Читать книгу Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life - Jonathan Bate - Страница 16

Rugby Street is in the Holborn district of central London, halfway between the elegant squares around the British Museum where the Bloomsbury Group once lived and the legal and financial district that spreads east and south from Gray’s Inn. Among the local landmarks were the Great Ormond Street children’s hospital, the old Foundling Hospital in Coram Fields, and the Lamb, a pub in Lamb’s Conduit Street much frequented by poets. Rugby Street itself was a Georgian terrace that had seen better days. The freehold was owned by Rugby School and, with rent controls keeping the price of an apartment down to £2 per week, maintenance of the block was not a priority. Some of the houses were occupied by locals whose families had been there for generations. Others were divided into scruffy flats, occupied by bohemian types – graphic designers, actors, photographers, young men and women trying to make their way in what we now call the ‘creative industries’. Number 18, where Ted was living in the flat belonging to Dan Huws’s father, was lit by gas, had a single lavatory in the basement and the only water supply was a tap in a basin on the half-landing.1 To Sylvia, raised on American plumbing and her mother’s cleanliness, it was disgusting. But the occupant held irresistible allure.

She booked into a hotel in New Fetter Lane, the other side of Holborn, then met Ted for the evening. The following Monday morning, she wrote up her memories of the weekend: ‘Arrived in Paris early Saturday evening exhausted from sleepless holocaust night with Ted in London … washed my battered face, smeared with a purple bruise from Ted and my neck raw and wounded too.’2 Love-bites: for Plath, desire was always a purple bruise; for Hughes, poetry was the healing of a wound.

She called it her ‘wild destructive London night’. She was anxious because Hughes’s paunchy friend Michael Boddy had come up the stairs at one point, and he was a gossip, so all Cambridge would soon know ‘that I am Ted’s mistress or something equally absurd’.3 She was also upset that once during their lovemaking he had called her Shirley instead of Sylvia.4 She wanted to see him again, so that she could ‘rip past’ Shirley and prove her capacity to be as ‘tender and wise’ as Shirley was, while also being a better, fuller, wilder, more extreme lover. Regardless of Boddy’s gossip, she wanted Ted’s body and it was inextricable from his poetry: ‘I lust for him, and in my mind I am ripped to bits by the words he welds and wields.’5

Ted shaped the night retrospectively, in a poem that he worked on for many years. It is a central pillar of Birthday Letters, though he nearly left it out, because it was too raw and was indiscreet in mentioning a third party who would enter their story later but whose posthumous privacy he wished to preserve. He begins by mythologising the house: as so often in his work, location is given symbolic force. ‘18 Rugby Street’ is imagined as a stage-set and a Cretan labyrinth. Each of the four floors was the scene of the love-struggle of its inhabitant: a car-dealer who shared the basement with a caged bird and a mistress, a lovelorn Belgian girl (elsewhere he wrote that she was German) trapped in the ground-floor flat with a manic barking Alsatian which protected her from everything except her own oven in which she would one day gas herself.

His memories of the night were of waiting at his battered carpenter’s bench that was both dining-table and work-desk; of Sylvia’s breathless voice as she panted up the uncarpeted stairs with Luke (he could not remember how and when Luke excused himself and disappeared); of his sense of Sylvia as a great blue bird charged at high voltage, ‘Fluorescent cobalt, a flare of aura’. He would always associate her with electricity, the positive pole being her innate energy and sex appeal, the negative that emotional volatility that took her to the darkest places and then the temporary cure that came from electro-convulsive therapy. Ted saw vulnerability in the temples above her bright brown and somewhat hooded eyes. In the theatre of her face, those temples were at first sight upstaged by her glamorous and fashionable bangs, but with knowledge of her history they elicited special tenderness because this was the place where the electrodes had been attached. The reference to her temples also evokes a place of worship, befitting this pagan goddess coming, with ‘Sexual Dreams’, from another world.

