Notes

Place of publication is London unless otherwise stated.

Abbreviations

BL – British Library

CP – Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (Faber & Faber; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003)

CPSP – Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, ed. with an introduction by Ted Hughes (New York: Harper & Row, 1981)

Emory – Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

JSP – The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950–1962, ed. Karen V. Kukil (New York: Anchor, 2000)

L – Letters of Ted Hughes, selected by and ed. Christopher Reid (Faber & Faber, 2007; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008)

SGCB – Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (Faber & Faber; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992)

SPLH – Sylvia Plath, Letters Home, selected and ed. with commentary by Aurelia Schober Plath (New York: Harper & Row, 1975; repr. Bantam Books, 1977)

WP – Ted Hughes, Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, ed. William Scammell (Faber & Faber, 1994; New York: Picador USA, 1995)

All Sylvia Plath quotations are from American editions published by Harper & Row (now HarperCollins).

Prologue: The Deposition

1. ‘Deposition of Edward James Hughes’, before the United States Federal District Court, District of Massachusetts, copy now held in the Jane V. Anderson Papers, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Neilson Library, Smith College. Public-domain document quoted under the United States Right of Public Access to Judicial Proceedings and Records.

2. ‘9 Willow Street’, in Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters (Faber & Faber, 1998), pp. 71–4. Hughes was a habitual reviser. Many of his poems have minor variations as they move through periodical publication, limited private-press edition and trade-book form. Normally, I quote from the version in the first published text, though revisions are sometimes noted. For convenience, I give page references to CP. Thus ‘9 Willow Street’, CP 1087.

3. ‘That Morning’ was Hughes’s contribution to A Garland for the Laureate (1981), a privately printed volume presented to Sir John Betjeman on his seventy-fifth birthday; it then appeared in the London Review of Books on 3 December 1981 and in New Selected Poems (New York: Harper & Row, 1982) and Selected Poems 1957–1981 (Faber & Faber, 1982), before finding its true home in River (Faber & Faber, 1983).

4. Quoted from the memorial stone in Westminster Abbey, a monument in the public domain.

5. L 514. Where possible, letters cited from this edition have been checked against their holograph originals and, where appropriate, omitted passages have been restored.

6. A meeting noted by Plath in her appointments diary, but unnoticed by her biographers prior to the opening of the Anderson Papers in 2012.

7. ‘Deposition of Jane V. Anderson’, before the United States Federal District Court, District of Massachusetts, copy now held in the Anderson Papers. Public-domain document quoted under the United States Right of Public Access to Judicial Proceedings and Records.

8. Victor A. Kovner, in ‘Libel in Fiction: The Sylvia Plath Case and its Aftermath’, Columbia-VLA Journal of Law and the Arts, 11 (1987), p. 473.

9. New York Times, 21 Jan 1987.

10. In Chapter 26, ‘Trial’, below.

11. Lois Ames, ‘Sylvia Plath: A Biographical Note’, in Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 203.

12. Opening paragraph of The Bell Jar.

13. Hughes Deposition, p. 67.

14. Sylvia Plath, Ariel (Faber & Faber, 1965).

15. ‘Ted Hughes/Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar legal case’, BL Add. MS 88993.

16. To Victor Kovner, 7 Feb 1987, quoted, Roy Davids, ‘The Making of Birthday Letters’, roydavids.com/birthday.htm (accessed 12 Jan 2014).

17. ‘Voices and Visions: Sylvia Plath’, broadcast on American PBS, 21 April 1988, available (in 2014) at youtube.com/watch?v=wmamNSa3sP8.

18. Quotations from ‘They are crawling all over the church’, unpublished fragment of long poem among Birthday Letters drafts (BL Add. MS 88918/1).

19. Roy Davids, ‘Memories, Reflections, Gratitudes’, in Nick Gammage, ed., The Epic Poise: A Celebration of Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber, 1999), p. 188.

20. Lecture at the Dartington Way with Words Festival, July 2007, published as ‘Suffering and Decision’, in Mark Wormald, Neil Roberts and Terry Gifford, eds, Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 221–37.

21. After hearing the lecture, I put the Wordsworth parallel to Heaney: he immediately acknowledged it, but said that he had not seen it.

22. Heaney, ‘Suffering and Decision’, p. 233.

23. Wendy Cope, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (Faber & Faber, 1986), p. 47.

24. Philip Larkin, Selected Letters (Faber & Faber, 1993), p. 581.

25. Ted Hughes Papers 1940–1997, Emory 644/4 (Incoming Correspondence, 13 June 1975, 8 Nov 1982).

26. ‘The Jaguar’, ‘Pike’, ‘The Thought-Fox’, ‘Hawk Roosting’, ‘Last Letter’.

27. Written in 1958; Olwyn Hughes Papers (BL Add. MS 88948/1).

28. Lucas Myers, Crow Steered, Bergs Appeared: A Memoir of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (Sewanee, Tenn.: Proctor’s Hall Press, 2001), p. 2.

29. ‘Money my enemy’, Olwyn Hughes Papers (Emory 980/2/2).

30. Robert Graves, a key influence, was a precedent for a life of writing and nothing but writing, but he resorted to novels and potboilers in a way that Hughes did not. The other, though short-lived, exemplar was a Welshman, Dylan Thomas.

31. In the light of this, I refer throughout this book to the contents of this particular box file as Hughes’s ‘journal’. See further, Roy Davids, ‘Ted Hughes Archive, The Final Portion: Papers of Ted Hughes mostly arranged in standard filing boxes, folders and cardboard boxes still in his possession at his death’, ted-hughes.info/uploads/media/The_Ted_Hughes_Archive_at_The_British_Library.pdf, from which the examples listed here are taken. This was Davids’s catalogue for the sale of the (second) archive to the British Library. The collection is now catalogued rather differently, with much of the journal-style material having been rearranged.

32. The centrality of fishing to Hughes’s life and work, together with the revelatory quality of his unpublished fishing diaries, is the subject of a major forthcoming book by Mark Wormald of Pembroke College, Cambridge.

33. The exception is Andrew Wilson’s excellent Mad Girl’s Love Song (Simon & Schuster, 2013), which self-consciously breaks the mould by focusing exclusively on Plath’s ‘Life before Ted’.

34. Philip Davis, Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. vii.

35. Heaney, interviewed at the Bloomsbury Hotel, London, 27 Oct 2009.

36. BL Add. MS 88918/129.

37. Yeats’s essay ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’, quoted, SGCB xvii.

38. Personal communication.

39. ‘Child’s Park’, CP 1087.

Chapter 1: ‘fastened into place’

1. When the film Sylvia (2003) was shown at the Picture House 2 miles down the road in Hebden Bridge, there was a ‘sharp and reproachful’ intake of collective audience breath when Daniel Craig, playing the part of Ted Hughes opposite Gwyneth Paltrow’s Sylvia Plath, said that he was from ‘myth-olm-royd’: John Billingsley, A Laureate’s Landscape: Walks around Ted Hughes’ Mytholmroyd (Hebden Bridge: Northern Earth Books, 2007), p. 41.

2. Opening of ‘The Rock’, BBC radio talk, printed in Geoffrey Summerfield, ed., Worlds: Seven Modern Poets (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), pp. 122–7. This publication was accompanied by Fay Godwin photographs. For original broadcast and publication, see note 5, below.

3. Ibid., p. 123.

4. Ibid., p. 124. Olwyn Hughes has no memory of this story and denies that Ted knew it, despite his explicit account in ‘The Rock’.

5. Broadcast 11 Sept 1963; published in the Listener, 19 Sept, then collected in Writers on Themselves (BBC Books, 1964).

6. Plath’s working title was ‘Landscape of a Childhood’. See Gail Crowther and Peter K. Steinberg, ‘These Ghostly Archives’ in the online journal Plath Profiles, 2, scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/plath/article/view/4745/4380.

7. BBC radio talk, ‘Ocean 1212-W’, repr. in Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and Other Prose Writings (Faber & Faber, 1977, 2nd edn 1979; New York: Harper & Row, 1980), pp. 117–24. Hughes’s note in this edition misdates the broadcast to 1962: perhaps it was too painful to remember that it went out posthumously.

8. William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805 version), 2.232.

9. ‘Wild Rock’, in Remains of Elmet: A Pennine Sequence (Faber & Faber, 1979; New York: Harper & Row, 1979) (CP 464).

10. ‘Climbing into Heptonstall’, in Wolfwatching (Faber & Faber, 1989; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991) (CP 750). First published in London Review of Books, 19 June 1986.

11. ‘Mount Zion’, in Remains of Elmet (CP 480). First published in Encounter, Dec 1977.

12. Edith (Farrar) Hughes, ‘Past and Present’ (1965), unfinished holograph manuscript, Olwyn Hughes Papers (Emory 980/2), quoted by kind permission of Olwyn Hughes.

13. Or did it really? At eighty-five, Olwyn was more sceptical: ‘That we believed astrology is ridiculous. We are not stupid. But it was a charming old craze and as material to indulge in – the planets all given meanings and so on – we were charmed with it and interested to see what it showed (if anything). Just a game really’ (Olwyn Hughes to Jonathan Bate, 22 Jan 2014). Despite such protestations, Olwyn insisted on casting this biographer’s horoscope before agreeing to co-operate.

14. To Leonard Clark, letter of 1974, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Cited by Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath – A Marriage (Little, Brown, 2004), p. 51. My interpretation is derived from Olwyn Hughes, ‘Corrections of Diane Middlebrook’s Her Husband’, Olwyn Hughes Papers (Emory 980/2).

15. ‘Superstitions’, book review of 1964 (WP 51).

16. Ibid.

17. He was Willie to the family, Billie or Billy to his wife Edith, Bill in later years.

18. To Keith Sagar, 18 July 1998 (L 724).

19. Included in Lupercal (CP 84). First published in the Spectator on 4 July 1958 and read in the BBC Third Programme on 27 Aug 1958.

20. To Sagar (L 724).

21. Epigraph to ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’, read in the BBC Third Programme series The Poet’s Voice; published as closing poem of The Hawk in the Rain (Faber & Faber, 1957).

22. ‘Little Gidding’, in T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (Faber & Faber, 1944). Hughes’s ‘Nicholas Ferrer’ was in his second collection, Lupercal (CP 69–70).

23. Olwyn remembers the story vividly; Ted records it in his short story ‘The Deadfall’.

24. Reminiscences from a series of interviews with Olwyn Hughes, 2010–14.

25. Edith remembered her sister’s age of death as eighteen, but Miriam was born in July 1896.

26. Note to Three Books (Faber & Faber, 1993) version of Remains of Elmet (p. 183).

27. ‘Sacrifice’, CP 759. Ted’s cousin Vicky still remembers hers.

28. His daughter’s phrase: Vicky Watling (interviewed 31 March 2010), who also provided some of the other details in the remainder of this chapter.

29. Edith’s memoir, ‘Past and Present’.

Chapter 2: Capturing Animals

1. ‘Dumpy’ is Seamus Heaney’s recollection of her (interview at Bloomsbury Hotel). He could not understand how Sylvia Plath could have been jealous of Moira (see Chapter 11, ‘Famous Poet’, below).

2. Hughes’s radio plays The Coming of the Kings (Nov–Dec 1964) and The Tiger’s Bones (Nov 1965) were also broadcast under the banner of Listening and Writing.

3. Initial print run of 4,000 in December 1967; reprint of 6,250 copies in 1968; paperback initial run of 6,000 copies in 1969, reprint of 8,000 copies in 1970, 10,000 in 1973, over 10,000 in 1975; subsequent reprints every three or four years through the Eighties. The omitted talk, about birds (including Hughes’s own ‘Hawk Roosting’, Edward Thomas’s ‘The Owl’ and Yeats’s ‘Wild Swans at Coole’), was called ‘Creatures of the Air’.

4. Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making: An Anthology of Poems and Programmes from ‘Listening and Writing’ (Faber & Faber, 1967), pp. 11–13. Revised American edition: Poetry Is (New York: Doubleday, 1970).

5. Ibid., p. 15.

6. Gerald Hughes, Ted and I: A Brother’s Memoir (Robson Press, 2012), p. 20.

7. See ‘The Ancient Briton Lay under his Rock’, in Remains of Elmet (CP 481).

8. This paragraph is based on Olwyn’s reminiscences.

9. Letter to Donald Crossley, 21 Jan 1985, private collection.

10. Gerald Hughes to Donald Crossley, 21 April 2005, private collection.

11. Gerald Hughes, Ted and I, p. 56.

12. Michael Morpurgo, ed., Ghostly Haunts (Pavilion Books, in association with the National Trust, 1994). ‘The Deadfall’ repr. in Ted Hughes, Difficulties of a Bridegroom: Collected Short Stories (Faber & Faber, 1995), pp. 1–19.

13. Ibid., p. ix. Ted to Keith Sagar, 19 Oct 1995: ‘Yes, I have the ivory fox. Let you see it some day.’ In Keith Sagar, ed., Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar (British Library, 2012), p. 249. Is this a tease or has Ted genuinely convinced himself of the story of the fox’s origin?

14. Difficulties of a Bridegroom, p. ix.

15. Poetry in the Making, p. 33.

16. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805 version), 11.258–79.

17. Poetry in the Making, p. 57.

18. In his collected short stories, Hughes describes ‘The Head’ (1978) as ‘the finale’ of the sequence to which ‘The Deadfall’ was overture. ‘These nine pieces’, he says, ‘hang together, in my own mind, as an accompaniment to my poems’ (Difficulties of a Bridegroom, pp. vii–ix).

19. Poetry in the Making, p. 17.

20. Ibid., p. 17.

21. Ibid., p. 81.

22. Ibid., p. 104. Poems from Meet My Folks! quoted in Poetry in the Making.

23. Ibid., p. 102. Poems from Meet My Folks! quoted in Poetry in the Making.

24. ‘The Thought-Fox’, in ibid., pp. 19–20 (CP 21). First published in the New Yorker, 31 Aug 1957.

Chapter 3: Tarka, Rain Horse, Pike

1. L 692–3.

2. Emory 980/2.

3. Ted Hughes, ‘Tarka the Otter, by Henry Williamson’, Sunday Times Colour Supplement, 16 Sept 1962, p. 18. One of a series of introductions to children’s classics, or rather classics suitable for children, especially boys. The others were Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World, and H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (the copy of another Wells story, The Time Machine, that Hughes borrowed from the Mexborough school library when in ‘Form 3A’ has recently turned up, mylifeinknitwear.com/ted-hughes-lives-here/).

4. Henry Williamson, Tarka the Otter (1927; repr. Penguin Modern Classics, 2009), ch. 9.

5. Brenda Hedden, the girlfriend who sometimes accompanied him, found these evenings immensely tedious.

6. Ted Hughes, Henry Williamson: A Tribute by Ted Hughes Given at the Service of Thanksgiving at the Royal Parish Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields 1 December 1977 (Rainbow Press, 1979); repr. as ‘Address Given at the Memorial Service’, in Henry Williamson: The Man, the Writings: A Symposium (Padstow: Tabb House, 1980), pp. 159–65.

7. L 686.

8. Henry Williamson, The Patriot’s Progress (1930; repr. Stroud: Sutton, 2004), ‘Third Phase’, p. 86.

9. Hughes, ‘Address Given at the Memorial Service’, pp. 161–2. See further, Yvonne Reddick’s excellent essay, ‘Henry Williamson and Ted Hughes: Politics, Nationhood, and Nature Writing’, English, 62:213 (Winter 2013), pp. 353–74.

10. Hughes, ‘Address Given at the Memorial Service’, p. 162.

11. See further my The Song of the Earth (Picador, 2000; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), especially its final chapter.

12. L 624–5.

13. Ted Hughes, interviewed by Drue Heinz, ‘The Art of Poetry: LXXI’, Paris Review, 37:134 (Spring 1995), p. 60. This key interview is available at theparisreview.org/interviews/1669/the-art-of-poetry-no-71-ted-hughes.

14. Gerald Hughes, Ted and I, p. 111.

15. David Smart, ‘John Fisher at Mexborough Grammar School: A Memoir’, Mexborough and District Heritage Society website, June 2011, joseflocke.co.uk/heritage/MGS02.htm.

16. Alan Johnson, a close friend in the sixth form, quoted in Steve Ely’s excellent ‘Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire’, Ted Hughes Society Journal, 3:1 (2013), pp. 26–36.

17. L 625.

18. Ely, ‘Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire’, p. 35, citing an interview with fellow-pupil Geoffrey Griffiths.

19. Hughes passed this at ‘subsidiary standard’ in June 1949, a year after his other Higher exams.

20. Donald Crossley (also a neighbour), personal communication.

21. ‘Sacrifice’, CP 760.

22. Paris Review interview, p. 58.

23. ‘Notes on Published Works’, March 1992 (Emory 644/115).

24. To Keith Sagar, 4 April 1990, in Keith Sagar, ed., Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar (British Library, 2012), p. 181.

