When Ted was in London for the Oedipus rehearsals in early 1968, he told Assia that he wanted to mend their relationship. She asked him whether he still felt ‘the animal thing between us’. Or did he just want her back in order to look after the children? She pleaded with him to open up to her again, as he had in their early days. ‘I feel so full of love to you at your sweet best,’ she wrote to him. ‘I admire you and I am frightened at the power you have over me. No man has ever had this power over me as a woman.’1
Ted tried to probe at her feelings, sensing that what she really wanted was a home for Shura. He asked her to explain her intentions in detail, to describe afresh their ‘real relationship’, which had ‘got buried in conveniences and necessaries’. What was she willing to do and what did she feel like doing? He suggested that if they were going to live together again back at Court Green, there would have to be some new rules. He proposed that they should each draw up a wish list, indicating how the relationship could be made to work from each party’s point of view. He prepared what he half jokingly called a ‘Draft Constitution: for suggestions and corrections’. Assia was invited to draw up a set of proposals of her own, and then they could compare notes and create a compromise. Ted described his own list as ‘a row of horrors’: children ‘to be played with’ and their clothes to be mended, bedtime routine to be supervised, German lessons ‘two or three hours a week’, no cooking for Ted ‘except! In emergencies’, at least one meal a week to be something new, some basic cooking lessons for Frieda as she approached her eighth birthday, ‘a daily log to be kept of every expense and bill’, general acceptance of his friends, no ‘foolish battles over interior design’ (which was to say, don’t remove every last trace of Sylvia’s taste), 8 a.m. as ‘getting up time, no dressing gown mornings, no sleep during day unless emergency, and by agreement’.2
Assia began her counter-proposal with the words ‘Teddy dear, forget the detail.’ She did not return to Court Green. In April, she made a new will. She expressed a wish for her ‘cadaver’ to be buried in any rural churchyard where the vicar did not object (to burying a suicide, she meant). She instructed that a tombstone should be erected within six months of her death inscribed with nothing other than her name and dates of birth and death, and the epitaph ‘Here lies a lover of unreason and an exile’. Then she set about her bequests: ‘To Nicholas Farrar Hughes, since he is too young for possessions, I will all my most tender love. To Freida [sic] Rebecca Hughes, I will also my love and all the lace, ribbons and silks she can find, as well as a fine gold chain. To Ted Hughes, their father, I leave my no doubt welcome absence and my bitter contempt.’3
Her bitterness came from the fact that at the beginning of the month, his star sign in eclipse, Ted had vowed to make a final break with her. He interrogated himself, struggling to find the good, the human virtue, in the mess of torments and revelations to which his life had been reduced. How could he figure out the ABC of things? The A, the B and the C were Assia, Brenda and Carol.
Brenda and Trevor Hedden had separated. The parting was amicable. Brenda and her little girls moved 40 miles away to Welcombe on the Hartland peninsula, a lovely stretch of North Devon coastline. She explained to Trevor that she needed some space because Ted’s intervention in their marriage had had a greater impact than she had anticipated when she had agreed to Trevor’s – very Sixties – proposal that they should have an open marriage. Trevor then complained that when he had suggested she should have some occasional casual affairs, as he was doing, he had not meant that she should ‘fall in love with them’.4
One of Ted’s most beautiful unpublished love poems is for Brenda. It conjures into words their intimacy and unity, the depth of his love and the idea of her body, in three quintains of delicate repetition, variation and incantatory passion.5 She had expressed apprehension about their relationship. She was always strongly drawn to him but sensed that if they continued it would drastically change her life and her relationship with Trevor, which had been sufficiently rewarding for a decade. The prospect was very unsettling. Ted returned a day later with the poem. He said that it was how he felt. After she had read it, she slowly crushed the paper within her hands, sensing that continued involvement with him would crush her, emotionally.6 She loved him, but not because he was a poet. It was his personality and his intelligence that attracted her, but she knew that she was letting herself in for disruption and intricacy.
The young nurse who offered so much help with childcare was now also very much in the picture. With A in London, Ted moved between B and C on impulse, usually for a few days at a time, sometimes taking off in the night. Sometimes he was open about his unpredictable moods, suggesting to Brenda that it was better to share his secret life (as a mistress, that is to say) than to be part of his domestic life, fully exposed to his demons. He also admitted to her that he liked the fact that neither B nor C was literary. After the implosion of his lives with literary S and literary hopeful A, it would be better to keep his work and his entanglements apart. The particular attraction of B was that, unlike A, she was not haunted by rivalry with Sylvia. Brenda appreciated some of Sylvia’s maternity clothes in 1965, but she never imagined herself stepping into Sylvia’s shoes. He could accordingly be relaxed with regard to what he said about Sylvia, in a way that was never possible with Assia. He once confided to Brenda that he had asked Sylvia what she thought of his lovemaking ability. Sylvia indicated that he had a tendency to be too dominant.
