Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected

M. Wormald, N. Roberts, M. Wormald, N. Roberts, Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137276582
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Including a previously unpublished poem by Ted Hughes, as well as new essays from Seamus Heaney and Simon Armitage, Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected offers fresh readings and newly available archival research, challenging established views about Hughes's speaking voice, study at Cambridge and the influence of other poets on Hughes's work.

1 The Ascent of Ted Hughes: Conquering the Calder Valley

Simon Armitage

Those not familiar with the biographical details could be forgiven for assuming that Ted Hughes was something of a stick in the mud.¹ This is because of Hughes’ enduring connection with the Calder Valley, a deeply scored river system running between the Pennine watershed to the west and Halifax to the east. Hughes was born in that valley in 1930, in the small town of Mytholmroyd, and for the rest of his life continued to refer to the area in his poems and in his prose writing, both obliquely and directly. His Remains of Elmet, written in response to Fay Godwin’s black-and-white photographs of the locality, confirmed Hughes’ faithful relationship with the upper Calder through powerful and dramatic evocations of the landscape, and the book is nothing like the extracurricular or coffee-table project it might have been in the hands of a less committed writer. In fact, Remains of Elmet is, in my view, not only the definitive poetic guide to the environs of Hughes’ homelands, but his single most important publication, a kind of concordance to the whole of his work, the poems within it serving as manifestos or blueprints for his later work and philosophical concerns.

And yet Ted Hughes left Mytholmroyd when he was a boy. In fact, some commentators make him as young as seven when the family packed their bags and in the local vernacular ‘flitted’ to Mexborough in South Yorkshire, a far less romantic part of the county. It would be easier to associate a writer such as Lawrence with the pit-heads and goods trains that probably characterized Mexborough in the thirties and forties, or Auden with his predilection for industrial landscapes. Nevertheless, in the outlying fields, Hughes still managed to serve out his apprenticeship as a ‘nature poet’. After South Yorkshire he went to Cambridge, then to London, then to Devon. That arcing journey from the terraced north to the thatched south-west was by no means a seamless one, and was punctuated with diversions both in this country and abroad. It is also true that Hughes’ parents returned to the Calder Valley and that Hughes made regular return trips, at one point purchasing Lumb Bank, the farmhouse we now know as the Ted Hughes Arvon Centre for creative writing. But as far as the National Census is concerned, Ted Hughes was an occupant of that particular postcode for little more than half-a-dozen years at the very beginning of his life, after which he was a visitor. Why is it, then, that place names such as Hebden Bridge and Heptonstall are so strongly connected to Hughes, both the man and the work? And more curiously, how could those childhood memories leave such a lasting impression on the imagination, to the point where Hughes was still writing about his Pennine background 60 years later and from 300 miles away?

For those uncertain of the cartography, Halifax is a former textile town famous for its building society, or rather its demutualized bank. Like many towns of comparable size and latitude, its civic buildings speak of an illustrious past, and its ailing non-league football team tells of a less confident present. The A646 out of Halifax skirts along the south-facing slope of the Calder Valley, passing through towns such as Sowerby Bridge and the fabulously named Luddendenfoot, and within a few miles has entered Hughes Country. I use that expression not quite in the way that Howarth, a few miles to the north, is referred to as Brontë Country, although this handful of former mill-towns and the hills which overshadow them should be the first stop for any Hughes enthusiast – tourist or scholar – because even though Hughes was only a temporary resident, the anthropology, religion, natural history and geography of the area provided him with not just a setting, but a model for nearly all of his future work. This continuing ability to draw from and poeticize his upbringing says a great deal about the extent to which Hughes, as a child, was tuned in to his surroundings. Perhaps the boyish wonder evident in some of his writing is part of the reason his poems have been so popular and successful among generations of schoolchildren. The poems in Remains of Elmet also confirm the depth of his memory – the extent of his recall when burrowing into the past – although not all of what he has said about the Calder Valley can be taken as fact. That isn’t to accuse him of falsifying the past; his portrayal of that part of the world is always graphic and never without significance, but his role as poet should not be confused with that of the fastidious chronicler or the scrupulous local historian. And as well as responding to his environment, Hughes demonstrated an equal capacity for imposing his views upon it too, moulding and mythologizing what lay in front of him to suit his needs. It worked both ways.

