Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  And what of Ted himself? On the Thursday after publication he wrote a journal entry contemplating flamingoes and clam-dippers, a line in Shakespeare, the need to get back to his translation of the Alcestis of Euripides, and his hope of a new life once his chemotherapy was complete. Having loosened himself into his reflective writing mode, he proceeded to an astonishingly detailed account of his feelings and actions upon the appearance of Birthday Letters.

  On the Friday, as the story was rolling off the press of The Times, he had become apprehensive. Was the decision to publish a huge mistake? Still scarred by the Jane Anderson affair, he worried about litigation. Would he be sued by the car-dealer in Rugby Street? Walking to Okehampton Castle, he had felt the trap closing in upon him. He had to vanish. So he and Carol left Court Green and went to stay in the Cotswolds with Matthew Evans, the head of Faber and Faber, and his wife Caroline Michel. Ted worried that Caroline would see the ravages of his chemotherapy – she did not know how ill he had been.

  Fearing that the paparazzi would find him with his publisher, they were away before breakfast the next morning. At a motorway service station, he caught a glimpse of himself on the front page of The Times: an old photograph beneath the dramatic headline. Then it was back into the fast lane and a great sense of liberation came over him, ‘a generally marvelous [sic] state of mind’ and a determination to hang on to that feeling, to ‘make it my new being’.6

  Freedom from the past was in his grasp; he had to avoid slipping back into the old paralysis. He was ready to live a new life, no longer caring what he revealed about himself. The years of sitting on his version of the story, of fear of public reaction, of dislike of the confessional mode of verse: all had been overturned by his illness. It was as if he had been commanded to speak. Perhaps keeping it all so bottled up had contributed to the sickness.

  There were certain things he had to hold on to. Family bonds above all. The stage-like composure of Matthew Evans’s little girl had reminded him of Frieda. The two sons in the household made him think of how brothers related to each other, and thus of himself and Gerald. As for work, he was tinkering with his Eighties collection Flowers and Insects, and it made him see that for years, decades indeed, his work had been a ‘marginalised flora and fauna’, ‘avoiding the main statement of the major theme’. Reluctance to publish the poetry about his time with Sylvia had crippled him for the better part of his poetic life: ‘Only wish now that I’d written a great many more of these B.L. – a thousand would have been few enough.’

  And so he goes on, self-castigating: ‘Usual error – simply not exploring deeply and tenaciously enough, not writing voluminously and experimentally enough, in the forbidden field. Ironic that I have done this only with the Shakespeare book and the Coleridge essay.’ Through the medium of criticism, he had come at Sylvia and the Goddess indirectly. By not ‘handling dynamite in a petrol dump’, he had opened the way. Now at last he was there. Or almost there: behind the journal entry is the knowledge of certain poems excluded from Birthday Letters.

  The next day he was at it again, acknowledging that his real poetic work had been blocked since at least 1970. He had excluded and suppressed the main thing. In the early Seventies he had made the disastrous mistake of trying to start again with something simpler – the A B C of his farming diaries, the lightness of Season Songs. He had only got back to the true voice of feeling in the Assia poems, then in the Shakespeare book, the Ovid and Oresteia translations. It was too late for remorse, but the price was high: physical wreckage and twenty-five years of second-rate work, the poetic power ‘squandered and deflected’. What had become, he asked himself, of the young creature who wrote ‘Song’ in 1948, of ‘the creature that wrote Thought-Fox, Jaguar and Wind – then met S.P.?’ He was speculating about the Frostian road not taken and the reasons for not taking it, the difficulty of following the path that maintained the ‘true centre of gravity of a talent’. How can an artistic career, the work of a life, take its form as ‘a solid city’ rather than ‘a series of hasty campfires’? That was the question. The answer, he told himself in his journal, was ‘to live alone, or as if alone’. And yet how could a man who so loved women live alone?

