Malcolm went on probing the sore that is the writer and subject's relationship in her next book, "The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes" (1994), a dauntingly elegant reflection on the practice of biography. Plath has been both a gold mine and a minefield for biographers ever since she put her head in an oven and turned the gas on during the dreary London winter of 1963. A gold mine because of the trove of letters and journals she left behind, because of the drama of her shattered marriage to the equally gifted poet Ted Hughes and, not least, because of the stream of astonishing verse -- among the finest of the century -- that practically poured out of her in the year or so before she killed herself. (One of the pleasures of "The Silent Woman" is Malcolm's shrewd and sturdy interpretations of these often difficult poems.) A minefield because Hughes, who remained alive until 1998, rose up in fury whenever feminist biographers who had found an icon in Plath tried to demonize him. For years he and his hawk of a sister, Olwyn, who controlled Plath's literary estate and thus the rights to quote from her writings, made life as miserable for the dead poet's biographers as the biographers made it for them.

Malcolm's curiosity was piqued by the critical mauling of a Plath biography -- one that, uncharacteristically, defended Hughes -- by Anne Stevenson, a talented writer she had known, or at least known of, at the University of Michigan in the 1950s. Malcolm felt for Stevenson, she explains, "because of an experience of my own that paralleled hers. A short time earlier, I, too, had written an unpopular book, and I, too, had been attacked in the press." (Melodramatic as it is of me, I can never read that melancholy description of "The Journalist and the Murderer" -- "an unpopular book" -- without thinking of the vicious critical attacks that laid Keats low.) And so, as in her previous book, Malcolm, champion though she is of journalistic cold-bloodedness, throws in her lot with those like her "on the helpless side of the journalist-subject equation." She has "taken a side," she asserts baldly -- "that of the Hugheses and Anne Stevenson." And from her own carefully palpated bias she extrapolates the canker at the heart of the biographical rose:

The pose of fair-mindedness, the charade of evenhandedness, the striking of an attitude of detachment can never be more than rhetorical ruses; if they were genuine, if the writer actually didn't care one way or the other how things came out, he would not bestir himself to represent them.

There she goes again! Malcolm seems to be hard-wired to go out on limbs. It's this audacity that makes her so provocative -- and also, unfortunately, so vulnerable. That incendiary passage is the Plath book's equivalent of the McGinniss book's line in the sand about the immorality of journalism, and, predictably, it drew shrieks. Michiko Kakutani, writing in the Times, paraphrased it as "don't bother me with evidence; my mind's made up" and then went out of her way (even for her) to be insulting: "For Ms. Malcolm to suggest that her own shortcomings are in any way representative of the vocations of journalism or biography-writing in general seems not only solipsistic, but profoundly disingenuous." James Atlas, the biographer of Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow, declared in the Times Magazine that in her "latest diatribe" Malcolm was arguing that "biography is a spurious art," and paraphrasing her observation "The writer, like the murderer, needs a motive" as "The biographer's real intent is to enact revenge," he finished up on a note of injured high-mindedness: "To recover and bring forth, to preserve against oblivion the documents that give texture to a life, those 'fossils of feeling' that Janet Malcolm holds up as the one verifiable artifact of truth -- is that such a scurrilous vocation?" (It is if you write like that.)

Malcolm, of course, wasn't attacking the biographer's art any more than she had earlier been attacking the journalist's. What she was doing, in fact, was engaging in it. And despite the confession of tendentiousness that her critics accepted at face value, her book is no valentine to Ted and Olwyn Hughes or to Anne Stevenson, all three of whom hobble out of its pages more bruised than some of their detractors. (Malcolm's idea of defense is rougher than many biographers' prosecution.)

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