Taking stock at the end of 1981, Ted Hughes told Luke Myers that ‘My doings touched a low low this last year, many things coming to an end, many mistakes coming to an end too I hope.’ He looked back on the Seventies as a decade of ‘estrangement’ from himself, follies in his life and piddling about in his work. Nothing of ‘the real thing’ since Crow.1 He had prepared a new Selected Poems as a kind of ‘audit’ of his progress to date, a clearing of the decks before the next big move forward. But the move would not come, not least because money worries meant that he was as ever being forced to accept trivial commissions and distracting commitments. Mercifully, the lengthy tax case arising from the huge royalties on The Bell Jar was finally settled. The large cheque, received via Sotheby’s, for the sale of Sylvia’s manuscripts to Smith, her old college, arrived just in time.
Other than River, his publications in the early Eighties were desultory. There was Under the North Star, a bestiary of poems for children, with illustrations by Baskin. Some of these, such as ‘Puma’ and ‘The Iron Wolf’, first printed on Ted and Nick’s Morrigu Press, were by no means exclusively meant for – or easily understood by – young people. Around the same time he produced A Primer of Birds, also with Baskin, printed on the latter’s Gehenna Press, the first twenty-five copies with signed and numbered Baskin prints for a cool £450 or $900 each. It includes some fine vignettes that would also appear in more accessible volumes. The ‘Kingfisher’ of River was first published here and the first swallow of spring, slipping through ‘a fracture in the snow-sheet / Which is still our sky’ and then ‘Water-skiing out across a wind / That wrecks great flakes against windscreens’, would be given a second flight in an expanded edition of Season Songs published in 1985.2 But A Primer of Birds is a distinctly patchy little collection, with too many of the poems weighed down by excess Hughesian baggage: an evening thrush is not allowed to be heard in its own right, but is juxtaposed to the sound of a ‘church craftsman’ who is ‘Switing idols, / Rough pre-Goidelic gods and goddesses, / Out of old bits of churchyard yew’.3 It would have been a better poem if Hughes had simply listened to the thrush in the yew trees in the churchyard beside Court Green.
In the spring of 1982 Faber brought out a new Selected Poems, a well-judged selection from all his adult collections to date. Most of the Gaudete epilogue poems were there in their own right, but none of the main poem. There were poems from Season Songs and Under the North Star, those volumes on the borderline between children’s and adult work. Two of the River poems, one of them being ‘That Morning’, were included even though the volume itself had not yet been published. The most startling inclusion, though one unobserved by reviewers, was ‘You Hated Spain’, which was appended to Crow, despite the fact that it was a poem about his honeymoon with Sylvia which had nothing to do with the life and songs of the Crow.
The year after the appearance of River, he published another children’s book, What is the Truth? A Farmyard Fable for the Young, with drawings by Reg Lloyd, a painter, potter and printmaker who had previously done some limited-edition silk-screen prints with poems by Ted. The two of them ‘found common ground in childhood memories of a shop bell ringing: Reg’s parents had owned a draper’s shop’.4 What is the Truth?, developed from a farmyard-focused idea proposed by Michael Morpurgo and his wife, is like a gentle version of Crow. It begins with God saying that he will ask humankind a few simple questions. In their sleep, the people of the village, on which God and his Son are looking down by moonlight, will say what they truly know. Each then tells truly, in verse, of an animal that they know. Again, Hughes is coming at his central theme indirectly: the quest for the inner truth of things, and of self, which may be revealed first in dreams and then in art. The most moving poem in the collection is ‘Bees’, which turns on the image of a wedding and ends with a ‘Priestly bee’ that ‘in a shower of petals, / Glues Bride and Groom together with honey’.5 Beekeeper Sylvia would have loved this.