Ted’s only way of keeping going with the complications that he had created for himself was by continuing to write. He set himself a minimum of five pages a day. But he was struggling to maintain his resolution. He considered it ominous that his dream life had gone dead again.
There always seemed to be distractions and misadventures. One June day, driving out of Exeter, he bumped the car at some traffic lights. He crawled to a garage by the university. The radiator had burst and it would take till four-thirty to fix it. When he returned, he suddenly found himself pulled towards a police car and told to get in. A policewoman snarlingly asked him what he had done to those girls up in the university. He was taken to the station and interrogated. The mechanic at the garage had said that he had been away for an hour. A man in a white shirt and green trousers had been exposing himself to the female undergraduates. The police arranged for him to stand on the street while two girls were paraded past separately. Neither thought that he remotely resembled the flasher. The police did not apologise, though they had the grace to drive him back to the garage. Another afternoon wasted. Faced with major traumas of the kind that Ted faced again and again in his life, many people would vent their anger and frustration by becoming furious over minor incidents of this sort. It is a mark of Hughes’s fortitude that he kept cool and saw the funny side.
As was the case for much of his life, he spent a lot of time going backwards and forwards between Devon and London. That summer he introduced the poet Michael Baldwin to the occult. He assumed that Baldwin would be interested because he practised hypnotism, which was banned from public performance, in clubs and at parties. Ted took him to a place that he called ‘Watkins’ bookshop’ in an alleyway off St Martin’s Lane. After lengthy browsing, he bought Baldwin a book called The Magician: His Training and Work. ‘This is harmless,’ he said. ‘Solid, and harmless but very, very good. Keep it to yourself, read it critically and take from it what you will.’ Behind the till stood Anna Madge, daughter of Kathleen Raine, poet, scholar of William Blake and expert on the Tarot, occult Neoplatonism, the gnostic tradition, the universal wisdom of the initiate and all such mysterious arts. Ted was a great admirer of Raine’s writings and was very pleased, many years later, to propose her for the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Late in life, he became a supporter of her Temenos Academy of Integral Studies, which fostered the arcane spiritual traditions and also won the support of Prince Charles.
Hughes and Baldwin remained friends for years. They were both dabblers as opposed to true initiates in the dark arts. ‘We did not ever perform occultist ritual conjurations together,’ Baldwin recalled, reassuringly, ‘or join Peter Redgrove and Penelope, who had lain in a circle feet to the moon in order to conceive [their daughter] Zoe.’ Baldwin remembered how Ted had shown him the letter from the Redgroves describing this ritual and said in mock horror, ‘The child will be mad!’ According to Baldwin, he then reflected for a moment and said, ‘Should have been head to the moon anyway. You always rope the heifer head to the moon so the usual tides draw the bull’s semen deep.’7
Despite his vow in April, by August Ted was seeing Assia again. He had assisted her with translations from the Hebrew of the selected poems of Yehuda Amichai. They were published under her maiden name Assia Gutmann on 11 July 1968, and received extremely favourable reviews. Assia’s poems, which had more than a few touches of Ted, were praised as fine creations in their own right, not mere translations.8 Before the end of the year, relations had been sufficiently repaired for Ted and Assia to participate jointly in a radio programme promoting the book. The broadcast was billed in the Radio Times as:
YEHUDA AMICHAI: Poems by an Israeli poet translated and introduced by ASSIA GUTMANN and read by TED HUGHES. Yehuda Amichai was born in Wurzburg in 1923, left Germany in 1937, and is now a citizen of Israel. During the 1950s he became the best known of the generation who freed Hebrew poetry from its traditions, and made it colloquial and supple enough to cope with the complexities of modern life.9
Assia provided spoken introductions and talked about Amichai’s life, while Ted read a selection of the poems.
On 6 August 1968, Ted took Frieda and Nick to Heathrow in a taxi. They were off to see their grandmother Aurelia in America. The taxi took them to the wrong terminal, and he panicked that they might miss their flight. But it was delayed. While they were waiting, eight-year-old Frieda told her little brother Nicholas that Daddy ought to marry both Carol and Brenda, so they would have one mother each. He waved goodbye and watched the plane take off: ‘Dropping skirts – motor-boat, nose-up, nearly horizontally before climb grips.’10 Then he ate some foul food at the airport’s Lyons café and took a bus to Clapham, where Assia now had a flat near the common. They made love. The next day, he was back at Heathrow with Assia and Shura. They took a BEA flight to Germany for a week’s holiday. On the first day, they visited Beethoven’s house in Bonn. For Ted, this was like paying homage at the shrine of a god. He noted down every detail: Beethoven’s last piano, his viola, his three hearing aids, the manuscript of the Ninth Symphony. The rest of the week could only be an anticlimax after this, though they enjoyed sending Amichai a postcard from his birthplace. Ted was intrigued (and Assia horrified) by a conversation on the train from Frankfurt to Würzburg during which a retired SS man, living on his pension, told them of his adventures on Hitler’s Russian campaign. Ted was prompted to write a death-camp poem for Crow. Assia noted in her journal that the trip was sometimes ‘bleak with T’s chemistry gone amok, an ugly impatient mood setting in’, but that on other occasions he was delightful with Shura, rowing her on the Schluchsee in the Black Forest, buying her little wooden birds and playing imaginative games. Assia was delighted that their daughter was now calling Ted ‘Daddy’.
