The day after St Valentine’s in February 1965, Ted Hughes scribbled one of his journal notes. That day, as on so many days, he had struggled to clear a few hours for poetry writing. He had fought for fifteen years to get time for himself, but was still ‘losing heavily’. The best moments were those when he was alone in the quiet, solid thatched house. Or when it was just him and the children. Did that mean that to be a writer one had to live alone? But how could he live alone when he was a father and when he so loved the company, the cooking and the lovemaking of women? He was beginning to feel that his words were slowly coming alive again, as they had not since Sylvia’s death. But the Muse had not yet awakened. He was still processing his loss. Three nights after the second anniversary of her suicide he had a ‘terrible grief dream about Sylvia, long and unending. In a house, large stone, on the moor’s edge – the garden was also a cemetary [sic]’.1
The strain of what he described as his ‘domestic game of chess’2 was showing. Gerald, in England for an extended visit over the Christmas and New Year period, found his brother ‘in a poor state, mentally and physically: he complained of feeling unwell, which was very unlike him’.3 Ted was still close to Sue Alliston. He took Gerald to meet her in London. ‘You met Joan,’ Ted said. ‘I like things to be symmetrical.’ She found Gerald ‘large and warm’, but uncomfortable in the London literary environment. ‘He uses bits of Ted’s vocabulary, is uneasy with it, uses it like a new toy,’ she noted in her journal. ‘Tells stories at great length … He seemed somewhat simple at times – (not simple in a derogatory way) and very knowledgeable about archaeology and such things.’4 Gerald told Sue that he was going back via Bombay and that he hoped to come to England again, but Australia was his home.
With Sue, there was a (relatively) pain-free transition from lovers to friends – ‘OK,’ she wrote, ‘there’s a lot Platonic in our relationship.’5 The relationship with Assia was more complicated, especially after the birth of Shura. She told her friends that she was sure her daughter was Ted’s. Olwyn’s memory is that Ted told her that he could not be sure that he was Shura’s father, but that he would treat her as if he were. Always jealous of anything that bound Ted more closely to another woman than her, Olwyn convinced herself that the baby girl had the facial features of David Wevill. Assia was still living with David, who undertook much of the baby care. Though emotionally absorbed in her newborn child, she was not the earth-mother type. Friends were impressed with David’s fathering and somewhat startled when Assia took them aside and whispered that Shura was really Ted’s.
They were engaged on a literary collaboration by correspondence. Like Sylvia before her, Assia was a talented artist. She and Ted worked on a book for which he would write poems and send them to her. She would then send back illustrations. The plan was to have a poem and a drawing for each card in a pack of playing cards. So, for example, for the three of hearts Assia drew three maidens dancing. The royal cards would each be a figure out of history, myth or the Bible. Queen Victoria was the Queen of Clubs, Nebuchadnezzar the King of Hearts, Don Juan the Knave of Hearts.6 The title would be ‘A Full House’. The scheme was eventually abandoned, though Ted revived a version of the idea many years later, giving the title to a cycle of poems in which the royal cards were made to represent Shakespearean characters.7
Financial prospects improved with the news that the German Embassy had established an annual three-month residency in Germany for an English poet, in honour of T. S. Eliot, and Charles Monteith had persuaded the awarding committee that Ted should be the first holder of the post, which would commence the following year. In his thank-you letter to Monteith, Ted mentioned that he was getting to work on a selection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry for Faber. It was three years before this was published. He was deeply drawn to her vision of ‘final reality, her own soul, the soul within the Universe’, a nameless vision of something deep, holy, terrible, ‘timeless, deathly, vast, intense’.8 This is Emily as poetic big sister to Sylvia.
In June, leaving little Shura with the long-suffering David Wevill and a nanny, Assia accompanied Ted to the Festival dei Due Mondi (Festival of the Two Worlds) in Spoleto, an ancient town on a foothill of the Apennine Mountains. Stephen Spender had asked Ted if he would like to travel with him, but Ted explained that he was going with ‘a friend’, so he would drive down in leisurely fashion and return via Germany, to improve his language before taking up his residency. Founded by the composer Gian Carlo Menotti in 1958, the annual Spoleto event had become one of the great arts festivals, in which Europe met the Americas and practitioners from every field of the creative arts came together in the Umbrian sunshine. The world’s top poetic talent was there: the father of modernism, Ezra Pound, about to turn eighty, his face a map of trenched wrinkles, in Italian exile after his long imprisonment in an American mental hospital following his fascist collaboration in the war; Pablo Neruda from Chile, embodiment of communism at its most idealistic; Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Ted’s contemporary, the rising star of Russian poetry, voice of the Khrushchev cultural thaw and now, in the more difficult era of the crackdown on dissent following the deposition of Khrushchev, agitating for the release of fellow-poet Joseph Brodsky from his sentence of hard labour in the far north. Pound spoke to no one. Assia, who enjoyed the food and the fact that the trip was expenses paid, said that old Ezra looked ‘hand-dressed and about to die like a new magnolia’.9 Ted described him as a ‘resurrected Lazarus’ with ‘dead button eyes’. Neruda, meanwhile, ‘read torrentially for about 25 minutes off a piece of paper about 3" by 4". Then he turned it over, and read on.’10
After Spoleto, Assia returned to her husband and her advertising job in London, where she was achieving considerable success. Ted went back to Court Green. He was beginning to think that it was time for them to live together. He desired and needed her. But there would have to be ground rules in order to protect their work. He proposed separate bedrooms, no sleeping together during the week, no visitors before seven in the evening, a banquet to usher in their lovemaking at the end of each five nights’ abstinence, and ‘Constant music’.
