Where Have You Been? (16 page)

A feeling that whereas most of the best poetry of our time aims for and is distinguished by its speed (I think of Brodsky's phrase, “a highly economical form of mental acceleration”), Hughes often writes with heavy feet. Like Lawrence. Not just won't leap, but can't leap. A characteristic movement of his is the clanking, mired advance of bulldozer or caterpillar tracks. One plodding platelet at a time (“Black Hair”—a poem to Hughes's mother):

I remember her hair as black

Though I know it was brown.

Dark brown. I first saw it as black.

She was combing it. Probably it was wet.

She was combing it out after washing it.

Black, straight, shining hair down over her breasts.

That's the memory.

The sentences—often, like these, noun phrases—setting themselves down, and the next one following half in its print, barely an advance. The antithesis of speed. Weight. Method. Force. Brute or main. Instruction. Like someone writing a computer program. (And then one, three or four along, will contradict it: this isn't computer programming, it's poetry. “I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself.”) But so many wild exceptions to this. Astounding juxtapositions and swirling sentences that go miles. Perhaps one conclusion remains unoverturned: that the model and the repeated subject of Hughes's writing is Creation itself: “
Only birth matters
/ Say the river's whorls. And the river / Silences everything in a leaf-mouldering hush / Where sun rolls bare, and earth rolls, / And mind condenses on old haws” (“Salmon Eggs”).

*   *   *

When Hughes is described as a “nature poet,” the effect—if not the intention—is drastically to limit him. That's what we were given at school, a vaguely reproachful litany of things with which we were unfamiliar and in which we weren't greatly interested. We didn't live in
nature
, who on earth lived in nature? But if nature, then a sort of Tinguely-cum-Brueghel
Weltmaschine
of everything-that-is-the-case. A cartoonish vitalism that saw “the phenomenal technology” inside a fox's head; to which everything,
au fond
, was wild, even house cats and daffodils, by virtue of its otherness; that outdid Marianne Moore by writing an ode to a sports car, “Flimsy-light, like a squid's funeral bone”; that offered a moorland tree as “A priest from a different land,” who “Fulminated / Against heather, black stones, blown water”; that listened to a heron “cranking rusty abuse, / like an unwanted porter”; that showed us mannerly bears “eating pierced salmon off their talons”; that was incapable of seeing crabs without a nightmarish Dix or Sutherland flashback of World War I, “Giant crabs, under flat skulls, staring inland / Like a packed trench of helmets”; that deconstructed a cranefly as “Her jointed bamboo fuselage, / Her lobster shoulders, and her face / Like a pinhead dragon, with its tender moustache, / And the simple colourless church windows of her wings.” Anything unhappy, ungainly, failed, or doomed enlists the poet's sympathy, whether it's a baby swallow that can't fly (“The moustached goblin savage // Nested in a scarf. […] The inevitable balsa death”), an ugly, lumpy apple blossom (“A straggle of survivors, nearly all ailing”), or a dirty river (“And the Okement, nudging her detergent bottles, tugging at her nylon stockings, starting to trundle her Pepsi-Cola cans”). If this sympathy wasn't so universally extended, it might seem sentimental—a strange accusation to level at Hughes. Equally, when things work, they are celebrated for working. It is not “nature”—sky-blue and pink nature, schoolroom nature—so much as technology. A mother sheep “carries on investigating her new present and seeing how it works.” A female spider's hands become cutting edge: “Far from simple, / Though, were her palps, her boxing-glove nippers— / They were like the mechanical hands / That manipulate radio-active matter / On the other side of safe screen glass.” A sparrow is read as a prole: “Pin-legged urchin, he's patient. / He bathes in smoke. He towels in soot, / And with his prematurely-aged hungry street-cry / Sells his consumptive sister.” All this is drama, function, it takes us to the sources of energy, character, identity. The descriptive resources of the writing match those of the creature or thing described. “The hills went on gently / shaking their sieve.” Hence the allowable comparison to Shakespeare. Who other than Shakespeare would have dared the coda to “Sing the Rat,” where invention and anonymous folk wit indistinguishably mingle?

