Irene Worth’s Jocasta was indeed the highlight of the production. She reached an extraordinary emotional pitch as the character urged the second husband who is also her son to let go of the past:
Oedipus / leave the dead alone / stop these
diggings into the past / bringing my dead husband
back to show his wounds and show himself still in
death agony / leave him alone / hell cannot be
opened safely / what can come out of it / only
more pain and more misfortune / more confusion
and more death51
The play ended with Oedipus speaking of:
pestilence / ulcerous agony / blasting consumption
plague terror / plague blackness / despair52
Then the chorus led him off to a rousing rendition of ‘Yes, we have no bananas’.
Ted was proud and excited at the opening night at the historic Old Vic, which the National made its home prior to the construction of its own purpose-built theatre. He was a seasoned author of radio plays, but this was his debut work for the London stage. He scribbled a souvenir note on Assia’s programme to the effect that she was the best sight on a very special night. She did not like the show, saying that it looked like ‘an exhibit in the Greek Pavilion of Expo ’67’. She was not impressed by the ‘golden cubes, revolving searchlights’ and costumes that looked like space suits. Her reaction to the phallus – which she described as 20 feet tall and pink, though it was actually 7 feet tall and golden – was to write ‘Ugh’ in her journal.53 Some of the more traditional reviewers expressed either bemusement or disapproval at the whole thing, but the critic Ronald Bryden in the Observer said that Brook packed into one evening ‘enough ideas to last an ordinary director a lifetime, once more proving himself light-years ahead of his nearest contemporaries, making most of what passes for avant garde nowadays look tamely nostalgic’.54 Charles Marowitz, who had co-directed the RSC’s famous 1964 ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ season with Brook, but had now gone off to found his own Open Space Theatre Company, was more cynical: ‘On a superficial plane, the production dazzles and seduces us with novelty, but a lingering dissatisfaction quickly banishes these virtues … Brook is like the liaison between the true avant-garde and the bourgeois public and critics.’55
Brook greatly enjoyed working with Ted and invited him to join him on his new adventure of establishing an experimental, improvisatory, international theatre company in Paris.56 It was, Ted excitedly told Gerald in an airmail letter, ‘more or less an invitation to create’ his own theatre, his ‘own kind of play’, with whatever actors he wanted, ‘since any actor falls over to be directed by this Peter Brook’.57
Another plan was for Brook to return to his acclaimed Royal Shakespeare Company production of King Lear, starring Paul Scofield, and turn it into a film. It wouldn’t be a film of the play like Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet or Richard III, but rather an English equivalent of Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa’s Japanese samurai adaptation of Macbeth, or perhaps Grigori Kozintsev’s Russian Hamlet, with its script heavily truncated from a translation by Boris Pasternak. It would be ‘a film of the story, using whatever in the text doesn’t sound unreal in a film’. So, Ted told his old Shakespeare-loving schoolmaster John Fisher, with six exclamation marks, ‘he wants me to rewrite the text’. He provided Fisher with a brief sample of how he was turning Shakespeare’s words into something plainer and simpler. He laboured away at the task for several months. His archive includes a ‘Draft Shooting Script’ dated 9 September 1968.58
The problem was that, with Shakespeare, every word counts: ‘take out one little nut’ in one place and a wing will fall off, and the tail will begin to come loose because ‘the whole thing is so intimately integrated’. If Ted is to be believed when reminiscing in a radio interview twenty-four years later, he was in the midst of his drafts when he had a dream in which there was a tremendous banging on the back door of Court Green. He opened it and ‘there was Shakespeare himself, in all his Elizabethan gear, like that portrait of Gloriana – jewels, ruffs, and the rest of it’. He was ‘boiling with rage’, furious with Ted for ‘tinkering with King Lear’. Shakespeare took Ted up into the great attic under Court Green’s thatch and directed his own production of Lear ‘as it should be put on, according to him’. This ‘immense’ performance filled the whole sky and unlocked ‘the whole mythical background of the play’. The next morning, like Coleridge trying to recover his vision of Xanadu, Ted wrote down what he could remember of Shakespeare’s interpretation of Shakespeare. But the real lesson of this dream – a reprise of the Cambridge one, with Shakespeare standing in for the burnt fox-man – was that he had to stop messing around with the play.
