Ted Hughes: Stronger Than Death

This programme contains some strong language and some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

"The head dragging forward, the body keeping up, the hind legs lagging,

"he coils, he flourishes the blackjack tail

"as if looking for a target, hurrying through the underworld soundless."

I used to believe that the poem is simply the text

and that all biographical information should be kept at bay.

I don't believe it any more.

I'm very interested in the whole package.

I think that's what you got with Ted Hughes.

"And I hold creation in my foot, or fly up and revolve it all slowly."

The physicality of the poems seems connected very much with him

as an individual, whose personality and magnetism were very important.

He lived the work.

He was poetic to the very core of his being.

Poetry was my father's voice.

Poetry was a means of transforming experience.

He was extraordinarily striking.

And the first person you thought of when you saw Ted Hughes was Heathcliff.

He was a man who radiated artistic power.

More controversy and scandal attaches to his name than that

of any other figure in literature, with the exception of Lord Byron.

One woman killing herself is pretty bad.

Two women, one right after the other,

killing themselves really makes you do a double take.

That's the kind of thing that gets a feminist's attention.

He was certainly formidable.

And all these women had fallen into his grip and he's destroyed them but

as soon as you look at the facts, it's not quite like that, is it?

I feel that my parents have been often fictionalised,

to the point where I no longer recognise them.

It could be that the difficult circumstances that he faced

were made worse by this unwavering sense that he was above all

a poet, a poet before he was a man.

"He was stronger than life.

"Death.

"But who is stronger than death? Me, evidently."

The winner of the 1998 Whitbread Book of the Year...

..is Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes.

APPLAUSE

'Frieda Hughes, the daughter of Ted Hughes

'and Sylvia Plath was the public face of the winner,

'Birthday Letters, at the awards ceremony, a book which poetically

'details the troubled and destructive relationship of her parents.'

I first found out about the Birthday Letters collection of poems

when I came back to England in 1997, and he sent me this manuscript

and he was very adamant I should read it right away.

And he was very anxious, um,

to know what I thought about it.

It seemed so incongruous to be sitting there

reading about my father's other world and his inner world

and this relationship with my mother and his feelings for my mother.

And there was a question, "Do you think I should publish it?"

And I think my immediate reaction was,

"Why on earth are you asking me if you should publish it?

"You should ABSOLUTELY publish it."

Nobody knew that they were coming.

And then, one Saturday morning in January 1998,

The Times was published,

and there on the front page was the story,

"Revealed - the most tragic literary love story of our time."

There was a full two-page spread, with photos of Ted and Sylvia.

The poet laureate had broken his decades of silence.

Suddenly, they were out there, and they were all over the place.

It was one of those few occasions in life

when you would regularly see people reading

a book of poems on the tube, on the bus or on the train, you know,

the general public were reading a book of poems.

You know, they were electrically charged, these poems.

You'd been waiting to hear Ted's version

of that part of his life for a long while.

And suddenly, here it was, so it had the urgency of testimony.

'Accepting the award, she read from a letter her father had written to a friend.'

"How strange that we have to make these public declarations

"of our secrets, but we do.

"If only I had done the equivalent 30 years ago,

"I might have had a more fruitful career.

"Certainly, a freer psychological life."

What was revelatory was that he had written them at all.

The emotions and the thoughts behind some of them,

he'd talked about during my childhood and my life.

When I asked him had it just appeared, he said,

"No, I've been working on this for years."

My father was very specific about including

the idea of my mother in the life of me and my brother.

She was a very conscious presence, yes, which was rather lovely, actually.

He was working on Birthday Letters for about 30 years.

There's a notebook that clearly belongs to the late 1960s.

There are literally hundreds of poems.

Many of them were not included in the finished collection itself.

Endless process of writing, rewriting,

spending his whole life working on this project.

Every single poem was constantly rewritten - one of them here,

a lovely poem about how he and Sylvia picked daffodils.

You can see how he starts writing it in manuscript,

then he gets to the stage of typing it out.

But even once he's typed it, he just goes over, again and again,

all...scrawling lines out, adding words in -

extraordinary process of constant revision.

He begins the poem Remember How You Picked The Daffodils -

"Nobody else remembers", he says, "but I do."

And then it ends with an image of Sylvia dropping

the daffodils as she stoops in the April rain

and there's a sense of dropping them suggestive of a death,

of dead flowers - traditionally we drop flowers in a grave.

For 20 years, the spectre of Sylvia Plath was what he called

the real thing, casting a shadow like a colossus across all his work.

But the way in which he wrote about the real thing was a dilemma,

a problem, something he wrestled with as an artist.

When Ted Hughes began writing poetry,

the confessional was not what good poetry was all about and the

evolution to the more personal voice is the story of his poetic delight.

This is Aspinall Street in Mytholmroyd in West Yorkshire.

We're along a valley that runs out of Halifax

and that is 1 Aspinall Street,

where Ted lived till he was six or seven, so, you know, not particularly

grand beginnings but left an incredible impression on Ted.

If you were choosing, you might not think that this would be

the most useful place for a poet laureate to grow up, but it was.

He found everything that you needed in the beginning in and around here,

in all the little nooks and crannies of these streets

and, you know, down on the canal and in the woods

and up on the tops there - animals, hunting, exploration, adventure,

just a place for his imagination to catch fire and come alive.

Scout Rock, which he talked about a lot

and wrote about a lot is just behind that block of flats there.

He used to say that his view to the south was blocked by that

great slab of rock.

"The most impressive early companion of my childhood was a dark cliff,

"or what looked like a dark cliff to the south.

"A wall of rock and steep woods halfway up the sky,

"just cleared by the winter sun.

"From my home near the bottom of the south-facing slope of the valley

"that cliff was both the curtain and backdrop to existence.

"If a man's death is held in place by a stone

"my birth was fastened into place by that rock

"and for my first seven years, it pressed its shape

"in various moods, into my brain.

