another dinner-party, at which Bill Merwin suggested that Ted and Sylvia should move back to England, because the opportunities for BBC broadcasting, together with newspaper and magazine reviewing, would give them much more time for their own writing than they would have staying in America, where the only way that poets could make a living was through distracting and debilitating university teaching. The Merwins were heading to London themselves.
In London, it was Al Alvarez, poetry editor of the Observer, who could make or break a young writer. He wrote poems himself – Ted thought they were ‘very crabby little apples’ – and he wasn’t easy to please. His review dropped a lot of names in a manner that Ted considered ‘undergraduatish’ – D. H. Lawrence, Thom Gunn, Robert Lowell, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (from which he accused Hughes of stealing the word ‘dispropertied’).15 Alvarez criticised some of the poems for being excessively ‘literary’ or having a ‘misanthropic swagger’, but said that half a dozen of them could only have been written by ‘a real poet’.16
Alvarez’s judgement was astute. Some of the poems in The Hawk in the Rain now read like period pieces. There is sometimes a clever literary allusiveness that does not feel real. And pieces such as ‘Secretary’ are unpleasantly misanthropic – or in this case, misogynist. Quite a lot of the poems are directly or indirectly about sex, viewed from a very masculine perspective. But there are indeed half a dozen pieces of true genius. Four of them are among the first five in the collection: ‘The Hawk in the Rain’, ‘The Jaguar’, ‘The Thought-Fox’ and ‘The Horses’. The two other highlights are ‘Wind’, which begins with the memorable line ‘This house has been far out at sea all night,’17 and ‘Six Young Men’. This was inspired by a photograph of a group of friends posing near the bridge at the top of Crimsworth Dene, that favourite spot of Ted’s. They are all ‘trimmed for a Sunday jaunt’ some time just before the outbreak of war. The ‘bilberried bank’, ‘thick tree’ and ‘black wall’ were all still there, forty years on, but the young men were not. ‘The celluloid of a photograph holds them.’ The image is ‘faded and ochre-tinged’, yet the figures themselves are free from wrinkles. ‘Though their cocked hats are not now fashionable, / Their shoes shine.’ A shy smile is caught in one of the faces, another of the lads is chewing a piece of grass. One is shy, another ‘ridiculous with cocky pride’. Little differences, but the same end: ‘Six months after this picture they were all dead.’18 The poem remains one of the two best retrospectives on the ‘never such innocence again’ motif of the beginning of the Great War, the other being Philip Larkin’s ‘MCMXIV’, published a few years later in The Whitsun Weddings.
The hawk, the jaguar, the thought-fox and the horses all seem perfectly formed: animal images seamlessly entering the inner self of the poet. But Ted’s notebooks reveal that all were struggled for, through draft after draft. So, for example, it was a tremendous trial to reach the shimmer of the line ‘Steady as a hallucination on the streaming air’ in the title poem:
As a hallucination in the avalanche of air untouched
As a hallucination in the heaving air buoyed
Like a hallucination in the swamping air to its sides
Like a hallucination the running air
Like a hallucination that the scene rides and it hangs
Like a hallucination that the scenes rides <vivid> through …
After these six failed attempts, he got to ‘Steady as a hallucination in the bursting sky’, but still that was not quite right.19 Again, it was a long time before he achieved ‘The window is starless still; the clock ticks, / The page is printed’ at the end of ‘The Thought-Fox’. First he had to create and reject such variants as ‘And the page where the prints have appeared’ and ‘The clock crowding and the whitening sky / Watch this page where the prints remain.’20
There were warning signs. Sylvia was exhausted by her duties at Smith. Ted told Olwyn that she was working twelve hours a day and cracking under the strain. Sometimes she would descend from the manic energy of her writing into days when she struggled to get out of bed, what with coughs and colds, fevers and flu, or sheer torpor. Christmas with Aurelia was marred by Sylvia suffering from viral pneumonia, exacerbated by her exhaustion from teaching and marking. In the new year, she told her head of department that she wanted to leave at the end of the academic session instead of accepting her option to stay on for a second year. Ted, meanwhile, got a similar teaching position for the semester over at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
He had to teach two classes three times a week on a ‘Great Books’ course. This meant mugging up on Milton’s shorter poems, including Samson Agonistes, reading Goethe’s Faust for the first time (opportune because he had been enthusing about Goethe and Nietzsche in a letter to Olwyn the previous autumn), getting advice from Sylvia about Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (they both heavily annotated their battered copy of the Penguin paperback of the English translation),21 plunging into that quintessentially New England book, Thoreau’s Walden, and going back to some of his favourite poetry – Wordsworth, Keats and Yeats. He also had to teach freshman English twice a week and a creative writing class in which he could do more or less what he liked. As a handsome young instructor with a relaxed teaching style, a rich English accent and a prizewinning first book of poems just published, he was an immediate hit with his students, especially the female ones. In the creative writing class, there were just eight of them, ‘3 beautiful, one brilliant & a very good person’.22
Back at Elm Street, despite all the preparation and marking, there was plenty of time for reading. Ted had some success in persuading Sylvia to share his Yeatsian occult interests, though these were more to Olwyn’s taste. He read through the Journals of the Psychical Research Society from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and wrote to her of ‘wonderful accounts of hypnoses, automatic writings, ghosts, double personalities etc’. He was delighted to find an anticipation of his own belief that the left side of the brain (in right-handed people) controlled ‘all consciously-practised skills’, whereas ‘the subconscious, or something deeper, a world of spirits’ was located in the right lobe.23
In April, Ted gave a poetry reading at Harvard. They drove down in the car they were borrowing from Warren Plath while he was away in Europe on his Fulbright scholarship. Sylvia’s ex-lover, the poet and publisher Peter Davison, remembered the ‘emphatic consonant-crunching of Hughes’s voice’ when he read.24 The effect was to emphasise the nouns and underplay the verbs. As his poetry developed, Ted would often take the opportunity to omit some of the verbs altogether, even on paper. At a reception afterwards, they were introduced to several poets and writers. The literary scene in Cambridge and Boston was much more lively than that in Northampton and Amherst, so they felt justified in a plan they were hatching to move there in the summer.
Not that they had failed to find a few like-minded people during their teaching year. Several would remain particular friends: the poet Anthony Hecht was a member of the Smith faculty and the British poet and classical scholar Paul Roche was on a visiting fellowship, accompanied by his American wife Clarissa. Then in May 1958, they met the artist Leonard Baskin and his family. Eight years older than Ted, and with a comparably dark imagination, he taught printmaking and sculpture at Smith. ‘How I love the Baskins,’ Sylvia would write in her journal the following summer. They were ‘a miracle of
