Just three days after arriving, without saying goodbye to Murphy, Ted left. Sylvia explained that he had gone down to County Clare to fish with his friend the painter Barrie Cooke. She would meet up with him in Dublin later in the week. Left alone with Richard Murphy, Sylvia made a pass at him, which he rebuffed. Back at Court Green, she wrote him a very awkward letter, simultaneously thanking him for his hospitality, seeking his help in finding a place for her in Connemara, and withdrawing an invitation to Court Green on the grounds that Ted would not be there (the implication being that she had registered his desire not to have an affair with her). She had fallen in love with the west of Ireland and wanted to live there, with just the children. In early October, she wrote again, reiterating the plan. She said that the end of her marriage was proving good for her work: ‘I am writing for the first time in years, a real self, long smothered. I get up at 4 a.m. when I wake, and it is black, and write till the babies wake.’47
Ted, it seemed, had not been serious about using Ireland as a real chance for a new beginning. By the end of the trip, he was acknowledging to Olwyn that a legal separation or even a divorce was on the cards. ‘In her manner with other people she’s changed extraordinarily,’ he wrote of Sylvia, ‘become much more as she was when I first knew her, and much more like her mother, whom I detest.’ Olwyn had written some characteristically robust words, and now he agreed with her, hardening his heart against Sylvia: ‘You’re right, she’ll have to grow up – it won’t do her any harm.’48 He had to attend to one or two things before going back to sort out arrangements at Court Green, he added.
One of those things was a clandestine holiday in Spain with Assia. Nathaniel Tarn was one of the first, and the very few, to know. On 1 October, he made one of his neat journal notes. Assia phoned him in the afternoon from work, ‘very agitated to say that she spent the last 10 days of her trip with Hughes in Spain’. It had all been arranged before she had flown to Canada at the end of August to see her mother, who had breast cancer. ‘She works wonderfully with Hughes,’ she told Tarn, they were ‘thinking of doing a film script together’.But should she inform David, or not? She and her husband were about to go to Germany together. Tarn sensed a ghastly inevitability about the whole unfolding drama. He replied that there was little he could do. The whole thing was ‘like watching a Greek play’.49
13
‘That Sunday Night’
Writing to happily married Gerald in Australia, Ted was evasive in describing his entanglement. He merely dropped a few hints about ‘calamitous confrontations with all sorts of bogies’ and the conflict between ‘puritan tendencies’ and the ‘irregularities’ that he needed in order to exist.1 He particularly stressed the way in which fame had changed his life. He needed to get away from London to escape the pressures and demands that literary celebrity had placed upon him. Court Green was the creative haven that he required. But almost as soon as he was there, he was drawn back to London, not only for the necessity of BBC work and meetings with editors, but also because he could not help enjoying the adulation he received there.
Writing some time later to unmarried and much closer sibling Olwyn in Paris, he was more candid. The letter is undated, but it must have been written either around the same time as Sylvia’s letter to her mother announcing that ‘I am going to try to get a legal separation from Ted’ (27 August 1962), or, more probably, immediately after Ted left Court Green ‘with all his clothes and things’ and Sylvia ‘piled the children and two cats in the car’ and drove to Cornwall to stay with the Kanes, the occasion that inspired the poem ‘Lesbos’ (16 October 1962).2
‘Grave news,’ he began his confession, ‘Sylvia and I have decided to part ways, in spite of the obstacles.’3 Something began to happen to him in ‘April or so’, he explained, deliberately not mentioning Assia’s visit on the third weekend of May. Since then, the marriage, the house and Sylvia had all seemed like ‘the dead-end of everything’. So he ‘blew up – very mildly’ (the kiss in the kitchen?) and then ‘went on the spree’ (the month of vigorous sex with Assia, presumably). But this was ‘no substitute for the real thing’, which was to go and live where he liked, ‘working uninterruptedly’, choosing his friends as he pleased and seeing them as often as he liked, and ‘generally changing’ himself ‘without the terrible censorship of somebody like Sylvia’ confining his ‘every impulse and inclination’. The jaguar, in other words, was trapped in the cage of marriage.
