Kitabı oku: «Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life»

Note to the Paperback Edition

I am most grateful to Anne Donovan, Peter Fydler, Brenda Hedden, Carol Hughes and Rowland Wymer for pointing out a number of errors, ambiguities and contested memories, which have been addressed in this edition.

Jonathan Bate, January 2016

Epigraph

As an imaginative writer, my only capital is my own life

Ted Hughes (1992)

When you sit with your pen, every year of your life is right there, wired into the communication between your brain and your writing hand … Maybe all poetry, insofar as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of something that the writer doesn’t actually want to say but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of. Perhaps it’s the need to keep it hidden that makes it poetic – makes it poetry. The writer daren’t actually put it into words, so it leaks out obliquely, smuggled through analogies … we’re actually saying something we desperately need to share. The real mystery is this strange need. Why can’t we just hide it and shut up? Why do we have to blab? Why do human beings need to confess? Maybe if you don’t have that secret confession, you don’t have a poem – don’t even have a story.

Ted Hughes, interviewed for The Paris Review (Spring 1995)

Prologue
The Deposition

Q. Would you state your full name for the record?

A. Edward James Hughes.

Q. What is your residence address?

A. Court Green, North Tawton 11, England.

Q. Have you a business address?

A. That’s it. I work from home.

Q. And what is your occupation, sir?

A. Writer.

The Yorkshire accent is unfamiliar. ‘Eleven’ is the stenographer’s mishearing of ‘Devon’. The date is 26 March 1986.

Q. And could you state your age for the record?

A. 55. I shall be 56 this year.

Q. Now, sir, were you at some time in your life married to a woman named Sylvia Plath?

A. Yes.

Q. Can you tell me when you first met her?

A. The 25th of February 1956.

Q. And where did you meet her?

A. Cambridge, England.

Q. And what were the circumstances of that meeting?

A. I met her at a party.

Q. Do you know what she was doing in England?

A. She was on a Fulbright scholarship.

Q. Do you know where she was from?

A. Did I know then?

Q. Yes.

A. I just knew she was American.

The details are established. Her home town was Wellesley, her college was Smith. And then:

Q. Do you know whether or not she had been ill?

A. She told me she had been ill later in the spring.

Q. Did she tell you she had been mentally ill?

A. She told me that she attempted to commit suicide.

Q. Did she tell you the circumstances of her having done that?

A. She only told me as an explanation of the scar on her cheek.

Q. Let me see if I understand your answer. There was a scar on her cheek, is that correct?

A. There was a big scar on her left cheek.1

The Deposition is being taken in the offices of Shapiro and Grace, attorneys, on Milk Street, Boston, before Josephine C. Aurelio, Registered Professional Reporter, a Notary Public within and for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Carolyn Grace, attorney, is acting on behalf of her client, Dr Jane V. Anderson, who is present in the room. Anderson is plaintiff in Civil Action number 82-0752-K, versus Avco Embassy Pictures Corporation and others, defendants. Edward James Hughes, writer, is one of the others.

He was a man who took astrology seriously. He believed in signs, auguries, meaningful coincidences. Often he would dream of something happening, only for it to happen subsequently. He lived by, and for, the power of words. His vocation was poetry, language wrought to its uttermost, words honed to their essence. The words of his poems – which he obsessively revised, refined, rewrote – are compacted, freighted with meaning, sometimes darkly opaque, sometimes cut like jewels of crystal clarity. He relished the resonance of names: Elmet, Moortown, the Duchy. He believed that houses held ghosts, strong forces, memories.

In Boston that March of 1986, walking familiar streets, he was flooded by memory. He and Sylvia had lived there some thirty years before, on:

Willow Street, poetical address.

Number nine, even better. It confirmed

We had to have it.2

Doubly poetical, in fact. There were the pastoral associations of willow: Hughes was haunted by the willow aslant the brook in Gertrude’s account of Ophelia’s suicide in Hamlet. More immediately, Hughes discovered that this had also once been the home of Robert Frost. Willow Street is just off Beacon Street, the heart of literary Boston. Here, a stone’s throw from the Charles River, you would find the offices of publishers, both established (Little, Brown) and independent (the Beacon Press). At number 10½ stood the Boston Athenaeum, the library at the centre of the New England intellectual life that back in the nineteenth century had set the template for the nation’s literature. For Ted Hughes, though, the name ‘Beacon’ was a call not only from the literary past but also from his Yorkshire home. His reading and his life came into conjunction. Which was something that seemed to happen to him again and again throughout his life.

The Yorkshire house, up on the hill, is called the Beacon. Square, rather squat, of dark-red brick, not the local gritstone that grounds those dwellings that seem truly to belong to the place. It stands, a little apart from its neighbours, on a long straight road at Heptonstall Slack, high above Hebden Bridge. It commands a sweeping view of hill and vale, down towards Lumb Bank, which would be another place of memory. This was the home of Ted Hughes’s parents when they returned to the Yorkshire Moors and the Calder Valley while he was at Cambridge University. A return to their roots, away from the unlovely town of Mexborough, further south, though still in Yorkshire, in the industrial area between Rotherham and Sheffield. Mexborough Grammar had been the school that prepared Ted Hughes for the Cambridge entrance examination.

The move to the Beacon was a sign of upward mobility. Edward James Hughes, like his elder brother and sister Gerald and Olwyn, was born and raised in a cramped end-terrace dwelling in the village of Mytholmroyd. In Mexborough, they had lived behind and above the newspaper and tobacco shop where William and Edith Hughes made their living. It was a matter of pride that they were eventually able to buy a detached house with a name and a view, just as it was a matter of pride that their boy Ted had got into Cambridge. They were not to know that he would rise even higher: that the boy from the end-terrace near the mill would fish privately with Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, talk of shamanism with a man born to become king and, just days before he died, receive from the hands of the Queen her highest personal honour, the Order of Merit.

The Beacon became a house of memory. It was here that Ted brought his bride, Sylvia Plath, to meet his parents in 1956. It was from here that he took Sylvia – playing Heathcliff to her Cathy – on a day trip to Top Withens, the ruined farmhouse believed to be the original of Wuthering Heights. It was here that the family gathered on the day that Sylvia was buried, near the family plot, just down the road in Heptonstall graveyard. It was here that he came at moments of crisis in later relationships: when he was thinking of buying Lumb Bank and making a home there with Assia Wevill and when he found himself having to choose between two women in 1970. It was to here that he and his sister Olwyn brought back their mother (‘Ma’) in the last days of her life and here that he came after seeing her cold body in the Chapel of Rest down in Hebden Bridge.

And it was here that he sometimes fought with Sylvia. ‘You claw the door,’ he wrote in a poem called ‘The Beacon’. The woman desperate to escape the house. Torrential Yorkshire rain crashes against the windowpanes. Inside the houses, on hillside and in valley, the lights of evening twinkle. ‘The Beacon’ gives a glimpse of Ted Hughes writing about domestic life. Yet it is also a poem of death, of graves and eternal silence. A beacon of memory, shining into the past. The memory of Sylvia among the Hugheses: chit-chat, telly, doing the dishes. Then a row, an explosion of anger. Sylvia, a trapped animal, brought fresh from the shining shore of the New World and confined in Yorkshire cold, Yorkshire grime, Yorkshire ways she does not really understand. She claws the door. Hughes at his most characteristic was a poet of claws and cages: Jaguar, Hawk and Crow. A poet who turns event and animal to myth.

Yet he was also a poet of deep tenderness, of restorative memory. If ‘The Beacon’ shines the light of memory into the past, there is another light that reaches forward with hope to the future, to redemption. In perhaps the greatest of his later poems, he calls it ‘a spirit-beacon / Lit by the power of the salmon’. This other beacon is found in an epiphanic morning moment when he stands waist-deep in pure cold Alaskan river water with his beloved son Nicholas. Here the ‘inner map’ of wild salmon becomes the cartography of Hughes’s own life: smoke-dimmed half-light of Calder Valley and wartime memory of ‘the drumming drift’ of Lancaster bombers. ‘Drumming’ had been one of Hughes’s signature words ever since the ‘drumming ploughland’ of ‘The Hawk in the Rain’, title poem of his first volume.

The poem is called ‘That Morning’.3 Even a word as seemingly flat as ‘that’ is often full of resonance in Hughes: not any morning, but that morning, that magical, memorable, poetical, immortal morning. The poem ends with a redemptive couplet that rhymes with itself: ‘So we stood, alive in the river of light / Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.’4 It is a poem about life at its best not only because Hughes is doing something that he loves in a location that is utterly sublime, but above all because he is together (‘we stood’) with his only son, who lives on the other side of the world. It is a poem full of heart, of love. A few years later Ted would urge Nick to ‘live like a mighty river’. ‘The only calibration that counts’, he wrote in a magnificent letter following another fishing trip, ‘is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.’5

The closing couplet of ‘That Morning’ is now inscribed on Ted Hughes’s memorial stone in Poets’ Corner. The national literary shrine in Westminster Abbey is indeed the place where England’s last permanent, as opposed to fixed-term, Poet Laureate in one sense belongs. But his spirit was only at peace in moorland air or when casting his rod over water, so it is fitting that his ashes are not there in the Abbey. Their place of scattering is marked by another stone, far to the west of his England.

Ted Hughes is our poet of light, but also of darkness. Of fresh water but also of polluted places. Of living life to the full, but also of death. And among his creatures are those not only of light but also of violence. We must celebrate his ‘dazzle of blessing’ but we cannot write his life without being honest about the ‘claw’, without confronting what in ‘That Morning’ he calls the wrong thoughts that darken.

In view of Hughes’s supernatural solicitings and given all the associations of the name Beacon, it was with grim satisfaction that, in the matter of Jane Anderson versus Avco Embassy Pictures and others, he found himself represented by Palmer and Dodge, working in conjunction with Peabody and Arnold, counsel for the lead defendant (Avco). These were two of Boston’s oldest and most respected law firms. Both had their premises at the auspicious address of 1 Beacon Street.

It was there on the morning of Thursday 3 April 1986, a week after Ted had made his Deposition, that Alexander (Sandy) H. Pratt Jr, acting on behalf of the defendants, asked some questions of Dr Anderson. Mr Pratt: ‘You felt, I take it, that Sylvia Plath wrote what she wrote in the book about the character Joan Gilling because she was hostile and angry towards you?’

Ms Grace: ‘Objection.’

Mr Pratt told Jane Anderson that she could answer. She replied, hesitantly: ‘I wouldn’t say – I would say that one of the reasons that she wrote what she wrote was – again, this is a hypothesis – but that she had some angry feelings towards me.’

Why was she angry? Because, said Anderson, of what took place when she visited Sylvia Plath in Cambridge, England, on 4 June 1956.6 That is to say, just over three months after Sylvia first met Ted Hughes ‘at a party’ and just twelve days before she married him in a swiftly arranged private ceremony in London. So what had happened at the meeting?

Sylvia Plath started talking in a very pressured way. That was my perception, that it was pressured. She said that she had met a man who was a poet, with whom she was very much in love. She went on to say that this person, whom she described as a very sadistic man, was someone she cared about a great deal and had entered into a relationship with. She also said that she thought she could manage him, manage his sadistic characteristics.

Q. Was she saying that he was sadistic towards her?

A. My recollection is she described him as someone who was very sadistic.7

Jane Anderson and Sylvia Plath had dated the same boys and had been fellow-patients in the McLean Hospital, New England’s premier mental health facility. By the time of the Deposition, Anderson herself had become a psychoanalyst. On the basis of what she had seen of Plath during her treatment at McLean following a suicide attempt, it was her judgement that Plath had not worked through her own feelings of anger regarding her father. Jane had told Sylvia that she was not taking her psychotherapy sufficiently seriously. In the light of this earlier history, Anderson had grave doubts about the wisdom of Plath entering into a relationship with a ‘very sadistic’ man. She did not actually counsel Sylvia against going ahead with the relationship, but, thinking about it on the train back to London, she sensed that she had created anger in Plath precisely because Plath was herself anxious and ambivalent about committing herself to Hughes.

How did it come to pass that Hughes and Anderson found themselves making these Depositions over twenty years after Plath’s suicide in the bitter London winter of 1963?

After the event, Ted Hughes’s lawyer summed up the issue at stake: ‘The plaintiff, Dr Jane Anderson, asserted that a character in the novel, The Bell Jar, and in the motion picture version was “of and concerning” herself, and that the portrayal of that character as a person with at least homosexual inclinations and suicidal inclinations defamed her and caused her substantial emotional anguish.’8 Reporting the first day of the trial, which finally came to court nearly a year after the Depositions, the New York Times put the case more dramatically:

Literature, lesbianism, psychiatry, film making, television and video cassettes were all touched upon in United States District Court today as a $6 million libel suit opened here … The defendants include 14 companies and individuals, including Avco Embassy Pictures, which produced the 1979 film derived from the novel; CBS Inc., which broadcast it twice; Time-Life Films, the owner of Home Box Office, which played it nine times; Vestron Inc., which made and distributed a video cassette of the film, plus the director and screen writer of the film … At the defendants’ table sat Ted Hughes, the poet laureate of England and a major defendant in the case.9

Many events in Ted Hughes’s eventful life have a surreal quality about them, but none more than this: Her Majesty’s Poet Laureate sits in a court room in the city of the Boston Tea Party, as defendant in a $6 million libel action against a film of a book that he did not write.

The full circumstances of the case, and its central significance in the Ted Hughes story, will be discussed later.10 What is particularly fascinating about his Deposition is that it provided the occasion for one of Hughes’s most forthright statements about what he considered to be the fallacy of biographical criticism. One reason why Jane Anderson had a good chance of winning her case, provided she could show that the character of Joan Gilling was indeed a ‘portrait’ of her, was that the first American edition of The Bell Jar, published posthumously in 1971, included a note by Lois Ames, who had been appointed by Ted and Olwyn Hughes as Sylvia Plath’s ‘official biographer’. The Ames note stated explicitly that ‘the central themes of Sylvia Plath’s early life are the basis for The Bell Jar’ and that the reason she had published it under a pseudonym in England shortly before her death (and not attempted to publish it at all in the United States) was that it might cause pain ‘to the many people close to her whose personalities she had distorted and lightly disguised in the book’.11

The name of Sylvia Plath has become synonymous with the idea of autobiographical or confessional literature. Teachers have a hard time persuading students that the character of Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar, working as an intern at a New York fashion magazine, is not quite synonymous with Sylvia Plath working for Mademoiselle in June 1953 (‘a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs’).12 Or, indeed, that her most famous and infamous poem ‘Daddy’ is not wholly ‘about’ Sylvia’s relationship to her father Otto and her husband Ted – who habitually wore black, the colour of the poem.

‘Do you remember disagreeing with any aspect of the biographical note?’ Carolyn Grace asked Hughes. He had expected her to be a brisk, hard-edged feminist but found her more like a plump, slow-moving tapir, surprisingly sympathetic. After the Deposition was completed, they had a friendly chat – she told him that she had studied under the famous critic Yvor Winters, who had said how much he admired Ted’s poetry. Hughes, with characteristic self-deprecation, assumed that she had misremembered and that the poet whom Winters really admired was his friend Thom Gunn. In the late Fifties, they had been the two rising stars, the twin angry young men in the English poetic firmament.

A. I thought the whole thing was unnecessary.

Q. What was unnecessary?

A. Well, I thought by touching, attaching it so closely to Sylvia, it merely encouraged the general dilution that the book was about Silvia’s life, it was a scenario from Silvia’s life.

The court reporter is erratic in her spelling of Sylvia’s name and has, in an almost Freudian slip, misheard ‘delusion’ as ‘dilution’.

Q. Which you disagreed with?

A. Which I disagreed with.

Q. What was the basis for your disagreement, sir, that the book was a scenario of Silvia’s life?

A. The turmoil that I’ve had to deal with since Sylvia died was of every one of her readers interpreting everything that she wrote as some sort of statement about her immediate life; in other words, trying to turn this symbolic artist, really [brief gap in transcription] That’s why she’s so famous, that’s why she’s a big poetic figure: because she’s a great symbolic artist.

It is unfortunate that Hughes’s exact words are lost to the record here, but it is clear what he was arguing: that Plath was a symbolic artist persistently misread as a confessional one. He went on to explain:

My struggle has been with the world of people who interpret, try to shift her whole work into her life as if somehow her life was more interesting and was more the subject matter of debate than what she wrote. So there’s a constant effort to translate her works into her life.

Q. And you object to that?

A. It seems to me a great pity and wrong.13

At the time of the Bell Jar lawsuit, Ted Hughes was battling with Sylvia Plath’s biographers – as he battled for much of his life after her death.

Hughes was prepared for this line of questioning. The day before making his Deposition he had phoned Aurelia Plath, Sylvia’s mother. By one of the coincidences typical of Hughes’s life, Aurelia was preparing to give a lecture in a high school later that week on the very subject of how non-autobiographical her daughter’s novel was. Aurelia was ferociously bitter about the autobiographical elements in her daughter’s work. People had accused her of destroying Sylvia and Ted’s marriage, simply on the basis of Plath’s portrayal of her in the enraged poem ‘Medusa’ in her posthumously published collection, Ariel:

You steamed to me over the sea,

Fat and red, a placenta

Paralysing the kicking lovers.14

The conceit of the poem is that ‘Medusa’ is the name not only of the monstrous gorgon in classical mythology but also of a species of jellyfish of which the Latin name is Cnidaria Scypozoa Aurelia. Mother as love-murdering jellyfish: no wonder Aurelia wanted to play the ‘non-autobiographical’ card.

The trouble was, there had been a clause in paragraph 12 of the agreement between the Avco Embassy Pictures Corporation and the Sylvia Plath Estate (that is, Ted Hughes, represented by his agent, Olwyn Hughes) prohibiting any publicity that referred to the film of The Bell Jar as autobiographical. But somehow this clause had been deleted, in an amendment signed by Ted. Letting this go through was a fatal slip on Olwyn’s part. That is why he felt vulnerable in the case, despite the fact that he had in no sense authorised the offending lesbian scenes in the movie. After the awkward fifteen-minute phone call to Aurelia, he agonised with himself in his journal.

Nobody could deny that The Bell Jar was centred on Sylvia’s breakdown and the trauma of her attempted suicide. Hughes accordingly reasoned that he would have to argue that it was a fictional attempt to take control of the experience in order to reshape it to a positive end. By turning her suicidal impulse into art, Sylvia was seeking to save herself from its recurrence in life: she was trying ‘to change her fate, to protect herself – from herself’ but as an ‘attempt to get the upper hand of her split, her other personality, to defeat it, banish it, and, in the end, extinguish it’ it was ultimately a failure.15 The notion of the ‘split’ or ‘other personality’ in Plath was something to which Hughes returned again and again; it was also an obsession of Plath herself, already manifest in her 1955 undergraduate honours thesis at Smith, which was entitled ‘The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky’s Novels’. But these were deep matters, subtle distinctions that would not be easy to make in court. That night, Ted ate swordfish and went to bed early, readied for the encounter with Anderson’s lawyer the following day. In the morning he awoke to the newspaper headline ‘War with Ghaddafi’. His own literary-legal battle was about to begin.

Even as he was resisting the equation of art and life, Hughes was writing (though not publishing) poetry of unprecedented candour about his marriage to Sylvia. The Boston Deposition was a way-station on the road to Birthday Letters, the book about his marriage to Sylvia which he finally published in January 1998. In courtroom and hotel room, he followed Sylvia’s example of turning life into art by transforming the saga of the Bell Jar lawsuit into a long poem, divided into forty-six sections, still unpublished today, called ‘Trial’.

He wrote to his lawyer, to whom he had grown very close, directly after the trial: ‘The whole 24 year chronic malaise of Sylvia’s biographical problem seems to have come to some sort of crisis. I’d say the Trial forced it.’16 Or rather, he added, the synchronicity of the trial and his dealings with Plath’s biographers, of whom there were by that time no fewer than six.

Sylvia Plath’s death was the turning point in Ted Hughes’s life. And Plath’s biographers were his perpetual bane. In a rough poetic draft written when a television documentary was being made about her life, he used the image of the film-makers ‘crawling all over the church’ and peering over Sylvia’s ‘ghostly shoulder’. For nearly thirty years, Hughes and his second wife Carol lived in Court Green, the house by the church in the village of North Tawton in Devon that Ted and Sylvia had found in 1961. Their home was, he wrote, Plath’s mausoleum. The boom camera of the film-makers swung across the bottom of their garden. It was as if Ted and Carol were acting out the story of Sylvia on a movie set, their lives ‘displaced’ by her death.

The documentary crew crawled all over the yew tree in the neighbouring churchyard. Ted wryly suggests that if the moon were obligingly to come out and take part in the performance, they would crawl all over it. Both Moon and Yew Tree had been immortalised in Plath’s October 1961 poem of that title: ‘This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. / The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.’ In the documentary, broadcast in 1988, Hughes’s friend Al Alvarez, who played a critical part in the story of Sylvia’s last months, argued that this poem was her breakthrough into greatness.17

Sylvia’s biographers kept on writing, kept on crawling all over Ted. He compares them to maggots profiting at her death, inheritors of her craving for fame: ‘This is the audience / Applauding your farewell show.’18 Hughes was interested in both the theatricality and the symbolic meaning of Plath’s moon and yew tree, whereas the biographers and film-makers worked from a crudely literal view of poetic inspiration. His distinction in the Deposition between the ‘symbolic’ and the autobiographical artist comes to the crux of the matter.

1
‘fastened into place’

Coming west from Halifax and Sowerby Bridge, along the narrow valley of the river Calder, you see Scout Rock to your left. North-facing, its dense wood and dark grey stone seem always shadowed. The Rock lowers over an industrial village called Mytholmroyd. Myth is going to be important, but so is the careful, dispassionate work of demythologising: the first syllable is pronounced as in ‘my’, not as in ‘myth’. My-th’m-royd.1 For Ted Hughes, it was ‘my’ place as much as a mythic place.

His childhood was dominated by this dark cliff, ‘a wall of rock and steep woods half-way up the sky, just cleared by the winter sun’. This was the perpetual memory of his birthplace; his ‘spiritual midwife’, one of his ‘godfathers’. It was ‘the curtain and back-drop’ to his childhood existence: ‘If a man’s death is held in place by a stone, my birth was fastened into place by that rock, and for my first seven years it pressed its shape and various moods into my brain.’2

Young Ted kept away from Scout Rock. He belonged to the other side of the valley. Once, though, he climbed it with his elder brother, Gerald. They ascended through bracken and birch to a narrow path that braved the edge of the cliff. For six years, he had gazed up at the Rock – or rather, sensed its admonitory gaze upon him – but now, as if through the other end of the telescope, he was looking down on the place of his birth. He stuffed oak-apples into his pockets, observing their corky interior and dusty worm-holes. Some, he threw into space over the cliff.

Gerald, ten years older, lived to shoot. He told his little brother of how a wood pigeon had once been shot in one of the little self-seeding oaks up here on the Rock. It had set its wings ‘and sailed out without a wing-beat stone dead into space to crash two miles away on the other side of the valley’.3 He told, too, of a tramp who, waking from a snooze in the bracken, was mistaken for a fox by a farmer. Shot dead, his body rolled down the slope. A local myth, perhaps.

There was also the story of a family, relatives of the Hugheses, who had farmed the levels above the Rock for generations. Their house was black, as if made of ‘old gravestones and worn-out horse-troughs’. One of them was last seen shooting rabbits near the edge. He ‘took the plunge that the whole valley dreams about and fell to his death down the sheer face’. Thinking back, the adult Hughes regarded this death as ‘a community peace-offering’.4 The valley, he had heard, was notable for its suicides. He blamed the oppression cast by Scout Rock.

He wrote his essay about the Rock at a dark time. It was composed in 1963 as a broadcast for a BBC Home Service series called Writers on Themselves.5 Broadcast three weeks earlier in the same series was a posthumous talk by Sylvia Plath (read by the actress June Tobin) entitled ‘Ocean 1212-W’. The letter in which BBC producer Leonie Cohn suggested this title for the talk was possibly the last that Plath ever received.6 Where the primal substance of Ted’s childhood was rock, that of Sylvia’s was water: ‘My childhood landscape was not land but the end of land – the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic … My final memory of the sea is of violence – a still, unhealthily yellow day in 1939, the sea molten, steely-slick, heaving at its leash like a broody animal, evil violets in its eye.’7

Though a suicide far from the Calder Valley preyed on Hughes’s mind as he wrote of the Rock, there is no reason to doubt his memory of its force. Still, whenever writers make art out of the details of their childhood, a part of the reader wonders whether that was really how they felt at the time. Is the act of remembering at some level inventing the memory? William Wordsworth was the great exemplar of this phenomenon. He called his epic of the self a poem ‘on the growth of the poet’s mind’. And it was there that he pondered questions that we should always ask when reading Hughes’s poetry of recollection. What does it mean to dissolve the boundary between the things which we perceive and the things which we have made? What is the relationship between the writing poet and the remembered self? Is a particular memory true because it is an accurate account of a past event or because it is constitutive of the rememberer’s consciousness? Each member of a family remembers differently. Reading a draft of this chapter, Olwyn Hughes was angry: she did not recognise her own childhood, which in her memory was filled with light and laughter, happy family life and the absolute freedom of outdoor play. ‘Hard task’, writes Wordsworth, ‘to analyse a soul.’8

Wordsworth, too, remembered a towering, shadowed rock as a force that supervised and admonished his childhood – the similarity of language in Hughes’s ‘The Rock’ suggests a literary allusion as well as a personal memory. For Wordsworth, the overseer was a cliff face that loomed above him as he rowed a stolen boat across a lake. It cast a shadow of guilt and fear over his filial bond with nature. For Hughes, too, to speak of living in the shadow of the Rock was a way of externalising a darkness in his own heart.

From the Rock, young Ted could also see the arteries leading out to east and west. The railway, fast and slow lines in each direction. The station building was perched on a viaduct. Below, there was the largest goods yard in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Inward goods: wool from Yorkshire and cotton from the Lancashire ports. Outward: clothing and blankets from the mills and sewing shops. Corduroy and flannel, calico and moleskin; men’s trousers in grey or fawn. New fashions: golf jackets, hiking shorts, blue and khaki shirts. The yard was also packed with boxes of chicks and eggs: overrunning the hillside above were chicken sheds belonging to Thornbers, pioneers of factory poultry farming.

Below the railway was the river Calder. A ‘mytholm’ is a meeting of streams. Just by the Co-op and the old Navvy Bridge, the Elphin Brook, darting down from the narrow gully of Cragg Vale, flows into the Calder. Beyond the river was the main road, the old cross-Pennine turnpike – rumbling lorries but some of the traffic still horse-drawn – that linked Halifax to Burnley, Yorkshire to Lancashire. The Calder Valley is on the cusp of the two great counties of northern industrial productivity, with their deep history of rivalry going back to the Wars of the Roses.

On the far side of the road – Ted’s side – ran the Rochdale Canal, still in use for transporting goods, but only just. Now it was a place for the local children to fish for gudgeon and stickleback. Beyond the canal, a network of terraced houses clustered, back to back or back to earth, on the northern hillside. This was the Banksfield neighbourhood, where he and his family belonged. Some of the muck streets went vertically, others (including his own) ran horizontally, in parallel with the canal. The surrounding fields were dotted with smallholders’ hen pens. Scattered above, where the fields sloped gently up to the moors, were farms. The path up the hill to the moor was always there as an escape from the blackened mills and terraces.

Down in the valley, Ted felt secure, if hemmed in. On top of the Rock that day in 1936 or ’37, he was exposed. He looked down on a community that was closed in on itself. Nearly all the buildings were made of the distinctive local stone. Known as millstone grit (‘a soul-grinding sandstone’),9 it oxidises quickly, whatever the condition of the air. Add a century of factory smoke and acid rain. Then, as a tour guide will put it in one of Hughes’s poems about his home valley, ‘you will notice / How the walls are black’.10 This was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. Everywhere, blackened chimneys known as lumbs rose skyward from the mills.

On his side of the valley, the dark admonitory presence was not a rock but a building. A stone mass towered beside the Hughes family home: the Mount Zion Primitive Methodist Chapel. It was black, it blocked the moon, its façade was like the slab of a gravestone. It was his ‘first world-direction’.11

Number 1 Aspinall Street stands at the end of the terrace. Now you walk in straight off the street; when Ted was a boy, before the road was tarmacked, there was a little front garden where vegetables were grown and the children could play. Go in through the front door and the steep stairs are immediately in front of you. The main room, about 14 feet by 14 feet, is to the left. From the front window the Hughes family could look straight up Jubilee Street to the fields.

There was a cosy little kitchen with a fireplace in the corner and a window looking out on the side wall of Mount Zion. According to Ted’s poem about the chapel, the sun did not emerge from behind it until eleven in the morning. His sister Olwyn, however, recalls the kitchen being bathed in afternoon light. The poems have a tendency to take the darker view of things. By the same account, Olwyn always thought that Ted exaggerated the oppressive height and darkness of the Rock.

A tin bath was stored under the kitchen table. One day Mrs Edith Hughes woke from a dream in which she had bought a bath in Mytholmroyd. She went straight to the shops, where she found one that was affordable because slightly damaged. The back door led to a ginnel, a passageway shared with the terraced row that stood back to back with Aspinall Street. The washing could be hung out here and the children, who spent most of their time playing in the street, could shelter from the rain. Which never seemed to stop.

The kitchen also had a door opening on some steps down to a little cellar, which had a chute where the coal was delivered, the coalman heaving sacks from his horse-drawn cart. Some of the terraces had to make do with a shared privy at the end of the row, but the Hughes family lived at the newer end of Aspinall Street, slightly superior, with the modern amenity of an indoor toilet at the top of the stairs.

Mother and father had the front bedroom and Olwyn the side one, with a window looking out on the chapel. Ted shared an attic room with Gerald. When he stood on the bed and peered out through the little skylight, the dark woods of Scout Rock gave the impression of being immediately outside the glass, pressing in upon him.

