Digital art by Katherine
“Malcolm’s book is not really much concerned with Sylvia Plath, and not at all with her poetry. It is deeply concerned with the nastiness of biography, and with interviewing, and the impossibility of objectivity. There is a good deal of knockabout stuff, like the statement that biography is ‘the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world’. The biographer is a burglar, rifling through drawers, driven by voyeurism and busybodyism, and seeking stolen goods. Biographer and reader, each as despicable as the other, tiptoe down corridors together, ‘to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole’. Sometimes they do; but then again, not always. Biography may concern itself with the shape of a life, with its human, historical and cultural context. It may wish to do justice to one who has not yet received it. It may uncover aspects of history that have been overlooked, or examine the interaction between the events of a life and the work produced. And sexual secrets may legitimately be discussed: how could Andrew Hodge’s superb life of Alan Turing have been written without considering Turing’s homosexuality? You don’t have to be the slobbering voyeur Malcolm loves to conjure up to think that a complete portrait of a human being is better than a partial one.
Another of Malcolm’s fixed ideas is that the 1950s were a particularly low and dishonest period. Journalists love to fix labels on decades, but it is a lazy device. We are told that Plath formed part of an ‘uneasy, shifty-eyed generation’, always keeping up a pretence about something; and that she looked a thoroughly ‘vacuous girl of the Fifties, with dark lipstick and blonde hair’. There was also, it seems, a special breed of young men who flourished in ‘the Eisenhower Fifties’, ‘thin, nervous, little, moody, sickly’ young men, they were, but perversely attractive to women. Yes, I remember them well, but there are still some of them around in the Nineties; there are still shifty eyes, too, and people pretending, and even dark lipstick and blonde hair.
Sometimes Malcolm does hit the nail on the head. She is right when she says that the story of Plath is trapped for ever at the terrible raw moment of her suicide, whereas most people get through their marital storms into calmer waters. She is also honest in declaring that she has decided to take the Hugheses’ side against their critics, even though Ted Hughes refused to talk to her, and even though she puts in a stinging reference to how one ‘cannot help wondering about the emotions of the man for whom (Olwyn) is sacrificing herself, as he observes it from his cover’.”
How my heart sings 