Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  It was also in 1995 that a New Selected Poems appeared from Faber. It was partly anticipated by a limited-edition selection the previous year, which was distributed for free to participants in the Struga Poetry Festival in Macedonia, which Ted hugely enjoyed attending. The selection was ‘new’ not only in that it was different from, and more expansive than, the 1982 Selected Poems, but also in that it included a group of confessional poems about Sylvia and Assia, some of which had only previously appeared in occasional publications or in the privately printed Capriccio. Others were published for the first time. Equally revealing was a hitherto unpublished poem in memory of his mother. It describes how each year on 13 May, the anniversary of her death, in his imagination he would see her in the company of her sister Miriam. He would look at a ‘torn-off diary page’ that he had preserved. Gerald had scribbled on it ‘Ma died today.’ Then the memories would come flooding back: Sunday walks at lark rise, chatter about favourite dresses and shoes.64 But the memories that push their way to the fore are her recollections of her love for Gerald. It is as if Ted is merely being used to fine-tune Edith’s love for her elder son. The younger boy is perpetually in his brother’s shadow. The poem ends with a memory of how he once came home across the fields from one of his boyhood moorland walks. His mother watches him all the way. When he comes close, he finds that she is crying because she wanted it to be his brother.

  Nearly all the reviews of the New Selected Poems took the opportunity to praise the early work and the range of Hughes’s achievement:

  We’ve got Ted the exact observer of nature … Ted the social realist (voice a bit squeaky), Ted the wild apocalyptic shaman, Ted the last of the Great War poets, Ted the Ancient Mariner lurking outside the Windsors’ doomed weddings, Ted the kiddies’ bedtime bard. All these voices, and yet Ted never sounds remotely like anyone else but Hughes.65

  Leafing through the reviews, which Ted kept and filed, one senses the critics’ relief at being able to offer some atonement for the drubbing dished out to Rain-Charm. Only a few saw that the book was a ‘Trojan horse’, that the handful of new poems at the back in a ‘new confessional voice’ were a testing of the waters that made this ‘the most exciting volume of poetry that Hughes has produced in many years’.66 For the most part, though, the references to Sylvia and Assia went quietly and rather gratifyingly unnoticed.

  The quest for money was a constant refrain in his letters in these years. He asked Baskin if he was owed anything from Capriccio. Baskin replied that the book had sold twenty-eight copies, which meant that Ted had earned nearly $30,000, of which he was owed just over $2,000, but the Gehenna Press had no money. Still, at least the Royal Shakespeare Company paid well for the Wedekind. He told Heaney that the translation work for the theatre served him as a form of anaesthesia, but was consistently interesting.67 He explained in the same letter that he needed money because he was looking for a flat in London, but only in private conversation did he tell Seamus why he wanted the flat.

  The collaboration inaugurated by the Wedekind translation had its origin at the Young Vic. A dynamic young director called Tim Supple had just taken over the theatre at the time of the Pete Townshend Iron Man. Supple wrote to Hughes asking if he would be interested in dramatising some of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, a project that would have suited him very well. Having received no reply, Supple asked the poet Carol Ann Duffy instead. Her versions were about to go into rehearsal when Supple received a scrawled note from Ted asking whether the offer was still open. It was too late, but when he saw Supple’s show he was impressed. He wrote again, making it clear that he would like to work with him. He reiterated his offer after seeing Supple’s revelatory productions of The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night. At this point, the Royal Shakespeare Company asked Supple to direct something different for them, and he chose Spring Awakening. He had a gut feeling that ‘Ted might be able to express the wildness of the sexual interior shared by the children in the play, and to bring to life the mythic shadow that they feel to be looming over them’.68

