Parable of a doomed woman
by Erica Wagner
Forty years ago, Sylvia Plath put milk and bread out for her children
and killed herself. Since then, the books about her have come thick and fast. But the true story is in her poetry

IN OUR avid consumption of stories about the lives of literary figures (Shakespeare in Love, Iris, The Hours, Ted and Sylvia and soon, believe it or not, a film about that old grump Philip Larkin), we should spare a thought for the subjects' families. A week after Virginia Woolf's great niece complained that The Hours had got everything wrong, wrong, wrong, Sylvia Plath's daughter Frieda weighed in with a poem called My Mother, accusing the BBC of insensitivity in the making of Ted and Sylvia:

My buried mother is updug for repeat performances

That families of literary figures might object to the fictional treatment of them is not necessarily a reason to abandon the task. After all, they are almost bound to object to an outsider's interpretation, however honourable. Even so, one does wonder when the eternal raking over of Plath's life will pall.

There have been many books on the subject, fictional, biographical, literary indeed, I wrote one myself and the story of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath exerts a particular and disturbing pull.

Two brilliant poets, one English and one American, meet in Cambridge in the 1950s, and, in that cold climate, burn with poetic and amorous desire. They fuel and feed off each other but perhaps too much, and the relationship crumbles after seven years. Plath takes her own life, turning herself into a martyr for feminism and for poetry. The book that makes her name, Ariel, is not published until two years after her death, brought to light by the husband she had been on the brink of divorcing.

Interest in this romance had always been quietly fuelled by Hughes's near-total silence on the matter: a silence he broke with the publication of Birthday Letters, just before his death in 1998. Now the story was really out in the open; Birthday Letters became a runaway bestseller poetry, sex, death: what more could anyone want?

But why is there such a compulsion to know about this story? Perhaps because it is so perfect as a narrative like Romeo and Juliet but it is also true. The most peculiar, the most wonderful, the most terrible things are not the things that happen in novels, but the things that happen all the time, all around us.

The greatest writers of fiction have always known this. The genius of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice or George Eliot's Middlemarch is not that they seem strange, fanciful tales, but familiar, lifelike. When we devour a novel it is because it speaks to something true in us: fiction's shaping is like a lens that makes our own messy lives come clear.

True stories that serve the same function are rare indeed but the story of Hughes and Plath seems to be such an account, even down to their seven-year marriage seven is such a mystical number. And upon reading Birthday Letters it becomes clear that even Hughes saw his life, their life, through that lens; or saw that she wished to see it that way.

It is this apparent perfection of structure (only apparent, for hindsight is a dangerous thing) that makes the lives of these two poets such tempting subjects not only for biography but for film and novel. For the latter, we have already had Emma Tennant's The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted; now there is another, Kate Moses's Wintering, which has drawn praise from Plath's biographers; though it's easy to imagine that Frieda Hughes might resent such a novel as exactly the same kind of intrusion as the film.

Wintering is a novel of 41 chapters, one for each of the poems in Ariel, and each is linked to a particular poem. But Moses has given them the order in which Plath apparently wished them to appear, an order significantly different from that which the editor of Ariel Ted Hughes created for them. The book Ariel ends in despair, with the bitter poems Contusion, Edge and Words. Instead, Moses's Ariel ends with Plath's cycle of bee poems; in particular, the last poem, Wintering, finishes on a note of optimism: "The bees are flying. They taste the spring."

In an author's note which appears, curiously, in the proof copy of the book though not in the finished version, Moses indicates that her book tells the "story" of Ariel. Only Ariel has no "story", as such, and was never meant to.

Furthermore, she implies that reading the poems in Plath's order makes her feel as if she had written them herself. And feeling that one had written a poem or poems oneself well, that is Plath's genius, but it is not Moses's, however connected to the work she may feel. That is the wonder of truly great literature, and the reason Plath's work will stand in the canon: in finding her own voice, she seems to find ours, too.

But although Moses is a good writer and her experiments with Plathian language (breast milk in the bath like a "tiny Hiroshima") are occasionally interesting, one closes this novel wondering what the point of it could possibly be. It tells us nothing new about Plath; and leaves the reader like poor Frieda Hughes feeling faintly invaded. The novel pins the poet like a butterfly under glass, imprisoning her in her life rather than allowing her to fly through her work.

