VIVAM: a talk presented at the Royal Society of Literature 24 June 2004, in which I discuss how carving a pathway through the writings of Ted Hughes, in Her Husband: Hughes and Plath, a Marriage, gave me the method by which I thought I might be able to tackle a biography of Ovid

 

VIVAM

 

Late one Sunday morning in February 2000, I came into my London kitchen to clean up after a party. For company, I switched on the radio to BBC4. Someone was being interviewed on the topic of writing biography. I turned up the volume just in time to catch the following exchange:

 

Interviewer: Can a biographer use literary works as sources of information in a biography?

 

Biographer: Certainly. The author can always be found inscribed in the work, by reading between the lines.

 

The person who was speaking is sitting in this room tonight, and he will probably recognize that I am referring to his interview with Sue Lawley on “Desert Island Disks.” However, I did not recognize his voice immediately. To me, this firmly delivered opinion was the voice of an oracle. It was as if my mind had been read, and a question it contained had magically been answered over the airwaves, telling me what I wanted to hear. Can a biographer use literary works as sources? Certainly. That very same month I began working on the book that has recently been published by Little, Brown, titled Her Husband: Hughes & Plath, a Marriage. It’s the biography of the persona to be found by reading between the lines of Ted Hughes’s poetry.

Readers open biographies with a set of well-founded expectations, one of which is that they are not about to read a work of fiction, even though the best-written biographies contain strong narratives. But one unbreakable rule governs the production of a biography: you can’t invent the information you draw on; your sources must exist in the real world and be clearly signaled in the text. Nonetheless, the oracle had claimed that among the viable sources of evidence on which to base a biography are works of the imagination. This sounds like a dubious proposition, but I hope to demonstrate that it isn’t, if you concede that every work of literature emerges from an embodied consciousness only partially in command of itself. All writing, like all speech, is a channel of expressiveness that rises from a distinctive unconscious matrix of feeling, developed from early childhood on, by the way we experience relationships. The gravitational pull of the unconscious is going to color the work, whether the writer is using the first-person or not.

I want to illustrate how biographers profit from this aspect of written language, by looking with the hovering attention of the analyst at passages in the poetry by Ted Hughes and Ovid which form rich sources of material for making biographies. These two poets are admittedly not much alike, except in two ways. Both of them strew through their work the components of an idealized autobiography that tell us how each wished to be remembered— that is, give us important information about the psychology of the artist; and have displaced into myth aspects of their own distinctive subjectivities.

Let me begin with a few examples from my work on Ted Hughes, specifically, his account of the background and meaning of his marriage to Sylvia Plath.

In his first three prizewinning books, Ted Hughes rigorously avoided situating his poetry in his personal life because he detested the so-called “confessional” poetry which was in vogue when he came of age as a poet. But around the time he reached middle age, Hughes seems to have experienced an irresistible longing to write a sequence of poems about the Calder Valley in Yorkshire where he was born and raised until he was 8 years old. He called this place by its ancient Celtic name, “Elmet.” Writing these poems occupied Ted Hughes from about age 46 until a few years before his death at age 68. These poems develop a coherent myth shaped by his belief in shamanism; and though Hughes never organized them into a narrative, a developmental history can be pieced together in the poems.

The myth can be easily summarized: in the Elmet poems, Hughes gives himself a magical, clairvoyant mother who endows him genetically with his poetic powers; a father whose voice has been silenced by war; and a brother skilled in hunting game, who teaches Hughes methods of observation and concentration that provide him with a “second brain,” attuned to nature. Finally, Hughes adds to this idealized autobiography a female partner with whom sexual connection releases his poetic powers; and a loss of the partner drives him on a quest into the underground of his own darkness. He emerges from that underground as a shaman, a man prepared to understand his own masculine sexuality and violence as an historical endowment that required comprehension by his whole nation, his whole era in history. Rather than war, marriage is the social context in which this struggle is enacted and understood in Ted Hughes’s work.

