Bitter fame

Fri, 06 Feb 1998 18:52:00 +0000

It all began with a picture of incoming Fulbright Scholars. It was 1956. England was still recovering from the war, and good food was rare, houses were cold and money was hard to get. Ted Hughes, a brilliant and talented undergraduate at Cambridge University, saw a photograph of the latest crop of scholars from America in the newspaper: "Were you among them?" he asks. He is referring, of course, to Sylvia Plath, the poet who became his wife and later committed suicide, thus passing into legend. Hughes writes:

I was waking

Sore-footed, under hot sun, hot pavements.

Was it then I bought a peach? That's as I remember.

From a stall near Charing Cross Station.

It was the first fresh peach I had ever tasted.

I could hardly believe how delicious.

At twenty-five I was dumbfounded afresh

By my ignorance of the simplest things.

The art of life

Wed, 19 Nov 1997 20:00:00 +0000

I've been addicted to reading writers' biographies for 30 years or so. Literary lives attract me, in part because I'm curious about how the great writers were able to assemble their masterworks and, somehow, also
manage to get to the dentist, play with their children, pay their bills,
visit elderly relatives and do all the time-consuming things one must do
in the natural course of a life. What often fascinates me is the source
of writers' inspiration and the specific details of their working lives:
how many hours they spent at the writing table, under what conditions
and with what results.

I'm hardly alone in liking, even loving, biographies. The art of
biography is an ancient one, preceding the novel by centuries. Among the
first major biographers was Suetonius (A.D. 75-150), who wrote "Lives of
the Noble Caesars" -- a book I often thumb through for gossip about Caligula, Nero and Tiberius. These manic, grandiose emperors may never recover from their first biographer, who lingered over the most salacious and melodramatic aspects of their lives. Indeed, this scandal-mongering style of biography has rarely been out of vogue, although in recent years we have been deluged with examples of what Joyce Carol Oates has called "pathographies" -- biographies that dwell on, revel in, the dark side of the subject. (As a biographer myself, I often wonder why anybody would bother to spend years and years doing research on somebody they didn't actually admire.)

Salon.com > Jay Parini

Bitter fame

The art of life