Читать книгу Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life - Jonathan Bate - Страница 13

Cambridge 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 end of the academic year was marked by a May Ball, held in June. Ted was still in touch with Edna Wholey, who was now living with her husband in nearby Bedford. He had been to stay with them for a weekend and, though he confided to Olwyn that their company now bored him, he went over again and asked Edna to accompany him to the Ball. She declined, probably because her husband disapproved of the idea, but a visitor happened to present, a stunningly beautiful dark-haired Italian called Carina, niece of a Bedford celebrity, boxer and bit-part movie actor Tony Arpeno. So Ted asked her instead. Since they had never met before, everyone was rather startled when Carina accepted. Her parents booked a hotel room in Cambridge, waited up anxiously all through the night of the Ball and whisked her off to the station at dawn. A surviving photo from Ball night shows Ted with his trademark lock of hair falling over the eyes. He has the facial expression of a cat that got the cream.

Summer back home in Woodlands Avenue, Todmorden, was dull in comparison, with Gerald far away in Australia and Olwyn working in London. After graduating, she had taken a secretarial course at Pitman on the Bayswater Road in order to make herself employable. Ted set up a study for himself in the attic and prepared for his second year.

When he returned to Pembroke in the autumn, he had different accommodation. It was a good-sized first-floor room with large windows, tucked away in a building that had once been the Master’s Lodge, reached via an opulent staircase and looking out over the Fellows’ car park. He was screened from street-noise, but annoyed by a loud public schoolboy on the floor above. He took revenge by playing Beethoven far into the night.

Music was a serious passion. Olwyn moved to Paris that autumn to take up a secretarial job at the British Embassy, and he wrote to tell her of many a concert. His standards were high: at a recital by the legendary pianist Solomon (Cutner) there were some disappointingly slight encore pieces and then, in response to the cry ‘More Beethoven!’, a rendering of the Waldstein sonata which Ted did not consider up to scratch. He expressed a good deal more enthusiasm for his new academic supervisor, a graduate student called Eric Mottram, who was a poet and an enthusiast for avant-garde American poetry. ‘I never knew anyone so forceful in his flow,’ Ted told Olwyn. Supervisions were heated, argumentative, energising, extending well beyond the appointed hour’s length.9

By day, Ted took charge of the reorganisation of the Archery Club. He kept a great bow in a corner of his room, and practised for hours. By virtue of representing the university against Oxford, he won a ‘half-blue’. In the evenings, besides concerts, there were films and plays – and the pub. The highlight of Michaelmas term was a poetry reading by Dylan Thomas, at the Cambridge Union under the auspices of the English Society. For the first time, Ted witnessed a charismatic poet in the flesh, holding an audience rapt with his word music. Afterwards, together with McCaughey and a couple of other friends, he followed Dylan Thomas and the society committee to the Eagle in Bene’t Street so as to listen in on their conversation. Thomas and his acolytes spoke of filling Swansea Bay with beer. Elated, Ted and his friends then returned to Pembroke and burst into the room of Francis Holmes à Court, a literary-minded undergraduate of aristocratic pedigree (he subsequently succeeded his father, the 5th Baron Heytesbury). There they met another Welshman, a freshman called Daniel Huws who had been at school with Holmes à Court and had now come up to Peterhouse, just across the road. Ted, still high on the oxygen of Thomas’s poetry, didn’t really notice him, but the following year their respective circles of friends conjoined in the Anchor pub, with its dark-brown bar, table-football machine and, downstairs, benches by the landing-stage beside the punts waiting for hire.

In the Anchor, Ted was a brooding silent presence, content to let others make the conversational running. The most opinionated was Roger Owen, Liverpool Welsh, all politics and sociology. But when Ted spoke, everyone listened. He wasn’t interested in politics but was an oracle on matters literary and was scathing about many of the dons in the English Faculty. Everyone in the group had a store of anecdotes, mostly mocking, about the lectures of Dr Leavis. Ted especially loathed the one on his beloved Yeats. In the Cambridge system, it was the weekly college supervision that counted. Lectures were an optional extra. Ted went to fewer and fewer as he progressed through his degree, but he thought well of both the theatrical Dadie Rylands and the sometime surrealist poet Hugh Sykes Davies on Shakespeare.

