Against Hagiography

In Defense of Love

[Image description: A photo of Judith Jones and Sara B. Franklin standing at a kitchen counter, prepping a meal. The photo is of their backs; only Jones’s sweater and hair are visible; Franklin’s face is in profile, her glasses perched upon the top of her head.]

“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle. Love is a war. Love is growing up.” -James Baldwin

It may surprise some of you that I only learned the meaning of the word hagiography in the late spring of 2020, during a Zoom interview with the Canadian writer Anne Theriault. We were discussing a Plath-adjacent biography, one I did not love; Anne had read it, too. She called it a hagiography, a word I had heard many times and never bothered to look up, until we finished our interview:

hag·i·og·ra·phy

/ˌhaɡēˈäɡrəfē/

noun

noun: hagiography

1. the writing of the lives of saints.

   • DEROGATORY

     View definition

   • biography that idealizes its subject.

     plural noun: hagiographies

     "a hagiography which is designed to serve a political agenda"

Although the definition was new to me, the idea was not. When my agent was trying to sell Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation, several editors turned it down because I was hellbent on carving out the importance of my life in loving relation to Plath’s. This was far from simple: it combined the identification of Plath as, like myself, a survivor of intimate partner violence and coercive control, and a fierce interrogation of the racist, antisemitic tropes in her work. Nevertheless, this love of Plath was usually presented as the reason one editor after the next passed on the book, something I couldn’t help but see as part of a longer tradition. For decades, Plath’s fans have been maligned as martyring and deifying her, as outlined by the writer (and, I am glad to say, my friend) Janet Badia, in her book Sylvia Plath and the Mythology of Women Readers. Part of my goal in writing Loving Sylvia Plath was to continue Janet’s work. I wanted to prove that writing out of my love for Plath could shed brighter light on the realities of her life and work, rather than obscuring them through the halo of martyrdom.

Although the book in its final form (yes! My author copies arrived from Norton ten days ago— for the official, de rigueur “unboxing” video, go here) is largely a mix of feminist literary criticism and literary detective work, in its first form, it was also a memoir about my time living with a violent partner. It was called The Dead Girl Spoke, a quote cribbed from Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman and it moved fluidly between the story, and cover-up, of Plath’s violent marriage to Hughes, and my own similar experience. My agent (the late, great Beth Vesel, to whom Loving Sylvia Plath is dedicated) disliked the title—it sounded, she said, like a horror story, or a detective novel. I had to find a new one, a task which rankled me through many beach runs, until the perfect one occurred to me, and made me laugh out loud— Loving Sylvia Plath.

It wasn’t that the title was funny in and of itself. It was that I had spent the prior summer working on a straight memoir about my violent relationship, one I called Loving A Psychopath. I had abandoned the project when Beth contacted me, out of the blue, to tell me she had read my work on Plath and wanted to help me publish a trade book about her. But the memoir was still very much with me, as was the experience on which it was based. Loving Sylvia Plath literally rhymed with the title of the memoir, but it also worked as its ironic, polar opposite. Whereas the experience of loving a psychopath had almost killed me, the experience of loving Sylvia Plath had kept me alive. Love had almost killed me and love— for my son, for Sylvia, and eventually, for myself— had saved my life.

And there was another irony in this titling business. Because I was writing a horror story, and a detective story. Sylvia knew that; she even wrote a poem called “The Detective,” in which her speaker describes a series of maimed and missing women. When I was writing Loving Sylvia Plath, I learned to read “The Detective,” and other Plath poems about intimate partner violence, in radical new ways, and realized how little real time I had spent with them. This is not an accident— these are the poems that Ted Hughes excised from the version of Ariel that he published in 1965, two years after his estranged wife’s suicide. Although I had read them in Plath’s Collected Poems, and later, as part of Ariel: The Restored Edition, Frieda Hughes’s attempt to publish her mother’s collection as Sylvia had intended it, these poems had often felt disembodied to me. For a long time, I agreed with the writer Meghan O’Rourke, who wrote in her review of The Restored Edition that, “Hughes’ version of Ariel is actually superior to Plath’s— and… Plath herself might have agreed.”

O’Rourke’s argument hinges on the idea that Plath’s feminist “vision” of rebirth after a broken marriage in Ariel and Other Poems is “a powerful narrative on its own,” but not, in the end, as powerful as Hughes’s vision for Ariel, in which she literally dies at the end. O’Rourke tells us that “the hopefulness” of Plath’s “bee poems,” which she chose to end her book with, “seems forced and self-conscious,” lacking the power of Hughes-sanctioned poems like “Edge” and “Totem:” “Most of Plath’s best tropes have the benefit of being factually plausible as well as emotionally powerful; this one doesn’t,” O’Rourke writes of Plath’s ecstatic, cheeky fantasy in “Wintering,” where

The bees are all women,
Maids and the long royal lady.
They have got rid of the men,

The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.

