Hughes pondered deeply over the poem ‘Among School Children’ by his revered W. B. Yeats. It is a meditation on the tension between artists and their work, the dancer and the dance, the exterior life of ‘A sixty-year-old smiling public man’ – by this time Yeats was a senator of the Irish Free State – and the interior life of the poet as he dreams of a beautiful woman and the loss of a time when ‘two natures blent / Into a sphere from youthful sympathy’.1 These thoughts sounded a persistent echo in the mind of Ted Hughes in the Nineties. Public man, Poet Laureate, famous author, he had much to preoccupy him through his sixties, but his deepest self never ceased to be embroiled with the myth of the Goddess and the loss of Sylvia, the poetic other half of his youthful self.
There were battles to be fought, causes to be taken up, letters to be written to editors and government ministers, lobbying groups to support, whether the campaign to ban the North-East Drift New Salmon Fishery off Northumbria or a local group to prevent the overdevelopment of Devon.2 There were newspaper articles to be written: defending the hunting of stag and fox on Exmoor because it preserved the delicate ecosystem and the mysterious ancient bond between rural people and indigenous animals or proposing that the interior of the Millennium Dome should be laid out in the shape of a giant human brain.3 Political decisions to be influenced: in thanking the Prime Minister for a ‘Wordsworth evening’ at Number 10, he urged John Major, at a time when the national Environment Agency was being restructured, to ensure that responsibility for dealing with pollution was not separated from the National Rivers Authority.4
Then there were academic Shakespeareans to be attacked: when a certain Gary Taylor proposed a second-rate little lyric ‘Shall I die? Shall I fly?’ as a new addition to the canon of the Bard, Hughes told the Sunday Times that it was ‘ersatz Taramasalata’ whereas true Shakespeare was always caviar, even if sometimes bad caviar. Taylor might know everything about Shakespeare but he had never truly read him.5 There was the work of Arvon, for which he tried to get support from first Prince Charles and then the billionaire Paul Getty. And decisions that came with the job of Laureate, such as the award of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. He took particular pleasure in proposing the Scottish poet Sorley MacLean, still more delight when the Queen arranged for her personal piper to lead in the victor with traditional Gaelic tunes. Another year, he was deeply disappointed when Thom Gunn turned the medal down.6
In private, he became a more prolific letter-writer than ever before. Letter-writing sustained his deepest friendships, with men from Cambridge days such as McCaughey and Myers, Huws and Weissbort, and with fellow-writers such as Ben Sonnenberg in New York, Yehuda Amichai in Israel and above all Seamus Heaney in Ireland. Heaney, whose great gift, he wrote, was to ‘make it easier for people to love each other’.7 Heaney, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, eliciting a magnificent letter of congratulation: ‘Well – there it is. And it’s there forever. Like a sea-god on a great wave you emerged and inevitably took it, by sovereignty of nature.’8 Hughes saw that the award was ‘perfectly ripe’ for the historical moment of Northern Ireland’s move towards peace and reconciliation. But there was, Heaney admitted after Hughes’s death, just a hint of envy over ‘the call from Stockholm’.9 No English-born poet has ever won the big one. Ted knew that it was almost inconceivable for the Nobel Committee to choose him as the first (imagine the feminist reaction!), but a small part of him found it difficult to see himself surpassed by Heaney, who acknowledged that it was the ‘almost magic effect’ of Hughes’s writing that had made him into a poet.10 The metaphor of the sea-god emerging on the great wave suggests the death of Hippolytus in a Greek myth to which Hughes kept returning in his later years. Hippolytus is a son-figure and he was famous for his sexual purity. The fertile unconscious of Hughes may be saying something about the metaphoric poetic father being usurped by the son whose hands seem always clean – politically, sexually – even as his work digs in the soil and bogs of rural Ireland.
The argument of Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being was rehearsed and refined for the benefit of numerous correspondents. Over several years, Ted exchanged views with the Reverend Moelwyn Merchant – Anglican and scholar – regarding not only Shakespeare but also the reconciliation of Christianity and syncretic mythology. He described himself as a ‘radically Pagan soul’ who was also in some sense a natural Christian.11 To the poet Bill Scammell, he wrote at length about the character of Anna Karenina and Tolstoy’s fear of sex. To his devoted explicator Keith Sagar and to the gently probing questioner Nick Gammage he wrote about his own work, again and again. His correspondence with another critic, Terry Gifford, is one part poetry, the other part environmental discussion. To others, he enthusiastically recommended the memory-training techniques of Tony Buzan, describing him as a Mental Martial Arts guru.
He was bombarded with invitations – to give readings (two or three requests a week to do free readings for charities, he once explained),12 to look at people’s work, to endorse books, to participate in literary projects, to give away rights. His patience was tried but his appetite for new and unusual ideas never failed him. Nor did his sense of humour. In conversation and in his informal letters, he had deadpan wit. When he met the actress Susannah York at a celebration of Wilfred Owen’s poetry in Oswestry, she mentioned that her son was going up to Cambridge to read English. He told her that she should chop off his head to save him from that fate.13 He was also very good at teasing himself, even making a joke of his erotic dream-life: ‘Sophia Loren, teasingly threatening to strip, then, sitting on a steep rock in river, actually being stripped as she slides willy nilly into water. Very vivid comic effects, on her part.’14
Often he did agree to write on behalf of writers. On a few occasions he succeeded in persuading Faber to take on a new poet; on many, he failed. He perfected the art of writing endorsements. One of the best was sent to his daughter’s American publisher: ‘When I think of Frieda Hughes, who is my daughter,’ he began, disarmingly, ‘I am always reminded of a certain morning, a breakfast of the Devon Beekeepers Association, hearing her talk wildly about various bee-swarms she had extricated from various near-impenetrable fortresses.’ This struck him as ‘very peculiar’, because he knew that ‘she had never so much as touched a bee – and was, in fact, allergic to their stings’. He was at the rear of the hall, close to the exit, but he heard her clearly: ‘She spoke in her familiar way, very fast and vivaciously, exclaiming and interrupting and cackling, until she had cleared herself enough startled attention to begin orating in earnest. Being Frieda, she did not stop at the savage swarm she had subdued. She had plans for a far grander campaign.’15 There is a revealing lapse of memory here. Sylvia’s beehives stood empty for many years in the garden of Court Green, the wood slowly rotting just as her old car rusted outside the house – Ted could not bear to get rid of them. Then, as a teenager, Nick took up beekeeping, partly in order to get in touch with the heritage of his mother and indeed his grandfather Otto, the bee expert. He, not Frieda, was the one who would get into conversations with old men about bees, tell tales of his adventures, and speak at beekeepers’ breakfasts. Ted’s memory lapse was part and parcel of the process whereby he saw Frieda as the reincarnation of Sylvia. She was, he said, more German than her mother but also very American, and entirely stultified by England. He was delighted when she found her inner self, and found happiness, in Australia, though of course he missed her even more than he did Gerald. He sent her long letters, filled with good advice about her poems.
