Ted Hughes: Stronger Than Death

[Music] the head dragging forward the body keeping up the hind legs liking he coils he flourishes the blackjack tail as if looking for a target hurrying through the underworld soulless I used to believe that the poem is simply the text and that all biographical information should be kept at bay I don't believe it anymore I'm very interested in the whole package I think that's what you got with tattoos now I hold creation in my foot for flap and revolve it all slowly the physicality of the poems seems connected very much with him as an individual whose personality and magnetism were very important you lived the work poetic to the you know to the very core of his being her tree was my father's voice poetry is a means of transforming experience he was extraordinary striking and the first person who thought of what he who saw it that Hughes was eath but it was a man who radiated artistic power more controversy and scandal attaches to his name than that of any other figure in literature with the exception of Lord Byron one woman killing herself is pretty bad two women one right after the other killing themselves really makes you do a double-take that's the kind of thing that gets a feminists attention we certainly formidable and all these women have fallen into his grip and he's destroyed them but as you look at the facts it's not like it's not like that is it I feel that my parents have been often fictionalized to the point where I no longer recognized them it could be that the difficult circumstances that he faced were made worse by this unwavering sense that he was above all the poet poet before he was a man who is stronger than life death but who is stronger than death me evidently [Music] the winner of the 1998 Whitbread Book of the Year his birthday letters by Ted [Applause] three the hues the daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath was the public face of the winner birthday letter with the award ceremony a book which poetically details the troubled and destructive relationship of her parents I first found out about the birthday lettuce collection perms when I came back to England in 1997 and he sent me this manuscript he was very adamant I should read it right away and he was very anxious to know what I thought about it it seemed so incongruous to be sitting there reading about my father's of the world and his inner world and this relationship with my mother and his feelings for my mother and there was a question do you think I should publish it and I think my immediate reaction was why on earth are you asking me if you should publish it you should absolutely publish it nobody knew that they were coming and then one Saturday morning in January 1998 The Times was published and there on the front page was the story revealed the most tragic literary love story of our time there was a full two-page spread with photos of Ted and Sylvia the poet laureate had broken his decades of silence suddenly they were out there and they were all over the place and it was one of those few occasions in life when you would regularly see people read in a book of poems on the tube or on a bus or a train you know the general public will read in a book of poems you know they were electrically charged these poems you'd been waiting to hear Ted's version of that part of his life for a long while and suddenly here it was so it had the urgency of testimony accepting the award she read from a letter her father had written to a friend how strange that we have to make these public declarations of our secrets but we do if only I had done the equivalent 30 years ago I might have had a more fruitful career certainly a freer psychological life what was revelatory was that he had written them at all the emotions and the thoughts behind some of them he talked about during my childhood in my life well I asked had it just appeared he said now I've been working on this for years my father was very specific about including the idea of my mother in the life of me and my brother she was a very conscious presence yes which was rather lovely honestly he was working on birthday letters for about 30 years there's a notebook that clearly belongs to the late 1960s there are literally hundreds of poems many of them were not included in the finished collection itself endless process of writing rewriting spending his whole life working on this project every single poem was constantly rewritten one of them here lovely poem about how he and Sylvia picked daffodils series starts writing it in manuscript then he gets to the stage of typing it up but even once has typed it he just goes over again and again all the scrolling lines out adding words in extraordinary processes of constant revision then it begins the perm remember how you picked the daffodils nobody else remembers he says but I do and then it ends with an image of Silvia dropping the daffodils as she stoops in the April rain and there's a sense of dropping them suggestive of of death of dead flowers traditionally we drop flowers in a grave for Ted Hughes the specter of Sylvia Plath was what he called the real thing casting a shadow like a colossus across all his work but the way in which he wrote about the real thing was a dilemma a problem something he wrestled with as an artist when Ted Hughes began writing poetry the confessionals was not what good poetry was all about and the evolution to the more personal voice is the story of his poetic development [Music] this is aspinall street in my them right in West Yorkshire were along a valley that runs out of Halifax and that is one Aspinall Street where Ted lived till he was six or seven so you know not particularly grand beginnings but left an incredible impression on Ted if you were choosing you might not think that this would be the most useful place for a poet laureate to grow up but it was he found everything that you needed in the beginning in and around here in all the little nooks and crannies of these streets and you know down on the canal and in the woods and up on the tops there animals hunting exploration adventure just a place for his imagination to catch fire and come alive Scout rock which he talked about a lot and wrote about a lot is just behind that block of flats there he used to say that his view to the south was blocked by that great slab of rock [Music] the most impressive early companion of my childhood is a dark cliff I won't look like a dark cliff to the south a wall of rock and steep woods halfway up the sky just cleared by the winter Sun from my home near the bottom of the south-facing slope of the valley that cliff was both the curtain and backdrop to existence if a man's death is held in place by a stone my birth was fastened into place by that rock and for my first seven years it pressed its shape and various moods into my brain there was no easy way to escape it I lived under it as under the presence of a