Ted Hughes, The Haunted Earth Joanny Moulin To cite this version: Joanny Moulin. Ted Hughes, The Haunted Earth. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015, 978-1508933601. hal-01643119 HAL Id: hal-01643119 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01643119 Submitted on 21 Nov 2017 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Joanny Moulin Ted Hughes The Haunted Earth A biography Copyright © 2015 Joanny Moulin English translation by Claude Moulin Cover copyright © Basile Moulin First published in French as Ted Hughes, la terre hantée by Éditions Aden 2007 English version first published in 2015 Nans-les-Pins: Independent Publishing ISBN-13: 978-1-5089-1741-0 (print) ISBN-10: 1508917418 (print) ISBN 978-2-9552300-1-5 (ebook) All rights reserved 2 CONTENTS FOREWORD 5 - I - YORKSHIRE 7 - II - CAMBRIDGE, FROM PEMBROKE TO ST BOTOLPH 43 - III - SYLVIA, OR NEW ENGLAND 93 - IV - THE WRECK OF AN IDYLL 147 - V - THE CROW YEARS 185 - VI - MOORTOWN PASTORAL 225 - VII - POET LAUREATE 267 - VIII - WINTER POLLEN 293 EPILOGUE 329 CHRONOLOGY 331 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 335 3 FOREWORD From time to time, one of those giants will loom forth, like huge trees casting familiar shadows around them. When they disappear, decades may elapse before there comes another poet showing promises of similar force. It is as if some tutelary spirits were presiding over the apparently arbitrary choices of literary glory. All of a sudden, some imposing figure dominates the poetic scene, and will do so till his time is over. In the case of Ted Hughes, this crystallisation, the moment when it all started, was that of his meeting with another poet of similar force: Sylvia Plath whose influence on American poetry would match that of Ted Hughes on English poetry. The strange thing is that both seemed to have had from the start the profound conviction that such would be the case. It would be truer to say that poetry had chosen them rather than they had themselves decided to follow its calling. Ted Hughes was later to write that they had only done what poetry had told them to do. The Valkyrie of glory seemed to have picked them, like the falcon of love, for reasons known to the gods alone, unless it was the tragic farce of a blind, melancholy Cupid with wings as black as a crow’s. From that time on, they were the toys of a greater destiny, as if together they had been possessed by spirits whose voices they did everything they could to stay tuned to and transcribe. It would be wrong to think that Sylvia Plath was simply Ted Hughes’s wife, just as it would be a mistake to see him as her husband. It is in fact both very complicated and very simple: each of their poetic works is a personal response to the enigma set by the sphinx of love. Both in their own way are wrestling with the ghoul that is after them: why love? Why this irresistible attraction and impossible agreement between a man and a woman? Ted Hughes, in his poetry, never ceased to probe the relationship between the masculine and the feminine. He would even go as far, in his attempt to account for and explain it, as to invent a theology. This places him in a long tradition of English poets: Milton, Blake, and to some extent Shelley, then more recently Yeats, who all plunged into the elaboration of imaginary worlds in their efforts to penetrate the mysteries of the world in which we live. Like them, Hughes was convinced that he had something to say to the world, and he considered it his duty to write it all before leaving it. Past and present contained so much that was regrettable, that he wanted to do everything in his power to change the future. To double his chances of being heard by the generations to come, he split himself in two to produce, in parallel, a plethora of poems and tales for children. Perhaps, he found there his true public, the readers dearest to his heart. For poetry, like childhood, is slipping out of a world getting too old too fast. 6 - I - YORKSHIRE Eroded relief of Yorkshire. These low hills and shallow dales were tirelessly scraped by the glaciers, of which they retain the unforgettable wear. The valleys have very little depth, and seem still erasing themselves, imperceptibly yet ineluctably. The horizons, at once too far and too near, exsude an irremediable sadness, under pale skies that steep the landscapes with northern light, always slightly grey. The flattened curves of the land are like those of an incommensurable animal sleeping, that sometimes seems to stir a little when some sea storm sends a shiver down its skin. On these low waves of heath and sheep pastures lined by stone walls, where the weather meets no hindrance whatsoever, everything has learnt to endure. To hide away as best they can from wind and rain, houses and trees huddle in wet hollows down which the rain runs. The earth around the churches is saturated with tombs of all ages, until the gravestones make a continuous pavement, on which the rare visitors have to tread. Some stones are broken or displaced, yet nobody has ever presumed to bring some derisory order to the work of time. Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return. The dead return very precisely to the earth in a kind of stoic, indifferent resignation of the living: a sort of ostentatious disdain of ostentation. Rarely does even the most unassuming of crosses adorn the graves of these severe Puritans, who were in the past particularly receptive to the Methodist doctrine of Wesley. Over the years, rain, frost and the continuous tread of passers-by have got the better of the inscriptions on the stones. In the village of Heptonstall, the Old Church of Saint Thomas Beckett, dedicated to the saint in about the year 1260, was strangely abandoned in the middle of the 19th century after a storm severely damaged the steeple. Indifferent to history, the parishioners preferred to seize the opportunity thus offered to build a new church. The old church was thus abandoned to the injuries of time, the roof caved in and only stone arches remained, like the ribs of some large bird. For the poet, it inevitably evoked the derelict state of Christianity of which, he thought, nothing but ghost- like vestiges survived. In the new graveyard, the site where Edith Farrar and her husband William Hughes rest together is surmounted by a vertical tombstone of gray granite on which their names are engraved. A similar stone marks the burial place of Sylvia Plath Hughes. It bears a poetic epitaph affirming that even among fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted. A few red flowers like those of the sage, evoking the salvia, and a yellow rose bush are planted in a small narrow rectangle of earth bordered with stones indicating the place of burial, around which the trodden grass testifies to frequent visits. The desolate streets of Heptonstall are cambered cobbled lanes, with no pavements, lined with severe- looking black stone houses with stunted front gardens, bordered with low walls made of similar stones carefully joined with cement, with a paved gutter running right at the foot. To this day, the air is charged with a vague, oppressive sense of anguish which seems to leave little room for hope in this world. The rural drift of people from the land has left these rural parts of Yorkshire still more desolate than before, yet melancholy seems to be precisely what a few tourists on short day-trips from the neighbouring cities come looking for. Throughout the ages, this 8 country has demanded of those who tried to survive on it a constant struggle as well as a tough and rugged character. In the 18th century, during the industrial revolution, when water mills were being turned into factories, spinning mills were built on the banks of mountain streams to exploit their water power. Later, owing to the pursuit of profit and the pressures of history, these manufacturing places were transformed into steam-powered factories, for which coal was feverishly conveyed by road in a vain attempt to keep pace with the big nearby centres of Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool. But soon, this sudden technological outburst began to wane, as if it were but an isolated episode lost in the indifference of an immutable nature, which would not even stoop down to pastoral beauty. At Lumb, the factory chimneys have long been conquered by brush that has outgrown them. Like the old church of Heptonstall, they are slowly going back to the earth. Now that Protestantism and the diligent practice of its virtues have finally bitten the dust, it would seem the romantic critics were right to inveigh against too strict an interpretation of the Gospel which, in the end, made no difference between the hope of an afterlife and success in this world, to the point of forgetting all the emotions of the heart. Edith Farrar, the poet's mother, came from a family that had been strongly influenced by the Methodist revival.