One day, Ted Hughes looked at the sky and saw an aircraft crossing in one direction, a crow in the other. The plane drew his mind to Gerald and the receipt of airmail letters from the other side of the world. But what of the crow’s flight? Would it be possible to see into that? To put aside the aircraft, the world, the sky, the self and to enter the full, the deep, ‘crowiness’ in the crow’s flight: its ‘ominous’ quality, ‘the bare-faced, bandit thing, the tattered beggarly gipsy thing, the caressing and shaping yet slightly clumsy gesture’. You could try to capture all that in words and still you might miss the crowiness, the essence – the ‘inscape’ as Gerard Manley Hopkins had it – of the way in which a knowledge of the human world might be derived in an instant from a glimpse of a crow’s wing-beat, as it was derived by Shakespeare when Macbeth says ‘Light thickens, and the crow / Makes wing to the rooky wood.’ In seeing into the life of things, poets, probably always but certainly since the time of Wordsworth and the Romantics, have also been looking into their own selves, surveying their inner universe. When Ted Hughes writes about the crow’s wing-beat, he says, echoing the language of Wordsworth, that the moment of its observation unlocks the doors ‘of all those many mansions inside the head’. The words that he writes about the crow offer ‘something of the inaudible music that moves us along in our bodies from moment to moment like water in a river’; they are ‘the vital signature’ of his own being. The long gestation of Hughes’s writing about the crow was his struggle ‘truly to possess his own experience, in other words to regain his genuine self’.
Human imagination, says Hughes, works in ‘scenes, things, little stories and people’s feelings’.1 Crow is a series of scenes, a ragbag of things, a collection of dark little stories written over a period of years and given new and even more bitter meaning in retrospect as they displace into myth the raw cry of the barely imaginable feelings that are summoned by the book’s spare dedication: ‘In Memory of Assia and Shura’.
Nineteen-seventy was the year when the crow poems – or at least a selection of them – became a book. It was also a year of turmoil in his personal life. Just before Christmas 1969, leaving Brenda and her daughters in Yorkshire, he took his father, Frieda and Nick back south to Court Green for the holiday season. Then, in January, they returned to Lumb Bank, this time bringing Carol. But at the beginning of February, Ted changed his mind about living in what he called the Yorkshire battleground. So they all returned to Devon. Having deposited his own children at Court Green, he drove back to Yorkshire to collect Brenda and her children. He escorted them to a large farmhouse that he had rented for them on the North Devon coast and spent several days settling them in there. Over the coming months, he paid the rent for her to live in a succession of cottages. She was beginning to feel like a kept woman on a Yorkshire budget.
In March, he opened his heart in a letter to Assia’s sister. Since the previous summer, he had been in a stupor and had done ‘the most insane things’. Getting Lumb Bank, which he and Assia had come so close to buying, had been some kind of attempted atonement for her lonely death at a time when they had been searching for a house. Assia would have made Lumb Bank beautiful but in her absence it was merely bleak. The whole of England was bleak because of her absence, London ‘unbearable’. Only a long journey far away would jolt him back to life. As it was, he was endlessly vacillating – going to and fro like a ping-pong ball – between schools for the children, between houses to live in, between north and south, between Brenda and Carol.2
Writing to Gerald from Court Green, he apologised for being out of touch, explaining that he had been trying to piece together his broken life. But he acknowledged that he perhaps didn’t really know himself well enough to have done so more than provisionally. Nor were his planetary alignments encouraging. Still, he had come to a number of realisations. That Carol, who cared so well for the children, was the backbone of his survival. And that the purchase of Lumb Bank was an understandable impulse at the time of his mother’s death (‘ensuring my roots maybe’), but that it so stirred up the hornet’s nest of family and memory that he now had a ‘psychic horror of the place’ and would do best to let it out for a couple of years and reconsider its future when his mind was more lucid. The other thing was that a house had come on the market near Bideford in North Devon. This was an area he loved because it was a pretty town with good schools, located near the sea and the estuary where he fished.
