Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  7. Lucas Myers, An Essential Self: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (Nottingham: Richard Hollis, 2011), pp. 19–20.

  8. May/June 1955 (L 28).

  9. See Nicholas Wroe, ‘Speaking of foreign tongues’ (interview with Weissbort), Guardian, 30 June 2001.

  10. Myers, Essential Self, p. 16.

  11. Ibid., p. 24.

  12. See Neil Roberts, A Lucid Dreamer: The Life of Peter Redgrove (Jonathan Cape, 2012), p. 89.

  13. Philip Hobsbaum, ‘Ted Hughes at Cambridge’, The Dark Horse, 8 (1999), p. 10.

  14. Helen Melody, ‘Rediscovered: the earliest recording of Ted Hughes?’, britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/english-and-drama/2013/10/rediscovered-the-earliest-recording-of-ted-hughes.html. The tape was discovered by Peter Redgrove’s wife, Penelope Shuttle. It may well be that the readings were rehearsals for Redgrove’s and Hughes’s BBC radio auditions in September 1956. The Hughes poems on the recording were included in Hawk in the Rain, save that the first half of one called ‘Lust and Desire’ was omitted. It remains unpublished, while the second half was renamed ‘Incompatibilities’.

  15. A Group Anthology, ed. Edward Lucie-Smith and Philip Hobsbaum (Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 47.

  16. CP 25.

  17. Untitled insert in the long poetic sequence of BL Add. MS 88918/1.

  18. Saint Botolph’s Review, Feb 1956, repr. in Hawk in the Rain (CP 29).

  19. 27 June 1955 (BL Add. MS 88918/129).

  20. Ted Hughes, A Dancer to God: Tributes to T. S. Eliot (Faber & Faber, 1992; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993), p. 20.

  21. Ibid., pp. 5, 20–4.

  22. Ibid., pp. 21, 44, 36.

  23. Ibid., pp. 21, 44, 36.

  24. Ibid., pp. 30–3.

  25. Poetry, 88 (Aug 1956), pp. 295–7 (sent to the editor by Sylvia) (CP 13–15). Described by Dan Huws as the product of a challenge concocted by Luke Myers and Ted to write a poem with this title, and as Ted’s ‘first professional piece of work … his existential celebration of his relationship with Sylvia, but written for his friends’ (Daniel Huws, Memories of Ted Hughes 1952–1963 (Nottingham: Richard Hollis, 2010), p. 36).

  26. Loose notebook leaves listing circumstances and dates of composition of early poems (BL Add. MS 88918/7).

  27. Ted Hughes MS 1, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington (CP 19–20).

  28. He often told the story, most fully in a 1990 letter to Sonnenberg, responding to the latter’s memory of an earlier telling (L 586–7).

  29. Ben Sonnenberg, Lost Property: Memoirs and Confessions of a Bad Boy (New York: Summit Books, 1991), p. 131.

  30. The story is recounted in Jung’s 1952 essay ‘Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle’.

  31. Hawk in the Rain version of ‘The Jaguar’ (CP 19).

  32. BL Add. MS 88918/7.

  Chapter 7: Falcon Yard

  1. BL Add. MS 88918/129.

  2. To McCaughey (L 35).

  3. The above account is based on private reminiscences (telephone interview, 2 May 2015, and subsequent emails).

  4. ‘Stone Boy with Dolphin’, 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), p. 297. This story is a chapter from her incomplete, and now lost, autobiographical novel ‘Falcon Yard’.

  5. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, ‘Reuben Davis, Sylvia Plath and Other American Writers: The Perils of Emotional Struggle’, in Peter Stearns and Jan Lewis, eds, An Emotional History of the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 446.

  6. Lucas Myers, An Essential Self: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (Nottingham: Richard Hollis, 2011), p. 27.

  7. The essay survives, with supervisor’s comments, in the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington (Plath MSS II.13.2).

  8. Plath, ‘Stone Boy’, p. 299.

  9. JSP 211. Myers’s poem was in Saint Botolph’s Review (1956), p. 8.

  10. Plath, ‘Stone Boy’, p. 297.

  11. Ibid., p. 305.

  12. JSP 211.

  13. JSP 212.

  14. JSP 212.

  15. Plath, ‘Stone Boy’, p. 308.

  16. Ibid., p. 309.

  17. Ibid., p. 311.

  18. Email from Jean Gooder to Jonathan Bate, 3 May 2015.

  19. ‘St Botolph’s’, in Birthday Letters (CP 1052).

  20. JSP 44.

  21. William Carlos Williams, in his poem ‘To Elsie’.

  22. Plath, ‘Stone Boy’, p. 309.

  23. CP 1169–70.

  24. Both poems were reprinted in The Hawk in the Rain (CP 41, 43).

  25. The Hawk in the Rain (CP 42–7). This war sequence is, strictly speaking, not quite the ending of the collection. One further poem follows as a kind of epilogue: ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’, which simultaneously invokes the old religious civil wars of the sixteenth century and Hughes’s own maternal Farrar heritage.