  Spring Awakening, written in 1888, begins with a girl confiding to her mother, during an argument about the length of her skirt, that she sometimes thinks about death and that she might one day wear nothing beneath the skirt. Two boys are tormented by sexual dreams. The girl asks one of the boys, Melchior, to hit her with a switch of wood, then hit her harder, harder. In the second act he rapes her and the other boy kills himself under the pressure of homework and the confusions of puberty. The school authorities blame Melchior for this: he is alleged to have corrupted his friend by writing him a letter explaining the facts of life. He is expelled. In the third act, the girl dies as the result of a botched abortion. Melchior is visited by the ghost of his friend, with his head tucked under his arm and the information that he has been more fulfilled in death than in his miserable life. Melchior is tempted to join his friend in death, but a Masked Gentleman arrives, tells him that death is not to be borne and that all the dead friend wanted was the love of his companion. In a sub-plot two other boys acknowledge their homosexual desire for each other. In another scene, the class of boys indulges in a spree of competitive masturbation. The friends bid farewell and the Masked Man guides Melchior to the future: he must go on living.

  It was clear to Supple that as Ted worked he was thinking deeply about sexual awakening and the destruction of love. Repression leads to shame and guilt, tragedy and suicide. Lust and love cannot be denied, whatever social convention tries to dictate. ‘He was clearly, as all poets must, mining his own emotional experience,’ Supple recalled. ‘One of the very few phrases that I remember asking him to change did this too overtly – a character referred to the gas oven. I asked him to change this not because of the personal reference but because it was anachronistic – the play is set in the late 1800s. But it revealed the deep connections he was making.’69

  Ted went to rehearsals when he could – he listened rather than watched. He would lean back against the steps of the room, cock his head to the ceiling and seem to ‘sniff the words in the air’. He struck up a particular rapport with the teenage actors who played the children. Whereas the adult RSC actors were suspicious of his presence (as actors nearly always are when there is an intruder in the rehearsal room), the boys and girls were entirely open: ‘not corseted in habit, pride and fear, they loved his observations and he was able to unlock a depth in the way they saw their roles’.70

  The production opened in August 1995 at the RSC’s studio theatre in London, the Barbican Pit. Most of the cast were schoolchildren themselves, lending the performance great credibility. Tim Supple’s production won plaudits all round, while Hughes’s translation was praised by some critics as ‘vivid and robust’, indeed ‘unobtrusively poetic’, but condemned by others as ‘stilted and overblown’.71 The truth is that he was working from a literal crib and both the sinewy strength and the occasional bloating of the language were Wedekind’s.

  Early in the play’s run, Ted went to dinner with Supple and the Morpurgos. Asked what he was doing next, Supple said that he had long wanted to direct Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding. Ted launched into an account of how every great writer had a controlling myth and in Lorca’s case it was encapsulated in his essay on duende, the demonic spirit of performance in which actor and audience share a kind of Bacchic frenzy. Supple asked him to do the translation, but he shied away from the task. He agreed only when Supple cut a deal: he, in return, would read the latest batch of ‘Sacred Earth’ environmental plays by children. As with the Wedekind, Ted worked from a literal translation. Supple was thrilled to find him grasping ‘the bare, blunt fierceness of the writing’, taking ‘something essentially Spanish’ and hearing in it ‘the language of the soil and the folk ritual’ and letting that language ‘re-emerge as something entirely English’.

  This time, the translation proved more successful than the production. The directorial and design vision of the production which opened at the Young Vic in September 1996 were, Supple admit
ted, ‘just too complicated, too aesthetic, not direct enough’. Ted was conscious of this. When Supple told him that they were struggling over the design, he replied (still under the influence of Peter Brook), ‘Design? what design do you need? A pot for civilisation and a bush for the wild.’ In order to promote the show, Ted did a number of press interviews, which he later regretted. ‘Never talk about anything before it is finished,’ he said. Because he had talked, the production was doomed: ‘You see, we cursed it, we said too much and trusted them when we shouldn’t.’72