The house was to be auctioned in the summer, but the owners said that they would settle before then, for about £15,000. Two miles out of town, it was a beautiful Elizabethan manor house with a central tower, light rooms, a big dining hall, a walled garden with fruit trees and nearly 40 acres of sheltered hilly grazing land leading down to the sea. It was secluded along a private lane and surrounded by mature woodland. He sketched it for Gerald, pointing out the location of pastures, cedar tree and a badger sett. He told himself that he would never see another house like it. Built in the time of Shakespeare, this was his dream of England incarnate: the great hall in which to eat, the symbolic tower like that of Yeats, the surrounding landscape.
How to afford it? An American library had offered him £20,000 for Sylvia’s manuscripts. But that money was rightfully the children’s. He justified the temptation by saying that it would do them more good to live in such a wonderful home than to wait for an unknown amount of cash when they were grown up. But he didn’t convince even himself with this argument. The better alternative would surely be for Gerald to come home and take a half-share in the house. He could keep bullocks and they could fish together: ‘What the hell else are you going to do – you’re 50 this year. I’m 40. What are we saving life up for? We could live here like barons – it’s a kingdom.’3 But Gerald had no intention of returning to the old country and its miserable weather.
Money was, as ever, the problem, given that Ted did not want to let go of Court Green (because of all the memories of Sylvia), or of Lumb Bank (because there would be a heavy tax hit if he sold it so soon after buying it), or of the manuscripts (his children’s birthright). With Gerald unwilling to come in on the scheme, he turned to Aurelia, which proved to be a fatal mistake. Just before Easter, he wrote to tell her about the house and proposed that its purchase could be financed by the royalties on an American edition of The Bell Jar. Seven years earlier, the book would have seemed ‘terribly raw and inflammatory’, but now that ‘Sylvia’s eruption into American consciousness’ was ‘pretty well digested’, the book would not be a bombshell at all – ‘The poems were the bombshell.’ Passages causing direct offence would naturally be quietly removed. If the book were not to be published soon, it would diminish in value until there came a point when it would be no more than ‘a curiosity for students’. The children loved the house, he told Aurelia – what with the badgers and the lobsters under the rocks on the beach – and it was their immediate happiness that was paramount.4
Things did not work out as planned. A year later, Aurelia scribbled a bitter annotation on the fold of the wafer-thin airmail paper: ‘Children said this was a “horrible house” and they didn’t want to live there. Ted did send me $10,000 from the royalties (I protested the publication which Sylvia would not have allowed) and deposited $5,000 each in accounts for Frieda and Nick – Ted never bought the property!!!’ The damage was done: Aurelia and, through her, several of Sylvia’s biographers came to believe that Ted had opened the wound of The Bell Jar merely for the sake of a big house by the sea.
He was in no mood for new writing. The important task was to get those crows into print. Leonard Baskin, who had originally suggested the idea for a crow sequence, was commissioned to do the engravings for a de luxe edition on his Gehenna Press. For the trade edition, Ted identified 1 October as an astrologically auspicious date, though Faber missed this by eleven days. At the beginning of the year, the plan was to include forty-five poems. By Easter it was sixty.5 The subtitle, From the Life and Songs of the Crow, was introduced in order to indicate that this was a selection, not the entire epic sequence.
To Ben Sonnenberg in New York he explained how, at the moment of Assia’s death, when Crow was at ‘the bottom of the inferno’, the sequence had come to a halt. He had, he said, not written a word for a year. ‘In piecing together the fragments of the beloved he himself is reduced to a scattered skeleton’: this was as true of himself as of the Crow.6
He knew that the stakes for his reputation were very high. Setting aside private-press work, he had not published a volume of original poetry since Wodwo in 1967, and most of the poems there had been written before Sylvia’s death. Crow, furthermore, had an immensely long gestation. It had begun from a request by Baskin to write a poem called ‘The Anatomy of Crow’ to go with a collection of his trademark Crow drawings – a request made just three weeks after Sylvia Plath’s death, with the explicit intention of propelling Ted ‘from despair to activity’.7 A rendering called Eat Crow came first, in 1964, as ‘part of a long waddling verse drama’ based on Andreae’s The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (a Renaissance alchemical fantasia that Hughes considered to be ‘a crucial seminal work – like Parzival or The Tempest – a tribal dream’).8 Then there was a plan for a folktale, initially for children, with the Crow in a similar role to that of the Raven in North American Indian tales. Hughes recalled making his first attempt before going to Ireland in 1965, then starting the sequence in earnest after his completion of the series of ‘Skylarks’ lyrics published in 19669 – a trajectory from an ascending bird long associated with lyric song to a descent into carrion. Things had started to flow on the trip along the Rhine with Assia, but had then been halted by the work of organising the first Poetry International Festival. A contract had been signed early in 1967. He had tried to grow the work into a saga, an epic poem, a creation myth, a counter-theology. He continued on and off, as his relationship with Assia imploded.
