The blood jet of poetry

Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted. By Andrew Wilson. Scribner; 384 pages; $30. Simon & Schuster UK; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath. By Carl Rollyson. St. Martin’s Press; 336 pages; $29.99. Buy from Amazon.com

BIOGRAPHY can be a messy business. Beneath a guise of clinical professionalism, writers roll up their sleeves and delve into the muck of life—the personal journals and feverish letters, the half-baked recollections and petty grudges—in a sweaty, voyeuristic effort to create some kind of order. Few subjects have proved as seductive as Sylvia Plath.

In the decades since her death in 1963, Plath “has been dissected, analysed, reinterpreted, reinvented, fictionalised, and in some cases completely fabricated,” laments Frieda Hughes, her surviving child. Her story has long been seen as a kind of “mysterious dream” upon which the public projects its own fantasies and desires, observed Ted Hughes, her estranged husband and literary guardian until he died in 1998. In life she was a talented writer on the rise, but in death—by her own hand, aged 30, while her two small children slept in the next room—she has been elevated to the realm of myth. The 50th anniversary of her suicide has unleashed two more truth-seekers, like investigators scrutinising a black box for answers after a crash.

Authors adding to the pile are quick to defend their scholarship as unique. Andrew Wilson, a British journalist, introduces “Mad Girl’s Love Song” as the first book to consider Plath’s life before she met Hughes in 1956. “Hughes’s enormous shadow obscures many aspects of Plath’s life and work,” he explains. Most writing about Plath is devoted to the bleak tableau of her final days in her dank London flat, when her separation from a philandering Hughes precipitated a frenzy of her darkest and most inspired poems. But she was vital and prolific even before she first kissed Hughes “bang smash on the mouth” at a party in Cambridge. To Hughes everything Plath wrote before they met was “juvenilia”, yet Mr Wilson sees in her early work signs of a poet coming into her own. His book is named for one of Plath’s favourites—a haunting 1953 villanelle—which Hughes left out of her “Collected Poems”.

Mr Wilson mines primary sources in previously unavailable archives to paint a portrait of the artist as a young woman—blisteringly ambitious, fiercely intelligent, emotionally unstable and often angrily envious of men. She had a lusty hunger for experience, but she was too conventional to indulge it. Instead she resented the sexual double-standard that kept her in a state of “soggy desire”, and she yearned for financial comfort beyond her family’s limited means. Born in Massachusetts to a domineering German father and self-sacrificing mother, Plath worked hard and excelled at nearly everything she did.

The first time Plath heard poetry read aloud she had goose-pimples. “I had fallen into a new way of being happy,” she recalled. Writing was her way of escaping, yet her subject was nearly always herself. She filled her journals with stories and poems, sending the best to magazines like Seventeen. Believing herself destined for greatness, she saw her many letters to her mother as a gift to posterity. Indeed, most of life was a form of performance, a way to seem normal despite the churn and spoil inside. “If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad,” she wrote in her journal.

Mr Wilson offers a comprehensive picture of a young Plath with an electric mind, a cultural omnivorousness and a sinister dark side—one that would lead to her first suicide attempt in 1953 and provide autobiographical fodder for her only novel, “The Bell Jar”, published 50 years ago. The narrative sometimes plods along, as the author follows nearly every twist and turn in Plath’s young love life (she had her pick of “literally hundreds of men”). But in risking a sluggish pace, Mr Wilson has written what is sure to become the official biography of young Sylvia.

Carl Rollyson, an American biographer, takes a different tack. With “American Isis” he sets out to view Plath’s life through the prism of her personal mythologising—her desire for fame and her presentation of herself on the world stage. He argues that Plath understood the way high art and popular culture were converging, and her hunger for an audience moved her to perform on all levels of culture at once.

It is an interesting conceit, but in practice it means Mr Rollyson blurs his portrait with needless pop-culture references. “Sylvia Plath is the Marilyn Monroe of modern literature,” he declares on the first page, an odd statement that he never manages to explain—though as the author of a biography of Monroe he seems primed to note parallels. His writing can be inelegant and rich with generalisations, but he tells Plath’s story with the verve of a thriller, punching it with choice quotes. Hughes, for example, praised the way Plath’s verse “never goes ‘soft’ like other women’s”. Her mother once lamented that “Anyone who did not know Sylvia before she had her first [electric shock] treatment…never knew the whole Sylvia.”

In her last days Plath remained startled by the upheaval of her life, “catapulted from the cowlike happiness of maternity into loneliness”. Yet she expressed her resolve “to fight it out on my own over here”. Her fight lasted only a few more days, her energy depleted by her daily, pre-dawn ritual of descending into her own depths to write poetry before the children woke up. Having devoured Friedrich Nietzsche as a teenager, she took his writerly advice to heart: “Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood.”