I can’t lock myself in behind this glass door one more week
(Ted Hughes)
But I was quite unprepared for the agon(y) of ‘Black Coat’ and ‘The God’ – like a ‘Prelude’ turned inside out
(Seamus Heaney)1
On Saturday 17 January 1998 Peter Stothard, the editor of the London Times, took the unusual step of writing the front-page story himself. The banner headline shouted ‘Revealed – the most tragic literary love story of our time’. The article announced that the Poet Laureate was today breaking his ‘35-year silence over the life and suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath’. In an ‘extraordinary verse narrative’, copiously sampled in the pages of the paper, ‘Hughes gives his account of one of the century’s most celebrated and tragic love stories.’ The existence of the poems had been ‘among the best-kept literary secrets’. Stothard had been in on it since the beginning of December, when he had offered £25,000 for the exclusive, telling Joanna Mackle at Faber and Faber, who was handling the secret sale, how privileged he felt to have been one of the first readers of the collection.2
On the leader page, The Times opined that this was ‘The greatest book by our greatest living writer’. In an op-ed headlined ‘A thunderbolt from the blue – this book will live for ever’, the poet Andrew Motion exclaimed that the collection was unlike anything else in literature. ‘Its power is massive and instant … Anyone who thought Hughes’s reticence was proof of his hard heart will immediately see how stony they have been themselves … This is a book written by someone obsessed, stricken and deeply loving.’ Birthday Letters was ‘his greatest book’, as ‘magnetic’ as Robert Browning’s poems for Elizabeth Barrett and as ‘poignant’ as Thomas Hardy’s elegies of 1912–13 in memory of his dead wife.3
News of the poems spread around the world. ‘Poet Laureate breaks silence over stormy years with Plath’ trumpeted the Yorkshire Post from Ted’s first home. ‘Hughes’ amazing love tribute to suicide wife’ announced the Western Morning News in his adopted county. And on the story went, to New York and Sydney and the South China Morning Post (‘Secrets of poets’ doomed marriage revealed at last’).4 The next day, the Observer announced more news: that Plath’s unexpurgated journals, less the two lost volumes, would finally be published soon. By the Monday, The Times was able to round up endorsements from other poets such as James Fenton and Tom Paulin. On the Tuesday, a backlash began. The Times was indulging in hype, overblowing their scoop; the poems were not up to scratch. ‘Embarrassing junk’ sneered the Glasgow Herald under the headline ‘A story more soap-operatic than Brookside’.5 The critical consensus which emerged over the following weeks and months was that the poems were of deep sincerity and unique biographical value, but of very variable literary quality, mixing exquisite imagery and memorable phrases with pedestrian and prosaic passages. But nothing could stop the sales.
And what of Ted himself? On the Thursday after publication he wrote a journal entry contemplating flamingoes and clam-dippers, a line in Shakespeare, the need to get back to his translation of the Alcestis of Euripides, and his hope of a new life once his chemotherapy was complete. Having loosened himself into his reflective writing mode, he proceeded to an astonishingly detailed account of his feelings and actions upon the appearance of Birthday Letters.
On the Friday, as the story was rolling off the press of The Times, he had become apprehensive. Was the decision to publish a huge mistake? Still scarred by the Jane Anderson affair, he worried about litigation. Would he be sued by the car-dealer in Rugby Street? Walking to Okehampton Castle, he had felt the trap closing in upon him. He had to vanish. So he and Carol left Court Green and went to stay in the Cotswolds with Matthew Evans, the head of Faber and Faber, and his wife Caroline Michel. Ted worried that Caroline would see the ravages of his chemotherapy – she did not know how ill he had been.
Fearing that the paparazzi would find him with his publisher, they were away before breakfast the next morning. At a motorway service station, he caught a glimpse of himself on the front page of The Times: an old photograph beneath the dramatic headline. Then it was back into the fast lane and a great sense of liberation came over him, ‘a generally marvelous [sic] state of mind’ and a determination to hang on to that feeling, to ‘make it my new being’.6
Freedom from the past was in his grasp; he had to avoid slipping back into the old paralysis. He was ready to live a new life, no longer caring what he revealed about himself. The years of sitting on his version of the story, of fear of public reaction, of dislike of the confessional mode of verse: all had been overturned by his illness. It was as if he had been commanded to speak. Perhaps keeping it all so bottled up had contributed to the sickness.
There were certain things he had to hold on to. Family bonds above all. The stage-like composure of Matthew Evans’s little girl had reminded him of Frieda. The two sons in the household made him think of how brothers related to each other, and thus of himself and Gerald. As for work, he was tinkering with his Eighties collection Flowers and Insects, and it made him see that for years, decades indeed, his work had been a ‘marginalised flora and fauna’, ‘avoiding the main statement of the major theme’. Reluctance to publish the poetry about his time with Sylvia had crippled him for the better part of his poetic life: ‘Only wish now that I’d written a great many more of these B.L. – a thousand would have been few enough.’
And so he goes on, self-castigating: ‘Usual error – simply not exploring deeply and tenaciously enough, not writing voluminously and experimentally enough, in the forbidden field. Ironic that I have done this only with the Shakespeare book and the Coleridge essay.’ Through the medium of criticism, he had come at Sylvia and the Goddess indirectly. By not ‘handling dynamite in a petrol dump’, he had opened the way. Now at last he was there. Or almost there: behind the journal entry is the knowledge of certain poems excluded from Birthday Letters.
The next day he was at it again, acknowledging that his real poetic work had been blocked since at least 1970. He had excluded and suppressed the main thing. In the early Seventies he had made the disastrous mistake of trying to start again with something simpler – the A B C of his farming diaries, the lightness of Season Songs. He had only got back to the true voice of feeling in the Assia poems, then in the Shakespeare book, the Ovid and Oresteia translations. It was too late for remorse, but the price was high: physical wreckage and twenty-five years of second-rate work, the poetic power ‘squandered and deflected’. What had become, he asked himself, of the young creature who wrote ‘Song’ in 1948, of ‘the creature that wrote Thought-Fox, Jaguar and Wind – then met S.P.?’ He was speculating about the Frostian road not taken and the reasons for not taking it, the difficulty of following the path that maintained the ‘true centre of gravity of a talent’. How can an artistic career, the work of a life, take its form as ‘a solid city’ rather than ‘a series of hasty campfires’? That was the question. The answer, he told himself in his journal, was ‘to live alone, or as if alone’. And yet how could a man who so loved women live alone?
