Where Have You Been? (17 page)

With the fever. You cried for America

And its medicine cupboard. You tossed

On the immovable Spanish galleon of a bed

In the shuttered Spanish house

That the sunstruck outside glare peered into

As into a tomb. “Help me,” you whispered, “help me.”

That painting over and over a scene and a situation is to me what Hughes does best in these poems; “as into a tomb” I view as another intrusion from the dramatic-ironical department. I like “baddie,” half condescension, half quotation. Hughes in the poem pits his amusement and his health and his good intentions against the contagion of panic. “I bustled about. / I was nursemaid. I fancied myself at that. / I liked the crisis of the vital role.” And the ending of that poem, though it has the right amplitude for an ending, is correctly deduced from the matter of the poem itself: “The stone man made soup. / The burning woman drank it.”

So much of the personal drama is comic, and I bless it for that. It's “The bats had a problem”—which is right, because they're American bats from Carlsbad, as American as NASA. It's the grandiloquent, posturing timing—riding for a fall—of “We are surrounded, I said, by magnificent beaches.” It's riding the long wave of remembering Plath declaiming Chaucer to an audience of cows: “It must have sounded lost. But the cows / Watched, then approached: they appreciated Chaucer.” It's like a scene in Jerome K. Jerome, you wish it could go on forever. It's Plath's—justified and witty—tirades against England:

                                                          England

Was so poor! Was black paint cheaper? Why

Were English cars all black?—to hide the filth?

Or to stay respectable, like bowlers

And umbrellas? Every vehicle a hearse.

The traffic procession a hushing leftover

Of Victoria's perpetual funeral Sunday—

The funeral of colour and light and life!

London a morgue of dinge—English dinge.

Our sole indigenous art-form—depressionist!

And why were everybody's

Garments so deliberately begrimed?

Grubby-looking, like a camouflage? “Alas!

We have never recovered,” I said, “from our fox-holes,

Our trenches, our fatigues and our bomb-shelters.”

This, for all its apparent ease, is a miraculous balance of indirect and quoted speech, of question and answer, of expansive and pithy, of detailed and universal, of naïve and informed, of drama and editorial. To throw off a phrase like “a morgue of dinge” like that, in the middle of what the fiction writers call a “riff.” There's life in the old country yet. Or there was.

 

“REMEMBERING TEHERAN”

How it hung

In the electrical loom

Of the Himalayas—I remember

The spectre of a rose.

All day the flag on the military camp flowed South.

In the Shah's Evin Motel

The Manageress—a thunderhead Atossa—

Wept on her bed

Or struck awe. Tragic Persian

Quaked her bosom—precarious balloons of water—

But still nothing worked.

Everything hung on a prayer, in the hanging dust.

With a splash of keys

She ripped through the lock, filled my room, sulphurous,

With plumbers—

Twelve-year-olds, kneeling the fathom

A pipeless tap sunk in a blank block wall.

*   *   *

I had a funny moment

Beside the dried-up river of boulders. A huddle of families

Were piling mulberries into wide bowls, under limp, dusty trees.

All the big males, in their white shirts,

Drifted out towards me, hands hanging—

I could see the bad connections sparking inside their heads

As I picked my way among thistles

Between dead-drop wells—open man-holes

Parched as snake-dens—

Later, three stoned-looking Mercedes,

Splitting with arms and faces, surfed past me

Warily over a bumpy sea of talc,

The uncials on their number-places like fragments of scorpions.

*   *   *

I imagined all Persia

As a sacred scroll, humbled to powder

By the God-conducting script on it—

The lightning serifs of Zoroaster—

The primal cursive.

*   *   *

Goats, in charred rags,

Eyes and skulls

Adapted to sunstroke, woke me

Sunbathing among the moon-clinker.

When one of them slowly straightened into a goat-herd

I knew I was in the wrong century

And wrongly dressed.

All around me stood

The tense, abnormal thistles, desert fanatics;

Politicos, in their zinc-blue combat issue;

Three-dimensional crystal theorems

For an optimum impaling of the given air;

Arsenals of pragmatic ideas—

I retreated to the motel terrace, to loll there

And watch the officers half a mile away, exercising their obsolete horses.

