For the first few days, they luxuriated in silence and ate simple meals Sylvia prepared in their single frying pan. Yet soon a neighbor began playing his radio too loudly, and the biting horseflies became a nuisance. Spaulding, for frequent rides into town. Spaulding, in turn, felt free to drop by for coffee and conversation—just the kind of suburban mingling they had longed to escape. I am just now restored.
And I suppose never will be. But she feared that creative paralysis would bring on another depression. While Hughes began writing the poems that would go into his second collection, Lupercal , Plath worked on four stories. Get tension of scenes with mother during Ira and Gordon crisis.
Car keys. Details: Dr. Beuscher: baby. Girl comes back to self, can be good daughter. Sees vision of mothers [ sic ] hard-ship. Yes yes. This is a good one. Mental hospital background. Dynamite under high tension. Mothers [ sic ] character. Not really. The book is magisterially respectful of Hughes, treating him throughout as an unquestionably great poet. Organs pulsing something red and uncontrollable. All along, Hughes refused the comforts and predictability of an academic position.
He supported himself through reviews, translations, and work in the theater with the avant-garde director Peter Brook, who shared his interests in mythology and violence. Yet somehow the poems kept emerging to the end. Not every literary biography has an argument, but this one does. Bate believes that Hughes is best understood as a poet who was divided between two ways of feeling and writing.
On the one hand, he was steeped in an impersonal notion of poetry as primarily myth-driven, the tradition inherited from T. He bought his corduroy cheap from a factory owned by one of the prosperous members of his mother's family, up in West Yorkshire, and dyed it black himself. His classmate Glen Fallows thought he looked "as though he'd just climbed out of a fishing smack after a stormy night.
He had smelly old corduroys and big flakes of dandruff in his greasy hair. Hughes was actually quite self-conscious and shy in company, but he hid his unease behind mesmerizing talk. For sociability, he gravitated to the Cambridge pubs where students passed their time singing folk songs. Hughes had a big, distinctive voice, rich and sonorous, the mannerisms of his native Yorkshire detectable under the influence of his elite education.
Many anecdotes about this voice appear in the memoirs of people who knew him when he was young. The American writer Ben Sonnenberg tells one of the best stories, about being invited to dinner with Hughes sometime during the early s at the home of the American poet W. While listening to Hughes, "I did indeed fall off my chair. Over the years, a lot of women would want to interrupt Ted Hughes long enough to initiate an affair with him. According to some, Hughes was "the biggest seducer in Cambridge" it was the chief topic of gossip about Hughes at the time Sylvia Plath met him, and she heard about it the night she met him, from the man who accompanied her to the party.
But even before she laid eyes on the man, Plath thought she had learned something essential about him by reading his work, and she was right. He had published only a few poems and essays, only in the smallest magazines, and usually under pseudonyms. But from the time he was sixteen, Hughes believed he was destined to become a poet on the grand scale.
He wanted to be a poet like W. Yeats, whose work he studied passionately, beginning in grammar school and right through his years at Cambridge. After discovering D. Lawrence, Hughes wanted to be a poet like D. Lawrence too; eventually he fulfilled both wishes in a highly original way. In he was still feeling his way toward his vocation it was the sense of having a vocation that underlay his friendship with the somewhat fanatical undergraduates whose work appeared in St.
One of these was the poet Daniel Weissbort, with whom Hughes later founded a journal to publish translations of poetry. At the time they met, Weissbort recalls of himself that he was awkwardly attempting to imitate Dylan Thomas.
The poet Peter Redgrove recalled his first encounter, as an undergraduate, with Hughes's Beethoven obsession. I knocked and entered. In the brightly lit room a hand-wound gramophone was playing a black disc this was the yowling. My puzzlement was complete. Hughes's own physical presence was also of a kind I had never encountered before.
It was decisive very few people in my experience had the ability of showing by their physique a kind of knowledge. This is the author' and he unhooked a frowning kindly plaster mask off the wall.
Yet on the whole, Cambridge University figures negatively in the myth of himself that Ted Hughes extracted from the facts of his life once he had become an established poet. Cambridge was "almost a deadly institution unless you're aiming to be either a scholar or a gentleman," he said.
Hughes was not born a gentleman and did not wish to become a scholar only some good luck and special pleading got him to Cambridge in the first place. He'd had the good luck as a boy of eleven: after he failed the preliminary exam for admission to the excellent grammar school in Mexborough, the mining town where he grew up in South Yorkshire, his mother had persuaded the headmaster a customer at the Hughes family tobacco shop to permit her boy to sit for the actual exam, which he got through by writing an essay on his desire to be a gamekeeper.
Eight years later, he performed badly on the exam for entrance at Pembroke College, but his grammar school teacher sent a sheaf of Hughes's poems to the master of Pembroke, and the poems won Hughes admission as a "dark horse. Hughes had arrived at Pembroke in after serving his compulsory term of National Service, as a ground wireless mechanic for the RAF.
He was posted to Fylingdales, a three-man station on the North York Moors, where he had little to do but read, and he tried to use this time to widen his taste in literature. He says he tried the poetry of Walt Whitman, but couldn't make his way into the rhythms, and also tried without success to read Rilke. He was equally at a loss with the collections of contemporary verse that he brought along. What he did read was his mother's Bible, and the works of Shakespeare. At Pembroke he intended to study English literature, to prepare himself for the profession he envisioned as a poet.
However, the university education he undertook was designed to make him into a literary critic. The chief literary man at Cambridge in those days was F.
Leavis, who achieved a lasting influence on Hughes's generation through practicing the analysis of literature as an elegant form of savagery. Hughes had a gift, himself, for the sadistic side of Leavis's intellectual style, so he understood the attraction.
