By LYNN CROSBIE
Saturday, February 8, 2003 Page R4

Filmmakers have been threatening to tell the story of poet Sylvia Plath for many years now. At one time, Meg Ryan was slated to play the poet, in a screenplay tentatively titled "You've Got No Male." Apparently, the film was to end on an upbeat note, with Meg pulling her head out of the oven, baking a batch of cookies and telling her father, "Daddy, you're not such a bastard after all."

Ryan's plans fell through, and Gwyneth Paltrow stepped up to play the part: She and co-star Daniel Craig are currently completing Ted and Sylvia, a British film directed by Christine Jeffs, and funded in part by the BBC.

Deemed a story of "a passionate love affair between two great minds," Ted and Sylvia emerges from Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters. Published in 1998, this poem-sequence stands as Hughes's first and last stand regarding his tumultuous relationship with his first wife.

The Paltrow movie is only a ripple in yet another big Plath Kahuna. Thirty-nine years after her death, this spring also brings the publication of two new books, a memoir by the poet's friend Jillian Becker and a novel about her domestic life, Wintering, by Kate Moses.

Intellectuals, who are notoriously hostile to pop culture, have always beenaverse to the idea of a biopic, likely assuming the great Lady Lazarus could not possibly rise "Out of the ash" into something as insipid as a mainstream film.

Plath, however, was an avid consumer of trash culture. She expended a great deal of her genius writing inane stories about women changing nappies and gushing about matrimony for the magazines she called "the slicks"; in her diaries, she recounts dreaming that Marilyn Monroe appeared to her as her fairy godmother, and gave her an expert manicure.

I think Plath would have liked Paltrow to portray her -- a vain blonde, who once modelled sexy spring fashions, and whose lust for hot clothes was only marginally exceeded by her desire to be the kind of babe who could "eat men like air," she would have been flattered by the movie star's beauty and style.

Further, as a shrewd student, in her prose work, of authenticity, she would have appreciated Paltrow's almost demonically flat voice and utter lack of affect, which are just so "Sivvy" (Plath's nickname of choice).

Ultimately, it doesn't matter what the long-dead Plath would have thought of the film: She forfeited her rights to such matters when she killed herself, dying intestate and leaving behind two children, who happened to be sleeping in the other room.

These two children, Nicholas and Frieda Hughes, have been largely silent about their mother. They are Hugheses after all, and the entire family's conduct is typically high-English: quietly suffering, sepulchral and guarded. Consider the Royal Family's squeamish relationship to their own Lady Die.

Frieda Hughes, however, is an artist and poet, who has recently made a tentative foray into the world of letters. In 1998, she published Wooroloo, a flawed collection that plunders from the work of both Ted and Sylvia, deforming it in the process.

Wooroloo's strong suit is its autobiographical elements, which are muted, for the most part. In the poem Readers, however, she expresses her stringent contempt for fans of Plath whom she accuses (in discomfiting verse) of having "fingered through her mental underwear." There are further distasteful references to her corpse mother's "withered thighs" and "shrunken breasts" -- comparing one's dead parent to a particularly awful piece of rotisserie chicken is, I imagine, one of the many unfortunate byproducts of being cruelly orphaned.

Suicide, however poignant its circumstances, is an act of vengeance, and one that demands a like anger, and ambivalent despair among its victims.

Recently, Frieda's loathing of Plath's devotees has centred on the makers of Ted and Sylvia. When the filmmakers approached her, she told them she would have none of it: "Why," she asked, rather sensibly, "would I want to be involved in moments of my childhood which I never want to return to?"

As the literary executor of Plath's estate, she denied all access to her mother's writing and, further, wrote a long poem about her distaste for the entire enterprise, soon to be published by The Tatler.

This poem, unfortunately, reads like an outtake from Wooroloo: a mishmash of Plath's and Hughes's writing, underlined by the proprietary venom the Hughes family has always wielded against interlopers, against anyone interested in a version of Plath that does not follow its own carefully circumscribed party line.

The following excerpt best expresses both the wrath of the woman and the artlessness of the poet: "Now they want to make a film . . . The peanut eaters, entertained/At my mother's death, will go home,/ Each carrying their memory of her,/Lifeless -- a souvenir./Maybe they'll buy the video."

"They think I should give them my mother's words," she continues, "To fill the mouth of their monster/Their Sylvia Suicide Doll."

The Sylvia Suicide Doll! Now there's a Chatty Cathy I can appreciate. Hughes's indignation is understandable; her grief unimpeachable. But her attempts to possess, in the tradition of the censorious and vituperative Hughes family, her own version of a Plath souvenir must be censured.

When Patricia Cornwell had the audacity to accuse painter Walter Sickert of being Jack the Ripper, his living family's objections barely registered. The Hugheses' continued hoarding of Plath is what has, in fact, made a "doll" of her; worse, that has reduced her to the ventriloquist puppet of a grieving and grievous family's complaint.

In Burning the Letters, Sylvia Plath writes of destroying her adulterous husband's "scum." She offers the papers to the flames and observes that they stain the air, "Telling the particles of the clouds, the leaves, the water/What immortality is. That it is immortal."

In the 1970s, Plath's tombstone in the Heptonstall churchyard was routinely attacked by feminists who would hack away at the name Sylvia Plath Hughes, believing she should reside beneath her maiden name alone, and locals are reported to fear that the film will encourage a new wave of vandalism. If Plath needs to rest in peace, she also needs, to cite one of Eminem's better tattoos, to "rot" or rest in pieces.

Engraved on her tombstone is a Sanskrit quotation that Hughes chose, as it is one that comforted her in life: "Even amidst fierce flames/The golden lotus can be planted."

Her tragic life, love and death notwithstanding, she remains one of the 20th century's most formidable writers, and those who appreciate her art
understand, amidst the "jet" of her wise blood, that her immortality resides outside of the reach of living, in the intangible regions of the fires she started, and fanned.