In order to prepare her for the dullness of life in the country, he then told her what a typical day in his life was like. Up at half past eight, to open the post and stare blankly at his correspondence for half an hour. Phone call from Doris Lessing who requires advice on her cottage. Ring builder and get price for new windows for Doris. Get down to work at ten o’clock. But it is not the proper work of poetry. He has to type up his next talk for BBC Schools (‘about how poetry is crime, and why theft is poetical, with poetical illustrations’). Write to Stephen Spender, who is on a grant committee. Write to Exeter University, returning a contract so that he could receive the fee for a poetry reading he has done. Write to the editor Donald Hall about the American edition of Ariel. At twelve-thirty, prepare a goat-meat stew for himself and the children. Go to post. Then to the bank and to pay for shoe repair. Take the cat to the vet ‘to have its sore tail chopped off’ (half an hour wasted in the waiting room). Return, put on the stew, start writing to Assia, fetch Frieda from nursery school. Look despairingly at pile of still-unanswered letters from Faber, Heinemann, the British Council, the Arts Council and others. At five-thirty, fetch the cat from the vet. Another day gone without any time for real writing. ‘Tomorrow & tomorrow & tomorrow’, he concludes in the vein of Macbeth’s lament that life creeps on in petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.11
Later in the summer, he did a poetry reading on a miserably wet day at the Edinburgh Festival, then visited the Beacon on the way back south. Edith’s health was in sharp decline. Ted feared that his parents could no longer cope on their own and would have to be moved down to Devon. Olwyn was getting restless. After the many months of childcare in the remote countryside, she wanted to go to London to start her literary agency. Ted came up with a scheme to move Edith and Bill into Court Green while he took the children to Ireland for a few months – with or without Assia and Shura. Richard Murphy offered his cottage in Cleggan, since he was off to America for a few months. Aurelia Plath was not pleased to hear that she would have to postpone her next visit to her grandchildren. ‘Bomb #1 Dec 1965’, she inscribed in thick black marker pen on the letter in which Ted broke the news.12 The letter made no mention of Assia, let alone Shura.
Ireland was delayed by various complications, including William Hughes’s attempts to sell his shop and a period when Edith was in hospital. By this time, Murphy had found a much better house than his own cottage: Doonreaghan in Cashel, a beautiful and remote area of Connemara on the far west coast. Ted so liked the sound of it that he started paying rent in December, even though it was far from certain exactly when he would be able to leave Devon and go there.
This time Ted did not want Elizabeth Compton to have access to Court Green. He suspected that she might be reporting back to Aurelia. So he asked some new friends to help his parents settle in. They were Trevor and Brenda Hedden, whom he had met through the Comptons. They lived 3 miles outside North Tawton at a place called Bondleigh, in open countryside. Trevor was studying as a mature student in Exeter, training to be a drama teacher. He felt that as a result of army service he had missed out on the chance to sow his youthful wild oats, so he was enjoying student life in the newly relaxed age of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the contraceptive pill. Brenda was nine years younger than Trevor and was influenced by his wider life experiences. She was a social worker who had studied psychodynamics. This sparked the interest of Ted, who had been fascinated by psychological theory ever since his youthful immersion in Jung.
In February 1966 Assia finally told David that she had made her choice. The marriage was over and she was going to live with Ted. She and Shura would go to Ireland with him. The night before they left, Ted went for a riverside walk alone. He clambered down an escarpment where the stream that he had been following joined the main river, and as he came down he saw salmon going upstream, leaping, shaking themselves in the air. On the riverbank he found himself ‘completely covered with milt and spawn from these leaping salmon’.13 From that night on, he claimed, his dreams were always of salmon instead of pike. Was Sylvia the devouring pike of the dream the night before their wedding and Assia a salmon running for home, drawing Ted to Ireland, the place where he always dreamed of finding peace?
Doonreaghan lived up to expectations. Light, spacious and well fitted, it nestled beneath a green hill and opened on a magnificent vista of the Atlantic. Ted could gaze across the ocean and imagine Sylvia’s spirit looking back from the shoreline thousands of miles away on the other side. The bay was sheltered and the air surprisingly warm. Here, for a few sweet weeks, they finally became a family. Ted was at last writing what he truly wanted to write, instead of merely what he had to write to earn some cash. Assia sketched. To the children, it was paradise. Frieda, who had the luxury of her own bathroom, made a little house for the one toy she had brought, her puppet Percy Panda. Her painting and drawing, Ted told Aurelia in a happy letter, were growing ‘like magic’.14 Nick loved the outdoors, especially the seashore. Soon Ted was teaching him to fish. And both children were very excited to be sharing their home with a new little sister. They celebrated her first birthday and Ted wrote a poem for her.
They hoped to stay on longer, but the winter lease ran out at the end of March, so they moved up to Cleggan, where Richard Murphy had found them a farmhouse a mile down the road from his own cottage. They dined regularly with Murphy, and had visits from Barrie Cooke, artist and fisherman, and his wife. Ted was hatching his Crow, as well as gathering and polishing a range of his other work. He knew that Faber were waiting for a third book. He planned to take up the German award later in the year. While he was in Ireland, some further good news arrived: thanks to the Abraham Woursell Foundation of New York, Ted was offered a five-year bursary from the Philosophy Department of Vienna University, amounting to the equivalent of two-thirds of a professor’s salary, a princely £1,500 per year (the equivalent of £25,000 or $38,000 in 2015). His sole duty would be to write poetry. Residence was not required. This was a much better prospect than commitment to a three-month residency in Germany.
The dream of making a permanent home in Ireland was ended by news from Court Green. Olwyn had finally had enough of domestic duties. She was off to London to start her agency. Edith’s health was getting worse and worse, with frequent periods of being bedridden and several stays in the hospital in Exeter. Towards the end of May, Ted and Assia took all three children to Devon. By this time, Brenda Hedden had given up work in order to look after her daughter Harriet, who was born the previous month.
