Letters of Ted Hughes (edited by Christopher Reid)
As promised here in my report of the Frankfurt Book Fair, I've now collected the passages of Letters of Ted Hughes which for one reason or another struck me most.
Starting with short quotes, and going to lengthy ones, this is how Sylvia Plath makes her entry into his letters to his family - specifically his older siblings, Olwyn and Gerald:
To Olwyn, 22. May 1956:
I have met a first-rate American poetess. She really is good. Certainly one of the best female poets I have ever read, and a dammed sight better than the run of best male.
To Gerald, 7. Sept. 1956:
As a result of her influence I have written continually and every day better since I met her. She is a very fine critic of my work, and abuses just those parts of it that I daren’t confess to myself unworthy.
The following excerpt from a letter to SP herself is a good example of how that mutual beta-reading, to use a fannish expression, worked. The poem in question was Sylvia's Spinster:
22. October 56:
First of all I think your poem’s good. I’m not sure about “green wilderness”. The shift of tone in it is masterly. I think it’s about the most accomplished poem you’ve ever written. I’m not sure either about “clear-cut” - “snowflake” perfect but not “clear-cut”. That doesn’t irk me so much as the other, - but the distinctness gets away in these last two lines of this verse - just slightly - and I think it’s in “clear-cut”, though it may be in “glittering”. There’s a terrific interplay of images and movement, - it “comes off” - vile phrase - perfectly. The subject - being short-story matter and descriptive - may seem to you slight, but I don’t think that’s in question. It’s just a good poem, and I bet you get it published first try. Your verse never goes “soft”.
(The phrase “green wilderness” became “rank wilderness of fern and flower” and “clear-cut as a snowflake” became “exact as a snowflake” in the published version of "Spinster".)
(It's not all literature talk; those early letters also contain passages as mushy as Hughes ever got: “The way I miss you is stupid. I have wandered about today like somebody with a half-completed brain-operation. (…) Goodnight darling darling darling darling".)
To Gerald, May 1957:
We work and walk about and repair each other’s writings. She is one of the best critics I ever met and understands my imagination perfectly, and I think I understand hers. It’s amazing how we strike sparks. And when we’re fed up of that we walk out into the country and sit for hours watching things. We sit by the river and watch water-voles and when they come near Sylvia goes almost unconscious with delight. She’s the most responsive alert creature in the world, about everything. I squeal and rabbits come out. The other night outside a wood I squealed to no effect for about quarter of an hour and was just thinking there was nothing left alive when an owl that must have flown at ground level suddenly rose in my face and tried to land on my head. Very good. It’s the first time I’ve ever got one so near.
If one has read either Janet Malcolm's "The Silent Woman" or Anne Stevenson's biography of Sylvia Plath, which heavily influenced by Olwyn Hughes, one knows the first actual meeting of Sylvia with the Hughes family, specifically Olwyn, must have been a disaster. This is Hughes trying to smooth the waves:
20. Juni 1957, to Olwyn:
The days at home were ill-starred. Don’t criticize Sylvia about the way she got up and came after me. After her exams etc I suppose she felt nervy - she did, that was obvious. But the Beacon is too small for five or six people. And everyone was walking in and out & up and down continually. She admires you more than any Englishwoman she’s ever met. Her immediate ‘face’ when she meets someone is too open & too nice - ‘smarmy’ you said - but that’s the American stereotype she clutches at when she is in fact panic-stricken. Or perhaps - and I think this is more like it - her poise and brain just vanish in a kind of vacuous receptivity - only this American stereotype manner then keeps her going at all. She says stupid things then that mortify her afterwards. Her second thought - her retrospect, is penetrating, sceptical, and subtle. But she can never bring that second-thinking mind to the surface with a person until she’s known them some time. She’s hard to bring out. You saw how much better she was the last day. Don’t judge her on her awkward behaviour. I’m sure you see what she’s really like. She’s no angel, but there is a balance to her worst side. She has a miserable past which I’ll tell you about gradually. She’s had enough experience to respect your life and your experience, and she judges harshly enough, ruthlessly enough, of people, to see that you’re extraordinary, and prize you.
Soon enough, TH found himself in the reverse position, meeting Sylvia's friends and family in the US and experiencing America for the first time. This resulted in something of a clash of cultures:
June 1957, to Gerald:
At present I’m still meeting all the friends & relations, which is interesting if a bit wearing. The houses are splendid here - each in its little grounds. The food, the general opulence, is frightening. (..) Last night I saw fireflies - twinkling in and out like little aircrafts on fire. There are skunks - though I haven’t seen them. I’m going to get some fishing tackle and keep my self buried as deep in what these 85ft long Cadillacs cannot touch, as I can. I never saw so many cars & so huge. The illustrations of the highways of the future - vast butterfly crossings with hundreds of cars like wingless airliners streaming in every direction through wooded countryside - that’s what its like just round here. But the real American phenomena is the kindness of these folk.
To Olwyn, 22. August 1957:
What a place America is. Everything is in cellophane. Everything is 10,000 miles from where it was plucked or made. The bread is in cellophane that is covered with such slogans as de-crapularised, re-energised, multi-cramulated, bleached, double-bleached, rebrowned, unsanforised, guaranteed no blaspheming. There is no such thing as bread. You cannot buy bread. And fifty processes that side of the wrapping these loaves saw the last molecule of their original wheat.
To Gerald, 7 Sept. 1958:
I meant to get some fishing over here, but I was a bit deflected by the fact that there is an air over all American sports, I don’t know how to define it. As if all those duck-shooters who were going out daily to make washing machines, you remember, were actually driving past the factory for a fe hours and going fishing because fishing was a sport for the man of the house, and only tough woodsy guys got round to it and so on. In America a calendar picture, say, of a fishing episode, is of some bronzed pipe-smoking lawyer-cum-doctor-cum-truck-driver-cum-your-honest-neightbour plated and belted and buckled from head to foot in all those frontierish looking accessories, gaffs, nets, bowie-knives and the rest, healing over in a tarzan-tearing-the-arms-off-the-ape-stance as he surfaces some proud king of the deeps(…). No, I’m spoiling it. But that is the tendency. That is the image of the fisherman in the American mind. Now the same image in the English mind is of some clown sitting in pouring rain fishing in a pool that has a great notice “Petrol Dump”. Something of that sort. But there’s a difference. One can go fishing in England without feeling that you’re taking part in some national Let’s All Be Good Americans campaign, and be sure that any fish you catch won’t have tattooed on its underside “I’m an American too so treat me well and cook me with FRENCH’S HOTCHA SAUCE.”
I'm interrupting linear chronology here, because it's worth to contrast this to what the decades older Hughes, ruefully looking back on this period and his younger self, writes to his (and Plath's) son Nicholas when the later starts a job in the US:
To Nicholas, 1986:
I came to America when I was 27, and lived there three years as if I were living inside a damart sock - I lived in there with your mother. We hardly made any friends, no close ones, and neither of us ever did anything the other didn’t want wholeheartedly to do. (…) I was quite happy to live like that, for some years. My three years in America disappeared like a Rip Van Winkle snooze. Why didn’t I explore America then? I knew it was there. Ten years later we could have done it, because by then we would have learned, maybe, that one person cannot live within another’s magic circle, as an enchanted prisoner. So take this new opportunity to look about and fill your lungs with that fantastic land, while it and you are still there.
Back to the young couple, who went back to England where their daughter Frieda was born. This is TH describing the birth:
22. April 1960, to Lucas Myers:
The midwife was a little Indian woman, very good & sensible, but adamant, obviously, for natural drugless childbirth. She was thinking of going off again at about 4 when Sylvia said she wanted to push - this desire comes as the beginning of the next stage. The midwife examined her inside & out & said O.K. she could push. The next minute she showed me the black hairs on top of the baby’s head - & showed it to Sylvia in a mirror, very merrily. Apparently the main pain stage is over when they begin to push & the pushing itself seems to be a relief. She rang up the doctor, who had no anaesthetics - being at home - either. However, he came along. The effect of the sleeping pills seemed to be wearing off, so Sylvia could cooperate - the business is like backing a lorry round a tight bend in a narrow alley full of parked cars. But they seemed to know just when to tell her to stop, to start, to lean over a little. The baby’s head appeared like a mushroom & the midwife guided it every second. Then all at once it slid clean out - looking exactly like a pink translucent balloon, baby-shape, smeared all over with a whitish cream like wet flour. The cord was around its neck, but not tightly. A little girl. In the same second that it became clear it gave a little sneeze, and muttered to itself & began moving its fingers. The afterbirth came five minutes later. The baby opened its eyes a few minutes after that. Sylvia was amazed. So was I.