In 1990, Frieda published a children’s novel called Waldorf and the Sleeping Granny about ‘a good witch, a bad witch and a girl in her teens taking charge and accepting responsibility for herself, thereby gaining confidence and being able to do wonderful things as a result’. Ted loved the book and its message about self-belief. But, as Frieda remembered it, Carol phoned and said, ‘The person you have written about knows what you have done.’ Frieda was puzzled, since – like her father in his mythological and folktale mode – she didn’t think of her characters as being based on real people. She got the impression that Carol had mistakenly taken the wicked witch to be a portrait of her.16 The two women were on opposite sides of the world in more ways than one.
Frieda struggled with illness during these years, when she lived in a little house, surrounded by gum trees, in a remote settlement called Wooroloo, about an hour’s drive from Perth. Her poetry and her painting pulled her through and in 1996 she married (for the third time). Her union with Hungarian fellow-painter László Lukács, who was also working in Western Australia, inspired one of Ted’s loveliest unpublished poems. Written as a wedding present, it is a capsule biography of his daughter that begins, ‘The day she was conceived Frieda set off to explore America.’
In the womb she sees the world through her mother’s eyes. The grand tour through mountain, forest and prairie, all the way to the California coast, where they stare out at the Pacific, sea-kelp at the water’s edge looking like the tails of lions, and she kicks and jumps inside Sylvia just at the moment when her father says ‘How far is Australia? O so far, far away!’ As energetic before birth as she would be in life, she is born at sunrise on April Fool’s Day and her first sight is the mother she would never remember,
Propped up in the bed, weeping with joy in the first light of the April sun
Yes, weeping with joy as she held the glowing rosy creature
That was going to be Frieda.
She then meets her Daddy (she would always call him Daddy), who had stayed awake all night, as giddy as Shakespeare’s Troilus, with the expectation of the gift of life, the newborn thing that would sneeze as he first lifted her up ‘In the room papered with big roses’.
The poem then gives back to Frieda some of the things she had forgotten: how Sylvia nursed her for more than a year because she wanted to give her everything and more, how she ‘shook her cot to pieces / Gripping the bars and shaking the whole thing to pieces / Because she wanted to be off’. How she kept tearing down the ‘life-size print of the Great Goddess Isis’ that hung over her cot as a talisman. How for hours and hours, by day and night, ‘to and fro’, her Daddy ‘walked with her in his arms’ and sang all the old ballads, again and again (‘Van Diemen’s Land’, ‘Eppie Morrie’, ‘Sir Patrick Spens’, ‘Barnyards of Delgatty’, ‘The Wearing of the Green’, all those songs he had shared with Dan Huws at Cambridge), and little Frieda would suck her thumb but not want to sleep because she did not want to miss ‘one minute of the world’. Remember: the album of snapshots in which Frieda is ‘Centre of the Universe’. Remember: the little girl as dancing ballerina, with tutu and tiara, whirling round to the music of Handel. Then the creaky boat ride to Ireland and the house by the sea in Connemara. Her love for every living thing – guinea pig, hamster, rat and ferret (‘I love them so much they make me shiver, they make me cry!’), even the tick that bit her, because it came from the dog that she loved. And then she is off, impatient with school and teenagerhood. Even the motorbikes are not fast enough for her, so she is off travelling the world, riding, running free, until László catches her in Australia.
She is her father’s ‘comet made of priceless, blazing jewels’, her eyes having blazed from the moment she was born. His ‘windfall from heaven’, now she must be given to her new husband. He closes by addressing László. The best part of his own life has been ‘hidden’ in Frieda. Ted trusts that because László is an artist he knows about precious things, about jewels, ‘even those that fall out of the blue Australian sky’. So he will know ‘how to value / A meteorite of diamonds / Fallen out of heaven’. Frieda will amaze her new husband every bit as much as she has amazed her Daddy. The most important thing for László to know will be ‘how to look after Frieda’.17
Ted always granted respect to strangers. He patiently responded to questions about his poems. A French graduate student at Oxford asked some good ones and he rewarded her with a letter of more than 5,000 words that amounts to a miniature literary autobiography.18 Here he acknowledged that his animal poems were the ‘dramatisation’ of his ‘internal psychodrama’, while telling of his literary and psychological influences (Jung especially). He granted his interrogator’s assumption that he found his own voice through the adoption of ‘another persona’ (Crow most obviously), that he was not a poet of ego, not interested in ‘Wordsworthian rumination over my own autobiography’. But he attributed this distancing from the self to the literary-critical climate of his youth, in which ‘the secrets of the private life needed total protection’. Later in the letter, he admitted that an autobiographical voice was trying to get out: the farming-diary poems were simply about his own life, ‘yes Wordsworthian style’. For all his experiments with mythic systems, this was perhaps his true voice of feeling, his most fertile vein. At the end of the letter, he suggested, to his own surprise, that his work was coming full circle to where he had begun in the little love poem ‘Song’: to the naked voice, the ‘living nerve’, of his inner being.
There were bizarreries of the kind that beset him throughout his life: a girl in her thirties who lived in Oxford, called herself Kayak, was obsessed with Lapland and wrote poems in the style of Crow, began pushing letters through the door of Court Green, claiming that she was Hughes’s daughter. A cease-and-desist letter was dispatched from the lawyers.19 In another development, his New York lawyer Victor Kovner was put on alert because rumours were emerging of a possible biographical film about the Plath–Hughes marriage – first Madonna was said to be interested and then the actress Molly Ringwald was signed up to play Plath.20 With the urge to suppress for fear of distortion and vilification came an urge to reveal. Writing to Stephen Spender, who had been wounded by an unauthorised biography, he suggested that the best solution would be to write a detailed autobiography, to tell everything so that interest in the life would be absolutely sated and the past life would no longer belong to the person who had lived it, meaning that they need no longer worry about it. The one thing one should never do, he added, was go to law.21
He belatedly surrendered to Wagner, under the influence of the maverick systematiser Dr Iris Gillespie, whose Wagnerian essays with such titles as ‘Death-Devoted Heart’ he vainly sent to Faber.22 He praised his friend Josephine Hart for the poetic passion of Damage, her novel of obsessive erotic desire.23 He read as voraciously and eclectically as ever. And over the dinner-table, his appetite still gargantuan despite the vicissitudes of his health, or over bottle upon bottle of good wine, he would talk and talk. Horatio, one of the Morpurgos’ children, had vivid memories of Ted’s ‘table talk’. One evening the Laureate would sound off about abstract art’s detachment from real life, another he would turn up with ‘a video of two ganglions in a rat’s brain actually forming a new connection – the birth of a thought captured on film’.24 His restless conversation was symptomatic of his deeper restlessness: his desire to live in Ireland rather than England, Devon as ‘the graveyard of ambition’ – ‘drab compared to Alaska, boring compared to London’. ‘Are we living in a museum?’ he asked one evening, after someone had described the ‘picturesque’ life of a local smallholder, soon to retire. Perhaps he should have been Jewish instead of ‘question-mark Anglican’. In some ways, he would rather have been a doctor than a poet. If only he hadn’t wasted so much time running around with women when he was young he ‘might have really achieved something’.
