He is holding something shaggy and terrible above her.
Felicity understands that she is a small anonymous creature which is now going to be killed.
She starts to cry, feeling the greatness and nobility of her role.
She starts to sing, adoring whatever the terrible lifted thing in front of her is,
Which needs all she can give, she knows it needs her,
She knows it is the love animal.15
And yet there are moments of aching beauty, as when, free from the cage of his body, Lumb’s spirit heads for the horizon:
He lopes out along a hogback
Through ungrazed grass
Toughened with buttercup and young thistles
Toward a hill-crown clump of beeches, black against the broad glare of sky,
Summit of power in the past.16
The young poet Simon Armitage was so mesmerised by the verse that he forgot about his laundry and left it in the machine all night, as he read into the small hours: ‘What’s so powerful about Gaudete is its passion – that sensation, as if a line is writing itself in front of your own eyes, which I’m sure is related to a feeling the author might have experienced during the creation of the line itself.’17 But the volume is probably not the best starting point for those unacquainted with Hughes’s writing.
‘It’s like a play,’ said Ted when interviewed about the poem, ‘it contains no author’s comments. As far as interpretation goes – I leave all options open.’18 But when it came to biographical interpretation, he closed the option with some dispatch:
Faas: Are critics aware of the extent to which the name Lumb is associated with your life? Your house in Yorkshire is called Lumb Bank.
HUGHES: It’s a fairly common West Yorkshire name. It means chimney, the tall factory chimney.19
Interviewer Ekbert Faas, a German-born novelist and literary critic, did not respond by commenting on the choice of Lumb’s Christian name, with its echo of Ted’s ancestor the Reverend Nicholas Farrar. In the light of the Farrar family’s unhappiness at Ted’s dalliances on his return to Yorkshire after Sylvia’s death, there is something a little provocative in the representation of Lumb as a man of irresistible sexual powers, running amok in a closed rural community.
The main body of Gaudete represents the extreme of that mode of Ted Hughes’s poetry which focuses on the mythic, the dramatic and the shamanistic, which is hooked on the Goddess and explores the process of spiritual descent and regeneration. Yet shadowing the Lumb narrative is his second self: the autobiographical, the man who has loved and lusted after women ever since writing ‘Song’ under the influence of the beautiful Jean Findlay. It cannot be a coincidence that the environment in which the ‘other’, the authentic, Lumb appears in the epilogue is that of the Galway coast, where Ted went at the crisis point in his relationship with Sylvia and where he returned with Assia in the hope of making a new life.
Gaudete was published with an epilogue: a series of poems that are quite unlike the preceding narrative. This is a sequence of just over forty short lyrics in a style that feels very different from anything Hughes had published before. Within the fiction of the poem, they are associated with the ‘real’ Nicholas Lumb as opposed to the false messiah of his spirit double. In terms of poetic development, one might say that the Two Teds were split across the Two Lumbs: the mythic self in the main narrative, the confessional self in the epilogue poems.
He explained their origin to the enquiring Ekbert Faas. In 1973, he read a Penguin Classics anthology of South Indian vacanas or devotional lyrics in free-verse translations by A. K. Ramanujan, under the title Speaking of Siva. These little poems are addressed to a divinity – sometimes Siva, sometimes a nameless goddess – who is ‘intensely personal, willing to share its ecstasies with animals and plants rather than with confederates of an organized religion’. But, ‘rather than bestowing gifts of grace, prosperity or righteousness, the deity responds by annihilating the worshipper’.20 This could be the White Goddess, with Ted himself as the worshipper.
He was very excited by Ramanujan’s introduction to the anthology, which told of how the vacana was a form that combined homely images of everyday experience with ‘the sense and idiom of the earth’ as well as ‘abstruse esoteric symbolism’. This made Ted prick up his ears. As did the idea that ‘all the phases of love become metaphors for the phases of mystical union and alienation’. In some of these poems, the intervention of a transgressive divine force disrupts conventional family life, shatters traditional loyalties and causes marital breakdown. Ramanujan writes of a quasi-religious legitimation of fornication: ‘The Lord is the Illicit Lover; he will break up the world of Karma and normal relationships, the husband’s family that must necessarily be violated and trespassed against, if one should have anything to do with God.’ This line of thinking cohered very well with the story of the Reverend Lumb’s sexual profligacy breaking up a number of marriages. It may also have made Ted think about his own track record. But what most attracted him to the vacana was that the form squared the circle of being both depersonalised (tapping into the divine, the mythic, the archetypal patterns) and highly personal: ‘They are uttered, not through a persona or mask, but directly in the person of the poet himself, in his native local dialect and idiom, using the tones and language of personal conversation or outcry.’21 This was the poetic voice for which Hughes’s inner self had been waiting.
