Highlights from this issue...

A tarnished reputation: Madame de Pompadour still gets no respect
Madame de Pompadour: A Life by Evelyne Lever, translated by Catherine Temerson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, 310 pp., $26.00 hardcover.
Madame de Pompadour: Images of a Mistress by Colin Jones. London: National Gallery Company Limited, distributed by Yale University Press, 2002, 176 pp., $35.00 paper.
The Portraits of Madame de Pompadour: Celebrating the Femme Savante by Elise Goodman. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000, 188 pp., $45.00 hardcover.
"Madame de Pompadour et les arts," Exhibition, Versailles, February 14-May 19, 2002
"Madame de Pompadour: Images of a Mistress," Exhibition, the National Gallery, London, October 16, 2002-January 12, 2003

Reviewed by Eunice Lipton

 

Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, Bust of Mme de Pompadour, 1749-51. From The Portraits of Madame de Pompadour.

MADAME DE POMPADOUR (née Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson in 1721), the mistress of Louis XV from 1745 to 1764, materialized in the public eye last year abruptly but emphatically. Long review essays appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review. Lavishly advertised museum exhibitions accompanied by thick, pretty catalogues opened at Versailles, the National Gallery in London and the Kunsthalle in Munich. One could no longer, it seemed, relegate this powdered and rouged, bejeweled and bedraped lady to the realm of historical-fiction filler. More than Marie Antoinette or the Empresses Joséphine and Eugénie, Madame de Pompadour, similarly wrapped in layers of gorgeous satins as she was, demanded serious consideration.

Why in 2002 a revival of interest in a period that can easily be read as a harbinger of the French Revolution? Why a fascination with an era of unscrupulous abundance and unbridled pleasure? And why this concentration on a largely forgotten but once powerful woman patron of arts and ideas? If in the scary, inhibited Cold-War 1950s the same rococo style afforded never-never-lands of escape--young men sporting "pompadour" hairdos, girls decked out in voluminous crinolines, birthday cakes spiraling out of control with their pastel-colored curlicues and rosettes--perhaps it's the same today.

François Boucher, Portrait of Mme de Pompadour at Her Toilette, 1758. From The Portraits of Madame de Pompadour.

After visiting the Pompadour exhibitions and reading the catalogues and books, I find it impossible to respond to these questions without cynicism, so paltry and disappointing--with one major exception--they all were. Where I had expected over-the-top fun, instead I found the presentation of Madame de Pompadour ominous.

The exhibitions. The first was installed amidst the glitter and gilt of Versailles, built by Louis XIV but embellished later by Louis XV. "Madame de Pompadour and the Arts" was squeezed into a small, windowless, ground-floor apartment: if it were possible to banish the splendor of the palace from any part of it, it would be here. One moved from painting to painting, many of the Marquise herself, but also of the king, ministers, Pompadour's brother. There were marble sculptures and exquisite, gaily-colored porcelain, thick, inviting rugs and furniture to match. So blandly were the objects displayed and so glum the trail through the galleries that it might have been an antique sale at a second-rate auction house. Never was it suggested that there was a compelling personality behind the acquisitions.

In London, the same exhibition was called "Madame de Pompadour: Images of a Mistress." A title with an argument but again a display without one. I began to feel sick at heart about the whole project. Feminism in recent English culture and cultural criticism has been effective in a way it never was in France. The London art world is adventurous and imaginative, far outstripping any other major world capital today. So the pedantic march through the National Gallery Pompadour show was a real disappointment.

François-Hubert Drouais Portrait of Mme de Pompadour, 1763-64. From The Portraits of Madame de Pompadour.

Museums of course are conservative institutions. Conserving is what they take their job to be, and is rare that such an institution considers intervention to be part of its mission. Yet in London museums often do run amok--the new Tate Modern is a splendid example--mixing up chronologies, countries and styles. So why was this particular show so bland and so boring? Was it simply old-fashioned sexism? This dame somehow put together this collection of stuff. She was just a high-class courtesan, but she snagged some smashing work, didn't she? Wink, wink, wink. Why construct these expensive exhibitions to make so paltry a statement? It makes one wonder if they weren't mounted ultimately to belittle the art--no Renaissance or Baroque masterpieces in the eyes of connoisseurs, just feminine trivia really. (Though by virtue of the very existence of the exhibition, prices of the work it presented would rise in the marketplace.)

The books and catalogues were no better. Colin Jones' Madame de Pompadour: Images of a Mistress and Evelyne Lever's Madame de Pompadour: A Life march out the same biographical material with similar condescension. They trace Pompadour's origins in the financial bourgeoisie in Paris. They linger on her meager education at a convent, and her subsequent private tutoring in the arts of acting and singing, harpsichord playing, painting and engraving. Both authors insist on her charm as a child and as an adult. Her appeal, we are told, was a mixture of her personality and her physical allure. She was not merely a beauty!

