Ted Hughes Poetry of Healing

Transcription

1 13 Ted Hughes Poetry of Healing Edward Hadley Ted Hughes poetry is commonly associated with depictions of the often cruel and unforgiving world of animals and nature, and in this way does not immediately offer the impression of being a place in which to sensitively appreciate, let alone diagnose or cure, illnesses. Yet a number of his poems attempt just this. The evidence for Hughes conviction that poetry is an agent of healing is plentiful. It is testified to not only by his verse, but also in his letters and his translations of classical texts. A number of critical works support this claim, concentrating on the therapeutic, healing powers invested in and exhibited by Hughes poetry. 1 The central concern here, however, is to consider Hughes depiction or understanding of illness; poetry may well harbour a bio- medical dimension so far as Hughes is concerned, one facilitating a change in the psychic odds (LTH 703), but it is an approach which can give rise to problematic ethical as well as aesthetic issues. Asked by Drue Heinz in his 1995 Paris Review interview about the function of poetry as opposed to the function of prose, Hughes offers a cryptic response. He tells Heinz about a healer, Ted Cornish, who could only cure himself by first healing others: Watching and listening to him, says Hughes, the idea occurred to me that art was perhaps this the psychological component of the autoimmune system. It works on the artist as a healing. But it works on others, too, as a medicine. For Hughes, art is a living medicine and whilst prose narratives can carry this healing, poetry does it more intensely. Music maybe most intensely of all. 2 One can only imagine Philip Larkin s response to this. Ten years earlier, in 1985, Hughes had written to Larkin advocating the services of Cornish, mentioning how these healing energies galvanise the patient s own auto-immune system (LTH 503). Neither art nor the services of a healer, upon whom Larkin did not draw, cured him of his cancer and 194 M. Wormald et al., Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2013

2 Edward Hadley 195 he died within a month of receiving Hughes letter. If Hughes letter is anything to go by, one may well think that Cornish could have successfully cured Larkin. Hughes alludes to how Cornish had recently held a gathering for a dozen patients of his who had formerly suffered cancer, now successfully cured by his healing. Illnesses from arthritic shoulders, to angina, to malfunctioning kidneys have all, according to Hughes, been successfully treated by Cornish s healing powers. It is easy to be disparaging about treating illness with anything other than medically or scientifically devised methods or prescriptions, but many of Hughes poems and letters are written with this conviction in mind: that there is a place for poetry and other alternative medicines to set right the sometimes disjointed frame of the body and its psychological components. Indeed, as Hughes suggests, the process of writing poetry does [work] on the artist as a healing. In a letter to his son, Nicholas, Hughes suggests that the publication of Birthday Letters had this curative effect. Instead of locking himself behind this glass door one more week (LTH 713), he remarks at the relief of making public his poems about Sylvia Plath, irrespective of the critical or familial response. For Hughes, the path to cure is, to borrow Jung s term, the active imagination aided by the agents of music and poetry. Jung s process involves such self- determination: You yourself must enter into the process with your personal reactions, just as if you are one of the fantasy figures, or rather, as if the drama being enacted before your eyes were real. It is a psychic fact that this fantasy is happening, and it is as real as you as a psychic entity are real. If this crucial operation is not carried out, all the changes are left in the flow of images, and you yourself remain unchanged. 3 He continues: The patient can make himself creatively independent through this method, if I may call it such. He is no longer dependent on his dreams or his doctor s knowledge: instead, by painting himself he gives shape to himself. For what he paints are active fantasies [...] it is himself in a new and hitherto alien sense, for his ego now appears as the object of that which works within him. 4 It is difficult to read Jung s assertions and not have a sequence such as Birthday Letters in mind. It is Hughes psychological drama: the

