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BETWEEN POETS: Middlebrook, in
London, plans some downtime before taking on Ovid.
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Hunkered down in the 46-story Helmsley Park
Lane Hotel on Central Park, author and English professor
emerita Diane Middlebrook is making last-minute revisions
on her latest manuscript for Viking. A few blocks away, editors
are poring over their own copies of Her Husband: Hughes & Plath,
A Marriage. The subject is the notorious union of poets Sylvia
Plath and Ted Hughes. The pressure is intense as deadline
approaches.
“These are the clothes I’ve had on for the last
week,” she
announces with cheerful resignation. “I’m not going
anywhere.” She’s wearing a black turtleneck sweater
and leggings, fittingly anonymous for the drizzling New
York weather. Middlebrook is small—5 feet 4 inches—and
her very short brown hair stands straight up, giving her
an electric-socket effect that belies her current exhaustion.
She flies to London for a four-month sojourn at 1 p.m.
tomorrow
(she divides her time between San Francisco and London).
She will be at Viking until the last possible minute before
grabbing
a taxi to the airport.
Middlebrook retired from her active
teaching schedule last year to become a full-time biographer. “One
of the reasons I like working on biographies is that it
takes a long time,” she
muses. “You don’t have to work quickly. People
are going to stay dead.”
Yet the career move doesn’t
appear to have slackened her pace. And success is still
dogging her heels: Her Husband was named a “must read” by Library
Journal even
as Middlebrook and her editor were fine-tuning text
and endnotes over international phone lines.
At the hotel, she had
requested a room with a desk. She
got one on the 36th floor. “There’s lots of drawer
space. Everything is organized and out of sight,” she
says approvingly. Nevertheless, work isn’t completely
hidden: a tall pile of finished manuscript pages sits
on the marble desktop, a short stack of unfinished pages
next
to it.
She has 1 1/2 chapters left to revamp.
Each revision makes
the story tighter, more focused on the subject at hand:
the story of Hughes and Plath—two
of the 20th century’s most famous poets, told yet again,
but this time concentrated on how they shaped each other
as poets during their marriage.
And such a marriage! The
six-year union ended with Hughes’s
disastrous affair and Plath’s suicide. Is there that
much to say about the debacle, after thousands of articles,
books, TV shows and this fall a movie, Sylvia, starring
Gwyneth Paltrow? Yes; Middlebrook’s book is different—“sure
to be the gold standard,” according to Publishers
Weekly’s
starred review.
“I don’t think that marriage was
a failure,” she
says. “They had an aim that they worked out together:
to become poets. It was very courageous. They turned down
contracts [for reliable work] to become poets. They had
no way to know
where their luck would come from. Each one was incredibly
helpful to the other.” Her book describes Hughes’s
middle-age rediscovery of Plath’s genius. Not that he
ever doubted it, according to Middlebrook. “What I really
wanted to do was write the story of a romance and its aftermath—and
to tell it as rapidly and with as much juice as I could
find in myself.”
Middlebrook’s previous biographies—of
the poet Anne Sexton and the jazz musician Billy Tipton—generated
controversy. Will this one? “She’s not interested
in hanging Ted,” says Kathryn Court, president of Viking/Penguin
Books. “I think the people who feel Ted murdered Sylvia
will be very upset by this book.”
Stanford English professor
Eavan Boland, one of Ireland’s
leading poets and a friend of Middlebrook’s, says, “I’m
sure that Diane will make a real contribution to the debate.
She has a particularly vivid sense of the lives—erotic,
imaginative, actual—of her subjects. Because of that,
I know her work will be scholarly, but never remote. There’s
always something fresh and intense about the way she sees
poetry and poets.”
Her current incarnation as
a biographer almost overshadows the work Middlebrook’s
former students and colleagues praise most often—her
teaching and scholarship. She is one of the founders
of the Institute for Research
on Women
and Gender (IRWG), formerly the Center for Research
on Women (CROW). By all accounts, she is a gifted teacher,
an inventive
networker of colleagues, ideas and disciplines, and
a provocative scholar.
One former disciple is black feminist writer bell
hooks. In her introduction to Wounds of Passion: A Writing
Life, hooks, ’73,
recalls Middlebrook handing out photocopied sheets of poetry
at the beginning of class. There were no authors’ names
given; Middlebrook lectured on whether their gender could
be determined by style and content. Hardly a groundbreaking
demonstration
now, perhaps, but the lesson occurred more than 30 years
ago.