25. Donald Crossley, personal communication.

26. ‘Ted and Crookhill’, handwritten memoir by Edna Wholey, 30 July 2000 (‘Ted Hughes Letters to Edna Wholey’, Emory 870/1), to which I also owe much of the detail in this section.

27. Paris Review interview, pp. 60–1.

28. L 3.

29. Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making: An Anthology of Poems and Programmes from ‘Listening and Writing’ (Faber & Faber, 1967), p. 21.

30. ‘So Quickly It’s Over’, interview with Ted Hughes, Wild Steelhead and Salmon, Winter 1999, p. 50.

31. Published by the Appledore Press, Devon (1982) in an edition of just twenty-six copies (price £300), in the form of six sheets, each being a facsimile of Hughes’s holograph of a single stanza of the poem with accompanying lithograph by his Irish fishing companion Barrie Cooke. Text reprinted in London Review of Books, Dec 1982.

32. L 287.

Chapter 4: Goddess

1. See Colin Wilcockson, ‘Ted Hughes’ Undergraduate Years at Pembroke College, Cambridge: Some Myths Demystified’, Agenda, 44:4/45:1 (Winter 2009), pp. 147–53, and Neil Roberts, ‘Ted Hughes and Cambridge’, in Mark Wormald, Neil Roberts and Terry Gifford, eds, Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 17–18.

2. Recollection of another local girl, Enid Wilkinson, quoted in Olivia Cole, ‘Found after 50 years: first love poems of Ted Hughes’, Sunday Times, 13 Aug 2006.

3. To Tom Paulin, 17 May 1994 (Emory 880/3).

4. See especially the manuscript poem ‘Summer she goes’ (Emory 644/84).

5. Loose leaf dating Hawk in the Rain poems, with Jean Findlay identified as ‘J.F.’ (BL Add. MS 88918/7); Hughes wrote ‘June 13th 59’ but clearly meant either ‘49’ or ‘50’; a transcription of the datings in a copy of Hawk now at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts, gives 16 June 1949; see also L 617–18. His memories of dates of composition are an odd mix of precision and error. Assuming the poem genuinely was written during National Service, it must have been June 1950, not 1949, since he did not join up until October 1949.

6. ‘Song’, in The Hawk in the Rain (CP 24).

7. Christmas 1946, Olwyn Hughes Papers (BL Add. MS 88948/4).

8. L 204, explicitly citing Jung.

9. E. J. Hughes’s RAF Discharge (Emory 644/180).

10. Inscribed: ‘Edward J. Hughes, to celebrate “going up.” October 1951, with all good wishes, John Fisher’ (Emory University, PR6013.R35 W58 1948 HUGHES).

11. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (Faber & Faber, 1948); all above quotations from ch. 1, ‘Poets and Gleemen’.

12. Hughes to Graves, 20 July 1967 (L 273), on thanking him for taking part in the Poetry International Festival. Canellun Collection of Robert Graves Manuscripts, St John’s College Library, Oxford, CC-0234-001.

13. Graves, The White Goddess, ch. 22, ‘The Triple Muse’.

Chapter 5: Burnt Fox

1. Glen Fallows, ‘Reminiscences’, Martlet (alumni magazine of Pembroke College, Cambridge, 1999), p. 8; Philip Hobsbaum, ‘Ted Hughes at Cambridge’, The Dark Horse, 8 (1999), pp. 6–12.

2. Hughes had a story of their one meeting: he was walking along a London street wearing his trademark greatcoat when a drunken and dyspeptic Waugh staggered out of his club, looked him up and down, took him for some sort of radical, said ‘I don’t like the cut of your jib,’ and spat at him. This may be apocryphal. Years later, shortly after the publication of Birthday Letters, Waugh’s son Auberon, a familiar figure on the London literary scene, thundered from his pulpit in the Literary Review to the effect that Hughes was a ‘rotten poet’ who wrote ‘pretentious drivel’ in abhorrent free verse. Hughes sent him a graceful postcard and a photocopy of an essay on verse form in Winter Pollen, together with the comment that he was a Tyndale man whereas Auberon was a Thomas More man. Auberon responded by thanking him for his ‘extraordinarily good-natured response to my unmannerly tirade’ and expressing the hope that they might one day meet again and sink their differences over some good wine. I am most grateful to Alexander Waugh for sight of this unpublished exchange.

3. Unpublished memoir of Hughes by Terence McCaughey, read publicly by Carol Hughes, Pembroke College, Cambridge, 17 Sept 2010.

4. Brian Cox, ‘Ted Hughes (1930–1998): A Personal Retrospect’, Hudson Review, 52:1 (Spring 1999), pp. 29–43 (pp. 30–1). Cox was two years ahead of Hughes, but stayed on at Pembroke to do graduate work.

5. To Olwyn (L 20).

6. During his second term as a freshman (L 12).

7. He told his Australian friend Jennifer Rankin that he was often mistaken for Dexter (draft manuscript of a radio talk about Ted, Jennifer Rankin Papers, University of New South Wales, Australian Defence Force Academy Library, MS 348). But Dexter, ‘Lord Ted’, as he was known, went up to Cambridge the year after Hughes went down, so if the encounter(s) did take place, this would have been when Hughes was back in Cambridge after graduating.

8. ‘Words and Experience’, in Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making: An Anthology of Poems and Programmes from ‘Listening and Writing’ (Faber & Faber, 1967), p. 121.

9. Olwyn Hughes Papers (Emory 980/1).

10. Daniel Huws, Memories of Ted Hughes 1952–1963 (Nottingham: Richard Hollis, 2010), p. 13.

11. Accounts of the burnt-fox dream from letter to Keith Sagar, 16 July 1979 (Keith Sagar, ed., Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar (British Library, 2012), pp. 74–6, the fullest version); letter to Seamus Heaney, Emory 960/40; ‘The Burnt Fox’, WP 8–9; and Cox, ‘Ted Hughes (1930–1998)’, pp. 33–4.

12. Syllabus for Archaeology and Anthropology Part I, in Student’s Handbook to Cambridge 1953–4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), pp. 148–9.

13. Huws, Memories of Ted Hughes, p. 18, adding, ‘The two splayed wings of the building, the vaginal entrance and the phallic tower had some complementary suggestiveness.’ Many students over the years have been struck by the phallic mass of the UL tower, which allegedly held pornographic materials in a closed stack at the top.

14. Part 6 of Bronisław Malinowski, Coral Gardens and their Magic: A Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands (George Allen & Unwin, 1935).

15. Hobsbaum, ‘Ted Hughes at Cambridge’, p. 7.

16. delta, 5:12 (Spring 1955) (CP 11).

17. Huws, Memories of Ted Hughes, p. 20.

18. Chequer, 7.2 (Nov 1954) (CP 10).

19. Hughes’s file in the Pembroke College Archive. ‘The Tutor’ at Pembroke was the Senior Tutor, responsible both for discipline and for the overall progress of all undergraduates.

20. Cox, ‘Ted Hughes (1930–1998)’, p. 32.

21. Huws, Memories of Ted Hughes, p. 16.

22. L 25.

Chapter 6: ‘a compact index of everything to follow’

1. ‘Paris 1954’, in Howls and Whispers (Northampton, Mass.: Gehenna Press, 1998) (CP 1173).

2. See letter from Ted to Olwyn (BL Add. MS 88948/1).

3. BL Add. MS 88918/129.

4. To Gerald and his family, 16 Oct 1954 (L 26).

5. Lucas Myers Papers at Emory 865/1.

6. Boddy’s reminiscences are recorded in Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001), pp. 41–4. This book, as much memoir as biography, is at its best on Hughes’s Cambridge friendships.

7. Lucas Myers, An Essential Self: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (Nottingham: Richard Hollis, 2011), pp. 19–20.

8. May/June 1955 (L 28).

9. See Nicholas Wroe, ‘Speaking of foreign tongues’ (interview with Weissbort), Guardian, 30 June 2001.

10. Myers, Essential Self, p. 16.

11. Ibid., p. 24.

12. See Neil Roberts, A Lucid Dreamer: The Life of Peter Redgrove (Jonathan Cape, 2012), p. 89.

13. Philip Hobsbaum, ‘Ted Hughes at Cambridge’, The Dark Horse, 8 (1999), p. 10.

14. Helen Melody, ‘Rediscovered: the earliest recording of Ted Hughes?’, britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/english-and-drama/2013/10/rediscovered-the-earliest-recording-of-ted-hughes.html. The tape was discovered by Peter Redgrove’s wife, Penelope Shuttle. It may well be that the readings were rehearsals for Redgrove’s and Hughes’s BBC radio auditions in September 1956. The Hughes poems on the recording were included in Hawk in the Rain, save that the first half of one called ‘Lust and Desire’ was omitted. It remains unpublished, while the second half was renamed ‘Incompatibilities’.

15. A Group Anthology, ed. Edward Lucie-Smith and Philip Hobsbaum (Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 47.

16. CP 25.

17. Untitled insert in the long poetic sequence of BL Add. MS 88918/1.

18. Saint Botolph’s Review, Feb 1956, repr. in Hawk in the Rain (CP 29).

19. 27 June 1955 (BL Add. MS 88918/129).

20. Ted Hughes, A Dancer to God: Tributes to T. S. Eliot (Faber & Faber, 1992; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993), p. 20.

21. Ibid., pp. 5, 20–4.

22. Ibid., pp. 21, 44, 36.

23. Ibid., pp. 21, 44, 36.

24. Ibid., pp. 30–3.

25. Poetry, 88 (Aug 1956), pp. 295–7 (sent to the editor by Sylvia) (CP 13–15). Described by Dan Huws as the product of a challenge concocted by Luke Myers and Ted to write a poem with this title, and as Ted’s ‘first professional piece of work … his existential celebration of his relationship with Sylvia, but written for his friends’ (Daniel Huws, Memories of Ted Hughes 1952–1963 (Nottingham: Richard Hollis, 2010), p. 36).

26. Loose notebook leaves listing circumstances and dates of composition of early poems (BL Add. MS 88918/7).

27. Ted Hughes MS 1, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington (CP 19–20).

28. He often told the story, most fully in a 1990 letter to Sonnenberg, responding to the latter’s memory of an earlier telling (L 586–7).

29. Ben Sonnenberg, Lost Property: Memoirs and Confessions of a Bad Boy (New York: Summit Books, 1991), p. 131.

30. The story is recounted in Jung’s 1952 essay ‘Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle’.

31. Hawk in the Rain version of ‘The Jaguar’ (CP 19).

32. BL Add. MS 88918/7.

Chapter 7: Falcon Yard

1. BL Add. MS 88918/129.

2. To McCaughey (L 35).

3. The above account is based on private reminiscences (telephone interview, 2 May 2015, and subsequent emails).

4. ‘Stone Boy with Dolphin’, in Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and Other Prose Writings (Faber & Faber, 1977, 2nd edn 1979; New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 297. This story is a chapter from her incomplete, and now lost, autobiographical novel ‘Falcon Yard’.

5. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, ‘Reuben Davis, Sylvia Plath and Other American Writers: The Perils of Emotional Struggle’, in Peter Stearns and Jan Lewis, eds, An Emotional History of the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 446.

6. Lucas Myers, An Essential Self: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (Nottingham: Richard Hollis, 2011), p. 27.

7. The essay survives, with supervisor’s comments, in the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington (Plath MSS II.13.2).

8. Plath, ‘Stone Boy’, p. 299.

9. JSP 211. Myers’s poem was in Saint Botolph’s Review (1956), p. 8.

10. Plath, ‘Stone Boy’, p. 297.

11. Ibid., p. 305.

12. JSP 211.

13. JSP 212.

14. JSP 212.

15. Plath, ‘Stone Boy’, p. 308.

16. Ibid., p. 309.

17. Ibid., p. 311.

18. Email from Jean Gooder to Jonathan Bate, 3 May 2015.

19. ‘St Botolph’s’, in Birthday Letters (CP 1052).

20. JSP 44.

21. William Carlos Williams, in his poem ‘To Elsie’.

22. Plath, ‘Stone Boy’, p. 309.

23. CP 1169–70.

24. Both poems were reprinted in The Hawk in the Rain (CP 41, 43).

25. The Hawk in the Rain (CP 42–7). This war sequence is, strictly speaking, not quite the ending of the collection. One further poem follows as a kind of epilogue: ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’, which simultaneously invokes the old religious civil wars of the sixteenth century and Hughes’s own maternal Farrar heritage.

26. The fullest and best account of Plath’s ‘life before Ted’ is Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life before Ted (Simon & Schuster, 2013).

27. JSP 212–14.

28. JSP 214.

29. To Aurelia Plath, 9 March 1956 (SPLH 249).

30. ‘Pursuit’, CPSP 22.

31. SPLH 249, 247.

32. 6 March 1956 (JSP 225).

33. L 37.

34. JSP 232–5; Lucas Myers, Crow Steered, Bergs Appeared: A Memoir of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (Seewanee, Tenn.: Proctor’s Hall Press, 2001), p. 35, and Essential Self, p. 28; ‘Visit’ in Birthday Letters is Hughes’s version, recording his shock ten years after her death upon reading for the first time her journal account of her feelings that weekend.

35. Jane Baltzell Kopp, who also lodged at Whitstead, in ‘“Gone, Very Gone Youth”: Sylvia Plath at Cambridge, 1955–1957’, in Edward Butscher, ed., Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977; repr. Peter Owen, 1979), p. 63.

Chapter 8: 18 Rugby Street

1. Daniel Huws, Memories of Ted Hughes 1952–1963 (Nottingham: Richard Hollis, 2010), p. 26.

2. JSP 552.

3. JSP 554.

4. JSP 563.

5. JSP 567.

6. ‘18 Rugby Street’, CP 1055–8.

7. These lines were first published in their original verse form in Jonathan Bate, ‘Sorrow in a Black Coat’, Times Literary Supplement, 5 Feb 2014 (extract from ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’, BL Add. MS 88918/1).

8. L 37.

9. JSP 217.

10. JSP 553.

11. Sassoon’s autobiographical story ‘The Diagram’, Chicago Review, 17:4 (1965), p. 111, quoted, Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life before Ted (Simon & Schuster, 2013), much the fullest and best account of the relationship between Plath and Sassoon.

12. 9 April 1956 (L 38).

13. Emory 644/139.

14. ‘Venus in the Seventh’, draft chapter for ‘Falcon Yard’ (Emory 644/130/12).

15. JSP 570 (16 April 1956); SPLH 263 (19 April 1956).

16. JSP 570.

17. ‘The first time I bought a bottle of wine’ (BL Add. MS 88918/1).

18. ‘Fidelity’, in Birthday Letters (CP 1060).

19. Jane Baltzell Kopp, ‘“Gone, Very Gone Youth”: Sylvia Plath at Cambridge 1955–1957’, in Edward Butscher, ed., Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977; repr. Peter Owen, 1979)’, p. 74.

20. Lucas Myers, Crow Steered, Bergs Appeared: A Memoir of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (Seewanee, Tenn.: Proctor’s Hall Press, 2001), p. 148.

21. SPLH 264, 265, 266.

22. SPLH 272.

23. SPLH 274.

24. SPLH 288.

25. ‘I didn’t even ask her to marry me. She suggested it as a good idea and I said OK, why not?’ (to Aurelia Plath, Emory 644/18).

26. ‘So Quickly It’s Over’, interview with Ted Hughes, Wild Steelhead and Salmon, Winter 1999, p. 51.

27. Emory 644/180.

28. ‘A Pink Wool Knitted Dress’, in Birthday Letters (CP 1064).

29. L 39.

30. SPLH 292–3.

Chapter 9: ‘Marriage is my medium’

1. As noted in the Prologue, the story of Ted and Sylvia’s years together has been told many times, most accurately, though not without errors of fact, in Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (Viking, 1989; repr. Penguin, 1998), written with assistance from Olwyn and checked by Ted. In the following chapters, I am indebted to Stevenson, but have based my narrative on primary sources, in particular Sylvia Plath, Letters Home (SPLH), The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950–1962 (JSP), Sylvia’s unpublished letters, Ted’s published and unpublished letters, and his unpublished journal entries, notebooks and pocket diaries, as well as his poetically reshaped memories in Birthday Letters and related poems. Specific references are given for all quotations.

2. ‘Your Paris’, CP 1065–7.

3. SPLH 298.

4. L 44.

5. JSP 240.

6. L 46.

7. ‘Moonwalk’, CP 1070.

8. Notes on How the Whale Became (Emory 744/115/6).

9. There are three fine drawings of Ted by Sylvia on the honeymoon. One is now in the National Portrait Gallery, one in the possession of Warren Plath, and the third (drawn in Paris, on the return journey) in the possession of Frieda Hughes, reproduced in her Sylvia Plath: Drawings (Faber & Faber, 2013), p. 25.

10. SPLH 298–9.

11. SPLH 300.

12. L 46.

13. JSP 259.

14. ‘You Hated Spain’, CP 1068. Plath’s discomfort is apparent in her poems ‘The Goring’ and ‘The Beggars’.

