Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  The hawk, the jaguar, the thought-fox and the horses all seem perfectly formed: animal images seamlessly entering the inner self of the poet. But Ted’s notebooks reveal that all were struggled for, through draft after draft. So, for example, it was a tremendous trial to reach the shimmer of the line ‘Steady as a hallucination on the streaming air’ in the title poem:

  As a hallucination in the avalanche of air untouched

  As a hallucination in the heaving air buoyed

  Like a hallucination in the swamping air to its sides

  Like a hallucination the running air

  Like a hallucination that the scene rides and it hangs

  Like a hallucination that the scenes rides through …

  After these six failed attempts, he got to ‘Steady as a hallucination in the bursting sky’, but still that was not quite right.19 Again, it was a long time before he achieved ‘The window is starless still; the clock ticks, / The page is printed’ at the end of ‘The Thought-Fox’. First he had to create and reject such variants as ‘And the page where the prints have appeared’ and ‘The clock crowding and the whitening sky / Watch this page where the prints remain.’20

  There were warning signs. Sylvia was exhausted by her duties at Smith. Ted told Olwyn that she was working twelve hours a day and cracking under the strain. Sometimes she would descend from the manic energy of her writing into days when she struggled to get out of bed, what with coughs and colds, fevers and flu, or sheer torpor. Christmas with Aurelia was marred by Sylvia suffering from viral pneumonia, exacerbated by her exhaustion from teaching and marking. In the new year, she told her head of department that she wanted to leave at the end of the academic session instead of accepting her option to stay on for a second year. Ted, meanwhile, got a similar teaching position for the semester over at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

  He had to teach two classes three times a week on a ‘Great Books’ course. This meant mugging up on Milton’s shorter poems, including Samson Agonistes, reading Goethe’s Faust for the first time (opportune because he had been enthusing about Goethe and Nietzsche in a letter to Olwyn the previous autumn), getting advice from Sylvia about Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (they both heavily annotated their battered copy of the Penguin paperback of the English translation),21 plunging into that quintessentially New England book, Thoreau’s Walden, and going back to some of his favourite poetry – Wordsworth, Keats and Yeats. He also had to teach freshman English twice a week and a creative writing class in which he could do more or less what he liked. As a handsome young instructor with a relaxed teaching style, a rich English accent and a prizewinning first book of poems just published, he was an immediate hit with his students, especially the female ones. In the creative writing class, there were just eight of them, ‘3 beautiful, one brilliant & a very good person’.22

  Back at Elm Street, despite all the preparation and marking, there was plenty of time for reading. Ted had some success in persuading Sylvia to share his Yeatsian occult interests, though these were more to Olwyn’s taste. He read through the Journals of the Psychical Research Society from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and wrote to her of ‘wonderful accounts of hypnoses, automatic writings, ghosts, double personalities etc’. He was delighted to find an anticipation of his own belief that the left side of the brain (in right-handed people) controlled ‘all consciously-practised skills’, whereas ‘the subconscious, or something deeper, a world of spirits’ was located in the right lobe.23

  In April, Ted gave a poetry reading at Harvard. They drove down in the car they were borrowing from Warren Plath while he was away in Europe on his Fulbright scholarship. Sylvia’s ex-lover, the poet and publisher Peter Davison, remembered the ‘emphatic consonant-crunching of Hughes’s voice’ when he read.24 The effect was to emphasise the nouns and underplay the verbs. As his poetry developed, Ted would often take the opportunity to omit some of the verbs altogether, even on paper. At a reception afterwards, they were introduced to several poets and writers. The literary scene in Cambridge and Boston was much more lively than that in Northampton and Amherst, so they felt justified in a plan they were hatching to move there in the summer.

  Not that they had failed to find a few like-minded people during their teaching year. Several would remain particular friends: the poet Anthony Hecht was a member of the Smith faculty and the British poet and classical scholar Paul Roche was on a visiting fellowship, accompanied by his American wife Clarissa. Then in May 1958, they met the artist Leonard Baskin and his family. Eight years older than Ted, and with a comparably dark imagination, he taught printmaking and sculpture at Smith. ‘How I love the Baskins,’ Sylvia would write in her journal the following summer. They were ‘a miracle of humanity and integrity, with no smarm’.25 For Ted, too, Baskin would always remain the model of uncompromising artistic integrity. His volatile temper and forceful opinions were a necessary part of the package.

