Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  When Rain-Charm was published, the assault from across the press was merciless. Auberon Waugh was incredulous in the Sunday Telegraph and A. L. Rowse scathing in the Evening Standard. For Hermione Lee, there was an embarrassing gap between the myth and the actuality of royalty (can the Queen’s corgis really stand in for the sleeping British Lion?) and for Hilary Corke it was impossible to read even a few lines ‘without emitting several little girlish shrieks of horror’.44 Poet-critics such as Sean O’Brien, Michael Horovitz and Peter Reading did their best to find something to praise, especially in the river and landscape imagery, but the only unequivocally positive voice was Andrew Motion, always an acolyte, who suggested that the collection revealed Hughes as the best Poet Laureate since Tennyson.45

  Ted was unlucky in the timing of Rain-Charm’s appearance. Nineteen-ninety-two, the Queen said in a speech that November, was not a year on which she would look back with undiluted pleasure: it was indeed her annus horribilis of royal scandal and fire in Windsor Castle. The republication of Hughes’s worst Laureate poem, written for the marriage of Prince Andrew and Miss Sarah Ferguson, was not exactly timely in the year that ‘Fergie’ was accused of plagiarising another children’s writer in her Budgie the Helicopter stories and then snapped sunbathing topless while having her toes sucked by a Texan millionaire. At the end of the year, the Evening Standard placed Ted at number eleven among a sorry dozen who had shared an annus horribilis with the Queen:

  With the Royal Family becoming ever more tawdry, the job of Poet Laureate became intensely embarrassing. His poem ‘The Honey Bee and the Thistle’, on the Yorks’ wedding, came back to haunt him (‘A helicopter snatched you up / The pilot it was me’). There were more mutterings about how he treated his first wife, Sylvia Plath [a reference to the Jacqueline Rose book]. The PC lobby attacked his children’s story ‘How the Polar Bear Became’, about a polar bear which dreams of a ‘spotless’ land where he can be alone with his whiteness. And his book Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being was ridiculed for impenetrable mysticism.46

  *

  Nineteen-ninety-three was not only the year in which Remains of Elmet, Cave Birds and River were revised and gathered as Three Books. It was also a good vintage for his children’s writing. In the spring he published a lovely little limited edition of seaside poems, from a private press in Exeter, inspired and accompanied by the pretty watercolours of local artist R. J. Lloyd. Written mostly in rhyming couplets aimed at children, they show that he had not lost the knack of imagining what it might be like to be a seal or an eel, a crab or a whelk, a bladderwrack or even a sea monster. Entitled The Mermaid’s Purse, the collection was reissued by Faber the year after Hughes’s death, with the additional inclusion of a poem on the graceful flight of seagulls – ‘back-flip’, ‘Wing-waltzing’, ‘they scissor / Tossed spray’ – that had been invisible since its appearance in the Christian Science Monitor forty years before.47

  September saw the publication of The Iron Woman, a sequel to The Iron Man with a much more overt ecological message. Dedicated once more to Frieda and Nicholas, it tells of how the Iron Woman comes to ‘take revenge on mankind for its thoughtless polluting of seas, lakes and rivers’.48 She emerges from muddy marshland like the sea monster that destroys Hippolytus, is cleansed in a river and, with the assistance of Lucy and Hogarth, destroys the waste-disposal factory, saves the water creatures and is united with the Iron Man.

  Two months after the appearance of The Iron Woman an adaptation of The Iron Man opened at the Young Vic. As a musical. The creator was Pete Townshend, lead guitarist of The Who. Ted struck up a friendship with him and they hung out at Soho House, an achingly trendy new private members’ club for arts and media types. The show received bewildered reviews but garnered full houses. Ted saw it in company with the Sillitoes, the Amichais, the Israeli cultural attaché and Olwyn. The latter was no lover of rock and roll, but found the music ‘amazingly likeable and catchy’. She wrote Pete Townshend a fan letter. Ted told the director that he liked the show immensely, though was not sure about the bit where the space-bat–angel came out of the star. He wondered if at the end Josette Bushell-Mingo, who played the angel, could be ‘roasted in the sun to a different colour’, in order to provide a greater contrast with ‘Trevor’s engine room grime’. In a postscript he suggested, with no regard for theatrical health-and-safety rules, that the space-bat’s approach might be accompanied by 10,000-decibel wingbeats.49 Young audiences loved the show, which ran through the Christmas holidays, but it failed to find the West End transfer that would have made some serious money.

