Customer Reviews

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

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Malcolm's characteristic interest, in all her books, is to examine the many sides in a typically academic battle regarding truth and viewpoint and show how the many people involved in the battle often shoot themselves in their feet by making self-servicing claims in their own defenses. Naturally, few things work better for this condition than the problematic of biography, and in the case of Sylvia Plath Malcolm found a humdinger of a topic.

Most literate readers know about the basic facts of Plath's life--the marriage to Ted Hughes, his philandering and subsequent abandonment of her, and her suicide in 1963. On these basic signposts various biographers (and, more crucially, Plath's friends, family, and enemies during her lifetime) have hung all sorts of interpretations, to the point where a college classmate of Malcolm's, Anne Stevenson, agreed to write an unsymathetic account of Plath's life on behalf of Hughes and his sister Olwyn--and wound up devastating her own literary career by pleasing neither the Hugheses nor Plath's advocates.

This is one of the most thoughtful studies of biography and its problems ever written, and shows the horrible things people can do to one another in the name of trying to "set the story straight."

THE SILENT WOMAN: SYLVIA PLATH AND TED HUGHES by Janet Malcolm is a biography through the lens of what's wrong with biography. It's fascinating to Plath fans and afficionados (me) and those who want to examine language, text and form and the barriers between whatever truth is and the outcomes of communication (me again).

Malcolm is explicit in her premise: A biography had been written of Plath by Malcolm's University of Michigan cohort, Anne Stevenson (Bitter Fame), that had been controversial. Plath loyalists fulminated against Stevenson's pro-Hughes bias, and the Hughes family denounced it because they said that Stevenson had not cooperated enough. Malcolm, who looked up to the slightly older Stevenson at U of M, who is also a poet of some standing, follows the process of the Plath biography, as well as other works on the famous poet and the machinations/efforts of her former husband and Plath's literary estate executor, Hughes's sister, Olwyn. Malcolm interviews many of the participants, including Olwyn, but not Ted Hughes, and works not to find a "right" or "wrong" but to understand the issues with biography that can create the problems of trying to portray another's life. In the process, she exhibits more on the life of Hughes and Plath that fascinates those who are interested in such things. She couldn't have chosen a better example/subject to use for this dissection, because their lives are compelling, and the drama around how those lives have been portrayed by others -- including the impression management on the Hughes side, which was no small matter -- seem never ending.

Malcolm writes, "In a work of nonfiction, we almost never know the truth of what happened" (p 154). Malcolm faces this issue squarely and doesn't try to make a definitive statement about what did or didn't happen between Hughes and Plath, Plath and others, the Hughes estate and her various biographers. Instead she narrates her investigation, her own biases, and the flaws and quandaries that exist at every point along the way. Stevenson's troubles, the reader comes to see, may just be a strong form of the problems and doubts all biographers could -- and should? -- experience.

In the end, one gets the sense that the Hughes family worked perhaps too hard to control the impression of Ted after the suicide of his up-and-coming poet wife in the early 1960s (though who could blame him after he was villified and blamed for her suicide by those who took public "sides" in their marital discord, and he stated that he was also quite worried about his children's perceptions of their mother, family and selves if there was a free-for-all regarding Plath's literary and personal legacy). Ted and Olwyn were negative even toward literary scholars who interpreted Plath's poetry in ways objectionable to them and made working with the estate for very necessary quoting rights quite difficult. As Malcolm depicts Stevenson after her book's publication and the ensuing hue and cry, her break with the Hughes family and Plath estate and her reaction to same as wilted and beaten down. The book seems as if it were a tragedy in her professional life from which she must recover because of the interpersonal drama between the author and Olwyn Hughes.

Interestingly, the book also has a strong subtheme that examines the pressures, pains and stress of accomplishment by literary women born in the 40s who came of age in the 60s. (There's a brief discussion of Stevenson's marriages, and the impact her literary ambitions had on her family life.) Stevenson and Malcolm are around the same age as Plath, and this personal investment in the times and age is also fascinating from a political-gender point of view.

If I had any complaint about the work, which was an expansion of a lengthy New Yorker article that was printed in the 90s, it is that it ends too suddenly. After all the activity and investigation, I wanted Malcolm to make sense of it all for me, but the book just seems to cut off after Malcolm meets a man integral to the Plath suicide narrative, her downstairs neighbor, who may have been the last to see her alive.

