Ted Hughes enjoyed writing Laureate poems. With his belief in the poet as shaman of the tribe and the royal family as embodiment of the land, he took the role more seriously than any of his twentieth-century predecessors. But, for his deeper poetic self, the new role was a new impediment. If in the autumn of 1984 he was on the brink of following Amichai and Heaney into a poetry of raw personal exposure, the Laureateship held him back. The last thing he wanted in his first years as a national figure was renewed attention in the press to the end of his first marriage and Sylvia’s death. That would have been the inevitable consequence of publication of any significant part of the long-gestated project that eventually became Birthday Letters.
So he kept on approaching his own story indirectly. He acknowledged that among his children’s stories one that came especially close to his inner life was Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth, published in 1986. Ffangs is a vampire bat who doesn’t like the sight of blood and only wants to be human. After various adventures including an audience with the Queen in Buckingham Palace – the sort of encounter which a newly crowned Poet Laureate was well qualified to write about – he goes to the moon, where he discovers the Truth when he kisses a girl called Selena who has a snake in her mouth. She is a figuration of the White Goddess, but her bite-kiss which transforms Ffangs into his true self is also that of Sylvia at Falcon Yard. There was more of that true self in this story than in the poetry collections he published at this time. They were Flowers and Insects, dedicated to Frieda and the Baskins’ daughter Lucretia, a slender volume from Faber containing some very pedestrian writing and few memorable lyrics other than ‘Sunstruck Foxglove’, and The Cat and the Cuckoo, a series of children’s poems to accompany colour illustrations of animals by Reg Lloyd. This was dedicated to, among others, ‘all the children who visit Farms for City Children’.
There was another reason besides the Laureateship why this was not the moment to write publicly about his relationship with Sylvia. On 6 January 1987, he wrote to János Csokits about the usual sort of literary business: the problems that the shoestring publisher Peter Jay was having over a proposed new selection of János Pilinszky’s selected poems, the equally slow progress of a collection of essays on translating poetry that Danny Weissbort was putting together. But these were trifling matters compared to dramatic developments in the lawsuit launched by Jane Anderson in response to the Bell Jar film: he was waiting for a phone call that would summon him to an American courtroom.
26
Trial
Ignorant of the tumblers in the lock
Of U.S. Copyright Law
Which your dead fingers so deftly unpicked.
(‘Costly Speech’, in Birthday Letters)1
When the letter arrived in the spring of 1982, he had no idea who the plaintiff was. A single name: Anderson. He even wondered whether it might be an anagram. The list of co-defendants, an assortment of American INCs and LLCs, was equally baffling. His own name came last. He couldn’t work out what Anderson was complaining about. He had never read The Bell Jar. He hadn’t seen the film, though he had heard that it was very bad. Nor had he read Edward Butscher’s biography of Sylvia Plath, which made a single passing reference to the character of Joan Gilling, rival to Esther Greenwood for the love of Buddy Willard, being ‘loosely based’ on Jane Anderson. Having eventually grasped what it was all about, Ted was puzzled: didn’t the fact that the literary character hanged herself cancel the identification? Anderson had not hanged herself. She had lived to sue nineteen years after the novel was published.
