Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  16. L 433.

  17. L 434.

  18. To Danny Weissbort, 23 Oct 1983 (L 472).

  19. To Barrie Cooke, 23 Oct 1983 (L 468).

  20. 10 Nov 1982 (Emory 644/5).

  21. To Myers, 29 Sept 1984 (Emory 865/1).

  22. See the facsimile of this wonderful 1976 letter, with sketch maps, in Simon Armitage, ‘Dear Peter’, Granta, 26 June 2012, granta.com/New-Writing/Dear-Peter.

  23. To Gerald, 26 Aug 1980 (Emory 854/1). The genesis of the project is well documented in BL Add. MS 88614, Letters etc., to Peter Keen from Ted Hughes (1976–1985). Mark Wormald’s fine essay ‘Fishing for Ted’ has an especially strong account of the gestation and context of the project, in Mark Wormald, Neil Roberts and Terry Gifford, eds, Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 112–29.

  24. BL Add. MS 88614.

  25. Ibid.

  26. River: Poems by Ted Hughes, Photographs by Peter Keen (Faber & Faber, 1983), pp. 127–8.

  27. Report to Coroner’s Inquest on death of Assia Wevill, cited in 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. 203.

  28. CP 643 (first published in the Listener, 13 Jan 1983).

  29. CP 681 (first published in Grand Street, Autumn 1981).

  30. ‘So Quickly It’s Over’, p. 57.

  31. Though not published until 1999, the interview was conducted on a sunny August morning in 1995, on Ehor Boyanowsky’s deck overlooking Horseshoe Bay, British Columbia, under huge cedar trees, the morning after Ted gave a rousing reading of ‘The Bear’ at a fundraiser for the Steelhead Society of British Columbia (personal communication from the interviewer, Tom Pero). He gave very few interviews thereafter, largely because of his illness.

  32. CP 679 (originally published as ‘An October Salmon’, London Review of Books, 16 April 1981; included among Remains of Elmet poems in 1982 Selected Poems, a placing that makes the link to the poems of family memory).

  33. CP 655.

  34. Sunday Times (London), 23 Oct 1983.

  35. To Keith Sagar, 14 Dec 1983, in Keith Sagar, ed., Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar (British Library, 2012), p. 132.

  36. ‘Torridge Action Group – Summary of Issues’ (Emory 644/170).

  37. CP 740 (originally published in the short-lived Sunday Correspondent newspaper, 17 Sept 1989).

  Chapter 25: The Laureate

  1. 28 Dec 1981 (L 450).

  2. ‘A Swallow’, CP 604.

  3. ‘Evening Thrush’, CP 607.

  4. Ann Skea, in her excellent piece, ‘A Creative Collaboration: R. J. Lloyd and Ted Hughes’, ann.skea.com/ArtisticCollaboration1.htm.

  5. Ted Hughes, Collected Poems for Children, illustrated by Raymond Briggs (Faber & Faber, 2005; paperback 2008), pp. 157–8.

  6. West Country Fly Fishing was edited by his friend Anne Voss Bark (1983); the pamphlet for the Frances Horovitz Benefit (to assist her only son) was called Tenfold (1983); Ted’s contribution was, interestingly, ‘Sunstruck Foxglove’ (that poem’s first publication).

  7. WP 88.

  8. To Leonard and Lisa Baskin, May 1984 (L 484).

  9. To Myers, 29 Sept 1984 (L 489; the published version omits the parts of the letter concerning Nick and Frieda).

  10. Dream diary, 15 May 1983 (BL Add. MS 88918/1).

  11. L 464.

  12. To Heaney, autumn 1984 (L 488).

  13. Hughes’s sense that Heaney had beaten him to the achievement of the Wordsworthian voice became explicit in his response to the subsequent autobiographical sequence, ‘Squarings’ (1989, in pamphlet form, reprinted at the core of Heaney’s next Faber volume, Seeing Things, 1991): ‘Made me think of The Prelude, in the ranging self-reassessment, the lifting of sacred moments … and in the way the whole thing is a self-rededication, a realigning of yourself’ (Hughes to Heaney, L 564).

  14. To Martin Booth, 12 June 1984 (Emory 644/2).

  15. Mistranscribed as ‘Warrener’ in L 495.

  16. CP 803–5.

  17. L 495.

  18. To Larkin, Emory 644/4.

  19. To Sagar, 21 Jan 1985, in Keith Sagar, ed., Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar (British Library, 2012), p. 142.

  20. L 497. ‘The Zodiac in the Shape of a Crown’, for Prince William, was eventually published in 1987 in the form of a facsimile of the manuscript in a limited-edition charity volume in aid of St Magnus’ Cathedral in Kirkwall on the Orkneys, together with poems by Seamus Heaney, Christopher Fry and local poet George Mackay Brown. Hughes never reprinted it, and it is not in CP.

