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June 22, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
June 21, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil
Over England:
The Gaucho's Wild Ride
John Borowski
Stossel
and Disney's Crimes Against Nature
Chris Floyd
Southern
Cross: The US Takes Aim at Brazil
David Martin
Of Lies
and Oil: an interview with Rahul Mahajan
James T. Phillips
Serbian
Reservations:
Kosovo 2002
June 20, 2002
Chris Kromm
The South
at War: a Tour of the US Military/Industrial Complex
Jacob Levich
The War
on Terror is
Not a Suicide Pact
Mark Weisbrot
What
are They Doing to Argentina?
Jeffrey St. Clair
and Alexander Cockburn
Fire
Walk With Me:
Terry Lynn Barton and the Flames of Colorado
June 19, 2002
Gary Leupp
Red Targets in Terror War
Lenni Brenner
The Road
Forward for the
Palestinian Movement
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Cheney's Diary:
Cakewalking Through Minefields
Alexander Cockburn
The
Incredible Shrinking President
June 18, 2002
David Vest
Raise the
White Flag in Terror War?
Ben White
Is It Possible
to "Understand" the Rise in "Anti-Semitism"?
Edward Said
Palestinian
Elections Now
June 17, 2002
Jack McCarthy
Watergate
and All That
Philip Farruggio
A Maximum
Wage Law
Ron Sullivan
Law
and Orders:
The Assault on Trial by Jury
Rev. Charles Booker-Hirsch
Taking
on the School
of the Americas
Joan Smith
G.W. Bush:
The Man is Stupid
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
June 15 / 16, 2002
Tanweer Akram
A Review
of Noam Chomsky's 9-11
Daniel Wolff
The Day
They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What It Meant
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
Crime State
David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
to the ABM Treaty
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
Resources:
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CIA, Drugs & the
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by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
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Weekend
Edition
June 22/23,
2002
Ted's Spell
by Ben Sonnenberg
Our friendship began in London at Bill and Dido
Merwin's house in 1959. Ted Hughes was twenty-eight years old
and I was twenty-two. I had never met anyone I admired so much
who was at the same time so approachable. Ted's voice was a level
baritone with overtones of his birthplace in the Northwest of
England. I listened to him so intently, literally on the edge
of my seat, that I fell off my chair. When he helped me up from
the floor, he didn't stop talking and I felt the vibration of
his voice running down his arm. To borrow words from his poem
"Pike," his voice seemed to come from a "Stilled
legendary depth:/ It was as deep as England."
We took long walks together, Ted with
his daughter, Frieda, in a baby carriage, gossiping some (quite
a lot, actually) but talking of poetry mostly. Ted would declaim
long passages of Chesterton and Kipling. He would quote at length
from Lawrence and the poets of the First World War. His quotations
from Shakespeare, by contrast, were short. "As the Clown
says in Measure for Measure...". I remember that
last quotation. I remember Ted's voice as he spoke it. "Groping
for trouts in a peculiar river." I wish I could remember
of what it was apropos.
* * *
Ted and I were good friends in those
days. Not close friends exactly, not intimate friends; but good
friends nonetheless. I remember encountering him in Marylebone
Road one fine fall day. I was in a jaunty mood. "Where are
you off to?" I asked him. He told me he was heading for
the bookseller Bertram Rota, then in Vigo Street, to sell him
some manuscript pages. I said, "How much does he give you
for them?" Five pounds, Ted said. I said, "I'll give
you ten." I enjoyed transactions like that. I also gave
Ted money to help start up Modern Poetry in Translation.
I was quite the debonair young patron of the arts at that time.
There were two main obstacles to a deeper
friendship between us. One was geography. Ted moved to North
Tawton in Devon in 1961; for most of the 1960s, I was living
in London and in the south of Spain. The other was Sylvia. I
didn't take to  Sylvia. We were
cordial to one another at first, but after she discovered that
I knew people in New York who had once known her, she became
distinctly cold to me. And yet, in his letters to me from Devon,
Ted sends me her love and tells me of her interest in my work.
I never doubted Ted's feelings for me.
Like an ideal older brother, he showed real interest in my work,
always overpraising it and encouraging me to write more. Not
only did Ted pay attention to my writing, he also asked my opinions
about his own. In his foreword to Difficulties of a Bridegroom,
he tells of showing me his story "The Suitor" and of
me saying "You should have called it 'Death and the Maiden'."
That would have been during the winter of 1962, after his son,
Nicholas, was born. "Your signsake," he wrote of Nicholas,
born under Capricorn. At times Ted's belief in astrology seemed
almost mediæval to me. At other times it seemed of a piece
with his scholarly interest in spirits, witches, magic, alchemy:
elements of understanding the Elizabethian world picture. It
was different with Sylvia. Or so I gathered from Ted. "She
witched herself into that building," he said one
day as we passed 27 Fitzroy Road, the house where Sylvia died
(and where, as has often been noted, William Butler Yeats once
lived).
Ted could be teased about his beliefs.
(I doubt you could tease Yeats.) When he offered to cast the
horoscope of my daughter Susanna, who was born in London in September
1965, I said,"You really believe in that stuff, don't you,
Ted?"
"Sometimes it's a useful way of
focussing one's attention on a person."
"So is a kiss, Ted."
"Well, you've got me there, haven't
you, Ben?" he said.
