In These New Essays, John McPhee Finds Poetry in the Material at Hand

By Craig Taylor

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/books/review/patch-john-mcphee.html

THE PATCH 

By John McPhee

242 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.

Here is the seventh collection of essays by John McPhee, his 33rd book and perhaps his eleventy-billionth word of published prose. This far into a prolific career, it may be a good time to finally unmask the 87-year-old as a one-trick pony. In "The Patch," he again shamelessly employs his go-to strategy: crafting sentences so energetic and structurally sound that he can introduce apparently unappealing subjects, even ones that look to be encased in a cruddy veneer of boringness, and persuade us to care about them. He's been working this angle since the 1950s; it's a good thing we're finally onto him now.

Reading McPhee's back catalog prompts uncomfortable questions, like "Why am I suddenly compelled to know more about plate tectonics or the engine rooms of the merchant marine?" In "The Patch," it's "Why am I suddenly invested in McPhee's quest to pluck golf balls from local rivers using a telescoping rod called an Orange Trapper?"

At this stage in life, McPhee is no longer writing stories that take him hiking with blistered feet through the Glacier Peak Wilderness, and when he canoes, he paddles through "The Patch" of the title essay aware of his so far "uneroded" balance. He mentions cycling, but his exercise still seems to derive from sentence construction, prying out lazy words, rummaging through dictionaries and wringing suspense from unlikely moments, as when he extends his Orange Trapper. It "quivers, wandlike." He reaches and reaches and finally snatches up a golf ball before fleeing the approaching greenskeeper "at a speed so blazing that I probably could not duplicate it if I were to try now, but that was years ago, when I was 80."

McPhee finds surprising poetry in the material at hand, as in his list of found golf balls emblazoned with the names of mutual funds; the shanked Titleists of the 1 percent sink into his beloved Merrimack, Delaware and Connecticut Rivers. The Northeast has changed and is always changing, from the rivers to the pine forests to the earth's crust below. Nature, in McPhee's journalism, can only be preserved until it's threatened again.

So why is he interested in this telescoping rod? Why the 18-wheeled trucks of the title essay in his earlier book "Uncommon Carriers"? Why did he dedicate so many words to oranges in the brilliantly titled "Oranges"? "Compulsions are easy to come by and hard to explain," McPhee admits in this new collection. Over the years, with generosity, he's shared them. "I have never spent time with anyone who was more aware of the natural world." This is how McPhee described a mineral engineer in one of his finest books, "Encounters With the Archdruid,"adding, "He seemed to find in the land and landscape … an expression of almost everything he had come to believe about that world." With time, the description now shines back on its author.

"The Patch" is billed as a "covert memoir," but McPhee has smuggled excerpts from his life into most of his books. "When you are deciding what to leave out, begin with the author," he warned students in his recent writing memoir, "Draft No. 4." "If you see yourself prancing around between subject and reader, get lost." Never a known prancer, McPhee has instead drifted gracefully alongside his interviewees, in motion and in communion, in canoes and the cabs of trucks, listening with an almost obsolete respect to both sides of our various divides: to the mineral engineer and the environmentalist. "The Patch" is just another chapter in an ongoing memoir of generous curiosity.

It's McPhee's way to prod landscape and people until an avalanche of the verifiable tumbles into his notebooks. He is never one to simply walk through a meadow when the path passes "heather, lupine, horsemint, daisies and wild licorice." The color and fragrance of his writing could easily turn sickly if they didn't yield up the world with such precision, if they weren't deployed in the service of greater meaning.

Case in point: In the first and best essay in this collection, he vividly introduces the latest thing-you-didn't-know-you-cared-about: the chain pickerel, a fish with a "culinary quality … in inverse proportion to its size." As expected, McPhee describes an explosive "slime dart" that treads water "in much the way that a hummingbird treads air." But he ensures that the essay is as much about the legacy of his dying father. The image of a fish "as voracious as insurance companies, as greedy as banks" lingers like a splash, but the lasting impression is that of a patient lying in a hospital bed while his son tells him what he caught that morning with the old man's bamboo fishing pole.

About the only essay in this collection that McPhee can't elevate is an account of an N.C.A.A. lacrosse game pitting the University of Denver against Syracuse. McPhee is, thankfully, human in the face of a few daunting subjects. Even with his faultless sentences, research and structure, the subject remains, with earthbound obstinacy, a game of lacrosse.

The second half of the book comprises an experiment called an "album quilt," a montage of "fragments" of varying length from pieces done across the years, a mix of buffed and whittled snippets in which Joan Baez leads to Thomas Wolfe, and a profile of Barbra Streisand gives way to a disquisition on oared ships, and young Time magazine McPhee alternates with wise New Yorker McPhee. With 250,000 words available, McPhee says he cut 75 percent. He was left surveying a stack of heartwood.