Hughes was influenced in his youth by reading Robert Graves’s book about poetic inspiration, The White Goddess; but the poems of Elmet make a completely original and personal use of Graves’s mythic lore. Let me show you a very striking sample of Hughes’s mythmaking, from a startling poem titled “Leaf Mould,” in which Hughes imagines himself being carried in his mother’s womb while she walked in the woods gathering compost for her garden, and listening to the voices of her dead lovers, who had been killed in the First World War. Captive in her womb, he is “brain-washed by her nostalgias,” which turns him into a “step-up transformer” of her inner life, he says—a device that changes an electrical current from a lower voltage to a higher. Here is the outcome of these prenatal influences:

…brain-washed by her nostalgias

You were her step-up transformer…

She hung round your neck her whole valley

Like David’s harp.

Now, whenever you touch it, God listens

Only for her voice.

 

In this and other poems about his mother Hughes links Edith Hughes intimately to his vocation: she is the first of the White Goddesses in his life, the first Muse figure behind his work. And in the Elmet books she is affiliated with the influence on Hughes of Sylvia Plath, who is buried in the Calder Valley, in Heptonstall churchyard near the grave of his mother. Returning to the Calder Valley is, for Hughes, a return to the site of primal forces in nature that shaped his imagination, the place, he writes, “where the mothers gallop their souls,” and “A happiness starts up, secret and wild, / Like a lark-song just out of hearing/ Hidden in the wind.”

Hughes’s legacy from his father is pointedly different in the Elmet poems. Billy Hughes was a decorated veteran of the First World War, who had served both at Gallipoli and the Somme. Hughes depicts his father as being unable or unwilling to speak about the war except in the shrieks that sounded from his nightmares. Now, according to people who met Hughes’s father in real life, Billy Hughes was downright chatty about his service in the war But the Elmet books are not recording a family history, they are developing a genealogy for the poet Hughes became. The silence that Hughes attributes to his warrior father is a silence pregnant with meaning that only the poet-son will be able to articulate. And reading between the lines of the Elmet books we can discover who stands in the place of a father in the poetic genealogy of Ted Hughes: it is the voice of T.S. Eliot, specifically the voice of The Waste Land—the most important poem to have emerged from the First World War.

During most of those same years that Hughes was writing the poems of Elmet, he was editing the papers of Sylvia Plath for publication: first the collection of letters selected by Plath's mother and published as Letters Home in 1975; then Plath’s short stories, collected in the volume Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams in 1977; then the Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath published in 1981; and finally, the abridged edition of Plath's journals that came out in the USA only, in 1982. In my biography of the marriage of Hughes and Plath, I mark that long, intimate phase of editing Plath’s prose and poetry as a turning point in the direction of Hughes’s work as an artist, and I provide a significant amount of solid evidence for this view, gathered from many sources. But Hughes himself gives it mythic shape in the volume Birthday Letters, which adds to his idealized autobiography an account of Sylvia Plath as the instigator of his journey to the land of the dead, from which he emerged as a shaman. A poem published in Birthday Letters, titled “Visit,” offers a dramatic version of the way that journey began.

Ten years after your death

I meet on a page of your journal, as never before…

Your actual words, as they floated

Out through your throat and tongue and onto your page…

I look up – as if to meet your voice

With all its urgent future

That has burst in on me…

 

The poem is thinking not only about the sorrowful past, it is describing the return of Sylvia Plath from the grave into his living consciousness, a creative force. The future that is trying to happen is the future of his art, which will have to find a way to accommodate an understanding of her living words.

Earlier I said that the myth to be found in Ted Hughes’s poetry could be easily summarized. But it is I who summarized it, not Hughes. As an artist, Hughes avoided producing a straightforward, idealized narrative of his life— in the manner of Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” for example. Hughes once commented in a letter that he believed the actualities of a poet’s experience would always “emerge obliquely, through a symbol, inadvertently— as in Shakespeare’s Venus & Adonis, or The Ancient Mariner, or Christabel, or Lamia, or The Eve of St Agnes.” Let me illustrate just such an oblique and possibly inadvertent emergence of Hughes’s own experience by discussing a type of imaginative writing that is not autobiographical at all, and does not seem likely to offer much opportunity for reading between the lines: translation. This is where Ovid enters the picture. Working in the Ted Hughes archive at Emory University in Atlanta, I was able to study the manuscript books in which Ted Hughes drafted Tales from Ovid, his “versions”—as he preferred to label them— of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Describing his method as a translator, he said: “I tried to include a literal presentation within an attempt to bring out the physical life of the stories for myself. The outline of the mural cartoon is Ovid’s, and I stick to it; the coloring is my own” (Introduction to Shakespeare’s Ovid).

