Текст книги "American Isis. The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath"

Автор книги: Carl Rollyson

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Hughes agreed to publication so long as Aurelia abided by his censorship of Sylvia’s references to him. He wanted the book considerably shortened so as to read like a novel, which he thought would silence detractors and become a bestseller. In other words, he remained unable to see he was part of the very process of biographical inquiry and popularization that he condemned. Even though he had praised Frances McCullough as a perspicacious editor, he was taken aback at her objection to the extensive cuts he wanted, and he wrote a mollifying letter to Aurelia (after she had engaged lawyers to insure Ted abided by his agreement with her). She was upset at his butchery of her book, but he argued he was saving her from the “mob”—a favorite term of his, used to describe virtually anyone interested in anything having to do with Plath other than her work.

In September 1972, Harriet Rosenstein published “Reconsidering Sylvia Plath” in Ms. magazine, part of her work on a Brandeis University doctoral dissertation. Already Plath had become a flashpoint, her every line the focus of biographical discussion and critical debate. Rosenstein is mentioned several times in Olwyn’s correspondence as someone who had been interviewing Plath’s friends and associates, even though Olwyn had told her Lois Ames had the estate’s exclusive cooperation. Indeed, Rosenstein’s research experience survives in the lore of Plathists as an exemplar of what biographers have suffered as a result of the Plath estate’s embargo.

In the Frances McCullough collection at the University of Maryland, the indefatigable Rosenstein makes repeated appearances as “Harriet the Spy,” securing Sylvia’s letters on the sly, interviewing Dr. Beuscher, hiding recording devices under a sofa, and in general “running circles around” Lois Ames—so much so that McCullough proposes that Olwyn make a “truce” with Rosenstein and name her the authorized biographer after deposing the author of the “idiot licensed biography.” But Olwyn objected, noting that Rosenstein had been telling people that Ted’s sister was the “great big monster in the wood pile” and a “witch (black).”

In her Ms. article, Rosenstein employs religious language in describing the already fractured audience of “apostles” and “infidels” that clashed over Plath. “Sects” and “schisms” threatened to overwhelm their subject, now the center of a “Holy War.” That Rosenstein was taking issue with all sides should have put her in a prime position to write a truly independent biography. She understood why Plath’s use of anger and her exploration of women’s lives and domestic routines should make her an icon for the feminist movement and a startling new figure in the history of Anglo-American literature. At the same time, the biographer expressed concern that Plath’s own voice had been drowned out by programmatic arguments about what she stood for. Distinctions had to be made between Plath as a representative figure and Plath’s singularity.

Writing on 23 November 1973 to Clare Court, a Court Green neighbor who had incurred Olwyn’s wrath by writing a letter to the TLS praising Plath, A. Alvarez noted: “Miss Rosenstein seems better than most … She seems very thorough and also independent—though how long that will last, heaven only knows.… But I must confess that it’s depressing to think that the unspeakable Olywn Hughes has managed to bully and insult you, too, into silence. She has tried that tactic on so many people that I despair of the truth of that sordid and tragic affair ever emerging.” Poor Clare Court, she had been charmed by Sylvia’s stories of the swifts, who took the thatch from her home to build nests of their own.

Perhaps the recalcitrance of the Plath estate was, in the end, enough to prevent Rosenstein from ever publishing her biography. She may also have been aware of another contender, Elizabeth Hinchliffe, a graduate of Wellesley High School, a Mademoiselle guest editor, and the author of a Wellesley College honors thesis on Plath. Hinchliffe had also spent her freshman year at Smith, thus appearing as yet another double that Plath herself would have appreciated. Judging by a manuscript in the Frances McCullough Papers at the University of Maryland in College Park, and by her correspondence in the Alvarez papers at the British Library, Hinchliffe did considerable research and interviewing, gathering intimate and even gruesome details that would not have served her well in dealings with the Plath estate. The Plath archives are silent on what happened to the Hinchliffe biography. McCullough’s collection at the University of Maryland includes a letter from Olywn deeming Hinchliff’s work “highly offensive and ludicrous.” Ted Hughes later wrote to poet and biographer Andrew Motion about biographers who had come to grief attempting to write about Sylvia, noting that Linda Wagner-Martin was “so insensitive that she’s evidently escaped the usual effects of undertaking this particular job—i.e. mental breakdown, neurotic collapse, domestic catastrophe—which in the past have saved us from several travesties of this kind being completed.”

