Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  ‘I sat in this chair in this corner on my thirty-second birthday.’

  ‘Was that in August 1962?’

  ‘August 17th. Sylvia was sitting where you are, with her mother next to her, and a woman who was a mentor of Sylvia’s on the other side. The woman sensed there was something troubling us, and said, to brush it aside, “In thirty years’ time, none of us will remember that we were sitting here in this corner of the Connaught Hotel.”’28

  The two men embraced and parted as Ted got into a taxi. They would not meet again.

  The friend whom he had summoned was Richard Murphy. The meeting at the Connaught in 1962 had taken place during the summer of crisis that came to a head when Ted and Sylvia arrived at his cottage in Cleggan, in the hope of saving their marriage, but with the disastrous outcome of Ted going off to Assia and Sylvia making a pass at Murphy. Once again, a circle was being closed. That night, Murphy went to the Almeida production of Ted’s version of Phèdre. He had with him the emended copy of the text that Ted had pressed into his hands as they parted, inscribed with the words ‘Love as ever’ and a north-country proverb: ‘bout’s bare, but it’s easy’. Murphy found this cryptic, but Hughes, as always, knew what he was doing. ‘Bout’ means ‘without’: without is bare (empty) but not troubling. This was the proverb that he added as epigraph to the poem ‘Climbing into Heptonstall’ when it was published for the third time.29 Without Sylvia: bare, but easier than being with her. Climbing into Heptonstall was synonymous with the return to her grave and the poem’s closing words were Hughes’s signature for his own sense of being trapped in the past of which Murphy had been such an important part: ‘Before us – / Stands yesterday’.

  October was a momentous month. Frieda’s first volume of poetry was published. Dame Diana Rigg was burning up the London stage in Jonathan Kent’s production of the Phèdre translation. On the 7th, Birthday Letters won the £10,000 Forward Prize for Poetry. Four days later, Seamus Heaney published his tribute to the collection, ‘On a new work in the English tongue’. The poem praises Hughes’s ‘language that can still knock language sideways’ and compares his ‘stunt and stress / Of hurt-in-hiding’ to the best of Beowulf, which Heaney was translating from Old to modern English at the time.30

  At the end of July, Ted had heard from Buckingham Palace that he was to be awarded the Order of Merit, the highest honour in the land, personal gift of the Queen, limited to the nation’s twenty-four most distinguished individuals in the arts and sciences. The presentation was on 16 October. Three days afterwards he wrote to his Aunt Hilda, telling her of his pride. He drew a picture of the medal and told of his private meeting with the Queen – there is an official photograph of the moment of presentation, in which he looks very ill – and of how he gave her a copy of Birthday Letters and explained to her how he came to write and publish it, and she was fascinated. Talking about the poems, he was able to open his heart to her as never before, ‘and so she responded in kind’.31 Then they had lunch with the Queen’s private secretary. Carol was a great hit.

  To Hilda, he sounded cheerful. There was no mention of his cancer. Future projects were still very much on his mind that autumn. On his long desk in the writing hut in the garden of Court Green lay his abandoned translation into modern English of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, that wonderful anonymous poem he had studied at Cambridge and that infused his own verse with the Middle English alliterative idiom: should he perhaps pick it up again? (Reg Lloyd was keen to offer illustrations.) He was also preparing for the staging of a selection of the Tales from Ovid, to be directed by Tim Supple for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and sketching out a dramatisation of the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, also for Supple. Other clouds were lifting, too: he made peace with the critic John Carey, who had so savaged the Shakespeare book, sending him a first edition of Ariel and ‘a cut-out from a newspaper showing one of those psychological puzzles made of thousands of multicoloured dots, which different viewers will see different shapes in’. They had seen different things in the multitudinous world of Shakespeare, that was all.32