3 196 Ted Hughes Poetry of Healing enactment of fantasy as real so as to effect self- recovery. The common accusations of responsibility (or the abdication thereof) in this sequence are therefore misplaced, for it is not in the poems that responsibility is being asserted; if indeed the poems are following a Jungian pattern of self- recovery and therapy, then they are the working through rather than the result. The healing occurs outside the poems and within Hughes. Perhaps there is no finer example of the effects of this attempt at self- cure than with his unguarded expression of relief in a letter to Seamus Heaney, that the publication of Birthday Letters resembled a physical operation rather than a literary endeavour, one that just might change the psychic odds crucially for me, and clear a route (LTH 703). Just as writing can be a cure for Hughes, so it can also be a cause. For Hughes, the freely creative imagination is the means by which to cure the inner self. However, in a letter to Marina Warner, he suggests that the effects of sustained prose writing, or an academic engagement with subjects, is damaging to the immune system, cryptically remarking: maybe in some people, whatever that critical overview separated part of the brain does to the poor old pre- verbal body of life, when it s drilling its squads, actually can collapse the immune system. Maybe that explains a lot about (Eng. Lit.) Academic life [...] in the world of the rational, suppressive moral order, the pre- verbal body of individuality, subjectivity, must die. At least must suffer a form of death. (LTH ) It was reasons such as these that Hughes cited in his striking selfdiagnosis for shingles, which he attributed to his work on his T.S. Eliot essay A Dancer to God and Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. Illnesses such as this were, understandably, not publicly known; that he had cancer came as a shock even to those close to Hughes, some only learning of it upon his death in October His reticence on the subject is hardly surprising; indeed, aside from occasional letters, personal illness seldom surfaces in his poetry or prose fiction. Yet, there are exceptions. Two poems from Birthday Letters, The Lodger (CP ) and Fever (CP ), suggest attitudes towards illness that are complicated and sometimes contradictory. The former poem concerns an ailment that afflicts Hughes, whilst the latter concerns Sylvia Plath. With The Lodger, Hughes presents diagnosis, treatment and efforts to cure a heart condition. Having moved to Court Green in Devon with Plath, the poem concerns Hughes efforts to dig their garden to prepare the

4 Edward Hadley 197 ground for growing vegetables. In the first phase of the poem (lines 1 53), so strenuous is the effort of manually turning the soil, that it leads to heart palpitations significant enough to give Hughes the impression that his death is imminent: Every heartbeat a fresh throw of the dice / A click of Russian roulette. Convinced he is going to die, he keeps a diary of his heart s errata, which leads to the second phase of the poem (lines 53 71) where he alludes to his divining a treatment, with Efforts to make my whole / Body a conduit of Beethoven, / To reconduct that music through my aorta / So he could run me clean and unconstrained / And release me. Music, the most intense of artistic medicines, fails to cure. As Erica Wagner notes, Hughes heart knows what is wrong before his mind does. 5 Thus, the metaphorical lodger, first seeded in the initial phase of the poem with the lines whatever hid in my heart, dug with me is revealed in the third phase of the poem (lines 71 81) as Otto Plath. The revelation of Otto Plath s identity is not much of a surprise given his role as arch malefactor in Birthday Letters, but it clearly impresses upon the reader how Hughes associates physical symptoms with psychological causes. Poetically, the revelation of Otto Plath s presence is announced with one of the most pronounced turns in Birthday Letters. Hughes separates the metaphor- entangled, poetically dramatized treatment of his situation with Plath in the third phase, from the straightforward if somewhat melodramatic diary of his heart s errata, which constitutes phases one and two. It is not an altogether convincing arrangement, since phase three registers as an appendage to the poem that simply ties it in with the narrative arc of Birthday Letters. Indeed, a letter to Seamus Heaney (LTH ) is surely the written source of The Lodger ; many lines, phrases and ideas from this letter find their way into the finished poem, at no point referring to a Sylvia/Otto Plath subplot. According to the letter, the source of Hughes heart condition was quite different from what is depicted in the poem; his research led him to understand that this heart disorder is not uncommon among males aged who are leading stressful lives. This alone convinces him that his ailment was a psychological one. By way of a cure, the letter details how he hypnotized himself into receiving instructions which righted his heart. Later relapses, he suggests, were due to being put in what I feel to be a false situation, literally, involving myself in anything I can t put my heart into, yet where I will have to lay myself on the line (LTH 600). The example of The Lodger and its source introduces a somewhat bewildering nexus of diagnoses, treatment and cure of illness, which provides some insight as to Hughes artistic appreciation of ill- health.

