Copyright

William Collins

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First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2015

Copyright © Jonathan Bate 2015

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be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008118228

Ebook Edition © October 2015 ISBN: 9780008118235

Version: 2016-03-23

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Note to the Paperback Edition

Epigraph

Prologue: The Deposition

1. ‘fastened into place’

2. Capturing Animals

3. Tarka, Rain Horse, Pike

4. Goddess

5. Burnt Fox

6. ‘a compact index of everything to follow’

7. Falcon Yard

8. 18 Rugby Street

9. ‘Marriage is my medium’

10. ‘So this is America’

11. Famous Poet

12. The Grass Blade

13. ‘That Sunday Night’

14. The Custodian

15. The Iron Man

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

17. The Crow

18. The Savage God

19. Farmer Ted

20. The Elegiac Turn

21. The Arraignment

22. Sunstruck Foxglove

23. Remembrance of Elmet

24. The Fisher King

25. The Laureate

26. Trial

27. A

28. Goddess Revisited

29. Smiling Public Man

30. The Sorrows of the Deer

31. The Return of Alcestis

Epilogue: The Legacy

Notes

The Principal Works of Ted Hughes

Suggestions for Further Reading

Picture Section

Acknowledgements

Index

Also by Jonathan Bate

About the Author

About the Publisher

Dedication

For Paula Jayne, again and always

And for Barrie and Deedee Wigmore,

because the shepherd’s hut unlocked it

Note to the Paperback Edition

I am most grateful to Anne Donovan, Peter Fydler, Brenda Hedden, Carol Hughes and Rowland Wymer for pointing out a number of errors, ambiguities and contested memories, which have been addressed in this edition.

Jonathan Bate, January 2016

Epigraph

As an imaginative writer, my only capital is my own life

Ted Hughes (1992)

When you sit with your pen, every year of your life is right there, wired into the communication between your brain and your writing hand … Maybe all poetry, insofar as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of something that the writer doesn’t actually want to say but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of. Perhaps it’s the need to keep it hidden that makes it poetic – makes it poetry. The writer daren’t actually put it into words, so it leaks out obliquely, smuggled through analogies … we’re actually saying something we desperately need to share. The real mystery is this strange need. Why can’t we just hide it and shut up? Why do we have to blab? Why do human beings need to confess? Maybe if you don’t have that secret confession, you don’t have a poem – don’t even have a story.

Ted Hughes, interviewed for The Paris Review (Spring 1995)

Prologue
The Deposition

Q. Would you state your full name for the record?

A. Edward James Hughes.

Q. What is your residence address?

A. Court Green, North Tawton 11, England.

Q. Have you a business address?

A. That’s it. I work from home.

Q. And what is your occupation, sir?

A. Writer.

The Yorkshire accent is unfamiliar. ‘Eleven’ is the stenographer’s mishearing of ‘Devon’. The date is 26 March 1986.

Q. And could you state your age for the record?

A. 55. I shall be 56 this year.

Q. Now, sir, were you at some time in your life married to a woman named Sylvia Plath?

A. Yes.

Q. Can you tell me when you first met her?

A. The 25th of February 1956.

Q. And where did you meet her?

A. Cambridge, England.

Q. And what were the circumstances of that meeting?

A. I met her at a party.

Q. Do you know what she was doing in England?

A. She was on a Fulbright scholarship.

Q. Do you know where she was from?

A. Did I know then?

Q. Yes.

A. I just knew she was American.

The details are established. Her home town was Wellesley, her college was Smith. And then:

Q. Do you know whether or not she had been ill?

A. She told me she had been ill later in the spring.

Q. Did she tell you she had been mentally ill?

A. She told me that she attempted to commit suicide.

Q. Did she tell you the circumstances of her having done that?

A. She only told me as an explanation of the scar on her cheek.

Q. Let me see if I understand your answer. There was a scar on her cheek, is that correct?

A. There was a big scar on her left cheek.1

The Deposition is being taken in the offices of Shapiro and Grace, attorneys, on Milk Street, Boston, before Josephine C. Aurelio, Registered Professional Reporter, a Notary Public within and for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Carolyn Grace, attorney, is acting on behalf of her client, Dr Jane V. Anderson, who is present in the room. Anderson is plaintiff in Civil Action number 82-0752-K, versus Avco Embassy Pictures Corporation and others, defendants. Edward James Hughes, writer, is one of the others.

He was a man who took astrology seriously. He believed in signs, auguries, meaningful coincidences. Often he would dream of something happening, only for it to happen subsequently. He lived by, and for, the power of words. His vocation was poetry, language wrought to its uttermost, words honed to their essence. The words of his poems – which he obsessively revised, refined, rewrote – are compacted, freighted with meaning, sometimes darkly opaque, sometimes cut like jewels of crystal clarity. He relished the resonance of names: Elmet, Moortown, the Duchy. He believed that houses held ghosts, strong forces, memories.

In Boston that March of 1986, walking familiar streets, he was flooded by memory. He and Sylvia had lived there some thirty years before, on:

Willow Street, poetical address.

Number nine, even better. It confirmed

We had to have it.2

Doubly poetical, in fact. There were the pastoral associations of willow: Hughes was haunted by the willow aslant the brook in Gertrude’s account of Ophelia’s suicide in Hamlet. More immediately, Hughes discovered that this had also once been the home of Robert Frost. Willow Street is just off Beacon Street, the heart of literary Boston. Here, a stone’s throw from the Charles River, you would find the offices of publishers, both established (Little, Brown) and independent (the Beacon Press). At number 10½ stood the Boston Athenaeum, the library at the centre of the New England intellectual life that back in the nineteenth century had set the template for the nation’s literature. For Ted Hughes, though, the name ‘Beacon’ was a call not only from the literary past but also from his Yorkshire home. His reading and his life came into conjunction. Which was something that seemed to happen to him again and again throughout his life.

The Yorkshire house, up on the hill, is called the Beacon. Square, rather squat, of dark-red brick, not the local gritstone that grounds those dwellings that seem truly to belong to the place. It stands, a little apart from its neighbours, on a long straight road at Heptonstall Slack, high above Hebden Bridge. It commands a sweeping view of hill and vale, down towards Lumb Bank, which would be another place of memory. This was the home of Ted Hughes’s parents when they returned to the Yorkshire Moors and the Calder Valley while he was at Cambridge University. A return to their roots, away from the unlovely town of Mexborough, further south, though still in Yorkshire, in the industrial area between Rotherham and Sheffield. Mexborough Grammar had been the school that prepared Ted Hughes for the Cambridge entrance examination.

The move to the Beacon was a sign of upward mobility. Edward James Hughes, like his elder brother and sister Gerald and Olwyn, was born and raised in a cramped end-terrace dwelling in the village of Mytholmroyd. In Mexborough, they had lived behind and above the newspaper and tobacco shop where William and Edith Hughes made their living. It was a matter of pride that they were eventually able to buy a detached house with a name and a view, just as it was a matter of pride that their boy Ted had got into Cambridge. They were not to know that he would rise even higher: that the boy from the end-terrace near the mill would fish privately with Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, talk of shamanism with a man born to become king and, just days before he died, receive from the hands of the Queen her highest personal honour, the Order of Merit.

The Beacon became a house of memory. It was here that Ted brought his bride, Sylvia Plath, to meet his parents in 1956. It was from here that he took Sylvia – playing Heathcliff to her Cathy – on a day trip to Top Withens, the ruined farmhouse believed to be the original of Wuthering Heights. It was here that the family gathered on the day that Sylvia was buried, near the family plot, just down the road in Heptonstall graveyard. It was here that he came at moments of crisis in later relationships: when he was thinking of buying Lumb Bank and making a home there with Assia Wevill and when he found himself having to choose between two women in 1970. It was to here that he and his sister Olwyn brought back their mother (‘Ma’) in the last days of her life and here that he came after seeing her cold body in the Chapel of Rest down in Hebden Bridge.

And it was here that he sometimes fought with Sylvia. ‘You claw the door,’ he wrote in a poem called ‘The Beacon’. The woman desperate to escape the house. Torrential Yorkshire rain crashes against the windowpanes. Inside the houses, on hillside and in valley, the lights of evening twinkle. ‘The Beacon’ gives a glimpse of Ted Hughes writing about domestic life. Yet it is also a poem of death, of graves and eternal silence. A beacon of memory, shining into the past. The memory of Sylvia among the Hugheses: chit-chat, telly, doing the dishes. Then a row, an explosion of anger. Sylvia, a trapped animal, brought fresh from the shining shore of the New World and confined in Yorkshire cold, Yorkshire grime, Yorkshire ways she does not really understand. She claws the door. Hughes at his most characteristic was a poet of claws and cages: Jaguar, Hawk and Crow. A poet who turns event and animal to myth.

Yet he was also a poet of deep tenderness, of restorative memory. If ‘The Beacon’ shines the light of memory into the past, there is another light that reaches forward with hope to the future, to redemption. In perhaps the greatest of his later poems, he calls it ‘a spirit-beacon / Lit by the power of the salmon’. This other beacon is found in an epiphanic morning moment when he stands waist-deep in pure cold Alaskan river water with his beloved son Nicholas. Here the ‘inner map’ of wild salmon becomes the cartography of Hughes’s own life: smoke-dimmed half-light of Calder Valley and wartime memory of ‘the drumming drift’ of Lancaster bombers. ‘Drumming’ had been one of Hughes’s signature words ever since the ‘drumming ploughland’ of ‘The Hawk in the Rain’, title poem of his first volume.

The poem is called ‘That Morning’.3 Even a word as seemingly flat as ‘that’ is often full of resonance in Hughes: not any morning, but that morning, that magical, memorable, poetical, immortal morning. The poem ends with a redemptive couplet that rhymes with itself: ‘So we stood, alive in the river of light / Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.’4 It is a poem about life at its best not only because Hughes is doing something that he loves in a location that is utterly sublime, but above all because he is together (‘we stood’) with his only son, who lives on the other side of the world. It is a poem full of heart, of love. A few years later Ted would urge Nick to ‘live like a mighty river’. ‘The only calibration that counts’, he wrote in a magnificent letter following another fishing trip, ‘is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.’5

The closing couplet of ‘That Morning’ is now inscribed on Ted Hughes’s memorial stone in Poets’ Corner. The national literary shrine in Westminster Abbey is indeed the place where England’s last permanent, as opposed to fixed-term, Poet Laureate in one sense belongs. But his spirit was only at peace in moorland air or when casting his rod over water, so it is fitting that his ashes are not there in the Abbey. Their place of scattering is marked by another stone, far to the west of his England.

Ted Hughes is our poet of light, but also of darkness. Of fresh water but also of polluted places. Of living life to the full, but also of death. And among his creatures are those not only of light but also of violence. We must celebrate his ‘dazzle of blessing’ but we cannot write his life without being honest about the ‘claw’, without confronting what in ‘That Morning’ he calls the wrong thoughts that darken.

In view of Hughes’s supernatural solicitings and given all the associations of the name Beacon, it was with grim satisfaction that, in the matter of Jane Anderson versus Avco Embassy Pictures and others, he found himself represented by Palmer and Dodge, working in conjunction with Peabody and Arnold, counsel for the lead defendant (Avco). These were two of Boston’s oldest and most respected law firms. Both had their premises at the auspicious address of 1 Beacon Street.

It was there on the morning of Thursday 3 April 1986, a week after Ted had made his Deposition, that Alexander (Sandy) H. Pratt Jr, acting on behalf of the defendants, asked some questions of Dr Anderson. Mr Pratt: ‘You felt, I take it, that Sylvia Plath wrote what she wrote in the book about the character Joan Gilling because she was hostile and angry towards you?’

Ms Grace: ‘Objection.’

Mr Pratt told Jane Anderson that she could answer. She replied, hesitantly: ‘I wouldn’t say – I would say that one of the reasons that she wrote what she wrote was – again, this is a hypothesis – but that she had some angry feelings towards me.’

Why was she angry? Because, said Anderson, of what took place when she visited Sylvia Plath in Cambridge, England, on 4 June 1956.6 That is to say, just over three months after Sylvia first met Ted Hughes ‘at a party’ and just twelve days before she married him in a swiftly arranged private ceremony in London. So what had happened at the meeting?

Sylvia Plath started talking in a very pressured way. That was my perception, that it was pressured. She said that she had met a man who was a poet, with whom she was very much in love. She went on to say that this person, whom she described as a very sadistic man, was someone she cared about a great deal and had entered into a relationship with. She also said that she thought she could manage him, manage his sadistic characteristics.

Q. Was she saying that he was sadistic towards her?

A. My recollection is she described him as someone who was very sadistic.7

Jane Anderson and Sylvia Plath had dated the same boys and had been fellow-patients in the McLean Hospital, New England’s premier mental health facility. By the time of the Deposition, Anderson herself had become a psychoanalyst. On the basis of what she had seen of Plath during her treatment at McLean following a suicide attempt, it was her judgement that Plath had not worked through her own feelings of anger regarding her father. Jane had told Sylvia that she was not taking her psychotherapy sufficiently seriously. In the light of this earlier history, Anderson had grave doubts about the wisdom of Plath entering into a relationship with a ‘very sadistic’ man. She did not actually counsel Sylvia against going ahead with the relationship, but, thinking about it on the train back to London, she sensed that she had created anger in Plath precisely because Plath was herself anxious and ambivalent about committing herself to Hughes.

How did it come to pass that Hughes and Anderson found themselves making these Depositions over twenty years after Plath’s suicide in the bitter London winter of 1963?

After the event, Ted Hughes’s lawyer summed up the issue at stake: ‘The plaintiff, Dr Jane Anderson, asserted that a character in the novel, The Bell Jar, and in the motion picture version was “of and concerning” herself, and that the portrayal of that character as a person with at least homosexual inclinations and suicidal inclinations defamed her and caused her substantial emotional anguish.’8 Reporting the first day of the trial, which finally came to court nearly a year after the Depositions, the New York Times put the case more dramatically:

Literature, lesbianism, psychiatry, film making, television and video cassettes were all touched upon in United States District Court today as a $6 million libel suit opened here … The defendants include 14 companies and individuals, including Avco Embassy Pictures, which produced the 1979 film derived from the novel; CBS Inc., which broadcast it twice; Time-Life Films, the owner of Home Box Office, which played it nine times; Vestron Inc., which made and distributed a video cassette of the film, plus the director and screen writer of the film … At the defendants’ table sat Ted Hughes, the poet laureate of England and a major defendant in the case.9

Many events in Ted Hughes’s eventful life have a surreal quality about them, but none more than this: Her Majesty’s Poet Laureate sits in a court room in the city of the Boston Tea Party, as defendant in a $6 million libel action against a film of a book that he did not write.

