Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  In April 1997, his cancer having returned, Ted Hughes wrote a will. It is not, however, the usual kind of document drawn up by a solicitor with elaborate legal phrasing concerning the revoking of former testamentary dispositions, the appointment of executors and trustees, residuary estate and alternative provisions in the event of the predecease of a legatee.

  It is a single sheet of hand-scrawled paper, with just three clauses. In the first he left ‘everything’ to his wife Carol Hughes. In the second he said that he wanted his remains to be cremated and his ashes kept by Carol Hughes his wife, until such time as she decided to scatter them ‘on Dartmoor at a point between the sources of the River Taw and the East Okement’. The point was to be chosen by his fishing friend Ian Cook. ‘If a point roughly equidistant to the sources of the Teign, the Dart, the Taw and the East Okemont can be found, that would be ideal.’ Subsequently, his name should be ‘cut in a long slab of granite, near that place, if that is possible’. Finally, his funeral was to be in the North Tawton village church, ‘public and open’. The cremation was to be private.16

  River, moor, stone, carefully plotted symbolic spot of English earth: one would have expected the fishing poet whose words were solid as Yorkshire granite to think of such things as he imagined his own mortal remains. In due time, his wish was carried out to the letter. With Cook’s assistance, the spot was found. A remote corner of Dartmoor, it can be reached only by crossing bog, stream and army firing range.

  By serendipity (or fate, Hughes would have said), the land belonged to the Duchy of Cornwall. Prince Charles, who keeps a private shrine to Ted Hughes at Highgrove, was happy to break the custom of not allowing such things as memorial stones on Duchy land. Approval was obtained from English Nature and the Dartmoor National Park Authority. A granite slab was taken from an area to the east of nearby Beardown Woods. It was carved with a simple inscription, ‘TED HUGHES OM 1930–1998’. In November 2001, it was flown in by helicopter. There would be no Yorkshire grave for Plath obsessives to deface. It would take a very determined proponent of the Plath fantasia to find the spot and chip into the stone.

  One would not, however, have expected the will to be so preoccupied with river source, ash and stone as to make no mention of Frieda, Nick and Olwyn. The likeliest explanation of this omission is that Ted Hughes had a long history of worrying about tax. An estate passed between husband and wife has no liability to inheritance tax, whereas a division into four would have incurred a considerable and immediate obligation, which would almost certainly have necessitated the sale of Court Green. The gross value of the estate was £1,417,560, the net value £1,196,737, so the financial stakes were high. That the gross sum was less than the million and a half pounds Hughes’s assets were said to be worth back in the Seventies was partly because of the passing of the valuable Plath estate to Frieda and Nick, but also a mark of Ted’s ability to spend money rather than save it. Estimated future royalties are included in the calculation of probate for a writer, so Hughes’s literary legacy formed a considerable portion of his estate: in this sense, the success of Birthday Letters had posthumous consequences.

  In order to ensure that his sister and his children were well provided for, Ted wrote a ‘Letter of Wishes’ alongside the will. Here he expressed his desire for an equal division of his copyrights into four parts, as in the earlier informal testament. The language and rhythm of the letter are uncannily similar to those of the poem about Shakespeare writing his will. There is one-quarter for each of the two children, one-quarter for Olwyn, and the fourth for Carol, until she decides to pass it to Frieda and Nick, or until her death, when it would pass to them.17 Four years after Hughes’s death, a bitter family dispute over the will was reported in the press.18 The solicitor for the Ted Hughes Estate responded with a robust press release, pointing out that a ‘Letter of Wishes’ does not have force in English law and that Carol had told Ted that ‘she could not implement this ambiguous and confusing letter as it stood’.19 The statement also laid out the Estate’s handling of royalties as of 2002. Ted’s close friend János Csokits heard rumours of the dispute. He was not satisfied by the Estate’s response:

  Whatever the four of you do now or in the near future, once all those involved are gone forever, the details of this painful affair will be dug up, analysed and commented upon by academics, biographers, journalists and housewives: the jury of posterity. I for one have no doubt what the long term verdict will be … To be generous is always a nobler way than the one laws and judges can offer us.20