Now, for the first time, Assia was living in Sylvia’s house. Bill and Edith accepted that Shura was Ted’s child, but they could not stand Assia. Their constant complaint to Trevor and Brenda Hedden was that she had seduced Ted; because of her three previous marriages, they called him ‘Edward the fourth’.15 There was a perpetual bad atmosphere. As a veteran of the Great War, Bill Hughes had a visceral dislike of the Germans. He found Assia’s upper-class English accent phoney in the extreme, and refused to speak to her. This was ironic, given her Jewish background: she, like him, was a survivor. Writing to her sister in Canada, Assia complained that Ted’s father even averted his eyes when she put a plate of food in front of him. Sometimes they resorted to eating separately, Assia with Shura and Ted with his father, Frieda and Nick.
Visitors sometimes helped to relieve the tension in the house. Alan Sillitoe and his wife Ruth Fainlight were loyal as ever. Sylvia’s journals had often been at their funniest and liveliest when she wrote – sometimes cruelly – about people. So too with Ted’s. He was as hungry for human experience as he was for natural. On a day trip to Dartmoor with Assia and the Sillitoes (an outing marred by Frieda being car sick), he noted not only a lizard ‘trickling down into a clump of heather’ (the freshness of the description coming from the choice of verb), but also a ‘bus-load of post-menopause women – hats like whipped cream walnuts, their fussy lavenders, pinks, lilacs and browns. Silver hair wiring and whiskering … their faces anxious thoughtfulnesses’.16
Ted and Assia managed to escape for one brief return visit to Murphy in Cleggan, but most of the time they felt imprisoned by the demands of looking after Ted’s parents as well as the children. Ted turned his back on the civil war in the house, spending most days working in his writing hut in the garden, or fishing or playing snooker with friends, or visiting the Heddens. Assia, who had a history of depression and suicide attempts, began voicing dark thoughts. She could not help comparing herself with Sylvia. She wallowed in the manuscript notebooks among the Plath papers and typed a bitter journal piece about her strong sense of Sylvia’s ‘repugnant live presence’ – though elsewhere in her journal she wrote generously of Sylvia’s great literary gifts.
Finding the phrase ‘work at femininity’ in one of Plath’s lists of resolutions and things to buy (‘including a bathrobe, slippers and nightgown’), Assia asked ‘Were the elbows really sharp? the hands enormous and knuckled? or is this my imaginary shape-giving to the muscular brain, my envy of her splendid brilliance?’17 She wrote a will and stole some pages of Plath manuscripts, which she sent to her sister with the information that they would fetch a good price if the time came when Shura had to be supported. She also wrote a cheque for over a thousand dollars, which would pay for an airfare to Canada and the initial expenses of looking after a little motherless child.18
She could equally well feel overwhelmed with passion for Ted. In one extraordinary journal entry, she wrote of how his generosity and affection were ‘almost unsupportable’. His kindness and love reached such luxuriance that she would ‘buckle over, speechless’. She imagined his writing hut smoking ‘with the temperature of his presence in it’. She had ‘huge fits of love and admiration for him’. But it was two parts that and one part ‘memory of Ruthless’. And then she voiced a hymn to his beauty, manifestly imitating the style of the Sylvia journals in which she had been immersing herself:
There he is in his white shirt scything in the glossy Rousseau jungle. In sweet sweat. There he is coming down the orchard in his plaid shirt carrying something. His superb legs and thighs – the beautiful Anatomical Man. One of God’s best creations. Is God squandering him on me? He carries so many perfections that I would in all truth not begrudge him an affair or two with other women – as long as he remains loyal to me. I would suffer bitterly – but this in all truth is the only due thanks I could give him for all his grace. He ventures everything. His lovely, long risks of grasp. Sometimes little yaps of greed, but all accounted for. He is one of God’s best creatures. Ever. Ever.19
*
In May 1967 Faber and Faber published the mysteriously entitled Wodwo. Though presented in their usual format for poetry, it was in fact an unusual hybrid work, with poetry at the beginning and end, and five short stories and Ted’s 1962 radio play, The Wound, in the middle. Dedicated to his mother and father, perhaps in the expectation that Edith would not be around for many more years to have another work dedicated to her, it began with an author’s note explaining that the stories and the play should be understood as ‘notes, appendix and unversified episodes of the events behind the poems, or as chapters of a single adventure to which the poems are commentary and amplification’.20 Either way, the book should be read as a unity. Following the contents list, there was an epigraph which explained the title (though only to readers versed in Middle English): ‘Sumwhyle wyth wormeȝ he werreȝ, and wyth wolves als, / Sumwhyle wyth wodwos, þat woned in þe knarreȝ’ – this is Sir Gawain, encountering an array of monsters as he crosses ‘the wilderness of Wirral’ in his quest for the Green Knight, in the poem that Hughes had especially admired when taking the medieval paper at Cambridge. The wodwo was a hairy wild man of the woods. In the title poem, written in early 1961 and printed as the last in the collection, he noses around – ‘turning leaves over / Following a faint stain on the air to the river’s edge’ – like an adult version of one of the creatures in Ted’s children’s tales. He begins by asking who he is and where he belongs, concludes by deciding that he is ‘the exact centre’ of things, though he doesn’t really know what or where his ‘roots’ are, so he’ll just have to go on looking.21
