Where Have You Been?

by Michael Hofmann

  The Earth keeps turning, night and day, spit-roasting all the tanned

  Tired icebergs and the polar bears, which makes white almost contraband.

  The biosphere on a rotisserie emits a certain sound

  That tells the stars that Earth was moaning pleasure while it drowned.

  The amorous white icebergs flash their brown teeth, hissing.

  They’re watching old porn videos of melting icebergs pissing.

  The icebergs still in panty hose are lesbians and kissing.

  The rotting ocean swallows the bombed airliner that’s missing.

  Thank God for Fred Seidel.

  TED HUGHES

  I have a dim sense of how Ted Hughes may be perceived here in America. (“Stare at the monster,” he wrote in the poem “Famous Poet,” from the 1950s.) I have a slightly clearer sense of how he has fared in the UK, at least over the last twenty years. Neither is the slightest use in preparing one for—a word I certifiably use for the first and last time in print!—an awesome collection of poems. Hughes is at least arguably the greatest English poet since Shakespeare; what’s the competition? Milton, Pope, Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Hardy, (maybe) Larkin. I think such a view can be advanced. This is indeed the man with the lifelong obsession with Beethoven. The poet whose voice Seamus Heaney described as “longer and deeper and rougher.” Of whom Gavin Ewart wrote his one-line poem, “Folk Hero”: “The one the foreign students call Ted Huge.” Unscientific though it certainly is, people who bought Ted Hughes books on Amazon UK also bought Dante, Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Heaney. Match me that.

  Of course, once poets die, there’s some fun cutting them down to size. Nihil de mortuis, unless it cuts them off at the knees. British poets particularly, because what do the British know about scale? It’ll fit on a postage stamp (albeit, a stamp that isn’t obliged to declare its provenance). Ask Derek Walcott about the state of British poetry, he starts brabbling about Larkin (this was when Hughes was alive but Larkin already safely dead). Ask James Schuyler for the last really good British poet, he’ll send you rootling back to Swinburne, or even earlier. I have a feeling, though, that Hughes will be spared this rather Australian (“tall poppy”) treatment. Not only because at above thirteen hundred pages (twelve hundred of them poems), his book handily pips even Lowell’s, published just a couple of months before, but also because so many of them are wonderful, and practically unknown. And because at a time when appearance and presentation are getting to be almost everything, this onetime poet laureate (a label whose potential for comedy and obloquy has gone strangely unrecognized in the Po-Faced States) carried himself superbly. “All this, too,” it says in “October Salmon,” “is stitched into the torn richness, / The epic poise / That holds him so steady in his wounds, so loyal to his doom, so patient / In the machinery of heaven.”

  Some of it is sheer industry. Hughes applied himself to poetry for the best part of fifty years, and with barely an intermission. The list of his poetry books alone covers a large, closely set page—p. 1238, if you must know. (I suppose there are some nonentities who manage a big product, but on such a scale, one would have to be an acute graphomaniac, not merely a persistent hack, to compete.) Beyond that, there were plays, translated from Aeschylus, Euripides, Seneca, Racine, Wedekind. Poetry International at the Albert Hall in 1970, the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation, with his friend of fifty years, Danny Weissbort. Poetry, translated and cotranslated from János Pilinszky and Yehuda Amichai. Poetry for children, and books to stimulate children to write (a lifelong commitment). Not an exemplary editor of Plath, for the simple reason that one wouldn’t wish anyone to be in that position, but I think hard to fault. Selections from Dickinson and Whitman and Keith Douglas and Coleridge and Shakespeare. Coedited two wonderful anthologies with Seamus Heaney, The Rattle Bag and then The School Bag. Work with the theater director Peter Brook as a dramaturge, and deviser of the language called Orghast. The huge experimental book on deep narrative structures in Shakespeare, called Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, a big selection of essays and reviews called Winter Pollen. (When he got the cancer that killed him, he blamed it, typically, on writing too much prose.) And all this not in some dusty monkish solitude or supportive college eyrie, but from a life in which he farmed, fished, traveled very widely, to Australia, to Africa, to Alaska, was several times honored by the Queen of England, with whom he was reputed to have got along well, and further, was—you won’t need me to tell you—thrice married, and (before reading Elaine Feinstein’s biography, I had no inkling of this) had many affairs, and also raised two children.