15. JSP 250.

16. Paul Alexander, Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath (New York: Viking, 1991, repr. 1999), p. 194. The friend of Plath’s from whom Alexander derived this story is not an entirely reliable source.

17. SPLH 304–5.

18. SPLH 305.

19. SPLH 306. In terms of the chronological run in the narrative of Birthday Letters, the poem ‘Wuthering Heights’ is misplaced insofar as it occurs after the poems about the following year in Cambridge (‘55 Eltisley’, ‘Chaucer’).

20. ‘Wuthering Heights’, CP 1080–2.

21. CPSP 71–2, 167–8.

22. SPLH 311.

23. 10 Oct 1956 (Plath MSS II, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington); 5 Oct 1956 (L 57–60).

24. Sylvia’s letters to Ted remain in private hands. This one (7–8 Oct 1956) was published in Sylvia Plath: Drawings, pp. 2–4.

25. Olwyn Hughes, in Stevenson, Bitter Fame, p. 99.

26. SPLH 329.

27. Notes on The Hawk in the Rain (Emory 644/11).

28. SPLH (21 Nov 1956).

29. Plath to Marcia Brown Plumer, 4 Feb 1963 (Sylvia Plath Collection, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, MS 45, 16/3/13).

30. ‘55 Eltisley’, CP 1073–4.

31. Plath to Marcia Brown Plumer, 9 April 1957 (Smith College MS 45, 16/3/15).

32. 23 Feb 1957 (L 94).

33. 24 Feb 1957 (SPLH 340).

34. L 98.

35. ‘Chaucer’, CP 1075–6.

36. Letter to Gerald and Joan Hughes, May 1957 (Emory 854/1).

37. L 97–8.

38. Olwyn Hughes, in Stevenson, Bitter Fame, p. 110.

39. To Olwyn, 20–3 June 1957, from on board ship (L 99–104).

40. JSP 302.

41. JSP 289.

42. L 104.

43. ‘The Chipmunk’, CP 1082–3.

44. To Gerald and Joan from Wellesley, late June 1957 (L 103).

45. 22 Aug 1957 (L 106).

46. To Gerald and Joan from Wellesley, late June 1957 (L 104).

47. JSP 296, inspiring Plath’s ‘Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor’ and Hughes’s Birthday Letters poem ‘Flounders’.

48. JSP 284.

49. JSP 285.

50. 20 July 1957 (JSP 289).

51. Ibid.

52. ‘The Prism’, CP 1162–3.

Chapter 10: ‘So this is America’

1. JSP 305.

2. ‘18 Rugby Street’, CP 1058.

3. JSP 302.

4. To Myers, Oct 1957 (L 110).

5. Ibid.

6. See ‘Child’s Park’ in Birthday Letters.

7. It was reprinted in 1960, though not all copies of the first edition had sold by this time, so they were recycled bearing the dust wrapper of the second.

8. Sylvia to Ted’s parents, 5 Nov 1957 (Emory 980/1).

9. Notes on The Hawk in the Rain (Emory 644/11).

10. L 111–12.

11. New Statesman, 28 Sept 1957.

12. To Myers, Oct 1957 (L 110).

13. nytimes.com/books/98/03/01/home/plath-hawk.html.

14. Sylvia to Olwyn, quoted, Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (Viking, 1989, repr. Penguin, 1998), p. 117; Ted to Olwyn (BL Add. MS 88948/1).

15. L 112.

16. Observer, 6 Oct 1957.

17. CP 36.

18. CP 45–6.

19. Draft for ‘The Hawk in the Rain’, unbound notebook page (Emory 644/57). < > indicates an arrowed insertion.

20. Drafts for ‘The Thought-Fox’, in drafts, notes and corrected page proof of The Hawk in the Rain, in the Ted Hughes Papers MS 1, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

21. It is now in the Hughes Archive at Emory. On Ted’s syllabus, see further Amanda Golden’s excellent article ‘Ted Hughes and the Midcentury American Academy’, Ted Hughes Society Journal, 3:1 (2013), pp. 47–52.

22. To Huws, late Feb 1958 (L 120–1).

23. To Olwyn, late March 1958 (L 123).

24. Peter Davison, The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston from Robert Frost to Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath, 1955–1960 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), p. 166.

25. 20 May 1959 (JSP 484–5).

26. 5 March 1958 (JSP 345–6).

27. 29 March 1958 (JSP 360–1).

28. JSP 388 (the performance was on 21 May 1958).

29. Amanda Golden, ‘Ted Hughes, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and an Interview with Jules Chametzky’, Ted Hughes Society Journal, 3:1 (2013), pp. 59–66, records the following memory of Chametzky, who arrived to teach at UMass Amherst the semester after Ted: ‘I was visited by two senior students, officers in the then Literary Club … [who] had studied with Ted Hughes the year before, when he had occupied the very office I was in. They both seemed to have a crush on Hughes. The older one named Susan Goldstein, about six feet tall, gave me a copy of Ted’s first book – The Hawk in the Rain’ (p. 64). Susan Goldstein is deceased.

30. 22 May 1958 (JSP 391).

31. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

32. 11 June 1958 (JSP 392). Plath biographers are not averse to turning the glass into Ted: ‘He hit her hard enough that she saw stars’ (Carl Rollyson, American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2013), p. 155).

33. 11 June 1958 (JSP 392).

34. 27 Dec 1958 (JSP 447).

35. 7 July 1958 (JSP 401).

36. 9 July 1958 (JSP 403).

37. ‘9 Willow Street’, CP 1087–90.

38. CP 1090–4.

39. 31 Dec 1958 (JSP 454).

40. 14 Sept 1958 (JSP 420).

41. 12 Dec 1958 (JSP 434).

42. Eliot to Hughes, 30 Oct 1958 (pasted by Sylvia into a blue scrapbook of memorabilia, Emory 644/OP103).

43. Early 1959 (L 139).

44. To Davison, 27 April 1959, in Davison, The Fading Smile, p. 166 (where the year is incorrectly remembered as 1958).

45. L 142.

46. John Summers, Obituary of Rollie McKenna, Guardian, 21 July 2003.

47. Robert Lowell, Life Studies (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1959, repr. 1964), pp. 81–2.

48. To Weissbort, 21 March 1959 (L 140).

49. To Myers, 19 May 1959 (L 145).

50. To Myers, 19 June 1959 (L 146).

51. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Figs’, in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (Martin Secker, 1923).

52. To Baskin, July 1959 (L 147).

53. See Peter K. Steinberg, ‘Did You Know … Sylvia Plath at Yaddo’, Sylvia Plath Info Blog, 19 Nov 2014, sylviaplathinfo.blogspot.co.uk/2014_11_01_archive.html.

54. ‘The Badlands’, in Birthday Letters (CP 1095–8).

55. To his parents, from Yellowstone (Emory 980/1/18).

56. Ibid.

57. Sylvia to Aurelia and Warren Plath, 28 July 1959, from California, describing what she called the ‘Bear Incident’ in a long letter composed on the new typewriter that they took with them on their travels (Lilly Library, only partially printed in SPLH 402–4). Some details also taken from Ted’s Yellowstone letter to his parents (partially printed in L 150–1).

58. Quoted phrase from Hughes, ‘The 59th Bear’, CP 1100–4.

59. Letter in Lilly Library, postscript not in SPLH extract.

60. Ibid.

61. ‘Yogi Bear’s Big Break’, his debut episode, aired on the ABC network on 2 Oct 1958. Ted and Sylvia’s television habits during their American residence are hard to reconstruct, but Sylvia was sufficiently in tune with popular culture to write in her journal on 31 May 1959, ‘Last night I sent off my application from here for a TV writing grant … Money, money. I like CBS, too. They are more attentive than most stations’ (JSP 487). Characteristically (and depressingly), Plath biographers tend to read the name of Norton in ‘The Fifty-Ninth Bear’ as the articulation of a murderous impulse towards either her ex-boyfriend Dick Norton or Ted (or both), rather than a jokey allusion to Yogi Bear.

62. Sylvia Plath, ‘The Fifty-Ninth Bear’ (1959), in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and Other Prose Writings (Faber & Faber, 1977, rev. edn 1979; New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 98.

63. CP 1103.

64. Sylvia to Aurelia and Warren Plath, 28 July 1959 (Plath MSS II, Lilly Library).

65. Sylvia to her mother and brother (ibid.); Ted to his parents (Emory 980/1).

66. Draft in red exercise book (BL Add. MS 88918/1).

67. To his parents (Emory 980/1).

68. ‘Grand Canyon’, CP 1104–6.

69. yaddo.org/yaddo/history.shtml.

70. 10 Sept 1959 (SPLH 407).

71. ‘Portraits’, in Birthday Letters (CP 1109–11).

72. See further, Jeremy Treglown’s fine article ‘Howard’s Way: Painting Sylvia Plath’, Times Literary Supplement, 30 Aug 2013, p. 13.

73. Ted’s working draft is preserved in BL Add. MS 88918/9.

74. 7 Oct 1959 (SPLH 409).

75. JSP 207.

76. JSP 516, 517, 520.

77. JSP 514, 518.

78. SPLH 411.

79. L 153.

80. 9 March 1959 (JSP 473).

81. Ibid.

82. CPSP 119–20.

83. ‘Black Coat’, in Birthday Letters (CP 1108–9).

Chapter 11: Famous Poet

1. L 170–7.

2. 4 Oct 1959 (JSP 513–14).

3. Olwyn Hughes, in Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (Viking, 1989; repr. Penguin, 1998), pp. 176–7.

4. SPLH 416–17.

5. SPLH 423.

6. ‘Isis’, in Birthday Letters (CP 1114).

7. Lucas Myers, Crow Steered, Bergs Appeared: A Memoir of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (Seewanee, Tenn.: Proctor’s Hall Press, 2001), p. 77.

8. SPLH 424.

9. Stevenson, Bitter Fame, pp. 185–7; letter from Janet Crosbie-Hill to New Review, June 1976; unpublished letter from Olwyn Hughes to Jonathan Bate, 2 Jan 2014.

10. To Myers, 22 Apr 1960 (L 158–9). Ted remembered the birth in a lovely poem called ‘Delivering Frieda’, later revised as ‘Remission’ in Birthday Letters (CP 1113–14).

11. Ted and Sylvia to Olwyn, 2 April 1960 (Emory 980/1).

12. SPLH 440.

13. L 148.

14. Loose-leaf listing of dates and places of composition (BL Add. MS 88918/7). ‘Crag Jack’s Apostasy’ was the one poem written (on the guest-room bed) in Aurelia Plath’s house in Elmwood Road, Wellesley. It is neat that a poem inspired by a Hughes ancestor was written in the Plath house.

15. Ted Hughes MS 1, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. The manuscript actually combines pages from ‘The Feast of Lupercal’ with some from the collection that Sylvia was putting together at the time, which, the manuscript reveals, she titled ‘New Poems 1958’, then ‘The Bull of Bendylaw’, then ‘The Devil of the Stairs’. The sheaf of paper thus has one page reading simply ‘To Sylvia’ (his dedication) and another reading simply ‘For Ted’ (hers).

16. CP 82–3; Emory 644/59.

17. Samuel Johnson, ‘Life of Cowley’, in Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–81); Hughes, ‘Notes on Lupercal’ (Ted Hughes MS 1, Lilly Library).

18. CP 84–5.

19. Ibid.

20. CP 68–9; ‘Notes on Lupercal’ (Lilly Library).

21. L 244 (programme transmitted 3 Sept 1965).

22. Interviewed by Ekbert Faas, in Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1980), p. 199.

23. Queen, 15 March 1960, p. 140.

24. ‘Poetic force refined by deep thought’, Halifax Daily Courier and Guardian, 18 March 1960.

25. Observer, 27 March 1960.

26. Times Literary Supplement, 15 April 1960, unsigned review by G. S. Fraser.

27. Spectator, 22 April 1960.

28. Kenneth Young, ‘Poet from the Pennines’, Daily Telegraph, 14 April 1960.

29. Philip Booth, ‘The instinct to survive’, New York Times, 14 Aug 1960.

30. Harper’s Magazine, Sept 1960, p. 103.

31. Observer, 18 Dec 1960. Ted kept his review clippings. Those for Lupercal are gathered at Emory 644/175.

32. To Olwyn, May 1960 (L 159–60).

33. To the Merwins, June 1960 (L 162–3).

34. To Olwyn (Emory 980/1).

35. L 165–6; SPLH 448–9.

36. Olwyn Hughes to Jonathan Bate, 2 Jan 2014.

37. The other two were Ted and Assia Wevill. Susan Alliston was just possibly a fourth.

38. Sylvia’s version of the Christmas row is in a letter to her mother: Sylvia to Aurelia, 1 Jan 1961 (unpublished passages of letter in Lilly Library). Olwyn’s is in Stevenson, Bitter Fame, pp. 203–4 (supplemented by personal communication). Both women had fierce tempers and were capable of exaggerating slights, so neither’s version can necessarily be trusted in every particular.

39. BL Add. MS 88918/128. Journal entries on torn notebook sheets.

40. Ibid., 26 Dec 1960.

41. Ibid., 3 Jan 1961.

42. Ibid., 2 April 1962.

43. Plath, ‘Tulips’, 18 March 1961; Hughes journal, 12 April 1961.

44. Broadcast 31 Jan 1961. Available on CD, The Spoken Word: Sylvia Plath (BBC/British Library, 2010).

45. Letter from Frances to David McCullough, 7 July 1974 (Frances McCullough Papers, University of Maryland, hdl.handle.net/1903.1/4603).

46. 28 Feb 1961 (JSP 601).

47. 5 March 1961 (JSP 605).

48. Plath to Dorothy Benotti, 29 March 1961 (Sylvia Plath Collection, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, MS 45, 16/2).

49. Mentioned in a letter to John Fisher and family, April 1961.

50. ‘The Gypsy’, in Birthday Letters (CP 117–18).

51. Myers, Crow Steered, p. 78.

52. Olwyn Hughes to Jonathan Bate, 2 Jan 2014.

53. Ibid.

Chapter 12: The Grass Blade

1. Emory 980/1.

2. ‘The Table’, CP 1132–4.

3. Hughes journal, 11 Sept 1961.

4. ‘Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath’s Poems’, in The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), pp. 187–95 (pp. 193–4).

5. SPLH 521.

6. Emory 980/1.

7. SPLH 520.

8. SPLH 529.

9. The New Poetry: An Anthology Selected and Introduced by A. Alvarez (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 15.

10. A. Alvarez, ‘The New Poetry’, in ibid., pp. 17–28.

11. Jan–May 1962 (JSP 630–43).

12. To Dan and Helga Huws, 9 June 1962 (Emory 644/4).

13. JSP 641.

14. See further, ‘Secret life of Sylvia Plath’, Daily Mail, 5 Feb 2004.

15. The novel was lost around 1970, according to Ted, so perhaps it was a victim of the 1971 fire at his Yorkshire home, discussed below.

16. 10 June 1962 (JSP 659).

17. ‘The Jaguar Skin’, quoted from BL Add. MM 88918/1, the typescript of Birthday Letters as originally submitted to Faber & Faber.

18. Ibid., though the poem exists in multiple drafts. Ted told the story in attenuated form in a letter to Gerald and Joan, 2 July 1962 (Emory 854/1).

19. Ruth Fainlight, ‘Sylvia and Jane’, Times Literary Supplement, 12 Dec 2003.

20. Plath to Leonard Baskin, 16 April 1962 (BL Add. MS 83684).

21. David Wevill, interview quoted in Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes’ Doomed Love (Robson Books, 2006), p. 90.

22. Macedo, interviewed twenty-five years after the event, quoted in Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (Viking, 1989; repr. Penguin, 1998), p. 243. In a more elaborate (embroidered?) interview given a further decade later, Macedo has Assia telling her that what Ted said in the kitchen was ‘You know what’s happened to us, don’t you?’, to which Assia allegedly said, ‘Yes’ (Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001), p. 140).

23. Nathaniel Tarn Papers, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

24. Angela Landels, interview quoted in Koren and Negev, Lover of Unreason, p. 86.

25. ‘Dreamers’, in Birthday Letters (CP 1145–6).

26. ‘The Rabbit Catcher’, in Birthday Letters (CP 1136–8).

27. CPSP 193–4.

28. ‘Event’, CPSP 194–5.

29. Suzette Macedo, who claimed that Assia showed her the note, interviewed in Feinstein, Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet, p. 141.

30. Nathaniel Tarn Papers, Stanford. Tarn, a minor writer from ‘the Group’, was in the extraordinary position of being (a) the intimate confidant of both David and Assia Wevill, separately, and (b) a psychoanalyst. He kept detailed notes on these events, which he heard about (from both points of view) over a series of lunch dates.