Ted explained to his old schoolteacher John Fisher that Wodwo was a kind of completion of The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal, the end of the first phase of his poetic career. He said that it had a hidden narrative but did not say what that narrative was. To János Csokits, an exiled Hungarian known to Olwyn from her Paris days and now broadcasting for Radio Free Europe, he was more forthcoming. Csokits had sent him a detailed critical analysis of what he saw as the strengths and weaknesses of the book. Ted sent a response. The collection was a ‘transit camp’ on the way to the next big thing (which was Crow). The poems were ordered not in chronology of composition but so as to suggest an ‘undisturbed relationship with the outside natural world’ being disrupted by a call ‘from a subjective world’. The theme of the book, as of his own life ‘from 1961–2 onwards’, was ‘this invitation or importuning of a subjective world, which I refuse’. ‘The Rain Horse’, the first story in the prose sequence in the middle of the book, was ‘the record of the importuning, and the refusal’.22 That ‘refusal’ led to a ‘mental collapse into the condition of an animal’. The final short story, ‘The Suitor’, was written in January 1962, ‘almost under dictation’. ‘The Suitor is me,’ he told Csokits, ‘the man in the car is me, the girl is Sylvia, the Stranger is death, and the situation turns me into an animal – as Gog. Also, the girl is my spirit of light, my Ophelia.’ The poems in the latter part of the book were ‘poems after the event’. His overall feeling was that the book was too subjective. There was an awful lot of himself in it, which is probably why it was unsatisfactory. But he hoped that the ordering of the poems would lead him back to the ‘objective world’ where his talent really belonged.23
The ‘event’ he has in mind seems to be the moment of shamanic initiation that he had read about in Eliade. As with his discovery of Graves’s White Goddess, Eliade gave him a context and a history for ideas that he had evolved, if inchoately, in his own thinking and writing. ‘Both spontaneous vocation and the quest for initiation’, he read in Shamanism in 1964, ‘involve either a mysterious illness or a more or less symbolic ritual of mystical death, sometimes suggested by a dismemberment of the body and renewal of the organs.’24 Having undergone this painful process, the shaman descends to the underworld and emerges as a healer and sage. Thus the ‘poems after the event’ in Part Three of Wodwo use a symbolic and quasi-mythological apparatus – Adam and Eve with the serpent, Gog, a rat and the wodwo – to penetrate a black inner world. This is the mode that anticipates the Crow poems on which he was continuing to work as Wodwo went through the production process at Faber.
Ted certainly thought he was wrestling with his shamanic destiny. But the other ‘event’ with which he was wrestling was Sylvia’s death. The extraordinary thing about his account of the story ‘The Suitor’ is that it makes Sylvia into his ‘Ophelia’ – the girl who goes mad and kills herself because her Hamlet has rejected her – despite the fact that it was written well before his affair with Assia and its consequences.
The self-analysis of Wodwo prompted by János Csokits also hints at the struggle between Hughes’s ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ styles. By this account, the poems in Part One are ‘objective’ fresh looks at things in the world, in the style he had made his own in The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal, whereas those in Part Three are more closely bound to his inner self. There is an element of truth in this. Among the poems in Part One are cleverly angled and innovatively worded responses to thistles (the first poem, and one of the best), crabs, grass flashed by wind, Beethoven’s death mask, a bear and a jaguar – a ‘second glance’ at his totemic animal, written in front of the jaguar cage in the zoo in Regent’s Park. Equally, Part Three is more subjective in the sense of using more autobiographical elements: not only the wolves heard from the zoo as he sat writing on Sylvia’s bed in Fitzroy Road, but also little Frieda calling out ‘Moon!’ and his father sitting in his chair unable to forget the ‘gunfire and mud’ of the Western Front, ‘Body buffeted wordless, estranged by long soaking / In the colours of mutilation’.25
It is not, however, the case that the objective and subjective voices of Hughes are neatly split between the different parts of the collection, nor that his ‘brilliant physical particularity’ is associated with one voice and his ‘oracular rhetoric’ with the other.26 And although the title poem strongly suggested the idea of a quest for identity, no ordinary reader would be able to discern a narrative progression through Wodwo. The critics certainly didn’t. ‘What is this “single adventure”?’ asked the poet Anthony Thwaite in some exasperation with respect to the author’s note, as he reviewed the collection anonymously in the Times Literary Supplement.27 Derwent May in the London Times thought that ‘This wodwo haunting the countryside is a good, if whimsical, symbol for Mr Hughes as poet,’ but he couldn’t quite decide what the wodwo was questing for.28 ‘I’m not sure I properly understand Hughes,’ wrote his old Cambridge contemporary C. B. Cox, in a review that astutely began from Ted’s remark that ‘when he first read D. H. Lawrence he felt as if he was reading his own autobiography’. Wodwo is full of Lawrentian language and includes an explicit homage in the form of ‘Her Husband’, a poem about a coal-blackened miner coming home to his wife.29
Elsewhere, Cox described the collection as undoubtedly the most important poetry book of the year.30 An element of puzzlement did not stand in the way of critical acclaim. Typical plaudits were ‘Hughes’ poetry is the real thing,’ ‘the best British poet since Dylan Thomas’, and, from Alvarez, ‘he is the most powerful and original poet now writing in this country’.31 The most insightful review, entitled ‘As deep as England’, was by the canny poet and critic Donald Davie, in the Guardian. He focused particularly on the short story ‘Sunday’, relating it to the ‘remarkable poem’ (unknown to him, one of the very few written after Sylvia’s death) ‘Song of a Rat’. ‘The wolves which hunt through the boy narrator’s mind,’ Davie wrote of ‘Sunday’, ‘the rats, the hawks, the otters and crabs – all the predatory and preyed-upon beasts which figure in the other poems – are projections of the predatory violence which is the only guise through which the English tradition is mediated to the poet through his war-shattered father.’32
Though Ted was well pleased with the reception of Wodwo, he was acutely conscious that almost all the poems in it had been written before Sylvia’s death. The real test of his development would be the Crow project – which kept growing but from which he kept being distracted.
