Ted Hughes

British Library apologises for linking Ted Hughes to slave trade

This article is more than 1 year old

The poet had been wrongly included among more than 300 figures whose collections were associated with wealth obtained from colonial violence

Treasure trove' of unseen Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney writing found

Alison Flood

25 November 2020

The British Library has apologised to Carol Hughes, the widow of the former poet laureate Ted Hughes, after it linked him to the slave trade through a distant ancestor.

Hughes’s name had been included on a spreadsheet from the library detailing more than 300 figures with “evidence of connections to slavery, profits from slavery or from colonialism”. Hughes’s link was through Nicholas Ferrar, who was born in 1592 and whose family was, the library said, “deeply involved” with the London Virginia Company, which was set up to colonise North America.

Ted Hughes, in 1966. Photograph: Jane Bown

Hughes was not directly descended from Ferrar, who died childless. Jonathan Bate, a biographer of the poet laureate, had hit out at his inclusion on the British Library’s list earlier this week. “Black Lives Matter, but this is going too far,” he wrote on Twitter. “Also, Nicholas Ferrar had no children: are we sure that the connection wasn’t family myth-making? Has anyone actually done a family tree?”

Now the library has publicly apologised for his inclusion, saying that the link should not have been made. “In particular we wish to apologise to Mrs Carol Hughes and to other family members and friends, owing to a reference included in the spreadsheet to a distant ancestor … which we withdraw unreservedly,” said the library. “While the document involved has been removed pending review, this reference will not be made again.”

The British Library said that its curators were working to identify collections “associated with wealth obtained from enslaved people or through colonial violence”, with the aim of sharing the information with researchers. But it admitted that “early presentation of these findings has caused confusion and concern, particularly in relation to connections drawn between named individuals and their ancestors”. “We regret profoundly the distress that this has caused and have removed the spreadsheet pending a review of this research,” it added.

Ted Hughes
David Levine

In a statement to the Times, Carol Hughes welcomed the “full apology” for “highly misleading comments … attempting to link the poet somehow with tenuous allegations of involvement in slavery by someone alleged to be a very distant ancestor who was born in the time of Shakespeare”. She also noted the library’s “acknowledgment of the distress caused by comments on the library’s website that should not have been made, and its assurance that these comments will not be repeated”.

Bate called the inclusion of Hughes “an error on so many levels - not only the tenuous, centuries-old connection, but also the fact that Nicholas Ferrar wrote a pamphlet attacking slavery even before the British slave trade had begun!”

“Over-zealousness of this kind undoes the important work of excavating the history of the institutions that have benefited from slavery - it plays into the hands of both the ‘cancel culture’ and the ‘anti-woke’ press,” he said.

According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ferrar is chiefly known for bringing the poetry of George Herbert, which Herbert had asked him on his deathbed to destroy or publish, to public attention. He was also the founder of a Christian community at Little Gidding.

THE GUARDIAN

Lovesong by Ted Hugues

Lovesong

by Ted Hugues

 

He loved her and she loved him.
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Off that moment’s brink and into nothing
Or everlasting or whatever there was

Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His words were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin’s attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
His glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon’s gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
Her vows put his eyes in formalin
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall

Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

In the morning they wore each other’s face

Ted Hughes and Barrie Cooke pike fishing in Ireland, 1978-9. Photograph: Aoine Landweer-Cooke

 

Treasure trove' of unseen Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney writing found

Alison Flood

14 November 2020

This article is more than 10 months old


Affectionate friendship between the two poets and artist Barrie Cooke, united by a love of fishing, revealed in a collection of correspondence that was believed lost

Alison Flood

Saturday 14 November 2020

A “treasure trove” of unseen poems and letters by Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and the artist Barrie Cooke has revealed the depth of a close three-way friendship that one Cambridge academic has described as a “rough, wild equivalent of the Bloomsbury group”.

Cooke, who died in 2014, was a leading expressionist artist in Ireland, and a passionate fisherman. Fellow fishing enthusiast Mark Wormald, an English fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge, came across his name while reading Hughes’s unpublished fishing diaries at the British Library. He visited Cooke in Ireland, and discovered the close friendship between the three men.

“Barrie told me that ‘outside Seamus’ family, I’m the closest man to Seamus alive’. And he said, ‘Ted and I have fishing in common, and Seamus and I have art and mud in common’,” said Wormald.

The academic visited Cooke again years later when the artist had developed dementia, and read to him from Hughes’s fishing diary, written in February 1980, detailing the moment the poet laureate landed his first Irish salmon.

“The diary ended: ‘It’s the most beautiful fish I’ve ever seen, said Barrie.’ And Barrie, who’d been listening rapt, said, ‘I did say that, Mark.’ And then he said, ‘would you like to see the letters?’” said Wormald.

Portrait of Seamus Heaney by Barrie Cooke, c 1980. Photograph: The Estate of Barrie Cooke

Cooke showed him an old cardboard box stuffed with “the most wonderfully expressive letters”, photographs showing the affection the three men held for each other, and 85 poems by Hughes and Heaney, some unpublished; a collection that was believed to be lost, and reveals the direct influence Cooke had on the work of the two poets.

In a letter from Heaney in March 1972, written as he was deciding to embark on life as a freelance writer, his friend: “Your confidence in us engendered confidence in ourselves and it is strange how the secret will to change burgeoned after that morning’s walk at Luggala and then, more irresistibly, in your kitchen on the Saturday night when we ate the pike. The first supper!”

There were 25 letters from Hughes, written over 30 years; a poem by Hughes titled Trenchford on Dartmoor, written for Cooke and his then-partner Jean Valentine; and a sketch by Hughes called The Dagda Meets the Morrigu on the Unshin Near Ballinlig, an angler’s retelling of Irish mythology.

When Hughes spent time with Cooke, his head and heart turned “Irishwards” towards a “freedom and flow”, he wrote; finding an “inner freedom” that made him and his son Nick “completely happy”, as he told Heaney.

“For Ted Hughes, tortured soul, controversial figure, to find that complete happiness is pretty remarkable,” said Wormald.

The friendship between the three men was already known: Heaney and Hughes worked together, while Cooke is credited for suggesting and illustrating Hughes’s poem The Great Irish Pike. But the collection also contains “wild” images of Hughes’ work Crow, and shows that their collaboration went back to the early 60s.

Ted Hughes cartoon of the Morrigu eating the Dagda, plus marginal notes and poem Trenchford on Dartmoor in the guest book of Cooke and Valentine. Photograph: Mark Wormald/The Estates of Ted Hughes and Dennis O’Driscoll and of Julie O’Callaghan

“For both Heaney and Hughes, evasiveness was a really significant principle of their work and they needed to protect their privacy. They regarded Barrie as a kind of secret friend … an exemplary devotee of art, and drew huge strength from that. And they knew that basically it was under the radar,” said Wormald, who has co-edited two books on Hughes, and whose book The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes is due to be published in 2021.

“The tenderness of the letters between these men takes my breath away, and it transforms what we know about their work and personal lives. Hughes emerges as an absolutely devoted father, a wonderfully generous friend, and someone who lived and breathed nature through fishing. And Cooke’s influence on Heaney, as an artist who was completely committed to the natural and mythological history of Ireland’s waters, was real and enduring, as was the nourishment Heaney took from their friendship.”

Cooke’s daughters gave Pembroke College, Hughes’s alma mater, first option to acquire the collection.

In a video by Cambridge University about the acquisition, the academic describes the “deep triangular friendship” as “a rough, wild equivalent of the Bloomsbury group, but completely unrecognised”.

Pembroke College will now catalogue and curate the collection in its library, with a series of exhibitions to follow.

THE GUARDIAN

Ted Hughes / The Unauthorised Life by Jonathan Bate review / Sex and self‑deception

Ted Hughes with Sylvia Plath in 1958

BOOK OF THE DAY

Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life by Jonathan Bate review – sex and self‑deception

He had ‘sex as strong as it comes’, Sylvia Plath said, and there’s plenty of bed-hopping, as well as torment, in this scrupulous and lucid biography

John Mullan
Friday 9 October 2015

A

s Jonathan Bate acknowledges in the last chapter of his biography of Ted Hughes, the poet liked to say that literary biographers were “vampiric”, and that famous authors should act together to frustrate their researches. But Hughes did not follow his own doctrine. He took care to preserve thousands of his manuscripts, including journals and letters. Some he sold to Coca-Cola-endowed Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, whose plentiful funds helped make his last years affluent. Many others he left to the British Library, a rich trove for a biographer. He can hardly have wanted them left unread.

The main service that Bate has done is to read this huge mass of material with a scholar’s ability to date and arrange it. His biography is a first report on what lies in wait in the archive. It is, however, a report that has been hindered and constrained. As has been widely reported, he began his work on a “literary life” with the support of the Ted Hughes estate, controlled by the poet’s widow Carol. Late in the day this support was withdrawn: evidently, his researches were not purely “literary” enough. Permission for any substantial quotation from Hughes’s writing was also withdrawn, and Bate’s Unauthorised Life has to grapple with this ban.

Carol Hughes had, of course, a strong reason for scorning the curiosity of literary investigators. To some he is always “Her husband”, the man who deserted Sylvia Plath, and the man to blame for her suicide in February 1963. Some feminists demonised him. Public fascination with his relationship with Plath, and its influence on her extraordinary, utterly disquieting, poetry seemed unstaunchable. Bate’s biography makes clear that it was a fascination that Hughes himself shared.

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath

When they met, Plath was a sophisticated and sexually experienced young woman – when she first called on Hughes in London she was en route to see a lover in Paris – but this was something else. Ted had “sex as strong as it comes”, she said. Three months after first going to bed together they were married. Hughes was in his mid-20s: he had done national service before going to the University of Cambridge and, after graduating, had oscillated back and forth between London (where he had casual jobs) and Cambridge (where he found his girlfriends). He was set on being a poet.

In their first years together Plath was his manager as well as his wife. It was she who collected his poems and found a competition for which they could be entered (and which they won), she who persuaded Faber to publish The Hawk in the Rain, she who found university teaching posts in the US. His second volume, Lupercal, published in 1960, made him a poetic star – even the society magazine Queen celebrated him. Reviewers rhapsodised. TS Eliotinvited him to dinner. The happy writing couple started a family and bought their writers’ house in Devon.

But then the other lovers came along. First, Assia Wevill, who would also eventually kill herself, along with the daughter that she had by Hughes. Then Susan Alliston, a secretary at Faber. Hughes was in bed with her the night that Plath died. It is impossible not to think, as he later often did, of that phone ringing and ringing in his empty flat, as his desperate wife tried to pull him back. Bate does his best to tell it from Hughes’s point of view: he had not deserted Plath but was still seeing her almost daily. We do not have to blame him for her madness to recognise the selfishness with which he gave himself up to his passing passions. He later told one of the other two lovers with whom Wevill had to share him that “he no longer wanted to be dependent on one woman; he felt it was weakening and suffocating him”. In her will, Wevill left Hughes only “my no doubt welcome absence and my bitter contempt”. From the journal entries that Bate quotes, it is clear that she thought Hughes still in the grip of his dead wife.

Ted Hughes trout fishing at Wistland Pound, Devon, in 1986. In later years fishing took over from sex as his ruling passion.
Photograph by Nick Rogers

Some of his women despair; others know they have to put up with it. A few days after marrying Carol Orchard, he is making love to old flame Brenda Hedden. When he leaves his wife in Britain for a trip to the Adelaide poetry festival, he is soon in bed with the alluring press officer, then another woman who interviews him, then a rather interesting Australian poet. Surely no reviewer will resist quoting Bate’s plea on behalf of his tormented author: “his infidelity in later relationships was partly a function of his fidelity to the memory of Sylvia”. He is, apparently, the jaguar of his famous poem. “After the end of his first marriage, never again would he allow himself to be fully caged.” Names are named, but the overall range of Hughes’s love life remains to be guessed at. I say “love life” because Hughes was not some heartless sensualist. Au contraire: the problem seems to have been that he was pursuing some God-bestowed drive – what Wevill called “the animal thing between us”. The poet’s self-mythologising sanctioned the harm he did to others. In his journal he wrote: “3 beautiful women – all in love, and a separate life of joy visible with each, all possessed – but own soul lost”.

And what about his poetry? After Plath’s death, her star rose and his slowly waned. With each new volume, we find Bate flinching from Hughes’s portentous mytho-poetic phrasing. He puts little faith in Hughes’s magnum opus, Crow, which is “all too parodiable”. Yet, very near the end of his life, Hughes turned the tables on the sceptics. First, there was the rivetingly confessional Birthday Letters, “the fastest-selling volume of verse in the history of English poetry”. Then there was the visceral Tales from Ovid, reminding former fans of his early days and gripping many a teenage reader. Hughes had his own imaginative world, into which he forced what he saw and what he read. He brilliantly turns Ovid’s witty and elegant modernisations of myth back into the dark stuff of his own primal imaginings – into Ted Hughes poems, in other words.

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in Concord in December 1959

The near-ban on quotation has radically limited Bate’s poetic analysis. More disablingly, he can give us only small fragments of the sheaves of Hughes’s letters and journals and jottings in which he has immersed himself. Some letters have been published, but very many remain unknown. Bate thinks Hughes one of the greatest of literary letter and journal writers; his letters are compared to those of Keats. Like Coleridge, in his journals he was a dedicated and brilliantly sharp-eyed recorder of material that might or might not one day get hammered into poetry, and even the tiny pieces that Bate gives us glitter.

In the later years there were good deeds – support for the Arvon PoetryFoundation, campaigns to clean up Devon’s rivers – and much hobnobbing with Tory cabinet ministers and members of the royal family. At least Hughes had an excuse: the ruling classes gave him access to prime stretches of fishing river, and fishing had taken over from sex as his ruling passion. Yet Eros still held some sway: Bate tells us that in his late 60s there was a lover whom Hughes visited on his trips to London, and whom he was seeing when he was taken mortally ill. It is evident that Hughes carried on telling himself tales from myth about the desires that drove him. This scrupulous and lucid biography makes it all seem like muddle and self-deception, tormenting to himself and the many who loved him.

THE GUARDIAN

The 100 best nonfiction books / No 4 / Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes (1998)

The 100 best nonfiction books

No 4 

Birthday Letters 

by Ted Hughes (1998)

These passionate, audacious poems addressed to Hughes’s late wife, Sylvia Plath, contribute to the couple’s mythology and are a landmark in English poetry

Robert McCrum
Monday 22 February 2016 05.45 GMT

P

oetry will be braided into this series like a golden thread, because in every generation it is the poets who replenish and tantalise the collective consciousness. As I’ve written already, this list is a personal inventory of some core texts, the books that I believe shaped our imagination and “made us who we are”. Birthday Letters fits that template, surviving Ted Hughes as a work of outrageous audacity, astonishing rhetorical and lyrical fervour, mixed with heartbreaking candour. In short, it is a landmark in English poetry.

In any age, the story of Ted (Hughes) and Sylvia (Plath) would be a chapter torn from the playbook of romantic tragedy. Furthermore, in the Anglo-American literary tradition, the marriage of two great contemporary poets from opposite sides of the Atlantic must be a source of endless fascination. At first, the double helix of love and work inspired some remarkable poems, but add the early suicide of one, and the lifelong torment of the other, and you have the makings of a myth. When, in the late summer of 1997, Hughes walked into the offices of his publisher, Faber & Faber, with the manuscript of 88 poems addressed to his dead wife, he was chiselling the synopsis of a stupendous private drama high into the north face of Parnassus. Birthday Letters, the manuscript in question, published in 1998, became the most sensational new collection of poems in living memory.

The collision of art and love, the tectonic plates of any writer’s career, creativity mingling with everyday life, must be the San Andreas fault of literature. When the two writers involved happen to be great contemporary poets, artistic equals, the material that explodes from the depths is bound to be incandescent, exhilarating, unearthly and passionate. For Hughes, addressing Plath inevitably had its mythologising dimension. He writes:

The dreamer in her

Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it.

That moment the dreamer in me

Fell in love with her and I knew it.

Ted Hughes

A 1998 letter to his friend and fellow poet Seamus Heaney, describes the backstory. From the 1970s, Hughes says that he began to address his “letters to Sylvia”, exploring every aspect of their relationship. At first, Hughes reports, he wrote them on the hoof, informally; later, he tried to work at them in a more controlled way but found that he was unable. He went back to spontaneous forays: some of these Birthday Letters poems first appeared in his New Selected Poems(1995), but in correspondence with friends, he would admit that he found some of the other poems in the series too personal to publish. Birthday Letters, written over a period of more than 25 years, was Hughes’s own great reckoning – although it would turn out to be incomplete.

When Birthday Letters finally appeared, Hughes cast his extraordinary spell, and not for the first time, over an audience which, for two generations, had been brought up on The Hawk in the Rain, Crow and The Rattle Bag, as well as on the tale of Ted and Sylvia, one of the love stories of the 20th century. The book became an instant bestseller and prizewinner.

There are many ironies in play with Birthday Letters. First, there is the unquenchable afterlife of a tragic relationship with which Hughes himself spent half a lifetime grappling. Throughout his career, Hughes was tormented by the vociferous fans of Plath who wanted to hold him to account for Plath’s suicide in the winter of 1963, and also for the way in which he administered the posthumous publication of her oeuvre. In death, as in life, Sylvia troubled him still.

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes on honeymoon in Paris...
in any age, their story ‘would be a chapter torn from the playbook of romantic tragedy’.

Birthday Letters became a painful, at times self-lacerating, tribute to the radioactive power of that legacy, as well as a monument that inexorably reminded readers of Hughes’s contemporary status. It was also a career-defining volume. Now, approaching 20 years after his death, Hughes the poet, so often teased and parodied in his lifetime, is emerging as one of the towering literary figures of the past century, to be spoken of in the same breath as Eliot, Yeats, Auden and Larkin. As the Observer put it recently, “he has become the once and future king of the English literary imagination”.

With Birthday Letters, Hughes also winds Sylvia inextricably into his own literary afterlife. Perhaps she would not have been disappointed. Plath was a mesmerising and tormented figure, who was only too willing to play her part in any drama. “She wrote her early poems very slowly,” Hughes once said of their early days together in the 1950s. It was, he said, “as if she were working out a mathematical problem, chewing her lips, putting a thick dark ring of ink round each word that stirred her on the page of the thesaurus”.

Birthday Letters (together with Plath’s letters and diaries) describes a now familiar tale. If her beginnings were slow and desk-bound, Plath was soon soaring beyond her lover’s reach. But it was a fatal trajectory. Theirs was a tragic match and the relationship turned sour. By 1963 the instability that had dogged Plath’s whole life was becoming painfully dominant. The question that feminist critics have endlessly debated is: was she so obsessed with her dead father that her suicide was almost predetermined, or did Hughes’s behaviour, particularly his decision to leave her for another woman after six years of marriage, push her to the edge?

