American Isis (39 page)

Reviewing
Letters Home
in the
Los Angeles Times Book Review
(23 November 1975), poet and novelist Erica Jong complained that Plath's work had been muddled by “relatives of hers … anxious … to suppress the truth.” To Jong, Ted, Olwyn, and Aurelia were no better than other commentators who had “axes to grind.” In
The National Observer
(10 January 1976), Anne Tyler, a highly regarded novelist, was equally excoriating, calling the Sylvia of
Letters Home
a “wax image,” and the collection not much better than a family scrapbook. In the
Southwest Review
(Summer 1976), scholar Jo Brans questioned the “reliability of the letters because of their editing.” So many ellipses suggested tendentiousness. Aurelia's italicized commentary was dismissed as reductive rationalization.

Edward Butscher's
Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness,
appearing at almost the same time as the publication of
Letters Home,
provided an explanation for readers who puzzled over how the dutiful daughter in Aurelia's book could possibly have written the searing verse of Sylvia's final year. The biographer argued that Plath had to shed her female modesty and middle-class values to become the “bitch goddess” entirely consumed by her art. Like several critics, Sylvia's friend, Phil McCurdy, thought Butscher had pushed his thesis too far. “You reify too many traits,” he wrote the biographer. In a subsequent letter to Butscher, McCurdy expressed his gratitude to Sylvia, who had made him a better man. “If it was just part of an unhealthy, manipulative—even unconscious—rationale on her part, I'm sure glad I was one of the objects!”

Although Butscher was accused of misogyny and superficial psychologizing, he proved an astute critic, establishing “almost all the formulas that later biographers would adopt and reinforce,” Susan R. Van Dyne contends in
The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath.
Hampered in some cases by his inability to name names (both Assia and Dick Norton were given pseudonyms), Butscher nevertheless nailed down the testimony of many important witnesses, while carefully assessing their reliability. A year later, in
Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work,
Butscher included important memoirs by Clarissa Roche and Elizabeth Sigmund (married to David Compton when she knew Sylvia at Court Green). Sigmund singled out Olwyn as “the most difficult person in Ted's family,” one who “feared and resented Sylvia's talent and beauty, as well as her relationship with Ted.”

In 1977, Ted Hughes published a collection of Plath's short stories,
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams
(1977), followed in 1981 by
The Collected Poems,
with helpful notes and introductions, and then in 1982 a redacted edition of Sylvia's journals, edited by Frances McCullough. Hughes wanted McCullough to cut out references to his “uncouthness” because they upset his wife Carol. Passages critical of Aurelia had to be removed, as did various references to his friends. An exasperated McCullough wrote Hughes on 21 September 1981:

The effect of a number of the cuts is to take away her sexuality. This seems to me really mistaken … It's absurd to think that Aurelia might be embarrassed by Sylvia's having sexual feelings in college—it's one of Aurelia's big virtues in LETTERS HOME that she talks frankly about sex to Sylvia and tries her best to seem liberated about it, whatever her true feelings. To take these passages out on the grounds that she might object just seems prudish, and it trivializes Sylvia.… There has already been so much question of censorship surrounding Plath that it would be much better simply to leave the unpleasant stuff in. I really think it would be counter-productive to censor it …

Undeterred, Hughes thought only of the humiliation of his wife and children. McCullough wrote to Olwyn nearly a decade later, after the publication of the journals, “There was a very real chance the book would be cancelled altogether because of the last set of cuts.” The editor withdrew from the Plath field, complaining to Olwyn that she was tired of accusations that she was a “Hughes patsy trying to censor Plath into oblivion,” only to be attacked by Olwyn as the “architect of a clever plot to inflame feminists.”

As with
Letters Home,
the response of reviewers to Plath's journals was predictable. “What is really annoying are the long editorial shadows that fall over these papers,” complained Marni Jackson in
Maclean's Magazine
(17 May 1982). “The decision to publish her journal should respect her contradictory selves; instead, the editing makes us feel that Plath's husband, mother and editor are peering over our shoulders as we read.…” Like many reviewers, Miriam Levine in the
American Book Review
rued Hughes's admission that he had destroyed one of Plath's journals and lost another. In “The Second Destruction of Sylvia Plath,” Steven Gould Axelrod argued in
American Poetry Review
that like Plath's last poems, her last journal, which Hughes destroyed, was probably a masterpiece. Axelrod cited the comments of several other scholars and critics, who deemed the editing of Plath's work a “scandal.” Taking aim at Hughes's introduction to the journals, in which Ted suggests, “All her writing appears like notes and jottings, directing attention towards that central problem—herself,” Axelrod concludes that it was “quite possible that the writings that we have been prevented from seeing have directed attention toward other central problems—for example, the problem of Ted Hughes himself.” Hughes's role in stewardship of Plath's posthumous career was, in short, nothing less than appalling.