The Brook film was eventually released in 1971, with an orthodox (though truncated) script. But Ted hung on to his ideas about Shakespeare’s substructure and developed them in an anthology of purple passages in 1969 and ultimately in his huge late book Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, which he described to Brook as his Shakespearean equivalent of the epic Mahabharata cycle.59
While Oedipus was in rehearsal, The Iron Man, Ted’s latest children’s book, was published. The American edition, published later in the year, was entitled The Iron Giant. This would prove to be Ted’s bestselling and best-loved work. It firmly established his place as one of the world’s leading children’s authors as well as one of its most admired poets. The story begins under the influence of the great clifftop scene in King Lear, with a giant figure teetering on the edge and tumbling into a mighty fall down to the beach below. The broken man of iron is then reassembled by seagulls – they begin by picking up an eyeball, another nod to Lear. This is a version of the ritual ‘dismemberment of the body and renewal of the organs’ about which he had read in Eliade’s Shamanism, and with which he had experimented in the film script that later became Gaudete.
The Iron Man then starts eating tractors, diggers and any other farm machinery made of iron. Not to mention chewing up barbed-wire fences (his equivalent of spaghetti). The figure who saves the farmers from this terrifying creature is a boy called Hogarth whom we first see fishing like a young Ted – or a young Wordsworth, since he blows mimic hootings to the owls and is frightened by the looming Iron Man in the exact same way that the boy Wordsworth feels awe and fear in the face of a rising cliff as he rows a borrowed boat across a lake. Like Ted and Gerald in Crimsworth Dene, Hogarth sets a trap for a fox. He catches the Iron Man instead and then, upon the giant’s later re-emergence from the pit, leads him away from the farms to a scrap-metal yard. A giant space-bat–angel–dragon then lands on the earth. In the manner of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which Ted had so enjoyed reading when he was a schoolboy, humankind uses its assembled military might to try to destroy this monster from the stars, but to no avail (space flight was all the rage at this time, since it was the moment when the Americans were preparing to launch Apollo 8 towards the moon). The Iron Man saves the day when, out of gratitude to Hogarth, he fights on earth’s behalf. He tames the space-bat–angel into singing the music of the spheres instead of waging cosmic war, with the result that human beings become peaceful, stop making weapons and live in global harmony.
In one sense, the story, published on the eve of the Prague Spring, is a dream of the end of the Cold War, an imagined realisation of the idealistic goals of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. At a deeper level, the story gives vivid and compressed form to some of Hughes’s key themes. When asked about its meaning, he said that his essential idea was ‘to dramatise three centres of power’. Hogarth embodies ‘the child’s nature – the child’s sense of himself’. The Iron Man is ‘the giant Robot of Technology – terrifying and destructive, uncontrollable and inhuman, unless it is approached without fear, but with patience and good sense’. And the space-bat–angel–dragon is ‘the infinitely mysterious life power that emerges from atoms, the biological psychic mystery of organic being’. This latter force is also ‘terrifying and destructiv
e, uncontrollable and inhuman, unless approached without fear but with firmness, superior courage, open-mindedness, cunning and kindness’. The story is ‘a ritual by which the child and these two monstrous entities are brought into a single, inclusive, integrated pattern of behaviour and awareness in a shared life that is happy and peaceful’.60
But young readers do not need to know about this allegorical dimension. Frieda and Nick certainly didn’t, as they listened in rapt attention to their father inventing the story for them at bedtime over five unforgettable nights.