  26. The fullest and best account of Plath’s ‘life before Ted’ is Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life before Ted (Simon & Schuster, 2013).

  27. JSP 212–14.

  28. JSP 214.

  29. To Aurelia Plath, 9 March 1956 (SPLH 249).

  30. ‘Pursuit’, CPSP 22.

  31. SPLH 249, 247.

  32. 6 March 1956 (JSP 225).

  33. L 37.

  34. JSP 232–5; Lucas Myers, Crow Steered, Bergs Appeared: A Memoir of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (Seewanee, Tenn.: Proctor’s Hall Press, 2001), p. 35, and Essential Self, p. 28; ‘Visit’ in Birthday Letters is Hughes’s version, recording his shock ten years after her death upon reading for the first time her journal account of her feelings that weekend.

  35. Jane Baltzell Kopp, who also lodged at Whitstead, in ‘“Gone, Very Gone Youth”: Sylvia Plath at Cambridge, 1955–1957’, in Edward Butscher, ed., Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977; repr. Peter Owen, 1979), p. 63.

  Chapter 8: 18 Rugby Street

  1. Daniel Huws, Memories of Ted Hughes 1952–1963 (Nottingham: Richard Hollis, 2010), p. 26.

  2. JSP 552.

  3. JSP 554.

  4. JSP 563.

  5. JSP 567.

  6. ‘18 Rugby Street’, CP 1055–8.

  7. These lines were first published in their original verse form in Jonathan Bate, ‘Sorrow in a Black Coat’, Times Literary Supplement, 5 Feb 2014 (extract from ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’, BL Add. MS 88918/1).

  8. L 37.

  9. JSP 217.

  10. JSP 553.

  11. Sassoon’s autobiographical story ‘The Diagram’, Chicago Review, 17:4 (1965), p. 111, quoted, Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life before Ted (Simon & Schuster, 2013), much the fullest and best account of the relationship between Plath and Sassoon.

  12. 9 April 1956 (L 38).

  13. Emory 644/139.

  14. ‘Venus in the Seventh’, draft chapter for ‘Falcon Yard’ (Emory 644/130/12).

  15. JSP 570 (16 April 1956); SPLH 263 (19 April 1956).

  16. JSP 570.

  17. ‘The first time I bought a bottle of wine’ (BL Add. MS 88918/1).

  18. ‘Fidelity’, in Birthday Letters (CP 1060).

  19. Jane Baltzell Kopp, ‘“Gone, Very Gone Youth”: Sylvia Plath at Cambridge 1955–1957’, in Edward Butscher, ed., Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977; repr. Peter Owen, 1979)’, p. 74.

  20. Lucas Myers, Crow Steered, Bergs Appeared: A Memoir of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (Seewanee, Tenn.: Proctor’s Hall Press, 2001), p. 148.

  21. SPLH 264, 265, 266.

  22. SPLH 272.

  23. SPLH 274.

  24. SPLH 288.

  25. ‘I didn’t even ask her to marry me. She suggested it as a good idea and I said OK, why not?’ (to Aurelia Plath, Emory 644/18).

  26. ‘So Quickly It’s Over’, interview with Ted Hughes, Wild Steelhead and Salmon, Winter 1999, p. 51.

  27. Emory 644/180.

&n
bsp; 28. ‘A Pink Wool Knitted Dress’, in Birthday Letters (CP 1064).

  29. L 39.

  30. SPLH 292–3.

  Chapter 9: ‘Marriage is my medium’

  1. As noted in the Prologue, the story of Ted and Sylvia’s years together has been told many times, most accurately, though not without errors of fact, in Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (Viking, 1989; repr. Penguin, 1998), written with assistance from Olwyn and checked by Ted. In the following chapters, I am indebted to Stevenson, but have based my narrative on primary sources, in particular Sylvia Plath, Letters Home (SPLH), The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950–1962 (JSP), Sylvia’s unpublished letters, Ted’s published and unpublished letters, and his unpublished journal entries, notebooks and pocket diaries, as well as his poetically reshaped memories in Birthday Letters and related poems. Specific references are given for all quotations.

  2. ‘Your Paris’, CP 1065–7.

  3. SPLH 298.

  4. L 44.

  5. JSP 240.

  6. L 46.

  7. ‘Moonwalk’, CP 1070.

  8. Notes on How the Whale Became (Emory 744/115/6).

  9. There are three fine drawings of Ted by Sylvia on the honeymoon. One is now in the National Portrait Gallery, one in the possession of Warren Plath, and the third (drawn in Paris, on the return journey) in the possession of Frieda Hughes, reproduced in her Sylvia Plath: Drawings (Faber & Faber, 2013), p. 25.