Throughout this time, he was writing essays and introductions, extremely variable in subject and tone, jobbing work one moment, private passions the next. He took on short pieces to give a leg-up to fellow-writers, commissions for friends, opportunities to make a little money for himself or for a worthwhile cause. He was equally happy writing about the relative merits of Stoat’s Tail and Silver Invicta flies for an essay on the Rivers Taw and Torridge in a volume called West Country Fly Fishing or offering a poem to a slim volume published in memory of the radiantly beautiful and dazzlingly clever poet Frances Horovitz, who died of cancer of the ear, aged forty-five, in October 1983 (Ted was a huge admirer of her work, and had hoped that his friend Ted Cornish might cure her).6 Typically, in the autumn of 1984 there appeared a poem on the river Nymet together with a polemic on the decline of the otter in the rivers of the West Country due to the pesticide dieldrin in the late Fifties and then the destruction of their habitat under the policies of the Severn-Trent Water Authority. This was published in a coffee-table volume extolling the natural beauties of, and environmental threats to, Britain: A World by Itself (‘Reflections on the landscape by eminent British writers’). Then a few weeks later, in completely different vein, there appeared a long, crabbed, inward-looking introduction to The Complete Prints of Leonard Baskin, arguing that his forms were ‘drawn from the hard core of human pain’.7 He determined to take from Baskin’s work the lesson that all art comes from a wound and the greater the pain the greater the art, because art was simultaneously ‘an anaesthetic and at the same time a healing session drawing up the magical healing electrics’.8
Accolades did not especially interest him. In 1982 Exeter University gave him an honorary doctorate and he wondered what such a thing was for, other than raising a smile. It did not feel important in comparison to the real Ph.D. that was clearly going to be Nick’s destiny after graduating from Oxford. In 1984, Nicholas Hughes duly went to the University of Alaska in Fairbanks to research the fish of the Yukon river system. Ted described him proudly to Luke Myers: 6 foot 3½ inches (just taller than Ted himself, who was beginning to stoop with age), immensely hard-working, very organised (far more so than Ted), strong and fit (a weightlifter), funny and happy, but with a touch of the Germanic quality of the Plaths. Frieda, meanwhile, had divorced her farm boy Des and set up home with an insurance salesman, whom Ted thought was a bit of a dodgy character. She now rejoiced in a superbly voluptuous figure, was the image of her mother, and had the energy of a rocket. She was writing surreal children’s stories, making dresses and painting in a bold abstract style.
In contrast to his pride in his children, Ted was despairing about his own work. In this same letter to Myers, he acknowledged that it was a quiet time as far as his poetry was concerned. The events of 1963 and 1969 had been like ‘giant steel doors shutting down over great parts of myself’.9 He still had not emerged from his ‘self-anaesthesia’. He worried that life wouldn’t be long enough to wake up from it. He knew that what he had to do was break through into direct confrontation with those two terrible years. His dreams were telling him to look to his own past. In one of them, a lion licked his face under a new moon and led him into the landscape of his childhood – Mexborough, the pond at Crookhill, foundry lights over Sheffield and the earth burning, an open wound, an ‘infernal crucible’. In a perfumed garden, he wept and mourned for his mother, half knowing that the real work of mourning was still to be done: germinations, gestation, but ‘prohibited sources’.10
And there were poetic models available to him. He was trying to persuade Faber to publish more of the poetry of Yehuda Amichai, in which he found the honesty and integrity of ‘the human being speaking like a human being about being a human being’.11 Amichai’s poetry, he said, opened him to his own life, enabled him to see his past freshly and to find richness at every turn. It freed him from his mental cage.
Then there was Seamus Heaney. Ted began to sense that he was being overtaken by the poet who had begun under his own strong influence. In the summer of 1984, Seamus had sent him his latest collection, Station Island, a volume that hit a new stride – some would see it as the apex of Heaney’s achievement. ‘Station Island itself must be what you’ve been pushing yourself towards. It obviously took some confronting,’ wrote Ted in response. ‘The passages where you tackle the greatest fright seem to me the most masterful successes. And I get the feel your real kingdom is in there – that’s your way in & forward.’12 The volume’s title sequence, which Ted saw as the key, was a run of poems in which personal memory, elegy and myth were held in moving and measured equilibrium. Heaney mediates his personal and political development through a series of Irish encounters, at the climax with the imagined ghost of James Joyce. The publisher’s blurb described the sequence as ‘an autobiographical quest’ concerning ‘the growth of a poet’s mind’ – Wordsworth’s description of the epic poem that was posthumously entitled The Prelude. Was this the moment for Ted to publish something similar, to release the ghost of Sylvia as Heaney had released his family ghosts?13
That summer, Ted combined literary festivals and fishing trips in the west of Ireland and the Orkneys. Sir John Betjeman, Poet Laureate since 1972, had died in May and the talk on the literary circuit inevitably turned to the appointment of his successor. Ted noted wryly that Philip Larkin had started signing himself ‘P.L.’ He would surely be regarded as the perfect choice, with his reassuring tone of voice, his occasional four-letter words to provide a dash of popular credibility, his loyal politics, and his mindset distinctly that of the little Englander.14 Ted’s personal preference was for Charles Causley, but over the coming months there was a general assumption that it would be P.L. for P.L. The whole thing seemed such a foregone conclusion that Ladbrokes the bookies stopped taking bets and Faber started reprinting Larkin’s books.
