It was a heady week. Soon after his arrival, he had sat under the trees in 40-degree heat being interviewed by a female journalist in company with Don Dunstan, the premier of South Australia and a great contributor to the local arts scene. They talked about the importance of poetry, the joy of writing for children, the neglect of Zbigniew Herbert (‘the greatest poet in the world’, Ted affirmed), the high quality of contemporary Australian verse and finally the subject about which he was always reluctant to speak in public: Sylvia. Amid awkward pauses, his replies were terse:
Interviewer: Was it in [pause] comparative with your writing, sometimes better than your writing do you think?
Hughes: She was [pause] I think she was an extraordinary genius. But then I always thought that. And [pause] I don’t think there’s anybody like her [pause] like [pause] Those last poems are something unique in English literature.
Interviewer: Is it very difficult, the relationship of a creative man like you and a genius person like her?
Hughes: No.
Interviewer: Can you give to each other? I mean [tails off]
Hughes: Sure.
Interviewer: Did she have any great influence on you?
Hughes: Must have done.
Interviewer: You’re not aware of it though?
Hughes: Not specifically. I might even have influenced her.5
Later, the same interviewer, Claudia Wright, spoke to Hughes at length in the studio, where he also read some of his poems for broadcast. He told of how he lived as a writer but how when that became too exhausting he took up farming simply in order to get away from dependence on writing. He was, however, still ‘completely dependent on writing’. For what, she asked? ‘Dependent for sanity,’ he replied, before explaining that having another occupation meant that he was not entirely financially dependent on his words: ‘You know that at the last crunch, you can eat a sheep, or you can kill a bullock, or [pause]. And besides, these beautiful animals occupy your whole time, or your thoughts. And the literary world fades away.’ As ever, he was caught between the rural and the literary world. The conversation then turned to Crow. Wright waxed lyrical: ‘half the beauty of listening to your poetry is watching you, your body and your hands and your face move with all the rhythms of the words’.
She drew him towards the poem ‘Lovesong’ and he explained that Crow voices ‘dilemma questions, and they’re all questions referring to his encounter with this – these females. So, they’re all questions about a man and woman. They’re questions about love.’ The atmosphere in the studio became charged as the interview was interspersed with folk songs in the gorgeous voice of Hughes’s admired Maddy Prior. ‘Could you read something for me please?’ asked Wright. ‘I’ll read you a rural poem, a little poem,’ he replied. ‘For a country girl,’ she said, laughing.6 After the interview they slept together.
Some of the big names had dropped out of the festival at the last minute, so Ted and Adrian Mitchell found themselves standing in for the legendary American writers Tennessee Williams and James Baldwin in a large sold-out lecture hall. The usual ‘libbers’ were in attendance. ‘How is Sylvia Plath?’ one woman asked. ‘She’s dead,’ he replied. He read fifteen poems, including such favourites as ‘The Thought-Fox’ and ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’ (‘This is just a description of a little girl – a two-year-old girl – looking at a full moon. And “moon” being one of her first words – so she being very excited to use these words’).7 He then elaborated at his customary length on the meaning of the Crow narrative.
At the festival he was taken up by a group of young Australian poets. One in particular seemed to him a genuine talent. A. E. Housman once said that the mark of a true poem was that it would raise the bristles on a man’s face, and Ted thought something similar about this young woman’s work: it made his hair stand up. But the electricity also came from her beauty. She had an unusual face and the most haunting eyes he had ever seen.8 In a letter to Richard Murphy, he remarked that she lived on a farm with a man who was quite a good poet – actually they lived in a suburb of Melbourne but had a retreat with a bush hut on it at Yerrinbool near Mittagong in the Southern Highlands. And though the husband was indeed a poet, he was, more significantly, one of Australia’s finest painters, David Rankin.9 Jennifer, the poet, was a free spirit, already on her second marriage and with a volume of verse called Ritual Shift about to be published. The Rankins were planning to travel to England. When they discovered that Ted lived in Devon, where David had been born, they asked him to arrange accommodation for them. He offered them his cottage near the sea at Moortown. The rumour around the festival was that the offer was made because an affair with Jennifer had already begun.