This was the house in which Edward James Hughes entered the world at twelve minutes past one in the morning on Sunday 17 August 1930. ‘When he was born,’ his mother Edith remembered, ‘a bright star was shining through the bedroom window (the side bedroom window) he was a lovely plump baby and I felt very proud of him. Sunday was a wet day and Olwyn just could not understand this new comer.’12

Gerald, just a few weeks off his tenth birthday, lent a helping hand. Despite the rain, Edith’s husband Billie went out for a spin in her brother Walter’s car. Minnie, wife of another brother, Albert, who lived along the street at number 19, had offered to look after Olwyn, but she didn’t that first day. A neighbour was called to take in the unsettled two-year-old.

As a teenager, Olwyn would develop a serious interest in astrology, which she shared with Ted. The conjunction of the stars mattered deeply to them.13 He was born at what astrologers call ‘solar midnight’. With knowledge of the exact time and place of his birth, a natal chart could be cast. He was born under the sign of Leo, the lion, which endowed him with a strong sense of self, the desire to shine. But because he was born at solar midnight, he would also need privacy and seclusion. His ‘ascendant’ sign was Cancer, bonding him to home and family. And Neptune, the maker of symbols and myths, was ‘conjunct’. His horoscope, he explained, meant that he was ‘fated to live more or less in the public eye, but as a fish does in air’.14 Bound for fame, that is to say, but fearful of scrutiny.

Did he really believe that his fate was written in the stars? ‘To an outsider,’ he once observed in a book review, ‘astrology is a procession of puerile absurdities, a Babel of gibberish.’ He granted that many astrologers peddled rubbish and craziness. Others, he thought, did make sense. He did not know whether genuine astrology was an ‘esoteric science’ or an ‘intuitive art’. That did not matter, so long as it worked: ‘In a horoscope, cast according to any one of the systems, there are hundreds of factors to be reckoned with, each one interfering with all the others simultaneously, where only judgement of an intuitive sort is going to be able to move, let alone make sense.’15 It is all too easy to select a few out of those hundreds of factors in order to make the horoscope say what you want it to say. Neptune is the sign of many things in addition to symbols and myths, but since Ted Hughes was obsessed with symbols and myths they are the aspect of ascendant Neptune that it seems right to highlight in his natal chart. By the time anyone is old enough to talk about their horoscope, their character is formed; at some level, they have themselves already written the narrative that is then ‘discovered’ in the horoscope. But there is comfort in the sense of discovery. For Ted, astrology, like poetry, was a way of giving order to the chaos of life.

‘Intuitive’ is the key word in Hughes’s reflections on astrology. If the danger of a horoscope is that it is an encouragement to the abnegation of responsibility for one’s own actions, a forgetting of Shakespeare’s ‘the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves’, the value of a horoscope is its capacity to confirm one’s best intuitions. The major superstitions – astrology, ghosts, faith-healing, the sixth sense whereby you somehow know that a person you love has died even though they are far away – are, Hughes thought, impressive because ‘they are so old, so unkillable, and so few. If they are pure nonsense, why aren’t there more of them?’16

His birth was formally registered in Hebden Bridge, the nearest large town. Father was recorded as William Henry Hughes, ‘Journeyman Portable Building maker’, that is to say a carpenter specialising in the assembly of sheds, prefabs and outbuildings. Mother was Edith Hughes, formerly Farrar.

William Hughes was born in 1894.17 His father, John, was a fustian dyer, known as ‘Crag Jack’. Family legend made him a local sage – ‘solved people’s problems, wrote their letters, closest friends the local Catholic and Wesleyan Ministers, though he spent a lot of time in pubs’.18 Crag Jack was said to have been a great singer. He was a bit of a ‘mystery man’, who came to the Calder Valley from Manchester and, before that, Ireland. In the young Ted’s imagination, he is perhaps a kind of bard or shaman, certainly a conduit of Celtic blood.

‘Crag Jack’s Apostasy’ is one of the few early Hughes poems to mention his family directly. There Jack clears himself of the dark influence of the church that ‘stooped’ over his ‘cradle’. He finds a god instead beneath the stone of the landscape.19 Here Ted takes on Grandfather Jack’s identity: the cradle stooped over by the dark church is clearly his own, shadowed by Mount Zion.

The story in the family was that Crag Jack died from pneumonia at the age of forty, leaving Willie Hughes a three-year-old orphan, together with his younger brother and elder sister. But there is a little misremembering or exaggeration here. The 1901 census records that John Hughes, aged forty-seven, and his wife Mary were living over a shop in King Street, Hebden Bridge, with their nineteen-year-old daughter, also called Mary, a ‘Machinist Fustian’, and the two boys, John aged eight (born Manchester) and Willie, seven (born Hebden Bridge), together with a young cousin called Elizabeth. Crag Jack died in 1903, closer to the age of fifty than forty. Willie was not three but nearly ten when he lost his father. Ted’s widowed Granny Hughes kept on the King Street shop for many years. She died in her eighties.

Like her husband, she had been born in Manchester. Her father was apparently a major in the regular army, his surname also being Major. His station was Gibraltar, so family tradition knew him as ‘Major Major of the Rock’. He married a short, dark-skinned, ‘Arab looking’ Spanish woman with, according to Ted, a ‘high thin nose like Olwyn’s’.20 This association with Spain and a distant Rock, an outpost of empire overlooking the Mediterranean, gave Ted the idea that he might have some exotic Moorish blood in him. A touch of blackness, akin to that of Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, found on the streets of Liverpool?

It was the Farrar family, not the Hughes, who dominated Ted’s childhood. In May 1920, Willie married Edith Farrar, who was five months pregnant with Gerald. There was a gap of eight years before Olwyn’s birth. Ted was the youngest.

Farrar was a distinguished name, woven into the historical and spiritual fabric of English poetry. Edith’s family traced their ancestry back to a certain William de Ferrers, who fought in the Battle of Hastings as William the Conqueror’s Master of Horse. Later generations of Farrars became famous in Tudor and Stuart times. One of Ted’s most prominent early poems was ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’, telling of how his ancestor was ‘Burned by Bloody Mary’s men at Caermarthen’. It was a poem of fire and smoke, evocative of the tradition of Protestant brimstone sermons that still lived in the Mount Zion Primitive Methodist Chapel over the road. ‘If I flinch from the pain of the burning,’ said the bishop on being chained to the stake, ‘believe not the doctrine that I have preached.’21 A Stoic gene to prepare Ted for his travails?

Nicholas Farrar (1592–1637), a collateral descendant of the martyred bishop, was a scholar, courtier, businessman and religious thinker. In his own way, Ted Hughes would grow up to be all these things. Cambridge University was the making of Nicholas, but he also owed a debt to the New World in that his family was closely involved with the colonial projects of the Virginia Company. The seventeenth-century Farrars eventually settled in the rundown village of Little Gidding, not far from Cambridge, where they established a community of faith and contemplation. It was to Farrar that fellow-Cambridge poet George Herbert sent the manuscript of his poetry collection The Temple from his deathbed with the instruction that it should be either burnt or published. Farrar saw that it was published, with the result that Herbert’s incomparably honest poetry of self-examination has remained in print ever since. As Hughes grew up, learning of his Farrar heritage, he could not have dreamed that a day would come when he too would be entrusted with seeing into print another poetry collection prepared at the moment of death, this one called Ariel. Like his Farrar ancestor, he had the responsibility of saving a loved one’s confessional poetry for posterity. Decisions as to whether to burn or preserve literary manuscripts would trouble him throughout his adult life.

What he did come to know, as he began reading in the canon of English poetry as a teenager, was that T. S. Eliot, the most revered of living poets, took deep religious solace from the example of the Farrar family: his great wartime meditation on the cleansing fire of faith, his fourth Quartet, was called ‘Little Gidding’. Eliot’s language seeps into Hughes’s own metaphysical lyric on his ancestor, ‘Nicholas Ferrer’ (Edith and her children were inconsistent in their spelling of the historic family name). Famously, in ‘Little Gidding’ Eliot began with spring in midwinter and ended with an epiphany of divine fire in the remote chapel deep in the English countryside. There is a catch of deep emotion in Hughes’s voice as he speaks this phrase in his recorded reading of Eliot’s poem. His own poem ‘Nicholas Ferrer’ is located in that same Little Gidding chapel, now ‘oozing manure mud’. The speaker tracks Eliot’s footsteps, past the same pigsty, in the same winter slant light. An ‘estranged sun’ echoes Eliot’s ‘brief sun’ that flames the ice on what in retrospect seem very Hughesian ponds and ditches. Nicholas and his family had ‘Englished for Elizabeth’ but in Hughes’s desolate modern November ‘the fire of God / Is under the shut heart, under the grave sod’.22

Hughes’s poem makes the death of Nicholas Farrar into a turning point in English history. It invokes the desecrating maw of Oliver Cromwell. The Little Gidding community was broken up by Puritans, who saw vestiges of Romish monasticism in their practices. Nicholas’s books were burnt. For Hughes, influenced by the Anglo-Catholic Eliot’s idea of a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ that fractured English culture and poetry at the time of the Civil War, Puritanism was the great enemy of those ‘ancient occult loyalties’ to a deeper, mysterious world that were embodied by such superstitions as astrology.

Ted’s belief in a world beyond the normal came from his mother. Edith Farrar felt that the spirit world was in touch with her. Ever since childhood, she had often felt the sensation of a ghostly hand. One night in June 1944 she was woken by an ache in her shoulder. She got up and saw crosses flashing in the sky above St George’s Chapel, which was across the road from their Mexborough home. She tried to wake William (whom she called Billie) to tell him that a terrible battle was going on somewhere and that thousands of boys were being killed. The next day the radio announced that the D-Day landings had begun early that morning.23 Later, when she and her husband moved to the Beacon, she saw a shadow in the house. She learned that the previous owners had died and their daughter had sold the house and moved into Hebden Bridge. She told the shadow, who was the mother, where her daughter now lived. It never reappeared.24

Mr Farrar, from Hebden Bridge, was a power-loom ‘tackler’ – a supervisor, with responsibility for tackling mechanical problems with the looms. Tall and quiet, with black hair and a heavy black moustache, he was fond of reading, played the violin a little and had a gift for mending watches. His grandson Ted would be good with his hands. Grandma Farrar, Annie, was a farmer’s daughter from Hathershelf, ‘short and handsome with a deep voice and great vitality’. When they went to the local Wesleyan chapel, ‘tears would roll down her cheeks under the veil she wore with her best hat’, so moved was she by the sermon or the hymns. As well as regular chapel attendance, there were prayer meetings once a week in the evening. But on Sunday afternoons came the freedom of country walks and picnics at picturesque Hardcastle Crags. The Farrars had eight children, the eldest born in 1891, the youngest in 1908: Thomas, Walter, Miriam, Edith, Lily, Albert, Horace (who died as a baby) and Hilda. In May 1905, Lily died of pneumonia, aged just four and a half.

As she grew up, Edith got on especially well with Walter, who was both easygoing and strong-willed. He wasn’t good at getting up in the morning. Soon he started work in the clothing trade, while taking evening classes to improve himself. Miriam and Edith left school at thirteen and went into the same trade, training to be machinists making corduroy trousers and moleskin jackets. Miriam was delicate. In June 1916, she caught cold and it turned to pneumonia and she died, aged nineteen.25

This was in the middle of the Great War. Walter had joined up by this time, along with some of the Church Lads Brigade. The whole village turned out to see them off, singing ‘Fight the good fight’ and ‘God be with you till we meet again’. Just weeks after Miriam’s death back home, Walter was wounded at High Wood on the Somme. He returned with a shattered leg that troubled him for the rest of his days. But it could have been worse: at first, he was reported killed in battle, only for the family to receive his Field Card saying ‘I am wounded.’ Mrs Farrar shouted up the stairs, ‘Get up all of you. He’s alive! Alive alive!’ Tom, who was in the Royal Engineers, came back gassed, broken by the death of many of his dearest friends.

Edith and her friends collected eggs and books to take to the wounded, the gassed and the shell-shocked in hospital. On the drizzly morning of 11 November 1918, she was working on army clothing when a male colleague tapped on the window, said, ‘War’s over,’ and threw his cap in the air. A flag was hoisted over the factory and everybody was allowed home, but there was no rejoicing, only deep thankfulness that it was finally over. Thirty thousand local men had joined the Lancashire Fusiliers. Over 13,500 of them were killed.

Years later, Ted Hughes would write ‘you could not fail to realize that the cataclysm had happened – to the population (in the First World War, where a single bad ten minutes in No Man’s Land would wipe out a street or even a village), to the industry (the shift to the East in textile manufacture), and to the Methodism (the new age)’. As he grew up in Mytholmroyd in the Thirties, looking around him and hearing his family tell their stories, it dawned on him that he was living ‘among the survivors, in the remains’.26

Edith’s one joy at the end of the Great War was that Billie Hughes was safe. He was a Gallipoli survivor. The story went that he had been saved from a bullet by the paybook in his breast pocket. Edith first met him in 1916 when he was home on leave, having just won the Distinguished Conduct Medal but then broken his ankle playing football when resting behind the lines – he was always a great footballer, could have been a professional. After the war, they spent their courtship walking the hills and moors, and once a week went to a dance club. In 1920, they discovered that she was pregnant and they married on a pouring wet day. For two shillings and ninepence a week they rented a cottage in Charlestown, to the west of Hebden Bridge. It had a living room, kitchen, two bedrooms and an outside toilet. They scraped together the money for a suite of furniture and on their wedding day Mrs Farrar gave them a carpet and a sewing machine. Billie’s mother was radiant on the wedding day, her white hair and fair skin set off by a mauve hat and veil.

Gerald’s birth was traumatic. The newborn boy lay blue and stiff on the washstand, and the nurse cried, ‘The baby is dead – fetch the doctor.’ But Edith told her to shake and smack him, and before they knew it he was crying and the doctor arrived and said he would be fine. When he was two, Edith went back to work and young Gerald was looked after by Granny Hughes.

They were happy in their little cottage on the hillside above the railway, though Edith didn’t like it when Billie went off for away football matches and did not return until very late at night. In 1927, they moved to Mytholmroyd, the other side of Hebden Bridge, buying the house in Aspinall Street. Now the Hughes family was truly among the Farrars: Uncle Albert, married to Minnie, was down the road at number 19 and Edith’s mother, with teenage Hilda, just round the corner in Albert Street.

The other brothers were doing very well for themselves. In the year of Gerald’s birth Uncle Walter, in partnership with a man called John Sutcliffe, started a clothing factory. When Sutcliffe left, Uncle Tom took over from him. Edith went to work for them. Walter marked and sometimes cut the cloth. He was very good at laying the heavy leather patterns for the trousers, then cutting out from the great long rolls of cloth. He was, his sister saw, ‘the director in every sense of the word’. Tom was more subdued, still affected by the gas of the trenches; Edith was terrified that his mind would drift, costing him a finger on one of the great flashing blades of the cutting machines. He was often to be found sitting in the office next to his little sister Hilda, who did the paperwork.

It was not easy for Edith and Billie to see Tom and Walter in their detached houses on the outskirts of the village: Walter and his wife Alice at Southfield, a handsome villa set back from the Burnley Road, Tom and his wife Ivy at Throstle Bower, at the top of Foster Brook, up towards the moors. Having a house with a name instead of a number was a mark of upward mobility. In addition, the brothers had cars, the ultimate sign of affluence. None of the family liked Ivy Greenwood, who looked down on the Farrars, would not even acknowledge them and certainly never deigned to invite them up to her big house. Olwyn thinks that Ivy was jealous of the close family bond among the Farrars.

The brother who really struggled was Albert. Minnie was regarded as a good catch, but she pushed him hard, resentful that Tom and Walt were getting rich on the factory, while they couldn’t keep up. Albert was a carpenter, like Billie Hughes. They both got work making prefabricated buildings. Albert would make wooden toys, to give to his nephews and nieces, or to sell: ‘toy ducks / On wooden wheels, that went with clicks’.27 One day he was knocked off his bike on the way to work and he was never the same after that.

Like all the Farrar children, Hilda left school at thirteen, but she took evening classes, learned shorthand, typing and bookkeeping, enabling her to become company secretary for her brothers. She married a much older man called Victor Bottomley, who had something to do with the motor trade. He turned out to be ‘a wrong ’un’,28 and before long Annie Farrar was instructing her sons Tom and Walt to go and bring Hilda home, where she stayed with Minnie and Albert at 19 Aspinall Street (eventually Hilda and Grandma settled at number 13).

Walt had his sadness. His two elder children, Barbara and Edwin, were, as their cousin Vicky put it, ‘witless’. Barbara seemed conscious that something was wrong with her as she struggled to learn to read. Edwin was in his own closed world. James, the only ‘normal’ son, died at the age of eleven.

When Gerald left school, he too went to work at Sutcliffe Farrar, which was located just beyond the Zion chapel. When the slump came in the early Thirties, men and women were laid off, or reduced to working two or three days a week. Billie had been working for his brothers-in-law but he was put on short time too, and in 1936 he got fed up, gave in his notice and went off with a friend to do building work for the government in South Wales. With no work at the factory, Gerald had taken to roaming the moors, leaving Edith miserable and alone with Olwyn and Ted, both under ten. She worked a little at the factory, sewing hooks and eyes on flannel trousers, and they had enough money to get by. They had paid off the house by then, food was reasonably cheap and Edith’s sewing skills meant that clothes could be mended. Billie came home once a month and soon realised how much he was missing the children. They had come into a little money from Granny Hughes and with many people struggling through the Great Depression there were opportunities in small business. Billie decided he wanted a newsagent’s. Eventually, they found one that was suitable. There was only one problem: it was 50 miles to the south-east, near Doncaster, in a ‘dark dirty place’29 called Mexborough.

They all went down in the removal van. When they arrived, Billie stood behind the counter of the new shop and the family walked in, trying to look confident. Then they went out and helped with the furniture. When the van left, Gerald sat down and cried.

2
Capturing Animals

Dumpy, bustling Moira Doolan was a powerhouse of ideas at the BBC in the early Sixties.1 Middle-aged and unmarried, she spoke with an Irish lilt and was passionate about her work as Head of Schools Broadcasting. In January 1961 Ted Hughes wrote to her with an idea for a radio series. She invited him to lunch and they worked up his proposal. It eventually became Listening and Writing, a sequence of ten talks for the Home Service’s daytime schools programming, broadcast between October 1961 and May 1964.2 Nine of the ten, together with illustrative poems by Hughes and others, were published in a book, aimed at teachers and dedicated to his own English teachers, Pauline Mayne and John Edward Fisher. Entitled Poetry in the Making, it became a classroom vade mecum for a generation and indeed one of Hughes’s bestselling books.3

In a brief introduction, he described the talks as the notes of a ‘provisional teacher’ and of his belief in the immeasurable ‘latent talent for self-expression’ in every child. The teacher’s watchword should be for children – he was typically thinking of pupils between the ages of ten and fourteen – to write in such a way that they said what they really meant. With self-expression comes self-knowledge and ‘perhaps, in one form or another, grace’.4

The series started from autobiography. The first talk, entitled ‘Capturing Animals’, began: ‘There are all sorts of ways of capturing animals and birds and fish. I spent most of my time, up to the age of fifteen or so, trying out many of these ways, and when my enthusiasm began to wane, as it did gradually, I started to write poems.’5 When the harvest was gathered in, little Ted would snatch mice from under the sheaves and put them in his pocket, more and more of them, until there were thirty or forty crawling around in the lining of his coat. He came to think that this was what poems were like: experiences captured and kept about the person.

He then explained that his earliest memory was of being three, placing little lead animals all the way round the fender of the fire in the front room, nose to tail. There was no greater treat than a trip to Halifax, where his mother or Aunt Hilda would buy him one of these creatures from Woolworth’s. Then for his fourth birthday Hilda gave him a thick green-backed book about animals. He pored over it, read the descriptions over and over again, drew copies of the photographs of animals and birds. Sometimes he would place the lead figures on the fender and read their descriptions from the book: the words put together with the things, the poet in the making. When he discovered plasticine, the possibilities for his personal menagerie became infinite, bounded only by the limit of his huge imagination.

He confided to his listeners that his passion for wildlife came from his elder brother. Gerald was his hero. And his saviour. One Christmas Billie Hughes bought his boys a Hornby clockwork train set. It was laid out in the front room by the piano. Three-year-old Ted loaded his lead soldiers aboard and Gerald wound up the engine. But an excited Ted tripped on the fender and fell towards the fire. Gerald scooped him out, but not before his hands had been blistered. ‘Fires can get up and bite you,’ Ted would say in later years.6

But this is Gerald’s memory. Olwyn’s earliest recollections are of trotting out into the fields with her mother and baby Ted, then of Ted’s two close friends, Derek Robertshaw and Brian Seymour, coming round every Saturday morning while the Hugheses were having breakfast, planning with Ted where they would go for the day and what animals they would find. They lived in the fields and they were never bored. As Olwyn remembered it, Gerald was always off with friends his own age. In Ted’s adult writings, the bond between the two brothers has a mythic force which exaggerates their closeness.

It was just before his fifth birthday that he joined Gerald on a camping trip for the first time. They were to spend the night up by the stream in the woods known as Foster Clough. Edith told Gerald not to let Ted take his model boat, for fear that he would sail it in the stream and get soaked. Those two friends, Derek and Brian, came round with advice, then the brothers set off, stopping on the way to buy sweets from the shop just past Uncle Walt’s factory. Watched by some very interested cows, they set up their tent and made a fire in a little clearing, fenced off with wire to keep the cattle out of the wood. Just before midnight, they heard their father’s call. He had come to check on them and was taking Ted home because there was a bull among the cows, making them too frisky for comfort. Ted was very excited by the bull.

From then on, Ted would often accompany Gerald on to the moor. He scurried silently beside his brother, pretending to be a Red Indian hunter. He kept a tom-tom drum hidden in Redacre Wood, where, according to local lore, an Ancient Briton, buried spirit of land and nation, lay beneath a half-ton rock.7 They loved the silence of the hills, shrouded in morning mist as they looked out over the valley below. They flew gliders and kites. Gerald taught Ted to identify all the different birds. The younger brother was fascinated by hawks and owls. Gerald shot rats, wood pigeon, rabbits and the occasional stoat, Ted acting as his retriever. Sometimes Gerald would let him have a go with the air rifle. Once the slug ricocheted back and gave him a bloody forehead, but they managed to keep the accident from their parents. They met an old-school gamekeeper called McKinley who regaled them with stories and sometimes paid them a shilling for a fat rabbit. They fished in the canal, using nets made from old curtains.

They poked around the site of a crashed plane – an RAF bomber on a training exercise had run into fog over Mytholmroyd – and salvaged bits of tubing for their own model planes. On the same site, they unearthed dozens of old lead bullets: it had been a firing range in the Great War.

In winter they sledged all the way down the fields above Jubilee Street. On snowy nights, they opened the skylight and listened to the shunting engines strain at the frozen trucks in the sidings. In summer, they would help out their uncles in the allotment or play tip cat in the fields with Uncle Albert – this was a game in which you balanced a block of wood on the end of a bat, then whacked it as far as you could send it. Occasionally, there was a special treat: a trip to the seaside, a first sight of big cats at Blackpool Zoo.

Olwyn did not join them on the hills, but she was there for family picnics at Hardcastle Crags and dips in the rocky pool on Cragg Vale. Mrs Hughes (‘Mam’ to Gerald, ‘Ma’ to Olwyn and Ted) was a great walker and swimmer. The children’s love of nature came from her. They all shared in the peace and magic of Redacre Wood, which seemed like their own private paradise.

The three siblings played in the open air around the Zion chapel. They stole gooseberries from a lady’s garden up on the Banks. They gave a fright to a younger boy called Donald Crossley by tying him to a tree, spreading leaves around his feet and setting fire to them as they danced and whooped like Red Indians.

Time spent indoors meant model-making with Gerald or reading with bookish Olwyn. Ma wrote poems for them and made up tales. They all loved the one about Geraldine mouse, Olwyna mouse and Edwina mouse because it echoed their own adventures. Grandma Farrar was charmed when they went round and read her the words of Edward Thomas, the poet and countryman who had died in the war. It was Edith who also instilled a passion for poetry in Olwyn and Ted. Wordsworth was her favourite, as might be expected of a woman who loved walking and the beauties of nature.

The war haunted Ted and his father because it had decimated a generation of the Calder Valley’s young men. The sorrow in the air of the valley came more from the war than from the decline of industry.

Gerald’s earliest memory was of finding his father’s sergeant’s stripes in a drawer and wondering what they were. Billie Hughes brought two other relics back from the war: his Distinguished Conduct Medal and the shrapnel-peppered paybook that had been in his breast pocket at Gallipoli. He told the family that he was one of only seventeen men from the company to have survived. Olwyn had a pearl necklace, which she loved to play with. Her father explained that it had been taken from the body of a dead Turk. He would occasionally shout at night in his sleep, dreaming of the Turks charging towards his trench.

When Ted was four and Olwyn six, for half a year every Sunday morning their father stayed in bed and they came in with him and said, ‘Tell us about the war.’ He told them everything, in the goriest detail, including things not very suitable for a four-year-old boy. Dismembered bodies, arms sticking out of the mud. Ted either suppressed or forgot all this, later saying that his father never talked about the war. When he wrote his story ‘The Wound’ he told Olwyn that it was something he had dreamed. The moment he woke up, he wrote it down. But he forgot certain details, so he went back to sleep and dreamed it again, filling in the gaps. But Olwyn thought that part of it was taken from their father’s memories of the war. The story includes a long walk to a palace: this was his father going up to the Front on the way to a particular sortie in which he, as Sergeant-Major, led a small group of men in a successful assault on a German machine-gun post. It was this walk up the line that Billie described so vividly in bed. He also talked about his time in the Dardanelles, but that mainly consisted of drinking tea and picking lice off his uniform. The Western Front was much more dramatic.8

Ted was formed by his outdoor life and his books, by his mother’s stories and father’s memories, but he was an attentive schoolboy at the Burnley Road Council School, bright, always asking questions. The headmaster gave a fearsome talk on the evils of alcohol. The message stuck. Ted grew up to love good wine, but always held his drink and never became addicted. Many writers have become alcoholics without bearing anguish remotely comparable to his.

A memory that became a foundational myth. In his fifties, Ted told his schoolfriend Donald Crossley that it was in Crimsworth Dene, camping under a little cliff on a patch of level ground beside what later became a council stone dump, that he had the dream that turned later into all his writing. It was a sacred place for him.9

It was sacred to Gerald as well: he told Donald that the memory of Crimsworth Dene sustained him through his service in the desert war. This secret valley, just north of Hebden Bridge, became in memory the spiritual home of the brothers.10 Gerald remembered how they had pitched their two-man Bukta Wanderlust tent for the last time. Two days later the family moved to Mexborough and life was never the same again. He felt that they both spent the rest of their lives trying to recapture those early days in the happy valley, but they never did.

The site was recommended by Uncle Walter. It had been a favourite camping spot for him, Uncle Tom and their friends before the Great War. At the top of the valley, there was a pool and a waterfall, with an old packhorse bridge going over. This had long been a favoured picnicking place for locals. The Hughes family cherished an old photo taken there: it showed six young men in Sunday best, before the war.

There was a drystone wall along the slope above the clearing where the boys pitched their tent. On their second day, they found a dead fox there. It had been killed by a deadfall trap – a heavy rock or slab tilted at an angle and held up with a stick that when dislodged causes the slab to fall, crushing the animal beneath. That night Ted slept restlessly in the tent. He told Gerald of ‘a vivid dream about an old lady and a fox cub that had been orphaned by the trap’.11

This was the dream that, according to Ted’s letter to Donald Crossley nearly fifty years later, turned into all his writing. It was his first thought-fox. He told the tale himself in ‘The Deadfall’, a short story from the last decade of his life, written for a collection of ghost stories, published to celebrate the centenary of the National Trust and edited by one of his closest friends, the children’s novelist Michael Morpurgo.12 All the stories are set in houses or landscapes owned by the Trust, of which Crimsworth Dene was one.

In the story, it is Ted’s first time in the secret valley, with its steep sides and overhanging woods. He immediately senses that it is the most magical place he has ever been to. The enclosed space means that every note of the thrush echoes through the valley and he feels compelled to speak in a whisper. At night, he can’t stop thinking about the fox for which the trap has been set. The idea of the creature near by, in its den, ‘maybe smelling our bacon’, makes the place more mysterious than ever. On the second night he is woken by the dream of the old lady, calling him out of the tent. He follows her voice up the slope to the trap, where he finds a young fox, still alive but with tail and hind leg caught beneath the great slab of stone. He is choked by ‘the overpowering smell of frightened fox’. He realises that the woman has brought him to the cub, wants him to free it. She has not gone to Gerald, because she knows that he would be likely to kill it. Summoning all his strength he manages to lift the corner of the slab – the cub snarling and hissing at him like a cat – just enough to set the animal free. It runs away and the old lady vanishes. But when he looks back at the deadfall there is something beneath it. At this moment, his brother wakes and calls him back to bed. It rains. In the morning, they go up to the deadfall and there is a big red fox, the bait (a dead wood pigeon) in its mouth.

According to the story, Gerald then digs a grave for the fox. As Ted helps him push the loose soil away, he feels what seems to be a knobbly pebble. When he looks at it closely, it turns out to be a little ivory fox, about an inch and a half long, ‘most likely an Eskimo carving’. He treasures it all his days. He and Gerald conclude that the old lady in the dream was the ghost of the dead fox.

Hughes admits in the preface to his collected short stories that this version of the incident, prepared for Morpurgo’s ghost collection, has ‘a few adjustments to what I remember’. In Gerald’s account, Ted’s dream of the old lady comes the night after they have discovered the body, whereas in the story it is a premonition of the fox’s death. Ted insisted on the reality of the memory, yet neither Gerald nor Olwyn has any recollection of the ivory fox.13 It was only as an adult that Ted began collecting netsuke and Eskimo carvings of animals.

‘The Deadfall’ was the only short story of his later career. He had not written one for fifteen years. Morpurgo’s invitation was an irresistible opportunity to round off his work in the genre. He gathered it together with his earlier stories and made it what he called the ‘overture’ to his writing.14 The camping trip with Gerald in Crimsworth Dene, the dream of the freed fox and the ivory figure that symbolically transformed his lead animal toys into tokens of art came together as his retrospective narrative of creative beginning.