The Crow was many things and required many explanations. One of the most revealing was a gloss on the poem ‘Crow on the Beach’, in which he explained that the guiding metaphor of the sequence came from his reading of the ‘Trickster’ tale familiar from many different folk traditions. The Trickster – Ted knew a whole array of examples, from Loki in Norse sagas to the anthropologist Paul Radin’s study of the ‘Trickster Cycle of the Winnebago Indians’ – is a part-god, part-human, part-animal figure who has some secret knowledge or power that is used to play tricks in order to disrupt the normal rules of nature and question the conventional behaviour of society. Though the intentions may be malicious, the outcome is ultimately valuable for humanity. The Trickster is cheater of death, hero and clown. He is both good and evil, affirmer and denier, destroyer and creator.10 Trickster and sexuality, Ted alleges in his commentary, are ‘connected by a hotline … Trickster literature corresponds to the infantile, irresponsible naïvity [sic] of sexual love, as if it were founded on the immortal enterprise of the sperm.’ The Crow, like the Trickster, has a kind of tragic joy, is ‘repetitive and indestructible’, a ‘demon of phallic energy’. He makes fatal mistakes, indulges tragic flaws, but ‘refuses to let sufferings or death detain him’. Never despairing, however low he falls, he ‘rattles along on biological glee’.11
At the same time, he explained elsewhere, ‘crow’ is another word ‘for the entrails, lungs, heart etc. – everything extracted from a beast when it is gutted. What is extracted, when this is done, is the vital organism of the creature – lacking only the brain and nerves.’ At a profound and symbolic level, Crow is a skeletal autobiography: ‘The Crow of a man, in other words, is the essential man – only minus his human looking vehicle, his bones and muscles.’12 Ted Hughes was looking into the heart of his own darkness. The colour of the collection is the black of crow and death; the outlines are of blood, claw and bone.
God has a nightmare about a crow dragging him around. Crow is then born. He is questioned in an examination. His answers? The word ‘death’ is repeated, fifteen times, more. Then ‘who is stronger than death? – Me, evidently.’ The narrative proceeds with a series of poems reworking images of the Garden of Eden and our expulsion from it. A serpent plays a prominent part. There is a morbid wit: ‘God crushed the apple and made cider.’ At times the imagery is intensely violent or sexually charged. Of words as weapons: ‘Crow turned the words into bombs – they blasted the bunker.’13 Of laughter: ‘People’s arms and legs fly off and fly on again.’14 And of lovers: ‘In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs … In the morning they wore each other’s faces.’15 The journey extends via a river-crossing and strange encounters. Figures out of Greek mythology. A hyena and an elephant. Later, a white owl.