  It is impossible to tell in what direction Ted’s original poetry would have gone had he lived. The mythic vein was mined through and the elegiac voice almost expiated – though there was a degree of unfinished family business, in that his exceptionally close relationship with Olwyn was rarely turned into poetry and the theme of the Rival Brothers was still on his mind with regard to Gerald. A pair of late uncollected poems, one about Gerald’s boyhood love of comics and the other about his mother’s possessiveness, which subtly fuses into Olwyn’s, might have been the beginnings of a sequence about sibling relations.33 He would certainly have gone on writing for young people and for his own children. Among his late uncollected poems, published in the angling magazine Waterlog opposite a drawing of Ted’s head in the form of a cluster of fishhooks, was ‘Some Pike for Nicholas’, in which memory is ‘rocked’ by the tail of a huge jumping pike on Lough Allen, swinging Ted into the past ‘like a hurricane lantern’, igniting the memory of camping with his son by the water all those years ago.34

  In addition, his work would almost certainly have focused more on the public role of the poet, not as royal encomiast but as dark prophet in dark times, a voice akin to the later work of Geoffrey Hill, who some said should have succeeded him as Laureate. Probably Ted’s last poem was a translation of Pushkin’s ‘The Prophet’, an archetypal early nineteenth-century Romantic lyric in which the language of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah is transposed to the secular domain and the poet becomes the shaman, the conscience of his tribe, the hierophant of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirror of the gigantic shadow which futurity casts upon the present, the unacknowledged legislator of the world: ‘God’s voice’ comes to him, tells the poet-prophet to be his ‘witness’ all across the earth, to speak ‘the Word’ that will ‘Burn the hearts of the people’.35

  He died nine days after writing the letter to Aunt Hilda. He had gone into hospital and come out again. Then he was rushed into intensive care at the private London Bridge Hospital, just along the Thames from Shakespeare’s reconstructed Globe. Olwyn asked the doctor – his name was Harding – whether her brother would survive. Yes, she was told, it might be weeks or even months, but he would go home, ‘He’s so strong.’ But then word came that he was weaker. Early the next morning Harding phoned and said, ‘It’s today.’ Olwyn asked what he meant and he said that Ted would die. When she went back to the hospital, he was in a coma. Nick had arrived just in time on the red-eye flight from Alaska. He was holding one of his father’s hands. Olwyn took the other. Then she passed that hand over to Frieda. Olwyn’s recollection is that her brother then seemed to wake, with a wild look in his eyes. She even supposed that he was trying to get up. He had been mumbling in delirious semi-consciousness. Olwyn convinced herself that he said something she understood. Her memory, or more probably the wishfulness of her unconscious, since her narrative is not corroborated by the others who were in the room, is that Ted sat bolt upright and in a great voice uttered his last words: ‘Feed me.’ His sister looked at the drip bag and saw that it was empty. She made a fuss with the nurses, demanded a new bag. Distressed, Olwyn went out and had a cigarette. A few minutes later, Nick came out and told her that it was over.36

  The jaguar was at rest in his cage.

  Epilogue

  The Legacy

  Frieda spent the evening sitting by his open coffin. She wrote a poem called ‘Conversation with Death’, in which Death boasts:

  ‘To take him at the peak of his

  Perfection, when he was at his

  Escaping most cleverest, meant

  I really got to achieve something.’1

  She filed and signed her father’s death certificate. Place: London Bridge Hospital, Tooley Street. Date: 28 October 1998. Cause: Metastatic Colon Cancer and LVF (Left Ventricular Failure).2 Faber and Faber announced the death the next day. The Queen sent her condolences and the news made the front pages. Tributes and
obituaries appeared with headlines such as ‘The god of granite who could shatter stones with plain words’.3

  The body was returned to Devon, the accompanying party stopping, as Ted the gastronome would have wanted, for a good lunch on the way. The funeral took place the following Tuesday, 3 November, in the rain-lashed church of St Peter in North Tawton, crammed with 200 mourners. Friends came down from London and convened in the kitchen of Court Green before going across to the church. For some, it was an uncanny experience to see Frieda, the image of her mother, open the door to the house.