  Ted Hughes’s absence was one of the sad givens when I was in England in the 1980s and 1990s. One knew about him, or thought one knew about him, and knew about his work, but never had any expectation of meeting him. He was both sanctioned—the schoolmaster’s poet—and under sanction. He dwelled simultaneously in a higher and a lower sphere; one thought of him as serving out some kind of punishment. Devonian relegation or house arrest. It was one of a number of revelations in Feinstein’s book that he was regularly in London, and lived not quite like Aung San Suu Kyi. I saw him just twice. Once at a Faber party, where our then-editor, Craig Raine, pushed us together and we shyly gulped at each other in silence like goldfish (I saw this happening with other baby poets too), and once when he agreed to read with ten others at the London Festival Hall from the book of Ovid translations that James Lasdun and I brought out in 1992, to which he contributed four sensational pieces.

  A good outcome from this partly voluntary, partly imposed seeming—partly actually illusory—withdrawal was that he kept his freedom, his dignity, his time. This extended to his personal life, his illness and death, and his work. The successive poetry editors at Fabers, Craig Raine, Christopher Reid, and Paul Keegan—who took the chair only after Hughes’s death—were deeply impressed by their charge and grew close to him. The rest of us may have thought we had him down, but he retained the capacity to surprise us with his every utterance. Whether it was his wholly unexpected Paris Review interview with Drue Heinz in 1995, or Birthday Letters, which floored us, or uncollected poems in his Selected like “Remembering Teheran”—who, other than the best-informed Hughes watcher would ever have guessed he’d been to Teheran (he went with Peter Brook’s International Centre for Theatre Research in 1971)?—or the last printed communication I remember from him, a long, eloquent letter to the Guardian in 1997, pleading for foxhunting and stag-hunting to be allowed to continue, everything from him was considered and powerful and left field. Nothing less would have allowed him to be poet laureate without a considerable diminution of his prestige. (That’s how things work in England.)

  And that’s how it is with his Collected Poems. Paul Keegan has taken Hughes’s New Selected Poems of 1995 as his model and intercalated the expected and familiar Faber texts with uncollected or small press works like a Viennese layer cake—in astonishing quantity and quality. Most Collected Poems merely give us what we have already. Not this one, not unless you are a wealthy book collector with access to three continents. Hughes was assiduous in sending out individual poems all his life, and he had a lifelong affinity for small presses. He had the output, too, to command this double issue. With Hughes’s Hugheses, it’s a little like Picasso’s Picassos. Some don’t fit whatever the large-press book happens to be; a few are rejects; some anticipate or trail along after preoccupations. (There’s a whole manslaughter of “Crow” poems, for instance, before and after the 1970 volume.) And some—especially late—are among his most personal. It’s interesting that these were reserved for tiny, exclusive, luxurious publications, things I never suspected existed, let alone ever saw—Capriccio in 1990, Cries and Whispers of 1998, the year Hughes died. Capriccio was printed in an edition of fifty copies, selling at $4,000 apiece.