  21. Ehor Boyanowsky, Savage Gods, Silver Ghosts: In the Wild with Ted Hughes (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2010). Information and quotations in this section are derived from this vivid and powerfully written memoir, supplemented by additional points provided privately by Boyanowsky, to whom I am most grateful.

  22. CP 669. See Nick Gammage’s fine account of the poem, in Nick Gammage, ed., The Epic Poise: A Celebration of Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber, 1999), pp. 86–91.

  23. Boyanowsky, Savage Gods, p. 23.

  24. Ibid., pp. 26–7. As with all the verbatim quotations in Savage Gods, these are Ted’s words as remembered by Boyanowsky, and to some degree as embellished for literary effect, not necessarily as spoken in the moment.

  25. CP 847.

  26. Boyanowsky, Savage Gods, p. 89.

  27. Ibid., p. 73.

  28. Ibid., p. 48.

  29. The account of how they first met is false (Ted was introduced to Carol and her sister by a local antique ‘knocker’); the story about the fainting is true.

  30. Ibid., pp. 108–9.

  31. Ibid., pp. 141–3.

  32. Ibid., p. 127.

  33. Ibid., p. 174. Boyanowsky misremembers: it was, of course, the RAF.

  34. L 510–11.

  35. CP 730. Never reprinted by Hughes, but included in Save the Earth, ed. Jonathon Porritt, with a foreword by the Prince of Wales and an introduction by David Attenborough, for the environmental campaigning organisation Friends of the Earth, Sept 1991.

  36. To the poet Michael Hamburger (L 538), with further comments on the dangers of the nuclear industry (Hamburger lived in Suffolk, near the Sizewell B power station).

  37. Quoted, Ed Douglas, ‘Portrait of a poet as eco warrior’, Observer, 4 Nov 2007, an excellent article which includes an interview with Ian Cook. There are further valuable interviews in Simon Armitage’s 2009 BBC Radio 4 documentary ‘Ted Hughes: Eco Warrior’. See further the admirable work of Terry Gifford: ‘Rivers and Water Quality in the Work of Brian Clarke and Ted Hughes’, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 34:1 (March 2008), pp. 75–91, revised and reprinted as ‘Hughes’s Social Ecology’, in Terry Gifford, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 81–93; also the review of eco-critical treatments in Gifford, Ted Hughes (Routledge Guides to Literature, 2009), pp. 139–47.

  38. Guardian, 16 April 1992.

  39. Blake Morrison, ‘Man of mettle’, interview with Hughes in Independent on Sunday, 5 Sept 1993.

  40. Undated, 1986 (L 512–14).

  41. ‘Slump Sundays’, ‘Macaw’ (a far cry from the ‘Macaw and Little Miss’ of The Hawk in the Rain), ‘On the Reservations: III The Ghost Dancer’, CP 750, 752, 779.

  42. Conversation with Ann Skea, quoted in her online chronology, ann.skea.com/timeline.htm.

  43. Sagar, ed., Poet and Critic, p. 165 (14 Nov 1987).

  44. London Review of Books, 24 Jan 1985.

  45. The Poetry Book Society Bulletin, 142 (Autumn 1989), pp. 1–3.

  46. Emory 644/115.

  47. ‘Not with a bang but a hum’, Observer, 17 Sept 1989.

  Chapter 26: Trial

  1. CP 1153–4.

  2. Diary entry, 4 April 1982, in purple exercise book (BL Add. MS 88993/3). All papers relating to the Bell Jar trial were embargoed
until Jane Anderson’s death in 2010, but they have now been made available to the public in two sources: BL Add. MS 88993: ‘Ted Hughes/Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar legal case: archive of poetry, diary entries, correspondence and other papers relating to the legal case brought by Dr Jane Anderson against the Plath Estate (then managed by Plath’s widower, Ted Hughes), Avco Embassy Pictures Corporation and others for defamation of character, invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional damage following the release of The Bell Jar film in 1979’; and Jane V. Anderson Papers, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College (grateful thanks to Karen Kukil for the provision of extensive photocopies of this material).

  3. BL Add. MS 88993/3.

  4. Ibid.

  5. L 529.

  6. Plath to James Michie (Sylvia Plath Collection, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, MS 45/5/46).

  7. BL Add. MS 88993/3.

  8. BL Add. MS 88993/3, quoting letters to Aurelia Plath and Olive Higgins Prouty, dated 27 Aug, 26 Sept, 18 Oct, 21 Oct 1962.