  The massive coffin was not shouldered but carried by its handles. ‘As though’, Heaney said later, ‘on a river of light and air’.4 The Nobel Laureate spoke in honour of his dear friend and inspiration the Poet Laureate. His passing, said Seamus, was ‘a rent in the veil of poetry’. Heaney read Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ (ironically, a poem that Ted had come to detest), together with two of Ted’s later poems. One was ‘The day he died’, from the sequence of Moortown elegies for Jack Orchard: in this context, the son-in-law stands in for the widow’s father. The other was a Heaney favourite, ‘Go Fishing’. An extract was quoted in the BBC News report: the poet joining water, wading ‘in underbeing’, letting ‘brain mist into moist earth’, gulping ‘river and gravity’, losing ‘words’ and ceasing, as a shade floats towards the sea that is eternity.5 Dante to Hughes’s Virgil, Heaney was summoning the national poet’s spirit downstream, to meet the ‘Ophelia’ of River, who was Sylvia. The Shaman and the ‘Darkfish’ with ‘finger to her lips’, reunited as they go Lethe-wards, ‘into the afterworld’.6

  The Bible reading was from St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: love does not keep a score of wrongs but rather it enables us to bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things. And then the Reverend Terence McCaughey, friend since Cambridge days, spoke of Ted’s kindness and loyalty, of how he would say things that made the familiar seem beautiful and strange, how he would encourage his friends when they floundered, would share his schemes and plans. Of the power of his speaking but also of his silence: ‘for it would be my sense that this craftsman with words, this “makar” (to use the Scottish lowland word for “poet” which I remember, he loved) this makar – for all his own vitality and exuberance with words – well recognized that there are times to be reticent in the use of them’. The only words in which Ted Hughes believed were those wrung from the way things are, ‘in all their vitality; their terrible harshness; their vividness; their funniness or sheer silliness; and sometimes in their almost unbearable gentleness’.7 The coffin and the family departed for a private cremation in Exeter, leaving the mourners in the November rain. Court Green was not reopened.

  In the weeks following the funeral, there were reported sightings of a big cat on the loose on Dartmoor.8 Emma Tennant recalled that ‘Ted’s face keeps appearing in flashes at the end of programmes, on TV. Film of swollen rivers – the rivers he loved – in a dark landscape. Weirdly, the main story is of an escaped lion in Devon; children are interviewed saying they’re “not really frightened”. No-one knows where the lion came from, and the story is dropped after a couple of days.’9 A cast of a paw print was taken and police marksmen were alerted, but the mysterious beast was never seen again.

  The following May, the great and the good of the nation, including Ted’s fishing companion Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, together with the Prince who regarded him as a guru, gathered in Westminster Abbey to give thanks for his life. His Iranian friend Shusha Guppy sang a poem that Ted had adapted for her from the thirteenth-century Scottish ballad-writer Thomas the Rhymer, accompanying herself on the guitar: ‘When you are old enough to love / You’ll be taken prisoner / By the blossom of apple and pear, / In the pink shade of the cherry.’10 Friends such as Michael Baldwin and Grey Gowrie read from the works, Alfred Brendel played the adagio from Beethoven’s 17th piano sonata. Heaney delivered another silken eulogy, comparing Hughes to Caedmon, father of English poetry, and to Wilfred Owen, to Gerard Manley Hopkins and to Shakespeare. The Prince of Wales described his poet as the incarnation of England, speaking as only he could speak of Avalon and of King Arthur on the ship of death. The entire congregation joined in a rousing rendition of Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ and the Dean of Westminster pronounced the blessing. Silence fell and then a Yorkshire voice, deep as England, was heard. Members of the congregation craned their necks from behind pillars. No one could see who was speaking. Then it dawned that the voice was coming over the public address system:

  Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,

  Nor the furious winter’s rages;

  Thou thy worldly task hast done,

  Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages;

  Golden lads and girls all must,

  As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.11

  Ted himself conjuring his beloved Shakespeare from beyond the grave.

  After this coup de théâtre, the royals and the literati, the ‘fishermen and fine-printers, old socialites and new socialists, Devonians, Yorkshiremen, friends and family’,12 departed to music chosen by the Prince of Wales: the Tallis Scholars singing a work loved by Ted, Spem in aliem, the glorious forty-part motet from the Tudor age, that time when, Hughes had always believed, the Goddess was still alive within the national consciousness.

