Reading word, image, and the body of the book: Ted Hughes and Leonard Baskin's Cave Birds

The narrative of Cave Birds climaxes in "Bride and groom lie hidden for three days," where the flayed and purified protagonist is reassembled in union with the neglected female in a ritual alchemical marriage. In Hughes's poem, the predatory female seems to have melted away, presumably because the hero has accepted her as part of himself, but in Baskin's illustration (fig. 17, a product of round C, in which Baskin illustrated Hughes's poems) her powerful legs and torso and impossibly pneumatic breasts pull against the poem's lyricism. The poem charts a dance of mutual remaking as male and female create each other out of the world's refuse:

      She gives him his eyes, she found them
      Among some rubble, among some beetles

      He gives her her skin
      He just seemed to pull it down out of the air
                                       and lay it over her (56)

In a sexualizing of Yeats's vow to "lie down" in the "foul rag and bone shop of the heart," male creation reciprocates female as "they bring each other to perfection," "gasping with joy, with cries of wonderment." The sparsity of punctuation is as headlong as any of Dickinson's dashes. The visual pattern of urgently overlapping lines expresses the intertwining of their making, repeated in the horizontal reach of the bird man's outstretched leg across the thigh of the bird woman in Baskin's illustration, where their feathers are nearly all stripped away, showing the human features beneath, making explicit the volume's presiding anthropomorphism.

After 55 pages of poems and pictures, it is impossible not to read this climax as also a description of the volume's collaboration, of the mutual bringing to perfection of poet and artist, word and image constituting each other in a book whose binding proves their inextricability. Like other collaborators (Frank O'Hara and Larry Rivers in Stones, for example), Hughes and Baskin work self-reflexively. The reassembled body parts ("spine," "plates"), the stitching "with steely purple silk," and the inlaying with "scrolls" play off the art of bookmaking.

[FIGURE 17 OMITTED]

But Baskin's image makes evident the fact that the task he and Hughes set for themselves was formidable, and there are arguments to be made that the collaboration does not wholly succeed. Elsewhere powerfully responsive to the written word, (18) Baskin, in round C, produced some images that are, as Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts justly observe of "Bride and groom," "inferior" (200). (See also "His legs ran about.") Ironically, the poem that celebrates the mutual creation of man and woman, word and image, inspired the least satisfying image in the volume. Fascination with the hybrid, with the results of unions of difference, can easily shade into the grotesque, as they do here.

And what are we to make of the extent of the mechanical metaphor of "Bride and groom," so at odds, as critics have protested, with the celebration of a reunion with earthy physicality? While the art of the book echoes in the description, bride and groom emerge from their mutual making more like fine machines with "delicate cogs" and "newly wound coils, all shiningly oiled" (56). Such questions about the success of Cave Birds belong to a larger critique of the gap between Hughes's primitivist message and his ability to realize it himself. Graham Bradshaw's thoughtful reservations about Hughes's mythologizing are worth recalling here. He observes that it "can seem primitivistic in worrying ways, when the saving 'primitive' message depends, for its creative advancement, on a highly elaborate and 'intellectual' ideology of romantic retrospection" (237), but he concludes that Hughes was aware of the difficulties and writes that awareness into the self-reflexive closing poem of Cave Birds, "Finale" ("At the end of the ritual/up comes a goblin"). The poem