Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  First he tries with a ‘dry fly’ – intended to bring the mighty but elusive steelhead to the surface, catch him on the fly, gain the full sensation. ‘Like making love with the lights on’ is how Boyanowsky puts it. No luck, though the seed is sown for a poem called ‘Be a Dry-Fly Purist’ that will be included in the second edition of River. Ted then puts on ‘a sinking tip line’ and a ‘Squamish Poacher’ fly. He casts his ‘powerful fifteen-foot Bruce and Walker rod’ upon the water: ‘Turning off the lights, are we, Ehor?’ ‘Afraid so, better sex in the dark than none at all.’ And on the third cast comes the reward: ‘Thank you, Ehor, thank you for bringing me to my first steelhead. She is surpassingly beautiful. Thank you.’24 The fish is gently returned to the water, as, according to local custom, steelhead always should be, for fear of alienating the spirit of the mighty river.

  Boyanowsky and his friends made Ted keep the logbook of the week’s fishing. The highs and lows of great catches and near misses. The evening meals of steak béarnaise, baked potatoes and magnums of unnamed red wine. The grizzlies strolling through the camp. The log gave him raw material for a new poem called ‘The Bear’, which he included in the revised version of River in Three Books: first a storm, then the ‘ecstasy’ of mountain and river embodied in the steelhead. These lines are an especially striking manifestation of the way in which fishing could stand in for sex in Ted’s later years:

  This actually was the love-act that had brought them

  Out of everywhere, squirming and leaping,

  And that had brought us too – besotted voyeurs –

  Trying to hook ourselves into it.

  And all the giddy orgasm of the river

  Quaking under our feet –

  And then the sight of a bear that salutes and vanishes, ‘a scapegoat, an offering’.25

  His second trip to British Columbia was combined with an arts festival in Victoria, where he was delayed by a ruptured appendix. But that did not stop him joining his new friends, and Nick, who had come down from Fairbanks, on the Thompson River. Father and son shot chukars (a kind of partridge) together, one of the few times Ted had picked up a rifle since his early days with Gerald. As he got to know Ehor Boyanowsky and his fishing companions, Ted relaxed and began to tell stories. For instance, of the time when he and Nick were fishing for pike on an Irish lough and the locals started asking probing questions, and the next thing they knew they were hauling up a heavy object from the depths. Just as they discovered that it was a ‘heavy burlap bag’, they realised that they were being watched through binoculars from the shoreline. They had stumbled upon an IRA arms cache and needed to make a quick getaway.26

  At night in the wilderness, by the crackle and flicker of the campfire, he opened his heart. Who were his favourite artists? Bosch, Goya and Cranach. What cause was closest to his heart? The environment – ‘If it were up to me alone, I would give all my money to Greenpeace.’27 Why did he marry Sylvia? ‘Because she was beautiful, passionate, a genius and I loved her.’28

  And why did he marry Carol? He explained that he was trying to look after the children and his ailing parents. He went fishing with a ‘local lad named Orchard’ who told of his teenage sister, just completing her nursing training. She became the babysitter and the children took to her straight away. So did his mother: ‘Marry that girl. She is one in a million.’ But she was just a girl, he told his mother, and so much younger than him. He thought no more of the idea for a time. Then Olwyn came down to Devon and organised a sophisticated dinner-party. Carol was invited. The girl was overwhelmed by the banter, the wine, the erudition. She did not speak. Olwyn said, ‘And what do you have to say for yourself?’ Carol was so intimidated that she ‘fainted dead away right at the table’. Ted gathered her into his arms and took her out into the garden of Court Green for some fresh air: ‘I set her on the grass in the moonlight and stroked her forehead and, gazing at her, her long black hair, pale skin and lovely features in repose, I fell in love with her.’ The fishermen loved this story, not caring whether it was ‘true or apocryphal’.29 Ehor proposed a toast to Carol. ‘My true salvation,’ said Ted.30