Is it, then, never possible to write fiction about real events? It is certainly difficult. A contrasting example is Beryl Bainbridge's slender classic, The Birthday Boys (1991; Penguin). This novel is an audacious act of ventriloquism as she allows the story of Scott's fatal expedition to the South Pole to unfold through the voices of the men who went with him to the bottom of the world, and died with him in a tent in the frozen desert of the Antarctic.

It is audacious on two counts: first, because the story itself is not
some little-known episode this is the main event, History with a capital H, especially after Roland Huntford's exhaustive and compelling The Last Place on Earth: Scott and Amundsen's Race to the South Pole, published six years before the Bainbridge book and the centre of a storm of controversy. What more could one possibly want to know about those men and their travail? It's audacious on count two, because Scott's own posthumously published account of the journey he is one of Bainbridge's narrators is a classic in its own right.

But Scott's story is a public story. The race to the Pole was emblazoned across the papers and those who took part did so in the knowledge that what they did would be observed, written about, analysed.

Bainbridge's book sees behind the heroic image valiantly presented to the world in the face of disastrously bad planning and reveals a larger human truth: therein lies the power of her book.

Yet her characters were not characters but real people: what would they have made of such an act of appropriation? It's a moot point: she wouldn't have written the book at all if the five hadn't died on their return from the Pole. And Scott's son, Sir Peter Scott (it is Scott who comes off worst in the novel, the high-handed, anxious and foolish "Owner") died two years before the book appeared; so perhaps one could say that the story of the expedition was now safe in the realms of history, at enough of a distance from us to be allowed to belong to us, rather than just the participants.

Still, it is the crucial contrast between private and public that gives The Birthday Boys its fascination. There is no such contrast in a book such as Wintering: if I want to understand Plath's work, I don't have to read the words of Kate Moses. Plath's own words will do.

Biography is not exempt from criticism; it too imposes a story on its subjects, just as a film does. There is no factual "firm ground" of biography; biographers are interpreters too. Janet Malcolm, author of The Silent Woman, the best book about Plath by a country mile, puts it very well indeed in her new book, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey: "Chekhov's privacy is safe from the biographer's attempts upon it as, indeed, are all privacies, even those of the most apparently open and even exhibitionistic natures.

"The letters and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity of death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography."

The facts of a life alone may be inescapably trivial; yet surely they may still be distinguished from fiction? Not necessarily, as Malcolm notes. She describes the eerie similarity between Chekhov's death- scene as described in Philip Callow's 1998 biography of the author, and a story by Raymond Carver called Errand which fictionalises the same scene; details from the latter appear in the former, and sources are difficult to identify. The reader "may well conclude that Carver has sinned as greatly against the spirit of fiction as Callow has sinned against the spirit of fact".

The trouble is that now, everyone is famous in the same way. If you are famous, we must know everything. There is no sense that Captain Scott, himself an actor on a public stage, is any different from Plath or Virginia Woolf writers who sent out their work to act on the public stage for them.

That's the point of being a writer. That's why Jonathan Franzen, who wrote last year's big book, The Corrections, didn't want to go back to the St Louis suburbs with Oprah to explore the origins of the book and of his own life. It was a journey entirely beside the point.

It's not that the work should only speak for itself; the work will always be interpreted, and the life however trivial an art biography may be will always have a bearing on the work. But when the life triumphs entirely over the work, as is the case with a novel such as Wintering, the result is entirely reductive and not just to
the subject, to the author, too.

Plath died 40 years ago this month. Yet she lives in her work, not in the endless portrayals of her as the paradigm of the doomed woman. How to explain this fascination with her? It's nearly impossible. A woman who wanted to write poems, have children, bake cakes is this the stuff of a major motion picture? Surely not. Though it is her very "ordinariness" that makes her appealing. But she was not ordinary. If you are looking for the truth of Plath, read her poems and you will be reminded just how extraordinary she was.

Erica Wagner's book, Ariel's Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of 'Birthday Letters' is published by Faber, £8.99. Wintering by Kate Moses is published by Sceptre at £14.99. Order both titles from Books Direct (0870 1608080; www.timesonline.co.uk/booksdirect) for £7.64 plus 99p p&p, and £11.99 plus £1.95 p&p respectively.