Naming Hughes and Plath

The blogger known as solearabiantree writes this week of the abuse (all too frequent) hurled at readers of Ted Hughes by fanatics who favour (too weak a word) his first wife Sylvia Plath. If I understand the post correctly he (or she) has now him(her)self joined the decriers of Hughes. And all as a result of one of the  pieces I wrote after the poet's death in October 1998.

Solearabiantree has fallen out with the spirit of our dead and much missed British genius because of Hughes's unusual hatred of Henry Reed's great poem Naming of Parts. I happened to record his view of Reed in a notebook entry written during the British general election of 1997 and I published it in The Times as an obituary tribute a year later.

I was the first publisher of Hughes's Birthday Letters, the book about his relationship with Plath (in The Times in January 1998) and will share almost any admiration of that work. For those who want a sensitive and balanced guide to the Hughes-Plath issues there is none better than Erica Wagner's critical and biographical commentary Ariel's Gift.

But many do not want a balanced guide. Since I know that both loving and hating Ted Hughes are popular pastimes around the world - and that misunderstanding comes easily with both territories - this is the full text of the piece "Ted Hughes's last reading", first published in The Times of October 30, 1998.

"It was an evening in April last year, two weeks before the general election, and Ted Hughes, with Seamus Heaney, was reading from a new anthology for more than a thousand Times readers. Hughes had selected a piece from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, promising that "out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex..." When he reached the word "sex", the full front rows of men and women, mainly women, swayed as though a wind had blown through grass. He had touched everyone with a breath.
This article ought, by normal rules, to be an appreciation of a great man who is dead. But to do the normal thing seems no easier now for the Editor of The Times than it was to do a normal chairman's job when Hughes was starring on the stage. Hughes defied what is normal and public. That private power is somehow more immediate today than any poem. So this has to be a piece of memory.
When Hughes was not reading at the lectern he was curled behind our shared wooden desk in a prawn-like not-quite-sitting posture. Meanwhile, Seamus Heaney was out there tapping his feet to The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a poem that is easier on the ear than anything of Whitman's and easier almost than anything at all, and yet Heaney's words were not easy to hear. It was as though Hughes were a pile of bricks on my right-hand side.
It is always tempting to exaggerate the power of the newly dead. Grief exaggerates. Loss exaggerates. Let me stick to the straightest, simplest memory. The force of Ted Hughes did not form a solid wall. His was not a spell of chains. I could easily have broken my mind back out into general election business. But I did not. That was the fact.
Song of Myself is about change and rejuvenation, about what every voter in Britain was supposed to be thinking that April. In Hughes's voice it was about only the private writer, the private speaker and all the private hearers who were there for what turned out to be the last public reading Ted Hughes ever gave.
The poets, their publishers, Faber & Faber, and our co-hosts, the booksellers Dillons, had just held a party behind the stage of London's Institute of Education. A classroom is forever a classroom and we all stood like teachers with tumblers in our hands toasting a colleague off to classrooms new. The celebration was going with a modest swing when the official photographer called on "the Laureates", to hold up their School Bag anthology.
Neither the Nobel Laureate nor the Poet Laureate seemed keen to do this: they balanced and bounced it but were reluctant to open their work for any end other than the real one of reading from it. The book came to me and, to the photographer's relief, it fell open: somewhere, anywhere would do.
To add fake verisimilitude of the sort that publicity pictures require I opened my mouth as though speaking. In order to avoid saying anything I stabbed at the first poem on the page, a description of a Second World War rifle drill by Henry Reed, which baldly began: "Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday, we had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning we shall have what to do after firing."
Heaney and I mumbled about Reed and about how this particular poem was "one of the most extraordinary works of the war". Hughes became agitated. "I hate this poem," he said, as though shovelling rocks into the vacuum around us. "I once crashed my car while listening to it."
All I could do was look back down at the page. "Japonica glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens and today we have naming of parts", Reed's last line, its recurrent absurdity of rifle-drill and suburban foliage, ran silently through my mind as though through my fingers. Hughes, the man of hawks and crows and earth, the man who gave animals ideas with his eyes, hates this poem.
Between the party and the reading we waited in a cream room with mirrors and ledges. Hughes recalled to Heaney how he had scribbled out his Queen's 60th birthday poem for The Times at immense pace in Heaney's flat, on his kitchen table.
In 1986, in Hughes's crown of flowers for the Queen were entwined a snowdrop "her neck bowed watching her modesty", a foxglove "raggily dressed, long-bodied" and a daffodil "whose chill, scrubbed face and cold throat looks utterly true and pure". Since I could neither concentrate on what Heaney was reading nor on my undone political tasks, I spent the time fitting these flowers from the text in front of me to the faces that looked up from the front rows.
"Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex." Every one of us heard what Hughes wanted us to hear - and only what Hughes wanted us to hear. This was the only time that I have ever been able to take Whitman seriously. Shame on me, but I had always much preferred the public, car-crashing Henry Reed, who looked at the gun and the gardens through the same cold eye and placed them side by side in the same stanza frame.
The evening ended. The poets went off to sign their books for the buyers. On the way to dinner, the phone rang from Conservative Central Office. Then there came the Labour call, saying much the same suspicious things. The hour of sanity and reality and closeness to the purest human power had gone. Now it will never come back."

