Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  33. The exception is Andrew Wilson’s excellent Mad Girl’s Love Song (Simon & Schuster, 2013), which self-consciously breaks the mould by focusing exclusively on Plath’s ‘Life before Ted’.

  34. Philip Davis, Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. vii.

  35. Heaney, interviewed at the Bloomsbury Hotel, London, 27 Oct 2009.

  36. BL Add. MS 88918/129.

  37. Yeats’s essay ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’, quoted, SGCB xvii.

  38. Personal communication.

  39. ‘Child’s Park’, CP 1087.

  Chapter 1: ‘fastened into place’

  1. When the film Sylvia (2003) was shown at the Picture House 2 miles down the road in Hebden Bridge, there was a ‘sharp and reproachful’ intake of collective audience breath when Daniel Craig, playing the part of Ted Hughes opposite Gwyneth Paltrow’s Sylvia Plath, said that he was from ‘myth-olm-royd’: John Billingsley, A Laureate’s Landscape: Walks around Ted Hughes’ Mytholmroyd (Hebden Bridge: Northern Earth Books, 2007), p. 41.

  2. Opening of ‘The Rock’, BBC radio talk, printed in Geoffrey Summerfield, ed., Worlds: Seven Modern Poets (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), pp. 122–7. This publication was accompanied by Fay Godwin photographs. For original broadcast and publication, see note 5, below.

  3. Ibid., p. 123.

  4. Ibid., p. 124. Olwyn Hughes has no memory of this story and denies that Ted knew it, despite his explicit account in ‘The Rock’.

  5. Broadcast 11 Sept 1963; published in the Listener, 19 Sept, then collected in Writers on Themselves (BBC Books, 1964).

  6. Plath’s working title was ‘Landscape of a Childhood’. See Gail Crowther and Peter K. Steinberg, ‘These Ghostly Archives’ in the online journal Plath Profiles, 2, scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/plath/article/view/4745/4380.

  7. BBC radio talk, ‘Ocean 1212-W’, repr. in Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and Other Prose Writings (Faber & Faber, 1977, 2nd edn 1979; New York: Harper & Row, 1980), pp. 117–24. Hughes’s note in this edition misdates the broadcast to 1962: perhaps it was too painful to remember that it went out posthumously.

  8. William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805 version), 2.232.

  9. ‘Wild Rock’, in Remains of Elmet: A Pennine Sequence (Faber & Faber, 1979; New York: Harper & Row, 1979) (CP 464).

  10. ‘Climbing into Heptonstall’, in Wolfwatching (Faber & Faber, 1989; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991) (CP 750). First published in London Review of Books, 19 June 1986.

  11. ‘Mount Zion’, in Remains of Elmet (CP 480). First published in Encounter, Dec 1977.

  12. Edith (Farrar) Hughes, ‘Past and Present’ (1965), unfinished holograph manuscript, Olwyn Hughes Papers (Emory 980/2), quoted by kind permission of Olwyn Hughes.

  13. Or did it really? At eighty-five, Olwyn was more sceptical: ‘That we believed astrology is ridiculous. We are not stupid. But it was a charming old craze and as material to indulge in – the planets all given meanings and so on – we were charmed with it and interested to see what it showed (if anything). Just a game really’ (Olwyn Hughes to Jonathan Bate, 22 Jan 2014). Despite such protestations, Olwyn insisted on casting this biographer’s horoscope before agreeing to co-operate.

  14. To Leonard Clark, letter of 1974, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Cited by Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath – A Marriage (Little, Brown, 2004), p. 51. My interpretation is derived from Olwyn Hughes, ‘Corrections of Diane Middlebrook’s Her Husband’, Olwyn Hughes Papers (Emory 980/2).

  15. ‘Superstitions’, book review of 1964 (WP 51).

