I’m writing a biography so I’m drawn to anything at all that is written about the art of biography. In 1993 the American journalist/biographer Janet Malcolm published The Silent Woman, which is a book about the controversial biography of Sylvia Plath, Bitter Fame, published in 1989, which I read in 1990. It was controversial because it was written with a bias (if that is the right word) towards Ted Hughes, Plath’s estranged husband, unlike most other biographies of Plath, and with the full co-operation of Ted’s sister, Olwyn, who was disgusted with the book when it came out for not going far enough in sympathy with her brother. I didn’t really notice the controversy when I was reading it, and when I first read Janet Malcolm’s book about the book, in 1997, I didn’t notice what a weirdly manipulative book that was, either.
What sent me back to Malcolm’s book was a review in last Sunday’s Observer, of a biography of Janet Malcolm. It turns out that Malcolm was a tricky person, sued for misquoting somebody, known to staff at the New Yorker as Lady Macbeth, and not universally liked (to put it mildly). She cheated on her sick husband with a journalist at the New Yorker and married him the same year her husband died. This experience of hers might explain her comment when summing up the bare facts of the Hughes-Plath marriage breakdown in The Silent Woman: ‘There was another woman. It is a situation that many young married couples find themselves in – one perhaps that more couples find themselves in than don’t – ‘. This is rubbish. Most couples with small children haven’t the time or the money or the energy to sneak off and have affairs – and many, believe it or not, do not have the inclination either. But maybe things are different in places like the New Yorker offices.
What makes Malcolm’s book such a racy and enjoyable read is the fact that she tells us everything that happens when she meets people. What I didn’t realise when I read it first is that that also makes it creepy, because it means she has a tape recorder or a notebook on the go all the time. When I read the book first I didn’t have several decades’ experience of doing and teaching oral history which gave me lots of perspective on interviewing people, on what is ethically acceptable and what is not, on what is, bluntly speaking, right and wrong. And Malcolm is quite simply wrong, most of the time, in the interviews she carries out for this book in England in the cold spring of 1991.
One of the first people she talks to is the American-born author of Bitter Fame, the poet Anne Stevenson, who lives in Durham. Stevenson lives in a house that comprises two miners’ cottages knocked together, with two parlours connected by cold hall-spaces with bowls laid out for dogs and cats. It’s a common house-type in the north of England but Malcolm finds it odd enough to remark on and describe in detail. After some conversation, Stevenson goes to the kitchen to prepare dinner, lasagna (that’s how Malcolm spells it), and when Malcolm comes with her to ‘help’, ‘suddenly in a strangled voice Anne asked if I would mind going and reading in the other room. She needed to be alone so she could concentrate on her cooking’. When the meal is served, Stevenson ‘in a stricken voice’ says she forgot to put the white sauce on the lasagne. Strangled, stricken, forgetting the sauce….it never occurs to Malcolm that it is her irritating presence which is provoking these reactions.
Malcolm is equally insensitive when she goes to visit Elizabeth Sigmund (formerly Compton) in Somerset; Compton/Sigmund grew very fond of Plath when they both lived in Devon in the early 1960s. Sigmund is described as ‘a portly woman in a black dress,with a flowered shawl over her shoulders’, stretched out on the couch with feet swollen from arthritis. When Malcolm arrives she begins ‘to chatter in a way calculated to charm and amuse rather than to invite pity’. Good manners which put visitors at their ease are always ‘calculated’, but Malcolm wouldn’t know anything about that. Sigmund’s husband William brings them tea and cookies ‘made from blameless natural ingredients’. (The comment is a dig at the Sigmunds for their campaigning against biological and chemical pollution.) Malcolm doesn’t think much of Sigmund’s stories, ‘thin unreliable narratives’ Plath biographers use ‘as if they were sacred writings’. But this doesn’t stop her photocopying newspaper cuttings of the ones she doesn’t have, on William’s photocopier, noting that he has become, over the course of the afternoon, ‘ not exactly resentful but a little less friendly.’ She muses a little on her ‘journalistic effrontery’ in intruding on this elderly couple, but if she really meant it she’d have cleared off earlier. Maybe she stuck around because she was hoping to be invited to stay for a meal (even one made from ‘blameless natural ingredients’).
She’s pretty good at blagging food wherever she goes, even from the unpromising Trevor Thomas (below). She is well-fed by Clarissa Roche, an American friend of Plath’s who lives in Somerset. When Malcolm visits, Roche is also entertaining the biographer Frances Spalding (a long story I won’t go into) but Malcolm doesn’t feel like a third wheel. She even has the gall to comment on the setting of the ‘wonderfully good’ lunch Roche gives them,’ in a small dining-room off the kitchen which had a fireplace, in which, English-style, a few flames wanly flickered’. Roche is a ’rounded, middle-aged woman with gray-blond hair and an easy, hearty, slightly vague manner.’ Malcolm does not see this vagueness as reluctance to engage with a visitor who is barging in on her time with Spalding. But Roche, probably just to get Malcolm out the door and away, eventually tells a sensational (and barely believable) story which presents Ted Hughes in a bad light. It’s unclear why Malcolm reproduces the story, which reflects badly on her very hospitable hostess. But it is rapidly dawning on the reader that this is a woman who doesn’t care very much about people.