31. William Trevor, Excursions in the Real World: Memoirs (Hutchinson, 1993), p. 117.

32. Hughes, ‘Chlorophyl’, in Capriccio (Lurley: Gehenna Press, 1990) (CP 799). In their biography of Assia, the touchingly literalistic Koren and Negev quote the next two lines of the poem, ‘Inside it, / The witchy doll, soaked in Dior’, and proceed to the assumption that ‘the blade of grass had been dipped in Dior perfume’ (Lover of Unreason, p. 95). But the poem says that it was a doll, not the grass, which was perfumed. ‘Chlorophyl’ proceeds like a Russian doll, with a series of things inside each other, the next being a gravestone and the one after that a sample of Assia’s ashes. One may assume that these were not also contained in the envelope with the blade of grass: Hughes is collapsing different memories, ending the Capriccio cycle by yoking the beginning and the end of his relationship with Assia.

33. CPSP 202–3.

34. CPSP 224.

35. CP 585–6, first published in Ploughshares (1980), repr. in 1982 and 1995 Selected Poems. Omitted lines: CP 1281.

36. CP 1195, where it is also printed as the closing poem.

37. ‘Lily’, CP 587.

38. CPSP 204–5.

39. Nathaniel Tarn Papers, Stanford.

40. Draft notes for Capriccio poem sequence (BL Add. MS 88918/1).

41. CP 783, with clear references to Sylvia and Assia. The third, who ‘sank without a cry’, may be Susan Alliston, in the light of her link to 18 Rugby Street, the house of Ted’s Friday the 13th night with Sylvia.

42. Nathaniel Tarn Papers, Stanford.

43. Ibid.

44. Richard Murphy, The Kick: A Life among Writers (Granta, 2002), p. 222.

45. Ibid., p. 223.

46. Ibid., p. 225.

47. Plath to Murphy, 7 Oct 1962 (Richard Murphy Papers, Department of Special Collections, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa).

48. Late Sept 1962 (L 208).

49. Nathaniel Tarn Papers, Stanford.

Chapter 13: ‘That Sunday Night’

1. To Gerald and family, 2 July 1962 (Emory 854/1).

2. SPLH 542, 554.

3. Olwyn Hughes Papers (BL Add. MS 88948/1). Subsequent quotations and paraphrase from the same crucial letter.

4. Lines from ‘The Grouse’ (BL Add. MS 88918/1).

5. Lines from ‘By day it was teaching in college’ (BL Add. MS 88918/1).

6. ‘Epiphany’, CP 1115–17.

7. Plath and Hughes to Davidow, Christmas 1960 (Sylvia Plath Collection, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, MS 45, 16/5/20).

8. ‘Error’, CP 1121–3.

9. Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798).

10. ‘Error’, CP 1121–3.

11. To Marcia Brown Plumer, 4 Feb 1963 (Smith College MS 45, 16/3/20).

12. Ibid., 2 Jan 1963 (Smith College MS 45, 16/3/21).

13. To Clarissa Roche, 19 Oct 1962 (Smith College MS 45, 17/17/3), continuing, in more bitter but still witty vein: ‘The fact that he left the week after I almost died of influenza last month, and that his family does not want him to support us in any way, is just one step, I guess, in the path of poetic genius.’

14. To Aurelia Plath, 12 Oct 1962 (SPLH 551).

15. CPSP 223–4.

16. CPSP 226–7.

17. CPSP 231–2.

18. CPSP 233–4.

19. CPSP 240–2.

20. 7 Nov 1962 (SPLH 567).

21. To Olwyn, pre-Christmas 1962 (Emory 980/1/10).

22. 26 Oct 1962 (Nathaniel Tarn Papers, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries).

23. 5 Jan 1963 (ibid.).

24. Quoted, Preface by Richard Hollis, in Susan Alliston, Poems and Journals 1960–1969, introduction by Ted Hughes (Nottingham: Richard Hollis, 2010), p. 9.

25. I owe this information to Gail Crowther, in Elizabeth Sigmund and Gail Crowther, Sylvia Plath in Devon: A Year’s Turning (Stroud: Fonthill Media, 2014), p. 117.

26. Nation, 14 May 1960, p. 426.

27. Hughes, ‘Susan Alliston’, in Alliston, Poems and Journals, p. 13.

28. Ibid., p. 15.

29. ‘Samurai’, in Alliston, Poems and Journals, p. 19.

30. Hughes, ‘Susan Alliston’, p. 15.

31. Alliston, Poems and Journals, p. 82.

32. ‘Soho Square’ (BL Add. MS 88918/1).

33. Ibid. If only at the level of metaphor, the language is orgasmic: ‘came / At the top of your voice. Volcanic’.

34. ‘Robbing Myself’, in Birthday Letters (CP 1150–1).

35. To Marty Brown, 4 Feb 1963 (Smith College MS 45, 16/3/20).

36. Quoted and paraphrased from BL Add. MS 88918/129.

37. ‘The Inscription’, CP 1154–5.

38. Susan Alliston, unpublished journal entry for 12 Feb 1963, quoted by kind permission of her sister.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid.

41. Nathaniel Minton, A Memoir of Ted Hughes (Westmoreland Press, 2015), p. 27.

42. Ibid.

43. ‘That Sunday Night’, manuscript draft in BL Add. MS 88918/1. ‘Of guilt’ is scored through in the holograph. The three epithets for the voice are from another draft.

44. L 213.

45. Dr John Horder, interviewed in Jane Feinmann, ‘Rhyme, reason and depression’, Guardian, 16 Feb 1993.

46. Emory 644/180.

47. Barbara Blackman, personal communication.

48. Observer, 17 Feb 1963.

49. Jillian Becker, Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath (Ferrington, 2002), p. 26.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid.

52. BL Add. MS 88918/1.

53. End of ‘Last Letter’, in a special edition of the New Statesman, edited by Ted’s friend Melvyn Bragg (11 Oct 2010), p. 44.

54. ‘Walking in the Snow Alone’, in ‘That Sunday Night’ exercise book (BL Add. MS 88918/1).

55. The haunting thought of the phone calls was best expressed in the version of ‘What did happen that Sunday night?’ in the same exercise book, in which he asks himself ‘How often the phone rang’ in his ‘empty room’, with Sylvia ‘hearing it’ in her ‘receiver’ as if she were ‘already a fading memory / Of a telephone ringing in a brain / That was already dead’.

56. ‘They’re doing “Difficulties of a Bridegroom” this week’: it was broadcast on Monday 21 Jan 1963, so the (undated) letter was probably written the previous day, 20 Jan 1963 (Emory 980/1).

57. There are extensive drafts of both this poem and ‘Uncle Albert’s Suicide’ in Emory 644/58.

58. ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’, CP 182–3.

59. ‘Uncle A’, in Jan 1963 letter to Olwyn, much revised into ‘Sacrifice’ in Wolfwatching (CP 758–60).

Chapter 14: The Custodian

1. 21 April 1967 (L 272).

2. 15 March 1963 (L 215–16).

3. Hughes to Lowell, 15 May 1963 (Houghton Library, Harvard University).

4. 12 March 1963 (Nathaniel Tarn Papers, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries).

5. Ibid.

6. Postcard supplied by Peter Porter to Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev for A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes’ Doomed Love (Robson Books, 2006).

7. Elizabeth Compton Sigmund, interviewed in the Guardian, 18 Jan 2013 (theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/18/elizabeth-sigmund-bell-jar-sylvia-plath). See also her co-written memoir (with Gail Crowther), Sylvia Plath in Devon: A Year’s Turning (Stroud: Fonthill Media, 2014). Her memory is not always reliable, but it does seem that in his darker moments Ted did make the ‘murder a genius’ remark (Alvarez reports hearing it at a party, about a year after Sylvia’s death).

8. Assia Wevill journal, quoted, Koren and Negev, Lover of Unreason, pp. 122–4.

9. Susan Alliston, Poems and Journals 1960–1969, introduction by Ted Hughes (Nottingham: Richard Hollis, 2010), p. 87.

10. Hughes to Elizabeth Compton (BL Add. MS 88612).

11. Double airmail letter, 22 July 1963 (Emory 854/1).

12. Hughes journal, Aug 1963.

13. Ibid., 27 Sept 1963.

14. Ibid., Aug 1963.

15. Ibid., 4 Feb 1965.

16. Now with the other books from Ted’s library at Emory.

17. Hilda to Aurelia, 12 Oct 1963 (Plath MS II, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington).

18. 24 Nov 1963, ‘Ted Hughes: Letters to Assia Wevill’ (Emory 1058/1).

19. Olwyn Hughes, personal communication.

20. Ted to Gerald, 4 Dec 1963 (Emory 854/1).

21. Assia to Ted, 22 Jan 1964 (Emory 1058/1).

22. Ted to Assia, 15 Jan 1964 (Emory 1058/1).

23. Alliston, Poems and Journals, p. 87, supplemented by unpublished passages.

24. 28 Aug 1963 (Emory 865/1).

25. See first draft at Emory 644/59.

26. CP 172; see also Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath – A Marriage (Little, Brown, 2004), p. 213, where it is asserted that Hughes also wrote the Wodwo poem ‘Ballad from a Fairy Tale’ at this time as another ‘incoherent elegy for Sylvia’. This claim is based on Ted’s remark to the critic Ann Skea some twenty years later that the ‘fringed square of satin’ in this poem (CP 172) was a piece of ‘funerary furnishing’ (Ann Skea, Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (Armidale, NSW: University of New England Press, 1994), p. 254), which Middlebrook assumes ‘he had seen under Plath’s head as she lay in her casket’. But this seems unlikely, since the poem was written on a train as Ted travelled from Court Green to London one morning long before Sylvia’s death – though the image may well have taken on new meaning after her death.

27. ‘Life after Death’, CP 1160–1.

28. New York Times Book Review, 8 Nov 1964, p. 28.

29. British Book News, Feb 1964, p. 141.

30. Guardian, 10 July 1964; Daily Telegraph, 23 July 1964.

31. Hughes journal, Aug 1963.

32. Wodwo, discussed below, and a selection of poems that he did not consider good enough to include in his Faber volume, gathered as Recklings, his first limited-edition fine-press project (150 copies for Turret Books of Kensington, with 1966 on the title page but actually published in January 1967, at five guineas a copy).

33. Saturday Night, 78:10 (Nov 1963), pp. 21–7.

34. Audio books: T. S. Eliot Reads (Caedmon, 2000); T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets, read by Ted Hughes (Faber/Penguin, 1996).

35. To ‘Gerald & Joan & infantry’, 10 May 1964 (Emory 854/1).

36. Hughes journal, 16–17 Aug 1964, with insertion written later in the year.

37. Ibid., 2 Sept 1964.

38. Ibid., 15 Sept 1964.

39. Ibid., 9 Oct 1964.

40. See ibid., 29 Sept 1964.

41. Produced by Ted’s friend Douglas Cleverdon. Cast listed at genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/72a24606054a46b5a37b2ee27fa4318b.

42. Account book for March 1964 to January 1967, its corners charred from the Lumb Bank fire (Emory 644/180/7).

43. Unsigned editorial, Modern Poetry in Translation, 1:1 (Autumn 1965). See further Daniel Weissbort, Ted Hughes and Translation (Nottingham: Richard Hollis, 2011).

44. Reviewed together with Idries Shah’s The Sufis under the title ‘Secret Ecstasies’, Listener, 29 Oct 1964.

45. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard Trask (1964, repr. Penguin, 1989), pp. 466–7.

46. Introduction to Keith Douglas, Selected Poems (Faber & Faber, 1964), repr. in WP 212–15.

47. ‘NOTES from Olwyn Hughes relating to Ted Hughes’s handling of Sylvia Plath publications and placing of ARIEL after her death’ (Emory 980/1/25).

48. ‘The Crime of Fools Exposed’, New York Times Book Review, 12 April 1964 (WP 42–4).

49. Encounter, 21:4 (Oct 1963), p. 45.

50. L 240.

51. Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating her Original Selection and Arrangement, foreword by Frieda Hughes (Faber & Faber, 2004), p. 43.

52. Sylvia Plath, Ariel (Faber & Faber, 1965), pp. 84–5.

53. Restored edition, pp. 7, 23.

54. The case for the prosecution was first made by Marjorie Perloff, ‘The Two Ariels: The (Re)Making of the Sylvia Plath Canon’, American Poetry Review, 13 (Nov–Dec 1984), pp. 10–18. The defence case is well articulated by Stephen Enniss, ‘Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Myth of Textual Betrayal’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 101:1 (March 2007), pp. 63–71.

55. Interview with John Horder, ‘Desk poet’, Guardian, 23 March 1965, p. 9.

56. ‘Sylvia Plath’, Poetry Book Society Bulletin, 44 (Feb 1965) (WP 161–2).

57. Undated letter, 1965. Quotation missing but story by Nick present in extract in L 239.

58. Observer, 14 March 1965.

59. The talk was published in October 1963, in a special issue of the magazine The Review devoted to Plath (9, pp. 20–6).

60. Spectator, 19 March 1965.

61. Reporter, 33 (7 Oct 1963), pp. 51–4.

62. Lowell, foreword to Plath, Ariel (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). The American edition contained a slightly different selection of poems.

63. ‘Russian Roulette’, Newsweek, 20 June 1966; ‘The Blood Jet is Poetry’, Time, 10 June 1966 (content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,942057,00.html). There is a helpful overview of the evolution of Plath’s posthumous reception in Marianne Egeland, Claiming Sylvia Plath: The Poet as Exemplary Figure (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013).

64. Assia was always an erratic speller. In a letter to Luke Myers (13 March 1965) announcing her daughter’s birth, she used the spellings ‘Tatianna’ and ‘Schura’ (‘to rhyme with Jura’).

Chapter 15: The Iron Man

1. Hughes journal, 15 Feb 1965.

2. To Murphy, 14 Sept 1965 (Richard Murphy Papers, Department of Special Collections, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa).

3. Gerald Hughes, Ted and I: A Brother’s Memoir (Robson Press, 2012), p. 165.

4. Susan Alliston, Poems and Journals 1960–1969, introduction by Ted Hughes (Nottingham: Richard Hollis, 2010), p. 89 (24 Jan 1965).

5. Ibid., p. 87.

6. Emory 1058/1.

7. CP 731–6.

8. Introduction to A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse (Faber & Faber, 1968) (WP 158).

9. Assia to Luke Myers, 15 July 1965 (Emory 865/1/11).

10. To Charles Tomlinson, fellow-poet and great friend of Ted (L 247).

11. To Assia, 31 Aug 1965 (Emory 865/1/35).

12. Plath MS II, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

13. ‘So Quickly It’s Over’, interview with Ted Hughes, Wild Steelhead and Salmon, Winter 1999, p. 51.

14. L 254.

15. I owe this, and much other information in this chapter, to Brenda Hedden.

16. Hughes journal, summer 1966 (BL Add. MS 88918/128).

17. End of Nov 1966 (Emory 1058/1).

18. Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes’ Doomed Love (Robson Books, 2006), p. 164.

19. End of Nov 1966 (Emory 1058/1).

20. Wodwo (Faber & Faber, 1967), p. 9.

21. CP 183.

22. Since ‘The Rain Horse’ was written in 1958, this doesn’t quite fit with the link to his own life after 1961. Ted was never averse to a little rewriting of history for the sake of an aesthetic or mythic pattern.

23. To Csokits, 6 Aug 1967 (L 273–4).

24. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard Trask (1964, repr. Penguin, 1989), p. 53.

25. ‘The Howling of Wolves’, ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’, ‘Out’, CP 180, 182, 165.

26. Epithets from ‘On the Shelf: Sean O’Brien recalls the inspirational example of Ted Hughes’s Wodwo’, Sunday Times (London), 3 April 1994.

27. Times Literary Supplement, 6 July 1967.

28. The Times (London), 13 July 1967.

29. C.B. Cox, ‘New Beasts for Old’, Spectator, 28 July 1967.

30. Critical Survey, Summer 1967.

31. Jeremy Robson, Tribune, 30 June 1967; Thwaite, Times Literary Supplement, 6 July 1967; Alvarez, Observer, 21 May 1967.

32. Guardian, 19 May 1967.

33. To Murphy, quoted, independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/features/the-diary-london-symphony-orchestra-poetry-international-festival-morrissey-harry-hill-richard-curtis-2100679.html.

34. See further Jack Malvern, ‘Beat it, British audience told drunk Ginsberg’, The Times (London), 10 April 2015.

35. To Spender, 21 July 1967 (Emory 644/8).

36. Film-maker Mira Hamermesh, quoted, Koren and Negev, Lover of Unreason, p. 167.

37. Hughes journal, 14 Aug 1967.

38. Ibid., undated, but immediately above entry of 18 Aug 1967.

39. Ibid., 11 Sept 1967.

40. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

41. To Myers, 10 Dec 1967 (Emory 865/1).

42. The evolution of his version can be traced in the manuscript drafts, which are now in the small Ted Hughes Archive in the library of Liverpool University – see especially his heavily corrected working draft, MS 24.55(2).

