Joe Saxton, a friend since Bedales, told of a darker turn in the aftermath of Ted’s passing. In a moving newspaper article he explained that until the death of his beloved father in 1998, Nick had been ‘a man in whom a zest for life and a thirst for learning welled over’: ‘Whether it was investigating Nile perch in Kenya for his undergraduate dissertation, working out how to make the perfect glaze for his pottery, discovering the ecology of grayling or trout, or “calibrating” (his term, not mine) how to only just lose at football in the garden against his godchild, my youngest son, his lust for learning was undimmed.’ Ted was Nick’s ‘soulmate’, his sharer in the world of water and fish. ‘Hey Sag,’ Nick would say to his friend as the two of them retraced the steps that father and son had trodden in Alaska. ‘This is the branch where dad’s line snagged when he had a big salmon.’ The death of Ted, Saxton wrote, meant that Nick lost ‘the most important relationship in his life’: ‘Worse still were the repercussions: disagreements of the sort that many grieving families have when the family linchpin dies. Nick was in his late thirties then and his mental health began to suffer.’56
On 16 March 2009, in his small wooden house on a steep, snow-covered Alaskan hillside reached through a dense forest of silver birch and spruce, Nicholas Farrar Hughes, aged forty-seven, took his own life. Frieda and Olwyn had to bear the anguish of flying all the way to Alaska to make the necessary arrangements. Ted Hughes endured great sorrow. It is a mercy that he did not have to endure this. It is the one thing that would have destroyed him.
When a prolific poet fears or even knows that he is dying, there must be significance in his choice of the last lines of verse published in his lifetime. The second of the two poems Ted submitted to the Sunday Times in the last months of his life was published on 18 October 1998, in honour of the award of the Order of Merit. Much longer than ‘Shakespeare, drafting his will’, it was called ‘The Offers’. It had previously appeared only in the privately printed Howls and Whispers. This was, from the point of view of his public self, Ted Hughes’s final poetic testament.
It tells of how a few months after Plath’s suicide he met her ghost on a Northern Line tube train to Chalk Farm: Orpheus in the underground, glimpsing but not recovering Eurydice. These are some of the most poignant lines Ted ever wrote, not least because of the quiet echo, with light turned to darkness, of his Wordsworthian epiphany on the threshold of ‘London’s waking life’ in the sequence of ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’ that describes his walk home after their first night of love: ‘Chalk Farm came. I got up. You stayed.’ It is ‘the testing moment’. He lifts her face from her and takes it with him to the platform, in a dream which is ‘the whole of London’s waking life’. Then he watches the train and Sylvia ‘move away, carried away / Northwards, back into the abyss’. Her ‘real new face’ is ‘unaltered, lit, unwitting’. It remains in sight for a moment before vanishing to leave Ted his ‘original emptiness / Of where you had been and abruptly were not’.57
The poem then tells of how the ghost appeared a second time, in her own home. He is sitting talking to another woman and before his eyes, in hallucinatory fashion, she seems to transform into Sylvia. He allows himself to be ‘covertly’58 wooed a second time. By two of those extraordinary coincidences, or synchronicities, that made Ted feel that his life was being controlled by some mysterious supernatural force of fate, the woman happened to share a birthday with Sylvia and a name with Sylvia’s ‘oldest rival’: her name was Shirley Smith. A friend of Olwyn’s, she did indeed, as the poem says, subsequently send Ted an annual postcard from Honolulu.59 This section of the poem includes the superbly formed phrase ‘Death had repossessed your talent’ and a bold image of Sylvia courting Ted anew as he breathes ‘a bewildering air – the gas / Of the underworld in which you moved so easily / And had your new being’. It took enormous courage to use the word ‘gas’ in this context.
And then, because offers and immortal intimations tend to come in threes, the ghost of Sylvia appears a third time, as he is stepping into the bath:
But suddenly – the third time – you were there.