  10. SPLH 298–9.

  11. SPLH 300.

  12. L 46.

  13. JSP 259.

  14. ‘You Hated Spain’, CP 1068. Plath’s discomfort is apparent in her poems ‘The Goring’ and ‘The Beggars’.

  15. JSP 250.

  16. Paul Alexander, Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath (New York: Viking, 1991, repr. 1999), p. 194. The friend of Plath’s from whom Alexander derived this story is not an entirely reliable source.

  17. SPLH 304–5.

  18. SPLH 305.

  19. SPLH 306. In terms of the chronological run in the narrative of Birthday Letters, the poem ‘Wuthering Heights’ is misplaced insofar as it occurs after the poems about the following year in Cambridge (‘55 Eltisley’, ‘Chaucer’).

  20. ‘Wuthering Heights’, CP 1080–2.

  21. CPSP 71–2, 167–8.

  22. SPLH 311.

  23. 10 Oct 1956 (Plath MSS II, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington); 5 Oct 1956 (L 57–60).

  24. Sylvia’s letters to Ted remain in private hands. This one (7–8 Oct 1956) was published in Sylvia Plath: Drawings, pp. 2–4.

  25. Olwyn Hughes, in Stevenson, Bitter Fame, p. 99.

  26. SPLH 329.

  27. Notes on The Hawk in the Rain (Emory 644/11).

  28. SPLH (21 Nov 1956).

  29. Plath to Marcia Brown Plumer, 4 Feb 1963 (Sylvia Plath Collection, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, MS 45, 16/3/13).

  30. ‘55 Eltisley’, CP 1073–4.

  31. Plath to Marcia Brown Plumer, 9 April 1957 (Smith College MS 45, 16/3/15).

  32. 23 Feb 1957 (L 94).

  33. 24 Feb 1957 (SPLH 340).

  34. L 98.

  35. ‘Chaucer’, CP 1075–6.

  36. Letter to Gerald and Joan Hughes, May 1957 (Emory 854/1).

  37. L 97–8.

  38. Olwyn Hughes, in Stevenson, Bitter Fame, p. 110.

  39. To Olwyn, 20–3 June 1957, from on board ship (L 99–104).

  40. JSP 302.

  41. JSP 289.

  42. L 104.

  43. ‘The Chipmunk’, CP 1082–3.

  44. To Gerald and Joan from Wellesley, late June 1957 (L 103).

  45. 22 Aug 1957 (L 106).

  46. To Gerald and Joan from Wellesley, late June 1957 (L 104).

  47. JSP 296, inspiring Plath’s ‘Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor’ and Hughes’s Birthday Letters poem ‘Flounders’.

  48. JSP 284.

  49. JSP 285.

  50. 20 July 1957 (JSP 289).

  51. Ibid.

  52. ‘The Prism’, CP 1162–3.

  Chapter 10: ‘So this is America’

  1. JSP 305.

  2. ‘18 Rugby Street’, CP 1058.

  3. JSP 302.

  4. To Myers, Oct 1957 (L 110).

  5. Ibid.

  6. See ‘Child’s Park’ in Birthday Letters.

  7. It was reprinted in 1960, though not all copies of the first edition had sold by this time, so they were recycled bearing the dust wrapper of the second.

  8. Sylvia to Ted’s parents, 5 Nov 1957 (Emory 980/1).

  9. Notes on The Hawk in the Rain (Emory 644/11).

  10. L 111–12.

  11. New Statesman, 28 Sept 1957.

  12. To Myers, Oct 1957 (L 110).

  13. nytimes.com/books/98/03/01/home/plath-hawk.html.

  14. Sylvia to Olwyn, quoted, Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (Viking, 1989, repr. Penguin, 1998), p. 117; Ted to Olwyn (BL Add. MS 88948/1).

  15. L 112.

  16. Observer, 6 Oct 1957.

  17. CP 36.

  18. CP 45–6.

  19. Draft for ‘The Hawk in the Rain’, unbound notebook page (Emory 644/57). < > indicates an arrowed insertion.

  20. Drafts for ‘The Thought-Fox’, in drafts, notes and corrected page proof of The Hawk in the Rain, in the Ted Hughes Papers MS 1, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

  21. It is now in the Hughes Archive at Emory. On Ted’s syllabus, see further Amanda Golden’s excellent article ‘Ted Hughes and the Midcentury American Academy’, Ted Hughes Society Journal, 3:1 (2013), pp. 47–52.

  22. To Huws, late Feb 1958 (L 120–1).

  23. To Olwyn, late March 1958 (L 123).

  24. Peter Davison, The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston from Robert Frost to Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath, 1955–1960 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), p. 166.

  25. 20 May 1959 (JSP 484–5).

  26. 5 March 1958 (JSP 345–6).