By this time, his politics were of the right: ‘Mrs Thatcher was a big enthusiasm. Michael Heseltine became a friend. Kenneth Baker – Thatcher’s ideologue-in-chief – was also a buddy. He liked Mrs T’s belligerent business sense, her militarism, patriotism and all-round impatience with slackers. These were traits he shared and was proud of.’ Politically, he was never exactly consistent: ‘He spoke of how much he owed to the fairness of Butler’s 1944 educational reforms – then suddenly Kenneth Baker was coming to dinner and 50% of school-teachers were homosexual. Fact.’
He was at his best with his passions: fishing stories, folklore, the ancient history of his Devon home. Young Morpurgo remembered how Ted loved talking about the Iron Age associations of the area, how the whole locality was a sort of sacred forest – the regional ‘Nymet’ place-name came from the Celtic word for a ‘sacred grove’. The names of fields and rivers were vestiges of ‘un-Romanised Celtic populations and culture’. ‘Devon rounds’ were late Iron Age fortifications. A nearby farmer had turned up ‘strange white stones in one of his fields’ and Ted was convinced that they were fragments of a pre-Roman temple-floor. As for the Romans’ brief occupation of the area, Vespasian set up camp in North Tawton and the garden of Court Green contained the rampart of his military camp, on which fox cubs now played. Morpurgo noted, shrewdly, that Ted had, ‘literally on his door-step, and all around him, traces of this tension between a native culture more or less stamped out elsewhere, and an “acquired”, wider European one’. He saw rural England as his ‘sub-culture’ – the place he knew best, the source of his literary voice – but it could ‘never be the whole picture’: a wider culture had to be integrated, a balance struck. So it was that one moment Ted would insult the French in the tone of a Little England Spectator columnist and the next he would translate Racine’s Phèdre. He would introduce a whole generation to the wonders of Yoruba poetry, then say that Third World aid was a waste of money. There is an odd mix of admiration and scorn in Morpurgo’s piece: an earnest young man, he did not fully appreciate Ted’s taste for mischief, for the wind-up and the tall story, for deliberate provocation and the opinion that went against the grain of liberal consensus.
That said, there is no doubting the seriousness with which Hughes threw himself into the world of the West Country gentry, which provided him with fishing rights to die for and many a meal at the very upmarket Gidleigh Park Hotel. And the Laureateship had opened the highest doors in the land. A weekend at Windsor with Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother included a private recital by Sir John Gielgud. Fishing with the Queen Mother in Scotland became a high point of the year. He relished the way that she was interested in everything and everybody, always positive in her outlook on the world.25 Other well-to-do connections took him beyond the Highlands to the Islands. In August 1991 he stayed at Amhuinnsuidhe Castle on the Isle of Harris in the Hebrides, from where he went deep-sea fishing. The exclusive Grimersta River on the island of Lewis became a Mecca for the Fisher King.
Trips away were a welcome escape from troubles at home – there was a particularly difficult time when Carol’s elder sister, whose vitality he loved, died of cancer. Bereavement sent Ted and Carol’s shared life into a tunnel from which it was difficult to emerge.26
In 1994, he helped Nick get American citizenship, which necessitated a trip to New York and the calling in of some favours. That May he had another week fishing with the Queen Mother on the Dee (this time he caught nothing). Another summer, his thank-you letter for a visit to Birkhall, her Scottish home in Royal Deeside, waxed lyrical about the northern light. The year after that he was at Birkhall again, deerstalking in the company of Prince Charles.27 The heir to the throne in place of brother Gerald: Ted had come a long way from his childhood hunting ground in the woods and moors above the Calder Valley.
Meanwhile, there was the usual legion of literary projects, though none so all-consuming or important to him as Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. Ever since the publication of The Rattle Bag, that highly personal anthology of Hughes and Heaney favourites, Seamus had wanted to produce a ‘more decidedly literary-historical’ sequel.28 In January 1990 Ted sent Seamus a list of the greatest English poets from the Middle Ages to the mid-twentieth century, suggesting that there should be no more than two or three works per poet. The focus, he said, should be on those who were ‘spiritually great – voices of the whole tribe at a moment of crisis’.29 Perhaps it should be called ‘The Kit Bag’: ‘a book for the lonely soldier surviving on essentials’.30 Heaney told him, more than half in earnest, that he couldn’t ‘go with the imperial associations of the kit bag’, its summoning of ‘Brits in cork helmets and shorts, wielding their swagger sticks’.31
Other priorities intervened, but the anthology was eventually published in 1997 as The School Bag, with a brief preface explaining that it was intended to be ‘a kind of listening post, a book where the reader can tune in to the various notes and strains that have gone into the making of the whole score of poetry in English’.32 Nearly 600 pages long, it is a superb selection from the canon of English and American poetry, inclusive of translations from Irish, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic. The arrangement seems haphazard – neither chronological nor thematic – but nearly all the essential poets from the anthologists’ two islands are sampled. An afterword by Ted outlined his method of memorising poems, an art that in his later years he was forever urging upon educators and correspondents. He told Prince Charles that his son Nick had used the memory method for everything from history to science, so perhaps it would be of use to the Princes William and Harry in their studies.33 In the early Nineties he often visited Highgrove, Prince Charles’s country residence in Gloucestershire, and read his stories aloud to the boys. They especially liked extracts from The Iron Man.34
To mark a visit, Ted would often inscribe a book for his host. There is a noteworthy body of unknown ‘occasional verse’ of this kind. On the spectrum of his writing, these short pieces lie between the expensive limited editions of fewer than a hundred copies and the unpublished drafts filed away among the writer’s own papers. Perhaps such works should never be published: a poem for an individual is a very private thing. But then again, Hughes knew that every scrap of his writing was of potential value and that all his manuscripts had the potential to end up in archive or auction room. Every now and then, one of these little poems-of-the-moment pops up in a sale or is stumbled upon in a library. On other occasions, they become treasured heirlooms. In her apartment in New York City, Jill Barber has what she calls a ‘Ted Memorabilia Room’, in which she keeps the books that he inscribed for her. At Highgrove, there is a cherished collection of personally inscribed copies of many of his books in the Prince of Wales’s private ‘sanctuary’, where there are also two stained-glass windows dedicated to Ted, who thus lives on as the household shaman. One particular treasure is the copy of New Selected Poems that Hughes inscribed for the Prince’s grandmother the Queen Mother in 1996, on the occasion of one of his visits to Birkhall. It is a celebration of the hard work undertaken by the royals, but also of their leisure time on Scottish river and moor. To work uncomplainingly is, the poem suggests, a good animal instinct, while the place for rest and recreation is among ‘rocks and stones and trees’. The latter phrase is an embedded quotation from Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’ poem that so haunted Hughes. The poem for the Queen Mother ends with an image of her as an exemplary respondent to the demands of Mother Earth.35
Another project, inspired by a brainstorming dinner at Buckingham Palace in which the Duke of Edinburgh tried to elicit ideas for raising public awareness of environmental issues, was for a competition in which schoolchildren would rework material out of myth, religion and folktale into plays that illuminated aspects of our modern ecological crisis. From this emerged the Sacred Earth Drama Trust and the publication by Faber of the competition-winning plays under the title Sacred Earth Dramas. When the Sacred Earth Drama Group met in London in 1994, Valerie Eliot donated £10,000 of her earnings from her husband’s work.