He remained on the run for nineteen days, staying in luxury hotels, feeling disconnected from the extraordinary public reaction to the book, which went straight to the top of the bestseller list, shifting 50,000 copies in a matter of weeks, a speed and volume of sales unheard of in poetry since the time of Lord Byron.
As well as talking to himself about Birthday Letters in his journals, he talked in his letters to friends and family about his feelings on releasing the book. He reiterated his sense of relief, but also his remorse at not having published sooner. He sent copies, often inscribing them with the phrase ‘before us stands yesterday’. He had been blocked ever since Sylvia’s death, he told the Baskins. The same confession was reiterated in a brave letter to the poet and William Blake scholar Kathleen Raine. This was made public when Frieda Hughes read it out in January 1999 when accepting the Whitbread Prize for Birthday Letters on her father’s behalf:
I think those letters do release the story that everything I have written since the early nineteen sixties has been evading. It was in a kind of desperation that I finally did publish them – I had always thought them unpublishably raw and unguarded, simply too vulnerable. But then I just could not endure being blocked any longer. How strange that we have to make public declarations of our secrets. But we do. If only I had done the equivalent 30 years ago, I might have had a more fruitful career – certainly a freer psychological life. Even now, the sensation of inner liberation – a huge, sudden possibility of new inner experience.7
An enormous burden had been lifted and he cared not a jot for the critics or the circling crocodiles of Plathians. He granted that the poems were ‘simple, naïve and unguarded’,8 but that didn’t matter: he had written them for himself.
But of course he did value the opinions of his fellow-poets. Heaney above all. Ted had sent him an advance copy. Seamus responded with high praise, saying how overwhelmed he was to read the manuscript and find ‘Poetry and wounded power gathering and doing the Cuchullain warp-spasm, the salmon-feat, showing a wild Shakespearean back above their element’. What he most admired was the simultaneous sense of the everyday and the sacred, of the sequence as a narrative of what had really happened and a transformation of what had happened, via a journey ‘round the dark side of the mind’s moon’, into poetry of mythic force. The force of the collection, he suggested, came from the holding together of ‘the lens of personal memory and the lens of mythic understanding’. His only anxiety was that the ‘up-and-at-them, tell-what-happened’ aspect of the poems would prevent critics from seeing the ‘gift-myth dimension of it’. But, all in all, the publication of the book would be ‘seismic’ for both Ted’s own being and ‘the literary and cultural history of our times’.9 He was so inspired that he had immediately written a poem in response – his equivalent of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s great meditation on hearing Wordsworth’s Prelude.
On New Year’s Day 1998 Ted replied with some background: how publication was less ‘a literary matter’ than ‘a physical operation’ that might ‘change the psychic odds’ for him and ‘clear a route’.10 He had been wanting to let the poems go for twenty-five years, but had never had the courage. The closest he had come previously was with the New Selected Poems of 1995, in which he thought of including some thirty or forty, but because it was such a stressful time in his private life, he backed away, including just the handful (and the few about Assia) that went under the radar. Heaney responded with enormous generosity in both private letters and public pronouncements.
There was also the family reaction to consider. Frieda, who had provided an abstract painting for the jacket, had been prepared. Shortly before publication, she wrote a poem of her own, saluting the collection: ‘There it was, born of them both. / Like it or not. Rounded in words, / And cracking open its shell for a voice.’11 Ted read the poem and laughed and said that it might just as well have been about him and Frieda. She found it hard to understand why her father had not published the Birthday Letters before, so great was the love they showed for her mother and so intense the liberation he clearly felt on releasing them.
Nick in Alaska, meanwhile, received one of the most revelatory letters in English literary history, a 4,000-word epistle that stands besides John Keats’s heart-opening journal-letters to his brother in America. Dated 20 February 1998, it begins with an account of Ted’s involvement with plans for the interior of the Millennium Dome in Greenwich and of his ‘runaway’ when Birthday Letters was published. Then he remembers Yaddo with Nick’s mother, his dreams of animals and of the pike in Crookhill Pond, of fishing for salmon when they were living at Doonreagan. Then he explains that his dreams, his fishing and most of his writing were all forms of escape. He was running away from ‘the big unmanageable event’: the breakdown of his first marriage and its consequences. He kept finding himself unable to write; he would make himself start again, but each time ‘the ship of salmon and Jaguars had to sail away again’. The only way he could deal with what he called the ‘giant psychological log-jam of your mother and me’ was to write private poems, ‘simple little attempts to communicate with her about our time together’. Poems for Sylvia’s ghost, not for a wider readership – they exposed too much to be publishable. But because he could not publish them, his ‘real self’ could ‘never get on with its life’. It was as if he were living behind a glass door, like one in a dream Nick had once described to his father, in which a glass barrier cut him off from life (as represented by a frog). He could not face the storm that would greet him from the feminists if he went public. He did not want to put Carol through the strain of the publicity that would follow. But he had finally seen that, as with a confession, he had to let it all out. That was his only way of breaking the logjam, moving his life beyond 1963.
Thirty-five years on from that terrible winter, he finally says that the feminists can do whatever they wish, readers can react as they wish, critics can eviscerate, Plathians can rave, Carol can ‘go bananas’, Frieda and Nick can dive for shelter. He is doing it for himself. The guard had to come down, the private had to be made public, the simple poems set free into the world: ‘I can’t care any more, I can’t lock myself in behind this glass door one more week.’ And when he did let them go, he had the surprise of his life. The heavens did not fall, the critics did not (for the most part) cavil. And his mind was transformed – gigantically, bewilderingly. It was as if he had been presented with a completely new brain. He felt as he had not felt since 1962. The sense of catharsis was complete (except that it wasn’t – there were more poems to come). His hope, he added, thinking of the cancer that was in remission but that could not be trusted to stay away, was that ‘it wasn’t all just a bit too late’.12 ‘Too late’: the novelists Noel Streatfeild and Evelyn Waugh said that these were the saddest words in the English language. Eight months after writing this letter to his son, Ted Hughes was dead.
