American Isis (40 page)

In a letter dated 17 February and marked “not sent,” a fed up Davison summed up Olwyn's attitude: “Something is wrong. Someone has blundered. You do not approve, you are not satisfied, and you will withdraw Ted's statement, or Ted's permission to quote his letters…” He had no reason to suppose any text he edited would “receive approval from
you.”
Davison concluded that it simply was not possible for Olwyn to “let go.” Olwyn wore “too many hats.” Many years later Davison confided to Smith archivist Karen V. Kukil that in the normal course of things, his correspondence would have been shredded. In this case, however, he wanted a record of what had happened.

Why such a savvy editor permitted himself to become mired in such a mess deserves comment. Davison had been enticed by the access that not only Olwyn but also Ted (who had lunched with Davison and talked over the biography) promised. But access, it turned out, meant adherence to Olwyn's ever-expanding provisos. Ironically, she exhibited exactly the kind of monomaniacal behavior that she attributed to Sylvia. In his unsent letter, Davison said he had come to realize that Sylvia had poisoned Olwyn's life. But when both Olwyn and Anne both agreed to abide by Davison's adjudication of their work, he decided to proceed, noting that the book had “survived, barely, a series of major operations, during which the doctors seemed to have disagreed in their diagnoses and prescriptions.” Warfare continued, with Anne charging, “Whatever Sylvia's faults, she cannot have been more self-blind or perverse in her treatment of people she tried to use than yourself,” and Olwyn replying that Stevenson was thwarting her “in Sylvia fashion.”

The result was very close to what Olwyn wanted. She had worn down both editor and biographer to the point where Olwyn begrudgingly called the book “ok.” Making the best of it, Davison wrote both of them to say how pleased he was with the book that was now balanced between Anne's “softness” and Olwyn's “asperity.” When the biography appeared, to mixed reviews, it contained Anne Stevenson's note stating that
Bitter Fame
was virtually a work of joint authorship—an admission Olwyn had resisted, but settled for in lieu of putting herself forward as the book's co-biographer.

On 22 April 1989,
The
Independent
published a long letter from Hughes rebutting several charges made against him by Ronald Hayman, who linked Hughes's alleged neglect of Plath's grave with his appalling handling of her estate and her biographers. Hughes rightly noted he had never taken court action against a biographer, but he acknowledged that the estate had denied biographers permission to quote from Plath's work, in effect using copyright as a form of censorship. He seemed to think that just because the biographers had been able to publish, no harm had been done. As for her grave, he confessed his inability to maintain the site because of constant pilfering and defacement of her stone (three times the name Hughes had been gouged out so that only the name Sylvia Plath remained). To Hughes, such desecration confirmed his belief that his own right to commemorate Plath had been debased.

Although Paul Alexander attempted to enlist Ted Hughes's cooperation—at least in so far as an interview was concerned—the biographer decided to steer clear of the Plath estate after Hughes turned him down. Alexander had one memorable encounter with Olwyn, who reported it to Frances McCullough: “Alexander really seems to me pretty hopeless … Did I tell you his big inspiration? Who do you think, he asks, those letters she wanted stamps for on the last night went to? I point out they were probably just an excuse to find out if neighbour would let nurse in next morning. I think he announces, eyes agleam, they were to … Sassoon! I advised him maybe he should stick to writing fiction.…” Alexander wrote a “fair use” biography, published in 1991, relying on summary and brief quotations. He produced a very detailed book, making extensive use of Plath's archives and hundreds of interviews with those who knew her. On 19 August 1992, the Plath estate contacted Alexander's publisher, Penguin USA. Penguin's senior vice president and general counsel, Alan J. Kaufman, replied:

I have had the work in question carefully and thoroughly legally vetted prior to publication. I am therefore taken by surprise by your letter alleging that there are numerous passages which grossly defame your client, Ted Hughes.

As a responsible publisher we are interested to learn, with great specificity, exactly which passages in the work you allege to be defamatory to your client.

