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EntrepreneurshipTom Paulin
Between leaving school and going to Cambridge, Ted Hughes did his National Service in the RAF. Writing from RAF West Kirby, in the Wirral, to a friend, Edna Wholey, in 1949 – characteristically there is no date on the letter – he exults in the wild weather:
This love of chaos, motion, process, which is the energy of his best poems, and often makes them resemble action paintings, is brought to a halt by the strong stresses on the last three words so that the stretched perception is completed. And there is a heightened exultation in chaos in a much later letter (23 October 1983) to the painter Barrie Cooke, where he describes fishing on Lake Victoria with his son, Nicholas:
Although the space fiction and the traffic light similes introduce a slightly processed, jarring quality to this ecstatic moment, we have here the poet as a latter-day Yeatsian fisherman (Hughes knew Yeats’s collected poems off by heart). Again there is the ghost of a Hopkins-style argument from design in the orange, man-made traffic lights, in which as often in his poems Hughes links nature to human processes. The sail like a great ripped map of the world adds to the sense of vast, tumultuous space. Hughes’s prose in his letters is always urgent and compulsive, but there are moments of tender observation, as in a letter to Edna Wholey in 1950, where he says he
Such moments are like dummy runs for poems, and they remind us of the animist tenderness in Hughes’s writing, a tenderness that plays against his celebration of feral power. It’s like the last line of a short early poem ‘Snowdrop’ – ‘Her pale head heavy as metal’ – where nature and human artifice come gently together. Inevitably, though, it is biographical interest that these letters stimulate. We catch Hughes’s early undergraduate life at Cambridge in 1952, when, writing to his sister, Olwyn, he says that sometimes he thinks Cambridge is ‘wonderful’, at others ‘a ditch full of clear cold water where all the frogs have died. It is a bird without feathers; a purse without money; an old dry apple, or the gutters run pure claret.’ This sounds very like Lawrence, except for the balancing, divided attitude. Hughes, it’s clear, is the most important writer to emerge from English Nonconformism since Lawrence. Like him Hughes writes to the moment with a voracious intensity. Yet in an unusually assured comment on the Anglican Swift (he was only 22) he tells Olwyn that Swift is the ‘only stylist’. Swift’s excellence is a talent for ‘clarity simplicity and power’ (note the lack of commas as in ‘mud water fire and air’). Swift’s writing is ‘the bedrock from which every writer must start’. This has a vigorous certainty – Lawrence wouldn’t have agreed with it – that shows Hughes’s driving ambition always to reach bedrock, and his insistence on what he calls ‘clarity simplicity and power’. Largely, he holds to this aesthetic in his letters and it enables him to write about everything in a spontaneous, direct, unforced and unflinching manner in keeping with his Nonconformist background. Writing prose was essential to him; in another early letter to Olwyn he says that he only writes poems when he is busy writing prose at the same time. He was a compulsive letter-writer and his enormous study of Shakespeare, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, began from a series of letters he wrote to the theatre director Donya Feuer. His other important prose work is the collection of essays and reviews that make up Winter Pollen. In the letter to his sister about prose being essential to him, he says that he hopes to write poems quite different from ‘the meanness and deadness of almost all modern English verse’. But he mentions, praises and encourages many poets in these letters (one of his weighty cultural legacies is the amount of translation he set in train both through contacts with publishers and through the journal Modern Poetry in Translation which he founded with Daniel Weissbort). It is, however, his letters to Plath that are the outstanding feature of this volume. The first letter (March 1956) is very brief:
The reference to the broached brandy bottle is characteristic of Hughes’s practical canniness. Two months later (22 May 1956) he is telling Olwyn:
He then says that she is ‘Scorpio Oct 27th, moon in Libra, last degrees of Aries rising and has her Mars smack on my sun, which is all very appropriate’. The astrological interest is a running theme; in October he designs an astrological chart for Plath which he draws out in another letter to Olwyn. It shows, he explains, Saturn ‘on the cusp of the twelfth, which is suicidal’. A letter to Plath earlier that month begins ‘Darling Sylvia Puss-Kish Ponky,’ and tells her that he has bought a ‘HOROSCOPE’ and predicts ‘you will be famous and . . . come into vast fortunes and happiness by marriage to an amazing strange provider of these’. Later in the letter he says that silent reading lacks an ‘emotional charge’, and this explains ‘Amis and Wain and the rest’. Hughes feels alienated from and hostile to the Movement poets: his exulting whap beats against their rational and ironic forms which are unable to address the original chaos he delights in. In the same way he tells Plath that Robert Graves has ‘a kind of disinfected enunciation, a crumb accent no less, states everything so far under that nothing at all is heard’. In these letters his love for Plath, for her ‘ponky warmth’, is absolute; in one letter he moves from describing a weasel or a stoat running across a field to filling in the football pools for them both, to saying: ‘Goodnight puss, goodnight little puss, little soft places little puss, I wish you were still here or rather I wish I was still there I would kiss you slowly from toe up.’ Then he says that he neglected her, that one of his most tormenting thoughts is that ‘I didn’t suck and lick and nibble you all night long.’ He finishes: ‘I love you everything and you write terrific letters. Love love love love Ted.’ Another letter ends: ‘All all all all all love Your Ted.’ And in another he says: ‘I love you from your toes to your ankles to your knees to your thighs to your hips to your navel to your nipples to your shoulders to your throat to your mouth to your nose to your eyes and then in to the end of you. All my love every minute.’ Reading these letters we are thrown into the opening act of the lovers’ tragedy. Writing to his brother, Gerald, and his family in Australia, Hughes says in May 1957:
Then he describes squealing to make rabbits come out, and how an owl rose in his face and tried to land on his neck. His happiness in the intense relationship with Plath and in their shared literary life zigzags through these early letters. But a month after writing to his brother, he tells Olwyn, to whom he is obviously very close, that their days at his parents’ house were ‘ill-starred’. He asks Olwyn not to be too critical about the way Plath ‘got up and came after me’. She was nervy after her exams, he says, and admires Olwyn more than any Englishwoman she’s ever met. Then in a tone that is both objective and informed by love and sympathy, he says:
The analysis continues with Hughes saying that she’s ‘no angel, but there’s a balance to her worst side’. A note to this letter tells us that during a visit from Hughes’s former schoolteacher and his wife, Plath had upped and left the house mid-conversation in silent rage. It is clear from Dido Merwin’s account in an appendix to Bitter Fame, Anne Stevenson’s biography of Plath, that she could be intensely demanding and jealous. And in a letter to his brother after the break-up of the marriage in 1962, Hughes refers to ‘Sylvia’s particular death-ray quality’, before saying that they are now better friends than they’ve been since they first met. Much earlier, in 1957, writing from the United States, he tells his brother that they have had a bad week in which Plath lay helpless ‘with sheer depression’, but then it cleared and they have suddenly begun ‘to write like angels and apply our brains like the bits of electric drills’. The letters that follow do not document the disintegration of their relationship – one feels in some sense intrusive in wishing that they did. The marriage fell apart in the summer of 1962 when David Wevill, a Canadian poet whose work Hughes admired, and his wife, Assia, visited Court Green, the house in Devon where Hughes, Plath and their two young children were living. The Wevills stayed over the weekend of 18 to 20 May, and it was during this visit that Hughes and Assia fell in love. Sensing this, Plath saw her visitors off, Reid notes, ‘in a mood of tension and unvoiced rage’. Hughes and Assia would afterwards meet clandestinely in London, until an argument during a visit by Plath’s mother, Aurelia, caused Hughes to leave Plath. In the late summer, Hughes writes to Olwyn that ‘things are quite irrevocable,’ and recounts a dream – a frequent subject in his letters – in which ‘Hitler came to me, furious, demanding that I carry out the commands instantly.’ This is obviously a guilty dream, but it is much later that we learn what his feelings were. Yet he and Plath still managed to communicate with each other and two months after he left her, they visited Ireland hoping to find a house where she could spend the winter (their difficult stay is recounted by Richard Murphy in his autobiography The Kick). Hughes’s letters appear cheerful and engaged and free of guilt. At this time, curiously, he concocts a plan to send poems out under one or two pseudonyms. He wants to invent a rival poet, ‘or perhaps two’, who will gradually become much better than him – then the people who resent him for one reason or another ‘will line up to support one of my rivals (i.e. me)’. What became of this scheme we don’t learn – it’s rather like his earlier scheme to open a mink farm in Australia and make his fortune. Hughes is in many ways a literary entrepreneur who always ‘sells’ poems to magazines, and whose reputation, he says in a letter to his cousin Vicky Watling, attracts ‘lucrative commissions’. The most complete example of this streak is his masterpiece, Moortown Diary, where, to quote Marx out of Shakespeare, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ In that volume the poems have a dawncold, intense, adrenalin-charged risk and rapidity: the verse is