Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life

In the washroom, Sylvia told the story to another woman, who replied that the bears were particularly bad that year. On the Sunday night, just before Ted and Sylvia’s arrival in the park, another woman had tried to scare one off with a flashlight and been mauled to death. This gave Sylvia the idea of, in Ted’s later phrase, transforming their own ‘dud scenario into a fiction’.60 (#litres_trial_promo) ‘The Fifty-Ninth Bear’ is one of her most effective short stories. It concerns a couple called Norton and Sadie. Norton was the surname of both a former boyfriend and the character in the television sitcom The Honeymooners whose vocal mannerisms inspired Yogi Bear.61 (#litres_trial_promo) Sadie was one of the names Sylvia thought of using for the autobiographical protagonist of ‘Falcon Yard’. They count fifty-eight bears as they drive round the Grand Loop at Yellowstone. When they are woken in the night by the sound of another bear, Norton goes outside and sees the smashed car window. He waves a flashlight to scare the bear away, but is cuffed over the head and killed: ‘It was the last bear, her bear, the fifty-ninth.’ The sinister aspect of the story is that Norton’s arrogance has in some sense made Sadie want him to die: in daydreams, he imagined himself as a widower,

a hollow-cheeked, Hamletesque figure in somber suits, given to standing, abstracted, ravaged by casual winds, on lonely promontories and at the rail of ships, Sadie’s slender, elegant white body embalmed, in a kind of bas relief, on the central tablet of his mind. It never occurred to Norton that his wife might outlive him. Her sensuousness, her pagan enthusiasms, her inability to argue in terms of anything but her immediate emotions – this was too flimsy, too gossamery a stuff to survive out from under the wings of his guardianship.62 (#litres_trial_promo)

Ted gave his own version of the story in the longest poem in Birthday Letters, also called ‘The 59th Bear’. In the rear-view mirror of memory, he vividly revisited ‘the off rear window of the car’,

Wrenched out – a star of shatter splayed

From a single talon’s leverage hold,

A single claw forced into the hair-breadth odour

Had ripped the whole sheet out. He’d leaned in

And on claw hooks lifted out our larder.

He’d left matted hairs. I glued them in my Shakespeare.63 (#litres_trial_promo)

Whereas Sylvia’s story exits the husband to death, pursued by the fifty-ninth bear, Ted captures a trophy of the animal encounter and gives it to his Shakespeare. One may assume that he pasted the matted hairs somewhere near the famous stage direction in The Winter’s Tale. He ended the poem by reflecting on Sylvia’s short story, reading the bear as an image of the death that was hurtling towards her rather than her husband.

After leaving Yellowstone, they drove through the Grand Teton mountain range, stopping for photographs, then south to Salt Lake City and Big Cottonwood Canyon, where, as a reward after their immensely long drive, they treated themselves to a huge meal of Kentucky fried chicken, rolls and honey, potatoes and gravy. They swam in the great Salt Lake, discovering with amazement and delight that you really didn’t sink, could almost sit up on the water as if in an armchair. Then it was across the desert into the sunset, passing into Nevada, where they stopped for the night to camp, Sylvia cooking the last of their Yellowstone trout, ‘with corn niblets, a tomato and lettuce salad and milk’.64 (#litres_trial_promo) At last they reached California, camping near Lake Tahoe, then stopping in ‘the lovely palm-tree shaded Capitol Park of Sacramento’ – ‘the site of the mine that started the gold rush’ – in 114-degree heat.65 (#litres_trial_promo) They liked the holiday feel of California, the mix of mountains, forests, fertile farmland. Sylvia wrote of the lushness, Ted of the fruit.

At last they reached the sea, intending to camp at Stinson Beach State Park, just over 20 miles outside San Francisco. But their guidebook was out of date. The supposed campsite had been turned into a parking lot. Sylvia, desperately tired from yet another mammoth drive, was on the verge of tears. Ted suggested that they should try their luck in town. They had cold beer and fried chicken at a café and the generous owner suggested that they park their car in his lot and sleep under the stars on the beach. For Sylvia, it was one of the best nights of her life, not least because she sensed new life quickening inside her. Her period was due and it had not yet come. Away from the stress of Smith, she had become pregnant early in the summer.

