Bate - Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life

William Collins

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First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2015

Copyright Jonathan Bate 2015

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Source ISBN: 9780008118228

Ebook Edition October 2015 ISBN: 9780008118235

Version: 2015-09-02

For Paula Jayne, again and always

And for Barrie and Deedee Wigmore,

because the shepherds hut unlocked it

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 doesnt actually want to say but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of. Perhaps its the need to keep it hidden that makes it poetic makes it poetry. The writer darent actually put it into words, so it leaks out obliquely, smuggled through analogies were actually saying something we desperately need to share. The real mystery is this strange need. Why cant we just hide it and shut up? Why do we have to blab? Why do human beings need to confess? Maybe if you dont have that secret confession, you dont have a poem dont even have a story.

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

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. Thats it. I work from home.

Q. And what is your occupation, sir?

A. Writer.

The Yorkshire accent is unfamiliar. Eleven is the stenographers 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.

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.

Doubly poetical, in fact. There were the pastoral associations of willow: Hughes was haunted by the willow aslant the brook in Gertrudes account of Ophelias 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 stones throw from the Charles River, you would find the offices of publishers, both established (Little, Brown) and independent (the Beacon Press). At number 10 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 nations 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 Hughess 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.