war or an occupying army [Music] here would have been Mount Zion Chapel another great big slab of rock and religion bar in his view and his escape plans it was a way up there onto the more that he talked about a more gentle gradient up towards the horizon where he could start seeing and thinking and breathing [Music] he was a happy lad Ted always laughing Oh was full of life always happy to see me I mean I couldn't understand really looking back on it I understand what were the age difference that he would have any time for a little girl you know a little little cousin that kept popping up every now and then into the house and and being me being imposed on him as it were look after her his brother Gerald taught him about trapping hunting fishing how animals behaved all the excitement out there in the world on the moors introduced him to the animal kingdom really and made him very unsentimental about death and killing I suppose it's a Countryman's feeling for animals that they are in some sense there to provide for human beings nature was always just there outside the front door my father says and I'm going to teach you how to skin a badger sit there so yes I sit down in his right here's the Badger he puts the Badger on my laptop it's dead badger on my lap he gives me a knife he says now this is how you do it and he shows me how to skin a badger so I can skin a badger it's not something that I'm no it's not a talent I'm going to share with anybody particularly you might not think that these two interests capturing animals and writing poems have much in common but the more I think back the more sure I am that with me the two interests have been one interest I think of poems as a sort of animal they have their own life like animals but which I mean that they seem quite separate from any person even from their author and nothing can be added to them or taken away without maiming and perhaps even killing them he started to see it from their point of view and he uses I think this really interesting phrase you have to turn yourself into it turn yourself into that thing but also I think he means you've got to give yourself up to it almost as if you've become the prey hand yourself over to it and allow it to become you Pyke three inches long perfect pike in all parts green triggering the gold killers from the egg the malevolent agent grin he's actually associating with that living organism and that's very different you know from the way that a lot of other people writes about nature if Larkin writes about a flower or an animal he's probably looking at it through a window from a train you know going at sixty miles an hour that's not true with use its face to face one jammed past its gills down the others we'll call it the outside I stared there's a Vice locks the same iron in this eye though it's film shrank in death the full of conflict and and violence and the aggression of the natural world [Music] when he got to Cambridge of course it was quite a surprise that he come from there very average sort of grammar school I have the impression that we were there in a rare period where it was felt to be okay somehow to have come from a provincial background in this rather odd unprivileged way when he spoke he was listened to he had a presence even then and what ever Ted said was regard it was something worth waiting for even though it might be a bit unexpected or bizarre he was never invisible in a room and he was always a kind of leader figure people came and came to his room in part because he did this extraordinary thing of roasting meat over whatever fire they had provided in the room and so people came in to see what was going on and to enjoy it there was never any doubt in their minds that he was the best poet you know they were quite sure but Ted was the one that mattered he didn't find the way that English was studied in Cambridge in the least bit sympathetic and the fee turning point is that was the famous visitation of the Fox [Music] every week we had to produce an essay and I stayed up till about 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning trying to push through this barrier to my plants and to finally I just had to give up went to bed and I immediately dreamed I was back at my table in my dream as I sat at my table over my essay the door opened and round the side of the door came the head of the Fox and he was a man he was a small man but he was Fox and he put his hand on the page and as he put it down he said you have to stop this you're destroying us and the Fox wild creature becomes an image for poetry itself and he knows that if he goes in for the academic world he won't be a great poet and he wants to be a poet more than anything else Ted Hughes claimed that as a result of this vision of this man Fox which burnt the page of his student essay he immediately gave up studying in English literature and changed to anthropology instead for the latter part of his degree through the window I see no star something more near the deeper within darkness is entering the loneliness cold delicate layer the dark snow the foxes nose touches twig leaf if he's got the words in that poem right it will have a life a life force and he talks about how it will stand up and come towards the mind of the reader and actually he's right you know look it says we're still talking about that poem now it's in our heads he's put it there the window is starless still the clock ticks the page is printed it comes back to this idea of the poem as a as a primitive form of magic words can have a very transformative effect if you get a poem right you know you can change how somebody thinks about something you could change their way of being their way of doing his way of thinking about the world is constantly shot through with the idea of another world a supernatural world a sense that there are mysterious forces above the human I know my father was fascinated in how people's minds work this idea of magic and the idea of spirituality how people can have a belief in something of which there is no evidence my father took that much further [Music] he was interested in the mysterious movements of the mind things which outside reason he was very interested in a shame an authority Ted was absolutely serious about that I mean just as serious he was say there's about the poetry of TS Eliot or anything else he and his sister all women with casting horoscopes the lovely letter he wrote to his sister oh and very soon after freed and his first daughter was born and he casts the horoscope and talks about fairies which is her her star sign and the position of the Sun the Moon the different planets um I've never seen my horoscope that's you wrote that can I keep this if you took it very seriously but interest in the occult I've been told that you know he tried to determine the launch dates of his book by planetary alignments and you know there's talk of seances and you know trying to