The Silvine Notebook begins with a list of twenty-two poems: ‘59th Bear’, ‘Fishing Bridge’, ‘Delivering Frieda’, ‘Your fingers’, ‘I brought you to Devon’, ‘Red’, ‘Remember the daffodils’, ‘The morning we set out to drive around America’, ‘Our happiness’, ‘Under the laburnums’, ‘Which part of you liked me rough?’, ‘What was poured in your ears?’, ‘The waters off beautiful Nauset’, ‘Of all that came to drink with you’, ‘A fragile cutting, tamped into earth’, ‘I came over the packed snow’, ‘A film of you skipping’, ‘We didn’t find her – she found us’, ‘What can I tell you that you do not know / Of the life after death’, ‘As if you descended in each night’s sleep’, ‘The first time I bought a bottle of wine’, and finally, scored through, ‘The last I had seen of you was you burning / Your farewell note’. The collection tells, directly and without distraction or attempt at myth-making, the story of his marriage to Sylvia, from Cambridge to America to Devon to parenthood to affair to death to ghostly return. The poems are unified through that vein of natural imagery (daffodils, laburnums, plant-cutting, the green of spring and the white of winter) which for centuries has provided grieving poets with glimmers of comfort as they remember love and loss in the literary genre known as elegy, John Milton’s Lycidas being the classic example. The Silvine Notebook would have made a slim but splendid volume of elegies, perhaps enabling Ted to move on to some other style.
How different his life might have been if he had had the courage to publish ‘The Sorrows of the Deer’ some time in the Seventies. A deleted stanza of ‘Delivering Frieda’ describes his daughter as a ‘somnambulist’ carrying the memory of her mother.20 The image of sleepwalking indicates that this was written before he told Frieda of the suicide. How different it would have been if he had shared that knowledge in his own time and his own way, instead of having his hand forced by other people’s publications about Sylvia’s life and death. Again, he would have been criticised by some for a poem that began by asking Sylvia’s ghost ‘Which part of you liked me rough?’ But if he had got his story out first – told the truth that some part of Sylvia did like it rough and could give it rough (the bite) – then he would not have been caught in defensive mode by Robin Morgan’s allegations of rape and abuse.
Above all, he would have expiated both his grief and his guilt. The Silvine Notebook includes poems of astonishing tenderness and love. Ted and Sylvia’s happiness in finding Court Green, a simple house built in the shape of a loaf. Sylvia stooping in the rain to take an armful of daffodils from tiny Frieda. Sylvia’s fingers flying over the keyboard of piano and typewriter: ‘I remember your fingers. And your daughter’s / Fingers remember your fingers / In everything they do.’21 Late in life, Ted appeared alone on Frieda’s doorstep, not having seen her for a long time. ‘You can ask me anything you like,’ he said to his daughter. The request was so sudden that she did not know where to begin. But she thought of one question: ‘What was my mother like?’ ‘She was just like you,’ her father replied. ‘Even in the way she moved her hands.’22
There is lightness in the Silvine Notebook, but it is also heavy with poems of aching grief. Among them is an early version of what eventually became ‘The Inscription’ in Birthday Letters, the poem about the conversation in Ted’s flat in Cleveland Street:
‘Under the laburnums’ – almost your last
Words to me. But repeated. And again
‘Tell me we will be together under the laburnums’ –
Which meant summer, the lawn, the children playing.23
‘The Inscription’ omits the most intimate elements: the direct speech and the reference to the children. This early version is fresher, somehow truer. Once the reader discovers that ‘under the laburnums’ were indeed among Sylvia’s last words to Ted, the lovely first part of ‘Autumn Nature Notes’ in Season Songs takes on new meaning: ‘The Laburnum top is silent, quite still / In the afternoon yellow September sunlight, / A few leaves yellowing, all its seeds fallen’ becomes an elegy for Sylvia’s passing: ‘She launches away, towards the infinite / And the laburnum subsides to empty.’24
‘Sorrows’ also includes poems of gnawing guilt. The original intention was to end the sequence with ‘The first time’ and ‘The last’: the poem about the bottle of wine and the dumping of Shirley, then the one about Sylvia’s last letter. The sweet beginning with Sylvia was a bitter end with Shirley; the end with Sylvia was too terrible to contemplate. Ted could not bring himself to publish either poem in his lifetime.