  The reviews were terrible. ‘Laughable Tragedy’ was the headline in the Daily Telegraph.73 ‘Try to imagine a company of fiery Spanish actors appearing in an adaptation of Jane Austen or Trollope,’ said another paper, ‘and you will get some idea of the incongruity involved.’74 ‘You know,’ said Ted, reflecting on the flop, ‘I think that Lorca’s theatre was much more simple than we imagine, and more anarchic. A bit like a street pageant or carnival. It would have been much cruder than we think.’75

  The characters are symbolic types – Mother, Mother-in-Law, Bride and Bridegroom – but Hughes’s translation also catches the immediacy of their humanity, as when he evokes the tenderness of love: ‘You are so lucky! To wrap your arms around a man, to kiss him, to feel his weight … And the best moment of all, when you wake up and feel him beside you, his breath stroking your shoulder – like a nightingale’s feather.’76 By the end, the language is suffused with death, and the poetry is close to that of Crow, as a knife:

  slides in cold

  Through startled flesh

  Till it stops, there,

  In the quivering

  Dark

  Roots

  Of the scream.77

  Crow itself, meanwhile, had been dramatised in a stunningly successful production at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow by the innovative Ulsterman Michael Boyd, who would later become artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company.78

  The theatre work didn’t produce enough money. In March 1997, after two years of careful preparation (organising, editing, weeding), he sold his poetic and epistolary archive to Emory University in Atlanta for a substantial six-figure sum, to be received in staged payments with an option on the purchase of items that were held back (a few things he was still working on, he told Emory – by which he meant anything to do with the Birthday Letters project, not to mention nearly all his journals, the poems about Assia, the poems arising from the Bell Jar trial and a swathe of other highly intimate material). He told Olwyn that the sale would help with the bills and that he was off to lie low for three weeks.79

  His unrelenting productivity in these last years also saw the publication in 1997 of By Heart: 101 Poems to Remember. The introduction is a guide to ancient ‘memory techniques’ that use ‘strongly visualized imagery’. Even this late in his career, well after the publication of Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Hughes is still reflecting obsessively on that idea of a rupture in English culture – Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’ – some time in the mid-seventeenth century. He contrasts the ‘unforgettable’ remark of Thomas Aquinas, ‘the patron saint of memory systems’, that ‘Man cannot understand without images’ against the attempt of the ‘Puritan/Protestant ascendancy of the Civil War’ to ‘eradicate imagery from all aspects of life’. The destruction of images in churches, the banning of stage-plays and the introduction of lifeless ‘learning by rote’ in schools, displacing the old memory techniques that used ‘imagery’, are all seen as parts of the same impulse.80

  The anthology itself, effectively a slimmed-down School Bag, compiled without the editorial companionship of Heaney, is Hughes’s personal selection of the greatest hits of English poetry. These are the poems that he knew by heart and that lived within him all his days. They may be read as a retrospective gathering of his influences. Here are Alfred Tennyson’s ‘The Eagle’, precursor of ‘Hawk Roosting’; Robert Frost’s ‘The Road not Taken’, which always came to his mind when he had to make a big life-choice (for example between two women); Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’ (another bird of prey) and ‘Inversnaid’, which helped to shape Hughes the ecopoet (‘What would the world be, once bereft / Of wet and of wildness?’); here is Wordsworth on Westminster Bridge, at Tintern Abbey and with Lucy in the grave; Wilfred Owen in the First World War and Keith Douglas in the Second; here are Edward Thomas, R. S. Thomas and Dylan Thomas; a wealth of Yeats and Eliot, Lawrence’s piano, Blake’s tiger, Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ and Keats looking into the classics. Emily Dickinson is represented by five poems, Sylvia Plath by only one – and that is the finely crafted, polished not raw, ‘Crossing the Water’. An Ariel poem would have been too painful with Birthday Letters still not yet published. And the most surprising omission is perhaps unsurprising. There is no Emily Brontë: Hughes cannot bring himself to ask the readers of his anthology to remember by heart the ghost of the beloved (‘What I love shall come like visitant of air’)81 or a woman lying in her grave under the snow on the Yorkshire moor.