43. Peter Brook Archive, Victoria and Albert Museum, THM/452.

44. Introduction to Seneca’s Oedipus, adapted by Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber, 1969), pp. 7–8.

45. Irene Worth, reminiscence to Nick Gammage.

46. Charles Marowitz, review in the Village Voice, March 1968, repr. in his Confessions of a Counterfeit Critic: London Theatre Notebook, 1958–71 (Methuen, 1973), pp. 135–6, to which the whole of this paragraph (apart from my Crow allusion) is indebted.

47. Seneca’s Oedipus, p. 35.

48. Ibid., p.47.

49. Hughes, notes on Oedipus (Emory 644/115).

50. Peter Brook Archive, THM/452.

51. Seneca’s Oedipus, p. 41.

52. Ibid., p. 55.

53. Koren and Negev, Lover of Unreason, p. 174.

54. Observer, 24 March 1968.

55. Marowitz, Confessions of a Counterfeit Critic, pp. 137–9.

56. Their collaborations are selectively documented in the Peter Brook Archive acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in September 2014 and made available to the public in summer 2015.

57. 15 May 1968 (L 281–2).

58. BL Add. MS 88918/10.

59. Interviews on BBC Radio 4 with Nigel Forde (22 March 1992) and Radio 3 with Clive Wilmer (5 April 1992), on the publication of Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, explaining (or fantastically elaborating) the project’s genesis. He did write to John Fisher in December 1968, saying that he had given up on the Brook plan because the task was giving him bad dreams. Mahabharata comparison: Peter Brook Archive, THM/452. Ted told Brook that his production of the Mahabharata was ‘the most stiring [sic] and enthralling performance of any kind I’ve ever experienced’ (Peter Brook Archive, THM/452).

60. Notes on The Iron Man (Emory 644/115).

Chapter 16: ‘Then autobiographical things knocked it all to bits, as before’

1. Emory 1058/1/71.

2. March 1968 (Emory 1058/1/66).

3. Emory 1058/1.

4. I owe this information, and other material in this chapter, to Brenda Hedden.

5. Personal communication.

6. Nevertheless, she uncrumpled the poem and preserved it over five decades.

7. This paragraph is based on Baldwin’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek ‘Ted Hughes and Shamanism’, ann.skea.com/MichaelBaldwinMemoir1.htm.

8. Pat Kavanagh, ‘An Awkward Shyness’, Guardian, 12 July 1968.

9. Broadcast 12 Dec 1968.

10. Emory 644/57.

11. Journal note, 15 Aug 1968, quoted, Stephen Enniss and Karen Kukil, ‘No Other Appetite’: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Blood Jet of Poetry (New York: Grolier Club, 2005), p. 59.

12. Journal note, 15 Aug 1968 (Emory 644/57).

13. First published in Word in the Desert, the tenth-anniversary volume of Critical Quarterly, the journal of Ted’s friends C. B. Cox and A. E. Dyson, 25 July 1968.

14. Brenda Hedden, quoted, Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes’ Doomed Love (Robson Books, 2006), pp. 189–90.

15. Brenda Hedden, personal communication.

16. Emory 644/57.

17. Emory 644/58.

18. Interview with Heaney, London, 27 Oct 2009.

19. Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (Faber & Faber, 2008), p. 116.

20. Emory 1058/1.

21. To Anne-Lorraine Bujon, 16 Dec 1992 (L 632).

22. Assia’s journal entry, dated 20 March 1969, but it was actually 19 March (correct dates reconstructed from information in BBC Archive).

23. Assia’s journal entry dated ‘March 21st’, but it was actually 20 March 1969. Koren and Negev, Lover of Unreason is inaccurate at this point, missing the Haworth location.

24. BL Add. MS 88918/1.

25. Information from Olwyn Hughes, not known to Koren and Negev.

26. Ted to Assia’s sister, Celia Chaikin, 14 April 1969 (L 290).

27. This was her constant complaint to friends such as Edward Lucie-Smith (personal communication).

28. Private collection.

29. This paragraph is based on Koren and Negev, Lover of Unreason, p. 202. I am much indebted to this piece of research by the book’s authors.

30. Hughes, statement to Det. Sgt J. Loakman, Clapham Police Station, quoted, ibid., p. 203.

31. Porter, ‘Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath: A Bystander’s Recollections’, in Peter Craven, ed., The Best Australian Essays 2001 (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2001), p. 411.

32. ‘Requiem pro duabus filiis Israel’, in Nathaniel Tarn, Selected Poems 1950–2002 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), pp. 62–4.

33. L 292.

34. L 290.

35. Jottings in spiral shorthand notebook, in Ireland, April to early May 1969 (Emory 644/57).

36. Letter of early May 1969, Peter Brook Archive, Victoria and Albert Museum, THM/452. One of the wretched coincidences was presumably the unfortunate fact of Olwyn’s friend being the person who picked up the phone when Assia made her last call to Court Green.

37. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

38. Ibid.

39. To Aurelia, 10 July 1969 (Plath MS II, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington).

40. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid.

43. Ted Hughes, ‘Susan Alliston’, in her Poems and Journals 1960–1969 (Nottingham: Richard Hollis, 2010), p. 16.

44. Hughes to Herbert, 9 May 1967 (Emory 644/182).

45. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

46. 30 July 1969 (ibid.).

47. To Murphy, 10 Oct 1969 (L 295).

48. Vasko Popa, Selected Poems, trans. Anne Pennington, with an introduction by Ted Hughes (Penguin, 1969) (WP 220–7). The introduction was adapted from a radio talk recorded for the Third Programme in June 1966, broadcast that October, and published in Critical Survey, Summer 1966.

49. To Baskin, 1 Dec 1969 (L 300).

50. Introduction to Vasko Popa, Collected Poems 1943–1976 (Manchester: Carcanet, 1978) (WP 228).

51. L 298–9.

Chapter 17: The Crow

1. Quotations from ‘Words and Experience’, BBC radio talk, 24 Jan 1967, repr. in Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making: An Anthology of Poems and Programmes from ‘Listening and Writing’ (Faber & Faber, 1967), pp. 118–24.

2. Letter to Celia Chaikin (Emory 1058/1/1).

3. Emory 854/1/58.

4. Plath MS II, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

5. ‘59 poems – out of about 90’, he put it to Peter Redgrove (L 306), but that was to count the ‘Two Eskimo Songs’ as one.

6. L 304.

7. Leonard Baskin, quoted, Leonard Scigaj, The Poetry of Ted Hughes: Form and Imagination (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), p. 144.

8. 1977 interview with Ekbert Faas, in Faas, Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1980), p. 212.

9. Critical Quarterly, 8 (Autumn 1966), pp. 200–2.

10. On Crow and the Trickster, see further Keith Sagar, The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), pp. 170–81, and Ann Skea, ‘Ted Hughes and Crow’, ann.skea.com/Trickstr.htm.

11. ‘Crow on the Beach’, in Alberta Turner, ed., 45 Contemporary Poems: The Creative Process (Longman, 1985) (WP 240–1).

12. ‘Notes on Published Works’ (Emory 644/115).

13. ‘Crow Goes Hunting’, CP 236.

14. ‘In Laughter’, CP 233.

15. ‘Lovesong’, CP 255.

16. Quotations from March 1976 interview on Radio 3AW Adelaide, Australia.

17. ‘Crow’s First Lesson’, CP 211.

18. CP 213, 228, 252.

19. Unidentified fragment re Crow (Emory 644/115).

20. ‘Black Bird’, Observer, 11 Oct 1970.

21. ‘Books of the Day’, unknown paper, undated (Emory 644/175).

22. Stephen Spender, ‘The Last Ditch’, New York Review of Books, 17:1 (22 July 1971), pp. 3–4.

23. Patrick Cosgrove, Spectator, 6 March 1971.

24. Jack Kroll, ‘The Tree and the Bird’, Newsweek, 12 April 1971.

25. Daniel Hoffman, ‘Plain Songs for an Apocalypse’, New York Times Book Review, 18 April 1971.

26. Victor Howes, ‘Supercrow as a Black Rainbow’, Christian Science Monitor, 29 April 1971.

27. Nicola Barker, Sunday Times (London), 1 Oct 1995.

28. Reviews of Crow (Emory 644/175).

29. Keith Sagar and Stephen Tabor, Ted Hughes: A Bibliography 1946–1995 (London and New York: Mansell, 1998), p. 52. I am much indebted to this work.

30. Ibid., p. 58.

31. 1971, 300 copies at £18.

32. Lexham Press, 1971. The Shakespeare project is discussed in Chapter 28, ‘Goddess Revisited’, below.

33. CP 269.

34. CP 231–2.

35. CP 255. For a brilliant account of the hidden presence of Plath in ‘Lovesong’, and indeed elsewhere in Crow, see ch. 9 of Heather Clark’s admirable study, The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (Oxford University Press, 2011).

36. ‘Littleblood’ (the title being a figuration of the wounded self), CP 258.

37. ‘Crow Wakes’, CP 258; also in Eat Crow (not in CP).

38. Letter to Keith Sagar, 18–19 July 1998, acknowledging that Crow was an ‘oblique’ creative response to Plath’s death (Keith Sagar, ed., Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar (British Library, 2012), p. 269).

Chapter 18: The Savage God

1. ‘The Environmental Revolution’, Spectator, 21 March 1970 (edited version); repr. in full in Your Environment, 1:3 (Summer 1970), pp. 81–3 (WP 128–35).

2. WP 130.

3. Frieda Hughes, ‘Father dear father’, Daily Telegraph, 29 Oct 2002.

4. Personal communication.

5. 20 April 1970 (BL Add. MS 88918/128).

6. Letter in the possession of Brenda Hedden.

7. Personal communication.

8. Personal communication.

9. This section is based on conversations with Brenda Hedden, Olwyn Hughes and others, and a chronology compiled by Hughes in BL Add. MS 88993.

10. BL Add. MS 88918/128/1.

11. Erica Jong, Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2006), p. 40. Subsequent quotations from the same source.

12. Hughes journal, 17 Sept 1964.

13. Personal communication.

14. To Redgrove, 27 Oct 1971 (Redgrove Archive, Sheffield University Library).

15. Aurelia Plath, in ‘Sylvia Plath: A Biographical Note’ by Lois Ames, in The Bell Jar (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 214–15.

16. Fran McCullough, foreword to twenty-fifth anniversary reissue of The Bell Jar (1996), p. xiv.

17. To Redgrove, spring 1971 (Peter Redgrove Papers, Emory MS 867, redacted from L).

18. To Redgrove, spring 1971 (L 311).

19. Peter Brook, The Empty Space (MacGibbon & Kee, 1968), p. 49.

20. A. C. H. Smith, Orghast at Persepolis: An International Experiment in Theatre (Eyre Methuen, 1972; New York: Viking, 1973), p. 43. This eyewitness account, with notes and interviews taken at the time, is an essential resource, to which the following paragraphs are deeply indebted. I have also drawn on the drafts and production materials in the Peter Brook Archive, Victoria and Albert Museum, THM 452/8/45.

21. ‘Orghast’, Times Literary Supplement, 1 Oct 1971, p. 1174, incorporating interview with Hughes by Stoppard (who visited the ensemble in Persepolis).

22. Smith, Orghast at Persepolis, p. 50.

23. Ibid., p. 91.

24. Ibid., p. 97.

25. Ibid., p. 104.

26. Confusingly, Hughes gave the same title to the collection of his short stories that was published in 1995.

27. Peter Brook Archive, THM/452/8.

28. Smith, Orghast at Persepolis, p. 200.

29. Opening of Orghast in Ted Hughes, Selected Translations, ed. Daniel Weissbort (Faber & Faber, 2006), pp. 74–5. There is also a wealth of draft material now in the Emory archive (644/120). Sample translations, for example: GRADOB: bombs. PULLUTTU: bird. NARGA: of darkness. OPPA BLAV: on the wall. OPPA CLAUN: on the door. KHERN SHEER: words of steel. TAP TAP DUTTU: tap tap of the leaden. TAP TAP TAPUN: tap tap tapping (Brook always likes tapping because his actors often come on stage bearing wooden sticks or poles). Sample passages, too: ‘Unkher brida kher udda khern sludda kher avokka dotta khern … grafot gleblot balugvablot’.

30. Smith, Orghast at Persepolis, pp. 209–10.

31. L 317.

32. Hughes journal, 13 Nov 1971.

33. L 323.

34. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

35. Olwyn referred to the passage in a letter to Alvarez, 9 June 1988 (Alvarez Papers, BL Add. MS 88603.3036c). In reply, rather than denying it, he asked what else Sylvia had said about him in her last journal. Olwyn told him that Sylvia confided in no one, that her journal was the only witness to their brief liaison, but that at least one other person was aware of it.

36. Fragment in BL Add. MS 88918/1.

37. BL Add. MS 88603.3036c.

38. Ibid.

39. According to Olwyn’s recollection of Sylvia’s last journal, in January she set her sights on another poet-friend, Bill Merwin, and was rejected a third time. There is no corroborative evidence for this.

40. Al Alvarez, Where Did It All Go Right? A Memoir (Richard Cohen Books, 1999; New York:William Morrow, 2000), p. 209.

41. Nathaniel Tarn Papers, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

42. Alvarez, Where Did It All Go Right?, p. 209.

43. Nathaniel Tarn Papers, Stanford.

Chapter 19: Farmer Ted

1. Emory 854/1.

2. Peter Brook Archive, Victoria and Albert Museum, production material for The Conference of the Birds, THM/452/8.

3. To Luke Myers, summer 1972 (L 331).

4. To Leonard Baskin, Nov 1972 (L 333).

5. Preface to Moortown Diary (Faber & Faber, 1989) (CP 1203).

6. Hughes journal, 12 June 1973.

7. ‘Roe-deer’, CP 513.

8. Hughes journal, 29 Aug 1973: a random choice from among scores of such entries.

9. Ibid., undated pages, circa 1974.

10. Introduction to János Pilinszky’s Selected Poems, trans. Ted Hughes and János Csokits (Carcanet, 1976) (WP 229–36).

11. Ibid.

12. Radio broadcast, BBC World Service, 18 Sept 1976.

13. All János Pilinszky poems quoted from his Selected Poems.

14. CP 288, 290, 291, 293, 295–6.

15. ‘The Scream’, ‘The Summoner’, ‘The Interrogator’, ‘The Scapegoat’, CP 419, 420, 421,433. The initial sequence matched each poem to the Baskin drawing that inspired it (thus ‘The Summoner’ went with ‘A Hercules-in-the-Underworld Bird’ and ‘The Interrogator’ with ‘A Titled Vulturess’), while the expanded Faber text of 1978 included extra poems originating from Hughes (e.g. ‘The Scream’), for some of which Baskin then created drawings.

16. Endnote to reprint in 1982 Selected Poems (CP 1271).

17. L 356–7.

18. See John Moat, The Founding of Arvon: A Memoir of the Early Years of the Arvon Foundation (Frances Lincoln, 2005).

19. ‘Ted Hughes Introduces and Reads Season Songs’, BBC Radio 3, 6 Sept 1977.

20. CP 307.

21. ‘April Birthday’ (addressed (without saying so) to Frieda, who was born on 1 April), ‘Swifts’, ‘The Harvest Moon’, ‘Autumn Nature Notes’, CP 312, 315, 323, 327.

22. ‘Spring Nature Notes’, ‘Autumn Nature Notes’, CP 311, 329.

23. Michael Harris, Montreal Star, 4 March 1978; Adam Thorpe, Observer, 5 March 1995.

24. To Daniel Weissbort (Emory 644/10/5).

25. L 361–2.

26. L 367.

27. To Charles Tomlinson, 22 Jan 1976, projecting his own trajectory on to that of his fellow-poet.

28. To Frieda, 7 Feb 1976 (Emory 1014/1).

29. L 376.

Chapter 20: The Elegiac Turn

1. L 632.

2. 13 July 1969 (BL Add. MS 88918/128).

3. L 204.

4. To Aurelia and Warren Plath, Dec 1960 (L 173).

5. ‘The House of Aries Part I’ appeared in print in the spring 1961 issue of a quarterly magazine called Audience, published in Cambridge, Mass. Part II seems never to have been published, save in the form of a few fragments spoken by a military captain (Two Cities, Summer 1961, pp. 12–13; Texas Quarterly, Autumn 1961, pp. 146–7).

6. To Assia, 31 Jan 1964 (Emory 1058/1/6).

7. To Baskin, 29 July 1974 (Emory 644/1).

8. Keith Sagar, ed., Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar (British Library, 2012), p. 58.

9. Heaney praising Gaudete, 22 May 1977: he has read it twice and been ‘deeply pleasured’ by it (a phrase that may unconsciously echo the poem’s sexual language). He thought that the shape of the story ploughed deep into the soil of Hughes’s genius. (Emory 644/9.)

