Emma Tennant tells a story, not recorded elsewhere, in which Ted Hughes recounts how his father once took off for London in order to have an affair with a pretty nurse, but got little further than King’s Cross station before his pursuing wife caught him and marched him home.1 On the Greek tragic principle of the sins of the fathers being visited upon – or replayed by – the children, this tale says something about Ted’s feelings regarding the double life he was now living in Devon and London. The pretty nurse is clearly an inverted projection of his own guilt at his desire to escape the boredom of country life.
Like many men in their late forties, Ted spent a lot of time worrying about family and money. The investigation into the back taxes due on Sylvia’s posthumous earnings was as interminable as a Dickensian legal case. By early 1977, the old tax inspector had died and the case was taken on by a fierce woman who rejoiced in the name of Mrs Skinner. ‘Why does everything have to be so symbolic?’ Ted asked Luke Myers when telling him of these woes.2 Two and a half years later, he was still waiting for the assessment on the Plath earnings for the period between 1971 and 1975.
Carol was a worry. He wanted to sell the farm, but she didn’t. He believed that she regarded its retention as a sign of faith in the future of their marriage. She was, he confided, not happy about his ‘follies’ (the term he always used when writing to Myers about his dalliances). He did not want her to be wholly dependent on him, to devote herself merely to doing the books and bookings in relation to his literary career. There was an overture about some work for her as a television presenter. He dissuaded her from pursuing the opportunity, then regretted doing so, thinking that she would have been very good at it. Then he tried to persuade her to become an acupuncturist.3
Frieda was a worry. When she left school, she spent all her time with the local bikers, tearing around the high-banked lanes of North Devon. On one occasion there was a chimney fire when she was at Court Green with her boyfriend, a handsome motorcyclist called Des. Ted came home from a happy Saturday’s fishing at Slapton Ley to find fire engines in the lane outside, blue lights flashing on the house and the thatch soaked with water. He gave whisky to the firemen and ordered a barrel of beer that they drank when they came back a few hours later to check that all was damped down and to clear up some of the mess. Soon after this, Frieda left home and moved in with Des, who was a cowman living in tied accommodation on a big farm near Exeter. They married in the summer of 1979, Frieda aged just nineteen.
Nick was not a worry. The boy was doing superbly at Bedales, excelling in every endeavour from (non-motorised) cycle racing to academic work. The English and History teachers wanted him to do A Levels in Arts subjects. They had him writing wonderfully imagin-tive stories and poems. He was equally good when it came to practical skills such as carpentry and pottery. But his great love was the sciences and that was the direction in which he went for A Levels. He would secure straight-A grades and a place to read Zoology at the Queen’s College, Oxford.
Father and son worked together composing Centaur type on an Albion hand printing press given to Nick by Olwyn and set up in an outhouse of Court Green. In the spring of 1979, they printed three of Ted’s poems – ‘Night Arrival of Sea-Trout’, ‘The Iron Wolf’ and ‘Puma’ – each on a single sheet of thickly textured Italian paper, thirty signed copies only, proudly branded as coming from ‘The Morrigu Press’. The Morrígu or Morrígan, meaning ‘great queen’ or ‘phantom queen’, was a goddess of battle in the ancient Ulster Cycle of mythical tales. She would sometimes appear in the form of a crow, flying above warriors as they went into battle, but she could also take the form of eel, wolf or cow. Sometimes she was imaged as triple goddess, three weird sisters. Robert Graves described her as a death goddess who often took the form of a raven and whom he linked to the figure of Morgan le Faye.4 Ted’s three poems for Nick’s hand press metamorphose her into various characteristically Hughesian forms. As Iron Wolf with iron fate, she conjures up Ted’s own grimmer histories. As puma sleeping in the sun, ‘half-melted / in the sheet-flame silence’, she opens ‘one jewel’ of an eye and there is a glimmer of the word that Ted habitually used for Sylvia’s eyes and of the big cat poem in which she first wrote about him.
