Читать книгу Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life - Jonathan Bate - Страница 15

Philip Hobsbaum was working for a television and film production company. He wrote a letter on his friend’s behalf to the story editor at the film company J. Arthur Rank, which had studios at Pinewood in the London suburbs. Ted duly got a job reading dozens of novels, histories and biographies, summarising the plots with a view to their potential as movie scripts. Many of his treatments survive in his notebooks: the Battle of Stalingrad, the Life of Robespierre, even James Joyce’s Ulysses.1 Summarising other people’s work made him all the more eager to find a way of devoting himself to his own writing. He kept his complete Shakespeare in the drawer of his desk in the office and got it out when the supervisor wasn’t around.

The movie people were not to his taste; he thought that they were all up their own or each other’s ‘arses’.2 He lived for the weekends. Sometimes Shirley went down to London and stayed with him in Rugby Street. Ted, convinced that his talents lay only in poetry and that he had no aptitude for prose, suggested to her that he might give her some of the plot outlines he was reviewing at Pinewood for her to turn into narrative. They would part with a farewell drink at Dirty Dick’s pub opposite Liverpool Street station before she got on the train to return to college. On other weekends, Ted would visit Cambridge and test Shirley’s ability to identify brief quotations from Marlowe and Shakespeare. He recited Dylan Thomas to her, and gave her an inscribed copy of Deaths and Entrances. He also gave her a handwritten copy of a poem inspired by her, which was later included in The Hawk in the Rain.

Shirley began to detect a subtle change in their relationship, hard to pinpoint, but impossible not to feel. Two newly arrived blonde Americans were cutting a figure in Newnham. Shirley didn’t get to know them, but she saw them weekly, waiting their turn, as she and her supervision partner left the room of Enid Welsford, author of the renowned study of The Fool: His Social and Literary History, who was taking them for the paper on the English Moralists. Shirley thought that they looked supremely all-American, so was surprised when Ted eyed them up and said that he thought they looked ‘Swedish’.3

On Saturday 25 February 1956 a launch party was held for Saint Botolph’s Review. During the day, the contributors and their friends sold copies on the streets and in cafés and pubs. Bert Wyatt-Brown, an American student at King’s, sold a copy to a fellow-American Fulbright scholar from Newnham. She raced off on her bicycle, only to seek him out again a few hours later in order to ask him where she might meet these St Botolph’s poets. She had been especially impressed by the work of Lucas Myers and Ted Hughes. If her very lightly fictionalised account of the day and night is to be believed, she crashed her bike into Bert in the market place, ‘spilling oranges, figs, and a paper packet of pink-frosted cakes’.4 He gave her an invitation to the launch party.5

They had hired a big upstairs room in Falcon Yard, just off Petty Cury in the centre of town. It belonged to the university Women’s Union (female undergraduates were excluded from the bastion of the historic Union Society, where future politicians developed their debating skills). This was one of the few places in Cambridge where you could guarantee a party with more women than men. It had a polished floor for dancing and stained-glass windows as in a church. They hauled a piano up the stairs and Joe Lyde brought along his top-class jazz men. Luke Myers danced the ‘hot-wild jitterbug’.6 His recollection was that everybody was drunk except for Ted, who liked to stay in control.

The party was in full swing when the Newnham girl arrived, in the company of Hamish Stewart, a pale Canadian from Queens’ College. She had left her essay on ‘Passion as Destiny in Racine’s Plays’, with particular reference to Phèdre, half finished in her Smith Corona typewriter.7 They were already drunk, having spent an hour slugging whisky in Miller’s bar near his college. She was wearing a red hairband, red shoes and bright-red lipstick. Her fingernails were varnished in Applecart Red.8 Her name was Sylvia Plath. She was one of the two ‘Swedish-looking’ girls who had caught Ted’s eye. Bert Wyatt-Brown was dating the other one, who lodged in the same student house: Jane Baltzell (even more blonde and in several respects a rival). Bert introduced Sylvia to the men of the hour: Luke, with his ‘dark sideburns and rumpled hair, black-and-white checked baggy pants and a loose swinging jacket’; Dan Huws, with whom she had a bone to pick because of his lukewarm review of the poems she had published in the student magazine Broadsheet; Than Minton, ‘so small and dark one would have to sit down to talk to him’; Danny Weissbort with his curly hair; and David Ross, ‘immaculate and dark’. They were all dark. She was exhilarated by this bohemian world of turtleneck sweaters and the jazz getting under her skin. She grabbed Myers from his girlfriend and danced with him, shouting about his poems, in particular his ‘Sestina of the Norse Seaman’, which took a highly complex poetic form and crashed through its rules and its line-endings.9

‘Then’, as she wrote in her diary when the morning finally came, ‘the worst happened’: ‘That big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes.’ She didn’t know him, ‘but she knew him by heart’.10 Though she did not admit so much in her diary, she had come to look for him. Always obsessed with rivals and doubles, she was determined to take him off the Newnham girl she knew he was going out with. On arriving in the room, she noticed Shirley straight away: ‘Pale, freckled, with no mouth but a pink dim distant rosebud, willowed reedy, wide-eyed to the streaming of his words … Silent, fawn-eyed. Clever.’11 She too was a ‘statue-worshipper’, putting the dark poet on a pedestal.

