Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  They got their books and boxes from Yorkshire, negotiated with the workmen who were still sanding the floors and painting the walls, and were in by the beginning of February. Sylvia wrote ‘You’re’, her bubbly poem to the baby in her womb. They decorated the walls of the living room with the Gehenna Press ‘Pike’, some Baskin prints and a greatly enlarged copy of an engraving of the great maternal goddess Isis from ‘one of Ted’s astrological books’.5 The original print had been their ‘lightest / Bit of luggage’ when they drove round America.6 Ted borrowed an old collapsible card-table from the Merwins and set it up in a small alcove in the hallway, intended as a place to hang coats. It was like a tiny cave – though the Merwins called it ‘the Black Hole of Calcutta’ – and he found he could concentrate there and get on with his radio play The House of Aries (not to be confused with ‘The House of Taurus’, which had stalled). He looked back on this cubbyhole as one of the best workspaces he ever had, though at the time he complained in the pub to Luke Myers that Sylvia was always interrupting him when he was trying to work there. One day he got so impatient that he decided to count the number of times she called out ‘Ted’ or ‘Teddy’. The score reached 104 by lunchtime.7

  Ten days after moving in, Sylvia signed a contract for her first book of poems, to be named The Colossus (the title of one of her best Yaddo poems) and dedicated to Ted, ‘that paragon who has encouraged me through all my glooms about it’.8 She proudly told her mother that the book had been accepted by the first British publisher to whom she sent the typescript, William Heinemann, whose list included Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh and D. H. Lawrence. She and Ted celebrated with veal and mushrooms (her pregnancy craving?) at a little upstairs Italian restaurant in Soho. James Michie, her editor, told her that the book would be published in October, as close as they could make it to the date of her birthday, which struck her as a typical example of British kindness and pleased her greatly because of the centrality of ‘Poem for a Birthday’ to the collection.

  Despite the advanced state of Sylvia’s pregnancy, they started going to the theatre and the cinema with the Merwins. Ted did a poetry reading in Oxford and Sylvia was very impressed with the city and its colleges – it was much grander than Cambridge and they both had a pang that they had gone to the wrong university. Ted’s sociability sometimes caused strain. On one occasion, Olwyn, over from Paris again, came to lunch with a friend, Janet Crosbie-Hill. Luke Myers was also there. Olwyn brought a cuddly toy, ‘a bottle of best champagne’ to celebrate the upcoming birth and ‘good French cologne’ to cool Sylvia. She received no thanks, except from Ted. After lunch, Bill Merwin came round. Sylvia was charming to him, describing ‘a rather beautiful flying dream full of lovely creatures’, but Olwyn thought that she was insufferably rude in ignoring her friend Janet. Sylvia, in turn, thought that her wishes were being ignored: Olwyn and Janet smoked the whole time, and objected when she kept opening the window to get some fresh air into the tiny flat. There was talk of Merwin taking Ted and Sylvia for a spin in the country in his little sports car, but this did not happen, so there was ‘a strained walk on Primrose Hill’, during which Sylvia seemed very aggressive. Ted walked Olwyn and her friend the short distance to Chalk Farm Underground station. Olwyn asked him if he was aware how upsetting Sylvia’s behaviour was, and he could only shrug.9

  Towards the end of March, Ted received a telegram telling him that The Hawk in the Rain had won the Somerset Maugham Award, a prize of £500 to be spent on foreign travel. They planned to find a place in the sun as soon as the baby was old enough to go abroad.

  Frieda Rebecca Hughes was born, five days after the due date, on 1 April 1960. In the early days, Ted sometimes called her Rebecca. The labour was remarkably brief for a first child (four and a half hours), with assistance from an Indian midwife, no doctor and no drugs, other than the lingering wooziness of the two sleeping pills Sylvia had taken the previous night – she had been so determined not to have the baby on April Fool’s Day that she had convinced herself she wouldn’t and therefore allowed herself to take the pills. Ted did what husbands were supposed to do (hand-holding, back-rubbing, kettle-boiling) and took some credit for the brevity of the labour. He had got into the habit of hypnotising Sylvia to make her relax and believe that she would have an easy, short labour. Since he had previously had a number of successes, such as making her believe that her period would begin on a particular day and be over in forty-eight hours, it stood to reason that his hypnotic arts had played a role.10

