(This follows on from the post on the book Crow)
Ted Hughes was maybe the greatest English poet of his generation. But when he described Crow as his finest book, he was wrong. Its bleak philosophical message is unsubtle and the emotional register is passionate, extreme but two dimensional. Birthday Letters, published 28 years later, is a genuinely humane response to the joint tragedy of Ted and Sylvia, and its honesty lifts the simple, direct account of their relationship into high art.
Hughes’ breakthrough book was The Hawk in the Rain. These were rigorously observed nature poems, stripped of any trace of pastoral sentimentality. They matched the mood of British intellectuals in the 1950s, and their sense of a British working class who had been dragged by the ineptitude of their rulers through two bloody world wars. (Hughes himself was more inclined to celebrate the toughness of English warriors.)
In his book Lupercal published in 1960 there is a famous poem, Hawk Roosting:
“…My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my 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 sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads…”
The bird of prey is like the emblem of an old aristocrat, a creature with total, temporary power, reflecting a natural world which is pitiless, red in tooth and claw.
Sylvia Plath was also a major poet, who opened up the tragedies of the inner world for a woman who was hypersensitive, alienated from everyday social life and repeatedly driven to suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts. She describes this inner landscape with the same ruthless honesty and dispassion as Ted Hughes observing the Pike or the Jaguar.
Plath’s writing was brilliant, horrific, reflecting something of the perspective of Franz Kafka, the tale of a young human being already doomed in a vengeful, alien society.
So Hughes and Plath shared a literary method, a searing, unblinking honesty in what they described – he the outer, natural world, she the inner world, of someone emotionally scarred, barely hanging on to their sanity. This is from her poem Tulips, flowers brought for her as she is recovering in hospital:
“I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free——
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.
“The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their colour,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck…”
Both Hughes and Plath were master-technicians with words, able to explode phrases to reveal new meanings and sensations. But they were opposite characters and the literary fashion for the bleak extreme was driving them to mutual destruction.
It’s as if they were being celebrated for “telling the truth.” But the truth doesn’t have to be that man is like a hawk or a jaguar pacing in a cage. Or that a woman has to be a suffering Madonna, drowning in the excess of her empathy, isolation and suspicion of male betrayal.
So to come to Birthday Letters: this is from the poem A Pink Wool Knitted Dress, describing the couple’s minimalist marriage ceremony on Bloomsday (nod to James Joyce.) Hughes hadn’t even informed his family and turned up in a threadbare black cord jacket and an ancient RAF black tie. He had made no compromise with his cultural rebel image.
There was no best man, so they co-opted the sexton to hold the rings. Hughes writes:
“You were transfigured.
So slender and new and naked,
A nodding spray of wet lilac.
You shook, you sobbed with joy, you were ocean depth
Brimming with God.
You said you saw the heavens open
And show riches, ready to drop upon us.
Levitated beside you, I stood subjected
To a strange tense: the spellbound future.
“In that echo-gaunt, weekday chancel
I see you
Wrestling to contain your flames
In your pink wool knitted dress
And in your eye-pupils – great cut jewels
Jostling their tear-flames, truly like big jewels
Shaken in a dice cup and held up to me.”
Ted Hughes pulls no punches. His new young wife was so wrapped in emotion, so idealistic, so vulnerable. And he was so unready to accept the responsibility and care for her in the way she would need.
Hughes was lucky as a writer. He not only had the gift to bring flora and fauna alive in words. He shared with his great contemporary and friend Seamus Heaney the ability to capture moments of transcendence in nature. For example in his poem The Horses from The Hawk in the Rain – we brush against another living world, with its own powerful and primordial meanings, entirely beyond our personal selves, that we can only grope to understand. Heaney could do the same in a poem like Grauballe Man – which also encompasses his compassion for all the victims of Ireland’s bitter sectarian wars.
Ted Hughes also had an ability to celebrate the diversity and wonder of nature’s cycle, as in his book, nominally for children, Season Songs. These are poems to help us all see more deeply and be thankful for the world we are in.
Do such literary judgements matter? The arguments about which artists are “great” rather than merely being good or skilful?
I think these two books help us to understand the tragedy of Ted and Sylvia, who were partly victims of the iconoclastic culture of their time, unsuited to care for each other, occasionally even literary rivals. Their story was sometimes exploited later to become part of the myth of the sexual politics of our age.
Returning to the JustBeauty theme of left and right brain thinking, the comparison of the two books suggests to me the higher value of art which expresses a healing, emotional wisdom. That means an acceptance of the powerful cycles of nature and compassion and forgiveness for our fellow, blundering human beings.