  Two offshoots from The Goddess of Complete Being were preoccupying him at this time. In the Shakespeare book, he had been mildly dismissive of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the book that was Shakespeare prime source for classical myth. Hughes regarded it as a decadent Roman recension that was insufficiently reverential towards its Greek originals. But when he was invited by the poets Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun to contribute to a book in which some three dozen pre-eminent British poets (and a handful of Americans) would each translate one or two Ovidian tales, he changed his mind. Suddenly in Ovid he found a way of writing myth with a lightness of touch – something that had eluded him in the dark years of Crow and Cave Birds. Offered a choice of three stories, he did them all. And a fourth.

  After Ovid: New Metamorphoses, which appeared from Faber in November 1994, begins with Hughes’s version of Ovid’s creation story and includes his take on Pentheus being ripped apart by the horde of Bacchic maenads (a return to the territory of Gaudete) as well as his sprightly translations of both ‘Venus and Adonis’ (the obvious one, in the light of the Shakespeare book) and the cognate tale of ‘Salmacis and Hermaphroditus’. In the latter he takes particular pleasure in writing about the woman as instigator of a passionate sexual liaison, which ends with a ‘dizzy boil’ of two bodies melted into one, ‘Seamless as water’.50 To write from the point of view of the male who is the seduced not the seducer afforded him a kind of release. Having started with these four tales, he couldn’t stop doing more Ovid. The outcome was his triumphant Tales from Ovid, published in 1997.51

  Salmacis coils herself round Hermaphroditus like a snake and in this she is reminiscent of the witch-like Geraldine seducing the innocent Christabel in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s great poem, which Ted was reading and re-reading and writing about at great length at this time. In ‘The Snake in the Oak’, a 100-page essay, he sought to find the key to Coleridge’s imagination, as he had tried to find the key to Shakespeare’s in Complete Being. The essay was too long for journal publication but too short to be a book in its own right. By good fortune, while he was working on it the poet and critic William Scammell was putting together a substantial selection of Hughes’s prose for Faber and Faber – extracts from Poetry in the Making, book reviews, introductions, key essays such as those on Baskin (‘The Hanged Man and the Dragonfly’) and Plath (‘The Evolution of “Sheep in Fog”’). The Coleridge essay could be included, meaning that the book could be marketed as having new material as well as old.

  Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, published in March 1994, is a polished showcase of the best of Hughes’s critical writings, in which his muscular and energetic prose, so influenced by Hazlitt and Swift, is shown to fine advantage. There is autobiographical projection in almost every piece, but the long Coleridge essay takes this to an extreme. It is Hughes at his most intense and insightful, and at the same time his most batty and idiosyncratic. In writing of Coleridge’s ‘two selves’ – the Christian and the erotically ‘unleavened’ – he is also writing of his own battle with the Goddess, the snake-woman, the force of desire. ‘Coleridge was besotted with woman,’ he begins, matter-of-factly. If time were reversed the poet-critic Coleridge could as well have written ‘Hughes was besotted with woman.’ ‘At the same time,’ Hughes continues, not realising that he is writing about himself as much as about Coleridge, ‘few can have so specialized in such terrifying nightmares about such terri
fying women.’52 Was it to do with being his mother’s favourite, as Coleridge claimed he was? ‘Woman is the source of all bliss, all love, all consolation. Then everything went wrong. Fighting for mother’s exclusive love against seven brothers, he lost.’ Coleridge became obsessed by William and Dorothy Wordsworth because they presented him with the intense brother–sister bond he craved but lacked: ‘his revered Wordsworth and the beloved yet untouchable Dorothy somehow supplied his need’.53 Ted, who relied so often on both the literary judgement and the business sense of his sister Olwyn, was always intrigued by the symbiosis between the sister’s journals and the brother’s poems, and by the ineffably profound intimacy between William and Dorothy (in a famous interpretation, the critic Freddie Bateson had wondered whether there was a whiff of incest).