Shouting to be heard above the band and the crowd, Sylvia enthused to Ted about his poems:

And he yelled back, colossal, in a voice that should have come from a Pole, ‘You like?’ and asking me if I wanted brandy, and me yelling yes and back into the next room past the smug shining blub face of dear Bert … and bang the door was shut and he was sloshing brandy into a glass and I was sloshing it at the place where my mouth was when I last knew about it.12

As if out on a moor in a high wind, they shouted about Dan’s review of her poems, Ted flirtatiously suggesting that his mate had only said what he did because she was beautiful. He explained that he was working in London, earning ten pounds a week, and that he had ‘obligations in the next room’ – meaning Shirley, who was not happy. Neither was Hamish, who supposedly punched Ted before the evening was out, which is hardly surprising in view of what happened next:

And I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband off, my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never again find, and my favorite silver earrings: hah, I shall keep, he barked. And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face. His poem ‘I did it, I.’ Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists.13

For Sylvia, he was the ‘one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunk of words’. Both his spoken and his written words were ‘strong and blasting like a high wind in steel girders’. She ‘screamed’ to herself, ‘oh, to give myself crashing, fighting, to you’.14 Her knees had gone ‘jelly-weak’ and ‘the room of the party hung in her eyes like a death’s-door camera-shot’.15 When she bit him and tasted his salty blood, he ‘shook her bang against the solid-grained substance of the wall’ and her attempt at another bite closed on thin air.16 Passion turned to embarrassment. She asked Hamish to take care of her – ‘I have been rather lousy,’ she explained.17

Shirley had entered the room at the moment of the kiss and the bite. Her friend and fellow-Newnham student Jean Gooder vividly recalled her figure framed in the doorway. Ted had his back to her as Sylvia came up to him, and his very height meant that Shirley did not see what happened.18

Ted had gone to the party with a sense of foreboding. He had cast the night’s horoscope and found it predicting ‘disastrous expense’. The launch was certainly not covered by the pitiful earnings of the magazine, but for Hughes it took the rest of his life to pay off the cost of that night:

First sight. First snapshot isolated

Unalterable, stilled in the camera’s glare.

Taller

Than ever you were again. Swaying so slender

It seemed your long, perfect, American legs

Simply went on up.19

The camera will be a key metaphor in Ted’s poems about Sylvia, an image of the gaze that fell upon their relationship. In this first snapshot, it is her bright confident American glamour and loudness that grab him and give him a glimpse of a very different world from that of Yorkshire Edna, Mancunian Liz and Liverpudlian Shirley.

His recall, in this Birthday Letters poem, may have been retrospectively shaped by the recollection of a famous photograph published in the Varsity student newspaper a couple of months later, in which ‘Sylvia Plath, American Fulbright Scholar at Newnham, reviews May Week fashions’. In one of the accompanying illustrations she wears a halter-neck swimsuit that reveals long muscular legs, honed by bicycling around Cambridge. She sent a cutting to her mother, calling herself Betty Grable. In her journals, she would compare herself to Grable in one sentence and Thomas Mann in the next.20 Glamour photography, movie stars, fashion, bright-red lipstick, sexually self-confident girls: in Fifties Cambridge, under grey skies and with memories of post-war rationing still alive, all these things were pure America. There was a vibrant but somewhat manic quality to them, as there was to this Fulbright scholar (‘full’ and ‘bright’ indeed). ‘The pure products of America’, wrote the poet William Carlos Williams, ‘go crazy.’21

‘You’re all there,’ Ted had said to her during their stamping dance. ‘Aren’t you?’22 She found him big and he found her tall. From the start, each was turning the other into a figure from myth. But here we need to be careful: Ted’s poem was written long after the moment. His memory was remade by subsequent events. It begins with astrological foreboding and ends with the knowledge, which he couldn’t possibly have had at the time, that the encounter in Falcon Yard would ‘brand’ him for the rest of his life: his ‘stupefied interrogation’ of her ‘blue headscarf’ and ‘the swelling ring-moat of tooth-marks’ that would mark his ‘face’ for a ‘month’ and his inner self ‘for good’. As the editor of Sylvia Plath’s journals, Hughes knew perfectly well that the scarf was red. He turns it blue as a sign of the sorrow that was to come. He would finally close Birthday Letters with a poem called ‘Red’ that begins ‘Red was your colour’ and ends ‘But the jewel you lost was blue.’23