5 198 Ted Hughes Poetry of Healing Examined alongside the sequentially earlier poem, Fever, where the relationship between psychological and physical illnesses is even more pronounced, one can observe similarities and inconsistencies in Hughes approach. In Fever, Plath s food poisoning receives a blunt diagnosis from Hughes, before slipping into an intimate linguistic register: You had a fever. You had a real ailment. / You had eaten a baddie. The real ailment of the opening line is the flourish against which the rest of the poem operates. Hughes alludes to his frustration at being unable to distinguish between genuine anguish and feverish rambling, to determine whether it is biological reaction or psychological smokescreen. Inwardly he exclaims: Stop crying wolf, / Or else I shall not know, I shall not hear / When things get really bad. His words carry with them the retrospective portent which characterizes the Birthday Letters poems, but the central question posed by Fever is: who is really being diagnosed? Plath for her cries of wolf? Or Hughes for misreading or misdiagnosing the patient to whom he plays nursemaid? Unlike the decisive turn of The Lodger which spells out the source of Hughes ailment, Fever presents a feverish imbroglio of uncertainty by weaving together truth and fiction; a real ailment becomes a baddie, the poet becomes nursemaid and the patient s fever becomes metaphor. The Lodger and Fever may present bodily illness as the result or herald of psychological imbalances, but there is an acute difference. The Lodger presents Hughes retrospectively rationalizing his ailment, to separate the suffering of the heart from the tricks of the mind: something reflected in the poem s structure. Fever, however, suggests that Plath does not make this distinction; bodily illness flares up her psychological demands and her psychological demands flare up her bodily illness. Whilst both play host to Otto Plath s malefactions, Hughes appears psychologically equipped to handle this ghost, even if he realizes it too late and his body suffers. Hughes letter to Heaney says much about his approach to treating his own ailments and none of them are really conventional, let alone pharmaceutical (he prescribes hypnosis, vitamin E and kelp). The Lodger and Fever also suggest alternative medicines for curing illness, both employing similar methods. In Fever Hughes makes a vegetable soup to saturate and flush Plath with this simmer of essences, proposing to make her a conduit / Of pure vitamin C. This is semantically echoed in The Lodger where Hughes wishes to become a conduit for the music of Beethoven to run him clean and unconstrained. In both cases, illness is characterized as a possession of sorts; in this way, in addition to the body and the mind, the spirit must also be exorcized to effect a cure.

6 Edward Hadley 199 In the closing remarks of his letter to Heaney (LTH 602), Hughes again underscores that his heart palpitations were the result of a psychological distemper, apportioning blame particularly on the negative interference of the left frontal lobe, the lobe of rational, well adjusted behaviour, logic and moral control is held to account for inducing such irregularities. 6 Time and again, the emphasis is on mind over matter and how a clear and well- treated, positively conditioned mind is the means of overcoming illnesses both temporary and, at worst, terminal. There is consistency in the treatment he affords himself and the treatment he affords others. Writing to Daniel Weissbort, who had recently been operated on for cancer of the jaw, Hughes alludes once again to the healer Ted Cornish: I ve been trying to think how you can get yourself into a position or the best position for fighting back, & bringing yourself out of it. My one or two fleeting glimpses of what it s like, to know you ve somehow got yourself so ill, gave me a good idea of the rage against yourself, & the fright. Ted Cornish always says the worst (he thinks, the most dangerous) thing about such illnesses is the fear. He thinks if you can control the fright the imagining of the worst & the resignation, you can get the upper hand, & come out of it. On confidence in miracles. (LTH 471) Cornish s line of defence might be labelled positive thinking. Whilst Hughes again emphasizes the psychological causes of physical illness, it is difficult for the detached reader not to register the suggestion of a degree of self- determination: to know you ve somehow got yourself so ill. Suggesting one can affect a positive mental attitude in order to right oneself is one thing, but to suggest that major illnesses or diseases in others may be self- inflicted is a risky strategy. Depicting such illnesses as anything other than wasteful suffering is surely insensitive when the recipient of the depiction has been or is a patient, whilst conversely, frank and unembellished poems may also lack discretion. Equally, the poet has to be careful to avoid using such illnesses as a metaphor, a move that seems unethical. But this is almost central to Hughes understanding of illness in these works: that bodily illnesses are a metaphor for the troubles of the mind. Three Poems for J.R. (CP ) courts this impasse. Jennifer Rankin was an Australian poet and playwright who lived near Hughes in Devon from 1976 to After returning to Australia, she developed breast cancer and died in In his poem, through a series of contrasts, Hughes manages to address and offset the debilitation she endured with

