Take-away
Nick Totton Season Songs Ted Hughes (Faber and Faber £2.40) A book by Ted Hughes is like a take-away Chinese meal: a colourful -mélange of surface excitements which leaves one hungry again within half an hour. Hungry for some real nourishment, for something that demands a bit of real work, an act of absorption and digestion; but there is nothing here that can be turned to blood and bone and muscle. A set of stylistic gestures depicting "food', rather than food itself. And through it all, like a substratum of monosodium glutamate inducing migraine and nausea, runs a fundamental irresponsibility, an irresponsiveness, to the natural world which stands officially as the work's subject.
Does the image seem rather strained ? Not half as strained as Mr Hughes's images. A river is 'her Mighty Majesty the sea/Travelling among the villages incognito'. A salmon is 'weightless/In the flag of depth/ Green as engine oil'. The grass is 'happy/To run like a sea, to be glossed like a mink's fur/ By the polishing wind'. And so on. To all of Which the only response is: Come off it, Mr Hughes. Sit down quietly over here and take a few deep breaths. Now start again, and this time try to show a little respect for rivers and salmon and grass—don't be so eager to uproot them and stuff them into the metaphor machine; don't clutter and pollute them with the Coke cans and plastic of Your verbal ingenuity. And if you, can't restrain yourself, then simply, please, leave them alone.
I am not mounting a general attack on startling imagery in poetry, or even in nature poetry'. Mr Hughes and I would no doubt agree in admiring, for instance, Gerard Manley Hopkins. But—to make a central point apparently unclear to the legion of Mr Hughes's admirers—Hopk ins's most unexpected and immediately shocking images are just the ones that we see to be most strongly forced upon him, in an immediate and irresistible experience which illuminates the way things are. Hopkins does not, like Hughes, simply import a lorry-load of Old elastic and fireworks and string and Shrapnel and motorcycles and bamboo and confetti—to take a few random images— and dump them all over the nearest field' in the hope that they will attach themselves to things. Hopkins is prepared to use drastic Measures in making things more deeply recognisable; Hughes, it seems, is only satisfied when he can make things wholly unrecognisable.
As a minor example, readers might care to guess what is here portrayed: Their long silk faces, shag-haired as old sheepdogs Their brown eyes, like prehistoric mothers Their mouse-belly mouths, their wiresprung whiskers Sudden yellow teeth of the nightmare and skull ...
Might one suggest that this is really not the way to go about describing horses? But there iS more wrong here than a simple clumsiness. Here, and elsewhere in Mr Hughes's writing, masquerading as 'freshness' and 'immediacy', there is what I can only call a pathological misprision, an actual perceptual defect : a reduction of the emotional and modal depth of reality to a narrow layer of feverishly-lit tumult populated by Bosch-like entities announced as horses, cows, trees, sheep ...
Clearly there is no such thing as 'nature poetry' in the sense of poetry about the nonhuman rather than the human. In the midst of nature we are in society—itself ultimately the product of biology. A poem is a very particular example of human work mediating between the social and the natural, two realities which can be only abstractly separated. A 'nature poem' is an interface, perhaps, a point of balance 'at which one can look both ways at once, informing one's humanity with non-humanity, and informing the non-human with human meaning. For Hopkins, 'God' is the name of the mediation, for others, not; but the mediation is central.
So it is not enough just to say that Ted Hughes is a very poor poet, which he is, without trying to locate the causes of his bad poetry and the reasons why he is nonetheless a much-respected, much-anthologised figure; and, in particular, one regarded as suitable fare for children, which is a minor cultural disaster. Season Songs itself is intended primarily for children and, like much of the contemporary poetry foisted upon them, is likely to teach only one lesson: that successful poety is a gaudy, garish bag of tricks just 'difficult' enough to give one the
petty pleasure of 'working it out'. Every child is capable of better poetry than this; it seems a shame to discourage them so forcibly.
What is fundamentally wrong with these poems, then, apart from Mr Hughes's poor ear ('Now a cooler push, rocking the mesh of soft-edged shadows'), his rhythmical sullenness, and his lack of much interesting to say, is their refusal of the mediating role. The poems are reductionist. They try to deal with their subject-matter, to reduce it at every turn to the shabbily human. Far from an interface, they form a barrier, a distorting glass held up between us and 'nature'.
The few poems in which humans other than Mr Hughes appear describe only grotesque and pathetic proles in motor-cars (apart from the occasional farmer leaning on a fence). This apparent misanthropy is transferred onto. the mock-human population. So many of the images refer to death, violence, sickness: 'The earth invalid, dropsied, bruised, wheeled/Out into the sun/ After the frightful operation'; the crocus bulb 'veteran of terrors beyond man'; apples 'a straggle of survivors' ; 'Who's killed the leaves?' The pathetic fallacy goes totally out of control as Ted Hughes projects his shadow-show of alienation onto a world far more interesting and important than he gives it credit for being.
To avoid misunderstanding, it should be made clear that this is not the result of 'avant-garde' writing. Despite widespread misconceptions, Mr Hughes is not a modernist. Nor is there anything wrong with the writing of pain and suffering, so long as one faces up to the subject and does not disguise it. The failure of Ted Hughes's work is an individual one, though its wide acceptance reflects a sickness in poetic culture; there is a couplet in one poem here, describing a dead lamb, which nicely sums up this failure : Death was more interesting to him.
Life could not get his attention.
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