46. Ted Hughes - 'The Suitor' (1962)

To János Csokits 6 August 1967 [János Csokits was a Hungarian poet friendly with TH]

[...] The Suitor is a story of death & the maiden & is a prophecy – I wrote it in 1962, ?January, almost under dictation. The Suitor is me, the man in the car is me, the girl is Sylvia, the Stranger is death, & the situation turns me into an animal – as Gog. Also, the girl is my spirit of light, my Ophelia.'
(The Daily Telegraph, 'Ted Hughes: A life thrown into turmoil', 7 October 2007, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3668391/Ted-Hughes-a-life-thrown-into-turmoil.html)

'She's whispered to me that she might be
All things bright and beautiful tonight'
(Jake Thackray, 'Salvation Army Girl', 1967; Jake in a Box, 2006)

'And here I am, hopeful of a beginning. As yet, I have not spoken to her.'
(Ted Hughes, Difficulties of a Bridegroom: Collected Short Stories, Faber and Faber, 1995, p.126)

Now this is powerful stuff, a great modern poet crafting an almost mythical tale. The story is simple - rival suitors waiting for a girl - but is rather more than just a mood piece.

Written in 1962 and published in Wodwo (1967), it is of course productive to view from a biographical angle - see Hughes's letter above - but this should not obscure the craft and other wider resonances.

Hughes perceives himself as split into two, a powerful, seemingly repressive figure - with an official, professional air - and a solitary, game-playing youthful suitor. The tall man inspects the vistas 'officially', 'gigantic in the tricky light', whereas the youth is ever crouching, hiding or creeping around. (p.131)

It is a first-person narrative, and the youthful narrator - presumed to be fifteen, as he first encounters the girl at school, and she is said to be that age - allocates plenty of emphasis to his feelings about the man (who has, it is ambiguously suggested, left the girl in the house, imprisoned). 'He glances at me and I recognise the type of face, I recognize a familiar category of face. Ah, no! I like him less and less, in these seconds. I like what I infer less and less'. (p.130) This controlled, colloquial sounding narration indicates the unnamed youth (or young Hughes, as we might infer) dislikes the older man that he might become. Before reading about Hughes's letter, I had felt this was possibly her father, ambiguously abusive - 'She flies to the wall, as if she had been struck.' He is arguably protective of her, in that he unambiguously attacks the rival suitor, the Trilby-wearing stranger - possibly warding off her death, as he sees it?

The girl herself, the object of the story, is scarcely characterised; is more of an elemental force, who has compelled these suitors to her door. Young Hughes has walked five miles, in inapt dancing shoes, to get there; the love seems to be courtly, and can only remain so in the context of this story: 'Is she exclusively my secret? I scarcely know her. I have watched her at a distance, outstanding among three hundred others.' (p.126) Whilst never having spoken to her, she has clearly enraptured him, and is only seen through his perception in this narrative - when emerging from the older man's 'managerial' car, she is described in terms of her 'great fleece of hair'. Appropriately classical imagery used to evoke her distance from the scrupulously observed natural setting.

Here is a fascinating sound recording of Hughes, reading from Crow, his 1970 collection of poems:



Such tactile, northern vowels; just listen to how he pronounces 'fact' and 'black' - the predominant colour applied to the setting in The Suitor.

The setting brings out Hughes's clear-sighted, blunt lyricism; every part of the suitors' strange game is described as embedded within a harsh, cold, grimly romantic landscape - the same to be recognised in his poems. It cannot help but evoke Hughes's Yorkshire and the Calder Valley in particular in its archetypally northern gloom: 'A wind chopping and cutting and swirling in from all directions throws up the boughts of the elms as I pass under the rectory wall, and swipes my lapels against my cheeks, and clogs my hair with the drizzle.' There is, you guessed it, heavier rain, later, which in the true northern manner does not bother the narrator*, or alter at all the progress of the suitors' game. Such grasp of the north, and the simplicity of the situation, brings to mind the work of Jake Thackray, with his mythically prosaic Yorkshire tales.

Then there is the house - 'a truly commonplace house, semi-detached, pebble-dashed' - which takes on a forboding aspect as the tale unfolds. And then, the people; young Hughes at one with bleak nature, almost a northern stone wall himself: 'I hug my garments to me, reshuffling my warmth. Behind me the shrubbery shudders and flinches dismally. I am a black column of patience.' (p.128) As the suitors circle the house, after the tall man has left, all of the lights in the house are out; the imagination cannot comprehend what has passed and what may pass: 'Has she gone into a dark house? Is she sitting in the dark?' (p.133)

And, the resolution? Bloody great in its lack of resolution - ending in a bizarrely existential state of stasis. The young suitor has transmogrified into a figure almost resembling Alan Bates as Charles Crossley in Skolimowski's film - from a Robert Graves short-story - The Shout (1978), and the stranger is playing notes on a flute, notes that vie with and overcome the winds.

A vivid scene of hopelessness which burns itself into your mind; here's the whole of the last paragraph:

'And now in a kind of inane ecstasy, I writhe up my features again, stretching my mouth wide, making my eyes bulge, like a man laughing at tremendous volume or uttering a battle-cry, but in absolute and prolonged silence, while the flute notes dot and carry about the black garden and climb the wall and tap at the dark window and come circling back to the bowed attentive figure here, not three feet from me.' (p.134)

10/10

14. Robert Westall - 'The Making of Me' (1989)

I Hear an Old World

'The world goes forward to drugs and violence and fruit-machine addiction. I go backwards, to where I am truly free.'

