Rough Magic

by Paul Alexander

  The book received a number of ambivalent reviews. A typical one was “Letters Focus Exquisite Rage of Sylvia Plath” by Erica Jong, which appeared in the Los Angeles Times. Jong criticized Aurelia Plath for editing the letters to a level she considered “appalling,” and Hughes for pruning Sylvia’s work when he was “the very man who pruned her life,” but she concluded that “Letters Home is an immensely valuable work and I am grateful that Mrs. Plath and Ted Hughes let it be published.” Many more reviews followed—and even a profile of Aurelia Plath in People magazine—before Faber and Faber brought out a British edition of Letters Home on April 20, 1976.

  Around this time, the estate decided to assemble a sampling of Plath’s prose. On October 17, 1977, Faber and Faber released Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, an anthology containing short stories, pieces of journalism, and excerpts from Plath’s notebooks and diaries. Later, Harper and Row published an American edition that had been expanded to include six stories and the novel fragment Stone Boy with Dolphin. The American reviews of Johnny Panic would be few—and mixed. “I have to admit at the outset that this kind of publication makes me uneasy by definition, hinting as it does of rummaging in bureau drawers that the author, had she lived, would doubtless have kept firmly locked,” Margaret Atwood wrote in The New York Times Book Review on January 28, 1979. “What writer of sane mind would willingly give to the world her undergraduate short stories, her disgruntled jottings on the doings of unpleasant neighbors, her embarrassing attempts to write formula magazine fiction?” When the enlarged, American version, updated yet again to include two more short stories, was published in England in April 1979, no news items or reviews of the book appeared at all.

  It was only a matter of time until the estate published a book-length excerpt of the journal that Plath had kept since age twelve. The job of editing the original manuscript did not appeal to Ted Hughes. Instead, the real work of carving the book into shape fell to Frances McCullough, who had edited Plath’s posthumously published books at Harper and Row and now worked for The Dial Press. Consulting with Hughes, McCullough decided to limit the book to essentially the years 1950-59 and to use only about one-third of the material available to them from that period—decisions that significantly altered the content of the book. Perhaps because of the fragmentary nature of the manuscript, or perhaps because they feared that maybe—just maybe— Plath’s marketability had fallen into a sharp decline since both Letters Home and Johnny Panic had posted anemic sales figures, Harper and Row did not purchase The Journals of Sylvia Plath. However, The Dial Press jumped at the chance to acquire the volume, which was released on March 31, 1982.

  The public interest in the book was so strong that, almost immediately, the first hardback printing of thirty-five thousand copies sold out completely. Wide critical coverage spurred sales on. Within weeks of the book’s release, major reviews appeared in a great variety of publications—Newsweek, The Atlantic Monthly, The Saturday Review, and most large city newspapers. In almost every review, one criticism surfaced—a criticism that Ted Hughes openly invited in the final paragraph of his brief foreword when he alluded to the two notebooks in which Plath had kept her diary from late 1959 until “within three days of her death.” Hughes declared: “The last of these contained entries for several months, and I destroyed it because I did not want her children to have to read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival).” And what of the second notebook? “The other disappeared,” Hughes stated flatly, offering no further explanation. Revelations of this sort left Hughes—indeed, the project itself—vulnerable to harsh attack. None was harsher than Peter Dav-ison’s. “How can we content ourselves, with a book so riddled with editorial expurgations, with omissions that stud the text like angry scars, with allusions to destroyed and ‘disappeared’ parts of the journals?” Davison wrote in the Washington Post on April 18. “Does anyone imagine that Sylvia Plath herself, had she lived, would have permitted these journals to be set in type?” In fact, they never were in England—or anywhere else, for that matter. Though The Journals of Sylvia Plath became an unqualified financial success in America, the estate never allowed the book to be published in any other country.

  Hughes had recorded the history of the notebooks much differently in an earlier, longer version of his foreword, which McCullough refused to print. Admitting that “her husband destroyed” the second notebook, Hughes postulated that “[the] earlier one disappeared more recently (and may, presumably, still turn up).” Regardless of these statements, people close to Hughes believe that both versions of his story are inaccurate. According to them, at the time of the publication of The Journals, the two notebooks existed intact. They still do. Hughes denies these claims.

