Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  Then he turns to the posthumous life of her work. How ‘Through the late Sixties’, her poems ‘crept through America – and / Took hold like an organised addiction’. For womankind, for the ‘Libbers’:

  Your image in manipulated neons

  Resembling flames was the martyr

  To their centuries of oppression.

  Yourself, would you believe it,

  Their megaphone marching saint.

  Who is she? Who was she?

  She became the voice against the patriarchy, but by then it was too late to ask whether or not she had really hated Daddy.

  Because of her suicide and because of the explosive content of Ariel – ‘Ariel’s electrocardiograph’, he brilliantly calls it, in an allusion to her ECT – The Bell Jar was read retrospectively as another anti-Daddy tirade. By the time the novel was published in America, it was too late for the alternative possibility that it was less an autobiographical scream than:

  A sort of metaphor for the tirade

  Many an injured wife would let fly

  At the Daddy of her children if only

  She could find the language.

  Sylvia had become a feminist icon because nobody before her, no woman before her,

  Had emptied her whole soul of its rage

  Against all that had suppressed and denied her,

  Against all that had shut her from the life

  She had wanted for herself, from her freedom.

  By writing of her father, her mother, her upbringing and her husband (‘me’), she became ‘the Universal / Hidden, mother hurt of womankind’.

  Now he understood about Jane Anderson and Joan Gilling and the meeting in Cambridge. Just as he and Sylvia had been finding each other, her ‘old suicide’s doppelganger’ had arrived on her doorstep to dog her ‘new dream’. That is why Jane/Joan had to be destroyed. She was ‘the double’ of Sylvia’s ‘old disasters’ and that was ‘a theme for a novel’. As for Ted himself, he was ‘a post-war Englishman’ who adopted ‘The bereft child in you and the broken girl / Hapless victim of your German nation’. Was she – he is thinking of ‘Daddy’ again – in some sense ‘Hitler’s bequest’ to him, to the poet whose pike-voice was ‘deep as England’?

  But then he pulls back and rearticulates the position of the Deposition. A novel is not an autobiography. A work of art is a work of art. It is not life.

  Esther Greenwood is an experiment,

  An extrapolation from the mind-warp nadir

  Of suicidal breakdown. She is not real.

  The paradox, though, is that ‘Trial’, the long poem in which Ted Hughes wrote these words, is about events and feelings that were real: it is a capsule biography of Sylvia Plath and a partial autobiography of Ted Hughes. Its story is real.

  27

  A

  Fishing was Ted Hughes’s recreation of choice, especially in his later years. All the more so if the airfare to Alaska and the rivers of British Columbia could be defrayed by a poetry reading in Vancouver, or the Inland Revenue persuaded that a fishing holiday in Scotland also constituted tax-deductible research for future poems. Another form of both recreation and research was reading. He devoured books throughout his life and after his death a library of 6,000 of them was shipped to Atlanta, Georgia, to join the two and a quarter tonnes of his original manuscripts that were already there. But at various times in his life he dabbled in other hobbies, sometimes in company with his children. At Court Green in 1967 or ’68, he bought a potter’s wheel. Frieda was already proving herself a talented painter. Now she took to sculpting in clay. She modelled an owl, a bird she would always love (she keeps owls to this day). As Nick matured, he became exceptionally gifted in the art of pottery. He would throw, glaze and fire, creating beautiful animals and other figures. In those early days, Ted had a go himself.

  He produced two black jaguars, each about 6 inches long. He knew the anatomy of the beast, and caught every sinew. These were grown-up equivalents of the little plasticine creatures he had made in his boyhood. One of them has its back curved in a smooth arch, its head low, its mouth wide open in a yawn or a roar or a howl of pain. He gave it to Gerald. It survives fully intact.1 The other is running free, legs curved in motion. He gave it to Olwyn. It survives in a sorry state, three legs gone. The two stances represented, Olwyn thought, the jaguar of his Hawk in the Rain poem in and out of the cage. She must be right. But there is another meaning too. Branded on the forehead of Gerald’s jaguar is a letter: ‘A’.

  ‘A’ is for Assia. It is also the Scarlet Letter that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne is forced to wear on her dress as a badge of shame: ‘A’ is for Adultery.

