Ted Hughes and Kim Philby – unique, original, or rough, scuffed and slightly foxed?
When I was reading two biographies recently I discovered that a fox emerged, quite fortuitously, as a character that forced the respective and totally unrelated subjects to confront a number of truths about themselves, truths that followed on from deceit and treachery.
These biographies are the recently published Ted Hughes, the unauthorised life by Jonathan Bate and A Spy among Friends – Kim Philby and the great betrayal by Ben Macintyre.
In folklore, the fox has a peculiar attractiveness. He symbolises cunning and craftiness, yet incorporates into his character a certain ability to get out of difficult and outrageous situations. I’ve sometimes thought that Sisyphus must have had a fox as a familiar. From the mediaeval Reynard to Erwin Rommel, slipperiness has been a declared characteristic of the fox.
Let me first mention a couple of poems of Ted Hughes. His well-known and well-cited poem The Thought-Fox came as the result of a dream warning about the poet facing up his responsibilities as an artist. There is the blank sheet of paper, the visitation, and
‘with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox,
It enters the hole of the head.’
Hughes, as an undergraduate, had dreamt of a wounded, burnt fox calling him to task for being dishonest to his own poetic self. Hughes then gave up reading English and turned to Archaeology and Anthropology. A few years later, he wrote the poem.
At the end of his life, another poem, Epiphany, from Birthday Letters tells the tale of the poet-persona being offered a fox-cub, the realisation of what it would entail and the subsequent rejection of the fox.
‘What would we do with an unpredictable,
Powerful, bounding fox,
The long-mouthed flashing temperament….’
In could be said Hughes was describing himself.
And another intriguing encounter with a ghost fox comes in Hughes short story ‘Deadfall’
So what do all these references have to do with deceit and treachery? It just seems to me that Hughes was a man who had created parallel lives and had compartmentalised his existence in such an expert way that when he was within one life he didn’t really see his extramural behaviour as deceit. This compartmentalising had become a fundamental part of his consciousness.
I’m not going to write a review of this controversial biography (Hughes’ widow withdrew the ‘authorised’ designation at a late stage). It is certainly worth reading, being wonderfully lucid, well-researched and honest. But I want to concentrate on what I see as a connection between the fox motif and Hughes’ life of deceit and dishonesty.
That Hughes’ affair with Assia Wevil caused his first wife Sylvia Plath a great deal of distress is well-known. What is not so well known is that through the years he seemed to shag anything that moved. In the late sixties he referred in a diary to the triumfeminate of his own life as ABC (Assia, Brenda, Carole), but these were just the women he was considering marrying; it seems that when it came to shagging-partners he could have gone right down the alphabet without any bother.
The fact that the fox was so fascinating to Hughes and such an archetypical symbol of slipperiness, betrayal and deceit, could not have been lost on him. Of course a poet lives in his own world, with its shifting realities and changing parameters and paradigms, and ironically enough it might be that this was the one real world to which he had a holdfast. Hughes had his literary life in London and his county life of hunting, shooting and fishing in Devon. He could be and often was the amoral bohemian during the week and the country squire at the weekend.
When he became Poet Laureate, Hughes might have seen these two lives as merging and perhaps made a decided effort to hold on to a secret life, a foxy, tricksy life yet one that was genuine, insofar as it had nothing to do with his other lives.
But now we come to Ben McIntyre’s book on Kim Philby and how he deceived his friends, especially Nicholas Elliot. It does strike me that in a profession where the ability to deceive and betray is part of the job description and to be perfidious and duplicitous is a worthy accomplishment of a spy, the shock and hurt that arises when ‘friends’ are found to have been used and betrayed is a little naive.
So how does the fox become a symbol of honesty in a long-term professional deceiver, the KGB and MI6 spy Kim Philby?