  16. Ibid.

  17. He was Willie to the family, Billie or Billy to his wife Edith, Bill in later years.

  18. To Keith Sagar, 18 July 1998 (L 724).

  19. Included in Lupercal (CP 84). First published in the Spectator on 4 July 1958 and read in the BBC Third Programme on 27 Aug 1958.

  20. To Sagar (L 724).

  21. Epigraph to ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’, read in the BBC Third Programme series The Poet’s Voice; published as closing poem of The Hawk in the Rain (Faber & Faber, 1957).

  22. ‘Little Gidding’, in T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (Faber & Faber, 1944). Hughes’s ‘Nicholas Ferrer’ was in his second collection, Lupercal (CP 69–70).

  23. Olwyn remembers the story vividly; Ted records it in his short story ‘The Deadfall’.

  24. Reminiscences from a series of interviews with Olwyn Hughes, 2010–14.

  25. Edith remembered her sister’s age of death as eighteen, but Miriam was born in July 1896.

  26. Note to Three Books (Faber & Faber, 1993) version of Remains of Elmet (p. 183).

  27. ‘Sacrifice’, CP 759. Ted’s cousin Vicky still remembers hers.

  28. His daughter’s phrase: Vicky Watling (interviewed 31 March 2010), who also provided some of the other details in the remainder of this chapter.

  29. Edith’s memoir, ‘Past and Present’.

  Chapter 2: Capturing Animals

  1. ‘Dumpy’ is Seamus Heaney’s recollection of her (interview at Bloomsbury Hotel). He could not understand how Sylvia Plath could have been jealous of Moira (see Chapter 11, ‘Famous Poet’, below).

  2. Hughes’s radio plays The Coming of the Kings (Nov–Dec 1964) and The Tiger’s Bones (Nov 1965) were also broadcast under the banner of Listening and Writing.

  3. Initial print run of 4,000 in December 1967; reprint of 6,250 copies in 1968; paperback initial run of 6,000 copies in 1969, reprint of 8,000 copies in 1970, 10,000 in 1973, over 10,000 in 1975; subsequent reprints every three or four years through the Eighties. The omitted talk, about birds (including Hughes’s own ‘Hawk Roosting’, Edward Thomas’s ‘The Owl’ and Yeats’s ‘Wild Swans at Coole’), was called ‘Creatures of the Air’.

  4. Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making: An Anthology of Poems and Programmes from ‘Listening and Writing’ (Faber & Faber, 1967), pp. 11–13. Revised American edition: Poetry Is (New York: Doubleday, 1970).

  5. Ibid., p. 15.

  6. Gerald Hughes, Ted and I: A Brother’s Memoir (Robson Press, 2012), p. 20.

  7. See ‘The Ancient Briton Lay under his Rock’, in Remains of Elmet (CP 481).

  8. This paragraph is based on Olwyn’s reminiscences.

  9. Letter to Donald Crossley, 21 Jan 1985, private collection.

  10. Gerald Hughes to Donald Crossley, 21 April 2005, private collection.

  11. Gerald Hughes, Ted and I, p. 56.

  12. Michael Morpurgo, ed., Ghostly Haunts (Pavilion Books, in association with the National Trust, 1994). ‘The Deadfall’ repr. in Ted Hughes, Difficulties of a Bridegroom: Collected Short Stories (Faber & Faber, 1995), pp. 1–19.

  13. Ibid., p. ix. Ted to Keith Sagar, 19 Oct 1995: ‘Yes, I have the ivory fox. Let you see it some day.’ In Keith Sagar, ed., Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar (British Library, 2012), p. 249. Is this a tease or has Ted genuinely convinced himself of the story of the fox’s origin?

  14. Difficulties of a Bridegroom, p. ix.

  15. Poetry in the Making, p. 33.

  16. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805 version), 11.258–79.

  17. Poetry in the Making, p. 57.

  18. In his collected short stories, Hughes describes ‘The Head’ (1978) as ‘the finale’ of the sequence to which ‘The Deadfall’ was overture. ‘These nine pieces’, he says, ‘hang together, in my own mind, as an accompaniment to my poems’ (Difficulties of a Bridegroom, pp. vii–ix).

