Ted Hughes

Terry Gifford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781134384334
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

For the first time, one volume surveys the life, works and critical reputation of one of the most significant British writers of the twentieth-century: Ted Hughes.

This accessible guide to Hughes' writing provides a rich exploration of the complete range of his works. In this volume, Terry Gifford:

• offers clear and detailed discussions of Hughes' poetry, stories, plays, translations, essays and letters
• includes new biographical information, and previously unpublished archive material, especially on Hughes' environmentalism
• provides a comprehensive account of Hughes' critical reception, separated into the major themes that have interested readers and critics
• offers useful suggestions for further reading, and incorporates helpful cross-references between sections of the guide.

Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, Ted Hughes presents an accessible, fresh, and fascinating introduction to a major British writer whose work continues to be of crucial importance today.

1
Life and contexts

The childhood to undergraduate years (1930–56)

Two themes dominate the youth of Ted Hughes: his fascination with wildlife and his early sense of himself as a future writer and poet. Both might have been thought unlikely, given Hughes’s upbringing in the two different industrial areas of first West Yorkshire and then South Yorkshire. But the young Hughes’s sense of being most alive in the countryside (easily accessible from each of his two childhood homes), a supportive family and nurturing state schools provided him with opportunities that were to shape his life’s work. All of his resources as a writer of poetry, fiction, literary studies, book reviews, translations, letters and children’s works are aimed at exploring the tensions and connections between our inner nature and the external nature, in both of which Hughes believed that we must find a way to be at home. Hughes’s constructions in his work of a range of figures such as the fox, the wodwo, Crow, the Iron Man, the moors, a river, Shakespeare’s goddess, Alcestis, Sylvia Plath and himself are all observed with a naturalist’s attention and a storyteller’s sense of aiming his construction towards healing the gap between inner and outer nature. Hughes said that when writing for children he knew that there were fewer defences thrown up across that gap: ‘the audience is still open’ (Kazzer 1999: 193). It is clear that in his own childhood he was increasingly ‘at home’ within the family, the countryside, schooling and the connections between them.

The street into which Edward James Hughes was born on 17 August 1930 was a row of terraced houses in the West Yorkshire village of Mytholmroyd that looked out across an open square of waste land and up through fields to the moors beyond. (The first syllable of this village is not pronounced ‘myth’ (pace Greening 2007: ix); the ‘y’ is pronounced ‘I’.) Number 1 Aspinal Street is on a corner and round its side it has an open arched entrance to a cobbled yard at the back of the house. One street further back behind the house was the canal, crossed by the bridge that gives access to the main road that runs through the Calder Valley, the natural corridor that contains Mytholmroyd, and west over the Pennines from the Yorkshire to the Lancashire textile industries. In this deeply cut valley, road, railway, river and canal run close together with factories and mills in between them. Terraced housing has crept up the sides of the valley, most notably at the steeply tiered town of Hebden Bridge, the centre of the nineteenth-century woollen industry that used water to power weaving looms. What had begun as a cottage industry in the higher villages above Hebden Bridge such as Heptonstall, where many small windows gave good light in the upper rooms of eighteenth-century cottages, developed into the centre of the industrial revolution with large mills and their tall chimneys, although industrial decline was well established by the time of Hughes’s childhood in the Depression years of the 1930s.

The spirit of dogged survival in the people of West Yorkshire, that is evoked so strongly in Remains of Elmet (1979), is symbolised not just by the presence of the industrial past in the valley and the marginal, often abandoned, hill farms above, but by the monuments to the dead of the First World War that stand on the rim of the valley and the surprising number of huge square non-conformist chapels that, now disused, still litter the landscape. Hughes explains in his book about his earliest landscape that this area was known as Elmet. It was the last Celtic kingdom in England and was famed for its independence and resilience. The villages of the Calder Valley lost dramatic numbers of men in the First World War, but the population’s ability to accept suffering had been sustained by the force of Methodism since John Wesley’s preaching had first taken root here, seemingly in the bleak conditions of the landscape itself. In his introduction to Remains of Elmet, Hughes emphasises that growing up here, ‘you could not fail to realise that cataclysms had happened … Gradually, it dawned on you that you were living among the survivors, in the remains’. Hence the original title of his book, Remains of Elmet. A second version, which contained more poems about the resilience of local people, was simply titled Elmet (1994).

