Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  45. ‘The crow vs the teddy bear’, Observer, 14 June 1992.

  46. Peter Bradshaw, ‘The dismal dozen’, Evening Standard, 30 Dec 1992.

  47. CP 55.

  48. Blurb for The Iron Woman: A Sequel to The Iron Man (Faber & Faber, 1993).

  49. To David Thacker, 30 Nov 1993 (Emory 644/54).

  50. CP 1024.

  51. Discussed in Chapter 31, ‘The Return of Alcestis’, below.

  52. WP 377.

  53. WP 378, 383.

  54. WP 446–7.

  55. ‘Corrections by Olwyn Hughes of Diane Middlebrook’s Her Husband’ (Emory 980/2/20).

  56. Personal communication.

  57. Csokits Letters (Emory 895/1).

  58. Phyllis Grosskurth, ‘Ted Hughes undone’, Globe and Mail (Toronto), 13 Nov 1999.

  59. Olwyn Hughes in conversation, March 2010.

  60. Personal communication.

  61. I owe this astute observation to Roy Davids (conversation of 10 Aug 2011).

  62. ‘Goku’, in Ted Hughes, The Dreamfighter and Other Creation Tales (Faber & Faber, 2003), pp. 200–1. This posthumous collection is a gathering of How the Whale Became (1963), Tales of the Early World (1988) and – borrowing its title – The Dreamfighter and Other Creation Tales (1995).

  63. Ibid., p. 320.

  64. ‘Anniversary’, CP 854.

  65. Gordon Wardman, ‘They Do the Ted in Different Voices’, Poetry Quarterly Review, Spring 1995, p. 5.

  66. Brian Hinton, Tears in the Fence, 16 (Oct 1995), pp. 56–8. ‘New confessional voice’ is Wardman’s phrase.

  67. To Heaney, 18 April 1995 (Emory 644/55).

  68. Tim Supple, ‘Ted Hughes and the Theatre’, ann.skea.com/TimSupple.html.

  69. Ibid.

  70. Ibid.

  71. Benedict Nightingale, The Times (London), 10 Aug 1995; Robert Hanks, unidentified clipping, Emory 644/176/27; Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, 10 Aug 1995. The process of tightening the translation can be traced in the rehearsal typescript, now at Emory (644/121/7).

  72. Supple, ‘Ted Hughes and the Theatre’.

  73. Daily Telegraph, 30 Sept 1996.

  74. Sunday Telegraph, 6 Oct 1996.

  75. Supple, ‘Ted Hughes and the Theatre’.

  76. Act 2, scene 1, in Lorca, Blood Wedding, in a version by Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber, 1996), p. 23.

  77. End of Act 3, scene 2, ibid., p. 72.

  78. April 1990, to rave reviews. Licensed but not seen by Hughes. This was not the first Hughes dramatisation to attract the eyes of the critics: in 1986 a company called dereck Productions pulled off an extraordinary epic version of Gaudete at the Almeida in Islington (‘Contains some of the most stunning images one is likely to see in the theatre,’ raved the Financial Times) – see reviews in Emory 644/176/24.

  79. To Olwyn, 6 March 1997 (BL Add. MS 88948/1).

  80. By Heart: 101 Poems to Remember, ed. with an introduction by Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber, 1997), pp. xv–xvi.

  81. ‘Silent is the house’, which is included in The School Bag, p. 449.

  82. He charged £1,000, with his bookkeeper reminding him to add on the VAT (sales tax).

  83. Frieda’s poem ‘The Last Secret’, written at this time and later published in her collection Stonepicker (Hexham: Bloodaxe, 2001), is about her father’s desire for the family not to share the news of his cancer.

  84. To Heaney, 26 Aug 1997 (Heaney Archive, Emory 960/40/16/2).

  85. To Baskin, 15 Aug 1997 (BL Add. MS 83685).

  Chapter 30: The Sorrows of the Deer

  1. Comment on reading the Sylvia poems in the 1995 New Selected, so referring to the short ‘Black Coat’ lyric, not the full epic version discussed below. Heaney to Hughes, from Glanmore Cottage, 14 March 1995 (Emory 644/55).