  He remained on the run for nineteen days, staying in luxury hotels, feeling disconnected from the extraordinary public reaction to the book, which went straight to the top of the bestseller list, shifting 50,000 copies in a matter of weeks, a speed and volume of sales unheard of in poetry since the time of Lord Byron.

  As well as talking to himself about Birthday Letters in his journals, he talked in his letters to friends and family about his feelings on releasing the book. He reiterated his sense of relief, but also his remorse at not having published sooner. He sent copies, often inscribing them with the phrase ‘before us stands yesterday’. He had been blocked ever since Sylvia’s death, he told the Baskins. The same confession was reiterated in a brave letter to the poet and William Blake scholar Kathleen Raine. This was made public when Frieda Hughes read it out in January 1999 when accepting the Whitbread Prize for Birthday Letters on her father’s behalf:

  I think those letters do release the story that everything I have written since the early nineteen sixties has been evading. It was in a kind of desperation that I finally did publish them – I had always thought them unpublishably raw and unguarded, simply too vulnerable. But then I just could not endure being blocked any longer. How strange that we have to make public declarations of our secrets. But we do. If only I had done the equivalent 30 years ago, I might have had a more fruitful career – certainly a freer psychological life. Even now, the sensation of inner liberation – a huge, sudden possibility of new inner experience.7

  An enormous burden had been lifted and he cared not a jot for the critics or the circling crocodiles of Plathians. He granted that the poems were ‘simple, naïve and unguarded’,8 but that didn’t matter: he had written them for himself.

  But of course he did value the opinions of his fellow-poets. Heaney above all. Ted had sent him an advance copy. Seamus responded with high praise, saying how overwhelmed he was to read the manuscript and find ‘Poetry and wounded power gathering and doing the Cuchullain warp-spasm, the salmon-feat, showing a wild Shakespearean back above their element’. What he most admired was the simultaneous sense of the everyday and the sacred, of the sequence as a narrative of what had really happened and a transformation of what had happened, via a journey ‘round the dark side of the mind’s moon’, into poetry of mythic force. The force of the collection, he suggested, came from the holding together of ‘the lens of personal memory and the lens of mythic understanding’. His only anxiety was that the ‘up-and-at-them, tell-what-happened’ aspect of the poems would prevent critics from seeing the ‘gift-myth dimension of it’. But, all in all, the publication of the book would be ‘seismic’ for both Ted’s own being and ‘the literary and cultural history of our times’.9 He was so inspired that he had immediately written a poem in response – his equivalent of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s great meditation on hearing Wordsworth’s Prelude.

  On New Year’s Day 1998 Ted replied with some background: how publication was less ‘a literary matter’ than ‘a physical operation’ that might ‘change the psychic odds’ for him and ‘clear a route’.10 He had been wanting to let the poems go for twenty-five years, but had never had the courage. The closest he had come previously was with the New Selected Poems of 1995, in which he thought of including some thirty or forty, but because it was such a stressful time in his private life, he backed away, including just the handful (and the few about Assia) that went under the radar. Heaney responded with enormous generosity in both private letters and public pronouncements.

  There was also the family reaction to consider. Frieda, who had provided an abstract painting for the jacket, had been prepared. Shortly before publication, she wrote a poem of her own, saluting the collection: ‘There it was, born of them both. / Like it or not. Rounded in words, / And cracking open its shell for a voi
ce.’11 Ted read the poem and laughed and said that it might just as well have been about him and Frieda. She found it hard to understand why her father had not published the Birthday Letters before, so great was the love they showed for her mother and so intense the liberation he clearly felt on releasing them.

