Ted Hughes wrote two versions of his foreword to “The Journals of Sylvia Plath,” a selection of diary entries covering the years between 1950 and 1962. The first version (the one that appears in the book, published in 1982) is a short, lyrical essay constructed on a single Blakean theme—the theme of a “real self” that finally emerged from among Plath’s warring “false selves” and found triumphant expression in the “Ariel” poems, which were written in the last half year of her life and are the whole reason for her poetical reputation. In Hughes’s view, her other writings—the short fiction she doggedly wrote and submitted, mostly unsuccessfully, to popular magazines; her novel, “The Bell Jar”; her letters; her apprentice poems, published in her first collection, “The Colossus”—“were like impurities thrown off from the various stages of the inner transformation, by-products of the internal work.” He writes about a remarkable prefigurative moment:
Hughes goes on to say that “when a real self finds language, and manages to speak, it is surely a dazzling event.” However, because the “Ariel” poems reveal little about the “incidental circumstances or the crucial inner drama” that produced them, he pauses to reflect that “maybe it is this very bareness of circumstantial detail that has excited the wilder fantasies projected by others in Sylvia Plath’s name.” Publication of the journals, he feels, will presumably lay some of these fantasies to rest, but he does not elaborate on how they will do this; he merely notes that they record Plath’s “day to day struggle with her warring selves” and are to be exempted from his over-all characterization of her prose writings as “waste products.” Hughes ends his three-page essay with a revelation that is so unexpected and so abrupt that one doesn’t immediately take in its significance:
The second version of the foreword, published in Grand Street in 1982 and, three years later, in an anthology of writings about Plath called “Ariel Ascending,” edited by Paul Alexander, is considerably longer, denser, and more complex; it hasn’t the elegant single-threadedness of the first version. It is as if Hughes looked at his first version and cast it aside as one of the too simple and too pretty false starts that a writer must make as a necessary part of finding out what he wants to say. (You could even call it a throwing off of impurities.) In his second foreword Hughes puts his revelation about the lost journals at the very beginning:
We note that Hughes has made two changes. In one he holds out hope that the “disappeared” journal may eventually reappear (inviting the speculation that the journal is in fact, and may always have been, in his hands). In the other, and more crucial, change he has himself disappeared: “I destroyed” now becomes “her husband destroyed.” Hughes can no longer sustain the fiction—on which all autobiographical writing is poised—that the person writing and the person being written about are a single seamless entity. In his second foreword Hughes needs to spell out his awareness of the discontinuity between the observing and the observed self: the observed self (“her husband”) represents the interests of the Hughes children, who must be protected from destructive knowledge, whereas the observing self—whom he calls “we,” as in “We cannot help wondering whether the lost entries for her last three years were not the more important section” represents the interests of the reader, who wants to understand the relationship between the “Ariel” poems and the poet’s life. The publication of Plath’s journals was evidently undertaken to elucidate this relationship. But “her husband” ’s destructive act has made a kind of mockery of the enterprise, since the very journals that would cast light on the “Ariel” poems—the journals written while the poems were being composed—are the ones he destroyed and lost. This is the conundrum that Hughes must solve in his second foreword, and this is why he has, with helpless honesty (which an unsympathetic reader could mistake for evasiveness), divided himself into—you could even say lost himself in—the two selves, neither one “true” or “false,” that allegorize the impossibility of his situation as both editor and destroyer.
In the course of his second foreword Hughes makes a Houdiniesque escape from the trunk he has stuffed himself into and has had thrown in the river. As he writes of a mysterious, urgent, hermetically sealed process of psychological rebirth going on within Plath, from which the “Ariel” poems came and to which the surviving journals are a key, the warring roles of the destructive husband and the irked editor quietly recede. The jarring designations “her husband” and “we” are heard less and less frequently, and a new figure, a serene critical intelligence, enters the essay and firmly takes charge of its purposes, riveting us with the suspenseful, elating narrative of Plath’s poetic emergence. By the end of the essay, the problem of the missing journals is a dot on the distant horizon. Hughes has been able to lead us away from it because he led us up to it. When he made his confession at the end of his first version, it was as if he had suddenly rolled an impassable boulder into the reader’s path. By beginning his second version with the boulder in place, he is able to propose ways of getting around it: by acknowledging difficulty, by resisting the temptation to minimize it, by moving sideways.
Life, as we all know, does not reliably offer—as art does—second (and a third and a thirtieth) chance to tinker with a problem, but Ted Hughes’s history seems to be uncommonly bare of the moments of mercy that allow one to undo or redo one’s actions and thus feel that life isn’t entirely tragic. Whatever Hughes might have undone or redone in his relationship to Sylvia Plath, the opportunity was taken from him when she committed suicide, in February of 1963, by putting her head in a gas oven as her two small children slept in a bedroom nearby, which she had sealed against gas fumes, and where she had placed mugs of milk and a plate of bread for them to find when they awoke. Plath and Hughes were not living together at the time of her death. They had been married for six years—she was thirty and he was thirty-two when she died—and had separated the previous fall in a turbulent way. There was another woman. It is a situation that many young married couples find themselves in—one that perhaps more couples find themselves in than don’t—but it is a situation that ordinarily doesn’t last: the couple either reconnects or dissolves. Life goes on. The pain and bitterness and exciting awfulness of sexual jealousy and sexual guilt recede and disappear. People grow older. They forgive themselves and each other, and may even come to realize that what they are forgiving themselves and each other for is youth.
But a person who dies at thirty in the middle of a messy separation remains forever fixed in the mess. To the readers of her poetry and her biography, Sylvia Plath will always be young and in a rage over Hughes’s unfaithfulness. She will never reach the age when the tumults of young adulthood can be looked back upon with rueful sympathy and without anger and vengefulness. Ted Hughes has reached this age—he reached it some time ago—but he has been cheated of the peace that age brings by the posthumous fame of Plath and by the public’s fascination with the story of her life. Since he was part of that life—the most interesting figure in it during its final six years—he, too, remains fixed in the chaos and confusion of its final period. Like Prometheus, whose ravaged liver was daily reconstituted so it could be daily re-ravaged, Hughes has had to watch his young self being picked over by biographers, scholars, critics, article writers, and newspaper journalists. Strangers who Hughes feels know nothing about his marriage to Plath write about it with proprietary authority. “I hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life,” Hughes wrote in a letter to the Independent in April, 1989, when he had been goaded by a particularly intrusive article. But, of course, as everyone knows who has ever heard a piece of gossip, we do not “own” the facts of our lives at all. This ownership passes out of our hands at birth, at the moment we are first observed. The organs of publicity that have proliferated in our time are only an extension and a magnification of society’s fundamental and incorrigible nosiness. Our business is everybody’s business, should anybody wish to make it so. The concept of privacy is a sort of screen to hide the fact that almost none is possible in a social universe. In any struggle between the public’s inviolable fight to be diverted and an individual’s wish to be left alone, the public almost always prevails. After we are dead, the pretense that we may somehow be protected against the world’s careless malice is abandoned. The branch of the law that putatively protects our good name against libel and slander withdraws from us indifferently. The dead cannot be libelled or slandered. They are without legal recourse.
Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world. The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away. 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. The biographer is portrayed almost as a kind of benefactor. He is seen as sacrificing years of his life to his task, tirelessly sitting in archives and libraries and patiently conducting interviews with witnesses. There is no length he will not go to, 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. The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography’s status as a popular genre. The reader’s amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole.
Every now and then, a biography comes along that strangely displeases the public. Something causes the reader to back away from the writer and refuse to accompany him down the corridor. What the reader has usually heard in the text—what has alerted him to danger—is the sound of doubt, the sound of a crack opening in the wall of the biographer’s self-assurance. As a burglar should not pause to discuss with his accomplice the fights and wrongs of burglary while he is jimmying a lock, so a biographer ought not to introduce doubts about the legitimacy of the biographical enterprise. The biography-loving public does not want to hear that biography is a flawed genre. It prefers to believe that certain biographers are bad guys.
This is what happened to Anne Stevenson, the author of a biography of Sylvia Plath called “Bitter Fame,” which is by far the most intelligent and the only aesthetically satisfying of the five biographies of Plath written to date. The other four are: “Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness” (1976), by Edward Butscher; “Sylvia Plath: A Biography” (1987), by Linda Wagner-Martin; “The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath” (1991), by Ronald Hayman; and “Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath” (1991), by Paul Alexander. In Stevenson’s book, which was published in 1989, the cracking of the wall was all too audible. “Bitter Fame” was brutally attacked, and Anne Stevenson herself was pilloried; the book became known and continues to be known in the Plath world as a “bad” book. The misdeed for which Stevenson could not be forgiven was to hesitate before the keyhole. “Any biography of Sylvia Plath written during the lifetimes of her family and friends must take their vulnerability into consideration, even if completeness suffers from it,” she wrote in her preface. This is a most remarkable—in fact, a thoroughly subversive—statement for a biographer to make. To take vulnerability into consideration! To show compunction! To spare feelings! To not push as far as one can! What is the woman thinking of? The biographer’s business, like the journalist’s, is to satisfy the reader’s curiosity, not to place limits on it. He is supposed to go out and bring back the goods—the malevolent secrets that have been quietly burning in archives and libraries and in the minds of contemporaries who have been biding their time, waiting for the biographer’s knock on their doors. Some of the secrets are difficult to bring away, and some, jealously guarded by relatives, are even impossible. Relatives are the biographer’s natural enemies; they are like the hostile tribes an explorer encounters and must ruthlessly subdue to claim his territory. If the relatives behave like friendly tribes, as they occasionally do—if they propose to coöperate with the biographer, even to the point of making him “official” or “authorized”—he still has to assert his authority and strut about to show that he is the big white man and they are just the naked savages. Thus, for example, when Bernard Crick agreed to be George Orwell’s authorized biographer he first had to ritually bring Orwell’s widow to her knees. “She agreed to my firm condition that as well as complete access to the papers, I should have an absolute and prior waiver of copyright so that I could quote what I liked and write what I liked. These were hard terms, even if the only terms on which, I think, a scholar should and can take on a contemporary biography,” Crick writes with weary pride in an essay entitled “On the Difficulties of Writing Biography in General and of Orwell’s in Particular.” When Sonia Orwell read excerpts from Crick’s manuscript and realized the worthlessness of the trinkets she had traded her territory for (her fantasy that Crick saw Orwell exactly as she saw him, and viewed her marriage to Orwell exactly as she viewed it), she tried to rescind the agreement. She could not do so, of course. Crick’s statement is a model of biographical rectitude. His “hard terms” are the reader’s guarantee of quality, like the standards set by the Food and Drug Administration. They assure the reader that he is getting something pure and wholesome, not something that has been tampered with.