  2. BL Add. MS 88918/1.

  3. The Times (London), 17 Jan 1998.

  4. All quotations from 19 Jan 1998.

  5. Herald (Glasgow), 20 Jan 1998. The reference is to a popular British television soap opera.

  6. BL Add. MS 88918/1. Subsequent quotations from same source.

  7. To Raine, 31 Jan 1998 (Emory 644/5); read in public by Frieda Hughes, and broadcast on BBC Television, 26 Jan 1999.

  8. To Baskins, 5 Feb 1998, quoted, John Ezard, ‘Hughes in hiding over Birthday Letters’, Guardian, 14 April 2004.

  9. Heaney to Hughes, 14 Dec 1997 (BL Add. MS 88918/8).

  10. L 703.

  11. Published in her debut poetry collection, Wooroloo (HarperCollins, 1998).

  12. L 712–13.

  13. To Caroline and Paul Tisdall, 8 April 1998 (BL Add. MS 88918/8). There is a wonderfully vivid journal of this adventurous holiday in BL Add. MS 88918/128.

  14. ‘The Laburnum’, CP 1176.

  15. Discussed at the end of the Epilogue, below.

  16. I am most grateful to Andrew Howard, Chairman and Managing Director of Sinclairs Products, for this information (email of 12 Oct 2010).

  17. Alternatively, the notebook might have been charred in the Lumb Bank fire before anything was written in it, or there may have been some other minor conflagration.

  18. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (Faber & Faber, 1948), ch. 14, ‘The Roebuck in the Thicket’. Ann Skea helpfully suggests other resonances in her article ‘Notes on the British Library’s Birthday Letters Archive’, ann.skea.com/BLArchiveLists.html. In the summer of 1978, when gathering poems for The Rattle Bag, Hughes asked Terence McCaughey ‘what is “The Sorrows of the Deer”?’ (L 394), an apparent reference to St Patrick’s hymn (‘The Deer’s Cry’). This may suggest that the title was not applied to the Sylvia sequence until the late Seventies. Another source seems to be a poem by the Hungarian Ferenc Juhász called ‘The boy changed into a stag cries out at the gate of secrets’, which Hughes retranslated on reading what he regarded as an unsatisfactory translation in an anthology of Hungarian poems that was published in 1963 (Ted Hughes, Selected Translations, ed. Daniel Weissbort (Faber & Faber, 2006), p. 24). To complicate matters further, David Wevill also translated this poem, for a Penguin anthology published shortly after Assia’s death.

  19. To Sagar, 18 July 1998 (Keith Sagar, ed., Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar (British Library, 2012), p. 269).

  20. The only occasions on which he used the word ‘somnambulist’ in his published poems were with regard to his father and fellow-soldiers going over the top on the Western Front (‘For the Duration’) and to Sylvia on the beach in their first days in Devon (‘The Beach’, where the Hartland peninsula becomes ‘the reverse of beautiful Nauset’).

  21. ‘Your fingers’ in Silvine Notebook, BL Add. MS 88918/1, revised as ‘Fingers’ in Birthday Letters (CP 1167–8).

  22. Personal communication.

  23. ‘Under the Laburnums’, in Silvine Notebook.

  24. CP 326.

  25. BL Add. MS 88918/1.

  26. BL Add. MS 88918/1. It is unclear whether ‘Black Coat’ and ‘Opus 131’ represent alternative titles or title and subtitle. Probably the latter.

  27. Quoted, Neil Roberts, A Lucid Dreamer: The Life of Peter Redgrove (Jonathan Cape, 2012), p. 80.

  28. In Redgrove’s version, but in the Two of a Kind: Poets in Partnership radio interview of Jan 1961 (available on The Spoken Word: Sylvia Plath (BBC/British Library, 2010, CD)), Ted corrects Sylvia and describes it as a ‘life mask’.