Having said goodbye to Assia at the end of the holiday and returned to Court Green, he dreamed that Sylvia had returned to life. She hoped to see the children. A certain drug made it possible, so she spent a whole day with her old friends from Smith, and Frieda and Nick. She fell asleep at the end of the day and died again in her sleep.11 In another version of the dream, Ted met her back at Smith, with all her college friends: ‘She greatly surprised and pleased by the success of Ariel, knowing she was back only for a day. She dug a hole in the main path at Smith (one that doesn’t exist) and there we buried her manuscript – the black book. It was her mother’s decision to bring her back briefly in this way.’ He wrote about the ‘insanity’ of the dream and its effect on him. He could not get over the strangeness of the sensation of ‘her presence after so much death’.12
He gave Brenda a heart-shaped gold bracelet inscribed with their names, identical to one he had given to Assia. He also gave them both copies of an intimate and highly erotic poem that reads as if it were originally written for Sylvia. It was first published in July 1968 with the title ‘Second Bedtime Story’ and later reprinted in Crow as ‘Lovesong’.13 Brenda’s copy is a typescript with her name written in giant capital letters across the page on top of the text. She recalls that at this point Ted’s three loves were ‘nicely spaced out’, with Assia in London, Carol just outside North Tawton at Nichols Nymet, her family’s large and handsome late-Georgian house, and herself in Welcombe. He had told her that ‘after Sylvia, he no longer wanted to be dependent on one woman; he felt it was weakening and suffocating him’.14 He left one of his lectures to himself on the subject of A, B and C on the kitchen table in Court Green. It came to the conclusion that the right balance was three.15 But was he really enough of a God to maintain a trinity? He crisply summed up his dilemma in a journal entry: ‘3 beautiful women – all in love, and a separate life of joy visible with each, all possessed – but own soul lost.’16 He also drafted a poem that began ‘Which bed? Which bride? Which breast’s comfort?’17
Assia was the one he took to a poetry reading in Dublin. The promising young Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney was there. He remembered being mesmerised by her huge eyes. He had never met a woman with such sexual charisma. ‘I think poets should be like bishops,’ she said to him: ‘they should have their own diocese and meet irregularly and formally.’18 The next day they went up to Belfast for another reading. Afterwards, they went for a Chinese meal and Ted, ever the teacher, insisted that Seamus should use chopsticks for the first time in his life. Heaney had by this time published his very Hughesian first collection, Death of a Naturalist, which included his signature poem ‘Digging’, highly influenced by ‘The Thought-Fox’ in the way that it was a poem about the act of writing a poem. After the Chinese meal, they returned to the Heaneys’ house in Ashley Avenue, where Ted and Assia and Seamus and his wife Marie drank poteen late into the night in the half-furnished front room: ‘Marie singing Irish folk songs, Assia singing Israeli songs, Ted singing “The Brown and the Yellow Ale”’.19
The evening with the Heaneys was the beginning of one of the most important friendships of Ted’s life. But Assia was close to despair by this time. ‘The bottle-opener has left a small rosy map-lake on my wrist,’ she had written to Ted the day before his birthday. ‘Bring a post-card with you, and on it a short manifesto, and a razor-blade – and we’ll celebrate your birthday so fabulously – there won’t ever be another like it.’ On 6 September 1968 she confided to her journal: ‘It is only inevitable that the life I have lead [sic] should end like this. That I should be supplanted (sub-planted!) by others. I was endowed with too many minor qualities, but with neither the will nor huge intelligence to bring them a life of their own.’20
Late in life, looking back on his poetic development, Ted Hughes wrote that ‘View of a Pig’, ‘Pike’ and ‘Hawk Roosting’ were the most important poems in Lupercal, his second volume of poetry and the one where his distinctive poetic voice, with its ‘broad inclusive concentration’ on the facticity – the intractable condition – of the world, truly emerged. Writing ‘Hawk Roosting’ in particular was one of the best moments of his life. Wodwo, he went on, was the ‘fall-out’ from the ‘Pig-pike-Hawk Roosting vein’. But the progression towards that collection was ‘broken up by autobiographical events’ – Sylvia’s death meant that his poems of 1960 to 1962 were not published until 1967. The ‘next conscious real step was Crow’, in which he resimplified his language and broke it into a new form of ‘lyrical-dramatic’ narrative. But ‘Then autobiographical things knocked it all to bits, as before’. His poetry came to an abrupt halt until, in the early Seventies, he started again with ‘ABC language’ in the ‘diary pieces’ that became Moortown, his farming book.21 The autobiographical things to which he was referring here were the events of 1969. Hard as it may be to imagine, this was an even worse year than 1963. It was indeed the worst of his life.