  9. Hughes to Leonard Scigaj and to his editors at Faber & Faber, Viking Penguin and HarperCollins, 9 March 1992. By the same account, one of the principal aims of this book is to explicate, celebrate and immortalise the writings of Ted Hughes, both published and unpublished, so as to bring him new readers at a time when knowledge of his work and even his name is rapidly declining, and thus to further the interests of his Estate.

  10. 5 Oct 1987 (Emory 644/7).

  11. Correspondence relating to Bitter Fame, in Literary Papers and Correspondence of Anne Stevenson, Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 9451/19.

  12. He ascribed them to the Bhagavad-Gita, but the quotation is actually from Journey to the West by the classical Chinese author Wu Cheng’en.

  13. Guardian, 20 April 1989.

  14. Trevor Thomas’s archive of papers arising from the case was acquired by the bookseller Richard Ford in 2009, and is now in the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, sylviaplathinfo.blogspot.co.uk/2009_04_01_archive.html.

  15. ‘Trial’ Draft 1 and Draft 2, in BL Add. MS 88993/1. All subsequent quotations in this chapter are from this draft poem, which is nearly two thousand lines in length (subdivided into forty-six sections).

  Chapter 27: A

  1. He put it up for sale in 2011: see Dalya Alberge, ‘Ted Hughes’s jaguar sculpture hints at poet’s demons’, Observer, 31 Jan 2011, theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/31/ted-hughes-jaguar-sculpture-sale. Further information derived from Olwyn Hughes, letter to Jonathan Bate, 7 Feb 2012.

  2. ‘Fanaticism’, CP 789.

  3. ‘The Locket’, CP 784.

  4. ‘Fanaticism’, CP 789.

  5. ‘Descent’, CP 787.

  6. CP 789–90.

  7. Paul Celan, ‘Todesfuge’, in his Der Sand aus den Urnen (1948), my translation.

  8. Now in the British Library archive, split into two folders within BL Add. MS 88918/1. Unless otherwise stated, all subsequent quotations in this chapter are from these manuscripts.

  9. ‘Daddy’, CPSP 223.

  10. For Shura as ash, see especially the end of the tender lyric ‘You found a magic path, your little girl’.

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

  Chapter 28: Goddess Revisited

  1. To Dermot Wilson (L 574).

  2. Earlier versions of this chapter were essayed as ‘Hughes on Shakespeare’, in Terry Gifford, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and, with actors reading relevant passages from the plays, as the 2014 Sam Wanamaker Fellowship Lecture on the stage of the Sam Wanamaker Theatre at Shakespeare’s Globe, London.

  3. Macbeth, Act 3, scene 2, quoted in the editorial version corresponding to that of the old red Oxford edition owned by Hughes.

  4. BL Add. MS 88918/1.

  5. L 105.

  6. Partially published in 1987 as A Full House (CP 731–6).

  7. BL Add. MS 88918/1.

  8. Personal recollections by John Billingsley of a reading in 1976 and Jonathan Bate of a reading at the Hobson Gallery, Cambridge, 27 February 1978.

  9. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (Faber & Faber, 1948), p. 426.

  10. L 679–81.

  11. CP 576.

  12. With Fairest Flowers while Summer Lasts: Poems from Shakespeare, ed. and introduced by Ted Hughes (New York: Doubleday, 1971), pp. v–ix.

  13. Ibid., p. ix.

  14. Ibid., pp. xi, xiii.

  15. Ibid., p. xvii.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Ibid.

  18. L 336.

  19. L 329.

  20. CP 279–82.

  21. L 336.

  22. L 405–19.

  23. Letter of 9 Sept 1991 (Emory 644/4).

  24. 21 July 1991 (L 596).

  25. This and subsequent quotations from Emory 844/105, first published in Gifford, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes, pp. 135–49.

  26. SGCB 11.

  27. Quoted, Gifford, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes, p. 143.

  28. Ibid., 16 Sept 1991.

  29. Ibid., 3 Nov 1991.

  30. WP 132.

  31. SGCB 91.

  32. SGCB 116. ‘Those visits’ refers to Shakespeare’s (presumably regular) returns to Stratford-upon-Avon to see his family and conduct business.

  33. Ibid.

  34. SGCB 179.

  35. SGCB 183.

  36. SGCB xix.

  37. Sunday Times (London), 5 April 1992.

  38. The Times (London), 9 April 1992.

  39. SGCB 142–5.

  40. BL Add. MS 88918/6.

  41. Ibid.

  42. SGCB 157–61.

  43. ‘A Brief Guide’ to Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, sent to the theatre director Michael Kustow on 2 Dec 1993 (Emory 644/55).

