Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  Secondly, the proscription against biographical reading of the plays – shaped by Cambridge-style ‘new criticism’ – began to break down in the early twenty-first century. Hughes’s hunches about the possible autobiographical element in such plays as All’s Well and Troilus anticipate a string of subsequent speculations in which critics and biographers have linked details in the plays to everything from Shakespeare’s sex life to the social climbing suggested by his pursuit of a coat of arms to his political associations with the circle around the Earl of Essex.

  Thirdly, in a remarkable excursion linking the Tragic Equation to the differing impulses of left and right brain,42 Hughes proves himself to be a John the Baptist heralding the advent of a new and very twenty-first-century genre: neurological literary criticism that benefits from developments in scanning technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging in order to ask questions about what exactly might have gone on in Shakespeare’s brain as he wrote, and what really happens in our brains as we read or listen to his extraordinary language.

  Ultimately, though, on Wildean and Woolfian principles, the spectacle of Hughes reading Shakespeare is less interesting than that of Shakespeare reading Hughes. The ‘Tragic Equation’ involves AC (‘Total Goddess’), ‘A(c)’ (‘The Woman with virtuous, loving aspect dominant’), ‘B(d)’ (‘Tragic Hero: Adonis phase, with puritan censor dominant’), ‘(a)C’ (‘The Woman with infernal aspect dominant’) and ‘(b)D’ (‘Tragic Hero: with Tarquin phase (Boar Madness) dominant’). The use of astrological terms such as ‘dominant’ and ‘aspect’ is Hughesian, not Shakespearean. It may or may not be the case that in Shakespeare’s narrative poems ‘A(c) loves B(d), but B(d) is distancing himself from A(c), actively rejecting her sexual claim with puritan disapproval,’ at which point ‘Shakespeare intensifies the situation with B(d)’s “double vision” – in which he sees (a)C superimposed on A(c), and rejects both in loathing.’43 But it is certainly the case that the tangle of love and sexual claim, desire and loathing, possession and rejection, overshadowed by familial ‘puritan disapproval’, was Ted’s own story of A (Assia), B (Brenda) and C (Carol) in the late Sixties.

  Shakespeare with his supposed double life, as married country gentleman in the shires but lad about town in London, is Hughes. Shakespeare with his supposed Goddess-worship, and the capacious libido that goes with it, is Hughes. Shakespeare was at once a court poet and a man who knew about ‘dark ladies’ and sweating tubs for the treatment of sexual disease. Hughes dined privately with members of the royal family (the Queen Mother told him that she was especially fond of Lupercal), but he was also intrigued by the London demi-monde (‘That elegant woman you have just been speaking to’, he once said to a friend at a party, ‘is the most expensive prostitute in London’).44

  Above all, Shakespeare with his supposed mythic method of composition is Hughes. Shakespeare did not think about boars in the way that Hughes thought about bulls. He wrote many plays about male rivalry but he never thought in terms of the Theme of the Rival Brothers. Shakespeare made frequent allusions to classical mythology, but always in the poetic or dramatic moment, never in an effort to build a system.45 The systematising belonged to Hughes, under the influence of Graves.

  In trying to make sense of Shakespeare, he was really trying to make sense of his own creative life. And in so doing he heard once more the call of Plath. The Goddess is many; one of the many is Plath. Sometimes, then, the manuscript drafts of the Shakespeare book veer away from the ostensible subject. A fragment headed ‘A Working Definition of Mythic, in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being’ includes a lengthy excursion concerning ‘the role of two obsessive but minatory images (actually two related myths) in Sylvia Plath’s basically mythic oeuvre’:

  She was obsessed by the story of Phaeton (the earthly son of the Sun-God, who takes the realm of his father’s Sun-chariot, loses control and is wrecked) and the story of Icarus (the son of the wizard artificer Daedalus. Escaping from Crete on wings constructed by his father, Icarus flew too near the sun, which melted the fixing wax and plunged him into the sea).46

  Breughel’s painting of the Fall of Icarus, he remembered, was on her wall.