In the same notebook there is a fragmentary poem, on a separate sheet, addressed to Richard Sassoon. How did he manage, Ted wonders, to get away from Sylvia ‘without being clobbered / by Ariel’? To escape the ‘crashed Phaeton’ without being cursed, without the baggage of Sylvia’s dark feelings towards her parents. Where did Ted go wrong? ‘Show me my mistake.’ The project that began as ‘The Sorrows of the Deer’ was a seemingly never-ending reckoning of mistakes and memories, of good intentions lost and bad moves made worse by circumstance.
Through all the years of writing and rewriting, Ted kept changing his mind about the amount of explicit autobiographical information he should expose, the balance he should create between plain facts and mythic patterns. To the end, he remained guarded about some of the most heart-wrenching details. The beautiful poem called ‘Delivering Frieda’ in the Silvine Notebook evokes Sylvia’s ‘cheek-scar’ and the ‘O-mouth’ of her newborn daughter. It ends with an allusion to ‘Edge’, the poem that concluded Ariel in 1965:
That last poem you wrote designed, modelling your death,
You planned to take
‘She is taking them with her.’
Poetic justice crossed it out. cancelled: poetic frenzy.
You went on alone. Now erase delete
That line utterly. Reabsorb
Into unbeing every letter of it –
Let your last sea-cold kiss evaporate
From the salt affliction.25
Sylvia’s own deletion from the draft of ‘Edge’ of the line about taking her children with her is replicated in Ted’s erasure of this terrible thought from a later draft of his poem. His writing hand is shadowed by the fact of Assia making the opposite choice and by the knowledge that in her lowest moment in the final burnt journal Sylvia did indeed contemplate the ‘unbeing’ of her and Ted’s line of inheritance. The image of reabsorption into ‘unbeing’ is a powerful variant on that of wading into ‘underbeing’ in that poem of grace, ‘Go Fishing’. The double sense of the word ‘line’, at once genetic and poetic, is one of Hughes’s most painfully brilliant strokes. But he felt compelled to spare his children from these dark thoughts – ‘Delivering Frieda’ was heavily revised before being published in Birthday Letters as ‘Remission’.
He kept changing his mind about how much and how explicitly to publish. The poem about his honeymoon, ‘You Hated Spain’, was first slipped unostentatiously into print in a 1979 anthology edited by fellow-poet Douglas Dunn. It reappeared in Hughes’s 1982 Selected Poems as an addendum to the Crow sequence, with which it had no connection – it was Sylvia, not Crow, who hated Spain! ‘Portraits’ appeared under the title ‘An Icon’ in the magazine Grand Street in autumn 1981. And then there was the trial run of the series of poems in the 1995 New Selected. There were times when Ted thought that he was taking a risk even with these murmurs. Perhaps his silence should have been absolute. But there were other times when he thought that he should let everything go.
Among the British Library manuscripts is a Challenge Triplicate Book in which drafts for what will become Birthday Letters are written at high speed, copied and reworked, run together, in loose, conversational blank verse, as if the whole thing might become a single autobiographical poem stretching over 5,000 lines, Hughes’s equivalent of Wordsworth’s Prelude. Wordsworth’s poem had at its core a meditation on how Nature became his ‘mother’ as a result of the premature death of both his parents: the scene when h
e returns from school to hear the news of his father’s death is among the most intense of all the ‘spots of time’ that shape his inner life. So, too, for Hughes the question of parentage, and the influence of fathers in particular, is the key to this station on his journey to poetic autobiography.
On the first page of the notebook there is a title that reads ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’.26 The Black Coat is an unholy trinity, three in one and one in three: the one worn by Otto Plath in Sylvia Plath’s nightmare of a fascist father, the one habitually worn at Cambridge by Ted Hughes – the man in black to whom Sylvia said ‘I do’ on her wedding day – and the one worn by Sylvia herself as he imagines her on that last freezing night walking down to the telephone box at the bottom of St George’s Terrace on Primrose Hill with her plait curled up at the back of her head.