The radio talks for schools that were eventually published as Poetry in the Making give incomparable insight into Ted Hughes, poet in the making. As the boy Ted sculpted his plasticine animals, so the adult writer created poetic images of fox, bird and big cat. In the same way, Ted the teacher found the right voice to capture the attention of ten- to fourteen-year-olds – exactly as his own attention had been caught by Miss Mayne and Mr Fisher.

Early in the second talk, called ‘Wind and Weather’ (there was no shortage of either in the Calder Valley), he suggested that the best work of the best poets is written out of ‘some especially affecting and individual experience’. Often, because of something in their nature, poets sense the same experience happening again and again. It was like that for him with his dreams, his premonitions and his foxes. A poet can, he argues, achieve greatness through variation on the theme of ‘quite a limited and peculiar experience’: ‘Wordsworth’s greatest poetry seems to be rooted in two or three rather similar experiences he had as a boy among the Cumberland mountains.’15 Here Wordsworth stands in for the speaker himself: the deadfall trap in Crimsworth Dene was Ted Hughes’s equivalent of what Wordsworth called those ‘spots of time’ that, ‘taking their date / From our first childhood’, renovate us, nourish and repair our minds with poetry.16

At school, Ted was plagued with the idea that he had much better thoughts than he could ever get into words. He couldn’t find the words, or the thoughts were ‘too deep or too complicated for words’. How to capture those elusive, deep thoughts? He found the answer, he tells his schools audience in the talk called ‘Learning to Think’, not in the classroom but when fishing. Keeping still, staring at the float for hours on end: in such forms of meditation, all distractions and nagging doubts disappear. In concentrating upon that tiny point, he found a kind of bliss. He then applied this art of mindfulness to the act of writing. The fish that took the bait were those very thoughts that he had previously been unable to get into words. This mental fishing was the process of ‘raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender’ that released what he called the ‘inner life’ – ‘which is the world of final reality, the world of memory, emotion, imagination, intelligence, and natural common sense’.17

Though a fisherman all his life, Ted did not follow in Gerald’s footsteps as a hunter, despite being an excellent shot. To judge from his sinister short story ‘The Head’, in which a brother’s orgiastic killing of animals leads to him being hunted down himself, he was distinctly ambivalent about Gerald’s obsessive hunting.18 At the age of fifteen, Ted accused himself of disturbing the lives of animals. He began to look at them from their own point of view. That was when he started writing poems instead of killing creatures. He didn’t begin with animal poems, but he recognised the analogy between poetry-writing and capturing animals: first the stirring that brings a peculiar thrill as you are frozen in concentration, then the emergence of ‘the outline, the mass and colour and clean final form of it, the unique living reality of it in the midst of the general lifelessness’.19 To create a poem was as if to hunt out a new species, to bring not a death but a new life outside one’s own.

Like an animal, a living poem depends on its senses: words that live, Hughes insists, are those that belong directly to the senses or to the body’s musculature. We can taste the word ‘vinegar’, touch ‘prickle’, smell ‘tar’ or ‘onion’. ‘Flick’ and ‘balance’ seem to use their muscles. ‘Tar’ doesn’t only smell: it is sticky to touch and moves like a beautiful black snake. Truly poetic words belong to all the senses at once, and to the body. Find the right word for the occasion and you will create a living poem. It is as if there is a sprite, a goblin, in the word, ‘which is its life and its poetry, and it is this goblin which the poet has to have under control’.20

Poetry is made by capturing essences: of a landscape, a person, a creature. In one talk, Hughes suggests that ‘beauty spots’ – he was remembering his childhood places such as Hardcastle Crags and the view from the moors above Mytholmroyd – ease the mind because they reconnect us to the world in which our ancestors lived for 150 million years before the advent of civilisation (the number of years is a typical Ted exaggeration). Poignantly, given that the broadcast went out a year after her death, the example he quoted at the close of this talk was ‘a description of walking on the moors above Wuthering Heights, in West Yorkshire, towards nightfall’ – ‘by the American poet, Sylvia Plath’.21

To capture people, you must find a memorable detail. ‘An uncle of mine was a carpenter, and always making curious little toys and ornaments out of wood.’ This memory of Uncle Albert was all that was needed to create the character of ‘Uncle Dan’ in his children’s poetry collection Meet My Folks!: ‘He could make a helicopter out of string and beetle tops / Or any really useful thing you can’t get in the shops.’22 To invent a good poem, though, you shouldn’t just transcribe your memories. You need to rearrange your relatives in imagination. ‘Brother Bert’ in Meet My Folks!, who keeps in his bedroom a menagerie of every bizarre creature from Aardvark to Platypus to Bandicoot to ‘Jungle-Cattypus’, is an exaggerated version of Gerald (who never kept anything bigger than a hedgehog). But the line ‘He used to go to school with a Mouse in his shirt’, Hughes reassures his listeners, does not refer to Gerald: ‘Somebody else did that.’23 The somebody else was Ted. In the poem, he and Gerald have become one. It was a way of registering his affection for his brother. His feelings about his mother, he admits, were too deep and complicated to capture: she is the one absence from the feast of Meet My Folks!

Think yourself into the moment. Touch, smell and listen to the thing you are writing about. Turn yourself into it. Then you will have it. That, for Hughes, was the essence of poetry.

He ended that seminal opening talk ‘Capturing Animals’ with two personal examples. Late one snowy night in dreary lodgings in London, having suffered from writer’s block for a year, he had an idea. He concentrated very hard and within a few minutes he had written his first ‘animal’ poem. It is about a fox but it is also about itself. The thought, the fox and the poem are one. In the ‘midnight moment’s forest’, something is alive beside the solitary poet. He captures the movement, the scent, the bright eyes. The fox’s paw print becomes the writing on the page. ‘Brilliantly, concentratedly … The page is printed’: it is a captured animal.24

The second example was one of his ‘prize catches’: a pike in a pool at Mexborough.

3
Tarka, Rain Horse, Pike

They moved on 13 September 1938, four weeks after Ted’s eighth birthday. They would stay for thirteen years to the day.1 Olwyn cried for a fortnight and the cat moped beneath a bed upstairs. Ted seemed least affected by the move. He was always adaptable, ready for a new direction. He was immediately enrolled at the Schofield Street Junior School round the corner, getting to know the local boys, some of them shopkeepers’ children, which is what he now was. His best mate was a lad called Swift, mother a greengrocer, father a miner. A neighbouring family had a brutal father, a miner who came home drunk, his face blackened from work. Ted befriended the redheaded daughter Brenda. On Saturday mornings he went to the local ‘flea pit’ cinema and watched Westerns.

The family’s new address was 75 Main Street, Mexborough: a newsagent’s in the centre of a busy mining town, where the bestselling paper was the Sporting Life, to be read daily before placing a bet on the horses. You went into the shop and diagonally to the right was a door to the downstairs living room. Edith and Billie had the front bedroom over the shop. Then there was a big bedroom to the right, over the living room. This had a double and a single bed. A door from here led to a smaller room over the kitchen. Beyond that, there was a room with just a bath. The loo was downstairs and outside. Ted played with his train set in the big bedroom. There was a garage behind, where Ted began keeping animals, notably rabbits and guinea pigs. He cried inconsolably when they died. It was not unknown for him to keep a hedgehog under the sofa in the living room.

Once again, they were overshadowed by a church: across the road stood the ugly red-brick edifice of the St George the Martyr Chapel of Ease to St John the Baptist Parish Church. Its clock had a loud tuneless chime. This was where, six years later, Edith would look out before dawn on D-Day and see crosses in the sky. It was within weeks of their moving to Mexborough that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from his meeting with Hitler in Munich and was heard on the radio speaking of ‘peace for our time’.

The business went well. Billie ordered the magazines and the tobacco, and organised the paper rounds. He also took on a concession selling tickets for coach trips. Edith diversified the stock, ordering games, stationery and dress patterns. Gerald and Ted became paperboys. Ted read all the comics and boys’ magazines on the shelves before they were sold. Even his mature poetry would be shot through with a love of super-heroes and an element of zap, kerpow and kaboom.

In later years, Aunt Hilda and Cousin Vicky came down at Christmas. For the children, the whole shop was their Christmas present: each received a pillowcase stuffed with goods, toys, sweets, chocolate.

Gerald struggled to find work locally. He had a brief stint at a steelworks just outside Rotherham, but this was ended by an accident. Then he moved down to Barnet, just north of London, to train as a garage mechanic. He bought a motorbike and started roaring around the countryside, to the consternation of young Ted, who told him he should stick to pedal power. But Gerald’s heart remained in the fields. His favoured reading was the Gamekeeper magazine and it was in answer to an advertisement there that he got a seasonal job as a second keeper on an estate in Devon. This involved rearing pheasants and locating them in the right places to be shot when the 1939 season opened. It was in Devon that he heard Prime Minister Chamberlain on the radio once again, this time announcing that the country was at war with Germany.

The war brought painful memories for Billie and Edith. For Gerald, it began a new life. He returned home at the end of the shooting season, remained there through the ‘phoney war’ and joined up in the summer of 1940. His skill with his hands and experience with engines meant that he was well suited for aircraft repair and maintenance in the RAF. From 1942 to 1944 he was posted to the desert war in North Africa. Gerald’s absence meant that Olwyn and Ted clung close together, sometimes sharing a bed. One of his earliest unpublished poems, witty and affectionate, is called ‘For Olwyn Each Evening’.2

For an adventurous boy such as Ted, there was a thrill in the sound of bombers overhead. Industrial Rotherham, just 6 miles along the river Don, was a target, as was Doncaster, 8 miles upstream. That meant blackouts at night and taped-up shop windows to prevent flying glass. A bomb fell on Mexborough railway station, but Main Street escaped.

Olwyn was a very clever girl. She got a scholarship to the local grammar school. Ted followed in her footsteps in 1941, also winning a county scholarship. Mexborough Grammar was the intellectual making of him. This was where his love of literature matured and began to intersect with his love of nature. In his first year he explored the school library and found Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter. He took it out and kept it, on and off, for two years, until he knew it almost by heart. This became the first of the talismanic books that shaped his inner life.

Williamson’s novel, first published in 1927, had become a bestseller and an acknowledged classic. Because it was written from an animal’s point of view, yet unsentimental and at times extremely violent, English teachers found it especially good to recommend to boys of Ted’s age. The combination of adventure (notably an extended hunting sequence), intricately observed natural history and heightened literary style truly caught Hughes’s imagination at a formative moment in his early adolescence. What especially impressed him was the otteriness of the book, its rigorous refusal to anthropomorphise. Tarka, he explained in a Sunday Times colour supplement article in 1962, is not ‘one of those little manikins in an animal skin who think and talk like men’.3

Hughes was enchanted. It was as if his own life in the fields and among the animals had been recreated in a book. This was the seeding of his poetic vocation. Among the set-piece descriptions that grabbed him was ‘The Great Winter’, which evoked six black stars and a great white one, ‘flickering at their pitches’ like six peregrines and a Greenland falcon, ‘A dark speck falling, the whish of the grand stoop from two thousand feet heard half a mile away; red drops on a drift of snow’. The moon, ‘white and cold’, awaits ‘the swoop of a new sun, the shock of starry talons to shatter the Icicle Spirit in a rain of fire’. Stories are written into the night sky: ‘In the south strode Orion the Hunter, with Sirius the Dogstar baying green fire at his heels. At midnight Hunter and Hound were rushing bright in a glacial wind, hunting the false star-dwarfs of burnt-out suns, who had turned back into Darkness again.’4 Here in embryo are the elements of Hughes’s poetry: the violent forces of nature played out against a cosmic backdrop, figures of myth, creation and destruction, bird of prey, blood on snow, moon, stars, apocalyptic darkness.

When he moved to Devon, Ted got to know Henry Williamson. He sat at his feet and listened to his rambling memories.5 In December 1977, he would deliver the address at a memorial service for the old writer, who had died on the very morning that the scene of Tarka’s death was being filmed for the movie of the book – another of those synchronicities that so fascinated the superstitious Hughes. Speaking to the congregation in St Martin-in-the-Fields on Trafalgar Square, he explained what had inspired him when he found Tarka in the school library all those years before. His first encounter with the book was one of the great pieces of good fortune in his life: ‘It entered into me and gave shape and words to my world, as no book has ever done since. In the confrontations of creature and creature, of creature and object, of creature and fate – he made me feel the pathos of actuality in the natural world.’ This, he said, was a gift of only the greatest writers. Though Williamson did not write in verse, ‘he was one of the truest English poets of his generation’.6

Williamson’s writing was indeed a kind of prose-poetry. Chop up the lines of a passage such as the description of ‘The Great Winter’ and you would almost have a Hughes poem. After all, Hughes did sometimes draft in prose before finding the rhythms of verse: his translations of foreign-language poetry were often versifications of literal prose versions undertaken for him by his friends, while many of the unpublished drafts for Birthday Letters live in a hinterland between journal-writing and poetry.

Tarka the Otter also got him thinking about the role of typography in literature, something in which he would take a keen interest throughout his career, whether in collaborating with his sister and others on private presswork and hand printing, or in complaining to Faber and Faber about their choice of font for a particular poetry collection. When Tarka and the hounds go down to a watery death at the very close of the book, the diminuendo of the typesetting enacts their drowning:

and while they stood there silently, a great

bubble rose out of the depths, and broke, and as

they watched, another bubble shook to the

surface, and broke; and there was a

third bubble in the sea-going

waters, and nothing

more.

Williamson was a Devon writer through and through. Tarka the Otter vividly and exactly evokes the landscape of the valleys of the twin rivers Torridge and Taw that share a North Devon estuary. Shortly after Ted and Sylvia found the house called Court Green, he realised that he had landed upon another spiritual home. On the first day he went fishing on the Taw, at the beginning of the 1962 season, an otter leapt from a ditch and led him to the river. Unawares, Ted had walked into his own ‘childhood dream’, stumbled upon Tarka’s two rivers.7 Later, he would gain riparian rights on the Torridge, at the very spot where Tarka was born. And in the Eighties, when the twin rivers’ otters and fish were threatened by pollution, he spent months and years fighting to save the aquatic life of the estuary.

Just as Tarka the Otter allowed Ted’s readerly imagination to follow brother Gerald to Devon, so Williamson’s war books, encountered later, would give him a way of comprehending his father’s experience of the trenches. He regarded The Patriot’s Progress (1930) in particular as one of the very finest of the many novels and memoirs that came out of the war. The incantatory quality of the prose, the transformation of the day-to-day realities of the soldier’s life into something epic and biblical in cadence again shaped the tones and textures of his own writing: ‘Their nailed boots bit the worn, grey road. Sprawling midday rest in the fields above the sunken valley road, while red-tabbed officers in long shiny brown boots and spurs cantered past on the stubble, the larks rising before them. But the sunshine ceased; and it rained, and rained, and rained. On the sixth day they rested.’8

John Bullock, the protagonist of Williamson’s war novel, is a symbol of England. There is danger here. Disillusionment following the war brings temptation: the search for a strong leader who will clear up the mess, stiffen the national backbone and lead a patriotic march to a New Jerusalem. In the Thirties, Henry Williamson saw such a man in Adolf Hitler. He attended the Nuremberg Rally in 1935 and was inspired by Hitler’s charisma. He idolised Oswald Mosley and became a member of the British Union of Fascists. This would turn him into a pariah in the literary world.

Hughes did not shy away from Williamson’s ugly politics. In his memorial address, he acknowledged that the stories of nature red in tooth and claw came from the same impulse as the fascism. That is to say, from a worship of natural energy that led to a fear (always close to rage) of ‘inertia, disintegration of effort, wilful neglect, any sort of sloppiness or wasteful exploitation’. Williamson’s ‘keen feeling for a biological law – the biological struggle against entropy’ sprouted into ‘its social and political formulations, with all the attendant dangers of abstract language’. His worship of ‘natural creativity’ meant that ‘he rejoiced in anybody who seemed able to make positive things happen, anybody who had a practical vision for repairing society, upgrading craftsmanship, nursing and improving the land’. This reverence for ‘natural’ as opposed to artificial life ‘led him to imagine a society based on natural law, a hierarchic society, a society with a great visionary leader’.9 The trajectory was very similar to that of D. H. Lawrence, whom Hughes would also come to admire. Such ideas, said Hughes, had ‘strange bedfellows’, but who was to say ‘that the ideas, in themselves, were wrong?’ Hughes himself shared exactly this vision of natural creativity and biological law. ‘It all springs’, he said, ‘out of a simple poetic insight into the piety of the natural world, and a passionate concern to take care of it.’ In this, Williamson was an ecowarrior before his time, ‘a North American Indian sage among Englishmen’.10 The lines of correspondence between Green thinking (‘Back to the land!’) and fascism (‘Blood and soil!’) are complex and troubling.11 Hughes, though, was too canny and grounded, too suspicious of the ‘abstract language’ of ideology, to make the fatal move from biocentric vision to extreme right-wing politics.

In the schoolroom, the boys sat on one side and the girls on the other. On winter days, biscuits and little bottles of milk for morning break were thawed on the black iron stove that stood in the middle of the classroom.

Miss McLeod, Ted’s first English teacher at Mexborough Grammar, praised his writing. His mother responded by buying him, second-hand, a library of classic poets. A children’s encyclopedia introduced him to folktales and myths. Rudyard Kipling was the first poetic favourite: the lolloping rhythms, the voicing of animals and the fables of their origins (‘How the Leopard Got his Spots’), the robust and conversational English working-class voices. Ted’s teenage poems, which he was soon publishing in the school magazine, brought Kipling’s style together with the substance of his Saturday-morning viewing of Westerns and jungle adventures. He rejoiced in imitating Kipling’s ‘pounding rhythms and rhymes’: ‘And the curling lips of the five gouged rips in the bark of the pine were the mark of the bear.’12

He also benefited from the attention of his next teacher. Sensitive to both praise and criticism, he showed her his Kiplingesque sagas. She pointed to a particular turn of phrase and said, ‘This is really … interesting … It’s real poetry.’ What she had highlighted was ‘a compound epithet concerning the hammer of a punt gun on an imaginary wildfowling hunt’. Young Ted pricked up his ears. This was an important moment.13 Soon, this second English teacher, Pauline Mayne, would introduce him to more demanding fare: the sprung rhythms and compacted vocabulary of Gerard Manley Hopkins and the challenging obscurity of T. S. Eliot.

There were many happy returns at the end of the war. The towering figure of Gerald arrived on the doorstep in September 1945, to be greeted by a now tall and handsome fifteen-year-old who stared and then, with tears streaming down his face, called out, ‘Mam, it’s him, it’s him!’14 Ted picked up his big brother’s kitbag and in they went for the reunion with Olwyn and their parents. At the grammar school, meanwhile, the masters were returning. Among them, coming out of the navy, where he had served on the North Atlantic convoys, was John Fisher, tall, with a long slim face and a copy of the Manchester Guardian tucked under his arm. Said to be the finest English teacher in Yorkshire, he put on plays, edited the school magazine – in 1947 the sub-editors were Olwyn Hughes and Edward Hughes – and taught poetry with a passion. He had the Bible, Shakespeare and classical mythology at his fingertips. He would sit on the edge of the desk and announce to the class that they were going to study Shakespeare, so they would all be bored to tears. But they never were. He brought wit and wordplay to the classroom, conjuring up Shakespeare’s characters and moving seamlessly between close reading and historical context. Whether it was Wordsworth (whom Fisher especially loved because he was raised on the Cumberland coast) or Wuthering Heights or the First World War poets, he brought the text to vivid life. He would gaze intently as he nurtured the class in the art of practical criticism, but then lighten the tone with some absurd remark (‘The school is now anchored off the east coast of Madagascar’).

‘He used the blackboard to write up names, dates, always clearly scripted,’ another pupil remembered. ‘When marking homework-essays he would write generously long comments, often in red ink which did not signify censure. He had a clear, fluent, individual hand, a joy to read. But the nitty-gritty of his teaching was working with his students through discussion of the texts.’15 Whether in catholicity of literary taste, in critical acumen, in firm-stroked handwriting or in the love of Beethoven, Fisher was an inspiration to the future poet, introducing him to Keats and Blake, Dante and Dylan Thomas. According to a fellow-pupil, Ted’s appearance – the floppy fringe falling across the eyes – was modelled on that of his master.16

Under this tutelage, and with the academic achievements of Olwyn to spur him on, Ted continued to explore the school library. His next discovery was W. B. Yeats, whose work offered a perfect combination of mesmeric poetic rhythms with subject matter rich in folklore, myth and magic. He claimed (with characteristic exaggeration) to have learned the complete works by heart. His dreams became coloured by The Wanderings of Oisin. He was ‘swallowed alive’. By a beautiful synthesis, the art of poetry, the natural world (his ‘animal kingdom’) and the world of myth and folktale ‘became a single thing’. His own poetry ‘jumped a whole notch in sophistication’.17

Olwyn added grist by introducing him to C. G. Jung’s Psychological Types, with its divisions of the mind between sensation and intuition, thinking and feeling, extravert and introvert. Like Yeats, Hughes was beginning to develop a ‘system’, at once psychological, philosophical, poetical and not a little mystical. At the same time, Shakespeare, that most unsystematic of geniuses, was an infatuation. He read the complete works, going line by line through a battered copy of W. J. Craig’s double-column, small-print Oxford edition, originally published in 1891. Then he went to the home of his girlfriend, Alice Wilson, and discovered that their edition included an additional play, The Two Noble Kinsmen, co-written by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Shakespeare’s chief contribution, the first act, was written in verse of newly knotted complexity. Alice’s mother loved classical music and, being rather better off, owned a gramophone, whereas the Hugheses only had the radio. Ted purchased recordings of Beethoven’s symphonies and concertos, taking them round to play at the Wilsons’ home.

Many of his contemporaries at the grammar school remembered him as a loner. But others recall him imposing his personality on the class, larking about (sometimes egotistically), dressing scruffily and writing vigorous reviews for the school magazine. He played a ‘dark, brooding lighthouse keeper’ in a play and wrote, cast and directed the sixth-form Christmas Revue ‘containing surreal skits anticipating the humour of the Goon Show and Monty Python, in which, for example, cowboys entered saloons to order coffins in which to place their victims.’ Mr Watkinson, the Headmaster, participated, ‘dancing enthusiastically, in full gown and mortarboard mufti, with buckskin-clad sixth-form “squaws”’.18 Above all, Ted was remembered for his size and strength. His sixth-form friend Alan Johnson, who came close to hurdling for Britain at the 1948 London Olympics, was convinced that Ted could have become a serious competitor in discus or shotput.

His academic results were more than satisfactory, though not outstanding. In July 1946, he got his School Certificate (the examination that later became O Levels, then GCSEs) in eight subjects: English Language was very good; English Literature, History, Geography, French and Physics all credits; Mathematics and Chemistry, passes. The following summer, he got a credit in Latin, a necessary prelude to the Higher School Certificate in Latin that was a prerequisite for entrance to the top universities.19 And in the summer of 1948, he passed the Higher School Certificate (the equivalent of A Levels) in English Literature (good), Geography (distinction) and French (pass). Both he and Fisher were disappointed with the English result, but his teacher’s strong support was enough to give him a shot at Cambridge.

Back in Mytholmroyd, there was a family tragedy in the summer of 1947. Uncle Albert’s depression had been growing more severe. His only solace was his woodwork in the attic. One evening, his twenty-one-year-old daughter Glennys called for him to come downstairs for supper. There was no answer. She went up to find out what was going on and fell back down the stairs as she saw the chair that he had kicked away, the body hanging. Albert’s wife ran for a neighbour, Harry Greenwood, who cut the rope.20 Forty miles to the south, perhaps at the very moment when Albert hanged himself, his sister Edith let out a cry, as if she had received a ‘hammer blow’ on the nape of her neck.21

Throughout the war years, Ted spent every free hour in the fields and woods. Before leaving home, Gerald the huntsman had found a new domain. Ted inherited it, along with his brother’s paper round. You went down Old Church Street to the edge of town and crossed a polluted river on a chain ferry, kept by an old man known as Limpy. On the other side, the road ran up the bank, over the railway, past an old pond and into the village of Old Denaby.

Ted came to regard all the land to the right of the railway and up to a place called Manor Farm as his own personal kingdom. He got to know it better than any place he would ever know. Apart from old Oats the farmer and his man, he never met a soul. In a mining town such as Mexborough during the war, nobody else was interested in nature for its own sake. His territory felt like deep country where he could stalk animals, watch, listen and shoot. He trapped mice, which he would then skin and cure, keeping them under the lid of his desk at school and selling them for a penny – or ‘maybe tuppence for a good one’.22 He got to know the local foxes, giving them personalities as if they were people. He practised discus-throwing in the fields. He joined the Denaby Wheelers, a cycling club with which he went on long-distance rides on a bike with drop handlebars.

The school magazine was named for the local rivers, Don and Dearne. In June 1946, Hughes’s first published poem appeared there, along with a short story that vividly describes the gathering in of the harvest at Manor Farm and the shooting of the rabbits and hares that emerged from the corn. Thirteen years later, he would work this up into ‘The Harvesting’, one of a sequence of stories spinning off from his boyhood. In this expanded version, the tale is spiced with magic: the narrator goes woozy with sunstroke, aims his gun at the last hare in the field, then turns into a hare himself, wounded, pursued by hounds. Autobiography has been turned to myth, as the metamorphosis and the hunt of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis are re-enacted in the landscape of Manor Farm.

The best known of his short stories, ‘The Rain Horse’ (1958), is also located at Old Denaby but again it diverges from its origin. The landscape – one particular copse especially – and the initial sighting of the horse come from a memory of being followed by a horse for about ten minutes near Manor Farm, but the animal’s return and the sense of mystery and menace draw from elsewhere. The story combines an experience of his mother’s, which, he alleges, was ‘strangely repeated twice’ in his own life, and ‘an exactly similar experience that my brother had with a mad cow’: ‘On each occasion, the animal kept pretending to attack, or really did attack but kept shying off at the last moment. The cow really did attack, demolished several walls, and had to be shot.’23 None of those incidents happened at Manor Farm. Yet the idea behind the story – that the natural world has a power that, once it grasps you, will never let you go, will gather you into a centrifuge of bond and violation – was something that he would also associate with Old Denaby.

He marked his memories of the war by those of another private kingdom, a little further out of town. Nearly fifty years later, he recollected a particular moment: ‘I was looking up into a Holly Tree beside Crookhill Pond (Conisborough) where there was sometimes a tawny owl, and I thought: today is 4/4/44 and I shall never forget this moment. Now I orient all holocaust experiences, all 2nd world war events, by that fixed moment.’24

After the war Gerald left home again. He became a policeman in Nottingham. Then, one day when he was on point duty, he saw a hoarding with a sunny poster and the words ‘Come to Australia’.25 It was advertising a special scheme that provided a cheap (£10) one-way boat ticket on condition that the emigrant stayed and worked for at least two years. Those who went became known as ‘Ten Pound Poms’. There was talk of his little brother following in his footsteps after doing a degree.

Ted had got to know a boy called John Wholey, who was in Olwyn’s class. Though eighteen months apart in age, the two lads were alike in look and temperament: quiet, tall, thin, in love with fishing, shooting and the countryside. In Gerald’s absence, John became a kind of substitute brother. His father was head gardener and gamekeeper on the Crookhill estate near Conisbrough, 3 miles east along the Don. The Wholeys lived in the keeper’s lodge, remote from everywhere other than the big house, which was being used as a sanatorium for men with terminal tuberculosis. Sometimes, when walking in the grounds, Ted would loudly recite poetry to the bemused patients. ‘Eh lad that were posh,’ they would say.26

He introduced his girlfriend Alice to the Wholeys and she eventually married John. Ted, meanwhile, very much liked John’s sister, Edna. He had regularly gone over to Crookhill on Saturdays. Now that he was older, he was allowed to go on Friday nights. ‘Have you come for the weekend?’ Mrs Wholey would ask. ‘Yes, please,’ said Ted. On one occasion, his parents accompanied him, in order to ensure that the arrangement was acceptable: ‘If our Edward misbehaves send him home with a flea in his ear,’ said his mother. He was soon one of the family. At their VE Day party, in the absence of fireworks, Ted and Johnny found some of keeper Wholey’s cartridges and threw them on the bonfire. The explosion made the ladies jump and Mr Wholey angrily banned the boys from using guns for several weeks. In a way, this suited Ted. Something was changing in him, and he lost the urge to hunt and to kill. He rarely shot again. Trap and gun gave way to rod.

The usual pattern was homework first, then fishing. In winter, they made their own rods out of split canes. A nearby pond was stocked with perch, roach and pike. They caught frogs and spiked them on the barbed wire around the pond, but then they would be sorry, so they held animal funerals as atonement. Sometimes they went out without permission in a little rowing boat. Once Ted and Johnny threw in a hedgehog to see if it would swim, but were ashamed and fished it out again, and Ted wrapped it in his jumper and took it home, where they dried it on the kitchen range. Another time, Ted told Edna to close her eyes and he gently placed a dormouse in her cupped hands.

He found an injured owl by the roadside and brought it back to Crookhill. Mr Wholey let him keep it in one of the outbuildings on condition that he cared for it at weekends (the kind keeper looked after it himself during the week). Ted used to sit and talk to it for hours. Sometimes in the small hours of the morning, Mr Wholey would gently wake the boys and Edna so as to take them out to watch badgers at play, before returning for a hot drink and back to bed. Once, under a full moon, they watched hundreds of frogs cross the lane.