Hughes’s mother Edith was a descendant of the Norman family named Ferrer (later Farrar), one of whom, Nicholas Ferrer, is the subject of a poem by Hughes. One of six children, Edith’s sister Hilda lived at 13 Aspinal St and her brother Albert lived at 19 Aspinal St. Her brothers Tom and Walter also lived with their families in Mytholmroyd, so that Hughes grew up with a strong sense of a close family that he came to celebrate with the inclusion of several family poems in Elmet. (Mentioned in poems are uncle Albert: 1902–47, the brother of Hughes’s mother Edith: 1898–1969, uncle Thomas: 1891–1951, uncle Walt: 1893–1976, and aunts Miriam: 1896–1915 and Hilda: 1908–2003). Because at least three sets of relatives had farms on the hillsides above the Calder Valley, the sense of family ownership of this landscape must have been strong. Edith must have given her children great self-confidence through allowing Ted to be taken on shooting and camping expeditions from the house by his brother Gerald, who was ten years older. Ted’s sister Olwyn, who was two years older than him, came to play an important supportive role in his life, not only as a mentor through school and later as his literary agent, but by moving in and looking after his two children when his wife Sylvia Plath committed suicide. At school, Olwyn lent Ted the books of poetry she was studying in classes two years ahead of him, but it was their mother who first supported her children’s early interest in literature by buying books to extend their reading experience. She herself loved poetry, Wordsworth especially, and made up stories for the children when they were small. That Edith had a matter of fact attitude towards the occasional appearance of the ghost of her elder sister Miriam, who had died young, would also be significant in Hughes’s later interest in esoteric forms of knowledge. We also now know that Edith Hughes wrote at least one poem and a narrative of her childhood (Emory, Gerald Hughes collection). Ted was later to return the debt to his mother by taking her and his father into his Devon home for long periods as she became infirm, and also in his second and more personal homage to his childhood, Elmet.

Hughes’s father, William Henry Hughes, was one of only seventeen men in a whole regiment of the Lancashire Fusiliers to have survived the battle of Gallipoli in the First World War. (Seventeen thousand, three hundred and forty-two members of his regiment did not return from the First World War.) He was saved by his paybook from a piece of shrapnel penetrating to his heart. The young boy heard his father calling out in his sleep in the nightmares that continued to haunt him. An able footballer, William’s fitness was tested to exhaustion as he repeatedly carried back wounded men at Ypres, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal. He was a carpenter, who, after church on Sunday, once took Ted along the canal towpath to the pub near his mother’s house to see the man who bit off rats’ heads, as reconstructed in the story ‘Sunday’ in Wodwo (1967). In Hughes’s writing his father is usually associated with the trauma of a survivor of the First World War. The horrors of his father’s war came to be overlaid with the horrors that made such an impression on the imagination of Hughes himself in the aftermath of the Second World War when the images of the camps and the Japanese cities were finally made public.

With a group of other boys, Hughes played in the nearby woods, swam in the river and fished in the canal. For his fourth birthday he was given a simple animal identification book and Gerald taught him how to trap small animals before later taking Hughes on hunting trips in the woods and moors where Ted acted as retriever. Later Gerald taught him how to use a gun. In the story ‘The Deadfall’ that opens the collection Difficulties of a Bridegroom (1995), Hughes describes a camping trip with his brother to Crimsworth Dene as though it is autobiographical. Their purpose was shooting rabbits, but they discovered a dead young fox caught in a gamekeeper’s trap. The story has a supernatural element that anticipates the even stronger fantasy element in the final one in the collection in which the narrator, sickened by his brother’s relentless shooting of everything that moves, decides to quit himself, with weird consequences. But as young brothers they certainly do seem to have shot more than just rabbits, sometimes accompanied by their Uncle Walt, who appears in several poems, always closely associated with an intimate knowledge of this West Yorkshire landscape.

At the age of eight the family moved to Mexborough, a South Yorkshire mining village where, once again, a river ran behind the newspaper and tobacconist shop William ran on the main street. On the other side of the river was rolling farmland with ditches and copses, pheasants and partridges, rabbits and foxes, and a farm that Hughes came to know well. Rather than move to Mexborough, at the age of seventeen his brother left the family to become a gamekeeper in Devon, but Hughes became friends with the son of a gamekeeper on a nearby estate where they could roam the woods and lakes, learning to fish for pike. It was in the hollows and farms, parkland and ponds of this landscape that Hughes developed his adolescent study of wildlife, informed by the magazines easily available in his father’s shop. At the age of fifteen his awareness of the destructiveness of his mode of engagement with the animals he had been trapping and shooting led to an imaginative interest in their inner lives and their habitats. At the same time he had registered the combined effects of silage and chemical pollution in the two rivers of his childhood:

From my earliest days I was hooked on fish – but I lived by a river, the West Yorks Calder, that had no life in it at all. Straight industrial effluent. And the Don, in South Yorks, … was worse. So my greening began you could say with everything that lay about me in my infancy.