Ramanujan’s ruminations and translations were timely for Ted because he was growing anxious about his own mortality. He read Speaking of Siva in the period when he had been suffering from a chronically sore throat for a year and was worrying that it might be cancer. So he began to write his own vacanas as ‘little prayers’, attempts to make peace with himself before he met his maker.22 Some of them went into a privately published volume, others became the epilogue to Gaudete (some appeared in both settings).
Another influence, he told Ekbert Faas, was his (always vivid) dreams, particularly his recurring adolescent nightmare of a plane crash over Mytholmroyd.23 If he could begin by turning such memories into poetry, there might come a time when he could dare to release his dreams of Sylvia. Hughes told the critic Keith Sagar that the epilogue poems represented ‘my furthest point, so far, some of them’. In a journal fragment dated 14 December 1974 he wrote, ‘With Gaudete, I have broke some sound barrier. I mustn’t let my momentum slack. I mustn’t let my aim be deflected. I must now as never before step up the pressure, rip aside the web, smash up the shells.’24 Speaking of Siva had made him think more seriously than ever before of daring to speak in print of Sylvia.
In sum, the Gaudete epilogue poems mark the emergence of a new voice in the poetry of Ted Hughes: quiet, tender, elegiac. And autobiographical. To put it another way, this was the moment when Hughes began to shift his allegiance from the myths and archetypes of T. S. Eliot to the true voice of feeling exemplified by Thomas Hardy’s poems in memory of his dead wife. When Birthday Letters was published near the end of Hughes’s life, critics were amazed by the autobiographical candour of the collection and greeted it as the breaking of long silence. But this was not the case. Seamus Heaney remembers opening the issue of the London Review of Books dated 21 February 1980, reading ‘The Earthenware Head’ and saying to himself, ‘Ah, he’s begun.’25 Ted had in fact begun to publish elegiacally with the Gaudete epilogue poems.
One of Hughes’s acutest critics, William Scammell, delivered a lecture at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 1997, which was published the following year in the magazine Poetry Review, together with a number of responses to Birthday Letters. Here Scammell noticed that the brief lyrics at the end of Gaudete were the place where ‘for the first time [Hughes] publicly addresses Plath’s suicide’.26 He then quoted three beautiful poems from the heart of the sequence, ‘Once I said lightly, / Even if the worst happens / We can’t fall off the earth,’ ‘Waving goodbye, from your banked hospital bed’, and ‘I know well / You are not infallible.’
Hug
hes read the piece and wrote to Scammell on 1 May 1998. He made some slight corrections and explained that the epilogue poems were modelled on the vacanas of Tamil tradition and that, of the three mentioned in the lecture, the first was indeed ‘related to SP’, but the second was related to his mother, and the third ‘to a close friend of mine Susan Alliston who died of Leukaemia’.27 Yes, the journey towards the publication of Birthday Letters did begin at the end of Gaudete, but Hughes was not yet ready to write in detail about Plath’s death. In ‘Once I said lightly’, he tempts fate with his words about the worst that can happen and is repaid when ‘She fell into the earth / And I was devoured.’28 But the two poems of explicit deathbed farewell are not, he corrects Scammell, about Sylvia. In that key journal entry in 1969, he had written ‘A’s death removed Sylvia’s to a great distance, swamped everything. Now Ma’s death has somewhat removed A’s. Yet A’s comes back.’29 A similar sort of displacement is at work here. He could only proceed gradually towards the pain of Sylvia’s death and Assia’s. Birthday Letters, and indeed Capriccio, his Assia collection, lay in the future. He began with his mother and with Susan Alliston.