direct, active, intensely to the moment and in-the-face, with an at times gruelling spontaneity, while in Crow his attempt at myth is insistently repetitive and unlocated, so that the poems which make up the sequence are, paradoxically, both flaccid and insistent. There are relatively few mentions of Moortown Diary in these letters and this serves to minimise its importance, while Crow, though a failure, is often referred to. We can see, glancingly, the entrepreneurial nature of his imagination in this passage from a letter to Olwyn (10 February 1963): ‘I drove up to London, ran over a hare (by pure chance – it’s impossible to do it deliberately) sold it to a butcher’s in Holborn and he gave me five bob. I spent it on roses – 4 I got for 5/-, smashed two, & gave 2 to Assia.’ It’s a moment that demands to be isolated as a short poem in prose, and is not unlike something Hardy, that master of prolepsis and superstition, might have invented. The next letter to Olwyn – short and bleak – is written later that month:
He then says, ‘I’ll write more later,’ which leaves us waiting for a follow-up letter to Olwyn, but either it wasn’t written or it hasn’t been included. Hughes’s feelings are again apparent in a letter to Daniel and Helga Huws: ‘Sylvia killed herself on Monday morning. She seemed to be getting in good shape, was writing again, she was making enough money, getting all sorts of commissions, good reviews for her novel.’ Then, he says, a series of things such as solicitors’ letters got to be too much: ‘she flared up, and the doctor put her on very heavy sedatives.’ In the gap between ‘one pill & the next she turned on the oven, and gassed herself’. The next letter in the sequence is to Aurelia Plath:
This is heartfelt and should be pitched against those writers who have sought to demonise Hughes in his relationship with Plath and at whom this selection is partly aimed. More moving is the next paragraph, where he says:
By this time Hughes was in a difficult relationship with Assia Wevill, which produced a daughter, Shura, and then another tragedy: Assia killed herself and Shura seven years later, on 23 March 1969. Writing to Assia’s sister, Celia Chaikin, he says that he’s gone through the past weeks in a daze. ‘Everything has become horrible to me, I cannot believe how I never knew what was really happening to her.’ He then says that their life together was very complicated, with ‘old ghosts’ and dozens of near separations over the years, but they belonged together so completely ‘that her repeatedly testing me, saying that we’d better separate for good, were just like a bad habit, part of our old difficulties, and so when she repeated it on that last day over the phone, it was nothing new, nothing we hadn’t got over dozens of times before’. This does not fit his poem ‘Dreamers’ in Birthday Letters about the weekend they fell in love. With her ‘Kensington jeweller’s elocution’ and ‘gaze of a demon/Between curtains of black Mongolian hair’, Assia is portrayed simply as dangerous, too foreign and unstable. She is ‘slightly filthy with erotic mystery’ and has nothing like the presence of Plath in the volume. Looking at the letters he wrote to Assia, one may feel that he writes lovingly, but that there is perhaps something overdone, as in the opening to a letter he wrote on 18 August 1965: ‘Dear sweet little love sweet Asseeke sweet love sweetness & sweetest’. The letter ends, ‘Sweetness lovely sweetness’, which is terser but still not quite convincing. And yet to say this is to face the central problem of reading letters: they are not written to convince us – we may see ourselves as prurient intruders touching and testing something we were never meant to see or to pass judgment on. The same is true of his and Plath’s life together. Hughes’s long rebuke to Al Alvarez speaks against the account of Plath’s suicide Alvarez published in The Savage God, which was serialised in the Observer:
Alvarez was ‘sticking electrodes’ in Plath’s children’s brains. Hughes was obviously devoted to Nicholas and his daughter, Frieda, as we can see from a number of long, supportive letters to them. Many years after rebuking Alvarez, he addresses the cult of Sylvia Plath, and his sense of having colluded in it. Writing to Lucas Myers (14 February 1987), he says that Plath managed to present her ‘diabolical streak’ as the voice of her suffering and martyrdom:
Plath, he says, was a lot more complicated, and in no small measure ‘a deal more perverse, than the popular saintly doll purveyed to students & literary tourists’. The enduring trauma to Hughes and his family is clear. He did everything possible to publish Plath’s work and advance her reputation, but, among many other criticisms, had to face the accusation of allowing her grave to fall into neglect. Again and again, Plath’s married name was prised from her gravestone in Heptonstall, and Hughes had it replaced. These acts of vandalism are the subject of a long letter to the Guardian (20 April 1989) in which Hughes criticises a pair of Plath scholars who had wrongly stated that Plath and he had signed divorce papers. He speaks of a critical ‘Fantasia’ which obscured Plath’s life and death and grieved him deeply. While the relationship with Plath generated the most powerful and compelling letters, they are all remarkable for their verve and spontaneity; for the glimpses we get of Eliot’s ‘huge thick hands’; Louis MacNeice talking like ‘a quick-fire car salesman’; Pound’s ‘dead button eyes’; Lowell’s manic fits; Auden’s ‘strangely wrinkled face, like a Viking seaman – that sort of tan & wrinkles. Like a reptile – though not squamous, not unpleasant. Lively brown eyes.’ Henry Williamson, whom Hughes admired, he describes in a letter to his brother, Gerald, saying he made a mess of his life ‘with Hitlerism’, but has an amazing knowledge of wildlife, ‘though he is a bit of an old sod.’ He is more critical of Donald Davie, saying in a sympathetic letter to John Montague apropos of a bad review that Davie is a ‘grotesquely shrunken silly imitator of Pound’, the receptacle of every other critic’s ‘dud cartridges & empty cases’, ‘the mincy mean know-all kind of little office snot’. His poetry is ‘all creak and no cart’. This type of vituperation – unfair in Davie’s case – is rare, though he writes to Daniel Weissbort in early 1958 that England is ‘a vicious doghole for the most part. One half has a bellyful of acid and old iron, that’s the articulate part, and the mass, the proletariat, is a great senile toothless hairless white ape, blind, tied, etcetera.’ America, where he was happy with Plath, he describes as ‘glazed’, ‘boundless suburbia’, ‘plastic cellophane’. He is severe on Larkin, saying of his prose miscellany, Required Writing, that ‘the whole book’s outrageous propaganda for his own tastes & limitations & prejudices’. Believing that Larkin must have refused the laureateship (he later realised Larkin wasn’t asked), he writes to Leonard and Lisa Baskin that ‘his general all-purpose No seems to me not so admirable, & there were attractions in turning mightily to my advantage what he’d shied from.’ Again we see his canniness. Learning that Larkin has cancer, he writes with details of a healer whom in several long paragraphs he encourages Larkin to consult. (Larkin didn’t, and died a month later.) But when Larkin’s letters are published he says: ‘All that self-loathing, at full spurt, bubble, ooze & drip. His tribe laps it up.’ The letters are ‘stinking bile-green weeds’. Like Larkin, Hughes was a devout monarchist, and this shows in a letter to the Queen Mother thanking her for having him and his wife, Carol, to stay at the Royal Lodge in Windsor. It also shows in his account of meeting the Queen. A letter to Prince Charles is signed ‘Your loyal and humble servant Ted Hughes’. In a heartfelt letter to Nick Gammage (15 December 1992), he claims that the monarchy has ‘deep psychological significance for the union’. He took attacks on the monarchy personally, and of course he had to take attacks on his laureate verses. This did not prevent him from admiring the work of that arch-republican William Hazlitt, as is clear from a letter he wrote to me just two months before his death from cancer, and which is included here. The impression these letters give is of an imagination on a kind of ecstatic alert, along with a talent for running with an idea, as in this 1962 letter to Charles Tomlinson where he celebrates the vegetables he’s planted at Court Green:
This sounds contented, but the next letter but one contains the account of his Hitler dream and the fact that things between him and Plath are irrevocable. This is a thick volume – more than 700 pages – but it serves as a taster for the many volumes of collected letters which I hope are still to come. When those letters are published Hughes should be established with Keats, Hopkins, the early Yeats and Elizabeth Bishop as one of the most important letter-writing poets. The Selected Letters is sensitively and meticulously edited by Christopher Reid (the one mistake I noted is the attribution of Antigone to Euripides), and in his introduction he says that an edition of three or four volumes, each just as big, could have been assembled. He has excluded letters that deal with environmental issues because their technical complexity and ‘immersion in the unresolved political moment’ would have made them impossible to annotate except at inordinate length. He also notes that often the letters end exactly at the bottom of the page, and yet appear to say as much as, and no more than, the occasion warranted. It is only when we have the whole, no doubt unwieldy, mass of the letters before us that we can begin to make sense of the driven, joyous, intent imagination they portray. Obviously there is too much rawness, intimacy, distance, difficulty, weight and mass to have a collected letters nine years after Hughes’s death, but we need to recognise that it is from the collected letters that we must hew the selected. From the LRB letters page: [ 13 December 2007 ] Anthony Thwaite, Page Nelson. Tom Paulin’s most recent book is Crusoe’s Secret. His study of poetic form, The Secret Life of Poems, will be published in January. |
From the archiveNo reason for not asking Sorry to go on like this You Have Never Written Better A Man with My Trouble First Pitch |
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