"There was no easy way to escape it.

"I lived under it, as under the presence of a war,

"or an occupying army."

Here would have been Mount Zion Chapel,

another great, big slab of rock and religion, barring his view

It was away up there on to the moor that he talked about

a more gentle gradient, up towards the horizon

where he could start seeing and thinking and breathing.

He was a happy lad, Ted.

Always laughing, always full of life, always happy to see me.

I mean, I couldn't understand, really,

looking back on it,

understand, with the age difference,

that he would have any time for a little girl.

You know, the little cousin that kept popping up

every now and then, into the house,

and me being imposed on him, as it were.

"Look after her."

His brother, Gerald, taught him about trapping, hunting, fishing,

how animals behaved, all the excitement out there in the world,

on the moors.

Introduced him to the animal kingdom, really.

And made him very unsentimental about death, and killing.

GUNSHOTS

I suppose it's a countryman's feeling for animals,

that they are, in some sense, there to provide for human beings.

Nature was always just there, outside the front door.

My father says, "And I'm going to teach you how to skin a badger."

"Sit there." So I'd sit down, he says, "Right, here's the badger!"

Puts the badger on my lap, so I've got a dead badger on my lap.

He gives me a knife and says, "Now, this is how you do it."

And he shows me how to skin a badger!

So, um, I can skin a badger.

It's not something...

it's not a talent I'm going to show anybody, particularly!

You mightn't think that these two interests,

capturing animals and writing poems, have much in common.

But the more I think back, the more sure I am that, with me,

the two interests have been one interest.

I think of poems as a sort of animal.

They have their own life, like animals,

by which I mean that they seem quite separate from any person,

even from their author,

and nothing can be added to them or taken away

without maiming or perhaps even killing them.

He started to see it from their point of view,

and uses, I think, this really interesting phrase,

"You have to turn yourself into it," turn yourself into that thing.

But also, I think, he means you've got to give yourself up to it,

almost as if you become the prey, hand yourself over to it,

and allow it to become you.

"Pike, three inches long, perfect

"Pike in all parts Green tigering the gold

"Killers from the egg The malevolent aged grin."

He's actually associating with that living organism.

And that's very different from

the way that a lot of other people write about nature.

If Larkin writes about a flower or an animal,

he's probably looking at it through a window,

from a train, you know, going at 60 miles an hour.

That's not true with Hughes - it's face-to-face.

"One jammed past its gills down the other's gullet

"The outside eye stared as a vice locks

"The same iron in this eye

"Though its film shrank in death."

They're full of conflict and violence, and the aggression

of the natural world.

When he got to Cambridge, of course, it was quite a surprise to him.

He'd come from a very average sort of grammar school.

I had the impression that we were there in a rare period,

where it was felt to be OK, somehow,

to have come from a provincial background

in this rather odd, unprivileged way.

When he spoke, he was listened to.

He had a presence even then

and whatever Ted said was regarded

as something worth waiting for,

even though it might be a bit unexpected or bizarre.

He was never invisible in a room

and he was always a kind of leader figure.

People came and came to his room,

in part, because he did this extraordinary thing

of roasting meat over...

..whatever fire they had provided in the room.

And so people came in to see what was going on and to enjoy it.

There was never any doubt in their minds that he was the best poet.

You know, they were quite sure that Ted was the one that mattered.

He didn't find the way that English was studied in Cambridge

in the least bit sympathetic

and the turning point was the famous visitation of the fox.

'And every week we had to produce an essay

'and I stayed up to about two or three in the morning

'trying to push through this barrier to write an essay.

'And finally I just had to give up...

'..and went to bed.

'And I immediately dreamed I was back at my table'

in my dream,

as I sat at my table over my essay.

The door opened

and round the side of the door

came the head of a fox.

And he was a man, he was a small man,

but he was a fox.

And he put his hand on the page

and as he put it down

he said,

"You have to stop this.

"You're destroying us."

And the fox, the wild creature,

becomes an image for poetry itself.

And he knows that if he goes in for the academic world,

he won't be a great poet.

And he wants to be a poet more than anything else.

Ted Hughes claimed that as a result of this vision

of this man-fox,

which burnt the page of his student essay,

he immediately gave up studying English literature

and changed to anthropology instead

for the latter part of his degree.

"Through the window I see no star

"Something more near

"Though deeper within darkness

"Is entering the loneliness.

"Cold

"Delicately as the dark snow

"A fox's nose touches twig, leaf."

If he's got the words in that poem right,

it will have a life,

a life force and he talks about how it will stand up

and come towards the mind of the reader.

And, actually, he's right.

You know, look at us. We're still talking about that poem now,

it's in our head, he's put it there.

"The window is starless, still,

"The clock ticks

"The page is printed."

It comes back to this idea of the poem

as a primitive form of magic.

Words can have a very transformative effect.

If you get a poem right,

you can change how somebody thinks about something,

you can change their way of being, their way of doing.

His way of thinking about the world is constantly shot through

with the idea of another world,

a supernatural world,

a sense that there are mysterious forces above the human.

I know my father was fascinated in how people's minds worked,

this idea of magic

and the idea of spirituality,

how people can have a belief in something

of which there is no evidence.

My father took that much further.

He was interested in the mysterious movements of the mind.

Things which are outside reason.

He was very interested in a shaman authority.

Ted was absolutely serious about that.

I mean, just as serious he was, say,

as about the poetry of TS Eliot or anything else.

He and his sister Olwyn were always casting horoscopes.

There's a lovely letter he wrote to his sister Olwyn

very soon after Frieda, his first daughter, was born.

He casts the horoscope

and talks about Aries, which is her star sign,

and the position of the sun, the moon, the different planets.

'That's your horoscope from when you were born.'

Oh...

I've never seen my horoscope

that he wrote out.

Can I keep this?

MUSIC: I Put A Spell On You by Nina Simone

He took it very seriously, that interest in the occult.

