Howls and Whispers
The death of a famous poet sets off a bitter fight for his reputation -- and his fortune.
POISON
A Novel
By Susan Fromberg Schaeffer
Norton. 606 pp. $25.95
The roman à cléf is a problematic genre: Its edges blur. Time may erase the name on the gravestone but not -- if vividly imagined -- the name of a character brought to life in a book. Most artists use some sort of template, someone half-remembered or glancingly encountered and then described anew. Most readers now don't know or care that real people once modeled for Proust's masterpiece and cast their shadow-figures on the page. It helps, perhaps, to know that A.S. Byatt was thinking of Robert Browning when she wrote Possession , or that Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift was based on Delmore Schwartz. But those novels don't require detailed biographical knowledge on the reader's part; they are self-sufficient works of art.
Poison also takes its impetus from the lives of poets and is ghost-haunted throughout. As a roman à cléf , it scarcely requires a key. For "Peter Grosvenor" read Ted Hughes, for "Evelyn Graves" read Sylvia Plath, and the door swings wide. There's been a cottage industry of memoirs and biographies about that famous pair, as well as such novels as Wintering , by Kate Moses (dramatizing Plath's last days, in February 1963), and even Birthday Letters, by the British poet laureate himself. (Shortly before his own death in 1998, Hughes broke his long, self-imposed silence and published a series of poems about the couple's marriage and collapse.) Book after book continues to appear, with footnotes to add, sides to take. We know about the children, the oven, the sister, the lovers, the biographers, the parents, the weather, the friends. We know of the first meeting, the passionate attachment and competitive ambition, the ugly aftermath of suicide and the allocation of blame.
It's hard to imagine that anything remains to be said about the Plath-Hughes nexus. For more than 600 pages, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer tries valiantly to bring the couple back to life, and I wish I could report that she succeeds.
Alas, the reverse is more nearly the case. The titular poison does its slow work, and all through this lengthy lamentation, there's a freezing of the veins. Even the house in the novel gets to be part of the chorus or, more accurately, the dirge: "The house is dreaming. No, that is not right. The house is thinking, as inanimate objects do, if there are such things as inanimate objects. The house waits until everyone is asleep, and then it is free to think its own thoughts, whereas when the people are awake and thinking or speaking, the house takes care to take everything in and remember it. The house knows its own name: Willow Grove."
In Willow Grove, Meena, the vengeful third wife of a dead Nobel Prize recipient (Hughes did not receive that honor, so there are inventions here), holds sway. She wants control of the poet's reputation as well as his cash. His sister Sigrid (Olwyn in real life) opposes her -- as do, increasingly, Peter's adult children. Meanwhile, biographers and lawyers focus, turn by turn, on who is to inherit or to publish what. The house is full of secrets, and -- predictably enough -- the trees are full of that signature bird in Hughes's poetry, the crow: "Peter looked over what he had written, sighed, and wrote his name, black, thick letters, as if a crow had walked across the page printing the words for him."
Some of the words in Poison do compel attention. Schaeffer is an accomplished author with nearly 20 books to her credit, and her characters are nothing if not passionate. More than two decades ago, she published The Madness of a Seduced Woman , and the portrait of Meena is similarly acid in its etching. There's a certain comedy in Meena's social climbing, and the question of "The List of Wish" -- the poet's final wishes -- has dramatic force. Schaeffer takes the risk of writing letters from Peter and Evelyn, and their epistolary style is vivid and direct.
But everything else is lugubrious, incantatory, over-emphatic and grim. The landscape is soaked in rain, and the language is full of heavy, gothic weather. Here are the Grosvenors' two children: "Sophie sat in front of her notebook and cried. On his cliff in the dark, the breakers crashing on the cliffs down below, Andrew wept silently. Then he heard the roar of the waves and it no longer seemed necessary to be so quiet and he cried and coughed and made as much noise as he cared to."
Here's a speech that sounds less like their father than Bronte's Heathcliff:
"And Peter turned slowly to Penelope, said slowly, 'Women devour everything. Women make me their world and then they want to devour me, and if I don't want to be devoured, they're worse than snakes; they twist themselves until they begin to eat their tails with their fangs, until they have devoured their own world and there is nothing left of anything. Evelyn has begun her devouring.'
" 'No,' said Penelope. 'No.' "
In this book, repetition is everywhere; one "No" would have sufficed. ·
Nicholas Delbanco directs the Hopwood Awards Program at the University of Michigan. His new novel, "Spring and Fall," will be published in October.
