Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and while they stood there silently, a great

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

they watched, another bubble shook to the

surface, and broke; and there was a

third bubble in the sea-going

waters, and nothing

more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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