Printing was shared craft, but the greater bond was fishing. The passion passed from father to son, and would eventually lead to a distinguished academic career in the field of stream salmonid ecology.5 Shared fishing trips became an annual treat. These often brought challenges. Jill’s presence was an awkwardness in Ireland in the autumn of 1977. A week on a high-class stretch of the Dee in Scotland in April 1979 was marred by daily snow and no salmon (Nick half hoped for an invitation to fish on an even higher-class stretch at Balmoral with his school friend David Linley, son of Princess Margaret). Iceland that summer was full of natural beauty, but all the salmon runs were either too expensive or fully pre-booked. They had more success with sea-trout. Whenever Ted was cast down, Nick cheered him up with wise observations and funny stories. He also developed the art of cooking ingenious suppers with very limited ingredients. They made plans to venture further afield the following year: to Alaska, a place that would draw Nick back and hold him for the rest of his life.
Olwyn was a worry. For some time, she had been in an on–off relationship with a handsome Irishman called Richard Thomas, who had something of the look of Ted about him. He was a heavy drinker, who became violent when under the influence. Again and again, he would dry out, then lapse. By 1978 he was in hospital, critically ill with pancreatitis. He had been apart from Olwyn for some time, living with a teacher who was also an alcoholic. Olwyn heard that he was dying and went to say goodbye in hospital. Richard swore that he was going to get better, would never touch another drop, study at the Open University to become a History teacher. He had the Irish blarney as well as the good looks, and she was hooked. She discharged him from hospital and kept him financially while he began his degree. For nine months he kept off the booze. They travelled to Russia and Turkey, and for the first time Olwyn seemed to have found genuine happiness in a relationship with a man. On an impulse, they got married in June 1979, a few weeks before Frieda also tied the knot.
Things started to go wrong within a month. Richard tried to control Olwyn: what she could and what she couldn’t do, no housework allowed, fury if a meal was not on the table at exactly the right time. He tried to stop her buying a house in Wales at a bargain price, simply because he didn’t like the man from whom she was buying it – who happened to be an old boyfriend. It did not help when the New York comedian Marvin Cohen came to dinner and said, ‘Where’s that fire-eating Marxist Irish Nationalist that used to live here, that great fiery wonderful drinker? And who’s this little quiet University student?’ This provoked Richard to go and get a bottle of vodka. A week later, he went to an Open University residential course in Bath and came back after two days, blind drunk. After that, he did not stop. He took Olwyn’s money, threatened her, pawned her jewels, shouted all night, smashed up her home. She was at her wits’ end, so Ted went to stay with her. For two nights, nothing was seen of Richard. Then he appeared, drunk out of his mind. There was an evening of high drama, lasting into the small hours of the morning, when Richard gashed his wrists and disappeared, bloodily, into a taxi, presumably to go to the other woman in his life. By the end of the year, the marriage just six months old, Ted was helping Olwyn prepare her divorce papers.
Most of all, Ted’s father was a worry. He was depressed, debilitated and difficult. He could not go on living on his own. Every time Ted left home – to go on a reading tour, to spend time in London with Jill, to pick up an OBE at Buckingham Palace in the summer of 1977 – there was the nagging anxiety about what Bill might do or fail to do. In May 1978, while Ted and Carol took a two-week holiday in Wales, they placed him in the private nursing home run by Carol’s sister Jean. This was a success. Ted wrote to Gerald saying that their father would have to move in with one or other of them, or with Olwyn (which was hardly likely), or go into a horrible state-funded nursing home that would be little better than a prison for the dying. Unless the money could be found – a far from cheap £70 per week – to enable him to go permanently to Jean’s, where he had fared so much better during his brief stay. Gerald did not rise to the bait and offer a financial contribution. Several months later Ted was still worrying about the impossibility of funding the nearly £4,000 a year it would take to secure a place for his father with his sister-in-law – he was terrified of how the sum would accumulate in the event of Bill staggering on for years.
As usual when faced with a financial challenge, Ted came up with various schemes. One of them was to professionalise his schedule of poetry readings for schools. Instead of going to them one at a time, he would do bigger events, creating a large audience by getting lots of different schools to send groups of sixth-formers along at £30 a time. Carol’s brother Robert Orchard was recruited to organise the process. But then, as a result of too many readings and runnings about, Ted’s body gave way. His left hip lifted itself out of its socket in the middle of a reading at a Poetry Book Society event on the Isle of Wight, causing him greater physical agony than he had ever known. He was laid up for weeks, and had to slow down when he went back on the road.
