Literature, lesbianism, psychiatry, film making, television and video cassettes were all touched upon in United States District Court today as a $6 million libel suit opened here … The defendants include 14 companies and individuals, including Avco Embassy Pictures, which produced the 1979 film derived from the novel; CBS Inc., which broadcast it twice; Time-Life Films, the owner of Home Box Office, which played it nine times; Vestron Inc., which made and distributed a video cassette of the film, plus the director and screen writer of the film … At the defendants’ table sat Ted Hughes, the poet laureate of England and a major defendant in the case.9
Many events in Ted Hughes’s eventful life have a surreal quality about them, but none more than this: Her Majesty’s Poet Laureate sits in a court room in the city of the Boston Tea Party, as defendant in a $6 million libel action against a film of a book that he did not write.
The full circumstances of the case, and its central significance in the Ted Hughes story, will be discussed later.10 What is particularly fascinating about his Deposition is that it provided the occasion for one of Hughes’s most forthright statements about what he considered to be the fallacy of biographical criticism. One reason why Jane Anderson had a good chance of winning her case, provided she could show that the character of Joan Gilling was indeed a ‘portrait’ of her, was that the first American edition of The Bell Jar, published posthumously in 1971, included a note by Lois Ames, who had been appointed by Ted and Olwyn Hughes as Sylvia Plath’s ‘official biographer’. The Ames note stated explicitly that ‘the central themes of Sylvia Plath’s early life are the basis for The Bell Jar’ and that the reason she had published it under a pseudonym in England shortly before her death (and not attempted to publish it at all in the United States) was that it might cause pain ‘to the many people close to her whose personalities she had distorted and lightly disguised in the book’.11
The name of Sylvia Plath has become synonymous with the idea of autobiographical or confessional literature. Teachers have a hard time persuading students that the character of Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar, working as an intern at a New York fashion magazine, is not quite synonymous with Sylvia Plath working for Mademoiselle in June 1953 (‘a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs’).12 Or, indeed, that her most famous and infamous poem ‘Daddy’ is not wholly ‘about’ Sylvia’s relationship to her father Otto and her husband Ted – who habitually wore black, the colour of the poem.
‘Do you remember disagreeing with any aspect of the biographical note?’ Carolyn Grace asked Hughes. He had expected her to be a brisk, hard-edged feminist but found her more like a plump, slow-moving tapir, surprisingly sympathetic. After the Deposition was completed, they had a friendly chat – she told him that she had studied under the famous critic Yvor Winters, who had said how much he admired Ted’s poetry. Hughes, with characteristic self-deprecation, assumed that she had misremembered and that the poet whom Winters really admired was his friend Thom Gunn. In the late Fifties, they had been the two rising stars, the twin angry young men in the English poetic firmament.
A. I thought the whole thing was unnecessary.
Q. What was unnecessary?
A. Well, I thought by touching, attaching it so closely to Sylvia, it merely encouraged the general dilution that the book was about Silvia’s life, it was a scenario from Silvia’s life.
The court reporter is erratic in her spelling of Sylvia’s name and has, in an almost Freudian slip, misheard ‘delusion’ as ‘dilution’.
Q. Which you disagreed with?
A. Which I disagreed with.
Q. What was the basis for your disagreement, sir, that the book was a scenario of Silvia’s life?
A. The turmoil that I’ve had to deal with since Sylvia died was of every one of her readers interpreting everything that she wrote as some sort of statement about her immediate life; in other words, trying to turn this symbolic artist, really [brief gap in transcription] That’s why she’s so famous, that’s why she’s a big poetic figure: because she’s a great symbolic artist.
It is unfortunate that Hughes’s exact words are lost to the record here, but it is clear what he was arguing: that Plath was a symbolic artist persistently misread as a confessional one. He went on to explain:
My struggle has been with the world of people who interpret, try to shift her whole work into her life as if somehow her life was more interesting and was more the subject matter of debate than what she wrote. So there’s a constant effort to translate her works into her life.