get in touch with a spirit world they done tell you how we work the Ouija board we were at Jim's gym and his girlfriend Dan and I each put a finger on the glass that evening did that Ted suggested we got the Ouija board it was my first and last experience it was very bizarre and all I can say is that because nothing happened for such a long time I got bored and started answering we got someone who called himself panicked we asked it if it knew Shakespeare he said yes they're not personally I had to use my wits to answer the questions which Ted was firing up at the spirit we asked it to recite his favorite line and he spelt never never never never out of Lear we then asked it to go on but he refused he said I forget so we forced it a little Ted came back how does it go on and I couldn't quite remember so I had to improvise three lines of pastiche Shakespeare Ted thought this was marvelous except he pointed out afterwards that Shakespeare would never have used the word branch she would have said bow of the tree and so I kicked myself put a spell on you [Music] because of robert graves interest in mythology and magic essentially I think Ted was kind of conduit for that to a great whole group of people he was like many in his generation fascinated by the white goddess the white goddess is the muse the muse the powerful Greek figure who in dows the perk with the power to write they all loved that I think because it was a kind of yet one more book which licensed sexuality at a time when it was a little dangerous with his poetic friends they put together a student magazine called the some bottles review and at the launch party for the magazine Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath met for the first time [Music] he went there with his girlfriend she went with her boyfriend they dance they have had a few drinks and famously they kissed each other and she bit him your eye squeezed in your face a crush of Diamonds incredibly bright bright is a crush of Tears that might have been tears of joy a squeeze of joy you meant to knock me out with your vivacity I remember little from the rest of that evening I slid away with my girlfriend nothing except her hissing rage in the doorway my stupefied interrogation of your blue headscarf from my pocket the swelling ring motive tooth marks that was to brand my face for the next month the me beneath it for good neither of them could get the other out of each other's minds so in her diary she starts writing obsessively about Ted a poem about desire coming upon her and the Panther becomes Ted and then she hopes that he's going to come and visit her in her student rooms that she will hear the tread of the Panther on the stairs the poet's supercharges experience he becomes the panther she becomes the white goddess it does become a whirlwind romance and within a matter of just four months they're married [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] [Music] that was a need for him to be with somebody with her animation and energy and love of life really it seems an absurd thing to say for someone who was going to kill themselves but the fact is the way she decorated the way she guarded and the way she picked daffodils everything is full of energy and she he needed her energy really [Music] there was definitely a time where Hughes and Plath were feeding off each other poetically encouraging each other you know they'd formed this partnership which was going to take on the world and they were going to you know create incredible bodies of work together there is a real sense that they work together as a team I remember my father telling me that but just sitting at a desk or a long table and he said his end would be piles of papers and mess and he and he said and your mother's end would be absolutely neat and everything would be neatly in order and the pens and so on before she'd start work and he was just this massive creativity at the other end of the table they were very supportive of each other I feel that I'd never be writing as I am and as much as I am with without Ted so understanding and cooperation really but from my experiences of my life I also have in a in a way some of his experiences of hers it's like a medium and what she writes out needn't be at all the contents of her own mind it needn't be anything she knows but it's something that somebody in the room knows and in this way to people who are sympathetic to each other who are compatible in this sort of spiritual way the in fact make up one person they make up one source of power it was two people in love having a relationship doing the same thing and trying to find a way to get somewhere in a world that must have been quite difficult especially doing what they did her tree she organized him he wrote by hand but she typed she typed up his poems she submitted them to all the literary magazines and it was Sylvia who spotted that a major New York publisher was running a competition for the best first collection of poems and she submitted not her own poems but Ted's she put together the book called the hawk in the rain that won the competition that got Ted published and that made his name he sort of exploded onto the scene with arc in the rain he seemed like the best writer of his generation immediately I must have met Ted Hughes early on because I remember that we talked about Hawk in the rain which I was stunned by it was definitely a new voice it was a voice that also linked deeply into the sort of English poetry and I mean English poetry British if you want an English poetry that I loved it was also part of the country the North which is a part of this country in many ways distinct and you couldn't sort of get it out of your head this was a new poetry wind stampeding the fields under the window floundering black astride and blinding wet tilde rooms then under an orange sky the hills had new places and wind wielded blade light luminous black and emerald flexing with the lens [Music] he was taken up by Faber and Faber who were are wearing are the most important publishers of poetry and he became very rapidly and miss showers from Foucault so the poetry editor of The Observer a man called Al Alvarez could make or break poetic reputations if you got Alvarez behind you you were made Alvarez reviewed Ted's first collection and completely put Ted Hughes on the map I just find it difficult to remember stuff it's kind of all faded away mercifully I used to be a very clever young man let me tell you solo and time again you were also quite bored by the movement poets who you then wrote that famous essay called beyond the gentility principle which was in the new poetry and they why well challenged what I do gentility what I did back in those days I challenged the whole [ __ ] blown offal stabbed with a different just something else you know I just thought he was onto something that I really thought mattered it was kind of my responsibility back