Ted did not quite share the sense of climax. He wrote several drafts of a poem about Stinson Beach under the title ‘Early August 1959’, but did not include it in Birthday Letters. ‘We got to the Pacific,’ he wrote. ‘What was so symbolic about the Pacific?’ Whatever it was, they had made it. But the sunset wasn’t as spectacular as it should have been and it was foggy when they woke up in the morning. Still, they had ‘kept to the programme of romance / Slept in our sleeping bags under the stars / Tried to live up to the setting’. He was then cheered when ‘a phone-call from within sight of the sea’ brought the news that Faber and Faber had accepted his second volume of poetry.66 (#litres_trial_promo) They were not sure about his proposed title ‘The Feast of Lupercal’, because there had been two recent novels of exactly that name (one of them a Faber bestseller), so he decided to call it ‘Lupercalia’ instead.67 (#litres_trial_promo)

They dipped into San Francisco to get the car window repaired. Then it was a beach camp halfway to Los Angeles, then a relaxing stay with Sylvia’s Aunt Frieda in Pasadena. Her hot water and other amenities were much appreciated and her name, with its echo of D. H. Lawrence’s feisty wife, gave them an idea for the baby, should it prove to be a girl. Their eastward journey began with the Mojave Desert and the Grand Canyon. At that grandest of all sights, ‘America’s Delphi’, they sought a blessing on the baby in Sylvia’s womb as a reward for their pilgrimage. Navajo dancers, standing on the rim of the greatest gorge in the world, beat a drum, sounding an echo that thirty years later Ted imagined he could hear, faintly, in the voice of his daughter.68 (#litres_trial_promo) The primitive power of the drumbeat would become a key resource in his theatre work. More prosaically, when they returned to the car their water-cooling bag, which had crossed the Mojave slung under the front bumper, had been stolen.

From the Grand Canyon they drove all the way across to New Orleans, then north to Tennessee to stay with Luke Myers’s family. The gigantic trip ended with sightseeing in Washington DC and a stay with Sylvia’s Uncle Frank near Philadelphia, before they at last returned home to the hot tubs and home baking of New England. Aurelia thought that they both looked tanned and well, but Sylvia was tired and worried about the pregnancy. She had a history of gynaecological complications, so she still did not feel sure that there really was a baby growing inside her.

Yaddo is an artists’ community located on a 400-acre estate in Saratoga Springs. It was founded in 1900 by a wealthy financier called Spencer Trask and his wife, Katrina, who wrote poetry herself. Left without immediate heirs by the deaths of their four young children, the Trasks decided to bequeath their palatial home to future generations of writers, composers, painters and other creative artists. Katrina had a vision of generations of talented men and women yet unborn walking the lawns of Yaddo, ‘creating, creating, creating’. The idea was to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in peaceful, green surroundings. The great American short-story writer John Cheever would write that the ‘forty or so acres on which the principal buildings of Yaddo stand have seen more distinguished activity in the arts than any other piece of ground in the English-speaking community and perhaps the world’.69 (#litres_trial_promo)

When Ted and Sylvia arrived just after Labor Day, the main house had been closed for winter. They were given spacious rooms in the clapperboard West House, among the trees. Each of them had a separate ‘studio’, Sylvia’s on the top floor of the house and Ted’s out in the woods – the perfect place for him. ‘A regular little house to himself’, Sylvia wrote to her mother, ‘all glassed in and surrounded by pines, with a wood stove for the winter, a cot, and huge desk’.70 (#litres_trial_promo) A writing hut away from the main house would be his salvation at Court Green in later years. The chance to live together but work apart was exactly what they needed. Meals were taken care of and the food was very good, a welcome change from the campground cookery of the summer. Breakfast was available from eight till nine, lunchboxes were then collected and taken to each resident’s studio, and in the evening they all gathered for dinner. Being a quiet season, there were only a dozen artists in residence, including painters, an interesting composer and a couple of other poets whose names were not familiar to them.