  Despite numerous calls for a “collected” Plath, pleas that started in the mid-sixties and did not stop for the next decade and a half, the estate did not seriously begin the preparation of such a volume until well into the seventies. The resulting The Collected Poems finally appeared in England (Faber and Faber) on September 28, 1981; in America (Harper and Row) on November 28. For the first time in the publishing history of Plath’s poetry, the American and British editions were the same. The Collected Poems contained 224 “mature” poems (poems composed between 1956 and her death), an appendix of some fifty poems considered juvenilia (poems composed before 1956), a complete list of all poems identified as juvenilia (the total number of juvenile poems listed is 221, of which only the fifty were printed), an introduction written by Hughes, and extensive notes to many of the poems.

  In the deluge of reviews following The Collected Poem’S release, critic after critic praised Plath’s achievement. Only one criticism tended to surface—more questions about Hughes’s decisionmaking. On November 22, 1981, in his front-page review of The Collected Poems in The New York Times Book Review, Denis Donoghue pointed out some important transgressions involving the “haphazard” publishing history of Plath’s work, the sloppy way The Collected Poems was assembled, and—most damning—missing poems. For instance, “Mad Girls Love Song,” Plath’s famous poem first published in Mademoiselle in the same month as her 1953 breakdown and suicide attempt, is not mentioned in The Collected Poems at all.

  In the end, critics focused on Plath’s poetic achievement, not Hughes’s shortcomings as an editor and an estate administrator. The Collected Poems confirmed what all of Plath’s previous single volumes had only suggested: Plath was, as Alvarez had declared only a week after her death, “the most gifted woman poet of her time.” On April 22, 1982, almost two full decades since her suicide, Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems received the highest honor the American literary community can bestow on a writer’s work, the Pulitzer Prize.

  6

  In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a revolutionary study of women in America. In part, Friedan contended that society prevented a woman from achieving a complete and fulfilled life by forcing her to function within the narrowly defined role of mother-wife-homemaker. The book gave voice to a pervasive problem; soon women were demanding a change of the status quo. In 1965, Friedan, along with a small group of concerned women, formed the National Organization for Women in Washington, D.C. Over the next few years, the women’s movement grew dramatically. In July 1971, Gloria Steinem founded Ms. magazine, the first national publication devoted to addressing the problems of the “new” woman.

  In the single decade following The Feminine Mystique’s release, a sociopolitical movement of staggering size emerged. It was in this climate, in April 1971, that The Bell Jar hit the bookshelves in the United States. Many women responded to the plight of Esther Greenwood, who is disgusted by the hypocritical society in which she lives. They also responded to the “story” of Sylvia Plath, whose destruction, they believed, could be blamed on society’s patriarchal power structure. On the surface, the facts seemed to support this theory. As of the early seventies, almost everything written by or about Plath—her four books of poems, The Bell Jar
, The Savage God, and several memoirs and biographical notes—suggested that she had suffered her last suicidal breakdown because she became disillusioned when she realized that what society had promised her and what she had gotten in her life were two different things entirely. After all, she had excelled at Smith, earned a Fulbright to Cambridge, chiseled out, with gritty determination, the beginnings of a serious literary career—all without neglecting the required goal of marrying a man and producing a family—and what had she ended up with? A husband who left her for another woman—left her, that is, in a cold flat in London with two small children and no way to make a good living.

  One vicious indictment of Ted Hughes came from Robin Morgan. In the first stanza of “Arraignment,” a poem included in her 1972 volume Monster, Morgan wrote:

  How can

  I accuse

  Ted Hughes

  of what the entire British and American

  literary and critical establishment

  has been at great lengths to deny,

  without ever saying it in so many words, of course:

  the murder of Sylvia Plath. . . .

