‘Ariel’ by Sylvia is in a class apart. She truly became the most phenomenal genius just before she died. In English, there is nothing quite so direct & naked & radiant – yet complicated & mysterious at the same time. As you will see.
(Ted Hughes to János Csokits)1
The children were kept away from the funeral. Aunt Hilda remained in London, looking after them. She stayed for a further month as Ted settled into Fitzroy Road. Frieda was clearly delighted that Daddy had returned. To begin with, the nanny, a Dorset girl called Jean, did very well.
In the middle of March, Ted poured out his heart in a letter to Aurelia. He said that he would never get over the shock of Sylvia’s death and did not want to. He had seen her bitter letters to his parents and could only imagine the content of those to her mother. Aurelia had to understand that it had always been a marriage of two people ‘under the control of deep psychic abnormalities’. By the end, they were literally driving each other mad. But Sylvia’s madness then took the form of insisting on a divorce, which was the last thing she really wanted. The irony of her last days was that they had come to a point where he had thought there was a serious prospect of giving the marriage another chance. She had agreed not to divorce. They had spoken of going away together. But now that she was dead he did not want to be forgiven. If there was an eternity, he would be damned in it: ‘Sylvia was one of the greatest truest spirits alive, and in her last months she became a great poet, and no other woman poet except Emily Dickinson can begin to be compared with her.’2
That greatness was apparent from the black spring-loaded binder that Sylvia had left on her desk. When Sue Alliston and Ted’s Cambridge friend David Ross came round, among Fitzroy Road’s first visitors since the funeral, Ted read out some of the forty-one poems that it contained. Shivers went down Ross’s spine. All three of them saw that Ted had in his hands something of a power far surpassing anything Plath had achieved before. There was no doubting the genius of the work. In response to a condolence letter from Robert Lowell, Ted wrote that Sylvia had written many ‘marvellous’ poems in the weeks leading up to her death. He typed out two of them, ‘Sheep in Fog’ and ‘Words’, for her mentor to see.3 Publication was simply a question of time: how many of them should be released and how soon? He knew that Aurelia for one would be devastated by the anger of some of them.
Meanwhile, David Wevill flew to Canada, where his mother was dying of cancer. In her husband’s absence, Assia started visiting Ted and the children when she finished work. To begin with, she still slept at home in Highbury. She did, however, take the opportunity to read Sylvia’s last journal and her unfinished Devon novel. The portrayal of herself as an ‘icy barren woman’ and her husband as a weak-willed man called Goof-Hopper was not flattering. On 12 March, she went to lunch with Nathaniel Tarn and told him that she was now living in the flat in the Yeats house with Ted and the children, and that Sylvia’s novel, which she hoped Ted would destroy, contained only ‘saints and miserable sinners’ – and a portrait of ‘SP’ herself, ‘full of poems, kicks and kids’.4
She also shared with Tarn her dilemma in deciding between her husband and her lover. The ‘anti-T.H.’ case was, first, his ‘voracious sexual appetite’; secondly, his ‘superstitions about remarriage’; thirdly, his ‘black moods’; fourthly, his ‘lack of contact and showing his work’ (David was always sharing his poetry drafts with her, creating a special intimacy); and fifthly, his ‘puritanism’ (which, unless it is intended to suggest stinginess, is hard to reconcile with the ‘voracious sexual appetite’). The ‘anti-D.W.’ case was that ‘sex is out now: D. is also a puritan and can’t stand the idea of T.H. & A.’; that ‘A. is pregnant by T.H. and D. appears to have known this’; and that ‘D. will not work and make his living like a man.’5 Tarn would have liked to reconcile the married couple, but saw that if their sex life had been poisoned and there was now going to be a child by Ted, then he would be fighting an uphill battle. Nine days later, Assia found an old Polish doctor in Maida Vale, who performed an abortion (illegal at the time). One of her colleagues at the advertising agency, Australian poet Peter Porter, was married to a nurse called Jannice. Assia asked her to visit Fitzroy Road, ‘the ghost house’, the following day, to check that she was not still haemorrhaging.6
Elizabeth Compton, whom Sylvia had befriended in Devon, also visited Ted in Fitzroy Road that month. She remembered him giving her a copy of The Bell Jar, just published and dedicated to her and her husband, and him saying, ‘It doesn’t fall to many men to murder a genius.’ He told her how right it seemed that he was kept awake all night by the wolves howling in Regent’s Park.7
At the end of the month, Ted told Assia that she would have to choose between him and her husband. She chose her husband and they went to Ireland together on his return from Canada. But they fought like cat and dog, and came to the conclusion that the best way forward would be a six-month trial separation. By early May, she was back with Ted, ensconced in Fitzroy Road but far from happy: ‘I’m immersed now in the Hughes monumentality, hers and his.’ She described herself as ‘The weak mistress, forever in the burning shadows of their [Ted and Sylvia’s] mysterious seven years’, and castigated herself for the ‘crazy compulsion’ that drove her to leave her ‘third and sweetest marriage’ and condemn herself to ‘this nightmare maze of miserable, censorious, middle-aged furies, and Sylvia, my predecessor, between our heads at night’. In her diary, she lamented that painful cystitis was interfering with her love-life and noted that Ted had taken to ‘inspecting with pleasure’ a bruise on her left breast.
Yet she watched him work with delight and awe. He would sit cross-legged, at an angle, too big for Sylvia’s desk, mug of tea or sandwich in one hand and pen in the other, writing at speed, never getting a word wrong, ‘His nostrils flared, his hair feathery, and leaping forward like a peacock’s back train in reverse, swaying a little as he writes’.8 Sylvia’s ghost was everywhere: in Ted’s dreams, in his preparation of her work for publication, in photographic form – Rollie McKenna’s image from 1959 – when a copy of The Modern Poets: An American–British Anthology arrived in the post.
