Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  The influential Professor John Carey in the Sunday Times described it as a ‘breathtaking’ book that should be given to every school in the land. He explained incisively how Hughes had fulfilled the task of the creative poetic translator by simultaneously being true to the original and making the work his own. Each alteration from the Latin was an awe-inspiring revelation of ‘the range and ingenuity of his poetic intelligence’. He ‘slims and strengthens’, ‘makes Latin’s swift, filmic effects available in uninflected English’, ‘puts throat-drying narrative suspense back into stories – such as Atalanta’s race – as familiar as the hare and the tortoise’. Of course it is not an ‘accurate’ translation. Hughes has done what great poet-translators have always done: he ‘commandeers and ransacks his original’. He has intensified the violence: passages such as Jupiter electrocuting Lycaon and ‘the nymph Thetis trussed by her ravisher’ (‘Her feet and hands were a single squirming cluster’) have been elaborated not out of ‘sadistic self-indulgence’, but in the spirit of the original, where people are indeed ‘dismembered, raped, impaled, mutilated, incinerated, cooked, eaten’ as ‘Ovid accommodates the whole gamut of perversity from incest to genocide’. ‘Writing in Augustan Rome’, Carey concludes, Ovid ‘anticipated centuries of crime-reporting, acres of newsprint. Hughes’s cruelty is entirely in key with his source.’4

  Carey was far from alone. There was hardly a dissenting voice to the acclaim. The book’s reception was a huge boost for Ted as he underwent surgery and chemotherapy following his diagnosis with cancer of the colon the previous month. Before long, the book was appearing on summer reading recommendations and then in July it was shortlisted for the prestigious Forward Poetry Prize. There was a small flurry of controversy over its eligibility, given that it was a translation, but the judges deemed it sufficiently free to count as original poetry. Sales were brisk because of the good reviews.

  On 27 January 1998, just a week after the revelation of Birthday Letters, the Ovid book won Britain’s biggest literary award apart from the Booker (which was only for novels): the Whitbread Prize, worth over £20,000. Ted was too ill to attend the award ceremony, so his friend the broadcaster and novelist Melvyn Bragg collected it on his behalf. A month earlier, in a column in The Times, Bragg had described the book as ‘the most exciting, addictive collection of poems in English written in recent and not so recent times’, perhaps the masterpiece of ‘a poet whose profligacy and magnificent unfashionability have made him the object of sneers by some etiolated critics whose swotted degrees make them think of themselves as the arbiters of good writing’:

  Hughes is a great poet. He can be bad, he can be poor, like all great poets. But at his best he can be called in with the very greatest – even with Wordsworth, our third poet, and sometimes with Milton, our second. Here, through Ovid, he challenges Shakespeare. Read Hughes’s Ovid and know the depths of our inheritance. I am not a pundit, but for my last column of this year let me push out the boat and guarantee that, like me, you will be awash with awe and newly alert understanding about the deep springs of our culture.5

  The prize propelled Tales from Ovid into the paperback bestseller list, a rather extraordinary place for a translated volume of Latin verse.

  In his introduction to the translation Hughes suggested that the reason for Ovid’s enormous influence on the history of Western art and literature was the thing he shared with Shakespeare: a fascination with the extremities of human passion, with the psychology of what passion feels like to someone who has been ‘possessed by it’. Thus in ‘Venus and Adonis’ Ovid stripped away all the encumbrances of previous versions of the tale and zeroed in on ‘the story of hopelessly besotted and doomed love in the most intense form imaginable’.6