By 1973, Edward Butscher, not a timid soul, was already well on his way to producing the first full-length Plath biography, discovering that “English authors … reluctantly refused to see me on the ground that they could not reveal the truth of Sylvia’s last years and still maintain social and/or business ties with Ted and Olwyn Hughes.” Elizabeth Compton, a Devon neighbor of Sylvia’s, wrote to Butscher, “If you wrote what I knew of Sylvia you could not publish it because Ted & Olwyn would sue you. ‘The truth about Sylvia can only be told when you are dying,’ Ted told me some weeks back.”

Olwyn met with Butscher three times and responded in writing to his queries. At one point, she offered to act as his agent in the UK if he submitted his book to her and she approved of it. In early 1975, Olwyn sent detailed corrections of Butscher’s biography, objecting, especially, to his sympathetic account of Sylvia after Ted had left her. In Olwyn’s version, Sylvia had been aggressively jealous and had driven Ted out of his own home, thus making it certain he would turn to Assia, whose own behavior is excused because she was so much in love with Ted. Olwyn, seeking to mitigate Ted’s treatment of Sylvia, campaigned relentlessly for a positive portrayal of Assia’s actions—even securing Assia’s friend, Edward Lucie-Smith, to write a character study that would soften her image in Butscher’s book.

On 7 April 1975, Butscher replied, thanking Olwyn for saving him from some embarrassing errors, but also admitting he found her “massive missive” annoying. He answered Olwyn’s concerns point-by-point, identifying sources and pointing out that many of her objections were to Sylvia’s point of view, which the biographer was trying to honor. He did not intend to rewrite the book. When Olwyn demanded more changes and mentioned her intention to contact Butscher’s publisher, he replied on 5 May 1975 that he deemed her response a threat. He encouraged her to carry through with it, saying Continuum Books would be delighted to advertise his biography as “THE BOOK THE HUGHES TRIED TO SUPPRESS!” He also wanted her to know that he had engaged a lawyer who had vetted his book and assured him he would win any legal action brought against him (Olywn had already suggested that certain passages might be libelous). Although he had initially believed in her sincerity, he now realized that too many of her “recent suggestions smack of a whitewash.” He agreed to change some other wording at her suggestion, but that was as far as he could go. If he was denied permission to quote from Plath’s work, the biographer promised to mount a letter-writing campaign to literary journals and newspapers decrying Olwyn’s “pre-censorship” and “heavy-handed tactics,” which would also be a subject of the preface to his biography. He did not consider these proposed actions threats—just aids to fulfilling his duty to “literature and objective scholarship.”

Olwyn’s reply on 12 May was forbearing, suggesting that Butscher’s “rage” was the result of her hastily composed letter, which she had dispatched too soon because of the press of other business. But well into mid-July 1975, when the book was in the proofs stage and corrections would be costly to the author and publisher, Olwyn was still requesting changes and cuts—even after she had endorsed Harper’s grant of permission to quote from Plath’s work. Butscher agreed to a few more alterations, telling Olwyn it was too late to do anything more. Three years later, she engaged in correspondence with Peter Owen, Butscher’s publisher for a collection of essays, Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work, complaining about the “horrible Butscher” as a “revengeful little sod.”