It was, then, with the deaths of those two other beloved women in the year 1969 that his elegiac voice first emerged. If his note to Scammell is to be believed, first there was a recollection of his mother knocking over a vase beside her hospital bed as he said goodbye to her for the last time. And then he turned into poetry the picture of the dying Sue Alliston, with her ‘pony face’ and once ‘marvellous forest of auburn’ now shrunk to ‘a twist / As thin as a silk scarf’ – that picture which he had sketched so precisely and tenderly in the journal entry written after returning from her bedside. Every detail is there: his lifting her hand for her as her chin sank to her chest ‘With the sheer weariness / Of taking away from everybody’ her ‘envied beauty’, her ‘much-desired beauty’, her ‘hardly-used beauty’, and the memory ‘Of lifting away yourself / From yourself // And weeping with the ache of the effort’.30
‘I know well’ could truly have been titled ‘Elegy for Susan’. At the same time, given that Ted’s visits to her bedside in the summer of 1969 were his first return to University College Hospital since the day six years earlier when he had formally identified Sylvia’s body in the morgue there, and given that he had been with Sue on the night of Sylvia’s death, it was inevitable that the two women came together in his poetic imagination.
There was a similar coalescence in the poem that is allegedly about his mother’s death. ‘Waving goodbye, from your banked hospital bed’ moves from ward to morgue and ends with the poet emerging ‘In the glaring metropolis of cameras’. The chapel of rest in Hebden Bridge was hardly a metropolis alive with the flashbulbs of paparazzi. In imagination and memory, there is a jump-cut to Sylvia and an anticipation of the unwelcome glare of publicity in the years after Alvarez published The Savage God. The movement from Hebden Bridge to London is perhaps signalled by the line ‘Like a pillar over Athens’, suggestive of the caryatids that stand on the porch of St Pancras Church, on the Euston Road round the corner from University College Hospital – and that also evoke the poem by Sylvia which Dan Huws mocked in their Cambridge days.
In the archive at Emory, there are a dozen manuscript drafts of ‘Waving goodbye’.31 In the original versions, Ted smiles and says goodbye to the dying woman in her hospital bed, then backs out and inadvertently walks into the morgue, where he bows and kisses a ‘refrigerated glazed’ temple. This is not his mother, but Sylvia. Other drafts reveal a shift from ‘He’ to ‘I’ that highlights the move into autobiography, together with images of hanging in space and time, or being in wrong time and space, that make the move to Sylvia more explicit. In the published text, the time–space jump is suppressed: Ted is not yet ready to go into print with explicit reference to Sylvia’s dead body. The journey has begun, but the elegiac voice is still constricted.
Furthermore, consciously or unconsciously, he was still suppressing the importance of Susan Alliston. In his journal account of his last visit to her, he goes into University College Hospital by the morgue entrance. And there is a vase by the bedside as she raises her hand to wave goodbye for the last time. Those details are the key inspiration for the poem. The proximity in time of his mother’s passing and Susan’s brought the two deaths together. ‘Waving goodbye’ is not just the elegy for Edith Farrar that he claimed it was. It is also another love poem in memory of Susan. It is haunted by the thought of himself and Susan lying in each other’s arms on the night that Sylvia died. And by the irony of its being in the same hospital that he said goodbye to them both – both so beautiful, once so alive, then dying so young – one on the ward in 1969 and the other in the morgue in 1963.
In the summer of 1978, a year after the appearance of Gaudete, a black-bound volume of poems called Orts was published by Olwyn’s Rainbow Press, in an edition of 200 copies at a price of £50. Handsomely lodged in a black slip-case lined with flocked fabric, it had Italian mould-made ‘laid’ paper, with decorated Japanese endpapers, a drawing by Leonard Baskin, and distinctly opaque lyric content. ‘Orts’, from a Middle English word for food left by an animal, means the scraps or leavings that remain after a meal. The collection represented the offcuts from the outpouring of vacanas that were originally going to be published under the title ‘Lumb’s Remains’ and a selection from which had become the Epilogue to Gaudete.