  Ted’s selection of tales begins with Ovid’s narrative of cosmological and human origins – always a primary Hughesian theme as he ranged across cultures and mythologies. Characteristically, he gives it a modern twist with apocalyptic references to nuclear catastrophe. He then provides an exceptionally energetic telling of the Phaethon story that he believed was so important to Plath’s poetry. Thereafter, the emphasis is on the human passions, especially extreme sexual desire: the rapes of Callisto, Proserpina and Philomel; Myrrha’s horrifying incestuous desire for her father; and the sculptor Pygmalion’s obsessive love for the statue he has made. The old stories are brought back to life through a combination of vivid Hughesian phrases – a screech owl described as a bird with a ‘sewn-up face’, Achilles smiting the helmet off an enemy ‘in shards / Like the shell of a boiled egg’7 – and occasional touches that have a personal feel. Arachne hangs herself, dangling and jerking at the rope’s end in an echo of Hughes’s recurring image of the hanged man, who was both a figure in the Tarot and his own Uncle Albert. And when the Arcadian beauty Callisto runs with ‘Her ponytail in a white ribbon’8 she seems for a moment to become the youthful Sylvia, whose long, sandy-coloured ponytail, bound with a white ribbon, is preserved in a box in the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana.9 When the disguised Jupiter takes Callisto by force, the language has a momentary (probably subconscious) hint of Plath’s ‘Rabbit Catcher’. The voracious lover stretches out beside the girl and kisses her with a kiss that roughens, ‘A kiss that, as she tried to answer him, / Gagged her voice, while his arms tightened around her, // Straitjacketing her body’.10 The girl is metamorphosed into a bear, a beast which always made Ted think back to the fifty-ninth bear on his American road trip with Sylvia.

  The triumph of Tales from Ovid showed Ted that it was possible to write a full-length volume of verse in a series of self-contained but linked narratives. This encouraged him in the preparation of Birthday Letters, which has a similar form. It also made him want to resume his unfinished engagements with the classics. The Oresteia project was revived, with a view to a production at the National Theatre in London, which was eventually realised a year after Ted’s death. The translation had a mixed response, but it includes many lines of great ingenuity, some of them influenced by Hughes’s favourite poets: ‘Do not massage me in public with oiled praise,’ Agamemnon says Shakespeareanly to Clytemnestra. ‘Words can do no more … / Nothing remains but the act / Everything waits for the act … Quickly. Now,’ the Chorus of Libation-Bearers recite Eliotically in the second play of the trilogy. The Furies of The Eumenides, ‘Black, like the rags of soot that hang in a chimney, / Like bats, yet wingless’, are pure Hughes.11

  As in Tales from Ovid, there are occasional intrusions from Ted’s contemporaneous wrestling with his memories of Sylvia and the force of her poetry. The most startling of these is the account of Iphigenia going to her death, as her father Agamemnon sacrifices her in order to appease the gods and set the Greek ships sailing for Troy:

  The wind presses her long dress to her body

  And flutters the skirt, and tugs at her tangled hair –

  ‘Daddy!’ she screams. ‘Daddy!’ –

  Her voice is snatched away by the boom of the surf.

  Her father turns aside, with a word

  She cannot hear. She chokes –

  Hands are cramming a gag into her mouth.12

  Given the Plathian cry ‘Daddy’, there can be no mistaking the echo of ‘The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair’, that line in ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ analysed by Jacqueline Rose in a way that raised Ted’s furies.

  Translating the Oresteia was part of his process of expiating guilt and sorrow by turning strong emotion into myth. Though there is nothing so crude as a direct correspondence, his immersion in the imagined emotional lives of Electra and Orestes, children of a tragic household, was a way of coping with the burden that had fallen on Frieda and Nick. There was also a personal subtext to his version of Jean Racine’s Phèdre, a commission of the Almeida Theatre for a production by its artistic director Jonathan Kent, which opened in Malvern in August 1998 and transferred to the Albery Theatre in London’s West End the following month. Like Ovid’s tales, this play is a forensic examination of the psychol
ogy of extreme, transgressive passion: in this case, the subject is a woman’s burning sexual desire for her own stepson.

  Ted was also thinking at this time about the process of releasing Plath’s journals in full. The particular autobiographical significance in his acceptance of the Phèdre commission was his knowledge, via those journals, that on the night of the Falcon Yard party a page of Sylvia’s essay on the poetic imagery of Racine’s Phèdre was rolled into her Smith Corona typewriter on her desk at Newnham College. And he never forgot that two days later, when she wrote ‘Pursuit’, her first poem about him, she took as its epigraph Racine’s line ‘Dans le fond des forêts votre image me suit,’ which Ted now translated into ‘Everywhere in the woods your image hunts me.’13 Racine had given her the black panther of desire and death, which she imagined embodied in him and his jaguar spirit.