  During these years, Ted was also publishing more personal poetry, though keeping it below the radar of publicity. Especially notable were his three exquisite elegies for Jennifer Rankin, which appeared in a volume of New Writing edited by Malcolm Bradbury and Andrew Motion from the school of creative writing at the University of East Anglia, where Ted was glad to give one of his – now infrequent – poetry readings.82 No one realised how much Jennifer had meant to him.

  The elegiac voice was becoming ever more insistent. In June 1997 he told János Csokits that he hadn’t written any original poetry for two years. He had been hiding behind his translation work. He was blocked by his failure to get the Plath poems out of his system. Though he informed very few friends, he was also battling with cancer at this time.83 It was serious enough for Frieda and László to move from Australia to London, and for Ted to write a new will. In July he told the Queen Mother that he was recovering well, following exceptionally good treatment. At the end of August, he confided to Heaney that he had backed himself into a corner but was working his way out of it. He had finished his translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, was working on a version of Euripides’ Alcestis, and was thinking of doing more Ovid.84 At the same time he told Leonard Baskin that he had been overwhelmed on all fronts for the last three to five years, but was moving forward by putting together a collection of about a hundred poems about Sylvia.85

  30

  The Sorrows of the Deer

  I can’t lock myself in behind this glass door one more week

  (Ted Hughes)

  But I was quite unprepared for the agon(y) of ‘Black Coat’ and ‘The God’ – like a ‘Prelude’ turned inside out

  (Seamus Heaney)1

  On Saturday 17 January 1998 Peter Stothard, the editor of the London Times, took the unusual step of writing the front-page story himself. The banner headline shouted ‘Revealed – the most tragic literary love story of our time’. The article announced that the Poet Laureate was today breaking his ‘35-year silence over the life and suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath’. In an ‘extraordinary verse narrative’, copiously sampled in the pages of the paper, ‘Hughes gives his account of one of the century’s most celebrated and tragic love stories.’ The existence of the poems had been ‘among the best-kept literary secrets’. Stothard had been in on it since the beginning of December, when he had offered £25,000 for the exclusive, telling Joanna Mackle at Faber and Faber, who was handling the secret sale, how privileged he felt to have been one of the first readers of the collection.2

  On the leader page, The Times opined that this was ‘The greatest book by our greatest living writer’. In an op-ed headlined ‘A thunderbolt from the blue – this book will live for ever’, the poet Andrew Motion exclaimed that the collection was unlike anything else in literature. ‘Its power is massive and instant … Anyone who thought Hughes’s reticence was proof of his hard heart will immediately see how stony they have been themselves … This is a
book written by someone obsessed, stricken and deeply loving.’ Birthday Letters was ‘his greatest book’, as ‘magnetic’ as Robert Browning’s poems for Elizabeth Barrett and as ‘poignant’ as Thomas Hardy’s elegies of 1912–13 in memory of his dead wife.3

  News of the poems spread around the world. ‘Poet Laureate breaks silence over stormy years with Plath’ trumpeted the Yorkshire Post from Ted’s first home. ‘Hughes’ amazing love tribute to suicide wife’ announced the Western Morning News in his adopted county. And on the story went, to New York and Sydney and the South China Morning Post (‘Secrets of poets’ doomed marriage revealed at last’).4 The next day, the Observer announced more news: that Plath’s unexpurgated journals, less the two lost volumes, would finally be published soon. By the Monday, The Times was able to round up endorsements from other poets such as James Fenton and Tom Paulin. On the Tuesday, a backlash began. The Times was indulging in hype, overblowing their scoop; the poems were not up to scratch. ‘Embarrassing junk’ sneered the Glasgow Herald under the headline ‘A story more soap-operatic than Brookside’.5 The critical consensus which emerged over the following weeks and months was that the poems were of deep sincerity and unique biographical value, but of very variable literary quality, mixing exquisite imagery and memorable phrases with pedestrian and prosaic passages. But nothing could stop the sales.