  Ted immediately cast the baby’s horoscope and sent it to Olwyn. It suggested that Frieda was going to be ‘very bright’, perhaps even ‘too bright’. Sylvia added a postscript to the letter, addressing it ‘Dearest Olwyn’, agreeing that Ted’s hypnosis had made the short labour possible, and saying that the baby had Hughes hands and a Plath nose.11 The flat overflowed with flowers, telegrams and cards. Ted went out and bought daffodils, a lucky silver thimble for the baby and a ‘pile of old New Yorkers’ for Sylvia. He had correctly surmised that, to begin with, all she would be good for were the jokes and cartoons, then a few poems and short stories. But she was soon taking the baby out and about. At the age of seventeen days, Frieda was installed in her cot in a makeshift crèche on the grassy lawn outside the National Gallery overlooking Trafalgar Square as the ‘Ban the Bomb!’ marchers of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament arrived from Aldermaston. Sylvia was delighted that her daughter’s first proper outing was to ‘a protest against the insanity of world-annihilation’.12 Bill Merwin had gone on the three-day march all the way from the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Berkshire. Ted and Dido watched the crowd from a different vantage point, the Albert Memorial. The threat of nuclear apocalypse hung as a shadow-image over many of his poems throughout the Sixties.

  At the age of twenty-one days, Frieda was left for the first time with a Babyminder Service while her parents went to a cocktail party at Faber and Faber. The great T. S. Eliot was there, but they hardly spoke to him.

  Ted and Faber had finally agreed on the title for his second collection: Lupercal. It came into the world exactly two weeks before Frieda. Ted explained his title to Olwyn. The feast of Lupercalia was a fertility rite in which ‘various bachelors’ ran naked through the streets of Rome, being splashed with goat and dog blood. Women who wanted to get pregnant stood in the way and held out their arms to be lashed with thongs wielded by the runners. This was supposed to make them fertile. Reading about it somehow made him think of God as ‘devourer’, ‘mouth and gut’, ‘absolute power’.13

  Nearly all the poems had been written on Cape Cod or in Elm Street or Willow Street, though ‘Thrushes’ went back to Eltisley Avenue days and ‘Mayday on Holderness’ was a late addition composed at Yaddo.14 The rural England of his childhood was seen at a distance, through an American lens. There is a surviving early manuscript, entitled ‘The Feast of Lupercal’, with the return address Willow Street scratched out and replaced with ‘c/o Plath, Elmwood Road, Wellesley, Mass, USA’. On the back of the poems, Ted scribbled notes about their origins.15 These reveal that many of them were inspired by memories of the Manor Farm. So, for example, ‘Sunstroke’ recalls a field of grass being mown when he was nine, with men waiting in the four corners of the field to shoot the rabbits and foxes that emerged from the hay. The same scenario formed the basis of his short story ‘The Harvesting’, broadcast on the BBC (read by Ted himself) in December 1960.

  Lupercal is alive with the apprehension of violence in places where readers would not normally expect to find it: ‘Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn, / More coiled steel than living – a poised / Dark deadly eye’ (‘Thrushes’). ‘Attent’ is a brilliant choice of word, but there were false starts before he found it.16 The originality of the language often comes from a trick learned from the Metaphysical poets he had studied at Cambridge: Dr Johnson had famously characterised their distinctive style as one in which ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’ and such yoking is e
xactly what Hughes achieves when moving from the watcher’s envy of ‘the single-mindedness of the thrushes’ to the utter concentration of ‘Mozart’s brain’ and then that of a ‘shark’s mouth’.17

  This, without doubt, is Ted Hughes’s best and most characteristic volume of poetry. All his trademark elements are there, more fully and finely honed than in his first book. His totemic beasts: hawk and fox in ‘Crow Hill’; a photograph of ‘the last wolf killed in Britain’ in ‘February’. His ability to imagine his way into the mind of an animal, whether bull (‘The Bull Moses’) or frog (‘Bullfrog’). His love of water: ‘An Otter’ influenced by Tarka, the pike in the pond ‘deep as England’.18 His landscape: rock, sky and wind in ‘Pennines in April’. His people: ‘Dick Straightup’, a real countryman from Heptonstall who, Ted explained in his manuscript notes, had died of pneumonia in the February before he wrote the poem (which he composed under the strong influence, in both form and content, of Edward Thomas’s ‘Lob’). ‘I imagine the whole landscape – which he is now a part of,’ Ted wrote of the old man, ‘and I fancy that he has given up his human strength for the everlasting strength of the earth.’19

