One may as well begin with the book that Ted was reading in proof on the day when, for the first time since he had formally identified Sylvia’s body in the morgue, he returned to University College Hospital to see the dying Sue Alliston. Published by Faber and Faber, The Art of Sylvia Plath reprinted the reviews of Ariel by Alvarez, Rosenthal and Steiner, together with a mix of critical essays, memoirs by acquaintances, an overview of the state of Plath’s reputation, and a piece by Ted called ‘Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath’s Poems’. This was his first substantial published essay on her work. It is where he wrote about ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ in terms of inner ‘suffering and decision’. Implicitly, this is an acknowledgement that his own poetry – Crow in particular – was made out of his own inner torment.
The Art of Sylvia Plath went into print in January 1970. That same year, a rather more high-profile book appeared from the Viking Press in New York: Sisterhood is Powerful, subtitled An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement. That movement was in full stride. This was the era of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, of the burning of bras and the march to take back the night. The editor of Sisterhood is Powerful was Robin Morgan, who had been a leading figure in the campaign to disrupt the annual Miss America beauty pageant. She had written a ten-point protest called ‘No More Miss America’, point one being ‘We Protest: The Degrading Mindless-Boob-Girlie Symbol’.1 It was in 1970 that the movement came to prominence in Britain when the Miss World contest at the Royal Albert Hall was heckled by ‘Women’s Libbers’ holding up placards, blowing whistles, and throwing smoke, stink and ink bombs on to the stage.
In Sisterhood is Powerful, Morgan coined the term ‘herstory’ to replace ‘history’. The contents of the anthology included polemical essays with titles such as ‘The invisible woman: psychological and sexual repression’, ‘Madison Avenue brainwashing: the facts’, ‘The politics of orgasm’, ‘Unfinished business: birth control and women’s liberation’, ‘Sexual politics (in literature)’, ‘Double jeopardy: to be Black and female’, ‘Institutionalized oppression vs. the female’, ‘The politics of housework’, ‘The feminists vs. the institution of marriage’ and ‘Women against Daddy’. A few poems were included, among them one called ‘Song of the fucked duck’. And sandwiched between an essay on the menopause and the SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) manifesto was Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘The Jailor’. If there was a single moment when Sylvia Plath was transformed from Fifties girl who loved lipstick and baking and Mademoiselle into icon of the oppressed woman brought to the edge and beyond by domestic drudgery, motherhood and male infidelity, but redeemed by the power of her poetic voice, this was it. Suddenly it became somehow symbolic that she had taken her own life in the year when the old myths about housewifery and a woman’s place were exploded by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. For thousands of women, the Ariel poems became a venting of rage at, and a song of liberation from, ‘The smog of cooking, the smog of hell’.2
This vision of her was compounded by Alvarez’s account in The Savage God, in which he quoted from her note for a BBC reading that was never broadcast, where she spoke of writing the Ariel poems ‘at about four in the morning – that still blue, almost eternal hour before the baby’s cry, before the glassy music of the milkman, settling his bottles’.3 The anti-Hughes backlash, stirred by images such as this, was beginning in earnest, even as he was continuing his curatorial work, preparing further selections of Sylvia’s poems for publication under the titles Crossing the Water and Winter Trees. The first of these he described as a collection of transitional poems written between The Colossus and Ariel, the second as late poems written around the same time as those included in his text of Ariel. Winter Trees, he explained in an essay in the Observer, brought into print ‘all but about six of the Ariel and after poems that were not in Ariel’.4 He also gave Sylvia the private-press treatment at this time. Nineteen-seventy-one was the inaugural year of Olwyn’s Rainbow Press, and two of its first four publications were Crystal Gazer (twenty-three Plath poems previously unpublished in book form) and Lyonnesse (a further twenty-one of Sylvia’s poems). Each gave an initial high-price, finely bound, limited-circulation outing to poems that were published in trade form soon afterwards, a pattern that Ted and Olwyn would also use for the Rainbow Press fine editions of his own poems.5
On a rainy New York day in June 1972, Robin Morgan received a telephone call from her editor at Random House. She had just corrected the proofs of a volume of her verse called Monster. But now, she was told, the lawyers were going to have a look at one of the poems. Entitled ‘Arraignment’, it began as follows:
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.