Since Hughes was one of Faber and Faber’s leading poets, and Wodwo was his first book for adults in seven years, his publishers mounted a strong publicity campaign. Together with the good reviews, this ensured that he was the centre of attention during the first Poetry International Festival in London in July 1967. The festival was indeed his brainchild, hatched in collaboration with the theatre director Patrick Garland. Since the previous autumn, Ted had been busy inviting major overseas poets, ranging from Lowell in America to Zbigniew Herbert in Poland to Israel’s leading poet, Yehuda Amichai. The offer, laid out on Poetry Book Society notepaper, was not munificent: five pounds a day for the five days of the festival, up to fifty pounds for travel expenses and, if the funding could be scraped together, a further fee of perhaps forty pounds. Funding constraints meant that Ted had to scale back his ambitions. ‘The Poetry Festival has lost a lot of feathers,’ he told Richard Murphy. ‘I was all set to cram London with geniuses, when John Lehmann etc [that is, the management board of the Poetry Book Society] decided I ought to be restrained – evidently. So the festival could only be five foreigners, five Americans, five English. It was those five English I was trying to avoid.’33 It wasn’t the particular English poets he objected to, but rather the fact that he did not want so many Anglophone voices. One of his main aims was to showcase the Eastern European poets whose work he and Danny Weissbort were publishing in their magazine Modern Poetry in Translation. He was disappointed that Herbert could not come, delighted when he made a late appearance in response to an urgent, pleading telegram.
The fifteen names lined up were impressive: from America, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Allen Ginsberg and Anthony Hecht (a friend since New England days and a poet whose work Ted greatly admired); Pablo Neruda came all the way from Chile; Bella Akhmadulina from Russia; Hans Enzensberger from Germany; Yves Bonnefoy from Paris; Giuseppe Ungaretti from Italy; Yehuda Amichai from Israel; Hugh MacDiarmid from Scotland; and Patrick Kavanagh from Ireland. Eliot having died in 1965 (Ted was surprised how deeply he felt the loss), the three elder statesmen of English poetry were there: W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Robert Graves, who was now frail. The event was held in the brand-new ‘brutalist’ concrete Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room on the South Bank of the Thames. The programme was a success, though by no means on the scale of the more radical ‘International Poetry Incarnation’ that had been held at the Royal Albert Hall two summers before, when the wild man of San Francisco Ginsberg had appeared drunk on stage in front of an audience of 7,000, recited a very explicit poem about an orgy and been heckled for refusing to read his signature poem ‘Howl’.34
Looking back on an exhausting five days, Ted felt that the whole thing had been almost too much of a poetry orgy, but very good ‘dramatic entertainment’. Neruda and Bonnefoy read for far too long but Ginsberg kindly told Ted that the old professionals Spender and Auden had saved the day (this was on the one evening when he was absent).35 Reflecting in his journal after the event, Ted expressed some regret at having got involved. Once he had started writing the letters of invitation, he had felt duty bound to follow through and effectively be the host. The Queen Elizabeth Hall had not really been a suitable space, the actor reading some of the translated poetry had not been very good, and so on. The whole process had taken an immense amount of time and emotional energy. Lessons would have to be learned if they were going to do it again. Renewal of his old friendship with Zbigniew Herbert and the start of a new one with Yehuda Amichai were the high points for Ted. He and Assia, who stayed with the Sillitoes for the duration of the festival, were much admired. A guest at one of the numerous parties during the week remembered the door opening and a couple emerging. She had never seen such beauty in her life. ‘Who are these gorgeous people?’ she asked Ruth Fainlight, who replied, ‘Ted Hughes and Assia Wevill.’36
Back at Court Green, all was not well. Ted’s mother was ill again and his father was continuing his ‘cold war’ with Assia. They talked about getting a nurse for Edith. The ideal would have been to find someone who could both mother his children and nurse his parents. Brenda Hedden was not a candidate for this role. In the summer of 1967, she gave birth to her second daughter, Judith. Assia visited with Ted, and gave a silver chain and a jewel box made of abalone.
It was a difficult summer for Ted. The day before visiting Brenda, he had driven Aurelia Plath to Exeter railway station at the end of a very uncomfortable visit to see the grandchildren, her first for two years. She had spent much of her time at Court Green talking with great bitterness about the effect of the publication of Ariel in the United States. Her life had become a ‘torment’, as she had to deal with endless correspondence about ‘Daddy’ and the humiliation of watching the critics publicly psychoanalysing her relationship with Sylvia. What Aurelia could not understand was how there seemed to be such venom in her daughter’s poems and yet how when she had visited Sylvia at McLean she had been greeted with the words ‘I don’t hate you, it’s not true, they tell me I hate you and I don’t.’ Aurelia reasoned that Sylvia must always have loved her because she asked her to come to England each year to visit her. Ted asked why she had not come for Christmas 1962.
Frieda and Nick saw that their grandmother had ‘a heavy, terrifying will – which they respond to and yet see through at the same time’. They felt ‘immense relief’ at ‘escaping her’, though their response to her ‘discipline and teaching’ was also ‘extremely energetic’. Ted concluded his journal note by summing up the paradox that was Aurelia Plath: ‘She is a sweet, charitable, brave, very strong woman – but simply too pedagoguic [sic] in her insistence on the good, falsifying reality, protecting her charges from the wicked and the sorrowful and the real.’37 One night later that week he dreamed of rats invading Court Green, then meditated in another journal note on a phrase used of people going to a mental hospital: ‘to get sorted out’. Didn’t dreams have the same function? And poems? Did poetry grow from neurosis but come to fruition as a form of healing? Could poetic experience be ‘the vital, medical operation’? Was it in some sense ‘the correction of God’?38
For some time he had been increasingly relying for childcare on a teenage girl from the village called Carol, who was training to be a nurse. Her father, to whom she was devoted, was Jack Orchard, born in the Devon village of Walston Barton in the summer of the Somme and raised to a farming life. Mrs Orchard was Welsh. Born Minnie Evans in Swansea, she had trained as a nurse in Devon. Carol was born in Crediton in March 1948 and was intending to tread in her mother’s footsteps, though she also loved the life of the farm. She had an elder sister, Jean, who had just got married and joined her new husband in running a local nursing home for the elderly. There was also a younger brother, Robert, who later became a parliamentary correspondent for the BBC while staging musicals in the summer recess.