I've been told that, you know,

he tried to determine the launch dates of his book

by planetary alignments and, you know,

there's talk of seances

and trying to get in touch with the spirit world.

'Did Dan tell you how we worked the Ouija board?

'We were at Jim's.

'Jim, his girlfriend, Dan and I each put a finger on the glass.'

That evening, Ted suggested we got out the ouija board.

It was my first and last experience.

It was very bizarre.

All I can say is that because nothing happened

for such a long time,

I got bored and started answering.

'We got someone who called himself Pan.

'We asked if it knew Shakespeare.

'It said, "Yes, but not personally."'

I had to use my wits to answer the questions

which Ted was firing at the spirit.

'We asked it to recite its favourite line and it spelt,

'"Never, never, never, never," out of Lear.

'We then asked it to go on it, but it refused.

'It said, "I forget,"

'so we forced it a little.'

Ted came back, "How does it go on?"

and I couldn't quite remember,

so I had to improvise

three lines of rusty Shakespeare.

Ted thought this was marvellous,

except he pointed out afterwards

that Shakespeare would never have used the word "branch",

he would've said "bough" of a tree.

So I kicked myself.

# I put a spell on you. #

Because of Robert Graves' interest in mythology

and magic, essentially...

..I think Ted was a kind of conduit for that

to a great whole group of people.

He was, like many in his generation,

fascinated by the White Goddess.

The White Goddess is the muse,

the muse, the powerful Greek figure who endows the poet

with the power to write.

SUDDEN DRAMATIC MUSIC

They all loved that,

I think, because, it was a...

a kind of...yet one more book

which licensed sexuality

at a time when it was a little dangerous.

With his poetic friends,

they put together a student magazine

called the St Botolph's Review,

and at the launch party for the magazine,

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath met for the first time.

# I only have eyes

# For you, dear. #

He went there with his girlfriend, she went with her boyfriend.

They danced, they had a few drinks

and famously they kissed each other and she bit him.

FEROCIOUS ROARING

"Your eyes squeezed in your face

"A crush of diamonds

"Incredibly bright

"Bright as a crush of tears

"That might have been tears of joy

"A squeeze of joy

"You meant to knock me out with your vivacity

"I remember little from the rest of that evening

"I slid away with my girlfriend

"Nothing except her hissing rage in a doorway

"And my stupefied interrogation of your blue headscarf from my pocket

"And the swelling ring-moat of tooth marks

"That was to brand my face for the next month

"Then me beneath it for good."

Neither of them could get the other out of each other's minds,

so in her diary,

she starts writing obsessively about Ted,

a poem about desire coming upon her

and the panther becomes Ted.

And then she hopes that he's going to come and visit her in her student rooms,

that she will hear the tread of the panther on the stairs.

The poet supercharges experience.

He becomes the panther, she becomes the white goddess.

And it does become a whirlwind romance

and within a matter of just four months

they're married.

MUSIC: Hammers by Nils Frahm

That was a need for him to be with somebody

with her animation and energy

and...love of life, really.

It seems an absurd thing to say for someone who was going to kill themselves,

but the fact is the way she decorated, the way she gardened,

the way she picked daffodils,

everything is full of energy.

He needed her energy, really.

There was definitely a time where Hughes and Plath

were feeding off each other poetically,

encouraging each other.

You know, they'd formed this partnership

which was going to take on the world.

They were going to, you know, create incredible bodies of work together.

There is a real sense that they worked together as a team.

I remember my father telling me that...

But just sitting at a desk,

or a long table,

and he said his end would be piles of papers and mess

and he said, "And your mother's end would be absolutely neat

"and everything would be neatly in order,

"and the pens and so on,

"before she'd start work."

And he was just this mass of creativity

at the other end of the table.

They were very supportive of each other.

SYLVIA: I feel that I'd never be writing as I am

and as much as I am

without Ted's understanding and cooperation, really.

TED: Apart from my experiences in my life,

I also have, in a way,

Sylvia's experiences of hers.

It's like a medium.

And what she writes out needn't be a door,

the contents of her own mind.

It needn't be anything she knows.

But it's something that somebody in the room knows.

And in this way, two people who are sympathetic to each other,

who are compatible in this sort of spiritual way,

in fact make up one person

and make up one source of power.

It was two people in love, having a relationship,

doing the same thing and trying to find a way

to get somewhere in a world that must have been quite difficult,

especially doing what they did -

poetry.

She organised him.

He wrote by hand, but she typed.

She typed up his poems,

she submitted them to all the literary magazines.

And it was Sylvia who spotted that

a major New York publisher

was running a competition

for the best first collection of poems.

And she submitted not her own poems, but Ted's.

She put together the book called The Hawk In The Rain

that won the competition that got Ted published

and that made his name.

He sort of exploded on to the scene with The Hawk In The Rain.

He seemed like the best writer of his generation immediately.

I must have met Ted Hughes early on,

because I remember that we talked about Hawk In The Rain,

which I was stunned by.

It was definitely a new voice.

and I mean English poetry, British if you want,

"Floundering black astride and blinding wet

"Till day rose, then under an orange sky

"Flexing like the lens of a mad eye."

He was taken up by Faber and Faber,

who were, are, were and are

PARTY CHATTER

a man called Al Alvarez,

and completely put Ted Hughes on the map.

I just find it difficult to remember stuff.

It's kind of all faded away.

Mercifully...

I used to be a very clever young man, let me tell you.

But you were also quite bored by the movement poets... Totally.

..and you then wrote that famous essay

called Beyond The Gentility Principle,

which was in The New Poetry and they...

That you challenged... What I did... ..gentility.

What I did back in those days,

I challenged the whole fucking lot of them.

Ted was different,

just something else, you know.

I just thought...

He was onto something that I really thought mattered.

It was kind of my responsibility, back then

to say, "This is a poet you've got to read,

"not blah-blah-blah."

