The Artist and The Poet: Leonard Baskin in conversation with Ted Hughes (1983)
by Noel Chanan (© Noel Chanan)
Permissions-cleared transcripts for press-use
The following transcripts have been permissions-cleared for press use in association
with the University of Exeter press-release for The Artist and the Poet (an event being
held on 6 November to mark the tenth anniversary of Ted Hughes’s death).
On friendship and working together [83 seconds] (© Noel Chanan)
LB: One of my strongest and earliest remembrances of you is of you reading ‘Pike’ in my
house.
TH: I didn’t read ‘Pike’. I recited you the first two verses.
LB: No, you read the whole thing.
TH: Didn’t…. Just the first two verses.
LB: How can you remember that?
TH: Clear memory of it.
LB: What always impressed me about me and Ted is how entirely and utterly different
our backgrounds are. That’s the thing that most impressed me about our working
relationship. I’m not saying anything about our friendship.
TH: Why do people become friends? I don’t know.
LB: Well, I think about a great deal… how I this son of a Lithuanian rabbi and white
Russian mother… you know can get on with this Yorkshire…
TH laughing: Yeah, what?
LB: …Englishman of ancient lineages. It’s just odd, isn’t it? How we should be crowhaunted and death-involved. And I mean I have lots of people I’m friends with, with who I
do not share invigorating, inspirational relationship in terms of work. In fact I have that
with almost nobody else. Do you?
[Pause]
LB: Well, you have all those other artists you love [TH & LB laugh]…Those dreadful
artists. [Laughs]
[ends]
On Cave Birds [83 seconds] (© Noel Chanan)
The second important collaboration between Ted Hughes and the America artist,
Leonard Baskin, published under the title Cave Birds, began casually when, just before
he returned to America for a summer break, Baskin presented Hughes with a group of
drawings of fantasized birdlike figures. While Baskin was away, Hughes wove a
sequence of poems round the drawings.
TH: The bird figures become the sort of accuser, the judge, the executioner and so on.
And so anyway end of summer Leonard came back and I drew these out and said, ‘well,
I’ve sort of done our book’, and he said ‘What book?’ and I said well you remember
those doodles you did. And he said ‘I don’t remember any doodles’. I said ‘well you know
those...’.anyway, I gave them to him and he stared at them and he’d obviously
completely forgotten about them. He said ‘DOODLES? GREAT DRAWINGS’.
[Both men laughing]
TH cont: He got so excited he produced another ten. He went off and took even bigger
sheets of paper and he did another ten. So there was I stuck with my protagonist dead
and resurrected and I had to somehow or other fit in a whole new chapter. And so I
prolonged his death, right, so I got him dead and put him into the underworld and then
he was judged again in the underworld, you see, in Egyptian style. So the second ten
drawings became his episodes of judgement and sort of redemption in the underworld.
[ends].
On their artistic collaboration [10 seconds] (© Noel Chanan)
TH: You see our collaboration is not at all deliberate and planned really. All these things
happen by accident. Don’t they? Come about by accident?
LB: Yes, but I think some divine accident.
[ends]
For further information contact the University of Exeter’s Head of Special
Collections, Dr Jessica Gardner (j.p.gardner@exeter.ac.uk).