In fact, in “Wintering,” Plath was writing out of her direct experience. In her small English village of North Tawton, smart, capable women surrounded her. These women buoyed her up when Hughes left—-when she thought she was dying of despair, they helped her survive, and to write Ariel. Plath’s work is full of these women: her midwife Winnifred Davies, who shows up in “Wintering,” her dear friend Elizabeth Sigmund, to whom she dedicated The Bell Jar, her nanny Susan O’Neill Roe, to whom she dedicated “Cut,” the writer Ruth Fainlight, to whom she dedicated “Elm.” The list goes on, but if you read Hughes on Plath, or writers mouthing Hughes on Plath, you wouldn’t know it. Hughes hated many of these women because they had seen him at his worst, and, in the wake of that, encouraged Sylvia to divorce him. In turn, after his wife’s death, he banished many of them from having a relationship with their children, who they had helped raise in his absence, and threatened some with lawsuits if they wrote publicly about what they had seen. To hack, then, at Plath’s vision of a world without men in which women huddle together to wait out the snowy winter by their children’s sides as “factually [implausible]” is to ignore not only her intention for her collection, but the facts of her life as she lovingly transformed them into verse.

This is not to say that Plath was some kind of perfect feminist. She could be brutal to women in her work, as evidenced in her poem “Lesbos” and the ways she dealt with so-called “barren” (read: childless, sometimes by choice) women, like Dido Merwin and Assia Wevill. When Ariel debuted, though, Hughes’s alterations left some the impression that Plath was ruled by a fierce misogyny. This was later promoted by critics with a vast reach, like Al Alvarez, who told Janet Malcolm Plath “liked men, and trusted them,” and had more anger at women, a comment even Malcolm, staunchly in the Hughes camp, found suspect. Her brief suspicion barely registered, though. Hughes had done his work, and we, the good children of the patriarch, found it easy to go along with his version of Sylvia Plath, a woman whose life and work were ruled by madness, misery, and death.

I know I did. I loved that idea of Plath so much, it led me down the garden path into a relationship with a man who wanted me dead. “The Detective” is rife with possible meanings, but one is irrefutable— there is a green, green valley that nonetheless reeks of death. It covers a plush country house with a spidery garden, where a killer hides. He is trying to stash the body of his wife. He is trying to disappear her. He sets her on fire and tamps the ashes into a pipe. He is very good at his work; almost flawless. When Holmes & Watson appear at the house, they are looking into “a case without a body.”

Before I survived the nightmare of my ex, “The Detective” and poems like it meant very little to me. They were intellectual exercises, poker chips I could stack in the bet I was waging in my petty academic world, that everyone else was wrong about Sylvia Plath, and I was right. This was, in the end, just another version of what Hughes did to Plath: another stupid, losing contest, ruled not by love, but vanity, and fear. Ownership. Control. Hughes had taught me well, and I, ever the cleverest girl in class, had learned my lesson by heart.

Then, I left. “The Detective” transformed. It was a horror movie; and it was a love poem. The missing body Plath writes of was both the murdered wife, and the wife’s cherished body, dead when the husband betrayed her, abandoned the twin projects of marriage and art. Like Plath, I had also lived through this. My ex was never faithful (as I suspect Hughes wasn’t to Plath), but after I gave birth to our son, the brief flame he had carried for my body went out and I felt the chill dark of his disinterest and disdain, the mechanical creep of our sex life. He felt like he had to (or maybe, he was entitled to me) but really, he was thinking of other, younger women, women whose breasts didn’t leak milk, whose bellies didn’t sag from recently carrying his baby. He was already texting those other women, meeting up with them, fucking them. Plath, too, survived this— in a vivid letter to her therapist, Ruth Beuscher, she describes her post-affair sex with Hughes as “like going to the toilet.” In “The Detective,” Plath’s speaker has an “insatiable” mouth; it is “hung out…to dry” in punishment for wanting to be kissed. For wanting to be fed. For wanting, above all, to talk about it.