The full circumstances of the case, and its central significance in the Ted Hughes story, will be discussed later.10 What is particularly fascinating about his Deposition is that it provided the occasion for one of Hughes’s most forthright statements about what he considered to be the fallacy of biographical criticism. One reason why Jane Anderson had a good chance of winning her case, provided she could show that the character of Joan Gilling was indeed a ‘portrait’ of her, was that the first American edition of The Bell Jar, published posthumously in 1971, included a note by Lois Ames, who had been appointed by Ted and Olwyn Hughes as Sylvia Plath’s ‘official biographer’. The Ames note stated explicitly that ‘the central themes of Sylvia Plath’s early life are the basis for The Bell Jar’ and that the reason she had published it under a pseudonym in England shortly before her death (and not attempted to publish it at all in the United States) was that it might cause pain ‘to the many people close to her whose personalities she had distorted and lightly disguised in the book’.11

The name of Sylvia Plath has become synonymous with the idea of autobiographical or confessional literature. Teachers have a hard time persuading students that the character of Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar, working as an intern at a New York fashion magazine, is not quite synonymous with Sylvia Plath working for Mademoiselle in June 1953 (‘a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs’).12 Or, indeed, that her most famous and infamous poem ‘Daddy’ is not wholly ‘about’ Sylvia’s relationship to her father Otto and her husband Ted – who habitually wore black, the colour of the poem.

‘Do you remember disagreeing with any aspect of the biographical note?’ Carolyn Grace asked Hughes. He had expected her to be a brisk, hard-edged feminist but found her more like a plump, slow-moving tapir, surprisingly sympathetic. After the Deposition was completed, they had a friendly chat – she told him that she had studied under the famous critic Yvor Winters, who had said how much he admired Ted’s poetry. Hughes, with characteristic self-deprecation, assumed that she had misremembered and that the poet whom Winters really admired was his friend Thom Gunn. In the late Fifties, they had been the two rising stars, the twin angry young men in the English poetic firmament.

A. I thought the whole thing was unnecessary.

Q. What was unnecessary?

A. Well, I thought by touching, attaching it so closely to Sylvia, it merely encouraged the general dilution that the book was about Silvia’s life, it was a scenario from Silvia’s life.

The court reporter is erratic in her spelling of Sylvia’s name and has, in an almost Freudian slip, misheard ‘delusion’ as ‘dilution’.

Q. Which you disagreed with?

A. Which I disagreed with.

Q. What was the basis for your disagreement, sir, that the book was a scenario of Silvia’s life?

A. The turmoil that I’ve had to deal with since Sylvia died was of every one of her readers interpreting everything that she wrote as some sort of statement about her immediate life; in other words, trying to turn this symbolic artist, really [brief gap in transcription] That’s why she’s so famous, that’s why she’s a big poetic figure: because she’s a great symbolic artist.

It is unfortunate that Hughes’s exact words are lost to the record here, but it is clear what he was arguing: that Plath was a symbolic artist persistently misread as a confessional one. He went on to explain:

My struggle has been with the world of people who interpret, try to shift her whole work into her life as if somehow her life was more interesting and was more the subject matter of debate than what she wrote. So there’s a constant effort to translate her works into her life.

Q. And you object to that?

A. It seems to me a great pity and wrong.13

At the time of the Bell Jar lawsuit, Ted Hughes was battling with Sylvia Plath’s biographers – as he battled for much of his life after her death.

Hughes was prepared for this line of questioning. The day before making his Deposition he had phoned Aurelia Plath, Sylvia’s mother. By one of the coincidences typical of Hughes’s life, Aurelia was preparing to give a lecture in a high school later that week on the very subject of how non-autobiographical her daughter’s novel was. Aurelia was ferociously bitter about the autobiographical elements in her daughter’s work. People had accused her of destroying Sylvia and Ted’s marriage, simply on the basis of Plath’s portrayal of her in the enraged poem ‘Medusa’ in her posthumously published collection, Ariel:

You steamed to me over the sea,

Fat and red, a placenta

Paralysing the kicking lovers.14

The conceit of the poem is that ‘Medusa’ is the name not only of the monstrous gorgon in classical mythology but also of a species of jellyfish of which the Latin name is Cnidaria Scypozoa Aurelia. Mother as love-murdering jellyfish: no wonder Aurelia wanted to play the ‘non-autobiographical’ card.

The trouble was, there had been a clause in paragraph 12 of the agreement between the Avco Embassy Pictures Corporation and the Sylvia Plath Estate (that is, Ted Hughes, represented by his agent, Olwyn Hughes) prohibiting any publicity that referred to the film of The Bell Jar as autobiographical. But somehow this clause had been deleted, in an amendment signed by Ted. Letting this go through was a fatal slip on Olwyn’s part. That is why he felt vulnerable in the case, despite the fact that he had in no sense authorised the offending lesbian scenes in the movie. After the awkward fifteen-minute phone call to Aurelia, he agonised with himself in his journal.

Nobody could deny that The Bell Jar was centred on Sylvia’s breakdown and the trauma of her attempted suicide. Hughes accordingly reasoned that he would have to argue that it was a fictional attempt to take control of the experience in order to reshape it to a positive end. By turning her suicidal impulse into art, Sylvia was seeking to save herself from its recurrence in life: she was trying ‘to change her fate, to protect herself – from herself’ but as an ‘attempt to get the upper hand of her split, her other personality, to defeat it, banish it, and, in the end, extinguish it’ it was ultimately a failure.15 The notion of the ‘split’ or ‘other personality’ in Plath was something to which Hughes returned again and again; it was also an obsession of Plath herself, already manifest in her 1955 undergraduate honours thesis at Smith, which was entitled ‘The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky’s Novels’. But these were deep matters, subtle distinctions that would not be easy to make in court. That night, Ted ate swordfish and went to bed early, readied for the encounter with Anderson’s lawyer the following day. In the morning he awoke to the newspaper headline ‘War with Ghaddafi’. His own literary-legal battle was about to begin.

Even as he was resisting the equation of art and life, Hughes was writing (though not publishing) poetry of unprecedented candour about his marriage to Sylvia. The Boston Deposition was a way-station on the road to Birthday Letters, the book about his marriage to Sylvia which he finally published in January 1998. In courtroom and hotel room, he followed Sylvia’s example of turning life into art by transforming the saga of the Bell Jar lawsuit into a long poem, divided into forty-six sections, still unpublished today, called ‘Trial’.

He wrote to his lawyer, to whom he had grown very close, directly after the trial: ‘The whole 24 year chronic malaise of Sylvia’s biographical problem seems to have come to some sort of crisis. I’d say the Trial forced it.’16 Or rather, he added, the synchronicity of the trial and his dealings with Plath’s biographers, of whom there were by that time no fewer than six.

Sylvia Plath’s death was the turning point in Ted Hughes’s life. And Plath’s biographers were his perpetual bane. In a rough poetic draft written when a television documentary was being made about her life, he used the image of the film-makers ‘crawling all over the church’ and peering over Sylvia’s ‘ghostly shoulder’. For nearly thirty years, Hughes and his second wife Carol lived in Court Green, the house by the church in the village of North Tawton in Devon that Ted and Sylvia had found in 1961. Their home was, he wrote, Plath’s mausoleum. The boom camera of the film-makers swung across the bottom of their garden. It was as if Ted and Carol were acting out the story of Sylvia on a movie set, their lives ‘displaced’ by her death.

The documentary crew crawled all over the yew tree in the neighbouring churchyard. Ted wryly suggests that if the moon were obligingly to come out and take part in the performance, they would crawl all over it. Both Moon and Yew Tree had been immortalised in Plath’s October 1961 poem of that title: ‘This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. / The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.’ In the documentary, broadcast in 1988, Hughes’s friend Al Alvarez, who played a critical part in the story of Sylvia’s last months, argued that this poem was her breakthrough into greatness.17

Sylvia’s biographers kept on writing, kept on crawling all over Ted. He compares them to maggots profiting at her death, inheritors of her craving for fame: ‘This is the audience / Applauding your farewell show.’18 Hughes was interested in both the theatricality and the symbolic meaning of Plath’s moon and yew tree, whereas the biographers and film-makers worked from a crudely literal view of poetic inspiration. His distinction in the Deposition between the ‘symbolic’ and the autobiographical artist comes to the crux of the matter.

Having studied English Literature at school and university, and having continued to read in the great tradition of poetry all his life, he was well aware of the debates among the Romantics of the early nineteenth century. For William Wordsworth, all good poetry was ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’. Poetry was ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. Wordsworth was the quintessential autobiographical writer, making his art out of his own memories and what he called ‘the growth of the poet’s mind’. His friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, by contrast, though he also mused in verse in a deeply personal voice, argued that the greatest poetry was symbolic, that it embodied above all ‘the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal’. We might say that Wordsworth was essentially an elegiac poet, mourning and memorialising times past, whereas Coleridge was a mythic poet, turning his own experiences into symbolic narratives by way of such characters as the Ancient Mariner and the demonic Geraldine in ‘Christabel’.

It might initially be thought that Plath was the Wordsworth (her autobiographical sequence Ariel being her version of Wordsworth’s contributions to Lyrical Ballads) and Hughes the Coleridge (his Crow standing in for the Mariner and his figure of the Goddess for Geraldine). Ted Hughes certainly was as obsessed with Coleridge as he was with Shakespeare. But in another sense, Hughes was more of a Wordsworth: he was shaped by a rural northern childhood, by the experience of going to Cambridge, then abroad, then to London. He was the one who followed in Wordsworth’s footsteps as Poet Laureate. Perhaps he was, as an admiring friend of his later years, manuscripts dealer Roy Davids, put it, ‘Coleridge-cum-Wordsworth, and yourself’.19

Seamus Heaney, a more long-standing and even closer friend, began a lecture on Ted Hughes by describing how there was once a poet born in the north of his native country, ‘a boy completely at home on the land and in the landscape, familiar with the fields and rivers of his district, living at eye level with the wild life and the domestic life’. This poet began his education in humble schools near his home, then went south to a great centre of learning. His work was deeply shaped by his reading in the literary canon but also by his memories ‘of that first life in the unfashionable, non-literary world of his childhood’. Convinced of his own poetic destiny, he grew famous and mingled with the rich and the powerful, even to the point of becoming ‘a favourite in the highest household of the land’. But the mark of his lowly beginning never left him: ‘His reading voice was bewitching, and all who knew him remarked how his accent and bearing still retained strong traces of his north-country origins.’20 Heaney then surprised his audience by revealing that this story contained all the received truths about the historical and creative life of Publius Virgilius Maro, better known as Virgil, the ‘national poet’ of ancient Rome. Of course his audience recognised that it was also the story of Hughes. What Heaney did not register at the time was that it is also the story of Wordsworth.21

Later in the talk, though, he did explicitly invoke Wordsworth. The context was a discussion of ‘But I failed. Our marriage had failed,’ the last line of ‘Epiphany’, a key poem in Birthday Letters in which Ted is offered a fox cub on Chalk Farm Bridge. The finality and simplicity of this conclusion, said Heaney, placed it among the most affecting lines in English poetry, alongside the end of Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ (‘And never lifted up a single stone’). For Heaney, the whole of ‘Epiphany’ answered to Wordsworth’s own requirements for poetry, as laid out in the 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads: ‘in particular his hope that he might take incidents and situations from common life and make them interesting by throwing over them a certain colouring of imagination and thereby tracing in them, “truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature”’.22

One reason why Virgil and Wordsworth and, above all, Hughes meant so much to Heaney, whose signature collection of poetry was entitled North, is that their progression from humble rural origin to great fame and the highest social circles was also his own. He too is the poet described at the opening of the lecture. The transformation of the incidents of ordinary life through the colouring of imagination: this was the essence of Wordsworth, of Hughes and of Heaney.

There is a further similarity between Hughes and Wordsworth. Above all other major English poets they are the two who were most prolific, who revised their own work most heavily and who left the richest archives of manuscript drafts in which the student can reconstruct the workings of the poetic mind. Furthermore, they both wrote too much for the good of their own reputation. Sometimes they wrote with surpassing brilliance and at other times each became almost a parody of himself. Of what other poets does one find oneself saying so frequently ‘How can someone so good be so bad?’

Indeed, what other major poet has been so easy to parody? In the late Sixties, the satirical magazine Private Eye began publishing the immortal lines of E. J. Thribb as an antidote to the dark Hughesian lyrics that filled the pages of the BBC’s highbrow Listener magazine. The fictional poet, ‘aged 17½’, had no difficulty in impersonating the voice: crow, blood, mud, death, short line, break, no verb. Others followed, notably Wendy Cope, with her ‘Budgie Finds His Voice From The Life and Songs of the Budgie by Jake Strugnell’: ‘darkness, blacker / Than an oil-slick … And the land froze / And the seas froze // “Who’s a pretty boy, then?” Budgie cried.’23 Cope has the affection that is the mark of the best parody, which cannot perhaps be said for Philip Larkin in a letter to Charles Monteith, his and Hughes’s editor at Faber and Faber, upon being asked to contribute a poem for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, in which he mischievously and scatologically parodied the language of Crow.24

Larkin, with his grumpy self-abnegating pose, was Hughes’s mighty opposite among the major English poets of the second half of the twentieth century. He liked to tease his rival over his reputed effect on women: ‘How was Ilkley? I am sure you were as big a success there as here. I hope all these stories about young girls fainting in the aisles are not exaggerated.’ And to rib him for his interest in astrology: ‘Dear Ted, Thank you for taking the trouble to send my horoscope which I shall carefully preserve, though I don’t know whether it is supposed to help me or frighten me; perhaps a bit of both. I never thought to ask what time of day I was born, and the information by now is gone beyond recall. I should guess about opening-time.’25

In order to be the object of strong parody, poetry must be memorable. What Larkin and Hughes had in common was the ability to write deeply memorable lines. Though none of Hughes’s turns of phrase has become as famous as one or two of Larkin’s, he is with Wordsworth and Tennyson in the very select company of Poet Laureates who have written line after line that passes the ultimate critical test of poetry, to be once read and never forgotten: ‘His stride is wildernesses of freedom’, ‘It was as deep as England’, ‘a sudden sharp hot stink of fox’, ‘I am going to keep things like this’, ‘Your wife is dead’.26

The argument of this biography will be that Ted Hughes’s poetic self was constantly torn between a mythic or symbolic and an elegiac or confessional tendency, between Coleridgean vision and Wordsworthian authenticity. His hostility to Plath’s biographers was partly defensive – he wanted to protect his children and himself, to stave off the haunting memory of her death. But it was also based on the principle articulated in his Deposition: that it is a great pity and wrong to translate an artist’s works into their life. And yet at the end of his career he finally published Birthday Letters, which became the fastest-selling volume in the history of English poetry precisely because it was a translation of his and Sylvia’s shared life into a literary work. The tragedy of his career was that it took so long for the elegiac voice to be unlocked. But how could that have been otherwise, when the work and death of his own wife were turned before his very eyes into the twentieth century’s principal myth of the fate of the confessional poet?