Early in the decade Ted wrote to the blonde and glamorous Joanna Mackle, a senior figure at Faber and Faber to whom he became very close, requesting a reissue of his choice of Shakespeare’s verse. No one but specialists would read The Goddess of Complete Being, he said, and nobody read Shakespeare’s complete works for pleasure any more, but the anthology would give them the essentials. Why not include it in the ticket price for productions at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, sell it at hotels to sit alongside the Gideon Bible or drop it in among the fancy soaps and shampoos in upmarket establishments, give free copies to first-class and Concorde passengers on British Airways and Virgin, offer it to tour groups, negotiate with the Ministry to provide copies for every fifteen-year-old in the land? The reissue duly appeared – with revised introduction and afterword – but nothing came of the grand schemes for distribution.36
Ted was not deterred. If they couldn’t do it with Shakespeare, then they could try with The Rattle Bag – he would write to Lord King at British Airways and Richard Branson at Virgin. Like many of Ted’s other bright ideas to promote either his own work or the art of poetry in general, this one blazed for a moment and then fizzled out.
In the summer of 1992, Faber and Faber published his Laureate poems under the title Rain-Charm for the Duchy. This consisted of nine poems, eight of which, including two very long ones, had been published in national newspapers to mark various royal occasions.37 Like the most famous of Faber poetry publications, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the book was fleshed out to marketable length by means of prose notes at the back. These are in some ways more readable than the poems themselves. The commentary on ‘Rain-Charm for the Duchy’ is one of Hughes’s most lyrical river essays, telling of how the poem maps the territory that had become his own spiritual home, the ‘roughly square “island”’ bounded by the Tamar, the Exe, the Torridge and the Taw. Strictly speaking, he explains, this means that he trespasses beyond the bounds of the Duchy itself, the royal lands of the Duke of Cornwall, His Royal Highness Prince Charles. He also explains, with a hint of regret, that since he excluded that part of Devon which lay to the east of the Exe there was no room for Coleridge’s ‘sweet birthplace’, the river Otter. Then he soars into an account of the wonders of the river Mole bringing in the best sea-trout, and of an eighteenth-century diarist attempting to ford the Tamar at a moment when the assembled salmon, coming upstream to spawn, ‘had decided to rush the shrunken river’: ‘His horse refused to approach the water, terrified by the massed fish going up over the gravel, through the ford, backs out, tails churning like propellors [sic], moving at their top speed.’38 At the climax of the note, he evokes the river Torridge ‘going over its last weir above the tide – Tarka the Otter’s famous Beam Weir’, looking like water ‘being spilled slowly from a tin bath’. Propeller (wartime bombers and aviator Gerald), Tarka (favourite book) and tin bath (Aspinall Street) are images – homecomings – from his own childhood.
In the note on ‘The Dream of the Lion’, the first of his poems for his beloved Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, he explains further that he had mentally associated her maiden name (Bowes-Lyon) with the ‘totem animal of Great Britain’ as long ago as his ‘boyhood fanatic patriotism’.39 As for the third lion on the crest, it is Leo, her star sign and his.
The note on ‘A Birthday Masque’, written for the Queen’s sixtieth birthday, veers into the territory of Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. Hughes explains that the poem’s three angels, of Water, Earth and Blood, bring, respectively, purity to the polluted waters of modernity, the Taoist Way ‘to the world of external bewilderment and empty distraction’, and ‘Blood’s true nature’ to ‘the lineal unity of mankind, not as an agglomeration of sub-species but as a true family, an orphaned and bereft family, scattered, like the family in Shakespeare’s play The Comedy of Errors’.40 Alert to the potentially dark politics of Blood and Soil, here Hughes evokes by contrast the idea of the Queen’s Commonwealth as a family. Perhaps, too, he is recalling the scattering of his own family across the globe: Gerald in Australia, Nick in Alaska, Frieda on her travels. The note continues with a brisk tour through the Goddess territory of Shakespeare’s Lear, ‘the Welsh sea-god Llyr, formerly the Irish god Lir, direct heir of an ancient lineage that goes back through Apollo to Ra, the high god of Ancient Egypt, the sun in geological time (flower-time) not that long ago’. And thence to the Sioux shaman Black Elk, the blade of a samurai sword, and ‘the Islamic Sufi masterwork, Attar’s Conference of the Birds’.41 The note to the most recent of his Laureate poems, ‘The Unicorn’, first published in the Daily Telegraph in February 1992, also becomes a miniature rewrite of the Shakespeare book, replete with references to Prospero, Ariel, Queen Mab, Brutus and Hamlet.
The calmest and most personal note is that to ‘A Masque for Three Voices’, written for the Queen Mother’s ninetieth birthday in August 1990. Ted describes his poem as a miniaturised version of an epic of the twentieth century, coinciding with the Queen Mother’s life. She was born in 1900 as the Boer War came to an end, Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams and Max Planck began elaborating quantum theory. The main drama of the century was the two world wars, its culmination the collapse of the Soviet system. The Queen Mother lost her beloved brother Fergus in 1915, as Ted’s home town lost so many of its sons. He writes, he says, ‘from the point of view of the son of an infantryman of the First World War’ and explains that one of his earliest recurrent dreams, ‘long before 1939, was clouds of German parachutists descending on the Calder Valley’ – he fantasised about ‘how this or that part of the valley could be defended, where a sniper might best lie, and who would be traitors’.42 In the age of anxiety leading up to the Second War, he felt that he would have to become a marksman himself. When the war came, the royal family, with the Queen Mother, then Queen, as its public face – encouraging her shy and stuttering husband, staying in London, living through the Blitz with her people – proved itself as a national resource. Now, towards the end of the century, Hughes implies, his role is to be the defensive marksman taking aim at the ‘politically correct’ who snipe against monarchy and nation. For the Poet Laureate, the nation was like a human soul, which was like a wheel, ‘With a Crown at the hub / To keep it whole’.43 Such imagery of national unity was replicated in his last, and, alas, flattest, Laureate poem, some brief verses for Diana’s funeral on 6 September 1997.