For someone who filled his recent book on the craft of writing with diagrams of circles and arrows resembling halftime football strategies, "The Patch" is a departure. At first it looks like a revelation in looseness, as if McPhee had simply riffled through his voluminous back catalog. In his introduction to the album quilt, McPhee assures readers, "With 56 three-by-five cards on a large smooth table, I reached an arrangement of passages in an intentionally various, random and subjective manner." I accept the subjective; the random not so much. I'd believe him more if the book didn't end with two essays placed with intent. The first is a remembrance of Robert Bingham, his longtime editor at The New Yorker, a chance to convey Bingham's love for language and its finest practitioners. The second describes a journey to McPhee's beloved Alaska and the northern landscape's ability to broaden both a writer and a person. McPhee might like you to believe these two cue cards happened to cling together in a vigorous shuffle, but my hunch is that "The Patch" is surreptitiously structured, un-unplanned. After years of elevating his prose with patience and organization, the craftsman just can't help himself. I suspect it's all he knows.

Craig Taylor, editor of the literary magazine Five Dials, is the author of "Londoners."

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朱天文：在财富权势统治的实然世界，要奋力留下一些应然之物

朱天文说，大学生的位置是"一个对声誉、财富、权势没兴趣，无利益，不参与的位置"，他们评选出的奖项让我感到"格外新鲜难得"。

朱天文获颁"21大学生世界华语文学盛典"年度致敬人物

前日，由中国人民大学文学院、腾讯新闻、东方文学国际写作中心联合主办的"21大学生世界华语文学盛典"在中国人民大学举办，向台湾作家朱天文致敬。今年是该盛典举办的第二年，去年的致敬人物是哈佛大学东亚系暨比较文学系讲座教授王德威。

朱天文在现场发表了以《一个书写者的位置和时间》为题的演讲，探讨了"奖"与声誉的意义。"华语文学人物"的终评委员是21位人民大学创作班研究生，她认为这一点极为特殊，"在国内外我所接触过的各种文学奖，这是仅有的。"朱天文在演讲中说，"大学生站在一个干净清爽的位置上，汉纳·鄂兰（大陆译名汉娜·阿伦特）所说'没兴趣，无利益，不参与'的位置。是对甚么没兴趣，无利益，不参与？我回答大家，对声誉，对财富，对权势，"所以获得这一奖项"让我更感到光荣"。

从1972年创作首部小说《强说心愁》算起，朱天文的写作生涯至今已有近五十年。人大文学院教授、作家梁鸿在颁奖词里写到，一方面，朱天文"关注台湾复杂的政治历史构成和转型时期台湾人的生存状态和精神状态，她的小说里充满离散和乡愁"，另一方面，她也始终对都市经验和性与性别议题保持关注，在写作中将个体精神的"荒凉与物的繁密结实构成强烈的反差"，从赢得《中国时报》百万小说大奖的作品《荒人手记》到长篇小说《巫言》，无不如此。作家阎连科从这一奖项的性质和初衷——一年一届，推选一位对华语文学的写作、研究、推介有重要贡献的作家、学者或翻译家——出发认为，"第一届盛典我们致敬王德威先生，因为他对华语推广做出了巨大贡献。第二届盛典我们致敬朱天文女士，因为她的小说和电影让我们的华语、我们的方块字在世界上流传。"

在颁奖典礼当天上午，朱天文与人大写作班的青年作家们进行了交流。作为"活得久一点，多那么一些人生阅历"的写作先行者，她分享了五个与其写作生涯紧密联结的概念——"倾听"、"念念不舍"、"修复碎片"、"歧路花园"以及"抵抗时间，抵抗遗忘"。与同为作家、热心公共事务的妹妹朱天心相比，朱天文的风格常常被视为"云端散步，冷冷的在高处"，但她认为，二人的写作属于"不同的抵抗姿态"，"和天心作品一半现实一半虚构的组合不同，我比较像卡尔维诺，沉重的现实是作品的基石，作品主体是虚构的内容。其实这是不同的抵抗姿态，但共同点在于'轻盈'，不同于'飘飞'，还是会受到地心引力的影响，与现实有距离但不至于太远，"朱天文在同作家班的交流中说。

"21大学生世界华语文学盛典"致敬朱天文

声誉：真正最该赋予声誉的，正是那些并不在意和喜欢声誉的人

写作近半世纪，朱天文一路获奖无数，从1976年《乔太守新记》获联合报小说征文奖、1994年《荒人手记》获首届《中国时报》百万小说奖，一直到2014年，她捧得了第4届美国纽曼华语文学奖。在剧本领域，她担任编剧的《悲情城市》《刺客聂隐娘》等作品曾数度入围台湾电影金马奖最佳原创及改编剧本奖。

但这次的"华语文学人物"评选仍让她感到"格外新鲜难得"。由21位大学生最终讨论和评定的奖项，究竟有何格外特殊之处？她引用汉娜·阿伦特的话，认为大学生的位置是"一个对声誉、财富、权势没兴趣，无利益，不参与的位置"，并更加引申一步提出，"其实这个位置，大家驰骋一下想象，不正是上帝的观看位置，降落于人间，不就是史官，一个史官应然站定的位置。"

这里所说的史官的位置，指的是"自成一系甚至一代代相传的独立家族或学门，隔离于权势和财富之外不交流，唯以专业来工作"。朱天文说，"史官把原本纪实性的书史工作，加进了对错是非善恶的反省，改正了实然发生之事，成为一个'报称系统'。这是春秋之笔，乱臣贼子惧，帝王都怕的。"