(Gifford 1995: 132)

Hughes added about his secondary school, Mexborough Grammar, that ‘our school song was “By Don and Dearne” – both dead, crucified rivers’ (T.H. to T.G., 17. 12. 1993, MSS 644, Box 54, FF1).

From the primary school down the road from the family corner shop, Hughes followed his sister in passing an exam at eleven years old to gain a place at Mexborough Grammar School. This school had a reputation for developing talented children from this area of the South Yorkshire coalfield. Here a series of inspirational teachers of English encouraged Hughes’s original writing in a manner that was progressive for its time, when essays and analysis dominated the English secondary school curriculum. A class reading of The Jungle Book sent Hughes to the library at the age of thirteen to find Kipling’s verse. He imitated and experimented in his own writing with the verse forms he encountered. ‘It was in the fourth year [year 10] that the teachers began remarking on some of his poetry’, said Vera Paley, his form teacher (Sheffield Star 20. 12. 1984). John Fisher, the charismatic English teacher Hughes revered, included his work in the school magazine and introduced Hughes to the work of Eliot and Hopkins. An interest in Yeats came via Celtic folktales, originally found in a children’s encyclopaedia that his mother had bought for the home. At the same time Olwyn, who was to gain a Distinction in the Higher School Certificate for English Literature, and with what Hughes later called ‘a marvellously precocious taste in poetry’ (Letters 725), now became the school’s prodigy and her brother’s mentor. Hughes recalled that ‘by sixteen I had no thought of becoming anything but a writer of some kind, certainly writing verse’ (Letters 725). At the age of nineteen he had written the exquisite poem ‘Song’ for a Sixth Form girlfriend in the manner of the metaphysical poets. It was the earliest poem included in his first published collection.

In 1948 Mexborough Grammar School’s development of Hughes led to his winning an Open Exhibition to Pembroke College Cambridge to read English, supported by John Fisher’s sending some of Ted’s poems to the college. First he had to do two years’ National Service, much of it at Fylingdales radar station on the North Yorkshire moors, where he ‘read and re-read Shakespeare and watched the grass grow’ (Sagar 1975: 8). Having studied King Lear for A Level exams (together with Hardy’s The Woodlanders and Shelley’s Adonais, the latter learned by heart), the influence of Shakespeare’s verse rhythms and phrasing were quite as strong on Hughes’s early poetry as was his preoccupation with Shakespeare’s themes in his later work. He also read Spenser and Milton aloud to himself while walking on the moors. By the time he went to university he knew most of the work of the Romantic poets and Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, which he had received as a prize at Mexborough. Based upon the model provided by John Fisher, Hughes had high hopes that English at Cambridge would feed his growth as a writer.

This was not to be the case. At Cambridge Hughes immediately felt the isolation of a rather reserved grammar school boy among public school products who were in the majority. ‘I was a quiet type, an outsider … (I lay low, because I felt, I suppose, that I was in enemy country. First two years, I didn’t feel much social self-confidence.)’ (BL ADD 78761, f. 61). The weekly essay of close analysis of texts became destructive rather than supportive of his deep appreciation of literature. The literary set, centred around King’s College and the journal Granta, were deliberately exclusive and dilettante, with connections to literary life in London. Despite what he felt about himself, Hughes displayed a charismatic self-confidence that is attested to by the memoirs of fellow students at the time and he had the ability to be successful in the intensive system of essays, supervisions and exams. At the end of his second year he gained an upper second classification and one of his supervisors later wrote to tell him that she had learned more from him about Dylan Thomas than she could teach him about John Donne. Most of Hughes’s friends were made in his second and third years and they can remember him quoting Blake and Hopkins by heart, singing ballads and living in his own slightly unconventional way. Some of these friends were made for life and his correspondence with them is now a major biographical source. One of them, Terence McCaughey, who was doing research on Scottish ballads at the time Hughes met him, became an Emeritus lecturer in Divinity at Trinity College, Dublin and was to officiate at Hughes’s funeral service.