Ted, meanwhile, took Sue for a drink in the Lamb and told her that he was going to ‘try with Assia’. He had never in his life found anyone so physically attractive. And there was a degree of creative collaboration in the film scripts they were plotting out. Assia was a rare person and they might save each other. Sue gamely said that his choice was ‘a good thing’, but she felt the rejection like the twist of a knife in a wound. She burnt Ted’s hand with a match or a cigarette.9
Things got complicated when Aurelia announced that she was coming to see her grandchildren and visit her daughter’s grave. Ted prevaricated. Should he sell Court Green and find a cheaper place in the North? Was it a good or bad idea to live close to his parents? Or should he make a completely fresh start somewhere far away – China, for instance? Perhaps he could sub-let the London flat. The nanny had not, after all, worked out: she was spending too much time out of town with her boyfriend. Having dispensed with her services, he took Assia and the children on a tour of the Lake District, keeping an on-the-road narrative of their encounters. Then they went to Yorkshire, so that Aunt Hilda could renew her assistance with childcare. Aurelia’s awkward visit was successfully negotiated, with Assia being kept well out of the way. At the Beacon, in order not to offend the puritan sensibilities of his parents, Ted and Assia slept in separate bedrooms.
Court Green was being looked after by David and Elizabeth Compton. Ted sent them updates of his news, telling of how his parents were worried that the shame of Sylvia’s death would prevent him from ever doing poetry readings in grammar schools again and have him permanently blackballed from getting a knighthood. Knowing that Sylvia had grown close to Elizabeth, he wrote movingly of his own sense of purposelessness without her: ‘When somebody who has shared life with you as much as Sylvia shared it with me, dies, then life somehow dies, the gold standard of it is somehow converted into death, and it is a minute by minute effort to find any sense in life, or any value.’ He had never understood Sylvia’s ‘wish to be with her father, as it appeared in her poems’, but now, ironically, he was coming ‘under the same law’ – having his life determined, that was to say, by someone who was dead.10
In July he put Court Green on the market and an offer was agreed. On an impulse, he decided to put in an offer for a big house called Lumb Bank, down in the valley just below the Beacon. He described it with great enthusiasm in a letter to Gerald in Tullamarine. It was the original Heptonstall village manor house, secluded in a very private valley. The main house had a long frontage and a terrace, with the fields dropping steeply away to a stream at the bottom. There were three substantial living rooms and a long thin kitchen with a pantry. Some other rooms had been converted into a two-car garage with a self-contained flat above. There was a wonderful cellar with stone arches, as in a crypt. The bedrooms had window-seats and a view. There was a great stone barn and a coach house and a coachman’s cottage (currently full of hens). The outside yard was carved into the hillside and there was a walled garden with fruit trees and traditional stone-socket beehives. Then there was another stone cottage, not to mention 17 acres of land – a dozen meadows and some fine woodland. He suggested that Gerald should come back to England so that they could share the place and start farming together.11
He reflected in his improvised journal on whether it would be possible to live in Heptonstall with Assia so soon after Sylvia’s death. He told himself that Ma and Pa would get used to the scandal, if it was a scandal, but Aunt Hilda was the main problem: she was horrified by Assia, jealous, angry, panicked, afraid of what people would say, anxious about the effect on Ted’s reputation and about whether Assia would drain him of cash and leave him bankrupt. She constantly sniped about Assia, ‘with her 3 husbands, her gypsy looks’ and her part in Sylvia’s death.12 The two women fought bitterly, Hilda convinced that she had the best interests of Ted and the children at heart. As for Lumb Bank, Hilda said that it would be nothing more than a white elephant. Could he deal with the local gossip by pretending that Assia was his housekeeper? Perhaps, but it was clear that Assia was never going to be one of the family. She had, he noted in his journal, like Sylvia before her, a ‘great and final hatred of Olwyn’.13 Or was it more that Olwyn had a hatred of any woman who came between her and Ted?
They went to an antique auction in Halifax. One of Ted’s recurring schemes was to become an antiques dealer. He took it as a sign of his recovery from Sylvia’s death that he was feeling once again his ‘fever for pretty possessions’. With Sylvia, periodic retail therapy had a manic quality. With Assia, there was ‘the temper of reality, as never with S.’ Having known poverty, and knowing what she wanted, Assia was, he reassured himself, wary of unnecessary expenditure. He filled page after page of his journal with accounts of his dreams, sometimes mingled with details of his daytime life. So, for example, in August 1963: ‘Letter from Pa to A[ssia]. Bewildered amusement rather than serious shock and dismay. Dreamed – for first time in 2 years – of Crookhill pond, catching big fish with flies that bit me.’14
When he really talked to himself in his journal, he reached his best resolutions with the recognition that what mattered most was giving a happy rural childhood to Frieda and Nick. But to be a good father was not enough. The self-communion by journal-writing was also a way of goading himself to live his own life: ‘all it needs is action’, he writes again and again.15 Inaction – the overbearing sense of the impossibility of doing anything – is the prime mark of depression, and there is a powerful sense in which writing of all kinds was Hughes’s way of staving off depression, private journal-writing being the most overt manifestation of this. Those entries that are most self-analytical seem to come at the moments when he is closest to fearing that he might share the depression of his Uncle Albert and of Sylvia.