In early March, he noticed that his hair was returning, following the side-effects of chemotherapy. He took this as a good sign. Later in the month, he rewarded himself for both the success of the book and the remission of the cancer with a two-week deep-sea fishing trip in Cuba, where he and his friends encountered bonefish, tarpon and barracuda. Everything seemed all the more exotic because one of the symptoms of his declining health was double vision – he saw not a single new moon but a ‘sheaf’ of them.13 Soon afterwards, there was another trip to Birkhall, where he discussed with Prince Charles the difficulty of remembering the Latin names of plants. Later, he offered assistance in the form of a long letter about Eastern memory-training techniques.
Still, though, he could not let Sylvia go. He and Baskin planned another of their expensive limited editions: it would be an opportunity to release, but avoid excessive public examination of, some of the most intimate poems that he had stepped back from including in Birthday Letters. In the spring, the volume appeared under the title Howls and Whispers (‘Cries and Whispers’ was the original intention). The print run consisted of a mere hundred copies, with a further ten, especially boxed and hyper-expensive, each containing a unique leaf of Ted’s manuscript. Baskin provided colour-printed etchings and additional watercolour drawings exclusively for the tiny de luxe edition.
Despite its status as a supplementary selection from the wealth of unpublished poems, Howls and Whispers, luxuriously bound in Easthampton, Massachusetts, has a narrative line of its own. It begins with ‘Paris 1954’, in which Hughes looks back at his pre-Sylvia self, drinking claret and eating Gruyère before the ‘scream’ of passion shaped ‘like a panther’ and like a girl (Sylvia) tracks him down. The second poem (‘Religion’) turns to her hunger for love and how it became another scream, of hatred for her parents metamorphosed into passion for him. Then there is ‘The Hidden Orestes’: the Greek idea of tragedy passed from parent to child and more specifically an allusion to Sylvia’s claim that the girl who speaks ‘Daddy’ is suffering from a Freudian Electra complex. The following poem is a jump-cut forward to the afterlife of those laburnum trees, the image of which he and Sylvia had clung on to that day she came to Cleveland Street.14 There is then a series of poems linking the breakdown of the marriage to Sylvia’s breakdown, and finally an exquisitely redemptive encounter with her ghost (‘The Offers’)15 and an anticlimactically clumsy poem about the ‘Superstitions’ of Friday the 13th, the date associated with their first night together (even though it was actually their second).
When Birthday Letters was published, most readers and reviewers made two assumptions: that the collection represented a late flowering and that these poems were Hughes’s first and last words on the subject of his marriage to Plath. Both assumptions were wrong. Howls and Whispers showed that there was more to come. And very few of the Sylvia poems were written late in Hughes’s career. As the letters to his friends reveal, he had been gestating the project for more than a quarter of a century.
Explaining the origin of Birthday Letters, Ted told many friends that it was in the early Seventies, at the beginning of his second marriage, that he began writing poems about Sylvia – very personal and private pieces to work through his feelings and crystallise his memories, not necessarily intended for publication. In expressing his relief on finally publishing the book in January 1998, he spoke of twenty-five or thirty years of bottled-up emotion. Sometimes, though, he said thirty-five years, the full duration since Sylvia’s suicide. Ted’s recollection of the dates and locations of the writing of his poems was sometimes exceptionally accurate (especially if there was an astrological conjunction in the case), but he often misremembered, or said different things to different people. And sometimes he shared information that was simply wrong: he not only made Freudian slips, but was also capable of deliberately misleading, laying false trails or covering his tracks. In the absence of a journal entry along the lines of ‘today I began writing a sequence of poems in memory of Sylvia’, we cannot rule out the possibility that the Birthday Letters project was begun before Assia’s death in 1969.
One of the notebooks in the British Library archive is especially intriguing in this respect. It is a red, soft-covered, spiral-bound student notebook, with holes punched for filing. Adorned on the cover with the logo of the stationery manufacturer Silvine, reference 140, it could have been bought any time between the late Sixties and the mid-Eighties.16 Two things are striking about this notebook. Its version of the poem about sleeping with Susan Alliston in 18 Rugby Street on the night of Sylvia’s death does not include any reference to the irony of her subsequent residence in the flat and her death. This raises the possibility of a date of composition before 1969. Secondly, the back cover of the notebook is charred brown, suggesting that it may have been rescued from the remnants of the Lumb Bank fire. If that were the case, early 1971 would be the latest possible date of composition.
Those intimate poems about baby Frieda and Uncle Albert’s suicide reveal that in early 1963 Ted was moving to a more confessional vein of poetry. But he was halted by Sylvia’s suicide. Could it be that, as he brought the Crow project towards a conclusion in early 1969, he was again moving into the confessional voice, but that he was then held back by Assia’s suicide, then by his mother’s and Susan’s deaths? That, as before, ‘autobiographical things’ broke his poetic development into pieces?17
The Silvine Notebook: even the manufacturer’s name carries an echo of Sylvia. He gave the book a title: ‘The Sorrows of the Deer’. In Robert Graves, ‘The Roebuck in the Thicket’ is a stag that is sacred to the White Goddess. It hides in the undergrowth, keeping a secret.18 Very late in life, reflecting on the origins of Birthday Letters, Hughes wrote of how he was ‘pulled inescapably back onto the autobiographical level of S’s death’ by the ‘huge outcry’ that ‘flushed’ him from his ‘thicket’ in the years 1970 to 1972, ‘when Sylvia’s poems & novel hit the first militant wave of Feminism as a divine revelation from their Patron Saint’.19 By this account, the sorrowful deer is his own inner self. But many of the poems, like many of his best memories, hold his self and Sylvia’s together in a single poetic being, so in this sense the deer is also Sylvia. His treasured photograph of a deer taking food from her hand in the Algonquin Provincial Park perhaps served as a private icon, presiding over the project.
