Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life. Jonathan Bate
rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">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