employable. Ted set up a study for himself in the attic and prepared for his second year.
When he returned to Pembroke in the autumn, he had different accommodation. It was a good-sized first-floor room with large windows, tucked away in a building that had once been the Master’s Lodge, reached via an opulent staircase and looking out over the Fellows’ car park. He was screened from street-noise, but annoyed by a loud public schoolboy on the floor above. He took revenge by playing Beethoven far into the night.
Music was a serious passion. Olwyn moved to Paris that autumn to take up a secretarial job at the British Embassy, and he wrote to tell her of many a concert. His standards were high: at a recital by the legendary pianist Solomon (Cutner) there were some disappointingly slight encore pieces and then, in response to the cry ‘More Beethoven!’, a rendering of the Waldstein sonata which Ted did not consider up to scratch. He expressed a good deal more enthusiasm for his new academic supervisor, a graduate student called Eric Mottram, who was a poet and an enthusiast for avant-garde American poetry. ‘I never knew anyone so forceful in his flow,’ Ted told Olwyn. Supervisions were heated, argumentative, energising, extending well beyond the appointed hour’s length.9
By day, Ted took charge of the reorganisation of the Archery Club. He kept a great bow in a corner of his room, and practised for hours. By virtue of representing the university against Oxford, he won a ‘half-blue’. In the evenings, besides concerts, there were films and plays – and the pub. The highlight of Michaelmas term was a poetry reading by Dylan Thomas, at the Cambridge Union under the auspices of the English Society. For the first time, Ted witnessed a charismatic poet in the flesh, holding an audience rapt with his word music. Afterwards, together with McCaughey and a couple of other friends, he followed Dylan Thomas and the society committee to the Eagle in Bene’t Street so as to listen in on their conversation. Thomas and his acolytes spoke of filling Swansea Bay with beer. Elated, Ted and his friends then returned to Pembroke and burst into the room of Francis Holmes à Court, a literary-minded undergraduate of aristocratic pedigree (he subsequently succeeded his father, the 5th Baron Heytesbury). There they met another Welshman, a freshman called Daniel Huws who had been at school with Holmes à Court and had now come up to Peterhouse, just across the road. Ted, still high on the oxygen of Thomas’s poetry, didn’t really notice him, but the following year their respective circles of friends conjoined in the Anchor pub, with its dark-brown bar, table-football machine and, downstairs, benches by the landing-stage beside the punts waiting for hire.
In the Anchor, Ted was a brooding silent presence, content to let others make the conversational running. The most opinionated was Roger Owen, Liverpool Welsh, all politics and sociology. But when Ted spoke, everyone listened. He wasn’t interested in politics but was an oracle on matters literary and was scathing about many of the dons in the English Faculty. Everyone in the group had a store of anecdotes, mostly mocking, about the lectures of Dr Leavis. Ted especially loathed the one on his beloved Yeats. In the Cambridge system, it was the weekly college supervision that counted. Lectures were an optional extra. Ted went to fewer and fewer as he progressed through his degree, but he thought well of both the theatrical Dadie Rylands and the sometime surrealist poet Hugh Sykes Davies on Shakespeare.
Towards the end of the pub evenings, much beer consumed, Terence McCaughey, with his seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of Irish ballads, led them in singing. Ted would eventually be cajoled into participation. ‘He had a soft, light voice,’ Huws recalled, ‘with the slight tremolo which later characterized his reading voice.’10 His party pieces were traditional numbers such as ‘Eppie Morie’ and Coleridge’s favourite, the grand old ballad of ‘Sir Patrick Spens’. Then they would all join in a round of ‘Waltzing Matilda’.
Others who joined the Pembroke group at the Anchor were Fintan O’Connell and Joe Lyde, Northern Irish grammar school boys, one a Catholic and the other a Protestant. Lyde was loud and sometimes rude, a trumpeter and jazz pianist with the best band in Cambridge. A ladies’ man, he would get to play in New Orleans, aggravate Sylvia Plath with his outlandish tales and brash words, and die young, of drink.
As for Ted’s studies, there were supervisions on the Victorians and a special paper on Wordsworth and Coleridge, very much to his taste. Always able to read poetry with close attention, he jumped easily through the hoop of Cambridge practical criticism and achieved a 2.1 classification in Part I of the English Tripos, the honours examination at the end of the second year. Only nine candidates achieved first-class honours in English that year, and over 120 got a 2.2 or a Third. Ted and three of his Pembroke contemporaries were among the thirty 2.1s, outshining the four other Pembroke students, so this was a very creditable if not an outstanding performance.
The Cambridge degree is very flexible: it was perfectly possible to take one part of the Tripos in one subject and the other in something completely different. After Part I, half the Pembroke English students changed course. Ted’s choice was Archaeology and Anthropology. He thus missed out on the paper that he would most have enjoyed had he stuck with English: the study of Tragedy from the ancient Greeks via Shakespeare and Racine to Ibsen, Chekhov and Yeats, a course in which Sylvia Plath would immerse herself a couple of years later.
Many times over the years Ted Hughes told the story of why he switched away from English. It was one of his party pieces, often used to introduce public readings of his best-known poem, ‘The Thought-Fox’ – though that poem was not written until well after he graduated. He was not always consistent in the details of the tale, so there may well be a characteristic element of invention, or at least embellishment, in the telling. But there is no doubting the centrality of the story to his personal myth.
A cornerstone of Cambridge undergraduate life is the ‘essay crisis’. Terms are short, reading lists are long and extra-curricular distractions are legion. The essay for the weekly supervision is accordingly left to the last minute, written deep into the night. Ted sometimes wrote with great facility, especially if the subject was one of his passions, such as William Blake. But sometimes he could not get going on his essay. He’d stare at the blank page on his desk, write and rewrite an opening, cross it out, give up and go to bed.
One night when this happened, he dreamed that he was still at his desk, in his ‘usual agonising frame of mind, trying to get one word to follow another’. The lamplight fell on the page. In the dream the door slowly opened. A head appeared in the dim light: at the height of a man but with the form of a fox. The creature descended the two or three steps down into the room. With its fox’s head and ‘long skinny fox’s body’, it stood upright, as tall as a wolf reared on its hind legs. The hands were those of a man: ‘He had escaped from a fire – the smell of burning hair was strong, and his skin was charred and in places cracking, bleeding freshly through the splits.’ The creature walked across the room to the desk, placed the paw that was a human hand on the page and spoke: ‘Stop this – you are destroying us.’ The burns were worst on the hand, and when the fox-man moved away there was a bloody print upon the page. The dream seemed so wholly real that Ted got up and examined his essay for the bloody mark. He determined forthwith to abandon his course in English Literature. In some versions of the story, he dreams again the following night. Either the fox returns and nods approvingly, or the creature returns in the variant form of a leopard, again standing erect.
In his fullest recounting of the story, Hughes says that the essay he was (not) writing was on Samuel Johnson, a personality he greatly liked. Johnson and Leavis are the only two English writers habitually referred to as ‘Doctor’ (the critic George Steiner once quipped that theirs were the only two honorary doctorates conferred by the Muses). Dr Johnson and Dr Leavis were archetypes of the critical spirit, so at this moment the former was standing in for the latter: ‘I connected the fox’s command to my own ideas about Eng. Lit. and the effect of the Cambridge blend of pseudo-critical terminology and social rancour on creative spirit, and from that moment abandoned my efforts to adapt myself.’ Hughes explained that he had a considerable gift ‘for
