[To] stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head, …
—Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”
Honesty, little slut, must you insist
On hearing every dirty word I know
And all my worst affairs? Are impotence,
Insanity, and lying what you lust for?
Your hands are cold, feeling me in the dark.
—Edgar Bowers, “To the Contemporary Muse”
Earlier this year, the London Times led the fanfare for Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters with this front-page banner headline: “Revealed: the most tragic literary love story of our time.” Hughes’s long silence over his life with Sylvia Plath gave way to a din of publicity. There were fawning symposia; prominent first-serial publications; and lengthy articles rehashing the familiar story of celebrity and suicide in all its lurid journalistic appeal. Then came the renewed hubbub from critics on both sides of the thirty-five-year-old debate over who was in fact the victim here—the silent woman (as Janet Malcolm has termed her), Sylvia Plath, a young American genius horribly wronged and survived these many years by her unfeeling husband; or the silent man silent no longer, Ted Hughes, that great lowing ox of British letters, England’s hoary poet laureate, and Plath’s unjustly vilified and long-suffering literary executor. With few exceptions, the book’s positive reviews were as exorbitant as its sales.
As memoirs go,