On numerous occasions, in letters, in published and unpublished notes, in broadcasts and at poetry readings, Hughes explicated the meanings of his sequence, told of how during his long tribulations Crow ‘gradually develops some purpose in his life, which becomes a quest to find who created him’: ‘he’s forever, through one clue and another, approaching his creator. And when he gets there, it always turns out that it’s some female or other.’ Some of these females seem human, but more often they are demons, serpents or versions of the Gravesian White Goddess. ‘And so throughout his tribulations he’s involved with all sorts of females’ – which is something that Ted’s friends noticed about him.16
The ways in which these females are represented can be startling. When God tries to teach Crow the word ‘Love’, Crow retches. ‘And woman’s vulva dropped over man’s neck and tightened.’17 In ‘The Battle of Osfrontalis’, words come ‘in the likeness of a wreathed vagina pouring out Handel’. In ‘Criminal Ballad’, there is a ‘woman of complete pain rolling in flame’. And in ‘Truth Kills Everybody’, Crow holds ‘a screeching woman’ by the throat.18 But Hughes hastened to reassure a sceptical reviewer that these poems intended no violence against women. The violence was internal to Crow’s psychology: the images are not of ‘violence’ per se but serve rather as metaphors of ‘breakthrough’ into self-knowledge. The poems are always grasping towards some dark mystery of the inner life: the creative tension out of which they are born is the incompatibility between the speaker’s ostensible mentality and what Hughes calls ‘the hidden thing’ which fleetingly escapes. Like dreams, poems offer momentary glimpses of the inner mystery. The images in ‘Truth Kills Everybody’, he confided, ‘are all from a series of dreams I once had, memorable to me for the shock they came with and the interpretation of them that presented itself’.19
Rarely has a volume of modern poetry had such a mixed reception as Crow. Al Alvarez set an authoritative, positive tone in a review in the Observer the day before publication. He said that the collection marked the end of Hughes’s faith in animals, which is certainly true insofar as the sequence has little to do with the natural history of crows, little similarity with the earlier collections in which each animal poem stood in ‘isolated perfection’. Alvarez compared Hughes’s development to Freud’s move from the pleasure principle to the death-drive after the First World War. The collection is described as an epic folktale in which ‘The tone is harsh but sardonic and utterly controlled. The poet will not yield an inch to sentimentality.’ The writing ‘could easily slop over into melodrama’, but it does not (in contrast to the less successful poems in Wodwo). Astutely, Alvarez identified the vivifying influence of Eastern European poetry, Vasco Popa especially: ‘From him Hughes has learned to control his private horrors and make them public by subjecting them to arbitrary rules, as a psychotic child repeats and controls his terrors by turning them into play.’ It is a collection, Alvarez concluded, ‘equipped for life in a world where people do die’. ‘With Crow, Hughes himself now joins the select band of survivor-poets whose work is adequate to the destructive reality we inhabit. I think he is the only British poet to have done so.’20 The memory of the Holocaust, not fully grasped in Britain until the Sixties, and the anxieties of the Cold War, with its threat of nuclear annihilation, hang more heavily over the review than any intimations of Hughes’s private life. The fear of real bombs is highlighted: there is no hint of the bombshell regarding Sylvia’s death that Alvarez was priming even as he wrote the review.
Two poets admired by Hughes took a balanced view, admiring but more modest in praise than Alvarez. For Peter Porter, Hughes’s achievement was ‘to use legendary material as old as Gilgamesh or Eden and make it apply to modern genocides and the smaller disasters of individual human lives. The plot has disappeared and the poems in their isolation seem exaggeratedly misanthropic. The language is simpler than Hughes usually employs (the influence of folk legends) but it can still flower into violent eloquence.’ The quality of the writing, Porter suggested, was by no means all good: ‘Hughes has got stuck with a lot of traditional properties (emotive nouns, stale vocabulary, litanies, and catalogues) and for the first time he oversimplifies and coarsens some of his poems.’ On the other hand, ‘English poetry has found a new hero and nobody will be able to read or write verse now without the black shape of Crow falling across the page.’21 And for Stephen Spender, ‘By using his extraordinary gifts to project a state of consciousness which sees the destruction of the world behind everything, Hughes may well be speaking for what many of his contemporaries really do feel. Some of the most terrifying (and terrifyingly funny) passages in Crow give one the sense that this is the nightmare reality behind the American or world dream of salesmanship and television.’ On the minus side, though, ‘The defect of the poem, it seems to me, is that he tends to use the “end-of-civilization” situation – which is the contemporary one – as a metaphor for the whole of life.’22