  The release in Wolfwatching of ‘Sacrifice’, the poem about Uncle Albert’s suicide, was a readying for confrontation with nearer pain. Still not prepared to release the collection about Sylvia that he had been working on for so many years, Ted turned to the memory of Assia. But he did not want reviews or public attention, so in the spring of 1990 he published an elegiac volume called Capriccio in an edition of a mere fifty copies on Leonard Baskin’s Gehenna Press. There were engravings by Baskin and ten of the copies were rendered unique (and could thus be sold for more money) by the inclusion of a page of Hughes manuscript and an extra Baskin drawing. A sequence of twenty poems, Capriccio seeks to hold together obscure mythographic, sometimes cabbalistic, mumbo-jumbo (‘the blood-clepsydra / Limit of Aphrodite’s epiphany’)2 and a direct confrontation with Assia’s suicide. The imagery is sometimes bold to the point of recklessness, as when Jewish Assia is described knowing exactly how her own death looked: ‘It was a long-cold oven / Locked with a swastika.’3 At other times, the verse is unbearably poignant. Ted writes with still raw emotion of Assia’s jealousy of Sylvia’s talent (‘The Other’) and of her all too real threats, for example when she only half jokingly said that she would end her own life once she turned forty. She ‘folded’ her ‘future’, he writes, into her ‘empty clothes. Which Oxfam took.’4 He writes, too, of Shura, stripped from life, her little arms ‘clinging round’ her mother’s neck, by the gas oven on the blanket on the cold kitchen floor of the dreary apartment in Clapham.5

  Capriccio ends with a pair of poems about the end and then the beginning of their relationship. ‘Flame’ is a record of their house-hunting in the final week of Assia’s life, and their final parting at Manchester Central railway station. ‘Chlorophyl’ is the one about the blade of grass.

  The most tender poem in the sequence is entitled ‘Snow’. It is a vivid memory, based on Assia’s journal, of her lonely walk down the cobbled hill in Haworth just before her suicide. She is seen on an ‘unending’ walk, down to the Brontë parsonage in which, because it is now a museum (a mausoleum), the oven is empty of fire. But the walk goes on for ever because Assia is following a path down to the underworld by way of another oven empty of fire but full of poison. The blackened Yorkshire stone of the closed cafés and gift-shops is elided with the smoke and fire of war and Holocaust – Assia’s Russian-Jewish-German origins are summoned in an image of the faces of her childhood friends ‘Beside their snowed-under tanks, locked into the Steppe’ where it was so cold that mud froze in the time it took to drink a cup of coffee. Assia in her black coat of ponyskin is going to join those dead. Ted watches her, merging her journal entry with the sight of her when he returned to Haworth to pick her up for the drive further north to Hexham. He feels the touch of the snow that is already burying the print of her feet, ‘Drawing its white sheet over everything, / Closing the air behind you’.6

  As always with Hughes, ‘Snow’ is a poem as entrenched in literature as in life. Experience is refracted through reading. At the beginning of the poem, snowflakes cling to the black fox fur of Assia’s hat and there is an evocation of the ‘ghostly wreckage / Of the Moscow Opera’. Ted was meditating deeply on the life and work of Leo Tolstoy. With her beauty and her style, her transgression and her suicide, here Assia is her own favourite literary character: Anna Karenina. Then, as the
imagery unfolds, playing the black of the buildings off against the white of the snow, the literary context shifts and the well-versed reader hears the whisper of an allusion to the greatest of all Holocaust poems, Paul Celan’s ‘Death Fugue’, with its ‘black milk of daybreak’ drunk morning, noon and night in a world where ‘Death is a Master from Germany’ and the hair of Shulamith is turned to ash.7 Both a personal elegy for Assia and an elegy for all the Jews who went to the ovens, ‘Snow’, one of Ted’s most moving poems, is in some sense his answer to ‘Daddy’. Where Sylvia appropriated the Holocaust into her own private trauma as a reaction against her father’s Germanic tendencies, Ted gives Assia back to her people, in recognition of the fact that her perpetual wandering, her inability ever to find a home, had its origin in her father’s flight from the Nazis in 1933.

  Hardly anyone knew that the fifty copies of Capriccio had appeared and of those who did only a handful (Carol and Olwyn most obviously) would have known that it was for Assia, let alone how profoundly autobiographical the content was. Limited release that it was, for Ted to have written openly about Assia was a huge step forward.