  When Ehor visited Devon, he found Carol to be a wonderful cook but rather a formidable presence. His memory is that she took one look at the cameras slung over his shoulder and told him that he should not take photographs at Court Green. The house was not what he expected: it seemed ‘too tidy and stylish to be Ted’s’. But then Ted summoned him into a long dark room ‘replete with papers, fishing gear and more papers and books stacked and strewn as far as the eye can see’. Ted’s world: ‘chaos on an epic scale’. This was where Ted was gathering material for the projected but unfinished Faber Book of Fishing on which he and Ehor were collaborating. Then Ted showed his guest the writing hut in the garden – a single room with a lamp and a big desk, raised on stilts on the ancient mound, looking for all the world like a large Wendy house or low-level treehouse. ‘This is where I work,’ Ted explained, ‘away from the phone and family and friends.’ Big books could only be finished in such a place, otherwise ‘the tendrils reach out and surround you and drag you away, every day, as certain as the seasons come and go’.31

  Much as Ted’s friends adored him, they acknowledged that the marriage was not easy for Carol. There was nothing in her farming and nursing background to prepare her for marriage at the age of twenty-two to a famous poet almost twice her age, a man of prodigious energy and capacious sexual appetite, with a restless desire for new experience, a fierce but cranky intelligence that frequently veered into fads and eccentric diversions, and an unwavering creative mission centred in the conviction that he would by the time of his death be, as Keats put it, ‘among the English poets’. The gaze of press and public, consequent upon his dead first wife’s fame, created great strain. As did the poet’s enduring memory of that first wife. Not to mention the presence of a stepdaughter who was the absolute image of her mother.

  What could she do, friends such as Ehor asked themselves? Feed him well, keep a clean house (though he wouldn’t really have cared if it had been dirty), maintain the financial accounts (she was good at this), make the garden beautiful (she was very good, and very fulfilled, when it came to this), be an exemplary hostess when required (she was always beautifully dressed, with impeccable hair and makeup), avoid asking too many questions about his extra-curricular activities. For Ted, Court Green as remade by Carol was the place of stability and homeliness; he worked off his excesses in London and on his reading tours and fishing trips.

  Ehor Boyanowsky once confided in Ted at a difficult time, when his wife was having an affair. Ted wrote back with words of kindness, comfort and advice: he could understand the wife’s point of view because he too had experienced sexual obsession leading to infidelity. He explained that on two occasions he had been ‘out of control’ yet ‘remaining during and forever after in love with – for him – a person infinitely more significant’. On the first occasion, when married to Sylvia, ‘he experienced total separation and loss’. On the second, when married to Carol, the response was, he presumed, ‘total forgiveness’.32

  In the mountains of British Columbia, by the mighty Dean River, far from all such worries, Ted and his Canadian fishing friends marvelled at the aurora borealis. Back in Vancouver they toured the strip clubs. ‘They are so much more elegant and feminine than I recall from my youth in England, in the army,’ Ted allegedly remarked of the graceful naked pole-dancers. ‘Nor did they [the dancers of his youth] remove all their clothing. Amazing.’33

  In February 1986 Ted laid out in the yard of Court Green a fishing line in the shape of a noose, with a pile of monkey nuts in the middle. An escaped peacock had taken up residence in the garden and was eating Carol’s spring flowers. He told the story in a letter to Nick in Alaska: how he got the bird at the first attempt and how an airborne upturned peacock was a remarkable sight. He closed the noose, threw a blanket over his prey and took it to Nethercott, Michael and Clare Morpurgo’s farm for city children,
where he hoped it would have novelty value. It was soon eaten by a fox.34 A couple of weeks later he was at the annual dinner of the Salmon and Trout Association. The guest speaker was the actor Michael Hordern. The chairman of the association owned a wonderful 2-mile stretch of the Torridge, which Ted fished on the first day of the season. Such was the life of the countryman.