“I still recall the relief I felt that day,” writes
hooks. “A
burden had been lifted. She had shown us that there was
no basis in reality for the biased sexist stereotypes
that were
so often taught by other professors as fact. I left class
assured that I could write work that was both specific
to my experience
as a southern black female as well as rooted in different
locations and different perspectives.”
Middlebrook has
a talent for juggling disciplines, ideas, allusions,
metaphors—which,
in the early days of CROW, led to an unusual intellectual
cross-fertilization among
junior faculty. “We had friendships and intellectual
colleagues across the entire campus,” recalls education
professor Myra Strober, the founding director of CROW. “Partly
because there were so few women on campus, we gravitated
toward one another. We lectured in one another’s courses,
taught courses together, had study groups together, and
to some extent
that’s still true.”
For example, Strober co-taught
a course with Middlebrook called Women’s Choices, cross-listed
with the English department, feminist studies and the
School of Education. Examining
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Strober discussed
the economic ramifications of the choices the women make
and the class structures underlying their social interactions
and
marital goals. Middlebrook gave a provocative psychoanalytic
interpretation of Darcy’s estate. Strober says her
own discussions of the development of human capital and
women’s
careers sparked Middlebrook’s interest in Anne Sexton,
a relatively uneducated housewife who became a poet and
academic. And Middlebrook’s work influenced Strober.
“She is inspiring and
spellbinding,” says Strober, enumerating her colleague’s
pedagogical virtues. “Even
speaking prose, her choice of words and sense of drama
are poetic.
She has a very interesting perspective on literary issues.
She
combines an understanding of the text with an understanding
of social issues—particularly feminist issues, but
not exclusively. She’s very well-versed in psychoanalysis
and brings that perspective to her analyses.” (Middlebrook
received the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in
Teaching in 1987.)
History professor Estelle Freedman, speaking at
a retirement party to celebrate Middlebrook’s remarkable
teaching career, noted, “Often, when I have to be ‘on,’ as
at public events, I think ‘WWDD.’ Instead of ‘What
would Jesus do?’ it is ‘What would Diane do?’ And
I reach deep inside for a touch of spark, wit, words
and connecting thoughts that might, in her style, embrace
those
around me
with the intellectual and personal vibrancy that she
brings with her always.”
Middlebrook’s interest in other
people’s lives
invites speculation on her own, including her marriage
to Stanford organic chemist and now novelist/playwright
Carl Djerassi,
father of “the Pill.”
Her transatlantic literary
career was not foretold by birth or upbringing. She was
born Diane Wood in Pocatello, Idaho,
the first of three sisters. The family moved to Spokane,
Wash., when she was 5. Because their mother had health
problems, “she
was kind of a hip surrogate mother for me,” says Michole
Nicholson, eight years younger. “Diane took care of me
and let me follow her around. I adored Diane as a child—and
I still do.”
Nicholson describes growing up “lower
middle-class” in
a tiny postwar house on a busy street. Their father, a
pharmacist, had been raised by his schoolteacher mother;
his father had
died in the mines of Idaho. Their mother, orphaned at age
9, had “barely made it through high school,” says
Nicholson. “I used to think of Diane as a changeling—from
those naughty mischievous fairies who would sometimes switch
babies. She just came out of nowhere. Nobody in our family
even read poetry, let alone studied poetry.”
Middlebrook
admits she was somewhat pampered as the first child. “My
mother named me very fancifully—my middle
name is Helen, my first name is Diane. She was thinking
of the moon goddess,” she said in a 1998 interview with
the e-zine Ellavon. Wonderwoman was her first hero. “I
used to have this fantasy that I was actually a goddess.
Wonderwoman came about as close as they got. I used to
buy those thick
Wonderwoman comic books.”
However, her parents’ attitude
toward education was pragmatic. “When
Diane declared that she wanted to be a poet and writer,
it caused a great uproar,” says Nicholson. Her father
insisted she at least get a teaching certificate. Middlebrook
replied
that she didn’t want to waste the time. Her father demanded
that she pay her own way through college.
“Diane, of course, totally vindicated her decision,” Nicholson
says. “She had a strong mind, a strong will, as if
she had an inner compass that pushed her wherever she
wanted to go.” Middlebrook first attended Whitman College
in Walla Walla, then transferred to the University of
Washington-Seattle, where she received her BA. She arrived
at Stanford as
an
assistant
professor of English in 1966 and got her phd from Yale
in 1968.