(Robert Westall, The Best of Robert Westall Volume One: Demons and Shadows, Macmillan, 1998, p.87)

To conclude Week #2 and the library-sale stories is a understatedly moving piece, about the relationship between a young boy and his grandfather, and how this influenced the man that resulted.

It is notable that something as low-key and humble as this is placed within a 'Best of' volume of Westall shorts that promises 'Eleven haunting tales', 'astonishing tales from the dark side of the mind...'. It may not be representative, or else it is representative of how Westall haunts, as it were.

The chills here are in terms of human disengagement; the boy and his grandfather do not understand each other at all to begin with, and inflict moments of cruelty on each other - the grandfather strikes the boy and then the boy constructs a washing line of pots, pans and other such noisy implements to get his own back, as it were.

There is a sense in which this tit-for-tat results from a lack of understanding; our infantilised, tabloid culture (painting children as perfect dolls) would no doubt denounce the penitent grandfather as a child abuser, and not allow the chance for the reconciliation. Westall rather movingly paints a scenario where things manage to move beyond the Old Testament barbarism of the child's 'new world'*, into a more humanist resolution. At the very start the first-person narrator reflects upon a 'Sally Army' aunt, who clearly did not point the way forward, and then portrays his father as his main role-model at that stage: 'a great wizard' amid 'roaring furnaces and stamping carthorses, among great heaps of smoking slag and clouds of green gas, and who could start great steel dinosaurs of engines with one push of his small shoulder to an eight foot flywheel.' (p.81) A desire to emulate his father perhaps inadvertently leads to his tormenting of his grandfather, who suffered from shell-shock while serving in World War I (WW1), and continues to find even the banging of a kettle lid a source of great irritation.

Westall is, like Priest, somebody I have wanted to read for a while; his geographical proximity may be a factor, as may memories of The Machine Gunners being shown in junior school - more recently, watching the charming, doughty TV-adaptation of The Watch House (1988), and John Lennard stressing his qualities in his Of Modern Dragons (2007) e-book on critically neglected genre literature: http://www.humanities-ebooks.co.uk/Catalogue/Of_Modern_Dragons.html

Westall is surely one of the finest chroniclers of the industrial north-east, setting much of his fiction in the North Shields / Tynemouth area he knew so well. The effect of indutrialisation and mechanisation is both terrible and defining in a more positive sense, as is made clearer as it progresses. This story evokes the early WW2 era (it is surely based on Westall's own childhood , who was born in 1929) and like Christopher Priest, the focus is on looking back; the main protagonist is made by the past and his family just as is Owsley in that strange tale. The difference here is that the narrator's burgeoning interest in the past, awakened by his grandfather's revealing of the stories behind various household objects, is productive, and indeed leads to his career.

This piece is a profound meditation on the intense meaning seemingly innocuous or unusual artefacts may hold for people; providing a tangible link to the past - in this particular case, to the grandfather's cherished memories of life, perhaps especially before the outbreak of WW1: of his courtship, for example. Musings on the Mauretania rub alongside those on Kitchener, Kaiser Bill, Marie Lloyd and Lloyd George. The old man also possesses the lens of the film projector which showed the first movie ever to shown in North Shields - at the Temperance Hall, with Fatty Arbuckle as its star. (p.84)

There is no avoiding the sense of there being such bleakness to life in the north-east, yet such warmth and lack of ceremony once people understand one another. The joke of the Shields lads in the trenches shows a deep rootedness inherent in the days when families and working-class solidarity held firm:

'The boy stood on the burning deck,
His feet were full o' blisters.
His father stood in Guthrie's Bar
Wi' the beer running down his whiskers'
(p.86)

Now that the depth of this man's past has been made clear to the young lad, he can now sympathise with his grandfather's silences; they now share a bond and are part of the same community, a tradition of remembrance: 'Now we were both silent, and it was all right. For I knew who was in the silence now. The good chums, every one.' (p.86)

As somebody so often fascinated by artefacts from the past myself, this story speaks directly to me more than most read so far; the only concern is to avoid becoming buried in the past, and hostile to everything that is current, as my chosen epigraph might suggest: it must rather be made to live for the present and future.

Westall's values seem to be classic Old Labour, the politics of togetherness, though not in the sense of being uniform; this impression is reinforced by what he said about his 1983 novel, Futuretrack Five, which I have and would like to read: 'It was a violent, angry book; every ounce of anger I felt as a careers teacher about what the Tory government was doing to my children went into it; it was a picture of the twenty-first century, of a Tory government gone beserk.' (Robert Westall, Lindy McKinnel, ed., The Making of Me: A writer's childhood, Catnip, 2006, p.195) I need not comment on the attendant ironies presented by what is happened in the intervening twenty-six years. Today, no doubt, Westall's fiction is neglected partly because Old Labour values are unfashionable - seen as defunct by those in politics, not even recognised by most under thirty. However, in the light of our current predicament, neo-liberalism is not even delivering on capitalism's own restricting terms. My feeling is that the provincial Westall's values will persist way longer than those of New Labour Islingtonites.

* The clattering line of implements, used by the child to gain control over and torment the grandfather, seems a twisted variant upon the improvised, more benevolent dictatorship of Joe Meek: 'It was like entering into a new world.' (p.82)

9/10