  * * *

  As I read through this—ha—huge book, I found all my provisional findings systematically overturned. Hughes’s beginnings—half a dozen or so much-
anthologized pieces aside, “Wind,” “Pike,” “Thrushes,” “View of a Pig”—were, contrary to expectation, not especially impressive. (The perceived U-shape of his career.) Most of it was ordinary poetry of its time. After that, it seemed literary, diligently, strenuously literary. Elements of Shakespeare, a lot, of Anglo-Saxon, of Donne, of Wallace Stevens, of Lawrence, of Hopkins. Of Plath. But when I got used to the literariness, and began looking for it, it lapsed. I felt—like Rimbaud alongside his river in “Le Bateau Ivre”—that I no longer had dependable guides. Crow, then, I read as an Eastern European book. Analytical, diminished, distended, caricatured. Like something by Holub or Herbert. Only for Cogito read Cuervo. Then a cosmic ferocity—always the least interesting part of Hughes to me. The hysterical, red-lit, gauge-busting style of “death-orgasm supernovae // Flood from the bitten-away gills.” Prometheus on his Rock, no great development from its premise. (Striking, though, the number of male victim figures in the poetry.) More series: birds, fish, flowers, insects, seasons, the majestic farm diary of Moortown (from 1979). It’s as if Rilke had written not two books of New Poems but seven; or not one Duino but more than anyone cared to keep track of. Something magnificent and medieval and also workaday about these catalog-series: each one an illuminated letter, or one of the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. Occasional spurts of a thin but aggressive little vein of satire, like Lawrence’s satire. Poems on Fay Godwin’s landscape portraits of the north of England—humdrum but suddenly sensational, two or three poems in a row. Wilderness a continual preoccupation, certainly—the last chronicler of wilderness on this shrinking McPlanet. “This is the Black Rhino, the elastic boulder, coming at a gallop. / The boulder with a molten core, the animal missile, / Enlarging towards you” (“The Black Rhino”). Hughes would have known how many species and how many square miles were lost in his lifetime. He writes about things people now see on television, if at all. Things whose existence we idly assume and blithely imperil. But then the surprise of two beautiful poems on livestock auctions. Favor extended to rats. A long study, through the looking glass, of spiders mating (another male victim). A tragic view of sex (like Lawrence, the tortoise), and of poetry.

  A feeling that whereas most of the best poetry of our time aims for and is distinguished by its speed (I think of Brodsky’s phrase, “a highly economical form of mental acceleration”), Hughes often writes with heavy feet. Like Lawrence. Not just won’t leap, but can’t leap. A characteristic movement of his is the clanking, mired advance of bulldozer or caterpillar tracks. One plodding platelet at a time (“Black Hair”—a poem to Hughes’s mother):

  I remember her hair as black

  Though I know it was brown.

  Dark brown. I first saw it as black.

  She was combing it. Probably it was wet.

  She was combing it out after washing it.

  Black, straight, shining hair down over her breasts.

  That’s the memory.

  The sentences—often, like these, noun phrases—setting themselves down, and the next one following half in its print, barely an advance. The antithesis of speed. Weight. Method. Force. Brute or main. Instruction. Like someone writing a computer program. (And then one, three or four along, will contradict it: this isn’t computer programming, it’s poetry. “I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself.”) But so many wild exceptions to this. Astounding juxtapositions and swirling sentences that go miles. Perhaps one conclusion remains unoverturned: that the model and the repeated subject of Hughes’s writing is Creation itself: “Only birth matters / Say the river’s whorls. And the river / Silences everything in a leaf-mouldering hush / Where sun rolls bare, and earth rolls, / And mind condenses on old haws” (“Salmon Eggs”).

  * * *

  When Hughes is described as a “nature poet,” the effect—if not the intention—is drastically to limit him. That’s what we were given at school, a vaguely reproachful litany of things with which we were unfamiliar and in which we weren’t greatly interested. We didn’t live in nature, who on earth lived in nature? But if nature, then a sort of Tinguely-cum-Brueghel Weltmaschine of everything-that-is-the-case. A cartoonish vitalism that saw “the phenomenal technology” inside a fox’s head; to which everything, au fond, was wild, even house cats and daffodils, by virtue of its otherness; that outdid Marianne Moore by writing an ode to a sports car, “Flimsy-light, like a squid’s funeral bone”; that offered a moorland tree as “A priest from a different land,” who “Fulminated / Against heather, black stones, blown water”; that listened to a heron “cranking rusty abuse, / like an unwanted porter”; that showed us mannerly bears “eating pierced salmon off their talons”; that was incapable of seeing crabs without a nightmarish Dix or Sutherland flashback of World War I, “Giant crabs, under flat skulls, staring inland / Like a packed trench of helmets”; that deconstructed a cranefly as “Her jointed bamboo fuselage, / Her lobster shoulders, and her face / Like a pinhead dragon, with its tender moustache, / And the simple colourless church windows of her wings.” Anything unhappy, ungainly, failed, or doomed enlists the poet’s sympathy, whether it’s a baby swallow that can’t fly (“The moustached goblin savage // Nested in a scarf. […] The inevitable balsa death”), an ugly, lumpy apple blossom (“A straggle of survivors, nearly all ailing”), or a dirty river (“And the Okement, nudging her detergent bottles, tugging at her nylon stockings, starting to trundle her Pepsi-Cola cans”). If this sympathy wasn’t so universally extended, it might seem sentimental—a strange accusation to level at Hughes. Equally, when things work, they are celebrated for working. It is not “nature”—sky-blue and pink nature, schoolroom nature—so much as technology. A mother sheep “carries on investigating her new present and seeing how it works.” A female spider’s hands become cutting edge: “Far from simple, / Though, were her palps, her boxing-glove nippers— / They were like the mechanical hands / That manipulate radio-active matter / On the other side of safe screen glass.” A sparrow is read as a prole: “Pin-legged urchin, he’s patient. / He bathes in smoke. He towels in soot, / And with his prematurely-aged hungry street-cry / Sells his consumptive sister.” All this is drama, function, it takes us to the sources of energy, character, identity. The descriptive resources of the writing match those of the creature or thing described. “The hills went on gently / shaking their sieve.” Hence the allowable comparison to Shakespeare. Who other than Shakespeare would have dared the coda to “Sing the Rat,” where invention and anonymous folk wit indistinguishably mingle?

