We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs-not seen.) At this point, Hayman-with reservations-cuts the brightest figure, with Plath chewing more scenery than even Alexander can muster. Lives of Plath are now so familiar that one reads them to see which writer can play Hamlet best. Alexander also uncovers a likely abortion that helped save her Fulbright. Alexander (as Hayman did) resorts to paraphrase of Plath's work (Hughes refuses all rights to quote unless he can vet any biography), which tends to de-energize his page, but he has cracked the reserve of many Plath intimates who've not spoken before, especially about Hughes in a strange delirium attempting to strangle Plath and later deserting her outright on a vacation in Ireland when he thought he saw a face move in a painting. Whatever the truth of this (Hughes has never granted an interview about Plath), it's now more than a quarter century later and Hughes still finds himself pursued by his dead but restless wife in a variety of legal battles about her estate. Implied is that Plath fulfilled an agenda reinforced in her by Hughes, though of course she had an earlier history of suicide attempts. Alexander carries Hayman's revisionist view of Plath's husband, poet Ted Hughes, to an even more extreme darkness, with Hughes now showing up as a craggy, violent man obsessed with horoscopes and the occult and in Plath's last year even urging her to suicide, perhaps with posthypnotic suggestion. Hayman is more exciting, though both writers strain at supposition. 909), a psychocritical investigation focusing on the nature of suicide as shown in the poet's work. Despite his detail, however, Alexander is much less involved with interpretation than Ronald Hayman is in The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (p. Alexander's is a full-bodied biography, long on facts, short on criticism, but the best so far as a conventional life of the poet.
Second biography of Sylvia Plath this season, this one by the editor of Ariel Ascending (1984), a collection of essays on Plath's life and work.
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