Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  169. SP, 7 Feb. 1956, 1955–56 calendar. 7.6, Lilly.

  170. SP to Mallory Wober, 7 Feb. 1956. L1, 1100.

  171. Harriet Rosenstein interview with Iko and Felicity Meshoulam, 1973. 2.22, MSS 1489, Emory.

  172. Harriet Rosenstein interview with Mallory Wober, 1973. 4.23, MSS 1489, Emory.

  173. SP to Jane Anderson, 21 Mar. 1956. L1, 1150.

  174. J, 197–98.

  175. HC interview with Philip Hobsbaum, 2001, Glasgow, Scotland.

  176. Ibid.

  177. Christopher Levenson email to HC, 18 Sept. 2017.

  178. She wrote in her 1955–56 Heffer’s calendar that she finished the novel on 16 Jan.

  179. SP to AP, 6 Feb. 1956. L1, 1100.

  180. J, 198–99.

  181. SP to AP, 18 Feb. 1956. L1, 1108.

  182. J, 204.

  183. SP, 14 Feb. 1956, 1955–56 calendar. 7.6, Lilly.

  184. SP to AP, 10 Feb. 1956. L1, 1102.

  185. SP, “Leaves from a Cambridge Notebook,” Christian Science Monitor (5 Mar. 1956), 17. Part II appeared on 6 Mar. 1956, p. 15. Plath’s drawing was captioned “Cambridge: A vista of gables and chimney pots.”

  186. SP, 15–20 Feb. 1956, 1955–56 calendar. 7.6, Lilly.

  187. SP, 21–22 Feb. 1956, 1955–56 calendar. 7.6, Lilly.

  188. SP, 24 Feb. 1956, 1955–56 calendar, 7.6, Lilly.

  189. SP to AP, 24 Feb. 1956. L1, 1114.

  190. See Jane Baltzell Kopp in Memories of Whitstead. Privately printed by Rhoda Dorsey, 2007. 20.29, SPC, Smith.

  191. SP to Elinor Friedman, 6–8 Mar. 1956. L1, 1131.

  192. Ibid., L1, 1131–32.

  16. MAD PASSIONATE ABANDON

  1. Hughes published “The Jaguar” and “The Casualty” in Chequer, Nov. 1954, and “Fallgrief’s Girl-Friends,” “Whenever I Am Got Under My Gravestone” (later retitled “Soliloquy of a Misanthrope”), “If I Should Touch Her She Would Shriek and Weeping” (later retitled “Secretary”), and “When Two Men Meet for the First Time in All” (later retitled “Law in the Country of the Cats”) in the Saint Botolph’s Review. Three of his poems also appeared in Poetry from Cambridge 1952–54, edited by Karl Miller.

  2. TH, “Law in the Country of the Cats,” Saint Botolph’s Review (1956): 17.

  3. David Bradley, Obituary (Ted Hughes), Pembroke College Gazette, 73 (Sept. 1999): 21–30.

  4. “We always called him Luke.” HC interview with Daniel Huws, May 2016, London.

  5. Weissbort, Ross, and Minton had been classmates at St. Paul’s School in London, and McCaughey had been to Campbell’s College in Belfast. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Ted, Sylvia, and St. Botolph’s: A Cambridge Recollection,” Southern Review 40.2 (Spring 2004): 352–69; 357.

  6. Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001), 31.

  7. Christopher Levenson, Not One of the Boys, unpublished memoir provided to HC by Levenson.

  8. EF interview with Peter Redgrove, Sept. 1999. EFP.

  9. TH to Keith Sagar, 10 Oct. 1998. Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes & Keith Sagar, Keith Sagar, ed. (London: British Library, 2012), 282.

  10. HC conversation with Nick Wilding, June 2017, Hebden Bridge, UK.

  11. I am grateful to Nick Wilding for showing me “mucky” photographs of Aspinall Street and the surrounding area in the 1930s.