He always had a book in his pocket, together with pencil and paper. He would go out in the fields for hours. He and Edna roamed in the woods reciting Longfellow’s Hiawatha, which she had to learn by heart for school. They walked, they talked, they dreamed. Ted would suddenly say ‘Stand still and listen’ and take from his pocket a crumpled page of poetry. They kept the ones that Edna liked best, stuffed others into holes in the tree trunks. He lay with his head on her lap and read to her. After John had left for National Service, Ted continued to go to Crookhill. He walked alone, high from reading verse aloud. ‘I used to sit around in the woods, muttering through my books. I read the whole of The Faerie Queene like that. All of Milton. Lots more. It became sort of a hobby-habit.’27

His earliest surviving letter is to Edna, written when he was seventeen and she had gone off to train as a nurse. He wrote that there were things which held ‘places of high wonder’ in his imagination. Things that ‘posterity may wonder at’, things that when placed before the camera of everyday life ‘invariably shattered the lens, burnt the film and slew the photographer’. ‘I have seen’, he went on, invoking the image of a caged animal that would become a recurring figure in his poetry, ‘things which, when put on public view, slew the unlooking population by the thousand, melted the iron bars which encased it and leaping for freedom, reduced the room which contained it to general matchwood and lumber.’28 Like the jaguar that he would conjure into poetry, Hughes came to hate being ‘put on public view’. But in his imagination he melted the iron bars. Already he is imagining that it will be his vocation to create ‘places of high wonder’ for himself and for readers. Even as a schoolboy, writing half ironically and in full awareness of his own hubris, he wanted posterity to wonder at him. The same thought – voiced with self-mocking boyish arrogance – recurs in another letter to Edna in which he imagines himself as a great poet immortalised in a burial urn in Trafalgar Square.

His favourite fishing place on the Crookhill estate was a large pond, very deep in places. In the ‘Capturing Animals’ talk, he evoked the memory of seeing giant forms on the surface resembling railway sleepers. They were huge pike. His poem ‘Pike’, he said, captured not just a fish but ‘the whole pond, including the monsters I never even hooked’.29 The pond is as deep as England, deep as memory. It is at once his childhood, his unconscious and the spirit of place that made him who he was.

Throughout his life, he remained hooked by the mystique of the pike. They were, he said, ‘fixed at some very active, deep level in my imaginative life’.30 They filled his dreams. If he was feeling good about life, he would dream of giant pike that were also leopards, full of energy, connecting him to the vital forces of the universe. If he was feeling bad, he would dream that the pond of the pike was filled with concrete and bereft of fish. Nothing gave him more pleasure in the Seventies than fishing the loughs of Ireland with his teenage son Nicholas, plumbing the dark, mystic depths for what in a myth-heavy poem he called ‘The Great Irish Pike’.31

At the end of 1968, he and Gerald drove to Mexborough to find the pond. The Wholeys’ lodge was in ruins, its garden entirely overgrown. They went down to the pond and found that ‘it had shrunk to an oily puddle about twenty feet across in a black basin of mud, with oil cans and rubbish’. Ted’s son Nicky made a few half-hearted casts into the dank water. They felt low, despite the presence of Ted’s name carved on a tree as a token of memory. As rain began to fall, Ted made one token cast himself, which he described as ‘a ceremonial farewell’, and there ‘among the rubbish’ he hooked ‘a huge perch’, one of the biggest he had ever caught: ‘It was very weird, a complete dream.’32

Manor Farm is now a gastropub, the Crookhill estate a golf course, the pond of the pike shrunk by mud and reed. The magic landscape survives only in Hughes’s writings.

4
Goddess

In order to get into Oxford or Cambridge University, you had to stay on at school for an extra term and take a special entrance exam. Ted Hughes duly won an exhibition: better than a mere place, but below a scholarship. Its value was £40 per year (a scholarship was £60), as much a matter of prestige as cash. His fees and a grant towards living expenses would be paid by the government; he was of that lucky first generation in which, thanks to grammar school and university grant, bright boys from very ordinary backgrounds had access to the best education without having to worry about money.

In later years, Ted liked to put about the myth that he got his place at Cambridge only because John Fisher sent the Master of the college a sheaf of his poems and a letter singing his praises as a budding writer, which led to his being admitted as a ‘dark horse’ despite failing the exam. But this would not have got him an exhibition and indeed in the Pembroke College archive there is a letter in which Fisher apologises for sending the poems, recognising that it might have been inappropriate to do so.1 Hughes got a place to read English at Cambridge on his merits as a schoolboy literary critic.

But there was a hitch. At the end of his first year in the sixth form, the government had introduced a National Service Act. The army was not getting enough recruits – hardly surprising after the long years of war – so conscription was introduced for healthy males between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one. The Act was due to come into force on 1 January 1949. Just weeks before it did so, in the very month in which Hughes got his offer from Cambridge, the period of service was increased from twelve to eighteen months, in the light of the ‘Emergency’ in Malaya and the Berlin blockade that began the Cold War. There was a genuine fear that another major war might be on the way all too soon.

Boys with university places on offer were allowed to serve before or after taking their degree. Ted decided to get it out of the way and, following in Gerald’s footsteps, applied for the Royal Air Force rather than the army. By the time his application had been processed and he had passed the medical, the eighteen-month period would have made it impossible for him to go up to Cambridge in the autumn of 1950. While he was still in uniform, the period of service was further extended, to two years, because of the outbreak of the Korean War.

He did not see active service. The RAF didn’t really know what to do with its compulsory recruits. There was an awful lot of sitting around, which for Ted meant the opportunity to read and to write. For two years he would be identified as ‘number 2449573 A.C. 2 Hughes E. J.’ (the abbreviation stood for ‘Aircraftman Second Class’). He sent witty, flirtatious and bored letters to Edna Wholey, first from Hut D35 of the RAF station at West Kirby on the Wirral, then from the Ops Section and after that from the Signals Section at RAF Patrington, near Hull in Yorkshire. His reports were of severe haircuts, rough and tumble in the barracks, dreadful food, pointless exercises, rain, rain and more rain, made bearable only by food parcels from home, the anticipation of the next ‘48’ (two days’ leave) and the quiet opportunity to read once he settled into his position as a flight plotter. He dated several local girls, none seriously, though he described one of them – Hilda Norris – as having ‘eyes like a tiger’.2

Patrington was a radar station for ground-controlled interception, whereby fighter planes would be guided towards an incoming target. Since there was no immediate prospect of Russian bombers or missiles winging their way over Bridlington Bay to the Holderness marshes of the East Riding, the screen was usually blank and, especially when on night duty, Ted was free to deepen his knowledge of the psychology of Jung and the canon of English literature. Shakespeare, Yeats and Blake were his constant companions. Among prose-writers, he especially admired William Hazlitt, regarding his essays as a model of ‘what-prose-ought-to-be’.3 The influence tells on the lucid, muscular prose he wrote throughout his life. He also composed poems for Edna, including an ‘epithalamium’ for her marriage – though he expressed some displeasure at the idea of her being with another man. They were pals who flirted rather than true lovers. He writes of kissing her wrists, not her lips. But he felt possessive about their special bond with each other and with their secret Crookhill places.

The finest poem he wrote during his National Service was addressed to another girl, Jean Findlay, the great beauty of Mexborough Grammar School. Ted had wooed her with poetry when he was a sixth-former.4 Now he saw her when he went home on leave. Walking back from a date, a love song formed in his head. On returning to duty – night watch, three o’clock on the morning of 13 June 1950, ‘after slogging at stupidities’ – he finished it in a two-minute heat of inspiration. It was the only early poem that he cared to preserve. Simply entitled ‘Song’, he included it (as a last-minute addition) in his first published volume, The Hawk in the Rain. He later said that it had a kind of ‘natural music’ that he never recaptured – or not at least until the more personal voice of his later poetry.5 Influenced by the medieval traditions of courtly love in general and the early lyrics of Yeats in particular, it turns Jean Findlay into an icy or marbled lady, blessed by ‘the tipped cup of the moon’, caressed by the sea and kissed by the wind but unwilling to give herself to the poet. His heart has fallen ‘all to pieces’ at the thought of her.6

The all-male world of National Service was frustrating for young men of nineteen and twenty. Ted had a lot of time to turn Edna and Jean into creatures of his imagination. Thinking about them both, and writing poems inspired by them, made him reflect on ancient types. Was Edna in the woods an embodiment of woman as nurturing Mother Nature? And Jean the incarnation of desirable but dangerous Beauty?

His thinking about such dualities was shaped by his reading of Jung’s Psychological Types, that book to which he had been introduced by his pathfinder Olwyn. She was now down in London, studying for an English Literature degree at Queen Mary College on the Mile End Road. She graduated in the summer of 1950 with a lower-second-class degree. As at school, she had not quite achieved her full academic potential: there was something prophetic in a sixth-form end-of-term report that read, ‘Olwyn has done creditable work on the whole. But she must not allow herself to be distracted.’7

Jung’s book divided human beings into two character types, introverted personalities who were highly subjective and absorbed in their own psychological processes, and extraverted personalities who were attuned to objects, to other people and to the external world. Jung treated this model as a key to all mythologies. His massive book worked through virtually the entire history of Western (and not a little Eastern) thought, dividing up ideas and writers according to extravert and introvert. Special value was attached to the inner life of the introvert, the type that was said to be typical of the creative artist.

Jung gave considerable space to a very distinctive exegesis of Carl Spitteler’s allegorical prose poem Prometheus and Epimetheus (1881), making it the basis for the proposition that the mythical figure of Prometheus is both the exemplar of the creative artist and the archetypal introvert who surrenders himself entirely to his inner psychic function. Hughes took the model to heart: he told Olwyn of how he tried ‘to inhibit all conscious thought and fantasy, so that my unconscious would compensate with an increased activity’.8 His hope was that poetry would emerge directly from his unconscious, rather as Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed that the vision of Kubla Khan came to him fully formed in a dream. For Ted, dreams would always be the taproot into the unconscious. Throughout his life, many of his journal entries consist of records of extraordinary dreams.

According to Jung, the union of opposites in the works of Spitteler took the form of the worship of women, a symbol for worship of the soul. In a move typical of Jung’s development of Freud, it is suggested that the libido is originally attracted to woman in an erotic fashion, but then fastened on to a symbolic function that had something to do with the development of religion. As Ted would come to see it, the girl is replaced by the Goddess; the choice between two girls is transformed into a battle between two aspects of the Goddess.

Aircraftman Second Class E. J. Hughes finished his National Service and went home to prepare for university. His formal discharge was signed off later in the year, summarising his record as follows: enlisted, 27 October 1949; discharged from National Service 5 October 1951; ‘Trade – Ground Wireless Mechanic – care and maintenance of transmitting and receiving gear’; ‘Trade Proficiency – Good’; ‘Character – Exceptional’; ‘Bearing [the options being Very Smart, Smart or Untidy]: Smart’; ‘Rank on discharge – L.A.C.’ (Leading Aircraftman, one rank above entry level); ‘6' 2" fresh complexion, blue eyes, brown hair’.9 His bearing was not always smart in later years, but transmitting on the radio would, in another way, become an important part of his life: in the early Sixties, his principal source of income was as a freelance contributor to the British Broadcasting Corporation.

A letter dated 30 May 1951 arrived from the Awards Branch of the Ministry of Education, informing him that the University Supplemental Award offered to him in 1949, and postponed due to his National Service, was now being converted to a state scholarship, enabling him to study for his English degree at Pembroke College, Cambridge, with effect from the coming October. The award consisted of a grant to cover the whole or part of the tuition fees, together with a maintenance grant, its amount to be determined on the basis of parental income. A subsequent letter, following the financial assessment, informed Hughes that his university fees would be paid, and he would receive a grant of £218 per annum, in addition to the £40 exhibition that he had won from the college.

In the late summer, his father found a shop that would enable them to return to the Calder Valley. The family left Mexborough and moved to Woodlands Avenue at the Hebden Bridge end of Todmorden. Though on the other side of Hebden Bridge from Mytholmroyd, they were back in the family domain, once again on the north side of the valley. You went over a railway bridge and up on to the hillside. The road had a very respectable and rather suburban feel to it. One side of it was lined with Thirties houses, some semi-detached. The Hugheses were at number 4, opposite a big house called Stansfield Hall. It felt a rather indeterminate, in-between sort of place, but it was the home to which Ted would return in his university vacations.

As a ‘going up’ present before he left for Pembroke, his teacher John Fisher, to whom he owed so much, gave him a copy of Robert Graves’s recently published The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth.10 Reading it through the lens of Jung, Ted was engrossed. He saw in Graves a mature mirror of his own youthful self. ‘Since the age of fifteen poetry has been my ruling passion,’ began Graves. And so it had been for Hughes. Poetry is rooted in magic, the book claims; poets are in touch with a mysterious primeval magical potency. The poet is priest and judge, prophet and seer, ‘in Welsh derwydd, or oak-seer, which is the probable derivation of “Druid”’. The truest poetry tunes in to ancient rhythms. Graves’s very first example was the Welsh bardic Cynghanedd with its ‘repetitive use of consonantal sequences with variants of vowels’, as illustrated by the lines:

Billet spied

Bold sped,

Across field

Crows fled,

Aloft, wounded,

Left one dead.

Which sounds rather like a Ted Hughes poem.

Graves signs up to the belief of the Welsh poet Alun Lewis, who was killed in the Burma campaign, that the ‘single poetic theme’ is Life and Death, ‘the question of what survives of the beloved’. He then gives the Theme a capital letter and turns it into an ancient story that he finds played out in the myths and epic poems of every culture. It involved a battle between the God of the Waxing Year and the God of the Waning Year for the love of the ‘capricious and all-powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride and layer-out’. The poet identifies himself with the God of the Waxing Year and his Muse with the Goddess, while ‘the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird’. Graves’s next paragraph haunted Hughes all his writing life:

The Goddess is a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowan-berries, startlingly blue eyes and long fair hair; she will suddenly transform herself into sow, mare, bitch, vixen, she-ass, weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid or loathsome hag … The test of a poet’s vision, one might say, is the accuracy of his portrayal of the White Goddess and of the island over which she rules.

Graves applied the term ‘poet-laureateship’ to the grounding of the Goddess in an island landscape and the role of the poet as the guardian of the spirit of both place and tribe. Hughes took this to heart. For better or for worse, in some of his richest poems and some of his poorest, till death parted him from Sylvia Plath and on until his own death, in health and in sickness brought on (he believed) by writing too much prose, Hughes married his imaginative vision to Graves’s claim that ‘a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust – the female-spider or the queen-bee whose embrace is death’.11

Like Jung, Graves then went on to apply his system across cultures and ages. Hughes immersed himself in chapters with titles such as ‘Fabulous Beasts’, ‘The Return of the Goddess’ and ‘The Roebuck in the Thicket’ (a vital motif for the very first version of Birthday Letters). He took special pleasure in the Celtic material, which added Welsh traditions to the Irish myths he had already encountered in Yeats. Here was the ninefold Muse Cerridwen who was originally the Great Goddess in her poetic or incantatory character, who had a son who was also her lover, the Demon of the Waxing Year, before she was courted by the Thunder-god (‘a rebellious Star-son infected by Eastern patriarchalism’), by whom she had twins, Merlin the magician and his sister Olwen. Ted lapped up all this and regurgitated much of it forty years later in his heftiest tome, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. He once told Graves that The White Goddess was ‘the chief holy book on poetic conscience’.12

All developed cultures, Graves suggests, eventually destroy the Goddess and replace her with a patriarchal sky god. ‘This stage was not reached in England until the Commonwealth, since in mediaeval Catholicism the Virgin and Son – who took over the rites and honours of the Moon-woman and her Star-son – were of greater religious importance than God the Father.’13 This idea chimed nicely with one of the tenets of certain prominent members of the English Faculty where Ted Hughes was now heading: that during the Civil War, just after the age of Shakespeare, a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ fractured English culture and society, and that it was the job of the poet to repair it.

In October 1951 he went up to Cambridge.

5
Burnt Fox

Cambridge is a city of water and history. Pembroke College, where Ted Hughes matriculated in the autumn of 1951, is at the top end of Trumpington Street, which leads out to the village where Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale was set. Immediately outside the college was Fitzbillies bakery, which had served Chelsea buns to generations of students. Turn right and you are in King’s Parade, dominated by the most glorious Gothic chapel in the world. Crossing the road from Pembroke, you pass the Pitt Building, which housed Cambridge University Press, the oldest publisher in the world. Then you are in Mill Lane, where gowned undergraduates attended lectures by such luminaries as Dr F. R. Leavis and (until his death in the year that Hughes went up) Ludwig Wittgenstein. In summer, you could hire a punt at Scudamore’s Boatyard by the mill pond, beside which were two much-frequented and watery-named pubs, the Anchor and the Mill. From there, the river Cam meandered via Byron’s Pool towards the village of Grantchester that had been immortalised by King’s College student Rupert Brooke.

In Michaelmas term, when freshmen arrived, Cambridge was bitterly cold and shrouded in fog. According to student lore, the wind came straight off the Ural mountains. Ted wrapped himself in his Uncle Walt’s Great War leather topcoat and fed all his change into the guttering gas fire in his room. But walking around town, among the colleges, there was something in the air that made everyone seem wide awake. He dressed in black, dying his own corduroy from the Sutcliffe Farrar factory. One contemporary said that he looked like a fisherman on a stormy night, while another – a jealous fellow-poet – remembered his ‘smelly old corduroys and big flakes of dandruff in his greasy hair’.1

Ted Hughes and Evelyn Waugh could hardly have been more different as writers,2 but they had one thing in common: the friends they made at university became friends for life. Ted’s best friend in college was an Irishman called Terence McCaughey. They were supervision partners, which is to say that they had their weekly tutorial together in the room of the Pembroke College English Fellow, M. J. C. Hodgart, an authority on medieval ballads who also had a passion for James Joyce. McCaughey recalls how he and Ted bumped into each other in Heffers bookshop, where they were supposed to be buying set texts in their first or second week as freshmen. One book on the list was an anthology of Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose. Ted explained that he already had a copy, passed down to him by his sister, but that it was an older edition lacking the vocabulary list. He proposed selling this to McCaughey and buying himself a new one, complete with vocabulary, thus simultaneously getting a bargain and doing a favour.

They soon became fast friends, their Yorkshire and Irish accents contrasting with the self-entitled voices of the public schoolboys who lorded it over Cambridge. They shared a love of music, nature and words. They would spend their evenings in one or the other’s room, reading poetry aloud or listening to Beethoven on 78rpm records. They went to the cinema together, especially enjoying the comedies of the Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton. Sometimes at dusk they walked along the Backs of the colleges or strolled on to Coe Fen, where, among the grazing cows, Ted blew mimic hootings to answering owls. They supplemented college food – which was no better than that of the National Service mess – with brown bread, cheese mixed with marmalade and, a particular Yorkshire delicacy, treacle sandwiches. Olwyn came to visit and Terence was amazed at the seriousness with which she and Ted discussed their friends in terms of horoscopic compatibility.

McCaughey went on to become a clergyman. They kept in touch by letter and occasionally visited each other. On Ted’s last trip to Dublin, just four months before he died, Terence took him to the recently renovated University Church, built at Cardinal Newman’s behest for the Catholic college. Quietly, Ted said, ‘This fairly closely persuades me to become a Catholic or a Christian.’3 But this was a sentiment felt in the moment: there was no subsequent deathbed conversion to orthodox faith.

About two-thirds of the Pembroke undergraduates were from public schools, one-third from grammar schools. Ted inevitably gravitated towards the latter group. Brian Cox was a typical example. Born in Grimsby into a frugal, lower-middle-class Methodist household, he grew up an avid reader, burying himself in the Grimsby public library after his mother died of tuberculosis when he was ten. After National Service, during which he wrote half a novel, he won a scholarship to Pembroke. With his friend Tony Dyson, another Pembroke man, he attended a term of Dr Leavis’s classes but was disillusioned by the narrowness of his taste and the seeming puritanism of his critical method. Cox blamed Cambridge English for killing his own creativity and driving him to become a critic rather than an imaginative writer. Looking back on his time at college, he felt that he had learned more from his contemporaries than from the English Faculty: breakfast, lunch and dinner were taken in the college hall and the students who were ‘in passionate love with literature’ sat together, arguing ‘over the long wooden tables about Shakespeare or Donne or Dickens meal by meal’.4

In his first year, Ted had to prepare for the ‘Preliminary’ examinations, which had to be passed but did not count towards the final degree. He took a medieval paper, in which his special delight was the anonymous alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with its green giant carrying away his own chopped-off head, its seductive enchantress and wintry northern English landscapes (including a journey across ‘the wilderness of Wirral’ where Ted had begun his National Service). For the Shakespeare paper, Richard III, Othello and Measure for Measure were set texts, but with his voracious literary appetite he habitually woke at six in the morning and read a complete play by nine. The whole canon was at his command.

Then there was a compulsory language paper (‘use of English’ and translation from either French or Latin) and a paper offering, first, passages for detailed explanation and comment from the Metaphysical poets and Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, and second, essay topics on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors. ‘Swift is the only stylist,’ he opined, the exemplar of ‘clarity, precision, concisenesss and power’.5 The Irish satirist taught Hughes the art of entering a word as if it were a world, of writing prose that is instantly accessible and memorable yet wild in imaginative reach. There was also a paper on literary criticism and, indeed, underlying all the work was the distinctive Cambridge method of practical criticism: close reading of the words on the page, dating of passages by their style, discrimination of good poetic writing from bad. In everything that he wrote, Hughes chose his words with care. He judged his own writing by the high standards instilled by John Fisher and reinforced by the Cambridge school of criticism. His letters to Olwyn are prose poems in themselves: ‘Sometimes I think Cambridge wonderful, at others a ditch full of clear cold water where all the frogs have died. It is a bird without feathers; a purse without money; an old dry apple, or the gutters run pure claret.’6

In his second term, King George VI died and there was a sense of national excitement and new hope projected on to the young Queen. He exclaimed to Olwyn that they were the new Elizabethans, the first since the time of Hamlet; he wrote a masque in which the first Elizabeth met the second; he dared to dream that he might become the poetic soul of a new English Renaissance. His principal extra-curricular activity was the university Archery Club – a suitably Elizabethan sport.

Six feet two inches, dark and handsome, he cut a figure striding along King’s Parade in his long dark coat. Reminiscing, he told of an occasion when an undergraduate called out, ‘Ted, Ted,’ ran up to him, shook his hand and said ‘Thank you for saving England.’ He had, he explained, been mistaken for Ted Dexter, the charismatic university cricket captain who made his Test debut while still an undergraduate. The two men did indeed share the same dark good looks. Whether or not there is embellishment in the telling,7 the spirit of the tale is true: saving England by re-embodying the heady spirit of Elizabethan poetry was indeed our Ted’s mission. He believed that a person’s whole biography was visible in their walk.8 All who knew him at Cambridge remembered the long coat and the confident stride, whereas his poetic ambition was, at least in his first year, kept under wraps.

The end of the academic year was marked by a May Ball, held in June. Ted was still in touch with Edna Wholey, who was now living with her husband in nearby Bedford. He had been to stay with them for a weekend and, though he confided to Olwyn that their company now bored him, he went over again and asked Edna to accompany him to the Ball. She declined, probably because her husband disapproved of the idea, but a visitor happened to present, a stunningly beautiful dark-haired Italian called Carina, niece of a Bedford celebrity, boxer and bit-part movie actor Tony Arpeno. So Ted asked her instead. Since they had never met before, everyone was rather startled when Carina accepted. Her parents booked a hotel room in Cambridge, waited up anxiously all through the night of the Ball and whisked her off to the station at dawn. A surviving photo from Ball night shows Ted with his trademark lock of hair falling over the eyes. He has the facial expression of a cat that got the cream.

Summer back home in Woodlands Avenue, Todmorden, was dull in comparison, with Gerald far away in Australia and Olwyn working in London. After graduating, she had taken a secretarial course at Pitman on the Bayswater Road in order to make herself employable. Ted set up a study for himself in the attic and prepared for his second year.

When he returned to Pembroke in the autumn, he had different accommodation. It was a good-sized first-floor room with large windows, tucked away in a building that had once been the Master’s Lodge, reached via an opulent staircase and looking out over the Fellows’ car park. He was screened from street-noise, but annoyed by a loud public schoolboy on the floor above. He took revenge by playing Beethoven far into the night.

Music was a serious passion. Olwyn moved to Paris that autumn to take up a secretarial job at the British Embassy, and he wrote to tell her of many a concert. His standards were high: at a recital by the legendary pianist Solomon (Cutner) there were some disappointingly slight encore pieces and then, in response to the cry ‘More Beethoven!’, a rendering of the Waldstein sonata which Ted did not consider up to scratch. He expressed a good deal more enthusiasm for his new academic supervisor, a graduate student called Eric Mottram, who was a poet and an enthusiast for avant-garde American poetry. ‘I never knew anyone so forceful in his flow,’ Ted told Olwyn. Supervisions were heated, argumentative, energising, extending well beyond the appointed hour’s length.9

By day, Ted took charge of the reorganisation of the Archery Club. He kept a great bow in a corner of his room, and practised for hours. By virtue of representing the university against Oxford, he won a ‘half-blue’. In the evenings, besides concerts, there were films and plays – and the pub. The highlight of Michaelmas term was a poetry reading by Dylan Thomas, at the Cambridge Union under the auspices of the English Society. For the first time, Ted witnessed a charismatic poet in the flesh, holding an audience rapt with his word music. Afterwards, together with McCaughey and a couple of other friends, he followed Dylan Thomas and the society committee to the Eagle in Bene’t Street so as to listen in on their conversation. Thomas and his acolytes spoke of filling Swansea Bay with beer. Elated, Ted and his friends then returned to Pembroke and burst into the room of Francis Holmes à Court, a literary-minded undergraduate of aristocratic pedigree (he subsequently succeeded his father, the 5th Baron Heytesbury). There they met another Welshman, a freshman called Daniel Huws who had been at school with Holmes à Court and had now come up to Peterhouse, just across the road. Ted, still high on the oxygen of Thomas’s poetry, didn’t really notice him, but the following year their respective circles of friends conjoined in the Anchor pub, with its dark-brown bar, table-football machine and, downstairs, benches by the landing-stage beside the punts waiting for hire.

In the Anchor, Ted was a brooding silent presence, content to let others make the conversational running. The most opinionated was Roger Owen, Liverpool Welsh, all politics and sociology. But when Ted spoke, everyone listened. He wasn’t interested in politics but was an oracle on matters literary and was scathing about many of the dons in the English Faculty. Everyone in the group had a store of anecdotes, mostly mocking, about the lectures of Dr Leavis. Ted especially loathed the one on his beloved Yeats. In the Cambridge system, it was the weekly college supervision that counted. Lectures were an optional extra. Ted went to fewer and fewer as he progressed through his degree, but he thought well of both the theatrical Dadie Rylands and the sometime surrealist poet Hugh Sykes Davies on Shakespeare.

Towards the end of the pub evenings, much beer consumed, Terence McCaughey, with his seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of Irish ballads, led them in singing. Ted would eventually be cajoled into participation. ‘He had a soft, light voice,’ Huws recalled, ‘with the slight tremolo which later characterized his reading voice.’10 His party pieces were traditional numbers such as ‘Eppie Morie’ and Coleridge’s favourite, the grand old ballad of ‘Sir Patrick Spens’. Then they would all join in a round of ‘Waltzing Matilda’.

Others who joined the Pembroke group at the Anchor were Fintan O’Connell and Joe Lyde, Northern Irish grammar school boys, one a Catholic and the other a Protestant. Lyde was loud and sometimes rude, a trumpeter and jazz pianist with the best band in Cambridge. A ladies’ man, he would get to play in New Orleans, aggravate Sylvia Plath with his outlandish tales and brash words, and die young, of drink.

As for Ted’s studies, there were supervisions on the Victorians and a special paper on Wordsworth and Coleridge, very much to his taste. Always able to read poetry with close attention, he jumped easily through the hoop of Cambridge practical criticism and achieved a 2.1 classification in Part I of the English Tripos, the honours examination at the end of the second year. Only nine candidates achieved first-class honours in English that year, and over 120 got a 2.2 or a Third. Ted and three of his Pembroke contemporaries were among the thirty 2.1s, outshining the four other Pembroke students, so this was a very creditable if not an outstanding performance.

The Cambridge degree is very flexible: it was perfectly possible to take one part of the Tripos in one subject and the other in something completely different. After Part I, half the Pembroke English students changed course. Ted’s choice was Archaeology and Anthropology. He thus missed out on the paper that he would most have enjoyed had he stuck with English: the study of Tragedy from the ancient Greeks via Shakespeare and Racine to Ibsen, Chekhov and Yeats, a course in which Sylvia Plath would immerse herself a couple of years later.

Many times over the years Ted Hughes told the story of why he switched away from English. It was one of his party pieces, often used to introduce public readings of his best-known poem, ‘The Thought-Fox’ – though that poem was not written until well after he graduated. He was not always consistent in the details of the tale, so there may well be a characteristic element of invention, or at least embellishment, in the telling. But there is no doubting the centrality of the story to his personal myth.

A cornerstone of Cambridge undergraduate life is the ‘essay crisis’. Terms are short, reading lists are long and extra-curricular distractions are legion. The essay for the weekly supervision is accordingly left to the last minute, written deep into the night. Ted sometimes wrote with great facility, especially if the subject was one of his passions, such as William Blake. But sometimes he could not get going on his essay. He’d stare at the blank page on his desk, write and rewrite an opening, cross it out, give up and go to bed.

One night when this happened, he dreamed that he was still at his desk, in his ‘usual agonising frame of mind, trying to get one word to follow another’. The lamplight fell on the page. In the dream the door slowly opened. A head appeared in the dim light: at the height of a man but with the form of a fox. The creature descended the two or three steps down into the room. With its fox’s head and ‘long skinny fox’s body’, it stood upright, as tall as a wolf reared on its hind legs. The hands were those of a man: ‘He had escaped from a fire – the smell of burning hair was strong, and his skin was charred and in places cracking, bleeding freshly through the splits.’ The creature walked across the room to the desk, placed the paw that was a human hand on the page and spoke: ‘Stop this – you are destroying us.’ The burns were worst on the hand, and when the fox-man moved away there was a bloody print upon the page. The dream seemed so wholly real that Ted got up and examined his essay for the bloody mark. He determined forthwith to abandon his course in English Literature. In some versions of the story, he dreams again the following night. Either the fox returns and nods approvingly, or the creature returns in the variant form of a leopard, again standing erect.

