Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  23. Ibid., p. 91.

  24. Ibid., p. 97.

  25. Ibid., p. 104.

  26. Confusingly, Hughes gave the same title to the collection of his short stories that was published in 1995.

  27. Peter Brook Archive, THM/452/8.

  28. Smith, Orghast at Persepolis, p. 200.

  29. Opening of Orghast in Ted Hughes, Selected Translations, ed. Daniel Weissbort (Faber & Faber, 2006), pp. 74–5. There is also a wealth of draft material now in the Emory archive (644/120). Sample translations, for example: GRADOB: bombs. PULLUTTU: bird. NARGA: of darkness. OPPA BLAV: on the wall. OPPA CLAUN: on the door. KHERN SHEER: words of steel. TAP TAP DUTTU: tap tap of the leaden. TAP TAP TAPUN: tap tap tapping (Brook always likes tapping because his actors often come on stage bearing wooden sticks or poles). Sample passages, too: ‘Unkher brida kher udda khern sludda kher avokka dotta khern … grafot gleblot balugvablot’.

  30. Smith, Orghast at Persepolis, pp. 209–10.

  31. L 317.

  32. Hughes journal, 13 Nov 1971.

  33. L 323.

  34. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

  35. Olwyn referred to the passage in a letter to Alvarez, 9 June 1988 (Alvarez Papers, BL Add. MS 88603.3036c). In reply, rather than denying it, he asked what else Sylvia had said about him in her last journal. Olwyn told him that Sylvia confided in no one, that her journal was the only witness to their brief liaison, but that at least one other person was aware of it.

  36. Fragment in BL Add. MS 88918/1.

  37. BL Add. MS 88603.3036c.

  38. Ibid.

  39. According to Olwyn’s recollection of Sylvia’s last journal, in January she set her sights on another poet-friend, Bill Merwin, and was rejected a third time. There is no corroborative evidence for this.

  40. Al Alvarez, Where Did It All Go Right? A Memoir (Richard Cohen Books, 1999; New York:William Morrow, 2000), p. 209.

  41. Nathaniel Tarn Papers, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

  42. Alvarez, Where Did It All Go Right?, p. 209.

  43. Nathaniel Tarn Papers, Stanford.

  Chapter 19: Farmer Ted

  1. Emory 854/1.

  2. Peter Brook Archive, Victoria and Albert Museum, production material for The Conference of the Birds, THM/452/8.

  3. To Luke Myers, summer 1972 (L 331).

  4. To Leonard Baskin, Nov 1972 (L 333).

  5. Preface to Moortown Diary (Faber & Faber, 1989) (CP 1203).

  6. Hughes journal, 12 June 1973.

  7. ‘Roe-deer’, CP 513.

  8. Hughes journal, 29 Aug 1973: a random choice from among scores of such entries.

  9. Ibid., undated pages, circa 1974.

  10. Introduction to János Pilinszky’s Selected Poems, trans. Ted Hughes and János Csokits (Carcanet, 1976) (WP 229–36).

  11. Ibid.

  12. Radio broadcast, BBC World Service, 18 Sept 1976.

  13. All János Pilinszky poems quoted from his Selected Poems.

  14. CP 288, 290, 291, 293, 295–6.

  15. ‘The Scream’, ‘The Summoner’, ‘The Interrogator’, ‘The Scapegoat’, CP 419, 420, 421,433. The initial sequence matched each poem to the Baskin drawing that inspired it (thus ‘The Summoner’ went with ‘A Hercules-in-the-Underworld Bird’ and ‘The Interrogator’ with ‘A Titled Vulturess’), while the expanded Faber text of 1978 included extra poems originating from Hughes (e.g. ‘The Scream’), for some of which Baskin then created drawings.

  16. Endnote to reprint in 1982 Selected Poems (CP 1271).

  17. L 356–7.

  18. See John Moat, The Founding of Arvon: A Memoir of the Early Years of the Arvon Foundation (Frances Lincoln, 2005).

  19. ‘Ted Hughes Introduces and Reads Season Songs’, BBC Radio 3, 6 Sept 1977.