Hughes spoke repeatedly of the ‘inner life’. And it is the story of his inner life that is told in the documents he preserved for posterity. However, as he observed in an early letter to Olwyn, the inner life is inextricable from the outer: ‘Don’t you think there’s a deep correspondence between outer circumstances and inner? … the people we meet, what happens to us etc., are a dimension of the same and single complication of meanings and forces that our own selves are.’27 His close friend Lucas Myers said that Hughes attended to and developed his inner life more fully than anyone he had ever known, save for advanced Buddhist practitioners. ‘Poetry was the expression and the inner life was the substance.’ But the context of Myers’s remark was Hughes’s material life:

The first poem of Ted’s I saw in draft and easily the least accomplished of any I have seen began ‘Money, my enemy’ and continued for six or seven lines that I do not recall. I think it doubtful that the poem survives. Before I met him, Ted had determined to devote his life to writing. ‘Scribbling’ was ‘the one excuse.’ Or ‘the one justification.’

But money was his enemy because generating it displaced the time and energy needed for the creation of poetry and the development of his inner life.28

The poem ‘Money my enemy’, written when Hughes was in his twenty-fifth year and eking out a living as a script reader for a film company, does in fact survive, because a manuscript of it was preserved by Olwyn. The poet represents his relationship to the world of money in the form of a great war. He imagines his own body cut into quarters, his brain carved up, his hands on the market with the heads of calves and the feet of pigs. Street dogs drag his gut, but his blood – mark of his true poetic vocation – sings of mercy and rest, cradled beneath the bare breast of a woman, satisfied with the food of love.29

Money was the enemy, but it cannot be neglected. Ted Hughes was perhaps the only major English poet of the twentieth century who, despite coming from humble origins, supported himself from his late twenties until his death almost entirely from his literary work. After a period of casual work upon graduating from Cambridge, and a brief university teaching stint in America, he never again had to take a day job as a librarian, teacher or bank clerk in the manner of other poets such as Larkin and Heaney, or for that matter T. S. Eliot.30 His financial endurance was a heroic endeavour, albeit with moments of prodigality. The nitty-gritty of how it was sustained has to be part of the story of his literary life.

Ted Hughes wrote tens of thousands of pages of personal letters, only a small percentage of which have been published, sometimes in redacted form. He preserved intimate journals, appointment diaries, memorandum books, accounts of income and expenditure, annotations to his publishing contracts. The journals are of extraordinary value to the biographer. They were kept very private in Hughes’s lifetime: Olwyn, his sister, agent, gatekeeper and confidante, did not even know that he kept a journal. It must be understood, though, that his diary-keeping was sporadic and erratic. The traces of his self-communion survive in fragmented and chaotic form. There is no equivalent of Sylvia Plath’s bound journals of disciplined self-presentation. Ted’s journal-style writings are scattered across a huge number of yellowing notebooks, torn jotter pads and thick sheaves of loose leaves.

The wealth and the chaos of his thoughts may be glimpsed from an account of just a very few items among the hundreds of boxes and folders of personal papers that were left in his home at his death. There was a box file inscribed ‘Memory Books’, containing prose notes on subjects ranging from Egyptian history and archaeological discoveries, to Hiroshima, to a book about Idi Amin called Escape from Kampala, to the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, to sagas, history, and notes for a metamorphic play on the Cromwells. Not to mention the Old Testament king Nebuchadnezzar, a park in West Glamorgan, and the German Romantic poet and short-story writer Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist. Another box file, with ‘WISE WORDS’ written on it, contained dozens of prose fragments, diary entries from between 1970 and 1982, episodic passages that seem to be a draft for a first-person story, dreams involving Ted’s children, quotations from books gathered for a planned but never finished ‘Wisdom Book’, photocopies of mind maps for classical subjects, and a drawing of a head with a cabbalistic legend. One could open a folder at random and find within it material as eclectic as a letter about a Ted Hughes impostor, an autograph translation of a poem by the Spanish dramatist Federico García Lorca, and a smoke-stained photocopy of a publicity questionnaire regarding the poet Laura Riding.

At the time of his death, he had already sold tens of thousands of pages of poetry and prose drafts, and many valuable notebooks, to the library of Emory University in America, but he retained a collection of twenty-two notebooks, mostly of pocket size, in which there were over 500 pages of poetry drafts and over 800 pages of autobiographical material, all mingled together. Again, he kept a thick buff-coloured quarto folder bulging with old partially used school exercise books, salvaged to save the cost of buying new notebooks. Here we find reading notes on the eighteenth-century English prophetess Joanna Southcott, the French Revolution, existentialism, China and anti-Semitism, together with thoughts on Sylvia Plath, memories of Frieda Hughes’s birth, accounts of travels in America with Plath, of fishing with her in Yorkshire and going to London Zoo with the children. Precious personal memories are mingled with notes on Albert Camus, a stomach ache, yoga, ghosts, horoscopes, magic, Othello and Macbeth (both Shakespeare’s villain and the poet George MacBeth, who was very involved with Ted’s radio broadcasting), memories of a holiday in Egypt with his second wife, records of dreams in 1962, Scott of the Antarctic, and a visit in January 1964 to the weird woman at Orley House in Bideford. It was into this folder that he slipped an account of the last few days of Sylvia Plath’s life, written within days of her death.

Another filing box was filled with loose sheets organised into roughly chronological sequence and amounting to nearly 500 pages of closely written manuscript prose: self-interrogation, descriptions of places and seasons, reflections on people, events and ideas. This was Hughes’s preliminary attempt to put together a journal.31 Given that he preserved it, the possibility of posthumous publication must have been on his mind.

Using all this raw material, it would be possible to write almost a day-by-day ‘cradle to grave’ account of his life. But the very wealth of the sources would make a comprehensive life immensely long and not a little tedious to all but the most loyal Hughes aficionados. Besides, certain portions of the archive will for some time remain closed for data protection and privacy reasons. The task of the literary biographer is not so much to enumerate all the available facts as to select those outer circumstances and transformative moments that shape the inner life in significant ways. To emphasise on the one hand the travails, such as the nightmare of the Bell Jar lawsuit, and on the other the joyful moments such as the mid-stream epiphany of ‘That Morning’.32

In writing of the inner life, it is sometimes necessary to track a theme, criss-crossing through the years. Subjects such as Hughes’s late work in the theatre, his curatorship of Sylvia Plath’s posthumous works and his obsession with Shakespeare are best treated as stories of their own, rather than scattered gleanings that would all too easily disappear from sight if dispersed across many different chapters. This approach has the added advantage of breaking up the potentially deadening march of chronological fact-listing.

So, for instance, in the summer of 1975, Ted Hughes was farming in North Devon, revising his long poem Gaudete, corresponding and negotiating with his mother-in-law about excisions from Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home, and reading an advance proof copy of Millstone Grit, a memoir of his native Calder Valley by Glyn Hughes (no relation). A strictly chronological biography would gather these four facts in a chapter on 1975. But the significance of the four facts is better demonstrated by placing them in separate strands of narrative: respectively, in chapters on ‘Farmer Ted’, ‘The Elegiac Turn’ in his poetic development, his ‘Arraignment’ by feminists and Plathians, and his own autobiographical ‘Remembrance of Elmet’ (the old name for the Calder district).

The biographer of Hughes faces the peculiar difficulty that he has been portrayed over and over again as Sylvia Plath’s husband rather than his own self. In the United States he is known almost exclusively as ‘Her Husband’ (which happens to be the title of one of his own early poems). This has meant that his marriage to Sylvia is much the best-known part of his life. Because they were barely apart, day or night, from the summer of 1956 to the autumn of 1962, every biography of Sylvia – and they are legion – is in effect a joint life.33 Furthermore, Olwyn Hughes contributed so much to Anne Stevenson’s authorised Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (1989) that it became, as its prefatory Author’s Note put it, ‘almost a work of dual authorship’. Bitter Fame covered the first twenty-three years of Sylvia’s life in just 70 pages, leaving nearly 300 for the seven years with Ted. It was a scrupulously detailed narrative of the marriage, checked for accuracy by Hughes himself. The marriage is also the subject of an entire book: Diane Middlebrook’s sensitive and balanced Her Husband (2004). Elaine Feinstein, meanwhile, in the first biography of Hughes (2001), devoted 125 pages to the seven years from the meeting with Sylvia at that party in Cambridge to her suicide in London, but only 110 to the remaining thirty-five years of Ted’s life. For this reason, my chapters on the years with Plath do not attempt a day-to-day record but focus instead on their joint writing life and on those moments that are caught in the rear-view-mirror perspective of the marriage in the published and unpublished Birthday Letters poems.

The cardinal rule is this: the work and how it came into being is what is worth writing about, what is to be respected. The life is invoked in order to illuminate the work; the biographical impulse must be at one with the literary-critical. The novelist Bernard Malamud’s biographer puts it well: the first aim of an authentic life of a writer is ‘to place the work above the life – but to show how the life worked very hard to turn itself into that achievement’. The second objective should be ‘to show serious readers all that it means to be a serious writer, possessed of an almost religious sense of vocation – in terms of both the uses of and the costs to an ordinary human life’.34 It was the assuredness of the sense of poetic vocation that most struck Seamus Heaney when he first met Ted Hughes: ‘the certainty of the calling from a very early stage … the parental relationship to writerly being is rarely so intimate’.35

In a journal entry written in 1956, Hughes quoted W. B. Yeats, an immensely significant poet for him: ‘I wished for a system of thought that would leave my imagination free to create as it chose and yet make all that it created, or could create, part of one history, and that the soul’s.’36 Hughes’s poetry was the history of his own soul.

Yeats also wrote, apropos of the question of what made Shakespeare Shakespeare, that ‘The Greeks, a certain scholar has told me, considered that myths are the activities of the Daimons, and that the Daimons shape our characters and our lives. I have often had the fancy that there is some one myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought.’37 For Ted Hughes, who had a soul as capacious as that of any poet who has ever lived, there were many controlling myths. None, however, was more important or all-consuming than that of the figure whom he called the Goddess. He quoted this passage from Yeats as the epigraph to his longest (and itself almost all-consuming) prose work, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being.

Whether or not that book sees truly into the heart of Shakespeare, it unquestionably reaches to the core of Hughes’s myth. His Daimon took the form of a woman and for that reason, if no other, women play a huge part in the story of his metamorphosis of life into art. It has accordingly been necessary to include a good deal of sensitive biographical material, but this material is presented in service to the poetry. His sister Olwyn said that Ted’s problem, when it came to women, was that he didn’t want to hurt anybody and ended up hurting everybody.38 His friends always spoke of his immense kindness and generosity, but some of his actions were selfish in the extreme and the cause of great pain to people who loved him. I seek to explain and not to condemn. Plath’s biographers have too often played the blame game. Instead of passing moral judgements, this book accepts, as Hughes put it in one of his Birthday Letters poems, that ‘What happens in the heart simply happens.’39 It is for the biographer to present the facts and for readers to draw their own conclusions.

There will be many biographies, but this is the first to mine the full riches of the archive and to tell as much as is currently permissible of the full story, as it was happening, and as it was remembered and reshaped in art, from the point of view of Ted Hughes. His life was, he acknowledged, the existential ‘capital’ for his work as an author. His published writings might be described as the ‘authorised’ version of the story, the life transformed and rendered authorial. His unpublished writings – drafts, sketches, abortive projects, journals, letters – are the place where he showed his workings. He kept them for posterity in their millions of words, most of which have now been made available to the public. The archive is where he is ‘un-authored’, turned back from ‘Famous Poet’ (the title of another of his early poems) to mortal being. Together with the memories of those who knew and loved him, the archive reveals that the way he lived his life was authorised not by social convention or by upbringing, but by his passions, his mental landscape and his unwavering sense of vocation. His was an unauthorised life and so is this.

1
‘fastened into place’

Coming west from Halifax and Sowerby Bridge, along the narrow valley of the river Calder, you see Scout Rock to your left. North-facing, its dense wood and dark grey stone seem always shadowed. The Rock lowers over an industrial village called Mytholmroyd. Myth is going to be important, but so is the careful, dispassionate work of demythologising: the first syllable is pronounced as in ‘my’, not as in ‘myth’. My-th’m-royd.1 For Ted Hughes, it was ‘my’ place as much as a mythic place.

His childhood was dominated by this dark cliff, ‘a wall of rock and steep woods half-way up the sky, just cleared by the winter sun’. This was the perpetual memory of his birthplace; his ‘spiritual midwife’, one of his ‘godfathers’. It was ‘the curtain and back-drop’ to his childhood existence: ‘If a man’s death is held in place by a stone, my birth was fastened into place by that rock, and for my first seven years it pressed its shape and various moods into my brain.’2

Young Ted kept away from Scout Rock. He belonged to the other side of the valley. Once, though, he climbed it with his elder brother, Gerald. They ascended through bracken and birch to a narrow path that braved the edge of the cliff. For six years, he had gazed up at the Rock – or rather, sensed its admonitory gaze upon him – but now, as if through the other end of the telescope, he was looking down on the place of his birth. He stuffed oak-apples into his pockets, observing their corky interior and dusty worm-holes. Some, he threw into space over the cliff.