* * *
I moved back to New York City in January
1966, and Ted and I kept up our friendship exclusively by letters.
Ted's are fitful, apologetic, often beginning with phrases like
"Long time since I wrote you" or "Sorry for the
long delay." He writes me explications of Wodwo,
Crow and Orghast and as always expresses interest
in my work in the theatre. Most of his letters are handwritten
on both sides of the paper, sometimes extending up the left-hand
margin and ending upside down on the top. Rereading them, I hear
his voice: energetic, hypnotic, unstoppable.
Ted came to New York in September of
1986. Except for a brief visit in 1984, this was the first time
I'd seen him in almost twenty years. He was here representing
the Plath estate in an action concerning the 1979 movie of The
Bell Jar. The action was brought by Dr. Jane V. Alexander,
a psychiatrist in Brookline, Massachusetts, who figured in both
the movie and the book as a character called Joan Gilling. A
scene in the movie shows Gilling making homosexual advances towards
Esther Greenwood, as the Plath character was named. Dr. Alexander
claimed that her reputation had been damaged by the movie and
she was asking $6,000,000 in compensation, not only from the
Plath estate but also from 14 other defendants, including Harper,
the publisher of The Bell Jar, Avco Embassy Pictures and
various other corporations. The trial was expected to last six
weeks.
Ted arrived with his sister, Olwyn, at
about four in the afternoon. We had tea in my living room, a
long bright room on the Upper West Side with an oblique view
of the Hudson. Ted and Olwyn were in New York in order to find
a lawyer. Before them was the prospect of a long, expensive trial.
Both of them were under strain, Ted the more visibly so. His
complexion was pale and his long hair unkempt. In the States,
he explained, more even than in England, he had to contend with
the "maenads," his term for those devotées of
the cult of Sylvia Plath who blamed him for her suicide. I said
I was sorry to see him so beleaguered. He said,"And I'm
sad to see you in a wheelchair, Ben." At our last meeting,
three years before, the symptoms of my multiple sclerosis had
not been so advanced.
Ted was back in New York in January of
1987. The whole affair was over almost before it began. There
was to be a settlement of $150,000. "All that the doctor
wanted, Ben, was to have her day in court," Ted said. None
of the judgement was chargeable to the Plath estate. Nevertheless,
he told me, the costs to the estate had been considerable. "One
year's earnings," he said. The amount was large. I forget
how much exactly. It astonished me, though.
Olwyn wasn't present that afternoon.
A disappointment to me. I feel a bond with Olwyn. Ted came with
the aptly named John Springer, a New York publicist. Christopher
Hitchens was also there. Ted spoke of the lawyer Victor Kovner
who'd represented the Plath estate. "Very good lawyer, wonderful
man.
I asked him how much trouble the "maenads"
had been. "No more than usual, Ben," he said. "I've
got John to thank for that." Then he told me of Ted Cornish,
a healer in Okehampton, Devon. "He has helped people over
long distances, Ben," he said. "I'll give you his telephone
number." Nobody spoke for a moment. My wife, Dorothy, gave
me a skeptical glance. I fancied I saw Christopher making a scornful
mental note. Not for the first time in my friendship with Ted,
I thought of that passage in Henry IV, Part I when Glendower
says, "I can call spirits from the vasty deep" and
Hotspur replies:
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
I promised I'd call Ted Cornish.
* * *
In 1990 I gave up the magazine Grand
Street which I'd started in 1981. Failing health, rising
costs. Ted wrote that he was sorry to hear that the magazine
was folding. He went on to write: "In retrospect, I see
I have submitted very little. Partly out of the wish to spare
you having to turn down work from a friend." But Ted's contribution
of three poems to the first issue of Grand Street was
exceedingly important. It helped establish the magazine, and
his second contribution, "Sylvia Plath and Her Journals,"
in the third issue of Grand Street, made me feel that
the magazine was indeed established. Ted had blessed the magazine,
which was exactly the kind of privilege I had from Ted from the
time of our first meeting, through our correspondance, up to
the time he died: a beneficence, a blessing on everything I did.
* * *
After Ted died, his widow, Carol, sent
me many photographs: Ted with the Poet Laureate's stipulated
cask of sherry; Ted fishing in Cuba, in Scotland; Ted with an
aged Leonard Baskin; Ted with Carol over the years.... My favorite
is of Ted holding the case containing the Order of Merit as the
Queen looks on with a genial smile. Ted smiles too like a small
boy who's gotten the Christmas present he wants. Physically,
he looks strong. In twelve days he was dead. Olwyn to me: "It's
almost as though he was suddenly shot."
On October 11th, 1999, about a year after
his death, I went with my wife to a tribute to Ted at the 92nd
Street Y. Here is where I first saw him, in the Winter of 1956.
He read then from The Hawk in the Rain which had been
given a prize that year for the best first book of poems. Now
several famous poets were reading from his numerous books and
a famous actress was reading from his dramatic works. When they
were done, the lights came down, and, over the sound system of
the auditorium, we heard Ted's spellbinding voice. He read "The
Thought Fox," from The Hawk in the Rain, with its
last line, "The page is printed."
Ben Sonnenberg
lives in New York City. He was the publisher of the literary
journal Grand Street and is counselor to CounterPunch. He is
the author of Lost
Property, which is available for free to CounterPunch Supporters.
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