Ted Hughes
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Heaney, Seamus, ‘Englands of the Mind’, in his Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (1980)
Paulin, Tom, ‘Laureate of the Free Market? Ted Hughes’, in his Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (1992)
Rees, Roger, ed., Ted Hughes and the Classics (2009)
Roberts, Neil, Ted Hughes: A Literary Life (2006)
Sagar, Keith, The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes (2000, rev. edn 2006)
——, Ted Hughes and Nature: Terror and Exultation (2010)
Scigaj, Leonard, The Poetry of Ted Hughes: Form and Imagination (1986)
Skea, Ann, Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (1994)
Weissbort, Daniel, Ted Hughes and Translation (2011)
Wormald, Mark, Neil Roberts, and Terry Gifford, eds, Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected (2013)
Hughes and Plath
Clark, Heather, The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (2011)
Kukil, Karen, ed., The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950–1962 (2000)
Kukil, Karen, and Peter K. Steinberg, eds, The Letters of Sylvia Plath (forthcoming from Faber & Faber)
Middlebrook, Diane, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath – A Marriage (2003)
Stevenson, Anne, with assistance from Olwyn Hughes and additional material by Lucas Myers, Dido Merwin and Richard Murphy, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (1989, repr. 1998)
Wagner, Erica, Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters (2000)
Picture Section
(© Harry Ogden, deceased)
Childhood home now and then: Mount Zion Primitive Methodist Chapel towering over 1 Aspinall Street, in the roof of which is the skylight of the attic bedroom from which Ted looked out on Scout Rock.
Childhood home now and then: 1 Aspinall Street as it is today. (© Jonathan Bate)
Ted as a schoolboy. (© Stuart Clarke/Writer Pictures)
Siblings: Gerald, Olwyn, Ted. (Unidentified studio photographer, rephotographed by Jonathan Bate by kind permission of Olwyn Hughes)
Mirrored in the heart: Ted photographed by Olwyn. (© Olwyn Hughes)
Deep England overgrown: the pond of the pike. (© Steve Ely)
During National Service: mother and son. (© Stuart Clarke/Writer Pictures)
Family home in student days and thereafter: the Beacon as it is today. (© Jonathan Bate)
Sylvia Plath about to set of for Smith College in 1950 (with mother Aurelia and brother Warren). (© Giovanni Giovannetti/Effigie/Writer Pictures)
Cambridge days: in June 1952, at the May Ball with Carina. (© Edna Wholey)
Cambridge days: graduation in summer 1954. (© Stuart Clarke/Writer Pictures)
Cambridge days: the first and only edition of student poetry magazine Saint Botolph’s Review, at the launch party for which Ted first met Sylvia on Saturday 25 February 1956. (© Tom Bate)
Honeymoon: Sylvia and Ted photographed by Warren in Paris in 1956. (© Warren Plath, courtesy of Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College)
Honeymoon: Ted drawn by Sylvia. (© Estate of Sylvia Plath)
Newly married: Sylvia with typewriter on a Yorkshire drystone wall in September 1956. (© Elinor Klein, courtesy of Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College)
Newly married: studio portrait during residence in Eltisley Avenue, Cambridge, late in 1956. (© Peter Lofts Photography/Ramsey and Muspratt Archive)
In the bosom of the family: Sylvia with Ted’s family at the Beacon, William Hughes (left) and Uncle Walt (right) standing behind, Sylvia sitting next to Ted’s mother. (© Harry Ogden, deceased)
At work in the apartment on Willow Street, Boston, in 1958. (© Black Star, courtesy of Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College)
On the rocks at Winthrop, after visiting Otto Plath’s grave in May 1959. (© Everett Collection/REX)
Boston literary life: Robert Lowell, who described Ted’s poem ‘Pike’ as a masterpiece. (© British Library Board/Fay Godwin Archive)
Of to see America: Ted photographed by Sylvia, during a roadside picnic in Wisconsin in July 1959. (© Estate of Sylvia Plath, courtesy of Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College)
(© Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation, courtesy of Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, via National Portrait Gallery, London)