In late November, Ted and Carol joined their friends Michael and Clare Morpurgo on a Nile cruise. This was relaxing for Ted after an exhausting two-week tour in which he had undertaken about twenty readings in the Midlands and the North – Oxford, Birmingham, Hull, Manchester, West Kirby on the Wirral. He had reached, he reckoned, some 6,000 sixth-formers. Morpurgo had become a friend after a meeting on the riverbank in Devon. Ted’s children’s books were an inspiration for his own, and the two wives got on famously. Ted and Carol were both giving assistance of various kinds to Farms for City Children, the charity established by the Morpurgos which gave urban children from all over the country the chance to spend a week living and working on a real farm in the heart of the Devon countryside.
Refreshed by fishing and sightseeing, impressed by a glimpse of a 6-foot-long crocodile-like Nile monitor15 crawling into the reeds, but tired from the journey, they arrived back at Court Green to a huge pile of post. Sorting through it, Ted came across an envelope marked ‘Confidential’, with the return address 10 Downing Street. It was an enquiry as to whether he had received the Prime Minister’s communication. Could he reply one way or the other, as a matter of urgency? ‘Here we go,’ he thought, ‘how horrible.’ Then he found the original letter from Margaret Thatcher: would he object to his name being put to Her Majesty the Queen for the position of Poet Laureate in Ordinary (‘in ordinary?’ he wrote to the Baskins with the written equivalent of a quizzical look).16 He assumed, correctly, that Larkin must have refused. He felt as if he had fallen into a trap: whether he accepted or refused, demons would be raised. They had got back on a Friday, so he had the weekend to think about the pros and cons. He phoned Olwyn, who refrained from pressing him, merely remarking that acceptance would be good for his American sales. On the Monday, he phoned Downing Street and accepted.
The Palace issued a press release on Wednesday 19 December 1984: ‘The Queen has been pleased to approve that Edward James Hughes be appointed Poet Laureate in Ordinary to Her Majesty in succession to the late Sir John Betjeman.’ It helpfully explained that the Poet Laureate is a member of Her Majesty’s Household, with annual remuneration of £70 plus a case of wine (actually a large quantity of sherry). Both salary and perk were unchanged since the time of John Dryden, the first official holder of the post back in the late seventeenth century. The announcement described Hughes as ‘both author and poet’. It listed a clutch of his many awards: the Guinness Poetry Award in 1958, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959–60, the Somerset Maugham Award in 1960, the City of Florence Poetry Prize in 1969, the Premio Internazionale Taormina in 1973 and the Queen’s Medal for Poetry the following year. The press welcomed the choice, noting how young Hughes was for the role and what a change he would be from Betjeman, to whom Larkin had seemed the natural successor. The London Times suggested that it was rather like a grim young crow replacing a cuddly old teddy bear. In America, with its dream of the backwoodsman going from a log cabin to the White House, there was particular emphasis on Ted’s humble origins: son of a Yorkshire carpenter, former nightwatchman and rose gardener, and so forth. Plath’s name was mentioned in most American reports of the appointment, but generally without rancour.
New Year brought vast numbers of congratulatory letters and considerable uncertainty as to what the role would entail – though it had been made clear that it was very much up to him to interpret his duties as he saw fit. He was especially pleased to hear from Larkin.17 Joking that he now considered himself a ‘public convenience’, Ted set about answering the deluge of requests to be the patron of this, the president of that, the guest of honour at such and such, a judge of so and so. Even gifts came with a price: someone sent him a package of lovely flies for salmon fishing, but only as bait to make him write a poem for the anniversary of the escape from Colditz.
He refused many such requests, but he took his royal duties very seriously. Two days after his appointment was announced, Prince Harry, younger son of Charles (Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall) and Diana, was baptised. Ted dashed off a ‘Rain-Charm for the Duchy’, with a subtitle that was soon mocked by the liberal metropolitan literary establishment: ‘A Blessed, Devout Drench for the Christening of His Royal Highness Prince Harry’. It is in fact a very good poem, instantly achieving a standard he would never reach again in his Laureate work. Nineteen-eighty-four had been a year of drought. The poem begins with an image of the windscreen of Ted’s Volvo ‘frosted with dust’. A thunderstorm breaks and the rivers of the West Country are replenished. The water imagery befits the occasion of a baptism, the catalogue of river-names follows in a grand tradition of English royal poetry going back to Elizabethan times, and Hughes takes the opportunity to make a point about pollution (‘the Okement, nudging her detergent bottles, tugging at her nylon stockings, starting to trundle her Pepsi-Cola cans’).18 The poem was published in the Observer newspaper just before Christmas. Its environmental message did not go unnoticed among local politicians in the West Country. Ted expressed pleasure that the Laureateship was clearly going to give him a public platform – but also relief that he had restrained himself from including some lines that were in the original draft of the poem, which, pre-Laureateship, he had intended for River: ‘And the Torridge, that hospital sluice of all the doctored and scabby farms from Welcombe to Hatherlea to Torrington / Poor, bleached leper in her pit’.19 It would not have done for his first official poem to have received a libel writ from an irate Devon farmer.