  The title Capriccio suggests a jeu d’esprit, a sprightly, lightweight, free-form fantasia. The casualness of the term obscures the fact that this is but a fragment of a much larger and more explicitly autobiographical sequence of Assia poems, which was never completed. In Hughes’s private archive at his death, there was a box labelled ‘A 4’.8 This does not refer to the size of the loose sheets of paper and notebooks inside. It means ‘for Assia’. Among the densely scrawled and heavily revised manuscripts is an inky-blue Challenge Triplicate Book to the cover of which three small strips of yellow sticky-tape have been attached in the shape of an upside-down ‘A’.

  ‘A’ is for Assia but now it is also for ‘ash’. It is still, too, the Scarlet Letter of Adultery. The inverted ‘A’ of yellow sticky-tape also resembles a fragment of a star of Zion, thus evoking the yellow star that branded the Jews in Nazi Germany. One of the unifying threads of the material in the box is the recognition that whereas Sylvia wrote ‘I think I may well be a Jew,’ Assia really was a Jew. Had Dr and Mrs Gutmann not left Germany for Palestine, Assia would have experienced in reality what was for Sylvia a metaphor: ‘an engine / Chuffing me off like a Jew. / A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen’.9

  Had it been completed, ‘A’ – the sequence of Assia poems – would have been a decisive turning point in Hughes’s poetic career. But he could not decide on the content and structure. Or on how explicit the autobiographical references should be. The box ‘for Assia’ includes several different plans for the work. There is a list of fifteen poems beginning with one that lays out some ground rules: ‘So – they – will have clear notion of me – you will not be known, shadowy, a name [–] they will not know how much you were more real than me [–] how much more real than them.’ This sounds suitably elusive, and yet the proposed second poem is very explicitly called ‘When Dad told Ma’: we know that Hughes believed that his father telling his mother of Assia’s suicide was the thing that killed her. As for Assia being unknown, the proposed ninth poem was to have been on the subject of her earlier marriage to Dicky Lipsey. But then the closing poem in this plan for the sequence would have faded Assia back into the ‘A’ of anonymity: ‘2 months after – evening with Sillitoe, pennicilin [sic] allergy, free fall – not a word of you’.

  Another plan was for a sequence of thirty poems with an extraordinary mix of direct autobiographical recollection and mutation into myth, symbol and a distancing third-person voice. The first of them follows a man as he goes to a pub, leaving his lover in a hotel bedroom. ‘He eats sausages drinks beer etc – strolls back through square.’ Second is a thunderbolt in the form of a phone call. Poem three: ‘The liar – what his lies permit him’. Four: ‘The man running along the beach with the girl has 4 children by 3 different women’. Five: ‘Goodnight kiss – inventory of its pathos’. Six flicks to the woman’s perspective: ‘Her dread of what people will say’. Seven goes back to the man: ‘He tries to fathom the actual value of copulation.’ Eight: ‘Bed – the act over – yet round this the torment of every hour, the motive of every action, the slant of every word, the bellow of life that is carrying us towards – what?’ The proposed sequence then veers from the aphrodisiac of spring woodlands and old empty houses to the folly of love poetry to the desolation of affairs to a series of ballads on dirty England, a whore-priestess and an existential survivor. Yet another draft outline, meanwhile, is almost entirely mythographic as opposed to personal: an alien passion destroying temple and Goddess, an auto-da-fé, the death-wish and death-recklessness in desire, the coming together of an ascetic and a girl.

  The Assia poems, he told himself in a Coleridgean phrase, were to be ‘the penetralia of the mystery’. To prepare himself for the writing of ‘A’, he jotted down his key memories. He disciplined his imagination, told himself to see again Assia at the Beacon, ‘sitting in that chair by the phone while Hilda screamed at her, and she helpless to defend herself’. To hear again Assia at Lumb Bank, her horror at its darkness and damp. To remember Assia in her ponyskin coat waiting for a train at Clapham Junction in the last month of her life. To capture the image of her in a pub, wearing a skirt of brown Thai silk and holding an Embassy cigarette. To recapture the energy and freedom of the beginning of their affair in London: the newness of everything, the shine of her black handbag, the thick scent of her Dior perfume, the smell of Mayfair in 1962. He even made himself confront the mingling of the hope that always comes at the start of a love affair with his glimmer of suspicion regarding Assia’s relationship with Alvarez.