  O sing

  Scupper-tyke, whip-lobber

  Smutty-guts, pot-goblin

  Garret-whacker, rick-lark

  Sump-swab, cupboard-adder

  Bobby-robin, knicker-knocker

  Sneak-nicker, sprinty-dinty

  Pintle-bum

  The corollary of the “nature poet” label is that Hughes didn’t “do” people. That his gift didn’t extend to historical intelligence, to narrative, to psychology, to abstracting and inducing and contextualizing. It did—to all of those things, see Birthday Letters, see the Tales from Ovid—but, like Lawrence, Hughes often took animals as his way in. The Metamorphoses are god and man stories with animal outcomes. Animals challenged him, or commanded him unconditionally, as people did only if they struck him as exceptional, or in exceptional situations. (Old subjects, uncontemporary people, holdouts, veterans, drudges, people of a dandified strength get his praise and attention: “Sketching a Thatcher,” “Dick Straightup,” “Walt,” “Sacrifice.”) There’s any amount of human intelligence and the slapstick of human incompetence (“O beggared eagle! O down-and-out falcon!”) in his poem “Buzzard”:

  When he treads, by chance, on a baby rabbit

  He looks like an old woman

  Trying to get her knickers off.

  In the end he lumbers away,

  To find some other buzzard, maybe older,

  To show him how.

  (It’s not just the indignity of “old woman,” the covertly sexual “tr
eads,” and the ribaldry of “knickers”; it’s the fact that an older buzzard might not necessarily be any more proficient.) Sometimes, a human subject will draw dignity and company from animal society, as in the early poem “The Retired Colonel”: “Here’s his head mounted, though only in rhymes, / Beside the head of the last English / Wolf (those starved gloomy times!) / And the last sturgeon of Thames.” (“English” rhymes with “vanish,” earlier.) Sometimes, it will draw further degradation, as in this short uncollected poem, “Gibraltar”—where, I’m guessing, Hughes might have visited in 1956, at the time of his Spanish honeymoon with Plath:

  Empire has rotted back,

  Like a man-eater

  After its aeon of terror, to one fang.

  Apes on their last legs—

  Rearguard of insolence—

  Snapping at peanuts and defecating.

  The heirloom garrison’s sold as a curio

  With a flare of Spanish hands

  And a two-way smile, wafer of insult,

  Served in carefully-chipped English.

  The taxi-driver talking broken American

  Has this rock in his palm.

  When the next Empire noses this way

  Let it sniff here.

  The “fang” is the Rock itself. There’s a touch of Yeats about the poem, about the slightly squeamish deployment of slang (you can’t help looking for the word “slouch” somewhere!), “carefully-chipped” is nice, doubling as crockery and mimicry. Overall, one might not necessarily have guessed it was Hughes, but it’s very confident; had it been more widely circulated, it might have saved him from the laureateship.

  “Remembering Teheran” is a terrific poem that I’ve written about elsewhere (see p. 112), full of heat and drought and static and theatricality and alienated intimations of prerevolutionary dread: it shows beyond a peradventure that Hughes could “do” abroad as well as anyone. “Auction at Stanbury” is a short and intense snapshot of the north of England, bleakly comic, sadly inward: