Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  Inside, the kitchen had a coal-burning Aga range and there was a small further kitchen beyond, with a pantry, a box room and steps to a wine-cellar. This was the old part of the house, dating, he reckoned, from the fifteenth century. Upstairs, it had a bathroom and two bedrooms. In the newer part, looking out on the garden, there were two living rooms, and a further three bedrooms above, not to mention a large attic. The house was well set back from the road. At the bottom of the garden, which was surrounded by thick hedges and tall trees, there was the churchyard, graced by mighty yew trees. Space, a garden, an orchard, a village, fishing near by: Ted and Sylvia had found their rural idyll.

  They left London five days later, on a hot late-summer’s day, their modest collection of furniture going down in a small removal van. Sylvia thought that the house was like a person, immediately responsive to sensitive touch. Her brother Warren was in Europe, so he came down to help them move in. He and Ted smoothed a great plank of elm and made it into Sylvia’s first proper writing-table: the best possible housewarming present. The Birthday Letters poem ‘The Table’ plays on the retrospective irony that the particular cut was known as ‘Coffin elm’.2 Ted set up a study for himself in the quiet of the attic.

  They erected bookcases and filled the shelves. They began the haphazard process of getting to know the village. Ted observed the bird life: the most whitely speckled starling he had ever seen nested over their bedroom and a family of goldfinches had their residence in the laburnum tree. He made it his business to catalogue all the plants in the overgrown garden. They planted a row of holly cuttings in the hope of making a hedge. They felt benignly watched by the three elm trees to one side, but oppressed by ‘the black explosion of yew’ in the graveyard beyond.3

  In October, feeling strong in her pregnancy and inspired by her new surroundings, Sylvia wrote her superb poem ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’. The following month, she won a Eugene Saxton Grant of $2,000. Yet there was a darkness in her poetry. Ted proposed the subject of moon and yew tree as an exercise based on their observation of the full moon over the yew in the churchyard early one morning. Though Sylvia regarded the poem as an exercise, he read into it her troubled relationship with her mother (moon) and late father (yew). ‘It depressed me greatly,’ he wrote later. ‘It’s my suspicion that no poem can be a poem that is not a statement from the powers in control of our life, the ultimate suffering and decision in us. It seems to me that this is poetry’s only real distinction from the literary forms that we call “not poetry”.’4

  Sylvia, who was always affected by the weather, struggled with the freezing cold of winter in the country before the days of affordable central heating, but that did not stop them from enjoying the best Christmas they had ever known, with all the trimmings of a big tree, piles of presents for Frieda, and a huge traditional dinner cooked by Sylvia. The new baby, to be called either Megan or Nicholas, was due on 11 January but, like Frieda, was late. Sylvia had been making cherry tarts, apple pie with the last of the autumn fruit from the orchard, and other supplies for Ted and Frieda to eat when she was recovering from the birth. Nicholas Farrar Hughes arrived in the world at five to midnight on 17 January 1962, weighing in at 9 pounds, in contrast to ‘Frieda’s ladylike 7 pounds’. This time Sylvia needed gas and air. A full moon beamed over the huge elm tree in the garden.5 Ted drew his usual diagram of the horoscope at time of birth and sent it to Olwyn, seeking advice – there was a very odd set of conjunctions and he didn’t know what to make of them.6

  They took turns with the childcare. Sometimes Sylvia would sleep in the spare room, where she had given birth, so that Ted could have a good night’s sleep in order to be fresh to look after Frieda the following day. He was still writing short stories and plays for the BBC. An interim project with Faber was a double selection of his poetry and that of his ‘poet-twin’ (Sylvia’s phrase),7 Thom Gunn. This came out in May, showcasing the best work of the two Young Turks of English poetry.

  In March they decided to have both children baptised in the village church, even though they did not like the vicar, who preached a sermon heralding the H-bomb as the potential advent of the Second Coming and attacking ‘stupid pacifists and humanists and “educated pagans” who feared being incinerated’.8 Newly inaugurated President John F. Kennedy was adopting a hawkish attitude towards the Soviet Union. The world was looking a dangerous place, and it was time for poetry to reflect this.

  In April Penguin Books published a paperback anthology with a brightly coloured abstract design on the cover. Entitled The New Poetry, it was the brainchild of Al Alvarez. A prefatory note explained that it was his personal selection of the British poetry of the previous decade ‘that really matters’.9 Alvarez also explained that, for reasons elaborated upon in his introduction, he had also included two Americans, John Berryman and Robert Lowell. The twelve-page introduction itself, provocatively entitled ‘The New Poetry, or Beyond the Gentility Principle’, outlined Alvarez’s take – which was also Hughes’s – on the course of twentieth-century poetry. The radical experimentation of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound had given way to the political poetry of the 1930s and then in the Forties the passionate rhetoric of Dylan Thomas was a reaction against the cool intellectualism of W. H. Auden. The Movement of the Fifties was, in turn, a reaction against the ‘wild, loose emotion’ of Thomas.

  At the heart of the Movement was the Larkin of ‘Church-going’, which offered ‘in concentrated form, the image of the post-war Welfare State Englishman: shabby and not concerned with his appearance; poor – he has a bike, not a car; gauche but full of agnostic piety; underfed, underpaid, overtaxed, hopeless, bored, wry’. There was, however, a certain undue ‘gentility’ about this incarnation of the common man. Larkin and the Movement offered the lower-middle-class equivalent of the upper-class, or Tory, ideal of Englishness that was ‘presented in its pure crystalline form by John Betjeman’.

  Alvarez’s manifesto proposed that what was needed now, at the beginning of the Sixties, was a reaction against this. Precedents were available, for example in the form of the First World War survivor, Hughes’s admired Robert Graves, and above all the working-class D. H. Lawrence, the very antithesis of gentility. But the stakes were higher than ever, as modern culture found itself forced to absorb the reality of the concentration camps and the hydrogen bomb, not to mention the Freudian understanding of the dark inner psyche and the importance of the sexual libido. What Berryman and Lowell brought from America was a willing nakedness in confronting their inner selves. Eliot’s cult of impersonality, itself a reaction against the self-indulgence of late Romanticism, was no longer necessary. The new poetry – for which Lowell’s Life Studies was the flag-bearer – managed to combine skill and intelligence with an openness to ‘the quick of experience, experience sometimes on the edge of disintegration and breakdown’.

  Alvarez exemplified the new poetry by contrasting Philip Larkin’s ‘At Grass’ (‘elegant and unpretentious and rather beautiful in its gentle way’) with Ted Hughes’s ‘A Dream of Horses’: less controlled, technically speaking less good, but ‘unquestionably about something; it is a serious attempt to re-create and so clarify, unfalsified and in the strongest imaginative terms possible, a powerful complex of emotions and sensations’. Like so many of Hughes’s poems, it had the quality of a vivid dream that hinted at an inner life of fear and sensation. It created a ‘brute world’ that was ‘part physical, part state of mind’. Cunningly, Alvarez talked up the power of Hughes by means of a poem that was far from his best. Though quoted in full in the introduction, ‘A Dream of Horses’ did not make the cut of the Hughes selection in the main body of the anthology. Alvarez was sufficiently intimate with the work to offer what was as much a reading of the superior poem ‘The Horses’ and the key short story ‘The Rain Horse’, without actually mentioning them.

  What he did mention was Hughes’s literary antecedent: ‘the strange, savage horses which terrorize Ursula Brangwen at the end of The Rainbow’. Dr F. R. Leavis, sa
id Alvarez, had represented Eliot and Lawrence as the warring and irreconcilable poles of modern literature. The best modern poetry, exemplified above all by Hughes, could, through its immunity to the English disease of gentility, creatively reconcile those opposites by combining ‘the new depth poetry, the openness to experience, the psychological insight and integrity of D. H. Lawrence … with the technical skill and formal intelligence of T. S. Eliot’.10 The anthology duly included more poems by Ted Hughes than anyone else, with Thom Gunn, seen once again as his poetic brother-in-arms, coming a close second. The early Hughes classics were all there: jaguar, thought-fox, roosting hawk, bull called Moses, viewed pig, pike, pibroch and famous poet.

  Ted was thrilled by his prime position in the anthology, and the strength of its reception. Sylvia was neither represented in the selection nor mentioned in the introduction. Alvarez’s behaviour, on reading her new poems later in 1962 and discovering that more than anyone else she embodied the essence of ‘the new depth poetry’, pushing even beyond the spirit of Lowell’s Life Studies, was partly shaped by guilt at his realisation that he had overlooked her talent, by hitherto regarding her – so ironically – as a genteel poet and as at best midwife to her husband’s genius rather than as the true genius of the poetry of ‘experience sometimes on the edge of disintegration and breakdown’.

  Ted and Sylvia were beginning to become part of the village community. They had hardly met anyone before Christmas, but the local bank manager invited them to his New Year’s Eve party, where they met his wife and their literary-minded and very pretty auburn-haired sixteen-year-old daughter Nicola, on holiday from a posh boarding school in Oxford called Headington. She loved literature and found the Hugheses unbelievably glamorous and sophisticated in comparison with everybody else in the monochrome village community. When Ted heard that she was thinking of studying English at university, he offered to ‘save’ or educate her, suggesting that she could borrow some of their books.

  She turned up in black stockings and a dark dress, her short hair neatly pulled with a dark ribbon. She raved in what Sylvia considered a ‘cutely theatrical’ way about Ted’s latest play, which she had heard on the radio. She would have loved to play the ‘romantic little-girl part’ herself. She spoke breathlessly of her love of Winnie the Pooh and Ted decided to mature her taste by offering her Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Sylvia groaned and gave her the archetypal teenager novel, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. When Nicola brought it back, she said that she thought it had been a bit too long. She and Ted corresponded when she returned to school. He sent her an analysis of one of her set poems, Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’. She came back at half-term, straight from the hairdresser. She wanted to lose some weight ‘to have a nice shape’. Ted said that there was nothing wrong with her shape. They talked about films – she thought that Seven Samurai was boring. It happened to be Ted’s favourite film, but he humoured her by agreeing. He did not, however, rise to her angling to be driven to the cinema in Exeter. Her role models, she said, were Brigitte Bardot and Lolita.11

  In the Easter holidays, Nicola turned up at Court Green, offering to take Frieda for a walk. By ill fortune, Frieda had just been pecked by a crow and was feeling upset. Nicola asked if she could offer any other help, then announced that the family was moving to London – she wouldn’t miss North Tawton but she would miss the literary company of Mr and Mrs Hughes. Sylvia’s ‘worries of N’s increasing limpetlike clinging in the next 3 years’ disappeared instantly. Ted wrote in a letter to a friend that he was relieved that they were no longer to be constantly pestered by the bank manager’s mother and daughter.12 But he seems to have enjoyed his conversations with young Nicola, sometimes going round to her house without Sylvia, who once said some sharp words when the two of them seemed to be talking a little too intimately under the laburnums outside Court Green.

  Before leaving North Tawton, Nicola returned some gramophone records that had been borrowed and asked whether she could come over and listen to the Hughes’s ‘German linguaphone records’. At the thought of this, Sylvia ‘seriously considered smashing up our old and ridiculous box victrola with an axe’.13 The need passed, and she ‘grew a little wiser’. Nicola, meanwhile, asked Ted if the girl in his poem ‘Secretary’ – the one about the sexually frustrated virgin – was a real person. ‘So hopes begin,’ Sylvia wrote dryly in her diary. Ted gave Nicola a fond farewell kiss the last time they saw her, together with copies of The Hawk in the Rain and his children’s book, Meet My Folks!, with affectionate inscriptions.14 She grew up to become a writer and journalist.

  Sylvia’s very funny notes on Nicola – there is no more than a glimmer of fear that Ted might have embarked on an affair with her had the family stayed in the village – survive among a set of vivid character sketches of village people, probably intended as material for a novel about her life in Devon that was to be entitled either ‘Doubletake’ or ‘Double Exposure’. She had drafted about 130 pages.15 Another of her vivid character sketches immortalises Major and Mrs Billyeald, and her father George Manly, ex-chief of the police in British Guiana. They named their tiny house on the Eggesford Road after the military compound there.16

  The indomitable Bertha Billyeald was secretary of the Devon Beekeepers Association. Her father saw Ted gazing in admiration at the jaguar skin that was ‘Splayed on the wall like a Picasso’ – Ted’s simile, in ‘The Jaguar Skin’, a poem intended for Birthday Letters but withdrawn at the last minute.17 Old Manly told his daughter to tell Ted and Sylvia the story. A jaguar had been killing the local dogs. One night Bertha saw its shadow on the verandah. It was looking for the two dogs who slept with her for safety (their safety, not hers, interjected the husband). She went out to the verandah to shoot it, but as she got there, the screen collapsed and something came tumbling on to her. At first, she thought it was one of the dogs, but then she realised it was the jaguar itself. ‘It must have got the shock of its life,’ she said laconically.

  The big cat bolted into the hen-house, a long low hutch. At this point, the Major took up the story, proudly telling Ted and Sylvia of how his wife had crawled in among the hysterical hens, felt for the jaguar with the muzzle of her rifle and shot it dead in the pitch dark. She went back to bed and dragged its body out in the morning. Ted then pulls back in his own narrative: they never met again, Sylvia died, the father died and Major Billyeald shot himself on his garden lawn. He wondered whatever happened to Bertha, with all her ‘strength’ and ‘sweetness’.18 Ten years later, Ted saw the jaguar skin ‘In a local auction among the rubbish’. He had to buy it, no matter how high the bidding went. He forgot the cost, but remembered ‘the strength, / The sweetness that went past so lightly’. The story mattered to him because the jaguar was his totemic beast, because Bertha Billyeald was the best of British, because the day that he and Sylvia went to tea with the Billyealds after a meeting of the Devon beekeepers at the home of local beekeeper Charlie Pollard was one of the last days they laughed happily together, and because the skin was a talisman giving afterlife to the dead.

  The people Ted and Sylvia got to know best in North Tawton were their immediate neighbours in the little row of cottages between Court Green and the road. Percy and Rose Key were a Cockney couple, retired from London where they had run a pub (the other next-door neighbour was the booming-voiced widow of an old colonial tea-planter). In April, there was a great drama when Rose banged on the door of Court Green at lunchtime, asking Ted to hurry round because Percy had had a stroke. In their journals, both Ted and Sylvia recorded the ensuing scene, which involved a great to-do over false teeth. Over the next couple of months Ted went round almost daily to help Percy in and out of bed as his health declined further. He died at the end of June, when they comforted Rose and went to the funeral.

  Through spring and summer 1962, guests descended on Court Green. A North Devon woman called Elizabeth Compton, who had written to them after the Poets in Partnership radio broadcast, came to tea, and Sylvia liked her. In Apri
l, there came an American actor and broadcaster called Marvin Kane, who was down to interview Sylvia, bringing his wife and children. Then Aunt Hilda and her daughter Vicky arrived for Easter, followed by a glamorous Swedish journalist called Siv Arb who interviewed Ted and took some lovely photographs of Sylvia and the children sitting among the daffodils in the garden. The moment is beautifully evoked in the Birthday Letters poem ‘Perfect Light’. The Sillitoes, always friendly and helpful, came down from London. Sylvia read her poem ‘Elm’ and Ruth told her that it was extraordinary. The Sillitoes did sense tension and a certain distance between the Hugheses, but this could easily have been attributed to the strain of having two small children and the pressure of freelance work.19 Baby Nicholas was not troublesome – Sylvia described him in a letter to the Baskins as ‘dark, Farrarlike, like Ted, quiet and smiley and utterly lovable’20 – but there was no relief from feeding, winding and nappies (diapers) to change.