Patric Dickinson's review of The Hawk in the Rain appeared in the TLS
of October 18 1957; Karl Miller's review of Birthday Letters appeared
in the TLS of February 6 1998.
PATRIC DICKINSON
Ted Hughes
THE HAWK IN THE RAIN
Faber and Faber. 10s. 6d.
After years of reviewing poetry Edward Thomas was able to write: "Nothing
is to be compared with seeing the stars . . . in the east when most eyes are
watching the west, except perhaps to read a fresh modern poet straight from
the press, before anyone has praised it, and know that it is good".
Mr. Hughes is good. It is natural that a young man’s experience should be
subjective: but few young poets make more than private or obscure poems out
of such material. Mr. Hughes in such poems as “Meeting” or “A Modest
Proposal” creates images which have more than a private value.
The ability to create such images is his strongest suit. But encouraging too
is the fact that most of his poems have real roots. He is a country man
sensitive and accurate in his observation of the world; his imagination has
been submitted to a natural discipline. Were one to say that he had
benefited from reading Thomas the astuter reader would not automatically
assume “Dylan” – though, astonishingly enough, that seems also to be the
case.
Mr. Hughes’s idiom, however, is not startlingly original. No idiom is
important in itself: what matters is what is said in it. Mr. Hughes has a
great deal to say. “October Dawn”, “Wind”, or the “ Two Wise Generals” are
good enough, particularly in a first book, to excite one’s enthusiasm, but
to come upon such a poem as “Six Young Men” is thrilling and delighting, and
there are other poems almost as greatly charged with humanity and
compassion, and with a tenderness which never for an instant turns into
sentimentality. There is a crisp and uncompromising intellectual content in
the best of these poems.
Naturally the work varies greatly in quality: “Secretary”, “Song”,
“Childbirth”, or “The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar” are the kind of dreadfully
bad poems which almost any young poet can write well. But Mr. Hughes would
not be the poet he is if all his work were on that careful beta-plus level
which so often wins prizes.
What is lacking in his work as yet is any strongly individual rhythm, and this
must be accounted a serious defect. The rhythm is monotonously loose, and
the sensuousness of the imagery meets with no corresponding sensuousness of
language. The language is sharp, accurate, flexible – almost everything it
should be without being either audible or memorable. This defect is to be
found in much contemporary American poetry: for example, Miss Elizabeth
Bishop, to whom Mr. Hughes’s work is somewhat akin. It is the content of his
work which is memorable, and as he develops his art we should have much to
look forward to.
* * *
KARL MILLER
Ted Hughes
BIRTHDAY LETTERS
197pp. Faber. £14.99.
0 571 19472 9
The dangerous union of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath celebrated and mourned
The poets of the modern world have said that poetry makes nothing happen, and
is no place for the poet's personal life, and that what the reader should
care about is not "the thing said" but the way of saying it. This
is a job description which might appear to have gone unheeded by the author
of the present book.
The thing said in this instance consists of a version of Ted Hughes's
seven-year marriage to Sylvia Plath, which ended with their separation and,
in 1963, with Plath's suicide. It seems well within the bounds of
possibility that this thing, and this way of saying it, will make a
difference to the way people feel about poetry, and about marriage, however
unlikely it may be that the book will appease the blamers and defacers who
have contributed to the cause celebre of this particular marriage by
demonizing Hughes. We have already heard that Sylvia Plath can't answer back
in relation to the self-justifications presumed to be implicit in Birthday
Letters.
The book is filled with the past and present feelings of its author; we can be
sure that he isn't professing or pretending to have them, for art's sake.
Birthday Letters is, none the less, a work of art, and none the less so for
being at least as personal and historical as it could be thought mystical or
transcendent. The two poets can seem larger than life, their destiny written
in the stars. During the seven years of their union, however, their
star-crossed feet were often on the ground, as these poems attest.
Oxford's Professor of Poetry, James Fenton, is reported to have said that
poets have been turning towards the provision of "information",
towards "content", the thing said; not all of their readers can
have noticed this. He suggests that Hughes has been saved from the harm that
may attend poetic information by the "intensity" of what he has
written here. This report takes one back to a past involvement of Plath's
poetry in the perennial debate about artistic impersonality.
Both Hughes's writings and Plath's are in some measure superstitious, astral.
How much magic gets into the weave is hard to assess, for those of mundane
outlook who are moved by the poems, while believing them susceptible of a "domestic"
reading - to make use of a term that came into play during this earlier
discussion of a transcendent Plath. There's a poem in which she writes that
she is "not mystical". But then the opposite of such intimations
can also appear to be true. The equivocal Plath was both moony and domestic.
