PROFESIONALES AUXILIARES DE LA JUSTICIA TITULO I

The 1960s were the decade when weather and climate data revealed that human beings could alter these vast systems (Hamblin 127) – and when NATO began to take an interest in the military possibilities of ‘environmental warfare’ (158). Silent Spring became a bestseller, and a new awareness of species extinction, the dangers of artificial chemicals, and the human and ecological cost of international warfare, culminated in the first Earth Day in 1970. For

Hughes, the decade produced ‘the whole idea of our ecological responsibility, fully

developed – maybe the crucial awakening’ (PC 80). By the end of 1960s, Britain would have its own environmental magazine, which was co-founded by Hughes. His understanding of environmental ideas in this important period becomes visible in two major written outputs: the poetry collection Crow (1970) and his editing of Your Environment magazine (1969-73), to which he contributed an important prose essay. This essay, and Hughes’s vast archive of prose notes accompanying Crow, which are analysed here for the first time, show that

Hughes was building up his corpus of environmental prose as well as ecopoetry. Thanks, too, to developments in ecological thinking of the 1960s and early 70s, he would launch a

reforestation scheme. Ignored by previous scholars, this important scheme was an even more practical and direct engagement with environmental issues than his previous anti-nuclear protesting. Critics who have labelled Hughes as ahistorical and apolitical have missed just how committed he was to this major development in his time.

In the early 1960s, escalations in Cold War tensions catalysed developments in nuclear issues. The Berlin Crisis of 1961, and particularly the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, brought the threat of nuclear war closer. Nevertheless, there was some progress with restricting nuclear weapons testing: atmospheric and underwater detonations were banned in 1963 under the Partial Test Ban Treaty. McCormick argues that it is possible that this was the first global environmental agreement (1995 64), although it was of course intended to slow the arms race. A new awareness of the environment as a global whole began to develop thanks to this

agreement (65). Hughes would write in greater detail about nuclear technology during the 1960s; it inspired some of the images that he would deploy in his poems of global

conflagration, and the images of fallout in Crow.

But it was the publication of Silent Spring in a single volume in 1963 that brought much of the western world to a greater awareness of environmental issues. McCormick credits the book with ‘marking the beginning of the environmental revolution’ (65). Hughes remembers

Carson’s bestseller as an important catalyst for his environmental awareness,113 and its

exposure of the damage done by pesticides and chemicals to human bodies, animal bodies and the wider environment came as a shock to most of the Anglophone world. The book created a widespread change in attitudes and caused Kennedy to commission a report on pesticides (Rome 532). Two years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a speech to Congress on the ‘conservation and restoration of natural beauty’. Conservation, then, was entering mainstream political discourse in the USA. It was political developments such as

these, and his reading of Rachel Carson, which Hughes evokes in his unpublished draft from

Birthday Letters.114

The wreck of the oil tanker Torrey Canyon in 1967 was a major environmental incident with international ramifications, polluting the Cornish coastline with Kuwaiti crude oil. At the end of the decade Hughes would also become aware of a problem polluting the coast even nearer

to his Devon home: sewage pollution.115 Local issues continued to preoccupy Hughes, but the

1960s also witnessed further developments in global environmental thinking. Between 1965

and 1968, politicians and writers developed the image of the earth as a spaceship116 ‘with

finite resources for survival’ (Heise 25). These images were linked to photographs taken during orbital flights in the early 1960s, the Apollo 8 crew’s 1968 ‘Earthrise’ image and the famous ‘blue marble’ photograph obtained by the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Human beings were able to see their planet as a whole. These images were appropriated by

environmentalists at the first Earth Day in 1970 (22).

The environmental movement had an international reach by the end of the decade. It had spread to ‘North America, Western Europe and Japan’ (McCormick 1995 55), and Hughes would comment on its far-reaching effects in his prose. Joined with protest against both nuclear technology and the Vietnam war, it became a focus of countercultural expression (Rome 543, 46). As McCormick notes, ‘If in 1962 there was growing unease about the state of the environment, by 1970 there was a new insistence on change in a global society seemingly bent on self-destruction’ (1995 55-6). The 1960s saw the emergence of the view that environmental degradation was a ‘war against nature’ (Rome 542). Here are the origins of Hughes’s call for politicians to deal with environmental issues ‘as a war’ (WP 131), the association of war with environmental cataclysm in Crow, and of his continued appeals to the government in the 1980s to treat the environmental crisis on a war footing (see Chapter VIII). The main difference between the conservationism of the 1950s and the environmentalism of the 1960s was that the new movement addressed the entire environment, including humans, rather than isolated issues such as wildlife, habitat, or natural resources. More ‘overtly activist and political’, it called for ‘radical changes’ in society (McCormick 1995 56). Moreover, the ‘new environmentalism’ was able to define itself. Around 1966, the terms

‘environmentalist’ and ‘environmentalism’ came into use.117 By the 1960s, Hughes would

have been able to identify himself as an ‘environmentalist’.