  Sylvia is an even more vivid presence in his other translation from the classics. Surprisingly, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being did not contain a detailed discussion of the beautiful, redemptive scene in The Winter’s Tale, where the statue of Hermione seems to come back to life and the beloved lost wife returns after sixteen years’ supposed death. Perhaps Ted could not bear to confront his own dearest wish, because he knew it would never come true. But as he moved ever closer to the publication of Birthday Letters he became more and more determined to make it true for himself. Through the power of words he would bring Sylvia back to life, as Paulina restores Hermione in Shakespeare. In 1993 and 1994, he worked – simply for his own satisfaction, without a formal commission – on a version of Euripides’ Alcestis, which, along with Ovid’s tale of Pygmalion, was the shadow story behind The Winter’s Tale: a play about the return of a beloved wife from the grave.

  In his first draft, scrawled at speed in one of his Challenge Triplicate Books, there are lines that did not make it into the final version, perhaps because they were too painful:

  She has gone. She cannot hear us.

  Your mother has gone.

  Is this why we were given our life?

  So that we would have to bear this?

  The unbearable.

  So that we would could each of us be tested

  By the unbearable?14

  Through the act of translation, Hughes comes to terms with the fact of his own destiny: that he was given life so as to be tested by the unbearable.

  The Alcestis was set aside while he busied himself on paid commissions from 1995 to 1997, but in January 1998 on the very weekend when the existence of Birthday Letters was made public he exhorted himself in his journal to get back into it. The following week, he wrote to fellow-Yorkshireman, actor and director Barrie Rutter. Ted spoke of his ‘tuning fork’ being in the Calder Valley.15 It occurred to him that Rutter was a kindred spirit and that his company Northern Broadsides, which performed classic plays in the broad accents of the North as opposed to the smooth sounds of southern received pronunciation, might give a home to the Alcestis. He completed his version, including an expansion of a sequence in which the demi-god Heracles gets drunk, and offered it to Rutter. Two years after Hughes’s death Northern Broadsides staged it, to strong reviews, in their Viaduct Theatre in the cellar of the former Dean Clough Mills in Halifax.

  Alcestis is Ted Hughes’s last major completed work. That status gives it a special poignancy. The echoes of his own life are all too clear. The action is driven by a choice: either the husband or the wife must die. When Ted wrote to Olwyn on the day in 1962 when he split from Sylvia, he said that the strain of living with her volatility was such that it was ‘her or me’. He would die if he stayed.

  The wife is taken, but she ensures that the children, a son and a daughter, are safe. Her last injunction to her husband is not to remarry. Hughes greatly expands Euripides’ original at this moment, spelling out the image of another woman in Admetos’ bed after Alcestis’ death. Sometimes, though, he does not need to expand in order for there to be resonances. ‘I shall mourn you, Alcestis, not for a year / But for my entire life.’ ‘But what of the girl – / A stepmother will tear her to pieces / One way or another.’ ‘We should never have married.’16 A dream in which the wife returns, only to be lost again on waking. All these are in the original.

  Again and again Hughes nudges the text close to his own life. Death as a fall through ‘a hole in the air, / A hole in the earth, endlessly falling’17 is Euripides’ descent to the underworld rewritten in the imagery of the first Plath elegy in Gaudete. Heracles’ ‘you have lost a good wife’ becomes ‘you have lost an extraordinary woman’.18 Euripides’ Alcestis is praised for her courage and virtue in dying on behalf of her husband, but in the Hughes version her death is a transfiguration into fame:

  And when you died

  Your death astonished the living …

  Your death

  Was your greatest opportunity

  And magnificently you took it.19

  And the fame is universalised: Heracles’ ‘I know the story’ in the original becomes ‘The whole world knows the story.’20 Most striking of all is an exchange within the Chorus:

  Chorus 1: She is dead.

