Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  She is her father’s ‘comet made of priceless, blazing jewels’, her eyes having blazed from the moment she was born. His ‘windfall from heaven’, now she must be given to her new husband. He closes by addressing László. The best part of his own life has been ‘hidden’ in Frieda. Ted trusts that because László is an artist he knows about precious things, about jewels, ‘even those that fall out of the blue Australian sky’. So he will know ‘how to value / A meteorite of diamonds / Fallen out of heaven’. Frieda will amaze her new husband every bit as much as she has amazed her Daddy. The most important thing for László to know will be ‘how to look after Frieda’.17

  Ted always granted respect to strangers. He patiently responded to questions about his poems. A French graduate student at Oxford asked some good ones and he rewarded her with a letter of more than 5,000 words that amounts to a miniature literary autobiography.18 Here he acknowledged that his animal poems were the ‘dramatisation’ of his ‘internal psychodrama’, while telling of his literary and psychological influences (Jung especially). He granted his interrogator’s assumption that he found his own voice through the adoption of ‘another persona’ (Crow most obviously), that he was not a poet of ego, not interested in ‘Wordsworthian rumination over my own autobiography’. But he attributed this distancing from the self to the literary-critical climate of his youth, in which ‘the secrets of the private life needed total protection’. Later in the letter, he admitted that an autobiographical voice was trying to get out: the farming-diary poems were simply about his own life, ‘yes Wordsworthian style’. For all his experiments with mythic systems, this was perhaps his true voice of feeling, his most fertile vein. At the end of the letter, he suggested, to his own surprise, that his work was coming full circle to where he had begun in the little love poem ‘Song’: to the naked voice, the ‘living nerve’, of his inner being.

  There were bizarreries of the kind that beset him throughout his life: a girl in her thirties who lived in Oxford, called herself Kayak, was obsessed with Lapland and wrote poems in the style of Crow, began pushing letters through the door of Court Green, claiming that she was Hughes’s daughter. A cease-and-desist letter was dispatched from the lawyers.19 In another development, his New York lawyer Victor Kovner was put on alert because rumours were emerging of a possible biographical film about the Plath–Hughes marriage – first Madonna was said to be interested and then the actress Molly Ringwald was signed up to play Plath.20 With the urge to suppress for fear of distortion and vilification came an urge to reveal. Writing to Stephen Spender, who had been wounded by an unauthorised biography, he suggested that the best solution would be to write a detailed autobiography, to tell everything so that interest in the life would be absolutely sated and the past life would no longer belong to the person who had lived it, meaning that they need no longer worry about it. The one thing one should never do, he added, was go to law.21

  He belatedly surrendered to Wagner, under the influence of the maverick systematiser Dr Iris Gillespie, whose Wagnerian essays with such titles as ‘Death-Devoted Heart’ he vainly sent to Faber.22 He praised his friend Josephine Hart for the poetic passion of Damage, her novel of obsessive erotic desire.23 He read as voraciously and eclectically as ever. And over the dinner-table, his appetite still gargantuan despite the vicissitudes of his health, or over bottle upon bottle of good wine, he would talk and talk. Horatio, one of the Morpurgos’ children, had vivid memories of Ted’s ‘table talk’. One evening the Laureate would sound off about abstract art’s detachment from real life, another he would turn up with ‘a video of two ganglions in a rat’s brain actually forming a new connection – the birth of a thought captured on film’.24 His restless conversation was symptomatic of his deeper restlessness: his desire to live in Ireland rather than England, Devon as ‘the graveyard of ambition’ – ‘drab compared to Alaska, boring compared to London’. ‘Are we living in a museum?’ he asked one evening, after someone had described the ‘picturesque’ life of a local smallholder, soon to retire. Perhaps he should have been Jewish instead of ‘question-mark Anglican’. In some ways, he would rather have been a doctor than a poet. If only he hadn’t wasted so much time running around with women when he was young he ‘might have really achieved something’.

  By this time, his politics were of the right: ‘Mrs Thatcher was a big enthusiasm. Michael Heseltine became a friend. Kenneth Baker – Thatcher’s ideologue-in-chief – was also a buddy. He liked Mrs T’s belligerent business sense, her militarism, patriotism and all-round impatience with slackers. These were traits he shared and was proud of.’ Politically, he was never exactly consistent: ‘He spoke of how much he owed to the fairness of Butler’s 1944 educational reforms – then suddenly Kenneth Baker was coming to dinner and 50% of school-teachers were homosexual. Fact.’