从这一奖项延伸开来，声誉在今天意味着什么？在一个财富和权力如此密实的现实中，声誉有何种力量？她引用作家唐诺的新书《我有关声誉、财富和权势的简单思索》里的一则老笑话，将声誉比作一根绳子。

"你怎么会被官府抓去？"

"我拿了人家一根绳子。"

"才一根绳子也报官？"

"绳子另一头系着他们家的牛。"

朱天文说，"声誉是这根绳子，它本身也许毫无价值还带点做张做致，但它系着、系住很多有价值的人和事。"声誉亦有悖论，"真正最该赋予声誉的，也许正是那些并不在意、喜欢声誉的人，"声誉也时常暴露其脆弱、不确定和虚伪的一面，并且对财富和权势靠近或谄媚，但唐诺和朱天文都认为，我们仍应为声誉辩护并捍卫声誉这一象征"善"的能量和系统，"因为声誉单独地探向应然世界，联系着也相当程度决定着，我们对应然世界的必要思索，及其可能的数量、幅度、范畴和内容——简言之，那头牛。在财富和权势统治的实然世界里，我们奋力留下一些应然的事物。"

时间：以零叙事抵抗时间，以离题逃逸死亡

一直以来，"时间"是朱天文以写作抵抗的对象，也是她在写作中反复思考、不断回归的主题。

二十多年前，她在《荒人手记》的结尾写到："时间是不可逆的，生命是不可逆的，然则书写的时候，一切不可逆者皆可逆。因此书写，仍在继续中。"如今回望，她在演讲中重申，"整本小说如果有主题，也许即是抵抗时间，抵抗遗忘。"

而在十年前的《巫言》中，她试图"实验一种有无可能的、能把时间变成空间的、一种'歧路花园'"，希望以"零叙事"的写法把时间带入歧路和迷宫之中，"把推进的时间变成无与伦比的空间，流连其中，我们观之不尽、赏之不完遂而忘返。"

朱天文《荒人手记》《巫言》

这种先锋的写作尝试，既与博尔赫斯的短篇小说《歧路花园》有相通之处，也受到了卡尔维诺《写给下一轮太平盛世的备忘录》（大陆译为《新千年文学备忘录》）的启发。朱天文认为，卡尔维诺将"离题"作为一种写作策略，为的是繁衍作品中的时间并拖延结局，进而逃离死亡的捕获。

时间迷路之后，叙事停留在永恒的当下。朱天文对当下的专注以及由此而来的精准的文字风格，被王德威誉为"文字炼金术"。另一方面，她认为同位作家的父亲朱西甯也以"一个书写者的独特时间，和他绝无仅有的位置"实现了对时间的抵抗。

朱西甯八易其稿，在生命的最后十年里第九次开笔写作《华太平家传》，写了五十五万字未完。朱天文在题为《一个书写者的位置和时间》的演讲中说，"他是用我们这个'实然'世界的材料，在打造他心目中那个'应然'世界的熠熠梦土了。晚年的他，当他说'我是写给上帝看的'——为父亲不平的朱天心直接呛'你也太抬举上帝了！'但就在此刻，我亦才忽然明白，对这位专注打造梦土的书写者，时间也只好叹息着站在一旁。

朱西甯

苦劳：成功的故事不值得下笔，失败与废墟更有意思

眼下除了正在参与拍摄"在岛屿写作"系列纪录片《文学朱家》，朱天文也在写两本新书。在作家班交流的过程中，她透露说，"一个是长篇小说《在民国的黄昏里》，写的是我所经历的台湾的这半个世纪，也是写我的父母。另一本是散文集《只有一个人的叛事》，写的是我身边的在文艺圈的朋友们，他们都是'新天使'，逆着潮流而行，去关注失败和废墟。"

在朱天文眼中，所谓"新天使"，指的是一群逼视破碎的历史，把被进步的风暴摧毁的世界碎片拾捡、擦拭、分类，将它们修补成破碎而完整的事物的人。在她看来，无论是中国传统小说中盛极而衰的故事还是那些关于成功的故事，都不是值得下笔的事物，反而是那些被掩埋的失败、没有人遗补的废墟更有意思，也更值得写作者用心。

"写作者就是劳动者，在滔滔往前的人群里做一个呆在角落的人，这是我理想中的一个劳动的身影。"对待散佚在宏观叙事与线性历史中的细微琐碎，以及被所谓"真相"和"主流"遗忘的边缘人事，朱天文认为不仅要"盯"，还要"盯得住"，这是写作的基本功，与素描之于绘画的意义相似。"看两眼和看三眼四眼是不一样的。现在很多台湾年轻人的作品读起来，感觉他们盯两下就不想盯了，就走神了，这导致他们的作品也有些站不住脚。"这种勤恳的写作方式在某种程度上类似于人类学田野调查方法中的"蹲点"，列维-施特劳斯是她最爱的作者之一，施特劳斯的代表作《忧郁的热带》被她戏称为"奶嘴书"（床头书）。

除了通过自我隔离来"专志凝神"于写作、像"山顶洞人"一样不用电脑也不用智能手机，朱天文还与青年作家们分享了其他一些磨练笔力的经验。"写作的续航，一是需要阅读，这是跨时空的功力培养与database的储备；二是需要生活历练，以一颗柔软谦逊的心去聆听；三是自省。你不能一直处在幸福题材的包围中，虽然去尝试新东西会有失败的风险，而且自觉性太强会削弱创造力，但我宁可这样。"朱天文说，"因为你知道你在尝试什么，你愿意往前去而非停留在已经成功的东西上面。突破的尝试可能是失败的，但这种失败也是有意思的。"