At this point, he had two volumes of poetry published at Faber & Faber and hence got invited to meet the old legends of the day, which results in descriptions like this:
Summer 1960, to Olwyn:
At the Faber party I scarcely spoke to Auden, since he was overpowered by the blue-haired hostesses that seem to run those meetings. Sylvia talked quite a lot to McNeice & Spender, and I talked to Eliot. Auden has a strangely wrinkled face, like a Viking seaman - that sort of tan & wrinkles. Like a reptile - though not squamous, not unpleasant. Lively brown eyes. The impression was pleasant. Spender was drunk - silly-giddy like Mabel Brown at her 9 year old birthday party. McNeice was drunk & talked like a quick-fire car salesman. Hedli Anderson, the singer, was there - trophy from the Spanish Civil War - drunk, her green eyelids coming up seconds too slow and not quite far enough. Eliot has been ill. His wife was supporting him. She is so Yorkshire you would smile.
We get minutae of the family life, focusing, as Plath's letters of the same period do, on the good parts, and avoiding any descriptions of arguments:
22. April 1961 to Aurelia Plath:
At this minute Sylvia is sitting at the window reading the mail - several cheques & Frieda is standing up in her pen laughing at everybody. No, now she’s thrown her ball out & she’s bawling at everbody. Sylvia’s been writing at a great pace ever since she’s been out of hospital & has really broken through into something wonderful - one poem about “Tulips’ whish she’s going to send to this Poetry Festival - they commissioned her - is a tremendous piece.
May 1st 1962, to Aurelia Plath:
It’s amusing to see the way Frieda’s beginning to own ‘Baby Nick’ as she calls him. Very concerned when he cries, & if he’s out in his pram at the time she runs & rocks him, which stops him successfully. Baby Nick is completely different from her - though they’re alike in some features, shape of their eyes and eyelids. He has a most complicated smile - Frieda’s is just a 1,000 kilowatt radiance. He gives the impression of being sage. Whereas Frieda’s a bit of a tempest.
And then, of course, in July 1962, the marriage exploded with the combination of TH's affair with Assia Wevill, SP's finding out of same, and everything pent up until this point. His description of this period, written two months before the suicide and hence one of the few statements about the whole thing without the benefit of hindsight, reads like this:
December 1962 to Gerald:
All this business has been terrible - especially for Sylvia, but it was inevitable, and now the storm-centre of it recedes in to the distance, I can only be relieved that I’ve done it. The one factor that nobody but quite close friends can comprehend, is Sylvia’s particular death-ray quality. In many of the most important ways, she’s the most gifted and capable & admirable woman I’ve ever met - but, finally, impossible for me to live married to. Now we’re separated, we’re better friends than we’ve been in the last two years. The main grief for me is that a life that had all the circumstances for perfection, should have been so intolerable, and that little Frieda loses a father & I lose little Frieda. (..) Now we’re trying to get a biggish flat in London where Sylvia can live with the two children - only in London can she get a girl to live in & look after the kids, & she needs that if she is to write & work. When they’re in London I can visit them regularly. They’ll spend their summers in Devon. That’s the plan. Meanwhile, I’m feeling a lot better except for dreaming about Frieda about every night. (…) Sylvia’s stories of all the women in London are exaggerations, of course, though it was cruelly unfortunate that the one woman Sylvia envied for her appearance should happen to get tangled up in my departure. That hurt her more than any other thing. But it’s done.
The following three excerpts are his immediate reactions to the suicide in February 1963 and the first letter to Plath's mother Aurelia about the subject in March:
Dear Olwyn,
On Monday morning, at about 6.a.m. Sylvia gassed herself. The funeral’s in Heptonstall next Monday. She asked me for help, as she so often has. I was the only person who could have helped her, and the only person so jaded by her states and demands that I could not recognise when she really needed it. I’ll write more later. Love, Ted.
Dear Dan & Helga,
Sylvia killed herself on Monday morning. She seemed to be getting in good shape, she was writing again, she was making enough money, getting all sorts of commissions, good reviews for her novel - then a series of things, solicotor’s letters, etc., piled up, she flared up, the doctor put her on very heavy sedatives - and in the gap between one pill & the next she turned on the oven, and gassed herself. A nurse was to arrive at 9.a.m. - couldn’t get in, & it was 11. a. m. before they finally got to Sylvia. She was still warm. The funeral’s in Yorkshire on Monday. I was the one who could have helped her, and the only one that couldn’t see that she really needed it this time. No doubt where the blame lies. I shall look after Frieda & Nick here. Ted.
15. March 1963, to Aurelia Plath:
I’ve seen the letters Sylvia wrote to my parents, and I imagine she wrote similar ones to you, or worse. The particular conditions of our marriage, the marriage of two people so penly under the control of deep psychic abnormalities as both of us were, meant that we finally reduced each other to a state where our actions and normal states of mind were like madness. My attempt to correct that marriage is madness from start to finish. The way she reacted to my actions also has all the appearance of a kind of madness - her insistence on a divorce, the one thing in this world she did not want (…). Only in the last month suddenly we became friends, closer than we’ve been for two years or so. Everything seemed to be prospering for her, and we began to have happy times together again. Then suddenly her book about her first breakdown comes out, fifty other hellish details go against her, she became over-agitated, begged me to leave the country because she couldn’t bear living in the same city, my presence was weakening her independence, and so on, then very heavy sedatives, then this. If I hadn’t been so blindly involved in the struggle with her, how easily I could have seen through all this! (…) We were utterly blind, we were both desperate, stupid and proud - and the pride made us oblique. I know Sylvia was so made that she had to mete out terrible punishment to the people she most loved, but everybody is a little bit like that, and it needed only intelligence on my part to deal with it. (…) I don’t want ever to be forgiven, I don’t mean that I shall become a publish shrine of mourning and remorse, I would sooner become the opposite. But if there is an eternity, I am damned in it. Sylvia was one of the greatest truest spirits alive, and in her last months she became a great poet, and no other woman poet except Emily Dickinson can begin to be compared with her, and certainly no one living. So now I shall look after Frieda and Nick and you are not to worry about them. I will write as often as I can about them. (…) I didn’t know how to start this letter and now I don’t know how I can end it.
The most significant thing SP left behind were of course the Ariel poems and the poems she wrote up till the end of her life which presumably would have ended up in a third volume. TH's publication of them later was to become controversial as he rearranged the order, and his published statements about them are either defensive or carefully neutral-editorial, so the private statements about the Ariel poems, which are quite passionate, are all the more valuable.
To Donald Hall, late 1963:
I hope you got a few more poems of Sylvia’s, before the proofs went too far. Her MS is still with me. I’m negotiating with publishers. I’m glad you like the poems. I don’t agree with your remarks about them in the review. It’s a pity remarks in print look so absolute. Other people’s weaker poems look like anybody’s, or somebody else’s, but her least successful efforts were unique - like a completely original substance, even the very artificial ones. When you criticise her for using the impact of her sufferings in place of the impact of art, it seems to me you misread them. What you’re saying really, is that at last she managed to get through - she managed actually to say something of her own, in verse. What a feat! For a change, and at last, somebody’s written in blood. Whatever you say about them, you know they’re what every poet wishes he or she could do.
(…) When poems hit so hard, surely you ought to find reasons for their impact, not argue yourself out of your bruises. If I cavil a bit, it’s because I hate to see cavilling, when something like those poems has occurred. And you seemed to cavil a bit, in that review.
