Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  It is towards the end of the notebook that the Wordsworthian voice becomes strongest. At the climax of the poem, on seven successive pages, he wrote seven successive drafts of his memory of the night when he first slept with Sylvia at her hotel in Fetter Lane. The epiphany that Ted experiences when he walks back to Rugby Street across Holborn, as the dawn chorus washes over the sleeping city, is remembered via Wordsworth. Crows walk the pavement beside him, and then there is an exquisitely Wordsworthian line-break:

  And I

  Remembering the mighty heart that slept

  For Wordsworth on his September morning

  Heard what was missing from his bliss

  That had now been added to mine –

  The huge awakening of the whole city

  In the robe of throbbing birds in their Eden

  A robe that might have wrapped, for him too,

  The memory of the sleeping foreign woman

  Who had just decided his life.31

  In some of the drafts ‘as for me’ replaces ‘for him too’ and the sleeping foreign woman is ‘a naked woman’ or ‘the naked body’. The poetic homage is made explicit by way of an allusion to the sense of grace and peace that pervades the famous sonnet ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’.

  Wordsworth’s poem was actually composed at a quarter past five in the morning on 31 July 1802, when he and his sister Dorothy were travelling to visit Annette Vallon, the young French woman with whom he had fallen passionately in love during his residence in France at the time of the Revolution, just after he had graduated from Cambridge. They were going to see not just Annette but also Caroline, the daughter she had borne him. The purpose of the visit was to make peace with his foreign lover and child prior to his forthcoming marriage to Mary Hutchinson. Hughes was fascinated by the relationship between Wordsworth and Annette. In another notebook he wrote of ‘Wordsworth – Annette – Vaudracour & Juliet [he means Julia, but the Shakespearean echo is apt] – his retreat to the hills – his sister’s imbecility. His human symbols: wild loss – stupefied endurance. His slow transformation into a rigid scar.’32

  The identification is clear: like Wordsworth, Hughes is inspired into his poetic vocation by a woman from across the sea, met at a formative moment soon after graduating from Cambridge. But the loss of that woman becomes a scar that marks the full remainder of his life and work. Fatefully, the poet’s life is decided by love. Respite from ‘stupefied endurance’ can come only in the visionary moment of poetry, the recollection of that London dawn in which it was bliss to be alive and very heaven to walk the empty streets, and hear birdsong, having just left the hotel room of a sleeping, beautiful woman to whom one has made love for the first time.

  Though the explicit allusion is to the Westminster Bridge sonnet, the tone and style are unmistakably those of Wordsworth writing his memories in blank verse. If Hughes could have sustained the quietly assured voice and loose pentameter rhythm of these lines through a much longer narrative of recollection, he would indeed have written the twentieth century’s sequel to The Prelude.

  On the next page, he turns to the dark words that Sylvia spoke during that night of love. The street lights are still on, and in them he seems to see her face as she told him of her suicide attempts: of jumping off a bridge that was too low, of ice that was too thick for drowning beneath, of a Gillette blade that broke on her wrist. A few pages later there are lines about how Sylvia saw her great love simply standing there on Grand Central station. He resembled her other great love, her equally great love. Who came after her like a ship with searchlights ablaze as she swam under the propeller. The name of that second great love, of that ship, was death. Hughes knew death, but that knowledge did not help him to hold on to Sylvia when he prayed:

  As you screamed for help

  For the strength to slip

  From your hands, and fall

  Down the mountain-face.33

  Over the page, Hughes writes just three words, the notebook turned sidewise: ‘The Last Page’.

  That was the end of what would have been his Prelude. The twin title was later broken up and attached to two short poems. ‘Black Coat’ is one of the strongest of the Birthday Letters. ‘Opus 131’ is a bitter little piece, first published in Capriccio, the Assia volume, and then reprinted in the 1995 New Selected Poems. It begins with an image of Assia in a homely hotel room, listening to Beethoven – a memory of that lonely night of hers in Haworth. The poem then tells of foetus, dark insect and wave-particles pronouncing on the unimportance of the menopause – Hughes in vatic, crankish mode. The allusion to Beethoven has broken down and what is missing is ‘the lifeline music’, the very Wordsworthian voice that would have made a finished ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’ so special: ‘consolation, prayer, transcendence’, ‘the selective disconnecting / Of the pain centre’.34 Biographically speaking, there is another ‘selective disconnecting’ in that ‘Black Coat’ is for Sylvia, ‘Opus 131’ for Assia. By deliberate contrivance or a slip of the memory, the wrong quartet is cited: it was the previous one, not ‘Opus 131 in C Sharp Minor’ but Opus 130 in B flat major that she had heard in the dark just up the hill from the Brontë parsonage.