In his fullest recounting of the story, Hughes says that the essay he was (not) writing was on Samuel Johnson, a personality he greatly liked. Johnson and Leavis are the only two English writers habitually referred to as ‘Doctor’ (the critic George Steiner once quipped that theirs were the only two honorary doctorates conferred by the Muses). Dr Johnson and Dr Leavis were archetypes of the critical spirit, so at this moment the former was standing in for the latter: ‘I connected the fox’s command to my own ideas about Eng. Lit. and the effect of the Cambridge blend of pseudo-critical terminology and social rancour on creative spirit, and from that moment abandoned my efforts to adapt myself.’ Hughes explained that he had a considerable gift ‘for Leavis-style dismantling of texts’, indeed an almost ‘sadistic’ aptitude for it, but the procedure – surgical and objective, the antithesis of schoolmaster Fisher’s spirit of ‘husbandry and sympathetic coaching’ – seemed to him both a ‘foolish game’ and inimical to the inner life.11 The critical impulse cauterises the creative spirit.

Given his interest in folklore and comparative mythology, fostered by The White Goddess, Archaeology and Anthropology was an obvious choice for Part II of the Tripos. He was able to focus on the anthropological side. An added advantage of changing subject was that, in order to mug up his new discipline, he was encouraged to come into residence during the ‘Long Vacation term’ (an opportunity to study in Cambridge for part of the three-month summer break). This was an escape from the boredom of home. There were a demanding eight papers to prepare for. General Ethnology was an introduction to race, culture and environment, exploring different types of human economy in relation to habitat. Two papers on prehistory gave him an introduction to the archaeology of the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic Ages, and the ‘origins of higher civilization’. Then there was Physical Anthropology: man’s zoological position in relation to the animal world, a subject of considerable interest to Hughes. Social Anthropology was less attractive to him, but it was compensated for by a special paper in Comparative Ethnography that gave him the opportunity to read such classics as Margaret Mead’s Growing up in New Guinea and Bronisław Malinowski’s Coral Gardens and their Magic. The course was rounded off with an essay on a subject of the student’s choice and a practical examination, ‘being a test of the candidate’s power of recognizing and describing bodily features and artifacts, ancient and modern, including those drawn from the culture or area specifically studied’.12 Ted enjoyed identifying bones.

Promising as the prospect of such a course seemed, he quickly grew bored with the slog of factual learning. He attended very few lectures and instead borrowed the notes of his supervision partner. Pembroke did not have an ‘Arch & Anth’ don, so he was farmed out to St John’s College, where he was supervised by Glyn Daniel, who later became a highly successful populariser of prehistory while writing Cambridge-based murder mysteries in his spare time. Ted spent most of his final year in the University Library, pursuing his own course of reading. Unlike the Bodleian in Oxford, the Cambridge UL housed most of its stock on open stacks, with an arcane classification system that led to serendipitous juxtapositions. It was perfect for browsing, for following one’s nose, for the gathering of eclectic wisdom. Ted had a lust for free-range intellectual enquiry: he told a friend that he got an erection every time he entered the library.13

For his Finals, he leaned heavily on Graves’s White Goddess, a book mistrusted by professional ethnographers, and he scraped a third-class result. Academically, he would have done better to stay with English Literature. Nevertheless, Mead’s work gave him fascinating insights into alternative views of sex, marriage, the rearing of children and the supernatural, while Malinowski’s ‘ethnographic theory of the magical word’14 could be read as an endorsement of his own attitude to the supernatural: its argument was that the magical spells of the Trobriand islanders had an essentially pragmatic function. Like all forms of language, they must be regarded as ‘verbal acts’ intended primarily not to communicate thought but to bring about practical effects. This was very much Hughes’s view of the horoscope and the Ouija board (several of his contemporaries expressed some alarm at his attempts to conjure up the spirit world). Another set text – of which he would have got the gist, even if he didn’t read it through – had the potential to contribute to his sense of modern civilisation’s damaging alienation from nature: Ian Hogbin’s Experiments in Civilization was a report on how the arrival of European culture severed a native community in the Solomon Islands from its ancient ways.

Cambridge had its own social anthropology. There were divides between the posh colleges and the more middling, between the hearties and the aesthetes, between the entitled public school crowd and the meritocratic grammar school boys. Cavalry twill and flamboyant hacking jackets were set against grey flannel trousers and tweed. Ted and his provincial friends, drinking in the Anchor, looked with a mixture of awe and scorn upon the metropolitan sophisticates who dominated the Union, the Amateur Dramatic Club and the student literary magazine Granta. Among the stars of their Cambridge were Peter Hall, future founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company and first artistic director of the National Theatre; Karl Miller, who would be literary editor of the Spectator, the New Statesman and the Listener and then found the London Review of Books; Thom Gunn of Trinity, regarded as the best student poet in Cambridge; and, most glamorous of all, Nick Tomalin, president of the Union and editor of Granta. Tomalin would marry a literary-minded Newnham College girl, Claire Delavenay, daughter of a French academic and an English composer. He became a journalist who was killed on the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War, she a leading biographer.

Ted published a couple of poems in Granta, hiding himself under the pseudonym Daniel Hearing. He also submitted work to new, smaller literary magazines. Peter Redgrove, something of a loner with unfashionably short hair and a leather jacket, set up delta explicitly to rival Granta. He took on Philip Hobsbaum, one of Leavis’s Downing men, as an assistant editor. Hobsbaum, who could be malicious, recalls Hughes sidling up to him in that other pub, the Mill, where the preferred beverage was strong Merrydown cider. Ted muttered out of the corner of his mouth, ‘I hear you and Redgrove are starting a poetry magazine. Here are some poems I’d like you to look at.’ With that, ‘he shuffled off to the gents’:

The wad of manuscript he had thrust at us was greasy and typed in grey characters, as though the ribbon in the typewriter had been used a great many times over a period of years, and never been changed. Redgrove looked at this dubiously, and uttered these memorable words: ‘Ted’s a nice chap, but I don’t think we ought to publish his poems.’15

After Ted had graduated, delta did publish one of these poems. Entitled ‘The Woman with Such High Heels She Looked Dangerous’, it tells of a woman slick with makeup coaxing a man into the darkness and stabbing him: ‘Men become wolves, but a wolf has become a woman.’16

The June 1954 issue of another little magazine, Chequer, appeared, in a bright yellow cover, in his final term. Daniel Huws, who had had a poem accepted there himself, was surprised to see Ted with a copy in his hands when he turned up in the Anchor one evening. Neither knew that the other wrote poetry. Ted quietly asked Dan his opinion of a poem by one Peter Crew. ‘I wrote it,’ he then explained.17 Entitled ‘Song of the Sorry Lovers’, it features a couple in bed, a hyena laughing outside and a rousing of the ‘animal faculties’.18 Later that night, Hughes and Huws went to see Redgrove, who also had a poem in Chequer. There were six bottles of German wine in his room at Queens’. They got drunk, crashed a party on another staircase and Ted got into a fight and damaged his thumb. On another occasion, he received a police caution for being drunk and disorderly after an undergraduate escapade involving a purloined road sign.

He was growing in confidence. Stories about him began circulating in college. His final-year room was on the top floor of the eastern side of Pembroke’s front court. He painted life-size pumas and what his bedmaker referred to as ‘bacchanalian orgies’ on the sloping ceiling. The Tutor, a benign classicist called Tony Camps, came to investigate. Ted suggested that the Tutor should lie down on the floor in order to appreciate the frescoes fully. He did so, then ordered whitewashing at Ted’s expense. Camps noted in the Tutor’s file that Hughes was often tipsy and that his manner had a bearish quality, but he still wrote him enthusiastic and affectionate job references.19 An even better story was that a college porter informed the Tutor that Mr Hughes was entertaining a lady in his rooms. Camps went to investigate, knocking on the heavy old door. After a few moments, it opened slowly to reveal Mr Hughes ‘stark naked with his arms outstretched like a cross’. Ted spoke: ‘Crucify me.’20

As with most undergraduates, there was many an incident involving climbing into college at night. Gallingly for ex-National Service men, it was like being in the forces again: lock-up at 10 p.m., fines for staying out late (twopence, doubled to fourpence if it was after eleven), and no overnight female guests. All the Cambridge colleges were single-sex and many girls at Newnham and Girton, the only two female colleges, kept to themselves or were intimidatingly bluestocking. Outnumbering female students by fifteen to one, male undergraduates looked to the town, and in particular to the nurses training at Addenbrooke’s Hospital on Trumpington Street, conveniently close to Pembroke. Ted started going out with a nurse called Liz Grattidge. Tall and blonde, from Manchester, she sat quietly in the Anchor, when she was free at weekends, ‘smiling indulgently at the proceedings’.21 Coming from a northern city of industrial grime and rain that was forever scudding in off the Pennines, she dreamed of making a new life in Australia – which she eventually did.

Ted was up for this. It would take him back to Gerald, who was now settled in Tullamarine, a suburb of Melbourne. He was married to a woman called Joan and sending home wafer-thin light-blue airmails filled with easy living and Australian light, perfect for painting (Gerald was showing a talent for watercolour). Just before sitting his Finals in May 1954, Ted surprised his mother and father with a letter. He had filled in emigration papers for Australia. Like Gerald, he would become a Ten Pound Pom. He told his parents that he was going to take a girl with him – she was up for anything. They would probably get married before going. He didn’t mention her name, but explained that she was a nurse and that all his friends said that from certain angles she looked just like him (apart from the fact that she was blonde and he was dark). There was something comforting about the idea of marrying a nurse who was happy to submit to his will: ‘I kick her around and everything goes as I please.’22

6
‘a compact index of everything to follow’

After graduation, Ted treated himself to a trip to Paris. Olwyn had been working for various international organisations there and eventually settled into a job as a secretary-cum-translator for a theatre and film agency called Martonplay, where she would encounter such legendary figures as the Absurdist dramatist Eugène Ionesco. Ted had previously been on a motoring tour of Spain with Uncle Walt, but this was his first self-sufficient time abroad. At the end of his life he looked back at this young man in a Paris café, drinking claret and eating Gruyère cheese, experiencing their taste for the first time. Sophistication, cosmopolitanism, sensuality. A world away from Calder Valley and Cambridge fen. In a poem, he tried to recover the immersion and innocence of that moment, the sense of hope, of being on the threshold of a life not yet lived. The young man has no idea what is about to hit him: ‘He could never imagine, and can’t hear / The scream that approaches him.’ A scream in the shape of a panther, a scream in ‘the likeness of a girl’.1

He also had a wonderful holiday in Switzerland with his girlfriend Liz, whose sister lived out there. They rowed on the lakes, fished and walked. Their plans had slightly changed. He would go to Gerald in Australia, and get a job, while she went to Canada with her parents to visit her brother there, then she would return to the United Kingdom and join him ‘down under’ some time later.2

He kept his options open, applying not only for a passage to Australia but also for a postgraduate diploma in Education that would have qualified him as a teacher. Then he dreamed up one of his schemes: to make a fortune out of mink-farming. It would be an extension of the animal-trapping of his wanderings around Old Denaby. But Australia House informed him that mink would be out of the question down under. He contemplated Canada instead. Canada House told him that the climate for mink was much better in Britain. So for a while he would go back home and get some experience on a big mink farm. He made notes in his Collins Paragon pocket diary: ‘30 buckets for 1250 mink. In every 30, 4 buckets wheatmeal and bran or oatmeal etc., with grass-meal. 2 buckets milk and chemical feed.’3 Before and after work, he could write poetry and – like the young Shakespeare – do a little poaching now that there were deer up on Hardcastle Crags.4 Mink, though, did not inspire him into poetry in the manner of fox and fish, hawk and crow, or big cat.

Nor did he really want to return to Yorkshire. Friends and girlfriend were in the south. Over the course of the next year, he drifted. The passage to Australia came through, but he asked to defer it for a year. Dan Huws’s father let him use a flat that he owned in Rugby Street in the Holborn district of London. Having made a little money doing casual work, Ted got into the habit of returning to Cambridge and reading in the University Library until the money ran out, at which point he would go back to London to earn some more. In Cambridge he stayed with his girlfriend Liz in her unheated ground-floor flat in Norwich Street, conveniently near the station and a favoured address for nurses and students in ‘digs’. Most of his friends were still at the university. Terence McCaughey was pursuing graduate work in Celtic studies, while Dan Huws and the others were in their final undergraduate year.

At various times in the spring and summer terms of 1955 Ted slept on a camp bed in the room of a Queens’ student called Michael Boddy or pitched his tent in the garden of St Botolph’s Rectory, beside a converted chicken coop occupied by an American student who had placed an advertisement in the Varsity newspaper seeking accommodation, to which he had received a reply from the rector’s widow asking ‘whether you would be interested in a sleeping hut in my garden, which you could have rent free with free light and electric fire and radiator, in return for the stoking of two fires – an Aga cooking stove and a Sentry boiler’.5

Boddy of Queens’ – a twenty-stone-plus trombonist, son of the Dean of Ripon – shared Hughes’s love of country life and the writings of Henry Williamson. He was bemused when Ted took him on a tour of the occult section of the stacks of the University Library and intrigued by his advice on how to treat women. The theory was ‘to build up the relationship gently stage by stage’ so that the woman would be subjugated before she knew what was happening: ‘First say “Bring me that cup.” Then say, “Bring me that cup full of tea,” until, I suppose, the woman was cooking a five-course meal, feeding the goldfish, walking the dog, and doing the laundry without argument.’6 None of this was entirely serious: Ted was still playing the undergraduate. One night they commandeered a punt and stole along the Backs, Ted towering in the rear with the pole, until they reached St John’s College, where Chinese geese grazed on the lawn. Boddy jumped out of the punt, caught one and broke its neck. Ted said that since it was dead it should be eaten, so the body was taken back to St Botolph’s and boiled in a pot. It stunk out the kitchen and proved too tough to eat.7 During exam season, Ted helped his friends prepare. He told Olwyn that Boddy wrote an entire set of answers on the basis of quotations he had selected. His gift of recall was coming in handy: he provided further assistance by recovering the argument of Shelley’s Defence of Poetry from his recollection of a lesson at Mexborough Grammar.8

His horizon was becoming more cosmopolitan. Assorted Americans appeared in the Anchor crowd, among them the pot-bellied future critic Harold (‘Hal’) Bloom, who, like Ted, seemed to hold the whole of English literature within his prodigious memory. The two of them did not get on. Another new arrival was Danny Weissbort, who brought polyglot credentials. He was the son of Polish Jews who had arrived in Britain in the 1930s by way of Belgium. At home they spoke French and Danny answered them in English. He had come up to read History at Queens’ while writing poetry under the influence of Dylan Thomas: ‘I went up to Cambridge the year after Thomas died and I very much remember trying to write like him – and, of course, the idea of the poet as a bohemian wild boy was very attractive, even though I didn’t really know what it all meant.’9 The premature death of Thomas, in the Michaelmas term of Ted’s third undergraduate year, had struck them all like a thunderbolt, though no one knew to what extent it could be attributed to his legendary drinking. After graduating, Weissbort went to work for a while in the family clothing factory (a similar path was open to Hughes), but then took up research on the subject of poetry in post-Stalinist Russia. He made a significant return to Hughes’s life a decade later, when they launched the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation.

The American who had moved to the chicken coop in order to escape the constriction of college lock-up was Lucas (‘Luke’) Myers from Tennessee. He had been drawn to Downing College by the reputation of F. R. Leavis. In later years, he would become the correspondent to whom Ted opened his heart most fully. They were the same age; they had both done military service before university; they both began with English Literature and switched to Anthropology. And they both had vigorous relationships with attractive girlfriends. They enjoyed exchanging stories of their escapades, Luke telling of sex in the chicken coop and Ted describing how he had been in bed with Liz in her lodgings one morning when the landlady came in with tea. He dived under the covers and in answer to the question ‘What’s that lump down there?’ Liz replied, ‘That’s Ted,’ with the result that she was obliged to find new lodgings the same day. On another occasion, Ted came up from London for a party and the first thing he and Liz did was dive into an unoccupied bedroom. He felt remorse for ‘violating hospitality’.10

Ted was getting a somewhat exaggerated reputation as a ladies’ man. Myers recalled only a single one-night stand, but its circumstances had momentous consequences. It was the final week of the summer term, known in Cambridge as the Easter term, of 1955. A Peterhouse student, a friend of Dan Huws and his roommate David Ross, had invited a girl up from London for a few days. One night she was asleep in Dan’s bed while he and Ross were out on the town with Ted and Luke. A porter observed two figures preparing to climb the wall back into college after hours. He thought he recognised the culprits, so went up to their rooms with another porter to check if the beds were indeed empty. They observed a trail of long yellow hair on Dan’s pillow and a set of female underclothes draped over a chair. The girl was escorted out of college. The boys gallantly directed her across Coe Fen to the St Botolph’s Rectory garden and then entered college to face their fate. Later, Ted and Luke returned to find the bed in the coop occupied by an attractive eighteen- or nineteen-year-old (this time clothed). With true Southern hospitality, Luke offered to sleep on the floor. But Ted and the girl decided that there was plenty of room in the tent, so Luke had his usual bed to himself. In the morning, the girl took him aside and said, ‘Ted’s so big and hot.’11

Huws, Ross and the student who had invited the girl in the first place were summoned before the Peterhouse authorities. Myers was implicated and his college informed. Ted’s name was also given, but since he had graduated he was not under college jurisdiction. However, the University of Cambridge had an ancient right to exclude miscreants among their graduates from an area within a radius of 3 miles from Great St Mary’s University Church. Peterhouse rusticated Huws and Ross, meaning that they had to leave the city for the remainder of the term (which was only a matter of days), while the boy who had issued the invitation was sent down permanently, thus losing the chance to get a degree. Downing decreed that Myers must move out of the debauched chicken coop and find other lodgings. The next term, the kindly widow allowed him to sleep in her dining room, so St Botolph’s Rectory remained his home a little longer. As for Ted, he was summoned before a specially convened university committee. After returning to London, he was informed that he would indeed be prohibited from setting foot within the prescribed radius of Great St Mary’s. He paid no attention. If he had done, he would probably never have met Sylvia Plath.

In the interim between trial and sentencing, Huws, Ross, Myers, Danny Weissbort and a medical student called Nathaniel (‘Than’) Minton met over wine in the ill-fated rooms in Peterhouse. It was then that David Ross announced that he wanted to start a new literary magazine. His father had generously agreed to put up some money. In the light of the recent misadventure, there was an obvious name for the new publication: Saint Botolph’s Review. They would set to work on it when they returned after the Long Vacation.

In that summer of 1955 Ted took an outdoor job as an assistant rose-gardener at a nursery between Baldock and Hitchin. In the autumn, he was back in Rugby Street, putting out feelers at the BBC, winning the odd sum of cash in newspaper competitions, taking on more casual work, for instance £8 a week as a security guard in a girder factory. When he wasn’t contemplating becoming a sailor on a North Sea trawler, he was dreaming up new money-making schemes: perhaps he could save up for five years to buy a house in Oxford or Cambridge and let it to students and nurses at £3 per head per week, with a landlady accommodated gratis in the basement. Or maybe rent out a string of garages, or act as agent for the sale of Gerald’s paintings, or teach English language in Spain or Hungary, where one could live cheaply.

The deferred offer to become a Ten Pound Pom lapsed. He did not want to commit to the other side of the world if there was any chance of making it in literary life at home. Philip Hobsbaum of delta had moved to London and revived the evenings of poetry reading that he had begun at Cambridge. He and his friends called themselves ‘the Group’. Their first meeting was held on a wet October evening in Hobsbaum’s bedsitter off the Edgware Road. Peter Redgrove was there, along with an Anglo-Argentinian poet who had also been at Cambridge, his American wife, a couple of aspiring actors, Hobsbaum’s young fiancée and Ted, who read some poems that would soon appear in Saint Botolph’s Review.12 Over the following couple of years, Ted was a frequent, though not regular, presence at meetings of the Group, which was soon joined by the brilliantly inventive Australian Peter Porter and the talented Jamaican-born poet and artist Edward Lucie-Smith, an Oxford man.

Hobsbaum never forgot the power of Hughes’s verse-speaking: ‘One night he read Hopkins’s “I wake and feel the fell of darkness, not day” in so vibrantly personal a manner that a young lady present took it to be a sonnet of his own recent composition.’13 He also recited a large chunk of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight into Peter Redgrove’s reel-to-reel tape recorder. A tape survives, now in the British Library, of an informal meeting of the Group and of Ted reciting some of his own poems as well as Yeats and Hopkins. His Yorkshire vowels are long but by today’s standards he sounds quite posh, his lilting incantation learned from Dylan Thomas.14

Ted annoyed Hobsbaum’s Rhodesian landlady by cooking a black pudding in her frying pan and singing ballads in the small hours of the morning, cajoling a shy, plain schoolteacher poet called Rosemary Joseph to join in. Rosemary later had a poem called ‘Baking Day’ published in an anthology of the work of the Group.15 Hobsbaum believed that Ted portrayed her, with a change of profession though not of character, in the poem that was entitled ‘Secretary’ in his first book, The Hawk in the Rain.

‘Secretary’ first appeared, untitled, in Saint Botolph’s Review. It is a cruel little poem about a nervous, demure young woman who would ‘shriek’ and run off in tears if touched by a man. Hughes imagines her scuttling ‘down the gauntlet of lust / Like a clockwork mouse’, darning and cooking for her family, then going to bed early with buttocks clenched tight against the force of youth and desire.16 Hobsbaum’s identification of this despised virgin with Rosemary Joseph should be treated with caution. As a student of F. R. Leavis, he should have remembered that one of the first lessons of practical criticism was to distinguish the speaker in a poem – the written ‘I’ – from the poet himself. The reader’s business is to attend to the words on the page, to judge the authenticity of the feeling created by the verbal tone, the cadence and texture of the verse, not to suppose that the poem is a crude transcription of the writer’s personal experience. Furthermore, as T. S. Eliot taught, all poems are as much engagements with previous poems, with the literary ‘tradition’, as they are expressions of the self. Hughes’s ‘Secretary’ may have had one seed in his observation of a particular woman, or kind of woman, but it was also his reworking of the typist in her bedsit passively surrendering to the ‘young man carbuncular’ in Eliot’s The Waste Land.

By the summer of 1955, Ted had broken up with Liz and was going out with a girl called Shirley who was reading English at Newnham. She was beautiful and clever, stronger and more interesting than Liz, though shy and quietly spoken. They were serious about each other. When she appeared leaning over the railings of the Mill bridge, Ted would leave his friends in the Anchor and go off with her.

Shirley was in her second year. She came from a suburban background in the north-west (her parents were both pharmacists), and had been to a mixed grammar school. At first she had been overawed by Cambridge, and most particularly by what seemed to her the supreme self-confidence of her fellow-undergraduates. Nevertheless, during her first year she had found some true friends at Newnham and come to feel more at ease.

What attracted Shirley to Ted initially was his unorthodox lifestyle, his residence in the orchard of St Botolph’s Rectory, his poetry, his snatches of French picked up over his Paris summer the previous year (‘Zut, alors,’ he would say), his trademark black corduroy jacket – all part of a bohemian persona. He fried herrings in oatmeal for her; he taught her a betting system based on the form of three-year-old racehorses. He seemed rooted in reality – the antithesis of the rarefied and cerebral atmosphere of Cambridge. He made the conventionally ambitious men pale into insignificance. But what made her fall deeply in love with him was an intensity, a power, a sense of certainty, of sureness. He had a stillness, a watchfulness about him – not the watchfulness of a detached analytic observer; he was empathetic, he engaged with the world, but always retained an immutable inner ‘self’. This, it seemed to her, encompassed but was more than his belief in his vocation as a poet. She thought it had been with him always. She grew to feel she had become part of that certainty, that ‘self’. Later, when she had to accept that this was no longer true, the effect was devastating.

With her auburn hair and pale freckled skin, she was his Deirdre of the Sorrows, his ethereal Celtic girl. In the warm summer of 1955, Shirley stayed up for the Long Vacation term. She had a lovely room looking out on Newnham greenery. Ted came over from his gardening job, bearing armfuls of roses. He invited her to the Beacon for a week. She found his father quiet and withdrawn, his mother warm and properly maternal: she made them real homemade lemonade. While there, Shirley, in his mother’s absence, made a disastrous attempt to cook Scotch eggs and left the kitchen a blackened mess. She feared that Ted’s house-proud mother would be enraged, but Edith just laughed it off. Olwyn then arrived from Paris for a brief visit. Like Ted, she towered over her parents. Shirley felt more than a little intimidated by this striking, blonde Viking goddess. Olwyn shook her hand, turned it over, examined her palm and said: ‘You have some very nasty moments coming.’ Shirley was chilled by an antagonism she could not understand. When she and Olwyn had to share a bed, Shirley balanced herself precariously on the extreme edge for the whole night.

It was in his West Yorkshire home that Ted revealed his detailed knowledge of and passionate love for the natural world. He was truly himself there. When he took Shirley to Haworth Parsonage, she, who had always loved Wuthering Heights, felt that Ted, like Heathcliff, belonged to these moors. He himself was part of that landscape, elemental, unchangeable.

From Yorkshire they went over to Liverpool. Shirley’s mother met them at the barrier at Lime Street station. They were both dressed in black, the uniform of rebellious youth. Her mother was shocked by Shirley’s appearance, and said: ‘You look as though you haven’t slept for a week.’ Shirley, of course, was secretly gratified by the remark. As they went down the avenue to her home, her mother walked a few paces ahead of them, not wanting the neighbours to associate her with this disreputable-looking pair. Shirley’s father was not impressed with Ted’s aspirations to be a poet. ‘I suppose you would go out to work,’ he said to his daughter, ‘and he would stay at home writing poetry.’ The following morning, Shirley, still in her nightdress, went into the guest room to bid Ted good morning. Her father saw her emerging, and Ted was asked to leave.

At the beginning of the Michaelmas term, Ted made a proposal: why didn’t she leave Cambridge and everything else behind her and go to Spain with him? She was not quite enough of a bohemian to agree. Later in life she was to wonder how all their lives would have turned out if she had gone, but she also convinced herself that what was about to happen was meant to be – it would lead to the magnificent poetry of both Ted and Sylvia.

As for Shirley’s appearance, Ted never forgot it. In an exquisite unpublished poem, the threads of memory are woven out of the ‘bushed mass’ of Shirley’s densely tangled hair that overwhelmed her ‘small-boned freckled / Irish face’. Her large green eyes were ‘Startling and nearly too pretty’ for her pretty and ‘silent’ face. ‘Baffled and loving’, she and Ted break out of themselves and into each other. A single strand of hair becomes his link, his bridge, to something he cannot forget, a world he never entered, a future that was not to be. Shirley offered him ‘a great richness’, but he was too young ‘To recognize one of those offers / Life makes only once’.17

The poem was written many years later, as part of Hughes’s long process of coming to terms with his marriage to Sylvia Plath and her death. He was always fascinated by the idea of the road not taken, the possible alternative life story. What if he had taken that passage to Australia? Or obeyed the command of the university Proctors and stayed away from the launch party of Saint Botolph’s Review? Ireland – especially the west of Ireland, where W. B. Yeats had found his home – was always his land of lost content, the place to which he dreamed of escaping. If Shirley had accepted the invitation to Spain and then married him, his soul and body would have mingled with a child of Ireland.

Shirley was the inspiration for ‘Fallgrief’s Girlfriends’, another of Ted’s poems published in Saint Botolph’s Review. The persona of Fallgrief, by this account a projection of Hughes himself, has a rather dim view of his girlfriends (‘admiration’s giddy mannequins / Lead every sense to motley’) and of sexual congress (‘insects couple as they murder each other’) until he is changed by finding ‘a woman with such wit and looks / He can brag of her in every company’.18 He was proud of Shirley. But still he was marking time, waiting for his real life to begin. Just before his twenty-fifth birthday he wrote in his journal of how he still felt like an ‘observer not yet called into the lists’. He sees himself as detached, idle, lacking in will, in need of some violent force to energise him and spark him into creative life.19

The living colossus in the pantheon of Ted Hughes and his contemporaries was Thomas Stearns Eliot. After Hughes became Poet Laureate, he delivered a lengthy toast in Eliot’s memory on the occasion of the centenary of his birth. He wrote it up under the title A Dancer to God. Like his meditations on his other poetic heroes – Shakespeare, Coleridge, Yeats – this piece is a scarcely veiled manifesto for his own work. Its theme is ‘the voice of Poetry as the voice of Eros’, which is indeed the thrust of Hughes’s own poetry. Eros: the primordial Greek god of desire, son of Aphrodite (Roman Cupid, son of Venus), embodiment of the madness of erotic love, and in Freud the term for the sex drive or life-force that is the opposite of the death drive (Eros versus Thanatos).

Even as a student, Ted was mapping out the argument that he later crystallised in what he called the ‘unified field theory’ of A Dancer to God.20 He and his friends believed that the two great English-language poets of modern times were unquestionably W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Each of them was deeply responsive to ‘the poetic Self – that other voice which in the earliest times came to the poet as a god, took possession of him, delivered the poem, then left him’. Yeats’s dabbling in the supernatural, like Hughes’s, though considered by many to be ‘at best a wilful indulgence, at worst a little bit crazy’, was of a piece with his belief in the magical spirit-force of the poetic self and with his attunement to Irish myth, legend and folklore. Yeats thus became the poet of the land and the spirit of place, the culmination of ‘the complex of autochthonous traditions in these islands’, the true Irish bard.21

Eliot, by contrast, was the poet of deracinated modernity. His ‘unique position in the history of poetry’ came from the fact that he was the first to see the ‘desacralized landscape’ of the world after the Great War, the first to give voice to ‘a new terror: the meaningless’. The Waste Land announced a rupture in the history of the world: it shores against our ruin fragments of civilisation in a time broken not only by the mass slaughter of the trenches but also by Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God and Freud’s reinvention of the poetic or second self as the dark unconscious within instead of a quasi-divine Muse descending from above. Eliot’s poetic career, Hughes suggests, followed a path from this new desolation to the redemption of Four Quartets, climaxing in the grace of the Farrar community at Little Gidding, ‘the rose-windowed, many-petalled choreography of the dance before God in an English chapel’.22 He also suggests that one of the key tensions in Eliot was that between the divine love embodied by Christ and the figure of ‘Eros/Dionysus, the androgynous, protean daemon of biological existence and the reproductive cycle’.23 Like many readers of Eliot, he links the imagery of desiccation and sterility in The Waste Land and elsewhere to some crisis of sexual frustration, to a failure of Eros concealed at the core of Eliot’s inner life.