Bill Hughes did stay on with Gerald for a few weeks. Ted flew back via Perth, where he called Jill Barber from an airport payphone and said that he had fallen in love with her. Jack Orchard’s death had released him from the self-imposed role of loyal son-in-law, faithful husband and toiling farmer. His psychological state, ‘a close mesh of uncontrollable peculiarities and psychosomatic upsets’, was in transition.10 As the discovery of the poetic genre of vacana opened the way for the Gaudete epilogue poems, so the trip to Australia helped to unlock not only a new directness in his poetry but also a new freedom in his personal life.
Jill Barber flew to London. She stayed with friends in Putney. Timothy Dalton, a future James Bond, was also staying; Jill recalled that he liked her to see him wearing nothing but a towel. She moved on when renovations were complete in the flat that she had bought on the Fulham Road. As soon as he could escape from the country, Ted came to see her. He bundled her into his battered old Volvo and drove to Olwyn’s house in Tufnell Park. There was some pretext about Jill having a contact with a potential Japanese purchaser for some of his manuscripts. But Olwyn immediately realised that she was meeting a new girlfriend. The awkward fact of Ted’s marriage, which he had not previously mentioned, made itself apparent during this visit. Jill liked Olwyn and saw that she was Ted’s London protector, as Carol was his protector in Devon: ‘As for me, I was his ray of sunshine. He would carve up his life, half for me, maybe more than half in the beginning.’ By Jill’s account, Ted’s excuse for falling in love with her was that his existence in Devon filled him with ‘black electricity’ and that his farm life was at odds with his literary and his ‘inner’ life.
Their love affair lasted for four years, intense in the first two, cooler thereafter. Jill was mesmerised by ‘his feline eyes, deft hands and fabulous laugh’, by the way that he listened intently to everything and ‘could make people feel as if they had never lived before they met him’. He listened and heard everything. But she insists that she eventually broke off the relationship because she wanted a child before it was too late, and realised that Ted would never give her one. He had not been happy on the one occasion when she had a pregnancy scare.
In London, he did not keep the affair secret; to many of his friends, Jill’s positive Antipodean energy was contagious. Like any other couple, they went to parties and literary events together. He helped her with contacts for the little magazine called Mars on which she was working as assistant editor. She was smart, sassy and quick-witted, but did not pretend to be an intellectual. She was very good at taking Ted out of his black moods and gently teasing his pretensions (though she shared his belief in a spirit world). They loved cooking and wine and laughter. Photographs taken in her flat show an exceptionally relaxed and happy Ted. He also became very close to her flatmate, a beautiful blonde American model and actress called Barbara Trentham, who later married John Cleese. Long evenings with two young women in a London flat inevitably reminded him of those few heady long-lost weeks with Sue Alliston and Tasha Hollis, both now so tragically dead.
Ted wrote some touching, if brief, love letters to Jill, but there are no references to her in the unrestricted pages of his journals, so we have only her account of what she meant to him. She loved to go barefoot and he called her his ‘Gypsy Girl’, giving her
symbolic presents such as Egyptian beads. He liked making love to her out of doors, once on Dartmoor uncomfortably on a rock where, according to legend, consummation led to eternal union, another time under a hedgerow while they were on a northern motoring tour in Northumberland. He was serious enough about her to take her to Sylvia’s grave at Heptonstall and to invite her to accompany him on fishing trips in Ireland.
The purpose of one of the Irish trips was for her to get to know the teenage Nick, who was uncomfortable around the woman who was obviously his father’s girlfriend, though there was a glorious moment on 27 October 1977 when he caught a 24½-pound pike in Castle Lake, near Sixmilebridge, County Clare. Ted noted in his journal that this was a special day because it was Nick’s mother’s birthday. Sylvia would have been forty-five.