114 BL Add MS 88918/1/6 red notebook labelled ‘Hildrid History’, marked ‘3.S.’ by TH, 18 verso. 115 For Hughes’s campaigns for cleaner water in the Torridge Estuary, see Chapter IX.

116 This holistic image of the earth appeared around 1965, when Adlai Stevenson used the image of the earth as a spaceship in a speech to the United Nations. The speech was drafted by the environmentalist and economist Barbara Ward (McCormick 80), who published Spaceship Earth the following year; Buckminster Fuller would further popularise the idea in his 1968 book.

117 The Oxford English Dictionary cites examples of the words ‘environmentalism’ and ‘environmentalist’ dating from 1966; ‘environmentalism’ is placed in quotation marks, suggesting that it was seen as a new term at the time.

If Hughes’s environmentalist opposition to pollution and nuclear technology chimed with the zeitgeist, one aspect of his environmentalism was distinctly primitivist. In this respect, he anticipated the 1960s’ interest in the more mythical, spiritual aspects of our connection to the environment by nearly two decades. By the early 1960s, he was making much of his income from book reviewing, and he often chose books that resonated with his interest in mythology and pre-Christian religion. Susanna Lidström links Crow to 1960s countercultural thinking about the problems with Christianity, as exemplified by Lynn White’s 1967 article ‘The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis’ (2013 13). She also cites the alternative religious thinking of the time, which turned away from Western thought and became receptive to pre- Christian European and Asian belief-systems (14). Hughes certainly did think that the 1960s developed a sense of ‘ecological responsibility’ through ‘ecological interconnectedness’ (PC 80). However, Lidström misses the fact that Hughes’s intellectual interests long predated the 1960s’ countercultural interest in non-Western systems of thought. He said that he

appreciated the Sixties because the political Left ‘had the liberty to express itself’ in Britain during the decade, but he was not interested in the mainstream cultural expression of the period: ‘pop music’. He had, however, been interested in mystic cults since 1948 (Skea, ‘Asia Festival Interview’), and in pre-Christian and Asian religions since adolescence and

university. Perhaps his first encounter with stories of a corvine trickster occurred while he was at Cambridge, for he recorded a Native American myth in which Raven disguises himself as a baby in order to steal one eye from everyone in a village (FTNB 94). He later

developed his interest in the trickster118 via his reading of Jung’s essay on tricksters in The

Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, and his 1956 edition of Paul Radin’s study of the

Native American trickster.119 However, the Sixties also saw the republication of the ‘essential

literatures’ (PC 80) of many non-Western societies, which would have reinvigorated

Hughes’s interest. By 1962 he had acquired ‘a small library’ of ‘folk-tales of a particular sort (like the Ananzi stories, many African stories, the Ainu stories, the Trickster cycles’ and The

Táin (LTH 195). Hughes was both a primitivist sage among Yorkshiremen and an

environmental revolutionary of the Sixties – and what united both of these strands of thought was his critique of consumerist modernity as spiritually alienating and environmentally damaging. In 1962 he had reviewed C.M. Bowra’s Primitive Song (1962), and in 1965, he reviewed John Greenway’s Literature Among the Primitives (1964) and The Primitive Reader (1965). Hughes’s longstanding interest in such texts permeates both his essay on ‘The

Environmental Revolution’ and his darkly ecopoetic masterpiece Crow.

Hughes uses the term ‘primitive’ to describe both peoples and their cultures. He would not have seen it as pejorative: to him, it means ‘primordial’, suggesting the healthy, ‘natural’ sanity of civilisations that lack our dependence on potentially destructive technology. He articulates a spirited defence of it in a review of 1965. ‘Primitive’ literature has been recorded by the very Westerners who destroy ‘the unique conditions of its flourishing’ (WP 73).

118 Hughes’s borrowings from trickster-tales are well known in Hughes scholarship, and are examined by writers such as Stuart Hirschberg (69-100) and Neil Roberts (2007 34-5, 2015 73-5).