Assia moved out. She had had enough, and was going to look for a job in London. A Pickfords van collected her belongings in mid-September. The children did not want her to go, Frieda saying so vociferously, Nick concurring but more silently. It was as if they were losing a second mother, and a sister (though in his journals Ted hardly ever mentions Shura). Ted’s own feelings were a blank, the future a case of watching and waiting. He was taking comfort – stoicism, good sense, acceptance – from the essays of Montaigne. He was beginning to think that he should write more like Thomas Hardy than W. B. Yeats: instead of turning the real into an imagined world, life into myth and his inner self into a symbolic persona, he should ground his writing in reality, in experience: ‘That is the weight behind his [Hardy’s] poems – the real world, and especially the pathos of the past, of time passing. Even his tinpot love-plots have a kind of woman’s magazine relevance – their triviality is awfully real.’39 This was something he could also have learned from the ‘woman’s magazine’ element of Sylvia writing, about which until this point he had always been sceptical. The Birthday Letters project would indeed entail a turn to a Hardyesque voice (‘the pathos of the past’ – his own past with Sylvia), but he was not yet ready for it while he was still working through his inner darkness in the mythic and apocalyptic voice of Crow.
In the same journal note, he recorded a dream of murderous rage about Olwyn. His unconscious was blaming his sister for the breakdown of his relationships with other women. And Assia’s departure was also reminding him of the loss of Sylvia: ‘dreamed: in bath – feeling somebody behind me, stunning shock, it was Sylvia, very young and happy’. That dream would play a part in ‘The Offers’, his greatest elegy for Sylvia, made public only in the week of his death.
There was a happy day soon after Assia’s departure when Carol accompanied him and the children to Bideford Zoo. Where Ted saw only ‘death-camp misery’ in the face of the chimp behind bars and a ‘greasy pool with a foul fish’ for the seal to churn away in, Nick and Frieda loved their pretty, youthful companion, as she pointed out the parrots, the mynah bird, ‘the spider monkey; the owl; the axolotl’ (otherwise known as the Mexican salamander); ‘the baby crocs; the brisk fox; the mountain lions’.40
Just before Christmas, Ted sent Luke Myers a letter with his news. Wodwo was out in the States (with slightly different content from the English version), his mother was rather better, Frieda and Nicholas were doing very well – Frieda, now seven and half, had started writing wonderfully imaginative poems. And, by a series of ‘Napoleonic moves’, he had got himself some ‘qualified peace’ in which to work. The main move, he explained, was Assia’s back to London, where she had (Luke would be astonished to hear this) reconciled with Olwyn. ‘Two local women come in to do the housework,’ Ted added. That was true, but it was also the case that two other local women, Brenda and Carol, were now playing a big part in his life. His writing was at last going well. Crow was ‘getting his feathers’. He was turning a play called Vasco into an opera libretto. And he was working on a version of Seneca’s Oedipus for the director Peter Brook, to be staged at the National Theatre in the New Year. He was excited by the style he was finding, which was not so much verse as a new sort of hardened, compacted prose, written in chunks or ‘gobbets’.41
Oedipus: not the famous Greek tragedy of Sophocles, but the little-known, more static and rhetorical Roman version of Seneca, dramatist of blood, ghost, revenge, explosive anger and stoic resilience. Ted explained to his Cambridge friend Peter Redgrove that the National Theatre had asked him to perform a light makeover on an existing translation by a Scotsman called David Turner, which had been broadcast on the radio by the BBC in Northern Ireland. But as he got deeper and deeper into the text, and worked with Peter Brook in the rehearsal room, it became a completely new version.42
Brook was at the height of his powers, the most highly regarded director in London. He had started directing for the Royal Shakespeare Company when he was only in his twenties and had conjured extraordinary performances out of Laurence Olivier in Titus Andronicus and Paul Scofield in King Lear. Then he had scandalised the British establishment but amazed the New York critics with his violent and sexually explicit production of Peter Weiss’s The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (known for convenience as the Marat/Sade). After this, there was his improvisatory-documentary anti-Vietnam agitprop evening, US, unprecedentedly political for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
In early January 1968, Ted asked Brook if he could be joined in the rehearsal room by a friend ‘who helps a lot in these things’.43 This was Assia. Ted was fascinated by the intensity of Brook’s directing method. His rehearsals were ‘like prolonged group-analysis of everybody concerned’. Ted, meanwhile, was working further on the ‘abbreviated style’ that seemed to him right for Seneca’s muscular Latin. Director and cast made contributions to the evolution of the text. In the rehearsal room, Ted felt that he was drawing on a ‘single battery of energy’. Brook was helping him to release the Oedipus story in its ‘plainest, bluntest form’ while at the same discovering ‘ritual possibilities’ in it. The great thing about the Seneca version was that it lacked the clear Hellenistic ethical imperative of Sophocles. These versions of the characters were even more ‘primitive’ than ‘aboriginals’. They were ‘a spider people, scuttling among hot stones’. Seneca’s descriptive language somehow contained ‘the raw dream of Oedipus, the basic, poetic, mythical substance of the fable’. The tragedy created an almost religious experience, ‘the sacred, ritual progress under the marriage of love and death’.44
Ted was fascinated by the London theatre world, but repelled by some of the people in it. He did not like Kenneth Tynan, the National Theatre’s flamboyant literary manager. When Tynan invited him to a dinner party, he declined. ‘What a pity,’ Tynan replied, ‘Elizabeth Taylor is coming.’ Ted, who regarded Taylor as the sexiest woman on the planet, was furious.