Aside from the catchy opening rhyme, the language of the poem is prosaic. The content is anything but. The charge sheet is recited: ‘mind-rape’, ‘body-rape’, sexual unfaithfulness, the ‘abduction and brainwashing’ of Frieda and Nick, plagiarism of Plath’s imagery, suppression of her last journals, financial exploitation by way of editing the poems, writing bad poetry himself, and, ultimately, not just metaphorical but real murder: ‘if he’s killed one wife, / he’s killed two’. Morgan then names Assia (misspelling her married surname and incorrectly asserting that she was the woman in Plath’s poem ‘Lesbos’). She also names Shura and reveals that Assia took her with her. Playing on Assia’s Jewishness and Sylvia’s allusions to the Holocaust, made notorious by George Steiner’s review of Ariel, she describes Ted as a ‘one-man gynocidal movement’. She arraigns the male critical establishment, naming Alvarez, Steiner and Lowell. They are charged with aiding and abetting Hughes the ‘legal executor’ (a clever pun), with engaging in a conspiracy to celebrate Plath’s genius while patronising her madness, diluting her rage and suppressing her (alleged) feminist politics. Robin Morgan then imagines a group of Hughes’s female fans knocking at his door, liberating Frieda and Nick, cutting off his penis, stuffing it in his mouth, sewing his ‘poetasting lips’ around it and blowing out his brains. Meanwhile, the poems ends, ‘Hughes, sue me.’6
Arthur Abelman, consulting counsel for Random House, feared that Ted might do just that. But could it be libel if the accusations were true, responded Morgan? And what about freedom of speech? Her female editor, Hilary Maddux, came under pressure from James Silberman, Random House’s editor-in-chief. Did Morgan really wish to risk being injuncted, or poet and publisher being sued, just for the sake of one poem? Morgan brought in her own female attorney, Emily Goodman, who pointed out that the accusation of rape was surely not libellous since marital rape was not a crime (feminist campaigners were, of course, arguing that it should be). Morgan held firm over the summer. The poem was central to the politics of the book; if it were suppressed, she would withdraw the entire collection. A compromise was reached: a revised version would be included. Fifteen different attempts were made in the course of the summer. Eventually, in November, Monster appeared in print. ‘How can / I accuse / Ted Hughes’, it now began, before acknowledging that the accusation of rape ‘could be conceived as metaphor, / and besides, it is permissible by law for a man to rape his wife, in body and in mind’. The story of Assia remains, as does the arraignment of Alvarez, Steiner and Lowell. At the close, ‘Hughes, sue me’ becomes a less brazen but still fierce (and intrusive) provocation: ‘Hughes / has married again.’7
From Ted’s point of view, even the revised version was actionable. But to sue in America would have been high risk. A lawsuit would not only cost a fortune; it would also draw massive attention to what might otherwise turn out to be a small-print-run volume of imperfect verse. Besides, anything that could be perceived as an attack on the First Amendment right of free speech would damage his reputation still further. He would stand a much better chance in Britain, where the libel law was stricter. And this was the place that mattered, the home of his family, his friends and his literary reputation. An agreement was reached with Random House: if the book were not distributed in Britain and the Commonwealth, he would not sue in the United States. However, cyclostyled or cheaply printed samizdat editions (‘pirated’ with the author’s permission) began appearing in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Some of them included both versions of ‘Arraignment’. In November 1973, an ‘English Feminist Edition’, complete with images of Sylvia and her grave, appeared in women’s centres and counter-culture bookshops, at considerable legal risk. Ted did not dignify or publicise it with a court action. But from this point on, he would be a marked man. Even some of his friends found themselves conflicted: Doris Lessing, revered in the women’s movement as author of The Golden Notebook, wrote enigmatically that ‘Since a great deal of effort has gone into trying to keep the Hughes scandals out of the limelight, it is a shame that Morgan’s poem has provoked such emotional reaction.’8
Unsurprisingly, given Morgan’s prominence in the movement, the poem made a considerable stir in feminist circles. Ted’s hope that it might not be noticed proved vain: Monster sold 30,000 copies within six months of publication, a remarkable figure for a first volume of verse. Morgan’s public readings played to packed houses across America. The Hughes name was vilified. Plath was turned into a martyr of a movement of which she was not really a part.
Ted was now in an impossible position. His inner voice was telling him that, having confronted Sylvia’s death indirectly and mythically in Crow, his next poetic move should have been to face it openly in confessional and elegiac mode. Only then could his verse progress beyond the easy pieces of the Moortown diary poems and Season Songs. But to release his version of the story of his marriage would now inevitably look like a response to the arraignment, a laying of his defence before the court of public opinion. The voice of the defendant, however dignified, would only give the oxygen of publicity to the less restrained tones of the female prosecutors. Above all, he wanted to protect the feelings and the privacy of his wife and his children. He imposed upon himself a vow of silence that would endure for more than two decades: no published poems about Sylvia (unless sufficiently oblique to go under the radar of biographical reading). At the same time, he remained determined to honour Sylvia’s legacy by continuing to curate her work and her posthumous reputation with all the care that he could muster.
