Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  Unhappy about his failure to make a major poetic breakthrough, he distracted himself by becoming a farmer. He bought various parcels of land and started acquiring livestock. Then he purchased an old millhouse, used as a pippery, along with a stretch of riverbank. And in the summer of 1972, he succeeded in a bid for a complete working farm. It was at Moortown, 6 miles from North Tawton. Ninety-five acres for £22,000: a bargain. Ted reckoned they were lucky that a big estate had been auctioned off in parts the same day and that all the buyers had gone there. Jack Orchard, who had a lifetime of farming experience, took on the actual running of it, but Ted and Carol frequently got their hands dirty and bloody.

  He kept a farming journal, making detailed notes that he turned into poems published first by Olwyn in a Rainbow Press limited edition under the title Moortown Elegies and later by Faber as Moortown and then Moortown Diary. The experience of working the land led him to reflect on hard winters, calving and lambing, birth and death, Devon bulls, foxhunting, the ulcerous infection of sheep known as orf. His material ranged from the brutal operation of dehorning cattle to the ‘dawn inspiration’ of two roe-deer glimpsed one snowy February morning. He was centring his self in North Devon, isolated, out of time, among old cob-walled farms ‘hidden not only from the rest of England but even from each other, connected by the inexplicable, Devonshire, high-banked, deep-cut lanes that are more like a defence-maze of burrows’.5 The verse of the farming poems is loose and informal. Save for the line breaks, the writing is barely altered from its journal origins. Hughes thought of the project as akin to his translation work, where he versified literal prose versions of the originals provided by others who knew the source language.

  Where the poems are prosaic, some of the journal entries written at this time read like poems, consisting as they do of jotted images fuelled with the quick-fire short-line energy of Hughes’s best verse: the isle of Lundy ‘in vaporous violet sea’, seagulls ‘skimming’ the ‘swell’, father-in-law Jack, ‘naked to waist, shearing. / Cutting his finger’, then ‘wrapping’ the sheep’s ‘oily fleeces’.6 Strikingly, the journal brings his new wife and father-in-law to life, whereas the published verses anonymise them into ‘she’ and ‘he’. The figures working the land in the poems have no personality.

  Only two of the published diary poems stick in the reader’s mind. One is the first journal entry that he turned to verse, ‘February 17th’ (‘A lamb could not get born …’), an unforgettably vivid account – not for the squeamish – of an abortive birth in which Ted can save the mother sheep only by hacking off the head of the lamb. The other is ‘Roe-deer’, which shines with an epiphany in ‘dawn-dirty light’. The two roe-deer happen momentarily into the poet’s ‘dimension’ and so take him into their dimension, away from the ‘ordinary’ world where the poem begins and ends and the rest of the sequence remains. The deer are like ghosts, revenants from another world. The poem is dated 13 February 1973: a snowy dawn exactly ten years on from the week of Sylvia’s death. The deer dip themselves through a hedge ‘and upright they rode their legs / Away downhill over a snow-lonely field’.7 Is he allowing himself a moment’s imagined reversal in which the shades of Sylvia and Assia have found companionship in the Elysian Fields and he is the one left alone in the snow? It is not a coincidence that the first draft of the sequence that became Birthday Letters was entitled ‘The Sorrows of the Deer’.

  Scribbling in his notebooks kept him going as a writer. He noticed everything. So, for example, on a single day in August 1973: ‘wet sloppy maroonish-grey clouds, against a clear blue sky’ at dawn, a demonstration at a local farm and a neighbour who nearly drowned, the fat friend of a friend, salesmen offering drainage and plastic piping, salmon on the river Dart and the high tide in Bideford Bay, crab and crayfish in a pool, ragwort and twisted foxgloves, fallen rowanberries and the first blackberries of autumn, the writing method of the poet Paul Valéry, Nick cleaning his bee-boxes, high tea at Westward Ho!, daddy-longlegs everywhere, ‘the hippies in the cottages’ and the absence of swifts from the air.8 Each detail had the potential to become an image in a poem, but none was enough to unlock the recesses of his consciousness.