  The subordination of humankind to the strength of the earth is one of the unifying themes of the volume. But, taken as a whole, Lupercal, with its closing poem ‘Lupercalia’ alluding to the rituals and the might of ancient Rome, is also alert to the rise and fall of empires, the capacity of humankind to destroy the earth in wars past and potentially future. He remembers the Great War in ‘Wilfred Owen’s Photographs’; ‘A Retired Colonel’ speaks from the heyday of the British Empire; a vestige of his father’s experience of the Gallipoli disaster is summoned by the sea in ‘Mayday on Holderness’; and the threat of nuclear warfare between America and Russia is the explicit starting point of ‘A Woman Unconscious’.

  The most famous poem in the collection – long a favourite of examination boards – is ‘Hawk Roosting’. Spoken from the point of view of a bird of prey, holding Creation in its foot, contemplating its next kill (‘No arguments assert my right … I am going to keep things like this’), it was glossed very simply by Hughes himself in his original notes on the collection: ‘In this, I imagine the hawk speaking to himself. He is like a dictator, who thinks he is God and invincible.’20 A few years later, telling the poet and BBC producer George MacBeth that ‘Hawk Roosting’ was the poem he wanted to read for a special edition of the radio programme Poetry Now to be recorded at the Edinburgh Festival, he said that if it was about violence, it was written to the text ‘The truth kills everybody’, and if the truth was ‘ultimately, a totalitarian system’ then his poem was indeed topical, but it wasn’t to do with ‘random, or civil or elemental violence’. Ultimately – though he doesn’t explain how – it was ‘about Peace’.21 Interviewed many years later, he seemed to prevaricate between accepting and denying the reading of the hawk as a fascist, ‘the symbol of some horrible genocidal dictator’. First he said, ‘Actually what I had in mind is that in this hawk Nature is thinking. Simply Nature.’ Then, in accordance with the way that his poetry developed from Lupercal through Wodwo to Crow, he invoked a Creation myth: ‘It’s not so simple maybe because Nature is no longer so simple. I intended some creator like the Jehovah in Job but more feminine. When Christianity kicked the devil out of Job what they actually kicked out was Nature’ – now he is going into the argument of Graves’s White Goddess (which he would further develop in his own Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being) that the attack on the cult of Mary was the Reformation’s banishment of the Goddess. Thereafter, Nature came to be regarded as ‘the devil’. So the hawk has gone from being ‘Isis, mother of the gods’ to becoming ‘Hitler’s familiar spirit’.22

  It is all very confusing, and becomes more so if one speculates about the unconscious influences on the poem, which was written during a morning sitting at the table in Willow Street. If Sylvia was beginning to think about her father’s alleged sympathy for Hitler, is there something of Otto Plath in it? Does the proud roosting posture and the image of the strong talons evoke the American eagle, the national bird that Ted saw cut in stone on public buildings all around him during his time in New England? Were Cold War politics part of the story? Or is it better to follow the advice that Ted gave to so many of the schoolchildren who wrote to him over the years asking him to interpret his poems, and that the burnt-fox dream seemed to be giving him as he wrote his literary critical essay: don’t look for too many symbols, or you might inadvertently kill the poem. The hawk roosting might just be a hawk roosting.

  The reviews were ecstatic. Trendy society magazine Queen paved the way with a pre-publication puff under the heading ‘The New Young Writers’: ‘Hughes is certainly among the most exciting poets writing in English today; like many of his contemporaries, he is attracted to themes of violence, but his treatment of these is often outstandingly striking and imaginative.’23 The local paper in Yorkshire managed to time a feature for publication day, as if for the express purpose of making Ted’s parents proud: it praised his powerful ‘use of the elemental forces of his native Pennines’, suggesting that ‘in his best work he has concentrated the forces of nature into one image – a shrew, a stoat, an old man of Heptonstall, or even, in one hilarious piece of internal rhyming, into an old tomcat’.24