Family mattered to Ted more than anything else other than writing. He wanted to be a good son as well as a good father. He worried about his own father, even as he was exasperated by him. He greatly admired the strength and the farming skills of his father-in-law. But he also had to contend with his first mother-in-law. Aurelia was bitterly hurt by the American publication of The Bell Jar in 1971. For the inside story of Sylvia’s suicide attempt in the crawl space below the family home to have been shared with her friends and family, let alone with the media and the wider public, added deep insult to the injury of such poems as ‘Daddy’ and ‘Medusa’. Soon after the novel’s publication Aurelia had a heart attack.
During her convalescence, she made a proposal to Ted. There was clearly a huge appetite for Sylvia’s work, so what about a collection of her letters? Sylvia was such a wonderful letter-writer, and so many of her letters home were full of joy. Would this not balance out The Bell Jar and create a more rounded picture? Aurelia’s thinking, of course, was that to reveal Sylvia’s openness and enthusiasm and eagerness to confide in her mother would shine a much more favourable light on the mother–daughter relationship. She set about gathering all the letters she could find and writing an interlinking commentary. The book would be like the ‘life and letters’ volumes with which great writers had been immortalised in Victorian times. She worked for two years, eventually producing a thousand pages of material, enough to fill two volumes.
In the summer of 1974 Ted Hughes lived a double life as farmer in collaboration with his father-in-law and literary editor in collaboration with his ex-mother-in-law. Three American women came to Court Green for extended visits. First there was Judith Kroll, who had recently completed a doctoral thesis on Plath, which Ted thought was full of amazing intuitions. He approved of Kroll’s work not least because her argument was grounded in literary sources more than biographical events. In particular, the thesis suggested that Plath used psychoanalytical and mythological theories in order to create a controlling myth that underlay her poetry. Beginning from Sylvia’s senior thesis at Smith on the figure of the ‘double’ in Dostoevsky, Kroll argued that her interior life was shaped by such sources as James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, which had been so important to T. S. Eliot and the first generation of modernists and which introduced her to the figure of the Fisher King and the idea of a cycle of death, rebirth and transcendence.
Even more attractively from Ted’s point of view, Kroll suggested that one of the keys to Plath’s personal mythology was Graves’s The White Goddess – to which he had introduced her. Furthermore, Kroll astutely perceived that both Ted and Sylvia had read Carl Gustav Jung and that another key to their shared poetic vision was the Jungian idea of the true inner self projecting its wound on to a false self embodied in an external hate figure:
The actual process of individuation – the conscious coming-to-terms with one’s inner centre (psychic nucleus) or Self – generally begins with a wounding of personality, and the suffering that accompanies it. This initial shock amounts to a sort of call, although it is often not recognised as such. On the contrary, the ego feels hampered in its will or desire and usually projects the obstruction onto something external. That is, the ego accuses God, the economic situation, or the boss, or the marriage partner of being responsible for whatever is obstructing it.9
The notion that the oppressive male figures in Sylvia’s poetry were not so much Otto Plath and Ted Hughes as mythic archetypes, and that the speaker of her poems was more White Goddess than Aurelia Plath’s daughter, promised to swing interpretation away from the biographical line that had been created by the influential early reviews of Ariel and above all by The Bell Jar. On the basis of Judith Kroll’s doctoral dissertation, Ted and Olwyn had decided that she was the right person to help with the daunting task of preparing a scholarly edition of Sylvia’s complete poems.
She stayed for several weeks. Ted discussed Plath’s work in detail with her, showed her books that he and Sylvia had shared and even seems to have given her information, presumably derived from the lost last journal, that there was some kind of religious dimension to the crisis in the final weeks of her life.10 And they started work on Sylvia’s manuscript drafts, beginning by seeking to put all her surviving poems in chronological order, a task upon which – as was clear from his contribution to The Art of Sylvia Plath – Ted had been engaged for many years. In time, though, it became clear that Kroll’s strong suit was critical interpretation, not the minutiae of textual bibliography and the investigation of manuscript drafts. Ted completed his work on the collected poems alone.
