In March 1976, with Jack Orchard barely cold in the ground, Ted flew to Australia. He had been invited to the Antipodes’ foremost literary gathering, the Adelaide Festival. With his father-in-law gone, it was an opportunity to take his own father to see brother Gerald. He rather hoped that Bill might stay on for a few months with Gerald and Joan, to relieve the pressure at home.
The trip proved to be another turning point in Ted’s life. As on many occasions when he was travelling, he kept a more systematic journal than usual. After a stupefying train journey with watery food under a March sun, a wait at Reading station and a dreary taxi ride, he and his father arrived at Heathrow. They had asked for a seat with extra leg-room, so found themselves at the front by the toilets, which proved disruptive but sometimes amusing. Bill Hughes, who had never flown long haul before, was amazed at the size of the plane’s wings. They stopped to refuel in the desert landscape of Bahrain where some ‘incredibly black small ugly Arabs’ came aboard to clean the plane.1 They stopped again in Singapore, brilliantly lit and gaudy, a ‘sinful Eastern city’ with an unutterably boring airport, where the only relief in the hot wet air was the sight of ‘Pretty Waitresses everywhere – Indonesians, Malays etc.’ Then in a dazzling dawn they found themselves above the landmass of Australia, looking down on mountain forests, scattered homesteads, a tangle of dirt roads and periodic water-holes.
They arrived in a daze at Gerald and Joan’s neat home in Tullamarine near Melbourne. Ted admired his brother’s Japanese sword carefully stowed in a steel box in his den. He had earache from the flight. Then they were shown a telegram with more bad news: while they had been in the air, Uncle Walt had died. Walt, the patriarch of the family, in many ways more of a father to Ted than his own father – memories of that first journey abroad and of the visit to Top Withens with Sylvia. To have been absent at the time of his death felt like another manifestation of the curse upon Ted’s life.
Later, from Gerald and Joan’s seaside second home overlooking miles of empty beach on the Mornington peninsula, they managed to phone Aunt Hilda: Walt had eaten nothing for three weeks, then finally asked for a bottle of whisky, which he drank through the night in the front room while Hilda slept upstairs. When she came down in the morning he was dead on the living-room floor, having laid himself out with arms folded.
They reminisced and drank cold Australian beer. Ted peeled some bark from an ancient gum tree as a keepsake of his visit, while Gerald carved the name of his house on an ancient piece of tea-tree wood.2 Ted asked if there were foxes and Gerald showed him snake tracks. For a fleeting moment, they were two boys in the wild once more. Then Gerald drove his brother to the airport and Ted took a little plane to Adelaide.
He liked the cleanness of the city, the lazy and innocent atmosphere, the extraordinary bird cries. Walking through empty streets and parks in the early morning, he saw quail-crested doves, a grey-brown and yellow thrush-like bird with a ‘rear-eye corner like Groucho Marx’, budgerigars taking flight, and ‘the giant rubber trees like acrobatic elephants copulating’. Above all, the heat: being down under, he did not have to wait for July to sense the transit of the sun into the sign of his Muse. Something was stirring.
Fellow-poet Adrian Mitchell, who had been on the same plane from London, had arrived in Adelaide a day before Ted, the time agreed with the festival organisers. He was met at the airport by a vivacious press officer in a white limousine with green-tinted windows, hired to impress the visiting writers. Mitchell told her that Hughes would be arriving the next day, since he was staying with his brother in Melbourne. She thought that it was cheeky of him not to arrive at the appointed hour, so she made a point of not fetching him from the airport. Ted challenged her over this when he was standing in the drinks queue at a barbecue hosted by the Writers’ Week Committee, sweltering in his heavy leather jacket. She said that she would make it up to him by bringing him wine straight away. She brought him four glasses, each with a different vintage. Telling him that he could not drink four glasses at once, she motioned to him to sit, where she joined him, unworried about the prospect of grass stains on her starched antique white dress. He asked her how she knew that he was a wine buff and she replied that she was psychic. He liked this.3 Her name was Jill Barber.
The following day, she met him at the Hotel Australia in her role as press officer. She was discomposed when they were forced to confront a crowd of anti-Hughes ‘libbers’ bearing placards, so he let her rest in his room. That evening, at the gala opening of the festival, they drank champagne and left early. Jill tipsily drove the limousine over a cement bollard in the parking lot and Ted let himself go in raucous laughter. Back at the hotel, he mopped her brow with a wet flannel as she threw up the cheap champagne into his sink, then he tenderly unbuttoned and unzipped her, gazed admiringly at her body and made forceful love to her. He told her that she reminded him of a woman whom he had loved very much. The night after he made love to her, he had a strange dream in which he was taking the caps off the poison chimneys at Auschwitz.4
It was a heady week. Soon after his arrival, he had sat under the trees in 40-degree heat being interviewed by a female journalist in company with Don Dunstan, the premier of South Australia and a great contributor to the local arts scene. They talked about the importance of poetry, the joy of writing for children, the neglect of Zbigniew Herbert (‘the greatest poet in the world’, Ted affirmed), the high quality of contemporary Australian verse and finally the subject about which he was always reluctant to speak in public: Sylvia. Amid awkward pauses, his replies were terse:
Interviewer: Was it in [pause] comparative with your writing, sometimes better than your writing do you think?