She recited the poem about the black panther that she had written for him. As she did so, he held her and kissed her and tried to keep her still. His poem then jump-cuts to their walk back to her hotel in New Fetter Lane. Opposite the entrance, there was a wartime bombsite on which some building work was being started. It was there that they ‘clutched each other giddily’ and took the plunge. She told him of the reason for her scar: her suicide attempt. In the poem of his memory, even as he is kissing her a part of him is sensing the danger and telling him to stay away. Something is being built, but there is also a bomb liable to explode. Somehow, she smuggled him into the hotel and they made love, her body ‘slim and lithe and smooth as a fish’. For the first time in his life, he is making love to a girl who is not English, a girl who embodies the energy and hope of Shakespeare’s ‘brave new world’, John Donne’s ‘my America, my newfound land’. ‘Beautiful, beautiful America’ has taken possession of him.6

Walking back to his flat at first light, he had an epiphany. His fullest account of that hour is excluded from ‘18 Rugby Street’ but included in a version of Birthday Letters that he never published, a 4,000-line blank-verse autobiography of his relationship with Sylvia called ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’. It was his equivalent of William Wordsworth’s posthumously published autobiographical blank-verse epic, The Prelude. He tells of how he left her hotel and walked back across Holborn to his flat at about five o’clock in the morning. He felt himself ‘floating / On air spilling in over the city / Off the Surrey gardens and orchards’. Then he heard ‘London’s hidden blackbirds and thrushes’, ‘a million singers’, singing a blessing upon the ‘sleeping millions’. It was like ‘a high tide at dawn, the top of the tide, / Their dawn chorus awash through the whole city’. Meanwhile, his totemic birds, the crows, accompanied him at ground level.7

Like every young romantic after such an encounter, he is walking on air, every one of his senses refined, every detail of the moment etched in his memory for ever.

Back in Rugby Street, he penned a short letter and sent it for Sylvia to pick up at the American Express office in Paris. It had been a night, he wrote, consumed by the discovery of the smoothness of her body. The memory of it went through him with the warming glow of brandy.8 This could be described as his first ‘birthday letter’: the letter of the birth of their love. He asked her to come back to him, telling her that he would be in London till 14 April, and that if she did not come to him he would go to her in Cambridge.

In Paris, Sylvia poured her confusion into her diary. From one point of view, Ted was a diversion. She had got drunk at Falcon Yard and kissed (and bitten) him. She had got drunk in London and slept with him. That was that. Now it was time to give herself to Richard Sassoon, of whom she had written – after meeting Ted – ‘I love that damn boy with all I’ve ever had in me and that’s a hell of a lot.’9 But on arriving in Paris, she discovered that Sassoon had gone south in order to avoid a confrontation with her. He needed time to make up his mind as to whether their long, passionate on–off relationship should turn to marriage or be finally ended. She was devastated. She had always been used to getting her own way with men: ‘never before had a man gone off to leave me to cry after’.10 She sat in the living room of the concierge of his apartment building on the rue Duvivier and wrote him a long, incoherent letter while the radio blared out ‘Smile though your heart is breaking’.

Then she made a bad error. She wrote again to Sassoon, telling him about Ted. As Sassoon put it, she ‘was going to start having an affair with a certain fellow so as to make me jealous and give me a mind to marry her, which I was unwilling to do just because of this imminent unfaithfulness’.11 She cheered herself up with sightseeing and an afternoon in a hotel room with an Oxford student called Tony Gray. She juggled her options in her diary. To play it cool and wait for Ted to come to her? To go to him, for one night only, then go back to Sassoon? To play safe and marry her devoted friend Gordon Lameyer? Or even to join Ted in one of his hare-brained schemes, such as teaching English in Yugoslavia?

In the latter part of the Easter vacation, she travelled with Lameyer to Munich, Venice and Rome. Their relationship was disintegrating. Sassoon was giving no sign of returning. On Friday 13 April, her late father’s birthday, Sylvia Plath boarded a plane in Rome, the ticket paid for by Lameyer. She had told Ted to expect her that night. In her possession was a prize: he had written her a poem. Though the first line read ‘Ridiculous to call it love’, it revealed that she had touched him to the quick, that he felt her absence as if it were a wound, that without her he was like a dying man, that ‘Wherever you haunt earth, you are shaped and bright / As the true ghost of my loss.’12 Even if this was a jeu d’esprit, a little act of seduction intended to bring her back to his bed for a second time, it is still an uncanny anticipation of the future haunting that would determine the course of his later life.