Faber poets: Louis MacNeice, Ted Hughes, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender in June 1960, the year of the publication of Ted’s second collection of poetry, Lupercal. (© Mark Gerson/Bridgeman Images)
Court Green, North Tawton, discovered by Ted and Sylvia in 1961 (seen here photographed in 1972). (© David Willis McCullough, courtesy of University of Maryland)
Family: with baby Frieda in Knole Park, Kent, in 1960. (© Ann Davidow-Goodman (Mrs Hayes))
Family: Sylvia with Frieda and Nicholas among the daffodils at Court Green in 1962. (© Siv Arb/Writer Pictures)
Family: Ted with Frieda and Nicholas at Doonreaghan in 1966. (© Jane Bown/Camera Press)
Assia Wevill. (© David Wevill)
Susan Alliston. (© Richard Hollis)
Frieda on the doorstep of Court Green with Shura in push-chair. (© Celia Chaikin)
(© Jonathan Bate)
Lumb Bank, which Ted first tried to buy in 1963, and eventually bought in 1969, as it is today. (© Eddie Jacob Photography)
Elm trees and Morris Traveller at Court Green. (© David Willis McCullough, courtesy of University of Maryland)
Seneca’s Oedipus: Irene Worth as Jocasta and John Gielgud as Oedipus in the National Theatre production, directed by Peter Brook, at the Old Vic in 1968. (© TopFoto)
Brenda Hedden in 1965. (© Estate of Trevor Hedden, courtesy of Brenda Hedden)
The Iron Man as rock musical: Ted at the Young Vic with Pete Townshend of The Who in 1993. (© Alex Lentati/Associated Newspapers/REX)
(© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum, via National Portrait Gallery, London)
Orghast at Persepolis: Ted in Iran. (© Stuart Clarke/Writer Pictures)
Second marriage: Nick, Carol, Frieda and Ted on the moors. (© Stuart Clarke/Writer Pictures)
Ted and Carol. (© Bill Brandt Archive)
Ted and Jill. (courtesy of Jill Petchesky © Estate of Barbara Trentham)
Jennifer Rankin, Australian poet. (© Hazel de Berg Collection of Photographs, National Library of Australia)
Emma Tennant, Scottish novelist. (© Jane Bown/The Observer/TopFoto)
Mighty opposites: Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes at a party in June 1977. (© Mark Gerson/Bridgeman Images)
Top Withens: the alleged original of Wuthering Heights, to which Ted and Sylvia were driven by Uncle Walt in 1956 (here photographed by Fay Godwin in 1977 for Remains of Elmet). (© British Library Board/Fay Godwin Archive)
The Fisher King: Ted on the first day of trout-fishing season at Wistland Pond, Devon, April 1986. (© Nick Rogers/REX)
Frieda and Nicholas Hughes at the unveiling of the blue plaque in memory of their mother at 3 Chalcot Square, Primrose Hill, in 2000. (© Dr Renate Latimer, courtesy of Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College)
Letter Home: Great War memorial at Paddington railway station, a key influence on ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’. (© Robin McMorran)
With steelhead on the Dean River, British Columbia, 1995. (© Ehor Boyanowsky)
Birthday Letters revealed, January 1998. (© News UK, photographed by Tom Bate)
The memorial stone on Dartmoor, photographed in July 2015. (© Tom Bate)
Acknowledgements
This book offers a preliminary report from the richest personal archive in the history of English poetry. For the purposes of research over a period of five years, I read and took notes on nearly 100,000 pages of Ted Hughes manuscripts. I also benefited immeasurably from conversations and correspondence with Olwyn Hughes, Frieda Hughes, Jill Barber, Barbara Blackman, Ehor Boyanowsky, Melvyn Bragg, His Royal Highness Prince Charles, Roy Davids, Anne Donovan, Jean Gooder, Grey and Neiti Gowrie, the late Seamus Heaney, Brenda Hedden, Richard Hollis, Edward Lucie-Smith, Janet Malcolm, Robin
Morgan, Lucas Myers, Tom Paulin, Tom Pero, Roger Pringle, Craig Raine, David Rankin, Christopher Reid, Annie Robinson, Judith Rodriguez, Jacqueline Rose, Elizabeth Sigmund (formerly Compton), Ann Pasternak Slater, the late Ben Sonnenberg, Sir Peter Stothard, Marina Warner, Vicky Watling, the late Daniel Weissbort, Carolyne Wright and others who prefer not to be named. Several people, including David Wevill, wished the project well but declined to be interviewed.