Two years earlier, he had written a poem for Prince William’s birth, based on the royal child’s ‘very strange’ horoscope and alluding to the White Goddess. He had not published it, out of respect for Poet Laureate Betjeman, but perhaps also because he recognised that it was not exactly his best poetic work: ‘Sun, moon and all their family stand / Around a new-born babe, in England … And a goddess, half-mother, half-coils, / The Serpent of Enigma, guarding the spoils.’20 Now he sent handwritten copies of both princely poems to the Royal Household, to go into the private collections of the boys themselves.
In the summer of 1985 he published a pair of poems for the eighty-fifth birthday of the Queen Mother, one grandly mythical (‘The Dream of the Lion’) and the other, much more to her taste, about salmon. The best thing about the Laureateship was that his royal connection opened doors to some very high-class fishing. The pressure to perform in public at galas and fundraisers was a price worth paying for that. But he also needed to get away from the spotlight. In this regard, Nick’s residence in Fairbanks was heaven-sent.
Some of Ted’s happiest days in the first decade of his Laureateship were spent under big skies far from little England, with his son in Alaska or with fishing friends in British Columbia and the Yukon. The air was light there, he said, and he felt unencumbered, free in a way that he never could be at home.21 The experience of fishing with Nick in Alaska was immortalised not only in the perfectly achieved River poem ‘That Morning’ but also in ‘The Gulkana’ (the name of a tributary of the glacial Copper River), a longer poem in the collection. It is an attempt to capture the feeling of the far north. The manuscript drafts ran to 150 pages. The climax of ‘The Gulkana’ has a similar feeling to ‘That Morning’ as it creates a sense of unity with nature achieved in the act of fishing:
Word by word
The voice of the river moved in me.
It was like lovesickness.22
On such a river, his troubles with women were displaced by a greater love.
In 1986 he combined his visit to Nick with a poetry reading at the University of British Columbia, and for ten years thereafter he would return most years for a fortnight to an environment that rekindled his childhood self. He confided to his host that as boys he and Gerald had made a pact to emigrate to British Columbia. But of course Gerald had ended up in Australia and Ted in Devon. Now he had arrived, albeit transiently, at their original destination.
Ehor Boyanowsky, criminal psychologist and professor at Simon Fraser University, author of academic papers on violence and aggression, was Ted’s host. In his memoir of his days ‘in the wild with Ted Hughes’, he sets the scene for their first expedition up the Dean River, 52 degrees north and 126 west, legendary among fishermen as the best place in the world for ‘that most glamorous of fish’ (Ted’s phrase), Oncorhynchus mykiss, the steelhead, or seagoing rainbow-trout, which could weigh up to 55 pounds and grow to almost 4 feet in length:
The river hisses against the oars and lashes at the inflatable raft, trying to force our craft downstream through the rapids into a looming logjam. Hunkered down on the pontoon, Ted looks around, feeling the river’s power; he drinks in the spicy aroma of the great cedars, and his face is wet from the spray, his gaze filled with the sweep of muscular granite cliffs shouldering the banks and the undulating horizon of glacier-topped peaks upstream and down.23
First he tries with a ‘dry fly’ – intended to bring the mighty but elusive steelhead to the surface, catch him on the fly, gain the full sensation. ‘Like making love with the lights on’ is how Boyanowsky puts it. No luck, though the seed is sown for a poem called ‘Be a Dry-Fly Purist’ that will be included in the second edition of River. Ted then puts on ‘a sinking tip line’ and a ‘Squamish Poacher’ fly. He casts his ‘powerful fifteen-foot Bruce and Walker rod’ upon the water: ‘Turning off the lights, are we, Ehor?’ ‘Afraid so, better sex in the dark than none at all.’ And on the third cast comes the reward: ‘Thank you, Ehor, thank you for bringing me to my first steelhead. She is surpassingly beautiful. Thank you.’24 The fish is gently returned to the water, as, according to local custom, steelhead always should be, for fear of alienating the spirit of the mighty river.