And there was one more way I read “The Detective” as a love poem, albeit about a love that could, and frequently did, turn violent. Why did she stay? people often ask me about Sylvia Plath, when I make the clear case for Hughes’s brutality. Why did you? others, who know my connection to this story, want to know. I can give you clear answers, and I can give you murky ones. The water at the bottom of the sea is rife with silt; as you lose air, thinking is impossible. You become— you can become— ruled wholly by your body: break free, or drown. When my body seemed to be the focus of the man who wanted to kill me, I let many things, egregious things, slide. I feel such shame, recalling this— the lies I ignored, the lies I told, the way I turned away when he did violence to me, or to those I loved. The way I stayed, maybe, only to bask in the glow of his attention, which I mistook for love. And the ways I tried so desperately, when he turned that attention to others, to get it back. The way I put up with almost anything if he paid me that particular mind. You stay with the knowledge that he loves you like no one else ever would, ever could, love you, because he has taught you that you are unlovable; he is unique. When I knew it was gone for good, I just couldn’t stand it anymore.

*

I had a moment, earlier, writing this. I almost cut the parenthetical clause that identifies Janet Badia as my friend, identifies my pride in that friendship. It felt a little braggy, a little in-crowd-y. I should keep this little essay professional and breezy and aboveboard. I should keep my friends out of it.

But in the end, this essay is about my friends, and inspired by them— by one, in particular. Sara B. Franklin, the writer and historian who I met a few years back while we were both trying to finish our books, mine on Sylvia Plath, hers on Judith Jones. Jones was Plath’s American editor in her lifetime; she bought The Colossus for Knopf, and later, turned down The Bell Jar for American publication. In 2022, I sought Sara out to ask her what she knew about Judith’s relationship with Sylvia, only to discover she was looking for me, wondering the same. It was, as I said in an interview I did with her for this newsletter, “an internet meet-cute,” and it led to a friendship. When Sara and I began speaking about finishing our respective books, it became clear that we were both coming up against a similar obstacle. We were writing, unabashedly, about women we loved. This love— not romantic, not toxic, not sexy— is sometimes frowned upon in the publishing world. It can be seen as an interference, a force that clouds your objectivity, keeping you from the ability to write clearly about your subject. Mostly, though, I think no one knows quite what to do with it. Where do we put it? Where do I stash this love I have for this far-off woman who died 17 years before I was born?

Or, in Sara’s case— what was she to do with the Platonic, generative, intergenerational love she shared with this legendary woman, who had brought us Plath’s poetry, Julia Child’s la belle cuisine Francais, and the novels of John Updike? As she writes in The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture In America, Sara became acquainted with Judith when she was hired by the Julia Child Foundation to conduct and record interviews with Judith in her New York City apartment. Over a series of lunches, the two of them became good friends, and when Judith died at the age of 93, her stepdaughter offered her papers to Sara, “an unimaginable gift. And I know that, because I loved Judith, I must say yes.”

This is the origin story of The Editor, this gifting of papers; like all good biographies, it had to have one. But the animating force behind the lunches; the years spent reading through Judith’s decades of correspondence; the writing and rewriting of an immaculately researched book, one that ends with the painful loss of a treasured friend, the woman Sara has called, “one of the great loves of my life,” is love. Love, it turns out, does not need compartmentalization during the writing process. There is no need to stash it anywhere; you can let it pour onto the page. It will allow your reader to walk, for the first time, through the markets of post-war Paris with a young American woman who is about to have her first taste of morels, and understand how this experience will eventually lead her to risk her burgeoning career in publishing to bring Julia Child’s cooking to America. This same love can be used to interrogate Judith’s whiteness, the ways it blinds and shields her, while her femininity keeps her locked out of the rooms she should by all rights be running. The kind of love Sara has for Judith, dead for almost a decade, now, can turn the ordinary stuff of life— difficulty conceiving, a husband’s depression, the so-called “second shift” of motherhood and housekeeping— into a book that I believe has carved out a new genre of biography, one in which the writer’s unabashed love for their subject demands better of the reader then the kind of blasé “objectivity” we are often tasked with delivering.

But this blasé objectivity remains firmly ensconced in the critical world. Although I am happy to say that the reception of The Editor has been overwhelmingly positive, at least one critic has taken issue with Sara’s approach, calling the book a “hagiography.” The writer, a young man named Elroy Rosenberg, claims that The Editor “betrays the code of anonymity and mirroring by which true editorial stars operate.” That this man thinks Judith’s list, which included Anne Tyler, John Updike, Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, Julia Child, Edna Lewis, and the discovery, for American audiences, of Anne Frank’s diary, is anything but the work of a “star” seems to me proof that there are some misogynists we’ll never crack; you can’t get blood from a stone, so why try?