Hughes: She was [pause] I think she was an extraordinary genius. But then I always thought that. And [pause] I don’t think there’s anybody like her [pause] like [pause] Those last poems are something unique in English literature.
Interviewer: Is it very difficult, the relationship of a creative man like you and a genius person like her?
Hughes: No.
Interviewer: Can you give to each other? I mean [tails off]
Hughes: Sure.
Interviewer: Did she have any great influence on you?
Hughes: Must have done.
Interviewer: You’re not aware of it though?
Hughes: Not specifically. I might even have influenced her.5
Later, the same interviewer, Claudia Wright, spoke to Hughes at length in the studio, where he also read some of his poems for broadcast. He told of how he lived as a writer but how when that became too exhausting he took up farming simply in order to get away from dependence on writing. He was, however, still ‘completely dependent on writing’. For what, she asked? ‘Dependent for sanity,’ he replied, before explaining that having another occupation meant that he was not entirely financially dependent on his words: ‘You know that at the last crunch, you can eat a sheep, or you can kill a bullock, or [pause]. And besides, these beautiful animals occupy your whole time, or your thoughts. And the literary world fades away.’ As ever, he was caught between the rural and the literary world. The conversation then turned to Crow. Wright waxed lyrical: ‘half the beauty of listening to your poetry is watching you, your body and your hands and your face move with all the rhythms of the words’.
She drew him towards the poem ‘Lovesong’ and he explained that Crow voices ‘dilemma questions, and they’re all questions referring to his encounter with this – these females. So, they’re all questions about a man and woman. They’re questions about love.’ The atmosphere in the studio became charged as the interview was interspersed with folk songs in the gorgeous voice of Hughes’s admired Maddy Prior. ‘Could you read something for me please?’ asked Wright. ‘I’ll read you a rural poem, a little poem,’ he replied. ‘For a country girl,’ she said, laughing.6 After the interview they slept together.
Some of the big names had dropped out of the festival at the last minute, so Ted and Adrian Mitchell found themselves standing in for the legendary American writers Tennessee Williams and James Baldwin in a large sold-out lecture hall. The usual ‘libbers’ were in attendance. ‘How is Sylvia Plath?’ one woman asked. ‘She’s dead,’ he replied. He read fifteen poems, including such favourites as ‘The Thought-Fox’ and ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’ (‘This is just a description of a little girl – a two-year-old girl – looking at a full moon. And “moon” being one of her first words – so she being very excited to use these words’).7 He then elaborated at his customary length on the meaning of the Crow narrative.
At the festival he was taken up by a group of young Australian poets. One in particular seemed to him a genuine talent. A. E. Housman once said that the mark of a true poem was that it would raise the bristles on a man’s face, and Ted thought something similar about this young woman’s work: it made his hair stand up. But the electricity also came from her beauty. She had an unusual face and the most haunting eyes he had ever seen.8 In a letter to Richard Murphy, he remarked that she lived on a farm with a man who was quite a good poet – actually they lived in a suburb of Melbourne but had a retreat with a bush hut on it at Yerrinbool near Mittagong in the Southern Highlands. And though the husband was indeed a poet, he was, more significantly, one of Australia’s finest painters, David Rankin.9 Jennifer, the poet, was a free spirit, already on her second marriage and with a volume of verse called Ritual Shift about to be published. The Rankins were planning to travel to England. When they discovered that Ted lived in Devon, where David had been born, they asked him to arrange accommodation for them. He offered them his cottage near the sea at Moortown. The rumour around the festival was that the offer was made because an affair with Jennifer had already begun.
Bill Hughes did stay on with Gerald for a few weeks. Ted flew back via Perth, where he called Jill Barber from an airport payphone and said that he had fallen in love with her. Jack Orchard’s death had released him from the self-imposed role of loyal son-in-law, faithful husband and toiling farmer. His psychological state, ‘a close mesh of uncontrollable peculiarities and psychosomatic upsets’, was in transition.10 As the discovery of the poetic genre of vacana opened the way for the Gaudete epilogue poems, so the trip to Australia helped to unlock not only a new directness in his poetry but also a new freedom in his personal life.
Jill Barber flew to London. She stayed with friends in Putney. Timothy Dalton, a future James Bond, was also staying; Jill recalled that he liked her to see him wearing nothing but a towel. She moved on when renovations were complete in the flat that she had bought on the Fulham Road. As soon as he could escape from the country, Ted came to see her. He bundled her into his battered old Volvo and drove to Olwyn’s house in Tufnell Park. There was some pretext about Jill having a contact with a potential Japanese purchaser for some of his manuscripts. But Olwyn immediately realised that she was meeting a new girlfriend. The awkward fact of Ted’s marriage, which he had not previously mentioned, made itself apparent during this visit. Jill liked Olwyn and saw that she was Ted’s London protector, as Carol was his protector in Devon: ‘As for me, I was his ray of sunshine. He would carve up his life, half for me, maybe more than half in the beginning.’ By Jill’s account, Ted’s excuse for falling in love with her was that his existence in Devon filled him with ‘black electricity’ and that his farm life was at odds with his literary and his ‘inner’ life.