Gerald, ten years older, lived to shoot. He told his little brother of how a wood pigeon had once been shot in one of the little self-seeding oaks up here on the Rock. It had set its wings ‘and sailed out without a wing-beat stone dead into space to crash two miles away on the other side of the valley’.3 He told, too, of a tramp who, waking from a snooze in the bracken, was mistaken for a fox by a farmer. Shot dead, his body rolled down the slope. A local myth, perhaps.

There was also the story of a family, relatives of the Hugheses, who had farmed the levels above the Rock for generations. Their house was black, as if made of ‘old gravestones and worn-out horse-troughs’. One of them was last seen shooting rabbits near the edge. He ‘took the plunge that the whole valley dreams about and fell to his death down the sheer face’. Thinking back, the adult Hughes regarded this death as ‘a community peace-offering’.4 The valley, he had heard, was notable for its suicides. He blamed the oppression cast by Scout Rock.

He wrote his essay about the Rock at a dark time. It was composed in 1963 as a broadcast for a BBC Home Service series called Writers on Themselves.5 Broadcast three weeks earlier in the same series was a posthumous talk by Sylvia Plath (read by the actress June Tobin) entitled ‘Ocean 1212-W’. The letter in which BBC producer Leonie Cohn suggested this title for the talk was possibly the last that Plath ever received.6 Where the primal substance of Ted’s childhood was rock, that of Sylvia’s was water: ‘My childhood landscape was not land but the end of land – the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic … My final memory of the sea is of violence – a still, unhealthily yellow day in 1939, the sea molten, steely-slick, heaving at its leash like a broody animal, evil violets in its eye.’7

Though a suicide far from the Calder Valley preyed on Hughes’s mind as he wrote of the Rock, there is no reason to doubt his memory of its force. Still, whenever writers make art out of the details of their childhood, a part of the reader wonders whether that was really how they felt at the time. Is the act of remembering at some level inventing the memory? William Wordsworth was the great exemplar of this phenomenon. He called his epic of the self a poem ‘on the growth of the poet’s mind’. And it was there that he pondered questions that we should always ask when reading Hughes’s poetry of recollection. What does it mean to dissolve the boundary between the things which we perceive and the things which we have made? What is the relationship between the writing poet and the remembered self? Is a particular memory true because it is an accurate account of a past event or because it is constitutive of the rememberer’s consciousness? Each member of a family remembers differently. Reading a draft of this chapter, Olwyn Hughes was angry: she did not recognise her own childhood, which in her memory was filled with light and laughter, happy family life and the absolute freedom of outdoor play. ‘Hard task’, writes Wordsworth, ‘to analyse a soul.’8

Wordsworth, too, remembered a towering, shadowed rock as a force that supervised and admonished his childhood – the similarity of language in Hughes’s ‘The Rock’ suggests a literary allusion as well as a personal memory. For Wordsworth, the overseer was a cliff face that loomed above him as he rowed a stolen boat across a lake. It cast a shadow of guilt and fear over his filial bond with nature. For Hughes, too, to speak of living in the shadow of the Rock was a way of externalising a darkness in his own heart.

From the Rock, young Ted could also see the arteries leading out to east and west. The railway, fast and slow lines in each direction. The station building was perched on a viaduct. Below, there was the largest goods yard in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Inward goods: wool from Yorkshire and cotton from the Lancashire ports. Outward: clothing and blankets from the mills and sewing shops. Corduroy and flannel, calico and moleskin; men’s trousers in grey or fawn. New fashions: golf jackets, hiking shorts, blue and khaki shirts. The yard was also packed with boxes of chicks and eggs: overrunning the hillside above were chicken sheds belonging to Thornbers, pioneers of factory poultry farming.

Below the railway was the river Calder. A ‘mytholm’ is a meeting of streams. Just by the Co-op and the old Navvy Bridge, the Elphin Brook, darting down from the narrow gully of Cragg Vale, flows into the Calder. Beyond the river was the main road, the old cross-Pennine turnpike – rumbling lorries but some of the traffic still horse-drawn – that linked Halifax to Burnley, Yorkshire to Lancashire. The Calder Valley is on the cusp of the two great counties of northern industrial productivity, with their deep history of rivalry going back to the Wars of the Roses.

On the far side of the road – Ted’s side – ran the Rochdale Canal, still in use for transporting goods, but only just. Now it was a place for the local children to fish for gudgeon and stickleback. Beyond the canal, a network of terraced houses clustered, back to back or back to earth, on the northern hillside. This was the Banksfield neighbourhood, where he and his family belonged. Some of the muck streets went vertically, others (including his own) ran horizontally, in parallel with the canal. The surrounding fields were dotted with smallholders’ hen pens. Scattered above, where the fields sloped gently up to the moors, were farms. The path up the hill to the moor was always there as an escape from the blackened mills and terraces.

Down in the valley, Ted felt secure, if hemmed in. On top of the Rock that day in 1936 or ’37, he was exposed. He looked down on a community that was closed in on itself. Nearly all the buildings were made of the distinctive local stone. Known as millstone grit (‘a soul-grinding sandstone’),9 it oxidises quickly, whatever the condition of the air. Add a century of factory smoke and acid rain. Then, as a tour guide will put it in one of Hughes’s poems about his home valley, ‘you will notice / How the walls are black’.10 This was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. Everywhere, blackened chimneys known as lumbs rose skyward from the mills.

On his side of the valley, the dark admonitory presence was not a rock but a building. A stone mass towered beside the Hughes family home: the Mount Zion Primitive Methodist Chapel. It was black, it blocked the moon, its façade was like the slab of a gravestone. It was his ‘first world-direction’.11

Number 1 Aspinall Street stands at the end of the terrace. Now you walk in straight off the street; when Ted was a boy, before the road was tarmacked, there was a little front garden where vegetables were grown and the children could play. Go in through the front door and the steep stairs are immediately in front of you. The main room, about 14 feet by 14 feet, is to the left. From the front window the Hughes family could look straight up Jubilee Street to the fields.

There was a cosy little kitchen with a fireplace in the corner and a window looking out on the side wall of Mount Zion. According to Ted’s poem about the chapel, the sun did not emerge from behind it until eleven in the morning. His sister Olwyn, however, recalls the kitchen being bathed in afternoon light. The poems have a tendency to take the darker view of things. By the same account, Olwyn always thought that Ted exaggerated the oppressive height and darkness of the Rock.

A tin bath was stored under the kitchen table. One day Mrs Edith Hughes woke from a dream in which she had bought a bath in Mytholmroyd. She went straight to the shops, where she found one that was affordable because slightly damaged. The back door led to a ginnel, a passageway shared with the terraced row that stood back to back with Aspinall Street. The washing could be hung out here and the children, who spent most of their time playing in the street, could shelter from the rain. Which never seemed to stop.

The kitchen also had a door opening on some steps down to a little cellar, which had a chute where the coal was delivered, the coalman heaving sacks from his horse-drawn cart. Some of the terraces had to make do with a shared privy at the end of the row, but the Hughes family lived at the newer end of Aspinall Street, slightly superior, with the modern amenity of an indoor toilet at the top of the stairs.

Mother and father had the front bedroom and Olwyn the side one, with a window looking out on the chapel. Ted shared an attic room with Gerald. When he stood on the bed and peered out through the little skylight, the dark woods of Scout Rock gave the impression of being immediately outside the glass, pressing in upon him.

This was the house in which Edward James Hughes entered the world at twelve minutes past one in the morning on Sunday 17 August 1930. ‘When he was born,’ his mother Edith remembered, ‘a bright star was shining through the bedroom window (the side bedroom window) he was a lovely plump baby and I felt very proud of him. Sunday was a wet day and Olwyn just could not understand this new comer.’12

Gerald, just a few weeks off his tenth birthday, lent a helping hand. Despite the rain, Edith’s husband Billie went out for a spin in her brother Walter’s car. Minnie, wife of another brother, Albert, who lived along the street at number 19, had offered to look after Olwyn, but she didn’t that first day. A neighbour was called to take in the unsettled two-year-old.

As a teenager, Olwyn would develop a serious interest in astrology, which she shared with Ted. The conjunction of the stars mattered deeply to them.13 He was born at what astrologers call ‘solar midnight’. With knowledge of the exact time and place of his birth, a natal chart could be cast. He was born under the sign of Leo, the lion, which endowed him with a strong sense of self, the desire to shine. But because he was born at solar midnight, he would also need privacy and seclusion. His ‘ascendant’ sign was Cancer, bonding him to home and family. And Neptune, the maker of symbols and myths, was ‘conjunct’. His horoscope, he explained, meant that he was ‘fated to live more or less in the public eye, but as a fish does in air’.14 Bound for fame, that is to say, but fearful of scrutiny.

Did he really believe that his fate was written in the stars? ‘To an outsider,’ he once observed in a book review, ‘astrology is a procession of puerile absurdities, a Babel of gibberish.’ He granted that many astrologers peddled rubbish and craziness. Others, he thought, did make sense. He did not know whether genuine astrology was an ‘esoteric science’ or an ‘intuitive art’. That did not matter, so long as it worked: ‘In a horoscope, cast according to any one of the systems, there are hundreds of factors to be reckoned with, each one interfering with all the others simultaneously, where only judgement of an intuitive sort is going to be able to move, let alone make sense.’15 It is all too easy to select a few out of those hundreds of factors in order to make the horoscope say what you want it to say. Neptune is the sign of many things in addition to symbols and myths, but since Ted Hughes was obsessed with symbols and myths they are the aspect of ascendant Neptune that it seems right to highlight in his natal chart. By the time anyone is old enough to talk about their horoscope, their character is formed; at some level, they have themselves already written the narrative that is then ‘discovered’ in the horoscope. But there is comfort in the sense of discovery. For Ted, astrology, like poetry, was a way of giving order to the chaos of life.

‘Intuitive’ is the key word in Hughes’s reflections on astrology. If the danger of a horoscope is that it is an encouragement to the abnegation of responsibility for one’s own actions, a forgetting of Shakespeare’s ‘the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves’, the value of a horoscope is its capacity to confirm one’s best intuitions. The major superstitions – astrology, ghosts, faith-healing, the sixth sense whereby you somehow know that a person you love has died even though they are far away – are, Hughes thought, impressive because ‘they are so old, so unkillable, and so few. If they are pure nonsense, why aren’t there more of them?’16

His birth was formally registered in Hebden Bridge, the nearest large town. Father was recorded as William Henry Hughes, ‘Journeyman Portable Building maker’, that is to say a carpenter specialising in the assembly of sheds, prefabs and outbuildings. Mother was Edith Hughes, formerly Farrar.

William Hughes was born in 1894.17 His father, John, was a fustian dyer, known as ‘Crag Jack’. Family legend made him a local sage – ‘solved people’s problems, wrote their letters, closest friends the local Catholic and Wesleyan Ministers, though he spent a lot of time in pubs’.18 Crag Jack was said to have been a great singer. He was a bit of a ‘mystery man’, who came to the Calder Valley from Manchester and, before that, Ireland. In the young Ted’s imagination, he is perhaps a kind of bard or shaman, certainly a conduit of Celtic blood.

‘Crag Jack’s Apostasy’ is one of the few early Hughes poems to mention his family directly. There Jack clears himself of the dark influence of the church that ‘stooped’ over his ‘cradle’. He finds a god instead beneath the stone of the landscape.19 Here Ted takes on Grandfather Jack’s identity: the cradle stooped over by the dark church is clearly his own, shadowed by Mount Zion.

The story in the family was that Crag Jack died from pneumonia at the age of forty, leaving Willie Hughes a three-year-old orphan, together with his younger brother and elder sister. But there is a little misremembering or exaggeration here. The 1901 census records that John Hughes, aged forty-seven, and his wife Mary were living over a shop in King Street, Hebden Bridge, with their nineteen-year-old daughter, also called Mary, a ‘Machinist Fustian’, and the two boys, John aged eight (born Manchester) and Willie, seven (born Hebden Bridge), together with a young cousin called Elizabeth. Crag Jack died in 1903, closer to the age of fifty than forty. Willie was not three but nearly ten when he lost his father. Ted’s widowed Granny Hughes kept on the King Street shop for many years. She died in her eighties.

Like her husband, she had been born in Manchester. Her father was apparently a major in the regular army, his surname also being Major. His station was Gibraltar, so family tradition knew him as ‘Major Major of the Rock’. He married a short, dark-skinned, ‘Arab looking’ Spanish woman with, according to Ted, a ‘high thin nose like Olwyn’s’.20 This association with Spain and a distant Rock, an outpost of empire overlooking the Mediterranean, gave Ted the idea that he might have some exotic Moorish blood in him. A touch of blackness, akin to that of Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, found on the streets of Liverpool?

It was the Farrar family, not the Hughes, who dominated Ted’s childhood. In May 1920, Willie married Edith Farrar, who was five months pregnant with Gerald. There was a gap of eight years before Olwyn’s birth. Ted was the youngest.

Farrar was a distinguished name, woven into the historical and spiritual fabric of English poetry. Edith’s family traced their ancestry back to a certain William de Ferrers, who fought in the Battle of Hastings as William the Conqueror’s Master of Horse. Later generations of Farrars became famous in Tudor and Stuart times. One of Ted’s most prominent early poems was ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’, telling of how his ancestor was ‘Burned by Bloody Mary’s men at Caermarthen’. It was a poem of fire and smoke, evocative of the tradition of Protestant brimstone sermons that still lived in the Mount Zion Primitive Methodist Chapel over the road. ‘If I flinch from the pain of the burning,’ said the bishop on being chained to the stake, ‘believe not the doctrine that I have preached.’21 A Stoic gene to prepare Ted for his travails?