  He went on to point out that the title poem of Ariel was Plath’s version of the Phaeton myth and that ‘Sheep in Fog’, the poem that he analysed in more detail than any other, was its reverse: they were two opposite poems about riding the same horse over the same moor. In Plath’s final corrections of ‘Sheep in Fog’, he explained, ‘the speaker, who in “Ariel” had been a Phaeton urging the flying horse into the sun (triumphant, albeit “suicidal” and doomed to fall), suddenly becomes an Icarus, whose melting world threatens to let her through “into a heaven” not of the sun and freedom, but “starless, fatherless, a dark water”’. The Icarus allusion was no ‘pedagogic ornament’ or ‘dip into the myth-kitty’. The brilliance of Plath was that her finished poems showed no overt signs of the myth: ‘nothing in her simple, final correction of the last three lines of “Sheep in Fog” suggests that she was conscious there of the Icarus myth that supplied both verbs, both nouns, and all three adjectives, as well as the situation’. But the deleted drafts were a giveaway: ‘the scrapped chariot and the dead man lying on the moor’. Hughes concluded that ‘Sheep in Fog’ had a quite extraordinary power to move the reader because it was ‘obviously drawn from that subjective, visionary, mystical experience’, Plath’s mythic personality’s relationship to her father, which was then ‘in crisis’.47

  That ‘obviously’ was obvious only to Hughes, because he was more versed than any other human being in Plath’s work and its relationship to her life. His method of studying Shakespeare – the search for mythic archetypes buried beneath images and movements of thought that do not overtly allude to myth – yielded him rich rewards as a reader of Plath. He argued that her transformation of Phaeton into Icarus was ‘the crucial episode of her soul’s myth – in the most literal sense a life and death emergency trying to communicate itself’. With a great author, whether Shakespeare or Plath, the core myth is ‘worth searching out’ because ‘This blood-jet autobiographical truth is what decides the difference in value between a myth (or any other image) as used by the realist and the mythic image as it appears in a truly mythic work.’48

  In this reading of Plath, as in his reading of Shakespeare, Hughes has found the myth beneath the realism in order to come to the core of the ‘evolving struggle’ in the artist’s ‘own psyche’. But really the struggle and the myth are his own. He is supposed to be writing a book about Shakespeare but he cannot stop writing about Plath. And in writing about the crisis in her relationship with her father, he is writing yet once more about her relationship with her husband. He is edging ever closer to his own ‘blood-jet autobiographical truth’.

  29

  Smiling Public Man

  Hughes pondered deeply over the poem ‘Among School Children’ by his revered W. B. Yeats. It is a meditation on the tension between artists and their work, the dancer and the dance, the exterior life of ‘A sixty-year-old smiling public man’ – by this time Yeats was a senator of the Irish Free State – and the interior life of the poet as he dreams of a beautiful woman and the loss of a time when ‘two natures blent / Into a sphere from youthful sympathy’.1 These thoughts sounded a persistent echo in the mind of Ted Hughes in the Nineties. Public man, Poet Laureate, famous author, he had much to preoccupy him through his sixties, but his deepest self never ceased to be embroiled with the myth of the Goddess and the loss of Sylvia, the poetic other half of his youthful self.

  There were battles to be fought, causes to be taken up, letters to be written to editors and government ministers, lobbying groups to support, whether the campaign to ban the North-East Drift New Salmon Fishery off Northumbria or a local group to prevent the overdevelopment of Devon.2 There were newspaper articles to be written: defending the hunting of stag and fox on Exmoor because it preserved the delicate ecosystem and the mysterious ancient bond betwe
en rural people and indigenous animals or proposing that the interior of the Millennium Dome should be laid out in the shape of a giant human brain.3 Political decisions to be influenced: in thanking the Prime Minister for a ‘Wordsworth evening’ at Number 10, he urged John Major, at a time when the national Environment Agency was being restructured, to ensure that responsibility for dealing with pollution was not separated from the National Rivers Authority.4

  Then there were academic Shakespeareans to be attacked: when a certain Gary Taylor proposed a second-rate little lyric ‘Shall I die? Shall I fly?’ as a new addition to the canon of the Bard, Hughes told the Sunday Times that it was ‘ersatz Taramasalata’ whereas true Shakespeare was always caviar, even if sometimes bad caviar. Taylor might know everything about Shakespeare but he had never truly read him.5 There was the work of Arvon, for which he tried to get support from first Prince Charles and then the billionaire Paul Getty. And decisions that came with the job of Laureate, such as the award of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. He took particular pleasure in proposing the Scottish poet Sorley MacLean, still more delight when the Queen arranged for her personal piper to lead in the victor with traditional Gaelic tunes. Another year, he was deeply disappointed when Thom Gunn turned the medal down.6