But it seems to me that his real issue is not with Judith’s ability to creep onto the pages of her writers’ books in her subtle, astute effect on their style, content, and whatever other elements of their work she touched. Rather, Rosenberg is angered by Sara’s betrayal— that she will not, in her book, be an anonymous, objective biographer, but is, instead, true to her presence in Judith’s life, and in Judith’s book. As Judith ages, and becomes ill with Alzheimer’s, Sara does not shy away from the truth of her illness or the reality of loving something very old, who is dying; we are there as she kisses Judith’s papery cheek for the last time. As Sara knows it, we know it. At a certain point in The Editor, it seems Judith, so alive and vigorous and working! Editing and writing books! into her 80s, might live forever. We hold our breath; we hold out hope. But none of us get out alive. Judith will die; Sara will lose her. In writing this book, and promoting it, she will lose Judith again and again, painful traces of her death that are also beautiful, because they return Judith to her, briefly. Some of us don’t want to be reminded of this, especially in an objective biography: love is agony, because the people we love will all die, which is also why love matters more than anything else on earth. This is too much for some people to bear, so they decide it’s icky; better to critique it away.

I met Sara because of Sylvia Plath, which is to say, we met because of our love for two women born decades before us. Two women who, in fact, never met, but grew fond and admiring of one another through letters sent back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean, in the early 1960s. Although I consider myself someone with longstanding, deep knowledge of Sylvia Plath, I was unaware of the unique nature of her relationship with Judith Jones until the publication of the second volume of Plath’s Letters, in 2018, when I read how the two got on for the first time. I knew of Judith Jones from the film Julie & Julia; how strange, I thought, that so little attention had been paid to the fact that Sylvia’s American editor, in her lifetime, was also Julia Child’s editor. Yet another way we keep Plath from the world she inhabited.

But, as I would learn during my first visit to Ted Hughes’s archive at Emory University, in 2019, it wasn’t strange at all; it was by design. The first place I looked was Hughes’s business correspondence concerning the publication of Ariel; the first letters to jump out at me were from Judith Jones. Hughes had long written, publicly, that he only published Ariel with his own publisher in the US because Plath’s American publisher— Knopf— had no interest in the book. Meghan O’Rourke even says as much in the piece I quoted, earlier: “Hughes [couldn’t] convince Knopf, in the United States, to publish the new poems. ‘People didn’t understand what they were getting at, or didn’t like what they saw,’ the critic A. Alvarez later told Janet Malcolm. Hughes did get Plath’s poems.”

But the archive proved this was a lie told and retold by Hughes in articles and essays he published in The Observer and the Times Literary Supplement, and which were later reprinted in anthologies of his prose. At Emory, I read Judith’s many letters to Ted Hughes, heartbreaking in their grief at her author’s death, moving in their fierce admiration for her “new” poems and Judith’s frank desire to publish them with Knopf. It was Hughes, then, who refused Plath’s American publisher, and her beloved and trusted editor, the rights to his wife’s work, a story he deliberately covered up in his public writing about his wife’s work for decades.

Why? No one can say for sure, but I suspect a few things. Judith was, as is widely reported, quietly indomitable; this comes across in her correspondence. She would not have allowed herself to be bossed around by Hughes; she would have had the kind of editorial control he repeatedly robbed from Fran McCullough, his American editor, who took over the editing of Plath’s American texts and was bullied out of any real decision making by Hughes in letters I find painful to read. More than that, though, I suspect that Hughes knew how much his wife cared for Judith, and was cared for, in return. In his posthumous handling of his wife’s affairs, Hughes displayed the same kind of ironclad coercion and control he displayed toward her in life. Those who loved her in life and death were systematically edged out, by coldness, by cutting off, or by threats, sometimes personal and sometimes legal. One of the most moving sections of The Editor comes as Sara writes of how badly Sylvia and Judith needed one another in the last months of Plath’s life, and how distance and convention kept them from being, for one another, the kind of support they might otherwise have been.

It was heartbreaking, reading this; partly because it’s true, and partly because I read a galley of the book before it debuted, and dreaded the critics taking a scalpel to it, the way one did to Gail Crowther’s Three-Martini Afternoons At The Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Crowther, writing of Plath’s last months, described how having her friend Anne nearby would have been a boon— someone who was also a mother, also wrote poetry, also struggled with suicidality. Someone who got it. But alas—one reviewer felt this kind of “speculation” was “distracting.” And really, fuck that. And fuck my internal censor, which has me referring to Gail as “Crowther” rather than Gail, my friend Gail, without whom, like Sara, I would never have finished my book, the woman who tramped through English graveyards with me, looking for something, who listened to me cry about how much I missed my kids in between time in the archive and giving lectures at Cambridge, together. Let Gail, and Sara, let me, let anyone else who wants to speculate about what might have given women like Plath and Sexton and Judith and Julia and Edna a better life. Imagine that, in this speculation, in our own friendships and the unbridled love and support we offer one another, we continue these women’s stories, and lives.

We miss nothing by doing this; impossible histories become possible futures; I write toward both.