Smart or Untidy]: Smart’; ‘Rank on discharge – L.A.C.’ (Leading Aircraftman, one rank above entry level); ‘6' 2" fresh complexion, blue eyes, brown hair’.9 His bearing was not always smart in later years, but transmitting on the radio would, in another way, become an important part of his life: in the early Sixties, his principal source of income was as a freelance contributor to the British Broadcasting Corporation.
A letter dated 30 May 1951 arrived from the Awards Branch of the Ministry of Education, informing him that the University Supplemental Award offered to him in 1949, and postponed due to his National Service, was now being converted to a state scholarship, enabling him to study for his English degree at Pembroke College, Cambridge, with effect from the coming October. The award consisted of a grant to cover the whole or part of the tuition fees, together with a maintenance grant, its amount to be determined on the basis of parental income. A subsequent letter, following the financial assessment, informed Hughes that his university fees would be paid, and he would receive a grant of £218 per annum, in addition to the £40 exhibition that he had won from the college.
In the late summer, his father found a shop that would enable them to return to the Calder Valley. The family left Mexborough and moved to Woodlands Avenue at the Hebden Bridge end of Todmorden. Though on the other side of Hebden Bridge from Mytholmroyd, they were back in the family domain, once again on the north side of the valley. You went over a railway bridge and up on to the hillside. The road had a very respectable and rather suburban feel to it. One side of it was lined with Thirties houses, some semi-detached. The Hugheses were at number 4, opposite a big house called Stansfield Hall. It felt a rather indeterminate, in-between sort of place, but it was the home to which Ted would return in his university vacations.
As a ‘going up’ present before he left for Pembroke, his teacher John Fisher, to whom he owed so much, gave him a copy of Robert Graves’s recently published The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth.10 Reading it through the lens of Jung, Ted was engrossed. He saw in Graves a mature mirror of his own youthful self. ‘Since the age of fifteen poetry has been my ruling passion,’ began Graves. And so it had been for Hughes. Poetry is rooted in magic, the book claims; poets are in touch with a mysterious primeval magical potency. The poet is priest and judge, prophet and seer, ‘in Welsh derwydd, or oak-seer, which is the probable derivation of “Druid”’. The truest poetry tunes in to ancient rhythms. Graves’s very first example was the Welsh bardic Cynghanedd with its ‘repetitive use of consonantal sequences with variants of vowels’, as illustrated by the lines:
Billet spied
Bold sped,
Across field
Crows fled,
Aloft, wounded,
Left one dead.
Which sounds rather like a Ted Hughes poem.
Graves signs up to the belief of the Welsh poet Alun Lewis, who was killed in the Burma campaign, that the ‘single poetic theme’ is Life and Death, ‘the question of what survives of the beloved’. He then gives the Theme a capital letter and turns it into an ancient story that he finds played out in the myths and epic poems of every culture. It involved a battle between the God of the Waxing Year and the God of the Waning Year for the love of the ‘capricious and all-powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride and layer-out’. The poet identifies himself with the God of the Waxing Year and his Muse with the Goddess, while ‘the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird’. Graves’s next paragraph haunted Hughes all his writing life:
The Goddess is a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowan-berries, startlingly blue eyes and long fair hair; she will suddenly transform herself into sow, mare, bitch, vixen, she-ass, weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid or loathsome hag … The test of a poet’s vision, one might say, is the accuracy of his portrayal of the White Goddess and of the island over which she rules.
Graves applied the term ‘poet-laureateship’ to the grounding of the Goddess in an island landscape and the role of the poet as the guardian of the spirit of both place and tribe. Hughes took this to heart. For better or for worse, in some of his richest poems and some of his poorest, till death parted him from Sylvia Plath and on until his own death, in health and in sickness brought on (he believed) by writing too much prose, Hughes married his imaginative vision to Graves’s claim that ‘a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust – the female-spider or the queen-bee whose embrace is death’.11
Like Jung, Graves then went on to apply his system across cultures and ages. Hughes immersed himself in chapters with titles such as ‘Fabulous Beasts’, ‘The Return of the Goddess’ and ‘The Roebuck in the Thicket’ (a vital motif for the very first version of Birthday Letters). He took special pleasure in the Celtic material, which added Welsh traditions to the Irish myths he had already encountered in Yeats. Here was the ninefold Muse Cerridwen who was originally the Great Goddess in her poetic or incantatory character, who had a son who was also her lover, the Demon of the Waxing Year, before she was courted by the Thunder-god (‘a rebellious Star-son infected by Eastern patriarchalism’), by whom she had twins, Merlin the magician and his sister Olwen. Ted lapped up all this and regurgitated much of it forty years later in his heftiest tome, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. He once told Graves that The White Goddess was ‘the chief holy book on poetic conscience’.12
All developed cultures, Graves suggests, eventually destroy the Goddess and replace her with a patriarchal sky god. ‘This stage was not reached in England until the Commonwealth, since in mediaeval Catholicism the Virgin and Son – who took over the rites and honours of the Moon-woman and her Star-son – were of greater religious importance than God the Father.’13 This idea chimed nicely with one of the tenets of certain prominent members of the English Faculty where Ted Hughes was now heading: that during the Civil War, just after the age of Shakespeare, a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ fractured English culture and society, and that it was the job of the poet to repair it.
In October 1951 he went up to Cambridge.
5
Cambridge is a city of water and history. Pembroke College, where Ted Hughes matriculated in the autumn of 1951, is at the top end of Trumpington Street, which leads out to the village where Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale was set. Immediately outside the college was Fitzbillies bakery, which had served Chelsea buns to generations of students. Turn right and you are in King’s Parade, dominated by the most glorious Gothic chapel in the world. Crossing the road from Pembroke, you pass the Pitt Building, which housed Cambridge University Press, the oldest publisher in the world. Then you are in Mill Lane, where gowned undergraduates attended lectures by such luminaries as Dr F. R. Leavis and (until his death in the year that Hughes went up) Ludwig Wittgenstein. In summer, you could hire a punt at Scudamore’s Boatyard by the mill pond, beside which were two much-frequented and watery-named pubs, the Anchor and the Mill. From there, the river Cam meandered via Byron’s Pool towards the village of Grantchester that had been immortalised by King’s College student Rupert Brooke.
In Michaelmas term, when freshmen arrived, Cambridge was bitterly cold and shrouded in fog. According to student lore, the wind came straight off the Ural mountains. Ted wrapped himself in his Uncle Walt’s