  12. As told to Nick Wilding by the late Donald Crossley. HC conversation with Nick Wilding, June 2017, Mytholmroyd, UK.

  13. EF interview with Donald Crossley, 2001. EFP.

  14. Ruth Crossley email to HC, 22 June 2017.

  15. Michael Parker, interview with Wilfrid Riley, 22 July 1977, Heptonstall, UK. Courtesy of Michael Parker.

  16. Gerald Hughes, Ted & I: A Brother’s Memoir (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012), 61; 64.

  17. CPTH, 463.

  18. Hughes, Ted & I, 48.

  19. Michael Parker, interview with Wilfrid Riley, 22 July 1977, Heptonstall, UK. Courtesy of Michael Parker.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Hughes, Ted & I, 64; 61.

  22. Ibid., 46.

  23. Ibid., 54.

  24. The teacher’s name was Miss McLeod. Keith Sagar, The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 43.

  25. Steve Ely has suggested that the money was lent to the Hughes family by wealthier Farrar relatives. Conversation with Steve Ely, 12 Sept. 2015, Mexborough, UK.

  26. Steve Ely, Made in Mexborough: Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 33–34; 53.

  27. Edna Wholey Chilton, “Reminiscence: Ted & Crookhill,” 30 July 2000. 1.1, MSS 870, Emory.

  28. Ely, Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire, 126–27; 131.

  29. Ibid., 129.

  30. TH to Robert Graves, 20 July 1967. LTH, 273.

  31. TH to Anne-Lorraine Bujon, 16 Dec. 1992. LTH, 625.

  32. Ekbert Faas, Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1980), 203.

  33. D. H. Lawrence, Selected Poetry, Keith Sagar, ed. (London: Penguin, 1972; 1986), 198.

  34. Ely, Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire, 112–13.

  35. Hughes, Ted & I, 71.

  36. TH to Terry Gifford, 16 Jan. 1994. LTH, 658.

  37. Feinstein, Ted Hughes, 16.

  38. See Mark Wormald, “Irishwards: Ted Hughes, Freedom and Flow,” Ted Hughes Society Journal 6.2 (2017): 58–77.

  39. Hughes, Ted & I, 70.

  40. Ely, Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire, 137.

  41. See James Underwood, “Mayday on Holderness: Ted Hughes, National Service, and East Yorkshire,” Ted Hughes Society Journal 6.2 (2017): 86–98.

  42. Ibid., 89.

  43. Quoted in ibid., 94.

  44. TH, autobiographical typescript. Add MS 88918/7/2, BL, as quoted in Underwood, “Mayday,” 92.

  45. Underwood, “Mayday,” 93.

  46. TH to Olwyn Hughes, Feb. 1952. LTH, 12.

  47. “The Little Boys and the Seasons,” “The Jaguar,” and “The Court-Tumbler and Satirist” appeared in the university anthology Poetry from Cambridge 1952–54, Karl Miller, ed. (London: Fortune Press, 1954).

  48. HC interview with Daniel Huws, May 2016, London.

  49. Brian Cox, “Ted Hughes (1930–1998): A Personal Retrospect,” Hudson Review 52.1 (Spring 1999): 29–43; 32.

  50. HC interview with Jean Gooder, July 2017, Cambridge, UK.

  51. Christopher Levenson email to HC, 18 Sept. 2017.

  52. Daniel Huws, “Conversation with Hughes’s Contemporaries.” Transcript of a recording made at the International Ted Hughes Conference, Pembroke College, Cambridge University, 17 Sept. 2010, https://ann.skea.com/​CambridgeRecording.htm. Terence McCaughey remembered that he met Ted Hughes at Heffer’s bookshop in 1951. They were supervised together by M. J. C. Hodgart, an authority on Irish ballads and James Joyce.

  53. Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life (New York: HarperCollins 2015), 546.