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Big Easy reading: A 300-year-old city in books

LITERARY HISTORY

Big Easy reading

A 300-year-old city in books

2057 words

NEW ORLEANS

DRUNK, dishevelled and remorseful, Stanley Kowalski throws back his head and howls at his wife: "Stellahhhhh!" Every March contestants gather in Jackson Square, New Orleans, to recreate this scene from "A Streetcar Named Desire"—ripping their T-shirts, pouring the contents of hip-flasks over themselves and dropping to their knees. The competition is the finale of a festival that honours the play's author, Tennessee Williams, who called the city his spiritual home.

Ten minutes' walk away, on Canal Street, is a bronze statue of an overweight man in a deerstalker hat. It is a likeness of Ignatius J. Reilly, the misanthropic hero of "A Confederacy of Dunces"; for Ignatius, New Orleans is an abode of "jades, litterbugs and lesbians", but the world outside it is a "wasteland". People come to the statue to pay tribute to this incorrigible voice of the Big Easy, and to his creator, John Kennedy Toole, who committed suicide before his book was published.

New Orleans is 300 years old this year. It has been celebrating its literary history for 100 of them—cultural tours were offered as early as the 1920s—but especially since the 1990s, when the Ignatius statue was erected and the shouting competition was inaugurated. Locals dress up as their favourite fictional characters during Mardi Gras and attend vampire balls that nod to Anne Rice's novels at Halloween. Some of the hotels are literary attractions in their own right. The Monteleone has featured in scores of stories; its Carousel Bar was a favourite haunt of Truman Capote and Eudora Welty. So are some of the bookshops, such as Faulkner House Books in Pirate's Alley, named after William Faulkner, a former resident. New Orleans helped to transform him from an obscure poet into a Nobel laureate, just as it turned plain-old Thomas Williams into Tennessee.

If transformation is one of the themes that pervades the city's literature, another is diversity. Like many ports, New Orleans has always been a melting pot: Frenchmen, Spaniards, Creoles, African slaves, Native Americans, free people of colour and waves of immigrants commingled, on the streets and on the page. "Les Cenelles", the first anthology of poetry by Americans of colour, was published there in 1845. As literature migrated from French to English in the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase, novelists used the community's nuances to explore racial inequalities in the South, in books such as George Washington Cable's "The Grandissimes", published in 1880. Kate Chopin explored the limits of female roles and desires in 19th-century Creole society in "The Awakening" (1899).

In the 1920s the Double Dealer, a literary magazine, was launched in New Orleans as a voice for modernist literature, and to show that the South was not a cultural backwater. It included African-American and women's writing and early work by Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Against a soundtrack of the jazz age, authors took up residence in the romantic decay of the French Quarter; the writer Sherwood Anderson hosted Parisian-style salons for the likes of Carl Sandburg and Gertrude Stein. In his introduction to "New Orleans: The First 300 Years", Lawrence Powell describes how this "Dixie Bohemia" inaugurated "a tradition of literary slumming that has scarcely abated".

Lost in the flood

In the post-war decades the Beat generation passed through: Jack Kerouac immortalised his stay with William Burroughs and their visit to the French Quarter in "On the Road" (1957). The city "at the washed-out bottom of America", Kerouac wrote, was "burned in our brains" before his party got there. In "The Moviegoer", Walker Percy's existential novel of 1961, the war-veteran narrator, Binx Bolling, perambulates around New Orleans and its cinemas in a quest for meaning.

The bygone days of piracy, plantationsand the old red-light district inspired historical fantasia; the grandiose cemeteries and practitioners of voodoo nurtured tales of the supernatural, witches and vampires. Meanwhile the latter-day mean streets cultivated characters such as Dave Robicheaux, the hardboiled protagonist of James Lee Burke's mysteries. Later arrivals showed up in fiction, too. In 1993 Robert Olen Butler won a Pulitzer for "A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain", a collection of stories about Vietnamese immigrants in Louisiana.

In 2005 Hurricane Katrina hit, the levees broke and most of New Orleans was flooded. People lost everything. But, as Susan Larson, author of "The Booklover's Guide to New Orleans", recounts, in time "fresh literary energy emerged from the fact that every New Orleanian had a story". Writing was a form of civic therapy. Dave Robicheaux returned to battle post-Katrina crime. New characters are changed irrevocably by the storm, such as T.C. in Margaret Wilkerson Sexton's "A Kind of Freedom". Katrina became a prism through which to ponder the issues that have always concerned the city's chroniclers: race, history, madness, identity, survival and death.

Today, as in the past, writers are drawn to the freedom, exuberance and tolerance of eccentricity. New Orleans embraces them while they are alive and reveres them when they are gone; writers, in turn, have helped to sear its legend into the imaginations of America and the world. But if the material is as rich as ever, the challenge to portray it freshly is steep. It is hard to better Alice Dunbar-Nelson's view of carnival from 1895: "A madding dream of colour and melody and fantasy gone wild in an effervescent bubble of beauty that shifts and changes and passes kaleidoscope-like before the bewildered eye."