Their love affair lasted for four years, intense in the first two, cooler thereafter. Jill was mesmerised by ‘his feline eyes, deft hands and fabulous laugh’, by the way that he listened intently to everything and ‘could make people feel as if they had never lived before they met him’. He listened and heard everything. But she insists that she eventually broke off the relationship because she wanted a child before it was too late, and realised that Ted would never give her one. He had not been happy on the one occasion when she had a pregnancy scare.
In London, he did not keep the affair secret; to many of his friends, Jill’s positive Antipodean energy was contagious. Like any other couple, they went to parties and literary events together. He helped her with contacts for the little magazine called Mars on which she was working as assistant editor. She was smart, sassy and quick-witted, but did not pretend to be an intellectual. She was very good at taking Ted out of his black moods and gently teasing his pretensions (though she shared his belief in a spirit world). They loved cooking and wine and laughter. Photographs taken in her flat show an exceptionally relaxed and happy Ted. He also became very close to her flatmate, a beautiful blonde American model and actress called Barbara Trentham, who later married John Cleese. Long evenings with two young women in a London flat inevitably reminded him of those few heady long-lost weeks with Sue Alliston and Tasha Hollis, both now so tragically dead.
Ted wrote some touching, if brief, love letters to Jill, but there are no references to her in the unrestricted pages of his journals, so we have only her account of what she meant to him. She loved to go barefoot and he called her his ‘Gypsy Girl’, giving her symbolic presents such as Egyptian beads. He liked making love to her out of doors, once on Dartmoor uncomfortably on a rock where, according to legend, consummation led to eternal union, another time under a hedgerow while they were on a northern motoring tour in Northumberland. He was serious enough about her to take her to Sylvia’s grave at Heptonstall and to invite her to accompany him on fishing trips in Ireland.
The purpose of one of the Irish trips was for her to get to know the teenage Nick, who was uncomfortable around the woman who was obviously his father’s girlfriend, though there was a glorious moment on 27 October 1977 when he caught a 24½-pound pike in Castle Lake, near Sixmilebridge, County Clare. Ted noted in his journal that this was a special day because it was Nick’s mother’s birthday. Sylvia would have been forty-five.
There was laughter on the holiday. Ted wrote in his journal about a redoubtable woman who would not let them fish in her lake. ‘A fish can’t piss in her lake but she knows about it,’ said Jill.11 She always saw the best in Ted, but did not approve when he left Nick alone in their tent while he came inside to make love to her in the bed-and-breakfast where she was staying. She was always conscious of the extreme vigour of his lovemaking (‘He would walk through my front door after four-and-a-half hours in the car and want to have me on the floor of the hallway there and then’). For a time, she liked it when they fought. ‘I was thrilled when he told me after one argument: “You’re a bigger bitch than Sylvia.”’12
When they first met, he complained to her, showing farm-calloused hands branded as if with stigmata, that he was suffering from writer’s block and had written little of value since Assia’s death. He sometimes called her his Muse and at a party he introduced her thus to no less a figure than Robert Graves, author of The White Goddess. He gave her each new book as it appeared. In her copy of Season Songs, he stuck an adhesive address label over the printed dedication ‘FOR CAROL’, inscribed it by hand to her instead, describing her as his birthday beauty and calling her by the nickname ‘Jillipops’. One or two London friends reckoned that Jill had Ted under her thumb. She did not seem to be in awe of him in the manner of a groupie. His letters to her are a mix of affection and playfulness. In one of them, he told her that he felt as if she had woken him up from a seven-year sleep. He then narrated two of his dreams. In one of them, he cast for a salmon and King Edward I (King Salmon as King Ted?) rose up from the riverbed and took him into his library. In the second dream, Jill made him laugh so much that she became angry and tried to drown herself in a bath of white wine, then emerged drunk to show him an Australian stone covered with hieroglyphics, which he sensed held the secret of his life, and she gave him the stone on condition that he treated her respectfully. He signed off the letter by saying how much he was missing kissing her ears.
Her part in his increased productivity in the late Seventies was perhaps less to do with her being an authentic Gravesian White Goddess than with her ability to relax him, to remove his inhibitions about revealing himself and having fun. Ted fell in love with places as much as women – Sylvia as embodiment of America, Brenda and Carol of Devon – and in this respect Jill the free spirit was the incarnation of the light and warmth, the youthful ‘laid-back’ atmosphere, of Australia.
Was Jill Barber a Muse in any profound sense? A lyric called ‘Sunstruck Foxglove’ begins with the speaker bending to touch a ‘gypsy girl’ who is waiting for him in a hedge. ‘Her loose dress falls open’, revealing ‘the reptile under-speckle / Of her sunburned breasts’. She is ‘Flushed, freckled with earth-fever, / Swollen lips parted, her eyes closing’. His head swims and they come together in the heat.13 Allusions to origin, maternity and fecundity mark this as a White Goddess poem, but in the light of the nickname Gypsy Girl and the fact that Jill was notable for her freckles, there must also be a conscious or unconscious memory here of that afternoon of summer loving beneath a Northumberland hedge. This one poem at least belongs to her, and she was rather pleased when, many years after the end of the affair, the cover design for New Selected Poems 1957–1994 was based upon a voluptuous image of a foxglove.