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When Anne Stevenson’s biography arrived, it looked like damaged goods. The wrapping was coming undone, the label looked funny, there was no nice piece of cotton at the top of the bottle. Along with the odd statement about the book’s intentional incompleteness, there was a most suspicious-looking Author’s Note on the opening page. “In writing this biography, I have received a great deal of help from Olwyn Hughes,” Stevenson said. (Olwyn Hughes is Ted Hughes’s older sister and the former literary agent to the Plath estate.) “Ms. Hughes’s contributions to the text have made it almost a work of dual authorship. I am particularly grateful for the work she did on the last four chapters and on the Ariel poems of the autumn of 1962.” The note ended with an asterisk that led to a footnote citing exactly which poems Olwyn Hughes had done work on. As if all this weren’t peculiar enough, the Author’s Note in the published book differed from the Author’s Note in the galleys sent to reviewers, which read, “This biography of Sylvia Plath is the result of a three-year dialogue between the author and Olwyn Hughes, agent to the Plath Estate. Ms. Hughes has contributed so liberally to the text that this is in effect a work of joint authorship.”
Anne Stevenson apparently had not subdued the natives but had been captured by them and subjected to God knows what tortures. The book she had finally staggered back to civilization with was repudiated by many as a piece of worthless native propaganda, rather than the “truthful” and “objective” work it should have been. She was seen as having been used by Ted and Olwyn Hughes to put forward their version of Ted Hughes’s relations with Plath. Hughes has been extremely reticent about his life with Plath; he has written no memoir, he gives no interviews, his writings about her work (in a number of introductions to volumes of her poetry and prose) are always about the work, and touch on biography only when it relates to the work. It evidently occurred to no one that if Hughes was indeed speaking about his marriage to Plath through Stevenson this might add to the biography’s value, not decrease it.
When I first read “Bitter Fame,” in the late summer of 1989, I knew nothing of the charged situation surrounding it, nor was I impelled by any great interest in Sylvia Plath. The book had been sent to me by its publisher, and what aroused my interest was the name Anne Stevenson. Anne had been a fellow-student of mine at the University of Michigan in the nineteen-fifties. She was in the class ahead of me, and I did not know her, but I knew of her, as the daughter of an eminent and popular professor of philosophy and as a girl who was arty—who wrote poetry that appeared in Generation, the university’s literary magazine, and who had won the Hopwood award, a serious literary prize. She had once been pointed out to me on the street: thin and pretty, with an atmosphere of awkward intensity and passion about her, gesticulating, surrounded by interesting-looking boys. In those days, I greatly admired artiness, and Anne Stevenson was one of the figures who glowed with a special incandescence in my imagination. She seemed to embody and to have come by naturally all the romantic qualities that I and my fellow fainthearted rebels against the dreariness of the Eisenhower years yearned toward, as we stumblingly, and largely unsuccessfully, attempted to live out our fantasies of nonconformity. Over the years, I watched Anne achieve the literary success she had been headed toward at Michigan. I had begun to write, too, but I did not envy or feel competitive with her: she was in a different sphere, a higher, almost sacred place—the stratosphere of poetry. Moreover, she had married an Englishman and moved to England—the England of E. M. Forster, G. B. Shaw, Max Beerbohm, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence—and that only fixed her the more firmly in my imagination as a figure of literary romance. When, in the mid-seventies, I read Anne’s book-length poem “Correspondences,” a kind of novel in letters, a chronicle of quiet (and sometimes not so quiet) domestic despair over several generations, my vague admiration found a sturdy object. The book showed Anne to be not only a poet of arresting technical accomplishment but a woman who had lived, and could speak about her encounters with the real in a tough, modern woman’s voice. (She could also modulate it into the softer tones of nineteenth-century moral thought.)
The years passed, and one day a poem by Anne Stevenson appeared in the Times Literary Supplement entitled “A Legacy: On My Fiftieth Birthday.” Anne was now a grand literary lady. Her poem was full of poets and editors and critics and friends and children and dogs, and its tone of intimate allusiveness evoked a society of remarkable people meeting in each other’s burnished houses and talking about literature and ideas in their quiet, kind English voices. I briefly considered writing Anne a note of congratulation and identifying myself as an old Michigan schoolmate—and didn’t. Her society seemed too closed, sufficient unto itself.
More years went by when I didn’t hear or think about Anne Stevenson; then “Bitter Fame” brought her into my imaginative life again. I read the early chapters about Plath’s childhood and adolescence and college years with pangs of rueful recognition—the three of us were almost the same age—and with a certain surprise at the accuracy and authority of Anne’s evocation of what it had been like to be a young person living in America in the nineteen-fifties. How did Anne know about it? I had placed her far above and beyond the shames and humiliations and hypocrisies in which the rest of us were helplessly implicated. Evidently, she knew about them all too well. “Middle-class teenage Americans in the 1950s subscribed to an amazing code of sexual frustration,” she writes, and continues:
When writing of how Plath, in her senior year at Smith, daringly matriculated from petting to sleeping with her boyfriends, and deceived her mother about her activities, Anne is moved to observe: “Many women who, like myself, were students in America in the 1950s will remember duplicities of this kind. Sylvia’s double standard was quite usual, as was the acceptable face she assumed in letters to her mother. My own letters home of the time were not dissimilar.”
The early chapters of “Bitter Fame” pulled me back into a period that I still find troubling to recall, precisely because duplicity was so closely woven into its fabric. We lied to our parents and we lied to each other and we lied to ourselves, so addicted to deception had we become. We were an uneasy, shifty-eyed generation. Only a few of us could see how it was with us. When Ted Hughes writes about the struggle of Plath’s “true self” to emerge from her false one, he is surely writing about a historical as well as a personal crisis. The nineteenth century came to an end in America only in the nineteen-sixties; the desperate pretense that the two World Wars had left the world as unchanged as the Boer War had left it was finally stripped away by the sexual revolution, the women’s movement, the civil-rights movement, the environmental movement, the Vietnam War protests. Sylvia Plath and Anne Stevenson and I came of age in the period when the need to keep up the pretense was especially strong: no one was prepared—least of all the shaken returning G.I.s—to face the post-Hiroshima and post-Auschwitz world. At the end of her life, Plath looked, with unnerving steadiness, at the Gorgon; her late poems name and invoke the bomb and the death camps. She was able—she had been elected—to confront what most of the rest of us fearfully shrank from. “For goodness sake, stop being so frightened of everything, Mother!” she wrote to Aurelia Plath in October, 1962. “Almost every other word in your letter is ‘frightened.’ ” In the same letter she said:
But Plath’s engagement with “the world’s hardest things” came only just before she killed herself. (Robert Lowell wrote in his introduction to “Ariel,” “This poetry and life are not a career; they tell that life, even when disciplined, is simply not worth it.”) The history of her life—as it has now been told in the five biographies and in innumerable essays and critical studies—is a signature story of the fearful, double-faced fifties. Plath embodies in a vivid, almost emblematic way the schizoid character of the period. She is the divided self par excellence. The taut surrealism of the late poems and the slack, girls’-book realism of her life (as rendered by Plath’s biographers and by her own autobiographical writings) are grotesquely incongruous. The photographs of Plath as a vacuous girl of the fifties, with dark lipstick and blond hair, add to one’s sense of the jarring disparity between the life and the work. In “Bitter Fame,” writing with the affectionate asperity of a sibling, Anne Stevenson draws a portrait of Plath as a highly self-involved and confused, unstable, driven, perfectionistic, rather humorless young woman, whose suicide remains a mystery, as does the source of her art, and who doesn’t add up.
As I read the book, certain vague, dissatisfied thoughts I had had while reading other biographies began to come into sharper focus. It was only later, when the bad report of the book had spread and I had learned about some of the circumstances of its writing, that I understood why it gave the sense of being as much about the problems of biographical writing as about Sylvia Plath. At the time, I thought that it was Sylvia Plath herself who was mischievously subverting the biographer’s project. The many voices in which the dead girl spoke—the voices of the journals, of her letters, of “The Bell Jar,” of the short stories, of the early poems, of the “Ariel” poems—mocked the whole idea of biographical narrative. The more Anne Stevenson fleshed out Plath’s biography with quotations from her writings, the thinner, paradoxically, did her own narrative seem. The voices began to take over the book and to speak to the reader over the biographer’s head. They whispered, “Listen to me, not to her. I am authentic. I speak with authority. Go to the full texts of the journals, the letters home, and the rest. They will tell you what you want to know.” These voices were joined by another chorus—that of people who had actually known Plath. These, too, said, “Don’t listen to Anne Stevenson. She didn’t know Sylvia. I knew Sylvia. Let me tell you about her. Read my correspondence with her. Read my memoir.” Three of these voices were particularly loud—those of Lucas Myers, Dido Merwin, and Richard Murphy, who had written memoirs of Plath and Hughes that appeared as appendixes in “Bitter Fame.” One of them, Merwin’s, entitled “Vessel of Wrath,” rose to the pitch of a shriek. The memoir caused a sensation: it was deplored because of its excess.