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The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume II: 1956-1963 – review

Infidelity, agony rage ... Plath's correspondence captures life with Ted Hughes and her terror of being alive

Far-fetched dreams … Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in New York, 1958. Photograph: Courtesy of The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

Volume one of the collected letters of Sylvia Plath – one of the most original poets of the 20th century, and a prolific correspondent – ended with her marriage, while studying at Cambridge on a Fulbright scholarship from America, to fellow poet Ted Hughes in June 1956. The second volume begins with her 24th birthday in October. The new Mr and Mrs Hughes are penniless and without a home of their own, but she has absolute faith in him as a writer and human being. He is "a genius", the best poet "since Yeats & Dylan Thomas". Inconveniently, he is also unpublished, and has no strategy for getting into print – but Plath is equal to the challenge. She is an old hand at approaching poetry magazines in Britain and her native US and promptly sets herself up as his agent.

By the start of 1957 she has typed up and submitted Hughes's first book of poetry to a major poetry contest, which he wins. By 1961 her first collection is forthcoming from Heinemann, his second is out with Faber, and they have a daughter, Frieda, with another baby on the way. They have bought an ancient thatched house in Devon – Hughes has always wanted a home in the countryside – and are fixing it up, intending to live off their own land in a bucolic writers' Eden. "Ted & I had nothing when we got married, & no prospects," Plath exults to her mother in America before the birth of her son Nicholas in January 1962, but "in 5 years all our most far-fetched dreams have come true".

The new Mr and Mrs Hughes are penniless and without a home of their own, but she has absolute faith in him as a writer

And then, five months later, while Plath is still in raptures over their "thatch, acres of apple trees, daffodils, laburnum, owls, bees", the genius throws it all over. That summer he begins an affair with Assia Wevill, the wife of a friend. When Plath gets wind of it he tells her that he does not want a marriage and children at all. He says, she relates incredulously, that "he was just waiting for a chance to get out, that he was bored & stifled by me, a hag in a world of beautiful women". Plath, whose dynamism conceals a dangerous emotional fragility (she narrowly survived a suicide attempt at 20) is thrown into crisis.

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In February 1963, having moved to London for the winter, she killed herself in her rented flat. She left behind the manuscript of Ariel – one of the most incandescent cries of rage and defiance in English literature, written during the "agonised and degraded" months after she discovered Hughes's infidelity. It comprises, as she recognises before her death, "the best poems of my life": poems that would, on their eventual publication in 1965 by her stunned widower, make her name.

Why not content ourselves with the poetry and avoid eavesdropping on the humiliations of Plath's short life, as she recounts them in these letters? Simply because she, more brilliantly than anyone, demonstrates what TS Eliot calls the poet's ability to form "new wholes" out of chaotic and disparate experiences. Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil have produced the first complete text of all Plath's known correspondence: every extant readable word she wrote to her needy mother as well as previously unpublished letters to Hughes's family and her own friends and professional mentors in literary London and America, some 1,400 letters in all. And what a tour de force it is. Plath's epistolary style, as the editors suggest, is "as vivid, powerful, and complex as her poetry, prose and journal writing". Her energy even when she is doing or observing the most ordinary things vaults off the page. She paints floors, sews curtains, learns Italian and speedwriting, works part-time to "free Ted from a dull job to support us", answers his fan mail, keeps the household accounts, mows the lawn. She has an uncanny ability to make the mundane strange, whether it is a room painted "the yellow shade of spoiled pears", a ceiling flaking "like leprosy", or a terraced house "nightmarishly exactly like all the rest, except that it has a small, tortuously withered tree by the front hedge". As a citizen of the "land of milk and honey and spin dryers", never wholly at ease in grim postwar Britain, she is mesmerised by the cold and dirt, the "filthy, cheerless, lightless, bathless places" for rent, the diminutive fridges, the scrawny chickens in the butchers' windows.

But Plath's panic is, at bottom, existential. There is a terror in her of being alive at all, which gives her poetry its hellish edge but which the letters keep valiantly at bay. It's through the material world, and her own body in particular, that she makes herself feel real: through food and the touch of the sun on her skin; sex and childbirth. Almost every letter contains a sacramental parsing of a meal she has cooked or eaten – nobody apotheosises "stuffed tomatoes, turkey, lemon mousse & Chablis" like Plath – while her ecstatic accounts of bearing and nursing her two children are unequalled anywhere. Hughes, meanwhile, is not just her husband; he is her religion. "My marriage is the center of my being," she admits, "I have given everything to it without reserve."

Through her body she makes herself feel real: through food and the touch of the sun on her skin; sex and childbirth

This is why his betrayal breaks her. At the radioactive core of this volume are 14 letters that Plath wrote to her psychiatrist in America, Dr Ruth Beuscher, the contents of which – among them a sensational claim by Plath that Hughes beat her up shortly before a miscarriage – were selectively leaked to the press in 2017 when the bundle was put up for sale by a private owner. On being bought by Smith College they were passed on to Frieda Hughes, the literary executor of Plath's estate. In deciding whether or not to publish these letters she is in the impossible situation of a child who finds herself being asked to arbitrate between warring parents. To her credit she allows them to be included, and lets us make up our own minds.

