and the Orkneys. Sir John Betjeman, Poet Laureate since 1972, had died in May and the talk on the literary circuit inevitably turned to the appointment of his successor. Ted noted wryly that Philip Larkin had started signing himself ‘P.L.’ He would surely be regarded as the perfect choice, with his reassuring tone of voice, his occasional four-letter words to provide a dash of popular credibility, his loyal politics, and his mindset distinctly that of the little Englander.14 Ted’s personal preference was for Charles Causley, but over the coming months there was a general assumption that it would be P.L. for P.L. The whole thing seemed such a foregone conclusion that Ladbrokes the bookies stopped taking bets and Faber started reprinting Larkin’s books.
In late November, Ted and Carol joined their friends Michael and Clare Morpurgo on a Nile cruise. This was relaxing for Ted after an exhausting two-week tour in which he had undertaken about twenty readings in the Midlands and the North – Oxford, Birmingham, Hull, Manchester, West Kirby on the Wirral. He had reached, he reckoned, some 6,000 sixth-formers. Morpurgo had become a friend after a meeting on the riverbank in Devon. Ted’s children’s books were an inspiration for his own, and the two wives got on famously. Ted and Carol were both giving assistance of various kinds to Farms for City Children, the charity established by the Morpurgos which gave urban children from all over the country the chance to spend a week living and working on a real farm in the heart of the Devon countryside.
Refreshed by fishing and sightseeing, impressed by a glimpse of a 6-foot-long crocodile-like Nile monitor15 crawling into the reeds, but tired from the journey, they arrived back at Court Green to a huge pile of post. Sorting through it, Ted came across an envelope marked ‘Confidential’, with the return address 10 Downing Street. It was an enquiry as to whether he had received the Prime Minister’s communication. Could he reply one way or the other, as a matter of urgency? ‘Here we go,’ he thought, ‘how horrible.’ Then he found the original letter from Margaret Thatcher: would he object to his name being put to Her Majesty the Queen for the position of Poet Laureate in Ordinary (‘in ordinary?’ he wrote to the Baskins with the written equivalent of a quizzical look).16 He assumed, correctly, that Larkin must have refused. He felt as if he had fallen into a trap: whether he accepted or refused, demons would be raised. They had got back on a Friday, so he had the weekend to think about the pros and cons. He phoned Olwyn, who refrained from pressing him, merely remarking that acceptance would be good for his American sales. On the Monday, he phoned Downing Street and accepted.
The Palace issued a press release on Wednesday 19 December 1984: ‘The Queen has been pleased to approve that Edward James Hughes be appointed Poet Laureate in Ordinary to Her Majesty in succession to the late Sir John Betjeman.’ It helpfully explained that the Poet Laureate is a member of Her Majesty’s Household, with annual remuneration of £70 plus a case of wine (actually a large quantity of sherry). Both salary and perk were unchanged since the time of John Dryden, the first official holder of the post back in the late seventeenth century. The announcement described Hughes as ‘both author and poet’. It listed a clutch of his many awards: the Guinness Poetry Award in 1958, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959–60, the Somerset Maugham Award in 1960, the City of Florence Poetry Prize in 1969, the Premio Internazionale Taormina in 1973 and the Queen’s Medal for Poetry the following year. The press welcomed the choice, noting how young Hughes was for the role and what a change he would be from Betjeman, to whom Larkin had seemed the natural successor. The London Times suggested that it was rather like a grim young crow replacing a cuddly old teddy bear. In America, with its dream of the backwoodsman going from a log cabin to the White House, there was particular emphasis on Ted’s humble origins: son of a Yorkshire carpenter, former nightwatchman and rose gardener, and so forth. Plath’s name was mentioned in most American reports of the appointment, but generally without rancour.
New Year brought vast numbers of congratulatory letters and considerable uncertainty as to what the role would entail – though it had been made clear that it was very much up to him to interpret his duties as he saw fit. He was especially pleased to hear from Larkin.17 Joking that he now considered himself a ‘public convenience’, Ted set about answering the deluge of requests to be the patron of this, the president of that, the guest of honour at such and such, a judge of so and so. Even gifts came with a price: someone sent him a package of lovely flies for salmon fishing, but only as bait to make him write a poem for the anniversary of the escape from Colditz.