For Ted’s thirty-third birthday on 17 August, Assia gave him the stories of Thomas Mann in two volumes, inscribed with the words ‘Love is not love until love’s vulnerable’, a quotation from a powerful love poem called ‘The Dream’ by the depressive Theodore Roethke, whose confessional voice Ted greatly admired.16 He had died from a heart attack in a friend’s swimming pool a few weeks before. By this time, Ted was thinking it would be better if Assia stayed in the London flat. He would see her when he came down to work and she could come to Heptonstall at the weekends. But then the sale of Court Green fell through and the price of Lumb Bank went up, so the plan changed again. What with family tensions and local gossip, Yorkshire wasn’t working. In late September he took the children back to Court Green.
Ted stuck to the idea of a commuting relationship, but from Devon instead of Yorkshire. Olwyn left her job in Paris and moved to Court Green to help with the children. Hilda, ever the supportive aunt, assisted as they settled in. She wrote to reassure Aurelia that all was well: ‘Frieda adjusts rapidly and is quite at home already, Nicky is not so easy and does not like to be put in his cot for some reason, but as soon as Ted holds him he is content. I shall not leave until he is quite used to his new surroundings.’17 The trees were laden with fruit and they busied themselves making damson jam.
It would be two and a half years before Ted and Assia lived together again. Their relationship was largely conducted by correspondence. Ted spilled a great deal of ink reassuring her of his love and calming her down after quarrels and misunderstandings: ‘My sweet Assia, sweetest, sweetnessest, sweetnesistest, your letter came this morning. Stop all your thoughts about manoeuvres – I don’t like manoeuvres. If you just show me what you feel, nothing can go wrong. It’s when you leave me to misinterpret, that things go wrong.’18 By this time, Assia had moved back in with her husband. She was unashamed of loving both men, but jealous when she discovered that Ted had invited Sue Alliston and Tasha Hollis to spend Christmas at Court Green. Olwyn, who was tremendously fond of these two spirited divorced ‘girls’ (her term), remembers it as a Christmas of great warmth and liveliness. Luke Myers was also there, on a four-month stay in England, and Ted was always at his best in the company of his Cambridge friend. Olwyn had the short straw. All Sue and Tash wanted to do was sit around, talking with Ted. They were not interested in cooking or babies, so, despite having the flu, Olwyn had to do all the childcare. One evening Nick was crying and she took a long time to settle him. When she came down, Frieda was crying. ‘Has anyone fed her?’ ‘No.’19
Christmas was not Sue’s only visit to Court Green. She went down for several weekends, both before and after. In early December, she had met Ted’s sister-in-law Joan, who was over from Australia, and also staying for the weekend.20
Assia’s reaction to the discovery that Ted was seeing Sue again was to say that the only revenge she could take would be to go to bed with any attractive man who asked, in order to hurt the sensation of him out of her body.21 Pregnant again, she was feeling especially vulnerable at this time. She miscarried and was briefly hospitalised the following month. In his journal Ted made a brief reference to her miscarriage as he observed the sound of a curlew on a drystone wall, the smell of a stagnant pond and the sight of a rusted tractor. Was it part of his curse that both his first wife and Assia, whom some were already assuming was now his wife, had miscarried?
The desire to appease Assia led him to write about Sue with most uncharacteristic cruelty. ‘As for that Sue – I’ve seen her for the last time if this upsets you. She must have gushed a great gush about Xmas & said & hinted Christ knows what but she’s out.’ If Sue started spreading rumours about their relationship he would ‘never speak to her again’. He ‘could kill’ Sue and Tash for telling people that he was seeing them ‘practically every weekend’. Then he let rip: ‘And she’d stare at you with those horrible lobster eyes – for Christ’ sake Assia Assia Assia – you’re always telling me to believe you why don’t you believe me. I love you & as far as I’m concerned no other women exist.’22
When he was in London three weeks later he had a blazing row with Sue, during which she hit him. She described it in her journal as ‘an impossible and awful evening’. She drafted a letter of apology in which she opened her heart about the ups and downs of their relationship. ‘One year ago, in the morning, Sylvia died,’ wrote Sue in her journal a few days later, on 11 February 1964. She then described a nightmare that had come to her on the exact anniversary of the early morning when she had lain in Ted’s arms as Sylvia was taking her own life. She starts talking to Sylvia: ‘my poems – some of them modelled on yours … Sylvia, why didn’t we meet? I am neither as extreme gifted nor as honest as you.’ Ted, she said, had a ‘stupid propensity to identify me with you’. He had said that Sue spoke as if she were married to him, as if she were the reincarnation of Sylvia. But she knew that she was not Sylvia, that they were ‘completely different’ in their personalities. ‘I am nothing beside you,’ she concludes. ‘I wish you were alive.’23
Why did Ted find it so difficult to choose between Assia and Sue? One reason was that he glimpsed aspects of Sylvia in each of them but knew in his deepest self that neither of them was Sylvia. His infidelity to others was a form of fidelity to her. Another reason was that he had made himself so vulnerable by trying to share everything, exterior life and interior, with Sylvia that he could not imagine making himself so vulnerable again. His only self-defence was to split himself between two women.