Younger than I had ever known you. You
As if new made, half a wild roe, half
A flawless thing, priceless, faceted
Like a cobalt jewel. You came behind me
(At my helpless movement, as I lowered
A testing foot into the running bath)
And spoke – peremptory, as a familiar voice
Will startle out of a river’s uproar, urgent,
Close: ‘This is the last. This one. This time
Don’t fail me.’60
As in the London-dawn sequence of ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’, Hughes is here writing in the classic Wordsworthian vein of memory: the ‘wild roe’ mimics the memorial recovery of a happier past in ‘Tintern Abbey’ (‘when like a roe / I bounded o’er the mountains’), while the delicate enjambment of the verse is learned from The Prelude (‘half / A flawless thing’; ‘a familiar voice / Will startle out of a river’s uproar’).
Whereas Clytemnestra kills unfaithful Agamemnon in his bath, Sylvia gives Ted one last chance as he is entering his. This is the Alcestis moment, the second chance. He takes it. He honours Sylvia’s ghost, the sorrow of the deer and the jewels that were her eyes. He does not fail her memory. It is a poem of longed-for redemption.
Like so many of the Birthday Letters and Howls and Whispers poems, Ted worked and reworked ‘The Offers’ over many years. In successive manuscripts, it has various titles, including ‘Resemblances’, ‘Mind-warp’ and ‘Three Chances’. The earliest draft, written in a red school exercise book when the Sylvia project was still called ‘The Sorrows of the Deer’, was entitled ‘Your after image’, then revised to ‘After image’. It is longer and more directly autobiographical than the final published version. The opening conceit is that the mask of Sylvia’s face distorts Ted’s retina: he keeps seeing her face in that of other women.
First, on the Underground, in the spring, just after Sylvia’s death. A girl with full shopping bags gets on to a Northern Line train at Tottenham Court Road, just after the rush hour. Her face seems to his sorrowful eyes to be identical to Sylvia’s. She gets off at Chalk Farm, and he follows her. It is as if Sylvia is back and they are going home together. This is the biographical origin of the incident. In the more polished version, the girl stays on the train as Ted gets off at Chalk Farm. She becomes the ghost of Sylvia, being driven into the underworld.
The second encounter, with Olwyn’s friend Shirley Smith, is dated to the autumn of 1963, at Court Green. Olwyn is living with him there and her Parisian ‘fellow-campaigner’ has come for a visit. Again, the face becomes Sylvia’s. As in the published version, Ted mentions the coincidence of birthdays, but in this first draft he also includes the autobiographical detail, discreetly dropped in later drafts, that Shirley made a pass at him, which he rejected. It would have been too strange to go to bed in Court Green, so soon after Sylvia’s death, with a woman who was in more than one respect her after-image.
The third chance in ‘After image’ is completely different from that in the eventual published text. There is no reference to the bath and the ghostly voice. Ted sees Sylvia not in a fleeting after-image, but in the whole demeanour of a woman he knows very well indeed. She is his ‘third’ love, long known to him but ‘still a riddle’. She is a ‘creature so unlike’ Sylvia, a ‘thesis’ to her ‘antithesis’, and yet ‘as surely my wife’. ‘Her profile’ is ‘identical but made perfect’ in ‘every feature’. She has a kind of ‘Apache’ look and in her ‘phase of dark beauty’ she is somehow associated with the moon. He is ‘fixed’, trapped ‘like a fly in amber’ in her ‘occult brightness’.61 There can be little doubt as to the identity of this imagined figure. Ted always said that his second bride had a face and hair that seemed vaguely Red Indian. Such features went with the whiff of gypsy origin that he found romantic in her. This is one of the very few poems that he wrote about his second wife. She is a
‘survivor’ and an enigma. She is the opposite of Sylvia and yet there are times when she looks to him like another Sylvia, though more beautiful.
But these lines are scored through, marked as a false start. He rejects the idea that finding a resemblance in another wife is the way to bring back Sylvia. In subsequent drafts, the third chance becomes that of the dream he recorded when Assia moved out of Court Green in the summer of 1967: ‘dreamed: in bath – feeling somebody behind me, stunning shock, it was Sylvia, very young and happy’.62 Whereas the first two offers turn on momentary resemblances, this is an encounter with the true ghost. No woman belongs here other than Sylvia herself.
