Janet Malcolm likes to trash entire genres of writing. Famously, on journalism she said
Every journalist who iTHE WHOLE IDEA OF BIOGRAPHY IS NAUSEATING
Janet Malcolm likes to trash entire genres of writing. Famously, on journalism she said
Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.
In this book she trashes biography which she tells us is an inherently revolting thing, pandering to our worst voyeurism.
The biographer’s business, like the journalist’s, is to satisfy the reader’s curiosity… 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
JM has nothing but contempt for readers of biography – they read their books
in a state of bovine equanimity
As a fan of biography I recognise this nasty quality in me to know everything, to peer through every keyhole and overhear all the squirmy pillow talk. I read true crime books in the same merciless spirit. But not only are our motives for reading biography disgraceful, we can’t even believe what we read, according to Janet Malcolm. There is
the epistemological insecurity by which the reader of biography and autobiography (and history and journalism) is always and everywhere dogged. In a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth of what happened.
THE CASE OF SYLVIA PLATH
There are rabbit holes you can fall down. Janet Malcolm leaps determinedly into this Sylvia Plath rabbit hole head first. Sylvia’s awful suicide of February 1963 at the age of 30 began a conflict which lasted at least until Ted Hughes died in 1998. Ted himself edited Sylvia’s latest poems and published them in 1965 as Ariel. This was a book of poetry so great that readers who never read poetry would read and reread it.
In the final poems, written in the terrible English winter of her death, Plath, like a feverish patient throwing off a blanket, sheds the ragged mantle of her rage and calmly waits for the cold of her desirelessness to achieve its deadly warmth.
After Ariel, a book full to the brim with hatred, feminists had a new icon and the vicious hand to hand fighting began. The story was clear – Ted Hughes killed Sylvia Plath by his gross treatment of her culminating in deserting her and their children in the middle of the worst London winter for a century.
Somebody quotes a remark by Ted
It doesn’t fall to many men to murder a genius.
It’s possible he was wracked with terrible guilt for many years, but that didn’t stop him and his new girlfriend immediately moving into Sylvia’s flat and cooking their meals on the very oven she used to gas herself. I’m not sure how much of that was generally known but Ted Hughes became the feminists’ enemy and when the biographies began to appear they all gleefully portrayed him as monstrous. Janet Malcolm, iconoclast, doesn’t join in that fun. She is on the side of Ted Hughes.
THERE ARE A LOT OF PLATH BIOGRAPHIES, CONSIDERING THAT SHE WAS 30 WHEN SHE DIED
I count seven full biographies, the latest being Red Comet at over 1000 pages. Janet Malcolm had only five to ponder, including one called Rough Magic, a book
whose chief aim seems to be to see how outrageously it can slander Hughes and still somehow stay within the limits of libel law
The Silent Woman is a brave and really fascinating attempt to figure out who said what and why and who omitted this sentence here and who destroyed that journal there – a portrait of the literary biography community as a hornets’ nest. Actually that is an insult to hornets, they don’t fly around furiously stinging each other.
I made a whole lot of other notes when I read this for the second time but I have tried your patience enough.
This is recommended for everyone interested in Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, biography in general, academic feuds, polite well mannered people losing their tempers, remarkable portraits of several wonderful eccentrics, and a future poet laureate being described as looking “like Jack Palance in Shane”....more
You might say that Assia Gutmann was born into difficult circumstances – the year was 1927 – the place was Berlin, the mother was German and the fatheYou might say that Assia Gutmann was born into difficult circumstances – the year was 1927 – the place was Berlin, the mother was German and the father was Jewish. Not good timing! He was a doctor, his Latvian family were wealthy, they were living a high middle class life but Adolf soon put a stop to that. In 1933 they were in the first wave of emigrants, they got out as fast as they could and went first of all to Pisa and then to Palestine. O capricious fate - in Germany the father had been the target of extreme hostility and now, in Tel Aviv, the only Jewish city in the world at that time, it flipped round and it was the mother who became the target of hatred.
So by the time she was seven Assia had had to learn four languages, German, Russian, Italian and now Hebrew. But she was good at it.
