Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  73. Ted’s working draft is preserved in BL Add. MS 88918/9.

  74. 7 Oct 1959 (SPLH 409).

  75. JSP 207.

  76. JSP 516, 517, 520.

  77. JSP 514, 518.

  78. SPLH 411.

  79. L 153.

  80. 9 March 1959 (JSP 473).

  81. Ibid.

  82. CPSP 119–20.

  83. ‘Black Coat’, in Birthday Letters (CP 1108–9).

  Chapter 11: Famous Poet

  1. L 170–7.

  2. 4 Oct 1959 (JSP 513–14).

  3. Olwyn Hughes, in Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (Viking, 1989; repr. Penguin, 1998), pp. 176–7.

  4. SPLH 416–17.

  5. SPLH 423.

  6. ‘Isis’, in Birthday Letters (CP 1114).

  7. Lucas Myers, Crow Steered, Bergs Appeared: A Memoir of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (Seewanee, Tenn.: Proctor’s Hall Press, 2001), p. 77.

  8. SPLH 424.

  9. Stevenson, Bitter Fame, pp. 185–7; letter from Janet Crosbie-Hill to New Review, June 1976; unpublished letter from Olwyn Hughes to Jonathan Bate, 2 Jan 2014.

  10. To Myers, 22 Apr 1960 (L 158–9). Ted remembered the birth in a lovely poem called ‘Delivering Frieda’, later revised as ‘Remission’ in Birthday Letters (CP 1113–14).

  11. Ted and Sylvia to Olwyn, 2 April 1960 (Emory 980/1).

  12. SPLH 440.

  13. L 148.

  14. Loose-leaf listing of dates and places of composition (BL Add. MS 88918/7). ‘Crag Jack’s Apostasy’ was the one poem written (on the guest-room bed) in Aurelia Plath’s house in Elmwood Road, Wellesley. It is neat that a poem inspired by a Hughes ancestor was written in the Plath house.

  15. Ted Hughes MS 1, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. The manuscript actually combines pages from ‘The Feast of Lupercal’ with some from the collection that Sylvia was putting together at the time, which, the manuscript reveals, she titled ‘New Poems 1958’, then ‘The Bull of Bendylaw’, then ‘The Devil of the Stairs’. The sheaf of paper thus has one page reading simply ‘To Sylvia’ (his dedication) and another reading simply ‘For Ted’ (hers).

  16. CP 82–3; Emory 644/59.

  17. Samuel Johnson, ‘Life of Cowley’, in Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–81); Hughes, ‘Notes on Lupercal’ (Ted Hughes MS 1, Lilly Library).

  18. CP 84–5.

  19. Ibid.

  20. CP 68–9; ‘Notes on Lupercal’ (Lilly Library).

  21. L 244 (programme transmitted 3 Sept 1965).

  22. Interviewed by Ekbert Faas, in Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1980), p. 199.

  23. Queen, 15 March 1960, p. 140.

  24. ‘Poetic force refined by deep thought’, Halifax Daily Courier and Guardian, 18 March 1960.

  25. Observer, 27 March 1960.

  26. Times Literary Supplement, 15 April 1960, unsigned review by G. S. Fraser.

  27. Spectator, 22 April 1960.

  28. Kenneth Young, ‘Poet from the Pennines’, Daily Telegraph, 14 April 1960.

  29. Philip Booth, ‘The instinct to survive’, New York Times, 14 Aug 1960.

  30. Harper’s Magazine, Sept 1960, p. 103.

  31. Observer, 18 Dec 1960. Ted kept his review clippings. Those for Lupercal are gathered at Emory 644/175.

  32. To Olwyn, May 1960 (L 159–60).

  33. To the Merwins, June 1960 (L 162–3).

  34. To Olwyn (Emory 980/1).

  35. L 165–6; SPLH 448–9.

  36. Olwyn Hughes to Jonathan Bate, 2 Jan 2014.

  37. The other two were Ted and Assia Wevill. Susan Alliston was just possibly a fourth.

  38. Sylvia’s version of the Christmas row is in a letter to her mother: Sylvia to Aurelia, 1 Jan 1961 (unpublished passages of letter in Lilly Library). Olwyn’s is in Stevenson, Bitter Fame, pp. 203–4 (supplemented by personal communication). Both women had fierce tempers and were capable of exaggerating slights, so neither’s version can necessarily be trusted in every particular.