Missionaries, lawmakers, compilers of children’s stories and anthropologists subjected it to ‘emasculations and and [sic] prettifications and denaturings’ (74). His use of the last term is telling. Hughes characterises all ‘primitive’ peoples as ‘think[ing] unremittingly about animals, herbage, weather, dependants and providers’ (33). Hughes’s ecopoetry in a primitivist vein seeks to undo our modern ‘denaturings’ and to bring literature closer to its ‘primitive’ origins in the natural world; of course, it necessarily does this via the

contemporary techniques of free verse and via the Western publishing industry. Postcolonial scholarship would argue that Hughes might risk removing the oral literatures of preliterate peoples from their cultural context, and appropriating them – but an interest in indigenous culture was a common feature of 1960s counterculture, and it would be anachronistic to blame Hughes for this.

Conservation and Extinction

Hughes’s visits to National Parks in the USA would have increased his awareness of megafauna conservation, but developments in conservationist thinking in the 1960s were more important influences. Conservation and the fear of extinction were also beginning to influence poetry. Hughes would have been able to read D.J. Enright’s elegy ‘The Quagga’ anthologised with a selection of his own verse in Alvarez’s 1962 volume The New Poetry. Hughes’s acquaintance W. S. Merwin elegised grey whale, sea cow and gorilla in ‘For a Coming Extinction’, written in 1963 and published in his 1967 collection The Lice (Merwin 163). World Wildlife Fund was founded in 1961, but more significantly, 1966 was the year when US Congress passed the Endangered Species Preservation Act. The Act permitted the listing of native US wildlife species as endangered, gave them limited protection, and preserved their habitats; it would later be amended and expanded. This was also the year of Hughes’s first explicit extinction elegy. Uncollected by Hughes but published in The Animal

Anthology (1966), ‘The Last Migration’ is a more overt extinction elegy even than

‘February’. Man replaces God and uncreates the Irish elk, the aurochs, the passenger pigeon and the buffalo. This poem sees Hughes create intense pathos for species that are dying out: they disappear into the ‘vortex and rifling’ of human overhunting with firearms (116). This is a portrait of animal suffering: the aurochs ‘struggled to rise, it wanted to charge’ (115) and the buffalo, those ‘Great Lakes on the hoof’, jostle ‘at that bottleneck of bellowing and pain’ (116). The passenger pigeon is an extinct North American bird; the buffalo neared extinction there in Hughes’s time. Significantly, the aurochs and Irish elk lived in Eurasia and North Africa; the elegy begins to show the international reach of Hughes’s environmental awareness, and suggests the need for European conservation movements to catch up with their American counterparts. It is a piece written to commission, and it is not Hughes’s finest ecological elegy. But it is an important articulation of his concern about overhunting and extinction. At the end of the poem, ‘the waters trembled | And began to move…’ (116). The ominous suspension point shows that environmental destruction is ongoing, and the work of mourning extinct and endangered species must continue. Hughes will return to this elegiac strain in Wolfwatching (1986).

‘The Book of Crow is in the Egg’

In Crow, it is unsurprising that Hughes’s work becomes distinctly ‘dark’. In the last year of his life, he reflected that Crow was an attempt to write about Plath’s death ‘obliquely’ (PC 269). By the time it was published, he had suffered further terrible personal traumas. In March 1969, his partner Assia Wevill had killed herself, taking their daughter with her. Only

two months later, his mother died; his friend and former lover Susan Alliston also passed away. Crow was published in 1970 and dedicated to Assia and Shura. Hughes could not bring himself to finish it in the wake of their deaths. Crow, like the Wodwo, is a part-human, part- animal hero; as with the rat, wolves and skylarks, Hughes would use the corvine character to channel human concerns and personal grief. Yet this complicated collection focuses more closely on environmental issues, and survival against the odds, than Hughes’s earlier work. The archives and Hughes’s correspondence testify to the complicated genesis of Crow. As the collection and poems related to it evolve, we see Hughes’s awareness of environmental issues developing and transforming. Early plans for Crow were optimistic about the possibility of solving environmental problems; but because of Hughes’s increasing awareness of

environmental risk and uncertainty, and because of traumas in his personal life, the published collection reaches no easy resolution. Prompted by an idea by the artist Leonard Baskin just weeks after Plath’s death (Bate 2015 289), Hughes began creating Crow-poems in early

1963; he wrote to Baskin in 1964 that ‘The Book of Crow is in the egg’.120 Hughes wrote

many plans for Crow, at different stages in his career. He was reworking a prose narrative to accompany the poems as late as the 1990s. But one particular document in the British Library might date from as early as 1963, and it shows that Hughes had intended to end the book with ‘world repair’:

Creation & Invocations of Crow:

Crow’s birth & appearing: events & circumstances. Legends of the birth of Crow:

Childhood: among animals & mothers.