Comments

[Nigel Beale]

A lovely little book by Hughes called "Poetry Is"

This from it: “You might not 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. My pursuit of mice at threshing time when I was a boy, snatching them from under the sheaves as the sheaves were lifted away out of the stack and popping them into my pocket till I had thirty or forty crawling around in the lining of my coat, that and my present pursuit of poems seem to me to be different stages of the same fever.”

[Peter Coleman]

In 1944 lucid Ern Malley of Sydney immortalised the sole Arabian Tree in his Petit Testament:


In the same year I said to my love (who is living)
Dear we shall never be that verb
Perched on the sole Arabian Tree
Not having learnt in our green age to forget
The sins etc. etc.

[Susan]

Has anyone addressed the biographical strangeness of TWO of Hughes' women suiciding?

[steef]

As the blogger whose Hughes post led to this Hughes post, I'm terribly grateful to see you resurrect the full, original text of your splendid story of the late Poet Laureate's last reading. Thank you!

Few words, other than than Hughes' own 'hawks and crows and earth,' could better temper any 'decriers' of the public -- or private -- poet (despite his forgivable misgivings surrounding "Naming of Parts").

[Clayton Burns]

Did Hughes hate "Naming of Parts" because he crashed his car listening to it, or because he thought it was an obnoxious poem? What was he doing listening to it if he couldn't endure it? What do you mean by "listening to it"? "Naming of Parts" has a curious if factitious force of analogy, as in "beautiful uncut hair of graves." The last line but one, "Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards," is composed, of course, of words present elsewhere in the poem. "They call it easing the Spring" has a nice ambiguity. I like how "neighboring gardens" echoes and anticipates the sounds of "naming of parts," how "finger... thumb" links to "fragile and motionless," and how "Easing the spring" is premonitory of "The early bees are assaulting." The silent, eloquent gestures of this five-fingered poem do not seem to me to be invidious. It is a mystery to me as to why Hughes would have hated it. In fact in school, I had an instinctive aversion to Henry Reed, but now I wonder why. Perhaps it is that despite the tug of the flowers and the bees, Reed seems hypnotized by the mechanisms of war, even as strangely potentially encoded in the images of Japonica and almond-blossom. The bees have been doing the flowers for a long time, but is there any meaning in it? Is there any meaning in Reed's war? What exactly is Reed suggesting for natural analogies? Perhaps Hughes was troubled by the faintest suggestion that Reed did not care, or suffered from a mild malelike dishonesty. claytonburns@gmail.com