Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life. Jonathan Bate
of practical criticism was to distinguish the speaker in a poem – the written ‘I’ – from the poet himself. The reader’s business is to attend to the words on the page, to judge the authenticity of the feeling created by the verbal tone, the cadence and texture of the verse, not to suppose that the poem is a crude transcription of the writer’s personal experience. Furthermore, as T. S. Eliot taught, all poems are as much engagements with previous poems, with the literary ‘tradition’, as they are expressions of the self. Hughes’s ‘Secretary’ may have had one seed in his observation of a particular woman, or kind of woman, but it was also his reworking of the typist in her bedsit passively surrendering to the ‘young man carbuncular’ in Eliot’s The Waste Land.
By the summer of 1955, Ted had broken up with Liz and was going out with a girl called Shirley who was reading English at Newnham. She was beautiful and clever, stronger and more interesting than Liz, though shy and quietly spoken. They were serious about each other. When she appeared leaning over the railings of the Mill bridge, Ted would leave his friends in the Anchor and go off with her.
Shirley was in her second year. She came from a suburban background in the north-west (her parents were both pharmacists), and had been to a mixed grammar school. At first she had been overawed by Cambridge, and most particularly by what seemed to her the supreme self-confidence of her fellow-undergraduates. Nevertheless, during her first year she had found some true friends at Newnham and come to feel more at ease.
What attracted Shirley to Ted initially was his unorthodox lifestyle, his residence in the orchard of St Botolph’s Rectory, his poetry, his snatches of French picked up over his Paris summer the previous year (‘Zut, alors,’ he would say), his trademark black corduroy jacket – all part of a bohemian persona. He fried herrings in oatmeal for her; he taught her a betting system based on the form of three-year-old racehorses. He seemed rooted in reality – the antithesis of the rarefied and cerebral atmosphere of Cambridge. He made the conventionally ambitious men pale into insignificance. But what made her fall deeply in love with him was an intensity, a power, a sense of certainty, of sureness. He had a stillness, a watchfulness about him – not the watchfulness of a detached analytic observer; he was empathetic, he engaged with the world, but always retained an immutable inner ‘self’. This, it seemed to her, encompassed but was more than his belief in his vocation as a poet. She thought it had been with him always. She grew to feel she had become part of that certainty, that ‘self’. Later, when she had to accept that this was no longer true, the effect was devastating.
With her auburn hair and pale freckled skin, she was his Deirdre of the Sorrows, his ethereal Celtic girl. In the warm summer of 1955, Shirley stayed up for the Long Vacation term. She had a lovely room looking out on Newnham greenery. Ted came over from his gardening job, bearing armfuls of roses. He invited her to the Beacon for a week. She found his father quiet and withdrawn, his mother warm and properly maternal: she made them real homemade lemonade. While there, Shirley, in his mother’s absence, made a disastrous attempt to cook Scotch eggs and left the kitchen a blackened mess. She feared that Ted’s house-proud mother would be enraged, but Edith just laughed it off. Olwyn then arrived from Paris for a brief visit. Like Ted, she towered over her parents. Shirley felt more than a little intimidated by this striking, blonde Viking goddess. Olwyn shook her hand, turned it over, examined her palm and said: ‘You have some very nasty moments coming.’ Shirley was chilled by an antagonism she could not understand. When she and Olwyn had to share a bed, Shirley balanced herself precariously on the extreme edge for the whole night.
It was in his West Yorkshire home that Ted revealed his detailed knowledge of and passionate love for the natural world. He was truly himself there. When he took Shirley to Haworth Parsonage, she, who had always loved Wuthering Heights, felt that Ted, like Heathcliff, belonged to these moors. He himself was part of that landscape, elemental, unchangeable.
From Yorkshire they went over to Liverpool. Shirley’s mother met them at the barrier at Lime Street station. They were both dressed in black, the uniform of rebellious youth. Her mother was shocked by Shirley’s appearance, and said: ‘You look as though you haven’t slept for a week.’ Shirley, of course, was secretly gratified by the remark. As they went down the avenue to her home, her mother walked a few paces ahead of them, not wanting the neighbours to associate her with this disreputable-looking pair. Shirley’s father was not impressed with Ted’s aspirations to be a poet. ‘I suppose you would go out to work,’ he said to his daughter, ‘and he would stay at home writing poetry.’ The following morning, Shirley, still in her nightdress, went into the guest room to bid Ted good morning. Her father saw her emerging, and Ted was asked to leave.
At the beginning of the Michaelmas term, Ted made a proposal: why didn’t she leave Cambridge and everything else behind her and go to Spain with him? She was not quite enough of a bohemian to agree. Later in life she was to wonder how all their lives would have turned out if she had gone, but she also convinced herself that what was about to happen was meant to be – it would lead to the magnificent poetry of both Ted and Sylvia.
As for Shirley’s appearance, Ted never forgot it. In an exquisite unpublished poem, the threads of memory are woven out of the ‘bushed mass’ of Shirley’s densely tangled hair that overwhelmed her ‘small-boned freckled / Irish face’. Her large green eyes were ‘Startling and nearly too pretty’ for her pretty and ‘silent’ face. ‘Baffled and loving’, she and Ted break out of themselves and into each other. A single strand of hair becomes his link, his bridge, to something he cannot forget, a world he never entered, a future that was not to be. Shirley offered him ‘a great richness’, but he was too young ‘To recognize one of those offers / Life makes only once’.17
The poem was written many years later, as part of Hughes’s long process of coming to terms with his marriage to Sylvia Plath and her death. He was always fascinated by the idea of the road not taken, the possible alternative life story. What if he had taken that passage to Australia? Or obeyed the command of the university Proctors and stayed away from the launch party of Saint Botolph’s Review? Ireland – especially the west of Ireland, where W. B. Yeats had found his home – was always his land of lost content, the place to which he dreamed of escaping. If Shirley had accepted the invitation to Spain and then married him, his soul and body would have mingled with a child of Ireland.
Shirley was the inspiration for ‘Fallgrief’s Girlfriends’, another of Ted’s poems published in Saint Botolph’s Review. The persona of Fallgrief, by this account a projection of Hughes himself, has a rather dim view of his girlfriends (‘admiration’s giddy mannequins / Lead every sense to motley’) and of sexual congress (‘insects couple as they murder each other’) until he is changed by finding ‘a woman with such wit and looks / He can brag of her in every company’.18 He was proud of Shirley. But still he was marking time, waiting for his real life to begin. Just before his twenty-fifth birthday he wrote in his journal of how he still felt like an ‘observer not yet called into the lists’. He sees himself as detached, idle, lacking in will, in need of some violent force to energise him and spark him into creative life.19
The living colossus in the pantheon of Ted Hughes and his contemporaries was Thomas Stearns Eliot. After Hughes became Poet Laureate, he delivered a lengthy toast in Eliot’s memory on the occasion of the centenary of his birth. He wrote it up under the title A Dancer to God. Like his meditations on his other poetic heroes – Shakespeare, Coleridge, Yeats – this piece is a scarcely veiled manifesto for his own work. Its theme is ‘the voice of Poetry as the voice of Eros’, which is indeed the thrust of Hughes’s own poetry. Eros: the primordial Greek god of desire, son of Aphrodite (Roman Cupid, son of Venus), embodiment of the madness of erotic love, and in Freud the term for the sex drive or life-force that is the opposite of the death drive (Eros versus Thanatos).
Even as a student, Ted was mapping out the argument that he later crystallised in what he called the ‘unified field theory’ of A Dancer to God.20 He and his friends believed that the two great English-language poets of modern times were unquestionably W.