  Later, he slipped some loose sheets into the back of the 300-page triplicate book: a fair copy of the poem of the finding of the fox cub on Chalk Farm Bridge in 1960, a note about the price he had paid for putting Sylvia’s journals into the public domain in the Seventies (‘Maybe the most stupid thing I ever did’), and a summary of the story of Rabbah bar bar Hannah, a Babylonian Jewish Talmudist who, having undergone a series of fantastic adventures through the desert and across the seas, set down his life upon a rock and slept. When he awoke, the rock had gone and he was on a precipice, staring into the abyss.

  The thousands of pages of holograph manuscript in the British Library could easily form the basis of a book-length study of the evolution of Birthday Letters. As with the Moortown elegies, there is a seamless development from the style of a prose journal to that of blank verse – rather as we can trace a line from Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals to her brother William’s poetry.

  The prose narrative in one of the notebooks is fresh and vivid, making the reader wish that Hughes had published a conventional autobiography. He sets down his first reading of the poem about caryatids, Daniel Huws’s teasing review, Sylvia’s reputation before he met her (‘The rumour of your height, your slenderness, your hair’). He tells of Shirley, ‘so English she was Irish’, with her spectacular hair and what he perceived as her dislike of Sylvia. He suggests that the only purpose of the Falcon Yard party was for him to meet Sylvia. He recalls his half-empty brandy bottle, Shirley’s rage, Sylvia’s drunken daring shining eyes, the kiss, the bite, the ‘new world’. Then the first evening in Rugby Street, the explosion of joy, the walk via Holborn to the hotel in Fetter Lane, the story of the scar and the lovemaking, Sylvia’s body Americanly firm, slender, fish-like. And so on: walking together in Paris, Sylvia reciting Chaucer’s ‘Prologue’ to the cows on the fen, marrying in the pink wool dress. The dream of Emily Brontë: Walter and the long walk up to Top Withens, ‘the whiff of isolation and rain’, Sylvia ‘smiling your American beach-smile, up that bitter little sycamore, monkeys on the cultural relic’. He created prose sketches, too, for poems subsequently rejected, their titles scored through, among them ‘Smashing the table. Misplaced passion’, ‘The kiss that killed – the dream-kiss, the real’, ‘Horrors in T.R. Park’, and, at the climax of the sequence, ‘What happened that night? Did you phone? Why didn’t your spirit reach me? I was not there. I was with Susan, in our marriage bed, in Rugby Street – she who also only had 3 years’. Finally, the coda of ‘The snow-grave, the funeral’, a poem that appears to be lost.35

  The processes of remembering, composing, decomposing and recomposing were unceasing. Correspondence with editor and copy-editor, revised typescripts and corrected proofs reveal many late changes to the collection.36 There are changes to the order of the poems. So,
for example, ‘The Cast’ is moved from early to late. And changes to their titles: ‘Apprehensions’ was originally ‘Prophecy and Paranoia’, with Sylvia’s writing as her fear, held between her fingers in the form of the Schaeffer pen that someone stole after her death. He remained uncertain about the precise contents until a very late stage. ‘18 Rugby Street’, ‘A Pink Wool Knitted Dress’ and ‘Karlsbad Caverns’ were sent to the copy-editor as additions.37 At the very last minute, ‘The Laburnum’ was taken out and ‘The Inscription’, a revision of ‘Under the Laburnums’, inserted instead.38 There were other late omissions too. Some of them, along with the ‘Laburnum’ that had been removed, went into the privately published collection Howls and Whispers: ‘Minotaur 2’, ‘The Hidden Orestes’, ‘The Difference’, ‘The Offers’, ‘Cries and Whispers’ (the title poem, with ‘howls’ revised from ‘cries’). Others remain unpublished: a poem alluding to Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, another about a near-drowning incident with a girl when he was in Australia, and the lovely story of the jaguar-skin rug told by the ex-colonial beekeeper in North Tawton. There are, in short, as many unpublished poems about Sylvia as published ones. But the reading public was not aware of this.