What did he really think at the time? If he wrote a journal entry in the next few days, it is lost. Still, he could not but have been impressed and flattered that she knew his poems so well. She had quoted at him not only ‘I did it, I’, the punchline of ‘Law in the Country of the Cats’, his Saint Botolph’s Review poem about male sexual rivals, but also an image from another poem that had carved itself upon her mind: ‘most dear unscratchable diamond’.24 It was in answer to this quotation that he had said ‘You like?’ It comes from ‘The Casualty’, one of the best of his early poems. This wasn’t one of the new pieces released that very day in Saint Botolph’s: it had been published in that other Cambridge magazine, Chequer, over a year before. Sylvia’s memory of it is a mark of how Ted had impressed her on the page well before she met him in the flesh. It is also a mark of her critical acumen, for the two Hughes poems in the November 1955 issue of Chequer are much better than the four in the February 1956 Saint Botolph’s Review.

‘The Casualty’, about the body of a shot-down airman in the burnt-out fuselage of his plane, crashed in the English countryside, is quintessential Hughes. It is his first war poem, inspired by a combined memory of the droning warplanes over Mexborough and the RAF bomber on a pre-war training exercise that had run into fog over Mytholmroyd, from the wreck of which he and Gerald had salvaged tubing for their own model planes. This yoking of Mexborough and Mytholmroyd readied him to bring together his own childhood experience of the Second World War and his father’s traumatic survival of the First. In The Hawk in the Rain, he reprinted ‘The Casualty’ as the first of a sequence of war poems that ends the collection. There it is followed by ‘Bayonet Charge’, ‘Griefs for Dead Soldiers’, his finest Great War poem ‘Six Young Men’, ‘Two Wise Generals’ and ‘The Ancient Heroes and the Bomber Pilot’.25

For Plath, it wasn’t the military content of ‘The Casualty’ so much as the violent intensity of its language that bit into her spirit. An image that pierced her especially sharply was that of how the groans of the dying airman ‘rip / The slum of weeds, leaves, barbed coils’. Drunk and dancing in Falcon Yard, she quoted the poem to its author and the ‘rip’ magically went from art to life, as he tore off her headband and earrings. From the outset, there was an electricity between them, a barbed coil of passion within. The latter image carries a hint of barbed wire and all its connotations of violence and the infliction of pain: ‘Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists.’

Sylvia was sexually precocious and unusually adventurous for a Fifties girl. One reason why she was aroused by the hunk and heft, the ‘flash of violent incredible action’, in the poem about man standing up to man which she had read earlier that day, with its punch-up in the street and its cocky ending (‘I did it, I’), is that she had a history of creating rivalry between men. During her final undergraduate months at Smith College the previous year she was coming to the end of a love affair with a gentle boy called Gordon Lameyer even as she was sleeping with a dangerously bohemian Yale student called Richard Sassoon. Over the summer she had a brief but sexually blazing liaison with Peter Davison, a New York editor working at a publishing house in Boston. Coming over to take up her Fulbright, she had a shipboard romance with another scholar aboard the Queen Elizabeth. Since her arrival in Cambridge on 1 October, she had flirted round many boys, made passionate love to Sassoon in Paris during the Christmas vacation and then been rejected by him after a huge row outside the Matisse Chapel near Nice.26 She was ready for something new and big and preferably involving a fight.

After leaving Falcon Yard, she and Hamish stumbled around the foggy streets of Cambridge. She whispered Ted’s name to the lamp-posts. She could not get out of her head how he had said her name, Sylvia, ‘in a blasting wind which shot off in the desert’ behind her eyes and his, and how ‘his poems are clever and terrible and lovely’. Hamish tried to put her off by saying that he was the biggest seducer in Cambridge and that all the St Botolph’s crowd were phoneys.

Then they found themselves surrounded by a group of undergraduates who were also out after college lock-up. The boys, reimagined in her journal as a symbolic group of potential boyfriends (or worshippers), were checking that she was all right, telling her how nice she smelt, asking to kiss her. Then Hamish was hoisting her over the railings into Queens’, his college. A spike pierced her tight skirt, exposing her thighs, and another dug into her hand, creating stigmata that did not bleed because the air was freezing. Then she was lying on the floor of his room by the fire, with him on top of her. She liked his kisses on her mouth and his weight on her body, but she told him that he should scold her for her behaviour at the party. At two-thirty in the morning, he walked her back to Whitstead, the house on the other side of the river, at the far end of the Newnham playing fields, where she lodged with eleven other girls. Though she was pleased that Hamish had proved himself able to fight for her, it was Ted who now consumed her imagination. He entered her life as a rival to Sassoon: ‘The one man since I’ve lived who could blast Richard.’27