A bleaching sun, cobalt-cored,

Played with the magnetic field of the mountains.

And prehistoric giant ants, outriders, long-shadowed,

Cast in radiation-proof metals,

Galloped through the land, lightly and unhindered,

Stormed my coffee-saucer, drinking the stain—

At sunset

The army flag rested for a few minutes

Then began to flow North

*   *   *

I found a living thread of water

Dangling from a pipe. A snake-tongue flicker.

An incognito whisper.

It must have leaked and smuggled itself, somehow,

From the high Mother of Snows, halfway up the sky.

It wriggled these last inches to ease

A garden of pot-pourri, in a tindery shade of peach-boughs,

And played there, a fuse crackling softly—

As the whole city

Sank in the muffled drumming

Of a subterranean furnace.

And over it.

The desert's bloom of dust, the petroleum smog, the transistor commotion

Thickened a pink-purple thunderlight.

The pollen of the thousands of years of voices

Murmurous, radio-active, rubbing to flash-point—

*   *   *

Scintillating through the migraine

The world-authority on Islamic Art

Sipped at a spoonful of yoghurt

And smiling at our smiles described his dancing

Among self-beheaded dancers who went on dancing with their heads

(But only God, he said, can create a language).

Journalists proffered, on platters of silence,

Split noses, and sliced-off ears and lips—

*   *   *

Chastened, I listened. Then for the belly-dancer

(Who would not dance on my table, would not kiss me

Through her veil, spoke to me only

Through the mouth

Of her demon-mask

Warrior drummer)

I composed a bouquet—a tropic, effulgent

Puff of publicity, in the style of Attar,

And saw myself translated by the drummer

Into her liquid

Lashing shadow, those arabesques of God,

That thorny fount.

*   *   *

… would I know there were such a place, with three old walnut trees, near Isfahan? Is there?

—James Buchan

Who will dare to say to me that this is an evil foreign land.

—Anna Akhmatova

What follows, a little apologetically, is a microcosm of what seems to me the most important development in English letters over the last decade or so, namely, the reemergence or rediscovery of Ted Hughes. Mutatis mutandis—with different readers and different poems (although, obviously, I love “my” poem!)—it should be imagined as enacting itself thousands of times up and down the country, and abroad. The personal part of it, that which concerns me, is unimportant and accidental, and is offered with some embarrassment.

I was born in 1957, the year
The Hawk in the Rain
was published. At school in the 1970s, I was given poems of Hughes to read (never the best way—it's still put me off Auden and Larkin). I supposed for a long time that he, an Englishman of a peculiar deep Englishness and a writer on animals and elemental subjects, just didn't have much to say to me, a German of a peculiar shallow Englishness and a writer on human and anecdotal subjects. I bought his books but didn't read them much.

One day in
The Times Literary Supplement
I saw a poem that changed all that for good. I don't know what poem it was, maybe “Walt” or “For the Duration” or “The Last of the 1st/5th Lancashire Fusiliers,” something about a relative who had survived World War I. Thenceforth, I read Hughes differently—as a contemporary, one of the three or four poets whose books I waited for and who made everyone else faintly superfluous. His prose—the huge book on Shakespeare, the sublimely intelligent and unconventional writing in
Winter Pollen—
the poems at the end of the 1995
New Selected Poems
, the Ovid versions he did, first for James Lasdun and me, and then in his own
Tales from Ovid
, and the irresistible
Birthday Letters
. This tremendous surge of creative work finally and belatedly—in the eyes of my cogenerationists and me—brought Hughes out from under the everlasting 1960s and his extended tenure of the laureateship.

I haven't, in the end, chosen “Walt,” or anything from Ovid, or one of the
Birthday Letters
, or that amazing poem-cum–deficit reckoning called “The Other,” but one of the earlier, uncollected pieces from the
New Selected Poems
, called “Remembering Teheran.” It mattered to me to get a sense of approaching something if not new, then at least disregarded or beyond the pale.