She has married three times. The name “Middlebrook” is
a souvenir of the second, by which she had a daughter,
Leah, now an assistant professor of comparative literature
at the
University of Oregon. By the time she met Djerassi in 1977,
she had established a scholarly reputation as Diane Wood
Middlebrook.
Djerassi was born in 1923, the son of Jewish
physicians in Vienna. Fleeing the Nazis, at 16 he arrived
in New York
penniless yet graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Ohio’s Kenyon
College at 19 and received his PhD from the University
of Wisconsin three years later. Djerassi’s work in synthetic
organic chemistry led to the invention of oral contraceptives,
antihistamines
and anti-inflammatory drugs. His rise was meteoric—the
London Sunday Times Magazine named him “one of the Top
Thirty Persons of the Millennium”—and his wealth
allowed him to establish an artists’ colony near Woodside.
He also became an eminent collector.
The couple’s art
interests are evident in their home, surely one of the most
fabulous apartments in San Francisco.
It occupies the entire 15th floor (they gradually absorbed
four apartments) of an art-deco building on Green Street,
atop Russian Hill. The elevator from the lobby opens onto
blue walls
meant to suggest a night sky, with poetry by Ovid, Paul
Klee, Wallace Stevens, Basho, Hughes and others written
across it
in different scripts and languages and illustrated with
zodiacal signs. To the left are living quarters; to the
right, offices
and the salon area, where the couple entertains. They enjoy
a 360-degree view of the city.
Middlebrook’s office features
Eurodesign cabinets and built-in bookcases, with a computer
desk and round work
table. As in the hotel room, all is very neat, very well-organized—a
Middlebrook cardinal virtue. A painted baroque ceiling,
with blue, gray and plum-colored swirls, gives the impression
the
sky is right above you.
Works of art by Klee, usually on
the walls in the salon area, are currently on loan to
San Francisco’s
Museum of Modern Art, keeping company with the permanent Klee
collection
Djerassi donated. The couple has one of the world’s most
significant private Klee collections.
“There’s nobody like either one of them,” says
Barbara Babcock, Crown Professor of Law and Middlebrook’s
friend for three decades. “They really, truly enjoy each
other’s
company—that’s a real hallmark of a true marriage.”
It
was a rocky courtship. In his autobiography, Djerassi
describes how in 1983 Middlebrook informed him that she
had decided to live with another man. And Djerassi has
been called
a ladies’ man on more than one occasion. (When Salon in 2001 asked point-blank if he was, he responded clumsily: “I’m
just an ordinary heterosexual person to whom the opposite
sex applies, so the possibility let us say of sexual attraction,
even confirmation, is an extra bonus in these relations.”)
Despite infidelity, the couple married in 1985.
Unlike
Plath and Hughes, Middlebrook and Djerassi appear to
have found their happy ending. “Diane is very committed
to her marriage,” says Nicholson. “Each is strong-willed,
driven, ambitious. She pays a lot of attention to the dynamics
between them. Part of her insight for the Plath-Hughes
book is from looking at her own marriage—where the boundaries
are between them and how they affect each other creatively.
She got into the Plath book and realized it was about a
marriage.”
Clearly, the Djerassi-Middlebrook marriage
withstands a lot of time apart. While Middlebrook went
off in late spring
to engagements in London and Wales, Djerassi was speaking
in Frankfurt and Berlin and attending rehearsals and
performances of his plays in Tokyo and Oxford. Somewhere
in Europe,
they
reconnoitered before returning to San Francisco in the
fall.
Even while she was still
chewing the end of her pen, Middlebrook attracted bullets
for Her Husband. In an
unpublished letter
to the San Francisco Chronicle dated May 22, 2001 (circulated
on the Internet), Lucas Meyer, a friend of the late
Hughes, predicted Middlebrook would create a “fairyland account” of
Plath and Hughes, citing her controversial book on Anne
Sexton.
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‘The
more that about each of the the better.’
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Anne Sexton: A Biography (1991),
a finalist for the National Book Award, was Middlebrook’s
rough baptism into the cutting edge of biographical research.
Her work got
attention
for its revelations of Sexton’s adultery, incest and
sexually abusive relationship with her own daughter.
But most controversial were the tapes offered by Sexton’s
psychiatrist, Martin Orne, tapes in which Sexton—who
killed herself in 1974, at 45—revealed her hopes, anxieties,
childhood abuse (real or imagined), affairs with both
sexes, and poetic
aspirations.