  Her suicide presented Ted with his most difficult decision as to what he should publish and what he should not. In the original plan for ‘The Sorrows of the Deer’, and many intermediate versions, the intention was to end the sequence with a poem about the night of her suicide. Having begun as ‘The last I had seen of you was you burning / Your farewell note’, it was much revised over the years under the titles ‘What did happen that Sunday night?’ and ‘That Sunday Night’.39 It reached its final form as ‘Last Letter’. It would have been the obvious climax, allowing Birthday Letters to end with Dr Horder’s words ‘Your wife is dead.’ Why did he exclude it? Surely not because it was simply too painful to remember: so much about his life with Sylvia was painful to remember, and the whole point of publishing was catharsis for the pain. No, the reason was that he did not want journalists crawling all over the fact that he spent that last night not with Assia, as had been generally assumed by Sylvia’s biographers, but with Susan Alliston. He wanted to protect her name, not least to shield her sister from intrusion.

  His dilemma was that he needed the sense of symmetry provided by his return to 18 Rugby Street that last weekend. Over time, parts of ‘That Sunday Night’ had evolved into the poem about the ill-fated house. So he decided, late in the production process, to include ‘18 Rugby Street’ in a version that did not mention the business about the last letter, but did bring the wheel full circle back to the flat. His hope was that by burying the mention of Sue mid-poem, its full significance would not become apparent to critics and journalists. On the first night with Sylvia, he writes, he was not thinking of the ‘Belgian girl’ in the flat below, who eventually gassed herself: ‘She was nothing to do with me.’ Then he moves seamlessly to Sue:

  Nor was Susan

  Who still had to be caught in the labyrinth,

  And who would meet the Minotaur there,

  And would be holding me from my telephone

  Those nights you would most need me.40

  This is the moment when he acknowledges in print Sue’s part in the fateful last weekend. The apportionment of blame is deliberately ambiguous: was it Sue or simply his own desire for Sue that held him from the phone? Before pursuing this awkward question any further, he cuts back to his first night with Sylvia: ‘Nothing could make me think I would ever be needed / By anybody.’ But then Sue returns as he tells of how a decade darkened prior to the moment when she paced the floorboards overhead, ‘night after night’, tearful, alone, facing death in the very room ‘Where you and I, the new rings big on our fingers, / Had warmed our wedding night in the single bed’.41 Like the Belgian (or German) girl, Susan indeed had ‘nothing to do with’ Ted and 18 Rugby Street in 1956, the time the poem is set in the story of Birthday Letters. But she had a great deal to do with him and the house in 1963 and again when she returned to it after her travels among the Bedouin. The memory of her tears on his last visits to her in University College Hospital is subsumed into the last line of the sequence, but lymphoma is changed to leukaemia to help with the disguise. Ted’s gamble paid off. The reviewers did not probe at the reference to Sue holding him from the telephone on those last nights when Sylvia so needed him; the journalistic pack did not start sniffing around for traces of ‘Susan’.

  Just as Wordsworth at some level repressed the autobiographical actuality of ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’ by getting the date wrong, so Hughes in ‘18 Rugby Street’ deliberately or unconsciously misdated this first night of love with Sylvia to Friday 13 April, which was actually the night on which she returned to him after her trip to Paris and Rome. The poem needs that later date for the sake not only of the astrologically ominous portent of Friday the 13th, but also because Sylvia Plath’s father Otto, so crucial to Hughes’s account of her life and the failure of his own marriage, was born on 13 April 1885. Equally, in remembering the girl downstairs, Hughes deliberately or unconsciously changes the nationality and miscounts the years: the poem dates her death to 1963, the year of Sylvia’s suicide in Fitzroy Road, whereas in reality the Belgian/German girl, whose name was Helen, had gassed herself in Rugby Street a couple of years earlier. Indeed, in the memory of another resident of the house, she was English and did not own an Alsatian.42 Here, and in ‘Last Letter’, there is also a fusion or confusion of the two flats, one above the other, which were owned by Dan Huws’s father. The poem is not to be read as a literal memory, but rather as the conversion of 18 Rugby Street into an ill-fated House of Atreus.