  The culmination of Coleridge’s woman obsession, Hughes suggests, is the apparition of the Nightmare Life-in-Death in ‘The Ancient Mariner’. She has full erotic allure, but she is also ‘a Death’, ‘white as leprosy’. She is Geraldine but she is also Lady Lazarus and she is Assia. But then Coleridge finds a kind of peace – though, with it, a loss of his poetic Muse – in a very different figure from the ‘snake in the oak’. This other woman is symbolised by a young birch tree which, though it cannot answer to ‘the truth of the heart’s passions’, does offer ‘a substitute happiness’, a kind of love free from the dangers of extreme eroticism, a love that is not ‘tragic and terrifying’ but is rather ‘a nostalgia for an idealized love that might have been’. The mother’s love is, as it were, recovered through a partner who is desexualised, a ‘pure-minded Christian virgin’ who appeals to the chaste, devotional aspect of Coleridge’s imagination.54

  But the Goddess would not go away. Hughes was extraordinarily prolific in his sixties. He took on far more commissions than his health could properly stand. Why? Because his curiosity could not resist a challenge. Because he wanted to keep his writing hand in. Because he needed to shield himself from the real necessity, which was to let go of his life with Sylvia. All these are good reasons.

  Olwyn had another explanation. In a document now lodged in the Hughes archive in Atlanta, Georgia, she suggests that his prolific volume of work in the mid- to late Nineties was simply intended to raise as much money as possible in order to lead a different life. At some point in 1994 or ’95, he told his sister that, much as he had relished the Laureate years and the contacts the post had brought him (all those aristocratic dinner-tables and riparian privileges), he now wanted only to ‘please himself’. The language was the same as that in the letter he wrote to Olwyn on the day he parted from Sylvia.

  His theatre work, the sale of the farm in the last year of his life, the expensive limited editions: all were part of an effort to buy himself freedom. Naturally, Olwyn concludes, ‘he was mindful of posterity’, but he was also looking forward to another, happier decade ‘of his own life and work’.55 The thing to which Olwyn here alludes and does not allude is that Ted embarked at this time on a serious affair with a woman in south London. Though not a literary type at all, she was his last great love, a person with whom he relaxed and laughed and let down his guard. A friend tells of a memorable day in May 1997 when he and Ted and the woman went down to the gambler John Aspinall’s private zoo in Kent. Ted became like a twelve-year-old boy. He imitated the sound of a wildebeest in order to make a tiger roar and it did. His friend had never seen him so happy.56

  The following month Ted told János Csokits that his last three years had been ‘as great a chaos as any previously’, culminating in his getting ill, which came as ‘a big shock’ causing a ‘general revision of priorities’.57 When Hughes spoke of chaos in his life, he usually meant amorous entanglement. Close friends knew what he was talking about with regard to these last years, but his renewal of a double life between Devon and London was kept secret and did not leak into the public domain until a year after his death when a story appeared in the press about a man in south London coming forward with the information that he had rented a house to Hughes where ‘the poet had lived with a woman and the landlord was furious about the mess in which the house had been left’ at the time of his death.58 Residence in south London – Brixton, say – explains why in his final illness he was rushed to hospital at London Bridge, 200 miles from Court Green.

  The woman in question does not wish to be named. She was from a humble East End background, but had prospered through property development – buying run-down houses in south London, doing them up and selling them on. Ted first met her through one of the well-to-do companions of his Scottish fishing trips. She had ventured north without her husband because he did not like fishing. In August 1995, Ted took her to meet Nick in Alaska. Nick, always loyal to Carol, was uncomfortable. Before going up to Fairbanks, Ted and his new companion joined his British Columbian fishing hosts for a dinner-party in Vancouver and then for an expedition to the wild Dean River. She was an excellent cook – Olwyn later enthused that ‘She made the best bouillabaisse I’ve ever tasted, and I’ve eaten in the South of France’59 – and she worried about the quality of ingredients she might find in Vancouver. Her hosts reassured her that Vancouver was renowned for its food, and she was duly impressed by what she found in the markets. Their first impression of her was not very favourable, largely because her voice seemed affected and posh. When Ted revealed that her origins were as lowly as his own, and that she had remade herself, then reaped the reward of success by joining the elite fishing set, they warmed to her.