  He was at his best with his passions: fishing stories, folklore, the ancient history of his Devon home. Young Morpurgo remembered how Ted loved talking about the Iron Age associations of the area, how the whole locality was a sort of sacred forest – the regional ‘Nymet’ place-name came from the Celtic word for a ‘sacred grove’. The names of fields and rivers were vestiges of ‘un-Romanised Celtic populations and culture’. ‘Devon rounds’ were late Iron Age fortifications. A nearby farmer had turned up ‘strange white stones in one of his fields’ and Ted was convinced that they were fragments of a pre-Roman temple-floor. As for the Romans’ brief occupation of the area, Vespasian set up camp in North Tawton and the garden of Court Green contained the rampart of his military camp, on which fox cubs now played. Morpurgo noted, shrewdly, that Ted had, ‘literally on his door-step, and all around him, traces of this tension between a native culture more or less stamped out elsewhere, and an “acquired”, wider European one’. He saw rural England as his ‘sub-culture’ – the place he knew best, the source of his literary voice – but it could ‘never be the whole picture’: a wider culture had to be integrated, a balance struck. So it was that one moment Ted would insult the French in the tone of a Little England Spectator columnist and the next he would translate Racine’s Phèdre. He would introduce a whole generation to the wonders of Yoruba poetry, then say that Third World aid was a waste of money. There is an odd mix of admiration and scorn in Morpurgo’s piece: an earnest young man, he did not fully appreciate Ted’s taste for mischief, for the wind-up and the tall story, for deliberate provocation and the opinion that went against the grain of liberal consensus.

  That said, there is no doubting the seriousness with which Hughes threw himself into the world of the West Country gentry, which provided him with fishing rights to die for and many a meal at the very upmarket Gidleigh Park Hotel. And the Laureateship had opened the highest doors in the land. A weekend at Windsor with Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother included a private recital by Sir John Gielgud. Fishing with the Queen Mother in Scotland became a high point of the year. He relished the way that she was interested in everything and everybody, always positive in her outlook on the world.25 Other well-to-do connections took him beyond the Highlands to the Islands. In August 1991 he stayed at Amhuinnsuidhe Castle on the Isle of Harris in the Hebrides, from where he went deep-sea fishing. The exclusive Grimersta River on the island of Lewis became a Mecca for the Fisher King.

  Trips away were a welcome escape from troubles at home – there was a particularly difficult time when Carol’s elder sister, whose vitality he loved, died of cancer. Bereavement sent Ted and Carol’s shared life into a tunnel from which it was difficult to emerge.26

  In 1994, he helped Nick get American citizenship, which necessitated a trip to New York and the calling in of some favours. That May he had another week fishing with the Queen Mother on the Dee (this time he caught nothing). Another summer, his thank-you letter for a visit to Birkhall, her Scottish home in Royal Deeside, waxed lyrical about the northern light. The year after that he was at Birkhall again, deerstalking in the company of Prince Charles.27 The heir to the throne in place of brother Gerald: Ted had come a l
ong way from his childhood hunting ground in the woods and moors above the Calder Valley.

  Meanwhile, there was the usual legion of literary projects, though none so all-consuming or important to him as Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. Ever since the publication of The Rattle Bag, that highly personal anthology of Hughes and Heaney favourites, Seamus had wanted to produce a ‘more decidedly literary-historical’ sequel.28 In January 1990 Ted sent Seamus a list of the greatest English poets from the Middle Ages to the mid-twentieth century, suggesting that there should be no more than two or three works per poet. The focus, he said, should be on those who were ‘spiritually great – voices of the whole tribe at a moment of crisis’.29 Perhaps it should be called ‘The Kit Bag’: ‘a book for the lonely soldier surviving on essentials’.30 Heaney told him, more than half in earnest, that he couldn’t ‘go with the imperial associations of the kit bag’, its summoning of ‘Brits in cork helmets and shorts, wielding their swagger sticks’.31