The financial stakes were high. Reading the initial correspondence, he discovered that, by some dreadful oversight, there was a clause in the Bell Jar film contract making him liable for half the cost of any libel action. This created a ‘certain fieriness in the air’ for him, ‘A certain stress of the blood, a burning, a restlessness’. But the more he thought about the questions raised by Jane Anderson’s action, the more intrigued he became. The issues – literary, psychological and biographical as well as legal – were fascinating. The case, he thought, was going to be a bit like an illness: something that would wholly preoccupy him until it went away. The good thing about illnesses was that they activated the immune system. And his deepest creative immune system, he had to admit, had been dormant for a very long time. There was ‘a certain thrill at the hazard ahead – a certain adrenalin elation’.2
The American legal system moved very, very slowly. Especially when there were nearly a dozen defendants involved, most of them corporations. Ted had to work closely with Olwyn, who, as his agent, had negotiated the film deal for The Bell Jar back in the Seventies. They instructed Jeffrey Jones of Palmer and Dodge, 1 Beacon Street, Boston. After two and a half years of information-gathering, delay and negotiation, they made a settlement offer. In October 1984, Ted took the unusual step of writing a personal letter to Jane Anderson, telling her how anxious he was about the stress the case was causing her and giving the reasons why he could not have known about the possible identification of her with the character of Joan Gilling. He offered to give Anderson control of the American rights to The Bell Jar, in order to bring the whole thing to an end. He pleaded poverty: the legal costs had already put his net income for the last financial year into the red. Just for the record, he reasserted his position that he had no prior knowledge of Anderson, that he had not read Butscher, and that from a literary-analytic point of view the identification of her with Joan Gilling was most unlikely. No settlement was agreed. The case rumbled on.
So it was that he flew to New York in March 1986, to make his Deposition. He was worried that the case would be pre-judged in the court of public opinion, with him being found guilty as a form of mass revenge on the part of the feminists, with Robin Morgan at their head. His friends Neil and Susan Schaeffer met him at the airport and they stopped for a good fish dinner on the way to their home. Supporters were being rounded up. Neil had rung Norman Mailer, seeking his assistance. Susan gave him a very helpful essay she had written about ‘The Biographical Fallacy’, a parallel to ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ that he had learned about as a student of English Literature at Cambridge. As a literary work should be judged by its own internal logic, not by the intentions of its author, so no novel should be judged by its alleged biographical origins. Susan Schaeffer had some experience of dealing with people who tried to identify themselves as characters in her novels.
When they went into the city the next day, they saw Ted’s old friend from Sylvia’s day, Ben Sonnenberg, now in a wheelchair. He said that he would try to get Philip Roth to help. Ted jotted down some calculations. He had made $70,000 from the sale of the film rights back in the Seventies. It looked as if the legal case had already cost him £40,000.
Then it was up to Boston to do his homework for the Deposition. He stayed at the Harvard Faculty Club, where he met Seamus Heaney, who now held the prestigious position of Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. The helpful development in the case was that the defendants’ legal team had obtained an old diary of Jane Anderson’s from her student days, in which she wrote ‘Today got into bed for first time with [a female name].’ If she really did have history as a lesbian, then surely it could not be defamation to have portrayed her as one?
While in Boston, Ted went out to Wellesley to see Aurelia Plath, who seemed shrunken and hunched with age, but still full of spirit. Then on Sunday 24 March, he spent the day at Seamus Heaney’s ‘jittery electric typewriter’ (he still preferred handwriting even to a manual typewriter), preparing his statement.3 The following day, in ripe Boston light, he met his lawyer, Jeffrey Jones, who suggested that it would be best if Ted were not called as a witness should the case come to trial. So the Deposition was going to be vital. He showed Ted the two pieces of evidence that were going to cause the most difficulty: a letter that he had signed saying that he was happy with the film and his signature beside the statement ‘this clause is cancelled’, the clause being paragraph 12 of the film contra
ct, where it said that there was to be no reference in any publicity to the movie having autobiographical origins. The cancellation of the clause had licensed the film company to take the biographical line. That was the essence of the problem, and it lay at Ted’s door.
His contrary argument, which he had been working out through detailed analysis of the novel, supported by hundreds of pages of summaries, quotations, diagrams and flow charts, was that The Bell Jar was a narrative of Sylvia’s battle with her own double. This, after all, had been her great literary theme ever since her undergraduate thesis on Dostoevsky. There may have been bits of other people in Joan Gilling, among them Sylvia’s Cambridge housemate Jane Baltzell and her Smith roommate, Nancy Hunter Steiner, who had mentioned the connection, and not objected to it, in an affectionate memoir of Sylvia. So perhaps there was some small element of Jane Anderson. But the most important original for Joan Gilling was Sylvia herself. The trouble was, this was a sophisticated literary and psychological argument. Wouldn’t a jury be more likely to take a simplistic view and side with the wronged Dr Anderson?