The Silvine Notebook begins with a list of twenty-two poems: ‘59th Bear’, ‘Fishing Bridge’, ‘Delivering Frieda’, ‘Your fingers’, ‘I brought you to Devon’, ‘Red’, ‘Remember the daffodils’, ‘The morning we set out to drive around America’, ‘Our happiness’, ‘Under the laburnums’, ‘Which part of you liked me rough?’, ‘What was poured in your ears?’, ‘The waters off beautiful Nauset’, ‘Of all that came to drink with you’, ‘A fragile cutting, tamped into earth’, ‘I came over the packed snow’, ‘A film of you skipping’, ‘We didn’t find her – she found us’, ‘What can I tell you that you do not know / Of the life after death’, ‘As if you descended in each night’s sleep’, ‘The first time I bought a bottle of wine’, and finally, scored through, ‘The last I had seen of you was you burning / Your farewell note’. The collection tells, directly and without distraction or attempt at myth-making, the story of his marriage to Sylvia, from Cambridge to America to Devon to parenthood to affair to death to ghostly return. The poems are unified through that vein of natural imagery (daffodils, laburnums, plant-cutting, the green of spring and the white of winter) which for centuries has provided grieving poets with glimmers of comfort as they remember love and loss in the literary genre known as elegy, John Milton’s Lycidas being the classic example. The Silvine Notebook would have made a slim but splendid volume of elegies, perhaps enabling Ted to move on to some other style.
How different his life might have been if he had had the courage to publish ‘The Sorrows of the Deer’ some time in the Seventies. A deleted stanza of ‘Delivering Frieda’ describes his daughter as a ‘somnambulist’ carrying the memory of her mother.20 The image of sleepwalking indicates that this was written before he told Frieda of the suicide. How different it would have been if he had shared that knowledge in his own time and his own way, instead of having his hand forced by other people’s publications about Sylvia’s life and death. Again, he would have been criticised by some for a poem that began by asking Sylvia’s ghost ‘Which part of you liked me rough?’ But if he had got his story out first – told the truth that some part of Sylvia did like it rough and could give it rough (the bite) – then he would not have been caught in defensive mode by Robin Morgan’s allegations of rape and abuse.
Above all, he would have expiated both his grief and his guilt. The Silvine Notebook includes poems of astonishing tenderness and love. Ted and Sylvia’s happiness in finding Court Green, a simple house built in the shape of a loaf. Sylvia stooping in the rain to take an armful of daffodils from tiny Frieda. Sylvia’s fingers flying over the keyboard of piano and typewriter: ‘I remember your fingers. And your daughter’s / Fingers remember your fingers / In everything they do.’21 Late in life, Ted appeared alone on Frieda’s doorstep, not having seen her for a long time. ‘You can ask me anything you like,’ he said to his daughter. The request was so sudden that she did not know where to begin. But she thought of one question: ‘What was my mother like?’ ‘She was just like you,’ her father replied. ‘Even in the way she moved her hands.’22
There is lightness in the Silvine Notebook, but it is also heavy with poems of aching grief. Among them is an early version of what eventually became ‘The Inscription’ in Birthday Letters, the poem about the conversation in Ted’s flat in Cleveland Street:
‘Under the laburnums’ – almost your last
Words to me. But repeated. And again
‘Tell me we will be together under the laburnums’ –
Which meant summer, the lawn, the children playing.23
‘The Inscription’ omits the most intimate elements: the direct speech and the reference to the children. This early version is fresher, somehow truer. Once the reader discovers that ‘under the laburnums’ were indeed among Sylvia’s last words to Ted, the lovely first part of ‘Autumn Nature Notes’ in Season Songs takes on new meaning: ‘The Laburnum top is silent, quite still / In the afternoon yellow September sunlight, / A few leaves yellowing, all its seeds fallen’ becomes an elegy for Sylvia’s passing: ‘She launches away, towards the infinite / And the laburnum subsides to empty.’24
‘Sorrows’ also includes poems of gnawing guilt. The original intention was to end the sequence with ‘The first time’ and ‘The last’: the poem about the bottle of wine and the dumping of Shirley, then the one about Sylvia’s last letter. The sweet beginning with Sylvia was a bitter end with Shirley; the end with Sylvia was too terrible to contemplate. Ted could not bring himself to publish either poem in his lifetime.
In the same notebook there is a fragmentary poem, on a separate sheet, addressed to Richard Sassoon. How did he manage, Ted wonders, to get away from Sylvia ‘without being clobbered / by Ariel’? To escape the ‘crashed Phaeton’ without being cursed, without the baggage of Sylvia’s dark feelings towards her parents. Where did Ted go wrong? ‘Show me my mistake.’ The project that began as ‘The Sorrows of the Deer’ was a seemingly never-ending reckoning of mistakes and memories, of good intentions lost and bad moves made worse by circumstance.
Through all the years of writing and rewriting, Ted kept changing his mind about the amount of explicit autobiographical information he should expose, the balance he should create between plain facts and mythic patterns. To the end, he remained guarded about some of the most heart-wrenching details. The beautiful poem called ‘Delivering Frieda’ in the Silvine Notebook evokes Sylvia’s ‘cheek-scar’ and the ‘O-mouth’ of her newborn daughter. It ends with an allusion to ‘Edge’, the poem that concluded Ariel in 1965:
That last poem you wrote designed, modelling your death,
You planned to take <include> her with you. You wrote
‘She is taking them with her.’
Poetic justice crossed it out. cancelled: poetic frenzy.