  19. Poetry in the Making, p. 17.

  20. Ibid., p. 17.

  21. Ibid., p. 81.

  22. Ibid., p. 104. Poems from Meet My Folks! quoted in Poetry in the Making.

  23. Ibid., p. 102. Poems from Meet My Folks! quoted in Poetry in the Making.

  24. ‘The Thought-Fox’, in ibid., pp. 19–20 (CP 21). First published in the New Yorker, 31 Aug 1957.

  Chapter 3: Tarka, Rain Horse, Pike

  1. L 692–3.

>   2. Emory 980/2.

  3. Ted Hughes, ‘Tarka the Otter, by Henry Williamson’, Sunday Times Colour Supplement, 16 Sept 1962, p. 18. One of a series of introductions to children’s classics, or rather classics suitable for children, especially boys. The others were Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World, and H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (the copy of another Wells story, The Time Machine, that Hughes borrowed from the Mexborough school library when in ‘Form 3A’ has recently turned up, mylifeinknitwear.com/ted-hughes-lives-here/).

  4. Henry Williamson, Tarka the Otter (1927; repr. Penguin Modern Classics, 2009), ch. 9.

  5. Brenda Hedden, the girlfriend who sometimes accompanied him, found these evenings immensely tedious.

  6. Ted Hughes, Henry Williamson: A Tribute by Ted Hughes Given at the Service of Thanksgiving at the Royal Parish Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields 1 December 1977 (Rainbow Press, 1979); repr. as ‘Address Given at the Memorial Service’, in Henry Williamson: The Man, the Writings: A Symposium (Padstow: Tabb House, 1980), pp. 159–65.

  7. L 686.

  8. Henry Williamson, The Patriot’s Progress (1930; repr. Stroud: Sutton, 2004), ‘Third Phase’, p. 86.

  9. Hughes, ‘Address Given at the Memorial Service’, pp. 161–2. See further, Yvonne Reddick’s excellent essay, ‘Henry Williamson and Ted Hughes: Politics, Nationhood, and Nature Writing’, English, 62:213 (Winter 2013), pp. 353–74.

  10. Hughes, ‘Address Given at the Memorial Service’, p. 162.

  11. See further my The Song of the Earth (Picador, 2000; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), especially its final chapter.

  12. L 624–5.

  13. Ted Hughes, interviewed by Drue Heinz, ‘The Art of Poetry: LXXI’, Paris Review, 37:134 (Spring 1995), p. 60. This key interview is available at theparisreview.org/interviews/1669/the-art-of-poetry-no-71-ted-hughes.

  14. Gerald Hughes, Ted and I, p. 111.

  15. David Smart, ‘John Fisher at Mexborough Grammar School: A Memoir’, Mexborough and District Heritage Society website, June 2011, joseflocke.co.uk/heritage/MGS02.htm.

  16. Alan Johnson, a close friend in the sixth form, quoted in Steve Ely’s excellent ‘Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire’, Ted Hughes Society Journal, 3:1 (2013), pp. 26–36.

  17. L 625.

  18. Ely, ‘Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire’, p. 35, citing an interview with fellow-pupil Geoffrey Griffiths.

  19. Hughes passed this at ‘subsidiary standard’ in June 1949, a year after his other Higher exams.

  20. Donald Crossley (also a neighbour), personal communication.

  21. ‘Sacrifice’, CP 760.

  22. Paris Review interview, p. 58.

  23. ‘Notes on Published Works’, March 1992 (Emory 644/115).

  24. To Keith Sagar, 4 April 1990, in Keith Sagar, ed., Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar (British Library, 2012), p. 181.

