the morning of Thursday 3 April 1986, a week after Ted had made his Deposition, that Alexander (Sandy) H. Pratt Jr, acting on behalf of the defendants, asked some questions of Dr Anderson. Mr Pratt: ‘You felt, I take it, that Sylvia Plath wrote what she wrote in the book about the character Joan Gilling because she was hostile and angry towards you?’
Ms Grace: ‘Objection.’
Mr Pratt told Jane Anderson that she could answer. She replied, hesitantly: ‘I wouldn’t say – I would say that one of the reasons that she wrote what she wrote was – again, this is a hypothesis – but that she had some angry feelings towards me.’
Why was she angry? Because, said Anderson, of what took place when she visited Sylvia Plath in Cambridge, England, on 4 June 1956.6 That is to say, just over three months after Sylvia first met Ted Hughes ‘at a party’ and just twelve days before she married him in a swiftly arranged private ceremony in London. So what had happened at the meeting?
Sylvia Plath started talking in a very pressured way. That was my perception, that it was pressured. She said that she had met a man who was a poet, with whom she was very much in love. She went on to say that this person, whom she described as a very sadistic man, was someone she cared about a great deal and had entered into a relationship with. She also said that she thought she could manage him, manage his sadistic characteristics.
Q. Was she saying that he was sadistic towards her?
A. My recollection is she described him as someone who was very sadistic.7
Jane Anderson and Sylvia Plath had dated the same boys and had been fellow-patients in the McLean Hospital, New England’s premier mental health facility. By the time of the Deposition, Anderson herself had become a psychoanalyst. On the basis of what she had seen of Plath during her treatment at McLean following a suicide attempt, it was her judgement that Plath had not worked through her own feelings of anger regarding her father. Jane had told Sylvia that she was not taking her psychotherapy sufficiently seriously. In the light of this earlier history, Anderson had grave doubts about the wisdom of Plath entering into a relationship with a ‘very sadistic’ man. She did not actually counsel Sylvia against going ahead with the relationship, but, thinking about it on the train back to London, she sensed that she had created anger in Plath precisely because Plath was herself anxious and ambivalent about committing herself to Hughes.
How did it come to pass that Hughes and Anderson found themselves making these Depositions over twenty years after Plath’s suicide in the bitter London winter of 1963?
After the event, Ted Hughes’s lawyer summed up the issue at stake: ‘The plaintiff, Dr Jane Anderson, asserted that a character in the novel, The Bell Jar, and in the motion picture version was “of and concerning” herself, and that the portrayal of that character as a person with at least homosexual inclinations and suicidal inclinations defamed her and caused her substantial emotional anguish.’8 Reporting the first day of the trial, which finally came to court nearly a year after the Depositions, the New York Times put the case more dramatically:
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
