American Isis (38 page)

In March 1972, Plath scholar Judith Kroll journeyed to London to confer with Olwyn about establishing definitive texts of Plath's poems. After she had written to Rainbow Press about textual discrepancies in an edition of Plath's work, Kroll was surprised to hear directly from Olwyn. Kroll then discovered that Olwyn and Ted were the founders of the firm. Kroll found Olwyn “formidable,” tall and copper-haired, and by turns friendly and imperious. Olwyn was easily distracted by an affair with a rowdy fellow Kroll identifies as “Richard,” who often interrupted their work, and during Kroll's second visit in June even threatened to destroy the papers they were working on. Kroll had trouble reading Olwyn, who seemed to say things meant to get a rise out of the cautious scholar. “I think Sylvia just wrote those poems to dazzle Ted and win him back,” Olwyn averred. It was hard to maintain one's equilibrium in the company of this mercurial personality: Olwyn allowed Kroll to take away valuable papers for several days, only to turn condescending and outraged when the scholar, who was performing considerable editing work, brought up the subject of payment (none was forthcoming). The erratic nature of the whole enterprise—often interrupted by the demanding Richard, who could turn violent and cause Olwyn to “call it a day”—cut short the hours Kroll had planned for her work. “Some of the men were rough on her [Olwyn],” said Marvin Cohen, one of Olwyn's friends.

“Sloppy and casual” are the words Kroll uses to describe Olwyn's custody of Plath's work, which resulted in a number of errors in
The
Collected Poems
that could have been avoided. Both Olwyn and Ted thought nothing of rearranging the order of Plath's work, even when Plath's own design was clear. Ted spent several hours with Kroll when she visited Court Green. He complimented her work, saying he thought she had got it right most of the time. From Hughes, this was praise indeed, since he scorned the academic study of literature. (He had forsaken his own literary studies at Cambridge for anthropology, believing that, as critic Janet Badia puts it, literary criticism “destroys not only the poem but the poet too.”) Because of Kroll's ability to identify the biographical sources of the poems, though, Ted felt sure that she had been talking to Plath's friends. Kroll, in fact, had come by her knowledge through intense study of Plath's work, which led her to identify Aurelia with Plath's poem “Medusa.” Ted and Olwyn told her that to publish the poem's connection with Aurelia would kill Sylvia's mother. When Kroll answered Olwyn's question about her astrological sign, Olwyn exclaimed that one of Kroll's planets was on a “collision course” with one of Aurelia's. In short, Kroll was “fatal for Aurelia.” When Kroll insisted that sooner or later the background of “Medusa” would be public knowledge, Olwyn reiterated her question: “Do you want to be a murderer?”

In 1978, Kroll decided to visit Aurelia, who announced she had not read Kroll's book because the publisher had not bothered to send her a copy. The visit went well, and some weeks later, Aurelia wrote to say she had read and learned a good deal from Kroll's book, which she deemed “brilliant.” Then Aurelia added that the identification of Aurelia and Medusa had been a “‘private joke' between her and Sylvia.” In Aurelia's annotated copy of Kroll's book, now in the Sylvia Plath collection at Smith College, Aurelia comments on the discussion of “Medusa,” noting that Sylvia used to “tease me about this!” To Kroll's comment that the poem “presents an exorcism of the oppressive parent,” Aurelia replies, “And I worked constantly to free her & encouraged every act of independence!” An agitated Aurelia then read that, as in “Daddy,” Plath created in “Medusa” “a scapegoat laden with the evils of her spoiled history, a source and sustainer of her false self, who therefore deserves to be expelled.” At the bottom of the page Aurelia wrote: “I worked to be free of her & at least live
my
life—not to be drawn into the complexities & crises of hers. I loved spending time with the children—but wanted freedom which Sylvia refused to grant.
She,
in summer '62 showed me a house where she wished me to retire—in Eng!!” Elsewhere in Kroll's book, Aurelia reproduced the evidence of her wish to foster an autonomous Sylvia: “I sent her to camp, let her go to Smith instead of Wellesley College, rejoiced in her Fulbright!!
I
wanted to be free at last!”