To Aurelia Plath, 13. July 1966 (after Ariel was published in the US and sealed the status of SP as an icon; he's referencing a Time Magazine article):
And all the insane rubbish talked about the ‘fatal’ nature of her gift, that she could not come back from these poems, etc., - (…) The truth is, I’m convinced, that the poems, which were nearly all completed by the end of November 63 (ending with the bee-poems, that was to be “Ariel” - the last word was to be “Spring”.) had cured her. What really set things going, on top of everything else, and in spite of the fact we were beginning to get on again, was her novel being published on Jan 19th - then the reviews. That novel was the accursed book, that required the tranquilizeres. So please don’t get fouled in reacting to the generalised malice & pseudo-psychologising of those reviewers.
Of TH's own projects in the 60s, one of the most challenging was a version of Seneca's "Oedipus" which he did for Peter Brooks, with John Gielgud as Oedipus and Irene Worth as Iocasta:
15 March 1968 to Gerald:
The bloke directing this play ‘Oedipus’ is one of the best most imaginative directors in the world, and we get on very well together. (…) It’s bad insofar as the original Roman play is fearfully melodramatic & the main actor, Sir John Gielgud, wonderful man though he is, is incapable of acting like a demon or speaking like a Stone-age witchdoctor - which is necessary, & which the younger actors can manage. He speaks in the usual high tragedy English convention. (…) I have my poetical strap iron, but this business needs bronze. So I have to melt down my iron, & recast it to do the work of bronze. But it will never be bronze.
In retrospect about this play to Nick Gammage in 1993:
Yes I wrote most of Oedipus during rehearsal time - I wrote the text as it now stands. My feeling was as I got to know the actors (and I watched them all the time), that I drew everything out of them, out of the possibilities their voices and temperaments suggested. I drew it particularly out of Irene. Early on I developed the feeling that the play is really about Jocasta. That may have been because Oedipus as Sir John described himself had to be not exactly passive but Hamlet-like in the suffering, sensitive, soul-searching vein. Olivier's Oedipus would obviously (as again Sir John pointed out) have been far more aggressively monopolist - of the feeling in the play. Irene, as it happened, did have a kind of aggressive, tigerish, elemental approach. She gripped my imagination. (...) Fairly early on in the revisions I was stuck at the crucial moment on the crucial phrase: the point at which Iocasta tries to grasp what has happened (before she kills herself - which she did by squatting on a vertical spike and forcing herself down on it). I wanted something very brief. Suddenly, Irene supplied it: "Nothing in me moves." That gave me the tuning for the key in which I then tried to recast the entire play - nudging and inching and trimming each moment to that wavelength, as far as I could. While I was trimming, I had a hankering - which had to be surpressed, to be writing the opposite kind of play, the old-fashioned kind in which everybody could be eloquent, speeches could lengthen a bit, the actors could really have their say. The longish speech for Jocasta is where I tried it. Also, I felt her part, as I was writing it, needed to be more openly declared in some way: her case needed to be stated more fully. That speech is I think the only passage which isn't based directly on the Seneca. It was the germinal point at which I began to make an adaption instead of a translation with a difference.
Also, I wanted to give Irene a chance to let rip.
There are constant descriptions of both of his children, and quite a lot of letters to either, so here are examples:
22. November 1977 to Gerald:
Frieda’s applying for Art School - she has some talent, enough to get in, real talent for design, unpredictable talent for a primitive style of painting. Her writing - of poems - seems to me phenomenal - I keep quiet about it even to myself - I can’t quite believe it. Otherwise, she’s a rather gorgeous dead-end kid. She’s very canny, at bottom, and very good - just tempestuous-wilful. Her mother plus Olwyn. 18 next April. Nick is becoming a pretty good scholar - took his O level maths a year early and got an A. Very high marks in everything. He’s still a fanatic cyclist - moreso than ever. And his mania for pike-fishing has its reward. We went to Ireland, & this pal of mine over there - angling fanatic - went with us onto some beautiful lakes in Clare.
To Nicholas, 1986
That was a most curious and interesting remark you made about feeling, occasionally, very childish, in certain situations. Nicholas, don’t you know about people this first and most crucial fact: every single one is, and is painfully every moment aware of it, still a child. To get beyond the age of about eight is not permitted to this primate (…) When I came to Lake Victoria, it was quite obvious to me that in some of the most important ways you are much more mature than I am. And your self-reliance, your independence, your general boldness in exposing yourself fto new and to most people very alarming situations, and your phenomenal ability to carry through your plans to the last practical detail (I know it probably doesn’t feel like that to you, but that’s how it looks to the rest of us, who simply look on in envy), is the sort of real maturity that not one in a thousand ever come near. As you know. But in many other ways of course you are still childish - how could you not be, you alone among mankind?
To Frieda, 10 September 1993, who just had her first one woman painting exhibitiono:
You will now be sitting feasting, after your show. I’ve been thinking of you on and off all evening. Seeing all your pieces together was really something. You have no idea how joyful I felt. I had absolute confidence that you are getting hold of the real thing. The best of them could not be more beautiful, or more strong. What I like is the terrific full-face blaze of feeling coming out of the flower-painting - as if you were pushing yourself into a furnace of your real feeling. Frieda, that is so are. And they are so beautifully grasped - completely and strongly grasped. So complete in themselves.
They might be too much for some people, you know. Ignore those people.
The ancient trees & the egg rocks are images of everything to come. The terrific strength & richness of the ancient trees are what will hatch the rocks. The whole show is like a nest of a terrific bird. (…) Don’t be depressed if none sold. Your best paintings are unforgettable and absolutely your own. People will come back to them - and gradually pluck up the courage to buy them.
It was very rarely necessary, as by the 80s SP had become one of the iconic poets of the 20th century, but he still had a defensive mechanism on the few occasions someone criticized her as a poet:
23 May 1981, to Keith Sagar:
If only I can get her notebooks etc published, you’d probably get a better idea of her. The letters merely mislead. And the poems have been overlaid with other people’s fantasy visions of her. Kenner seems to me simply wrong about The Colossus. The metrica of those poems expresses limbo - immobility of fear - inability to come to grips with the real self. If a statis of that sort, which she experienced as psychic paralysis, is a control of “dangerous forces” - well, he can be said to be right. But he doesn’t mean that.
Ariel - March-Nov. 62 - is the diary of her coming to grips with & inheriting this real self. It isn’t the record of a ‘breakdown’. Growing up brought her to it - having children etc., & confronting the events of 1962 (and mastering them completely). (After all, in 1960, she was only 18 months out of college - nearly all the Colossus poems were written while she was still a student or teacher & the rest within the first year after.)
You know Goethe’s remark about the labour & difficulty of actually laying claim to what we have inherited - and you know how few people attempt it, how few even know they need tom ake the effort, how some go through Primal Screams to find it etc. Well, Ariel is her record of her experience of it - of coming into possession of the self she’d been afraid of. You suggest you find much of it a language of disintegration. I see it as a footwork & dexterity - the honesty (nakedness) to meet the matter on its own terms, & the brave will to master it - which she did. Those poems enact a a weird fusion & identity with the material & simultaneously take control of it, & possession of it.
It’s a process of integration, start to finish. By Dec. 62 she was quite a changed person - greatly matured, and a big personality. In Dec/Jan she stopped writing (no poems really from early December to late January) & set up a new home, a new circle of friends, & a new life. (…) So you see I read those Ariel poems as a climb - not a fall. A climb to a precarious foothold, as it turned out. But she was knocked off again by pure unlucky combination of accidents. (…) I tell you all of this to quality your attitude to the notion of her as a young woman hurtling to disintegration shedding rags of poetry - leaping into Aetna & bursting into flames as she fell. Ariel poems are about successful integration - violently inheriting of a violent temperament. The first sign of disintegration - in a writer - is that the writing loses the unique stamp of his/her character, & loses its inner light.
Mustn’t underestimate her humour either.
The real question is - what would be the interpretation of those poems if she hadn’t died, if she’d gone on to write something marvellous in a different way. As those very last poems suggest she was about to do. They could only have been read as the scenes of a victorious battle for so called ‘self-integration’. The whole accent of subsequent commentary would have been different. The interpretation generally given is a pure fantasy - induced by her death, which was an accident (it could have happened at any moment between 51 & 63, if she’d got physically low enough - just as it could happen to thousands who never show a symptom), and not at all essential to her poems - except as one latent factor in her mythology.