While reading the Ovid manuscripts in Atlanta, I came upon an interesting doodle that Hughes scribbled in ink on the back page of his prose crib of Metamorphoses. Hughes was casting a horoscope for some event on the 18th of November 1993 at some specific hour which he didn’t note but obviously knew, since he indicated the positional degrees of the planets. Of course, no biographer would let a dated object escape her, so I dutifully inserted a note about this find in my files for the 1990s. I regret to say that it never linked up chronologically with any significant event captured in my files. Nonetheless this obscure non-sequitur in Hughes’s handwriting prodded me to bear in mind that in daily life Hughes had an outlook highly compatible with the themes of Ovid’s epic. That rough little sketch in his Ovid crib is a diagram of fatedness. And “fatedness” was what Ted Hughes thought Metamorphoses was all about. As he said in his introduction to Tales from Ovid: “In every [tale], to a greater or lesser degree, Ovid locates and captures the peculiar frisson of that event, where the all-too-human victim stumbles out into the mythic arena and is transformed.”

At the time Hughes was translating Ovid, he was also finishing up the work of Birthday Letters, which tell his own version of how this all-too-human couple, Hughes & Plath, stumbled into the mythic arena they occupy in our own culture. The significance of this coincidence can be seen in the way Hughes shaped his version of Ovid’s tale of Diana and Actaeon.

I’ll remind you of the plot: Actaeon has been hunting on a mountaintop with his band of men; the day grows hot, so they stop hunting and Actaeon wanders off alone into the forest. Descending into a deep cleft, he comes upon the grotto and pool where the goddess Diana has retreated from the hunt to bathe with her band of nymphs. Ovid depicts Diana as strikingly tall, towering over her attendants: “The tallest [nymphs] barely reached her navel.” When the nymphs catch sight of Actaeon, they rush to cover the goddess, but Actaeon sees Diana’s nakedness. Furious, she punishes him by taking away his human voice and transforming him into a stag. He is chased down and killed by his own hunting dogs.

In Hughes’s project of translating “Actaeon,” Ovid wrote the psychodrama; Hughes contributed the psyche. Here’s a small but important example. In the confrontation scene which exposes Diana to Actaeon’s gaze, Ovid supplies the mural cartoon, including Diana’s line— “Now, if you can, tell how you saw me naked”— but it is Hughes who picks up the trope of the voice and the mouth, from “tell,” and colors the rest of the tale with it. The “physical life” that Hughes gives to this story all has to do with a man’s fatal loss of a voice that makes him recognizable to himself and to others. Diana destroys Actaeon’s humanity by mouthing a curse that deprives him of his voice; the dogs destroy his human body with their animal mouths-- where Ovid says Actaeon’s life was ended by many wounds, Hughes says his life was “torn from his bones, to the last mouthful.”

However, Hughes gives his most significant coloration to Ovid’s text in the way he introduces the tale. Actaeon, he says, is a tale of “Destiny, not guilt.” As the world knows, for many years Ted Hughes has been regarded by many people as guilty of contributing to the suicides of two women. I believe that Ted Hughes is responding to this charge in the way he handles the tale of Actaeon and Diana. Sylvia Plath too was a tall, handsome, somewhat Amazonian female capable of towering rages, in life and in her art. Her poem “Daddy,” for example, is a declaration of war against certain extreme culturally masculine attributes. After Plath’s death in 1963, when Ted Hughes was editing the volume Ariel for publication, he decided to omit from the book certain of what he called “personally aggressive poems” because, he said, he thought they would be “too hard for the public to take.” One of the poems he left out of Ariel was “The Rabbit Catcher”—a poem about Plath’s loathing of the rural English practice of trapping and killing animals, and also a poem about her husband, from whom she was deeply alienated.