Sylvia wrote about their second night together in her incomplete novel ‘Falcon Yard’. In the surviving draft, Ted is called Gerald – hardly a disguise – but her ‘Character Notebook’ for the novel calls him Leonard, a ‘God-man, because spermy’, a creator, ‘Dionysiac’, a Pan who has to be led into the mundane world of ‘toast and nappies’.13 ‘What I need’, she writes in the voice of Jess, the autobiographical protagonist, is ‘a banging, blasting, ferocious love’. But a voice tells her that it will hurt. Her counter-voice replies, ‘So what … better bleed.’ She needs to stop being ‘the Girl Who’s Never Been Hurt’. She tells herself to get hurt and be glad of it, to take his desire ‘even though he’ll never love you but will use you and lunge on through you to the next one’. She determines to ‘blast his other girls to hell and back’. After an encounter with another man on the bus from the airport, Jess heads for Rugby Street, ‘blazing’, ‘letting the wet wind blow her hair back’, only too glad to look wild because ‘The recklessness came banging up in her: stronger and fiercer than she had ever known it’. She is greeted by the Ted character – his name now changed from Gerald to Ian – who observes that it is Friday the 13th as he takes her suitcase upstairs.

His voice, she notices this time, is ‘UnBritish’, almost ‘Refugee Pole, mixed with something of Dylan Thomas: rich and mellow-noted: half sung’. They exchange small talk with Jim, the commercial artist from the flat upstairs – this is Jim Downer, with whom Ted was working at this time on an illustrated children’s book called Timmy the Tug. The Sylvia character is pleased to be called ‘Jess, not Judy’, an allusion to the wound of Ted having called her Shirley not Sylvia when they were first making love back in March. Then he tells his dreams of white leopard, burnt fox and pike. He kisses her on the throat, loving the incredible smoothness – fish- or mermaid-like – of her skin. They openly discuss the violence of the first time:

‘I went to Paris all scarred. Black and blue …’

‘But you liked it?’

‘Yes.’

‘I was furious with myself. I don’t know what happened to me …’

She has it out with him about the wrong name being blurted out. He defuses the tension with an account of that moment of morning grace when he left her, the Wordsworthian epiphany that would be recaptured years later in ‘Black Coat: Opus 131’: ‘I’ll never forget it. When I came out into the streets, the air was all blue, like blue water, and the buildings were covered, just thick, with thrushes. Everything clear and blue. Not a sound. The air isn’t like that in London at any other time.’

Then they read poetry to each other. First, her ‘Conversation among the Ruins’. ‘You love one-syllabled words, don’t you?’ he says, setting the template for their relationship by mingling literary criticism with love-talk, ‘Squab, patch, crack. Violent.’ She replies that she hates the abstraction of ‘-ation’ words: ‘I like words to sound what they say: bang crash. Not mince along in singsong iambic pentameter.’ He responds by reading an old English ballad and his voice reaches to the core of her being: ‘The way he took words, rounded, pitched them. It was holy. I will learn this by heart, she told herself … part of her vibrating to the sound of his voice. I will learn it, and hear his voice every time, reading it.’ She convinces herself that she will never forget the sound of his voice or a single syllable of the verse that passes his lips. Her bare arms ‘go stippled with goose flesh’, he tells her the poem is ‘an altar to spill blood at’, and the surviving fragment breaks off before they go to bed.14

‘I can make more love the more I make love,’ he said to her. ‘The more he writes poems, the more he writes poems,’ she was soon reporting to her mother.15 Three days after the night in Rugby Street, Sylvia wrote in her diary of ‘his big iron violent virile body, incredible tendernesses and rich voice which makes poems and quirked people and music’. He is a ‘huge derrick-striding Ted’. He makes her feel safe but he makes her feel scared:

Consider yourself lucky to have been stabbed by him; never complain or be bitter or ask for more than normal human consideration as an integrated being. Let him go. Have the guts. Make him happy: cook, play, read … keep other cups and flagons full – never accuse or nag – let him run, reap, rip – and glory in the temporary sun of his ruthless force.16