In the autumn of 1968 his ailing mother had been taken back to Yorkshire by ambulance, his father following. Ted at last had Court Green to himself. Then in December Gerald, Joan and their children Ashley and Brendon, along with Joan’s mother, came over from Australia. They spent a white Christmas at Court Green, meeting Carol for the first time. Gerald found her ‘very attractive’, shy but welcoming. His whole family took to her. Ted, Nick and Frieda then travelled north to the Beacon with Gerald and his entourage for a New Year’s visit to their parents. There was a reunion with the extended Farrar family and it was on this occasion that Ted, Gerald and Nick drove down to Mexborough for the ‘ceremonial farewell’ to the pike pond at Crookhill.
The day after this, he wrote to Assia, talking about them finding a new place and moving back in together, with the three children. The perpetually on–off relationship appeared to be on again. The return visit to the Beacon seemed to have had the effect of drawing Ted back to A and to the North, far away from the complications of B and C in Devon. Charles Monteith at Faber had asked him to edit a selection of Emily Brontë’s poems and this inevitably had him thinking again about Top Withens and the moors and Sylvia’s snow-covered grave in Heptonstall.
On 18 March 1969 Ted went to Manchester to record a reading of his poetry for a television broadcast. He met Assia at the station. She had left Shura with her au pair. He was nervous. He had read and spoken on the radio dozens of times, but never done television before. He didn’t want Assia in the room where the recording took place at Holly Royde College, so she waited in a corridor. She was annoyed not to be allowed into the monitoring van, where she would have been able to see how Ted looked on screen. He introduced and read eleven of his best poems, including ‘The Thought-Fox’, ‘Wind’, ‘An Otter’, ‘Wodwo’, ‘Hawk Roosting’, ‘Six Young Men’ and ‘View of a Pig’. Assia was miserable at the meal after the recording, Ted stroking her shoulder to try to comfort her. They had a heart-to-heart in the dingy lounge of the Elm Hotel. Why could he not commit? ‘It’s Sylvia,’ he said, ‘it’s because of her.’22
The next day, they drove to Yorkshire. Ted left Assia in, of all places, Haworth. He went to see his mother in hospital and spent the night at the Beacon with his father. That afternoon, Assia walked down the precipitous High Street towards the Brontë parsonage. The snow on the ground was hardening and deep. It felt, she wrote in her journal, like a town made of iron. She went to the local doctor’s surgery and obtained a prescription for thirty-five Seconal sleeping pills. That night, feeling lonely, she read some of Zbigniew Herbert’s poems. But it was cold and then the bedside light packed up. She lay in the dark, listening to the radio. First there was a programme on Radio 4 entitled Exquisite Sister. It told the story of Dorothy Wordsworth and how she had helped her brother with his poetry, how intimately she lived with him, but how she ended up, as Assia put it in her journal, ‘mad and old’. The thought of a great poet and his intimacy with his sister inevitably brought to mind the strong influence that Olwyn always exercised over Ted. Then she turned over to Radio 3 and fell asleep listening to the Hollywood String Quartet playing Beethoven’s late quartet in B flat major, Opus 130.23
But she had not taken the pills. She woke in good time in the morning. The Brontë parsonage had been closed to tourists the previous day. She tried again, but it was too early. Having asked the landlady at the pub where she was staying if she knew of any houses for sale, she strolled around the little town as the snow slowly thawed, wondering what it would be like to live there with Ted and the three children. He then arrived to pick her up and they spent the next two days house-hunting. They looked at places as far north as Hexham in Northumberland, where they saw a dower-house that was available for rent. It belonged, Ted later recalled, to ‘Lord Whatsisname’. Assia was keen that his Lordship should know how important Ted was, which embarrassed him. They also saw a place called Green Farm, a lovely house available at low rent with salmon in a river close by. On the way back to Manchester, where they returned for Assia to get her train back to London, they inspected some less desirable properties. Assia had the feeling that by this time Ted was just playing along, that, as ever, he was not really serious about making a commitment. They said goodbye on the station platform and he headed off on the long journey down to Devon. ‘Last embraces,’ he would later scribble in a notebook, ‘clear memory of her going off on the London train.’24
She phoned Court Green the next day, Sunday 23 March 1969. A friend of Olwyn’s was staying. She picked up the phone. Assia assumed it was ‘another woman’. Ted came in tired and it was several hours before he got the message that Assia had phoned.25 He called back and tried to give her hope with regard to their future – there was talk of a house up for let in Barnstaple – but in a way that was insufficiently ‘emphatic’.26 Fatally, he misjudged the extent of her vulnerability. Her divorce from David Wevill had been finalised (he moved to Texas and started a new life). She had always been conscious that her body was not nearly so beautiful as her ravishing face; now she felt that she was losing her looks altogether, running to fat.27 She no longer walked into a room and turned every head. If Ted was not going to give her hope, there was no future. In a small notebook, she wrote down his words: ‘It was no good thinking they could live together in a house – it’s because of Sylvia.’ Then she wrote, ‘I have no answer to that, so die soon … execute yourself and your little self efficiently.’28
That evening, a Mrs Jones in the neighbouring flat in the house in Clapham sensed the distinctive smell of gas. Some time later, Assia’s au pair, Else, who had been to visit a friend, came home. Before leaving, she had checked that Shura, four years and three weeks old, was asleep in bed.