One of the painters, Howard Rogovin, did portraits of both Sylvia and Ted. For Sylvia, he set up his easel in the old greenhouse. To the sound of ‘rain in the conifers’, he painted Sylvia lifted out of herself ‘In a flaming of oils’, her ‘lips exact’. But he also seemed to catch a shadow on her shoulder, a dark marauding ‘doppelgänger’.71 (#litres_trial_promo) At one point, a graceful snake slid across the dusty floor of the hot greenhouse. Both this portrait and the one of Ted, which was said to be less successful, are lost.72 (#litres_trial_promo)

The composer was Chou Wen-chung, a United States immigrant from Shandong in China. A protégé of the radical experimentalist Edgar Varèse, he sought to integrate Eastern and Western classical (and modernist) musical traditions. They struck up a friendship and Ted began work on a libretto for him, for an oratorio based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The original title, Bardo Thödol, literally means ‘Liberation through Hearing during the Intermediate State’. These ‘intermediate states’ included the dream state, the moment of death in which the clear light of reality is experienced, and the ‘bardo of rebirth’, which involved hallucinatory images of men and women erotically entwined. The project was never finished, but it took Ted into territory that he would make his own in almost all his later mythic works.73 (#litres_trial_promo)

His main project at Yaddo was his play (now lost, save for a few fragments), ‘The House of Taurus’. Sylvia described it in a letter home written in early October: ‘a symbolic drama based on the Euripides play The Bacchae, only set in a modern industrial community under a paternalistic ruler’.74 (#litres_trial_promo) She hoped that it would at least get a staged reading, but explained that she had not yet typed it up.

During the weeks at Yaddo Ted also revised one or two of the poems in his forthcoming ‘Lupercalia’ collection, but for poetic development it was more of a breakthrough moment for Sylvia. Before Yaddo, her verse had been highly accomplished but somehow brittle. A self-description in a journal entry of late 1955 was harsh but apt: ‘Roget’s trollop, parading words and tossing off bravado for an audience’ (Roget’s Thesaurus was the vade mecum of writers looking for unusual words for ordinary things).75 (#litres_trial_promo) Very few Plath poems written before Yaddo stick in the mind; almost all the hundred or so that Sylvia wrote thereafter sear themselves into the consciousness of the attentive reader. Years earlier, Plath had dreamed of gathering forces into a tight tense ball for the artistic leap. At Yaddo, she made that leap.

On 10 October 1959, she wrote in her journal: ‘Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. When will I break into a new line of poetry? Feel trite.’ It was certainly odd to feel barren when she was at last pregnant. Then on the 13th: ‘Very depressed today. Unable to write a thing. Menacing gods. I feel outcast on a cold star.’ Ted told her to ‘get desperate’. On the night of the 21st, she felt ‘animal solaces’ as she lay with him, warm in bed. The next day, walking in the woods in the frosty morning light, she found the ‘Ambitious seeds of a long poem made up of separate sections: Poem on her Birthday. To be a dwelling on madhouse, nature. The superb identity, selfhood of things. To be honest with what I know and have known. To be true to my own weirdnesses.’76 (#litres_trial_promo) Madhouse, nature, identity, self, weirdness: in ‘Poem for a Birthday’, Sylvia began for the first time to write poetry overtly about her suicide attempt, mental breakdown and electro-convulsive therapy, albeit refracted through a symbolic narrative of descent and rebirth.