So it was with a certain amount of ‘finger-in-the-wind’ imaginative liberty that Hughes defined Elmet as the limits of an Old Celtic Kingdom, whose bolt-holes and smoke-holes took in the foothills of the lower Pennines and the steep-sided, wooded valleys of what was then known as the West Riding of Yorkshire. What is completely convincing, however, is Hughes’ more personalized account of the region as he understood it in a 1980 radio talk, one with which any member of the indigenous population could only agree.² Hughes developed a fascinating portrait of Elmet in which members of the local community were, he said, an ‘essentially geological and meteorological phenomenon’, suggesting that all aspects of society and personality in that part of the world could be attributed to rocks and rain. ‘This helps to explain their obsessive concern through the ages with chills, bronchitis, pneumonia, rheumatism; with hot food and as much of it as can be had, and with wrapping up well.’ Certainly this tallies with my experience of West Yorkshire. More than half a century after Hughes left the area a fair proportion of the conversation still revolves around homespun remedies for coughs and colds and typically takes place in a shop-doorway while sheltering from the ‘nithering wind’. His description of the upper Calder as ‘a naturally evolved local organism, like a giant protozoa’, might seem at first like Hughesian hyperbole, but the implication – that the area exhibits a peculiar form of self-sufficiency – still feels very true, especially in the case of Hebden Bridge, a town which attracts a great many epithets, some of them contradictory, not all of them complimentary. In his talk on ‘Elmet’, Hughes said that Hebden Bridge had been referred to as ‘Cradle of the Industrial Revolution in Textiles and Cradle of the Chartist Movement, and even, according to some, the Cradle of the Splitting of the Atom’. He also pointed out that ‘in the mid-sixties Hebden Bridge was declared the hippie capital of the United Kingdom’, and its reputation for independence, for example through its well publicized and active resistance to ‘chain’ retail outlets, remains to this day.

But more than anything, Hebden Bridge is the archetypal Calder Valley town, by which I mean it is a settlement located deep in the water-cut ravine, whose outlying houses cling precariously to the valley sides and whose remote farmhouses on the moorland above risk obliteration by the elements. And it is here, within the cross-section, across the strata of the valley, that I think a theory can be formulated that goes some way to explaining Hughes’ lasting preoccupation with his early life. The poetry of Ted Hughes is the poetry of conflict. Whether writing about animal, vegetable or mineral, rival and opposing energies are always felt to be at work in a Hughes poem. Very often such conflict produces dramatic tension, as if Hughes is utilizing a technique we might more readily associate with theatre. A crass simplification would be to say that characters, objects and even concepts in a Hughes poem are sometimes cast in ‘good’ or ‘bad’ roles, then pitted against each other in a way that suggests a possible ‘winner’ or ‘loser’. The Crow poems are the most obvious example, but even in a short, ostensibly pastoral piece like ‘Snowdrop’ we find that small, delicate flower to be in a siege situation, holding out against the deadly grip of winter. In ‘Pike’, far from being under threat from the line and the hook, the fish appears locked in mortal combat with nothing less than the whole of evolution. And the poem ‘Thistles’, from its rustic opening of farmers and cows, develops into a full-blooded metaphor for war. Everywhere in Hughes we are witnesses to this struggle between natural adversaries. The survivors in his poems have succeeded against all the odds, against everything the opposition could throw at them. But what constitutes victory, and what reward does triumph bring?

As a boy, said Hughes, ‘all my more exciting notions gravitated upwards’. Standing outside 1 Aspinall Street, the house where he was born, it is not difficult to understand why. On one side of the valley stand the sentinels of blackened buildings and dark ridges. On the other looms Scout Rock, the blank quarry face that blots out all but the highest movements of the sun. Along the corridor of the valley, traffic rumbles through at a rate that has only increased through the years, despite the opening of the M62 between Leeds and Manchester. In these circumstances, the valley becomes a kind of trap, a narrow funnel of darkness and fumes. In his memory, and with the poet cranking up the rhetoric, it then becomes a gorge, ditch, a trough, a pit and ultimately (and perhaps inevitably) a trench. It is a place to be avoided or escaped, and the only escape route is up. Above the confines of the valley lie illumination and reprieve – a fleeting but nonetheless worthwhile sense of enlightenment and hope. And Hughes’ means of escape is not crampons or ladders or ropes, but language. Words. No. 1 Aspinall Street is now owned and run by the Elmet Trust and is available for hire as self-contained tourist accommodation. Should they wish to, visitors can sleep in what was Hughes’ attic bedroom, poke their heads through the hatch and look out onto a bird’s-eye world of rooftops, moorland and sky.

Let’s start at the very bottom, though. Not just at ground level but in a channel cut from the earth which disappears into a subterranean shaft passing beneath the hill. The Rochdale canal is quite literally a stone’s throw from Hughes’ birthplace, a largely ignored stretch of mainly stagnant water running parallel to the river and the road. Since becoming obsolete as transport routes, which they have been for over a hundred years now, the canals in the industrial north have suffered a variety of fates. At best they are venues for half-hearted leisure activities such as walking the dog. At worst they are dead-waters, repositories of discarded shopping trolleys, disused bikes and domestic waste. The canal at Mytholmroyd in the smog-bound thirties would have been no aquarium, and yet it conceived in Hughes a life-long passion for fishing, and provided him with a rare glimpse of that most precious of fish – the trout.