  25. Donald Crossley, personal communication.

  26. ‘Ted and Crookhill’, handwritten memoir by Edna Wholey, 30 July 2000 (‘Ted Hughes Letters to Edna Wholey’, Emory 870/1), to which I also owe much of the detail in this section.

  27. Paris Review interview, pp. 60–1.

  28. L 3.

  29. Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making: An Anthology of Poems and Programmes from ‘Listening and Writing’ (Faber & Faber, 1967), p. 21.

  30. ‘So Quickly It’s Over’, interview with Ted Hughes, Wild Steelhead and Salmon, Winter 1999, p. 50.

  31. Published by the Appledore Press, Devon (1982) in an edition of just twenty-six copies (price £300), in the form of six sheets, each being a facsimile of Hughes’s holograph of a single stanza of the poem with accompanying lithograph by his Irish fishing companion Barrie Cooke. Text reprinted in London Review of Books, Dec 1982.

  32. L 287.

  Chapter 4: Goddess

  1. See Colin Wilcockson, ‘Ted Hughes’ Undergraduate Years at Pembroke College, Cambridge: Some Myths Demystified’, Agenda, 44:4/45:1 (Winter 2009), pp. 147–53, and Neil Roberts, ‘Ted Hughes and Cambridge’, in Mark Wormald, Neil Roberts and Terry Gifford, eds, Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 17–18.

  2. Recollection of another local girl, Enid Wilkinson, quoted in Olivia Cole, ‘Found after 50 years: first love poems of Ted Hughes’, Sunday Times, 13 Aug 2006.

  3. To Tom Paulin, 17 May 1994 (Emory 880/3).

  4. See especially the manuscript poem ‘Summer she goes’ (Emory 644/84).

  5. Loose leaf dating Hawk in the Rain poems, with Jean Findlay identified as ‘J.F.’ (BL Add. MS 88918/7); Hughes wrote ‘June 13th 59’ but clearly meant either ‘49’ or ‘50’; a transcription of the datings in a copy of Hawk now at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts, gives 16 June 1949; see also L 617–18. His memories of dates of composition are an odd mix of precision and error. Assuming the poem genuinely was written during National Service, it must have been June 1950, not 1949, since he did not join up until October 1949.

  6. ‘Song’, in The Hawk in the Rain (CP 24).

  7. Christmas 1946, Olwyn Hughes Papers (BL Add. MS 88948/4).

  8. L 204, explicitly citing Jung.

  9. E. J. Hughes’s RAF Discharge (Emory 644/180).

  10. Inscribed: ‘Edward J. Hughes, to celebrate “going up.” October 1951, with all good wishes, John Fisher’ (Emory University, PR6013.R35 W58 1948 HUGHES).

  11. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (Faber & Faber, 1948); all above quotations from ch. 1, ‘Poets and Gleemen’.

  12. Hughes to Graves, 20 July 1967 (L 273), on thanking him for taking part in the Poetry International Festival. Canellun Collection of Robert Graves Manuscripts, St John’s College Library, Oxford, CC-0234-001.

  13. Graves, The White Goddess, ch. 22, ‘The Triple Muse’.

  Chapter 5: Burnt Fox

  1. Glen Fallows, ‘Reminiscences’, Martlet (alumni magazine of Pembroke College, Cambridge, 1999), p. 8; Philip Hobsbaum, ‘Ted Hughes at Cambridge’, The Dark Horse, 8 (1999), pp. 6–12.

  2. Hughes had a story of their one meeting: he was walking along a London street wearing his trademark greatcoat when a drunken and dyspeptic Waugh staggered out of his club, looked him up and down, took him for some sort of radical, said ‘I don’t like the cut of your jib,’ and spat at him. This may be apocryphal. Years later, shortly after the publication of Birthday Letters, Waugh’s son Auberon, a familiar figure on the London literary scene, thundered from his pulpit in the Literary Review to the effect that Hughes was a ‘rotten poet’ who wrote ‘pretentious drivel’ in abhorrent free verse. Hughes sent him a graceful postcard and a photocopy of an essay on verse form in Winter Pollen, together with the comment that he was a Tyndale man whereas Auberon was a Thomas More man. Auberon responded by thanking him for his ‘extraordinarily good-natured response to my unmannerly tirade’ and expressing the hope that they might one day meet again and sink their differences over some good wine. I am most grateful to Alexander Waugh for sight of this unpublished exchange.