Nicholas Farrar (1592–1637), a collateral descendant of the martyred bishop, was a scholar, courtier, businessman and religious thinker. In his own way, Ted Hughes would grow up to be all these things. Cambridge University was the making of Nicholas, but he also owed a debt to the New World in that his family was closely involved with the colonial projects of the Virginia Company. The seventeenth-century Farrars eventually settled in the rundown village of Little Gidding, not far from Cambridge, where they established a community of faith and contemplation. It was to Farrar that fellow-Cambridge poet George Herbert sent the manuscript of his poetry collection The Temple from his deathbed with the instruction that it should be either burnt or published. Farrar saw that it was published, with the result that Herbert’s incomparably honest poetry of self-examination has remained in print ever since. As Hughes grew up, learning of his Farrar heritage, he could not have dreamed that a day would come when he too would be entrusted with seeing into print another poetry collection prepared at the moment of death, this one called Ariel. Like his Farrar ancestor, he had the responsibility of saving a loved one’s confessional poetry for posterity. Decisions as to whether to burn or preserve literary manuscripts would trouble him throughout his adult life.

What he did come to know, as he began reading in the canon of English poetry as a teenager, was that T. S. Eliot, the most revered of living poets, took deep religious solace from the example of the Farrar family: his great wartime meditation on the cleansing fire of faith, his fourth Quartet, was called ‘Little Gidding’. Eliot’s language seeps into Hughes’s own metaphysical lyric on his ancestor, ‘Nicholas Ferrer’ (Edith and her children were inconsistent in their spelling of the historic family name). Famously, in ‘Little Gidding’ Eliot began with spring in midwinter and ended with an epiphany of divine fire in the remote chapel deep in the English countryside. There is a catch of deep emotion in Hughes’s voice as he speaks this phrase in his recorded reading of Eliot’s poem. His own poem ‘Nicholas Ferrer’ is located in that same Little Gidding chapel, now ‘oozing manure mud’. The speaker tracks Eliot’s footsteps, past the same pigsty, in the same winter slant light. An ‘estranged sun’ echoes Eliot’s ‘brief sun’ that flames the ice on what in retrospect seem very Hughesian ponds and ditches. Nicholas and his family had ‘Englished for Elizabeth’ but in Hughes’s desolate modern November ‘the fire of God / Is under the shut heart, under the grave sod’.22

Hughes’s poem makes the death of Nicholas Farrar into a turning point in English history. It invokes the desecrating maw of Oliver Cromwell. The Little Gidding community was broken up by Puritans, who saw vestiges of Romish monasticism in their practices. Nicholas’s books were burnt. For Hughes, influenced by the Anglo-Catholic Eliot’s idea of a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ that fractured English culture and poetry at the time of the Civil War, Puritanism was the great enemy of those ‘ancient occult loyalties’ to a deeper, mysterious world that were embodied by such superstitions as astrology.

Ted’s belief in a world beyond the normal came from his mother. Edith Farrar felt that the spirit world was in touch with her. Ever since childhood, she had often felt the sensation of a ghostly hand. One night in June 1944 she was woken by an ache in her shoulder. She got up and saw crosses flashing in the sky above St George’s Chapel, which was across the road from their Mexborough home. She tried to wake William (whom she called Billie) to tell him that a terrible battle was going on somewhere and that thousands of boys were being killed. The next day the radio announced that the D-Day landings had begun early that morning.23 Later, when she and her husband moved to the Beacon, she saw a shadow in the house. She learned that the previous owners had died and their daughter had sold the house and moved into Hebden Bridge. She told the shadow, who was the mother, where her daughter now lived. It never reappeared.24

Mr Farrar, from Hebden Bridge, was a power-loom ‘tackler’ – a supervisor, with responsibility for tackling mechanical problems with the looms. Tall and quiet, with black hair and a heavy black moustache, he was fond of reading, played the violin a little and had a gift for mending watches. His grandson Ted would be good with his hands. Grandma Farrar, Annie, was a farmer’s daughter from Hathershelf, ‘short and handsome with a deep voice and great vitality’. When they went to the local Wesleyan chapel, ‘tears would roll down her cheeks under the veil she wore with her best hat’, so moved was she by the sermon or the hymns. As well as regular chapel attendance, there were prayer meetings once a week in the evening. But on Sunday afternoons came the freedom of country walks and picnics at picturesque Hardcastle Crags. The Farrars had eight children, the eldest born in 1891, the youngest in 1908: Thomas, Walter, Miriam, Edith, Lily, Albert, Horace (who died as a baby) and Hilda. In May 1905, Lily died of pneumonia, aged just four and a half.

As she grew up, Edith got on especially well with Walter, who was both easygoing and strong-willed. He wasn’t good at getting up in the morning. Soon he started work in the clothing trade, while taking evening classes to improve himself. Miriam and Edith left school at thirteen and went into the same trade, training to be machinists making corduroy trousers and moleskin jackets. Miriam was delicate. In June 1916, she caught cold and it turned to pneumonia and she died, aged nineteen.25

This was in the middle of the Great War. Walter had joined up by this time, along with some of the Church Lads Brigade. The whole village turned out to see them off, singing ‘Fight the good fight’ and ‘God be with you till we meet again’. Just weeks after Miriam’s death back home, Walter was wounded at High Wood on the Somme. He returned with a shattered leg that troubled him for the rest of his days. But it could have been worse: at first, he was reported killed in battle, only for the family to receive his Field Card saying ‘I am wounded.’ Mrs Farrar shouted up the stairs, ‘Get up all of you. He’s alive! Alive alive!’ Tom, who was in the Royal Engineers, came back gassed, broken by the death of many of his dearest friends.

Edith and her friends collected eggs and books to take to the wounded, the gassed and the shell-shocked in hospital. On the drizzly morning of 11 November 1918, she was working on army clothing when a male colleague tapped on the window, said, ‘War’s over,’ and threw his cap in the air. A flag was hoisted over the factory and everybody was allowed home, but there was no rejoicing, only deep thankfulness that it was finally over. Thirty thousand local men had joined the Lancashire Fusiliers. Over 13,500 of them were killed.

Years later, Ted Hughes would write ‘you could not fail to realize that the cataclysm had happened – to the population (in the First World War, where a single bad ten minutes in No Man’s Land would wipe out a street or even a village), to the industry (the shift to the East in textile manufacture), and to the Methodism (the new age)’. As he grew up in Mytholmroyd in the Thirties, looking around him and hearing his family tell their stories, it dawned on him that he was living ‘among the survivors, in the remains’.26

Edith’s one joy at the end of the Great War was that Billie Hughes was safe. He was a Gallipoli survivor. The story went that he had been saved from a bullet by the paybook in his breast pocket. Edith first met him in 1916 when he was home on leave, having just won the Distinguished Conduct Medal but then broken his ankle playing football when resting behind the lines – he was always a great footballer, could have been a professional. After the war, they spent their courtship walking the hills and moors, and once a week went to a dance club. In 1920, they discovered that she was pregnant and they married on a pouring wet day. For two shillings and ninepence a week they rented a cottage in Charlestown, to the west of Hebden Bridge. It had a living room, kitchen, two bedrooms and an outside toilet. They scraped together the money for a suite of furniture and on their wedding day Mrs Farrar gave them a carpet and a sewing machine. Billie’s mother was radiant on the wedding day, her white hair and fair skin set off by a mauve hat and veil.

Gerald’s birth was traumatic. The newborn boy lay blue and stiff on the washstand, and the nurse cried, ‘The baby is dead – fetch the doctor.’ But Edith told her to shake and smack him, and before they knew it he was crying and the doctor arrived and said he would be fine. When he was two, Edith went back to work and young Gerald was looked after by Granny Hughes.

They were happy in their little cottage on the hillside above the railway, though Edith didn’t like it when Billie went off for away football matches and did not return until very late at night. In 1927, they moved to Mytholmroyd, the other side of Hebden Bridge, buying the house in Aspinall Street. Now the Hughes family was truly among the Farrars: Uncle Albert, married to Minnie, was down the road at number 19 and Edith’s mother, with teenage Hilda, just round the corner in Albert Street.

The other brothers were doing very well for themselves. In the year of Gerald’s birth Uncle Walter, in partnership with a man called John Sutcliffe, started a clothing factory. When Sutcliffe left, Uncle Tom took over from him. Edith went to work for them. Walter marked and sometimes cut the cloth. He was very good at laying the heavy leather patterns for the trousers, then cutting out from the great long rolls of cloth. He was, his sister saw, ‘the director in every sense of the word’. Tom was more subdued, still affected by the gas of the trenches; Edith was terrified that his mind would drift, costing him a finger on one of the great flashing blades of the cutting machines. He was often to be found sitting in the office next to his little sister Hilda, who did the paperwork.

It was not easy for Edith and Billie to see Tom and Walter in their detached houses on the outskirts of the village: Walter and his wife Alice at Southfield, a handsome villa set back from the Burnley Road, Tom and his wife Ivy at Throstle Bower, at the top of Foster Brook, up towards the moors. Having a house with a name instead of a number was a mark of upward mobility. In addition, the brothers had cars, the ultimate sign of affluence. None of the family liked Ivy Greenwood, who looked down on the Farrars, would not even acknowledge them and certainly never deigned to invite them up to her big house. Olwyn thinks that Ivy was jealous of the close family bond among the Farrars.

The brother who really struggled was Albert. Minnie was regarded as a good catch, but she pushed him hard, resentful that Tom and Walt were getting rich on the factory, while they couldn’t keep up. Albert was a carpenter, like Billie Hughes. They both got work making prefabricated buildings. Albert would make wooden toys, to give to his nephews and nieces, or to sell: ‘toy ducks / On wooden wheels, that went with clicks’.27 One day he was knocked off his bike on the way to work and he was never the same after that.

Like all the Farrar children, Hilda left school at thirteen, but she took evening classes, learned shorthand, typing and bookkeeping, enabling her to become company secretary for her brothers. She married a much older man called Victor Bottomley, who had something to do with the motor trade. He turned out to be ‘a wrong ’un’,28 and before long Annie Farrar was instructing her sons Tom and Walt to go and bring Hilda home, where she stayed with Minnie and Albert at 19 Aspinall Street (eventually Hilda and Grandma settled at number 13).

Walt had his sadness. His two elder children, Barbara and Edwin, were, as their cousin Vicky put it, ‘witless’. Barbara seemed conscious that something was wrong with her as she struggled to learn to read. Edwin was in his own closed world. James, the only ‘normal’ son, died at the age of eleven.

When Gerald left school, he too went to work at Sutcliffe Farrar, which was located just beyond the Zion chapel. When the slump came in the early Thirties, men and women were laid off, or reduced to working two or three days a week. Billie had been working for his brothers-in-law but he was put on short time too, and in 1936 he got fed up, gave in his notice and went off with a friend to do building work for the government in South Wales. With no work at the factory, Gerald had taken to roaming the moors, leaving Edith miserable and alone with Olwyn and Ted, both under ten. She worked a little at the factory, sewing hooks and eyes on flannel trousers, and they had enough money to get by. They had paid off the house by then, food was reasonably cheap and Edith’s sewing skills meant that clothes could be mended. Billie came home once a month and soon realised how much he was missing the children. They had come into a little money from Granny Hughes and with many people struggling through the Great Depression there were opportunities in small business. Billie decided he wanted a newsagent’s. Eventually, they found one that was suitable. There was only one problem: it was 50 miles to the south-east, near Doncaster, in a ‘dark dirty place’29 called Mexborough.

They all went down in the removal van. When they arrived, Billie stood behind the counter of the new shop and the family walked in, trying to look confident. Then they went out and helped with the furniture. When the van left, Gerald sat down and cried.

2
Capturing Animals

Dumpy, bustling Moira Doolan was a powerhouse of ideas at the BBC in the early Sixties.1 Middle-aged and unmarried, she spoke with an Irish lilt and was passionate about her work as Head of Schools Broadcasting. In January 1961 Ted Hughes wrote to her with an idea for a radio series. She invited him to lunch and they worked up his proposal. It eventually became Listening and Writing, a sequence of ten talks for the Home Service’s daytime schools programming, broadcast between October 1961 and May 1964.2 Nine of the ten, together with illustrative poems by Hughes and others, were published in a book, aimed at teachers and dedicated to his own English teachers, Pauline Mayne and John Edward Fisher. Entitled Poetry in the Making, it became a classroom vade mecum for a generation and indeed one of Hughes’s bestselling books.3

In a brief introduction, he described the talks as the notes of a ‘provisional teacher’ and of his belief in the immeasurable ‘latent talent for self-expression’ in every child. The teacher’s watchword should be for children – he was typically thinking of pupils between the ages of ten and fourteen – to write in such a way that they said what they really meant. With self-expression comes self-knowledge and ‘perhaps, in one form or another, grace’.4

The series started from autobiography. The first talk, entitled ‘Capturing Animals’, began: ‘There are all sorts of ways of capturing animals and birds and fish. I spent most of my time, up to the age of fifteen or so, trying out many of these ways, and when my enthusiasm began to wane, as it did gradually, I started to write poems.’5 When the harvest was gathered in, little Ted would snatch mice from under the sheaves and put them in his pocket, more and more of them, until there were thirty or forty crawling around in the lining of his coat. He came to think that this was what poems were like: experiences captured and kept about the person.

He then explained that his earliest memory was of being three, placing little lead animals all the way round the fender of the fire in the front room, nose to tail. There was no greater treat than a trip to Halifax, where his mother or Aunt Hilda would buy him one of these creatures from Woolworth’s. Then for his fourth birthday Hilda gave him a thick green-backed book about animals. He pored over it, read the descriptions over and over again, drew copies of the photographs of animals and birds. Sometimes he would place the lead figures on the fender and read their descriptions from the book: the words put together with the things, the poet in the making. When he discovered plasticine, the possibilities for his personal menagerie became infinite, bounded only by the limit of his huge imagination.

He confided to his listeners that his passion for wildlife came from his elder brother. Gerald was his hero. And his saviour. One Christmas Billie Hughes bought his boys a Hornby clockwork train set. It was laid out in the front room by the piano. Three-year-old Ted loaded his lead soldiers aboard and Gerald wound up the engine. But an excited Ted tripped on the fender and fell towards the fire. Gerald scooped him out, but not before his hands had been blistered. ‘Fires can get up and bite you,’ Ted would say in later years.6

But this is Gerald’s memory. Olwyn’s earliest recollections are of trotting out into the fields with her mother and baby Ted, then of Ted’s two close friends, Derek Robertshaw and Brian Seymour, coming round every Saturday morning while the Hugheses were having breakfast, planning with Ted where they would go for the day and what animals they would find. They lived in the fields and they were never bored. As Olwyn remembered it, Gerald was always off with friends his own age. In Ted’s adult writings, the bond between the two brothers has a mythic force which exaggerates their closeness.