Within a fortnight the sequence was ‘miraculously’ written. The title came from the fact that her birthday fell halfway through the process of composition. What was it that released the flow? The example of Lowell confronting his nervous breakdown in Life Studies was crucial. Ted, who was convinced that this was indeed the turning point in her poetic career, pointed to the influence of the poetry of Theodore Roethke, which she read in the Yaddo library (where she also renewed her acquaintance with the wonderfully confident and supple poetry of Elizabeth Bishop). Conversations with Ted about the death and rebirth structure of Bardo Thödol would also have played a part. But her journal offers other clues. It reveals that she was ‘electrified’ by the consonance between the imagery she was developing and the language of Jung’s Symbols of Transformation, another book in the well-stocked Yaddo library. And a couple of days earlier, her creativity released by some breathing exercises that Ted taught her, she had written two poems that pleased her, one to ‘Nicholas’, the name they had chosen for their child if it proved to be a boy, and the other on ‘the old father-worship subject’.77 (#litres_trial_promo) The father who had died when she was eight and the unborn child in her womb. She was on a cusp, about eighteen weeks pregnant. Did the baby quicken and give its first kick at this time? Before her stood tomorrow.

They returned to Wellesley just before Thanksgiving. Sylvia was now noticeably pregnant. Aurelia later remembered Ted working away in the upstairs bedroom while Sylvia ‘sorted and packed the huge trunk’ that they had set up in the breezeway. On the day they left, ‘Sylvia was wearing her hair in a long braid down her back with a little red wool cap on her head.’ She looked like a teenage girl going off to boarding school. As the train pulled out of the station, Ted shouted out, ‘We’ll be back in two years!’78 (#litres_trial_promo) He was looking forward to home, and English beer, having found the American variety ‘unspeakable and unspewable’.79 (#litres_trial_promo)

On a clear blue day in March 1959, Ted and Sylvia had gone out from their little Willow Street apartment to Winthrop, the southernmost point of Boston’s North Shore. In the morning, Sylvia had been with her psychoanalyst, probing further at her feelings about her dead father. It was time, they decided, for her to visit Otto Plath’s grave in Winthrop for the first time. When they found it, she felt cheated by the plain and unassuming flat stone, tempted to dig him up in order to ‘prove he existed and really was dead’.80 (#litres_trial_promo)

Then they walked over some rocks beside the ocean. The wind was bitter. Their feet got wet and they picked up shells with cold hands. Ted walked alone to the end of the bar, in his black coat, ‘defining the distance of stones and stones humped out of the sea’.81 (#litres_trial_promo) Afterwards, Sylvia wrote a poem called ‘Man in Black’. It was soon accepted by the New Yorker, one of her first big successes in getting her work into high-profile print. It catches the moment: the breakwaters absorbing the force of the sea, the March ice on the rock pools, ‘And you’ – Ted, that is – striding out across the white stones:

in your dead

Black coat, black shoes, and your

Black hair …82 (#litres_trial_promo)

There he stands, a ‘Fixed vortex’ on the edge of the land, holding it all together, the stones, the air, Sylvia’s life and her father’s death. The line-break catapults the word ‘dead’ into double sense. At one level, Ted’s coat is dead black in the sense of pitch black. At another level, it is black because black is the colour of death. Sylvia’s black imagination has indeed dug Otto out of his grave – and reincarnated him in her husband.

That is how Ted read the poem. In Birthday Letters, he made a point of placing his reply-poem, which he called ‘Black Coat’, after the long journal-like poems about the road trip. In terms of strict chronology, it should have been before. But he wanted to make it into a summation of their time in America. He places himself looking across the sea, ready for home. He remembers the moment in the Algonquin Provincial Park when he had photographed Sylvia feeding a wild deer with freshly picked blueberries. Something about the idea of a camera makes him uncomfortable. It is the same sensation as that provoked by the sinister image behind Sylvia’s shoulder in the portrait that Howard Rogovin had painted in the Yaddo greenhouse. A shadow, a double, a whisper of death. He then imagines Sylvia taking a photograph of him. Perhaps she had brought a camera to snap her father’s grave, or perhaps it is the metaphoric photograph of the poem ‘Man in Black’ that is entering her mind at this moment. Either way, he feels as if he has stepped ‘Into the telescopic sights / Of the paparazzo sniper’ nested in Sylvia’s brown eyes. He feels as if she is pinning him with a ‘double image’, ‘double exposure’ (the name she would choose three years later for her lost novel about the disintegration of their marriage). He feels as if her dead father has just crawled out of the sea. He ‘did not feel’ Otto sliding into him as Sylvia’s ‘lenses tightened’.83 (#litres_trial_promo)

Or at least all this is what he thought he thought when, years later, he began to write the series of letter-poems that first took their overall title from the deer, then from the black coat, and finally from the poem that Sylvia had written at Yaddo, ‘for a Birthday’.