As agreed during the Adelaide Festival, Jennifer and David Rankin came to Devon. They spent their first night at Court Green. Ted told their young son that there was a ghost in the room where he was going to sleep. As always, he was wonderful with the children. Jennifer especially remembered a stormy winter’s evening when they were all sitting around eating fish and chips out of newspaper. There was a lull in the conversation. Ted then turned to her daughter. ‘Jessica, you are 5?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Tell me something,’ continued Ted. ‘Can you remember when you were 3?’ ‘Of course,’ said Jessica, disdainfully. ‘Well!’ said Ted, feverishly, almost on his hands and knees beside her. ‘Then tell me! What was it like?!’14
The Rankins stayed all winter in Ted’s stone cottage near the sea. Jill joined them there for Christmas. Jennifer and David remained in Devon, with time out for several trips to Europe, until the following autumn. David used a shed for a studio and took charge of the childcare, leaving Jennifer free to concentrate on her poetry. She also did a little tuition for Arvon on poetry weekends at Totleigh Barton. Their time in Devon was all about her – and Ted. Crucially, he helped her to find an English publisher. Her collection Earth Hold was placed towards the end of their stay. It was initially accepted by Chatto and Windus, but then the established poet D. J. Enright came along with a new manuscript and Jennifer’s book, the newest on the list, was bumped off it. ‘Great calamity-scenes’, remembered a friend who was visiting them at the time. Then, on Ted’s recommendation, Secker and Warburg took the poems. It was also his idea to pull off a Hughes–Baskin-type trick: admired Australian painter John Olsen was persuaded to provide illustrations, creating a large-format book that could make a splash. It duly appeared in 1978, with a puff from Ted praising it for introducing ‘a new note’ into English poetry, ‘the note that tunes us in, somehow, to the bedrock of the ancient Australian landmass – that eerie, powerful presence which silences both aboriginal and white man’.15
He frequently visited the cottage and his relationship with Jennifer blossomed over poetry, laughter and clifftop walks around the Hartland peninsula. In her ‘North Devon poem’, unpublished in her lifetime, a charismatic, earth-holding Ted-like man kneels at the open door of the stove in the cottage and teaches her about coal-fires, ‘His eyes / sudden pieces of sky in this winter kitchen’.16
In the year that Earth Hold was published in London, Jennifer, now back in Australia, was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was ravaged by intensive chemotherapy and died in early December 1979, a few days after her thirty-eighth birthday. During her illness, Ted wrote her many tender, moving letters.17 After her death, he remembered her in a series of elegies in scattered publications, uncollected in his lifetime. In one she is a waif standing on the shore against the Pacific surf. In another she is lovesick: ‘You barely touched the earth. You lived for love. / How many loves did you have?’ And in the third, she is a lover of the desert, taken all too soon by ‘boundless Tao’.18 But his finest poem for her never appeared in print. It exists in ten manuscript drafts under the title ‘For Jennifer, nothing has changed’. Here he remembers her on the Hartland cliffs by the ‘insatiable Atlantic’, then reflects on the utter loneliness of terminal illness, where even her poems seem to have deserted her, to have become survivors who are oddly reticent about the creator from whom they have turned away. For Jennifer herself, nothing has changed, but for Ted, and the others who have loved her, ‘only one thing’ had changed: the ‘space’ that she ‘electrified’ inside their heads. It had become ‘a dark theatre’, where her eyes, ‘no longer interested in an audience’, ‘Brilliant, grave, silent heroines, alone’, kept on ‘rehearsing’ everything that she was going through in her ‘final days’.19
In September 1982, when Ted spent a week at the Hilton Hotel in Toronto, during the city’s Harbourfront literary festival, the Australian poet and critic Judith Rodriguez met him on his way to an elevator after a session. ‘I believe you knew Jennifer Rankin,’ she found herself saying. ‘What sort of person was she?’ He looked at her balefully, said that ‘She was the most nervous woman I have ever known,’ and stepped into the lift.
Journalist and novelist the Honourable Emma Tennant, daughter of the second Baron Glenconner, was educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School, with childhood memories of the family’s Gothic pile in the Scottish countryside. She had two marriages, both to writers, behind her. She had worked as a travel writer, been an assistant editor at Vogue and established herself as a novelist. In 1975, she launched a magazine called Bananas, attracting both new talent and established writers such as the great dystopian chronicler of modern times J. G. Ballard. At exactly the time Ted began his affair with Jill Barber, she called on Olwyn in the hope of getting some Hughes or even Plath material for the magazine. Her memoir Burnt Diaries offers a vivid picture of Olwyn and her terraced house in Chetwynd Road: the tall woman, once strikingly handsome, ‘with her long, Spanish-looking face and quick flashes of charm under a harassed exterior’; the cluttered ‘office’ at the back of the house with ‘raw materials of the Private Edition business’, ‘volumes of Plath and Hughes poems in slender tomes with names like Rainbow’, ‘sheaths [sheafs?] of thin paper looking desperately in need of salvaging’, ‘bills, some months old, for electricity and gas’.20 Olwyn gave her an unpublished Plath short story called ‘Day of Success’.
