Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  35. To ‘Gerald & Joan & infantry’, 10 May 1964 (Emory 854/1).

  36. Hughes journal, 16–17 Aug 1964, with insertion written later in the year.

  37. Ibid., 2 Sept 1964.

  38. Ibid., 15 Sept 1964.

  39. Ibid., 9 Oct 1964.

  40. See ibid., 29 Sept 1964.

  41. Produced by Ted’s friend Douglas Cleverdon. Cast listed at genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/72a24606054a46b5a37b2ee27fa4318b.

  42. Account book for March 1964 to January 1967, its corners charred from the Lumb Bank fire (Emory 644/180/7).

  43. Unsigned editorial, Modern Poetry in Translation, 1:1 (Autumn 1965). See further Daniel Weissbort, Ted Hughes and Translation (Nottingham: Richard Hollis, 2011).

  44. Reviewed together with Idries Shah’s The Sufis under the title ‘Secret Ecstasies’, Listener, 29 Oct 1964.

  45. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard Trask (1964, repr. Penguin, 1989), pp. 466–7.

  46. Introduction to Keith Douglas, Selected Poems (Faber & Faber, 1964), repr. in WP 212–15.

  47. ‘NOTES from Olwyn Hughes relating to Ted Hughes’s handling of Sylvia Plath publications and placing of ARIEL after her death’ (Emory 980/1/25).

  48. ‘The Crime of Fools Exposed’, New York Times Book Review, 12 April 1964 (WP 42–4).

  49. Encounter, 21:4 (Oct 1963), p. 45.

  50. L 240.

  51. Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating her Original Selection and Arrangement, foreword by Frieda Hughes (Faber & Faber, 2004), p. 43.

  52. Sylvia Plath, Ariel (Faber & Faber, 1965), pp. 84–5.

  53. Restored edition, pp. 7, 23.

  54. The case for the prosecution was first made by Marjorie Perloff, ‘The Two Ariels: The (Re)Making of the Sylvia Plath Canon’, American Poetry Review, 13 (Nov–Dec 1984), pp. 10–18. The defence case is well articulated by Stephen Enniss, ‘Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Myth of Textual Betrayal’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 101:1 (March 2007), pp. 63–71.

  55. Interview with John Horder, ‘Desk poet’, Guardian, 23 March 1965, p. 9.

  56. ‘Sylvia Plath’, Poetry Book Society Bulletin, 44 (Feb 1965) (WP 161–2).

  57. Undated letter, 1965. Quotation missing but story by Nick present in extract in L 239.

  58. Observer, 14 March 1965.

  59. The talk was published in October 1963, in a special issue of the magazine The Review devoted to Plath (9, pp. 20–6).

  60. Spectator, 19 March 1965.

  61. Reporter, 33 (7 Oct 1963), pp. 51–4.

  62. Lowell, foreword to Plath, Ariel (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). The American edition contained a slightly different selection of poems.

  63. ‘Russian Roulette’, Newsweek, 20 June 1966; ‘The Blood Jet is Poetry’, Time, 10 June 1966 (content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,942057,00.html). There is a helpful overview of the evolution of Plath’s posthumous reception in Marianne Egeland, Claiming Sylvia Plath: The Poet as Exemplary Figure (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013).

  64. Assia was always an erratic speller. In a letter to Luke Myers (13 March 1965) announcing her daughter’s birth, she used the spellings ‘Tatianna’ and ‘Schura’ (‘to rhyme with Jura’).

  Chapter 15: The Iron Man

  1. Hughes journal, 15 Feb 1965.

  2. To Murphy, 14 Sept 1965 (Richard Murphy Papers, Department of Special Collections, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa).

  3. Gerald Hughes, Ted and I: A Brother’s Memoir (Robson Press, 2012), p. 165.

  4. Susan Alliston, Poems and Journals 1960–1969, introduction by Ted Hughes (Nottingham: Richard Hollis, 2010), p. 89 (24 Jan 1965).

  5. Ibid., p. 87.

  6. Emory 1058/1.

  7. CP 731–6.

  8. Introduction to A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse (Faber & Faber, 1968) (WP 158).

  9. Assia to Luke Myers, 15 July 1965 (Emory 865/1/11).

  10. To Charles Tomlinson, fellow-poet and great friend of Ted (L 247).

  11. To Assia, 31 Aug 1965 (Emory 865/1/35).

  12. Plath MS II, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

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

  14. L 254.

  15. I owe this, and much other information in this chapter, to Brenda Hedden.

  16. Hughes journal, summer 1966 (BL Add. MS 88918/128).

  17. End of Nov 1966 (Emory 1058/1).

  18. Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes’ Doomed Love (Robson Books, 2006), p. 164.

