Ted Hughes:Environmentalist and Ecopoet: Yvonne Reddick [Palgrave Macmillan 2017. £79.99]

As you know, I’ve become resident poetry blogger for Write Out Loud. I can’t manage to write two brand new posts a week, but I know there are lovely folk who follow the great fogginzo’s cobweb, but may not have hooked on to the WOL site. So, as promised, for the time being I’ll be re-posting articles and other ramblings from WOL on the cobweb. The most recent is huge…over 4000 words…so I’m splitting into two parts. I’ve riffed on the business of academic publishing, what it means to be a reader, on poetry criticism, and on why I think Ted Hughes’ work as a champion of educating the imagination was so inspirational. I’m also be telling you why I think Yvonne Reddick’s book is really really good. So here we go.

“What do I want in a critic of poetry? I am a slow and basic reader: clarity, first of all. Everything else, the enthusiasm, the insight, even little bits of esoteric knowledge, can all come later. I need to see what is going on”. (Anthony Wilson)

Procrastination is the thief of time. More months ago than I like to remember, I was asked if I’d like to review Yvonne Reddick’s new book. 

No problem, I said Send it over…I’ll do it forthwith. 

The book arrived shortly after, and very handsome it is. Compact, satin-y hardback, high quality paper. 335 pages of complex exegesis, plus an additional densely-printed 16 pages of citations. Daunting, but it sat nicely in the hand, with a comforting heft. And I settled down to read it, immediately realising that I probably wasn’t qualified to critique it, but persuading myself that I could make a fist of saying what I made of it, and what it taught me. 

Some time…quite a long time…later, the book was bristling with post-it stickers, and my notebook was filling up with quotations, and queries and jottings, and I didn’t know where to start. Nevertheless, I started, threw away the draft, started again, put it away for a bit, thought about it, forgot it, felt guilty, started again..and so on. 

Meanwhile I missed a deadline for submitting to The North, found the next one was an Irish edition, but finally gritted my teeth, set myself down and wrote a review. I thought I’d done justice to the job, and proof-read and tidied, and then looked up the publication details because the price isn’t on the book cover. The price! I thought I’d misread. Anything from £65 to £79.99 depending on where you look. 

A bit of context: Ted Hughes in context: Terry Gifford (ed) C.U.P. 2018 is priced at an equally eye-watering £75   Why? Apparently it’s because they only sell in small quantities. Maybe the price is one reason for that? What do I know? Anyway, here’s an response from the academic and writer Kate Beswick’s blog; she’s bemoaning the pricing of texts by academic publishers, like this and hers, and the way it it arguably significantly reduces her readership.

“Every six years or so, UK academics have to submit our work to the Research Excellence Framework where its ‘quality, significance and rigour’ is graded anywhere between 1 and 4 stars. …… there are still good reasons to choose an academic publisher….. if you are hoping to submit a book to REF. Most obviously because with an academic publisher your book will be subject to a rigorous peer review by someone in your discipline, which means there is quality control and you can have some confidence the academic world thinks your work is worthwhile.”

Me? I did the only thing I could; I panicked. I couldn’t send in this review; what if everything I said was wrong or just naive? After all, here’s a book that’s self-evidently the product of extensive, meticulous scholarly research, and has most certainly been peer-reviewed within an inch of its life. What more could I possibly add that would be of the slightest interest to anyone, especially to folk who know a lot more about Ted Hughes than I ever will. And thus I missed the Spring deadline. Procrastination. 

But a promise is a promise. This won’t be a review, not properly. Like Bleak House’s Esther Summerson, ‘I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever.’ Let me qualify that. For ‘have’ read ‘had’, and for ‘clever’ read  ‘ill-qualified’. Think of it as the musings of a particularly common reader. Let’s start with something apparently straightforward, an extract from a poem you can find very nearly at the end of Charles Causley’s Collected poems 1951-2000 

When I asked

what the poet did, a girl said,

‘Make up true stories

of people and animals

in his head’

When I told them 

he was also a farmer,

they said they thought

farmers didn’t have time to write

stories and poems.

……………

‘Once,’ I said,’he took home

a wounded badger.

Nursed it well, then set it free.’

All the children smiled;

clapped their hands very loudly.’

(In a Junior School: to Ted Hughes)

It seems so simple to these children, the idea of a farmer-poet who once nursed a badger. I imagine they would not have been fazed to know that in his early life he’d hunted and trapped and killed animals, and throughout his life had been a fisherman. They would possibly be baffled by the fact that critics of Hughes and his poetry find it problematic. What Yvonne Reddick’s book does, with a clarity that belies its density, is to sure-footedly take the reader through the thickets of academic controversy that surround the poetry and the poet; to analyse their relationship to the burgeoning environmental  movement; to deftly unpick interpretations of art’s relationship with ecology, and equally to the alarming number of sects and subsects that occupy the fields of eco-poetics and eco-poetry.

The publisher’s blurb is a useful starting point if there’s to be an element of evaluation in what follows. 

“This book is the first book devoted entirely to Hughes as an environmental activist and writer. Drawing on the rapidly-growing interest in poetry and the environment, the book deploys insights from ecopoetics, ecocriticism and Anthropocene studies to analyse how Hughes’s poetry reflects his environmental awareness. Hughes’s understanding of environmental issues is placed within the context of twentieth-century developments in `green’ ideology and politics, challenging earlier scholars who have seen his work as apolitical. The unique strengths of this book lie in its combination of cutting-edge insights on ecocriticism with extensive work on the British Library’s new Ted Hughes archive. It will appeal to readers who enjoy Hughes’s work, as well as students and academics.”

