Her Husband

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were husband and wife; they were also two of the most remarkable poets of the twentieth century. In this stunning new account of their marriage, Diane Middlebrook draws on a trove of newly available papers to craft a beautifully written portrait of Hughes as a man, as a poet, and as a husband haunted—and nourished—his entire life by his relationship to Sylvia Plath.

Her Husband is a triumph of the biographer's art and an up-close look at a couple who saw each other as the means to becoming who they wanted to be: writers and mythic representations of a whole generation.

Her HusbandAcknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Becoming Her Husband

Chapter One: Meeting (1956)
Ted Huge
Flashy American
The "Dairy I"

Chapter Two: Romance (1956)
The White Goddess: Song
Plath's Idyll
"To Ariadne, Deserted by Theseus"

Chapter Three: His Family (1956)
Leo
William Henry Hughes (1894-1981)
Edith Farrar Hughes (1898-1969)
Gerald Hughes (1920- )

Chapter Four: Struggling (1956-1963)brRabbit Stew
Silent Strangers
Complicated Animals
Earth Mother
The Luxury of Solitude

Chapter Five: Prospering (1957-1963)
Money
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman
Literary London
Homemaking
Literary Lion
Fertility

Chapter Six: Separating (1962- )
The Rabbit Catcher
He Said, She Said

Chapter Seven: Parting (1962-1963)
Plath Turns Thirty: Ariel
"Daddy"
London on Her Own
Doubletake

Chapter Eight: Husbandry (1963-1998)
Hughes's Tribe
Hughes's Ariel
The Wodwo and the Crow
Stewardship

Chapter Nine: Curing Himself (1967-1998)
Knot of Obsessions
Sinking into the Folk-Tale
From Relic Husband to Her Husband

Chapter Ten: The Magical Dead (1984-1998)
Poet of England
The Drama of Completion

Coda: Naked (1998- )

Sources and Notes
Bibliography
Index

Diane MiddlebrookÆs shrewd and compelling biography . . . is a book of mysteries, delicately revealed. (O Magazine)

A deep, rich, and satisfying biography of a marriageù harrowing and ironic, playful and grave. (The Washington Post Book World)

Unquestionably the best book written thus far on these complicated geniuses. (The Baltimore Sun)Diane Middlebrook is the author of two highly praised, bestselling biographies, Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton and Anne Sexton: A Biography, which was a National Book Award and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.Becoming Her Husband

Ted Hughes met Sylvia Plath at a wild party in February 1956 and married her four months later. He was English, twenty-five years old; she was twenty-three, an American. For six years they worked side by side at becoming artists. Then Hughes initiated an affair with another woman, and the marriage collapsed. Hughes moved out and, exactly four months later, Plath committed suicide, leaving behind their two very young children. One of the most mutually productive literary marriages of the twentieth century had lasted only about twenty-three hundred days. But until they uncoupled their lives in October 1962, each witnessed the creation of everything the other wrote, and engaged the other’s work at the level of its artistic purposes, and recognized the ingenu-ity of solutions to artistic problems that they both understood very well. This kind of collaboration is quite uncommon between artists, especially if they are married to each other, and after the publication of Hughes’s prizewinning first book, The Hawk in the Rain, the marriage began attracting the attention of journalists. In January 1961, Hughes and Plath were interviewed for a radio broadcast on the BBC, Two of a Kind, that displays them at the apex of their compatibility. The interviewer, Owen Leeming, asked whether theirs was “a marriage of opposites.” As if in a movie by Woody Allen, Hughes said they were “very different” at the same moment Plath said they were “quite similar.” Explaining “different,” Hughes allowed that he and Plath had similar dispositions, and worked at the same pace—indeed, so deep were the similarities that he often felt he was drawing on “a single shared mind” that each accessed by telepathy. But he and Plath drew on this shared mind for quite different purposes, he said, and each of their imaginations led a thoroughly “secret life.”

Explaining “similar,” Plath said that though she and Hughes had very different backgrounds, she kept discovering unexpected likenesses. Hughes’s fascination with animals, for example, had opened up for her the subject of beekeeping, which was one of her father’s scholarly pursuits. More of her own history had become available to her poetry because Hughes was so interested in it, she said: that was how the similarities were developing in their work—though the work itself was not at all similar, she insisted. Did she too believe they had a single shared mind? No, Plath laughed. “Actually, I think I’m a little more practical.”