Hughes’s “Actaeon” is not an autobiographical poem, in any direct sense. But it reveals the gravitational pull of this subject—his guilt, his destiny— on his own emotions. Hughes always believed that Sylvia Plath had been a genius of literature. But in middle age he had come into contact with aspects of Plath’s writing that had made him rethink his whole relationship to her. Translating Ovid’s “Actaeon” provided a literary vehicle adequate to the complexity of his understanding of what, exactly he had been guilty of in censoring a poem such as “The Rabbit Catcher.” He believed that he had come into contact with the goddess-principle, through Sylvia Plath and the other women in his life—beginning with his mother. The failures in his relationships to them, he understood as the predictable outcome of the male dominance that structures Western Culture: that insight was the spur to the huge tome on Shakespeare that Hughes published in 1994. If Plath is Hughes’s prototype for the figure of Diana, I think she stands for the irreducible differences that arise from the simple biological opposition of female and male, which has great consequences in emotional life. So Actaeon is in that sense every man, including Ted Hughes: his fault lies in being a man. But he is at another level specifically Ted Hughes— who had a privileged intimacy with Plath the poet, and intruded into the private space of her work by destroying some of it, losing some of it, and significantly misrepresenting some of it when he published Ariel. It was his destiny to join his life to Sylvia Plath’s; it was his guilt to tell the world who she was, and censor her in the process— the guilt of a man who presumes to speak for the woman he has been privileged to see in her nakedness.

 

It was carving this pathway through the writings of Ted Hughes that gave me the method by which I thought I might be able to tackle a biography of Ovid. Admittedly, a very strong argument against writing a biography of Ovid at all lies in the fact that there is no evidence for his existence, except in the poetry associated with his name. Early in my research I came across a book by the Classical scholar Ronald Syme, with the promising title History in Ovid. Syme’s general aim, it turned out, was to demolish the representation of the Augustan Age which generations of scholars had carefully fabricated from a largely favorable ancient tradition. His book on Ovid is no exception. Syme gets right to the point: he says there isn’t any history in works about Ovid— from start to finish, all discussion of Ovid’s life is based on rumor and fantasy.

Fortunately, this dismissive attitude is not shared by the scholar of Ovid whom I find most congenial, Peter Green. Green decided to trust the sources that gave Ovid a life history. In his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Ovid’s erotic poems, Green draws on these sources to establish for Ovid a detailed curriculum vitae, then moves on to examine the psychological, social, and historical congruities between that cv and the lively narrator to be found in Ovid’s art. Where Syme keeps a chilly distance from these narrators, Green revels in teasing a person out of the persona in Ovid’s works.

Green is most interested in the erotic poems, written from Ovid’s late adolescence into his early forties. Ovid, he notes in his edition of the erotic poems, spent “much of his early life, aside from two brief marriages, as an unattached man-about-town,” and Green is sure that Ovid’s poetry “constantly embodies and exploits materials” from his own very wide-ranging experience with love and sex. Green considers it “a waste of time” trying to present Ovid “as a respectable middle-class individual who, like Nabokov, just happened to have this purely literary obsession with the seamier side of sex.” Green concludes that Ovid was not only writing about himself in the way that all writers cannot help but do; in the sequence of books in which Ovid wrote about love, Green thinks, Ovid was deliberately “creating a kind of fictional poetic Bildungsroman.”

Some readers and critics will suspect that Peter Green is going too far in arguing for the information value to be found in Ovid’s verse. Yet Ovid’s work frankly invites such speculation. For Ovid is unique among poets of the ancient world in having written the equivalent of an autobiography. When Ovid was fifty years old, Augustus personally expelled him from Rome and “relegated” him to a distant outpost of the empire in Tomis (which is now the city of Costanza, Romania) a port on the Black Sea. Scholarship has never been able to establish the cause of Ovid’s punishment, and Ovid himself only hinted at the cause: he said that his transgression was an “error, not a crime.” Relegation was a mitigated form of exile, and Ovid always hoped he would be permitted to return home. He spent his time on the Black Sea writing two long sequences of verse epistles which he hoped would be deployed on his behalf by his influential friends. These were titled Tristia (“Sorrows”) and Epistulae ex Ponto (“Letters from the Black Sea”). In Tristia, Ovid provides an account of himself that includes details about his birthplace, birthdate, birth order, genealogy, upbringing, education and career— the details on which the biographical essays on him have always been based, the details that prompted Ronald Syme to be so withering, and inspired Peter Green to be so ingenious. It seems likely that these verse epistles had some degree of truth value, since the details presented as factual were addressed to knowing readers and had practical aims.