You went on alone. Now erase delete
That line utterly. Reabsorb
Into unbeing every letter of it –
Let your last sea-cold kiss evaporate
From the salt affliction.25
Sylvia’s own deletion from the draft of ‘Edge’ of the line about taking her children with her is replicated in Ted’s erasure of this terrible thought from a later draft of his poem. His writing hand is shadowed by the fact of Assia making the opposite choice and by the knowledge that in her lowest moment in the final burnt journal Sylvia did indeed contemplate the ‘unbeing’ of her and Ted’s line of inheritance. The image of reabsorption into ‘unbeing’ is a powerful variant on that of wading into ‘underbeing’ in that poem of grace, ‘Go Fishing’. The double sense of the word ‘line’, at once genetic and poetic, is one of Hughes’s most painfully brilliant strokes. But he felt compelled to spare his children from these dark thoughts – ‘Delivering Frieda’ was heavily revised before being published in Birthday Letters as ‘Remission’.
He kept changing his mind about how much and how explicitly to publish. The poem about his honeymoon, ‘You Hated Spain’, was first slipped unostentatiously into print in a 1979 anthology edited by fellow-poet Douglas Dunn. It reappeared in Hughes’s 1982 Selected Poems as an addendum to the Crow sequence, with which it had no connection – it was Sylvia, not Crow, who hated Spain! ‘Portraits’ appeared under the title ‘An Icon’ in the magazine Grand Street in autumn 1981. And then there was the trial run of the series of poems in the 1995 New Selected. There were times when Ted thought that he was taking a risk even with these murmurs. Perhaps his silence should have been absolute. But there were other times when he thought that he should let everything go.
Among the British Library manuscripts is a Challenge Triplicate Book in which drafts for what will become Birthday Letters are written at high speed, copied and reworked, run together, in loose, conversational blank verse, as if the whole thing might become a single autobiographical poem stretching over 5,000 lines, Hughes’s equivalent of Wordsworth’s Prelude. Wordsworth’s poem had at its core a meditation on how Nature became his ‘mother’ as a result of the premature death of both his parents: the scene when he returns from school to hear the news of his father’s death is among the most intense of all the ‘spots of time’ that shape his inner life. So, too, for Hughes the question of parentage, and the influence of fathers in particular, is the key to this station on his journey to poetic autobiography.
On the first page of the notebook there is a title that reads ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’.26 The Black Coat is an unholy trinity, three in one and one in three: the one worn by Otto Plath in Sylvia Plath’s nightmare of a fascist father, the one habitually worn at Cambridge by Ted Hughes – the man in black to whom Sylvia said ‘I do’ on her wedding day – and the one worn by Sylvia herself as he imagines her on that last freezing night walking down to the telephone box at the bottom of St George’s Terrace on Primrose Hill with her plait curled up at the back of her head.
As for Opus 131, this was the number of the late Beethoven string quartet that in Ted’s mind was the final masterpiece, the breaker of artistic boundaries, the summation of the composer’s genius. It had occupied a place of honour in his personal pantheon ever since his youthful discovery of Beethoven. Fellow-poet Peter Redgrove used to tell of his first meeting with Hughes at Pembroke College, Cambridge. As he went up the steep staircase, Redgrove heard a ‘strange yowling’ coming from Hughes’s room. It was not a fox, or even a thought-fox, but Opus 131, in which, Hughes told him, ‘the whole of the music is crushed into the first few bars, which are then unravelled’.27 Ted then took Beethoven’s death mask28 from the wall of his room, put it against his breast and waddled across the room, explaining that this was Beethoven’s height and gait. Undergraduate flamboyance this may have been, but there is no doubting the sincerity with which Hughes took Beethoven to heart. The musical key of Opus 131 is C sharp minor, often associated with sorrow and the night (it is also the key of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ sonata). The structural key is its unity: forty minutes long, its seven movements, with recurring adagio tempo, are played without a break. This is why Hughes calls ‘Black Coat’ his Opus 131: it would have been Birthday Letters without any breaks.
It begins with death and the difficulty of death when your own family is a shadow play. Ted’s father returns from the Great War, loaded with the memory of the wounded who had died. Day after day and decade after decade he was ‘undemobbed’, sent back to the Front to search for the place where he could lay down his burden of memory. Death comes to every generation, but you never step into the same river twice. Hughes is schooled by survivors of the Great War but his own growth was shaped by the Second, to which the poem then turns, before reverting to an image of an old soldier, confused on a railway platform, reading a book, not knowing whether he is returning to Flanders or heading for a family holiday on the Cornish Riviera. The train of association clearly links the soldier to his father.
But then there is a Wordsworthian jump-cut from past to present. We are heading for a picnic on the side of Lochnagar in Scotland, in the time when Ted is staying on Deeside in the Queen Mother’s beloved home at Birkhall. The air is fresh, the scene is dramatic: a roebuck bounds across the stage (a reminder to the writing hand that ‘Black Coat’ is a new version of ‘The Sorrows of the Deer’). Hughes and his party, in royal company (out of discretion, only the corgis are identified), are both stars and starry-eyed. To the cry of a capercaillie, they sip tea in a log lodge.29 It is a scene of benediction.
Like Wordsworth in The Prelude, the Hughes of ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’ moves seamlessly from the memory of those ‘spots of time’ that have shaped his poetic being to reflection on how poetry itself can heal. He describes reading and writing as weight-training for the mind. When he retreated to his writing hut in the garden of Court Green, Hughes undertook a daily mental workout. He went there to tell the tale of Sylvia’s tragedy. That was his practice, his toy. Like Beethoven at his keyboard, he played through variation after variation. Practice was the only way ‘To wring from life’s error / The strange tears of joy’. Poetry, he argued to himself, would eventually enable him to go beyond grief to what Wordsworth called ‘Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears’. But the nagging anxiety for Hughes was that there might be a kind of lie, or at best an evasion, within the truth-telling. Could it ever be right, he asked himself, to make his own ‘toy’ of Sylvia’s tragedy?
