On a hillside, part farm, part stone rubble
Shitty bony cattle disconsolate
Rotten and shattered gear
Farmers resembling the gear, the animals
Resembling the strewn walls, the shabby slopes
Shivery Pakistanis
Wind pressing the whole scene towards ice
Thin black men wrapped in bits of Bradford
Waiting for a goat to come up
The auction is cleverly held off till the last two words; the scene is too miserably messy to deserve any more hierarchy or purpose than that. Shit/shat/shab/shiv. Waiting for a goat—a scapegoat, perhaps—waiting for Godot. It’s a final, humbling indignity. Like the—roughly contemporaneous—devaluation of a currency. The condition of England is always something Hughes is keen to infer, sometimes ceremonially, almost magically, as in the Laureate poems, sometimes satirically in more occasional pieces. It’s one of the identifications that lend a cute cultural amplitude to his poems about Plath, the fact that she’s America and he’s England, and much of the time he’s on the receiving end: “It confirmed / Your idea of England: part / Nursing home, part morgue / For something partly dying, partly dead.” By the same metonymic token, one “J.R.” is identified with Australia (“your firestick-naked, billabong spirit”), his second wife Assia Wevill with an unstable amalgam of German, Jewish, Levantine, Russian, his father-in-law Jack Orchard with a gypsy Africa. It’s ethnobotanical labeling.
* * *
Birthday Letters is mainly stunningly unbeautiful—it’s mostly written in the bulldozer style with the short, incremental sentences—but it’s still Hardy by other means. I like to think Hughes couldn’t have written it without writing the Tales from Ovid first, to draw him into the sphere of the human and the narrative, but I’m not so sure now. It’s not known whether, as the title suggests, and as I think Hughes claimed, the poems were written steadily over many years, or if they came pell-mell toward the end of his life. The latter seems likelier to me. There barely seems time to draw breath between one poem and the next; I can’t imagine them being composed years apart, leisurely, or sharply, at so many separate promptings. The composition of the Duino Elegies strikes me as a likely parallel, some glimmerings earlier and one or two poems (there were some in the New Selected of 1995), but basically an abrupt tumble at the end. In the case of the Birthday Letters, the very notion of such a project—the narrative and publication of his version of the years with Plath—might have been the last thing to emerge.
They’re not all great, or even good, poems. Partly, I think, they are pulled apart by Hughes following different, and even contradictory, purposes at the same time: to celebrate, to explain, and to mourn. The simplicity and heavy slowness of the style is almost forced upon the poet wanting to do so many different things. Third-person description, with its myriad revelations, exaggerations, and suggestions, is abandoned for a simple “I-you” mode used by Hughes for the first time, though the rest of us have been flogging it for years. Dignity and reticence, I imagine, would have meant he abhorred it. The way he uses it, it’s unexpectedly capable of holding and disclosing feeling. Sometimes, it’s almost a style without words. I’m thinking especially of a poem called “The Other,” which it took me a while to “see,” but which now looks drastic and original: “She had too much so with a smile you took some. / Of everything she had you had / Absolutely nothing, so you took some. / At first just a little.” It’s related to another poem from Capriccio, called “Folktale,” but it’s even more bare. Like Lawrence, it seems to break every known rule. There’s not a concrete noun in the place. Not a scene. Not a recognizable event. Nothing. A few clichés are allowed to disport themselves rather grimly, but basically, it’s naked arithmetic. Subtraction, to be precise. But something of the schematic style of that poem, the threadbare simplicity, an otherworldly point of view where memory and self-accusation, transgression and punishment, seem to become one thing, informs a lot of the poems of Birthday Letters. (“Birthday” perhaps in that rather British sense of “naked.”) “Was that a happy day?” begins one poem; “Nearly happy,” another. “What happened to Howard’s portrait of you? / I wanted that painting.” “Remember how we picked the daffodils? / Nobody else remembers, but I remember.” It could hardly be any more straightforward. It’s hard to think there could ever be a more successful narrative—not least because we all grew up on the story anyway. But then, “Nobody else remembers, but I remember.” It’s quite a card.