The freelance literary life meant constant juggling of priorities. His notebooks are filled with To Do lists. One typical February day, he listed the eight tasks in hand: completing his edition of Sylvia’s Collected Poems; getting her manuscripts ready for Sotheby’s to sell them; selecting the poems for an anthology on behalf of PEN, the organisation supporting oppressed writers; writing to Ted Cornish and two doctors, to fix a meeting in relation to plans for a book on Cornish’s faith-healing (the doctors would monitor a selection of his patients to see if they really were getting better); completing a poetry anthology for children; writing to David Pease, the warm and energetic director of the Arvon Foundation (by now a great friend), to organise their poetry competition; and ‘Write about ten letters, fending people off etc.’6
Some of these tasks would make him money. The manuscript experts Felix Pryor and Roy Davids had come down from Sotheby’s and been very encouraging about the potential price that an American library or collector would pay for Sylvia’s archive. Other tasks were associated with personal obsessions, notably his desire to write a biography of Ted Cornish. He tried to interest Prince Philip in Cornish’s remarkable powers. And others were duties incumbent upon him as the country’s leading missionary for the importance of poetry. The Arvon International Poetry Competition, which was Ted’s idea, had great potential to raise the profile of as well as funds for the foundation, which was in severe financial difficulty.
He gave the competition a high profile by persuading three of the most distinguished poets of the day – Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney and Charles Causley – to join him as judges. His letter to Larkin asking him to be a judge took the opportunity to offer congratulations on the recently published ‘Aubade’, a first venture back into print after long public silence. Larkin replied glumly that the act of writing the poem had staved off his fear of death for a few months but that it was creeping back. He in turn congratulated Ted on being ‘our best/most popular/or whatever it was poet’.7 Well over 30,000 people paid to enter the competition, providing much-needed income. The judges read every poem. Ted claimed that the whole process was so consuming that he wrote nothing for the next six months.8
It was interesting to observe Larkin (whose literary taste Ted described as ‘spermicide’)9 and a pleasure to work with Heaney and Causley, a poet whose work he greatly admired. With his tongue only partly in his cheek, Ted said that the only submission he really liked among the thousands of entries was a thirty-five-page piece by Kenneth Bernard, founder of a movement called Theatre for the Ridiculous back in the late Sixties. The poem was a priapic celebration of a baboon in a nightclub having complicated and various sex with a beautiful woman. Ted was green with envy when he read it. He claimed that Larkin said that if it won he would dissociate himself from the prize, though in his notes on the short-listed poems Larkin actually described it as ‘potentially funny and potentially lyrical and moving’, though too long.10 Causley thought that it was simply obscene. Heaney quite liked it.11 The £5,000 first prize went to the young poet Andrew Motion, Ted’s eventual successor as Poet Laureate, though not before a debacle in which the judges tried to change the rules and have six joint winners instead, at £1,000 each. This led the sponsor, the Observer newspaper, to threaten to withdraw the prize money and caused embarrassment to Ted’s friend Melvyn Bragg, who was devoting a special edition of his television South Bank Show to the award.
The children’s anthology was eventually published in 1982 under the title The Rattle Bag (‘The Medicine Bag’ was considered, but rejected). The origin of this project was a suggestion by Charles Monteith at Faber that Seamus and Marie Heaney – both teachers – should edit an anthology called The Faber Book of Verse for Younger People. The project lay dormant because Marie was not keen, so in 1978 Monteith suggested that it should be a Heaney–Hughes collaboration. To begin with, they worked independently. Then they would compare selections. The process continued through 1980, in conjunction with the judging of the biennial Arvon poetry competition. The two poet-editors made a conscious decision to omit many of the canonical authors. The selection was deliberately personal, eclectic, intended for enjoyment rather than edification. The title, chosen at the last minute, nicely evoked the sense of the volume as a carnivalesque ragbag in which, as Heaney later put it, ‘Gaelic charm and African oral poetry turned up alongside highly literary work by Elizabethan courtiers and contemporary Americans’. There were translations from Hungarian, Russian and modern Greek poets; ‘Celtic monks and medieval hunters’ were corralled alongside cosmopolitan high modernists and hippyish San Francisco beat poets.12
By self-denying ordinance, they did not include any of their own poems, but several of Plath’s are there. Since the arrangement was alphabetical by title, to avoid the ‘textbook’ feel of chronological order, the final poem is, touchingly, ‘You’re’, that loveliest of lyrics addressed to Frieda in the womb. Reviewers delighted at the book’s success in restoring the ‘thrill in reading’ that was ‘forfeited by most conventional anthologies’. This was that rare thing, a hugely varied collection of poems that had its reader ‘laughing out loud, springing from his chair in delight, rushing to other books to supplement new discoveries, and beaming with remembered pleasure at odd moments of the day’.13 Thanks to the respect in which Heaney and Hughes were held, especially among schoolteachers, the anthology was tremendously successful, with the paperback edition quickly selling out and being reprinted.