  20. CP 307.

  21. ‘April Birthday’ (addressed (without saying so) to Frieda, who was born on 1 April), ‘Swifts’, ‘The Harvest Moon’, ‘Autumn Nature Notes’, CP 312, 315, 323, 327.

  22. ‘Spring Nature Notes’, ‘Autumn Nature Notes’, CP 311, 329.

  23. Michael Harris, Montreal Star, 4 March 1978; Adam Thorpe, Observer, 5 March 1995.

  24. To Daniel Weissbort (Emory 644/10/5).

  25. L 361–2.

  26. L 367.

  27. To Charles Tomlinson, 22 Jan 1976, projecting his own trajectory on to that of his fellow-poet.

  28. To Frieda, 7 Feb 1976 (Emory 1014/1).

  29. L 376.

  Chapter 20: The Elegiac Turn

  1. L 632.

  2. 13 July 1969 (BL Add. MS 88918/128).

  3. L 204.

  4. To Aurelia and Warren Plath, Dec 1960 (L 173).

  5. ‘The House of Aries Part I’ appeared in print in the spring 1961 issue of a quarterly magazine called Audience, published in Cambridge, Mass. Part II seems never to have been published, save in the form of a few fragments spoken by a military captain (Two Cities, Summer 1961, pp. 12–13; Texas Quarterly, Autumn 1961, pp. 146–7).

  6. To Assia, 31 Jan 1964 (Emory 1058/1/6).

  7. To Baskin, 29 July 1974 (Emory 644/1).

  8. Keith Sagar, ed., Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar (British Library, 2012), p. 58.

  9. Heaney praising Gaudete, 22 May 1977: he has read it twice and been ‘deeply pleasured’ by it (a phrase that may unconsciously echo the poem’s sexual language). He thought that the shape of the story ploughed deep into the soil of Hughes’s genius. (Emory 644/9.)

  10. L 376–7.

  11. Martin Dodsworth, Guardian, 19 May 1977.

  12. Conrad, ‘In the Safari Park’, New Statesman, 27 May 1977.

  13. Symons, ‘The case of the lecherous cleric’, Sunday Times (London), 29 May 1977.

  14. Donald Hall, Washington Post Book World, 18 Dec 1977; Joan Joffe Hall, ‘A bloody, violent poem’, Houston Post, 5 March 1978; Mark Halliday, ‘Ted Hughes’s new poem: rural sex and violence’, Providence Sunday Journal, 5 March 1978. Collected, with other reviews, in Emory 644/175/14.

  15. Gaudete (Faber & Faber, 1977), pp. 140–1 (not in CP).

  16. Ibid., p. 155.

  17. ‘On the Shelf: Simon Armitage on why Ted Hughes’s Gaudete made him forget the laundry’, Sunday Times (London), 17 March 1996.

  18. ‘Ted Hughes and Gaudete’, 1977 interview in Ekbert Faas, Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1980), p. 214.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Ibid., p. 137, citing Ramanujan’s Speaking of Siva.

  21. Speaking of Siva, trans. A. K. Ramanujan (Penguin Classics, 1973), pp. 48–53.

  22. Faas, Ted Hughes, p. 138.

  23. Influencing ‘The viper fell from the sun’, Gaudete, p. 188; quoted, Faas, Ted Hughes, p. 122.

  24. 30 May 1977, in Sagar, ed., Poet and Critic, p. 57; BL Add. MS 88918/128.

  25. Personal communication; see also Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (Faber & Faber, 2008), p. 392.

  26. William Scammell, ‘The fox thinks twice’ (Cheltenham lecture), edited version published as ‘Burst Open Under a Blue-Black Pressure’, Poetry Review, Hughes and Plath Special (1998), pp. 82–7.