The world was full of blah-blah-blah.

"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 allotment of death."

I think what was unique about it was the explosiveness of the image,

the way the words knocked together, made sparks.

Well, if you looked at the poetry of the movement,

the previous generation,

John Wain, Kingsley Amis, even Larkin,

their work wasn't doing that.

It looked genteel compared with Ted's.

He was a modernist poet, but he belonged to

a dwindling tradition...

..which is that of a country poet.

In a bizarre way, that appeals to a townie audience.

"Ted was already a powerful presence,

"even though he was just beginning.

"He was a man who seemed to carry his own climate with him,

"to create his own atmosphere.

"And in those days, that atmosphere was dark and dangerous.

"It was the darkness many women found irresistible.

"One of them said, he looked like a gunfighter."

If you read Hawk Roosting,

he is that hawk.

He just absolutely is it.

And he knows what it's like to be a predator

who looks down on his kingdom

and the frail creatures that he's going to stab with his beak

without any doubt or remorse or pity or anything.

So much attention was given to him

and he was such a charismatic figure.

You know that everyone was very happy to write about him

and talk about him,

so he was definitely in the ascendency,

he was in the position of power.

The conversation recorded by Ruth Fainlight,

in which the two women poets

compare the extraordinary success of their mates,

Alan Sillitoe on the one hand and Ted on the other,

in comparison with their own small success.

One has to realise that...

..Sylvia never again in her lifetime saw real success.

I mean, she wasn't Sylvia Plath when I met her,

she was Sylvia Plath who was married to Ted Hughes...yes.

I liked her and understood her.

I'd read her poems and admired them.

Being in the position of power

was important to each of them.

You know, and the one who wasn't in the position of power...

..wasn't altogether happy about that state of affairs.

I think Sylvia was pleased for him...

..but, by the time she'd had her first baby,

I think depression,

not so uncommon after the birth of a child,

began to set in.

Yes, she was always fragile.

She could go tipping down by any manner of means.

At that point, the most admired poet in America

was a man called Robert Lowell.

Lowell published a new volume of poems called Life Studies

and it was revolutionary because it was all about his own mental breakdown.

It was poetry in a mode of confessional directness

that had not really been seen before.

Ted was very sceptical

about the autobiographical elements of the work.

He says, "That's for Americans."

Sylvia absolutely lapped it up

and it released her into feeling

that she could write about her own self,

her own life, much more directly.

And she writes a series of poems directly about her own nervous breakdown.

That, for her, and certainly Ted believed this,

was a breakthrough moment.

SYLVIA: ..when it comes to managing a nine-month-old baby.

And we're are dreaming of a house

where I can shout to Ted from one end to the other

and he won't be able to hear me,

but I don't know how far away that is.

'I heard them on the radio, I felt very sorry for them.

'They seemed to have a difficult time with a baby to bring up

'and them both being writers.'

And we lived in North Devon

and we were, at that point, renting a big farmhouse,

so I wrote to Ted and Sylvia -

care of the BBC - and said,

"If you'd like a holiday with us, I can look after the children

"and all the logistics of that

"and you two can go off and write."

And I heard nothing.

But low and behold a year later,

I had a letter from Ted saying,

"We, too, are living in a thatched farmhouse.

"We'd like you to come and have lunch with us."

Ted and Sylvia decided to move to Court Green in Devon.

This was Ted's wish,

because Ted was profoundly a countryman.

"I brought you to Devon

"I brought you into my dreamland

"I sleepwalked to you into my land of totems

"Never-never land

"The orchard in the west

"I wrestled with the blankets, the caul and the cord

"And you stayed with me

"Gallant and desperate and hopeful

"Listening for different gods

"Stripping off your American royalty

"Garment by garment."

This photo is of my mother pregnant with my brother

and holding me and me holding a kitten.

And I like that because it's all of us together,

except for my father, obviously.

And I wrote a little poem about that...

My mother is laughing

Holding me against the bulge of my unborn brother

Kitten strangling in my eager palms

My father photographs us

All his eggs in one basket

Bundled in my mother's arms.

He was kind to her.

I think what people have missed is that he...

He was endlessly protective to her

and particularly to her wish to write poetry.

I mean, I didn't know what sort of writing it was.

One day I said to Ted,

"Is she writing poetry?"

And he said,

STERNLY: "No, she IS a poet!"

MUSIC: Caged In Stammheim by Demdike Stare

Her problem was that she was often blocked -

things which might turn into a story

and she didn't follow up on poetic ideas,

which hadn't come to fruit.

He helped her a lot with that.

And what he was trying to do was to reach into her inner being

and her inner being was fractured.

She really had a big crack right down the middle.

She needed huge amounts of attention from him.

And he would hypnotise her,

to help her relax and help her write.

There is no doubt that Ted's assistance

helped Sylvia Plath to develop

from a technically very accomplished poet

into a poet of extraordinary force and originality.

When Ted gave her resources

for writing a more mythic kind of poetry,

the demons did come out.

The result was great poetry,

but it also, perhaps,

was what tipped her over the edge mentally.

"Black magic and pagan superstitions got him where he wanted to be.

"They worked fine for him.

"But for Sylvia, it was a foreign country in every sense.

"Belief in dark gods didn't come naturally to her.

"But she'd always been good at things, fiercely ambitious,

"anything her husband could do, she could do better.

"So she went along willingly."

She does record jealousy and suspicion.

When she was angry, he could see the power in her.

She began to write out of kind of not a hatred of life,

but a peculiar obsession with death which was not healthy

and was there long before Assia arrived on the scene.

"We knew what was waiting for us...

BIRDS CRY

"The Sea Witches The Greeks knew about them,

"The faces of mortal women, but their hair

"Their hair is legend."

Assia came to work at Notley's,

which was the advertising agency which employed me.

In those days, advertising was regarded as the work of the devil.