As for Opus 131, this was the number of the late Beethoven string quartet that in Ted’s mind was the final masterpiece, the breaker of artistic boundaries, the summation of the composer’s genius. It had occupied a place of honour in his personal pantheon ever since his youthful discovery of Beethoven. Fellow-poet Peter Redgrove used to tell of his first meeting with Hughes at Pembroke College, Cambridge. As he went up the steep staircase, Redgrove heard a ‘strange yowling’ coming from Hughes’s room. It was not a fox, or even a thought-fox, but Opus 131, in which, Hughes told him, ‘the whole of the music is crushed into the first few bars, which are then unravelled’.27 Ted then took Beethoven’s death mask28 from the wall of his room, put it against his breast and waddled across the room, explaining that this was Beethoven’s height and gait. Undergraduate flamboyance this may have been, but there is no doubting the sincerity with which Hughes took Beethoven to heart. The musical key of Opus 131 is C sharp minor, often associated with sorrow and the night (it is also the key of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ sonata). The structural key is its unity: forty minutes long, its seven movements, with recurring adagio tempo, are played without a break. This is why Hughes calls ‘Black Coat’ his Opus 131: it would have been Birthday Letters without any breaks.
It begins with death and the difficulty of death when your own family is a shadow play. Ted’s father returns from the Great War, loaded with the memory of the wounded who had died. Day after day and decade after decade he was ‘undemobbed’, sent back to the Front to search for the place where he could lay down his burden of memory. Death comes to every generation, but you never step into the same river twice. Hughes is schooled by survivors of the Great War but his own growth was shaped by the Second, to which the poem then turns, before reverting to an image of an old soldier, confused on a railway platform, reading a book, not knowing whether he is returning to Flanders or heading for a family holiday on the Cornish Riviera. The train of association clearly links the soldier to his father.
But then there is a Wordsworthian jump-cut from past to present. We are heading for a picnic on the side of Lochnagar in Scotland, in the time when Ted is staying on Deeside in the Queen Mother’s beloved home at Birkhall. The air is fresh, the scene is dramatic: a roebuck bounds across the stage (a reminder to the writing hand that ‘Black Coat’ is a new version of ‘The Sorrows of the Deer’). Hughes and his party, in royal company (out of discretion, only the corgis are identified), are both stars and starry-eyed. To the cry of a capercaillie, they sip tea in a log lodge.29 It is a scene of benediction.
Like Wordsworth in The Prelude, the Hughes of ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’ moves seamlessly from the memory of those ‘spots of time’ that have shaped his poetic being to reflection on how poetry itself can heal. He describes reading and writing as weight-training for the mind. When he retreated to his writing hut in the garden of Court Green, Hughes undertook a daily mental workout. He went there to tell the tale of Sylvia’s tragedy. That was his practice, his toy. Like Beethoven at his keyboard, he played through variation after variation. Practice was the only way ‘To wring from life’s error / The strange tears of joy’. Poetry, he argued to himself, would eventually enable him to go beyond grief to what Wordsworth called ‘Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears’. But the nagging anxiety for Hughes was that there might be a kind of lie, or at best an evasion, within the truth-telling. Could it ever be right, he asked himself, to make his own ‘toy’ of Sylvia’s tragedy?
This is the point at which Sylvia enters ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’. The next variation is a redraft of the soldier on the platform. ‘You came to think of him as a sentry cast / In blackening old bronze – probably / Meant to represent forgetfulness.’ We are looking not at a real passenger but at the Great Western Railway War Memorial on Platform One of Paddington station. The Tommy is in fact reading a letter from home, not a book. There is then a startling jolt of memory and outside the lost property office Hughes notices banks of snow in the street. Hard cold. Bright, empty light. In the drafting, Hughes becomes the soldier, watched by Plath: ‘So you needed me finally … I had promised you everything you asked for.’ But Hughes then goes back over the page and turns every ‘I’ to a ‘he’, every ‘you’ to a ‘she’. As so often, he is torn between confessional autobiography and the creation of symbolic characters of mythic force. He wants to write about redemptive memory and the resurrection of the dead, but he cannot resolve the question of how much or how little to say about the last week of Sylvia’s life. ‘What do you want?’ he asks the ghost of Sylvia. ‘For us to go north together next week, / Yes next week, or for me to vanish off the earth’. That was exactly how he remembered it in his journal record of their final meetings, how one day she would want them to try again and the next never to see him again.
