Ted Hughes

by Jonathan Bate

  The consensus among the defending legal team was that Jane had done very well indeed. The jury was going to have a lot of sympathy for her. Settlement was the only solution, before things got any worse. Victor Kovner pressed Sandy Pratt very hard. The other side was willing to talk, but they wouldn’t go below a quarter of a million dollars. That, they said, was what the case had cost Jane Anderson in the five years since she had launched the action. Pratt didn’t want to go that high, but he agreed that they should settle. For one thing, it would stop the co-defendants (and their individual lawyers) arguing among themselves as to each party’s particular liability.

  Ted was very keen to settle. He was horrified at the way that details of his own life were being dragged into the case, for instance a letter to Aurelia in which he had voiced indiscreet feelings about how his parents were burdening his life, and how he wanted them back in Yorkshire, even though his mother was an invalid. The blazing rows between his parents and Assia were not the sort of thing he wanted reported in the press back home. The case was bringing back some very painful memories of his own inward trial in those years. He began to see that the fallout from everything to do with Sylvia had affected his whole life for twenty years, had in many ways led him to suppress his own poetic Muse.

  In her final day of testimony, Jane Anderson seemed an even more powerful presence. She swept aside the allegedly homosexual diary entry: it was all a misinterpretation, college ‘girlfriends’ could cuddle up together in the dorm without there being anything sexual about it. She was not and never had been a lesbian.

  On the Wednesday afternoon, terms were agreed: $150,000. As good a result as could be expected, Victor thought. There was a glitch when the California lawyers acting for some of the co-defendants expressed reluctance to settle and a desire to fight on, but they were won round. They all signed in the afternoon: damages awarded for unintentional defamation of character and agreement to the prominent display at all future screenings, and before any future broadcast, that the film was fictitious. Ted spent the evening with Seamus Heaney at Harvard, heartily relieved.

  The next day, in snow, he went to see Leonard and Lisa Baskin. They drove him past Smith College and memories came flooding back: how he and Sylvia both felt asphyxiated there, ground down by their teaching jobs. He felt a strange sense of release, even elation. It was as if the case had unlocked everything.

  For the most part, the reporting in the British press was fair, concentrating on the interesting question of the relationship between fiction and fact. Only the Mail on Sunday published an article blackening his name. Double love-suicides, the Nazi boot in the face from ‘Daddy’: all the old stuff familiar to him from the writings of the feminist hitwoman Robin Morgan. Should he sue? Victor’s advice was always the same: never, ever sue.

  They did, however, manage to put one precautionary measure in place. On 31 January 1987, two days after the settlement, the judge’s signature was sealed on defendant Hughes’s motion to ‘exclude from evidence all references to the nature of Hughes’ personal relationship with Sylvia Plath’ and to exclude the ‘sadism’ claim. In particular, certain unpublished passages which Jane Anderson had assiduously extracted from holograph letters in the Lilly Library were to be excluded from the record. The harsh words had spilled out when Sylvia was at her angriest and most rejected, between August and October 1962, when Ted was conducting his affair with Assia. She had written: ‘a father who is a liar and an adulterer and utterly selfish … Ted has it in him to be kind and true and loving but has chosen not to be’; ‘he is a vampire on my life, killing and destroying all’; ‘I have no feelings for Ted, except that he is an absolute bastard’; ‘he was furious I had not committed suicide’; ‘he never has loved or touched little Nicholas’; ‘I suppose it is something to have been the first wife of a genius’; ‘His family is behind him – the meanest, most materialistic of the English working class’; and ‘I think now my creating babies and a novel frightened him – for he wants barren women like his sister and this woman [Assia], who can write nothing, only adore his stuff.’8

  Ted had come to revere Victor Kovner. And he was deeply bruised, both financially and emotionally, by the Bell Jar case. For the rest of his life, he would do his best to follow Kovner’s sage advice: he was very reluctant ever to sue, no matter how extreme the provocation. Olwyn was forever riding into battle against the army of Plath biographers, demanding corrections, putting her point of view, threatening action for copyright infringement.