  Ted was very attentive to her out in the wilderness. ‘Even in the midst of storytelling,’ one of the group recalled, ‘he would spring up from the campfire each night as she called out to him from their tent, slightly annoying the assembly and inspiring us to speculate upon what she had to offer that would make him, a notoriously lingering campfire denizen and scotch nightcapper, abandon us in her favour.’ ‘It need hardly be said’, he added, ‘that Ted loved sex in all its variations between man and woman and would sometime seem almost charmingly adolescent in his amazement at how enthusiastic women were about those variations. But he was never disrespectful or crude … It was one of his more endearing qualities, and he had many.’ The rugged fishermen were not so impressed when Ted announced that under the influence of his new companion he had taken to frequenting golf courses, which the steelhead fanatics regarded as ‘those most artificial of greens, the antithesis of the domain of the savage gods’.60

  Ted Hughes wrote in the moment. That is why he created such a huge body of poems and left such a vast archive of drafts and notes. Ted Hughes aspired to live in the moment. That is why when he told the woman in south London he would come to live with her permanently, he meant it. And why when he was back at Court Green saying that he would never leave, he meant it.61 And it is also why he loved writing, fishing and sex, in all of which there is a sense of total absorption, a unity of mind and body, an escape from the shadows of the past and the responsibilities of the future.

  The volume of late publication was indeed prodigious. There were more fine-press editions, such as Earth Dances (1994, 250 copies at £195 each) and Shakespeare’s Ovid (his translations for Hofmann and Lasdun recycled in an edition of 200 copies, 50 of them signed and with original etchings, selling at £450 each, and the remainder at £100). In 1995 alone, his latest ‘Creation Tales’ were collected under the title The Dreamfighter and his short stories as Difficulties of a Bridegroom, his Collected Animal Poems were put together in four volumes and there was a printed text of his translation for the Royal Shakespeare Company of the Frank Wedekind play of teenage sexual arousal, Spring Awakening.

  The Dreamfighter, dedicated to Carol, continues in the vein of How the Whale Became and Tales of the Early World: surreal folktales and myths of origin, dark revisitings of the territory of the Kipling Just So Stories that he had loved as a child. God creates all manner of creatures but demons keep reappearing; bodies are distorted and the reader never knows whether the next twist will be a fight, a kiss, a screa
m or a conflagration. The stories are a children’s version of the Crow sequence, slightly watered down but with the injection of humour that is sometimes delightful, sometimes bizarre. Every creature comes from the creative head of God. In this sense, God is the writer, Hughes himself. When in the title story God summons a succession of animals to protect him from his nightmares, some of the bad dreams are the same as those recorded in Ted’s journals. And every now and then there is a glimpse of his own life, transposed into mythic narrative: ‘Suddenly God had a brainwave. If Goka has a baby, he thought, she will calm down. She’ll become sensible. And Goku too, he will become serious. Fathers become serious.’62 But things don’t turn out as planned.

  A psychoanalyst would have a very interesting time with the last story in the collection, ‘The Secret of Man’s Wife’, in which the wife yearns to escape and the husband believes she is meeting a wolf in the woods. He asks God to capture the wolfiness that is making her strange and to tame it as a pet so that his wife will be normal again. God consults his mother, who tells him that a Demon has got into the wife. So, with the assistance of his mother, God captures the wife, ties her up, gags her, places her by a furnace and drives the Demon out of her through sheer fear. Man then meets the beast that has been driven out. He asks it to come and live with them as a pet: ‘Woman pretended to be surprised as he described its red fur, its amber eyes, its slender, jet-black legs, its blazing white chest and chin and its miraculous lovely tail.’ She asks whether it agreed to come. Man explains that it did indeed reply, very politely. It said: ‘O Man, O husband of glorious and beautiful Woman, it is the fear of being anyone’s pet that has turned the tip of my tail quite white.’63 A wife is not a pet. As this story went into print, Ted was writing and rewriting the poem about his marriage to Sylvia and the fox that he nearly brought home from Chalk Farm Bridge, but did not.