In the final account, this is a book about the making of a biography and while the focus is on Plath and Plath biographies that have come before, it could be a book about the making of any biography and the necessities that are involved. The unreliable sources, the wishes of the estate, the permissions denied and given. It’s an interesting topic and is very much a piece would expect to find in the late Fred Karl’s Biography and Source Studies – a series entirely devoted to the art and making of biography and what it means to be a biographer. (An interesting series for anyone interested in the subject; books are available by volume on Amazon and elsewhere. The most recent is Biography and Source Studies; Volume 5, editor Fred Karl.)
The focus here is largely on Anne Stevenson’s book and from the start it is dismissed as she notes “when Anne Stevenson’s biography arrived, it looked like damaged goods. The wrapping was coming undone, the label looked funny, there was no piece of cotton at the top of the bottle” and even comments on the “suspicious Author’s Note on the opening page” which says that “in the writing of this biography I have received a great deal of help from Olwyn Hughes.” The statement goes on to say that Olwyn’s help had almost made the book a work of “dual authorship.”
Malcolm says she first read Bitter Fame in 1989 and was “unaware” of the “charged situation” surrounding it and that Anne Stevenson was in the graduating class ahead of her at the University of Michigan in the 1950s. It is this little fact on page 13 of the book, that opens chapter two, that is telling. For the rest of the book after that statement, Anne Stevenson will be dragged around behind Janet Malcolm like a rag doll that belongs to a petulant and snotty child; dragged to such an extent that one begins to empathize not with Malcolm or see her point, even the valid ones, but with Stevenson. Even I had problems or issues with Stevenson’s book and yes, it was controversial, but at least it was a book about Plath, which is a lot more than I could ever say about Janet Malcolm’s book.
This is no more a book about Plath than is Catcher in the Rye or some other title. It is a book about a personal rivalry, it seems, that uses Plath as the hook on which to hang the rest. There are a few interesting details here and there that relate to Plath but nothing new and certainly not very much that can’t be found in other true biographies and not a study of biography as this claims to be. This is not a study of biography; it is a sort of biography about an entirely different subject than it lays claim to and that is the author’s relationship to Anne Stevenson and her book Bitter Fame and the relationship of Olwyn Hughes to the two of them, who frankly comes off as having a bit of fun herself, playing these two against each other as if they were her pawns.
Article comments
1 - Hope
Hello. I am not sure I follow the point about Zelda Fitzgerald. Is is well known tha she tried to succeed as a dancer at one point and wrote a novel of her own. She was no deferential wife, but famously high spirited and later mentally unbalanced.
Hope
http://humorhangout.blogspot.com/
2 - sadi
hi Hope: thanks for reading, first. About Zelda, and i may be wrong in this, the way i always read it and heard it too, was that many of Fitzgerald who for the count, is one of my favorties, so this is hard), used a lot of Zelda's ideas and had her typing up his work for him a great deal; that was the part that i meant. I know the Crack Up was written about her nervous breakdown and subsequent hospitalization, right? I had read that the breakdown was due in part to the role she was playing in the marriage and putting her own life rather secondary to him. That maybe wrong, but that is what i have always read. Do you have a reliable source on this, because i would actually like to know with certainty -- it would help. I also understood that Zelda died in a fire in that same mental institution.
Anything you can tell mne or any good sources would be much appreciated. I've long loved Fitzgerald and this has always bothered me. I'd be thrilled to be wrong about this.
Cheers,
s.
3 - Ken Cameron
Janet Malcolm is a writer who deals in subtle, complex, nuanced perceptions and judgments and who seems fated to attract critics who are incapable of such perceptions or judgments. Your review leaves me thinking that you don't get Malcolm. You seem to agree, as you write that "I'm not sure what Janet Malcolm was after when she wrote the silent woman". I see that as your problem, not Janet Malcolm's. You seem unhappy that the book isn't something it doesn't pretend to be - a biography of Sylvia Plath. You might find it worthwhile to read it again with a different assumption - that is is about the difficulty of writing biography. This is what shapes its treatment of all its "characters", including Malcolm herself as well as Olwyn Hughes Ted Hughes, Anne Stevenson and Jacqueline Rose and Plath herself. The book leaves my human sympathy for all of them intact, along with and my sense of their human weakness and ultimately their complexity, the fact that they are not captured by the various self-serving or otherwise partial narratives that biographers cobble together. You seem unhappy that the book doesn't provide a straightforward verdict, a simple narrative, but unaware that not doing so, deconstructing all the narratives, the biographers', Hughes', and Malcolm's own, is its whole point.
4 - sadi ranson-polizzotti
as a biographer myself, as a writer myself, and further, as a poet - i can honestly say that it is up to the writer (songwriter, poet, author, etc etc) to convey. Yes, the reader has to work and be interested, and certainly if was and am, but if Malcolm did not convey to me, then I wonder who she did convey to, because I was and remain a captive audience... So this to me, just as I have fallen flat on my face, is a minor (I said minor) failure on her part. You need not be so pithy about it. This is a simple review, nothing more, nothing less - it's absolutely not personal. Why do you make it so?
Thanks for reading - I can give Malcolm another read since I read this a while ago, but I doubt my opinion will have much changed, but you never know. Again, I am also a biographer and have fallen flat, but then , who does not? I find you are saying "there is no fault with this faultless, flawless gem of a book" etc etc and the "fault" must lie with the reader - which is, frankly, utter b.s. - If the message is NOT conveyed, that is often a failing on the writer's part if the reader is educated, etc etc in the subject matter and eager to read and educated in general: there is something not quite right here. To put it all off on me and make th author "St. Malcolm" is rather absurd.
5 - Ken Cameron
I certainly don't mean to say the book is flawless. I just think it is very interesting, in itself and as part of Malcolm's oeuvre, which deconstructs a series of intellectual enterprises - psychoanalysis, journalism, biography, autobiography, literary criticism, law - in the end writing itself as an activity and a career - in a way which I find enlightening and helpful.
To say, as I did, that I felt you didn't get the book does sound excessively personal and I apologise for that. But it is, in the end, something like what I think. For me Malcolm's book "conveys" (to use your useful word) with clarity and subtlety. Other books, that other people admire, don't. With some of those books, I think it likely that the impediment is with me rather than the book. The same applies to painting and other arts. EG, I don't get Samuel Beckett, or Raoul Dufy, or Schoenberg, but in saying so I am hesitant to imply any failing on the part of those artists. I don't think Janet Malcolm is in their class, but I think she deserves more than faint praise.
I also think that Malcolm does attract a certain kind of misunderstanding. People accuse her of taking sides when I find she is recording vivid impressions, together with her own reservations about those impressions, in a way which reminds me that the person she is writing about exists outside her (Malcolm's) story. I think this kind of respect for the people she is writing about is exemplary. I have this kind of problem with the account you give of Anne Stevenson and Plath herself as they appear in Malcolm's book - I simply don't think she is criticising them in the way you imply.
Thanks for your response, and I apologise again for the clumsiness of my earlier post - although I still don't think "Forget about The Silent Woman" is good advice to your readers. As you may have guessed, I admire Janet Malcolm, and am inclined to rise up in her defense.
6 - Ken Cameron
Amending para 2 above, I should have written "Some other books, that other people admire....".