Not only had Hughes rearranged the order of Plath's
Ariel
poems to suit his proprietary view of her genius, he invidiously divided
The Collected Poems
into two sections, one of them a sort of consignment ghetto called “Juvenilia.” The “mature” poems date from 1956, the year she met Hughes. Thus Plath's development is occluded and incomplete in
The Collected Poems.
The volume's exclusivity has no place for poems like “Mad Girl's Love Song,” for example, a favorite of many Plath enthusiasts.

Linda Wagner-Martin, intending to write a feminist biography that would do full justice to her subject's work, made an issue of the Plath estate's effort to bully biographers by withholding permission to quote from Plath's materials if the biographers' interpretations diverged from the estate's. Altogether Wagner-Martin cut something like fifteen thousand words from her book when it became clear she could not get permission to conduct close readings of Plath's writing. The exasperated biographer wrote to Elizabeth Compton, “No mention of Assia allowed, for example. Well, then the separation just looked like Sylvia
had
lost her mind.” As A. Alvarez remarked, Olwyn and Ted had a “Soviet view of history,” believing that “you could airbrush people out.” Perhaps most upsetting to Ted Hughes was Wagner-Martin's skepticism about his claim that he and Plath could have reconciled. Ted and Olwyn then decided it was more important than ever to find a replacement for Lois Ames, so that the estate's version of Plath's life could begin to rectify the damage done to them by unauthorized biographies.

For Dido Merwin, who had come to loathe Plath and lionize Ted, any biographer who thought Sylvia committed suicide after realizing her ties to her husband were severed had it wrong. Ted was a “quintessential, ineradicable, irreplaceable part of Sylvia's myth,” Dido instructed Wagner-Martin in a letter (18 September 1985). Sylvia never meant to end her life, Dido was certain. Rather, Sylvia's actions were meant to scare Ted into a reconciliation. In effect, Dido was building the case for what would become Anne Stevenson's authorized biography, which would also shift the focus to Sylvia's faults and her manipulative sensibility. Dido pithily summed up the anti-Plath position in April 1986: “It was above all her phenomenal sense of drama. Her gift for timing and organization. The ability to create the maximum embarrassment, shame, consternation and dismay and of course guilt, as a comeback to anything that displeased her, which brought to mind a character out of Strindberg.” In the end, what is so troubling about Dido Merwin's memoir of Sylvia is that she is so
certain
of her point of view and so content in her animus, seeing no merit whatever in a feminist analysis of Plath's life and dismissing Wagner-Martin's narrative as a “whitewash.” A good deal of Dido's letter was later incorporated into Stevenson's book as an appendix.

Dido claimed a kind of absolute authority because she was
there,
a tactic often employed against a biographer who was not. And yet, just one example of her misreading of Hughes demonstrates why eyewitness testimony can be unreliable. Dido fumed over Sylvia's arrogating the one decent room for writing in the cramped London flat she shared with Ted, consigning him to a card table in a hallway. But Ted later told Anne Stevenson, “One of the best [writing] places I ever had was the hallway of the flat in Chalcot Square—a windowless cubicle just big enough for a chair.”

On 25 August 1985, Anne Stevenson wrote to Ted Hughes, informing him that Viking Penguin had offered her a contract to write a short biography of Sylvia Plath. The money was too good to refuse, she admitted. Disavowing “rampant” feminism and determined to be “tactful,” she assured him that he could remove any offending passages. Hughes replied in the autumn of 1986 that he received her letter with the “usual dismay.” To him, biographers were strangers whose concoctions derived from “a few hearsay legendary bits and pieces.” But Hughes seemed more resigned than outraged. Even old friends were now “spilling the beans.” He was probably thinking of Lucas Myers, who a week later sent Hughes a memoir. Myers had complied with Hughes's request to delete passages from Hughes's letters to Myers that might be taken the wrong way. Yet Hughes sold these very letters to Emory, and they were later reproduced in an edition of his correspondence. With Olwyn's encouragement, Stevenson persevered while Hughes dealt with Jane Anderson's lawsuit, alleging that Hughes had allowed the libel of her in
The Bell Jar
to be perpetuated and amplified in the film adaptation of the novel. The suit, finally settled in 1987 by AVCO Embassy, producers of the film adaptation of
The Bell Jar,
cost him nothing.