  39. BL Add. MS 88918/128. Journal entries on torn notebook sheets.

  40. Ibid., 26 Dec 1960.

  41. Ibid., 3 Jan 1961.

  42. Ibid., 2 April 1962.

  43. Plath, ‘Tulips’, 18 March 1961; Hughes journal, 12 April 1961.

  44. Broadcast 31 Jan 1961. Available on CD, The Spoken Word: Sylvia Plath (BBC/British Library, 2010).

  45. Letter from Frances to David McCullough, 7 July 1974 (Frances McCullough Papers, University of Maryland, hdl.handle.net/1903.1/4603).

  46. 28 Feb 1961 (JSP 601).

  47. 5 March 1961 (JSP 605).

  48. Plath to Dorothy Benotti, 29 March 1961 (Sylvia Plath Collection, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, MS 45, 16/2).

  49. Mentioned in a letter to John Fisher and family, April 1961.

  50. ‘The Gypsy’, in Birthday Letters (CP 117–18).

  51. Myers, Crow Steered, p. 78.

  52. Olwyn Hughes to Jonathan Bate, 2 Jan 2014.

  53. Ibid.

  Chapter 12: The Grass Blade

  1. Emory 980/1.

  2. ‘The Table’, CP 1132–4.

  3. Hughes journal, 11 Sept 1961.

  4. ‘Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath’s Poems’, in The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), pp. 187–95 (pp. 193–4).

  5. SPLH 521.

  6. Emory 980/1.

  7. SPLH 520.

  8. SPLH 529.

  9. The New Poetry: An Anthology Selected and Introduced by A. Alvarez (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 15.

  10. A. Alvarez, ‘The New Poetry’, in ibid., pp. 17–28.

  11. Jan–May 1962 (JSP 630–43).

  12. To Dan and Helga Huws, 9 June 1962 (Emory 644/4).

  13. JSP 641.

  14. See further, ‘Secret life of Sylvia Plath’, Daily Mail, 5 Feb 2004.

  15. The novel was lost around 1970, according to Ted, so perhaps it was a victim of the 1971 fire at his Yorkshire home, discussed below.

  16. 10 June 1962 (JSP 659).

  17. ‘The Jaguar Skin’, quoted from BL Add. MM 88918/1, the typescript of Birthday Letters as originally submitted to Faber & Faber.

  18. Ibid., though the poem exists in multiple drafts. Ted told the story in attenuated form in a letter to Gerald and Joan, 2 July 1962 (Emory 854/1).

  19. Ruth Fainlight, ‘Sylvia and Jane’, Times Literary Supplement, 12 Dec 2003.

  20. Plath to Leonard Baskin, 16 April 1962 (BL Add. MS 83684).

  21. David Wevill, interview quoted in Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes’ Doomed Love (Robson Books, 2006), p. 90.

  22. Macedo, interviewed twenty-five years after the event, quoted in Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (Viking, 1989; repr. Penguin, 1998), p. 243. In a more elaborate (embroidered?) interview given a further decade later, Macedo has Assia telling her that what Ted said in the kitchen was ‘You know what’s happened to us, don’t you?’, to which Assia allegedly said, ‘Yes’ (Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001), p. 140).

  23. Nathaniel Tarn Papers, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

  24. Angela Landels, interview quoted in Koren and Negev, Lover of Unreason, p. 86.

  25. ‘Dreamers’, in Birthday Letters (CP 1145–6).

  26. ‘The Rabbit Catcher’, in Birthday Letters (CP 1136–8).

  27. CPSP 193–4.

  28. ‘Event’, CPSP 194–5.

  29. Suzette Macedo, who claimed that Assia showed her the note, interviewed in Feinstein, Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet, p. 141.

  30. Nathaniel Tarn Papers, Stanford. Tarn, a minor writer from ‘the Group’, was in the extraordinary position of being (a) the intimate confidant of both David and Assia Wevill, separately, and (b) a psychoanalyst. He kept detailed notes on these events, which he
heard about (from both points of view) over a series of lunch dates.

  31. William Trevor, Excursions in the Real World: Memoirs (Hutchinson, 1993), p. 117.

  32. Hughes, ‘Chlorophyl’, in Capriccio (Lurley: Gehenna Press, 1990) (CP 799). In their biography of Assia, the touchingly literalistic Koren and Negev quote the next two lines of the poem, ‘Inside it, / The witchy doll, soaked in Dior’, and proceed to the assumption that ‘the blade of grass had been dipped in Dior perfume’ (Lover of Unreason, p. 95). But the poem says that it was a doll, not the grass, which was perfumed. ‘Chlorophyl’ proceeds like a Russian doll, with a series of things inside each other, the next being a gravestone and the one after that a sample of Assia’s ashes. One may assume that these were not also contained in the envelope with the blade of grass: Hughes is collapsing different memories, ending the Capriccio cycle by yoking the beginning and the end of his relationship with Assia.

  33. CPSP 202–3.

  34. CPSP 224.

  35. CP 585–6, first published in Ploughshares (1980), repr. in 1982 and 1995 Selected Poems. Omitted lines: CP 1281.

  36. CP 1195, where it is also printed as the closing poem.

  37. ‘Lily’, CP 587.

  38. CPSP 204–5.

  39. Nathaniel Tarn Papers, Stanford.

  40. Draft notes for Capriccio poem sequence (BL Add. MS 88918/1).

  41. CP 783, with clear references to Sylvia and Assia. The third, who ‘sank without a cry’, may be Susan Alliston, in the light of her link to 18 Rugby Street, the house of Ted’s Friday the 13th night with Sylvia.

  42. Nathaniel Tarn Papers, Stanford.

  43. Ibid.

  44. Richard Murphy, The Kick: A Life among Writers (Granta, 2002), p. 222.

  45. Ibid., p. 223.

  46. Ibid., p. 225.

  47. Plath to Murphy, 7 Oct 1962 (Richard Murphy Papers, Department of Special Collections, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa).

  48. Late Sept 1962 (L 208).

  49. Nathaniel Tarn Papers, Stanford.

  Chapter 13: ‘That Sunday Night’

  1. To Gerald and family, 2 July 1962 (Emory 854/1).

  2. SPLH 542, 554.

  3. Olwyn Hughes Papers (BL Add. MS 88948/1). Subsequent quotations and paraphrase from the same crucial letter.

  4. Lines from ‘The Grouse’ (BL Add. MS 88918/1).

  5. Lines from ‘By day it was teaching in college’ (BL Add. MS 88918/1).

  6. ‘Epiphany’, CP 1115–17.

  7. Plath and Hughes to Davidow, Christmas 1960 (Sylvia Plath Collection, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, MS 45, 16/5/20).

  8. ‘Error’, CP 1121–3.

  9. Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798).

  10. ‘Error’, CP 1121–3.

  11. To Marcia Brown Plumer, 4 Feb 1963 (Smith College MS 45, 16/3/20).

  12. Ibid., 2 Jan 1963 (Smith College MS 45, 16/3/21).

  13. To Clarissa Roche, 19 Oct 1962 (Smith College MS 45, 17/17/3), continuing, in more bitter but still witty vein: ‘The fact that he left the week after I almost died of influenza last month, and that his family does not want him to support us in any way, is just one step, I guess, in the path of poetic genius.’

