Plath and the Perils of Biography
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing PLATH AND THE PERILS OF BIOGRAPHY BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL JANET MALCOLM has created a literary niche for herself as a chronicler of quarrels. Ten years ago, In the Freud Archives...
...She was obviously driven by private demons we cannot fully fathom...
...Malcolm notes that the eventual result was something neither anticipated nor wanted: Public attention began to focus on the details of Plath's life more than on her poetry...
...Plath is considered a "confessional" poet...
...Aurelia Plath was understandably upset, for the book contained highly unflattering portraits of her family and friends, as well as an account of Sylvia's first suicide attempt while in college...
...Nevertheless, he insists on his right to preserve an undistorted portrait of Plath for their two children?infants at the time she died—whom he and Olwyn raised...
...All writers wear "the blinders of narrative," she argues, since any attempt to tell a coherent story necessitates editing the material...
...The allusion is to In the Freud Archives...
...She takes up cudgels against those who, reacting to its connection with the estate, have written it off as an attack on a heroine unable to respond...
...and the more his book reflects his industry the more the reader believes that he is having an elevating literary experience, rather than simply listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people's mail...
...With good reason, if unrealistically, he also resents having his own life hashed over...
...At her trial she countered (with little success) that such a charge distorts both the offending portrait and her purpose...
...He sued her for defamation and she was widely presumed to have intruded her own Freudian bias into her tale...
...Because she left no will when she killed herself in 1963, her writings and other properties automatically passed to him...
...sacrificing years of his life to his task...
...Since Malcolm's style depends on startling metaphors, it comes as no surprise that she sees those biographers as players in a gothic poker game, taking place "in a room so dark and gloomy that one has a hard time seeing one's hand...
...Will these rather menacing characters help or hinder the game...
...In 1970 Hughes wanted money to buy a new house, so he decided to reprint Plath's autobiographical novel The Bell Jar...
...If Hughes had wanted to escape blame, he might better have suppressed the furious poems of the Ariel manuscript altogether...
...Her writings, public and private, indicate that she deliberately discarded the image of "a nice person" in favor of a grittier truth...
...For her model she has chosen one of the most fierce and public battles ever fought between a literary estate and aspiring biographers...
...Reviewers accused her of "selling out" to the estate and assuming an advocate's role for the Hugheses...
...Ten years ago, In the Freud Archives gave us a blow-by-blow account of orthodox Freudians duking it out with their master's detractors...
...He has instead faithfully kept her flame burning bright before literary audiences...
...The main figures in this allegory are Plath's survivors...
...But how does one go about filling in the lacunae in one's knowledge of a dead person...
...A tall, graying man, all in black, enters where the players are gathered, followed by a tall woman who glares malevolently at them...
...The friction the novel's appearance caused, though, soon escalated into a war between husband and mother over the poet's image...
...In short, "she doesn't add up...
...AFTER two accounts of Plath's life were published —both fairly innocuous to an outsider's eye, yet hurtful to those who figured in her history—the estate made another unfortunate move...
...In one of her most memorable passages Malcolm writes: "The voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity...
...Malcolm shows how the situation is both oppressive and tantalizing for Plath's would-be biographers: Each hopes to be the one to illuminate what actually happened and voice the feelings of the "silent woman" in the casket, whose poetry still speaks so loudly...
...Malcolm confesses to appreciating Anne Stevenson's predicament because she herself has "written an unpopular book...
...In 1990, The Journalist and the Murderer depicted the feud between an Army doctor convicted of killing his family and a friendly writer with whom he cooperated in hopes of exoneration, but whose book ultimately concurred with the court...
...A postmodernist critic who had done a study that saw everything Plath wrote as dreamlike, allowing infinite speculation, confided that an outraged letter from Hughes over her reading of one poem as a bisexual fantasy caused her to feel physically threatened...
...An American poet about Plath's age, Stevenson too had moved to England...
...Her thoughtful book proclaims that too many contemporary biographies do violence to reality by treating it merely as a form of literature, complete with black-or-white characters, a tidy plot and a Hollywood moral...
...Hughes decided to "cooperate," through his sister, with Anne Stevenson in order to correct what he and Olwyn agreed were the failings of the earlier books...
...Ted Hughes, now England's Poet Laureate, is the tall man, the husband whose desertion inspired Plath's most powerful and angry verse...
...Yet of the five biographies to date [Silent Woman does not properly belong to the genre), Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame alone confronts the enigma at the heart of Plath's work...