One big issue for Hughes the naturalist in the 80s was the environment and pollution. "Margaret" here is Margaret Thatcher, of course:
To Michael Hamburger, 12 September 1987:
Margaret is no ordinary woman. If she were, she might have some conscience about cleaning up - some sense of responsibility for it. In the various Children’s Poetry Competitions, which I help to judge, the new preoccupation is pollution - poisoning of earth & people. Even with six & seven year olds. Very aware, &/ very frightened - depressed. Problem, maybe, is that Margaret can’t be frightened. She’s like the general who says “we can afford 25% casualties”. Her job, as an analytical chemist, was researching the maximum number of bubbles that can be pumped into ice-cream, before it disillusions the customers. If only it were her priority, she’s one person who could really clean the place up. But I don’t think she grasps the reality, & the real horror of what is happening. As a trained chemist, she naturally listens to the hired experts, the professional consultants, who lie according to the fee & say what she wants to hear.
The following passage was in response to basically the question whether the huge significance of WWI in Hughes' poetry was due to his fondness for Wilfrid Owen's poems:
15 March 1991, to Nick Gammage:
It’s dawned on me gradually, over the last few years, that for most readers of verse (people under 45?) the First World War is remote history. They know about the trenches as they know about the squares of Waterloo or the archers at Agincourt - as curious fact about other people’s excitement and woes. Rather as they know about that wipeout on the Kuwait Basra road last month. They know about it, but it doesn’t mean much to them.
They are (I suppose you probably are) offspring of men who fought in the second World War. And they know that the second World War also had its sensational aspects - London Blitz, firestorm bombing of Germany, Dunkirk, atom bomb. But because that war escaped (as far as the English were concerned) the feared repeat performance of the First World War, and because it kept light and mobile, it had almost no traumatic effect - for the English. No psychological effect in that it did not ever feel like a disaster. I know, because I was expecting to be in it, had a brother in it, and was very conscious when it ended - have known since a great many who were in it. In fact, rather than shock, there was a general feeling of relief - that it had not been like the first World War. For us. (…) Now after the first World War the whole country was traumatised. (…) When I came to consciousness I never heard of anything but the First World War (and it had been over, say, fifteen years). Those towns in West Yorks were still stunned. So I passed my early years in a kind of Mental Hospital of the survivors, widowers etc. And it wasn’t simply the horrible mud struggle in a terrain more or less composed of liquefied corpses, the stories of how this or that village lost of all of its men in one day, one attack. It was something much more inclusive - the shock suffered by a species that had thought the world was quite different, and that war was quite different. (…) Industrialised slaughter, mass-production of corpses. Those who met the shock in person never got over it, they never were able to assimilate it. My father’s whole life was posthumous in some way, after that. In the fifties, when I began publishing my first poems, to me the First World War was my most intimate experience, my mythology.(…) To get back to your question: in that context (my early background, the pervasive presence of that war), Owen seemed to be expressing the drama of the shared mythology. (Maybe you’ve noticed he still obsesses writers such as Jon Silkin - born 1930, John Stallworthy, born about the same time). He gave form to our childhood nightmares and preoccupations. The second part of your question (“Did your reading of him swing your thinking on the effect of the Great War etc.”) would be unimaginable to those two. It illustrates what I’ve been saying - you’re too young to realise that our problem was not to get our minds to consider the Great War, but to get our minds off it.
In my own case, though I suppose I swallowed Owen as deeply as anybody well could, and have never lost my taste for his best poems (and would defend his weaker poems for what I think are good reasons), I did have a reservation about him: first, he was an officer. Thoughout the war my father as an infantryman and obviously an effective soldier - being very strong physically, very combative and rather bright - refused promotion. And told strange stories about some officers (when he told any). Second, Owen did not get into the war until late 1916 - Octoberish, when the Somme had been going on for months or so (24,000 killed on the first day). I know he made up for it, and that men grew old in two days out there, but as I say somehow I held it against him. I’ve never quite been able to reconcile my liking for his poems with the fact that he was still pursuing the cultivated life in France quite late in 1915. It’s a foolish reservation, and I disown it - but I know it’s there.
There are far fewer references to the other woman in his life who committed suicide, Assia Wevill; the most striking of those to me was in a letter to his German translators who had asked about a reference in his poem "Shibboleth", which leads to the following description of Assia:
To Jutta and Wolfgang Kaussen 1997:
She had no defences, being a born refugee: a Jew born in Hitler’s Germany (Father a Russian Jew); later, a German in Israel (Mother as I said Prussian); later, in Western Canada, a continental freak (married to an English ex-Aermy officer); later, cosmopolitan beauty and wife of a wandering Canadian student in the far East, eventually settling in England - but never forgetting for a moment that she was on the run and belonged nowhere. But a big personality. Passionate about Tolstoy.
And lastly, a letter to his son about the publication of "Birthday Letters", a decision he made after he was diagnosed with cancer and knew he had only a limited time to live (he died on Octobert 28th 1998):
To Nicholas, 1998:
I’ve been thinking about your kiln. Do you remember, when you were at Bedales, you read that book about the Primal Scream. However cock-eyed that whole book and therapy, riding its wave of fashion, may have been - it stirred up one giant Truth. At the time, when you were telling me about what you thought of it, you described a dream - that I immediately connected to what the book had wakened up in you. You were walking up a garden path towards a building with a glass door. A frog was jumping up the path behind you. You entered the building and closed the glass door, shutting out the frog. The frog then jumped against the glass of the door. Do you remember it? (…) My “frog” has been salmon, mainly. But sometimes other creatures. (…) I dug out, with your help, the real rivers of big salmon. But I should have done it internally, through my work on myself, rather than simply gathered happy outer experiences. I should have done both, perhaps, simultaneously. What I was needing to do, all those years, was deal with what had happened to your mother and me. That was the big unmanageable event in my life, that had somehow to be managed - internally - by me. Somehow through my writing - because that’s the method I’ve developed to deal with myself. (…) The best I could do, through all those following years, to deal with that giant psychological log-jam of your mother and me, was write, as if to her, quite privately, simple little attempts to communicate with her about our time together. They were what accumulated, over the years, to this Birthday Letters. Most of them I never dreamed of publishing - they expose to o much, I always thought. But they were inadequate to break up the log-jam. That thickening thickening glass window between me and that real self of mine which was trapped in the unmanageable experience of what had happened with her and me. (…) So all I wrote, through all those years, contained nothing of what I really needed to say. And nothing in my way of life contained the real me - I was living on the wrong side of the glass door. All I was aware of, all that time, was the desperate need to break the glass door, and blow up the log jam, but I didn’t dare because it was - the business of your mother and me. (…) Until I got ill. It was then I realised that my only change to get past 1963 was to blow up that log-jam, and assemble whatever I had written about your mother and me, and simply make it public - like a confession - that I decided to publish those Birthday Letters as I’ve called htem. I thought, let the feminists do what they like, let people think what they like about me, let critics demolish, and tear to bits these simple, unguarded, quit private for the most part, unsophisticated bits of writing, let the heavens fall, let Carol go bananas, let Frieda and Nick bolt for their bomb-shelter - I can’t care any more, I can’t lock myself in behind this glass door one more week.
So I did it, and now I’m getting the surprise of my life. What I’ve been hiding all my life, from myself and everybody else, is not terrible at all. Though you didn’t want to read it.
And the effect on me, Nicky, the sense of gigantic, upheaval transformation in my mind, is quite bewildering. It’s as though I have completely new different brains. I can think thoughts I could never think. I have a freedom of imagination I’ve not felt since 1962. (…) But I tell you all this, with a hope that it will let you understand a lot of things. Also, that it will make you think about the frog and the kiln. Don’t laugh it off. In 1963 you were hit even harder than me. But you will have to deal with it, just as I have had to. And as Frieda has had to. You were given the means - if you use them, everything about you will be changed, by what follows the frog through the door. Slowly. Like a leakage. Bit by bit.