  14. To Aurelia Plath, 12 Oct 1962 (SPLH 551).

  15. CPSP 223–4.

  16. CPSP 226–7.

  17. CPSP 231–2.

  18. CPSP 233–4.

  19. CPSP 240–2.

  20. 7 Nov 1962 (SPLH 567).

  21. To Olwyn, pre-Christmas 1962 (Emory 980/1/10).

  22. 26 Oct 1962 (Nathaniel Tarn Papers, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries).

  23. 5 Jan 1963 (ibid.).

  24. Quoted, Preface by Richard Hollis, in Susan Alliston, Poems and Journals 1960–1969, introduction by Ted Hughes (Nottingham: Richard Hollis, 2010), p. 9.

  25. I owe this information to Gail Crowther, in Elizabeth Sigmund and Gail Crowther, Sylvia Plath in Devon: A Year’s Turning (Stroud: Fonthill Media, 2014), p. 117.

  26. Nation, 14 May 1960, p. 426.

  27. Hughes, ‘Susan Alliston’, in Alliston, Poems and Journals, p. 13.

  28. Ibid., p. 15.

  29. ‘Samurai’, in Alliston, Poems and Journals, p. 19.

  30. Hughes, ‘Susan Alliston’, p. 15.

  31. Alliston, Poems and Journals, p. 82.

  32. ‘Soho Square’ (BL Add. MS 88918/1).

  33. Ibid. If only at the level of metaphor, the language is orgasmic: ‘came / At the top of your voice. Volcanic’.

  34. ‘Robbing Myself’, in Birthday Letters (CP 1150–1).

  35. To Marty Brown, 4 Feb 1963 (Smith College MS 45, 16/3/20).

  36. Quoted and paraphrased from BL Add. MS 88918/129.

  37. ‘The Inscription’, CP 1154–5.

  38. Susan Alliston, unpublished journal entry for 12 Feb 1963, quoted by kind permission of her sister.

  39. Ibid.

  40. Ibid.

  41. Nathaniel Minton, A Memoir of Ted Hughes (Westmoreland Press, 2015), p. 27.

  42. Ibid.

  43. ‘That Sunday Night’, manuscript draft in BL Add. MS 88918/1. ‘Of guilt’ is scored through in the holograph. The three epithets for the voice are from another draft.

  44. L 213.

  45. Dr John Horder, interviewed in Jane Feinmann, ‘Rhyme, reason and depression’, Guardian, 16 Feb 1993.

  46. Emory 644/180.

  47. Barbara Blackman, personal communication.

  48. Observer, 17 Feb 1963.

  49. Jillian Becker, Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath (Ferrington, 2002), p. 26.

  50. Ibid.

  51. Ibid.

  52. BL Add. MS 88918/1.

  53. End of ‘Last Letter’, in a special edition of the New Statesman, edited by Ted’s friend Melvyn Bragg (11 Oct 2010), p. 44.

  54. ‘Walking in the Snow Alone’, in ‘That Sunday Night’ exercise book (BL Add. MS 88918/1).

  55. The haunting thought of the phone calls was best expressed in the version of ‘What did happen that Sunday night?’ in the same exercise book, in which he asks himself ‘How often the phone rang’ in his ‘empty room’, with Sylvia ‘hearing it’ in her ‘receiver’ as if she were ‘already a fading memory / Of a telephone ringing in a brain / That was already dead’.

  56. ‘They’re doing “Difficulties of a Bridegroom” this week’: it was broadcast on Monday 21 Jan 1963, so the (undated) letter was probably written the previous day, 20 Jan 1963 (Emory 980/1).

  57. There are extensive drafts of both this poem and ‘Uncle Albert’s Suicide’ in Emory 644/58.

  58. ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’, CP 182–3.

  59. ‘Uncle A’, in Jan 1963 letter to Olwyn, much revised into ‘Sacrifice’ in Wolfwatching (CP 758–60).