Q. And you object to that?
A. It seems to me a great pity and wrong.13
At the time of the Bell Jar lawsuit, Ted Hughes was battling with Sylvia Plath’s biographers – as he battled for much of his life after her death.
Hughes was prepared for this line of questioning. The day before making his Deposition he had phoned Aurelia Plath, Sylvia’s mother. By one of the coincidences typical of Hughes’s life, Aurelia was preparing to give a lecture in a high school later that week on the very subject of how non-autobiographical her daughter’s novel was. Aurelia was ferociously bitter about the autobiographical elements in her daughter’s work. People had accused her of destroying Sylvia and Ted’s marriage, simply on the basis of Plath’s portrayal of her in the enraged poem ‘Medusa’ in her posthumously published collection, Ariel:
You steamed to me over the sea,
Fat and red, a placenta
Paralysing the kicking lovers.14
The conceit of the poem is that ‘Medusa’ is the name not only of the monstrous gorgon in classical mythology but also of a species of jellyfish of which the Latin name is Cnidaria Scypozoa Aurelia. Mother as love-murdering jellyfish: no wonder Aurelia wanted to play the ‘non-autobiographical’ card.
The trouble was, there had been a clause in paragraph 12 of the agreement between the Avco Embassy Pictures Corporation and the Sylvia Plath Estate (that is, Ted Hughes, represented by his agent, Olwyn Hughes) prohibiting any publicity that referred to the film of The Bell Jar as autobiographical. But somehow this clause had been deleted, in an amendment signed by Ted. Letting this go through was a fatal slip on Olwyn’s part. That is why he felt vulnerable in the case, despite the fact that he had in no sense authorised the offending lesbian scenes in the movie. After the awkward fifteen-minute phone call to Aurelia, he agonised with himself in his journal.
Nobody could deny that The Bell Jar was centred on Sylvia’s breakdown and the trauma of her attempted suicide. Hughes accordingly reasoned that he would have to argue that it was a fictional attempt to take control of the experience in order to reshape it to a positive end. By turning her suicidal impulse into art, Sylvia was seeking to save herself from its recurrence in life: she was trying ‘to change her fate, to protect herself – from herself’ but as an ‘attempt to get the upper hand of her split, her other personality, to defeat it, banish it, and, in the end, extinguish it’ it was ultimately a failure.15 The notion of the ‘split’ or ‘other personality’ in Plath was something to which Hughes returned again and again; it was also an obsession of Plath herself, already manifest in her 1955 undergraduate honours thesis at Smith, which was entitled ‘The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky’s Novels’. But these were deep matters, subtle distinctions that would not be easy to make in court. That night, Ted ate swordfish and went to bed early, readied for the encounter with Anderson’s lawyer the following day. In the morning he awoke to the newspaper headline ‘War with Ghaddafi’. His own literary-legal battle was about to begin.
Even as he was resisting the equation of art and life, Hughes was writing (though not publishing) poetry of unprecedented candour about his marriage to Sylvia. The Boston Deposition was a way-station on the road to Birthday Letters, the book about his marriage to Sylvia which he finally published in January 1998. In courtroom and hotel room, he followed Sylvia’s example of turning life into art by transforming the saga of the Bell Jar lawsuit into a long po
em, divided into forty-six sections, still unpublished today, called ‘Trial’.
He wrote to his lawyer, to whom he had grown very close, directly after the trial: ‘The whole 24 year chronic malaise of Sylvia’s biographical problem seems to have come to some sort of crisis. I’d say the Trial forced it.’16 Or rather, he added, the synchronicity of the trial and his dealings with Plath’s biographers, of whom there were by that time no fewer than six.
Sylvia Plath’s death was the turning point in Ted Hughes’s life. And Plath’s biographers were his perpetual bane. In a rough poetic draft written when a television documentary was being made about her life, he used the image of the film-makers ‘crawling all over the church’ and peering over Sylvia’s ‘ghostly shoulder’. For nearly thirty years, Hughes and his second wife Carol lived in Court Green, the house by the church in the village of North Tawton in Devon that Ted and Sylvia had found in 1961. Their home was, he wrote, Plath’s mausoleum. The boom camera of the film-makers swung across the bottom of their garden. It was as if Ted and Carol were acting out the story of Sylvia on a movie set, their lives ‘displaced’ by her death.