  54. EF interview with Brian Cox, Oct. 1999. EFP.

  55. HC interview with Suzette and Helder Macedo, May 2016, London.

  56. Daniel Huws, Memories of Ted Hughes 1952–1963 (Nottingham: Richard Hollis/Five Leaves, 2010), 39.

  57. Bradley, Obituary (Ted Hughes), 21–30.

  58. TH to Terence McCaughey, 17 Nov. 1997. Add MS 88616, BL.

  59. Nathaniel Minton, A Memoir of Ted Hughes (London: Westmoreland Press, 2015), 11.

  60. Lucas Myers, An Essential Self: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (Nottingham: Richard Hollis/Five Leaves, 2011), 14.

  61. TH to SP, 2 Oct. 1956. Lilly.

  62. One friend, John Honey, corroborated Hughe
s’s story to Elaine Feinstein. Feinstein, Ted Hughes, 29.

  63. TH to SP, 2 Oct. 1956. Lilly.

  64. Ibid.

  65. Daniel Huws, “Conversation with Hughes’s Contemporaries.” Transcript of a recording made at the International Ted Hughes Conference, Pembroke College, Cambridge University, 17 Sept. 2010, https://ann.skea.com/​CambridgeRecording.htm.

  66. Harriet Rosenstein interview with Iko and Felicity Meshoulam, 1973. 2.22, MSS 1489, Emory.

  67. Ibid.

  68. Myers, An Essential Self, 17–18. Myers, who had been introduced to the group when he published his poetry in Chequer in 1954, recalled that Bloom found Hughes’s poetry “violent.”

  69. Levenson, Not One of the Boys.

  70. TH, Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, William Scammell, ed. (New York: Picador, 1995), 9.

  71. CPTH, 21.

  72. TH to Keith Sagar, 16 July 1979. Sagar, Poet and Critic, 75–76.

  73. SP to AP, 9 Mar. 1956. L1, 1136.

  74. TH, “The ear-witness account of a poetry-reading in Throttle College, before the small poets grew up into infinitesimal critics.” ENGL 1/155, Cambridge University Library.

  75. Feinstein, Ted Hughes, 35.

  76. TH to Terence McCaughey, spring 1956. Add MS 88616, BL.

  77. Philip Hobsbaum, “Ted Hughes at Cambridge,” Dark Horse 8 (Autumn 1999): 6–12. 10.

  78. W. P. Cummane to unnamed Commonwealth Migration Officer, Melbourne, 20 Feb. 1956. There are five official letters detailing Hughes’s Australian immigration plans and deferment in the Christopher Reid Papers at the University of Huddersfield.

  79. Mrs. Hitchcock was the widow of the former Queen’s College rector, who died during World War II. Her son Robin would marry Plath’s biographer Anne Stevenson.

  80. Wyatt-Brown, “Ted, Sylvia, and St. Botolph’s,” 353.

  81. Hobsbaum, “Ted Hughes at Cambridge,” 9.

  82. HC interview with Daniel Huws, May 2016, London.

  83. Ibid.

  84. HC interview with Jean Gooder, July 2017, Cambridge, UK. Luke Myers told the story in his memoir; Michael Boddy captured one of the swans, which they then cooked.

  85. Harriet Rosenstein interview with Iko and Felicity Meshoulam, 1973. 2.22, MSS 1489, Emory.

  86. Michael Boddy email to EF, 21 Feb. 2001. EFP.

  87. Michael Boddy email to EF, 5 Feb. 2001. EFP.

  88. Ibid.

  89. EF interview with Peter Redgrove, Sept. 1999. EFP.

  90. Michael Boddy email to EF, 22 Mar. 2001. EFP.

  91. Daniel Huws, “Conversation with Hughes’s Contemporaries.” Transcript of a recording made at the International Ted Hughes Conference, Pembroke College, Cambridge University, 17 Sept. 2010, https://ann.skea.com/​CambridgeRecording.htm.