This is the point at which Sylvia enters ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’. The next variation is a redraft of the soldier on the platform. ‘You came to think of him as a sentry cast / In blackening old bronze – probably / Meant to represent forgetfulness.’ We are looking not at a real passenger but at the Great Western Railway War Memorial on Platform One of Paddington station. The Tommy is in fact reading a letter from home, not a book. There is then a startling jolt of memory and outside the lost property office Hughes notices banks of snow in the street. Hard cold. Bright, empty light. In the drafting, Hughes becomes the soldier, watched by Plath: ‘So you needed me finally … I had promised you everything you asked for.’ But Hughes then goes back over the page and turns every ‘I’ to a ‘he’, every ‘you’ to a ‘she’. As so often, he is torn between confessional autobiography and the creation of symbolic characters of mythic force. He wants to write about redemptive memory and the resurrection of the dead, but he cannot resolve the question of how much or how little to say about the last week of Sylvia’s life. ‘What do you want?’ he asks the ghost of Sylvia. ‘For us to go north together next week, / Yes next week, or for me to vanish off the earth’. That was exactly how he remembered it in his journal record of their final meetings, how one day she would want them to try again and the next never to see him again.
Then the figure of Sylvia sees the book that the bronze soldier is reading on the platform at Paddington. It is Ted’s red Oxford Shakespeare that she had ripped to rags in a furious row. She opens it, reads the inscription and closes it again. She begs for reassurance that he will be faithful to her. He gives it to her over and over and over again. The poetry is compacted in such a way that he is giving both the reassurance and the Shakespeare, the token of their shared art. Sylvia’s reading of the inscription in the copy of Shakespeare and the words about either going north or vanishing off the earth recur in various guises during the long and complex evolution of Birthday Letters. Until shortly before publication, the intention was for them to appear in ‘Under the Laburnums’, but at the last minute they were moved to ‘The Inscription’.
Hughes was proud of the symbolic figure of the soldier reading by Platform One at Paddington, but he could not quite find a way of using him to secure the links between his father and the First War, Sylvia’s father and the Second, himself, Sylvia and death. Rather as Wordsworth took the crucial passage about the ‘boy of Winander’ who blew ‘mimic hootings to the silent owls’ out of the manuscript of The Prelude, turned it from the first person to the third and published it as a freestanding lyric, Hughes stripped all personal association from ‘Platform One’ and published it in 1995 as his Laureate’s contribution to Freedom: A Commemorative Anthology to Celebrate the 125th Birthday of the British Red Cross.30
The next jump in ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’ is more awkward. Hughes turns directly to Sylvia’s relationship with her parents. First her gratitude to her mother, who ‘glued’ her ‘whole’ after she was found in her ‘Daddy’s tomb in the basement’ (the crawl space of her first suicide attempt). But then the rage at her father’s death is projected on to her mother. A butterfly in a lump of amber, given to her by her mother, comes to represent the huge tear that she exuded all through her life: the permission to hate. The amber is then transformed into the letter in which Aurelia turns against Ted, gives her daughter permission to hate another man in black, suggests that the lovers try a separation.
None of this is sufficiently worked through to be publishable. The next movement of ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’ is more fragmented, and some of the fragments did indeed prove salvageable for publication in Birthday Letters: here we find a version of the fox cub on the hump of Chalk Farm Bridge, of the Shakespearean fantasia that became ‘Setebos’ (‘Who could play Miranda? / Only you. Ferdinand – Only me’), of ‘The Rag Rug’ and ‘Trophies’ and ‘Your Paris’. Some of these are marked with asterisks, to indicate that they are worth keeping. Others were too raw, including one that is variously titled ‘Generosity’, ‘Greater Love’, ‘The Gift’ and finally ‘The Real Thing’, and another, filled with classical allusions, on the reading of Sylvia’s dark dreams.
The sequence was beginning to break up. Blank spaces appear between the poems, markers of the realisation that it is not going to work with the unity of Beethoven’s Opus 131. At times, there is a journal-like feel, as in a long sequence on the year when Sylvia taught at Smith and Ted was in her shadow. On other pages, there is more of a sense of the poet as psychoanalyst, puzzling over Sylvia’s neuroses: ‘You were afraid your typewriter / Would fall through the earth … You were afraid all your wedding presents / Would be stolen.’ These lines were later worked into ‘Apprehensions’. There is a fascination with Sylvia’s journal, described as her ‘secret hospital’, and with the difficulty of mothering, filtered not only through the figure of Aurelia but also through Sylvia and her daughter Frieda. The ‘oracle’ born by the mother is a ‘mighty god’ whose name is ‘Hurt’.
Later in the notebook, the sense of a Wordsworthian autobiographical unfolding recurs. This becomes ‘Visit’ in Birthday Letters. Hughes remembers a time ten years after his wife’s death when, reading her papers, he is hit more strongly than ever before by the shock of memory. Then he retraces their story from her joy when he and Lucas first threw clods of earth at the Whitstead window, to the ‘the melt-down of love’ (a phrase omitted from the eventual published version), to her despair and her absence. He is haunted by the voice of their daughter as he walks into the silent home: ‘Daddy, where’s Mummy?’ And by the freezing soil he claws in the garden, which symbolically becomes the cold earth of the graveyard at Heptonstall. ‘You are ten years dead. I think it is only a story. / Your story. My story.’
It is towards the end of the notebook that the Wordsworthian voice becomes strongest. At the climax of the poem, on seven successive pages, he wrote seven successive drafts of his memory of the night when he first slept with Sylvia at her hotel in Fetter Lane. The epiphany that Ted experiences when he walks back to Rugby Street across Holborn, as the dawn chorus washes over the sleeping city, is remembered via Wordsworth. Crows walk the pavement beside him, and then there is an exquisitely Wordsworthian line-break:
And I
Remembering the mighty heart that slept
For Wordsworth on his September morning
Heard what was missing from his bliss
That had now been added to mine –
The huge awakening of the whole city
In the robe of throbbing birds in their Eden
A robe that might have wrapped, for him too,
The memory of the sleeping foreign woman
Who had just decided his life.31
In some of the drafts ‘as for me’ replaces ‘for him too’ and the sleeping foreign woman is ‘a naked woman’ or ‘the naked body’. The poetic homage is made explicit by way of an allusion to the sense of grace and peace that pervades the famous sonnet ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’.
