Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life. Jonathan Bate
But the boys loved him, especially when he read out ballads and encouraged them to write their own. And still more when he made them stage little Elizabethan plays.
In February, three days before the anniversary of their first meeting at Falcon Yard, came winter cheer: Ted had won the competition. The Hawk in the Rain was going to be published in America. The distinction of the judging panel almost certainly assured English publication too. Ted told Olwyn that his first reaction on hearing the news was a tremendous sense of guilt – partly, though he did not say so, at the fact that he owed the breakthrough to Sylvia finding out about the competition, and yet it was his poems, not hers, that would be published. He went straight back to read the poems and immediately found all sorts of things he wanted to change. He was appalled at himself for letting Sylvia send them out ‘in such an unfinished state’.32 Sylvia had no such hesitation: the book was magnificent, Ted was a genius, the poems combined ‘intellect and grace of complex form, with lyrical music, male vigor and vitality, and moral commitment and love and awe of the world’. He had everything and she was blissfully happy with him, happy indeed that his book had been accepted first. She rejoiced, she told Aurelia, that he was ahead of her: ‘There is no question of rivalry, but only mutual joy and a sense of us doubling our prize-winning and creative output.’33 She was proud to have been the one who had pushed Ted to make the selection and then typed up the poems.
Sylvia promptly sent a copy of the typescript to Faber and Faber, Britain’s premier poetry publisher, mentioning the prize and the prospect of publication by Harper in America. Faber returned it with a curt note saying that they did not publish first volumes by American writers. With characteristic persistence, she sent it back, saying that Ted was actually English. They agreed to publish a UK edition. Mr T. S. Eliot himself very much liked the poems. Within a week of acceptance, Faber sent the poems in proof – well before Harper had set up the New York edition in type. Ted would, he proudly told his parents, be ‘the first poet ever to publish his first book in both countries’.34 Indeed, only Auden and Dylan Thomas had gone before him in having a volume of poems published simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic.
More good news arrived from America: Sylvia was offered a teaching job at Smith, her old college. Ted would go too. Plans for language teaching in Spain or further afield were abandoned. To show her husband her own country was a much more exciting plan. In the better weather of Easter term, they walked on Grantchester Meadows, sometimes getting up early enough to watch the sun rise. One morning Sylvia sat on a stile and recited Chaucer to the cows: ‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote …’.35 Soon she was preparing for her final exams. Ted helped her to revise.
In May, he wrote to Gerald and Joan – they now had two children, Ashley and Brendon – saying that ‘marriage is my medium’.36 He and Sylvia worked and walked and repaired each other’s writing. She was one of the best critics he had ever met and they understood each other’s imagination ‘perfectly’. She was ‘the most responsive alert creature in the world’. They struck sparks, sitting by the river, just watching for water-voles, Sylvia thrilled when the little animals came close. Ted would let out a squeal in imitation of a rabbit, and out they would come. The sound was so realistic that once an owl flew down and tried to sit on his head.37
His visa and the necessary blood test were arranged. Before leaving Coleridge, he directed a school play and Sylvia attended, her only visit to his place of work. They would sail on 20 June, as soon as Sylvia had graduated. The plan was that they would be in New York for the launch of his book in August (in fact it appeared a couple of months later than that).
They went up to Yorkshire to say goodbye to the family. During this visit they happily corrected the Harper proofs of The Hawk in the Rain, but there was an embarrassing incident when Ted’s old schoolteacher John Fisher and his wife Nancy drove up from Mexborough to see them. Olwyn, who was also over from Paris for a summer stay, remembered the visit as follows:
Sylvia was very ‘gushy’ when they arrived. This clearly disconcerted the Fishers, and possibly their inadequate response offended her. Well on in the afternoon, when the talk was deep in reminiscences, she suddenly rose and left the room. We heard the outside door open and banged shut. When she didn’t return after about ten minutes, during which time Ted had become rather silent, he rose in turn and said he’d better go and see where she was. Quite a while later they returned, Sylvia rushing straight upstairs.38
For the family, this was a first glimpse of Sylvia’s emotional volatility.
Then it was off to Southampton to cross the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth. The best thing about the crossing was the food: ‘all included in the fare’, ‘steak, steak, steak – if you wish’ (a real treat, in those years when post-war rationing was still a recent memory), ‘Five courses to each meal and many choices of dish’.39 For Sylvia, who always had a very hearty appetite, the only problem was the combination of this with the Atlantic swell. On one occasion she found herself ‘kneeling on the floor of the little cabin under the electric light’ with ‘the vomit shooting out across the room from the rich dinner, the lobster and pecans and martinis’.40 Landing in New York, a customs officer looked with suspicion at Sylvia’s copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. She had often joked that in Ted she had found her own gamekeeper.
‘Ted is wonderful: how to get it down? All of a piece, smelling lovely as a baby, a hay field, strawberries under leaves, and smooth white, browning to tan, with his great lion head of hair erupting.’41 It was July 1957. Cape Cod. They had washed off the spiders and dust and coal-sludge and smeared windows of Eltisley Avenue, bathed and freshened themselves, rebaptised their marriage in the great salt tides of the Atlantic, under the summer sun.
Brother-in-law Warren drove them there a few days after a garden party at which Sylvia proudly introduced her handsome husband to more than seventy friends and family. Bicycles were strapped to the roof of the car. Aurelia’s wedding present could not have been better judged: a summer rental of a cottage belonging to friends at Eastham, a short bike ride from Nauset Light and Coast Guard beaches. For seven magical weeks they could write, before heading inland for Sylvia to take up her position at Smith. It was a little wooden house in ‘a Christmas tree forest’,42 fully fitted out with squirrels on the roof and chipmunks under the floor. ‘That’s my first ever real chipmunk,’ cried Ted. The little creature lodged in his memory as a ‘midget Aboriginal American’, a ‘snapshot for life’. Especially as Sylvia would sometimes make a face like a chipmunk.43
He recorded his first impressions of America in long, journal-like letters sent to his parents in Yorkshire, Gerald and Joan in Australia, and Olwyn in Paris. In comparison with dour, confined Fifties England, everything was large, opulent, brash. Even the robins were as big as thrushes. Sociability was compulsory. As was cleanliness, which he joked that he felt like reacting against: ‘My natural instinct is to practise little private filthinesses – I spit, pea [sic] on shrubbery, etc, and have a strong desire to sleep on the floor – just to keep in contact with a world that isn’t quite as glazed as this one.’44 Wellesley seemed to him very suburban, so he was glad to return to nature on the Cape. He didn’t like the way that things were homogenised and packaged. ‘What a place America is,’ he wrote to Olwyn. ‘Everything is in cellophane. Everything is 10,000 miles from where it was plucked or made. The bread is in cellophane that is covered with such slogans as de-crapularised, re-energised, multi-cramulated, bleached, double-bleached, rebrowned, unsanforised, guaranteed no blasphemin. There is no such thing as bread. You cannot buy bread.’