Although Paul Alexander attempted to enlist Ted Hughes’s cooperation—at least in so far as an interview was concerned—the biographer decided to steer clear of the Plath estate after Hughes turned him down. Alexander had one memorable encounter with Olwyn, who reported it to Frances McCullough: “Alexander really seems to me pretty hopeless … Did I tell you his big inspiration? Who do you think, he asks, those letters she wanted stamps for on the last night went to? I point out they were probably just an excuse to find out if neighbour would let nurse in next morning. I think he announces, eyes agleam, they were to … Sassoon! I advised him maybe he should stick to writing fiction.…” Alexander wrote a “fair use” biography, published in 1991, relying on summary and brief quotations. He produced a very detailed book, making extensive use of Plath’s archives and hundreds of interviews with those who knew her. On 19 August 1992, the Plath estate contacted Alexander’s publisher, Penguin USA. Penguin’s senior vice president and general counsel, Alan J. Kaufman, replied:
I have had the work in question carefully and thoroughly legally vetted prior to publication. I am therefore taken by surprise by your letter alleging that there are numerous passages which grossly defame your client, Ted Hughes.
As a responsible publisher we are interested to learn, with great specificity, exactly which passages in the work you allege to be defamatory to your client.
No legal action was taken. Ted wrote to Olwyn on 26 August, advising her not to get into a newspaper debate with Alexander, as no one remembers what is said in newspapers, which only want “hot copy.” Olwyn should write her own book. Stevenson’s was “catastrophic,” he added with rhetorical flourish, “because everything that was said there was heard as if you got her to say it—and as if I got you to get her to say it.” Only books get through to new readers, he argued. “Nothing else is accessible to them. Think of the advance too.” Although it has been said that Olwyn is working on her memoirs, she has yet to publish any.
Ronald Hayman’s The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (1991) took a bolder line than Alexander had done. Hayman argued that Plath had crossed the line between life and art, and that her greatest work virtually demanded to be read alongside her biography. In other words, the conventional biographer’s argument that the life helped to illuminate the work had been abrogated in favor of a fusion of the two, making the estate’s withholding of material and its efforts to control the flow of information about Plath all the more reprehensible. How exactly were biographers to distinguish between the private and public Plath? Although Plath scholarship has moved away from conflating the poet and her work, Hayman’s argument has been difficult to dismiss. Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley note in Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual (2007) that the “boundaries between Plath literary critics, biographers, and devotees” who worship at the “altar of Plath,” remain unclear.
In 1991, on 11 February, the anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s suicide, Janet Malcolm met with Olwyn Hughes to discuss a projected book, which became The Silent Woman (1994). Like Judith Kroll, Malcolm describes Olwyn as “forbidding and imposing.” Disdaining the plodding earnestness of biographers who pretend to be neutral or objective, Malcolm then dispatches Olwyn with gusto: “She is like the principal of a school or the warden of a prison: students or inmates come and go, while she remains.” Indeed, in Malcolm’s film noir, Olwyn becomes Mrs. Danvers welcoming Rebecca (the callow biographer) to Court Green, the Mandalay of Plath biography. One half expects Malcolm to include the Daphne DuMaurier line, “Last night I dreamed I went to Mandalay again.”
But Malcolm is rewarded only with Olwyn’s grudging agreement to take the importunate writer for a look at the exterior of the Fitzroy Road flat. Much of their conversation centers on how Olwyn had to “nanny” Anne Stevenson along to no avail, since Anne still got Sylvia “wrong.” Malcolm notes that suicide always leaves the survivors in the wrong. Nothing can be done about it, because Plath remains “silent, powerful”—and in the right. Malcolm characterizes Olwyn’s demand that Anne remove an account of Sylvia’s attack on Olwyn as the only available method of replying to Plath—even though Sylvia’s harsh words can themselves be interpreted as a bias the reader is perfectly capable of detecting. Olwyn, Malcolm implies, is unable to let the biographer and the reader do their work. In spite of Malcolm’s criticism, Olwyn and her brother left Malcolm alone—perhaps because she had such obvious scorn for biographers who do not trouble to make the Hugheses into fully rounded human beings coping with an impossible situation, wishing both to protect their privacy and do justice to Plath’s work. Ted Hughes realized that Malcolm was on the estate’s side, and yet prior to publication he still tried to ferret out what she would write about Olwyn. Malcolm replied on 16 September 1992 that of course Olwyn figured in the narrative, but she was not the “central figure.” The cagey biographer added, “I feel by telling you this I am saying more than I should (you may feel I am saying too little)…”
A brilliant stylist, Malcolm evokes the problematics of biography. How can biographers possibly know the truth? As Dido Merwin said, they were not there. Of course, by this logic, Malcolm, too, is suspect. But presumably she is more honorable because at least she concedes (indeed wallows in) the fallibility of biography. But memoirs written after the fact are no less fallible, which is why Malcolm focuses on Hughes’s letters, showcasing him as a brilliant interpreter of Plath’s work. Malcolm is right to emphasize that in his letters Ted expresses virtually no animus toward Plath. But it is hard to see why his later letters should be taken as the last word. In the end, Malcolm seems to have put herself in thrall to Ted Hughes, wishing, like Olwyn, to safeguard him from predators.
Ted Hughes, however, did not see matters this way. To him, Malcolm had adopted the guise of an objective truth-teller, painfully and regretfully revealing the “bad as well as the good because that’s the truth.” Her concoction of psychoanalytical commentary and “self-doubt” conveyed an impression of “helpless verisimilitude.” Malcolm knew her audience and knew how it would eagerly devour a controversial book written with the patented Malcolm style. And Ted understood, as he warned Olwyn, that she was the “main target.” By now, Ted was just part of the “trampled field.”
In Birthday Letters (1998), poems addressed to Plath and written over a thirty-five year period, Ted Hughes finally provided his own apologia. The work is difficult to assess as biography, since it bears the same relation to reality as Plath’s creative work. And yet a poem like “Fulbright Scholars” is hard to resist, because it is such an antidote to the sour memoirs of his friends. By mentioning Plath’s “Veronica Lake” bang, he evokes not only Sylvia’s glamour in postwar Cambridge, but also how she exuded so much more style than his contemporaries. She was so American and so romantic, a dream girl coming to him off the movie screen, his own Marilyn Monroe. Birthday Letters is not a record of what happened, but a crafted memory of what Sylvia Plath meant to Ted Hughes.
In hindsight, Hughes describes himself in “Visit” as auditioning for the lead role in Plath’s drama. Hughes evokes the power of the “brand” her teeth marks left for nearly a month after she bit him. The blood rite of their first meeting is subsumed in “The Shot” in Plath the “god-seeker,” an Isis looking for an Osiris to worship—although Hughes does not name his god. He remains first among the god-candidates after she jettisons the “ordinary jocks,” but it is remarkable in these poems how he subjects his persona to her quest, replicating precisely the pattern of those biographies of her that he abhorred.