I had the privilege, very rare for a biographer, of writing the childhood chapters of this book in the very house where Ted Hughes was born and spent the first eight years of his life. Through the good offices of the Elmet Trust, 1 Aspinall Street, now known as ‘Ted’s House’, is available as a holiday let. I am grateful to John Billingsley and the late Donald Crossley for being my guides to the moors above Mytholmroyd, which were so formative of Hughes’s imagination. I am also grateful to Marion Allen and Julia Ashby of the Mexborough District Heritage Society.
My deep gratitude goes to the librarians and archivists who made the work possible, especially Steve Enniss (now of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin) and Kathy Shoemaker at the Manuscript and Rare Book Library, Emory University; Jamie Andrews and Helen Melody at the British Library; David Frasier at the Lilly Library, University of Indiana, Bloomington; Karen Kukil (who went far beyond the call of duty) at the Mortimer Rare Books Room, Smith College; Wilgha Edwards at the Australian Defence Force Academy; Marc Carlson and Kristen Leatherwood at the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. Manuscripts that are now in the following collections were also consulted, either as originals or as copies: BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham; Peter Brook Archive, Victoria and Albert Museum; Cambridge University Library; Special Collections, University of Exeter; Special Collections, University of Liverpool; Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries; the archive of Pembroke College, Cambridge; Sheffield University Library.
For insights into Hughes at Cambridge University, thanks to Jayne Ringrose, Colin Wilcockson and especially Mark Wormald. Into his dealings with Faber and Faber: Gillian Bate, Joanna Mackle and others. Thanks, too, to theatre workers, especially Michael Boyd, Peter Brook, Barrie Rutter, Tim Supple and Oliver Taplin. And to poets, especially Simon Armitage and Sir Andrew Motion. To Hughes scholars: Terry Gifford, Claas Kazzer (special thanks for recordings of interviews with Ted’s childhood friends), Neil Roberts, the late Keith Sagar, Ann Skea, Carrie Smith, Stephen Tabor (for his indispensable bibliographic acumen), Mark Wormald and others. To Warren Plath’s neighbour, Richard Larschan. And to my doctoral student Yvonne Reddick, for invaluable research assistance in the archive at Emory. To the great Plath scholar Peter K. Steinberg, who provided valuable information and corrected several errors when he read a draft through Plathian eyes. And for a reading with a novelist’s eye for narrative and character, to my dear friend Candida Crewe. Most of all, to two Hughes scholars, who were also Ted’s friends: Christopher Reid for making available the letters, and Nick Gammage for an astute and scrupulous reading of the entire typescript, as well as copies of manuscripts in his possession.
The early research phase of the project in 2010–11, my final year as a professor at the University of Warwick, was made possible by a generous Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, matched by study leave from the Department of English. A Visiting Fellowship at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, gave me a room in a quiet tower where I could read through the hundred books written or edited by Ted Hughes; thanks to the Principal, Ralph Waller, and the Fellows of Harris Manchester for making this possible (and to Eric Anderson for suggesting it). The Fellows of Worcester College, Oxford, were generous in allowing me to retain my life as a scholar and writer while also becoming their Provost.
I am deeply grateful to several senior members of the legal profession who gave informal advice, and especially to Richard Hooper for explaining the background to the important changes in copyright that were implemented in 2014, following the Hooper Review of 2012. It was a pleasure to work with Ross Wilson of Matchlight, Liz Hartford, Lucy Evans and especially the visionary Richard Curson Smith on a documentary about Hughes’s life and work, for broadcast on BBC2 television at the time of this book’s publication.
Andrew Wylie and his team, notably Tracy Bohan, looked after me as no other agency could – especially at the difficult moments. At HarperCollins, Arabella Pike in London and Terry Karten in New York stepped into the breach with courage and passion. I am proud to have joined them. The whole publishing team was superb: special thanks to Joseph Zigmond, Stephen Guise, Jo Walker, copy-editor Peter James and proof-reader Philip Parr for their hawk eyes, and Tom Jarvis for his legal expertise.