Dido Merwin couldn’t stand Plath, and had waited thirty years to tell the world what she thought of her former “friend,” depicting her as the unbearable wife of a long-suffering martyr. According to Merwin, the wonder was not that Hughes left Plath but that he “stuck it out as long as he did.” After the separation, Merwin writes, she asked Hughes “what had been hardest to take during the time he and Sylvia were together,” and he revealed that Plath, in a fit of jealous rage, had torn into small pieces all his work-in-progress of the winter of 1961, as well as his copy of Shakespeare. Merwin also recalls as if it had happened yesterday a disastrous visit that Plath and Hughes paid her and her then husband, the poet W. S. Merwin, at their farmhouse, in the Dordogne. Plath “used up all the hot water, repeatedly helped herself from the fridge (breakfasting on what one had planned to serve for lunch, etc.), and rearranged the furniture in their bedroom.” She cast such a pall with her sulking (though her appetite never diminished, Merwin notes, and tells of balefully watching Plath attack a fine foie gras “for all the world as though it were ‘Aunt Dot’s meat loaf’ ”) that Hughes had to cut the visit short. Anne Stevenson was heavily criticized for giving an “unbalanced” idea of Plath by including this venomous portrait in her biography.
In fact, where Anne Stevenson made her mistake of balance was not in including such a negative view of Plath but in including such a subversively lively piece of writing. The limitations of biographical writing are never more evident than when one turns from it to writing in another genre; and when, led by a footnote, I turned from the text of “Bitter Fame” to Dido Merwin’s memoir I felt as if I had been freed from prison. The hushed cautiousness, the solemn weighing of “evidence,” the humble “she must have felt”s and “he probably thought”s of biographical writing had given way to a high-spirited subjectivity. Writing in her own voice as her own person, fettered by no roles of epistemological deportment, Dido could let rip. She knew exactly how she felt and what she thought. The contrast between the omniscient narrator of “Bitter Fame,” whose mantle of pallid judiciousness Anne Stevenson was obliged to wear, and the robustly intemperate “I” of the Merwin memoir is striking. Merwin’s portrait of Plath is a self-portrait of Merwin, of course. It is she, rather than Plath, who emerges, larger than life, from “Vessel of Wrath,” and whose obliterating vividness led readers into their error of questioning Anne Stevenson’s motives.
The first of the bad reviews of “Bitter Fame”—a powerful harbinger—appeared in the September 28, 1989, issue of The New York Review of Books and was by the English writer A. Alvarez. Alvarez was a logical choice to review “Bitter Fame.” As poetry editor of the Observer in the nineteen-sixties, he was one of the first people in England to recognize Plath’s talent; he had published several of her poems in the Observer. In 1971, he had himself written a memoir of Plath; it appeared as the first chapter of “The Savage God,” a book he wrote about suicide, and it was the first account in print to give details of Plath’s death. Like Dido Merwin’s memoir—like every memoir—Alvarez’s is a work of autobiography, though what Merwin does naïvely and unwittingly he does artfully and consciously. He works his recollections of Plath into a kind of allegory of suicidal drive; the depression and disorder of his own life (he tells us he swallowed forty-five sleeping pills a decade earlier) are fused with and metaphorized by the last act of her life, when she gambled with fate—as Alvarez characterizes it, and as he himself did—and lost. Alvarez argues, giving chilling details, that Plath meant to be found and saved, and that she died only because of a freakish series of accidents. His argument is compelling and horrifying.
But it is a second narrative, a sort of sub-allegory, that gives Alvarez’s memoir its high verve and also its status as a foundation text of the Plath legend. This is the narrative of the flow of power between husband and wife—the story of how, during the two years of his acquaintance with Plath and Hughes, Alvarez watched power go from one to the other, like water poured from one pitcher into another. At first, the husband was the full vessel. “This was Ted’s time,” Alvarez writes about Hughes when he first met him, in London, in the spring of 1960; Hughes’s second book of poems, “Lupercal,” had just appeared and Alvarez thought it “the best book by a young poet that I had read since I began my stint on the Observer.” Alvarez goes on to describe the poet himself “He was a tall, strong-looking man in a black corduroy jacket, black trousers, black shoes; his dark hair hung untidily forward; he had a long, witty mouth. He was in command.” In contrast, he says, Plath was just a banal little housewife, “briskly American: bright, clean, competent, like a young woman in a cookery advertisement.” Alvarez didn’t notice her very much then. He reports an embarrassing moment when, as he and Hughes were going out the door (the two of them would take walks or go to the pub, while Plath stayed home), Plath shyly stopped him and mentioned a poem of hers that he had accepted for publication in the Observer the previous year. At first, Alvarez didn’t know what she was talking about—he simply didn’t connect the bright, clean housewife with the world of poetry, and hadn’t known that her writing name was Plath. Later that year, when Plath’s first book of poems, “The Colossus,” was published in England, Alvarez reviewed it for the Observer. “It seemed to fit the image I had of her: serious, gifted, withheld, and still partly under the massive shadow of her husband,” he writes in his memoir. He praised Plath’s poems for their technical proficiency but felt that something was being held back: “Beneath most of the poems was a sense of resources and disturbances not yet tapped.”
Alvarez went to America to teach for a term, and when he returned to London, in February of 1961, his relationship with the couple attenuated: “Ted had fallen out of love with London and was fretting to get away; Sylvia had been ill—first a miscarriage, then appendicitis—and I had my own problems, a divorce.” When he saw them next, in June, 1962, they were living in Devon, in Court Green, an old manor house with a thatched roof and a cobbled courtyard and a big wild garden and orchard, next to a twelfth-century church. It was now Sylvia’s time, Alvarez reports:
And Ted: he “seemed content to sit back and play with little Frieda [his two-year-old daughter], who clung to him dependently.” Alvarez adds, a little nervously, “Since it appeared to be a strong, close marriage, I suppose he was unconcerned that the balance of power had shifted for the time being to her.”
By the fall of 1962, the strong, close marriage had failed, and Hughes had moved back to London. Plath remained in Devon with the children, travelling to London from time to time on literary business. She began to visit Alvarez regularly in his studio, a converted stable in Hampstead, and read to him from her new work. Alvarez was now more Plath’s friend than Hughes’s. He parts the curtain and permits us a glimpse of himself and Plath in the studio:
The poems that Plath read to Alvarez were the poems that are now taught in literature courses—“Ariel,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,” “The Applicant,” “Fever 103°,” the bee poems, “A Birthday Present”—and their destructive and unforgiving force, he reports, so shook him that to maintain his equilibrium he resorted to small, picky criticisms; one that he now particularly regrets was of a line in “Lady Lazarus,” which Plath took out at his suggestion. After the reading of the poetry and Alvarez’s criticism of it, the talk would become more personal. “Perhaps because I was also a member of the club,” Alvarez writes, Plath told him about her first suicide attempt, in the summer of 1953 (she, too, had swallowed a bottleful of sleeping pills), and about a more recent incident of driving her car off the road.
However, the relationship between the critic and the poet did not go where it seemed to be going. Alvarez backed off from Plath. “She must have felt I was stupid and insensitive. Which I was,” he writes of their last meeting, on Christmas Eve of 1962, less than two months before her death. “But to have been otherwise would have meant accepting responsibilities I didn’t want and couldn’t, in my own depression, have coped with.” By this time, Plath, too, had left Devon for London, and was living on Fitzroy Road in a flat that Alvarez found chillingly orderly and austere. She had invited him for dinner, but he was engaged elsewhere and only stopped in for a drink. “When I left about eight o’clock to go on to my dinner party, I knew I had let her down in some final and unforgivable way. And I knew she knew. I never again saw her alive.”
Alvarez’s memoir set the tone for the writing about Plath and Hughes that was to follow; it erected the structure on which the narrative of Plath as an abandoned and mistreated woman and Hughes as a heartless betrayer was to be strung. Although Alvarez is extremely discreet and gives no details of Hughes and Plath’s separation—about which, in fact, he knew a great deal—it is not hard to read his self-castigation as a veiled accusation against Hughes, whose rejection of Plath was, after all, much more profoundly final and unforgivable. The ordeal of Ted Hughes could be said to date from the publication of Alvarez’s memoir in “The Savage God” and its serialization in the Observer. Hughes was immediately aware of the destructive power of the piece, and he succeeded in getting the second half of the memoir pulled from the Observer, but he could do nothing about its appearance in “The Savage God,” or about its subsequent influence.
Once the plot of the suicidal poetess and her abandonment by the man with the witty mouth was released into the world, there would be no end to the variations played on it, or to Hughes’s burial alive in each of its retellings. When “Bitter Fame” appeared, declaring that it would “dispel the posthumous miasma of fantasy, rumor, politics, and ghoulish gossip” that was feeding Plath’s “perverse legend,” it was hardly surprising that the book was not greeted with open arms. The world likes to hold on to its fantasy, rumor, politics, and ghoulish gossip, not dispel them, and nobody wanted to hear that it was Hughes who was good and Plath who was bad. The pleasure of hearing ill of the dead is not a negligible one, but it pales before the pleasure of hearing ill of the living. There is simply no choice between a dead bad guy and a live one. Given the task of reviewing a book whose declared object was to dismantle the narrative that he himself had set in motion, Alvarez could hardly have been expected to look upon it favorably. He raked over “Bitter Fame,” and when he was finished there were three bad guys where previously only one had stood: to Ted Hughes were now added Anne Stevenson and Olwyn Hughes. An ancillary narrative was born of Alvarez’s review—the narrative of the corrupt biographer and the evil sister.