Just such a dance through the minefield of their differences characterized their partnership at its best. It succeeded because each of them invested wholeheartedly in whatever the other was working on, even when the outcome was of dubious merit. In the late 1950s, Hughes helped Plath develop plots for stories she could publish in women’s magazines, even though he regarded fiction-writing as a false direction for Plath. At the time, he saw, accurately, that only conventional plots in which people got born, married, or killed released her distinctive “demons,” so he encouraged her to invest in whatever mode was most productive of tapping these unique sources of energy. Plath, for her part, loyally defended the incoherent and unmarketable plays in which Hughes promoted the esoteric ideas he was hooked on, beginning in the early 1960s—she was as interested in his artistic strategies as she was in the results. Paradoxically, their intimate creative relationship enabled each of them to conduct better the “secret life” expressed in their art. The rupture in their marriage closed down this literary atelier. But poetry had brought Hughes and Plath together, and poetry kept them together until Hughes’s death in 1998. Hughes inherited Plath’s unpublished manuscripts, appointed himself her editor and made her famous. In 1965, when he brought out the volume titled Ariel, which contained Plath’s last work, he said proudly, “This is just like her—but permanent.” By that year, the world was ready to agree with him about Plath’s importance. Poets rarely become cultural icons, but Plath’s suicide had occurred just when women’s writing was beginning to stimulate the postwar women’s movement. The posthumous publication of Plath’s poetry, fiction, letters and journals added her voice to a swelling chorus of resistance to the traditional positions women occupied in social life. The more celebrated Sylvia Plath became, the more people wanted to know what role her marriage to Ted Hughes had played in the catastrophe of her decision to die—especially after it became widely known that the woman Hughes left her for, Assia Wevill, had also committed suicide and had killed the daughter she had borne to Hughes.

Hughes spent the rest of his life quashing public discussion of these painful episodes in his private life. But shortly before his death in 1998, he released two books of poems that explore the subject of what it meant to have been the husband of Sylvia Plath. One was titled Birthday Letters. Speaking to Plath as if she were looking back with him from the vantage of their middle age, Hughes reflected on the array of circumstances that drove them together in 1956, and kept them together for six years; and he also proposed an explanation of the psychological issues behind her suicide.

Birthday Letters became a huge commercial success, but most people never even heard about the other book, Howls and Whispers, which was published in an expensive limited edition, and was never reviewed in the press. To make Howls and Whispers Hughes had reserved eleven poems from the manuscripts that became Birthday Letters, as a winemaker sets aside the choicest vintage for special labeling. In its keynote poem, “The Offers,” the ghost of Sylvia Plath appears to Ted Hughes three times. On each visit she tests him; on the last visit she warns, “This time don’t fail me.”

That startling phrase sends a pulse of light back through every page Hughes had published since Plath’s death. It points our attention to the theme in Hughes’s work of how marriages fail, or how men fail in marriage. Sometimes his work contains a representation of himself as the character who fails, as in Birthday Letters. In other writings, such as the translations of the grand works of Western literature with which Hughes occupied himself toward the end of his life—Racine’s Phèdre, Tales from Ovid, the Alcestis of Euripides—Hughes brings empathy to the theme of marriage under duress. His versions of these were all produced for the stage, and audiences were quick to intuit that a second passionate story—Hughes’s own story—was being explored, inexactly, within the dynamics of a venerable classic.

Though only 110 copies of Howls and Whispers were printed, Hughes acquired a large audience for its most important poem, “The Offers,” by releasing it in the London Sunday Times on October 18, 1998. Ten days later, Hughes died. Whether by accident or design, that sentence spoken by Sylvia Plath through the medium of Ted Hughes would be on record as his last words. Birthday Letters offers us a way to see Ted Hughes from inside his partnership with Plath; “The Offers” requires that we see them as inseparable, even in death. “This time, don’t fail me” is the voice of poetry itself, which Plath embodied; the persona created in his work is her husband; and that persona is his contribution to the history of poetry.

