Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  The reader of the letters meets undergraduate Ted getting up at six o’clock in the morning to read Shakespeare. Wide-eyed Ted wondering at cellophane-wrapped America. Ted full one moment of bizarre ideas. Early summer 1962: ‘I think of the gall-bladder as one of the vital centres, along with the prostate gland & the cerebellum – inside all Defences.’32 And the next bursting with energy for some new scheme. Late summer 1962: ‘I am rapidly becoming editor of a Magazine of translation … publishing modern poetry only, from other languages – destroy Larkin’s affable familiar.’33 Ted on people: ‘The bloke directing this play “Oedipus” is one of the best most imaginative directors in the world, and we get on very well together.’34 Ted opinionating: ‘What an odd thing to think of “modern” English literature. I can see why Americans aren’t very interested. It’s a collection of eccentrics – English Parson style, like Larkin, and ever shallower whiz kids … Did you see the Rozewicz, and the Celan? Both lovely books.’35 Ted being kind to schoolgirl enquirers: ‘Dear Miss Clement and Miss George, Thank you for your letter. If I answered your question, it might stop you worrying, but it would not help you. You know that when you answer a problem, you kill it. And it might be a fruitful problem. Best wishes, Ted Hughes.’36 Ted becoming an environmentalist: ‘I do think a good deal about the whole complication of the re-alignment of human life to the natural world which created him [humankind], and on which he depends.’37 Ted looking deeply into his wounded inner self: ‘Almost all art is an attempt by somebody unusually badly hit (but almost everybody is badly hit), who is also unusually ill-equipped to defend themselves internally against the wound, to improvise some sort of modus vivendi with their internal haemophilia etc. In other words, all art is trying to become an anaesthetic and at the same time a healing session drawing up the magical healing electrics.’38

  Reviewing the volume in the Sunday Times, John Carey more than atoned for his scathing review of Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being by judging that ‘No other English poet’s letters, not even Keats’s, unparalleled as they are, take us so intimately into the wellsprings of his own art.’39 This point is so true and so momentous that it is worth reiterating: for a century and a half, Keats’s letters had held a unique place in English literature as the greatest example of a poet’s intensely self-aware reflections on his own art. In 2007, those of Hughes joined them. And we have barely begun to absorb their riches. The Reid selection offers but a small proportion of his monumental correspondence.

  Many of Hughes’s letters are prose poems, magnificent works of art in their own right. He often spent hours drafting and honing a single letter. He kept copies of many of them and eventually sold them to Emory University in Atlanta, without restrictions on the availability of most of them. Though not composed expressly for publication, Hughes’s letters, from a surprisingly early stage in his literary career, were written in the knowledge that posthumous publication was highly probable. When, to take the supreme example, the correspondence between Hughes and Heaney is published in full, as one fervently hopes it will be, it will come to be regarded as a literary monument akin to the letters that passed between Wordsworth and Coleridge or T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

  But the published letters are not sufficient to constitute a full biographical record.

  Ted Hughes made a point of explicating his poems at length when scholars enquired about them. In the latter part of his life, he wrote extensively about the biographical origins of his work. There is an even greater wealth of biographical gold dust in his extensive but fragmented journals and in the 100,000 pages of unpublished drafts of his poems, plays and prose works. He died in 1998 in the full knowledge that he had left the raw material for years of scholarly investigation into the circumstances in which his works came into being and the ways in which they transformed his life into literature.

  He burnt Sylvia Plath’s last journal, but did not burn his own. He carefully preserved a huge archive. Two archives, rather: the one sold to Emory before he died and another, containing more intimate material, held back by his widow for a decade but then sold to the British Library in London. Unlike his rival Philip Larkin, who told his literary executors to burn his manuscripts, Ted Hughes deliberately left trails and clues, tantalising invitations to future critics and biographers. What he preserved, he manifestly intended to be read and discussed.