The ground had been prepared for this narrative by the biography of Plath written by Linda Wagner-Martin, a professor of English then at Michigan State University. The chief interest of this book, which is written in a style as blandly unpretentious as a young girl’s diary (“Dick had gone to Florida during spring break, he and Perry had just taken a trip to Maine, and now he was going to Arizona. In contrast, she stayed in Wellesley and mowed the grass”), is its preface, in which Wagner-Martin boldly speaks out about her unhappy dealings with the Plath estate:
In his review of “Bitter Fame” Alvarez quotes this passage, holding it up as the “typical” experience of unauthorized biographers of Plath. He commends the plucky Linda Wagner-Martin for standing up to the estate and writing “a mildly feminist but otherwise careful and evenhanded account of the life” (note the “but”), and rendering an “admiring and forgiving” portrait. The supine Anne Stevenson, in contrast, is censured for caving in under the pressure of the evil sister and writing a book that Alvarez sees as “more than 350 pages of disparagement.” Of the Dido Merwin memoir in the appendix, Alvarez writes that it is “a work of sustained and quite astonishing venom and what is most tasteless about it is not that it should have been written about someone who can no longer defend herself but that it should be published in a biography commissioned and approved by the Plath estate.” As in his own memoir of Plath, Alvarez once again presents Ted Hughes as a recessive figure, about whom he elaborately speaks no ill but who is damned by his very recessiveness. Since “Ted Hughes has steadfastly refused to be involved in the biographical wrangling,” Alvarez writes, Plath, the defenseless dead woman, has been left abandoned to the mercies of the cruel Olwyn. Once again, Hughes has evaporated when Plath needed him most, and once again Alvarez has stepped in to play the role of Plath’s champion and (as it proved) Hughes’s nemesis.
What Alvarez left delicately unsaid but hovering in the air was quickly picked up by other reviewers of “Bitter Fame” and run into the ground. In one of the crassest of the post-Alvarez reviews, in the November 10, 1989, Independent, Ronald Hayman writes, “At the core of this vindictive book are two strategies. One is to lay the blame for the break-up of the marriage squarely on Sylvia Plath by depicting her behaviour as so consistently outrageous that no husband could have put up with it for long, while Ted Hughes is characterised as patient, generous, warm, innocent, reluctant to be unfaithful. The other strategy is to undermine her poetic achievement by representing her verse as negative, sick, death-oriented, and comparing it unfavorably with his.” Hayman complains:
Hayman continues:
“Fantasy, rumor, politics, and ghoulish gossip” are represented here in their most unconstrained and ugly guise. As it happens, there is every reason to doubt Trevor Thomas’s account, and when Ted Hughes challenged its veracity before an organization called the Press Council he was upheld (the Independent published a correction and apology), and when he brought legal action against Thomas he similarly prevailed. (Thomas died on May 27th of this year.) But the harm was done—or redone. The narrative of the faithless, heartless Hughes and his Jezebel could not be dislodged. “Bitter Fame,” far from altering the old image of Hughes, only entrenched it further in the public imagination. The patient got sicker from the attempted cure. The doctors (who had already quarrelled, as doctors do in hopeless cases) withdrew in disarray. Deep pathologies of biography and of journalism began to fuse, and to engender virulent new strains of the bacillus of bad faith. As a susceptible member of the journalist tribe myself, I began to feel the early symptoms of infection: the familiar stirrings of reportorial desire.
In December, 1989, I wrote to Ted Hughes, in care of his sister (as I had been told to do by his publisher), and asked him for an interview, saying, among other things, that I thought of the Plath biographical situation as a kind of allegory of the problem of biography in general. By return post I received a long letter from Olwyn Hughes. I read it in wonder and awe. We all move through the world surrounded by an atmosphere that is unique to us and by which we may be recognized as clearly as by our faces. Some of us, however, have thicker atmospheres than others, and a few of us have an atmosphere of such opacity that it hides us entirely from view—we seem to be nothing but our atmosphere. Olwyn Hughes is like this. Her letter was that of a person so intensely preoccupied and so passionately aggrieved that she simply could not be bothered to explain what she was talking about. She just hurtled headlong into her subject, “the myth of Sylvia Plath,” and I was left to follow her or not—it was all the same to her. She wasn’t there to persuade me; she was there to once again set down what she knew to be true. Olwyn wrote:
If I was surprised by the length and vehemence of Olwyn’s letter, I was not surprised by the fact of hearing from her rather than from Hughes. Of course, I thought. Over the years that Ted Hughes has been trying to escape from his narrativizing pursuers, his sister has done just the opposite. As literary agent of the Plath estate, a position she assumed in the mid-sixties and resigned from in 1991, Olwyn has had dealings with everyone who has wanted to write about Plath, presenting herself as a kind of Sphinx or Turandot before whom the various supplicants must appear—and invariably come to grief. She is also famous for her letters to editors and for the comments she regularly makes to journalists following the appearance of new writings about Plath and Hughes; these, too, display her strange fierceness and discursiveness. Her two roles fit uneasily together: Sphinxes and Turandots don’t usually write letters to editors or talk to journalists. They bar, they forbid, they slay; they don’t volunteer. After three and a half years of acquaintance with Olwyn—of meetings, telephone conversations, and correspondence—I cannot say I know her much better than I did when she first appeared to me in her letter. But I have never seen anything in her of the egotism, narcissism, and ambition that usually characterize the person who welcomes journalistic notice in the belief that he can beat the odds and gain control of the narrative. Olwyn seems motivated purely by an instinct to protect her younger brother’s interests and uphold the honor of the family, and she pursues this aim with reckless selflessness. Her frantic activity makes one think of a mother quail courageously flying into the face of a predator to divert him from the chicks scurrying to safety. The journalist whose talons are closing around her cannot but be stirred by the woman’s fierce loyalty and love—and cannot help wondering about the emotions of the man for whom she is sacrificing herself, as he observes it from his cover.
In 1971, in The New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote of Plath that “she has the rarity of being, in her work at least, never a ‘nice person.’ ” Hardwick put her finger on the quality that so arrested readers of “Ariel” when it first came out (in England in 1965, and in America in 1966), and continues to arrest us today. Plath’s not-niceness is the outstanding characteristic of the “Ariel” poems, it is what sets her apart from the other so-called confessional poets of the fifties and sixties, it is the note of the “true self” that Hughes celebrates. Her status as a feminist heroine has in large part derived from this tone. Women honor her for her courage to be unpleasant. “Every woman adores a Fascist,” Plath wrote in “Daddy”—meaning a male Fascist. But women have adored Plath for the Fascist in her, for the “boot in the face” that, even as she writes of male oppression, she herself viciously administers to readers of both sexes. Though “The Bell Jar” hasn’t the art of the late poems, its tone is still bracingly not-nice. (Had she lived, Plath might have developed into a first-rank novelist; “The Bell Jar” might have been to her mature fiction what “The Colossus” is to her mature poetry.) The novel is an indictment of the fifties in America. It chronicles the breakdown and suicide attempt and “recovery” of its heroine, Esther Greenwood, and is narrated by Esther in a voice that has all the disdain of the voice of “Ariel,” if not its chilly beauty and authority. The book has a surface puerility, a deceptive accessibility: it reads like a girls’ book. But it is a girls’ book written by a woman who has been to hell and back and wants to revenge herself on her tormentors. It is a girls’ book filled with poison, vomit, blood, and volts of electricity (the electrocution of the Rosenbergs and Esther’s horrifyingly powerful shock treatments are mordantly linked), and peopled by creepy men and pathetic older women.
“The Bell Jar” is a fictionalized account of Plath’s own breakdown and shock therapy and suicide attempt in 1953, and Plath did not want the originals of her unlovely characters—particularly her mother—to read the book. Esther’s mother is rendered with deft mercilessness. “My mother took care never to tell me to do anything,” Esther caustically observes. “She would only reason with me sweetly, like one intelligent mature person with another.” Also examined and found wanting in every respect are, among others, Olive Higgins Prouty, the author of “Stella Dallas,” who was Plath’s benefactor (she was the sponsor of Plath’s freshman scholarship at Smith, paid for her hospitalization after her suicide attempt, and became a lifelong friend of Aurelia’s); Plath’s college boyfriend, Dick Norton; and his mother. Plath therefore published the book under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. It came out in England in January of 1963 under that name and then, after her suicide, under her own name. (Two American publishers had turned it down.) When “The Bell Jar” was finally scheduled for publication in America, in 1971, Aurelia Plath was beside herself. In a letter to the publisher she wrote:
The shade of Plath must have read these words with a mocking and rather satisfied smile. Mrs. Plath giving freely of time is indistinguishable from Mrs. Greenwood reasoning sweetly. However, Mrs. Plath didn’t end matters there. In 1975, to make good her claim that the not-nice persona of “Ariel” and “The Bell Jar” was Plath’s sick “false self,” and that her healthy “real self” was a kindly, “service-oriented” good girl, she asked for and received permission from Ted Hughes, Plath’s literary executor, to publish a book of Plath’s letters to her written between 1950 and 1963. The idea was to show that Plath was not the hateful, hating ingrate, the changeling of “Ariel” and “The Bell Jar,” but a loving, obedient daughter. The shade’s smile of satisfaction must have faded when the letters appeared, in a volume called “Letters Home.” “Mother, how could you?” would be any daughter’s anguished response to an act of treachery like the publication of these letters: letters sloppily written, effusive, regressive; letters written habitually, compulsively, sometimes more than one a day; letters sent in the secure knowledge that they were for a mother’s uncritical eyes alone. It is one thing when some “publishing scoundrel” somehow gets hold of a cache of your most private and unpremeditated letters after your death and prints them, and another when your own mother hands you over to posterity in your stained bathrobe and unwashed face; it is quite beyond endurance, in fact. It seems simply never to have occurred to Mrs. Plath that the persona of “Ariel” and “The Bell Jar” was the persona by which Plath wished to be represented and remembered—that she wrote this way for publication because this was the way she wished to be perceived, and that the face she showed her mother was not the face she wished to show the reading public. One cannot blame the poor woman for her innocence. When a child commits suicide, the parents may be forgiven anything they do to dull their pain, even (or perhaps especially) acts of unconscious aggression.