Hughes began developing this autobiographical persona, her husband, when he was nearly fifty years old. After years of attempting to avoid autobiographical writing, Hughes had come to believe that the voice in poetry had to issue from a human being situated in historical time and place, engaged in attempting to “cure” a wounding blow to his psyche inflicted by an historically significant conflict. The struggle conducted in a poet’s art was his way of participating in history. Hughes also saw that no single work of writing stood alone, that a strong writer’s work proceeded by accretion over time. Hughes observed that the poetic DNA expressed itself in single, definitive images or a “knot of obsessions” produced early in the poet’s career and repeated in variations thereafter. Like the cells of a developing foetus, each work contained the DNA of the whole man, that is, the whole image of the persona.

“The Offers” is the central poem in Hughes’s work of self-mythologizing. It marks the turning point in his creative life, showing in a set of images how the poet’s powers were summoned back to him following the two successive personal disasters of the suicides of women close to him. What would it mean not to fail the claims that Woman had made on his psyche from childhood on? How could he negotiate the urgency of contradictory needs for separation from her, and for dialogue with her? During the last two decades of his career, these questions informed works of lasting importance by Ted Hughes. These included Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, in which he investigated the conflicted “way of loving” to be found in Shakespeare’s writing; and the autobiographical poems wherein Hughes provided himself with a mythical childhood, much in the manner of Wordsworth, setting forth an account of the growth of the poet’s mind. But in Hughes’s account, marriage was the culmination of that developmental path. And marriage forced a man into the underground of his own darkness. In “The Offers,” he is stepping naked back into the world, no longer in the form of a man, but as a persona.

This is the myth that can be pieced together from its scattered manifestations in Hughes’s published works and private papers; and Hughes made sure that it could be found. The year before his death, he sold a very large collection of his manuscripts and letters to Emory University in Atlanta. And during the latter years of his career, anxious about his relationship to posterity, he responded generously to inquiries from scholars and critics interested in his work, and granted interviews about his beliefs and practices, and about his personal life.

In just such ways did Ted Hughes insure that his persona as a poet would survive him and would slowly work its way into the consciousness of posterity. He said as much to Sylvia Plath’s mother, Aurelia, back in 1975 while they were editing some of Plath’s correspondence for publication. Hughes requested that many references to himself be excised from this book. Aurelia Plath protested that Hughes was asking her to leave out too many informative details. He responded in a long letter, of which he made a carbon copy that he placed in his own archive. “An impartial scholar will eventually—no doubt—put all these notes in quite pitilessly,” he assured her. “In time everything will be quite clear, whatever has been hidden will lie in the open.”

Hughes was speaking, specifically, about his relationship to Sylvia Plath. He understood that after his death the story of their marriage would belong to the cultural history of the twentieth century. As he knew, the totality of his work contained a unique and poignant account of how they struggled together to become writers: what each gave, what each took; how their marriage floundered and their art did not. Her Husband threads together the story Hughes told and the history that surrounds the story. Drawing from his books and papers, it follows a single line of inquiry through the maze of Hughes’s life as he enters into the partnership, struggles and prospers in it, loses the partner but not the relationship, and turns the marriage into a resonant myth.

chapter one

Meeting
(1956)
Ted Hughes believed that destiny had singled him out to become the husband of Sylvia Plath. “The solar system married us,” he claimed, when he re-created their meeting in Birthday Letters, locating the astrological coordinates very precisely. The date was Saturday, February 25, 1956, under the sign of Pisces, in the zodiac; the place was Cambridge University, from which Hughes had graduated a year and a half earlier. During the week he was living in a borrowed flat in London, working at a glamorous-sounding day job as a reader of fiction submissions at the film company J. Arthur Rank. But he continued to spend his weekends in Cambridge, hanging out with friends, mainly poets who were still enrolled at the university. They were ambitious, idealistic, apprentice artists, and that winter Hughes joined them in putting together a very small, very literary magazine, St. Botolph’s Review. One of the contributors, an American named Lucas Myers, lived in a repurposed chicken coop behind the rectory of St. Botolph’s Church, off campus. His residence inspired the cheeky title—these poets were ultra-anti-establishment. Friends began peddling copies of St. Botolph’s Review around the Cambridge colleges on publication day, spreading word that a launch party would be held at rooms in Falcon Yard that night. Sylvia Plath bought a copy from an American cousin of one of the poets, and he invited her to the launch.

