Book Review: SYLVIA AND TED AND EMMA AND ERICA by Dennis Loy Johnson 3 June 2001 — The recent court case that blocked an author from re-imagining the inner lives of the fictional characters in Gone With the Wind throws into ironic relief what will be the sticking point for most people with Emma Tennant's new novel, Sylvia and Ted (Holt, $22): it re–imagines the inner lives of real people. It re–imagines poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, to be precise, as well as Assia Wevill, Hughes' lover after the disintegration of his marriage to Plath. It's a ghastly tragedy even before being layered with literary meanings. Plath, as readers may know — indeed, it's often all anyone does know about her — killed herself in 1963, soon after separating from Hughes. Virtually unknown at the time, two years later a collection of her blistering confessional poems — Ariel — turned her into one of the first icons of the feminist movement, and Hughes, whose fame had eclipsed Plath's from the start, was transformed into an ogre for supposedly driving her to her death. Less widely known is that, just six years after Plath's death, Wevill — with whom Hughes had a daughter, Shura — committed suicide, too, gassing both herself and four–year–old Shura. In real life as in "Sylvia and Ted," it is the thing that cemented Hughes reputation as the worst kind of ladykiller — that is, actual. And with that final murder–suicide, the novel rests, in both plot and sympathy. It's an unfortunately neat package for fiction — using a plot based entirely on a well–known and recent reality undercuts all suspense. The only areas left for invention are characterization and prose style. But here, too, Tennant provides no surprises. She is of the camp that believes Hughes was a brutal womanizer entirely responsible for the death of both women. Take, for example, the Tennant's introduction of his character, wherein Hughes is first seen as a small nameless boy, working as a "beater" to drive deer out of the underbrush for rich hunters to kill. But he can't help it — the seven–year–old kills a deer himself, "this boy whose name is Ted." "How long he has yearned, with his great lust to kill, to take one of these, lift it dead like a bride in his arms and carry it down the mountainside." Sylvia, meanwhile, is shown in an early scene in a bar "with her new friend Anne" — the poet Anne Sexton, in another of Tennant's melodramatic delayed identifications — where they're depicted as a couple of "semi–goddesses who dare." Throughout, Tennant's language is florid, a tortured poesy seemingly meant to match style with subject. But in terms of narrative it often adds up to profoundly purple prose that is stripped almost entirely of meaning. Take the scene of Hughes' and Plath's first meeting, at an apartment party. Everyone there suddenly notices the two looking at each other, and "What can be seen is so wild, so primitive, so extraordinary, that even the music dies down and people break out in excited chatter and the place grows hot . . . There's a sense of orgy — of Dionysus let loose — and of the flames that must consume such unlicensed behavior in puritan, postwar Cambridge: the flames of hell." All this, plus endless depiction of what went on in the characters' heads during sex, while creating poetry, and while committing suicide. Such fantasizing leaves no room for a far more complicated reality: The text raises no criticism of Plath for, at the very least, abandoning two toddlers; it mentions, but seems largely uninformed by, the fact that Plath was suicidal long before she met Hughes; it seems to blame Hughes as much as Assia for Shura's murder; and it grants neither woman any sense of free will. Nor does it tell you that Hughes diligently edited and brought to the public eye all the writing that made Plath famous, much of it scathingly critical of him; that he refused to talk about either woman despite withering, decades–long attack; that the children he supposedly abandoned along with Plath were raised in his house and continue to praise him; nor does it tell you that he went on to became England's Poet Laureate and even chance love again — including one notable failure, with a little–known writer named Emma Tennant. None of which is to defend Hughes, but merely to say that this story is complex unto being unknowable to outsiders, and Sylvia and Ted is ghoulishly judgmental in its exploitative presumption. Another new book, however, seems to take on the same subject matter in a way that even the principals would have appreciated — that is, through their writing. In Ariel's Gift (Norton, $25), Erica Wagner studies Hughes' and Plath's destructive relationship not by speculating as to their innermost thoughts, but by comparing their two books on the subject — Plath's "Ariel," and Hughes "Birthday Letters," the collection of poems addressed to Plath that Hughes had secretly worked on for 25 years, and published only just before his death in 1998. It's a refreshing take on a story that is undeniably fascinating, yet difficult to consider in a way that's not uncomfortably voyeuristic. Considering both books seems eminently fair and to the knowable heart of the matter, and gives readers an opportunity to interact with the story in a more profoundly meaningful way than in shallow renderings such as Tennant's. And ultimately, Wagner, the literary editor of the Times of London, has written an absorbing book that is more than just the sum of its critical and biographical parts — it is tribute to two of the twentieth century's most troubled yet brilliant poets.

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