10. L 376–7.

11. Martin Dodsworth, Guardian, 19 May 1977.

12. Conrad, ‘In the Safari Park’, New Statesman, 27 May 1977.

13. Symons, ‘The case of the lecherous cleric’, Sunday Times (London), 29 May 1977.

14. Donald Hall, Washington Post Book World, 18 Dec 1977; Joan Joffe Hall, ‘A bloody, violent poem’, Houston Post, 5 March 1978; Mark Halliday, ‘Ted Hughes’s new poem: rural sex and violence’, Providence Sunday Journal, 5 March 1978. Collected, with other reviews, in Emory 644/175/14.

15. Gaudete (Faber & Faber, 1977), pp. 140–1 (not in CP).

16. Ibid., p. 155.

17. ‘On the Shelf: Simon Armitage on why Ted Hughes’s Gaudete made him forget the laundry’, Sunday Times (London), 17 March 1996.

18. ‘Ted Hughes and Gaudete’, 1977 interview in Ekbert Faas, Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1980), p. 214.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., p. 137, citing Ramanujan’s Speaking of Siva.

21. Speaking of Siva, trans. A. K. Ramanujan (Penguin Classics, 1973), pp. 48–53.

22. Faas, Ted Hughes, p. 138.

23. Influencing ‘The viper fell from the sun’, Gaudete, p. 188; quoted, Faas, Ted Hughes, p. 122.

24. 30 May 1977, in Sagar, ed., Poet and Critic, p. 57; BL Add. MS 88918/128.

25. Personal communication; see also Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (Faber & Faber, 2008), p. 392.

26. William Scammell, ‘The fox thinks twice’ (Cheltenham lecture), edited version published as ‘Burst Open Under a Blue-Black Pressure’, Poetry Review, Hughes and Plath Special (1998), pp. 82–7.

27. BL Add. MS 88918/35.

28. Gaudete, p. 182.

29. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

30. Gaudete, p. 191.

31. Emory 644/65 and 644/58.

32. Orts (Rainbow Press, 1978), poems 9, 22, 4, 11, 13, 19, 32, 36, 48, 52, 53.

33. Emory 644/57/10, Notebook 11.

34. Adapting Paul Keegan’s phrase (CP 1277).

35. ‘The day he died’, ‘A monument’, ‘The formal auctioneer’, ‘A memory’, ‘Now you have to push’, ‘Hands’, CP 533–7. ‘Aloof’ was emended to ‘estranged’ in the trade printings.

36. Remains of Elmet (Rainbow Press, April 1979; Faber & Faber, May 1979).

Chapter 21: The Arraignment

1. 28 Aug 1968, repr. in Sisterhood is Powerful and at redstockings.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=65&Itemid=103.

2. ‘Lesbos’, CPSP 228.

3. Al Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), p. 19.

4. ‘Publishing Sylvia Plath’, WP 168.

5. See further, Ann Skea, ‘Ted Hughes and Small Press Publication’, ann.skea.com/RainbowPress.htm. Fiesta Melons by Sylvia Plath with an Introduction by Ted Hughes (Exeter: Rougemont Press, May 1971) was an analogous production (not mentioned by Skea).

6. Original version of ‘Arraignment’ published in Feminist Art Journal (New York), Oct 1972.

7. ‘Arraignment’, in Monster (New York: Random House, 1972).

8. Quoted by Robin Morgan on her website, robinmorgan.us.

9. C.G. Jung et al., Man and his Symbols (Picador, 1964), p. 169.

10. See Judith Kroll, Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), especially p. 177.

11. BL Add. MS 88918/128. Correspondence regarding this and other projects is preserved in the Frances McCullough Papers at the University of Maryland, hdl.handle.net/1903.1/4603.

12. To Aurelia Plath, 12 Jan 1975 (Plath MS II, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington).

13. Mary Folliet, ‘Reviewing Sylvia Plath’, New York Review of Books, 30 Sept 1976.

14. Olwyn Hughes, New York Review of Books, 30 Sept 1976.

15. 22 Dec 1976, passage excluded from text in L 380–2.

16. To Ben Sonnenberg (L 451).

17. ‘Sylvia Plath and her Journals’, WP 177–90, repr. from Grand Street, 1:3 (Spring 1982).

18. The Journals of Sylvia Plath (New York: Dial Press, 1982), p. xiii. As Janet Malcolm points out in the opening pages of her superb The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), in the Grand Street version Ted changed ‘I destroyed’ to ‘her husband destroyed’ and ‘disappeared’ to ‘disappeared more recently (and may, presumably, still turn up)’. The latter phrase has led to much speculation and fantasy.

19. Preface to Edward Butscher, ed., Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977; repr. Peter Owen, 1979), p. vii. Like Butscher’s biography, this was a book whose gestation involved a difficult history with Ted and Olwyn, as is clear from a publisher’s note on the first page of the introductory essay, ‘In Search of Sylvia’: ‘Mr Butscher wishes it known that changes were made in his Introduction by hands other than his own.’

20. Lameyer, in ibid., p. 143.

21. Ibid., p. 164.

22. Ibid., p. 165.

Chapter 22: Sunstruck Foxglove

1. Hughes journal (BL Add. MS 88918/128). The phrasing belongs to the unthinking racism of Hughes’s generation; subsequent quotations are from the same source, illustrative of his great gifts of observation and phrasing in his travel journals.

2. Gerald Hughes, Ted and I: A Brother’s Memoir (Robson Press, 2012), p. 184.

3. My account of the relationship with Jill Barber is based on her articles in the Mail on Sunday, 13 and 20 May 2001 (‘Ted Hughes, my secret lover’), her unpublished memoir, and conversations by email and at her home in New York.

4. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

5. Interview for Radio 3AW Adelaide, produced by Julie Copeland. There is a transcription by Ann Skea at ann.skea.com/Adelaide3.htm.

6. Ibid.

7. Ted Hughes at the Adelaide Festival Writers’ Week: A transcription of Ted Hughes own commentary, ann.skea.com/adelaide.htm

8. Personal communication.

9. To Murphy, 31 March 1976; the whole sequence about Jennifer Rankin is suppressed from the text in L.

10. To János Csokits, May 1976 (L 376).

11. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

12. Barber, ‘Ted Hughes, my secret lover’.

13. First published 1983, collected in Flowers and Insects (Faber & Faber, 1986) (CP 723–4).

14. Jennifer Rankin, draft manuscript of a radio talk about Ted, University of New South Wales, Australian Defence Force Academy Library, MS 348.

15. Back cover of Jennifer J. Rankin, Earth Hold (Secker & Warburg, 1978).

16. Jennifer Rankin, Collected Poems, ed. Judith Rodriguez (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1990), p. 195. My account of Rankin is indebted to Rodriguez and her husband, the poet Tom Shapcott, who was at the Adelaide Festival and visited the Rankins in Devon. The Toronto lift story, below, is quoted, by permission, from an email from Rodriguez.

17. Now in the archive of her papers in the library of the Australian Defence Force Academy.

18. ‘Three Poems for J.R.’, published in 1985, 1986, 1993 (CP 838–40).

19. Emory 644/82.

20. Emma Tennant, Burnt Diaries (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1999), p. 45. Subsequent Tennant quotations are all from this memoir.

21. The Emory archive includes Harry Fainlight letters written from prison and from ‘a Scottish madhouse’ (644/2/23).

22. Elaine Feinstein, It Goes with the Territory: Memoirs of a Poet (Chicago: Alma Books, 2013), p. 156.

23. Tennant, Burnt Diaries, p. 96.

24. Edna O’Brien, Country Girl: A Memoir (Faber & Faber, 2012), pp. 136–40, 210–15. One might compare and contrast ‘I will know you for a long time’ with Emma Tennant’s ‘I want you for no more than a year’: affirmations almost too Hughescliffian to have been truly uttered?

25. Barber, ‘Ted Hughes, my secret lover’.

26. For example: the astonishingly beautiful and charismatic feminist, memoirist and political activist Sally Belfrage went to dinner with Ted and Sylvia in Chalcot Square with her then partner Ben Sonnenberg. Before he died, Sonnenberg said that he did not know whether Ted later had an affair with Sally after Sylvia’s death, but he suspected that they might have become close. Sally died of cancer in Middlesex Hospital, just at the time when Ted’s own cancer was first diagnosed. Her private papers in the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive, New York University, remain closed until 2021.

27. Personal communication.

28. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

29. Syed Muhammad Hussain, ‘Remembering Ted Hughes’, Financial Express (Dhaka), 14 April 2012, thefinancialexpress-bd.com/old/more.php?newsid=126732&date=2012-04-14.

30. Amzed Hossein, ‘An Interview with Ted Hughes’, 18–20 Nov 1989, transcribed at ann.skea.com/AsiaFestivalInterview.html.

31. Quoted, Hussain, ‘Remembering Ted Hughes’.

32. This and preceding quotations from Carolyne Wright, ‘What Happens in the Heart: An Encounter with Ted Hughes’, Poetry Review, 89:3 (Autumn 1999), pp. 3–9.

33. BL Add. MS 88919/128.

34. Ibid.

Chapter 23: Remembrance of Elmet

1. Emma Tennant, Burnt Diaries (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1999), pp. 178–9.

2. Letter of Feb 1977 (Emory 865/1).

3. Letters to Gerald (Emory 854/1).

4. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (Faber & Faber, 1948), p. 143.

5. By the time of his father’s death, Nicholas Hughes had built an impressive academic curriculum vitae: sfos.uaf.edu/memorial/hughes/hughes_cv-99.pdf.

6. Hughes journal fragment, 20 Feb 1980.

7. Hull University Archives, DPL(2)3/8/9.

8. John Moat, The Founding of Arvon: A Memoir of the Early Years of the Arvon Foundation (Frances Lincoln, 2005), p. 26.

9. L 476.

10. ‘Comments’ by Larkin, 2 Jan 1981 (Emory 644/4).

11. Letter to Lucas Myers, Dec 1980 (Emory 865/1).

12. Heaney on The Rattle Bag in a ‘Memo to Joanna Mackle re The School Bag: 6 January 1997’ (BL Add. MS 88918/16).

13. Review by Christopher Reid (clipping in Emory 645/176/3).

14. Moon Whales and Other Moon Poems is conveniently reprinted in Ted Hughes, Collected Poems for Children, illustrated by Raymond Briggs (Faber & Faber, 2005, paperback 2008), pp. 67–107.

15. To Monteith, 21 May 1976 (L 377).

16. Hughes’s copy is now among his library books at Emory.

17. Glyn Hughes, Millstone Grit (Victor Gollancz, 1975), p. 12. Subsequent quotations from pp. 17, 28, 29, 139.

18. Ted Hughes, ‘Introduction’, in Glyn Hughes, Where I Used to Play on the Green (Victor Gollancz, 1982; repr. Penguin, 1984), pp. 5–6.

19. Remains of Elmet: A Pennine Sequence – Poems by Ted Hughes, Photographs by Fay Godwin (Faber & Faber, 1979), p. 7.

20. CP 483.

21. Plath: ‘Now, in valleys narrow / And black as purses, the house lights / Gleam like small change’ (CPSP 167–8); Hughes: ‘Rain / Crashes the black taut glass, // Lights in floundering valleys, in the gulf, / Splinter from their sockets’ (CP 485).

22. Included in both Three Books: Remains of Elmet, Cave Birds, River (unillustrated, Faber & Faber, 1993) and Elmet (illustrated, Faber & Faber, 1994).

23. CP 486. Assia’s diary entry noted the blackness of the buildings in Haworth, contrasting with the white of the snow on the ground.

24. CP 492.

25. CP 470–1.

26. CP 473.

27. Peter Porter, ‘Landscape with poems’, Observer, 15 July 1979.

28. To Joanna Mackle, 4 Jan 1992 (Emory 644/14). On the origins of River, see Chapter 24, ‘The Fisher King’, below.

29. Blurb for Three Books.

30. Three Books, p. 183.

31. CP 462–3.

32. CP 840.

Chapter 24: The Fisher King

1. ‘So Quickly It’s Over’, interview with Ted Hughes, Wild Steelhead and Salmon, Winter 1999, p. 57.

2. To Gerald, 21 Dec 1979 (Emory 854/1); to Murphy, 20 Dec 1979 (Richard Murphy Papers, Department of Special Collections, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa).

3. To Gerald, Feb 1981 (Emory 854/1).

4. To Gerald (Emory 854/1).

5. To Gerald (Emory 854/1).

6. Nathaniel Minton, A Memoir of Ted Hughes (Westmoreland Press, 2015), pp. 28, 40. The request for anti-depressants came in the early Nineties.

7. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

8. ‘Portraits’ (BL Add. MS 88918/7).

9. Ibid.

10. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

11. For a particularly good example, see the verse journal of an Irish fishing expedition with Barrie Cooke, dated 29 Feb 1980 (BL Add. MS 88918/128/3, fos. 6–14).

12. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

13. 29 June 1983.

14. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

15. Ibid.

16. L 433.

17. L 434.

18. To Danny Weissbort, 23 Oct 1983 (L 472).

19. To Barrie Cooke, 23 Oct 1983 (L 468).

20. 10 Nov 1982 (Emory 644/5).

21. To Myers, 29 Sept 1984 (Emory 865/1).

22. See the facsimile of this wonderful 1976 letter, with sketch maps, in Simon Armitage, ‘Dear Peter’, Granta, 26 June 2012, granta.com/New-Writing/Dear-Peter.

23. To Gerald, 26 Aug 1980 (Emory 854/1). The genesis of the project is well documented in BL Add. MS 88614, Letters etc., to Peter Keen from Ted Hughes (1976–1985). Mark Wormald’s fine essay ‘Fishing for Ted’ has an especially strong account of the gestation and context of the project, in Mark Wormald, Neil Roberts and Terry Gifford, eds, Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 112–29.

24. BL Add. MS 88614.

25. Ibid.

26. River: Poems by Ted Hughes, Photographs by Peter Keen (Faber & Faber, 1983), pp. 127–8.

27. Report to Coroner’s Inquest on death of Assia Wevill, cited in Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes’ Doomed Love (Robson Books, 2006), p. 203.

28. CP 643 (first published in the Listener, 13 Jan 1983).

29. CP 681 (first published in Grand Street, Autumn 1981).

30. ‘So Quickly It’s Over’, p. 57.

31. Though not published until 1999, the interview was conducted on a sunny August morning in 1995, on Ehor Boyanowsky’s deck overlooking Horseshoe Bay, British Columbia, under huge cedar trees, the morning after Ted gave a rousing reading of ‘The Bear’ at a fundraiser for the Steelhead Society of British Columbia (personal communication from the interviewer, Tom Pero). He gave very few interviews thereafter, largely because of his illness.

32. CP 679 (originally published as ‘An October Salmon’, London Review of Books, 16 April 1981; included among Remains of Elmet poems in 1982 Selected Poems, a placing that makes the link to the poems of family memory).

33. CP 655.

34. Sunday Times (London), 23 Oct 1983.

35. To Keith Sagar, 14 Dec 1983, in Keith Sagar, ed., Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar (British Library, 2012), p. 132.

36. ‘Torridge Action Group – Summary of Issues’ (Emory 644/170).

37. CP 740 (originally published in the short-lived Sunday Correspondent newspaper, 17 Sept 1989).

Chapter 25: The Laureate

1. 28 Dec 1981 (L 450).

2. ‘A Swallow’, CP 604.

3. ‘Evening Thrush’, CP 607.

4. Ann Skea, in her excellent piece, ‘A Creative Collaboration: R. J. Lloyd and Ted Hughes’, ann.skea.com/ArtisticCollaboration1.htm.

5. Ted Hughes, Collected Poems for Children, illustrated by Raymond Briggs (Faber & Faber, 2005; paperback 2008), pp. 157–8.

6. West Country Fly Fishing was edited by his friend Anne Voss Bark (1983); the pamphlet for the Frances Horovitz Benefit (to assist her only son) was called Tenfold (1983); Ted’s contribution was, interestingly, ‘Sunstruck Foxglove’ (that poem’s first publication).

7. WP 88.

8. To Leonard and Lisa Baskin, May 1984 (L 484).

9. To Myers, 29 Sept 1984 (L 489; the published version omits the parts of the letter concerning Nick and Frieda).

10. Dream diary, 15 May 1983 (BL Add. MS 88918/1).

11. L 464.

12. To Heaney, autumn 1984 (L 488).

13. Hughes’s sense that Heaney had beaten him to the achievement of the Wordsworthian voice became explicit in his response to the subsequent autobiographical sequence, ‘Squarings’ (1989, in pamphlet form, reprinted at the core of Heaney’s next Faber volume, Seeing Things, 1991): ‘Made me think of The Prelude, in the ranging self-reassessment, the lifting of sacred moments … and in the way the whole thing is a self-rededication, a realigning of yourself’ (Hughes to Heaney, L 564).

14. To Martin Booth, 12 June 1984 (Emory 644/2).

15. Mistranscribed as ‘Warrener’ in L 495.

16. CP 803–5.

17. L 495.

18. To Larkin, Emory 644/4.

19. To Sagar, 21 Jan 1985, in Keith Sagar, ed., Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar (British Library, 2012), p. 142.