there to say this is a poet you can read not blah blah blah and the world was full of blah blah blah my feet the locked upon the rough bark it took the whole of creation to produce my foot by each feather now I hold creation in my foot or fly up and revolve it all slowly I kill where I please because it is all mine there is no surface during my body my man has a tearing of heads I think what was unique about it was the explosiveness of the image the way the words knocked together made sparks well if you looked at the poetry of the movement the previous generation John Wayne TV Amy's even locking their work wasn't doing that it looked genteel compared with Ted's is this a modernist poet he belonged to a dwindling tradition which is that of the country but in a bizarre way that appeals to a Tony audience Ted was already a powerful presence even though he was just beginning he was a man who seemed to carry his own climate with him to create his own atmosphere and in those days the atmosphere was dark and dangerous it was the darkness many women found irresistible one of them said he looked like a gunfighter if you read Hawk roosting he is that Hawk he just absolutely is it and he knows what it's like to be a predator who looks down on his kingdom and the frail creatures that he's going to stab with his beak without any littie or anything so much attention was given to him and he was such a charismatic figure you know that everyone was very happy to write about him and talk about him and so he was definitely in the ascendancy he was in the position of power there's a conversation recorded by rusev a night in which the two women poets compare the extraordinary success of their mates Alan Sillitoe on the one hand and Ted on the other in comparison with their own small success one has to realize that Sylvia never again in her lifetime saw real success I mean she wasn't Sylvia Plath when I met her she was Sylvia Plath who was married to Ted Hughes yes I liked her and understood her I'd read her poems and admired them being in the position of power was important to each of them you know and the one who wasn't in the position of power wasn't altogether happy about that state of affairs [Music] I think Soviet was pleased for him but by the time she'd had her first baby I think depression not so uncommon after the birth of a child began to set in she was always fragile she could go tipping down by any manner of news at that point the most admired poet in America was a man called Robert Lowell Lowell published a new volume of poems called life studies and it was revolutionary because it was all about his own mental breakdown it was poetry in a mode of confessional directness there has not really been seen before Ted was very skeptical about the autobiographical elements of the work he says that's for Americans Sylvia absolutely lapped it up and it released her into feeling that she could write about her own self her own life much more directly and she writes a series of poems directly about her own nervous breakdown that for her and certainly Ted believe this was a breakthrough moment [Applause] like a juggling affair when it comes to managing a nine-month-old baby and we're we're dreaming of a house where I can shout to Ted from one end to the other and he won't be able to hear me but I don't know how far away that is I heard them on the radio I felt very sorry for them they seemed to have a difficult time with baby to bring up and both being writers and we lived in North Devon and we were at that point renting a big farmhouse so I wrote to Tarrant Sylvia care of the BBC said if you'd like a holiday with us I can look after the children are old all the just six the fans and you too can go off and write and I heard nothing but learn behold a year later I had a letter from tensing we two living in his such farmhouse we'd like you to come and have lunch was carol sevier decided to move to court Green in Devon this was Ted's wish because Ted was profoundly a countryman I brought you to Devon I brought you into my dreamland i sleepwalk to you into my land of totems never Neverland the orchard in the West I wrestled with the blankets that call and the cord you stayed with me gallant in desperate and hopeful listening for different gods stripping off your American royalty garment by garment this photo is of my mother pregnant with my brother and holding me and me holding a kitten and I like that because it's all of us together except for my father obviously and I wrote a little poem about that my mother is laughing holding me against the Bulge of my unborn brother kitten strangling in my eager palms my father photographs us all his eggs in one basket bundled in my mother's arms he was kind to her I think what people have missed but he'd he was endlessly protective to her and particularly to her wish to write poetry I mean I didn't know what what sort of writing it was and one day I said to Ted is she writing poetry and he said no she is a poet [Music] the problem was that she was often blocked things which might turn into a story and he didn't follow up on poetic ideas which hadn't come to fruit he helped her a lot with that and what he was trying to do was to reach into her inner being and their inner being was fractured she really had a big crack right down the middle she needed huge amounts of attention from him and he would hypnotize her to help her relax and help her rise there is no doubt that Ted's assistants helped sylvia plath to develop from a technically very accomplished poet into a poet of extraordinary force and originality when Ted gave her resources for writing a more mythic kind of poetry the demons did come out the result was great poetry but it also perhaps was what tipped her over the edge mentally [Music] black magic and Pagan superstitions golly where he wanted to be they work for him but for Silvia was a foreign country in every sense belief and dark gods didn't come naturally to her but she'd always be good at things fiercely ambitious anything a husband could she could do better so she went along willingly she does record jealousy and suspicion when she was angry he could see the power in her he began to write out of kind of not a hatred of life but a peculiar obsession with death which was not healthy and was there long before hacia arrived on the scene [Music] we knew what was waiting for us the sea witches the Greeks knew about the faces of mortal women but they're here they're handy LCL came to work at knotless which was the advertising agency which employed me in those days advertising was regarded as the work of the devil yet it's surprising how many greats and writers were employed by the big advertising editors at your chemist for 11 tons as you told me about how she met Ted as I was very proud and apparently still they asked her to peeled potatoes and that's just took offense because she didn't like being treated like a servant and