The poem here about the couple's recourse to the Ouija board has its
intentionally comic moments, as does an earlier prose passage by Ted Hughes
on the same subject, where communicative astral bodies are assigned inverted
commas – they are "'spirits'", these regular attenders at
the seances – and one of them is her dead father, spoken of at the time as
Prince Otto and "said to be a great power in the underworld". In
the poem, nevertheless, the Ouija board gives pertinent or at any rate
ponderable answers. Hughes is told that "fame will ruin everything",
while his wife learns that when fame comes, "You will have paid for it
with your happiness, Your husband and your life." Forty-nine is her
magic number at one point in the sequence, and Hughes unlocks a certain
forty-ninth chamber by means of the skeleton key of a blade of grass.
Domestic readings of Plath's poems were impugned in Judith Kroll's book about
her, published a decade later. Kroll's Hughes-approved descriptions tended
to remove her work, as far as possible, from the ambit of the confessional
or autobiographical. A higher sense was proposed, in which autobiography was
subsumed – without, however, disappearing from view – in a mist of dying
gods and divine kings. Kroll explained that the marvellous poetry of the end
of her days came of a second severance from the divine male. The first
severance, Otto's death, which occurred before Hughes knew her, helped to
induce a suicide bid, treated by means of electro-convulsive therapy. Kroll
also explained that, in 1963, shortly before her death, Sylvia Plath passed
beyond the conceptions of mystic rebirth which had mattered to her before,
in some eclectic fashion – that she passed beyond these into a religious
transfiguration or conversion. This higher sense has not been forsaken in
Birthday Letters. But the book can also be called radically domestic.
"Domestic" here does not mean mean or small, doesn't mean knives and
forks. The term has to encompass the large and disastrous matter of Plath's
father-fixated suffering. These poems abound in responses to those of Plath
(they refer to her "dark water", to her "peanut-crunchers",
lookers-on at the deaths of poets and princes), and have at their heart her
exorcistic poem-curse, "Daddy". Hughes identifies himself in the
book as having been auditioned "for the male lead in your drama",
a drama which is in turn identified as issuing from Otto Plath's premature
death. "Starless and fatherless, a dark water", wrote Sylvia in
Ariel. Hughes's book informs us that the loss of her father, and the need to
get back to him, and rid of him too, caused, for the pair, the loss of their
happiness. Father-fixation is not named in Nancy Hunter Steiner's memoir of
her dealings with her room-mate Sylvia at Smith College, A Closer Look at
Ariel (1974), but can be inferred from it. The memoir corroborates much that
is said in these letters to her friend. It persuasively recalls Plath's
anxiety, her demands, and finds in her suicide the cry, "I'll die if
you desert me."
That she was the lead in his drama, that each was compelled by the other –
this is, perhaps inevitably, somewhat occluded here. Thesaurus in hand – the
thesaurus which took part in her early poems and which is commemorated in
these poems – the academic and literary achiever was led out into the wild,
to be with the animals and birds that illuminate, in Lawrentian style,
several of the letters; one letter tells her how, when they were out walking
one black night, he imitated a rabbit's cry and an owl came swooping down on
him. This feat was his "masterpiece". He conveys that she could
enable him to see his world – as foreign, if not feral – through her eyes.
His was undoubtedly a world which made its own demands.
The male victim who can be glimpsed in the letters – to comic effect, at times
– is not like the master of his art and of his profession who is apparent
elsewhere in Hughes's life and works. But there is no reason to think of
this victim as a defensive persona, as tactical or inauthentic. This is very
much Ted Hughes's story, but Birthday Letters is not a self-justifying book.
It is inhabited by a man who knows that he can be, and has been, mistaken;
there is no Lord Hughes of Life, giving out his authorized version.
It is, in this respect, palpably different from the fifty-poem sequence
produced by George Meredith a century, to the year, before Plath's death.
Modern Love is in some other respects almost a precursor; it has a
mismating, Meredith's, has demons and the death of a wife, together with the
semi-ironic suggestion that poetic content is all right, that "life,
some think, is worthy of the Muse".
The hundred and more poems in this book are a tale of two cities, Cambridge,
England, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, with trips to the American wilderness
and a last act set in Devon. They come, as do their individual lines, in
various shapes and sizes, and are for the most part conversational, indeed
epistolary, in manner; they are seldom at all vatic. Each is an episode, an
interesting narrative. They have their difficulties, their recalcitrance (a
hunter makes his bag of lions "sound as likely as finished"). But
the best of them are among the best poems Ted Hughes has written. Together
with his recent Tales from Ovid (reviewed in the TLS, July 4, 1997), they
are an impressive recruitment and rejuvenation of his powers.