  Chapter 14: The Custodian

  1. 21 April 1967 (L 272).

  2. 15 March 1963 (L 215–16).

  3. Hughes to Lowell, 15 May 1963 (Houghton Library, Harvard University).

  4. 12 March 1963 (Nathaniel Tarn Papers, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries).

  5. Ibid.

  6. Postcard supplied by Peter Porter to Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev for A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes’ Doomed Love (Robson Books, 2006).

  7. Elizabeth Compton Sigmund, interviewed in the Guardian, 18 Jan 2013 (theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/18/elizabeth-sigmund-bell-jar-sylvia-plath). See also her co-written memoir (with Gail Crowther), Sylvia Plath in Devon: A Year’s Turning (Stroud: Fonthill Media, 2014). Her memory is not always reliable, but it does seem that in his darker moments Ted did make the ‘murder a genius’ remark (Alvarez reports hearing it at a party, about a year after Sylvia’s death).

  8. Assia Wevill journal, quoted, Koren and Negev, Lover of Unreason, pp. 122–4.

  9. Susan Alliston, Poems and Journals 1960–1969, introduction by Ted Hughes (Nottingham: Richard Hollis, 2010), p. 87.

  10. Hughes to Elizabeth Compto
n (BL Add. MS 88612).

  11. Double airmail letter, 22 July 1963 (Emory 854/1).

  12. Hughes journal, Aug 1963.

  13. Ibid., 27 Sept 1963.

  14. Ibid., Aug 1963.

  15. Ibid., 4 Feb 1965.

  16. Now with the other books from Ted’s library at Emory.

  17. Hilda to Aurelia, 12 Oct 1963 (Plath MS II, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington).

  18. 24 Nov 1963, ‘Ted Hughes: Letters to Assia Wevill’ (Emory 1058/1).

  19. Olwyn Hughes, personal communication.

  20. Ted to Gerald, 4 Dec 1963 (Emory 854/1).

  21. Assia to Ted, 22 Jan 1964 (Emory 1058/1).

  22. Ted to Assia, 15 Jan 1964 (Emory 1058/1).

  23. Alliston, Poems and Journals, p. 87, supplemented by unpublished passages.

  24. 28 Aug 1963 (Emory 865/1).

  25. See first draft at Emory 644/59.

  26. CP 172; see also Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath – A Marriage (Little, Brown, 2004), p. 213, where it is asserted that Hughes also wrote the Wodwo poem ‘Ballad from a Fairy Tale’ at this time as another ‘incoherent elegy for Sylvia’. This claim is based on Ted’s remark to the critic Ann Skea some twenty years later that the ‘fringed square of satin’ in this poem (CP 172) was a piece of ‘funerary furnishing’ (Ann Skea, Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (Armidale, NSW: University of New England Press, 1994), p. 254), which Middlebrook assumes ‘he had seen under Plath’s head as she lay in her casket’. But this seems unlikely, since the poem was written on a train as Ted travelled from Court Green to London one morning long before Sylvia’s death – though the image may well have taken on new meaning after her death.

  27. ‘Life after Death’, CP 1160–1.

  28. New York Times Book Review, 8 Nov 1964, p. 28.

  29. British Book News, Feb 1964, p. 141.

  30. Guardian, 10 July 1964; Daily Telegraph, 23 July 1964.

  31. Hughes journal, Aug 1963.

  32. Wodwo, discussed below, and a selection of poems that he did not consider good enough to include in his Faber volume, gathered as Recklings, his first limited-edition fine-press project (150 copies for Turret Books of Kensington, with 1966 on the title page but actually published in January 1967, at five guineas a copy).

  33. Saturday Night, 78:10 (Nov 1963), pp. 21–7.

  34. Audio books: T. S. Eliot Reads (Caedmon, 2000); T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets, read by Ted Hughes (Faber/Penguin, 1996).