Ted’s work for young people during this phase of his career also included a volume entitled Moon-Bells in a series published by Chatto and Windus called ‘Poets for the Young’. This brought together a mix of new and previously published poems, mostly about animals and various moon-beings. Some were taken from Earth-Moon, a limited-edition sequence for the Rainbow Press, others from older collections. Confusingly, there is also a volume called Moon-Whales and Other Moon Poems, with drawings by Leonard Baskin and a dedication to Frieda and Nicholas, for the Viking Press in New York, which combines the complete contents of Earth-Moon and the much older collection of children’s (or were they?) poems, The Earth-Owl. This (with some omissions) was republished in England by Faber more than a decade later. Each poem takes something from the earth – a whale, a lily, a wolf, a mirror, a theatre, an oak, haggis, a tulip, a nasturtium, a snail, a witch, a hyena, a foxglove, a clock, a walker, a bell, a hare, a bull, and more – and reimagines an inverted or surreal moon version of it.
Some of the poems are written in jogging rhyme: ‘A man-hunt on the moon is full of horrible sights and sounds. / There are these foxes in red jackets, they are their own horses and hounds’ (‘A Moon Man-Hunt’). Others have the darkness of Hughes’s poems for grown-ups. In the poem that gave the title to the Rainbow Press edition, a burning full moon rolls slowly towards a human out on a walk. It crushes boulders and dwelling-places as it goes. The man shuts his eyes against the glaring brightness, draws a dagger and stabs and stabs and stabs until ‘The cry that quit the moon’s wounds / Circled the earth’. The punctured moon shrinks to the size of a handkerchief, which the man picks up as a trophy which he carries ‘Into moonless night’. Still others, such as ‘Moon Marriage’, begin in doggerel (‘Marriage on the moon is rather strange. / It’s nothing you can arrange’) and end in a tone that, coming from Hughes, is to say the least pointed: ‘On the moon it is all a matter of luck / Is marriage. / And the only offspring are poems.’14
Early in the Seventies, around the time he was determining to live in Devon rather than Yorkshire, Ted had suggested to Charles Monteith that he might write a series of poems memorialising his place of origin, accompanied by the landscape work of the distinguished photographer Fay Godwin. In 1970, she had been commissioned to take a new portrait photo of him as part of the publicity campaign for Crow. Ted usually loathed photo shoots, but he and Godwin hit it off. Her portrait became his preferred image for reproduction: brooding, looking straight down the camera, with lick of hair over forehead and leather jacket unzipped. With his hooked nose and cragged demeanour, there is something of the hawk or crow about him. They struck up a friendship and he suggested that she should create images of the Calder Valley that would stir him into poetry. She became excited by the scheme and fell in visual love with the area, taking dozens of photos. It was Ted who stalled on the project, feeling inner resistance to the idea of moving from simple evocation of place to ‘autobiography and history’. He didn’t want to give away what he called his ‘capital and the medicine bundle’.15
In the summer of 1976, helped by the release into elegy that had come with the poems in memory of Jack Orchard, he was ready. Then he heard news that Fay had been diagnosed with cancer. Once again, a woman to whom he had become close was in danger of slipping into death. In fact, she was treated successfully and went on to outlive Ted by seven years. But the prospect of losing her before he had done justice to her images gave him the added spur that he needed. He wrote her a long letter describing how he was getting to work on an ‘episodic autobiography’ that linked personal memory to the history of the place – its wildness, its centrality to the Industrial Revolution, its decline and the shadow of the First World War. A black history to match her stark black-and-white images of bleak landscapes, hard stone and blackened buildings.