O sing

Scupper-tyke, whip-lobber

Smutty-guts, pot-goblin

Garret-whacker, rick-lark

Sump-swab, cupboard-adder

Bobby-robin, knicker-knocker

Sneak-nicker, sprinty-dinty

Pintle-bum

The corollary of the “nature poet” label is that Hughes didn't “do” people. That his gift didn't extend to historical intelligence, to narrative, to psychology, to abstracting and inducing and contextualizing. It did—to all of those things, see
Birthday Letters
, see the
Tales from Ovid
—but, like Lawrence, Hughes often took animals as his way in. The
Metamorphoses
are god and man stories with animal outcomes. Animals challenged him, or commanded him unconditionally, as people did only if they struck him as exceptional, or in exceptional situations. (Old subjects, uncontemporary people, holdouts, veterans, drudges, people of a dandified strength get his praise and attention: “Sketching a Thatcher,” “Dick Straightup,” “Walt,” “Sacrifice.”) There's any amount of human intelligence and the slapstick of human incompetence (“O beggared eagle! O down-and-out falcon!”) in his poem “Buzzard”:

When he treads, by chance, on a baby rabbit

He looks like an old woman

Trying to get her knickers off.

In the end he lumbers away,

To find some other buzzard, maybe older,

To show him how.

(It's not just the indignity of “old woman,” the covertly sexual “treads,” and the ribaldry of “knickers”; it's the fact that an older buzzard might not necessarily be any more proficient.) Sometimes, a human subject will draw dignity and company from animal society, as in the early poem “The Retired Colonel”: “Here's his head mounted, though only in rhymes, / Beside the head of the last English / Wolf (those starved gloomy times!) / And the last sturgeon of Thames.” (“English” rhymes with “vanish,” earlier.) Sometimes, it will draw further degradation, as in this short uncollected poem, “Gibraltar”—where, I'm guessing, Hughes might have visited in 1956, at the time of his Spanish honeymoon with Plath:

Empire has rotted back,

Like a man-eater

After its aeon of terror, to one fang.

Apes on their last legs—

Rearguard of insolence—

Snapping at peanuts and defecating.

The heirloom garrison's sold as a curio

With a flare of Spanish hands

And a two-way smile, wafer of insult,

Served in carefully-chipped English.

The taxi-driver talking broken American

Has this rock in his palm.

When the next Empire noses this way

Let it sniff here.

The “fang” is the Rock itself. There's a touch of Yeats about the poem, about the slightly squeamish deployment of slang (you can't help looking for the word “slouch” somewhere!), “carefully-chipped” is nice, doubling as crockery and mimicry. Overall, one might not necessarily have guessed it was Hughes, but it's very confident; had it been more widely circulated, it might have saved him from the laureateship.

“Remembering Teheran” is a terrific poem that I've written about elsewhere (see p. 112), full of heat and drought and static and theatricality and alienated intimations of prerevolutionary dread: it shows beyond a peradventure that Hughes could “do” abroad as well as anyone. “Auction at Stanbury” is a short and intense snapshot of the north of England, bleakly comic, sadly inward:

On a hillside, part farm, part stone rubble

Shitty bony cattle disconsolate

Rotten and shattered gear

Farmers resembling the gear, the animals

Resembling the strewn walls, the shabby slopes

Shivery Pakistanis

Wind pressing the whole scene towards ice

Thin black men wrapped in bits of Bradford

Waiting for a goat to come up

The auction is cleverly held off till the last two words; the scene is too miserably messy to deserve any more hierarchy or purpose than that. Shit/shat/shab/shiv. Waiting for a goat—a scapegoat, perhaps—waiting for Godot. It's a final, humbling indignity. Like the—roughly contemporaneous—devaluation of a currency. The condition of England is always something Hughes is keen to infer, sometimes ceremonially, almost magically, as in the Laureate poems, sometimes satirically in more occasional pieces. It's one of the identifications that lend a cute cultural amplitude to his poems about Plath, the fact that she's America and he's England, and much of the time he's on the receiving end: “It confirmed / Your idea of England: part / Nursing home, part morgue / For something partly dying, partly dead.” By the same metonymic token, one “J.R.” is identified with Australia (“your firestick-naked, billabong spirit”), his second wife Assia Wevill with an unstable amalgam of German, Jewish, Levantine, Russian, his father-in-law Jack Orchard with a gypsy Africa. It's ethnobotanical labeling.