16
‘Then autobiographical things knocked it all to bits, as before’
When Ted was in London for the Oedipus rehearsals in early 1968, he told Assia that he wanted to mend their relationship. She asked him whether he still felt ‘the animal thing between us’. Or did he just want her back in order to look after the children? She pleaded with him to open up to her again, as he had in their early days. ‘I feel so full of love to you at your sweet best,’ she wrote to him. ‘I admire you and I am frightened at the power you have over me. No man has ever had this power over me as a woman.’1
Ted tried to probe at her feelings, sensing that what she really wanted was a home for Shura. He asked her to explain her intentions in detail, to describe afresh their ‘real relationship’, which had ‘got buried in conveniences and necessaries’. What was she willing to do and what did she feel like doing? He suggested that if they were going to live together again back at Court Green, there would have to be some new rules. He proposed that they should each draw up a wish list, indicating how the relationship could be made to work from each party’s point of view. He prepared what he half jokingly called a ‘Draft Constitution: for suggestions and corrections’. Assia was invited to draw up a set of proposals of her own, and then they could compare notes and create a compromise. Ted described his own list as ‘a row of horrors’: children ‘to be played with’ and their clothes to be mended, bedtime routine to be supervised, German lessons ‘two or three hours a week’, no cooking for Ted ‘except! In emergencies’, at least one meal a week to be something new, some basic cooking lessons for Frieda as she approached her eighth birthday, ‘a daily log to be kept of every expense and bill’, general acceptance of his friends, no ‘foolish battles over interior design’ (which was to say, don’t remove every last trace of Sylvia’s taste), 8 a.m. as ‘getting up time, no dressing gown mornings, no sleep during day unless emergency, and by agreement’.2
Assia began her counter-proposal with the words ‘Teddy dear, forget the detail.’ She did not return to Court Green. In April, she made a new will. She expressed a wish for her ‘cadaver’ to be buried in any rural churchyard where the vicar did not object (to burying a suicide, she meant). She instructed that a tombstone should be erected within six months of her death inscribed with nothing other than her name and dates of birth and death, and the epitaph ‘Here lies a lover of unreason and an exile’. Then she set about her bequests: ‘To Nicholas Farrar Hughes, since he is too young for possessions, I will all my most tender love. To Freida [sic] Rebecca Hughes, I will also my love and all the lace, ribbons and silks she can find, as well as a fine gold chain. To Ted Hughes, their father, I leave my no doubt welcome absence and my bitter contempt.’3
Her bitterness came from the fact that at the beginning of the month, his star sign in eclipse, Ted had vowed to make a final break with her. He interrogated himself, struggling to find the good, the human virtue, in the mess of torments and revelations to which his life had been reduced. How could he figure out the ABC of things? The A, the B and the C were Assia, Brenda and Carol.
Brenda and Trevor Hedden had separated. The parting was amicable. Brenda and her little girls moved 40 miles away to Welcombe on the Hartland peninsula, a lovely stretch of North Devon coastline. She explained to Trevor that she needed some space because Ted’s intervention in their marriage had had a greater impact than she had anticipated when she had agreed to Trevor’s – very Sixties – proposal that they should have an open marriage. Trevor then complained that when he had suggested she should have some occasional casual affairs, as he was doing, he had not meant that she should ‘fall in love with them’.4
One of Ted’s most beautiful unpublished love poems is for Brenda. It conjures into words their intimacy and unity, the depth of his love and the idea of her body, in three quintains of delicate repetition, variation and incantatory passion.5 She had expressed apprehension about their relationship. She was always strongly drawn to him but sensed that if they continued it would drastically change her life and her relationship with Trevor, which had been sufficiently rewarding for a decade. The prospect was very unsettling. Ted returned a day later with the poem. He said that it was how he felt. After she had read it, she slowly crushed the paper within her hands, sensing that continued involvement with him would crush her, emotionally.6 She loved him, but not because he was a poet. It was his personality and his intelligence that attracted her, but she knew that she was letting herself in for disruption and intricacy.
