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

      reminds us that the problem confronts the poet as well as his
      protagonist; this suggests how Hughes has avoided or at least
      contained the danger of romantic retrospection and sophisticated
      primitivism, by recognising it within his "alchemical cave drama."
      (Bradshaw 237)

We might understand the cogs and coils in similar terms as another recognition within the narrative of the difficulties of recovering the body, specifically that it is hard to escape the methods and products of mechanical rationalism.

The volume's gender dynamics, however, resist such containment within the narrative. Even a sympathetic feminist reader like Nathalie Anderson finds the terms of the mystic marriage unsatisfying. "Perfection," she notes of "Bride and groom," may "feel diminishing to a female reader": "'she' characteristically finds the parts of his body ... while 'he' characteristically devises her parts" (106-07). Rarely in this volume does the main female character exist on her own: always she is understood as his victim and the necessary component of his redemption. Apart from her desire to end the victimization, her need (does she, too, require reunion?) is never an issue. In addition, there is no sense within the narrative that the erotic frisson that the predatory females provide their author (and maybe their reader/viewers) might be a problem.

Although Cave Birds offers evidence that collaboration is not the panacea it is sometimes imagined to be, Hughes's repeated collaborations have the effect, in one aspect of his life, of bringing his mythologizing into the realm of practical activity, of giving it a small but real commitment to the collaboration itself and to the other artist, and of producing a tangible consequence in the collaborative book. Collaboration grounds Hughes's great theme--the integration of damaged, rational man with the other, the recovery of empathy--in a social commitment.

Now is a good time, as Hughes's life and achievements are being reconsidered following his death, to give his collaborative works the thoughtful readings they deserve and to undertake comparative studies placing them in the context of other modern experiments with words, images, and the body of the book. How would Hughes's collaborations appear compared with Creeley's or O'Hara's? Such defamiliarizing would, I think, prove suggestive in understanding and assessing Hughes's achievements by reshaping the field in which we see them. It would also help expand the current, growing effort to write the history of collaboration in twentieth-century poetry not only by adding Hughes to the account but also by demonstrating the extension of collaborative practice beyond avant-garde circles.

I thank the curator, Douglas McElrath, and the staff of the University of Maryland Rare Books Collection, and Steve Eniss of Emory University Special Collections and Archives, for their generous time and help with materials in their collections. I also thank Randall McLeod for his responses to an earlier, shorter version of this essay given as a talk at the Society for Textual Scholarship meeting in 2001 and Catherine Hays for her help with the images.