The publication of “Letters Home” had a different effect from the one Mrs. Plath had intended, however. Instead of showing that Sylvia wasn’t “like that,” the letters caused the reader to consider for the first time the possibility that her sick relationship with her mother was the reason she was like that. Previously, the death of Plath’s father, Otto (a German-born professor of entomology, who died when she was barely eight), had been thought of as the shadow-event of her life, the wound from which she never recovered. But now it looked as if the key to Plath’s tragedy might all along have lain buried in the mother-daughter relationship. What Plath, with an artist’s indirection, had only suggested about its pathology (in such poems as “The Disquieting Muses” and “Medusa” as well as in “The Bell Jar”) now leaped off the pages of “Letters Home.” In the last line of “Medusa”—a poem in the form of a daughter’s angry speech to a mother—Plath writes, with chilling double meaning, “There is nothing between us.” The crushing too-closeness of Sylvia and her mother (and its concomitant terrifying alienation) is everywhere documented in “Letters Home.” Critical commentary about the unnatural bond between mother and daughter (Harriet Rosenstein and Lynda Bundtzen are among the most distinguished contributors to this literature) could hardly have cheered Mrs. Plath. But something even more momentous than her painful miscalculation—her utter failure to convince the world of how wonderful everything was with Sylvia and between her and Sylvia—resulted from the publication of “Letters Home.” This was the release into the world of a flood of information about Plath and the people in her life, most notably Ted Hughes—a flood that could be likened to an oil spill in the devastation it wrought among Plath’s survivors, who to this day are like birds covered with black ooze. Before the publication of “Letters Home,” the Plath legend was brief and contained, a taut, austere stage drama set in a few bleak, sparsely furnished rooms. Alvarez’s artful memoir established its anxious tone and adumbrated its potential as a feminist parable. Now the legend opened out, to become a vast, sprawling movie-novel filmed on sets of the most consummate and particularized realism: period clothing, furniture, and kitchen appliances; real food; a cast of characters headed by a Doris Dayish Plath (a tall Doris Day who “wrote”) and a Laurence Olivier–Heathcliffish Hughes. In exposing her daughter’s letters to the world’s scrutiny, Mrs. Plath not only violated Plath’s writer’s privacy but also handed Plath herself over to the world as an object to be familiarly passed from hand to hand. Now everyone could feel that he “knew” Plath—and, of course, Hughes as well. Hughes had retained the right of final approval of the book, and he was criticized for its editing; it was felt that he had taken out too much, that there were too many ellipses. But in fact “Letters Home” is remarkable not for what it leaves out about Hughes but for what it leaves in.
Plath’s hysterically ecstatic letters to her mother about Hughes when she first fell in love with him and her only slightly calmer ones during the good years of the marriage give us—even with the elisions—a remarkably close look at the man. Of course, it is Plath’s vision of him that we receive—other people who knew Hughes at the time have suggested that her version is a reflection of her tendency toward exaggeration and excess—but it is one we cannot easily erase. With the instincts of the novelist she was trying to become, Plath drew Hughes’s character for her mother with a few sure, bold, stylized strokes. He makes his first appearance in a letter of March 3, 1956:
On April 17th, she writes:
April 19th:
April 29th:
May 3rd:
Plath and Hughes were married on June 16, 1956, and Plath continued to write to Mrs. Plath about the “rugged, kind, magnificent man, who has no scrap of false vanity or tendency to toady to inferior strategic officials,” and whose mind is “magnificent, not hair-splitting or suavely politic.” When Hughes took a job teaching at a boys’ school, Plath wrote of her hulking Adam, “They must really admire him; he is such a strong, fascinating person, compared to the other sissy teachers they get,” and five years later, when Plath had an appendectomy and Hughes came to the hospital bringing “huge rare steak sandwiches,” Plath wrote, “He is an absolute angel. To see him come in at visiting hours, about twice as tall as all the little, stumpy people, with his handsome, kind, smiling face is the most beautiful sight in the world to me.”
In Plath’s journals, the representation of Hughes as an overgrown Adonis/Aryan superman is the same, although the voice of the journal writer is a different one, often sharper and darker than that of the letter-home writer. On February 26, 1956, Plath set down a now famous account of her first meeting with Hughes at “the wild St. Botolph’s Review party” that she wistfully (“will probably never see him again”) wrote about to her mother. In the journal Plath tells of drinking and talking too loud and dancing and getting drunk. Then:
Hughes takes Plath to a back room, and
I quote the passage as it appears in the published “Journals.” A fuller text—in which Hughes, along with kissing Plath, rips off her red hairband and pockets her silver earrings—was subsequently published elsewhere and is held up as proof of Hughes’s self-servingly suppressive editing. But even in its censored version the passage is extraordinarily intimate, and one can only wonder why Hughes permitted any part of it to be published. In fact, if he was so keen to preserve his privacy why did he sanction the publication of “Letters Home” and “The Journals” at all?
An unpublished letter that Hughes wrote to Mrs. Plath seven years after Sylvia Plath’s death offers a possible answer. The letter is in the Plath archive in the Lilly Library, at Indiana University at Bloomington—a huge repository of letters by Plath and to her, as well as family correspondence written after her death. (Mrs. Plath sold this collection to the Lilly in 1977.) In the letter, dated March 24, 1970, Hughes tells Mrs. Plath of a house that he wants to buy on the North Coast of Devon—“an unbelievably beautiful place”—for which, however, he hasn’t the money. He doesn’t want to sell a house he bought recently in Yorkshire (“a first class investment”), nor does he want (“for sentimental as they say reasons”) to sell Court Green, which he moved back into with the children after Plath’s death (and where he lives now, with his second wife, Carol). “Therefore,” he tells Mrs. Plath, “I am trying to cash all my other assets and one that comes up is The Bell Jar.” He asks Mrs. Plath how she would “feel about U.S. publication of this now,” adding that in a few years the book will “hardly be saleable,” a mere “curiosity for students.” Mrs. Plath, of course, hated the book, and she wrote Hughes a strong letter of protest: she does not want “The Bell Jar” published in America. But at the end of the letter, “like one intelligent mature person with another,” she defers to Hughes. “As the fight to publish is yours, so too must be the decision,” she says, with lame primness. So in 1971 “The Bell Jar” was published in America. Mrs. Plath endured it, and presently she exacted her pound of flesh: she asked Hughes’s permission to publish Plath’s letters to her. Hughes could hardly refuse.
One of the unpleasant but necessary conditions imposed on anyone writing about Sylvia Plath is a hardening of the heart against Ted Hughes. In one way or another, for this reason or that, the writer must put aside pity and sympathy for Hughes, the feeling that the man is a victim and a martyr, and resist any impulse to withdraw from the field and not add further to Hughes’s torment. A number of writers have, in fact, left unfinished manuscripts. In a letter to Andrew Motion, Linda Wagner-Martin’s British editor, Hughes speaks of these fallen aspirants with a kind of bitter triumph:
Hughes’s letter to Mrs. Plath about cashing in on “The Bell Jar” allowed me to see Hughes for the first time with the requisite coldness: he had evidently exchanged his right to privacy for a piece of real estate. For if he had not published “The Bell Jar” against Mrs. Plath’s wishes she would surely not have felt impelled to publish “Letters Home,” and Hughes, in his turn, might not have felt impelled to administer a corrective to her corrective by publishing “The Journals.”
In a letter that appeared in The New York Review of Books on September 30, 1976, written in response to a review of three books about Plath, Olwyn Hughes complains that the reviewer, Karl Miller, “treat[s] Sylvia Plath’s family as though they are characters in some work of fiction.” She says, further, “It is almost as though, writing about Sylvia, some of whose work seems to take cruel and poetically licensed aim at those nearest to her, journalists feel free to do the same.” Of course they do. The freedom to be cruel is one of journalism’s uncontested privileges, and the rendering of subjects as if they were characters in bad novels is one of its widely accepted conventions. In Mrs. Plath, Ted Hughes, and Olwyn Hughes journalism found, and continues to find, three exceptionally alluring targets for its sadism and reductionism.
When “Bitter Fame” appeared, and raised the stakes of the game, I decided to become a player. Like all the other players at the table, I have felt anxious and oppressed by the game. It is being played in a room so dark and gloomy that one has a hard time seeing one’s hand; one is apt to make mistakes. The air in the room is bad; it is the same air that has been breathed there for many years. The windows are grimy and jammed shut. The old servant’s hands shake as he brings watery drinks. Through a door one sees an open coffin surrounded by candles. A small old woman sits in a straight-backed chair reading a manual of stenography. A very tall man with graying hair, dressed in black, comes through the doorway, having to duck his head, and stands watching the players. The door to the street suddenly opens, and a tall woman bursts in. She whispers something into the tall man’s ear; he shrugs and returns to the room with the coffin. She looks after him, then gives the card table a malevolent little shove, so that drinks spill and cards scatter, and leaves, slamming the door. I look at my cards and call the bet.
On February 11, 1991, I sat eating lunch with Olwyn Hughes in an almost empty Indian restaurant in London’s Camden Town. London itself had a hushed, emptied-out feeling. The Gulf War had begun a few weeks earlier; terrorism was feared, and travel had halted—my hotel was three-quarters empty. The weather was contributing to the city’s mutedness. A spell of snow and freezing weather, for which the nation was unprepared, had set in, a siege of cold like the one that England was undergoing at the time of Plath’s death, which Alvarez unforgettably rendered in his memoir:
Now, twenty-eight years later, the English were still stubbornly clinging to their notion that severe winter weather comes so infrequently to their green and pleasant land that preparing for it is not worthwhile, and I was thus able to experience at first hand some of Plath’s frustration and feeling of stuckness during the winter of her suicide. I had sat for hours in an unheated train—grounded at a local station because the doors had frozen shut—and observed my fellow-passengers, who sat docile and expressionless, incurious about their fate, in a kind of exaltation of uncomplaining discomfort. I had walked through the city covered with treacherous hard-frozen snow and recalled Plath’s “humorous” essay “Snow Blitz,” written shortly before her death, in which her American impatience with English passivity and its attendant moral superiority kept breaking through the surface tone of amused detachment.
“Sylvia died this month,” I said to Olwyn in the Indian restaurant. “On which day was it?”
“It happens to be today,” she said. “I realized it yesterday, when I was dating a letter to you. It’s strange.”