  In private, he became a more prolific letter-writer than ever before. Letter-writing sustained his deepest friendships, with men from Cambridge days such as McCaughey and Myers, Huws and Weissbort, and with fellow-writers such as Ben Sonnenberg in New York, Yehuda Amichai in Israel and above all Seamus Heaney in Ireland. Heaney, whose great gift, he wrote, was to ‘make it easier for people to love each other’.7 Heaney, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, eliciting a magnificent letter of congratulation: ‘Well – there it is. And it’s there forever. Like a sea-god on a great wave you emerged and inevitably took it, by sovereignty of nature.’8 Hughes saw that the award was ‘perfectly ripe’ for the historical moment of Northern Ireland’s move towards peace and reconciliation. But there was, Heaney admitted after Hughes’s death, just a hint of envy over ‘the call from Stockholm’.9 No English-born poet has ever won the big one. Ted knew that it was almost inconceivable for the Nobel Committee to choose him as the first (imagine the feminist reaction!), but a small part of him found it difficult to see himself surpassed by Heaney, who acknowledged that it was the ‘almost magic effect’ of Hughes’s writing that had made him into a poet.10 The metaphor of the sea-god emerging on the great wave suggests the death of Hippolytus in a Greek myth to which Hughes kept returning in his later years. Hippolytus is a son-figure and he was famous for his sexual purity. The fertile unconscious of Hughes may be saying something about the metaphoric poetic father being usurped by the son whose hands seem always clean – politically, sexually – even as his work digs in the soil and bogs of rural Ireland.

  The argument of Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being was rehearsed and refined for the benefit of numerous correspondents. Over several years, Ted exchanged views with the Reverend Moelwyn Merchant – Anglican and scholar – regarding not only Shakespeare but also the reconciliation of Christianity and syncretic mythology. He described himself as a ‘radically Pagan soul’ who was also in some sense a natural Christian.11 To the poet Bill Scammell, he wrote at length about the character of Anna Karenina and Tolstoy’s fear of sex. To his devoted explicator Keith Sagar and to the gently probing questioner Nick Gammage he wrote about his own work, again and again. His correspondence with another critic, Terry Gifford, is one part poetry, the other part environmental discussion. To others, he enthusiastically recommended the memory-training techniques of Tony Buzan, describing him as a Mental Martial Arts guru.

  He was bombarded with invitations – to give readings (two or three requests a week to do free readings for charities, he once explained),12 to look at people’s work, to endorse books, to participate in literary projects, to give away rights. His patience was tried but his appetite for new and unusual ideas never failed him. Nor did his sense of humour. In conversation and in his informal letters, he had deadpan wit. When he met the actress Susannah York at a celebration of Wilfred Owen’s poetry in Oswestry, she mentioned that her son was going up to Cambridge to read English. He told her that she should chop off his head to save him from that fate.13 He was also very good at teasing himself, even making a joke of his erotic dream-life: ‘Sophia Loren, teasingly threatening to strip, then, sitting on a steep rock in river, actually being stripped as she slides willy nilly into water. Very vivid comic effects, on her part.’14