Reviewing Letters Home in the Los Angeles Times Book Review (23 November 1975), poet and novelist Erica Jong complained that Plath’s work had been muddled by “relatives of hers … anxious … to suppress the truth.” To Jong, Ted, Olwyn, and Aurelia were no better than other commentators who had “axes to grind.” In The National Observer (10 January 1976), Anne Tyler, a highly regarded novelist, was equally excoriating, calling the Sylvia of Letters Home a “wax image,” and the collection not much better than a family scrapbook. In the Southwest Review (Summer 1976), scholar Jo Brans questioned the “reliability of the letters because of their editing.” So many ellipses suggested tendentiousness. Aurelia’s italicized commentary was dismissed as reductive rationalization.

Edward Butscher’s Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness, appearing at almost the same time as the publication of Letters Home, provided an explanation for readers who puzzled over how the dutiful daughter in Aurelia’s book could possibly have written the searing verse of Sylvia’s final year. The biographer argued that Plath had to shed her female modesty and middle-class values to become the “bitch goddess” entirely consumed by her art. Like several critics, Sylvia’s friend, Phil McCurdy, thought Butscher had pushed his thesis too far. “You reify too many traits,” he wrote the biographer. In a subsequent letter to Butscher, McCurdy expressed his gratitude to Sylvia, who had made him a better man. “If it was just part of an unhealthy, manipulative—even unconscious—rationale on her part, I’m sure glad I was one of the objects!”

Although Butscher was accused of misogyny and superficial psychologizing, he proved an astute critic, establishing “almost all the formulas that later biographers would adopt and reinforce,” Susan R. Van Dyne contends in The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath. Hampered in some cases by his inability to name names (both Assia and Dick Norton were given pseudonyms), Butscher nevertheless nailed down the testimony of many important witnesses, while carefully assessing their reliability. A year later, in Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work, Butscher included important memoirs by Clarissa Roche and Elizabeth Sigmund (married to David Compton when she knew Sylvia at Court Green). Sigmund singled out Olwyn as “the most difficult person in Ted’s family,” one who “feared and resented Sylvia’s talent and beauty, as well as her relationship with Ted.”

In 1977, Ted Hughes published a collection of Plath’s short stories, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977), followed in 1981 by The Collected Poems, with helpful notes and introductions, and then in 1982 a redacted edition of Sylvia’s journals, edited by Frances McCullough. Hughes wanted McCullough to cut out references to his “uncouthness” because they upset his wife Carol. Passages critical of Aurelia had to be removed, as did various references to his friends. An exasperated McCullough wrote Hughes on 21 September 1981:

The effect of a number of the cuts is to take away her sexuality. This seems to me really mistaken … It’s absurd to think that Aurelia might be embarrassed by Sylvia’s having sexual feelings in college—it’s one of Aurelia’s big virtues in LETTERS HOME that she talks frankly about sex to Sylvia and tries her best to seem liberated about it, whatever her true feelings. To take these passages out on the grounds that she might object just seems prudish, and it trivializes Sylvia.… There has already been so much question of censorship surrounding Plath that it would be much better simply to leave the unpleasant stuff in. I really think it would be counter-productive to censor it …

Undeterred, Hughes thought only of the humiliation of his wife and children. McCullough wrote to Olwyn nearly a decade later, after the publication of the journals, “There was a very real chance the book would be cancelled altogether because of the last set of cuts.” The editor withdrew from the Plath field, complaining to Olwyn that she was tired of accusations that she was a “Hughes patsy trying to censor Plath into oblivion,” only to be attacked by Olwyn as the “architect of a clever plot to inflame feminists.”

As with Letters Home, the response of reviewers to Plath’s journals was predictable. “What is really annoying are the long editorial shadows that fall over these papers,” complained Marni Jackson in Maclean’s Magazine (17 May 1982). “The decision to publish her journal should respect her contradictory selves; instead, the editing makes us feel that Plath’s husband, mother and editor are peering over our shoulders as we read.…” Like many reviewers, Miriam Levine in the American Book Review rued Hughes’s admission that he had destroyed one of Plath’s journals and lost another. In “The Second Destruction of Sylvia Plath,” Steven Gould Axelrod argued in American Poetry Review that like Plath’s last poems, her last journal, which Hughes destroyed, was probably a masterpiece. Axelrod cited the comments of several other scholars and critics, who deemed the editing of Plath’s work a “scandal.” Taking aim at Hughes’s introduction to the journals, in which Ted suggests, “All her writing appears like notes and jottings, directing attention towards that central problem—herself,” Axelrod concludes that it was “quite possible that the writings that we have been prevented from seeing have directed attention toward other central problems—for example, the problem of Ted Hughes himself.” Hughes’s role in stewardship of Plath’s posthumous career was, in short, nothing less than appalling.

