Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life. Jonathan Bate
is a city of water and history. Pembroke College, where Ted Hughes matriculated in the autumn of 1951, is at the top end of Trumpington Street, which leads out to the village where Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale was set. Immediately outside the college was Fitzbillies bakery, which had served Chelsea buns to generations of students. Turn right and you are in King’s Parade, dominated by the most glorious Gothic chapel in the world. Crossing the road from Pembroke, you pass the Pitt Building, which housed Cambridge University Press, the oldest publisher in the world. Then you are in Mill Lane, where gowned undergraduates attended lectures by such luminaries as Dr F. R. Leavis and (until his death in the year that Hughes went up) Ludwig Wittgenstein. In summer, you could hire a punt at Scudamore’s Boatyard by the mill pond, beside which were two much-frequented and watery-named pubs, the Anchor and the Mill. From there, the river Cam meandered via Byron’s Pool towards the village of Grantchester that had been immortalised by King’s College student Rupert Brooke.
In Michaelmas term, when freshmen arrived, Cambridge was bitterly cold and shrouded in fog. According to student lore, the wind came straight off the Ural mountains. Ted wrapped himself in his Uncle Walt’s Great War leather topcoat and fed all his change into the guttering gas fire in his room. But walking around town, among the colleges, there was something in the air that made everyone seem wide awake. He dressed in black, dying his own corduroy from the Sutcliffe Farrar factory. One contemporary said that he looked like a fisherman on a stormy night, while another – a jealous fellow-poet – remembered his ‘smelly old corduroys and big flakes of dandruff in his greasy hair’.1
Ted Hughes and Evelyn Waugh could hardly have been more different as writers,2 but they had one thing in common: the friends they made at university became friends for life. Ted’s best friend in college was an Irishman called Terence McCaughey. They were supervision partners, which is to say that they had their weekly tutorial together in the room of the Pembroke College English Fellow, M. J. C. Hodgart, an authority on medieval ballads who also had a passion for James Joyce. McCaughey recalls how he and Ted bumped into each other in Heffers bookshop, where they were supposed to be buying set texts in their first or second week as freshmen. One book on the list was an anthology of Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose. Ted explained that he already had a copy, passed down to him by his sister, but that it was an older edition lacking the vocabulary list. He proposed selling this to McCaughey and buying himself a new one, complete with vocabulary, thus simultaneously getting a bargain and doing a favour.
They soon became fast friends, their Yorkshire and Irish accents contrasting with the self-entitled voices of the public schoolboys who lorded it over Cambridge. They shared a love of music, nature and words. They would spend their evenings in one or the other’s room, reading poetry aloud or listening to Beethoven on 78rpm records. They went to the cinema together, especially enjoying the comedies of the Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton. Sometimes at dusk they walked along the Backs of the colleges or strolled on to Coe Fen, where, among the grazing cows, Ted blew mimic hootings to answering owls. They supplemented college food – which was no better than that of the National Service mess – with brown bread, cheese mixed with marmalade and, a particular Yorkshire delicacy, treacle sandwiches. Olwyn came to visit and Terence was amazed at the seriousness with which she and Ted discussed their friends in terms of horoscopic compatibility.
McCaughey went on to become a clergyman. They kept in touch by letter and occasionally visited each other. On Ted’s last trip to Dublin, just four months before he died, Terence took him to the recently renovated University Church, built at Cardinal Newman’s behest for the Catholic college. Quietly, Ted said, ‘This fairly closely persuades me to become a Catholic or a Christian.’3 But this was a sentiment felt in the moment: there was no subsequent deathbed conversion to orthodox faith.
About two-thirds of the Pembroke undergraduates were from public schools, one-third from grammar schools. Ted inevitably gravitated towards the latter group. Brian Cox was a typical example. Born in Grimsby into a frugal, lower-middle-class Methodist household, he grew up an avid reader, burying himself in the Grimsby public library after his mother died of tuberculosis when he was ten. After National Service, during which he wrote half a novel, he won a scholarship to Pembroke. With his friend Tony Dyson, another Pembroke man, he attended a term of Dr Leavis’s classes but was disillusioned by the narrowness of his taste and the seeming puritanism of his critical method. Cox blamed Cambridge English for killing his own creativity and driving him to become a critic rather than an imaginative writer. Looking back on his time at college, he felt that he had learned more from his contemporaries than from the English Faculty: breakfast, lunch and dinner were taken in the college hall and the students who were ‘in passionate love with literature’ sat together, arguing ‘over the long wooden tables about Shakespeare or Donne or Dickens meal by meal’.4
In his first year, Ted had to prepare for the ‘Preliminary’ examinations, which had to be passed but did not count towards the final degree. He took a medieval paper, in which his special delight was the anonymous alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with its green giant carrying away his own chopped-off head, its seductive enchantress and wintry northern English landscapes (including a journey across ‘the wilderness of Wirral’ where Ted had begun his National Service). For the Shakespeare paper, Richard III, Othello and Measure for Measure were set texts, but with his voracious literary appetite he habitually woke at six in the morning and read a complete play by nine. The whole canon was at his command.
Then there was a compulsory language paper (‘use of English’ and translation from either French or Latin) and a paper offering, first, passages for detailed explanation and comment from the Metaphysical poets and Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, and second, essay topics on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors. ‘Swift is the only stylist,’ he opined, the exemplar of ‘clarity, precision, concisenesss and power’.5 The Irish satirist taught Hughes the art of entering a word as if it were a world, of writing prose that is instantly accessible and memorable yet wild in imaginative reach. There was also a paper on literary criticism and, indeed, underlying all the work was the distinctive Cambridge method of practical criticism: close reading of the words on the page, dating of passages by their style, discrimination of good poetic writing from bad. In everything that he wrote, Hughes chose his words with care. He judged his own writing by the high standards instilled by John Fisher and reinforced by the Cambridge school of criticism. His letters to Olwyn are prose poems in themselves: ‘Sometimes I think Cambridge wonderful, at others a ditch full of clear cold water where all the frogs have died. It is a bird without feathers; a purse without money; an old dry apple, or the gutters run pure claret.’6
In his second term, King George VI died and there was a sense of national excitement and new hope projected on to the young Queen. He exclaimed to Olwyn that they were the new Elizabethans, the first since the time of Hamlet; he wrote a masque in which the first Elizabeth met the second; he dared to dream that he might become the poetic soul of a new English Renaissance. His principal extra-curricular activity was the university Archery Club – a suitably Elizabethan sport.
Six feet two inches, dark and handsome, he cut a figure striding along King’s Parade in his long dark coat. Reminiscing, he told of an occasion when an undergraduate called out, ‘Ted, Ted,’ ran up to him, shook his hand and said ‘Thank you for saving England.’ He had, he explained, been mistaken for Ted Dexter, the charismatic university cricket captain who made his Test debut while still an undergraduate. The two men did indeed share the same dark good looks. Whether or not there is embellishment in the telling,7 the spirit of the tale is true: saving England by re-embodying the heady spirit of Elizabethan poetry was indeed our Ted’s mission. He believed that a person’s whole biography was visible in their walk.8 All who knew him at Cambridge remembered the long coat and the confident stride, whereas his poetic ambition was, at least in his first year, kept under wraps.
The