The greatest surprise of the Beuscher letters, which are far franker than those Plath writes to anyone else, is the initial steadiness with which Plath assesses her situation after Hughes announces that she has been "a jinx, a chain" and that he now wants "to experience everybody & everything". In contrast to the myth – promoted by Hughes in Birthday Letters (1998) – that his infidelity was somehow predestined, she insists wryly that in marriage "there is some purpose … in riding through infatuations without always indulging yourself, if you know it hurts someone". Her husband, she realises, has carried out the cost-benefit analysis of an affair that he suspects will be psychic death to her and has decided that it is worth it. "Do not imagine that your whole being hangs on this one man," Beuscher counsels her, but that is precisely what Plath does feel. Her gradual disintegration, "the return of my madness, my paralysis", is dreadful to watch. Though Hughes later claimed that she didn't seriously consider divorce, this is belied by her desperation to "become a verb, instead of an adjective"; to claw back her independent self and "never bind it to anyone again". Too late. During her final mental collapse she sees very clearly that her readiness to predicate her identity on her marriage, as she puts it in one of her last poems, "Death & Co.", has "done for" her.

Even in extremis, Plath's wit doesn't desert her (Wevill is "this Weavy Asshole"; when Plath asks for a copy of a friend's crime novel, she jokes that "it looks just the thing to cheer me up, all about murder"). Nor does she lose her poetic judgment. She finds a stash of love letters written by Hughes to Wevill, "describing their orgasms, her ivory body, her smell, her beauty", and though she is "just dying" she concedes that these are "fine poems". What about her grasp of the truth? Did Hughes really "beat" her? There is evidence scattered throughout Plath's letters and diaries that their arguments could become physical, and that she was at times not just the aggressor, but gave as good as she got. From her 10th letter to Beuscher it's apparent that they fought in this way again one day in early February 1961, after she had torn up some of Hughes's papers to spite him when he made her late for work. The difference is that on this occasion Plath was four months pregnant. Exactly how much force was involved, and whether the miscarriage that followed was linked to this fight, or to a grumbling appendix – as Plath herself believed back then – or to neither thing, is anybody's guess. It doesn't need saying that pushing your pregnant wife around is inexcusable.

In the aftermath of a disaster, it is the survivors who get to tell how things happened. For the moment though, Plath, who writes in the dark days before her death that "it is my great consolation just now, to speak & be heard", has the last word.

• The Letter of Sylvia Plath: Letters Vol 2 by Sylvia Plath (Faber, £35). To order a copy for £30.10, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

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CLASHING VIEWS RESHAPE ART HISTORY

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This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive. To preserve articles as they originally appeared in print -- before the start of online publication in 1996 -- The Times does not alter, edit or update these articles.

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December 20, 1987, Page 002001 The New York Times Archives

SOME CALL THEM ''RADICALS,'' ''REVISION-ists'' or simply troublemakers. But to others -and to themselves - they are challenging the traditional insularity of art history. Energetic, contentious and often controversial, they are a loose-knit community of scholars in universities throughout the country who use methods derived from outside the field to study the visual arts as more than a purely esthetic phenomenon.

They are cued by such lines of thought as structuralism, feminism and in some cases Marxism, which in art history is an attempt to relate art to class structure within the context of economic, social and political issues. They are also in touch with such disciplines as psychoanalysis, anthropology and linguistics and aware of currents from France and England. Busily undermining traditional myths and theories about the making of art, they view it as reflecting social practices, and they are more concerned with ''issues'' than with what they call formalist investigations into style, subject matter and history of ownership. Their fields of interest range from Islamic and medieval art to Abstract Expressionism, the subject of a recent polemical treatise suggesting that the movement was used as a political tool by the United States Government in the cold war.

When dealing with a work of art, the revisionists tend to stress its relationship to the socio-political climate of its time, rather than focusing on such esthetic elements as shape, color and composition. For example, writing about Manet's nude, ''Olympia,'' in his book, ''The Painting of Modern Life,'' the Marxist-oriented art historian Timothy J. Clark places emphasis on the view of prostitution that the painting conveys in this particular era of social history. More traditional historians might emphasize such atrributes as the contrasts of light and dark, the visible brushwork, the flat patterning characteristic of Manet's innovative approach to the painted image.

The revisionist thinking - which has long established itself in such other areas of the humanities as history and literary criticism - has brought ferment and change to a field that some feel has too long suffered from academic isolation. It has caused conflict at such prestigious universities as Harvard and Princeton. It has led to a revamping of the famed museum training program at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, where emphasis is now placed on ''intellectual'' rather than ''esthetic'' issues. It has shaken up the annual forums of the College Art Association, the national professional group for art historians, where topics once considered marginal to mainstream art history are now given equal weight. It is reaching the public through books that are eagerly issued by such university presses as Chicago and Yale. And it has even given birth to a major art institution, the Orsay Museum of the 19th Century in Paris, which - though now watered down to accommodate both traditional and revisionist approaches -was born of the notion that art relates to the historical, social and political forces of its era.