  *

  The lesson of Hughes’s life was that you never knew what twist fate would throw at you next. The lesson of Plath’s afterlife was that a spouse cannot control the public legacy of a famous writer. The shade of Ted Hughes would have wanted the year 2003 to be remembered for the publication of his Collected Poems by Faber and Faber, a great 1,300-page slab of a book that gathered together almost all his published poetry, including private-press and fugitive work (though, oddly, excluding the main body of Gaudete). The book was reviewed with high praise from the literary establishment, but for the wider public 2003 was memorable as the year in which Ted Hughes was played on screen, gruffly and sympathetically, by Daniel Craig (a future James Bond) opposite Gwyneth Paltrow’s Plath in Christine Jeffs’s film Sylvia. The project did not have the support of Hughes’s family – though Elizabeth Sigmund (Compton), dedicatee of The Bell Jar, was eager to help.

  One of the legacies of a great artist is indeed to become the subject of later artworks. Shakespeare and Byron, Beethoven and Pushkin have become characters in novels and films as well as the objects of numerous biographies. Emma Tennant recreated Ted Hughes biographically in her memoir Burnt Diaries (1999) and then fictionally in her novel The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted (2001). Some would say that the fictional representation was truer to his inner life than the supposedly factual one.

  Four years after the dispute over the will entered the public domain, a 600-page work of fiction entitled Poison was published by W. W. Norton in New York. It was the fourteenth novel of Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, poet and Professor of English at the University of Chicago, where she had moved after spending the bulk of her career teaching at the small college in Brooklyn where Ted had read for her. The novel, which has never been published in Britain, carries the usual disclaimer: ‘This is a work of fiction. The characters in this book are products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to real living or dead persons or any similarities to actual historical events are purely coincidental.’ The Kirkus Review offered a lively summary of the narrative:

  The epic saga of a landmark British poet and his three wives, two of whom committed suicide … this vast, overwhelming vortex of a novel [is] built on the life of promiscuous Peter Grosvenor, ‘a man with an immeasurable weakness for women’ and a gargantuan gift for poetry. Less a narrative, more a spreading ink blot of reminiscence and reflection, the story, which always keeps Peter’s death at its center, shifts its point-of-view between the perspectives of a range of family members and literary friends while also moving back and forth in time. Peter’s first wife, Evelyn, was a manic and gifted American poet who gave birth to two children, Sophie and Andrew. Her decision to gas herself was subsequently copied by Peter’s second wife, Elfie, who killed their daughter as well as herself. Needing a mother for Sophie and Andrew, Peter made a third – calculated, loveless – marriage to Meena, who bestrides the novel as gothically as any wicked stepmother.21

  As we have seen, Susan Schaeffer first met Ted Hughes when he was in New York in early 1971 for the American publication of Crow. She and her husband Neil, also an English professor, remained good friends with him. Ted stayed with them on several occasions when he returned to America, including at the time of the Bell Jar lawsuit. He also wrote Susan some of his more candid letters. After his death, she engaged in lengthy conversations with Olwyn and others. These raw materials were then transmuted into fiction, rather as Plath had transmuted her pre-Ted life into the narr
ative of The Bell Jar and her relationship with Ted into ‘Falcon Yard’ and the lost ‘Double Exposure’.

  The biographer is bound by fact, whereas the novelist can penetrate to the heart of a story through selective dramatisation and invention. In the Bell Jar trial, and in his many dealings with Plath’s biographers, Ted Hughes complained again and again about the tendency to treat Sylvia’s work as autobiographical rather than symbolic. Because she used the form of fiction, Susan Schaeffer was able to do the opposite: instead of writing a biography of Ted, she turned his life into myth and the people in his story into symbolic figures.