The production opened at the Old Vic on 19 March 1968 with the silver-tongued Sir John Gielgud as Oedipus and Irene Worth as Jocasta. She was fifty-one, fourteen years older than Ted, but still exceptionally attractive, with high cheekbones and dazzling eyes. She was as renowned as Ted for sexual charisma and the two of them shared several intimate evenings. She was a woman not easily discomposed, but on one occasion when he read out to her some of his still-unpublished Crow poems during a break in rehearsals, she had shaken with fear and pleaded with him not to write any more.45
As the audience entered the theatre, they saw actors in black rollneck sweaters and casual trousers perched all over the auditorium, clinging to pillars every bit as though they were Hughesian crows. They droned out a single note, then the players on stage turned over the cubes on which they were sitting and beat out a tattoo at ever-increasing pace. The drumming cut out and the play began. Throughout the performance, the actors would ‘hiss, throb, vibrate and intone’, interrupting the long Senecan speeches with ‘group-sounds’.46
It was an evening of auguries, nightmares, priestly incantations, dark transgressions and a blighted land, with references to ‘organs pulled bleeding alive from deep in the bodies of animals’ and lines such as:
my country rots / but it isn’t the gods
it is this / a son and a mother
knotted and twisted together / a son and a mother
a couple of vipers bodies twisting together
blood flowing back together in the one sewer47
The script had lengthy blank spaces between phrases to help the actors with their rhythms and their pauses. Gielgud, used to flowing Shakespearean iambic pentameter, struggled a little with the fragmentary movement of such speeches as:
birth / birthed / blood take this / open
the earth bury it / bottom of the darkness
under everything / I am not fit for the light
Thebans your stones / now put a mountain on
me / hack me to pieces / pile the plague fires
on me / make me ashes / finish me / put me
where I know nothing / I am the plague48
Two days before the opening night, Brook lined up the cast on stage and told them to go through the play at double speed, ‘without moving a muscle, and with flat, uninflected voices like robots’. Ted said that it was the most astonishing theatrical experience of his life. The tension was so great that one of the actors collapsed and a stagehand sitting in the front row passed out. At the end, Hughes and Brook looked at each other with ‘wild surmise’. It had been an ‘amazing auditory experience’, but they couldn’t repeat it for the theatregoing public because ‘it had only taken about 35 minutes and our audience wanted a night out’.
The next evening was the final dress rehearsal in the presence of Sir Laurence Olivier, director of the National Theatre, who had originally been going to direct the production but had fallen ill, which is why the job had been passed to Brook. At the finale, ‘a spike was fixed in the middle of the stage, point upwards, and Jocasta killed herself by squatting on this and writhing downwards – a terrifying piece of acting by Irene Worth’. An enormous column draped in silk was then carried on, ‘erected over the spike, and unveiled to reveal a giant golden phallus’. Olivier was so appalled that he said this effect had to be removed. Peter Brook ‘exploded with such a shattering display of anger that Sir Laurence finally had to accept it’.49 Ted described the end of the play as ‘a sort of prodigious formal fuck and rebirth’. At the planning stage, he had suggested to Brook that a female figure should appear in the position of a ‘Sheila-na-gig’, a kind of ancient Irish stone carving of a woman with her knees more or less over her shoulders and her fingers pulling wide ‘a very large cunt’. The Irish name, he explained, meant ‘Woman of the Tits’. The giant phallus could perhaps, he thought, go up into the woman and then be seen on a ‘sort of spider’s web of veins, like the drapery of the placenta’.50
Irene Worth’s Jocasta was indeed the highlight of the production. She reached an extraordinary emotional pitch as the character urged the second husband who is also her son to let go of the past:
Oedipus / leave the dead alone / stop these
diggings into the past / bringing my dead husband
back to show his wounds and show himself still in
death agony / leave him alone / hell cannot be
opened safely / what can come out of it / only
more pain and more misfortune / more confusion
and more death51
The play ended with Oedipus speaking of:
pestilence / ulcerous agony / blasting consumption
plague terror / plague blackness / despair52
Then the chorus led him off to a rousing rendition of ‘Yes, we have no bananas’.