  Other priorities intervened, but the anthology was eventually published in 1997 as The School Bag, with a brief preface explaining that it was intended to be ‘a kind of listening post, a book where the reader can tune in to the various notes and strains that have gone into the making of the whole score of poetry in English’.32 Nearly 600 pages long, it is a superb selection from the canon of English and American poetry, inclusive of translations from Irish, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic. The arrangement seems haphazard – neither chronological nor thematic – but nearly all the essential poets from the anthologists’ two islands are sampled. An afterword by Ted outlined his method of memorising poems, an art that in his later years he was forever urging upon educators and correspondents. He told Prince Charles that his son Nick had used the memory method for everything from history to science, so perhaps it would be of use to the Princes William and Harry in their studies.33 In the early Nineties he often visited Highgrove, Prince Charles’s country residence in Gloucestershire, and read his stories aloud to the boys. They especially liked extracts from The Iron Man.34

  To mark a visit, Ted would often inscribe a book for his host. There is a noteworthy body of unknown ‘occasional verse’ of this kind. On the spectrum of his writing, these short pieces lie between the expensive limited editions of fewer than a hundred copies and the unpublished drafts filed away among the writer’s own papers. Perhaps such works should never be published: a poem for an individual is a very private thing. But then again, Hughes knew that every scrap of his writing was of potential value and that all his manuscripts had the potential to end up in archive or auction room. Every now and then, one of these little poems-of-the-moment pops up in a sale or is stumbled upon in a library. On other occasions, they become treasured heirlooms. In her apartment in New York City, Jill Barber has what she calls a ‘Ted Memorabilia Room’, in which she keeps the books that he inscribed for her. At Highgrove, there is a cherished collection of personally inscribed copies of many of his books in the Prince of Wales’s private ‘sanctuary’, where there are also two stained-glass windows dedicated to Ted, who thus lives on as the household shaman. One particular treasure is the copy of New Selected Poems that Hughes inscribed for the Prince’s grandmother the Queen Mother in 1996, on the occasion of one of his visits to Birkhall. It is a celebration of the hard work undertaken by the royals, but also of their leisure time on Scottish river and moor. To work uncomplainingly is, the poem suggests, a good animal instinct, while the place for rest and recreation is among ‘rocks and stones and trees’. The latter phrase is an embedded quotation from Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’ poem that so haunted Hughes. The poem for the Queen Mother ends with an image of her as an exemplary respondent to the demands of Mother Earth.35

  Another project, inspired by a brainstorming dinner at Buckingham Palace in which the Duke of Edinburgh tried to elicit ideas for raising public awareness of environmental issues, was for a competition in which schoolchildren would rework material out of myth, religion and folktale into plays that illuminated aspects of our modern ecological crisis. From this emerged the Sacred Earth Drama Trust and the publication by Faber of the competition-winning plays under the title Sacred Earth Dramas. When the Sacred Earth Drama Group met in London in 1994, Valerie Eliot donated £10,000 of her earnings from her husband’s work.

  Early in the decade Ted wrote to the blonde and glamorous Joanna Mackle, a senior figure at Faber and Faber to whom he became very close, requesting a reissue of his choice of Shakespeare’s verse. No one but specialists would read The Goddess of Complete Being, he said, and nobody read Shakespeare’s complete works for pleasure any more, but the anthology would give them the essentials. Why not include it in the ticket price for productions at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, sell it at hotels to sit alongside the Gideon Bible or drop it in among the fancy soaps and shampoos in upmarket establishments, give free copies to first-class and Concorde passengers on British Airways and Virgin, offer it to tour groups, negotiate with the Ministry to provide copies for every fifteen-year-old in the land? The reissue duly appeared – with revised introduction and afterword – but nothing came of the grand schemes for distribution.36

  Ted was not deterred. If they couldn’t do it with Shakespeare, then they could try with The Rattle Bag – he would write to Lord King at British Airways and Richard Branson at Virgin. Like many of Ted’s other bright ideas to promote either his own work or the art of poetry in general, this one blazed for a moment and then fizzled out.