7 200 Ted Hughes Poetry of Healing elevating poetic flourishes: her earth- bound life has her as an outsider; she is a waif among humans; she is at home, yet lost; she is a primeval howl in the finitude of a fugue. This process of dislocation suggests that her qualities are both unique and unrecognized; even more so, that her mortal life was a fleeting visitation. Earthly concerns, even those held in high affection, are just anaesthetics ; her true love, to which she is betrothed, is the desert, which prepares her for her consummation with the elements, in the poem s final part. Rankin s reclamation by the elements is complete when the Gulf Provoked by your reckless, hungry glances, Your incantatory whisperings, your prayers to be carried off [...] Came in the dream you just managed to tell, Skull- eyed, big- winged, and took you. (CP 840) Hughes poem empowers Rankin; having cast her as an outsider, her affinity with the desert s wilderness is appropriate and her regression from terminally ill waif [...] to her becoming a part of a wider elemental family is as close a remission of her breast cancer as he can achieve. 7 In doing so he assigns a meaning to her passing which a premature death frequently denies, and frames her life in a narrative which suggests her stay on earth was only ever due to be a visitation so as to numb the shock of her passing. Yet the apotheosis of the deceased risks ennobling the suffering of so debilitating an illness. Hughes faces a dilemma; his many poems often strive to report the savagery of both the natural and artificial worlds, so here his efforts at empowering the deceased enter choppy critical waters. Rather than explicitly suggesting that breast cancer was responsible for Rankin s demise, he instead tenders that her transcendence is of her own volition, with, one might surmise, the implicit suggestion that her illness was in some way self- determined. In Lovesick : You burned out. You reserved nothing. / You gave and you gave / And that included yourself and that / Was how you burned out / A lonely kind of death (CP 839; my emphases). Atavist again figures Rankin s death as one she determined: Your incantatory whisperings, your prayers to be carried off. Rankin is placed in an uncanny and ancient landscape to both elevate and secure against the apparent unmentionability of cancer. But what is there to hide?