“For me, listening to the tapes provided immeasurably
valuable insight into the person Sexton had been during the
most
important period of her creative life,” Middlebrook wrote
in a letter to the New York Times, which covered the debate
extensively. “The
tapes made me privy not only to anguish but also to thousands
of homely particulars that make up an actual life.”
Sexton’s
survivors agreed the revelations were exactly what the poet
would have wanted, but others, especially
psychiatrists, were outraged. They saw Middlebrook’s
action opening the way for a flood of posthumous “outing” of
clients’ records,
undermining the trust between psychiatrist and patient.
The
book spent eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller
list, an unexpected twist for a biography of a minor poet. “Yeah,
I was surprised,” says Middlebrook, looking back on the
furor with the perspective of a decade or so. “My book
was a success because all psychotherapists in the country
had to read it. It was an audience I hadn’t anticipated.”
Middlebrook
adds that although she was “baffled at the
time,” she now realizes “the world of the psychiatrist
and psychoanalyst was ready to have a controversy. We were
on the very brink of the information age.” Issues of
privacy and information control were coming to the fore.
Who owns patient records—client or doctor? Can they be
inherited? In any case, says Middlebrook, Orne “spent
two years battling with his own professional organizations
before being
exonerated.”
The Sexton book apparently whetted Middlebrook’s
appetite for the offbeat and controversial. In February
1989, when
she read the “respectful, faintly marveling obituary” for
Billy Tipton in the New York Times, she was riveted. Suits
Me (1998) is her biography of the cross-dressing jazz musician
born as Dorothy Tipton, who lived as a man from age 19
until his death at 74. He married five times and reared
several adopted
children, yet his wives and kids were unaware of the disguise. “When
he died, people were absolutely dumbfounded to discover
he was a she,” says Middlebrook, whose father had known
the musician.
As Middlebrook explained in the Ellavon interview, “Right
away, there is the voyeuristic fascination with how can
someone not be known by a wife and sons to be the wrong
sex? Then,
it hit me that the story itself is a very ordinary story,
that we are connected by relationships, and our relationships
are
projected onto who we think [people] are. So when the son
said to me, ‘He will always be Dad to me,’ it didn’t
matter whether it was a female person, and I thought right
away that, yes, that’s correct—‘Father’ is
a relationship, it’s not a sex.”
The book won a
Lambda Foundation Literary Award, and Middlebrook garnered
praise for her sensitivity as well as her style.
London’s
Financial Times wrote, “Tipton may have spent his life
fearing exposure, but he/she could not have wished for
a more perceptive or sympathetic biographer than Middlebrook.”
Clearly,
though, she wades into questionable waters. “I’ve
heard her say in many forums that the dead have no rights,
the dead have no interests. It’s a very unsentimental
view,” says Babcock. And what of the survivors—someone,
say, who has a brief affair and finds years later that
their lover has become famous and their passion is being ridiculed?
Plath’s early lovers come to mind.
“So what?” responds Middlebrook. “You’re
not the first person in the world who had sex—anything
said about it is not too surprising. Maybe your attitude should
be, ‘So what?’
“I guess I’m not very sympathetic to the idea that
telling the life of somebody is intruding on lives of other
people,” she
adds. “The territoriality that people express about each
other’s lives requires some scrutiny.” But, she
admits, “I feel that way because I am a biographer.”
That
tough stance also belies the thoughtful treatment she
has often given the living—Tipton’s widows,
for example. “I do know people are capable of feeling
shame about things, and writers ought to be careful about
that,” says
Middlebrook. Still, she reverts to her credo: “The more
that each of us knows about each of the other human beings
in the world, the better off [we] are,” she says. “It’s
true that it is very painful to be exposed to people’s
curiosity. But it’s painful in a way that can only lead
to self-knowledge, because it’s really not a big deal.
In the scope of human endeavor, it’s not a big deal.”
Middlebrook’s
next project will sidestep most of these issues. It will
be a biography of the Augustan poet Ovid,
to be published by Viking in 2008. The subject is dear
to her: she has been teaching the Metamorphoses since
her first year
at Stanford. Not surprisingly, this book may show a
slightly feminist twist, and perhaps a Djerassi influence
as well. “Ovid
is a man who I’m absolutely sure was interested in women,” says
Middlebrook. “He’s interested in the way they conduct
their lives—especially when men aren’t around,
doing both nefarious and kind things to each other.”
The
Ovid project will give her “a pretext to live in
Rome,” but first there is the upcoming Hughes/Plath brouhaha
to get behind her. “He’s my next investment, but
I want a little downtime before I do the heavy lifting.” |