The poem ‘The Long Tunnel Ceiling’ could be read as a simple celebration of nature, which on one, perfectly satisfying level, it is. But it is in relation to the topographical structure of Hughes’ writing that I prefer to consider it. We begin with the Moderna Blanket factory and lorries from Bradford, icons and images of industrial hell situated in the valley bottom. The tunnel itself has become a grim, chthonic world, Hades perhaps, no longer a simple underground passage, but a place of stalactites (a cave) and cell-windows (a prison). Yet it his here, in this netherworld, that Hughes receives a sign. And without doubt it is a sign intended for his eyes by some higher power, ‘A seed / Of the wild god now flowering for me’, as he puts it (CP 479). And what is the trout a sign of? Of effort, of struggle, of the life-long journey upstream, driven on by some primitive subconscious ambition. The elements have conspired against it, a cloudburst flushing it from its hillside stream to leave it languishing in the lower, man-made reaches of the world, ‘Between the tyres, under the tortured axles’. But here in this hell-on-earth it is an omen of higher thoughts and aspirations. It is a pointer towards a worldly heaven. A signpost, almost, showing not only the direction of travel that Hughes must take, but a glimpse of the destination that awaits him. Hughes shares with us the sudden, almost miraculous moment when this mystical, sacred being breaks the glazed surface of the canal and launches itself into the air. It is a manifestation of the innate desire to rise, expressed here as a burst of energy and a raw physical urge. In one moment, the fish is transmuted from a ‘brick’ to an ‘ingot’. Alchemy has taken place. It flashes with the colour of the sun, as if some kindred fire within it compels the trout to thrust itself towards the supreme, life-giving light.

If the stony outcrop of Scout Rock was an obstruction to Hughes’ view, there was another impediment to his vision much closer to home, a man-made obstacle situated only a few yards from the kitchen window, in the form of a chapel by the name of Mount Zion. In his poem of the same title, Hughes evokes the idea of a ‘deadfall’, a very crude and honestly named animal trap. When a stick is disturbed, a heavy but delicately balanced stone tips forward and flattens whichever animal has dislodged it, often a fox, perhaps a sinner on this occasion, or anyone who might attempt to sneak past the black wall of the church. Once again, we find ourselves near the very bottom of the slope, looking upwards, but what obscures our view this time, barricading us against attainment, is religion itself. Orthodox religion that is, in the shape of buildings, dogma, conformity and a rather scary-sounding congregation. The church-goers seem to have little to do with spiritual fulfilment of any kind, which once again is elsewhere, above and beyond, and this less than flattering recollection of the parish worthies would have succeeded as a poem in its own right. But Hughes has another move to make. He introduces a cricket, at work in the distance and the dark. I don’t think he intends the cricket as a literal threat, slowly demolishing the church, and in some respects the insect is almost comical, chirring away in the mortar between the dark stones. Nor do I read it as a biblical portent; a plague of locusts might have contributed to the destruction of Old Testament Egypt but it is hard to imagine the humble cricket undermining the foundations of a fairly robust religious doctrine. Instead, what begins as a kind of music emanating from this near-invisible creature becomes in Hughes’ night-time imagination a sort of relentless gnawing – a growing, persistent doubt. The church is a physical manifestation of man’s desire to impose order on the world, and the sound of the cricket is the heretical erosion of that order. To stand on Aspinall Street today is to see that impatient land-developers have stripped the crickets of their demolition franchise; Mount Zion has been razed to the ground and replaced by a less intimidating three-storey block of flats. Along the valley, dozens of other Methodist chapels still stand obstinate and foursquare against the horizon. But eternity is a long time. Oblivion has a patient determination, and gravity – its most patient foot-soldier – shows no signs of abating. For the purpose of my theory, the sound of the cricket is also a wake-up call to Hughes, ‘smothered’ in his bed at the bottom of the hill, alerting him to the war of attrition being played out directly above his head. That word ‘smothered’ is so tactically deployed, suggesting an element of malice (as in suffocation), but also containing the spelling and sound of ‘mothered’. Hughes in bed is cosseted, cutoff, almost forcibly removed from the natural world outside. But the sound of the cricket still percolates through the darkness, inflaming his imagination. It makes us rethink an earlier passage in the poem, his account of his introduction to or initiation into the Methodist Church, which he likens to the slaughter of a lamb. We reread it now as a dream or nightmare, and for the superstitious Hughes, such waking-visions were always loaded with significance and could never be taken lightly or ignored. Returning as far as the opening lines, it is interesting to compare Hughes’ frustratingly occluded view of the night-sky with that of his young daughter in the poem ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’. His eye-line is blocked by a building, a church even, but in rural North Devon Frieda comes face to face with the moon. She is captivated, and in turn empowered by language.