  3. Unpublished memoir of Hughes by Terence McCaughey, read publicly by Carol Hughes, Pembroke College, Cambridge, 17 Sept 2010.

  4. Brian Cox, ‘Ted Hughes (1930–1998): A Personal Retrospect’, Hudson Review, 52:1 (Spring 1999), pp. 29–43 (pp. 30–1). Cox was two years ahead of Hughes, but stayed on at Pembroke to do graduate work.

  5. To Olwyn (L 20).

  6. During his second term as a freshman (L 12).

  7. He told his Australian friend Jennifer Rankin that he was often mistaken for Dexter (draft manuscript of a radio talk about Ted, Jennifer Rankin Papers, University of New South Wales, Australian Defence Force Academy Library, MS 348). But Dexter, ‘Lord Ted’, as he was known, went up to Cambridge the year after Hughes went down, so if the encounter(s) did take place, this would have been when Hughes was back in Cambridge after grad
uating.

  8. ‘Words and Experience’, in Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making: An Anthology of Poems and Programmes from ‘Listening and Writing’ (Faber & Faber, 1967), p. 121.

  9. Olwyn Hughes Papers (Emory 980/1).

  10. Daniel Huws, Memories of Ted Hughes 1952–1963 (Nottingham: Richard Hollis, 2010), p. 13.

  11. Accounts of the burnt-fox dream from letter to Keith Sagar, 16 July 1979 (Keith Sagar, ed., Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar (British Library, 2012), pp. 74–6, the fullest version); letter to Seamus Heaney, Emory 960/40; ‘The Burnt Fox’, WP 8–9; and Cox, ‘Ted Hughes (1930–1998)’, pp. 33–4.

  12. Syllabus for Archaeology and Anthropology Part I, in Student’s Handbook to Cambridge 1953–4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), pp. 148–9.

  13. Huws, Memories of Ted Hughes, p. 18, adding, ‘The two splayed wings of the building, the vaginal entrance and the phallic tower had some complementary suggestiveness.’ Many students over the years have been struck by the phallic mass of the UL tower, which allegedly held pornographic materials in a closed stack at the top.

  14. Part 6 of Bronisław Malinowski, Coral Gardens and their Magic: A Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands (George Allen & Unwin, 1935).

  15. Hobsbaum, ‘Ted Hughes at Cambridge’, p. 7.

  16. delta, 5:12 (Spring 1955) (CP 11).

  17. Huws, Memories of Ted Hughes, p. 20.

  18. Chequer, 7.2 (Nov 1954) (CP 10).

  19. Hughes’s file in the Pembroke College Archive. ‘The Tutor’ at Pembroke was the Senior Tutor, responsible both for discipline and for the overall progress of all undergraduates.

  20. Cox, ‘Ted Hughes (1930–1998)’, p. 32.

  21. Huws, Memories of Ted Hughes, p. 16.

  22. L 25.

  Chapter 6: ‘a compact index of everything to follow’

  1. ‘Paris 1954’, in Howls and Whispers (Northampton, Mass.: Gehenna Press, 1998) (CP 1173).

  2. See letter from Ted to Olwyn (BL Add. MS 88948/1).

  3. BL Add. MS 88918/129.

  4. To Gerald and his family, 16 Oct 1954 (L 26).

  5. Lucas Myers Papers at Emory 865/1.

  6. Boddy’s reminiscences are recorded in Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001), pp. 41–4. This book, as much memoir as biography, is at its best on Hughes’s Cambridge friendships.