20. L 497. ‘The Zodiac in the Shape of a Crown’, for Prince William, was eventually published in 1987 in the form of a facsimile of the manuscript in a limited-edition charity volume in aid of St Magnus’ Cathedral in Kirkwall on the Orkneys, together with poems by Seamus Heaney, Christopher Fry and local poet George Mackay Brown. Hughes never reprinted it, and it is not in CP.

21. Ehor Boyanowsky, Savage Gods, Silver Ghosts: In the Wild with Ted Hughes (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2010). Information and quotations in this section are derived from this vivid and powerfully written memoir, supplemented by additional points provided privately by Boyanowsky, to whom I am most grateful.

22. CP 669. See Nick Gammage’s fine account of the poem, in Nick Gammage, ed., The Epic Poise: A Celebration of Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber, 1999), pp. 86–91.

23. Boyanowsky, Savage Gods, p. 23.

24. Ibid., pp. 26–7. As with all the verbatim quotations in Savage Gods, these are Ted’s words as remembered by Boyanowsky, and to some degree as embellished for literary effect, not necessarily as spoken in the moment.

25. CP 847.

26. Boyanowsky, Savage Gods, p. 89.

27. Ibid., p. 73.

28. Ibid., p. 48.

29. The account of how they first met is false (Ted was introduced to Carol and her sister by a local antique ‘knocker’); the story about the fainting is true.

30. Ibid., pp. 108–9.

31. Ibid., pp. 141–3.

32. Ibid., p. 127.

33. Ibid., p. 174. Boyanowsky misremembers: it was, of course, the RAF.

34. L 510–11.

35. CP 730. Never reprinted by Hughes, but included in Save the Earth, ed. Jonathon Porritt, with a foreword by the Prince of Wales and an introduction by David Attenborough, for the environmental campaigning organisation Friends of the Earth, Sept 1991.

36. To the poet Michael Hamburger (L 538), with further comments on the dangers of the nuclear industry (Hamburger lived in Suffolk, near the Sizewell B power station).

37. Quoted, Ed Douglas, ‘Portrait of a poet as eco warrior’, Observer, 4 Nov 2007, an excellent article which includes an interview with Ian Cook. There are further valuable interviews in Simon Armitage’s 2009 BBC Radio 4 documentary ‘Ted Hughes: Eco Warrior’. See further the admirable work of Terry Gifford: ‘Rivers and Water Quality in the Work of Brian Clarke and Ted Hughes’, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 34:1 (March 2008), pp. 75–91, revised and reprinted as ‘Hughes’s Social Ecology’, in Terry Gifford, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 81–93; also the review of eco-critical treatments in Gifford, Ted Hughes (Routledge Guides to Literature, 2009), pp. 139–47.

38. Guardian, 16 April 1992.

39. Blake Morrison, ‘Man of mettle’, interview with Hughes in Independent on Sunday, 5 Sept 1993.

40. Undated, 1986 (L 512–14).

41. ‘Slump Sundays’, ‘Macaw’ (a far cry from the ‘Macaw and Little Miss’ of The Hawk in the Rain), ‘On the Reservations: III The Ghost Dancer’, CP 750, 752, 779.

42. Conversation with Ann Skea, quoted in her online chronology, ann.skea.com/timeline.htm.

43. Sagar, ed., Poet and Critic, p. 165 (14 Nov 1987).

44. London Review of Books, 24 Jan 1985.

45. The Poetry Book Society Bulletin, 142 (Autumn 1989), pp. 1–3.

46. Emory 644/115.

47. ‘Not with a bang but a hum’, Observer, 17 Sept 1989.

Chapter 26: Trial

1. CP 1153–4.

2. Diary entry, 4 April 1982, in purple exercise book (BL Add. MS 88993/3). All papers relating to the Bell Jar trial were embargoed until Jane Anderson’s death in 2010, but they have now been made available to the public in two sources: BL Add. MS 88993: ‘Ted Hughes/Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar legal case: archive of poetry, diary entries, correspondence and other papers relating to the legal case brought by Dr Jane Anderson against the Plath Estate (then managed by Plath’s widower, Ted Hughes), Avco Embassy Pictures Corporation and others for defamation of character, invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional damage following the release of The Bell Jar film in 1979’; and Jane V. Anderson Papers, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College (grateful thanks to Karen Kukil for the provision of extensive photocopies of this material).

3. BL Add. MS 88993/3.

4. Ibid.

5. L 529.

6. Plath to James Michie (Sylvia Plath Collection, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, MS 45/5/46).

7. BL Add. MS 88993/3.

8. BL Add. MS 88993/3, quoting letters to Aurelia Plath and Olive Higgins Prouty, dated 27 Aug, 26 Sept, 18 Oct, 21 Oct 1962.

9. Hughes to Leonard Scigaj and to his editors at Faber & Faber, Viking Penguin and HarperCollins, 9 March 1992. By the same account, one of the principal aims of this book is to explicate, celebrate and immortalise the writings of Ted Hughes, both published and unpublished, so as to bring him new readers at a time when knowledge of his work and even his name is rapidly declining, and thus to further the interests of his Estate.

10. 5 Oct 1987 (Emory 644/7).

11. Correspondence relating to Bitter Fame, in Literary Papers and Correspondence of Anne Stevenson, Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 9451/19.

12. He ascribed them to the Bhagavad-Gita, but the quotation is actually from Journey to the West by the classical Chinese author Wu Cheng’en.

13. Guardian, 20 April 1989.

14. Trevor Thomas’s archive of papers arising from the case was acquired by the bookseller Richard Ford in 2009, and is now in the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, sylviaplathinfo.blogspot.co.uk/2009_04_01_archive.html.

15. ‘Trial’ Draft 1 and Draft 2, in BL Add. MS 88993/1. All subsequent quotations in this chapter are from this draft poem, which is nearly two thousand lines in length (subdivided into forty-six sections).

Chapter 27: A

1. He put it up for sale in 2011: see Dalya Alberge, ‘Ted Hughes’s jaguar sculpture hints at poet’s demons’, Observer, 31 Jan 2011, theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/31/ted-hughes-jaguar-sculpture-sale. Further information derived from Olwyn Hughes, letter to Jonathan Bate, 7 Feb 2012.

2. ‘Fanaticism’, CP 789.

3. ‘The Locket’, CP 784.

4. ‘Fanaticism’, CP 789.

5. ‘Descent’, CP 787.

6. CP 789–90.

7. Paul Celan, ‘Todesfuge’, in his Der Sand aus den Urnen (1948), my translation.

8. Now in the British Library archive, split into two folders within BL Add. MS 88918/1. Unless otherwise stated, all subsequent quotations in this chapter are from these manuscripts.

9. ‘Daddy’, CPSP 223.

10. For Shura as ash, see especially the end of the tender lyric ‘You found a magic path, your little girl’.

11. Al Alvarez, Where Did It All Go Right? A Memoir (Richard Cohen Books, 1999; New York: William Morrow, 2000), p. 209.

Chapter 28: Goddess Revisited

1. To Dermot Wilson (L 574).

2. Earlier versions of this chapter were essayed as ‘Hughes on Shakespeare’, in Terry Gifford, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and, with actors reading relevant passages from the plays, as the 2014 Sam Wanamaker Fellowship Lecture on the stage of the Sam Wanamaker Theatre at Shakespeare’s Globe, London.

3. Macbeth, Act 3, scene 2, quoted in the editorial version corresponding to that of the old red Oxford edition owned by Hughes.

4. BL Add. MS 88918/1.

5. L 105.

6. Partially published in 1987 as A Full House (CP 731–6).

7. BL Add. MS 88918/1.

8. Personal recollections by John Billingsley of a reading in 1976 and Jonathan Bate of a reading at the Hobson Gallery, Cambridge, 27 February 1978.

9. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (Faber & Faber, 1948), p. 426.

10. L 679–81.

11. CP 576.

12. With Fairest Flowers while Summer Lasts: Poems from Shakespeare, ed. and introduced by Ted Hughes (New York: Doubleday, 1971), pp. v–ix.

13. Ibid., p. ix.

14. Ibid., pp. xi, xiii.

15. Ibid., p. xvii.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. L 336.

19. L 329.

20. CP 279–82.

21. L 336.

22. L 405–19.

23. Letter of 9 Sept 1991 (Emory 644/4).

24. 21 July 1991 (L 596).

25. This and subsequent quotations from Emory 844/105, first published in Gifford, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes, pp. 135–49.

26. SGCB 11.

27. Quoted, Gifford, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes, p. 143.

28. Ibid., 16 Sept 1991.

29. Ibid., 3 Nov 1991.

30. WP 132.

31. SGCB 91.

32. SGCB 116. ‘Those visits’ refers to Shakespeare’s (presumably regular) returns to Stratford-upon-Avon to see his family and conduct business.

33. Ibid.

34. SGCB 179.

35. SGCB 183.

36. SGCB xix.

37. Sunday Times (London), 5 April 1992.

38. The Times (London), 9 April 1992.

39. SGCB 142–5.

40. BL Add. MS 88918/6.

41. Ibid.

42. SGCB 157–61.

43. ‘A Brief Guide’ to Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, sent to the theatre director Michael Kustow on 2 Dec 1993 (Emory 644/55).

44. Personal communication.

45. See my Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) and my forthcoming Shakespeare and the Classical Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

46. Add. MS 88918/6.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid.

Chapter 29: Smiling Public Man

1. Yeats, ‘Among School Children’, in The Tower (1928).

2. Letters to Bernard Jenkin MP, 3 Feb 1990, to John Gummer MP, Minister in the Department of Agriculture, Farming and Fisheries, 10 Sept 1991, and to Emma Nicholson MP, 22 March 1990 (Emory 644/53).

3. ‘The hart of the mystery’, Guardian, 5 July 1997; ‘A brainy idea for the Domeheads’, The Times (London), 18 Feb 1998.

4. Letter of 28 Jan 1992 (Emory 644/53).

5. Letter to Sunday Times (London), book review section, 20 Jan 1990.

6. L 652–4.

7. To Heaney, 29 Sept 1990 (Heaney Papers, Emory 960/40/16).

8. L 683.

9. My interview with Heaney.

10. Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (Faber & Faber, 2008), p. 189. ‘View of a Pig’ was a particularly strong influence, shaping ‘Turkeys’, the earliest poem in Heaney’s first collection (p. 79). Stepping Stones also includes valuable material on the creation of The Rattle Bag and The School Bag and on Heaney’s response to Birthday Letters (see especially pp. 390–7).

11. To Martin Palmer, 26 Aug 1992 (Emory 644/38).

12. To Nicki Clinton, 28 Nov 1994 (Emory 644/55).

13. To William Scammell, 31 March 1993 (Emory 644/7).

14. BL Add. MS 88918/129.

15. 17 Aug 1993 (Emory 1014/1).

16. Frieda Hughes, ‘Father dear father’, Daily Telegraph, 29 Oct 2002.

17. Emory 1014/1. ‘Windfall from heaven’ is a lovely improvement on the banal ‘treasure’ in an earlier draft. Ted considered the piece more of a ‘rambling rhapsody’ (ibid.) than a poem.

18. To Anne-Lorraine Bujon, 16 Dec 1992, L 621–36.

19. To Baskin, 15 Aug 1991 (Emory 644/1).

20. The film was supposedly to be based on the Paul Alexander biography Rough Magic; Kovner sent a warning letter to Columbia Pictures and to Ringwald. Columbia backed away (letter to Hughes from New York libel lawyer David Ellenhorn, 7 April 1992; Emory 644/37).

21. To Spender, 27 July 1992 (Emory 644/8).

22. L 638.

23. Letter of 7 Oct 1991 (Emory 644/3).

24. This and subsequent quotations from Horatio Morpurgo, ‘The Table Talk of Ted Hughes’, Areté, 6 (Autumn 2001), aretemagazine.co.uk/06-autumn-2001/the-table-talk-of-ted-hughes/.

25. For the Gielgud evening, there is a fulsome thank-you letter dated 12 March 1990 in the Royal Archives at Windsor (RA/QEQM/PRIV/CSP/PAL), together with a poem. The fishing visit is described in a long letter to Gerald and Joan, 18 May 1991 (Emory 854/1/95).

26. 16 Feb 1994, Ted Hughes, ‘Letters to János Csokits’ (Emory 895/1).

27. Unpublished letters of June 1996 and April 1997 (Emory 644/55).

28. O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, p. 397.

29. L 574.

30. L 576.

31. O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, p. 397.

32. Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, eds, The School Bag (Faber & Faber, 1997), p. xvii.

33. To HRH the Prince of Wales, 9 Oct 1997 (Emory 644/55).

34. ‘Tell us princes another story, poet Ted’, Sunday Times (London), 20 Feb 2011.

35. It is inappropriate to cite anything other than the Wordsworth quotation from this private poem, but I am most grateful to HRH Prince Charles for allowing Ian Skelly of the Temenos Academy to transcribe it and show it to me.

36. To Joanna Mackle, 4 Jan 1992 (Emory 644/14).

37. Some of those written in the Eighties were discussed in Chapter 24, ‘The Fisher King’, above. Along with the trade printing there was a two-volume limited edition (280 signed copies at £75, a nice little earner), with ‘The Unicorn’ standing alone in the second volume.

38. CP 1215.

39. CP 1216.

40. CP 1216–17.

41. Ibid.

42. CP 1219.

43. Epigraph to Rain-Charm, also quoted at climax of note to ‘A Birthday Masque’ (CP 1218) and inscribed by hand on books presented personally to members of the royal family (personal communication).

44. Hermione Lee, ‘Sacred myths and fishing lines’, Independent on Sunday, 21 June 1992; Hilary Corke, ‘Sunny Side up for the Laureate’, Spectator, 20 June 1992.

45. ‘The crow vs the teddy bear’, Observer, 14 June 1992.

46. Peter Bradshaw, ‘The dismal dozen’, Evening Standard, 30 Dec 1992.

47. CP 55.

48. Blurb for The Iron Woman: A Sequel to The Iron Man (Faber & Faber, 1993).

49. To David Thacker, 30 Nov 1993 (Emory 644/54).

50. CP 1024.

51. Discussed in Chapter 31, ‘The Return of Alcestis’, below.

52. WP 377.

53. WP 378, 383.

54. WP 446–7.

55. ‘Corrections by Olwyn Hughes of Diane Middlebrook’s Her Husband’ (Emory 980/2/20).

56. Personal communication.

57. Csokits Letters (Emory 895/1).

58. Phyllis Grosskurth, ‘Ted Hughes undone’, Globe and Mail (Toronto), 13 Nov 1999.

59. Olwyn Hughes in conversation, March 2010.

60. Personal communication.

61. I owe this astute observation to Roy Davids (conversation of 10 Aug 2011).

62. ‘Goku’, in Ted Hughes, The Dreamfighter and Other Creation Tales (Faber & Faber, 2003), pp. 200–1. This posthumous collection is a gathering of How the Whale Became (1963), Tales of the Early World (1988) and – borrowing its title – The Dreamfighter and Other Creation Tales (1995).

63. Ibid., p. 320.

64. ‘Anniversary’, CP 854.

65. Gordon Wardman, ‘They Do the Ted in Different Voices’, Poetry Quarterly Review, Spring 1995, p. 5.

66. Brian Hinton, Tears in the Fence, 16 (Oct 1995), pp. 56–8. ‘New confessional voice’ is Wardman’s phrase.

67. To Heaney, 18 April 1995 (Emory 644/55).

68. Tim Supple, ‘Ted Hughes and the Theatre’, ann.skea.com/TimSupple.html.

69. Ibid.

70. Ibid.

71. Benedict Nightingale, The Times (London), 10 Aug 1995; Robert Hanks, unidentified clipping, Emory 644/176/27; Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, 10 Aug 1995. The process of tightening the translation can be traced in the rehearsal typescript, now at Emory (644/121/7).

72. Supple, ‘Ted Hughes and the Theatre’.

73. Daily Telegraph, 30 Sept 1996.

74. Sunday Telegraph, 6 Oct 1996.

75. Supple, ‘Ted Hughes and the Theatre’.

76. Act 2, scene 1, in Lorca, Blood Wedding, in a version by Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber, 1996), p. 23.

77. End of Act 3, scene 2, ibid., p. 72.

78. April 1990, to rave reviews. Licensed but not seen by Hughes. This was not the first Hughes dramatisation to attract the eyes of the critics: in 1986 a company called dereck Productions pulled off an extraordinary epic version of Gaudete at the Almeida in Islington (‘Contains some of the most stunning images one is likely to see in the theatre,’ raved the Financial Times) – see reviews in Emory 644/176/24.

79. To Olwyn, 6 March 1997 (BL Add. MS 88948/1).

80. By Heart: 101 Poems to Remember, ed. with an introduction by Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber, 1997), pp. xv–xvi.