When Else opened the door, she was almost overcome by the gas fumes. Mrs Jones summoned a male neighbour from upstairs. He went into the kitchen of the darkened flat, switched on the light and saw the bodies of mother and child. He turned off the gas, opened the windows and called the police. Another neighbour, who happened to be a nurse, was called down. ‘Mrs Wevill was lying on some blankets on the floor on her left side’, she said in her police statement, ‘and her daughter was lying on her back, with her face inclined towards her mother.’ There was no pulse in either of them and the pupils were dilated. ‘The little girl was much colder than her mother.’29 It had not taken long for the fumes to overcome the sleeping child, whom her mother had carried into the kitchen. A post-mortem would reveal that Assia herself had taken whisky and the sleeping pills she had obtained in Haworth.
The police officer attending the scene found an envelope on the bedside which was addressed to Ted, together with another to Assia’s father in Canada. As a result of this, Ted was contacted by the local police in Devon and asked to go to Southwark Mortuary to identify the bodies. He gave a statement to the police, explaining that he had met Assia seven years before, having known her husband David Wevill ‘through the profession’. He and Assia had become ‘very close friends, and eventually the friendship blossomed into love’. They ‘became intimate, and there was a girl born of this union’.30
Ted took charge of the funeral arrangements, delaying the date so that there was time for Assia’s father to fly over from Canada. Her sister Celia could not afford a ticket. At the end of March, Assia and Shura were cremated. Ted had managed to round up most of her friends. He asked Peter Porter and his wife Jannice to share the front taxi with him and Assia’s father for the journey across the river to Lambeth Cemetery, where the brief funeral service took place. Porter thought that this was Ted’s way of thanking Jannice for all the support she had given Assia, going back to her visit after the abortion in 1963 (five years later, Jannice killed herself, her husband believing that the example of Assia was in her mind). Colleagues from the advertising agency were also there. Edward Lucie-Smith remembered the tears pouring down Ted’s face. Porter was haunted for the rest of his days by ‘the memory of the two coffins waiting before the fire curtain, the one an adult coffin and the other a diminutive shape’.31 Nathaniel Tarn thought it was wrong to have a Christian ceremony. There was no Hebrew Kaddish. He atoned for its absence in a lengthy verse requiem written soon afterwards and dedicated ‘in memoriam Assia & Shura’. Here, as Ted would in poems written many years later, he used the fire of the crematorium to give ‘these daughters of the people gone’ back to their Jewish heritage:
With lungs still full of gas
with nostrils bruised by her last breath
she lies oak-packaged on a pedestal
beside her / in white cloth
the child she took into the oven with her …
We give her up now / to the lapping fire
To Terezin / Auschwitz / and Buchenwald.32
After the cremation, Edward Lucie-Smith took Ted and Olwyn out to lunch with a group of Assia’s friends. Among them was a jewel-maker called Pat Tormey. Afterwards, on the way back to Olwyn’s flat (she was living in Hampstead at this time), Ted noticed an exquisite gold ring on Pat’s finger. She had recently made it. Ted asked her for it because it seemed more right for Assia than any piece of jewellery he had ever given her. If she had been alive, he would have bought it without hesitation. It seemed uncanny that Pat had just made it and was wearing it. She willingly handed it over. ‘I don’t know what I shall do with it,’ Ted wrote in thanks. ‘When I saw it I thought I must bury it with her ashes and I think I shall.’33 He repaid Tormey with a gift of one of his precious netsuke.
On 14 April 1969, Ted wrote to Celia Chaikin in Canada. He said what he could about the complications of his life with her sister. He cursed himself for not being more sympathetic in the final phone call – ‘But I was exhausted, and nearly off my head with other distractions.’ He mourned for Shura: ‘the most wonderful little girl, full of fire’. And for Assia: ‘my true wife and the best friend I ever had’.34 Her memory was with him every minute of every day, every night.