  The character of Sigrid is a representation not of Olwyn but of a great writer’s sister acting as agent, gatekeeper and guardian, possessor and interpreter of her beloved brother’s life and work. Clare is a representation not of the woman in south London with whom Ted Hughes shared a house (she was not, as Clare is, a chandelier-designer), but of a complicated man’s last great love. She is a symbolic bringer of grace through lightness found in a brief interlude of serenity before death. ‘Peter’ tells her, laughingly, that he will cut himself loose, ‘come back as a spirit, an unmarried spirit’: ‘laughing, both of them, laughing, Peter long ago having noted her indifference to what was said about his first two wives, even incurious about what he wrote, completely heedless of things like “reputation,” “ambition,” “a place in the canon”.’22 Peter and Clare share a romantic love of the ocean, of crashing wave and windy clifftop, something that has more symbolic force than the mundane reality of the shared love of fishing and cooking that brought Ted close to his last love.

  Ted Hughes discovered during his cross-examination for the Bell Jar Deposition that the problem with a fiction based on fact is that the presence of any element of biography or autobiography is sufficient to make the reader wonder precisely which elements are factual and which are invented. Poison begins with a sensitively realised scene that is manifestly an imagining of the occasion when Ted took the children home from school and told them the true circumstances of their mother’s death. By beginning the novel in this way, Schaeffer inevitably makes her readers wonder what sort of truth lies behind her treatment of the funeral of Peter, the dispute over his will, the attitude of the family to his first biography, and so on.

  The real-life parallels range from the famous photograph of Ted and Sylvia in newly married bliss, to the cowbell at the door of Court Green, to the near-quotation of Ted’s phrase in the most public of his spats with the Plath fantasia (‘I hope everyone is entitled to his own life’),23 to the reading of Crow at the New York 92nd Street Y and the handsome poet’s flirtation with a character who is manifestly Erica Jong, to the visits to Highgrove, to the voicing of Shakespeare’s ‘Fear no more’ from beyond the grave in the memorial service, to the telephonic intimacy of brother and sister (‘She knew everything, on the phone to Peter almost daily for more than forty years, and if she did not ring him, he rang her, or worse, got on the train and stayed in her little house overnight, or sometimes more than overnight’). Even, boldly, to Olwyn’s theory about the reason for the publication of Birthday Letters: ‘That long affair of Peter’s. He would never have published that book of poems about Evelyn if he hadn’t needed the money … Of course he didn’t count on the cancer coming back.’24

  Schaeffer knew that Ted wrote at length about Sylvia in his unpublished journals: this before it was widely known that he even kept a journal. Olwyn claims that she was never aware that he did so.25 Remarkably, the novel even offers an accurate account of the contents of Sylvia’s final note to Ted: how did Schaeffer know about this, given that she was writing several years before the poem ‘Last Letter’ entered the public domain?

  Anyone acquainted with the real Olwyn will smile in recognition upon reading of the sister-agent’s taste for Ouija boards and horoscopes, or at the account of Sigrid slamming the phone down so hard that she hurts her wrist, or of her sitting in the fug of her little London house ‘on her overstuffed chair which she long ago covered with an indigo kilim to hide the cigarette holes in the chair’s fabric, but now there are so many cigarette holes in the kilim, they are even more obvious than the holes in the chair were before, if only because the kilim itself is so beautiful and draws attention’.26 The long stub of ash on the cigarette in hand is familiar to all who have sat listening to Olwyn reminisce with love for Ted and hatred – in more recent years modified by pity27 – for Sylvia. In 2013, as if in a miniature recreation of the Lumb Bunk conflagration, the ash fell on the chaise and set fire to the house in Chetwynd Road, nearly killing Olwyn and destroying some of the remnants of her collection of Hughesiana. Fortunately for her brother’s literary legacy, she had previously sold her most important manuscripts to the British Library, where they joined the huge and immeasurably rich archive of poetic and prose drafts, letters, journals, autobiographical meditations and other materials that his widow sold to the nation in the autumn of 2008 for half a million pounds.

