13 JULY 1991, Page 27

Al endless inquest

Frances Spalding

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF SYLVIA PLATH by Ronald Hayman

Heinemann, £16.99, pp. 220

THE HAUNTING OF SYLVIA PLATH by Jacqueline Rose

Virago, £14.99, pp. 288

Here are two more books on Sylvia Plath. One furthers an interest in her saga as an up-market soap opera in which she becomes, as has been remarked, the Marilyn Monroe of the literati. The other undoes precisely those techniques that the first depends on and proves how complex are the facts and how unfixed their inter- pretation. The second has been pro- nounced 'evil' by Plath's executors, who may feel indicted in particular by the motives that Jacqueline Rose investigates. But the cumulative effect of her book is akin to that of Plath's poetry which, as Rose rightly argues, stays with anxiety and does not resolve it.

The titles of both books allude to Plath's unresting state, but it is Jacqueline Rose's which is the more richly ambiguous. Haunt- ed in her work by fantasy and ghosts ( How they grip us through thin and thick'), Plath has herself been traduced by myth and obliged to serve the interests of various critical theories. But her posthumous life has also been overshadowed by a notion of .truth' which her executors have upheld to Justify their demarcations of the accept- able. Ted Hughes has commented on the Way that Plath's death has multiplied all her statements with 'a quantity that is wild and unknown'. To counteract this there has been an attempt to foist on her a consisten- cy, damaging both as a diagnosis and as a celebration of her work. At one point she was used as a case-study by analysts work- ing on schizophrenia. For the purposes of Anne Stevenson's biography, Bitter Fame, selected friends of Plath provided an image of her almost as grotesque as the vindict- iveness their remarks betrayed. Bitter Fame made horribly evident how far-reaching the act of suicide can be.

Jacqueline Rose is an expert on the repercussions of feminism on psycho- analysis. Her grounding in the re-reading of Freud makes her profoundly aware of the subversive role of the unconscious and of the difficulties presented by language and subjectivity. Owing to the subtlety and penetration of her thought, her style some- times becomes knotted and convoluted, in part because she uses two or three phrases where one would do. Her book can also be criticised for having no clear agenda and for shifting from critical analysis into liter- ary politics and psychoanalytical theory. She is particularly adept at spotting bodily metaphors and deduces from these a wide- reaching conspiracy to sexualise culture. Plath's remark in her journals — 'If I can digest changes, in my novel. Not swell tumid with inarticulateness' — offers the kind of physicality of language that Rose can unpack with ease. Like other post-structural critics, Rose resists the notion of an author's unified voice. Plath's use of pseudonyms, her desire to write short stories for 'slick' mag- azines as well as poetry, and the different personae that haunt her letters and jour- nals — all these provide evidence of her many voices which make a 'singular, mono- logic reading' of her work inappropriate. There are many ways in which this delib- erately unsettling book enriches one's understanding of Sylvia Plath, especially her ability to allegorise personal experi- ence. But in one instance Rose's excava- `I've been responsible and implemented a wage freeze.'

tions result in overkill: 30 pages are devot- ed to the poem 'Daddy' in a final critical tour de force which nevertheless ignores, and fails to remove, Seamus Heaney's remark, that the poem is

so entangled in biographical circumstance and rampages so permissively in the history of other people's sorrows that it overdraws its rights to our sympathy.

After Plath's death, her estranged hus- band faced the decision whether to protect her work or his and their children's right to privacy. He did both. One of Plath's jour- nals was destroyed by Hughes, another 'dis- appeared', while others were deposited in Smith College Rare Book Room in the form of severely edited typescripts, extracts from which have been published in Ameri- ca but not over here. Ariel, the collection of poems prepared by Plath before her death, was published in a mangled state, Hughes omitting 14 of the more autobiographical poems and altering the arrangement of the rest. As her executor, his control extended even to those letters which Aurelia Plath was permitted to use in Letters Home, in an attempt to present a view of her daughter that corrected the 'raging adolescent voice' found in the fictionalised autobiography, The Bell Jar. Hughes then gave his sister Olwyn charge of the literary estate and Plath's posthumous reputation was further cabined and confined by a woman who once described her sister-in-law as 'pretty straight poison'. The worst outcome of this was the unbalanced Bitter Fame, which Anne Stevenson admits was written in 'dual authorship' with Olwyn, who also took a share in the royalties.

Rose is excellent on the subtleties of all this censorship. Her concern is not with the logic of blame that has dogged Plath's rep- utation, but with making transparent the lack of innocence that has surrounded the Plath industry. Ronald Hayman, on the other hand, works as if facts come indepen- dent of their context or speaker. His book is promoted as an 'uninhibited biographical study' and, as such, loses not a trick in its sensational appeal. Hayman begins with Plath's death and all the unexplained fac- tors that still surround it. He makes public the fact that Assia Weevil, with whom Ted Hughes was having an affair at the time, later killed herself and her two-year-old daughter by Hughes by the same method that Plath used. In between these two sen- sational chapters is a brief canter through the familiar drama of Plath's life. Any details that would blur the sharpness of Hayman's focus are omitted. Aurelia Plath becomes a plain villain, compensating vicariously through her daughter for her own educational sacrifices. Hayman's obsession with Plath's death is single-minded. 'In lighting the bonfire,' he writes of her angry burning of Hughes's papers, 'she lit a fuse that would burn slow- ly towards the Ariel poems and towards suicide.' With such resistible melodrama the book proceeds to its unhappy end.