The tone of both books is insulting. From Lever: "[The Marquise] exhausted herself in the service of this man…. The King still seemed infatuated…. Louis XV belonged to her. She still intended to run his life down to the very last detail." From Jones: "Pompadour launched a charm offensive…"; she was "less a collector…than a cultural accumulator…"; and "Whatever Pompadour wanted, Pompadour got." (I know a Lola when I see one.)

Both see Pompadour as a scheming, climbing woman, educated in charm and cultivated by tutors, manipulative, profligate, shallow and shrewd. Nowhere is she given credit for effecting a profound and sustained change in the visual arts or encouraging and supporting Voltaire, the Encyclopedists, Montesquieu and others. Yes, they acknowledge, she knew these men and entertained them, but it was all out of pure vanity.

François Boucher, Portrait of Mme de Pompadour, 1756. From The Portraits of Madame de Pompadour.

Elise Goodman's The Portraits of Madame de Pompadour: Celebrating the Femme Savante is the only recent book that takes Madame de Pompadour seriously and along with her all the women of the Enlightenment who strove to educate themselves. From Goodman we get details about Pompadour's education, what she read, that she was a serious musician, that drawing was a life-long love and that in most of the many portraits of her she is depicted as a femme savante, a learned woman. She accumulated a library of "dictionaries, prints, poetry, drama, history, and books on science, rhetoric, geography, music, and painting." She was the woman of whom Montesquieu wrote: "In the eyes of posterity, the representatives of the 18th century will be Voltaire and Madame de Pompadour." Voltaire himself said that Pompadour is "one of us." And even an enemy of hers, the president of the Paris Parlement, said, "I must admit that I was as struck by her easy speech as by the perfection of the style…and I looked at her with pleasure and admiration while she spoke so well."

The problem, however, is that Goodman is excessively positive. As a result, the reader questions her judgment too, and the Marquise remains a wooden emblem of the possibilities available to a handful of rich women.

THE QUESTION REMAINS: Who is Madame de Pompadour? One knows she's there somewhere, but one grasps neither her intentions nor her personality from any of these recent productions.

There are a couple of things one can be certain of. One is the representation of Pompadour in painting; the other is the pictorial style she cultivated and patronized. A number of different artists painted her: François Boucher, Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Carle Vanloo, François-Hubert Drouais. She patronized Boucher more than any other artist, so if he flattered her it wouldn't be surprising. Quentin de La Tour, however, was a prickly, independent-minded man often referred to as the painter of the intelligentsia. He frequented the salons where intellectuals went. He counted among his friends Diderot and Voltaire. His career was not built on flattery. His portrait of the Marquise, made in 1755, measures approximately four by six feet and is in pastel, Quentin's preferred medium. Pompadour is luxuriantly but characteristically dressed in white satin embroidered with gold and rose. Lace drips from her elbows. Her pertly turned out feet are clad in pink satin pumps. Quentin represents her as a femme savante. She sits at her desk, resting one arm on a massive tome while she holds a charmingly curving musical score. Behind her on a couch a guitar is propped up against an open book or score. At her feet, leaning against her desk, is a portfolio filled with drawings. More prints hang from the side of her desk. As a number of writers have pointed out, the area around her head is lightened almost as if it were a halo.

This is an informative, gracious and, it seems to me, respectful picture of Pompadour as a patron of the arts. This single painting convinces me to agree with Elise Goodman that "When [historian Donald] Posner casts Pompadour as a mere 'public relations' expert rather than a woman of learning and intellectual substance, his argument contradicts the testimony of contemporaries." This image of the femme savante has a history in paintings and prints of learned--and fashionable--women. As Goodman points out, the learned and cultivated mistresses of Louis XIV, Madame de Montespan and Madame de Maintenon, were pictured similarly. The symbolism of Quentin's portrait is typical of representations of Pompadour; of course, she had control over how she was represented, but picture after picture of her, filled with symbols of learning and art, does not lie.

Pompadour loved and championed rococo art, epitomized by the work of François Boucher. Bodies in his paintings have a pre-lapsarian, pre-gendered sensuosity. Figures languish near ponds, zoom around on cloud banks, loll in gardens. The paintings are filled with sensual and sexual appetite, strikingly uninflected by gender. Of course, this is work made for the very few. It is an art that tells us in retrospect that there will and should be a democratic revolution, but it is art that also pulls the viewer away from the world of traditional masculine activity. War, weapons, ammunition dissolve into baths, parks and putti. It is a world of privilege, luxury and leisure, but it was also a world whose values were not all bad. Who would argue against a realm of polymorphous perversity if we could all have it at least some of the time?

What is missing from Lever's and Jones' books and the recent exhibitions is the understanding that Madame de Pompadour was a person with desire and subjectivity. She is patronized by one and all, and that is what I find so ominous. Her desires are reduced to the accumulation of material goods and keeping her man happy. No one but Goodman sees her as she might have seen herself.