Through all these twists and turns, he spent many hours writing. But he felt blocked. At the end of August 1963 he told Luke Myers that all he had managed since Sylvia’s death were some ‘stupid’ book reviews, a radio play and one poem.24 The latter was a skewed elegy for Sylvia. First it was called ‘The Horrors of Music’ and then ‘Primrose Hill’, before he finally settled on ‘The Howling of Wolves’.25 Lying in Sylvia’s bed in Fitzroy Road at night he heard the eerie call from the wolf enclosure at London Zoo. It was like the howl of pain in his own heart. There may also be a covert allusion to the unhappily apt coincidence of the coroner’s inquest on Sylvia’s death having taken place on 15 February, the date of the Roman festival of Lupercalia, with all its associations of Sylvia’s part in the inspiration of his book named for that festival and the whole business of the Lupercal cave where Romulus and Remus, children of Rhea Silvia, were suckled by a she-wolf.26 He revisited the memory of the wolves, making them more like benign guardians, in the poem ‘Life after Death’ in Birthday Letters, where Frieda and Nick become the Romulus and Remus orphans, ‘Beside the corpse of their mother’, nurtured by the wolves. The singing of the wolves was a kind of consolation:
They wound us and enmeshed us
In their wailing for you, their mourning for us,
They wove us into their voices. We lay in your death,
In the fallen snow, under fallen snow.27
The double sense in the ‘wound’ (both embrace and injury) is a stroke of genius.
He kept himself going with children’s stories that connected him to Frieda and Nick. The first book he published after Sylvia’s death was How the Whale Became, the series of sometimes surreal variations on Kipling’s Just So stories that he had written all those years ago on his honeymoon in Benidorm. It received a rave review in the New York Times from the artist, fashion designer and millionaire Gloria Vanderbilt, in which she identified the essence of so much of Hughes’s work for children: ‘These 11 enchanting stories deserve to take their place among the classic fables. They come alive because they are rooted in the fundamental truth of the need for identity, and they illustrate the happiness that comes when we stop pretending to be something we are not and start being ourselves.’28
The next book, published in November 1963, was The Earth-Owl and Other Moon-People, a collection of poems with titles such as ‘The Adaptable Mountain Dugong’ and ‘Moon-Nasturtiums’. The trade paper British Book News announced the volume laconically: ‘This is a curious but enjoyable book. Mr Hughes, one of the most prominent of the younger generation of poets, has written twenty-three poems about the inhabitants of the Moon, most of whom, it appears, are vegetables.’29 Both books were dedicated to Frieda and Nicholas. In 1964 there followed the comic verse narrative Nessie the Mannerless Monster. It was judged favourably by the novelist Robert Nye in the Guardian – ‘Seemingly slap-happy, awkwardly off-rhyming, often very funny verse’ – but the Daily Telegraph was mildly discomposed by its politics: ‘The story is up-to-the-minute, with Nessie being used for “Ban the Bomb” processions before reaching her goal.’30 On first seeing the illustrations, by Gerald Rose, as the book went into production, Ted had a curious dream: ‘making love to the Queen on a carpet in the palace. – This assoc[iation] with the illustrations to Nessie which I saw yesterday, when Nessie, after eating Sir etc, lies on carpet.’31
As a widower with two very young children, it was entirely fitting that Ted should have been writing such things at this time. But it was not until 1967 that he produced a new volume of poetry for adults.32 That was partly because of the devastation of his inner life as a result of Sylvia’s death, but also because he had to spend a lot of time on money-making projects in order to support the children. He tried his hand at a number of film scripts, among them the story that eventually became Gaudete, as well as a farcical treatment concerning an American ornithologist in the Hebrides, and a collaboration with Assia (who was concurrently dramatising Turgenev’s novel First Love as a screenplay) involving a Spanish beauty, a mob of prostitutes in Venice and an encounter with a beautiful art student at the Acropolis.
He was also feeling gloomy about the state of the nation. In the summer of 1963 the bestselling novelist Arthur Hailey made a brief return to England from Toronto, where he was living as an expatriate grown wealthy on his literary earnings. In the September issue of the magazine Saturday Night he published an article excoriating the old country as paralysed, miserable and class-ridden. The magazine received a torrent of outraged response: what right had Hailey to criticise his native land on the basis of one short visit? The editor fought back by inviting ‘one of Britain’s leading young literary lions’ to read Hailey’s article and write a response. The choice was Ted. His article, ‘a pessimistic document, rooted in a depth of feeling conveyed by his exciting style’, was published in the November issue, ‘not to add fuel to the flame but to stir the hearts of those many readers who really do care about Britain’s future’. It was entitled ‘The Rat under the Bowler’.33
‘Can anything definite be said about England and the English at present?’ Hughes asked. First and foremost, Hailey was right about the importance of class. For most of the population, the working class, it was ‘a bad place to be’: ‘They feel oppressed, cheated, exploited.’ For the middle class, England was a place of ‘goodish opportunities, enviable (they think) education, comfortable living, decent self-respect, all the amenities’ – though with a certain uneasiness. As for the tiny ruling class, for them England was a paradise. These basic facts, Ted suggested, were insufficiently acknowledged because the lowest classes have very few spokesmen. When a lower-class boy managed to climb the ladder (usually via a grammar school education), he tended to become transformed and to lose his anger, his drive, his rooted memory of his origins. The ‘angry young man’ (Alan Sillitoe and David Storey in fiction, John Osborne and Arnold Wesker in the theatre) spoke up, ‘but the rest of the country reads their books and plays as most people go to a museum, in amused incredulity’.
The other thing that Hailey was right about, Ted argued, was that the English were a drab race. He recalled his own incredulity at the sheer ‘sooty grime’ of England when he returned from America in 1960. He had originally thought it was confined to South Yorkshire but it seemed to have spread across the whole country. He was depressed by the ‘funeral colour and antique design of the cars’, the grubby clothes and café menus and house façades and newspapers. The perpetual rain and low dark cloud also depressed him ‘after the vast, staggeringly brilliant skyscapes of America’.