It does not seem possible to discern any consistency or logic in Hughes's management of his papers and Plath's, perhaps because his view of their marriage kept changing. To Myers, Hughes wrote that he regretted, for example, that he had colluded in the publication of
Letters Home,
which burnished the myth of Sylvia as martyr and absolved Aurelia. The problem, Hughes told Myers, was that he had “coddled Sylvia”—the very point that Dido Merwin had driven home in her memoir. He should just have carried on in his own way instead of deferring to Plath, Hughes concluded.

By mid-1987, Anne Stevenson had abandoned the Viking Penguin project for a full-length biography to be published by Houghton Mifflin and supervised by the heavy-handed Olwyn. Stevenson possessed a promising background for a Plath biographer. She was an American who made England her home. She was a member of Plath's generation. She was a poet. As she wrote to her editor, Peter Davison, on 29 December 1986, she understood Plath's “uncanny identification with archetypal myth-figures (Isis, the Black Goddess) and her striving to be both antitheses of herself: Successful American Woman on Smith Girl lines and Great Imaginary Poet-Earth Goddess.…”

But almost immediately, Stevenson ran into trouble, reporting to Davison on 25 February 1987, that she had little direct access to Ted and could not “get around” Olwyn's “fixed ideas” about him. After a trip to the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Stevenson wrote her editor that Olwyn could not see how her own biases interfered with the biography Anne wanted to write. At the Lilly, Anne discovered a letter Sylvia wrote over the 1960–61 Christmas holiday during a visit to the Hughes home. Sylvia had adopted her customary absolutist reaction to personal criticism: “Olwyn made such a painful scene that I can never stay under the same roof with her again. She has never hidden her resentment of me and her relation to Ted is really quite pathological.” Although Anne had come to discount many of Sylvia's extreme statements—especially her attacks on Ted after their marriage broke up—on the subject of Olwyn, Anne was “beginning to think Sylvia was right.”

Olwyn was an indispensable resource for Stevenson, who gained access to papers and interviewees unavailable to previous biographers. Davison, no fan of Sylvia's, believed that Stevenson had the opportunity to dispel the myth of the martyred Sylvia, but he realized that Olwyn was getting in the way. When he asked her to let Stevenson alone, an offended Olwyn shot back at Stevenson on 20 August 1987, denying that she was trying to “run the show.” To Davison, Olwyn expressed her anger at “Anne's ferocious (on occasions) resentment of my help.” The biographer's insinuation that Olwyn was trying to “sway the tenor of the book,” and Davison's belief that Anne could do the book on her own depressed Olwyn, who did not see how Anne could get on without “constant hints, help and overseeing.” As usual, Olwyn objected to the portrayal of Ted, claiming that material Stevenson wanted to include was “slanderous.” Even worse, in a letter to Anne on 13 September, Olwyn accused the biographer of identifying with her subject! Beware of empathy, Olwyn admonished. She assured Anne she was nothing like Sylvia, even if Anne—Olwyn averred—now and then threw a Sylvia-like tantrum.

Davison stood by his author, telling Olwyn that he sympathized with “Anne's feeling that you sometimes give the sense of looking over her shoulder. It is hard enough to decide what to write on a page without imagining someone else is listening.…” But Olwyn declared Stevenson was hardly better than the “appalling Wagner.” Olwyn had, in short, “backed the wrong horse.” Davison jockeyed between Stevenson and Hughes, bolstering the former and placating the latter. While Stevenson worried that the book would ruin her reputation, Olwyn asserted she was saving the biographer's good name and demanded 25 percent of the royalties for all her work, which had kept Anne up to the mark. Davison, with a book seven months overdue, finally lost patience and flatly told Olwyn in a letter dated 13 January 1988 that he was near the point of withdrawing the book from publication. Olwyn, he said, had taken it over, inserting passages in her own style that clashed with Anne's. Even worse, Olwyn demanded 40 percent of the royalties, a demand that Edward Lucie-Smith, one of Olwyn's friends, would not have been surprised to learn about. As much as he loved Olwyn, he had told Edward Butscher that she was a “cow” about business. Davison could not make it plainer to her: If Olwyn did not approve the manuscript the publisher would be sending her in three days, Stevenson's biography would be cancelled for “non-delivery.”