  19. End of Nov 1966 (Emory 1058/1).

  20. Wodwo (Faber & Faber, 1967), p. 9.

  21. CP 183.

  22. Since ‘The Rain Horse’ was written in 1958, this doesn’t quite fit with the link to his own life after 1961. Ted was never averse to a little rewriting of history for the sake of an aesthetic or mythic pattern.

  23. To Csokits, 6 Aug 1967 (L 273–4).

  24. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard Trask (1964, repr. Penguin, 1989), p. 53.

  25. ‘The Howling of Wolves’, ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’, ‘Out’, CP 180, 182, 165.

  26. Epithets from ‘On the Shelf: Sean O’Brien recalls the inspirational example of Ted Hughes’s Wodwo’, Sunday Times (London), 3 April 1994.

  27. Times Literary Supplement, 6 July 1967.

  28. The Times (London), 13 July 1967.

  29. C.B. Cox, ‘New Beasts for Old’, Spectator, 28 July 1967.

  30. Critical Survey, Summer 1967.

  31. Jeremy Robson, Tribune, 30 June 1967; Thwaite, Times Literary Supplement, 6 July 1967; Alvarez, Observer, 21 May 1967.

  32. Guardian, 19 May 1967.

  33. To Murphy, quoted, independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/features/the-diary-london-symphony-orchestra-poetry-international-festival-morrissey-harry-hill-richard-curtis-2100679.html.

  34. See further Jack Malvern, ‘Beat it, British audience told drunk Ginsberg’, The Times (London), 10 April 2015.

  35. To Spender, 21 July 1967 (Emory 644/8).

  36. Film-maker Mira Hamermesh, quoted, Koren and Negev, Lover of Unreason, p. 167.

  37. Hughes journal, 14 Aug 1967.

  38. Ibid., undated, but immediately above entry of 18 Aug 1967.

  39. Ibid., 11 Sept 1967.

  40. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

  41. To Myers, 10 Dec 1967 (Emory 865/1).

  42. The evolution of his version can be traced in the manuscript drafts, which are now in the small Ted Hughes Archive in the library of Liverpool University – see especially his heavily corrected working draft, MS 24.55(2).

  43. Peter Brook Archive, Victoria and Albert Museum, THM/452.

  44. Introduction to Seneca’s Oedipus, adapted by Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber, 1969), pp. 7–8.

  45. Irene Worth, reminiscence to Nick Gammage.

  46. Charles Marowitz, review in the Village Voice, March 1968, repr. in his Confessions of a Counterfeit Critic: London Theatre Notebook, 1958–71 (Methuen, 1973), pp. 135–6, to which the whole of this paragraph (apart from my Crow allusion) is indebted.

  47. Seneca’s Oedipus, p. 35.

  48. Ibid., p.47.

  49. Hughes, notes on Oedipus (Emory 644/115).

  50. Peter Brook Archive, THM/452.

  51. Seneca’s Oedipus, p. 41.

  52. Ibid., p. 55.

  53. Koren and Negev, Lover of Unreason, p. 174.

  54. Observer, 24 March 1968.

  55. Marowitz, Confessions of a Counterfeit Critic, pp. 137–9.

  56. Their collaborations are selectively documented in the Peter Brook Archive acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in September 2014 and made available to the public in summer 2015.

  57. 15 May 1968 (L 281–2).

  58. BL Add. MS 88918/10.

  59. Interviews on
BBC Radio 4 with Nigel Forde (22 March 1992) and Radio 3 with Clive Wilmer (5 April 1992), on the publication of Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, explaining (or fantastically elaborating) the project’s genesis. He did write to John Fisher in December 1968, saying that he had given up on the Brook plan because the task was giving him bad dreams. Mahabharata comparison: Peter Brook Archive, THM/452. Ted told Brook that his production of the Mahabharata was ‘the most stiring [sic] and enthralling performance of any kind I’ve ever experienced’ (Peter Brook Archive, THM/452).

  60. Notes on The Iron Man (Emory 644/115).

  Chapter 16: ‘Then autobiographical things knocked it all to bits, as before’

  1. Emory 1058/1/71.

  2. March 1968 (Emory 1058/1/66).

  3. Emory 1058/1.

  4. I owe this information, and other material in this chapter, to Brenda Hedden.

  5. Personal communication.

  6. Nevertheless, she uncrumpled the poem and preserved it over five decades.

  7. This paragraph is based on Baldwin’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek ‘Ted Hughes and Shamanism’, ann.skea.com/MichaelBaldwinMemoir1.htm.