Tom Bate’s photography was on the button. Assistance in sorting vast piles of photocopies was provided by Vicky Ironmonger in the early stages and Hester Styles towards the end. My personal assistants in the Provost’s Lodgings at Worcester, first Corinna Hilton and then Ilaria Gualino, served as gatekeepers when I needed to be free from other business. Barrie and Deedee Wigmore gave me the place by the college lake where the book was written in the dawn company of kingfisher and heron. Tom, Ellie and Harry showed their habitual grace and good humour in putting up with their father’s distraction and absence. Paula Byrne read it all, shared it all, argued about it, understood Ted and Sylvia and marriage better than I do.
Index
The page numbers in this index relate to the printed version of this book; they do not match the pages of your ebook. You can use your ebook reader’s search tool to find a specific word or passage.
Notes. Works by Ted Hughes (TH) and Sylvia Plath (SP) appear directly under title; works by others under author’s name. Titles of rank are generally the highest mentioned in the text
‘A’ poems (TH), 452–6
Abelman, Arthur, 348
Abraham Woursell Foundation of New York, 246
Abse, Danny, 302
Adam and the Sacred Nine (TH; poems), 324, 343
Adelaide Festival (1976), 359–63
Adorno, Theodor, 172
Aeschylus: Oresteia, 502, 527–8, 531–2
After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (TH and others; stories), 490, 528
Akhmadulina, Bella, 252
Alaska: Nick in, 383, 405, 415, 420, 493; TH travels to, 399, 405, 420–1, 449, 493–4
Albery Theatre, London, 532
‘Alchemy, An’ (TH; poem), 465
Alliston, Susan: TH’s affair and relations with, 203–6, 210–11, 214, 225–6, 241–2, 341, 365, 511, 524–5; and SP’s death, 211–12, 216, 524–5; death, 214, 370; TH confesses family troubles to, 217; TH reads SP’s poems to, 220; and TH’s relations with Assia, 221–2; quarrel with TH, 226; meets Gerald Hughes, 241; TH visits in University College Hospital, a279–81, 341; funeral, 281; in TH’s ‘Epilogue’ poems in Gaudete, 339–41; ‘Hill Behind Tunis’ (poem), 211; ‘St Martin’s Lane, London’ (poem), 203–4; ‘Samurai’ (poem), 205
Alvarez, Al: on SP’s poetry, 12, 136–7; reviews TH’s poetry, 136, 166–7, 251; and publication of The New Poetry, 179–80; TH borrows flat, 190; praises SP’s poetry, 201, 213, 216; relations with SP, 202, 314; and SP’s death, 211; at SP’s funeral, 213; publishes SP’s poems, 216; reviews Ariel, 239; reviews Crow, 291; and Assia, 315–16, 455; Robin Morgan accuses, 347–8; accuses TH of neglecting SP’s grave, 441; The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, 312–14, 316, 340, 346
Alvarez, Ursula, 314
‘America-bound jet, on its chalky thread’ (TH; poem), 392
Ames, Elizabeth, 304
Ames, Lois, 304; as Sylvia’s official biographer, 8, 353, 440
Amichai, Yehuda: TH invites to 1st Poetry International Festival, 252–3; Assia translates, 269–70; TH praises, 282, 416; friendship with TH, 301; leaves wife for American girl, 403; poetry of personal exposure, 429; TH corresponds with, 476; sees stage adaptation of The Iron Man, 490
Amis, Kingsley, 135
‘Ancient Heroes and the Bomber Pilot, The’ (TH; poem), 102
Anderson, Jane V. (‘Joan Gilling’): brings lawsuit against TH over Bell Jar, 2, 6–8, 11, 358, 430–1, 433–9, 446, 504; death, 441
Andreae, Johann Valentin: The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, 289, 332
Andrew, Prince, Duke of York, 488
Anne, Princess, 465
‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ (TH; poem), 429
‘Apprehensions’ (TH; poem), 519, 523
Aquinas, Thomas, 501
Arb, Siv, 184, 333
Ariel (SP; poems): likened to Wordsworth’s Prelude, 12; TH prepares for publication, 30; TH praises and promotes, 219, 234; publication and reception, 236–9, 244, 254; autobiographical element, 331–2, 355; reviews, 345, 347, 351; as feminist issue, 346; as anti-Daddy tirade, 446; myth in, 473; on hope, 535