Malcolm is a conversational and somewhat "confessional" feeling writer who is not afraid to be explict about her personal investment and lens that engages the reader and makes her feel an insider in this investigation of femininity, biography, rhetoric and one of the lightning rods of gender relations in the 20th century. I recommend it on any one of these levels.

This is not a book for a casual reader to pick up and assume s/he will finish it understanding Plath & Hughes in a linear sense. It is more a record of the author's journey into the world of Plath biographers, and Hughes defenders. Having read those previously, I did find this work interesting but ultimately confusing. Were previous biographers co-opted by Ted Hughes' sister Olwyn, and were they harder on Sylvia's quirky personality than they would have been otherwise? That is the question and, to my mind, it is not answered here. Hughes' death last year makes it all more interesting; though the poems in Birthday Letters speak for himself, he no longer can. This will be a great sourcebook, in a sense, for biographers in the future, after ALL the players are gone, but at this time, for me, it raised more questions than it answerered.

Not only does Janet Malcolm peice together the life of Sylvia Plath, but her famous persona that began to grow upon her death. From Plath's suicide to publishing rights and the immediate family, the process of why things have come about as they have - and clues to where they could go- are well documented in this book as her time on Earth has been by other biographers, giving home the parts that make American myth that is known as Sylvia Plath. Although at time, Malcom is sharp, overbearing and intrusive. She makes claims without sufficient facts, and some of the peices of the story are a bit scattered about the book, making it difficult to follow at points. But she explains why her facts are not quite complete. Malcolm also sneaks in a heafty dose of poison to the biography industry as well, making an example out of Plath and her family. This book is stricly for the Plath buffs-whether they want to love or hate Malcolm for taking this project- and for those interested in the process of the biography mill in publishing today.

Malcolm has written a great book on the difficulties of writing a good and fair biography. She uses Sylvia Plath, and specifically Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame as her example. What you get here is an interesting book that engages the reader and at times almost reads like a novel. The book is gripping and before you know it, you've finished it. Also, Malcolm claims to be on the "side" of Ted Hughes, but I still think she gives a fairly balanced view of the whole situation. But, this isn't a biography of Sylvia Plath. This is a biography of a biography.

Part of the great appeal of Janet Malcolm's work is precisely her subjectivity. She makes no bones about being "objective." There is no such thing as objectivity even in a New York Times article. What you get with a Malcom book is her view of the facts, and that is exactly what makes her interesting, for her view is so psychologically astute and well reasoned and just plain well-written that even if the stance she takes is contrary to yours, the story will be fascinating. The exploration of the effect of Sylvia Plath's suicide on those she left behind is what makes this book so worth reading. The universals here go way beyond who was the victim and who was the demon. I don't really care about Sylvia Plath. I don't care about Ted Hughes either. It's Malcolm who's the main character here.

This is a remarkable book, a blend of numerous genres: biography, memoir, journalism, criticism, psychological analysis, deconstruction of other biographers and memoirists and their work, discussion of postmodernism, and more. Malcolm has an extraordinary intelligence and imagination--both expressed in her metaphors, many of them extended beyond belief. I particularly liked her metaphors for and about Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes's sister: "Cerberus to the Plath estate," Anne Stevenson's unsuccessful commanding of "Olwyn back into the lamp," Anne's obliviously walking into "Olwyn's web." (Anne wrote what Malcolm says is a good biography of Plath that Olwyn insisted on editing and correcting as the price of permission to quote.) Malcolm has brilliant things to say about memory and memoirs, criticism, biography, the impossibility of fair-mindedness and truth, writing in general, the language of face and body that can't be captured on recordings, and footnotes. What I don't understand, although Malcolm addresses the question, is why any of the people she interviewed and wrote about gave her permission to quote them. Even the people whose sides she takes emerge scarred and bleeding from her descriptions. Surely her reputation for this proclivity preceded her with at least some of the characters in the book. On the other hand, the noted critic Harold Bloom has remarked on her "wonderful exuberance" and has stated that her books "transcend what they appear to be: superb reportage."

Of biography Malcolm says that it "is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out into full view of the world. The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house . . . . 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." And, "there is no length he [the biographer] 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." Similarly, "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."