“The house on Fitzroy Road where she died is near here, isn’t it?” I said. “After lunch, would you walk over there with me?” “Darling, I don’t think I want to do that,” Olwyn said. She lit a cigarette, and as I looked at her through the smoke I recalled an entry in “Letters Home,” dated November 21, 1956, which gives Plath’s first impression of her new sister-in-law:
Plath’s sense of Olwyn as a fey creature who would never grow old was brilliantly prescient. Although Olwyn today “looks her age”—isn’t one of those astonishingly young-looking older women the modern world is full of—neither does she look like the usual woman in her sixties. There is something of the schoolgirl about her, an atmosphere of daring and disobedience, a hint of bohemianism. The hair is still amber-gold; the face is handsome and cared for. At the same time, there is something forbidding and imposing about her. Like Hughes (and Plath), she is large-boned and tall, and as she sat in the restaurant with her coat over her shoulders, in a hunched posture that unsettlingly fused willfulness and dejection, I thought of Dürer’s allegorical rendering of Melancholy. In person, as in her letters, Olwyn is magnificently indifferent to the question of what her interlocutor does or doesn’t know about the outrages that writers about Plath have committed or will commit. She simply pours out anger at and contempt for the people she has had to deal with in her position as literary agent to the Plath estate. She is like the principal of a school or the warden of a prison: students or inmates come and go, while she remains. A rowdy new class of freshmen was about to arrive. Ronald Hayman and Paul Alexander were soon to publish their defiantly unauthorized biographies, and Jacqueline Rose was about to come out with a literary study that would impertinently challenge the editing of “The Journals” and “Letters Home.” But Olwyn had by no means forgotten the misdemeanors of the alumni, or those of the recently matriculated Anne Stevenson. I had only to touch the sore spot to send her into an aria of derision whose first notes I had heard a few months earlier, and which I would continue to hear throughout our acquaintance. “Let’s face it, Anne was a mistake,” she had said at our first meeting. “I regret I didn’t get somebody brighter, somebody like Hilary Spurling. Sylvia was an intellectual—Anne is not. I had to nanny her along. She wasted a year of my life.” And (in a later recital): “Anne is a good little poet. She’s a little literary lady. She did some good things; there are one or two chapters that are quite nice. She’s a passionate little writer. But she doesn’t have a lively hungry mind. I hadn’t realized that. I was misled by her sober demeanor and her nice tweeds and the fact that she taught. She never quite grasped Sylvia’s nature. She got her wrong. She was always imagining she was this sweet emotional girl. But she wasn’t.” Now, in the Indian restaurant, Olwyn returned to the theme. “Anne left all the interesting things out and put the dull things in,” she said. “She had to put her stamp on everything. She kept one dancing about with her silly little notes. I was exasperated by this rubbish. I wanted the facts to be on record. I didn’t know she would write her little personal musings on Sylvia Plath. Biography isn’t a poem, it isn’t a novel, it’s a document.”
“Why didn’t you write your own book?” I asked.
“I’m not a writer. And, as Ted’s sister, I wouldn’t have been believed.”
“ ‘Bitter Fame’ isn’t believed, either,” I said. “If you had written a sister’s frank account, it would have been read as such. People would have known where they stood. This way, they are suspicious. They feel something is being hidden from them and put over on them.”
“Yes, people can’t bear to think that there’s something they can’t see. I’ve been sent a manuscript by an awful woman, a Jacqueline Rose. It’s another attack on Ted. It builds its theory on Ted’s cutting things out of Sylvia’s journals. People have this idea that Ted watches over everything. Ted is a very sweet-natured man. A very nice guy. I’ve written twenty pages of notes on Rose’s book—I’ll send them to you. Do you know this woman?”
“I am going to meet her in a few days.” I had heard of Jacqueline Rose’s project—it is now the book “The Haunting of Sylvia Plath”—and a couple of months earlier I had spoken with her on the telephone about it and about the prospect of meeting with her when I came to England. The conversation had been brief. Rose told me that she had delivered her manuscript to her publisher, Virago, and was waiting to find out how a “situation” that had developed between Virago and the Plath estate would come out. If things went well—if the difficulties were ironed out and the book went uneventfully to press—she would have nothing to speak to a journalist about. If things did not go well, she would have a great deal to talk about. Evidently, things had not gone well: I had an appointment to meet Rose.
The waiter started clearing the table, and Olwyn reached into her handbag and gave me a sheet of paper. It was the letter to me that she had mentioned dating the previous day; she had decided to hand it to me rather than mail it. Most of it consisted of three passages written by relatives of three famous dead writers—Virginia Woolf, John Middleton Murry, and Sylvia Plath—expressing anger and bitterness toward biographers and/or critics. The relatives were Quentin Bell, writing to Olwyn; Katherine Middleton Murry (J.M.M.’s daughter), writing in the Independent; and Ted Hughes writing to Jacqueline Rose. The Hughes passage was the one that interested me most. It read:
“That’s a remarkable piece of writing,” I said, putting the letter in my handbag.
Olwyn lit another cigarette, and I ventured a question to which I felt I already knew the answer. “What was it like to know Sylvia?”
She hesitated for a moment and then said, “There was no girl-to-girl between us. She was very absorbed in Ted; she wasn’t interested in me.”
“Do you feel that she came between you and your brother?”
“That’s rubbish,” Olwyn said. “That’s cultish nonsense. I was full of my own life in those days.”
If all our relationships are founded on imagination as much as reality, circumstances dictated that Olwyn’s relationship to Plath be more interior than most. Because Olwyn lived and worked in Paris during the six years of the Plath-Hughes marriage (two of them spent in America and four in England), she and Plath were brought together, all told, only five or six times. It could be fairly said that Olwyn’s “real” relationship with Plath began only after Plath’s death, when Olwyn left her job in Paris to live at Court Green with Hughes and help him take care of the motherless children. During Plath’s lifetime, Olwyn evidently thought of Plath—when she thought of her at all—as the woman she wished her brother had not married. Support for this reading of Olwyn’s mind lies in three scenes recounted in “Bitter Fame.” Each of them shows something unpleasant happening between the sisters-in-law, and each of them was retailed to Anne Stevenson by Olwyn to illustrate flaws in Plath’s character. In each case, the reader knows that he is hearing only one side of a quarrel, and, as with the Dido Merwin memoir, is arrested by the innocence of the narrator’s belief in her power of persuasion. Reporting ill of another is one of the most difficult and delicate of rhetorical operations; to be persuasive, to leave the reader with an impression of X’s badness and of one’s own disinterestedness and goodness, requires great skill. One cannot just blurt out—as Dido and Olwyn blurt out—how awful X is. All this achieves is to arouse the reader’s sympathy for X.
The most unpleasant of the unpleasant scenes recounted in “Bitter Fame” took place in Yorkshire, in the home of Ted and Olwyn’s parents during the Christmas holidays of 1960:
One notices that it is Plath’s silence that incenses Olwyn. We remember Hughes’s association of authenticity—“the real self”—with dumbness. But here dumbness is perceived (as Lear perceives it in Cordelia) as aggression. Olwyn verbally attacks Plath, but Olwyn’s words are only words; it is Plath’s (Medusan) speechlessness that is the deadly, punishing weapon. In a letter Olwyn wrote to me a year and a half ago she returned to this incident, underscoring the threatening character of Plath’s silence:
Below the surface of Olwyn’s story of the Yorkshire confrontation, with its anxious score-settling atmosphere, lie deep wounds, and one of them is surely the wound from which survivors of suicides never recover. Plath, as we know, “left at dawn” on another day, in 1963. The suicide “goes away,” and the survivors are forever in the wrong. They are like the damned, who can never make amends, who have no prospect of grace. Olwyn’s “Why doesn’t she say something?” expresses the anguish and anger of those who have been left without a word in a lake of fire.
Of course, Plath did “say something.” On January 1, 1961, she wrote to her mother about the incident, quoting the unpleasant things Olwyn had said about her, and making some unpleasant observations of her own about the relationship between Olwyn and Ted, even, outrageously, suggesting incest. The letter is mentioned in “Bitter Fame” (“Sylvia complained in characteristically extreme language about the scene with Olwyn”), but it is not quoted. Anne Stevenson had intended to quote it—passages from it appear in a draft of her book—but Olwyn couldn’t bear to hear herself spoken of in this way, and insisted that the passages be removed, reproaching Anne, in a letter of December 12, 1987, for her “unaffectionate wish to slander me in Plath’s words.” Stevenson felt that the quotation spoke for itself—that it was so intemperate and out of control that it would actually create sympathy for Olwyn, as Dido Merwin’s intemperate lashings out at Plath only created sympathy for her victim. But Olwyn couldn’t see this. Plath had refused to engage with Olwyn during her life, and now, in death, was compounding the injury by talking about her behind her back. Olwyn, understandably, found this intolerable.
Olwyn’s recollection of this unpleasant scene and of two similar scenes reads like a single recurrent dream of infantile diminishment. In each, Plath is rendered as a silent, powerful, uncanny antagonist, whose aggression leaves Olwyn stunned and cowed and baffled. Freud speaks in one of his technical papers of how the analytic patient’s secrets leak out from every pore without his knowledge. The warily silent Hughes has protected his secrets better than his sister has: no one can use his words against him. But everyone can—and does—speculate about his motives. “They can no longer feel the difference between the living and the dead,” he complains about the biographers and critics and journalists who write about him and his family when writing about Plath. “They extend over the living that licence to say whatever they please.” Milan Kundera, in his novel “Immortality,” has a passage of commiseration for the dead. Under the ground, they are “even lower than the old,” he writes. “The old are still accorded human rights. The dead, however, lose all rights from the very first second of death. No law protects them any longer from slander, their privacy has ceased to be private; not even the letters written to them by their loved ones, not even the family album left to them by their mothers, nothing, nothing belongs to them any longer.” What Hughes is protesting is being treated as if he were dead. The issue between the Hugheses and the public hostile to them is whether or not the Hugheses are dead. They have compromised their claim to being alive by their financial gains from the dead poet’s literary remains. They have eaten the pomegranate seeds that tie them to the underworld. Plath’s advocates have watched with malicious satisfaction as the Hugheses vainly struggle to assert their rights as live people. Hughes’s acceptance of the odd job of Poet Laureate has only further worsened his prospects as a live person. The Poet Laureate is no longer quite mortal. He has ascended to the pantheon of the belaurelled dead. He has also descended into the cesspool from which sensationalist journalism draws its lurid narratives about celebrities. “secret life of the poet laureate—‘ted cannot hide forever’ ” was the headline of a particularly low specimen in the Mail on Sunday, on February 1, 1987. But a paradox hedges the struggle between the Plath advocates and the Hugheses. The advocates, whom Olwyn calls “libbers,” because many of them are feminists, are, in this struggle, not representatives of women’s liberation so much as representatives of a kind of dead lib. They want to restore to Plath the rights she lost when she died. They want to wrest from Hughes the power over her literary remains which he acquired when she died intestate. They want to remove the gag of censorship from her journals and letters. But by so doing, by restoring Plath to the status of the living, they simply achieve a substitution: they send the Hugheses and Mrs. Plath down to take Plath’s place among the rightless dead.
