Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  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 sett
led 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 th
e 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