Janet Malcolm on Ted Hughes: Defending the Indefensible?

Ted Hughes, 1978 (Photo by Bill Brandt)

The case for literary criticism as art is easy to make. Simply adduce Janet Malcolm’s brilliant The Silent Woman (1993), a mesmerizing exploration of “the labyrinth of the Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes story,” and rest your case. No further submissions are necessary. The Silent Woman originally appeared in The New Yorker (August 23, 1993). One of my favorite lines in it is “When Bitter Fame appeared, and raised the stakes of the game, I decided to become a player.” Twenty-three years later, Malcolm is back at the table with her " 'A Very Sadistic Man' " (The New York Review of Books, February 11, 2016), a scathing review of Jonathan Bate’s Ted Hughes: The Unauthorized Life. She says of Bate’s book,

Bate’s malice is the glue that holds his incoherent book together—malice directed at other peripheral characters but chiefly directed at its subject. Bate wants to cut Hughes down to size and does so, interestingly, by blowing him up into a kind of extra-large sex maniac.

Malcolm is a staunch defender of Hughes. Her support is based largely on his letters, which she admires immensely. In The Silent Woman, she says, “The letters from Hughes immediately drew me, as if they were the electrically attractive man himself,” and “Reading the letter giving Hughes’s response to the chapters Anne had sent him of her short biography, I felt my identification with its typing swell into a feeling of intense sympathy and affection for the writer.”

In “ ‘A Very Sadistic Man,’ ” she writes,

He emerges from his letters as a man blessed with a brilliant mind and a warm and open nature, who seemed to take a deeper interest in other people’s feelings and wishes than the rest of us are able to do and who never said anything trite or obvious or pious or self-serving. Of course, this is Hughes’s epistolary persona, the persona he created the way novelists create characters. The question of what he was “really” like remains unanswered, as it should. If anything is our own business, it is our pathetic native self. Biographers, in their pride, think otherwise. Readers, in their curiosity, encourage them in their impertinence. Surely Hughes’s family, if not his shade, deserve better than Bate’s squalid findings about Hughes’s sex life and priggish theories about his psychology.

Is that why we read literary biographies – to see what writers are “really” like? Maybe. The literary biographies I most enjoy explore the relationship between the life and the work. Perhaps the greatest of them is George D. Painter’s Marcel Proust. A recent example is Adam Begley’s excellent Updike. Bate’s book is not that kind of biography. It dishes the dirt. Malcolm rightly dismisses it. But it seems to me her defense of Hughes has at least one hole in it. It fails to adequately explain his destruction of Plath’s last journal, the one she wrote during the months leading up to her suicide when she was composing her great Ariel poems. That action strikes me as seriously self-incriminating. It puts Hughes’s character in issue.

Adam Begley's Brilliant "Updike"

This summer I’m reading Adam Begley’s Updike. I find it addictive. Begley’s biographical readings of Updike’s work are fascinating. For example, in his early chapters, he shows how immersed Updike was in his beloved Pennsylvania geography (Plowville, Shillington, Reading). He says of Updike’s great “The Happiest I’ve Been” (The New Yorker, January 3, 1959), “The farm, the town, the city – when an adult John Nordholm looks fondly back on the events of that night, Updike is taking us on a pilgrimage to all three of his holy sites.” Updike, in his “On Literary Biography” (Due Considerations, 2007), described George D. Painter’s masterly Marcel Proust as “a way of re-experiencing the novel [Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past], with a closeness, and a delight in seeing imagined details conjured back into real ones, that only this particular writer and his vast autobiographical masterpiece could provide.” Begley’s Updike works the same way in relation to Updike’s writing - mirroring the fiction back into reality. I’m enjoying it immensely.

April 28, 2014 Issue

Is Adam Begley’s Updike worth reading? That was the question on my mind as I began reading Louis Menand’s "Imitation of Life," a review of Begley’s book, in this week’s issue. The answer appears to be yes. Menand says, “Writing was what the man was about, and the writing is what Begley focuses on. Updike is a highly literate illumination of a supremely literate human being.”

Updike was a “supremely literate human being” who disliked literary biographies. Some of his severest criticism is found in his reviews of biographies of Eliot, Fitzgerald, Cheever, Graham Greene, and Dorothy Parker, among others. His view was that writers’ lives are “poured into books, not deeds” (“This Side of Coherence,” More Matter, 1999). He deplored biographies that dish “the dirt, the lowdown” (“This Side of Coherence”).

The one exception he made is for biographies that enable us “to partake again, from another angle, of the joys we have experienced within the author’s oeuvre, in the presence of a voice and mind we have come to love” (“On Literary Biography,” Due Considerations, 2007). The supreme example of this kind of biography is George D. Painter’s Marcel Proust (1959). Updike admired Painter’s book enormously. In “On Literary Biography,” he wrote, “Lovers of Proust will be inevitably drawn to Painter because it is more of the same, mirrored back into reality.”

Based on my reading of Menand’s “Imitation of Life,” I’d say that Adam Begley’s Updike sounds like it’s mostly in the Painter category. Menand says that Begley’s Updike “is essentially an extended essay in biographical criticism, an insight into the man through the work and the work through the man.”

I wish Menand had provided at least one extended quotation from Begley’s Updike so that I could form my own impression of Begley’s writing. But he says enough to persuade me that Begley’s book is worth a look.

Postscript: Pick of the Issue this week is Justin Quinn’s delightful "Recession Song," celebrating the medicinal and spiritual benefits of sage (“Sage is just the thing / for snakebite, bee sting / and keeping the bad at bay”). It’s a classic poem, beautifully rhymed, artfully lineated, specific, vital, and complete. It went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker poems.