The 1960s and 70s were a time of political and social upheaval in Britain. Under the governments of Harold Wilson, it seemed that power was edging ever closer to the people, but at the same time, radical politics was racing on further to the left.
When I was a student at Oxford in the late 60s and early 70s, revolution was in the air. The slogans I heard from fellow students were “We must smash the system!” as they brandished Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. And some of them also brandished this book of poetry, with its striking cover – Crow by Ted Hughes.. Politics and literary fashion intertwined.
I was pig ignorant of the real world in those days, but gradually the awful backstory filtered through. Hughes had married the brilliant young American poet Sylvia Plath in 1956. They lived in the USA and then Britain, as Hughes’ fame rose to challenge hers. The couple had two children before separating in 1962. The following year, Plath (who had long suffered from depressive illness) took her own life.
In the summer of 1962, Hughes had begun an affair with a married woman called Assia Wevill. The couple faced the fury and contempt of Plath’s admirers following her suicide. On 23 March 1969, six years after Plath’s death, Assia Wevill took her own life by the same method: asphyxiation from a gas stove. Wevill also killed her child, Alexandra Tatiana Elise, the four-year-old daughter of Hughes, born on 3 March 1965.
Crow was published in October 1970. Here’s a taste:
CROW ALIGHTS
Crow saw the herded mountains, steaming in the morning. And he saw the sea
Dark-spined, with the whole earth in its coils.
He saw the stars, fuming away into the black, mushrooms of the nothing forest, clouding their spores, the virus of God.
And he shivered with the horror of Creation.
In the hallucination of the horror
He saw this shoe, with no sole, rain-sodden,
Lying on a moor.
And there was this garbage can, bottom rusted away,
A playing place for the wind, in a waste of puddles.
There was this coat, in the dark cupboard, in the silent room, in the silent house.
There was this face, smoking its cigarette between the dusk window and the fire’s embers.
Near the face, this hand, motionless.
Near the hand, this cup.
Crow blinked. He blinked. Nothing faded.
He stared at the evidence.
Nothing escaped him. (Nothing could escape.)
This isn’t the strongest Crow poem. But it conveys the moment of horror, the disbelief, the projected grief and misery – and the shock of realising that nothing that’s happened can be undone. There’s fury at God, who’s made such a painful, ugly and meaningless world. And a very human guilt.
Back as students in the 1970s, we thought it was really brave and cool to see the world like this. We’d absorbed the stories of the Nazi concentration camps. We’d absorbed the stories of Stalin’s camps in Siberia for independent thinkers. We felt that we’d been lied to in our positive Christian upbringing – we’d been fed the opium of the masses. The British Empire and its wars and daring deeds had been a con.
But we were wrong about the poetry. The grand, black rhetoric in Crow matches the immaturity of the young students’ vision. Their disgust at finding themselves in a world that is not fair or even logically organised. Their terrible self-obsession, so that when a tragedy happens, it’s all about them. The unappealing posture of the angry victim.
The lesson I have drawn from Iain McGilchrist is that the world is more than a set of facts and numbers that we can’t escape. It is up to us to construct a positive meaning, finding the beauty outside ourselves: in nature, family love and our caring impulses. To do that, we have to use the emotional side of our brains, employing metaphor, empathy, intuition, maybe even our own personal myths of angels and spirits and respect for the sacred circle of life.
It is simply immature to revel in catastrophe and anger, as though we are powerless. It’s a stage of grief that we have to pass through. The nihilism of a pure, cynical atheism is not the final stage of human emotional development,
Many years later in 1998, Hughes published his last book of poetry, Birthday Letters. It’s a work of huge delicacy, accuracy and restraint – in which he finally does justice to what occurred between the two young poets, Ted and Sylvia.
(This post continues with a review of Birthday Letters.)