  Nick in Alaska, meanwhile, received one of the most revelatory letters in English literary history, a 4,000-word epistle that stands besides John Keats’s heart-opening journal-letters to his brother in America. Dated 20 February 1998, it begins with an account of Ted’s involvement with plans for the interior of the Millennium Dome in Greenwich and of his ‘runaway’ when Birthday Letters was published. Then he remembers Yaddo with Nick’s mother, his dreams of animals and of the pike in Crookhill Pond, of fishing for salmon when they were living at Doonreagan. Then he explains that his dreams, his fishing and most of his writing were all forms of escape. He was running away from ‘the big unmanageable event’: the breakdown of his first marriage and its consequences. He kept finding himself unable to write; he would make himself start again, but each time ‘the ship of salmon and Jaguars had to sail away again’. The only way he could deal with what he called the ‘giant psychological log-jam of your mother and me’ was to write private poems, ‘simple little attempts to communicate with her about our time together’. Poems for Sylvia’s ghost, not for a wider readership – they exposed too much to be publishable. But because he could not publish them, his ‘real self’ could ‘never get on with its life’. It was as if he were living behind a glass door, like one in a dream Nick had once described to his father, in which a glass barrier cut him off from life (as represented by a frog). He could not face the storm that would greet him from the feminists if he went public. He did not want to put Carol through the strain of the publicity that would follow. But he had finally seen that, as with a confession, he had to let it all out. That was his only way of breaking the logjam, moving his life beyond 1963.

  Thirty-five years on from that terrible winter, he finally says that the feminists can do whatever they wish, readers can react as they wish, critics can eviscerate, Plathians can rave, Carol can ‘go bananas’, Frieda and Nick can dive for shelter. He is doing it for himself. The guard had to come down, the private had to be made public, the simple poems set free into the world: ‘I can’t care any more, I can’t lock myself in behind this glass door one more week.’ And when he did let them go, he had the surprise of his life. The heavens did not fall, the critics did not (for the most part) cavil. And his mind was transformed – gigantically, bewilderingly. It was as if he had been presented with a completely new brain. He felt as he had not felt since 1962. The sense of catharsis was complete (except that it wasn’t – there were more poems to come). His hope, he added, thinking of the cancer that was in remission but that could not be trusted to stay away, was that ‘it wasn’t all just a bit too late’.12 ‘Too late’: the novelists Noel Streatfeild and Evelyn Waugh said that these were the saddest words in the English language. Eight months after writing this letter to his son, Ted Hughes was dead.

  In early March, he noticed that his hair was returning, following the side-effects of chemotherapy. He took this as a good sign. Later in the month, he rewarded himself for both the success of the book and the remission of the cancer with a two-week deep-sea fishing trip in Cuba, where he and his friends encountered bonefish, tarpon and barracuda. Everything seemed all the more exotic because one of the symptoms of his declining health was double vision – he saw not a single new moon but a ‘sheaf’ of them.13 Soon afterwards, there was another trip to Birkhall, where he discussed with Prince Charles the difficulty of remembering the Latin names of plants. Later, he offered assistance in the form of a long letter about Eastern memory-training techniques.

  Still, though, he could not let Sylvia go. He and Baskin planned another of their expensive limited editions: it would be an opportunity to release, but avoid excessive public examination of, some of the most intimate poems that he had stepped back from including in Birthday Letters. In the spring, the volume appeared under the title Howls and Whispers (‘Cries and Whispers’ was the original intention). The print run consisted of a mere hundred copies, with a further ten, especially boxed and hyper-expensive, each containing a unique leaf of Ted’s manuscript. Baskin provided colour-printed etchings and additional watercolour drawings exclusively for the tiny de luxe edition.

  Despite its status as a supplementary selection from the wealth of unpublished poems, Howls and Whispers, luxuriously bound in Easthampton, Massachusetts, has a narrative line of its own. It begins with ‘Paris 1954’, in which Hughes looks back at his pre-Sylvia self, drinking claret and eating Gruyère before the ‘scream’ of passion shaped ‘like a panther’ and like a girl (Sylvia) tracks him down. The second poem (‘Religion’) turns to her hunger for love and how it became another scream, of hatred for her parents metamorphosed into passion for him. Then there is ‘The Hidden Orestes’: the Greek idea of tragedy passed from parent to child and more specifically an allusion to Sylvia’s claim that the girl who speaks ‘Daddy’ is suffering from a Freudian Electra complex. The following poem is a jump-cut forward to the afterlife of those laburnum trees, the image of which he and Sylvia had clung on to that day she came to Cleveland Street.14 There is then a series of poems linking the breakdown of the marriage to Sylvia’s breakdown, and finally an exquisitely redemptive encounter with her ghost (‘The Offers’)15 and an anticlimactically clumsy poem about the ‘Superstitions’ of Friday the 13th, the date associated with their first night together (even though it was actually their second).