The young nurse who offered so much help with childcare was now also very much in the picture. With A in London, Ted moved between B and C on impulse, usually for a few days at a time, sometimes taking off in the night. Sometimes he was open about his unpredictable moods, suggesting to Brenda that it was better to share his secret life (as a mistress, that is to say) than to be part of his domestic life, fully exposed to his demons. He also admitted to her that he liked the fact that neither B nor C was literary. After the implosion of his lives with literary S and literary hopeful A, it would be better to keep his work and his entanglements apart. The particular attraction of B was that, unlike A, she was not haunted by rivalry with Sylvia. Brenda appreciated some of Sylvia’s maternity clothes in 1965, but she never imagined herself stepping into Sylvia’s shoes. He could accordingly be relaxed with regard to what he said about Sylvia, in a way that was never possible with Assia. He once confided to Brenda that he had asked Sylvia what she thought of his lovemaking ability. Sylvia indicated that he had a tendency to be too dominant.
Ted’s only way of keeping going with the complications that he had created for himself was by continuing to write. He set himself a minimum of five pages a day. But he was struggling to maintain his resolution. He considered it ominous that his dream life had gone dead again.
There always seemed to be distractions and misadventures. One June day, driving out of Exeter, he bumped the car at some traffic lights. He crawled to a garage by the university. The radiator had burst and it would take till four-thirty to fix it. When he returned, he suddenly found himself pulled towards a police car and told to get in. A policewoman snarlingly asked him what he had done to those girls up in the university. He was taken to the station and interrogated. The mechanic at the garage had said that he had been away for an hour. A man in a white shirt and green trousers had been exposing himself to the female undergraduates. The police arranged for him to stand on the street while two girls were paraded past separately. Neither thought that he remotely resembled the flasher. The police did not apologise, though they had the grace to drive him back to the garage. Another afternoon wasted. Faced with major traumas of the kind that Ted faced again and again in his life, many people would vent their anger and frustration by becoming furious over minor incidents of this sort. It is a mark of Hughes’s fortitude that he kept cool and saw the funny side.
As was the case for much of his life, he spent a lot of time going backwards and forwards between Devon and London. That summer he introduced the poet Michael Baldwin to the occult. He assumed that Baldwin would be interested because he practised hypnotism, which was banned from public performance, in clubs and at parties. Ted took him to a place that he called ‘Watkins’ bookshop’ in an alleyway off St Martin’s Lane. After lengthy browsing, he bought Baldwin a book called The Magician: His Training and Work. ‘This is harmless,’ he said. ‘Solid, and harmless but very, very good. Keep it to yourself, read it criti
cally and take from it what you will.’ Behind the till stood Anna Madge, daughter of Kathleen Raine, poet, scholar of William Blake and expert on the Tarot, occult Neoplatonism, the gnostic tradition, the universal wisdom of the initiate and all such mysterious arts. Ted was a great admirer of Raine’s writings and was very pleased, many years later, to propose her for the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Late in life, he became a supporter of her Temenos Academy of Integral Studies, which fostered the arcane spiritual traditions and also won the support of Prince Charles.
Hughes and Baldwin remained friends for years. They were both dabblers as opposed to true initiates in the dark arts. ‘We did not ever perform occultist ritual conjurations together,’ Baldwin recalled, reassuringly, ‘or join Peter Redgrove and Penelope, who had lain in a circle feet to the moon in order to conceive [their daughter] Zoe.’ Baldwin remembered how Ted had shown him the letter from the Redgroves describing this ritual and said in mock horror, ‘The child will be mad!’ According to Baldwin, he then reflected for a moment and said, ‘Should have been head to the moon anyway. You always rope the heifer head to the moon so the usual tides draw the bull’s semen deep.’7
Despite his vow in April, by August Ted was seeing Assia again. He had assisted her with translations from the Hebrew of the selected poems of Yehuda Amichai. They were published under her maiden name Assia Gutmann on 11 July 1968, and received extremely favourable reviews. Assia’s poems, which had more than a few touches of Ted, were praised as fine creations in their own right, not mere translations.8 Before the end of the year, relations had been sufficiently repaired for Ted and Assia to participate jointly in a radio programme promoting the book. The broadcast was billed in the Radio Times as:
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