  Sylvia’s adoration of Ted and his poetry was undimmed. In March he did a public reading at the University of Massachusetts, coming on third, after two very inferior local poets. He ‘shone’, she wrote, ‘the room dead-still for his reading’. Her eyes filled with tears and the hairs on her skin stood up like quills: ‘I married a real poet, and my life is redeemed: to love, serve and create.’26 When her own writing was going well, she dared to imagine that she might one day be ‘The Poetess of America’ as Ted would certainly be ‘The Poet of England and her dominions’. She thought he was infallible in his suggestions for improvements in her poems, even down to the alteration of odd words such as ‘marvelingly’ instead of ‘admiringly’.27

  Just before the end of the semester, the mood suddenly changed. Their new friend Paul Roche, the visiting poet and classicist, had arranged a public reading of his new translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. Ted agreed to play the part of Creon, but he told Sylvia that he would prefer it if she did not attend. There had been no rehearsals and he did not have any confidence in the production. At the last minute, Sylvia did decide to go. She slipped into a seat at the back. For the first time, she didn’t like the look of Ted: he appeared slovenly, ‘his suit jacket wrinkled as if being pulled from behind, his pants hanging, unbelted, in great folds, his hair black and greasy’ under the stage lights. Afterwards, he went backstage, frustrated with himself for agreeing to be inveigled into the evening. Paul Roche wondered whether he was grumpy because he thought he could have done a better job on the translation himself. With one finger, Ted banged out a tune on an old piano. It was probably a mistake not to have greeted Sylvia straight after the show: she was beginning to grow suspicious of Ted, not wanting to be apart from him for even an hour at a time. That semester there were rumours about all sorts of affairs going round the English Department. Something about his manner wasn’t right. He wouldn’t speak to her, but wouldn’t leave. He had what she called an ‘odd, lousy smile’ of a kind she hadn’t seen since Falcon Yard – was this the smile of the man who had taken Shirley to the party and ended up in a fierce embrace with Sylvia? In her journal she asked herself whether his behaviour could really be explained by his being ‘ashamed of appearing on the platform in the company of lice’.28

  The next day was the final day of teaching before the long summer break. Sylvia got a great round of applause from both her morning and her afternoon classes. Ted agreed that he would drive down to the Smith campus, return his library books and meet Sylvia to celebrate the end of term. He had time on his hands, since he had taught his last class at Amherst a day or two before. Sylvia had twenty minutes to spare before the afternoon class, so she went into the campus coffee shop. She noticed one of her male colleagues deep in flirtatious conversation with a very pretty undergraduate. This got her thinking about liaisons between professors and their students, which were not at all uncommon, especially in an English department at an all girls’ college. After class, she went to look for Ted in the car park. Their car was there, but it was empty. Thinki
ng he had gone to return his books, she drove it towards the library.

  Suddenly she saw Ted, ‘coming up the road from Paradise Pond where girls take their boys to neck on weekends’. He had a broad smile on his face and was – as Sylvia saw it – gazing into the ‘uplifted doe-eyes of a strange girl with brownish hair, a large lipsticked grin, and bare thick legs in khaki Bermuda shorts’. When Sylvia appeared, the girl made a very hasty exit. Ted made no effort to introduce her. ‘He thought her name was Sheila’ (actually it was Susan).29 Had he not once, Sylvia wrote in a bitter diary entry, thought that her name was Shirley? Everything seemed to fall into place: the unfamiliar smile, the excuses for returning home late. Suddenly, the God, the great poet, the only man she could ever want, was ‘a liar and vain smiler’. They made up and made love, but afterwards, as he snorted and snored beside her, she lay awake, wondering, doubting. Why was his ‘great inert heavy male flesh hanging down so much of the time’? Yes, there were ‘such good fuckings’ when they did make up, but why had he been sexually ‘so weary, so slack all winter’? That had not been characteristic. Was he ‘ageing or spending’? ‘Fake. Sham ham. No explanations, only obfuscations’: she was seeing again ‘the vain, selfish face’ she had first seen. The ‘sweet and daily companion’, the lovely ‘Yorkshire Beacon boy’, was gone. Now she could only think of his sulks, his selfishness, his greasy hair, the foul habits that she could not stand, obsessed as she was with personal hygiene (picking his nose, ‘peeling off his nails and leaving them about’). Their marriage was over. She wouldn’t slit her wrists in the bath or drive Warren’s car into a tree or, to save expense, ‘fill the garage at home with carbon monoxide’, but, ‘disabused of all faith’, she would throw herself into her teaching and writing.30

  Ted never published his side of the story, but many years later he did scribble a note about it. The ‘big handsome girl’ was in his creative writing class. She called herself ‘Spring’. He had always found her very friendly, but she ‘kept her distance’. He did feel a certain ‘affinity’ with her (having admitted this, he scored it out). He liked all his students in the little creative writing group. After his last class, this girl and her friend produced a bottle of red wine and three glasses, just as he was hurrying off to drive back from Amherst to Northampton. He excused himself and left them standing crestfallen. He did not expect ever to see any of his students again. By sheer coincidence, when he went to meet Sylvia on the Smith campus the following day, he bumped into the girl, coming out of the library with a bunch of other girls. So he walked with her for a few minutes. And that was when Sylvia appeared.31 From his point of view, the encounter was entirely innocent and Sylvia’s rage worryingly irrational.

  They fought violently. There were ‘snarls and bitings’. Sylvia ended up with a sprained thumb and Ted with ‘bloody claw-marks’ that lasted a week. At one point, she threw a glass across the room with all her might. Instead of breaking, it bounced back and hit her on the forehead. She saw stars for the first time.32

  The fight cleared the air. They were intact. ‘And nothing,’ Sylvia wrote, ‘no wishes for money, children, security, even total possession – nothing is worth jeopardizing what I have which is so much the angels might well envy it.’33 If she could learn not to be over-dependent, not to require ‘total possession’, things would work out.