Yet, it's surprising how many poets and writers

were employed by the big advertising agencies.

'At your chemist, 4 and 11 pence.'

Assia told me about how she met Ted.

Assia was very proud

and, apparently, Sylvia asked her to peel the potatoes

and Assia took offence,

because she didn't like being treated like a servant.

And Ted was down the bottom of the garden picking beans.

So Assia went down and chatted up Ted.

And they kissed behind the bean poles

and that was the beginning of the affair,

which Assia told me with some pride.

I asked her what happened.

And she said,

"Well, it was like taking candy from a baby."

She had no doubt about her own seductive powers.

She drifted into our agency

and she'd come straight from a lunchtime assignation with Ted.

And she said, "Oh, you know, he's so wonderful.

"Do you know, in bed, he smells like a butcher!"

Wow!

Sylvia sensed what was going on

and when she picked up a telephone call

she recognised Assia's voice, though she tried to disguise it.

Assia had rung up on the phone and pretended to be a man.

And she said, "I know you're not a man,"

and called Ted downstairs to the phone and he answered it.

And she said, "He lies to me, he's become a little man."

She ripped the phone out of the wall

and said he had to leave.

I think it was a great pity that she took such precipitous action.

I think she should have been patient

and been a little bit...

understanding.

SYLVIA: "I made a model of you

"A man in black with a Meinkampf look

"And a love of the rack and the screw

"And I said, 'I do, I do'

"So, Daddy, I'm finally through

"The black telephone's off at the root

"The voice's just can't worm through

"If I've killed one man, I've killed two

"The vampire who said he was you

"And drank my blood for a year

"Seven years if you want to know."

One can see how Ted, in some senses, becomes the Meinkampf figure,

but it's not really Ted.

What she said about that poem, is it's a poem written

from the point of view of a girl with an Electra complex,

a fixation on her father.

The poem does need to be seen as a mythic construct,

as well as a personal statement.

She would have bonfires of his work,

if she was angry with him.

He kind of admired that, you know.

He would, when she'd burn up some really important thing of his,

and was screaming at him, he was saying,

"There, that's what needs to be in your poetry,

"get that into your work!"

"By the end, the black magic which Ted used cannily

"to get through to the sources of his inspiration

"had taken Sylvia over.

"When he left her for another woman,

"she took his manuscripts,

"mixed them with a debris of fingernail pairings

"and dandruff from his desk

"and burnt them in a witches' ritual bonfire."

"As the flames died down,

"a single fragment of charred paper drifted onto her foot.

"It was the name of the woman he'd left her for, Assia."

"With the smoke of the fire you tended

"Flames I had lit, unwitting

"That whitened in the oxygen jet of your incantatory whisper."

Whatever went wrong, wrong it went.

And Ted went back to London

and Sylvia decided she couldn't make a life in the country.

And she found a lovely flat,

where Yeats had once lived,

in Chalcot Square.

It was the coldest winter for 150 years.

Everything froze

and she was in a strange state.

She'd been given monoamine oxidase inhibitors,

which is not something people would do nowadays.

And that means she was given a burst of energy...

It's a bad idea with someone who's potentially suicidal.

She'd determined to, as it were, gamble.

She put milk and bread out for the kids,

she taped up their door so that the gas couldn't get through to them.

She'd written the poems that went into Ariel.

She was certainly able to leave them behind

as a typescript for Ted to find.

She also left the number of the doctor...

She was obviously ambiguous about her intentions.

On the radio in January, there was this radio play by Ted

called the Difficulties Of A Bridegroom

and that, in a way, was, I think, Sylvia's death warrant.

It concerned a man running over a hare in the car

and taking the hare's body to a butcher

and getting some money and buying red roses for his mistress.

with that money.

And this must have given her a most horrible shock.

I think the play gave a picture of him being cruel.

I mean, why would he write such a thing?

Ted's belief in shamanism would lead him to think of her

as being like a hare,

magic and mysterious and very powerful.

The connection between the shamanic animal being a hare being Sylvia

and then buying roses with a dead hare

and giving them to Assia,

was the most horrible thing to contemplate.

Do you think that had an effect on her?

Yes, it certainly did.

That was...the heaviest cross that Ted had to carry

for the rest of his life.

Ted looked...he looked honestly like a beaten dog.

He looked so upset and he said,

"Doesn't fall to many men...

"..to murder a genius."

And I said, "You haven't murdered anybody.

"You didn't kill her."

And he said, "I might just as well have

"and I hear the wolves howling all night in the park

"and it seems apt."

"The wolves lifted us in their long voices

"They wound us and enmeshed us in their wailing for you

"Their mourning for us...

WOLVES HOWL

"They wove us into their voices

"We lay in your death

"In the fallen snow, under falling snow...

WOLVES HOWL

"As my body sank into the folk-take

"Where the wolves are singing in the forest

"For two babes, who have turned, in their sleep,

"Into orphans

"Beside the corpse of their mother."

He's in an awful position and his letters showed this...

"When somebody who has shared life with you

"as much as Sylvia shared it with me dies,

"then life somehow dies.

"The gold standard of it is somehow conversed into death.

"And it is a minute by minute effort to find any sense in life...

"or any value."

To have an infidelity in your marriage is by no means the worst thing

and people get through that.

Not everybody kills themself.

It is just incredibly difficult for him to see what to do.

He then felt burdened...

for the rest of his life

by what had happened.

So I feel sorry for his BURDEN.

It's his fault, but it's still his burden.

Ted, to do him justice,

had a curiously detached attitude towards her writing.

Not detached in a negative way, detached in a positive way.

Not, actually, anything they might have said about him,

but just, "Wow! This is literature."

"Dying is an art like everything else

"I do it exceptionally well

"I do it so it feels like hell

"I do it so it feels real

"I guess you could say I've a call."

In the sense of Ariel, for instance,

my mother was, I feel,

frozen in a moment of a sort of aggressive reaction.