No legal action was taken. Ted wrote to Olwyn on 26 August, advising her not to get into a newspaper debate with Alexander, as no one remembers what is said in newspapers, which only want “hot copy.” Olwyn should write her own book. Stevenson's was “catastrophic,” he added with rhetorical flourish, “because everything that was said there was heard as if you got her to say it—and as if I got you to get her to say it.” Only books get through to new readers, he argued. “Nothing else is accessible to them. Think of the advance too.” Although it has been said that Olwyn is working on her memoirs, she has yet to publish any.

Ronald Hayman's
The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath
(1991) took a bolder line than Alexander had done. Hayman argued that Plath had crossed the line between life and art, and that her greatest work virtually demanded to be read alongside her biography. In other words, the conventional biographer's argument that the life helped to illuminate the work had been abrogated in favor of a fusion of the two, making the estate's withholding of material and its efforts to control the flow of information about Plath all the more reprehensible. How exactly were biographers to distinguish between the private and public Plath? Although Plath scholarship has moved away from conflating the poet and her work, Hayman's argument has been difficult to dismiss. Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley note in
Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual
(2007) that the “boundaries between Plath literary critics, biographers, and devotees” who worship at the “altar of Plath,” remain unclear.

In 1991, on 11 February, the anniversary of Sylvia Plath's suicide, Janet Malcolm met with Olwyn Hughes to discuss a projected book, which became
The Silent Woman
(1994). Like Judith Kroll, Malcolm describes Olwyn as “forbidding and imposing.” Disdaining the plodding earnestness of biographers who pretend to be neutral or objective, Malcolm then dispatches Olwyn with gusto: “She is like the principal of a school or the warden of a prison: students or inmates come and go, while she remains.” Indeed, in Malcolm's film noir, Olwyn becomes Mrs. Danvers welcoming Rebecca (the callow biographer) to Court Green, the Mandalay of Plath biography. One half expects Malcolm to include the Daphne DuMaurier line, “Last night I dreamed I went to Mandalay again.”

But Malcolm is rewarded only with Olwyn's grudging agreement to take the importunate writer for a look at the exterior of the Fitzroy Road flat. Much of their conversation centers on how Olwyn had to “nanny” Anne Stevenson along to no avail, since Anne still got Sylvia “wrong.” Malcolm notes that suicide always leaves the survivors in the wrong. Nothing can be done about it, because Plath remains “silent, powerful”—and in the right. Malcolm characterizes Olwyn's demand that Anne remove an account of Sylvia's attack on Olwyn as the only available method of replying to Plath—even though Sylvia's harsh words can themselves be interpreted as a bias the reader is perfectly capable of detecting. Olwyn, Malcolm implies, is unable to let the biographer and the reader do their work. In spite of Malcolm's criticism, Olwyn and her brother left Malcolm alone—perhaps because she had such obvious scorn for biographers who do not trouble to make the Hugheses into fully rounded human beings coping with an impossible situation, wishing both to protect their privacy and do justice to Plath's work. Ted Hughes realized that Malcolm was on the estate's side, and yet prior to publication he still tried to ferret out what she would write about Olwyn. Malcolm replied on 16 September 1992 that of course Olwyn figured in the narrative, but she was not the “central figure.” The cagey biographer added, “I feel by telling you this I am saying more than I should (you may feel I am saying too little)…”

A brilliant stylist, Malcolm evokes the problematics of biography. How can biographers possibly know the truth? As Dido Merwin said, they were not
there.
Of course, by this logic, Malcolm, too, is suspect. But presumably she is more honorable because at least she concedes (indeed wallows in) the fallibility of biography. But memoirs written after the fact are no less fallible, which is why Malcolm focuses on Hughes's letters, showcasing him as a brilliant interpreter of Plath's work. Malcolm is right to emphasize that in his letters Ted expresses virtually no animus toward Plath. But it is hard to see why his later letters should be taken as the last word. In the end, Malcolm seems to have put herself in thrall to Ted Hughes, wishing, like Olwyn, to safeguard him from predators.

Ted Hughes, however, did not see matters this way. To him, Malcolm had adopted the guise of an objective truth-teller, painfully and regretfully revealing the “bad as well as the good because that's the truth.” Her concoction of psychoanalytical commentary and “self-doubt” conveyed an impression of “helpless verisimilitude.” Malcolm knew her audience and knew how it would eagerly devour a controversial book written with the patented Malcolm style. And Ted understood, as he warned Olwyn, that she was the “main target.” By now, Ted was just part of the “trampled field.”