When Rain-Charm was published, the assault from across the press was merciless. Auberon Waugh was incredulous in the Sunday Telegraph and A. L. Rowse scathing in the Evening Standard. For Hermione Lee, there was an embarrassing gap between the myth and the actuality of royalty (can the Queen’s corgis really stand in for the sleeping British Lion?) and for Hilary Corke it was impossible to read even a few lines ‘without emitting several little girlish shrieks of horror’.44 Poet-critics such as Sean O’Brien, Michael Horovitz and Peter Reading did their best to find something to praise, especially in the river and landscape imagery, but the only unequivocally positive voice was Andrew Motion, always an acolyte, who suggested that the collection revealed Hughes as the best Poet Laureate since Tennyson.45
Ted was unlucky in the timing of Rain-Charm’s appearance. Nineteen-ninety-two, the Queen said in a speech that November, was not a year on which she would look back with undiluted pleasure: it was indeed her annus horribilis of royal scandal and fire in Windsor Castle. The republication of Hughes’s worst Laureate poem, written for the marriage of Prince Andrew and Miss Sarah Ferguson, was not exactly timely in the year that ‘Fergie’ was accused of plagiarising another children’s writer in her Budgie the Helicopter stories and then snapped sunbathing topless while having her toes sucked by a Texan millionaire. At the end of the year, the Evening Standard placed Ted at number eleven among a sorry dozen who had shared an annus horribilis with the Queen:
With the Royal Family becoming ever more tawdry, the job of Poet Laureate became intensely embarrassing. His poem ‘The Honey Bee and the Thistle’, on the Yorks’ wedding, came back to haunt him (‘A helicopter snatched you up / The pilot it was me’). There were more mutterings about how he treated his first wife, Sylvia Plath [a reference to the Jacqueline Rose book]. The PC lobby attacked his children’s story ‘How the Polar Bear Became’, about a polar bear which dreams of a ‘spotless’ land where he can be alone with his whiteness. And his book Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being was ridiculed for impenetrable mysticism.46
*
Nineteen-ninety-three was not only the year in which Remains of Elmet, Cave Birds and River were revised and gathered as Three Books. It was also a good vintage for his children’s writing. In the spring he published a lovely little limited edition of seaside poems, from a private press in Exeter, inspired and accompanied by the pretty watercolours of local artist R. J. Lloyd. Written mostly in rhyming couplets aimed at children, they show that he had not lost the knack of imagining what it might be like to be a seal or an eel, a crab or a whelk, a bladderwrack or even a sea monster. Entitled The Mermaid’s Purse, the collection was reissued by Faber the year after Hughes’s death, with the additional inclusion of a poem on the graceful flight of seagulls – ‘back-flip’, ‘Wing-waltzing’, ‘they scissor / Tossed spray’ – that had been invisible since its appearance in the Christian Science Monitor forty years before.47
September saw the publication of The Iron Woman, a sequel to The Iron Man with a much more overt ecological message. Dedicated once more to Frieda and Nicholas, it tells of how the Iron Woman comes to ‘take revenge on mankind for its thoughtless polluting of seas, lakes and rivers’.48 She emerges from muddy marshland like the sea monster that destroys Hippolytus, is cleansed in a river and, with the assistance of Lucy and Hogarth, destroys the waste-disposal factory, saves the water creatures and is united with the Iron Man.
Two months after the appearance of The Iron Woman an adaptation of The Iron Man opened at the Young Vic. As a musical. The creator was Pete Townshend, lead guitarist of The Who. Ted struck up a friendship with him and they hung out at Soho House, an achingly trendy new private members’ club for arts and media types. The show received bewildered reviews but garnered full houses. Ted saw it in company with the Sillitoes, the Amichais, the Israeli cultural attaché and Olwyn. The latter was no lover of rock and roll, but found the music ‘amazingly likeable and catchy’. She wrote Pete Townshend a fan letter. Ted told the director that he liked the show immensely, though was not sure about the bit where the space-bat–angel came out of the star. He wondered if at the end Josette Bushell-Mingo, who played the angel, could be ‘roasted in the sun to a different colour’, in order to provide a greater contrast with ‘Trevor’s engine room grime’. In a postscript he suggested, with no regard for theatrical health-and-safety rules, that the space-bat’s approach might be accompanied by 10,000-decibel wingbeats.49 Young audiences loved the show, which ran through the Christmas holidays, but it failed to find the West End transfer that would have made some serious money.
Two offshoots from The Goddess of Complete Being were preoccupying him at this time. In the Shakespeare book, he had been mildly dismissive of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the book that was Shakespeare prime source for classical myth. Hughes regarded it as a decadent Roman recension that was insufficiently reverential towards its Greek originals. But when he was invited by the poets Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun to contribute to a book in which some three dozen pre-eminent British poets (and a handful of Americans) would each translate one or two Ovidian tales, he changed his mind. Suddenly in Ovid he found a way of writing myth with a lightness of touch – something that had eluded him in the dark years of Crow and Cave Birds. Offered a choice of three stories, he did them all. And a fourth.
After Ovid: New Metamorphoses, which appeared from Faber in November 1994, begins with Hughes’s version of Ovid’s creation story and includes his take on Pentheus being ripped apart by the horde of Bacchic maenads (a return to the territory of Gaudete) as well as his sprightly translations of both ‘Venus and Adonis’ (the obvious one, in the light of the Shakespeare book) and the cognate tale of ‘Salmacis and Hermaphroditus’. In the latter he takes particular pleasure in writing about the woman as instigator of a passionate sexual liaison, which ends with a ‘dizzy boil’ of two bodies melted into one, ‘Seamless as water’.50 To write from the point of view of the male who is the seduced not the seducer afforded him a kind of release. Having started with these four tales, he couldn’t stop doing more Ovid. The outcome was his triumphant Tales from Ovid, published in 1997.51
Salmacis coils herself round Hermaphroditus like a snake and in this she is reminiscent of the witch-like Geraldine seducing the innocent Christabel in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s great poem, which Ted was reading and re-reading and writing about at great length at this time. In ‘The Snake in the Oak’, a 100-page essay, he sought to find the key to Coleridge’s imagination, as he had tried to find the key to Shakespeare’s in Complete Being. The essay was too long for journal publication but too short to be a book in its own right. By good fortune, while he was working on it the poet and critic William Scammell was putting together a substantial selection of Hughes’s prose for Faber and Faber – extracts from Poetry in the Making, book reviews, introductions, key essays such as those on Baskin (‘The Hanged Man and the Dragonfly’) and Plath (‘The Evolution of “Sheep in Fog”’). The Coleridge essay could be included, meaning that the book could be marketed as having new material as well as old.
Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, published in March 1994, is a polished showcase of the best of Hughes’s critical writings, in which his muscular and energetic prose, so influenced by Hazlitt and Swift, is shown to fine advantage. There is autobiographical projection in almost every piece, but the long Coleridge essay takes this to an extreme. It is Hughes at his most intense and insightful, and at the same time his most batty and idiosyncratic. In writing of Coleridge’s ‘two selves’ – the Christian and the erotically ‘unleavened’ – he is also writing of his own battle with the Goddess, the snake-woman, the force of desire. ‘Coleridge was besotted with woman,’ he begins, matter-of-factly. If time were reversed the poet-critic Coleridge could as well have written ‘Hughes was besotted with woman.’ ‘At the same time,’ Hughes continues, not realising that he is writing about himself as much as about Coleridge, ‘few can have so specialized in such terrifying nightmares about such terrifying women.’52 Was it to do with being his mother’s favourite, as Coleridge claimed he was? ‘Woman is the source of all bliss, all love, all consolation. Then everything went wrong. Fighting for mother’s exclusive love against seven brothers, he lost.’ Coleridge became obsessed by William and Dorothy Wordsworth because they presented him with the intense brother–sister bond he craved but lacked: ‘his revered Wordsworth and the beloved yet untouchable Dorothy somehow supplied his need’.53 Ted, who relied so often on both the literary judgement and the business sense of his sister Olwyn, was always intrigued by the symbiosis between the sister’s journals and the brother’s poems, and by the ineffably profound intimacy between William and Dorothy (in a famous interpretation, the critic Freddie Bateson had wondered whether there was a whiff of incest).