  Birthday Letters was published without its ‘Last Letter’. In the absence of that key poem, and a few other equally important ones, such as ‘The first time I brought a bottle of wine’, ‘The Grouse’, ‘Soho Square’ and ‘The Offers’, the book did not give the whole story. But critics, journalists and readers, not knowing the manuscript history, assumed that it did. Ted, it appeared, had finally told his version of the story and, by and large, he was forgiven. Without question, he was financially rewarded. By the end of 1998, Birthday Letters had sold more than 100,000 copies in hardback, making it the fastest-selling volume of verse in the history of English poetry. More than fifty writers chose it among their ‘Books of the Year’, its poignancy heightened by the proximity of its release to Hughes’s death.

  31

  The Return of Alcestis

  Uncle Albert’s suicide, Sylvia’s suicide, Assia’s suicide and the filicide of Shura, Susan’s painful death, 18 Rugby Street as a House of Atreus, the Lumb Bank fire, the Plathian maenads, the Bell Jar lawsuit, the cancers (Jack Orchard, Jennifer Rankin, Carol’s sister), the years of blockage, the realisation that the release into Birthday Letters might have come too late: Ted Hughes’s life was, in the vulgar sense, ‘like a Greek tragedy’. But his fascination with mythology and the resonance of the recurring tragic idea of the sins of the fathers being visited upon the children meant that reading and translating Greek tragedy was also a way of coming to terms with that life.

  In March 1995, Leonard Baskin sent him a collection of skulls in the hope that they might inspire some poetry. Ted replied that he was busy on translation work. He had been deep in Ovid, had been working on Euripides’ Alcestis and had been commissioned by the Northcott Theatre in Exeter to do a new version of the foundation text of Western tragedy, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, from which he hoped to make some money. He feared that he was becoming a hack, but on the other hand he reckoned that he had found a technical solution to one of the main difficulties of the action and that, for the actor, his version would be much easier to speak than other recent attempts. His aim was ‘to release the howl in every line’ of the verse.1

  At the end of the year he reported back that he had not managed to work up any skull poems, indeed had not written any original verse for over a year, his longest fallow period since the age of sixteen. He was too busy wi
th commissions for much-needed cash. Besides, he did not want to write anything that was not central to his own concerns – it was too late to be messing around in the foothills. The following autumn, he told Baskin that it had now been two years since he had written ‘a connected page’ of his own verse.2 He sent him a great slab of the completed Oresteia translation instead.

  His recurring complaint was that the translations were distracting him from his own work. They had been intended to get him going, but had gone on too long. They did, however, have the virtue of distracting from what he described to Baskin as the other confusions and crises in his own life, by which he meant his double life in Devon and London, as well as his health problems. His painful shingles kept recurring.

  Then the plans for a production at the Northcott collapsed for financial reasons, leaving the Oresteia high and dry. The Ovid progressed more happily. His ‘Twenty-four Passages from the Metamorphoses’ were completed by the summer of 1996 and published under the unassuming title Tales from Ovid the following May. Neither Ted nor Faber had especially high hopes for sales, but the reviews passed all expectations. Michael Hofmann set the tone in The Times, where he also explained his own part in the origin of the collection, telling of how when he received Ted’s contributions to After Ovid he experienced the kind of awe that Keats described in his sonnet ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’. Standing by the telephone to appease his sense of urgency, he read the thirty or forty pages straight through and scribbled a note to Ted urging him to ‘go on and do an Ovid book all of his own’. Now that the master had done so, it was the most beautiful match: he had created a modern masterpiece out of a series of 2,000-year-old stories of dried-up rivers, hunting dogs and mutinous sailors, both broad and subtle, violent and erotic, elegant and folksy.3