Towards the end of the pub evenings, much beer consumed, Terence McCaughey, with his seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of Irish ballads, led them in singing. Ted would eventually be cajoled into participation. ‘He had a soft, light voice,’ Huws recalled, ‘with the slight tremolo which later characterized his reading voice.’10 His party pieces were traditional numbers such as ‘Eppie Morie’ and Coleridge’s favourite, the grand old ballad of ‘Sir Patrick Spens’. Then they would all join in a round of ‘Waltzing Matilda’.

Others who joined the Pembroke group at the Anchor were Fintan O’Connell and Joe Lyde, Northern Irish grammar school boys, one a Catholic and the other a Protestant. Lyde was loud and sometimes rude, a trumpeter and jazz pianist with the best band in Cambridge. A ladies’ man, he would get to play in New Orleans, aggravate Sylvia Plath with his outlandish tales and brash words, and die young, of drink.

As for Ted’s studies, there were supervisions on the Victorians and a special paper on Wordsworth and Coleridge, very much to his taste. Always able to read poetry with close attention, he jumped easily through the hoop of Cambridge practical criticism and achieved a 2.1 classification in Part I of the English Tripos, the honours examination at the end of the second year. Only nine candidates achieved first-class honours in English that year, and over 120 got a 2.2 or a Third. Ted and three of his Pembroke contemporaries were among the thirty 2.1s, outshining the four other Pembroke students, so this was a very creditable if not an outstanding performance.

The Cambridge degree is very flexible: it was perfectly possible to take one part of the Tripos in one subject and the other in something completely different. After Part I, half the Pembroke English students changed course. Ted’s choice was Archaeology and Anthropology. He thus missed out on the paper that he would most have enjoyed had he stuck with English: the study of Tragedy from the ancient Greeks via Shakespeare and Racine to Ibsen, Chekhov and Yeats, a course in which Sylvia Plath would immerse herself a couple of years later.

Many times over the years Ted Hughes told the story of why he switched away from English. It was one of his party pieces, often used to introduce public readings of his best-known poem, ‘The Thought-Fox’ – though that poem was not written until well after he graduated. He was not always consistent in the details of the tale, so there may well be a characteristic element of invention, or at least embellishment, in the telling. But there is no doubting the centrality of the story to his personal myth.

A cornerstone of Cambridge undergraduate life is the ‘essay crisis’. Terms are short, reading lists are long and extra-curricular distractions are legion. The essay for the weekly supervision is accordingly left to the last minute, written deep into the night. Ted sometimes wrote with great facility, especially if the subject was one of his passions, such as William Blake. But sometimes he could not get going on his essay. He’d stare at the blank page on his desk, write and rewrite an opening, cross it out, give up and go to bed.

One night when this happened, he dreamed that he was still at his desk, in his ‘usual agonising frame of mind, trying to get one word to follow another’. The lamplight fell on the page. In the dream the door slowly opened. A head appeared in the dim light: at the height of a man but with the form of a fox. The creature descended the two or three steps down into the room. With its fox’s head and ‘long skinny fox’s body’, it stood upright, as tall as a wolf reared on its hind legs. The hands were those of a man: ‘He had escaped from a fire – the smell of burning hair was strong, and his skin was charred and in places cracking, bleeding freshly through the splits.’ The creature walked across the room to the desk, placed the paw that was a human hand on the page and spoke: ‘Stop this – you are destroying us.’ The burns were worst on the hand, and when the fox-man moved away there was a bloody print upon the page. The dream seemed so wholly real that Ted got up and examined his essay for the bloody mark. He determined forthwith to abandon his course in English Literature. In some versions of the story, he dreams again the following night. Either the fox returns and nods approvingly, or the creature returns in the variant form of a leopard, again standing erect.

In his fullest recounting of the story, Hughes says that the essay he was (not) writing was on Samuel Johnson, a personality he greatly liked. Johnson and Leavis are the only two English writers habitually referred to as ‘Doctor’ (the critic George Steiner once quipped that theirs were the only two honorary doctorates conferred by the Muses). Dr Johnson and Dr Leavis were archetypes of the critical spirit, so at this moment the former was standing in for the latter: ‘I connected the fox’s command to my own ideas about Eng. Lit. and the effect of the Cambridge blend of pseudo-critical terminology and social rancour on creative spirit, and from that moment abandoned my efforts to adapt myself.’ Hughes explained that he had a considerable gift ‘for Leavis-style dismantling of texts’, indeed an almost ‘sadistic’ aptitude for it, but the procedure – surgical and objective, the antithesis of schoolmaster Fisher’s spirit of ‘husbandry and sympathetic coaching’ – seemed to him both a ‘foolish game’ and inimical to the inner life.11 The critical impulse cauterises the creative spirit.