There was laughter on the holiday. Ted wrote in his journal about a redoubtable woman who would not let them fish in her lake. ‘A fish can’t piss in her lake but she knows about it,’ said Jill.11 She always saw the best in Ted, but did not approve when he left Nick alone in their tent while he came inside to make love to her in the bed-and-breakfast where she was staying. She was always conscious of the extreme vigour of his lovemaking (‘He would walk through my front door after four-and-a-half hours in the car and want to have me on the floor of the hallway there and then’). For a time, she liked it when they fought. ‘I was thrilled when he told me after one argument: “You’re a bigger bitch than Sylvia.”’12
When they first met, he complained to her, showing farm-calloused hands branded as if with stigmata, that he was suffering from writer’s block and had written little of value since Assia’s death. He sometimes called her his Muse and at a party he introduced her thus to no less a figure than Robert Graves, author of The White Goddess. He gave her each new book as it appeared. In her copy of Season Songs, he stuck an adhesive address label over the printed dedication ‘FOR CAROL’, inscribed it by hand to her instead, describing her as his birthday beauty and calling her by the nickname ‘Jillipops’. One or two London friends reckoned that Jill had Ted under her thumb. She did not seem to be in awe of him in the manner of a groupie. His letters to her are a mix of affection and playfulness. In one of them, he told her that he felt as if she had woken him up from a seven-year sleep. He then narrated two of his dreams. In one of them, he cast for a salmon and King Edward I (King Salmon as King Ted?) rose up from the riverbed and took him into his library. In the second dream, Jill made him laugh so much that she became angry and tried to drown herself in a bath of white wine, then emerged drunk to show him an Australian stone covered with hieroglyphics, which he sensed held the secret of his life, and she gave him the stone on condition that he treated her respectfully. He signed off the letter by saying how much he was missing kissing her ears.
Her part in his increased productivity in the late Seventies was perhaps less to do with her being an authentic Gravesian White Goddess than with her ability to relax him, to remove his inhibitions about revealing himself and having fun. Ted fell in love with places as much as women – Sylvia as embodiment of America, Brenda and Carol of Devon – and in this respect Jill the free spirit was the incarnation of the light and warmth, the youthful ‘laid-back’ atmosphere, of Australia.
Was Jill Barber a Muse in any profound sense? A lyric called ‘Sunstruck Foxglove’ begins with the speaker bending to touch a ‘gypsy girl’ who is waiting for him in a hedge. ‘Her loose dress falls open’, revealing ‘the reptile under-speckle / Of her sunburned breasts’. She is ‘Flushed, freckled with earth-fever, / Swollen lips parted, her eyes closing’. His head swims and they come together in the heat.13 Allusions to origin, maternity and fecundity mark this as a White Goddess poem, but in the light of the nickname Gypsy Girl and the fact that Jill was notable for her freckles, there must also be a conscious or unconscious memory here of that afternoon of summer loving beneath a Northumberland hedge. This one poem at least belongs to her, and she was rather pleased when, many years after the end of the affair, the cover design for New Selected Poems 1957–1994 was based upon a voluptuous image of a foxglove.
As agreed during the Adelaide Festival, Jennifer and David Rankin came to Devon. They spent their first night at Court Green. Ted told their young son that there was a ghost in the room where he was going to sleep. As always, he was wonderful with the children. Jennifer especially remembered a stormy winter’s evening when they were all sitting around eating fish and chips out of newspaper. There was a lull in the conversation. Ted then turned to her daughter. ‘Jessica, you are 5?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Tell me something,’ continued Ted. ‘Can you remember when you were 3?’ ‘Of course,’ said Jessica, disdainfully. ‘Well!’ said Ted, feverishly, almost on his hands and knees beside her. ‘Then tell me! What was it like?!’14
The Rankins stayed all winter in Ted’s stone cottage near the sea. Jill joined them there for Christmas. Jennifer and David remained in Devon, with time out for several trips to Europe, until the following autumn. David used a shed for a studio and took charge of the childcare, leaving Jennifer free to concentrate on her poetry. She also did a little tuition for Arvon on poetry weekends at Totleigh Barton. Their time in Devon was all about her – and Ted. Crucially, he helped her to find an English publisher. Her collection Earth Hold was placed towards the end of their stay. It was initially accepted by Chatto and Windus, but then the established poet D. J. Enright came along with a new manuscript and Jennifer’s book, the newest on the list, was bumped off it. ‘Great calamity-scenes’, remembered a friend who was visiting them at the time. Then, on Ted’s recommendation, Secker and Warburg took the poems. It was also his idea to pull off a Hughes–Baskin-type trick: admired Australian painter John Olsen was persuaded to provide illustrations, creating a large-format book that could make a splash. It duly appeared in 1978, with a puff from Ted praising it for introducing ‘a new note’ into English poetry, ‘the note that tunes us in, somehow, to the bedrock of the ancient Australian landmass – that eerie, powerful presence which silences both aboriginal and white man’.15