  29. I am grateful to Professor Norman Hammond for the information that Hughes is topographically imprecise here: the log cabin (a gift of the Norwegian government) where the royal family like to barbecue amid the midges is actually on one of the branches of the Garbh Allt, south of the Dee, some considerable distance from the proud cone of Lochnagar itself, and a considerable drive from Birkhall, perhaps in the Queen’s Land Rover.

  30. Freedom: A Commemorative Anthology to Celebrate the 125th Birthday of the British Red Cross (Little, Brown, 1995)

  31. Extract from ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’, first published i
n ‘Sorrow in a Black Coat’, Times Literary Supplement, 5 Feb 2014.

  32. BL Add. MS 88918/129. In 1963, shortly after Sylvia’s death, Hughes had submitted to Poetry magazine in Chicago a modern ‘angry young man’ reworking of Wordsworth’s ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’, with a polluted Thames and the nation becoming a sewer (CP 104).

  33. Extract from ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’, first published in ‘Sorrow in a Black Coat’.

  34. CP 797.

  35. This paragraph describes the contents of one of the old school exercise books in BL Add. MS 88918/1. Hughes gathered many more of these exercise books together, numbering them from ‘S1’ (‘S’ for Sylvia) to ‘S9’, as he built up the sequence of ‘The Sorrows of the Deer’ before alighting on the new title Birthday Letters (in the assemblage of the sequence into a rough chronological order of events – not, that is to say, chronological order of composition – the original Silvine Notebook is numbered S6). The distribution of the published poems among these draft notebooks is helpfully tabulated by Ann Skea, ‘Notes on the British Library’s Birthday Letters Archive’.

  36. See especially BL Add. MS 88918/1/12, a photocopy of the typescript as submitted to Faber & Faber. This includes a dedication of ‘Caryatids’ to Daniel Huws, which editor Christopher Reid thought ill advised given that the entire collection was dedicated formally to his children and implicitly to Sylvia’s memory. ‘The Tender Place’, ‘Chaucer’ and ‘The God’ take the form of photocopies of previously published versions.

  37. 1 Oct 1997 (BL Add. MS 88918/1/13).

  38. BL Add. MS 88918/1/11, a revised proof.

  39. The latter is the title written on the front of another of the school exercise books in BL Add. MS 88918/1/6.

  40. ‘18 Rugby Street’, CP 1055.

  41. Ibid.

  42. Richard Hollis, personal communication.

  Chapter 31: The Return of Alcestis

  1. To Baskin, 25 March 1995 (BL Add. MS 83685).

  2. To Baskin, 13 Oct 1996 (BL Add. MS 83685).

  3. The Times (London), 8 May 1997.

  4. Sunday Times (London), 11 May 1997.

  5. Melvyn Bragg, ‘Two Poets Laureate joined by 2,000 years’, The Times (London), 29 Dec 1997.

  6. Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid (Faber & Faber, 1997), pp. ix–x.

  7. Ibid., pp. 124, 171.

  8. Ibid., p. 46.

  9. Sylvia Plath Collection, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Lilly II/14/5, hair.

  10. Tales from Ovid, p. 47.

  11. Aeschylus, The Oresteia: A New Translation by Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber, 1999; quoted here from the American paperback edition, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), pp. 44, 117, 152.

  12. Ibid., p. 16. The Plathian parallel is discussed in Michael Silk’s superb essay ‘Ted Hughes: Allusion and Poetic Language’, in the admirable collection Roger Rees, ed., Ted Hughes and the Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  13. Hughes’s translation, in Jean Racine, Phèdre: A Version by Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber, 1998), p. 28.

  14. BL Add. MS 88918/4.

  15. Personal communication from Barrie Rutter.

  16. Euripides, Alcestis, in a New Version by Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber, 1999), pp. 22, 21, 67.