Unlike his fellow Cambridge spies Burgess and McLean, Philby was quite at ease with his secret life. In fact, it seems to me he needed it. It constituted half of what he was. But he wasn’t being innovative at all. Philby was simply following in his old man’s footsteps, in just the same way a boy might become a baker, a politician, GP or plumber because it’s the family trade. Although McIntyre doesn’t really go into this, there is no real puzzle about Philby’s double life. Spying was what Dad did. The betrayal of his friends and colleagues in MI6 was part of it.
His father was St John Philby aka Sheik Abdullah. He was a polyglot colonial administrator attached to MI6 who for six months of the year was a smooth-talking civil servant, a member of the Atheneum, a connoisseur of fine wines and a charmer. However, he converted to Islam, gave up alcohol, married an Arabian woman and became an advisor of Ibn Saud……for the other six months of the year. He see-sawed between the two for the rest of his life. He was eventually fired from the civil service and MI6. In the same way, so was Kim Philby.
St John was seen as a traitor (although McIntyre claims he wasn’t) whose loyalties lay with Saudi Arabia. Kim was seen as a traitor whose loyalties lay with the Soviet Union. The pattern is clear.
In the fifties, Philby eventuated in Beirut, surviving the dust of suspicion that had been stirred up after the Burgess-McLean defection. Working as a journalist, he was brought back into the MI6 fold by friend Elliot and both of them lived happily in the Middle East. This of course delighted the KGB. Philby who was only perfectly happy when spying, was Elliot’s informant but of course all intelligence went on to Moscow as well. ‘Elliot and Philby spied, plotted and socialised together in a family relationship that intensified over time’.
Their wives became close, their children played together, they went on family holidays together. ‘Philby was spying on everyone and no one was spying in him, because he fooled them all.’ Of course he was also seeing his Russian minder but this also belonged to his routine.
They were ‘days of professional satisfaction and domestic tranquillity.’ I can well believe this. St John’s paternal example was being followed.
So where does the fox come in?
Well, I can’t say whether father St John had a foxy moment of truth but Ben MacIntyre gives us the story of the fox cub called Jackie that Kim Philby, when living in Beirut, had been given by a couple of friends who had bought her from a Bedouin. She became like a dog and Philby found her ‘hopelessly endearing’ and McIntyre tells us that he even wrote a sentimental article about her for Country Life. But it was just at the time when Jackie the vixen had become a symbol of domestic contentment that two incidents changed the world for Philby.
The first was the death of St John Philby. He died suddenly while visiting his son and was buried as a Muslim under his Muslim name. The death of his father caused Philby to go on a bender. It was the beginning of his downfall.
The second incident was the arrest of George Blake as a KGB spy. In nineteen sixty one Blake was sentenced to forty two years imprisonment and suspicion was once more directed at Philby. When Philby heard of Blake’s sentence, he began to crumble, drank more and made mistakes. He might have survived – he had brazened his way out of a much worse situation a decade earlier - but something happened at home that made Philby want to give up. His wife arrived at their apartment to discover her husband drunk and grief-stricken.
Jackie the fox had died, having fallen (perhaps pushed by the maid) from the balcony. Philby was completely inconsolable, his wife and friend Nicholas Elliot perplexed and worried at his anguish. It seemed totally out of proportion. Only the death of his father had affected him so badly.
Evidently, his despair about his father's death was bleeding into his anguish about Jackie. But was the death of the fox a sudden rush of reality into Philby’s life? His father had been the symbol of duplicity and protean loyalties, the man for whom one life had not been enough. But that theatrical life had ended. The fox, while accredited with slyness, dissembling and mendacity was the one creature who could break down the barriers separating Philby’s lives and draw out genuine emotion.
I wonder if, after his defection to Moscow and he had no more need to deceive or betray, Philby found that his life was without purpose. When he died did he have the last words of his father on his lips - ‘God, I’m bored’?
To finish off - let's return to the fox as seer and truth-teller, if also a creature that is astute and cunning, I shall quote another line from Ted Hughes’ poem Epiphany when he describes his desire to adopt his fox cub he had been offered –
‘How would we cope with its cosmic derangements whenever we moved?’