In 1943 she was 16 and met a British soldier. In 1946 with Palestine descending into chaos her parents thought – hey, this could be our ticket out of this war zone. She applied to a London art school, got on a plane and never went back to Israel. She found her soldier again and married him. A year or so later, it was “Darling, pack a suitcase, we’re moving to Vancouver!” In 1952 she divorced No 1 and married No 2, a Canadian. Let’s just say that by this time she was drop dead gorgeous so without intending to, she became a maneater, she could just snap her fingers, next, next; she married three guys before she was 33 and only really loved one of them – all of them seem to have just goggled at her and drooled unpleasantly, she was the exotic Latvian-Russian-German-Jewish-Israeli elusive butterfly of love love love in their pawky English and Canadian lives – according to our authors
she had a big bosom, a flat bottom, thick ankles, radiating magnificence rather than sex appeal
- hmmm - but men dropped like flies and sometimes she didn’t even notice. So, she was a bit of a nightmare. For instance, in spring 1959, she was 32, married to husband No 2, back living in England, and involved in a heavy affair with the guy who became husband No 3. No 2 knew about No 3. No 3 finished his studies and got a great job at the University of Mandalay – a long way from England. He thought that would make her leave No 2. While she was dithering, two things happened. She found she was pregnant, didn’t know who the father was, and got an immediate abortion. Then, she heard her mother, who was living in Canada, had cancer. No 2 then borrowed money to fund her trip to see her mother. Our authors then comment :
To boast that she crossed the Atlantic on one of the majestic boats, Assia was willing to suffer great inconvenience, and travelled third class on the Queen Mary in a ghastly cramped cabin, though she would have obtained much better conditions for the same price on one of the less illustrious Canadian pacific ships.
Using her mother's illness to get to brag that she sailed on the Queen Mary? Nice! Back to the story : she married No 3 (David Wevill) in Rangoon, Burma (he was a lecturer). She still had a beef with No 2 (Assia’s possessiveness and vanity would not let her get over her husband’s quick recovery from their divorce) so, on her return to England:
One day she phoned and demanded to see Dick (No 2) at once; they met at the entrance to the South Kensington underground station and had a stormy row. “She suddenly pulled a long Burmese ceremonial dagger and tried to stab me. I grabbed her arm and we fell in the gutter. The bystanders – how typical of the English – walked by while we struggled, no one trying to separate us.” He wrenched the dagger off her and stormed off. “Be careful, I have a gun,” she screamed at his receding back.
Two years after marrying David Wevill, she was flat hunting, called up a phone number, the flat sounded okay, it turned out that it was two poets who were sub-letting, they were moving to the countryside. Their names were Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Cue sinister chords - Fate had taken another hand.
So Ted gloomily glommed Assia and mentally wrote her down in his little black book. The Wevills got an invitation to spend a weekend chez poets in Devon.
On Saturday, after breakfast, Ted brought out air rifles, and he and David shot at blackbirds perching on the roof.
As you do, when you’re a nature poet.
Things developed. (Al Alvarez described Assia as a woman who “made a pass at every man so automatically it was hard to feel flattered.”) Assia became Ted’s London girlfriend, David tried suicide, then grew to accept the situation, Sylvia didn’t, they split up, she committed suicide, Ted and Assia moved into what our authors call the “death flat”, they slept in Sylvia’s bed, and prepared meals on the “death oven”! I mean, would you do that? I wouldn't. They both had opportunities to regret the wreckage they’d helped to cause. Assia wrote:
David, my sweet husband, my most always favourite, my best and truest love. What insanity, what methodically crazy compulsion drove me to sentence him to being alone, and myself to this nightmare maze of miserable , censorious, middle-aged furies, and Sylvia, my predecessor, between our heads at night.
In March 1965 she had Ted’s daughter. By now he was cooling off – did he really want to live with this woman? But he would never be decisive. She was living the old Supremes song of the time – get out of my life why don’t you? Cause you don’t really love me, you just keep me hangin’ on. Total despair began to set in during 1968. By then, Ted had sorted out his other girlfriends thus :
We were nicely spaced out : Assia was in London, Carol was in North Tawton, and I [Brenda Hedden] was in Welcombe, 40 miles away…Ted told me that after Sylvia he no longer wanted to be dependent on one woman. He kept us in the pecking order…Assia was the chief hen, I was number two, and then there was Carol, and maybe others.
(Not so different from what I hear about the lives of certain modern men, really.)