Some months later, there was a ring on the doorbell of Emma’s house in Elgin Crescent, Notting Hill, in the small hours of the morning. It was her friend, the poet, biographer and translator Elaine Feinstein. ‘Yevtushenko and Ted Hughes are here, can we come in for a drink?’ They all sat on the floor while Yevgeny Yevtushenko beat out the rhythms of the poetry of the legendary Marina Tsvetaeva (which Feinstein had been translating). Ted was subdued, happy to prowl on the margin of the conversation. Soon afterwards, he and Emma met for a second time, at a party. As if in imitation of Sylvia at Falcon Yard, she forced a reluctant Ted to gyrate, despite his gruff claim ‘I can’t dance.’ ‘You’re a fantastic woman,’ he shouted over the music, before he was whisked away by his female entourage. Tennant clocked the presence of Jill Barber and sensed the younger woman’s proprietorial aura.
She and Feinstein were then invited to teach on a weekend Arvon course down in Devon, where she registered the sweetness, loveliness and youth of Carol. Yevtushenko, who was staying at Court Green, picked them up and drove them over for Sunday lunch. Broad planks were propped up in the cobbled yard outside the thatched house, resembling up-ended coffins. ‘I could make you a table, if you like,’ said Ted, ‘a work-table.’ This was another echo of his life with Sylvia: the elm plank which he and Warren had made for her when they first moved to Court Green and which in Ted’s imagination merged with the elm of her coffin as it was lowered into her Heptonstall grave. Emma Tennant left with a copy of Ted’s Pilinszky translations, marked with a personal inscription in his ‘black, barbed-wire handwriting’.
In the summer of 1977, now a year into his relationship with Jill, he invited Emma to lunch at Julie’s Bar in Notting Hill. At the very least, she was hoping for a poem or story for Bananas. Alone with him for the first time, she found him magnificent. His face, ‘like an Easter Island statue’, seemed to dominate the room, as ‘anger, certainty and pride’ gave ‘an unchanging air to his features’ while, ‘as if unwilled by himself, a smile, thin and nervous’ played on his lips. He launched into tales of his ‘love disasters’: his being reported to the police following the M1 sex murder, the time he ran over a hare on the way to a girlfriend’s house, picked up the body and read the future from its entrails in the girl’s kitchen. He mesmerised her with his stories, including one about a woman who had taught him ‘how to make the hairs on a person’s neck stand up even if they are miles away’. Then they went to look at the peacocks strutting in Holland Park before going to his flat in Fortess Road, where they made love, unsatisfactorily. She was surprised by the paleness of his body.
Afterwards, he drove her back to Notting Hill. They passed the mansion block on Baker Street where Sue Alliston once had a flat: ‘I knew a pretty woman of forty who lived there,’ he said. ‘She died.’ When he dropped her off, he asked her if she knew of the habits of the greylag goose. ‘They are faithful to their first mate, I may be,’ he said, hesitating a moment, ‘I may, after all, be a greylag goose.’
All these details are from Tennant’s memoir Burnt Diaries. As a carefully contrived work by a novelist, it is shaped with a degree of artistic licence. Did Ted really say ‘I want you for no more than a year’ before their second assignation (rougher and much more satisfying, she recalled), this time in a hotel in Bayswater? Did Emma really think of herself at the time as a ‘sub-mistress’, or was that witty term invented retrospectively in the act of writing the memoir? There is no reason to doubt, though, that he was more than half serious in proposing that they should go off together to Scotland – even as far as the Hebrides. As a scion of the Scottish aristocracy, the Honourable Emma was another person who embodied a place, in this instance a wild landscape with fresh air and great fishing, far from the stultifying stuffiness of Anglo-Saxon society and the gossipy backbiting of literary London. This remained one of his unfulfilled dreams of a different life, another Frostian road not taken. He sent sporadic postcards between long silences as he visited schools to enthuse children about poetry, was knocked out with the flu on a trip to Paris, and went backwards and forwards between Devon and London. They occasionally met up again, but the sexual relationship petered out before it really got going.
Emma could never claim, as Jill did, that she effectively lived with Ted during his time in London in the late Seventies. As a writer, though, she was able to turn each meeting with him into vivid anecdote and imagery. His flat in Fortess Road, where they made love for the first time, is starkly drawn: furnished only with a Fifties-style basket chair, a large bed with rumpled sheets and ‘piles of typescripts and notebooks everywhere, floor, chair and bed’. The seedy hotel room in Bayswater where they go for the second assignation has a ‘pink nylon frilly lampshade on the mock-mahogany bedside table’. She alleges that in Regent’s Park he once put his hands tightly round her neck, the gleam of the rabbit-catcher in his eye. She records that he never wanted to talk about Sylvia, but once when they saw a child with a baby fox on a lead in the park, he told of the incident on Chalk Farm Bridge. Again, on an autumn evening he looked out of the window, saw a girl walking past and said that she looked how Shura would have looked then, had she lived. Passing Sue Alliston’s flat a second time, he said, ‘All the women I have anything to do with seem to die.’