And so, despite the attention Madame de Pompadour has received recently, she slips below the horizon, trailing only her satins and silks and a whiff of perfume. That's a shame.

Start a trial subscription with a copy of the current issue!
Want to respond to what you've read? Send a Letter to the Editor

Nuala O'Faolain (© Perry Ogden)

Alone in a crowd
Almost There: The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman by Nuala O'Faolain. New York: Riverhead Books, 2003, 272 pp., $24.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Mary O'Donoghue

AT THE CLOSE OF HER 1996 BOOK, Are You Somebody?: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman, Nuala O'Faolain resolves to "[k]eep working on [her] escape tunnels out of the past. Keep hoping to break through to the here-and-now." That book and its follow-on, Almost There: The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman, are as much about excavating the unhappiness of the author's past as they are attempts to tunnel up from darkness and strike light. Escaping the past has been a failed enterprise for O'Faolain, and we see the same preoccupations paining this installment of her memoir: the tunnel, bored by an unrelenting self-evaluation, is what is important. Now in her sixties, she finds a classical parallel for her mission. "Writing has brought me up from underground. I've been my own Orpheus." But O'Faolain's scrutiny of her more recent past is hardly the careless backward glance of Orpheus; it is tenaciously forensic, scorching in its honesty and saddening in what it finds.

O'Faolain is well-known in Ireland for her Irish Times columns and frequent radio commentary. Are You Somebody? grew from the foreword to a collection of her journalism into a book-length narrative. The project drove her deep into the details of her background in an effort to make sense of her present identity. She was born into a Dublin family of nine children, with a feckless journeyman journalist father and an alcoholic dreamer for a mother. She beholds her adult self: prominent radio, television and print journalist; a woman without husband or child; a lonesome figure spending evenings in her room, with wine and books for company.

O'Faolain's delineation of loneliness, wrenching in Are You Somebody?, reappears here, raw as a wound, in words as starkly beautiful as stripped bone. Almost There opens with the author in her mid-fifties, just after the break-up with her partner of almost fifteen years, the journalist Nell McCafferty. She assumes responsibility for the loneliness that worries and gnaws at the edges of her life. After all, she sees her name in print, hears herself on the radio--confirmation that she is "somebody" in the world, and yet not enough. Nobody's lover and nobody's mother, autobiography is an effort to write herself back into being. Yet autobiography is also autopsy: O'Faolain's "I" is to be dissected and dispassionately picked over. "[Writing] about my life as if it were over fitted exactly how I felt. The good times were indeed, as far as I was concerned, effectively over. So, now was the time to walk around my experience and examine it, to see how it had arrived at such emptiness."

O'Faolain is perceptive about the business of autobiography. She describes enlisting three of her sisters as an editorial board of sorts. The third sister, seeing vengeful aspects in the narrative, enforces the deletion of "this bit here and that bit there," and the first draft is drastically revised as a result of her brusque counsel. We are reminded of the dangerous vagaries of memory when O'Faolain compares the startlingly dissimilar versions of an incident involving herself and a male acquaintance. She has a childish fit of spleen when McCafferty, wanting to assess how O'Faolain has represented her, shows a draft of the book to another reader: "I gave myself permission to talk about people, but look how I felt at the thought of those two talking about me! I wanted to control the characters and actions of everyone in my story. I didn't want anything from any reader but acquiescence. It was as if I wanted them all completely passive..."

She grants herself permission to portray and "read" her relationship with an older man who charms her by calling her his "Girl." Their sporadic connection lasts four years, played out in motel rooms around Ireland to which O'Faolain would drive for several hours at a phone call's bidding. Thrilled by this gruff truck-driver's desire for her, she imposes a misplaced feminist interpretation upon her excitement: "Wasn't it like having patriarchy tremble?"

Unsurprisingly, he turns out to be married, and O'Faolain finds her feminism confounded by her role as the other woman. Her deployment of the letters she receives from this "intelligent man trapped in an unintelligent life" has a disquieting effect on the reader; we are embarrassed at the exposure of his high-falutin' attempts at articulating desire. Even more unsettling is O'Faolain's unashamed use of him as the model for a character in her 2001 novel My Dream of You; she describes the affair as a necessary induction into the writing of the novel.

IN HER JOURNEY FROM PRIVATE TO PUBLIC, O'Faolain enjoys the solidarity of strangers. Theirs is another narrative in this book, a patchwork made from swatches of pain in her readers' lives. She includes extracts from letters sent to her after Are You Somebody? was published, in a "parade of human hurt." Each letter is an identification with O'Faolain, each writer seeks her out as confessor. And she takes on the role, replying to every one. "An atmosphere emanated from the letters that floated in almost poetic detachment from the facts recounted in them. The bad things that had happened had been so complete that they belonged now to the nature of the writer's life." The cumulative effect of this narrative--and it is only a fraction of the book--is both agonizing and vital to understanding that impulse to claim and utter "I," in all its anguish.