The culmination of Coleridge’s woman obsession, Hughes suggests, is the apparition of the Nightmare Life-in-Death in ‘The Ancient Mariner’. She has full erotic allure, but she is also ‘a Death’, ‘white as leprosy’. She is Geraldine but she is also Lady Lazarus and she is Assia. But then Coleridge finds a kind of peace – though, with it, a loss of his poetic Muse – in a very different figure from the ‘snake in the oak’. This other woman is symbolised by a young birch tree which, though it cannot answer to ‘the truth of the heart’s passions’, does offer ‘a substitute happiness’, a kind of love free from the dangers of extreme eroticism, a love that is not ‘tragic and terrifying’ but is rather ‘a nostalgia for an idealized love that might have been’. The mother’s love is, as it were, recovered through a partner who is desexualised, a ‘pure-minded Christian virgin’ who appeals to the chaste, devotional aspect of Coleridge’s imagination.54
But the Goddess would not go away. Hughes was extraordinarily prolific in his sixties. He took on far more commissions than his health could properly stand. Why? Because his curiosity could not resist a challenge. Because he wanted to keep his writing hand in. Because he needed to shield himself from the real necessity, which was to let go of his life with Sylvia. All these are good reasons.
Olwyn had another explanation. In a document now lodged in the Hughes archive in Atlanta, Georgia, she suggests that his prolific volume of work in the mid- to late Nineties was simply intended to raise as much money as possible in order to lead a different life. At some point in 1994 or ’95, he told his sister that, much as he had relished the Laureate years and the contacts the post had brought him (all those aristocratic dinner-tables and riparian privileges), he now wanted only to ‘please himself’. The language was the same as that in the letter he wrote to Olwyn on the day he parted from Sylvia.
His theatre work, the sale of the farm in the last year of his life, the expensive limited editions: all were part of an effort to buy himself freedom. Naturally, Olwyn concludes, ‘he was mindful of posterity’, but he was also looking forward to another, happier decade ‘of his own life and work’.55 The thing to which Olwyn here alludes and does not allude is that Ted embarked at this time on a serious affair with a woman in south London. Though not a literary type at all, she was his last great love, a person with whom he relaxed and laughed and let down his guard. A friend tells of a memorable day in May 1997 when he and Ted and the woman went down to the gambler John Aspinall’s private zoo in Kent. Ted became like a twelve-year-old boy. He imitated the sound of a wildebeest in order to make a tiger roar and it did. His friend had never seen him so happy.56
The following month Ted told János Csokits that his last three years had been ‘as great a chaos as any previously’, culminating in his getting ill, which came as ‘a big shock’ causing a ‘general revision of priorities’.57 When Hughes spoke of chaos in his life, he usually meant amorous entanglement. Close friends knew what he was talking about with regard to these last years, but his renewal of a double life between Devon and London was kept secret and did not leak into the public domain until a year after his death when a story appeared in the press about a man in south London coming forward with the information that he had rented a house to Hughes where ‘the poet had lived with a woman and the landlord was furious about the mess in which the house had been left’ at the time of his death.58 Residence in south London – Brixton, say – explains why in his final illness he was rushed to hospital at London Bridge, 200 miles from Court Green.
The woman in question does not wish to be named. She was from a humble East End background, but had prospered through property development – buying run-down houses in south London, doing them up and selling them on. Ted first met her through one of the well-to-do companions of his Scottish fishing trips. She had ventured north without her husband because he did not like fishing. In August 1995, Ted took her to meet Nick in Alaska. Nick, always loyal to Carol, was uncomfortable. Before going up to Fairbanks, Ted and his new companion joined his British Columbian fishing hosts for a dinner-party in Vancouver and then for an expedition to the wild Dean River. She was an excellent cook – Olwyn later enthused that ‘She made the best bouillabaisse I’ve ever tasted, and I’ve eaten in the South of France’59 – and she worried about the quality of ingredients she might find in Vancouver. Her hosts reassured her that Vancouver was renowned for its food, and she was duly impressed by what she found in the markets. Their first impression of her was not very favourable, largely because her voice seemed affected and posh. When Ted revealed that her origins were as lowly as his own, and that she had remade herself, then reaped the reward of success by joining the elite fishing set, they warmed to her.
Ted was very attentive to her out in the wilderness. ‘Even in the midst of storytelling,’ one of the group recalled, ‘he would spring up from the campfire each night as she called out to him from their tent, slightly annoying the assembly and inspiring us to speculate upon what she had to offer that would make him, a notoriously lingering campfire denizen and scotch nightcapper, abandon us in her favour.’ ‘It need hardly be said’, he added, ‘that Ted loved sex in all its variations between man and woman and would sometime seem almost charmingly adolescent in his amazement at how enthusiastic women were about those variations. But he was never disrespectful or crude … It was one of his more endearing qualities, and he had many.’ The rugged fishermen were not so impressed when Ted announced that under the influence of his new companion he had taken to frequenting golf courses, which the steelhead fanatics regarded as ‘those most artificial of greens, the antithesis of the domain of the savage gods’.60
Ted Hughes wrote in the moment. That is why he created such a huge body of poems and left such a vast archive of drafts and notes. Ted Hughes aspired to live in the moment. That is why when he told the woman in south London he would come to live with her permanently, he meant it. And why when he was back at Court Green saying that he would never leave, he meant it.61 And it is also why he loved writing, fishing and sex, in all of which there is a sense of total absorption, a unity of mind and body, an escape from the shadows of the past and the responsibilities of the future.
The volume of late publication was indeed prodigious. There were more fine-press editions, such as Earth Dances (1994, 250 copies at £195 each) and Shakespeare’s Ovid (his translations for Hofmann and Lasdun recycled in an edition of 200 copies, 50 of them signed and with original etchings, selling at £450 each, and the remainder at £100). In 1995 alone, his latest ‘Creation Tales’ were collected under the title The Dreamfighter and his short stories as Difficulties of a Bridegroom, his Collected Animal Poems were put together in four volumes and there was a printed text of his translation for the Royal Shakespeare Company of the Frank Wedekind play of teenage sexual arousal, Spring Awakening.
The Dreamfighter, dedicated to Carol, continues in the vein of How the Whale Became and Tales of the Early World: surreal folktales and myths of origin, dark revisitings of the territory of the Kipling Just So Stories that he had loved as a child. God creates all manner of creatures but demons keep reappearing; bodies are distorted and the reader never knows whether the next twist will be a fight, a kiss, a scream or a conflagration. The stories are a children’s version of the Crow sequence, slightly watered down but with the injection of humour that is sometimes delightful, sometimes bizarre. Every creature comes from the creative head of God. In this sense, God is the writer, Hughes himself. When in the title story God summons a succession of animals to protect him from his nightmares, some of the bad dreams are the same as those recorded in Ted’s journals. And every now and then there is a glimpse of his own life, transposed into mythic narrative: ‘Suddenly God had a brainwave. If Goka has a baby, he thought, she will calm down. She’ll become sensible. And Goku too, he will become serious. Fathers become serious.’62 But things don’t turn out as planned.
