Daniel Huws

One evening in 1952 Dylan Thomas did a poetry reading in Cambridge. In the audience was Ted Hughes. Daniel Huws was also a spectator at this event, though his father had known Dylan Thomas in the 1930s. Following the reading, Ted Hughes was one of a small group who managed to gatecrash the English Society's post-reading session with Dylan Thomas. Daniel Huws met Ted Hughes for the first time later that evening when the latter was flushed with excitement after the event. The story is significant not just because it marks the beginning of their acquaintance, but because it captures the peripheral nature of their lives in Cambridge relative to what Daniel Huws calls ‘metropolitan undergraduate life’. The two men became part of a small group of friends who met regularly in a quiet pub away from this metropolitan centre. Ted Hughes was not, of course, a well-known poet at this time and published his first poems in student publications using a pseudonym. The main interest of this brief memoir is the glimpses it gives of the life of Hughes, and of a particular aspect of Cambridge student life for other members of the group at this time. The memoir also covers the relationship between Hughes and Sylvia Plath, though much of the information conveyed here is already in the public record from other sources.

The picture that emerges of the young Hughes is perhaps not at odds with what is known of the mature poet, though we are told that he was not the dominant contributor to group discussions. He would, rather, sit ‘broodily, in the background, listening’, but when he did speak it was with authority and with a ‘gnomic’ originality. He had switched from studying English to Anthropology and regarded stalwarts of the English Department such as FR Leavis with some contempt. The activities of this group were not restricted to discussion. They also used to sing, and Hughes would contribute ballads such as 'Sir Patrick Spens', in the folk purist style of Ewan MacColl. The view that emerges of the whole group is one of students ‘without public school pretensions’, with ‘tenuous Celtic roots’ and among whom ‘unpretentious provincial values’ prevailed. Ted Hughes indulged his enthusiasm for folk narratives in the folklore section of the University library where he was particularly taken by collection of Bushman legends. Daniel Huws records that he too explored the riches of the library and ‘discovered what wealth of traditional music was to found in print’. He also records that Ted Hughes told him that ‘whenever he entered the library he got an erection’!

Other personal information conveyed about Hughes at this time includes his literary enthusiasms, including the early work of RS Thomas. He was also developing his interest in astrology which he came ‘to live by, or at least to carry it in mind as some sort of parallel to actual life’. On leaving Cambridge, Hughes lived in a flat in London that Daniel Huws' father had passed on to Huws, and where Dylan Thomas had visited. Daniel Huws himself lived in the flat with his wife for a time and it was also the first shared home of Hughes and Sylvia Plath. From here Huws' narrative runs in parallel with other published accounts. Ted Hughes was establishing his reputation as a poet and exhorted Daniel Huws to translate Dafydd ap Gwilym, which he began to do until encountering the translations of Joseph Clancy. Although regular contact with Hughes became intermittent after the marriage to Sylvia Plath, some events in Huws' narrative intersect with published poems, for instance, the 'Ouija' incident related in Hughes's Birthday Letters. Following his relocation to Wales and a post in the National Library, Huws moved away from the regular contact with Hughes and Plath that had been maintained in London, though the couple did visit Huws and his wife in Penrhyncoch in 1962. The occasion is remembered as anything but gloomy although both of the poets spoke of having discovered their ‘dark muse'.

In spite, then, of going over some ground covered elsewhere, especially in the second half of the book, this memoir contains much that is interesting and contains a few fascinating details of the life of Ted Hughes as a student and as an emerging poet.… (mehr)