The problem was, England had never recovered from the war. Come to think of it, it had never recovered from the Civil War: the country had been divided ever since the battle between Oliver Cromwell and the Crown. The monarchy had been restored in 1660, bringing back from France a ‘hatred and contempt of the lower classes’. Ever since then, the downtrodden masses had been reduced to ‘homicidal rage’ – primal class hatred – which forever emerges ‘two or three drinks down’. England is not really a democracy: ‘the much boasted legal system is, in practice, just as in all other countries, highly adjustable, with different readings for richer or poorer’. The recent Profumo scandal had revealed just how different life was within the ‘establishment’.
‘The Rat under the Bowler’ was Ted’s most explicitly political publication. It clearly positions him, at this point in his life, as a man of the left. How did this positioning relate to his poetic vocation? The answer to that question may come in a passage of the essay in which he argues that the key characteristic of the ruling class, cultivated in their ‘big expensive Public Schools’, was snobbery. All the qualities of the public school ‘gentleman’ were apparent from his manner of speech: ‘The aloof, condescending superiority, the dry formality, the implicit contempt, the routine thought and extinction of feeling – above all, that pistol-shot, policing quality. It is a voice for a purpose, an instrument.’ The purpose of a posh voice was to elicit ‘instant obedience and fear’. This worked well enough when there was an empire – the function of the public school system had long been to mould the character of the men who would administer the colonies – but with the Empire having crumbled, things would have to change at home. He was not optimistic that they would.
Almost exactly a year after Hughes wrote this essay, the Labour Party won the October 1964 general election by the tiniest of majorities, bringing to an end thirteen years of Conservative rule. At 10 Downing Street, the plummy voice of Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home (formerly the Earl of Home) was replaced by the distinctively northern long vowels of Harold Wilson, a grammar school boy from the West Riding. A Yorkshire voice, like Ted’s own. It was the beginning of the end of that upper-class manner of speech which he had nailed so decisively in the essay. There was change ahead, and possibly trouble. The rat was about to be released from beneath the bowler hat.
Listening to Ted’s radio broadcasts – there were more than 300 of them in the course of his life – one notices that his voice becomes if anything more, not less, Yorkshire as he grows older. The longer he was away from the vowel sounds of his home valley, the more he held on to that voice as a way of grounding himself as a poet of the people. The great Caribbean poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite once wrote that he was liberated into writing poetry in his own dialect by hearing the cricket commentator John Arlott on the radio. Arlott’s deep, musical Hampshire burr showed him that one did not have to speak ‘BBC English’ – ‘the Queen’s English’ – in order to have a poetic voice. In this sense Ted Hughes was the John Arlott of English poetry. Listen to the clipped tones of T. S. Eliot reading his Four Quartets, having turned himself into an English gentleman. Then listen to the long vowels of Ted reading the same poems (‘cont – ai – ned in time future’).34 He was the man who democratised poetry by showing that you could publish with Eliot’s Faber and Faber, and be heard on the BBC, while staying true to your own voice, your own people.
For much of 1964, when Assia was living with her husband David in Belsize Park, Ted sent her clandestine love letters addressed to a certain ‘F. Wall Esq’, supposedly a resident in one of the other flats into which their house was divided, but actually a private joke – he was the fly on the wall in her marital home. But most of the time he was in Court Green with Olwyn and the children. He loved fatherhood, what with the excitement of Frieda starting nursery school and Nicky enjoying full-on attention at home. But every now and then he dreamed of escape: he thought of just taking off for a couple of months, ‘going to find the loneliest place’ imaginable, perhaps ‘in the Hebrides or Yugoslavia’.35
Ted’s journal entries are dark at this time. On his thirty-fourth birthday he complained that he was tired. The previous night he had stayed up until four in the morning reading (and not being impressed by) Jung on Sacred Marriage. During the day he had worked on and off on his plays, had some precious moments making up stories for the children, and been to a soirée where there had been talk of politics and theatre. Now he was in reflective mode. The last twelve months had been ‘the worst, most confused, most distracted, most superficial, least productive, most evasive, most desperate’ of his life. He wished them good riddance and said that his only desire for the next year was to summon his willpower and to work. But the struggle went on. Three months later, he returned to the page and scrawled a parenthesis to the effect that the bad year was continuing.36
There was potent imaginative life in his dreams. A typical example has him wandering through a circular library, then handling a precious piece of porcelain in the shape of a woman’s head. He catches his finger in a sharp lock of the figure’s hair and is afraid he will break it. Then suddenly a woman is serving tea, among the shelves. He cups his hand to receive the sugar lumps and finds to his embarrassment that he is cupping her breasts, which are very small, while she explains that he will get tea only if he gives his name, because he is a visitor in the library, not the owner of it. After a series of further twists, in which a vulgar and pushy businessman enters the dream, he finds himself outside a wood, holding a shotgun. It is the wood at Old Denaby, that place of magic in his memory. Two other men are there, the businessman and the ‘fop son’ of the lord of the manor. They stand in for a mysterious ‘other’ who has shadowed him throughout the dream. He tries to shoot some birds, his aim difficult to steady in the high wind. Then he confronts the smouldering fragments of a crashed motorbike and the body of the rider, smashed up, legless, his head almost torn off. It is both the business entrepreneur and the fop, yet it is also neither of them. In another episode of the same dream – or was this another dream merging in his memory? – he is first a rabbit-catcher and then he is hunted by a boar. Analysing the dream, he saw the various figures – entrepreneur, fop, ‘other’ (‘the mysterious element that wants a changeover’) – as dimensions of his own self. The glaringly obvious thing he does not mention in his analysis is that the motorcyclist is manifestly Gerald and that a major aspect of the dream is what he would later call the theme of ‘the rival brothers’.37