  27. 29 March 1958 (JSP 360–1).

  28. JSP 388 (the performance was on 21 May 1958).

  29. Amanda Golden, ‘Ted Hughes, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and an Interview with Jules Chametzky’, Ted Hughes Society Journal, 3:1 (2013), pp. 59–66, records the following memory of Chametzky, who arrived to teach at UMass Amherst the semester after Ted: ‘I was visited by two senior students, officers in the then Literary Club … [who] had studied with Ted Hughes the year before, when he had occupied the very office I was in. They both seemed to have a crush on Hughes. The older one named Susan Goldstein, about six feet tall, gave me a copy of Ted’s first book – The Hawk in the Rain’ (p. 64). Susan Goldstein is deceased.

  30. 22 May 1958 (JSP 391).

  31. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

  32. 11 June 1958 (JSP 392). Plath biographers are not averse to turning the glass into Ted: ‘He hit her hard enough that she saw stars’ (Carl Rollyson, American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2013), p. 155).

  33. 11 June 1958 (JSP 392).

  34. 27 Dec 1958 (JSP 447).

  35. 7 July 1958 (JSP 401).

  36. 9 July 1958 (JSP 403).

  37. ‘9 Willow Street’, CP 1087–90.

  38. CP 1090–4.

  39. 31 Dec 1958 (JSP 454).

  40. 14 Sept 1958 (JSP 420).

  41. 12 Dec 1958 (JSP 434).

  42. Eliot to Hughes, 30 Oct 1958 (pasted by Sylvia into a blue scrapbook of memorabilia, Emory 644/OP103).

  43. Early 1959 (L 139).

  44. To Davison, 27 April 1959, in Davison, The Fading Smile, p. 166 (where the year is incorrectly remembered as 1958).

  45. L 142.

  46. John Summers, Obituary of Rollie McKenna, Guardian, 21 July 2003.

  47. Robert Lowell, Life Studies (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1959, repr. 1964), pp. 81–2.

  48. To Weissbort, 21 March 1959 (L 140).

  49. To Myers, 19 May 1959 (L 145).

  50. To Myers, 19 June 1959 (L 146).

  51. D. H. Lawre
nce, ‘Figs’, in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (Martin Secker, 1923).

  52. To Baskin, July 1959 (L 147).

  53. See Peter K. Steinberg, ‘Did You Know … Sylvia Plath at Yaddo’, Sylvia Plath Info Blog, 19 Nov 2014, sylviaplathinfo.blogspot.co.uk/2014_11_01_archive.html.

  54. ‘The Badlands’, in Birthday Letters (CP 1095–8).

  55. To his parents, from Yellowstone (Emory 980/1/18).

  56. Ibid.

  57. Sylvia to Aurelia and Warren Plath, 28 July 1959, from California, describing what she called the ‘Bear Incident’ in a long letter composed on the new typewriter that they took with them on their travels (Lilly Library, only partially printed in SPLH 402–4). Some details also taken from Ted’s Yellowstone letter to his parents (partially printed in L 150–1).

  58. Quoted phrase from Hughes, ‘The 59th Bear’, CP 1100–4.

  59. Letter in Lilly Library, postscript not in SPLH extract.

  60. Ibid.

  61. ‘Yogi Bear’s Big Break’, his debut episode, aired on the ABC network on 2 Oct 1958. Ted and Sylvia’s television habits during their American residence are hard to reconstruct, but Sylvia was sufficiently in tune with popular culture to write in her journal on 31 May 1959, ‘Last night I sent off my application from here for a TV writing grant … Money, money. I like CBS, too. They are more attentive than most stations’ (JSP 487). Characteristically (and depressingly), Plath biographers tend to read the name of Norton in ‘The Fifty-Ninth Bear’ as the articulation of a murderous impulse towards either her ex-boyfriend Dick Norton or Ted (or both), rather than a jokey allusion to Yogi Bear.

  62. Sylvia Plath, ‘The Fifty-Ninth Bear’ (1959), in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and Other Prose Writings (Faber & Faber, 1977, rev. edn 1979; New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 98.

  63. CP 1103.

  64. Sylvia to Aurelia and Warren Plath, 28 July 1959 (Plath MSS II, Lilly Library).

  65. Sylvia to her mother and brother (ibid.); Ted to his parents (Emory 980/1).

  66. Draft in red exercise book (BL Add. MS 88918/1).

  67. To his parents (Emory 980/1).

  68. ‘Grand Canyon’, CP 1104–6.

  69. yaddo.org/yaddo/history.shtml.

  70. 10 Sept 1959 (SPLH 407).

  71. ‘Portraits’, in Birthday Letters (CP 1109–11).

  72. See further, Jeremy Treglown’s fine article ‘Howard’s Way: Painting Sylvia Plath’, Times Literary Supplement, 30 Aug 2013, p. 13.