It was just before his fifth birthday that he joined Gerald on a camping trip for the first time. They were to spend the night up by the stream in the woods known as Foster Clough. Edith told Gerald not to let Ted take his model boat, for fear that he would sail it in the stream and get soaked. Those two friends, Derek and Brian, came round with advice, then the brothers set off, stopping on the way to buy sweets from the shop just past Uncle Walt’s factory. Watched by some very interested cows, they set up their tent and made a fire in a little clearing, fenced off with wire to keep the cattle out of the wood. Just before midnight, they heard their father’s call. He had come to check on them and was taking Ted home because there was a bull among the cows, making them too frisky for comfort. Ted was very excited by the bull.

From then on, Ted would often accompany Gerald on to the moor. He scurried silently beside his brother, pretending to be a Red Indian hunter. He kept a tom-tom drum hidden in Redacre Wood, where, according to local lore, an Ancient Briton, buried spirit of land and nation, lay beneath a half-ton rock.7 They loved the silence of the hills, shrouded in morning mist as they looked out over the valley below. They flew gliders and kites. Gerald taught Ted to identify all the different birds. The younger brother was fascinated by hawks and owls. Gerald shot rats, wood pigeon, rabbits and the occasional stoat, Ted acting as his retriever. Sometimes Gerald would let him have a go with the air rifle. Once the slug ricocheted back and gave him a bloody forehead, but they managed to keep the accident from their parents. They met an old-school gamekeeper called McKinley who regaled them with stories and sometimes paid them a shilling for a fat rabbit. They fished in the canal, using nets made from old curtains.

They poked around the site of a crashed plane – an RAF bomber on a training exercise had run into fog over Mytholmroyd – and salvaged bits of tubing for their own model planes. On the same site, they unearthed dozens of old lead bullets: it had been a firing range in the Great War.

In winter they sledged all the way down the fields above Jubilee Street. On snowy nights, they opened the skylight and listened to the shunting engines strain at the frozen trucks in the sidings. In summer, they would help out their uncles in the allotment or play tip cat in the fields with Uncle Albert – this was a game in which you balanced a block of wood on the end of a bat, then whacked it as far as you could send it. Occasionally, there was a special treat: a trip to the seaside, a first sight of big cats at Blackpool Zoo.

Olwyn did not join them on the hills, but she was there for family picnics at Hardcastle Crags and dips in the rocky pool on Cragg Vale. Mrs Hughes (‘Mam’ to Gerald, ‘Ma’ to Olwyn and Ted) was a great walker and swimmer. The children’s love of nature came from her. They all shared in the peace and magic of Redacre Wood, which seemed like their own private paradise.

The three siblings played in the open air around the Zion chapel. They stole gooseberries from a lady’s garden up on the Banks. They gave a fright to a younger boy called Donald Crossley by tying him to a tree, spreading leaves around his feet and setting fire to them as they danced and whooped like Red Indians.

Time spent indoors meant model-making with Gerald or reading with bookish Olwyn. Ma wrote poems for them and made up tales. They all loved the one about Geraldine mouse, Olwyna mouse and Edwina mouse because it echoed their own adventures. Grandma Farrar was charmed when they went round and read her the words of Edward Thomas, the poet and countryman who had died in the war. It was Edith who also instilled a passion for poetry in Olwyn and Ted. Wordsworth was her favourite, as might be expected of a woman who loved walking and the beauties of nature.

The war haunted Ted and his father because it had decimated a generation of the Calder Valley’s young men. The sorrow in the air of the valley came more from the war than from the decline of industry.

Gerald’s earliest memory was of finding his father’s sergeant’s stripes in a drawer and wondering what they were. Billie Hughes brought two other relics back from the war: his Distinguished Conduct Medal and the shrapnel-peppered paybook that had been in his breast pocket at Gallipoli. He told the family that he was one of only seventeen men from the company to have survived. Olwyn had a pearl necklace, which she loved to play with. Her father explained that it had been taken from the body of a dead Turk. He would occasionally shout at night in his sleep, dreaming of the Turks charging towards his trench.

When Ted was four and Olwyn six, for half a year every Sunday morning their father stayed in bed and they came in with him and said, ‘Tell us about the war.’ He told them everything, in the goriest detail, including things not very suitable for a four-year-old boy. Dismembered bodies, arms sticking out of the mud. Ted either suppressed or forgot all this, later saying that his father never talked about the war. When he wrote his story ‘The Wound’ he told Olwyn that it was something he had dreamed. The moment he woke up, he wrote it down. But he forgot certain details, so he went back to sleep and dreamed it again, filling in the gaps. But Olwyn thought that part of it was taken from their father’s memories of the war. The story includes a long walk to a palace: this was his father going up to the Front on the way to a particular sortie in which he, as Sergeant-Major, led a small group of men in a successful assault on a German machine-gun post. It was this walk up the line that Billie described so vividly in bed. He also talked about his time in the Dardanelles, but that mainly consisted of drinking tea and picking lice off his uniform. The Western Front was much more dramatic.8

Ted was formed by his outdoor life and his books, by his mother’s stories and father’s memories, but he was an attentive schoolboy at the Burnley Road Council School, bright, always asking questions. The headmaster gave a fearsome talk on the evils of alcohol. The message stuck. Ted grew up to love good wine, but always held his drink and never became addicted. Many writers have become alcoholics without bearing anguish remotely comparable to his.

A memory that became a foundational myth. In his fifties, Ted told his schoolfriend Donald Crossley that it was in Crimsworth Dene, camping under a little cliff on a patch of level ground beside what later became a council stone dump, that he had the dream that turned later into all his writing. It was a sacred place for him.9

It was sacred to Gerald as well: he told Donald that the memory of Crimsworth Dene sustained him through his service in the desert war. This secret valley, just north of Hebden Bridge, became in memory the spiritual home of the brothers.10 Gerald remembered how they had pitched their two-man Bukta Wanderlust tent for the last time. Two days later the family moved to Mexborough and life was never the same again. He felt that they both spent the rest of their lives trying to recapture those early days in the happy valley, but they never did.

The site was recommended by Uncle Walter. It had been a favourite camping spot for him, Uncle Tom and their friends before the Great War. At the top of the valley, there was a pool and a waterfall, with an old packhorse bridge going over. This had long been a favoured picnicking place for locals. The Hughes family cherished an old photo taken there: it showed six young men in Sunday best, before the war.

There was a drystone wall along the slope above the clearing where the boys pitched their tent. On their second day, they found a dead fox there. It had been killed by a deadfall trap – a heavy rock or slab tilted at an angle and held up with a stick that when dislodged causes the slab to fall, crushing the animal beneath. That night Ted slept restlessly in the tent. He told Gerald of ‘a vivid dream about an old lady and a fox cub that had been orphaned by the trap’.11

This was the dream that, according to Ted’s letter to Donald Crossley nearly fifty years later, turned into all his writing. It was his first thought-fox. He told the tale himself in ‘The Deadfall’, a short story from the last decade of his life, written for a collection of ghost stories, published to celebrate the centenary of the National Trust and edited by one of his closest friends, the children’s novelist Michael Morpurgo.12 All the stories are set in houses or landscapes owned by the Trust, of which Crimsworth Dene was one.

In the story, it is Ted’s first time in the secret valley, with its steep sides and overhanging woods. He immediately senses that it is the most magical place he has ever been to. The enclosed space means that every note of the thrush echoes through the valley and he feels compelled to speak in a whisper. At night, he can’t stop thinking about the fox for which the trap has been set. The idea of the creature near by, in its den, ‘maybe smelling our bacon’, makes the place more mysterious than ever. On the second night he is woken by the dream of the old lady, calling him out of the tent. He follows her voice up the slope to the trap, where he finds a young fox, still alive but with tail and hind leg caught beneath the great slab of stone. He is choked by ‘the overpowering smell of frightened fox’. He realises that the woman has brought him to the cub, wants him to free it. She has not gone to Gerald, because she knows that he would be likely to kill it. Summoning all his strength he manages to lift the corner of the slab – the cub snarling and hissing at him like a cat – just enough to set the animal free. It runs away and the old lady vanishes. But when he looks back at the deadfall there is something beneath it. At this moment, his brother wakes and calls him back to bed. It rains. In the morning, they go up to the deadfall and there is a big red fox, the bait (a dead wood pigeon) in its mouth.

According to the story, Gerald then digs a grave for the fox. As Ted helps him push the loose soil away, he feels what seems to be a knobbly pebble. When he looks at it closely, it turns out to be a little ivory fox, about an inch and a half long, ‘most likely an Eskimo carving’. He treasures it all his days. He and Gerald conclude that the old lady in the dream was the ghost of the dead fox.

Hughes admits in the preface to his collected short stories that this version of the incident, prepared for Morpurgo’s ghost collection, has ‘a few adjustments to what I remember’. In Gerald’s account, Ted’s dream of the old lady comes the night after they have discovered the body, whereas in the story it is a premonition of the fox’s death. Ted insisted on the reality of the memory, yet neither Gerald nor Olwyn has any recollection of the ivory fox.13 It was only as an adult that Ted began collecting netsuke and Eskimo carvings of animals.

‘The Deadfall’ was the only short story of his later career. He had not written one for fifteen years. Morpurgo’s invitation was an irresistible opportunity to round off his work in the genre. He gathered it together with his earlier stories and made it what he called the ‘overture’ to his writing.14 The camping trip with Gerald in Crimsworth Dene, the dream of the freed fox and the ivory figure that symbolically transformed his lead animal toys into tokens of art came together as his retrospective narrative of creative beginning.

The radio talks for schools that were eventually published as Poetry in the Making give incomparable insight into Ted Hughes, poet in the making. As the boy Ted sculpted his plasticine animals, so the adult writer created poetic images of fox, bird and big cat. In the same way, Ted the teacher found the right voice to capture the attention of ten- to fourteen-year-olds – exactly as his own attention had been caught by Miss Mayne and Mr Fisher.

Early in the second talk, called ‘Wind and Weather’ (there was no shortage of either in the Calder Valley), he suggested that the best work of the best poets is written out of ‘some especially affecting and individual experience’. Often, because of something in their nature, poets sense the same experience happening again and again. It was like that for him with his dreams, his premonitions and his foxes. A poet can, he argues, achieve greatness through variation on the theme of ‘quite a limited and peculiar experience’: ‘Wordsworth’s greatest poetry seems to be rooted in two or three rather similar experiences he had as a boy among the Cumberland mountains.’15 Here Wordsworth stands in for the speaker himself: the deadfall trap in Crimsworth Dene was Ted Hughes’s equivalent of what Wordsworth called those ‘spots of time’ that, ‘taking their date / From our first childhood’, renovate us, nourish and repair our minds with poetry.16

At school, Ted was plagued with the idea that he had much better thoughts than he could ever get into words. He couldn’t find the words, or the thoughts were ‘too deep or too complicated for words’. How to capture those elusive, deep thoughts? He found the answer, he tells his schools audience in the talk called ‘Learning to Think’, not in the classroom but when fishing. Keeping still, staring at the float for hours on end: in such forms of meditation, all distractions and nagging doubts disappear. In concentrating upon that tiny point, he found a kind of bliss. He then applied this art of mindfulness to the act of writing. The fish that took the bait were those very thoughts that he had previously been unable to get into words. This mental fishing was the process of ‘raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender’ that released what he called the ‘inner life’ – ‘which is the world of final reality, the world of memory, emotion, imagination, intelligence, and natural common sense’.17

Though a fisherman all his life, Ted did not follow in Gerald’s footsteps as a hunter, despite being an excellent shot. To judge from his sinister short story ‘The Head’, in which a brother’s orgiastic killing of animals leads to him being hunted down himself, he was distinctly ambivalent about Gerald’s obsessive hunting.18 At the age of fifteen, Ted accused himself of disturbing the lives of animals. He began to look at them from their own point of view. That was when he started writing poems instead of killing creatures. He didn’t begin with animal poems, but he recognised the analogy between poetry-writing and capturing animals: first the stirring that brings a peculiar thrill as you are frozen in concentration, then the emergence of ‘the outline, the mass and colour and clean final form of it, the unique living reality of it in the midst of the general lifelessness’.19 To create a poem was as if to hunt out a new species, to bring not a death but a new life outside one’s own.

Like an animal, a living poem depends on its senses: words that live, Hughes insists, are those that belong directly to the senses or to the body’s musculature. We can taste the word ‘vinegar’, touch ‘prickle’, smell ‘tar’ or ‘onion’. ‘Flick’ and ‘balance’ seem to use their muscles. ‘Tar’ doesn’t only smell: it is sticky to touch and moves like a beautiful black snake. Truly poetic words belong to all the senses at once, and to the body. Find the right word for the occasion and you will create a living poem. It is as if there is a sprite, a goblin, in the word, ‘which is its life and its poetry, and it is this goblin which the poet has to have under control’.20

Poetry is made by capturing essences: of a landscape, a person, a creature. In one talk, Hughes suggests that ‘beauty spots’ – he was remembering his childhood places such as Hardcastle Crags and the view from the moors above Mytholmroyd – ease the mind because they reconnect us to the world in which our ancestors lived for 150 million years before the advent of civilisation (the number of years is a typical Ted exaggeration). Poignantly, given that the broadcast went out a year after her death, the example he quoted at the close of this talk was ‘a description of walking on the moors above Wuthering Heights, in West Yorkshire, towards nightfall’ – ‘by the American poet, Sylvia Plath’.21

To capture people, you must find a memorable detail. ‘An uncle of mine was a carpenter, and always making curious little toys and ornaments out of wood.’ This memory of Uncle Albert was all that was needed to create the character of ‘Uncle Dan’ in his children’s poetry collection Meet My Folks!: ‘He could make a helicopter out of string and beetle tops / Or any really useful thing you can’t get in the shops.’22 To invent a good poem, though, you shouldn’t just transcribe your memories. You need to rearrange your relatives in imagination. ‘Brother Bert’ in Meet My Folks!, who keeps in his bedroom a menagerie of every bizarre creature from Aardvark to Platypus to Bandicoot to ‘Jungle-Cattypus’, is an exaggerated version of Gerald (who never kept anything bigger than a hedgehog). But the line ‘He used to go to school with a Mouse in his shirt’, Hughes reassures his listeners, does not refer to Gerald: ‘Somebody else did that.’23 The somebody else was Ted. In the poem, he and Gerald have become one. It was a way of registering his affection for his brother. His feelings about his mother, he admits, were too deep and complicated to capture: she is the one absence from the feast of Meet My Folks!