In
Birthday Letters
(1998), poems addressed to Plath and written over a thirty-five year period, Ted Hughes finally provided his own apologia. The work is difficult to assess as biography, since it bears the same relation to reality as Plath's creative work. And yet a poem like “Fulbright Scholars” is hard to resist, because it is such an antidote to the sour memoirs of his friends. By mentioning Plath's “Veronica Lake” bang, he evokes not only Sylvia's glamour in postwar Cambridge, but also how she exuded so much more style than his contemporaries. She was so American and so romantic, a dream girl coming to him off the movie screen, his own Marilyn Monroe.
Birthday Letters
is not a record of what happened, but a crafted memory of what Sylvia Plath meant to Ted Hughes.

In hindsight, Hughes describes himself in “Visit” as auditioning for the lead role in Plath's drama. Hughes evokes the power of the “brand” her teeth marks left for nearly a month after she bit him. The blood rite of their first meeting is subsumed in “The Shot” in Plath the “god-seeker,” an Isis looking for an Osiris to worship—although Hughes does not name his god. He remains first among the god-candidates after she jettisons the “ordinary jocks,” but it is remarkable in these poems how he subjects his persona to her quest, replicating precisely the pattern of those biographies of her that he abhorred.

Birthday Letters
also reveals how little Hughes knew of his wife's inner turmoil until, like her biographers, he could read her journals and accompany her on that last desperate pursuit of Richard Sassoon in Paris. And like Plath's biographers, Hughes can only re-create her suffering. He, too, was not
there.
He guesses and speculates, presuming that poetry, rather than biography, has license to re-create Plath's life. And he falls for the Plath myth just like so many others, in “18 Rugby Street” imagining her visiting the “shrines” of her sojourns with Sassoon. How, Hughes wonders, was Plath “conjuring” him?

Was it Plath's death that made Hughes write in such a supplicating way? In an astonishing scene of abasement, he refers not to his weapons but to her “artillery,” as he imagines her climbing the stairs of his flat after her failed effort to secure Sassoon. Plath practically gives off sparks with the “pressure” of her “effervescence,” suggesting an eruptive nature that fairly overwhelmed Hughes. Even if this is the hyperbole of hindsight, it reveals how all encompassing the Sylvia Plath myth had become for more than just her biographers. It is Plath, a goddess with “aboriginal” thick lips, who initiates Hughes into the mysteries. She flies about his London flat like a spirit he cannot contain, her face like the sea, subject to all sorts of weather and the play of sun and moon. A devotee of astrology—its vocabulary suffuses
Birthday Letters—
Hughes seems bound by the charts of her moods, merely “hanging around” until she can shape him. What is odd here is the absence of Sylvia's Ted Hughes—at least the one she thought of as a god. Why is the titan Plath described in her letters, poems, and journals absent from
Birthday Letters
?

Hughes occasionally provides striking vignettes of their mythologized daily life, such as one involving Sylvia's distress when she does not find him at their meeting place and rides a taxi like a chariot, in search of him. He marvels in “Fate Playing” at her “molten” eyes and face when she greets him as though he had “come back from the dead,” the answer to a priestess's prayer. Then he “knew what it was / To be a miracle.” Here Hughes discloses why Sylvia Plath was so irresistible. He even turns her taxi driver into a “small god,” treating her eruption of joy as an act of nature drenching the “cracked earth” in the “cloudburst” of her emotions. In “The Owl,” the childlike abandon Plath took in nature awakened Hughes's own “ecstatic boyhood,” bringing back to him an elemental rapture he had previously experienced only with his beloved older brother. In “A Pink Wool Knitted Dress,” Hughes pictures his wedding as the marriage of the swineherd to the princess, the postwar threadbare “not quite … Frog-Prince” bound to Plath's transfigured and flaming personage. On their honeymoon, described in “Your Paris,” he is like her dog, sniffing out the fear and corruption in the collaborationist city, while she basks in the aura of her expatriate predecessors: Miller, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Stein. While he is mired in history, she soars into the mythos of her own making.