  At other times he used his journal to penetrate that self, to analyse his inner being. The problem of his existence was that there was ‘always something in the way’: every time he started on ‘the vital journey’ he was blocked by an intrusion from his ‘outer life’. What was the solution? Perhaps by close attention to the world, he might sow some seeds for the inner journey. Perhaps he should loosen up, free himself to release his personal voice, ignore the sniggers of the anti-confessional poets of the Movement (‘Even Larkin – he’s a sniggerer’). You know, he tells himself, what the true goal should be: ‘to hang on to the real life, at every point honour and nurse that’. Keep clear of ‘the surrealist mask’. Don’t cultivate a ‘style’. Ensure that the writing is always ‘a genuine investigation’.9

  Self-exhortation of this kind came from the awareness that his more inward work had been in limbo since Crow. Early in 1974, he tried to galvanise himself by completing his translations of the Hungarian poet János Pilinszky, bringing from one mother-tongue to another the work of a writer deeply attuned to the power of words.

  Conscripted into the retreating German army in 1944, Pilinszky had moved from prison camp to camp in Germany and Austria. The camps were a revelation to him of what King Lear calls unaccommodated man, humankind ‘stripped of everything but the biological persistence of cells’. Pilinszky began to publish after the war and became widely admired in Budapest and beyond, though regarded with suspicion by the communist authorities. He said that he would like to write as if he had remained silent. This, said Hughes in the introduction to his translations, was ‘a real thing’, a raising of imaginative integrity to a price ‘beyond what common words seem able to pay’.10

  Because of his experience of the camps Pilinszky was somehow able to square the circle whereby the artist ‘after Auschwitz’ was compelled both to testify and to remain silent. For Ted, Pilinszky’s poems achieved what the Crow project was striving towards: the revelation of a God of ‘absences and negative attributes, quite comfortless’, a God ‘in whose creation the camps and modern physics are equally at home’, a God who is ‘the Truth’, a truth discovered through ‘naked, carnal, helpless’ suffering but somehow touched by ‘radiance’. In Pilinszky’s love poems, ‘he’ and ‘she’ are separated from ‘meaning and hope’, as the human spirit is separated from consolation. Sexual love ‘becomes a howl, or a dumbness groping for somebody – anybody – in the dazzling emptiness’. And yet there is no disgust. For all that ‘the ultimate reality of total war has become natural law’ and ‘man has been reduced to the mere mechanism of his mutilated body’, the language of poetry becomes redemptive: ‘the symbols of the horror become the sacred symbols of a kind of worship’. The moment of near extinction becomes a moment of joy. The poetry reaches its most intense pitch when it achieves a stillness that is at the same time ‘an ecstasy of affliction, a glare of inner exposure, a passivity of transfiguration’.11 Pilinszky’s direct witnessing of the camps gave an authenticity to his juxtaposition of love and war, of the personal and the political – no one could accuse him, as some accused Sylvia, of a tasteless appropriation of the dark matter of the Holocaust.

  Hughes said of his translations that he had not turned Pilinszky’s poems into his own poems, but rather that he had adapted himself to something that attracted him strongly. He had ‘extended himself towards’ a new voice rather than produced it ‘out of himself’.12 His translations are based on literal renderings by his friend János Csokits, who had by this time moved to London, where he was working on the Hungarian desk at the BBC. At a double distance from each poem’s original moment of conception, Hughes finds a new mode of intensity without bombast. Some of the poems directly recall war and prisoners of war; others are dark intimations of erotic passion and loss with such titles as ‘The Desert of Love’. Sometimes love i
s a war: ‘I love you and nothing can console me … Intimately you cleave to my body / and laugh. Savagely I hit you’ (‘Trapeze and Parallel Bars’).