  In the summer of 1992, Faber and Faber published his Laureate poems under the title Rain-Charm for the Duchy. This consisted of nine poems, eight of which, including two very long ones, had been published in national newspapers to mark various royal occasions.37 Like the most famous of Faber poetry publications, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the book was fleshed out to marketable length by means of prose notes at the back. These are in some ways more readable than the poems themselves. The commentary on ‘Rain-Charm for the Duchy’ is one of Hughes’s most lyrical river essays, telling of how the poem maps the territory that had become his own spiritual home, the ‘roughly square “island”’ bounded by the Tamar, the Exe, the Torridge and the Taw. Strictly speaking, he explains, this means that he trespasses beyond the bounds of the Duchy itself, the royal lands of the Duke of Cornwall, His Royal Highness Prince Charles. He also explains, with a hint of regret, that since he excluded that part of Devon which lay to the east of the Exe there was no room for Coleridge’s ‘sweet birthplace’, the river Otter. Then he soars into an account of the wonders of the river Mole bringing in the best sea-trout, and of an eighteenth-century diarist attempting to ford the Tamar at a moment when the assembled salmon, coming upstream to spawn, ‘had decided to rush the shrunken river’: ‘His horse refused to approach the water, terrified by the massed fish going up over the gravel, through the ford, backs out, tails churning like propellors [sic], moving at their top speed.’38 At the climax of the note, he evokes the river Torridge ‘going over its last weir above the tide – Tarka the Otter’s famous Beam Weir’, looking like water ‘being spilled slowly from a tin bath’. Propeller (wartime bombers and aviator Gerald), Tarka (favourite book) and tin bath (Aspinall Street) are images – homecomings – from his own childhood.

  In the note on ‘The Dream of the Lion’, the first of his poems for his beloved Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, he explains further that he had mentally associated her maiden name (Bowes-Lyon) with the ‘totem animal of Great Britain’ as long ago as his ‘boyhood fanatic patriotism’.39 As for the third lion on the crest, it is Leo, her star sign and his.

  The note on ‘A Birthday Masque’, written for the Queen’s sixtieth birthday, veers into the territory of Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. Hughes explains that the poem’s three angels, of Water, Earth and Blood, bring, respectively, purity to the polluted waters of modernity, the Taoist Way ‘to the world of external bewilderment and empty distraction’, and ‘Blood’s true nature’ to ‘the li
neal unity of mankind, not as an agglomeration of sub-species but as a true family, an orphaned and bereft family, scattered, like the family in Shakespeare’s play The Comedy of Errors’.40 Alert to the potentially dark politics of Blood and Soil, here Hughes evokes by contrast the idea of the Queen’s Commonwealth as a family. Perhaps, too, he is recalling the scattering of his own family across the globe: Gerald in Australia, Nick in Alaska, Frieda on her travels. The note continues with a brisk tour through the Goddess territory of Shakespeare’s Lear, ‘the Welsh sea-god Llyr, formerly the Irish god Lir, direct heir of an ancient lineage that goes back through Apollo to Ra, the high god of Ancient Egypt, the sun in geological time (flower-time) not that long ago’. And thence to the Sioux shaman Black Elk, the blade of a samurai sword, and ‘the Islamic Sufi masterwork, Attar’s Conference of the Birds’.41 The note to the most recent of his Laureate poems, ‘The Unicorn’, first published in the Daily Telegraph in February 1992, also becomes a miniature rewrite of the Shakespeare book, replete with references to Prospero, Ariel, Queen Mab, Brutus and Hamlet.

  The calmest and most personal note is that to ‘A Masque for Three Voices’, written for the Queen Mother’s ninetieth birthday in August 1990. Ted describes his poem as a miniaturised version of an epic of the twentieth century, coinciding with the Queen Mother’s life. She was born in 1900 as the Boer War came to an end, Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams and Max Planck began elaborating quantum theory. The main drama of the century was the two world wars, its culmination the collapse of the Soviet system. The Queen Mother lost her beloved brother Fergus in 1915, as Ted’s home town lost so many of its sons. He writes, he says, ‘from the point of view of the son of an infantryman of the First World War’ and explains that one of his earliest recurrent dreams, ‘long before 1939, was clouds of German parachutists descending on the Calder Valley’ – he fantasised about ‘how this or that part of the valley could be defended, where a sniper might best lie, and who would be traitors’.42 In the age of anxiety leading up to the Second War, he felt that he would have to become a marksman himself. When the war came, the royal family, with the Queen Mother, then Queen, as its public face – encouraging her shy and stuttering husband, staying in London, living through the Blitz with her people – proved itself as a national resource. Now, towards the end of the century, Hughes implies, his role is to be the defensive marksman taking aim at the ‘politically correct’ who snipe against monarchy and nation. For the Poet Laureate, the nation was like a human soul, which was like a wheel, ‘With a Crown at the hub / To keep it whole’.43 Such imagery of national unity was replicated in his last, and, alas, flattest, Laureate poem, some brief verses for Diana’s funeral on 6 September 1997.