Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #670419 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From Kirkus Reviews
Among the best Plath psychocritical investigations, by the author of Proust (1990), Brecht (1985), Kafka (1981), Nietzsche (1980), etc. Not a full-bodied life of Plath, Hayman's is a psychological weighing of the nature of the poet's suicide and its prefiguring in her works, deeds, letters, and so on. As ever, Ted Hughes, Plath's husband and now poet laureate of England, has nothing to do with the project; indeed, Hayman takes Hughes and his sister Olwyn to task for vetting earlier biographies by withholding permission to quote Plath unless Hughes or Olwyn had cut the more painful passages. (Hughes also destroyed Plath's last journal, saying he did not want their children to have to face such an upsetting work.) Plath, Hayman shows, sought her disciplinarian father's love; when he died when she was eight, she fell into a symbiotic tie with her mother Aurelia, a martyr to her children's welfare. Aurelia never told Sylvia that clinical depression ran among the women in Otto Plath's side of the family. Sylvia became a poet in part to shine in her mother's eye, grew into an academic workhorse, sold her first stories in her teens, became overloaded and failed her first pill-death effort at 20 (she took too many). That act, though, wrote the end of symbiosis with Aurelia. Sylvia transferred her superego to her psychiatrist; left America and married Hughes, with the commanding Hughes replacing father, mother, and doctor. When Hughes began seeing other women and finally separated to live with Assia Wevill, Sylvia--burdened with two children, drugged, depressed, schizophrenic, gushing razor-edged new poems in the midst of London's worst winter in a century--gassed herself. Four years later, so did Assia, killing her child--by Hughes--as well. Hayman brings new riches to Plath's story, stitching in imagery from the poems while showing that the poems of the last phase have to be read as far more intensely confessional than all that came before. (Eight pages of photographs--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Ronald Hayman has worked in the theatre as an actor and director. His books include biographies of Nietzsche, Kafka, Brecht, Sartre and Proust. He writes for the Independent and the Guardian, broadcasts regularly and writes the Radio 3 comedy series Such Rotten Luck. He lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Suicide as Life
The main problem of writing a biography of Sylvia Plath is the roadblocks that are constantly being thrown out by her husband's controlling estates. Unlike other biographers, Hayman has managed to be honest and critical about who Plath is, and how she was treated by people around her, including her husband and his mistress. Hayman addresses critically and honestly Plath's husband controlling nature. He controlled her life when she was alive, but worse still he controlled her totally after she died. There are many crucial works and correspondences of Plath that were destroyed, or mysteriously disappeared (presumable by her husband). Hayman argues that these materials are extremely valuable to understand more Plath's life as suicide.

Analysis
Ronald Hayman provides excellent insight into Sylvia Plath's life, effectively using much analysis of her poetry to tell her biography.

a strong & brittle vision unencumbered by cumbersome family.
********
the first time i read this book, my partner (of 14 inimitable years) had walked out on me, leaving me not only bereft, but w/ no forwarding address (in, of course, imitation of neal casady, in all that glory & stupidity), i was standing in a largely empty apartment in san francisco, ca, being stalked by not only someone harmless i had met at a service non-profit who stood, after i had had an operation, at my door, in the rain, as he cried & held a box of matzoh (my friend had to say, truthfully, i was in no shape to see him), but also much less harmfully, by my building manager, who not only stole my mail, but cut my telephone wires, moved my stuff around (i had to put a new & different lock on the door) & pointed a gun out the window at my friend chris.

the same friend who sent away the crying man o' matzoh, later sent me this book. she thought i would like it. i did.

it makes you HATE ted hughes. i am uncertain whether one would have had to have had a similar experience to that of sylvia plath to feel this way (i was hospitalized for "suicidal ideation," actually against my will, overnight during all this mess), so take that into account. however, i am not someone whose dreams would be so --academic-- for lack of a better word. i did not go to smith. my mother forced me into college & away from musicians. i did go to grad school, but, my heavenly stars, my heart would have not been broken had a major grad school turned down my summer school ap. i have no kids. but TED. i do have that.

so this book will make the blood of anyone who has ever been owned by a ted completely curdle. though it's more than that. i suppose it is that one can feel thru ronald hayman's very careful handling of his subject, how small things slowly merge themselves into becoming --all-- things. & then one looks at one's life, & then one looks at one's --ted-- &. so help me, at the last it all adds up into something insurmountable, something one simply does not want, something one is unable to --do-- any more. if i remember correctly, ronald hayman is the only biographer of sylvia plath able to convey the sense --& it is necessary to do this in a biography of sylvia plath-- of a grinding down to complete futility.

my only regret & continual lack of understanding is that she left her kids. i bless her for opening those windows. this was not a bad person. & the sorrow does, does, does, does, does multiply.