  On 4 June 1987, just over a week before the general election in which Margaret Thatcher coasted to her third successive term as Prime Minister, Hughes published an ‘ecological dialogue’ in The Times newspaper, headed ‘First Things First’ and subtitled ‘An Election Duet, performed in the Womb by foetal Twins’. It blamed man’s headlong obsession with economic growth, and more particularly the policies of Western governments and the regulations of the European Economic Community, for a mountain of wasted butter, for contaminated tap water, leukaemia brought on by pesticides sprayed on grain fields, and even the phenomenon of cot death. The price of increasing the Gross National Product was leafless trees, rivers without fish, and human beings suffering from pre-senile dementia. The poem begins in loose iambic pentameter and ends in brisk rhyming trimeter, but contains in the middle the two longest and perhaps least poetic lines of verse that Hughes ever wrote:

  And if the cost of Annual Expansion of the World Chemical Industry taken as a whole over the last two decades is a 40% drop in the sperm count of all human males (nor can God alone help the ozone layer or the ovum)

  Then let what can’t be sold to your brother and sister be released on the 3rd World and let it return by air and sea to drip down the back of your own throat at night.35

  He explained to a fellow-poet that pollution was the great theme of the age. He noticed, judging children’s poetry competitions, how it was something that even six- and seven-year-olds were worried about. The poem, he explained, was inspired by his reading of John Elkington’s book The Poisoned Womb: Human Reproduction in a Polluted World, published the previous year. Elkington was a preacher of eco-apocalypse, speculating that toxins were causing a massive reduction in human fertility. Ted did not have any faith in Mrs Thatcher’s willingness to address the question. For one thing, her husband Denis was involved in the waste-disposal trade. For another, she was the sort of woman upon whom nothing could put the frighteners. She resembled an army commander who believed that he could afford a casualty rate of 25 per cent. Her intransigence was ironic, since she had an Oxford degree in Chemistry. But perhaps it was not surprising: as Prime Minister she would listen only to professional consultants with vested interests. Besides, when she had been a practising chemist her job had merely been to research ‘the maximum number of bubbles that can be pumped into ice-cream, before it disillusions the customers’.36

  Ted was worried by bubbles of another kind. His fishing friend Ian Cook, who lived in a house on the Exe, had observed some kind of white foam boiling up on the weir where he fished the river Creedy. There was a sewage works a little way upstream. He would eventually bring a civil case against South West Water. Ted offered his usual support: ‘Top Poet in Water Fight’ read the headline in the local paper.37 Inspired by Ted, Cook and his lawyer dramatically invoked the rights enshrined in the Magna Carta. The judge compared the relevant stretch of river to ‘the face of a beautiful woman scarred by disease’, a metaphor very much up Ted’s street. Against expectation, Cook won his case. Ted told the press that it was a historic victory because it had ‘reactivated the power of common law in this terrific issue of water quality in rivers’.38 Instead of seeking damages, Cook asked the water authority to contribute to the research of the Institute of Freshwater Ecology into the polluting effect of detergents in the Exe. This established a connection between Ted and the ecotoxicologist Professor John Sumpter, who was working on the phenomenon of endocrine disruptors causing male fish to change gender.

  The ‘ecological dialogue’ during the election campaign and the South West Water court case are just two of the many instances in which Hughes used his public profile to address environmental concerns. Whether it was ammonia in the Torridge estuary, a proposal to establish a ‘Tarka Trail’ that risked disrupting the fragile ecosystem of the riverbank and bringing the masses to his sacred territory, an amusement park beside the river at Knaresborough back in Yorkshire, or an international campaign to save the black rhinoceros, he was ready to pen a protest. And he always made it clear that concern for the natural world was also concern for humankind, most forcefully in an interview on the occasion of the publication of his ecological children’s fable, The Iron Woman. He said that most people tended to ‘defend or rationalise the pollution of water’. The general assumption was that environmentalists were merely ‘defending fish or insects or flowers’. This missed the point that ‘the effects on otters and so on are indicators of what’s happening to us’. The issue was not so much to look after ‘the birds and bees’ as to ‘ferry human beings through the next century’: ‘The danger is multiplied through each generation. We don’t really know what bomb has already been planted in the human system.’39 With the Cold War at an end, the old image of the fear of nuclear annihilation was translated into fear of global ecocide. Such was the life of the Poet Laureate as ecowarrior.