And that's the moment that got frozen,

because otherwise, had she lived longer,

there would have been other collections,

other evolutionary...poetry...

..sort of sequences and that didn't happen.

"Herr God, Herr Lucifer,

"Beware, beware

"Out of the ash I rise with my red hair

"And I eat men like air."

He did not have to publish Ariel.

He honoured her work right through her...

you know,

long after her death and right through the life they had together.

So, I think, for me, that speaks volumes...

literally, actually.

You can see why he might have been reluctant to publish them immediately.

Not that there was any great enthusiasm for anyone

to publish them, actually.

I think he showed them to one or two publishers,

who were not knocked out by them in 1963.

Of course, two years later,

they were the Pulitzer-prize-winning

jewels of the crown.

It was a huge head,

double page spread in Time magazine,

just the thing everybody had to read.

One of the things which nobody likes to say

was what sustained the family group after Sylvia's death

was the cult of Sylvia.

That was where the royalties were coming in.

Whether he liked it or not, with two children to bring up,

a living to make,

locked into this eternally recurring story,

the bad man, the man who killed Sylvia,

but at the same time,

the family income was heavily dependent on the myth.

He passed the copyrights,

the rights and the royalties from Sylvia Plath onto his children,

Nick and Frieda.

But that accusation of making money out of her legacy

hung over him.

By now in 1965,

Sylvia was the most famous poet in the Anglo-Saxon world

and suddenly Assia was the woman

who was responsible for Sylvia's death.

So she really felt quite lonely and hated in the literary world.

To me, Assia was just...

you know, the evil demon incarnate.

In fact, we became very close.

Yes, I became more and more sorry for her.

And they both looked, you know, like...

..medieval paintings of Adam and Eve

being expelled from Paradise.

You know, the way those faces...

Oh.

It was just so intense...

..the emotion that was coming out of them.

We were having lunch and she suddenly thought she saw Sylvia

and she turned completely pale and she said,

"That's Sylvia, that's Sylvia."

And then it moved closer and it wasn't, but she said then that she haunts,

she said, "She's haunting me."

And she really did feel that, I think.

Though...

I don't think with any sense of guilt.

I think with a sense of fury, really,

that Sylvia had ruined her relationship with Ted.

He must have drawn some of this belief

in the power of poetry as a healing power,

which he never, a belief he never lost.

He always thought poetry could heal you.

He decides to write a long cycle of poems

based on a sort of motif he found

in a lot of the folk tales that he knew.

Well, he approaches it, as you might expect,

And he uses Crow,

must be the Inuit Raven.

The Crow poems become a kind of anti-Bible.

goes through all sorts of adventures.

the idea that a story about a figure who defeats death,

"Who is stronger than hope?

"Death.

"Who is stronger than the will?

"Stronger than love?

"Death.

"But who is stronger than Death?

"Who is stronger than Death?

"Me, evidently," says Crow.

And, you know, that's such an extraordinary...

..bewildered assertion that he has survived all this.

Only he doesn't really survive it.

It's early 1969,

Assia felt Ted had to make a commitment to her.

She and Ted had had a child called Shura.

They lived together, but a lot of the time they were living apart.

It was a difficult relationship.

Ted also began seeing someone else.

They came around a lot.

They were both in a terrible state.

He'd always dressed in black, now she was dressed in black

and they'd sit on either side of your fireplace,

like a couple of black panthers hissing at each other,

because they were quarrelling a lot.

Ted promised to buy her a house,

only she would have to find the house that Ted would like,

so she would go all round the country and leave Shura with me.

She would find one and then Ted would go and look at it

and say no.

I was worried for Assia.

She did ask me once if anything happened to her,

if I would look after Shura and I said yes.

And it was very annoying when Assia

decided Shura was going to have another fate.

Assia was aware she was duplicating Sylvia's death,

there can be no question of that.

It wasn't quite the same circumstances

because Sylvia had made sure that her children lived.

Assia was essentially a lost soul,

who was always, psychologically speaking,

looking for an identity of her own.

Sylvia provided Assia with a disastrous model.

She wanted to resurrect Sylvia in herself.

I think she recognised that,

while she was more of a sexual success,

Sylvia had a genius which she could never possess.

That was what triggered it.

Suddenly, Crow feels like it's massive,

and it feels raw.

It feels, um, instant.

"Black is the gall lying on the bed of the blood

"Black is the earth-globe, one inch under

"An egg of blackness

"Where sun and moon alternate their weathers

"To hatch a crow

"A black rainbow

"Bent in emptiness over emptiness

"But flying..."

That black, black aspect to those poems...

..it's a way of trying to explain it to himself,

these terrible things that had happened.

That there's this evil, you know it is a sort of Manichaean view

of the world, isn't it?

Evil being the reigning principle, really.

I mean, if he could convince himself that that was the case,

that must have eased his feeling of responsibility in some way.

He felt that Crow was his masterpiece,

that he had made that transition from experience into myth,

created something that would be archetypal, eternal.

Some critics said, "Yes, this is the great literary work of our time."

Others thought it has gone too far,

it's all blood, guts...

Through the late 1960s and into the early 1970s,

the feminist movement took off.

And so Ariel became an iconic text for feminists.

Sylvia was just the sort of thing

which the rising feminist movement needed.

That is, as an exemplar, as a martyr, as a saint.

But, of course, that had the effect of making him

into a character in her story.

So, in 1970, there was a very influential anthology

of feminist writings published,

and it included one of Sylvia's poems, The Jailer,

the idea of the husband as a jailer.

Then the next year, a feminist,

a New York feminist called Robin Morgan, actually published a poem.

"How can I accuse Ted Hughes

"Of what the entire British and American

"Literary and critical establishment

"Has been at great length to deny

"Without ever saying it in so many words, of course

"The murder of Sylvia Plath?