Plath accepted immediately; here was an opportunity she had been waiting for. She was studying literature at Cambridge on a two-year Fulbright Fellowship after graduating from Smith, a prestigious women’s college in New England. Her writing had won minor literary prizes in the United States and was beginning to appear in such American magazines as Harper’s, Mademoiselle, The Nation, and Atlantic Monthly. Arriving at Cambridge, she had quickly learned that the literary world was tightly networked in Britain; even the limpest student publications were scouted for new talent by London publishers, who were often themselves Cambridge graduates. She immediately began submitting work to college publications. In January, two of her poems had been printed in a little magazine called Chequer—and not only published but, to her amazement, scoffed at, in a fierce little low-budget paper called Broadsheet, which was produced every two weeks on a mimeograph machine by some of the St. Botolph poets. The men who reviewed Plath’s poems disliked on principle the formal verse at which she was very skillful, and on principle they derided what they disliked. “Quaint and eclectic artfulness,” the reviewer labeled Plath’s style, then added, “My better half tells me ‘Fraud, fraud,’ but I will not say so; who am I to know how beautiful she may be.”

The stapled pages of Broadsheet were read avidly by the local poets, and Plath was mortified at being so manhandled. This had been her first exposure to the blokishness of English literary culture. What bothered her most, though, was that little refrain “fraud, fraud.” Plath was aware of her shortcomings and didn’t like them to be noticed by others. Yet the critic’s rhetoric gave her an opening. Did he want to see whether she was beautiful? She would introduce herself. She put on a pair of red party shoes and smoothed back her pageboy with a red hair band, then went to a bar with her date for the evening, where she fortified herself with several whiskeys. But before getting high she had fortified herself another way: she had memorized some of the poems in St. Botolph’s Review.

The party was well under way by the time Plath arrived in Falcon Yard and climbed in her red shoes up the stairs to the Women’s Union, where a jazzy combo hammered music into the babble of raised voices. Plath started working the room, getting noticed. She immediately sought out the reviewer who had called her a fraud; he turned out to be a little chap, “frightfully pale and freckled,” quite unimposing in person, after all—Plath too judged poets by their looks. She cut in on men she wanted to dance with, bantering at the top of her lungs. At the end of the long hall, she spotted a good-looking fellow, and learned his name: Ted Hughes, one of the two poets whose work she had memorized that afternoon. He caught her watching him and slouched across the room, staring into her eyes. She began yelling over the dance music, and he recognized that she was reciting lines from a poem he had written. He shouted back, “You like?” He steered her into an adjoining room where they could talk, and refilled her glass with brandy, apologizing, lamely, for the bad notice in Broadsheet, though privately he shared the reviewer’s opinion. They sparred a bit, Plath nervy and exhilarated. He suddenly kissed her, hard, and she retaliated—she bit him on the cheek until blood ran. He snatched off her hair band and her silver earrings, and walked out.

Ted Hughes left the party with his current girlfriend. He didn’t know, yet, that the solar system had married him. But he was wearing a wedding ring of tooth marks, and for the next several weeks, one of his cheeks would display a scar as did one of hers, a scar just under her right eye, about which he would learn much more during the ensuing months.

Hughes wasn’t looking for a wife that night. Quite the contrary—he was in a profound dither about where his life was heading. At the time of his graduation from Cambridge, Hughes had decided somewhat impulsively that he would apply for immigration to Australia, where his older brother, Gerald, had settled. The Australian government provided free passage to British men who agreed to work there; Hughes envisioned taking up a life of shooting and fishing with Gerald, an avid sportsman. But Hughes deferred his application for the allotted period of two years—he was in no hurry. In March 1955—maybe between jobs—he suddenly wrote to Gerald that he was coming “without delay,” but again he delayed. By February 1956, the deferral period was almost up, so Hughes reactivated the application, hoping that the long waiting list would give him as many as nine more months in England. Nonetheless, he knew he could be assigned a ticket at any time, and the question came home to him, urgently: What was he actually going to do, in Australia, anyway? Work as a teacher? or a day laborer? On the other hand, how much longer could he tolerate the hand-to-mouth existence he was leading in London and Cambridge? Given these unmanning worries, Hughes may have been especially receptive to the kind of flattery Plath lavished on him at the launch party. She had plucked from St. Botolph’s Review a poem that glorifies male aggression. It opens with the line, “When two men meet for the first time,” and goes on to observe that (male) strangers sometimes attack each other on slight provocation, as animals do, because the animal is still alive in them:
their blood before
They are aware has bristled into their hackles
Plath had thrown herself at Hughes chanting the poem’s last words: “ ‘I did it, I’ ”—Hughes’s first experience of Sylvia Plath was hearing her voice pronouncing his words as knowingly as if she had written them.