Wordsworth’s poem was actually composed at a quarter past five in the morning on 31 July 1802, when he and his sister Dorothy were travelling to visit Annette Vallon, the young French woman with whom he had fallen passionately in love during his residence in France at the time of the Revolution, just after he had graduated from Cambridge. They were going to see not just Annette but also Caroline, the daughter she had borne him. The purpose of the visit was to make peace with his foreign lover and child prior to his forthcoming marriage to Mary Hutchinson. Hughes was fascinated by the relationship between Wordsworth and Annette. In another notebook he wrote of ‘Wordsworth – Annette – Vaudracour & Juliet [he means Julia, but the Shakespearean echo is apt] – his retreat to the hills – his sister’s imbecility. His human symbols: wild loss – stupefied endurance. His slow transformation into a rigid scar.’32
The identification is clear: like Wordsworth, Hughes is inspired into his poetic vocation by a woman from across the sea, met at a formative moment soon after graduating from Cambridge. But the loss of that woman becomes a scar that marks the full remainder of his life and work. Fatefully, the poet’s life is decided by love. Respite from ‘stupefied endurance’ can come only in the visionary moment of poetry, the recollection of that London dawn in which it was bliss to be alive and very heaven to walk the empty streets, and hear birdsong, having just left the hotel room of a sleeping, beautiful woman to whom one has made love for the first time.
Though the explicit allusion is to the Westminster Bridge sonnet, the tone and style are unmistakably those of Wordsworth writing his memories in blank verse. If Hughes could have sustained the quietly assured voice and loose pentameter rhythm of these lines through a much longer narrative of recollection, he would indeed have written the twentieth century’s sequel to The Prelude.
On the next page, he turns to the dark words that Sylvia spoke during that night of love. The street lights are still on, and in them he seems to see her face as she told him of her suicide attempts: of jumping off a bridge that was too low, of ice that was too thick for drowning beneath, of a Gillette blade that broke on her wrist. A few pages later there are lines about how Sylvia saw her great love simply standing there on Grand Central station. He resembled her other great love, her equally great love. Who came after her like a ship with searchlights ablaze as she swam under the propeller. The name of that second great love, of that ship, was death. Hughes knew death, but that knowledge did not help him to hold on to Sylvia when he prayed:
As you screamed for help
For the strength to slip
From your hands, and fall
Down the mountain-face.33
Over the page, Hughes writes just three words, the notebook turned sidewise: ‘The Last Page’.
That was the end of what would have been his Prelude. The twin title was later broken up and attached to two short poems. ‘Black Coat’ is one of the strongest of the Birthday Letters. ‘Opus 131’ is a bitter little piece, first published in Capriccio, the Assia volume, and then reprinted in the 1995 New Selected Poems. It begins with an image of Assia in a homely hotel room, listening to Beethoven – a memory of that lonely night of hers in Haworth. The poem then tells of foetus, dark insect and wave-particles pronouncing on the unimportance of the menopause – Hughes in vatic, crankish mode. The allusion to Beethoven has broken down and what is missing is ‘the lifeline music’, the very Wordsworthian voice that would have made a finished ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’ so special: ‘consolation, prayer, transcendence’, ‘the selective disconnecting / Of the pain centre’.34 Biographically speaking, there is another ‘selective disconnecting’ in that ‘Black Coat’ is for Sylvia, ‘Opus 131’ for Assia. By deliberate contrivance or a slip of the memory, the wrong quartet is cited: it was the previous one, not ‘Opus 131 in C Sharp Minor’ but Opus 130 in B flat major that she had heard in the dark just up the hill from the Brontë parsonage.
Later, he slipped some loose sheets into the back of the 300-page triplicate book: a fair copy of the poem of the finding of the fox cub on Chalk Farm Bridge in 1960, a note about the price he had paid for putting Sylvia’s journals into the public domain in the Seventies (‘Maybe the most stupid thing I ever did’), and a summary of the story of Rabbah bar bar Hannah, a Babylonian Jewish Talmudist who, having undergone a series of fantastic adventures through the desert and across the seas, set down his life upon a rock and slept. When he awoke, the rock had gone and he was on a precipice, staring into the abyss.
The thousands of pages of holograph manuscript in the British Library could easily form the basis of a book-length study of the evolution of Birthday Letters. As with the Moortown elegies, there is a seamless development from the style of a prose journal to that of blank verse – rather as we can trace a line from Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals to her brother William’s poetry.
The prose narrative in one of the notebooks is fresh and vivid, making the reader wish that Hughes had published a conventional autobiography. He sets down his first reading of the poem about caryatids, Daniel Huws’s teasing review, Sylvia’s reputation before he met her (‘The rumour of your height, your slenderness, your hair’). He tells of Shirley, ‘so English she was Irish’, with her spectacular hair and what he perceived as her dislike of Sylvia. He suggests that the only purpose of the Falcon Yard party was for him to meet Sylvia. He recalls his half-empty brandy bottle, Shirley’s rage, Sylvia’s drunken daring shining eyes, the kiss, the bite, the ‘new world’. Then the first evening in Rugby Street, the explosion of joy, the walk via Holborn to the hotel in Fetter Lane, the story of the scar and the lovemaking, Sylvia’s body Americanly firm, slender, fish-like. And so on: walking together in Paris, Sylvia reciting Chaucer’s ‘Prologue’ to the cows on the fen, marrying in the pink wool dress. The dream of Emily Brontë: Walter and the long walk up to Top Withens, ‘the whiff of isolation and rain’, Sylvia ‘smiling your American beach-smile, up that bitter little sycamore, monkeys on the cultural relic’. He created prose sketches, too, for poems subsequently rejected, their titles scored through, among them ‘Smashing the table. Misplaced passion’, ‘The kiss that killed – the dream-kiss, the real’, ‘Horrors in T.R. Park’, and, at the climax of the sequence, ‘What happened that night? Did you phone? Why didn’t your spirit reach me? I was not there. I was with Susan, in our marriage bed, in Rugby Street – she who also only had 3 years’. Finally, the coda of ‘The snow-grave, the funeral’, a poem that appears to be lost.35
The processes of remembering, composing, decomposing and recomposing were unceasing. Correspondence with editor and copy-editor, revised typescripts and corrected proofs reveal many late changes to the collection.36 There are changes to the order of the poems. So, for example, ‘The Cast’ is moved from early to late. And changes to their titles: ‘Apprehensions’ was originally ‘Prophecy and Paranoia’, with Sylvia’s writing as her fear, held between her fingers in the form of the Schaeffer pen that someone stole after her death. He remained uncertain about the precise contents until a very late stage. ‘18 Rugby Street’, ‘A Pink Wool Knitted Dress’ and ‘Karlsbad Caverns’ were sent to the copy-editor as additions.37 At the very last minute, ‘The Laburnum’ was taken out and ‘The Inscription’, a revision of ‘Under the Laburnums’, inserted instead.38 There were other late omissions too. Some of them, along with the ‘Laburnum’ that had been removed, went into the privately published collection Howls and Whispers: ‘Minotaur 2’, ‘The Hidden Orestes’, ‘The Difference’, ‘The Offers’, ‘Cries and Whispers’ (the title poem, with ‘howls’ revised from ‘cries’). Others remain unpublished: a poem alluding to Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, another about a near-drowning incident with a girl when he was in Australia, and the lovely story of the jaguar-skin rug told by the ex-colonial beekeeper in North Tawton. There are, in short, as many unpublished poems about Sylvia as published ones. But the reading public was not aware of this.
