Hughes, Glyn
HUGHES, Glyn
Nationality: British. Born: Middlewich, Cheshire, 25 May 1935. Education: Altrincham Grammar School, Cheshire, 1946–52; Regional College of Art, Manchester, 1952–56, 1958–59, National Diploma in Design 1956, Art Teacher's Diploma 1959. Family: 1) Wendy Slater in 1959 (marriage dissolved), one son; 2) Roya Liakopoulos in 1974; 3) Jane Mackay in 1990 (marriage dissolved). Career: Art teacher in secondary schools in Lancashire and Yorkshire, 1956–65, and in H.M. Prison, Manchester, 1969–71; extra-mural lecturer in art, University of Manchester, 1971–73. Since 1973 fulltime writer. Awards: Welsh Arts Council prize, 1969; Arts Council bursary, 1970, 1973; Guardian Fiction prize, 1982; David Higham prize, for novel, 1982. Member: Manchester Institute of Contemporary Arts Committee, 1966–69; Arts Council Fellow, Bishop Grosseteste College, Lincoln, 1979–81, and Southern Arts Fellow, Hampshire, 1982–84. Agent: Mic Cheetham Agency, 11–12 Dover Street, London W1X 3PH, England. Address: Mor's House, 1 Mill Bank Road, Sowerby Bridge, West Yorkshire HX6 3DY, England.
Publications
Poetry
The Stanedge Bull and Other Poems. Manchester, Manchester Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1966.
Almost-Love Poems. Oxford, Sycamore Press, 1968.
Love on the Moor: Poems 1965–1968. Manchester, Phoenix Pamphlet Poets Press, 1968.
Neighbours: Poems 1965–1969. London, Macmillan, and Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, Dufour, 1970.
Presence. London, Poem-of-the-Month Club, 1971.
Towards the Sun: Poems/Photographs. Manchester, Phoenix Pamphlet Poets Press, 1971.
Rest the Poor Struggler: Poems 1969–71. London, Macmillan, 1972.
The Breast. Richmond, Surrey, Keepsake Press, 1973.
Alibis and Convictions. Sunderland, Ceolfrith, 1978.
Best of Neighbours: New and Selected Poems. Sunderland, Ceolfrith, 1979.
Plays
Mary Hepton's Heaven, adaptation of his novel Where I Used to Play on the Green (produced Oldham, 1984).
Radio Plays: The Yorkshirewomen, 1978; Dreamers, 1979; The Stranger, 1979; Pursuit, 1999.
Television Plays: Alone on the Moors, 1975; One Man Alone, 1976.
Novels
Where I Used to Play on the Green. London, Gollancz, 1982.
The Hawthorn Goddess. London, Chatto and Windus, 1984.
The Rape of the Rose. London, Chatto and Windus, 1987.
The Antique Collector. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1990
Roth. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1993.
Bronte. N.p., Transworld, 1996; New York, St. Martin's Press, 1997.
Other
Millstone Grit (on Yorkshire and Lancashire). London, Gollancz, 1975; as Glyn Hughes's Yorkshire: Millstone Grit Revisited, London, Chatto and Windus, 1985.
Fair Prospects: Journeys in Greece. London, Gollancz, 1976.
Editor, Selected Poems, by Samuel Laycock. Sunderland, Ceolfrith, 1981.
*Manuscript Collection: West Yorkshire Archive Service, Bradford; Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.
Critical Study: "Glyn Hughes and the Pennine Goddess" by Keith Sagar, in Critical Survey (Oxford, England), 4 (1), 1992.
Glyn Hughes comments:
During the last decade I have published novels mostly, keeping verses in a private notebook to revise and publish them or not, according to what I think later. I certainly hope to return to writing more fully in verse forms. History teaches us that the chance of writing true poetry does seem to increase with age.
The link between my published verse and my novels is for others to analyze, but to me it has seemed an easy passage from one to the other and a development of the narratives I employed in verse anyway. Often I miss the Muse, sometimes with a physical pain, but I also know that the novel has at times provided an exotic and fulfilling bed for us, one in which we have made love many times.
* * *One of the purposes of art is to bring order to the complexity of our experiences so that the truth behind them can be explored and revealed, and one aspect of this truth is to be discovered in the observation of man both against and as part of the terrain he inhabits. In the visual arts the Chinese do this superbly, and so does Hardy in his novels, where a sense of values and proportion, which is a truth in itself, is revealed. It is such an exploration of how the nature and quality of life are shaped and influenced by the environment, a sort of poetic ecology, that marks out Glyn Hughes's poems in Love on the Moor and in his first full collection, Neighbours. As Hughes said in his introduction to Love on the Moor, "My idealism about how people ought to live is implicit in every poem." This has been maintained in his later collections.
The terrain of Hughes's poems is one of those harsh, unrelenting, inbred bits of countryside that still endure in twentieth-century England, as described in "Rock Bottom":
the last place of rickets and bow legs
aching from their grip of iced roads.
Where the stranger's stared-at smile is unreturned,
the stranger's house is shunned.
Even the joys of spring sunshine are hard-won, as in these lines from "Toward the Sun":
The fractured land bursts into grass.
A farmer, woken by the sun and us,
yaps like a terrier at the field's edge
to defend his growth. We laugh,
point, joke. Old walls glow
like unripe apples as we cross his field
to see the coltsfoot flowers.
Hughes's approach is as equally uncompromising and well suited to his subject matter. Unsentimental, his poetry is not without compassion, as illustrated in "Love on the Moor," where the farmer's wife, stirred for a moment by the smile of a visiting salesman—"What might /have been that trickle of light /to the cinders of her heart /stopped at a scowling grate"—calls her man, who shambles out "from his kitchen doze /fly open, feet in oven— /not that he'd ever lied /he would be different." Hughes's ability to touch on just the right nuance of feeling, and in situations where the slightness of its manifestation belies its depth, is quite remarkable.
The life described is harsh, but harshness is not indulged for the sake of it; rather it is allied to the quality of life portrayed, as in "Neighbours":
We communicate
in other ways: we poke the grate,
and whether we rise early or rise late
is boasted from the roof. Each broods alone
with a false air of no-one at home.
It is life withdrawn, pulled into itself—like a snail into its shell—in order to render it bearable. It is Hughes's achievement not only to have described his terrain with economy and accuracy but also to have expressed the spirit of it with a sensitivity that is masterly.