The strange, strained ties to family are stretched tight for examination. O'Faolain's parents are persistent ghosts: her irresponsible, come-a-day, go-a-day father is exonerated by his charm, while her mother receives the brunt of her resentment. Terrified of becoming "the she-in-me," O'Faolain attacks the foundation of her mother's identity: she was a "martyr to passion." Her love for her husband, her passionate pining for its loss, and her subsequent refuge in drink and books, cannot be pardoned by her daughter. Readers must evaluate for themselves the conflict between not forgiving, and not forgiving oneself for not forgiving, in the closing passages.

There are many things to admire and criticize in this narrative, and to her credit, O'Faolain gets in ahead of us and turns each upon herself in equal measure. She can be as optimistic as she seems self-flagellating. She pokes fun at herself in an utterly endearing fashion. There are beauties in the writing; she talks about giving up smoking, then following smokers in the street "to gulp their slipstreams." The wit is light and lovely: "the woman who cares to keep a gleam in her eye will get an answering gleam in America, or at least she won't be blamed for having the gleam in her eye." (Her romance with New York, where she lived during the writing of her novel, staled when the post-September 11 atmosphere dissolved her community of bright Manhattanite friends.)

The telling of her professional life is wonderful. A much-loved columnist in Ireland, O'Faolain reveals herself as gauche and often out of her depth. In Florence, she stands on a bed to read under a dim lamp and eats every night at a Chinese restaurant. Dispatched to Northern Ireland to report on the new "normality" setting in after détente, she has difficulty in finding the promised normality in question. She resorts to her talent for presenting the quotidian, and therein readers find a sinister truth. She talks of Protestant teenagers who could not attend the "really cool disco," for the IRA managed the premises; she describes a moment of absorption in a flock of blackbirds, then turning to find British soldiers quietly filing down the street behind her. After the World Trade Center collapsed, she visited the site, and she writes with restrained mourning of the commingling of public and private grief at parallel atrocities: "When I stood there at the Trade Center site, I was standing in the smell of the burned-out house in Northern Ireland where the three little boys perished--thousands of times magnified, but not very different."

As Almost There draws to its end, O'Faolain has found love. She writes of her burgeoning jealousy of the relationship between her partner and his eight-year-old daughter, and she does not shy from portraying her irrationality. Yet she does see a chink of hope in this difficult ménage; the struggle with her loverless, childless lonesomeness might now be done with. "Let me be Jane Eyre, prim and tough, and in the end, adored by father and child, and not the lunatic woman, cackling madly up in the attic."

O'Faolain says her aim is to refine her story to "the least untruthful narrative," and it seems a fitting description for the troublesome task of writing one's life. I'm not lying, as the saying goes, I'm being economical with the truth. Yet there is no thrift, no tightfistedness, in O'Faolain's account of herself. The narrative is by turns meditative and unreasonable, self-abasing and (hesitantly) self-affirming. Though she looks backwards, like Orpheus, and is denied chance after chance at happiness, she continues in her courageous ascent from the past.

Start a trial subscription with a copy of the current issue!
Want to respond to what you've read? Send a Letter to the Editor

Dead poet's society
Sylvia and Ted by Emma Tennant. New York: Henry Holt, 2001, 192 pp., $22.00 hardcover.
Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath by Kate Moses. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003, 291 pp., $23.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Sandra Gilbert

AURELIA PLATH MUST BE SPINNING IN HER GRAVE. Is there no end to her daughter's "bitter fame"? Now the story that won't go away--the apparently ineradicable soap opera of the damned, doomed triangle of Sylvia and Ted and Assia--is slated to be a major motion picture, coming soon to a theatre near you, tout ensemble with (rumor has it) Gwyneth Paltrow (or is it Cate Blanchett?) as the unhappy Sylvia and maybe Russell Crowe as the hapless Ted and who knows what slinky femme fatale in the hopeless role of Assia Gutman Wevill, the Dark Lady of this particular poetic romance. And not one but two "novelizings" of the tale have already appeared. What's a mother to do?

Emma Tennant (© Jerry Bauer)

Indeed, what's a literary critic to do? The plight of the dead-and-buried mother may evoke unanswerable rhetorical questions, but the genre of the novelized life-and-work raises real and immediate issues for reviewers, not to mention scholars who may have devoted many years to studying the writer's career. Should Emma Tennant's Sylvia and Ted and Kate Moses' Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath be scrutinized for their biographical accuracy, or at any rate their psychological insight? Should they be read as themselves "readings" of Plath's oeuvre? And why do we, anyway, find ourselves confronted with these unusually fictionalized "treatments" of Sylvia Plath, rather than a dozen other poets I could mention? Has anyone begun a novel tentatively entitled Cal and Lizzie or maybe Skunk Hour: A Novel of Robert Lowell?