  Ted was always much more hesitant, especially on the matter of illustrative quotation from his and Sylvia’s poems. He once described a work about him as a ‘promotional campaign’ for his books, mounted by its author on behalf of his publishers. Books about poets ‘can be considered to promote the sale of the books of verse in question’, so it was ‘obviously in the interest of the publisher of those books that the quotations be liberal, and in this case there is even less occasion to seek payment for the quotes used’. By writing about Hughes and his work, scholars were, he suggested, ‘working directly for the publisher, doing an advertising job that would otherwise be costly’.9

  Olwyn’s more effective strategy was not to sue but to commission and take control of a semi-authorised life of Plath (Lois Ames having signally failed to deliver the fully authorised one). ‘Dear Ben,’ one of Olwyn’s characteristically feisty letters to Ben Sonnenberg began, later in the year of the trial,

  You’ll no doubt have heard rumours of, seen reviews of, A BIOGRAPHY of SYLVIA PLATH by a person (a Professor, God help us) who started out on the book as Linda Wagner, got herself hyphenated to Wagner-Martin mid-stream, and is on the book cover (completely unfurled at last one hopes) as Linda W. Wagner-Martin. (All this hierarchical donning of names and initials as they hopefully mount fame’s ladder in American ladies must have profound implications for their psyches.)

  That alas is where L. W. W-M’s interest stops. The book is dreary when it is not being nasty (usually, if only archly or by implication, about Ted) or sacchariney (exclusively about Sylvia).

  ‘However,’ she continued triumphantly, ‘out of it has sprung an infinitely better biography – now on its way to being finished – by Anne Stevenson.’10 Olwyn was a little optimistic about the timely completion of the biography by poet and scholar Anne Stevenson. Largely because of her own interference, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath was not published until 1989. Olwyn’s close involvement in the creation of the book – to the author’s increasing exasperation, almost to the point of nervous collapse – can be traced in surviving correspondence.11 The whole story is forensically analysed by Janet Malcolm in her gripping account of Plath and the moral compass of biography, The Silent Woman (1994), a book greatly admired by Ted.

  Janet Malcolm’s book also rehearsed Ted’s battle with the literary critic Jacqueline Rose over her reading of Plath’s poem ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ in the psychoanalytic study The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991). Malcolm was puzzled, as indeed was Rose herself, at what seemed to be the almost pathological vehemence of Ted’s objection to her speculative and subtle analysis. At one point, he told Rose that there were cultures in which allegations of the kind she was making were reasonable grounds for murder. The reason for his extreme reaction was not apparent at the time, but with the opening of the archive of the Bell Jar case following Jane Anderson’s death in 2010, all becomes clear: the two themes at the heart of Rose’s reading of ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ were male sexual sadism and female homosexual desire. These themes came to the very core of the forbidden fruit of the sealed papers associated with the trial. Ted genuinely feared that for him to be seen to endorse in any way a work implying subconscious lesbian tendencies in Plath would have risked breaching the terms of the Anderson settlement and costing him another action, with further vast expense in legal fees and damages. He was still smarting from his six-figure outlay on the Bell Jar case – he always said that it cost him his farm.

  On the whole, he left it to Olwyn
to fight the biographers. He was, however, provoked to intervention in response to matters pertaining directly to Sylvia’s death. In the Seventies and Eighties feminists repeatedly defaced her grave in Heptonstall, which bore the name ‘Sylvia Plath Hughes’ and the inscription ‘Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted’ – words chosen by Ted because he often quoted them to her when she was depressed.12 The name ‘Hughes’ was chiselled from the stone by night. It would be reinstated by the stonemason. Then removed another night. After the mason had replaced the letters three times, Ted asked him to keep the stone in his workshop while he ‘considered what to do next’. It was during this hiatus that two feminist academics wrote to the Guardian newspaper, with supporting signatures from various people in the literary world, among them Al Alvarez and the exiled Russian poet Joseph Brodsky (who had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature). Brodsky told Ted that he had not really known what he was signing: it was a letter, published on 7 April 1989, complaining that Hughes was shamefully neglecting Plath’s grave. Ted’s dignified retort appeared in the same paper a fortnight later: ‘A rational observer might conclude (correctly in my opinion) that the fantasia about Sylvia Plath is more needed than the facts,’ he wrote, with magnificent ironic bite. ‘Where that leaves respect for the truth of her life (and of mine), or for her memory, or for the literary tradition, I do not know.’13