As in the epilogue poems, the voice is at once personal and impersonal, intimate and distancing. At one level, an unidentified speaker addresses either himself or an interlocutor who sometimes seems to be the Goddess. At another level, there is a clear movement towards the autobiographical. A poem about a bad meal in a restaurant or the awful food in a cafeteria on the M5 motorway must be drawn more from personal experience than ancient myth. An exquisite address to a female child collecting ‘egg-pebbles’ and ‘tops of dandelions’ is clearly to some extent about, or for, Frieda. The figure of Ophelia floating downstream to the underworld after her suicide cannot but evoke Sylvia. To anyone in the know, a final farewell wave on a station platform inevitably suggests the last glimpse of Assia. The biographer is also bound to ask whether there is an origin in experience as opposed to imagination for a litany of longing sickness for various women: the ‘lecherous pallor’ of one, the smooth fish-like flank of another (this was a favoured simile for Sylvia’s body), the ‘cool saliva’ of another, the ‘dirty feet in sandals’ of another, the ‘crazy yells and claws’ of another. From a biographical point of view, it is also noteworthy that several of the Orts poems are about marriage as entrapment. A woman claws the door of a house: later, this poem will be explicitly linked to Sylvia. The phrase ‘I do’ – in such a context always redolent of ‘Daddy’ – is compared to the doomed charge of a hurt leopard. In another poem, the state of matrimony is compared to an obstinate tooth decaying ‘In an imbecile’s mouth’. In others, marriage is a life-sentence dished out by a judge or an analogous state to that of an animal imprisoned for life in a zoo.32 The ‘stuck in marriage’ poem was first drafted in Ireland in the aftermath of Assia’s death; the syntax is nicely ambiguous, so the phrase could refer to her marriage to David Wevill or Ted’s own to Sylvia, or both: ‘Then he met her, yes, he found her / Stuck in marriage like a decaying tooth.’33
Another volume appeared from the Rainbow Press a few months later. Printed as usual on handmade paper, but with sheets of a much larger size, this time there were 143 numbered copies bound in stiff vellum and priced at £140. A further set of twenty-six, lettered A to Z, was bound in full brown morocco with bevelled edges and the price jacked up to £175. This handsome volume was ‘Dedicated to the memory of JACK ORCHARD’. It yoked the journal-like farming poems that Ted had written in the early Seventies to a series of elegies on his father-in-law.
The subsequent publishing history of this collection was complicated. A year later, Faber and Faber reprinted the sequence (slightly reordered) as ‘Moortown’, the opening section of the portma
nteau volume called Moortown, a volume best described as an ‘interim selected new poems’34 – it also included Prometheus on his Crag, Adam and the Sacred Nine and a miscellany of short poems gathered under the title ‘Earth-Numb’. A decade later, the farming poems were reprinted (with further slight reordering) as a standalone trade paperback entitled Moortown Diary. This 1989 edition added dates, prose notes and a preface.
From the point of view of Ted’s poetic development, it was the final six poems in the Moortown sequence that had genuine significance. These were elegies in the true classical sense: poems in memory of a beloved and admired acquaintance who has passed away. Crow had been dedicated to the memory of Assia and Shura but was in no direct sense about them. Some of the epilogue poems in Gaudete – a volume that, tellingly, carried no dedication – were elegies for Sylvia, Sue and Edith, but they were not acknowledged as such. Now for the first time, albeit in a privately published collection, Hughes was openly advertising his move into the poetry of personal mourning.
The elegiac sextet begins with ‘The day he died’, written on Valentine’s Day, the day after Jack died. It is a poem both moving and muscular, with earth as crisp as toast, ‘snowdrops battered’ and ‘Thrushes spluttering’. There is a ‘new emptiness’ in the landscape, where the bright fields are as ‘dazed’ as the bereaved daughter and son-in-law who have been farming them. ‘From now on the land / Will have to manage without him,’ the poem declares. Ted already knew that he could not go on as a farmer without the manager of his land. The next three poems etch stark and vivid memories of rural life and labour, outlining the figure of Jack against his landscape and his community: putting up a wire fence, shearing ‘an upturned sheep’, standing stock still at an auction (like a poker-player, he gives nothing away and gets a bargain on a bullock). The final two elegies remember his hands: hands that tightened barbed wire, grasped bullocks by the nose, stripped down tractors, held cigarettes, hands that now ‘lie folded, aloof from all they have done’. They are surprisingly ‘slender hands’, evocative of his mother’s (and perhaps Ted’s mother’s), no longer in the motion of work but now folded in death’s ‘final strangeness of elegance’.35
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