  92. HC interview with Jean Gooder, July 2017, Cambridge, UK.

  93. Levenson, Not One of the Boys.

  94. EF interview with Peter Redgrove, Sept. 1999. EFP.

  95. Levenson, Not One of the Boys.

  96. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Neither Priest nor Poet: A Search for Vocation,” Shapers of Southern History: Autobiographical Reflections, John B. Boles, ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 62–90. 78.

  97. Wyatt-Brown, “Ted, Sylvia, and St. Botolph’s,” 361.

  98. Lucas Myers, Crow Steered Bergs Appeared: A Memoir of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (Sewanee, Tenn.: Proctor’s Hall Press, 2001), 7.

  99. TH interview with Ekbert Faas in Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1980), 201.

  100. Wyatt-Brown, “Ted, Sylvia, and St. Botolph’s,” 360.

  101. TH to Olwyn Hughes, early 1956. LTH, 34.

  102. TH to Keith Sagar, 30 Aug. 1979. LTH, 426. “High Table” refers to the long, elevated table at the back of Oxford and Cambridge college dining halls where dons and college officials are seated and served.

  103. TH to Nick Gammage, 7 Apr. 1995. LTH, 679.

  104. Wyatt-Brown, “Neither Priest nor Poet,” 79.

  105. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, 2nd ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1948; 1975), 17.

  106. Ibid., 447–48.

  107. Ibid., 446.

  108. In her journal, Plath talks about looking to Graves’s book for potential names for their unborn children (J, 377).

  109. Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband, Plath and Hughes: A Marriage (New York: Viking, 2003), 31.

  110. HC interview with Daniel Huws, May 2016, London.

  111. J, 289.

  112. See Heather Clark, The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), for a detailed discussion of Plath’s ironic use of Graves.

  113. SP, “ ‘Three Caryatids Without a Portico’ by Hugo Robus: A Study in Sculptural Dimensions,” Chequer 9 (Winter 1956): 3. The issue also contained two poems by Christopher Levenson and a story by Bill Carr.

  114. Wyatt-Brown, “Neither Priest nor Poet,” 79.

  115. CPTH, 1047.

  116. Ibid., 1045.

  117. Myers, Crow Steered, 25; Lucas Myers, “Ah, Youth…Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath at Cambridge and After,” Grand Street 8.4 (Summer 1989): 86–103. 92.

  118. CPTH, 1060.

  119. Wyatt-Brown, “Neither Priest nor Poet,” 79.

  120. Harriet Rosenstein interview with Michael Frayn, 1973. 1.28, MSS 1489, Emory.

  121. Ibid.

  122. HC conversation with Michael Frayn and Claire Tomalin, 24 Sept. 2018, Manhattan.

  123. HC phone interview with Jane Baltzell Kopp, 4 Nov. 2015.

  124. HC interview with Daniel Huws, May 2016, London.

  125. He had heard about Plath even before he went to Cambridge—a friend of his had married a Smithie, Amy Gardner, who knew Plath and told him to look her up.

  126. Wyatt-Brown, “Ted, Sylvia, and St. Botolph’s,” 361.

  127. Michael Boddy email to EF, Apr. 2001. EFP.

  128. Wyatt-Brown, “Neither Priest nor Poet,” 81.

  129. Wyatt-Brown, “Reuben Davis, Sylvia Plath, and Other American Writers,” An Emotional History of the United States, Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis, eds. (New York: NYU Press, 1998), 458. Wyatt-Brown said “she was particularly struck” by these two poems when they spoke for the second time that day.