  27. BL Add. MS 88918/35.

  28. Gaudete, p. 182.

  29. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

  30. Gaudete, p. 191.

  31. Emory 644/65 and 644/58.

  32. Orts (Rainbow Press, 1978), poems 9, 22, 4, 11, 13, 19, 32, 36, 48, 52, 53.

  33. Emory 644/57/10, Notebook 11.

  34. Adapting Paul Keegan’s phrase (CP 1277).

  35. ‘The day he died’, ‘A monument’, ‘The formal auctioneer’, ‘A memory’, ‘Now you have to push’, ‘Hands’, CP 533–7. ‘Aloof’ was emended to ‘estranged’ in the trade printings.

  36. Remains of Elmet (Rainbow Press, April 1979; Faber & Faber, May 1979).

  Chapter 21: The Arraignment

  1. 28 Aug 1968, repr. in Sisterhood is Powerful and at redstockings.org/index.php?option
=com_content&view=article&id=65&Itemid=103.

  2. ‘Lesbos’, CPSP 228.

  3. Al Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), p. 19.

  4. ‘Publishing Sylvia Plath’, WP 168.

  5. See further, Ann Skea, ‘Ted Hughes and Small Press Publication’, ann.skea.com/RainbowPress.htm. Fiesta Melons by Sylvia Plath with an Introduction by Ted Hughes (Exeter: Rougemont Press, May 1971) was an analogous production (not mentioned by Skea).

  6. Original version of ‘Arraignment’ published in Feminist Art Journal (New York), Oct 1972.

  7. ‘Arraignment’, in Monster (New York: Random House, 1972).

  8. Quoted by Robin Morgan on her website, robinmorgan.us.

  9. C.G. Jung et al., Man and his Symbols (Picador, 1964), p. 169.

  10. See Judith Kroll, Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), especially p. 177.

  11. BL Add. MS 88918/128. Correspondence regarding this and other projects is preserved in the Frances McCullough Papers at the University of Maryland, hdl.handle.net/1903.1/4603.

  12. To Aurelia Plath, 12 Jan 1975 (Plath MS II, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington).

  13. Mary Folliet, ‘Reviewing Sylvia Plath’, New York Review of Books, 30 Sept 1976.

  14. Olwyn Hughes, New York Review of Books, 30 Sept 1976.

  15. 22 Dec 1976, passage excluded from text in L 380–2.

  16. To Ben Sonnenberg (L 451).

  17. ‘Sylvia Plath and her Journals’, WP 177–90, repr. from Grand Street, 1:3 (Spring 1982).

  18. The Journals of Sylvia Plath (New York: Dial Press, 1982), p. xiii. As Janet Malcolm points out in the opening pages of her superb The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), in the Grand Street version Ted changed ‘I destroyed’ to ‘her husband destroyed’ and ‘disappeared’ to ‘disappeared more recently (and may, presumably, still turn up)’. The latter phrase has led to much speculation and fantasy.

  19. Preface to Edward Butscher, ed., Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977; repr. Peter Owen, 1979), p. vii. Like Butscher’s biography, this was a book whose gestation involved a difficult history with Ted and Olwyn, as is clear from a publisher’s note on the first page of the introductory essay, ‘In Search of Sylvia’: ‘Mr Butscher wishes it known that changes were made in his Introduction by hands other than his own.’

  20. Lameyer, in ibid., p. 143.

  21. Ibid., p. 164.

  22. Ibid., p. 165.

  Chapter 22: Sunstruck Foxglove

  1. Hughes journal (BL Add. MS 88918/128). The phrasing belongs to the unthinking racism of Hughes’s generation; subsequent quotations are from the same source, illustrative of his great gifts of observation and phrasing in his travel journals.

  2. Gerald Hughes, Ted and I: A Brother’s Memoir (Robson Press, 2012), p. 184.

  3. My account of the relationship with Jill Barber is based on her articles in the Mail on Sunday, 13 and 20 May 2001 (‘Ted Hughes, my secret lover’), her unpublished memoir, and conversations by email and at her home in New York.