  On one subsequent occasion, he did take legal action. Trevor Thomas, an eccentric art historian, had been Sylvia’s neighbour in the ground-floor flat at 23 Fitzroy Road. He was the last person to see her alive, when at about midnight on the night of 10–11 February 1963 she went downstairs to ask for some stamps. Years later, in 1989, he cashed in with a privately published memoir called Sylvia Plath: Last Encounters, in which he made the scurrilous and groundless allegation that Ted and his friends had a loud party with bongo drums in Sylvia’s flat on the night that he returned from her funeral in Heptonstall. Outraged, Ted sued. He got an injunction and an apology in December 1990.14

  During his time in Boston for the trial, Ted began thinking about the Bell Jar case in Shakespearean terms. ‘The law’s delay’: Hamlet. The dream of dispossessing himself of everything: King Lear. And he thought about the conflicting arguments as a kind of drama. ‘The Accusation’: The Bell Jar as autobiographical text. ‘The Defence’: The Bell Jar as articulation of the myth of the double self.

  Autobiography versus myth: was this not his own argument with himself? If there was truth to the analysis of the novel that he had developed in such immense detail – picking up from hints in Lameyer’s essay – that ‘Esther Greenwood’ was Sylvia’s autobiographical self and ‘Joan Gilling’ her mythic double, then what about Ted’s own double self? Crow and the demonic double of Nicholas Lumb were his mythic selves. But what about his autobiographical self: was it not time to confront that in poetry?

  He began a new poem, in many parts. He called it ‘Trial’. It was in the plain, autobiographical voice he had been using in unpublished poems about Sylvia, not the vatic, mythic Crow voice for which he had by this time become known in print.15 It has now been made available to the public. Section 1 begins with the letter he received about the Anderson action, out of the blue in the spring of 1982. Looked at one way, it was ‘only a letter’. But it was also ‘The eggshell – from which his next five years had already flown’ (‘his’ replaces the more personal ‘your’ of his first draft). The letter was, he continues, ‘the forensic fragment / Of booby-trap explosion’. The idea is developed in section 2: ‘This is what it looked like – / The Letter of the Law. The Letter of the U.S. law.’ And section 4: ‘The bomb was in the book’ – Butscher’s biography, that was.

  Having begun with the law-case, the poem then flashes back to the origin of the novel. Sylvia, he reveals, wanted The Bell Jar to be a mixture of Crime and Punishment, Sons and Lovers, The Golden Bowl, Light in August, The Catcher in the Rye, and ‘It wanted impossibly to be / Ulysses, La Recherche Du Temps Perdu’. Sylvia was nothing if not ambitious. Realistically, the honest comparison was with that other novel of Fifties adolescent angst: ‘Isn’t it as alive as Salinger?’ he quotes her as saying. ‘At least, it’s as heart-felt.’

  He remembers tearful eyes when Sylvia was sitting blocked in front of an empty page and then her thrilled delight with the birth-pangs of creation. He witnesses her creation of a new self in the act of writing. He begins to ask questions about her hatred of her father: ‘What was the motive? / What hand or eye framed the plan / You packed such fury into?’ (‘What immortal hand or eye’: she has the Blakean frenzy of the creator of the tiger). In his mind’s eye he sees her going down the golden path between her father’s salvias and his beehives to McLean. ‘Is this the end of a Trail,’ he asks (‘Trail’ playing on ‘Trial’), ‘Or the beginning / Of a promising line of enquiry?’ He wonders where the hatred was born. He could not see it in her smile or her ‘platinum / Veronica Lake bang’. No, ‘A small girl bore it, crouching in a coffin.’ The buried child was resurrected in the art of the adult woman. Writing The Bell Jar took Sylvia into confessional mode: ‘This was your introduction to yourself.’ Her throwing herself into the novel was deeply bound up with her psychoanalysis, with the moment when Dr Ruth Beutscher said, ‘I give you / Permission to hate your mother.’ This opened the box, the ‘bible of Dreams’, the terrors and the drowning.