tapers down the bottom of the garden picking beans so as he went down and chest up head and they kissed behind the bean poles and that was the beginning of the affair which has you talking with some pride I also what happened and she said weld was like taking candy from a baby I think she had no doubts about her own seductive powers she drifted into our agency and she'd come straight from an understand assignation with Ted and she said oh you know he's so wonderful do you know in bed he smells like a butcher Wow Silvia sensed what was going on and when she picked up a telephone call he recognized a Sears voice that she tried to disguise it I'll see her dragged out on the phone and pretended to be a man and she said I know you're not on dirt called Ted downstairs the phone and he answered it and she said he lies to me he's become a little remand she ripped the phone out of the wall and said he had to leave I think it was a great pity that she took such precipitous action I think she should have been patient and be knows a bit understanding I need a model of you a man in black with a mind Kampf look and a love of the rack and a screw when I said I do I do so daddy and finally through the black telephones off at the roof the voices just can't burn through if I've killed one man I've killed two the vampire who said he was you and drank my blood for a year seven years if you want to know I [Music] can see how Ted in some senses becomes the mind camp figure but it's not really Ted what she said about that poem is it's a poem written from the point of view of a girl with an Electra complex a fixation on her father the poem does need to be seen as a mythic construct as well as a personal statement [Music] she would have bonfires of his work and she was angry with him he kind of admired that you know he would when she's burnt up some really important thing of his he was screaming of him he was saying there that's what needs to be in your poetry get that into your work by the end the black magic which had used candidly to get through to the sources his inspiration had taken Sylvia over but he left her for another woman she took his manuscripts mix them with the debris of fingernail parings and dandruff from his desk and burn them in a which is ritual bonfire as the flames to hide down a single fragment of charred paper drifted onto her foot it was the name of the woman I'd left her for a seer with the smoke of the fire you tended the flames I had lit unwitting that whitened in the oxygen jets of your incantatory whisper whatever went wrong wrong it went and Ted went back to London and Sylvia decided she couldn't make a life in the country and she found a lovely flat where Yates had once lived it was the coldest winter for 150 years everything froze she was in a strange state she'd been given monoamine oxidase inhibitors which is not something people would do nowadays and that means she was giving us bursts of energy it's bad idea with someone who was potentially suicidal she determined to as it were gamble she put milk and bread out for the kids she taped up their door so that the gas couldn't get through to them she'd written the poems that went into aerials she was certainly able to leave them behind as a type spirit for Ted to find she also left a number of the doctor so she was obviously ambiguous about their intentions [Music] on the radio in January that there was this radio play by Ted called the difficulties of the bridegroom and that in a way was I think Silva's death warrant it concerned a man running over here in the car and taking the hares bodies were butchered and getting some money and buying red roses for his mistress with that money and this must have given her the most horrible shock I think the play gave it a picture of him being cruel and why would he write such a thing Ted's belief in shamanism would lead him to think of her as a being like a hare magic and mysterious and very powerful the connection between the shamanic animal being a hair being Silvia and then buying roses with a dead hare and giving them to hacia was horrible thing to contemplate do you think that I have effect on her yes it certainly did that was one that the heaviest cross that Ted had to carry for the rest of his life Ted look she looked honestly like a beaten dog he looks so obsessed and he said doesn't fall too many men to murder a genius and I said you haven't murdered anybody you didn't kill her and he said I might just as well have and I hear the wolves howling all night in the park and it seems apt the Wolves lifted is in their long voices they wound us and then masters in there wailing for you they're mourning for us they wore vus into their voices we lay in your death in the fallen snow under falling snow as my body sank into the folk take where the wolves are singing in the forest for two babes who have turned in their sleep into orphans beside the corpse of their mother he's in an awful position and his letters show this when somebody who has shared life with you as much as Sylvia shared it with me dies then life somehow dies the gold-standard of it is somehow converted into death and it is a minute-by-minute effort to find any sense in life or any value to have an infidelity in your marriage is by no means the worst thing and people get through that and not everybody kills themselves it is just incredibly difficult for him to see what to do he then felt burdened for the rest of his life by what had happened so I feel sorry for his burden it's his fault but it's still his burden [Music] [Music] Ted to do him justice had accuracy detached attitude towards her writing not detached in a negative way detached in a positive way not actually anything they might have said about him but just wow this is literature dying is an art like everything else I do it exceptionally well I do it so it feels like hell I do it so it feels real I guess you could say I've a call in the sense of Ariel for instance my mother was I feel frozen in a moment of a sort of aggressive reaction and and that's the moment that got frozen because otherwise had she lived longer there would have been you know other collections other evolutionary poetry and sort of sequences and that didn't happen here God Hill beware beware out of the ash I arrive with my red hair and I eat men like you did not have to publish Ariel he honored her work right through her you know long after her death and right through the life they had together so I think for me that said that speaks volumes literally actually you can see why you might have been reluctant to publish them immediately there was any great enthusiasm for anyone to publish them actually I think he showed them to one or two publishers who were not knocked out by them in 1963 of course two years later they were pull it so what Prize winning jewels of the crown it was a huge hair double page spread in Time magazine just the thing everybody had