Olwyn and I left the dark, warm restaurant for the bitterly cold street. Olwyn began to tell me how to get to Plath’s house on Fitzroy Road, but the directions were complicated, and when she learned that I had no street guide with me she said, “Oh, all right—I’ll walk with you. You’d never find it.”
We walked what seemed like a long way, having to pick our path slowly through the hardened snow. “It’s strange going to Sylvia’s house on the anniversary of her death,” Olwyn said. We had reached the pleasant neighborhood of Primrose Hill and had crossed a square that Olwyn identified as Chalcot Square, where Plath and Hughes had lived between February of 1960 and the summer of 1961. She pointed out a handsome five-story row house where they had had a tiny apartment on the fourth floor. The apartment had been found by Dido Merwin; she and William Merwin, who lived in the neighborhood, had become the helpful—probably too helpful—older friends of Hughes and Plath. In her memoir Dido writes of the “literary string-pullings and introductions” that William performed on Ted’s behalf, and of her own efforts in “fixing up the very pregnant Sylvia with the right National Health Service doctor.” She then reports Plath’s ingratitude, her “summary and unexpectedly graceless rejection” of Dido’s suggestion that she buy furniture and appliances for the flat from local secondhand shops. (The Merwins had already lent Plath and Hughes furniture from their attic.) It was, Dido writes, “like a warning shot across the bows: things, it seemed, were not going to be such congenial plain sailing as I had supposed. But if the Hugheses elected to go splurging on a posh cooker, refrigerator, and bed, what the hell? Never mind if it made no sense to a couple of flea-marketeers like Bill and me. It would have made complete sense, of course, had we any inkling of the besetting insecurity that was the root cause of Sylvia’s need for morale-boosting toys.” The American reader can only stare at the puritanism that conceives of the desire for a decent bed and a new stove as decadent and pathological.
The passage affords another glimpse of Plath’s alienation in England. Interestingly, this was never a theme for Plath. She occasionally permitted herself a few words to her mother or to American friends about the uncleanliness and dismalness of English kitchens and bathrooms, but she seemed determined to accept the discomforts of her adopted country with good grace. After the separation from Hughes, there was nothing keeping her in England, but she never considered returning to America. In harsh England Plath had found a refuge from (as she called it in “The Bell Jar”) “the motherly breath of the suburbs” of Eisenhower America. Here her wicked wit could flourish and her writing could break out of the caul of obedient mannerism that encased its early examples. The emergence of the “true self” as a writer was a shedding of Plath’s American identity along with the other “false” identities she cast off. She did not write—and could not have written—“The Bell Jar” or “Ariel” in her native Massachusetts. The pitiless voice of the “Ariel” poet was a voice that had rid itself of its American accent.
When Plath arrived in England on a Fulbright to Cambridge, in the fall of 1955, the accent was still strong. A fellow American graduate student, Jane Baltzell Kopp, recalls Plath’s conspicuous “Americanisms” with the air of a sibling who has herself learned how to appear in public and not trot out the family’s tacky little habits. She singles out for special scorn Plath’s “full set” of white-and-gold Samsonite luggage, which (Kopp reports) inspired “much amazement, incredulity, and humor among the British” when they saw her with it on drab railway platforms. Kopp’s memoir appears in “Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work,” an anthology of writings about Plath, edited by Edward Butscher, and published in 1977. Another contributor, the late Dorothea Krook, who was Plath’s favorite teacher at Cambridge, and whose memoir is tenderly sympathetic, also, however, points out Plath’s exoticism as a girl who was “always neat and fresh, wearing charming, girlish clothes, the kind of clothes that made you look at the girl, not the garments; hair down to the shoulders still, but ever so neatly brushed and combed, and held back in place by a broad bandeau on the crown. . . . This charming American neatness and freshness is what I chiefly recall about her physical person.” The photographs of Plath in the various biographies and in “Letters Home” and “The Journals” show her as Krook described her. With her shining blond hair and her soft, rounded face, she evokes the soap and deodorant advertisements of the nineteen-forties and fifties, in which the words “dainty” and “fresh” never failed to appear. Contrast this picture with Alvarez’s description of Plath on the night of his last meeting with her, on Christmas Eve, 1962, two months before her death. Plath is no longer blond (the earlier blondness had been artificial) and no longer conspicuously clean. Alvarez writes:
Another index to the transformation may be found in two recordings of poetry readings that Plath made—one in Massachusetts in 1958, and the other in London in late 1962, for the BBC. In the Massachusetts recording, she reads in a young, slightly declamatory voice, with a Boston accent. The reading is pleasant, a little dull. The BBC recording is extraordinary; no one who hears it can fail to be jolted by it. Elizabeth Hardwick has written a definitive description of this rare document:
And yet when we think of Plath’s death at dawn in an indifferent London it is homely Massachusetts that somehow comes back into view. The idea of death far away from home has a special pathos; embedded in it is the fantasy that the foreign place contributed to the death, perhaps was even the cause of it. Foreignness is threatening, dangerous: if only he or she had stayed home and not drunk that water, not taken that ancient bus over the pass, never ventured into that evil café. Again, it is Alvarez’s memoir that sets the “if only” terms of the narrative of Plath’s suicide. Plath’s first suicide attempt, in 1953, took place literally at home, in the crawl space under the porch of her mother’s house, and she survived it. Far away from home, she died. Alvarez believed that Plath had not meant to die, that her death “came carelessly, by mistake and too soon,” and was “ ‘a cry for help’ which fatally misfired.” A deadly concatenation of events—for which the relentless cold, the frozen pipes, the lack of a phone, the children’s and Plath’s viral infections were a kind of rancorous background music—plucked her from a world she had not intended to leave. She left it abjectly. As Alvarez remembered her from his last visit to her flat and imagined her on the eve of her death, she was a pathetic, diminished figure.
“Bitter Fame” further sharpens the contrast between the large, powerful panzer-woman of “Ariel,” who eats “men like air” and “adores a Fascist,” and the little defeated American girl in the chilly white, sparsely furnished flat, who places bread and milk at her children’s bedsides and then turns on the gas taps and lays her head in the oven on a folded cloth she has placed there. The folded cloth is a new detail, as is a letter from Plath’s doctor, John Horder, writing of Plath’s dire mental condition in the weeks before her death; and so is the testimony of Jillian Becker, a new English friend, who took Plath and her children into her house on her final weekend and tried to keep her from returning to Fitzroy Road. Paradoxically, the vividness with which “Bitter Fame” evokes the pathos and horror of Plath’s death only contributed to the outrage that its publication provoked—only strengthened the narrative of a Plath mistreated in death by a hostile sister-in-law, as she had been mistreated in life by a faithless husband. “There she still is, a fragile, lovable creature, in danger of being crushed,” Ronald Hayman, one of the most persistent of the Hugheses’ harriers, wrote of Plath in the Independent on April 19, 1989. Ludicrous as this description of the author of “Ariel” and “The Bell Jar” is, it reflects a popular fantasy about Plath: it expresses the public’s need to see Plath as victim, its desire to impose a Jamesian structure of American innocence versus European corruption (Plath as Isabel Archer, let us say, and Hughes and Olwyn as Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle) on the struggle between the vivid dead girl and the ghostly English relations.
As I write the word “ghostly,” I feel closer to the center of the mystery of why the weight of public opinion has fallen so squarely on the Plath side and against the Hugheses—why the dead have been chosen over the living. We choose the dead because of our tie to them, our identification with them. Their helplessness, passivity, vulnerability is our own. We all yearn toward the state of inanition, the condition of harmlessness, where we are perforce lovable and fragile. It is only by a great effort that we rouse ourselves to act, to fight, to struggle, to be heard above the wind, to crush flowers as we walk. To behave like live people. The contest between Plath and Hughes invokes the contest between the two principles that hedge human existence. In his poem “Sheep” Ted Hughes writes of a lamb that inexplicably died soon after birth:
Life, of course, never gets anyone’s entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us. As sleep is necessary to our physiology, so depression seems necessary to our psychic economy. In some secret way, Thanatos nourishes Eros as well as opposes it. The two principles work in covert concert; though in most of us Eros dominates, in none of us is Thanatos completely subdued. However—and this is the paradox of suicide—to take one’s life is to behave in a more active, assertive, “erotic” way than to helplessly watch as one’s life is taken away from one by inevitable mortality. Suicide thus engages with both the death-hating and the death-loving parts of us: on some level, perhaps, we may envy the suicide even as we pity him. It has frequently been asked whether the poetry of Plath would have so aroused the attention of the world if Plath had not killed herself. I would agree with those who say no. The death-ridden poems move us and electrify us because of our knowledge of what happened. Alvarez has observed that the late poems read as if they were written posthumously, but they do so only because a death actually took place. “When I am talking about the weather / I know what I am talking about,” Kurt Schwitters writes in a Dada poem (which I have quoted in its entirety). When Plath is talking about the death wish, she knows what she is talking about. In 1966, Anne Sexton, who committed suicide eleven years after Plath, wrote a poem addressed to Plath entitled “Wanting to Die,” in which these startlingly informative lines appear:
When, in the opening of “Lady Lazarus,” Plath triumphantly exclaims, “I have done it again,” and, later in the poem, writes,
we can only share her elation. We know we are in the presence of a master builder.