Some of the poems are more furnished than others, and they are the ones I prefer: “Fever,” “Flounders,” “Daffodils,” “The Beach.” I read Hughes with the grain—I’ve learned to do that, it’s wasteful not to—and against. The one thing I’m loath to go along with is to follow him into the doomed—not just predestined, but predestinarian—mode that he wraps a lot of the memories and episodes in. His celebrating and mourning, in other words, I allow; I jib a little at the explanations. Time and time again, he offers up the machinery of doom, whether it’s Ouija sessions, an offended gypsy, a dream, an illness, Otto, poetry. There’s a tense—the opposite of the future perfect, if you like, the posthumous future—where the poems like to take you to, the tense of “I had no idea,” of “if only I’d known then what I know now,” the tense of dramatic irony. “We thought they were a windfall. / Never guessed they were a last blessing.” This wears out, and it’s my one serious reservation about Birthday Letters. I much prefer it when Hughes coasts on the “present” of the simple past:
You had a fever. You had a real ailment.
You had eaten a baddie.
You lay helpless and a little bit crazy
With the fever. You cried for America
And its medicine cupboard. You tossed
On the immovable Spanish galleon of a bed
In the shuttered Spanish house
That the sunstruck outside glare peered into
As into a tomb. “Help me,” you whispered, “help me.”
That painting over and over a scene and a situation is to me what Hughes does best in these poems; “as into a tomb” I view as another intrusion from the dramatic-ironical department. I like “baddie,” half condescension, half quotation. Hughes in the poem pits his amusement and his health and his good intentions against the contagion of panic. “I bustled about. / I was nursemaid. I fancied myself at that. / I liked the crisis of the vital role.” And the ending of that poem, though it has the right amplitude for an ending, is correctly deduced from the matter of the poem itself: “The stone man made soup. / The burning woman drank it.”
So much of the personal drama is comic, and I bless it for that. It’s “The bats had a problem”—which is right, because they’re American bats from Carlsbad, as American as NASA. It’s the grandiloquent, posturing timing—riding for a fall—of “We are surrounded, I said, by magnificent beaches.” It’s riding the long wave of remembering Plath declaiming Chaucer to an audience of cows: “It must have sounded lost. But the cows / Watched, then approached: they appreciated Chaucer.” It’s like a scene in Jerome K. Jerome, you wish it could go on forever. It’s Plath’s—justified and witty—tirades against England:
England
Was so poor! Was black paint cheaper? Why
Were English cars all black?—to hide the filth?
Or to stay respectable, like bowlers
And umbrellas? Every vehicle a hearse.
The traffic procession a hushing leftover
Of Victoria’s perpetual funeral Sunday—
The funeral of colour and light and life!
London a morgue of dinge—English dinge.
Our sole indigenous art-form—depressionist!
And why were everybody’s
Garments so deliberately begrimed?
Grubby-looking, like a camouflage? “Alas!
We have never recovered,” I said, “from our fox-holes,
Our trenches, our fatigues and our bomb-shelters.”
This, for a
ll its apparent ease, is a miraculous balance of indirect and quoted speech, of question and answer, of expansive and pithy, of detailed and universal, of naïve and informed, of drama and editorial. To throw off a phrase like “a morgue of dinge” like that, in the middle of what the fiction writers call a “riff.” There’s life in the old country yet. Or there was.
“REMEMBERING TEHERAN”
How it hung
In the electrical loom
Of the Himalayas—I remember
The spectre of a rose.
All day the flag on the military camp flowed South.
In the Shah’s Evin Motel
The Manageress—a thunderhead Atossa—
Wept on her bed
Or struck awe. Tragic Persian
Quaked her bosom—precarious balloons of water—
But still nothing worked.
Everything hung on a prayer, in the hanging dust.
With a splash of keys
She ripped through the lock, filled my room, sulphurous,
With plumbers—
Twelve-year-olds, kneeling the fathom
A pipeless tap sunk in a blank block wall.
* * *
I had a funny moment
Beside the dried-up river of boulders. A huddle of families
Were piling mulberries into wide bowls, under limp, dusty trees.
All the big males, in their white shirts,
Drifted out towards me, hands hanging—
I could see the bad connections sparking inside their heads
As I picked my way among thistles
Between dead-drop wells—open man-holes
Parched as snake-dens—
Later, three stoned-looking Mercedes,
Splitting with arms and faces, surfed past me
Warily over a bumpy sea of talc,
The uncials on their number-places like fragments of scorpions.
* * *
I imagined all Persia
As a sacred scroll, humbled to powder
By the God-conducting script on it—
The lightning serifs of Zoroaster—
The primal cursive.
* * *
Goats, in charred rags,
Eyes and skulls
Adapted to sunstroke, woke me
Sunbathing among the moon-clinker.