  4. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

  5. Interview for Radio 3AW Adelaide, produced by Julie Copeland. There is a transcription by Ann Skea at ann.skea.com/Adelaide3.htm.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Ted Hughes at the Adelaide Festival Writers’ Week: A transcription of Ted Hughes own commentary, ann.skea.com/adelaide.htm

  8. Personal communication.

  9. To Murphy, 31 March 1976; the whole sequence about Jennifer Rankin is suppressed from the text in L.

  10. To János Csokits, May 1976 (L 376).

  11. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

  12. Barber, ‘Ted Hughes, my secret lover’.

  13. First published 1983, collected in Flowers and Insects (Faber & Faber, 1986) (CP 723–4).

  14. Jennifer Rankin, draft manuscript of a radio talk about Ted, University of New South Wales, Australian Defence Force Academy Library, MS 348.

  15. Back cover of Jennifer J. Rankin, Earth Hold (Secker & Warburg, 1978).

  16. Jennifer Rankin, Collected Poems, ed. Judith Rodriguez (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1990), p. 195. My account of Rankin is indebted to Rodriguez and her husband, the poet Tom Shapcott, who was at the Adelaide Festival and visited the Rankins in Devon. The Toronto lift story, below, is quoted, by permission, from an email from Rodriguez.

  17. Now in the archive of her papers in the library of the Australian Defence Force Academy.

  18. ‘Three Poems for J.R.’, published in 1985, 1986, 1993 (CP 838–40).

  19. Emory 644/82.

  20. Emma Tennant, Burnt Diaries (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1999), p. 45. Subsequent Tennant quotations are all from this memoir.

  21. The Emory archive includes Harry Fainlight letters written from prison and from ‘a Scottish madhouse’ (644/2/23).

  22. Elaine Feinstein, It Goes with the Territory: Memoirs of a Poet (Chicago: Alma Books, 2013), p. 156.

  23. Tennant, Burnt Diaries, p. 96.

  24. Edna O’Brien, Country Girl: A Memoir (Faber & Faber, 2012), pp. 136–40, 210–15. One might compare and contrast ‘I will know you for a long time’ with Emma Tennant’s ‘I want you for no more than a year’: affirmations almost too Hughescliffian to have been truly uttered?

  25. Barber, ‘Ted Hughes, my secret lover’.

  26. For example: the astonishingly beautiful and charismatic feminist, memoirist and political activist Sally Belfrage went to dinner with Ted and Sylvia in Chalcot Square with her then partner Ben Sonnenberg. Before he died, Sonnenberg said that he did not know whether Ted later had an affair with Sally after Sylvia’s death, but he suspected that they might have become close. Sally died of cancer in Middlesex Hospital, just at the time when Ted’s own cancer was first diagnosed. Her private papers in the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive, New York University, remain closed until 2021.

  27. Personal communication.

  28. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

  29. Syed Muhammad Hussain, ‘Remembering Ted Hughes’, Financial Express (Dhaka), 14 April 2012, thefinancialexpress-bd.com/old/more.php?newsid=126732&date=2012-04-14.

  30. Amzed Hossein, ‘An Interview with Ted Hughes’, 18–20 Nov 1989, transcribed at ann.skea.com/AsiaFestivalInterview.html.

  31. Quoted, Hussain, ‘Remembering Ted Hughes’.

  32. This and preceding quotations from Carolyne Wright, ‘What Happens in the Heart: An Encounter with Ted Hughes’, Poetry Review, 89:3 (Autumn 1999), pp. 3–9.

  33. BL Add. MS 88919/128.

  34. Ibid.

  Chapter 23: Remembrance of Elmet

  1. Emma Tennant, Burnt Diaries (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1999), pp. 178–9.

  2. Letter of Feb 1977 (Emory 865/1).

  3. Letters to Gerald (Emory 854/1).

  4. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (Faber & Faber, 1948), p. 143.