Boyanowsky and his friends made Ted keep the logbook of the week’s fishing. The highs and lows of great catches and near misses. The evening meals of steak béarnaise, baked potatoes and magnums of unnamed red wine. The grizzlies strolling through the camp. The log gave him raw material for a new poem called ‘The Bear’, which he included in the revised version of River in Three Books: first a storm, then the ‘ecstasy’ of mountain and river embodied in the steelhead. These lines are an especially striking manifestation of the way in which fishing could stand in for sex in Ted’s later years:
This actually was the love-act that had brought them
Out of everywhere, squirming and leaping,
And that had brought us too – besotted voyeurs –
Trying to hook ourselves into it.
And all the giddy orgasm of the river
Quaking under our feet –
And then the sight of a bear that salutes and vanishes, ‘a scapegoat, an offering’.25
His second trip to British Columbia was combined with an arts festival in Victoria, where he was delayed by a ruptured appendix. But that did not stop him joining his new friends, and Nick, who had come down from Fairbanks, on the Thompson River. Father and son shot chukars (a kind of partridge) together, one of the few times Ted had picked up a rifle since his early days with Gerald. As he got to know Ehor Boyanowsky and his fishing companions, Ted relaxed and began to tell stories. For instance, of the time when he and Nick were fishing for pike on an Irish lough and the locals started asking probing questions, and the next thing they knew they were hauling up a heavy object from the depths. Just as they discovered that it was a ‘heavy burlap bag’, they realised that they were being watched through binoculars from the shoreline. They had stumbled upon an IRA arms cache and needed to make a quick getaway.26
At night in the wilderness, by the crackle and flicker of the campfire, he opened his heart. Who were his favourite artists? Bosch, Goya and Cranach. What cause was closest to his heart? The environment – ‘If it were up to me alone, I would give all my money to Greenpeace.’27 Why did he marry Sylvia? ‘Because she was beautiful, passionate, a genius and I loved her.’28
And why did he marry Carol? He explained that he was trying to look after the children and his ailing parents. He went fishing with a ‘local lad named Orchard’ who told of his teenage sister, just completing her nursing training. She became the babysitter and the children took to her straight away. So did his mother: ‘Marry that girl. She is one in a million.’ But she was just a girl, he told his mother, and so much younger than him. He thought no more of the idea for a time. Then Olwyn came down to Devon and organised a sophisticated dinner-party. Carol was invited. The girl was overwhelmed by the banter, the wine, the erudition. She did not speak. Olwyn said, ‘And what do you have to say for yourself?’ Carol was so intimidated that she ‘fainted dead away right at the table’. Ted gathered her into his arms and took her out into the garden of Court Green for some fresh air: ‘I set her on the grass in the moonlight and stroked her forehead and, gazing at her, her long black hair, pale skin and lovely features in repose, I fell in love with her.’ The fishermen loved this story, not caring whether it was ‘true or apocryphal’.29 Ehor proposed a toast to Carol. ‘My true salvation,’ said Ted.30
When Ehor visited Devon, he found Carol to be a wonderful cook but rather a formidable presence. His memory is that she took one look at the cameras slung over his shoulder and told him that he should not take photographs at Court Green. The house was not what he expected: it seemed ‘too tidy and stylish to be Ted’s’. But then Ted summoned him into a long dark room ‘replete with papers, fishing gear and more papers and books stacked and strewn as far as the eye can see’. Ted’s world: ‘chaos on an epic scale’. This was where Ted was gathering material for the projected but unfinished Faber Book of Fishing on which he and Ehor were collaborating. Then Ted showed his guest the writing hut in the garden – a single room with a lamp and a big desk, raised on stilts on the ancient mound, looking for all the world like a large Wendy house or low-level treehouse. ‘This is where I work,’ Ted explained, ‘away from the phone and family and friends.’ Big books could only be finished in such a place, otherwise ‘the tendrils reach out and surround you and drag you away, every day, as certain as the seasons come and go’.31
Much as Ted’s friends adored him, they acknowledged that the marriage was not easy for Carol. There was nothing in her farming and nursing background to prepare her for marriage at the age of twenty-two to a famous poet almost twice her age, a man of prodigious energy and capacious sexual appetite, with a restless desire for new experience, a fierce but cranky intelligence that frequently veered into fads and eccentric diversions, and an unwavering creative mission centred in the conviction that he would by the time of his death be, as Keats put it, ‘among the English poets’. The gaze of press and public, consequent upon his dead first wife’s fame, created great strain. As did the poet’s enduring memory of that first wife. Not to mention the presence of a stepdaughter who was the absolute image of her mother.