She uses one of her extended metaphors to discuss the issues of writer's block and the elusiveness of truth, which I had not realized were related: "At the end of Borges's story 'The Aleph,' the narrator goes to the cellar of a house, where he has the experience of encountering everything in the world. He at once sees all places from all angles . . . . Writer's block derives from the mad ambition to enter the cellar; the fluent writer is content to stay in the close attic of partial expression, to say what is 'running through his mind,' and to accept that it may not--cannot--be wholly true." Later, Malcolm says, "Truth is, in its nature, multiple and contradictory, part of the flux of history, untrappable in language." She contrasts nonfiction and fiction in an interesting way: "In a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth of what happened. The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports what is going on in his imagination." (Of course that leaves unanswered the real question of whether that imagination captures the truth.) Finally, Malcolm relates a visit she made to the incredibly littered, filthy house of an artist and author who had written recollections about Plath. She saw the place as "a kind of monstrous allegory of truth" in its "unmediated actuality, in all its multiplicity, randomness, inconsistency, redundancy, authenticity."

In relation to the cluttered house, she writes further, "the narratives called biographies pale and shrink in the face of the disorderly actuality that is life. . . . Each person who sits down to write faces not a blank page but his own vastly overfilled mind. The problem is to clear out most of what is in it, . . . to make a space where a few ideas and images and feelings may be so arranged that a reader will want to linger awhile among them, rather than to flee. . . . But this task of housecleaning (of narrating) is not merely arduous; it is dangerous. There is the danger of throwing the wrong things out and keeping the wrong things in."

Malcolm is also insightful on post-structuralism, a viewpoint that she at least partly shares, calling it "a theory of criticism whose highest values are uncertainty, anxiety, and ambiguity." Writing about a poststructuralist writer and professor of English literature who wrote _The Haunting of Sylvia Plath_, Malcolm says that "In accordance with post-structuralist theory," Jacqueline "Rose argues for suspension of all certainty about what happened, and thus of judgment and blame." Finally, she refers to "the post-structuralist vision of writing as a kind of dream, which no one (including the dreamer-writer) ever gets to the bottom of."

Of her conversation with Rose, Malcolm says, "I render it with the help of a tape recording, which preserved the words that passed between Rose and me but did not catch any of the language of face and body by which we all speak to one another and sometimes say what we dare not put into words." This from a woman who had won a lawsuit brought against one of her books about Freudianism by a psychoanalyst; she won by playing a tape recording of her interview with him.

Recommended even for people who are not specifically interested in Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes because of the book's insights into the nature of truth, memoirs,fiction, and biography.

Malcolm's book is a compelling look at the process of writing a biography, as well as an interesting biography of Plath's and Hughes's relationship in itself. By examining the motivations behind Plath biographers, friends, and enemies, Malcolm comments on the process and biases of the biography genre, most importantly, the controversial Bitter Fame. In this book, we see the Hughes's sister shut out all biographers with a negative view of Hughes. We see Plath enemy Dido Merwin write a skewed tale about a Plath/Hughes visit. We see admirers of Plath's write scathing biographies blaming Hughes for the downfall of the Plath/Hughes marriage. What Malcolm attempts to do is to look at the union in a balanced manner, while exposing the motivations of the players in the Plath drama. She succeeds whole-heartedly in this excellent book.

Janet Malcolm is really unique. Her book is never a conventional biography of Plath, but a study of the things that were not written by Hugues, an exam of every other book on Sylvia Plath and a brilliant anaylisis of the literary biographic genre and literary biographies readers. Besides, her style is so concise and it has an inner rythm and you feel as if you were reading a thriller. And there is something really Davoine or Lacanian in her approach, because she shows the inner sides, the difficulties, the doubts and the reverse of everything she touches. You can see Ted Hugues hidding himself and divided between the two masters he has to serve. And in the same time, Sylvia Plath is there, in every page, the Silent Woman. Terrific.

This is a terrific book because it makes you think about so much more than just the circumstances surrounding Plath's life and death. Even more interesting, are the politics and ethical issues involved in actually writing a biogarphy of her life. Even for the most devout Plath fan, I guarantee that the aftermath of Plath's death and its mainfestation into subsequent biographies on her life, will be far more captivating.