When Ted became acquainted with the content of Anderson’s Deposition, he got three very nasty surprises.4 The first was a letter from Heinemann, the original English publishers of The Bell Jar by ‘Victoria Lucas’, thanking him for permission to use Sylvia Plath’s real name in any republication of the novel. This was dated 13 March 1963, just a month after Sylvia’s death. Secondly, there was mention of the letter he had written to Aurelia saying that he wanted to buy a house in North Devon, so he needed money and publication of The Bell Jar in the United States would be the best way of getting it. This would not look good for his reputation, especially with the feminists. Thirdly, there was the fact, completely unknown to him until this moment, that Jane Anderson had visited Sylvia in Cambridge, England, in 1956.
Almost a year passed between Deposition and trial. No settlement was reached. The plaintiff was on her third lawyer and Ted himself on his second. He had parted ways from the first with a $60,000 bill, but fortunately his new counsel, Victor Kovner (‘the best in New York’), had extracted $90,000 of insurance cover from his co-defendants.5 The stakes were high. He felt like a student studying for a bizarre examination. He was waiting for Kovner’s signal telling him it was time to get on a plane.
The phone call came. Leaving a sealed envelope with Olwyn, he boarded a plane to New York. On 14 January 1987, he spent five hours in Kovner’s office, working through every angle on the case. Ted was asked to consider further correspondence with Aurelia Plath that had been obtained from the Lilly Library of Indiana University, which had purchased all the papers pertaining to Sylvia that had been in Aurelia’s possession. He was also forced to confront the fact of his not having published The Bell Jar at all in the United States. Until, that was, the moment when his hand had been forced by the bizarre twist in US copyright law whereby, because Sylvia was a United States citizen who had died abroad, there was only seven years of American copyright protection for the English text. All the evidence pointed to the fact that he was trying to protect Aurelia from The Bell Jar. If he was so keen to protect her, it could only have been because the novel was autobiographical, because she was Esther Greenwood’s mother. So the contention that the book did not contain biographical material simply would not wash. Ted’s response was his argument about doubles. Sylvia was always creating doubles. ‘Lady Lazarus’ was her double. ‘The Jailor’ was her double. So Joan Gilling was Esther Greenwood’s, that is Sylvia Plath’s, double, not Jane Anderson’s.
Ted and Victor also discussed a letter that Sylvia had written from Court Green on 14 November 1961 to her editor at Heinemann, which began, ‘Dear James, No, I’ve not forgotten about the libel issue. In fact, I’ve thought about little else.’6 Michie had gently suggested to her that it might be advisable for her heroine to have a different name from the author of the novel. Plath had thought of using ‘Victoria Lucas’ as both a pseudonym on the title page and the name of the protagonist. This, Michie thought, would be confusing to readers and reviewers. In her letter, Sylvia agreed on a change of name, proposing Esther Greenwood. She then went through various libel risks that Michie had raised. And she told him that most of the characters were based on real people, that the book was all true. ‘Jane (I’m changing her name to Joan) is fictitious,’ she wrote, ‘and so is her suicide.’ But if she was fictitious, then why bother to change her name from Jane to Joan? The inference could well be that, yes, the suicide was fictitious, but the character was based on someone called Jane.
The more Ted and Victor talked the case through, the clearer it became that this was ‘a precedent case for all fiction’. If the court found for Anderson, could any novelist (any poet, indeed?) ever be entirely safe from legal action of a similar kind? There would be enormous interest in the outcome.