ETA: from kalypso_v: until Monday morning, you can listen to excerpts from the letters read by Richard Armitage here, which were broadcast by the BBC last Monday.
Starting with short quotes, and going to lengthy ones, this is how Sylvia Plath makes her entry into his letters to his family - specifically his older siblings, Olwyn and Gerald:
To Olwyn, 22. May 1956:
I have met a first-rate American poetess. She really is good. Certainly one of the best female poets I have ever read, and a dammed sight better than the run of best male.
To Gerald, 7. Sept. 1956:
As a result of her influence I have written continually and every day better since I met her. She is a very fine critic of my work, and abuses just those parts of it that I daren’t confess to myself unworthy.
The following excerpt from a letter to SP herself is a good example of how that mutual beta-reading, to use a fannish expression, worked. The poem in question was Sylvia's Spinster:
22. October 56:
First of all I think your poem’s good. I’m not sure about “green wilderness”. The shift of tone in it is masterly. I think it’s about the most accomplished poem you’ve ever written. I’m not sure either about “clear-cut” - “snowflake” perfect but not “clear-cut”. That doesn’t irk me so much as the other, - but the distinctness gets away in these last two lines of this verse - just slightly - and I think it’s in “clear-cut”, though it may be in “glittering”. There’s a terrific interplay of images and movement, - it “comes off” - vile phrase - perfectly. The subject - being short-story matter and descriptive - may seem to you slight, but I don’t think that’s in question. It’s just a good poem, and I bet you get it published first try. Your verse never goes “soft”.
(The phrase “green wilderness” became “rank wilderness of fern and flower” and “clear-cut as a snowflake” became “exact as a snowflake” in the published version of "Spinster".)
(It's not all literature talk; those early letters also contain passages as mushy as Hughes ever got: “The way I miss you is stupid. I have wandered about today like somebody with a half-completed brain-operation. (…) Goodnight darling darling darling darling".)
To Gerald, May 1957:
We work and walk about and repair each other’s writings. She is one of the best critics I ever met and understands my imagination perfectly, and I think I understand hers. It’s amazing how we strike sparks. And when we’re fed up of that we walk out into the country and sit for hours watching things. We sit by the river and watch water-voles and when they come near Sylvia goes almost unconscious with delight. She’s the most responsive alert creature in the world, about everything. I squeal and rabbits come out. The other night outside a wood I squealed to no effect for about quarter of an hour and was just thinking there was nothing left alive when an owl that must have flown at ground level suddenly rose in my face and tried to land on my head. Very good. It’s the first time I’ve ever got one so near.
If one has read either Janet Malcolm's "The Silent Woman" or Anne Stevenson's biography of Sylvia Plath, which heavily influenced by Olwyn Hughes, one knows the first actual meeting of Sylvia with the Hughes family, specifically Olwyn, must have been a disaster. This is Hughes trying to smooth the waves:
20. Juni 1957, to Olwyn:
The days at home were ill-starred. Don’t criticize Sylvia about the way she got up and came after me. After her exams etc I suppose she felt nervy - she did, that was obvious. But the Beacon is too small for five or six people. And everyone was walking in and out & up and down continually. She admires you more than any Englishwoman she’s ever met. Her immediate ‘face’ when she meets someone is too open & too nice - ‘smarmy’ you said - but that’s the American stereotype she clutches at when she is in fact panic-stricken. Or perhaps - and I think this is more like it - her poise and brain just vanish in a kind of vacuous receptivity - only this American stereotype manner then keeps her going at all. She says stupid things then that mortify her afterwards. Her second thought - her retrospect, is penetrating, sceptical, and subtle. But she can never bring that second-thinking mind to the surface with a person until she’s known them some time. She’s hard to bring out. You saw how much better she was the last day. Don’t judge her on her awkward behaviour. I’m sure you see what she’s really like. She’s no angel, but there is a balance to her worst side. She has a miserable past which I’ll tell you about gradually. She’s had enough experience to respect your life and your experience, and she judges harshly enough, ruthlessly enough, of people, to see that you’re extraordinary, and prize you.
Soon enough, TH found himself in the reverse position, meeting Sylvia's friends and family in the US and experiencing America for the first time. This resulted in something of a clash of cultures:
June 1957, to Gerald:
At present I’m still meeting all the friends & relations, which is interesting if a bit wearing. The houses are splendid here - each in its little grounds. The food, the general opulence, is frightening. (..) Last night I saw fireflies - twinkling in and out like little aircrafts on fire. There are skunks - though I haven’t seen them. I’m going to get some fishing tackle and keep my self buried as deep in what these 85ft long Cadillacs cannot touch, as I can. I never saw so many cars & so huge. The illustrations of the highways of the future - vast butterfly crossings with hundreds of cars like wingless airliners streaming in every direction through wooded countryside - that’s what its like just round here. But the real American phenomena is the kindness of these folk.
To Olwyn, 22. August 1957:
What a place America is. Everything is in cellophane. Everything is 10,000 miles from where it was plucked or made. The bread is in cellophane that is covered with such slogans as de-crapularised, re-energised, multi-cramulated, bleached, double-bleached, rebrowned, unsanforised, guaranteed no blaspheming. There is no such thing as bread. You cannot buy bread. And fifty processes that side of the wrapping these loaves saw the last molecule of their original wheat.
To Gerald, 7 Sept. 1958:
I meant to get some fishing over here, but I was a bit deflected by the fact that there is an air over all American sports, I don’t know how to define it. As if all those duck-shooters who were going out daily to make washing machines, you remember, were actually driving past the factory for a fe hours and going fishing because fishing was a sport for the man of the house, and only tough woodsy guys got round to it and so on. In America a calendar picture, say, of a fishing episode, is of some bronzed pipe-smoking lawyer-cum-doctor-cum-truck-driver-cum-your-honest-neightbour plated and belted and buckled from head to foot in all those frontierish looking accessories, gaffs, nets, bowie-knives and the rest, healing over in a tarzan-tearing-the-arms-off-the-ape-stance as he surfaces some proud king of the deeps(…). No, I’m spoiling it. But that is the tendency. That is the image of the fisherman in the American mind. Now the same image in the English mind is of some clown sitting in pouring rain fishing in a pool that has a great notice “Petrol Dump”. Something of that sort. But there’s a difference. One can go fishing in England without feeling that you’re taking part in some national Let’s All Be Good Americans campaign, and be sure that any fish you catch won’t have tattooed on its underside “I’m an American too so treat me well and cook me with FRENCH’S HOTCHA SAUCE.”
I'm interrupting linear chronology here, because it's worth to contrast this to what the decades older Hughes, ruefully looking back on this period and his younger self, writes to his (and Plath's) son Nicholas when the later starts a job in the US:
To Nicholas, 1986:
I came to America when I was 27, and lived there three years as if I were living inside a damart sock - I lived in there with your mother. We hardly made any friends, no close ones, and neither of us ever did anything the other didn’t want wholeheartedly to do. (…) I was quite happy to live like that, for some years. My three years in America disappeared like a Rip Van Winkle snooze. Why didn’t I explore America then? I knew it was there. Ten years later we could have done it, because by then we would have learned, maybe, that one person cannot live within another’s magic circle, as an enchanted prisoner. So take this new opportunity to look about and fill your lungs with that fantastic land, while it and you are still there.
Back to the young couple, who went back to England where their daughter Frieda was born. This is TH describing the birth:
22. April 1960, to Lucas Myers:
The midwife was a little Indian woman, very good & sensible, but adamant, obviously, for natural drugless childbirth. She was thinking of going off again at about 4 when Sylvia said she wanted to push - this desire comes as the beginning of the next stage. The midwife examined her inside & out & said O.K. she could push. The next minute she showed me the black hairs on top of the baby’s head - & showed it to Sylvia in a mirror, very merrily. Apparently the main pain stage is over when they begin to push & the pushing itself seems to be a relief. She rang up the doctor, who had no anaesthetics - being at home - either. However, he came along. The effect of the sleeping pills seemed to be wearing off, so Sylvia could cooperate - the business is like backing a lorry round a tight bend in a narrow alley full of parked cars. But they seemed to know just when to tell her to stop, to start, to lean over a little. The baby’s head appeared like a mushroom & the midwife guided it every second. Then all at once it slid clean out - looking exactly like a pink translucent balloon, baby-shape, smeared all over with a whitish cream like wet flour. The cord was around its neck, but not tightly. A little girl. In the same second that it became clear it gave a little sneeze, and muttered to itself & began moving its fingers. The afterbirth came five minutes later. The baby opened its eyes a few minutes after that. Sylvia was amazed. So was I.