Then the figure of Sylvia sees the book that the bronze soldier is reading on the platform at Paddington. It is Ted’s red Oxford Shakespeare that she had ripped to rags in a furious row. She opens it, reads the inscription and closes it again. She begs for reassurance that he will be faithful to her. He gives it to her over and over and over again. The poetry is compacted in such a way that he is giving both the reassurance and the Shakespeare, the token of their shared art. Sylvia’s reading of the inscription in the copy of Shakespeare and the words about either going north or vanishing off the earth recur in various guises during the long and complex evolution of Birthday Letters. Until shortly before publication, the intention was for them to appear in ‘Under the Laburnums’, but at the last minute they were moved to ‘The Inscription’.
Hughes was proud of the symbolic figure of the soldier reading by Platform One at Paddington, but he could not quite find a way of using him to secure the links between his father and the First War, Sylvia’s father and the Second, himself, Sylvia and death. Rather as Wordsworth took the crucial passage about the ‘boy of Winander’ who blew ‘mimic hootings to the silent owls’ out of the manuscript of The Prelude, turned it from the first person to the third and published it as a freestanding lyric, Hughes stripped all personal association from ‘Platform One’ and published it in 1995 as his Laureate’s contribution to Freedom: A Commemorative Anthology to Celebrate the 125th Birthday of the British Red Cross.30
The next jump in ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’ is more awkward. Hughes turns directly to Sylvia’s relationship with her parents. First her gratitude to her mother, who ‘glued’ her ‘whole’ after she was found in her ‘Daddy’s tomb in the basement’ (the crawl space of her first suicide attempt). But then the rage at her father’s death is projected on to her mother. A butterfly in a lump of amber, given to her by her mother, comes to represent the huge tear that she exuded all through her life: the permission to hate. The amber is then transformed into the letter in which Aurelia turns against Ted, gives her daughter permission to hate another man in black, suggests that the lovers try a separation.
None of this is sufficiently worked through to be publishable. The next movement of ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’ is more fragmented, and some of the fragments did indeed prove salvageable for publication in Birthday Letters: here we find a version of the fox cub on the hump of Chalk Farm Bridge, of the Shake
spearean fantasia that became ‘Setebos’ (‘Who could play Miranda? / Only you. Ferdinand – Only me’), of ‘The Rag Rug’ and ‘Trophies’ and ‘Your Paris’. Some of these are marked with asterisks, to indicate that they are worth keeping. Others were too raw, including one that is variously titled ‘Generosity’, ‘Greater Love’, ‘The Gift’ and finally ‘The Real Thing’, and another, filled with classical allusions, on the reading of Sylvia’s dark dreams.
The sequence was beginning to break up. Blank spaces appear between the poems, markers of the realisation that it is not going to work with the unity of Beethoven’s Opus 131. At times, there is a journal-like feel, as in a long sequence on the year when Sylvia taught at Smith and Ted was in her shadow. On other pages, there is more of a sense of the poet as psychoanalyst, puzzling over Sylvia’s neuroses: ‘You were afraid your typewriter / Would fall through the earth … You were afraid all your wedding presents / Would be stolen.’ These lines were later worked into ‘Apprehensions’. There is a fascination with Sylvia’s journal, described as her ‘secret hospital’, and with the difficulty of mothering, filtered not only through the figure of Aurelia but also through Sylvia and her daughter Frieda. The ‘oracle’ born by the mother is a ‘mighty god’ whose name is ‘Hurt’.
Later in the notebook, the sense of a Wordsworthian autobiographical unfolding recurs. This becomes ‘Visit’ in Birthday Letters. Hughes remembers a time ten years after his wife’s death when, reading her papers, he is hit more strongly than ever before by the shock of memory. Then he retraces their story from her joy when he and Lucas first threw clods of earth at the Whitstead window, to the ‘the melt-down of love’ (a phrase omitted from the eventual published version), to her despair and her absence. He is haunted by the voice of their daughter as he walks into the silent home: ‘Daddy, where’s Mummy?’ And by the freezing soil he claws in the garden, which symbolically becomes the cold earth of the graveyard at Heptonstall. ‘You are ten years dead. I think it is only a story. / Your story. My story.’
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