Sometimes the work of the night was less complicated: ‘Extraordinarily vivid dream of Sylvia’s return – ecstatic joy of her and me. Love, complete reality. In a hotel room. The next morning, I went to collect her in her room. Her bags were there, a meal that she had had in her room and not eaten – but she was not.’ The next evening he described this as the most vivid dream experience of her that he had ever had. It had stayed with him all day.38 A few weeks later, visiting his parents at the Beacon, he tried to find her spirit by walking to Top Withens in warm autumnal light. He noted every detail in his journal – streams, thorns, tumbling walls, grouse, waterfall noise – but everything seemed ‘shadowy’, so halfway up the hill he turned back.39
He also dreamed of flying. And of being able to make portraits in which all the poets could come alive, except – however hard he tried – for Shakespeare. He dreamed in bright colours.40
He continued to derive income from radio broadcasts, ranging from his talks aimed at schools to such projects as ‘Dogs: A Scherzo’, broadcast on the Third Programme a year and a day after Sylvia’s death and described in the Radio Times as follows: ‘Cases of possession by the spirit of an ancestor or of a historical personage have often been recorded. There is also possession by Heroic Fury and by the Furies. A small and seemingly irrelevant incident may be enough to start any of these. On the other hand, a large relevant incident may trigger off what is merely a case of possession by Dogs.’41
Like all freelance writers, he had to get used to irregular payments and keeping his own accounts as opposed to relying on a regular monthly pay cheque. His tally at this time is both precise in its recording of pounds, shillings and pence, and revealing in its ups and downs. May 1964: £133 8s 11d. June: £165 15s 8d. July: £428 18s 0d (including a £250 Arts Council grant). August: £122 9s 8d (plus £45 10s 0d rent for sub-let of 23 Fitzroy Road). September, down to £45 13s 6d. November was a good month: £634 14s 5d (including £172 for his radio play The Wound). The following February a bad one: £33 5s 6d. March 1965 was equally lean, redeemed only by £87 11s 6d for a broadcast of The Wound on German radio.42
Another project, with no earnings potential, was also keeping him busy at this time. Together with Cambridge friend Danny Weissbort, he started planning the launch of a magazine that would introduce English readers to Modern Poetry in Translation. He was becoming convinced that Eastern Europeans such as Zbigniew Herbert, Miroslav Holub, Czesław Miłosz and Vasko Popa, struggling under the pressure of Soviet occupation, were producing the most exciting new writing of the age. After lengthy planning, the first issue appeared in the autumn of 1965. Ted co-edited the first ten issues with Danny, choosing poems and contributing introductory editorials. The aim, he explained in the opening manifesto, was to honour the original poems by translating as closely as possible, but without pedantry: ‘The type of translations we are seeking can be described as literal, though not literal in a strict or pedantic sense. Though this may seem at first suspect, it is more appropriate to define our criteria negatively as literalness can only be a deliberate tendency, not a dogma.’43
A steady stream of book reviews also occupied him. Just occasionally, there would be a title that provided him with inspiration as opposed to distraction. In the autumn of 1964, the Listener sent him the English translation of Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.44 This became his bible on the subject of everything from sickness-initiation and dreams to the acquisition of shamanic powers to the descent into the underworld to ‘Magical Flight’ to ‘The Three Cosmic Zones and the World Pillar’. It was as great an influence as The White Goddess in shaping the mythic and ‘ecstatic’ strand of his work. Eliade furnished him with a wealth of symbolic interpretations that resonated with his own poetic bestiary: ‘The shaman encounters the funerary dog in the course of his descent to the underworld, as it is encountered by the deceased or by heroes undergoing an initiatory ordeal.’ So much for the dog. As for the horse, it ‘enables the shaman to fly through the air, to reach the heavens … the horse is a mythical image of death and hence is incorporated into the ideologies and techniques of ecstasy’.45
All this was food for thought as he contemplated the images of infernal descent, the real and symbolic deaths, in Sylvia’s poems, not to mention the ecstatic horse-ride of the title poem of her collection. He was pushing Ariel in the direction of Charles Monteith at Faber and Faber, having persuaded Heinemann, who had published The Colossus and The Bell Jar, not to exercise an option on her posthumous work.
Before the release of Ariel there was another editorial task. In November 1963 Faber agreed to publish a selected edition of Keith Douglas, regarded by Ted as the greatest English poet of the Second World War. He provided a fine introduction in which, without knowing it, he rehearsed his future writings about Sylvia. Douglas was cut off in his prime: killed in action during the Normandy invasion, aged just twenty-four. His poetry has an exceptional bluntness, an ‘impatient, razor energy’. He developed rapidly during his brief nine-year poetic career, going at astonishing speed from ‘virtuoso juvenilia’ to a phase in which ‘the picturesque or merely decorative side of his imagery disappears; his descriptive powers sharpen to realism’. He became a ‘renovator of language’, renewing ‘the simplicity of ordinary talk’ and ‘infusing every word with a burning exploratory freshness of mind – partly impatience, partly exhilaration at speaking the forbidden thing, partly sheer casual ease of penetration’. Then in his maturity – a maturity achieved in a brief blaze of creativity in the months leading up to his death – he found the truth of the doomed man in the doomed body. His subject was ‘the burning away of all human pretensions in the ray cast by death’. His late poem ‘Simplify me when I’m Dead’ was the consummation of his genius.46 Every aspect of this account is as apt for Plath as it is for Douglas: from the early development to the peculiar death-ray quality to the culminating poem that envisions the poet’s own end (as in Plath’s ‘Edge’).