Now he was making his bid for freedom. The cage was soul-destroying. They had been ‘good for each other’ in the first couple of years of their marriage, but then things had deteriorated until ‘finally the mutual destruction has been too obvious and open to ignore’. He told Olwyn that during the previous two years the only decent things he had written were during the ten days when Sylvia was in hospital. This suggests that Assia may, after all, have been telling the truth when she informed Nat Tarn that Ted had said this to her during the weekend at Court Green – she just made the incorrect assumption that he was referring to Lupercal, since it was the only book he had published in the previous few years.
Village life in Devon, Ted went on, was like living in an old people’s home. The 10,000 desires that he had repressed for six years ‘in a gentlemanly considerate way’ (for which the usual phrase would be ‘out of marital fidelity’) had ‘suddenly appeared in full bloom, absolutely insatiable’. He would give Sylvia Court Green, the Morris Traveller and as much cash as he could send. The fewer his possessions, the better for his work. He would live in London till December, fulfilling his many reading engagements, then it would be off to Germany, Italy, wherever. He was beginning to write good poetry again. Sylvia had assisted in that by refusing him access to Court Green since he had become ‘so sinful’ (not strictly true – he was returning home at weekends). He wanted to break the mould of tedious, conventional English middle-class life. To be a kind of bohemian. The risk was that he would become a ‘drifter’, but he thought that he had the willpower and ‘inner direction’ to avoid this – besides, the need for cash would keep him working. Yes, his plan sounded like ‘terrific egoism’, but the alternative was – a phrase that reads with bitter irony in the light of subsequent events – ‘suicide by wishi-washiness’. Sylvia would be ‘O.K.’, she was ‘tough’. The only thing he says against her is that she ‘made some terrible mistakes’ and he ‘let her make them’. He does not say what they are, but he was probably thinking of the outbursts of rage and the awkward incidents on social occasions. The loss of Frieda would be ‘a problem’; as for Nick, being only a few months old, they hardly knew each other. He signed off by saying that he had written some film outlines – not mentioning that he and Assia were talking about collaborating on scripts. The letter does not mention Assia at all.
When a man has an affair, his classic defence is to say that there had long been cracks in the marriage anyway. A big part of the Birthday Letters project was an attempt to ask when things began to go wrong. Selection and retrospection, the rear-view-mirror perspective, meant that it was easy to highlight symbolic moments of foreboding – auguries and portents – from the start and all the way through. But some of the poems seek to pinpoint specific moments of crisis. Was there one as early as their first walk across the moors to ‘Wuthering Heights’, when they had seen an injured grouse and he had put it out of its misery with a crisp blow to the head, and she had been sorry for the poor bird and afraid of the ease with which, like Heathcliff, he could perform a casual act of violence? ‘The Grouse’ was not included in the published Birthday Letters, but probably should have been. It describes Sylvia ‘shaking’ and ‘weeping, staring in horror’, then verbally attacking Ted as if had done ‘Something incredible, inconceivable’. The grouse was, for Sylvia, ‘like the Rosenbergs’ in the opening paragraph of The Bell Jar, with its foreshadowing of Sylvia’s own electro-convulsive therapy:
All the stupid murders of this earth
Had moved into my hand to crush the eyebrows
/> Of the heather-bird.4
Sylvia’s reaction to the killing of the grouse echoes in Ted’s mind with the later incident of the rabbit-catcher.
More plausibly: did the first crack appear at the time of the incident with the girl at Smith? Like ‘The Grouse’, the poem about this was excluded from the published version of Birthday Letters. It tells of how Ted was a little envious of the sexual freedom of his colleagues in the relaxed college world of the late Fifties. Sylvia was keeping him on a tight leash, suffocating him under her bell jar. He began to fight for air, to ‘de-mesmerise’ himself, to ‘be normal’. This ‘shattered no glass’ – an allusion to the glass that Sylvia threw across the room at him, which so bizarrely refused to shatter but bounced back, hit her in the face and made her see stars. It did not shatter the glass, but it ‘almost / Shattered’ Sylvia. The poems tells of how his two pretty students arrived with their bottle of wine to celebrate the end of term, how he refused their offer, in the knowledge that Sylvia was ‘waiting / Aggrieved’, and of how ‘They walked with me – till you saw them.’ He ‘could not understand’ her ‘frenzy’.5 This was ‘the first’ in ‘a series of lessons’. He humoured Sylvia, nursed her, spoiled her ‘strange fits of possessive passion’ (a neat twist on Wordsworth’s ‘strange fits of passion’ in his ‘Lucy’ poem about his dead love). By doing all this, he ‘cultivated a monster’ or ‘released a monster’: ‘Yes, it was monstrous in you.’