  Then, in the rest of the poem, Morgan criticizes Hughes for making “a mint / by becoming Plath’s posthumous editor”; relates the suicide of “Assia Gutmann Wevill,” the woman Hughes never “formally” married; praises Gutmann, “a Jewish mother in the most heroic sense,” for murdering her daughter to save her from a life with Hughes; attacks Alvarez, Steiner, and Lowell for “aiding, abetting, rewarding / her perfectly legal executor"; and, threatens to dismember Hughes, stuff “that weapon” in his mouth, and sew up his lips. After that, “we women [will] blow out his brains.”

  Though Monster became a manifesto of the feminist movement, it was never released outside the United States. Instead, pirated editions appeared in countries like Canada, England, and Australia. On the back of the British edition, the editors echoed the sentiments of “Arraignment.” They quoted two lines from “Mushrooms” that ostensibly reflected the hopes of the women’s movement and ran Plath’s “dates”: “Born 27-10-32 / Driven to Suicide: 11-2-63.”

  During the seventies, radical feminists conducted what they saw as a “holy war” against Hughes. In England, Canada, and especially America, feminists harassed Hughes during his public poetry readings. A woman would stand up in the audience and either launch into a diatribe against him or on occasion recite “Arraignment.” Hughes gave fewer and fewer readings.

  Still, Plath’s devoted followers persisted. Through the years, they traveled to Heptonstall to decorate her grave with flowers. The visitors became so numerous that local church officials proposed putting up signs to direct tourists to the grave—an idea eventually dropped at, some insist, Hughes’s demand. Not content with a floral tribute, eventually visitors, with a hammer and a chisel, would chip Hughes’s surname from the “Sylvia Plath Hughes” engraved on her tombstone, leaving only “Sylvia Plath.” It was generally assumed that feminists, angry still with Hughes, had committed the acts. Each time that Hughes replaced a defaced stone with one that displayed Plath’s full married name, vandals would chisel away the “Hughes” again. In the early eighties, workers, at Hughes’s request, put into place a third new tombstone.

  7

  In the sixties, Ted Hughes went through the violent breakup of his first marriage to a young poet, had an affair with another woman that dragged on into a complicated long-term relationship, and endured the suicides of these two women. The seventies, on the other hand, were a time of comparable tranquillity, as Hughes matured into a father, husband, and “family man.” In 1970, he married Carol Orchard, a nurse, and settled down in London at 74 Fortress Road, so that Nicholas and Frieda could attend an excellent boarding school and still come home every other weekend. Nicholas outperformed Frieda, but eventually both graduated from British public (equivalent to American private) school. Frieda did not go to college; she married and (soon afterwards) divorced. Nicholas went to Oxford University, then entered graduate school in marine biology at the University of Alaska. As Nicholas advanced in the sciences, Frieda pursued the arts. In the eighties, she published two children’s books.

  After his children grew up, Hughes left London to return, now with Carol Orchard, to Court Green. In the seventies and early eighties, he published a number of books, among them Selected Poems: 1957–1967 (1972), Season Songs (1976), Moon-Whales and Other Moon Poems (1976), Gaudete (1977), Moortown (1979), New Selected Poems (1982), and River (1983).

  On May 19, 1984, Sir John Betjeman, who had replaced C. Day Lewis as Britain’s poet laureate twelve years earlier, died of a heart condition at his holiday home in Trebetherick, Cornwall. In the wake of his death, speculation ran high concerning who would replace him as poet laureate. Officially, Queen Elizabeth II would make the announcement, although the Queen really only formalized the nomination made by the Prime Minister, whose appointment secretary drew up a list of candidates. London bookmakers began accepting wagers on which man—or woman—the Queen might select. Several seemed to be possibilities—Stephen Spender, Robert Graves, Roy Fuller, Kathleen Raine—but, finally, one man, Philip Larkin, emerged as the favorite. Hughes was considered, at best, a long-shot. His age, fifty-four, and his violent poetry worked against him.

  Consequently, many observers were shocked when the Queen, upon consulting with Margaret Thatcher, appointed not Larkin but Hughes. It was rumored that Larkin had been Her Majesty’s first choice, but had turned down the honor for medical reasons. (On December 2, 1985, Larkin died in a hospital in Hull, ending what newspapers called “a chronic illness.”) Hughes’s name was second on the Prime Minister’s list, so the Queen offered the job to him. Finally, appointed to the post, Hughes joined the company of John Dryden; William Wordsworth; Ben Jonson; Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Sylvia Plath would have been the first American ever married to the poet laureate of England.