The documentary crew crawled all over the yew tree in the neighbouring churchyard. Ted wryly suggests that if the moon were obligingly to come out and take part in the performance, they would crawl all over it. Both Moon and Yew Tree had been immortalised in Plath’s October 1961 poem of that title: ‘This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. / The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.’ In the documentary, broadcast in 1988, Hughes’s friend Al Alvarez, who played a critical part in the story of Sylvia’s last months, argued that this poem was her breakthrough into greatness.17
Sylvia’s biographers kept on writing, kept on crawling all over Ted. He compares them to maggots profiting at her death, inheritors of her craving for fame: ‘This is the audience / Applauding your farewell show.’18 Hughes was interested in both the theatricality and the symbolic meaning of Plath’s moon and yew tree, whereas the biographers and film-makers worked from a crudely literal view of poetic inspiration. His distinction in the Deposition between the ‘symbolic’ and the autobiographical artist comes to the crux of the matter.
Having studied English Literature at school and university, and having continued to read in the great tradition of poetry all his life, he was well aware of the debates among the Romantics of the early nineteenth century. For William Wordsworth, all good poetry was ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’. Poetry was ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. Wordsworth was the quintessential autobiographical writer, making his art out of his own memories and what he called ‘the growth of the poet’s mind’. His friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, by contrast, though he also mused in verse in a deeply personal voice, argued that the greatest poetry was symbolic, that it embodied above all ‘the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal’. We might say that Wordsworth was essentially an elegiac poet, mourning and memorialising times past, whereas Coleridge was a mythic poet, turning his own experiences into symbolic narratives by way of such characters as the Ancient Mariner and the demonic Geraldine in ‘Christabel’.
It might initially be thought that Plath was the Wordsworth (her autobiographical sequence Ariel being her version of Wordsworth’s contributions to Lyrical Ballads) and Hughes the Coleridge (his Crow standing in for the Mariner and his figure of the Goddess for Geraldine). Ted Hughes certainly was as obsessed with Coleridge as he was with Shakespeare. But in another sense, Hughes was more of a Wordsworth: he was shaped by a rural northern childhood, by the experience of going to Cambridge, then abroad, then to London. He was the one who followed in Wordsworth’s footsteps as Poet Laureate. Perhaps he was, as an admiring friend of his later years, manuscripts dealer Roy Davids, put it, ‘Coleridge-cum-Wordsworth, and yourself’.19
Seamus Heaney, a more long-standing and even closer friend, began a lecture on Ted Hughes by describing how there was once a poet born in the north of his native country, ‘a boy completely at home on the land and in the landscape, familiar with the fields and rivers of his district, living at eye level with the wild life and the domestic life’. This poet began his education in humble schools near his home, then went south to a great centre of learning. His work was deeply shaped by his reading in the literary canon but also by his memories ‘of that first life in the unfashionable, non-literary world of his childhood’. Convinced of his own poetic destiny, he grew famous and mingled with the rich and the powerful, even to the point of becoming ‘a favourite in the highest household of the land’. But the mark of his lowly beginning never left him: ‘His reading voice was bewitching, and all who knew him remarked how his accent and bearing still retained strong traces of his north-country origins.’20 Heaney then surprised his audience by revealing that this story contained all the received truths about the historical and creative life of Publius Virgilius Maro, better known as Virgil, the ‘national poet’ of ancient Rome. Of course his audience recognised that it was also the story of Hughes. What Heaney did not register at the time was that it is also the story of Wordsworth.21
Later in the talk, though, he did explicitly invoke Wordsworth. The context was a discussion of ‘But I failed. Our marriage had failed,’ the last line of ‘Epiphany’, a key poem in Birthday Letters in which Ted is offered a fox cub on Chalk Farm Bridge. The finality and simplicity of this conclusion, said Heaney, placed it among the most affecting lines in English poetry, alongside the end of Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ (‘And never lifted up a single stone’). For Heaney, the whole of ‘Epiphany’ answered to Wordsworth’s own requirements for poetry, as laid out in the 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads: ‘in particular his hope that he might take incidents and situations from common life and make them interesting by throwing over them a certain colouring of imagination and thereby tracing in them, “truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature”’.22
One reason why Virgil and Wordsworth and, above all, Hughes meant so much to Heaney, whose signature collection of poetry was entitled North, is that their progression from humble rural origin to great fame and the highest social circles was also his own. He too is the poet described at the opening of the lecture. The transformation of the incidents of ordinary life through the colouring of imagination: this was the essence of Wordsworth, of Hughes and of Heaney.