to read one of the things which nobody likes to say was what sustained the family group after Sylvia's death was the cult of Sylvia that was rather raucous for coming in whether he liked it or not with two children to bring up a living to make locked into this eternally recurring story the bad man the man who killed Sylvia but at the same time what family income was heavily dependent on the myth he passed the copyrights via the rights and the royalties from Sylvia Plath on to his children Nick and Freda but that accusation of making money out of her legacy hung over him by now in 1965 Sylvia was the most famous poet of the anglo-saxon world and suddenly I see it was the woman who was responsible for Sylvia's death so he really would felt quite lonely and hated in the littering world to me acid was just you know the evil demon incarnate in fact we became very close because I became more and more sorry for her and they both looked you know like medieval paintings of Adam and Eve being expelled from paradise you know the way those faces oh it was just so intense the emotion that was coming out of them we were having lunch and and she suddenly thought she saw Sylvia teacher and completely apparent she said did Sylvia that's Olivia and they moved closer and it wasn't but she said then that she haunts resulting me I'm g-rated feel that I think though I don't think with any sense built I think with a sense of very rainy that so they have burned her relationship with ten he must have drawn some of this belief in the power of poetry as a healing power which he never a belief he never lost he always thought poetry could ill you he decided to write a long cycle of poems and based on sort of motif he found in a lot of folk tales that he he knew well he approaches it and he might expect using anthropology and he uses crow which if it's related to any real tribal God must be the inner wit Raylan the crow poems become a kind of anti Bible it's a creation story God creates crow and crow is this kind of demonic figure goes through all sorts of adventures ted was fascinated by all these these myths of death and rebirth the idea that a story about a figure who defeats death that's very comforting who is stronger than hope death who is stronger than the will they're stronger than love death stronger than life there but who is stronger than death me evidently who is stronger than death me evidently says crow and you know that's such an extraordinary bewildered assertion that he has survived all this only he doesn't really survive it it's early 1969 hacia felt Ted had to make a commitment to her she and Ted have had a child called Shura they lived together but a lot of the time they were living apart it's a difficult relationship Ted also began seeing someone else [Music] they came around a lot they were both in a terrible state he'd always dressed in black now she was dressed in black and they'd sit on either side of your fireplace like a couple of black powders hissing at each other because they were quarreling a lot then promise to buy her a house only she would have to find the house that Jade would like so she will go around the country and he showed with me she would find one and then Ted would gondol it and say no I was fired for a sip she just asked me once if anything happened to her I find her part of the genre and I said yes and was very annoyed when a CEO decided show is going to have another page [Music] [Laughter] [Music] a fear was aware she was duplicating Sylvia's death that can be no question of that it wasn't quite the same circumstances because Silva had made sure that her children lived Asher was essentially a lost soul he was always psychologically speaking looking for identity of her own Silvia provided Elsa with the disastrous model she wanted to resurrect Silvia and herself I think she recognized that well she was more of a sexual success Silvia had a genius which she could never possess that's baptists what triggered it suddenly crow just feels like it's blah you know it's massive and it's it feels raw it feels instant black is the girl lying on the bed to the blood black is the earth globe one inch under an egg of blackness where Sun and Moon alternate their weathers to hatch a crawl a black rainbow bend in emptiness over emptiness but running black black aspects to those poems it's a way of trying to explain it to himself these terrible things that have happened that best is evil you know it's a sort of Manichaean view of the world isn't it you know of evil being the reigning principle really I mean if he could convince himself that that was the case that must have eased his feeling of responsibility in some way he felt that crew was his masterpiece that he had made that transition from experience into myth created something that would be archetypal eternal some critics said yes this is the great literary work of our time others thought it's gone too far it's all blood guts through the late 1960s and into the early 1970s the feminist movement took off and so Arielle became an iconic text for feminists Sylvia was just the sort of thing which the rising feminist movement needed that is as an exemplar as a martyr as a saint but of course that had the effect of making him into a character in her story so in 1970 there was a very influential anthology of feminist writings published and it included one of Sylvia's poems the Jayla the idea of the husband as a jailer and then the next year a feminist a New York feminist called Robin Morgan actually published a poem how can I accuse Ted Hughes of what the entire British and American literary and critical establishment has been at great lengths to deny without ever saying it in so many words of course the murder of Sylvia Plath having once been so successful at committing the perfect marriage one can hardly blame Hughes for trying again the second also was a suicide or didn't you know one night ring the doorbell to enter a copy of his girlish fans who then disarmed him of that weapon with which he tortured us stuff it into his mouth so up his poet asting lips around it and blow out his brains the poem arraignment came into being not triggered by Platts death but because the final straw was the death of a Stephen level he was responsible certainly morally responsible no one was saying that he literally shoved her head in the oven some extraordinary allegations if it had been published in Britain Ted would have sued for libel without without doubt so through the early 1970s this ferment emerges where Ted is the demonic husband [Music] there were groups of women who took it all on their own impetus to begin to pick it fuse where ever he read with lines on the signs from the poem so the poem turned into a sort of organizing tool which was not its intent I assure you I was appalled that something that happened in 1963 could be carried forward and what an easy way out for somebody to think yes we're right