Olwyn and I finally reached the house on Fitzroy Road where Plath killed herself. I recognized it immediately—it is an obligatory photographic subject of the Plath biographies, and its oval blue ceramic plaque reading “William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939, Irish poet and dramatist, lived here” is a compulsively mentioned (and yet oddly irrelevant) detail. No. 23 was part of a row of three-story brick houses, with white trim around the windows and white clapboard at the basement and first-floor levels. Plath had rented the second-and-third-floor duplex, and lived there a bare two months, alone with her children. “Ted had been told late in September to leave Court Green. Early in October he came to collect his things,” Stevenson laconically writes in “Bitter Fame,” and two months later Plath moved to London with the children. The period of the breakup of the Plath-Hughes marriage is the radioactive center of the Plath biographical enterprise. Here is lodged the precious ore that the biographers struggle to wrest from the Hugheses. If the journals of this period, which Hughes destroyed or lost, are out of their reach, there remain the crazed letters that Plath wrote to her mother and to friends in her misery and jealousy and fury over Hughes’s faithlessness. There is also the testimony of two friends, Elizabeth Sigmund and Clarissa Roche, who were confidantes of Plath’s during her time of Medean trouble. They have come forward as defenders of the “fragile, lovable” Plath against the heartless Hughes. Each has published a memoir, and both have incurred the Hugheses’ undying enmity and contempt for purveying lurid smiles to grateful biographers and journalists. Sigmund, who lived in North Devon and saw more of Plath than Roche did, has contributed a famous set piece:
It was at Alvarez’s suggestion that Sigmund wrote her memoir, which was published in The New Review, then edited by Alvarez’s friend Ian Hamilton. It was republished (in a slightly different version) in Butscher’s anthology. Roche (whose memoir also appears in Butscher’s book) recalls a similarly distraught Plath during a visit to Court Green in November, 1962: “The strong, passionate, sensitive Heathcliff had turned round and now appeared to [Plath] as a massive, crude, oafish peasant, who could not protect her from herself nor from the consequences of having grasped at womanhood. She cursed and mocked him for his weakness, and she called him a traitor.”
There is no reason to doubt the bare truth of these reminiscences. As we know from the crazed letters, Plath said all kinds of things about Hughes in those days. And, as we all know from our own brushes with sexual jealousy, being crazed is the chief symptom of the malady. But what few of us have experienced during the progress of the illness is a surge of creativity, empowering us to do work that surpasses everything we have done before, work that seems to be doing itself. It was in a brief two months in the autumn of 1962, when Hughes had left Devon, and Plath, unable to eat or sleep, was running actual high fevers as well as figurative ones of jealous rage and bathetic self-pity, that she wrote the majority of the “Ariel” poems. She was taking sleeping pills, and when they wore off, at about five in the morning, she would get up and write until the children awoke. In a letter to her friend the poet Ruth Fainlight (which begins with the obligatory abuse of Hughes) Plath wrote, “When I was ‘happy’ domestically I felt a gag in my throat. Now that my domestic life, until I get a permanent live-in girl, is chaos, I am living like a Spartan, writing through huge fevers and producing free stuff I had locked in me for years. I feel astounded and very lucky. I kept telling myself I was the sort that could only write when peaceful at heart, but that is not so, the muse has come to live here, now Ted has gone.” To her mother, Plath wrote (in a letter in which she also said, “I hate and despise him so I can hardly speak”), “I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.” In late October, Plath began to look for an apartment in London—this was the period of her friendship with Alvarez—and on November 7th she wrote ecstatically to her mother:
This was the house that Olwyn and I now stood before. It had an air of prosperity and well-being. I had expected something less ample and nicely tended; Alvarez’s memoir had prepared me for something pinched and melancholy. It is a commonplace of visits to places where something bad happened that no trace of it remains; the visitor is struck by the absence of what he has come to “see.” Claude Lanzmann begins his film “Shoah” with a view of beautiful green countryside. He and a survivor of the Chelmno Nazi death camp are seen strolling on the camp’s site, now a poetic meadow beside a stream. In an ordinary voice, as Lanzmann questions him in an equally ordinary voice, the survivor tells of horrors that defy belief. The film is poised on the tension between time and history. Time heals all wounds, smooths, cleanses, obliterates; history keeps the wound open, picks at it, makes it raw and bleeding. In his film, Lanzmann makes the point over and over again. In Tel Aviv, he interviews a barber who survived Treblinka. The barber is cutting a customer’s hair. Business as usual. As Lanzmann presses him for more specific details about the camp, the barber, now in tears, can’t go on. “You must go on,” Lanzmann sternly tells him. “You have to.” The barber resolutely picks up his scissors and resumes his extraordinary oxymoronic performance of forgetting the past (cutting hair, cutting the connection to Treblinka) and remembering it (obeying Lanzmann’s command to speak, saying the unsayable).
Imaginative literature is produced under the pressure of an inner interrogation like Lanzmann’s. Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts. Ted Hughes, in his introduction to a collection of Plath’s short prose writings called “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,” writes of the “strange conflict between what was expected of her and what finally was exacted.” What was expected of Plath was the obedient A student’s genteel achievements of the nineteen-fifties; what was exacted was the dire poetry of “Ariel.” In “Daddy” Plath writes:
“Daddy” has had a mixed reception. There are critics who condemn Plath for appropriating the Holocaust for private purposes. “Whatever her father did to her, it could not have been what the Germans did to the Jews,” Leon Wieseltier writes in The New York Review of Books (1976). “The metaphor is inappropriate. . . . Familiarity with the hellish subject must be earned, not presupposed.” The late Irving Howe, in his book “The Critical Point” (1973), writes, “There is something monstrous, utterly disproportionate, when tangled emotions about one’s father are deliberately compared with the historical fate of the European Jews; something sad, if the comparison is made spontaneously.” Seamus Heaney writes in his book “The Government of the Tongue” (1989), “A poem like ‘Daddy,’ however brilliant a tour de force it can be acknowledged to be, and however its violence and vindictiveness can be understood or excused in light of the poet’s parental and marital relations, remains, nevertheless, so entangled in biographical circumstances, and rampages so permissively in the history of other people’s sorrows that it simply overdraws its fights to our sympathy.” On the other side, George Steiner honors Plath for her “act of identification, of total communion with those tortured and massacred.” In his essay “Dying Is an Art” (1965) Steiner writes of her as “one of a number of young contemporary poets, novelists, and playwrights, themselves in no way implicated in the actual Holocaust, who have done most to counter the general inclination to forget the death camps.” He calls “Daddy” “one of the very few poems I know of in any language to come near the last horror.” And yet, after saying this, after calling “Daddy” the “Guernica” of modern poetry, Steiner is troubled. Something doesn’t sit right with him. “Are these final poems entirely legitimate?” he asks, and then, in a turnaround—one that Howe pounces on and sees as “devastating to his early comparison with ‘Guernica’ ”—asks, “In what sense does anyone, himself uninvolved and long after the event, commit a subtle larceny when he invokes the echoes and trappings of Auschwitz and appropriates an enormity of ready emotion to his own private design?” Three years later, writing of “Daddy” in the Cambridge Review, Steiner is still fretting about the question: “What extra territorial right had Sylvia Plath—she was a child, plump and golden in America, when the trains actually went—to draw on the reserves of animate horror in the ash and the children’s shoes? . . . Do any of us have license to locate our personal disasters, raw as these may be, in Auschwitz?”
Steiner’s ambivalence, his “yes, but” verdict on “Daddy,” is a characteristic response to Plath’s work and to her persona. We praise her (those of us who do not condemn or dismiss her), but then we draw back. We retract some of our praise. Like Steiner, we’re not sure where we stand with her. “Why doesn’t she say something?” Olwyn asked. Like the life, the work is full of threatening silences. It is beautiful and severe and very cold. It is surrealistic, with surrealism’s menace and refusal to explain itself. We stand before the “Ariel” poems as Olwyn stood before the stone-faced Sylvia. We feel humbled and rebuked, as if we were the “little, stumpy people” Plath saw in the hospital or the herbivores she writes of in her poem “Mystic,” “whose hopes are so low they are comfortable.” To speak of Plath’s overdrawing her fight to our sympathy isn’t accurate. Plath never asks for our sympathy; she would not stoop to it. The voice of the “true self” is notable for its high notes of disdain—and its profound melancholy. The “tortured and massacred” are never far from Plath’s thoughts. (She is reported to have said to the Scottish poet George MacBeth, “I see you have a concentration camp in your mind, too.”) To say that Plath did not earn her fight to invoke the names of Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen is off the mark. It is we who stand accused, who fall short, who have not accepted the wager of imagining the unimaginable, of cracking Plath’s code of atrocity.
In “The Bell Jar” Plath conveys what it is like to go mad. In the “Ariel” poems she gives us what could be called the waste products of her madness. The connection that art draws between individual and collective suffering is drawn by Plath’s art in a way that not every reader has found convincing. Howe, for example, extends his criticism of “Daddy” to the whole of “Ariel.” “What illumination—moral, psychological, social—can be provided of either [extreme situations] or the general human condition by a writer so deeply rooted in the extremity of her plight?” he asks. And yet what was exacted from Plath was so far beyond what was expected of the gushing girl with the Samsonite luggage that we must all agree on the singularity of the achievement. How the child, “plump and golden in America,” became the woman, thin and white in Europe, who wrote poems like “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” and “Edge,” remains an enigma of literary history—one that is at the heart of the nervous urgency that drives the Plath biographical enterprise, and of the hold that the Plath legend continues to exert on our imaginations. ♦
This is the first part of this article. Click here to read Part II.
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