  When Birthday Letters was published, most readers and reviewers made two assumptions: that the collection represented a late flowering and that these poems were Hughes’s first and last words on the subject of his marriage to Plath. Both assumptions were wrong. Howls and Whispers showed that there was more to come. And very few of the Sylvia poems were written late in Hughes’s career. As the letters to his friends reveal, he had been gestating the project for more than a quarter of a century.

  Explaining the origin of Birthday Letters, Ted told many friends that it was in the early Seventies, at the beginning of his second marriage, that he began writing poems about Sylvia – very personal and private pieces to work through his feelings and crystallise his memories, not necessarily intended for publication. In expressing his relief on finally publishing the book in January 1998, he spoke of twenty-five or thirty years of bottled-up emotion. Sometimes, though, he said thirty-five years, the full duration since Sylvia’s suicide. Ted’s recollection of the dates and locations of the writing of his poems was sometimes exceptionally accurate (especially if there was an astrological conjunction in the case), but he often misremembered, or said different things to different people. And sometimes he shared information that was simply wrong: he not only made Freudian slips, but was also capable of deliberately misleading, laying false trails or covering his tracks. In the absence of a journal entry along the lines of ‘today I began writing a sequence of poems in memory of Sylvia’, we cannot rule out the possibility that the Birthday Letters project was begun before Assia’s death in 1969.

  One of the notebooks in the British Library archive is especially intriguing in this respect. It is a red, soft-covered, spiral-bound student notebook, with holes punched for filing. Adorned on the cover with the logo of the stationery manufacturer Silvine, reference 140, it could have been bought any time between the late Sixties and the mid-Eighties.16 Two things are striking about this notebook. Its version of the poem about sleeping with Susan Alliston in 18 Rugby Street on the night of Sylvia’s death does not include any reference to the irony of her subsequent residence in the flat and her death. This raises the possibility of a date of composition before 1969. Secondly, the back cover of the notebook is charred brown, suggesting that it may have been rescued from the remnants of the Lumb Bank fire. If that were the case, early 1971 would be the latest possible date of composition.

 
Those intimate poems about baby Frieda and Uncle Albert’s suicide reveal that in early 1963 Ted was moving to a more confessional vein of poetry. But he was halted by Sylvia’s suicide. Could it be that, as he brought the Crow project towards a conclusion in early 1969, he was again moving into the confessional voice, but that he was then held back by Assia’s suicide, then by his mother’s and Susan’s deaths? That, as before, ‘autobiographical things’ broke his poetic development into pieces?17

  The Silvine Notebook: even the manufacturer’s name carries an echo of Sylvia. He gave the book a title: ‘The Sorrows of the Deer’. In Robert Graves, ‘The Roebuck in the Thicket’ is a stag that is sacred to the White Goddess. It hides in the undergrowth, keeping a secret.18 Very late in life, reflecting on the origins of Birthday Letters, Hughes wrote of how he was ‘pulled inescapably back onto the autobiographical level of S’s death’ by the ‘huge outcry’ that ‘flushed’ him from his ‘thicket’ in the years 1970 to 1972, ‘when Sylvia’s poems & novel hit the first militant wave of Feminism as a divine revelation from their Patron Saint’.19 By this account, the sorrowful deer is his own inner self. But many of the poems, like many of his best memories, hold his self and Sylvia’s together in a single poetic being, so in this sense the deer is also Sylvia. His treasured photograph of a deer taking food from her hand in the Algonquin Provincial Park perhaps served as a private icon, presiding over the project.