  Meena is a monster of the imagination and not a representation of Carol Hughes. Sigrid is another monster, a grotesque exaggeration in her possessiveness towards her brother and his work. Olwyn felt an entirely understandable sense of betrayal when the novel was published. Of Susan Schaeffer she said, ‘I thought she was my friend. She isn’t now.’28 Yet in many of its particular details, Poison is every bit as much a roman-à-clef as The Bell Jar. The reader is accordingly forced to ask some painful questions akin to those with which Ted was confronted when interrogated by Jane Anderson’s attorney. A single example will suffice. The character of Penelope is manifestly inspired by Dido Merwin, who knew Sylvia and Ted exceptionally well but who had very complicated feelings about them both. So what credence may be given to Schaeffer’s sentence, ‘Penelope, hugging her secret, the only one still alive who knew that Peter had struck Evelyn and caused her to miscarry’?29 Sylvia’s tender journal entries following her miscarriage almost certainly give the lie to the claim of Penelope. But the casual reader of the novel is not to know this. The accusation feeds the myth of Ted himself as the monster. That is the pernicious aspect of the book. At times, Poison is itself a kind of poison.

  Poisonous she may have been, but Susan Schaeffer’s own close familiarity with Ted gives an authority to her account of his magnetic effect upon women. In meditating upon the source of his power, Julia, the novel’s projection of Schaeffer herself, concludes astutely and persuasively that it was to do with the way that ‘he turned you back into a child’:

  Something about the way he stared at you, as if he’d forgotten there was anyone else in the world. Well, everyone mentions that. Though that wasn’t the important thing. What was important was how safe he made you feel. And that laughter of his, barely hidden, no matter what you were talking about, so you didn’t carry on feeling serious for very long. And that voice, completely soothing, as if you’d known it once before, nothing to do with his accent, or its pitch, nor anything like that, but its essence of soothingness, if there’s such a phrase for it. A mischievousness, completely incorrigible, and a way of drawing you into it, as if the two of you were children together, but he was still the safe and protecting one; he was both things at once, the parent and the child.30

  These are the words of a woman who loved and understood Ted Hughes, though in the knowledge that her looks meant that he would never look at her as a lover rather than a friend.

  Horrified that American readers would take the autobiographical projections of The Bell Jar as the whole truth about Sylvia, Aurelia Plath set about preparing her daughter’s letters for publication as a way of setting the record straight and creating a more rounded picture, a more nuanced legacy. She hoped that the ‘real’ relationship between mother and daughter revealed in Letters Home would displace the fictionalised dynamic of the novel.

  By the time that Poison was published in America, Christopher Reid, Ted’s last editor at Faber and Faber, was well advanced with the editorial work of preparing a selection of Hughes’s letters f
or publication. Carol Hughes was collaborating very closely with him, providing contacts and photocopies, permissions and explanations, guiding the principles of selection. She could have followed Aurelia’s example and chosen to include some examples of Ted’s letters to her in order to demonstrate the depth of their love. But she faced a Catch-22. Were she to have authorised the inclusion of letters to her but the exclusion of those to, say, Brenda Hedden, Jennifer Rankin, Jill Barber, Emma Tennant and the woman in south London, she would have been accused of censorship, just as Ted was when he demanded that Aurelia remove the letters to him from the Sylvia collection. She decided, very understandably, to adopt a Cordelia-like silence on the matter of her own marriage.

  This decision meant that when the 750 pages of selected letters were published in 2007, the volume was curiously lopsided. The first half, reaching from National Service and Cambridge through the Sylvia and the Assia years, is as full of Ted’s emotional life as his literary meditations. There are glorious and poignant love letters to both Sylvia and Assia. The second half, by contrast, offers rich insights into the writer and the public man, into his preoccupations (fishing, pollution, royalty) and his idiosyncrasies (the perpetual casting of horoscopes, the fascination with faith-healer Ted Cornish), but little sense of the complicated personal life of the later Hughes.

  Though the editor’s introduction denied that the book was ‘a biography in disguise’,31 Letters of Ted Hughes was in effect the authorised autobiography. Stitched together with brief but informative biographical headnotes and footnotes by Christopher Reid, it amounts to a brilliantly constructed and astonishingly well-written ‘literary life’, a posthumous Coleridgean Biographia Literaria. Each letter is a brightly coloured snapshot of the poet in the act of writing, thinking, reacting, remembering.