He had no idea what his next move should be. On the same day, he wrote to Aurelia, saying that he planned to go to Ireland, where he would put the children in a famous Quaker school that had been recommended to him by friends who were professors at Trinity College Dublin. Ireland, as always, was the dream of escape and a fresh start. Leaving the children in Devon, he headed to Waterford to check out the school. From there, he drove north to County Kilkenny to stay overnight with Barrie Cooke, who had never seen him looking so terrible. He went on alone – one of his first days fully alone for many years – to Cashel in County Tipperary. Over a glass of brandy, looking out on the Rock of Cashel, associated in legend with St Patrick and the coming of Christianity to Ireland, he took out a spiral-bound shorthand notebook and began composing prose and poetry for the ‘dead souls’ of the women he had lost.
‘Steady terrible pain’, he wrote. ‘How much remorse, how much sentimental pain at what I have missed, and am missing. Much much much more complicated. The face, the millionfold life, & Shura.’ He dreamed of Assia every night. He castigated himself for their bitter misunderstandings. He began sketching a long poem about Orpheus and his attempt to recover his beloved Eurydice from the underworld. He turned into verse a recurring dream about being hauled into court and accused. With this second death, his sentence was doubled. He wrote of his prison, his desire to break out into the wilderness. ‘I will get free. I summon the cunning fox / He will set me free. He will dig, / He will find freedom for me, find it, find it. / Fox, fox, in the wild open.’ He blamed himself bitterly for the ‘mistake’ that ‘cost two lives – three’. He wrote that he was not composing for readers, but for himself. He asked himself whether the ‘momentary pleasure’ of some stranger would one day ‘pay’ him for ‘ruining’ his own life ‘and causing the deaths / of those I have loved best / and who loved me best, and who were my life’.35 He did not consider this to be real poetry. He was only writing as a way of attempting to ‘get out of the flames’.
He thought that he was at his nadir. He wrote to Peter Brook with an apology for his long silence, explaining that ‘the most horrible thing has happened’: ‘In a fit of depression and a crush of wretched far-fetched coincidences Assia killed herself and our little four year old daughter.’36 He included a note for Irene Worth, which is lost: it probably urged her not to feel any responsibility for Assia’s jealousy of other women.
Then, before he could implement the plan to move back to Ireland with the children, there was bad news from Yorkshire.
On 13 May 1969, he was still wrestling with the dilemma of the choice between B and C, Brenda and Carol. He went to bed late and said a prayer for his mother, who was in hospital following a knee operation. At one o’clock in the morning he woke suddenly with a sensation of ‘awful horror’.37 His immediate apprehension was that his mother had died. Having banished the thought – she was supposed to be convalescing – he managed to get back to sleep. He was up at 8.30 in the morning because some electricians were coming to work in Court Green. He tinkered with some writing, and then at 10.15 Olwyn called. Edith had died in the night.
Later that day, he drove north with the children. Nicky had shown no reaction, but as they got close to Yorkshire, Frieda, who had been in tears for the first hour of the journey, said, ‘My stomach is getting very excited at meeting Grandad but I myself am getting sadder.’ Bill was quite lively when they arrived. The subject was not broached for about a quarter of an hour. Then he said, ‘Well this is a sudden business,’ and explained that Edith had been recovering well, expected to be out of hospital soon, but had then suddenly developed breathing problems.38
Ted had not written to his mother since Assia’s death eight weeks before, partly because he could not help blaming his parents, who had been so horrible to her, for the downward spiral that led to her death. His father had accordingly asked Olwyn what was wrong with Ted: why had they not heard from him for so long? She told him the terrible news, making him promise that he would not tell Edith while she was still in hospital. But Bill couldn’t keep the awful burden to himself. He had no one else to tell, so he broke his word and told his wife. ‘Well, aren’t you glad I told you?’ he asked her, as she digested the appalling reality of it. And she had replied, ‘Well, – I’m not sure.’ She was dead within a few days. Ted convinced himself that the news of this second suicide was responsible for her demise. As he told Aurelia Plath, ‘I’ve no doubt that the shock and the agitation was fatal, she reacted violently to any news on that front, which is why I had not told her.’39 His mother’s death seemed like a terrible requital for all the harsh words that had passed between Assia and his family: ‘A’s death removed Sylvia’s to a great distance, swamped everything,’ he wrote in his makeshift journal. ‘Now Ma’s death has somewhat removed A’s. Yet A’s comes back.’ He struggled to grasp his own ‘stupefaction in face of all this’. ‘Must not go numb,’ he told himself. ‘Terribly tired.’40 The writer must never allow himself to go numb, but in the face of these successive hammer blows Hughes was struggling not to go under. He said goodbye to his mother’s body in the chapel of rest in Hebden Bridge.
That summer, he spent a lot of time in London, leaving Nick and Frieda in Devon. He travelled up by train on 29 May. It was an unusually hot day and he couldn’t help noticing the near-naked girls with long legs, strolling through the streets. He was flooded with erotic memories, then overwhelmed by the ‘black dog’ of depression, the sense of ‘walking on air over a black gulf’. He thought one moment about the Neoplatonic philosophy of Jacob Böhme, the next about his multiple sexual entanglements. Then he noticed a hair on his pullover and realised that it was Assia’s, a symbolic rope or ‘hawser’ mooring him to the memory of her.41 Later in the summer, he scattered her ashes in a rural Kentish graveyard, doing what he could to fulfil her last wish for her body.