Not only had Hughes rearranged the order of Plath’s Ariel poems to suit his proprietary view of her genius, he invidiously divided The Collected Poems into two sections, one of them a sort of consignment ghetto called “Juvenilia.” The “mature” poems date from 1956, the year she met Hughes. Thus Plath’s development is occluded and incomplete in The Collected Poems. The volume’s exclusivity has no place for poems like “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” for example, a favorite of many Plath enthusiasts.

Linda Wagner-Martin, intending to write a feminist biography that would do full justice to her subject’s work, made an issue of the Plath estate’s effort to bully biographers by withholding permission to quote from Plath’s materials if the biographers’ interpretations diverged from the estate’s. Altogether Wagner-Martin cut something like fifteen thousand words from her book when it became clear she could not get permission to conduct close readings of Plath’s writing. The exasperated biographer wrote to Elizabeth Compton, “No mention of Assia allowed, for example. Well, then the separation just looked like Sylvia had lost her mind.” As A. Alvarez remarked, Olwyn and Ted had a “Soviet view of history,” believing that “you could airbrush people out.” Perhaps most upsetting to Ted Hughes was Wagner-Martin’s skepticism about his claim that he and Plath could have reconciled. Ted and Olwyn then decided it was more important than ever to find a replacement for Lois Ames, so that the estate’s version of Plath’s life could begin to rectify the damage done to them by unauthorized biographies.

For Dido Merwin, who had come to loathe Plath and lionize Ted, any biographer who thought Sylvia committed suicide after realizing her ties to her husband were severed had it wrong. Ted was a “quintessential, ineradicable, irreplaceable part of Sylvia’s myth,” Dido instructed Wagner-Martin in a letter (18 September 1985). Sylvia never meant to end her life, Dido was certain. Rather, Sylvia’s actions were meant to scare Ted into a reconciliation. In effect, Dido was building the case for what would become Anne Stevenson’s authorized biography, which would also shift the focus to Sylvia’s faults and her manipulative sensibility. Dido pithily summed up the anti-Plath position in April 1986: “It was above all her phenomenal sense of drama. Her gift for timing and organization. The ability to create the maximum embarrassment, shame, consternation and dismay and of course guilt, as a comeback to anything that displeased her, which brought to mind a character out of Strindberg.” In the end, what is so troubling about Dido Merwin’s memoir of Sylvia is that she is so certain of her point of view and so content in her animus, seeing no merit whatever in a feminist analysis of Plath’s life and dismissing Wagner-Martin’s narrative as a “whitewash.” A good deal of Dido’s letter was later incorporated into Stevenson’s book as an appendix.

Dido claimed a kind of absolute authority because she was there, a tactic often employed against a biographer who was not. And yet, just one example of her misreading of Hughes demonstrates why eyewitness testimony can be unreliable. Dido fumed over Sylvia’s arrogating the one decent room for writing in the cramped London flat she shared with Ted, consigning him to a card table in a hallway. But Ted later told Anne Stevenson, “One of the best [writing] places I ever had was the hallway of the flat in Chalcot Square—a windowless cubicle just big enough for a chair.”