The second visitor in the summer of 1974 was Fran McCullough, who was preparing Aurelia’s edition of the letters for Harper and Row in New York. Ted proposed various cuts, some in the interest of economy, others in that of privacy. McCullough relished her time at Court Green. Ted did not. He wrote in his journal of her paleness and ‘monotone stillness’, unflatteringly seeing in her ‘Something resembling Sylvia as a zombie’.11 After her departure, Ted continued wrangling with both her and Aurelia about what should and what should not be included. The process took a full further year. In January 1975, for example, Ted sent Aurelia one of many long lists of ‘Notes for final cuts to letters’.
This document survives. Even as it proposed substantial cuts, it provided all sorts of fascinating biographical material not available elsewhere. Ted mentioned in passing that the true nature of his marriage to Sylvia would be revealed only ‘when somebody produced her journals of the time and mine’ – ‘That could well be a long time coming,’ he adds, but it is intriguing to overhear him mentioning that he kept a journal. Again, he revealed what she was reading at the time of her death: she was halfway through a re-reading of A. E. Ellis’s The Rack, an extremely depressing book about the suicide of a young man in a tuberculosis sanatorium. Ted did not mention that it was published by Heinemann and edited by James Michie, who was also the in-house editor responsible for The Colossus and The Bell Jar. He went on to disagree with many of Aurelia’s interpretations. ‘Next point: “renouncing the subservient female role” sounds strange to me. One thing she never was, as I believe you know, was subservient.’ Sylvia would never have allowed her cookery and homemaking to be described as ‘subservient’: ‘She was “Laurentian” [sic], not “woman’s lib”.’ And what on earth was this about her drying the dinner plates with her own ‘dense hair’? ‘As you probably remember, the washing up in our establishment was generally done by me, until maybe the last month of two.’12
The notes also suggest that Sylvia was exaggerating when she talked of snowdrifts 20 feet deep in the winter of 1962. He recalls the occasion when he drove down from London and back in a day in order to stock her up with home-grown potatoes and apples and two strings of their onions: yes, it had been snowing, but there were thousands of cars on the road. He also mentioned that in London in her final weeks she was not as lonely as some of her letters home made out: he visited her every other night and several times during the day and sometimes spent two or three evenings in succession in her company. When she wasn’t seeing him, she was usually seeing somebody else.
Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963, ‘selected and edited with commentary by Aurelia Schober Plath’, was finally published in late 1975. The following year, it was reviewed in the New York Review of Books by Ted’s Cambridge contemporary Karl Miller. His review essay, under the editorial title ‘Sylvia Plath’s Apotheosis’, treated the letters alongside Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, the book of Judith Kroll’s thesis, and a biography by Edward Butscher called Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness. Like many an NYRB review, Miller’s piece provoked some lively correspondence. A feminist writer called Mary Folliet had written a Morgan-influenced poem about Plath called ‘Ten Years Cold’. She complained that Miller had quoted, as an example of the sort of thing Ted now had to put up with, her line ‘Hughes has one more gassed out life on his mind.’13 Olwyn also weighed in. She made some remarks about ‘the lunatic fringe of Women’s Lib’, but what was really on her mind was the biography.
She explained that in 1969 Ted had signed the agreement with Lois Ames that appointed her Sylvia’s official biographer. The contract stipulated delivery by 1975 and Ted had offered her exclusive assistance until 1977. Ames had been Ted’s third Sylvia-researching visitor at Court Green in the summer of 1974. There had been a lot of talk about the journals, but very little progress towards the book. Olwyn pointed out in her NYRB letter that as a result of the exclusivity agreement, she had been unable to help Edward Butscher with his biography other than to correct the most egregious of his numerous factual errors. She had been unable to do anything about what she regarded as his naive belief in the inventions and exaggerations of unreliable witnesses, his ‘outrageously dramatized versions of events’ and his ‘novelettishly sensationalized’ portraits of just about everyone in Sylvia’s life. She suggested that it was time for Lois Ames to throw in the towel and let someone else write ‘a properly researched biography of Sylvia’.14
At the end of 1976, Ted told Dan Huws that he was having to waste so much time and emotional energy on this plethora of new Plath books that he was seriously considering getting the whole story of his first marriage off his chest by publishing his own account.15 The first thing to do, though, was to publish the primary materials, so that readers did not have to rely on the second-hand and distorted perspective of biographers and critics. His selection of her short stories, under the title Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, appeared in 1977. Four years later, his edition of the Collected Poems was finally published. There are few precedents – only Mary Shelley springs immediately to mind – for a creative artist taking on the academic role of textual editor of their dead spouse’s works. The combination of personal knowledge and patient scholarship enabled Hughes to complete his arrangement of Plath’s poems in chronological order. To the chagrin of some feminists, he took it upon himself to relegate her early work to the status of ‘juvenilia’, beginning the run of her mature poems in 1956 – the year of their first encounter at Falcon Yard. By Hughes’s reckoning, Plath wrote 224 poems between 1956 and her death, her breakthrough into that uniqueness of voice which constitutes poetic greatness coming with the seven-part ‘Poem for a Birthday’ composed in late 1959 while they were in residence at Yaddo. The title of Birthday Letters is, among other things, a tribute to this turning point in Plath’s career.