Given his interest in folklore and comparative mythology, fostered by The White Goddess, Archaeology and Anthropology was an obvious choice for Part II of the Tripos. He was able to focus on the anthropological side. An added advantage of changing subject was that, in order to mug up his new discipline, he was encouraged to come into residence during the ‘Long Vacation term’ (an opportunity to study in Cambridge for part of the three-month summer break). This was an escape from the boredom of home. There were a demanding eight papers to prepare for. General Ethnology was an introduction to race, culture and environment, exploring different types of human economy in relation to habitat. Two papers on prehistory gave him an introduction to the archaeology of the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic Ages, and the ‘origins of higher civilization’. Then there was Physical Anthropology: man’s zoological position in relation to the animal world, a subject of considerable interest to Hughes. Social Anthropology was less attractive to him, but it was compensated for by a special paper in Comparative Ethnography that gave him the opportunity to read such classics as Margaret Mead’s Growing up in New Guinea and Bronisław Malinowski’s Coral Gardens and their Magic. The course was rounded off with an essay on a subject of the student’s choice and a practical examination, ‘being a test of the candidate’s power of recognizing and describing bodily features and artifacts, ancient and modern, including those drawn from the culture or area specifically studied’.12 Ted enjoyed identifying bones.

Promising as the prospect of such a course seemed, he quickly grew bored with the slog of factual learning. He attended very few lectures and instead borrowed the notes of his supervision partner. Pembroke did not have an ‘Arch & Anth’ don, so he was farmed out to St John’s College, where he was supervised by Glyn Daniel, who later became a highly successful populariser of prehistory while writing Cambridge-based murder mysteries in his spare time. Ted spent most of his final year in the University Library, pursuing his own course of reading. Unlike the Bodleian in Oxford, the Cambridge UL housed most of its stock on open stacks, with an arcane classification system that led to serendipitous juxtapositions. It was perfect for browsing, for following one’s nose, for the gathering of eclectic wisdom. Ted had a lust for free-range intellectual enquiry: he told a friend that he got an erection every time he entered the library.13

For his Finals, he leaned heavily on Graves’s White Goddess, a book mistrusted by professional ethnographers, and he scraped a third-class result. Academically, he would have done better to stay with English Literature. Nevertheless, Mead’s work gave him fascinating insights into alternative views of sex, marriage, the rearing of children and the supernatural, while Malinowski’s ‘ethnographic theory of the magical word’14 could be read as an endorsement of his own attitude to the supernatural: its argument was that the magical spells of the Trobriand islanders had an essentially pragmatic function. Like all forms of language, they must be regarded as ‘verbal acts’ intended primarily not to communicate thought but to bring about practical effects. This was very much Hughes’s view of the horoscope and the Ouija board (several of his contemporaries expressed some alarm at his attempts to conjure up the spirit world). Another set text – of which he would have got the gist, even if he didn’t read it through – had the potential to contribute to his sense of modern civilisation’s damaging alienation from nature: Ian Hogbin’s Experiments in Civilization was a report on how the arrival of European culture severed a native community in the Solomon Islands from its ancient ways.

Cambridge had its own social anthropology. There were divides between the posh colleges and the more middling, between the hearties and the aesthetes, between the entitled public school crowd and the meritocratic grammar school boys. Cavalry twill and flamboyant hacking jackets were set against grey flannel trousers and tweed. Ted and his provincial friends, drinking in the Anchor, looked with a mixture of awe and scorn upon the metropolitan sophisticates who dominated the Union, the Amateur Dramatic Club and the student literary magazine Granta. Among the stars of their Cambridge were Peter Hall, future founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company and first artistic director of the National Theatre; Karl Miller, who would be literary editor of the Spectator, the New Statesman and the Listener and then found the London Review of Books; Thom Gunn of Trinity, regarded as the best student poet in Cambridge; and, most glamorous of all, Nick Tomalin, president of the Union and editor of Granta. Tomalin would marry a literary-minded Newnham College girl, Claire Delavenay, daughter of a French academic and an English composer. He became a journalist who was killed on the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War, she a leading biographer.