The Keith Douglas book was also important because it marked a turning point in Olwyn’s life. She loved Ted so much that she had been prepared to give up her career for him. But residence at Court Green as substitute mother for her niece and nephew was dull indeed, in comparison to her life in Paris. She kept her professional self stimulated by taking an interest in the contractual side of her brother’s publications. She happened to be opening the post one day in late 1963 and found herself looking at the contract from Faber and Faber for the Keith Douglas selection. Being familiar with contractual negotiations for film and stage work, thanks to her job at the Martonplay agency in Paris, she was astonished to see that Ted was to receive a one-off payment of £25 for making the selection and writing the introduction. Furthermore, Faber intended to recoup that sum by deducting it from the royalties payable to the fallen Douglas’s widowed mother. Ted in turn was surprised to learn from his sister that contracts could actually be negotiated. Hitherto, simply grateful to be published, he had just signed whatever contract he was sent. He agreed, however, that he could do better with the Douglas book, so he asked Olwyn to negotiate the contract on his behalf and she achieved some improvements, not least for the widow. So began her career as his agent. During her time in Devon, she rounded up the novelist Jean Rhys, who lived near by, and a couple of other authors, who agreed that she could represent them too. For thirty years, Olwyn would go into battle on her brother’s behalf with publishers, promoters and people requesting quotation rights. She earned a reputation as a fearsome, difficult gatekeeper and negotiator.
Olwyn also recognised the particular importance of Keith Douglas’s poetry to both Ted and Sylvia. She thought back to a beautiful summer’s day at the Beacon when Ted and Sylvia lay on a rug in the field beyond the low garden wall, engrossed in the edition of Douglas’s collected poems that had been published in 1951: ‘Two poets communing with a precursor whose work had many affinities with their own’. She always saw this ‘as an image of Sylvia and Ted’s central shared allegiance to poetry’. She reckoned that ‘Douglas’s skills and the presentiment of his death that haunted him must have deeply affected Sylvia’. Olwyn believed that his poem ‘The Sea Bird’, ‘with its dazzling flight and doom’, mirrored Sylvia’s ‘inmost fears and her own soaring achievement and end’.47
It was no coincidence that Hughes was preparing the Ariel manuscript for Faber at the same time as the Keith Douglas poems. Nor that this was also the moment when he wrote a review of Poet Laureate C. Day Lewis’s edition of The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, another war poet whose slender body of work developed in astonishing leaps and bounds in the few months before his premature death, combining technical innovation with a sense of words as weapons and an ‘extraordinary detachment from the agony’ which allowed his work to reveal both ‘immediate suffering and general implication, as nobody else did’. Nobody else before Douglas, before Plath, that is to say.48
In October 1963 he had released ten of Sylvia’s late great poems, including ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘Thalidomide’ and ‘Daddy’, to the magazine Encounter, introducing them with a brief eulogy signed ‘T.H.’ and ending with a poignant paragraph in which he wrote of how people who met Sylvia tended to be either ‘alarmed or exhilarated by the intensity of her spirits’. ‘Her affections were absolute,’ he continued. ‘Once she had set her mind to it, nothing was too much trouble for her.’ Her every action was of a piece with ‘the lovely firm complexity of design, the cleanly uncompromising thoroughness that shows in her language’. Above all, in ‘spite of the prevailing doom evident in her poems, it is impossible that anybody could have been more in love with life, or more capable of happiness, than she was’.49
The Encounter selection was a bold harbinger of what was to come. Eighteen months later, on 11 March 1965, Ariel was published by Faber and Faber, in a yellow dust jacket printed in a bright pattern of blue, black and red. Ted was initially shocked by the design, but it grew on him. ‘What an insane chance’, he wrote to Richard Murphy on the eve of publication, ‘to have private family struggles turned into best-selling literature of despair and martyrdom, probably a permanent cultural treasure.’50 A further poignancy came from the way that the book seemed as much a part of him as of Sylvia: his other titles were promoted on the flap of the dust jacket and his name was on the copyright page.
The typescript of forty-one poems which Sylvia had left on her desk at the time of her death, with a dedication ‘for Frieda and Nicholas’, had four title pages. Below the clean one marked ‘ARIEL and other poems by Sylvia Plath’ were two others, in which she experimented with other titles: ‘The Rival’, then ‘A Birthday Present’, then ‘Daddy’. It was clearly a work in progress, subject to revision. Ted had also read the nineteen poems that Sylvia had written after its completion, and he knew that they were some of her best. He was also aware that some of the poems in the typescript would have been very offensive to living people, such as the actor Marvin Kane and his wife Kathy, who were portrayed so savagely in ‘Lesbos’, and his own Uncle Walt, who was described in ‘Stopped Dead’ as ‘pants factory Fatso, millionaire’.51 He accordingly left out thirteen poems from Sylvia’s prepared manuscript and added in ten others instead – ‘Sheep in Fog’, which he hugely admired, near the beginning of the collection and the remaining nine at the end. This meant that the book concluded not, as the typescript had done, with the uplifting promise of spring in ‘Wintering’, but with the death-ray of the poems of Sylvia’s very last days, such as ‘Contusion’ (‘The rest of the body is all washed out … The mirrors are sheeted’) and ‘Edge’ (‘The woman is perfected. / Her dead // Body wears the smile of accomplishment’).52
Among the omissions were some poems that, if read autobiographically, did not reflect well on Ted himself, notably ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ (‘It was a place of force’) and ‘The Jailor’ (‘I have been drugged and raped … Lever of his wet dreams’).53 When these editorial decisions became apparent upon his publication of Plath’s collected poems in 1981, Hughes was vilified. The feminist line was that the husband was trying to control the posthumous voice of the woman for whose suicide he had been responsible. This argument was not entirely fair, given that he had already published some of the rejected poems, including ‘The Jailor’, in Encounter. The counter-argument would be that he and Sylvia had collaborated on each other’s work and relied on each other’s judgement during their marriage, and Ted was merely continuing this process after her death.54