He dug out his copy, received in uncorrected proof, of a book about the valley that had been published in 1975: Millstone Grit by Glyn Hughes.16 It described the Calder Valley as ‘the English Siberia’, a place where the punished old have been left to die while the young go adventuring.17 Glyn Hughes told of how the area created wealth in the nineteenth century for wars in the twentieth, how that wealth benefited London traders far more than the local people, how (as Karl Marx said) the only good that came of the Industrial Revolution was that it released the working class from ‘the idiocy of rural life’, how the Calder Valley was a place of broken walls and dead farms, a hilly enclave between two packed industrial areas, a man-made desert, yet with raw beauty. It had a particular grip upon Glyn Hughes, as it did upon Ted, ‘because its arraignment against poisonous, dirty and ugly towns destructive of the human spirit, is a symbol of the human condition, balanced between the impulses of inspiration and destruction’.
The whole book is steeped in the mood of D. H. Lawrence, Ted-like in its account of how geology defines temperament (‘dour’), prose-poetically evocative of millstone grit oxidising from its original orange and gold with glassy crystals of silica to the ‘black, black, that makes your eyes ache everywhere in West Yorkshire, so that you think of dirt, no matter how clean and bright the day’. Houses back to back or back to earth, hanging on the edge of the valley. Houses now boarded up, clog factories slowly going broke, mills half demolished. Terraced rows where you hear the sounds of life next door. And the people: the Brontës, who were the first to give the region a literary consciousness; the fearsome Parson Grimshaw who went from Todmorden to Haworth, who once wore a horned mask to impersonate the Devil in order to frighten a young man into marrying a girl he had seduced, and who increased the congregation in the Methodist chapel at Haworth a hundredfold through the sheer theatricality of his fire-and-brimstone sermons; Billy Holt, self-taught writer and artist, also from Todmorden, who rode around Europe on a grey horse called Trigger bought from a rag-and-bone man. A little further afield was Saddleworth Moor, a place of ‘violent conflicts that were, perhaps, as much products of that violent weather over the denuded uplands, as they were a product of social forces. And these conflicts were expressed, from time to time, in murders’ – including the Moors Murders that Ted had gestured obliquely towards in ‘Crow’s Song about England’.
A few years later, Glyn Hughes turned Grimshaw’s life into a novel called Where I Used to Play on the Green. Ted contributed an introduction linking the perverted parson to the Brontës and implicitly, by way of reference to ‘sexual sacrifice’, to his own Reverend Lumb. He noted that, like William Blake (whose poem ‘The Garden of Love’ gave the novel its title), Glyn Hughes saw the links between Puritanism and the factory, the psychosis of the minister passed to the millmaster. ‘It is the story of a spiritual genocide, and the historical evidence for it is there, in the barren island bounded by Halifax, Todmorden, Colne and Keighley: the broken fragments of a cruel decalogue, tumbled about a giant graveyard.’18 And yet Glyn Hughes’s books – both Millstone Grit and the novel – are full of light, of glitter in the landscape created by pace in the writing.
All these aspects of Glyn Hughes’s Calder Valley writing corresponded with Ted’s feelings about the place. He was at last able to forge ahead with his collection, bringing together geology, meteorology, community, history and autobiography. People emerge as a product of place and weather. The spirit of Billy Holt is invoked. The poems are full of chills, hot food, clothes manufactured for money and employment but also worn for warmth. The moor becomes his mother. The child wanders on hillside and by water. Fishing for tiddlers, sheltering from a storm, throwing stones into the canal on the way to school, poaching, communing with birds, dreaming fearfully, meeting old men on the road, finding bones and thinking about ancient Britons. This is Ted as another Wordsworth, but a Wordsworth transported from the gentle bosom of the English Lake District to an edgier terrain.
By the spring of 1978, Ted was able to tell Gerald that the collection was nearly complete. Remains of Elmet was published by Faber and Faber a year later, in May 1979 (with the usual de luxe edition from the Rainbow Press a month before). Ted dedicated the poems to the memory of his mother. Fay Godwin dedicated the photographs to Ted. Immediately after the dedication page comes a poem, printed in italics, beginning:
Six years into her posthumous life
My uncle raises my Mother’s face
And says Yes he would love a cup of tea.19
For readers accustomed to the style of Gaudete and Crow, even that of the early poems, this feels like a new voice: quiet, matter-of-fact, above all deeply personal. Uncle Walt stands in for Edith as the repository of family memory, the connector that attaches Ted (in both senses of ‘attach’) to his ‘inheritance’. Walt, now frail himself, holds the fragile, crumbling ‘treasures’ of the past; they must be captured and preserved before it is too late. The poem was written in 1975; the retention of the present tense for his voice when publishing it after his death the following year gives it added poignancy.
On turning the page, the reader finds a prefatory note that distances the poems from the personal. Here Hughes explains that the Calder Valley was ‘the last ditch of Elmet, the last British Celtic kingdom to fall to the Angles’. It was a place of wilderness and outlaws, then ‘the cradle for the Industrial Revolution in textiles’, then a place of decay. Hughes notes that throughout his life he had watched the mills and chapels fall into disuse, the population – rooted and settled for centuries – change, the spirit of the place become elegiac. Godwin set out to capture that spirit in her photographs, he says, and it was the photographs that inspired the poems.
This depersonalisation is a screen. The first poem in the main body of the text is entitled ‘Where the Mothers’. Godwin’s photograph, on the page opposite, shows Abel Cross in Crimsworth Dene, a pair of stone markers associated with a local legend of rival brothers. Given the closeness of the spot to the place where Ted and Gerald camped, there can be no doubting the autobiographical resonance. So too with the second poem, ‘Hardcastle Crags’. There is no explicit autobiographical reference, but Ted knew that this was his mother’s favourite place, the site of family picnics and the walks with Olwyn and little Ted that first exposed him to the beauty of the natural world. The third poem, ‘Lumb Chimney’, inevitably, though again not explicitly, evokes Lumb Bank and the Reverend Lumb of Gaudete.
Then there is ‘Open to Huge Light’, printed immediately below a stark Godwin photograph of two bare trees at Top Withens. One of Hughes’s most treasured possessions was another photograph, of Sylvia in one of these very trees, taken on the memorable day when Ted and his bride and Uncle Walt went in search of Wuthering Heights. Again, though, the personal association is not made explicit. Similarly, ‘Football at Slack’ contains but does not reveal the memory of his father’s prowess as a soccer player.
‘Crown Point Pensioners’ has two old men – with ‘Old faces, old roots. / Indigenous memories’ – sitting, each with flat cap and favourite walking stick with polished knob, looking down on ‘The map of their lives’, reminiscing by way of the landmarks of the valley. What the poem does not say is that Crown Point is just a few yards up the road from the Beacon. The corresponding Godwin photograph was not actually taken at Crown Point (and it shows one old man, not two). Hughes is not so much turning the photographs into verse as using them as a springboard into his own memories. Crown Point is effectively a personal trig station, symbolically located between the Beacon, Lumb Bank and Heptonstall graveyard. At the end of the poem ‘An America-bound jet, on its chalky thread, / Dozes in the dusty burning dome.’20 The thread of memory is drawing him back to Sylvia.
Turn two leaves and there is a poem called ‘Heptonstall’. Turn one more and there is a title that begins with a word that has occurred in only two poems in the previous hundred pages (and in these only glancingly, not flagged up in the title): ‘You Claw the Door’. There is no doubting the identity of ‘you’: it is Sylvia, trapped in the Hughes family home. The image of the lights twinkling from the valley at night is borrowed from one of her poems remembering her time at the Beacon, ‘Wuthering Heights’.21 Like so many of Ted’s most telling and powerful poems, this one has a complicated textual history. It first appeared in print the previous year in Orts, that privately published collection full of coded autobiographical musings not meant for public consumption. But in that first outing, Sylvia was veiled within a veil: here the poem was called ‘Hathershelf’, the alternative name of Scout Rock, the cliff that loomed over Ted’s childhood home in Mytholmroyd. With that title, a reader in the biographical know might assume that it is Hughes himself – or a member of his immediate family – who is clawing the door.