we've got the real story we know what really happened and we are going to punish this complete stranger for something we weren't around to witness we know nothing about that we're the ones with the answer he described those people as fantasies you know he described the issue around Plath as a Fantasia and the people had fallen for that Fantasia and they were more interested in it and needed it more than they needed the truth [Applause] for outsiders for because that's what they are outsiders to make judgments that affects somebody in their life for all of their life is a sort of horrible form of theft it's an abuse having to suffer watching that freestyle street theater presented and accepted and discussed as the final truth about our lives and having to realize over the years that no mistake can be corrected no fantasy or lie can be extinguished and that any attempt to correct the record only gives a weirder energy to the lies having the monkey world of all this play among one's nerves for 25 years induces a stupor of horror he'd finally affect your judgment of mankind I think he's keeping quiet and dealing with it in his own way really preserve something essential for him I think if he once started talking about it it just would have it would have been it's interpreted it would have it would have come back to haunt him I think I think he couldn't have done that I just remember one really difficult day when I saw him cry somebody made him cry and I felt that the world collapsed I stopped writing just over a year ago and have entered a state since that I thought I was too robust and saying to succumb to I'm having to believe that my guardian angels who I always thought were on my side are now having a game with me it felt as if at the very least Ted had gone undercover you know that his star maybe wasn't shining as brightly as before and you know that's fine you know every every every writing career as it has its moments and you know better books and all that kind of stuff in the immediate aftermath of chrome he's he's struggling to UM to start a new big project in some ways went into a fairly rapid poetic decline in collections called cave Birds and Prometheus on his crag becomes overblown the poet is quasi profit we could talk about Hugh suddenly using more masks and curtains and hiding behind characters and becoming a fugitive in his work [Music] Australia writers week press conference Ted Hughes which was interrupted by the FEM fascists as they were labeled the Soviet crowd who heckled and spat at Ted and of course he could not speak a word in front of all the photographers and news people I'd arranged so he walked into the cool of the hotel and he just looked at me and he said you look very tired would you like to take a nap in my bed and that's how our love really started I just thought what a kind man and he's not a wolf well what I did was I cheered him up I think he was actually very depressed at that time and there was something about her bubbly energy her light her life and its association with Australia and newness that really did reinvigorate him and in the late 1970s he his his poetic muse seems to come back on track he was vulnerable to women there is no question about that and in some way it was connected to work I noticed he was just looking for the muse figure who would help trigger the next poem really I was his muse in fact he said as much in my earring to Robert Graves the writer of the white goddess it was a fabulous moment for me to hear that he'd written his most erotic poem about me and so this is it as you bend to touch the gypsy girl who waits for you in the head shall lose stress Falls open midsummer ditch sickness flushed freckled with us fever swollen lips parted her eyes closing a lulling armful and so young hot I mean no we would never have dream of tackling him on his infidelities I mean it was his life that's that's what he was that's what he he was living and it was up to him it was almost as though he had two personalities one part of his life was nothing to do with anybody else and there was another side which was the family side and that the two sort of like didn't mean didn't seem to meet a bark out 8a in a bookshop in Huddersfield and I didn't really know what he was the Anglican minister he's abducted into the spirit world because the spirits have some purpose for for Nikolas Nikolas lon and while he's been taken away they send a double and this doppelganger interprets the Ministry of God's love quite literally he's out there making love to all the women of the parish there's incredible scene in a in a hot where there's a you know the sexual act is taking place in and amongst all these ferrets spilling out of various cages the figure of Reverend lamb in Gaudete who's clearly related to Hughes that is a difficult book to like I think he was trying to write something out of his system [Music] but he included with it a series of epilogue poems in a completely different voice these were quiet reflective emotional poems in these poems he addresses a lost female they become like elegies two dead women whom he has loved I turned I bowed in the morgue I kissed your temples refrigerated glazed as rained on graveyard marble my lips queasy heart non-existent straightened into some darkness like a pillar over Athens [Music] it felt as if you know that the guard had come down for a moment that this was somebody you know writing from the from the heart the points felt sincere [Music] I think that's what people responded to [Music] so his next major collection it's called remains of ailment ailment was the old legendary name for his district of Yorkshire the Calder Valley and he writes a beautiful sequence of poems I think his most underrated book about the decay of the community that he grew up in but also their poems of memory about childhood in the middle of it was their big graveyard which was the graveyard for the whole southern southwestern corner of Yorkshire it's the one about the this graveyard full of bodies which has all they all the graves of my mother's family [Music] you claw your way over a giant beating we and Thomas and Walter and Edith a living feathers Esther and Sylvia living feathers where all the horizons left Queens a family of dark swans and go beating low through storm silver toward the Atlantic I think what you get in that book is the the archaeology of all Ted's later writing just this sense of always wanting to get up there into the light and towards the light and and I think in it remains a Velma you can trace that that journey towards a form of ecstasy and epiphany well when I saw the poetry syllabus for my own levels and my mother and father were both on it and I remember asking a couple of my friends you know how would you feel if your parents were on it and they couldn't put themselves in that place and so I telephoned my father and said you know I have a bit of a problem because