  17. Ibid., p. 26.

  18. Ibid., p. 77.

  19. Ibid., pp. 26–7.

  20. Ibid., p. 33.

  21. Ibid., p. 25.

  22. BL Add. MS 88918/4.

  23. ‘Last Letter’, New Statesman, 11 Oct 2010.

  24. Alcestis, p. 45.

  25. Ibid., p. 66.

  26. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847), ch. 29, with thanks to Alistair Heys for pointing out the centrality of this passage.

  27. JSP 594.

  28. Richard Murphy, The Kick: A Life among Writers (Granta, 2002), pp. 378–9. Ted’s memory plays him false: Aurelia had returned home by this point, so the meeting must have been some weeks earlier.

  29. The texts in London Review of Books (19 June 1986) and Wolfwatching (1989) have no epigraph; the proverb was introduced into the Elmet text (1994).

  30. Seamus Heaney, ‘On a new work in the English tongue’, Sunday Times (London), 11 Oct 1998.

  31. In possession of Hilda’s daughter Vicky Watling (L 738). Postmarked 19 Oct and the line ‘Recovering ever since’ indicates written then, but the date on the letter itself is that of the royal audience, 16 Oct.

  32. 6 Oct 1998 (L 733). For the enclosures, see John Carey, The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books (Faber & Faber, 2014), p. 309. Humbled, Carey sent an apologetic reply to Court Green, but since Hughes was in London he did not open it before his death.

  33. ‘Comics’ (in a 1997 pamphlet from the Prospero Press), ‘Mother-Tongue’ (Sunday Times (London), 12 Oct 1997).

  34. Waterlog, 7 (Dec/Jan 1997/8), p. 10 (CP 1191).

  35. Daily Telegraph, 9 Jan 1999 (CP 1194).

  36. Olwyn Hughes, personal communication.

  Epilogue: The Legacy

  1. Frieda Hughes, Stonepicker (Hexham: Bloodaxe, 2001), p. 80.

  2. Emory 1014/2/2.

  3. Boyd Tonkin, Independent, 30 Oct 1998, p. 3.

  4. Memorial address in Westminster Abbey, quoted, Peter Stothard, ‘The moment that changed a memorial’, The Times (London), 14 May 1999.

  5. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/207169.stm, misquoting ‘in underbeing’ as ‘into underbeing’ and, ironically, ‘Loose words’ for ‘Lose words’ (CP 652).

  6. CP 655.

  7. Terence McCaughey, ‘A Light Gone Out – A Tribute to Ted Hughes at his Funeral Service in St Peter’s Church, North Tawton, 3rd November, 1998’, Céide: A Review from the Margins, 2:6 (July/Aug 1999), pp. 12–13.

  8. ‘Hunters Try to Bag Dartmoor Lion’, BBC News, 20 Nov 1998, news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/218650.stm.

  9. Emma Tennant, Burnt Diaries (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1999), p. 228.

  10. ‘Thomas the Rhymer’s Song’, from Guppy’s album Durable Fire (Linnet Records, 1982) (CP 628).

  11. Song over the headless body, supposed to be Fidele/Imogen, in Cymbeline. A Hughesian favourite, included in his 1971 Shakespeare anthology, as well as in both The Rattle Bag and By Heart.

  12. Stothard, ‘The moment that changed a memorial’.

  13. Poems for Shakespeare, ed. Charles Osborne, July 1987.

  14. Sunday Times (London), 6 Sept 1998 (CP 1303).

  15. BL Add. MS 88918/1.

  16. Proved ‘In the High Court of Justice: The District Probate Registry at Bristol’, 25 March 1999. Now in the public domain, as are all wills proven in English law.

  17. Copy of ‘Letter of Wishes’ in the possession of Olwyn Hughes.

  18. telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1411415/Dying-wish-of-Ted-Hughes-splits-family.html (originally published 27 Oct 2002).