A psychoanalyst would have a very interesting time with the last story in the collection, ‘The Secret of Man’s Wife’, in which the wife yearns to escape and the husband believes she is meeting a wolf in the woods. He asks God to capture the wolfiness that is making her strange and to tame it as a pet so that his wife will be normal again. God consults his mother, who tells him that a Demon has got into the wife. So, with the assistance of his mother, God captures the wife, ties her up, gags her, places her by a furnace and drives the Demon out of her through sheer fear. Man then meets the beast that has been driven out. He asks it to come and live with them as a pet: ‘Woman pretended to be surprised as he described its red fur, its amber eyes, its slender, jet-black legs, its blazing white chest and chin and its miraculous lovely tail.’ She asks whether it agreed to come. Man explains that it did indeed reply, very politely. It said: ‘O Man, O husband of glorious and beautiful Woman, it is the fear of being anyone’s pet that has turned the tip of my tail quite white.’63 A wife is not a pet. As this story went into print, Ted was writing and rewriting the poem about his marriage to Sylvia and the fox that he nearly brought home from Chalk Farm Bridge, but did not.
It was also in 1995 that a New Selected Poems appeared from Faber. It was partly anticipated by a limited-edition selection the previous year, which was distributed for free to participants in the Struga Poetry Festival in Macedonia, which Ted hugely enjoyed attending. The selection was ‘new’ not only in that it was different from, and more expansive than, the 1982 Selected Poems, but also in that it included a group of confessional poems about Sylvia and Assia, some of which had only previously appeared in occasional publications or in the privately printed Capriccio. Others were published for the first time. Equally revealing was a hitherto unpublished poem in memory of his mother. It describes how each year on 13 May, the anniversary of her death, in his imagination he would see her in the company of her sister Miriam. He would look at a ‘torn-off diary page’ that he had preserved. Gerald had scribbled on it ‘Ma died today.’ Then the memories would come flooding back: Sunday walks at lark rise, chatter about favourite dresses and shoes.64 But the memories that push their way to the fore are her recollections of her love for Gerald. It is as if Ted is merely being used to fine-tune Edith’s love for her elder son. The younger boy is perpetually in his brother’s shadow. The poem ends with a memory of how he once came home across the fields from one of his boyhood moorland walks. His mother watches him all the way. When he comes close, he finds that she is crying because she wanted it to be his brother.
Nearly all the reviews of the New Selected Poems took the opportunity to praise the early work and the range of Hughes’s achievement:
We’ve got Ted the exact observer of nature … Ted the social realist (voice a bit squeaky), Ted the wild apocalyptic shaman, Ted the last of the Great War poets, Ted the Ancient Mariner lurking outside the Windsors’ doomed weddings, Ted the kiddies’ bedtime bard. All these voices, and yet Ted never sounds remotely like anyone else but Hughes.65
Leafing through the reviews, which Ted kept and filed, one senses the critics’ relief at being able to offer some atonement for the drubbing dished out to Rain-Charm. Only a few saw that the book was a ‘Trojan horse’, that the handful of new poems at the back in a ‘new confessional voice’ were a testing of the waters that made this ‘the most exciting volume of poetry that Hughes has produced in many years’.66 For the most part, though, the references to Sylvia and Assia went quietly and rather gratifyingly unnoticed.
The quest for money was a constant refrain in his letters in these years. He asked Baskin if he was owed anything from Capriccio. Baskin replied that the book had sold twenty-eight copies, which meant that Ted had earned nearly $30,000, of which he was owed just over $2,000, but the Gehenna Press had no money. Still, at least the Royal Shakespeare Company paid well for the Wedekind. He told Heaney that the translation work for the theatre served him as a form of anaesthesia, but was consistently interesting.67 He explained in the same letter that he needed money because he was looking for a flat in London, but only in private conversation did he tell Seamus why he wanted the flat.
The collaboration inaugurated by the Wedekind translation had its origin at the Young Vic. A dynamic young director called Tim Supple had just taken over the theatre at the time of the Pete Townshend Iron Man. Supple wrote to Hughes asking if he would be interested in dramatising some of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, a project that would have suited him very well. Having received no reply, Supple asked the poet Carol Ann Duffy instead. Her versions were about to go into rehearsal when Supple received a scrawled note from Ted asking whether the offer was still open. It was too late, but when he saw Supple’s show he was impressed. He wrote again, making it clear that he would like to work with him. He reiterated his offer after seeing Supple’s revelatory productions of The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night. At this point, the Royal Shakespeare Company asked Supple to direct something different for them, and he chose Spring Awakening. He had a gut feeling that ‘Ted might be able to express the wildness of the sexual interior shared by the children in the play, and to bring to life the mythic shadow that they feel to be looming over them’.68
Spring Awakening, written in 1888, begins with a girl confiding to her mother, during an argument about the length of her skirt, that she sometimes thinks about death and that she might one day wear nothing beneath the skirt. Two boys are tormented by sexual dreams. The girl asks one of the boys, Melchior, to hit her with a switch of wood, then hit her harder, harder. In the second act he rapes her and the other boy kills himself under the pressure of homework and the confusions of puberty. The school authorities blame Melchior for this: he is alleged to have corrupted his friend by writing him a letter explaining the facts of life. He is expelled. In the third act, the girl dies as the result of a botched abortion. Melchior is visited by the ghost of his friend, with his head tucked under his arm and the information that he has been more fulfilled in death than in his miserable life. Melchior is tempted to join his friend in death, but a Masked Gentleman arrives, tells him that death is not to be borne and that all the dead friend wanted was the love of his companion. In a sub-plot two other boys acknowledge their homosexual desire for each other. In another scene, the class of boys indulges in a spree of competitive masturbation. The friends bid farewell and the Masked Man guides Melchior to the future: he must go on living.
It was clear to Supple that as Ted worked he was thinking deeply about sexual awakening and the destruction of love. Repression leads to shame and guilt, tragedy and suicide. Lust and love cannot be denied, whatever social convention tries to dictate. ‘He was clearly, as all poets must, mining his own emotional experience,’ Supple recalled. ‘One of the very few phrases that I remember asking him to change did this too overtly – a character referred to the gas oven. I asked him to change this not because of the personal reference but because it was anachronistic – the play is set in the late 1800s. But it revealed the deep connections he was making.’69
Ted went to rehearsals when he could – he listened rather than watched. He would lean back against the steps of the room, cock his head to the ceiling and seem to ‘sniff the words in the air’. He struck up a particular rapport with the teenage actors who played the children. Whereas the adult RSC actors were suspicious of his presence (as actors nearly always are when there is an intruder in the rehearsal room), the boys and girls were entirely open: ‘not corseted in habit, pride and fear, they loved his observations and he was able to unlock a depth in the way they saw their roles’.70
The production opened in August 1995 at the RSC’s studio theatre in London, the Barbican Pit. Most of the cast were schoolchildren themselves, lending the performance great credibility. Tim Supple’s production won plaudits all round, while Hughes’s translation was praised by some critics as ‘vivid and robust’, indeed ‘unobtrusively poetic’, but condemned by others as ‘stilted and overblown’.71 The truth is that he was working from a literal crib and both the sinewy strength and the occasional bloating of the language were Wedekind’s.
