The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath And Ted Hughes by Malcolm Janet

Author:Malcolm, Janet [Malcolm, Janet]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: biography, Sylvia Plath
ISBN: 9781847085665
Publisher: Granta
Published: 2011-11-09T13:00:00+00:00

Now Anne said, “That kind of arrangement wasn’t unusual in the seventies; many people were leaving husbands or wives and living with other people, and everyone was being very civilized about it. I think we had this notion that once we were adults we could live with whomever we wanted to, but we still had responsibilities toward children. I think we all subscribed to a rather crazy sense of what was possible for a human being to do. I now look back on it all, I must say, in horror. It was not a happy time. But I did finish Correspondences.” Anne went on to say that she had been hurt by the indifference with which Correspondences was met. “It came out about the time that Ted’s Crow came out. Crow was a grand success, and no one paid any attention to Correspondences.” The defeated note had crept back into her voice.

Peter Lucas, who had tactfully disappeared so that Anne and I could be alone, returned, and he and Anne drove me to the station. He joined our concluding conversation about Bitter Fame—again in a grimly knowledgeable way, as a sort of fellow survivor (barely) of a catastrophe. When we said good-bye, I felt a pang of affection and pity for this pair of decent and honorable people who had somehow strayed into a nightmare. Yet I was also conscious of a somewhat impatient unasked question: Why, when Anne, like her namesake in Persuasion, was finally safely reunited with her Wentworth, had she had to go and take up with Olwyn, yet another “other man”?

On the train back to London, I took out the packet of letters Anne had given me, and read through the correspondence between Anne and Olwyn in the years 1986 through 1989.1 read with rapt fascination. I was being made privy to a lovers’ quarrel. The letters rang with accusations, recriminations, resentments, grievances, threats, insults, shows of pitiableness, rage, petulance, contempt, injured pride—the whole repertoire of bad feeling that people who have got under each other’s skin trot out and fling at each other like buckets of filthy water. The letters were abashingly real. They brought the story that Anne and Olwyn had told me back to its emotional source. I felt like the possessor of a great prize—the prize that the narrator of The Aspern Papers goes to such extreme lengths to try to get. Letters are the great fixative of experience. Time erodes feeling. Time creates indifference. Letters prove to us that we once cared. They are the fossils of feeling. This is why biographers prize them so: they are biography’s only conduit to unmediated experience. Everything else the biographer touches is stale, hashed over, told and retold, dubious, unauthentic, suspect. Only when he reads a subject’s letters does the biographer feel he has come fully into his presence, and only when he quotes from the letters does he share with his readers his sense of life retrieved. And he shares something else: the feeling of transgression that comes from reading letters not meant for one’s eyes.

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