Assia wrote a suicide note to her father :
The prospect before me is so bleak, that to have lived my full life-span would have entailed more misery than I could possibly endure. It is the life alone. Insecure, dependent on an au pair to look after my little Shuratchka properly – dependent on the sort of people for whom I work – a very bad 3rd rate agency who would fire me in case of illness. No husband. No father for Shura. … Life was very exciting at the beginning – but this living death was too much to pay for it…. Please don’t think that I’m insane…it was simple accountancy. I couldn’t leave little Shura by herself. She’s too old to be adopted.
GOTHIC AFTERMATH
When Ted’s mother was told of Assia’s suicide and the killing of her daughter, she lapsed into a coma and died in three days. Assia’s father died a couple of months later.
Ted recovered.
STATS
Police records show that in 1969 nearly two thousand women killed themselves in the UK. The average age was 42 which was exactly Assia’s age.
Highly recommended for all Plathophiles - this is the missing part of the story, very well told. One of those odd books you pick up on the spur of the moment that turn out to be really memorable....more
Once again I'm the only person to have read this teeny tiny book, booklet really - a straight account of where Sylvia was and how she was immediately Once again I'm the only person to have read this teeny tiny book, booklet really - a straight account of where Sylvia was and how she was immediately before she returned to that cold flat with her kids and killed herself. The story of SP rapidly becomes metaphorical - firstly it's a minefield of conflicting recollection, and then it's a warzone of opposite interpretation. See Janet Malcolm's brilliant "The Silent Woman" for an overview of the whole thing. ...more
Redbooted porker, with teeth you have to watch Indignant protestant, with God to thank for everything and nothing All those sausages, rashers and[image]
Redbooted porker, with teeth you have to watch Indignant protestant, with God to thank for everything and nothing All those sausages, rashers and scratchings Kitted up for a lark in the park But that look in his eyes says it all
(pb ripping off th)
(Er - just a (serious!) note - Ted's animal poetry is pure genius, the kind of stuff which takes you by the scruff and hurls you into a different place; I bet when God read it he had a go at Moses - Oi, why didn't you put stuff like this in the Bible?)
When the gnats dance at evening Scribbling on the air, sparring sparely, Scrambling their crazy lexicon, Shuffling their dumb Cabala, Under leaf shadow
LeaWhen the gnats dance at evening Scribbling on the air, sparring sparely, Scrambling their crazy lexicon, Shuffling their dumb Cabala, Under leaf shadow
Leaves only leaves Between them and the broad swipes of the sun Leaves muffling the dusty stabs of the late sun From their frail eyes and crepuscular temperaments
Dancing Dancing Writing on the air, rubbing out everything they write Jerking their letters into knots, into tangles Everybody everybody else's yo-yo
Immense magnets fighting around a centre Not writing and not fighting but singing That the cycles of this Universe are no matter That they are not afraid of the sun That the one sun is too near It blasts their song, which is of all the suns That they are their own sun Their own brimming over At large in the nothing Their wings blurring the blaze Singing
That they are the nails In the dancing hands and feet of the gnat-god That they hear the wind suffering Through the grass And the evening tree suffering The wind bowing with long cat-gut cries And the long roads of dust Dancing in the wind The wind's dance, the death-dance, entering the mountain And the cow-dung villages huddling to dust
But not the gnats, their agility Has outleapt that threshold And hangs them a little above the claws of the grass Dancing Dancing In the glove shadows of the sycamore A dance never to be altered A dance giving their bodies to be burned And their mummy faces will never be used
Their little bearded faces Weaving and bobbing on the nothing Shaken in the air, shaken, shaken And their feet dangling like the feet of victims 0 little Hasids Ridden to death by your own bodies Riding your bodies to death You are the angels of the only heaven! And God is an Almighty Gnat! You are the greatest of all the galaxies!
My hands fly in the air, they are follies My tongue hangs up in the leaves My thoughts have crept into crannies
Your dancing Your dancing Rolls my staring skull slowly away into outer space...more
It's true, every time I think about this book I tremble with awe and reverence. It's like major partRevived review : RIP Janet Malcolm 1934 - 2021
****
It's true, every time I think about this book I tremble with awe and reverence. It's like major parts of the whole thing about how human beings are human are here in its little pages. All the stuff that goes who are you really and anyway who is the I asking this question and what do these marks signify on these pages which apparently relate to people who used to be here but now aren't and why that should matter anyway, don't we have other more pressing concerns like, er, people who are actually alive?