At this point, he had two volumes of poetry published at Faber & Faber and hence got invited to meet the old legends of the day, which results in descriptions like this:
Summer 1960, to Olwyn:
At the Faber party I scarcely spoke to Auden, since he was overpowered by the blue-haired hostesses that seem to run those meetings. Sylvia talked quite a lot to McNeice & Spender, and I talked to Eliot. Auden has a strangely wrinkled face, like a Viking seaman - that sort of tan & wrinkles. Like a reptile - though not squamous, not unpleasant. Lively brown eyes. The impression was pleasant. Spender was drunk - silly-giddy like Mabel Brown at her 9 year old birthday party. McNeice was drunk & talked like a quick-fire car salesman. Hedli Anderson, the singer, was there - trophy from the Spanish Civil War - drunk, her green eyelids coming up seconds too slow and not quite far enough. Eliot has been ill. His wife was supporting him. She is so Yorkshire you would smile.
We get minutae of the family life, focusing, as Plath's letters of the same period do, on the good parts, and avoiding any descriptions of arguments:
22. April 1961 to Aurelia Plath:
At this minute Sylvia is sitting at the window reading the mail - several cheques & Frieda is standing up in her pen laughing at everybody. No, now she’s thrown her ball out & she’s bawling at everbody. Sylvia’s been writing at a great pace ever since she’s been out of hospital & has really broken through into something wonderful - one poem about “Tulips’ whish she’s going to send to this Poetry Festival - they commissioned her - is a tremendous piece.
May 1st 1962, to Aurelia Plath:
It’s amusing to see the way Frieda’s beginning to own ‘Baby Nick’ as she calls him. Very concerned when he cries, & if he’s out in his pram at the time she runs & rocks him, which stops him successfully. Baby Nick is completely different from her - though they’re alike in some features, shape of their eyes and eyelids. He has a most complicated smile - Frieda’s is just a 1,000 kilowatt radiance. He gives the impression of being sage. Whereas Frieda’s a bit of a tempest.
And then, of course, in July 1962, the marriage exploded with the combination of TH's affair with Assia Wevill, SP's finding out of same, and everything pent up until this point. His description of this period, written two months before the suicide and hence one of the few statements about the whole thing without the benefit of hindsight, reads like this:
December 1962 to Gerald:
All this business has been terrible - especially for Sylvia, but it was inevitable, and now the storm-centre of it recedes in to the distance, I can only be relieved that I’ve done it. The one factor that nobody but quite close friends can comprehend, is Sylvia’s particular death-ray quality. In many of the most important ways, she’s the most gifted and capable & admirable woman I’ve ever met - but, finally, impossible for me to live married to. Now we’re separated, we’re better friends than we’ve been in the last two years. The main grief for me is that a life that had all the circumstances for perfection, should have been so intolerable, and that little Frieda loses a father & I lose little Frieda. (..) Now we’re trying to get a biggish flat in London where Sylvia can live with the two children - only in London can she get a girl to live in & look after the kids, & she needs that if she is to write & work. When they’re in London I can visit them regularly. They’ll spend their summers in Devon. That’s the plan. Meanwhile, I’m feeling a lot better except for dreaming about Frieda about every night. (…) Sylvia’s stories of all the women in London are exaggerations, of course, though it was cruelly unfortunate that the one woman Sylvia envied for her appearance should happen to get tangled up in my departure. That hurt her more than any other thing. But it’s done.
The following three excerpts are his immediate reactions to the suicide in February 1963 and the first letter to Plath's mother Aurelia about the subject in March:
Dear Olwyn,
On Monday morning, at about 6.a.m. Sylvia gassed herself. The funeral’s in Heptonstall next Monday. She asked me for help, as she so often has. I was the only person who could have helped her, and the only person so jaded by her states and demands that I could not recognise when she really needed it. I’ll write more later. Love, Ted.
Dear Dan & Helga,
Sylvia killed herself on Monday morning. She seemed to be getting in good shape, she was writing again, she was making enough money, getting all sorts of commissions, good reviews for her novel - then a series of things, solicotor’s letters, etc., piled up, she flared up, the doctor put her on very heavy sedatives - and in the gap between one pill & the next she turned on the oven, and gassed herself. A nurse was to arrive at 9.a.m. - couldn’t get in, & it was 11. a. m. before they finally got to Sylvia. She was still warm. The funeral’s in Yorkshire on Monday. I was the one who could have helped her, and the only one that couldn’t see that she really needed it this time. No doubt where the blame lies. I shall look after Frieda & Nick here. Ted.
15. March 1963, to Aurelia Plath:
I’ve seen the letters Sylvia wrote to my parents, and I imagine she wrote similar ones to you, or worse. The particular conditions of our marriage, the marriage of two people so penly under the control of deep psychic abnormalities as both of us were, meant that we finally reduced each other to a state where our actions and normal states of mind were like madness. My attempt to correct that marriage is madness from start to finish. The way she reacted to my actions also has all the appearance of a kind of madness - her insistence on a divorce, the one thing in this world she did not want (…). Only in the last month suddenly we became friends, closer than we’ve been for two years or so. Everything seemed to be prospering for her, and we began to have happy times together again. Then suddenly her book about her first breakdown comes out, fifty other hellish details go against her, she became over-agitated, begged me to leave the country because she couldn’t bear living in the same city, my presence was weakening her independence, and so on, then very heavy sedatives, then this. If I hadn’t been so blindly involved in the struggle with her, how easily I could have seen through all this! (…) We were utterly blind, we were both desperate, stupid and proud - and the pride made us oblique. I know Sylvia was so made that she had to mete out terrible punishment to the people she most loved, but everybody is a little bit like that, and it needed only intelligence on my part to deal with it. (…) I don’t want ever to be forgiven, I don’t mean that I shall become a publish shrine of mourning and remorse, I would sooner become the opposite. But if there is an eternity, I am damned in it. Sylvia was one of the greatest truest spirits alive, and in her last months she became a great poet, and no other woman poet except Emily Dickinson can begin to be compared with her, and certainly no one living. So now I shall look after Frieda and Nick and you are not to worry about them. I will write as often as I can about them. (…) I didn’t know how to start this letter and now I don’t know how I can end it.
The most significant thing SP left behind were of course the Ariel poems and the poems she wrote up till the end of her life which presumably would have ended up in a third volume. TH's publication of them later was to become controversial as he rearranged the order, and his published statements about them are either defensive or carefully neutral-editorial, so the private statements about the Ariel poems, which are quite passionate, are all the more valuable.
To Donald Hall, late 1963:
I hope you got a few more poems of Sylvia’s, before the proofs went too far. Her MS is still with me. I’m negotiating with publishers. I’m glad you like the poems. I don’t agree with your remarks about them in the review. It’s a pity remarks in print look so absolute. Other people’s weaker poems look like anybody’s, or somebody else’s, but her least successful efforts were unique - like a completely original substance, even the very artificial ones. When you criticise her for using the impact of her sufferings in place of the impact of art, it seems to me you misread them. What you’re saying really, is that at last she managed to get through - she managed actually to say something of her own, in verse. What a feat! For a change, and at last, somebody’s written in blood. Whatever you say about them, you know they’re what every poet wishes he or she could do.
(…) When poems hit so hard, surely you ought to find reasons for their impact, not argue yourself out of your bruises. If I cavil a bit, it’s because I hate to see cavilling, when something like those poems has occurred. And you seemed to cavil a bit, in that review.