What could she do, friends such as Ehor asked themselves? Feed him well, keep a clean house (though he wouldn’t really have cared if it had been dirty), maintain the financial accounts (she was good at this), make the garden beautiful (she was very good, and very fulfilled, when it came to this), be an exemplary hostess when required (she was always beautifully dressed, with impeccable hair and makeup), avoid asking too many questions about his extra-curricular activities. For Ted, Court Green as remade by Carol was the place of stability and homeliness; he worked off his excesses in London and on his reading tours and fishing trips.
Ehor Boyanowsky once confided in Ted at a difficult time, when his wife was having an affair. Ted wrote back with words of kindness, comfort and advice: he could understand the wife’s point of view because he too had experienced sexual obsession leading to infidelity. He explained that on two occasions he had been ‘out of control’ yet ‘remaining during and forever after in love with – for him – a person infinitely more significant’. On the first occasion, when married to Sylvia, ‘he experienced total separation and loss’. On the second, when married to Carol, the response was, he presumed, ‘total forgiveness’.32
In the mountains of British Columbia, by the mighty Dean River, far from all such worries, Ted and his Canadian fishing friends marvelled at the aurora borealis. Back in Vancouver they toured the strip clubs. ‘They are so much more elegant and feminine than I recall from my youth in England, in the army,’ Ted allegedly remarked of the graceful naked pole-dancers. ‘Nor did they [the dancers of his youth] remove all their clothing. Amazing.’33
In February 1986 Ted laid out in the yard of Court Green a fishing line in the shape of a noose, with a pile of monkey nuts in the middle. An escaped peacock had taken up residence in the garden and was eating Carol’s spring flowers. He told the story in a letter to Nick in Alaska: how he got the bird at the first attempt and how an airborne upturned peacock was a remarkable sight. He closed the noose, threw a blanket over his prey and took it to Nethercott, Michael and Clare Morpurgo’s farm for city children, where he hoped it would have novelty value. It was soon eaten by a fox.34 A couple of weeks later he was at the annual dinner of the Salmon and Trout Association. The guest speaker was the actor Michael Hordern. The chairman of the association owned a wonderful 2-mile stretch of the Torridge, which Ted fished on the first day of the season. Such was the life of the countryman.
On 4 June 1987, just over a week before the general election in which Margaret Thatcher coasted to her third successive term as Prime Minister, Hughes published an ‘ecological dialogue’ in The Times newspaper, headed ‘First Things First’ and subtitled ‘An Election Duet, performed in the Womb by foetal Twins’. It blamed man’s headlong obsession with economic growth, and more particularly the policies of Western governments and the regulations of the European Economic Community, for a mountain of wasted butter, for contaminated tap water, leukaemia brought on by pesticides sprayed on grain fields, and even the phenomenon of cot death. The price of increasing the Gross National Product was leafless trees, rivers without fish, and human beings suffering from pre-senile dementia. The poem begins in loose iambic pentameter and ends in brisk rhyming trimeter, but contains in the middle the two longest and perhaps least poetic lines of verse that Hughes ever wrote:
And if the cost of Annual Expansion of the World Chemical Industry taken as a whole over the last two decades is a 40% drop in the sperm count of all human males (nor can God alone help the ozone layer or the ovum)
Then let what can’t be sold to your brother and sister be released on the 3rd World and let it return by air and sea to drip down the back of your own throat at night.35
He explained to a fellow-poet that pollution was the great theme of the age. He noticed, judging children’s poetry competitions, how it was something that even six- and seven-year-olds were worried about. The poem, he explained, was inspired by his reading of John Elkington’s book The Poisoned Womb: Human Reproduction in a Polluted World, published the previous year. Elkington was a preacher of eco-apocalypse, speculating that toxins were causing a massive reduction in human fertility. Ted did not have any faith in Mrs Thatcher’s willingness to address the question. For one thing, her husband Denis was involved in the waste-disposal trade. For another, she was the sort of woman upon whom nothing could put the frighteners. She resembled an army commander who believed that he could afford a casualty rate of 25 per cent. Her intransigence was ironic, since she had an Oxford degree in Chemistry. But perhaps it was not surprising: as Prime Minister she would listen only to professional consultants with vested interests. Besides, when she had been a practising chemist her job had merely been to research ‘the maximum number of bubbles that can be pumped into ice-cream, before it disillusions the customers’.36
Ted was worried by bubbles of another kind. His fishing friend Ian Cook, who lived in a house on the Exe, had observed some kind of white foam boiling up on the weir where he fished the river Creedy. There was a sewage works a little way upstream. He would eventually bring a civil case against South West Water. Ted offered his usual support: ‘Top Poet in Water Fight’ read the headline in the local paper.37 Inspired by Ted, Cook and his lawyer dramatically invoked the rights enshrined in the Magna Carta. The judge compared the relevant stretch of river to ‘the face of a beautiful woman scarred by disease’, a metaphor very much up Ted’s street. Against expectation, Cook won his case. Ted told the press that it was a historic victory because it had ‘reactivated the power of common law in this terrific issue of water quality in rivers’.38 Instead of seeking damages, Cook asked the water authority to contribute to the research of the Institute of Freshwater Ecology into the polluting effect of detergents in the Exe. This established a connection between Ted and the ecotoxicologist Professor John Sumpter, who was working on the phenomenon of endocrine disruptors causing male fish to change gender.