81. ‘Silent is the house’, which is included in The School Bag, p. 449.

82. He charged £1,000, with his bookkeeper reminding him to add on the VAT (sales tax).

83. Frieda’s poem ‘The Last Secret’, written at this time and later published in her collection Stonepicker (Hexham: Bloodaxe, 2001), is about her father’s desire for the family not to share the news of his cancer.

84. To Heaney, 26 Aug 1997 (Heaney Archive, Emory 960/40/16/2).

85. To Baskin, 15 Aug 1997 (BL Add. MS 83685).

Chapter 30: The Sorrows of the Deer

1. Comment on reading the Sylvia poems in the 1995 New Selected, so referring to the short ‘Black Coat’ lyric, not the full epic version discussed below. Heaney to Hughes, from Glanmore Cottage, 14 March 1995 (Emory 644/55).

2. BL Add. MS 88918/1.

3. The Times (London), 17 Jan 1998.

4. All quotations from 19 Jan 1998.

5. Herald (Glasgow), 20 Jan 1998. The reference is to a popular British television soap opera.

6. BL Add. MS 88918/1. Subsequent quotations from same source.

7. To Raine, 31 Jan 1998 (Emory 644/5); read in public by Frieda Hughes, and broadcast on BBC Television, 26 Jan 1999.

8. To Baskins, 5 Feb 1998, quoted, John Ezard, ‘Hughes in hiding over Birthday Letters’, Guardian, 14 April 2004.

9. Heaney to Hughes, 14 Dec 1997 (BL Add. MS 88918/8).

10. L 703.

11. Published in her debut poetry collection, Wooroloo (HarperCollins, 1998).

12. L 712–13.

13. To Caroline and Paul Tisdall, 8 April 1998 (BL Add. MS 88918/8). There is a wonderfully vivid journal of this adventurous holiday in BL Add. MS 88918/128.

14. ‘The Laburnum’, CP 1176.

15. Discussed at the end of the Epilogue, below.

16. I am most grateful to Andrew Howard, Chairman and Managing Director of Sinclairs Products, for this information (email of 12 Oct 2010).

17. Alternatively, the notebook might have been charred in the Lumb Bank fire before anything was written in it, or there may have been some other minor conflagration.

18. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (Faber & Faber, 1948), ch. 14, ‘The Roebuck in the Thicket’. Ann Skea helpfully suggests other resonances in her article ‘Notes on the British Library’s Birthday Letters Archive’, ann.skea.com/BLArchiveLists.html. In the summer of 1978, when gathering poems for The Rattle Bag, Hughes asked Terence McCaughey ‘what is “The Sorrows of the Deer”?’ (L 394), an apparent reference to St Patrick’s hymn (‘The Deer’s Cry’). This may suggest that the title was not applied to the Sylvia sequence until the late Seventies. Another source seems to be a poem by the Hungarian Ferenc Juhász called ‘The boy changed into a stag cries out at the gate of secrets’, which Hughes retranslated on reading what he regarded as an unsatisfactory translation in an anthology of Hungarian poems that was published in 1963 (Ted Hughes, Selected Translations, ed. Daniel Weissbort (Faber & Faber, 2006), p. 24). To complicate matters further, David Wevill also translated this poem, for a Penguin anthology published shortly after Assia’s death.

19. To Sagar, 18 July 1998 (Keith Sagar, ed., Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar (British Library, 2012), p. 269).

20. The only occasions on which he used the word ‘somnambulist’ in his published poems were with regard to his father and fellow-soldiers going over the top on the Western Front (‘For the Duration’) and to Sylvia on the beach in their first days in Devon (‘The Beach’, where the Hartland peninsula becomes ‘the reverse of beautiful Nauset’).

21. ‘Your fingers’ in Silvine Notebook, BL Add. MS 88918/1, revised as ‘Fingers’ in Birthday Letters (CP 1167–8).

22. Personal communication.

23. ‘Under the Laburnums’, in Silvine Notebook.

24. CP 326.

25. BL Add. MS 88918/1.

26. BL Add. MS 88918/1. It is unclear whether ‘Black Coat’ and ‘Opus 131’ represent alternative titles or title and subtitle. Probably the latter.

27. Quoted, Neil Roberts, A Lucid Dreamer: The Life of Peter Redgrove (Jonathan Cape, 2012), p. 80.

28. In Redgrove’s version, but in the Two of a Kind: Poets in Partnership radio interview of Jan 1961 (available on The Spoken Word: Sylvia Plath (BBC/British Library, 2010, CD)), Ted corrects Sylvia and describes it as a ‘life mask’.

29. I am grateful to Professor Norman Hammond for the information that Hughes is topographically imprecise here: the log cabin (a gift of the Norwegian government) where the royal family like to barbecue amid the midges is actually on one of the branches of the Garbh Allt, south of the Dee, some considerable distance from the proud cone of Lochnagar itself, and a considerable drive from Birkhall, perhaps in the Queen’s Land Rover.

30. Freedom: A Commemorative Anthology to Celebrate the 125th Birthday of the British Red Cross (Little, Brown, 1995)

31. Extract from ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’, first published in ‘Sorrow in a Black Coat’, Times Literary Supplement, 5 Feb 2014.

32. BL Add. MS 88918/129. In 1963, shortly after Sylvia’s death, Hughes had submitted to Poetry magazine in Chicago a modern ‘angry young man’ reworking of Wordsworth’s ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’, with a polluted Thames and the nation becoming a sewer (CP 104).

33. Extract from ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’, first published in ‘Sorrow in a Black Coat’.

34. CP 797.

35. This paragraph describes the contents of one of the old school exercise books in BL Add. MS 88918/1. Hughes gathered many more of these exercise books together, numbering them from ‘S1’ (‘S’ for Sylvia) to ‘S9’, as he built up the sequence of ‘The Sorrows of the Deer’ before alighting on the new title Birthday Letters (in the assemblage of the sequence into a rough chronological order of events – not, that is to say, chronological order of composition – the original Silvine Notebook is numbered S6). The distribution of the published poems among these draft notebooks is helpfully tabulated by Ann Skea, ‘Notes on the British Library’s Birthday Letters Archive’.

36. See especially BL Add. MS 88918/1/12, a photocopy of the typescript as submitted to Faber & Faber. This includes a dedication of ‘Caryatids’ to Daniel Huws, which editor Christopher Reid thought ill advised given that the entire collection was dedicated formally to his children and implicitly to Sylvia’s memory. ‘The Tender Place’, ‘Chaucer’ and ‘The God’ take the form of photocopies of previously published versions.

37. 1 Oct 1997 (BL Add. MS 88918/1/13).

38. BL Add. MS 88918/1/11, a revised proof.

39. The latter is the title written on the front of another of the school exercise books in BL Add. MS 88918/1/6.

40. ‘18 Rugby Street’, CP 1055.

41. Ibid.

42. Richard Hollis, personal communication.

Chapter 31: The Return of Alcestis

1. To Baskin, 25 March 1995 (BL Add. MS 83685).

2. To Baskin, 13 Oct 1996 (BL Add. MS 83685).

3. The Times (London), 8 May 1997.

4. Sunday Times (London), 11 May 1997.

5. Melvyn Bragg, ‘Two Poets Laureate joined by 2,000 years’, The Times (London), 29 Dec 1997.

6. Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid (Faber & Faber, 1997), pp. ix–x.

7. Ibid., pp. 124, 171.

8. Ibid., p. 46.

9. Sylvia Plath Collection, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Lilly II/14/5, hair.

10. Tales from Ovid, p. 47.

11. Aeschylus, The Oresteia: A New Translation by Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber, 1999; quoted here from the American paperback edition, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), pp. 44, 117, 152.

12. Ibid., p. 16. The Plathian parallel is discussed in Michael Silk’s superb essay ‘Ted Hughes: Allusion and Poetic Language’, in the admirable collection Roger Rees, ed., Ted Hughes and the Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

13. Hughes’s translation, in Jean Racine, Phèdre: A Version by Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber, 1998), p. 28.

14. BL Add. MS 88918/4.

15. Personal communication from Barrie Rutter.

16. Euripides, Alcestis, in a New Version by Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber, 1999), pp. 22, 21, 67.

17. Ibid., p. 26.

18. Ibid., p. 77.

19. Ibid., pp. 26–7.

20. Ibid., p. 33.

21. Ibid., p. 25.

22. BL Add. MS 88918/4.

23. ‘Last Letter’, New Statesman, 11 Oct 2010.

24. Alcestis, p. 45.

25. Ibid., p. 66.

26. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847), ch. 29, with thanks to Alistair Heys for pointing out the centrality of this passage.

27. JSP 594.

28. Richard Murphy, The Kick: A Life among Writers (Granta, 2002), pp. 378–9. Ted’s memory plays him false: Aurelia had returned home by this point, so the meeting must have been some weeks earlier.

29. The texts in London Review of Books (19 June 1986) and Wolfwatching (1989) have no epigraph; the proverb was introduced into the Elmet text (1994).

30. Seamus Heaney, ‘On a new work in the English tongue’, Sunday Times (London), 11 Oct 1998.

31. In possession of Hilda’s daughter Vicky Watling (L 738). Postmarked 19 Oct and the line ‘Recovering ever since’ indicates written then, but the date on the letter itself is that of the royal audience, 16 Oct.

32. 6 Oct 1998 (L 733). For the enclosures, see John Carey, The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books (Faber & Faber, 2014), p. 309. Humbled, Carey sent an apologetic reply to Court Green, but since Hughes was in London he did not open it before his death.

33. ‘Comics’ (in a 1997 pamphlet from the Prospero Press), ‘Mother-Tongue’ (Sunday Times (London), 12 Oct 1997).

34. Waterlog, 7 (Dec/Jan 1997/8), p. 10 (CP 1191).

35. Daily Telegraph, 9 Jan 1999 (CP 1194).

36. Olwyn Hughes, personal communication.

Epilogue: The Legacy

1. Frieda Hughes, Stonepicker (Hexham: Bloodaxe, 2001), p. 80.

2. Emory 1014/2/2.

3. Boyd Tonkin, Independent, 30 Oct 1998, p. 3.

4. Memorial address in Westminster Abbey, quoted, Peter Stothard, ‘The moment that changed a memorial’, The Times (London), 14 May 1999.

5. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/207169.stm, misquoting ‘in underbeing’ as ‘into underbeing’ and, ironically, ‘Loose words’ for ‘Lose words’ (CP 652).

6. CP 655.

7. Terence McCaughey, ‘A Light Gone Out – A Tribute to Ted Hughes at his Funeral Service in St Peter’s Church, North Tawton, 3rd November, 1998’, Céide: A Review from the Margins, 2:6 (July/Aug 1999), pp. 12–13.

8. ‘Hunters Try to Bag Dartmoor Lion’, BBC News, 20 Nov 1998, news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/218650.stm.

9. Emma Tennant, Burnt Diaries (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1999), p. 228.

10. ‘Thomas the Rhymer’s Song’, from Guppy’s album Durable Fire (Linnet Records, 1982) (CP 628).

11. Song over the headless body, supposed to be Fidele/Imogen, in Cymbeline. A Hughesian favourite, included in his 1971 Shakespeare anthology, as well as in both The Rattle Bag and By Heart.

12. Stothard, ‘The moment that changed a memorial’.

13. Poems for Shakespeare, ed. Charles Osborne, July 1987.

14. Sunday Times (London), 6 Sept 1998 (CP 1303).

15. BL Add. MS 88918/1.

16. Proved ‘In the High Court of Justice: The District Probate Registry at Bristol’, 25 March 1999. Now in the public domain, as are all wills proven in English law.

17. Copy of ‘Letter of Wishes’ in the possession of Olwyn Hughes.

18. telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1411415/Dying-wish-of-Ted-Hughes-splits-family.html (originally published 27 Oct 2002).

19. Emory 895/23. ‘For the Duration’, CP 760, and ‘The Beach’, CP 1143.

20. 17 Nov 2002 (Emory, 895/2).

21. kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/susan-fromberg-schaeffer/poison-5/ (review originally published 24 April 2006).

22. Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Poison (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), pp. 244–5.

23. Ibid., p. 249.

24. Ibid., pp. 236, 571.

25. Olwyn Hughes, personal communication.

26. Schaeffer, Poison.

27. I detected a striking change in Olwyn’s language about Sylvia in the immediate aftermath of Nick’s suicide. Before, she spoke of Sylvia as being bad; afterwards, of her as being ill. It was as if the heart-rending loss of little Nicky – whom she had loved from his infancy and who so resembled Ted – made her finally believe that depression is real. The Yorkshire ‘pull your socks up’ attitude dissolved, at least for a while, into sorrow and compassion.

28. Personal communication, 2010, the year before Schaeffer’s death.

29. Schaeffer, Poison, p. 182.

30. Ibid., p. 279.

31. Letters of Ted Hughes, selected by and ed. Christopher Reid (Faber & Faber, 2007), p. xi.

32. To Bill and Dido Merwin (L 198).

33. To Olwyn (L 204). ‘Affable familiar’ alludes to Shakespeare on the ‘rival poet’ of his sonnets as an ‘affable familiar ghost’ (Sonnet 86).

34. To Gerald, March 1968, on first meeting Peter Brook (L 281).

35. To Daniel Weissbort, April 1982 (L 453).

36. July 1985, to two thirteen-year-old schoolgirls who had written asking him to interpret his work for them (L 500).

37. To Nick Gammage, Nov 1989 (L 570).

38. To Leonard and Lisa Baskin, May 1984 (L 484).

39. Sunday Times (London), 21 Oct 2007.

40. 17 Dec 1992 (BL Add. MS 88918/123).

41. 41. Unpublished letter, 12 Dec 1992 (BL Add. MS 88948).

42. Olwyn Hughes, personal communication.

43. Roy Davids, personal communication.

44. Elaine Feinstein, a literary acquaintance, got Ted Hughes biography off to a personally inflected start with Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001): written prior to the availability of many archival materials and without the co-operation of the Estate, it animated some of the key friendships but was inevitably cursory in its treatment of the writings. Diane Middlebrook’s Her Husband: Hughes and Plath – A Marriage (New York: Viking, 2003) offers much more on the poetic partnership with Plath, but did not have the benefit of the vital second archive. Neil Roberts’s Ted Hughes: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) skilfully surveys the development of the literary career, but is sparing in biographical detail.

45. Hughes journal, 31 May 1979.

46. Emory 644/115.

47. Letters page, Independent, 22 April 1989.

48. Personal communication. The painting is now owned by Dr Paula Byrne.

49. Foreword by Libby Purves, in Frieda Hughes, Forty-Five: Poems (HarperCollins, 2006), p. ix.

50. Frieda Hughes, Forty-Five, p. 18. In fact, her memory is playing her slightly false: the borrowed dog and the tick belonged to the loughs, not the lochs: see Ted’s account of a family fishing trip in Ireland (hosted by Richard Murphy) later that summer (L 314).

51. Frieda Hughes, Forty-Five, p. 19.

52. Quoted, Andrea Sachs, ‘Q & A with Frieda Hughes’, Time, 13 March 2007.

53. Frieda Hughes, Forty-Five, p. 89.

54. Frieda Hughes, Waxworks: Poems (HarperCollins, 2003), especially ‘Medea’, ‘Job’, ‘Hera’ and ‘Honos’. ‘Hippolytus’ is also especially intriguing, in relation both to Nick and to Ted’s late return to the Phèdre story. But these are matters for Frieda’s future biographer, as are the vicissitudes of her relationship with Olwyn, which are hinted at by indirection in her clever and funny children’s story Getting Rid of Aunt Edna (New York: Harper & Row, 1986).

55. Jason Neuswanger and Bessie Green, quoted, ‘Remembering Dr Nicholas Hughes’ on the website of the School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, University of Alaska Fairbanks, sfos.uaf.edu/memorial/hughes/.

56. Joe Saxton, ‘What suicide gene? My friend Nick was brilliant, passionate and fun’, Sunday Times (London), 29 March 2009.

57. In Howls and Whispers (CP 1182).

58. The only time this word occurs in his Collected Poems.

59. Personal communication.

60. CP 1180. There are good pages on ‘The Offers’ in Middlebrook, Her Husband, pp. 280–2, and Edward Hadley, The Elegies of Ted Hughes (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 138–40 (where it is compared to Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Voice’), though these accounts were written without the benefit of the draft manuscripts.

61. BL Add. MS 88918/1.

62. BL Add. MS 88918/128.

63. Propertius, Elegies, 4.7; ‘The Ghost (after Sextus Propertius)’, in Robert Lowell, Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), pp. 52–4 (originally published in Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), a book which Sylvia gave Ted for his birthday when they were living in America). John Donne’s wonderful ‘The Apparition’ is in the same Propertian tradition of lover–ghost poem.

64. 16 June 1998, to Andrea Paluch and Robert Habeck, in Keith Sagar, ed., Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar (British Library, 2012), p. 324.