But Ovid’s account is of himself is no less artful for all that. It is framed by the metaphor that a book is alive, and, further, is a substitute for himself as an agent in the world:

Exile was ordered for me, it was not decreed for my writings

Which did not deserve to suffer the penalty laid upon me.

Often a father is exiled in flight to external seashores

But his children are given permission to continue their life at Rome.

In the example of Pallas, who was born without any mother,

Are my poems; they are my offspring who form my posterity

(Tristia III, 14, trans. L.R. Lind)

 

This trope of the book as a grown-up child of the poet is threaded through Tristia as a kind of framing device, providing a touch of poignant comedy, as when Ovid warns the book—a scroll, of course— that it must arrive in Rome looking “disheveled,” as befits an exile:

Unhappy one, wear the clothes that befit my miserable state….

Vaccinium dye will not stain with red the sheathe that will hold you,

Nor minium glow on your title nor cedar oil soak your papyrus…

Your edges will not be trimmed down and polished with soft stone of pumice,

In order that you may appear with your hair frayed out in a mess.

And don’t be ashamed of erasures: he who sees them will realize

They were not made by a pen: they are the stains of my tears

(Tristia I, 1, trans. L.R. Lind)

 

Ovid also fantasizes in Tristia that everybody is going to be curious about him in the future— curious not only about the poetry, but the person. At one point he turns dramatically toward us readers, to make eye contact across the centuries: “Just so you know who I was —I, whom you read, the playful poet of love — accept this, posterity…” (Tristia IV, 1, trans. Middlebrook) and that is where he goes on to tell us the story of his life.

Further, in his most ambitious work, Metamorphoses, Ovid lets us know that, not only is his book alive, he is alive within it. The narrator of Ovid’s epic presents himself in the first-person at the very opening lines: “My purpose is to tell of bodies changed to different forms. Oh gods, who made the changes, inspire me with a song that runs from the world’s beginning to my own times.” This narrator remains a lively presence throughout the poem: signposting, taking sides, cautioning, drawing back in dismay, and generally keeping us aware that there is only one teller of these tales. I have always thought, in fact, that the poem’s powerful immediacy flows from the existential predicament of this narrator: the gods may or may not help; it will be human ingenuity alone that enables him to arrive at “my own times.” By that phrase (ad mea tempora) he cleverly includes the Now of both the writing and of the reading: the moment of the encounter of the eyes with this phrase is mea tempora, 24 June 2004. Ovid brings this point home at the very closure of the epic, where he makes a formal bow, predicting his own immortality in the life of language itself:

...Now I have done my work. It will endure

...[and] part of me

The better part, immortal, will be borne

Above the stars; my name will be remembered.

Wherever Roman power rules conquered lands,

I shall be read, and through all centuries—

If prophecies of bards are ever truthful—

I shall be living, always.

(Metamorphoses XV, trans. Rolfe Humphries)

 

Ovid’s greatest skill was the shaping of that narrator, a complex, continuing presence who possesses a coherent psychology that can be extracted from the poem and— I believe— assigned to its author. “I shall be read… I shall be living.” Let me illustrate with my favorite example, from the opening book of Metamorphoses: the tale of Apollo & Daphne.

This story is ostensibly about the origin of the laurel wreath that was given to winners of various competitions in ancient days. It is set on the slopes of Parnassus. Apollo—an adolescent in the story—is bragging to Cupid about his expertise with the bow and arrow. Cupid decides to teach him a lesson. He flies to the peak of Parnassus and shoots Apollo with a gold-tipped arrow that condemns Apollo to fall helplessly in love. Then Cupid shoots a leaden arrow into a young nymph named Daphne—daughter of the river god Peneus— who is roving the woods nearby, snaring game; the leaden arrow repulses love. Apollo, who has never been in love before, is enflamed by the sight of Daphne and attempts to chase her down, comically appealing to her better judgment: “You don’t know who you are running from,” he tells her, listing all the attributes and powers and geographical locations that would be associated with Apollo— and, seemingly, discovering them himself as he enumerates them. But Daphne flees from Apollo, paying no attention to his eloquence. By the time they reach the river Peneus, Apollo is closing in. Daphne throws up her arms, appealing to her father to release her from the beauty that has caused Apollo’s lust. She changes into a laurel tree just as Apollo’s hands reach her breasts: he can feel her heart still racing under the bark. Stymied in his desire for consummation, Apollo appropriates her for another purpose: “Since you cannot be my wife, you will be my tree: there will always be you on my hair, you on my lyres, you, laurel, on my quivers… and as my head is youthful, my hair unshorn, you too be always dressed in a perpetual glory of leaves.” Daphne, now voiceless, seemed to nod her assent.