  Reflecting on the incident when undergoing psychoanalysis six months later, she recognised that Ted was not habitually spending time with other women. There was no reason not to trust him. She had reacted so forcefully because the end of her exhausting teaching year was a big moment and she had wanted him to be there for her, and he wasn’t. His absence, she reasoned, with the assistance of her analyst, must have made her think of her father, who had deserted her for ever by dying when she was eight. Insofar as he was ‘a male presence’ – though ‘in no other way’ – Ted was ‘a substitute’ for her father. ‘Images of his faithlessness with women’ accordingly echoed her father’s desertion of her mother upon the call of ‘Lady Death’.34 Any act of male rejection or desertion, however temporary, would have an extreme effect because it would take her unconscious back to the primary trauma of Otto’s sudden disappearance into death. This line of thinking would crystallise in some of her later poems and give Ted lifelong food for reflection in both prose and verse.

  That summer they had a week’s holiday in New York and a fortnight revisiting Cape Cod, but otherwise they were in the apartment on Elm Street, writing. Or trying to write – they both suffered from bouts of block. In search of inspiration or relaxation, they took to experimenting with a Ouija board, conjuring up a spirit called Pan.

  Two years after the whirlwind romance and the rushed wedding, the reality of married life was kicking in. ‘We are amazingly compatible,’ Sylvia reassured herself. ‘But I must be myself – make myself and not let myself be made by him.’ She was beginning to tire of his tendency to give mutually exclusive ‘orders’. He would tell her to – or, to put it more moderately, suggest that she should – ‘read ballads an hour, read Shakespeare an hour, read history an hour, think an hour’. But then he would say that no proper reading could be done in one-hour chunks; you had to read a book straight through to the end without distraction. There was an almost fanatical ‘lack of balance and moderation’ in his habits and his fads. He decided that, since he sat writing for much of the day, he should do some particular exercises for his back and his neck. They only made his neck stiffer, but that didn’t stop him doing them.35

  On the eve of Independence Day, they went for a walk and found a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. Ted took it home and nursed it, just as he always used to care for injured fauna in his childhood. After a week, it became clear that the bird would not survive. Sylvia could not bear the thought of Ted strangling it, so he fixed their rubber bath hose to the gas jet on the cooker and taped the other end on the inside of a cardboard box. The bird was laid to rest, but unfortunately he removed it from the makeshift gas chamber prematurely and it lay gasping in his hand. Five minutes later, he took it to Sylvia, ‘composed, perfect and beautiful in death’.36

  In early September they moved to a tiny sixth-floor apartment at 9 Willow Street in the Beacon Hill district of Boston, with all its literary associations. Ted’s poem named for the address evokes the claustrophobia they felt there, the sense that they were holding each other back instead of inspiring each other’s work as they had done before. The main memory within the poem is a variant replay of the baby-bird incident. This time it is a sick bat that has fallen out of a tree on the nearby Common. In front of a bemused audience of passersby, he tries to restore it to its home and has his finger bitten for his pains. Then he remembers that American bats carry rabies, so he starts thinking of death.37 His other Birthday Letters poems commemorating their residence in Willow Street are equally gloomy: visiting Marianne Moore, Sylvia devastated because the distinguished poet did not like her work; Sylvia and her ‘panic bird’; the ‘astringency’ of the Charles River in a bitterly cold Boston winter.38

  One day, looking over a letter from his wife to his parents before posting it, he misread the signing off as ‘woe’ instead of ‘love’.39 This seemed symbolic of the new mood in the marriage. Sometimes when his writing was not going well, he would while away the afternoon making a wolf mask. But that did nothing to keep the wolf from the door: the plan to live for a year off their savings, together with such casual literary earnings as they could muster, meant that they sometimes fought, because it wasn’t always clear where the next month’s dollars were coming from. They both sensed that the marriage had no future in America; Ted had not settled and Sylvia did not want to go back to teaching. There were days when they both suffered from ‘black depression’, relieved only by sporadic absorption in Beethoven piano sonatas.40

  This was when she began seeing Dr Ruth Beuscher, her old psychoanalyst from McLean. Among her many worries was the fear that she was barren. Beuscher was a Freudian. She suggested that the
main focus of their sessions should be Sylvia’s ‘Electra complex’, the daughterly equivalent of the Oedipus complex. They explored the hatred that Sylvia had projected on to her mother following her father’s death. That anger was by this time mixed up with a feeling that Aurelia was undermining the marriage by means of her constant complaints about Ted not having a proper job. ‘I’ll have my own husband, thank you,’ Sylvia wrote in her diary, as if addressing her mother. ‘You won’t kill him the way you killed my father.’ Ted had ‘sex as strong as it comes’. He supported her in body and soul by feeding her bread and poems. She loved him and wanted to be always hugging him. She loved his work and the way he was always changing and making everything new. She loved the smell of him and the way their bodies fitted together as if they were ‘made in the same body-shop to do just that’. She loved ‘his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and his stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy’. ‘And’, she goes on, ‘how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles’.41