  5. By the time of his father’s death, Nicholas Hughes had built an impressive academic curriculum vitae: sfos.uaf.edu/memorial/hughes/hughes_cv-99.pdf.

  6. Hughes journal fragment, 20 Feb 1980.

  7. Hull University Archives, DPL(2)3/8/9.

  8. John Moat, The Founding of Arvon: A Memoir of the Early Years of the Arvon Foundation (Frances Lincoln, 2005), p. 26.

  9. L 476.

  10. ‘Comments’ by Larkin, 2 Jan 1981 (Emory 644/4).

  11. Letter to Lucas Myers, Dec 1980 (Emory 865/1).

  12. Heaney on The Rattle Bag in a ‘Memo to Joanna Mackle re The School Bag: 6 January 1997’ (BL Add. MS 88918/16).

  13. Review by Christopher Reid (clipping in Emory 645/176/3).

  14. Moon Whales and Other Moon Poems is conveniently reprinted in Ted Hughes, Collected Poems for Children, illustrated by Raymond Briggs (Faber & Faber, 2005, paperback 2008), pp. 67–107.

  15. To Monteith, 21 May 1976 (L 377).

  16. Hughes’s copy is now among his li
brary books at Emory.

  17. Glyn Hughes, Millstone Grit (Victor Gollancz, 1975), p. 12. Subsequent quotations from pp. 17, 28, 29, 139.

  18. Ted Hughes, ‘Introduction’, in Glyn Hughes, Where I Used to Play on the Green (Victor Gollancz, 1982; repr. Penguin, 1984), pp. 5–6.

  19. Remains of Elmet: A Pennine Sequence – Poems by Ted Hughes, Photographs by Fay Godwin (Faber & Faber, 1979), p. 7.

  20. CP 483.

  21. Plath: ‘Now, in valleys narrow / And black as purses, the house lights / Gleam like small change’ (CPSP 167–8); Hughes: ‘Rain / Crashes the black taut glass, // Lights in floundering valleys, in the gulf, / Splinter from their sockets’ (CP 485).

  22. Included in both Three Books: Remains of Elmet, Cave Birds, River (unillustrated, Faber & Faber, 1993) and Elmet (illustrated, Faber & Faber, 1994).

  23. CP 486. Assia’s diary entry noted the blackness of the buildings in Haworth, contrasting with the white of the snow on the ground.

  24. CP 492.

  25. CP 470–1.

  26. CP 473.

  27. Peter Porter, ‘Landscape with poems’, Observer, 15 July 1979.

  28. To Joanna Mackle, 4 Jan 1992 (Emory 644/14). On the origins of River, see Chapter 24, ‘The Fisher King’, below.

  29. Blurb for Three Books.

  30. Three Books, p. 183.

  31. CP 462–3.

  32. CP 840.

  Chapter 24: The Fisher King

  1. ‘So Quickly It’s Over’, interview with Ted Hughes, Wild Steelhead and Salmon, Winter 1999, p. 57.

  2. To Gerald, 21 Dec 1979 (Emory 854/1); to Murphy, 20 Dec 1979 (Richard Murphy Papers, Department of Special Collections, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa).

  3. To Gerald, Feb 1981 (Emory 854/1).

  4. To Gerald (Emory 854/1).

  5. To Gerald (Emory 854/1).

  6. Nathaniel Minton, A Memoir of Ted Hughes (Westmoreland Press, 2015), pp. 28, 40. The request for anti-depressants came in the early Nineties.

  7. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

  8. ‘Portraits’ (BL Add. MS 88918/7).

  9. Ibid.

  10. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

  11. For a particularly good example, see the verse journal of an Irish fishing expedition with Barrie Cooke, dated 29 Feb 1980 (BL Add. MS 88918/128/3, fos. 6–14).

  12. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

  13. 29 June 1983.

  14. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

  15. Ibid.