...The biographer is portrayed almost as a benefactor...
...Thus it is commonly assumed that by studying her personality and the events of her life, readers can better understand the desperation of what Emily Dickinson would have called her "letter to the world...
...Her approach seems sensible and balanced to an impartial reader...
...Both sides started releasing private letters and journals to support their contrasting impressions of "the real Sylvia...
...All the same, it drew fire from every side...
...They insist that no one may criticize the deceased, although living members of the family are fair game...
...In fact, she clarifies how a serious tactical misstep he made set in motion a chain of events that had quite the opposite effect...
...The old woman is her mother, Aurelia, with whom Sylvia had a close but difficult relationship...
...A small old woman sits in a straight-backed chair reading a manual of stenography...
...Now, in The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (Knopf, 208 pp., $23.00), Malcolm explores the conflicts inherent in accurately describing the life of a dead contemporary author...
...Malcolm had claimed that one of its subjects, a Freudian apostate, used his position in that august institution to hunt for documents that might discredit the founder of psychoanalysis...
...Family keepers of that material, however, will frequently turn hostile if their vision of the deceased is not accepted...
...Hughes was within his legal rights...
...When Hughes bitterly protests the way "writers move onto the living because they can no longer feel the difference between [them] and the dead," and charges that they ransack their subjects' "psyches and reinvent them however they please," readers of recent biographies know exactly what he is talking about...
...In Malcolm's view, Bitter Fame is "the most intelligent and only esthetically satisfying" life of Plath thus far...
...Doubtless many will charge her again with being grossly biased...
...Previously it had been published under a pseudonym and only in England, to avoid inflicting pain on its American subjects...
...But that would miss her fundamental point...
...Her overriding concern was, and remains, to defend her brother from the "libbers" she imagines to be Sylvia's champions and his adversaries...
...Many Plath scholars, identifying strongly with the rage and hurt their heroine expressed against her husband during her last months, cannot forgive him—even 30 years later—for censoring parts of her Journals or for controlling their freedom to quote from her in print...
...A number of individual lives have been reshaped—usually for the worse—by getting caught up in the thicket surrounding Plath...
...Without being disengaged—her own opinions do emerge, and tend to be strong—she fashions portraits that, favorable or not, retain the feel of authenticity...
...On one level, The Silent Woman is a continuation of her defense...
...His enemies, recalling her best-known poem, "Daddy," crudely mark him as the "man in black with a Meinkampf look/And a love of the rack and the screw," persecuting her defenders to hide his own moral complicity in her death...
...Nothing becomes clear until the bidding starts...
...In Malcolm's own complicated interpretation, Hughes emerges a compelling and sympathetic figure...
...From the time of his wife's death, Ted Hughes has been what Malcolm terms "Plath's greatest critic, elucidator, and (you could almost say) impresario...
...This view does not jibe with reality...
...Some made it a melodrama between the good girl and the bad guy...
...The notoriously difficult Olwyn, meanwhile, felt Stevenson had not listened to the family enough and never forgave her for it...
...Inevitably, some issues get left out and others are magnified...
...Malcolm, observing that there have been countless similar exploitations of the survivors of a biographer's dead subject, cites the case of George Orwell's widow, Sonia, and his authorized biographer, Bernard Crick...
...Witnesses prove contradictory, so one ends up trying to collate the paper trail of a lifetime...
...As she did the interviews for this work, Malcolm tells us, she paid particular attention to the way each person molded "the Plath legend...
...The tall woman is his sister, Olwyn Hughes, a literary agent who administered the estate until her retirement in 1991...
...Malcolm's research uncovered clumsy errors in the handling of Plath's estate, but no self-serving omissions by Hughes...
...Her tales are gripping precisely because she zeroes in on the essence of a personality...
...Not one to pull her own punches, Malcolm lets us see how people talk to a reporter, how in seeking to control a story they usually reveal the very information they later regret having mentioned...
...In the next room lies "an open coffin surrounded by candles...
...one is apt to make mistakes...
...Mostly, she suggests, these are the people eager "to wrest from Hughes the power over [Plath's] literary remains which he acquired when she died...
...Malcolm rightly points out that "The taut surrealism of the late poems and the slack, girl's book realism of her life (as recorded by biographers and by her own biographical writings) are grotesquely incongruous...
...and been attacked in the press...
...Had he done so, Plath probably would never have come to public notice...
Vol. 77 • March 1994 • No. 3