There is a further similarity between Hughes and Wordsworth. Above all other major English poets they are the two who were most prolific, who revised their own work most heavily and who left the richest archives of manuscript drafts in which the student can reconstruct the workings of the poetic mind. Furthermore, they both wrote too much for the good of their own reputation. Sometimes they wrote with surpassing brilliance and at other times each became almost a parody of himself. Of what other poets does one find oneself saying so frequently ‘How can someone so good be so bad?’
Indeed, what other major poet has been so easy to parody? In the late Sixties, the satirical magazine Private Eye began publishing the immortal lines of E. J. Thribb as an antidote to the dark Hughesian lyrics that filled the pages of the BBC’s highbrow Listener magazine. The fictional poet, ‘aged 17½’, had no difficulty in impersonating the voice: crow, blood, mud, death, short line, break, no verb. Others followed, notably Wendy Cope, with her ‘Budgie Finds His Voice From The Life and Songs of the Budgie by Jake Strugnell’: ‘darkness, blacker / Than an oil-slick … And the land froze / And the seas froze // “Who’s a pretty boy, then?” Budgie cried.’23 Cope has the affection that is the mark of the best parody, which cannot perhaps be said for Philip Larkin in a letter to Charles Monteith, his and Hughes’s editor at Faber and Faber, upon being asked to contribute a poem for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, in which he mischievously and scatologically parodied the language of Crow.24
Larkin, with his grumpy self-abnegating pose, was Hughes’s mighty opposite among the major English poets of the second half of the twentieth century. He liked to tease his rival over
his reputed effect on women: ‘How was Ilkley? I am sure you were as big a success there as here. I hope all these stories about young girls fainting in the aisles are not exaggerated.’ And to rib him for his interest in astrology: ‘Dear Ted, Thank you for taking the trouble to send my horoscope which I shall carefully preserve, though I don’t know whether it is supposed to help me or frighten me; perhaps a bit of both. I never thought to ask what time of day I was born, and the information by now is gone beyond recall. I should guess about opening-time.’25
In order to be the object of strong parody, poetry must be memorable. What Larkin and Hughes had in common was the ability to write deeply memorable lines. Though none of Hughes’s turns of phrase has become as famous as one or two of Larkin’s, he is with Wordsworth and Tennyson in the very select company of Poet Laureates who have written line after line that passes the ultimate critical test of poetry, to be once read and never forgotten: ‘His stride is wildernesses of freedom’, ‘It was as deep as England’, ‘a sudden sharp hot stink of fox’, ‘I am going to keep things like this’, ‘Your wife is dead’.26
The argument of this biography will be that Ted Hughes’s poetic self was constantly torn between a mythic or symbolic and an elegiac or confessional tendency, between Coleridgean vision and Wordsworthian authenticity. His hostility to Plath’s biographers was partly defensive – he wanted to protect his children and himself, to stave off the haunting memory of her death. But it was also based on the principle articulated in his Deposition: that it is a great pity and wrong to translate an artist’s works into their life. And yet at the end of his career he finally published Birthday Letters, which became the fastest-selling volume in the history of English poetry precisely because it was a translation of his and Sylvia’s shared life into a literary work. The tragedy of his career was that it took so long for the elegiac voice to be unlocked. But how could that have been otherwise, when the work and death of his own wife were turned before his very eyes into the twentieth century’s principal myth of the fate of the confessional poet?
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