The ‘ecological dialogue’ during the election campaign and the South West Water court case are just two of the many instances in which Hughes used his public profile to address environmental concerns. Whether it was ammonia in the Torridge estuary, a proposal to establish a ‘Tarka Trail’ that risked disrupting the fragile ecosystem of the riverbank and bringing the masses to his sacred territory, an amusement park beside the river at Knaresborough back in Yorkshire, or an international campaign to save the black rhinoceros, he was ready to pen a protest. And he always made it clear that concern for the natural world was also concern for humankind, most forcefully in an interview on the occasion of the publication of his ecological children’s fable, The Iron Woman. He said that most people tended to ‘defend or rationalise the pollution of water’. The general assumption was that environmentalists were merely ‘defending fish or insects or flowers’. This missed the point that ‘the effects on otters and so on are indicators of what’s happening to us’. The issue was not so much to look after ‘the birds and bees’ as to ‘ferry human beings through the next century’: ‘The danger is multiplied through each generation. We don’t really know what bomb has already been planted in the human system.’39 With the Cold War at an end, the old image of the fear of nuclear annihilation was translated into fear of global ecocide. Such was the life of the Poet Laureate as ecowarrior.
He always enjoyed describing his environmental discoveries and interventions in lengthy letters to Nick in Alaska. He was also superb at providing long-distance paternal advice. When Nick broke up with his girlfriend Madeline, whom he had known since Oxford, Ted comforted him with his own story of a life ‘oscillating between fierce relationships that become tunnel traps, and sudden escapes into wide freedom when the whole world seems to be just there for the taking’. It is a letter of extraordinary beauty, wisdom and tenderness, telling of the inner child and the paradox that ‘the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world’. There is a key to the source of true elegiac and cathartic poetry here: ‘That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember.’ Father Ted in the role of a very wise agony aunt, this is Hughes at his most humane and compassionate, yet with the necessary touch of self-deprecation: ‘And that’s how we measure out our real respect for people – by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate – and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river.’40
Countryman, ecowarrior and family man came together in his next collection of poetry for Faber and Faber, which he entitled Wolfwatching. Planned by the end of 1987, it was dedicated to Aunt Hilda and published in September 1989. It is a thin volume, in both proportion and poetic development, gathering further elegiac poetry of childhood memory in the vein of Remains of Elmet. The family history is padded out with occasional pieces, such as his polemical lines written for the black rhino campaign. The collection is marred by some of the worst phraseology of the later Hughes, in which the over-vigorous and monotonous hammer-blows of the mother-tongue are combined with a dip into what Philip Larkin scathingly called the myth kitty: ‘Oracular spore-breath’, ‘goblin clump / Of agaric’, ‘scraggy sheep’, ‘ectoplasmic pulp’, ‘Temenos Jaguar mask – a vogue mandala: / Half a Loa, half a drugged Oglala’.41 Ted himself had doubts about the quality of some of the work that he had included: ‘doubting my powers and getting older’, he said of the collection. ‘Of course both wolves are caged.’42 He told the critic Keith Sagar, who was by this time tracking his master’s every literary move, that it was a funereal volume, a series of ‘obsequies over a state of mind that is to me, now, defunct’.43
The importance of the book comes from the increasing confidence and directness with which Hughes exposes his personal voice. At its heart are the family poems, most of which he had originally published in fugitive form in the mid-Eighties. Here are tender evocations of his shell-shocked father in the aftermath of the Great War (‘Dust As We Are’ and ‘For the Duration’); of his mother’s tears for her husband’s damaged soul as she bends over her sewing machine (‘Source’); of happier times of early boyhood with Ma walking up Hardcastle Crags (‘Leaf Mould’); of Uncle Walt as a young man ‘Under High Wood’ on the Somme, then as an old man on the clifftop, seeing a peregrine falcon and looking out on the Atlantic towards ‘Untrodden, glorious America’ (‘Walt’). The most telling inclusion is ‘Sacrifice’, the poem about Uncle Albert’s suicide, written just days before Sylvia took her own life in 1963 but only published two decades later, after his father’s death.44