Blocked in the writing of his own poems by the hard rigour of dissecting and evaluating those of others, Hughes changed to study Archaeology and Anthropology for his third year. The turning point in making this decision was a famous dream that came at the end of a long night struggling to complete a critical essay. A fox appeared in his room in Cambridge and placed a bloody paw on the blank page in front of Hughes, leaving a blood-print and speaking the words, ‘Stop this. You are destroying us.’ Hughes often told this story in introducing the poem ‘The Thought-Fox’, written two years later. Hughes was not the only poet whose creativity was crushed by the spirit of the English course at that time. Brian Cox, a fellow grammar school entrant to Pembroke College and Cambridge English, only returned to writing poetry late in his life, writing in his memoir of Hughes, that at Pembroke, ‘in those Leavis dominated years, so unsympathetic to the early work of young writers, I never found out he wrote verse’ (1999: 32).

So the poet freed his creative spirit and came to deepen his knowledge of the folktales he had first read in the encyclopaedia his mother had bought him. The study of the role of myth in culture, and of the healing role of the shaman, bard, singer of songs, teller of tales in ‘primitive’ societies, came to inform his own work in crucial ways that are transparent from Wodwo to his work as Poet Laureate. He began to publish in Cambridge literary journals, including Granta, often using the pseudonym ‘Daniel Hearing’, and he gained a reputation as a serious poet that attracted the interest of other aspiring poets such as Peter Redgrove, who sought him out. Ironically, when he graduated he could not leave Cambridge behind him and returned at the weekends from the odd jobs he found in London to stay with friends who gravitated to a rented hut (until recently used for chickens) in the garden of St Botolph’s rectory.

Hughes had a series of jobs after leaving university that were intended to sustain his real vocation to write poetry. His job in London Zoo was actually washing dishes rather than feeding the animals. He read novels for the J. Arthur Rank film company, summarising them for potential directors, but found that it affected his own work. Back in the hut one weekend his friends decided to start a literary magazine to be called the St Botolph’s Review and a party was arranged to launch the first issue. It was hawked around the two female colleges on the day of the party and a copy was bought by an American Fulbright scholar at Newnham College called Sylvia Plath.

The Plath years (1956–63)

Sylvia Plath was born on 27 October 1932 into a spacious detached house in a leafy Boston street close to the Harvard Arboretum in a suburb called Jamaica Plain. Her father, Otto, had a Harvard University doctorate in Entomology and the year after she was born published his only book, Bumblebees and Their Ways. He had emigrated to America from Germany at the age of sixteen and her mother, Aurelia, was twenty-one years younger than him and was a second generation Austrian. The only thing Plath’s childhood had in common with Hughes’s was that she was also taken to Sunday School at the local non-conformist church. When Plath was eight years old her father died suddenly and she felt abandoned, saying to her mother, ‘I’ll never speak to God again.’ As the elder of two children now brought up by her mother alone, she took on an ambition to be successful, first at school and then in sending out her stories for publication while still a schoolgirl. After an outstanding career at Smith College, Plath spent the early summer working in New York at the invitation of Madamoiselle magazine and returned to find that she had not been accepted on an end-of-summer short-story writing class at Harvard. Her depression led to her attempted suicide at the age of twenty-two. When she gained a Fulbright scholarship to study in England at Cambridge University, her hard work and undoubted flair had given her the academic success she desired, if only a fragile sense of self-confidence. At Cambridge she published poetry in a student magazine that was ridiculed by a friend of Hughes in another magazine. At the party to launch the St Botolph’s Review, Hughes approached her and they discussed his friend’s review of her poem until suddenly Hughes kissed her. He snatched her hairband and earrings to keep and in return she bit him so hard on the cheek that she drew blood.

Very quickly Hughes moved back to Cambridge from London to be close to Plath. They were married in London on 16 June 1956, secretly in order not to compromise Plath’s scholarship, as she thought it would. (In fact, she had drawn the wrong conclusions from a requirement to notify the Fulbright authorities of her intention to marry.) Her mother was present at the wedding, but Hughes maintained the secrecy for a while with his own family. After a honeymoon in the quiet little fishing village of Benidorm in Spain (the little house they rented still sits among the tower blocks, opposite a pet shop), they found that it was perfectly possible for them to set up home together in Cambridge on the ground floor of 55 Eltisley Avenue. From a gate at the end of the street they could walk on the path through Granchester Meadows, where Hughes called up owls and Sylvia recited Chaucer to the bemused cows. Plath began to send out Hughes’s poems for publication as well as her own and she submitted a collection of forty of his poems to an American competition for a first book. When he won, Harper Brothers published The Hawk in the Rain in 1957 to startlingly good reviews. Hughes later admitted that his exposure to American poetry had been a key to his recovery of his voice after his ‘six years of bewilderment’ between writing the poem ‘Song’ and ‘The Thought-Fox’. Indeed, t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: Life and contexts
• 2: Works
• 3: Criticism
• 4: Chronology
• Further reading
• Bibliography