  44. Personal communication.

  45. See my Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) and my forthcoming Shakespeare and the Classical Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

  46. Add. MS 88918/6.

  47. Ibid.

  48. Ibid.

  Chapter 29: Smiling Public Man

  1. Yeats, ‘Among School Children’, in The Tower (1928).

  2. Letters to Bernard Jenkin MP, 3 Feb 1990, to John Gummer MP, Minister in the Department of Agriculture, Farming and Fisheries, 10 Sept 1991, and to Emma Nicholson MP, 22 March 1990 (Emory 644/53).

  3. ‘The hart of the mystery’, Guardian, 5 July 1997; ‘A brainy idea for the Domeheads’, The Times (London), 18 Feb 1998.

  4. Letter of 28 Jan 1992 (Emory 644/53).

  5. Letter to Sunday Times (London), book review section, 20 Jan 1990.

  6. L 652–4.

  7. To Heaney, 29 Sept 1990 (Heaney Papers, Emory 960/40/16).

  8. L 683.

  9. My interview with Heaney.

  10. Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (Faber & Faber, 2008), p. 189. ‘View of a Pig’ was a particularly strong influence, shaping ‘Turkeys’, the earliest poem in Heaney’s first collection (p. 79). Stepping Stones also includes valuable material on the creation of The Rattle Bag and The School Bag and on Heaney’s response to Birthday Letters (see especially pp. 390–7).

  11. To Martin Palmer, 26 Aug 1992 (Emory 644/38).

  12. To Nicki Clinton, 28 Nov 1994 (Emory 644/55).

  13. To William Scammell, 31 March 1993 (Emory 644/7).

  14. BL Add. MS 88918/129.

  15. 17 Aug 1993 (Emory 1014/1).

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

  17. Emory 1014/1. ‘Windfall from heaven’ is a lovely improvement on the banal ‘treasure’ in an earlier draft. Ted considered the piece more of a ‘rambling rhapsody’ (ibid.) than a poem.

  18. To Anne-Lorraine Bujon, 16 Dec 1992, L 621–36.

  19. To Baskin, 15 Aug 1991 (Emor
y 644/1).

  20. The film was supposedly to be based on the Paul Alexander biography Rough Magic; Kovner sent a warning letter to Columbia Pictures and to Ringwald. Columbia backed away (letter to Hughes from New York libel lawyer David Ellenhorn, 7 April 1992; Emory 644/37).

  21. To Spender, 27 July 1992 (Emory 644/8).

  22. L 638.

  23. Letter of 7 Oct 1991 (Emory 644/3).

  24. This and subsequent quotations from Horatio Morpurgo, ‘The Table Talk of Ted Hughes’, Areté, 6 (Autumn 2001), aretemagazine.co.uk/06-autumn-2001/the-table-talk-of-ted-hughes/.

  25. For the Gielgud evening, there is a fulsome thank-you letter dated 12 March 1990 in the Royal Archives at Windsor (RA/QEQM/PRIV/CSP/PAL), together with a poem. The fishing visit is described in a long letter to Gerald and Joan, 18 May 1991 (Emory 854/1/95).

  26. 16 Feb 1994, Ted Hughes, ‘Letters to János Csokits’ (Emory 895/1).

  27. Unpublished letters of June 1996 and April 1997 (Emory 644/55).

  28. O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, p. 397.

  29. L 574.

  30. L 576.

  31. O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, p. 397.

  32. Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, eds, The School Bag (Faber & Faber, 1997), p. xvii.

  33. To HRH the Prince of Wales, 9 Oct 1997 (Emory 644/55).

  34. ‘Tell us princes another story, poet Ted’, Sunday Times (London), 20 Feb 2011.

  35. It is inappropriate to cite anything other than the Wordsworth quotation from this private poem, but I am most grateful to HRH Prince Charles for allowing Ian Skelly of the Temenos Academy to transcribe it and show it to me.

  36. To Joanna Mackle, 4 Jan 1992 (Emory 644/14).

  37. Some of those written in the Eighties were discussed in Chapter 24, ‘The Fisher King’, above. Along with the trade printing there was a two-volume limited edition (280 signed copies at £75, a nice little earner), with ‘The Unicorn’ standing alone in the second volume.

  38. CP 1215.

  39. CP 1216.

  40. CP 1216–17.

  41. Ibid.

  42. CP 1219.

  43. Epigraph to Rain-Charm, also quoted at climax of note to ‘A Birthday Masque’ (CP 1218) and inscribed by hand on books presented personally to members of the royal family (personal communication).

  44. Hermione Lee, ‘Sacred myths and fishing lines’, Independent on Sunday, 21 June 1992; Hilary Corke, ‘Sunny Side up for the Laureate’, Spectator, 20 June 1992.