Hughes proposes that the richest revelation of the evolution of the poetic self in its hidden life often comes from a single early poem, ‘either because the interfering ego is weakest then, or because these creative visions are very like conventional serial dreams, in that the first successful representation is likely to be a compact index of everything to follow’. In Eliot’s case, the key was to be found in the early poem ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’ (‘Come in under the shadow of this gray rock, / And I will show you something different …’).24 So which early Hughes poem is the ‘compact index of everything to follow’ in his writing career?

Eros is certainly a central feature of his early work. ‘Bawdry Embraced’ goes to it, with a vengeance:

Great farmy whores, breasts bouncy more

Like buttocks, and with buttocks like

Two white sows jammed in a sty door,

Are no dunghills for Bawdry’s cock.25

But this is rollicking, playful stuff, not a hidden revelation of the inner self. Hughes himself clearly thought of ‘The Thought-Fox’ as his signature poem. It was written in 1955, sitting in bed at one o’clock in the morning after an evening in the flat of fellow-poet Thom Gunn.26 But the point of his argument about the key early creative vision is that the ‘interfering ego’ has no say in its significance. So the poet himself is the last person to be in a position to identify the key early work. ‘The Thought-Fox’ is ruled out by the presence of Hughes’s self, both in the poem and in his self-conscious mythologising of the poem when in public readings he linked it to the dream of the burnt fox.

Hughes was not a fox, he was a jaguar. An early manuscript draft of ‘The Jaguar’ survives: this is the poem that is a compact index of everything to follow. He began with a leopard, then crossed the word out. A leopard folding itself to sleep in the sun. No, he crosses it out again. Begin with the other animals: yawning ape, shrieking parrot, coiled boa-constrictor. And then the sleepers awake: excited children gather outside the cage of the pacing jaguar on a ‘short fierce fuse’ with eyes that drill as blood bangs inside its brain.27 Voracious, violent and beautiful, the jaguar has embodied the raw force of nature for a million years. Now it is caged in our so-called ‘civilisation’. Spinning on the ball of his heel, he stalks behind his bars like a prisoner serving a life sentence. This is the fate of the human spirit confined in dreary Fifties Britain. For Hughes, the role of the poet is to break the iron bars, to set free the spirit of the jaguar, to return humankind to its primal relationship with nature.

His later memory was of beginning the poem as he sat in a deep chair wearing his First World War greatcoat in the front room of Liz’s flat in Norwich Street, Cambridge, on a freezing-cold morning in January 1955. He informed his American friend Ben Sonnenberg that the previous autumn he had had a temporary job doing the washing up in the cafeteria of London Zoo in Regent’s Park. A particular jaguar was kept in a ‘transit’ cage near the kitchen window. He watched it going to and fro all day. He was reminded of seeing a jaguar in a very small cage on a family trip to Morecambe Zoo when he was about five and of how he had tried to model it in plasticine, clay and wax. Then he explained that in trying to describe the jaguar’s snarl, he thought of a dog he had once seen trying to bite a fly that had landed on its nose. So in order to suggest the intensity of the jaguar’s rage, he imagined that a fly had gone right up its nose. As he was writing a line to this effect, a bluebottle flew across the room in Norwich Street – which was very odd, given that it was midwinter and icy cold. It went straight up Ted’s nostril. He took it out and pressed it into his precious volume of Shakespeare’s complete works.28

‘That’s the magic of poetry,’ Ted said to Sonnenberg, on telling him the story in London in the early Sixties.29 He saw the incident as a classic example of what C. G. Jung called synchronicity, an idea that fascinated him. Jung and Hughes used the term for those moments of meaningful coincidence when the boundary between different worlds dissolves. A synchronicity is like a dream that offers a glimpse into an alternative reality.

Jung told of a patient who was locked in her own world, trapped in the self-created prison of her own mind. But then in a session of psychoanalysis she narrated a dream in which she was given a golden jewel in the shape of a scarab beetle. As she was recounting the dream, there was a tap on the window of Jung’s consulting room. He opened the casement and in flew a gold-green scarabaeid rose-chafer beetle. He caught it in his hand, gave it to her and said, ‘Here is your scarab.’ Her defences were broken and she became open to treatment, with Jung reporting very satisfactory results.30 For Jung, a synchronicity was a manifestation of an ‘archetypal’ pattern within what he called ‘the collective unconscious’. The individual psyche comes into constellation with a deeper reality that transcends time and place. For Hughes, the same thing happens in the moment of red-hot poetic creativity. Poet and jaguar become as one.

The more mundane reality of the making of a poem is the craft of writing and rewriting. Ted wasn’t satisfied with the ending of ‘The Jaguar’. He continued working on the poem on a visit home to Yorkshire. The original manuscript has an additional stray line about the animal’s eye being ‘blind in fire’. The first published version ends with the jaguar staring out through the bars. Far from being completed in a white heat of inspiration, stimulated by a bluebottle in Liz’s Norwich Street flat, it did not reach its perfected form for a long time.

A new issue of Chequer appeared in Cambridge with the date November 1954. Previously, Hughes had published there under a pseudonym. Now, having graduated, he put his real name to two poems. One of them was ‘The Jaguar’. It was reprinted the following year in a collection of Poetry from Cambridge 1952–4, edited by Karl Miller. So was the first version actually written before he worked at the zoo? Was the story about the bluebottle an invented memory, a playful fantasy or even a self-conscious adaptation of Jung’s story about the scarab beetle? Or was the poem a free translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘The Panther’ rather than a memory of witnessing a real caged jaguar? The imagery is remarkably similar – the animal pacing endlessly behind its bars, then achieving a momentary vision of freedom. These questions cannot be answered with any certainty. Hughes was good at covering his tracks and laying false scents. And his belief in synchronicity and archetype would lead him to say that the details do not matter, provided the poem penetrates to the core of the reality embodied by the jaguar.

The young man drinking in the sensation of claret and Gruyère in that Paris café in 1954 sensed that there was more to life than anything he had yet found in Cambridge or London, in academic work or casual labour. He was ready to burst the bars, but didn’t yet see how to do so. Something was needed to take his writing to another level. A stronger imagination was required in order to free the beast, to widen the horizon. In 1956, it came. A new ending, as powerful and sinuous as the jaguar’s footfall: the ‘stride’ a wilderness of ‘freedom’, the ‘world’ rolling ‘under the long thrust of his heel’, the horizon coming ‘Over the cage floor’.31 In a scribbled note, Ted Hughes remembered the moment of achievement: ‘Finished on Whitstead Lawn, Cambridge, with Sylvia.’32

7
Falcon Yard

Philip Hobsbaum was working for a television and film production company. He wrote a letter on his friend’s behalf to the story editor at the film company J. Arthur Rank, which had studios at Pinewood in the London suburbs. Ted duly got a job reading dozens of novels, histories and biographies, summarising the plots with a view to their potential as movie scripts. Many of his treatments survive in his notebooks: the Battle of Stalingrad, the Life of Robespierre, even James Joyce’s Ulysses.1 Summarising other people’s work made him all the more eager to find a way of devoting himself to his own writing. He kept his complete Shakespeare in the drawer of his desk in the office and got it out when the supervisor wasn’t around.

The movie people were not to his taste; he thought that they were all up their own or each other’s ‘arses’.2 He lived for the weekends. Sometimes Shirley went down to London and stayed with him in Rugby Street. Ted, convinced that his talents lay only in poetry and that he had no aptitude for prose, suggested to her that he might give her some of the plot outlines he was reviewing at Pinewood for her to turn into narrative. They would part with a farewell drink at Dirty Dick’s pub opposite Liverpool Street station before she got on the train to return to college. On other weekends, Ted would visit Cambridge and test Shirley’s ability to identify brief quotations from Marlowe and Shakespeare. He recited Dylan Thomas to her, and gave her an inscribed copy of Deaths and Entrances. He also gave her a handwritten copy of a poem inspired by her, which was later included in The Hawk in the Rain.

Shirley began to detect a subtle change in their relationship, hard to pinpoint, but impossible not to feel. Two newly arrived blonde Americans were cutting a figure in Newnham. Shirley didn’t get to know them, but she saw them weekly, waiting their turn, as she and her supervision partner left the room of Enid Welsford, author of the renowned study of The Fool: His Social and Literary History, who was taking them for the paper on the English Moralists. Shirley thought that they looked supremely all-American, so was surprised when Ted eyed them up and said that he thought they looked ‘Swedish’.3

On Saturday 25 February 1956 a launch party was held for Saint Botolph’s Review. During the day, the contributors and their friends sold copies on the streets and in cafés and pubs. Bert Wyatt-Brown, an American student at King’s, sold a copy to a fellow-American Fulbright scholar from Newnham. She raced off on her bicycle, only to seek him out again a few hours later in order to ask him where she might meet these St Botolph’s poets. She had been especially impressed by the work of Lucas Myers and Ted Hughes. If her very lightly fictionalised account of the day and night is to be believed, she crashed her bike into Bert in the market place, ‘spilling oranges, figs, and a paper packet of pink-frosted cakes’.4 He gave her an invitation to the launch party.5

They had hired a big upstairs room in Falcon Yard, just off Petty Cury in the centre of town. It belonged to the university Women’s Union (female undergraduates were excluded from the bastion of the historic Union Society, where future politicians developed their debating skills). This was one of the few places in Cambridge where you could guarantee a party with more women than men. It had a polished floor for dancing and stained-glass windows as in a church. They hauled a piano up the stairs and Joe Lyde brought along his top-class jazz men. Luke Myers danced the ‘hot-wild jitterbug’.6 His recollection was that everybody was drunk except for Ted, who liked to stay in control.

The party was in full swing when the Newnham girl arrived, in the company of Hamish Stewart, a pale Canadian from Queens’ College. She had left her essay on ‘Passion as Destiny in Racine’s Plays’, with particular reference to Phèdre, half finished in her Smith Corona typewriter.7 They were already drunk, having spent an hour slugging whisky in Miller’s bar near his college. She was wearing a red hairband, red shoes and bright-red lipstick. Her fingernails were varnished in Applecart Red.8 Her name was Sylvia Plath. She was one of the two ‘Swedish-looking’ girls who had caught Ted’s eye. Bert Wyatt-Brown was dating the other one, who lodged in the same student house: Jane Baltzell (even more blonde and in several respects a rival). Bert introduced Sylvia to the men of the hour: Luke, with his ‘dark sideburns and rumpled hair, black-and-white checked baggy pants and a loose swinging jacket’; Dan Huws, with whom she had a bone to pick because of his lukewarm review of the poems she had published in the student magazine Broadsheet; Than Minton, ‘so small and dark one would have to sit down to talk to him’; Danny Weissbort with his curly hair; and David Ross, ‘immaculate and dark’. They were all dark. She was exhilarated by this bohemian world of turtleneck sweaters and the jazz getting under her skin. She grabbed Myers from his girlfriend and danced with him, shouting about his poems, in particular his ‘Sestina of the Norse Seaman’, which took a highly complex poetic form and crashed through its rules and its line-endings.9

‘Then’, as she wrote in her diary when the morning finally came, ‘the worst happened’: ‘That big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes.’ She didn’t know him, ‘but she knew him by heart’.10 Though she did not admit so much in her diary, she had come to look for him. Always obsessed with rivals and doubles, she was determined to take him off the Newnham girl she knew he was going out with. On arriving in the room, she noticed Shirley straight away: ‘Pale, freckled, with no mouth but a pink dim distant rosebud, willowed reedy, wide-eyed to the streaming of his words … Silent, fawn-eyed. Clever.’11 She too was a ‘statue-worshipper’, putting the dark poet on a pedestal.

Shouting to be heard above the band and the crowd, Sylvia enthused to Ted about his poems:

And he yelled back, colossal, in a voice that should have come from a Pole, ‘You like?’ and asking me if I wanted brandy, and me yelling yes and back into the next room past the smug shining blub face of dear Bert … and bang the door was shut and he was sloshing brandy into a glass and I was sloshing it at the place where my mouth was when I last knew about it.12

As if out on a moor in a high wind, they shouted about Dan’s review of her poems, Ted flirtatiously suggesting that his mate had only said what he did because she was beautiful. He explained that he was working in London, earning ten pounds a week, and that he had ‘obligations in the next room’ – meaning Shirley, who was not happy. Neither was Hamish, who supposedly punched Ted before the evening was out, which is hardly surprising in view of what happened next:

And I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband off, my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never again find, and my favorite silver earrings: hah, I shall keep, he barked. And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face. His poem ‘I did it, I.’ Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists.13

For Sylvia, he was the ‘one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunk of words’. Both his spoken and his written words were ‘strong and blasting like a high wind in steel girders’. She ‘screamed’ to herself, ‘oh, to give myself crashing, fighting, to you’.14 Her knees had gone ‘jelly-weak’ and ‘the room of the party hung in her eyes like a death’s-door camera-shot’.15 When she bit him and tasted his salty blood, he ‘shook her bang against the solid-grained substance of the wall’ and her attempt at another bite closed on thin air.16 Passion turned to embarrassment. She asked Hamish to take care of her – ‘I have been rather lousy,’ she explained.17

Shirley had entered the room at the moment of the kiss and the bite. Her friend and fellow-Newnham student Jean Gooder vividly recalled her figure framed in the doorway. Ted had his back to her as Sylvia came up to him, and his very height meant that Shirley did not see what happened.18

Ted had gone to the party with a sense of foreboding. He had cast the night’s horoscope and found it predicting ‘disastrous expense’. The launch was certainly not covered by the pitiful earnings of the magazine, but for Hughes it took the rest of his life to pay off the cost of that night:

First sight. First snapshot isolated

Unalterable, stilled in the camera’s glare.

Taller

Than ever you were again. Swaying so slender

It seemed your long, perfect, American legs

Simply went on up.19

The camera will be a key metaphor in Ted’s poems about Sylvia, an image of the gaze that fell upon their relationship. In this first snapshot, it is her bright confident American glamour and loudness that grab him and give him a glimpse of a very different world from that of Yorkshire Edna, Mancunian Liz and Liverpudlian Shirley.

His recall, in this Birthday Letters poem, may have been retrospectively shaped by the recollection of a famous photograph published in the Varsity student newspaper a couple of months later, in which ‘Sylvia Plath, American Fulbright Scholar at Newnham, reviews May Week fashions’. In one of the accompanying illustrations she wears a halter-neck swimsuit that reveals long muscular legs, honed by bicycling around Cambridge. She sent a cutting to her mother, calling herself Betty Grable. In her journals, she would compare herself to Grable in one sentence and Thomas Mann in the next.20 Glamour photography, movie stars, fashion, bright-red lipstick, sexually self-confident girls: in Fifties Cambridge, under grey skies and with memories of post-war rationing still alive, all these things were pure America. There was a vibrant but somewhat manic quality to them, as there was to this Fulbright scholar (‘full’ and ‘bright’ indeed). ‘The pure products of America’, wrote the poet William Carlos Williams, ‘go crazy.’21

‘You’re all there,’ Ted had said to her during their stamping dance. ‘Aren’t you?’22 She found him big and he found her tall. From the start, each was turning the other into a figure from myth. But here we need to be careful: Ted’s poem was written long after the moment. His memory was remade by subsequent events. It begins with astrological foreboding and ends with the knowledge, which he couldn’t possibly have had at the time, that the encounter in Falcon Yard would ‘brand’ him for the rest of his life: his ‘stupefied interrogation’ of her ‘blue headscarf’ and ‘the swelling ring-moat of tooth-marks’ that would mark his ‘face’ for a ‘month’ and his inner self ‘for good’. As the editor of Sylvia Plath’s journals, Hughes knew perfectly well that the scarf was red. He turns it blue as a sign of the sorrow that was to come. He would finally close Birthday Letters with a poem called ‘Red’ that begins ‘Red was your colour’ and ends ‘But the jewel you lost was blue.’23

What did he really think at the time? If he wrote a journal entry in the next few days, it is lost. Still, he could not but have been impressed and flattered that she knew his poems so well. She had quoted at him not only ‘I did it, I’, the punchline of ‘Law in the Country of the Cats’, his Saint Botolph’s Review poem about male sexual rivals, but also an image from another poem that had carved itself upon her mind: ‘most dear unscratchable diamond’.24 It was in answer to this quotation that he had said ‘You like?’ It comes from ‘The Casualty’, one of the best of his early poems. This wasn’t one of the new pieces released that very day in Saint Botolph’s: it had been published in that other Cambridge magazine, Chequer, over a year before. Sylvia’s memory of it is a mark of how Ted had impressed her on the page well before she met him in the flesh. It is also a mark of her critical acumen, for the two Hughes poems in the November 1955 issue of Chequer are much better than the four in the February 1956 Saint Botolph’s Review.

‘The Casualty’, about the body of a shot-down airman in the burnt-out fuselage of his plane, crashed in the English countryside, is quintessential Hughes. It is his first war poem, inspired by a combined memory of the droning warplanes over Mexborough and the RAF bomber on a pre-war training exercise that had run into fog over Mytholmroyd, from the wreck of which he and Gerald had salvaged tubing for their own model planes. This yoking of Mexborough and Mytholmroyd readied him to bring together his own childhood experience of the Second World War and his father’s traumatic survival of the First. In The Hawk in the Rain, he reprinted ‘The Casualty’ as the first of a sequence of war poems that ends the collection. There it is followed by ‘Bayonet Charge’, ‘Griefs for Dead Soldiers’, his finest Great War poem ‘Six Young Men’, ‘Two Wise Generals’ and ‘The Ancient Heroes and the Bomber Pilot’.25

For Plath, it wasn’t the military content of ‘The Casualty’ so much as the violent intensity of its language that bit into her spirit. An image that pierced her especially sharply was that of how the groans of the dying airman ‘rip / The slum of weeds, leaves, barbed coils’. Drunk and dancing in Falcon Yard, she quoted the poem to its author and the ‘rip’ magically went from art to life, as he tore off her headband and earrings. From the outset, there was an electricity between them, a barbed coil of passion within. The latter image carries a hint of barbed wire and all its connotations of violence and the infliction of pain: ‘Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists.’

Sylvia was sexually precocious and unusually adventurous for a Fifties girl. One reason why she was aroused by the hunk and heft, the ‘flash of violent incredible action’, in the poem about man standing up to man which she had read earlier that day, with its punch-up in the street and its cocky ending (‘I did it, I’), is that she had a history of creating rivalry between men. During her final undergraduate months at Smith College the previous year she was coming to the end of a love affair with a gentle boy called Gordon Lameyer even as she was sleeping with a dangerously bohemian Yale student called Richard Sassoon. Over the summer she had a brief but sexually blazing liaison with Peter Davison, a New York editor working at a publishing house in Boston. Coming over to take up her Fulbright, she had a shipboard romance with another scholar aboard the Queen Elizabeth. Since her arrival in Cambridge on 1 October, she had flirted round many boys, made passionate love to Sassoon in Paris during the Christmas vacation and then been rejected by him after a huge row outside the Matisse Chapel near Nice.26 She was ready for something new and big and preferably involving a fight.

After leaving Falcon Yard, she and Hamish stumbled around the foggy streets of Cambridge. She whispered Ted’s name to the lamp-posts. She could not get out of her head how he had said her name, Sylvia, ‘in a blasting wind which shot off in the desert’ behind her eyes and his, and how ‘his poems are clever and terrible and lovely’. Hamish tried to put her off by saying that he was the biggest seducer in Cambridge and that all the St Botolph’s crowd were phoneys.

Then they found themselves surrounded by a group of undergraduates who were also out after college lock-up. The boys, reimagined in her journal as a symbolic group of potential boyfriends (or worshippers), were checking that she was all right, telling her how nice she smelt, asking to kiss her. Then Hamish was hoisting her over the railings into Queens’, his college. A spike pierced her tight skirt, exposing her thighs, and another dug into her hand, creating stigmata that did not bleed because the air was freezing. Then she was lying on the floor of his room by the fire, with him on top of her. She liked his kisses on her mouth and his weight on her body, but she told him that he should scold her for her behaviour at the party. At two-thirty in the morning, he walked her back to Whitstead, the house on the other side of the river, at the far end of the Newnham playing fields, where she lodged with eleven other girls. Though she was pleased that Hamish had proved himself able to fight for her, it was Ted who now consumed her imagination. He entered her life as a rival to Sassoon: ‘The one man since I’ve lived who could blast Richard.’27

Falling in love is often about place and placing yourself. Sylvia needed a proper Cambridge boyfriend in order to prove to herself that she had arrived in England and in English literature. Housemate Jane (‘the blonde one’) was content to go out with other American boys such as Bert. Though Sylvia would not have said no to handsome Luke from the Deep South, she sensed a fatal magnetism pulling her towards the huge man from the north of England. One of the attractions of Sassoon had been that he was collaterally descended from the First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon. One of the attractions of Davison had been that he was a literary publisher with British connections. Now she was on the brink of the thing itself: a great English poet. Her mind was steeped in the language of the English literature that had been her study for years. Her repeated use of the word ‘blast’ when writing about their first encounter and her image of them shouting passionately at each other as if in a high wind reveal where she is going: to a ‘blasted heath’ – the location of the opening of Shakespeare’s most northern play – and more specifically to a Yorkshire moor. She is already, unconsciously, projecting herself as Cathy and Hughes as Heathcliff.

For Ted, thinking over and rewriting these events, again and again through the course of thirty-five years after her death, there was a fatalistic quality from the start. In their myth of themselves, Ted and Sylvia were Heathcliff and Cathy from the first instant, but in reality each of them spent the immediate aftermath of Falcon Yard in the company of another.

Ted had come to Cambridge that weekend to be with Shirley and to make love to her. He never wrote about what they said to each other that night. All she remembers is that she did not speak to Sylvia and that, though Ted was still attentive, she quickly became aware of a deliberate ‘distancing’ on his part. She returned to Falcon Yard the next day to search for an earring lent by a friend. She found the earring but knew that somehow she was losing Ted.

On the Monday, with Ted back at work in London, Sylvia Plath wrote ‘a full-page poem about the dark forces of lust’. Its title was ‘Pursuit’. ‘It is not bad,’ she told herself. ‘It is dedicated to Ted Hughes.’28 It began from a line in Racine’s Phèdre, the play she was studying for the essay she had to write for the Tragedy paper that week: ‘Dans le fond des forêts votre image me suit’ (‘In the depth of the forests your image pursues me’). This was a line that haunted her. She believed that it captured the inextricable relationship between desire and death. It sprang her into a poem that she believed to be her best yet, one which offered ‘a symbol of the terrible beauty of death, and the paradox that the more intensely one lives, the more one burns and consumes oneself’.29

There is a panther stalks me down:

One day I’ll have my death of him;

His greed has set the woods aflame,

He prowls more lordly than the sun.30

Writing about the poem to her mother, Plath acknowledged the strong influence of Blake’s ‘Tyger, tyger’ on its rhythms, its questions and its elemental force. When she first told her mother that she had written it, she acknowledged that it was directly inspired by the encounter in Falcon Yard with ‘the only man I’ve met yet here who’d be strong enough to be equal with’, but whom she would probably never see again.31

What she did not acknowledge, in either her journal or her letters, was that the most direct inspiration behind ‘Pursuit’ was the other poem that Hughes had published in Chequer a few months before: his compact index of everything to follow, ‘The Jaguar’. Ted as panther, animal force, sexual marauder; Sylvia willing her own death of him. In mythologising their relationship from the start, she was in some sense creating the conditions for her own tragedy – and laying the ground for the posthumous dramatisation of her story, his story.

Now she knew what she wanted: ‘a life of conflict, of balancing children, sonnets, love and dirty dishes; and banging banging an affirmation of life out on pianos and ski slopes and in bed in bed in bed’.32 Ted proceeded in a more circumspect manner. All he said about the party was that ‘it was very bright, and everything got smashed up’.33 He was preoccupied with the approach of the final deadline on the option to take up the cheap passage to Australia.

Two weeks later he was back in Cambridge, staying with Luke. He came up on the bus from Victoria after work on the Friday and late that evening the two of them threw stones at what they thought was Sylvia’s window. Bert told her the next day and she spent the weekend longing to hear the tread of the black panther on the stair, aching with desire for a new life. The boys tried again in the small hours of Sunday morning – mud as well as stones this time – but once again they got the wrong window.34 Sylvia was in a little attic room, which she had tastefully decorated with art books artfully stacked or opened, a tea set of ‘solid black pottery’ and bright pillows on the couch.35 The stones and earth could hardly have reached that high.

The next weekend, conscious that the Easter vacation was upon them, Ted asked Luke to ask Sylvia to come and see him in London. The timing was propitious. She was about to go to Paris, for another make-or-break visit with Sassoon. She called at 18 Rugby Street on the evening of Friday 23 March 1956, prior to her Channel crossing the following day.

8
18 Rugby Street

Rugby Street is in the Holborn district of central London, halfway between the elegant squares around the British Museum where the Bloomsbury Group once lived and the legal and financial district that spreads east and south from Gray’s Inn. Among the local landmarks were the Great Ormond Street children’s hospital, the old Foundling Hospital in Coram Fields, and the Lamb, a pub in Lamb’s Conduit Street much frequented by poets. Rugby Street itself was a Georgian terrace that had seen better days. The freehold was owned by Rugby School and, with rent controls keeping the price of an apartment down to £2 per week, maintenance of the block was not a priority. Some of the houses were occupied by locals whose families had been there for generations. Others were divided into scruffy flats, occupied by bohemian types – graphic designers, actors, photographers, young men and women trying to make their way in what we now call the ‘creative industries’. Number 18, where Ted was living in the flat belonging to Dan Huws’s father, was lit by gas, had a single lavatory in the basement and the only water supply was a tap in a basin on the half-landing.1 To Sylvia, raised on American plumbing and her mother’s cleanliness, it was disgusting. But the occupant held irresistible allure.

She booked into a hotel in New Fetter Lane, the other side of Holborn, then met Ted for the evening. The following Monday morning, she wrote up her memories of the weekend: ‘Arrived in Paris early Saturday evening exhausted from sleepless holocaust night with Ted in London … washed my battered face, smeared with a purple bruise from Ted and my neck raw and wounded too.’2 Love-bites: for Plath, desire was always a purple bruise; for Hughes, poetry was the healing of a wound.

She called it her ‘wild destructive London night’. She was anxious because Hughes’s paunchy friend Michael Boddy had come up the stairs at one point, and he was a gossip, so all Cambridge would soon know ‘that I am Ted’s mistress or something equally absurd’.3 She was also upset that once during their lovemaking he had called her Shirley instead of Sylvia.4 She wanted to see him again, so that she could ‘rip past’ Shirley and prove her capacity to be as ‘tender and wise’ as Shirley was, while also being a better, fuller, wilder, more extreme lover. Regardless of Boddy’s gossip, she wanted Ted’s body and it was inextricable from his poetry: ‘I lust for him, and in my mind I am ripped to bits by the words he welds and wields.’5

Ted shaped the night retrospectively, in a poem that he worked on for many years. It is a central pillar of Birthday Letters, though he nearly left it out, because it was too raw and was indiscreet in mentioning a third party who would enter their story later but whose posthumous privacy he wished to preserve. He begins by mythologising the house: as so often in his work, location is given symbolic force. ‘18 Rugby Street’ is imagined as a stage-set and a Cretan labyrinth. Each of the four floors was the scene of the love-struggle of its inhabitant: a car-dealer who shared the basement with a caged bird and a mistress, a lovelorn Belgian girl (elsewhere he wrote that she was German) trapped in the ground-floor flat with a manic barking Alsatian which protected her from everything except her own oven in which she would one day gas herself.

His memories of the night were of waiting at his battered carpenter’s bench that was both dining-table and work-desk; of Sylvia’s breathless voice as she panted up the uncarpeted stairs with Luke (he could not remember how and when Luke excused himself and disappeared); of his sense of Sylvia as a great blue bird charged at high voltage, ‘Fluorescent cobalt, a flare of aura’. He would always associate her with electricity, the positive pole being her innate energy and sex appeal, the negative that emotional volatility that took her to the darkest places and then the temporary cure that came from electro-convulsive therapy. Ted saw vulnerability in the temples above her bright brown and somewhat hooded eyes. In the theatre of her face, those temples were at first sight upstaged by her glamorous and fashionable bangs, but with knowledge of her history they elicited special tenderness because this was the place where the electrodes had been attached. The reference to her temples also evokes a place of worship, befitting this pagan goddess coming, with ‘Sexual Dreams’, from another world.

She recited the poem about the black panther that she had written for him. As she did so, he held her and kissed her and tried to keep her still. His poem then jump-cuts to their walk back to her hotel in New Fetter Lane. Opposite the entrance, there was a wartime bombsite on which some building work was being started. It was there that they ‘clutched each other giddily’ and took the plunge. She told him of the reason for her scar: her suicide attempt. In the poem of his memory, even as he is kissing her a part of him is sensing the danger and telling him to stay away. Something is being built, but there is also a bomb liable to explode. Somehow, she smuggled him into the hotel and they made love, her body ‘slim and lithe and smooth as a fish’. For the first time in his life, he is making love to a girl who is not English, a girl who embodies the energy and hope of Shakespeare’s ‘brave new world’, John Donne’s ‘my America, my newfound land’. ‘Beautiful, beautiful America’ has taken possession of him.6

Walking back to his flat at first light, he had an epiphany. His fullest account of that hour is excluded from ‘18 Rugby Street’ but included in a version of Birthday Letters that he never published, a 4,000-line blank-verse autobiography of his relationship with Sylvia called ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’. It was his equivalent of William Wordsworth’s posthumously published autobiographical blank-verse epic, The Prelude. He tells of how he left her hotel and walked back across Holborn to his flat at about five o’clock in the morning. He felt himself ‘floating / On air spilling in over the city / Off the Surrey gardens and orchards’. Then he heard ‘London’s hidden blackbirds and thrushes’, ‘a million singers’, singing a blessing upon the ‘sleeping millions’. It was like ‘a high tide at dawn, the top of the tide, / Their dawn chorus awash through the whole city’. Meanwhile, his totemic birds, the crows, accompanied him at ground level.7

Like every young romantic after such an encounter, he is walking on air, every one of his senses refined, every detail of the moment etched in his memory for ever.