No less than Ted Hughes, Aurelia Plath wanted to rebut various accounts of her daughter, especially in relation to
The Bell Jar.
In August 1972, she wrote to the novel's American editor, Frances McCullough: “For me, the book itself will always remain unbearably painful for the record of suffering it embodies and for the decent, loyal friends it hurts. Also, being very human, I resent being identified with ‘mother,' whose sanctimonious utterances and insipid personality make me want to retch!” Aurelia believed a collection of letters would demonstrate how loving Sylvia had been to her, as well as reveal Aurelia's own efforts to provide her daughter with every possible means of support. But Ted Hughes held the copyright to his wife's correspondence, and Aurelia feared that Olwyn would block publication of what came to be titled
Letters Home.
On 16 August 1972, Aurelia wrote to Ted: “Olwyn, of course, doesn't know me as you do. Frankly, she frightens me. I am, I believe, a direct, uncomplicated person—now pressed to the wall financially because, in good faith in connection with this project, I've burned my bridges behind me [she had given up teaching]. I depend on you, Ted, to free me to do this very difficult work, which I am doing for your and Warren's children.” How could Hughes deny her, when so often he and Olwyn argued for publication of Plath's work on grounds that it would benefit Frieda and Nicholas?

Hughes agreed to publication so long as Aurelia abided by his censorship of Sylvia's references to him. He wanted the book considerably shortened so as to read like a novel, which he thought would silence detractors and become a bestseller. In other words, he remained unable to see he was part of the very process of biographical inquiry and popularization that he condemned. Even though he had praised Frances McCullough as a perspicacious editor, he was taken aback at her objection to the extensive cuts he wanted, and he wrote a mollifying letter to Aurelia (after she had engaged lawyers to insure Ted abided by his agreement with her). She was upset at his butchery of her book, but he argued he was saving her from the “mob”—a favorite term of his, used to describe virtually anyone interested in anything having to do with Plath other than her work.

In September 1972, Harriet Rosenstein published “Reconsidering Sylvia Plath” in
Ms.
magazine, part of her work on a Brandeis University doctoral dissertation. Already Plath had become a flashpoint, her every line the focus of biographical discussion and critical debate. Rosenstein is mentioned several times in Olwyn's correspondence as someone who had been interviewing Plath's friends and associates, even though Olwyn had told her Lois Ames had the estate's exclusive cooperation. Indeed, Rosenstein's research experience survives in the lore of Plathists as an exemplar of what biographers have suffered as a result of the Plath estate's embargo.

In the Frances McCullough collection at the University of Maryland, the indefatigable Rosenstein makes repeated appearances as “Harriet the Spy,” securing Sylvia's letters on the sly, interviewing Dr. Beuscher, hiding recording devices under a sofa, and in general “running circles around” Lois Ames—so much so that McCullough proposes that Olwyn make a “truce” with Rosenstein and name her the authorized biographer after deposing the author of the “idiot licensed biography.” But Olwyn objected, noting that Rosenstein had been telling people that Ted's sister was the “great big monster in the wood pile” and a “witch (black).”

In her
Ms.
article, Rosenstein employs religious language in describing the already fractured audience of “apostles” and “infidels” that clashed over Plath. “Sects” and “schisms” threatened to overwhelm their subject, now the center of a “Holy War.” That Rosenstein was taking issue with all sides should have put her in a prime position to write a truly independent biography. She understood why Plath's use of anger and her exploration of women's lives and domestic routines should make her an icon for the feminist movement and a startling new figure in the history of Anglo-American literature. At the same time, the biographer expressed concern that Plath's own voice had been drowned out by programmatic arguments about what she stood for. Distinctions had to be made between Plath as a representative figure and Plath's singularity.

Writing on 23 November 1973 to Clare Court, a Court Green neighbor who had incurred Olwyn's wrath by writing a letter to the
TLS
praising Plath, A. Alvarez noted: “Miss Rosenstein seems better than most … She seems very thorough and also independent—though how long that will last, heaven only knows.… But I must confess that it's depressing to think that the unspeakable Olywn Hughes has managed to bully and insult you, too, into silence. She has tried that tactic on so many people that I despair of the truth of that sordid and tragic affair ever emerging.” Poor Clare Court, she had been charmed by Sylvia's stories of the swifts, who took the thatch from her home to build nests of their own.