On 20 January 1987, Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, sat in a Boston courtroom and watched as Dr Jane Anderson arrived wearing a thin grey cardigan draped over a blue dress. The jury was chosen. It was important that none of them had read the novel or seen the film. From Ted’s point of view something else was important too, as he scribbled in his black notebook: ‘Make sure no Women’s Libbers on the Jury.’7 Then came the opening statement of the plaintiff. The starting point of the case was that everybody knew that The Bell Jar was autobiographical. As to the question of why Ted was among the defendants, despite the fact that he had written neither the novel nor the screenplay: it was because ‘Mr Hughes took it to Hollywood.’
Sandy Pratt, acting for the co-defendants collectively, made his opening remarks. Ignoring Ted’s sophisticated argument about ‘doubles’, he granted that The Bell Jar was autobiographical on Sylvia Plath’s part, but this did not necessarily make it biographical about anyone else. The novel was a fiction, not a factual account, and the movie was a further fictionalisation. The jury looked puzzled at some of these fine distinctions. But Pratt scored a palpable hit when he pointed out that Jane Anderson was not able to bring forward any witnesses in the form of friends saying that there were visible signs of mental harm after she had seen the film. The movie had been released in 1979, but she had not filed her suit until 1982. Why had she waited so long before taking legal action? And was it not the case that she had ‘called her psychiatrist ahead of time, to tell him she was going to the Movie and how she would be upset’? The implication was that she deliberately embarked on a course of action with a view to winning future legal damages. Pratt then said that there was evidence that Anderson did engage in ‘a homosexual act’. Her counsel yelled, ‘I object.’ The judge called the lawyers to the bar for private words. Ted thought that Pratt had gone too far for this early point in the proceedings. He was right: the judge told the jury to disregard the remark about a homosexual act. For the time being, the point was lost.
As the proceedings unfolded, Ted took detailed notes. Every now and then, sitting in the courtroom, he also began to write poems. Among the first of them was one called ‘Beutscher’, a doubling of the names of Sylvia’s psychoanalyst and the author of the biography that had started the whole sorry saga.
Jane Anderson took the witness stand. Key information was given to the jury. She, as well as Sylvia, had dated Dick Norton, the boy who was the original of ‘Buddy Willard’. Indeed, Norton’s affair with Sylvia had started while he was still going out with Jane. Anderson had been in the McLean mental hospital at the same time as Plath. There was another boy they had both had affairs with – that was Gordon Lameyer, who had identified Anderson as Joan Gilling in the essay collection Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work. So, then, had Anderson seen Plath again at any time after all this? Yes, they met again at their graduation from Smith. Victor Kovner got his objection ready. He knew what was coming next: Jane’s visit to Cambridge in June 1956, and the conversation about Ted’s sadistic tendencies. The judge called over the attorneys. Was this relevant?
It might be, if it could be shown that Sylvia had angry feelings towards Jane which she m
ay then have vented by means of a defamatory portrait of her in the novel. But this was a fragment of a thirty-year-old conversation known only to Anderson, who by her own admission couldn’t remember anything else that was said at the time. Might not she have been projecting? There was no firm evidence that Sylvia had said the things she allegedly said on that June day in Cambridge. The judge ruled that the passage about the Cambridge visit in Anderson’s diary could be used, but the jury was told to limit its application. It was stressed that the question of Hughes’s character was no part of the case. Anderson then described the visit: how Sylvia had spoken of Ted’s ‘sadistic’ tendencies, and how she had advised against Sylvia marrying him, and how this had meant that the encounter ended frostily. The implication was that for this reason Plath had a vendetta against Anderson, a motivation for turning her into a suicidal lesbian.
Anderson was able to quote numerous details from The Bell Jar that were clearly based on conversations between the two young women when they were both confined at McLean. Then the offending quotation from the Butscher biography was read out: Joan Gilling alleged to be ‘very loosely based’ on Jane Anderson. Then an account of the Lameyer essay in the context of the fact that Anderson had dated Lameyer for six to eight months.
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