Cosmic derangements indeed.
These biographies are the recently published Ted Hughes, the unauthorised life by Jonathan Bate and A Spy among Friends – Kim Philby and the great betrayal by Ben Macintyre.
In folklore, the fox has a peculiar attractiveness. He symbolises cunning and craftiness, yet incorporates into his character a certain ability to get out of difficult and outrageous situations. I’ve sometimes thought that Sisyphus must have had a fox as a familiar. From the mediaeval Reynard to Erwin Rommel, slipperiness has been a declared characteristic of the fox.
Let me first mention a couple of poems of Ted Hughes. His well-known and well-cited poem The Thought-Fox came as the result of a dream warning about the poet facing up his responsibilities as an artist. There is the blank sheet of paper, the visitation, and
‘with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox,
It enters the hole of the head.’
Hughes, as an undergraduate, had dreamt of a wounded, burnt fox calling him to task for being dishonest to his own poetic self. Hughes then gave up reading English and turned to Archaeology and Anthropology. A few years later, he wrote the poem.
At the end of his life, another poem, Epiphany, from Birthday Letters tells the tale of the poet-persona being offered a fox-cub, the realisation of what it would entail and the subsequent rejection of the fox.
‘What would we do with an unpredictable,
Powerful, bounding fox,
The long-mouthed flashing temperament….’
In could be said Hughes was describing himself.
And another intriguing encounter with a ghost fox comes in Hughes short story ‘Deadfall’
So what do all these references have to do with deceit and treachery? It just seems to me that Hughes was a man who had created parallel lives and had compartmentalised his existence in such an expert way that when he was within one life he didn’t really see his extramural behaviour as deceit. This compartmentalising had become a fundamental part of his consciousness.
I’m not going to write a review of this controversial biography (Hughes’ widow withdrew the ‘authorised’ designation at a late stage). It is certainly worth reading, being wonderfully lucid, well-researched and honest. But I want to concentrate on what I see as a connection between the fox motif and Hughes’ life of deceit and dishonesty.
That Hughes’ affair with Assia Wevil caused his first wife Sylvia Plath a great deal of distress is well-known. What is not so well known is that through the years he seemed to shag anything that moved. In the late sixties he referred in a diary to the triumfeminate of his own life as ABC (Assia, Brenda, Carole), but these were just the women he was considering marrying; it seems that when it came to shagging-partners he could have gone right down the alphabet without any bother.
The fact that the fox was so fascinating to Hughes and such an archetypical symbol of slipperiness, betrayal and deceit, could not have been lost on him. Of course a poet lives in his own world, with its shifting realities and changing parameters and paradigms, and ironically enough it might be that this was the one real world to which he had a holdfast. Hughes had his literary life in London and his county life of hunting, shooting and fishing in Devon. He could be and often was the amoral bohemian during the week and the country squire at the weekend.
When he became Poet Laureate, Hughes might have seen these two lives as merging and perhaps made a decided effort to hold on to a secret life, a foxy, tricksy life yet one that was genuine, insofar as it had nothing to do with his other lives.
But now we come to Ben McIntyre’s book on Kim Philby and how he deceived his friends, especially Nicholas Elliot. It does strike me that in a profession where the ability to deceive and betray is part of the job description and to be perfidious and duplicitous is a worthy accomplishment of a spy, the shock and hurt that arises when ‘friends’ are found to have been used and betrayed is a little naive.
So how does the fox become a symbol of honesty in a long-term professional deceiver, the KGB and MI6 spy Kim Philby?
Unlike his fellow Cambridge spies Burgess and McLean, Philby was quite at ease with his secret life. In fact, it seems to me he needed it. It constituted half of what he was. But he wasn’t being innovative at all. Philby was simply following in his old man’s footsteps, in just the same way a boy might become a baker, a politician, GP or plumber because it’s the family trade. Although McIntyre doesn’t really go into this, there is no real puzzle about Philby’s double life. Spying was what Dad did. The betrayal of his friends and colleagues in MI6 was part of it.