  8. Pat Kavanagh, ‘An Awkward Shyness’, Guardian, 12 July 1968.

  9. Broadcast 12 Dec 1968.

  10. Emory 644/57.

  11. Journal note, 15 Aug 1968, quoted, Stephen Enniss and Karen Kukil, ‘No Other Appetite’: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Blood Jet of Poetry (New York: Grolier Club, 2005), p. 59.

  12. Journal note, 15 Aug 1968 (Emory 644/57).

  13. First published in Word in the Desert, the tenth-anniversary volume of Critical Quarterly, the journal of Ted’s friends C. B. Cox and A. E. Dyson, 25 July 1968.

  14. Brenda Hedden, quoted, Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes’ Doomed Love (Robson Books, 2006), pp. 189–90.

  15. Brenda Hedden, personal communication.

  16. Emory 644/57.

  17. Emory 644/58.

  18. Interview with Heaney, London, 27 Oct 2009.

  19. Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (Faber & Faber, 2008), p. 116.

  20. Emory 1058/1.

  21. To Anne-Lorraine Bujon, 16 Dec 1992 (L 632).

  22. Assia’s journal entry, dated 20 March 1969, but it was actually 19 March (correct dates reconstructed from information in BBC Archive).

  23. Assia’s journal entry dated ‘March 21st’, but it was actually 20 March 1969. Koren and Negev, Lover of Unreason is inaccurate at this point, missing the Haworth location.

  24. BL Add. MS 88918/1.

  25. Information from Olwyn Hughes, not known to Koren and Negev.

  26. Ted to Assia’s sister, Celia Chaikin, 14 April 1969 (L 290).

  27. This was her constant complaint to friends such as Edward Lucie-Smith (personal communication).

  28. Private collection.

  29. This paragraph is based on Koren and Negev, Lover of Unreason, p. 202. I am much indebted to this piece of research by the book’s authors.

  30. Hughes, statement to Det. Sgt J. Loakman, Clapham Police Station, quoted, ibid., p. 203.

  31. Porter, ‘Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath: A Bystander’s Recollections’, in Peter Craven, ed., The Best Australian Essays 2001 (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2001), p. 411.

  32. ‘Requiem pro duabus filiis Israel’, in Nathaniel Tarn, Selected Poems 1950–2002 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), pp. 62–4.

  33. L 292.

  34. L 290.

  35. Jottings in spiral shorthand notebook, in Ireland, April to early May 1969 (Emory 644/57).

  36. Letter of early May 1969, Peter Brook Archive, Victoria and Albert Museum, THM/452. One of the wretched coincidences was presumably the unfortunate fact of Olwyn’s friend being the person who picked up the phone when Assia made her last call to Court Green.

  37. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

  38. Ibid.

  39. To Aurelia, 10 July 1969 (Plath MS II, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington).

  40. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

  41. Ibid.

  42. Ibid.

  43. Ted Hughes, ‘Susan Alliston’, in her Poems and Journals 1960–1969 (Nottingham: Richard Hollis, 2010), p. 16.

  44. Hughes to Herbert, 9 May 1967 (Emory 644/182).

  45. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

  46. 30 July 1969 (ibid.).

  47. To Murphy, 10 Oct 1969 (L 295).

  48. Vasko Popa, Selected Poems, trans. Anne Pennington, with an introduction by Ted Hughes (Penguin, 1969) (WP 220–7). The introduction was adapted from a radio talk recorded for the Third Programme in June 1966, broadcast that October, and published in Critical Survey, Summer 1966.

  49. To Baskin, 1 Dec 1969 (L 300).

  50. Introduction to Vasko Popa, Collected Poems 1943–1976 (Manchester: Carcanet, 1978) (WP 228).

  51. L 298–9.

  Chapter 17: The Crow

  1. Quotations from ‘Words and Experience’, BBC radio talk, 24 Jan 1967, repr. in Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making: An Anthology of Poems and Programmes from ‘Listening and Writing’ (Faber & Faber, 1967), pp. 118–24.

  2. Letter to Celia Chaikin (Emory 1058/1/1).

  3. Emory 854/1/58.

  4. Plath MS II, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

  5. ‘59 poems – out of about 90’, he put it to Peter Redgrove (L 306), but that was to count the ‘Two Eskimo Songs’ as one.

  6. L 304.

  7. Leonard Baskin, quoted, Leonard Scigaj, The Poetry of Ted Hughes: Form and Imagination (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), p. 144.

  8. 1977 interview with Ekbert Faas, in Faas, Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1980), p. 212.

  9. Critical Quarterly, 8 (Autumn 1966), pp. 200–2.

  10. On Crow and the Trickster, see further Keith Sagar, The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), pp. 170–81, and Ann Skea, ‘Ted Hughes and Crow’, ann.skea.com/Trickstr.htm.