  19. Emory 895/23. ‘For the Duration’, CP 760, and ‘The Beach’, CP 1143.

  20. 17 Nov 2002 (Emory, 895/2).

  21. kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/susan-fromberg-schaeffer/poison-5/ (review originally published 24 April 2006).

  22. Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Poison (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), pp. 244–5.

  23. Ibid., p. 249.

  24. Ibid., pp. 236, 571.

  25. Olwyn Hughes, personal communication.

  26. Schaeffer, Poison.

  27. I detected a striking change in Olwyn’s language about Sylvia in the immediate aftermath of Nick’s suicide. Before, she spoke of Sylvia as being bad; afterwards, of her as being ill. It was as if the heart-rending loss of little Nicky – whom she had loved from his infancy and who so resembled Ted – made her finally believe that depression is real. The Yorkshire ‘pull your socks up’ attitude dissolved, at least for a while, into sorrow and compassion.

  28. Personal communication, 2010, the year before Schaeffer’s death.

  29. Schaeffer, Poison, p. 182.

  30. Ibid., p. 279.

  31. Letters of Ted Hughes, selected by and ed. Christopher Reid (Faber & Faber, 2007), p. xi.<
br />
  32. To Bill and Dido Merwin (L 198).

  33. To Olwyn (L 204). ‘Affable familiar’ alludes to Shakespeare on the ‘rival poet’ of his sonnets as an ‘affable familiar ghost’ (Sonnet 86).

  34. To Gerald, March 1968, on first meeting Peter Brook (L 281).

  35. To Daniel Weissbort, April 1982 (L 453).

  36. July 1985, to two thirteen-year-old schoolgirls who had written asking him to interpret his work for them (L 500).

  37. To Nick Gammage, Nov 1989 (L 570).

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

  39. Sunday Times (London), 21 Oct 2007.

  40. 17 Dec 1992 (BL Add. MS 88918/123).

  41. 41. Unpublished letter, 12 Dec 1992 (BL Add. MS 88948).

  42. Olwyn Hughes, personal communication.

  43. Roy Davids, personal communication.

  44. Elaine Feinstein, a literary acquaintance, got Ted Hughes biography off to a personally inflected start with Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001): written prior to the availability of many archival materials and without the co-operation of the Estate, it animated some of the key friendships but was inevitably cursory in its treatment of the writings. Diane Middlebrook’s Her Husband: Hughes and Plath – A Marriage (New York: Viking, 2003) offers much more on the poetic partnership with Plath, but did not have the benefit of the vital second archive. Neil Roberts’s Ted Hughes: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) skilfully surveys the development of the literary career, but is sparing in biographical detail.

  45. Hughes journal, 31 May 1979.

  46. Emory 644/115.

  47. Letters page, Independent, 22 April 1989.

  48. Personal communication. The painting is now owned by Dr Paula Byrne.

  49. Foreword by Libby Purves, in Frieda Hughes, Forty-Five: Poems (HarperCollins, 2006), p. ix.

  50. Frieda Hughes, Forty-Five, p. 18. In fact, her memory is playing her slightly false: the borrowed dog and the tick belonged to the loughs, not the lochs: see Ted’s account of a family fishing trip in Ireland (hosted by Richard Murphy) later that summer (L 314).

  51. Frieda Hughes, Forty-Five, p. 19.

  52. Quoted, Andrea Sachs, ‘Q & A with Frieda Hughes’, Time, 13 March 2007.

  53. Frieda Hughes, Forty-Five, p. 89.

  54. Frieda Hughes, Waxworks: Poems (HarperCollins, 2003), especially ‘Medea’, ‘Job’, ‘Hera’ and ‘Honos’. ‘Hippolytus’ is also especially intriguing, in relation both to Nick and to Ted’s late return to the Phèdre story. But these are matters for Frieda’s future biographer, as are the vicissitudes of her relationship with Olwyn, which are hinted at by indirection in her clever and funny children’s story Getting Rid of Aunt Edna (New York: Harper & Row, 1986).