Ted was indeed superstitious in this regard, believing that any lover he made his Muse or White Goddess might then be taken from him. In this sense, he felt that he was doing his wife a great service by dedicating books to her but not actually writing poems about her. He also knew that he was doing her a disservice in his behaviour. Tennant claimed that Hughes referred to his home in Devon as a hospital, taking this as a cruel reference to Carol’s nursing background. She was angry with herself for conniving at his infidelity. ‘We did harm,’ he once said to her on the phone the morning after an evening party when Carol had suffered the pain and embarrassment of being in the same room as her husband’s ‘sub-mistress’. At the same time, Emma wondered what Ted was thinking of – or whether he knew what he was thinking of – when he wrote the story ‘The Head’, with its ‘silent and illiterate’ wife.
She tells of how he gave her books and she gave him a beautiful and expensive Mont Blanc pen. And of how she witnessed something of the drama of his life. On one occasion after lunch they left a plush restaurant in Notting Hill, aptly named La Pomme d’Amour. They walked towards Holland Park, where Ted’s car was parked. Suddenly a man grabbed his arm. It was the schizophrenic homosexual poet Harry Fainlight, brother of Ted’s friend Ruth. Emma recognised him because he had once turned up in the Bananas office in the hope of getting some of his work published. On that occasion, Harry had opened a black briefcase. It was empty save for a kitchen knife with a fearsomely long blade.
Ted managed to open his car door with his one free hand. He told Emma to get in the back (not easy, since the car only had two doors). According to Emma, Fainlight was ‘literally foaming at the mouth’. Ted coolly told his lunch companion to open his battered old satchel, which was on the back seat, and get out a piece of paper. Meanwhile, he explained that Harry – now forcibly buckled into the front seat – had been stalking him, sleeping in his Devon barn for a year, then in a field, and now following him to London. A moment later he was holding Fainlight firmly by the shoulder as he got out a penknife, said ‘Look at this,’ and slit the sheet of paper diagonally ‘into two identical halves’. He then released the now terrified-looking Fainlight, who ‘shambled off aimlessly into the Holland Park crowd’. ‘He won’t trouble us again,’ said Ted.
The story is probably exaggerated in order to dramatise Ted’s quasi-occult powers, but it is absolutely true that mentally ill Harry Fainlight, who died alone in a field in 1982, did periodically stalk and send threatening letters to Ted, blaming him for Faber’s rejection of his poems.21 Ted, always protective of his friends and their loved ones (and Ruth Fainlight and Alan Sillitoe were among his closest friends), did his best to conceal all this, and would never have dreamed of reporting Harry to the police.
Elaine Feinstein told Emma Tennant that a poetry sequence in ‘Earth-Numb’ described all the women Ted had ever loved. The sequence begins ‘I went into a worse chamber’. This led Emma to suppose that in the darker reaches of Ted’s psyche – so scarred by Sylvia’s death – all women were torturers and anything to do with women ‘demanded a return form of torture’. If he could transform the women in his life into White Goddesses, creatures of myth and symbolic torturers, then why should she not transform him into an equally Gothic literary character for the purposes of her memoir? It would be a mistake to treat some of the stories in Burnt Diaries as reportage rather than quasi-mythic narrative. At the same time, Tennant understood many aspects of Hughes exceptionally well: his love of sea-bass, Dom Pérignon champagne and tall tales; his sometimes bonkers ideas about astrology and the occult; his use of ancient ideas and obscure literary sources as a way of explaining, even justifying, what most reasonable people would simply describe as bad behaviour.
Ted’s affairs sometimes created difficulty for his friends. Most of his London friends were very good at not taking sides. Whatever they thought privately, they understood his need to have both a calm, well-managed house in Devon and a very different life in London. It is testimony to his capacity for friendship, and the loyalty he inspired, that he hardly ever lost a friend and that those who were close to him remained discreet, so that – although there were always rumours – much remained unknown outside his immediate circle until his death. Occasionally, though, there was tension, especially with Devon couples who were loyal to Ted and Carol as a couple.
The Baskins had moved to Devon so as to be close to Ted. On one occasion, Elaine Feinstein was visiting Court Green. Baskin offered to do a cover drawing for her latest volume of selected poems. She went to watch him at work. He drew ‘a flat-faced woman with small mean eyes’ and as he did so he began to ask questions about the affair with Jill Barber. Feinstein told him to ask Ted himself. ‘You know all about it, don’t you?’ Baskin replied. ‘Who is it? Has Olwyn arranged it?’ Feinstein was stunned. Olwyn? ‘She likes to involve herself,’ Baskin went on. ‘That witch! What does she do for Ted?’22 Feinstein, who was one of the very small group of writers other than Ted whom Olwyn represented as an agent, defended his sister for the effort she put into arranging fees and contracts, promoting his work, running the Rainbow Press. Baskin was not satisfied. When Feinstein left, he dismissed her invitation to visit her in Cambridge, where she lived with her husband. Despite this, Baskin remained friends with Olwyn, though his letters to her contain some barbed remarks about Ted’s extramarital life.