  11. ‘Crow on the Beach’, in Alberta Turner, ed., 45 Contemporary Poems: The Creative Process (Longman, 1985) (WP 240–1).

  12. ‘Notes on Published Works’ (Emory 644/115).

  13. ‘Crow Goes Hunting’, CP 236.

  14. ‘In Laughter’, CP 233.

  15. ‘Lovesong’, CP 255.

  16. Quotations from March 1976 interview on Radio 3AW Adelaide, Australia.

  17. ‘Crow’s First Lesson’, CP 211.

  18. CP 213, 228, 252.

  19. Unidentified fragment re Crow (Emory 644/115).

  20. ‘Black Bird’, Observer, 11 Oct 1970.

  21. ‘Books of the Day’, unknown paper, undated (Emory 644/175).

  22. Stephen Spender, ‘The Last Ditch’, New York Review of Books, 17:1 (22 July 1971), pp. 3–4.

  23. Patrick Cosgrove, Spectator, 6 March 1971.

  24. Jack Kroll, ‘The Tree and the Bird’, Newsweek, 12 April 1971.

  25. Daniel Hoffman, ‘Plain Songs for an Apocalypse’, New York Times Book Review, 18 April 1971.

  26. Victor Howes, ‘Supercrow as a Black Rainbow’, Christian Science Monitor, 29 April 1971.

  27. Nicola Barker, Sunday Times (London), 1 Oct 1995.

  28. Reviews of Crow (Emory 644/175).

  29. Keith Sagar and Stephen Tabor, Ted Hughes: A Bibliography 1946–1995 (London and New York: Mansell, 1998), p. 52. I am much indebted to this work.

  30. Ibid., p. 58.

  31. 1971, 300 copies at £18.

  32. Lexham Press, 1971. The Shakespeare project is discussed in Chapter 28, ‘Goddess Revisited’, below.

  33. CP 269.

  34. CP 231–2.

  35. CP 255. For a brilliant account of the hidden presence of Plath in ‘Lovesong’, and indeed elsewhere in Crow, see ch. 9 of Heather Clark’s admirable study, The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (Oxford University Press, 2011).

  36. �
�Littleblood’ (the title being a figuration of the wounded self), CP 258.

  37. ‘Crow Wakes’, CP 258; also in Eat Crow (not in CP).

  38. Letter to Keith Sagar, 18–19 July 1998, acknowledging that Crow was an ‘oblique’ creative response to Plath’s death (Keith Sagar, ed., Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar (British Library, 2012), p. 269).

  Chapter 18: The Savage God

  1. ‘The Environmental Revolution’, Spectator, 21 March 1970 (edited version); repr. in full in Your Environment, 1:3 (Summer 1970), pp. 81–3 (WP 128–35).

  2. WP 130.

  3. Frieda Hughes, ‘Father dear father’, Daily Telegraph, 29 Oct 2002.

  4. Personal communication.

  5. 20 April 1970 (BL Add. MS 88918/128).

  6. Letter in the possession of Brenda Hedden.

  7. Personal communication.

  8. Personal communication.

  9. This section is based on conversations with Brenda Hedden, Olwyn Hughes and others, and a chronology compiled by Hughes in BL Add. MS 88993.

  10. BL Add. MS 88918/128/1.

  11. Erica Jong, Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2006), p. 40. Subsequent quotations from the same source.

  12. Hughes journal, 17 Sept 1964.

  13. Personal communication.

  14. To Redgrove, 27 Oct 1971 (Redgrove Archive, Sheffield University Library).

  15. Aurelia Plath, in ‘Sylvia Plath: A Biographical Note’ by Lois Ames, in The Bell Jar (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 214–15.

  16. Fran McCullough, foreword to twenty-fifth anniversary reissue of The Bell Jar (1996), p. xiv.

  17. To Redgrove, spring 1971 (Peter Redgrove Papers, Emory MS 867, redacted from L).

  18. To Redgrove, spring 1971 (L 311).

  19. Peter Brook, The Empty Space (MacGibbon & Kee, 1968), p. 49.

  20. A. C. H. Smith, Orghast at Persepolis: An International Experiment in Theatre (Eyre Methuen, 1972; New York: Viking, 1973), p. 43. This eyewitness account, with notes and interviews taken at the time, is an essential resource, to which the following paragraphs are deeply indebted. I have also drawn on the drafts and production materials in the Peter Brook Archive, Victoria and Albert Museum, THM 452/8/45.

  21. ‘Orghast’, Times Literary Supplement, 1 Oct 1971, p. 1174, incorporating interview with Hughes by Stoppard (who visited the ensemble in Persepolis).

  22. Smith, Orghast at Persepolis, p. 50.