The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes (Granta Editions)

A fascinating and balanced story of Malcolm's attempt to get at the core of what happened between Plath and Hughes. It is as much historiography as it is history Malcolm is one of my favorite writers, who sadly is no longer with us.

Excelente

J'ai beaucoup aimé ce livre, j'avais lu d'autres biographies auparavant ,mais celle -ci reprend "Bitter Fame" avec des questionnementsJ'ai particulièrement apprécié les passages consacrés à ce qu'est être une femme écrivain.Peut-on allez jusqu'au plus profond de soi_même dans son écriture tout en vivant une vie "normale"?...

This isn’t a biography of Sylvia Plath but an intelligent probing into the biographical industry that has sprung up around Plath, and the struggles for ownership of the various legends which surround the Plath-Hughes marriage.From the publishing of Plath’s ‘Letters Home’ by her mother, to Hughes’ controversial editing and destruction of her last journals, and the various memoirs, essays and biographies that have been written from both sides of what has sometimes been constructed as a Plath-Hughes divide, Frame meditates not just on the art of biography but on the impossibility of ever reaching a stable and fixed ‘truth’.Confessing herself sympathetic to the Hughes, Frame is equally fascinated by Anne Stevenson whose Bitter Fame was broadly castigated when it appeared. She travels to meet many of the writers on Plath to understand their role in the continuous re-forging of the Plath legacy, and throws light on the art of biography itself.For anyone fascinated by Plath’s life and poetry, or the concept of biography more generally, this is an elegant and absorbing read.

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.

This book is a flat-out marvel. Malcolm is a master of compression and she manages to say more, in this relatively compact book, about marriage, poetry, genius, biography and madness than you will find in volumes and volumes of work by windier and more self-important writers. A masterpiece of nonfiction writing, one of the purest and most perfect examples of the form--and since it is by Janet Malcolm it is also, of course, utterly original.

I did not want to read the history of other Plath biographers. I was disappointed. The book was all psychoanalytical speculation; I think it is quite presumptuose to think you can say, why another person dose anything. the continuous justifications to statments made became tiresome. I got the empression the author wanted to include herself in the drama, it is Plath's and Hughes story I wanted to hear. I particularly did not like the retelling of petty complaints, such as "slvia helped herself to food in my refridgerater." If the author in deed thought these remarks were not worthy of being in a biography, then why give a second life to them? I felt that the book was forcing me to take sides, Plath or Hughes. By making one right, one must be wrong. Yuck! I was left with the feeling the book was written by a mean competitive jealous person.

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.

It's not very often I get absorbed in criticism, but for a book which wrestles with the complexities and dichotomies of biography, this is surely the best example which exists. It far surpasses even Hamilton's work on J D Salinger. A must - read for every graduate student and would-be journalist and editor!