Back in Rugby Street, he penned a short letter and sent it for Sylvia to pick up at the American Express office in Paris. It had been a night, he wrote, consumed by the discovery of the smoothness of her body. The memory of it went through him with the warming glow of brandy.8 This could be described as his first ‘birthday letter’: the letter of the birth of their love. He asked her to come back to him, telling her that he would be in London till 14 April, and that if she did not come to him he would go to her in Cambridge.

In Paris, Sylvia poured her confusion into her diary. From one point of view, Ted was a diversion. She had got drunk at Falcon Yard and kissed (and bitten) him. She had got drunk in London and slept with him. That was that. Now it was time to give herself to Richard Sassoon, of whom she had written – after meeting Ted – ‘I love that damn boy with all I’ve ever had in me and that’s a hell of a lot.’9 But on arriving in Paris, she discovered that Sassoon had gone south in order to avoid a confrontation with her. He needed time to make up his mind as to whether their long, passionate on–off relationship should turn to marriage or be finally ended. She was devastated. She had always been used to getting her own way with men: ‘never before had a man gone off to leave me to cry after’.10 She sat in the living room of the concierge of his apartment building on the rue Duvivier and wrote him a long, incoherent letter while the radio blared out ‘Smile though your heart is breaking’.

Then she made a bad error. She wrote again to Sassoon, telling him about Ted. As Sassoon put it, she ‘was going to start having an affair with a certain fellow so as to make me jealous and give me a mind to marry her, which I was unwilling to do just because of this imminent unfaithfulness’.11 She cheered herself up with sightseeing and an afternoon in a hotel room with an Oxford student called Tony Gray. She juggled her options in her diary. To play it cool and wait for Ted to come to her? To go to him, for one night only, then go back to Sassoon? To play safe and marry her devoted friend Gordon Lameyer? Or even to join Ted in one of his hare-brained schemes, such as teaching English in Yugoslavia?

In the latter part of the Easter vacation, she travelled with Lameyer to Munich, Venice and Rome. Their relationship was disintegrating. Sassoon was giving no sign of returning. On Friday 13 April, her late father’s birthday, Sylvia Plath boarded a plane in Rome, the ticket paid for by Lameyer. She had told Ted to expect her that night. In her possession was a prize: he had written her a poem. Though the first line read ‘Ridiculous to call it love’, it revealed that she had touched him to the quick, that he felt her absence as if it were a wound, that without her he was like a dying man, that ‘Wherever you haunt earth, you are shaped and bright / As the true ghost of my loss.’12 Even if this was a jeu d’esprit, a little act of seduction intended to bring her back to his bed for a second time, it is still an uncanny anticipation of the future haunting that would determine the course of his later life.

Sylvia wrote about their second night together in her incomplete novel ‘Falcon Yard’. In the surviving draft, Ted is called Gerald – hardly a disguise – but her ‘Character Notebook’ for the novel calls him Leonard, a ‘God-man, because spermy’, a creator, ‘Dionysiac’, a Pan who has to be led into the mundane world of ‘toast and nappies’.13 ‘What I need’, she writes in the voice of Jess, the autobiographical protagonist, is ‘a banging, blasting, ferocious love’. But a voice tells her that it will hurt. Her counter-voice replies, ‘So what … better bleed.’ She needs to stop being ‘the Girl Who’s Never Been Hurt’. She tells herself to get hurt and be glad of it, to take his desire ‘even though he’ll never love you but will use you and lunge on through you to the next one’. She determines to ‘blast his other girls to hell and back’. After an encounter with another man on the bus from the airport, Jess heads for Rugby Street, ‘blazing’, ‘letting the wet wind blow her hair back’, only too glad to look wild because ‘The recklessness came banging up in her: stronger and fiercer than she had ever known it’. She is greeted by the Ted character – his name now changed from Gerald to Ian – who observes that it is Friday the 13th as he takes her suitcase upstairs.

His voice, she notices this time, is ‘UnBritish’, almost ‘Refugee Pole, mixed with something of Dylan Thomas: rich and mellow-noted: half sung’. They exchange small talk with Jim, the commercial artist from the flat upstairs – this is Jim Downer, with whom Ted was working at this time on an illustrated children’s book called Timmy the Tug. The Sylvia character is pleased to be called ‘Jess, not Judy’, an allusion to the wound of Ted having called her Shirley not Sylvia when they were first making love back in March. Then he tells his dreams of white leopard, burnt fox and pike. He kisses her on the throat, loving the incredible smoothness – fish- or mermaid-like – of her skin. They openly discuss the violence of the first time:

‘I went to Paris all scarred. Black and blue …’

‘But you liked it?’

‘Yes.’

‘I was furious with myself. I don’t know what happened to me …’

She has it out with him about the wrong name being blurted out. He defuses the tension with an account of that moment of morning grace when he left her, the Wordsworthian epiphany that would be recaptured years later in ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’: ‘I’ll never forget it. When I came out into the streets, the air was all blue, like blue water, and the buildings were covered, just thick, with thrushes. Everything clear and blue. Not a sound. The air isn’t like that in London at any other time.’

Then they read poetry to each other. First, her ‘Conversation among the Ruins’. ‘You love one-syllabled words, don’t you?’ he says, setting the template for their relationship by mingling literary criticism with love-talk, ‘Squab, patch, crack. Violent.’ She replies that she hates the abstraction of ‘-ation’ words: ‘I like words to sound what they say: bang crash. Not mince along in singsong iambic pentameter.’ He responds by reading an old English ballad and his voice reaches to the core of her being: ‘The way he took words, rounded, pitched them. It was holy. I will learn this by heart, she told herself … part of her vibrating to the sound of his voice. I will learn it, and hear his voice every time, reading it.’ She convinces herself that she will never forget the sound of his voice or a single syllable of the verse that passes his lips. Her bare arms ‘go stippled with goose flesh’, he tells her the poem is ‘an altar to spill blood at’, and the surviving fragment breaks off before they go to bed.14

‘I can make more love the more I make love,’ he said to her. ‘The more he writes poems, the more he writes poems,’ she was soon reporting to her mother.15 Three days after the night in Rugby Street, Sylvia wrote in her diary of ‘his big iron violent virile body, incredible tendernesses and rich voice which makes poems and quirked people and music’. He is a ‘huge derrick-striding Ted’. He makes her feel safe but he makes her feel scared:

Consider yourself lucky to have been stabbed by him; never complain or be bitter or ask for more than normal human consideration as an integrated being. Let him go. Have the guts. Make him happy: cook, play, read … keep other cups and flagons full – never accuse or nag – let him run, reap, rip – and glory in the temporary sun of his ruthless force.16

With Sylvia back in Cambridge for the summer term, Ted’ s problem was Shirley. His relationship with her came to a bitter end in an encounter that he recorded in several drafts of a poem that, sensitive to her privacy, he never published. It tells of how he turned up in Cambridge with a bottle of wine and two pounds of rump steak intended for a ‘love-feast’ with Sylvia at Whitstead. He went the long way round so as not to be seen outside Newnham College, only to turn the corner and see Shirley coming for him like ‘an electrical storm’, beautiful in her red-haired anger. He hid the wine and the parcel of meat in a privet hedge. He never forgot the pain of their exchange. He remembered her ‘furious restraint’ and ‘her outraged under-whisper’. He ‘refused’ her and his memory is that as he did so he thrice denied that he had slept with Sylvia, even though he was only 50 yards from her door. The triple denial is an allusion to the disciple Peter denying his knowledge of Jesus; Shirley’s memory, by contrast, is that Ted had always been true to himself and honest with her during their affair, and he was candid with her in their parting.

In Ted’s colourful dramatisation of their blazing row, the wine bottle (‘uncontrollable, bulbous / Priapic’) rolls on to the pavement between them. It is as if even the world’s inanimate objects are on the side of his new love. Shirley’s green eyes fill with tears and she walks away across Newnham playing fields. He stands and watches her walk out of his life. It was as if she had turned not to the playing fields but the other way, into the road, ‘And gone under a lorry’.17 He never saw her again.

With the help of friends, she struggled through her last term at Cambridge and her final exams. She knew that nothing could change what had happened, but confronting her loss, accepting it, she found almost impossible. Ted had a deep and lasting impact on her life.

Both now free from serious relationships that might have led to marriage, Ted and Sylvia became inseparable. For much of the Easter term, he camped out on a mattress in a bare-boarded room on the top floor of Alexandra House, a soup-kitchen run by the Women’s Voluntary Service just off Petty Cury. He found himself sharing a blanket with one of the volunteers, ‘a lovely girl escaped freshly / From her husband’. For a month, they slept nightly in each other’s arms, naked but never once making love. She tenderly traced her hands over the love-scratches that Sylvia had ‘inscribed’ across his back, while he ‘never stirred a finger beyond/ Sisterly comforting’. Sometimes they were joined in the bed by a ‘plump and pretty’ friend of hers, who ‘did all she could’ to get Ted ‘inside her’ – without success.18 Like a medieval knight lying between two naked temptresses, he was proving himself in the art of fidelity. He did not fail.

Cambridge is at its loveliest in the Easter term. According to Jane Baltzell, Sylvia’s rival and housemate, one warm day Ted and Luke sat in a haystack in a field just outside town, drinking wine and making literary plans. Ted then walked to Whitstead with another bottle of wine, intending to share some of their dreams with Sylvia. She did not have a corkscrew, so Ted went down from her attic room to borrow one. The first door on which he knocked happened to be that of the resident don whose job it was to keep an eye on the Whitstead girls. Baltzell’s version of the incident has the door opening and a face, ‘framed in tight braids of dark hair’, peering out. Ted asks if she has a corkscrew that he can borrow. Almost before she can reply that she ‘most certainly has not’ – she happened to be a teetotal Methodist – Ted loses patience, strikes ‘the neck of the bottle off on her doorknob’ and bolts back upstairs.19 One never knows quite how much embellishment there is in the telling of such myth-making tales about Ted: Luke Myers was convinced that this story was pure invention, probably on the part of Sylvia.20

The lovers listened to Beethoven and Bartók in record shops. They went into the moonlight to find owls, and Sylvia immediately composed a poem called ‘Metamorphosis’. They were both writing at an unprecedented rate, Sylvia being inspired by Ted to take on ‘the vocabulary of woods and animals and earth’ and creating poems for him in pastiche of his own style, such as an ‘Ode for Ted’ that begins:

From under crunch of my man’s boot

green oat-sprouts jut;

he names a lapwing, starts rabbits in a rout …

stalks red fox, shrewd stoat.21

They wandered the meadows around Grantchester, made love in the open air. Having at last found a man who loved food as much as she did, Sylvia cooked steak and trout on her single gas ring. Ted taught her – as he had once taught Shirley – how to cook herring roes and how to read horoscopes. He took her to ‘the world’s biggest circus’.22 They shared improvised recipes:

He stalked in the door yesterday with a packet of little pink shrimp and four fresh trout. I made a nectar of Shrimp Newburg with essence of butter, cream, sherry and cheese; had it on rice with the trout. It took us three hours to peel all the little tiny shrimp, and Ted just lay groaning by the hearth after the meal with utter delight, like a huge Goliath.23

They read and wrote and revised their poems in the garden of Whitstead, quoting swathes of Dylan Thomas and Shakespeare that Ted knew by heart. Each immediately became the other’s best critic. He sharpened her style, made her feel she was writing from her truest and deepest self for the first time. She organised his poems, typed them up and began sending them to American periodicals. He taught her to punt on the Cam. She took him to a Fulbright reception in London, where they met the American ambassador and the dashing Duke of Edinburgh who, mistaking Ted for a student, asked him what he was doing, to which Ted replied that he was ‘chaperoning Sylvia’ and the Duke smiled and said, ‘Ah, the idle rich.’24

She told of all this in effusive letters to her mother Aurelia. Otto Plath had died shortly after Sylvia’s eighth birthday. He had gone to have his leg amputated as a result of gangrene, and died of an embolism while still in hospital. On being told the news, Sylvia had announced that she would never speak to God again. Mother and daughter were inevitably drawn intensely close by their loss. When Sylvia moved to England, her letters were a lifeline to her mother. She also kept in touch with her brother Warren, who was two and a half years younger than her. Ted, she wrote to tell him, was the one man worthy of becoming his brother-in-law, though he would benefit from Warren giving him some American-style training in how to buy himself a decent wardrobe.

Her Fulbright scholarship having been renewed for a second year, she arranged for her mother to visit England at the end of term. Aurelia arrived in London on Wednesday 13 June and the three of them went to a cheap but good German restaurant called Schmidt’s, in honour of the Teutonic Plathian heritage. Sylvia was delighted that her mother and lover immediately hit it off. That night, Sylvia suggested to Ted that they should get married and he agreed.25

They rushed to make arrangements before Aurelia left town. This involved getting a special Archbishop’s licence, tracking down a local vicar, buying new shoes and trousers for Ted, and spending the last of their money on gold wedding rings. The night before the wedding Ted dreamed that he had caught a pike from an enormous depth in the pond at Crookhill. As it rose to the surface, its head filled the entire lake. He backed away, straining to control it.26

By good fortune, Aurelia had in her luggage a pink wool knitted suit dress that she had never worn. Adorned with a pink hair ribbon and a pink rose from Ted, this served as a wedding dress. The hurried ceremony, conducted by a twinkle-eyed old clergyman who lived opposite Charles Dickens’s house, took place at the church of St George the Martyr in Bloomsbury, just across the square from the offices of Faber and Faber, on 16 June 1956 (‘Bloomsday’, Ted noted – the date of the action of James Joyce’s Ulysses). Ted wore his RAF tie and the corduroy jacket that he had three times dyed black. It rained. Aurelia was the only guest, so the curate was requisitioned as best man, delaying him from taking a busload of children to the zoo. ‘All the prison animals had to be patient / While we married,’ wrote Ted in Birthday Letters, where he turned the curate into a sexton, grimly foreshadowing Hamlet’s macabre dialogue over Ophelia’s grave. The vicar read an off-the-shelf printed marriage sermon entitled ‘Unto Your Lives’ End’.27 Sylvia’s eyes were like jewels, their brown glistening with tears of joy.28

Ted had told Olwyn that he had met a first-rate American female poet, ‘a damned sight better than the run of good male’, and that they were going to come to Paris in the summer.29 But he didn’t tell anyone in his family about the decision to marry. Sylvia, by contrast, poured out every detail in an ecstatic letter to her brother Warren. She explained that, because of the Newnham and Fulbright authorities, and the fact that Ted was probably about to go to Spain to get a job teaching English, the big wedding reception would be postponed for a second ceremony in Wellesley the following summer. For now, the official line was that they were engaged. The marriage was in keeping with their situation: ‘private, personal, legal, true, but limited in its way’. She did not hesitate to write that she could now be addressed – Warren could take his pick – as Mrs Sylvia Hughes, Mrs Ted Hughes, Mrs Edward James Hughes, or ‘Mrs E. J. Hughes (wife of the internationally renowned poet and genius)’.30

9
‘Marriage is my medium’

They spent their wedding night in 18 Rugby Street. Ted then cleared his stuff from the flat and took it to Yorkshire. He still did not tell his parents that he was married. The story was that he would be off to Spain in search of work teaching English as a foreign language. Sylvia took the opportunity to show her mother round Cambridge. There was talk of a visit to the Beacon in early August so that the family could meet Sylvia and Aurelia, though this did not come off.1

They met up back in London and flew to Paris, with Aurelia. After a week’s exhausting sightseeing, she went off on her European tour, while Ted and Sylvia stayed another week. They met up with Luke Myers, who had never seen either of them looking so happy. Ted was conscious that Sylvia’s was an ‘American’ Paris of Impressionist paintings, chestnut trees and the shades of ‘Hemingway, / Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein’. Also of the memory of her failed attempt to reconcile with Richard Sassoon just a couple of months earlier. His Paris, by contrast, was shaped by the memory of his earlier visit to Olwyn and the sense he had then of the shadows of the war – ‘walls patched and scabbed with posters’, the ghosts of SS men sitting in pavement cafés, the sense that the waiter serving you bitter coffee might have been a collaborator.2

Paris was proving too expensive, so they took a train to cheaper Spain, with nothing but a rucksack and Sylvia’s typewriter. First stop was Madrid, where they attended a bullfight. Fascinated by the rituals and the blood, Ted wrote an enormously detailed account of it in a letter to his parents. Sylvia felt disgusted and sickened by the brutality, though recognised that the experience was good material for a story. ‘I am glad that Ted and I both feel the same way,’ she reported to her mother, ‘full of sympathy for the bull.’ The most satisfying moment was when ‘one of the six beautiful, doomed bulls managed to gore a fat, cruel picador’.3 He was lifted off his horse and carried away with blood spurting from his thigh. ‘You could see great holes in him,’ wrote Ted. ‘Whether he died later or not I don’t know.’4

From Madrid it was on to Benidorm, which was in the early stages of its transformation from fishing village to tourist resort. They began by lodging in a widow’s house. There was no hot water or refrigerator and the dark kitchen cupboard was full of ants. They cooked – ‘fresh sardines fried in oil, potato and onion tortillas, café con leche’5 – on an ancient paraffin burner with a blue flame. Ted got sunburnt on the first day. Soon they moved to a rental house set back from the sea, away from the noise of the main hotels on the neon-lit tourist strip. They decided to stay all summer and write.

Sylvia filled her journal with detailed observations of fishermen, markets brimming with fresh food, and day excursions. Ted carried on with what he had started in Paris: a collection of fables for children, in the manner of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. The first was called ‘How the Donkey Became’. Myths of origin were a peculiar obsession throughout his writing career. He was very pleased with his narratives, though it would take several years before he found a publisher for them. He told Olwyn that Sylvia rated them, too: ‘Sylvia is as fine a literary critic as I have met, and she thinks about my ordinary prose narrative style just as you do. But my fables she cries over and laughs all together.’6

He always remembered their big cool house and the hotels under construction in ‘The moon-blanched, moon-trenched sea-town’ where a ‘hook of promontory’ halved ‘The two wings of beach’.7 One of Ted and Sylvia’s favourite devices was to apply the bleaching light cast by the moon as a filter upon their poetic lenses. They wrote all morning and bathed in the afternoons, ‘played and shopped, maybe wrote again in the evenings’.8 On some evenings, Ted worked to improve his Spanish while Sylvia translated Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir from the French. He tried to teach her the art of hypnosis, which gave her the idea of writing a story called ‘The Hypnotising Husband’. She sketched in pen and ink, catching the outline of kitchen pots, an old stove, white-plastered tenements on the cliffs above the fishing bay, bowls of fruit, and her new husband in profile.9

Sylvia told her mother that they were utterly happy. She could not imagine how she had lived without him: ‘I think he is the handsomest, most brilliant, creative, dear man in the world. My whole thought is for him, to make a comfortable place for him.’10 She was just as effusive to her brother: ‘He knows all about so many things: fishing, hunting, birds, animals, and is utterly dear … What a husband!’11 Ted in turn told his brother in Australia that he had never been writing so well, that this ‘American poetess’ was the making of him.12 In her journal, she described their writing table: 5 foot square, in the centre of the stone-tiled dining room, made of ‘glossy dark polished wood’, with a gap in the middle. At one end Ted sat ‘in a squarely built grandfather chair with wicker back and seat’:

His realm was a welter of sheets of typing paper and ragged cardboard-covered notebooks; the sheets of scrap paper, scrawled across with his assertive blue-inked script, rounded, upright, flaired, were backs of reports on books, plays and movies written while at Pinewood studios; typed and re-written versions of poems, bordered with drawings of mice, ferrets and polar bears, spread out across his half of the table. A bottle of blue ink, perpetually open, rested on a stack of paper. Crumpled balls of used paper lay here and there, to be thrown into the large wooden crate placed for that purpose in the doorway. All papers and notebooks on this half of the table were tossed at angles, kitty-corner and impromptu.13

A cookbook rested open by his right elbow, where Sylvia had left it after reading out recipes for rabbit stew. These are the sort of conditions in which he would write for the rest of his life. On Sylvia’s half of the table, by contrast, everything was neat, well ordered, carefully stacked. He wrote in longhand; she typed.

Though one would not guess it from the brightness of her journal-writing, if Ted is to be believed, Sylvia hated Spain. He said this in retrospect, on account of what he perceived as the darkening in the style of the poems that she wrote while they were there, of her reaction to the bullfight, and of a glimpse of her by moonlight walking alone by the sea in Alicante, looking out towards America like a lost soul. He loved Goya; she found something disturbing in the ‘Goya funeral grin’ of Spanish culture.14

A single brief shadow passed across their honeymoon summer under the Benidorm sun. Sylvia’s fragmentary journal entry for 23 July speaks of ‘The hurt going in, clean as a razor, and the dark blood welling’.15 The first part of that day’s diary is missing, apparently torn from her notebook. Years later, when her marriage to Ted was at rock-bottom, she allegedly told a friend that one afternoon he turned violent as they made love in the open air on a hillside. The – unverified – story went that his hands tightened around her neck and she nearly choked.16

After six hot weeks in Spain, they returned via Paris. Olwyn had been away on a conference when they passed through in July and this time she was away again, on holiday. They were, however, able to see Sylvia’s brother Warren, who was about to take up a Fulbright himself. He took some photographs of the newlyweds, arm in arm. In the city, everything seemed rushed, and tiring, after their summer by the sea. Sylvia was ready to head north to ‘Ted’s wuthering-heights home’.17

The photographs were taken by a colleague from the trouser factory who was an enthusiastic amateur with a camera. In the most famous image, she holds with both hands the strong arm that is around her. His other hand is casually in his pocket. The light bounces off their white shirts on to their fresh faces and high cheekbones. He has just turned twenty-six and she is not quite twenty-four. They look impossibly beautiful, impossibly happy. In another snapshot, Edith is between them, proud of the son who has brought an American bride instead of going off to have a family in Australia. In a third, Sylvia is in the bosom of the family, sitting on a garden bench between Ted and Edith, with Uncle Walt and Bill Hughes standing behind.

On 2 September, she wrote to her mother, describing herself as ‘a veritable convert to the Brontë clan’, with warm woollen sweater, slacks, socks to her knees and a steaming cup of coffee, sitting in Ted’s bedroom looking out over the beautiful landscape of moorland criss-crossed with drystone walls, as the wind whipped the rain against the side of the house and the coal fires glowed within.18 On a never-to-be-forgotten day, Uncle Walt drove them over to Top Withens, the alleged original of Wuthering Heights. They had a picnic and walked over the moor to the ‘lonely, deserted black-stone house, broken down, clinging to the windy side of a hill’.19 Ted photographed her halfway up a tree, just by the ruin. She re-read Wuthering Heights and then on a day of freezing wind they hiked 10 miles over the moors to visit Top Withens again. They also went to the Brontë parsonage in Haworth, where they marvelled at Charlotte Brontë’s little watercolours and the miniature books in which the sisters had written their earliest stories. Sylvia was full of hope and ambition. A poem ‘unfurled’ from her ‘Like a loose frond of hair’ from the nape of her neck, ‘To be clipped and kept in a book’.20 The moors and the Brontë connection would inspire two fine Plath poems, ‘Two Views of Withens’ and, later, ‘Wuthering Heights’.21

Towards the end of September, they went down to London for a couple of days. Ted auditioned as a reader of modern poetry for the BBC’s highbrow Third Programme (the station that a decade later was rebranded as Radio 3). At Sylvia’s suggestion, he slipped in a couple of his own poems among selections from W. B. Yeats and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The producer, Donald Carne-Ross, sat with Sylvia in the listening room and murmured his approval of Ted’s voice: ‘Perfect, superb’.22 There was the possibility of a programme about Yeats, if the commissioning committee agreed. He would be in touch.

In October, Sylvia had to return to Cambridge for her second year of study. Ted remained for a fortnight with his parents at the Beacon, then went back to Dan Huws’s flat in Rugby Street. They still had not told the college authorities, or indeed the Fulbright Commission, about their marriage. Sylvia was unnecessarily worried about getting into trouble. So they were apart for a few weeks, one of the very few times that they were not together during the six years before the marriage broke down. They wrote each other love letters every day, alive with longing and playfulness and writing ideas and smart criticism of each other’s work and dreamy plans for the future. Ted sometimes took to typing instead of using his favoured black fountain pen, as if in homage to Sylvia’s love of the new Olivetti typewriter she had bought in the month of their marriage. They were not averse to sentimentality. ‘Darling Dearest Sylvia kish puss ponk’, Ted would begin, and he would end, ‘I love you I love you, I love you I love you your Ted’ or ‘My kiss puss All my lovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelove lovelove from top to tow [sic]’ – followed by a postscript with the promise that ‘I shall see you Friday and we shall make up for all these interims.’23

His literary career was beginning to take off. Not least thanks to Sylvia’s organisational skills, his poems were being sent out to magazines in both Britain and America, and some were being accepted. It made a difference that the submissions were neatly typewritten; one can guess from the American spellings who was responsible for that. News came from Carne-Ross of provisional acceptance of the Yeats programme. ‘Darling darling Teddy,’ wrote Sylvia, ‘I read your letter over breakfast … and fought and conquered a huge urge to … leap up in the center of the table and shout: MY HUSBAND IS GOING TO READ OVER THE BBC! With appropriate whoopdedos. I AM SO PROUD.’24 As it turned out, he was paid, but the Yeats readings were never broadcast. The first time Ted’s voice was heard on the radio was on 14 April 1957, when a recording made on 24 October the previous year of him reading his poem ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’ was included in an episode of a series called The Poet’s Voice.

By the time he had done his recordings, the Governing Body of Newnham and the Fulbright Commission had been told about the marriage. Far from taking away Sylvia’s scholarship or throwing her out, they congratulated her. The Fulbright took the view that the union was a boost to Anglo-American relations, which was their raison d’être. Ted was free to move to Cambridge. Mr and Mrs Hughes had found a ground-floor flat in Eltisley Avenue, in Newnham village, on the edge of the city, nicely placed between Sylvia’s college and the green spaces of Grantchester Meadows. The rent was low (£4 per week) and they had a living room, dining room, cavernous kitchen and bedroom. Like many houses in west Cambridge, it was a single residence that had been divided into flats. This meant that they had to share a bathroom with the occupant of the flat upstairs; by a curious coincidence, that was George Sassoon, son of the First World War poet Siegfried, and thus a relative of Richard Sassoon (though Sylvia never mentioned him). Ted moved in first, with Sylvia following at the end of the academic term in December. She had sent a batch of their work to the prestigious American magazines the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly. All of hers had been rejected, but a poem of Ted’s called ‘The Hawk in the Storm’ was accepted by Peter Davison, editor of the Atlantic. Ted thought it was the worst of the poems that they had submitted.

In November, Olwyn stopped by for a weekend on the way back to Paris after a break with her parents in Yorkshire. Her first impression of Sylvia was of ‘American-classic’ clothes, good manners, blonde hair, fair skin, brown eyes (‘deep, watchful and intelligent’), elegant limbs (‘her best feature’) and an attractively low-pitched voice (‘deepening engagingly when she was amused’). She thought that her new sister-in-law was ‘poised and controlled, with a hint of reserve or constraint’.25 They went to Heffers bookshop and Sylvia bought an impressive pile of literary texts with her generous Fulbright book allowance. In the evening, Sylvia cooked a large dinner of roast beef, followed by strawberries and cream. They drank wine. Sylvia thought Olwyn was ‘startlingly beautiful with amber-gold hair and eyes’, but felt that she was ‘quite selfish and squanders money on herself continually in extravagances of clothes and cigarettes, whilst she still owes Ted fifty pounds’.26

That same month, Sylvia spotted the announcement of a competition for a best first book of poems. It came from the American publisher Harper Brothers, in conjunction with the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association of New York (YMYWHA), which had a renowned Poetry Center at its headquarters on 92nd Street. The judges were figures of immense distinction in the poetry world: W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and the American Marianne Moore. Since Sylvia did not think she had quite enough good poems of her own to create a book, she and Ted selected what they thought were the best forty of Ted’s. Six of them already had magazine acceptances. She typed them up and submitted them, with a renamed version of the Atlantic poem as the title piece: The Hawk in the Rain. He had for some time been intending to put together a collection of his poems, taking the title from a recurrent dream he had been having: ‘A Hill of Leopards’.27 The trouble was, he had not yet been inspired to write the poem that would go with the title. So he was happy to go with Hawk and to let his wife take the lead on the process. Sylvia was convinced that Ted would win the competition, and gain the prize of publication. She assured her mother that it was the best collection of any poet since W. B. Yeats and Dylan Thomas.28

Sylvia rounded up her year in a pre-Christmas letter to her dearest friend, Marty Brown, her sophomore roommate at Smith. She had found a husband who was ‘the most magnificent man ever’, a ‘roaring hulking Yorkshireman’ who had put the sound of a ‘hurricane’ in her ear at the Falcon Yard party. From that first instant, she ‘just knew’ that he was the one. She rescued him from a ‘slum’ in London, where he had told her that Dylan Thomas used to stay, and now they were writing ‘like fury’, each the other’s best critic. He was ‘a crack shot and fisherman, discus thrower and can read horoscopes like a professional’. He shot rabbits and she stewed them. They had nothing to their name but ‘a wood coffee table, a travel rug and very sharp steak knife’, but they wanted nothing more. They had each other. She loved that he was the only man she had ever met whom she could ‘never boss’ – she just knew that if she tried, ‘he’d bash my head in’.29

They spent Christmas with Ted’s family at the Beacon, all getting on well, then returned to Cambridge for the freezing-cold Lent term. Dorothea Krook, Sylvia’s generous college supervisor, lent them a paraffin heater, at which Sylvia warmed her hands as she worked on an autobiographical novel about her Cambridge experiences. The ‘greasy-grimed shelves’ and ‘tacky, dark walls’ of 55 Eltisley ‘confirmed’ her ‘idea of England’: ‘part / Nursing home, part morgue / For something partly dying, partly dead’.30 The contrast between dirty, dying England and pristine, newborn America was a recurrent image in Ted’s work. Sylvia cleaned the kitchen in a frenzy of scouring.