Not only does she not care about people, she doesn’t look at them, either. When Malcolm gets a taxi from Devon to Somerset, the taxi-driver brings along his wife and child (which he shouldn’t do, really). The wife, sitting in the back with the child, resists all Malcolm’s attempts at conversation and so the taxi-driver, probably to make up for his wife’s bad manners, addresses all his conversation to Malcolm, who can only ‘read’ the entire situation as a crushed and repressed wife being kept silent by an overbearing husband. That’s how blind she is.
This blindness is emphatically not cultural difference. Stevenson and Roche are both Americans, from similar backgrounds to her own, Compton/Sigmund is English, and marital relationships in the west of England are no more repressive than they are in the USA. But Malcolm is so stolidly solipsistic that she cannot imagine anyone being upset by her relentless questioning (Stevenson), keeping her at arms’-length with impeccable manners (Compton/Sigmund and Roche) or taking a dislike to her (the taxi-driver’s wife, and probably,the taxi-driver too.)
She eventually meets her match in Jacqueline Rose, a lecturer at the University of London. Rose’s book The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, which Malcolm (grudgingly) praises, has just come out. Malcolm notices that in their encounter Rose never allows either of them to forget that they are ‘not two women having a friendly conversation over a cup of tea and a box of biscuits, but participants in a special, artificial exercise of subtle influence and counterinfluence, with an implicit antagonistic tendency.’ Feeling threatened by a situation she cannot manipulate, Malcolm is reduced to making snide comments about Rose’s clothes (‘close-fitting’), hair (‘artfully unruly’), and even her spoken syntax. Then she tries to bully Rose into letting her (Malcolm) quote a sentence from a letter Olwyn Hughes sent her (Rose). Rose won’t give in, so eventually Malcolm goes directly to Hughes, who loathes Jacqueline Rose, for permission to quote the relevant line. I’ve read this passage a few times and I cannot for the life of me understand why the line is so important. But of course it isn’t – it’s the power struggle that matters here. Malcolm has to ‘win’.
Her visit to Trevor Thomas, however, finishes the book in style. He was Plath’s downstairs neighbour in London, and the last person to speak to her before her suicide. The kind of person for whom the term ‘English Eccentric’ was coined, he has a permanent sense of grievance from having been sued by Ted Hughes for a (very unlikely) story he (Thomas) circulated about Hughes and his lover hosting a party with bongo drums in Plath’s apartment a few days after she died. Thomas’s small terraced house – he moved to Bedford – is manically cluttered with boxes and there are unrelated, random items on every surface, nothing has been sorted or tidied or thrown out for years – though his friend Robbie still produces an edible meal out of all this chaos. But Malcolm can’t resist (who could?) seizing on the cluttered house as a metaphor for the biographer’s plight, confronted with masses and masses of facts, most of which end up in black plastic bin bags. The only trouble is, which facts should be discarded and which should be kept? And who chooses?
But given how firmly she has established herself as an unreliable narrator, can we even believe her about Thomas’s cluttered house? It seems too good to be true. She’d probably say it doesn’t matter anyway. Because, as she comments at one stage ‘The lay [i.e. non-biographer] reader, who knows only what the biographer tells him (sic), reads [biography]…in a state of bovine equanimity.’ That’s us, folks! Cows in a field.
In that little sentence she reveals the kind of writer she is – a writers’ writer, who writes for other writers, like an academic who writes only for other academics. When I read The Silent Woman first I was saturated in academic values, and had a very high tolerance for that kind of insidery writing. I don’t, any more.
Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: a life of Sylvia Plath (London: Penguin 1989.) I have the paperback, bought in 1990. I’ve written indignant comments in biro on the text like ‘She’s 8 months pregnant for God’s sake!’ and ‘You only have his word for this.’ The nasty attack on Plath by Dido Merwin, a ‘friend’ of the Hugheses ( included as an Appendix), is described rightly by Janet Malcolm as revealing more about Dido than it does about Sylvia. At the time I read it as comedy. Now it reads like a sad little lesson about the terrible psychic damage that can result from holding grudges over time against the dead.
Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (London: Picador 1993 and 1994. Originally N.Y: Knopf).
Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (London: Virago 1991).
Anna Leszkiewicz, reviewing Eve Sneider, The Absent Woman: the Genius of Janet Malcolm (N.Y. Atlantic 2026). The Observer 8/11/2026.
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