In many ways, it contradicts one's received idea of Hughes. It's not about England or about animals, it's funny and occasional (as I remember him writing somewhere that almost the whole recent output of the Western tradition has become), and exotic and diagnostic, and it deploys the poet himself in it as a kind of pawn. It is very much “my kind of poem.” I wish I'd written it. More to the point, it's the kind of thing Lawrence might have written on his travels, in Germany or Italy or Australia or Ceylon or New Mexico—and perhaps did write, although I couldn't find any especially close analogy, not in Lawrence's poems, anyway. Perhaps it's not too surprising that Hughes didn't include it in any of his books of the period (if I understand the arrangement of the
New Selected Poems
, he wrote it in the 1970s): it would tend to “fall outside the frame,” as you say in German. On the other hand, it would be a natural for any anthology on “abroad thoughts,” of expatriation, of centrifugal musings and scrutinies. Think how well it would go with Elizabeth Bishop's poems about Brazil, Bunting's “Aus Dem Zweiten Reich,” Cummings's poem about the police and the Communists in Paris, Brodsky's divertimenti from Italy, Mexico, or England, or—I think, best of all—with Robert Lowell's “Buenos Aires.” It's a type of poem that comes to us from the Romantics, from Shelley's “Mont Blanc” and Goethe's “Roman Elegies,” but touristically and culturally and interrogatively extended by our century; where the unsettled self takes its bearings (“In my room at the Hotel Continentál / a thousand miles from nowhere”—Lowell) and shyly or intrepidly goes out to encounter a changed world that reflects it differently, better, or perhaps not at all. “
Je
” is not “
un autre
”—perhaps, think of Bishop or Brodsky, is even more “
je
” than it ever could be “at home”—it is simply “
ailleurs
,” and perhaps nowhere more so than in “Remembering Teheran.”

The poem is spun out of Hughes's nerve endings. “How it hung,” it starts, itself hanging, echoing Sylvia Plath's desert poem “The Hanging Man” and, more dimly, Dylan Thomas's “I sang in my chains like the sea.” Prometheus is not far to seek.

How it hung

In the electrical loom

Of the Himalayas—I remember

The spectre of a rose.

(How incredibly beautifully, by the way, Hughes writes free verse: the breaths of the first two
h
's heavily, almost reluctantly muted into the drone of “hung,” “loom” a foreshadowing of “Himalayas,” “electrical” generating “spectre,” the Persian picture-postcard prettiness of “rose” countermanded and finally more menacing than anything else. Isn't this tensile music Poe or Tennyson by any other means?) In another poem, that “hanging” might have been used for the structuring of the whole piece, and Hughes uses the word three more times, and maybe its presence is felt further in the army flag resting “for a few minutes,” and in the water “dangling from a pipe,” but the growth of the poem outstrips even such a helpless and dégagé thing as hanging. Nor is it bracketed by the flag that, at sunset, “rested for a few minutes then began to flow North” (how proud any dissident East European or South American poet would be of the two contrasting coats of the pathetic and the automatic in those glorious lines!). Instead, the poem keeps being broken open, again and again, by the pressure of its strange and abundant material. In an odd way, it gets out of sync with itself. It has its funny moment in the delicious story of the blind tap in Hughes's room and the squad of baby plumbers sent in to “fathom” it—and then an asterisk, and then “I had a funny moment.” Unforgettable things crowd into the poem: the “three stoned-looking Mercedes” (a pure droll outrageous equivocation between the two senses of “stoned”—but no more than “loom” at the beginning is equivocal too: it's as though what Hughes sees and experiences is so strange he needs to call upon words in many different senses all at once) that bring back a decade of newsreel from Beirut; the gorgeous Latinity of “Eyes and skulls / Adapted to sunstroke”; the naked vulnerability of “I knew I was in the wrong century / and wrongly dressed” (a little like Lowell's “I was the worse for wear”); the Lowellian pairing of “the tense, abnormal thistles”—as indeed much of the poem is reminiscent of Lowell, and the line “In the Shah's Evin Motel”
is
Lowell just as much as “In Boston the Hancock Life Insurance Building's / beacon flared” is Lowell; the clever, helpless agglomerations of language, thickening and emulsifying, in “The desert's bloom of dust, the petroleum smog, the transistor commotion” (what a humming line!); to the beautiful line—which wouldn't look out of place in Crane (or hemicrane) or Eliot—“Scintillating through the migraine” to the final discord, “That thorny fount.”