On the surface, at least, one of these questions would seem comparatively easy to answer. Not long before his death in 1998, Ted Hughes broke his long silence about his marriage to Plath, publishing his own Birthday Letters to and about her while also releasing his iron grip on much material deleted from Plath's Journals. Within the last few years most of what researchers haven't been able to examine and/or quote has become available either in print or in libraries. At the same time, because Hughes notoriously admitted destroying Plath's last journal and also confessed that a novel manuscript had "disappeared," it seems unlikely that much more biographical information will come to light after this.

On the one hand, there's a new openness about the permutations of the Plath-Hughes marriage, including Hughes' peccadilloes and Plath's tantrums. On the other hand, there's a yawning gulf in records of Plath's own sensibility--a gulf that can only be filled by conjecture or even fantasy, unless the missing manuscripts (including the allegedly destroyed journal) miraculously resurface. With the dramatic exceptions of Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, who led lives sufficiently opaque to prompt considerable literary speculation, the biographies of most dead poets are either tediously predictable or so richly documented that there's little opportunity for invention. But Plath's life--and death--are now unusually ripe for fictionalizing. Thus she's become a sort of Hollywood Subject, like Roosevelt at Campobello, Maria Callas in Paris, or Nobel Prize winner John Nash on the Princeton campus.

TENNANT AND MOSES HAVE SEIZED THE CHANCE for romance in very different ways. Tennant has produced a number of vaguely feminist novels, including Pemberley (a "sequel" to Pride and Prejudice), as well as a recent memoir entitled Burnt Diaries that offered readers a minor frisson by describing its author's erotic fling with Poet Laureate Hughes. She's thus a practiced and practicing sensationalist whose chief interest is in plot: not just what's the sequel but what was the prequel and what might be the seamy or scandalous subplot lurking underneath the cover story. Beyond obvious texts by "Sylvia and Ted" (the requisite poems and journals and essays), her sources--such as they are--seem to be people rather than books, notably Elizabeth Compton Sigmund, "Sylvia Plath's best friend in the last year of her life," upon whose "often tragic memories of the [Plath-Hughes] relationship" she evidently relied quite heavily (although as a one-time Hughes groupie--and grope-ee--Tennant is inclined to be a bit partial to his side of things).

Moses, by contrast, is a first-time novelist and an undeniably diligent Plath scholar. Her list of sources occupies the three densely printed pages of an "Author's Note" at the back of Wintering and includes a dozen or so analytic studies of Plath's verse as well as the usual biographies, primary works and unpublished manuscripts. She seems, therefore, to define her task not just (or even principally) as the crafting of a fiction but as a sort of critical hypothesizing--an act of portraiture meant to encompass both a person and a sensibility. As if to emphasize this point, she's made the rather odd decision to structure her novel by giving each chapter the title of one of the poems Plath had meant to include in the original manuscript of Ariel, sequencing them according to the poet's own outline.

Kate Moses (© Claire Lewis)

Plath completed the arrangement of her manuscript some weeks before her death. This primordial Ariel began with the word "Love" (the first word of "Morning Song"--still the opening poem in the collection we have) and ended with the word "spring" (the final word of "Wintering," the concluding poem in the "bee series"). After Plath's suicide, Hughes dismantled this arrangement and reordered the book, adding a number of the poems she wrote in the last month of her life and presumably intended for another volume, and deleting several that seemed to him, he said, potentially controversial or problematic. Moses' organizational gesture is thus a kind of swipe at Hughes (and presumably his admirers), an effort at righting and re-writing a wrong on which feminist critics have brooded ever since Marjorie Perloff published her influential "The Two Ariels: The (Re)Making of the Sylvia Plath Canon." But given the upbeat nature of the poet's own sequencing (start with "love," end with "spring"), this structure is also an effort at (re)imagining a Plath who might have been, in some part of herself, more reliant on the fabled Power of Positive Thinking than her reputation as a suicidal depressive would suggest.

Given their very different proclivities as well as the very different sources on which they depend, it's not surprising that Tennant and Moses have written such radically diverse books. The first was perhaps appropriately titled The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted when it originally appeared in England, because in simplified ballad fashion it traces the melodramatic outlines of the Sylvia and Ted and Assia soap opera, then turns into a kind of literary thriller, with follow-up testimony about the post-Plath doings of Ted and Assia from three different "informants" ("The Nurse's Tale," "The Secretary's Tale," "The House Sitter's Tale"). Wintering, far less sensational but a good deal more self-consciously "sensitive," attempts to reconstruct the days "sometime around Christmas 1962," when Plath--living alone in London with her two small children--assembled what she considered the final manuscript of Ariel.