When one of them slowly straightened into a goat-herd
I knew I was in the wrong century
And wrongly dressed.
All around me stood
The tense, abnormal thistles, desert fanatics;
Politicos, in their zinc-blue combat issue;
Three-dimensional crystal theorems
For an optimum impaling of the given air;
Arsenals of pragmatic ideas—
I retreated to the motel terrace, to loll there
And watch the officers half a mile away, exercising their obsolete horses.
A bleaching sun, cobalt-cored,
Played with the magnetic field of the mountains.
And prehistoric giant ants, outriders, long-shadowed,
Cast in radiation-proof metals,
Galloped through the land, lightly and unhindered,
Stormed my coffee-saucer, drinking the stain—
At sunset
The army flag rested for a few minutes
Then began to flow North
* * *
I found a living thread of water
Dangling from a pipe. A snake-tongue flicker.
An incognito whisper.
It must have leaked and smuggled itself, somehow,
From the high Mother of Snows, halfway up the sky.
It wriggled these last inches to ease
A garden of pot-pourri, in a tindery shade of peach-boughs,
And played there, a fuse crackling softly—
As the whole city
Sank in the muffled drumming
Of a subterranean furnace.
And over it.
The desert’s bloom of dust, the petroleum smog, the transistor commotion
Thickened a pink-purple thunderlight.
The pollen of the thousands of years of voices
Murmurous, radio-active, rubbing to flash-point—
* * *
Scintillating through the migraine
The world-authority on Islamic Art
Sipped at a spoonful of yoghurt
And smiling at our smiles described his dancing
Among self-beheaded dancers who went on dancing with their heads
(But only God, he said, can create a language).
Journalists proffered, on platters of silence,
Split noses, and sliced-off ears and lips—
* * *
Chastened, I listened. Then for the belly-dancer
(Who would not dance on my table, would not kiss me
Through her veil, spoke to me only
Through the mouth
Of her demon-mask
Warrior drummer)
I composed a bouquet—a tropic, effulgent
Puff of publicity, in the style of Attar,
And saw myself translated by the drummer
Into her liquid
Lashing shadow, those arabesques of God,
That thorny fount.
* * *
… would I know there were such a place, with three old walnut trees, near Isfahan? Is there?
—James Buchan
Who will dare to say to me that this is an evil foreign land.
—Anna Akhmatova
What follows, a little apologetically, is a microcosm of what seems to me the most important development in English letters over the last decade or so, namely, the reemergence or rediscovery of Ted Hughes. Mutatis mutandis—with different readers and different poems (although, obviously, I love “my” poem!)—it should be imagined as enacting itself thousands of times up and down the country, and abroad. The personal part of it, that which concerns me, is unimportant and accidental, and is offered with some embarrassment.
I was born in 1957, the year The Hawk in the Rain was published. At school in the 1970s, I was given poems of Hughes to read (never the best way—it’s still put me off Auden and Larkin). I supposed for a long time that he, an Englishman of a peculiar deep Englishness and a writer on animals and elemental subjects, just didn’t have much to say to me, a German of a peculiar shallow Englishness and a writer on human and anecdotal subjects. I bought his books but didn’t read them much.
One day in The Times Literary Supplement I saw a poem that changed all that for good. I don’t know what poem it was, maybe “Walt” or “For the Duration” or “The Last of the 1st/5th Lancashire Fusiliers,” something about a relative who had survived World War I. Thenceforth, I read Hughes differently—as a contemporary, one of the three or four poets whose books I waited for and who made everyone else faintly superfluous. His prose—the huge book on Shakespeare, the sublimely intelligent and unconventional writing in Winter Pollen—the poems at the end of the 1995 New Selected Poems, the Ovid versions he did, first for James Lasdun and me, and then in his own Tales from Ovid, and the irresistible Birthday Letters. This tremendous surge of creative work finally and belatedly—in the eyes of my cogenerationists and me—brought Hughes out from under the everlasting 1960s and his extended tenure of the laureateship.
I haven’t, in the end, chosen “Walt,” or anything from Ovid, or one of the Birthday Letters, or that amazing poem-cum–deficit reckoning called “The Other,” but one of the earlier, uncollected pieces from the New Selected Poems, called “Remembering Teheran.” It mattered to me to get a sense of approaching something if not new, then at least disregarded or beyond the pale.