  Hughes could not avoid being affected by the act of translating a group of poems in which the speaker aches for, yet also feels guilty about, his dead beloved. In particular, an eight-stanza lyric called ‘What Underground Struggle’ is uncannily close to his own contemporaneous dreams and later poems of being haunted by the ghost of Sylvia Plath. Since the lost love’s departing – some unspecified aspect of her death makes the poet feel almost as if he has murdered her – the speaker cannot find his place anywhere: ‘And I keep asking, “Though you are dead / are you still alive?”’ The ‘underground struggle’ takes him down, down into fear of what might happen if the lost love is disinterred in the poet’s dreams: ‘I long for you, yet desperately / heap the earth over you.’ He tastes ‘the dirt / of a lurking hell’.13

  The Pilinszky translations feel like an advance on Crow because of their stripped-down quality. By contrast, Hughes’s original work at this time was going badly awry. He was publishing, but only in desultory fashion: a new Selected Poems; some short plays aimed partly at children (Orpheus and individual volumes of the group of dramas he had first collected with The Coming of the Kings, which was his homage to T. S. Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’); the libretto of an opera called The Story of Vasco that was first performed by the Sadler’s Wells Opera at the London Coliseum in March 1974, to baffled reviews.

  The power of Orghast had come from its primal quality. The dramatic setting and forceful acting, together with the costumes and the music, were combined with the body-rich sounds of Hughes’s invented language in such a way as to create the impression of an intense connection with the raw material of the Prometheus story, with its gift of fire, challenge to the gods and punishment in rock, chain and vulture gnawing at the liver. Myths are stories of the origins of those forces that make us most human – desire and loss, aspiration and transgression, bonds and the breaking of bonds, hope and fear, freedom and restraint, ego and other. As stories, they work especially well in the form of drama, where narrative is put into action and words are accompanied by visual images. The logical next step for Hughes would have been to dramatise Crow in the style of Orghast, but he chose instead to translate the core matter of Orghast from Persian stage to English page by writing a series of poems called Prometheus on his Crag.

  The sequence was published by Olwyn’s limited-edition Rainbow Press in November 1973. A slightly revised version reached a wider audience some years later in the portmanteau Faber collection Moortown. Lacking the narrative drive and visual effect provided by dramatic form, the effect falls flat. With language as the only available resource, Hughes overreaches and overwrites: ‘a brain horoscoped cretaceous’, ‘two cosmic pythons, the Sea and the Sky’, ‘Babies were being dragged crying pitifully / Out of the wombs’, ‘A bitten-out gobbet of sun’. The sequence ends with Prometheus asking whether the vulture is his ‘unborn half-self’ or his ‘anti-self’, but the reader versed in Hughes cannot help feeling that the poetic voice has become a parody self, a rehash of the worst of Crow without the directness and clarity of the best of it.14

  Similarly, if he had stuck with Brook’s Conference of the Birds he could have produced something of great power, but instead he tried to create ‘an alchemical cave drama’ in a setting far from the tribal African environment that Brook saw as the project’s natural home. He turned to another of his long-term collaborators, Leonard Baskin. Cave Birds, first published in 1975 in a Scolar Press limited edition, brought together Baskin drawings and Hughes poems of mythical, semi-mythical and real birds. At the Ilkley Literature Festival in May 1975, the drawings were projected on to a screen and the poems given a dramatised reading, produced by the poet and BBC man George MacBeth. This was broadcast on Radio 3 the following month, with Hughes himself providing a linking commentary. A revised and expanded collection of Cave Birds was published by Faber three years later, without the Baskin drawings. The whole project felt provisional and fragmented. The attempt to bring myth home to roost in Yorkshire was doomed: a projector in Ilkley somehow lacked the primal quality of the rocky tomb of Artaxerxes in the Persian desert at sunset. Once again, the language has all the agony and none of the ecstasy of the mythologised self: ‘The scream / Vomited itself’; ‘Spectral, gigantified / Protozoic, blood-eating’; ‘olfactory X-ray … spread-fingered Efreet’; ‘The baboon of panoply / Jumped at the sky-rump of a greasy rainbow’.15

  Turning from pagan to Judaeo-Christian foundations, Hughes made a further projection into myth in the form of a sequence called Adam and the Sacred Nine, first published in part in 1976 and eventually included in Moortown. The mise-en-scène has a prostrate Adam, after the Fall, ‘visited by nine birds who each in turn bring their gift of “how to live”, for him to accept or reject’.16 Looking back on the traumas of the previous decade, the Hughes of the early Seventies saw himself as a fallen Adam, having to make choices about both how to live and how to write. He had to choose between the literary world and rural life, between marital fidelity and his fierce libido, and in his writing between the way of myth and some other direction.