Nor could he escape the memory of Sylvia. On 13 July, he was staying with Olwyn in London. The second Poetry International Festival was under way, though this time he was not so centrally involved. While Olwyn took a siesta, he read through the proofs of an academic essay collection called The Art of Sylvia Plath. Reading about her poems brought everything back with absolute freshness and a sense of ‘total recall’. ‘To me,’ he wrote, ‘those poems open alphabet – every nuance, I know its whole history and connection, every phrase – its exact weight and angle.’42
With the memory of Sylvia thus freshened, he went in the late afternoon to visit Sue Alliston in University College Hospital. Back in 1967, inviting Zbigniew Herbert – who was very fond of Sue – to the first Poetry International, he had explained what had happened to her. She had enrolled for a degree in Anthropology, done well, and gone to North Africa to study the Bedouin. Ted imagined her ‘setting out in her usual style – her long scarf ends dangling and her handbag swinging and colliding with things and her skirts in a swirl round her long, beautiful legs’.43 The Bedouin chiefs tried to ‘entangle her in marriage’ – a nice irony, given her role in Ted’s disentanglement from marriage. She returned after a few months with Hodgkin’s disease, a lymphoma that had until recently been incurable, with a maximum life expectancy of five years. After several months of treatment, she had apparently responded, though she was painfully thin.44 She and Ted had resumed their close friendship, now without a sexual element. But the remission was temporary. Now she was back in hospital, and dying.
It was the first time he had been in the hospital since going there for the formal identification of Sylvia’s body in the mortuary. He went into the ward and saw Sue asleep, her tear-swollen face fallen sideways over a book. As he walked towards her, she woke in that half-amazed, half-alarmed manner that is familiar to anyone who has visited a dying loved one as they drift in and out of consciousness in a hospital bed. She said that she had been having such strange thoughts, strange dreams. She stared at Ted, composing her face, ‘trying to remember’. She was utterly exhausted. He had brought cherries. She ‘tries to eat some, then drink lime juice – later goes yellowy green, last 15 minutes she is wanting to vomit – I eventually go so she can vomit in private’. A little later, a nurse injects her and she notices Ted looking at her arm, that arm which was around him at the moment of Sylvia’s death. She told him that she was tired of living alone. He said that she could recuperate in Court Green, his empty house. She wept, she talked emptily about work. He knew that it was to no avail: ‘Very bad feeling about her. Kept seeing her dead. Felt her hopelessness & loneliness, her despair about future. I feel hollow and fake – since I betrayed her too, though not drastically.’ She wanted love, ‘somebody to live with and care for her’. He knew that he was the one person she really wanted. But it was too late for him to give her a home. ‘Half-wave, half-smile. Farewell.’45 This key journal entry gave him the raw material for one of the most important poems on his trajectory towards a personal voice.
As he walked to the Festival Hall for the poetry festival afterwards, the city seemed spectral and the river filthy. After the evening’s readings, he went to a party but felt disengaged. Back at Olwyn’s, he read the book about Sylvia deep into the night. He then returned to Devon, staying at Court Green with the children but also visiting Brenda in Welcombe. They fought and made up in the summer heat. His behaviour was becoming increasingly volatile.
At the end of the month, he was back in London, visiting Sue again, bearing roses and carnations. Into University College Hospital by the morgue entrance, with its memory of Sylvia. The antiseptic smell and polished floors. As soon as he saw Sue, he sensed that it was her last day: ‘Her eyes huge in shrunken clay face. Her arms wasted and colourless, except for bruisemarks everywhere, and vein marks, skin tissue-thin.’ It almost seemed as if one eye were trying to recognise him and the other did not care. She was too tired to speak, her mouth so numb that she could only mumble. With her wide eyes and inability to articulate, he couldn’t help thinking of his mentally incapacitated niece Barbara. Sue didn’t really register the flowers, so he gave them to a nurse who put them in a vase by the bed. Sue’s hair was ‘brushed to a tight crumpled dark material skullcap – that marvellous forest of auburn. Her pony face more so – sick, staring, like a sick animal.’ She reached out to touch his leather jacket, did not have the strength to turn over, so he helped her. He found it hard to say anything. He kissed her and made to leave. The nurse told him that the bloods were not too bad, it was the ‘strange awful drowsiness’ that was puzzling the doctors. Perhaps, Ted mused, she wanted to die. Her dear friend Tasha Hollis had died, horribly, of alcoholism. What was there left for Sue to live for, all her lovers having fallen away? One death ‘infects another’, he wrote in his journal account of the terrible day. Tasha was somehow infected by ‘the German girl’ who took her own life in 18 Rugby Street. Then Tasha’s death had infected Assia. Sue had reacted terribly on hearing of Assia’s suicide. Now, with Tasha gone, Sue had no motivation to fight on. As he was speaking to the nurse, ‘She waved an exhausted spread hand. I went back, kissed her again – left.’46 He returned to Devon, and would not see her again.