So did the point of no return arrive when Sylvia’s rages became uncontrollable – perhaps when she smashed the mahogany-topped table that was a Farrar family heirloom (‘The Minotaur’)? Or did it occur on the April evening in 1960, just after the birth of Frieda, when Ted walked over Chalk Farm Bridge, ‘slightly light-headed / With the lack of sleep and the novelty’, and was offered a fox cub for a pound and did not buy it? Was that the failed test?
If I had grasped that whatever comes with a fox
Is what tests a marriage and proves it a marriage –
I would not have failed the test. Would you have failed it?
But I failed. Our marriage had failed.6
As Heaney recognised, these lines have great poetic power. Biographically, however, this is nonsense: their marriage had not failed by the time of Frieda’s birth. They were often blissfully happy in Chalcot Square. How could their marriage possibly have failed when eight months after this they wrote an ecstatic and hilarious joint Christmas card to Sylvia’s undergraduate friend from Smith, Ann Davidow, in which Sylvia tells of how Ted ‘got a wicked telegram from ABC television this morning (heaven knows how they knew where he was) asking him to appear as poet-of-the-year’ (he refused) and Ted jokes about the three kings on the card holding caskets of ‘petrol for their vespa’, ‘fuel of brandy’ and cocaine, before signing off by saying that he would leave space for Sylvia to tell her ‘how surpassingly indescribably dissectingly unearthingly collapsingly bisectingly beautiful her daughter is, because it is all true and needs to be told’?7
Symbolically, the failure of the fox-cub test is a retrospective version of the choice described in the letter to Olwyn. For Ted, ever since ‘The Thought-Fox’, a fox had meant the gift of poetry. The rejection of the fox cub signals that the choice to have children was a rejection of a life devoted wholly to poetry. It is the ‘pram in the hall’ argument.
Then again, could the crack in the marriage be dated to the time when Ted started suffering from fibrillations of the heart, while digging the garden at Court Green (‘The Lodger’)? Was that some kind of sign that his heart was not really in the marriage?
The most honest answer in Birthday Letters to the question of when and why it all went wrong is the poem called simply ‘Error’, which is filled with totemic images out of literary romance:
I brought you to Devon. I brought you into my dreamland.
I sleepwalked you
Into my land of totems. Never-never land:
The orchard in the West.
That was the beginning of the end: taking Sylvia away from the city, from the cocktail parties at Faber, the dinner-parties with Mr Eliot, the BBC, the theatre, the cinema and the art galleries, the buzz around the publication of her work. Trying to make her live his dream, burying her in the country, taking her to the ‘vicarage rotting like a coffin, / Foundering under its weeds’, where she would stare at her blank sheet of paper, silent at her typewriter, ‘listening / To the leaking thatch drip, the murmur of rain, / And staring at that sunken church’.8 That was the error.
Ted’s imagining of a rural idyll came from the loveliest poem in the English language, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’, in which a poet in a peaceful cottage in a village in the West Country watches lovingly over his infant by moonlight as ‘eave-drops’ fall from the ‘thatch’.9 The line in ‘Error’ about the dank and depressing drip from the thatch of Court Green negatively rewrites this image in recognition that the idyll had turned into a nightmare. In sharp contrast to Coleridge’s inspirational Nether Stowey, Mr and Mrs Hughes’s North Tawton has become a place where the entire world seems to come to an end in a field of bullocks ‘Huddled behind gates, knee-deep in quag, / Under the huddled, rainy hills’.10 Court Green: they thought it was paradise, but it had become hell.