He refused many such requests, but he took his royal duties very seriously. Two days after his appointment was announced, Prince Harry, younger son of Charles (Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall) and Diana, was baptised. Ted dashed off a ‘Rain-Charm for the Duchy’, with a subtitle that was soon mocked by the liberal metropolitan literary establishment: ‘A Blessed, Devout Drench for the Christening of His Royal Highness Prince Harry’. It is in fact a very good poem, instantly achieving a standard he would never reach again in his Laureate work. Nineteen-eighty-four had been a year of drought. The poem begins with an image of the windscreen of Ted’s Volvo ‘frosted with dust’. A thunderstorm breaks and the rivers of the West Country are replenished. The water imagery befits the occasion of a baptism, the catalogue of river-names follows in a grand tradition of English royal poetry going back to Elizabethan times, and Hughes takes the opportunity to make a point about pollution (‘the Okement, nudging her detergent bottles, tugging at her nylon stockings, starting to trundle her Pepsi-Cola cans’).18 The poem was published in the Observer newspaper just before Christmas. Its environmental message did not go unnoticed among local politicians in the West Country. Ted expressed pleasure that the Laureateship was clearly going to give him a public platform – but also relief that he had restrained himself from including some lines that were in the original draft of the poem, which, pre-Laureateship, he had intended for River: ‘And the Torridge, that hospital sluice of all the doctored and scabby farms from Welcombe to Hatherlea to Torrington / Poor, bleached leper in her pit’.19 It would not have done for his first official poem to have received a libel writ from an irate Devon farmer.
Two years earlier, he had written a poem for Prince William’s birth, based on the royal child’s ‘very strange’ horoscope and alluding to the White Goddess. He had not published it, out of respect for Poet Laureate Betjeman, but perhaps also because he recognised that it was not exactly his best poetic work: ‘Sun, moon and all their family stand / Around a new-born babe, in England … And a goddess, half-mother, half-coils, / The Serpent of Enigma, guarding the spoils.’20 Now he sent handwritten copies of both princely poems to the Royal Household, to go into the private collections of the boys themselves.
In the summer of 1985 he published a pair of poems for the eighty-fifth birthday of the Queen Mother, one grandly mythical (‘The Dream of the Lion’) and the other, much more to her taste, about salmon. The best thing about the Laureateship was that his royal connection opened doors to some very high-class fishing. The pressure to perform in public at galas and fundraisers was a price worth paying for that. But he also needed to get away from the spotlight. In this regard, Nick’s residence in Fairbanks was heaven-sent.
Some of Ted’s happiest days in the first decade of his Laureateship were spent under big skies far from little England, with his son in Alaska or with fishing friends in British Columbia and the Yukon. The air was light there, he said, and he felt unencumbered, free in a way that he never could be at home.21 The experience of fishing with Nick in Alaska was immortalised not only in the perfectly achieved River poem ‘That Morning’ but also in ‘The Gulkana’ (the name of a tributary of the glacial Copper River), a longer poem in the collection. It
is an attempt to capture the feeling of the far north. The manuscript drafts ran to 150 pages. The climax of ‘The Gulkana’ has a similar feeling to ‘That Morning’ as it creates a sense of unity with nature achieved in the act of fishing:
Word by word
The voice of the river moved in me.
It was like lovesickness.22
On such a river, his troubles with women were displaced by a greater love.
In 1986 he combined his visit to Nick with a poetry reading at the University of British Columbia, and for ten years thereafter he would return most years for a fortnight to an environment that rekindled his childhood self. He confided to his host that as boys he and Gerald had made a pact to emigrate to British Columbia. But of course Gerald had ended up in Australia and Ted in Devon. Now he had arrived, albeit transiently, at their original destination.
Ehor Boyanowsky, criminal psychologist and professor at Simon Fraser University, author of academic papers on violence and aggression, was Ted’s host. In his memoir of his days ‘in the wild with Ted Hughes’, he sets the scene for their first expedition up the Dean River, 52 degrees north and 126 west, legendary among fishermen as the best place in the world for ‘that most glamorous of fish’ (Ted’s phrase), Oncorhynchus mykiss, the steelhead, or seagoing rainbow-trout, which could weigh up to 55 pounds and grow to almost 4 feet in length:
The river hisses against the oars and lashes at the inflatable raft, trying to force our craft downstream through the rapids into a looming logjam. Hunkered down on the pontoon, Ted looks around, feeling the river’s power; he drinks in the spicy aroma of the great cedars, and his face is wet from the spray, his gaze filled with the sweep of muscular granite cliffs shouldering the banks and the undulating horizon of glacier-topped peaks upstream and down.23
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