  He always enjoyed describing his environmental discoveries and interventions in lengthy letters to Nick in Alaska. He was also superb at providing long-distance paternal advice. When Nick broke up with his girlfriend Madeline, whom he had known since Oxford, Ted comforted him with his own story of a life ‘oscillating between fierce relationships that become tunnel traps, and sudden escapes into wide freedom when the whole world seems to be just there for the taking’. It is a letter of extraordinary beauty, wisdom and tenderness, telling of the inner child and the paradox that ‘the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world’. There is a key to the source of true elegiac and cathartic poetry here: ‘That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember.’ Father Ted in the role of a very wise agony aunt, this is Hughes at his most humane and compassionate, yet with the necessary touch of self-deprecation: ‘And that’s how we measure out our real respect for people – by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate – and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river.’40

  Countryman, ecowarrior and family man came together in his next collection of poetry for Faber and Faber, which he entitled Wolfwatching. Planned by the end of 1987, it was dedicated to Aunt Hilda and published in September 1989. It is a thin volume, in both proportion and poetic development, gathering further elegiac poetry of childhood memory in the vein of Remains of Elmet. The family history is padded out with occasional pieces, such as his polemical lines written for the black rhino campaign. The collection is marred by some of the worst phraseology of the later Hughes, in which the over-vigorous and monotonous hammer-blows of the mother-tongue are combined with a dip into what Philip Larkin scathingly called the myth kitty: ‘Oracular spore-breath’, ‘goblin clump / Of agaric’, ‘scraggy sheep’, ‘ectoplasmic pulp’, ‘Temenos Jaguar mask – a vogue mandala: / Half a Loa, half a drugged Oglala’.41 Ted himself had doubts about the quality of some of the work that he had included: ‘doubting my powers and getting older’, he said of the collection. ‘Of course both wolves are caged.’42 He told the critic Keith Sagar, who was by this time tracking his master’s every literary move, that it was a funereal volume, a series of ‘obsequies over a state of mind that is to me, now, defunct’.43

  The importance of the book comes from the increasing confidence and directness with which Hughes exposes his personal voice. At its heart are the family poems, most of which he had originally published in fugitive form in the mid-Eighties. Here are tender evocations of his shell-shocked father in the aftermath of the Great War (‘Dust As We Are’ and ‘For the Duration’); of his mother’s tears for her husband’s damaged soul as she bends over
her sewing machine (‘Source’); of happier times of early boyhood with Ma walking up Hardcastle Crags (‘Leaf Mould’); of Uncle Walt as a young man ‘Under High Wood’ on the Somme, then as an old man on the clifftop, seeing a peregrine falcon and looking out on the Atlantic towards ‘Untrodden, glorious America’ (‘Walt’). The most telling inclusion is ‘Sacrifice’, the poem about Uncle Albert’s suicide, written just days before Sylvia took her own life in 1963 but only published two decades later, after his father’s death.44

  Wolfwatching was a selection of the Poetry Book Society. In introducing it in the society’s Bulletin, Ted explained that he had wanted Remains of Elmet to focus on the atmosphere of the place, so as to complement Fay Godwin’s photographs. He had accordingly excluded more autobiographical poems, to avoid ‘hijacking Fay’s inclusive vision’.45 Now the poems of family remembrance were gathered together. Later, he disparaged the collection as ‘various pieces that I wished to get out of the way – i.e. published, in order to clear the decks for something different’.46 The critical response was by and large respectful but muted. The poet Mick Imlah offered the most astute commentary: he saw that the two ‘Uncle’ poems were the best in the book and that they ‘sound like a new start’.47

  Their true home was in Ted’s Yorkshire collection, and that is where they ended up. A year after the re-release of Remains of Elmet without photographs as part of Three Books, the Elmet poems and Fay Godwin’s images were reunited. Faber produced a new edition of the collection, the title now stripped down to a bare Elmet. The quality of the paper was much better than that of the 1979 Remains of Elmet, so the black-and-white images, many of which had been very murky in the original edition, now looked fresh and sharp. At the end, Ted added in his family poems, implicitly dismembering Wolfwatching. ‘Sacrifice’, ‘For the Duration’ and ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ are turned into a run of elegies for both place and people, both family and wider community, shadowed by the Great War. Hughes regarded this final version of Elmet as the definitive version of his project to memorialise his native valley and its inhabitants, but because the volume was for the most part a reissue, which looked like an expensive coffee-table book (£30 in hardback, £14.99 or $19.99 even for the paperback), it did not have the sales or the impact that it deserved. It remains his most underrated work.