In many ways, it contradicts one’s received idea of Hughes. It’s not about England or about animals, it’s funny and occasional (as I remember him writing somewhere that almost the whole recent output of the Western tradition has become), and exotic and diagnostic, and it deploys the poet himself in it as
a kind of pawn. It is very much “my kind of poem.” I wish I’d written it. More to the point, it’s the kind of thing Lawrence might have written on his travels, in Germany or Italy or Australia or Ceylon or New Mexico—and perhaps did write, although I couldn’t find any especially close analogy, not in Lawrence’s poems, anyway. Perhaps it’s not too surprising that Hughes didn’t include it in any of his books of the period (if I understand the arrangement of the New Selected Poems, he wrote it in the 1970s): it would tend to “fall outside the frame,” as you say in German. On the other hand, it would be a natural for any anthology on “abroad thoughts,” of expatriation, of centrifugal musings and scrutinies. Think how well it would go with Elizabeth Bishop’s poems about Brazil, Bunting’s “Aus Dem Zweiten Reich,” Cummings’s poem about the police and the Communists in Paris, Brodsky’s divertimenti from Italy, Mexico, or England, or—I think, best of all—with Robert Lowell’s “Buenos Aires.” It’s a type of poem that comes to us from the Romantics, from Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” and Goethe’s “Roman Elegies,” but touristically and culturally and interrogatively extended by our century; where the unsettled self takes its bearings (“In my room at the Hotel Continentál / a thousand miles from nowhere”—Lowell) and shyly or intrepidly goes out to encounter a changed world that reflects it differently, better, or perhaps not at all. “Je” is not “un autre”—perhaps, think of Bishop or Brodsky, is even more “je” than it ever could be “at home”—it is simply “ailleurs,” and perhaps nowhere more so than in “Remembering Teheran.”
The poem is spun out of Hughes’s nerve endings. “How it hung,” it starts, itself hanging, echoing Sylvia Plath’s desert poem “The Hanging Man” and, more dimly, Dylan Thomas’s “I sang in my chains like the sea.” Prometheus is not far to seek.
How it hung
In the electrical loom
Of the Himalayas—I remember
The spectre of a rose.
(How incredibly beautifully, by the way, Hughes writes free verse: the breaths of the first two h’s heavily, almost reluctantly muted into the drone of “hung,” “loom” a foreshadowing of “Himalayas,” “electrical” generating “spectre,” the Persian picture-postcard prettiness of “rose” countermanded and finally more menacing than anything else. Isn’t this tensile music Poe or Tennyson by any other means?) In another poem, that “hanging” might have been used for the structuring of the whole piece, and Hughes uses the word three more times, and maybe its presence is felt further in the army flag resting “for a few minutes,” and in the water “dangling from a pipe,” but the growth of the poem outstrips even such a helpless and dégagé thing as hanging. Nor is it bracketed by the flag that, at sunset, “rested for a few minutes then began to flow North” (how proud any dissident East European or South American poet would be of the two contrasting coats of the pathetic and the automatic in those glorious lines!). Instead, the poem keeps being broken open, again and again, by the pressure of its strange and abundant material. In an odd way, it gets out of sync with itself. It has its funny moment in the delicious story of the blind tap in Hughes’s room and the squad of baby plumbers sent in to “fathom” it—and then an asterisk, and then “I had a funny moment.” Unforgettable things crowd into the poem: the “three stoned-looking Mercedes” (a pure droll outrageous equivocation between the two senses of “stoned”—but no more than “loom” at the beginning is equivocal too: it’s as though what Hughes sees and experiences is so strange he needs to call upon words in many different senses all at once) that bring back a decade of newsreel from Beirut; the gorgeous Latinity of “Eyes and skulls / Adapted to sunstroke”; the naked vulnerability of “I knew I was in the wrong century / and wrongly dressed” (a little like Lowell’s “I was the worse for wear”); the Lowellian pairing of “the tense, abnormal thistles”—as indeed much of the poem is reminiscent of Lowell, and the line “In the Shah’s Evin Motel” is Lowell just as much as “In Boston the Hancock Life Insurance Building’s / beacon flared” is Lowell; the clever, helpless agglomerations of language, thickening and emulsifying, in “The desert’s bloom of dust, the petroleum smog, the transistor commotion” (what a humming line!); to the beautiful line—which wouldn’t look out of place in Crane (or hemicrane) or Eliot—“Scintillating through the migraine” to the final discord, “That thorny fount.”
Where Have You Been? Page 13