  Often he did agree to write on behalf of writers. On a few occasions he succeeded in persuading Faber to take on a new poet; on many, he failed. He perfected the art of writing endorsements. One of the best was sent to his daughter’s American publisher: ‘When I think of Frieda Hughes, who is my daughter,’ he began, disarmingly, ‘I am always reminded of a certain morning, a breakfast of the Devon Beekeepers Association, hearing her talk wildly about various bee-swarms she had extricated from various near-impenetrable fortresses.’ This struck him as ‘very peculiar’, because he knew that ‘she had never so much as touched a bee – and was, in fact, allergic to their stings’. He was at the rear of the hall, close to the exit, but he heard her clearly: ‘She spoke in her familiar way, very fast and vivaciously, exclaiming and interrupting and cackling, until she had cleared herself enough startled attention to begin orating in earnest. Being Frieda, she did not stop at the savage swarm she had subdued. She had plans for a far grander campaign.’15 There is a revealing lapse of memory here. Sylvia’s beehives stood empty for many years in the garden of Court Green, the wood slowly rotting just as her old car rusted outside the house – Ted could not bear to get rid of them. Then, as a teenager, Nick took up beekeeping, partly in order to get in touch with the heritage of his mother and indeed his grandfather Otto, the bee expert. He, not Frieda, was the one who would get into conversations with old men about bees, tell tales of his adventures, and speak at beekeepers’ breakfasts. Ted’s memory lapse was part and parcel of the process whereby he saw Frieda as the reincarnation of Sylvia. She was, he said, more German than her mother but also very American, and entirely stultified by England. He was delighted when she found her inner self, and found happiness, in Australia, though of course he missed her even more than he did Gerald. He sent her long letters, filled with good advice about her poems.

  In 1990, Frieda published a children’s novel called Waldorf and the Sleeping Granny about ‘a good witch, a bad witch and a girl in her teens taking charge and accepting responsibility for herself, thereby gaining confidence and being able to do wonderful things as a result’. Ted loved the book and its message about self-belief. But, as Frieda remembered it, Carol phoned and said, ‘The person you have written about knows what you have done.’ Frieda was puzzled, since – like her father in his mythological and folktale mode – she didn’t think of her characters as being based on real people. She got the impression that Carol had mistakenly taken the wicked witch to be a portrait of her.16 The two women were on opposite sides of the world in more ways than one.

  Frieda struggled with illness during these years, when she lived in a little house, surrounded by gum trees, in a remote settlement called Wooroloo, about an hour’s drive from Perth. Her poetry and her painting pulled her through and in 1996 she married (for the third time). Her union with Hungarian fellow-painter László Lukács, who was also working in Western Australia, inspired one of Ted’s loveliest unpublished poems. Written as a wedding present, it is a capsule biography of his daughter that begins, ‘The day she was conceived Frieda set off to explore America.’

  In the womb she sees the world through her mother’s eyes. The grand tour through mountain, forest and prairie, all the way to the California coast, where they stare out at the Pacific, sea-kelp at the water’s edge looking like the tails of lions, and she kicks and jumps inside Sylvia just at the moment when her father says ‘How far is Australia? O so far, far away!’ As energetic before bi
rth as she would be in life, she is born at sunrise on April Fool’s Day and her first sight is the mother she would never remember,

  Propped up in the bed, weeping with joy in the first light of the April sun

  Yes, weeping with joy as she held the glowing rosy creature

  That was going to be Frieda.

  She then meets her Daddy (she would always call him Daddy), who had stayed awake all night, as giddy as Shakespeare’s Troilus, with the expectation of the gift of life, the newborn thing that would sneeze as he first lifted her up ‘In the room papered with big roses’.

  The poem then gives back to Frieda some of the things she had forgotten: how Sylvia nursed her for more than a year because she wanted to give her everything and more, how she ‘shook her cot to pieces / Gripping the bars and shaking the whole thing to pieces / Because she wanted to be off’. How she kept tearing down the ‘life-size print of the Great Goddess Isis’ that hung over her cot as a talisman. How for hours and hours, by day and night, ‘to and fro’, her Daddy ‘walked with her in his arms’ and sang all the old ballads, again and again (‘Van Diemen’s Land’, ‘Eppie Morrie’, ‘Sir Patrick Spens’, ‘Barnyards of Delgatty’, ‘The Wearing of the Green’, all those songs he had shared with Dan Huws at Cambridge), and little Frieda would suck her thumb but not want to sleep because she did not want to miss ‘one minute of the world’. Remember: the album of snapshots in which Frieda is ‘Centre of the Universe’. Remember: the little girl as dancing ballerina, with tutu and tiara, whirling round to the music of Handel. Then the creaky boat ride to Ireland and the house by the sea in Connemara. Her love for every living thing – guinea pig, hamster, rat and ferret (‘I love them so much they make me shiver, they make me cry!’), even the tick that bit her, because it came from the dog that she loved. And then she is off, impatient with school and teenagerhood. Even the motorbikes are not fast enough for her, so she is off travelling the world, riding, running free, until László catches her in Australia.