Wolfwatching was a selection of the Poetry Book Society. In introducing it in the society’s Bulletin, Ted explained that he had wanted Remains of Elmet to focus on the atmosphere of the place, so as to complement Fay Godwin’s photographs. He had accordingly excluded more autobiographical poems, to avoid ‘hijacking Fay’s inclusive vision’.45 Now the poems of family remembrance were gathered together. Later, he disparaged the collection as ‘various pieces that I wished to get out of the way – i.e. published, in order to clear the decks for something different’.46 The critical response was by and large respectful but muted. The poet Mick Imlah offered the most astute commentary: he saw that the two ‘Uncle’ poems were the best in the book and that they ‘sound like a new start’.47
Their true home was in Ted’s Yorkshire collection, and that is where they ended up. A year after the re-release of Remains of Elmet without photographs as part of Three Books, the Elmet poems and Fay Godwin’s images were reunited. Faber produced a new edition of the collection, the title now stripped down to a bare Elmet. The quality of the paper was much better than that of the 1979 Remains of Elmet, so the black-and-white images, many of which had been very murky in the original edition, now looked fresh and sharp. At the end, Ted added in his family poems, implicitly dismembering Wolfwatching. ‘Sacrifice’, ‘For the Duration’ and ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ are turned into a run of elegies for both place and people, both family and wider community, shadowed by the Great War. Hughes regarded this final version of Elmet as the definitive version of his project to memorialise his native valley and its inhabitants, but because the volume was for the most part a reissue, which looked like an expensive coffee-table book (£30 in hardback, £14.99 or $19.99 even for the paperback), it did not have the sales or the impact that it deserved. It remains his most underrated work.
Ted Hughes enjoyed writing Laureate poems. With his belief in the poet as shaman of the tribe and the royal family as embodiment of the land, he took the role more seriously than any of his twentieth-century predecessors. But, for his deeper poetic self, the new role was a new impediment. If in the autumn of 1984 he was on the brink of following Amichai and Heaney into a poetry of raw personal exposure, the Laureateship held him back. The last thing he wanted in his first years as a national figure was renewed attention in the press to the end of his first marriage and Sylvia’s death. That would have been the inevitable consequence of publication of any significant part of the long-gestated project that eventually became Birthday Letters.
So he kept on approaching his own story indirectly. He acknowledged that among his children’s stories one that came especially close to his inner life was Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth, published in 1986. Ffangs is a vampire bat who doesn’t like the sight of blood and only wants to be human. After various adventures including an audience with the Queen in Buckingham Palace – the sort of encounter which a newly crowned Poet Laureate was well qualified to write about – he goes to the moon, where he discovers the Truth when he kisses a girl called Selena who has a snake in her mouth. She is a figuration of the White Goddess, but her bite-kiss which transforms Ffangs into his true self is also that of Sylvia at Falcon Yard. There was more of that true self in this story than in the poetry collections he published at this time. They were Flowers and Insects, dedicated to Frieda and the Baskins’ daughter Lucretia, a slender volume from Faber containing some very pedestrian writing and few memorable lyrics other than ‘Sunstruck Foxglove’, and The Cat and the Cuckoo, a series of children’s poems to accompany colour illustrations of animals by Reg Lloyd. This was dedicated to, among others, ‘all the children who visit Farms for City Children’.
There was another reason besides the Laureateship why this was not the moment to write publicly about his relationship with Sylvia. On 6 January 1987, he wrote to János Csokits about the usual sort of literary business: the problems that the shoestring publisher Peter Jay was having over a proposed new selection of János Pilinszky’s selected poems, the equally slow progress of a collection of essays on translating poetry that Danny Weissbort was putting together. But these were trifling matters compared to dramatic developments in the lawsuit launched by Jane Anderson in response to the Bell Jar film: he was waiting for a phone call that would summon him to an American courtroom.