Think yourself into the moment. Touch, smell and listen to the thing you are writing about. Turn yourself into it. Then you will have it. That, for Hughes, was the essence of poetry.

He ended that seminal opening talk ‘Capturing Animals’ with two personal examples. Late one snowy night in dreary lodgings in London, having suffered from writer’s block for a year, he had an idea. He concentrated very hard and within a few minutes he had written his first ‘animal’ poem. It is about a fox but it is also about itself. The thought, the fox and the poem are one. In the ‘midnight moment’s forest’, something is alive beside the solitary poet. He captures the movement, the scent, the bright eyes. The fox’s paw print becomes the writing on the page. ‘Brilliantly, concentratedly … The page is printed’: it is a captured animal.24

The second example was one of his ‘prize catches’: a pike in a pool at Mexborough.

3
Tarka, Rain Horse, Pike

They moved on 13 September 1938, four weeks after Ted’s eighth birthday. They would stay for thirteen years to the day.1 Olwyn cried for a fortnight and the cat moped beneath a bed upstairs. Ted seemed least affected by the move. He was always adaptable, ready for a new direction. He was immediately enrolled at the Schofield Street Junior School round the corner, getting to know the local boys, some of them shopkeepers’ children, which is what he now was. His best mate was a lad called Swift, mother a greengrocer, father a miner. A neighbouring family had a brutal father, a miner who came home drunk, his face blackened from work. Ted befriended the redheaded daughter Brenda. On Saturday mornings he went to the local ‘flea pit’ cinema and watched Westerns.

The family’s new address was 75 Main Street, Mexborough: a newsagent’s in the centre of a busy mining town, where the bestselling paper was the Sporting Life, to be read daily before placing a bet on the horses. You went into the shop and diagonally to the right was a door to the downstairs living room. Edith and Billie had the front bedroom over the shop. Then there was a big bedroom to the right, over the living room. This had a double and a single bed. A door from here led to a smaller room over the kitchen. Beyond that, there was a room with just a bath. The loo was downstairs and outside. Ted played with his train set in the big bedroom. There was a garage behind, where Ted began keeping animals, notably rabbits and guinea pigs. He cried inconsolably when they died. It was not unknown for him to keep a hedgehog under the sofa in the living room.

Once again, they were overshadowed by a church: across the road stood the ugly red-brick edifice of the St George the Martyr Chapel of Ease to St John the Baptist Parish Church. Its clock had a loud tuneless chime. This was where, six years later, Edith would look out before dawn on D-Day and see crosses in the sky. It was within weeks of their moving to Mexborough that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from his meeting with Hitler in Munich and was heard on the radio speaking of ‘peace for our time’.

The business went well. Billie ordered the magazines and the tobacco, and organised the paper rounds. He also took on a concession selling tickets for coach trips. Edith diversified the stock, ordering games, stationery and dress patterns. Gerald and Ted became paperboys. Ted read all the comics and boys’ magazines on the shelves before they were sold. Even his mature poetry would be shot through with a love of super-heroes and an element of zap, kerpow and kaboom.

In later years, Aunt Hilda and Cousin Vicky came down at Christmas. For the children, the whole shop was their Christmas present: each received a pillowcase stuffed with goods, toys, sweets, chocolate.

Gerald struggled to find work locally. He had a brief stint at a steelworks just outside Rotherham, but this was ended by an accident. Then he moved down to Barnet, just north of London, to train as a garage mechanic. He bought a motorbike and started roaring around the countryside, to the consternation of young Ted, who told him he should stick to pedal power. But Gerald’s heart remained in the fields. His favoured reading was the Gamekeeper magazine and it was in answer to an advertisement there that he got a seasonal job as a second keeper on an estate in Devon. This involved rearing pheasants and locating them in the right places to be shot when the 1939 season opened. It was in Devon that he heard Prime Minister Chamberlain on the radio once again, this time announcing that the country was at war with Germany.

The war brought painful memories for Billie and Edith. For Gerald, it began a new life. He returned home at the end of the shooting season, remained there through the ‘phoney war’ and joined up in the summer of 1940. His skill with his hands and experience with engines meant that he was well suited for aircraft repair and maintenance in the RAF. From 1942 to 1944 he was posted to the desert war in North Africa. Gerald’s absence meant that Olwyn and Ted clung close together, sometimes sharing a bed. One of his earliest unpublished poems, witty and affectionate, is called ‘For Olwyn Each Evening’.2

For an adventurous boy such as Ted, there was a thrill in the sound of bombers overhead. Industrial Rotherham, just 6 miles along the river Don, was a target, as was Doncaster, 8 miles upstream. That meant blackouts at night and taped-up shop windows to prevent flying glass. A bomb fell on Mexborough railway station, but Main Street escaped.

Olwyn was a very clever girl. She got a scholarship to the local grammar school. Ted followed in her footsteps in 1941, also winning a county scholarship. Mexborough Grammar was the intellectual making of him. This was where his love of literature matured and began to intersect with his love of nature. In his first year he explored the school library and found Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter. He took it out and kept it, on and off, for two years, until he knew it almost by heart. This became the first of the talismanic books that shaped his inner life.

Williamson’s novel, first published in 1927, had become a bestseller and an acknowledged classic. Because it was written from an animal’s point of view, yet unsentimental and at times extremely violent, English teachers found it especially good to recommend to boys of Ted’s age. The combination of adventure (notably an extended hunting sequence), intricately observed natural history and heightened literary style truly caught Hughes’s imagination at a formative moment in his early adolescence. What especially impressed him was the otteriness of the book, its rigorous refusal to anthropomorphise. Tarka, he explained in a Sunday Times colour supplement article in 1962, is not ‘one of those little manikins in an animal skin who think and talk like men’.3

Hughes was enchanted. It was as if his own life in the fields and among the animals had been recreated in a book. This was the seeding of his poetic vocation. Among the set-piece descriptions that grabbed him was ‘The Great Winter’, which evoked six black stars and a great white one, ‘flickering at their pitches’ like six peregrines and a Greenland falcon, ‘A dark speck falling, the whish of the grand stoop from two thousand feet heard half a mile away; red drops on a drift of snow’. The moon, ‘white and cold’, awaits ‘the swoop of a new sun, the shock of starry talons to shatter the Icicle Spirit in a rain of fire’. Stories are written into the night sky: ‘In the south strode Orion the Hunter, with Sirius the Dogstar baying green fire at his heels. At midnight Hunter and Hound were rushing bright in a glacial wind, hunting the false star-dwarfs of burnt-out suns, who had turned back into Darkness again.’4 Here in embryo are the elements of Hughes’s poetry: the violent forces of nature played out against a cosmic backdrop, figures of myth, creation and destruction, bird of prey, blood on snow, moon, stars, apocalyptic darkness.

When he moved to Devon, Ted got to know Henry Williamson. He sat at his feet and listened to his rambling memories.5 In December 1977, he would deliver the address at a memorial service for the old writer, who had died on the very morning that the scene of Tarka’s death was being filmed for the movie of the book – another of those synchronicities that so fascinated the superstitious Hughes. Speaking to the congregation in St Martin-in-the-Fields on Trafalgar Square, he explained what had inspired him when he found Tarka in the school library all those years before. His first encounter with the book was one of the great pieces of good fortune in his life: ‘It entered into me and gave shape and words to my world, as no book has ever done since. In the confrontations of creature and creature, of creature and object, of creature and fate – he made me feel the pathos of actuality in the natural world.’ This, he said, was a gift of only the greatest writers. Though Williamson did not write in verse, ‘he was one of the truest English poets of his generation’.6

Williamson’s writing was indeed a kind of prose-poetry. Chop up the lines of a passage such as the description of ‘The Great Winter’ and you would almost have a Hughes poem. After all, Hughes did sometimes draft in prose before finding the rhythms of verse: his translations of foreign-language poetry were often versifications of literal prose versions undertaken for him by his friends, while many of the unpublished drafts for Birthday Letters live in a hinterland between journal-writing and poetry.

Tarka the Otter also got him thinking about the role of typography in literature, something in which he would take a keen interest throughout his career, whether in collaborating with his sister and others on private presswork and hand printing, or in complaining to Faber and Faber about their choice of font for a particular poetry collection. When Tarka and the hounds go down to a watery death at the very close of the book, the diminuendo of the typesetting enacts their drowning:

and while they stood there silently, a great

bubble rose out of the depths, and broke, and as

they watched, another bubble shook to the

surface, and broke; and there was a

third bubble in the sea-going

waters, and nothing

more.

Williamson was a Devon writer through and through. Tarka the Otter vividly and exactly evokes the landscape of the valleys of the twin rivers Torridge and Taw that share a North Devon estuary. Shortly after Ted and Sylvia found the house called Court Green, he realised that he had landed upon another spiritual home. On the first day he went fishing on the Taw, at the beginning of the 1962 season, an otter leapt from a ditch and led him to the river. Unawares, Ted had walked into his own ‘childhood dream’, stumbled upon Tarka’s two rivers.7 Later, he would gain riparian rights on the Torridge, at the very spot where Tarka was born. And in the Eighties, when the twin rivers’ otters and fish were threatened by pollution, he spent months and years fighting to save the aquatic life of the estuary.

Just as Tarka the Otter allowed Ted’s readerly imagination to follow brother Gerald to Devon, so Williamson’s war books, encountered later, would give him a way of comprehending his father’s experience of the trenches. He regarded The Patriot’s Progress (1930) in particular as one of the very finest of the many novels and memoirs that came out of the war. The incantatory quality of the prose, the transformation of the day-to-day realities of the soldier’s life into something epic and biblical in cadence again shaped the tones and textures of his own writing: ‘Their nailed boots bit the worn, grey road. Sprawling midday rest in the fields above the sunken valley road, while red-tabbed officers in long shiny brown boots and spurs cantered past on the stubble, the larks rising before them. But the sunshine ceased; and it rained, and rained, and rained. On the sixth day they rested.’8

John Bullock, the protagonist of Williamson’s war novel, is a symbol of England. There is danger here. Disillusionment following the war brings temptation: the search for a strong leader who will clear up the mess, stiffen the national backbone and lead a patriotic march to a New Jerusalem. In the Thirties, Henry Williamson saw such a man in Adolf Hitler. He attended the Nuremberg Rally in 1935 and was inspired by Hitler’s charisma. He idolised Oswald Mosley and became a member of the British Union of Fascists. This would turn him into a pariah in the literary world.

Hughes did not shy away from Williamson’s ugly politics. In his memorial address, he acknowledged that the stories of nature red in tooth and claw came from the same impulse as the fascism. That is to say, from a worship of natural energy that led to a fear (always close to rage) of ‘inertia, disintegration of effort, wilful neglect, any sort of sloppiness or wasteful exploitation’. Williamson’s ‘keen feeling for a biological law – the biological struggle against entropy’ sprouted into ‘its social and political formulations, with all the attendant dangers of abstract language’. His worship of ‘natural creativity’ meant that ‘he rejoiced in anybody who seemed able to make positive things happen, anybody who had a practical vision for repairing society, upgrading craftsmanship, nursing and improving the land’. This reverence for ‘natural’ as opposed to artificial life ‘led him to imagine a society based on natural law, a hierarchic society, a society with a great visionary leader’.9 The trajectory was very similar to that of D. H. Lawrence, whom Hughes would also come to admire. Such ideas, said Hughes, had ‘strange bedfellows’, but who was to say ‘that the ideas, in themselves, were wrong?’ Hughes himself shared exactly this vision of natural creativity and biological law. ‘It all springs’, he said, ‘out of a simple poetic insight into the piety of the natural world, and a passionate concern to take care of it.’ In this, Williamson was an ecowarrior before his time, ‘a North American Indian sage among Englishmen’.10 The lines of correspondence between Green thinking (‘Back to the land!’) and fascism (‘Blood and soil!’) are complex and troubling.11 Hughes, though, was too canny and grounded, too suspicious of the ‘abstract language’ of ideology, to make the fatal move from biocentric vision to extreme right-wing politics.

In the schoolroom, the boys sat on one side and the girls on the other. On winter days, biscuits and little bottles of milk for morning break were thawed on the black iron stove that stood in the middle of the classroom.

Miss McLeod, Ted’s first English teacher at Mexborough Grammar, praised his writing. His mother responded by buying him, second-hand, a library of classic poets. A children’s encyclopedia introduced him to folktales and myths. Rudyard Kipling was the first poetic favourite: the lolloping rhythms, the voicing of animals and the fables of their origins (‘How the Leopard Got his Spots’), the robust and conversational English working-class voices. Ted’s teenage poems, which he was soon publishing in the school magazine, brought Kipling’s style together with the substance of his Saturday-morning viewing of Westerns and jungle adventures. He rejoiced in imitating Kipling’s ‘pounding rhythms and rhymes’: ‘And the curling lips of the five gouged rips in the bark of the pine were the mark of the bear.’12

He also benefited from the attention of his next teacher. Sensitive to both praise and criticism, he showed her his Kiplingesque sagas. She pointed to a particular turn of phrase and said, ‘This is really … interesting … It’s real poetry.’ What she had highlighted was ‘a compound epithet concerning the hammer of a punt gun on an imaginary wildfowling hunt’. Young Ted pricked up his ears. This was an important moment.13 Soon, this second English teacher, Pauline Mayne, would introduce him to more demanding fare: the sprung rhythms and compacted vocabulary of Gerard Manley Hopkins and the challenging obscurity of T. S. Eliot.