  But how fully, how candidly? Besides making the comparison with Keats, Carey’s review of the published selection of letters pointed out that more scandal is attached to the life of Ted Hughes than to that of any English poet since Lord Byron. He might have added that in her last days Plath herself implicitly reflected on the Byronic parallel in her final book review. The series of unfortunate events in Ted Hughes’s life – and indeed his afterlife – includes not just the fame, bed-hopping and quarrels over bad reviews that are the usual stuff of high-profile literary life, but several suicides, a mother taking her child with her to death, arson, the royal family, a repeatedly defaced grave, exhortation to lynching, toxic allusions to Nazism and the death camps, and a very unusual will. One can see why he did not appoint a literary executor to pave the way for the writing of an authorised biography. How could he not have been ambivalent about the idea of anyone writing his life?

  His view of biographers was made clear in a letter to Stephen and Natasha Spender, written in 1992 upon the publication of a book that dredged up Spender’s homosexual liaisons. He suggested that the oppressed victims of biography should form themselves into a ‘solidarity’ pack that, with the assistance of the Royal Society of Literature, could serve as a kind of ‘vigilante commando’ that would ‘form an effective superego for the literary world’. He granted that this sounded a bit ‘Ku Klux Clannish’, but said that there were times when he felt distinctly Clannish.40 His sister Olwyn was equally forthright:

  Dear Natasha Spender,

  Just a note to wish you and Sir Stephen well and to congratulate you warmly on your splendid TLS piece on vampire biographies. The dilemma of their victims has never been so well expressed. The wonder to me is how otherwise fairly serious reviewers treat these hacks seriously. Their only reviews should read ‘Another inhuman, inaccurate and impertinent junk biography.’ Or they should simply be shot.

  The deafness to the moral issues is astounding in most people who have not been actually clobbered by them.41

  After his death, for entirely understandable reasons, the message ‘no biographies’ went out loud and clear from the Estate of Ted Hughes and his publishers, Faber and Faber.

  And yet in the last months of his life each time he visited Olwyn in Tufnell Park, he silently left a literary biography on the table: Gibson’s Lorca, Foster’s Yeats, and others. ‘He had never done that sort of thing before,’ Olwyn recalled. ‘Never shown any interest in biography.’42 This was a quiet message.

  When his final illness came upon him in October 1998, Ted Hughes, in an agony of constipation caused by cancer of the colon, was reading Richard Holmes’s magnificent biography Coleridge: Darker Reflections.43 Published that very month, it is a book that makes much of Coleridge’s graphic accounts of his own constipation, a side-effect of opium addiction. Hughes would have regarded the conjunction of the stars that led to his reading this book at this moment not as a matter of chance but as a fateful sign of what he deserved himself: a sympathetic but unsparing literary biography.

  Once the collected poems and selected letters were published, and the British Library archive made available to the public in 2010, the time was manifestly ripe for such a work.44 Hughes would not have wanted all those archival resources to go to waste or for large portions of his work to stop being read because of the absence of an explanatory apparatus that could help to keep it alive. At the same time, he systematically weeded his archives. Again and again, burrowing through his papers, one comes across a ripped-out page, a heavily deleted paragraph, a missing poem known only from its title. Some of the pages torn from the notebooks in the Emory archive
are to be found as loose sheets among the British Library materials, but even the more intimate second archive has tantalising gaps. There were some things that he did not want revealed, even beyond the grave. Should these silences and mysteries be respected? To tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the mighty dead while maintaining the privacy of the living is a delicate task.