Moses intersperses depictions of domestic episodes from this period with flashbacks to earlier times in the Plath-Hughes marriage. Tennant, in contrast, is flatly chronological, relentlessly reiterating the familiar outlines of the Plath story that begins with a little girl on the beach, far more skillfully depicted by the poet herself in "Ocean 1212-W" (in Tennant's version, "Somehow Sylvia senses that this is the last day of her oneness with the world"). To be sure, Tennant opens with a "Prologue" dramatizing the head-in-the-oven scene ("She sniffs the staleness of the meals, the vanished happiness") out of which the poet's notoriety evolved. But after that, it's "Three Childhoods and a Suicide" (Sylvia's, Assia's and Ted's, culminating in Sylvia's 1953 attempt at self-immolation); "Love and Marriage" (the meeting, wedding, and breeding of Plath and Hughes, accompanied by Hughes' philanderings and the definitive adultery initiated by the entrance of "Assia Wevill [who] came to 10 Chalcot Square--and took first the flat, then the husband, then everything"); and "The Chill" (a set of dramatic conjectures about the weekend of February 8, 9 and 10, 1963, the last of Plath's life). Finally, in the post-Plath epilogue Assia has an abortion, Ted breaks down in tears while revisiting his old home in Devon, and the once triumphantly thieving Assia is shown to have been only a temporary winner: "Everything she had taken was taken back from her, and more. Love, youth, finally her child's life and her own, seven years after that first visit to the poets in Devon."

Among Tennant's plot innovations (some of which she no doubt expects readers to experience as journalistic revelations, considering her vaunted intimacy with Hughes): Ted has an affair in Devon with the couple's underage Australian babysitter; Plath has an affair with a somewhat effete mystery man named Ralph (pronounced "Raif" in England, as the author informs us) who lives in the Albany ("A place for bachelors, ancient peers, dons"); Assia discovers that she's pregnant, and though "Ted knows, as his eye adds to [her] plumpness... watches her harem walk, proud stretching of limbs and extending of stomach, that this baby will kill Sylvia," he and Assia evidently visit Sylvia on the night (yes!) of February 10, 1963 to discuss the impending Happy (or is it Unhappy?) Event; and, then, once Plath is dead, Assia has an abortion, and Ted breaks down in tears while rolling up the carpet at Court Green and etcetera.

FORTUNATELY, MOSES STEERS CLEAR of this sort of what might be called, at best, speculative fiction. Her interest in her subject seems to be as literary--and as politically feminist--as her decision to shape the book into 41 chapters titled and arranged in the original Ariel order. And in comparison to the purple prose and blues-ballad voyeurism of Sylvia and Ted her work is nuanced and intelligent, beautifully detailed and thoughtfully imagined, while her delineation of what we can mostly accept as Plath's consciousness is both plausible and poetic. Ultimately, however, Wintering has the flaws of its essentially un- (even anti-) dramatic structure, which comes to seem increasingly arbitrary, like an exercise in willful critical free association. If it weren't for the artifice of such a structure, after all, it mightn't make a lot of sense to represent an afternoon of Christmas shopping and movie-going in three separate, rather brief chapters ("The Other," "Stopped Dead" and "Poppies in October"), only one of which ("The Other," where Plath glimpses Assia in a bookstore) includes material significantly related to its title.

Nor is Moses' novel well-served in other ways by the decision to superimpose Plath's table of contents on a story whose shape doesn't really seem to fit it. Besides forcing the writer to perform a set of intellectual somersaults in almost every chapter--for instance, Plath is "Stopped Dead" in the movie-going scene because she's sitting in the balcony, "Hung out over a dead drop [in the] first row"--the arbitrariness of the scheme requires rather a lot of stilted dialogue to carry exposition that might have evolved more naturally and credibly out of a more straightforwardly dramatic narrative. It's hard to believe, for example, in the following moments of what Moses' Sylvia calls "girl talk" ("I so rarely get any girl talk") when the Wevills visit the Hugheses at Court Green on May 19, 1962: "Did I tell you my father was German?" Sylvia asks Assia.

"He emigrated as a teenager and became a professor of German language and entomology--an expert on bumblebees. He wrote a book. But he died when I was eight. My mother says he'd never seen a doctor in his life, and it turned out he had diabetes mellitus. He had a embolism after his leg was amputated for gangrene. He died a miserable death rather than show weakness." (p. 54)

"Assia, my mother [has been] living through me for as long as I remember. She can't leave me alone, and I can't get far enough away. She really was a saint, scrimping and sacrificing so I could have everything, but she expects me to turn my life over to her in return. When Ted and I were on a camping trip across America--I was pregnant with Frieda, but I don't think I knew it then--we saw catfish eating their live young at the edge of a lake, as they were being born. I thought, 'Oh! Just like home. Thank god we're moving back to England.' And yet she's my mother. My father's dead; she's what I've got." (p. 55)

Well, the 64,000-dollar question is: why would anyone as smart and learned as Moses want to write this kind of thing, especially when she obviously understands how dazzlingly Sylvia Plath said it all for herself, in her own inimitable words? Both Tennant and Moses might, I guess, be accused of capitalizing on the Plath Myth and the Plath-Hughes Mystery. Certainly Tennant's Burnt Diaries used Hughes as ruthlessly as the Poet Laureate himself may have used her and other women. And certainly The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted was meant to climb to the top of the literary hit parade, becoming the foundation of, say, the bio-pic even now forthcoming.