With Sylvia back in Cambridge for the summer term, Ted’ s problem was Shirley. His relationship with her came to a bitter end in an encounter that he recorded in several drafts of a poem that, sensitive to her privacy, he never published. It tells of how he turned up in Cambridge with a bottle of wine and two pounds of rump steak intended for a ‘love-feast’ with Sylvia at Whitstead. He went the long way round so as not to be seen outside Newnham College, only to turn the corner and see Shirley coming for him like ‘an electrical storm’, beautiful in her red-haired anger. He hid the wine and the parcel of meat in a privet hedge. He never forgot the pain of their exchange. He remembered her ‘furious restraint’ and ‘her outraged under-whisper’. He ‘refused’ her and his memory is that as he did so he thrice denied that he had slept with Sylvia, even though he was only 50 yards from her door. The triple denial is an allusion to the disciple Peter denying his knowledge of Jesus; Shirley’s memory, by contrast, is that Ted had always been true to himself and honest with her during their affair, and he was candid with her in their parting.

In Ted’s colourful dramatisation of their blazing row, the wine bottle (‘uncontrollable, bulbous / Priapic’) rolls on to the pavement between them. It is as if even the world’s inanimate objects are on the side of his new love. Shirley’s green eyes fill with tears and she walks away across Newnham playing fields. He stands and watches her walk out of his life. It was as if she had turned not to the playing fields but the other way, into the road, ‘And gone under a lorry’.17 He never saw her again.

With the help of friends, she struggled through her last term at Cambridge and her final exams. She knew that nothing could change what had happened, but confronting her loss, accepting it, she found almost impossible. Ted had a deep and lasting impact on her life.

Both now free from serious relationships that might have led to marriage, Ted and Sylvia became inseparable. For much of the Easter term, he camped out on a mattress in a bare-boarded room on the top floor of Alexandra House, a soup-kitchen run by the Women’s Voluntary Service just off Petty Cury. He found himself sharing a blanket with one of the volunteers, ‘a lovely girl escaped freshly / From her husband’. For a month, they slept nightly in each other’s arms, naked but never once making love. She tenderly traced her hands over the love-scratches that Sylvia had ‘inscribed’ across his back, while he ‘never stirred a finger beyond/ Sisterly comforting’. Sometimes they were joined in the bed by a ‘plump and pretty’ friend of hers, who ‘did all she could’ to get Ted ‘inside her’ – without success.18 Like a medieval knight lying between two naked temptresses, he was proving himself in the art of fidelity. He did not fail.

Cambridge is at its loveliest in the Easter term. According to Jane Baltzell, Sylvia’s rival and housemate, one warm day Ted and Luke sat in a haystack in a field just outside town, drinking wine and making literary plans. Ted then walked to Whitstead with another bottle of wine, intending to share some of their dreams with Sylvia. She did not have a corkscrew, so Ted went down from her attic room to borrow one. The first door on which he knocked happened to be that of the resident don whose job it was to keep an eye on the Whitstead girls. Baltzell’s version of the incident has the door opening and a face, ‘framed in tight braids of dark hair’, peering out. Ted asks if she has a corkscrew that he can borrow. Almost before she can reply that she ‘most certainly has not’ – she happened to be a teetotal Methodist – Ted loses patience, strikes ‘the neck of the bottle off on her doorknob’ and bolts back upstairs.19 One never knows quite how much embellishment there is in the telling of such myth-making tales about Ted: Luke Myers was convinced that this story was pure invention, probably on the part of Sylvia.20

The lovers listened to Beethoven and Bartók in record shops. They went into the moonlight to find owls, and Sylvia immediately composed a poem called ‘Metamorphosis’. They were both writing at an unprecedented rate, Sylvia being inspired by Ted to take on ‘the vocabulary of woods and animals and earth’ and creating poems for him in pastiche of his own style, such as an ‘Ode for Ted’ that begins:

From under crunch of my man’s boot

green oat-sprouts jut;

he names a lapwing, starts rabbits in a rout …

stalks red fox, shrewd stoat.21

They wandered the meadows around Grantchester, made love in the open air. Having at last found a man who loved food as much as she did, Sylvia cooked steak and trout on her single gas ring. Ted taught her – as he had once taught Shirley – how to cook herring roes and how to read horoscopes. He took her to ‘the world’s biggest circus’.22 They shared improvised recipes:

He stalked in the door yesterday with a packet of little pink shrimp and four fresh trout. I made a nectar of Shrimp Newburg with essence of butter, cream, sherry and cheese; had it on rice with the trout. It took us three hours to peel all the little tiny shrimp, and Ted just lay groaning by the hearth after the meal with utter delight, like a huge Goliath.23

They read and wrote and revised their poems in the garden of Whitstead, quoting swathes of Dylan Thomas and Shakespeare that Ted knew by heart. Each immediately became the other’s best critic. He sharpened her style, made her feel she was writing from her truest and deepest self for the first time. She organised his poems, typed them up and began sending them to American periodicals. He taught her to punt on the Cam. She took him to a Fulbright reception in London, where they met the American ambassador and the dashing Duke of Edinburgh who, mistaking Ted for a student, asked him what he was doing, to which Ted replied that he was ‘chaperoning Sylvia’ and the Duke smiled and said, ‘Ah, the idle rich.’24

She told of all this in effusive letters to her mother Aurelia. Otto Plath had died shortly after Sylvia’s eighth birthday. He had gone to have his leg amputated as a result of gangrene, and died of an embolism while still in hospital. On being told the news, Sylvia had announced that she would never speak to God again. Mother and daughter were inevitably drawn intensely close by their loss. When Sylvia moved to England, her letters were a lifeline to her mother. She also kept in touch with her brother Warren, who was two and a half years younger than her. Ted, she wrote to tell him, was the one man worthy of becoming his brother-in-law, though he would benefit from Warren giving him some American-style training in how to buy himself a decent wardrobe.

Her Fulbright scholarship having been renewed for a second year, she arranged for her mother to visit England at the end of term. Aurelia arrived in London on Wednesday 13 June and the three of them went to a cheap but good German restaurant called Schmidt’s, in honour of the Teutonic Plathian heritage. Sylvia was delighted that her mother and lover immediately hit it off. That night, Sylvia suggested to Ted that they should get married and he agreed.25

They rushed to make arrangements before Aurelia left town. This involved getting a special Archbishop’s licence, tracking down a local vicar, buying new shoes and trousers for Ted, and spending the last of their money on gold wedding rings. The night before the wedding Ted dreamed that he had caught a pike from an enormous depth in the pond at Crookhill. As it rose to the surface, its head filled the entire lake. He backed away, straining to control it.26

By good fortune, Aurelia had in her luggage a pink wool knitted suit dress that she had never worn. Adorned with a pink hair ribbon and a pink rose from Ted, this served as a wedding dress. The hurried ceremony, conducted by a twinkle-eyed old clergyman who lived opposite Charles Dickens’s house, took place at the church of St George the Martyr in Bloomsbury, just across the square from the offices of Faber and Faber, on 16 June 1956 (‘Bloomsday’, Ted noted – the date of the action of James Joyce’s Ulysses). Ted wore his RAF tie and the corduroy jacket that he had three times dyed black. It rained. Aurelia was the only guest, so the curate was requisitioned as best man, delaying him from taking a busload of children to the zoo. ‘All the prison animals had to be patient / While we married,’ wrote Ted in Birthday Letters, where he turned the curate into a sexton, grimly foreshadowing Hamlet’s macabre dialogue over Ophelia’s grave. The vicar read an off-the-shelf printed marriage sermon entitled ‘Unto Your Lives’ End’.27 Sylvia’s eyes were like jewels, their brown glistening with tears of joy.28

Ted had told Olwyn that he had met a first-rate American female poet, ‘a damned sight better than the run of good male’, and that they were going to come to Paris in the summer.29 But he didn’t tell anyone in his family about the decision to marry. Sylvia, by contrast, poured out every detail in an ecstatic letter to her brother Warren. She explained that, because of the Newnham and Fulbright authorities, and the fact that Ted was probably about to go to Spain to get a job teaching English, the big wedding reception would be postponed for a second ceremony in Wellesley the following summer. For now, the official line was that they were engaged. The marriage was in keeping with their situation: ‘private, personal, legal, true, but limited in its way’. She did not hesitate to write that she could now be addressed – Warren could take his pick – as Mrs Sylvia Hughes, Mrs Ted Hughes, Mrs Edward James Hughes, or ‘Mrs E. J. Hughes (wife of the internationally renowned poet and genius)’.30