"Having once been so successful at committing the perfect marriage

"One can hardly blame Hughes for trying again

"The second also was a suicide

"Oh, didn't you know?

"One night ring the doorbell

"To enter a covey of his girlish fans

"Who then disarm him of that weapon with which he tortured us

"Stuff it into his mouth

"Sew up his poetasting lips around it

"And blow out his brains."

The poem, Arraignment, came into being

not triggered by Plath's death,

but because the final straw was the death of Assia.

He was responsible.

Certainly morally responsible.

No-one was saying that he literally shoved her head in the oven.

Some extraordinary allegations.

If it had been published in Britain, Ted would have sued for libel,

without a doubt.

So, through the early 1970s,

this ferment emerges where Ted is the demonic husband.

There were groups of women who took it all on their own impetus

to begin to pick at Hughes wherever he went,

with lines on the signs from the poem.

So, the poem turned into a sort of organising tool,

which was not its intent, I assure you.

I was appalled that something that happened in 1963

could be carried forward,

and what an easy way out for somebody to think,

"Yes, we're right, we've got the real story,

"we know what really happened,

"and we're going to punish this complete stranger

"for something we weren't around to witness,

"we know nothing about, but we're the ones with the answer."

He described those people as fantasists.

You know, he described the issue around Sylvia Plath

as a fantasia, and that people had fallen for that fantasia

and were more interested in it,

and needed it more than they needed the truth.

For outsiders, because that's what they are, outsiders,

to make judgments that affect somebody in their life,

for all of their life,

is a sort of horrible form of theft.

It's an abuse.

"Having to suffer watching that freestyle street theatre

"presented and accepted and discussed

"as the final truth about our lives,

"and having to realise over the years that no mistake can be corrected,

"no fantasy or lie can be extinguished,

"and that any attempt to correct the record

"only gives a weirder energy to the lies.

"Having the monkey world of all this play among one's nerves for 25 years

"induces a stupor of horror.

"It finally affects your judgment of mankind."

I think his keeping quiet and dealing with it in his own way

really preserved something essential for him.

I think, if he once started talking about it,

it just would have been misinterpreted,

it would have come back to haunt him, I think.

I think he couldn't have done that.

I just remember one really difficult day when I saw him cry.

Somebody made him cry,

and I felt that the world collapsed.

"I stopped writing just over a year ago, and have entered a state since

"that I thought I was too robust and sane to succumb to.

"I am having to believe that my guardian angels,

"who I always thought were on my side,

"are now having a game with me."

It felt as if, at the very least, Ted had gone undercover.

You know, that his star maybe wasn't shining as brightly as before,

and that's fine, you know, every writing career has its moments,

better books, and all that kind of stuff.

In the immediate aftermath of Crow,

he's struggling to start a new big project -

in some ways, went into a fairly rapid poetic decline

in collections called Cave Birds and Prometheus on his Crag,

becomes overblown, the poet as quasi-prophet.

You could talk about Hughes suddenly using more masks and curtains

and hiding behind characters,

and becoming a fugitive in his work.

Australia, writers' week, press conference, Ted Hughes,

which was interrupted by the Femme Fascists,

as they were labelled,

the Sylvia crowd,

who heckled and spat at Ted,

and of course, he could not speak a word

in front of all the photographers and the news people I'd arranged,

so we walked into the cool of the hotel,

and he just looked at me and he said, "You look very tired.

"Would you like to take a nap in my bed?"

And that's how our love really started.

I just thought, "What a kind man, and he's not a wolf."

What I did was I cheered him up.

I think he was actually very depressed at that time,

and there was something about her bubbly energy,

her light, her life and its association with Australia

and newness that really did reinvigorate him,

and in the late 1970s, his poetic muse seems to come back on track.

He was vulnerable to women, there's no question about that.

In some way, it was connected to work,

I noticed.

He was just looking for the muse figure

who would help trigger the next poem, really.

I was his muse.

In fact, he said as much in my hearing to Robert Graves,

the writer of The White Goddess,

it was a fabulous moment for me to hear that.

He'd written his most erotic poem about me,

and so this is it.

"As you bend to touch

"The gypsy girl

"Who waits for you in the hedge

"Her loose dress falls open.

"Midsummer ditch-sickness!

"Flushed, freckled with earth-fever

"Swollen lips parted, her eyes closing,

"A lolling armful, and so young! Hot."

I mean, we would never dream of tackling him on his infidelities.

I mean, it was his life.

That's what he was living,

and it was up to him.

It was almost as though he had two personalities.

One part of his life was nothing to do with anybody else,

and there was another side,

which was the family side.

The two sort of didn't meet... didn't seem to meet.

I bought Gaudete in a bookshop in Huddersfield,

and I didn't really know what it was.

The Anglican Minister,

he's abducted into the spirit world

because the spirits have some purpose for Nicholas,

and while he's being taken away,

they send a double.

This doppelganger interprets the ministry of God's love

quite literally -

he's out there, making love to all the women of the parish.

There's an incredible scene in a hut

where the sexual act is taking place

in and amongst all these ferrets spilling out of various cages.

The figure of the reverend in Gaudete

is clearly related to Hughes.

That is a difficult book to like.

I think he was trying to write something out of his system.

But he included with it a series of epilogue poems

in a completely different voice.

These were quiet, reflective, emotional poems.

In these poems, he addresses a lost female.

They become like elegies to dead women whom he has loved.

"I turned, I bowed in the morgue

"I kissed your temples

"Refrigerated

"Glazed as rained on graveyard marble

"My lips queasy

"Heart non-existent

"Straightened into some darkness like a pillar over Athens."

that this was somebody writing from the heart.

The poems felt sincere.

I think that's what people responded to.

So, his next major collection is called Remains Of Elmet.

Elmet was the old legendary name for his district of Yorkshire,

the Calder Valley.

He writes a beautiful sequence of poems,

I think his most underrated book,

about the decay of the community that he grew up in,

but also they're poems of memory about childhood.

