Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life. Jonathan Bate
a new poetry of working-class roots and rural rootedness. This is what he was developing in his new book, which was nearing completion. The name of D. H. Lawrence is strikingly absent from the genealogy outlined here: perhaps out of a certain ‘anxiety of influence’, Ted is suppressing the name of the writer who came immediately before him as a northern, working-class voice with a sensitivity to the raw forces of nature, an interest in myth and archetype, an unashamed openness of sexual energy, and a distinctly lubricious attitude to the female body (Lawrence was the poet who compared the ‘wonderful moist conductivity’ of a fig to a woman’s genitals).51
Leonard Baskin agreed to consider doing a design for the cover of the new book. Ted gave him a lead by suggesting that the ‘general drift’ of the poems could be summed up as ‘Man as an elaborately perfected intestine, or upright weasel’.52 Ted proposed Baskin to Faber, but did not get the response he wanted; they went for a geometric dust-wrapper design instead. In a separate development, though, Faber did accept ‘a book of 8 poems for children’, each of which was about a relative: a sister who was really a crow, an aunt devoured by a thistle, and so on. It was published under the title Meet My Folks!
Ted jokingly told Charles Monteith, his editor at Faber, that it was his own equivalent of Lowell’s Life Studies, which had included intense poems of family memory and marital discord with such titles as ‘My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow’, ‘Grandparents’ and ‘Man and Wife’. It would be a long time before Ted started publishing pieces about his family, let alone his marriage, in this ‘confessional’ voice.
Ted and Sylvia received a joint invitation to spend two months in the autumn at Yaddo, a rural retreat for writers in upstate New York. Though invited to apply, their proposals still had to be graded by the writers who were Yaddo’s assessors (Richard Eberhart, John Cheever and Morton Zabel). Both applications received a good mix of As and Bs.53 They were in.
They decided that, before taking up residence and then returning to England, they should set off to see America. They packed boxes for the journey, boxes in readiness for Yaddo and boxes for home. Ted wrote to his parents, telling them in great detail (complete with a little drawing) about the tent they had bought, discounted from $90 to $65. It had a sewn-in waterproof groundsheet, something unheard of in the camping days of his youth, and even a meshed window. Aurelia Plath bought them air mattresses that folded down to the size of pillowcases and thick puffy sleeping bags with zips all round (meaning that they could be joined together for cuddles on chilly nights in the wild). She threw in an assortment of other camping gadgets for good measure, and they had a trial night sleeping in the tent on the back lawn of her house in Elmwood Road, Wellesley. Ted pronounced it as comfortable a night as he had ever had. Any apprehensions that cleanliness-minded Sylvia would not be the camping type were swiftly dispelled. They said goodbye and off they went in Aurelia’s car, on a ten-week road trip through mountain, prairie and desert, all the way to California and back.
First they headed for the Great Lakes, crossing the Canadian border into Ontario. They took snapshots of each other by the tent and the waterside. In the Algonquin Provincial Park, Sylvia looked happier than she had ever looked, as a deer took blueberries from her hand. Then they went west to Wisconsin, where they camped by Lake Superior in the field of a kindly Polish fisherman near a village with the wonderful name of Cornucopia. His daughter took them fishing, but there wasn’t much in the way of catch, since lampreys had eaten nearly all the trout in the lake.
Then it was across the prairies, under big skies and through the Dakota Badlands. There were fierce electric storms, the earth was a sinister red. It was a place where seams of lignite ignited spontaneously, burning slowly for years or even centuries, turning the clay soil to brick shale. The land reeked of sulphur and tar. ‘This is evil,’ Ted remembered Sylvia saying. ‘This is real evil.’ There seemed to be some strange consonance between this America and the dark recesses of her mind. ‘Maybe it’s the earth,’ she said, or ‘Maybe it’s ourselves.’ The emptiness seemed to be sucking something out of them, the dark electricity within ‘Frightening the earth, and frightening us’.54 ‘The Badlands’, which went through dozens of drafts before reaching its final form in Birthday Letters, was one of his first poems in the loose style of a journal.
Stepping further westward, they crossed Montana. This was real cattle country, empty wilderness, not unlike the Yorkshire Moors, but with grass and richer soil, and without any valleys. At roadside cafés, you got ‘steak the size of a plate, home-made berry pie piled with icecream, your coffee cup filled up as fast as you emptied it (for the price of just one cup)’.55 This was the real America, the generous and friendly people real Americans. After a long drive southwards, they arrived at the Yellowstone National Park, which was becoming more famous than ever with the advent on television the previous year of the animated cartoon character Yogi Bear. Ted told his parents that it was like the Alps, but with bears. They counted nineteen on the road in the first 30 miles after entering the National Park. The bears would wander up to people’s cars and stand on their hind legs, hoping for food. ‘People get regularly mauled, trying to feed them,’ Edith and Bill were informed.56 On their first night in the park, Ted heard one sniffing round their tent, which was only 10 feet from a trash can.
On the second night they returned at dusk from a drive around the Grand Loop of the park, seeing the geysers and the hot pools, only to find a large black bear standing over their trash can. It lumbered off when it was caught in their headlights. They locked their food in the boot of the car and washed down the picnic table and benches. At ‘the blue moonlit hour of quarter to three’ Sylvia was woken from a dream in which their car was blown to pieces with a great crash. The crashing sound was real: her first thought was that a bear had smashed open the car with a great cuff and started eating the engine (a seed here for Ted’s story about the metal-devouring Iron Man?). Ted, also woken by the crash, had the more prosaic thought that the bear had knocked their cooking pans off the picnic table. They lay listening to ‘grunts, snuffles, clattering can lids’. Then there was ‘a bumpity rolling noise as the bear bowled a tin’ past their tent. Sylvia peered out of the tent screen and, ‘not ten feet away’, saw a huge bear ‘guzzling at a tin’. In the morning they discovered that the noise was that of ‘the black-and-gilt figured cookie tin’ in which they kept their fruit and nut bars. Though they had secured most of their food in the boot, this had been on the back seat of the car inside Sylvia’s closed red bag. The bear had smashed the car window, torn the bag open and found the tin, which it had also managed to open. The bag had also contained Ritz crackers and Hydrox cookies, which had been eaten, and a selection of postcards, which she found in the morning among the debris left from the visit. The top card, a picture of moose antlers, was turned upside down. And a postcard of a bear was face up on the ground with the paw print of an actual bear on it.57
Having consumed the contents of the cookie tin, the bear had gone away. Ted and Sylvia had lain awake, terrified that it might come back and rip its way into their tent. It did indeed return, just as dawn broke. Ted stood up and looked out of the window of the tent to see it slurping away at the oranges that they had left on the ledge behind the back seat of the car. ‘It’s the big brown one’, he told Sylvia. They had heard that this was the nasty sort. Scared off by the sound of ‘The Camp Ranger’s car, doing the morning rounds’, it ran away, tripped on a guy rope and nearly tumbled into Ted and Sylvia’s tent.58
The story went around the camp. A Yellowstone regular told them to smear the tent with kerosene because bears hated the smell. Someone else suggested red pepper, but they decided that the best thing would be to move to a campsite higher up the hillside and not too close to any garbage cans. Ted appended a handwritten postscript to Sylvia’s typewritten letter home: ‘Well, I wanted to tell about the bear, but Sivvy’s done that better than I even remembered it.’59
In