  Then, on the baby’s due date, came the important one: Alvarez in the Observer. The reservations he had expressed about The Hawk in the Rain were swept away. ‘An Outstanding Young Poet’ said the headline. ‘Ted Hughes’s first volume of poems was good but in some ways predictable. He was a Cambridge man and his work showed all the Cambridge influences’ (Alvarez was an Oxford man). ‘His second volume, Lupercal, is another matter entirely. There are no influences to sidetrack the critic, no hesitations to reassure him. Hughes has found his own voice, created his own artistic world and has emerged as a poet of the first importance.’25

  More praise poured in over the following month, along with the congratulatory telegrams on fatherhood. According to the highbrow Times Literary Supplement, Ted’s was (headline) ‘The Renewing Voice’ of English poetry, reacting against the ‘sophisticated numbness’ and ‘neutral tone’ of the Movement: ‘Mr Hughes’s second volume is startlingly better than his first. He is looking for the numinous, he is facing the terror of our contemporary world, and he finds, paradoxically, his central image of the numinous in the blind, instinctual thrust (in itself, in a way, an image of terror) of the animal and vegetable worlds.’ The snowdrop was a conventional poetic image of ‘pathetic and over-confident frailty’, but in ‘the most perfect short poem’ in the book Hughes focused instead on the ‘terrifying strength’ that pushed the little flower’s head through the hard winter soil. It was ‘a remarkable achievement’ to have made ‘a narrow, vivid, rather obsessive range of images (images of blind but beautiful greed, terror, fierceness, lust for survival) seem so generally relevant to our contemporary world’.26

  The distinguished poet Norman MacCaig came to a similar conclusion in the Spectator: it was as if the natural things in these poems ‘become spokesmen for the hidden and violent beings that we partly are, to be regarded with a kind of rueful honesty as obeying the laws of their nature, however much we regret the redness of their tooth and claw’.27 The Daily Telegraph’s poetry reviewer agreed: ‘Toughness, we know, is suspect … But Ted Hughes’s poems, Lupercal, which have been called violent, are in fact genuinely powerful, not self-consciously virile … Mr Hughes at 30 is to me the most strikingly original, technically masterful, poet of his generation.’28

  Faber and Faber printed over 2,000 copies of Lupercal. They sold out by June, calling for a reprint of another 1,500. The American edition published by Harper at $3 in early August had a smaller print run, but the reviews were equally strong. The New York Times said that ‘Like his patron priest, Faunus, Ted Hughes owns a “hair and bone wisdom” about husbandry, hunting and herding. Cows, pigs, cats, stoats, foxes, shrews, weasels, frogs, and wolves are his hedgerow fami
liars. And, like the old mid-winter fertility rites from which he draws the title of this second book, his poems revive us by their own brute vitality.’29 And in Harper’s Magazine, Stanley Kunitz, one of the poets Ted and Sylvia had met in Boston, wrote that Lupercal ‘passes beyond all this pother of school and region and movement and vanguardism and coterie’. This ‘second volume by Ted Hughes, a young Englishman lately resident in the United States, establishes him as one of the most exciting of living poets … These poems seem to be all process, and they are, running like the tide, or shooting thick as clover, until we discover, in a marvel of knowing, that they are completely things.’30

  Alvarez summed up the general view, not just his own, when in the ‘Books of the Year’ round-up for the Observer he opined that Lupercal ‘seems to me not only the best book of poems to appear for a long time but potentially one of the most important: a first true sign of thaw in the dreary freeze-up of contemporary poetry’.31 One of the (less successful) poems in The Hawk in the Rain had been called ‘Famous Poet’. Thanks to Lupercal, that is what Ted Hughes became in the course of his first year back in England.

  Parenthood did not stop them going out. On 4 May, the Babyminder Service obliged again so that they could go to dinner with Eliot and his wife Valerie. The other guests were Stephen and Natasha Spender. Ted found Eliot whimsically amusing, but distant in his manner. He noticed a certain habit of looking down at the ground when talking. Old Possum only looked up ‘to smile at his wife’, his smile being like that ‘of a person recovering from some serious operation’. Spender ‘chattered so much’ that he felt compelled to write Ted and Sylvia a letter of apology for having done so.32 Ted was surprised by how much he liked Spender and by how thick Eliot’s hands were. He was not surprised that all the talk, some of it indiscreet, was about the Bloomsbury Group and their acolytes. Eliot wrote afterwards to tell Ted that he had left his scarf behind. Either the newly famous poet was still nervous at the end of the evening with the world’s most famous poet or he and Sylvia were rushing because the babyminder’s time was almost up.