Ted Hughes was immensely generous in his championing of women writers, his assistance in getting such poets as Jennifer Rankin into print. But there was also a part of him that seems to have wanted to possess women writers. It is not always clear whether he succeeded. In contrast to those women who chose to advertise their affairs after his death, some subtle writers have been deliberately teasing. Angela Carter, brilliant and beautiful magic realist, hinted that there had been ‘something’ between her and Ted.23 Edna O’Brien – sexually awakened Irish country girl and very much Ted’s type – flirts delicately with the reader in her memoir. Early in the book she gives a hilarious account of a poetry evening at a suburban house in Dulwich around 1960 where ‘the living Orpheus’, ‘the reincarnation of Heathcliff’, is expected. The host has donned an orange velvet jacket and laid out suitably decadent yellow liqueur bottles with long yellow spires (totally empty – purely for show). A pair of Canadian lesbian poets turn up, then an earnest and bashful poet from Crystal Palace called Archie. But Orpheus Hughes proves a no-show and the evening dissolves into drunken, pretentious anticlimax.
Later, though, O’Brien tells of a vertiginous love affair that was written in the stars. At a party in Pall Mall she meets a man who emanates power and shares her love of Dylan Thomas. She leaves, weak-kneed, and soon he calls at her house and says what every woman yearns to hear: ‘I will know you for a long time.’24 From the high trapeze of the commencement of love, she descends to the mistress’s familiar story of ‘surprise meetings, cancelled meetings, devouring jealousies, the rapture and the ruptures of an affair’. She receives a phone call describing a party at which her lover is the principal guest, all the women swooning around him; she wanders the streets of Italy one summer, hoping vainly for a chance encounter, since she knows that he is on holiday there with his wife; they break off the affair and then start it again when they meet on a train, tossed from side to side at the place where two carriages join; she lives off ‘emotional crumbs’ until it comes to an end again. O’Brien emphatically does not identify the lover as Hughes, but the rollercoaster she describes is a fine evocation of what an affair with Hughes would have been like. Jill Barber recalls: ‘When collecting material for Kristina Dusseldorp’s literary magazine Mars, we were invited to Edna O’Brien’s terraced house off the King’s Road in Chelsea for tea. She opened the door resplendent in a floaty kaftan, still very beautiful. She was flirtatious with Ted and kept telling him about her erotic dreams, asking for his interpretation of them. It was a distinct come-on and I was not sure if he had invited me along to protect him or to witness yet another woman desirous of taking him to bed.’25
Other encounters, some of them friendships, others rather more, some fleeting and casual, others felt in the heart, went below the radar even of his close friends. They will remain private, perhaps for ever, certainly for the time during which a number of archives, including a significant part of Ted’s own, remain closed.26 Though he never fully broke from Devon, he relished the personal freedom afforded by reading tours, fishing trips and overseas travel. Seamus Heaney, reminiscing about his fellow-poet’s times with Barrie Cooke on the rivers and loughs of the west of Ireland, spoke with soft voice and twinkling eye of ‘trysts’.27 And Ted always had an eye for the women he met abroad. As late as April 1996, in Berlin for a reading, in his mid-sixties and with his health failing, he wrote appreciatively in his journal of the ‘bewitching’ allure of his guide Francesca, an ‘Italian Madonna model’ with a ‘caressing voice’ and ‘mercury mind’.28
All his life he loved women, but his reputation as a womaniser did not endear him to Plathians. There is an irony to that: his infidelity in later relationships was partly a function of his fidelity to the memory of Sylvia. After the end of his first marriage, never again would he let a woman possess the whole of him. Never again would he allow himself to be fully caged. And it was when he was away from the cage, in sight of new horizons, that he sometimes found it possible to speak of Sylvia.
In November 1989 he was guest of honour at the second World Poets Festival in Dhaka. He remained in Bangladesh for a week, fascinated by the subcontinent, discovering the richness of Bengali language and literature and the finer aspects of the local cuisine. He and his hosts talked and joked. He ran through a selection of his favourite set-piece stories. His account of ‘the amazing island of monkeys near Japan where they had an organized social life’, his belief in ‘the aggressive nature of men through the ages’, his rueful admission of the failure of his farming career, the story of his rise from ‘dairy hand to the plumed and plum post of Poet Laureate’, which gave him ‘great liberty’ in exchange for the small price of donning ‘formal attire on rare occasions’.29
He gave an interview, in two sweltering sessions, one during a tea break at the festival venue and the other in his room at the Sonargaon Hotel. He was on excellent form, loquaciously offering some of the most cogent summaries of his work. With regard to that defining early poem, ‘Hawk Roosting’, he explained that the hawk represented the natural world, ‘the whole biological kingdom’ which was ‘unaware of death’. Picking up on a powerful thought in a poem by Yeats, he remarked that ‘only man knows of death, knows beforehand of death’. The hawk does not know that the death it inflicts on other beasts will one day come to it. ‘In the early phases of writing it out,’ he added, ‘I had in my mind the notion of the Egyptian Horus, who was the hawk … who was the rising sun; so he was the sun in its positive phase, so he was the first original living energy in its positive phase. But that means a very destructive phase.’ Then he turned to that strange hybrid volume, Wodwo, explaining that it was the product of his search for his own self in a modern Western world where people ‘very easily lose touch with themselves’. Going on to Crow, he identified The Conference of the Birds and its quest-form as the model: Crow is a bird without any attribute other than ‘the will to keep searching’.