Early in the play’s run, Ted went to dinner with Supple and the Morpurgos. Asked what he was doing next, Supple said that he had long wanted to direct Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding. Ted launched into an account of how every great writer had a controlling myth and in Lorca’s case it was encapsulated in his essay on duende, the demonic spirit of performance in which actor and audience share a kind of Bacchic frenzy. Supple asked him to do the translation, but he shied away from the task. He agreed only when Supple cut a deal: he, in return, would read the latest batch of ‘Sacred Earth’ environmental plays by children. As with the Wedekind, Ted worked from a literal translation. Supple was thrilled to find him grasping ‘the bare, blunt fierceness of the writing’, taking ‘something essentially Spanish’ and hearing in it ‘the language of the soil and the folk ritual’ and letting that language ‘re-emerge as something entirely English’.
This time, the translation proved more successful than the production. The directorial and design vision of the production which opened at the Young Vic in September 1996 were, Supple admitted, ‘just too complicated, too aesthetic, not direct enough’. Ted was conscious of this. When Supple told him that they were struggling over the design, he replied (still under the influence of Peter Brook), ‘Design? what design do you need? A pot for civilisation and a bush for the wild.’ In order to promote the show, Ted did a number of press interviews, which he later regretted. ‘Never talk about anything before it is finished,’ he said. Because he had talked, the production was doomed: ‘You see, we cursed it, we said too much and trusted them when we shouldn’t.’72
The reviews were terrible. ‘Laughable Tragedy’ was the headline in the Daily Telegraph.73 ‘Try to imagine a company of fiery Spanish actors appearing in an adaptation of Jane Austen or Trollope,’ said another paper, ‘and you will get some idea of the incongruity involved.’74 ‘You know,’ said Ted, reflecting on the flop, ‘I think that Lorca’s theatre was much more simple than we imagine, and more anarchic. A bit like a street pageant or carnival. It would have been much cruder than we think.’75
The characters are symbolic types – Mother, Mother-in-Law, Bride and Bridegroom – but Hughes’s translation also catches the immediacy of their humanity, as when he evokes the tenderness of love: ‘You are so lucky! To wrap your arms around a man, to kiss him, to feel his weight … And the best moment of all, when you wake up and feel him beside you, his breath stroking your shoulder – like a nightingale’s feather.’76 By the end, the language is suffused with death, and the poetry is close to that of Crow, as a knife:
slides in cold
Through startled flesh
Till it stops, there,
In the quivering
Dark
Roots
Of the scream.77
Crow itself, meanwhile, had been dramatised in a stunningly successful production at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow by the innovative Ulsterman Michael Boyd, who would later become artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company.78
The theatre work didn’t produce enough money. In March 1997, after two years of careful preparation (organising, editing, weeding), he sold his poetic and epistolary archive to Emory University in Atlanta for a substantial six-figure sum, to be received in staged payments with an option on the purchase of items that were held back (a few things he was still working on, he told Emory – by which he meant anything to do with the Birthday Letters project, not to mention nearly all his journals, the poems about Assia, the poems arising from the Bell Jar trial and a swathe of other highly intimate material). He told Olwyn that the sale would help with the bills and that he was off to lie low for three weeks.79
His unrelenting productivity in these last years also saw the publication in 1997 of By Heart: 101 Poems to Remember. The introduction is a guide to ancient ‘memory techniques’ that use ‘strongly visualized imagery’. Even this late in his career, well after the publication of Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Hughes is still reflecting obsessively on that idea of a rupture in English culture – Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’ – some time in the mid-seventeenth century. He contrasts the ‘unforgettable’ remark of Thomas Aquinas, ‘the patron saint of memory systems’, that ‘Man cannot understand without images’ against the attempt of the ‘Puritan/Protestant ascendancy of the Civil War’ to ‘eradicate imagery from all aspects of life’. The destruction of images in churches, the banning of stage-plays and the introduction of lifeless ‘learning by rote’ in schools, displacing the old memory techniques that used ‘imagery’, are all seen as parts of the same impulse.80
The anthology itself, effectively a slimmed-down School Bag, compiled without the editorial companionship of Heaney, is Hughes’s personal selection of the greatest hits of English poetry. These are the poems that he knew by heart and that lived within him all his days. They may be read as a retrospective gathering of his influences. Here are Alfred Tennyson’s ‘The Eagle’, precursor of ‘Hawk Roosting’; Robert Frost’s ‘The Road not Taken’, which always came to his mind when he had to make a big life-choice (for example between two women); Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’ (another bird of prey) and ‘Inversnaid’, which helped to shape Hughes the ecopoet (‘What would the world be, once bereft / Of wet and of wildness?’); here is Wordsworth on Westminster Bridge, at Tintern Abbey and with Lucy in the grave; Wilfred Owen in the First World War and Keith Douglas in the Second; here are Edward Thomas, R. S. Thomas and Dylan Thomas; a wealth of Yeats and Eliot, Lawrence’s piano, Blake’s tiger, Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ and Keats looking into the classics. Emily Dickinson is represented by five poems, Sylvia Plath by only one – and that is the finely crafted, polished not raw, ‘Crossing the Water’. An Ariel poem would have been too painful with Birthday Letters still not yet published. And the most surprising omission is perhaps unsurprising. There is no Emily Brontë: Hughes cannot bring himself to ask the readers of his anthology to remember by heart the ghost of the beloved (‘What I love shall come like visitant of air’)81 or a woman lying in her grave under the snow on the Yorkshire moor.
During these years, Ted was also publishing more personal poetry, though keeping it below the radar of publicity. Especially notable were his three exquisite elegies for Jennifer Rankin, which appeared in a volume of New Writing edited by Malcolm Bradbury and Andrew Motion from the school of creative writing at the University of East Anglia, where Ted was glad to give one of his – now infrequent – poetry readings.82 No one realised how much Jennifer had meant to him.
The elegiac voice was becoming ever more insistent. In June 1997 he told János Csokits that he hadn’t written any original poetry for two years. He had been hiding behind his translation work. He was blocked by his failure to get the Plath poems out of his system. Though he informed very few friends, he was also battling with cancer at this time.83 It was serious enough for Frieda and László to move from Australia to London, and for Ted to write a new will. In July he told the Queen Mother that he was recovering well, following exceptionally good treatment. At the end of August, he confided to Heaney that he had backed himself into a corner but was working his way out of it. He had finished his translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, was working on a version of Euripides’ Alcestis, and was thinking of doing more Ovid.84 At the same time he told Leonard Baskin that he had been overwhelmed on all fronts for the last three to five years, but was moving forward by putting together a collection of about a hundred poems about Sylvia.85