*   *   *

Birthday Letters
is mainly stunningly unbeautiful—it's mostly written in the bulldozer style with the short, incremental sentences—but it's still Hardy by other means. I like to think Hughes couldn't have written it without writing the
Tales from Ovid
first, to draw him into the sphere of the human and the narrative, but I'm not so sure now. It's not known whether, as the title suggests, and as I think Hughes claimed, the poems were written steadily over many years, or if they came pell-mell toward the end of his life. The latter seems likelier to me. There barely seems time to draw breath between one poem and the next; I can't imagine them being composed years apart, leisurely, or sharply, at so many separate promptings. The composition of the
Duino Elegies
strikes me as a likely parallel, some glimmerings earlier and one or two poems (there were some in the
New Selected
of 1995), but basically an abrupt tumble at the end. In the case of the
Birthday Letters
, the very notion of such a project—the narrative and publication of his version of the years with Plath—might have been the last thing to emerge.

They're not all great, or even good, poems. Partly, I think, they are pulled apart by Hughes following different, and even contradictory, purposes at the same time: to celebrate, to explain, and to mourn. The simplicity and heavy slowness of the style is almost forced upon the poet wanting to do so many different things. Third-person description, with its myriad revelations, exaggerations, and suggestions, is abandoned for a simple “I-you” mode used by Hughes for the first time, though the rest of us have been flogging it for years. Dignity and reticence, I imagine, would have meant he abhorred it. The way he uses it, it's unexpectedly capable of holding and disclosing feeling. Sometimes, it's almost a style without words. I'm thinking especially of a poem called “The Other,” which it took me a while to “see,” but which now looks drastic and original: “She had too much so with a smile you took some. / Of everything she had you had / Absolutely nothing, so you took some. / At first just a little.” It's related to another poem from
Capriccio
, called “Folktale,” but it's even more bare. Like Lawrence, it seems to break every known rule. There's not a concrete noun in the place. Not a scene. Not a recognizable event. Nothing. A few clichés are allowed to disport themselves rather grimly, but basically, it's naked arithmetic. Subtraction, to be precise. But something of the schematic style of that poem, the threadbare simplicity, an otherworldly point of view where memory and self-accusation, transgression and punishment, seem to become one thing, informs a lot of the poems of
Birthday Letters
. (“Birthday” perhaps in that rather British sense of “naked.”) “Was that a happy day?” begins one poem; “Nearly happy,” another. “What happened to Howard's portrait of you? / I wanted that painting.” “Remember how we picked the daffodils? / Nobody else remembers, but I remember.” It could hardly be any more straightforward. It's hard to think there could ever be a more successful narrative—not least because we all grew up on the story anyway. But then, “Nobody else remembers, but I remember.” It's quite a card.

Some of the poems are more furnished than others, and they are the ones I prefer: “Fever,” “Flounders,” “Daffodils,” “The Beach.” I read Hughes with the grain—I've learned to do that, it's wasteful not to—and against. The one thing I'm loath to go along with is to follow him into the doomed—not just predestined, but predestinarian—mode that he wraps a lot of the memories and episodes in. His celebrating and mourning, in other words, I allow; I jib a little at the explanations. Time and time again, he offers up the machinery of doom, whether it's Ouija sessions, an offended gypsy, a dream, an illness, Otto, poetry. There's a tense—the opposite of the future perfect, if you like, the posthumous future—where the poems like to take you to, the tense of “I had no idea,” of “if only I'd known then what I know now,” the tense of dramatic irony. “We thought they were a windfall. / Never guessed they were a last blessing.” This wears out, and it's my one serious reservation about
Birthday Letters
. I much prefer it when Hughes coasts on the “present” of the simple past:

You had a fever. You had a real ailment.

You had eaten a baddie.

You lay helpless and a little bit crazy