Ted brought in some income by getting a job as an English teacher at the Coleridge Secondary Modern School for Boys. The name had suitably inspiring literary connotations, but he found the work tiring. Because it was a school for boys who had failed to get into the more academic grammar schools, he worked across the curriculum, teaching basic Maths as well as English, History, Drama and Art. He brought the students’ work home in the evening and read out samples to Sylvia as he was marking. It was not an easy school. Sylvia was only mildly exaggerating for comic effect when she told her friend Marty that his class consisted of ‘a gang of 40 teddy-boys, teen-age, who carry chains and razors to school and can’t remember their multiplication tables for 2 days running: a most moving, tragic and in many ways rewarding experience’. It took a lot out of Ted ‘to maintain physical and emotional discipline (they still use the cane here!)’.31 But the boys loved him, especially when he read out ballads and encouraged them to write their own. And still more when he made them stage little Elizabethan plays.

In February, three days before the anniversary of their first meeting at Falcon Yard, came winter cheer: Ted had won the competition. The Hawk in the Rain was going to be published in America. The distinction of the judging panel almost certainly assured English publication too. Ted told Olwyn that his first reaction on hearing the news was a tremendous sense of guilt – partly, though he did not say so, at the fact that he owed the breakthrough to Sylvia finding out about the competition, and yet it was his poems, not hers, that would be published. He went straight back to read the poems and immediately found all sorts of things he wanted to change. He was appalled at himself for letting Sylvia send them out ‘in such an unfinished state’.32 Sylvia had no such hesitation: the book was magnificent, Ted was a genius, the poems combined ‘intellect and grace of complex form, with lyrical music, male vigor and vitality, and moral commitment and love and awe of the world’. He had everything and she was blissfully happy with him, happy indeed that his book had been accepted first. She rejoiced, she told Aurelia, that he was ahead of her: ‘There is no question of rivalry, but only mutual joy and a sense of us doubling our prize-winning and creative output.’33 She was proud to have been the one who had pushed Ted to make the selection and then typed up the poems.

Sylvia promptly sent a copy of the typescript to Faber and Faber, Britain’s premier poetry publisher, mentioning the prize and the prospect of publication by Harper in America. Faber returned it with a curt note saying that they did not publish first volumes by American writers. With characteristic persistence, she sent it back, saying that Ted was actually English. They agreed to publish a UK edition. Mr T. S. Eliot himself very much liked the poems. Within a week of acceptance, Faber sent the poems in proof – well before Harper had set up the New York edition in type. Ted would, he proudly told his parents, be ‘the first poet ever to publish his first book in both countries’.34 Indeed, only Auden and Dylan Thomas had gone before him in having a volume of poems published simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic.

More good news arrived from America: Sylvia was offered a teaching job at Smith, her old college. Ted would go too. Plans for language teaching in Spain or further afield were abandoned. To show her husband her own country was a much more exciting plan. In the better weather of Easter term, they walked on Grantchester Meadows, sometimes getting up early enough to watch the sun rise. One morning Sylvia sat on a stile and recited Chaucer to the cows: ‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote …’.35 Soon she was preparing for her final exams. Ted helped her to revise.

In May, he wrote to Gerald and Joan – they now had two children, Ashley and Brendon – saying that ‘marriage is my medium’.36 He and Sylvia worked and walked and repaired each other’s writing. She was one of the best critics he had ever met and they understood each other’s imagination ‘perfectly’. She was ‘the most responsive alert creature in the world’. They struck sparks, sitting by the river, just watching for water-voles, Sylvia thrilled when the little animals came close. Ted would let out a squeal in imitation of a rabbit, and out they would come. The sound was so realistic that once an owl flew down and tried to sit on his head.37

His visa and the necessary blood test were arranged. Before leaving Coleridge, he directed a school play and Sylvia attended, her only visit to his place of work. They would sail on 20 June, as soon as Sylvia had graduated. The plan was that they would be in New York for the launch of his book in August (in fact it appeared a couple of months later than that).

They went up to Yorkshire to say goodbye to the family. During this visit they happily corrected the Harper proofs of The Hawk in the Rain, but there was an embarrassing incident when Ted’s old schoolteacher John Fisher and his wife Nancy drove up from Mexborough to see them. Olwyn, who was also over from Paris for a summer stay, remembered the visit as follows:

Sylvia was very ‘gushy’ when they arrived. This clearly disconcerted the Fishers, and possibly their inadequate response offended her. Well on in the afternoon, when the talk was deep in reminiscences, she suddenly rose and left the room. We heard the outside door open and banged shut. When she didn’t return after about ten minutes, during which time Ted had become rather silent, he rose in turn and said he’d better go and see where she was. Quite a while later they returned, Sylvia rushing straight upstairs.38

For the family, this was a first glimpse of Sylvia’s emotional volatility.

Then it was off to Southampton to cross the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth. The best thing about the crossing was the food: ‘all included in the fare’, ‘steak, steak, steak – if you wish’ (a real treat, in those years when post-war rationing was still a recent memory), ‘Five courses to each meal and many choices of dish’.39 For Sylvia, who always had a very hearty appetite, the only problem was the combination of this with the Atlantic swell. On one occasion she found herself ‘kneeling on the floor of the little cabin under the electric light’ with ‘the vomit shooting out across the room from the rich dinner, the lobster and pecans and martinis’.40 Landing in New York, a customs officer looked with suspicion at Sylvia’s copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. She had often joked that in Ted she had found her own gamekeeper.

‘Ted is wonderful: how to get it down? All of a piece, smelling lovely as a baby, a hay field, strawberries under leaves, and smooth white, browning to tan, with his great lion head of hair erupting.’41 It was July 1957. Cape Cod. They had washed off the spiders and dust and coal-sludge and smeared windows of Eltisley Avenue, bathed and freshened themselves, rebaptised their marriage in the great salt tides of the Atlantic, under the summer sun.

Brother-in-law Warren drove them there a few days after a garden party at which Sylvia proudly introduced her handsome husband to more than seventy friends and family. Bicycles were strapped to the roof of the car. Aurelia’s wedding present could not have been better judged: a summer rental of a cottage belonging to friends at Eastham, a short bike ride from Nauset Light and Coast Guard beaches. For seven magical weeks they could write, before heading inland for Sylvia to take up her position at Smith. It was a little wooden house in ‘a Christmas tree forest’,42 fully fitted out with squirrels on the roof and chipmunks under the floor. ‘That’s my first ever real chipmunk,’ cried Ted. The little creature lodged in his memory as a ‘midget Aboriginal American’, a ‘snapshot for life’. Especially as Sylvia would sometimes make a face like a chipmunk.43

He recorded his first impressions of America in long, journal-like letters sent to his parents in Yorkshire, Gerald and Joan in Australia, and Olwyn in Paris. In comparison with dour, confined Fifties England, everything was large, opulent, brash. Even the robins were as big as thrushes. Sociability was compulsory. As was cleanliness, which he joked that he felt like reacting against: ‘My natural instinct is to practise little private filthinesses – I spit, pea [sic] on shrubbery, etc, and have a strong desire to sleep on the floor – just to keep in contact with a world that isn’t quite as glazed as this one.’44 Wellesley seemed to him very suburban, so he was glad to return to nature on the Cape. He didn’t like the way that things were homogenised and packaged. ‘What a place America is,’ he wrote to Olwyn. ‘Everything is in cellophane. Everything is 10,000 miles from where it was plucked or made. The bread is in cellophane that is covered with such slogans as de-crapularised, re-energised, multi-cramulated, bleached, double-bleached, rebrowned, unsanforised, guaranteed no blasphemin. There is no such thing as bread. You cannot buy bread.’45 What he liked was the kindness of everybody. Reading the literary reviews, which in England were ‘bittermost gall to boil the heads and hearts of everyone’, he was impressed by the tone of civility. The style was ‘surprisingly honest, outspoken, but not venomous’: ‘They attack each other mercilessly – but openly.’46 There was none of the sarcasm, the snide remarks, the backbiting that characterised the literary establishment back home.

Ted sat and wrote – or poised himself over a blank page – from seven in the morning until two in the afternoon. The poems weren’t really coming, but his children’s stories were exciting him. He hatched a grand plan to produce a great compendium – 5,000 fables, perhaps – which would bring together all the situations, characters and themes out of all the fairy tales and animal stories that he had ever read. And there weren’t many that he hadn’t read.

Then they would explore: sunbathing, swimming, fishing. Once, their little boat was swept out to sea and they were stranded on a reef until a motorboat rescued them. On another occasion, they went mussel-hunting at Rock Harbor, watching with fascination ‘the weird spectacle of fiddler crabs in the mud-pools’.47

Sylvia started a new journal. She too was aching to fill a blank page. She would begin with short stories in which to work herself up towards a novel. She would aim for a ‘jewel prose’ akin to poetry. Little paragraphs. Vignettes. Memories of the cold, the food and the eccentricities of Cambridge. Then she would be ready for ‘Novel: FALCON YARD: central image: love, a falcon, striking once and for all: blood sacrifice: falcon yard, central chapter of book: the irrefutable meeting and experience.’ There would be an emblem out of the traditions of medieval courtly love: a lord and lady on horseback, smiling. A falcon on the wrist, not a hawk in the rain. The bird of prey tamed. She was struggling with writer’s block, but was sustained by ‘the endless deep love’ in which she was living that second honeymoon summer. And by ‘the unique and almost bottomless understanding of Ted’.48

As always, she had dark dreams, but there were joyful ones too: of Ted’s rosy-cheeked mother holding a baby, with two older children by her side. Sylvia wondered whether this was a memory of a photograph of Ted and his elder siblings or a vision of the grandchildren that she would one day give to Edith.

Ted was teaching her the art of poetic economy. Choose something very particular: a pig, say, or a cow by moonlight. Describe with words that ‘have an aura of mystic power’. Name the names of a quality: ‘spindly, prickling, sleek, splayed, wan, luminous, bellied’.49 Repeat the words aloud and the incantation will make them strong.

She felt that a new era had begun. After the months of exam-cramming, ‘slovenly Eltisley living, tight budgeting, arranging of moving’, she was becoming whole, stretching her writerly wings. Ted brought her cold orange juice to quench sleep-thirst and they exchanged dreams. In hers she was back at Newnham but this time surrounded by wild flowers instead of having her old bad dream about exams. In his, they walked a meadow in which there was a baby tiger and another tiger beyond a hedge. A tiger-man knocked at the door with a gun and Ted defended her, ‘bluffing with an empty rifle’.50

Sylvia was reading Virginia Woolf, learning to write prose poetry, to follow the stream of consciousness and not worry about realistic detail. This was how she could turn ‘Judith Greenwood’, her autobiographical character, into a symbolic figure. ‘Make her enigmatic: who is that blond girl: she is a bitch: she is the white goddess. Make her a statement of the generation. Which is you.’51 But was it possible to be both the eternal feminine of the White Goddess and the symbol of a new materialistic, carefree generation?

Before long, she would be blocked again. And then the anxiety would kick in, the jealousy of Ted’s success. She wanted him to have it, she felt in her gut that he was the better poet and that he deserved it. The reason she could marry him and him alone was the knowledge that she would never have to restrain her own talent. With a lesser poet, she would have had to rein herself in so as not to emasculate him by overtaking him and becoming the successful one. With Ted, she told herself, however high she flew he would always be ahead. For all this, she could not but envy his prize, his winning of Mr T. S. Eliot’s admiration, his forthcoming publication on both sides of the Atlantic.

Ted knew that ‘the waters off beautiful Nauset’ – a phrase from ‘Daddy’ that he quotes back in ‘The Prism’, his Birthday Letters poem about her grave – were the cradle of Sylvia’s self. He kept her talismanic stone in which, like a prism, he imagined seeing the Cape’s ‘salty globe of blue, its gull-sparkle, / Its path of surf-groomed sand’.52 In the prism and in the Birthday Letter named from it, both her childhood – pre-depression, pre-suicide attempts – and their second honeymoon summer of 1957 were intact. Their sunlit seaside love was the antithesis of the snow-covered, windswept Brontë moors.

10
‘So this is America’

With summer gone, they took up residence in the town of Northampton, on the banks of the Connecticut River in western Massachusetts. This was the location of Smith College, where Sylvia taught as an instructor for freshman English throughout the 1957–8 academic year. They lived in an apartment at 337 Elm Street, near a church, a high school and the green oasis of Childs Memorial Park. After a nervous first day, fastened in the straitjacket of a blue flannel suit that Ted remembered in a Birthday Letters poem, Sylvia threw herself into her teaching. Busy as she was preparing and taking classes, she continued to plan ‘Falcon Yard’, her Cambridge novel. Ted helped to steer her away from the superficial externals of her magazine-style prose, towards his own more inward territory. ‘Place doesn’t matter – it’s the inner life: Ted & me,’ she reminded herself in her journal.1 But for Ted, place did matter. ‘So this is America’ was his memory of his thought on first making love to Sylvia.2 Now he was in America with his American wife.

In her imagination, Sylvia was still in England. She planned short stories. One of them, ‘Four Corners of a Windy House’, sketched out in ‘physical, rich, heavy-booted detail’ their bracing hike across the moors to Top Withens:

blisters, grouse – picnic – honey soaking through brown paper bag – fear, aloneness – goal – cairn of black stones, small, contracted – their dream of each other, she & he … Strength – each alone – bracken, marsh – tea in deep cleft of valley – dark, cats – story of lost woman – match-flare of courage in the dark – moor sheep – bus-wait opposite spiritualists – ghosts & reality on moor … house: absolute reality, but clustered with ghosts – eternal paradox of identity.3

Before his eyes, Ted’s life was being transformed into art through his wife’s magical gift for words.

He, on the other hand, felt blocked. With Sylvia as the breadwinner, he was free to write full time, but the poems had dried up. He would sit for hours ‘like a statue of a man writing’.4 The only difference between him and an inanimate figure was that after a few hours a bead of sweat would drip down his forehead. For the first time, he was trying to write as opposed to writing down the words that just came to him. And it was the trying that proved the impediment. What was more, the fact of having published all the decent poems he had written meant that he had to move on to a new style. There would be no point in producing a second book that was just like the first – and it was on the basis of a second book that his long-term literary future would be judged. He cooked Sylvia both breakfast and lunch, but the life of idleness was not for him. He wandered around Northampton and was disconcerted by the Smith girls, who went around in gaggles, all looked like each other, and had a ‘machined glaze of hyper-health’.5 Later in the year, an encounter with some of them in Childs Memorial Park seems to have provoked an angry outburst from Sylvia.6

Ted sensed that, paradoxically, he would be more productive if he had less time on his hands. So he began to look for a job. The trouble was, there was nothing interesting for him to do in the dull town of Northampton. He made some enquiries about part-time work for the college radio station in nearby Amherst.

The Hawk in the Rain was published in London by Faber and Faber on 13 September 1957, at a price of ten shillings and sixpence, in an edition of 2,000 copies in a yellow dust jacket with narrow blue stripes, the title in blue and ‘poems by Ted Hughes’ in red.7 The American edition appeared five days later, in a smaller edition, at a price of $2.75. A month later, Ted and Sylvia went to New York for a reading and launch party at the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y, which had been the country’s leading venue for live poetry since 1939. Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood had had its premiere there.

Sylvia wrote to his parents afterwards, telling them that Ted had done a wonderful job, looking extremely handsome in his only suit (dark grey) and the golden yellow tie she had bought him in Spain for his birthday the previous year. She had persuaded him, much against his will, to have a haircut, so he looked like ‘a Yorkshire god’. There were about 150 people in the audience, and he ‘read beautifully’.8 Some members of the audience bought the book beforehand and followed the poems on the page as he read. Afterwards, he signed autographs, using Sylvia’s shoulder as a writing-desk. In the same letter, she thanked her in-laws for the mother-of-pearl earrings they had just sent her for her twenty-fifth birthday: these would go perfectly with the pink woollen dress that she had worn on her wedding day. She also told them that she had persuaded Ted to write an autobiographical children’s story about a little boy who lived on the moors that he so loved.

Ted in turn wrote excitedly to Dan Huws, saying that the 92nd Street Y had been packed for his reading and that afterwards he was ‘swamped by dowagers’ who wanted to know why ‘Bawdry Embraced’ – those rollicking verses from their Cambridge days – had not been included in the book. The answer was that Marianne Moore had considered them ‘too lewd’ and insisted on the poem being dropped.9 An assortment of ‘maidenly creatures’ asked him to sign their fresh copies of his slim volume. One of them took the book back after he had signed it, looked at him with wide eyes and said, ‘And what I want to say is “Hurrah for you”.’10 This was his first full experience of the effect his poetry readings would have on females in the audience.

Reviews came more quickly in Britain than America. One of the first was by the distinguished Orcadian poet Edwin Muir in the New Statesman: ‘Mr Ted Hughes is clearly a remarkable poet, and seems to be quite outside the current of his time.’ His voice was very different, that was to say, from the urbane tones of the poets of the so-called Movement – the anti-romantic, anti-Dylan Thomas group, including Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Donald Davie, whose work had been gathered the previous year in an anthology called New Lines. ‘His distinguishing power is sensuous, verbal and imaginative; at his best the three are fused together,’ Muir continued. ‘His images have an admirable violence.’ All in all, The Hawk in the Rain was ‘A most surprising first book, and it leaves no doubt about Mr Hughes’s powers.’11 He said that Hughes’s ‘Jaguar’ was better than Rilke’s ‘Panther’, praise so high that Ted thought it would be more likely to provoke ‘derision than curiosity’.12

The reviews that counted most were those in the New York Times and the London Observer. They appeared on the same day, 6 October. The New York account was by a poet who would soon become a very good friend, W. S. Merwin. He could hardly have been more positive. The book’s publication, he wrote, gave reviewers ‘an opportunity to do what they are always saying they want to do: acclaim an exciting new writer’. The poems were more than promising. They were ‘unmistakably a young man’s poems’, which accounted for ‘some of their defects as well as some of their strength and brilliance’, but ‘Mr Hughes has the kind of talent that makes you wonder more than commonly where he will go from here, not because you can’t guess but because you venture to hope.’13

Later in the autumn, they met Merwin. Ted found him impressively ‘composed’. His English wife Dido was, according to Sylvia, ‘very amusing, a sort of young Lady Bracknell’; to Ted, she seemed ‘bumptious garrulous upper class’.14 They were introduced through Jack Sweeney, director of the Woodberry Poetry Room in the student library at Harvard. Sweeney gave lively dinner-parties for local and visiting poets at his home on Beacon Street in Boston. Ted arrived with a limp and his foot in plaster, because he had fractured the fifth metatarsal in his right foot when jumping out of an armchair in the Elm Street apartment at a moment when his foot had gone to sleep. He was still limping when he struggled up the stairs some time later to the Merwins’ fifth-floor apartment on West Cedar Street, for another dinner-party, at which Bill Merwin suggested that Ted and Sylvia should move back to England, because the opportunities for BBC broadcasting, together with newspaper and magazine reviewing, would give them much more time for their own writing than they would have staying in America, where the only way that poets could make a living was through distracting and debilitating university teaching. The Merwins were heading to London themselves.

In London, it was Al Alvarez, poetry editor of the Observer, who could make or break a young writer. He wrote poems himself – Ted thought they were ‘very crabby little apples’ – and he wasn’t easy to please. His review dropped a lot of names in a manner that Ted considered ‘undergraduatish’ – D. H. Lawrence, Thom Gunn, Robert Lowell, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (from which he accused Hughes of stealing the word ‘dispropertied’).15 Alvarez criticised some of the poems for being excessively ‘literary’ or having a ‘misanthropic swagger’, but said that half a dozen of them could only have been written by ‘a real poet’.16

Alvarez’s judgement was astute. Some of the poems in The Hawk in the Rain now read like period pieces. There is sometimes a clever literary allusiveness that does not feel real. And pieces such as ‘Secretary’ are unpleasantly misanthropic – or in this case, misogynist. Quite a lot of the poems are directly or indirectly about sex, viewed from a very masculine perspective. But there are indeed half a dozen pieces of true genius. Four of them are among the first five in the collection: ‘The Hawk in the Rain’, ‘The Jaguar’, ‘The Thought-Fox’ and ‘The Horses’. The two other highlights are ‘Wind’, which begins with the memorable line ‘This house has been far out at sea all night,’17 and ‘Six Young Men’. This was inspired by a photograph of a group of friends posing near the bridge at the top of Crimsworth Dene, that favourite spot of Ted’s. They are all ‘trimmed for a Sunday jaunt’ some time just before the outbreak of war. The ‘bilberried bank’, ‘thick tree’ and ‘black wall’ were all still there, forty years on, but the young men were not. ‘The celluloid of a photograph holds them.’ The image is ‘faded and ochre-tinged’, yet the figures themselves are free from wrinkles. ‘Though their cocked hats are not now fashionable, / Their shoes shine.’ A shy smile is caught in one of the faces, another of the lads is chewing a piece of grass. One is shy, another ‘ridiculous with cocky pride’. Little differences, but the same end: ‘Six months after this picture they were all dead.’18 The poem remains one of the two best retrospectives on the ‘never such innocence again’ motif of the beginning of the Great War, the other being Philip Larkin’s ‘MCMXIV’, published a few years later in The Whitsun Weddings.

The hawk, the jaguar, the thought-fox and the horses all seem perfectly formed: animal images seamlessly entering the inner self of the poet. But Ted’s notebooks reveal that all were struggled for, through draft after draft. So, for example, it was a tremendous trial to reach the shimmer of the line ‘Steady as a hallucination on the streaming air’ in the title poem:

As a hallucination in the avalanche of air untouched

As a hallucination in the heaving air buoyed

Like a hallucination in the swamping air to its sides

Like a hallucination the running air

Like a hallucination that the scene rides and it hangs

Like a hallucination that the scenes rides <vivid> through …

After these six failed attempts, he got to ‘Steady as a hallucination in the bursting sky’, but still that was not quite right.19 Again, it was a long time before he achieved ‘The window is starless still; the clock ticks, / The page is printed’ at the end of ‘The Thought-Fox’. First he had to create and reject such variants as ‘And the page where the prints have appeared’ and ‘The clock crowding and the whitening sky / Watch this page where the prints remain.’20

There were warning signs. Sylvia was exhausted by her duties at Smith. Ted told Olwyn that she was working twelve hours a day and cracking under the strain. Sometimes she would descend from the manic energy of her writing into days when she struggled to get out of bed, what with coughs and colds, fevers and flu, or sheer torpor. Christmas with Aurelia was marred by Sylvia suffering from viral pneumonia, exacerbated by her exhaustion from teaching and marking. In the new year, she told her head of department that she wanted to leave at the end of the academic session instead of accepting her option to stay on for a second year. Ted, meanwhile, got a similar teaching position for the semester over at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

He had to teach two classes three times a week on a ‘Great Books’ course. This meant mugging up on Milton’s shorter poems, including Samson Agonistes, reading Goethe’s Faust for the first time (opportune because he had been enthusing about Goethe and Nietzsche in a letter to Olwyn the previous autumn), getting advice from Sylvia about Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (they both heavily annotated their battered copy of the Penguin paperback of the English translation),21 plunging into that quintessentially New England book, Thoreau’s Walden, and going back to some of his favourite poetry – Wordsworth, Keats and Yeats. He also had to teach freshman English twice a week and a creative writing class in which he could do more or less what he liked. As a handsome young instructor with a relaxed teaching style, a rich English accent and a prizewinning first book of poems just published, he was an immediate hit with his students, especially the female ones. In the creative writing class, there were just eight of them, ‘3 beautiful, one brilliant & a very good person’.22

Back at Elm Street, despite all the preparation and marking, there was plenty of time for reading. Ted had some success in persuading Sylvia to share his Yeatsian occult interests, though these were more to Olwyn’s taste. He read through the Journals of the Psychical Research Society from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and wrote to her of ‘wonderful accounts of hypnoses, automatic writings, ghosts, double personalities etc’. He was delighted to find an anticipation of his own belief that the left side of the brain (in right-handed people) controlled ‘all consciously-practised skills’, whereas ‘the subconscious, or something deeper, a world of spirits’ was located in the right lobe.23

In April, Ted gave a poetry reading at Harvard. They drove down in the car they were borrowing from Warren Plath while he was away in Europe on his Fulbright scholarship. Sylvia’s ex-lover, the poet and publisher Peter Davison, remembered the ‘emphatic consonant-crunching of Hughes’s voice’ when he read.24 The effect was to emphasise the nouns and underplay the verbs. As his poetry developed, Ted would often take the opportunity to omit some of the verbs altogether, even on paper. At a reception afterwards, they were introduced to several poets and writers. The literary scene in Cambridge and Boston was much more lively than that in Northampton and Amherst, so they felt justified in a plan they were hatching to move there in the summer.

Not that they had failed to find a few like-minded people during their teaching year. Several would remain particular friends: the poet Anthony Hecht was a member of the Smith faculty and the British poet and classical scholar Paul Roche was on a visiting fellowship, accompanied by his American wife Clarissa. Then in May 1958, they met the artist Leonard Baskin and his family. Eight years older than Ted, and with a comparably dark imagination, he taught printmaking and sculpture at Smith. ‘How I love the Baskins,’ Sylvia would write in her journal the following summer. They were ‘a miracle of humanity and integrity, with no smarm’.25 For Ted, too, Baskin would always remain the model of uncompromising artistic integrity. His volatile temper and forceful opinions were a necessary part of the package.

Sylvia’s adoration of Ted and his poetry was undimmed. In March he did a public reading at the University of Massachusetts, coming on third, after two very inferior local poets. He ‘shone’, she wrote, ‘the room dead-still for his reading’. Her eyes filled with tears and the hairs on her skin stood up like quills: ‘I married a real poet, and my life is redeemed: to love, serve and create.’26 When her own writing was going well, she dared to imagine that she might one day be ‘The Poetess of America’ as Ted would certainly be ‘The Poet of England and her dominions’. She thought he was infallible in his suggestions for improvements in her poems, even down to the alteration of odd words such as ‘marvelingly’ instead of ‘admiringly’.27

Just before the end of the semester, the mood suddenly changed. Their new friend Paul Roche, the visiting poet and classicist, had arranged a public reading of his new translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. Ted agreed to play the part of Creon, but he told Sylvia that he would prefer it if she did not attend. There had been no rehearsals and he did not have any confidence in the production. At the last minute, Sylvia did decide to go. She slipped into a seat at the back. For the first time, she didn’t like the look of Ted: he appeared slovenly, ‘his suit jacket wrinkled as if being pulled from behind, his pants hanging, unbelted, in great folds, his hair black and greasy’ under the stage lights. Afterwards, he went backstage, frustrated with himself for agreeing to be inveigled into the evening. Paul Roche wondered whether he was grumpy because he thought he could have done a better job on the translation himself. With one finger, Ted banged out a tune on an old piano. It was probably a mistake not to have greeted Sylvia straight after the show: she was beginning to grow suspicious of Ted, not wanting to be apart from him for even an hour at a time. That semester there were rumours about all sorts of affairs going round the English Department. Something about his manner wasn’t right. He wouldn’t speak to her, but wouldn’t leave. He had what she called an ‘odd, lousy smile’ of a kind she hadn’t seen since Falcon Yard – was this the smile of the man who had taken Shirley to the party and ended up in a fierce embrace with Sylvia? In her journal she asked herself whether his behaviour could really be explained by his being ‘ashamed of appearing on the platform in the company of lice’.28

The next day was the final day of teaching before the long summer break. Sylvia got a great round of applause from both her morning and her afternoon classes. Ted agreed that he would drive down to the Smith campus, return his library books and meet Sylvia to celebrate the end of term. He had time on his hands, since he had taught his last class at Amherst a day or two before. Sylvia had twenty minutes to spare before the afternoon class, so she went into the campus coffee shop. She noticed one of her male colleagues deep in flirtatious conversation with a very pretty undergraduate. This got her thinking about liaisons between professors and their students, which were not at all uncommon, especially in an English department at an all girls’ college. After class, she went to look for Ted in the car park. Their car was there, but it was empty. Thinking he had gone to return his books, she drove it towards the library.

Suddenly she saw Ted, ‘coming up the road from Paradise Pond where girls take their boys to neck on weekends’. He had a broad smile on his face and was – as Sylvia saw it – gazing into the ‘uplifted doe-eyes of a strange girl with brownish hair, a large lipsticked grin, and bare thick legs in khaki Bermuda shorts’. When Sylvia appeared, the girl made a very hasty exit. Ted made no effort to introduce her. ‘He thought her name was Sheila’ (actually it was Susan).29 Had he not once, Sylvia wrote in a bitter diary entry, thought that her name was Shirley? Everything seemed to fall into place: the unfamiliar smile, the excuses for returning home late. Suddenly, the God, the great poet, the only man she could ever want, was ‘a liar and vain smiler’. They made up and made love, but afterwards, as he snorted and snored beside her, she lay awake, wondering, doubting. Why was his ‘great inert heavy male flesh hanging down so much of the time’? Yes, there were ‘such good fuckings’ when they did make up, but why had he been sexually ‘so weary, so slack all winter’? That had not been characteristic. Was he ‘ageing or spending’? ‘Fake. Sham ham. No explanations, only obfuscations’: she was seeing again ‘the vain, selfish face’ she had first seen. The ‘sweet and daily companion’, the lovely ‘Yorkshire Beacon boy’, was gone. Now she could only think of his sulks, his selfishness, his greasy hair, the foul habits that she could not stand, obsessed as she was with personal hygiene (picking his nose, ‘peeling off his nails and leaving them about’). Their marriage was over. She wouldn’t slit her wrists in the bath or drive Warren’s car into a tree or, to save expense, ‘fill the garage at home with carbon monoxide’, but, ‘disabused of all faith’, she would throw herself into her teaching and writing.30

Ted never published his side of the story, but many years later he did scribble a note about it. The ‘big handsome girl’ was in his creative writing class. She called herself ‘Spring’. He had always found her very friendly, but she ‘kept her distance’. He did feel a certain ‘affinity’ with her (having admitted this, he scored it out). He liked all his students in the little creative writing group. After his last class, this girl and her friend produced a bottle of red wine and three glasses, just as he was hurrying off to drive back from Amherst to Northampton. He excused himself and left them standing crestfallen. He did not expect ever to see any of his students again. By sheer coincidence, when he went to meet Sylvia on the Smith campus the following day, he bumped into the girl, coming out of the library with a bunch of other girls. So he walked with her for a few minutes. And that was when Sylvia appeared.31 From his point of view, the encounter was entirely innocent and Sylvia’s rage worryingly irrational.