Conservative critics did not hesitate to describe Crow as ‘the assertion of a nihilistic violence’.23 But fortunately for Ted, just as a rearguard action against the volume was being mounted in the English press early in 1971, the American edition was published to high acclaim. Newsweek said that ‘Crow is one of those rare books of poetry that have the public impact of a major novel or a piece of super-journalism’: ‘Ted Hughes has created one of the most powerful mythic presences in contemporary poetry. Crow is the blackness of all of us, including the whiteness that was.’24 And the influential New York Times Book Review trumpeted that ‘this is no mere book of poems, but a wild yet cunning wail of anguish and resilience, at once contemporary, immediate, and as atavistic as the archaic myths it resembles’, while astutely adding – without knowledge of the importance of the experience of Ted’s father – that ‘Among British poets, Hughes is the most haunted inheritor, from Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves, of the sensibility shaped by the appalling slaughter in World War I.’25 In Boston, the Christian Science Monitor caught the humour as well as the darkness. ‘Part of the fun’, the reviewer suggested, was that, though the form was childlike and the topic often ‘a myth of origin’, the subject matter was ‘anything but childlike’. It was a ‘grim kind of fun’: ‘Black-humor poetry to be sure, but programmed to awaken man to what he is doing to his planet, warring, polluting, destroying its natural balance. Mr Hughes has a vision of what life on earth could be, and if he shows us its negative side, it is a stratagem to make us demand the positive.’ Some commentators in England had hailed it ‘as a work of genius, a seminal book which will change the direction of English poetry, a new Waste Land for the ’70s’. Whatever the final critical reckoning might prove to be, Crow was a book ‘too powerful to be ignored, too passionate to be overlooked; a marriage of primitive fantasy and sophisticated knowledge too rare to miss’.26 The Eliotic comparison could not have pleased Ted more. He cut out the review and preserved it.
The retrospective judgement upon the collection has been equally mixed. For some readers, it represents Hughes at the height of his powers. So, for example, the experimental novelist Nicola Barker looked back from the vantage point of the Nineties and described the collection as ‘a skinny Bible dedicated to life’s stupid gory ugliness, but also a vindication, as joyous, as bubbly, as fizzy and nose-tickling as a glug of liver-salts’. Crow, she said, was a ‘raddled, mangy, empty creature’ who wasn’t ‘so much a bird as a smudge on the page, a blot of ink which links the collection of poems together, staggers between the poems and barks at them, eyes them up, tips his head, picks them apart, one by one … Hughes booked his ticket to immortality in 1970, and the way I see it, that ticket’s not refundable’ (despite, she meant, the weakness of some of the Laureate poems).27 For others, though, the collection marked the beginning of a descent into poetic self-indulgence, misogyny and all too parodiable blackness. There are good critics who argued that Ted Hughes’s best work was already behind him.
But perhaps the last word on the book’s reception should be left to the local paper of Hughes’s place of origin, the Mytholmroyd Courier: ‘Crow will hardly outsell the collected poems of Mrs Harold Wilson. But, with one flap of its monstrous black wing, it has swept Mytholmroyd-born Ted Hughes head and shoulders clear of the current generation of British poets, alike in reputation, daring and achievement.’28
Despite its distance from the versifying of the Prime Minister’s wife, Crow, which cost twenty shillings (one pound), sold well. The first edition of 4,000 copies sold out within weeks; Faber brought out two further editions of the same quantity before the end of the year and two more the following year. Seven further poems were added to the 1972 reprint of another 4,000 copies (£1.40 in the new decimal currency). This too sold out. A further 5,000 copies were printed the next year and a paperback edition of 20,000 the year after that, with 20,000 more in 1976.29
There were also the usual Hughesian limited editions, beautifully crafted and intended for deep pockets. Olwyn established her own imprint, the Rainbow Press, at this time, though Ted was also collaborating with other fine printers. Following a number of broadsides early in the year (‘A Crow Hymn’ in March for three guineas, four further crows in August for £4), 150 copies of A Few Crows, at £5 signed or a guinea unsigned, were issued from the Rougemont Press in Exeter on the originally planned publication date of 1 October 1970. In April 1971 twelve further poems, ‘excluded for personal reasons’ from the public edition, were privately printed in Essex under the title Crow Wakes.30 The title poem ‘Crow Wakes’ was extracted from Eat Crow, which appeared in full in 150 copies on Olwyn’s Rainbow Press for the considerable sum of £16.80. And finally, in 1973, the project came full circle to its origins with a de luxe, hand-set limited edition of 400 copies of the full augmented collection illustrated with twelve drawings by Leonard Baskin. This also included three further poems, two that had first appeared in another of Olwyn’s Rainbow Press limited editions, a selection of Poems by Ted and their friends Ruth Fainlight and Alan Sillitoe,31 and one (‘Crow’s Song about Prospero and Sycorax’) which had been published with a limited-edition text of the introduction to the selection of Shakespeare’s verse that was his other major project at this time.32 The price of the volume with the dozen clawed, hooded and visceral Baskin illustrations was £30. In the light of the rampant inflation of the Seventies, forty years on this equates to more than £300 per copy. A rare-book dealer might ask more than twice that sum for a second-hand copy.
