Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  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 pos
t-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, a few months 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.