A plot outline cannot do justice to the psychological acuity of the telling of this tale, in which Ovid provides a psychosocial frame for Apollo’s development into the god of lyric poetry. It requires three subjectivities: the naďve boy, Apollo, just coming into sexual awareness; the slightly older boy, Cupid, who instigates Apollo’s initiation by playing a competitive practical joke; and the object of desire, Daphne, who remains unknowable to Apollo— though not to the omniscient narrator of the poem, who gives us a good deal of information about Daphne’s relationship to her father, and about her desire not to become a wife, not ever. Ovid took a great interest in feminine psychology: he was unusually curious about women, and treats them with imaginative empathy throughout his work.

But the story also contains an account, I think, of the psychology of the lyric poem as a genre in Western literature: a genre that is essentially commemorative, the art made necessary by the human experience of losing our first loves. “Apollo & Daphne” is the only one of Ovid’s tales in which a god is shown to have a developmental history comparable to that of a human being. Apollo displays that development in the increasing maturity of his command of language. At the outset, he is a boy-god acquiring mastery of his powers, and he brags. Chasing Daphne while he pours his heart out, his rhetoric grows increasingly sophisticated. Finally, unable to possess her in any other way, Apollo makes a godlike command: let the laurel be my tree. In effect, Apollo puts Daphne through yet another metamorphosis, from tree into poetic symbolism. “My hair, my lyres, my quiver will always hold you,” he tells her. It is a radiantly expressive chain of associations, transferring his arousal by Daphne from the hairs on his body to the strings on his lyre, and keeping the power of love’s influence on him always ready at hand in his quiver: the poetry of love, which has the power to pierce our hearts. Ironically, he has won the competition with Cupid, after all.

One implication of this tale is that even an immortal god would have to undergo these particular kinds of pain—longing, rejection, abandonment— to become the god of poetry. At that final moment in the story Ovid applies to Apollo the epithet Paean, which is the name associated with his powers as a healer, but it also the term for a mode of song: a victory chant of joy and triumph. Making the paean, we might say, is an act of sublimation in which Apollo’s frustrated desire is driven upward into formal beauty, and the lost body of the girl is fixed forever in a generic form: this line is, of course, the source of Petrarch’s name for the idealized lady in his sonnets, Laura. And not the least interesting thing about the tale of Apollo and Daphne is that last glimpse Ovid gives us of the silenced woman, whose leafy head nods in a movement that the god interprets as compliance. Once she has been transferred from life into symbol she speaks no more.

Maybe it hasn’t escaped your notice that Apollo in this tale is the prototype of the kind of poet Ovid became in his youth, the “poet of tender love,” as he calls himself in the lines I quoted from Tristia. And this tale of the metamorphosis of Apollo is, I think, a complex tribute to the tradition of poetry-making which was Ovid’s chosen mode of participating in the work of civilization. But my point, as a biographer, in “reading between the lines” in this manner, is not to suggest that the story of Apollo and Daphne is disguised autobiography— that “Apollo” is Ovid. What we look for when we read this way is not a simple identification of person with persona, but the patterns and consistencies that convey a disposition, a mindset, a moral character, a psychology. “The author inscribed in his work,” as the oracle said to me that Sunday morning.

That anonymous voice had already done its work on me before I learned that it belonged to Michael Holroyd. And he will deny, perhaps correctly, that he ever issued the bald, authoritative claim I attribute to him. But never mind. As we know, it’s not what the oracle says that matters; it is what the recipient of the oracle’s message makes of it, and acts on.