  The biographies of writers that Ted admired were not those that came branded as the ‘authorised version’ of a literary estate. They were those that honoured, though not uncritically, their subject, the craft of poetry, and the complicated relationship between art and life. Hughes disciplined himself into complete literary honesty. ‘What is the Truth?’ he asked in the title of that children’s book which he said came to the core of his writerly being. As a writer, he saw it as his primary duty to tell the truth about how he saw the world. As an autobiographer in his journals, he examined the deepest truths of his own self: ‘And that’s the use of this writing to myself,’ he wrote in a journal entry about journal-keeping. ‘It does bring me closer to my self. It does lock me in close conversation with my most conscientious self – and so it gives me energy, and ties me to my real feelings.’45 To examine Hughes’s life with an honesty answerable to his own requires the biographer to explore that ‘most conscientious self’, to expose those ‘real feelings’, and in so doing to fill in some of the gaps left by the weeding of the archive. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that no biographer can tell the whole truth and that what Hughes says about the writing of the natural world in What is the Truth? is equally applicable to human subjects: ‘the truth about them could never be more than provisional, distorted by human interpretation’.46

  ‘I hope each of us owns the facts of his or her own life,’ wrote Ted at the time of the dispute over the state of Sylvia’s grave.47 But every life intersects with other lives. Hughes’s family and friends had the right to tell the facts of his place in their lives, and books such as Lucas Myers’s exceptionally insightful Crow Steered, Bergs Appeared (2001), Daniel Huws’s brief but touching Memories of Ted Hughes (2010) and Ehor Boyanowsky’s flamboyant if occasionally unreliable Savage Gods, Silver Ghosts (2009) truly bring aspects of Ted back to life. Gerald’s Ted and I (2012) is an important family record. Olwyn’s reluctance to publish an autobiography of her own, instead of correcting the biographies of others, will always be a matter for regret. And Frieda Hughes, a writer and an artist in her own right as well as the daughter of two great poets, perhaps has more right than anyone else to tell her version of the story.

  On her fortieth birthday, 1 April 2000, she began work on what might be described as her own version of Birthday Letters, a sequence of poems and accompanying abstract paintings, one for each year of her life. The aftermath of her father’s death was the obvious time for such a reckoning. Her abstract oils of this period, some of her best work, embody her emotions at this difficult time. One of them, Man Thinking, executed in 1999, includes the head of a pike that she did not realise she was painting.48

  The autobiographical project took five years of thinking, feeling and creating, so by the time it was finished there were Forty-Five poems and paintings and that became the title of the book. As her friend the broadcaster Libby Purves explained in a foreword, this was not a ‘plodding autobiography’ but ‘the internal story’, a series of snapshot memories revealing ‘the way it felt to her at each time’.49

  For the first four years, there were no direct memories. She sees herself in the garden of Court Green among the creepy-crawlies, but that is a back projection or an image from a photograph or a family tradition. She believes that the trauma of her mother’s death caused a period of complete amnesia. Only in her fifth year does sentience of her family emerge: her troubled father, her little brother, and the woman she had thought was her mother but who she is now told is really her aunt, Olwyn, sacrificing the glamour of Paris for the sake of Ted and the children.

  Then the snapshots become real. The search for a new life in Ireland with Assia and Shura; first school surrounded by Irish accents and a statue of the Virgin on top of the stationery cupboard. Back in Devon, a sense of being the outsider, looking on as Ted teaches Nick how to tie flies for fishing while Assia and Shura make wings for imaginary angels with paper feathers. Like her father before her, she makes models of clay and plasticine – flowers and dragons where his were zoo and farm animals. Again as he had done as a boy, she brings home wounded animals. In the tiny, gossip-filled Devon town she feels self-conscious when wearing the American clothes sent over for Christmas by Grandmother Aurelia. At her Hughes grandmother’s funeral, she throws shells on the coffin and they clatter so loudly that she cringes in shame.

  That was in the terrible year of 1969. Next she is in Yorkshire with a new mother and new hope. While the family is on the bonding holiday by Loch Ness, ‘Collecting ticks from an adopted dog … In a mildewed tent at the lake’s edge’,50 Lumb Bank smoulders. In Frieda’s memory, the arsonist takes only one thing from the house: the tin box in which she kept her special treasures and the tokens from her baptism, a silver house-fly on a shirt stud of bone, a silver mug embossed with a teddy bear and the square-shaped pearly beads that had belonged to Granny Hughes.