Worldly travels & education of Crow: ordeal, disasters, lovers, initiations.

Crow’s bride: her momentary appearance

Evaporation of Universe: Crow’s elemental enemies, non-crow: his defeats.

Crow’s journey to Otherworld.

Crow’s trial in otherworld: conditions laid down.

Crow’s Defence of Poetry.

Crow’s return: feats, reparations, marriage labours: world repair.121

120 BL Add MS 83684, postcard from TH to Baskin, 14. 08. 1964.

Even after the evaporation of the Universe – an event that suggests a nuclear holocaust – Hughes considered letting Crow’s reunification with his bride repair the damaged

environment.

The Crow-project engaged with environmental issues from the outset, then. It consisted of both poetry and prose commentaries; Hughes left most of the latter unpublished. There are significant ways in which Crow responds to contemporary developments in ecopoetic theory, but it suggests ways in which ecopoetics need to be expanded to take into account poetry that grapples with depicting a world laid waste. The ecopoetry of Crow dramatises processes, interconnections and relationships (both between organisms and between masculine and feminine). This is tropological ecopoetry. But any poetry that contemplates the end of life on earth, actually contemplates a moment when tropological interconnections break down. Here, Hughes’s work becomes most prescient of Anthropocene theories of terminal environmental change. Moreover, Hughes stated that Crow holds dialogues with everything he meets –

‘rocks and trees and rivers’122 – because ‘[e]verything sings its own song about itself’ (Sagar

2006 175). This resonates with Knickerbocker’s view of the interlocutory function of personification and apostrophe in ecopoetry (2012 6). However, both Crow and these other creatures are envisaged as communicators and makers of meaning: here, Hughes stays true to his folktale sources, but he also anticipates posthuman thinking about other species’

possession of culture (Feder 228). Crow writes songs and plays, and even defends poetry in the early draft quoted above; the collection does not aim at ecomimesis, but draws ironic attention to its own acts of literary creation. Compared with Hughes’s more experimental poems such as ‘Milesian Encounter on the Sligachan’, Crow rarely represents the formal experimentation that Tarlo, Gander, Kinsella and Timothy Clark view as important to ecopoetry; although offshoots of the Crow-project that are written in hybrid forms, such as

Eat Crow, would qualify. Crow straddles the archetypal world of Jung and Radin’s tricksters,

and Hughes’s own, veiled ‘mythic life’ (LTH 706), hopping across the species boundary between human and bird: it interrogates our capacity for ‘becoming animal’ and our ‘ethically challenged’ interactions with other species (Skinner 2011). Hughes takes the subjectivity of an individual character, and pushes, tests and refashions it. In this respect,

Crow resonates with Gander and Kinsella’s call for the lyric I to be put under pressure.

There are some contemporary ecopoetic and ecocritical theories that are eminently applicable to Crow, but we need something more in order to account fully for the developments that Hughes’s Crow-project creates. The collection might resonate with Gary Snyder’s view of the poet as a detritivore recycling ‘symbol-detritus’ (71), although Snyder does not elaborate this concept as fully as he might. Skinner does mention that some critics view ecopoetry as confronting ‘disasters and environmental injustices’ (2011), although his work needs to be expanded to account for the precise ways in which poetry accomplishes this. Gifford’s idea of the anti-pastoral as ‘Unidealised – harsh, unattractive,’ grappling with the concept of eco- apocalypse (2012 1961-62), is also useful. Hughes’s farming-poetry certainly complicates the pastoral, but in Crow, he is reacting to other poetic modes as well: hymns, epiphanic nature- poems, the sublimity of the Romantics’ nightingales and skylarks, and even some of his own earlier work. Buell’s idea of ‘toxic discourse’ is relevant: this mode of writing becomes more prevalent after Silent Spring (1998 645) and analyses the uncanny idea of ‘communities, population groups, and finally the whole earth contaminated by occult toxic networks’ (648). However alarming Buell’s theory of occult toxicity may be, it is not broad enough to

encompass Hughes’s terrifying vision of an entire planet laid waste. Dana Phillips has created ‘excremental ecocriticism’ in response to global sanitation challenges (2014); this might be adequate for interpreting the collection’s filth and excreta, but Phillips’s theory is too narrow for the wide-ranging scope of Crow. Ursula Heise’s theory of environmental risk (119-59) is