In Remains of Elmet, the text of ‘Hathershelf’ is paired with an image of fallen leaves and tree roots – reaching tentacles on the surface of the earth – and, in the foreground, an oblong patch of compacted soil that looks somewhat like a freshly filled grave. But now the opening phrase has become the title: ‘You Claw the Door’. The poem is deprived of the name that placed it in Mytholmroyd. Ted comes one step closer to the acknowledgement that the ‘you’ of his most personal poems is Sylvia more often than anyone else. When Remains of Elmet was revised some years later as Elmet the phrase ‘You claw the door’ was returned to the text and a new title introduced, locking the memory of Sylvia – and her nearby grave – into the house on Heptonstall Slack: ‘The Beacon’.22
Steeped in the English literary tradition, the poem’s ending – ‘While the world rolls in rain / Like a stone inside surf’ – echoes one of the greatest elegies in all literature, William Wordsworth’s mysterious, lapidary ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’. Wordsworth mourns for a dead girl called Lucy:
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
Hughes, always a poet of motion and force, converts Wordsworth’s passive ‘rolled’ (Lucy’s body beneath the earth) to an active ‘rolls’ (the world goes on). The tree is, as it were, moved out of the poem into the Fay Godwin photograph, while the turf on Lucy’s grave becomes ‘surf’, suggestive of the restorative power of water.
Turn the page again and the coded references to Sylvia multiply. The next poem in Remains of Elmet is a meditation on ‘Emily Brontë’ and her death: a Sylvia obsession. The one after that is called ‘Haworth Parsonage’. It uses the resonantly Plathian image of electrocution for the suicidal depression of Bramwell Brontë – though here Hughes’s memory is complicated by Assia’s lonely day and night in Haworth in the last week of her life. The image of the parsonage as ‘A house / Emptied and scarred black’ echoes the language of her journal.23
Then comes ‘Top Withens’, enshrining the memory of the walk there with Walt. Next there is ‘The Sluttiest Sheep in England’, a deromanticised variation on Sylvia’s ‘Sheep in Fog’, that poem about which Hughes the critic-editor of his wife wrote at enormous length. Remains of Elmet ends with a return to Hughes’s mother, alluding to her dreams of angels. But the penultimate poem is called ‘Heptonstall Cemetery’. It evokes wind slamming over the tops and then repeats the formulation ‘You claw’. It ends with swans flying westward, low across a stormy sky, towards the Atlantic, tracing the same path as the American-bound plane over Crown Point. Ted knew well that swans, like greylag geese, mate for life and know the meaning of grief. Some bereaved swans stay alone for the rest of their lives, while others take flight and rejoin their flock. Between the wind and the swans comes an explicit sequence of namings:
And Thomas and Walter and Edith
Are living feathers
Esther and Sylvia
Living feathers.24
Here are Uncle Tom and Mother Edith joined in the family plot by Uncle Walt, who died while Ted was in Australia. And by Sylvia in double form, as both herself and as the Esther of The Bell Jar. Looking across the page, one sees a magnificent Fay Godwin photograph of radiant light and rising mist over a Yorkshire landscape with the silhouette of a church tower on the horizon. The list of photographic locations at the back of the book identifies it, needless to say, as Heptonstall Old Church. The geographically and biographically alert reader will come to the realisation that the focal point of the image is Sylvia’s grave. It is no coincidence that this is the image chosen for the front cover of the book. Nor that the back cover shows the two trees at Top Withens, one of which Sylvia had climbed on that never-to-be-forgotten day in 1956.
The recognition that ‘You Claw the Door’ is about Sylvia, and that her ghost inhabits so many of the poems in the second half of the book, raises the possibility that she is the ‘you’ mentioned twice in poems placed earlier in the collection, ‘Churn-Milk Joan’ and ‘Bridestones’. The former, based on a stone above Mytholmroyd and the story of a rape and murder associated with it, ends with an image, reminiscent of Plath’s ‘The Rabbit Catcher’, of screams and ‘awful little death’.25 The latter imagines a marriage mystically consecrated upon the moors and then a grave in which the dead bride, again like Wordsworth’s Lucy, is rolled in earth’s diurnal course:
With the wreath of weather
The wreath of hills
The wreath of stars
Upon your shoulders.26
Most of the reviews of Remains of Elmet were lukewarm. Godwin’s starkly beautiful photographs garnered more praise than Hughes’s chiselled poems, which critics tended to fault for ‘a muscle-bound galvanism expressing itself in packed and tensile phrases listed down the page, often with no verb at all’.27 The allusions to Sylvia went unnoticed.