He frequently visited the cottage and his relationship with Jennifer blossomed over poetry, laughter and clifftop walks around the Hartland peninsula. In her ‘North Devon poem’, unpublished in her lifetime, a charismatic, earth-holding Ted-like man kneels at the open door of the stove in the cottage and teaches her about coal-fires, ‘His eyes / sudden pieces of sky in this winter kitchen’.16
In the year that Earth Hold was published in London, Jennifer, now back in Australia, was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was ravaged by intensive chemotherapy and died in early December 1979, a few days after her thirty-eighth birthday. During her illness, Ted wrote her many tender, moving letters.17 After her death, he remembered her in a series of elegies in scattered publications, uncollected in his lifetime. In one she is a waif standing on the shore against the Pacific surf. In another she is lovesick: ‘You barely touched the earth. You lived for love. / How many loves did you have?’ And in the third, she is a lover of the desert, taken all too soon by ‘boundless Tao’.18 But his finest poem for her never appeared in print. It exists in ten manuscript drafts under the title ‘For Jennifer, nothing has changed’. Here he remembers her on the Hartland cliffs by the ‘insatiable Atlantic’, then reflects on the utter loneliness of terminal illness, where even her poems seem to have deserted her, to have become survivors who are oddly reticent about the creator from whom they have turned away. For Jennifer herself, nothing has changed, but for Ted, and the others who have loved her, ‘only one thing’ had changed: the ‘space’ that she ‘electrified’ inside their heads. It had become ‘a dark theatre’, where her eyes, ‘no longer interested in an audience’, ‘Brilliant, grave, silent heroines, alone’, kept on ‘rehearsing’ everything that she was going through in her ‘final days’.19
In September 1982, when Ted spent a week at the Hilton Hotel in Toronto, during the city’s Harbourfront literary festival, the Australian poet and critic Judith Rodriguez met him on his way t
o an elevator after a session. ‘I believe you knew Jennifer Rankin,’ she found herself saying. ‘What sort of person was she?’ He looked at her balefully, said that ‘She was the most nervous woman I have ever known,’ and stepped into the lift.
Journalist and novelist the Honourable Emma Tennant, daughter of the second Baron Glenconner, was educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School, with childhood memories of the family’s Gothic pile in the Scottish countryside. She had two marriages, both to writers, behind her. She had worked as a travel writer, been an assistant editor at Vogue and established herself as a novelist. In 1975, she launched a magazine called Bananas, attracting both new talent and established writers such as the great dystopian chronicler of modern times J. G. Ballard. At exactly the time Ted began his affair with Jill Barber, she called on Olwyn in the hope of getting some Hughes or even Plath material for the magazine. Her memoir Burnt Diaries offers a vivid picture of Olwyn and her terraced house in Chetwynd Road: the tall woman, once strikingly handsome, ‘with her long, Spanish-looking face and quick flashes of charm under a harassed exterior’; the cluttered ‘office’ at the back of the house with ‘raw materials of the Private Edition business’, ‘volumes of Plath and Hughes poems in slender tomes with names like Rainbow’, ‘sheaths [sheafs?] of thin paper looking desperately in need of salvaging’, ‘bills, some months old, for electricity and gas’.20 Olwyn gave her an unpublished Plath short story called ‘Day of Success’.
Some months later, there was a ring on the doorbell of Emma’s house in Elgin Crescent, Notting Hill, in the small hours of the morning. It was her friend, the poet, biographer and translator Elaine Feinstein. ‘Yevtushenko and Ted Hughes are here, can we come in for a drink?’ They all sat on the floor while Yevgeny Yevtushenko beat out the rhythms of the poetry of the legendary Marina Tsvetaeva (which Feinstein had been translating). Ted was subdued, happy to prowl on the margin of the conversation. Soon afterwards, he and Emma met for a second time, at a party. As if in imitation of Sylvia at Falcon Yard, she forced a reluctant Ted to gyrate, despite his gruff claim ‘I can’t dance.’ ‘You’re a fantastic woman,’ he shouted over the music, before he was whisked away by his female entourage. Tennant clocked the presence of Jill Barber and sensed the younger woman’s proprietorial aura.
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