Ted was proud and excited at the opening night at the historic Old Vic, which the National made its home prior to the construction of its own purpose-built theatre. He was a seasoned author of radio plays, but this was his debut work for the London stage. He scribbled a souvenir note on Assia’s programme to the effect that she was the best sight on a very special night. She did not like the show, saying that it looked like ‘an exhibit in the Greek Pavilion of Expo ’67’. She was not impressed by the ‘golden cubes, revolving searchlights’ and costumes that looked like space suits. Her reaction to the phallus – which she described as 20 feet tall and pink, though it was actually 7 feet tall and golden – was to write ‘Ugh’ in her journal.53 Some of the more traditional reviewers expressed either bemusement or disapproval at the whole thing, but the critic Ronald Bryden in the Observer said that Brook packed into one evening ‘enough ideas to last an ordinary director a lifetime, once more proving himself light-years ahead of his nearest contemporaries, making most of what passes for avant garde nowadays look tamely nostalgic’.54 Charles Marowitz, who had co-directed the RSC’s famous 1964 ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ season with Brook, but had now gone off to found his own Open Space Theatre Company, was more cynical: ‘On a superficial plane, the production dazzles and seduces us with novelty, but a lingering dissatisfaction quickly banishes these virtues … Brook is like the liaison between the true avant-garde and the bourgeois public and critics.’55
Brook greatly enjoyed working with Ted and invited him to join him on his new adventure of establishing an experimental, improvisatory, international theatre company in Paris.56 It was, Ted excitedly told Gerald in an airmail letter, ‘more or less an invitation to create’ his own theatre, his ‘own kind of play’, with whatever actors he wanted, ‘since any actor falls over to be directed by this Peter Brook’.57
Another plan was for Brook to return to his acclaimed Royal Shakespeare Company production of King Lear, starring Paul Scofield, and turn it into a film. It wouldn’t be a film of the play like Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet or Richard III, but rather an English equivalent of Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa’s Japanese samurai adaptation of Macbeth, or perhaps Grigori Kozintsev’s Russian Hamlet, with its script heavily truncated from a translation by Boris Pasternak. It would be ‘a film of the story, using whatever in the text doesn’t sound unreal in a film’. So, Ted told his old Shakespeare-loving schoolmaster John Fisher, with six exclamation marks, ‘he wants me to rewrite the text’. He provided Fisher with a brief sample of how he was turning Shakespeare’s words into something plainer and simpler. He laboured away at the task for several months. His archive includes a ‘Draft Shooting Script’ dated 9 September 1968.58
The problem was that, with Shakespeare, every word counts: ‘take out one little nut’ in one place and a wing will fall off, and the tail will begin to come loose because ‘the whole thing is so intimately integrated’. If Ted is to be believed when reminiscing in a radio interview twenty-four years later, he was in the midst of his drafts when he had a dream in which there was a tremendous banging on the back door of Court Green. He opened it and ‘there was Shakespeare himself, in all his Elizabethan gear, like that portrait of Gloriana – jewels, ruffs, and the rest of it’. He was ‘boiling with rage’, furious with Ted for ‘tinkering with King Lear’. Shakespeare took Ted up into the great attic under Court Green’s thatch and directed his own production of Lear ‘as it should be put on, according to him’. This ‘immense’ performance filled the whole sky and unlocked ‘the whole mythical background of the play’. The next morning, like Coleridge trying to recover his vision of Xanadu, Ted wrote down what he could remember of Shakespeare’s interpretation of Shakespeare. But the real lesson of this dream – a reprise of the Cambridge one, with Shakespeare standing in for the burnt fox-man – was that he had to stop messing around with the play.
The Brook film was eventually released in 1971, with an orthodox (though truncated) script. But Ted hung on to his ideas about Shakespeare’s substructure and developed them in an anthology of purple passages in 1969 and ultimately in his huge late book Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, which he described to Brook as his Shakespearean equivalent of the epic Mahabharata cycle.59
While Oedipus was in rehearsal, The Iron Man, Ted’s latest children’s book, was published. The American edition, published later in the year, was entitled The Iron Giant. This would prove to be Ted’s bestselling and best-loved work. It firmly established his place as one of the world’s leading children’s authors as well as one of its most admired poets. The story begins under the influence of the great clifftop scene in King Lear, with a giant figure teetering on the edge and tumbling into a mighty fall down to the beach below. The broken man of iron is then reassembled by seagulls – they begin by picking up an eyeball, another nod to Lear. This is a version of the ritual ‘dismemberment of the body and renewal of the organs’ about which he had read in Eliade’s Shamanism, and with which he had experimented in the film script that later became Gaudete.
The Iron Man then starts eating tractors, diggers and any other farm machinery made of iron. Not to mention chewing up barbed-wire fences (his equivalent of spaghetti). The figure who saves the farmers from this terrifying creature is a boy called Hogarth whom we first see fishing like a young Ted – or a young Wordsworth, since he blows mimic hootings to the owls and is frightened by the looming Iron Man in the exact same way that the boy Wordsworth feels awe and fear in the face of a rising cliff as he rows a borrowed boat across a lake. Like Ted and Gerald in Crimsworth Dene, Hogarth sets a trap for a fox. He catches the Iron Man instead and then, upon the giant’s later re-emergence from the pit, leads him away from the farms to a scrap-metal yard. A giant space-bat–angel–dragon then lands on the earth. In the manner of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which Ted had so enjoyed reading when he was a schoolboy, humankind uses its assembled military might to try to destroy this monster from the stars, but to no avail (space flight was all the rage at this time, since it was the moment when the Americans were preparing to launch Apollo 8 towards the moon). The Iron Man saves the day when, out of gratitude to Hogarth, he fights on earth’s behalf. He tames the space-bat–angel into singing the music of the spheres instead of waging cosmic war, with the result that human beings become peaceful, stop making weapons and live in global harmony.
In one sense, the story, published on the eve of the Prague Spring, is a dream of the end of the Cold War, an imagined realisation of the idealistic goals of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. At a deeper level, the story gives vivid and compressed form to some of Hughes’s key themes. When asked about its meaning, he said that his essential idea was ‘to dramatise three centres of power’. Hogarth embodies ‘the child’s nature – the child’s sense of himself’. The Iron Man is ‘the giant Robot of Technology – terrifying and destructive, uncontrollable and inhuman, unless it is approached without fear, but with patience and good sense’. And the space-bat–angel–dragon is ‘the infinitely mysterious life power that emerges from atoms, the biological psychic mystery of organic being’. This latter force is also ‘terrifying and destructive, uncontrollable and inhuman, unless approached without fear but with firmness, superior courage, open-mindedness, cunning and kindness’. The story is ‘a ritual by which the child and these two monstrous entities are brought into a single, inclusive, integrated pattern of behaviour and awareness in a shared life that is happy and peaceful’.60
But young readers do not need to know about this allegorical dimension. Frieda and Nick certainly didn’t, as they listened in rapt attention to their father inventing the story for them at bedtime over five unforgettable nights.