The Ted Hughes of mid-1950s Cambridge England steps forward here in his black
cord jacket, three times dyed. He was seen by companions as a romantic
country boy, a Heathcliff, as Lawrentian: lumber-shirted, tall and stalwart,
like that other colossus of the time and place, Thom Gunn, a time and place
when poets could be "tough". There were bystanders for whom he was
a gypsy threat to King's Parade and Petty Cury. One don thought that Sylvia
could "pass", as she put it, in any civilized company, but that
Sylvia's uncouth, unlettered friend from the country could not. Another don
(a good one) felt that Ted's stuff would never do. The future Poet Laureate
was at this point the author of "The Court-Tumbler and Satirist",
a poem in the Jacobean style to which he and Gunn were then drawn. "Princes"
are handed there a tendentious view of the artistic life and made to
declare:
Scrambling after girls, bloodying his tusk,
Groping in the sweat halls for what he can get,
His fork in any hot dish, the two-backed beast
Spurring neck and neck with every slut,
Is how the blood of a true artist makes out."
This true artist was to meet his fate in lipsticked silver-shod Sylvia, the
Veronica Lake "bang" of hair, as he calls it, shadowing the scar
from a scarcely ancient suicide attempt. Here, on the face of it, was a
college queen from the conformist American 1950s pictured in her room-mate's
memoir, from a land of hope and glory where an army of perfect co-ed legs
marched towards you in their Bermuda shorts. Beauty and the beast had met.
Different backgrounds, different expectations, had met. It must also have
been possible to feel that here were two beauties, two stars, two gods, two
writers, that a dangerous union was impending.
Towards the start of the book, a letter tells Sylvia that her "'real
target' Hid behind me. Your Daddy, The god with the smoking gun." Soon
he is with her in their Fetter Lane hotel. She is his smooth fish, his "beautiful
America", his new world, and he is a John Donne redivivus, for the
space of an allusion. But a star warns him to "stay clear". The
next poem is a formidable articulation of his fate, or part of it:
the grotesque mask of your Mummy-Daddy
Half-quarry, half-hospital, whole
Juggernaut, stuffed with your unwritten poems,
ground invisibly without a ripple
Towards me . . . .
In the poem after this, she is the child who used to rush at visitors, "clasping
their legs and crying: 'I love you! I love you!'" - the child who
continued to dance for her father. But the poem is concerned with "the
mystery of hatred". As if "reporting some felony to the police",
the Colleges "let you know that you were not John Donne". The
colleges of the world would presently bow to her fame, and had already begun
to honour her. But it seemed that the return for what she wanted to offer
was "envelopes full of carefully broken glass".
They got married, he says, in the parish church of St George of the Chimney
Sweeps: the bride in her pink wool knitted dress, with Hughes "a
post-war, utility son-in-law" wielding a new umbrella, fresh from the
bohemian hang-outs of Cambridge England. They are then to be seen in
beautiful America, in the academies of New England, and off encountering
evil in the deserts of the West. They pay a visit to Yellowstone National
Park, where bears have joined the all-American family and gambol at
campsites, while able to deliver ninety-mile-an-hour forearm smashes. The
one that trashes their car is called a ghoul.
Et in America ego. Daddy is back. Watching Hughes on a seashore through the
eye of her camera, she is watching her father, who has risen from that sea.
The poet has "no idea" he has stepped into her sights. She has "no
idea" how a "two-way heart" and her eye's "inbuilt
double exposure" have brought a double image into focus. A further
unknowing concludes the poem.
I did not feel
How, as your lens tightened,
He slid into me.
In Devon, her eye decrees that New England's beautiful Nauset beach, with its
surf and its horseshoe crabs, puts the English coast to shame. The English
coast is the extension of a universal English bereavement and subfusc. She
is not won over by Woolacombe Sands, which Hughes takes her to inspect, and
does not budge from the car.
A car-park streetlamp made the whole scene hopeless.
The sea moved near, stunned after the rain,
Unperforming. Above it
The blue-black heap of the West collapsed slowly,
Comfortless as a cold iron stove,
Standing among dead cinders
In some roofless ruin. You refused to get out.
You sat behind your mask, inaccessible -
Staring towards the ocean that had failed you.
Modern poems tend to be no more funny than they are informative. This one is
very funny. And could well be the tenderest in the book.
The poem that follows inaugurates the end of the story, with the arrival of a
Jewish woman of "many-blooded beauty" whose fate bears her towards
a subversion of the marriage. She is spoken of as a Lilith – that same
Lilith, presumably, who was once a demon and Adam's mutinous, proto-feminist
first wife. Presently, the poet is driving down from London along a frozen
A30 to fork up his potatoes and gather apples in the garden of their
deserted West Country house.
I picked over my apples,
My Victorias, my pig's noses,
In the dark outhouse, and my fat Bramleys.
My spring prayers still solid,
My summer intact in spite of everything
He haunts the house, peering into it as through a keyhole into a casket, the
kind of keyhole that might be attempted by a blade of grass. But he "did
not know" that he had already lost the treasure from that casket.
Treasures are apt, as here, to be magical, equivocal, ephemeral. In this
thrilling poem he is about to discover that the good life is over. Paradise
lost.