In answer to a question about whether poetry has a role to play in society, he launched into his theory of poetry as ‘the psychological component of the auto-immune system’:
So you have the physical auto-immune system and in stress, in any stress, in any disaster, in any grief or mourning or just simply the stress of life, just the day-to-day biological response to the problems of your life, your immune system is in constant activity to repair the effect of this on your own body, on your own system. Your whole chemistry of your body is constantly under bombardment from external things, and your immune system is constantly repairing and renewing it. And that is a physical component of that which is actually a chemical process. But it seems to me that there is also a psychological component of it. And the psychological component is the strange business that we call Art.
He believed that poetry was ‘simply the verbal form of that process’.
And did he think that the materialism and rationality of the modern West were crippling to the soul? ‘Yes, I do, yes, yes, I would like to see the West completely injected by the East.’ The West needs the spirit of the East because there was ‘an easy acceptance throughout Eastern society that existence is based on spiritual things’. That was what had been lost in the West, which is why for all the material prosperity of the West, people were fundamentally miserable: ‘they don’t have the important thing, which is to be happy, and they know what they are lacking is something, some sort of spiritual foundation’.30 The East was the place to find that foundation, or at the very least a resource to be used by the West in its reinvention. It was this sense of alienation from modernity and this yearning for the spirituality of the East that had by this time made the Poet Laureate into a guru for Prince Charles.
With his love of exotic travel, Ted took the opportunity to visit the Sundarbans in the hope of seeing a Bengal tiger. He also viewed with amazement the sixty-domed historic mosque at Bagerhat. And at Hiron Point, the southernmost point of Bangladesh, he looked out on the Bay of Bengal and wrote a delicate poem called ‘Dreams Like Deer’, in which he told of chaotic dreams spreading through the forest, meeting real tigers, and then a vision of the sea at dawn, looking like ‘a bed of pink rose petals / Where somebody very beautiful had slept / A perfect sleep’.31 The image of a deer, there in the simile of the poem’s title, is one of his markers for the memory of Sylvia. She was very much on his mind at this time, as may be seen from another encounter on the trip.
Carolyne Wright was an attractive forty-year-old American poet in Dhaka on a two-year Fulbright fellowship, translating Bengali verse into English. She and Ted met during the mid-morning tea break on the first day of the festival, where he towered ‘head and shoulders above the clusters of Bangladeshi journalists and the Thai and Indonesian and Bhutanese guest poets resplendent in their national dress’. Wright admired his broad-shouldered ‘solid gravitas’, writing later that ‘in his dark woollen suit, he could have been a former American football player turned professor of English literature’. Ted fixed her with that ‘warmth and focused concentration’ that he gave to everyone he met, making them think they were the centre of his universe. ‘It seems we’re the only native English speakers here,’ he said. This meeting with an American Fulbright Fellow unlocked something in him.
On the last day of the festival, the two poets, senior and junior, man and woman, leaned on the rail of the pleasure-launch Rangapalli, as it chugged along on the noubihar, the river cruise which was customary for guests of honour in Bangladesh. The conversation turned to accents and Ted said, as if from nowhere, ‘that he had become very familiar with American English when he lived for two years in the United States with – and here he hesitated ever so slightly – “with, you know, my late wife, Sylvia”’. He then spoke, dreamily, of how the river landscape before them might have figured in her poetry. And as they stood at a distance from the other guests on the crowded launch, the floodgates opened and he spoke of Plath ‘with respect, admiration, affection’. ‘I’ve been writing my own version of events,’ he continued, ‘but it will be published posthumously. If people knew the full story, when they learn what really happened between us, they’ll be surprised that it’s so mundane, so ordinary.’ With a poet’s sensitivity, Wright understood ‘that Hughes would go on living with Plath in the only way now possible – in words, in memory – perhaps to the end of his days’:
In his reserved, understated manner, he was making a profound expression of the undying nature of love – of his love and respect and sorrow for the brilliant and tormented poet-wife of his youth. In his words to me, as in the poems he was even then writing, he was seeking a resolution to his own and their children’s loss and grief, some way of coming to terms with his beloved’s abrupt, irreversible departure – from him, from her children, from herself. He seemed to seek no less than a reconciliation across the very boundary between life and death.32
Thanks to the presence of another woman, he seemed to recover Sylvia. It had occasionally happened with Brenda, as once when he returned to Court Green: ‘I seemed to take a loop and recapture absolutely lost life, – coming up the path from the front gate, seeing toys on the lawn and the front door open, when I expected only the everlasting locked-up decayed gloom, of everything finished. Like dreams of S. returning.’33 It happened again with a friend of Olwyn’s, in a visionary moment immortalised in his achingly sad late poem ‘The Offers’. And it happened here, during this peaceful moment in a beautiful alien place, with the Fulbright poet. ‘But [he] who never felt that absoluteness of loss then found it again’, he wrote in his journal on one such occasion, ‘has missed the sweetest, strongest feeling in life.’34