She had not written them, but she knew where Hughes was coming from: in the poem’s DNA lay works of Sigmund Freud and D. H. Lawrence that were fundamental to a literary education in those days. Hughes had read Lawrence avidly in his teens, and Lawrence’s notorious celebration of “blood consciousness” appears undisguised in this poem that Plath picked out to memorize. Plath had read the same books, and had undergone a similar literary infatuation with Lawrence—she couldn’t miss the allusion. The first, telegraphic exchange that passed between Plath and Hughes that night was both a party game and a discovery scene in six syllables. “ ‘I did it, I.’ ” “You like?” When he kissed her, when she bit him, they were acting out a scene of primitive impulsiveness that would have been at home in one of Lawrence’s novels.

Ted Huge
Ted Hughes may not have been looking for a wife that night, but Sylvia Plath was looking for a husband, and Ted Hughes met her specifications exactly. “That big, dark, hunky boy,” she called him, in her journal the next day, “the only one huge enough for me.” He was a striking man, more than six feet tall, and he normally weighed around 195 pounds. In winter he liked to wear a heavy, brown leather army-issue topcoat that had survived the Great War, which gave his shoulders extra bulk and cloaked his shabby clothes in a bohemian glamour.

An extremely unkempt appearance was unusual at Cambridge in his day. Hughes was acutely aware of the class anxieties expressed in bizarre clothing at Cambridge: grammar school boys like himself attempting to counter the contempt of public school boys through displays of eccentricity. Hughes’s contemporary Karl Miller recalled that the most spectacular students “dressed in a weird exacerbation of Edwardian chic—pipe-stem tweed trousers, lapelled and brocaded waistcoats, wilting bow-ties, wafer-thin flat caps.” Winter and summer Hughes wore the same shapeless black clothes. He bought his corduroy cheap from a factory owned by one of the prosperous members of his mother’s family, up in West Yorkshire, and dyed it black himself. His classmate Glen Fallows thought he looked “as though he’d just climbed out of a fishing smack after a stormy night.” A fellow poet, Philip Hobsbaum, was less charitable: “Ted was appalling. He had smelly old corduroys and big flakes of dandruff in his greasy hair.”

Hughes was actually quite self-conscious and shy in company, but he hid his unease behind mesmerizing talk. For sociability, he gravitated to the Cambridge pubs where students passed their time singing folk songs. Hughes had a big, distinctive voice, rich and sonorous, the mannerisms of his native Yorkshire detectable under the influence of his elite education. Many anecdotes about this voice appear in the memoirs of people who knew him when he was young. The American writer Ben Sonnenberg tells one of the best stories, about being invited to dinner with Hughes sometime during the early 1960s at the home of the American poet W.S. Merwin. “I felt like Hazlitt meeting Coleridge for the first time: bowled over by his warmth and energy,” Sonnenberg writes. While listening to Hughes, “I did indeed fall off my chair. When he helped me up from the floor, I wrote in my notebook, ‘He didn’t stop talking and I felt the vibration of his voice running down his arm.’ ” The English writer Emma Tennant tells another good one, about finding Hughes sitting immobile in the middle of a lively London party in 1976, broadcasting a rambling fairy tale to anybody who would listen; she dragged him onto the dance floor, interrupting him long enough to initiate an affair with him. Over the years, a lot of women would want to interrupt Ted Hughes long enough to initiate an affair with him. According to some, Hughes was “the biggest seducer in Cambridge”—it was the chief topic of gossip about Hughes at the time Sylvia Plath met him, and she heard about it the night she met him, from the man who accompanied her to the party.

But even before she laid eyes on the man, Plath thought she had learned something essential about him by reading his work, and she was right. He had published only a few poems and essays, only in the smallest magazines, and usually under pseudonyms. But from the time he was sixteen, Hughes believed he was destined to become a poet on the grand scale. He wanted to be a poet like W. B. Yeats, whose work he studied passionately, beginning in grammar school and right through his years at Cambridge. After discovering D. H. Lawrence, Hughes wanted to be a poet like D. H. Lawrence too; eventually he fulfilled both wishes in a highly original way. In 1956 he was still feeling his way toward his vocation—it was the sense of having a vocation that underlay his friendship with the somewhat fanatical undergraduates whose work appeared in St. Botolph’s Review.