Her suicide presented Ted with his most difficult decision as to what he should publish and what he should not. In the original plan for ‘The Sorrows of the Deer’, and many intermediate versions, the intention was to end the sequence with a poem about the night of her suicide. Having begun as ‘The last I had seen of you was you burning / Your farewell note’, it was much revised over the years under the titles ‘What did happen that Sunday night?’ and ‘That Sunday Night’.39 It reached its final form as ‘Last Letter’. It would have been the obvious climax, allowing Birthday Letters to end with Dr Horder’s words ‘Your wife is dead.’ Why did he exclude it? Surely not because it was simply too painful to remember: so much about his life with Sylvia was painful to remember, and the whole point of publishing was catharsis for the pain. No, the reason was that he did not want journalists crawling all over the fact that he spent that last night not with Assia, as had been generally assumed by Sylvia’s biographers, but with Susan Alliston. He wanted to protect her name, not least to shield her sister from intrusion.
His dilemma was that he needed the sense of symmetry provided by his return to 18 Rugby Street that last weekend. Over time, parts of ‘That Sunday Night’ had evolved into the poem about the ill-fated house. So he decided, late in the production process, to include ‘18 Rugby Street’ in a version that did not mention the business about the last letter, but did bring the wheel full circle back to the flat. His hope was that by burying the mention of Sue mid-poem, its full significance would not become apparent to critics and journalists. On the first night with Sylvia, he writes, he was not thinking of the ‘Belgian girl’ in the flat below, who eventually gassed herself: ‘She was nothing to do with me.’ Then he moves seamlessly to Sue:
Nor was Susan
Who still had to be caught in the labyrinth,
And who would meet the Minotaur there,
And would be holding me from my telephone
Those nights you would most need me.40
This is the moment when he acknowledges in print Sue’s part in the fateful last weekend. The apportionment of blame is deliberately ambiguous: was it Sue or simply his own desire for Sue that held him from the phone? Before pursuing this awkward question any further, he cuts back to his first night with Sylvia: ‘Nothing could make me think I would ever be needed / By anybody.’ But then Sue returns as he tells of how a decade darkened prior to the moment when she paced the floorboards overhead, ‘night after night’, tearful, alone, facing death in the very room ‘Where you and I, the new rings big on our fingers, / Had warmed our wedding night in the single bed’.41 Like the Belgian (or German) girl, Susan indeed had ‘nothing to do with’ Ted and 18 Rugby Street in 1956, the time the poem is set in the story of Birthday Letters. But she had a great deal to do with him and the house in 1963 and again when she returned to it after her travels among the Bedouin. The memory of her tears on his last visits to her in University College Hospital is subsumed into the last line of the sequence, but lymphoma is changed to leukaemia to help with the disguise. Ted’s gamble paid off. The reviewers did not probe at the reference to Sue holding him from the telephone on those last nights when Sylvia so needed him; the journalistic pack did not start sniffing around for traces of ‘Susan’.
Just as Wordsworth at some level repressed the autobiographical actuality of ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’ by getting the date wrong, so Hughes in ‘18 Rugby Street’ deliberately or unconsciously misdated this first night of love with Sylvia to Friday 13 April, which was actually the night on which she returned to him after her trip to Paris and Rome. The poem needs that later date for the sake not only of the astrologically ominous portent of Friday the 13th, but also because Sylvia Plath’s father Otto, so crucial to Hughes’s account of her life and the failure of his own marriage, was born on 13 April 1885. Equally, in remembering the girl downstairs, Hughes deliberately or unconsciously changes the nationality and miscounts the years: the poem dates her death to 1963, the year of Sylvia’s suicide in Fitzroy Road, whereas in reality the Belgian/German girl, whose name was Helen, had gassed herself in Rugby Street a couple of years earlier. Indeed, in the memory of another resident of the house, she was English and did not own an Alsatian.42 Here, and in ‘Last Letter’, there is also a fusion or confusion of the two flats, one above the other, which were owned by Dan Huws’s father. The poem is not to be read as a literal memory, but rather as the conversion of 18 Rugby Street into an ill-fated House of Atreus.
Birthday Letters was published without its ‘Last Letter’. In the absence of that key poem, and a few other equally important ones, such as ‘The first time I brought a bottle of wine’, ‘The Grouse’, ‘Soho Square’ and ‘The Offers’, the book did not give the whole story. But critics, journalists and readers, not knowing the manuscript history, assumed that it did. Ted, it appeared, had finally told his version of the story and, by and large, he was forgiven. Without question, he was financially rewarded. By the end of 1998, Birthday Letters had sold more than 100,000 copies in hardback, making it the fastest-selling volume of verse in the history of English poetry. More than fifty writers chose it among their ‘Books of the Year’, its poignancy heightened by the proximity of its release to Hughes’s death.