  Chorus 2: Alcestis is dead. Your wife is dead.21

  The draft of the working manuscript is in biro, but the latter phrase is in ink, darker black.22 It is clearly an afterthought, a late insertion of the very words spoken by Dr Horder on the telephone in his ‘voice like a selected weapon / Or a measured injection’, those four coolly delivered words that never left Ted’s ear: ‘Your wife is dead.’23

  After his wife’s death, Admetos shows hospitality to a visitor, who turns out to be Heracles. There is drunkenness that some consider inappropriate at such a time – shadows of the bongo-drum accusation. And then there is castigation, as if from Robin Morgan and the radical feminists: ‘You killed her. You. You. You.’24

  Contrary to his wife’s injunction, Admetos agrees to remarry, as Ted did. But by an act of grace, the second bride turns out to be Alcestis herself, brought up from the underworld by Heracles in gratitude for the hospitality that Admetos showed at his darkest hour. One of Hughes’s expansions of the original text is a long sequence about Orpheus and the fatal glance that sends Eurydice back to Hades. With the return of Alcestis, the backward glance is redeemed. She lives. The final word of the play is ‘hope’, a raising of the heart akin to ‘spring’, the final word of the original manuscript of Ariel that lay on Sylvia’s desk in Fitzroy Road in February 1963.

  If in one sense the memory of Sylvia lives through the redemptive power of literary art, in another Ted joins her in the imagination of death. The manuscript draft of Alcestis has a long and somewhat overblown passage about the vacuum and silence of the empty house after the loss of the mother. In the final version, this is replaced by some much more powerful lines in which Hughes develops Euripides’ image of Admetos envying the dead into something very personal:

  I think of cool soil

  A mask over my face,

  A weight of stillness over my body,

  A darkness

  In which she lies next to me – her lips

  Maybe only an inch from my lips.

  Forever.25

  This is Hughescliff, imagining himself in the moorland graveyard at Heptonstall:

  ‘You were very wicked, Mr Heathcliff!’ I exclaimed; ‘were you not ashamed to disturb the dead?’

  ‘I disturbed nobody, Nelly,’ he replied; ‘and I gave some ease to myself. I shall be a great deal more comfortable now; and you’ll have a better chance of keeping me underground, when I get there. Disturbed her? No! she has disturbed me, night and day, through eighteen years – incessantly – remorselessly – till yesternight; and yesternight I was tranquil. I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart stopped and my cheek frozen against hers.’26

  Why did Ted bury Sylvia in Heptonstall rather than north London or Devon? (The churchyard with the yew trees beside Court Green had been closed to new burials for years, so was not an option.)
Of course it was to place her near his family. But in a deeper and more literary sense, it was because of Wuthering Heights. ‘Haworth and graves’, Sylvia had once written in her notebook.27 She wanted to be Cathy. And for the rest of his life, until the completion of Alcestis, he was Heathcliff, the brooding figure, tall, dark and handsome, who wanders the moors in search of his lost love.

  In September 1998, not long after putting the finishing touches to Alcestis, Ted wrote to Dan Huws, hinting that his life was in a state of upheaval – and not just for health reasons. It had been another strange summer and now he was spending most of his time in London.

  At three o’clock in the afternoon on Thursday 17 September, the Poet Laureate sat in the left-hand corner of the lounge of the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair. The man he had arranged to meet was a few minutes late. When his friend arrived, Ted put away the copy of his translation of Racine’s Phèdre in which, obsessive reviser that he was, he had been making post-publication alterations. He looked ‘haggard but undefeated’, unaffected by the new celebrity brought to him by the success of Tales from Ovid and Birthday Letters. He complained of the recurrence of his shingles. There were sores on his forehead, itches on his scalp and he was almost blind in his formerly strong right eye. As always, he talked fast, ranging widely, ending on the subject of the importance of wine to keep the heart of an old man ticking (never less than two glasses at a time). His friend, a former Faber poet who had fallen out of favour since the retirement of Charles Monteith, asked him whether he should let the northern press Bloodaxe publish his collected poems. ‘Going to Bloodaxe from Faber’, said Ted, ‘would be like leaving the Brigade of Guards to join a Territorial regiment.’ So what about joining the poetry list of Oxford University Press? Ted paused, then answered, ‘Salvation Army.’ As they were leaving, after three hours of laughter and reminiscence, he explained why he had chosen the Connaught for the rendezvous. It was to do with birthdays and remembering and Sylvia: