Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life by Jonathan Bate

Author:Jonathan Bate [Bate, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

In the summer of 1978, a year after the appearance of Gaudete, a black-bound volume of poems called Orts was published by Olwyn’s Rainbow Press, in an edition of 200 copies at a price of £50. Handsomely lodged in a black slip-case lined with flocked fabric, it had Italian mould-made ‘laid’ paper, with decorated Japanese endpapers, a drawing by Leonard Baskin, and distinctly opaque lyric content. ‘Orts’, from a Middle English word for food left by an animal, means the scraps or leavings that remain after a meal. The collection represented the offcuts from the outpouring of vacanas that were originally going to be published under the title ‘Lumb’s Remains’ and a selection from which had become the Epilogue to Gaudete.

As in the epilogue poems, the voice is at once personal and impersonal, intimate and distancing. At one level, an unidentified speaker addresses either himself or an interlocutor who sometimes seems to be the Goddess. At another level, there is a clear movement towards the autobiographical. A poem about a bad meal in a restaurant or the awful food in a cafeteria on the M5 motorway must be drawn more from personal experience than ancient myth. An exquisite address to a female child collecting ‘egg-pebbles’ and ‘tops of dandelions’ is clearly to some extent about, or for, Frieda. The figure of Ophelia floating downstream to the underworld after her suicide cannot but evoke Sylvia. To anyone in the know, a final farewell wave on a station platform inevitably suggests the last glimpse of Assia. The biographer is also bound to ask whether there is an origin in experience as opposed to imagination for a litany of longing sickness for various women: the ‘lecherous pallor’ of one, the smooth fish-like flank of another (this was a favoured simile for Sylvia’s body), the ‘cool saliva’ of another, the ‘dirty feet in sandals’ of another, the ‘crazy yells and claws’ of another. From a biographical point of view, it is also noteworthy that several of the Orts poems are about marriage as entrapment. A woman claws the door of a house: later, this poem will be explicitly linked to Sylvia. The phrase ‘I do’ – in such a context always redolent of ‘Daddy’ – is compared to the doomed charge of a hurt leopard. In another poem, the state of matrimony is compared to an obstinate tooth decaying ‘In an imbecile’s mouth’. In others, marriage is a life-sentence dished out by a judge or an analogous state to that of an animal imprisoned for life in a zoo.32 The ‘stuck in marriage’ poem was first drafted in Ireland in the aftermath of Assia’s death; the syntax is nicely ambiguous, so the phrase could refer to her marriage to David Wevill or Ted’s own to Sylvia, or both: ‘Then he met her, yes, he found her / Stuck in marriage like a decaying tooth.’33

Another volume appeared from the Rainbow Press a few months later. Printed as usual on handmade paper, but with sheets of

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