To Aurelia Plath, 13. July 1966 (after Ariel was published in the US and sealed the status of SP as an icon; he's referencing a Time Magazine article):
And all the insane rubbish talked about the ‘fatal’ nature of her gift, that she could not come back from these poems, etc., - (…) The truth is, I’m convinced, that the poems, which were nearly all completed by the end of November 63 (ending with the bee-poems, that was to be “Ariel” - the last word was to be “Spring”.) had cured her. What really set things going, on top of everything else, and in spite of the fact we were beginning to get on again, was her novel being published on Jan 19th - then the reviews. That novel was the accursed book, that required the tranquilizeres. So please don’t get fouled in reacting to the generalised malice & pseudo-psychologising of those reviewers.
Of TH's own projects in the 60s, one of the most challenging was a version of Seneca's "Oedipus" which he did for Peter Brooks, with John Gielgud as Oedipus and Irene Worth as Iocasta:
15 March 1968 to Gerald:
The bloke directing this play ‘Oedipus’ is one of the best most imaginative directors in the world, and we get on very well together. (…) It’s bad insofar as the original Roman play is fearfully melodramatic & the main actor, Sir John Gielgud, wonderful man though he is, is incapable of acting like a demon or speaking like a Stone-age witchdoctor - which is necessary, & which the younger actors can manage. He speaks in the usual high tragedy English convention. (…) I have my poetical strap iron, but this business needs bronze. So I have to melt down my iron, & recast it to do the work of bronze. But it will never be bronze.
In retrospect about this play to Nick Gammage in 1993:
Yes I wrote most of Oedipus during rehearsal time - I wrote the text as it now stands. My feeling was as I got to know the actors (and I watched them all the time), that I drew everything out of them, out of the possibilities their voices and temperaments suggested. I drew it particularly out of Irene. Early on I developed the feeling that the play is really about Jocasta. That may have been because Oedipus as Sir John described himself had to be not exactly passive but Hamlet-like in the suffering, sensitive, soul-searching vein. Olivier's Oedipus would obviously (as again Sir John pointed out) have been far more aggressively monopolist - of the feeling in the play. Irene, as it happened, did have a kind of aggressive, tigerish, elemental approach. She gripped my imagination. (...) Fairly early on in the revisions I was stuck at the crucial moment on the crucial phrase: the point at which Iocasta tries to grasp what has happened (before she kills herself - which she did by squatting on a vertical spike and forcing herself down on it). I wanted something very brief. Suddenly, Irene supplied it: "Nothing in me moves." That gave me the tuning for the key in which I then tried to recast the entire play - nudging and inching and trimming each moment to that wavelength, as far as I could. While I was trimming, I had a hankering - which had to be surpressed, to be writing the opposite kind of play, the old-fashioned kind in which everybody could be eloquent, speeches could lengthen a bit, the actors could really have their say. The longish speech for Jocasta is where I tried it. Also, I felt her part, as I was writing it, needed to be more openly declared in some way: her case needed to be stated more fully. That speech is I think the only passage which isn't based directly on the Seneca. It was the germinal point at which I began to make an adaption instead of a translation with a difference.
Also, I wanted to give Irene a chance to let rip.
There are constant descriptions of both of his children, and quite a lot of letters to either, so here are examples:
22. November 1977 to Gerald:
Frieda’s applying for Art School - she has some talent, enough to get in, real talent for design, unpredictable talent for a primitive style of painting. Her writing - of poems - seems to me phenomenal - I keep quiet about it even to myself - I can’t quite believe it. Otherwise, she’s a rather gorgeous dead-end kid. She’s very canny, at bottom, and very good - just tempestuous-wilful. Her mother plus Olwyn. 18 next April. Nick is becoming a pretty good scholar - took his O level maths a year early and got an A. Very high marks in everything. He’s still a fanatic cyclist - moreso than ever. And his mania for pike-fishing has its reward. We went to Ireland, & this pal of mine over there - angling fanatic - went with us onto some beautiful lakes in Clare.
To Nicholas, 1986
That was a most curious and interesting remark you made about feeling, occasionally, very childish, in certain situations. Nicholas, don’t you know about people this first and most crucial fact: every single one is, and is painfully every moment aware of it, still a child. To get beyond the age of about eight is not permitted to this primate (…) When I came to Lake Victoria, it was quite obvious to me that in some of the most important ways you are much more mature than I am. And your self-reliance, your independence, your general boldness in exposing yourself fto new and to most people very alarming situations, and your phenomenal ability to carry through your plans to the last practical detail (I know it probably doesn’t feel like that to you, but that’s how it looks to the rest of us, who simply look on in envy), is the sort of real maturity that not one in a thousand ever come near. As you know. But in many other ways of course you are still childish - how could you not be, you alone among mankind?
To Frieda, 10 September 1993, who just had her first one woman painting exhibitiono:
You will now be sitting feasting, after your show. I’ve been thinking of you on and off all evening. Seeing all your pieces together was really something. You have no idea how joyful I felt. I had absolute confidence that you are getting hold of the real thing. The best of them could not be more beautiful, or more strong. What I like is the terrific full-face blaze of feeling coming out of the flower-painting - as if you were pushing yourself into a furnace of your real feeling. Frieda, that is so are. And they are so beautifully grasped - completely and strongly grasped. So complete in themselves.
They might be too much for some people, you know. Ignore those people.
The ancient trees & the egg rocks are images of everything to come. The terrific strength & richness of the ancient trees are what will hatch the rocks. The whole show is like a nest of a terrific bird. (…) Don’t be depressed if none sold. Your best paintings are unforgettable and absolutely your own. People will come back to them - and gradually pluck up the courage to buy them.
It was very rarely necessary, as by the 80s SP had become one of the iconic poets of the 20th century, but he still had a defensive mechanism on the few occasions someone criticized her as a poet:
23 May 1981, to Keith Sagar:
If only I can get her notebooks etc published, you’d probably get a better idea of her. The letters merely mislead. And the poems have been overlaid with other people’s fantasy visions of her. Kenner seems to me simply wrong about The Colossus. The metrica of those poems expresses limbo - immobility of fear - inability to come to grips with the real self. If a statis of that sort, which she experienced as psychic paralysis, is a control of “dangerous forces” - well, he can be said to be right. But he doesn’t mean that.
Ariel - March-Nov. 62 - is the diary of her coming to grips with & inheriting this real self. It isn’t the record of a ‘breakdown’. Growing up brought her to it - having children etc., & confronting the events of 1962 (and mastering them completely). (After all, in 1960, she was only 18 months out of college - nearly all the Colossus poems were written while she was still a student or teacher & the rest within the first year after.)
You know Goethe’s remark about the labour & difficulty of actually laying claim to what we have inherited - and you know how few people attempt it, how few even know they need tom ake the effort, how some go through Primal Screams to find it etc. Well, Ariel is her record of her experience of it - of coming into possession of the self she’d been afraid of. You suggest you find much of it a language of disintegration. I see it as a footwork & dexterity - the honesty (nakedness) to meet the matter on its own terms, & the brave will to master it - which she did. Those poems enact a a weird fusion & identity with the material & simultaneously take control of it, & possession of it.
It’s a process of integration, start to finish. By Dec. 62 she was quite a changed person - greatly matured, and a big personality. In Dec/Jan she stopped writing (no poems really from early December to late January) & set up a new home, a new circle of friends, & a new life. (…) So you see I read those Ariel poems as a climb - not a fall. A climb to a precarious foothold, as it turned out. But she was knocked off again by pure unlucky combination of accidents. (…) I tell you all of this to quality your attitude to the notion of her as a young woman hurtling to disintegration shedding rags of poetry - leaping into Aetna & bursting into flames as she fell. Ariel poems are about successful integration - violently inheriting of a violent temperament. The first sign of disintegration - in a writer - is that the writing loses the unique stamp of his/her character, & loses its inner light.
Mustn’t underestimate her humour either.
The real question is - what would be the interpretation of those poems if she hadn’t died, if she’d gone on to write something marvellous in a different way. As those very last poems suggest she was about to do. They could only have been read as the scenes of a victorious battle for so called ‘self-integration’. The whole accent of subsequent commentary would have been different. The interpretation generally given is a pure fantasy - induced by her death, which was an accident (it could have happened at any moment between 51 & 63, if she’d got physically low enough - just as it could happen to thousands who never show a symptom), and not at all essential to her poems - except as one latent factor in her mythology.
