Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life. Jonathan Bate
It had been a favourite camping spot for him, Uncle Tom and their friends before the Great War. At the top of the valley, there was a pool and a waterfall, with an old packhorse bridge going over. This had long been a favoured picnicking place for locals. The Hughes family cherished an old photo taken there: it showed six young men in Sunday best, before the war.
There was a drystone wall along the slope above the clearing where the boys pitched their tent. On their second day, they found a dead fox there. It had been killed by a deadfall trap – a heavy rock or slab tilted at an angle and held up with a stick that when dislodged causes the slab to fall, crushing the animal beneath. That night Ted slept restlessly in the tent. He told Gerald of ‘a vivid dream about an old lady and a fox cub that had been orphaned by the trap’.11
This was the dream that, according to Ted’s letter to Donald Crossley nearly fifty years later, turned into all his writing. It was his first thought-fox. He told the tale himself in ‘The Deadfall’, a short story from the last decade of his life, written for a collection of ghost stories, published to celebrate the centenary of the National Trust and edited by one of his closest friends, the children’s novelist Michael Morpurgo.12 All the stories are set in houses or landscapes owned by the Trust, of which Crimsworth Dene was one.
In the story, it is Ted’s first time in the secret valley, with its steep sides and overhanging woods. He immediately senses that it is the most magical place he has ever been to. The enclosed space means that every note of the thrush echoes through the valley and he feels compelled to speak in a whisper. At night, he can’t stop thinking about the fox for which the trap has been set. The idea of the creature near by, in its den, ‘maybe smelling our bacon’, makes the place more mysterious than ever. On the second night he is woken by the dream of the old lady, calling him out of the tent. He follows her voice up the slope to the trap, where he finds a young fox, still alive but with tail and hind leg caught beneath the great slab of stone. He is choked by ‘the overpowering smell of frightened fox’. He realises that the woman has brought him to the cub, wants him to free it. She has not gone to Gerald, because she knows that he would be likely to kill it. Summoning all his strength he manages to lift the corner of the slab – the cub snarling and hissing at him like a cat – just enough to set the animal free. It runs away and the old lady vanishes. But when he looks back at the deadfall there is something beneath it. At this moment, his brother wakes and calls him back to bed. It rains. In the morning, they go up to the deadfall and there is a big red fox, the bait (a dead wood pigeon) in its mouth.
According to the story, Gerald then digs a grave for the fox. As Ted helps him push the loose soil away, he feels what seems to be a knobbly pebble. When he looks at it closely, it turns out to be a little ivory fox, about an inch and a half long, ‘most likely an Eskimo carving’. He treasures it all his days. He and Gerald conclude that the old lady in the dream was the ghost of the dead fox.
Hughes admits in the preface to his collected short stories that this version of the incident, prepared for Morpurgo’s ghost collection, has ‘a few adjustments to what I remember’. In Gerald’s account, Ted’s dream of the old lady comes the night after they have discovered the body, whereas in the story it is a premonition of the fox’s death. Ted insisted on the reality of the memory, yet neither Gerald nor Olwyn has any recollection of the ivory fox.13 It was only as an adult that Ted began collecting netsuke and Eskimo carvings of animals.
‘The Deadfall’ was the only short story of his later career. He had not written one for fifteen years. Morpurgo’s invitation was an irresistible opportunity to round off his work in the genre. He gathered it together with his earlier stories and made it what he called the ‘overture’ to his writing.14 The camping trip with Gerald in Crimsworth Dene, the dream of the freed fox and the ivory figure that symbolically transformed his lead animal toys into tokens of art came together as his retrospective narrative of creative beginning.
The radio talks for schools that were eventually published as Poetry in the Making give incomparable insight into Ted Hughes, poet in the making. As the boy Ted sculpted his plasticine animals, so the adult writer created poetic images of fox, bird and big cat. In the same way, Ted the teacher found the right voice to capture the attention of ten- to fourteen-year-olds – exactly as his own attention had been caught by Miss Mayne and Mr Fisher.
Early in the second talk, called ‘Wind and Weather’ (there was no shortage of either in the Calder Valley), he suggested that the best work of the best poets is written out of ‘some especially affecting and individual experience’. Often, because of something in their nature, poets sense the same experience happening again and again. It was like that for him with his dreams, his premonitions and his foxes. A poet can, he argues, achieve greatness through variation on the theme of ‘quite a limited and peculiar experience’: ‘Wordsworth’s greatest poetry seems to be rooted in two or three rather similar experiences he had as a boy among the Cumberland mountains.’15 Here Wordsworth stands in for the speaker himself: the deadfall trap in Crimsworth Dene was Ted Hughes’s equivalent of what Wordsworth called those ‘spots of time’ that, ‘taking their date / From our first childhood’, renovate us, nourish and repair our minds with poetry.16
At school, Ted was plagued with the idea that he had much better thoughts than he could ever get into words. He couldn’t find the words, or the thoughts were ‘too deep or too complicated for words’. How to capture those elusive, deep thoughts? He found the answer, he tells his schools audience in the talk called ‘Learning to Think’, not in the classroom but when fishing. Keeping still, staring at the float for hours on end: in such forms of meditation, all distractions and nagging doubts disappear. In concentrating upon that tiny point, he found a kind of bliss. He then applied this art of mindfulness to the act of writing. The fish that took the bait were those very thoughts that he had previously been unable to get into words. This mental fishing was the process of ‘raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender’ that released what he called the ‘inner life’ – ‘which is the world of final reality, the world of memory, emotion, imagination, intelligence, and natural common sense’.17
Though a fisherman all his life, Ted did not follow in Gerald’s footsteps as a hunter, despite being an excellent shot. To judge from his sinister short story ‘The Head’, in which a brother’s orgiastic killing of animals leads to him being hunted down himself, he was distinctly ambivalent about Gerald’s obsessive hunting.18 At the age of fifteen, Ted accused himself of disturbing the lives of animals. He began to look at them from their own point of view. That was when he started writing poems instead of killing creatures. He didn’t begin with animal poems, but he recognised the analogy between poetry-writing and capturing animals: first the stirring that brings a peculiar thrill as you are frozen in concentration, then the emergence of ‘the outline, the mass and colour and clean final form of it, the unique living reality of it in the midst of the general lifelessness’.19 To create a poem was as if to hunt out a new species, to bring not a death but a new life outside one’s own.
Like an animal, a living poem depends on its senses: words that live, Hughes insists, are those that belong directly to the senses or to the body’s musculature. We can taste the word ‘vinegar’, touch ‘prickle’, smell ‘tar’ or ‘onion’. ‘Flick’ and ‘balance’ seem to use their muscles. ‘Tar’ doesn’t only smell: it is sticky to touch and moves like a beautiful black snake. Truly poetic words belong to all the senses at once, and to the body. Find the right word for the occasion and you will create a living poem. It is as if there is a sprite, a goblin, in the word, ‘which is its life and its poetry, and it is this goblin which the poet has to have under control’.20
Poetry is made by capturing essences: of a landscape, a person, a creature. In one talk, Hughes