you're on here on my syllabus and he said that's marvelous I can tell you what I meant I can we can go through the poems together and I said but my mother's on the syllabus - he said yes he said you know III know all about her work and I can tell you what she meant and I can and I said okay this is my problem I said if you tell me what you meant actually the examiners might disagree with you and then they're going to fail me and what if I then argue and I say yes but I got it straight from the horse's mouth in fact I live with the horse and then if I if you don't help me they're going to think you did anyway I actually can't win in 1979 or 1980 we came on a school trip to this cinema to hear Ted Hughes reading his poems we were studying the points at school for exams and I remember him coming onto stage he sort of shuffled on in that corner brought his own seat on to sit on and there was no ceremony no introduction I even wondered if he was the caretaker and then sat down and with this incredible voice and sort of low intensity started reading the work I don't think there's any doubt that if it hadn't have been for Ted's work I wouldn't be writing I didn't know that the world was such an interesting place and I certainly didn't know they could contain it in these little blocks of language I'd only seen language as information before this was language with it with a different dimension a completely different dimension I mean the people who still disliked him still disliked him nevertheless being so remarkable of poets he just won over the hearts of all people who loved poetry and there were more in the country than you always realize people forgave him I think much more easily as a result the new poet laureate is Ted Hughes filling the gap left by the death of Sir John Betjeman seven months ago mr. Hughes a Yorkshire lad who went to Cambridge was the youngest of the handful who'd been tipped for the post he first came to prominence in the 50s and won many prizes with his work described by one critic as being totally without sentimentality and of forceful roughness do you have you any feeling at all that the appointment might be an outmoded one perhaps old fashioned in this televisual here oh no no I think it's well it depends what you think of the Queen or of the crown [Music] and here's the crown now promoted welcome be the crowns the sort of symbol of you know the unity the try the spiritual unity of the tribe anyway and so when that's outmoded then the laureates have ordered in some sense the poet becomes well the guardian of the spirit of the language of the tribe and so the essential soul of the tribe and so the poet has this duty to perform in order to keep the spirit of the tribe alive in poetry were all sorts of salvation and that's why he took on children's poetry run children's competitions in the Daily Mirror I think it was run and because he he was convinced that by learning poetry by learn to write but by carrying him up you could fulfill yourself fully and totally as a human being this was through his religion and that he believed in it he thought would change the world that's what he thought [Music] if my father had not had fishing if he had not had that piece where he'd go and be alone how might he have coped with the life that he goes back to [Music] came up here a few times with them the first time we fished oh I just had a bite I can't believe that fishings like plumbing the mysteries of the world it's an absolute epiphany that this mysterious creature comes from the bottom of the river and takes your fly you're trying constantly to adjust like you are to life and it becomes then a kind of a model for how you live your life I think that the tragedies that ensued from his indiscretions did teach him a lesson but I think at the same time it was like being addicted to a drug he liked the regularity of married life but he also wanted the inspiration of new relationships this actually was a love act that had brought them out of everywhere squirming and leaping and that had brought us to besotted voyeurs trying to hook ourselves into it and all the giddy orgasm of the river quaking under our feet Ted told me one time sitting around the campfire having a scotch and having had a great day on the river he said by the time you hit 60 you think what else is there you know have I used my time well he felt that life was closing in on him when he felt that his creative energies were going down when the passion was gone I think he was in a funny sort of wife fearful that it might infect his creative ability [Music] [Music] later on you get these two books which suddenly put him right back in in the center they got an incredible amount of praise and critical attention for different reasons but largely because it felt as if you know Ted was back in in some ways you know with poems with writing that was a strong and is powerful and has energized and as important as anything that he'd written before usually you know they just expect us to fade out [Music] [Music] I do remember him saying as soon as you tell somebody you've got an illness something like cancer it says they write you off and I supposed you do it you look at people differently when you know that they're there on the way out basically you don't know how long we've got left then it a sadness descends on everybody and I think that's probably why I kept it quiet the old Ted was like someone on parole from some purgatorial ordeal to which he'd been condemned the important point of the poet rights to heal the wounds and the wounds come from Iiro and Foley and he was more wounded authorities life by falling there was a moment in tattoos his life where he said I hope that everyone has the right to own the facts of their own life in many ways the most tragic the saddest words in the English language are too late and it was too late that he came to publish his poems about his life with Sylvia Plath nine months after he published them he was dead that's a tragedy [Music] we have come to Pez corner where the word is celebrated [Music] I always think the line that had put open Sylvia's headstone says what he makes out of it that even in these horrific fires the Lotus can bloom you know something extraordinary can come out of it and I think both Sylvia and Ted did that they made something astounding out of this horrific tragedy I kept everything that he ever wrote to me in fact there's a poem in one of my books about that see if I can remember it's only a little short one there's no justice I can do to the memory of you your letters speakers clearly to me now as they did when written book bound they may illuminate the father that you were so others see the loss you are to me [Music] [Laughter] you [Music]

Channel: Twenty-First Century Fudge

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Id: XbAGbjXPCP8

Length: 89min 18sec (5358 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 11 2019