One big issue for Hughes the naturalist in the 80s was the environment and pollution. "Margaret" here is Margaret Thatcher, of course:
To Michael Hamburger, 12 September 1987:
Margaret is no ordinary woman. If she were, she might have some conscience about cleaning up - some sense of responsibility for it. In the various Children’s Poetry Competitions, which I help to judge, the new preoccupation is pollution - poisoning of earth & people. Even with six & seven year olds. Very aware, &/ very frightened - depressed. Problem, maybe, is that Margaret can’t be frightened. She’s like the general who says “we can afford 25% casualties”. Her job, as an analytical chemist, was researching the maximum number of bubbles that can be pumped into ice-cream, before it disillusions the customers. If only it were her priority, she’s one person who could really clean the place up. But I don’t think she grasps the reality, & the real horror of what is happening. As a trained chemist, she naturally listens to the hired experts, the professional consultants, who lie according to the fee & say what she wants to hear.
The following passage was in response to basically the question whether the huge significance of WWI in Hughes' poetry was due to his fondness for Wilfrid Owen's poems:
15 March 1991, to Nick Gammage:
It’s dawned on me gradually, over the last few years, that for most readers of verse (people under 45?) the First World War is remote history. They know about the trenches as they know about the squares of Waterloo or the archers at Agincourt - as curious fact about other people’s excitement and woes. Rather as they know about that wipeout on the Kuwait Basra road last month. They know about it, but it doesn’t mean much to them.
They are (I suppose you probably are) offspring of men who fought in the second World War. And they know that the second World War also had its sensational aspects - London Blitz, firestorm bombing of Germany, Dunkirk, atom bomb. But because that war escaped (as far as the English were concerned) the feared repeat performance of the First World War, and because it kept light and mobile, it had almost no traumatic effect - for the English. No psychological effect in that it did not ever feel like a disaster. I know, because I was expecting to be in it, had a brother in it, and was very conscious when it ended - have known since a great many who were in it. In fact, rather than shock, there was a general feeling of relief - that it had not been like the first World War. For us. (…) Now after the first World War the whole country was traumatised. (…) When I came to consciousness I never heard of anything but the First World War (and it had been over, say, fifteen years). Those towns in West Yorks were still stunned. So I passed my early years in a kind of Mental Hospital of the survivors, widowers etc. And it wasn’t simply the horrible mud struggle in a terrain more or less composed of liquefied corpses, the stories of how this or that village lost of all of its men in one day, one attack. It was something much more inclusive - the shock suffered by a species that had thought the world was quite different, and that war was quite different. (…) Industrialised slaughter, mass-production of corpses. Those who met the shock in person never got over it, they never were able to assimilate it. My father’s whole life was posthumous in some way, after that. In the fifties, when I began publishing my first poems, to me the First World War was my most intimate experience, my mythology.(…) To get back to your question: in that context (my early background, the pervasive presence of that war), Owen seemed to be expressing the drama of the shared mythology. (Maybe you’ve noticed he still obsesses writers such as Jon Silkin - born 1930, John Stallworthy, born about the same time). He gave form to our childhood nightmares and preoccupations. The second part of your question (“Did your reading of him swing your thinking on the effect of the Great War etc.”) would be unimaginable to those two. It illustrates what I’ve been saying - you’re too young to realise that our problem was not to get our minds to consider the Great War, but to get our minds off it.
In my own case, though I suppose I swallowed Owen as deeply as anybody well could, and have never lost my taste for his best poems (and would defend his weaker poems for what I think are good reasons), I did have a reservation about him: first, he was an officer. Thoughout the war my father as an infantryman and obviously an effective soldier - being very strong physically, very combative and rather bright - refused promotion. And told strange stories about some officers (when he told any). Second, Owen did not get into the war until late 1916 - Octoberish, when the Somme had been going on for months or so (24,000 killed on the first day). I know he made up for it, and that men grew old in two days out there, but as I say somehow I held it against him. I’ve never quite been able to reconcile my liking for his poems with the fact that he was still pursuing the cultivated life in France quite late in 1915. It’s a foolish reservation, and I disown it - but I know it’s there.
There are far fewer references to the other woman in his life who committed suicide, Assia Wevill; the most striking of those to me was in a letter to his German translators who had asked about a reference in his poem "Shibboleth", which leads to the following description of Assia:
To Jutta and Wolfgang Kaussen 1997:
She had no defences, being a born refugee: a Jew born in Hitler’s Germany (Father a Russian Jew); later, a German in Israel (Mother as I said Prussian); later, in Western Canada, a continental freak (married to an English ex-Aermy officer); later, cosmopolitan beauty and wife of a wandering Canadian student in the far East, eventually settling in England - but never forgetting for a moment that she was on the run and belonged nowhere. But a big personality. Passionate about Tolstoy.
And lastly, a letter to his son about the publication of "Birthday Letters", a decision he made after he was diagnosed with cancer and knew he had only a limited time to live (he died on Octobert 28th 1998):
To Nicholas, 1998:
I’ve been thinking about your kiln. Do you remember, when you were at Bedales, you read that book about the Primal Scream. However cock-eyed that whole book and therapy, riding its wave of fashion, may have been - it stirred up one giant Truth. At the time, when you were telling me about what you thought of it, you described a dream - that I immediately connected to what the book had wakened up in you. You were walking up a garden path towards a building with a glass door. A frog was jumping up the path behind you. You entered the building and closed the glass door, shutting out the frog. The frog then jumped against the glass of the door. Do you remember it? (…) My “frog” has been salmon, mainly. But sometimes other creatures. (…) I dug out, with your help, the real rivers of big salmon. But I should have done it internally, through my work on myself, rather than simply gathered happy outer experiences. I should have done both, perhaps, simultaneously. What I was needing to do, all those years, was deal with what had happened to your mother and me. That was the big unmanageable event in my life, that had somehow to be managed - internally - by me. Somehow through my writing - because that’s the method I’ve developed to deal with myself. (…) The best I could do, through all those following years, to deal with that giant psychological log-jam of your mother and me, was write, as if to her, quite privately, simple little attempts to communicate with her about our time together. They were what accumulated, over the years, to this Birthday Letters. Most of them I never dreamed of publishing - they expose to o much, I always thought. But they were inadequate to break up the log-jam. That thickening thickening glass window between me and that real self of mine which was trapped in the unmanageable experience of what had happened with her and me. (…) So all I wrote, through all those years, contained nothing of what I really needed to say. And nothing in my way of life contained the real me - I was living on the wrong side of the glass door. All I was aware of, all that time, was the desperate need to break the glass door, and blow up the log jam, but I didn’t dare because it was - the business of your mother and me. (…) Until I got ill. It was then I realised that my only change to get past 1963 was to blow up that log-jam, and assemble whatever I had written about your mother and me, and simply make it public - like a confession - that I decided to publish those Birthday Letters as I’ve called htem. I thought, let the feminists do what they like, let people think what they like about me, let critics demolish, and tear to bits these simple, unguarded, quit private for the most part, unsophisticated bits of writing, let the heavens fall, let Carol go bananas, let Frieda and Nick bolt for their bomb-shelter - I can’t care any more, I can’t lock myself in behind this glass door one more week.
So I did it, and now I’m getting the surprise of my life. What I’ve been hiding all my life, from myself and everybody else, is not terrible at all. Though you didn’t want to read it.
And the effect on me, Nicky, the sense of gigantic, upheaval transformation in my mind, is quite bewildering. It’s as though I have completely new different brains. I can think thoughts I could never think. I have a freedom of imagination I’ve not felt since 1962. (…) But I tell you all this, with a hope that it will let you understand a lot of things. Also, that it will make you think about the frog and the kiln. Don’t laugh it off. In 1963 you were hit even harder than me. But you will have to deal with it, just as I have had to. And as Frieda has had to. You were given the means - if you use them, everything about you will be changed, by what follows the frog through the door. Slowly. Like a leakage. Bit by bit.
ETA: from kalypso_v: until Monday morning, you can listen to excerpts from the letters read by Richard Armitage here, which were broadcast by the BBC last Monday.