The limited editions were not only about beauty, rarity and profit – which was not always substantial, given that the market was tiny and the production values of the highest, while the raw materials of fine-woven paper, bevelled boards and gold leaf for the spines did not come cheap. These special collections were also a form of catharsis, an opportunity to release poems of particular rawness to a very limited readership more interested in the look and value of a book than the inner life of the tormented Crow. So, for example, ‘Crow’s Song about England’ appeared only in the Rainbow Press selection of Hughes, Fainlight and Sillitoe. It tells of a girl who ‘tried to give her mouth’ but found it ‘snatched from her and her face slapped’. Then ‘She tried to give her breasts / They were cut from her and canned’. And finally, ‘She tried to give her cunt / It was produced in open court she was sentenced’.33 This was the debased England of tabloid sex-crime headlines and a macabre national obsession with Myra Hindley and the Moors Murders. In the very month that this poem was published by Olwyn, Hughes blackly joked (or only half joked) that he had been put in the frame as a suspect in a high-profile Yorkshire sex crime. In October 1970 a twenty-three-year-old schoolteacher called Barbara Mayo, hitchhiking on the M1, had been picked up by a dark-haired man in a Morris 1000. He raped and strangled her. The ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ Peter Sutcliffe later became a suspect, though DNA evidence thirty years after the event pointed to another man who had by then emigrated to Canada. The photofit picture of the murderer did, unfortunately, bear a vague resemblance to Hughes, who had a Morris Traveller.
In the trade edition, Crow is always ‘he’, not an ‘I’. He should not be mistaken for Ted Hughes. But a poet’s persona is an essential part of that poet’s inner self. In the poem ‘Crow Tries the Media’, where the verb in the title has a double sense, ‘He wanted to sing about her’ but a ‘tank had been parked on his voice’. He wants to ‘sing to her soul simply’ but the media horde is waiting so he cannot release his inner voice, with the result that ‘her shape dimmed’.34 This is the elegiac voice, the desire to write about Sylvia struggling for release. Again, Crow’s ‘Lovesong’ is not only one of many battles with the maw of the White Goddess but also an intensely felt yet oblique poem for Sylvia:
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever.35
The bite cannot but be a memory of Falcon Yard, the complete and all-consuming desire a recollection of Sylvia’s strenuous and emotionally demanding lovemaking.
Only in the very last line of the trade edition of Crow does the he become a me, so allowing the open self to rest upon the page: ‘Sit on my finger, sing in my ear, O littleblood.’36 And only behind the veil of the limited edition does the mask slip and the ‘I’, the first-person voice, emerge, hounded and broken, in an explosion, ‘a bombcloud’: ‘I became smaller than water, I stained into the soilcrumble. / I became smaller.’37 He became smaller: Elizabeth Compton remembers that Sylvia described Ted as having become a little man by virtue of his affair with Assia.
These lines actually go back to the very beginning of the Crow project: they belong to Eat Crow and were first published as early as July 1965, under the enigmatic title ‘X’, in Encounter magazine – the very place where such devastating poems as ‘Daddy’ and ‘The Jailor’ had first appeared. The truth is that from the outset Crow was a means of coming to terms, indirectly and ‘through a symbol’, with Sylvia’s death. But Hughes did not openly acknowledge this until the last year of his life, after the publication of Birthday Letters.38