But although Wintering has been opportunistically scheduled for a pub date of February 11, 2003, the fortieth anniversary of Plath's suicide, it's hard to accuse her of either voyeurism or exploitation. For one thing, Wintering doesn't dwell on the more lubricious aspects of the Sylvia-Ted-Assia love triangle. For another, Moses rigorously avoids exhibiting the poet in her deeply suicidal moments, emphasizing instead Plath's struggle to be strong and free, as in this almost programmatically ecstatic representation of the writer's birthday ride on the famous horse Ariel: "She is no daughter, no mother, no wife. She is herself, held by nothing under the pure blue dome of sky, attended by granite and sheep and curious ponies, trilling warblers drunk on sloes in the bushes."

But perhaps voyeurism of a special kind does mark Moses' work, though very differently from Tennant's. Wintering has a curious subtitle: not "a novel about Sylvia Plath" but "a novel of Sylvia Plath"--as if it were, somehow, "a novel of Sylvia Plath's," the novel Plath might have written for herself had she gone on to complete the work-in-progress that unaccountably "disappeared" after her death. If Tennant's openly confessed hankering for Hughes led her to wonder how it would have felt to be Sylvia and first have him and then not have him (so that she therefore wrote Sylvia and Ted), perhaps Moses' frank adulation of Plath the brilliant poet led her to wonder how it would feel to be Plath the brilliant poet, what it would be like to have just that tormented yet live and leaping consciousness (so that she therefore wrote Wintering).

BUT NEITHER OF THESE AMBITIOUS WRITERS seems to have taken into account the plain fact that just as there was Otto Plath, a real-life German-born "daddy" and there is Plath's poem "Daddy," and just as there is a French beach called Berck-Plage and there is Plath's dazzling elegy "Berck-Plage," there was Sylvia Plath and there is "Sylvia Plath." And just as in Otto Plath his daughter had a good candidate for transformation into "Daddy," and in Berck-Plage she unerringly chose the right beach to metamorphose into "Berck-Plage," so this extraordinarily gifted writer unerringly singled out the personal details that would transform her from the particular, complex and variegated person who was Sylvia Plath to a more streamlined and simplified version of the self as "Sylvia Plath."

By all accounts, Sylvia Plath was a skinny, brilliant, extremely intense, astonishingly accomplished young woman. Whether her composition of often disturbingly nihilistic verse might in fact have precipitated her suicide, and if so through what psychological mechanisms this could have happened, must always be a matter for conjecture. Yet within the first years after her death, Sylvia Plath began to be mythologized by others as a "Sylvia Plath" whom her own poems hadn't necessarily chosen to represent. Her one-time verse-writing teacher, Robert Lowell, characterized her as "hardly a person at all, or a woman, certainly not another 'poetess,' but one of those super-real, hypnotic, great classical heroines," while her literary friend Al Alvarez described her as having the "pale face... gaunt figure [and] curiously desolate, rapt air [of a] priestess emptied out by the rites of her cult."(1)

Much of the rapid notoriety Plath posthumously achieved was, to be sure, precisely a consequence of her suicide, her youth and her embattled relationship with the estranged husband who survived her to function as a villain in a story whose confusing contours are ripe for all kinds of obsessive fictionalizing. And Hughes' subsequent fame, especially his accession to the pomp and circumstance of England's Poet Laureateship and more recently his widely-publicized affairs, made matters more interesting, even (or do I mean especially?) to newspaper gossip columnists. Then there was the theatrical death of the woman for whom he left Plath: Assia Guttman was so haunted by "Sylvia" that she gassed herself and her child, so "Ted's" life closed twice before its close, adding a further and more lurid glow to the shimmering outline of what came to be called "the Plath Myth."

That this myth is still as alive as it is ambiguous becomes clear from the different ways it shapes Sylvia and Ted and Wintering. That there's a large and eager audience ready to buy, read, view--whatever!--will be plain to anyone who logs on to the internet and undertakes the simplest search for matters Plathian. Google lists at least 55,000 references to the author of Ariel, including (at present count) more than thirty websites entirely devoted to her work. How many other twentieth-century writers can equal those numbers?

But maybe Hollywood can spice up the images of a few other literary greats. If Sylvia and Ted does as well as its producers must expect it to, there could be a spinoff in the works. Remember Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice? How about an update called Sylvia and Ted and Tom and Viv and Jim and Nora?