Climbing the hill brings us to various staging posts along the way, staging posts in the form of poems, but the next stopping off point on this particular attempt on the summit is ‘Heptonstall Old Church’. From the east, Heptonstall has to be approached by means of a turning-circle, meaning that vehicles must overshoot the junction by a few hundred yards, then swing around 180 degrees before attempting the gradient. It’s as if visitors are being given the opportunity of changing their minds, or at least collecting their thoughts before proceeding. A narrow, Hovis-esque cobbled street runs through the village itself, and on the left-hand side stands the ruin of the old church, looking exactly as Hughes describes it. The newer church next door is less interesting, except for the fact that Sylvia Plath is buried in the graveyard across the lane. For students of poetry at Lumb Bank, about a mile away on the same contour, the grave has become a necessary pilgrimage site as well as the setting for a thousand well-intentioned elegies. But all that is another story. What fascinates about the poem ‘Heptonstall Old Church’ is the image of the building as that most symbolic and unconstrained of all the animals – a bird. To the climber, to the person struggling towards the peak, the bird represents the kind of soaring freedom that can only be dreamed of. To the bird, height is nothing to fear, and the idea of falling, and therefore failing, is anathema. This particular bird, returning to planet Earth carrying some visionary gemstone in its song, implants the same vision in the head of man. It is almost a creation myth, but as with most of those stories, something goes wrong. Man, it seems, just isn’t up to the job. After this tantalizing vision of not just altitude but outer space – heaven, quite possibly – the dream fades. The vision dies. There can only be momentary snatches of paradise. After that, blackness. Like the trout fighting its way upstream for one epiphanic moment of procreation, so humanity stumbles towards the light for a split-second of … what? Love? Beauty? Knowledge? A glimpse of the meaning of life? Then the light goes out. It is a bleak poem, redeemed only by a parallel reading which sees the death of the bird as the death of a more orthodox form of faith. The original Heptonstall church is medieval, built in the thirteenth century. As with ‘Mount Zion’ the poem could be taken as a despairing comment on the nature of latter-day worship, particularly the poker-faced austerity of Wesleyan Methodism which took hold so powerfully in the West Riding, transforming its attitudes and its architecture. In that scenario there is hope, it is simply that we have become estranged from it, or forgotten what form it took.

However, with hope comes no guarantee of success. In fact, man often seems doomed in Hughes’ work, even if he does enjoy a certain amount of pleasure along the way, as with the poem ‘Football at Slack’. Is this a case of the indomitable human spirit rising above the elemental forces of destruction? Or is it a case of the band playing on as the Titanic enters the abyss? A bit of both, I’d suggest, but for me, the quality of the writing and even the humour is enough to tip this poem in the direction of optimism, as if language and wit were key weapons in the battle against failure. Here we are, closer now to the top of the hill. The wind is so powerful it seems incomprehensible that a man could stand up in it, let alone take part in a game involving the precise control of a spherical, pneumatic object. But even though the world is sinking, and the rain is a steel press, and the words ‘depression’ and ‘holocaust’ are rising towards us from the bottom of the poem, the playfulness of the imagery reads like a justification of their actions. And even if these men are engaged in what some might think of as a particular futile activity (unlike his father Hughes had no interest in football apart from as a metaphor for war, as his limited edition poem ‘Football’ makes clear)³ they are enacting some fundamental need to perform, to take part, to exist. Those taking part appear blissfully ignorant of the atrocities going on on all sides. And I don’t get the impression that Hughes is being judgemental or disrespectful about their lack of concern. Perhaps there is even a trace of envy, like Keats’ feelings for the nightingale, env...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dediaction
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Ascent of Ted Hughes: Conquering the Calder Valley
• 2 Ted Hughes and Cambridge
• 3 Mythology, Mortality and Memorialization: Animal and Human Endurance in Hughes’ Poetry
• 4 Ted Hughes’ Inner Music
• 5 Knowing the Bible Right Down to the Bone: Ted Hughes and Christianity
• 6 Ted Hughes’ Vacanas: The Difficulties of a Bridegroom
• 7 ‘The Fox is a jolly farmer and we farm the same land’: Ted Hughes and Farming
• 8 Fishing for Ted
• 9 Traumatic Repetition in Capriccio
• 10 Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes: A Complex Friendship
• 11 ‘I fear a Man of frugal Speech’: Ted Hughes and Emily Dickinson
• 12 Ted Hughes and Federico García Lorca: The Tragic Theatre of Mourning
• 13 Ted Hughes’ Poetry of Healing
• 14 ‘The Ted Hughesness of Ted Hughes’: The Construction of a ‘Voice’ in Hughes’ Poetry Readings and Recordings
• 15 Suffering and Decision
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Index of Works by Ted Hughes