But Hughes had little taste for the coteries that formed around the scholars whose influence would later be essential to professional promotion. Nor did he join clubs or play team sports.
Hughes had learned astrology from his sister, Olwyn, before he entered Cambridge, according to his friend Lucas Myers. But he was an indifferent student. His tutorials in English literature felt to Hughes like mere time-serving, and did not feed his hunger for wildness in art, at all.
During his second year at Cambridge, he reached a crisis in his studies that culminated in a fabulous and prophetic dream. He had been working late on an essay for a tutorial on eighteenth-century literature, when the door opened and a man in the shape of a fox entered the room. The animal was singed and bloody, as though he had stepped out of a furnace. He strode to the desk and placed his hand, palm down, on the paper Hughes had been writing, and told Hughes he must stop.
When the apparition lifted his hand, Hughes saw that the page bore a bloody palm print. Hughes told versions of that story time and again throughout his life, and eventually wrote it down, for publication. Not surprisingly, the story changed significantly over the years, but the purpose of telling it didn't change: this was Hughes's explanation for dropping English literature for the study of archaeology and anthropology.
It was a practical decision, because he had already absorbed much of the required material on his own. From early childhood he had been fascinated by folktales, and at Cambridge had been drawn to the anthropological literature that had influenced the modernist poets Hughes admired, especially T.
Eliot, Robert Graves, D. Lawrence, and W. Hughes graduated from Cambridge in July , having achieved a rank of II. But artists didn't need to achieve "firsts," and Hughes wanted to be an artist. He moved to London and continued writing poetry, picking up one job and another while undergoing the typical postgraduate jolt of discovery that his higher education was economically useless.
He resisted moving back to his parents' home in Yorkshire, where his worried mother was waiting to take him in, possibly with the idea of bringing Ted into the family textile business.
It was run by his rich uncle Walt, who invited Hughes to be his driver on a trip to the Continent, shortly after Hughes left Cambridge. They visited battlefields; his uncle had been wounded on the Somme, when he was Hughes's age, and the visit impressed Hughes deeply, later surfacing in a number of poems.
They also tasted wines on that trip, and discovering the taste of claret became synonymous in Hughes's imagination with the promise of prosperity that might await him. But he didn't want to work for his uncle. Returning to London after this holiday, he took a job as a dishwasher in the cafeteria at the London Zoo. Next, he found work as a security guard; in his off-hours, he entered newspaper competitions, and sometimes won a spot of cash. He wrote to his brother, Gerald, that what he really wanted was to ship with a North Sea trawler for the winter, but he knew their mother would collapse with dismay if her son the Cambridge graduate did such a thing.
But all along Hughes was reading and writing poetry. During his cigarette breaks at the zoo, he studied the big cats, and got one of them rather quickly into a poem titled "The Jaguar" that Sylvia Plath admired in a Cambridge literary magazine before she even met Hughes, and that Hughes always remained proud of. When he became a security guard, he took a late shift so he could write and read while earning eight pounds each night.
Whenever he was free, he was a regular at evenings organized by the poet Philip Hobsbaum, whom he had known slightly in Cambridge. Hobsbaum had a bed-sitter off the Edgware Road, where poets gathered to read aloud and discuss the minutiae of poetics.
Hobsbaum recalled that on one occasion Hughes spent hours reading passages from the medieval English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight into Peter Redgrove's tape recorder. Actually, Hughes greatly coveted a "respectable" job in television or film, the sort of work a swank Cambridge graduate might expect to hold Philip Hobsbaum held such a job. But Hughes's scruffy bohemianism was a liability in that world, where appearances counted. In a memoir, Hobsbaum recalled the strikingly bad impression Hughes made in the glitzy environment of a TV studio on a day when Hughes met him at the office before going out to "drink lunch" together.
Hughes is quite right in his head? Arthur Rank, commuting by train to the Pinewood Studios in Slough, to write summaries of novels that had been submitted for possible development into films then commuting on weekends to Cambridge, to sleep on the floor of Lucas Myers's chicken coop, and put his new-minted poems into St. Which led him to Sylvia Plath. Flashy American Many of these details about Ted Hughes would have been circulating in the pool of Cambridge gossip when Plath began inquiring about him, after the party in Falcon Yard.
Plath had acquired a certain notoriety herself, even before the party. The male undergraduates outnumbered the females by ten to one, and all of the women came under close scrutiny. It is recalled in various memoirs that Plath was considered flashy and pushy, even in comparison to the other American women enrolled at Cambridge it is recalled that even Ted Hughes considered her too "forward," at first.
She was opinionated, impatient, sometimes arrogant, and always on the move, even when seated, as one of her housemates at Cambridge remembered.
It was typical. Plath was not a little girl, she was a big girl: five foot nine, slim and well-proportioned, with a long waist and broad shoulders. Though she indulged a big appetite for food, her weight normally hovered around pounds. Her most striking characteristic was a physical vitality that, by all accounts, a camera couldn't capture; people who knew her, including Hughes, thought that no photographs of Plath did justice to her looks. She didn't like her nose: "fat," she thought, and squashy, prone to sinus infections that left the internal passages revoltingly clogged with thick mucus, which she perversely reveled in annotating for her journal, more than once the opening of James Joyce's Ulysses had licensed her to write about snot.
She had a manner of testing the air with her tongue as she talked, and a habit of gnawing her lips raw, when she was nervous. She moved to London and wrote dozens of her best poems in the winter of Her only novel, The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical account of a college girl who works at a magazine in New York and suffers a breakdown, was published in early , but received mediocre reviews. Plath took her own life in February , at age Hughes edited several volumes of her poetry, which appeared after her death, including Ariel , Crossing the Water , and Collected Poems , which won the Pulitzer Prize in But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
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