  Ted was with Sylvia as she turned the key and released the little girl who was angry because her father had left her, gone off with Lady Death, and not said goodbye and she did not know why. This little girl was buried when Aurelia announced that what was past was past, when she told her daughter not to mourn, to move ‘onward’, because life was ‘for living’, the earth was ‘beautiful’ and one should never be ‘unhappy’. Her mother, the poem proposes, should not have denied her the mourning process. The little girl’s grief was buried for so many years that when her heart did eventually come out, ‘lifting the coffin lid’, it took the form of her own vampiric double. The ‘Daddy’ in the coffin and ‘The Jailor’: they did not come back to life as the ‘man in black’, the husband, Ted. No, they came back as Sylvia’s own demonic double. Who was Joan Gilling in The Bell Jar? Not Jane Anderson, but the ghost of Sylvia’s own jailed childhood self, ‘the revenant’.

  Then he remembers her writing of the novel, in London in 1961. How ‘Morning after morning’ she worked on it ‘In Bill Merwin’s study’ while he ‘patrolled the zoo, introducing / All the creatures to Frieda’. Sylvia would not give him progress reports, would only say ‘I am / Having a terrific time.’ He remembers recoiling from his own imagining of the novel. Ever the poet, he is suspicious of ‘Uneasy, manipulative prose!’ He still dislikes the medium of prose fiction, but now, with the trial, he understands it. And the novel could be forgiven because it was helping her poetry. Sylvia was changing fast. In each poem that she wrote alongside the novel, he heard ‘a fuller, surer rehearsal’ of her voice.

  Then he remembers ‘The evening of the day the book was published’, 23 January 1963 (this is a slip of the pen or the memory – the actual publication date was 13 January). He and Sylvia drank sherry together, they tasted the sensation of her being a published novelist, albeit under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. He admired the cover:

  The dim, distorted image of a girl

  Dissolving in a Bell Jar. Did I wonder

  ‘Now dare I read it? Ought I to read it now?’

  This was at 23 Fitzroy Road. ‘Trial’ provides corroborative evidence for his claim that he did go to see Sylvia night after night in the weeks leading up to her death, that he was more than just the weekly ‘apocalyptic Santa Claus’. He summons up every detail of those evenings:

  The electric bars glared in the wall.

  The matting smell of tobacco. The glass-topped table.

  Brightness. Freshness. Novelty.

  He was reminded of the way in which she had furnished her room at Whitstead in Cambridge.

  The following w
eek, she showed him the reviews: The Times from 24 January, the New Statesman the following day, the Sunday Telegraph and Observer on 27 January. ‘No pannings. No raves.’ Perhaps if there had been a rave she would have had the strength to go on living. He summons:

  Those few evenings,

  All that were left, the evenings of that fortnight

  Between The Bell Jar coming out for the public

  And your death.

  And he summons Sylvia’s face, coaxing his memory to yield him some ‘inkling’, some ‘little epiphany’ that would reveal that she knew what she had done by writing the novel, that what was done ‘Could never be undone’.

  On those winter nights in Fitzroy Road, they talked about the children as they sipped their sherry. What Ted didn’t realise as they sat discussing The Bell Jar was that in her head Sylvia was rewriting the suicide attempt described there. She was thinking of doing it again. Of composing a successful sequel. The novel was the map of her journey to the underworld. It was a draft of her Dantesque Commedia, her preview of Hamlet’s undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns (no traveller except Lady Lazarus, that is):

  The reconnaissance, the summary report

  Of your exploration of that country

  Where your nightmare reigned, the dead land

  Ruled by your buried alter ego.

  He did not know at this time that the final edition of her Commedia was already written, ‘All verses completed, the total song / Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso’. It was written in a little book of poems called Ariel, which was there in the house along with the ghost of W. B. Yeats. She read him some of the poems on those evenings when they drank sherry and talked about the children. What was she thinking of, he wondered, when she wrote ‘Daddy’ and ‘Medusa’, which she declaimed to him ‘with a divine malice’? He was appalled, baffled and alarmed: was she aware of what she had done? Surely she didn’t really want to hurt her mother so cruelly. Should she not come to her senses, call the novel back in and burn the poems?