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Sylvia Plath The blood jet of poetry

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  Culture | Sylvia Plath The blood jet of poetry Two new biographies 50 years after her death Save Share Mar 9th 2013 | 5 min read 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 ...
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Facing History

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  A Critic at Large Facing History By Adam Gopnik April 2, 2012 Abjuring abstraction and extremism, Camus found a way to write about politics that was sober, lofty, and a little sad. Photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Save this story The French novelist and philosopher Albert Camus was a terrifically good-looking guy whom women fell for helplessly—the Don Draper of existentialism. This may seem a trivial thing to harp on, except that it is almost always the first thing that comes up when people who knew Camus talk about what he was like. When Elizabeth Hawes, whose lovely 2009 book “Camus: A Romance” is essentially the rueful story of her own college-girl crush on his image, asked survivors of the Partisan Review crowd, who met Camus on his one trip to New York, in 1946, what he was like, they said that he reminded them of Bogart. “All I can tell you is that Camus was the most attractive man I have ever met,” William Phillips, the journal’s editor, said, while the thorny...
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