On 25 August 1985, Anne Stevenson wrote to Ted Hughes, informing him that Viking Penguin had offered her a contract to write a short biography of Sylvia Plath. The money was too good to refuse, she admitted. Disavowing “rampant” feminism and determined to be “tactful,” she assured him that he could remove any offending passages. Hughes replied in the autumn of 1986 that he received her letter with the “usual dismay.” To him, biographers were strangers whose concoctions derived from “a few hearsay legendary bits and pieces.” But Hughes seemed more resigned than outraged. Even old friends were now “spilling the beans.” He was probably thinking of Lucas Myers, who a week later sent Hughes a memoir. Myers had complied with Hughes’s request to delete passages from Hughes’s letters to Myers that might be taken the wrong way. Yet Hughes sold these very letters to Emory, and they were later reproduced in an edition of his correspondence. With Olwyn’s encouragement, Stevenson persevered while Hughes dealt with Jane Anderson’s lawsuit, alleging that Hughes had allowed the libel of her in The Bell Jar to be perpetuated and amplified in the film adaptation of the novel. The suit, finally settled in 1987 by AVCO Embassy, producers of the film adaptation of The Bell Jar, cost him nothing.

It does not seem possible to discern any consistency or logic in Hughes’s management of his papers and Plath’s, perhaps because his view of their marriage kept changing. To Myers, Hughes wrote that he regretted, for example, that he had colluded in the publication of Letters Home, which burnished the myth of Sylvia as martyr and absolved Aurelia. The problem, Hughes told Myers, was that he had “coddled Sylvia”—the very point that Dido Merwin had driven home in her memoir. He should just have carried on in his own way instead of deferring to Plath, Hughes concluded.

By mid-1987, Anne Stevenson had abandoned the Viking Penguin project for a full-length biography to be published by Houghton Mifflin and supervised by the heavy-handed Olwyn. Stevenson possessed a promising background for a Plath biographer. She was an American who made England her home. She was a member of Plath’s generation. She was a poet. As she wrote to her editor, Peter Davison, on 29 December 1986, she understood Plath’s “uncanny identification with archetypal myth-figures (Isis, the Black Goddess) and her striving to be both antitheses of herself: Successful American Woman on Smith Girl lines and Great Imaginary Poet-Earth Goddess.…”

But almost immediately, Stevenson ran into trouble, reporting to Davison on 25 February 1987, that she had little direct access to Ted and could not “get around” Olwyn’s “fixed ideas” about him. After a trip to the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Stevenson wrote her editor that Olwyn could not see how her own biases interfered with the biography Anne wanted to write. At the Lilly, Anne discovered a letter Sylvia wrote over the 1960–61 Christmas holiday during a visit to the Hughes home. Sylvia had adopted her customary absolutist reaction to personal criticism: “Olwyn made such a painful scene that I can never stay under the same roof with her again. She has never hidden her resentment of me and her relation to Ted is really quite pathological.” Although Anne had come to discount many of Sylvia’s extreme statements—especially her attacks on Ted after their marriage broke up—on the subject of Olwyn, Anne was “beginning to think Sylvia was right.”

Olwyn was an indispensable resource for Stevenson, who gained access to papers and interviewees unavailable to previous biographers. Davison, no fan of Sylvia’s, believed that Stevenson had the opportunity to dispel the myth of the martyred Sylvia, but he realized that Olwyn was getting in the way. When he asked her to let Stevenson alone, an offended Olwyn shot back at Stevenson on 20 August 1987, denying that she was trying to “run the show.” To Davison, Olwyn expressed her anger at “Anne’s ferocious (on occasions) resentment of my help.” The biographer’s insinuation that Olwyn was trying to “sway the tenor of the book,” and Davison’s belief that Anne could do the book on her own depressed Olwyn, who did not see how Anne could get on without “constant hints, help and overseeing.” As usual, Olwyn objected to the portrayal of Ted, claiming that material Stevenson wanted to include was “slanderous.” Even worse, in a letter to Anne on 13 September, Olwyn accused the biographer of identifying with her subject! Beware of empathy, Olwyn admonished. She assured Anne she was nothing like Sylvia, even if Anne—Olwyn averred—now and then threw a Sylvia-like tantrum.