In the middle of it, there's a big graveyard,

which was the graveyard for the whole southern south-western corner

of Yorkshire.

Here's the one about the...

this graveyard full of bodies,

which has all the...

all the graves of my mother's family in it.

"You claw your way over a giant beating wing

"And Thomas and Walter and Edith are living feathers

"Esther and Sylvia, living feathers.

"Where all the horizons lift wings

"A family of dark swans

is the archaeology of all Ted's later writing.

and towards the light, and I think in Remains Of Elmet,

you can trace that journey towards a form of ecstasy and epiphany.

When I saw the poetry syllabus for my O-Levels,

and my mother and father were both on it...

..I remember asking a couple of my friends

how they'd feel if their parents were on it

and they couldn't put themselves in that place,

so I telephoned my father and said,

"I have a bit of a problem,

"because you're on my syllabus," and he said, "That's marvellous!

"I can tell you what I meant.

"We can go through the poems together."

I said, "But my mother's on the syllabus too."

He said, "Yes, I know all about her work,

"I can tell you what she meant and I can..."

I said, "OK, this is my problem."

I said, "If you tell me what you meant,

"actually, the examiners might disagree with you,

"and then they're going to fail me.

"What if I say, 'But I got it straight from the horse's mouth!

"'In fact I live with the horse!'

"And, um...then if you don't help me,

"they're going to think you did anyway.

"I actually can't win."

In 1979 or 1980,

we came on a school trip to this cinema

to hear Ted Hughes reading his poems.

We were studying the poems at school for exams,

and I remember him coming onto stage.

He sort of shuffled on in that corner,

brought his own seat to sit on,

and there was no ceremony, no introduction,

and I even wondered if he was the caretaker.

He sat down and with this incredible voice,

sort of low intensity, started reading the work.

I don't think there's any doubt that

if it hadn't have been for Ted's work, I wouldn't be writing.

I didn't know that the world was such an interesting place,

and I certainly didn't know you could contain it

in these little blocks of language.

I'd only seen language as information before.

This was language with a different dimension,

a completely different dimension.

I mean, the people who still disliked him still disliked him.

Nevertheless, being so remarkable a poet,

he just won over the hearts of all people who loved poetry,

and there were more in the country than you always realise.

People forgave him much more easily as a result.

The new poet laureate is Ted Hughes,

filling the gap left by the death of Sir John Betjeman seven months ago.

Mr Hughes, a Yorkshire lad who went to Cambridge,

was the youngest of the handful who'd been tipped for the post.

He first came to prominence in the '50s

and won many prizes with his work,

described by one critic as being totally without sentimentality

and of forceful roughness.

Have you any feeling at all

that the appointment might be an outmoded one,

perhaps old-fashioned, in this televisual era? No, no.

I think it's...

Well, it depends what you think of the Queen or the Crown, rather.

Is the Crown outmoded?

To me, the Crown is the symbol of, you know,

the unity of the tribe,

the spiritual unity of the tribe anyway,

and so, when that's outmoded, then the laureate is outmoded.

In some sense, the poet becomes the guardian

of the spirit of the language of the tribe,

and so the essential soul of the tribe,

so the poet has this duty to perform

in order to keep the spirit of the tribe alive.

In poetry were all sorts of salvation,

and that's why he took on children's poetry,

ran children's competitions in the Daily Mirror, I think it was,

because he was convinced that by learning poetry,

by learning to write poetry and by caring about it,

you could fulfil yourself fully and totally as a human being.

This was his religion.

He believed in it, he thought it would change the world.

If my father had not had fishing,

if he'd not had that peace where he could go and be alone,

how might he have coped with the life that he goes back to?

I came up here a few times with him. The first time, we fished...

Oh, I just had a bite, I can't believe that!

Fishing is like plumbing the mysteries of the world.

It's an absolute epiphany,

that this mysterious creature comes from the bottom of the river

and takes your fly.

You're trying constantly to adjust, like you are to life,

and it becomes then a kind of model for how you live your life.

I think that the tragedies that ensued from his indiscretions

did teach him a lesson,

but I think at the same time,

it was like being addicted to a drug.

He liked the regularity of married life,

but he also wanted the inspiration of new relationships.

"This actually was the love act

"That had brought them out of everywhere

"Squirming and leaping

"And that had brought us too

"Besotted voyeurs

"Trying to hook ourselves into it

"And all giddy orgasm of the river, quaking under our feet."

Ted told me one time, sitting around the campfire having a Scotch,

having had a great day on the river,

he said by the time you hit 60,

you think, "What else is there?"

Have I used my time well?

He felt that life was closing in on him.

When he felt that his creative energies were going down,

when the passion was gone, I think he was, in a funny sort of way,

fearful that it might infect his creative ability.

Late on, you get these two books,

which suddenly put him right back in the centre.

It got an incredible amount of praise and critical attention

for different reasons,

but largely because it felt as if,

you know, Ted was back, in some ways.

You know, with poems, with writing that was as strong

and as powerful and as energised,

and as important as anything that he'd written before.

Usually, you know, they just expect us to fade out.

I do remember him saying,

as soon as you tell somebody you've got an illness,

something like cancer, they write you off, and I suppose you do.

You look at people differently

when you know that they're on the way out, basically.

You don't know how long they have got left.

Then, um...

a sadness descends on everybody.

I think that's probably why he kept it quiet.

The old Ted was like someone on parole

from some purgatorial ordeal to which he had been condemned.

The important poems that a poet writes

are to heal the wounds,

and the wounds come from your own folly,

and he was more wounded throughout his life by folly.

There was a moment in Ted Hughes's life where he said,

"I hope that everyone has the right to own the facts of their own life."

In many ways, the most tragic,

the saddest words in the English language

are "too late",

and it was too late that he came to publish

his poems about his life with Sylvia Plath.

Nine months after he published them, he was dead. That's a tragedy.