Carl Rollyson on another biographer--Lives of Plath "cumulative and incremental"--and the Shame of Melville biography

Praising my competitor: Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

by Heather Clark

https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780307961167



Heather Clark is coming out with a HUGE new biography of Sylvia Plath. She even delayed publication to include material from the Harriet Rosenstein papers recently sold to Emory.  For those of you who don’t know, Rosenstein began a biography she never completed, assembling an indispensable trove of documents and interviews that will make Clark’s biography a must read.  So where does that leave me?  Fortunately, I was able to access some of Rosenstein’s material before it was sold to Emory, and I was the first to get access to the papers of Plath’s therapist.  Also, The Last Days of Sylvia Plath, focuses on the last seven months of her life, going back and forth between various details and perspectives—something like a slice of life biography.  All this is to say that the work of biography is never done. Each biography, if it is any good, has to be shaped as a story, and all stories leave something out that someone else will put back in or see a new way of presenting in yet another biography.  The words that always come to mind when I think of biography are cumulative and incremental.  Biography is like a building constantly under construction and yet livable during each phase of the construction and re-construction. 

This is not true of Melville biography. I won't discuss the earlier phases here, other than to say that the silver platter theory of biography did not work. Jay Leyda gave Leon Howard all of the 1951 MELVILLE LOG but Leon brought his own convictions to the job. Anyhow, it turned out once new troves were discovered, some of the greatest riches were not on the silver platter. Very oddly, the least documentary of the recent biographies, that of Newton Arvin, has been by far the most influential on later writers such as John Updike and Andrew Delbanco. And the 2002 lies about my second volume, Richard Brodhead and Delbanco and Elizabeth Schultz saying I had made up Melville's POEMS and THE ISLE OF THE CROSS too, have persisted into the present, John Bryant in 2019 insisting that these [unnamed] critics were "fair enough" in saying that I lacked documentary evidence. So much for Melville's 12-point memo to his brother Allan on the publication of his POEMS! So much for at least two publishers' rejections of the volume! I tell you, it is horrible to be lied about in the New York TIMES and the NEW REPUBLIC, and it is painful to be treated badly in the Melville magazine LEVIATHAN. I understood how things were going in the 1990 Melville Society Meeting when the audience and some on the dais (Wai Chi Dimock and Bryant were there with Harrison Hayford and me) approved the satanic red-bearded stranger who kept shouting from the doorway, THE FACTS DON'T MATTER--THE FACTS DON'T MATTER. Look at the dozens of errors Bryant published in EVER MOVING DAWN (1997), his annotations to my 1991 speech at Pittsfield--grotesque blunders in Melville's biography, any Aunt Mary interchangeable with another Aunt Mary. The facts have not mattered often enough to the editors of LEVIATHAN, although there is a promising change of editorship just now. Good for Carl and Plath biography!