8 Edward Hadley 201 Although the sincerity of Hughes poem is unquestionable, the self- determined death with which Hughes empowers Rankin is false. This, together with a euphemistic gloss and the appealing return to nature principle, conceals what a barbarous attack on the body and mind cancer can be. This might not seem anomalous were it not for the fact that Hughes acknowledges the lung cancer that killed Jack Orchard in the Moortown Diary poem Hands (CP 537), where Orchard s cigarettes glowed patiently through all your labours / Nursing the one in your lung / To such strength, it squeezed your strength to water / And stopped you. Indeed, though not cancer, the illness that killed Bill Fowkes, a local publican known to Hughes, is depicted in Funeral (CP 575 6) with a notable lack of embellishment: Too deep in age and diabetes / For illusion, / With his gangrenous foot ; he is at last [...] being received in person, / Bodily, irrecoverably, / As if torn to pieces. As I have noted in my study of Hughes and elegy, Fowkes and Orchard s respective illnesses are given unembellished poetic reports, so why should Rankin differ? Melissa F. Zeiger links the myth of Eurydice to the silence surrounding breast cancer in elegy. Women fulfil Eurydice s role which reinstates their association with death, silence, darkness, and, above all, loss of the body. 8 Zeiger notes that as the primary cultural signifier of womanhood in its sexual and maternal aspects, breast cancer is a taboo in writing, one sanitized to the point of periphery, and that the tributes to those writers who die of this disease have become exclusively anodyne, performing an act of silencing so complete as to pull the reader up short. 9 Even though it is not premeditated, Hughes is complicit in this silencing : Rankin is mute throughout Hughes poem [...] her body is lost in the final lines of Atavist ; her reclamation is both unannounced and sudden. 10 Hughes poem I know well (CP 368), from Gaudete s epilogue poems, does not use elevating language in rendering Susan Alliston s illness; her Mass of bronze hair shrank to a twist is a startling image of frailty and deterioration. Here, falling and rising movements effectively convey the physical diminution and the desire to be free from the constraints of the body s suffering. But just as in Three Poems for J.R., I know well harbours a similarly questionable pattern of self- empowerment and determination: illness is not cited as the source of her pain; Alliston s sufferance lies in taking away her beauty: Of taking away from everybody / Your envied beauty, your much- desired beauty // Your hardly- used beauty. In 18 Rugby Street (CP ), Hughes allusion to Alliston hints that the titular house exerts an untoward influence on its occupants ( It s possessed! ), a spell under which Alliston falls: Ten years

9 202 Ted Hughes Poetry of Healing had to darken, / [...] before Susan / Could pace that floor above night after night / [...] Crying alone and dying of leukaemia. 11 The picture of Alliston s suffering in both poems is powerfully rendered, but Hughes introduction to her verse sits uneasily alongside this, since it implies that her diagnosed illness was not the one that took her life. Alliston s anthropological studies of Bedouin tribes were complicated when, The Bedouin chiefs tried to entangle her in marriage. She returned home with the first signs of Hodgkin s disease. 12 Given Hughes letter to Heaney where he suggests how his illness was brought on by the stress of being situated in uncomfortable circumstances, one cannot help but register how Hughes remarks here connect Alliston s disease with the uninvited proposal of marriage. Even more striking than this, however, is Hughes speculative diagnosis that Alliston was really dying of a form of loneliness. 13 Alliston s journals provide a link to another prescient poem featuring illness. Originally entitled Dark Women, The Green Wolf (CP ) initially concerns a neighbour of Hughes and Plath, Percy Key, who had suffered a stroke. Almost incapacitated, Key is described as Already days posthumous. The first three stanzas evoke the cruelty of his suffering, likening Key s body to an ever tightening trap: the words all the huge cries // Frozen in his brain his tongue cannot unfreeze. In her journals, Plath summarizes: Well, Percy Key is dying. That is the verdict. Poor old Perce, says everybody. Rose comes up almost every day. Te-ed she calls in her hysterical, throbbing voice. And Ted comes, from the study, the tennis court, the orchard, wherever, to lift the dying man from his armchair to his bed. He is very quiet afterwards. He is a bag of bones, says Ted. I saw him in one turn or do, lying back on the bed, toothless, all beakiness of nose and chin, eyes sunken as if they were not shuddering and blinking in a fearful way. And all about the world is gold and green, dripping with laburnum and buttercups and the sweet stench of June. 14 But the depiction of Key s illness becomes subsumed in the poem s second half. Alliston s impression of this part, derived from conversation with Hughes, suggests the poem s meaning is altogether less obvious: His poem dark women. He says his neighbour was dying paralysed down one side, similarly I assume one half of him (Ted) is paralysed. The dark blood clot moves in a woman she killed him, she brings