In making this revision, and putting into ghost-Sylvia’s mouth the demand that this time he should not fail her, Ted was probably influenced by one of the elegies of the Roman poet Sextus Propertius. Here, the ghost of the poet’s dead beloved comes to his bedside and chides him for his infidelity. This model was familiar to Ted from a well-known free translation by Robert Lowell, entitled ‘The Ghost’. ‘I will not hound you, much as you have earned / It, Sextus,’ says the woman. Instead, ‘I shall reign in your four books.’ As Sylvia reigns in Ted’s late elegies. ‘Propertius, I kept faith,’ says the ghost.63 Hughes revises the tone by having Sylvia’s ghost offer forgiveness and ask him to be the one to keep faith. He does so by writing the poem and publishing it from his deathbed.
The Propertius elegy also mentions ‘Agamemnon’s wife’, perhaps contributing to the bath scenario in Hughes’s response – but, as throughout his career, the literary allusiveness in no way diminishes the reality of the apparition, the dream, the memory. It is fitting that this last poem is also a homage to Robert Lowell, at whose feet Ted and Sylvia sat in Boston, and whose personal voice in Life Studies did so much to liberate and shape their work. Lowell was on Ted’s mind at this time because he had also published a translation of Racine’s Phèdre: Ted’s version was, among other things, an outdoing of the master-translator of modern poetry.
Sylvia Plath’s death was the central fact of Ted Hughes’s life. However he tried to get away from it, he could not; however the biographer broadens the picture, it is her image that returns. In the letters of his final months, even after the expiation that came with Birthday Letters, Plath remains the most vivid presence in his mental world. So, for example, in a single sentence of luminous poetic prose in a long letter to his German translators who had sought advice on the meaning of various phrases in such poems as ‘The Bee God’, Ted explains how the image ‘Your page a dark swarm’:
brings together SP bending over the bees (bending over the beehive with its roof off), SP bending over her page (where the letters as she composed writhed and twisted, superimposed on each other, displacing each other), her page, as a seething mass and depth and compound ball of living ideas – carrying, somewhere in the heart of it, in the heart of the words, of the phrases, of the poetic whole struggling to form itself, the vital nuclei of her poetic operation – her ‘self’ and her ‘Daddy’ – and finally, her poem (in process of composition there on her page as she bends over it) as a swarm of bees clinging under a blossoming bough.
‘The lit blossom’, he writes, ‘is also SP’s face.’64 It is as if Sylvia instead of the thought-fox has entered the room and is bending over Ted as he writes. Her face is radiant. Her ghost has returned in recognition of the knowledge that he loved her until the day he died. Before him stands yesterday.
Notes
Place of publication is London unless otherwise stated.
Abbreviations
BL – British Library
CP – Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (Faber & Faber; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003)
CPSP – Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, ed. with an introduction by Ted Hughes (New York: Harper & Row, 1981)
Emory – Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia
JSP – The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950–1962, ed. Karen V. Kukil (New York: Anchor, 2000)
L – Letters of Ted Hughes, selected by and ed. Christopher Reid (Faber & Faber, 2007; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008)
SGCB – Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (Faber & Faber; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992)
SPLH – Sylvia Plath, Letters Home, selected and ed. with commentary by Aurelia Schober Plath (New York: Harper & Row, 1975; repr. Bantam Books, 1977)
WP – Ted Hughes, Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, ed. William Scammell (Faber & Faber, 1994; New York: Picador USA, 1995)
All Sylvia Plath quotations are from American editions published by Harper & Row (now HarperCollins).
Prologue: The Deposition
1. ‘Deposition of Edward James Hughes’, before the United States Federal District Court, District of Massachusetts, copy now held in the Jane V. Anderson Papers, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Neilson Library, Smith College. Public-domain document quoted under the United States Right of Public Access to Judicial Proceedings and Records.
2. ‘9 Willow Street’, in Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters (Faber & Faber, 1998), pp. 71–4. Hughes was a habitual reviser. Many of his poems have minor variations as they move through periodical publication, limited private-press edition and trade-book form. Normally, I quote from the version in the first published text, though revisions are sometimes noted. For convenience, I give page references to CP. Thus ‘9 Willow Street’, CP 1087.
3. ‘That Morning’ was Hughes’s contribution to A Garland for the Laureate (1981), a privately printed volume presented to Sir John Betjeman on his seventy-fifth birthday; it then appeared in the London Review of Books on 3 December 1981 and in New Selected Poems (New York: Harper & Row, 1982) and Selected Poems 1957–1981 (Faber & Faber, 1982), before finding its true home in River (Faber & Faber, 1983).