One of these was the poet Daniel Weissbort, with whom Hughes later founded a journal to publish translations of poetry. At the time they met, Weissbort recalls of himself that he was awkwardly attempting to imitate Dylan Thomas. “I went up to Cambridge the year after Thomas died and I very much remember trying to write like him,” Weissbort said. “And of course the idea of the poet as a bohemian wild boy was very attractive, even though I didn’t really know what it all meant.” For Hughes, the ideal artistic wild man was Beethoven—he often said that the most intellectually useful thing he did at Cambridge was listen to Beethoven. The poet Peter Redgrove recalled his first encounter, as an undergraduate, with Hughes’s Beethoven obsession. “A strange yowling was coming out of this doorway of a kind that I had never known before—I was not at that time musical. I knocked and entered. In the brightly lit room a hand-wound gramophone was playing a black disc—this was the yowling. My puzzlement was complete. Hughes’s own physical presence was also of a kind I had never encountered before. It was decisive—very few people in my experience had the ability of showing by their physique a kind of knowledge.” Hughes told Redgrove that they were hearing Beethoven’s last quartet. “ ‘It is as if the whole of the music is crushed into the first few bars, which are then unraveled,’ ” Hughes explained. “ ‘Look! This is the author’—and he unhooked a frowning kindly plaster mask off the wall. ‘This is how he walked’—and he waddled this face towards me at chest-level. ‘This was his height and how he walked.’ ” Hughes introduced Sylvia Plath to Beethoven with the same thoroughness as soon as they began spending time together.

Yet on the whole, Cambridge University figures negatively in the myth of himself that Ted Hughes extracted from the facts of his life once he had become an established poet. Cambridge was “almost a deadly institution unless you’re aiming to be either a scholar or a gentleman,” he said. Hughes was not born a gentleman and did not wish to become a scholar—only some good luck and special pleading got him to Cambridge in the first place. He’d had the good luck as a boy of eleven: after he failed the preliminary exam for admission to the excellent grammar school in Mexborough, the mining town where he grew up in South Yorkshire, his mother had persuaded the headmaster—a customer at the Hughes family tobacco shop—to permit her boy to sit for the actual exam, which he got through by writing an essay on his desire to be a gamekeeper. Eight years later, he performed badly on the exam for entrance at Pembroke College, but his grammar school teacher sent a sheaf of Hughes’s poems to the master of Pembroke, and the poems won Hughes admission as a “dark horse.”

Hughes had arrived at Pembroke in 1951 after serving his compulsory term of National Service, as a ground wireless mechanic for the RAF. He was posted to Fylingdales, a three-man station on the North York Moors, where he had little to do but read, and he tried to use this time to widen his taste in literature. He says he tried the poetry of Walt Whitman, but couldn’t make his way into the rhythms, and also tried without success to read Rilke. He was equally at a loss with the collections of contemporary verse that he brought along. What he did read was his mother’s Bible, and the works of Shakespeare. At Pembroke he intended to study English literature, to prepare himself for the profession he envisioned as a poet.

However, the university education he undertook was designed to make him into a literary critic. The chief literary man at Cambridge in those days was F. R. Leavis, who achieved a lasting influence on Hughes’s generation through practicing the analysis of literature as an elegant form of savagery. Hughes had a gift, himself, for the sadistic side of Leavis’s intellectual style, so he understood the attraction. But Hughes had little taste for the coteries that formed around the scholars whose influence would later be essential to professional promotion. Nor did he join clubs or play team sports. “He was already fascinated by the Ouija board and the occult,” said Brian Cox, who became a writer and good friend of Hughes. “There were Pembroke stories about the frightening intensity with which he engaged in these activities.” These included his interest in astrology, which was advanced enough to be used as the basis of a memorable paper on “The Scope of Horror,” which he presented at Pembroke. Hughes had learned astrology from his sister, Olwyn, before he entered Cambridge, according to his friend Lucas Myers. “He loved the opulent lexicon of symbols, the convergences, oppositions, planetary solar and lunar influences, the cusps and