Today, as they teach, write and lecture, the revisionists are shaping the tastes of a new generation of curators, collectors, critics, dealers - and, inevitably, the public. Already, suggests Oleg Grabar, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art at Harvard and former chairman of the art history department, the new trends in art historical thinking have increased public interest in areas other than the traditional ''high'' art of Western culture - such as the decorative arts, the history of architecture and so-called primitive art.

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Their diversity makes it hard to label the revisionists as a group - indeed, some regard that diversity as now the norm in the field. ''Art history today is much more about exchanges with other disciplines,'' says Kurt Forster, director of the innovative Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica, Calif. He points out that half of the scholars working on art research projects at the Getty Center are from fields other than art history.

But even today, the challengers do not go entirely unchallenged. Two recent targets have been Professor Clark, 44, a specialist in French 19th-century art, and Thomas Crow, 39, a revisionist art historian who received two prestigeful awards for his book on art in 18th-century France. In 1983, questions were raised by a visiting committee to Harvard's art history department about whether Professor Clark's teaching approach was too closed to other views. And in 1986, after five years at Princeton, Mr. Crow was refused tenure, a move that helped spur the departure of John Shearman, a respected Renaissance historian who supported him.

To be sure, the ''social'' view of art by its historians is not all that new. Before mid-century, such European Marxist thinkers as Frederick Antal and Arnold Hauser had done influential work in dealing with the relationship of art and society. And in this country, in 1937, the historian Milton Brown published a pioneering Marxist analysis of the painting of the French Revolution. Younger socially oriented art historians, such as Linda Nochlin, professor of art history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and Robert Herbert, professor of art history at Yale, have since helped to spread revisionist views through legions of students. What's more, in ''The Painting of Modern Life,'' Professor Clark acknowledges the inspiration of the art historian Meyer Schapiro's Marxist writing of the 1930's. Art and Society

The most visible public evidence of the new approach is the controversial Orsay Museum, opened last December in Paris. The result of new thinking about how museums should relate to their public, it was originally planned to show the connections between art and the larger culture. Under the Socialist Government of Francois Mitterrand, the program was revamped to place art in the context of social and political history. But as now constituted, the Orsay is a compromise of traditional art historical and revisionist approaches, in which the most banal Salon art of the era is celebrated along with masterworks of the Impressionist avant-garde.

In this country, the new thinking has invaded the College Art Association of America. At its annual meeting in Houston this February, symposiums - led by prominent teachers at major universities - will let the full membership discuss such formerly peripheral topics as ''Assessing the Marxist Tradition'' and ''Art and Authority.'' The association's sessions were drastically revamped in 1985 to make them more of an ''intellectual reckoning,'' says Harvey Stahl, a medievalist and associate professor of art history at the University of California at Berkeley, who, as program chairman that year, introduced the revisions.

As Henri Zerner, professor of fine art at the Fogg Art Museum, sees it, the new wave is gaining strength partly because of the disenchantment felt by ''a growing minority of art historians, particularly the younger ones. There's a feeling that too many professionals are routinely feeding a busy academic machine. Although established art history pretends to be objective, it is in fact allied to a conservative ideology and very involved with the art market.''

''The field is going through a generational passage,'' adds Thomas Crow, who is now an associate professor of art history at the University of Michigan. ''It has expanded so much, and the clublike atmosphere that has prevailed in the Eastern universities is changing as well. The view that art is bound up with social interaction unites a lot of people.''

Yet, while acknowledging a place for the new methodologies, Sidney Freedberg, a traditionalist who was professor of fine art at Harvard and is now chief curator of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, took issue with them in a 1985 talk before the Art Dealers Association of America. ''Many of the studies which approach art from a sociological or an economic point of view,'' said Professor Freedberg, ''lavish far more effort and attention on the factors that surround the art than the art itself, as if the setting, not the stone, were the important matter.''

Robert Rosenblum, professor of fine arts at New York University, and something of a revisionist himself, is concerned about the prevalence of the trend. ''I'm for the social history of art,'' he says, ''but also for all kinds of other approaches. I would not want art history departments to be taken over by a Marxist mafia. Why are people who want to change the class structure involved with art history? Why don't they go on to do something real?'' Esthetic Merits

A sore point for the traditionalists is ''connoisseurship,'' a term coined by the arch-guru of art historians, Bernard Berenson, for judging an object's esthetic merits and its relation to other works by means of the scholar's trained eye. ''What the radicals are really about is the destruction of connoisseurship,'' said Hilton Kramer, the art critic and editor of the conservative magazine of culture, The New Criterion. ''They're substituting social science for art history. The whole question of how you distinguish one picture from another is tossed out. It all becomes a Marxist scenario of markets, class structure and so forth. The quality of the work of art and its derivation from an esthetic tradition is regarded as peripheral.''

Lending fuel to the fire is the fact that Harvard, whose great teaching instrument, the Fogg Art Museum, was once the capital of connoisseurship, producing generations of museum curators who ended up at leading institutions, has revised its museum-training program. The former introductory course in connoisseurship is now called ''Methods of Art History,'' and according to Professor Oleg Grabar, who now teaches it, the course addresses ''intellectual issues'' rather than the esthetic evaluation of objects. ''Connoisseurship is not dead - you can't do art history without it,'' says Mr. Grabar. ''But it is only one criterion and one which may have been too influenced by the art market and collectors.''