On 7 August 1969, Ted and his father caught an early train to London. Ted put Bill on an onward train to Yorkshire, then met up with Olwyn and took a taxi to Golders Green Crematorium, where they attended Susan Alliston’s funeral beneath a blue sky on a hot summer’s day.
On an impulse on the day of his mother’s funeral in May, he had bought the house that back in 1963 he had so nearly bought with Assia: Lumb Bank. He planned to close up Court Green, rid himself of all its associations. Frieda and Nick would be taken north, put in touch with their Yorkshire origins. Now he made his choice: it would be Brenda and her daughters that he would take with them. The two little girls would do something to fill the place left by Shura.
Frieda and Nick were sent on one of their summer visits to Aurelia in the States while their father prepared for the big move. By the autumn his new extended family was ensconced in Lumb Bank. ‘It is very beautiful – marvellous house,’ he told Richard Murphy, ‘I’m pleased with all of it.’ Ever mindful of Murphy’s hospitality in Cleggan, he added that, despite this, he was still thinking of a place in Ireland: ‘I need another pole – not Devon or London, out of England.’47
One piece of good news came during these bad times: Ted was awarded the 5 million lire City of Florence Prize for poetry, which was worth about £3,000. But as far as publications were concerned, 1969 was, understandably, an exceptionally lean year. There were only two works of any substance. The text of Seneca’s Oedipus appeared from Faber in December: a showcase for Ted in mythic mode, a turmoil of violent passions but at a defensive distance from anything personal. Earlier in the year, he had published an essay in a very different voice, in the form of an introduction to an English translation of the selected poems of the Yugoslavian Vasko Popa. He described Popa as one of that ‘generation of mid-European poets – Holub of Czechoslovakia, Herbert of Poland and Amichai of Germany/Israel are perhaps others of similar calibre – who were caught in mid-adolescence by the war’ and who accordingly developed a new kind of poetry of survival which succeeded in yoking the suffering of the mid-century generation to ‘their inner creative transcendence of it’. Ted recalled a remark of Czesław Miłosz, another of these poets, to the effect that ‘when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him’, he realised ‘that most poetry is not equipped for a world where people actually do die’. ‘But some is,’ Ted replied, and Popa’s was a supreme example.
The introduction then explores the characteristics of Popa’s work, and its influence on Ted’s own development quickly becomes apparent. Popa’s poetry is a landscape in which ‘heads, tongues, spirits, hands, flames, magically vitalized wandering objects, such as apples and moons, present themselves, animated with strange but strangely familiar destinies’. There is a ‘surprising fusion of unlikely elements’; the ‘sophisticated philosopher’ is also ‘a primitive, gnomic spellmaker’. A ‘desolate view of the universe’ is opened up by way of ‘childlike simplicity and moody oddness’. ‘The wide perspective of elemental and biological law is spelled out with folklore hieroglyphics and magical monsters.’48 This account of Popa’s poetic world was also a template for Crow. By the end of 1969, Ted had selected the poems to include in the published sequence and sent them to Leonard Baskin for illustration: ‘Crow was your suggestion remember,’ he wrote. ‘Whether people like them or not, they are my masterpiece. Insofar as I can manage the likeness of a masterpiece.’49
A decade later, Ted updated his introduction for a new edition of Popa’s Collected Poems. He noted a change of style in the late collection, Raw Flesh (1975). Though it included some overspill in the mythic vein from the earlier Wolf-Salt (the wolf was Popa’s totemic beast), most of the poems were ‘unlike anything Popa had published before: simple direct jottings evoking memories of the poet’s childhood and youth, memories of the war years and the town of Vershats’. These poems were ‘without mythical dimension’, yet they still stretched their wings ‘towards the wider legendary worlds of the other books, setting themselves into the bigger settings’.50 Here Ted could just as well have been writing of his own change of style in the Seventies.
He anticipated his new direction in a letter written in the autumn of 1969 to Danny Weissbort, with whom he had worked so closely in bringing the Eastern European poets to English readers: ‘I’ve decided I’ve been trying to write verse in completely the wrong way for some years. I’ve been excluding the real thing. I institutionalized the mode of one or two successes in 1962 – and got myself stuck on the board of management. So my best 7 years have passed in error and futile strife.’ But of course they were the worst, not the best, seven years. Perhaps everyone in their thirties lived through a time of ‘special chaos’: ‘you reap what the innocent eagerness of your twenties sowed, and before you can wise up’.51 After the trauma of 1969, Ted was ready to wise up. For that to happen, he would need a stabilising female influence.