  When a prolific poet fears or even knows that he is dying, there must be significance in his choice of the final poems published in his lifetime. In the last two months of his life, Ted Hughes submitted two poems to the Sunday Times. The first was a revised and retitled version of a piece originally written as part of a series of poems about Shakespeare published in a limited edition in aid of the actor Sam Wanamaker’s plan to rebuild the Globe Theatre.13 In its self-contained end-of-life form, the poem is called ‘Shakespeare, drafting his will in 1605, plots an autobiographical play for 1606’.

  Published seven weeks before Hughes’s death, it is prefaced with an explanatory note by Hughes, telling of how ‘Shakespeare is imagined dividing his estate into three, like King Lear.’ One third goes to his wife Anne and another to each of his daughters, Susanna and Judith, the twin of Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, who would have come of age in 1606 had he not died aged eleven in 1596. Hughes also explains that the coat of arms to which he alludes in the final verse of his poem is the one that Shakespeare obtained on behalf of his father, as part of his effort to restore the family name after John Shakespeare fell into debt and disgrace, and that ‘In 1606, the only heir to it was Edmund (or Edward), the illegitimate son of Shakespeare’s youngest brother, Edmund – who died just before his father in 1607.’14

  In the poem, Hughes’s imaginary Shakespeare says that his will will be as he has planned. His treasure (a term suggesting the value of his work) and his land (the impressive property portfolio built up by the business-canny poet) will be split into three. One third will be to help his wife Anne in her old age to ‘Put her youth’s rage / And hate away’. ‘Hate away’ is Ted’s borrowing of Shakespeare’s own apparent pun on ‘Hathaway’ in Sonnet 145. The reference to Anne’s youth is slightly curious, since she was – very unusually for marriage customs in the age of the first Elizabeth – nearly a decade older than Will Shakespeare. Whether in Hughes’s version of events the wife’s rage and hate have anything to do with the well-attested anecdotes of her husband’s philandering in London is a matter for speculation.

  As the prefatory note indicates, Hughes – still unable to let go of his Shakespearean obsession, even though several years had passed since the publication of The Goddess of Complete Being – was intrigued by the fact that at the time when Shakespeare was writing King Lear the consequence of young Hamnet’s death was that the potential heir to the Shakespeare name and the honour of the family crest was Edmund, son of Shakespeare’s youngest brother Edmund, the only member of the family who followed him into the theatrical profession in London. But Edmund’s son Edmund – to whom Edward James Hughes, on the
scantest of scholarly warrant, gives the alternative name Edward – was illegitimate. For Hughes, it was not a coincidence that the name of the illegitimate son whose plotting is so central to the familial disintegration of King Lear is Edmund.

  ‘The man running along the beach with the girl has 4 children by 3 different women,’ he had written in the outline for the deeply autobiographical poem sequence ‘A’.15 Four children by three women? That is not quite Shakespeare, even if Poet Laureate William Davenant was telling the truth when he claimed that he was the greater William’s illegitimate son. In his self-identification with Shakespeare, Ted Hughes merges the Lear-thought of three daughters, the Hamnet-thought of a child who died, and the Edmund Shakespeare/William Davenant-thought of illegitimate offspring. He was thinking very hard. Thinking about his own place in the lineage of English literature: Ted as both William Hughes’s son and that greatest of Williams’ metaphoric heir. Thinking, too, about the future of his bloodline and his name. Nick was unmarried, Frieda childless. Only in the work would the name endure. Perhaps, too, he was thinking of a shadow story that may one day be revealed.

  Most pressingly, he was, like Lear and Shakespeare, thinking about the division of his own estate. When he went to America for his court appearance in the Bell Jar case back in the Eighties, Ted had left with Olwyn a sealed envelope to be opened only in the event of his death. She wondered what he was going to do: he was afraid of losing everything. Olwyn genuinely thought that he might not come back. When she eventually opened the envelope, she found a simple statement, unwitnessed, saying that he wanted all his earthly goods to be divided equally in four parts between her, Frieda, Nicholas and Carol.