Falling in love is often about place and placing yourself. Sylvia needed a proper Cambridge boyfriend in order to prove to herself that she had arrived in England and in English literature. Housemate Jane (‘the blonde one’) was content to go out with other American boys such as Bert. Though Sylvia would not have said no to handsome Luke from the Deep South, she sensed a fatal magnetism pulling her towards the huge man from the north of England. One of the attractions of Sassoon had been that he was collaterally descended from the First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon. One of the attractions of Davison had been that he was a literary publisher with British connections. Now she was on the brink of the thing itself: a great English poet. Her mind was steeped in the language of the English literature that had been her study for years. Her repeated use of the word ‘blast’ when writing about their first encounter and her image of them shouting passionately at each other as if in a high wind reveal where she is going: to a ‘blasted heath’ – the location of the opening of Shakespeare’s most northern play – and more specifically to a Yorkshire moor. She is already, unconsciously, projecting herself as Cathy and Hughes as Heathcliff.

For Ted, thinking over and rewriting these events, again and again through the course of thirty-five years after her death, there was a fatalistic quality from the start. In their myth of themselves, Ted and Sylvia were Heathcliff and Cathy from the first instant, but in reality each of them spent the immediate aftermath of Falcon Yard in the company of another.

Ted had come to Cambridge that weekend to be with Shirley and to make love to her. He never wrote about what they said to each other that night. All she remembers is that she did not speak to Sylvia and that, though Ted was still attentive, she quickly became aware of a deliberate ‘distancing’ on his part. She returned to Falcon Yard the next day to search for an earring lent by a friend. She found the earring but knew that somehow she was losing Ted.

On the Monday, with Ted back at work in London, Sylvia Plath wrote ‘a full-page poem about the dark forces of lust’. Its title was ‘Pursuit’. ‘It is not bad,’ she told herself. ‘It is dedicated to Ted Hughes.’28 It began from a line in Racine’s Phèdre, the play she was studying for the essay she had to write for the Tragedy paper that week: ‘Dans le fond des forêts votre image me suit’ (‘In the depth of the forests your image pursues me’). This was a line that haunted her. She believed that it captured the inextricable relationship between desire and death. It sprang her into a poem that she believed to be her best yet, one which offered ‘a symbol of the terrible beauty of death, and the paradox that the more intensely one lives, the more one burns and consumes oneself’.29

There is a panther stalks me down:

One day I’ll have my death of him;

His greed has set the woods aflame,

He prowls more lordly than the sun.30

Writing about the poem to her mother, Plath acknowledged the strong influence of Blake’s ‘Tyger, tyger’ on its rhythms, its questions and its elemental force. When she first told her mother that she had written it, she acknowledged that it was directly inspired by the encounter in Falcon Yard with ‘the only man I’ve met yet here who’d be strong enough to be equal with’, but whom she would probably never see again.31

What she did not acknowledge, in either her journal or her letters, was that the most direct inspiration behind ‘Pursuit’ was the other poem that Hughes had published in Chequer a few months before: his compact index of everything to follow, ‘The Jaguar’. Ted as panther, animal force, sexual marauder; Sylvia willing her own death of him. In mythologising their relationship from the start, she was in some sense creating the conditions for her own tragedy – and laying the ground for the posthumous dramatisation of her story, his story.

Now she knew what she wanted: ‘a life of conflict, of balancing children, sonnets, love and dirty dishes; and banging banging an affirmation of life out on pianos and ski slopes and in bed in bed in bed’.32 Ted proceeded in a more circumspect manner. All he said about the party was that ‘it was very bright, and everything got smashed up’.33 He was preoccupied with the approach of the final deadline on the option to take up the cheap passage to Australia.

Two weeks later he was back in Cambridge, staying with Luke. He came up on the bus from Victoria after work on the Friday and late that evening the two of them threw stones at what they thought was Sylvia’s window. Bert told her the next day and she spent the weekend longing to hear the tread of the black panther on the stair, aching with desire for a new life. The boys tried again in the small hours of Sunday morning – mud as well as stones this time – but once again they got the wrong window.34 Sylvia was in a little attic room, which she had tastefully decorated with art books artfully stacked or opened, a tea set of ‘solid black pottery’ and bright pillows on the couch.35 The stones and earth could hardly have reached that high.

The next weekend, conscious that the Easter vacation was upon them, Ted asked Luke to ask Sylvia to come and see him in London. The timing was propitious. She was about to go to Paris, for another make-or-break visit with Sassoon. She called at 18 Rugby Street on the evening of Friday 23 March 1956, prior to her Channel crossing the following day.