Davison stood by his author, telling Olwyn that he sympathized with “Anne’s feeling that you sometimes give the sense of looking over her shoulder. It is hard enough to decide what to write on a page without imagining someone else is listening.…” But Olwyn declared Stevenson was hardly better than the “appalling Wagner.” Olwyn had, in short, “backed the wrong horse.” Davison jockeyed between Stevenson and Hughes, bolstering the former and placating the latter. While Stevenson worried that the book would ruin her reputation, Olwyn asserted she was saving the biographer’s good name and demanded 25 percent of the royalties for all her work, which had kept Anne up to the mark. Davison, with a book seven months overdue, finally lost patience and flatly told Olwyn in a letter dated 13 January 1988 that he was near the point of withdrawing the book from publication. Olwyn, he said, had taken it over, inserting passages in her own style that clashed with Anne’s. Even worse, Olwyn demanded 40 percent of the royalties, a demand that Edward Lucie-Smith, one of Olwyn’s friends, would not have been surprised to learn about. As much as he loved Olwyn, he had told Edward Butscher that she was a “cow” about business. Davison could not make it plainer to her: If Olwyn did not approve the manuscript the publisher would be sending her in three days, Stevenson’s biography would be cancelled for “non-delivery.”

In a letter dated 17 February and marked “not sent,” a fed up Davison summed up Olwyn’s attitude: “Something is wrong. Someone has blundered. You do not approve, you are not satisfied, and you will withdraw Ted’s statement, or Ted’s permission to quote his letters…” He had no reason to suppose any text he edited would “receive approval from you.” Davison concluded that it simply was not possible for Olwyn to “let go.” Olwyn wore “too many hats.” Many years later Davison confided to Smith archivist Karen V. Kukil that in the normal course of things, his correspondence would have been shredded. In this case, however, he wanted a record of what had happened.

Why such a savvy editor permitted himself to become mired in such a mess deserves comment. Davison had been enticed by the access that not only Olwyn but also Ted (who had lunched with Davison and talked over the biography) promised. But access, it turned out, meant adherence to Olwyn’s ever-expanding provisos. Ironically, she exhibited exactly the kind of monomaniacal behavior that she attributed to Sylvia. In his unsent letter, Davison said he had come to realize that Sylvia had poisoned Olwyn’s life. But when both Olwyn and Anne both agreed to abide by Davison’s adjudication of their work, he decided to proceed, noting that the book had “survived, barely, a series of major operations, during which the doctors seemed to have disagreed in their diagnoses and prescriptions.” Warfare continued, with Anne charging, “Whatever Sylvia’s faults, she cannot have been more self-blind or perverse in her treatment of people she tried to use than yourself,” and Olwyn replying that Stevenson was thwarting her “in Sylvia fashion.”

The result was very close to what Olwyn wanted. She had worn down both editor and biographer to the point where Olwyn begrudgingly called the book “ok.” Making the best of it, Davison wrote both of them to say how pleased he was with the book that was now balanced between Anne’s “softness” and Olwyn’s “asperity.” When the biography appeared, to mixed reviews, it contained Anne Stevenson’s note stating that Bitter Fame was virtually a work of joint authorship—an admission Olwyn had resisted, but settled for in lieu of putting herself forward as the book’s co-biographer.

On 22 April 1989, The Independent published a long letter from Hughes rebutting several charges made against him by Ronald Hayman, who linked Hughes’s alleged neglect of Plath’s grave with his appalling handling of her estate and her biographers. Hughes rightly noted he had never taken court action against a biographer, but he acknowledged that the estate had denied biographers permission to quote from Plath’s work, in effect using copyright as a form of censorship. He seemed to think that just because the biographers had been able to publish, no harm had been done. As for her grave, he confessed his inability to maintain the site because of constant pilfering and defacement of her stone (three times the name Hughes had been gouged out so that only the name Sylvia Plath remained). To Hughes, such desecration confirmed his belief that his own right to commemorate Plath had been debased.

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.