  At boarding school, she nearly dies when a matron gives her the wrong medication. With the Orghast actors in Persia, she witnesses a world at once exotic and bloody, sees the mutilated body of a criminal with ‘Hands chopped off at wrists, / Mouth open, tongue-slit and earless’.51 Then in 1974, as the result of a newspaper article, Ted took his children home for the weekend and told them that their mother had not in fact died of pneumonia. In an interview given shortly after her book’s publication, Frieda recalled how she was on a weekend Arvon poetry course and the girl with whom she was sharing a room was reading The Bell Jar. Frieda’s usual response to the question ‘Are you related to Sylvia Plath Hughes?’ had been ‘Well, I can’t imagine why you’d think that,’ but this time she couldn’t help saying ‘Oh, that’s my mother.’ To which the other girl, looking out of the window, replied, ‘But it can’t be. Sylvia Plath committed suicide and your mother is walking across the forecourt with your father.’ Ted and Carol had just dropped her off. Frieda sat on the bed, shocked and disbelieving. It was soon after this, she said, that the truth was confirmed. Later, Frieda asked her father why he had kept it from her for so long. He said, ‘What do you tell a three-year-old who doesn’t understand?’ And then he said, ‘Once having told a three-year-old something that they could cope with at the time, how do you determine the age at which you tell them the truth? Every year would go by and I’d say, could I tell them now? It was because of the pain that I put it off and put it off.’52

  The poem sequence goes on to tell of how as a teenager she struggled with bulimia and fell in love with a dangerous man on a fast motorcycle. In 1980 when her grandfather Bill Hughes lay dying in the nursing home run by Carol’s sister, she arrived twenty minutes too late to say goodbye to him. She perceived her step-aunt’s welcome as hostile. She had clerical jobs in the tax office and the bureaucracy of the Ministry of Defence. Then she sold greeting cards and split from her husband, who had turned violent. A second partner proved to be a fraudster. She studied art in London, then went off and sailed the world with a shipboard engineer, her Flying Dutchman. She wrote, she painted, she ran through more relationships, she lived in Australia – welcomed by Gerald and Joan – and when she published her children’s stories pressure was allegedly put on her to use a pseudonym and not to give interviews, so as to keep the prying eyes of the press away from the family history. She tells of how she dealt with ill health – anorexia, endometriosis, chronic fatigue syndrome – and how she coped with her Australian home being burnt in a bushfire, but also of how she found happiness, for a long time, with fellow-artist László.

  And then in her father’s last year she publishes Wooroloo, filled with Australian light. He died in the knowledge that she was a published poet who had fin
ally found a happy marriage. She comforted herself with the knowledge of her father’s love, reiterated in almost daily phone calls:

  His voice on the telephone telling me

  Over and over how he loved me

  As if I must learn it, and

  Might not have heard him the first, second,

  Or third time.53

  For all its pain, Forty-Five achieves a sense of requital, of making peace with tumultuous history, by means of the honesty of that kind of confessional poetry which Frieda’s mother had pioneered in the Ariel poems and her father had turned to in Birthday Letters. In this, the slim volume stands in sharp contrast to Waxworks, the collection Frieda completed and published halfway along the journey to Forty-Five, which – in the manner of her father’s other poetic mode – comes at her personal story indirectly through symbolic figures, many of them monstrous, out of classical mythology.54

  Nick, by contrast, chose not to tell his own story. After his father’s death, he remained in Fairbanks, immersed in his academic work on stream salmonid ecology, conducting research in the Alaskan interior and in New Zealand. He resigned from his university position at the end of 2006 and devoted more time to his work as a potter. But he continued his research on king salmon and he supervised graduate students. One of them remembers staying out with him on fieldwork until 3 a.m. on the night of the summer solstice in 2008, ‘just watching fish’. Another recalled ‘his passion for everything he did’, his encyclopaedic command of piscean natural history, his brilliance and creativity and patience and kindness, and his gift of always making time ‘to sit down with a cup of tea and help with anything: questions about class, working out a study design, writing computer code, building sampling equipment, chatting about fish or life’.55