 Let’s add to that a crucial caveat acknowledged by Reddick in her introductory chapter:

It would be foolish to suggest that reading Hughes’ work through the lens of his environmentalism is the only way of reading it.

Exactly. There’s an implied ‘as’ in the title, and the reader needs to hold on to that, to avoid saying but what about…..?. We need to go elsewhere for the ‘what about’. What are we to be concerned with? I’d say it was the meaning of being human, and of being human in relation to all other sentient creatures, and the complex eco-systems they live in, and on, and through; the challenges to human imagination and responsibility presented by the degradation of our complex environment and eco system. The argument is for all of us, and the book is is presented as being for ‘readers who enjoy Hughes’s work, as well as students and academics’.

Well, I’ve never been an academic, but I fit in the first category of ‘reader’, and I’ve never really stopped being a student, so I’ll take it from there. In the 1980s I was introduced to the sometimes baffling world of meta-narrative, and semiotics. I probably remain baffled, but one text that stuck was Wolfgang Iser’s The implied reader. I probably still don’t quite understand it, or else it’s simpler than it seems. This passage, an interpretation of Iser, was central, for me

“When an author is composing a text, they [sic]have a particular reader in mind, which is in part represented in the text. This reader is not identical to a real, flesh-and-blood reader, but is “a textual structure anticipating the presence of a recipient without necessarily defining him…the concept of the implied reader designates a network of response-inviting structures, which impel the reader to grasp the text.” Iser separates the concept of implied reader into two “interrelated aspects: the reader’s role as a textual structure, and the reader’s role as a structured act.” 

The textual structure refers to the reader’s point-of-view as found within the text. This standpoint is multifaceted, because the narrator, the characters, the plot, and the fictitious reader all offer sides of it. Further, the reader’s role as a textual structure is defined by the “vantage point by which he joins [these perspectives], and the meeting place they converge.” All, as component parts, operate together to shape the reader’s role as found within the text.”

Now, I’m pretty firm in my belief that in the first instance this doesn’t apply to poems at the moment they’re being written. I’m on the side of Ted Hughes when he wrote in Poetry in the making that the whole business is about focussing absolutely on what it is you think you’re trying to capture. I think ‘capture’ is the right word here, and it’s germane to the debate about Hughes’ imaginative and ethical engagement with animals that is reviewed in Reddick’s book. 

But it undeniably applies to a work of evaluative criticism, which attends to the imagined reader just as much these lines that I’m currently writing. If I wasn’t conflicted about my imagined audience, I’d have written this months ago. And I’m not sure that it would be possible to attend to the needs of the common reader AND the student AND the peer-academic simultaneously without going slightly mad. So who is this book intended for? Since Yvonne Reddick’s writing is beautifully poised and coherent and rational, I’m guessing that, whilst she’ll always have one eye over her shoulder, anticipating the what abouts of a specialised segment of literary academia, her primary implied reader is the student, and I’ll argue later that if this is the case she makes a stunningly good job of it.

Whenever we read anything we bring to the text all the accumulated baggage of previous reading and experience, and this becomes the lens that distorts the message the imagined writer intended for the actual reader. Several times in the book, Yvonne Reddick uses a word I’d never before encountered. Imbricated.I had to look it up, and have to say it’s a remarkably useful word. It means that something is in a complex way, layered. You could think of roof tiles, which are each distinct and separate, but simultaneously part of a single structure. I found it more useful to thing of something organic and flexible. Like the scales of a snake. In this case, applied to Hughes and his poetry, it acknowledges that they are made up of many layers, and that some of them may seem contradictory; this becomes especially relevant when it comes to the last chapter of the book…on hunting, shooting, fishing and conservation…in which the inconsistencies of Hughes’ public positions on this are described as ‘problematic’. Reddick pretty well keeps her powder dry on this…a studious objective neutrality is one of the hallmarks of the book….but I can’t.

Melvyn Bragg wrote, for the Observer,in a review of an unauthorised biography, 

There was so much of him. He lived the lives of many men called Ted Hughes. Driven, all of them, by a core of energy so bright and fierce it burned out many of those he encountered. By the time he reached manhood, he had, fully developed, an appetite, even a greed, above all a relentless questing passion for the life of passion itself which he sought and fed with poetry, sex and transformative mysticism about the earth and its meaning. Sometimes jubilant, sometimes tormented. He had a compulsion, which seemed to him to be mysterious, to confess and describe everything that claimed his concentration. And at whatever the cost.

Hughes was a prodigious reader of just about everything, and a prodigious writer of letters (700 pages of the collected letters), of poems (1200 pages), of plays and essays and so on. He was an educator, a broadcaster, a lecturer and a performer. He was conflicted hunter, a conflicted farmer (how many other poets do a full time job like that?), a conflicted and unfaithful husband, father, lover. He grew up in the physically and historically imbricated landscapes of the upper Calder Valley, and of Mexborough. Landscapes of the kind D H Lawrence grew up in. When I read Reddick’s accounts of various critics’ condemnation of his inconsistencies when it come to ecopolitics, I get annoyed. Because, I think, why should a poet be consistent, why should a life be simplified into ‘consistency’? Fortunately, she does not. She sticks to the task. And in the next week’s post I’ll try to tell you how well she does it. See you in a week. Thanks for reading xx