10 Edward Hadley 203 life to Ted. The punctual evening star the Venus of the piece is another woman, the polar to blood clot I suppose. There is another woman at the end, who he says is there but scarcely appears. He says there are about eight dark women in it! 15 Alliston focuses on the cryptic elements of Hughes poem and her interpretation corresponds with Ann Skea s more substantiated reading. Skea identifies the wolf as a central figure in the midsummer ceremonies that took place in Normandy. She continues: Frazer, in The Golden Bough, associates the Green Wolf with vegetation gods that were ritually burned each year to ensure fertility in the coming season. These are unmistakable allusions to the Goddess, who, according to Skea, is represented by the Green Wolf and figured in the various deadly flowers. 16 Portentous images of natural decomposition are a means of facilitating renewal. The incantatory quality of these allusions may be of and for Percy Key, but since the poem tessellates biographically with The Lodger, The Green Wolf also has Hughes confronting his own death. In this way, the line Unmake and remake me is not so much a demand, as it is a challenge. Hughes is empathetic precisely because he sees himself as an insider a survivor who has encountered grave illness and pulled through. In Hughes verse, the only way for illness to become meaningful is for the illness to become metaphor; it has to signify something more than itself. Suggesting that maladies are rooted in psychological imbalances or infractions makes manageable otherwise inconceivable conditions. According to Hughes verse and letters, these can be righted by mental programming and discipline; poetry s latent incantatory qualities can facilitate an opening to such programming. Yet such propositions are highly questionable, since it indicates that the individual has the power to both cause and cure their illness, or that their ailment is a metaphor for something they have not yet registered. Hughes poems for Rankin and Alliston illustrate the complicated relationship his verse has with illness. The desire to afford dignity in suffering sometimes yields uneasy results; in this way Hughes becomes the real Rev. Lumb of Gaudete: He declares he can do nothing He protests there is nothing he can do For this beautiful woman who seems to be alive and dead. He is not a doctor. He can only pray. (G 15) Lumb s self- effacing declaration that he can only pray is, surely, an excuse for poetry, that it is not a cure in itself, that the process of

11 204 Ted Hughes Poetry of Healing healing must begin from within and that cure is to unlock and become conscious of the root psychological causes in order to effect recovery. Notes 1. Critical works concerning Hughes and healing include: Daniel Xerri (2009), Ted Hughes s Art of Healing: Into Time and Other People (Palo Alto: Academia Press). 2. Ted Hughes interview with Drue Heinz, in Philip Gourevitch (ed.) (2008), The Paris Review Interviews: Volume III (New York: Picador), pp Carl Jung ( ), The Collected Works of Carl Gustav Jung, ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham and Gerhard Adler (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), vol. 4, para Jung, Collected Works of Jung, vol. 16, para Erica Wagner (2000), Ariel s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters (London: Faber & Faber), p See also Keith Sagar (2011), Ted Hughes and the Divided Brain, The Ted Hughes Society Journal 1, 7. Edward Hadley (2010), The Elegies of Ted Hughes (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), p Melissa F. Zeiger (1997), Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes of Elegy (New York: Cornell University Press), p Zeiger, Beyond Consolation, p Hadley, Elegies of Ted Hughes, p Hughes misdiagnoses Alliston in 18 Rugby Street. She actually suffered from Hodgkin s disease. 12. Ted Hughes (2010), Susan Alliston, in Susan Alliston, Poems and Journals: (Nottingham: Richard Hollis/Five Leaves), p Hughes, in Alliston, Poems and Journals, p Sylvia Plath (2000), The Journals of Sylvia Plath: , ed. Karen V. Kukil (London: Faber & Faber), p Pp intermittently chart the consequences of Percy Key s stroke and his eventual death. 15. Alliston, Poems and Journals, p Ann Skea (1992), Wolf Masks: From Hawk to Wolfwatching, in Leonard M. Scigaj (ed.), Critical Essays on Ted Hughes (New York: G.K. Hall), p. 247.

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