For us bookreaders the distinction between who is alive and who is dead gets very blurry. I know that Mervyn Peake and Raymond Chandler are more alive to me than several members of my family. Now strictly speaking, Mervyn and Raymond are stone cold dead in the marketplace, and my nephews and their broods are all very much alive (although many many miles away from here). But it doesn't seem like they are, it seems like Mervyn and Raymond and a great many others are here in my brain, the voices and the worlds in the pages.
I'll go further - Steerpike from Gormenghast and Lorelei Lee from Little Rock, Arkansas are more alive than most people I know. And they never were alive to begin with. This must be wrong. Maybe I should start the medication again.
But you know what I mean anyway or you wouldn't be here.
This brilliant book is all about why it's important to get the past, someone's life, someone's work, straightened out, but how that's as hard a task as anyone will give you, especially when there are as many versions as there are people remembering. So it's a meta-biography, it's not a biography about Sylvia Plath, it's a biography of other biographies about her, and if that sounds a little convoluted, believe me, it is, but it's completely fascinating.
How do we know what we know? I believe Kant or Leibniz or one of those other fictional characters had a word for that. Janet Malcolm has yet more words and I prefer hers, bitter and wonderful as they are....more
Inspired by Paul Legault's brilliant idea of translating Emily Dickinson's poems into English, I thought immediately - I have to steal that idea. So hInspired by Paul Legault's brilliant idea of translating Emily Dickinson's poems into English, I thought immediately - I have to steal that idea. So here are some of the Ariel poems of Sylvia Plath translated into English. I have, of course, tried my utmost to perform this task with tact, discretion and good taste.
ARIEL TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH
ELM.
Look, let's get this straight. I am a tree, you are a woman. We can never be together, not in the way you'd like, anyway. Plus, you're kind of irritating.
THE RABBIT CATCHER
I went out with this guy once and then I found out he liked to catch rabbits. So he was toast. I should have dimed the bastard.
BERCK-PLAGE
I went on holiday. Every single person in the whole hotel was talking about me behind my back. I don't like bikinis. Don't even get me started on nude beaches.
THE OTHER
I have something dead in my handbag. Tee hee. Also, I scratched myself and made myself bleed. I don't really recommend marriage.
A BIRTHDAY PRESENT
I got a present. But I was thinking that if I unwrapped it, it would bite my face off. So I didn't. Hah.
THE BEE MEETING
I thought I'd like to join in village life and get involved with local societies and all that. So I went to the bee keepers' meeting. It was like something out of Alfred Hitchcock. I liked it.
STINGS
Now I'm a real bee keeper. I get blase about stings. It's like a metaphor.
THE SWARM
Bees are kind of like Nazis. Or the French. I can't decide.
WINTERING
Country life can suck. I wish I was a bee. No, I don't really. That would be silly. I think it would be silly. Maybe it wouldn't be silly.
A SECRET
Men are like big babies that drink beer and want you to wear high class lingerie. Okay, that's not much of a secret.
THE APPLICANT
I got this job as a temp. So I was filing and I knew I could destroy them if I chose, just like that, but I didn't choose to that day.
DADDY
When I was little and my dad used to dress up in his SS uniform I used to think he looked so smart and handsome. Of course, later, the penny dropped.
LESBOS
You really shouldn't have taken the kittens and given them to the neighbours without a by-your-leave. I think I am going to pour sulphuric acid on your head while you are sleeping. I'll do it tonight. Yes.
FEVER 103
I got one of those 48 hour bugs. That's why he's still alive. If I had any strength in my limbs I would have sulphuric-acided his head last night.
CUT
I nearly cut my fucking thumb off when I was making a casserole for a man. I jumped about swearing. I could have cut off something useful, like his member, but no, it had to be my thumb.
POPPIES IN OCTOBER
Have you noticed that everything is slowly dying of carbon-monoxide poisoning?
LADY LAZARUS
I like to commit suicide like some people like to visit their grandparents. You really don't want to, it's kind of a drag and there's nothing to do there, but you just feel you have to because you're a good person.