His father was St John Philby aka Sheik Abdullah. He was a polyglot colonial administrator attached to MI6 who for six months of the year was a smooth-talking civil servant, a member of the Atheneum, a connoisseur of fine wines and a charmer. However, he converted to Islam, gave up alcohol, married an Arabian woman and became an advisor of Ibn Saud……for the other six months of the year. He see-sawed between the two for the rest of his life. He was eventually fired from the civil service and MI6. In the same way, so was Kim Philby.
St John was seen as a traitor (although McIntyre claims he wasn’t) whose loyalties lay with Saudi Arabia. Kim was seen as a traitor whose loyalties lay with the Soviet Union. The pattern is clear.
In the fifties, Philby eventuated in Beirut, surviving the dust of suspicion that had been stirred up after the Burgess-McLean defection. Working as a journalist, he was brought back into the MI6 fold by friend Elliot and both of them lived happily in the Middle East. This of course delighted the KGB. Philby who was only perfectly happy when spying, was Elliot’s informant but of course all intelligence went on to Moscow as well. ‘Elliot and Philby spied, plotted and socialised together in a family relationship that intensified over time’.
Their wives became close, their children played together, they went on family holidays together. ‘Philby was spying on everyone and no one was spying in him, because he fooled them all.’ Of course he was also seeing his Russian minder but this also belonged to his routine.
They were ‘days of professional satisfaction and domestic tranquillity.’ I can well believe this. St John’s paternal example was being followed.
So where does the fox come in?
Well, I can’t say whether father St John had a foxy moment of truth but Ben MacIntyre gives us the story of the fox cub called Jackie that Kim Philby, when living in Beirut, had been given by a couple of friends who had bought her from a Bedouin. She became like a dog and Philby found her ‘hopelessly endearing’ and McIntyre tells us that he even wrote a sentimental article about her for Country Life. But it was just at the time when Jackie the vixen had become a symbol of domestic contentment that two incidents changed the world for Philby.
The first was the death of St John Philby. He died suddenly while visiting his son and was buried as a Muslim under his Muslim name. The death of his father caused Philby to go on a bender. It was the beginning of his downfall.
The second incident was the arrest of George Blake as a KGB spy. In nineteen sixty one Blake was sentenced to forty two years imprisonment and suspicion was once more directed at Philby. When Philby heard of Blake’s sentence, he began to crumble, drank more and made mistakes. He might have survived – he had brazened his way out of a much worse situation a decade earlier - but something happened at home that made Philby want to give up. His wife arrived at their apartment to discover her husband drunk and grief-stricken.
Jackie the fox had died, having fallen (perhaps pushed by the maid) from the balcony. Philby was completely inconsolable, his wife and friend Nicholas Elliot perplexed and worried at his anguish. It seemed totally out of proportion. Only the death of his father had affected him so badly.
Evidently, his despair about his father's death was bleeding into his anguish about Jackie. But was the death of the fox a sudden rush of reality into Philby’s life? His father had been the symbol of duplicity and protean loyalties, the man for whom one life had not been enough. But that theatrical life had ended. The fox, while accredited with slyness, dissembling and mendacity was the one creature who could break down the barriers separating Philby’s lives and draw out genuine emotion.
I wonder if, after his defection to Moscow and he had no more need to deceive or betray, Philby found that his life was without purpose. When he died did he have the last words of his father on his lips - ‘God, I’m bored’?
To finish off - let's return to the fox as seer and truth-teller, if also a creature that is astute and cunning, I shall quote another line from Ted Hughes’ poem Epiphany when he describes his desire to adopt his fox cub he had been offered –
‘How would we cope with its cosmic derangements whenever we moved?’
Cosmic derangements indeed.
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