My tube reading this week has been the biography of
Sylvia Plath (Bitter Fame: A Life of
Sylvia Plath, Anne Stevenson, Penguin).
Apart from causing a few people to throw me curious glances –yes,
I know it’s fairly heavy for 8am in the rain, but please– it has shed some
light on a writer that I clearly knew far less about than I thought.
Currently I’m in 1956, and our Sylv is a graduate student at
Cambridge. She is spending most of her time flitting off to Paris for trysts,
leading on a ridiculous amount of men, and having far more sex than I could
ever have expected from a writer who is most famous (and I don’t mean to
disregard her work; the facts are unfortunate) for her all-encompassing
depression.
In general, she could not be pegged as,
a) a recluse
b) socially awkward
c) overlooked
which are three things that I definitely considered her to
be, before I started reading Stevenson’s book.
There are clearly a lot of misconceptions flying around
about Sylvia. But she certainly isn’t the only one who has been obscured over
the years.
According to the book, when Sylvia first met Ted Hughes she
yelled at him before biting his face
(steady on, love). From this point on she seems determined to turn him into a
brooding, dangerous, Heathcliff-type character. It is the impression I always
had of him, so maybe Sylvia succeeded. It is at odds with how his Cambridge
friends saw him, though – gentle and kind are the words I seem to remember
Stevenson using.
It is worth noting, if you weren’t already aware, that Ted
Hughes was born in Heptonstall, West Yorkshire – a village way up in the hills,
just a mere stone’s throw from the Brontes’ home at Howarth. It is, in my
entirely unbiased, Yorkshire-bred opinion, a place everyone should visit for
its literary associations. Was (and is) this location part of the reason why
Ted Hughes has been so depicted, by Sylvia and by history? I’d hazard a guess
at, um, yes. In reality, it doesn’t appear
that he was this person at all.
I think, maybe, that Sylvia Plath was determined to play the
tragic heroine all along. Controversial? Possibly. It is unlikely, of course,
that her phenomenally bright, utterly unstable mind will ever be fully
understood – although biographers like Stevenson make a decent attempt.
So, I’m learning a lot about Sylvia, and about Ted. Bitter Fame is throwing up a whole heap
of surprises. Slap on the wrist, history. You have misrepresented them both.