  But then there is a later memory, of the continuing dominance of the image of Assia. He recalls another woman ‘in her leather skirt, who seemed to me then so identical to A’. If Assia was the catalyst for the escape from Sylvia, he asks, was this other an ‘escape from A – as with Susan’? And so, page after page, the memories are gathered, until the last farewell is reached: ‘In Haworth – Beethoven’s last quartets. The ice on the trees. Walking downhill in the snow alone. The second image.’ Assia in the snow alone; Sylvia in the snow alone. ‘How these histories repeat’, he writes in the margin of his notebook.

  The most finished version of the poetry sequence begins with a piece called ‘Dream of A’. She appears in the poet’s dream, more beautiful than ever before, her beauty more ‘Frightening and strange and delicate / Richer with the inaccessible things / That send desire crazy’. The ghost comes with a blackness about her eyes and her hair, a mystery that fevers the imagination and ‘makes the prick stand up willy nilly’ (one of Hughes’s more unfortunate turns of phrase). There is then an attempt to evoke the intensity of their lovemaking, which is never an easy literary task. He imagines faceless people interrupting them. He elevates their lovemaking into a thing that miraculously gives material form to ‘An empty space surrounded by the infinity / Of absence and inhumanity and nothingness’. He turns their lovemaking into a ‘masterpiece / Translated from the language of an extinct people / And of some unknown author’. He makes it an ‘eternal thing’ out of the biblical Song of Songs, an offering of love and beauty so strong that the earth cannot cope with it or allow it, with the result that it is obliterated and Assia destroyed:

  You lost the body to enjoy it

  And the beauty to give to it, and in exchange

  You received death and burning to ashes

  And I lost you.

  But because of the dream, he says, he has not wholly lost her. Her image and her voice have returned to him. He, in turn, restores her through his writing. At one level, Assia the super-lover and supreme beauty is being turned into the Goddess of some ancient female-worshipping tribe. At another level, she is the archetypal Jewish beauty out of the Song of Songs. The Jews after Auschwitz are imagined as a near-extinct people and the ‘unknown author’ is the Yahweh who must not be named.

  Throughout the drafts of ‘A’, Hughes is haunted by the fact t
hat whereas Sylvia lies in her grave in Brontë country, Assia was cremated. This seems to have been Ted’s decision, probably made before discovering the will in which she wrote of her desire to be buried in an English country graveyard. Being cremated, there was a double sense in which she lost her body. The sequence of poems in her memory is haunted by the image of both Assia and Shura reduced to ash.10

  This inevitably draws the narrative back to Nazi Germany. Another attempt to start the story – untitled other than with the number 1 – begins ‘When she was eight she started running’ (actually she was six when the family fled from Vienna). One line here, ‘Her breath puffs like a refugee train,’ echoes the Plathian puff of the train on the way to the camps that Assia’s ‘milky lips shaped to the nipple / Never tasted’. ‘But who escapes?’ he asks: wherever she went, from America to Russia to Israel to England, Assia lived with the guilt of the survivor. So when she lies on a blanket on the kitchen floor, gassed along with her little girl, she is not one of love’s but ‘One of Hitler’s casualties’, albeit a quarter of a century later. The swastika, not his own infidelity, is claimed as the thing that killed her.

  Hughes, who believed that all artistic creativity came from a wound, convinces himself – or at least tries to convince himself – that the brief and far from smooth course of their love, and then the poem he is writing in memory of that love, offered Assia respite from the wound inflicted by her origin as a German Jew. He evokes Germany through the image of a black forest and the smell of burning; he writes of touching her hurt, of how everything in Assia rested on a hurt, and of how, as she rested ‘in the thick of the forest’, she allowed him to ‘Touch all her hurts’. He writes tenderly of kissing ‘each one’, imagines the two of them secretly planting a flower ‘Over the buried enmity of our fathers’. But it would have been impossible for Hughes to write publicly of Assia’s lifelong wound without the accusation of self-exculpation. His perpetual dilemma with regard to both Sylvia and Assia was that he needed to write his love and grief and guilt into poetry, to expiate in order to move his art forward, but he could not publish.