the war remains of keith douglas and hughes a poet, who in the same fashion roams the battlefield, searching remorselessly for
whathe can plunder. All war poetry is loot.
‘Out’ follows Hughes’s intensive reading of Douglas in the early Sixties; another
poem regarding his father’s war service, ‘For the Duration’, published in 1989,
follows his return to Douglas for a new 1987 edition of his poems. Hughes’s
father’s martial activities have not gainedin energy or force in the intervening
quarter-century. Hughes describes his father at war: ‘again and again|Carrying in
the wounded|Collapsing with exhaustion’, then being thrown by a ‘shell-burst’
‘Before you fell under your load into the trench’.^24 The son recalls of the shrapnel
that hit his father ‘how it spun you’ and remarks, too, the ‘traversing machine-gun
that tripped you’. Billie Hughes appears to have stumbled gracelessly across many
battle-fronts, ‘collapsing’, falling, being ‘spun’ and ‘tripped’, his physical ineptitude
seeming itself to have contributed to his inexplicable survival.
In his 1987 ‘Introduction’ Hughes pursues an extensive comparison of Douglas
with Wilfred Owen in ways that illuminate these lyric portraits of his father.
According to Hughes, Owen’s ‘empathy with the wounded and killed suggests a
supine figure’, drawing us back to the motionless father and prostrate child in
‘Out’, overwhelmed and laid low by domesticated empathy. Meanwhile, Douglas’s
poetry exhibits ‘a masculine movement, a nimble, predatory attack, hard-edged,
with a quick and clean escape’. Hughes offers a historical analysis, contrasting
‘the punished, mobilized experience’ of the Second World War and ‘the helpless,
immobilized innocence’ which he recognizes in retrospect is in fact a personal
analysis.^25 In a 1988 letter he recollects that after he had written that piece, he
realized that Owen ‘grew to represent my father’s experience’, and Douglas came to
represent that of his brother Gerald, ‘(who was in North Africa through the same
period). So that pattern of antithetical succession was prefigured, for me, and quite
highly charged.’^26 But a sense of urgency, while unacknowledged, comes across in
a 1964 letter from Hughes to his brother, who had moved to Australia, and to
whom he had sent his new edition: ‘Did you get the Keith Douglas poems, Gerald?
Answer this.’^27 And Plath had recognized this fraternal relationship to Douglas as
well, when she wrote of his effect on her and Hughes, ‘Both of us...feel he would
have been like a lovely big brother to us.’
Tacitly admitting to Douglas’s mother his disappointment in his own heroic
father, Hughes writes to her that her ‘son must have been a kind of man one
looks for in vain among the survivors, and even among much of history’. But
perhaps summoning the ‘razor energy’ that Hughes so admires in Douglas’s poetry
(^24) Hughes, ‘For the Duration’, inCollected Poems, 760.
(^25) Hughes, ‘Introduction’, in Douglas,Complete Poems, pp. xxvii, xxv–vi, xxiii.
(^26) Hughes to William Scammell, 2 Feb. 1988, ‘Postscript 1: Douglas and Owen’, in Hughes,Winter
Pollen: Occasional Prose, ed. William Scammell (London: Faber, 1994), 215.
(^27) Hughes to Gerald Hughes, n.d. [postmarked 14 July 1964], Gerald Hughes Papers (MSS 854),
Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.