The year after Collected Poems came The Journals of Sylvia Plath, for which he was credited as consulting editor, along with Frances McCullough, and to which he contributed a brief foreword. He struggled to complete it, knowing it would be an important piece of work that would begin to reveal her poetry as ‘the X-ray record of the history of a purely impersonal process’, something akin to the paintings produced by Jung’s psychiatric patients.16 His foreword duly explained that, although he had been with her for six years ‘and was rarely separated from her for more than two or three hours at a time’, he never saw Sylvia ‘show her real self to anybody – except, perhaps, in the last three months of her life’. That real self began to speak in her poetry at a moment in Yaddo when she ‘recited three lines as she went through a doorway’. From that point on, she would ‘throw off the artificial selves’ of her earlier verse: ‘It was as if a dumb person suddenly spoke.’
He developed this claim in a longer version of the foreword, published in his friend Ben Sonnenberg’s magazine Grand Street contemporaneously with the appearance of the journals. Here he outlined his own version of the Judith Kroll argument about Sylvia’s ‘death–rebirth’ cycle. His essay came to the conclusion that all her poems were in a sense ‘by-products’ of her ‘real creation’, which was ‘that inner gestation and eventual birth of a new self-conquering self, to which her journal bears witness, and which proved itself so overwhelmingly in the Ariel poems of 1962’.17
But it was the end of the foreword that attracted the attention of Hughes’s accusers. Ted explained that Sylvia’s journals consisted of ‘an assortment of notebooks and bunches of loose sheets’. His selection consisted of about one-third of the total sum of the manuscripts, which were held at Smith College. But two notebooks were absent from that collection. They were ‘maroon-backed ledgers’ similar to a surviving volume that covered 1957–9. They ‘continued the record from late ’59 to within three days of her death’. The first of them had ‘disappeared’. The second contained entries for the final months of her life, ‘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)’.18 For anti-Hughesians this was another devastating indictment to add to the charge sheet: he had burnt the vital clue, destroyed the evidence, silenced Sylvia even as she was in the grave.
What was more, the edition was incomplete. There were extensive cuts, and two notebooks from the period August 1957 to November 1959 were excluded. It was Hughes’s intention to keep them sealed until the fiftieth anniversary of Plath’s death, probably because they contained such dark matter as some disturbing matricidal notes from the time of her psychoanalysis. As it was, he relented at the time of Birthday Letters and the unabridged journals were published just over a year after his death.
Soon after Edward Butscher had published Method and Madness, that first biography of Sylvia, he threw together a collection of essays entitled Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work. It included critical essays on her poetry, including distinguished work by the critic Marjorie Perloff and the novelist Joyce Carol Oates, together with a number of memoirs by people he had interviewed during his research for the biography – lover Gordon Lameyer, fellow-Mademoiselle intern Laurie Levy, Cambridge supervisor Dorothea Krook, fellow-Whitstead resident Jane Baltzell Kopp, and friends from later years, Clarissa Roche and Elizabeth Compton (now Sigmund). It was a line-up that entrenched the Plath narrative: carefree Smith girl with boyfriends aplenty, crack-up following the New York summer, scholarship student at Cambridge, deserted wife and mother in the bitter winter of 1962–3.