11

Famous Poet (#ulink_6f81edab-fc39-5851-8b14-5ab100165706)

When I got here (having left in 1957 as a complete unknown) I found myself really quite famous and was deluged by invitations to do this, give readings, do that, meet so-and-so, etc, and many doors were comfortably wide open that I had never dreamed of being able to enter and places such as the B.B.C., which I had been trying to penetrate for years, suddenly received me as guest of honour.

(Ted Hughes to Aurelia and Warren Plath, December 1960)1 (#litres_trial_promo)

At Yaddo, Sylvia had a dream in which Marilyn Monroe appeared to her as ‘a kind of fairy godmother’, gave her an expert manicure and advice on hairdressers, invited her for Christmas and promised her ‘a new flowering life’.2 (#litres_trial_promo) Dream Sylvia told Marilyn how much she and Arthur Miller meant to her and Ted: the dream couple. But perhaps because the new flowering life involved motherhood, Sylvia stopped imitating the Marilyn look. When Olwyn arrived to spend Christmas 1959 at the Beacon, the first thing she saw was Ted and Sylvia standing at the sitting-room door, waiting to welcome her. Sylvia’s hair was mousy brown. Olwyn thought that she had stopped bleaching it (in fact, the last time she bleached it had been in 1954; thereafter, it was naturally lightened by sun-worship). Olwyn had not realised until that moment that she was not a natural blonde. Sylvia, she thought, had become less the ‘good-looking girl’ and more ‘a contained individual’.3 (#litres_trial_promo)

On Boxing Day, Sylvia sat by a roaring coal fire in the little second parlour of the Beacon, digesting a light supper of creamed leftover turkey and mushrooms that she had made for the family, and wrote to her mother as the rain lashed against the triple window and a gale howled. This was what the weather had been like for the entire two weeks of their stay. She told Aurelia that to feel the Yorkshire weather she should ‘reread Ted’s poem “Wind”: it’s perfect’. Olwyn, she said, was ‘very nice, a beautiful blonde, slim girl, my height and size, with yellow-green eyes and delicate, graceful bone structure’. Sylvia said that she liked Olwyn immensely and got on much better with her ‘now that she’s really accepted me as Ted’s wife’.4 (#litres_trial_promo) Olwyn herself was not so sure. She thought that Sylvia overreacted to small incidents, such as some sharp words about a borrowed dressing-gown.

After the Christmas and New Year festivities, Ted and Sylvia went to London. They began in a bed-and-breakfast, then stayed in one of Daniel Huws’s father’s flats back at 18 Rugby Street, which had had a makeover since they had been away. There were now sinks in each flat and running water in their tiny kitchens. They threw themselves into house-hunting, looking in various parts of London before deciding on the Primrose Hill area near Regent’s Park, where Bill Merwin and his posh English wife Dido had a lovely flat.

After one or two disappointments, such as a lovely furnished ground-floor flat that they were going to take until the landlord said ‘no children’, Dido pointed them in the direction of a third-floor flat in a five-storey house in Chalcot Square. The area was rather run-down, but beautifully placed close to both the park and the gentle green slope of Primrose Hill itself. The flat, which was in the process of being refurbished, was small, with only a single bedroom. They would have to furnish it themselves. But it was cheap – six guineas a week – and the shops, the zoo and the green spaces were all within walking distance, perfect for a young mother with a pram. The Merwins were near by and Dido was friendly with the local GP, Dr Horder. They registered with the practice and the obstetrician took on Sylvia. Home birth was the norm in those days.