Ted knew that there was more work to be done in securing Plath’s permanent reputation. In about four years’ time, he told Murphy, he would prepare a complete edition. For now, Ariel was enough to honour her memory and satisfy himself in his role of custodian of her work as well as her children. At publication time, he gave an interview to the Guardian, telling of how he and Sylvia were ‘like two feet, each one using everything the other did’. Their partnership was all-absorbing; ‘There was an unspoken unanimity in every criticism or judgment we made.’55
Prior to this, he wrote a detailed note introducing the volume in the Bulletin of the Poetry Book Society, which had made it a ‘Spring Choice’. ‘The truly miraculous thing about her’, he wrote, ‘will remain the fact that in two years, while she was almost fully occupied with children and house-keeping, she underwent a poetic development that has hardly any equal on record, for suddenness and completeness.’ He dated the great leap forward to the birth of her first child and in this sense it was fitting that Ariel began with the wonderfully gentle ‘Morning Song’, written for baby Frieda. But he did not shy away from the toughness of the collection: ‘She was most afraid that she might come to live outside her genius for love, which she also equated with courage, or “guts”, to use her word.’ Ariel had guts. It was unlike any other poetry. It was Sylvia. ‘Everything she did was just like this, and this is just like her – but permanent.’56
He dispatched copies of the book to his friends and mentors. Richard Murphy was deeply moved and sent an elegy for Sylvia in return. In the covering letter with the copy sent to his old teacher John Fisher, Ted generously acknowledged a chain of influence: ‘Nobody else writes like that or ever has done. If any of it is thanks to me, as it may be a little bit, then some of it is thanks to you.’57 He then copied out a story by three-year-old Nick about a wolf who lived inside a giant mouse and drank its blood and drowned and was shot by a hunter and another wolf was then shot by a shark with a sun between its teeth and the second wolf was turned to ice and the mouse was turned to stone and a man came with a big sword and chopped its head off. Nick had recently met his Uncle Gerald, who had purchased two antique swords, one to leave at Court Green and the other to take back to Australia. Ted was hinting to John Fisher that Sylvia’s, and his own, creative juices had flowed into the next generation.
Al Alvarez in the Observer hailed the publication of Ariel as a major literary event. His review was entitled ‘Poetry in Extremis’.58 It drew on a radio talk he had given on the BBC shortly after Sylvia’s death. He had spoken there of the bravery of her writing, of the terrible unforgiving quality of ‘Daddy’, and of how the poems written in her last months tapped the ‘roots of her own inner violence’ (‘violence’, that word which was so often applied to Ted’s work). ‘Poetry of this order’, he had ended the talk, ‘is a murderous art.’59
Meanwhile in the Spectator, a magazine with especially influential book pages, Ariel was reviewed alongside Robert Lowell’s latest poetry collection, For the Union Dead, under the headline ‘Poets of the Dangerous Way’. The reviewer was none other than M. L. Rosenthal, who had coined the phrase ‘confessional poetry’ with regard to Lowell’s Life Studies. For Rosenthal, the true confessional poet embodies the trauma of the age within their own psychological torment. ‘If a poet is sensitive enough to the age and brave enough to face it directly,’ he wrote, with regard to such poems as ‘Daddy’ and ‘Fever 103°’, ‘it will kill him through the exacerbation of his awareness alone.’60 The use of the male pronoun was unfortunate in the context of Ariel, but Rosenthal was astute in predicting that Plath’s death would become the stuff of legend. Between them, Alvarez and Rosenthal established a connection, which has never been broken, between Plath’s last poems and her suicide. The link was solidified in a review-essay of exceptional power by the brilliant young Cambridge critic George Steiner. Its title took a phrase from ‘Lady Lazarus’: ‘Dying is an Art’.61 Its content dwelt heavily on the Holocaust imagery of Sylvia’s poetry – Steiner, of Viennese Jewish descent, wrestled throughout his writing life with the question of what it meant to create poetry ‘after Auschwitz’.
The 3,000 copies of the first edition of Ariel sold out in less than a year. Hardback reprints followed, and in 1968 two paperback runs of 10,000 copies each. By the Seventies, the slim collection had come to be regarded as one of the century’s most significant volumes of poetry, its impact on a par with that of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
The first American edition appeared in the summer of 1966, with a foreword in which Plath’s genius was hailed by no less a figure than Lowell himself. ‘Her art’s immortality is life’s disintegration,’ he wrote. In her ‘last irresistible blaze’, her ‘appalling and triumphant fulfillment’, she broke the bounds of tradition in poems that were ‘playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder’.62 Newsweek picked up on that phrase for the title of its review, while Time, the other weekly magazine with a circulation in many millions, reprinted the whole of ‘Daddy’ and published a review entitled ‘The Blood Jet is Poetry’ (a line from ‘Kindness’), which begins with the uncompromising sentence ‘On a dank day in February 1963, a pretty young mother of two children was found in a London flat with her head in the oven and the gas jets wide open.’63 For all that the majority of critics in the more highbrow outlets concentrated on the brilliance, but also the shocking quality, of the poems themselves, it was this image combined with the venom of ‘Daddy’ that laid the ground for the cult of Plath, what Ted called the Sylvia Plath fantasia.
Eight days before Faber and Faber ushered Ariel into the world, Assia Wevill gave birth to a daughter, Alexandra Tatiana Elise, to be known as Shura.64 On the birth certificate, the father was named as Edward James Hughes, author, of Court Green, North Tawton, Devon.