The thesis of the collection was that Plath was a writer in whom there was a peculiarly close connection between the woman and the work. ‘Indeed’, wrote Butscher in his preface, a little dramatically, ‘a poet’s life and art have never appeared so intimately related before, with the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe’s own horror tale.’19 The prize exhibit in support of this argument came from Gordon Lameyer, who contributed not only his memoir but also an analytic essay entitled ‘The Double in Sylvia’s Plath The Bell Jar’. The latter began by noting the prevalence of mirrors and ‘doubles’ – psychological projections of some aspect of the speaker – in Plath’s poetry. Picking up on Plath’s own explanation, in her BBC interview, that the poem ‘Daddy’ was to be imagined in the voice of a girl with an Electra complex, Lameyer suggested that it was indeed ‘spoken by the author’s evil double, resenting her father’s death and consequent loss of love’. He linked this idea to ‘The Magic Mirror’, Sylvia’s 1954 Smith College senior honours’ thesis on the figure of the double in Dostoevsky, most notably ‘in the great study of parricide, The Brothers Karamazov’. Dostoevsky’s fiction, Lameyer suggested, gave Plath ‘a deeper understanding of her own nervous breakdown, attempted suicide, and recuperation’ than she achieved from ‘her limited psychoanalysis at McLean’.20 Lameyer’s perceptive analysis of Plath’s reading of Dostoevsky provided a springboard into The Bell Jar, itself a novel full of doubles. Towards the end of the essay, he referred to the biographical ‘original’ of one of them:
The terrible irony of The Bell Jar is that the original of Joan Gilling, the double that Sylvia kills off so that Esther can live, is very much alive, and that it is Sylvia who has been successful in killing herself … The girl whom Sylvia knew in Wellesley and at Smith College and whom she felt had followed her to McLean is actually very unlike the Joan Gilling who has lesbian leanings toward another inmate. In fact, Sylvia very much admired and liked the original girl. Was Sylvia, then, projecting her deepest fears onto the double of her heroine?21
Lameyer then stopped to think. Clearly there was a very strong case for the argument that one of those deep fears – the will to suicide – was a projection, that Joan’s success in hanging herself was a proxy for Esther/Sylvia’s failed suicide attempt. But, he asked himself, were the ‘lesbian leanings’ also a projection? His conclusion was that ‘Sylvia was trying to free herself from certain negative attitudes that she recognized within herself, puritanical attitudes … which she projected in a perversion of sexual purity upon her double.’ But then he hastened to inform the reader that this projection did not have a biographical origin:
I knew her too well at the time of the incidents related in The Bell Jar ever to conclude that she had lesbian tendencies. Aside from the original of Buddy Willard, I am the only person, I believe, who has ever dated both Sylvia and the original of Joan Gilling. Although certainly neither girl was inclined towards lesbianism, Sylvia understood enough of the love–hate duality of rivals to suggest this characteristic in her artistic double.22
This is a very unusual moment in the history of literary analysis: the critic substantiates his argument on the grounds that he must be right since he has dated the two central female characters in the book he is writing about. In addition, Lameyer let slip the information that Dick Norton, the original of Buddy Willard, also dated both Sylvia and the original of Joan Gilling. The sharing not only of residential treatment at McLean but also of two boyfriends did indeed suggest that the two women were ‘doubles’.
Just over a year after the publication of this essay, Avco Embassy Pictures released their film adaptation of The Bell Jar. It received dismal reviews, but had enough life to become a videocassette and to be shown on television. The screenplay took a fair a number of liberties with the novel. Plath’s rigorously autobiographical account of the overdose and the crawl space beneath the deck of the family home were turned into a woozy dance in the basement followed by a collapse on the floor. And, in keeping with the tawdriness of late Seventies Hollywood, the novel’s unrealised hints of lesbian desire in the character of Joan Gilling were fleshed into a scene where Joan kisses Esther’s breasts as they kneel together in a field. She begs her friend to join her in a lovers’ suicide pact, and it is Esther’s rejection of this proposal that leads her to hang herself from a tree.
The ‘very much alive’ original of Joan Gilling was Jane Anderson. Like Sylvia, she was born in Wellesley. As girls, they went to the same junior high school and the same church. They both went to Smith. They both had intense relationships with Dick Norton as well as dating Gordon Lameyer. They both had complicated relationships with their fathers, though Sylvia’s father was dead and Jane’s alive. And they were fellow-inmates at McLean. Here, though, their paths diverged. Electro-convulsive therapy was remarkably effective for Sylvia, leading to her rapid discharge from the hospital, whereas Anderson was sucked in by the talking cure. She chastised Sylvia for not taking psychoanalysis seriously enough and she eventually became a psychoanalyst herself, engaging in private practice and teaching at Harvard. The explicitly lesbian scene in the film of The Bell Jar came as a shock to her. She began reading around the subject and alighted upon Lameyer’s essay. In due course she would file a lawsuit that would engulf Ted Hughes.