4. Quoted from the memorial stone in Westminster Abbey, a monument in the public domain.
5. L 514. Where possible, letters cited from this edition have been checked against their holograph originals and, where appropriate, omitted passages have been restored.
6. A meeting noted by Plath in her appointments diary, but unnoticed by her biographers prior to the opening of the Anderson Papers in 2012.
7. ‘Deposition of Jane V. Anderson’, before the United States Federal District Court, District of Massachusetts, copy now held in the Anderson Papers. Public-domain document quoted under the United States Right of Public Access to Judicial Proceedings and Records.
8. Victor A. Kovner, in ‘Libel in Fiction: The Sylvia Plath Case and its Aftermath’, Columbia-VLA Journal of Law and the Arts, 11 (1987), p. 473.
9. New York Times, 21 Jan 1987.
10. In Chapter 26, ‘Trial’, below.
11. Lois Ames, ‘Sylvia Plath: A Biographical Note’, in Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 203.
12. Opening paragraph of The Bell Jar.
13. Hughes Deposition, p. 67.
14. Sylvia Plath, Ariel (Faber & Faber, 1965).
15. ‘Ted Hughes/Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar legal case’, BL Add. MS 88993.
16. To Victor Kovner, 7 Feb 1987, quoted, Roy Davids, ‘The Making of Birthday Letters’, roydavids.com/birthday.htm (accessed 12 Jan 2014).
17. ‘Voices and Visions: Sylvia Plath’, broadcast on American PBS, 21 April 1988, available (in 2014) at youtube.com/watch?v=wmamNSa3sP8.
18. Quotations from ‘They are crawling all over the church’, unpublished fragment of long poem among Birthday Letters drafts (BL Add. MS 88918/1).
19. Roy Davids, ‘Memories, Reflections, Gratitudes’, in Nick Gammage, ed., The Epic Poise: A Celebration of Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber, 1999), p. 188.
20. Lecture at the Dartington Way with Words Festival, July 2007, published as ‘Suffering and Decision’, in Mark Wormald, Neil Roberts and Terry Gifford, eds, Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 221–37.
21. After hearing the lecture, I put th
e Wordsworth parallel to Heaney: he immediately acknowledged it, but said that he had not seen it.
22. Heaney, ‘Suffering and Decision’, p. 233.
23. Wendy Cope, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (Faber & Faber, 1986), p. 47.
24. Philip Larkin, Selected Letters (Faber & Faber, 1993), p. 581.
25. Ted Hughes Papers 1940–1997, Emory 644/4 (Incoming Correspondence, 13 June 1975, 8 Nov 1982).
26. ‘The Jaguar’, ‘Pike’, ‘The Thought-Fox’, ‘Hawk Roosting’, ‘Last Letter’.
27. Written in 1958; Olwyn Hughes Papers (BL Add. MS 88948/1).
28. Lucas Myers, Crow Steered, Bergs Appeared: A Memoir of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (Sewanee, Tenn.: Proctor’s Hall Press, 2001), p. 2.
29. ‘Money my enemy’, Olwyn Hughes Papers (Emory 980/2/2).
30. Robert Graves, a key influence, was a precedent for a life of writing and nothing but writing, but he resorted to novels and potboilers in a way that Hughes did not. The other, though short-lived, exemplar was a Welshman, Dylan Thomas.
31. In the light of this, I refer throughout this book to the contents of this particular box file as Hughes’s ‘journal’. See further, Roy Davids, ‘Ted Hughes Archive, The Final Portion: Papers of Ted Hughes mostly arranged in standard filing boxes, folders and cardboard boxes still in his possession at his death’, ted-hughes.info/uploads/media/The_Ted_Hughes_Archive_at_The_British_Library.pdf, from which the examples listed here are taken. This was Davids’s catalogue for the sale of the (second) archive to the British Library. The collection is now catalogued rather differently, with much of the journal-style material having been rearranged.
32. The centrality of fishing to Hughes’s life and work, together with the revelatory quality of his unpublished fishing diaries, is the subject of a major forthcoming book by Mark Wormald of Pembroke College, Cambridge.
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