Perhaps the recalcitrance of the Plath estate was, in the end, enough to prevent Rosenstein from ever publishing her biography. She may also have been aware of another contender, Elizabeth Hinchliffe, a graduate of Wellesley High School, a
Mademoiselle
guest editor, and the author of a Wellesley College honors thesis on Plath. Hinchliffe had also spent her freshman year at Smith, thus appearing as yet another double that Plath herself would have appreciated. Judging by a manuscript in the Frances McCullough Papers at the University of Maryland in College Park, and by her correspondence in the Alvarez papers at the British Library, Hinchliffe did considerable research and interviewing, gathering intimate and even gruesome details that would not have served her well in dealings with the Plath estate. The Plath archives are silent on what happened to the Hinchliffe biography. McCullough's collection at the University of Maryland includes a letter from Olywn deeming Hinchliff's work “highly offensive and ludicrous.” Ted Hughes later wrote to poet and biographer Andrew Motion about biographers who had come to grief attempting to write about Sylvia, noting that Linda Wagner-Martin was “so insensitive that she's evidently escaped the usual effects of undertaking this particular job—i.e. mental breakdown, neurotic collapse, domestic catastrophe—which in the past have saved us from several travesties of this kind being completed.”

By 1973, Edward Butscher, not a timid soul, was already well on his way to producing the first full-length Plath biography, discovering that “English authors … reluctantly refused to see me on the ground that they could not reveal the truth of Sylvia's last years and still maintain social and/or business ties with Ted and Olwyn Hughes.” Elizabeth Compton, a Devon neighbor of Sylvia's, wrote to Butscher, “If you wrote what I knew of Sylvia you could not publish it because Ted & Olwyn would sue you. ‘The truth about Sylvia can only be told when you are dying,' Ted told me some weeks back.”

Olwyn met with Butscher three times and responded in writing to his queries. At one point, she offered to act as his agent in the UK if he submitted his book to her and she approved of it. In early 1975, Olwyn sent detailed corrections of Butscher's biography, objecting, especially, to his sympathetic account of Sylvia after Ted had left her. In Olwyn's version, Sylvia had been aggressively jealous and had driven Ted out of his own home, thus making it certain he would turn to Assia, whose own behavior is excused because she was so much in love with Ted. Olwyn, seeking to mitigate Ted's treatment of Sylvia, campaigned relentlessly for a positive portrayal of Assia's actions—even securing Assia's friend, Edward Lucie-Smith, to write a character study that would soften her image in Butscher's book.

On 7 April 1975, Butscher replied, thanking Olwyn for saving him from some embarrassing errors, but also admitting he found her “massive missive” annoying. He answered Olwyn's concerns point-by-point, identifying sources and pointing out that many of her objections were to Sylvia's point of view, which the biographer was trying to honor. He did not intend to rewrite the book. When Olwyn demanded more changes and mentioned her intention to contact Butscher's publisher, he replied on 5 May 1975 that he deemed her response a threat. He encouraged her to carry through with it, saying Continuum Books would be delighted to advertise his biography as “THE BOOK THE HUGHES TRIED TO SUPPRESS!” He also wanted her to know that he had engaged a lawyer who had vetted his book and assured him he would win any legal action brought against him (Olywn had already suggested that certain passages might be libelous). Although he had initially believed in her sincerity, he now realized that too many of her “recent suggestions smack of a whitewash.” He agreed to change some other wording at her suggestion, but that was as far as he could go. If he was denied permission to quote from Plath's work, the biographer promised to mount a letter-writing campaign to literary journals and newspapers decrying Olwyn's “pre-censorship” and “heavy-handed tactics,” which would also be a subject of the preface to his biography. He did not consider these proposed actions threats—just aids to fulfilling his duty to “literature and objective scholarship.”

Olwyn's reply on 12 May was forbearing, suggesting that Butscher's “rage” was the result of her hastily composed letter, which she had dispatched too soon because of the press of other business. But well into mid-July 1975, when the book was in the proofs stage and corrections would be costly to the author and publisher, Olwyn was still requesting changes and cuts—even after she had endorsed Harper's grant of permission to quote from Plath's work. Butscher agreed to a few more alterations, telling Olwyn it was too late to do anything more. Three years later, she engaged in correspondence with Peter Owen, Butscher's publisher for a collection of essays,
Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work,
complaining about the “horrible Butscher” as a “revengeful little sod.”