  130. CPTH, 29.

  131. CPTH, 25.

  132. Christopher Levenson to Harriet Rosenstein, 14 Apr. 1974. 2.15, MSS 1489, Emory.

  133. J, 207–208.

  134. SP to AP, 25 Feb. 1956. L1, 1115.

  135. Ibid., L1, 1115–16.

  136. Broadsheet 4 (1 Feb. 1956): 1–3. Original copy sent to HC by Daniel Huws. Huws pointed out to me that Ted Hughes had excoriated the previous issue of Chequer in the 8 June 1955 issue of Broadsheet under the pseudonym “Jonathan Dyce.”

  137. SP to AP, 2 Feb. 1956. L1, 1096.

  138. Wyatt-Brown, “Neither Priest nor Poet,” 81.

  139. SP to AP, 3 Mar. 1956. L1, 1120.

  140. Wyatt-Brown, “Neither Priest nor Poet,” 81.

  141. EF interview with David Ross, Oct. 1999. EFP.

  142. Harriet Rosenstein interview with Iko and Felicity Meshoulam, 1973. 2.22, MSS 1489, Emory.

  143. HC interview with Jean Gooder, July 2017, Cambridge, UK.

  144. Wyatt-Brown, “Neither Priest nor Poet,” 82–83. In Wyatt-Brown’s article, Jane quotes a letter to her parents dated 2 Mar. 1956.

  145. TH to Terence McCaughey, spring 1956. Add MS 88616, BL. Hughes did not mention Plath in the letter, and told McCaughey he might live in Dublin if he could get by cheaply. He wanted to “write and publish,” he said, “but I get no leasure [sic] in London. My life in Lon
don is in fact no life. Automatism in a stunned half-wake.”

  146. Wyatt-Brown, “Neither Priest nor Poet,” 83.

  147. Ibid., 82.

  148. J, 210.

  149. Harriet Rosenstein interview with Jane Baltzell Kopp, 1974–75. 2.11, MSS 1489, Emory.

  150. Jane Baltzell Kopp, “ ‘Gone, Very Gone Youth’: Sylvia Plath at Cambridge, 1955–57,” Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work, Edward Butscher, ed. (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1977), 73. In this article Baltzell misremembers the location of the party as the Saint Botolph’s rectory rather than Falcon Yard.

  151. HC phone interview with Jane Baltzell Kopp, 4 Nov. 2015.

  152. HC interview with Jean Gooder, July 2017, Cambridge, UK.

  153. J, 211.

  154. Huws, Memories of Ted Hughes, 34.

  155. Myers, An Essential Self, 27.

  156. Ibid., 16.

  157. HC interview with Jean Gooder, July 2017, Cambridge, UK. To protect her privacy, I have not used Shirley’s surname.

  158. CPTH, 1052.

  159. Daniel Huws, “Conversation with Hughes’s Contemporaries.” Transcript of a recording made at the International Ted Hughes Conference, Pembroke College, Cambridge University, 17 Sept. 2010, https://ann.skea.com/​CambridgeRecording.htm.

  160. Bate, Ted Hughes, 98.

  161. Levenson, Not One of the Boys.

  162. HC phone interview with Jane Baltzell Kopp, 4 Nov. 2015.

  163. Yehuda Koren and Eliat Negev, A Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath’s Rival and Ted Hughes’s Doomed Love (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2007), 68.

  164. J, 211.

  165. TH, draft of “St Botolph’s.” Add MS 88918/1/6, BL.

  166. J, 211–12.

  167. TH, draft of “St Botolph’s.” Add MS 88918/1/6, BL.

  168. HC interview with Jean Gooder, July 2017, Cambridge, UK.

  169. J, 211–12.

  170. Luke remembered seeing the Russian’s “complete works” on Hughes’s Yorkshire bookshelf at the Beacon. Myers, An Essential Self, 21.

  171. TH, Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, William Scammell, ed. (New York: Picador, 1995), 255.

  172. See TH’s 1992 letter to Anne-Lorraine Bujon (LTH, 621–37) for an extended discussion of these literary influences.

  173. TH, “Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath’s Poems,” TriQuarterly 7 (Fall 1966): 81–88. 81.