  8

  After several producers had approached the estate, Jerrold Brandt, Jr., and Michael Todd, Jr., purchased the film rights to The Bell Jar in the mid-seventies for a reported one hundred thousand dollars. They then lined up Marjorie Kellogg to write the screenplay, which Larry Peerce would direct. Best known for the critically acclaimed Goodbye, Columbus and the commercially successful The Other Side of Midnight, Peerce hired a veteran cast in the supporting roles (Julie Harris would portray Mrs. Greenwood; Anne Jackson, Dr. Nolan; Barbara Barrie, Jay Cee; and Robert Klein, the country-western disc jockey) to complement the newcomer he had chosen to play Esther, Marilyn Hassett. The film was shot in and around Manhattan during the summer of 1978.

  When The Bell Jar was released by Avco Embassy Pictures on March 21, 1979, it met with disastrous reviews. The New York Times’ Janet Maslin compared Hassett’s Esther to “a cheerleader whose team has just lost a big game"—certainly not the complicated young woman in the novel. Also, Maslin attacked the filmmakers for tampering with the novel’s plot and characters. One major diflFerence between the book and the movie was the way Esther tried to kill herself. Instead of hiding in a crawl space and swallowing fifty sleeping pills, as she does in the novel, in the film Esther dances drunkenly around the basement of her home, washing down a handful of pills with a bottle of liquor, until she dissolves into a heap on the floor. Maslin wrote: “This sequence, which lasts a long time and isn’t aflFecting in the slightest, is emblematic of the movie’s way of spelling things out ad nauseam and still not making them clear.” Ultimately, the decision to change the novel’s plot and characters would bring The Bell Jars filmmakers more than just bad reviews.

  On March 19, 1982, Jane Anderson, Plath’s Smith acquaintance with whom she was hospitalized at McLean, and by then a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, filed a six-million-dollar lawsuit against The Bell Jars filmmakers because she felt she had been defamed by the movie. When the filmmakers had developed the character Joan Gilling, whom Anderson thought Plath had based on her, they changed her from the heterosexual she had been in the novel to a lesbian. One s
equence in the movie, which was not in the book, particularly bothered Anderson. Kneeling on the ground in a field, Joan kisses Esther’s breasts as she tries to convince her to enter into a suicide pact “like lovers.” Esther rejects Joan, who dashes off into the woods, near the mental institution where they are hospitalized, to hang herself from the low branch of a tree.

  “We have no problem with the book,” Anderson’s lawyer, Harry L. Manion III, stated when, after almost five years of delays and postponements, the suit came to trial in Boston in January 1987. The problem that necessitated the suit arose “when Hollywood got its hands on this property.” So, Anderson sued only those individuals and companies who had filmed the novel or who had distributed or broadcast the movie. One party was Ted Hughes, who, as estate executor, had sold the novel’s film rights.

  The trial began on January 20, 1987, before Judge Robert Keeton. Manion represented Anderson. Victor Kovner defended Hughes; Alexander H. Pratt, Jr., the media interests. Immediately, Manion put Anderson on the stand. “I never, never in any way attempted to seduce Sylvia Plath into a homosexual relationship,” Anderson said, her voice controlled yet full of emotion. “I never in any way attempted to get her into a ‘suicide pact like lovers.’ I also never made any suicide attempts or had scars on my breasts”—details in the film, not in the novel. On the Friday night in March 1979, in Boston’s Paris Theatre, where she had first watched The Bell Jar, Anderson testified, she suffered vivid flashbacks, a series of “colored, visual images of various components of the painful aspects” of her torturous months at McLean. However, Anderson proved most effective on her final day of testimony. When Manion asked if she “was then or ever had been” a homosexual, she responded: “I am not now a homosexual, and I have never been a homosexual.” An awkward silence fell in the courtroom. No one was more moved than the jury—the four men and four women, all older, solid, middle-class citizens, who, like Anderson, would not have appreciated having anyone portray them as something they were not, particularly a homosexual.