Ted published a couple of poems in Granta, hiding himself under the pseudonym Daniel Hearing. He also submitted work to new, smaller literary magazines. Peter Redgrove, something of a loner with unfashionably short hair and a leather jacket, set up delta explicitly to rival Granta. He took on Philip Hobsbaum, one of Leavis’s Downing men, as an assistant editor. Hobsbaum, who could be malicious, recalls Hughes sidling up to him in that other pub, the Mill, where the preferred beverage was strong Merrydown cider. Ted muttered out of the corner of his mouth, ‘I hear you and Redgrove are starting a poetry magazine. Here are some poems I’d like you to look at.’ With that, ‘he shuffled off to the gents’:

The wad of manuscript he had thrust at us was greasy and typed in grey characters, as though the ribbon in the typewriter had been used a great many times over a period of years, and never been changed. Redgrove looked at this dubiously, and uttered these memorable words: ‘Ted’s a nice chap, but I don’t think we ought to publish his poems.’15

After Ted had graduated, delta did publish one of these poems. Entitled ‘The Woman with Such High Heels She Looked Dangerous’, it tells of a woman slick with makeup coaxing a man into the darkness and stabbing him: ‘Men become wolves, but a wolf has become a woman.’16

The June 1954 issue of another little magazine, Chequer, appeared, in a bright yellow cover, in his final term. Daniel Huws, who had had a poem accepted there himself, was surprised to see Ted with a copy in his hands when he turned up in the Anchor one evening. Neither knew that the other wrote poetry. Ted quietly asked Dan his opinion of a poem by one Peter Crew. ‘I wrote it,’ he then explained.17 Entitled ‘Song of the Sorry Lovers’, it features a couple in bed, a hyena laughing outside and a rousing of the ‘animal faculties’.18 Later that night, Hughes and Huws went to see Redgrove, who also had a poem in Chequer. There were six bottles of German wine in his room at Queens’. They got drunk, crashed a party on another staircase and Ted got into a fight and damaged his thumb. On another occasion, he received a police caution for being drunk and disorderly after an undergraduate escapade involving a purloined road sign.

He was growing in confidence. Stories about him began circulating in college. His final-year room was on the top floor of the eastern side of Pembroke’s front court. He painted life-size pumas and what his bedmaker referred to as ‘bacchanalian orgies’ on the sloping ceiling. The Tutor, a benign classicist called Tony Camps, came to investigate. Ted suggested that the Tutor should lie down on the floor in order to appreciate the frescoes fully. He did so, then ordered whitewashing at Ted’s expense. Camps noted in the Tutor’s file that Hughes was often tipsy and that his manner had a bearish quality, but he still wrote him enthusiastic and affectionate job references.19 An even better story was that a college porter informed the Tutor that Mr Hughes was entertaining a lady in his rooms. Camps went to investigate, knocking on the heavy old door. After a few moments, it opened slowly to reveal Mr Hughes ‘stark naked with his arms outstretched like a cross’. Ted spoke: ‘Crucify me.’20

As with most undergraduates, there was many an incident involving climbing into college at night. Gallingly for ex-National Service men, it was like being in the forces again: lock-up at 10 p.m., fines for staying out late (twopence, doubled to fourpence if it was after eleven), and no overnight female guests. All the Cambridge colleges were single-sex and many girls at Newnham and Girton, the only two female colleges, kept to themselves or were intimidatingly bluestocking. Outnumbering female students by fifteen to one, male undergraduates looked to the town, and in particular to the nurses training at Addenbrooke’s Hospital on Trumpington Street, conveniently close to Pembroke. Ted started going out with a nurse called Liz Grattidge. Tall and blonde, from Manchester, she sat quietly in the Anchor, when she was free at weekends, ‘smiling indulgently at the proceedings’.21 Coming from a northern city of industrial grime and rain that was forever scudding in off the Pennines, she dreamed of making a new life in Australia – which she eventually did.

Ted was up for this. It would take him back to Gerald, who was now settled in Tullamarine, a suburb of Melbourne. He was married to a woman called Joan and sending home wafer-thin light-blue airmails filled with easy living and Australian light, perfect for painting (Gerald was showing a talent for watercolour). Just before sitting his Finals in May 1954, Ted surprised his mother and father with a letter. He had filled in emigration papers for Australia. Like Gerald, he would become a Ten Pound Pom. He told his parents that he was going to take a girl with him – she was up for anything. They would probably get married before going. He didn’t mention her name, but explained that she was a nurse and that all his friends said that from certain angles she looked just like him (apart from the fact that she was blonde and he was dark). There was something comforting about the idea of marrying a nurse who was happy to submit to his will: ‘I kick her around and everything goes as I please.’22