Ted Hughes in the BBC Archives

Ted Hughes has just been honoured by a place in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey.  Melvyn Bragg takes a walk through the BBC Archives with some wonderful tapes of Ted Hughes reading his poetry and talking about it.  Informative interviews with his wife Carole and best friend Seamus Heaney, as well as intimate letters from Ted Hughes to and about Sylvia Plath.  The programme deals very frankly with their relationship.  The best thing I've ever listened to on Ted Hughes and his work.   Available on BBC Radio 4 free anywhere in the world from this link. 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0183glm/Archive_on_4_Ted_Hughes_Memorial_Tones/

Dartington Hall: the Ted Hughes Memorial Lecture

The bliss of Dartington Hall and the Ways with Words literature Festival!  The Hall is one of the most beautiful buildings in the south west of England - grey stone walls crammed with history.  Add in the delight of many of your favourite authors, green lawns to lie on with the sunlight filtering through the cherry trees, a glass of wine in hand and Waterstones’ book tent just across the grass, and  - as a way of spending the afternoon - it takes a bit of beating.

I first came to Dartington 20 years ago to talk about Christina Rossetti, so it is wonderful to be here again to celebrate their 20th anniversary as a literature festival.   The bedroom I’ve been allocated is like a royal suite - one of the heritage rooms with antique furniture and medieval graffitti.  The bed was so big I needed a step-ladder to get into it!  Sadly, I couldn’t take a photo of the wall drawings because the white wall just reflected back the flash.  A ship has been carved into the wall, probably by soldiers billeted here at the end of the 14th century.

           
Once we’d unpacked and recovered from the 7 hour drive, we went to the Ted Hughes Memorial Lecture in the Great Hall, given this year by Blake Morrison.   He was brilliant on Hughes’s poetry and his life, making illuminating connections between the two informed by  interviews he had had with the poet.

I hadn’t known that Ted Hughes had given up his study of English Literature because, after struggling for hours on an essay,  he dreamt that a fox came into his bed, burnt and injured.  The fox put his paw (a human hand in the dream) on a white page and left a bloodprint on the paper.  ‘Stop this,’ he said to Hughes, ‘You are destroying us.’  After that, Hughes transferred to Archaeology and Anthropology believing that the structures of critical thought taught by the university system ruined creativity.   The fox became the equivalent of a ‘spirit guide’ and it occurs three more times in his poetry - the marvellous Thought Fox, and the ‘fox for sale’ poem in the Birthday Letters.   Later Hughes told Blake Morrison that for a poet  ‘Prose is a killer’.

Apparently Hughes felt that the real fall in human history had come with the loss of animal innocence - and that our egotism, introspection and self-consciousness separate us from our creativity and prevent us being whole.   He often quoted the phrase ‘Every man must skin his own skunk’, and he believed that every poet must be true to their own experience - getting to grips with what was real.  Poets who could do that became healers.

Later he apparently acknowledged that much harm had come from his decision not to write about his own tragic experiences  - the deaths of  Sylvia Plath and then Assia Wevill and her daughter by Hughes.  Not dealing with grief and its consequences, he said, creates a canker inside that eats away at your creative self - it ‘takes a piece of yourself away, like an amputation’.

More from Dartington tomorrow.

Autumn on Wuthering Heights

There are still wild places left in the north of England. These bare uplands on the borders of Lancashire and Yorkshire were once home to a large population of small farmers, who began to move in at the end of the last ice age. They burned the trees, drained the peat, introduced sheep, and enclosed the land in walls of grey limestone. A hundred and fifty years ago, in the face of bitter winters, falling prices and the 19th century rise of the cotton and woollen mills, they began to abandon these bleak, wind-scoured heights for a more comfortable life in the lowland townships. It’s a process that is still going on.

The walls are still there, though many are fallen now, and the farmsteads lie in ruins, while the land gradually becomes feral.

On an autumn day with sun and cloud chasing each other across the landscape it’s a good place to be. A couple of crows are hang-gliding in the wind above a copse of trees. There’s water everywhere - seeping out of the limestone through cracks and breaches in the rock.

A few rowan trees are growing on the edge of a natural gorge where the water spills out. It’s the colour of Yorkshire tea, stained by the peat on the moors above. There’s still some here, despite centuries of drainage, and there are schemes to preserve it because the peat has, over thousands of years, locked carbon dioxide away in its fibrous layers.

As I walk up, they’re gathering the sheep for the autumn ‘tupping’. Fell sheep are mated quite late so that the lambs are born after the worst of the winter weather.

Apart from the farmer and his dogs there’s no one else in the landscape, and as I walk down, it's beginning to get dark.  The cloudscape is amazing.  It reminds me of Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Wuthering Heights’ - ‘the wind/pours by like destiny, bending/everything in one direction’ and ‘hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass’. But these same solitudes that unsettled Sylvia Plath, are home to me, since I was born and brought up on a remote farm in a similar location.  Wuthering Heights was my favourite novel at 16.

When I come home and switch on the television, there’s a moment of shock. Ted Hughes’ newly released poem about Plath’s death ‘Last Letter’ is being read on Channel 4. It is brutal and unbearably tragic, since it was written in the 1970s with the knowledge not only of Plath’s suicide and the guilt of Hughes’ emotional involvement, but also the suicide of his second wife, Assia Wevill, who also killed their child. More grief than anyone should have to deal with. It makes a sombre ending for what had been a particularly beautiful day.

Stone, Wood, Water.