A dozen years later, in the early Nineties, Ted told Faber and Faber that he was no longer satisfied with his existing Selected Poems but not yet ready for a new selection. And he certainly didn’t want a Collected, which would be like a coffin. So how about republishing his poems in groups of three: Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal and Wodwo without the prose stories would make one trio, Cave Birds, Remains of Elmet and River (his next collection) another.28 Faber knew that the first three books, his universally acknowledged masterpieces, still sold enough to be worth keeping in print as freestanding volumes, but they liked the idea of gathering together the latter trio and in 1993 they published Three Books: the Elmet, Cave Bird and River poems, though with many a variant (revisions, additions) from the earlier collections, and without any Fay Godwin photographs. Faber’s marketing ploy was to explain that the three books were all ‘central texts in Ted Hughes’s output’ and that by gathering them together, ‘unadorned’ (which is to say, without the cost of illustrations), ‘each can now be read as part of a larger visionary enterprise, with family resemblances and shared concerns freshly accentuated’.29 The argument works well enough for Remains of Elmet and River: when read together they form a diptych in which Yorkshire contrasts with Devon and ravaged community with restorative nature. But the arcane ritual of Cave Birds is a chasm, not a bridge. Where the first and third books brought Hughes’s elegiac voice to a wide audience for the first time, the middle one feels like the last gasp of the tired, overworked mythic voice.
In several respects, the version of Remains of Elmet included in Three Books was significantly different from that published back in 1979. Most obviously, the absence of the photographs not only made it a normal – and affordable – pocket-sized paperback, it also marked the collection as being truly Ted’s, the product of his rather than Godwin’s vision and memory of the Calder Valley. His father was dead by this time, so it could now be dedicated to the memory of both his parents, not just his mother. Ted also took the opportunity to add an explanatory note, partly drawing on his introduction to Glyn Hughes’s Where I Used to Play on the Green, in which he linked his own upbringing to the decline of the valley: the emptying chapels, the closing mills, the abandoned farms, the sense of ‘living among the survivors, in the remains’.30 The note gives context and added poignancy to some of the best poems in the collection, such as ‘First, Mills’, in which the land is gradually drained and quietened until at last all that is left is ‘two minutes silence’ (alluding to cenotaphs and Remembrance Day) ‘In the childhood of earth’.31
There is also an increased personalisation. ‘Hardcastle Crags’, which was not explicitly about Hughes’s mother, is replaced by ‘Leaf Mould’ from Wolfwatching (another intermediate collection), which vividly places her in this place that she loved. ‘What’s the first thing you think of?’, a poem about Gerald and his model glider, first published casually in the Spectator in 1985, is now gathered into the family setting of the collection. ‘Football at Slack’ is brought nearer the beginning, in honour of Ted’s footballer father. Above all, reordering of the sequence also makes the presence of Sylvia more apparent. ‘Emily Brontë’ and finally ‘Heptonstall Cemetery’, with its explicit naming of her, now form the climax of the collection.
And a new poem is added: ‘Two Photographs of Top Withens’. In the original Remains of Elmet, precisely because of the presence of Godwin’s photographs, Hughes avoided writing about photographs or even using the word in the poems. Now, in the absence of actual photographs, he conjures up the memory of two of them. One is Godwin’s photo of a pair of trees by Top Withens, which had been on the back cover of Remains of Elmet. The other is that precious snapshot belonging to Ted: Wuthering Heights, ruined but with roof slabs still in place, and ‘you’ (Sylvia) smiling, halfway up one of the sycamore trees beside it. Emily Brontë is below the earth,
But you smile in the branches – still in your twenties,
Ear cocked for the great cries.
‘We could buy this place and renovate it!’32
The ‘great cries’ are presumably those of Cathy and Heathcliff, calling their passion for each other across the moor.
The lovely thought of Ted and Sylvia restoring Wuthering Heights and making it their home is then modified by images of bleakness and horror, ‘Mad heather and grass tugged by the mad / And empty wind’. No, Sylvia would have gone mad living on the moor. The only thing that endures in this bleak environment is stone. Even ‘the spirit of the place’, like that of Emily, is ‘Hidden beneath stone’. By the end of the poem Walt, their guide, has gone into the earth too. But the trees remain, in the second photograph, and in them the camera-lens of Ted’s poetic memory captures, if only for an instant, the ‘ghost’ of Sylvia.