(1) Robert Lowell, "Foreword" to Ariel (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. vii; A. Alvarez, The Savage God (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 46.

Start a trial subscription with a copy of the current issue!
Want to respond to what you've read? Send a Letter to the Editor

Crossing Sabarmati
An oasis of peace sits in a city divided by hate
By Meena Alexander

SEPTEMBER 11, 2002, AHMEDABAD. I had traveled north from Tiruvalla in Kerala to visit the relief camps for the survivors of the carnage against Muslims. In February a Muslim mob had torched a train carrying Hindu activists and 59 people lost their lives. The aftermath of Godhra--a single word suffices to summon up that tragedy--was carefully orchestrated by right-wing Hindu groups. The plundering and burning of Muslim properties, the killing and mutilation of men and the terrible rape of women all showed signs of meticulous planning. Muslim women, including those who were pregnant, were targeted for brutal sexual violence. From the documentation it is clear that the state, under the sponsorship of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, was complicit: after the December 2002 elections, the BJP was returned to power in the state of Gujarat, Gandhi's homeland.

The city of Ahmedabad lies on the banks of the river Sabarmati. It is where Gandhi had chosen to set his ashram. In the clear morning light, in the company of my friend Svati, I crossed the river over the main bridge. We found a decrepit three-wheeler that dropped us off in Shahpur, a poor neighborhood. With the help of a Dalit activist--"Dalit" is a term of resistance used by those who were previously called Untouchable--we made our way to a large relief camp, Quraish Hall, that in better times had been used for weddings.

As we sat, two women in our cotton kurtas on the low wooden stools in the courtyard, the people pressed around us. They were the survivors of the killings in Naroda Patiya, a neighborhood of Ahmedabad. Svati explained that she was collecting information for PUDR, the People's Union for Democratic Rights, as part of their project of documenting human rights violations. I don't have anything material to give you, Svati said, but please tell us what happened. People pressed forward. There was a terrible hunger to tell their stories.

Afterwards, I could not sleep, hearing those voices. A thin, elderly woman in an orange sari told us how her daughter-in-law Kausar Banu, nine months pregnant, was set upon by armed Hindu men, her belly ripped open, the unborn child pierced by a sword, thrown into the fire. A small dark man, Bashir Yusuf, had survived by hiding under dead bodies. He showed us the marks on his back from knife blades where the Hindutva men had attacked him. He had to run for his life from the Civil Hospital--you are a Muslim, a doctor said to him, I won't help you live.

Then a tiny child, barely two, was raised up in the arms of a thin woman. The child's name was Yunus. He was dressed in a torn green shirt, and the woman who was carrying him and said she was his mother turned him around and lifted his shirt and we saw the burn marks on his bottom, where the skin had scarred, the marks stretching over his tiny back, making it look like a raw fruit, terribly disfigured. He had been thrown into a fire and someone had pulled him out and rescued him. The child had enormous eyes and kept staring at me. Even now, back in this wintry city, I see his eyes staring into mine.

AHMEDABAD ITSELF IS A CITY SPLIT IN TWO. On one side of the river, a thriving city, cars and money and people eating bhel puri on the streets or flocking to restaurants. On the other side of the river, marks of devastation and victims with no means of livelihood filled with fear of what will happen if they dare to return to their old neighborhoods.

One thing I cannot forget--when people desperate for help approached the Sabarmati Ashram, those who were in charge of the ashram closed the doors on them, denied them shelter.

I first entered the ashram in what feels like another life, over two decades ago, in the company of Svati's father, the Gujarati poet Uma Shankar Joshi. He was a follower of Gandhi and knew the compound and the buildings well. I followed him into the cool, low-ceilinged house as he showed me where Gandhi and his wife Kasturba had lived. Now in this season of difficulty I felt the peace inside Gandhi's dwelling. I stopped, touched the walls of the small whitewashed kitchen I have always held in memory. Low shelves, windows, small receptacles for food. There was peace here, but at what cost was it maintained?

At the threshold I shut my eyes. I saw the Mahatma, in his pale loin-cloth. He tore open the doors of the house, he strode down the path under the neem trees. He cried out in words that were hard to understand. He leapt into the river, a flash of flesh and cloth. In bold, unhurried strokes he swam across the Sabarmati. Then, just as he was, Gandhi walked into the burning city.

That afternoon, as always, there were green parrots. I saw them as I walked down the steps of Gandhi's house. They flitted through the trees, into the holes in the outer wall of the ashram. The walls went down all the way to the river.

On the other side of the river innocent human beings had been killed and raped. I watched the parrots disappear into their hiding holes. Slowly it grew dark, then darker. The river, with the smoke-stacks on the other side, kept flowing on.

Start a trial subscription with a copy of the current issue!
Want to respond to what you've read? Send a Letter to the Editor