It is too early to tell what effect the de-emphasis on connoisseurship might have on American museums. But Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery in Washington and himself weaned on the discipline, says: ''Universities have traditionally been the places where people were trained to deal with works of art as objects - to develop a sense of what they mean in the history of human values, and to enable them to tell the difference between the real and the fake. I'd hate to see the day when they simply abdicated that responsibility.''

But the revisionists insist that their interpretive work is based on close reading of art objects. ''One of the striking things about the new people is that they work on first-rate art,'' says Svetlana Alpers, professor of art history at the University of California at Berkeley and author of a forthcoming book called ''Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market.'' ''It's a bit of a smokescreen to say they're losing the work in the context. The best of them, no matter the social and economic sweep of their views, have a sense of the nature of pictorial achievement.''

Among the more controversial of the Young Turks are Timothy J. Clark and two of his former students, Thomas Crow and Serge Guilbaut. Mr. Clark, an Englishman trained at Cambridge University and the Courtauld Institute in London, has been professor of art history at Harvard since 1980 (he will take up a new post at the University of California at Berkeley next summer).

He has published three books on French art in the 19th century, an era of political and esthetic revolution for which the revisionists have a decided affinity. ''The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers'' (1985), his most recent work, connects art with the social practices of the period. While Mr. Clark's two earlier books were praised for their writing and scholarship, this one has drawn fire from some critics who see its socio-economic emphasis as scanting the artists' intentions and their esthetic sensibilities.

At Harvard Mr. Clark has been a thorn in a few sides. A charismatic personality who is also respected as a scholar (though light-hearted colleagues refer to his students as ''Clarkettes''), he is in some eyes arrogant and intolerant of others' views. His former colleague Sidney Freedberg says: ''He politicized the department, and tried to diminish the interest of graduate students in attendance at courses given by teachers in a more conventional way.''

Mr. Clark says: ''I think that art history has problems. It's an undernourished and troubled discipline. Thank God there are some signs of renewal, but this renewal is not helped by the way things inevitably get converted into some kind of intellectual Star Wars.'' A Tenure Debate

Debate has also touched Thomas Crow. After the 1985 publication of his book, ''Painters and Public Life'' - a social and political history of art in 18th-century France that analyzes the interplay between artists such as Watteau, Greuze, David and the public - he was refused tenure at Princeton. According to Mr. Crow, a written statement from the chairman of the art history department lauded his teaching and his scholarship, but charged that his point of view in the book was ''too lopsided and did not give sufficient consideration to the artistic or art historical aspects'' of his material. The book later won two prestigious awards.

Asked why Mr. Crow was not given tenure, William A. P. Childs, an archeologist who heads Princeton's art history department, said that the reasons were ''totally confidential,'' but that they had nothing to do with Mr. Crow's teaching methods. What had he thought of the book? ''I'm a classical archeologist,'' Mr. Childs said, simply.

A third focus of controversy is Serge Guilbaut, whose 1983 book, ''How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art,'' reaches some controversial conclusions about the relationship of Abstract Expressionism to the cold war. The French-born art historian argues that the Abstract Expressionist painters - Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and others - had turned from representationalism to abstraction after a series of devastating political disillusionments, among them the use of the atomic bomb in 1945. At the height of the cold war, in 1948, he maintains, their powerful - but nonpolitical - imagery was seized on by the United States liberal leadership as a symbol of American cultural authority in the postwar world.

In the book, Mr. Guilbaut attacks ''traditional'' historians of the period as producing ''positive, heroic and optimistic'' accounts. Among them is Irving Sandler, professor of art history at the State University of New York at Purchase, and author of perhaps the best-known work on the period, ''The Triumph of American Painting.'' Says Mr. Sandler: ''Writers like Guilbaut submerge the work of art in theory and ideology. His enterprise is to make Abstract Expressionism the art of American imperialism. Not only are his dates in error, but he does not bother much with the analysis and interpretation of the art he is writing about. I think the book is meretricious, and wrong.''

Lively, disputatious and provocative, the field of art history has changed significantly in recent years. And many see the changes as healthy. ''After all,'' says Kurt Forster of the Getty Center, ''the serious study of art will always challenge the assumptions you make about it.'' Two views of a Manet ''What Manet has done is to rearrange a momentary view creating a permanent artistic statement without losing the active excitement of the immediate impression. He has done this by subtly shifting the elements of his picture in relation to each other and to the picture plane, preserving the sensuous textures which give the picture its tangible reality, but sacrificing precise naturalism.'' ANNE COFFIN HANSON Catalogue essay for ''Edouard Manet: 1832-1883,'' Philadelphia Museum of Art and Art Institute of Chicago. 1966-1967. ''She is detached: that is the best description. She looks out steadily at something or somebody, the various things which constrain and determine her, and finds that they all float by 'with the same specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money.' The customer evidently thinks she is one more such object which money can buy, and in a sense it is part of her duties to maintain the illusion.'' TIMOTHY J. CLARK ''The Painting of Modern Life,'' 1985.

A version of this article appears in print on December 20, 1987, on Page 2002001 of the National edition with the headline: CLASHING VIEWS RESHAPE ART HISTORY. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

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