LETTER IN NOVEMBER
Dear Ted - Fuck you - Sylvia
DEATH & CO
Cheer up, things could be worse, I could be dead. Oh no, wait a minute - this is worse, that would be better. Hmm.
SHEEP IN FOG
Well, you know sheep aren't that bright to begin with. So when you mix 'em up with a thick fog, the results are hilarious.
I remember reading this one on my way to Southampton to be interviewed by professors, I'd applied to the university there, it being as far away from NI remember reading this one on my way to Southampton to be interviewed by professors, I'd applied to the university there, it being as far away from Nottingham as I could conceive in those days. I remember I had ridiculously long hair in those days too. But these things are not relevant. I'm not sure I'm up to reviewing the Bell Jar, much less Ariel, so instead.... here's a review of the movie SYLVIA which I hated and which has a few things to say about the Sylvia and Ted Show.
A MOVIE REVIEW
The facts of the matter of Ted and Sylvia are well known, this movie presents them soberly, there are no cranky theories on offer (she may be the only American celebrity the CIA did not murder). On the surface what happened is banal, a marriage which went quickly wrong, and her left with two little kids. Happened all the time and still does. So what. But here's two Giant Poets doing what everyone else does.
The genre known as the biopic tends towards the cartoon (Ah, Wilde, let me introduce you to my friend Whistler. I'm sure you'll find him most amusing... So, Oliver Cromwell, we meet at last.) and this portrait of Sylvia Plath in pre-feminist, pre-swinging 60s, pre-rock, pre-nearly everything late 1950s England, trapped like a bird in a house flying bang into the windows time and again trying painfully to escape, veers close to pure caricature.
Sample dialogue :
Sylvia : How was your walk? Ted: Good. I got a poem. A good one. Sylvia: I'm dried up. Ted: Cause you've got nothing to say. Sylvia: I'm no good. Ted: You make great cakes.
Cue great offstage feminist moaning and gnashing. Then Ted says some useful blokeish things, like this. They're talking about writing poetry, they never talk about anything else: "There's no secret to it, you just have to pick a subject and stick your head into it." Sylvia retorts : "You go out for a bike ride and come back with an epic in hexameters - I sit down to write, I get a bake sale." A little later, on their honeymoon, they're in a dinghy rowing in the sea when Ted suddenly realises - he's out of his depth! ("the tide's dragging us out - I can't get us back in... people drown like this...") Heavy handed metaphor? Er, let me think. Okay, I've thought - YES, I think so! And so under waves of risible dialogue like that, the movie slowly sinks whilst the captain stands bravely on deck saluting to the last - that would be Gwyneth Paltrow, who gives a fine Paltrified performance, but what can even she do?
Middle aged woman to Ted after his lecture : Mr Hughes, your voice is so.... powerful. Ted : But what did you think of the words? Middle-aged woman (blankly) : ....the words? Cue Sylvia smiling ironically. Cue audience rolling eyes and nudging each other - "I reckon there's Trouble Ahead!" Yes, we get it. Ted's a wow with the ladies. So it seems that these big name high toned poets have relationships which turn on the tedious negotiations of sexual fidelity just like everyone. No, really. And in this grisly movie sexual and creative jealousy is given to us as the whole cause of Sylvia's misery. Her extremely disturbed adolescence is alluded to twice but never examined. So, it was ted. He done it! Just as I thought!
Sylvia Plath was a prisoner - of the 1950s and its common or garden sexism, of Ted Hughes, of her own ambition, of her marriage, of her children, and she was in an almost permanent rage. The only time she captured and channelled this rage was in the six month burst of energy in late 62 and early 63 when she wrote the Ariel poems, which collectively form one of the essential documents of the 20th century. This really unnecessary film cannot illuminate what happened. It peers at the photogenic surfaces. What was Ted thinking? What about Sylvia's friends - we only see one, Al Alvarez - had she scared them off? Why did she become suicidal? I mean. depressed, okay, but suicidal? She knew she had a brilliant talent. She knew she would do great things. Was she born a suicide, as some people are born junkies? What the hell was she thinking, with her two little kids in the next room? This was no ordinary despair. Is this movie for those who haven't read Sylvia or those who have? Either group would have many complaints.
Avoid the Paltrification of Sylvia Plath, read Ariel. ...more
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