Who will ever know? In Last Letter, a poem with the traumatic line “Your wife is dead”, released by the poet’s estate after his death, Hughes himself gets sucked into that vortex, declaring that the explanation for suicide is “as unknown as if it never happened”. So Plath’s tragic death remains a mystery that has already inspired one masterpiece (The Savage God by Al Alvarez, the Observer’s former poetry editor) and numberless words of exegesis.

Hughes himself went to ground, living in Devon, writing about nature and keeping his counsel. It did not do him much good. “My silence seems to confirm every accusation and fantasy,” he once wrote. With Promethean stoicism, he held his ground. “I preferred [silence], on the whole, to allowing myself to be dragged out into the bullring and teased and pricked and goaded into vomiting up every detail of my life with Sylvia.”

But he was still wounded. I remember once awkwardly broaching the Sylvia question with him, after several glasses of wine, and being touched and amazed at the flood of loving recollection released by a simple – and tactless – inquiry. He was, in his prime, as compelling a figure as Plath: an unforgettable physical presence with fathomless reserves of feeling and humanity, and a gentle Yorkshire voice that seemed to remake every sentence it uttered.

Birthday Letters was also an attempt by Hughes to nail shut a Pandora’s box of prurient, often vicious, speculation. It’s easy to forget the vehemence of the opposition. The poet’s readings were sometimes interrupted by cries of “murderer”; the American feminist poet Robin Morgan published The Arraignment which began with the lines “I accuse/Ted Hughes...”

Having explored the passage of Plath’s short life, Hughes stopped short of revealing the circumstances of the suicide itself, about which there had been endless gossip. He had been wrestling with that lost weekend in the frozen midwinter of 1963, especially the horrifying, almost macabre, detail that Plath had reassuringly burned her suicide note, which had reached Hughes prematurely, in front of him. He distilled the horror of this moment into repeated drafts of Last Letter in a “blue school-style exercise book” that contained versions of several other poems that also appear in Birthday Letters. The only person who knew of this poem’s existence, because Hughes had given her a typed fair copy of it, was the poet’s widow, Carol.

This is where a concluding and redemptive chapter in this story begins. Carol Hughes, with impressive dignity, has chosen never to speak publicly about her husband. For any literary estate, the question of what it is right to publish is always fraught. The second Mrs Hardy burned her husband’s correspondence with her predecessor, enraging generations of scholars. Hughes himself had been criticised for his destruction of Plath’s last journal. Carol Hughes, however, has always tried to do her best by her husband’s work. She had always known about this “last letter”, and what it revealed. Biding her time, she chose the right moment to release it, in the pages of the New Statesman. On publication, Carol Ann Duffy, the poet laureate, observed that this last poem, the coda to Birthday Letters, is “a bit like looking into the sun as it’s dying. It seems to touch a deeper, darker place than any poem he’s ever written.” Time will tell if Sylvia Plath’s spirit has finally been laid to rest. Birthday Letters has already become part of the canon.

A signature line

That blue suit,

A mad, execution uniform,

Survived your sentence. But then I sat, stilled,

Unable to fathom what stilled you

As I looked at you, as I am stilled

Permanently now, permanently

Bending so briefly at your open coffin.

From The Blue Flannel Suit, Birthday Letters.

Three to compare

Al Alvarez: The Savage God (1971)

Sylvia Plath: Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963 (1975)

Janet Malcolm: The Silent Woman – Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1993)

• Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes (Faber & Faber, £12.99).

THE GUARDIAN

THE 100 BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF ALL TIME

The 100 best nonfiction books of all time

001 The Sixth Extintion by Elizabeth Kolbert (2014)
002 The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2005)

003 No Logo by Noami Klein (1999)

004 Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes (1998) (KISS)

005 Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama (1995)

006 A brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking  (1988)

007 The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe (1979)

008 Orientalism by Edward Said (1978)

011 North by Seamus Heaney (1975) (KISS)

017 Ariel by Sylvia Plath (1965) (KISS)

029 Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1952/53)

046 The Waste Land by TS Eliot (1922) (KISS)