Sylvia Plath: A Biography. - book reviews

National Review, March 18, 1988 by Jeffrey Meyers

Sylvia Plath: A Biography

THERE IS a desperate need for a good biography of Sylvia Plath. Plath's Letters Home (1975), edited by her mother, Aurelia, present an idealized view of her life; the first biography, by Edward Butscher (1977), is thoroughly inadequate; her Journals (1982), edited by Frances McCullough, are heavily censored; and her husband, Ted Hughes, has suppressed or destroyed many of her other works. Hughes, who controls Miss Plath's literary estate, has also used his power to censor works about her; his version of their marriage has never been told. Feminists, who have virtually accused Hughes of murdering Miss Plath, have translated her into a martyr.

Miss Wagner-Martin's life does nothing to improve this situation. She has done extensive research at Smith College and Indiana University but--denied acces to Hughes and to Plath's psychiatric records--has made no significant discoveries. Her competent but pedestrian book is filled with cliches and trivial details, has a sinking style, is more descriptive than interpretive, lacks a dramatic sense, and is imperceptive about Miss Plath's poetry and fiction. The book transforms a fascinating life into a dull one and remakes a tragedy into a soap opera.

Miss Wagner-Martin has also recycled a number of myths. Plath's father, Otto, was born in 1885 in a town between Hamburg and Berlin--not in the Polish Corridor, which was created in 1919 Northwestern College, which he attended, was in Minneapolis--not in Watertown, Wisconsin. Greenwood could not possibly be the maiden name of Miss Plath's maternal grandmother, who was Austrian. Miss Wagner-Martin does not give the date of Otto Plath's first (1915) or second marriage (January 4, 1932), or mention that Yeats was only a small child when he lived in the house that Miss Plath later rented. And she does not see that Miss Plath's revealing poem about her father's death, "Electra on Azalea Path," is really about Sylvia on Aurelia Plath.

The main events of Miss Plath's life--described in her brilliant novel, The Bell Jar (which was rejected by Knopf and Harper & Row and still sells 100,000 copies a year in the U.S.)--are well known. The daughter of a German entomology professor, who died when she was eight, and an Austro-American mother, who moved from Catholicism through Methodism to Unitarianism, Miss Plath grew up in suburban Boston. She was a first-rate student, won a scholarship to Smith (where she had a number of distinguished teachers), and, after her junior year, was chosen for the College Board of Mademoiselle. Despite her considerable achievements, she become severaly depressed and, after disastrous shock treatments, tried to kill herself. She was successfully treated at McLean Hospital and took a therapeutic series of Lovers (she compared one of them to "a small bug crawling on me" and claimed another had raped her). She returned to Smith, won a Fulbright to Cambridge University, and fell in love with a handsome poet, Ted Hughes. She married him, spend her honeymoon in Spain, taught at Smith, was invited to the writers' colony Yaddo, and returned to live in London and Devon. Her marriage broke up after Hughes's adultery, and she retaliated by burning his papers. After moving back to a fierce winter in London and writing, in a single month, most of the poems in her best book, Ariel (1966), she gassed herself.

This biography, which uffers from intellectual poverty, misses nearly every opportunity to illuminate Miss Plath's life. Miss Wagner-Martin solemnly maintains that "the Plaths believed in a natural, healthy existence for their daughter" (did any sane parents ever want an unnatural, unhealthy existence for their children?). She says that Otto's death "made Sylvia heavily dependent on her mother." She dutifully plods with her through the seventh and then the eighth and then the ninth grades. She explains Miss Plath's lifelong habit of hiding unpleasant truths from her mother by stating: "Like a child, Sylvia seemed to believe that pretending would make any situation improve." Instead of probing the nature of Miss Plath's college friendships, she states that "they talked nonstop, giggled, accepted each other's personalities and loved them."

Miss Wagner-Martin does not mention any of the negative criticism of Miss Plath's poetry by George Steiner, Irving Howe, and James Dickey, nor does she comment on the fact that Miss Plath almost always published in middle-brow journals rather than in the more intellectually demanding little magazines. She portrays Miss Plath as downtrodden and oppressed, but does not recognize that if Miss Plath wanted to write and become famous, she should not have had children; if she wanted children, she should not have complained about the time they took from her writing. Though Hughes betrayed her and ruined her life, he also hurt her into the greatest poetry she ever wrote.

Despite Miss Wagner-Martin's book, all the major aspects of Miss Plath's life remain unexplored: her father's background and character; her parents' marriage; the effect of Otto's death on his daughter; her troubled relations with her mother; the radical problems of her childhood; her adult frienships; her connections with other poets; Hughes's parents, background, and character; the failure of Miss Plath's marriage; Hughes's affair with Assia Wevill (who later killed herself and her child by Hughes); the pattern of Miss Plath's suicide attempts; and the factors that led her-with two small children, and at the height of her poetic powers--to take her own life.