There were many happy returns at the end of the war. The towering figure of Gerald arrived on the doorstep in September 1945, to be greeted by a now tall and handsome fifteen-year-old who stared and then, with tears streaming down his face, called out, ‘Mam, it’s him, it’s him!’14 Ted picked up his big brother’s kitbag and in they went for the reunion with Olwyn and their parents. At the grammar school, meanwhile, the masters were returning. Among them, coming out of the navy, where he had served on the North Atlantic convoys, was John Fisher, tall, with a long slim face and a copy of the Manchester Guardian tucked under his arm. Said to be the finest English teacher in Yorkshire, he put on plays, edited the school magazine – in 1947 the sub-editors were Olwyn Hughes and Edward Hughes – and taught poetry with a passion. He had the Bible, Shakespeare and classical mythology at his fingertips. He would sit on the edge of the desk and announce to the class that they were going to study Shakespeare, so they would all be bored to tears. But they never were. He brought wit and wordplay to the classroom, conjuring up Shakespeare’s characters and moving seamlessly between close reading and historical context. Whether it was Wordsworth (whom Fisher especially loved because he was raised on the Cumberland coast) or Wuthering Heights or the First World War poets, he brought the text to vivid life. He would gaze intently as he nurtured the class in the art of practical criticism, but then lighten the tone with some absurd remark (‘The school is now anchored off the east coast of Madagascar’).

‘He used the blackboard to write up names, dates, always clearly scripted,’ another pupil remembered. ‘When marking homework-essays he would write generously long comments, often in red ink which did not signify censure. He had a clear, fluent, individual hand, a joy to read. But the nitty-gritty of his teaching was working with his students through discussion of the texts.’15 Whether in catholicity of literary taste, in critical acumen, in firm-stroked handwriting or in the love of Beethoven, Fisher was an inspiration to the future poet, introducing him to Keats and Blake, Dante and Dylan Thomas. According to a fellow-pupil, Ted’s appearance – the floppy fringe falling across the eyes – was modelled on that of his master.16

Under this tutelage, and with the academic achievements of Olwyn to spur him on, Ted continued to explore the school library. His next discovery was W. B. Yeats, whose work offered a perfect combination of mesmeric poetic rhythms with subject matter rich in folklore, myth and magic. He claimed (with characteristic exaggeration) to have learned the complete works by heart. His dreams became coloured by The Wanderings of Oisin. He was ‘swallowed alive’. By a beautiful synthesis, the art of poetry, the natural world (his ‘animal kingdom’) and the world of myth and folktale ‘became a single thing’. His own poetry ‘jumped a whole notch in sophistication’.17

Olwyn added grist by introducing him to C. G. Jung’s Psychological Types, with its divisions of the mind between sensation and intuition, thinking and feeling, extravert and introvert. Like Yeats, Hughes was beginning to develop a ‘system’, at once psychological, philosophical, poetical and not a little mystical. At the same time, Shakespeare, that most unsystematic of geniuses, was an infatuation. He read the complete works, going line by line through a battered copy of W. J. Craig’s double-column, small-print Oxford edition, originally published in 1891. Then he went to the home of his girlfriend, Alice Wilson, and discovered that their edition included an additional play, The Two Noble Kinsmen, co-written by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Shakespeare’s chief contribution, the first act, was written in verse of newly knotted complexity. Alice’s mother loved classical music and, being rather better off, owned a gramophone, whereas the Hugheses only had the radio. Ted purchased recordings of Beethoven’s symphonies and concertos, taking them round to play at the Wilsons’ home.

Many of his contemporaries at the grammar school remembered him as a loner. But others recall him imposing his personality on the class, larking about (sometimes egotistically), dressing scruffily and writing vigorous reviews for the school magazine. He played a ‘dark, brooding lighthouse keeper’ in a play and wrote, cast and directed the sixth-form Christmas Revue ‘containing surreal skits anticipating the humour of the Goon Show and Monty Python, in which, for example, cowboys entered saloons to order coffins in which to place their victims.’ Mr Watkinson, the Headmaster, participated, ‘dancing enthusiastically, in full gown and mortarboard mufti, with buckskin-clad sixth-form “squaws”’.18 Above all, Ted was remembered for his size and strength. His sixth-form friend Alan Johnson, who came close to hurdling for Britain at the 1948 London Olympics, was convinced that Ted could have become a serious competitor in discus or shotput.

His academic results were more than satisfactory, though not outstanding. In July 1946, he got his School Certificate (the examination that later became O Levels, then GCSEs) in eight subjects: English Language was very good; English Literature, History, Geography, French and Physics all credits; Mathematics and Chemistry, passes. The following summer, he got a credit in Latin, a necessary prelude to the Higher School Certificate in Latin that was a prerequisite for entrance to the top universities.19 And in the summer of 1948, he passed the Higher School Certificate (the equivalent of A Levels) in English Literature (good), Geography (distinction) and French (pass). Both he and Fisher were disappointed with the English result, but his teacher’s strong support was enough to give him a shot at Cambridge.

Back in Mytholmroyd, there was a family tragedy in the summer of 1947. Uncle Albert’s depression had been growing more severe. His only solace was his woodwork in the attic. One evening, his twenty-one-year-old daughter Glennys called for him to come downstairs for supper. There was no answer. She went up to find out what was going on and fell back down the stairs as she saw the chair that he had kicked away, the body hanging. Albert’s wife ran for a neighbour, Harry Greenwood, who cut the rope.20 Forty miles to the south, perhaps at the very moment when Albert hanged himself, his sister Edith let out a cry, as if she had received a ‘hammer blow’ on the nape of her neck.21

Throughout the war years, Ted spent every free hour in the fields and woods. Before leaving home, Gerald the huntsman had found a new domain. Ted inherited it, along with his brother’s paper round. You went down Old Church Street to the edge of town and crossed a polluted river on a chain ferry, kept by an old man known as Limpy. On the other side, the road ran up the bank, over the railway, past an old pond and into the village of Old Denaby.

Ted came to regard all the land to the right of the railway and up to a place called Manor Farm as his own personal kingdom. He got to know it better than any place he would ever know. Apart from old Oats the farmer and his man, he never met a soul. In a mining town such as Mexborough during the war, nobody else was interested in nature for its own sake. His territory felt like deep country where he could stalk animals, watch, listen and shoot. He trapped mice, which he would then skin and cure, keeping them under the lid of his desk at school and selling them for a penny – or ‘maybe tuppence for a good one’.22 He got to know the local foxes, giving them personalities as if they were people. He practised discus-throwing in the fields. He joined the Denaby Wheelers, a cycling club with which he went on long-distance rides on a bike with drop handlebars.

The school magazine was named for the local rivers, Don and Dearne. In June 1946, Hughes’s first published poem appeared there, along with a short story that vividly describes the gathering in of the harvest at Manor Farm and the shooting of the rabbits and hares that emerged from the corn. Thirteen years later, he would work this up into ‘The Harvesting’, one of a sequence of stories spinning off from his boyhood. In this expanded version, the tale is spiced with magic: the narrator goes woozy with sunstroke, aims his gun at the last hare in the field, then turns into a hare himself, wounded, pursued by hounds. Autobiography has been turned to myth, as the metamorphosis and the hunt of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis are re-enacted in the landscape of Manor Farm.

The best known of his short stories, ‘The Rain Horse’ (1958), is also located at Old Denaby but again it diverges from its origin. The landscape – one particular copse especially – and the initial sighting of the horse come from a memory of being followed by a horse for about ten minutes near Manor Farm, but the animal’s return and the sense of mystery and menace draw from elsewhere. The story combines an experience of his mother’s, which, he alleges, was ‘strangely repeated twice’ in his own life, and ‘an exactly similar experience that my brother had with a mad cow’: ‘On each occasion, the animal kept pretending to attack, or really did attack but kept shying off at the last moment. The cow really did attack, demolished several walls, and had to be shot.’23 None of those incidents happened at Manor Farm. Yet the idea behind the story – that the natural world has a power that, once it grasps you, will never let you go, will gather you into a centrifuge of bond and violation – was something that he would also associate with Old Denaby.

He marked his memories of the war by those of another private kingdom, a little further out of town. Nearly fifty years later, he recollected a particular moment: ‘I was looking up into a Holly Tree beside Crookhill Pond (Conisborough) where there was sometimes a tawny owl, and I thought: today is 4/4/44 and I shall never forget this moment. Now I orient all holocaust experiences, all 2nd world war events, by that fixed moment.’24

After the war Gerald left home again. He became a policeman in Nottingham. Then, one day when he was on point duty, he saw a hoarding with a sunny poster and the words ‘Come to Australia’.25 It was advertising a special scheme that provided a cheap (£10) one-way boat ticket on condition that the emigrant stayed and worked for at least two years. Those who went became known as ‘Ten Pound Poms’. There was talk of his little brother following in his footsteps after doing a degree.

Ted had got to know a boy called John Wholey, who was in Olwyn’s class. Though eighteen months apart in age, the two lads were alike in look and temperament: quiet, tall, thin, in love with fishing, shooting and the countryside. In Gerald’s absence, John became a kind of substitute brother. His father was head gardener and gamekeeper on the Crookhill estate near Conisbrough, 3 miles east along the Don. The Wholeys lived in the keeper’s lodge, remote from everywhere other than the big house, which was being used as a sanatorium for men with terminal tuberculosis. Sometimes, when walking in the grounds, Ted would loudly recite poetry to the bemused patients. ‘Eh lad that were posh,’ they would say.26

He introduced his girlfriend Alice to the Wholeys and she eventually married John. Ted, meanwhile, very much liked John’s sister, Edna. He had regularly gone over to Crookhill on Saturdays. Now that he was older, he was allowed to go on Friday nights. ‘Have you come for the weekend?’ Mrs Wholey would ask. ‘Yes, please,’ said Ted. On one occasion, his parents accompanied him, in order to ensure that the arrangement was acceptable: ‘If our Edward misbehaves send him home with a flea in his ear,’ said his mother. He was soon one of the family. At their VE Day party, in the absence of fireworks, Ted and Johnny found some of keeper Wholey’s cartridges and threw them on the bonfire. The explosion made the ladies jump and Mr Wholey angrily banned the boys from using guns for several weeks. In a way, this suited Ted. Something was changing in him, and he lost the urge to hunt and to kill. He rarely shot again. Trap and gun gave way to rod.

The usual pattern was homework first, then fishing. In winter, they made their own rods out of split canes. A nearby pond was stocked with perch, roach and pike. They caught frogs and spiked them on the barbed wire around the pond, but then they would be sorry, so they held animal funerals as atonement. Sometimes they went out without permission in a little rowing boat. Once Ted and Johnny threw in a hedgehog to see if it would swim, but were ashamed and fished it out again, and Ted wrapped it in his jumper and took it home, where they dried it on the kitchen range. Another time, Ted told Edna to close her eyes and he gently placed a dormouse in her cupped hands.

He found an injured owl by the roadside and brought it back to Crookhill. Mr Wholey let him keep it in one of the outbuildings on condition that he cared for it at weekends (the kind keeper looked after it himself during the week). Ted used to sit and talk to it for hours. Sometimes in the small hours of the morning, Mr Wholey would gently wake the boys and Edna so as to take them out to watch badgers at play, before returning for a hot drink and back to bed. Once, under a full moon, they watched hundreds of frogs cross the lane.

He always had a book in his pocket, together with pencil and paper. He would go out in the fields for hours. He and Edna roamed in the woods reciting Longfellow’s Hiawatha, which she had to learn by heart for school. They walked, they talked, they dreamed. Ted would suddenly say ‘Stand still and listen’ and take from his pocket a crumpled page of poetry. They kept the ones that Edna liked best, stuffed others into holes in the tree trunks. He lay with his head on her lap and read to her. After John had left for National Service, Ted continued to go to Crookhill. He walked alone, high from reading verse aloud. ‘I used to sit around in the woods, muttering through my books. I read the whole of The Faerie Queene like that. All of Milton. Lots more. It became sort of a hobby-habit.’27

His earliest surviving letter is to Edna, written when he was seventeen and she had gone off to train as a nurse. He wrote that there were things which held ‘places of high wonder’ in his imagination. Things that ‘posterity may wonder at’, things that when placed before the camera of everyday life ‘invariably shattered the lens, burnt the film and slew the photographer’. ‘I have seen’, he went on, invoking the image of a caged animal that would become a recurring figure in his poetry, ‘things which, when put on public view, slew the unlooking population by the thousand, melted the iron bars which encased it and leaping for freedom, reduced the room which contained it to general matchwood and lumber.’28 Like the jaguar that he would conjure into poetry, Hughes came to hate being ‘put on public view’. But in his imagination he melted the iron bars. Already he is imagining that it will be his vocation to create ‘places of high wonder’ for himself and for readers. Even as a schoolboy, writing half ironically and in full awareness of his own hubris, he wanted posterity to wonder at him. The same thought – voiced with self-mocking boyish arrogance – recurs in another letter to Edna in which he imagines himself as a great poet immortalised in a burial urn in Trafalgar Square.

His favourite fishing place on the Crookhill estate was a large pond, very deep in places. In the ‘Capturing Animals’ talk, he evoked the memory of seeing giant forms on the surface resembling railway sleepers. They were huge pike. His poem ‘Pike’, he said, captured not just a fish but ‘the whole pond, including the monsters I never even hooked’.29 The pond is as deep as England, deep as memory. It is at once his childhood, his unconscious and the spirit of place that made him who he was.

Throughout his life, he remained hooked by the mystique of the pike. They were, he said, ‘fixed at some very active, deep level in my imaginative life’.30 They filled his dreams. If he was feeling good about life, he would dream of giant pike that were also leopards, full of energy, connecting him to the vital forces of the universe. If he was feeling bad, he would dream that the pond of the pike was filled with concrete and bereft of fish. Nothing gave him more pleasure in the Seventies than fishing the loughs of Ireland with his teenage son Nicholas, plumbing the dark, mystic depths for what in a myth-heavy poem he called ‘The Great Irish Pike’.31

At the end of 1968, he and Gerald drove to Mexborough to find the pond. The Wholeys’ lodge was in ruins, its garden entirely overgrown. They went down to the pond and found that ‘it had shrunk to an oily puddle about twenty feet across in a black basin of mud, with oil cans and rubbish’. Ted’s son Nicky made a few half-hearted casts into the dank water. They felt low, despite the presence of Ted’s name carved on a tree as a token of memory. As rain began to fall, Ted made one token cast himself, which he described as ‘a ceremonial farewell’, and there ‘among the rubbish’ he hooked ‘a huge perch’, one of the biggest he had ever caught: ‘It was very weird, a complete dream.’32

Manor Farm is now a gastropub, the Crookhill estate a golf course, the pond of the pike shrunk by mud and reed. The magic landscape survives only in Hughes’s writings.

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