Sylvia’s own analysis of the reasons for the end of the marriage was expressed most clearly in letters to her dear friend and sophomore roommate Marty Brown, written in the last few weeks of her life. Her reasoning is remarkably similar to Ted’s in his half-acknowledgement of the state of affairs in his letter to Gerald and his explicit account in the letter to Olwyn. First, there was the fact that fame had changed him: ‘he lives just for himself without a care in the world in a Soho flat, flying to Spain on holiday and so on and universally adored. You have no notion how famous he is over here now.’11 And secondly, there was his desire for freedom from family ties: ‘Ted’s suddenly decided he doesn’t want any children, home, responsibility etc.’12
Soon after the break-up, she anticipated his poem ‘Error’: burial in the country was a dream for him, but a kind of death for her. To her friend Clarissa Roche, she wrote, ‘I loved London life and did not want to leave – coming to the country was his idea, his “dream”, as he said. I guess he thought we could live on potatoes and apples.’13 And to her mother, ‘I miss brains, hate this cow life, am dying to surround myself with intelligent, good people. I’ll have a salon in London.’14 Back amid the life and culture of the city in December 1962, she felt like kissing the paintings in the art galleries.
Though Assia may have been what a psychoanalyst would call the ‘presenting problem’, behind which there were deeper reasons for the breakdown of the marriage, had she not entered their lives Sylvia would not have thrown Ted out and he would not have stayed away. On the whole, a man does not leave his wife, home and two tiny children unless he has another woman’s bed to go to. From the point of view of Ted’s desire to live alone and do exactly what he pleased, it was advantageous that Assia was married to someone else. An affair was exciting and carried none of the drudgery or the compromises necessary when two people live together.
There is a degree of truth in Ted’s claim that he had done his best work early in the marriage, though he should have said in the first three years, not the first two. Lupercal, the dazzling product of those years, was dispatched to Faber and Faber just after their third anniversary and just before they set off on their journey across America. By the time they were on the road in early July 1959, it was in the admiring hands of T. S. Eliot. Only one poem was added after Yaddo. But he did also write good poems in Chalcot Square and Court Green. They were not collected in book form until Wodwo of 1967. The main difficulty in 1960–2 was not so much the drying up of poetry as the need to write plays and stories, mainly for broadcast, because the BBC was the best source of income. It was also the case that Ted was distracted from his adult work by his children’s writing. Sometimes, it wasn’t clear to him whether a particular poem was for adults or
children. His collection The Earth-Owl and Other Moon-People, sent to Faber and Faber just as he was leaving his marriage, was submitted as a children’s book, moved to the adult list because some of its contents seemed rather grotesque and grown-up for children, then later returned to the roster of his children’s works.
The uncomfortable truth was that, since her breakthrough at Yaddo, Sylvia’s poetry had been getting better and better while Ted’s had remained more or less the same. This was hard for him to admit, but perhaps a subliminal reason for his moving out. The great irony of the next four months was that he achieved very little by way of advance: he continued busily with radio plays, including one called Difficulties of a Bridegroom, an inauspicious title at this time in his life. Sylvia, on the other hand, launched into the best writing of her life, arguably (and certainly in Ted’s opinion and Al Alvarez’s) the best poetry by any woman since Emily Dickinson (whose work Ted was really discovering at the time).
The parting of the ways was supposed to help Ted with his work, but in fact it helped Sylvia. And, of course, it was her anger at his behaviour that fuelled her imagination. 12 October 1962, ‘Daddy’: the fascist brute, the boot in the face and the marital words ‘I do’ spoken to a ‘model’ of the father who is ‘A man in black with a Meinkampf look’.15 How could Ted not see himself as the ‘man in black’ to whom Sylvia said ‘I do’ on Bloomsday 1956 and who lived with him for ‘Seven years, if you want to know’?
17 October 1962, ‘The Jailor’: ‘My night sweats grease his breakfast plate … I have been drugged and raped … I wish him dead or away … what would he / Do, do, do without me?’16 20 October 1962, ‘Fever 103°’: ‘Greasing the bodies of adulterers / Like Hiroshima ash’.17 21 October 1962, ‘Amnesiac’: ‘Name, house, car keys, / The little toy wife – / Erased, sigh, sigh … I am never, never, never coming home!’18 29 October 1962, ‘Nick and the Candlestick’: ‘The pain / You wake to is not yours.’19 Nick and Frieda were of course her prime concern. She kept herself cheerful through horseback riding and by writing to her mother about Nick cutting his first tooth, pushing around Frieda’s building blocks as he learned to crawl.
Ted Hughes Page 24
