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 contract, 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 may 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.

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 week, 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?

Then he turns to the posthumous life of her work. How ‘Through the late Sixties’, her poems ‘crept through America – and / Took hold like an organised addiction’. For womankind, for the ‘Libbers’:

Your image in manipulated neons

Resembling flames was the martyr

To their centuries of oppression.

Yourself, would you believe it,

Their megaphone marching saint.

Who is she? Who was she?

She became the voice against the patriarchy, but by then it was too late to ask whether or not she had really hated Daddy.

Because of her suicide and because of the explosive content of Ariel – ‘Ariel’s electrocardiograph’, he brilliantly calls it, in an allusion to her ECT – The Bell Jar was read retrospectively as another anti-Daddy tirade. By the time the novel was published in America, it was too late for the alternative possibility that it was less an autobiographical scream than:

A sort of metaphor for the tirade

Many an injured wife would let fly

At the Daddy of her children if only

She could find the language.

Sylvia had become a feminist icon because nobody before her, no woman before her,

Had emptied her whole soul of its rage

Against all that had suppressed and denied her,

Against all that had shut her from the life

She had wanted for herself, from her freedom.

By writing of her father, her mother, her upbringing and her husband (‘me’), she became ‘the Universal / Hidden, mother hurt of womankind’.

Now he understood about Jane Anderson and Joan Gilling and the meeting in Cambridge. Just as he and Sylvia had been finding each other, her ‘old suicide’s doppelganger’ had arrived on her doorstep to dog her ‘new dream’. That is why Jane/Joan had to be destroyed. She was ‘the double’ of Sylvia’s ‘old disasters’ and that was ‘a theme for a novel’. As for Ted himself, he was ‘a post-war Englishman’ who adopted ‘The bereft child in you and the broken girl / Hapless victim of your German nation’. Was she – he is thinking of ‘Daddy’ again – in some sense ‘Hitler’s bequest’ to him, to the poet whose pike-voice was ‘deep as England’?

But then he pulls back and rearticulates the position of the Deposition. A novel is not an autobiography. A work of art is a work of art. It is not life.

Esther Greenwood is an experiment,

An extrapolation from the mind-warp nadir

Of suicidal breakdown. She is not real.

The paradox, though, is that ‘Trial’, the long poem in which Ted Hughes wrote these words, is about events and feelings that were real: it is a capsule biography of Sylvia Plath and a partial autobiography of Ted Hughes. Its story is real.