  He collected old oak beams, Japanese netsuke and the skins of big cats. He wrote incessantly to Gerald about money. As ever, there were new get-rich-quick schemes – couldn’t his brother come back to England and they could get a bigger farm or deal in classy antiques, or both? He worried about his father in Yorkshire. He worried about keeping the children together and getting them into a good secondary school. Nick flew through the entrance exam for progressive Bedales, but Frieda had to resit maths (she passed, thanks to extra tuition). He worried about his tax bills. Family troubles and money troubles came together when Olwyn separated from her alcoholic and sometimes violent partner Richard: Ted generously went halves with her on the purchase of a house in London, meaning he had to put the mill up for sale at the worst possible time, just as both the rural housing and the livestock markets were collapsing.

  Some of the distractions were pleasurable, notably a holiday in Rome and Naples with Carol, recorded in bright journal snapshots. Then in November 1974, under the auspices of Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman, he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and sent Frieda a long and very funny letter about his visit to Buckingham Palace with Carol: ‘And there, far away across this great room, was a tiny person whom of course I recognized. Nobody else in the room at all. Just her. Then I saw Sir John seemed to have fallen asleep, with his chin sunk on his chest, so hastily I sank my chin too, and we presented the Queen with the tops of our heads.’ Her Majesty told him that she particularly liked the Lupercal poem ‘An Otter’, so he told her all manner of bizarre stories about its origin.17

  It was also in 1974 that he renovated Lumb Bank and leased it to the Arvon Foundation. This cost him two years’ literary earnings and a great deal of stress with builders. The origins of Arvon, which became another of Ted’s passions, went back to 1968 when two poet-teachers, John Moat and John Fairfax, came up with the idea of creating residential courses for aspiring poets, with a couple of experienced poets on hand to provide guidance. They received an offer to use a rural arts centre, owned by the progressive college Dartington, in the remote Torridge Valley in Devon. This was Hughes country and he agreed to give a reading on the last night of their first course. He listened to the young people’s poems, sensed the thrill of transformation created by the course, and backed the plan to make it go on happening. The scheme gradually grew, finding a permanent home in an ancient thatched manor farmhouse with oak floors called Totleigh Barton. Arvon became a charitable foundation in 1972 and was now seeking a second home in the North. Though Ted never taught formally on the Arvon courses, he often dropped in on them and he devoted huge amounts of time to fundraising for the foundation.18

  Farming and Arvon were typical examples of a pattern that would endure for the rest of Hughes’s life: bursts of intense po
etic creativity were brought to an end by the distraction of other passions. Some of these were literary: prose projects, most notably his work on Shakespeare; translations for the theatre; the preparation of Sylvia’s works for publication; anthologies; support for young poets. Others belonged to the outdoors: the farm, the fishing trips, the environmental campaigns. Sometimes he was drawn away from his poetic vocation because he was too kind to say no when people asked him for help. More often, he threw himself into his extra-curricular passions because of his reluctance to complete and to publish the project that he knew in his deepest self he was destined to be remembered for, because it would be his own remembrance of Sylvia. ‘The Sorrows of the Deer’, ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’, Birthday Letters: whatever the title, whatever the length and the poetic form, that was the book he had to complete and to publish before he could take his work to a new plane. The only expiation would be for him to publish the poems: perhaps that would get Sylvia out of his system. But quite apart from the fact that Ted kept changing his mind about which poems should be published and which should not, he was wary of the glare of publicity that would fall upon Court Green in the event of publication.

  Repress, distract, redirect: his new prize possession was a red bull called Sexton, bought in the summer of 1974, a time of terrible weather and national economic collapse. Contrarily, it was also a time when Ted discovered that his own finances weren’t quite as bad as he thought. He got a recurrent virus, thought it was throat cancer and went to see a lawyer to get some advice on such matters as death duties. He was astonished to learn that his assets, adding together Sylvia’s copyrights, his manuscripts, his houses and his land, were worth nearly half a million pounds (allowing for inflation, which was about to become rampant, that would be £4.5 million, or $7.5 million in 2015). He concluded that the best course would be to create a trust to give as much as possible to Nick and Frieda and to spend what he could of the rest while there was still time. The problem was, nearly all the assets were illiquid. So it was a relief to discover that it wasn’t throat cancer after all.